BARBARIANS AT THE GATE IN BROOKS BROTHER THREADS COIFFURES AT FLEISCHMANN’S SALON IVY LEAGUE CREDENTIALS WITH A LICENSE TO STEAL
James
R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Originally
published © May 3, 2016/August 12, 2021
With
the new breed of professional workers, success is measured in terms of
challenging work, in doing something significant, in having freedom and control
of what professionals do, in being trusted and treated with respect and
dignity.
Regrettably,
most organizations are not structured to abide much less promote this
climate. Meanwhile, professionals grow
tired of bureaucratic constraints that sponsor non-thinking thinking and
non-doing doing of non-thing things.
Today,
it is a different society but society acts as if nothing has changed. Yesterday, a family meant a man and a woman
and a child, not two members of the same sex in an intimate relationship. Yesterday, religion meant a faith in God, not
a Church of Scientology. Yesterday, school
meant a building dedicated to education, not a satellite dish beaming a
television lecture into a room with only one student. Yesterday, the government meant a national
entity, not an international marketplace.
Yesterday's work meant making a product, not creating information in a
workplace away from home, now it means working at home or near home.
James
R. Fisher, Jr., Work
Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1991)
WHEN
THERE IS NO PLACE FOR REALITY
Nowhere Man looks back, not ahead; is nostalgic for the
past, fearful of the future; solves problems with the same thinking that caused
them; takes pride in critical thinking,
which is limited to what is already known, failing to embrace the unknown but
knowable through creative thinking.
Nowhere Man is committed to crisis management solving problems he has already created; praising his initiative but covertly opposing its departure from the expected procedure as you don’t know where it will take you; conducting long-term planning but fixated on short-term results; chronic dissemblers by inclination but expecting others, to be honest.
Nowhere Man sees himself exceptional without the evidence to support this self-assurance; treats the surreal as real; regards people as things to be managed and calls it leadership; promotes the idea that everyone is equal but some are more equal than others; operates in secret and calls it transparent; deludes himself as being in the know and in charge.
THE GREATEST GENERATION
Nowhere Man has evolved unsuspectingly from college-trained professionals of the Baby Boomer Generation who came to take control when there was little worldwide competition, internal opposition, and no question of their authority to do as they desired.
They were in quest of absolutes – sexual pleasure, eternal youth, and irrepressible bliss – in an ambiguous secular world that had no place for permanence. They were blind optimists plagued with identity crises but tempered with economic clout in reckless abandon, a world in which consequences were playing on another circuit.
This self-indulgent generation rose out of WWII, after their parents, members of the Great Depression Generation won that war. Children of these parents had not felt the numbing sting of poverty or the uncertainty of that war. They also were not privy to see their parents triumph over sacrifice, scarcity, and depression to support a cause greater than themselves. These parents didn’t want their children to suffer the same insecurity and scarcity, the same pain and struggle, the same disappointment and hardship, the same embarrassment and humiliation that sticks to the psyche like an old suit of clothes and masks personality.
It never occurred to The Greatest Generation that had embraced their fears that this might be good medicine for their offspring. No, they wanted their children to have little or no sense of that constant shadow; no need to burden their lovely little imps with such self-conscious reminders of how they triumphed over their pettiness to assert themselves in that war as it had not occurred to the general population in the previous war. In 1917, Americans joined WWI (1914 – 1918) and were known as “Doughboys.”
It was an informal term for members of the US Army and Marine Corps infantry in WWI but was first used in the Mexican-American War of 1846 - 1848. WWII had a more appropriate sobriquet in that American fighting men were called “G.I. Joe’s.”
The United States between 1942 and 1945 (the American years of WWII), became a literal fusion of diverse races, ethnicities, religions, classes, and ideologies to form a united front of a most united nation. At home and abroad, men and women were fighting valiantly on both fronts 24/7: on the islands of the South Pacific and the battlefields of Europe, and in the factories across the nation, Americans were producing a war machine greater than their Allies and their enemies, the Axis Powers combined while women as “Rosie the Riveter” personified this effort at home. My aunt was a certified welder in a defense plant in WWII as a toolmaker. Author David Halberstam writes:
As good a date as any to mark the true coming of the American Century is the Battle of Midway from June 4 to June 6, 1942. We had been unprepared at the outbreak of the war, our Navy devastated in the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. Yet only seven months later, at Midway, our industrial capacity and our sources of natural energy were so great that we inflicted on the Japanese what was probably the crucial defeat of the war. At Midway, using land- and carrier-based planes, we sank four Japanese carriers and one heavy cruiser, while losing one destroyer and one aircraft carrier. Even had Admiral Chester Nimitz lost more carriers at Midway, as Paul Kennedy points out, his losses would have been quickly replaced by three new carriers, three light fleet carriers, and fifteen escort carriers, and in 1943 by five fleet carriers, six light carriers, and twenty-five escort carriers. With our great assembly lines and our ever-expanding industrial core (and protected as we were by two great oceans in an age when weaponry could not yet cross an ocean), we became the industrial arsenal for the mightiest of war efforts. In 1942 and 1943 America alone produced almost twice as many airplanes as the entire Axis. In 1943 and 1944 we were producing one ship a day and an airplane every five minutes (The Next Century, 1991, pp. 58-59).
