ARE YOU HAPPY -- PRELUDE TO A PLANNED PIECE

ARE YOU HAPPY?

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

© April 24, 2011

PRELUDE TO A PLANNED PIECE:

This is s prelude to what will be coming up in the next week or so when Dr. Fisher finally gets his study back in order after pruning it of books no longer germane to where he is or where he is going. . 

The Peripatetic Philosopher discusses a number of authors on their take on happiness, essentially disagreeing with them all, as he sees happiness as only engagement, not an end or anything tangible or palpable of what is popularly known as happiness.  Happiness is not a thing.  It is a state.  It is not something dependent on someone else but the character and construction of our own internal world and our relationship to that state and that world.  Stay tuned.

JRF

*     *     *

EARLY RESPONSE TO THIS PRELUDE:

You are right on the money with regard to happiness.  Thank you.  I have believed that for quite some time now but have never put it quite that eloquently.

DR. FISHER COMMENTS:

In this explanatory age, which explains everything, which often amounts to an inability to understand anything, we find this noticeably true in sensitive areas of our lives, such as happiness. 

No surprise, people so captivated by these explanations are looking for happiness in all the wrong places, and for all the wrong reasons.  

A series of authors who are keen practitioners of this explanatory model will be discussed subsequently, including an icon of our Western cultural heritage.  The authors included are:

CANDIDE or OPTIMISM BY Voltaire

SMILE OR DIE by Barbara Ehrenreich

PERPETUAL EUPHORIA by Pascal Bruckner

SEVEN PLEASURES ON ORDINARY HAPPINESS by Willard Spiegelman

FLOW by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS by Daniel Gilbert

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS by Darrin McMahan

MY HAPPY DAYS IN HELL by Gyorgy Faludy

HAPPINESS LESSONS FROM NEW SCIENCE by Richard Layard

THE SADDEST KING by Chris Warmell

LAUGHTER: NOTES ON PASSION by Anca Parvulescu

EXPLORING HAPPINESS FROM ARISTOTLE TO BRAIN SCIENCE

*     *     *

NOTE: To caution my readers, this is neither a long nor definitive work but a collection of comments on the works of these devoted souls who set out to discover for us what they were unable to find for themselves, the key to happiness.  Why so?

Once you try to define happiness, you lose it.  It is as simple as that.  Still, it will be fun to play with the idea.     

The chairman of my dissertation committee for my Ph.D. wrote this note to me:  “For Jim, who really appreciates my perpetually perplexing paradoxes, affectionately, Kant Nimbark, July 19, 1977.”  If anyone is the blame for me seeing inside nonsense that we take to be scholarship, it is this paradoxical academic.

*     *     *

 

COMMENT -- THE HANGOVER OF THE NONDRINKER -- A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA

COMMENT ON – THE HANGOVER OF THE NONDRIKER – FROM A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 19, 2011

REFERENCE:

This is the most wrenching chapter of this book shared thus far.  I was pleased to receive a comment from someone who might be offended by its language and imagery.  Reference was made in the sharing to Joseph Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS, which is the story of an Englishman’s descent into living hell after constant exposure to Africa.

*     *     *

A WRITER WRITES:

Conrad, indeed.

*     *     *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I was pleased to hear from you, as I shall now explain.

I've published three parts of this novel, THE PROLOGUE, THE DINNER PARTY, AND HANGOVER OF A NONDRINKER for reason.  Each has given the reader a closer glimpse of how wrenching this work is.  Each explores aspects of the very soul of the protagonist and all with whom he is associated.  The intent is to reveal that place and space where the poison consumes the human soul.  Outwardly, the protagonist appears, for all intent and purposes seems sane, rational, stable, functional and a solid contributing member of society.  

The book could not have been written by this author ten years ago because the patina of society still bought its fiction.  The protagonist is an instrument of what I choose to call "corpocracy," which was just building up its momentum in 1968 to become the unequivocal hegemonic authority of the land. 

1968 also marked the end of the American century.  We went from making things to measuring our success level in terms of finance.  The irony is that we are now a sinking ship losing our credit rating because as banker to the world and consumer of the world's products at the expense of our workingmen and women we are going bankrupt. 

Were I not so busy on this novel I would write about this as many scholars have put pen to paper and have written revealing books of this tragedy. 

Another reason I have shared this with my readers is because I doubt if they believe I can get inside the sick soul of society and reveal its ugliness with brutal clarity, clarity that will offend many readers so used to their church going and safe friends that they either deny or refuse to believe the sordid mess the world has become.

I have noticed that the Don Farr Network has not been privy to this chapter and I am saddened by that because it is tame compared to what is revealed in the book.  The world cannot be simply divided into Christian and Jews and Moslems at the exclusion of all those outside such confines.  Society has been betrayed by its families, friends, churches, schools, and governments. 

Former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher, said there is no such thing as society; there is only the individual and the family.  Individualism, what we seem to so applaud, is killing man at a time when only the common good can secure his future.

