OKAY! HERE IS MY TAKE ON AN ALTERNATIVE TO PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL!

OKAY! HERE IS MY TAKE ON AN ALTERNATIVE TO PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 13, 2010


REFERENCE:

Some readers felt I avoided to take a stand on performance appraisal. I hope this helps.

* * *

In 1980, I directed the largest Quality Control Circle (QCC) program in the United States at Honeywell Avionics, Inc., Clearwater, Florida. There were more than 1,000 hourly workers participating religiously in these quality circles, while 1,000 engineers and 2,000 professional support personnel participated half heartedly seeing them as being a cosmetic and inconsequential intervention, which of course they were.

That said I did something that was quite revealing to me. Each hourly quality circle had from ten to fifteen members, people working on the same project. In the course of my work with them, I asked them to name the three people in their respective groups who were most important to the success of the project, being careful to focus on the work not the popularity of the person.

The first time I did this the results came back mixed with no clear indicator of who was and wasn’t contributing. Over time, we were able – as a group – to decide what criteria indicated the most significant contributions and who were the persons most likely to be responsible for such contributions.

The top three, not often in the same order, were mentioned some seventy-five percent of the time consistently for each respective quality circle. Obviously, in a 15-member circle, some voted for themselves. Significant, all of them voted. Even more significant, three out of four of them agreed on who in their group was carrying the ball.

Professionals, paranoid to the nth degree, wouldn’t even participate in this exercise.

Then along came Tom Brokaw’s NBC Television electrifying program, “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” (mid-1980). Quality circles exploded across the country, but now the workforce was becoming increasingly white-collar or professional versus blue-collar and unskilled workers. Quality Control Circles (QQC) were directed at the wrong workforce, and so they soared like Daedalus with the same ultimate fate.

Still, I did learn that the best evaluators of performance are the performers themselves. No ten-point scale of management, indeed, no management at all. Now in this electronic age this could be done on software that could accurately gauge input, and correctly target promotions on the basis of systematic criteria. If this is being done, I applaud it. The point is there is no need for managers in the process.

* * *

PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL: THE FLOODGATES ARE OPEN THE DELUGE IS HERE!

PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL: THE FLOODGATES ARE OPEN THE DELUGE IS HERE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 13, 2010

REFERENCE:

My missive yesterday was to point out how good and bad intentions have consistent unintended consequences.

Feudal lords were not all bad. They simply wanted order and for people to behave and appreciate the little they were given.

Capitalists were not all bad, but they wanted people to behave and appreciate the little they were given.

In our post capitalistic society with the same sex marriages of communism and capitalism (China), and Islam and capitalism (Indonesia), to name a couple, Christianity and capitalism considered the appropriate heterosexual marriage of good people is floundering. It has been floundering since World War Two.

* * *

There has always been a ruling class with few breakthroughs throughout history. Power is always reluctant to share even a modicum of power, and so it has been, so it will be, and so conflicts will be on periodic display.

When I was coming into the world, good men, brave men, but poorly educated and skilled men, took or the Carnegies, the Mellons, and the Rockefellers. Many lost their lives fighting for a decent wage, hygienic working conditions, a proper return on their productivity in terms of benefits, and the dignity of work.

The Robber Barons met workers’ demands with strike busters armed with guns and clubs. Don’t’ take my word. It is all in our history books. It happened in Europe as well. It happened in Russia, too, only to give birth to the Soviet Union. It is happening today in China, India, Indonesia, and South Africa and elsewhere in emerging economic powers and is being met with draconian methods.

* * *

What I have found astounding in my career is the behavior of grandsons and granddaughters of these workers who took on the Carnegies, Mellons, and Rockefellers. Eighty years ago men picketed their workplaces and bled on American streets. They had their knuckles busted as they refused to remove their hands from the fences locking them out of their work.

Today, their grandsons and granddaughters are far better educated more knowledgeable and therefore more relevant to their work than their bosses, indeed, to the whole idea of corpocracy. Yet they allow themselves to be repressed compressed and grinded into conformity with hardly a whimper of protest.

They are professionals.

Being professional has come to mean they are docile, timid, impotent, cowardly, submissive, retiring, nonconfrontational, passive-aggressive, and counter dependent on a pusillanimous system that pays them a structured salary and gives them miniscule increases. The mechanism that keeps them in place is performance appraisal. Human Resources, its architect, has become management’s union. HR has all the skills of Madison Avenue advertisers.

Those at the top earn sometimes 1,000 percent or more than those with the brainpower that is the lifeblood of the operation. Meanwhile, the well heeled are steering that selfsame operation in far too many instances into bankruptcy, reorganization, redundancy exercises, mergers, reengineering, or some other claptrap justification of the moment

While this is going on, these professionals are expected to behave and appreciate the little they are given. And they do.

* * *

It has become a cradle to grave phenomenon and the unintended consequences of grandchildren and great grandchildren becoming primarily interested in getting and not giving, in escape rather than confrontation, and in living a surreal existence rather than a real one with some electronic contraption.

Eighty years ago parents were determined their children would never suffer as they had, never have to fight as they had, never have to stand up for their beliefs and their dignity as they had. They wanted their children and grandchildren to avoid pain and risk that was a constant companion to their lives. They forgot that it was that spirit that won World War Two, a legacy they refused to pass on to their children.

Ordinary Joes and Janes – I had many in my clan – put on the military uniform and fought the Axis Powers the same way their parents had fought the Robber Barons, and they won the war, or did they, actually?

* * *

I propose they unwittingly killed the spirit that won the war. They kept the truth from their children and the painful lessons of that truth, while forgiving their children the consequences of their actions, being always there to break their fall, apologize for their missteps, or deny them the integrity that had made them what they were. .

My greatest advantage in life was to be born to poor parents with no grandparents on either side, no safety net other than my own cunning, knowing that when I fell there would be no one to pick me up. Many of my generation avoided having their spirit killed for the same reason as mine, but what did we do to our children?


I was educated with a mindset of that grandparent generation. Although mine were gone when I was born, I had it programmed into my soul. I road the easy life to a fine education, and rapid promotion in the 1960s when the heritage that had made us strong as a nation was unraveling. We were already living in nostalgia.

The survival spirit was too deep in my soul for it to happen in me. I never forgot I was a poor boy, and I have never joined those of wealth who would be patronizing to the poor. Never. I never joined the club. I am comfortable with a poor boy’s mindset into my advanced years, while not being poor, but I have the anger and fight of my grandparent’s generation that mounted the battle against the Robber Barons eighty years ago. It is why I write.

The biggest disappointment of my life has been how my children and the children of their generation have been finessed by sex and economic wealth. You only have to look at PBS on television or at the most popular books to see that these two subjects dominate. Sex is of prurient interest because we are human beings. Wealth is seen as the panacea meant to cure everything.

Have you ever noticed that only weeds grow on parched earth? We have become a society of weeds.

Casinos are the current weeds in our economic parchedness. They are everywhere even in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa. “The answer to economic woes.” Florida’s governor Crist is flirting with $1.5 billion from Seminole Indian casinos over the next ten years as an answer to a budget deep in the red.

It is that old “catch 22” – the profits come from those least able to afford to gamble, thinking by gambling they will no longer be poor when the house is designed to kill that hope.

Artificial stimulants are the rave today to a hapless sex life, while plastic surgery is a multibillion-dollar industry. We don’t want to grow old because that would mean we would have to grow up.

* * *

Our nation is dying, not because of immigrants, not because of the fears of Anglo Saxon and Christian entropy, not even because of the economic challenges, which have always been with us.

Our nation is dying because we are preoccupied with such issues when entropy is a normal fact of existence and the persistent challenge. We are failing to reinvent our nation for its role in an emerging world. We are stuck with what we were and where we were in those glory days, and have forgotten what it was like to be unstuck.

This is the macrocosm of the microcosm that I address. Focus on the wrong ball and that one rolling down the hill will eventually bury you.

So, what does this have to do with performance appraisal? I won’t attempt to answer that as I have had a plethora of responses to my missive, showing that the idea of performance appraisal resonates with many of you in alarming ways. Here is a representative sample of those responses

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

You have hit the nail, plucked a note, struck a chord, rung the bell and started the chant reminding us again of the most tedious, clichéd and non-value adding process used in business today.

One of my former bosses, a VP of Human Resources, once told me the job of HR was to keep the company out of court. Hence, the performance appraisal, the sole purpose of which seemed to be justification for terminations. Unfortunately, our mostly spineless managers found it difficult to ever document on paper anything really bad about one of their employees, primarily because it would mean having a discussion about improving that performance. Nor could they say anything too good for fear that someone on top would notice and promote the employee.

Tom Coens wrote a book in 2002, "Abolishing Performance Appraisals." I had an opportunity to speak with him briefly after a presentation he gave on the subject. He seemed very sincere. In the book he provided several alternatives. Apparently, now, eight years later another one has surfaced

The problem is that HR is the keeper of the flame, holder of the records and designer/ perpetual redesigner of the process. I'll admit I fell into this trap early in my career. Part of a team established to re-design our appraisal process.

We cleverly tried to focus on competencies and the understanding that required competencies varied from function to function. Nice, but shallow attempt at forcing thought. We succumbed to the scale, one to five points. When we presented our process to the executive board the GM from England suggested we use a ten-point scale to avoid managers giving half points. They (managers) gave half points even on the ten-point scale. Talk about an inability to commit.

This was the beginning of the end for me. The naiveté of youth began to give way to the cynicism of experience. Managers and executives I held in high regard because of what they had accomplished and their presumed intelligence became increasingly disrobed.

It was about this time I discovered some of your books, which fueled the journey. A friend, who is on your mailing list today, told me about your writing. He talked about your edginess as compared to other 'sacrilegious" management/leadership/OD authors of the period.

