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.