NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- TEN

 Long Day’s Journey into the Western Night!

EUGENE O'NEILL'S “LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHT,” A DYSTOPIAN PLAY, IN WHICH A FAMILY RETREATS FROM ITS CORE VALUES AND CENTRAL ESSENCE INTO PERSONAL ISOLATION AND SELF-ESTRANGEMENT.

 

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

Originally published © May 22, 2016/August 14, 2021

Everything that our present-day psychologist has to tell us – and here we refer not only to the systematic science but also in the wider sense to the physiognomic knowledge of men – relates to the present condition of the Western soul, and not, as hitherto gratuitously assumed, to the “human soul” at large.

Oswald Spengler (1880 – 1936), German historian and philosopher, Decline of the West (1918), Volume 1.

ONCE THE QUIET DAY IS GONE

It has been Western society’s mistaken belief that through “cut & control” progress on the wings of technology that man could soar above human deficiencies and usher him into the Promised Land of metaphorical milk and honey.

This emphasis and impetus have instead taken man into Nowhere Land where technology’s golden achievements may inevitably contribute to planetary ruin. Man has used his mind not so much to liberate himself from fear but to imprison him in fear with the sinister face of Nowhere Man.

We are currently imprisoned in the Scientific Age as we once were imprisoned in the Miraculous Age of Christianity over the past 2,000 years. American inventor Thomas Edison (1847 – 1931) who gave us the electric light, the motion picture, and the public utility, once said, “Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge.”

American novelist James Fennimore Cooper (1789 – 1851) wrote in his novel, The Prairie (1827):

"The air, the water, and the ground are free gifts to man and no one has the power to portion them out in parcels. Man must drink and breathe and walk and therefore each man has a right to his share of each."

Similarly, Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881) wrote in “The Brothers Karamazov” 1880):

"Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you -- and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!”

Creative writers and poets have been using their art to enhance our level of awareness through the years, but without applying noticeable brakes to our excesses. American science fiction writer Robert Stikmanz declares with a spike of humor: “Consider that mind—like a garden, a species, an economy, or realms of discourse—may grow vulnerable in sameness and vigorous in diversity. How cool is that?”

In his Prelude to a Change of Mind (2007), he writes with quiet grace, dramatizing our ambivalence in a quirky fantasy novel populated by dwarfs suggests what is likely to happen if man fails to make peace with Nature:

"If we fail, the planet will grow sterile and your people will die in hunger, thirst, and waves of plagues. Our people and the thrm's will die more slowly because the poisons here will render us unable to conceive. The skies will cease to be blue, the land will lose its verdure and the seas, well, the seas will be the first to go. Anything that does survive will be broken, mutant, discontinuous from us, and mutually exclusive. It will be the new life of a shattered world, a world for chitinous, crawly things, not one for soft and tender emotion. I hope, child, I have answered your question.

"Meg said nothing. None of it made sense, but she still felt an urge to deny it, deny it, even though Ekaterina's strange, rolling words carried a ring of truth. Suddenly, the autumn chill cut through all her layers of bundling wraps. She could not stop shivering.”

THE CHILLING NIGHT MOVES IN

The story of Nowhere Man reads like a novel as Nowhere Land bears a striking resemblance to an imaginary tale of a surreal vision of a desolate state where no real people live and no real things occur.

Two thousand years later, reality haunts this vision as Nowhere Man continues in his stubborn determination to bend Mother Nature to his will. He fails to realize he exists now, as he has existed before, and will continue to exist in the future at Mother Nature’s pleasure or wrath, as she is without conscience, but always about consequences.

English philosopher and statesman, Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) put it simply: “Nature is commanded by obeying her.”

We pride ourselves in our analytics, in our ability to define problems, believing once defined they are half solved. Austrian-born-American organization guru, Peter Drucker (1909 – 2005) laments: “I hope we are over our belief that if you define a problem you don’t have to do any work.”

We have come to use language loosely. When we say we define a problem, it is more likely we have described a problem in culturally acceptable terms with little to no regard for subtext, where the problem is buried. We also tend to seek answers to problems rather than to design a way forward. As Maltese psychologist Edward de Bono (born 1933) points out, you must first design a house before you can build it.

Unfortunately, as much as we pride ourselves as being otherwise, we are “box-like thinkers,” imprisoned in the box of the contemporary mind of the time as debilitating as that mind may be.

