CONFIDENT THINKING, THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 14, 2009
“The subprime crisis was essentially psychological in origin. Denying the importance of psychology and other social sciences for financial theory would be analogous to physicists denying the importance of friction in the application of Newtonian mechanics.”
Robert J. Shiller, “The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It” (2009).
* * *
THE LIMITS OF MACROECONOMICS
If you are like me, considering macroeconomics hurts your head. Clever people have taken arithmetic to new heights of complexity. In the process, banks and lending institutions have suffered loses of more than $4 trillion (re: International Monetary Fund); unemployment is 9 percent and threatening to go higher, industrial production is off 13 percent compared to last year; and most companies find their profits falling or morphing. What’s worse, no one knows for sure if the Bush-Obama stimulus packages will work.
Economic Nobel Laureate George A. Akerlof and economist Robert J. Shiller feel there is a troubling lack of reform in macroeconomics. What they find especially troubling is the share of the “finance” sector in total corporate profits rose from 10 percent on average (1950s through the 1980s) to 22 percent in the 1990s, and to an astonishing 34 percent in the first half of this decade of the twenty-first century.
The finance industry’s share of US wages and salaries has likewise been rising from 3 percent in the early 1950s to 7 percent in the current decade.
Clearly, this is a failure of the economy and the economists to track the capital absorbed “up front” by the financial industry, which has euphemistically represented its cut as “the costs allocating that capital.”
It is no accident that our best brains have moved to Wall Street where the money has been siphoned off over the last several decades at will before being distributed. Few gave this much attention until the economic meltdown. What’s more, it was perfectly legal.
* * *
In their book, “Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism” (2009), Akerlof and Shiller consider genuine loses of the economy, credit default swaps (CDSs), losers and winners in the capital betting game, but, mainly, the psychology behind the whole dramaturgic play.
They argue people psychology is missing in macroeconomics today, what John Maynard Keynes called the “animal spirits” in his 1936 book, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.” The original “animal spirits” passage by Keynes reads:
“Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decision to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits – a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighed average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.” (pp. 161 – 162)
AKERLOF AND SHILLER’S “FIVE ELEMENTS OF ANIMAL SPIRITS”
The authors argue economists have limited macroeconomics to statistical models to predict economic trends, and track large economic entities such as financial systems with mainly mathematical algorithms while failing to see the problem as being equally intellectual. The “animal spirits,” by which they mean the psychological and even irrational elements that figure importantly in personal choices and personal behavior, are missing.
They have identified five elements in what they call “animal spirits”:
(1) CONFIDENCE or the lack of confidence has telling consequences as to the choices people make or fail to make. I have written a great deal about confidence over the years in several books and articles. It is nice to see men of this distinction giving confidence its just due. Confidence is not driven by rationality but the irrational belief in oneself and one’s choices. It is also driven by self-worth and self-trust, which are also irrational indices. They imply you have the confidence and capacity to manage your life and make choices beneficial to yourself.
This is a major theme in CONFIDENT THINKING (not yet published). Critical to confident behavior, economic or otherwise, is for people to trust the system to be honest and forthwith in dealing with them.
(2) CONCERN FOR FAIRNESS, that is, how people treat them against how they think they and others should behave. That dovetails with the first element. In terms of fairness, a person does not expect to be exploited although he may confuse what he needs with what he wants. In that sense, he expects to be treated fairly and honestly in guiding him to what is in his best interest.
This is also a major theme of CREATIVE SELLING (not yet published) in which I argue that the job of the seller is to persuade the buyer to want what he needs rather than to exploit need to the seller’s advantage by selling what is wanted but cannot be afforded
(3) CORRUPTION and other tendencies towards antisocial behavior. The authors point out that, relatively speaking, there has been little corruption, but it is the taint of corruption, the toxic attitude, which it generates, that has led to massive paranoia and suspicious behavior. This includes distrusting banks, postponing investments, or major purchases seeing the shadow of corruption everywhere. The shrinkage of the world economy has been more a matter of delayed spending than skimming at the top. Yet the perception of corruption, the belief banks, insurance companies and Wall Street are corrupt, with little evidence in support of such beliefs, has crippled the economy.
(4) “MONEY ILLUSION,” meaning susceptibility to being misled by purely nominal price movement that, because of inflation or deflation, do not correspond to real values. Money, per se, has been equated with value when often how much you pay for a thing may have little to do with either its quality or value. It is the status, prestige, or current faddism of the thing that generates the money illusion.
(5) OUR RELIANCE ON “STORIES,” for example, that all Jews are rich, that a Harvard or Princeton education insures economic independence, that the Internet led to a “new era” in productivity, that electronic gadgets have improved the quality of performance. It could be argued that workers spend far too much time emailing, texting, checking their BlackBerrys, and taking and downloading pictures when they should be otherwise employed with the tasks at hand for which they are being paid. That said, “stories” as myths are turning into fictive facts, which influence behavior. Earlier, this was called “self-fulfilling prophecies.” Now, it is the repetition of lies being reified into truths.
Other topics they cover are joblessness, savings, the volatile prices of financial assets and real estate, and the prevalence of poverty among African Americans. They see systemic limitations on today’s conventional macroeconomics. To wit:
“The theories economists typically put forth about how the economy works are too simplistic. That means we should fire the weather forecaster, and firing the forecaster means giving up the myth that capitalism is purely good.”
CRISIS IN CONFIDENCE
The element of “animal spirits” on which they place the most emphasis is the current crisis in confidence. It is, they say, “The first and most crucial of our animal spirits.” It displays itself when we ask ourselves: Is it rational or not for me to put my money in a bank in which I have confidence, or to buy a stock if I have confidence in the company’s business prospects? According to Akerlof and Shiller, this kind of behavior, by definition, is irrational since “confidence” for them is a kind of faith, not a matter of rational analysis. They write:
“The very term confidence implies behavior that goes beyond a rational approach to decision making. When confidence is explained in terms of trust, the very meaning of trust is that we go beyond the rational.”
But there is a downside to the “animal spirits” as well. The authors point out that when people have too much of irrational confidence, they behave in ways that cause the economy to become overheated.
In any case, the authors insist confidence is the critical index to behavior and has been largely ignored by economists. They have instead been preoccupied with data collection and evaluation while disregarding irrational aspects because they cannot be so easily quantified. This is another instance of the focus being on “things” at the expense people.
“Confident Thinking” and “Creative Selling” are consistent with these five elements of Akerlof and Schiller, authors who have brought their analysis down to ordinary people having ordinary lives making ordinary decisions that have direct impact on the economy. They understand how critical behavior is as a factor in a world of growing complexity.
Benjamin Freedland, Professor of Political Economy at Harvard in the “New York Review” (May 28, 2009) questions the efficacy of Akerlof and Shiller’s five elements while applauding the authors enlisting the behavior of people into the economic equation of the current crisis. It remains to be seen how seriously other economists take these five elements.
CONFIDENT THINKING, THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY
I am not an economist, but an organizational development (OD) psychologist who has written widely on these five elements, as they are fundamental to the efficacy of OD interventions.
Akerlof and Shiller demonstrate a fundamentally OD perspective. These five elements, expressed in a different context, are evident in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) as well.
“Confident Thinking” and “Creative Selling” are natural complements to Akerlof and Shiller’s “Animal Spirits.” Economics are not only involved in the buying and selling of commodities, but in intellectual capital as well, something these authors feel has been neglected in an economic sense. Intellectual capital considered on a most down-to-earth, intimate and fundamental basis has been my OD view from the trenches.
Macroeconomics has failed to give appropriate attention to excessive risk-taking, systematic mispricing of assets, and, often, plain reckless behavior. In the psychological world of OD, there has been inadequate attention given to the impact of confidence, trust, and the perception of paranoia. These irrational indices do not lend themselves easily to statistical verification, but do reflect the way people behave.
It was the reason forty years ago I wrote CONFIDENT SELLING (1970). No one could explain my success nor could I. So, I had to reexamine what I did, why I did it, and how I triggered behaviors that sparked significant sales. The key was a verification of Akerlof and Shiller’s “Five Elements.”
* * *
Akerlof and Shiller have departed from the conventional wisdom of economists. They have put people first before profits. It remains to be seen the level of their influence. Reading yet another profile of “Einstein” (“Einstein,” Discover, Spring 2009), I was reminded how difficult it is to depart from convention. The profile was a reminder of what confidence it takes to step out of the pack.
Einstein was a man of such unshakable confidence. He was a loner and self-absorbed, and let very few people into his inner sanctum, and that included his own family. In retrospect, colleagues have written he wasn’t a polished mathematician or a profound physicist. He not only stayed with problems longer than others but also asked the right questions; questions that were often thought to be heretical. Going against the grain was natural to him. Nor was he afraid to embarrass or be in conflict with his colleagues.
Einstein discovered relativity and quantum mechanics, but in his stubbornness deserted the later, which has become the voice of physics today. He stayed in that stubborn mindset never retreating the rest of his life.
It bothered him for naught that he was out of sync with his colleagues while chasing a unified theory he never discovered.
He got it wrong, not once, not twice, but countless times. He made subtle blunders, outright goofs, and his oversights were glaring. Error infiltrated every aspect of his thinking. For example, he was wrong about the universe – he saw in a state of stasis and not an expanding universe. He was wrong about its content, wrong about the workings of atoms. His mistakes could be compelling and instructive, and some were even essential to the progress of modern physics.
He was an intuitive thinker whose discoveries were eminently logical, only his errors preserve the doubts, quirks and prejudices that fed his intuitions. He imagined himself chasing a beam of light. He focused passionately and painfully on a few simple ideas, looking for the truth of nature God had designed. He preferred to see that truth as stable, orderly, deterministic and knowable to the most intimate detail. “That God would choose to play dice with the world,” he once said, “is something that I cannot believe for a single moment.” His friend, physicist Niels Bohr replied, “Stop telling God what to do.”
He was a pantheist in the same sense as Spinoza and kept to that constant all of his life, which explains why he did not believe in religions, but believed in religion. He was as much an aesthete as a scientist with an instinct for beauty as would an artist.
The iconic Einstein is not the man. We sometimes forget he was as stubborn as a mule, a man who had the temerity, fortitude, stick-to-it-to-ness, and the luck to change our idea of the physical world. And for that we have made him that iconic figure.
Akerlof and Shiller have brought the individual into the economic equation. Very few ever step out from the crowd because most of us buy into ideas of things as they are, only a few display the confidence to challenge those ideas. That has been a central theme to my many missives, articles and books. Confident thinking is not founded in the absence of insecurity or befuddlement, something that plagued Einstein throughout his career, but in the wisdom of insecurity.
* * *
Friday, May 15, 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
THE FACTORY UNIVERSITY, THE FACTORY CULTURE -- AN EXCHANGE!
THE FACTORY UNIVERSITY, THE FACTORY CULTURE – AN EXCHANGE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 11, 2009
“New York City used to be the world’s financial capital. It no longer is even the financial capital of the United States, Washington is.”
Ian Bremmer, “State Capitalism Comes of Age: The End of the Free Market?” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2009, pp. 40 – 55.
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
We are all so very dissatisfied with the current state of affairs. I know I have offered my share, not a fair share but a disproportional heaping of rants and raves, directed at those "in control" who have systematically abused us the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe unencumbered by the robber barons, while ranting at their heartless oppression.
We, the wretched refuse in our teeming stores (Wal-Mart, Target, Costco Best Buy and Sam's Club) maxed on our credit cards and waiting for the next unemployment check, search for our own Golden Door. I'll take what's behind #3.
My apologies to Emma Lazarus.
Jim, you were a pioneer leading the introduction of QCCs in the 70s. If you recall, one of the concepts we emphasized to the teams was avoid "curing" the symptoms. The use of root cause analysis helped to ensure we dug deeper. It has been rare that you attack the surface of an issue. Each of the initial issues raised are symptoms of deeper societal problems. The list of six solutions address removing boundaries and success criteria for everyone but old professors. Essentially the proposal is to fire old professors. Each fails to explore why the symptom exists.
Having been fortunate to attend two universities in which professors seemed available and receptive to students, or at least this student, I can't relate to that lament. Nor can I understand how an MBA doesn't prepare someone for business. That is more the student's fault. You could earn the degree by filling electives with cakewalk classes or you could challenge yourself with advanced statistics and complex finance classes.
We forget that Universities are also businesses. Endowments only go so far. Pandering to students (or companies with ed assistance programs) brings those fat tuition checks to the bursar's office. Oh, what a tangled web we weave....
Michael
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
As I said in my “Factory University” missive (May 10, 2009) that I applaud a sitting academic for having the courage to speak out, while seeing he still retains “remnants of the factory mindset.”
Of course, he is addressing symptoms instead of root causes. I applaud him because we have heard little noise from academics. Can you imagine how entrenched academics might however react to his relatively innocent remarks? Panic comes to mind.
And yes, universities are businesses, but they should create the model appropriate to the climate of today instead of reifying the old factory model of the past.
* * *
Our economy is upside down, and no one would notice if it wasn’t in the tank.
More than fifty years ago, Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers went into collusion with the automotive industry, vying for pay and entitlement concessions, while giving up control and decision-making of workers in their work. Now that chicken has come to roost.
More than fifty years ago GM’s CEO Charles Wilson was right to say, “As GM goes so goes America!” We have been captive to that Detroit mystique for half a century. We are still captive albeit no longer relevant. Why? Notice my closing remarks to this missive.
* * *
In typical American fashion, when the money is flowing freely, American workers are willing to give up almost everything for that extra buck and perk. I wrote about the steel and aluminum industries regarding this in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998).
Senior employees at Alcoa and Bethlehem Steel in the 1960s were given 13-week paid furloughs every five years. What did most workers do with this free time? Go back to school and attain new skills? No. Get a second job? Yes.
So, when they returned they tried to maintain both jobs because their standard of living had changed. The experiment was a disaster. Workers came back disgruntled and less efficient for this bifurcated focus. It was a lose-lose proposition. The company lost because workers were inefficient on the job, and workers lost because it was impossible for them to maintain the two jobs. Whose fault was it? The company’s of course because it had devised the scheme. Workers felt no sense of complicity in the furlough plan.
* * *
What was apparent but not seized upon was the fact that you cannot disrupt the factory cultural programming of workers with a poorly thought out intervention and expect to reap untold benefits. The first step in the intervention should have been to acknowledge and accept the creature the factory system had created and then appreciate the long arduous task of reprogramming required for real change. It takes six weeks to develop a habit. It takes six years to change it.
* * *
One hundred years ago, when compulsory education taught us to read, write and do arithmetic, it also taught us to behave as robots and to be taken care of by our factory system masters. We were fodder for the Industrial Revolution with an assembly line mentality. It permeated everything we did.
A century of wars, an explosion of innovation, burgeoning population growth across the globe, reduction of the distance between us, and the birth of the Information Age and a global economy have all converged to make timely problem solving a worker-centered rather than a mahogany row affair.
The incredible insanity of the times is the belief that power resides in Washington, DC and corpocracy, in the leaders of the twenty advanced technology nations of the world, when such leadership behaves like puppets to the giant puppeteer of unanticipated cataclysmic events.
Consequently, not only is our economy upside down, but effective decision-making is as well. But, alas, workers, not even professionals, have been programmed to be responsive to this new reality. They wait. We wait. So events rule the day.
Society is too late smart, and this has been its patterns since the beginning.
* * *
Now, automotive workers because of the extended recession are being given anywhere from a month to more than two months furloughs with 80 percent of their take home pay. Interviewed on television, most of them said they were going fishing, hunting in Canada, fixing up the house, or “just laying low.” Not a single person interviewed said he would take a course at the local junior college to increase his employability
This is the entrenched factory mentality that we have created: passive, reactive, and conditioned to being taken care of by the paternalistic system that has kept workers in arrested development and permanent adolescence since WWII. This is a luxury society can no longer afford.
John Strothmeyer documented all this in CRISIS IN BETHLEHEM (1986) showing how the steel and aluminum industries induced workers into greater dependence with their 13-week furloughs every five years, and excessive employee perks not attached to performance. Workers, instead of responding with appreciation, Strothmeyer tells us they “crippled the goose that laid the golden age.”
The United States and Europe are at root societies that have been riding the boom and bust period like global beach bums catching the soaring trends and not learning from the rapid declines, absorbing their transgressions with little real pain, while not expecting the rest of the world to catch up, but, alas, the world has.
* * *
Sovereign States across the globe are using a heavy hand called “sovereign wealth funds” (SWFs), a new term coined for state owned investment portfolios, which account for one-eighth of global investment.
Ian Bremmer writes in “Foreign Affairs” (May/June 2009), “These trends are reshaping international politics and the global economy.”
When politics instead of economics drive the world economy, he says, “State capitalism introduces massive inefficiencies into global markets.”
This should come as no surprise because “profit motive” is not a state but a private economic driver. God only knows what kind of a world we will have without motivated wealth creators. Wealth creators have been the measure of America’s greatness. Like it or not, this is changing in the current economic woes, and has been for some time. Governments are entering the vacuum created by the impotence of private enterprise. You think I exaggerate?
When we think of the giants of “big oil,” we typically think of British Petroleum, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and Total. If we do, we are terribly misinformed. They own only about ten percent of the reserves and production, while state owned companies control more than 75 percent of global oil reserves and production. SWFs for these interests are being made in such places as Abu Dhabi, Ankara, Beijing, Brasilia, Mexico City, Moscow and New Delhi, not New York City.
Even the President of the United States is operating as if a CEO of the nation with Washington, DC the corporate and financial capital of the enterprise. A good deal of the private sector is now beholden to the government because of the stimulus packages and corporate bailouts. State capitalism has indeed come of age.
* * *
You mention that I was a pioneer in Quality Control Circles in the 1970s and 1980s. I was. You are also right that we looked for chronic problems under the auspices of “Total Quality Management,” but QCCs had no teeth and were regimented to cosmetic or hygiene interventions such as workplace ergonomics, lighting, operating manual design, and so on.