Be always well,

Jim



 

Another excerpt from A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA

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

© April 17, 2011

 

REFERENCE: Many write and ask about this novel – when will it be published?  I don’t even know if it will.  This is another excerpt as I go through correcting and editing and rewriting.  I hope it is not found too confusing.  Remember, it is a novel that has much in common with the works of James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett.

JRF

 

CHAPTER FORTY

THE HANGOVER OF A NONDRINKER

Devlin woke seeing he was fully clothed, wrinkled and disheveled, and remembered he had spent the previous day with his chief chemist.  A silhouette appeared in the morning light projected through the window of the study.  There was a humid putrid smell in the air as the fire was out in the fireplace.  The room was cold and dank.  At some point in his sleep he had an erotic dream about Nina he couldn’t remember, but he could feel the sticky reminder to that fact in his boxer shorts. 

How different they were.  She was the United Nations in one body, and he the United States of Anxiety in one soul.  She gave him peace with an exchange of bodily fluids but how different the education of her soul.

Devlin’s religion taught the body, soul, and mind were discrete entities of disparate connection and function.  His mind reasoned, his body needed, and his soul fought to uplift his spirit beyond reason and need.  It was nothing less than a war zone.  The mind tantalized the body to avoid pain and seek pleasure, and through spiritual ecstasy the soul released the body and mind from such limitations.  Nina found spiritual ecstasy naturally through the fusion of mind, body and soul.  How envious he was of her.

Freudian psychology, then, was no less thwarted and weird than Catholicism.  If anything, he was an amplification and reification of the conflict.  Freud tampered with a 2,000-year proposition and thought he had gone one better.  In attempting to simplify human complexity, he had compounded the excesses of St. Paul.  Salvation for Christianity’s creator was left to the hereafter whereas so stated it could be neither confirmed nor denied.  Likewise, Freud put his money on the subconscious that no one can see much less define, building his rationale on this porous sieve.  He claimed we are social animals with our conscious mind only the tip of the more controlling influence of the unconscious mind. 

According to him, and this is why the religious connection seems valid, being based more on faith than science, he would have the unconscious buried deep inside us wrapped in coils of denial.  Most of us, then, pass through life controlled by this buried force like puppets on a string.  Here that, Nina?

Were Devlin to have followed the dictates of his programming, he would not be here.  He had been successful by rejecting his programming.  How so?  He had been trained to reason when feelings had been the key to his success.  He had been schooled in logic when moral intuition had fueled the problem solving.  He had been schooled in limits when he found his boundaries were only the fragility of his perceptions.

Americans bought into Freud whereas Europeans did not.  Americans believe solving problems through social connections.  They are suckers for fads, for anything that will delay dealing with reality.  Americans are quick to embrace the simplistic explanation to the complex conundrum, which confirms their fascination with fads.

Freud narrative is the equivalent of Paul’s.  Freud thought he was unveiling a new science with his narrative of a secular religion where no god need mix up the works.  Christianity has its dogma and Freud has his explanatory models.  Both models play on fear.

Nothing makes us believe more than fear.  Christianity in the first century was threatened with Armageddon while modernity now threatens man’s relevance.  When we feel threatened, when we feel like victims, our actions and beliefs are legitimized, however questionable they may be.  We become paranoid, isolated, insular, and xenophobic.  We stop growing as provokers and become childish defenders.  We become green islands in a black sea.

Envy, greed, and resentment now motivate and become sanctified because now we are defending our honor and acting in self-defense. 

Freud and Paul understood the first step to believing passionately is fear, fear of losing our identity, our lives, our status, our security, and our beliefs.  Fear is the gunpowder and hatred is the fuse.  Religion isn’t alone in dogma as Freudians can attest.  Dogma is only the lighted match. 

What did Sarah say earlier, “So I wake up your fucking brats?"   Pure Freud, but was she a ventriloquist speaking her husband’s mind?  The words came out of her mouth but was his mind the origin of them?  Did he make her like that?  Or did she make him like this?  Or were they two unconscious icebergs on a collision course?  Freud would have an explanation; the Church would have a sacred text, and both would damage their souls for the effort.  Why was that?

*     *     *

Devlin retrieved a notebook he had hidden behind a loose brick in the fireplace.  This notebook was dedicated to “Fragments of a Journal.”  He wrote them to Robbie, his eldest child, now ten, primarily because Robbie showed all the signs of being as much a displaced person as his father.  He expected him to be equally as successful and equally as miserable.  Devlin reasoned that in knowing his father better he might come to know himself better.  Disheveled and soiled in the quiet of the house at 6:30 in the morning he commenced to write.

Dear Robbie,

Once again I’m writing to you while in South Africa.  I am now fully 31-years-old, successful and an enjoy influence beyond anyone in my family’s history.  Your father, however, is a fraud, and I fear you may follow in my footsteps.  You may not read this until you are fifty, but it is for you.

Your father is a sinner.  He sins and he continues to sin.  Given the culture of our times you will sin as your father has sinned.  It is sinning with no few clues as to why or how it came about.  It is the nature of the times.  Most numbing is to know you have neither the will nor the energy to extricate yourself from this downward spiral. 