A final step in the process, after several years of pushing, the company I was with, thanks to the leadership of a thoughtful Division President, finally did "abolish appraisals." The monitoring device was a quarterly red/yellow/green review of project status. The only qualitative evaluation was whether the employee was maintaining company values - teamwork, respect, development, and integrity. In other words, there were no bodies in the wake of an accomplishment.

I suppose there is hope. I believe it starts with wresting control of "appraisal" from the HR function and leaving it to those who use the tool to shape it. Clearly, based on past application of PAs, management does not want to rate people. Now, ranking, in the Jack Welch 10/80/10 mode, is the next disparaging tactic to address.

Thanks for the reminder. Pound the nail, bang the going, push on the flywheel, it will eventually gain its own momentum.

Michael

* * *

DR, FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

Thank you. I feel I’m talking to the choir. It is those that have no church, speaking metaphorically, that are the challenge.

Be always well,

Jim

* * *

WHEN YOU POUND AT AN IDEA EVENTUALLY THE NAIL GETS THROUGH -- PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL EXPOSED!

WHEN YOU POUND AT AN IDEA EVENTUALLY THE NAIL GETS THROUGH – PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL EXPOSED!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 11, 2010

In early 1986, I was invited all expenses paid to speak at the International Conference of Human Resource Managers in New Orleans. One of the ideas that I was working on at the time was that of “work without managers,” which would become a book in four more years.

The idea mystified the group of more than 400 that attended my seminar, and some walked out. More walked out when I said that performance appraisal was a bad idea that had turned into a counterproductive joke, taking workers away from their work and giving managers, who had no real function, something to demonstrate their power over workers the way academics exercised their power over students with the grade. More people walked out.

BB and I were quite new at the time and she wondered seriously what kind of a person this Dr. Fisher was that she had hooked up with, and well that she might, as my purpose in life since I reentered industry in 1980 after a two-year sabbatical of doing nothing but reading books and playing tennis had become that of alerting whomever would listen to the changing nature of the workforce from blue-collar to write-collar and from management to professionals.

My last assignment in corpocracy was in Honeywell Europe where what I had observed in the United States was more oppressively obvious there. Management and performance appraisal had risen to the level of a religion, and was practiced with the ecclesiastical authority to demonstrate all that was wrong with the corporation.

In 1990, I retired from the corporation for the second time, and looked for a publisher across both sides of the Atlantic and found none, and so formed The Delta Group Florida and published WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1991).

This self-published book represented my entering an industry of which I knew nothing, and had even less interest in knowing, grabbed the book as a kind of breath of free air, while calling it “angry” or “provocative” while naming it one of the ten best business books of the year (Industry Week) or one of the four best business books of the year (Business Book Review Journal), along with NPR’s “All Things Considered” reviewing it for radio in a positive light. It turned out to be too much too many too soon because it attacked the very premise of capitalism as it had festered into a chronic malignancy. Less than two decades later it would read like prophecy as the world flirted with a Great Depression.

Nothing changed. It was an anomaly. The business community remained transfixed with “In Search of Excellence” (1982), a book that took the country by storm believing imitation was the root to the Holy Grail, a view that I opposed, and for it was by some seen to be jealous for its success. Not true. It was the wrong message at the wrong time to the wrong audience and set American enterprise on its head to spin like a top until it finally keeled over in 2008 bleeding $trillions of dollars all over the red carpet.

You toot your own horn from the hinterland with no pedigree or credentials or connections to booster your premise and you are likely to be seen as I have been seen as angry and not perspicacious. It is the sadness and consequences of not listening to Chicken Little.

WWMs was followed by THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (1995), a call to battle of professionals to take charge of their power and restructure work to be more amendable to their purposes. Again, I attacked performance appraisal but to no avail.

TWA! was followed by SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT'S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998), which expanded on the ideas of WWMs with greater specificity in an attempt to bring corpocracy out from under the sheets, where it was hiding. The Wall Street Journal, to its credit, reviewed it and said every executive in America should read it. Few did. One CEO told me he read only the "good parts" that were not offensive to him, which was to say he read very little of the book.

SSKs was followed by CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000) in which I attempted to show in a balanced view that the rope-a-dope of hope without courage would change nothing as the offense was on both sides of the spectrum, as workers were as guilty as managers for the mess.

The meritocracy of miniscule raises as the outcome of performance appraisals only drove the stake deeper in the heart of hope expunging courage. It was not a pretty sight.

Meanwhile, corporate pay at the highest levels was soaring as these characters that manned these positions of privilege operated with the infallibility of a pope, and were treated as such. It was madness, madness on both the part of workers and managers and was not a good omen for the future. The little CORPORATE SIN was reviewed -- an academic loved it and published a powerful review on Amazon -- he was the wrong audience.

Not to be undaunted, I returned to the battle with a retrospective, hoping in the process for those in charge to see how we were like the Pied Pipers serenading us off the cliff in A LOOK BACKWARD TO SEE AHEAD (2007). I could see, although not an economist, that our behavior and culture were in the process of signaling our doom. We were stuck, missing the changes, staying the same, leaving the future up for grabs, and said as much.

This doomsday scenario was manifested a little more than a year later in the subprime fiasco and the Wall Street meltdown. Greed and false aspirations can carry a dream only so far. And yes, I have punished my readers with my perspective on the performance appraisal review in this book as I had in the other books previously mentioned here.

This is all preamble to the fact Samuel A. Culbert with Lawrence Rout has published a book that resonates with my long-term view, GET RID OF THE PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL REVIEW: HOW COMPANIES CAN STOP INTIMIDATING , START MANAGING – AND FOCUS ON WHAT REALLY MATTERS (2010).

There is a lot of crème puff in this effort but it is the first real attempt to get out of the morass that I call “anachronistic management.”

I hope it generates a dialogue and gets beyond a lot of the damage Peter Drucker did with his MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVES (MBO’s) that never worked, and his PERFORMANC APPRAISAL that worked even less well.

Drucker was one of those sacred cows that spoke and everybody listened whenever he spoke. I stopped listening to him a long time ago when he said, and apparently meant it, that workplace culture had little to do with performance, when it has everything to do with it.

I’ve retired from writing books on the psychology of management. I’ve said everything that I have had to say, some have stolen my ideas as theirs, which is okay as long as they use them wisely, others have made me the object of their focus rather than what I have had to say, and as a consequence pushed the stone back into place, after I had used all my energy to dislodge it, and then there are still others who have no idea what I am writing about here.

* * *

AN ESSAY ON LOVE!

AN ESSAY ON LOVE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 10, 2010

In society’s attempt to marry the mind to reason, the heart has run astray. The heart is the engine of society. The heart a kilter leads to emptiness, which is the province of fear. Fear leads to terror, and terror leads to hate where there is no longer room for the heart.

CONVERSATION WITH A PUBLISHER – THE FISHER PARADIGM©™®

CONVERSATION WITH A PUBLISHER – THE FISHER PARADIGM©™®

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 19, 2010

* * *

REFERENCE:

A publisher has shown some interest in one of my manuscripts, but feels THE FISHER PARADIGM©™® detracts rather than enhances my message. Also, it is not seen as sufficient to stand alone as a publication. That said I woke up in the middle of the night and submitted what follows.

* * *
My reason for mentioning THE FISHER PARADIGM was only because the examples are demonstration of right brain or intuitive thinking, which complements conventional critical thinking and is instrumental to creative thinking.

Alexander the Great is alleged to have solved the mystery of the Gordian knot by slicing it apart with a sword. Plutarch disputes that saying he pulled it out of its pole pin. In either case, whatever is true, Alexander the Great wasn't confined to conventional thinking. He acted outside the box. Edward de Bono would say he embraced lateral thinking.

FDR came into office after the Great Depression had been raging for going on four years. More than 25 percent of American workers were unemployed. President Hoover was log jammed as he attempted to break the Gordian knot of the depression with the same thinking that caused it -- unregulated speculation and unbridled commerce without government intervention.

Ideology took precedence over the demands of reality. Matters only got worse.

If you study history, you will see that FDR had no idea what to do but knew he had to do something. The cognitive Gordian knot was not being undone. FDR launched a program of acronyms (WPA, NRA, CCC), many were of only marginal success, but were breakthroughs nonetheless because it changed the psychological dynamic of the nation. Double-digit unemployment mocked his efforts right up to the Second World War, but people were working again!

Scientists and economists, schooled in cognitive thinking, have been writing for some time now that exclusive dependence on left-brain thinking has become a weakness of Western problem solving and a crippling impediment to progress.

If Congress had gotten past the impasse of cognitive or left brain thinking -- worrying about getting reelected or playing with voodoo economics of costs -- healthcare would have been passed long ago. Everyone or nearly everyone seems confounded by the Gordian knot of media.

The Western Ship-of-State is taking on water if not sinking, and what are we doing? We are obsessed with bailing out the water rather than fixing the leak.

You have to go no further than look at the current impasse in Congress to see the limits of critical thinking. Congress, whether on the right or left side of the aisle, is paralyzed with brain freeze inertia.

THE FISHER PARADIGM is but a gauge to look past critical thinking to the possibilities of creative thinking. It introduces the bicameral mind's left lobe to its right lobe, and attempts to get the two sides working together towards the same end.

Women have been using both sides of their brains for years, but, alas, few women are in power positions, and those that are often feel compelled to think like men, which neutralizes their power and contribution.

The three spheres of influence of THE FISHER PARADIGM -- personality, geography and demographics -- clash and burn when limited to critical thinking, but clash and produce insight when acknowledged and used in creative thinking. Several illustrations in THE FISHER PARADIGM attempt to show this from an empirical perspective.

Freud introduced the idea of quid pro quo, something gained for something given. It was an idea that resonated with the Western mind, especially the American mind that could see relations as transactions. Others followed to get beyond critical thinking into the maze of creative engagement.