There were exceptions. I remember an energetic QCC worker identified $5 million of scrap waste in one operation, and nearly lost his job for “stepping outside his job description,” and embarrassing the management.
You see he was not a manager but a technician, but obviously a very good one. He came to me for counseling for fear he was going to lose his job. Others saw what happened to him with the shadow of silence following the operation thereafter.
QCCs were a group-oriented process and they never made purchase with professional employees who considered themselves “individuals,” and part of the management corps. They were however equally passive, reactive and obedient to the dictates of the factory culture as were their blue-collar colleagues.
* * *
I am neither pro worker or anti management or pro management or anti worker. My beef is that the culturally conditioned workers and managers needed today are not being produced in a factory culture. Corpocracy has not changed the cookie cutter molds that have produced them.
* * *
My beef with the MBA program is that it epitomizes the cookie cutter mold. My desire is for MBA’s to be stand up people and not complicit toads to a failed and failing factory system.
Unfortunately, the cookie cutter mold continues to produce people to manage things when computer software can do a better job. MBA programs have failed to generate people to lead, and to display the courage to challenge the status quo. Market logic and profit purposefulness are not leadership.
“States Capitalism” across the globe is filling the void created by private enterprise’s failure to appreciate the importance of social justice to its survival within its operations and with its markets. I witnessed how inured corpocracy can become to this in South America and South Africa. The United States is not the only capitalistic society guilty of such exploitation, but it is coming to roost now for them all. People who have nothing have nothing to lose. Rebellion is in the air.
* * *
Social justice is a matter of moral principle. We weren’t put on this earth to create wealth for our own self-aggrandizement. We were put on earth to make a better more civilized and just world for all.
This may seem an abstract idea when shown so bluntly in all its nakedness. But I assure you it is quite concrete. The downside of not living within this principle is perhaps the greatest hazard to future world tranquility. No dimension of society has a more intimate role in this than the business community.
* * *
The reason MBA programs infuriate me is the misapplication of energy and intellect of otherwise brilliant minds, while at the same time reifying what is wrong with our society, which is the enhancement of wealth for its own benefit. Equally wrong is "to give wealth away" like a gift instead of showing people how to create their own wealth. You diminish people when you give them what they have not created or earned themselves. Self-worth is a function of pain, sacrifice, failure and success, all of which are missing in a factory system of flippant munificence.
Wealth, per se, has become the only arbiter of worth for many. When taken to its absurdity, it leads to economic meltdown with the definition of progress always “more,” and “more,” as we know, can never be satisfied.
Self-worth is not so limited an asset. It is an expression of the utilization of one's inherent abilities.
We live in an MBA world. It thinks, feels and behaves in terms of financial assets enhancement, not of the enhancement of people. No one questions that the purpose of a corporation is not only to make a profit but “more profit.” I ask, why?
(1) Imagine if the focus of MBAs was to find ways to get beyond the factory system, and in the process save industries and jobs, and create more reliable instruments to anticipate and neutralize economic downturns.
(2) Imagine if MBAs could deprogram worker dependence on management and counterdependence on the company to operate more freely as independent contractors. It might resurrect the worker's spirit and increase the health of the body of his work.
(3) Imagine if the aim of business was to improve the cultural health of society.
* * *
We have for too long had the cart in front of the horse. Profits are the cart; people are the horse. The horse has been pushing the cart (profits) when it could be much more effective and efficient pulling it and society to new horizons.
Simplistic? Perhaps. But it has been a mistake to focus exclusively “on the bottom line,” or the outcome (the cart or profits) when how you manage the process (the horse or the people) is and always has been the key to everything.
People are the critical mass. And people in crisis, when they are made aware of the crisis and the impact of the crisis on them, have pulled several times their normal weight. Likewise, they have made miraculous impact on what was felt to be hopeless situations. That has never changed. It is time, once more, to take note of that.
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?
If there is one thing that the current economic meltdown has taught us, it is that market logic and profit fixation have run amuck. We are in a new phase of capitalism according to such voices as Ian Bremmer. He sees the end of free markets and the dominance of politicians in state capitalism. Is he correct? I don’t know.
Bremmer claims state capitalism has been in the works since 1973 when OPEC agreed to cut production in response to the United States’ support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Since then, commodities have become a geopolitical weapon.
Much is now being said about the Great Depression of the 1930s. What is not mentioned is that between 1932 and 1934 there were over 4,000 strikes across the United States. There was rank and file rebellion in this country. Historian H. W. Brand in his book “Traitor to His Class” (2008) claims President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deserted his patrician class. But if he did so, I believe, it was to stem a revolution.
There is evidence that FDR reluctantly created the “New Deal,” and reluctantly signed into law the Social Security System because of the inordinate pressure of ordinary Americans. They were tired of the money class ruining the day. The torpor of the times with millions unemployed was restive for action. Did FDR fear a second revolution? I think he did.
At the time, the intelligentsia, academics, writers, entertainers and other intellectuals saw Marxist communism as a possible alternative to chaotic capitalism. They would suffer greatly for their beliefs during the “Great Red Scare” of the 1950s when the House Un-American Activities Committee “blackballed” them as communist sympathizers. Many never worked again in their professions.
* * *
Could such hysteria be rekindled in the not too distant future? Of course it could. We are a reactionary society. Could American society be again threatened with possible revolution? Certainly, the seeds of discontent are always there waiting for a flame to ignite them.
If the Obama government fails to get a grip on this current crisis, it is a possibility. The irony is that these banks and lending institutions are using money from the bailout to pay lobbyists to prevent corrective legislation. It happened recently when Congress failed to pass real estate legislation supportive of desperate homeowners.
There is more truth than fiction to the more things change the more they remain the same. Political and corporate power is using this economic collapse to reconsolidate their power base. My wonder is if the rank and file will allow it.
* * *
While General Motors is flirting with bankruptcy, one wonders if taxpayers will be expected to cover the costs of pensions the company promised workers. The cost for GM, alone, is estimated at $13.5 billion. The “Big Three” automakers’ retiree health benefits are not insured, but the government has insured autoworkers pensions up to $54,000 a year.
Who pays for those retirement benefits if the “Big Three” go belly up? Our grandchildren do.
Such utopian largesse happened during the good years (1945 – 1965) when the automotive leadership and the government leadership could not see beyond the latest gas-guzzling models. The rest of the United States copied the Detroit corporate factory economic dependency model during the hey days of unionism as best they could. Now many of these workers have no such guarantees.
* * *
So, here in 2009, more than 5 million or 9 percent of the workforce are unemployed, home prices fell in nearly 90 percent of U.S. cities in the first quarter of this year, one in every 374 homes nationwide is in some state of foreclosure (one in every 135 Florida homes is in foreclosure), credit card debt is soaring, and people feel they have done nothing wrong. They were programmed in factory dependence and have behaved consistent with that dependency.
Now, they feel their leaders are betraying them, but these leaders have been betraying them for more than fifty years, most notably in the past quarter century.
As management guru Peter Drucker has noted, corpocracy immediately after WWII paid itself ten times the average pay of the production worker. Sixty-five years later, that differential has soared to more than a thousand times the worker in the trenches pay.
* * *
When Bill Clinton became president, the people in Treasury who created the policy of deregulation, which has caused much of the present panic, paradoxically, are the same people in charge of restoring regulation to Treasury.
The Democratic Congress a quarter century ago, which removed usury limitations to credit card companies giving them permission to punish credit card holders who could lease afford the exorbitant rates, are the new Democratic Congress setting out to restore these credit card limitations.
This absurdity competes with “In Praise of Folly” of Erasmus written 500 years ago.
It could be argued both parties in Congress have abandoned their constituencies, being manipulated by those ever present puppeteers, the lobbyists. Now, in crunch time, due to the government’s vacillation and ineptitude, social security is expected to go broke by 2037 and Medicare by 2017.
The talk again is about privatization of social security. Imagine where ordinary retirees would be if such privitization were the law today. No doubt we would be on the brink of revolution.
To demonstrate the ineffectiveness of Congress, they may punish American workers who retire at age 65, which once was the maximum benefit level of social security, by raising the level of maximum social security benefits to age 77 or older.
It is why I argue leaderless leadership has been the preferred model of the day driving us like the Pied Piper over the cliff.
Ordinary workers and taxpayers have trusted the leadership “to take care of them,” and we see where that has gotten them. They have been betrayed not only by government and corpocracy but also by a factory culture of counterdependency. It is an out-of-date system built for another time. It was a factory system willing to be surrogate parent to workers and taxpayers, and often a generous one, until it was a luxury it could no longer afford. We are in that day now.
* * *
We are in a spiritual as well as economic meltdown where little minds and large egos rule the day. We have had a minor breakthrough with the presidency of Barak Obama. What it will mean in four or more years remains to be seen. Will people put the factory mentality behind and assume a more active and energetic role, or will they retreat further into the net of dependency? Whatever route they take will have significant consequences. That is for sure.
* * *
To nudge us towards self-direction is why I write these missives. I don’t write for journals. I don’t write to get on Charlie Rose malarkey discussion panels. I don’t write for national attention. I write to keep my sanity so that I don’t do something stupid to remove myself from the chaos.
I live humbly and comfortably for I could not in my wildest conscience live otherwise when I know there is so much suffering around me.
I don’t do much. I am old and I’m in my last innings, and so I write. I am able to write because I have a lovely wife, Betty Ann, best in the land, the sun, the moon, the stars and the earth to me, who allows me to write unsullied by either compliment or criticism. I could not think much less write without this support. I dedicate everything I do to her, my wife for twenty-three years now. She would prefer I continue on my South Africa novel, but life keeps intervening. My apologies to all for this.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 11, 2009
“New York City used to be the world’s financial capital. It no longer is even the financial capital of the United States, Washington is.”
Ian Bremmer, “State Capitalism Comes of Age: The End of the Free Market?” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2009, pp. 40 – 55.
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
We are all so very dissatisfied with the current state of affairs. I know I have offered my share, not a fair share but a disproportional heaping of rants and raves, directed at those "in control" who have systematically abused us the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe unencumbered by the robber barons, while ranting at their heartless oppression.
We, the wretched refuse in our teeming stores (Wal-Mart, Target, Costco Best Buy and Sam's Club) maxed on our credit cards and waiting for the next unemployment check, search for our own Golden Door. I'll take what's behind #3.
My apologies to Emma Lazarus.
Jim, you were a pioneer leading the introduction of QCCs in the 70s. If you recall, one of the concepts we emphasized to the teams was avoid "curing" the symptoms. The use of root cause analysis helped to ensure we dug deeper. It has been rare that you attack the surface of an issue. Each of the initial issues raised are symptoms of deeper societal problems. The list of six solutions address removing boundaries and success criteria for everyone but old professors. Essentially the proposal is to fire old professors. Each fails to explore why the symptom exists.
Having been fortunate to attend two universities in which professors seemed available and receptive to students, or at least this student, I can't relate to that lament. Nor can I understand how an MBA doesn't prepare someone for business. That is more the student's fault. You could earn the degree by filling electives with cakewalk classes or you could challenge yourself with advanced statistics and complex finance classes.
We forget that Universities are also businesses. Endowments only go so far. Pandering to students (or companies with ed assistance programs) brings those fat tuition checks to the bursar's office. Oh, what a tangled web we weave....
Michael
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
As I said in my “Factory University” missive (May 10, 2009) that I applaud a sitting academic for having the courage to speak out, while seeing he still retains “remnants of the factory mindset.”
Of course, he is addressing symptoms instead of root causes. I applaud him because we have heard little noise from academics. Can you imagine how entrenched academics might however react to his relatively innocent remarks? Panic comes to mind.
And yes, universities are businesses, but they should create the model appropriate to the climate of today instead of reifying the old factory model of the past.
* * *
Our economy is upside down, and no one would notice if it wasn’t in the tank.
More than fifty years ago, Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers went into collusion with the automotive industry, vying for pay and entitlement concessions, while giving up control and decision-making of workers in their work. Now that chicken has come to roost.
More than fifty years ago GM’s CEO Charles Wilson was right to say, “As GM goes so goes America!” We have been captive to that Detroit mystique for half a century. We are still captive albeit no longer relevant. Why? Notice my closing remarks to this missive.
* * *
In typical American fashion, when the money is flowing freely, American workers are willing to give up almost everything for that extra buck and perk. I wrote about the steel and aluminum industries regarding this in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998).
Senior employees at Alcoa and Bethlehem Steel in the 1960s were given 13-week paid furloughs every five years. What did most workers do with this free time? Go back to school and attain new skills? No. Get a second job? Yes.
So, when they returned they tried to maintain both jobs because their standard of living had changed. The experiment was a disaster. Workers came back disgruntled and less efficient for this bifurcated focus. It was a lose-lose proposition. The company lost because workers were inefficient on the job, and workers lost because it was impossible for them to maintain the two jobs. Whose fault was it? The company’s of course because it had devised the scheme. Workers felt no sense of complicity in the furlough plan.
* * *
What was apparent but not seized upon was the fact that you cannot disrupt the factory cultural programming of workers with a poorly thought out intervention and expect to reap untold benefits. The first step in the intervention should have been to acknowledge and accept the creature the factory system had created and then appreciate the long arduous task of reprogramming required for real change. It takes six weeks to develop a habit. It takes six years to change it.
* * *
One hundred years ago, when compulsory education taught us to read, write and do arithmetic, it also taught us to behave as robots and to be taken care of by our factory system masters. We were fodder for the Industrial Revolution with an assembly line mentality. It permeated everything we did.
A century of wars, an explosion of innovation, burgeoning population growth across the globe, reduction of the distance between us, and the birth of the Information Age and a global economy have all converged to make timely problem solving a worker-centered rather than a mahogany row affair.
The incredible insanity of the times is the belief that power resides in Washington, DC and corpocracy, in the leaders of the twenty advanced technology nations of the world, when such leadership behaves like puppets to the giant puppeteer of unanticipated cataclysmic events.
Consequently, not only is our economy upside down, but effective decision-making is as well. But, alas, workers, not even professionals, have been programmed to be responsive to this new reality. They wait. We wait. So events rule the day.
Society is too late smart, and this has been its patterns since the beginning.
* * *
Now, automotive workers because of the extended recession are being given anywhere from a month to more than two months furloughs with 80 percent of their take home pay. Interviewed on television, most of them said they were going fishing, hunting in Canada, fixing up the house, or “just laying low.” Not a single person interviewed said he would take a course at the local junior college to increase his employability
This is the entrenched factory mentality that we have created: passive, reactive, and conditioned to being taken care of by the paternalistic system that has kept workers in arrested development and permanent adolescence since WWII. This is a luxury society can no longer afford.
John Strothmeyer documented all this in CRISIS IN BETHLEHEM (1986) showing how the steel and aluminum industries induced workers into greater dependence with their 13-week furloughs every five years, and excessive employee perks not attached to performance. Workers, instead of responding with appreciation, Strothmeyer tells us they “crippled the goose that laid the golden age.”
The United States and Europe are at root societies that have been riding the boom and bust period like global beach bums catching the soaring trends and not learning from the rapid declines, absorbing their transgressions with little real pain, while not expecting the rest of the world to catch up, but, alas, the world has.
* * *
Sovereign States across the globe are using a heavy hand called “sovereign wealth funds” (SWFs), a new term coined for state owned investment portfolios, which account for one-eighth of global investment.
Ian Bremmer writes in “Foreign Affairs” (May/June 2009), “These trends are reshaping international politics and the global economy.”
When politics instead of economics drive the world economy, he says, “State capitalism introduces massive inefficiencies into global markets.”
This should come as no surprise because “profit motive” is not a state but a private economic driver. God only knows what kind of a world we will have without motivated wealth creators. Wealth creators have been the measure of America’s greatness. Like it or not, this is changing in the current economic woes, and has been for some time. Governments are entering the vacuum created by the impotence of private enterprise. You think I exaggerate?
When we think of the giants of “big oil,” we typically think of British Petroleum, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and Total. If we do, we are terribly misinformed. They own only about ten percent of the reserves and production, while state owned companies control more than 75 percent of global oil reserves and production. SWFs for these interests are being made in such places as Abu Dhabi, Ankara, Beijing, Brasilia, Mexico City, Moscow and New Delhi, not New York City.
Even the President of the United States is operating as if a CEO of the nation with Washington, DC the corporate and financial capital of the enterprise. A good deal of the private sector is now beholden to the government because of the stimulus packages and corporate bailouts. State capitalism has indeed come of age.
* * *
You mention that I was a pioneer in Quality Control Circles in the 1970s and 1980s. I was. You are also right that we looked for chronic problems under the auspices of “Total Quality Management,” but QCCs had no teeth and were regimented to cosmetic or hygiene interventions such as workplace ergonomics, lighting, operating manual design, and so on.
There were exceptions. I remember an energetic QCC worker identified $5 million of scrap waste in one operation, and nearly lost his job for “stepping outside his job description,” and embarrassing the management.
You see he was not a manager but a technician, but obviously a very good one. He came to me for counseling for fear he was going to lose his job. Others saw what happened to him with the shadow of silence following the operation thereafter.
QCCs were a group-oriented process and they never made purchase with professional employees who considered themselves “individuals,” and part of the management corps. They were however equally passive, reactive and obedient to the dictates of the factory culture as were their blue-collar colleagues.
* * *
I am neither pro worker or anti management or pro management or anti worker. My beef is that the culturally conditioned workers and managers needed today are not being produced in a factory culture. Corpocracy has not changed the cookie cutter molds that have produced them.
* * *
My beef with the MBA program is that it epitomizes the cookie cutter mold. My desire is for MBA’s to be stand up people and not complicit toads to a failed and failing factory system.
Unfortunately, the cookie cutter mold continues to produce people to manage things when computer software can do a better job. MBA programs have failed to generate people to lead, and to display the courage to challenge the status quo. Market logic and profit purposefulness are not leadership.
