DISSEMBLING AS WE GO: WHY NOTHING IS REAL, NOT EVEN "WE!"

DISSEMBLING AS WE GO: WHY NOTHING IS REAL, NOT EVEN “WE”!

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

© January 2008

“DISSEMBLE: to hide under a false appearance; to put on the appearance of; to put on a false appearance; to conceal facts, intentions, or feelings under some pretense.”

MERRIAM WEBSTER’S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY (1993)

Shauna Moffit, a star football player at the University of South Florida, who played for a USF’s top 25 team in the Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas, and is now eligible for the NFL draft, has become infamous for something other than football, academic cheating.

This has come to light as he apparently deserted his wife and 3-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son two months ago, and recently filed divorce papers after five years of marriage.

Just when his career looks golden with a possible multi-million dollar contract with some NFL team, his wife and children find themselves in the lurch. So, it should come as no surprise that the wife might use what little ammunition she has to clip her husband’s wings by telling the rest of the story of her husband who recently received his degree in communication from USF.

It appears that she and her sister wrote many if not all of his academic papers on their computers. They have proof of this, the wife on her work computer, and the sister on her home computer. Additionally, Moffit’s sister-in-law took at least two on-line courses for him in which she claims he failed to participate at all.

These on-line universities promise to be an oasis for dissembling with the world papered with degrees of students that are not only cynical of learning but of the whole academic institution that honored them with degrees. I once ghost wrote a book for a professional who gave me a huge box of material and asked me to turn it into a book, which I did. Now we are on the brink of ghost written degrees and dissembling careers.

Today, according to the Tampa Tribune, a week after this drama first surfaced, USF president Judy Genshaft turns the problem over to her USF spokesman, Ken Gullette. He immediately starts the spin that it is a “domestic dispute” and there will be no investigation “unless professors come forth with complaints.” Meanwhile, the NCAA lurks in the background with possible academic and athletic sanctions.

AGE OF AMBIVALENCE REIFIED

This has become a headline story in the local newspaper when it is actually a reflection of our ambivalent times, which go back as far as I can remember. Cheating is what people do to get an edge when society makes having an edge important.

Take the “Patriots Paradox,” as Time (January 14, 2008) magazine puts it. The New England Patriots football team of the National Football League, with by far the best team in the sport, cheated when clearly it was not necessary.

Coach Bill Belichick justified his unethical approach to coaching with the weak plea, “We get judged on our performance. And that’s what drives our decisions. Performance.”

The Patriots were given a huge fine, but hey, that’s only money, no big deal. Thirty-five years ago, the Miami Dolphins had an undefeated season when Don Shula coached them, when the ambivalence between playing a sport and creating a dynasty had not yet become a moral wrecking ball.

Technology was just rearing its ugly head, as chemistry had not yet become the diet of the times for professional athletes. That said we were no longer comfortable as human beings; we had to be super human beings, what Nietzsche called “superman.”

In the late sixteenth century, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were creating dramatic literature that has never been surpassed.

In the late sixteenth century, science was gaining momentum in solving the mysteries of the universe, but science then as now had little appreciation of the human soul, and so we languish, then as now, in ambivalence and confusion.

Science was trying to create a Faustian edge when it knew little, then as now, about whom we are, where we are, or why we are. In the absence of such knowledge, distraction from self-ignorance became the drive to perform.

Eric Hoffer, the dockworker turned philosopher, once said, “To understand your time study the way it plays its games.” He then went on to say that this is the boilerplate of how society sees itself and is reflected in its mirror.

DISSEMEBLING AS A WAY OF LIFE

When I was a chemistry student at the University of Iowa, and had a reputation of acing all the tests, two students approached me with ten-dollar bills, and asked, “Can we sit on either side of you in the final?” Naively, I said, “You can sit wherever you like.”

Then they tried to give me the two ten-dollar bills, which today would total more than $100. “You don’t understand,” they said, “we want to copy your work. We need to get a good grade in this course or we won’t graduate.”

It so shocked me that I yelled out, “Get out of here,” and they did. But I learned something that I didn’t know to that point; dissemblers are not so easily discouraged.

The chemistry final took place in the amphitheater. Seats at the top to the bottom of this student assembly were at a sharp angle ending in the narrow lecture platform of the professor at the bottom. Unbeknown to me, these two students positioned themselves above and to the side of me so that they could see my work, work I failed to cover up. They relayed the answers to each other as I wrote.

The examination was complicated in that it asked for equations that involved several steps to eventual completion. This included correct catalysts at each step, and calculation of the proper yields. A typical equation would be a page or page and one half, all in alphabetic symbology according to the Periodic Table.

When my grade wasn’t posted, I went to my professor who told me the amazing news that he had three identical papers, one of which was mine.

Not only had I failed to “ace” the course but I registered a low “B,” having gone off the rails to one problem with a wild answer, as did two other students.

My professor wanted an explanation. Typical of my personality, which has not changed appreciably in over fifty years, I said, “You can’t be seriously. Why would I cheat when I am the best student in the department?"

I was reminded of this when Alex Rodriquez of the New York Yankees, and MVP of the American League in 2007, was recently asked in a television interview, “Have you every used growth hormones or performance enhancing drugs?” He answered as I did, indicating he didn’t have to take anything to have an edge; his talent was enough.

“I know,” my professor said with a smile, “but I would like for you to explain how you got lost in this one problem, only to have identical work show up in two other papers.” For some reason, I played ignorant, and he left it at that. We then had an amicable discussion from that point on.

Years later, when I was a chemical sales engineer in the field for Nalco Chemical Company, my colleagues wondered at my edge, leading the district in sales quarter after quarter. It was rumored that I cheated; that I gave my customers special prices or some kind of gratuities, when none of this was true. I only gave them good service and partnered with them to solve their problems.

This approach was finally formulated in a book (Confident Selling Prentice-Hall 1970). The book demonstrated that from my earliest days I never believed in shortcuts, but did believe in looking at problems intuitively as well as cognitively.

Years later, now a mature student in my late thirties, I returned to the university to pursue a Ph.D. One of my professors, who noted I had some facility in writing, asked if I would consider writing some papers for him, indicating he would make it worth my while. I refused and not politely. The professor was much younger than I was. While I failed to take his bribe, I didn’t report it, as I should have. Dissemblers are equally guilty when they are complicit in the scheme.

Still later, now a management psychologist at Honeywell, I continued to be an adjunct professor at Florida Institute of Technology and the University of South Florida. One course was “management theory & thought” in which I asked the students to conceive their own theory. I received two almost identical papers in which the content varied slightly but not the context, or subject matter. Moreover, the writing style was clearly the same. It turned out they were a husband and wife, one working at Honeywell, and one for the city of Clearwater (Florida). I had had the wife in a previous course and recognized her style and conceptual skills. It was obvious that her husband didn’t write his paper. I had a conference with them, indicating what I had found.

The husband said, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing. You’re going to write your own paper.”

“What if I refuse?”

“Then you fail the course.”

He wrote the paper but neither one of them ever spoke to me again.

Dissembling isn’t always this direct. One student of mine from another company with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, which is a difficult discipline that I know from having taken a course in it, wrote such a deplorable paper that I couldn’t give it a passing grade, which is a “B” in graduate work, or the student gets no credit for the course.

We met and I told him I thought he could do much better; that his paper wasn’t graduate level work. There was anger if not hate in his eyes bordering on belligerence. Ignoring this, I said, “I sense a problem here because I know you are a brilliant man.”

With that statement, his hostility seemed to melt, as did his pride. He confessed that he was dyslexic; that reading and writing had always been difficult for him but, for some reason, not quantitative thinking. He further confessed that he needed an MBA because it was required for promotion in his department.

“But you’re a research scientist; you don’t work much with people, do you? Mainly with algorithms, right?” He nodded.

“Are you in management, or interested in being a paper pushing manager?”

He smiled, “No, but in our place whatever the work you have to have this. It’s part of the drill.”

So, in his case, dissembling was the personality not only of the individual, but of the organization as well. Perhaps the company could tell its stockholders that its scientists were business savvy, another dissembling facade.

There is no one that is more susceptible to directness, to honesty whatever its nature than I am. This scientist and I worked hard together and we got him through the course with a well-earned “B.” He went on to earn his MBA and get the promotion he desired.

Still later, now a director of Honeywell Europe, I was given a project where we would conduct a popularity contest of the “best executive” in Europe with a criteria of indicators to guide the contributors. This was a contest that extended from one end to the other end of Europe and included all manufacturing plants and national subsidiaries.

Honeywell Europe employees loved the contest and submitted impressive arguments for their favorite executive. My people were well involved in evaluating these submissions, when my boss noted that the person whom he thought should be so recognized was not even nominated. At that point, he closed the contest. His person would be recognized as the “most popular executive” at the next Honeywell Europe Conference, and so it happened.

SO WHAT?

The test of ambivalence is the degree to which dissembling captures the essence of society.

When women feel the need to show their cleavage to be desired, and men their growth hormone physiques to appear virile; when people have nose reshaping, eyelifts, Liposuctions, breast reduction or enhancements, facelifts, collagen injections, or Dermabrasion, dissembling is in play.

When people need Viagra to perform, or a series of drugs to get through the day, dissembling is in play.

Nature is put on hold, as is conventional wisdom, and narcissism becomes therapy for an anxious age.

