Excerpt -- THE WORKER, ALONE!

Going Against the Grain!

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

© May 6, 2015

PART ONE

BIOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE:

Just as going along to get along may be natural to most people, going against the grain is equally as inherent as breathing for others.  This seems to have been true of Curtis Flood and Martin Luther, as well as this author. 

Taking a stand is visceral.  It involves having a center and a moral compass that says the prevailing norm is wrong.  Such a position often defies reason and good sense as its costs are quickly apparent. 

Consequently, going against the grain is not for everyone.  For those so predisposed, there is no other recourse.  They have to act to live with themselves.

While it may be self-defining, it is invariably at the expense of self-alienation from the herd.  It may be as selective as DNA.   

In 1958, I left the R&D lab as a chemist at Standard Brands, Inc., and joined Nalco Chemical Company as a chemical sales engineer, never having sold anything before.  Two weeks in the field after a month of training at the home office in Chicago, I was told I was not cut out for this kind of work.

I had offended the area manager by answering his question: What have you learned after traveling with me for two weeks?  I told him nothing as he never ask for an order, never listened to customers, never found out what they needed, and mainly wasted their time and ours socializing.

This resulted in my being given marginal accounts to service, and the right to call on competitors, but for only six weeks after which I was to find other employment. 

During this period, however, I sold the largest account of the district’s operation in years – taking it from a major competitor – by listening, asking what the customer needed, and was not getting, while working closely with engineering and operations as a partner, an advocate, not as an adversary.

Nalco would send 78 sales engineers (yes, I kept track) from other districts to work with me.  They also ask me to make presentations at various Nalco conclaves across the country to share my approach to selling technical systems to highly savvy prospects, as the word was out that Fisher doesn’t sell technically!   

Such opportunities gave me corporate exposure and a chance to capture my ideas on paper.  This led to rapid promotion and elevated me to executive status in the international division when barely thirty. 

The momentous ride found me working in South America, Europe and finally facilitating the creation of a new company in South Africa.  It was there I hit a wall, that is, South Africa apartheid.  This clashed with my values and a reality foreign to my programming.    

At the top of my career, father of four young children, in my mid-thirties, I resigned from Nalco, resettled in Florida, wrote a book, did little else for two years but read books, played tennis, and attempted, however unsuccessfully, to write for a living. 

When nearly broke, I went back to school full-time, year around, to earn a Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology, consulting on the side.  Once I had my Ph.D., I joined one of my clients, Honeywell, Inc., as an organizational development (OD) psychologist. 

Honeywell proved a repeat of the Nalco episode.  Having been a free-wheeling line executive, it was a new experience to be relegated to an “in house” staff function in human resources of a large facility (4,000 employees) on a scenic campus in sunny South Florida, and expected to tow the company line, or else! 

Not known to be a company man, it came as no surprise that the human resource director suggested shortly after my settling in that I don’t believe you’re cut out for this kind of work, while my OD boss stated more emphatically, find your role within the next few weeks or you’ll be gone.

A clinical psychologist deals with an individual client and addresses problems in terms of behavior.  An OD psychologist deals with the organization as his client and addresses performance problems in terms of workers and managers in the workplace. 

My approach to OD was as eccentric as my methodology had been to selling.  I met with groups not as an expert or with an agenda, strategy, or Honeywell’s proprietary line, but to find out what got in the way of their productive effort and what they thought needed to be done.              

At first I was distrusted, then challenged, then accepted as the real deal and a breath of fresh air.  For Honeywell to have gotten rid of me, then, might have caused a protest, as the rank and file worker, professional or blue collar, was not used to being taken seriously, or to have their best interests taken to heart. 

Honeywell groups asked me to give speeches to their associations, while for management, I wrote monographs, presented papers and gave speeches at technical conferences, and made significant interventions, one of which was the creation of an “in house” technical education program to address systemic deficiencies. 

The director of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, read one of these publications, and invited me to Cambridge to work with his designing team for the ring laser gyros being manufactured at Honeywell Avionics facility in Clearwater, Florida. 

So, it wasn’t unusual for the Department of Contracts Administration Services (DCAS) to approach me in 1984 to give the keynote speech at a department sponsored conference on Participative Management, when that theme was the flavor of the month across corporate America.

Having given off site seminars for this group before, I felt it necessary to make clear my reservations on this topic, stipulating that I be allowed to be critical of the value of this intervention.  The group said in unison, “No problem!”   

That proved to be in error.  My speech became a major problem, for me, as I explain in this segment Going Against the Grain. 

This was 1984.  My manager, a very capable man understood OD, and granted me creative freedom to practice the discipline.  In the next segment (Typology of Leaderless Leadership), he might best be described as the “Happily in Harness.”  He loved his work, and was loyal to a fault to Honeywell, always at the ready to satisfy its demands whatever they might be.  Not surprisingly, he considered my speech a personal betrayal.

The United States in the 1980s experienced an artificial economic boom (e.g., Reagan “Star War” years) against a plethora of scandals (e.g., Savings & Loan), while corporate America never stumbled upon a fad it didn’t love as long as it was simple, inexpensive and didn’t disturb its power (e.g., Participative Management). 

Panic was in the air, which I came to call, The Prison of Panic called “Now”!

America’s hard goods markets at home and abroad were fast disappearing, while, paradoxically, the American workforce had seemingly changed overnight to a professional class of workers, only management still treated them as if nothing had changed.  During these years of panic, rather than step back, pause, take inventory and study the changing tide of events, it was do anything, everything now!  The speech which follows was given in that atmosphere. 

For my punishment, I was placed on the equivalent of “house arrest,” banned from writing papers or giving speeches for 18-months.  But by something akin to serendipity, I emerged from this to be promoted in 1986 to Honeywell Europe’s management team in its Brussels, Belgium headquarters. 

There I saw first-hand that corporate Europe was as messed up as corporate America.  Honeywell’s European national franchises had retrogressed to operating essentially as feudal fiefdoms after WWII with the managing directors as lords and masters of all that they surveyed.  As passive and hierarchically inert as were American workers, European workers, country to country, were even more so.  It was a perfect situation for an OD study, which I quickly launched into with the idea of a subsequent book in mind. 

As Director of Human Resources Planning & Development, an OD position, it was soon apparent, however, that my new boss in Brussels had no idea what OD was or what it could do.  Whereas in the States I had been given carte blanche to practice OD, he saw my role as that of a traditional technocrat or “management’s advocate.”  

