The Peripatetic Philosopher Asks: A BRIDGE TOO FAR?

A BRIDGE TOO FAR?

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

© October 12, 2019

MARGIE WRITES

I just finished reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essay on Self-Reliance (does that surprise you?)  I never cease to wonder at the hundreds of hours that philosophers and authors and other inquisitive minds spend studying (or pondering) the same subjects. I seem to have interpreted Emerson as saying "listen to your own heart - be true to one's self” and "don't be concerned with what is past - start anew."

Seems a workable philosophy to me. It appears that he writes of social, cultural, religious, and behavioral issues as is still done today and probably only resolved within one's self (did I interpret him accurately at all?)

I often wonder about people like yourself who read so much and who might be influenced in your thinking and writing by other authors, - does it change who you were/are?

Hope your doctor's appointment brought good news.

P.S. Ole Ralphie and I agree on prayer. I never pray for material things, only thanks, or courage, strength, etc. Mr. Emerson called personal gain prayers "vicious".

PPS. WHAT BRIDGE?

MY RESPONSE

Margie,

Thank you for your comments on my missive, “When I cannot sleep, I ponder.”  BB has taught me how to type with two hands – two or three fingers on my left hand and all working on my right hand.  So, in that sense, I am coping pretty well.  Thank you for your interest.

THE STRANGER THAT IS THE SELF

It is nice that you are reading Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And you are right.  He insists that experience is fundamental to our happiness and well-being, and that knowledge, per. se. is no substitute.   But does that mean we shouldn’t read and seek to enlarge our awareness of life through conversation with others through books?  Of course not.  The danger, and we are all vulnerable to this, is to only read what reinforces our current biases. 

My sense of what Emerson was attempting to do with this essay (you quote) was to guide the individual to connect with himself and hold that self, accountable and responsible – in other words, self-reliant – for his actions and their consequences. 

The hardest thing in life, it has been my experience, is to be true to oneself as that self is often a total stranger to us.  As I have recently shared with my readers, we are often in conflict with our “ideal self” or how we are supposed to be and our “real self” or how we actually are.  Further complicating this matter, we have “role demands” (our job or daily responsibilities) and “self-demands” (how we expect to be treated). 

The Reader’s Digest published a piece I wrote for its June 1993 issue.  The first sentence was:

To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself.

Most of us look for friends outside ourselves never considering friendship is not real or sustainable unless it is first authentic with ourselves.  I wrote in my first book, Confident Selling (1971):

Accept yourself as you are, warts and all, and chances are you will accept others as you find them. 

Listen to anyone complaining about someone not there and you will be hearing a recording of what they despise but deny about themselves. 

A WORD ABOUT PHILOSOPHY

British American philosopher Alan W. Watts (1915 – 1973) says we are all philosophers and this has nothing to do with formal education.  Although I also think there is room for academic and independent professional philosophers.  They anticipate and often define drastic or subtle changes in the temper of the times.  Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) may have said “God is dead!”  But what was that about? 

He could see secular society was replacing spiritual society and that science, materialism and progress were part of the new agenda of the West, replacing the dominance of religion, especially Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church.  The 19^th century was an energetic playground with wars fomenting new societal arrangements with the appearance of new nations and the disappearance of monarchies.

Read Nietzsche and you find he was a moralist who didn’t live long enough to see much of what he feared would transpire. 

A BRIDGE TOO FAR?

My point in this essay was that it is hard for us to communicate over our differences.  We take a stand or believe what we believed as a child is what others of the same programming would believe as well later in life.  Yet, we all don’t have the same experience.  We can say the difference is because “we read too many books,” when that doesn’t get inside the cause of the “BRIDGE TOO FAR.”

Should you read DEVLIN (2018), you would see how that experience caused the protagonist to be totally disenchanted with his Irish Roman Catholicism. 

But that wasn’t the source of the reference.  When I was with Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida, I wrote an article for an electrical engineering journal that came to the attention of the Director of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He asked Honeywell management's permission to interview me.  It was granted. 

He wanted me to come to Cambridge and work with his scientists and engineers who were designing the ring laser gyro that was being built in Clearwater, a separation of 1,000 miles.  The separation proved “A Bridge Too Far.”  

I write about this in TIME OUT FOR SANITY: Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age (2015).  It was also the featured article in the Quality & Participation Journal (July/August 1999). 

I would spend the better part of a month at MIT confirming much of what has been shared here.

Be always well,

Jim       

A CURSE OR BLESSING TO EMBRACE INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM?

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

© October 10, 2019

Thanks to general beliefs, the men of every age are enveloped in a network of traditions, opinions, and customs which render them all alike, and from whose yoke they cannot extricate themselves. Men are guided in their conduct above all by their beliefs and by the customs that are the consequence of those beliefs. These beliefs and customs regulate the smallest acts of existence, and the most independent spirit cannot escape their influence. The tyranny exercised unconsciously on men’s minds is the only real tyranny, because it cannot be fought against. 

Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931), “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1896)

FREUDIANISM IN THE ERA OF THE CROWD MENTALITY

For Corporate America to loosen the controls one turn, and allow a little individual freedom in, would be tantamount to a sacrilege. Yet, I know a man who has gone against the grain to establish his identity and a meaningful career. His name is Ken Shelton.

What did he do?  He left the crowd and embraced his freedom.  That is not easy.

On assignment for an American company, I know how difficult this can be.  In 1968, I experienced the draconian rule of South African apartheid. It left me a broken man, not sure why, but knew I needed a “time out!”  Once the assignment was completed, I took it – for two years.

Never into confidants but a natural loner, I read books, wrote one, played tennis regularly with a professor whom I had met when asked to give a lecture on South Africa at his college. Ironically, he would persuade me to go back to school to earn my Ph.D, but that is another story.

The famous Haslam Bookstore of St. Petersburg (Florida) became a second home.  There I was introduced to the Indian mystique, Krishnamurti, buying all his books, devouring them like a starving man.  The same happened with the American longshoreman turned philosopher Eric Hoffer, the British don Isiah Berlin, and a bevy of authors pursuing the historical Jesus and whimsical Apostle Paul, along with several volumes on such perplexing personalities of history as America's Andrew Jackson and Germany's Adolf Hitler.  Reading connected me with myself and became my therapy.

Without realizing it, I was identifying with outsiders who had a rage in their bellies, individuals who could not help themselves for taking on the crowd. I was still a long way from writing “Work Without Managers” (1991) or "Devlin" (2018), both of which were gestating in my soul.  I believe these books will survive my lifetime.

At the same time, I was on a quest to understand Freud.  BB cannot believe how many books by or about Freud that I have read, but it was his interpreters who first triggered my fancy in this climate of the crowd.

Freud made people think in a new way. Psychoanalysis, his invention, was offered as a physiological science in an age of hysteria, where the world of the Enlightenment was collapsing, as science was replacing religion as the new dogma.  Psychoanalysis, known as "the talking cure," differs from a number of rival psychologies, and is still widely disparaged, but persists as psychotherapy.

Pragmatic psychiatrists took a page from Alfred Adler (1870 – 1937), a former devotee of Freud’s who contends, in opposition to Freud, that society exerts a shaping influence of the mind. Adler, incidentally, has given us the terms “inferiority complex,” and “introvert” and “extrovert.”

