Community Minded “WE” Generation (1930 – 1946) Saved the United States & Its Mature Leadership Saved Our Democracy.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

BB’s sister sent this. Her sister is a member of this group, as am I, while she is not.My children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren have little sense of the “WE” Generation’s significance much less American and world history failing to recognize that genealogy and mortality are inextricably related.

I told my daughter that my da (and her grandfather) was working-class poor and an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad. She scoffed at that saying, "I am the daughter of an executive, author, and consultant with a Ph.D."

Alas, she never knew my da as he died at the age of 49 from leukemia before she was born, unaware that my da’s mother died in delivery with his father taking off never to be seen again. My da completed the seventh grade at St. Patrick’s grammar school while my mother graduated from high school at St. Mary’s. It was The Great Depression.

It was not my daughter's fault that she has grown up in a culture that scorns history, doesn’t believe in God, and blames all the foibles of society on the abstract idea of religion and not on a suspension of conscience. Her two brothers and sister have grown up in that same self-indulgent culture as has Western society in general.

It was my good fortune by the accident of my birth to be born in this generation where my father had a conscience and was the most honest man I have ever known.

When I was five years old and he had no job, he took me aside and said, “Jimmy, we have little money. We bought your sister a doll for Christmas but we had no money for a gift for you.”

At the time, I had no sense this would stay with me all my life. Materialism as an expression of caring has never seemed relevant. Conscience and honesty have. Later in high school when everything was going my way academically and athletically, and I was quite full of myself, I boasted to my parents that I was significantly exceptional.

My da looked up from his Clinton Herald, and said, “Jimmy, the day you deny being the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad you won’t know who the hell you are and everyone will own you.” This I have found true.

When I mention such things to my daughter, you would think I was speaking a foreign tongue.

Truth be known, it wasn’t hard to excel in my generation as there were so few of us, nothing like the competition young people since the collective fixation on progress following World War Two. Nor were there the temptations, distractions, and stressors that now fill the very air we breathe. It was a simpler time. I must remind myself that I have no idea what my daughter and her generation and succeeding generations have had to endure as happiness has come to be measured in terms of wealth, status, and the accumulation of things.

As difficult as THE GREAT DEPRESSION was here in the United States, my heart goes out to Europeans of my generation who not only endured The Great Depression but experienced the daily hell of a WORLD WAR on their turf.

I have worked with many Europeans and cherish their friendship. Their triumph over tragedy and devastation is overwhelmingly monumental and I salute them one and all.

Community Minded “WE” Generation (1930 – 1946) Saved the United States & Its Mature Leadership Saved Our Democracy.

This is a great read ... especially if you fall within the stated age group. Those of us who yearn for a simpler time of life will surely enjoy this piece. If you are too young to fully appreciate the content, please feel free to pass it along to anyone you know "who fits the bill". And, if you are a member of this elite group ... by all means, stand up and take a bow!

You are part of the 1% “WE” Group! The complacent sleeping tiger that was America was aroused from a deep slumber with the attack on the US Seventh Fleet at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaii Islands on December 7, 1941, by the Empire of Japan.

This “WE” generation of Great Depression men and women put on military uniforms or manned the critical positions in Defense Plants across the country to create the most powerful war machine ever known to man, not in a matter of years, but a matter of months.

In 2021, the age range of this group is between 75 & 91.

Are you, or do you know, someone who's still living who is a member of this group?

Interesting Facts for you ...

You are a member of the smallest group of children born since the early 1900s.

You are the last generation, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the impact of a world at war that rattled the structure of our daily lives for years.

You are the last to remember ration books for everything from gas to sugar to shoes to stoves. You saved tin foil and poured fried meat fat into tin cans. You saw cars up on blocks because tires weren't available.

You can remember milk being delivered to your house early in the morning and placed in the "milk box" on the porch.

You are the last to see the gold stars in the front windows of grieving neighbors whose sons died in the War.

You saw the 'boys' home from the war, build their little houses.

You are the last generation who spent childhood without television; instead, you "imagined" what you heard on the radio.

With no TV until the 1950s, you spent your childhood "playing outside". There was no Little League. There was no city playground for kids. The lack of television in your early years meant that you had little real understanding of what the world was like. On Saturday mornings and afternoons, the movies gave you newsreels sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons.

Telephones were one to a house, often shared (party lines), and hung on the wall in the kitchen (no one could care about privacy).

Computers were called calculators; they were hand-cranked.

Typewriters were driven by pounding fingers, throwing the carriage, and changing the ribbon.

INTERNET' and 'GOOGLE' were words that did not exist.

Newspapers and magazines were written for adults and the news was broadcast on your radio in the evening. As you grew up, the country was exploding with growth.

The Government gave returning Veterans the means to get an education (called “The G.I” Bill) and spurred colleges and state-supported universities to grow with G.I. veterans from the war anxious for an education. The G.I. Bill loans also fanned a housing boom.

Pent-up demand coupled with new installment payment plans opened many factories for work. New highways would bring jobs and mobility.

The veterans joined civic clubs and became active in politics.

The radio network expanded from 3 stations to thousands.

Your parents were suddenly free from the confines of the depression and the war, and they threw themselves into exploring opportunities they had never imagined. You weren't neglected, but you weren't today's all-consuming family focus. Parents were glad you played by yourselves without their involvement until the street lights came on.

Parents were busy discovering the post-war world that formerly only belonged to rich people.

You entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where you were welcomed, enjoyed yourselves and felt secure in your future although in your bones the poverty of the Great Depression was deeply remembered.

Polio was still a crippler.

You came of age in the 50s and 60s. You are the last generation to experience an interlude when there were no threats to our homeland.

The Second World War was over and the cold war, terrorism, global warming, and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life with unease.

Only your generation can remember both a time of Great War and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty.

You grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better... You are "The Last Ones."

More than 99 % of this group are either retired or deceased, and you feel privileged to have "lived in the best of times!"

THE AFTERMATH OF "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS" & GROUPTHINK

  

 

James Raymond Fisher, Jr.

© November 22, 2021

 

Writers forever have been reminding us of our self-conscious narcissism.  No one more appropriately than British novelist D. H. Lawrence.  He writes in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929):

Never was any age more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling than our own . . . the radio and the cinema re mere counterfeit feeling all the time, the current press and literature the same.  People wallow in emotion, counterfeit emotion.  They lap it up, they live in and on it . . . and at times they get on very well with it all.  And then, more and more, they break.

We can see this is the case since what Eric Hoffer called the “terrible 60s” when everybody seemed to jump on the same bandwagon and call it being “politically correct”

As I have attempted to show in my writing, everything seemed to change after WWII: two-parent families dissolved with half ending in divorce; women had taken the place of fighting men in Europe and the Pacific in essential defense industries across the United States manufacturing fighting instruments of war; men were still men and women with no identity crisis for the changing roles; most at home and in the fighting fronts were Christians and believed in God without question, and nearly everyone attended church on Sunday be they Protestant or Catholic; Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter were not self-conscious but sacred holidays where no one had trouble saying prayers at Thanksgiving, or to wish others a “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Easter”; when a man and woman married, the priest or minister blessed the marriage of this “man and wife”;  men and women were not suspect if devout or never marrying; indeed, everything changed after the Second World War.

Readers familiar with my work know that I often speak of intuition and instinct, masculine and feminine brain, or I dismay at women trying to be like men, however, I never paid much mind to men wanting to be like women, although in the broadest sense, and I have dealt with this – the best minds are minds that use the bicameral mind or the right brain as well as the left brain.  I have also been distrustful of critical/analytical thinking (masculine mind) at the exclusion of creative/intuitive thinking (feminine mind) as they are complements to each other. 

Well, Christopher Booker in GROUP THINK is far more articulate than I am on the subject.  To wit:

Through those five extraordinary years of the Second World War, men and women rose to the challenge.  Men displayed the stern masculine values of duty, discipline, patriotism, responsibility, and respect for authority.   Men were not only masculine they were selfless, sensitive, and compassionate using their masculine strength to act firmly on behalf of others.  As Jungians would put it their outward manly strength was balanced by more selfless qualities of their inner feminine . . .