Eric Berne's wrote "The Games People Play," using transactional analysis to get psychiatry out the funk of attempting to solve irrational problems with pure rationality.

R. D. Laing did the same, even going to the point of sitting down naked with a naked patient to talk to him.

Thomas Szasz went so far as to write "The Myth of Mental Illness." Each was attempting to break through the wall of conventional thinking to make empathetic connection with people as persons.

Berne's provided a psychological skeletal structure to get people to look at their problems in other than two-dimensional terms, bringing into the language the power of "warm fuzzies." Such books followed his as, "I'm OK You're OK" by Thomas Harris. This resonated with a wider audience that could see itself in his schematics.

Each of them put hooks into the song we all sing with little lyrical variation. Whatever your regard for their effectiveness, they got people thinking differently on purpose.

I am an idea guy, who has had many careers by not following convention and not thinking as I was programmed to think. My attempt is to share, not with scholars, but with ordinary workingmen and women alternatives to their difficulties beyond the limits of Socratic thinking.

Packaged right, promoted effectively, and targeted to the right audience people could benefit.

I accept your call that THE FISHER PARADIGM is not sufficient to stand-alone. My reason for sending it was for you to see what it contained, and whether or not it could be integrated into the narrative to possibly enhance it. If not, then I agree it should be tabled.

I've been writing continuously since 1990 and have learned one thing if nothing else, and that is writing is the easiest part of the publishing process.

Be always well,

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

THE DESCHOOLING OF COLLEGE BASKETBALL

THE DESCHOLING OF COLLEGE BASKETBALL

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 17, 2010

* * *

“Our society resembles the ultimate machine which I once saw in a New York shop. It was a metal casket which, when you touched a switch, snapped open to reveal a mechanical hand. Chromed fingers reached out for the lid, pulled it down and locked it from the inside. It was a box; you expected to be able to take something out of it, yet all it contained was a mechanism for closing the cover. This contraption is the opposite of Pandora’s box.”

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (Harper & Row 1970), p.151.

* * *

“For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.”

John Copperman, “Inside American Education” by Thomas Sowell (The Free Press 1993)

* * *

BRACKET THIS -- THE MYTH OF THE STUDENT ATHLETE IN COLLEGE BASKETBALL!


Economic watchers estimate that several $Billion is lost in productivity during the “March Madness” of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament. The top 64 teams in the country compete for the national championship.

People will be watching the game on some electronic contraption, twitting or texting, or skipping work altogether to attend some games, not to mention betting on the games at work, or standing around talking about their favorite team.

Damaging as all this may be, and I’m not minimizing it, the greater travesty is to consider the fact that these college players are athletes’ first and college scholars second, or not at all. There are exceptions but I'm speaking of the rule.

Dedicated college basketball players are essentially in the minors, or the Grapefruit League of Professional Basketball. Their drive to get to the big dance is mainly to profile their talents for the NBA. That is where the travesty lies.

* * *

Observers of education such as Page Smith (“Killing the Spirit” Penguin Books 1990) have been decrying the lame dogmatic and counterproductive travesty that is college education with Smith referring to it as “mapping out the desert.”

That said if you like sport, and I happen to have played and liked basketball, being four years on the varsity in high school, education was always my primary motivation with basketball a recreational alternative. Also, in my day, if you weren’t a reasonable student, you couldn’t even practice much less play in games.

* * *

At university, I was president of my dormitory where all “student-athletes” on scholarship resided. Many of them were already entering the university with only a vague notion of schoolwork much less scholarship. Some could not even read well enough to have completed a rigorous high school program.

In one instance, a basketball player who would one day play in the NCAA Championship Game asked me to take a final for him. I was the wrong color and also had never taken the course. Putting aside the ethics of the situation, and to put him down gently, I said, “I don’t know anything about this course. I’ve never studied this material.”

“That may be true,” he said, “but you’d do better than I would because I haven’t had much of a chance to study the material at all.”

Now, that may or may not be true, but I knew how hard these athletes worked in their jobs to make the basketball team. It was a full-time job. Moreover, he wasn’t stupid. In fact, he was quite a bright guy but sport was his whole curriculum and his coaches and the athletic director supported this.

This was in the “Big Ten” conference, which was alleged to uphold high academic standards. As you will see below, that is not always true.

* * *

Fast-forward 50 years and what follows is the graduation rate of members of the “Final 64 College Team” in 2010:

Graduation rates of 100 percent

1. Marquette (100)
2. Utah State (100)
3. Notre Dame (100)
4. BYU (100)
5. Wake Forest (100)

Graduation rates in the 90 percent range

6. Lehigh (92)
7. Vermont (92)
8. Butler (90)
9. Duke (92)
10. Villanova (92)

Graduation rates in the 80 percent range

11. Georgetown (82)
12. Ohio (85)
13. Oklahoma St. (82)
14. UCSB (82)
15. Florida St. (80)
16. Vanderbilt (85)
17. Xavier (89)
18. Oakland (82)
19. Sienna (86)
20. Richmond (85)

Graduation rates in the 70 percent range

21.Kansas (73)
22. N. Iowa (78)
23. Murray St. (73)
24. Pittsburgh (75)
25. Winthrop (75)
26. Wisconsin (78)
27. Gonzaga (78)
28. UTEP (71)

Graduation rates in the 60 percent range

29. Ohio St. (60)
30. Florida (60)
31. Kansas St. (62)
32. N. Texas (60)
33. Purdue (64)
34. Montana (67)
35. R. Morris (67)
36. E. Tenn. St. (61)

Graduation rates in the 50 percent range

37. Michigan St. (58)
38. San Diego St. (58)
39. Syracuse (55)
40. Texas A&M (56)
41. Old Dominion (53)
42. St. Mary’s (57)
43, Sam Houston (50)

Graduation rates in the 40 percent range

44. UNLV (46)
45. Houston (42)
46. Minnesota (44)
47. Texas (47)
48. Temple (43)
49. New Mexico (43)
50. W. Virginia (44)
51. Morgan St. (42)

Graduation rates in the 30 percent range

52. Tennessee (30)
53. Ga. Tech (38)
54. Clemson (37)
55. Missouri (36)
56. Louisville (38)
57. Baylor (36)
58. N. Mexico St. (36)
59. Kentucky (31)

Graduation rates in the 20 percent range

60. Arkansas P. B. (29)
61. Washington (29)
62. California (20)

Graduation rates below 10 percent range

63. Maryland (8)

64.Cornell (Ivy League Schools do not report graduation rates)

* * *

I wrote in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), “The Japanese seem obsessed with people and realize profits. Americans seem obsessed with profits, but realize problems with people. The irony is the Japanese understand and play the business game far better than Americans who invented it.” (p. 138)

Alfred Sloan, the legendary leader of General Motors, once boasted that GM, although forced to lay off tens of thousands of workers during the Great Depression, continued to pay stockholders dividends. Ultimately, as we know in 2010, GM has collapsed and is suffering for its hubris and insensitivity to people.

Toyota followed the American model while still focusing on people to realize profits until it got caught up in the same American economic “win,” translated be “Numero Uno.”

College athletics, mainly football and basketball, are big business. Colleges build quarter billion stadiums and have 100,000 fans attending college football games. College basketball arenas have likewise growing in size to seat tens of thousands of fans.

College sports no longer recruit scholar athletes like some that I know from my generation, students first and foremost and athletes after the fact. That is no longer true as the breakdown of graduation rates indicate here. My words aren’t going to change anything, that is, unless and until presidents of universities are no longer general managers of professional programs being touted as amateurs.

* * *

We have seen the Olympics become a mockery of amateur athletics. The International Olympic Governing Committee has finally conceded amateurism was a travesty of the facts allowing professional athletes to compete.

These sports programs in colleges and universities are not doing the athletes any favor by not insisting on them being students first and athletes second. Why? Because less than 10 percent of them will ever make a living as athletes, but they all can make a living with the skills, knowledge and understanding of a college education that ends in a degree.

* * *

THE FALLACY OF GETTING AHEAD BY BEING A JERK!

THE FALLACY OF GETTING AHEAD BY BEING A JERK!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 9, 2010

* * *

REFERENCE:

“Mission,” mentioned by the reader below is to my current project of writing a novel of my experience in South Africa in the late 1960s during the reign of apartheid.

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Hello Dr. Fisher.

Sorry to distract you from your mission. Sorry Betty.

Re the link below: I'm sure you have written about this topic, probably embedded in one of your essays Jim, but I could not locate it. Can you point me in the right direction?

A friend sent this to me. Intuitively, I think the author is being contrary to appeal to a particular audience. And, if this gentlemen or his philosophy is gaining credence, I might be a bit concerned. I mean, how can one be human if one is inclined to be deliberately insensitive? I understand however, corporate fads being what they are, sensitivity training is likely overdone.

Any thoughts Jim? I want to give my friend a helpful response.

Regards,

George

* * *

WHAT GEORGE’S FRIEND WROTE TO HIM:

We are so afraid of being cast aside that we do our best to think as everyone else thinks and to feel as everyone else feels.

We have learned all this in our sensitivity training workshops. We want to develop our emotional intelligence and our capacity for empathy. We have made a fetish of fellow-feeling. We are convinced that it is the key to worldly success.

We are continually told to be sensitive to others. See the attached for key to success in business. Insensitivity training.

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I couldn’t successfully reference the blog that your friend mentioned, but I have a couple thoughts on sensitivity training.

You are correct. We as human beings need to be sensitive to others in terms of how our behavior enhances or deters them from feeling comfortable about themselves.

Your friend is also right in that this sensitivity training charade is overdone and has become a pejorative when it attempts to be a palliative to social discord, especially in business.

When the wheels come off, as they have now, anyone can get attention by taking an adverse perspective on the problem. Remember the book, “Winning Through Intimidation.” I thought that was a crock of baloney then – it was at the zenith of my career – but it sold like gold at the bookstores.

