The Peripatetic Philosopher ponders The Meaning of Music without Lyrics

The Meaning of Music without Lyrics

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© February 12, 2019

A READER WRITES

Finished John Gray’s book Seven Types of Atheism.  He basically stated that the world is like it is; it has always been like that, and it will never be any different.  

The people he writes about are all looking for meaning, and each of these people has created some sort explanation of what all of this is about.  

For many years I have been on the same search in looking for meaning in religion, philosophy, literature and art.  Before I even started reading this book, I finally came to the conclusion if there is meaning it won’t be determined by humans.  

We should accept that and live just as plants and animals live.  Since the earth began there have been extinctions, climate changes.  There is always going to be a beginning and an end as far as we know.  Plants and other animals apparently accept the situation as they live and die.  We should do the same.  We came about apparently by accident when the asteroid killed the dinosaurs.  

Because we can experience life with greater complexity, we think we are special.  So we create all these myths which are basically no different from fairy tales that portray us better and greater than the plants and animals that share the planet with us.  

However, we are just like them.  Just as animals and plants because of their makeup may see differently and hear differently, we also see and hear differently.  

So all this searching through religion, philosophy, literature and art is nothing more than forms of entertainment and a way to pass the time and nothing else.

My RESPONSE

If you want to think of yourself like a plant, that is your prerogative but a plant can't control its destiny and man can because he has a conscious mind and can make moral choices.  

The whole world we have created has risen out of our imagination.  

It is real as long as we believe it is real, and ceases to be real when we no longer choose to think of it as real.  

Religion rose out of our imagination because we felt alone, terrorized for what was happening that we didn't understand.  

The shaman rose out of that imagination, then through many eons so did religion, an anchor in the storm of the unknown and the unknowable.  

It is no accident that science rose out of dedicated religiously trained shaman-like priests who weren't content to stop their imagination at the door of the absolute, which religion had become.

Read about these early scientists, then about people such as Newton and Einstein and you see a pattern, the pattern of the imagination dealing with the reality encountered, and wondering consistent with that imagination.  

Mathematics is one of the inventions out of this imagination as a more precise language than that of religion for dealing with the unknown, but from a similar foundation.  

One of the dangers of seeing ourselves other than a plant is now possessing those dedicated to science, as earlier those so dedicated were to theology.  For example, the venerated curriculum of Oxford at Cambridge was for 600 years primarily theology.  

Scientists like theologians before them have come to take themselves and their work at times so seriously as to brook no challenge (take global warming).  They have come to see themselves as gods with no need for a God Almighty.  

Indeed, they have come to confuse the reality of the imagination with the imagination of reality.

See yourself as a plant or as an agnostic or atheist.  It doesn't matter.  Whatever floats your boat is okay.  

Author John Gray whom you reference here had great hopes for Marx, then Lenin, then Stalin, and for the imaginative wonders of communism, which, alas, failed to materialize.  

Gray writes book after book, similar to the book you've just read, struggling with his dilemma of life's meaning and the meaning of life he had expected.  

"Meaning" is something a plant doesn't have to bother about, but which man seems to obsessively and sometimes compulsively be concerned with to the point of his utter distraction.

Meaning to some is being rich and powerful and beyond sanction, in other words free and happy and above reproach in that freedom and happiness.  

But having a mind not possessed by a plant -- to my best knowledge -- it seldom if ever works out the way we expect.

Meaning, like freedom and happiness are a product of the reality of our imagination and therefore have little to do with wealth or power or control of our circumstances, but everything to do with the imagination of our reality and the mindset that enjoins.  

For many, believing in God is sanctuary for the human soul irrespective of concrete reality alluded to here.  

Does the imagination make it real?  Yes, because believers choose to see it so.  

That said, people will continue to strive for meaning, for happiness, for wealth and for power, and for control and dominance over others, believing that to be in possession of such attributions they will be envied, adored, emulated and beyond reproach.  

This will convince them that they are a cut above everyone else and have reached the ultimate, the end of the Yellow Brick Road.  

Capitalism is based on that premise to their narcissistic delight.  

But such self-indulgence never has enough of anything including recognition, identity and celebrity.   It may be why some nearly two billion souls are on social media devotees chasing that same phantom.  

We are more other-directed rather than inner-directed and self-directed because we are so programmed by corporate capitalistic society.

Christianity, which has failed, attempted to rein in this madness but without success.  Paradoxically, Christianity has been caught up in the deceptions of its own imagination of reality, trying to be what it cannot be, while failing to understand that its basic premise had meaning, not because Jesus was God, but because Jesus was parent to our souls.

