DON'T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF!

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 28, 2020

A READER COMMENTS ON “THIS I KNOW”:

Enjoyed reading this, but I disagree that things changed with the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. They changed for the people at the top and the educated, but did very little for the people in the rest of the population.

The rest of the population may have gained a little freedom. Having now lived 81 years, what I have experienced in my life is that the people at the top want control and most everyone else submits. I even saw that in the school system. They left you alone in the classroom unless they had problems from your students, but when it came to anything else it was control from the top.

Over all it has been the same thing over and over again. From the history I have read and the experiences of my life very little has changed in human behavior.

RESPONSE:

As William L. Livingston IV, my mentor and friend, has taught me – “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff!” To get above the mentoring line, as he puts it, you have to put aside all your precious perceptions and see beyond sight to insight. This means that you have to table the desire to change the equation of life, and your perceptions of “what is” in that equation. Why? Because first you have no control over anything beyond your own initiative, and second, what you think is, isn’t necessarily so.

Humanity limps along, but humanity has always limped along; and somebody will always be in charge because most people don’t want the aggravation. They want to be comfortable, content, and yes, essentially be able to luxuriate robotically, but they still wouldn’t turn down the benefits that accrue to those who puts themselves on the line and risk everything to establish an identity outside the norm.  Leadership is an act that becomes a habit.

As many philosophers have written, often in ponderous tomes, Rousseau for one, people don’t want freedom because they prefer “chains” rather than submit to the demands that freedom calls for.

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During the decade of the 1970s, I was a police consultant along the East Coast from New York City to Miami, as well as giving American Management Association (AMA) seminars across the nation in which senior police officers and government officials were in attendance, along with teaching as an adjunct professor at several universities in their Criminal Justice Colleges and Police Academies across the State of Florida, as well as making major organizational development (OD) interventions for The Professional Institute of the American Management Association with The Fairfax County Police Department, Fairfax, Virginia, and for The Public Safety Institute (PSI), a police consulting firm, in Raleigh, North Carolina with The Raleigh Police Department.

I wrote my Master’s Thesis on my nine months while embedded in the Fairfax County Police Department after a white police officer shot and killed a 27-year old unarmed African American man in a 7-11 Store, after which a riot took place (MA thesis: A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot, 1976).

Two years later, I would write my doctorate dissertation (The Police Paradox: A Systematic Exploration of the Paradoxical Dilemma of the Police and the Policed, 1978), substantiating to a considerable degree what former Los Angeles Police Sergeant Joseph Wambaugh, who became a bestselling novelist, once said, “A community gets the police it deserves.”

This is mention in the context of these remarks because, while much of what this writer says are true, a completely different perspective could be argued with equal validity. As Sir William would say, “what is the point?” And he would be right.

THIS I KNOW was a reflective piece from my working life and scholarship, and that is that education is or can be liberating with a few caveats.

During the 1970s, the Florida University System did a study, finding that police officers who went to the trouble of acquiring baccalaureate degrees tended to be more tolerant than police officers with only GED’s or high school diplomas.

This study was so convincing that the State of Florida launched a program to give police officers who acquired a college degree a substantial boost in their income. Statistics in my work towards my dissertation confirmed these findings, as well as I have observed the significance of this correlation on tolerance in my police consulting work and riding with police officers on the job.

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Homo sapiens as a specie climbed out of the Dark Middle Ages in Europe with the “Renaissance” or the rebirth of learning in the 14th to the 17th century, producing such polymaths as Leonardo de Vinci and Michelangelo, among others, with an eruption of intellectual, political and social change. You are an artist and you have benefited from this breakthrough. There was however an innocence in this explosion.

Now, the “Age of the Enlightenment” from 18th to the 19th century was much less innocent, from my point of view, and much more contrived, so I will give you that.

With good intentions, it however “threw the baby out with the bath water,” wanting to improve the human condition in a material sense with less concern about the spiritual nature of man. Thinkers of this age valued reason, objective science, natural rights of man to liberty and property, all very admirable, but finding little room for religion other than a grudging tolerance, as religion and the afterlife to these thinkers were considered suspicious and irrelevant to man’s dignity.