“States Capitalism” across the globe is filling the void created by private enterprise’s failure to appreciate the importance of social justice to its survival within its operations and with its markets. I witnessed how inured corpocracy can become to this in South America and South Africa. The United States is not the only capitalistic society guilty of such exploitation, but it is coming to roost now for them all. People who have nothing have nothing to lose. Rebellion is in the air.
* * *
Social justice is a matter of moral principle. We weren’t put on this earth to create wealth for our own self-aggrandizement. We were put on earth to make a better more civilized and just world for all.
This may seem an abstract idea when shown so bluntly in all its nakedness. But I assure you it is quite concrete. The downside of not living within this principle is perhaps the greatest hazard to future world tranquility. No dimension of society has a more intimate role in this than the business community.
* * *
The reason MBA programs infuriate me is the misapplication of energy and intellect of otherwise brilliant minds, while at the same time reifying what is wrong with our society, which is the enhancement of wealth for its own benefit. Equally wrong is "to give wealth away" like a gift instead of showing people how to create their own wealth. You diminish people when you give them what they have not created or earned themselves. Self-worth is a function of pain, sacrifice, failure and success, all of which are missing in a factory system of flippant munificence.
Wealth, per se, has become the only arbiter of worth for many. When taken to its absurdity, it leads to economic meltdown with the definition of progress always “more,” and “more,” as we know, can never be satisfied.
Self-worth is not so limited an asset. It is an expression of the utilization of one's inherent abilities.
We live in an MBA world. It thinks, feels and behaves in terms of financial assets enhancement, not of the enhancement of people. No one questions that the purpose of a corporation is not only to make a profit but “more profit.” I ask, why?
(1) Imagine if the focus of MBAs was to find ways to get beyond the factory system, and in the process save industries and jobs, and create more reliable instruments to anticipate and neutralize economic downturns.
(2) Imagine if MBAs could deprogram worker dependence on management and counterdependence on the company to operate more freely as independent contractors. It might resurrect the worker's spirit and increase the health of the body of his work.
(3) Imagine if the aim of business was to improve the cultural health of society.
* * *
We have for too long had the cart in front of the horse. Profits are the cart; people are the horse. The horse has been pushing the cart (profits) when it could be much more effective and efficient pulling it and society to new horizons.
Simplistic? Perhaps. But it has been a mistake to focus exclusively “on the bottom line,” or the outcome (the cart or profits) when how you manage the process (the horse or the people) is and always has been the key to everything.
People are the critical mass. And people in crisis, when they are made aware of the crisis and the impact of the crisis on them, have pulled several times their normal weight. Likewise, they have made miraculous impact on what was felt to be hopeless situations. That has never changed. It is time, once more, to take note of that.
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?
If there is one thing that the current economic meltdown has taught us, it is that market logic and profit fixation have run amuck. We are in a new phase of capitalism according to such voices as Ian Bremmer. He sees the end of free markets and the dominance of politicians in state capitalism. Is he correct? I don’t know.
Bremmer claims state capitalism has been in the works since 1973 when OPEC agreed to cut production in response to the United States’ support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Since then, commodities have become a geopolitical weapon.
Much is now being said about the Great Depression of the 1930s. What is not mentioned is that between 1932 and 1934 there were over 4,000 strikes across the United States. There was rank and file rebellion in this country. Historian H. W. Brand in his book “Traitor to His Class” (2008) claims President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deserted his patrician class. But if he did so, I believe, it was to stem a revolution.
There is evidence that FDR reluctantly created the “New Deal,” and reluctantly signed into law the Social Security System because of the inordinate pressure of ordinary Americans. They were tired of the money class ruining the day. The torpor of the times with millions unemployed was restive for action. Did FDR fear a second revolution? I think he did.
At the time, the intelligentsia, academics, writers, entertainers and other intellectuals saw Marxist communism as a possible alternative to chaotic capitalism. They would suffer greatly for their beliefs during the “Great Red Scare” of the 1950s when the House Un-American Activities Committee “blackballed” them as communist sympathizers. Many never worked again in their professions.
* * *
Could such hysteria be rekindled in the not too distant future? Of course it could. We are a reactionary society. Could American society be again threatened with possible revolution? Certainly, the seeds of discontent are always there waiting for a flame to ignite them.
If the Obama government fails to get a grip on this current crisis, it is a possibility. The irony is that these banks and lending institutions are using money from the bailout to pay lobbyists to prevent corrective legislation. It happened recently when Congress failed to pass real estate legislation supportive of desperate homeowners.
There is more truth than fiction to the more things change the more they remain the same. Political and corporate power is using this economic collapse to reconsolidate their power base. My wonder is if the rank and file will allow it.
* * *
While General Motors is flirting with bankruptcy, one wonders if taxpayers will be expected to cover the costs of pensions the company promised workers. The cost for GM, alone, is estimated at $13.5 billion. The “Big Three” automakers’ retiree health benefits are not insured, but the government has insured autoworkers pensions up to $54,000 a year.
Who pays for those retirement benefits if the “Big Three” go belly up? Our grandchildren do.
Such utopian largesse happened during the good years (1945 – 1965) when the automotive leadership and the government leadership could not see beyond the latest gas-guzzling models. The rest of the United States copied the Detroit corporate factory economic dependency model during the hey days of unionism as best they could. Now many of these workers have no such guarantees.
* * *
So, here in 2009, more than 5 million or 9 percent of the workforce are unemployed, home prices fell in nearly 90 percent of U.S. cities in the first quarter of this year, one in every 374 homes nationwide is in some state of foreclosure (one in every 135 Florida homes is in foreclosure), credit card debt is soaring, and people feel they have done nothing wrong. They were programmed in factory dependence and have behaved consistent with that dependency.
Now, they feel their leaders are betraying them, but these leaders have been betraying them for more than fifty years, most notably in the past quarter century.
As management guru Peter Drucker has noted, corpocracy immediately after WWII paid itself ten times the average pay of the production worker. Sixty-five years later, that differential has soared to more than a thousand times the worker in the trenches pay.
* * *
When Bill Clinton became president, the people in Treasury who created the policy of deregulation, which has caused much of the present panic, paradoxically, are the same people in charge of restoring regulation to Treasury.
The Democratic Congress a quarter century ago, which removed usury limitations to credit card companies giving them permission to punish credit card holders who could lease afford the exorbitant rates, are the new Democratic Congress setting out to restore these credit card limitations.
This absurdity competes with “In Praise of Folly” of Erasmus written 500 years ago.
It could be argued both parties in Congress have abandoned their constituencies, being manipulated by those ever present puppeteers, the lobbyists. Now, in crunch time, due to the government’s vacillation and ineptitude, social security is expected to go broke by 2037 and Medicare by 2017.
The talk again is about privatization of social security. Imagine where ordinary retirees would be if such privitization were the law today. No doubt we would be on the brink of revolution.
To demonstrate the ineffectiveness of Congress, they may punish American workers who retire at age 65, which once was the maximum benefit level of social security, by raising the level of maximum social security benefits to age 77 or older.
It is why I argue leaderless leadership has been the preferred model of the day driving us like the Pied Piper over the cliff.
Ordinary workers and taxpayers have trusted the leadership “to take care of them,” and we see where that has gotten them. They have been betrayed not only by government and corpocracy but also by a factory culture of counterdependency. It is an out-of-date system built for another time. It was a factory system willing to be surrogate parent to workers and taxpayers, and often a generous one, until it was a luxury it could no longer afford. We are in that day now.
* * *
We are in a spiritual as well as economic meltdown where little minds and large egos rule the day. We have had a minor breakthrough with the presidency of Barak Obama. What it will mean in four or more years remains to be seen. Will people put the factory mentality behind and assume a more active and energetic role, or will they retreat further into the net of dependency? Whatever route they take will have significant consequences. That is for sure.
* * *
To nudge us towards self-direction is why I write these missives. I don’t write for journals. I don’t write to get on Charlie Rose malarkey discussion panels. I don’t write for national attention. I write to keep my sanity so that I don’t do something stupid to remove myself from the chaos.
I live humbly and comfortably for I could not in my wildest conscience live otherwise when I know there is so much suffering around me.
I don’t do much. I am old and I’m in my last innings, and so I write. I am able to write because I have a lovely wife, Betty Ann, best in the land, the sun, the moon, the stars and the earth to me, who allows me to write unsullied by either compliment or criticism. I could not think much less write without this support. I dedicate everything I do to her, my wife for twenty-three years now. She would prefer I continue on my South Africa novel, but life keeps intervening. My apologies to all for this.
* * *
Monday, May 11, 2009
WE CANNOT HOLD THE WATER!
WE CANNOT HOLD THE WATER
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 11, 2009
“Everyone worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess of the four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”
David Foster Wallace, “This is Water” (2009)
* * *
Wallace committed suicide last year at the age of 46. Life apparently ate him alive. Sad. He was best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” and was included on Time magazines All-Time 100 Greatest Novels covering the period of 1923 – 2006. In an odd way, he refuted everything there was about his baby boomer generation, the worship of money and beauty, and mindlessly seeking more self-gratification.
Yet our pumped up society, which is drunk on technology, is like a porous sieve that cannot hold its water. Indeed, it cannot explain why this young man chose death to life when he was so highly talented and esteemed for his work.
As my readers know, I am unimpressed with our rapid technological expansion, especially in view to the blatant fact of its apparent dulling of our sensitivities to be outraged. We can go to the moon and sends probes to Mars, but we cannot explain a suicide such as author Wallace’s.
Nor can we explain why a teenage father, Richard Anthony McTear, Jr., throws his girlfriend’s four-month-old infant son from a moving automobile, which causes the child’s death.
We cannot explain why four flag-team football players, Randall John Moye, 14, Raymond A. Price-Murray, 14, Lee Louis Myers, 14, and Diemante I. Roberts, 15, raped and brutally beat a thirteen-year-old teammate.
We cannot explain why an upscale neighborhood on Treasure Island in Pinellas County, Florida was used to imprison young girls as sex slaves and transport them across the Tampa Bay area to high rolling clients for sex. It would surprise few if these clients turned out to be leading citizens of the community living shadow lives.
We cannot explain why such men would resort to such behavior other than rhetorically.
Every single day of the year there are senseless murders, sometimes of entire families, that are covered on the local network television news, and we cannot explain this either.
Something is wrong with this picture when we know so much more about things but so much less about ourselves and why we behave so poorly.
I studied chemistry and engineering in college and went back year’s later, and studied psychology, sociology, anthropology, and I learned the respective theories, paradigms, and algorithms of these disciplines sufficiently well to earn my Ph.D.
For those not familiar, graduate school leading to a dissertation and Ph.D. is more an endurance contest than learning experience. Members of the faculty have no power other than the grade and the issuing of degrees.
In the corporation, the essential role of the manager is not to lead but to keep order and records, and conduct performance appraisals. The performance appraisals represent management’s only power, and it is consistent with the power of professors and the giving of grades. Managers pass out miniscule increases called “merit increases” and this keeps workers in line. It is the equivalent of issuing academic grades, which is further evidence of the factory model of society.
My point is that we have become amalgamated into a collective soup in which identity, ethnicity, race, religion, and culture have been stirred into a common brew, leading to the disappearance of cultural distinction. That might explain why people otherwise with better sense are painting their bodies with tattoos: looking in the mirror they can at least recognize themselves.
And we call this progress.
We are a society that has everything ass backwards. We applaud science and the genius of man who has created weapons of mass destruction that could lead to our extinction to match that of the dinosaurs. And why do we have these weapons? Because man has never found a cure for paranoia. You see, the science of man is centuries behind the science of things, yet things are inanimate and man is becomingly increasingly crowded on this small planet.
An epidemiology said the other day that swine flu and HIV in animals such as monkeys have been present for centuries but they are impacted man now because "the reduced green" between man and the animal kingdom. This is another warning sign to pay more attention to man and his behavior as a species and less to things.
Should man's insanity lead to his extinction it will not be a natural disaster, not a meteor storm like with the dinosaurs, but systematically, cognitively, and selectively in a compulsive-impulsive manner over time.
People write and ask me, “All right, smart guy, what is the answer?”
I don’t have the answer. I have decided the only way to change things is one person at a time. I live what I write and I write what I live. I don’t buy into all the bullshit that comes out of the mouths of the most respected of society’s movers and shakers. Nor do I buy into all the bullshit about positive energy and optimism and going with the flow.
If anyone is paying attention, we are becoming increasingly insensitive to the horrors of the times, escaping into all our electronic wonders which have become the equivalent of burying our heads under the covers.
Most of our information comes through our eyes not our ears, and those we see on television and on our computer screens are trained to be a presence, which means to neutralize their negative aspects and promote their positive aspects.
It has become an art form to look good and speak well. I know. I wrote a book on effective presentations, and taught people how to appear on video or before groups. Every public figure in every discipline knows about effective presentation.
Now, because of technology, you can fool people not some of the time but all of the time with your aplomb, diction, rhetoric and your mock sensibilities.
Remember those cigarette company executives before Congress several years ago? They lied through their teeth about cigarettes not being dangerous to your health when every one of them had ample research in their operations proving just how dangerous cigarette smoking in fact was. These executives were insensitive to the dangers because they were bent on protecting their stockholders and stakeholders, and their own positions.
That is why I mourn the loss of someone like author David Foster Wallace, someone who could help us get well. I wonder if he chose to leave life finding the duplicity too unbearable to continue. He wrote novels, short stories, essays, and was a college professor, but it was not enough apparently to endure the pain that he was so sensitive to while those around him were not.
We are all hard-wired into the default setting of self-indulgence, which, paradoxically, makes us less self-aware.
People reading this may wonder, “Why did he have to say ‘bullshit’ to express himself? He must be a real hick!” Why, is pretty obvious. I am not a polite guy. That said a better question to ask is why do we as a people over intellectualize and over rationalize and over play everything in our lives, instead of paying attention to what is happening right under our noses? Could it be we don’t because we are too busy sending and receiving text messages?
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 11, 2009
“Everyone worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess of the four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”
David Foster Wallace, “This is Water” (2009)
* * *
Wallace committed suicide last year at the age of 46. Life apparently ate him alive. Sad. He was best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” and was included on Time magazines All-Time 100 Greatest Novels covering the period of 1923 – 2006. In an odd way, he refuted everything there was about his baby boomer generation, the worship of money and beauty, and mindlessly seeking more self-gratification.
Yet our pumped up society, which is drunk on technology, is like a porous sieve that cannot hold its water. Indeed, it cannot explain why this young man chose death to life when he was so highly talented and esteemed for his work.
As my readers know, I am unimpressed with our rapid technological expansion, especially in view to the blatant fact of its apparent dulling of our sensitivities to be outraged. We can go to the moon and sends probes to Mars, but we cannot explain a suicide such as author Wallace’s.
Nor can we explain why a teenage father, Richard Anthony McTear, Jr., throws his girlfriend’s four-month-old infant son from a moving automobile, which causes the child’s death.
We cannot explain why four flag-team football players, Randall John Moye, 14, Raymond A. Price-Murray, 14, Lee Louis Myers, 14, and Diemante I. Roberts, 15, raped and brutally beat a thirteen-year-old teammate.
We cannot explain why an upscale neighborhood on Treasure Island in Pinellas County, Florida was used to imprison young girls as sex slaves and transport them across the Tampa Bay area to high rolling clients for sex. It would surprise few if these clients turned out to be leading citizens of the community living shadow lives.
We cannot explain why such men would resort to such behavior other than rhetorically.
Every single day of the year there are senseless murders, sometimes of entire families, that are covered on the local network television news, and we cannot explain this either.
Something is wrong with this picture when we know so much more about things but so much less about ourselves and why we behave so poorly.
I studied chemistry and engineering in college and went back year’s later, and studied psychology, sociology, anthropology, and I learned the respective theories, paradigms, and algorithms of these disciplines sufficiently well to earn my Ph.D.
For those not familiar, graduate school leading to a dissertation and Ph.D. is more an endurance contest than learning experience. Members of the faculty have no power other than the grade and the issuing of degrees.
In the corporation, the essential role of the manager is not to lead but to keep order and records, and conduct performance appraisals. The performance appraisals represent management’s only power, and it is consistent with the power of professors and the giving of grades. Managers pass out miniscule increases called “merit increases” and this keeps workers in line. It is the equivalent of issuing academic grades, which is further evidence of the factory model of society.
My point is that we have become amalgamated into a collective soup in which identity, ethnicity, race, religion, and culture have been stirred into a common brew, leading to the disappearance of cultural distinction. That might explain why people otherwise with better sense are painting their bodies with tattoos: looking in the mirror they can at least recognize themselves.
And we call this progress.
We are a society that has everything ass backwards. We applaud science and the genius of man who has created weapons of mass destruction that could lead to our extinction to match that of the dinosaurs. And why do we have these weapons? Because man has never found a cure for paranoia. You see, the science of man is centuries behind the science of things, yet things are inanimate and man is becomingly increasingly crowded on this small planet.
An epidemiology said the other day that swine flu and HIV in animals such as monkeys have been present for centuries but they are impacted man now because "the reduced green" between man and the animal kingdom. This is another warning sign to pay more attention to man and his behavior as a species and less to things.
Should man's insanity lead to his extinction it will not be a natural disaster, not a meteor storm like with the dinosaurs, but systematically, cognitively, and selectively in a compulsive-impulsive manner over time.
People write and ask me, “All right, smart guy, what is the answer?”
I don’t have the answer. I have decided the only way to change things is one person at a time. I live what I write and I write what I live. I don’t buy into all the bullshit that comes out of the mouths of the most respected of society’s movers and shakers. Nor do I buy into all the bullshit about positive energy and optimism and going with the flow.
If anyone is paying attention, we are becoming increasingly insensitive to the horrors of the times, escaping into all our electronic wonders which have become the equivalent of burying our heads under the covers.
