WHY
NO LONGER SIGNIFICANT
James
R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
©
March 27, 2020
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.
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.
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.
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