Keep reading, keep thinking, and stay strong!

  

The Peripatetic Philosopher ruminates about: God in the Middle -- Part Three

GOD IN THE MIDDLE

Part Three

 “The Inner Self as Legacy to the Enlightenment.” 

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 8, 2019

The foundations of identity were laid with the perception of a disjunction between one’s inside and one’s outside.  Individuals come to believe that they have a true or authentic identity hiding within themselves that is somehow at odds with the role they are assigned by their surrounding society.

Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and The Politics of Resentment (2018)

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

It all started 500 years ago.  In the West, the idea of identity was born during the Protestant Reformation.  It was launched by a bold and apocryphal move by Martin Luther in 1517 to post his protests to Catholic Church indulgences on the Wittenberg church door.  The quiet Augustinian friar had struggled for ten years with his inner self while he read and taught and performed his duties as a priest.  Biographer Richard Marius in “Martin Luther” (1999) saw the monk as a Christian between God and Death:

He found himself in a state of despair before God.  He wanted the assurance of being acceptable to God, but could discover in himself only the certainty of sin and in God only an inexorable justice which condemned to futility all his efforts at repentance and his search for the divine mercy.”  

Luther came to understand that the Church acted only on the outer person through such rituals as confession, penance, tithing and worship of the saints.  None of which could make a difference in one’s authentic existence because grace did not need a church as grace was a free act of a loving God. 

Thus Luther was one of the first Western thinkers to validate the “inner self” over the external social being.  He insisted that man had a twofold nature: an inner spiritual one and an outer bodily being, but only the inner man could be renewed. 

This placed the individual, paradoxically, in the center of the dialogue on the nature of man.

By the single act of making faith alone the central doctrine of Protestantism, it undercut the 1500 legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church. 

That said the Church remained the intermediary between man and God, but it could only shape the outer man through its rites and rituals, ceremonies and works.  It could not touch the inner man by rationale and definition.

Luther was not the disgruntled teenager brought back to obedience by society, but rather through due diligence and initiative, he put on notice that society itself would now have to adjust to the demands of the inner person.  The idea of democracy would have to gestate for more than 250 years.

Nothing again would be the same in Christendom as this marked the beginning of the decline of the Universal (Catholic) Church and the rise of scores of alternative churches with God in the middle. 

Whether the monumental changes that led to modernity can be put at the door of Wittenberg and Luther or not, a series of propitious changes occurred in rapid succession.  

In 1439 Gutenberg had invented the movable type printing press.  Books now flourished in the 1530s with Luther’s translation of the Bible into German to create a sense of identity among the German people.  Translations of the Bible in other languages had the same affect. 

New ideas on trade and commerce sparked the creation of what would be eventually called capitalism.  This gave rapid rise to industrialization with new methods of producing goods and delivering services as material forces were being driven by new technologies legitimized by the changes in the way people thought about things.

On the plane of ideas, the distinction between the inner and outer, seeded by Luther, would occupy philosophers for generations to come as modern man struggled with the new idea of personal identity as identity with the Church faded. 

[My own empirical work over the past fifty years has found me exploring the deep layers of the “inner self” from the conscious to the subconscious to the subtext level of confidence which ensures identity is axiomatic.] 

Read the “Confessions of St. Augustine” and you will see that this Christian of the 3^rd and 4^th century took such a private introspective journey to uncover his “inner self,” although he did not disparage the Church in this quest, or feel the necessity of a new identity,  but remained an institutional Roman Catholic to the end.     

In that same vein, while rejecting the Universal Church, Luther accepted completely the legitimacy and underlying truth of Christianity. 

Marius in his Martin Luther biography (The Christian Between God and Death) documents the monk’s painful quest for personal clarity, questioning Church authority and the theology of penance. 

Then there was the auspicious timing of the “Reformation.” seeded as it was by the failed “Peasant’s War” of 1525 in which 100,000 of the 300,000 German peasant farmers were slaughtered by armies of the aristocracy of The Holy Roman Empire.

In that climate, Luther resolutely attacks the celebrated cleric, Desiderius Erasmus, who remained in the Church to lead the Counter Reformation, making the young monk a rebel with a cause in an intellectual army of one.

German American philosopher Hannah Arendt has an explanation for this while referencing her own disposition:

“One first has to think in dialogue with oneself and reach an agreement with oneself.  The principle of agreement with oneself is very old.  It was actually discovered by Socrates whose central tenet, as formulated by Plato, is contained in the sentence: ‘Since I am one, it is better for me to disagree with the whole world than to be in disagreement with myself.’”