He saw management as OD's client, failing to understand that OD assesses equally the efficacy of management as it does the workforce.  This conflict in perspective didn’t make for a happy marriage.

His persona appears in the next segment as the Winning Side Saddler, or the constant pleaser but with a hidden agenda as opposed to Happily in Harness of my boss in the States who had no agenda at all other than that of his bosses. 

So, in a not too subtle way, going against the grain expresses an intellectual perspective, which is consistently conveyed thematically in my books and articles. 

The reader will find in this 1984 seminal work ideas that will reappear in Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1991, 2^nd edition 2014), The Worker, Alone: Going Against the Grain (1995, 2^nd edition 2015), Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers (2000, 2^nd edition 2013) and Time Out for Sanity! Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age (2007, 2^nd edition 2015). 

The germ of ideas that leads to books is active in the subconscious mind as a working life unfolds and is therefore basically a recording of that fact. 

  GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN!

“Time is painted with a lock before, and bald behind, signifying thereby that we must take time by the forelock, for when it is once passed there is no recalling it.”

—Jonathan Swift, Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist and poet

Sometimes it is necessary to step out of the shadows and take a stand, not because it is a courageous act, but because it is necessary.  Martin Luther did it early in the sixteenth century, many others have done it along the way. Some are as modest as this one, but all involve personal and professional risk.

A CAREER CHANGING KEYNOTE SPEECH

This speech was given on March 30, 1984 to a Conference of Department of Contract Administration Services (DCAS), which included an audience of some 200 government officials, senior military officers of U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, and consultants, as well as Honeywell Avionics’s CEO and senior managers. At the time, I was an organizational development (OD) psychologist for the Honeywell’s Clearwater, Florida facility, the host of the conference.

This conference convened during the collective hysteria of the time. Japan and South East Asia had quietly captured a significant portion of pristine American manufacturing markets. 

In 1980, Tom Brokaw of NBC television, bringing attention to this fact, presented an hour-long tutorial, “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” Japan, Inc.’s growing dominance in manufacturing, included the automotive industry, machine tools, electronics, home appliances, light fixtures, and steel production. Human Resources (HR) stepped into the breach with Quality Control Circles (QCC), teaming, employee empowerment and participative management, not as a carefully framed design of the problem, but in an attempt to replicate the Japanese miracle.

One of my functions was to direct the QCC Program, which at the time, was one of the largest in the country. Honeywell Avionics was a facility of 4,000 with 80 percent professionals or white collar workers and 20 percent blue-collar. Among the professionals were 1,000 engineers many with advanced degrees in their respective disciplines. Blue-collar workers responded to quality circles, professionals did not. 

Little note was made of the fact that Japan was a group oriented culture versus America’s individual oriented society. Nor did many stop to consider that 80 percent of Japanese workers were blue-collar whereas 20 percent of ours were. NBC pricked the nation’s denial button flooding its conscience with collective hysteria.

From my perspective in the trenches, this was a charade.  Workers had little power and less participation beyond cosmetic change, which had little bearing on performance or outcomes. Even blue-collar workers with the best of intentions were essentially treading water and going nowhere. I felt it was time to speak out, and go against the grain. 

To Honeywell’s credit, no limitation was put on what I might say. It had become routine to have me present papers, write monographs and represent Honeywell by giving speeches at technical conferences in the genre of industrial and organizational psychology relative to this facility’s operations.

For giving this paper, I was essentially put on “house arrest” for 18 months, during which time I was not to give any speeches, write any monographs, or sit for outside interviews. I was also asked to hand in my engineering notebook weekly to check its content. 

I was not fired although some executives, program managers, and a chief engineer thought that I should have been. At the end of my 18-month house arrest, I was not let go, but promoted to Human Resource Director for Planning & Development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd., and relocated to Honeywell Europe’s Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

THE SPEECH

PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT: AN ADVERSARY POINT OF VIEW

INTRODUCTION

Man is a pragmatic animal. He does what he does because he thinks it is the best way to do it. He may listen to a contrary way of doing it. If his heart is not in it, there is little chance he’ll give his best.

During the past several years, I have attempted to facilitate the shift from paternalistic to participative management, from centrally located decision-making to autonomous work groups. This work was conducted in an ideal environment here at Honeywell.

For one, the team concept had been employed among the hourly workforce since 1972. For another, all of the operations of this 4,000-employee facility were on one beautiful campus in the Florida Sunbelt. For yet another, management had been educated in the Quality Control Circle concepts with countless organizational development (OD) interventions, resulting in a significant number of changes. 

These were however essentially cosmetic changes: e.g., changing the lighting in workstations, having more flexibility in dress code, providing longer breaks, changing work hours, and so on.

In any case, this facility has perhaps the longest sustained participative working climate in the continental United States. There are 110 Quality Circle teams with more than 1,000 members of the workforce participating in the process. Additionally, there is a pilot program of some 200 professional workers and their managers immersed in “Shared Management,” which is touted as a “step beyond Quality Circles.”

Virtually everything management could reasonably be expected to do has been done for the workforce. Are workers happy? Reasonably so. Are they productive? Relatively speaking, yes. Are they doing as much as they are capable of doing? No. Do they have the entrepreneur spirit? Not on a bet.

Then are you saying all this has been for naught? Compliance is not cooperation, and this is compliance. Fear or coercion is the motivator. Workers are aware of the Great Depression in the Steel and Automotive Industries, and say, “There go I but for the grace of my employer.”

Meanwhile, management has been in a long slump, thinking in terms of 1955 competition and been close to panic. It has resulted in turning OD from a hybrid of psychology, sociology and industrial engineering into a burgeoning profession without portfolio. Undaunted by this fact management has stopped everything to listen to what we have to say.

“Process” has become the magic word, along with “systemic problems,” in other words, explanatory rather than operational approaches. Jargon gets the attention of most managers. The irony is that this shock wave that has gone through management has escaped the attention of the workforce. They are huddled in passivity willing to do whatever without complaint.

PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT’S HIDDEN AGENDAS

Paternalistic management was authoritative, task oriented and bottom line driven. Conversely, the workforce was management dependent, authoritatively compliant, selfishly motivated and bottom line indifferent. Enter the sobriquet, “Participative Management.”

This implies that management is people centered and process conscious with the workforce expected to be cooperative and motivated. No surprise the workforce for this renewed attention felt good about itself and its workplace – even happy – but still bottom line disinterested. The good intentions did not translate into an entrepreneur spirit or productive work.