Education is a series of boxes called “grades” in elementary school, “years” in high school, and “semesters” in college, but always inescapable boxes. Jobs are a series of boxes called “positions” with increasing prestige as the boxes acquire socially significant gravitas, boxes associated with income levels and disposable wealth. Happiness, too, is a series of boxes called “contentment,” and meaning is a series of boxes called “values.”

Cultural gurus of all sundry disciplines and occupations attempt to inspire us with numerical steps we might take to the fulfillment of the boxes of particular interest to us. We are weary of saying, “I’m going to be a doctor, lawyer, executive, engineer, teacher, preacher, or television personality,” overwhelmed as we are with the mountain we must climb in terms of boxes to realize such an advantage. So, we avoid embracing the whole as it may be too much to grasp.

We drift to a major in college – because it is secure or it pays the most – with hardly a thought as to what we might prefer doing, which could be working as an electrician and entering an apprentice program or being a nurse or teacher's aide.

Going through life can be a mesmerizing dance carefully orchestrated without commitment to a task or personal involvement, and softened from such resolve by staying safely in the cocoon while appearing to have left its confinement.

We love going to school, accumulating boxes on our resumes, thus escaping taking bold action on anything, while feeling we are making progress when we are dancing in place.

The West has been doing this for more than one hundred years, attempting to force the world to fit its preconceived notion of a rightful sequence of boxes, and the world, for the most part, has been obliging, feeling it has had no other option, until now.

Take the Eastern Pacific archipelagos in this early 21st century. The interest of the West, it is clear, should be confined to trade. What reason is there for the United States to have 50,000 troops in Japan, 30,000 in South Korea, and another 100,000 scattered throughout the Far East when these countries and regions are prosperous and should defend their geography?

Likewise, why the paranoia over China rising out of the bowels of a Third World nation into a regional power? China is attempting to establish a base of integrity as the United States has established one in North America over the past 200 years.

Remember the panic of October 1962, when a U-2 spy plane discovered the Soviet Union was building medium-range missile sites in Cuba? It became known as the “Cuban Missile Crisis,” lasting thirteen days, until President Kennedy persuaded the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev to remove the missiles for Allied military concessions in Eastern Europe.

ALAS, NO SAFE BOXES!

The world is changing and in the end, there will be no safe boxes because there will be no need for boxes. There will be a need to design a way forward along with a policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of another country. We have enough problems of our own to sort out, as do they.

Education doesn’t take place in a box called “an institution of higher learning,” but in the classroom of discovery where boxes have no relevance. Yet Americans are preoccupied with institutional learning dedicated to boxamania.

We educate ourselves by reading and writing, developing a vocabulary out of this machinery for thinking, but it is the experience we have, individually and collectively, where learning resides and not in some book.

School is never out in life, and only the wise realize this. Life is a continuing course in experiencing and processing that experience as to what it means and its relevant value. A teacher can be a guide to the process, but the teacher is not the arbiter in life when the rubber hits the road and choices in life have to be made. Then we are on our own as life gives us a report card every day.

Most teachers are trapped in institutional learning where the day is packed with the colossal task of managing often a hostile environment of students not interested in learning, and wanting desperately to be somewhere else doing something else. It is also loaded with administrative duties with draconian policies and procedures that handcuff the teacher from taking control of the class much less the curriculum.

An appetite for learning doesn’t start with the classroom. It starts in the home, and if it doesn’t exist in the home, then it is nigh impossible for it to exist in the classroom. When the major role of the teacher is that of disciplinarian, then the situation is hopeless. Throwing money at the problem, which is the American way, has not changed the results. Such countries as Finland, Taiwan, Denmark, and Sweden spend a lot less money on education with far superior results than those of the United States. Also, the role of the teacher is more prestigious in these countries, the pay is better, and the quality of people entering the profession is more impressive.

Compulsory education in America has gone from a utopian to a dystopian aspect over the past several generations. The vision of everyone being given an equal opportunity to excel has instead collapsed into a dumbing down of what a letter grade means, as well as the quality of a high school diploma or college degree. We have reached the point where high school graduates cannot read or do simple mathematics, and college graduates don’t know what the “Cold War” was about much less what caused it to occur, or even the significance of a date in American history such as December 7, 1941.

