A WORLD OUT OF SYNC WITH ITS TIMES

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 24, 2020

Everything is connected. The macro is precisely the same as the micro, only many times more. A true leader knows this in his bones. The structure of the human cell mirrors the universe. We explore the micro to understand the macro.

A "changed society" is an evolutionary process, which starts with an idea. There is no ideal plan or strategy to the growth of an idea. It is a factor of climate, opportunity and time. An idea may undergo several mutations before maturity is reached and bear little resemblance to the initial idea. There is no "right or true" course, only movement from moment to moment.

Ideas have a growth period the same as every other living thing. It is slow and tortuous with no clear path to the future. Ideas grow like cracks in the cement as weeds, wild flowers or grass. One day an idea experiences a transmutation from a puzzling perturbation into a clarifying insight that resonates with mean­ing to the times, which is not unlike a shoot bursting into bloom as a beautiful flower. Ideas are not separate but part of nature.

James R. Fisher, Jr., The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995)

An established author, philosopher and social critic writes:

Jim,

I find Ken Shelton’s (conservative author and publisher) worry over socialism stupefying. We are much closer the fascism. The number of people who can fit into a local movie theater own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. We have the greatest income inequality since the 1920s and the current low employment numbers hide the realty that income inequality is still increasing exponentially, as millions of people work two and three jobs and still can’t make ends meet.

Taxpayers fund food stamps from some of our largest employers who pay slave wages. We have socialism in the top tiers of our society with what we call the financialization of the economy as executives continue to loot public corporations as effectively as 21st century feudalism. No doubt we owe some of the above to the reality that civics education has gone the way of the buffalo.

In an age of omnipresent social media, a country founded upon the Constitutional principles of knowledge-based reasoning cannot be sustained by tribalistic emotion, and yet, fully a third of our population relates politically in tribalistic fashion, which is why they are impervious to information. Blind obedience is antithetical to democracy and it can quickly lead to fascism, world history makes this point clear.

If low-information citizens ever become a substantial majority, any chance for achieving democracy will be doomed because contempt and ethnocentric prejudice, will foreclose the opportunity for common ground. The only avenue for the uninformed, is to up the ante of loyalty, because they don’t know enough about anything important to engage in constructive dialog. They don’t reason, they relate.

Myriad forms of racial and misogynist bias are embedded in our culture. Partiality is written into law, it’s programmed via algorithms, in our literature, our entertainment and our break-room chatter, and unfortunately, a red state education renders one incapable of noticing, therefore, Texas school textbooks, for example, are intellectually sterile, so complexity is off limits and the emotional ostracizing of the other, becomes a polarizing distraction, and a formidable barrier to the kind of thinking that questions power.

When education is heavily influenced by fundamentalist religion, and right-wing culture, obedience is considered evidence of successful learning, and thus, conduct and conformity become more important than the critical thinking democracy requires.

The result of such an indoctrination is that people grow up believing that being a good citizen is demonstrated, not by reasoned deliberation, but by submissiveness, so symbols and icons become more important than the values they are supposed to represent, and hence the familiar cry “America love it or leave it.”

We are on the cusp of an AI technology that is radically reshaping our economics, in which, prejudices and manifestations of political power are being surreptitiously preprogrammed via the algorithms that automate our governance—and a population incapable of discerning sophisticated oppression, will eventually render our Constitutional rights null and void, because they will be incapable of deconstructing the injustices in a backdrop posing as pseudo patriotism.

Never has it been easier for the powerful to stoke the fear and existential insecurities of uninformed citizens, and to persuade them to vote against their own interest, and to genuflect rage on cue.

We need a citizenry capable of critical thinking now more than any time in our history, and yet there is nothing on the horizon that suggests we are up to the task. Donald Trump’s presidency is a global embarrassment of epic proportion, his campaign rallies are disgraceful exhibitions of bigotry and racism, they reek the tenor and tone of fascism, and the effect that they have on our standing in the world as defenders of freedom and democracy are both psychologically devastating and morally debilitating.