Adlerian psychology emphasizes the human need and ability to create positive social change and impact. Adler's work stressed the importance of nurturing feelings of belonging and striving for superiority. He held to equality, civil rights, mutual respect, and the advancement of democracy as core values in his "Individual Psychology."  Now for the Freudian pragmatists.

ERIC BERNE, M.D.

Eric Berne (1910 - 1970) created Transactional Analysis introducing the mechanism with his book, “Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relations” (1964) being faithful to Freud’s Superego (The Morality Principle); Ego (The Reality Principle); and Id (The Pleasure Principle).

To these, he assigns “The Parent” to the Superego; “The Adult” to the Ego; and “The Child” to the Id.  

P – The Parent (Morality Principle)

A – The Adult (Reality Principle)

C – The Child (Pleasure Principle)

He insists all three of these are active in all of us throughout our lives in various transactional combinations depending on the situation and the status of our emotional health.

I see a lot of Parent and Child in today’s society, but very little Adult. Berne also mentions “warm fuzzies,” or the needed emotional compliments necessary for appropriate validation.

A scientist or an accomplished man of maturity may need only one a year from an esteemed colleague as opposed to a needy person, or say an entertainer who cannot survive a day without the accolades of a highly responsive audience.

[I witnessed this as a student at the University of Iowa. Bob Hope and his entourage were scheduled to perform at the Iowa Fieldhouse, capacity 15,000. When Hope was about to take the stage only about 100 or so were seated. In anger, he left the stage and took his crew to the VA Hospital nearby and performed for an obliging and enthusiastic captive audience.]

THOMAS A. HARRIS, M.D.

Thomas A. Harris (1910 – 1995), a close friend and colleague of Eric Berne, came up with a cliché to further popularize Berne’s Transactional Analysis. Educators, religious leaders and industrial trainers latched on to his simplistic model as if a message from the Oracle of Delphi.

The Harris book, “I’m OK -- You’re OK: A Practical Guide to Transactional Analysis” (1967) is faithful to all attributes of Berne’s paradigm, but in colloquial slang:

The PARENT – You’re not Okay; I’m Okay!

The ADULT – You’re Okay; I’m Okay!

The CHILD – I’m Okay; you’re not Okay!

Like Berne’s model, all the combinations were explored and identified. The book and its name has become a cliché although the Harris approach to psychotherapy is somewhat passé today.

JOHN M. DUSAY, M.D.

John M. Dusay’s approach, consistent with the premises of Berne and Harris, focuses on the egostates with the book title, “Egograms: How I see You and How You See Me” (1977). Dusay claimed that anyone can become the person they want to be. He shows the reader how to chart his five primary egostates:

(1) Critical Parent, the judgmental part of us;

(2) Nurturing Parent, the part of us that wants people to feel better;

(3) Adult, the logical rational part of us;

(4) Free Child, the fun-loving part of us;

(5) Adapted Child, the conforming repressive part of us.

BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE 

This egogram is from, “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (1996):

Should you be familiar with either of these books or the wave of self-conscious self-regard bordering on self-indulgence of the American culture in the 1960s through the 1980s, you can appreciate the innocence of the time. The “talking cure” to anxiety, lack of self-esteem, paranoia, insecurity and depression had some legitimacy as psycho-pharmaceuticals were then essentially limited to the treatment of psychosis and similar disorders, not to social psychological complaints and common accompanying neuroses.

To sum it up, the gestation of modernism to post-modernism has gone through three phases:

(1) Post-World War Two, the United States went from self-imposed rationing and sacrifice in support of the war to become the manufacturing center of the world to put it back on its feet;

(2) A period of prosperity and affluence to ordinary Americans never before realized, led to self-indulgence and a displaced national sense of exceptionalism if not invincibility;

(3) Then Japan, Inc., South East Asia, Singapore and Germany roared back with a vengeance. A counterfeit economy and its concomitant leadership clung to the idea that nothing had changed.

Meanwhile, the crippled genius of the American people was looking for a safety valve. Berne, Harris and Dusay provided an innocuous one, which like Emerson’s Transcendentalism was short lived but equally fascinating.

Psychiatry has become our psycho-pharmacologist with the pharmaceutical industry now a major growth industry. In this new century, the American constituency can either escape into its drug culture or be preoccupied with its electronic "Toys of the Mind."

How artificial is the experience of life through Facebook and other social media; how narrow relational connections. Yet, no one seems to mind.

Newspapers, now on life support, act on the public conscience as an advertising vehicle to excite, tantalize, terrorize and placate our collective conscience without any display of indignity. Additionally, the social and electronic media, mainly through television and the Internet, propel us as if automatons to predetermined destinations of purpose, dogma, and political sanctuary, or they provide social psychological remedies for all that ails us as if wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

The overcrowding of the modern mind with names, places, phrases, pictures, events, controversies and other haranguing minutia, diverts the mind from its own purpose, fulfillment and happiness in its own right.

IN THE MIDST OF THIS, FREEDOM CAN BE AN INDIVIDUAL BLESSING

If you are able to get past these aggravations and able to see that it doesn’t matter what others think or say or do vis-à-vis your own motivation, you won’t own their problems nor will you imitate them to ease their discomfiture. If they still have a problem with you as you are, then move on, as they are no friend of yours. Parents can damage you as much if not more than others. Keep that in mind. Your role in life is not to validate your parents or anyone else, but to discover your own essence.

A friend of mine, a successful man in every sense of the word has fought his way through this briar patch to come out the man that he is and has become. He writes in his essay, “Field Colors”:

“When I gave a speech at BYU that won Best Speech in a competition, I was told it was too “off-color”. When I launched a weekly magazine at BYU that included colorful graphics, photos, reviews and interviews, I won National Student Journalist of the Year and was kicked out of school; and when I won National University Editor of the Year for publishing a colorful and entertaining alumni magazine, I was fired. When I published a book on Counterfeit Leadership as editor/publisher of Leadership Excellence magazine, I was shunned by former colleagues and lost one-third of our subscribers. It’s possible that no one in my community has experienced and suffered more back-bite and knife-in-back for adding a little life and color to a black-and-white culture and tradition.”

Elsewhere he writes, responding to my missive, “When I cannot sleep, I ponder”:

“Thanks, Jim, I am accustomed to being hated within and without my own community, church, culture, and country. Since the vote appears to be universal and almost unanimous, I must be the designated villain. Like you, I am "cursed" to have my own voice, independent of all who seek to influence or incarcerate me. It comes from extensive cross cultural reading, writing and publishing.”

Since I was a little boy, and as far forward as a hospital corpsman on the flagship of the Sixth Fleet, I have been harassed for reading such books as Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, the Bronte sisters as well as Dostoyevsky, Chekov, Ibsen, Strindberg and others. “Why are you reading that crap?” a shipmate said to me one day. I just shook my head. A person who wants to be a writer, which I have always wanted to be, reads to get a sense of his own style and composition.

When I was a sophomore at Iowa, my literature professor approached me. He wanted to recommend me to the “University of Iowa Honors Program in the Humanities,” which was an international acclaimed program. When I mentioned this to my da, a passenger brakeman on the railroad, he exploded. “I see these guys on my trains reading these books, long hair, unkempt, lazy, acting like they don’t have a care in the world.” I stayed in chemistry!

Berne, Harris and Dusay came out of a quieter time advancing a formula that assumed that 80 to 90 percent of the American public could manage their own relationships without a personal trainer, licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, or without a retinue of addictive mind numbing drugs.