Most of our information comes through our eyes not our ears, and those we see on television and on our computer screens are trained to be a presence, which means to neutralize their negative aspects and promote their positive aspects.
It has become an art form to look good and speak well. I know. I wrote a book on effective presentations, and taught people how to appear on video or before groups. Every public figure in every discipline knows about effective presentation.
Now, because of technology, you can fool people not some of the time but all of the time with your aplomb, diction, rhetoric and your mock sensibilities.
Remember those cigarette company executives before Congress several years ago? They lied through their teeth about cigarettes not being dangerous to your health when every one of them had ample research in their operations proving just how dangerous cigarette smoking in fact was. These executives were insensitive to the dangers because they were bent on protecting their stockholders and stakeholders, and their own positions.
That is why I mourn the loss of someone like author David Foster Wallace, someone who could help us get well. I wonder if he chose to leave life finding the duplicity too unbearable to continue. He wrote novels, short stories, essays, and was a college professor, but it was not enough apparently to endure the pain that he was so sensitive to while those around him were not.
We are all hard-wired into the default setting of self-indulgence, which, paradoxically, makes us less self-aware.
People reading this may wonder, “Why did he have to say ‘bullshit’ to express himself? He must be a real hick!” Why, is pretty obvious. I am not a polite guy. That said a better question to ask is why do we as a people over intellectualize and over rationalize and over play everything in our lives, instead of paying attention to what is happening right under our noses? Could it be we don’t because we are too busy sending and receiving text messages?
* * *
Sunday, May 10, 2009
PROFESSOR CRITICIZES THE ANACHRONISTIC "FACTORY UNIVERSITY"!
PROFESSOR CRITICIZES THE ANACHRONISTIC "FACTORY UNIVERSITY"!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 10, 20009
“Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).”
Professor Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University, “Time to end the university as we know it” (St. Petersburg Times, May 10, 2009)
* * *
Dr. Taylor is addressing the anachronistic institution of higher education. I have been writing about the factory mentality of our society, which has stubbornly maintained anachronistic institutions since 1990 (Work Without Managers, The Delta Group) without as much as a fair thee well.
Does it angry me that so little has been done about this? Yes. Am I surprised? No. Will Dr. Taylor’s article in a Sunday newspaper change anything? I doubt it.
My daughter graduated from the University of South Florida in communications in December of 2008, and she still cannot find a job. She is a waitress in a restaurant to keep body and soul together. She will be paying student loans well into the next decade.
Is this right? It depends. If the product of the investment gives a sufficient return, it is money well spent. But I taught in the university system for tens years (1970 – 1980), as an adjunct professor at mainly the graduate school level, and I was not impressed with the curriculum or with the return students got on their investment. I wrote this in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990):
“American has been trading off its early greatness for the past 150 years. Look at any organization in America, and you will find the same arid landscape. Education is an excellent example:
(1) Even at our most prestigious (and expensive) universities there is not an opportunity for a decent education because teachers are not personally involved with their students. Students get instruction, not education, in the form of information transferals, communication techniques, or some other impersonal and antiseptic phrases to cover non-teaching teaching to facilitate non-learning learning.
(2) Interaction between professors and students is minimal or non-existent because professors are preoccupied with scholarly research and publication. Career-minded faculty cannot afford to spend time with students. They must publish or perish by having their scholarly tomes appear in the right journals. This helps them win promotion and tenure, which means they stay employed.
“The results are a ‘cult of dullness’ in which clear writing and inspired lecturing are deviant and suspicious behaviors. Nothing is done to challenge the system, the prevailing mode of thing or doing. This incidentally fits nicely into the industrial model of non-thinking thinking to do non-doing doing of non-thing things because what these professors have to say amounts to practically nothing at all.” (pp 256 – 257)
In my missive “It isn’t America’s student math and reading skills that are the problem, it is the factory society we have become” (Peripatetic Philosopher: April 23, 2009 -- see blog), I wrote:
“Dr. Keith Hart, professor emeritus of anthropology at the London School of Economic, was on a discussion panel recently on C-Span ruminating about our current economic chaos . . . Professor Hart said essentially that we have been in the business since WWII of creating synthetic jobs to fuel our synthetic economy which has in turn created a synthetic infrastructure to support a synthetic foundation. This has in turn taken us away from our values and therefore our concrete sensibilities.”
He was defining our factory society. In SIX SILENT KILLERS (CRC Press 1998), I zeroed in on a particular discipline at the center of the current economic crisis:
“The MBA degree is essentially a vocational degree in the same sense as a trade school education. MBAs scoff at the idea that their work has cultural implications. They find the concept of the workplace culture suspect, too abstract. Being trained in a set of skills – finance, information systems, macro economics, statistics, computers, and management practices – they find little time and less inclination for background reading on culturally related subjects.” (p. 237)
Since the baby boomer generation, there has been a mad dash into the factory mentality with identity, status, prestige, and recognition based on “how much you made,” and where was the making better place to make it than on Wall Street, or in the insurance and real estate industries, all part of the factory economy’s current crumbling walls.
Dr. Taylor writes:
“If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.”
I agree with the restructuring but not the regulation. The more government is involved the more inefficient everything becomes and we are at an all-time low now in inefficency.
I sense, unfortunately, that Dr. Taylor still has remnants of the factory mindset. Here are his six steps in brief:
(1) Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs. The division of labor model (i.e. factory model) is obsolete and must be replaced like a web or complex adaptive network.
(2) Abolish permanent departments, even in undergraduate education, and create problem (solving) focused programs to be reevaluated every seven years.
(3) Increase collaboration among institutions. Strong institutions in one discipline should partner with strong institutions in another.
(4) Transform the traditional dissertation. There is no longer a market for books modeled on medieval dissertations.
(5) Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold a job for which they are trained.
(6) Impose mandatory retirement for academics and abolish tenure. Initially, tenure meant to protect academic freedom but has instead produced professor impervious to change.
This broad outline is a start but I feel there is too much emphasis on the professor end of it and not enough on the actual curriculum. Professors didn’t create the factory mentality. They simply have been culturally programmed to sustain it. We don’t teach students to think, to wonder, and to intuit and we never have. If Einstein had not resisted this factory programming, he would never have been Einstein, but he did, and he changed the world.
That said it is encouraging to have a sitting professor say in print what distant voices have been saying for years. I went back to graduate school after working across the world, at age 37, and I was astounded how little interest academics had in learning how their precious theories, algorithms, and paradigms worked in the real world. They were more interested in cementing me into the factory mentality demonstrating little sense of humor when I resisted. Time has made me aware, however, that we both were equally victims of the same anachronistic system.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 10, 20009
“Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).”
Professor Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University, “Time to end the university as we know it” (St. Petersburg Times, May 10, 2009)
* * *
Dr. Taylor is addressing the anachronistic institution of higher education. I have been writing about the factory mentality of our society, which has stubbornly maintained anachronistic institutions since 1990 (Work Without Managers, The Delta Group) without as much as a fair thee well.
Does it angry me that so little has been done about this? Yes. Am I surprised? No. Will Dr. Taylor’s article in a Sunday newspaper change anything? I doubt it.
My daughter graduated from the University of South Florida in communications in December of 2008, and she still cannot find a job. She is a waitress in a restaurant to keep body and soul together. She will be paying student loans well into the next decade.
Is this right? It depends. If the product of the investment gives a sufficient return, it is money well spent. But I taught in the university system for tens years (1970 – 1980), as an adjunct professor at mainly the graduate school level, and I was not impressed with the curriculum or with the return students got on their investment. I wrote this in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990):
“American has been trading off its early greatness for the past 150 years. Look at any organization in America, and you will find the same arid landscape. Education is an excellent example:
(1) Even at our most prestigious (and expensive) universities there is not an opportunity for a decent education because teachers are not personally involved with their students. Students get instruction, not education, in the form of information transferals, communication techniques, or some other impersonal and antiseptic phrases to cover non-teaching teaching to facilitate non-learning learning.
(2) Interaction between professors and students is minimal or non-existent because professors are preoccupied with scholarly research and publication. Career-minded faculty cannot afford to spend time with students. They must publish or perish by having their scholarly tomes appear in the right journals. This helps them win promotion and tenure, which means they stay employed.
“The results are a ‘cult of dullness’ in which clear writing and inspired lecturing are deviant and suspicious behaviors. Nothing is done to challenge the system, the prevailing mode of thing or doing. This incidentally fits nicely into the industrial model of non-thinking thinking to do non-doing doing of non-thing things because what these professors have to say amounts to practically nothing at all.” (pp 256 – 257)
In my missive “It isn’t America’s student math and reading skills that are the problem, it is the factory society we have become” (Peripatetic Philosopher: April 23, 2009 -- see blog), I wrote:
“Dr. Keith Hart, professor emeritus of anthropology at the London School of Economic, was on a discussion panel recently on C-Span ruminating about our current economic chaos . . . Professor Hart said essentially that we have been in the business since WWII of creating synthetic jobs to fuel our synthetic economy which has in turn created a synthetic infrastructure to support a synthetic foundation. This has in turn taken us away from our values and therefore our concrete sensibilities.”
He was defining our factory society. In SIX SILENT KILLERS (CRC Press 1998), I zeroed in on a particular discipline at the center of the current economic crisis:
“The MBA degree is essentially a vocational degree in the same sense as a trade school education. MBAs scoff at the idea that their work has cultural implications. They find the concept of the workplace culture suspect, too abstract. Being trained in a set of skills – finance, information systems, macro economics, statistics, computers, and management practices – they find little time and less inclination for background reading on culturally related subjects.” (p. 237)
Since the baby boomer generation, there has been a mad dash into the factory mentality with identity, status, prestige, and recognition based on “how much you made,” and where was the making better place to make it than on Wall Street, or in the insurance and real estate industries, all part of the factory economy’s current crumbling walls.
Dr. Taylor writes:
“If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.”
I agree with the restructuring but not the regulation. The more government is involved the more inefficient everything becomes and we are at an all-time low now in inefficency.
I sense, unfortunately, that Dr. Taylor still has remnants of the factory mindset. Here are his six steps in brief:
(1) Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs. The division of labor model (i.e. factory model) is obsolete and must be replaced like a web or complex adaptive network.
(2) Abolish permanent departments, even in undergraduate education, and create problem (solving) focused programs to be reevaluated every seven years.
(3) Increase collaboration among institutions. Strong institutions in one discipline should partner with strong institutions in another.
(4) Transform the traditional dissertation. There is no longer a market for books modeled on medieval dissertations.
(5) Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold a job for which they are trained.
(6) Impose mandatory retirement for academics and abolish tenure. Initially, tenure meant to protect academic freedom but has instead produced professor impervious to change.
This broad outline is a start but I feel there is too much emphasis on the professor end of it and not enough on the actual curriculum. Professors didn’t create the factory mentality. They simply have been culturally programmed to sustain it. We don’t teach students to think, to wonder, and to intuit and we never have. If Einstein had not resisted this factory programming, he would never have been Einstein, but he did, and he changed the world.
That said it is encouraging to have a sitting professor say in print what distant voices have been saying for years. I went back to graduate school after working across the world, at age 37, and I was astounded how little interest academics had in learning how their precious theories, algorithms, and paradigms worked in the real world. They were more interested in cementing me into the factory mentality demonstrating little sense of humor when I resisted. Time has made me aware, however, that we both were equally victims of the same anachronistic system.
* * *
Saturday, May 09, 2009
WHY DO WE DESERVE TO SURVIVE -- AN EXCHANGE!
WHY DO WE DESERVE TO SURVIVE -- AN EXCHANGE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 9, 2009
“War! That mad game the world so loves to play.”
Jonathan Swift
“He who makes war his profession cannot be otherwise than vicious. War makes thieves, and peace brings them to the gallows. War is a profession by which a man cannot live honorably; an employment by which the soldier if he would reap any profit, is obliged to be false, rapacious, and cruel.”
Machiavelli
“There never was a good war, or a bad peace.”
Benjamin Franklin
“All the talk of history is of nothing almost but fighting and killing, and the honor and renown which are bestowed on conquerors, who for the most part are mere butchers of mankind, mislead growing youth, who by these means, come to think slaughter the most laudable business of mankind, and the most heroic of virtues.”
John Locke
“War is an instrument entirely inefficient towards redressing wrong; and multiplies instead of indemnifying losses.”
Thomas Jefferson
“A great war leaves the country with three armies, an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.”
German Proverb
REFERENCE:
An author and consultant friend shared with me his correspondence with an acquaintance and asked for me to consider making it a missive.
Reading his exchange, I thought of Erich Maria Remarque, the German novelist, who wrote the most powerful war novel I have ever read concerning World War I. It was titled in English “ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT” and in German IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES. Remarque later came to the United States and became a naturalized American citizen.
Very few men of my generation escaped military service because the Selective Service Draft was on. We did not run off to Canada, or burn our draft cards as the next generation did, but we were still mainly reluctant warriors. God only knows what American society would be like today if the draft were still on.
Military training, which in many countries, remains compulsory does teach discipline, obedience to authority, and becoming regimented to a routine. It can also teach cruelty unintentionally by submitting its people to the most draconian of methods "to toughen them up."
I must confess I enjoyed my active duty in the US Navy, as there is a certain robotic consistency to my natural behavior. I am not into cruelty in any form and, fortunately, experienced none in my military service.
I end this piece with a brief note from a German friend, an executive colleague whom I worked with in Honeywell Europe, Ltd. out of Brussels in the late 1980s.
My German friend, only a boy was forced to fight on the Eastern Front for Germany in World War II, and survived.
In the US Navy in the late 1950s, my best friend in the navy was a German optometrist who escaped from Communist East Germany to the US only to be drafted into the US Navy. He escaped East Germany when the Berlin Wall was still a murder zone.
Wolfgang and I, both college graduates and hospital corpsman, were assigned to the US Marines when in 1957 Great Britain and France bombed the Suez Canal to stop shipping through it.
In battle gear and about to climb down the ropes into our landing ship tanks (LSTs) to invade Egypt at Port Said, President Eisenhower issued a “stand down.” We were in our early twenties. I thought that would be the end for me, while Wolfgang said, “Why can’t I escape war?”
* * *
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
Terry is an interesting, highly intelligent, but sadly radically conservative friend I've picked up in my travels. I copied you because I thought you'd find our dialogue a good jumping-off point for your own missives. I wish you lived down here, so you could join us for our Friday morning breakfasts!
Ted
TERRY WRITES TO TED
Ted,
For those of you who haven't been in the Marine Corps as I have, you might be shocked to learn how naive the "liberals" are these days. What follows should be required reading for everyone in this country.
Unfortunately, only Marines would understand what it really means.
A MARINE CONFESSES HE WITNESSED TORTURE
My fellow veterans please forgive me. But I must purge my soul. I only ask that you reserve judgment until you read this. I only want peace for all and a world free of torture.
What I saw in the military was much worse than water boarding. The prisoners were taken to a 12-foot deep pool with their feet weighted and then forced into the pool. Those who hesitated were moved onto a plank high above the pool and forced off. They were to stay in this deep water for over an hour with their feet weighted down and in full clothing.
Those who touched the side of the pool had their fingers stepped on by angry guards. Not enough to break their fingers as that would reveal this terrible secret but just enough to inflect severe pain without detectable injury. The guards knew their craft well.
Like water boarding, the prisoners were not allowed to drown. No, that would expose the cover-up. It gets worse!
I must tell all! They were then taken to a wooden building far from the main complex. A lantern like device burned in the middle of the building. It gave off a horrible gas. The prisoners were forced to run around the lantern without the benefit of the gas masks worn by the guards and sing in their native language their country’s patriotic songs.
I saw them with my own eyes as they were finally released from the windowless building: eyes red, mucus flowing uncontrollably from their mouths and noses. Some looked near death.
A spec of humanity prevailed as they were allowed to recover for several minutes before being taken to the bleachers. About one hundred of them were taken to the bleachers. They were not restrained, no that would blow this horrible trick. The bleachers were located in a bug-infested marsh.
Those prisoners who moved their hands in any effort to ward of the flying bugs were severely punished. Mockingly, the guards in the native language of the prisoners said, “these bugs have to eat too.”
The guard threw a dud hand grenade into the helpless group. He laughed as they scattered in terror. The prisoners were reassembled and prepared for more.
I saw one prisoner taken out of the line up with his shorts on backwards. Horrible sexual innuendos and insults were directed at him. I saw a tear roll down his cheek.
The prisoners were United States Marine recruits the “torture” described above was part of our training. The guards were drill instructors. The above is why we shake our heads in disbelief when water boarding, bugs, and loud music are described as torture by the mainstream press.The above prepared us for combat so that fair-weather pacifists can stand on our street corners only in the best of weather.
God forbid, they should be out in the cold or even worse the rain, as that would resemble water boarding.
Terry
TED WRITES TERRY:
Terry,
When you sign up for an elite military unit, you know that the grueling training you undergo is your choice, you're proud of yourself, and you know that your "tormentors" aren't going to kill you (except, sadly, by accident). You also have the pride of knowing that undergoing this treatment is making your country - and by implication your family - safer.
By the way, I'm actually a hawk, not a pacifist. And John Wayne is my iconic Hollywood hero. My Dad was a drill sergeant in the Army and just missed combat in WWII when he was 18 - just missed it because, as he was gearing up for the invasion of the home islands of Japan, Truman saved his life (and a million other solders' lives) by dropping the bombs. Thank you, Mr. President.
I keep waiting for someone in the political realm to use the symbolism the whole world will understand right away: America is the white-hat country. We don't torture. That's what Mao, Stalin, and Hitler did. We're the good guys. It's what makes us worth saving as a society.
I don't want our country to win this battle of existence with the Muslim extremists of Al Qaida, etc. merely because we are stronger than they. I want us to win because morally, we deserve to win. Because we're better than they in an entirely morally, objective way.
If we continue to embrace torture, why would we deserve to survive? We'd be debasing ourselves, bringing ourselves down to their level.
(You're going to inspire me to start a political blog if you're not careful....)