I am optimistic from habit not from experience or my expectation about the future. I hope I am wrong, but I have grave doubts about the outlook for democracy because our technology and our echo chamber media are proving to be much better at polarization and indoctrination than inspiring critical thinking. A sham impeachment trial as a cover up, may very well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. We may have to take to the streets in Hong Kong fashion to wake this country up.

My age group is about to exit, but the generations to follow must realize what responsible citizenship requires and not simply be cheerleaders for despots.

The critical thinking needed today to sustain democratic rule, is equal to or greater than, the intellectual efforts upon which this country were founded, which is to my thinking a very frightening reality, given the current lack of civic education, and the regressive mentality holding red state America hostage, via a strain of ethnocentric contempt, fueled and spurred on by an incompetent and morally bankrupt president, whose breathtaking ignorance makes him egregiously unfit for office and whose erratic mental instability means his continuation as president, represents a clear and present danger to our national security and quite possibly world peace.

Charles

MY RESPONSE

Charles,

What you say here is at least partially true:

We are on the cusp of an AI technology that is radically reshaping our economics, in which, prejudices and manifestations of political power are being surreptitiously preprogrammed via the algorithms that automate our governance—and a population incapable of discerning sophisticated oppression, will eventually render our Constitutional rights null and void, because they will be incapable of deconstructing the injustice in a backdrop posing as pseudo patriotism.

We have a surfeit of critical thinking, which is limited to cause and effect analysis and logic, or what is already known. We need creative thinking which explores what is not known but can be found out in the pursuit of discovery,

That was the problem with Tom Peters’s and Bob Waterman’s bestselling book, “In Search of Excellence” (1982). It fostered imitation, which Business Week slammed two years later (November 5, 1984) with the headline story, “Who’s Excellent Now?” Many companies superimposed this book’s ideal examples on their own culture with sometimes disastrous results.

There are good people on the right and the left, and it turns out the ideas and passions of the one side tend to be as flawed as the excesses of the other side. You cannot persuade the other side that their views are faulty any more than they can convince you them that your views are faulty.

Nearly 50 years ago, I wrote Confident Selling (1971) in 1969 after returning from South Africa where I had facilitated the formation of a new specialty chemical company.  Earlier, I had been a successful chemical sales engineer for Nalco Chemical Company with my approach to find out what the customer needed then partnering with him to realize that end. I wrote the book in a friend’s plumbing catalogue publishing office on his IBM electric typewriter from 6 p.m. to 4 a.m., Monday through Friday for six weeks, sending the first draft to Prentice-Hall (P-H) in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where it was accepted two weeks later, then published in the fall of 1970 with P-H’s 1971 copyright.  It would be in print for 20 years and become a modest national bestseller, selling over 100,000 copies. 

Twenty years later, after ending my executive career and retiring from Honeywell, I wrote my second book on the labor/management phenomenon.  This project started while working for Honeywell Europe, SA in 1986 while living in Brussels, Belgium.  BB collected my research in a dozen three-inch loose leaf notebooks, creating the schematics, graphics, tables and visuals that went with the text.  She would type on our Honeywell computer in a Microsoft Word document while I walked around my study and dictated the book to her.  It would become Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, and be published five years later in 1991 and listed as one of the ten best business books of 1991 by Industry Week.

WWMs made a minor rumble and then faded being decades early as the electronic revolution had yet to take hold confirming its thesis. Five years after publication of WWMs, economist Jeremy Rifkin’s “The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era” (1995) came out. It seemed evident author Rifkin had perused my book but without acknowledgement. The same was true of Fortune Magazine.  It had a cover story WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS a year after my book was published, but again without acknowledgement.

Critical thinking and critical thinkers represent an army at the ready to latch on to any creative work that serves its fancy.  Otherwise, the problem solving is to circular logic.

When you’re not in the power grid you can be exploited with impunity by a celebrated economist or an established magazine.  This son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad never joined that crowd much less given to pay it homage.