This is consistent with the idea that one must conduct oneself in such a way that the principle of one’s actions becomes a general law – Kant’s categorical imperative –  based upon the necessity for rational thought to agree with itself.

[Those in modern times who agree with this rationale have likely been influenced by David Riesman’s book, “The Lonely Crowd” (1950).  Riesman came up with the idea of the “inner-directed” and “outer-directed” person, with the former personality self-directed and self-reliant, while the latter personality tending to be a conformist and pleaser, or part of the herd mentality.]

THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT & SOME OF ITS PHILOSOPHICAL LIGHTS

By the end of the 18^th century, the “inner man” was the core of modern identity and had evolved into a secular form.  Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau played a central role in this identity.  His thinking would lead to such modern trends as democracy, human rights, communism, the discipline of anthropology, and environmentalism.  For Rousseau, the natural goodness of the “inner self” was a theme tied to his political, social and personal writing. 

Luther believed in Original Sin and human beings as fallen creatures redeemable by God’s love, alone.  Rousseau in Discourse on the Origins of Inequality argued that the first human being as man in the state of nature was not sinful.  He romanticizes early man for whom sex was natural but not the family; where sin and evil – jealousy, greed, violence and hatred did not exist.  There was no original society.  For him, human unhappiness begins with the discovery of society. 

In Rousseau’s account, man’s descent into society began by the mastering of animals.  Man started to cooperate for his mutual protection and with that surfaced the idea of pride and the perception of relationships.  This was given expression in words: great, little, strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold, and other comparisons.  

The ability to compare and to evaluate other human beings was the fountainhead of human unhappiness. 

Rousseau denounces the shift from “love of self” to “self-love” or vanity, seeing self-interest is transmuted into feelings of pride and the desire for social recognition.  From hunters and gatherers, human beings became farmers with the necessity of accumulating property.  He writes in the Discourse:

The first person who having enclosed some land, took it upon himself to say “This is mine,” and found people simpleminded enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

Rousseau argues crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors followed.  He attempts to walk mankind back with the first lines of his famous The Social Contract:

“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

These “chains” are the constraints placed on the freedom of citizens in modern states.

Francis Fukuyama in “Identity” (2018) traces Rousseau’s sentiments to morphing to what are called today, “identity politics.”  We see this in the United States Congress where polarity and gridlock prevent consensus and cooperation, and therefore effective governance. 

What Rousseau asserts is that a thing called “society,” exists outside the individual.  Indeed, on the corporate organizational level, a mass of rules, regulations, relationships, injunctions and customs have become an obstacle to the realization of human potential, and therefore, human happiness. 

The reason for this French philosopher's continued relevance is that he saw a sharp distinction between the “inner self” and the “outer society.”  But unlike Luther, the freedom of the inner individual does not lie only in his ability to accept the grace of God.  But rather, it lies in the natural ability of the individual to experience the sentiments of existence free of layers of accumulated social convention.  In this sense, it is similar to Isiah Berlin’s idea of  “negative freedom” discussed elsewhere in these missives.

Fukuyama sees Rousseau’s secularization of the “inner self” from social convention as the stepping stone to the modern idea of identity and recognition.  In other words, the pressing dominance of social convention, now more intense than ever before through social media, is the foundation of human unhappiness manifested in a psychotherapy and drug dependent society.  Fukuyama writes:

The recovery of the inner self thus required divesting oneself of the need for social recognition; the solitary dreamer does not need anyone’s approval.

Of course, we know while much of what Rousseau espouses had merit he was wrong about man, early man or otherwise, being one-dimensional.  We also know that feelings of pride and self-esteem can be effectively manipulated by parents, teachers, preachers, bosses, advertisers, the media, entertainers, politicians and friends to ends not necessarily in our own best interests. 

It is no accident that we are essentially a robotic society given to be mobilized by special interests to their given ends.  We see this when asked to respond to why we think, believe, behave and feel about God, religion, work, marriage, the government, education or the basis of the choices we make.  That is because all the characteristics that make up the “inner self” are not fixed.  The evidence?

We may run away from the idea of God, for example, but be as resolute in our new belief system as we had been before.  The same relates to work and marriage and life in general.  We constantly run back into ourselves repeating the same errors in the new situation that we rebelled against in the old.  We cannot lose ourselves. 

German philosopher Immanuel Kant, like Rousseau, wrestled with this in terms of reason and moral choice.  Kant asserts that we can point to nothing as unconditionally good other than good will and the capacity for moral choice.  He did not see this as a Christian concept or in religious terms, but as the ability to follow strict rules of reason for their own sake.  