We drive big or sporty cars because they make us feel big or sporty. We push our children to excel beyond their interests and abilities because it makes us feel important and good parents in their reflected glory.

We keep moving to the periphery of our being because ambivalent detritus occupies where we once had a center.

Somewhere along the line, shortcuts became more important than experience. We became obsessed with the goal and forgot the journey, yet the journey is all we ever have.
It is the reason why when what we wished for is accomplished, we say, “is that all there is to love?” It is never love, either of things or persons, but self-dissembling possessiveness.

It is why billionaires cheat; why winning coaches cheat; why good students cheat; why great athletes cheat; why everyone cheats failing to realize the only loser in the equation is the cheater, not the cheated.

Is there any hope to regain our moral center? It was Alexander Lowen who put it best, “The path to joy leads through despair.”

The child must die to give birth to the man. America remains an obsessed society in terminal adolescent refusing to grow up because it has never had to grow up. The time will come when necessity will not be an option, and America will mature as all peoples have in the past, not out of strategy but out of necessity. We are moving in that direction and time will only tell when it will arrive.

___________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). Check out his blog and website: www.fisherofideas.com

LEADERS: ANTIDOTE TO TOXIC LEADERSHIP

LEADERS: ANTIDOTE TO TOXIC LEADERSHIP

PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON

GEOFFREY CANADA, PRESIDENT & CEO, HARLEM CHILDREN ZONE

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

© January 2008

“Who will lead me into the strong city; who will bring me into Edom?”

The Book of Common Prayer

Many of my books center around the idea of leaderless leadership in our time, and with reason. In the darkest of periods, however, there is always the promise of redemption. So, it has been throughout American history.

The only problem today is that we expect our leaders to be squeaky clean, as if sanitized by history to make our heroes bigger than life so that we can treat them as less than human. Nothing is more human than leadership; no one more human than a leader.

We want one-dimensional myths reified in three-dimensional leaders. We want heroes within the margin of perfection, not people like ourselves. We want them to be a little different but not too different; a little better but not too much better; a little smarter but not too smart. Otherwise, how could we identify with them?

Despite this ambivalence, a leader periodically steps out of the reservoir of our resilience to make a difference whatever we may think of them as individuals.

Nineteenth century Andrew Jackson and twenty-first century Geoffrey Canada appear to be such men. At a time when what poses as leadership is mainly destructive, when people want to be reassured not enlightened, when the culture is susceptible to passive followers, such leaders come forward.

Jackson was a slave owner, Canada descendant of slaves. Jackson created an age; Canada is attempting to create a viable society. Both are as American as we get. Both stepped away from the herd to be blinded by the light; and both were guided by that “god within” that recognizes no insurmountable barriers.

ANDREW JACKSON (1767 – 1845)

Last night PBS television had a special on the life of Andrew Jackson, eighth president of the United States.

Jackson was the litmus test of this fragile new nation in the early nineteenth century having risen from so little to accomplish so much.

The public television program captured his complex personality to some degree, not the way a book can, but I doubt many have read books on this president. If they had, they would discover he was a walking oxymoron. He was a powerful friend and a ferocious enemy. He never forgot a kindness given or the smallest of betrayals, ever. He was a democratic autocrat, an urbane savage and an atrocious saint.

Jackson embodied something of the American character that has always found room for dedication and duplicity, for caring and callousness, for prejudice and patronizing. He lifted the nation out of its false airs that mimicked gentrified Europe, and brought the quiet beast that rested beyond America’s doleful eyes.

Were he not to have risen in our midst in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, we would be a very different country if a country at all.

His mortal sins were as gigantic as were his mortal achievements. He won the Battle of New Orleans when the Army of the Potomac refused to fight in Washington, D.C., and the British burned the capitol to the ground.

Imagine how stunned the British were at New Orleans when Jackson’s ragtag army did not cut and run, but stayed, killing two thousand British soldiers and sailors, while losing only eight men, and saving the city, and the nation in one stroke.

His Irish heritage found it easier for him to ask forgiveness than permission. Ordered to patrol the southern territories, he instead invaded Florida conquering the Spanish without first receiving permission from president James Monroe. For his insubordination, Florida now part of the United States, president Monroe accepted his apology and then promoted him as head of the US Army.

Jackson embraced resistance, loved a fight, and once killed a man in a dual. The man first fired; Jackson then took aim and shot the man, dead. It wasn’t until after the dual that his second noticed blood coming out of his sleeve. Jackson had been shot inches from his heart. The bullet lodged in such a precarious place that he carried it in his body the rest of his life.

To public television’s credit, it also showed Jackson’s coarseness and racism. He had more than one hundred slaves and was not above having a slave whipped nearly to death for attempting to escape. He also drove Indian nations out of their native lands that were protected by United States Treaties. This two thousand mile trek across the continent into the Pacific Northwest became known as the “trail of tears.” Hundreds died on the way from disease, malnutrition and fatigue.

Jackson, a frontiersman with no formal education, upheld the laws he believed in, and ignored the laws that he didn’t. He was the strongest most ruthless and most Machiavellian president in our American history. He was also the necessary leader of this fragile republic when it was barely fifty years old, and surrounded by a world of piranha in the uniform of the French, Spanish and British waiting for our courage to falter and make us captive to their will.

He also founded the Democratic Party, created a strong executive branch of government, took all federal funds out of the Bank of the United States, thus destroying it, then reorganized American banking, and redirected the focus of capitalism from the privileged few of the East to disadvantaged many in the hinterland. Sound bytes from John Edwards echo Jackson's persona, but without the calloused hands and hickory in the sinews.

GEOFFREY CANADA

A very different leader is in our midst if what I saw on public television’s Charlie Rose show today is any indication.

Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone appeared in a business suite with a shaved head, lean athletic physique, passionate command of the American language, and a clear vision of his mission with a long twenty-year record of service to back it up.

The Harlem Children’s Zone is a 96-block area in Harlem serving the educational needs of 20,000 underprivileged students mainly of color and economically disadvantaged.

What is refreshing about this man and his message is that he sees the problem of educating the poor not a local but a national issue, not one of race but of reality, not one of tweaking this or that but of radically changing the system.

He sees the educational system not simply broke but anachronistic, the teaching profession not simply weak but atavistic, and the curriculum designed for an agrarian and early industrial society, not for the postmodern electronic age.

What does he propose? He proposes that the school day be longer and the school year correspondingly extended. Students had three months of summer vacation, he reminds us, when we were an agricultural society and school children were needed to help their fathers bring in the crops. Now, less than two percent of Americans are engaged in agriculture. Even traditional industrial and manufacturing jobs of the booming industrial period of the 1940s through the 1980s has essentially evaporated.

General Motors, Ford and Chrysler once represented hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs with tens of thousands of satellite jobs created by the “Big Three” in support of the automotive industry. Now, GM is near bankruptcy, Chrysler has essentially disappeared, and Toyota of Japan has replaced Ford as number two auto manufacturer in this country soon to be number one. Times are a changing. We have become a service and information society, which requires brains not brawn or a well-educated constituency to sustain the national economy.

Canada knows this, and recognizes that students in the classroom are bored and under whelmed by a curriculum designed for another time and a different student population. This is not a problem of color but culture and extends from the teaching of primary skills (reading, writing and arithmetic) to higher mathematics, science and the humanities. To have a civil society, Canada insists, is a civic responsibility with education at the forefront.

We are not only failing within our own society, he argues, but we are last or near last in test scores of our students against advanced nations about the globe. Bill Gates said a high school diploma is not enough, and he agrees, adding, we should be geared to create a society of college graduates with the social and professional skills needed to be competitive in this new world, otherwise we will continue to decline.

Canada is an enthusiastic optimist who doesn’t think optimism means being an apologist for our problems. Consider this, he says, in one state there were 40,000 college graduates and 40,000 young people incarcerated in the prison system. It cost about $18,500 per year to educate a student, $32,500 a year to house a convict. Nearly all these criminals, he adds, were high school dropouts.

Perhaps the bravest thing he said was that the educational system failed to improve or change because of the polarity of politics, chiefly displayed in teachers’ unions, which protect incompetent members from censure or dismissal.

It doesn’t stop there. Teacher unions not only protect incompetent teachers from being fired, but also prevent real change from taking place.

Nor can he find any justification for social promotion. If a student is in the third grade is not reading or writing or doing math at that level, he should be given special attention, but not promoted.

Teachers should not be allowed to continue to teach, however long in the system, when incompetence is demonstrated. They should be removed from the classroom and the system, in other words, fired. If removed from the classroom, they should not be paid comparable pay doing nothing to protect their jobs. Draconian? Canada would prefer the word “necessary,” showing hickory in his spine, too.

He sees merit in “No Child Left Behind,” but only in its spirit not in the letter of the law. Not enough funding has been dedicated to this purpose to make any impact on the problem.

It is Canada’s belief that education must start as soon as the child is born and be carried through the system and college. He sees this as a choice between the student becoming a leader and productive citizen or a burden to society, on the dole or a criminal. If this seems an exaggeration, he repeatedly emphasized the connection between education and civil responsibility, and its absence, and crime, welfare and chaos.

He claims we don’t have the right people in education because there is not incentive for the right people to come into the system. Too often we want a body in front of a classroom with little regard for what that person can do to educate the students.