A recent experience illustrates my point. I was talking to a production line supervisor, who thinks these changes are terrific.  I asked him about a colleague. “Have you seen him lately?” I asked “Oh, yeah. Over the weekend.”

“How are things going in his operation?” I continued.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “We didn’t talk about the company business. We talked about the new businesses we’re starting.”

After he told me a bit more about this, I offered, “I guess it’s the American spirit to be in business for yourself.”

“Yeah,” he smiled. “You could say that, you want to be independent. Be your own boss. Have something of your own.”

Here was a supervisor who could see through cosmetic changes without knowing he was doing so, and was keeping his options open if things didn’t work out. Imagine the mindset of the people working for him.

THE RISE OF THE NON-DOER DOERS

The organization is made up of those that manage and those that do. Those that manage have grown into a force unto themselves with layer on layer of middle management created to move the paperwork while acting as a buttress between the feudal lords of industry and the masses.

Next there has been created parallel organizations, which support and serve management, but who neither manage nor do (I belong to this exalted community). These non-doer doers have been called “professionals,” the white-collar class and “staff” to “line” (i.e., to the doers). You find these workers in personnel, finance, security, maintenance, marketing, and even engineering.

Once a need is created for their services, it is impossible to imagine being without it or them. Since WWII, pyramid building has become something of a natural phenomenon in all professions. Translated, the organization has too many people doing too many non-thing things.

So, the first problem that should have been noted when our competitive edge was slipping was this organizational excess baggage, that is, one manager to every ten-twelve workers (industrial average) and one staff employee per every four managers (industrial average). 

Scaling down this pyramid, alone, amounts to megabucks in savings not to mention a much sprier and leaner organization. So, what have we done? Where has the focus been?

On the doers, of course. The powerful on the powerless. In transactional terms, the Parent on the Child.  Since the ownership spirit is precisely what we are trying to instill and since the referenced supervisor had been sent to a considerable number of courses and laboratories to develop his consciousness concerning such ownership, I said, “How does this differ from what you are doing here?”

He looked at me in amazement. “I don’t want to do this all my life.” Sensing that I wanted to know more, he continued. “My wife is my partner in this.” He started to laugh. “She has a real problem paying the help $4.00 an hour.”

“Joe, that’s not even a living wage,” I responded. His expression was defiant – 

“So?”

This intrigued me. “As you know from your own people,” I continued, “They want more money not because they have done more, but because they need more. It seems you are faced with the same problem in your private enterprise that we are facing here.”

He scratched his head. “I never thought of it like that.”

“No, possibly not,” I offered. “Perhaps because it is coming out of your own pocket now and you can feel the pinch.”

“Yeah. I see what you mean,” he replied. And this was an experienced supervisor who had been given all the training and tools, which were designed to create a feeling of ownership, but he, too, was bottom line disinterested.

ENTER INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF QUALITY CIRCLES

(IAQC)

A whole organization has sprung into being, IAQC, with a strategy to get the “most out of the least” – and they have. Dr. J. M. Juran calls this the problem solving strategy of the “trivial many.”

Juran and others point out, given the scope of what quality circles encompass, if doers knock out all the fat and become lean as a tooth, they still have solved only 15 percent of the problems facing the organization.

Meanwhile, management, which has become too much and too many has difficulty turning the microscope on itself for fear it will see the “big C” – Capital neglect.

Management has purposely established a caste and class system of non-doers who are confused. Just as doers are inclined to be bottom line disinterested, they are more inclined to mistake self-interested outcomes (department goals) as bottom line, which could be even worse.

THE ANSWER TO BOTTOM LINE DISINTEREST –

SERIAL OR PARALLEL CAREERS

Add to this the fact that in this changing work climate where all sorts of wonderful programs are being sponsored, the workforce sees its benefits shrinking, its pay frozen, its promotional opportunities disappearing and its job security eroding. Is it any wonder that workers and managers go out and start businesses on the side?

I was writing this in the cafeteria the other day and there in the booth next to me was a company staff engineer selling an insurance policy to an administrative worker – two non-doers doing personal business on company time without apology, guilt or concern. It was as if “I have the right. I get this opportunity in lieu of pay…,” or whatever.

For comparative purposes, out of this population of 4,000, there are 800 production workers (20%), 1,000 engineers (25%), 400 managers (10%), and 1,800 other professionals (45%). No less than one quarter of these professional workers are believed to have serial or parallel careers, much of which is conducted on company time. From selling real estate to selling diamonds, from pet fish to insurance, from restaurant to management consulting, from private teaching to private investigating, from motel operations to hardware store managing.

What all this seems to indicate is that a great number of attractive solutions have been developed without a clear understanding of what the problem is. Meanwhile, the rank and file are oblivious to the anguish and pain common to the organization.

They fail to care because they don’t see it as their problem. Let the “organization” solve it. They see the organization as distinct from them, as if it has life without their blood in it. If the organization bleeds, they would be hard pressed to see themselves bleeding with it, that is, until the organization goes out of business or moves elsewhere.  To understand how this dilemma has evolved one must revisit the history of the complex organization.

THE SEEDS OF THE PROBLEM

Two hundred years ago, when most of the business of business was conducted in small guilds, there was great informality. People did what they did best. Somebody was in charge but it was an additional role besides being a line contributor. There were no job descriptions, no performance appraisals, no reward and recognition programs, no staff support, nobody else to blame if a product did not sell because it was made poorly or overpriced.

Survival was predicated on doing the best you were able to do with the skills you had, the materials and mechanics you had to work with, and pride and sense of ownership you brought to the work. Work was love made visible.

People knew who they were by what they did. Often, the work was dirty, grimy, exhausting with little profit, hardly a living wage.  We romanticize this period now, but in reality, it was a harsh, hard existence. The guild workers had to work long hours, seventy hours a week was not uncommon. There were few if any entitlements, only work.

Were they happy? Not particularly. Were they productive? Extremely so. Were they doing as much as they were capable? Generally speaking, yes. Did they have the entrepreneur spirit? In buckets! They had no choice. The wolf was always gaining ground on them.

Then the Industrial Revolution exploded into their midst. These self-directed, self-managed, self-motivated workers were forced by necessity into a strange environment of huge machines and masses of people.

There was no model that fit the purposes of the complex organization. The closest model was the Roman Catholic Church and the National Army. The goal of the church was to save your soul; the goal of the army was to save your life. No confusion there. Everyone knew, understood, and could relate to those common goals.