* * *

A friend sent a story about two ferocious foxes. One was docile the other hostile. What determined the docile character of the one fox given both foxes had the same genetic code? He was fed.

* * *

Social life is one of being fed, and in the absent of receiving sufficient nutrition all sorts of aberrant and hostile behaviors can be manifested.

You don’t make people happier by sending them to self-esteem courses or preaching self-worth. You give them opportunity in which they feel they have earned something that is esteeming and as a consequence gives them a sense of self-worth.

Likewise, you don’t send an asshole boss off to a sensitivity seminar and expect him to come back peachy-cream and all altruistic.

We create assholes in the work environment from the Board of Director down through the ranks because assholes get promoted, and everyone sees this and follows suit.

So, you don’t correct the problem with sensitivity training or insensitivity training. You correct the problem, and here I have written tons on the subject, by becoming your own best friend. I wrote a book called THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).

We sometimes forget each of us embodies a corporation. If we’re always looking to melt in, to be accepted, to belong, there is little energy left to find out what we are about or how to lead.

Leadership has little to do with the elected or the people at the headpin of the corporation. Leadership has everything to do with the rest of us. Everyone is a leader or no one is. You can’t wait for city hall to make the right decision.

And no one can lead if we are governed by polls, by best sellers, by privileged education, by approval ratings, fads, popular jargon or the latest electronic wonder. This is the metaphorical equivalent of a beautiful vehicle with an empty tank. We are currently an empty tank society.

That is why these silly debates on such subjects as sensitivity training are a waste of energy. It would be a bizarre idea to think insensitivity key to anything much less success.

Your friend’s mention of emotional intelligence is obviously a reference to a popular book. If it helps him understand himself, fine, but it is a very flimsy concept, and we currently like very flimsy concepts because we want easy answers to complex problems. This is not new. A half century ago or earlier there were such bromides as, “The Power of Positive Thinking,” “Think and Grow Rich,” and “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” They were buttered popcorn and didn’t help much with the digestion.

Not having a point of view is like tumbleweed directed by the prevailing winds. Without a set of values, and yes, moral principles, which represent the spine of one's existence, the inclination are to look for answers outside one’s own experience. They are never there. As Confucius says, we should treat others, as we would have them treat us, recognizing none of us is better or more important than anyone else, ever.

The one discipline that has wreaked more devastation on corporate America than any other has emanated from human resource management. I don’t know what your friend’s experience has been, but I for years was a corporate consultant dealing with HR types, and they were boorish to the point of bullish in the discharge of their function, and created more havoc than help with their various interventions, also a subject of which I have written tons.

Elton Mayo created the nonsense with his Hawthorne Studies in Chicago in the 1930s and then the management gurus took up the calling with works such as those of Douglas McGregor, and Blake and Mouton, et al, where using cosmetic interventions and promoting management style was meant to cure corporate ills, and lead to maximum efficiency and efficacy, when as a result of all this we have the sorry mess of corporacy today which goes all the way to the White House.

Sensitivity is not only important in terms of working with others. Sensitivity is important as part of our animal instinct to know when a deal is bad, when our social company is bad, or the workplace we find ourselves in is bad for us, and to do something about it. You don’t bed down in a lion’s pride but we do let a poor choice of life partners, friends and workplaces corrupt us, and sometimes destroy us without doing anything constructive about it.

The whole basis of THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ is intuitive in some instances and counterintuitive in others, but always thinking which is sensitive to the demands of the situation in terms of people, places and things.

My conceptual framework is hard to perceive because readers are conditioned to the problem of working together effectively through a litany of what I call cosmetic interventions including sensitivity training.

One time when I was a young man and far more successful selling with Nalco Chemical Company than anyone else, a colleague said to me, “Fisher, I’m sure you’d agree the most important thing to be successful in this business is to have a thick skin.”

“I don’t agree at all,” I answered, “the thinner the skin the better.”

He shook his head and walked away not allowing me to explain myself. So, I wrote CONFIDENT SELLING (1970).

Be always well,

Jim

PS Virtually everything I have said here is in the books I’ve mentioned above that I’ve written and also in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998) and CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP REDUX!

LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP REDUX

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 7, 2010

* * *

“The American dilemma and the phantom challenge, the trauma of the modern organization. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winner only painfully confused losers. Trauma is written on the face of American enterprise. Meanwhile, the once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990)


* * *

Toyota is a corporation in the news at the moment with all kinds of horror stories about uncontrollable speeding cars in which computer glitches cause the manufacturer’s vehicles to accelerate up to 90 to 100 mph, or the gas peddle to stick, or the floor mat to get in the way of the brake, or God only knows what will be next. Twenty years ago, I wrote:

“An undeclared psychological war is being waged within most major enterprises today with bodies falling on all sides and nobody’s paying attention. The principal players are worrying about what’s in and what’s out; who’s in and who’s out; who’s making points and who isn’t while the marketplace is disappearing into the sunset.” (WWMs 1990, p. 13). Where were the leaders there?

* * *

It has happened to the Roman Catholic Church, not only in the United States, but in Europe as well, costing young men and women the loss of their innocence at the hands of lecherous priests. It has cost parishioners $billions in their Sunday offerings, money that they have given generously and money that was given at a sacrifice. It has seen landmark churches, hundred-year-old churches, torn down to sell the property to pay attorneys and the families of the abused children. Where were the leaders there?

* * *

We have had the economic meltdown and the worldwide recession/depression of 2007-2009, and now continuing into 2010 with Congress asleep at the switch, while the president is out to establish a legacy with healthcare reform legislation, while not 9.7 percent are unemployed but perhaps as much as double that number. Statistics don’t lie but statisticians do lie and they keep statistics. Where were the leaders there?

* * *
We are quick to report the corruption in Afghanistan and Iraq, but most recently it appears the House of Hell, the House of Representatives with the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee playing to that corruption tune. He has a far bigger whip than any of those corrupt politicians in those distant lands. Where were the leaders there?

* * *

A virtual nobody without any journalistic credentials much less an economic specialist pedigree waved a red flag twenty years ago by self-publishing what was called by some an “angry book” and by others even worse. The book made a twenty-four hour blip on the collective conscience and then was quickly forgotten. Where were the leaders there?

* * *

That book was WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), a concept that cottoned to no special interest as opposed to IN SEARCH FOR EXCELLENC that did. I read this book and found the concept was all-wrong.

You don’t search for excellence. You create excellence. It made Tom Peters a national figure. As I point out in WWMs, most of the companies that copied those profiled in that book eventually failed! See Business Week, “Who’s Excellent Now?” (November 5, 1984). Where were the leaders there?

* * *

When you are small and insignificant and are like Chicken Little yelling, “The sky is falling,” you are apt to be seen as a polemicist, yet are equally apt to see your message stolen and soft pedaled commercially with a thematic treatment in Fortune Magazine – of course with no acknowledgement to WWMs as happened in 1990s. Where were the leaders there?

* * *

Joe Klein in the current issue of Time magazine (March 15, 2010) writes of “leaderless Democrats,” as if Democrats in Congress have a corner on the leaderless leadership market. They don’t.

The Republicans are doing their best to be equally leaderless. Klein talks of incompetence derailing healthcare. Sometimes derailment is a good thing. It gives the train a chance to get on the right track.

Healthcare is not the main issue of the day. The main issue of the day is jobs! Congress needs to show some leadership in banking regulation and getting people back to work instead of counting the pratfalls of the powerless powerful and keeping score of them in the press.

* * *

We have reached the pusillanimous stage in which society is on automatic pilot. Nobody is at the helm and the Ship of State is being fueled by white noise. Where were the leaders there?

* * *

The most egregious sin I imply in my book CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIPS AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000) is the collective predicament of everyone rushing to the high ground as if they had nothing to do with the encroaching tsunami.

What is corporate sin? It is that no one is in charge! Workers blame management. Management blames the market. And the market is an artificial entity that cannot defend itself against the charges. I write:

“The working world is upside down. It demands working against the grain to put work back on its foundation. What is killing this country in particular and the working world in general is too much HYPE (Harvard Yale Princeton Elitism) in law, politics, government, commerce, religion, education, entertainment, and industry.

“These institutions take themselves too seriously. They attempt to carry the 19th century mantle of the James brothers, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the like, as if the center of the country is the East Coast. They are disruptive today because they don’t get it. They actually believe the rich and knowing are Ivy Leaguers, and that they have an obligation to guide and protect us from ourselves.

“These institutions of lazy scholars and recidivistic professors, of inflated grading and solipsistic egos, would restore order from chaos by cosmetic surgery (crime bills), revitalize trust by synthetic measures (declarations of ethics), establish economic parity and stability by treaty (NAFTA and GATT), rejuvenate accountability by modification of rites of passage (term limits in Congress). None of this touches the sick soul of our American society. It is all pomp with a dash of circumstance. No more.” (Corporate Sin, p. 14). Where were the leaders there?

* * *

It is easy to criticize the automotive industry for its failure to lead, to criticize the Federal Reserve for its hokey pokey policies, to blame illegal immigrants for eating into the social welfare largesse, and on and on.

Somewhere on the road after 1945 we got lost. We walked into Alice’s Wonderland or onto the yellow brick road of the Wizard of Oz, and departed from self-responsibility.

We have come to blame everyone but ourselves for living beyond our means, burning the candle at both ends, buying into the idea of a free lunch, expecting our employer to be our nanny for life, accusing everyone but ourselves for our lifestyle excesses that have contributed to the soaring cost of healthcare insurance.

We have declared war on drugs yet there would be no need for such a war if recreational drugs were not so popular with the self-indulgent. We can blame the poppy growers of Afghanistan or the drug lords of Columbia for the drug problem but that is like trimming the toenails of the issue, when supply will always find a way to meet demand. Where were the leaders there?

