POST FREUDIAN COUNTERINTUTIVE THOUGHT – ANARCHISTS & CAPITALISTS – COMMENT & RESPONSE TO “A FIRST RATE MADNESS” (A BOOK REVIEW)
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 3, 2011
REFERENCE:
We live in an explanatory age not in a solution driven age, an age of dreamers, schemers and redeemers who consistently play the blame game. It is always something or someone else that is responsible for our plight. Consequently, we can explain anything after the fact, but cannot anticipate what is at issue for the focus is too often on who is wrong not what is wrong. We put our minds to solving problems we can solve while the real problems we face keep accumulating. We are all Freudians even if unaware of Freudianism, which is the template of social psychological thought. Dr. Nassir Ghaemi’s book is an attempt to get beyond this, not as a definitive work, but as a counterintuitive inquiry into the link between leadership and mental illness.
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
I thoroughly enjoyed your review of Dr. Ghaemi’s book. But I just have a question: which side of the sanity/insanity divide are those leading the “Occupy Wall Street” protest group? They are thwarting Wall Street people from doing their jobs at the moment, a movement that seems to be growing and growing over the last month.”
Michael
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Michael,
Your questions always provoke reflection.
To this question I’m not sure there is a precise answer. The human comedy of mass movements has been thoroughly covered by many including Eric Hoffer in such books as “The True Believer” (1951), “The Temper of Our Time” (1952), “The Ordeal of Change” (1964) and “In Our Time” (1976).
Hoffer sees mass movements driven by the herd mentality or a loose confederation of individuals looking for a cause to resolve their anguish. So, it has been throughout human history. Such movements often result in unintended consequences counter to the impact intended or expected.
That was the case with the late 19th century and early 20th century drive to ban the sale, manufacture, or transportation of alcohol (18th Amendment to the Constitution). It became the law of the land in 1920. Prohibition was meant to reduce or eliminate many social problems, particularly drunkenness, crime, mental illness, and poverty. It instead led to speakeasies, bootlegging and organized crime. Many law biding citizens became criminals because of this law.
Fortuitously, the Women’s Suffrage Movement joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to promote the vote for women. The same year prohibition became law the 19th Amendment was passed giving women such a right, a positive result of this joint movement.
On the other hand, the beer and liquor industry felt safe because at the time of prohibition taxes on distilleries and beer producers represented nearly 70 percent of all the revenues collected by the federal government. With this revenue drying up, the federal income tax (16th Amendment ratified in 1913) was leveraged more aggressively on individuals and corporations to compensate for this loss; I would assume many consider this a negative.
The “noble experiment,” what prohibition was called, was repealed in December 1933 at the time of the Great Depression.
THE INCLINATION TO FOCUS ON THE WRONG BALL
Thousands have been arrested for the unlawful protest of the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd, many of them are individuals who have lost their jobs, homes, savings, are in upside down mortgages, or know friends and families so strapped. It would be easy to criticize this group for breaking the law, which they are doing, but more importantly what is at issue is to understand the “why” of this behavior.
My sense is that they are neither sane nor insane on Dr. Ghaemi’s continuum of leadership. My sense is that they feel abandoned and helpless as the economy stagnates and threatens to plunge into a double dip recession if not a depression.
As with the 19th century frustration of women with husbands’ being slaves to alcohol, throwing families into poverty, the belief was that by getting rid of alcohol the problem of inebriation would be solved. The problem might have been better served by asking why men drank excessively. Drink was an escape for some, an alibi for others, and then there was the Irish.
I come from an Irish culture in which it was manly to drink, manly to smoke, and manly to sit around talking about how they were gonna be’s and gonna have’s if only given the opportunity.
Many of these manly Irishmen dropped out of grammar school or didn’t finish high school, never found time to take an apprenticeship in some course of livelihood that might lead to being a bricklayer, carpenter, electrician, welder, house painter, or salesman.
It is pointless to focus on Wall Street or Main Street without taking into account what has been happening in government and to us, individually or collectively over the past fifty years. We are, unfortunately, a nation of followers, fad fanciers, keeping up with the Joneses, living beyond our means, looking for scapegoats, playing the blame game, losing ourselves in the latest technology without a thought as to how we got into this mess we’re in or what to do about it.