But the complex organization was an organization of sub-organizations and sub-sub-organizations, all with their own goals along with every individual’s hidden agenda. Meanwhile, workers, who were never comfortable with all these goals, dreamed in terms of their own private agenda. 

They saw themselves as renting their bodies for a price, leaving their minds safely at home, which included their motivation. They saw the factory as a voluntary prison that they entered because they had no other choice.

They couldn’t compete with the factory from the guild, nor from the farm. They had given up their freedom out of economic fear, the fear of survival. And so, from the opening chapters of the Industrial Revolution to the Post-Industrial Age, the worker has never identified with the factory as “his” factory, or as an extension of his will and dreams.

This has been the domain of only a precious few, the senior managers of the organization. This is where the power rests, not in the stockholders nor, indeed, in capitalistic society. Curiously, senior management operates very similarly to the management of the guilds. There is a common will dedicated to the same set of principles and a consensus bottom line. It is their organization and their hide if it falls on hard times.

More curious still, the doers and the senior managers are cut from the same atavistic cloth. They both speak the language of the guilds. What makes for the problem of the modern organization is that there are ten or twelve layers of bodies between senior management and these doers.

What these doers hear, then, is a language that is remote and beyond their interests and comprehension. Instead, what they hear is demands, threats, and candy-coated enticements, directives that a child hears from a concerned or frustrated parent.

And appropriately, like a child, the expected behavior follows:

• Testing the firmness of the demand.

• Accepting punishment as justification for challenging the demands.

• Learning to say the right words while continuing to misbehave.

• Treating the machines (toys) with disdain, neglect and contempt.

• Seeing the organization as blocking them from what they want to do.

• Crying and embarrassing the organization into submitting to their will.

• Feeling angry and hostile and unfulfilled after getting their own way.

• Telling the organization what it wants to hear rather than needs to know.

Behaving in a way that says, “I want more” – when more is given – “I still want more” – “I will always want more.”  

The workforce is frozen in the adolescent-infantile state notwithstanding all the programs and slogans, which would suggest otherwise. Put another way, the modern organization gets very little real productivity out of its people – perhaps only about 30 percent of what they could do.

Does this mean most workers don’t care? Of course not. It means that the structure of the organization does not fit the tasks – the structure should enhance the accomplishment of the tasks, which too often it does not.

More importantly, workers are not treated as adults, as full partners in the enterprise. Oh! The words are used, but management’s behavior does not compute with the words.

Granted, a great deal of attention is being given the environment in terms of Quality Circles, Quality of Work Life, and Quality of Work. There are also cross-cultural awareness programs designed to get this blueprint on to the factory floor. Management styles are being modified in quest of the magic formula that will make the organization more productive.

What have these activities achieved? At best, marginal if ephemeral results. Why? The majority still march to the programmed cadence of terminal adolescence that has been the organization’s drumbeat for decades. Why should anyone be surprised for their inability to respond with maturity?

NOTE:

Part Two will follow soon: STUCK IN MACHINE AGE THINKING – Erik Erikson’s Model of Human Development

EXCERPT -- The Worker, Alone!

EMBRACING A PARADIGM SHIFT

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

© May 4, 2015

“The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by the problem solving.”

—Thomas S. Kuhn, American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science

There is a discernible contrast between the reality of the worker’s life today and its historical antecedence. The worker is at once a collection of atoms living its own conscious life “for itself,” and at the same time the unconscious agent of change. Since workers are not, in fact, free, but could not live without the conviction that they are, it is better that they understand what goes on as they do, than to seek to subvert such common sense beliefs.

“Happy ignorance” rules the head if not the heart of most workers. Even so, there is movement against the grain, now a slight tremor but rapidly building. The focus of this natural fault line is apparent — the worker, alone!

“Great men” do not move workers from their epicenter, but “important people” do appear when discontinuity leads to shock waves of catastrophe. These people are less important than they may suppose, but neither are they shadows. They embody the strengths and weaknesses, the passions and dreams, the nightmares and madness of their times. They step out of the darkness and display wisdom. They appear when rhetoric is reduced to rubble. Wisdom is not a matter of pedigree or credentials, not a matter of accumulated knowledge or experience, wisdom is a way of thinking creatively unencumbered with the known or with what has worked before.

Given this, the deciding factor when it comes to going against the grain takes courage.  Evidence of this courage was displayed by professional baseball player, Curtis Flood when he sued Major League Baseball for the right to collective bargain for himself.

When Flood came to Marvin Miller, Director of the Players Association of Major League Baseball, he could see the athlete’s mind was made up. “I told him,” recalls Miller, “that given the courts’ history of bias toward the owners and their monopoly, he didn’t have a chance in hell of winning.  “More important than that, I told him even if he won, he’d never get anything out of it—he’d never get a job in baseball again.”

Flood asked Miller if it would benefit other players. “I told him, yes, and those to come.”  He said, “Then let’s do it!”

Flood won, he was, as Miller predicted out of baseball, and professional athletes have been basking in Flood’s courage ever since.

To put “the worker, alone” in perspective, permit this brief excursion. The working man’s faith in ideas has controlled his lot far more than he might believe. Belief is the most powerful motivator known to man.

In the Western world, workers once had a deep commitment to an ancient faith, Roman Catholicism. That faith has eroded in the last 500 years, with some insisting workers have become amoral. Closer to the truth, workers have changed. They have adapted to stress and accelerating demands not always wisely perhaps, but inevitably. Change is never born in the void.

Religion for centuries played its part in the persistent pursuit of the spiritual truth treating secular truth as if the enemy as specialization became increasingly dominant, which required people to be educated and enlightened and to live in the “now” as opposed to a focus on the hereafter.

The Church argued it, alone, understood the “inner rhythms,” the silent march of things. Only those who understood this “truth” knew what could or could not be achieved, what should or should not be attempted. The “Doctors of the Church” believed they alone held the key to secular success as well as spiritual salvation.  Omniscience belonged to God alone, and they were His agents. Only by immersing ourselves in His Word dare we hope for wisdom.

Against this cultural inculcation, another truth emerged, empirical or practical wisdom. This is knowledge of the inevitable: of what, given our world of order, could not but happen; or conversely, of how things cannot be, or could not have been. The rare capacity for seeing this we call a “sense of reality.” This has been the domain of science and the scientist.

There is hostility against believers today in the United States, especially among young people, the so-called “millennials.” They see people of faith as judgmental, hypocritical, old-fashioned, or simply out of touch, according to social commentator David Brooks. Yet, between the doubters and the believers, Brook’s writes,

“There is a silent majority who experience a faith that is attractively marked by combinations of fervor and doubt, clarity and confusion, empathy and demand.”