Government and industry rose above narrow private interests and supported the broader concerns of national survival to prevail. Private enterprise in league with the government became part of the solution, not the problem. The synergy was impressive, the commitment total, and the unselfishness universal to represent one of the great moments in U.S. history.
“The Greatest Generation” is a term made popular by journalist Tom Brokaw in describing the United States during the deprivation of the Great Depression to fight successfully to the conclusion of WWII (see Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, 1998).
That collaborative effort would lead the United States to become the lone superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, or for the past quarter-century.
Professors Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth of Dartmouth College in World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (2008) see this dominance eroding while paradoxically remaining essentially unchallenged. They point out that China is not the threat some entertain alluding to the fact that half of all Chinese exports consist of what economists call “processing trade,” that is, parts are imported into China for assembly and then exported afterward.
The U.S. remains the leading source of innovative technologies, boasting $128 billion in receipts in 2013 – more than four times that of Japan, with China, in contrast, generating less than $1 billion in 2013 for use of its intellectual property. Moreover, 114 Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, and Medicine have gone to U.S.-based research institutions since 1990, while 2 have gone to China-based research centers (see “The Once and Future Superpower, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2016).
Is this the cause for optimism? Is this reason for the United States to rest on its laurels? You would think so by reading Kishore Mahbubani of the National University of Singapore and Lawrence H. Summers of Harvard University (see “The Case for Global Optimism,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2016). Their optimism is an expression of the global connection via this Information Age. U.S. political policy and strategy paints a different picture.
The ubiquitous optimism after WWII was already unraveling in the Korean War (1950 – 1953), which was not a war but a police action with ambivalent support at home and ambiguous commitment by the US government.
The American people were weary of war. It was in that climate that President Harry S. Truman, and his Supreme Commander in the Far East, General Douglas MacArthur, proved not to be on the same page.
On April 11, 1951, in perhaps one of the most memorable confrontations between a president and his field commander, President Truman relieved General MacArthur of his command of the U.S. forces in Korea. MacArthur wanted to take the role beyond North Korea into Manchuria China possibly using the atomic bomb to secure the entire peninsula of Korea to become a democratic state.
As it often happens, it was not realized then but the idea of containment was already an unconscious strategy as the American leadership wanted to keep Korea a limited engagement. As a consequence, for the past sixty-four years, we have had a permanent American military presence in South Korea varying from 30,000 to 50,000 troops. It has kept South Korea independent but has failed to change the calculus between the two Koreas.
CONTAINMENT THEORY
American diplomat George Kennan (1904 – 2005) sent a famous anonymous article to Foreign Affairs (1947) titled a “Long Telegram from Moscow,” laying out a path between the extremes of war and appeasement called “containment.” He claimed Stalin was not Hitler and had no timetable for aggressive expansionism and that the U.S. could develop a coherent strategy on non-provocative resistance. He proved to be right with the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan that saved Western Europe after WWII. That was with then, but what about now?
That containment philosophy appears like a nightmare or bad dream in the wake of the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and the Afghanistan War, as ambiguous leadership and an ambivalent strategy have proven embarrassing in their consequences, first to the nation, and then to the world-at-large. Now, we have seen that ambiguity and ambivalence repeated in the Syrian Civil War, as it is clear that President Barak Obama prefers to lead from behind.
One wonders if this “containment policy” has run its course or if the leadership today doesn’t compute favorably with the leadership of WWII and post-WWII. It appears that something is missing in American leadership, which cannot be explained away by spin or platitude. It wasn’t like this some 150 years ago when American leadership wasn’t afraid to lead as will be shown shortly.
LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION
During the Great Depression-era children who became parents did not want their children to be deprived as they had been deprived. Never had children had so much freedom and power and so little guidance as did the Baby Boomer Generation.
While parents were chasing “the American dream,” they became their own parents as both parents were likely to be working. When parents are away, children will play. This found Baby Boomers getting in all kinds of mischief. This included smoking and drinking, doing drugs, skipping school, and playing house as if they were adults.
When parents found time to act as parents, they wanted to be friends with their children, not parents to compensate for their guilt. They wanted their children to “like” them, to find them “cool.” Parents’ intentions were good. They wanted their children to be happy, secure, and free of pain, struggle, humiliation, and embarrassment. They wanted their children to be “champions,” not experience the disheartening nature of failure or disappointment. They wanted everyone to get winning trophies and ribbons, and to have no one labeled their children as losers, only winners. They wanted to protect their delicate psyches from reality, challenge, and failure when it was this characteristic of their parents that won WWII. Unfortunately, protection from life doesn’t make us stronger, only weaker, and for us to allow others to carry our burdens, alas, could only lead to the spoiled brat generations that have been with our culture since the “terrible 60s.”
These parents expected their children to take this freedom to be as natural as osmosis passing from them into the world as if through a semi-permeable membrane finding them being, doing, and acquiring all the right things without parental guidance.