Ted
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ted,
It may surprise you but I have little use for John Wayne. He protected his career making war movies while his peers went into service and fought in W.W.II. Garry Wills wrote a powerful book, "John Wayne's America," which I quoted from in my last missive .
And we do torture, have tortured, and probably will continue to torture. The military of all ideologies behaves inhumanly when at war, or in a paranoid state.
Moreover, I am not a hawk, mainly, because wars are started and sustained by corpocracy under several different names since the beginning of history. Kings have used war to expand their territory when the party line was to convert the infidels.
Man never changes, only the weapons he uses grow more sophisticated. I've always thought how wonderful it would be if the weapons didn't change, but man grew more sophisticated and mature, but, alas, that is not likely to happen.
Look at the history of capitalism and you will see it has profited greatly by war at the expense of collateral damage it caused. Today we are allies with China, twenty-five or fifty years from now, we will be at war with China. It is as inevitable as the sun rising and setting. Why? Because what I've said above.
You wouldn't have copied me if you didn't want my views. I respect yours but differ with them.
Be always well,
Jim
PS As for survival, a young person feels immortal and has an insouciance about life, that is, until it is in jeopardy. The United States has always behaved like that youth, and has continued to so behave because it has not had to pay the consequences. They are coming due. Time will tell if only too late to be smart.
-----------------
A GERMAN FRIEND REPLIES TO MY REMARKS:
Jim,
From my experience I can say in a war there is no humanity whatsoever and no rules are observed other than to survive.
But people coming back from a war - whether victorious or defeated - will become the most pronounced opponents to any bellicose conflict. They know the outrageous impact to innocent people. Since my warrior days as a meer child, I have never touched a weapon again and hopefully will never have to do so in my life. And certainly one cannot call me a coward.
Take care,
Manfred
A FINAL WORD:
Indeed, Manfred by the accident of his birth and the times has lived through what Remarque's novel describes only in the Second World War.
I have edited the US Marines communiqué somewhat but have allowed “bleachers” to remain not knowing whether he meant “beaches.” I spent my military with marines as a hospital corpsman, and many of my acquaintances throughout my life have been ex-marines. I know Terry does not exaggerate the rigors of marine training.
One of my friends in marine boot camp on bivouac took off his helmet because he was so hot, and his drill instructor hit him on the head with the butt of his rifle so hard it gave him a concussion and put him in the hospital for three weeks.
What I left out when describing the possible invasion of Port Said, Egypt was the marines to a man with whom Wolgang and I were with were disappointed. They wanted to “kick ass” because they were trained to do so.
JRF
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 9, 2009
“War! That mad game the world so loves to play.”
Jonathan Swift
“He who makes war his profession cannot be otherwise than vicious. War makes thieves, and peace brings them to the gallows. War is a profession by which a man cannot live honorably; an employment by which the soldier if he would reap any profit, is obliged to be false, rapacious, and cruel.”
Machiavelli
“There never was a good war, or a bad peace.”
Benjamin Franklin
“All the talk of history is of nothing almost but fighting and killing, and the honor and renown which are bestowed on conquerors, who for the most part are mere butchers of mankind, mislead growing youth, who by these means, come to think slaughter the most laudable business of mankind, and the most heroic of virtues.”
John Locke
“War is an instrument entirely inefficient towards redressing wrong; and multiplies instead of indemnifying losses.”
Thomas Jefferson
“A great war leaves the country with three armies, an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.”
German Proverb
REFERENCE:
An author and consultant friend shared with me his correspondence with an acquaintance and asked for me to consider making it a missive.
Reading his exchange, I thought of Erich Maria Remarque, the German novelist, who wrote the most powerful war novel I have ever read concerning World War I. It was titled in English “ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT” and in German IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES. Remarque later came to the United States and became a naturalized American citizen.
Very few men of my generation escaped military service because the Selective Service Draft was on. We did not run off to Canada, or burn our draft cards as the next generation did, but we were still mainly reluctant warriors. God only knows what American society would be like today if the draft were still on.
Military training, which in many countries, remains compulsory does teach discipline, obedience to authority, and becoming regimented to a routine. It can also teach cruelty unintentionally by submitting its people to the most draconian of methods "to toughen them up."
I must confess I enjoyed my active duty in the US Navy, as there is a certain robotic consistency to my natural behavior. I am not into cruelty in any form and, fortunately, experienced none in my military service.
I end this piece with a brief note from a German friend, an executive colleague whom I worked with in Honeywell Europe, Ltd. out of Brussels in the late 1980s.
My German friend, only a boy was forced to fight on the Eastern Front for Germany in World War II, and survived.
In the US Navy in the late 1950s, my best friend in the navy was a German optometrist who escaped from Communist East Germany to the US only to be drafted into the US Navy. He escaped East Germany when the Berlin Wall was still a murder zone.
Wolfgang and I, both college graduates and hospital corpsman, were assigned to the US Marines when in 1957 Great Britain and France bombed the Suez Canal to stop shipping through it.
In battle gear and about to climb down the ropes into our landing ship tanks (LSTs) to invade Egypt at Port Said, President Eisenhower issued a “stand down.” We were in our early twenties. I thought that would be the end for me, while Wolfgang said, “Why can’t I escape war?”
* * *
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
Terry is an interesting, highly intelligent, but sadly radically conservative friend I've picked up in my travels. I copied you because I thought you'd find our dialogue a good jumping-off point for your own missives. I wish you lived down here, so you could join us for our Friday morning breakfasts!
Ted
TERRY WRITES TO TED
Ted,
For those of you who haven't been in the Marine Corps as I have, you might be shocked to learn how naive the "liberals" are these days. What follows should be required reading for everyone in this country.
Unfortunately, only Marines would understand what it really means.
A MARINE CONFESSES HE WITNESSED TORTURE
My fellow veterans please forgive me. But I must purge my soul. I only ask that you reserve judgment until you read this. I only want peace for all and a world free of torture.
What I saw in the military was much worse than water boarding. The prisoners were taken to a 12-foot deep pool with their feet weighted and then forced into the pool. Those who hesitated were moved onto a plank high above the pool and forced off. They were to stay in this deep water for over an hour with their feet weighted down and in full clothing.
Those who touched the side of the pool had their fingers stepped on by angry guards. Not enough to break their fingers as that would reveal this terrible secret but just enough to inflect severe pain without detectable injury. The guards knew their craft well.
Like water boarding, the prisoners were not allowed to drown. No, that would expose the cover-up. It gets worse!
I must tell all! They were then taken to a wooden building far from the main complex. A lantern like device burned in the middle of the building. It gave off a horrible gas. The prisoners were forced to run around the lantern without the benefit of the gas masks worn by the guards and sing in their native language their country’s patriotic songs.
I saw them with my own eyes as they were finally released from the windowless building: eyes red, mucus flowing uncontrollably from their mouths and noses. Some looked near death.
A spec of humanity prevailed as they were allowed to recover for several minutes before being taken to the bleachers. About one hundred of them were taken to the bleachers. They were not restrained, no that would blow this horrible trick. The bleachers were located in a bug-infested marsh.
Those prisoners who moved their hands in any effort to ward of the flying bugs were severely punished. Mockingly, the guards in the native language of the prisoners said, “these bugs have to eat too.”
The guard threw a dud hand grenade into the helpless group. He laughed as they scattered in terror. The prisoners were reassembled and prepared for more.
I saw one prisoner taken out of the line up with his shorts on backwards. Horrible sexual innuendos and insults were directed at him. I saw a tear roll down his cheek.
The prisoners were United States Marine recruits the “torture” described above was part of our training. The guards were drill instructors. The above is why we shake our heads in disbelief when water boarding, bugs, and loud music are described as torture by the mainstream press.The above prepared us for combat so that fair-weather pacifists can stand on our street corners only in the best of weather.
God forbid, they should be out in the cold or even worse the rain, as that would resemble water boarding.
Terry
TED WRITES TERRY:
Terry,
When you sign up for an elite military unit, you know that the grueling training you undergo is your choice, you're proud of yourself, and you know that your "tormentors" aren't going to kill you (except, sadly, by accident). You also have the pride of knowing that undergoing this treatment is making your country - and by implication your family - safer.
By the way, I'm actually a hawk, not a pacifist. And John Wayne is my iconic Hollywood hero. My Dad was a drill sergeant in the Army and just missed combat in WWII when he was 18 - just missed it because, as he was gearing up for the invasion of the home islands of Japan, Truman saved his life (and a million other solders' lives) by dropping the bombs. Thank you, Mr. President.
I keep waiting for someone in the political realm to use the symbolism the whole world will understand right away: America is the white-hat country. We don't torture. That's what Mao, Stalin, and Hitler did. We're the good guys. It's what makes us worth saving as a society.
I don't want our country to win this battle of existence with the Muslim extremists of Al Qaida, etc. merely because we are stronger than they. I want us to win because morally, we deserve to win. Because we're better than they in an entirely morally, objective way.
If we continue to embrace torture, why would we deserve to survive? We'd be debasing ourselves, bringing ourselves down to their level.
(You're going to inspire me to start a political blog if you're not careful....)
Ted
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ted,
It may surprise you but I have little use for John Wayne. He protected his career making war movies while his peers went into service and fought in W.W.II. Garry Wills wrote a powerful book, "John Wayne's America," which I quoted from in my last missive .
And we do torture, have tortured, and probably will continue to torture. The military of all ideologies behaves inhumanly when at war, or in a paranoid state.
Moreover, I am not a hawk, mainly, because wars are started and sustained by corpocracy under several different names since the beginning of history. Kings have used war to expand their territory when the party line was to convert the infidels.
Man never changes, only the weapons he uses grow more sophisticated. I've always thought how wonderful it would be if the weapons didn't change, but man grew more sophisticated and mature, but, alas, that is not likely to happen.
Look at the history of capitalism and you will see it has profited greatly by war at the expense of collateral damage it caused. Today we are allies with China, twenty-five or fifty years from now, we will be at war with China. It is as inevitable as the sun rising and setting. Why? Because what I've said above.
You wouldn't have copied me if you didn't want my views. I respect yours but differ with them.
Be always well,
Jim
PS As for survival, a young person feels immortal and has an insouciance about life, that is, until it is in jeopardy. The United States has always behaved like that youth, and has continued to so behave because it has not had to pay the consequences. They are coming due. Time will tell if only too late to be smart.
-----------------
A GERMAN FRIEND REPLIES TO MY REMARKS:
Jim,
From my experience I can say in a war there is no humanity whatsoever and no rules are observed other than to survive.
But people coming back from a war - whether victorious or defeated - will become the most pronounced opponents to any bellicose conflict. They know the outrageous impact to innocent people. Since my warrior days as a meer child, I have never touched a weapon again and hopefully will never have to do so in my life. And certainly one cannot call me a coward.
Take care,
Manfred
A FINAL WORD:
Indeed, Manfred by the accident of his birth and the times has lived through what Remarque's novel describes only in the Second World War.
I have edited the US Marines communiqué somewhat but have allowed “bleachers” to remain not knowing whether he meant “beaches.” I spent my military with marines as a hospital corpsman, and many of my acquaintances throughout my life have been ex-marines. I know Terry does not exaggerate the rigors of marine training.
One of my friends in marine boot camp on bivouac took off his helmet because he was so hot, and his drill instructor hit him on the head with the butt of his rifle so hard it gave him a concussion and put him in the hospital for three weeks.
What I left out when describing the possible invasion of Port Said, Egypt was the marines to a man with whom Wolgang and I were with were disappointed. They wanted to “kick ass” because they were trained to do so.
JRF
Thursday, May 07, 2009
BEAVIS & BUTT-HEAD REDUX, OR THE AGING FLU PANDEMIC OF THE UNITED STATES!
BEAVIS & BUTT-HEAD REDUX OR THE AGING FLU PANDEMIC OF THE UNITED STATES!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 7, 2009
“The current dissatisfied electorate vis-Ã -vis the last presidential election draws portraits of the Obama Administration in the manner of an Impressionistic painter. At a distance, where viewers of a certain mind stand, the portrait appears suspect, perhaps flawed and even contemptible; close in, where operations take place it is transparent, actively expedient and richly challenging. It is the reason all my writing is based on my own empirical work and not on Impressionistic academic, cultural or political painters who view matters from afar.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., the Peripatetic Philosopher, "Fragments of a Philosophy."
* * *
REFERENCE: This is from an executive bombarded with pejorative emails.
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
I just wanted to show you what I am typically being sent from this one person. She sends me scores of these diatribes. I hope it is okay what I’ve said. I'm really sick and tired of Obama bashing. Maybe, just possibly, she'll stop once she reads this. We'll see. What do you think?
HERE IS WHAT I WROTE TO HER:
B,
And you believe this because why? Did you personally hear each and every one of these quotes come out of their mouths? Or is this something Rush Limbaugh said or you read on the internet or some Republican bashing the Democrats? Please don't send me this stuff. I could send you bucketfuls of ridiculous things that Republicans (especially George Bush) have said but I respect you enough not to. I listen to you sometimes Bonnie and want to say something but some things are better left unsaid. If you feel it's necessary to pass on your propaganda, leave me off your list. I'm truly not interested in hearing it. It makes me think less of you.
HERE IS WHAT SHE SENT TO ME
SUBJECT:
GREAT ORATORS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
This may help you understand why I can't vote "Democrat":
Great Orators of the “Old” Democratic Party
Great quotes:
'One man with courage makes a majority.'- Andrew Jackson
'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.'- Franklin D. Roosevelt
'The buck stops here.'- Harry S. Truman
'Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.'- John F. Kennedy
And for today's Democrats... idiot quotes:
'It depends what your definition of 'IS' is?'' - Bill Clinton
'That Obama - I would like to cut his NUTS off.' - Jesse Jackson
'Those rumors are false... I believe in the sanctity of marriage.' - John Edwards
'I invented the Internet.' - Al Gore
'It doesn't matter if the planet is cooling and plants need it to live. We still have to ban carbon dioxide.' - Henry Waxman
'To the next person that tells me I'm not religious. I'm going to shove my rosary beads up their ASS.' - Joe Biden
'America is--is no longer, uh, what it--it, uh, could be, uh, what it was once was... uh, and I say to myself, "uh, I don't want that future, uh, uh, for my children."' - Barack Obama
'I have campaigned in all 57 states.' - Barack Obama
'You don't need God anymore, you have us democrats.' - Nancy Pelosi
'Paying taxes is voluntary- Harry Reid
'Bill is the greatest husband and father I know. No one is more faithful, true, and honest than he.' - Hillary Clinton
'The days of "traditional values" and strong foreign policy are over.' Chuck Schumer
'I do not regard Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as problems, I regard them as great assets. I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis. Fannie and Freddie pose no threat to the Treasury.' - Barney Frank
HOW LUCKY CAN WE BE TO HAVE SUCH BRILLIANT MINDS IN CHARGE OF OUR COUNTRY!
DR FISHER RESPONDS:
You have a perfect right to send this to me. There is not a person on earth that we cannot selectively excise comments that person has made, compromising behavior of some embarrassment, or words published that might put that person in a poor light.
We supposedly learn as a child not only to be a good winner but a good loser as well. Successful people have a lot of failures, and a lot of failures are successful people because of this rule.
It is apparent from similar emails that I have received that many cannot get past the Obama election.
We are preoccupied with the current economic meltdown and the scandalous behavior of corpocracy in industry, banking, insurance and government. But we have had a spiritual meltdown since 1945 or for sixty-four years since WWII. We won the war but have lost the spiritual peace:
(1) The family has abandoned its responsibility.
(2) The church has abdicated its role as refuge from greed and licentiousness.
(3) The corporation has set the bar as low as possible in taking rather than giving.
(4) The government has had a nervous breakdown in both parties.
(5) The military/industrial complex has used wars to sustain itself.
(6) The average citizen has played ignorant by living in denial of everything.
Recently, my twelve-year-old granddaughter, who is a straight A student in a tough prep school, told her father she wanted to be an ob-gyn doctor. He said, “Why would you want to do that? There’s no money in it!” It sent her away crying.
The happiest people I know are like my sister still working in her seventies every day, fiscally responsible, and living well below the radar of public attention. She votes her conscience and once she does she gets on with her life. She is active in her community but is not interested in headlines or kudos but only living a full, useful and productive life. She once was a devout Roman Catholic, but would be still if the church had not become as materialistic and corrupt as every other institution in this what I call an “aging flu pandemic.”
We have lost our moral compass and our way, but my sister has not. We are afraid to grow old and therefore grow up. In a society of more than 300 million, there are few adults, and least of all in the most critical positions of the land. We are suckers for beauty, youth, presence, glibness, and superficiality. If you have any doubt, look who are the news anchors on local and national television from news, to sports, to weather.
It is apparent there is a constituency in these United States that is a poor loser. As a consequence, they are not looking for ways to pull themselves up, but ways to sink winners down. The Obama Administration is their current focus.
They claim Obama harps on the mess the Bush Administration has left him, as if that is some kind of a secret. We have had eight years for the meltdown to take hold and become virulent. It is not going to be corrected in 100 days or 1000 days. Neglect doesn’t work that way. What do you expect from cowboys such as Bush, Chaney, Rumpsfelt? They represent the “American Adam,” which embodies the American myth. Here is how Garry Wills describes this Adam:
“The archetypal America is a displaced person arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killer for cleaning the world of things that need killing, loving but not bound down by love, rootless but carrying the center in himself, a gyroscopic direction-setter, a traveling norm.”
We like cowboys and cowboys have put us in the longest war in our American history. This is depleting our treasury.
There is little that you can do about someone of this mindset other than to delete these messages, and as you have done, let the person know they aren’t acceptable.