Why should it be any different for faith? Is this not the age of ambivalence?

Spiritual and secular truth, truths of the heart and mind, spirit and reason, religion and science, have been warring with each other for centuries. Men of God insist the human intellect is but a feeble instrument when pitted against the power of divine forces; that rational explanations of human conduct seldom explain anything. Secular truths are inadequate if only because they ignore man’s “inner” experience. A high value is set on family life and on the superiority of the heart over the head, the moral over the intellectual. Notice as economics evolved to competition as opposed to cooperation, theology devolved to science, while the heart and the head no longer experienced comfort in the same body.

By the curious supposition of secular humanists that the 21st century represents life after faith, the rhetoric used continues to sound less like liberation and more like defeat.  It would seem that the language they choose to use betrays their emotional agenda as the talk centers on the “death of God” and the “loss of faith,” and not on the rebirth of reason and the achievement of truth.  Read Voltaire or Nietzsche, Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris and you will find ethical, philosophical and scientific arguments against belief but little clarity on what these humanists advocate. 

Men of science stand apart. They hold that only by patient empirical observation can reliable knowledge be obtained; that this knowledge, even then, is always inadequate and incomplete, but that it must be sought.

The solitary thinker draws a gloomy picture of the impotence of the human will against the rigid laws of the universe. Yet men of science display the same vanity of human passion as they attempt to uncover its mysteries, while failing to comprehend much less explain the bases of their irrational actions and feelings.

They aspire to reduce man to a manageable lot, to a condition of predictability, where passionless man can no longer be frustrated, humiliated or wounded. Men of science have a near metaphysical belief in logical detachment, whereas the religious have an equally metaphysical belief in supernatural detachment.

Doctors of the church and men of science represent the spiritual and secular half of the same whole. Both long for a universal explanatory principle, composed of the bits and pieces of the furniture of the universe, which may be reduced to a single unifying design. From their respective vantage points, the quest for a unifying theory of the universe and a quest for the “Holy Grail” appear to be equally elusive.

They are men, like all working men, and therefore their personal and professional lives are inescapably a tangled web of unresolved issues, conflicts and savage battles between their gifts as thinkers and their passionate ideals; between what they are and what they purport to be. If you have any doubt how human men and women of science are, read Brenda Maddox’s “Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA” (2002) and “The Double Helix” (1968) by James Watson.

The humanness of scientists is illustrated by Mario Livio’s “Brilliant Blunders” (2014), where he traces the great scientific blunders of such leading lights as Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle and Albert Einstein, all of whom are known for their great discoveries. 

David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers in “When Science & Christianity Meet” (2003) ask the question:

Have science and Christianity been locked in ethical combat for the past 2,000 years, or has their relationship been one of existence, encouragement and support?  

Both views have been vigorously defended, and both have been rejected as oversimplification of the clearly human conflict through the ages between faith and reason, fact and value, longing for immortality and the assertion of reality coherence.  The Christian focus on existence is said to be outside of time whereas the focus of science, in contrast, is inside of time.    

Science consists of facts and theories, which are born in different ways. Facts are true or false, which are discovered through experimentation, whereas theories are free creations of the human mind, intended to describe our understanding of nature, or in my case, human nature. Theories are tools and need not be precisely true in order to be useful. It is easy to argue against theories based upon one’s own experience, but it is much more difficult to argue against facts, which in science can be replicated and therefore corroborated.

At no time in history has there been such a gathering of scientists with such powers of insight — with the uncanny ability to probe and differentiate — as now, and yet, on balance, never have so many displayed such palpable ignorance! Society is lost because too often theories are treated as facts by scientists as well as laymen, which is unfortunate. Einstein concurs. He writes, “The more one chases after the quanta, the better they hide themselves.”

Could it be that man seeks too much, that he overestimates his capacities? If only the most gifted of men displayed a little humility and realized that conflict is natural and harmony artificial, and paradise on earth is not the absence of struggle but its requisite.

From the beginning of recorded history, workers have struggled to find truth, failing to realize truth, outside of nature, is relative. What is truth to you may not be truth to me. Religion has been at the forefront to carry workers on this journey. This has unwittingly devolved and turned intimacy into contractual matters to be litigated. David Brooks writes,

“There must be something legalistic in the human makeup, because cold, rigid unambiguous, unparadoxical belief is common, especially considering how fervently the scriptures oppose it.”

Religion and science combine to be “apostles of despair.” Both speak with the same angry irony, both are deeply skeptical of each other’s powers. They have lost faith with faith. 

Organized religions seem hardly religious at all smitten by modernity, struggling to remain relevant somehow thrown off their stride by dynamic progressive change, when man, himself, has essentially not changed at all, and therefore needs what religion has always provided, which is a sanctuary from contemporary madness.

Could the cause be our dwindling religious inheritance over the last two centuries that accounts for the gradual disintegration of the bildungsroman as a life ideal?   Is Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov representative of a universe of growing tragedy and depravity in which evil and suffering are not eradicable accidents but deeply woven into the texture of our being?   

Religious leaders appear out of gas, pusillanimous warriors.  They fail to see that spiritual need (theology) and secular demand (science) are complementary forces. Einstein put it succinctly, “Science without religion is tame, religion without science is blind.” The clergy seem less certain of their role in postmodern society than the average worker does of his.  A disconnect between them has resulted.  Could it be that the church is more interested in its survival than its mission?

When illiteracy was the norm in Europe through the first thousand years of the Christian era, magnificent cathedrals were built to capture the imagination of the faithful in compensation for this limitation. The clergy reign supreme even over monarchs and princes.

With Gutenberg’s invention (15th century) of movable type in printing, followed by Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible, (16th century) literacy spread like a rash across Europe. The Bible was translated into indigenous languages, literacy flourished, and common cultures were born. Feudalism and the peasant class was eroding, while capitalism and a market economy was driving people off the land and out of guilds into factories and crowded cities.

Nation states evolved as national cultures grew out of common languages and values. Kingdoms and empires became disenchanted with the temporal authority of the Church. Meanwhile, the Catholic collective conscience of feudalism was now threatened with the Protestant individualistic conscience of capitalism.  

