SO, WHAT WOULD BE YOUR SOLUTION TO THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC?

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 27, 2020

Since this is a hypothetical question, and since I have no power, I can explain what I would do cognitively, intuitively and counterintuively, as if I did, indeed, have that requisite authority to attack this situation on all sides and at all levels. 

First of all, I would not look for solutions.  I would put an army of epidemiologists to the epicenter of the disease to investigate and determine disease patterns, risk factors involved and the relative health of the people and their animals in that center.  This in the short term might best protect them against the disease if they don’t already have it. 

The cause of the disease cannot be the primary focus, but it might subsequently surface counterintuively by leaving the door open to such factors as circumstances, incidents and recent and long range history that might at first blush seemingly have nothing concrete to do with the problem. 

This would require tackling the disease from the other side of the tracks where intuitive speculation and creative thinking complement conventional strategies of statistical analysis, disease quantification, and critical thinking. 

Numbers are always attractive to assessors of pandemics but they only make the population more restless and unsettled as numbers only track what panic has invested in the enterprise.       

A pandemic is the equivalent of a world war.  That said, I would not shut down the nation or freeze frame people in the isolation of panic.  I would however suspend the rights to life, liberty, fraternity and equality temporarily in this Global War, which would require price controls so that there could be no gouging or exploitation of the situation. 

At the same time, I would turn the nation’s colleges, universities, and related industries into war effort assemblies dedicated to the war effort making the necessary supplies and medicines to detect, classify, and evaluate pockets where the pandemic is currently flourishing. 

Within these pockets I would take stratified random statistical samples of the population in terms of Personality Profiles; Geographic Profiles and Demographic Profiles to get a sense of the maturity, fitness, mental readiness, and history to determine the level and sophistication required of the intervention.

I would not throw tons of resources at the zone indiscriminately or beyond the current projected needs of the situation.  Nor would I lock down an entire city because one or two zones are mini-epicenters until it was clear what the need might be, something similar to what China did. 

Moreover, I would turn the construction industry into a national army to build hospitals, clinics, quarantine facilities posthaste to isolate and treat those most suffering.

There would also be national rationing draconically enforced with violators sent to jail immediately without due process.  Hoarding in war is a criminal offense.

The national media at all levels: electronic, television, radio, assembly, in print either books, newspapers, magazines, handouts, or leaflets would be subject to judicious guidelines.  These media would be sanctioned similar to what happened in the United States in World War Two when media got into trouble when perceived to be “giving comfort to the enemy” by exploiting the vulnerable emotional climate of the times. 

To prevent the possibility that the nation might run out of food, fuel, clothing, medication, or health providers, I would encourage homeowners to tear up their pristine lawns and plant victory gardens, limit the amount of gasoline that could be purchased for nonessential jobs, turn homes into making clothes for the family from materials available, while policing the pharmaceutical industry so that it did not exploit the public by manufacturing only the most profitable drugs at the expense of those required for the pandemic, while accelerating the education of medical professionals to be available throughout the United States to apply their skills to the needy.

And finally, I would limit network and cable news reporting to what citizens can and should do during this challenging period, while limiting national press conferences to succinct broadcasts of what experts would have citizens do, putting a lid on politicians who seemingly cannot help themselves from fanning the flames of dissension and confusion. 

These politicians seemingly cannot escape from dangerous judgments, discriminating policies, or abortive suggestions. The complacent arrogance of politicians prevents them from seeing the extent of their failure until failure is everyone’s problem.  Even so, they continue to lament what is wrong, who is wrong, and why they are martyrs like peacocks in the wind standing helpless in the eye of the storm.

We will get beyond this, one day, but there is no guarantee learning will have taken place even though Western thinking has once again been shown to be inadequate bordering on dangerous to deal with this pandemic.  We are a complacent self-indulgent society and although my recommendations are a bit draconian they cannot or will not change the national mindset.  

THE DANGER OF BEING MISUNDERSTOOD

WHY NO LONGER SIGNIFICANT

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

© March 27, 2020

Readers’ eclectic references to The Fisher Paradigm & Coronavirus Pandemic:

Your comments on the so-called pandemic are mild, not negative. Ambiguous even. The reason I included the quote from Joseph Heath's book, “Enlightenment 2.0” is that it relates to the situation today, where our freedom of expression and movement is curtailed. There is a war-like atmosphere against the virus and most people accept it without questioning. When we question it, we are seen as irresponsible and part of the problem.