Masculine and feminine qualities are not confined to one sex.  Men and women have both masculine and feminine traits in their psychological make-up . . . A softer empathetic feeling and sensitivity towards others is seen in psychological terms as ‘feminine.’  Unless strength is balanced by feeling for others it makes people regardless of their gender, hard, insensitive, and self-centered . . . that part of our brain which tries to think rationally, concerned with order, structure and facts – what is described as ‘left-brain thinking – is in psychological terms ‘masculine.’  ‘Right-brain thinking’ is based on intuition and creative imagination, and is psychologically ‘feminine.’  Without the life-giving balance of intuitive understanding, the rational calculations of left-brain thinking can become so boxed in on itself as to lose touch with practical reality . . . [in The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire I refer to this as boxamania in today’s Western society]

These different aspects refer to men and women alike.  To become fully alive, mature, and responsible requires masculine and feminine traits to be in balance.  Men may naturally be more governed by the masculine side of their psyche, but this must be balanced by the inner feminine element which Jung called the anima, that is, the ability to feel for others and a sense of wider intuitive understanding.  That strength of mind and character which has typified women down through the ages enabled women to display this part of them in the Second World War . . .

After the ‘sexual revolution’ of the Sixties, the sexes were meant to have converged.  Men were supposed to become softer, gentler, more ‘feminized.’  In the new age of ‘equality and ‘women’s rights,’ those sterner masculine values of discipline, authority and order had come to be seen as oppressive, constricting, and life-denying instruments of domination . . . Women were supposed to become more assertive and independent, capable of competing equally with men on male terms . . . So many of those contradictions were to lead the groupthink of political correctness into bitter and divisive confusion.   

Booker sees other casualties of convergence being the loss of the former harmonious balance between men and women with the surfacing of the new dogma of political correctness.  Identity and gender imbalance now find boys wanting to be girls and girls wanting to be boys, along with the not-so-subtle collapse of conscience and empathic understanding.

He also points out the first rule of groupthink is that it is never properly rooted in reality; instead, equality between the sexes extends to a significant degree to no more than collective make-believe with positive masculinity in men and equal characteristic of women with little qualms about the loss of women femininity.  He writes:

What happened to society in those decades since the early Fifties was a picture of people no longer fully developed on either the masculine or the feminine side of their personality, caught in a state of psychological immaturity, ultimately centered on little more than the promptings of their own egos . . . which brings us back to the real underlying nature of political correctness . . . a division of the world into two groups with an instinct to feel sympathy for one of them as ‘victims’ . . . once this is taken over by groupthink, even the ‘victims’ themselves can sentimentalize about their plight, as can all those who rally to support them . . . emotional gratification is inseparable from groupthink: the need to express morally superior contempt for all those unfeeling self-centered ‘others’ who don’t understand, and therefore be dismissedly labeled as ‘sexists,’ ‘racists,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘homophobes,’ trans-phobes,’ ‘fascists,’ or whatever scornful term seems appropriate where there is no longer a connection with reality . . . welding all those under its spell into a kind of collective egotism . . . this is the essence of what has come to be known as identity politics with those carried away with their own personal egos submerged in the collective  ego of their group which is inevitably divisive . . .

In THE RISE & FALL OF THE HUMAN EMPIRE, I attempt to show we’ve been here before letting the reader survey the many centuries profiled to calibrate why we in the 21^st century are seemingly so unhappy, so edgy, so strained, and a great deal confused.  Why do so many of us despise and hate each other when we never had so much and so much diversity.  If you question this assessment, ask yourself with the miracle of technology and the Internet, in the age of the ‘selfie’ with Facebook and Twitter, et al, taking over our identity and our mind, why have we allowed this?  It could be argued that the Internet has turned social media into anti-social media where huge numbers of people have had a chance, probably for the first time, to exercise their egos, both individually and collectively, not least with the license to broadcast to the world their intolerance and rage with ease previously unthinkable.

These children, by the accident of their birth, have been born in a time of collapsing civilization and exploding technology which they prefer to ignore comforted with their electronic devices.  But the future is not controlled by osmosis as challenges and reality disturb their situation.    

With real problems with real consequences, those of political correctness comically have no room for personal pronouns such as “he” and “she”; “we” and “they”; “him” and “her”; indeed, no room for such nouns as “boy” and “girl”; “good” and “evil”; “God” and “Lucifer”; but there is plenty of room for “hate” and “despise”; and for profanity for boys and yes girls as young as ten and twelve to sprinkle their conversation with the “f-word”; indeed, such popular television dramas such as “Yellowstone,” see everyone, including young ladies and young and old cowboys unable to communicate without the “f-word” dramatically expressed in their conversation.

GROUPTHINK has been the catalyst of political correctness from the hallow halls of our most prestigious universities to the slums that fester gangs in the streets of our cities and towns.  English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge (1903 – 1990) once remarked:

When people cease to believe in God, they believe not in nothing but anything.        

This is the power and absurdity of GROUPTHINK.  But before you node your head in agreement, there is not one of us that is not also guilty of GROUPTHINK and therefore susceptible to political correctness.  Doctors, lawyers, and academics have their special inside track language and special collective identity, as do priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams; as do engineers, technologists, and people in trades.  The pressure to belong to our church, profession, community, indeed, to our ethnicity is the pressure of group persuasion.  We don’t buy a car, wash machine, television, computer, or the dress code we observe without checking with what is “in.”  We have essentially given up thinking for ourselves relying on what talking heads on television tell us what is real and what is not, failing to inform us that they promulgating specific information with a slant.  The evidence is compelling.  You can tell by talking to someone whether they listen to talking heads on CNN or FOX.  People are unlikely to read books or newspaper or magazine articles that are not consistent with their particular GROUPTHINK.

We see evidence of political correctness and GROUP THINK during the Christmas season when families have discontinued displaying Christmas trees and festive lights for fear of offending people other than those of Christian faith, indeed, being careful not to display baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in their front lawns as was common when I was a boy.  The absurdity of this is that we have always had people of other ethnicities in our community be they Jewish or Muslim, even in my hometown of 33,000 growing up in Iowa who had no objection to these Western traditions showing evidence instead that they quite enjoyed these displays. 

The irony is that the affluent of other ethnicities even today do not mine the homogeneity of the community.  It is the lower and more impoverished classes of these groups that seem to take offense, groups that self-segregate themselves in their own traditions and language failing because of lack of will or inclination to assimilate into the wider culture.   

Everything changed after the end of the Second World War with the 1950s introducing into America and American life a place this young country had never been before.

Americans experienced the unreality of the affluence of the 50s, got on board the train of GROUPTHINK in the crazy 60s, and from the 70s through the end of the 90s believed all the lies they told themselves about America’s exceptionalism with everyone wanting to think and believe, and value what Americans do, swiftly to move into the new century with the shock of a pandemic to accentuate their unreality, only to wonder if they still have the power to control their existence by getting off this GROUPTHINK train as they see in the distance they are approaching the horizon where NOWHERE LAND lies just beyond.      

       

 

 

 

 

A TEACHING MOMENT: ONE MORE THING ABOUT MIND

SIR WILLIAM WRITES:

Sire: Learn all you can about the assets and limitations of your subconscious mind. They're impressive in both positive and negative directions. Suspect intuition.

I remember well the 1950s when female "intuition" was placed on the altar of choice-making perfection. JFK relied on Monroe's intuition regarding everybody he was unsure of. In the 1960s scientific study of intuition dispelled that myth and, like prayer, has been relegated to the slow-poison category.

It's easy to detect when someone is coming at you with their intuition. They offer no proof of evidence and it's instant. Intuition clocks in at 28% correct when blind chance sits at 50%. Forewarned is forearmed.


I RESPOND

Sir William,

Everything you say may be scientifically correct. And you know I respect that.

In my case, my writing is based on my empirical experience in which life has been my laboratory.