He doesn’t recommend “teacher bonuses,” but does believe there is reason for merit pay when teachers are highly successful. Incentives are not a panacea. They will not bring people into teaching that would prefer the economic possibilities in the private sector, but they may bring people who prefer the teaching profession, but cannot afford the financial sacrifices demanded.

Canada is open to people of ideas outside the public school system, people from charter schools, private schools, and other approaches to education. He wants a dialogue created and plan developed to best utilize resources that eventually materializes into a national plan. He believes the tradition of local boards of control to public education is flawed, and can only be remedied by a national overseer system with real power to impose meaningful guidelines, or schools will continue to fail. This is a controversial stand but one, which is axiomatic to a leader.

Between 60 and 70 percent of the students in low-income areas in places such as New York City, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and south central Los Angeles are not performing at grade level. These areas are also high crime areas, which further deplete economic resources to deal with the problem.

How about tests and measuring performance?

He is all for tests. One of the startling discoveries of these tests, he says, is that students of color in affluent schools perform just as poorly as students in mostly colored schools in poor neighborhoods.

He asks why? His answer: because students of color in these schools are not expected to perform at the same level; they are forgiven for poor performance. Fewer demands are made on them, he believes, fulfilling the self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Incredible to his thinking, they are forgiven for reasons from dysfunctional home life to lack of academic support and access to academic aids such as computers. He shakes his head saying students improvise when they are encouraged to learn, and fail to try when they are not.

As I watched the program, and reflected, I wondered how many people had tuned out hearing this educator, who was essentially blasting the education system, but quietly and politely. Some might see him stepping on the toes of a lot of sacred cows, while others might see him echoing the radical sentiments of vested interests. I saw him as neither, but a sincere man convinced of the worthiness of his mission.

LEADERSHIP, THE DANGER OF BEING DIFFERENT

It is not easy to be a leader. It takes courage as well as vision and a capacity to serve. When the message of the leader is disturbing, often the message is not attacked directly but the messenger, the leader. It is why the leader needs an inner moral compass that intuitively steers him to his objective.

When a leader suggests change, possibly radical change, it always agitates those who have benefited most from the corrupt system as they see themselves threatened, their livelihood put in jeopardy, and the leader the cause. They fail to see the system and their participation in it driving them and it to inevitable ruin.

It is possibly for this reason that they behave so aggressively toward the leader, displacing their frustration as an unconscious defense mechanism where emotions and ideas are transferred from their own insecurity to the leader who would change things as they are. That is the group level.

At the individual level, displacement can combine with projection to blame the problem on all those who would support the leader or would see change in a positive light. They would thus become an abomination to that person, and the enemy. No longer would the enemy have the face of the leader, but now a broadband contempt for everyone.

We have seen this form of pathological paranoia of a crazed person repeatedly in recent years on high school and college campuses, most recently at Virginia Tech. A disturbed student gunned down thirty-two students and teachers, including a girlfriend. He projected his anxieties and displaced his hostilities by murdering indiscriminately in symbolized madness of college life. .

My reason for bringing this up in this piece is that in many ways the barbarism of the early frontier society of Andrew Jackson has held on tenaciously to our own. Geoffrey Canada faces a similar frontier barbarism in a failed system that persists. He has no less daunting task to save the American soul than Andrew Jackson had to save the American body.

We live in violent times where displacement and projection are fed by a pervasive paranoia. Geoffrey Canada is a breath of free air in the stale air of academic entropy. May his energies hold up and his vision manifest itself.

And what is that vision? To create an educated society that serves the civil needs of the American people and allows future Americans to be competitive and able to take their proper place in this new global world as leaders.

Dr. Fisher’s most recent book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (Authorhouse 2007).

METACODING & CONNECTING

METACODING & CONNECTING

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2008


First of all, I want to wish each and every one of you a Happy, Healthy, and Hallowed New Year with the emphasis on "hallowed."

In our rush to enslave ourselves to things, many of us have gotten lost in technology, which is the narcotic of our age.

It makes other addictions pale by comparison.

Our retreat into electronic gadgets has resulted in our being stuck, staying the same, missing the changes, and leaving the future up for grabs.

It is why I write what I do, and why the past is future to us all.

But enough of moralizing, the purpose of this brief note is to answer a small question that has caused you some concern during this busy season of the year: what is metacoding?

METACODING EXPLAINED

You have received these long lists of "metacodes" from my books; these lists of short phrases titled "metacoding," and wondered what is this all about.

Until recently, I didn't know such a thing existed. I did know that I wasn't getting much traffic on my website, or with books sales.

People in the business of ideas, and others who were booksellers kept telling me, "Your books should be flying off the shelves. Your honesty, directness, clarity, and compassion represent a wake-up call for all of us."

Then they would add, "Let me help you get the word out." Invariably, what followed was predictable. I was advised to get a computer consultant.

Now, computer consultants are in their infancy, know a lot about digital technology or 0 to 1 iterations, but not necessarily much about books or book readers much less ideas in books. They are computer literate while not necessarily being literate in a literary sense if you get my drift.

They are in the business of business making money without necessarily being in the business of promulgating ideas.

They are looking for well-heeled souls who want but don't necessarily need another cellphone or iPod or more fan club memorabilia.

They are by the nature of their calling indifferent to the state of the nation much less the state of the soul as businessmen have been throughout history. What sells rings their bell. It is not their nature to worry about the Pied Piper marching us over the precipice to oblivion. Not their job, but more importantly, it doesn’t sell.

Stated another way, they are the architects of the archipelago of the Internet; the lost world of Atlantis that has suddenly surfaced into our midst as the media of this medium. They are betting on a sure thing when the surest thing is not new ideas.

If this sounds like doublespeak, let me be more precise.

Metacoding is the synapses of the central nervous system of communication in the New Electronic World of the Internet. Without sparks flying from its nerve endings and making connection with that electronic world, ideas go unnoticed, and eventually idea makers burn out.

In my limited world, I have seen this happen repeatedly. Countless writers of ideas far better than I am finally desist from sparking at all. They burn out. On the other hand, I am a Taurus and know no better than to spark to the end regardless of making connection.

This burn out of my friends is sad to report because metacoding could have saved them and their ideas.

That said imagine an idea as a tiny nerve cell expressed in a few letters. To connect with the multi-ganglion of nerve cells (the world), it must explode across “no man’s land,” or this gap in connection to this idea synapse by the chemical message of these words.

So, metacodes, then, are simply connectors. They broadcast these sparks to the ganglion world and bring the idea to life to be shared beyond its creator.

A website that does not develop these connectors is unknown to the world-at-large drifting in a sea of meaningless sparks with no connection in sight. That has been my world.

To make this connection, a metacode alerts the Internet surfer that you are "out there" with some idea of interest and use to them.

Take someone who feels we are stuck, as many do, and they type in the word, "stuck."

Eureka! My book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD comes up. A book excerpt on my website (www.fisherofideas.com) is available on being stuck, and a person in Hong Kong, Berlin, Suriname, and East London (South Africa) simultaneously orders the book. Another person in Sao Paulo sends an email wondering if I'm available to speak at a conference in Brazil.

All this is because of the exploding cell of an idea being transformed across a synapse connecting with the wider world of our small planet.

This past year I took a Caribbean cruise in which I became the metacode of my idea synapse, and repeated it on a Baltic Sea cruise with a similar outcome. I made some connections. The cruise directors wanted Dr. Fisher to come to sea and discuss his ideas.

It is, however, an expensive, tiring, and a bit daunting experience to be one's own metacode, while having only to type in a few letters such as "toxic leadership" or "empowerment" or "stuck" and discover one's whole world changing.

At least that is the idea.

Thus far I have metacoded WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS, CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s, and THE WORKER, ALONE!

I told BB that it might be better to write my manuscripts, then metacode them. and then rewrite them. I say this because in metacoding I had to reread these books entirely, and found acres of diamonds that were no longer covered in coal dust but were visible in their naked brilliance.

CONNECTION REDUX

People write to me all the time and tell me they download my missives and put them on discs to refer to later. I have no problem with this. It means I am being read by an alert and connecting readership.

My only caution is that they note that I copyright everything, or nearly everything I write, and therefore it cannot be used or sold or included in other writings for publication without permission.

My words and ideas, which are not necessarily that popular at the moment, may be so when I am gone, and that is BB's legacy.

If I have had any peculiar talent in my long life, it has been having had the ability to see ahead when most people were totally invested in now. For example, one need read any of my three books (mentioned above) to see that that book is as if it were just written.

The sanctuary of ideas is that of psychological not chronological time, of the human heart that has syncope with the eternity of the human soul.

And who is a writer of ideas? Actually, it is everyone. I cannot improve upon the words of the British writer and philosopher Alan W. Watts:

"A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gapes and stares at what sensible people take for granted, a person who cannot get rid of the feeling that the barest of facts of everyday life are unbelievably odd. Aristotle put it best: the beginning of philosophy is wonder."

My intentions in writing books and missives are a little less grand. The human link to us all is our minds as an expression of our souls. Life often contaminates this linkage and buries this connection in a heap of hate, greed and paranoia. In none of my books and missives do I ask the reader to agree with me, but I do ask the reader to get under this debris of suffocating nowness to find the synapses that connect us all to each other.

Be always well,

Jim

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Books listed in this piece, along with several others of Dr. Fisher, are available at reduced prices on www.fisherofideas.com compared to other electronic websites.