* * *

We didn’t save for a rainy day because “that was not our responsibility.” That was our employer’s or the government’s or our parent’s responsibility. People too young to fight in WWII have contributed to the problems of today by not being able to say “no” to their children, or their children’s children.

Now, those children are parents and sometimes even grandparents. They have created a generation of weak minded, weak willed, weary eyed, confused and escape artists of impressive skill in laying a guilt trip for their predicament on those children of 1945, who became parents and wanted to give their children everything except the freedom to fail.

Baby boomers were given too much too many too soon. They were given everything and forgiving anything that might have helped them to grow up and take charge of their lives. Baby boomers, may I remind you, are now running everything. Where were the leaders there?

* * *

We are in the Information Age, the Electronic Age, the Communication Age with entrepreneurs creating every conceivable device to escape the fact that Nature is unimpressed. Nature has no conscience. Nature destroys those that ignore her laws. No device is more powerful than Nature or first principles.

Meanwhile, while we are texting or whatever that is we do, society is going into the toilet, literally, as haste makes more than waste. It has become self-fulfilling prophecy.

That is because leadership is about the ability to self-sustain, self-manage, self-discipline and self-direct yourself to a meaningful, useful and honorable life consistent with Nature and an acknowledgement of her demands and limits. Where were the leaders there?

* * *

You don’t feed the poor. You give the poor training and jobs. You don’t give people jobs because they have a degree. You give them jobs because they are learners not knowers. You don’t make progress by forming a group and becoming a true believer. You do so by changing your lifestyle and stepping outside the blame game of seeing society as the culprit. You are society!

You examine your own conscience and see where you have gone off the rails and what it will take to get back on them. Everyone is a leader of his or her own life or no one is a leader. That is where leaders are found.

* * *

TOYOTA, FROM THE CULTURE THAT ONCE SAID, "NO" -- TOO LATE SMART!

TOYOTA, FROM THE CULTURE THAT ONCE SAID “NO” -- TOO LATE SMART!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2, 2010

Toyota is coming in for bashing, as well that it should, but what has happened to Toyota is endemic to our capitalistic system.

I wrote in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS:A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1990):

The General Motors assembly plant in the Van Nuys area of Los Angeles instituted the Japanese approach to the team concept in 1987. Three years later (1990), an incident indicated how badly it was failing. Barry Stavro of the Los Angeles Times tells the story:

“It was only one of the 3,000 or so parts that go into a new Chevrolet or Pontiac Firebird. But Larry Barker, a welder, one part summed up all that is wrong with the way GM builds cars.

“One night last fall Barker, along with the rest of the shift was sent home early after GM ran out of a reinforcement panel that is welded next to the wheel near the motor compartment. The panels come in pairs, one for the right side, one for the last, and when the plant ran out of panels for one side, the assembly line stopped.

“A night shift supervisor came down and actually took one of the panels from the other (wrong) side and literally tried beating it into place with a hammer and then welding it.

“The Rube Goldberg-fix-it took so long, Barker said, that GM decided “it wasn’t worth it, so then they sent us home. But if the wrong part could have been forced into place faster, he believes, they probably would have run the assembly line." (WWMs, pp 145 –146)

* * *

The United States hubris is classical while Japanese humility is also legendary. But in 1989, two Japanese executives decided Japan didn’t need the US anymore, that the US was holding Japan back. I write in SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT’S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998):

A document surfaced in 1989, The Japan that Can Say ‘No’: The Case for a New US/Japanese Relationship by Akio Morita and Shintaro Ishihara, gives credence to the warning that Americans must understand the ‘Japanese Goliath’ better. This document passionately xenophobic, written exclusively for a Japanese audience, is tacitly nostalgic for the dominance of the Emperor and a return to the feudalistic consistency of such a society: “Our honest and sincere emperor is the tribal symbol within our national policy and our culture, indeed, he is like the father of our family.” (SIX SILENT KILLERS p. 77)

* * *

In a short twenty years (1990 – 2010), Toyota, the giant of Japanese car manufacturers, has gone from value, safety, and profit to profit, profit, profit in the old GM formula.

We should not be surprised. The industrial paradigm is structured to support and only support such a system, especially when the drive is for industrial dominance. It is axiomatic that when you MUST be NUMERO UNO of anything, everything else not only is secondary but evaporates in the quest.

Now China and India are following the American paradigm. It appears the future is prisoner of the past.

* * *

In 1990 I published my first book as a wake up call in this regard because I saw first hand on four continents over a thirty year career this fundamental organizational problem and corporate strategy. Subsequent books have been published, and disregarded with similar consistency. What I have written about has come from the trenches, not the boardrooms, and every worker knows of what I speak. Larry Barker is typical.

Incidentally, over 50 percent of Toyotas sold in America have been produced in America. One wonders if the GM syndrome has crept into the process.

* * *

TOLSTOY

TOLSTOY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 26, 2010

Reference: I write about Tolstoy in the missive TIGER WOODS, THE RAGE OF SOCIETY AND THE MONSTER IN US (February 24, 2010).

* * *

As I said in this recent piece, myth surrounds our heroes, what I didn’t say, "And then they make films about these people."

I have not yet seen the new film on Tolstoy, “The Last Station,” but I did read a review of the film, which was positive (three and one half stars).

It stars two of my favorites: Christopher Plummer in the role of Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as Tolstoy's long-suffering wife, Sofya.

The review claims the movie centers on the last year of Tolstoy’s life, 1910, when he was 82. He did die at Astapovo Station, which was a train station.

As I point out in my piece, Tolstoy, great writer that he was, left only two great works, WAR AND PEACE and ANNA KARENINA.

The film is apparently based on the battle to get Tolstoy to sign over rights to his works. It was some battle fraught with jealousy, revenge, furtiveness, treachery, and always, Tolstoy's bad temper.

The battle for control of the rights was between Sofya and Tolstoy's agent and friend, Cherkov, whom Sofya hated, and others as well.

I don’t know if the film shows he ultimately signed the rights over to his youngest daughter, Alexandra, but it should. Royalties for these works in the last one hundred years (1910 – 2010) have run into the millions of dollars.

So much for accuracy.

* * *

It appears that the film captures what I have tried to say in a few words in my piece, and that is that Tolstoy was contradictory, hypocritical and somewhat of a buffoon, a brilliant buffoon, to be sure, but nonetheless a buffoon.

(1) He was a moralist who led a deeply immoral life;

(2) He advocated and practiced celibacy when he lost an interest in sex;

(3) He became a vegetarian when he no longer had a taste for food; and

(4) He practiced his own kind of Christianity where Jesus was a brother and no more God than he was.

If the film captures this, it will provide a service to history.

* * *

What prompted me to make these remarks was David Cavanaugh, a friend from my youth, and an original member of the Courthouse Tigers that I write about IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003).

David reminded me in an email that we remember our teachers but we don’t remember who won the last Nobel Prize in Literature. David put things in perspective.


* * *

This film will, too, if it depicts this great author as the flawed human being that he was. We have arrived at the point in our culture in which the extraordinary lives of ordinary people are seldom chronicled, but they hold us together and on course. Without them, we would perish.

This will not be the last film on Tolstoy, but if it is authentic, it should make us feel lucky that we’re not in the limelight.

Be always well,

Jim

POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC

POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 25, 2010

* * *

Before you become exercised about the title of this piece, please allow me to explain. To my request for input as to how I could engage people in considering THE FISHER PARADAIGM©™®, a writer responded:

The only problem with the Fisher Paradigm is its name:

1. 80% of people don't have a clue what paradigm means so it seems inaccessible.

2. To those who know what it means, don't have a clue who you are and may wonder why you are proclaiming something you present as a paradigm. They may think you are putting yourself in the same category as Einstein or Darwin, Kepler or pick your famous theorist.

* * *

I appreciated his response, and new only too well he was correct, as he was the only one that responded.

Before I go on, having somewhat of a weakness for Latin expressions, perhaps a holdover from my days as a Roman Catholic altar boy, the Latin expression has to do with the fallacy argument that insists that something is the effect of a certain cause whereas no such connection may actually exist.

It is the footprint of our explanatory society that always understands why something happens after the fact. “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc” translates as “after this, therefore, because of it.” But that is not necessarily so.

* * *

COMPLEXITY AND COLLAPSE

Niall Ferguson of Harvard has a thoughtful piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (March/April 2010) that deals with “Decline and Fall: When the American Empire Goes, It Is Likely To Go Quickly.”

Now Ferguson is an economist not a polemicist. He is not waving a red flag, but pointing out the flaw in explanatory models that have been penciled through our history suggesting that decline is a life cycle phenomenon and not an unforeseen abrupt change.

I've mentioned the works of William L. Livingston before on these pages with regard to complexity. Check him out and his books on www.amazon.com.

Ferguson, after briefly covering all of the best known cyclic theories, suggests that history is not cyclical and slow moving but arrhythmic, at times almost stationary, but also capable of accelerating suddenly. He asks the question: “What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly like a thief in the night?”

Read the article, which should be available at your public library if you do not subscribe to the periodical.

COMPLEXITY AND THE FISHER PARADIGM©™®

Ferguson sees the world, as does Livingston in terms of complex systems with a large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized. He uses the analogy of the termite hill, which operates somewhere between order and disorder and on the edge of chaos. To the observer, the termite hill seems to be operating quite stably and even seems to be in equilibrium, but it is in fact constantly adapting, that is, until the complex system “goes critical,” and collapses. A single grain of sand could be the trigger to set off the transition from a benign equilibrium to a crisis.

Now, what this has to do with my paradigm is this:

The story line on all our models is deterministic our minds are not. These models do not represent unanticipated perturbations, and therefore are unlikely to respond appropriately to the breakdown of complex systems.

Our minds are complex systems with a capacity for spontaneous organization. One neuroscientist calls our brains “an enchanted loom.”