Often, and it is documented in THE FISHER PARADIGM, I have done things, yes, based on my intuition which has proved correct, including marrying BB some 35 years ago despite the difference in our ages. I don't recommend my experience but simply use it as an index that may help someone else. It is the basis of my book CONFIDENCE IN SUBTEXT as well.

I read people not through what they say but what they do. In my work in assessing situations in the complex organization, as an executive and consultant, I often encountered what novelist Don Dilillo calls "White Noise" (1985) which is the noise that constantly distracts us from the reality of the situation being experienced.

As a neophyte chemical sales engineer, I sat for an hour in the central bullpen of a seven-acre Philco plant waiting for the superintendent, noting the chaos around me. Once he arrived, he said, "Sport, what have you got for me? You have five minutes."

Without preamble, only having had a three-week technical training course for Nalco Chemical Company's field operations in Chicago, I said, "I'm here to save your job" (see THE FISHER PARADIGM) and coming from R&D for Standard Brands as a bench chemist, this introvert was in a world of difference.

The sales of a chemical and engineering treatment program became the biggest sale in the Indiana district in years, and I had to have the area manager survey the operation to recommend the right chemicals that Philco should purchase. This is not an isolated case in my long career(s).

Although I am not a devotee of C.J. Jung, there is something to what he says in "Modern Man in Search of Soul"(1933):

It is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation, it is not microbes, it is not cancer but man himself who is his greatest danger: because he has no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating in their effect tan the greatest natural catastrophes.

You and I come from distinctly different backgrounds but with similar initial credentials.

Your reality testing and rational judgment are the essences of thinking today from a scientific standpoint. Mine is more intuitive, instinctive, and philosophical and is not very popular with most readers who peruse my writing.

I am not looking for a following. I am just a recorder of one man's experience that no doubt is influenced by St. Thomas Aquinas.

Thank you for the teaching moment.

Jim

AN EXCHANGE ON MIND

SIR WILLIAM WRITES

Never think or discuss "mind" without separating the conscious mind, tortoise, from the subconscious mind (hare on steroids). These two "minds" are so unlike on so many fronts of function and capacity that you will make unnecessary errors in sizing up social behavior - for yourself.

The worst is thinking conscious mind when your target is operating on the subconscious mind on autopilot. It's easy to determine when your audience is subconscious-driven, they respond instantly, reflexively.

Know that the subconscious gets first dibs on the limited glucose supply stream going to the cranium. When you are into deep cognition for an hour or so, your conscious mind runs out of glucose and you go blank. It takes two hours for the conscious mind to get enough fuel to pick up where it left off. Willpower has nothing to do with it.

Cheers

I ANSWER

Sir William,

Oh, my! Your correct assumptions here remind me of my studies in the biochemistry of osmotic glucose imbalances (hyperglycemia/hypoglycemia) in the bloodstream in undergraduate school, and then the study of blood chemistry of the brain in psychology in graduate school.

You are so right that we are, most of the time, mainly operating on automatic pilot. Occasionally, we have exceptions, which I call "thinking moments like an adult."

My granddaughter Rachel, whom I often wrote about in my missives to Ken Shelton's EXECUTIVE EXCELLENCE magazine when she was young and featured her in an episode in my book WHO PUT IN A CAGE, has continued to tap her subconscious successfully since she was seven years old. She is now an adult and a practicing physician's assistance (PA), which has many of the same privileges and responsibilities as MDs.

James Madison, whose biography I recently completed, showed this same ability to tap into his subconscious and act wisely. This was significant in the WAR of 1812, when Great Britain sacked the Nation's Capitol, burned down Washington, DC to the ground with several states threatening to leave the UNION in a state of panic.

Cowardice is only the actions of the frightened mind (or child's mind) in the body of the adult. It was a climate similar if not worse than that of Iraq and Afghanistan, indeed, of Vietnam.

Bravery, I have found, is instinctive, intuitive (it is the essence of THE FISHER PARADIGM). In high school football, if you flinch, that is, hesitate, when you're about to hit someone else, you are likely to get hurt as your conscious mind is cautious, your instinctive mind reacts to the circumstances without hesitation, and you are much less likely to get hurt. That was my experience in high school football, but also in life as well.

Thank you for sharing,

Jim

PS Madison never lost his cool, allowed the states threatening to leave the UNION to have their convention without interference, not only succeeding in the end but prevailing. The Treaty at Ghent, signed before fighting on the ground in the United States had ended, including the conclusive and overwhelming defeat of England at New Orleans, suggests the gods were looking on Madison favorably.

But more to the point, Madison's strategy to win control of the oceans succeeding and the outcome of the WAR of 1812 changed nothing but yet everything. The United States now had the respect of the world that has lasted until now. How Madison was able to manage this makes for stimulating reading.

I am a writer and can appreciate the soundness of my granddaughter and President James Madison to act responsibly in an extreme situation, and recognize the connection to the conscious and unconscious mind that you so aptly describe, knowing that something takes over that I have described only as an incredible calm when it happens.

ANNOUNCEMENT - THE RISE & FALL OF THE HUMAN EMPIRE -- NOW AVAILABLE

THE RISE & FALL OF THE HUMAN EMPIRE

© JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR.

DESCRIPTION


Historical, cultural, philosophical, and operational changes in the past several centuries are the themes and Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land is the focus to show how knowledge has misguided us when used in “Cut & Control” fashion to dispatch or nullify “what was” to what is purported to now be “what is,” separating the mind from the reality of experience with no one seeming to be the wiser. We collectively find comfort in the illusion that “what was” no longer contaminates “what is,” feeling superior in the new, while oblivious to what may have been lost. Cultural DNA plays a prominent role in dictating outcomes with little if any conscious awareness. Over the past 500 years, or since the shocking discovery of America, man has been at times on a rollercoaster climbing slowly, then rapidly descending taking tortuous turns at breathtaking speeds to end up pretty much where he started, only to believe because of his “cut & control” progress to be in a different place and space. He sees what he has gained but not what he has lost. Some might say this has been a five-hundred-year retreat from a God-centered to a man-centered universe, and with all that man has and has accomplished, that man finds himself in a place and space, not all that reassuring. Another metaphor might be that of a locomotive that must first overcome enormous inertia to establish some momentum, but once that is accomplished the momentum builds to acceleration that keeps quickening which becomes impossible to control, but nobody minds as they race past landmarks and sacred markings that they once cherished not realizing they are running from themselves as “Nowhere Man” to a place just over the horizon called “Nowhere Land.”



PAPERBACK - $19.95 -- illustrations, tables, photographs, captions, refererences -- 394 pages

e-book - $4.95

PUBLISHED – NOVEMBER 11, 2021 

FOREWORD

It has been 30 years since I first met Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. It was 1991 and I was working at the time for a non-profit organization in Tampa, Florida.  He was a retired Organizational Development (OD) Psychologist and I was an Assistant Director and Human Resource Manager for this agency.

This organization had a long history (70 years) of providing community services in Tampa/Hillsborough County in food distribution, nutrition, housing, infant/childcare, developmental, and group home services.

Dr. Fisher had been retained by the agency of some 100 professional employees who were struggling with several organizational issues including leadership training, professional development, internal conflict management, and funding.  I was aware that he had authored several books, trade journal articles and had conducted seminars in the Tampa Bay area and across the country.  On many occasions, I have had the honor of reviewing drafts of his manuscripts giving him feedback before publication.

He is a prolific reader and consummate autodidact of several disciplines including anthropology, psychology, medicine, public health, chemistry, chemical engineering, philosophy, sociology, theology, marketing, management, history, biography, politics, culture, work, and workers.  These disciplines are evident in this narrative as he confronts the ugly realities that keep us from succeeding and thriving in these difficult times.

His thought-provoking approach is designed to give the reader new insight into his or her world as experienced.  He is neither a passive nor a conventional thinker but uses an interdisciplinary approach to chart a better understanding of where we are and how we got into what he calls “a muddle” irrespective of the prevailing cant.