LOOKING BACK TO SEE AHEAD -- Perennial Problem of Emptiness vs. Caring in an Age in Transition

My daughter, Jennifer, graduated from the University of South Florida with a degree in Marketing & Public Relations last Saturday, December 15, 2007. There were 3,600 graduates. I was thinking about her when I first started this piece, and have not been to bed since Wednesday in an effort to finally finish it. The piece is dedicated to her who is very special and has worked very hard to reach this milestone. I salute her and her graduating classmates.
JRF

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LOOKING BACK TO SEE AHEAD

Perennial Problem of Emptiness vs. Caring in an Age in Transition

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007

“From the lessons of history concerning life and death, the blossoming and sickness of society, man learns hardly anything. He behaves either as if past history were nonexistent or as if the past presented no situation essentially comparable to that in which his own society finds itself; as if there were no causal relationships and consequences; as if there were no such thing as socio-cultural sickness, and hence no need to sacrifice momentary pleasures and other sensate utilities and values in order to avoid an infinitely greater catastrophe. In this field of experience he remains virtually unteachable.”

Pitrim Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age (1941), p. 325.


“Once when ‘Care’ was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took up a piece and began to shape it. While she was meditating on what she had made, Jupiter came by. ‘Care’ asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, he forbade this, and demanded that it be given his name instead. While ‘Care’ and Jupiter were disputing, Earth arose and desired that her own name be conferred on the creature, since she had furnished it with part of her body. They asked Saturn to be their arbiter, and he made the following decision, which seemed a just one: ‘Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since ‘Care’ first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. And because there is now a dispute among you as to its name, let it be called ‘homo’ (man), for it is made out of humus (earth).’”

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1962), p. 242.

* * * * * * * * * * *

I’ve embarked on this discussion of “emptiness” and “caring” by quoting the Russian born but American pioneering sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, and the German existential philosopher Martin Heidegger. Both men seem increasingly relevant. Sorokin wrote with passionate clarity about culture; Heidegger with murky detachment about being. Both saw the need for a complete change of contemporary thinking, as well as the need for a fundamental transformation of our conduct toward other men, and the world at large. Neither name has mainstream identity. Even so, their wisdom permeates our time.

UNTEACHABLE EMPTINESS OF OUR TIMES

Heidegger quotes this ancient parable of “Care,” which Goethe also uses at the end of Faust (1832). Goethe’s story is of a disillusioned scholar who deserts his “ivory tower” of academia to seek happiness in the real world. He makes a pact with Satan, spiraling down through a number of escapades to the brink of moral degradation. Like the parable, the moral certainty and intellectual satisfaction that Faust seeks the more insecurity and dissatisfaction he encounters.

Rollo May captures the sense of this in Love and Will (1969) when he suggests modern man lives in a “schizoid” society and culture. He cautions us, however, not to think of “schizoid man” in the psychopathological sense, but in terms of our increasingly self-detachment.

It follows we are out of touch. We avoid close relationships. We have an inability to feel. Yet, in our stubborn desire to remain the same, we become unteachably empty. Even so, we cannot escape caring. We carry caring to our death, as it is our connection with the Earth as conscious thinking man.

Pitrim Sorokin, on the other hand, in Crisis of Our Age (1941) reminds us we are in a transitional period.

The old myths and symbols of stability by which we once oriented ourselves are gone or have disintegrated beyond recognition: the nuclear family; the sacred vows of marriage; the sense of community; the concept of the common good; the ethical standard of the Ten Commandments; the central union of trust, honesty, fairness, and love to character; the natural joy of honest work; all manifestations of caring, all in trouble, all in hasty decline.

The same forces that have determined growth and achievement in our Sensate culture have made unavoidable the growth of the cancer of its disintegration. The more we have the less we feel ourselves to be. Bigger has not proven better, while the distinctions between true and false, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, positive and negative have been increasingly dissolved. Boundaries have lost their meaning. We have become “Nowhere Man” in “Nowhere Land,” a stranger in the artificial world we have created.

To counter this, we have retreated into our inventions and innovations reversing our minds to “small is better.” This is personified in mobiles: digital cameras, PDAs, MP3 players, iPods, iPhones, and various other electronic wonders. We think we are changing when we are merely flip-flopping. Technology is the new narcotic of the mind. It forgets and forgives our angst and excesses. Today the greatest terror is to be alone without a cell phone.

Anxiety is rampant. We cling to each other electronically, not out of love and caring, but out of boring dullness. We try to persuade ourselves that what we feel is love when we are afraid to feel, afraid to love, afraid to step aside from the masses to be different. We are afraid to make choices; afraid to choose one person over another; one career over another; one thing over another. We are afraid to take risks, afraid to take chances. We embrace the Grim Reaper of fate, masking our anguish by putting the tattoo needle to our bodies to become walking billboards of anomie.

Our self-identity is skin deep. We are obsessed with knowing who we are separate from everyone else, only to become restless imitation of everybody. Peter Berger in The Homeless Mind (1973) sees us liberated from the narrow controls of family and community, but lost and empty, unable to influence our situation or others. We balance precariously on the precipice of apathy.

Apathy, Love and Violence

If this dismal outline of our society and culture is disheartening, consider the first step that always follows apathy. It is violence to others or to ourselves.

We are at war with ourselves on every street, every corner, in every community, in every church, school and home.

We have more guns than citizens with nearly everyone over the age of ten with at least one cell phone. We cannot stand silence, or being alone. We go to the mall as much for the noise, and for the crowd and anonymity as much as to shop.

We look for holy causes in which we can lose our identity, our apathy, and ourselves in something bigger than we are, where someone else takes charge, does the thinking, makes the choices, and takes responsibility for the action.

We do this out of a lack of individual self-worth and the gnawing sense of powerlessness.

We are perfect fodder for fanatics and fanaticism, for holy causes and half-truths. Our glass is always half empty if not bone dry. We are at the ready to blame others for the fix we’re in. Enter ambulance chasers who rescue us from ourselves and then turn us into their ornaments.

Look around you. We are moving faster than ever before, but it is an old habit of us to run faster when we have lost our way, and to grasp more fiercely to passing canards. When we have no depth or understanding, we are ornaments on somebody else’s tree.

Whatever merits or failings research, statistics and technical tools may have, they are inanimate things. They are not real people. They may frame an idea but they have no personal meaning beyond a thing. If this seems self-evident, think again. We treat our things better than we treat our people.

The mechanisms of science and technology have chased us from ourselves into the adoration of new tools and toys. Our gullibility is equally evident in our eagerness to accept “scientific pronouncements” with little hesitation. We were once told coffee was bad for our health. The other day we were told coffee is not only good for our health, but it impedes Alzheimer’s disease. The average American drinks less than two cups of coffee a day. It takes five cups of coffee per day to impede this disease. It will be interesting to see if the stock price on coffee futures goes up.

We are buried daily in a sea of factual statistics from the social, behavior and physical sciences, facts which often later prove unreliable, or untrue. This confounds and confuses but should not come as a surprise. In our solution driven culture, ten or more solutions to a problem jump out before the problem has actually been defined. Ergo, it is open season on gullibility.

All You Need is Love

We treat sex as if it is a hostile foreign country. The mind and body are at war with each other. The mind refuses to listen to the body, and the body refuses to listen to the mind. Small wonder why we have trouble connecting. How can we expect to connect with someone else when we refuse to connect with ourselves?

Pornography is an obvious exploitation of this riddle, making the natural perverted and the perverted, natural. We are not content to be silly putty. We have to broadcast it in silly romance novels, television soap operas and situation comedies where sex makes fools of us. And in all this silliness, we have no idea what it means to love.

Love has been assumed to be a motivating force, a power which could be relied upon to push us onward in life to greater happiness and well being with not so much as a nod to caring. If this were not so, we would treat each other better when we say we love them. But it doesn’t stop there.

Why is it so often that people in the caring professions – social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists – hard working though they might be, are so seldom found to be caring people? Well-meaning is a far cry from caring. When you care, you see beyond the client to the individual person, and listen to that person not as an ideal type but as a hurting human being.

Love has been crafted in the narrowest sense to love making, which is not necessarily identical with loving. Advertisers have had a field day with Viagra, the performance enhancing sex stimulant. It is ironic that it appears during the dying days of the Sensate culture. Still, love has become a problem, as greater sex hasn’t led to liberation and greater connection, but instead too often to nihilism, and self-estrangement. Why is that?

Love has become all about control. It is a way to possess, dictate, and dominate, as opposed to a means to unity, trust and union. It caused psychiatrist R. D. Laing to suggest that love is a cover for violence.

The Hand of Culture in the Mix

In this age of transition, none of the supporting beams of the past are either in place, or if in place, reliably up to the task of needed support.

Self-assurance in this rational ordering society no longer holds true. We have become ambiguous stick figures teetering on the brink of ambivalence. Life is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide. We are stuck. We look for experts to guide us only to find these experts are as lost as we are. We are in “No Man’s Land.” We have missed the changes, stayed the same, and left the future up for grabs.

It is not totally our fault, but this should give us little comfort.

No certain clan or group created this societal malaise. To grasp what is happening, it might be thought, in geological terms, to resemble a tectonic shift that speeded up since the bourgeois experience of the Victorian period (1837 – 1901).