Worse yet, what wisdom is there to education when the student, once graduated, never picks up a book and reads it for pleasure, never reads a newspaper or of current events in a periodical, never ventures outside the cocoon of his friends and the familiar, never visits a foreign country, never listens to classical music, never visits an art or science museum, never goes to a local art show or a play put on by an amateur group in the community, never visits the library, never goes to church, never votes, never attends a town meeting to discuss local issues, never volunteers for anything in the community, never contributes to local causes, never gets out of the box of his comfort zone?

If you had been a high school student in tiny Clinton, Iowa in 1900, here is the curriculum you would have had to master for a high school diploma:

FRESHMAN YEAR

Algebra, Physical Geography, English History, English Composition, Latin, German, American Literature.

SOPHOMORE YEAR

Geometry, Zoology, Botany, Civil Government, Latin, German, European Literature, English Composition.

JUNIOR YEAR

Physics, History, Advanced Algebra, Geology, Latin, German, French, Rhetoric (speech presentation skills), English Composition.

SENIOR YEAR

Chemistry, Chemistry Mathematics, Physiology, American History, Political Economics, English Grammar, Latin, German, French, English and European Literature, English Composition.

[These additional courses were added to the curriculum between 1910 and 1915: Manual Arts Training, Agriculture, Journalism, Mechanical Drawing, Music Appreciation, Art, Domestic Science (social/personal relationships), Commercial Arts, and Public Speaking.]

If this seems surprising, consider the Ken Burns miniseries featured on PBS Television in the 1990s of The American Civil War (1860-1865). Letters sent home by soldiers from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line were introduced in the narrative. These letters were noteworthy for their clarity, creative composition, and intelligence in expressing their sentiments.

WHEN LIFE WAS NOT CONFINED TO BOXES

America’s Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790) finished his formal education at age eleven, worked in his father’s shop making candles from ages, eleven to twelve, then tried the cutlery business on his own, only to return to his father’s shop back to making candles.

From the ages of thirteen to fifteen, he worked for his older brother in the same business, spending his free time writing broadside ballads and borrowing books to read from John Bunyan to John Locke.

His reading then became more catholic to include histories and religious polemics, moving beyond reading these books to practicing and perfecting his writing skills by copying stirring passages over and over again until they sounded like his own voice. This led him to study the essay format finding a particular affection for the works of English essayist Joseph Addison (1672 – 1719), imitating his dialectical style to make his point.

Reading, and writing mainly for his pleasure, led to exploring the printing business, and publishing little essays, first anonymously in pamphlet form, then in a weekly community newspaper, leading ultimately to Poor Richard’s Almanac which was published annually, cementing his reputation and turning his publishing into a thriving business. Publishing these works continued from 1732 to 1758, bringing them out in book form in 1759.

Discovering this knack for business, he encouraged others to explore their potential for entrepreneurship, charging a fee or playing banker to them, then having them sign a contract with him for a percentage of the profits once they were established.

Meanwhile, he broadened his interests turning to voracious reading in science, engineering, and mathematics, chemistry, and physics, self-teaching himself the practical application of these disciplines while duplicating experiments of distinguished scientists.

At the age of forty, now an independently wealthy businessman essentially retired from the daily chore of conducting a business with people he had trained, he coordinated the running of several of his businesses, while becoming an investor in several others.  At the same time, his hobby of conducting scientific experiments now found him enjoying international acclaim, using a kite in an electrical storm to prove lightning and electricity were identical suggesting that buildings should be protected by lightning rod conductors.

Carl Van Doren writes of the significance of this achievement in “Benjamin Franklin” (1938):

The episode of the kite, so firm and fixed in the legend turns out to be dim and mystifying. Franklin himself never wrote the story of the most dramatic of his experiments. All that is known about what he did on that famous day, of no known date, comes from Joseph Priestley (1733 – 1804), the English scientist who had discovered oxygen.  He published this account fifteen years afterward having read in manuscript form the precise details of his electric storm experiment.  Priestley writes: 

"As every circumstance relating to so capital a discovery (the greatest, perhaps, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton) cannot but give pleasure to all my readers, I shall endeavor to gratify them with the communication of a few particulars which I have from the best authority.

"The Doctor, having published his method of verifying his hypothesis concerning the sameness of electricity with the matter of lightning was waiting for the erection of a spire on Christ Church in Philadelphia to carry his views into execution; not imagining that a pointed rod of a moderate height could answer the purpose; when it occurred to him that using a common kite he could have better access to the regions of thunder than by any spire whatever.