We look to our leadership when there are no leaders. There hasn’t been any leadership, real leadership, leadership aware of the changing world or the changing climate within and outside our world with any demonstrable will to leave the herd.
I have never been a fan of what many Americans consider a great president, Theodore Roosevelt. He had the bravado that Ernest Hemingway would later display in his life and writing, a president who carried a big stick but had more bark than bite, the great trust buster in New York, when his record in trust busting is suspect. He desired empire for the United States, and Americans went along with his philosophy, when we are, by nature, isolationists.
The American Century, which was a result of our energy, innovation, initiative and risk taking, was coming to a close in 1968 when my window on what was happening was from South Africa.
I write about leadership but have seen little in my life. A maverick most comfortable as an outsider, offstage, a pedestrian to most that has happened, I don’t claim this to be healthy. Nor do I think that it is healthy to protest without a core philosophy, organized management, or palpable leadership.
The downside of every issue should be seen along with its upside. I thought that my writing would provoke thought and rally individuals to see that everyone must be a leader or no one is.
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Nor is the problem President Barak Hussein Obama’s. Put Ford's, Carter's, Reagan's, Bush’s, Clinton’s or the second Bush’s face on his poster, or any of the others that preceded them, and you have the same presidency.
Presidents follow how we expect them to lead, and how we have expected them to lead has put us into the mess that we are now in.
We blame the president, and expect him to get us out of the mess with no change, no sacrifice, or no pain on our part. Likewise, we expect Republicans to solve the mess that Democrats are now in, while Democrats point out that they inherited the mess. The implication here is that the two parties are different when they are doppelgangers.
My sense is that the “Occupy Wall Street” group has no central leadership, core agenda, no back up strategy, no demonstrable cause other than that wealth creators are destroying our country, when that seems a little absurd. They are quick to point out wealth creators control 99 percent of the wealth, while failing to mention 50 percent of Americans pay no income taxes.
My sense also is that few of the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd understand how a capitalistic society works in our democracy, how we happen to be a corporate society, and what corporate society means and is.
There is a spate of books written by ghostwriters for CEOs of America’s Fortune 500 corporations that are invariably defensive if not fictitious in CEOs’ accomplishments. Implicitly if not explicitly, they justify the status quo, business as usual practices, and infallibility of corporate authority, in other words, “they” have an eye on the right ball, everyone’s best interests at heart, and know what is best for us.
Do you see the problem here?
Wall Street, the government, and corporations don’t know us, and we don’t know them.
Most of us have no idea what risk management or venture capital is, much less the nightmare of cash flow problems, making payroll, or having a positive balance sheet. Nor does Wall Street, the government or corporations know us because feedback is not a natural process, but a cosmetic one in our culture.
We have a capitalistic democracy, which is world’s apart from communist China’s capitalism where draconian measures might be employed with the “Occupy Wall Street” group. We have a chance because we are different.
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Dr. Ghaemi suggests a little madness in leadership fosters creativity, realism, empathy and resilience. “Occupy Wall Street” is not leadership but an example of frustration and learned helplessness, a condition programmed into our collective soul over the last half century.
Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were leaders. They understood nonviolent disruption of things as they are, and how they could lead to things changing as they are. We don’t like to think of them as anarchists, but clearly they were, but nonviolently so.
Likewise, the feminist movement was disruptive for women’s rights, and can be said to have been successful, but in its wake the pornography industry has flourished, marriage has been on the decline, and the family, as we once knew it, destabilized. With gain, there is always loss.
The anti-war campus riots during 1968, as writer Lance Morrow has noted, “drove a knife through the past to sever the past from the future” (Time, January 11, 1988). Many young men burned their draft cards to escape to Canada while 58,000 Americans lost their lives fighting that war in South East Asia. Today, seemingly not learning from that experience, we have the casualties of Afghanistan and Iraq, which has also taken $1.3 trillion from our treasury (to date), or we might not be having the “Occupy Wall Street” problem of the moment. We are not good at keeping our eye focused on the right ball.
Be always well,
Jim
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