Victorians, armed with their wealth and military might, gave themselves permission with impunity to ridicule, bully, patronize, and exploit individuals and classes, races and nations they deemed inferior. They looked on war as purification, liberation, and the instrument of hope. Historian Peter Gay reveals this narcissistic sentiment in his book, “Cultivation of Hatred” (1993). Victorian hubris has spread across the Western world as a cultural pandemic.

In many ways, despite this postmodern era of electronic wonders, the vestiges of the Victorian age still contaminate our Western roots. This finds us essentially defenseless as the “schizoid man,” the detached man, which is another way of saying the technological man.

The more we cover the sickness of society with technological man’s creative genius the less relevant we have become to ourselves.

Sorokin notes this, and says, there is no cause for alarm. The transition from the magnificent six-hundred-year day of the Sensate culture to the majestic promise of the six-hundred-year day of the Ideational culture is now in progress. Nothing, he says, can change this as there is nothing we can do about it other than understand what is happening and embrace the opportunities that are unfolding.

Cultures and civilizations are born, prosper, disintegrate and die, and then are reborn in new iterations. We are living in the dying days of the Sensate culture. Sorokin writes:

“The failure is not due to this or that incidental external factor, but has been generated by the system of sensory truth in the process of its own development. The seeds of decay were inherent in the system from the very first, and with its development they began to germinate and grow until they have finally become veritable lethal poisons.” (Crisis of Our Age, pp. 115 – 116).

The “truth” landscape of today is a maze of conveniences, conventions, and instrumental and terminal values. We are currently experiencing the contradictory truths of capitalism and communism, Islam and Christianity, Judaism and other isms. Then there is evolution and creative design, deists and atheists, scientists and Christian Scientists, Catholicism and Protestantism, global warming and globalization, pacifists and hawks, patriots and internationalists, religion and pseudo-religion.

Our sick culture has come to be the way we live and how we solve the problems that perplex us. It is the reason why the lid has come off technological man and has exploded into violence. When truths are not treated as relative, and one truth attempts to suppress or destroy another truth, the world more resembles a pock like rash of volcanoes.

Victorians thought it was self-evident that they were the proper custodians of truth; that it was their duty to the world to be policeman and doctor to its tangled web of deceit and debility, and to cultivate its roots with Victorian wisdom and culture.

The reign of queen Victoria ended with her death in 1901, but the momentum continued. The twentieth century was to become a constant bloodbath of opposing truths. More than 100 million people perished on the battlefields of Europe and Asia in two world wars, and many wars after. Currently, Iraq and Afghanistan have the stamp of Victorian hubris on them, proving how fundamental her legacy on the West has been.

Gay writes,

“They (Victorians) would serve as a cloak to imperialistic military or commercial designs, and were driven by personal devils to be exorcised by self-destructive ventures abroad, by unimpeachable benevolence, by active feelings of guilt over one’s privileged position or a mixture of them all. For centuries, the conviction that Christians had a divine call to convert the world had animated believers.”

Gay add:

“Victorians injected what it touted as scientific rationale for hating or despising outsiders. What came to dominate these rationales for aggressiveness was the argument from race.” (Cultivation of Hatred, p. 69)

Thus far the twenty-first century seems to have departed little from this Victorian mindset much as many would argue otherwise.

The Creative Paradox

When pathology takes on normalcy, ‘schizoid man’ does not require repression. Since this is not schizophrenia, or psychotic behavior, but a state that can be constructive, it has pushed the schizoid personality toward creativity making art out of the sickness.

We see this in the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso and Freud, among others. It was the pathology of the age that liberated their genius.

The pathology also pushed others of a more technological bent toward utilitarian inventions, many of which, as mentioned earlier, have made us more detached, sedentary, and mechanical as well as entertained. This phenomenon is not exclusive to cultures in transition, but a common experience when men are allowed by society and convention to operate “out of their minds,” which is, incidentally, the definition of insanity.

Artists have always been intrigued with the archetypal qualities and characteristics that make us human. That is why they are society’s gatekeepers and recorders when society is coming apart as they thrive on chaos and collapse.

Take Orestes by Aeschylus and Faust by Goethe. These works are more than portraits of two demented characters who have wild flights of fantasy, one in Greece in the fifth-century B.C., and the other in eighteenth-century Germany.

In one sense, they represent the struggles of ambivalent man in everyday life. With the poet’s touch of genius, they interpret the ferocity of our minds as we are forced to deal with what it means to grow up, to find our identity, to affirm our power, to find love and create enough space to breathe, and finally to meet and deal with life up to and including our death. Century, race and ethnicity are strangely irrelevant.

One of the advantages of living in a transitional age is nothing is nailed down.

It forces us to rise to the challenges and contradictions, to uncover new meanings to our nature, and to see more deeply into what makes us human. It is uncanny that Aeschylus in the last Sensate culture of our distant pass, and Goethe in the dying Sensate culture of the modern era would write similarly of their times.

Aeschylus is the theological poet of his time like Milton (Paradise Lost) was in the seventeenth and Goethe in the eighteenth century. Orestes portrays the agony of being caught in the contradictory blood feuds of his time, while Faust sells his soul for immediate gratification. Both protagonists ignore the consequences of their actions.

Diagnosis of the Crisis

Explanatory models don’t represent truth personified, but provide a gauge to better understand complexities that defy easy understanding. Freud comes to mind. His explanatory model of the ego, id and superego is catchy. This is even truer in its elaboration with the “reality principle” (ego), “pleasure principle (id), and “morality principle” (superego). The problem with Freud is that he felt a need to reify his model as being “scientific,” which is far from the truth.

German philosopher Oswald Spengler wrote the obituary of civilization in his iconoclastic Decline of the West (1918). His explanatory model claimed that civilizations are mortal and have a distinct organic form and grow, mature, and decay according to a predetermined historical cycle. Spengler’s book was commercially but not critically successful. The book did, however, influence Sorokin. He latched unto the cyclic nature of civilization as explained by Spengler. Instead of seeing the death knell of the West, however, he envisioned a cyclic change from one culture to another in an overlapping continuum.

No culture in Sorokin’s explanatory model is mutually exclusive but has common characteristics to all three cultures before it moves into dominance of one. For instance, he shows how the Grecian Sensate culture (500 B.C. to 100 A.D.) moved into Medieval Ideational culture (200 through 800 A.D.), and then into the Renaissance Idealistic culture (900 through 1500 A.D.), and then into the Sensate culture of the Modern Era (1600 to the present).

As in the time of Aeschylus (c. 525 – 456 BC), Sorokin sees us in the dying Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday. The Ideational culture he sees rising like a Phoenix out of the Sensate ashes as society moves from the secular, materialistic and quantitative culture of the scientific age to a more theocratic, spiritual and qualitative culture where humanism and technology become integrated. It has happened before, and he sees it happening again.

After the collapse of the Grecian Sensate culture of Aeschylus, rose the Medieval Ideational culture of Emperor Constantine and the Roman Empire. Christianity, which had been persecuted, was now protected by the state.

Constantine is alleged to have seen a flaming cross in the sky at the river Tiber before going into battle. It was inscribed with the words, “In this sign thou shalt conquer.” He adopted the cross as his banner, and was victorious. With that stroke of serendipity, Christianity became the most powerful religion in the world, and would one day grow to more than one billion souls.

Modern and Postmodern Era and the Changing Nature of Belief

In the Modern Era of the Sensate culture, beginning roughly with the late sixteenth century, the new principle that true reality was objective, quantifiable, value free and sensory became dominant. Protestantism, and science challenged Catholic doctrine and church mythology.

It was a new age. The arts and sciences, philosophy and pseudo-religions, ethics and law flourished. Society took rational measure of social, economic and political organization. Thinking became objective, cognitive, linear and vertical with the emphasis on the empirical and secular with a “this worldly” cast to its perspective. Man, not God, had become the center of man’s consciousness.

Through the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter Reformation, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution, Western society moved swiftly through the Modern to the Postmodern Era.

Conventional religions, which are mainly intuitive, were being challenged by “pseudo-religions” in the Sensate culture with their emphasis on being scientific, rational, empirical and verifiable. Scientology would fit this description. Pseudo-religions have failed, however, to capture many converts as they have been seen to vulgarize the social and humanistic philosophies

Mystics endowed with charismatic appeal, such as Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao-tse, the Hebrew prophets, Mohammed, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine and others, found all great religions.

“Pseudo-religions” arise in the Sensate culture based upon “science,” “rationality,” or empirically verified truths. Scientology comes to mind. Pseudo-religions never get anywhere because they vulgarize social and humanitarian philosophy.

The clashes between Islam, Judaism and the Christian West today suggest the emergence of a new synthesis of theocracy in the coming Ideational culture. Sorokin sees this as a movement toward a new spiritual awakening, which may resemble the last Ideational period.

Does his view have credence? Consider this. Seventy years ago, he predicted in Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937) the dullness of our tastes would lead to shocking art, that the drop in our libido would lead to a preoccupation with sex, that the family would disintegrate, students would riot on college campuses, police would be engaged in bloody confrontations with citizens on the streets, that pornography would become mainstream and addictive, and that the bliss for “bigger and better” would run its course while the world would collapse in continuing war, chaos, and genocide.

Economic and political neuroticism would lead to a crisis in the arts and sciences, philosophy and religion; in laws and morals, manners and mores. This would spread across all Western society.