Reader One

The danger of being misunderstood" is a topic very much on my mind. Such danger does not exist with a computer programming language unless one makes a programming error. Methinks a way toward improving global society calls for a precise language with well-defined meanings for words and yet without being cumbersome. That is one tall order indeed, potentially impossible. But I am wondering just how far we can get toward such an objective. That's something I am playing with.

Reader Two

Great exposition of the writer's dilemma: to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help him God, or to prevaricate for self-preservation. In my case, as in Christ's case, the greater danger is being understood; hence, we must sometimes speak in parable when critics are out to silence us.

Reader Three
We readers don't misunderstand you or disagree with what you write Doc, we just think your preoccupations and predilections lead to your inevitable rambling historical excursions, thereby preventing your readers from perceiving your position on say, pandemics. 

Reader Four

Agree wholeheartedly. I guess that the sharp turn in the road came when Harvard U.’s MBA program began to shout that the bottom line is the supreme concern of a business, not the product or service it provides. Thinking used to be that if you provide a fine product or service then the bottom line will take care of itself. Turning things around, the result is a downward spiral in quality. As for customers complaining, their voice is drowned by the noise of sales propaganda replete with utterly meaningless slogans. And me too, I read Edward de Bono and I believe I have a tendency to annoy people with doses of lateral thinking and then poking sideways into their stream.

Reader Five

So, what would be your solution to the Coronavirus Pandemic problem?

Reader Six

An author is not surprised when some readers are not pleased with his efforts. The relation between an author's intentions and a text's meaning may differ between the author and reader. A gap between what is written and what is understood is inevitable. This is especially true when the ideas are "from the other side of the tracks," as is the case with The Fisher Paradigm.

When a reader finds some value or truth in a text in the reading, he is sending the author a message of love and connection, and hopefully of some benefit. Of course, conversely, if the text goes against the reader's inherent beliefs, it is another matter.

Creative misunderstanding of words both spoken and written is common, yet writing and reading is crucial to understanding no matter how faulty the process.

The aim here is to remind readers that we have survived as a species because of the original equipment in our human machine, our brain, and more specifically our “reptilian brain.” We have been programmed in the West since the Age of the Enlightenment to think a certain way. It is no longer working, which is one of the reasons for The Fisher Paradigm.

Perhaps the weakness in this thesis is that it is empirically based upon how the author has survived as an individual in a long life while being aware of how outside agents have always been at work to compromise his reliance on his intuitive brain.  

IT IS NOT A STRAIGHT ROAD FROM WHERE WE HAVE BEEN TO WHERE WE ARE GOING 

We as a society always have to blame someone outside ourselves for our misery. It has resulted in society throughout the ages having a problem with maturity, self-analysis, self-responsibility and grappling directly with its perturbations.

We quickly point to social injustice, political ideology or some segment of society as being responsible for all that ails us. There always has to be a fall guy, someone or something outside ourselves that has brought calamity to our door and down on us.

Since the nuclear family is the hub of society, we see it in parents who cannot say “no” to their children; in grandparents who cannot say “no” to their grown children or their grandchildren; and great grandparents who cannot say “no” to anyone in the family even at considerable jeopardy and expense to their own lives.

This has spawned a “spoiled brat generation” that has in turn metastasized to a “spoiled brat society” that while being denied, has in turn spawned a palliative industry to focus attention away from the problem by dividing and conquering the receptive attention of these spoilers.

I am talking about politicians, columnists, writers, directors and intellectuals, television and sports moguls, opinion assessors, advertisers, corporations, executives and leaders who believe their role is to solve problems outside their own inimitable experience because they have a higher calling than the rest of us and so we should savor their attention. What do they produce?

They produce polarity. Polarity is an industry in which two sides differ with what is the problem, who is responsible for the problem, who are the “bad guys and bad girls” of the problem with leaders most prominent having an insane need to stay in power, not having the time or inclination to solve the problem, or to mitigate the circumstances of the problem, but having a surprising amount of time to castigate those with whom they claim caused the problem emphasizing how terrible “these people are,” which only exacerbates the problem, producing the only product of polarity, gridlock.