Your father cannot disentangle his mind or his body from this pattern as he has committed himself in the name of ecstasy in the person of a woman God should never have created to tempt him so.  Your father can explain his enslavement because he lives in an explanatory age, but explanation drives him only deeper into his dilemma. 

You say this is absurd, but we live in an absurd age.  Will it have faded when you are an old man?  That is doubtful because we are becoming increasingly detached from ourselves with ready-made explanatory models accelerating self-estrangement. 

Inaction is justified by rationalization for it is easier to explain why something isn’t done than to do something. 

Self-deception has been perfected into a science.  We call it psychiatry.  Self-distrust has been idealized into a phobia. We call it celebrity.  An active life has been rejected.  We call it iconic worship.  Thinking has been abandoned.  We call it secondhand information. Without a foundation in self-knowing, life is an accidental journey that can end only in disappointment

We have no sense of evil or menace as we see them as the preserves of others, nothing to do with us.  Meanwhile, our preserve is dogma.  Dogma forms our identity.  Whoever questions are dogma is our enemy.  What do I mean by dogma?  The dogma of capitalism, the dogma of being white, the dogma of being American, the dogma of being Christian, the dogma that makes anyone and everyone differing with us evil, making it our right and duty to destroy them.  Dogma is the only road to salvation.  Dogma is the order of survival, and dogma is the face and personification of fear.

Your father is a passenger in someone else’s vehicle.  He looks around this place far from home, and sees clones of a gone by era claiming to be in charge.  Small wonder they are bored, and of course so is your father.

South Africa has been a shock to your father’s system, not only in having an affair with a South African woman more beautiful than a movie star, but in business being of equal depravity to match that of apartheid. 

These conditions offend him on so many levels.  They make him scream in his sleep.  Instead of doing anything, he makes love to his multiracial princess, and comes home to fight with your mother yet another night.

Is your father a cad?  Yes, he is.  Is he immoral?  No, he isn’t.  That might surprise you.  He’ll admit to not caring about your mother’s feelings, but he does care about the morality of business and the immorality of apartheid.  He hopes that when you are an old man the content of your character will not be judged by the color of your skin, but he suspects that, too, will not change.

Your father has a different take on morality than when he came to this country.  He’ll leave that discussion to another time. 

Don’t be hard on yourself when you read this, be hard on your father if you like, although that would serve no useful purpose.   Mainly, don’t punish yourself for being blood of his blood.

Your father is walking through the wilderness, alone, by choice, and there are no landmarks to guide his progress.  Some call that a life.  Until later.

Your father

*     *     *

Devlin closed the notebook, placed it back behind the brick, then tiptoed down the passage way with his shoes off, went to the armoire, got a fresh suit, shirt, tie, socks, shoes and underwear, took them to the bathroom to take a bath, wishing they had a shower.  The tub was ridiculously short for his long body and had ancient legs on it suggesting another time, but he had come to love it nonetheless.  The warm water was soothing.

Once dressed, he tiptoed down the hall again, left all his clothes out for Gabriel to send to the cleaners, put his shoes on, and was hit by the invigorating cold of a Transvaal morning, got into his car, and thought, I hope this is an uneventful day.  If he had only known, he might have gone back to bed.

*     *     *

ANOTHER EXCERPT: A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA

 

THE POWER OF SCIENCE AND THE NECESSITY OF RELIGION!

THE POWER OF SCIENCE AND THE NECESSITY OF RELIGION!

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

© April 15,2011

REFERENCE:

What I have here are copies received of a conversation between two people that have honored me with their thoughts.  Since I’ve been working on a philosophical-psychological novel for sometime, I thought I’d add my two cents for whatever its worth.

*     *     *

A WRITER WRITES:

People keep sending me Londoner Pat Condell's stuff, and it's nothing if not provocative and entertaining. He has contempt for Islam, Christianity and a lot of other things bus his views are stated appealingly and with forethought. I'd appreciate your take. He seems to be a darling of the right wing as to some of his views, but to others as well.  They adopt the late Gilda Radner's injunction to "never mind." I'd appreciate your reaction.

*     *     *

A WRITER RESPONDS:

Pat Condell cites Richard Dawkins frequently.  Here's a Dawkins' gem I found in my file:  

"If you live in America the chances are good that your next door neighbors believe the following:

"The Inventor of the laws of physics and Programmer of the DNA code decided to enter the uterus of a Jewish virgin, got himself born, and then deliberately had himself tortured and executed because he couldn't think of a better way to forgive the theft of an apple, committed at the instigation of a talking snake.  

"As Creator of the majestically expanding universe, he not only understands relativistic gravity and quantum mechanics, but also actually designed them.  

"Yet what he really cares about is 'sin', abortion, and how often you go to church, and whether gay people should marry.  

"Statistically, chances are that your neighbors believe all of that---and they can vote.  Even if your neighbors don't hold these mutually contradictory beliefs, they probably unquestionably respect those who do (even though in their heart of hearts, the educated must know it is nonsense)."