Sorokin claims that when a society’s creative forces are exhausted, the culture either becomes petrified, rigid, uncreative and stuck, or it shifts into another gear and takes off with new creative force and energy that previously lay dormant. We are in this transitory period and the jury is still out on what is next.

TEACHABLE CARING

As the ancient parable states, “Care” is born in the same act as the infant, the source of human tenderness. Love cannot live without “Care.” It is given power by nature’s sense of pain as we come into life. “Care” then becomes the psychological side of love. We feel this pain in our bodies as a child and in our hearts as an adult. Parents know this pain and sense of powerlessness when a child leaves the protective custody of the home too early.

When we say we no longer “Care,” we lose our being, and “Care” is the only way back to life. If I “Care” about life, I will husband my resources with full attention to its welfare, whereas if I do not “Care,” my life will disintegrate. “Care” is the basic construct of human existence. It constitutes man as man. The constancy of the self is guaranteed by “Care.”

Time is not intimidating nor is it fleeting. Time is what makes “Care” possible. It is the fact that we are finite, that we will one day die, that makes “Care” possible.

Yet, there is a clear distinction between “Care” and sentimentality. Sentimentality is thinking about sentiment rather than genuinely experiencing reality. Some people will cry in movies or watching television, but will show no sentiment when they see a homeless person freezing on the street.

Sentimentality glories in tears. It begins with subjectively and ends there. “Care” is caring about something or someone real, and then doing something about it. The caring person is caught up in the experience of the objective thing we “Care” about.

“Care” is what is missing today. It takes many forms, some of which may surprise. For example, “Care” is what young people are fighting when they skip school, or drop out of school, or do drugs, or play house, or go on drinking binges, or steal from their parents or neighbors, or lie about where they are and what they are about, maintaining the cringing, creeping, seeping conviction that nothing matters, that they can’t do anything about it so why give a shit.

“Care” is what pushes young people on the fringe into gangs; young girls into rushing their biological clocks; young boys for thinking with their gonads.

The threatening shadow over all this is apathy, uninvolved in mainstream activities, the relentless grasping for external stimulation. “Care” is the necessary antidote. There is none other. “Care” leads to a productive and fulfilling life.

Should the apathetic person fail to muster this antidote, he may not know it but he is a powder keg sitting on the precarious edge of violence, and possible death at his own hands or the hands of an equally disturbed apathetic person.

The struggle is real as full existence in life is made ever more difficult as the world increasingly becomes mechanical and computerized distancing the individual from meaningful association and therefore from himself.

Apathy is the refusal to accept emptiness though it is everywhere. It is nigh on impossible to maintain human dignity as apathy violates it on every side. Apathy conveniently confuses rights with privileges, failing to recognize that education is a privilege and not a right; a job is a privilege and not a right; a meaningful career is a privilege and not a right; a comfortable existence is a privilege not a right.
Nobody owes us anything. It is a privilege if they befriend us, listen to us, care about us, advise us, guide us, and aid us when we need it, but it is never our right to expect it from anybody.

Failure to understand the difference between privileges and rights drives a wedge between being and becoming. Being is what we are, and it is a process of being to struggle and embrace resistance to get us where we want to go. A bird flies because it embraces the wind. We soar because we embrace adversity and turn challenge into opportunity. Becoming looks to avoid struggle and keeps its eye on the prize while never getting off the dime. Becoming wants to be rich but doesn’t want to take an entry level job, save, sacrifice, study, take risks, and endure pain to get there, all of which being does as a matter of course.

Apathy is always looking for an edge failing to see at its feet that it is surrounded by acres of diamonds. All that is desired and vital to our well being is already at our disposal. Being knows this; becoming avoids this.

Apathy sees some men in full enjoyment of riches and reputation, dignity and authority, happy and in fair frame with wife and children, while it slips off in disgust with aching heart and pangs of powerlessness venting its frustration in virulent epithets. Apathy suffers from the disease of compare and compete. It always looks outside itself for motivation and is always disappointed. Psychiatrist Willard and Marguerite Beecher put it this way in Beyond Success and Failure (1966):

“Competition enslaves and degrades the mind. It is one of the most prevalent and certainly the most destructive of all the many forms of psychological dependence. Eventually, if not overcome, if produces a dull, imitative, insensitive, mediocre, burned out, stereotyped individual who is devoid of initiative, imagination, originality and spontaneity. He is humanly dead. Competition produces zombies! Nonentities!” (p.56).

If “Care” is not nurtured, apathy will invade the emptiness, and become the source of this illness. It is so easy for us to be lost in our world, to be cut off from caring for our soul and therefore a contagion to others.

The first sign is the loss of connection with this world, with others, and with ourselves. The myths and symbols of our culture have broken down and have little meaning or relevance. We can easily drift to being on automatic pilot in life, at home, in school, on the job, and throughout the day. We fill our bodies with junk food and spirits that consume our vital organs. We smoke or lull around as if the world owes us a living. While we torture our bodies in this manner, we poison our minds with urban legends, voyeurism and vicarious fixes routing for our favorite teams.

We want life to behave as we see it, not as it is. We take pride in thinking the same as we thought as a child refusing to see how this has shrunk us into micro sized souls. Or we totally escape all the boundaries and barriers of life in hedonistic abandon refusing to acknowledge our growing insensitivity to any stimulant. We have become hollow vessel running on empty.

We listen to the gurus that tell us they have the key to unlock our souls, when theirs are locked up in gods and myths. They play on our heartstrings how they have cut the Gordian knot by exiling suspicion, fantasy, and doubt, and opening life to a world of utter tranquility. They do this while being aloof and detached. This has been the doctrine of the Stoics and Epicureans for thousands of years, reinterpreted by these gurus, yet there has never been more anxiety and depression.

The irony is that these gurus in their passion to explain away the myths are forced to fall into myth making. They talk of progress, which is killing our planet; how wealth brings health, when the wealthy are often as sick as the poor; how struggle and pain can be avoided when they are essential to growth; how stress can be eradicated when stress is essential to life – it is distress that is the culprit; how spiritual man is the answer when they are consumed with economic man, or why would they be on the circuit? They see themselves as the answer to the Four Horses of the Apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence and death, while they perpetuate their myths.

They embody technological man and that is why they have such large audiences. They are the rationalists with a religion message of health and well being. They would make emotions respond to rational demands as anxiety and dread are cured with understanding and anecdote. They are mythmakers with whom we are well acquainted.

It is the spiritual side of man that makes him human. The material side has reduced the planet to a garbage dump with its sickening redolent perfume; caused a leak in the ozone layer, created global warming; and has led to tankers loaded with nuclear waste under the cover of darkness wandering the seas like the Flying Dutchman, a man without a country, looking for a place to drop their poison.

We feel before we think, feeling is the basis of human existence.

Love starts with caring, and caring starts with feeling. Feeling transports us beyond our egos. Feeling is the way we relate to reality and others. American psychologist William James put it simply, “Feeling is everything.” James doesn’t mean that there is nothing more than feeling, but that everything starts with feeling. Feeling commits one, ties one to the object, and ensures some kind of action. We often call it love, but only because we are not comfortable identifying it as a feeling.

In this scientific age feelings have been relegated to subjective status and so value cluttered that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Reason, not feelings, has become the ultimate reality, and look where reason has gotten us.

When confused or angry, we don’t take responsibility for our feelings. We take offense; seldom stopping to ask ourselves why we are upset. Instead of taking umbrage, we might say, “What you said offends me, you hurt my feelings by not respecting me.” Attack what the person said, and take responsibility for your anger, but don’t attack the person.

When we are upset, angry, disappointed or embarrassed, we should not direct our emotions at the person, but at the offending behavior. We should value the person but be appalled at the behavior. It is the behavior, not the person, per se, that offends us. Like all such behavior, there may be more than a grain of truth to what has been said, explaining why we are upset. Criticism when coached in caring terms can make our feelings work for us.

We cannot know ourselves except as to how we feel.

Descartes didn’t do us a favor by saying, “I think, therefore I am.” He should have said, “I feel, therefore I am.” Thinking follows feeling, not the other way around. Scientists can be crippled by feelings the same as us. In fact, feelings can sometimes be more crippling for them because they deny feelings with pride.

We are subjective actors to our environment no matter how subtlety our minds have been developed.

Consider Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (1952) and Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” (1946).

Godot does not come. Vladimir and Estragon wait forever and the problem remains. Beckett forces us to look more deeply into our condition as men. He shocks us into awareness of our human significance, all to make us feel. We find ourselves caring for the tramps despite the apparent meaningless of their situation. Godot does not come, but in the waiting there is care and hope. Beckett is saying, waiting is caring, and caring is hoping.

Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” tells the same story from another perspective. It is Harry Hope’s bar and hardware salesman Theodore “Hickey” Hickman’s birthday. It is a time when Hickey’s hopes, dreams and pipe dreams have all disintegrated into the self-knowledge that greatness has fled from him forever. At this point, in this heavy state of morose, it seems no longer a play and we are swept up into a vacuum of despair. Hickey is in a paradox state of meaning in meaninglessness. The vacuum, the emptiness, and the apathy are the tragic facts that embrace audience and actors alike. The emoting on stage has taken on a life of its own. These actors feel strangely real to us in their own lives, which have now become a part of ours.