Once power was more important than people during the Age of Monarchies and the Age of Roman Catholicism. To solve this intransigence, the intellectual community gave birth to “The Age of the Enlightenment.”

WHY “THE AGE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT” WAS ONLY FOR A WHILE

Societies wear out just like everything else. The Roman Catholic Church was spending more than it was taking in no matter how much that might be. That led to the duplicitous practice of “selling indulgences” to ensure the buyer of going to heaven.

How a church of hundreds of millions of worshipers can be led to do that which is the equivalent of corporate suicide appears equally and absurdly the case with many American families living well beyond their means. I have known families who have gone through millions as if life was a “Game of Monopoly.”

The Church was like that. That is, until Martin Luther came along in the 16th century and led to “The Reformation.”

Monarchies were wearing out in the same manner from the 16th to the 19th century no longer with sufficient funds to rape and plunder in war to maintain their lifestyle. Such personalities as Hobbes, John Locke, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and Charles Montesquieu were at the ready in the late 17th and 18th century to promote a replacement idea with three concepts: the use of reason the scientific method and progress.

Reason would negate superstition and science see through blind faith to lead to better societies and better people. How did that work out?

Well, the success of these ideas resulted in the American Revolution and the French Revolution and democratic republics in North America and Europe with “progress becoming society’s most important product.”

Even Communist China in the late 20th and early 21st century has caught the “progress bug” becoming the most dynamic economic society in the world.

China, as everyone knows, was once the epicenter of the Coronavirus Pandemic but now that has shifted to Italy, Spain and the United States. Scientists and healthcare professions across the globe are attempting to lower the bell curve of this terrible virus while others are looking for whom to blame for this interruption to their conventional lifestyle, which incidentally, is unlikely to ever return.

We are watching a global society becoming unglued. It may seem like a stretch but chances are this disruption will subsequently be as significant as “The Age of the Enlightenment” and “The Age of Reason” have been to Western society over the last 500 years.

Remember, we have had a 100 year hiatus since the terrible scourge of the Spanish Flu. The world population in 1918 was 1.8 billion souls; today in 2020, 8 billion people are packed into this tiny planet. In 1918, the American population was 103 million; in 2020, it is 331 million.

During the Spanish Flu Pandemic, between 50 and 100 million died to the disease, 675,000 Americans. It is estimated as many as 500 million were infected with the Spanish Flu in 1918.

In Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1991), it was mentioned that work would cease to be in great colossal complexes of thousands, and instead work increasingly would be conducted at home or in small groups; that managers were atavistic and management anachronistic; that knowledge power that now belonged to workers would superseded position power. With something akin to a rallying cry to that purpose, this was followed with The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995).

Nothing changed, and nothing has changed in the past thirty years with regard to power, position, authority, or organization except cosmetically until this Coronavirus Pandemic. Now everything will change whether you are ready for it or not.

WHAT ABOUT THE SOCRATIC METHOD?

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 26, 2020

An overview of the COVID-19 Pandemic as an equation in the The Fisher Paradigm:

A viewer challenged me to explain my reason for deprecating the noble Socrates of our Western tradition.  First of all, like Jesus, we only know what Socrates’s thought and believed from others, especially Plato.  Socrates was a sophist, something that Plato hated, and a gifted writer, something Socrates wasn’t, as his whole tradition was oral.   

We actually know Plato through his writing with Socrates the dominant character of his prose.  Plato, who was a student of Socrates, took over his ideas when the great philosopher was forced to take hemlock and commit suicide, giving Socrates back his ideas in Plato dialogues.

What we call the “Socratic Method” is the Socratic Method as expressed in Plato’s writing.

Today we use the term in a rather broad sense to cover our endless search for truth through asking questions rather than discovering creative approaches beyond the pale of what is conventional and known.  This is delimiting because the answers to what trouble us are not with old knowledge already experienced.  It is with what is not known but can be found out with due diligence beyond the Socratic Method.

We saw this reliance demonstrated in the business community in 1981 with the runaway bestseller “A Search for Excellence” by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, as tens of thousands of companies were ready to jump on any bandwagon that promised “excellence.” 