He calls himself a renegade “Irish Roman Catholic,” but be assured he is a man of faith and has no time for duplicity at any level of society.  This was apparent when he was sent to South Africa by his company to facilitate the formation of a new specialty chemical conglomerate in 1968.  He wasn’t prepared for the indifference of his company or church to the Afrikaner apartheid policy of separation of the races with the 20 percent white population controlling the 80 percent black or Bantu population with draconian finality.  

In The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire, he doesn’t apologize for his interpretations of events past and present.  Nor does he shy away from the prevailing biases on the right and left of the political spectrum.

I have collaborated with several consultants in my professional career but none so well prepared and desiring to help partner with me to develop solutions to pesky organizational problems. 

The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire is a consistent narrative of earlier published essays with the provocative theme of NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND, essays designed to bring attention to our society, indeed, to our civilization that keep repeating the same pratfalls that may ultimately lead to our demise.     

Speaking personally, I can tell you the book challenges your sense of history; while encouraging you to see events over the past millenniums in a new light, events involving faith leaders such as Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, and Jehovah meant to make this earth a kinder, gentler and more welcoming place.  Too often faith leaders and followers divide rather than unite us consumed as they are by ethnocentrism.  Take the destruction of the indigenous cultures of the New World when European explorers and missionaries marched into these native civilizations in the 15^th through the 17^th century to introduce them to Christianity and the wisdom of Western Civilization only to reduce the native populations with new western diseases.  After 500 years of Progress, we are now experiencing the cost and casualties of war, climate change, racial, and social division, and societal polarity. 

This book encouraged me to ponder my understanding of our collective history from the time of Greece and Rome to the Crusades, to the role of religion across time, to the evolution of science and medicine, law and politics, ideas and philosophy to its current impact on our postmodern world.

Humans are a savage race and often brutal to their own species.  Since the beginning of mankind, we have been wanderers starting in Africa.  The march of human progress across the planet has always been one of continuing conquests over others by a “higher-order,” be it God, Pope, King, Queen, oligarch, or dictator.  Society is broken.  Our fragile democracy stands in the face of this with common memes such as manifest destiny, peace, belief, security, terrorism, genocide, truth, hypocrisy, crime, freedom, monuments, “cut & control” progress, and Sunday School, to name a few.

2020-2021 has been a challenging year in the times of our lives.  Our fragile democracy is under threat.  Failure of corporate, legislative, global, national, state, and local leaders to take sensible control has instead brought our nation and our world to its knees, and it is going to take all of us to survive after this COVID-19 pandemic to regain our health and safety.  Dalai Lama XIV writes:

“Happiness is not something readymade.  It comes from your own actions.”

Put simply, Dr. Fisher’s book is therapy for our anxious age.

E. Buddy Davis,

Myakka City, Florida

 

 

 

EPILOGUE - THE RISE & FALL TO THE HUMAN EMPIRE

NOTE: This is the EPILOGUE of a book to be published later in 2021.

We are if anything as Homo sapiens a most interesting species. We invent words that lead to language, thinking in these words that lead to thoughts, selective thoughts that become philosophies, building our lives around these philosophies into religions, treating these religions as sanctuaries of truth, then fighting to the death to defend these religions as truth personified when they are inventions of our imaginings to protect us from ourselves.

From the opening chapters of our existence those many millenniums ago, we have felt self-conscious and vulnerable to the forces outside, a gift of our consciousness. Alas, we have always been fearful of the unknown and the unknowable, consumed with self-doubt, wondering why we are here, and why we have been separated from the animal kingdom of Mother Nature that terrifies us, problems these other species don't experience as they simply exist instinctively.

To combat this self-doubt, misgivings, fears, and this sense of loneliness, we have created an artificial world which we treat as reality. This includes God that exists in our consciousness as an invention as many "Secular Age" youth of postmodernity are inclined to believe.

It was the seventeenth-century French philosopher, theologian, mathematician, and physicist, Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662), who posited the philosophical wager that human beings gamble with their lives that God either exists or does not. Since we do not know whether God exists then we should play it safe rather than risk being sorry.

[Being born during The Great Depression as an Irish Roman Catholic and instructed in my early life by the good Sisters of St. Francis, my long life has often played havoc with these early certainties. I am a renegade Roman Catholic, but a Roman Catholic nonetheless, thankful that I had this early nurturing which has served me well in my many careers. I confess to being a Catholic writer seeing life through that specific lens and filter with that inevitable biased perspective. Ideas have always fascinated me, even controversial ones. That said, I am not inclined to be either a proselytizer or a crusader. My hope is only to stimulate thought in others to be better in touch with themselves. Nor do I believe the "Good Books" were the works of other than men divinely inspired as they may be. In this "Secular Age," we are constantly bombarded with extraneous multi-faceted stimulation telling us what to think, what to believe, what to value, and how to behave. Our consciousness with its curiosity is without barriers less we construct them around ourselves.]

Words are our most sophisticated invention. We have created societies and civilizations out of words from primitive to modern, from pagan gods to the monotheistic God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. We see the same God at the helm to guide our species through life to safety if not in this life surely into the next. Yet, each of these religions treats the monotheistic God as more divine than the others, warring endlessly with each other.

Pagan religions made human sacrifices. Christianity makes symbolically cannibalistic sacrifices in the changing of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ (transubstantiation), while the purpose of both pagan and Christian rituals is to pay homage to their polytheistic gods or our monotheistic God.

With words, we have created sacred books such as the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran to preserve and reinforce our dependence on The Word and secure our existence beyond our mortality. We have gone to war with others of our species for failure to acknowledge and follow the beliefs of The Word or for our failure to conduct our lives consistent with The Word.

As evidence of the power of The Word, we have built magnificent churches, temples, synagogues, and cathedrals displaying our ingenuity centuries before the science of architecture and engineering had reached the heights it enjoys today, physical evidence that our species is in touch with the Almighty.

The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire is a modest attempt to show how the use of words has led to language than to mature ideas. We have in turn built our lives around ideas only to have them come crashing down due to man's shortsightedness. From the dawn of our consciousness, we have progressed and periodically regressed but always remained optimistic, even utopian, in the worst of times, believing we are equal to the challenge.

Anthropologists claim language was first a form of gossip built around the primitive anxieties of love and hate, envy and jealousy, fear and loathing, loneliness and isolation. It was neither an instrumental nor a terminal device of consciousness but simply a spontaneous intuitive response to ill-defined needs that have come to dominate our unconscious behavior. This was displayed in another sense during "The Hunting & Gathering" period remained a way of life for Homo heidelbergensis (700,000 to 200,000 years ago), a time when men would band together to forage for food by killing animals much larger, agile, powerful, and menacing. These men invented crude weapons and used their innate cunning to trap and subdue these prey. This success led to their survival and enhanced their sense of power using their consciousness.

EVOLVING FROM THE HUNTING & GATHERING PERIOD

Men and women next became farmers learning to till the soil and seed plants to provide food in abundance to supplement the need to kill animals exclusively for food, even leading to the domesticated of animals as beasts of burden, which led to the formation of small groups becoming larger groups and then small colonies.

These developments radically changed social existence as close-knit groups led to the formation of families transferring dominance of the group from women to men. Every aspect of human existence has evolved progressively, mainly spontaneously and situationally. This was true of the family, the home, the nature of morality and ethics as they were all inventions of "Men of Ideas" and over time reified into conventions, then defended as if designed by God as the case may be.

As farms, land became property, ownership of property became wealth, which led to power and dominance of the more resourceful property owners. At the same time, farmers who perfected weapons for hunting now employed these weapons to defend their property.

"Men of Words" and "Men of Ideas" escalated into prominence. First as servants to landowners then monarchs and kings who seldom had the time or inclination to learn how to read or write as they saw themselves as "Men of Action," depending upon these clerks to ensure their legitimacy and to sustain their dominance by keeping ledgers and tracking logistical support and supplies as indicators of their wealth and power.

On the pages of this book, we see the rise and fall of empires and civilizations: the Greek Civilization and the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Spanish and British Empires, all manifestations of “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire.”