 *     *     *

DR. FISHER ADDS HIS OWN TWO CENTS TO THE DISCUSSION:

Many of the people who typically correspond with me or place comments on my blog have made their living through the application of scientific disciplines, while remaining quite or relatively religious.  I have respect for them although my writing often may seem otherwise. 

The protagonist in my novel (not yet published) is a deeply devoted Irish Roman Catholic who feels betrayed by his church, by its edicts, doctrines and dogma, and descends into what the church would call sin, but which he sees as losing his way, and in the process his mind as well. 

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA is an earthy novel and the most honest thing I have ever written in my life, which I suppose was in part motivated by the fact that I’m in the afternoon of my life, if not its evening. 

The novel takes place in South Africa.  It represents the most important chapter in this young man’s life.  I attempt to show that he expected too much of religion, and failed, despite his scientific training to realize that religion is a human institution with the fallibility of human existence despite its protests to the contrary. 

We are increasingly coming to consider that faith, the act of believing in myths, ideologies, or supernatural legends are the consequence of biology.  Many see a "God gene" in our physiological make up.  This is no longer speculation.  Scientists are finding evidence that God and religion are a brain function.  One researcher in this arena is Antonio Damasio in his investigation of the importance of feelings relative to cognitive functioning.  Damasio was, at one time, a University of Iowa professor in the Medical School.

*     *     *

Human nature is complex and part of that nature is to have an affinity for being deceived.  It is part of our survival mechanism.  What we fear we want explained, and what is explained we want some evidence to support it, spurious as that evidence might be.  Witch doctors did it thousands of years ago when people were cowered with thunder and lightning. 

They created supernatural explanations for this phenomenon and rode the deception to power and prominence.  Religious leaders have been doing so ever since with no interruption in the scheme of things.  This does not, however, lessen their prominence or relevance, as I hope to show here.

Faith is an instinctive response to what we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we feel in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of life, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning.  We want someone to step forward and reassure us so we can maintain emotional balance. 

Emotional responses to life are defense mechanisms.  All facts are tainted with feelings.  It is why once someone bridges the feeling void people are vulnerable to their devices. 

Religion, as my protagonist knew it as a child in A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA, was his life's anchor.  It allowed him to go forward confidently, that is, until he stepped into the world of South Africa apartheid and British colonialism.  The safety net of his first thirty years was shredded. 

The irony of belief systems and cultural idealism can be better explained by fiction than any other way.  I happen to believe most of life is fiction, in any case, and that we compound that fact by failing to see this.

For example, my protagonist doesn’t believe in or trust psychologists or psychiatrists because they are dedicated to explanatory models not unlike those of religion, which he sees has failed him. 

GREEN ISLAND is a serious novel and implies that all life and experience are founded in fiction because our interpretation of and observation of reality are necessarily fictitious.  How could it be otherwise?  Moral man has been abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate his species. 

My protagonist shows that it is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, and so he is constantly dreaming while awake, which is indicative of his biology controlling the day. 

Where I differ with Pat Condell and Richard Dawkins is that I have no contempt for any religion because in writing my novel I have come to appreciate how fundamental religion is in our lives, and even more so in this scientific age.  Why?  Because every mystery that science solves creates ten others.  Look at the wasteland that relativity and quantum mechanics has inadvertently left in their wake.

We need our fables to live by, and if some consider the major religions fables, so be it.  This does not illegitimate them or their efficacy. 

The protagonist of GREEN ISLAND, and I hope this comes through, was given a conscience through his religion although it failed him in every other way.  He cannot get comfortable in a draconian state where three quarters of the people are black and one quarter white, and the majority has no rights, while the minority lives in the lap of luxury. 

People constantly attempt to label him, seduce and manipulate him, but it is the African milieu that seeps into his veins.

Labelers want to dispense with him as an intellectual, which he scoffs at because he has little respect for intellectuals seeing them as people who aren’t exactly distinguished for their intellect.  He sees labelers compensating for their own inadequacies.  “Tell me what you boast of and I’ll tell you what you lack.” 

He sees the incompetent presenting themselves as experts (his company brass), the cruel as pious (his pastor), sinners as devout (assortment of characters), usurers as benefactors (his company brass and managing director in South Africa), the small-minded as patriots (Americans he meets), the arrogant as humble (the Brits), the vulgar as elegant (South African Anglo wives), and the well intentioned as devious (his own wife).

My point, and the reason I’m responding to this exchange is that we should take Condell and Dawkins no more seriously than anyone else once they step out of their limited worlds, as auspicious as those worlds may be, and look down on the rest of us.  There is no toxicity greater in our midst than experts that step out of their shoes and attempt to slide into some others.  Once they do, they become witch doctors of a kind.