“Preparing, therefore, a large silk handkerchief and two cross-sticks of a proper length on which to extend it, he (Franklin) took the opportunity of the first approaching thunderstorm to take a walk in the fields, in which there was a shed convenient for his purpose. But, dreading the ridicule which too commonly attends unsuccessful attempts in science, he communicated his intended experiment to nobody but his son – then twenty-one, not a child as in the traditional illustrations of the scene – who assisted him in raising the kite.

"The kite being raised, a considerable time elapsed before there was any appearance of its being electrified. One very promising cloud had passed over it without any effect; when, at length, just as he was beginning to despair of his contrivance, he observed some loose threads of the hempen string to stand erect, and to avoid one another, just as if they had been suspended on a common conductor.

“Struck with this promising appearance, he immediately presented his knuckle to the key, and (let the reader judge of the exquisite pleasure he must have felt at that moment) the discovery was complete. He perceived a very evident electric spark. Others succeeded, even before the string was wet, to put the matter past all dispute, and when the rain had wet the string he collected electric fire very copiously. This happened in June 1752, a month after the electricians in France had verified the same theory, but before he heard of anything they had done."

For the next nearly forty years, or until the end of his life, Benjamin Franklin devoted himself to public service, becoming a leading figure in the fight for America’s independence from Great Britain, and a prominent voice in the American Revolutionary War.

As an old man, he became actively involved in the framing of the American Constitution at a convention in Philadelphia, and an important framer of the Declaration of Independence (1776), demonstrating his skills as a politician and negotiator, successfully winning Great Britain’s recognition of the independence of the United States as a new nation (1783), while being America’s minister to France until 1785, and finally playing a major role in the Federal Constitution Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, three years before his death in 1790 at the age of 84.

We like to tag Benjamin Franklin as a genius, an idea that, as Einstein has said, has no personality. I prefer to see him as a man who husbands his considerable resources and focused on their application, didn’t wait for others to show him the way, but designed a way forward, treating education as intended, “a devotion to discovery,” with that education as a crucible to fulfilling services to others.

My wonder is how much better children would be if they were given jobs and vocational education at an early age, say twelve or thirteen, to stimulate their curiosity as to how things work, especially if academic education has little appeal. The idea that everyone should be a college graduate has resulted in the dilution of college credentials to the point of meaninglessness beyond the physical and applied sciences. This may explain why so many bored children drift into juvenile crime and teenage pregnancies, and why one-third of American youths today fail to complete their high school education.

What is the point of education if it does not turn the student on to learning? Why go to school if it leads to boredom, humiliation, and embarrassment and makes you feel lost when nothing computes with what and who you are? Touch a child’s interests and stimulate his curiosity and you have opened the doors to his soul.

It is this obsession with wrong boxes, not the child who is forced to fit into one or more of these boxes. Ninety percent of young people have no idea what is burning in them to be expressed because they are led away from that recognition. If only someone would ask them the right questions, open them up to express what is fomenting in their hearts to be conveyed, listen to them, and then steer them in the direction of that inner voice crying to be heard, then there would be no need for boxes.

How much wiser to treat young people like young adults, as was the case with young Benjamin Franklin, with the expectations of making their way in life. The public school system attempts to do a yeoman-like job of bringing order and wisdom and motivation to young minds when it is handicapped from the start by parents refusing to take responsibility for their part in this educational process, which is to steer their children to where they want to go. The public school system has become the dumping ground for failed parenting. American Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931) reminds us of this in The Prophet (1972):

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and although they are with you, they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you, for life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”

Box-like thinking seeks certainty amidst uncertainty, harmony in the eye of the storm of chaos, predictability in a universe of randomness failing to heed the Buddha reflection: you cannot push the water!

Destiny is not in the stars but the current of our lives. American theologian Tryon Edwards (1809 – 1894) describes life as a river: Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth into action; actions form habits; habits decide character; character fixes our destiny.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have the consistency as if composed by a novelist. Events that seemed accidental and of little moment, upon reflection, appear indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. He suggests that just as an aspect of us of which our consciousness is unaware composes our dreams, so, too, our whole life is composed by the will within that expresses the path we have taken.