This led to breakaway sects such as the Puritans (17th century) who left their known European society to embrace the unknown in the New World in order to freely practice their faith. A new society was taking root on the American continent.  The American and French Revolution (late 18th century) were fought in quest of individual political freedom, and economic and social justice. America had a series of wars with Great Britain, but ultimately established a republic as a constitutional democracy and a new nation-state. The French went through a Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, and experienced great instability.

Stepping into that instability was Napoleon Bonaparte, declaring himself as Emperor. The Napoleonic Wars (early 19th century) followed until a confederacy of European nations defeated him at Waterloo in Belgium. Fifty years later, the American Civil War (late 19th century) led to the Emancipation Proclamation, liberating Negro slaves from bondage, and inaugurating the Industrial Revolution. Factories, machines, steel mills, railroads and a plethora of inventions signaled a new day. It also marked the rise of the secular and decline of the spiritual. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman captured this sentiment with his statement, “God is dead!” God wasn’t dead. He just changed His uniform.

Believers simply moved away from religious doctrine to a secular belief system placing a higher value on ritual and religious practices than on traditional formal tenets of religion.  This proved as true for Catholics as Protestants.

Nietzsche died (1900) in the dawn of the 20th century, the most violent century in the history of man with WWI, WWII, the atomic bombing of Japan, the annihilation of six million Jews, the Korean War, Vietnam War, and a number of other wars across the globe.

The Austro-Hungarian and Persian empires were split up, the reparations of the Versailles Peace Treaty after WWI was felt to be so extreme by the Kaiser’s Germany that the treaty opened the door to Adolf Hitler and Nazis Germany, and WWII.

An explosion in technology followed WWII, including space exploration, and the boilerplate for the Information Age (21st century), which has become inadvertently an anxious age, an unconscious age, and an age seemingly in total retreat from the spiritual self. This has resulted in man’s self-estrangement, making him less the master of his fate and more its prawn. Rather than find a new connection with these iterative changes, the Church has relegated itself to the role of ritualistic entertainer, which has left man sensing abandonment.

Religion as distraction has continued to foster the “should be” qualities worshippers’ desire. There is a certain irony to this, a manifest dishonesty and deception. It is an expedient design. It has not always been so.  Religion had vitality in the 16th century when a single cleric, Martin Luther, went against the grain of the dominant figure of the culture of the time, The Holy See of Rome, His Holiness, Pope Leo X, to post his 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg chapel. This was unprecedented. Here a young cleric was putting his career and comfort in jeopardy for what he believed. He had little support, and was immediately labeled a heretic. Some called him a madman, pointing out the emotional character to his temperament.

He was all alone. He made no apology for his act as he believed his regeneration could only come from within, and that the source of that inner life was concealed in his immortal soul.  The enormity of this act is difficult to comprehend today. Clearly, it was not motivated by self-interest, or to justify disobedience to the Holy See. It was an act of conscience and conviction, not deviance, an act with a complete willingness to accept the consequences. As an individual, he stepped outside the obedient rank and file and declared himself one with his Creator. Scripture revealed to Luther a loving God, not the God he was programmed to worship. This loving God bestowed on sinful man the free gift of salvation through faith alone. The church’s liturgical dogma necessitating good works to attain salvation was revoked. Luther’s theology went against the grain of accepted Roman Catholic teaching, and cut to the core the hypocritical practice of selling indulgences.

Earning indulgences was proclaimed as a way to avoid Purgatory, and to go straight to heaven upon death. Indulgences were created originally to award believers for their good works.  But the affluent, who had little time or felt little inclination to do good works, bypassed the process by buying indulgences. Indulgences were sold wholesale the way scalpers sell tickets to rock concerts today. The practice was ludicrous, but no one did anything.

The Roman Catholic Church was the most powerful force in Western Europe, indeed, in most of the civilized world. It condoned the practice of selling indulgences presenting a blind eye to the activity until one man, Martin Luther, demonstrated the courage to take on the entire Roman Catholic establishment, by going against the grain.

With that single heroic act, Luther set the chain reaction which would release the worker from “The Dark Ages” of corporate dependency on Holy Mother Church, and plant the seeds for a growing individualism. Western man’s mindset and disposition was thus to undergo radical restructuring.  What is most remarkable about this is that Martin Luther was not a saint, not cast in the mold of the “great man,” not even an especially “learned man,” a man with many of the psycho-sexual flaws of modern man, a man who made the same foot prints as his contemporaries. He was neither a demigod nor a scoundrel, only a man of intense passion and focus. But he was a man of substance whereas shallowness ruled his day as it does ours.

Like workers today, Luther’s contemporaries immersed themselves in the medium of the mundane. Life was taken for granted with the many living in feudalistic dependence on the church, which was quite corrupt at the time, dictating the terms of that dependency.

Being so other-directed, the individual fails to see the absurdity of his dependence. His consciousness is so clearly interwoven with the flow of things that he cannot separate himself from them or their demands.

When workers are caged in standards of truth and falsehood, of reality and the ideal, of the good and the bad, of the central and the peripheral, of the subjective and objective, of the beautiful and the ugly, of movement and rest, of past, present and future, of one and the many, they are kin to the time of Martin Luther.

These are the basic presuppositions of man throughout the ages. Martin Luther could not analyze his predicament from an external vantage point because with change there is only inner resolution. So, the question might be asked, was Luther more conscious of his times than his contemporaries as change agent?

My sense is that he was not, that is, until he visited Rome and saw the corruption first hand. The posting of his 95 theses was to my mind an impulsive act consistent with his temperament, a ways of atoning for his raging distemper. The superficial dominate every age and mask the disturbing tremors few acknowledge unless or until they are shocked into awareness.

Wisdom abhors the superficial. It burrows through “the way things are.” Wisdom is not scientific, but a sensitivity to the circumstances of the times. It is felt!

ANOTHER EXCERPT: The Worker, Alone!

Why we can never get off the “dime,” and instead head for a constant train wreck!

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

© May 2, 2015

THE “LOST” AND “FOUND” IN THE SAME MOMENT!

In the recent past we have heard much about “re-inventing” and “re-engineering” the corporation, Total Quality Management, Performance Management Systems, and now the Edenic expectations of the “information highway.”

The idea is that the postmodern world is Eden and man as Adam and Eve can return to that idyllic state through man’s ingenuity.  British philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was weary of this misguided optimism identifying its aberrational source. He wrote:

“The machine has gained control not only over the material aspects of society, but also over its philosophy, art and literature.  Men have grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. Their whole attachments, opinions, turn on Mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.”

These mechanistic propositions can easily become toys of the mind treated as tools, or little more than distractions, if a holistic approach is not adopted, where cause and effect, the controlled and controller are treated as one.