When confronted with conflict, challenge, danger, or unanticipated discord, the interaction of dispersed agents of the brain come into play. There is no central control, no cause and effect analysis, no linear interpretation of the situation, but multiple levels of activity gearing up for a spontaneous response.

Virtually all research in social and economic endeavors is with trend analysis, sampling and general deterministic theories from these data.

Yet complex systems, either created by man, or man as a complex system, are wholly nondeterministic, meaning it is impossible to predict how a system or a person will respond when the assumed stability is confronted with a maladaptive challenge.

This was the case I describe in my paradigm when I was walking in Washington, D.C. at 2 o’clock in the morning and was confronted by three black youths.

When a complex system is disrupted from its routine, it is nearly impossible to anticipate what the response will be, or what the correct response should be. Intuition in the personal sense takes over.

There is another term taken out of physics that applies here. It is “self-organized criticality.” We are always teetering on the verge of breakdown, no matter if it is a physical or personal system, but we have this survival mechanism in our brain that allows course corrections and adaptation when disruptions occur.

A FINAL NOTE

Ferguson points out, after carefully outlining his thesis that economic collapse is still unlikely to occur no matter how much the data suggest it is impossible to avoid if people maintain their confidence in the system.

It is panic that kills, that destroys and reduces the complex system to ash. It is why civilizations have disappeared, empires have been extinguished and people have experienced nervous collapse.

We are complex self-organized self-adaptive systems that have life and health challenges every day. And no, I am not comparing myself to Darwin, Einstein or Kepler with my paradigm, but celebrating the incredible capacity of the human mind to heal itself as well as thwart danger.

If we believe, if we have faith, if we remain positive, if we wear a smile on our face no matter what, and can say and mean it:

“What a beautiful day. Today is the first day of the rest of my life,” the fractal geometry of all those molecules and neurons will produce “annus mirabilis,” a Latin expression that means "an astonishing year."

* * *



.

RESPONSE TO ARTICLE -- TIGER WOODS, THE RAGE OF SOCIETY, AND THE MONSTER IN US!

RESPONSE TO ARTICLE – TIGER WOODS, THE RAGE OF SOCIETY, AND THE MONSTER IN US!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 24, 2010

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Good article Jim.

I'm glad someone finally pointed this out. Our rage, collectively, at Tiger Woods is really anger at ourselves. As you say, he never was the deity we imagined he was. Clay feet is a great way to put it. Poor guy! He was forced all these years to try to live up to the superman image created by and for him. This applies to many situations I believe, not just celebrities.

For example, we elevate certain professions far beyond the reality of their actual worth and skill. Last evening after a game of tennis three couples, including my wife and I, were enjoying a beer.

One couple mentioned their son, a 13 year old strapping athletic boy, also a tennis player, had broken his back during a tournament a few months previous. This got everyone's attention. Evidently, an extreme move he attempted on the tennis court damaged some vertebrae.

Now he was facing surgery, this very week in fact. The surgery would be performed by an orthopedic surgeon. We all know how risky back surgery can be, so the group enquired as to whether they'd sought more than one opinion concerning the necessity of the operation. They'd had three it turned out, two in favour and one surgeon who advised first waiting to see if the injury, which was not now bothering the young man, recurred in the future. The dissenting doctor had said the risk presented by simply waiting was not great.

Now, coincidentally, my wife and I had just played a match against a gentleman who was a practicing orthopedic surgeon. After the match the fellow mentioned that had we tried to play this match one night earlier, he would not have been able to play at all because he had been so ill.

He had, he explained, a serious infection affecting his nasal and respiratory system. It had been ongoing for 10 days, keeping him on his back for the most part. To underline this point he recounted that during surgery the previous day he had been stricken so severely by this illness he was forced to call for a gurney himself to lie down for 20 minutes.

Thus, the surgery, well underway, was put on hold, the patient kept waiting, fully anaesthetized I presume, pending the doctor's own treatment and recovery; fluids and rest. With a smile I asked him, "Did you manage to operate on the correct limb?" And just as casually he laughed and said he had. This is not the usual image we have of our surgeon, entrusted with our well-being in potentially life-altering circumstances.

Although my wife, who knew the story too, tried to muzzle me, I felt compelled to tell this little tale to our friends having the ailing 13 year old. They were incredulous, which surprised me a bit, because I do not put doctors in a higher class than other skilled artisans.

They are fallible despite their esteemed status. There are poor surgeons, and great ones and a whole lot in between, I am quite sure. I hope our friends believed the story. I would estimate there's a 50/50 chance.

Anyway, I thought you'd enjoy this little story Jim. It seems in line with what you're saying. We set ourselves up for big disappointments with our delusions of supermen and superwomen. People, it seems, hate reality. Is it just too boring for us maybe?

Thank you once again for sharing your insights.

Your friend,

George

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

George,

BB was a little upset when I wrote this piece, taking my attention away from my novel, GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA. I hate to disappoint her ever, but I’ve been writing like a demon and needed a break. I’m glad I took it because of this response. Thank you.

Be always well,

Jim

* * *

TIGER WOODS: THE RAGE OF SOCIETY AND THE MONSTER IN US!

TIGER WOODS: THE RAGE OF SOCIETY AND THE MONSTER IN US

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 24, 2010


In football, there is an expression “telegraphing the pass,” meaning what is to happen is a fait accompli because of the precondition of the act. The same is true with the history of ideas. Where we are today is a materialization of the preconditions of ideas generated over the past three hundred years.

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There is currently much drama associated with a professional golfer, Tiger Woods, a golfer who happens to be the best in the world, possibly the best that has every played the game. It has been discovered he has clay feet like the rest of us. This is not acceptable as we expect our heroes to be more like gods than men. When our heroes appear mere mortals, then they differ little with the rest of us. This is impossible for us to fathom. We are stuck with the unsavory fact that no one escapes the telegraph pass. No one.

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So, what is the good doctor talking about? He’s talking about the weight of ideas over time that have made society and therefore us as we are

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A more basic question is why do we need heroes? The answer can be found in our admiration of others who generate power, are purposeful and manifest combination in superior performance. The athletically gifted have the same biology and chemistry as we all do while those who excel in thought have the same brains that we possess but are more driven to make use of these gifts. It is easier for us to admire than to get up off the couch. Heroes are engaged and we are spectators to such engagement. Otherwise, they are the same as us reacting to the same 300 years of programming unconsciously as we are.

Heroes have a drive to prove they are different, and to be different they must stand out from the rest of us. It is an obsession that has become the rule. They step out of the norm and become representatives of the extremes of our nature. It is not Darwinian. It is conceit. It is arrogance. And it has always been so.

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One of the peculiar things about human nature is that we think of it in terms of weakness. We that go with the flow and never leave the crowd are said to lack the discipline, the passion, the motivation, and the commitment to be outstanding, as if being outstanding or becoming a super duper hero makes life more meaningful. It doesn’t. It makes us more controlled vulnerable and dependent and living up to the expectations of others for us without ever discovering what makes us tick in and of and for ourselves.

We live for accolades, or we dedicate ourselves to being fans of others thinking our heroes are different when they are drowning in the same human foibles as the rest of us. The problem is that heroes may think they have escaped even when repeatedly reminded that they have not. This is such a case with Tiger Woods. Those we place among the exulted ranks have the same clay feet as us all. Nature is not arbitrary. Nature has no special allegiance no special lobby. Nature has no free lunch. You overdraft Nature on one scale you pay for it on another. A nest egg of a $ trillion cannot change Nature’s exactitude.

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Yet our inclination is to put certain people on pedestals and celebrate them until they slip and fall from these heights. We expect them to be more than human so that when they fall we can treat them as less than human. Such is the folly of man.

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Our society did not become so hyper, self-indulgent and permissive in a generation. It has taken centuries for us to reach the level of self-absorption and permissiveness that exists today. We have gone from a God fearing spiritual focus where the Church and clergy ruled the roost to a secular society where skepticism has led to a whole new set of isms from agnosticism to atheism to capitalism to communism to socialism to full blown materialism in less than three hundred years. We now have the oxymoron of China with a communistic political system and a capitalistic economy, and celebrate it as the wave of the future when it carries the diseases of the two isms in the name of progress.

Intellectuals that might not be on the tip of our tongue have changed the furniture of our minds and thus our behavior over the centuries.

We are a product of their preoccupation and are now saddled with their collective madness. They are names we may come across in some college course, but they were (or are) very real very flawed and very decisive in their influence to this day. This is but a sample of a few of them.

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JEAN-JCQUES ROUSSEAU (1712 – 1778):

It was Rousseau who wrote the “Social Contract” we love to quote: “Man is born free and is everywhere in chains.” He possessed an interesting madness. His great gift to society was to make those chains real by giving a philosophy adopted by Lenin to mount the madness that led to communism and totalitarianism.

He invented the cult of nature, introduced the critique of urban sophistication, and branded civilization as artificial. He rejected the idea of gradual improvement and looked for a more radical ideal that was more intuitive and not confined to reason.

We can thank Rousseau for discovering the individual and leading to the Renaissance, the delving into the self and presenting it for public inspection and consumption.

He saw the advantage to being outwardly frank and inwardly full of guile. He concluded from this trend that man is corrupted and naturally selfish, that he is controlled by vanity and self-esteem.

From this came the obsession with what others thought of him leading to his being competitive and acquisitive. This led in turn to a tragic divergence between appearance and reality, and to the creation of the artificial man.

He saw the coming Industrial Revolution and capitalism leading to avarice and alienation.

Like others who will follow, Rousseau was obsessively self-absorbed, in effect, only a petulant child who loved people but had little use for individuals. He had a strong sense of self-pity and deprivation and a monstrous ego with an obsessive need for the world to take notice of him.

Like others that will follow, he had an uncanny capacity for self-publicity and self-promotion, but unlike others he was a born writer and the prototype of the self-made man.