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, among others, believed people were innately selfish and self-interested with marginal tolerance for others. Hobbes wrote:

The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone. 

John Locke, on the other hand, was less pugnacious in his thinking on the “nature of man.” Locke gave us many powerful treatises including “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” which would become reinterpreted in our times as a self-conscious obsession with the idea of the “self.”

Ironically, that was not the case in either Hobbes or Locke’s time for the ideas of “The Enlightenment” mainly failed because they were scores of years ahead of the times when society would be ready to absorb such ideas.

But “Enlightenment ideas” are very much alive today in which, as you point out, they have not turned out as their creators would have expected. Today, in a very quiet way, far removed from the “women’s lib” movement, women are asserting themselves.  This is a nascent product of "The Enlightenment."

That said, education of the masses, and I include myself as one within that multitude, have profited from education in a very real sense. Were it not for the benefit of an education, I don’t know what I would have done because I have no talent beyond that of a day laborer.

I write of the ascent of women in MEET YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND (2013):

Women who view life through the feminist prism campaign for an Office of Gender Equity, implying a gender bias favors men, especially with regard to education. A review of the facts paints a different picture:

· While boys get higher scores in mathematics and science, girls get higher scores in reading and writing.

· Boys in eighth grade are 50 percent more likely to be held back a grade, and boys in high school constitute 68 percent of the special education population.

· 67 percent of female high school graduates go on to college, compared with 58 percent of male high school graduates.

· In 1970, women were only 41 percent of all college students. Today, women account for 55 percent of all undergraduates, and they receive 54 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States.

· Regarding graduate school, in 1970: Women received 40 percent of all master’s degrees; today they are 59 percent of all master’s degree students and earn 53 percent of all master’s degrees.

· Women earned only 6 percent of all first professional degrees; by 1991, that figure was up to 39 percent.

· Only 14 percent of all doctoral degrees went to women, but today that figure is up to 39 percent. The medical degree earned during that period by women jumped from 8 percent to 36 percent. In 1993, 42 percent of first-year medical students were women; now over 50 percent of all medical school graduates are women.

· Five percent of women earned law degrees; today that figure is more than 40 percent.

· Women received only 1 percent of dental degrees, compared with 32 percent in 1991.

· Women today earn a majority of the degrees awarded in pharmacy and veterinary medicine.

· There is, however, a growing gender imbalance in higher education among minority students. Among black students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 1990, fully 62 percent were female; among Hispanic students, 55 percent were female. Among white students, the imbalance is 53 percent to 47 percent in favor of women (pp. 27-29).

Given these encouraging statistics, I can recall 80 percent of the top 10 percent of my class in high school were women, at the university, the top 10 percent were 80 percent men and 20 percent women.


High School Graduates (all)            College Graduates (Male/Female)  


1900 – 6 percent                                                   


1930 – 29 percent


1940 – 51 percent                                  6/3 percent


1964 – 77 percent


1970 – 80 percent


1984                                                       23/16 percent


2000 – 78 percent


2019                                                     33/35 percent

If I have learned anything from life, it is that those willing to take risks and endure pain and experience failure on their way to success tend to fill the vacuum by those more able but unwilling to do the same.  You can talk about the emasculation of society of the male, but what is the point? 

In the peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com, I write in an essay titled “Job Security in An Uncertain World” (June 16, 2014): No One Promises You a Living, No One Owes You a Job!

In an uncertain world, where job security is vital to our self-interests, we often do all the wrong things to put ourselves back together again.  Instead, we panic or become traumatized when made redundant, when our place of work closes, when the skills we have that once were in demand are no longer, when we are asked to take a 10, 20 or 30 percent cut in wages and benefits for the company’s survival, and are barely making it on our current income.  How could this happen when we’ve done nothing wrong?  Turns out we’ve done a lot wrong, starting with waiting for someone to rescue us from our predicament and ourselves.  