The human capacity for moral choice means that we are not machines subject to the laws of physics, but can be moral agents independent of our material environment. 

Because we have the capacity to reason, Kant insists, moral choice does not need to be treated as ends to other means, but ends in themselves.  

We manifest good will not because of what it will lead to but for its own sake.  Human dignity revolves around the human will where we are genuine agents of uncaused causes. 

THE “INNER SELF” & INDIVIDUALISM

German philosopher Friedrich Hegel accepted the link between moral choice and human dignity with the individual a morally free agent and not simply a rational machine seeking maximum satisfaction.  But unlike Rousseau and Kant, he put recognition at the center of the human condition.  He advised:

From birth on human history is driven by a struggle for recognition.

This drives the soldier to risk his life, not for territory, not for wealth, but for recognition itself as a patriotic citizen.  A worker doesn’t simply work for wages and benefits but for the acquired dignity and recognition of what he is doing.  

We know who we are by what we do.

For Hegel, however, it is not primarily an individual journey into the self as with Rousseau, but politically motivated.  The great conflict of his day was the French Revolution and the “Rights of Man.” 

By the early 19^th century, the elements of the modern concept of equal dignity for everyone under the law was the mantra of the American Revolution (1776) and French Revolution (1789) with the understanding that the dignity of the “inner self” rests on its moral freedom. 

The democratic upsurge that would unfold in the two centuries after these revolutions was driven by peoples demanding recognition of their political personhood. 

Expressive individualism would also be seeded by Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith and then British philosophers John Locke and finally by John Stuart Mill.  They put a pragmatic and empirical stamp on the movement towards capitalism in economics and to democracy in politics.

Smith’s laissez-faire philosophy was to minimize the role of government intervention and taxation in free market economies with the idea of an “invisible hand” guiding the supply and demand of commerce.  

Locke focused on human motivation and behavior, believing human nature allowed people to be selfish with the natural tendency to follow their self-interests.  

Mill was the most influential English language philosopher of the 19^th century whose work explored the consequences of a thoroughgoing empiricist outlook.  

These “Enlightened Age” thinkers believed that successful governance depends not on idealism but balance between individual freedom and political equality; between the state exercising legitimate power and institutional laws and accountability providing the appropriate constrains.  It was Mill, however, who put temperance into his philosophy advocating population limits and slowed economic growth.  He believed this would be equally beneficial to the environment and the public good.  He was a naturalist, a utilitarian and a liberal who cautioned:

“Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”    

THE “INNER SELF” BECOMES OBSESSIVE INTRODUCING A NEW MODERN ERA

The expression of the “inner self” soon became the key to dignity and recognition.    

Christianity universalized people being capable of moral choice.  This was secularized by Kant in the form of rational moral rules.  Rousseau added the idea that the inner moral self was not just capable of binary moral choice, good or evil, but was filled with personal feelings suppressed by the surrounding society.  

Dignity now centered on the recovery of that authentic “inner self” that society must recognize in every human being. 

Rousseau’s powerful idea is that each individual has an “inner self” buried deep within; that it is unique and a source of creativity; that this self has equal value to all others; that this self is expressed through feelings and not through reason; and that this “inner self” is the basis of human dignity, recognized in such political documents as the American Declaration of Independence. 

Rousseau’s influence is obvious in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther; in the paintings of Vincent van Gogh; in the novels of Franz Kafka; and in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche who expanded the scope of human autonomy with the figure of Zarathustra and individualism in Beyond Good and Evil.    

By the late 20^th century, the scope of the “inner self” and individual autonomy reached a fever pitch with the clamor to define one’s own existence as well as the meaning of life irrespective of what society, the government or the church promoted.    

In the Christian tradition, the “inner self” was the source of Original Sin, but now it was simply moral choice.  

A wave of promoters of self-esteem and personal improvement followed.  There was Abraham Maslow “Hierarchy of Needs,” Robert Schuller’s “Hour of Power,” who also wrote a book, “Self-Esteem: The New Revolution,” and Robert Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life.”  

More than 30 percent of the American upper middle class was in therapy complaining of lacking self-esteem and happiness, while being in the top 10 percent of the American economy in terms of income.  Today, they are supporting more than a half million psychotherapists across the United States.

Christopher Lasch argued against this trend in "The Culture of Narcissism" (1979) insisting that the obsession with human potential and self-esteem would instead lead to crippling invasive cultural self-indulgence.  This would in term lead to the depoliticizing of society in which social justice would be reduced to personal angst and psychological problems.  Lasch died more than a score of years before Donald Trump, a nonpolitician, would become President of the United States. 