THE BOXAMANIA OF WESTERN SOCIETY

What is true of the individual appears equally true of society. It is the reason we will now look back over the centuries in an attempt to understand this pattern, which has collapsed around the essence of Western society that often seems framed in a tragic comedy as this long day’s journey into the Western night.

Our programmed box-like mentality is more apt than not to process a problem than to develop a bevy of perceptions of the problem to explore such possibilities. We are essentially confined to what we know and what has worked before.

History indicates that problems are never solved, but only controlled, and then only for a spell, seemingly metastasizing to more challenging aspects of the original concern. Once perceived in this context, they can be dealt with more clearly and effectively. But we are a solution-driven society, constantly developing boxes of solutions looking for problems with which to apply them.

This boxamania is apparent with our obsessive fascination with information as opposed to ideas, taking more pride in deductive reasoning or critical thinking (what is known) than in inductive intuition (what is not known but can be found out) or creative thinking.

Corporate thinking, which has dominated Western thinking over the past seventy-five years, especially in the United States, has been guilty of this boxamania.

· We see this in Management by Objectives (MBOs), in parceling out objectives to functional groups;

· We see this in assessing personnel performance on the job in the Performance Appraisal System (PAS);

· We see this in calculating executive compensation to the company on the basis of the company's performance on the New York Stock Exchange (Dow Jones Industrials);

· We see this in terms of the readiness of students for college in the Standard Achievement Test (SAT), or graduate school in the Graduate Record Examination (GRE);

· We see this in calibrating popular sentiment on a wide range of subjects on Polls to books with provocative fragmentary enticements such as "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" (1989) and "In Search of Excellence" (1984), always in an attempt to simplify the problem or concern to digestible morsels that often prove misleading to inadequate to the extreme.

Deductive reasoning is what we are familiar with, what we have been programmed to use in solving problems, and whether it proves adequate or not, whether solutions are reliable or not, we have the security of the box.

Human coping is limited. There are two conditions of coping with reality in our cranial cellular construction, which is finite. This is limited by the brain’s capacity to process information. It is the machinery with which that process takes place and it is not a conscious unity.

When the space requirements of the problem solving fit the network of that coping process, things go well. When they do not, things go to pot. British management philosopher Charles Hampden-Turner (born 1934) explains this in Maps of the Mind (1981):

“We ‘map’ with words as well as images but because words come in bits and pieces may have assumed that the world is in bits and pieces corresponding to words. ‘Not so,’ said Alfred Korzybski (1879 – 1950), ‘the map is not the thing.’ Word maps have a fragmentary structure that derives from language itself, not necessarily from what language describes. The idea of linear cause and effect, for example, is inherent in the structure of science, where a subject acts by way of a verb upon an object, but this may be very inadequate of what is happening, especially of mutual influences.

One way to correct this verbal bias is to supplement with visual maps. If the human mind is to be conceived as a whole as well as parts, we need not just words to convey parts, but patterns, pictures, and schemata to convey the whole. Words must also be used in ways that suggest wholeness.”

Alfred Korzybski was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field of general semantics, which he differentiated from the more encompassing field of semantics. His field was engineering mathematics and philosophy. Provocatively, he says, “there are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.”

He emphasizes that the map is not the territory, as information often hides the facts. Therefore, whatever we think to be so, is more than likely not to be so, once again, illustrating the limitations of the box.

That is one reason for this "Long Day's Journey into the Western night."  We think we have the problem scoped; we have confidence in our accumulated boxes designating a network of packaging that has the appearance of order, while things constantly run amuck. American psychologist Leslie A. Hart outlines the challenge in Human Brain and Human Learning (1983):

“The brain uses the principle of ‘the match’ by which information matches, more or less exactly, the patterns stored in the brain, or else it is not recognized. Biasing involves all stored in the brain, relevant to a program decision, from experience, plans, aims, fears, and current situational input. To effect a change of behavior, or ‘open a new door’ to learning, we must try to change biases, not behavior directly. Present learning depends heavily on previous learning and biases stored in the brain of each individual. Giving individuals uniform instruction without regard to what they bring to the learning effort virtually guarantees a high incidence of failure.”