In such circumstances, we are consumed with the law of anxiety that looks at nature backwards:

Everything is the reverse of common sense with everything turned inside out and upside down.  Suddenly, circumstances have forced us to be in charge of our lives and no one has prepared us for that ordeal, leastwise ourselves. 

We think we live in a time of unusual insecurity.  This is not the case at all.  In the past hundred years, or throughout the past twentieth century, long established traditions have broken down continuously: the traditional family, social life, government, economic order, religious beliefs, values, ethics, and most notable of all, morality. 

We have seen society stagger out of the Industrial Age only to be caught in a breathless dance in the Information Age, as manufacturing assembly lines have become a shadow of the former status.  This watershed moment of the early twentieth century was the backbone of the spirited working middle class, now replaced by quick minds and fingers on computer keyboards all but obliterating the blue-collar working class. 

There is no longer certainty.  Actually, certainty never existed, but it remained a myth perpetuated by a society deep in denial.  Institutions denied the reality by failing to pay attention, workers denied it by failing to learn new skills, and companies denied it by failing to press for change as the metamorphosis of the workforce went from blue-collar to college trained white collar.  Meanwhile, schools and universities continued to teach as if locked in 1945 nostalgia, even as private and public workplaces managed as if the color of the workers’ collars had not changed.   If blame is the game, there is more than enough to go around, but that doesn’t get us off the dime.

That said, for far too long the majority were willing to put up with lives largely doing jobs that were boring and inconsequential, content in earning the means to seek relief from the tedium with periodic respites of drinking and partying in expensive pleasure, or going on shopping sprees with reckless abandon.  Saving for a rainy day was not in the specs as the weather ahead was full of sunshine and promise with no dark clouds.  Neither workers nor employers were looking ahead.  It wasn’t anybody’s job!

All I can add is, “Indeed!”

THIS I KNOW

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

© April 23, 2020

It occurred to me that I am disinclined to find favor with many authors, who seem in plenitude at the moment, being too sensational for my tastes or temperament.  That does not mean they are wrong; nor does it suggest that they are right.  It only implies that they do not find favor with my conscience. 

Fifty years ago when I came back from South Africa, I was a spent individual on the brink of collapse but also an “angry young man” as my psychiatrist told me.  In fact, he suggested that anger was my motivation.  I went to him at the behest of my then wife, or wife Before Betty, who while implying I was brilliant and that brilliant people so suffer, he lost credence with me with that assessment.  Brilliant I am not, but simply a consistent persistent plodder with a point of view, a person who knows no other way to go forward.   

Few people I know have read as much as I have read, and that includes all of my professors at every level; and few people, and this is even a larger group, have written as much as I have written without generating an audience of any impression. 

What you think, you become; and when writing is an exercise consistent with your thinking, then what you become is a fait accompli, nothing less or nothing more.    

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Ten months ago, I had open heart surgery and experienced what many in my lifetime have experienced, some many times.  It was my first, and were it not for my Beautiful Betty being there for ten hours a day, every day during my stay in intensive care, and then in rehab for physical and occupational therapy, I don’t know if I would have made it emotionally and psychologically.  It was a terrifying experience for me not to be in control of my body or my wits, evidence of this fact is that I never read a single page during the three weeks of such confinement.  I slept fitfully and watched the clock, seemingly never moving with the television above my bed on 24/7 finding 99 percent of what was on more torture than enlightenment.

I shudder with the prospects of going through this during the current pandemic.  Then BB would not have been able to visit me, and knowing my mental construction, it would have been a paralyzing situation.  My prayers go out to the multitude who have not been as fortunate as I have been. 

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Pope John XXIII, who became pope as a very old man, once said that he should not be given credit for being celibate because he never had the urge to be otherwise.  “Continence,” he once said, “was never a problem for me.”

Likewise, the Pontiff didn’t think Catholicism, indeed, Christianity, should be isolated from other faiths, as he claimed, and I agree, that no one can be without faith, be it belief or nonbelief in God, as it is all the same.  