Control is not a matter of doing something “to the system.”  It is realized only by a radical change in the mentality of each member of the workforce, where self-order is the outcome. Once movement is made in that direction, it will have a ripple effect, ultimately resulting in a revolutionary restructuring of the culture of the workplace. What deters this is a thinking system that overtly acknowledges change but covertly promotes stability.

Since this dichotomy seems to be in place, is it any wonder that we have little faith in the change process?  To put this in perspective, consider the notion of the social contract, which speaks of workers “vesting” their power in a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and his management team to honor their rights to a pension fund should they retire or be terminated.

Workers have granted control of such pension funds (in too many cases) to a management team and union consortium only to find the funds misapplied or depleted due to mismanagement, collusion or corruption.

As a practical matter, this vesting is not challenged, as power is accumulated like a commodity without opposition. The “conferring” of power makes for the powerful, but what is this?  What is “power”?  What is “conferring”? Who confers power and how is it done?

Nobody knows.  It is just the way it has always been.  The conferring is an incomprehensible act.  Conferring power, acquiring power, using power, is like eating or drinking or walking, on automatic pilot. Workers everywhere remain in the dark: obscurum per obscurius. All they know is that power is another word for control, and in their experience such control has always been outside of them.

What currently worries workers is that events suggest that those in charge—the CEO and his key executives courtiers—are not always diligent.

Events have proven to be the master. It is not uncommon that workers in the trenches have a better feel for the “state of the company.” It can even be argued that decisions issued in the trenches are likely to seem crucial in retrospect. Perfectly sensible orders issued from mahogany row may prove ultimately an embarrassment, foiled by an unfavorable work climate or the turn of events.

Power (control) exercised in the wrong place at the wrong time, and in the wrong manner invariably leads to corporate derailment or the equivalent of a corporate train wreck.  Stated another way, internal organizational stress and strain, if not acknowledged and properly addressed, can lead to organizational fatigue, instability, and consequently, an inability to respond effectively to accelerating external competitive demands.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s 19th century, Democracy in America (1834–1836), expressed anxiety about the pervasiveness of “soft despotism” in the conduct of business. His insight turned prophetic in the 20th century as we saw management attempting, and largely succeeding, to kill trade unionism with kindness.  Its success has contributed to an undesirable outcome, worker disenfranchisement.  This destabilization has led to worker disenchantment, apathy and counter dependence.

Unwittingly, management’s disingenuous approach to power sharing has led workers to go from being management dependent to counter dependent on the organization for their total well being, placing workers and managers poles apart.

Much energy is wasted at this interface. Managers with position power become aggressive, while workers with knowledge power retreat into submissive passive behaviors. Line managers know about this situation, but are far removed from corporate decision-makers.

Meanwhile, first causes are accessible to trench workers, who experience them first hand. If acted upon immediately, crises can be avoided later.  But workers too often do not act. They wait for orders from above. Control of the situation, when it is controllable, slips out of control and into a major crisis. This alone, and nothing deeper or more interesting, is the source of common corporate perturbations.

To be fair, executives have gravitated to a role as have workers that has proven counterproductive.  Managers would rather take the blame for disasters than admit their impotence in the face of events.  Prudent decision making is a necessary and sufficient condition of joint problem solving, especially in this electronic age.

Traditional executive leadership is a luxury workers can no longer afford.  They must take charge of their lives and destinies. For workers to enjoy the fruits of their labors they must embrace an equal share of the responsibilities. This requires commitment and accountability, the ability to take risks and failure in stride.  It requires mature adult workers.

Once established, there will be a different working mentality and a radically different distribution of power. No grand design will produce this outcome. It will be a gradual process based upon the primal drive of workers, survival!

The focus will shift from disorder to order. Power will begin to flow organically according to demands of the task; decisions will be made at the level of consequences; managers and workers will be treated as teammates; management will be part of the workforce, as compensation and entitlements will be brought more in line. Mythic executive infallible authority will vanish. Interdependency will be the key to order.

To grasp this concept, consider control on a personal basis.  If a worker is “envious,” he is told he must control his envy. This is wrong. This tends to separate envy from the person. He says, “I must not be envious!” This never works, as he becomes more obsessed with what others have and are than ever before. The worker is not separate from envy. He is envy! There is no way to change that fact. He may try to control envy as though it was separate from him, but it cannot be done. He may attempt to imitate someone else who has mastered his envy, and this, too, will fail. Not until he embraces the fact that envy is integral to his nature, can envy be understood, and therefore controlled.

The worker, who deals successfully with envy, moves toward envy, not away from it. He admits to himself that envy is “what is,” that he is the cause and effect of his own condition. This allows him to deal with his envy by bringing all the pain to the surface. Envy no longer is buried in his mind where it gnaws at him. Subject and object are one. Envy is controlled. He no longer feels a need to control envy, so he can. Without cause, there is no effect.

On the other hand, look at the 1960s and the Sexual Freedom Revolution. More than five decades later, sex is obsessional and more, not less a problem. Ask yourself, are we, as a society, more or less attuned to our sexual nature? Do we have more or fewer psycho-sexual hang-ups?

EXCERPT: THE WORKER, ALONE! Going Against the Grain (2015)

A QUESTION OF CONTROL!

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

© May 1, 2015

“A violent order is disorder, and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.”

—Wallace Stevens. American modernist poet

REFERENCE:

This is another excerpt from The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (revised, expanded and edited from its 1995 edition, due out in late summer 2015).

The very process of control breeds disorder, just as certainly as a sensible tolerance for unavoidable disorder leads to control.  The more the obsession with control the greater the chaos. Everyone is bound and shaped by control.

Most workers attempt to control themselves — their tempers, desires, appetites — because it is safe. There is security in control. Control generates a certain sense of safety, a certain assurance that with control, they will not fail.  But is this prudent behavior?

When there is a need for control, chaos is always around the corner. Control manifests a division between the controller and the thing controlled. Virtue does not lie in such separation. This is so because control implies effort, the demand for security, all in the name of what is good. But control is the very denial of goodness, and is therefore disorder.

Does a tree strive for control?  Does the universe exert effort to maintain ecological balance?  The observer who separates himself from the thing observed is the source of failure, not success.

A mind which sees directly without the paralysis of analysis is a mind without division. It is a whole mind, a sane mind, a mind one with itself. On the other hand, a neurotic mind is a divided mind, a mind at war with itself, a mind obsessed with control.