But now we have the Baker Act here in Florida where people considered a danger to themselves or others can be committed to a clinic, hospital or sanatorium without their approval. Maverick psychiatrist Thomas Szasz (1920 – 2012) insists madness is manufactured and a convenient dodge for psychiatrists who still have their heads in the sand. It’s nice to note that publisher and author Ken Shelton is not one of them.

WHEN I CANNOT SLEEP, I PONDER

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 7, 2019

Ken Shelton, whom many of whom my readers are suspect are so because they don’t know him. Ken is a highly successful publisher, academic, international lecturer and keynote speaker, leader in his church and community, novelist, consultant and a generous sharer of his wisdom, humor and his candid take on life.

His missive “Voices from the Dust” deals with crimes against persons and society and our collective ambiguity. He writes:

For much of my life, I have gone to a University and lived in a Community that wants to sweep all dirt under rugs: to become see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys for the sake of not rocking boats owned by goats and donkeys; to “lie for the Lord” in order to keep the establishment afloat, using the logic: if we keep all criminals out of jail (and conceal all case records), we can keep them out of hell. It’s better, after all, not to cut off the head of King Laban if he is related to Coach Saban—even if Cougar or Bama nations dwindle in unbelief. Let’s save one and all, give preferential treatment to sinners and criminals and tip and tilt the scales of justice toward mercy and grace, forgiveness and forgetting, leniency and clemency, since everyone and everything is beautiful in his or her own way—so be happy and live another day! I wonder . . .

Ken alerts our minds and consciences, not to think as he does, but to ruminate a little over what he chooses to share. That’s a dangerous undertaking as what we think is guided by our emotions and not our reason. Proof of this is that we look for confirmation not refutation when it comes to our beliefs.

Ken uses sarcasm and misdirection. I use simple declarative sentences: We have lost our moral compass and thus our way.

I also wrap ideas in schematics, equations and formulas, and candid admissions of changes in my thinking. These exchanges are respondent to my changing sense of the nature of human existence.

My dear friend Margie responded to my missive, “Crossing the Treacherous Waters of Differences." You began to question your belief in Catholicism and that your 'library is full of books by scholars who support the myths in our religious culture and belief system."

My analysis: YOU READ TOO MUCH! I also have read many books by great scholars who support my beliefs - it's called THE BIBLE.

So a couple of Germans decided that God was invented and then died. Life goes on - miracles still happen. You stated that atheism and agnosticism are more prevalent today and many scholars that you have read are leaning more to those beliefs than Christianity. YOU READ TOO MUCH! (By your own admission, you have renounced your Catholicism that you were taught as a child in favor of (?)

You can't just believe there is a God - you have to believe IN him. When people can explain how the earth was formed or the miracle of life forming from a single cell, then I'LL QUIT BELIEVING.

In the meantime, keep getting better and no more reading by any German authors.

When the Bridge is Too Far to Cross

My answer was, “Life for me is not about ‘what.’ It is about 'why.' The ‘why’ gets inside the ideas of the ‘what’ that make people tick. My books are meant to explain this in terms of:

Self-Demands (protecting our delicate egos) and our Role-Demands (who and what we are and do)

Ideal-Self (how we think we should be) and Real-Self (how we actually are)

The conflict between these demands and selves determine if we define the actual situations we encounter clearly or not.

THE FISHER MODEL OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION

Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902). A Kindred Spirit

In reading a lot, you are bound to come across someone who has had a similar approach to life as that of yourself. Butler attacked progress and respectability with his utopian novel “Erehwon” (Nowhere spelled backward). I have done the same with a series of books on Corporate America excess. He self-published as have I, not concerned about sales, again, as like him I never have had to make my living as a writer; nor had he. But where we have a special connection is that he wrote his scandalous THE WAY OF ALL FLESH (1903) between 1873 and 1884, but insisted it not be pushed until after his death, while DEVLIN, also semi-autobiographical has been published within my own lifetime.

Then there is Plato’s theory of forms (theory of ideas).

Plato perfected his style over time by the systematic process of dividing a position into parts and then making generalizations that would advance his ideas. He called "form."

Plato’s “theory of forms,” maintains that there are two levels of reality: the visible world of sight and sound. We can recognize beauty in a painting or hear it in a voice, and therefore have a general sense of beauty whichever form it takes. This is not rational, but abstract but has as much meaning as the rational and concrete. They are complementary forms.

This capacity to recognize beauty is perception in the abstract and therefore invisible to our lives in the mind. We take the conceptual beauty with us as memory and it lives in our minds as an extension of ourselves.

Plato, however, does not develop this theory of forms, as he apparently felt no such need. It was self-evident. In essence, the “theory of forms” represents his attempt to cultivate our capacity for conceptual and abstract thought, as complements not in conflict with each other. This maturity of reason is something we still struggle with today. We escape from this reality by living in myth, which religion is, or become obsessed with "toys of the mind" (e.g. , social media and electronic games).

Reality is so discombobulating that we supplant one obsession with another. 

In The Republic and Phaedrus, Plato describes the soul as divided into three parts: sensual (appetite), spiritual, and rational. He explains our psychological complexity partly to provide justification for philosophy as the highest of all pursuits, and being representative of the highest part of the soul, or the rational part.

Psychology grew out of philosophy. What is interesting is that psychology has never found a more comfortable home since leaving its philosophical roots. At various times in the past century, psychology has mimicked mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and social science, never quite leaving religion. There are more than sixty disciplines and sub-disciplines in psychology today. Small wonder the expression “homeless mind” has come into prominence in recent decades.

Plato acknowledges and seeks to explain the fact that we all experience "inner conflict." This is the basis of his psychology. But his theory seeks not only to explain this inner conflict but also to present the rational part of the soul as superior. Philosophy, according to Plato, is essentially the practice of refining our rationality.

This Greek philosopher has had a pragmatic influence on me that is apparent in my writing. For example, Klaus writes:

In the finale analysis we really don't understand how we are made. They used to think that people who do all these bad behavior like a killer or anyone else it was because of their environment or their genetic makeup. They don't know why people do what they do. For example a person who gets pleasure from killing people can't be explained. Serial killers give no indication to the people they live around what they are really like. All these things don't happen because Adam & Eve ate an apple. As you said all these stories were written because people were trying to understand. I am not implying that bad things people do should be overlooked, but if there is a God involved, I sure would like to know what he is doing. As far as I'm concerned religion doesn't explain anything. I look at our two daughters who are different from each other. I look at our 3 grandchildren who are totally different from each other. When I taught art, I had students who were talented. It was never a parent, but some relative in their family. Look at yourself and what you accomplished or at your children. I am sure they are all different. Or your son in law who can't understand what you desire. If you can explain all this, I would love to hear about it. Plato would remind Klaus, in terms of form, that he is obviously more comfortable in the conceptual than the abstract. It is not a question “how we are made,” but how we relate in the abstract to each other in terms of love and hate, beauty and ugliness, today and tomorrow (see www.theperipateticphilosopherblogspot.com., “Ideas Control the World: Our Debt to Plato,” 12/14/05).

And yes, we are different but alike as well. Our culture, which is an abstraction, molds us subliminally into the person we become. When I was young, I was gone Monday to Friday on the road as a chemical sales engineer, then still young I was an executive traveling about the world and not always home on the weekends; then in South Africa, I was often gone visiting affiliate operations.across South Africa. Not surprising, the cultural influence of my four children is more in tune with their mother.