Pope John XXIII created The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (1962 – 1965) that addressed relations between the Catholic Church and the modern world.

In DEVLIN, a biographical novel, Devlin struggles mightily to live in South Africa’s apartheid culture in 1968.  He sought solace from his perplexity by approaching his pastor in Johannesburg introducing himself and mentioning the work of Pope John XXIII, only to find he knew more about The Second Ecumenical Vatican Council than his parish priest did.  In fact, his pastor thought he was a failed seminarian for his knowledge and understanding of Vatican II. 

Now, fifty years later, in the twilight of my life, I have often run into people who have identity issues and stay within accepted confines of convention, as did this priest when it came to apartheid, because thinking, behaving and becoming represent “safety.”  It never works but that doesn’t make it less endemic. 

If anger was once my motivation as the good psychiatrist inferred, it is sadness now.  I don’t know many people who are truly free when freedom is like breathing, something that you don’t choose but something native to your construction.  It is unfreedom that is contrived.

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I published my first book, CONFIDENT SELLING (1971), after coming back from South Africa, when the rage soon would be a book titled WINNING THROUGH INTIMIDATION (1974).  

My book was a modest national bestseller based on the idea of the seller and buyer being partners, not adversaries, in enterprise; the other book was about finessing the buyer through coercion.  It sold in the millions.  Forty five years later,  it is still the most prevalent modus operandi in the business community.

We see this demonstrated when a half trillion dollars is approved for “small business” and “big business” wipes the slate clean before anyone in small business sees economic relief through government loans/grants.  Another quarter trillion is to be approved with little hope that the little guy will participate.

Why? Because we have a system, and this is something I’ve been writing about since 1990, that is anachronistic and those pulling the strings are atavistic. 

To wit, one of my relatives, a successful cottage fishing establishment at the border between the United States and Canada, a business conducted by him and his wife, went from bringing in $11,000 in its peak period to $400 since COVID-19, and now he is one of the small businesses falling between the cracks in the system. 

My second book, twenty years later, WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1991) was addressed to management from workers in the trenches.  It got good reviews, but was self-published because after being finessed by a major publisher with my first book, I decided to never go that route again.  Incidentally, it was called an “angry book” by a first rate reviewer, who also said it was one of the ten best business books of 1991.  Most everything advocated in this work has turned to prophecy, but alas, only cosmetically so.

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So, what is my point?  There is no point in crying “fire,” even if the building is figuratively going up in smoke because people are slow to grasp change, and then only when it has some immediate palpable benefit or is expedient to do so. 

People like to read David Quammen’s “Spillover” (2012) or John Barry’s “The Great Influenza” (2004) because they feel as if they are doing something, but nothing changes because people are not interested in changing. 

I often feel that people are like those watching the film of the lady tied to the tracks as a giant locomotive is zooming down upon her, hoping that she is rescued in the last frame, but she never is.   

To put it another way, the addictive gambler, and I’ve known a few, believe that they can recoup their losses when the system is designed to produce only losers not winners.  

Likewise, to print billions than trillions of dollars to rescue the economy from the current pandemic makes as much sense as the compulsive gambler who already in debt believes his next gambling gig will reverse his fate by borrowing money from friends.  It never does.

Leaders of government, industry, commerce, academia and the church have acted like sixth graders in senseless polarity over who is right and who is dominant.  The fact is, and this was true of sixth graders in the past and present century, no one is in charge.  

Institutional polarity has hollowed out meaning and motive to the point that the belief that the next administration, the next generation, the nexus of whatever, will right the situation, again it never does.  

Idealists enter the fray and say a grand strategy must be developed to get beyond six grade bullying establishing harmony in the distribution of power, as well as wealth with fundamental social and societal change, and that too never happens. 