Lasch could envision the long decline of the United States accompanied by the rapid rise of a therapeutic society dependent on psychotherapy.  Bernard Zilbergeld would confirm this prognosis four years later in “The Shrinking of America: Myths of Psychological Change” (1983).

Today, the question of identity has become central to the life of many Americans.  

We now have battles over ethnicity, sexual identity, sexual politics, sexual orientation, gay rights, racial equality (“Black Lives Matter!), gender politics, religion, God, the meaning of life, inequality, ecology, feminism, Native Americanism, capitalism, socialism, communism, social justice, human biology, education, liberalism, conservatism, self-esteem, dignity, recognition, freedom (negative & positive), happiness, social responsibility, moral responsibility, robotics, automation, good and evil, spiritualism, materialism, multiculturalism, war, peace, nuclear holocaust, environmentalism, global warming, civil war, national identity, ethno nationalism, radicalism, immigration, personhood, the common good, ethnic cleansing, hegemony, terrorism, civil religion, civil liberty, professionalism, work ethic, knowledge power, position power, politics of anger, polarization, gridlock, natural language, national language, citizenship, crime, wealth, poverty, celebrity worship, cyberspace, “Big Brother,” dystopia, and the beat goes on.

Identity and the “inner self” has come to underlie philosophy and the political climate today, yet identity and this buried “inner self” in us all is neither fixed nor given to us by the accident of birth.  This sense of identity can be used to divide or unite us, or pragmatically integrate us.  This will happen when we lose our fascination to stand apart and complain about everything. 

  

    

The Peripatetic Philosopher announces: Fisher's books have gone VIRAL!

Work Without Managers Has Gone Viral!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 1, 2019

Man’s inventiveness and his flashes of insight come not when he grubbing for necessities but when he reaches out for the superfluous and the extravagant.  Play is older than work, art older than production for use.  Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments (author’s bold emphasis).

Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey, Calvin Tomkins, 1967

Nearly thirty years ago, I wrote what was then considered an “angry book” while being named “One of the Ten Best Business Books of 1991” by Industry Week (December 2, 1991).  Business Book Review Journal (April 1991), however, named it “One of the Four Major Works of the Year in its Genre,” while adding: “Work promises to foster a controversy that will be instrumental in affecting a fundamental change in the American workplace.”    

These many years later there are discernible cracks in the corporate power structure and the architecture of the workplace, but only cracks.  That said professional athletics, mainly the players in the National Basketball League (NBA), are however about to open the floodgates to change. 

THE LABORATORY OF EXPERIENCE

It would be safe to say that I have been in the corporation most of my working life, but not of the corporation as I have never joined it in spirit.  The corporation has been a work environment of necessity that I had no other option but to join.  At the same time, I have never identified with or paid allegiance to the corporation, per se.  It has essentially been my laboratory.   

My introduction to the complex organization was first as a laborer in a chemical plant where I worked summers while attending the University of Iowa, familiarizing myself with chemical processes working in virtually all departments, while observing the management structure and how it used workers as if well-oiled machine parts.  Upon graduation, I was hired as a chemist with the same company’s Research & Development department. 

After a stint in the US Navy, as an enlisted man, impressed how naval personnel were treated at all levels. I joined another chemical company as a chemical sales engineer calling on all manner of complex chemical operations, public utilities, paper mills, automotive and other hi-tech manufacturing facilities in my role as service engineer and chemical consultant. 

During this period I experienced something that I would never experience again: that is, a level of freedom in the corporate world that otherwise does not exist. 

I was totally my own boss for as long as I was productive as a sales engineer with no one to bother me at all.

Success, however, led to promotion into the Industrial Division’s management team, where I rose to corporate management in the company’s International Division.  I would work in South America, Europe and South Africa. 

Only in my thirties, frustrated with the pettiness and peccadilloes of corporate management’s compensation, entitlements and incentives which I felt were totally unearned, offending my working class mind, I retired to pursue the soft sciences in graduate school totally abandoning the hard sciences.  I had reached the point where the workplace made no sense to me and I wanted to learn why. 

To my astonishment, graduate school was as much a corporate factory as the one I had left.  My professors preached the priestly message mainly from books they had read or had written without a scintilla of doubt although devoid of empirical work in-the-trenches or empathetic understanding of the workers who were so engaged.

With no interest in being an academic, upon acquiring my Ph.D. in social, industrial/organization psychology, I launched a consulting career joining other established firms as an organizational development (OD) specialist.