*     *     *

Nature is cruel and without conscience.  Nature simply is.  Man has a conscience, and yes, he is sometimes obsessed with sin, which I define only as waste, and in no other way, and yes, he cares about life and abortion because he can, because he knows Mother Nature has a voracious need to feed on the creatures she gives birth to in order to stay alive.  It is a continuing statistical cycle derived from our biology. 

On a more pragmatic note with the conflict in North Africa and the accelerating costs of petroleum products, an individual is slipping below the poverty level every second of every minute of every hour of every day.  What is the poverty level?

What do you think?  $30? $20 $10 $5 – the poverty level is $1.25 per person per day.  Our conscience tells us these are our brothers and sisters.  Religious and philanthropic institutions attempt to meet this need, not in sarcasm but with boots on the ground.  Often, scoundrels hoard the limited resources of their own people contributing to hunger and starvation, men without consciences. 

Religion attempts to give men consciences.  Where is science and scientists in this jungle of inhumanity?  No, I'm not much in to sarcasm of the religious, who are guided by their consciences, or of anyone else that is not comfortable with this picture of poverty.  

A final thought. 

I do believe that religion is biology. 

Something else in that biology is psychology, not academic psychology, but survival psychology. 

That psychology functions beyond politics and economics with the all-embracing concept of trust.  If part of our nature is to be vulnerable to deception, then the mountain to trust is not an easy one to climb.

Yet, without trust, and we have seen this throughout our history, we destroy each other and retreat into the so-called “seven deadly sins.”  The lack of trust finds people afraid to give to these people slipping below the poverty line because of corruption, which, again, is very real.  In the end, biology notwithstanding, we are ultimately, all of us in our lives, guided by faith, alone.

Be always well,

Jim

CELEBRATION OF LIFE -- JEANNIE FISHER & HER DAD, LAURIE, HER DAD & JEANNIE

This is a picture of the late Jeannie Fisher on her day off from work, May, 2009.  Jeannie always took her father for a grouper sandwich on his birthday, which was April 29, 2009.

This is Laurie Carr, her dad, and Jeannie in May 2009 on Clearwater Beach, Florida after Jeannie had treated her sister and her father to a grouper sandwich.

Several people have asked after my daughter who was killed by a hit-and-run driver on February 4, 2011, do you have a picture of your daughter?  Here are two pictures.  And yes, my daughers are tall both over six foot, as are my two boys, Michael and Robert.  I hope you enjoy these pictures as they capture the moment.

Be Always well,

James R. Fisher, Jr.

WHERE ARE ALL THE YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE DISCUSSION OF "THE ECONOMIC REALITY IN THE UNITED STATES?"

WHERE ARE ALL YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE DISCUSSION OF “THE ECONOMIC REALITY IN THE UNITED STATES?”

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

© April 14, 2011

I have heard from many on this subject, but only from those who have the safety net in place and are involved, but only academically in the present economic crisis.  It is not all about them, and they know it.

Responses have been thoughtful and sometimes radical but I’ve not heard from young people 25 to 45 who will be most affected by this economic debate in Congress.

The President of the United States, Barak Obama, who wants to be reelected, knows that young people put him in office and young people are more interested in choices and values, something that is not nailed down to sacrifices, specifics, or radical lifestyle changes.

On the other hand, Congressman Paul Ryan, only 41, eight years younger than my youngest birth child, is talking in specifics and with a detailed and, yes, wrenching plan. 

The president and the congressman are speaking in different languages and therefore are talking past each other, while only senior citizens or people beyond that 25 to 45 window seem to be interested in the debate.  The 25 to 45 crowd seems to be hoping for the best, finding safety in campaign slogans and generalizations having a natural abhorrence for specifics. 

One writer reports, correctly, that social support programs since 2009 have been quite substantial, while another writer suggests that the top 25 percent pay all the taxes.  While I’ve always been proud to pay my share of taxes, and having been in that so-called bracket more than one time, I wonder if that is the answer. 

If there is no incentive to pay your fair share, what incentive is there to succeed?

Another indication that the world has changed is that most of the 25 to 45 crowd are renters not owners.  Check it out.  I owned my first home when I was 24, and have been a homeowner ever since.  As I’ve suggested in my writing, owners and renters have different mentalities.  Nor am I sympathetic to the argument that it is harder to own a home today than it was fifty years ago.  I was a saver then and am a saver now.  A different mentality is reflected in young people today.  I’ve never had a desire nor a need to keep up with the Jones even though at times I could have bought and sold them.  Obviously, that is no longer the case. 

The economy is in the shape it is in primarily for those born after World War Two who thought they could have their cake and eat it, too.  You can’t.  You never could.  Now, those born in 1950 are 61-years-old with children who are renters not owners, children who have nice cars, nice jobs, nice lifestyles, children who have all the latest electronic contraptions, and children too busy to realize the country is going in the tank and cannot survive on choices and values, but must engage in belt tightening specifics, thank you very much.

Be always well,

Jim

.