To wrench us out of this madness, and madness I see it as being, calls for a Renaissance.  We had one in the 15^th and 16^th century transitioning from the Middle Ages to Modernity; and we had it again in the “Age of the Enlightenment” of the 17^th to the 19^th century called the “Renaissance of Humanism,” including the rebirth of philosophy and science. 

We are stuck, a word my BB hates when I use it, but stuck we are nonetheless.  We need a new Renaissance that gets away from the tiring dribble of writers, scholars, academics and power brokers.  And, yes, writers like me.     

 

  

WHEN EFFECTS BECOME A COMMON CAUSE

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 22, 2020

Sometimes I feel like St. Augustine of Hippo, other times like Johann Gutenberg, still other times like Stephen Jay Gould, but most times like Chicken Little.

St. Augustine (354 – 430 C.E) talked to God, and he claimed in his “Confessions” that God often spoke to him.  But were he not the benefactor of a generous sponsor in his youth he might never have risen above the unknowable’s, leaving the saving of the Christian faith to someone else as Christianity was already on life support at the time in the 4^th century C.E. 

Like many others, I talk to my own mind, and sometimes it answers pointing me in the right direction moving my unconscious accommodating mind forward.

Johann Gutenberg (1400 – 1468) was a goldsmith who had been misinformed in 1439 about the date of a Pilgrim’s Fair in nearby Aachen.  He had agreed with a couple of investors to make small mirrors to sell to these pilgrims at the fair.  When it turned out that the fair was to be held a year later, he revealed to his co-investors that he had been thinking about making individual letters on metal plates so as to combine and recombine them to print on paper. 

The revolutionary technique of moveable typeface would radically change the world of documentation in the West, replacing as it did, handwritten manuscripts.  The effect of Gutenberg’s letters of metal would change the map of Europe, considerably reduce the power of the Roman Catholic Church, open the floodgates of knowledge to a wider audience, provide a dissemination process for Martin Luther’s message of Reformation, spawn the identity of diverse peoples with their own native language, which in turn would lead to nation building, and a new enterprise system called “capitalism.” 

When I look back on my own long life, not being particularly gifted in any real sense, but repeatedly enjoying fortuitous situations due to timing and circumstance, l feel blessed sharing what I would deem an intuitive instinct for survival with inventor Gutenberg. 

Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002), a paleontologist of the first rank, has been one of my heroes, not because I am that interested in his discipline, but because I love reading his books and his hundreds of articles in Nature, as few write with such clarity and poignancy.  He also loved baseball and was fond of baseball stats as am I.  My Beautiful Betty once endured nine hours of cassette tapes of Gould’s “Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin” on our way up north by car from Florida for a summer vacation.  Alas, my sense is that were Gould alive today he would scoff at the panic and pandemonium of the current pandemic.  He writes:   

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.

Stephen Jay Gould is best known for his "theory of punctuated equilibrium," which proposes that evolution of species is not a slow, gradual process of change, but in fact consists of long periods of stability broken by shorter periods of rapid change.

In a more modest sense, I have posited the belief that success is not a linear curve of constant effort to the achievement of some goal, but a gradual process of change interrupted by periodic failures, or gestation periods, where pain and risk are considered and an inventory taken of where we have been, where we thought we were going, and where we actually are.

I call this the “Plateau of Failure” and every successful person experiences it if their ultimate success is truly genuine and essentially new. Otherwise, the experience no matter how high a person climbs is not new but a repeated imitation of what was and what continues to be. Once the gestation period on this “Plateau of Failure” has passed from disappointment to the calm of an intuitive grasp of reality, it progresses to instinctive integration and insight, erupting into a new explosion in personal growth. See diagram “Triangle of Growth".

When I say I feel most like Chicken Little, it gets attention but is not meant exactly in the sense that you might think. You know the story of Chicken Little who throws his small town into panic by claiming “the sky is falling,” but is unable to find the piece of the “sky” that hit him, earning the displeasure if not the scorn of his fellow citizens. The moral of my story is that we jump to conclusions to what the real situation is and what it tells us by embracing some form of mass hysteria, which leads us vulnerable to manipulation by unscrupulous foxes who could be a politician, neighbor, scholar, preacher, media personality, scientist, academic, or our own conscience.

