AN EPIDODIC LIFE & CULTURE CRISIS

 

AN EPISODIC LIFE & CULTURE CRISIS

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

© March 2022

PROLOGUE

 

Culture is one of those equivocal terms that punctuate the rhetoric of academics, politicians, commercial advertisers, members of the clergy, and media as if everyone understands what they are driving at when clearly they do not.

 

According to sociologists and social psychologists, “culture” is a potpourri of implicit values, beliefs, and inculcated interests that people come to consider reality.  These norms come to guide them to their day-to-day intercourse with others triggering their subsequent behavior.  The distillate of these indices becomes the subliminal value system that guides their moral choices and commitments and constitutes the reality that their mind takes to be reality.  Such a mind latches on to the symbols of these belief norms failing to see that they also constitute their explicit biases.

 

When we are born and the circumstances that permeate that world and influence our parents directly and our society collective, differ from generation to generation as the stimuli differ and the prevailing promulgation of information changes.  We see evidence of this in everyday life as codes of manner, dress, language, religion, rituals, and what is considered art in music, literature, history, and philosophy change with the mind of the time.  An indication of this is the story we tell ourselves along with the learned and acquired behaviors.

 

Samuel P. Huntington’s (1927 – 2008) “The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order” (1998) anticipated what is happening today in 2022.  But this is a far less grand treatment of culture relating specifically to an individual who experienced “culture shock” when leaving the insular world of his Irish American Catholic world to enter that of his dominant Protestant and Republic society of his community of 33,000 by becoming a high school student at Clinton High in Clinton, Iowa.

 

“Culture Shock” refers to feelings of uncertainty, confusion, and anxiety when moving from a new country and surroundings where the new culture and environment seems not only beyond his comprehension but his ability to cope adequately. 

 

The feeling of disorientation experienced was subtle although poignant that now with the perspective of age I can better understand how the unfamiliar culture, way of life, and sets of attitudes experienced clashes with the expected and familiar while shaping me into the person that I would become.

 

While what follows may seem naïve, immature, and self-righteous, which cannot be denied, it made me into the writer that I would become writing books that had little commercial value and clashes with the prevailing corporate norms of my society.  If the reader can identify with some of these meanderings, fine, if they cannot, that is also okay as I am writing this and the end of my blessed existence in which by the grace of God I was born in a time and place where struggle, pain, failure, and regret were necessary to grow up, an absence of which lie suggest that maturity is not the prevailing norm.  

 

We don’t usually think of our lives in terms of a series of unanticipated shocks, but those who venture out of the norm be it the values, beliefs, and culture of their early existence, or indeed those whose early existence is outside the norms have experienced the bumpy road to maturity.

 

We live in an age when it is not fashionable to admit the trauma and dysfunction of existence early on to take risks, experience failures pick ourselves up to move on knowing that we are the architects of our lives and can blame no one if things don’t work out as expected. 

 

Life is a combination of curiosity and discovery to penetrate the arbitrary props society and indeed civilization creates to protect us from ourselves imprisoning us in cages of cultural constructs of man.  Our age is not much different than others only the absurdity is generational and time-specific.  Wealth, power, celebrity, beauty, and possessiveness of the haves versus the have nots are seemingly endemic to every age liberal idealists notwithstanding.    

No attempt is made here to suggest this an academic reference to psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, law, science, religion, or engineering although they pervade this story.  It is my story written as honestly as my memory allows in this late stage of my life.  Lying is a hassard of existence, and we are all liars, me no less than anyone else.  Also, the exaggeration of one’s achievements minimizing one’s defeats is likewise common.

 

The reader will have to draw their conclusions to what makes sense and has some validity to their own self and experience.  Critics have suggested that I write with anger.  A psychiatrist once told me it was my primary motivation. 

 

It will start with my birth in THE GREAT DEPRESSION and move inextricably to now where I am an old man who hopes he has the energy to write this outline of a story of a time and circumstances of society that goes blindly forward on the back of progress and technology creating the world that now is our God that owns and controls us with apparent no way out, or is there?  It was for me.  Stay tuned.  My life along with culture shock has one constantly enriched with serendipity.