AN EXCHANGE REGARDING: "THE ECONOMIC REALITY IN THE UNITED STATES"

AN EXCHANGE REGARDING: "THE ECONOMIC REALITY IN THE UNITED STATES"

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 13, 2011

REFERENCE:

This is a series of exchanges regarding this missive with a ninety-two-year-old reader with a perceptive and agile mind.  The original missive:

THE ECONOMIC REALITY IN THE UNITED STATES

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

© April 12, 2011

I don’t care whether you are Republican or Democrat or Independent, the fact remains, and it has been this way for some time, the top 4 percent of American earners pay 50 percent of the Federal Income Tax, the next 50 percent pay 47 percent of the Federal Income Tax, the bottom 46 percent of taxpayers pay 3 percent of the Federal Income Tax.  

Be always well,

Jim

PS It came out today that Americans that make $33,000 or less a year represent 3 percent of the collected Federal Income Tax, while those that make $350,000 or more represent 40 percent of the collected Federal Income Tax (April 13, 2011)

*     *     *

THE READER WRITES:

Jim,

My sincere thanks for your prompt reply.  

May I say thought I had matched your "shortest missive ever" in responding to it, but your comment on Krugman's "failure to put the bottom 50 percent in the right context" provides the premises for a huge socio-economic debate.  

My take remains much simpler: this remarkable change in income share (toward greater income inequality) is paralleled by a concerted effort to weaken labor.

Beginning with Reagan's administration, organized labor unions have declined from more than 25% to about 7% today.  The process continues with state after state "right to work" laws.  In Texas, we now rank with Mississippi in percentage of minimum wage workers.  

Reduced income share translates to reduced political power.  With the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, a corporation, in campaign finance law, has the same contribution privilege as any other "person". (Yes, unions, too, have that privilege, but compare the relative political power, given their decline and possible disappearance.)

Jim, as an aside, I share with you the agonizing grief of the loss of a child; although it happened (a son) many years ago, the pain lingers, even in this 92nd year of my life.

With admiration and appreciation for your many contributions to the "net",

John

*     *     *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

John,

Thank you for your response.  You are right about the unions.  As I've written elsewhere, they took the Robber Barons in the late nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century on at great personal cost to establish equitable wages and hygienic and safe working conditions.  I will come back to this in a surprising and disturbing way in a moment and it concerns Apple, Inc.

Somehow, no matter what the good intentions, corpocracy -- which I've also written widely about -- seeps into the mindset and comes to dominate. 

Unions after WWII were strong, when nearly two out of every five men and women workers belonged to some kind of a union, from the teamsters to the garment industry, from the automotive to steel, from railroad workers to small businesses. 

As unions bargained with corporations, they became increasingly mirror images of their adversaries in very telling ways.  They assumed similar hierarchies, organizational structures, the same infallible authority and pecking orders, and alas, the same insensitivity to workers as persons.

Unions negotiated contracts to win wage and benefit concessions but at the expense of worker freedom and worker control of work.  Worker rights became the small print between the corporations and the unions that kept workers in place.  Alas, unions became corporations with the same insensitive draconian practices of corporations.

It was not the intention of unions, I’m sure, to estranged workers from what they did, to demotivate them from taking pride in their work, but it was the unintended consequences.  Profits were more important than people to corporations, corporate concessions were more important to unions than workers. 

Workers were treated as things to be managed and manipulated rather than as persons to be led by both corporations and unions.

In two of my books, I systematically show how corporations programmed workers into being management dependent and then counterdependent on the corporation for their total well being.  This led to workers becoming suspended in terminal adolescent never having to grow up and take charge of what they did, or indeed, of their lives.  It was not their problem! 

When the world recovered from WWII, and was now competing with the United States, corporations attempted to go from a culture of comfort, which they had created, to a culture of contribution, which they sought to be competitive by out-of-sight wage and benefit concessions and cosmetic changes.  The intention was to give workers the impression they were involved in the decision-making, when, of course, they weren’t.  This was the bonehead strategy of the 1980’s or a quarter century after WWII. 

If these workers wanted to be contributors, they didn’t know how.  You can’t say one day, “wait for orders from headquarters, “ and the next day, “take charge of what you do.”  Increased pay and benefits, and slogans, drove workers not into the Culture of Contribution, but the Culture of Complacency.

This complacent culture went on through the 1980’s and 1990’s until corporations could no longer afford it. 

Corporations were losing whole industries to foreign competition: cars, electronics, light fixtures, appliances, shoes, clothes, etc.  I called it “the present panic of now,” which was caused by a reactive rather than a proactive corporate society.  We still suffer for it when workers best operate as independent contractors.  We are still a society of smoke and mirrors living in virtual reality and wondering why the game is being stolen from us.

The irony is that corporations when they were giving workers everything but the kitchen sink took the bacon out of the mouths of union leaders, and therefore led to the decline of unions, which had been promoted, in my view, on the wrong agenda.  Workers don’t work for bread, alone. 

John, over my long career, I have found the most altruistic, idealistic and humanistic of souls gradually to succumb to the intoxication of power and corporate profit, and then lose all sense of their good intentions and become like every other corporation on the face of the earth believing themselves to be invincible and infallible. 