WHEN EFFECTS BECOME A COMMON CAUSE

We have the effects of splitting the atom, of radioactivity and nuclear waste; the exhaust of our internal combustion engines in our automobiles filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide; the dropping dung of cows across the planet producing methane gas, and now cows and other domestic and wild creatures being considered the source of pathogens contributing to pandemics, climate change and global warning. Effects have, indeed, become a common cause.

Plagued with effects while cause forever proves elusive, dread has become a common cause. Biblical scripture reminds us of this:

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth (REVELATIONS 6:8).

Today, I opened my May/June 2020 copy of Foreign Affairs with the cover story headline “The Fire Next Time: How to Prevent a Climate Catastrophe.” For some reason, I thought the issue would be on the COVID-19 Pandemic, but it was on climate change and global warming, commencing with 2018 Nobel Laureate William Norhaus on “How to Fix a Failing Global Effort.” In other words, on the effects of our present dilemma. The Western mind even in the sacrosanct chambers of academia cannot get past the failure of Western mind to think other than deductively.

The Western mind of ours is absolutely obsessed with “effects” and has no inclination to chase causes. It is a mind always catching up with some disaster or failure of people across the West to behave as mature adults. It has precedence.

Socrates set out to discover the true definition of justice with the idea that ethics would resolve the matter. Plato then followed with his notion of “ideal forms,” treating beauty as abstract and physical forms as only shadows or images of reality. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that beauty, in fact all objects and concepts, were intrinsic and not abstract, and that they had to be analyzed on their own. As the father of Western logic, Aristotle was the first to develop a formal system for reasoning, observing that the deductive validity of any argument can be determined by its structure giving birth to the syllogism: all men are mortal, Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.

The legacy of these three (i.e., Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) is that, throughout the ages, the discovery of the truth has been an attractive idiom for academics, theologians, scientists, journalists, and idealists: “Truth will set us free!” But whose truth?

This has led to a near total reliance on deductive reasoning and an obsession with effects leading to a consensus of a common cause. Incredibly, this doesn’t seem to discourage the constant engagement in circular logic and crisis management with the treatment of effects as if they were causes.

We see this in the composition of the arguments in Foreign Affairs; we see this in the daily television long winded conference calls of the President of the United States and his collection of scientists and technologists at his side from the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

In earnest, these devoted public servants are all dealing with the effects of this pandemic. It is what we as Westerners do best, which is to pursue effects; our legacy from the “Gang of Three” (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) and our attack weapon. And so now, consistent with this, the Holy Grail is the search for an effective vaccine for COVID-19.

I am not a TED television viewer, but occasionally one of these speakers’ performance will be sent to me by e-mail. They all appear to deal with effects, sometimes with such passion that you temporarily lose your orientation, and think they are addressing causes, but it is never so. They put on a solid performance of what we want to believe at the moment.

Author David Quammen (born 1948) in his book “Spillover” (2012), a book with some 70,000 copies in print, claims to examine the emergence and causes of new diseases across the world, insisting most pathogens that lead to pandemics originate with wild animals or even possibly domestic animals.

No surprise, Quammen, like many others, questions the origin of COVID-19. When asked in an interview if the animal population should be inoculated with a vaccine (ref: Ebola in Africa), he answered a qualified “yes,” except for the possibility of locating all the gorillas who would be hard to find.

My mind raced, “Say what?” In another appearance, Quammen touched on the case of livestock carrying pathogens harmful to humans, implying perhaps all domestic animals should be vaccinated as well.

Now, funny as this sounds, it is scary that attention is focused on the effects derived from possibly treating animals, domestic and wild, as common carriers of pathogens harmful to humans, and seeing people in the audience nodding their heads approvingly.