When such a mind believes it has realized total control, the body cannot move. The person is utterly in the grips of its mania, its neurotic need for control. Such a person is not free, more likely paralyzed with fear, caged in his own obsession.

We see this in the artist who is involved in creative destruction.  Thought is scrambled from “what is” to what is perceived; integrity of the frame is then restored in one sense and destroyed again in another. This is called “art.” The artist, whatever the endeavor, is in the business of control, only that control is then euphemized to an expression of culture.

Control is the basic neurosis of the workplace. Management desires to control workers to ensure that they are productive; that time is not wasted; that the organization operates at maximum efficiency. But do these worthwhile desires materialize? No, because the greater the intensity of management’s obsession with control the greater the chaos. 

The organization is an organism not unlike the autonomic nervous system of the human body, more so now with its electronic connective tissue, and is thwarted from its mission by arbitrary policies and procedures that either deny or take away from this reality.

Control is a function of order, and order is an integral function.  Each worker and manager must embody order through their own volition; their own action. Together, worker and manager are one function. What they hold in common is productive work.

George Orwell wrote “A Homage to Catalonia” (1938) about his personal experience and observations in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Northeastern Spain, more particularly Catalonia, was in the midst of the most far-reaching social revolution seen to that time in Western Europe. 

Workers were running factories, peasants large estates, waiters restaurants, trolley drivers complex transport systems, municipal workers sanitation systems. It didn’t last as Fascist General Francisco Franco with the support of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany prevailed, but it demonstrated, if only in cameo, what people are capable of doing given the opportunity.

The differentiation of managers from workers is an arbitrary one, a division which causes chaos in the world of work. Because of the cultural inclination to separate the controller from the controlled, the analyzer from the analyzed, there is corruption, disorder, distrust, violence and much ruthless manipulation in the workplace. 

Consequently, the more hysterical the quest for control the greater the workplace paralysis. This is willfully ignored throughout the working world, because control is at war with freedom, when control and freedom are but a single entity.

This is not so with young minds. Such minds are not afraid to learn. They are not yet deeply burdened with knowledge and experience. To learn means to observe oneself without division, without analysis, without denial or the censor of “what should be” and “what should not be.” There is no question of control. There is only experience.

Cultural conditioning is anathema to learning, the curse to seeing things clearly, to seeing things as they are. What cultural conditioning promotes is the idea of self-control in the individual, and the appearance of harmony in the workplace, both bogus ideas. This conditioning is the reason there is such madness in society, for the idea of control is the very embodiment of emotional rupture and breakdown.

There is no wisdom to self-control. Control is paradoxical.  Those consumed with a need for control, lose it; those not bothered with control, have it. What is more appropriate is self-organization, self-order. Workers and managers worry far too much about changing or controlling each other, or other things which disturb them. This is guaranteed to create frustration and conflict, because the only thing workers and managers can change or control is themselves. Order flows from this.

For the past quarter century we have had a bombardment of ideas on how to manage change. Actually, change in the workplace is of only secondary importance. Change will come about naturally, over time, once workers and managers bring about change in themselves. Order comes from within. To establish order takes more than good intentions, more than a change in attitude.  Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way workers and managers view the world. Such radicalism requires the individual going against the grain.

As long as there is the analyzer, the supervisor, the director, the administrator feverishly consumed with maintaining order, there will be the problem of chaos. It is such censors who create the problems by failing to understand the dynamics of control.

Unfortunately, as matters now stand, from the moment of birth to the moment of death, workers and managers seem consumed with the need for control of each other. The “must” and “must not,” the “should” and “should not” are stenciled on their brains.

This posed little problem when society was moving at a snail’s pace. No longer. The world is exploding with people and burgeoning technology. Flexibility, not rigidity; creativity, not conformity are now requirements. If anything, less control is called for, thus establishing a climate for the controller and the controlled to merge.

Control has developed a bizarre aspect in this new era of 24/7 cable news programs with journalists as simplifiers and codifiers of complex multi-dimensional conflicts and perturbations across the globe, situations that defy understanding much less explaining.

Yet, these intrepid globe-trotting journalists, such as Thomas Friedman, for instance, jet off to Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria, and a few days later appear on PBS television’s Charlie Rose program, and tell us exactly what’s wrong, and exactly what those in power should be doing about it, and why they are not. By contrast, the generation of scribes that came out of World War Two, such as Edward R. Murrow, and William L. Shirer were more circumspect, aware of distortions having seen only a corner of events, and therefore were much less inclined to come off as pundits.

Control implies conformity, imitation, following a particular principle, set of rules, an ideal all the way to respectability. Respectability is a moral dimension which better fits another place and another time. Morality is in the mind of the time, and it changes, not because of some great evil conspiracy, but because the requirements of the times demand it. Respectability cultivates a reverence for “what should be,” not “what is,” or reality.

Therefore, the very process of control breeds disorder. Disorder is brought about by the censor, the analyzer, the do gooder, the “true believer,” the pundit, the one who tries to impose what he thinks is right, instead of qualifying what he is saying or reporting from his limited perspective. Journalists have become “instant historians” in this age of instant everything. The mind of the censor is never a clear mind, capable of candid observation, because such a mind must ferret through various forms of authoritarianism, through vertical hierarchical arrangements, or must gingerly follow some system, guidebook, principle, or form of belief to which it is helplessly tethered. Such a mind does not belong to itself. It is lost to itself, impossibly entangled in the maze of its own stultifying conditioning. Alas, it is the mind of the expert, of the pundit.  It is the mind of the times.

The conflict between the controller and the controlled is programmed into workers and managers alike. They are actors in a drama in which they have no creative involvement. Religious and social sanctions control, shape, direct and cement the societal will to its purposes. Jesse Bering calls this The Belief Instinct (2011), which he finds very real, but questions its validity. In any case, so has it been throughout history. This makes most workers spectators to their own lives.

The controller, whomever he may be, proclaims, “I have the answer!” The answer invariably represents a proposed solution to a fragment of the problem, likely a new fad, gimmick or the rhetoric that provides expedient relief, but seldom a cessation to the aggravation.

The proclaimed answer is tied to the past, to what is known, not to the present or the present situation. It is old knowledge in a new suit of clothes. But reality requires a mind fresh, clear and undivided, a naked mind. Such a mind has no answers, nor does it worry about being offensive, stepping on toes, causing embarrassment, being prohibitively expensive, or fomenting argument.   Nor does it worry about acceptance, or going against the grain.