It should be mentioned at this point that all these men were autodidactic. They had various levels of formal education but were constant students all their lives.

Rousseau, as is the case with the others, was vain just short of madness saying, “I love myself too much to hate anybody,” yet in truth he was a virulent hater, another characteristic of them all, self-deception.

Still, what sets them all apart is that they didn’t deny or conceal their weakness, but emphasized it as a virtue. In the case of Rousseau, it was his vulgarity. He admitted he was uncouth, unpleasant and rude but on principle. “I am a barbarian,” he declared but had a higher calling that necessitated its expression.

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Rousseau, like the others, was incapable of repaying his debts, borrowing from those who could least afford it, but doing so callously without conscience. He would make the indebted feel guilty while he the borrower was incapable of feeling so. “However much it may have cost you to give to me,” he would say to the loaner, a debt he never planned to repay, “you are actually in my debt as it has cost me more.” Anyone who helped him was doing himself a favor because he was a great man.

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Paranoia is so huge among heroes and the great, and none more so than Rousseau. He quarreled ferociously with friends and belittled them before others. Being a scalawag himself, and untrustworthy to a fault, he projected this in others.

Love and truth were often on Rousseau’s tongue but neither found their way into his personal life. Again, this is common among those who promulgate lofty ideals. It is fundamental to their script and but commonly toxic in their personal and professional lives.

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Rousseau like others who are to follow was an indifferent parent. He was an original mind but a sick personality and, unfortunately, shares these attributes with these others. Our modern society is set on a foundation of this madness.

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KARL MARX (1818 – 1883):

Marx we know from his “Communist Manifesto,” which was written mainly on secondary information, as he led a secondary life in the British Museum Library. Incredible as it may seem, he never actually collecting valid primary research data for the ideas he espoused and took up right where Rousseau left off.

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Everything we know about Marx was borrowed. There was apparently not an original bone in his body.

His research, which he claimed to be scientific, was not. It was eclectic and secondary. He was not a vigorous scholar but a persistent one.

St. Augustine, who is celebrated in a similar fashion, influenced society as well as the church from the fifth to the thirteenth century with the institutionalization of his ideas on sin, hell, heaven and salvation.

In modern times, Marx has had a similar impact, not because he was right or had answers, but because his ideas were institutionalized into communism. Marx, a Jew, was baptized a Protestant but drifted away from that faith to be mainly atheistic. He never became an orthodox Jew but the Jewish influence is very much present in scholarship and writing. I can relate to this, as I am a renegade Catholic but know I am very much a Catholic writer.

Common to Marx as others discussed here is that he was not interested in finding truth but proclaiming truth.

He is a giant because he was a poet, journalist and moralist and had an uncanny capacity for self-publicity of his ideas. Perhaps no one in the annals of man was more persistent in formulating his ideas.

On balance, though, he drifted from a doomsday scenario to an economic scenario with an artistic rather than a scientific vision.

Like Freud and Frederick Winslow Taylor, the concept of science was casually stated but dogmatically presented which of course refutes the possibility of scientific disputation.

Marx greatest gift was that of a polemical journalist.

He was a great reader, as were all the others, and has been given credit for many sayings he never invented.

Heinrick Heine (1997 – 1856) first said, “Religion is the opium of the people.”

We should not be surprised. Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931) was the first to say, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” He said it to the Lebanese people fifty years before John F. Kennedy said it in his inaugural address.

The irony of Marx, and he is not alone in this tribute, is that he was for the cause of the workingman but never worked at a job a day in his life. He was incorrigibly deskbound to his ideas.

Moreover, he wrote about the squalid conditions in cotton mills but never visited one. He wrote about the suffering of the laboring poor but never interviewed a single soul in such straights. His style was not that of the investigator researcher but the polemical vindicator of his proclaimed beliefs. He showed little interest and less inclination to acquire scientific evidence of boots on the ground.

It is true he was a moral philosopher with a wide interest in humanity writ large but little interest in individuals writ small. He was an indifferent husband, father and parent at home. His long-suffering wife lived the disparity between high ideals and attention to wife and children.

Marx, like Rousseau, thought he was owed allegiance because of his important work. No matter how great the sacrifice of others, he thought it appropriate to expect more.


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We now know some scientists have played tendentiously with select facts regarding their research. This is true of global warming at the moment. Marx was an expert at bending and blending information to corroborate his thesis. Vigorous or careful researcher had little appeal to him.

He looked for verification of the truth he had already decided existed and not the other way around.

His crimes against truth are his use of outdated data, selective study of industries, quotes only of bad conditions ignoring reports to the contrary, and totally disregarding progress being made with capitalism. His works were structurally dishonest.

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We mere mortals who are subjected to these giants of intellect, and who must suffer for the conclusions they make. This goes back as far as St. Augustine and now beyond Marx as ideas of thinkers are institutionalized as the way it is, when the way it is, is only that way because they have said it was so.

Skepticism was once a cherished filter that screened out the toxic intellectual waste thrown at us so that we could breathe the purified truth as we came to know it.

We have chosen to forget, perhaps because we are too busy, that truth and freedom and love and meaning do not spring from abstract workings of the mind and imagination of products we purchase on a shelf, but are deeply rooted in the personality and melancholy of the thinkers.

We have abdicated thinking to others like we have abdicated exercise to top athletic performers. When they win, we win; when they lose, we lose. Could anything be more tragic?

Thinkers and doers are often exploiters and more often than not their works and lives are structurally dishonest. We are complicit in the affair when we become spectators to life, and let them dictate our existence as our equipment rusts and atrophies in the attic of our minds.

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We know that Rousseau was something of a dandy, and that Marx was a permanent exile.

The pattern of men who have made our world shows them to frequently be outsiders, and with few exceptions, men of deep reflection and little action. They consistently displayed poor hygiene, handling of money, and being insensitive to the needs of others. They were controlling, often bohemian, difficult to work for or live with, given to being idle and dissolute, and seldom, and this may surprise, systematic thinkers.

Outside the mainstream, while craving its attention, they lead secret lives that ultimately were their undoing. The irony in death is that a mystic image developed around them and helped to perpetuate their ideas and to romanticize their lives. They have added to this mystique by carefully constructed autobiographies, which have proven in their mendacity that no one escapes the figment of their imagination.

What they did do is step away from the crowd in their thinking and action and made up rules to suit their inclinations.

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We are a species enamored of the idea of “greatness” with some mounting the quest to save humanity from itself when they cannot save themselves from humanity. They talk much about truth but have proven to be great liars, talk about perfection and flaunt their imperfections with impunity. They burn with a desire to create a better world when their own personal world is falling apart for lack of attention. The daughter of the great psychotherapist, Erik Erikson, wrote at piece in The Atlantic Monthly (November 1999) complaining her father never had time for her mental problems when she was growing up.

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HENRIK IBSEN (1828 – 1906):

What Rousseau did for the eighteenth century Ibsen did for the nineteenth century. Henrik, a contemporary of Tolstoy, created the theatre that we enjoy today. His work became a powerful source to women’s liberation yet he was horrible to women in his personal life. He used women to dramatize his ideas and cared little what it did to them or their reputations. You see the pattern here. He saw himself outside the constrictions of ordinary souls. There was a contrary strain in him:

(1) He preached women's rights but hated their independence.

(2) He wanted women to get ahead but not to compete with men in any form. He preferred their freedom be limited to the stage.

(3) He was for workingman, and workingman rights, but knew nothing about workingmen. He thought it repugnant to be associated with them or their causes, again limiting his association to the stage. His approach to art was creative selfishness. The little guy was prominent in his plays but he had nothing to do with him in h is life.

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LEO TOLSTOY (1828 – 1910):

Tolstoy was a true intellectual giant, but also the biggest puzzle. His two great novels, written over 100 years ago, still sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year but writing was an embarrassment to him.

No one has ever put words together better than he has. Read pieces of “War and Peace” or “Anna Karenina” – anywhere – and it will melt your heart. He had a gift like Dickens and Flaubert but preferred to “save the world” from itself, than write, when he could not save himself from the world.

If you know anything about Tolstoy, you know he was a religious zealot, but a profligate human being. He was a compulsive gambler and drinker, and was cruel to his long-suffering wife who he treated like a serf. To the very end he was dastardly, secretly signing the copyrights of all his works over to a daughter and leaving his widow out in the cold, penniless.

Our greatest writer was a bastard. He wanted to lead the world in a crusade, when he had no aptitude for leadership. It is one of the peculiar predilections of intellectuals. They think they can lead, and no one was more self-deluded in this sense than Tolstoy.

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With greatness what you see is never what you get, or what the great produce is seldom a reflection of what they are. It is more likely a profile of the opposite extreme. The great have a will to power with a feeling of being anointed with something the rest of us lack.

Tolstoy was born into the Russian aristocracy. This was a form of slavery known as serfdom. Aristocrats owned the land and the serfs came with it. There were aristocrats in Tolstoy’s time that had as many as 200,000 serfs. Tolstoy inherited only about 700 with his land. He was never comfortable with the idea of serfdom.

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Another pattern of people who get above the radar is that they seldom believe in conventions such as marriage and fidelity. Nor do they believe in paying their bills or living within their means. Their most grievous error is forgetting who helped them get to where they have gotten.

Tolstoy, by the way, penned the line, “All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He knew a lot about such unhappiness because he orchestrated it.

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Like the others mentioned, Tolstoy was great at celebrating the theme of love. He embraced the concept in the abstract, but had little acquaintance with it other than as self-love. You get the impression these great men were incapable of love, but yet claimed love was the ultimate value of humanity.

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ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899 – 1961):

Whereas Rousseau changed politics, Henrik Ibsen changed theatre, Tolstoy defined prose, it was Hemingway who created a new ethical style as a novelist and short story writer. His influence exceeded the boundaries of literature in that he defined modern American man.