In each scenario, we see “Men of Words” as philosophers, theologians, economists, and psychologists providing "Men of Action" with the rationale to legitimize their prominence and dominance.

War is the leading catalyst to revolution from the Industrial Revolution, to the Age of Faith, to the Scientific Revolution, to the Renaissance, to the Reformation, to the Age of Enlightenment, to the Technology Revolution, and now the Information Age while the Secular Age as such is not yet defined but becoming increasingly prominent.

Doubt and misgivings are often the sparks to lift our species out of its comfort zone to eventually soar. We seldom think of motivation being so mundane, but it was quite apparent in the monasteries of the Middle Ages when monks with too much time on their hands followed their curiosity to the dismay of the absolute authority of the Roman Catholic Church, a curiosity that led to modern science, philosophy, and psychology. Words and ideas as presented are mutually interdependent as the primary narrative over mainly the last 500 years (see Jacques Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life,” 2000).

Words have led to systems of thought, and these systems have led to constructs by which we now live called by their advocates as democracies, oligarchies, capitalistic, social systems (such as communism), and theocracies, then at another level institutionally as universities, industrial and commercial corporate enterprises, think tanks, governments, and other citadels of intrigue and persuasion.

With these many millenniums as our history, we are running out of room, running out of water, running out of food, and running out of fresh air to breathe that continues unabated unless and until we change our ways of thinking, behaving, and living.

The irony is that with our species exalted consciousness and problem-solving capabilities we have become slaves to our appetites, and want our cake and eat it, too. This has unwittingly placed the survival of our species in jeopardy, as we are still obsessed with the new, failing to see with every new thing, something is lost with “cut & control” finality.

This observer has enjoyed a long life born when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler were coming to power which was in the era of The Great Depression, and on the eve of what would become the Second World War in which nearly one hundred million would perish. It is this shortsightedness that I have come to identify as NOWHERE MAN seeing our species ineluctably moving into NOWHERE LAND. And for that reason, I have written this book.

[In the first sixteen years of this new century, I worked off and on to create 24 essays. Philosopher and novelist, Charles D. Hayes suggested that I post these as 24 individual essays on Amazon's Kindle, which I did in 2016, and now they have become this book. The title is credited to Ken Shelton, author, publisher, consultant, and friend who is familiar with my work.]

ADDENDUM

We have become a secular society with our civil religion the government and its economic mandates. Meanwhile, our corporate infrastructure has lost its integrity and the people’s trust. Rather than challenge this new corporate “Gilded Age,” reminiscent of its earlier appearance in 19th century American history when the “Robber Barons” (i.e., Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller) dictated economic reality, today the populace willingly embraces the new corporate “Robber Barons” of Facebook, Google, Amazon, et al, mesmerized by social media platforms blurring constitutional rights with no apparent interest in doing anything. Thirty years ago, Corporate America was king teetering on schizophrenic confusion. This caused me to write:

Take corporate America. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers. Meanwhile, this once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening or why. The era of free lunch supposedly ended in the 20th century. This century began with such paternal control and submissive obedience has now run amuck. No one (and nothing) is in control (Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1991, pp. 37-38).

Fast forward and we see government in the early 21st century bent on restoring the “free lunch” while the once-revered Executive, Legislative, and Supreme Court branches of the federal government appear frozen in forward inertia by divisive political intrigue unraveling in a worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. The Center for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health hide behind science failing to manage this with a consistent policy. The vacuum left behind has left citizens confused (i.e., masks/no masks, vaccinations/no vaccinations) as to how to protect themselves and their loved ones.

In this climate, millennial and centennial youth ignore the muddle with their cellphone prayer books ignoring the high jinx paranoia of the talking heads of CNN and FOX Cable News who fill the airwaves with their biased solipsistic narcissistic polarities.

Society is broken. The systemic “chain of command of authority” which once provided some sense of order has lost its relevance and impact: from parents in the home to academics in the classroom to leaders in the free enterprise system. It happened in ancient Greece. The seeds of decadence were palpable but ignored. We hear this in the lament of Socrates about the youth of his time:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

The same occurred in ancient Rome, again with the Roman Catholic Church, and currently to the Judaic-Christian culture as political correctness, political identity, and critical race theory distract from embracing issues that find society teetering on the precipice of its demise. Nobel Laureate poet T. S. Eliot in “The Hollow Men” (1925): ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.’

A WAY OF LOOKING AT WHAT WE ARE AND HAVE BECOME

“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” – The more things change the more they remain the same thing.

French author, journalist, and critic, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808 – 1890) coined this expression that lives on to the present.

Déjà vu is one way of looking at “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire.” Man’s coping has much in common with his relentless attempt to survive while repeating the same errors in judgment, ad infinitum while continuously returning to the same well. We have never moved off our earliest superstitions.

The shaman was able to bottle man’s fears by making up what natural phenomena meant (sunrise, sunset, thunderstorms, torrential rains, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, extremely hot and frigid seasons, and so on). Religions were a natural progression from these early disturbing episodes from pagan polytheism to monotheism.

Continuing the idea that monotheism like polytheism is made up consistent with the legacy of the shaman, evidence of monotheism emerges first in Egypt in the 14th-century (1353 – 1336 BCE) during the reign of Akhenaten. The king was known to have worshipped Aten, the sun god, which constituted the first monotheistic religion in the world. Akhenaten’s exclusive worship of the sun god led Egyptologists to claim that he created the world's first monotheistic religion. However, modern scholars note that Akhenaten's cult drew from aspects of other gods—particularly re-Harakhte, Shu, and Ma’at—in its imagining and worship of Aten.

Others claim the world's first monotheistic God was Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion that may have originated as early as 4,000 years ago. Arguably the world's first monotheistic faith, it's one of the oldest religions still in existence. That said, some claim the first god was Brahma and that the Hindus are the creators of god. Brahma is also known as the Grandfather and later as the equivalent of Prajapati, the primeval first god. In early Hindu sources such as the Mahabharata, Brahma is supreme in the triad of great Hindu gods which includes Shiva and Vishnu.

The point is that Judaic, Christian, and Islamic monotheism are relatively recent in the schemes of things yet consistent with the need for some deity outside ourselves to cope with life in its growing complexity and confusion.

Christianity, we see in these pages, has been self-conscious in its quest for dominance, relevance, and legitimacy. In that sense, it has been like other religions, that is, having fallen prey too often to behaving counter to what it claims its sacred mission. To sustain its existence, Christianity created the “Divine Right of Kings,” which is a European political doctrine in defense of monarchical absolutism, which asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not, therefore, be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as parliament. Originating in Europe, the divine-right-of-kings can be traced to the medieval conception of God’s award of temporal power to the political ruler, paralleling the award of spiritual power to the church.

By the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the new national monarchs were asserting their authority in matters of both church and state. King James I of England (reigned 1603–1625) was the foremost exponent of the divine right of kings, but the doctrine virtually disappeared from English politics after the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689). This revolution was also called “The Bloodless Revolution,” which took place from 1688 to 1689 in England which involved the overthrow of the Catholic King James II, who was replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, kings such as Louis XIV (1643–1715) of France continued to profit from the divine-right theory, even though many of them no longer had any truly religious beliefs. The American Revolution (1775–1783), the French Revolution (1789), and the Napoleonic Wars deprived the divine right doctrine of its remaining credibility.

The bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627–1704), one of the principal French theorists of the divine right asserted that the king's person and authority were sacred; that his power was modeled on that of a Father’s and was absolute, deriving from God; and that he was governed by reason (i.e., custom and precedence).

In the middle of the 17th century, the English Royalist squire Sir Robert Filmer (1588 – 1653) likewise held that the state was a family and that the king was a father. He claimed, in an interpretation of biblical Scripture, that Adam was the first king and that Charles I (reigned 1625–1649) ruled England as Adam’s eldest heir. The anti-absolutist philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) wrote his First Treatise of Civil Government (1689) to refute that argument.