For twenty years, despite Business Week’s (November 5, 1984) cover story (“Who’s Excellent Now?”), a new industry of imitation was created consistent with the “Socratic Method.”

It was as if these authors discovered a truth about “excellence” and wanted to promulgate their good fortune. 

Sophists would say, and Socrates is included in this lot, “Why do we believe there is a truth to be found?”   

Edward de Bono would say, “If truth exists, it is relative truth, and it cannot be found but must be discovered.”  

I have suggested in my writing, “If truth is discovered, it will be your truth but not my truth.” I have since gone beyond that to show how critical culture is to an operation.  For example, A Culture of Comfort is going nowhere in unconscious incompetence; A Culture of Complacency is self-indulgent in conscious incompetence; while A Culture of Contribution is consciously competent with everyone on board in synergy enterprise towards excellence.    

Sophists were even more insistent that there is no such thing as truth; that truth is only an idea meant to persuade people to believe such a thing exists.

“The Socratic Method” rests on the assumption that the knowledge is there, somewhere to answer what is troubling us.  As we have seen, this is by no means always the case.  

Take the mania with which the Coronavirus COVID-19 is shutting down life across the world to a quasi-prison whether a pandemic situation exists or not in that pocket of society. 

The cause of the virus is not known and so the world’s best minds in the World Health Organization (WHO) and in the United States, in the Center for Disease Control (CDC) are following the dictates of the Socratic Method to a tee. 

The world is in Plato’s cave where a person is chained up so that he can see only the back wall of the cave.  At the mouth of the cave, Plato tells us, there is a fire.  Another person comes into the cave carrying an object.  The chained-up person cannot turn around but can see only the shadow of the person with an object that is thrown off on the wall in front of the chained person.

This allegory suggest we go through life looking for truth and chasing causes often only seeing and intimidated with shadows, which have captured our limited vision and then often mistakenly so resulting instead in our panic.

Socrates was trained as a Sophist, and Sophist were into rhetoric and persuasion, or argument for argument’s sake.  He was concerned with the search for knowledge because to him knowledge was virtue, and virtue would protect man from himself.  This has led to a circular argument that is still with us today: when someone acts improperly, we can always claim it is because he lacks perfect knowledge. 

Here is how that might be considered in the current pandemic with the scientific, medical, political and governmental contingent all on board. 

Clearly, these people are doing everything imaginable that could possibly be done, justifying the shutdowns, the confinements, the quarantines, and the abandonment of convention in the interim.  On the other hand, should this fail, should these draconian methods prove counterproductive or even disastrous, it will be because brazen citizens failed to hunker down and take the matter seriously, failing to do what was right.  Or might they have failed to do so because they weren't blinded by shadows?

   

FROM MAXIMUM CONNECTION TO MAXIMUM SEPARATION

Soon to be published as an e-book on Kindle  

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

©

March 19, 2020, First Day of Spring

Reaction to the pandemic is simply a reminder that what you learn about a system in happy equilibrium tells you nothing about system behavior in disturbance. To obtain system control, as per Ashby's law of requisite variety, you require the system characteristic equation. In industry such is obtained by disturbing the system in several different ways in tests. In social systems, we do not yet have this equation. That's why our progress is set by applying disturbances in a systematic manner - the story of your life as well.

William L. Livingston, IV, author of The New Plague: Organizations in Complexity, 1985


W. Ross Ashby was a British cybernetician interested in the phenomenon of homeostasis or the way complex systems operate in changing environments to maintain a relatively stable equilibrium within tightly defined limits (e.g., internal body temperature at 98.6).

Ashby came up with the concept of variety as a measurement of the number of possible states of a system. His "Law" of Requisite Variety posits the idea that for a system to be stable, the number of states that its control mechanism is capable of attaining (its variety) must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled.

Ashby’s Law was framed in the context of self-regulating biological systems, but it rapidly became relevant to a number of other systems. In colloquial terms, Ashby’s Law has come to be understood as a simple proposition: if a system is to be able to deal successfully with the diversity of challenges that its environment produces, then it needs to have a repertoire of responses equal to or exceeding the problems thrown at the environment. So a viable system is one that can handle the variability of its environment. Or, as Ashby put it, only variety can absorb variety.