Culture is very prominent in my ideas. I wrote:

Organizational culture follows this formula: 

The structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates organizational behavior; organizational behavior establishes whether an organization will succeed or fail; or simply vegetate and ultimately expire. (Quality & Participation Journal, Winter, 2002).

I have differentiated Personality (what we acquire) from Essence (what we own, or with what we are born). Personality can and will change, Essence cannot be changed, but it can be developed.

That said, there are several MLB and NFL players in which three generations have made it to the big leagues. Obviously, they are different but alike in very similar talented ways, which are genetic.

While still on this matter of form, Eric Hoffer wrote “The True Believer” (1950). It corroborated another of my simple equations:

BELIEF + BELONGING = BEHAVIOR

BB will be getting up. I think I’d better get some shut eye as I have a doctor’s appointment today.

Be always well,

Jim

The Peripatetic Philosopher comments on "His Most Mature Work":

MY MOST MATURE WORK?

Confessions of a Writer in the Midst of a Work

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 25, 2018


To those who may be interested:

For the past several weeks, I've been working on an essay, updated only slightly, that I'm massaging with the care seldom shown in my works before as I've always been in a hurry to get it out, in print, so as to move on to what is fomenting in my mind. I suppose that is because I started so late to be a full time writer (1990) although having written sporadically before including several published essays (early 1970s) and one book (Confident Selling, Prentice-Hall, 1971).

One of my colleagues at Honeywell accused me of using the company and its people as my laboratory, and being little interested in either the company or the people much beyond that. I was employed by Honeywell from 1980 - 1990, and although that comment was brutal, I suppose there is some truth to it.

Novelist and philosopher Charles D. Hayes, once wrote in one of his books, that I was an expert on organizational culture and behavior but never found an organization in which I was comfortable. Again, Charles had (and has) a point.

Recently, the Clinton County Historical Society (Clinton, Iowa) hosted a soiree for me in which I talked at some length on how I became a writer, suggesting that I knew it was my destiny as early as when I was a five-year-old because I have thrived in a climate of trauma; and have been more comfortable observing behavior than participating in it, although I was a four-sport athlete in grammar and high school which forced me out of that isolation.

I also confessed to that CCHS audience that it has taken me a lifetime to recognize, admit and accept that I am a natural introvert as Dr. Alfred Adler would define that inclination.

Yet, this is another confounding thing about labels. I was a successful chemical sales engineers with Nalco Chemical Company while going against the grain of what was then called "selling," developing my own approach which was essentially counterintuitive. I explained this approach, and why successful in my first book, Confident Selling (1971).

The book was accepted without preamble by Prentice-Hall (P-H) two weeks after receiving the manuscript, and in print for twenty years (1971-1991), selling over 100,000 copies.

Since I wrote it in six weeks, and sent it off unedited, I thought this writing business was a breeze. Nearly fifty years later, I can tell you it is hardly that. It is very hard work with rejection and discouragement part of the drill.

If writing is your call, and this I expressed to the CCHS audience, then al-oneness is not a punishment but an elixir. There is something to being alone and not needing the company of others for validation. It is a kind of joy being one's own best friend, looking for answers from empirical data in one's own life rather than from secondhand sources. 

A crowd for me is three people, or someone else other than my Beautiful Betty.

Several years ago, a friend and former principle turned historian, (the late Gary Herrity), said to me, "Jim, do you know what your genre is?"

I smiled and said, "My genre?"

"Yes, how would you classify your output which is somewhat mind boggling."

"Life," I answered, "I'd say my genre is life."

Unsatisfied with this answer, he continued, "I don't believe that would be very satisfying to a publisher."

I smiled again, "You've noticed? They're not standing in line waiting for my output."

"Doesn't that bother you?"

"Doesn't that bother me?" I repeated. "Should it?"

Obviously, this ended the inquiry, and so we went on to other things.

When you hear from several sources, including your own family, that you are different, and it is treated as a pejorative, you feel more at home with dead authors who have experienced a similar conundrum, knowing that when you are gone, someone will gain encouragement from your going against the grain.

Someone wrote that I repeat many of the same insights and stories in several of my books. I asked him if he had a problem with that as novelist James Patterson writes 50 or 60 books telling the same story with different scenarios and characters and they are all national bestsellers.

He wrote back, "But they are entertainments!  You write serious nonfiction."

My current project

Indeed. People will read my latest book, which is one of the shortest and will see in the end notes and bibliography of a lifetime of reading, but with little sense that this book has been gestating for many years in the back of my mind.

I wrote the book in 1999 in a rush with my good friend and archivist Canadian George Daly, keeping it in his files. Then I wrote it again in 2004 and went to a copy place and had it bound as my only copy. Then another Canadian friend, the academic and chemist, Henry van Eyken suggested I read Israeli scholar and historian Juval Noah Harari's two books, SAPIENS and HOMO DEUS, which I did.

About every tenth book I read makes me think. When that happens, I appreciate the writer's diligence and applaud his mastery. It was apparent I had covered many of the same themes as Harari in NEAR JOURNEY'S END if more modestly. His two polished and expensive editions totaled nearly 1,000 pages to my mere 200.

Clearly, the good professor is on the Information Age's bandwagon, and those who read me, know that I am not.

Professor Harari sees man or Homo sapiens on the way to extinction, and I see man in transition. He sees algorithms and data as the new religion, and I see God and the soul and the conventional religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam taking a respite from the hysteria in the catacombs of antediluvian times to regroup.

My little book should be out on Kindle in September written from an American's point of view, being critical of narcissistic America which fails to grow up or face the reality of the challenges of the "Internet of All Things," as Dr. Harari puts it.

If interested, stay tuned.

JRF

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares a conversation on Intuitive Leadership:

Intuitive leadership & the Tsunami Soul

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 30, 2019

George claims, rightly so, that I've said this all before. I answer:

Thanks for your response to my request as to how you like my title, "INTUITIVE LEADERSHIP." 

It is true I read a lot. And I'm now into 700 pages of Jacques Barzun's massive "Dawn to Decadence" (2000). It covers 1500 to 2000 in Western history and was published when Barzun was 93. 

I had read his "The House of Intellect"(1959) when I was young and it made quite an impression on me. In fact, if you have read it, you might understand why it woke me up and found me retreating from everything I was taught to cherish: ideas, authority, education and my culture (Catholicism). 

Then South Africa was experienced, corroborating my malaise, which found me retreating from life (and work), resigning from Nalco, and from the self I was programmed to be, doing nothing for two years but reading books, playing tennis and basketball with my boys and their friends after school, consulting a bit, then going back to school for six years (full time), year around to earn a Ph.D. 

Graduate academics were everything Barzun had said they were and were not. So, the last shreds of my idealism were essentially left behind in meaningless scholastic pedantry. 

Life before and since has been my best teacher.

Yes, I’ve said all this before in my books, but what I have not said is why I have had the extraordinary life that I have had, landing on my feet no matter what I have done. It was all there – between the lines and words – but not necessarily apparent. It was – what I might call – my nascent “Intuitive Leadership” – since I was a child. 

What I would like to do now is go from episode to episode to point out what transpired and why and what was learned. 