Before we dispense with this as mere history, the Pope for Roman Catholicism is the absolute authority in matters of faith and morals which he publishes in encyclicals (i.e., papal letters) to his bishops throughout the world. These encyclicals carry particular weight because they are formal documents.

In a secular sense, the lay world of American corporate society promotes the idea that the corporation is a family, and the CEO is the father figure along with his managers. Workers are meant to obligingly follow the chain of command of authority with departure from that structure treated as insubordination. This has unraveled after World War Two.

With the economic boom that followed that war, a majority of American parents anxious to exploit this opportunity both took jobs outside the home. This was not surprising as many women worked in American factories during the war (e.g., the symbolism of “Rosie the Riveter”) and enjoyed the feeling of independence making their own money. This had lasting consequences however as many children became their “own parents” and were left to their own devices. The war also gave birth to the “baby boomer generation” (born between 1946 – 1964), the largest and the longest living generation in American history.

Parents out of guilt for their absence working or preferring to be their children's best friend than authority figures showered their children with material things, things that were substitutes for love, and attention. Materialism became a substitute for affection as there was little time for simply caring. This led to what I call “the spoiled brat generation,” with no place for pain or suffering, disappointment or failure, struggle or growth, indeed, no place for a mature adult with a conscience. Individualism and independence have been the casualties with progress and success somebody else’s responsibility, say the government’s with the herd mentality the order of the day. I write in Be Your Own Best Friend (2017):

To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons. The same holds true of ourselves.

Likewise, the doctrine of divine right was dangerous for both church and state. For the state, it suggested that secular authority was conferred, and therefore could be removed by the church. For the church, it implied that kings have a direct relationship to God and therefore may dictate to ecclesiastical rulers such as the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. We never escape the foibles of our personal or collective worlds.

Today the patterns displayed in the theologies of our time continue to clash culturally with each other and with religions of the East in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran as the West attempts to impose its moral agenda of free enterprise and human rights on national sovereignties of differing religious persuasions. Unhappily, the same embarrassing results occurred with indigenous natives of South America in the 16th century by well-meaning Christian Missionaries.

The Protestant Reformation ended the dominance of Roman Catholicism and gave birth to free enterprise and capitalism, ending, or so it seemed European feudalism. Yet post-World War Two Europe appeared reluctant to dismantle its pre-war national industrial centers that had a striking resemblance to feudalism as I experienced working for Honeywell in Europe in the 1980s.

Following the idea that everything is speculatively created as we go along, evidence of this was apparent when Rome fell and the Christian Church gained new life with the Supreme Pontiff of Catholicism establishing a power structure similar to that of the Roman Emperor. The Pontiff’s governing body consisted of the Roman Curia kin to the Roman Parliament, with the church's “command & control” hierarchy of the College of Cardinals, Catholic Bishops, Monsignors, Priests, and Monks similar to that of the Roman Army’s Generals, commissioned and noncommissioned officers, and soldiers. Indeed, the Emperor’s Praetorian Guard, a special force serving as the pope’s personal guard, was now the Swiss Praetorian Guard of the Pope in that symbolic role to this very day.

Indeed, industrialism in the West evolved with craftsmen out of feudalism during the middle ages forming small working groups called guilds where there were no bosses but workers of various skills committed to the same enterprise: e.g., producing wood, metal, glass, and machine parts. These craftsmen evolved into carpenters, sheet metal workers, and eventually tool & die, makers.

With war came the invention of new weapons in the American Civil War including battleships, submarines, and canon power providing new roles for tool & die, craftsmen. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, bicycle mechanic Henry Ford became a successful producer of the Model T Ford, while equally self-educated Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb that led to the public utility.

Henry Ford used the newly invented assembly line to economically produce his automobiles, cleverly coming up with the idea in January 1914 to increase hourly workers' pay to $5 a day when this was more than the weekly wage of many industrial workers. Doubling the average wage helped ensure a stable workforce and directly boosted the sales of his Model T Ford as workers could now afford to buy what they were making. It also laid the foundation for an economy-driven consumer economy. As a result, thanks to Henry Ford the working middle class took off more than one hundred years ago.

Thomas Edison exerted a similar influence on modern life. In addition to inventing the incandescent light bulb, he invented the phonograph, and the motion picture camera, as well as improved the telegraph and the telephone. More dramatically, the electrical age began on September 4, 1882. It was on that day that Edison Illuminating Company flipped the switch on his power station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, providing electricity to homes at a price comparable to gas. Cleverly, because Edison used 100-volt direct current to power his new light bulbs, customers could be no further than ½ mile from the generator. But he needed a high-profile location to promote the system. Edison chose a site in the heart of New York's financial district, at 255 and 257 Pearl Street.

Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller, among others, were called “Robber Barons” because they created monopolies in railroads, steel, automobile manufacturing, et al, controlling these sources of revenue that resulted in huge profits while intentionally regulating prices restricting goods produced by competitors. Author Mark Twain called this period the “Gilded Age,” which occurred in the United States during the late 19th century, from the 1870s to 1900. It was a period of rapid economic growth, especially in the Northern and Western United States.

These “Robber Barons” continued to compensate their executives and managers modestly before and during World War Two. Managerial compensation compared to workers was then the equivalent of ten times that of workers – who earned approximately $12.98 per week for 59 hours of work in 1900 or $674.96 a year – or a little less than one-tenth of the $70,000 some executives earned.

Management as a class was a product of WWII. After 1946, management successfully sold the idea to the American public that “it” had won the war by successfully managing logistical support, the timely delivering of supplies and weapons to fighting men at the battlefront, while economically husbanding vital raw materials to effect a positive outcome of the war, thus implying its extraordinary role in the war’s triumph (see David Halberstam’s quote, p 69). A spate of books focused fixedly on management to confirm management’s essential role and that of the manager to motivate and mobilize the worker population to sustain America’s industrial might. To wit:

Robert Blake & Jane Mouton, The Managerial Grid, 1964

Peter Block, The Empowered Manager, 1987

James MacGregor Burns, Leadership, 1978

Saul Gellerman, Why Good Managers Make Bad Ethical Choices, 1985

Paul Hersey & Kenneth Blanchard, Management of Organizational Behavior, 1972

Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, 1960,

Peter Drucker, Management, Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1973, et al

Management still in the 21st century is keen to continue to see itself as the parent and workers as its family, consistent with the “Divine Rights of Kings” of the middle ages with little sense that work, workers, and the workplace have radically changed with knowledge workers now superseding the position power of management, making management itself anachronistic and managers atavistic.

That said management’s compensation continues to soar as multiple levels of management were created during the boom years resembling empires that have been difficult to dismantle. Even so, management continues to cling to the idea of being indispensable with CEOs today earning as much as 300 or more times that of workers, growing a staggering 940 percent since 1978. Consequently, professionally trained engineers, statisticians, chemists, biologists, and other highly skilled professionals have opted to become pyramid climbers seeking their fortunes as managers leaving their professional credentials behind (see Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers, 2nd edition, 2014, The Worker, Alone, Going Against the Grain, 2nd edition, 2012).

Management guru Peter Drucker writes regarding executive compensation:

In the current version of business ethics in the United States, one side has all the obligations and the other side has all the entitlements. This is compatible neither with the ethics of interdependence nor with a universal code of ethics. It corrodes the bond of trust that times superior to subordinate (Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind, John E. Flaherty, 1999, p 270).

Some thirty years ago this ethic and trust were already unraveling as the “Rise & Fall” of the corporation was evident in the tea leaves (see Work Without Managers, A View from the Trenches, 2nd edition, 2013).

The Covid-19 Pandemic accelerated this demise as virtual workers in their homes and not in brick & mortar centers is a new reality. More than 60 percent of professionals now prefer working at home, and 20 percent are willing to take less money to do so, seeing no reason for bosses and the constant disruption of work by managers whose only function seemingly is to get in the way of productive work. We can see how management has mishandled this pandemic from the Center for Disease Control to the National Institute of Health to the President of the United States to Congress to the Governors of the fifty states, to the media that takes political sides leading to the increasing confusion of many Americans.