T. S. Eliot captures this contradictory situation with these lines:

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love for the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting,
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing.”
(Four Quartets, p. 15)

Often artists dwell on nihilism to stoke the boilers for relevance, to transcend superficiality for substance, to penetrate the mythos of “Care” to enable us to feel, to stand ready against cynicism and apathy, to take the high ground of authenticity in relationships, to shed the morality of appearance and form, to seek an honest and genuine connection with others, to feel, to touch, and to look one in the eye and share hopes and dreams without embarrassment, to simply sit in silence and take in the natural light without language, to simply feel connected. No feeling is more embracing for “Care” than this.


Sources: James R. Fisher, Jr., “A Look Back To See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007); Pitrim Sorokin, “The Crisis of Our Age” (Dutton 1941); Martin Heidegger, “Being and Time” (Harper & Row 1962); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Faust” (Alfred A. Knopf 1964); Rollo May, “Love and Will” (Norton 1969); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land” (unpublished); Peter Berger, et al, “The Homeless Mind” (Random House 1973); R. D. Laing, “The Facts of Life” (Ballantine Books 1973); Peter Gay, “The Cultivation of Hatred” (Norton 1993); Aeschylus, “Agamemnon” (University of Chicago Press 1953); John Milton, “Paradise Lost” (Penguin Classics 2003); Oswald Spengler,“Decline of the West” (Modern Library 1965); F. Van der Meer, “The Faith of the Catholic Church” (Dimension Books 1966); Pitrim Sorokin, “Social and Cultural Dynamics”( Porter Sargent 1937); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Confident Thinking” (unpublished); Willard and Marguerite Beecher, “Beyond Success and Failure” (Pocket Books 1966); Samuel Beckett, “Waiting for Godot” (Faber & Faber 1998); Eugene O’Neill, “The Iceman Cometh” (Vintage 1957); T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets (Harcourt, Brace 1943)

THE QUANDARY OF PLENTY, AND THE PLENTY WHO ARE IN A QUANDARY!

THE QUANDARY OF PLENTY, AND THE PLENTY WHO ARE IN A QUANDARY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007

QUESTION:

Jim,

Another question before I dash out to lunch: how do we solve the overpaid CEO problem? I don't think we can pass laws to limit income -- or the world of sports would probably be the first place to start, at least as far as public opinion would dictate. Do we add our voices to the din of outrage? Methinks we'd be ignored by boards that are themselves composed of CEOs from other companies. Do we offer a model that enlightened companies can adopt if we show them some benefit in doing so? Do we "merely" celebrate those few companies that don't participate in this inflationary contest? (That's not "mere" at all; I think that step alone could do some good).

I'll bet you've already thought of something. Can't wait to read it!

Ted

ANSWER:

Ted

Yes, I have thought of this problem, and have looked at it in the ways that follow. My mind is not convinced that anyone with six zeros after a numeral or two is of a mind to do anything enlightening or otherwise to change the status quo.

I see the problem longitudinally as a natural progression that started innocently and collegially but unwittingly poisoned its roots and became damaged goods along the way. CEOs and other senior managers now survive in the cocoon of that denial and assumed safety.

It is of course not safe at all, and like everything else, will lose its perch and fade into history, but I sense not before it remains Faustian for some time.

I don't mean to be vague but wish to prepare you for what I hope is not too cumbersome an explanation.

Jim

* * * * * * * * * * *

WHAT WAS RIGHT BEFORE ABOUT SENIOR MANAGEMENT

There was a time when senior management self-managed itself with dignity and frugality.

That time was the late 1930s or the end of the Great Depression, through the late 1950s, when the euphoria of WWII was still an echo in the mind.

Most companies (compared to today) were small; many were individually owned or in limited partnerships. There were few mega corporations, and they were mostly in retail.

What is especially important to note is that management was integral rather than separate from the function of work. There was no mahogany row. Senior management didn't have personal trainers or make-up artists, or specialists that taught them presentation skills. They winged it, and didn't worry about being politically correct. They were tough but fair, consistent and on target.

They didn't talk in sound bytes but in the jargon and dialect of work. This was not a conscious act; this was the way it was. Affectation had no place in the business, as making an impression had not yet an audience.

Managers and workers were on the same page getting off on the same dime. If you were to use these words to describe work, you would sound to their ears like an alien.

Personhood had not yet raised its ugly head, as the common good was understood as the unifying force. The focus was in doing not describing; into dealing with what was wrong not who was wrong. Schedules had to be met, and they had no time or interest in pointing fingers but in putting the situation right.

My evidence?

"In the Shadow of the Courthouse" (2003), I take the reader into the mind of a young boy who would scoot down behind the living room sofa, and hide, so that he could listen to his aunts and uncles talk about their work during WWII.

They worked in such places as the Garment Factory that made mosquito nets for North Africa, Central Steel & Tube that made containers for machine guns, Collis & Company that made metal shelving and racks for submarines and destroyers, Chicago & North Western Railroad that moved troops across the country, Schick Army Hospital that took care of the wounded from the South Pacific, and on and on.

His relatives talked about their work with pride -- many of his aunts were "Rosie the Riveter" -- and of their bosses as partners.

They would mention with respect the long hours their bosses worked, and how kind and generous they were to them as colleagues. The focus for all was on the job at hand, taking care of business. Work was gratifying because it was important; self-gratification never came up.

Bosses worked beside workers, listened to their ideas on how things could get done better and more efficiently, and generally put such ideas into practice. Everyone saw themselves as part of a unit, not separate from, or below or above it.

If you are a history buff, and have read about the collapse of the German war machine in World War II, you will find that that didn't happen here, not in small town or metropolitan America.

Germany lost, if you can believe its own historians, because of mismanagement and slave labor, whereas the United States won at home as well as on the battlefield because this was management's finest hour.

American management rose in a chorus of one voice. It became the greatest war machine in military history. The late David Halberstam documents this incredible feat in a little book called, "The Next Century" (1991).

WHAT WENT WRONG WITH AMERICAN MANAGEMENT?

In all my reading on this subject, I've failed to see any attention given to the exhaustion of the captains of industry after the war. Imagine the letdown when a workweek was reduced from 80 to 40 hours.

I knew of cases in my hometown, which was a factory town on the Mississippi, and a perfect place to support the war, where owners of these small industries had severe mental and physical health problems after the war.

I sense that they were worn out physically and mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It must have been like having the bends coming up from the deep too fast.

Owners and managers had been working twelve hour days, seven-days a week for four years without vacations or holidays.

Then peace came, and everyone across the globe wanted to buy American. So, selfless pursuit of a higher purpose by those in the war machine now became a kind of affluence never dreamed of. No one was paid very well during the war. That was all about to change now.

New companies came in; some owners sold their operations becoming employees of the new firms, while others never found purpose again.

To this day -- and I think that is one reason for the success of my book -- there is a mania for nostalgia and for that perfect day when everyone was hitting on all cylinders and moving in happy cadence to the same drum roll.

It has also occurred to me that American management that sacrificed so much, and gave so much, and endured so much, during that great war, but were never given the credit it deserved for its role in managing the war, became miffed and a little passive aggressive.

Over the years, I've interviewed hundreds of supervisors, managers, owners and executives from this period, citizens who didn't fight on the battlefield but fought another war on the frontlines of production, who gave me that impression. It would come in the manner of an apology for not having been in the military when I would remind them that they were.

I've never seen a banner or a banquet for these warriors, and probably never will.

It always surprises the person who has never been a CEO or a senior manager when I remind them that these people are persons, too, and should be given the same courtesy and respect that they expect. "What if I yelled that at you?" I said to one person who shouted, "Liar, liar, liar," as his general manager rode by. "Your words hurt him as much as they would hurt you," I added.

There is nothing wrong with differing with another person, whatever his station, but we should differ politely and frequently and directly when we feel we have cause. It is so easy to forget we are all flesh and blood, bone and muscle, sinew and adipose tissue. We are all somebody.

One of the amazing things I've experienced is that life has treated me so well that people seem to believe I don't need reassurance, don't need the same caring and concern they do. It is as if people think when you reach a certain intellectual or affluent level that you cease to have the same demands that they do, when of course you do. In fact the sensitivity of the person that has been passionately involved in life and career is most likely more acute, making that person more not less vulnerable to the ravages of criticism and ill treatment.

Never forget the high brow has a lot of low brow in him; the sophisticated person who takes barbs from all sides, and is expected not to react, has a breaking point the same as any low brow, only he may hide it longer, or may show it in ways not directly apparent, but more consequential in such expressions as debilitating health.

WHEN THE RUBBER HITS THE ROAD AND THE BRAKES ARE ON

The 1960s came and everything started to unravel.

We had a president that looked pretty, spoke pretty, but had his own demons to deal with, and who got us into Vietnam, but was never held responsible for it because he lived in the myth of Camelot, and then was assassinated before that war became truly ugly.

The next president wasn't pretty, didn't speak pretty, and had his own demons but they were mainly contempt for Camelot with which his every action was compared. He escalated Vietnam to the point that more than 600,000 American troops were there; the Civil Rights Movement at home was gaining strength; and he convinced himself that America was so resourceful that it could maintain guns in Vietnam and butter at home in a series of social welfare initiatives that found the United States with its foot to the floor on the accelerator and brake at once going nowhere.

The United States disengaged in shame from Vietnam, having lost the war, with 55,000 Americans dead on its battlefields.