THE HUMAN BRAIN CAPACITY TO PROCESS INFORMATION IS LIMITED

HUMAN COPING LIMITATIONS OF THE BRAIN

There are two limiting conditions in our cranial cellular congress to cope with reality. The brain’s capacity to process information is finite, and the machinery with which to do this is not a conscious unity. When the space requirements of the problem solving fit the network there, things go well. When they don’t, things go to pot.

Consequently, people, with the constant fear of being overwhelmed, are inclined to study the problem in pieces rather than as a whole, using linear logic exclusively rather than non-linear reasoning to complement linear parameters. We look backward to assess where we are rather than forward to where we want to go. Paradoxically, we seek stability without embracing the inevitable flow of change. In our paranoia, a function of boxamania, we see China as a waking giant with threatening possibilities but fail to see India in those same terms. India is a democracy while China is a communistic state. The West watches with trepidation as China’s military strategy becomes increasingly comparable to the United States when India’s military-industrial complex is even more impressive and soon will surpass China in population and wealth. Do we fail to see the irony here?

The mind as a box-like frame of reference, sees what it wants to see, here’s what it wants to hear, believes in or fears what its mind has programmed it to believe or fear, and responds like a willing lamb when the stimulus and information are congruent with what is already thought to be true. The mindset of zealots is fodder for the demagogue. He packages his strategy to encompass the passions and fears, appetites and longings, resentments and hatreds to his purpose. We have had a great deal of exposure to this crowd-pleasing manipulator in the past century.

FASCISM AS “NOWHERE LAND” BEGINS AND ENDS BADLY!

We saw this with the dark charisma of Adolf Hitler, a never do well rabble-rouser, poorly educated, but with a genius for identifying the pathology of the masses along with the rhetorical skills to translate that pathology into a painless ride into Paradise, which turned out to be Nowhere Land.

Hitler built up the reputation as an iron man who stood up to the moneyed politicians with a message that he had all the answers to Jewish bankers and industrialists who he claimed were responsible for Germany’s losing WWI.

Hundreds then thousands came to his rallies to hear him make his apocalyptic predictions of a new Germany with pat solutions to the people’s most pesky problems. His incoherent and contradictory arguments had one thing in common: his German listeners were eager to hear facile explanations for their mounting misery, and Hitler knew just where to place the blame.

Germany had been stabbed in the back by politicians negotiating the Peace Treaty of WWI at Versailles, politicians that had betrayed the “frontier fighters” in that war, men who had died in vain, as these special interests caused Germany to lose the war.

Hitler vilified the current German government and ranted on that the German Weimar Constitution was illegitimate. He next said that he would annihilate the threat of Communism that was campaigning vigorously to dominate German politics.

He identified Germany’s enemies as Communism on the left and ultranationalists and unreconstructed monarchists on the right. The big bugaboo was “Big Capital” and internationalists such as President Woodrow Wilson of the United States. He painted Wilson as a swindler with his unrealized “Fourteen Points” for a peaceful world. The “League of Nations,” which Wilson advocated, was created but without the participation of the United States as the politics of isolation still controlled the U.S. Congress.

Then quick as a dime, Hitler would paint a rosy picture of prewar Germany’s glory days in contrast to the “disgrace and defeat” that currently dominated German politics. He made complicated things seem simple and easily solvable with the right leader, warning his listeners, however, that the times called for firm measures and primitive perhaps even brutal methods.

Hitler’s skill at galvanizing his audience and striking deeper emotional chords than any other politician lay not merely in his demagoguery, but in his ability to see beyond conventional political issues to the underlying themes and yearnings of his listeners. His detractors underestimated his appeal with the confident expectations that the people would see through his diatribe, but of course, the people didn’t.

He called on Germans to reach for something bigger and broader – to a sense of greatness – that lifted the people out of their doldrums and confusion, and buffered them from the reality they were experiencing. Hitler wrote:

“The question of recovery of the German people is not a question of economic recovery. Rather it is a matter of regaining an inner feeling among the people, the only thing that can lead again to national greatness and, through that, to economic welfare.”

He was selling the German people's goodness and potential, not just a stronger mark and fair wages. When he announced the outrages of the Treaty of Versailles and ranted about the usury against the people, he rhapsodized about creating a German culture single to none.

With his dark charisma, people felt he was talking about them, and the problems with which they could identify on a painful basis, not about abstractions. German self-esteem may have been shattered and offended, but Hitler was offering them a different picture of themselves as strong and honorable, indeed, as members of a master race.