You are an active executive while I am retired and write books. I wrote a book in 1996 in which I talked about a couple of other cowboys who are still haunting us. One is Rush Limbaugh and the other is Howard Stern. The chapter about them is titled “Beavis and Butt-Head & United States of Anxiety.” This in part what I wrote:
“Only a comic opera could explain what has evolved. Rush Limbaugh became a conservative spokesperson by default, while liberals have Howard Stern as the sheik of the pornographic left. Limbaugh and Stern put excitement and good cheer into the prototype of this lackluster prism.
"The political prism is best known for its stuffiness, dullness, rudeness, and snobbery. Newt Gingrich and the Republican’s “Contract with America” had the resonance of Limbaugh and the spontaneity of Stern.
"Small wonder that the Republicans were swept into office in the 1994 election, reclaiming both the House and Senate for the first time in forty years.
"Only in the United States of Anxiety could two less likely individuals rise to prominence. Limbaugh, the Pillsbury Doughboy personified, and Stern, the long stem, cadaverous and rakish Dracula, made their reputation as populist radio personalities, Limbaugh as the right-wing king and Stern as the gross-out shock jock of the left.
"Both men are intelligent misfits who in their youth were not noticed by their peers much less taken seriously. Limbaugh and Stern appear to have a mandate to do much as they please. They are loved and hated by millions, but hardly ignored.” (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, pp 15-16)
Today, thirteen years later in 2009, they are still with us both earning over $100 million a year. This says a lot more about us than about them. It tells us that we are a society of the lowest common denominator. They are both outsiders that have been adopted like pets by insiders.
Limbaugh and Stearn rack their havoc in ways politicians only dream of. Neither of them could ever be elected to public office, but from their sanctuaries of hate and malcontent, impotence and insecurity, they rule the day. They have confirmed more than Herbert Marcuse could ever have imagined the presence of his “One Dimensional Man” (Ark Paperbacks 1964), as they reflect our spiritual toxicity.
Limbaugh is great at hyperbole and political histrionics while Stern is outrageous at exposing our Puritanical uptightedness of our own sexuality.
What is the answer to this dilemma? Perhaps it would help if we grew up.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 7, 2009
“The current dissatisfied electorate vis-Ã -vis the last presidential election draws portraits of the Obama Administration in the manner of an Impressionistic painter. At a distance, where viewers of a certain mind stand, the portrait appears suspect, perhaps flawed and even contemptible; close in, where operations take place it is transparent, actively expedient and richly challenging. It is the reason all my writing is based on my own empirical work and not on Impressionistic academic, cultural or political painters who view matters from afar.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., the Peripatetic Philosopher, "Fragments of a Philosophy."
* * *
REFERENCE: This is from an executive bombarded with pejorative emails.
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
I just wanted to show you what I am typically being sent from this one person. She sends me scores of these diatribes. I hope it is okay what I’ve said. I'm really sick and tired of Obama bashing. Maybe, just possibly, she'll stop once she reads this. We'll see. What do you think?
HERE IS WHAT I WROTE TO HER:
B,
And you believe this because why? Did you personally hear each and every one of these quotes come out of their mouths? Or is this something Rush Limbaugh said or you read on the internet or some Republican bashing the Democrats? Please don't send me this stuff. I could send you bucketfuls of ridiculous things that Republicans (especially George Bush) have said but I respect you enough not to. I listen to you sometimes Bonnie and want to say something but some things are better left unsaid. If you feel it's necessary to pass on your propaganda, leave me off your list. I'm truly not interested in hearing it. It makes me think less of you.
HERE IS WHAT SHE SENT TO ME
SUBJECT:
GREAT ORATORS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
This may help you understand why I can't vote "Democrat":
Great Orators of the “Old” Democratic Party
Great quotes:
'One man with courage makes a majority.'- Andrew Jackson
'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.'- Franklin D. Roosevelt
'The buck stops here.'- Harry S. Truman
'Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.'- John F. Kennedy
And for today's Democrats... idiot quotes:
'It depends what your definition of 'IS' is?'' - Bill Clinton
'That Obama - I would like to cut his NUTS off.' - Jesse Jackson
'Those rumors are false... I believe in the sanctity of marriage.' - John Edwards
'I invented the Internet.' - Al Gore
'It doesn't matter if the planet is cooling and plants need it to live. We still have to ban carbon dioxide.' - Henry Waxman
'To the next person that tells me I'm not religious. I'm going to shove my rosary beads up their ASS.' - Joe Biden
'America is--is no longer, uh, what it--it, uh, could be, uh, what it was once was... uh, and I say to myself, "uh, I don't want that future, uh, uh, for my children."' - Barack Obama
'I have campaigned in all 57 states.' - Barack Obama
'You don't need God anymore, you have us democrats.' - Nancy Pelosi
'Paying taxes is voluntary- Harry Reid
'Bill is the greatest husband and father I know. No one is more faithful, true, and honest than he.' - Hillary Clinton
'The days of "traditional values" and strong foreign policy are over.' Chuck Schumer
'I do not regard Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as problems, I regard them as great assets. I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis. Fannie and Freddie pose no threat to the Treasury.' - Barney Frank
HOW LUCKY CAN WE BE TO HAVE SUCH BRILLIANT MINDS IN CHARGE OF OUR COUNTRY!
DR FISHER RESPONDS:
You have a perfect right to send this to me. There is not a person on earth that we cannot selectively excise comments that person has made, compromising behavior of some embarrassment, or words published that might put that person in a poor light.
We supposedly learn as a child not only to be a good winner but a good loser as well. Successful people have a lot of failures, and a lot of failures are successful people because of this rule.
It is apparent from similar emails that I have received that many cannot get past the Obama election.
We are preoccupied with the current economic meltdown and the scandalous behavior of corpocracy in industry, banking, insurance and government. But we have had a spiritual meltdown since 1945 or for sixty-four years since WWII. We won the war but have lost the spiritual peace:
(1) The family has abandoned its responsibility.
(2) The church has abdicated its role as refuge from greed and licentiousness.
(3) The corporation has set the bar as low as possible in taking rather than giving.
(4) The government has had a nervous breakdown in both parties.
(5) The military/industrial complex has used wars to sustain itself.
(6) The average citizen has played ignorant by living in denial of everything.
Recently, my twelve-year-old granddaughter, who is a straight A student in a tough prep school, told her father she wanted to be an ob-gyn doctor. He said, “Why would you want to do that? There’s no money in it!” It sent her away crying.
The happiest people I know are like my sister still working in her seventies every day, fiscally responsible, and living well below the radar of public attention. She votes her conscience and once she does she gets on with her life. She is active in her community but is not interested in headlines or kudos but only living a full, useful and productive life. She once was a devout Roman Catholic, but would be still if the church had not become as materialistic and corrupt as every other institution in this what I call an “aging flu pandemic.”
We have lost our moral compass and our way, but my sister has not. We are afraid to grow old and therefore grow up. In a society of more than 300 million, there are few adults, and least of all in the most critical positions of the land. We are suckers for beauty, youth, presence, glibness, and superficiality. If you have any doubt, look who are the news anchors on local and national television from news, to sports, to weather.
It is apparent there is a constituency in these United States that is a poor loser. As a consequence, they are not looking for ways to pull themselves up, but ways to sink winners down. The Obama Administration is their current focus.
They claim Obama harps on the mess the Bush Administration has left him, as if that is some kind of a secret. We have had eight years for the meltdown to take hold and become virulent. It is not going to be corrected in 100 days or 1000 days. Neglect doesn’t work that way. What do you expect from cowboys such as Bush, Chaney, Rumpsfelt? They represent the “American Adam,” which embodies the American myth. Here is how Garry Wills describes this Adam:
“The archetypal America is a displaced person arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killer for cleaning the world of things that need killing, loving but not bound down by love, rootless but carrying the center in himself, a gyroscopic direction-setter, a traveling norm.”
We like cowboys and cowboys have put us in the longest war in our American history. This is depleting our treasury.
There is little that you can do about someone of this mindset other than to delete these messages, and as you have done, let the person know they aren’t acceptable.
You are an active executive while I am retired and write books. I wrote a book in 1996 in which I talked about a couple of other cowboys who are still haunting us. One is Rush Limbaugh and the other is Howard Stern. The chapter about them is titled “Beavis and Butt-Head & United States of Anxiety.” This in part what I wrote:
“Only a comic opera could explain what has evolved. Rush Limbaugh became a conservative spokesperson by default, while liberals have Howard Stern as the sheik of the pornographic left. Limbaugh and Stern put excitement and good cheer into the prototype of this lackluster prism.
"The political prism is best known for its stuffiness, dullness, rudeness, and snobbery. Newt Gingrich and the Republican’s “Contract with America” had the resonance of Limbaugh and the spontaneity of Stern.
"Small wonder that the Republicans were swept into office in the 1994 election, reclaiming both the House and Senate for the first time in forty years.
"Only in the United States of Anxiety could two less likely individuals rise to prominence. Limbaugh, the Pillsbury Doughboy personified, and Stern, the long stem, cadaverous and rakish Dracula, made their reputation as populist radio personalities, Limbaugh as the right-wing king and Stern as the gross-out shock jock of the left.
"Both men are intelligent misfits who in their youth were not noticed by their peers much less taken seriously. Limbaugh and Stern appear to have a mandate to do much as they please. They are loved and hated by millions, but hardly ignored.” (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, pp 15-16)
Today, thirteen years later in 2009, they are still with us both earning over $100 million a year. This says a lot more about us than about them. It tells us that we are a society of the lowest common denominator. They are both outsiders that have been adopted like pets by insiders.
Limbaugh and Stearn rack their havoc in ways politicians only dream of. Neither of them could ever be elected to public office, but from their sanctuaries of hate and malcontent, impotence and insecurity, they rule the day. They have confirmed more than Herbert Marcuse could ever have imagined the presence of his “One Dimensional Man” (Ark Paperbacks 1964), as they reflect our spiritual toxicity.
Limbaugh is great at hyperbole and political histrionics while Stern is outrageous at exposing our Puritanical uptightedness of our own sexuality.
What is the answer to this dilemma? Perhaps it would help if we grew up.
* * *
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
WHY SOME PEOPLE OF POLITICAL PERSUASION HATE OBAMA!
WHY SOME PEOPLE OF POLITICAL PERSUASION HATE OBAMA!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”
Shakespeare
Being apolitical rather than political, I wonder at all the spent energy on trying to make a rose a weed and a weed a rose. I’m thinking of President Barak Obama haters, who seemingly have an aversion to him and his presidency hoping to find a kink in his armor with a misbegotten policy, misspoken word, or some other contretemps. After all, he is our duly elected president, and will be, God willing, for the next four years. Are these haters going to look under every rock or misplaced gesture for confirmation of their malevolence?
There isn’t a single person on earth that can pass such scrutiny, especially the President of the United States. After all, he is a mere human who has come forth to lead us through these difficult times. He needs our support not our enmity.
Why such vitriolic attention? Obviously, the president doesn’t fit comfortably into caricature or stereotype. He is a graduate of the best schools in our country, former constitutional law professor, and a creative campaigner who defied tradition by upsetting the heir apparent to the presidency, Hillary Clinton. President Obama with his rhetoric, poise and calm has left the loyal opposition searching for a constituency. Even his harshest critics admit the range and depth of his intellect. Indeed, his whole persona defies those who would hold one race superior to another. That mindset will never find purchase again.
Have you ever noticed:
(1) Antipathy finds something in the hated to shoot at with a pretense to combustion?
(2) That disappointment that festers within is made the pretext of base tyrannies?
(3) When we want to punish our enemies we fasten to them our own troubles?
(4) When our hatred is irrational it sinks us lower than those we hate?
(5) That in order for our hate to register with us we must make it personal?
(6) That hate seldom focuses on the deed but instead on the person?
(7) That with hatred you take ownership of the problems of those you hate?
(8) How much easier it is to hate at a distance of someone you don’t know and will unlikely ever meet?
(9) That what we claim we hate we merely dislike?
(10) The irony of what we hate defines our character and personality?
(11) That hatred can only be cured with love?
(12) That hatred is a stooping down rather than lifting up?
(13) That it is impossible to hate someone we truly know?
(14) That hatred so often is a cause separate from our actual existence?
(15) That when you hate you enter your enemies’ prison?
(16) That hatred is a form of death and only love can restore it to life?
(17) That hate is a kind of murder of the spirit?
(18) That hatred wears out the mind as well as the body?
(19) That hatred is a shortcut to thinking why we are so bothered?
The only way to absolve oneself of hatred is self-acceptance, that is, knowing, liking and understanding why one is the person he or she is. Without such self-understanding, one is vulnerable to jargon and clipped answers to frustrating problems. The paradox that the contempt haters have for other individuals does not come close to measuring their own self-hatred. It is as impossible to be self-accepting and hating as it is for a thing to be and not be at once.
* * *
Dr. Fisher is author of “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”
Shakespeare
Being apolitical rather than political, I wonder at all the spent energy on trying to make a rose a weed and a weed a rose. I’m thinking of President Barak Obama haters, who seemingly have an aversion to him and his presidency hoping to find a kink in his armor with a misbegotten policy, misspoken word, or some other contretemps. After all, he is our duly elected president, and will be, God willing, for the next four years. Are these haters going to look under every rock or misplaced gesture for confirmation of their malevolence?
There isn’t a single person on earth that can pass such scrutiny, especially the President of the United States. After all, he is a mere human who has come forth to lead us through these difficult times. He needs our support not our enmity.
Why such vitriolic attention? Obviously, the president doesn’t fit comfortably into caricature or stereotype. He is a graduate of the best schools in our country, former constitutional law professor, and a creative campaigner who defied tradition by upsetting the heir apparent to the presidency, Hillary Clinton. President Obama with his rhetoric, poise and calm has left the loyal opposition searching for a constituency. Even his harshest critics admit the range and depth of his intellect. Indeed, his whole persona defies those who would hold one race superior to another. That mindset will never find purchase again.
Have you ever noticed:
(1) Antipathy finds something in the hated to shoot at with a pretense to combustion?
(2) That disappointment that festers within is made the pretext of base tyrannies?
(3) When we want to punish our enemies we fasten to them our own troubles?
(4) When our hatred is irrational it sinks us lower than those we hate?
(5) That in order for our hate to register with us we must make it personal?
(6) That hate seldom focuses on the deed but instead on the person?
(7) That with hatred you take ownership of the problems of those you hate?
(8) How much easier it is to hate at a distance of someone you don’t know and will unlikely ever meet?
(9) That what we claim we hate we merely dislike?
(10) The irony of what we hate defines our character and personality?
(11) That hatred can only be cured with love?
(12) That hatred is a stooping down rather than lifting up?
(13) That it is impossible to hate someone we truly know?
(14) That hatred so often is a cause separate from our actual existence?
(15) That when you hate you enter your enemies’ prison?
(16) That hatred is a form of death and only love can restore it to life?
(17) That hate is a kind of murder of the spirit?
(18) That hatred wears out the mind as well as the body?
(19) That hatred is a shortcut to thinking why we are so bothered?
The only way to absolve oneself of hatred is self-acceptance, that is, knowing, liking and understanding why one is the person he or she is. Without such self-understanding, one is vulnerable to jargon and clipped answers to frustrating problems. The paradox that the contempt haters have for other individuals does not come close to measuring their own self-hatred. It is as impossible to be self-accepting and hating as it is for a thing to be and not be at once.
* * *
Dr. Fisher is author of “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend.”
Sunday, May 03, 2009
ON THE FREEDOM FRONT: IS THE WEST LOSING THE BATTLE?
ON THE FREEDOM FRONT: IS THE WEST LOSING THE BATTLE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 3, 2009
“Why do the media (and others) not jump all over vile, hate-filled pronouncements by imams and mullahs the way they do controversial, though far less outrageous, comments by Christian leaders such as James Dobson and Pat Robertson? Why, in short, is ‘Muslim extremism someone else’s fault’? As to hypocrisies: In the United States, a Koran flushed down the toilet is pursued as a hate crime, while a crucifix placed in urine is hailed as a work of art. In Norway, Muslim women can be kept as virtual prisoners in their homes, but a Norwegian attempting to draw attention to the condition risks being prosecuted.”
Roger K. Miller, a novelist and freelance writer and editor.
* * *
REFERENCE: The writer to follow here was responding to my blog entry: “The More Things Change The More They Remain The Same” (April 28, 2009). The writer makes reference to the Memories’ List. It is a network of mainly people from Iowa spread across the country if not the world who are given an opportunity to express their views on nostalgic or current topics. Dr. Donald Farr, an organization-industrial psychologist, and former NASA scientist has availed his time to this purpose.
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
You've got it there in a nutshell!
In '70's parlance, it represents a Win-Win, symbiosis, whatever... leastwise the utter antithesis of our recent "race to the bottom."
Henry Ford still had plenty left, didn't he? Ponder today's uber rich, trashing Obama's efforts & whining about taxes (the lowest in decades)-- while their $$ is often undeclared, still more is 'sheltered', and w/ legit write-offs (read 'Perfectly Legal'). These people pay way less than their 'brackets' would indicate, and sometimes nothing at all. - Grr-rr!
I agree man isn't inherently greedy, but so many become greedy. I’d say the tendency’s there; ergo, r-e-g-u-l-a-t-i-o-n is necessary... for everyone.
Odd, isn't it, that during Ike's time-- when taxes truly penalized personal wealth beyond a millionaire cap, there wasn't such a huge need to acquire... why bother, if you were just going to pay 90% in taxes. May as well enjoy life, consume, and draw accolades for 'putting back,’ also known as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. -- Again, a Win-Win.
The folks who don't support national healthcare, as a humane entitlement (bad word!), ought to consider it's a Win-Win economic decision too! It'd remove a huge load off business making our U.S. labor far more competitive while encouraging older workers to retire early (ergo, making jobs for younger ones),
AND (done right), perhaps allow us to recoup some of the waste & fraud that the healthcare corpocracy now causes (which makes us pay twice as much as other rich countries for healthcare, while still leaving 50 million uncovered!)