How many people give up (a high six figure income in 2019 dollars) with a wife and four children ages 5 to 8 to support, then to do nothing for two years, only to go back to school when nearly broke to rise again to corporate executive status in another company (Honeywell Europe) and for the first time find love in marriage against all odds? 

Three things I’ve always had going for me: (1) I am a listener not only to others but to myself; (2) with rare exception, I accept myself as I am, therefore am not easily fooled by others; and (3) have no trouble admitting I feel before I think. Feeling a situation (and people in it), when not ignored has proven close to infallible for me. 

That said, I’ve not always listened to myself, but almost always when in dire circumstances, not cognitively, as it exists only in my subtext, but intuitively. 

But when I do listen, this finds me often experiencing not what is expected but something considered counterintuitive. 

Will “Intuitive Leadership” resonate with others? I don’t know.

In any case, Barzun shows grandly how there is nothing new. Every triumph, scandal, colossal embarrassment or defeat has likely happened many times in the past 500 years. Indeed, there have been comforting “dawns” and discomforting “decadences” throughout Western history. 

In the end, there is little evidence we are anything but simple souls despite our many engineering feats and inventions to prove the contrary.

My whole writing life has been addressed to sharing what I have learned. I am not the most gifted of men, but I’ve paid attention. That has been the focus of my missives – to alert a society in a state of relative somnolence that there are acres of diamonds under their feet waiting to be picked up. 

The war everyone thinks they are facing is not “out there.” It resides inside waiting to be addressed. To read the books today, surf the net, you detect a preference for social media to personal identity, for national political intrigue to family concerns. 

Orchestrated escape as entertainment has been the order of the day dominated by those who man the power grid while a tsunami is churning inside society calmed by the narcotics of political chicanery, social gratuitous violence and media scandal. 

Be always well,

Jim

+

The Peripatetic Philosopher exposes fallacy of efficiency:

THE FALLACY OF EFFICIENCY 

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

© September 28, 2019

Workers like to measure themselves against their own criteria and to track their progress towards their desired outcomes. It gives them a sense of “value added.” They want to be effective in what they are doing. But they resent it when they are measured on the basis of how efficiently they perform. Effectiveness is a measure of service to others; to meeting the requirements of users.

Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (2nd Edition, 2014)



Insight during long recovery

Nervous about this second surgical procedure I was about to undergo, and not in an especially talkative mood, I let my mind accept matters as they were, while April, the main supervising nurse was competently coordinating a staff of medical professionals, her performance reminding me of an efficiency expert. She liked that, “it is better than an ‘air traffic controller’ that one of my previous patients compared me to.”

This current procedure called for checking the health of my heart after “open heart surgery,” which occurred more than twelve weeks ago, looking for possible blood clots about the heart by passing a tube (with camera) down my throat while sedated. If any blockage had been found, it would have negated proceeding.

My heart, since the first surgery, has been in what is called “arrhythmia,” with my pulse running at an abnormal level of around 122, when it normally varies between 56 and 65. The condition is known as “Atrial fibrillation” or AFib.” It can be corrected by shocking the heart, which was done. Afterwards, and the very next day, I felt as I once did after playing in a high school football game, seemingly sore in every bone in my body. Now, days later, I am fine, with my blood pressure and pulse now in my normal range.

Nurse April’s efficiency found my mind wondering to the disparity, however, between “efficiency and effectiveness,” precipitating these reflections.

Output versus Outcomes

My long corporate career has convinced me that “efficiency” is a misnomer as a description of effective human endeavor; more like a stop sign in which those in charge take comfort in the idea of seeing efficiency as a fait accompli; failing to note, necessarily, that the results (output) are not always consistent with those expected (outcomes). On the contrary, the opposite is more likely to be the case for the emphasis is on the wrong focus.

Workers in the 21st century no longer react to the authoritative dictums of management like the automatons Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 – 1915) chose to view them as being a hundred years ago. Taylor, father of the efficiency movement, which dominated a good part of the 20th century, especially in the United States, is the author of The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) where he wrote:

“One of the very first requirements for man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles an ox than any other type.”

Not to be outdone, the esteemed Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr. (1875 – 1966), CEO of General Motors, took pride in announcing that GM never missed a dividend to stock holders during The Great Depression, while 20 percent of the American workforce was under/unemployed. Today his name is immortalized in The Sloan School of Management at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Why the fallacy to efficiency?

If you focus on efficiency measurements, chances are you get the output you expect. But if you focus on process, and correct chronic problems at the source, you are promoting effectiveness and can possibly realize outcomes beyond expectations.

With such a process focus, attention is directed at the vital few problems that make up 80 percent of the difference as opposed to being obsessed with doing everything right the first time. This leads to a fixation on the trivial many problems that make up only 20 percent of the desired outcomes. In the face of this, the irony is that quality award programs, which has become a burgeoning industry within itself, remain notably popular and totally loyal to efficiency.

We have seen this with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, an award that recognizes U.S. organizations in business, healthcare, education, and the nonprofit sector for quality performance in terms of excellence. We have also seen it with The Deming Statistical Prize. Caveat:

If there is not a significant cultural change from the top to the bottom, whatever the sincerity of intentions the results will be disappointing.

This was the case with Florida Power & Light. Jim Alyea writes in his article, “Total Quality Management” (2012):

(Disappointed with the results of Deming’s “Seven Point Quality Statistical Process”) FDL made sweeping changes during the months following receipt of the award. The more stringent requirements of Deming’s quality program, though not abandoned, were pushed into the background. The Quality Department was reduced from 85 full-time individuals monitoring the quality teams to 6, and the quality-related departments set up during the award application process to do statistical “quality reviews” were disbanded. The number of tracked “quality indicators” were cut from 41 to 3.

Clearly, FPL was set on winning the award and not of a mind to make a distinct cultural change to bring everyone on board. An experience with an American subsidiary in Europe relates to this.

As Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for an American fortune 500 company in Europe during the 1980s, I experienced the sham that this can turn out to be. From Work Without Managers, 2ND edition, 2014, pp. 214-216:

Imagine a small high tech operation in which 400 employees conscientiously come to work every day. This operation — once a highly competitive leader in its specialized field — suddenly finds itself in a desperate survival mode with executives working seven days a week (some ten to 12 hours a day), vainly struggling to keep the operation afloat.

In this situation, work means executives cordoning themselves off from other employees, frantically running from meeting to meeting — from marketing to sales; from engineering to production; from crisis to crisis. The operation is under siege, and no one has time to think, much less smile, as morbid activity fills a humorless void.

Meetings provide the worry beads for this anxious group with preparation for meetings leaving little time for calm reflection. Work, albeit undeniably laborious, finds no one with either the inclination or courage to call ‘time out’ for a sanity check.

Yet, at this most critical moment, the focus is shifted suddenly from ‘the problem’ and refocused on the demands of the corporate fathers for a Total Quality Management review. All energy is now rededicated to an elaborate presentation of the ‘State of Quality,’ combining CYA and SYA ‘show and tell’ documentation. A veritable magnum opus of 1300 pages is generated, with copies, of course, for all corporate fathers. The text is then featured in a four-hour, 400-Power Point presentation in living color.

Someone from another planet watching this spectacle might conclude “there is no intelligent life on the planet earth.”

The corporate fathers, numbed to the bone at the conclusion of this exercise, reciprocate by directing the staff to return to the drawing board and “simplify, codify and verify your findings.”