At another level, our constitutional government, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the role of elected representatives and the voting public as the arbiters of civilian authority over the military and appointed officials have been bridged.

New York Times journalist Michael S. Schmidt writes:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff twice called his Chinese counterpart in the final months of the Trump administration to reassure him that Donald J. Trump had no plans to attack China to remain in power and that the United States was not collapsing, according to PERIL (2021), a new book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

“Things may look unsteady,” the chairman, Gen. Mark A. Milley, told Gen. Li Zuocheng of China on January 8, two days after Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol to try to stop the certification of his election loss and in the second of two such calls. “But that’s the nature of democracy, General Li. We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”(Published September 14, 2021, Updated September 15, 2021)

Imagine President Harry S. Truman’s Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall warning the Japanese that the President of the United States was about to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to end the Second World War in the Pacific.

Then remember in the famous civilian-military confrontation when President Harry S. Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his command of the U.S. forces in Korea. This firing set off an uproar among the American public but the president held his ground and weathered the storm. On April 11, 1951, President Truman flew to Korea and met with General MacArthur who was saber-rattling at the time threatening to invade Manchuria and suggesting using the atomic bomb against China in Manchuria. Truman aware of the general’s flamboyance, said, “I’ll put that egotistical bastard in his place,” and he did flying to Korea and relieving him of his command, demonstrating publically that America’s democratic civilian authority took precedence over military authority.

Imagine if General Milley bypassed the President of the United States in 1945 as he did in 2020, with the bogus rationale that he had to console China by promising to forewarn China if the United States should ever plan on launching an attack. It is only a brief 75 years ago when the President of the United States was clearly in charge, only to find this republic three-quarters of a century later spiraling into confusion if not chaos while crippled with the COVID-19 pandemic. This young nation will be only 250 years old in 2025 yet appears to be unraveling as did the empires of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Great Britain, Spain, and the Roman Catholic Church. If there is an iota of truth to the alleged findings of Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their new book, PERIL, our demise as an empire may be closer than we think. It is why “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire” was written with its provocative assertion that the civilization we cherish and its Judaic-Christian culture appears to be unraveling.

To put this in perspective, French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon wrote in 1896:

The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation. Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation. The first is the destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilization are rooted. The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries.

AMERICA’S VEXING CULTURAL DNA

There seems a pesky shadow to America’s DNA that follows a cultural schizophrenic narrative. The exact nature of schizophrenia isn't known, but it is believed to be a combination of genetics, environment, and altered brain chemistry and structure that may play a role in behavior. Schizophrenia is characterized by thoughts or experiences that seem out of touch with reality, disorganized speech or behavior, and decreased participation in daily activities in a consistent and meaningful way. Difficulty with concentration and memory may also be manifested in repetitive behavior patterns.

ISOLATIONISM

Donald J. Trump was spirited into office with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” This isolationistic ploy originated with General Robert E. Wood’s “American First Committee” in 1940, the foremost United States pressure group against entry into World War II. To be fair, many who supported the presidency of Donald Trump are embarrassed with the January 6, 2020 storming of the nation’s Capitol. One reader who has read this book in manuscript form defends Trump supporters:

Yes, history repeats itself, and for understandable and justifiable reasons. Until Trump, the US had been going the opposite direction for 30 years, hoodwinked by the globalists, who aimed to weaken nation-states and elevate transnational corporations, which they did. Trump did not equate globalism with fascism, but that label fits, recalling Mussolini's vision of a partnership of government with big corporations, marginalizing the citizens. The South Korean miracle relied totally on protectionism. So did Japan's. China too used protectionism, with impunity, until Trump rode in. The globalists meant for China to grow, exempting them from reciprocal free trade. All in plain sight. I'd call it corruption... 'the family' first. Successive US administrations, Republican and Democrat, we're happy to go along with it, turning a blind eye. Or were they just that stupid? Trump, being an outsider, was happy to say out loud what no one in 'the family' would ever say; the emperor has no clothes, and in the case of American workers, no good jobs and no corporate taxes to maintain infrastructure. So, America 1st was a long overdue reply to 'the family' 1st.

[“The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire” traces societies across the globe and throughout history who react to circumstances rather than anticipating and then acting. This writer chooses to see Donald J. Trump as the exception.]

Consistent with our cultural DNA, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term largely on the promise of keeping America out of WWII, that is until the Empire of Japan bombed the United States Seventh Fleet on December 7, 1941, in the Hawaiian Islands at Pearl Harbor.

Similarly, President Woodrow Wilson was elected to a second term in 1916 promising to keep the United States out of WWI. That changed in 1917 when a German submarine sank the British ocean liner The RMS Lusitania in 1915 killing 1,198 passengers including 128 American citizens. In 1916 The SS Sussex, an unarmed ferry under the French flag was torpedoed in the English Channel with four Americans among the dead. The United States then mobilized for war. Prominent Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, an avowed isolationist, supported a “Declaration of War” when Wilson asked for this on April 6, 1917, declaring war on Germany, and subsequently on Austria-Hungary with bilateral Congressional support.

After WWI, Senator Lodge returned to his isolationism opposing the United States joining The League of Nations, an international organization largely the creation of President Wilson.

The unlikely presidency of Donald Trump suggested a return to isolationism with his rhetoric of “we/they” divisive tribal polarity with a direct appeal to the shattered mainly white working middle-class. When he failed to be reelected for a second term, these loyal supporters stormed the nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2020, believing President Joseph Biden stole the election although winning the popular and Electoral College vote. Academic psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh writes in “HIVEMIND: The New Science of Tribalism in Our Divided World” (2019):

We are at a watershed moment, for these new technologies have not only allowed us to access a world of information and communication but have also ushered in a revolution in our social functioning.

British Swiss writer Johann Hari adds in Lost Connections: Why You Are Depressed and How to Find Hope (2019):

“The Internet was born into a world where many people had already lost their sense of connection to each other. Our obsessive use of social media is an attempt to fill a hole, a great hallowing that took place before anyone had a smartphone.”

Eric Hoffer claimed in “The True Believer” (1951) that people joined mass movements to escape their ineffectual and helpless individual selves often leading to fanatic zeal while embracing “mob rule” leaving their consciences and moral connection to the wider society.

When Donald Trump ran for the presidency, the mainly white working middle class had essentially collapsed with his rhetoric suggesting something outside itself must be the cause, seeing well-paying jobs going to low-paid workers in Mexico, India, South Korea, and China. These displaced or marginalized American workers rallied to the voice that declared they had done nothing wrong. No attention was given to workers' obsolescent skills or that they were being replaced by knowledge workers comfortable with robotics, electronics, and the changing requirements of work.

Rather than Europe and Asia being the cause, the culprit appeared to be our anachronistic education system, producing high school graduates who could neither read nor write with efficiency and college graduates with meaningless college degrees.

Meanwhile, a small nation, Finland, outperforms American students in nearly every essential category of learning in the postmodern era. This is starkly true of many American students in metropolitan areas. Still, the cry is for everyone to be a college graduate when many students would prefer a trade school education.

The COVID-19 pandemic intervened to neutralize Trump’s popularity with workers’ angst displaced by Joseph Biden’s surge to the presidency a man who had always existed in the background.

TURNING BACK THE HISTORICAL CLOCK & DEJA VU

Roman Emperor Constantine signed the Edict of Milan of 313 that proclaimed religious tolerance in the Roman Empire for Christians removing them from being persecuted. Christianity essentially became the state religion however not declared until 380 essentially crushing paganism to the point of extinction.

That changed in 361 when Julian became the sole Roman Emperor. He immediately restored Hellenistic paganism angered with Christianity for its claim to be the only true religion. Julian’s reign as emperor lasted only 18 months (361-363) being mortally wounded during the Battle of Samara in 363. He was only 31. The Christian Sozomen acknowledged that Emperor Julian did not compel Christians to offer sacrifices nor did he allow Romans to commit acts of injustice against Christians or to insult them. With his death, Christianity was restored as the Roman Empire’s religion.