Quammen goes on to say 60 percent of all communicable human diseases originate with animals. Then a reference to HIV/AIDS follows in this same breath, a disease that killed 35 million in three decades, but without a clear understanding of the cause other than promiscuous male-to-male sex and addicts sharing narcotic syringes. The effect of this behavior and the sharing of needles resulted in destabilizing the immune system of the sufferers with these terrible consequences.

But these casualties were not domestic or wild animals but human beings who had conscious minds, but never apparently exercised the discipline or embraced the business of growing up. Behavior has consequences which humans can control if wild and domestic animals cannot.

This error is endemic to Western thinking man because we are not educated or culturally programmed to deal with a changing complex world. Our sanguine spirit prevents us from seeing the extent of our failing Western mindset. We can describe, analyze, evaluate, and create explanatory models, but none of this changes the reality of the complexity of modern interaction. It is time we create new gods of our minds and let the “Gang of Three” rest in peace.

When I came into the world, there were less than 2 billion souls; today there are 8 billion; a 400 percent growth in one person’s lifetime.

We have not been taught to think creatively, but only critically; not shown how to think constructively and move forward but instead provided with apologies for our situational fault lines; fault lines for which we cannot be blamed because we are not in charge; so, we fall back on the bromide: how could we design a way forward when we have never been taught how?

Author and psychologist Edward de Bono captures the essence of our dilemma:

Western thinking is failing because it is not designed to deal with a changing world. It is failing because it is inadequate to deal with change, because it does not offer creative constructive and design energy. It is failing because it suggests dangerous judgments and discriminations which tend to make things worse (as in legislative chambers and politics). It is failing because its complacent arrogance prevents it from seeing the extent of its failures (Parallel Thinking, 1995, p. 225).

The hope of this observer is that some learning and less addiction to effects will result in a fresh if also a new embrace with causes once the current pandemic has subsided.

ARE YOU GOD?

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

© April 15, 2020

REFERENCE

Possible influence on this dream, the long historical work, AUGUSTINE: Conversions and Confessions (2005) that I just completed.

Turns out that St. Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430 C.E.) was quite an ordinary man in many senses of the word, despite his brilliance, and while he talked to God many of us talk to our own minds. 

Likewise, Augustine was comfortable in rhetoric and made his living as an orator before turning inward and becoming a prolific author, which others in this modern day can relate to as well.

Many of us have lived through The Great Depression, the Second World War and subsequently, the explosion in technology and the emasculation of society, culture and religion, especially Christianity, not realizing that nothing was more contentious, chaotic and uncertain than this religion four centuries after its founding, not to mention the collapse and fall of the Roman Empire occurred in Augustine’s lifetime. 

As St. Paul invented Christianity as he envisioned it, four centuries later, Augustine, who was not baptized Christian until in his thirties, reinvented Christianity again, low born that he was, the son of a pagan father and Christian mother, a man who had a lot of lion as well as lamb in his personality. 

So, as they say, the more things change, it is apparent the more they remain the same, including coming to understand what it is like to be alive for a short time on this blessed planet.

THE DREAM – Background

After I retired from gainful employment in 1990, I turned to writing books, articles, missives and monographs that have swelled to some 1,500 missives and 25 books, mostly in the genre of social psychology. 

A book with which my soul has been gestating, mutating, selectively assimilating and conceptually adapting to my experience over the years, then incrementally written about, ideas presented at conferences, and addressed to leaders in the United States, Canada and Europe has taken the form of The Fisher Paradigm©™ that was formed innocently in my mind in youth, and has grown to fruition over the past 60 years including in a confessional novel, DEVLIN (2019).  This is the background to the dream.

THE DREAM

I am having coffee at MacDonald’s of a weekday morning, where I like to ponder what I had written on The Fisher Paradigm the previous day.  A man in another booth keeps looking over at me, smiling.  He has the incongruous look of either a professor or an engineer, years younger than I am, but with a well lived in face that suggests he has paid his dues to get to this point in his life.

“Pardon,” he says with a broad smile, “if I seem intrusive (which clearly he was being), but I, too, come here often and read my newspapers, but you have an intensity about you that, well, I find fascinating.”