After weeks of Herculean effort, you would think the profound shock of this would break staff members’ composure — if not their decorum (see Sisyphus). Instead, you see faces filled with weary resignation (except the secretarial pool — their marriages are on hold, and to them, it is “enough already!”). As one secretary put it, “It’s as if all my energies were poured down a black hole, without the slightest hint of light.”

Sisyphus in Hades - condemned to roll a stone up a hill, only to have it roll down again as it nears the top for eternity.

This epitomizes corpocracy at its most debilitating stage. ‘Non-thinking thinking’ to do ‘non-doing doing’ of ‘non-thing things’ becomes a matter of routine — or “if you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with bullshit.” This was the effort of 80 men and women against an organization of 400.

Stated otherwise, 80 self-appointed saviors operated without the support, input, or involvement of the other 320. Yes — 80 people were observed pushing the great stone of Sisyphus up the slope, while four times that number stood by and watched (laughing through their teeth).

“It’s not our problem,” the multitude sings in chorus. “Management got its tit in the ringer! Let management get it out!” These workers are ‘having none of it.’ So glib. So righteous. So comfortable in their ignorance. They are not simply irresponsible; they are nonresponsive.

Not a single worker interviewed stopped to think it was his or her job that was on the line. Management takes care of its own. Shake the tree and it lands on different branches; or at the very least is given a golden parachute to break its fall. Not so the workers. Poverty faces them. Outplacement counseling, two week’s severance pay, and encouraging words don’t feed a family for very long.

Then to add insult to injury, giving credence to these workers’ passivity, the Total Quality Management team was given handsome bonuses and everyone else a company party. After six months, operations slipped back to how they had been before the frenzied drive for the quality award.

Incidentally, The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) is an award established by the U.S. Congress in 1987 to raise awareness of quality management and recognize U.S. companies that have implemented successful quality management systems. The award is the nation's highest presidential honor for performance excellence. So, US politics has had a hand in this deception. This high tech subsidiary was committed to winning a quality award similar to the MBQA. The 20 percent that represented management and direct reports worked feverishly seven days a week for literally months to win the award while the 20 percent not designated management sat on their hands.

You cannot change the value system of any entity with a corporate sponsored award system until you first change the organization’s mindset and culture. Expediency is always ephemeral.
Organizations are not unlike individuals in that once recognized and esteemed for the hard work necessary to achieve an award, whatever its legitimacy, there is a high probability that to sustain that positive spirit mechanisms must be in place that celebrate that precious esteem every day. It is best that these mechanisms be unobtrusive as FPL’s Deming protocols read too much like efficiency devices, which inevitably are found obtrusive.

Alas, quality is not an award or a designated factor, but a ubiquitous mind-set, which is a cultural phenomenon and cannot be transferred to a specific group or a segment of operations (as was the case in Geneva, Switzerland where the Procurement Department’s management got monetary bonuses while workers got “high fives, and nothing else). For if it has an exclusive management designation, as it did in Geneva, quality is likely to have a short life span.

The same can be said of Quality Control Circles (QCC). They worked miraculously well in Japan, Inc., especially during the 1980s and 1990s, because Japan, at the time, was an exclusively collective society with a group think mentality while the United States was/is an individualistic society with self-interests dominating its ego driven mentality.

Making this matter even more perplexing , Japan today is still primarily a blue collar working society with a growing professional class, while the United States has been a professional workforce for nearly 40 years (see “The Worker, Alone,” 1995).

Professionals are salaried like management and do not respond well to being treated as if only grammar school graduates. The protocol, policies & procedures, and rules of engagement, although still widely practiced, have more in common with workers of pre-WWII than with workers in this new century. That said, professional workers too often are obliged to follow the dictates of authority figures (“position power”) who are often out of touch with the technical requirements of work today and sullied with obsolescent skills and know how. Meanwhile, professionals with “knowledge power” sit on their hands and take orders from headquarters. Effectiveness is sacrificed for order. This is not new situation. American business has operated in “1945 nostalgia” for nearly 75 years. Those in charge are the same gray beards only they are the grandsons or great-grandsons of their descendants.

QCC’s have had some success in the United States with hourly blue collar workers but that has tapered off precipitously in light of the fact that blue collar workers are now mainly professionals with credentials.

Why is society always 50 to 100 years behind the times?

The answer, at least to me, is obvious. It is well established but ignored. That is because most authority figures who control the screws of the economic, industrial, military, educational and government machine refuse to turn the screws a single turn to allow fresh ideas to germinate. Let’s face it, Corporate America is dedicated to the status quo come hell or high water.

American Corporate Management’s investment is in maintaining power and control with its antiquated “position power” while tossing crumbs and pointless kudos to the burgeoning “knowledge power” professional workforce, which is too timid to read the tea leaves. So, everything remains as it is, which is gridlock or the modus operandi of the day.

In fact, Corporate Management will stubbornly defend matters as they exist pointing out that the America’s economy is booming during a trade war with China, that the Dow Jones Industrial are flirting with an all-time high, that the low unemployment is the lowest it has been in years, and that more women and minorities have jobs and improving economic status than ever before. It can be argued that all or most of this is true.

But buried in the fine print of these truisms is the fact that the world is refusing to change with the prevalent challenging indicators of the times such as pollution and global warming, not to mention violence in our cities, workplaces, schools and businesses.

These figures hide an important fact that nobody, especially those at the top of the power grid are likely to admit:

1 Management, as it is, has become redundant, obsolete, and counter-productive, yet more colleges and universities have MBA programs feeding this glutted market with knowledge workers with anachronistic credentials and atavistic skills.

2 Institutional government as it is now practiced, is glutted with a House of Representative and a Senate in perennial polarity as governance has been reduced to self-interested obtuseness. Moreover, many if not the majority belong to the affluent class with little in common with the majority of Americans. Trained in the discipline of gridlock, since most are attorneys, litigious engagement is the order of the day. They find new ways to avoid the challenges of the people’s business.

3 In the absence of dealing with matters at hand, we have become a jingoistic or cliché driven society. Politics has become mainly social and self-conscious. Simplistic expressions have become surrogate for action: Buck Stops Here, Walk the Talk, Open door policy, American Exceptionalism, Harvard, Princeton, Yale Elitism (HYPE), American righteousness (imperialism), Might makes right. Right to bear arms (NRA), Civil disobedience (CRM), Black Power, Right to life (antiabortionists), Right to control my body (Feminism), Gay Pride, Gay Rights, Black Pride, Black Lives Matter and so on.

What I would have liked to have shared with April

Like above, I would have liked to have shared one of the lessons learned along the way with excerpts from published works and missives from my blog (e.g., The Peripatetic Philosopher.blogspot.com).
 

* * *

PS   This may turn into a little book to track my working, writing, thinking life. Stay tuned.

The Peripatetic Philosopher revisits an old idea - SODIUM IS SODIUM

Sodium is Sodium

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

© November 10, 2005

If the chemist is studying the element such as sodium, he does not say it is his sodium, or that somebody else studies his sodium, and of course they compare notes. Sodium is sodium universally.

David Bohm, in a conversation with J. Krishnamurti, The End of Time (1985)


The roots of psychological conflict may be as simple as the denial that “sodium is sodium.” We like to take possession of our angst as if it is ours, alone, that nobody else hurts as much as we do, is as anxious as we are, or feels as alone as we do.

