RELAX! THIS, TOO, WILL PASS!

 

RELAX! THIS, TOO, WILL PASS! 

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. 

© November 13, 2020 

REFERENCE:

I have encouraged a colleague of mine to launch another career, that as a writer, as he has had a successful career as an engineer and executive. In that encouraging note, I mentioned the book I’m working on which is a conversation with longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer vis-à-vis the content and context of The Fisher Paradigm©™ and its trilogy of A Sense of Self (Personality), A Sense of Place & Space (Geography) and A Sense of Self-Worth (Demography). 

Hoffer didn’t use such terminology but did explore these dimensions of our human existence in pursuit of understanding the nature and social psychology of mass movements.

Since February of this year, haven’t had quite a scare fifteen years ago, vacationing on the French Riviera, thinking I was going to die from a debilitating virus, and asking my BB to get me to the United States, as I didn’t want to die in France, I took the initial disclosures of the coronavirus quite seriously, and have only left my home four times in ten months. 

This isolation has provided me with the sanctuary to have this conversation with Hoffer, rereading his ten published books and imagining a conversation with him.

Hoffer, like my correspondent here, whom I’ve encouraged to write, was rationale but intuitive, pragmatic rather than theoretical, and concise rather than expansive.  My friend, like Hoffer, has a taste for the good sentence.


I’ve chosen to share his precise thoughts against the wild, crazy, chaotic and frantic comedy of print hysteria to the recent presidential election.

JRF


A READER WRITES:

Jim


I remember Hoffer, but paid little attention at the time as I was a kid. I will read him.


I have refrained from writing to date, for want of substantive material. We seem awash in writers who have learned wordsmithing in school but lack the life experience for substantive contribution. They fill the excess bandwidth with rehash of what they’ve heard elsewhere. They use a chapter to make a point often better made in a single sentence, as if they’re paid by the pound. They waste our time.


I’d like to address what is seen as a societal misbalance toward the theoretical at the expense of the pragmatic. Starting in my generation, and worsening in each succeeding class, we were all programed with an idealistic worldview, a strong sense of how ‘things should be’. Against that baseline, the world is a mess. I would submit that the world is what it is at this point, and the baseline is unrealistic. While I appreciate idealism in that it lets us imagine and pursue improvement, beyond that I see it as just the dreams of a person too lazy to cope with the world as it is. We cannot solve problems immersed in fantasy.


Our species is long on hubris, believing ourselves the masters of the planet. In fact, we’re visitors passing through on our way to extinction like every other species before and after. The principles upon which this planet operates often seem harsh from an individual’s perspective, but are simple and brilliant from a creator’s perspective. They will go on long after us.


I expect my thoughts to threaten existing monetary-industrial complexes. I’m glad we no longer employ public crucifixion.


Thanks for your inputs; I welcome them all.

 I RESPOND:

 

What a joy to read your reflections.  Your experience is obviously different than mine, but you are correct in that it is the base from which our thoughts originate, a baseline that when honest and balanced, which yours is, can be useful to us all when expressed.  I look forward to that possibility in this new writing adventure for you.

 

Crossing my desk, which is mainly an expression, as I confine myself to e-mails and my blog, I haven't submitted to or do I follow social media of any kind, as I see it increasingly a composite of nonsense often including the reputably august sources of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.  My wonder is how good people can take these sources seriously anymore. 

 

We survived the 1947 – 1949  80th United States Congress where the Republican Party controlled the House of Representative and the US Senate in the Truman Administration.  

Democrats – look it up! – were on the same accusatory tear of Republicans then.  While Truman tabbed the 80th US Congress a "Do Nothing Congress," citing all sorts of shenanigans by Republicans, including, yes, "stuffing the ballot box," Eisenhower as president the next eight years (1952-1960) gave us relative tranquility. 

I was a Navy Hospital Corpsman on the Flagship of the Sixth Fleet, the USS Salem CA-139, a heavy cruiser with a crew of 1,400 men operating in the Mediterranean Sea.  

In 1957, when Great Britain and France bombed Egypt's Suez Canal into smithereens, I was dressed for combat attached to the US Marines.  We were ready to invade Port Said, Egypt, when President Eisenhower gave us a "stand down!"  Eisenhower was an adult as president, a rarity since, and a moment that is important in my own personal history. 

My  friend writes:

Starting in my generation, and worsening in each succeeding class, we were all programed with an idealistic worldview, a strong sense of how ‘things should be’. Against that baseline, the world is a mess.

I have a more crass definition of the times, and this goes back to Eric Hoffer's "terrible '60's," when young adults retreated from the center stage and wandered off to communes, or to Haight Asbury in Golden Gate State Park, or off to Canada to avoid the draft, or simply in cahoots with academics confined to the security of the university and able to "tune in, turn on, and drop out" in a psychedelic haze.  Otherwise this generation was nowhere to be found.   

I saw this first hand for myself when I spoke at Nalco Chemical Conferences in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1964. 

Articles being written today in the aftermath of the 2020 Presidential Election boarder on fanaticism and represent testimony to that fact.  If these bizarre reflections are taken seriously, Republicans doom the American Republic not only to this temporary "drift," but to a totally unequivocal absolute permanent authoritarian.  

I find that assessment absurd as I see Americans whatever their political persuasion of more balanced and less doctrinaire proclivities than this.  

Democrats accused Republicans of that same authoritarianism 71 years ago when Republicans controlled the Congress, a time before many of my readers were born.  

Harry S. Truman won reelection in 1948 in a stunning upset of New York Governor Thomas Dewey, but the transition was adult because the country after WWII had not yet waffled into ubiquitous juvenility, which it would seem now prevails.

 

RELAX, THIS TOO WILL PASS!