Consulting appeared a strange game.  Management paid a handsome fee to be told how best to run their operations, information attained by consultants asking workers-in-the-trenches what the problems were and how they thought they best be fixed.  

This worker and workplace intelligence was then fed back to management, along a justification of the consultants’ impressive fees by either furloughing or discharging a certain number of employees but never the “Winning Side Saddlers” (see this author’s The Chronic Problem: Typology of Leaderless Leadership, Journal of Quality & Participation, 2000, pp. 20-24). 

For nearly ten years, I consulted Fortune 500 companies in the private sector and large and small state and federal institutions in the public sector.  Common thinking supports the idea that “for profit” operations in the private sector display much greater meritocracy and accountability than do public sector operations.  That has not been my experience.  The two cultures appear equally inclined to favoritism. 

After a lapse of several years, I joined a Fortune 100 hi-tech company as an industrial psychologist on a campus complex of 1,000 engineers, 2,000 support professionals, 480 supervisors, managers and executives, and 520 hourly workers in clean rooms and machine tool operations. 

Here I conducted seminars and OD interventions, did counseling of employees at all levels, including management, developed Assessment Centers, and designed a Technical Education Program that addressed professional skill competency issues, while providing technicians with a roadmap to full engineering status.   

The success of these endeavors led to a promotion as Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for the company’s European operations in Brussels, Belgium.  Europe was transitioning to the European Economic Community with the company interested in applying an OD specialist to its European operations.    

The curious thing about my European OD experience is that corporate management expected OD to operate as other consultants of the company had operated.  In other words, that OD would see management as its client and not the organization, per se.  It soon became apparent, since management held the purse strings, that OD was expected not to forget this fact in its deliberations or conclusions.  Alas, OD was expected to operate as Human Resources operates, and that is as management's union.

OD, however, is a diagnostic tool beholding neither to labor nor to management in the assessment process, but only to the organization as if it were a viable organism. 

But the fault, in any case, did not lie entirely with management as it was clear OD had failed to educate management in what it did or what management could expect from a successful OD intervention.  

In OD's detection and detective work, feelings becomes facts as morale (group feelings) and motivation (individual feelings) merge in functional purpose.  In other words, group will and individual competence are complements to successful performance as a collective sense of belief and belonging are critical to the task at hand.  OD knows and explores this from the vantage point of looking beyond the obvious, which I have called elsewhere, "exploring the problem in subtext."    

Returning from this assignment, still in my 50s, I decided to retire a second time to turn my attention to writing what I had learned over the years working in virtually every level of the complex organization as well as on four continents.  It has been from these notes, studies, profiles, published articles, interviews and interventions that have been the primary sources of my work and basis of my several books in this and related genres.

Others have been there before me pruning this same garden, but often with a special client or relationship in mind such as that of academia, government, industry or other special interests.  My approach has been more catholic as I have operated like a medieval priest in his secret laboratory worrying about the little man in this mammoth corporate world who is often smashed like a bug into inescapable compliance.  Whatever his education or prowess, submission is complete while he chooses to deny the regiment that has become his life.  Paradoxically, while everything on the surface seems to be humming along without a glitch, incipient catastrophe lurks ahead and the reason for these books.      

THE RATIONALE FOR A SPATE OF BOOKS FROM A WORKER IN THE TRENCHES

Management has been the architect of a failed system in virtually every institution of society from the family, the school, the community, the company, the government, the church and the environment.  It has fumbled along in narcissistic self-indulgence seemingly without a clue as to its creative destruction, while celebrating its technological hubris.   

America is an optimistic society and continues to believe the glass half full no matter what economic calamity, social upheaval, cultural conflagration, spiritual crisis, psychological embarrassment or military collapse occurs to threaten the very foundation of American society and its substantive history. 

America is a violent society and has been since its conception.  It is a reactive society to crisis with an inability to anticipate threats to its survival because its attention is always on another circuit.  It is a skin deep culture that prefers others to fight its battles electing “feel good” people to public office who echo the superficial sentiments by which most Americans live. 

Americans congratulate themselves on their ingenuity, entrepreneurial spirit and ability to turn their play into functional tools as has been the case with the explosion of our electronic wonders by college drop outs such as Jobs and Gates, who liked to play games in their garages, and in the process changed the world forever.  Meanwhile, the corporate world appears a slow learner.

General Electric, IBM, General Motors and old standby corporations such as Montgomery Wards and Sears got caught with their pants on fire.  GE and IBM recovered at the 11^th hour, while GM had to be “bailed out” because it was “too big to fail.”  Montgomery Wards, however, is gone, and Sears is on the cutting block.