I look up, but say nothing.  He waits.  I still say nothing.

“Mind if I join you?”  What could I say as he already has moved into the booth sitting across from me? 

“I’m professor of physics down the way at the university.  Nuclear fusion is my passion.  Are you familiar with nuclear fusion?”

“As opposed to nuclear fission, you mean?” I say finally.

“Yes, exactly.  Yes, indeed.  Combining rather than splitting to produce energy of a less magnitude of nuclear radioactivity.”

“To imitate the sun’s energy source, I would imagine,” I say sorry for being so pompous.

“Well, yes, in a sense that is the idea,” he ruffles his beard. “Can I tell you something?”

Being somewhat territorial, the privacy of my morning destroyed, my silence was taken for consent, but that was not the wonder of this man.  He told me a story that dovetailed so well with my own that I hoped his commentary would never end.

He had been a university student at 16 with a passion for physics, earning his Ph.D. at a major eastern university before he was 20.  A rather satisfying if not distinguished career followed, and now nearing 65, he was, as he put it, in the “coasting stage,” happy to be employed around young people with bright minds and a kind of confidence he remembered once having.

Over the years, he has kept in touch with a professor he has never met, who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics.

He confessed to the professor his passion for nuclear fusion with his desire to make the ultimate breakthrough.  He smiled recalling his arrogance, but continued earnestly.  “Every time I would excitedly share an insight into nuclear fusion with him he would write and say it was redundant; that I should apply myself more vigorously.  I took his advice, thinking he knew the answers to what I only dreamed of discovering, but he was keeping them to himself.

“Since you can only win the Nobel Prize once, I suspect he was not of a mind to reveal his secrets.  It sometimes made me angry, but I never let him know that.  I knew he was right.  It was for me to discover on my own.” 

Then he got a sad look on his face and looked nearly as old as me.  For the longest time he said nothing.  Silence is my nature, and listening perhaps my greatest virtue, but I had to know.

“What happened?” I asked anxiously.

“He quit writing; he quit answering my queries.  I thought he may have died, but I checked and he hadn’t.”

“Why do you think he quit writing?”

He shrugged his shoulders, “Who knows.  I suspect it was because I stopped growing; stopped pursuing my passion, was looking for him to relieve me of the burden of discovery.”  He folded and refolded his newspaper.  “He was right of course.  I had surrendered to what I had known; was not of a mind to keep growing.”

A chill went up my spine.  I thought of my friend in Canada whom I have never met; who has worked with me in this computer age of which I am a nincompoop to get my ideas into print.  In fact, unpublished manuscripts, articles, and missives that I have failed to catalogue and keep at my bidding, he has.  He works as hard as I do to get my ideas into a format that will appeal to readers when it is clear that I fail to register equal concern.  He knows this last book, the equivalent of my discovery of nuclear fusion, is a passion of mine.        

“Hello!  Hello!” my booth stranger says.  I look up dreamy eyed.  “Thank goodness!” he says, “I didn’t know what to think as you seemed to have left me.  Do you do this often?”

Instead of answering, I said quickly, “I’ve never met him, my Canadian friend.  I’m not what you would call a social person, yet two people, you and I have never met have had extraordinary impact on our thinking. 

“You have dealt with the idea of nuclear fusion as a more reliable source of energy, primarily in an isolated academic setting, at least essentially from the maddening chaotic conflicting energy which is the social setting of human combustibles.  That, alas, has been my laboratory.   

“My temperament, I suspect, is closer to yours than yours is to my experience.  Would you say that is fair?”

He looked at his watch and got up hurriedly.  “I’m due for a class.”  Then as he turned to leave, after shaking my hand, and said strangely, “Do you think my professor friend I’ve never met and your Canadian friend are God?”

My coffee was cold and tasted like acid.  I looked up and into the parking lot to get my last glimpse of the man who had only left seconds before, and there was no man in sight.  I wondered: Did I imagine all this?  Then I woke up.