Organizations traditionally cope with environmental challenges by reducing the variety in which they have had to cope. Mass production was meant to reduce the variety of its environment by limiting the range of choices available to consumers (Vance Packard’s “The Waste Makers,” 1960 wrote about how “planned obsolescence” impacted productivity and the national character). Product standardization was essentially an extrapolation of Henry Ford’s slogan that customers could have the Model T in any color so long as it was black.

But the rise of the Internet has made variety-reduction increasingly difficult if not impossible. By any metric the pace of change in our information ecosystem is of an order of magnitude beyond comprehension and therefore seemingly impossible to resolve. We have a greater knack for creating than comprehending.

In Ashby’s terms, variety has increased in proportion to its complexity. Given that variety reduction seems unfeasible in this new situation, the implication is that many of our organizations and social systems—ones that had evolved to cope with variety—are no longer viable. For them, the path back to viability requires that they have to find ways of increasing their variety. And that is the big question: how do they do that? That is the conundrum, or is it?

Livingston says, “In social systems, we do not as yet have this equation.” I wonder.

With THE FISHER PARADIGM, I look at the situation from an entirely different perspective. When I was at university, I was not fascinated with the laboratory in chemistry, but with biochemistry. Why so?

It started with an experiment in which I was involved regarding osmosis. The experiment related to the osmotic hydraulic equilibrium that the human body attempts to maintain between the body’s lymphatic system and its blood supply by passing through a semi-permeable membrane. What was fascinating is that the human body’s autonomous system manages systemically to practice Ashby’s Law despite human biological complexity or essentially without our involvement in the process.

We are currently consumed with nightmarish fear of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Another thing I learned in biochemistry is that our bodies contain the pathogens that could lead to such things as cancer, yet many go through life and avoid this unsettling state. Likewise, human existence is vulnerable to invisible microbial pathogens that are either dormant within us or festering in the animal and insect kingdoms.

Now, about THE FISHER PARADIGM, remembering fondly the homeostasis maintenance of a constant internal environment to such factors as body temperature, blood pH, and a multitude of other chemical reactions constantly occurring, I confess to practicing a kind of homeostasis in my external environment, a practice that I have gradually come to realize is part of my nature as a Homo sapiens.

It has to do with instinct, intuition and integration, and the idea of fight, flight, and survival. It is a social system predicated on our primordial brain, often referred to as the “reptilian brain.”

Everyone has this brain but society, indeed, civilization prefers to ignore our primordial nature which is bombarding our mind with how a situation reads in terms of instinct, intuition and integration translating sight into insight and action. THE FISHER PARADIGM is a modest attempt to bridge this void.

Only last night, I was telling Beautiful Betty that THE FISHER PARADIGM has a lot in common with the current pandemic of the coronavirus. “How so,” she asked. Then I reduced it to the equation that is representative of a dozen scenarios in the book:

Cognitive confidence has waned in the Coronavirus Pandemic

Intuition

· Personality – mankind is under siege

· Geographic – an invisible microbial pathogen is on the rampage

· Demographic – draconian focus on the crisis has reached the point of insanity

Fear and panic has stolen the mind of humanity

Maximum connection we find leads invariably to maximum separation. It happened with the Bubonic Plague, and is now happening with the Coronavirus Pandemic. Why has no learning taken place?


LIFE WITHOUT A CAUSE

Maximum connection invariably leads to maximum separation as we are now experiencing, and it is clear people don’t know how to handle it. They are angry because they can no longer be on automatic robotic pilot and are confronted with the prospects of being alone as persons, people who have never learned to be alone or separated from the noise and commotion of others.

The inconvenience finds scientists looking desperately, first for a vaccine for the coronavirus, and then for the cause. The cause, as it was with the Bubonic Plague, is likely to be found in one of nature’s creatures that was the innocent carrier of the pathogen.

Perhaps this would be a good time to realize that life has no cause as much as we wish to give it such a noble role.

But our lives, all of our lives, have a symmetry that could be missed. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer points out that when we reach a certain age, and look back over our lifetime, it can be seen to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little consequence turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed this plot?

Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an unconscious aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed of the will within you. This has led me to THE FISHER PARADIGM and to sharing this missive with you.