Ordinary citizens working paycheck to paycheck have assumed that these people running things are a lot smarter than they are, and know what they are doing, when the evidence paints a far different picture. 

Clever advertisers have made diamonds a precious mineral which they are not.  A diamond is actually an extremely simple material.  It is pure carbon and is the hardest naturally occurring mineral, but the only thing separating it as a precious stone from coal is its molecular structure. 

Likewise, top executives of Fortune 500 companies are paid (with bonuses) 500 to 1,000 times as much as their hourly laborers.  Workers have accepted this differential if reluctantly believing these executives are critical to the success of the company, and therefore to their livelihood working in the trenches. 

It has gotten more complicated over the last several decades.  Professionals go into engineering and the sciences seeking employment in some solid Fortune 500 company, hoping one day to get into management, not because they love the idea of playing the power game, but because the pay structure euphemistically implies that managers are more valuable to the company than workers, whatever their education, when clearly this is not the fact.  It is an idea that died forty years ago but has been kept alive on life support by management ever since. 

That worked immediately following World War Two, when only 40 percent of Americans graduated from high school, but today, 80 percent are high school graduates with 40 percent college graduates with 20 percent of those graduates holding engineering degrees.

In terms of the hi-tech organization, 75-80 percent of the workforce holds academic credentials with 25 percent (as in the example given above) engineers.

The complex organization is dependent on knowledge power possessed by workers while position power the province of management often gets in the way of productive work.

To my sorrow, I watched highly qualified professionals retreat into “Six Silent Killers” (the title of one of my books) in passive but undetected behaviors that penalized the company contributing $ billions of lost productivity.  

All indicators are that management is anachronistic and managers atavistic but they hold on like Sears denying the inevitable.   

BOOKS BELOW THE RADAR THAT MAY BE LAUNCHING A REVOLUTION

It is rather ironic that someone such as myself would write a rash of polemically inspired books on the subject of work, workers and the workplace, indeed, on the complex organization when I’ve never been comfortable in its confines over my long career.  Yet, that has indeed been my fate.  I have neither had a privileged education nor an exemplary following to encourage such an endeavor.  Indeed, my message in the bottle has been largely ignored with a blip here or there by discerning readers or critics who have been paying attention to the colossal dysfunction of the complex organization with which modern society has been indulged. 

These in summary are some of my books that address this incipient catastrophe:

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1991)

Joining a hi-tech company as an OD psychologist in 1980, the timing couldn’t have been more propitious.  The company had a Quality Control Circle (QCC) program for hourly employees, who represented only 10 percent of the workforce, designed to inspire greater motivation.   

At the same time, NBC television had an hourly program, “Japan Can! Why can’t We?”  Japan had this same QCC program and was eating America’s lunch in quality manufacturing of automobiles, electronics, household appliances and glass products.  A tsunami followed across the nation as everyone had to have the program my company already had in place and knew well its limitations. 

The main problem was that Japan is a group minded culture and the United States is an individualistic minded culture. 

Ignoring this discrepancy, corporations across America spent millions of dollars launching signatory programs such as “Participative Management.”  It was like pouring money down a rabbit’s hole as the problem of performance was never defined, and so employees took advantage of their companies’ laxity acting like spoiled children. 

In 1984, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a conference of executives, managers and military leaders who were caught up in this fever.  My subject was “Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View.”   

[As a result of that provocative presentation, for two years, I was on the equivalent of house arrest not allowed to give any speeches or to write any articles, having to turn in my engineering notebooks every week for review.  These notebooks that grew to nearly forty would become the basis of Work Without Managers.]

In 1986, I was promoted to Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for the company’s European headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.  Europe would become my sanctuary and laboratory where I would commence to collate my notes into WWMs.

In 1990 I retired from the company, and published the WWMs in 1991.

The focus of the next book in this genre was The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain.  Professionals continued to be phlegmatic despite now being in the driver’s seat in the 1990s with knowledge power which had already superseded position power.  

While management continued to get the perks, the promotions, the salary bonuses, and the largest percentage of the corporate pie, professionals were the architects of the world that only management enjoyed.  This slender volume addresses this discrepancy with a bit of reality.  It was published in 1995.