Likewise, President Trump attempted to restore the affluent working middle class by executive edit that had previously materialized by circumstances after WWII when the war-torn world was now dependent in the short term on the United States for all its essential needs: i.e., food supplies, farm machinery, automobiles, home appliances, building materials, and manufactured goods including clothing, radios, televisions, etc.

American factories ran 24/7 during WWII and now in the 1950s and 1960s were again running 24/7 to supply the world. The labor unions of the United Auto Workers, Teamsters, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, United Steel Workers, et al, had their employers over a barrel with demands for higher wages and fringe benefits given without recourse. The optimistic corporate world even flirted with the idea of “lifetime employment” (see Work Without Managers, 1991) as the work of the moment established an affluent working middle class that extended from 1950 to the late 1980s however rapidly declining thereafter.

A post-war rise in unionism, the passage of the GI Bill, a housing program, and other progressive actions led to a doubling of the median family income in only 30 years (1950 – 1980), creating a working middle class of multiple ethnicities that included nearly 60 percent of Americans by the late 1970s. Today, it is less than 40 percent of what it had been at its peak.

Like Emperor Julian nearly 2,000 years before, President Trump misread the tee leaves in his attempt to turn back the clock to the “Golden Age of Manual Labor” making little allowance for the miraculous economic recovery of Europe and Asia that saw Sweden, Germany, France, South Korea, Indonesia, and Japan flooding the American market with automobiles, electronics, televisions, videos, computers, household goods, furniture, and appliances. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler suffering a marked reduction in demand could no longer afford the workforce of the earlier period. Moreover, it was evident that the “Big Three” automakers insisted on continuing to make large gas-guzzling big cars when the world and Americans now preferred more compact and economic vehicles.

THE ALL TOO HUMAN AMBIVALENT MEDIA

There was a time in the mid-twentieth century when the American media showed prudence and self-restraint. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt required cruel steel braces to stand up paralyzed from the waist down having suffered poliomyelitis when he was 39 years old. Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie had a mistress so did Roosevelt, but what was striking about Willkie's adulterous affair is how brazen and openly he campaigned for the presidency with her at his side against FDR in 1940. The press avoided schadenfreude, the German term for delighting in gossip having nothing to do with the political issues of the day.

In the late 19th century, eminent publisher William Randolph Hearst (1863 – 1951) promoted aggressive headlines that became known as “yellow journalism.” Newspapers across the land competed with an epidemic of sensationalized headlines that represented no legitimate well-researched news but instead provided eye-catching headlines for increased sales having nothing to do with the truth (or fake news).

In the current era of our civil religion, we have political correctness and critical race theory with divisive tribalism dominating journalism from the left and equally from the right both claiming to be guided by the facts. This has led to an ineffective national and foreign policy as Americans don’t know who to believe. This duplicity is displayed in an inconsistent COVID-19 pandemic message from public service institutions that claim to have no political agenda.

Strangely, journalism was politely silent when President Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924) suffered a massive stroke in 1919 in his second term with his wife Edith becoming essentially the shadow president for much of his second term. It was the worst crisis of presidential politics in American history, and it was handled badly by the press, Congress, and Wilson’s cabinet.

No one seriously suggested that Wilson resign, while his wife, Edith, controlled access to him, making presidential decisions by default and engineering a successful cover-up of his condition, including misleading optimistic reports from his doctors. Wilson died in his sleep three years after leaving office with his presidency a permanent casualty of his illness.

During Ronald Reagan's presidency (1981 – 1989), he developed unreported dementia in his second term, often falling asleep during cabinet meetings and having lapses in discussions, which led to his cabinet asking cerebral and popular Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee to observe the president.

Baker, who was fully capable of being president in his own right was however a team player and not one to rock the boat. He reported the president was in charge of all his faculties giving the president his unmitigated endorsement. It was at this point, similar to Edith Wilson's role as shadow president nearly seventy years earlier that Nancy Reagan, wife of President Reagan, assumed a similar role. She held the president’s cabinet and all its direct reports in check during the remainder of Reagan’s presidency. It wasn’t until 1995 or six years after President Reagan left office that he admitted to the press that he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Nancy Reagan, who now controlled his legacy, characteristically described his condition as “the long goodbye.”


ZEITGEIST or the SPIRIT of the TIMES

Journalists are members of a most human profession whose business is to tell us the stories of our time. “Human, All Too Human” was a book of aphorisms of polemical German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) published posthumously by his sister Elizabeth-Foster Nietzsche in 1908, or eight years after his death. Nietzsche believed human nature’s hard moments could be overcome through understanding and philosophy claiming the individual must craft his identity through self-realization transcending the limits of God and the idea of the soul.

While this concept of “all too human” has proven prescient, Nietzsche understandably could not have had a sense that we would surrender the steering wheel of our lives to unconscious influences from within and without, above and below our sense of self, or that journalists on the left and right, and politicians of the same persuasions would look for justification, not in God or the soul, but human technology with scientists tracking these discoveries.

Educators and social scientists often see us moving from individualism to group and cultural norms, not as a regression but progression to a new reality. They may be right as sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1889 – 1968) writes in “Social & Cultural Dynamics” (1937):

“We are seemingly between two epochs: the dying Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow. We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred-year-long Sensate day.”

Each of these phases of cultural development not only seeks to describe the nature of reality, but also stipulates the nature of human needs and goals to be satisfied, the extent to which they should be satisfied, and the methods of satisfaction. Sorokin has interpreted contemporary Western civilization as a sensate civilization, dedicated to technological progress and prophesied its fall into decadence and the emergence of a new ideational or idealistic era, again as with Nietzsche having no sense of the rise and dominance of electronic technology or its abrupt clash with culture and tradition now evident in a generation.

Research psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh gives a perceptive view of the implications of ubiquitous smartphones seemingly in everyone’s hands, the power of the Internet, and the accelerating sweep of social technologies in her book “HIVEMIND” (2019) providing reasoned discussion in the new spirit of the times.

Alas, the focus of “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire” is not on technology, per se, but on how we constantly muddled our way through the ages periodically rescued by our instinct for survival and ingenuity. The narrative of this story could be metaphorically described as a locomotive that must first overcome enormous inertia to establish some momentum, but once that momentum is established it builds to acceleration that keeps quickening which becomes impossible to control, but nobody minds as they race past landmarks and sacred markings that they once cherished not realizing they are running from themselves as “Nowhere Man” to a place just over the horizon called “Nowhere Land.”

That said instinct and ingenuity were at hand in 1450 when Johannes Gutenberg (1400 – 1468) accidentally discovered and introduced the metal movable-type printing press in Europe, along with innovations in casting the type based on a matrix and hand mold (see “The Axemaker’s Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture,” James Burke and Robert Ornstein, 1997, pp. 122-123).

Gutenberg was the first to create his type pieces from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony—and these materials remained standard for 550 years. This invention ended feudalism and the singular dominance of the Roman Catholic Church with Martin Luther’s (1483 – 1546) posting his 95 theses of protests against the selling of indulgences on the Wittenberg chapel door in 1517 which led to the economic dominance of capitalism.

This gave birth to the Protestant Movement, spurring the production of books principally the Bible, followed by a rush to the literacy of the populace sparking the education of the masses. This, in turn, led to the wide expansion of universities with science now the key to the Industrial Revolution and eventually the “Age of Enlightenment.” Within a short 42 years after Gutenberg’s invention, Queen Isabella II of Spain sponsored Christopher Columbus’s venture into the New World proving the planet was not flat but a globe, necessitating the rediscovery of what was knowledge and what was mainly conjecture.

European manners, morays, and morals changed as Europeans were shocked that pagans of the New World could have created sophisticated societies without Christianity or European cultural acumen. Here in 2021, we are on the brink of an equally amazing time in history with much of what has gone before as wisdom, and knowledge likely to look quite pedestrian as was the case when Gutenberg changed the world. Today, with smartphones, the Internet, and social media we continue to navigate between sanity and madness as we have throughout the centuries with NOWHERE MAN always in the shadows of NOWHERE LAND.