I'm still ruminating on the Memories’ Lists latest! My God, well-off people are losing their homes after losing the jobs that paid the freight. It's not rocket science to know those already marginalized (retarded, sick, or with no skills or family resources) would get 'flushed' too? Don't conservative "Christians" believe in compassion anymore?
Be well too!
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
In a clipped but highly energetic style you have touched on a number of soft spots in the American firmament. It would take an entire missive to respond to them. Surfeit it to say here, your awareness, passion and humanity are highly visible and appreciated.
I wager to differ with you on the Don Farr Memories’ List. It is what is missing in our society – healthy CONFLICT! That is "managed conflict," which is polite, and is expressed, not after it has become hot with distemper, but when it is felt. We are not a United States of Harmony, but a United States of individual ideas and opinions, but committed to supporting a common good.
As for the Memories’ List, I know some expressions frustrate, others anger, and still others cause those listed to threaten to leave the list. They want confirmation of their views, not open discussion of contrary views. They want to be confirmed not criticized or, indeed, marginalized. I smile to myself as I know Dr. Don does his level best to keep the heat down on what he passes on, often deciding against passing on my missives. I understand and approve.
You see I salute him for the yeoman like job he does for so many who might otherwise dry up like prunes. When you encourage people to state their views, whatever those views might be, you put them in touch with their hearts, and they see "in the open air" how they feel if not why they feel so.
These are good people, hard working people, who pushed the bale, toed the mark, and took authority at its word. To listen to some of them you would think they had deep prejudices. I don't think so. They are red, white and blue Americans and mainly Christians.
When they criticize the President of the United States or the First Lady, they are conservatives speaking, mostly I suspect, as Republican conservatives, who have no current leadership. They are filling the vacuum with their views. They are also mainly Protestants who are still fighting the last election.
This is not new. Democrats have done it for years as well when not in the Executive Branch. I suspect, too, that they are mainly senior citizens who have been loyal to a political ideal. It confuses them when America refuses to stand up for itself as they expect.
Sure, sometimes they are terribly blunt but remember most of them (I am guessing) never took the art of expressing themselves in words too seriously. We that use the pen a lot often hide behind words in expressing ourselves. They do not.
One of the nicest things that has happened in this electronic age is the Memories’ List. I'm serious.
As for this economic meltdown, it is hard for people who resisted putting on airs, spending their last dime to look good, and saved for a rainy day, to feel much empathy for people who gambled on the future, and lost. Now, these same hard working people, who sacrificed instead of gambled on the future, see they and their children must pay for these profligates. It doesn’t make for happy campers.
They write to me, too, and have little sympathy for high rollers anywhere. So, people are losing their homes, so what, they say. Where their sympathies are is with renters who landlords go belly up.
They represent an incongruity in a nation that has become endemically passive. Passivity, as you know, is my major concern. We have a silent invasion in our American culture and they are speaking out about it perhaps crudely, but thank God they are adding their voices.
It is people on Don Farr's Network, I believe, that have built America as far back as the 17th century (1634), when the Pilgrims came here to be individuals, to practice their faith without punishment, and to speak their language, English, without apology.
In the 18th century (1776), church and state were separated and the United States of America was created, a Christian nation but a nation tolerant of other religions, a nation built on an idea of life, liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness for all.
People on the Don Farr Network are not pundits, not intellectuals, not change makers, but Americans of the common good who feel in their bones their freedoms are in jeopardy, and they are. My wish is that more pundits and propagandists would listen to these voices, voices that have no hidden agenda but speak their hearts.
I don't expect most of these people to be mesmerized by my missives on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com), but that does not change the fact that I am one of them, reared out of the same soil. I have had people write and say they start reading a missive of mine, come to a passage they don’t like, and delete the whole thing. That is all right. I am not running for public office. I am one person with a view, and only one person. If that view does not play well with a person, all I ask is that he or she understand why, which puts them better in touch with themselves.
Nor do I expect them to read all the books I do to which I refer to in my missives. I do wish them to be cognizant of a few voices “out there” attempting to cut through the malarkey. Such a voice is Bruce Bawer's SURRENDER: APPEASING ISLAM, SACRIFICING FREEDOM (2009).
We forget that the Islamic Moors possessed and ruled 80 percent of Spain by 910; by 1150, they were driven to less than half of Spain, and by 1492, when Columbus was discovering America, were confined to mainly Gibraltar.
I can remember how fascinated I was in fourth grade at St. Patrick's Grammar School reading about the art, architecture, mathematics, science, and literature that the Moors brought to Spain. What I wasn't taught, which I learned much later is how the Moors installed Islam and its tenets on a Christian people and attempted to conquer Europe. Nor was I taught how Charles Martel of the Franks, called "Charles the Hammer," saved Europe from total domination by Islam in 732. It was a remarkable victory, and were it not to have happened, western civilization could have been crushed forever.
We face the same threat now only in a less obtrusive sense.
I confess I write a lot about FREEDOM. I see it threatened, not with a bloody invasion but with a silent invasion of hyper anxiety exploiting our complicit passivity, our obsession with being politically correct in apologizing for being an English speaking and Christian nation, not wanting to offend any other religion.
Tolerance for other religions does not demand we apologize for ours, or for our culture or for our English, for our individualism, for our rights and privileges of men and women alike, and for our rule of law governed and directed by a republic independent of a theocratic authority.
This freedom is in jeopardy. This is real. An illiberal democracy has silently invaded Europe as well as the United States, and nothing is being done about it. There is no Charles Martel about.
Fareed Zakaria addresses this problem in "The Future of Freedom" (2003), but he does so politely. Bruce Bawer in "Surrender" (2009) is not so polite. Earlier Bawer wrote a book called "While Europe Slept," in which he claimed Europe underestimated the extreme threat not only of jihadists or “Islamofascism,” but also of Islam itself. Today, Europe can be seen to be caving in to Islamic demands.
To put it bluntly, people on the Don Farr’s Memories’ List don’t apologize for Christmas. People of the Jewish Faith have gone along with this tradition in celebrating their Holy Season without strive. Nor have the Jewish people resented speaking English in America, but came from countries across the globe and learned the English language. We are a richer society because of Jewish contributions without losing the integrity of our common culture.
We are a Christian-Judaic society and culture, and people who wish to live in our society, as have immigrants for centuries, have had the freedom to practice their culture in the privacy of their homes or their respective communities. What Bawer is saying is that they have no right to replace our culture with theirs, or demand unrealistic concessions that might make them more at home in our culture.
If Bawer is right, and I hope he is not, the road to our perdition is paved with wrong-headed good intentions, which he sees gaining exponentially.
Perhaps an unintended consequence of the Dr. Donald Farr Memories’ List may be that of a tool to assist in saving America as we know and love it.
Be Always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 3, 2009
“Why do the media (and others) not jump all over vile, hate-filled pronouncements by imams and mullahs the way they do controversial, though far less outrageous, comments by Christian leaders such as James Dobson and Pat Robertson? Why, in short, is ‘Muslim extremism someone else’s fault’? As to hypocrisies: In the United States, a Koran flushed down the toilet is pursued as a hate crime, while a crucifix placed in urine is hailed as a work of art. In Norway, Muslim women can be kept as virtual prisoners in their homes, but a Norwegian attempting to draw attention to the condition risks being prosecuted.”
Roger K. Miller, a novelist and freelance writer and editor.
* * *
REFERENCE: The writer to follow here was responding to my blog entry: “The More Things Change The More They Remain The Same” (April 28, 2009). The writer makes reference to the Memories’ List. It is a network of mainly people from Iowa spread across the country if not the world who are given an opportunity to express their views on nostalgic or current topics. Dr. Donald Farr, an organization-industrial psychologist, and former NASA scientist has availed his time to this purpose.
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
You've got it there in a nutshell!
In '70's parlance, it represents a Win-Win, symbiosis, whatever... leastwise the utter antithesis of our recent "race to the bottom."
Henry Ford still had plenty left, didn't he? Ponder today's uber rich, trashing Obama's efforts & whining about taxes (the lowest in decades)-- while their $$ is often undeclared, still more is 'sheltered', and w/ legit write-offs (read 'Perfectly Legal'). These people pay way less than their 'brackets' would indicate, and sometimes nothing at all. - Grr-rr!
I agree man isn't inherently greedy, but so many become greedy. I’d say the tendency’s there; ergo, r-e-g-u-l-a-t-i-o-n is necessary... for everyone.
Odd, isn't it, that during Ike's time-- when taxes truly penalized personal wealth beyond a millionaire cap, there wasn't such a huge need to acquire... why bother, if you were just going to pay 90% in taxes. May as well enjoy life, consume, and draw accolades for 'putting back,’ also known as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. -- Again, a Win-Win.
The folks who don't support national healthcare, as a humane entitlement (bad word!), ought to consider it's a Win-Win economic decision too! It'd remove a huge load off business making our U.S. labor far more competitive while encouraging older workers to retire early (ergo, making jobs for younger ones),
AND (done right), perhaps allow us to recoup some of the waste & fraud that the healthcare corpocracy now causes (which makes us pay twice as much as other rich countries for healthcare, while still leaving 50 million uncovered!)
I'm still ruminating on the Memories’ Lists latest! My God, well-off people are losing their homes after losing the jobs that paid the freight. It's not rocket science to know those already marginalized (retarded, sick, or with no skills or family resources) would get 'flushed' too? Don't conservative "Christians" believe in compassion anymore?
Be well too!
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
In a clipped but highly energetic style you have touched on a number of soft spots in the American firmament. It would take an entire missive to respond to them. Surfeit it to say here, your awareness, passion and humanity are highly visible and appreciated.
I wager to differ with you on the Don Farr Memories’ List. It is what is missing in our society – healthy CONFLICT! That is "managed conflict," which is polite, and is expressed, not after it has become hot with distemper, but when it is felt. We are not a United States of Harmony, but a United States of individual ideas and opinions, but committed to supporting a common good.
As for the Memories’ List, I know some expressions frustrate, others anger, and still others cause those listed to threaten to leave the list. They want confirmation of their views, not open discussion of contrary views. They want to be confirmed not criticized or, indeed, marginalized. I smile to myself as I know Dr. Don does his level best to keep the heat down on what he passes on, often deciding against passing on my missives. I understand and approve.
You see I salute him for the yeoman like job he does for so many who might otherwise dry up like prunes. When you encourage people to state their views, whatever those views might be, you put them in touch with their hearts, and they see "in the open air" how they feel if not why they feel so.
These are good people, hard working people, who pushed the bale, toed the mark, and took authority at its word. To listen to some of them you would think they had deep prejudices. I don't think so. They are red, white and blue Americans and mainly Christians.
When they criticize the President of the United States or the First Lady, they are conservatives speaking, mostly I suspect, as Republican conservatives, who have no current leadership. They are filling the vacuum with their views. They are also mainly Protestants who are still fighting the last election.
This is not new. Democrats have done it for years as well when not in the Executive Branch. I suspect, too, that they are mainly senior citizens who have been loyal to a political ideal. It confuses them when America refuses to stand up for itself as they expect.
Sure, sometimes they are terribly blunt but remember most of them (I am guessing) never took the art of expressing themselves in words too seriously. We that use the pen a lot often hide behind words in expressing ourselves. They do not.
One of the nicest things that has happened in this electronic age is the Memories’ List. I'm serious.
As for this economic meltdown, it is hard for people who resisted putting on airs, spending their last dime to look good, and saved for a rainy day, to feel much empathy for people who gambled on the future, and lost. Now, these same hard working people, who sacrificed instead of gambled on the future, see they and their children must pay for these profligates. It doesn’t make for happy campers.
They write to me, too, and have little sympathy for high rollers anywhere. So, people are losing their homes, so what, they say. Where their sympathies are is with renters who landlords go belly up.
They represent an incongruity in a nation that has become endemically passive. Passivity, as you know, is my major concern. We have a silent invasion in our American culture and they are speaking out about it perhaps crudely, but thank God they are adding their voices.
It is people on Don Farr's Network, I believe, that have built America as far back as the 17th century (1634), when the Pilgrims came here to be individuals, to practice their faith without punishment, and to speak their language, English, without apology.
In the 18th century (1776), church and state were separated and the United States of America was created, a Christian nation but a nation tolerant of other religions, a nation built on an idea of life, liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness for all.
People on the Don Farr Network are not pundits, not intellectuals, not change makers, but Americans of the common good who feel in their bones their freedoms are in jeopardy, and they are. My wish is that more pundits and propagandists would listen to these voices, voices that have no hidden agenda but speak their hearts.
I don't expect most of these people to be mesmerized by my missives on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com), but that does not change the fact that I am one of them, reared out of the same soil. I have had people write and say they start reading a missive of mine, come to a passage they don’t like, and delete the whole thing. That is all right. I am not running for public office. I am one person with a view, and only one person. If that view does not play well with a person, all I ask is that he or she understand why, which puts them better in touch with themselves.
Nor do I expect them to read all the books I do to which I refer to in my missives. I do wish them to be cognizant of a few voices “out there” attempting to cut through the malarkey. Such a voice is Bruce Bawer's SURRENDER: APPEASING ISLAM, SACRIFICING FREEDOM (2009).
We forget that the Islamic Moors possessed and ruled 80 percent of Spain by 910; by 1150, they were driven to less than half of Spain, and by 1492, when Columbus was discovering America, were confined to mainly Gibraltar.
I can remember how fascinated I was in fourth grade at St. Patrick's Grammar School reading about the art, architecture, mathematics, science, and literature that the Moors brought to Spain. What I wasn't taught, which I learned much later is how the Moors installed Islam and its tenets on a Christian people and attempted to conquer Europe. Nor was I taught how Charles Martel of the Franks, called "Charles the Hammer," saved Europe from total domination by Islam in 732. It was a remarkable victory, and were it not to have happened, western civilization could have been crushed forever.
We face the same threat now only in a less obtrusive sense.
I confess I write a lot about FREEDOM. I see it threatened, not with a bloody invasion but with a silent invasion of hyper anxiety exploiting our complicit passivity, our obsession with being politically correct in apologizing for being an English speaking and Christian nation, not wanting to offend any other religion.
Tolerance for other religions does not demand we apologize for ours, or for our culture or for our English, for our individualism, for our rights and privileges of men and women alike, and for our rule of law governed and directed by a republic independent of a theocratic authority.
This freedom is in jeopardy. This is real. An illiberal democracy has silently invaded Europe as well as the United States, and nothing is being done about it. There is no Charles Martel about.
Fareed Zakaria addresses this problem in "The Future of Freedom" (2003), but he does so politely. Bruce Bawer in "Surrender" (2009) is not so polite. Earlier Bawer wrote a book called "While Europe Slept," in which he claimed Europe underestimated the extreme threat not only of jihadists or “Islamofascism,” but also of Islam itself. Today, Europe can be seen to be caving in to Islamic demands.
To put it bluntly, people on the Don Farr’s Memories’ List don’t apologize for Christmas. People of the Jewish Faith have gone along with this tradition in celebrating their Holy Season without strive. Nor have the Jewish people resented speaking English in America, but came from countries across the globe and learned the English language. We are a richer society because of Jewish contributions without losing the integrity of our common culture.
We are a Christian-Judaic society and culture, and people who wish to live in our society, as have immigrants for centuries, have had the freedom to practice their culture in the privacy of their homes or their respective communities. What Bawer is saying is that they have no right to replace our culture with theirs, or demand unrealistic concessions that might make them more at home in our culture.
If Bawer is right, and I hope he is not, the road to our perdition is paved with wrong-headed good intentions, which he sees gaining exponentially.
Perhaps an unintended consequence of the Dr. Donald Farr Memories’ List may be that of a tool to assist in saving America as we know and love it.
Be Always well,
Jim
Friday, May 01, 2009
THE ETERNAL PARADOX: PART OF WHAT WE DESIRE IS OUR OWN SUBJUGATION!
THE ETERNAL PARADOX: PART OF WHAT WE DESIRE IS OUR OWN SUBJUGATION!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 1, 2009
“The past contains precious resources for the present and future. It is therefore advisable to move backwards into the future with your gaze fixed steadily on the past, rather than hurdle headlong into whatever lies ahead of us. Those who seek to abolish the past – to draw a line in front of it and move on, as the current boneheaded mantra has it – tend to end up destroying a lot more than that. ‘New, new, everything is new,’ Tony Blair once rhapsodized. One wonders whether he had bird flu in mind.”
Terry Eagleton, Professor of Cultural Theory, National University of Ireland
* * *
We have passed that legendary mark of the first hundred days of the presidency of Barak Obama. I have been busy reading my “Foreign Affairs” magazine, my “New York Review” and “London Review,” my “Time” magazine as well as reading The Tampa Tribune, listening to C-Span and C-Span 2, as well as reading Fareed Zakaria’s “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad” (2003) and “The Post-American World" (2008), and of course a spate of books by my favorite, Isaiah Berlin, as well as skimming Bob Woodward’s pop novel as history, “The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006 – 2008.”
What comes to mind is the absurdity of our preoccupation. We expect all these apparently learned men and women to express what is repressed in us, and that is the eternal battle between desiring freedom and wanting security.
Their power is our fear, and our fear is their power.
We have by default awarded those in charge the magnificent role of gods, which they dispatch with the seriousness as if they were. I am not only speaking of those elected but also of those who assume the role to inform. I’m also speaking of those that by cunning and design rise to the pinnacle of the corporate tree, and I’m speaking of you and me as complicit in this whole theatre.
We all play our rhapsody with our BlackBerrys, iPhones and laptops with instant information circulated in nanoseconds across this tiny planet, raising the tendrils of our souls to respond to rumor like scared rabbits.
In our quest to be all that we can be, something is flawed at the heart of this quest, which can fester and poison our moral compass and send us off course groping for someone to bring us back on course and in control. There is always someone in the wing waiting to do just that.
The paradox is that oppressive political and moral authority flourish when our impulses are for freedom and self-expression rather than extinguishing them.
This is mainly because we are an eternal paradox to ourselves dogged by internal contradictions:
(1) We want freedom but will sacrifice freedom willingly for security.