Part of us sees that we are connected, but seemingly a greater part of us sees ourselves as separate. It is as if we, alone, are experiencing this ordeal called “life” in an impenetrable shell; that no one else has the faintest idea what we are experiencing, when we are all caught up in the same illusion. You cannot see nor can I see it because the illusion has been cultivated, nurtured and has become our identity. It is part of the structure that we call life.

If you doubt the strength of this illusion that wraps us in indefinable patterns, call on someone you haven’t seen in years, remembering how miserable they were or complain to be, and chances are you will see little change in their situation. Misery has become a security blanket, which they have no intentions of leaving.

You visit them, attempt to cheer them up, take them someplace to get free of themselves, and for a while, color comes back into their face, a smile breaks across their lips, and a lightness of being seems apparent. But when you leave, they go back to their same old self. Should you visit them a year or more later, it is as if you had never left. They are back to their old gloomy self. Why is that?

There may be a quietness to you, a caring empathetic intelligence which is non-verbal but felt because you pay attention. It doesn’t last because you are outside; you are with the person but not of the person. It is like going to empty church, and feeling extraordinarily good about yourself in the quiet of the place. Here the only music is the rhythm of the rafters responding to the wind. Like incense, this is ephemeral, comforting for a spell but then it is gone because it doesn’t exist within; it fails to penetrate the cage.

What is there that can break through this cage, this cage that we like to think only encases us when it encases everyone? It isn’t his or her cage, or our cage, but a cage that human beings have built, which might be called the “Cage of Society.”

What can break us out of this cage? It is an element that is lacking, an element that doesn’t belong to the scientist, the religious, the politician, the worker, the student, or to anyone. The 2018 book opens with:


Gentlemen, this is my rule: if I fail I don’t lose heart, if I succeed I persevere, and in any case, I never underhand. I’m not one to intrigue. I’m not proud of it. I’ve never prided myself on diplomacy. They say, too, gentlemen, that the bird flies itself to the hunter. It’s true and I’m ready to admit it: but who’s the hunter, and who’s the bird in the cage? That is still the question, gentlemen.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Double (1846)


Who Put You in the Cage is about the individual and society, and how the individual and society relate to the cage. This author sees postmodern society resembling a cage resulting in extraordinary caged behavior. Individuals continue to make choices, but choices that confine them to diminishing horizons. Unaware of this state, they resort to bizarre often deviant and counterproductive behavior.

Society, which has bought into the idea of progress, has programmed the individual to frenzied “cut and control” exploitation of himself and the environment diminishing material and spiritual resources to the point that the planet is now on life support systems.

Who Put You in the Cage looks at the individual from the author’s own personal and professional life in terms of society and the complex organization in the interest of generating reflection of readers on their own situation.

If we in fact live in cages, then escape might simply be a matter of reexamining the choices that have put us in the cage. That said, this book is not a prescription for release from such confinement. No two escape routes are likely to be the same. Nor does the book present a litany of “right choices” to change the individual’s behavior to ease one out of the cage.

The individual has constructed the cage in which he finds himself, only he can determine the way to deconstruct the cage. Habits become choices as well as behaviors. If such barriers are vague, the book intends to facilitate easing them to the surface.

Each lifestyle situation is a move either towards or away from confinement as each individual roadmap is different to one’s health and rehabilitation. You can see by the chapter headings that the cage is viewed from various perspectives, which should give the reader a sense of where he is relative to one’s own cage. Don’t be surprised if you find the key to escape from your cage is already in your hand.

What is love?

If love is the answer, why is love nothing that belongs to anyone? It is because love is considered personal when it is not. Love is not that. Love like sodium is universal only we treat it as if it is not.

There are a great many things that we consider personal when they are not personal.

Isolation does not belong to anyone nor does togetherness. It is not a personal problem. It is a human condition. Love, or the lack of love is a human condition, an illusion, like God, invented to give comfort in the wilderness of being. We need illusions to exist. That is why they are as real as we claim to be.

Moreover, intelligence is not personal, yet we say this person is more intelligent than this other person. Such perceptions form barriers between ourselves and others that exist only in our minds.

To survive in what we call “sanity,” we give illusions substance that in turn drives us toward separation. We say such inane things as “these qualities belong to me,” implying “not to you.”

Psychiatrists, psychologists and sociologists provide language to these illusions to make them credible and justified. They have taken the baton from religion as guardians of sacred illusions dressing them up in scientific theses (i.e., dogmas) that make the prognostications of the religious in comparison seem inconsequential.

Qualities of existence and behavior belong to us all. It is our fragmentary minds that promotes a divisive perspective. Why might construe this presentation as an elaborate ruse? It is because love while universal cannot claim the universal acceptance of

Sodium is sodium

Yet, love is our sodium. It is our element. It is not personal. Anyone can use it providing they pay attention to others, not in a superfluous fashion, but with sincerity; perceptive of where the other is from that person’s point of view; and sensitive to possible barriers to allow love to take root.

When love connects there is no fragmentation; it sees past differences, dissolves past hurts and bridges to compassion so that two people as persons can get on with their lives without self-conscious insecurity, fear, anxiety or pain.

Does this take courage? Of course. The first step is to “let go” of everything and let love be like what scientists have allowed “sodium to be sodium.”

* * *

PS   Never conventional, I’ve always taken comfort in the Irish dictum: it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Hopefully, this approach will be turned into a little book to track by working thinking life through excerpts of my published works. Stay tuned.


NOTE: THIS WAS DICTATED TO BB as I'm still limited to two finger typing.

The Peripatetic Philosopher Shares Part Two of an Exchange

MY FRIEND WRITES


Good morning, Jim.

“Like viewing a painting, we project ourselves into what we view.” 

Yes, I feel I can go along with that.

“All writing, even scientific writing, is imprinted with the spiritual.” 

This made be pause about the word “spiritual.” I was inclined to replace it with the word “ethical,” but on perusing the internet I quickly realized that this would be dead wrong. I found that “Scholars suggest that spirituality is a broad, subjective concept. It is the pursuit of something bigger than we are. Simply put, it is a pursuit of the meaning of life.”

That scholarly suggestion puts me in some quandary, that “bigger than we are.” This statement, to my mind, makes the world we have come into the “bigger than we are, something we somehow adapt to. I am inclined to believing that we need a word, X, to denote an equivalent concept for the notion that X arises from something WITHIN us from conception, hence subjective, but not bigger than we are.

Maybe that word X exists and just failed to come to mind.

_________________________________________

Jim, you heap too much praise on me. I do not consider who I am as a personal achievement. Unlike Frank Sinatra’s “I did it my way,” I am what I am due to the constitution I was born with embroidered upon by parents, teachers, friends, enemies, etc. Which brings me to mention the last writing you did before your operation in which you put a long list of people who you recognized had an influence on you. That letter has been on my mind ever since.

Months ago I promised to read Devlin, but I haven’t gotten beyond chapter 4 yet. So many things fighting for attention! Must keep my word, life permitting.

Best, and thanks for your reply; I am pondering to make it a subject of a next piece in My World.

 Henry

_________________________________

I ANSWER

Henry,

This "2-cent" piece is remarkable and consistent with your supple mind.

Like viewing a painting, we tend to project our cultural perceptive self into what we view.