Today, on the NEWS HOUR OF PBS a report came out of China that the greatest corporate violator of worker rights, worker safety, worker welfare, and worker health is none other than Apple, Inc., the Steven Jobs store operating in China.  Workers have been exposed to and forced to handle hazardous materials in order to maximize profits.  Sound familiar?

I have written nine books on this subject, but no more.  Corporations and corpocracy are dinosaurs, and will eventually expire because we are a knowing society and not a learning one.  The irony about this is that we think we are so smart, the first key to dissolution.

Be always well,

Jim

PS I admire your longevity, but more importantly, your agile mind.  Thank you for the kind words about my daughter.  I know, as only a parent can know that that son you lost is never far from your mind nor is my daughter from mine.
 
*     *     *

THE READER WROTE EARLIER:

 Dr. Jim,

An obverse view of these data show a rather remarkable shift in income percentage gain and loss in recent decades: e.g., from 1983 to 1998 the top 1% enjoyed an income increase of 42%, the middle 20% a more modest 10%, and the bottom 40% an income decline of 76%.   The gap in income inequality seems to be growing, viewing more current figures.  (Confer Dr. Paul Krugman).

John

*     *     *

DR. FISHER’S EARLIER RESPONSE:

John,

I read Dr. Paul Krugman, too, and I'm not disputing his numbers. 

What Dr. Paul fails to do, and I can see why, as he is very much a Keynesian economist, and that is he has failed to put the bottom 50 percent of our society in the right context.

The bottom 50 percent has failed to keep up with the educational requirements of a progressive technological society.  Nearly half of the African American students don't finish high school, more than a third of the Hispanic students don't and nearly a quarter of white students don't.  This energy, this manpower, this potential has been summarily dissipated.

When you don't have job skills, you wait on tables, work at MacDonalds, or do part-time manual labor or domestic work of some type. 

Our educational system has failed, but it is not only teachers, but also parents, educators, politicians, the religious and the indifference of the general public that is doing fine, thank you very much.

We are a bankrupt nation that still doesn't get it.  Envy is the religion of mediocrity.  It comforts, it soothes, it explains away things that worry, and for this attention it rots our collective soul, allowing sloth, and meanness and greed to be celebrated in a celebrity culture as if virtues. 

We don't want to embarrass, cause pain or discomfort to people convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened to them without hitting the books, leading responsible lives, picking themselves off the ground when they are knocked down, while leaving little trace of their threadbare attempts to belittle achievers or play on achievers' guilt.  It is not "their" problem it is society's, and society can no longer afford them.

Social justice is not achieved by doing everything those poor of spirit, mind and guts are unwilling to do for themselves, but by creating a climate of opportunity and consequences. 

We are not all equal in talent or ability, which festers in mockery for many in this bottom 50 percent.  You cannot live in virtual reality and expect palpable reality to carry you. 

It has become a laughing game of students texting, checking their Facebook, and yes, cheating on tests while in school and in class with this virtual reality, not expecting to pay the consequences for this indulgence, but they do, and we do, and society does in spades.   

I came from this bottom 50 percent, and I have had many failures, and a few triumphs, but at no time did I expect someone else to pick me up off the turf, or to explain away my poor performance, or the stupidity of my actions.   

My children, one who recently died an untimely death by a hit-and-run driver, have been in sometimes great straits, always of their own making, but they have always worked themselves out of these straits, which has strengthened them to go forward.  I am proud of all five of them for this, but I am more proud that they are pleased with themselves.

Be always well,

Jim

*     *     *

 

THE ECONOMIC REALITY IN THE UNITED STATES

THE ECONOMIC REALITY IN THE UNITED STATES

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

© April 12, 2011

This is my shortest missive ever.  I don’t care whether you are Republican or Democrat or Independent, the fact remains, and it has been this way for some time, the top 4 percent of American earners pay 50 percent of the Federal Income Tax, the next 50 percent pay 47 percent of the Federal Income Tax, the bottom 46 percent of taxpayers pay 3 percent of the Federal Income Tax.  

Be always well,

Jim

WALDEN UNIVERSITY -- A METAPHOR FOR A NEW AGE OR EXCUSE FOR AN OLD AGE?

WALDEN UNIVERSITY -- A METAPHOR FOR A NEW AGE OR EXCUSE FOR AN OLD ONE?

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

© April 1, 2011

*     *     *

A READER WRITES:

With what free time I have left (if we discount The Singularity), I am speculating on taking a PhD at Walden U.

What is your VERY QUICK take on the value of this?

N

*     *     *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I am aware that today is April Fools Day, but the writer is no fool and the desire for a short sweet answer, I’m sure, is real.  This is the age when no one wants the back-story, but the back-story is the key to the future.  There is no way I can give this person an intelligent answer by leaving out the back-story.  The back-story is why I attended WALDEN UNIVERSITY.

Today, Hall of Fame major league baseball player Reggie Jackson was on the Charlie Rose show on PBS hosted by Jon Meacham, author of AMERICAN LION, about my lion, President Andrew Jackson. 