Not only was the president blamed for this defeat, but the generals in the Pentagon and in the field. Then too, senior management that had been taken for granted in WWII was now openly criticized for its failure to keep workers from strikes and lockouts, students from storming the dorms and the administrative buildings on college campuses, churchgoers from failing to take control of their families, citizens from rioting in the cities.

Divorce, adultery, illicit sex relations, and promiscuity were all on the rise. America was coming apart at the seams. And it didn't get any better with the 1968 presidential campaign and summer Olympics in Mexico City. There was a cultural breakdown and American society was in chaos.

Then when it was thought it couldn't get any worse, it did. Japan, Inc. and South East Asia started to make major inroads into American manufacturing markets: automobiles, electronics, electrical fixtures, electrical appliances, and steel smelting.

I was a young executive during this period and I felt the panic in my own company, and experienced it when I dealt with other companies.

What worked before wasn't working anymore. Rather than entertain questions as to why, and change, a new kind of cynicism developed. Like all cynicisms it contain a kind of manageable innocence and naiveté at first.

Creeping into enterprise was a new sense of command & control, and that was to do what is necessary to make things look good on one's CEO watch. Don't worry about tomorrow, let tomorrow take care of itself. Look out for yourself because nobody else will. If you have to engage change, make sure it is only cosmetic.

Senior management found many ways to do what was legal but not necessarily ethical such as taking finders fees when divisions merged; or accepting elaborate gifts from suppliers in the form of exotic trips or dinners or tickets to sporting events.

Once the focus moved from doing to getting, as innocent and legal as the getting might be, it soon became a pattern, and then progressed to a set of tactics, and finally, became a broad strategy often in collusion with the board of directors.

In my career, I have seen the complex organization go from an organic work-centered enterprise with workers and senior management committed to the same goals, to a multilayered fragmented hierarchical desperate assembly of mixed messages and mixed disciplines with everyone in charge so that no one is.

Once the pattern and then the tactics and finally the strategy become set, it takes on a life of its own, and those that enter this mahogany row as the freshest faces see nothing wrong with the process as it is what they expected, and why they have worked so hard to climb the pyramid to experience its amoral status.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

It might seem facetious to say, but perhaps the best course is to do nothing. As it turns out, nothing has its own momentum and directional velocity. Nothing is building incrementally to something, and what that something will look like when it comes to fruition is still open to question.

I feel like a spectator thinking about this, sitting in the stands looking at all these handsome highly qualified young people, who are given entry level jobs at anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000, depending on their specialty skills, and expected like Henry Ford did a century ago to behave as safe hires.

They are being indoctrinated into becoming willing soldiers of enterprise: obedient, polite, submissive, passive, and docile, while CEOs and senior managers take home suitcases full of cash, while announcing the company is going through belt-tightening.

Yes, CEOs and senior managers have gotten greedy. As stated in the opening, greed has crawled not rushed to its present prominence. Money means a lot to some, but to the majority it is still pride that pulls them out of bed in the morning to do battle every day. Greed is ancillary not fundamental to their construction.

These willing soldiers of enterprise may not understand this, or the fact that they are now expendable. Corporate raiders are always ready to buy a company's assets, give the CEO and senior managers a sweetheart deal, then break up the business, and sell off the pieces at a handsome return on investment.

It is all perfectly legal, if not ethical, and these handsome highly qualified young people have been complicit in the conspiracy by their naiveté and silence.

So, my wonder is when will these professionals wake up and say, "Hell, no, I won't go!" When will they storm the Bastille?

They have the power but only want the perks not the responsibilities of power and senior management knows that.

It all started a century ago when Henry Ford bribed his workers into doing his bidding, and it will go on as long as these new professionals behave as these workers did a century ago.

My prediction is that we will have a revolution when these professionals cannot pay off their student loans after five years of working.

Think of it! When the individual return on the investment is not paying off, something will have to give.

Am I trying to be an alarmist? No, it just stands to reason nobody gives up anything until they have to, and the rhetoric hasn't touched CEOs, as they keep filling up their trunks and carrying their loot off to the bank. So, stay tuned.

Be always well,

Jim

_____________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is "A Look Back To See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007). This is a discussion that emanates from a question from a colleague in a think tank, The Naples Institute, to which they both belong.

"URBAN LEGEND" -- SOME DELIGHT IN SCHADENFREUDE

Urban Legend -- Some Delight in Schadenfreude

To my email address book readers:

Thanks to editorial columnist Joseph H. Brown of The Tampa Tribune I now know what "urban legend" means.

Brown, who always writes with control and panache, made reference in his Sunday column "All The 'News' Unfit To Print" to some of the wild stories posted on the Internet that are believed to be the unvarnished truth, when they are simply "urban legends." People cut and paste these stories into their emails, and then delight in disseminating them.

The point of the column was that there is an increasingly angry Internet surfing reader who feels newspapers are avoiding the "real stories." Not true.

Brown mentioned the "urban legend" of Andy Rooney. At least ten different emailers in my email address book sent me an article allegedly written by Rooney. The article made me very angry. I accepted it as true, and reacted in an email posted to my address book, and alas, also to my blog (www.fisherofideas.com).

I received a cryptic note from Joseph Brown afterwards: "This is only urban legend."

I had no idea what he meant, and never got back to asking him to explain.

My email to him that follows this (below) explains that I am not a Internet surfer of urban legends, not a radio talk "shock jock" listener, and get most of my information from reading and experience. I don't even own cable television.

The alleged "transcript" of "60 Minutes," that Andy Rooney was said to have made with these salacious political and racial views, never happened.

Brown:

"Anyone who has heard Rooney would know instantly (this) wasn't him." Well, not being a "60 Minutes" fan, I wouldn't know.

Brown continues:

"Rooney has been denying this garbage since 2003, and in 2005 disclaimed in a '60 Minutes' segment, saying, 'There's a collection of racist and sexist remarks on the Internet with a picture of me with the caption, 'Andy Rooney said on '60 Minutes...'

'If I could find the person who did write it using my name I would sue him.'"

Brown suggests the Rooney urban legend is alive and well years later, and will likely never die. Sad.

These vicious stories play on our natural inclination to schadenfreude, to the enjoyment of the faux pas of others, and so people will continue to delight in them.

People receptive to such nonsense are apparently too lazy to discover for themselves the real truth. Even more ominous, with this new electronic technology, the worst is yet to come.

People believe what they want to believe: all politicians are corrupt; all Jews are rich; all intellectuals are snobs; something must be rotten in Denmark when an ordinary kid succeeds.

Take me, for instance. I have several degrees from bachelor's to master's to doctorate's, and I have experienced my own variety of urban legend.

A friend has told me that people believe a prominent doctor in my hometown put me through school and greased the skids for my "good connections" and the "good life."

The truth is I never got a dime from anyone at any level through a nine-year college and university educational journey. My parents had no money, so it was entirely up to me. I put myself through school aided by good grades and academic scholarships at the bachelor's, master's, and doctorate's level. What's more, I never took out a school loan. As for my many careers, they, too, have had no sponsors, but a bit of luck and a lot of pluck.

But this is not what people want to hear, so my urban legend will probably continue long after my death.

Be always well,

Jim

-----------------
Forwarded Message:
Subj: RE: Today's column
Date: 12/17/2007 5:06:57 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: JBrown@tampatrib.com
To: THEDELTAGRPFL@cs.com
Received from Internet: click here for more information

Jim:
I remember reading Time magazine in high school and questioned some of the stuff published in it even back then. Henry Luce definitely had an agenda.
Joe

To Joseph H. Brown, Editorial columnist, The Tampa Tribune

Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 12:51 PM

SUBJECT: Today's column

Joseph,

Now I know what you mean by "urban legend." It was a new term to me.

I don't surf the Internet, but get from ten to twenty of these things to which you refer from people of my youth.

I don't listen to talk radio, never have. And I am not a fan of "60 Minutes," so didn't know whether Andy Rooney was this or that.

In fact the few times I listened to "60 Minutes" in the distant past, when it related to stories of which I had first hand information, I saw how the story was choreograph for making it viewer friendly to its point of view.

I read books, and still love newspapers especially the "op-ed" pages and sport pages. I feel journalism, especially television journalism has given a huge window to the miscreants of society reporting rape, murder and mayhem on the nightly news as if nothing of significance otherwise has happened in the last 24-hours.

Newspapers have not (yet) been reduced to such exclusive reporting.

Yes, there are people of The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and The New York Times that have sullied their reputations by allowing reporters to publish bogus reports and bogus series, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

The newspaper I have always loved more than any other is my own Iowa "The Des Moines Register." Even the "Daily Iowan" when I went to Iowa was awfully fair for a university newspaper. And the Tampa Tribune, thanks to people like you on its staff, has maintained a dispassionate and credible posture.

Years ago, Time magazine's featured an article (during the midst of the confusion that was the Vietnam War) with the headline, "What you should think about Vietnam."

Incensed, I wrote back that I don't want you to tell me what to think about that war, but for me to decide on my own what I think.

To the Time magazine's credit, an editor wrote back that slanting the news was its role, as anyone that read Time knew it had a point-of-view as, for instance, does Newsweek.

We live in a time when people (most people I know) are quite intelligent at doing things but quite lazy at thinking about things beyond the scope of their direct experience. They don't read, and are obliged to funnel things into their thinking that are convenient and consistent with what they want to believe is true. To penetrate this carapace is the function of a good newspaper.

Be always well,
Jim