In a real sense, children were treated as if they were pets controlled externally by incentives with no need for conscious internal clocks to govern their emotions and control their behavior. This is the legacy of Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning.
Unwittingly, this left the Baby Boomer Generation without an internal monitoring system, that is, without a moral compass or guidance system, making them prime targets for fads and fantasies; for false standards and the need for personal trainers to get them to do what they should do on their own; requiring crash courses to ensure the attainment of adequate scores on SAT’s and GRE’s for college and graduate school; turning them into slaves to polls and rating systems for books, films, and even restaurants; equating competence in leadership as an index of their charisma; never planned on growing and therefore never needing to get old.
Cheryl Merser writes in “Grown-Ups: A Generation in Search of Adulthood (1987):
“How can you have a career crisis if you don’t have a career? How can you have a seven-year marital itch if you’re still single at thirty? How can you have an all-out life crisis at thirty-five if you’re attending your first Lamaze class? How can you suffer the empty nest syndrome when you’re childless and approaching forty? How can you deal with the predictable ups and downs of marriage if you are both working all the time and never see each other?”
The “cut & control” magnitude of the last seventy years, or since the end of WWII have seen succeeding generations lost in transition and translation but with an army of psychologists, psychotherapists, gurus, personal trainers, plastic surgeons, and other sycophants to justify their total retreat from reality into the surreal.
As I’ve written elsewhere in this commentary, Nowhere Man retreats to his “man cave” in Nowhere Land, and like those dogs that frantically chase that mechanical rabbit around the Greyhound Tracks, but never catch it, Nowhere Man surrenders his total existence to outside stimuli and frantically endeavoring to be consistent with the prevailing norms even if they are pathological.
Sociologists and psychologists, anthropologists, and political scientists blame these fractured demographics, these “homeless minds,” this political, social, and cultural turmoil, on everything but the person who is a slave to everything and in charge of nothing. Parents are a convenient scapegoat to this remarkably continuing “spoiled brat generation.” Whatever the issue, it is the times! But is it? Could it be that we have forgotten how to take charge, govern ourselves, be our own best friend (see The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best friend, 1996)?
When we were a fledgling nation, James Madison, one of the architects of the American constitution, stated the point of governance bluntly at the Virginia ratifying convention:
“There never was a government without force. What is the meaning of government? An institution to make people do their duty. A government leaving it to a man to do his duty, or not, as he pleases, would be a new species of government, or rather no government at all.”
The same applies to parents.
WHEN THERE WERE NO APOLOGISTS
Children of the Great Depression Generation knew they did not have a safety net if they should do something stupid or embarrassing, or should they fail as no one had the means or motivation to apologize for their behavior. They had no choice, whatever they had done, but to pick themselves up and go forward for if they didn’t they would be stuck in place and eventually reduced to seed.
Children knew a lot about delayed gratification or little or no gratification and accepted it stoically. They also knew a lot about failure and even more about suffering the consequences of their choices and actions. The same rules and standards applied to everyone which were clear and concise and undeviatingly enforced with fairness, and consistency so that tears and excuses did not mitigate the situation.
Members of the Depression Generation (1929 – 1945) knew that if they cheated on a test in high school they could be expelled; get caught smoking a cigarette on campus and there was a good chance of being kicked off the football team no matter how good you were; steal something out of another person’s locker, and you were sent off to reform school with no chance of your record being expunged; fail a course which was a permanent grade with no chance to take the course over and change the grade; talk back to a teacher and you were sent to the principal’s office where he or she had discretionary authority to expel you from school on the spot with no judicial process to reverse the finding. Alas, you had no choice but to grow up!
The saving grace of the times was that honesty was the best policy and therefore was not a rare commodity but common practice among those from the humblest of circumstances.
When I was five years old, and in kindergarten, my da took me aside just before Christmas and told me, “Jimmy, we don’t have any money for Christmas. We can’t buy you any gifts but we love you very much and want you to know that. Your mother has been able to get a little doll for your sister (she was three years old) and we wanted you to know this beforehand.”
That candor from my da has stayed with me all my life. Looking back, it was the most profound thing a father could ever tell a son, my da with his seventh-grade education was a loving man, a good man, a man who lost his mother when he was born, his father taking off never to be heard from again. He knew how to be a parent.
These nearly eight decades later, I realize how that set the bar for me for the rest of my life; how that simple confession would make material possessions never that important to me; how it has made it easy for me to be my own man and not to worry about how the ball bounces.
You may wonder if I fell prey to making apologies for my children, who became part of the Baby Boomer Generation, all being born in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the answer is “no.”
My children grew up in the “spoil brat generation era,” but they were not part of it, at least not when I was around, and they have had their problems with me for that. Did they make the transition to adulthood for this tough love? Of the four, two boys and two girls, only one did, which exceeds the average of that generation.
[I have written volumes on the spoiled brat generations of “Baby Boomers,” “Generations X & Y,” and even on “The Millennials” in my other books. I suspect they all have a lot in common with “Nowhere Man!”]
NEXT: TEN – LONG JOURNEY INTO THE WESTERN NIGHT
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