Reggie said that one thing he knew is that he could hit, and would be able to hit in any era because he could hit the fastball and the change up. 

What I knew about myself when I came back from South Africa was that I could write as well as anyone and think better than most outside the box.  My evidence was my empirical record.  I was a practitioner of organizational development (OD) without credentials, a nascent field I had never heard of, which happened to resonate with my intuitive approach to management.

Always a reader, I read widely and passionately before South Africa, but doing little else than reading and playing tennis when I returned.  I did write one book, that ironically, is the only one that has ever sold well.  I wrote it in six weeks, one draft, and it was accepted without an agent or protocol. 

By the accident of my daughter Laurie’s comment, seeing a home in the neighborhood had similar books to those in my library, I made contact with a man, who was a management consultant with close ties to the American Management Association (AMA).  We talked, and he recommended AMA’s Professional Institute (PI) take me on to do executive seminars across the United States. 

PI branched out into conflict interventions.  I was asked to interview with the Chief of Police and the Command Staff of the Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) in Fairfax, Virginia after a riot broke out in Herndon, which was within the county.  I wrote my Master’s Thesis at the University of South Florida (USF) on that intervention. 

As mentioned above, I am a writer and a conceptual thinker and have had a knack since quite young for crystallizing ideas.  I got the job at FCPD on the strength of my presentation competing with Ph.D.’s from Wharton School of Business and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

At the time, I was a full-time student at the University of South Florida having to take several undergraduates as well as graduate courses simultaneously in what I called “mom and pop” presentations of ideas.  At USF, there was no opportunity for discourse on my empirical experience.  I was expected to behave, study the material and regurgitate it without comment. 

In South Africa, flying by the seat of my pants, with no training in intervention strategy, I had successfully facilitated the marriage of three different companies with three different cultures and two different languages (Afrikaans and English) into a new entity. 

My current novel in progress covers that period. 

Success in OD before I knew what OD was can be attributed, I believe, to being a reader of novels, as well as histories, which are novels of a kind, and the pioneers of psychology and  the enlightenment period of philosophy. 

My major reason for going back to school was first and foremost to discover why I was successful doing something that seemed so grounded in intuition, but must have a cognitive dimension. 

My personality is abrasive to institutional authority but empathetic to the minions that institutional authority abuses.  Invariably, this creates problems for me with the power structure but great rapport and support within the troops. 

Moreover, as a listener, an eternal student, sensitive to the nuances of behavior, and a committed outsider, unobtrusive detachment was as natural to me as my DNA.  Stated otherwise, I am comfortable thinking outside the box. 

The University of South Florida, on the other hand, was as conventional as the first pilgrims, and therefore, quite predictably attempted to force me into the box, creating tension for us both. 

The exception to this was a Dr. Billy G. Gunter, who read my massive paper on sociological theory applied to my work in South Africa, and invited me for coffee.  We bonded and have been friends for forty years.  He also guided me through the defense of my Master’s Thesis, and advised me, although I had completed my course work, to go elsewhere for my Ph.D., preferably somewhere unconventional that would appreciate my maverick spirit.  He recommended WALDEN UNIVERSITY.   

I had no idea who or what WALDEN UNIVERSITY was but wrote to the university and received a warm letter from Bernie Turner, co-founder of the graduate institution with his wife, Rita.  In 1976, I attended a summer session in Fort Lauderdale, Florida hosted in conjunction with the University of Miami. 

It was an amazing experience.  Dr. Kant Nimbak of Columbia University was my adviser and I had a Harvard professor and one from the University of Pennsylvania on my dissertation committee.  I was treated as a scholar, an adult, and my empirical experience was valued as it resonated with my academic preparation.  The Harvard professor said my dissertation was one of the best he had ever read, and it was based on my empirical work in several interventions in police organizations across the country, including Fairfax County, Virginia. 

That is the back-story.  In summary, I didn’t go back to school “to get a job,” although the Ph.D. became the only reason I was interviewed and hired by Honeywell, Inc.  It was also the reason I was an adjunct professor over more than a ten-year period at several colleges and universities.  I had no intentions of being a full-time academic.  So, I cannot tell you how the WALDEN Ph.D. would have played in that marketplace. 

In these pages, I have reviewed Bernie and Rita Turner’s story (ASPIRE TOWARD THE HIGHEST) of how they created this growing university on the cutting edge of educational technology.  To their credit, they encouraged renegade spirits who were comfortable thinking outside the box to become credentialed. 

Today, WALDEN UNIVERSITY has moved beyond its founders.  It is fully accredited as much as Harvard or any other institution of higher learning.  Does that translate into immediate access to being able to compete with the movers and shakers?  I doubt it. 

We are still a “mom and pop” society when it comes to education wanting students to behave, not think, to fit the mold, not challenge that model no matter how irrelevant or absurd that model may me.  There is risk involved when you not only think outside the box but attempt to live there.  I would be comfortable in no other place.  How about you?

Be always well,

Jim