When it comes to our cognitive self, this can get far more complicated and cause conflict between our cognitive and spiritual self.

All writing, even scientific writing is imprinted with the spiritual. Our spiritual self as flawed as it is is our humanity.

Nothing is then an easy read. That is okay. The problem occurs, however, when you attempt to decipher what the author meant -- take THE HEART OF DARKNESS -- and what paid critics say it means, attempting then to reconcile this with what you think it means. Ever notice critics seldom agree with each other, which is quite human, and for me, reassuring.

I've had the arrogance of never being impeded by their learned pronouncements.

But then, unlike you, I am not an educated man but captive to my native tongue, American English, while you can speak and read in several languages and so have cultural depth that I lack.

Moreover, in your impressionistic years, you survived a terrible period (WWII) living in Europe, coming to Canada as a young man, to launch a meaningful career. Kudos to you!

On a related subject, if able to peck it out, I'd like to explain Irish Roman Catholicism, from my perspective, and how it is central to the self-made writer that I have become.

This mindset is evident in two protean works: my memoir as a novel, "In the Shadow of the Courthouse," and my bawdy novel of South Africa, combining episodic high jinks with the clash of cultures to end the impressionistic innocence of a young American executive that takes place in 1968 during Afrikaner "apartheid." The novel is called "Devlin."

Stay tuned!

Jim

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares AN EXCHANGE BETWEEN FRIENDS

AN EXCHANGE BETWEEN FRIENDS



I HAD WRITTEN:


What motivates us may follow this formula: what we think we do, and what we do we become.

Now what complicates this, with all do apologies, is that what we think is not necessarily in our control.

A professor in the west several years ago came up with the idea that values govern our behavior. Values are another word for “culture.” The controlling factor, according to his thesis, was that values were a matter of when we were born.

Culture, in any case, greatly influences our thinking if it does not control it.

Young people today are addicted to their electronic devices. You and I were born during the great depression and the collapse of the world into WWII, which finds us (still) concerned with or preoccupied with among other things the survival of our fragile democratic culture.

Your “2-cent” pieces are precious and informative in that sense as you see institutional erosion at the government level whereas I see it at the corporate and societal level.

Ken Shelton, born after WWII, is empathetic with our views but has been bombarded in his life with different values, and therefore different thinking and has dedicated himself to preserving his (and our) heritage at the leadership level. He is also on a much bigger stage than we are.

That said, Ken’s essays are sprinkled with common sense and love, which unhappily is in short supply in this avaricious and anxious age. With this thinking, more is always better but more is never enough.

We have risen out of the swelter of our own particular cultural conditioning, as does everyone. Each of us, it might be said, are quasi-prisoners of our cultural inculcation and time.

Culture is a shadow in the mind, making it a wonder that we can relate to each other.

Our saving grace, it seems to me, is what each of us has going for us. That is, our sincerity which confirms the legitimacy of what we do and then become.

Peace and always be well,

Jim


MY FRIEND RESPONDS

Jim.

Fascinating formula:

What we think we do. What we do we become.

Off hand, this makes sense to me, but prudence tells me that I must ponder this before I cheer.

From neuroscience we know that the mind creates what we will be saying before we are consciously aware of what leaves our mouth.

Psychologists are wondering whether we are truly responsible for our actions.

Quantum physics tells us that "yes" is not the only companion of "no."

Experience tells us that neither the wave theory nor the particle theory adequately explain the behavior of electromagnetic radiation.

And so reality as we perceive it is merely part of some super-reality (maybe the one that has more than four dimensions). Like yes and no, true and false may not be the only players in their domain. As things stand, they are "constructs of the organically formed human mind."

Moreover, from birth onwards, our minds have been formed somewhat differently (possibly from before birth already), It is by arduous summation that people begin to understand one another in some sort of asymptotic endeavor.

The final answer will remain unattainable by us Earthlings.

But we can't help pondering.

Thanks you for your extensive two-finger email. I take it that you expect improvement in you manual capacity.

Best,

Henry 

 MY RESPONSE TO HENRY

Henry

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) writes in “Pensees”: We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart. This work has been an inspiration to me.
In any case, thank you for your insights and comments, and for the clarity of your views vis-a-vis those of my own. It is however apparent that we look at the same things differently, which is all right.

There is precedence as Pascal explains in his “Pensees” (Thoughts).

It was Pascal’s view that the body and its feelings took precedence over the mind and its reason. That had singular appeal to me as the rational failed to be fulfilling to me in my work and life.

You could conclude that sentiment and precedence is apparent from my writings.

Pascal differentiated between a scientific (rational) and intuitive (feeling) approach to the problem solving although he was very much an accomplished scientist in his own right. The impulse of love was prominent in his character and persuasion as it is apparent in the FISHER PARADIGM.

Writing about love, Pascal differentiated between two types of mind: the scientific mind that works with exact definitions (analysis) and abstractions and the intuitive mind that works with ideas and perceptions while not being restricted by exact definitions or necessarily repeatable conclusions. Each intuitive situation is complete within itself.

I was trained in the discipline of science but have drifted in my long career to being increasingly intuitive. Like Pascal, I am a Catholic thinker and believe in the eminence of the soul. Feelings, I have discovered, become facts in the most discriminating minds.

That said, the two minds (the rational and intuitive) do not refer to two different individuals but two directions that, hopefully, complement each other in a given mind.

Put another way, the scientific mind is not valid in all instances; nor is the intuitive mind. For me, the intuitive mind is responsible for much of my career and has even saved my life that I share in my writing.

The rage for certainty and the drive for unity in our time has often found science and scientists close to doctrinaire posturing rivaling the arrogance of religion.

This is apparent when analysis and abstraction produce theoretical constructs that are treated, not as theories, but as actual verities. Pascal saw this as a fallacy of science. It is also a fallacy of religion.

Pascal writes in Pensees, “The heart has its reasons that the reason does not know.”

The heart is not only the seat of love and affection it is the seat of desire and impulse to action.

In other words, it is not what we say we believe or claim to espouse, but what we do.

For example, intelligence is not a high SAT or IQ score or a college degree, but what a person does.

An intuitive approach studies actions, not words. Needs and motives come out in actions and are not products of reasoning although often treated as such. Yes, you are correct. We are often on automatic pilot.

Catholic Pascal did not espouse predestination nor the need of grace to obtain faith. I consider myself a renegade Catholic writer who attempts to practice the principles of morality taught to me as a child with no interest in the pomp and circumstance of the today’s Catholic Church.

Analysis and abstraction are not only limited to science but have become the obsession of sport (analytics), marketing, government (Polls) and the entertainment industry, among many others.

We have become caught up in the moment too busy to observe and reflect on our actions to intuit their insignificance preferring to react to what experts say it all means.

Pascal experienced this problem more than 300 years ago. Little has changed. Love and spirit were locked out then as they are today. 

Nearly 400 years ago (1621), English scholar Robert Burton (1577-1640) wrote “The Anatomy of Melancholy.” It reads as if written today.

Science has its place, as Pascal once said, he a scientist of the first rank, but science was not enough then or is it now. There is a need for more balance. It starts with a change of views like those that appear here.

Be always well,

Jim






PS Only my index finger and thumb work on my left hand while all my fingers work on my right hand. Doctors tell me it may take a year for this to be corrected with the possibility that my left hand may never return to normal usage. Thank you for asking.