The ingenious of his emotional strategy transformed events into mass entertainment where policies and politics were superseded by an overlay by a dominant religious fervor that resembled a revivalist tent meeting. Consequently, he didn’t have to coerce his audience into being with him, it did so enthusiastically. Likewise, the more critics attempted to derail The Hitler Movement the more enthusiastically his audience grew in its loyalty to him.

Hitler was on his way to creating a fascistic state, that is, a dictatorial, authoritarian society with total intolerance for opposing views or practices. The government of the German Third Reich that would come to control Germany stripped citizens of all their rights. Meanwhile, Hitler’s expansionist policies would lead to WWII in which tens of millions of people died and many of Germany’s great cities would be turned into rubble.

“It Can’t Happen Here!” (1935) was a novel written by Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951) during the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. The American novelist was warning citizens of the United States that “it could happen here!”

French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931) writes in The Crowd: The Study of the Popular Mind (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."

The ideas of the past, although half destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in the process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transition and anarchy.

While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that menaces, the prestige of which is continually on the increase. The age we are now entering is in truth the ERA OF THE CROWD.

We see this in the current American 2016 Presidential Campaign with the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party in Donald James Trump playing to the crowd and the lowest common denominator in American society. We saw this before in the megalomania of Adolf Hitler where he led the great nation of Germany to ruin.

Donald Trump’s supporters don’t seem to care what he says, and how many times he changes his stance on issues, as they are not interested in policies or ideologies. They are only devoted to him, as legions were once devoted to Hitler, that is, until the very end. Hitler proved to be Nowhere Man. Will “the Donald” drive the American electorate to the brink of Nowhere Land? We shall see should he win the presidency.

THE LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO THE WESTERN NIGHT

The Western mind has been vulnerable to a demigod as it has a history of being more paranoid than perceptive, more single-minded than pluralistic, more arrogant than humble. By attitude or implication, it has conducted its business as if the Anglo-Saxon Caucasian is superior to other races.

Throughout the ages, the discovery of advantage of this belief has established a cultural truth that the West was destined to first conquer nature, and then impose its collective will on the rest of the world. This “cut & control” extravagance has led to the question: Can the planet earth survive self-indulgent man?

Now, paradoxically, the rest of the world, to catch up, as it were, is committing the same errors as the West, imitating Western extravagance to realize its dominance, putting the earth and the 21st-century world in further jeopardy.

Not to worry, as with Western boxamania, problems are treated as effects irrespective of the causes. The drumbeat thunders on in celebration of the progress being made, and the myriad of problems being solved, failing to realize that the problems being solved are the problems being created by boxamania.  For existence remains mainly in the cocoon of Nowhere Land failing to see the accumulated waste and excess created.

It is the nature of Western culture, the character of its society, the slant of its religion, the take on what it is to be human that by implication if not the intention that being white and of European ancestry is the essence of exceptionalism. Is it any wonder that the world resents this arrogance?

We are moving swiftly away from the shadow of this perspective of Nowhere Land and into the full light of a rainbow confederation of diverse races, ethnicities, religions, cultures, and characteristics, where democracy may not resemble the ideas we cling to so passionately, or otherwise take for granted.

Western man for the past thousand years has been dedicated to changing the world into his image and likeness, while being disinclined to accept or even acknowledge the world as it is, or would have itself be.

This stubborn solipsistic view of the world persists with the best Western minds as they still hold to the Old Testament messianic concepts in the New Testament's “end of days.”

Will reason and love enable man to be one with his fellow man and with nature, preserving his individuality and integrity, or will Western man continue to dominate with his amnesia for “what is,” while staying safely in Nowhere Land clinging to beliefs that no longer apply?

There is no question that Western man has dominated with his quest for perfection and his control of historical time. Much of it can be attributed to his faith. As you shall see, Christianity transformed the spiritual into a pragmatic apparatus for social, political, military, and cultural dominance of the world's indigenous peoples.

Western man destroyed many ancient civilizations desecrating their sacred idols and abolishing their traditions replacing them with the Christian God, a God now of science in its ambivalent wisdom and ambiguous forays into the world of the so-called “infidels.” The West acted as if it possessed substantive truth, and in its magnanimity was generously sharing it with the world. It is quite a story.

NEXT: NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND – PART ELEVEN – THE IMPROBABLE CHRISTIAN ERA