(2) We believe in free markets as long as our jobs are secure and our economic status continuously improves.
(3) We have tolerance for minorities as long as they don’t live in our neighborhood speaking their gibberish rather than English.
(4) We tolerate other religions as long as they don’t impinge on Christianity.
(5) We uphold the principle of the separation of church and state as long as it supports our interests.
(6) We endorse the idea of emancipation in all its forms but surprisingly fail to exercise self-emancipation, which is critical to political and economic freedom.
In a word, we are less free today because we want our cake and eat it too. We want to eliminate tax havens and have the rich cough up a good portion of their filthy lucre to rescue the poor from itself, yet in human history going back as far as anyone could imagine this has never translated into the utopian ideal desired, and for reason.
The enlightened and the powerful have always assumed that the less fortunate want what they have and are, at least in part, never realizing that the poor are often poor in spirit as well as in body because they prefer that state.
We cannot rescue people by imposing our values but we can accommodate them to a certain degree by legitimizing theirs.
Developers want to clean up the slums used in the film “Slum Dog Millionaire,” which won the 2009 Academy Award as Best Picture, and build multimillion-dollar condominiums and business complexes on this prime real estate in Brunei, India. PBS “Frontline” showed that the majority of residences of this slum, many entrepreneurs in their own right, simply want to be left alone.
The paradox goes deeper.
We have had a “War on Drugs” through several United States presidencies, and yet the crimes associated with this war seem to escalate rather than diminish. It goes back to the internal conflict mentioned earlier: many law-abiding citizens in the main are regular users of recreational drugs, and so there is an active market for these illegal exotic chemicals. You cannot stop the entrepreneurial criminals if you cannot eliminate the demand. I wager there is not one person reading this that does not know a person or persons who regularly use recreational drugs.
Typically profiled on the “War on Drugs” ads are the dregs of society unwittingly consumed in the poverty associated with this addiction, but what about executives, doctors, lawyers, legislators, teachers and priests who are quietly kept out of the limelight who are culpably feeding this societal disease? We forget it is a $billion industry and feeds the demand for more police, prisons and political activists.
The same could be said for the “War on Terror.” John Le Carre has been a favorite of mine, and I prefer his amoral intrigue to his moral maze. That said the moral maze is evident in “A Most Wanted Man” (2008). It is a novel about a “suspected Islam terrorist” because of the dastardly crimes of his father. It turns into a comedy of converging spies of Germany, England and America on this innocent man as operatives of the “War on Terror” attempt to prevail. My wonder is how close is this to the truth of such operatives.
It is obvious to me that since 9/11 it is not only an economic bubble that haunts us but a psychological one as well. The books and articles I mentioned earlier are expressive in detail of our willing repressive inclination, that is, until our comfort zone is disturbed.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. National Security Adviser in the Carter Administration writes in the current issue of “Foreign Affairs” (May/June 2009):
“It is now evident that in the case of the second (Iraq) war, the national shock induced by 9/11 – abetted (for whatever reason) by a campaign to stimulate public fear, fueled by demagogic and undiscriminating language about ‘Islamofascists,’ ‘jihadists,’ and ‘Muslim terrorism,’ not to mention apocalyptic references to ‘mushroom clouds’ and ‘World War III’ – created a toxic atmosphere.” (p. 151)
Toxic or legacy assets threaten us in an economic sense, but so does the toxic climate produced by fear mongering threaten us in a psychological sense. Freedom, incidentally, is expressed psychologically as well as behaviorally.
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FREEDOM AND THE QUEST FOR COMFORT
Isaiah Berlin developed a model of the polarity of freedom, which I first discussed in my book "THE WORKER, ALONE!" (1995). It was appropriate that I did so because I could see workers were coming down on the wrong side of freedom. They were coming down on the side of "positive freedom," or restricted freedom instead of on the side of "negative freedom," or unrestricted freedom where individualism is nurtured and expressed.
Positive freedom is the freedom with a long laundry list of restrictions, always for our own good. Employers and union leaders have enthusiastically supported this freedom, as have conservatives of both the Democratic and Republican Party. It is no accident that positive freedom has driven Chrysler into bankruptcy, likely to be followed by General Motors, and Ford. Positive freedom ignores reality and represses as the chaos mounts trying harder and harder when it might better let go and let flow with negative freedom.
It could be said with reasonable accuracy that positive freedom, with the exception of the presidency of Andrew Jackson, among a very few others, has been the law of the land. We have been protected from ourselves because it was believed we needed protection. We couldn’t control our anger so there had to be laws and implicit rules of employment in which we were obliged to be polite, obedient, submissive, passive, reactive, non-confrontational and to let others do the thinking for us who were “more qualified.”
HUMAN RESOURCES AND THE MBA DEGREE
Over the years, the most consistent criticism I have received is my treatment of human resources (HR) professionals and my outright contempt for the MBA degree.
The majority of my career was in line management where I enjoyed a great deal of negative freedom. Late in my career, after receiving my Ph.D., I found myself doing organizational development ((OD) work out of the HR department, in a staff function, which I found had a running romance with positive freedom.
It didn’t take me long to discover HR never found a policy or procedure it didn’t like. HR subscribes to the dictum "the greater the chaos the greater the need for control," whereas I have found the "the greater the control the greater the inevitable chaos."
Each control procedure was, of course, an impingement on negative or unrestricted freedom. What amazed me more, however, was the willingness of white as well as blue-collar workers to go along with these impositions without a whimper. It didn’t even seem to disturb them seeing those in executive positions not so restricted.
QUESTION: What is the function of higher education if those so educated are not allowed to express negative freedom?
It was in my OD corporate work that I came to recognize the internal paradox of our nature, which is a collective desire for our own subjugation. Individualism, while being practically nonexistent, is one of the more successful myths of our society. We are a society founded on individualism with but few having the courage to practice the tenets of individualism.
All hell broke loose, as I have pointed out elsewhere, when on March 30, 1984 I gave a speech (Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View) to corporate and military executives. The essence of the speech was that cosmetic interventions of positive freedom were backfiring. I was quite nervous that day stepping out of the rank and file repressive world in which I was born to express what I saw and felt.
Heavyweight Boxing Champion, Muhammad Ali, did as well when drafted in the 1960s to go to Vietnam, and said, “Hell, no, I won’t go!” He was exercising his negative freedom but suffered mightily for it, as positive freedom at the time had no sense of humor for its expression.
As for the MBA degree, I taught as an adjunct for ten years in several universities’ MBA programs, and in interviewing many MBA graduates over the years, against the vocational nature of the curriculum, I concluded that it was a combination of filling the right boxes for promotion as well as focusing on economic enhancement at the expense of development in their chosen profession. There were exceptions, of course, but I’m speaking of the majority.
For example, I saw top engineers giving up their engineering to become lousy executives. Then too, once they acquired the MBA, I often worked with them in the corporation finding them equally non confrontational and unchallenging of superiors as they had been before. If anything, they were more passive than the rank and file blue-collar workers with whom they now managed.
It would appear that positive freedom is inherently paternalistic for the professionally trained as well as for unskilled workers. Both white and blue-collar workers are seemingly oblivious to their self-interests. It is as if they concede that they must be steered to what is best for them by submitting to a paternalistic or autocratic authority.
Some might call it poetic justice when the paternalistically arrogant and dogmatic ways of its practitioners finally catch up with them. Those at the top enjoy negative freedom and paternalistic authority as long as they are winning.
Brzezinski captures this:
“The ex post factor verdict of history is inevitably derived from a simple maxim: nothing fails like failure, and nothing succeeds like success.”
Executives across the nation are tumbling out of the tree at a record pace because of a series of failures across a broad spectrum of industries and markets in a spiraling down economy. The irony is that tens of thousands, perhaps even millions of individuals who have been locked in the stranglehold of positive freedom, looking for the company, church, country, society to set them straight, when only they could do it themselves, had the answers, knew the alternatives to avoid disaster but kept silent, going along to get along, until there was no longer a going or getting to go to.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 1, 2009
“The past contains precious resources for the present and future. It is therefore advisable to move backwards into the future with your gaze fixed steadily on the past, rather than hurdle headlong into whatever lies ahead of us. Those who seek to abolish the past – to draw a line in front of it and move on, as the current boneheaded mantra has it – tend to end up destroying a lot more than that. ‘New, new, everything is new,’ Tony Blair once rhapsodized. One wonders whether he had bird flu in mind.”
Terry Eagleton, Professor of Cultural Theory, National University of Ireland
* * *
We have passed that legendary mark of the first hundred days of the presidency of Barak Obama. I have been busy reading my “Foreign Affairs” magazine, my “New York Review” and “London Review,” my “Time” magazine as well as reading The Tampa Tribune, listening to C-Span and C-Span 2, as well as reading Fareed Zakaria’s “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad” (2003) and “The Post-American World" (2008), and of course a spate of books by my favorite, Isaiah Berlin, as well as skimming Bob Woodward’s pop novel as history, “The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006 – 2008.”
What comes to mind is the absurdity of our preoccupation. We expect all these apparently learned men and women to express what is repressed in us, and that is the eternal battle between desiring freedom and wanting security.
Their power is our fear, and our fear is their power.
We have by default awarded those in charge the magnificent role of gods, which they dispatch with the seriousness as if they were. I am not only speaking of those elected but also of those who assume the role to inform. I’m also speaking of those that by cunning and design rise to the pinnacle of the corporate tree, and I’m speaking of you and me as complicit in this whole theatre.
We all play our rhapsody with our BlackBerrys, iPhones and laptops with instant information circulated in nanoseconds across this tiny planet, raising the tendrils of our souls to respond to rumor like scared rabbits.
In our quest to be all that we can be, something is flawed at the heart of this quest, which can fester and poison our moral compass and send us off course groping for someone to bring us back on course and in control. There is always someone in the wing waiting to do just that.
The paradox is that oppressive political and moral authority flourish when our impulses are for freedom and self-expression rather than extinguishing them.
This is mainly because we are an eternal paradox to ourselves dogged by internal contradictions:
(1) We want freedom but will sacrifice freedom willingly for security.
(2) We believe in free markets as long as our jobs are secure and our economic status continuously improves.
(3) We have tolerance for minorities as long as they don’t live in our neighborhood speaking their gibberish rather than English.
(4) We tolerate other religions as long as they don’t impinge on Christianity.
(5) We uphold the principle of the separation of church and state as long as it supports our interests.
(6) We endorse the idea of emancipation in all its forms but surprisingly fail to exercise self-emancipation, which is critical to political and economic freedom.
In a word, we are less free today because we want our cake and eat it too. We want to eliminate tax havens and have the rich cough up a good portion of their filthy lucre to rescue the poor from itself, yet in human history going back as far as anyone could imagine this has never translated into the utopian ideal desired, and for reason.
The enlightened and the powerful have always assumed that the less fortunate want what they have and are, at least in part, never realizing that the poor are often poor in spirit as well as in body because they prefer that state.
We cannot rescue people by imposing our values but we can accommodate them to a certain degree by legitimizing theirs.
Developers want to clean up the slums used in the film “Slum Dog Millionaire,” which won the 2009 Academy Award as Best Picture, and build multimillion-dollar condominiums and business complexes on this prime real estate in Brunei, India. PBS “Frontline” showed that the majority of residences of this slum, many entrepreneurs in their own right, simply want to be left alone.
The paradox goes deeper.
We have had a “War on Drugs” through several United States presidencies, and yet the crimes associated with this war seem to escalate rather than diminish. It goes back to the internal conflict mentioned earlier: many law-abiding citizens in the main are regular users of recreational drugs, and so there is an active market for these illegal exotic chemicals. You cannot stop the entrepreneurial criminals if you cannot eliminate the demand. I wager there is not one person reading this that does not know a person or persons who regularly use recreational drugs.
Typically profiled on the “War on Drugs” ads are the dregs of society unwittingly consumed in the poverty associated with this addiction, but what about executives, doctors, lawyers, legislators, teachers and priests who are quietly kept out of the limelight who are culpably feeding this societal disease? We forget it is a $billion industry and feeds the demand for more police, prisons and political activists.
The same could be said for the “War on Terror.” John Le Carre has been a favorite of mine, and I prefer his amoral intrigue to his moral maze. That said the moral maze is evident in “A Most Wanted Man” (2008). It is a novel about a “suspected Islam terrorist” because of the dastardly crimes of his father. It turns into a comedy of converging spies of Germany, England and America on this innocent man as operatives of the “War on Terror” attempt to prevail. My wonder is how close is this to the truth of such operatives.
It is obvious to me that since 9/11 it is not only an economic bubble that haunts us but a psychological one as well. The books and articles I mentioned earlier are expressive in detail of our willing repressive inclination, that is, until our comfort zone is disturbed.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. National Security Adviser in the Carter Administration writes in the current issue of “Foreign Affairs” (May/June 2009):
“It is now evident that in the case of the second (Iraq) war, the national shock induced by 9/11 – abetted (for whatever reason) by a campaign to stimulate public fear, fueled by demagogic and undiscriminating language about ‘Islamofascists,’ ‘jihadists,’ and ‘Muslim terrorism,’ not to mention apocalyptic references to ‘mushroom clouds’ and ‘World War III’ – created a toxic atmosphere.” (p. 151)
Toxic or legacy assets threaten us in an economic sense, but so does the toxic climate produced by fear mongering threaten us in a psychological sense. Freedom, incidentally, is expressed psychologically as well as behaviorally.
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FREEDOM AND THE QUEST FOR COMFORT
Isaiah Berlin developed a model of the polarity of freedom, which I first discussed in my book "THE WORKER, ALONE!" (1995). It was appropriate that I did so because I could see workers were coming down on the wrong side of freedom. They were coming down on the side of "positive freedom," or restricted freedom instead of on the side of "negative freedom," or unrestricted freedom where individualism is nurtured and expressed.
Positive freedom is the freedom with a long laundry list of restrictions, always for our own good. Employers and union leaders have enthusiastically supported this freedom, as have conservatives of both the Democratic and Republican Party. It is no accident that positive freedom has driven Chrysler into bankruptcy, likely to be followed by General Motors, and Ford. Positive freedom ignores reality and represses as the chaos mounts trying harder and harder when it might better let go and let flow with negative freedom.
It could be said with reasonable accuracy that positive freedom, with the exception of the presidency of Andrew Jackson, among a very few others, has been the law of the land. We have been protected from ourselves because it was believed we needed protection. We couldn’t control our anger so there had to be laws and implicit rules of employment in which we were obliged to be polite, obedient, submissive, passive, reactive, non-confrontational and to let others do the thinking for us who were “more qualified.”
HUMAN RESOURCES AND THE MBA DEGREE
Over the years, the most consistent criticism I have received is my treatment of human resources (HR) professionals and my outright contempt for the MBA degree.
The majority of my career was in line management where I enjoyed a great deal of negative freedom. Late in my career, after receiving my Ph.D., I found myself doing organizational development ((OD) work out of the HR department, in a staff function, which I found had a running romance with positive freedom.
It didn’t take me long to discover HR never found a policy or procedure it didn’t like. HR subscribes to the dictum "the greater the chaos the greater the need for control," whereas I have found the "the greater the control the greater the inevitable chaos."
Each control procedure was, of course, an impingement on negative or unrestricted freedom. What amazed me more, however, was the willingness of white as well as blue-collar workers to go along with these impositions without a whimper. It didn’t even seem to disturb them seeing those in executive positions not so restricted.
QUESTION: What is the function of higher education if those so educated are not allowed to express negative freedom?
It was in my OD corporate work that I came to recognize the internal paradox of our nature, which is a collective desire for our own subjugation. Individualism, while being practically nonexistent, is one of the more successful myths of our society. We are a society founded on individualism with but few having the courage to practice the tenets of individualism.
All hell broke loose, as I have pointed out elsewhere, when on March 30, 1984 I gave a speech (Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View) to corporate and military executives. The essence of the speech was that cosmetic interventions of positive freedom were backfiring. I was quite nervous that day stepping out of the rank and file repressive world in which I was born to express what I saw and felt.
Heavyweight Boxing Champion, Muhammad Ali, did as well when drafted in the 1960s to go to Vietnam, and said, “Hell, no, I won’t go!” He was exercising his negative freedom but suffered mightily for it, as positive freedom at the time had no sense of humor for its expression.
As for the MBA degree, I taught as an adjunct for ten years in several universities’ MBA programs, and in interviewing many MBA graduates over the years, against the vocational nature of the curriculum, I concluded that it was a combination of filling the right boxes for promotion as well as focusing on economic enhancement at the expense of development in their chosen profession. There were exceptions, of course, but I’m speaking of the majority.
For example, I saw top engineers giving up their engineering to become lousy executives. Then too, once they acquired the MBA, I often worked with them in the corporation finding them equally non confrontational and unchallenging of superiors as they had been before. If anything, they were more passive than the rank and file blue-collar workers with whom they now managed.
It would appear that positive freedom is inherently paternalistic for the professionally trained as well as for unskilled workers. Both white and blue-collar workers are seemingly oblivious to their self-interests. It is as if they concede that they must be steered to what is best for them by submitting to a paternalistic or autocratic authority.
Some might call it poetic justice when the paternalistically arrogant and dogmatic ways of its practitioners finally catch up with them. Those at the top enjoy negative freedom and paternalistic authority as long as they are winning.
Brzezinski captures this:
“The ex post factor verdict of history is inevitably derived from a simple maxim: nothing fails like failure, and nothing succeeds like success.”
Executives across the nation are tumbling out of the tree at a record pace because of a series of failures across a broad spectrum of industries and markets in a spiraling down economy. The irony is that tens of thousands, perhaps even millions of individuals who have been locked in the stranglehold of positive freedom, looking for the company, church, country, society to set them straight, when only they could do it themselves, had the answers, knew the alternatives to avoid disaster but kept silent, going along to get along, until there was no longer a going or getting to go to.
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