Charles, you are schooled in philosophy, economics, politics, work, and social justice while “working in the trenches.” I had only a spell in the trenches spending five summers laboring in a chemical plant while going to university. This work plus an academic scholarship provided the funds to attend a land grant institution (University of Iowa) after completing a public high school education.

No doubt from the urging of my mother, I pursued educational goals without any special talent for academics as athletics came more naturally. I studied hard in high school and college, while receiving no free passes at either level because I am not easy to take.  I am in your face challenging (as is true in my writing) to those reliant on special crutches, who expect gain without pain, success without failure, and a comfortable lifestyle without any effort.

The masses don’t like upstarts who succeed especially while choosing to be different. Jealousy and envy and a potpourri of justifiers surface when driven by a “compare and compete” mania.  This sponsors imitation, which is a weakness of critical thinking. So, outliers are finding a way outside the main stream, not expecting anyone to carry their baggage or displaying any interest in carrying other people’s. They prefer to think creatively knowing to think otherwise corrupts everyone involved.

My da once told me I’d never make it because I had too much asshole in me. My mother responded, “Asshole or not, Ray, if Jimmy brings something new to the table that is wanted, rest assured, they’ll find a place for him,” and she was of course right as my long career has shown.

In high school, taking the toughest courses, I was an “A” student, and went up for “National Honor Society” every semester from my sophomore year on, and never made it, whereas my Beautiful Betty (BB) made it on her first try. I was in the top 10 percent of my high school graduating class, and made every honor society offered in undergraduate through graduate school, being elected into Phi Beta Kappa at Iowa, an honor only 1 percent of college graduates achieve.

Academic honors are based on academic achievement, not personality.

Charles, unfortunately, much of life is however based on personality, on being connected, or in the desirable crowd, not simply achievement. Read J. Robert Oppenheimer’s biography, “American Prometheus,” and you will see it happens to our geniuses as well as ordinary sorts like myself.

Charles, I have often thought that you and William L. Livingston IV are the only geniuses I know, personally. Like Walt Whitman, you are cut from a common stock. The same is true of Ben Franklin, another genius simpatico with Whitman.

Whitman used poetry in the “celebration of self” to create a new prosody; Franklin used curiosity to demonstrate the source of electricity with his kite, using humor and guile to create his niche in history with his diplomatic skills in Paris during the American Revolution.  This helped to transform a rebellious people into the mindset of a nation.

You have used the celebration of self-university through self-initiative, which is what learning is about whether experienced formally or informally.

My parents were staunch Democrats, my mother a devote Roman Catholic, saying her Rosary every day, while my da identified with the Irish Roman Catholic culture but preferred, with his Irish cronies, to take false comfort in being dealt an unfair hand by being Irish, making no attempt to change their circumstances.  I did, and have had the life I have enjoyed using my world, small as it is, as my learning zone.

I have no plans to contest what you have said, or to persuade you to think otherwise, knowing people who think just as passionately obverse to your views, and they are, like you, equally nice people.

Economic and political systems change with war or when they are no longer useful or relevant. It has been so for the past 2,000 years. Our time is no different. Free public education is more than 100 years old and yet 30 million Americans cannot read these words. Since public education is free many if not the majority look on it as a right rather than the privilege that it is.

Many of these nonreaders are immigrants, people who don’t want to assimilate the American culture or its traditions, such as learning English, observing its sacred and secular holidays, or going to school. They want to continue living in their conclaves as if they are still “back home.”

Consequently, we have cultural and societal conflict in our cities and small communities rife with violence. In the midst of this insanity, some politicians want to offer free college education to all Americans as if this is a solution when a quarter of Americans don’t appreciate free public education.

There are cheaters at the top, but cheaters at the bottom as well. The former CEO of Wells Fargo was recently fined $17.5 million for encouraging employees to create false accounts to provide a fake bottom line. And yes, the 1 percent control the wealth of the United States; and yes, Walmart and MacDonald’s do not provide a living wage, but these businesses are not built to provide a living wage, essentially offering entry level jobs, like I had at the A&P Supermarket when I was a boy.