The whole macho craze has Hemingway’s footprint. He coined that expression, “grace under pressure.” He was speaking about writing but he could just as well have been speaking about the exploits of Tiger Woods or Larry Bird when he said,

“Find what gave you the emotion, what the action was that gave you the excitement, everything must be done in brevity, economy, simplicity, strong verbs and short sentences (he could have been saying golf strokes or handling the basketball) do nothing superfluous or for effect.”

Hemingway saw prose as an architect. He became the model of an age for attention grabbing action. Look at film and television drama today. Plot has evaporated replaced by pyrotechnics and hard breathing like the television drama, “24.”

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The story I’m telling is that each of these men of achievement became prisoner of their own imagination and celebrity.

They came to believe they were different, that the rules didn’t apply to them, that they were practicing anarchists outside the law of restrictions, that they had a right to live huge not realizing this amounted to ritualistic isolation.

Most high achievers are loners surrounded by sycophants; private persons with no privacy; control freaks out of control; shy to the point of mania but craving idolatry, bored to tears all the way to the bank.

When they fall on their petard, they expect understanding and empathy when it doesn’t exist in their makeup. They believe they deserve it because of their many sacrifices as if it were we that had put their feet to that fire.

These patterns have become society’s collective DNA, which means there is no comfort in pointing fingers.

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BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872 – 1970):

Take Bertrand Russell who epitomizes the whole lot.

Russell lived almost one hundred years, a trained mathematician, who wrote as if an expert on everything. He did so because he was a "genius," and a genius has no limitations. Genius is an equally meaningless word as is greatness, both words of which we seem enraptured.

He wrote books on geometry, philosophy, mathematics, justice, social construction, political ideas, mysticism, logic, Bolshevism, China, the brain, industry, ABC of atoms (long before the atomic bomb) science, relativity, education, skepticism, marriage, happiness, morals, idleness, religion, international affairs, history, power, truth, knowledge, authority, citizenship, ethics, love, biography, atheism, wisdom, the future of disarmament, peace, war, crime and many other topics.

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Now, there is nothing wrong with writing books about subjects of which the writer is not actually an expert. What is wrong is when such writing is valued as “brilliant” – another non-word – and taken seriously without close examination.

One thing of which you can be certain is that people of brilliance are stupid in many other ways, as extremes in one direction have a natural counterbalance of extremes in the opposite direction. Nature did not create any perfect human beings.

The danger with Russell, and I have read many of his books, is that his character comes through when he departs from what he knows well replaced by his hyper and meddling personality with something of the odor of the crackpot. “Why I am Not A Christian” (1957) is an example. When I read the book, I couldn’t believe him serious, until I saw him on television. I have no problem with him not being Christian but I do have a problem with his puerile arguments in obtuse syllogisms.

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Like the others, Russell was an incredibly creative self-promoters.

He craved the limelight and managed to stay in it most of his adult life. He was not good at doing anything but thinking and even then he could go off the rails. A completely pampered man, he loved women only insofar as they would indulge him. For example, he never learned to make tea although he was addicted to the beverage.

Russell was an outsider, too, who forced his way in as an insider never content living in the isolated world of pure mathematics. Gregarious and everywhere, he thought logic and mathematics could explain everything and solve anything. Logic was the fire of the gods.

What is surprising, and biographers are having fun with this, is that in all of his writings there is one consistent theme – he had little regard for accuracy or for verifiable sources. He, like his predecessors in far less scientific endeavors, made many of his facts fit his preconceived theses without apologies, although tantamount to heresy in science and mathematics.

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All of the men described here were vain but some to comedic extremes. Henrik Ibsen loved medals and honors and would seek them to the point of embarrassment. Once in his possession, he would wear them around the house as part of his wardrobe. .

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Another thing in common is that they saw themselves as moralists against evidence of lecherous personalities. They used women to their purposes sexually and otherwise. Common as well is that these men were generally physically ugly. Women throughout history have looked past this to be romantically attracted to minds of brilliance. These men were no exception. Once discarded, these women often attempted suicide causing these great men little guilt or discomfort.

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All were either first born or the only child. When they were the first born in a family of many other siblings, invariably they were treated as if an only child. Moreover, at maturity, they were often diminutive in stature, physically plain bordering on ugly but were never wanting for beautiful female companions.

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JEAB0OAYK SARTRE (1905 – 1980):

No one was more diminutive or ugly than Jean-Paul Sartre. At five-two with bulging eyes, he became the darling of the permissive age with his doctrine of existentialism.

This gave the individual the right of self-responsibility, the right to criticize everything and everybody, and the responsibility for nothing. Young people were encouraged to live in the moment and take from it what they will and not to have to apologize for anything.

In his existential philosophy, he created the justification for permanent adolescent. It is the reason we have no adults running anything anywhere today.

No one need ever grow up or therefore grow old.

Like many other myths, Sartre didn’t invent the word “existentialism,” the press did. It is one of those meaningless journalistic inventions that reached the credibility of truth. Now, politicians; pundits, professors and psychotherapists are doctrinaire existentialists, which means we are all saddled with the immaturity that no one can escape.

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Great thinkers are great drinkers so one wonders how many ideas have the aroma of the spirits that gave birth to them.

I say this because none of thinkers I have profiled – including the scientists and mathematicians – are systematic thinkers. They are doers crowd pleasers puppets on a string dancing for the crowd in which they periodically reinforce their judgments into the fabric of alcoholic or drug induced doctrines.

We endorse their silliness with behavior defiant of our roots and call it progress.

You could say despite the adulation, attention and celebrity we have awarded them, they periodically stand on their head, so to speak, and look ridiculous.

Sartre wrote much about boredom and absurdity as if it were our problem when he was bored or absurd. It is not his fault that we took him at his word, as we did Freud, and made their sickness our own.

Sartre, in old age with a coterie of idealistic youth following him and mimicking his every grunt, was the Pied Piper of the times as society departed from good sense into a psychedelic haze.

In three hundred years we have gone from spiritual values to secular materialism, from utopian idealism to runaway hedonism, from self-responsibility to permissiveness, and from confidence in reality to a flight from reason.

It all started back in the time of Rousseau but Sartre and others in recent times have provided the catalyst that was added after World War Two to bring everything to this mockery fruition.

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Today, when so much is going wrong, when the explainable is no longer making sense, when everything is in a state of flux, a state that it has always been in, but previously it was more tectonic, the fault is not in the stars but in man.

There is not one person reading this that does not live in a messed up family, not one that does not know of the sins described here, or the violence and trauma that is associated with such excesses. We live in a sick age and a sick society, which is not new, as every age has its societal diseases. Being messed up has become the norm. Instead of being charitable to those that stumble, we engage in schadenfreude, which is the enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others as compensation and distraction from our own.

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GEORGE ORWELL (1903 – 1950):

A word that is common to all those described here is “childish.” Not one of them could be described as an adult mature or otherwise. Adulthood seems anathema to thinkers who feel more comfortable in the puerile world of attention. There are exceptions.

George Orwell published “1984” in 1949. The book like the man was truthful and prescient. It was Orwell who said,

“Ordinary people have a stronger sense of what is common decency, a greater attachment to simple virtues such as honesty, loyalty and truthfulness than the highly educated.”

He was an adult and he was right. Over my long career working at every level of organization I have seldom encountered an exception to these words.

Orwell stepped away from his privileged class and public education to see and write about the world he was in working as a policeman in India, among other jobs. He saw the real world without apologies or hidden agenda.

He didn’t glorify the Spanish Civil War as Hemingway and others did, but wrote about it in a balanced view in “Homage to Catalonia” (1938).

He saw the collapse of traditional morality and spiritual certitude leading to permissiveness and violence and a new language to justify it all in his novel, “1948” with the newspeak.

He previously had published “Animal Farm” (1945), at the end of WWII, addressing the corruption of revolution and the wickedness and indifference that corrupt leadership leads to no matter how utopian the cause.

Not only have I found Orwell’s words true, but I am astounded with his honesty. When other thinkers would bend the facts to suit their premises or promote their celebrity, he could and would not.

Orwell saw how language was misused to the point of meaningless. He was appalled with such words as “great” or “brilliant” or “genius” as they were used in his day. Imagine what he would think more than fifty years later.

Commentators today use these as throwaway words as preface to their remarks. Orwell was suspect of formal education when it was used to warrant listening. He saw political behavior as largely non-rational and not rule susceptible to solutions generated and therefore impossible to hold water. We see this in Washington, D.C. today.

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Our permissive society didn’t just happen. It is a three hundred year program in our retreat from good sense. It has even invaded sport. But why should sport be any different than the rest of society? Tiger Woods is a mathematician on the golf course, but a failed student in arithmetic in life. So, what is new?

Creators of our permissive society have:

(1) A penchant for patriotisms and the greater good but no answer to senseless wars.

(2) Perpetuated violence by qualifying what is good and bad terrorism.

(3) An appetite for leadership but no one who can lead.

(4) A platform for prisoner rehabilitation without consulting prisoners.

(5) Urban renewal plans for clearing the slums but no place for the slum dwellers.

(6) Plans for subsidizing low cost housing with funny money.

(7) Grand schemes for free food, free medicine, free clothing and free housing for the disadvantage but no jobs.

(8) Utopian schemes to ensure security but at the expense of destroying privacy.


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We are messed up, people, and we’re not going to be able to correct it if we don’t know why we are, or what has contributed to the status. A chronic problem is one that keeps slapping us down, we pay it no mind, get back on our feet, proud of our courage, but learning nothing, get slapped down again, then repeating it again and again, ad infinitum.

When a “role model” falls from grace, we are always surprised. Why? Do we think, “There go I but for the grace of God,” or do we say, “Not my problem,” or do we try to imagine the pressures of having to live in the caldron of constant fame? I know what I think. Do you?

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