Professionals, while being non-confrontational in conflict avoidance with management at every turn, were passively demonstrating their angst in what I came to call “six silent killers”: (1) passive aggression, coming in late and leaving early doing as little as possible to get by; (2) passive responsive: never doing anything until told what to do, and then doing little more; (3) passive defensive: always having an excuse why a job doesn’t get done or done on time; (4) approach avoidance: accepting assignments with no intention of completing; (5) obsessive compulsive: always wanting what others have failing to attend to the work paid to do; (6) malicious obedience: spreading rumors and disinformation, withholding information critical to operations, and misusing company property.  SSKs was published in 1996:

CORPORATE SIN, originally published in 2000, addressed the masochistic clash of management and professionals that literally devolved into leaderless leadership and dissonant workers. 

As the United States became an industrial power in the early 20^th century with 95 percent of the workforce blue collar with little formal education, the formula for success was that “the very first requirement for man is that he be so stupid and phlegmatic that he more resemble an ox than any other type.” 

While Frederick Winslow Taylor could make that statement in his 1911 book, Scientific Management, it would not be politically correct today.  Even so, it could be argued that many workers are still held hostage to this same industrial engineering grid. 

Early in the 20th century, management programmed workers to be polite, obedient, loyal, punctual, passive, and reactive to management’s authority.  It was tantamount to suborn perjury to attempt to bypass one’s direct supervisor to seek answers from top management.

It is 90 years later with only 20 percent of the workforce blue collar and 80 percent white collar or professional, yet this prevailing behavioral norm still holds sway in many organizations.   

Incredibly, management took on the airs of a self-appointed aristocracy voting themselves larger and larger salaries and benefits, and then camouflaging these excesses by seemingly demonstrating benevolence in offering morsels to workers in the trenches.  

This CORPORATE SIN has been manifested and institutionalized at every level of American society with the possible exception of professional sport.  CORPORATE SIN was published in 2000.

EVIDENCE THAT THIS, TOO, WILL CHANGE

As Eric Hoffer has advised, play not work defines us, and play always gives us a clue as to the work climate of tomorrow.  

Kurt Flood, a much acclaimed Major League Baseball player, sued the league when it attempted to trade him from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies without his permission.  He felt like chattel in a medieval feudal system and took offense to the policy.   

It was 1970 and his legal success ended his professional baseball career but owners, general managers and managers could no longer treat players without dealing with the players or their agents. 

Despite this, MLB remains a top heavy and top down management industry.  

Not so the National Basketball Association (NBA) and its professional players.  

We have seen in recent years Lebron James go from an 18-year-old high school graduate to an NBA star first with the Cleveland Cavaliers while gradually evolving to the coach of the team as a player on the court, carrying this distinction further bypassing the coach, general manager and owner  to take in the reins to manage his own career.  

Indeed, he left Cleveland for the NBA’s Miami Heats where he earned an NBA Championship, then returned to Cleveland, enduring the protests of the Heats' management, to win a second NBA Championship for the Cleveland Cavaliers.  

Now, in 2019, he is with the NBA Los Angeles Lakers, again demonstrating he is in control of his career and intends to go wherever the basketball gods direct him.

Lebron James knows not only basketball but its entertainment value.  He is a successful entrepreneur and adept at performing many of the functions of coaches, general managers, and even owners.  He demonstrates this in being an effective recruiter of basketball talent to improve his team's chances of winning, while also studying the changing demographics of his sport and its audience.  

He is representative of the knowledge worker who has a full sense of his power and potential.  He stirs the drink and controls its content.  

Fully 80 percent of NBA players are African American or of color.  This has reached palpable significance in this league and promises to have widespread impact in professional enterprise beyond sport down the road.  

Meanwhile, nearly 70 percent of NFL players are black, but without the freedom or control of their destiny exhibited by NBA players.  Billionaire owners of the NFL remain like corporate feudal lords over the sport.  NFL owners pay the NFL Commissioner 40 million large to keep it that way, while ironically, sportscasters and sports analysts, many of whom once were NFL stars, fall in line to promote this corporate mindset.  In a word, the NFL is identical to corporate America to the extreme.

On the other hand, black players, once climbing in Major League Baseball, are now declining as many are choosing the NFL or the NBA for their professional career.  Neither the NFL nor MLB has reached the power grid of player dominance displayed in the NBA. 

NBA players, who pretty much choose who they will play for, may mimic Lebron James in his career management, but they have not reached his level of work without management that surely will be the measure of professional sport if not the wider society in the future.

Meanwhile, Corporate America pays professional engineers, chemist, accountants, programmers, psychologists and other credentialed knowledge workers a dollar more an hour than they believe they can afford to quit, or test the market for interest in their skills.  There is movement, to be sure, among the ranks and files, but it is pathetic compared to what is displayed in sport.