When you have a permissive society, when the culture looks for what it doesn’t have with hard eyes on those who do, a President, a Congress or a Corporation is expected to assuage angst and anxiety as surrogate parent.

Statistics and analytics, notwithstanding, communism is the extreme of socialism and fascism of capitalism. Democrats, incidentally, became a political power when they engineered the repeal of prohibition. Ironically, there was more drinking during prohibition than after its repealed. Go figure!

Still, you are right. Your generation is moving off stage; mine has already departed. The masses ultimately move the dial either to self-responsibility or self-absorption.  Painting a President as the epitome of evil or his election as illegitimate has the taste of sour grapes. How can one person who came into office only three years ago be held responsible for the nation’s decline since the 1960s?

With reference to Artificial Intelligence or AI, it started its creep into our midst in the 1930s, spirited by the code busters in WWI and WWII. As a result, today we have robotics, drones, and automatic assembly lines, invasive ubiquitous surveillance, laptops, iPhones, the Internet, automobiles without drivers, and airline pilots “managing” automated electronic dashboards. These pilots, always suing for more pay and benefits, have jobs that have become as anachronistic as coal tenders to railroad locomotives after diesel fuel replaced that function. These sinecure positions in the engineer’s cabin still existed for thirty years after they became redundant. 

We have had nearly 100 years to prepare for this information electronic invasion, but our schools, churches, businesses, workplaces, homes, and, indeed, our politicians still live in nostalgia forever denying encroaching reality, which is now here.

It seems unreasonable to blame this all on a sitting President, or the Republican Party, religion in general or the church in particular, or on the rich. Fully 3 to 4 billion people believe in and practice some form of religion, and that is half the world’s population, while half of Americans are either Republicans or Independents who are equally inclined to paint economic issues as black and white as are many Democrats.

It doesn’t make any difference when society is out of sync because nothing diminishes polarity. 

My generation, The Great Depression Generation preceded the “Spoiled Brat” generation of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, into the cynical generations that have followed, who believe in nothing and are willing to ignore the nation in its free fall.

Even members of my own generation, when I was a sacker at the A&P Supermarket, forced to lie about my age when I was 14, saying I was 16, to get a job to help support the family, already nearly 6’2” tall, people would ask, “Why do you always have a book in yours hands? Don’t you know we’re all going to be blown to smithereens by the atomic bomb?” This ambiguity that there is no point to anything has gotten legs.

My philosophy of life is to leave something that might prove useful. I have no interest in recruiting people to this or any other philosophy while I suspect I write for a generation not yet born.

Finally, in a conversation with Stanley Reeves, an educator, the Afterword posits the idea the controller and the controlled are one and the same in The Worker, Alone!

Stanley:

"I wish we could think of the controller as the leader. It is my belief that the majority of people will respond to good leadership. They resent being managed. . . controlled. You suggest a changed society may take a century. Are we sure enough of the right course? Can we remain firm of resolve for that long? Not trying doesn't present a very pretty picture. It seems a given that to succeed managers and workers must share each step of the process. As to consultants, shouldn't they be part of the process instead of outside it?"

With control, Stanley, as with everything, it starts with the indi­vidual. The individual is the controller, or the leader, if you prefer, or of that which is controlled, which is himself. The two cannot be separated. The individual cannot depend on a "leader" to rescue him from chaos and disorder. It is his individual responsibility.

A leader can only symbolize what is already established. There are no miracles. Should this be construed as minimizing the tra­ditionally understood power of the leader, per se, in leadership, so be it.

Leadership has attempted to buy, bargain, cajole and/or coerce workers into the desired behavior without success. The quest for freedom, control and order rests with the worker, alone.

Control is a sequential product of order, and order comes from within, one person at a time.  The multiple of this process leads to communal order.  And so it is as well for life in a world out of sync with its times.