YOU KNOWS, TATTOOS AND OTHER IDIOCIES OF OUR TIMES!

YOU KNOWS, TATTOOS AND OTHER IDIOCIES OF OUR TIMES!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 12, 2010

* * *

CATHEDRALS IN THE AIR

In the late 1980s, when I was a corporate executive with an American company living in Brussels, Belgium, my two sisters came to visit Beautiful Betty and me. We lived in Uccle, a suburb of Brussels, on diplomatic row, which I thought would impress them. It didn’t.

BB then took them on a tour of Europe, and being Irish Roman Catholic, they visited the resplendent cathedrals of Amiens, Bavaria and, of course, Rome, among other places.

My sisters came back from the experience with a serious dent in their FAITH, especially my one sister. “Jimmy,” she said, “how can they display such extravagance surrounded by so much poverty?” She was referring to side trips taken into the villages in the shadow of these prominent structures.

It didn’t help in telling her that most of these cathedrals were built in the high middle ages when the majority were illiterate, including the aristocracy, and that this magnificence solidified church temporal as well as spiritual power. I then added, “We are no less influenced today with such collusion."

Conservative, an Iowan, who could buy and sell her brother several times over, she was offended by what she saw, and would have none of my explanation.

* * *

In my walk today, I thought of that visit and then quickly to the recently completed mid-term elections in which upwards of $ billion was spent on campaigning to solidify power by being elected or reelected to public office.

Members of the House of Representatives are elected every two years, and spend much of the time in office running for reelection or putting earmarks into bills. What is worse, it is unusual if they are in Washington, DC more than a couple days a week so busy are they campaigning for reelection, or taking jaunts across the globe at taxpayer expense supposedly on “fact finding missions.”

We have Congressmen that have had ten or twenty consecutive terms. Senators are elected for six years, and many have had three to six consecutive reelections. Incumbency feeds the biometrics.

A consultant to government writes me:

“America was outraged when Nancy Pelosi said of the healthcare bill that they have to pass it to see what’s in it. Well, America was outraged because it doesn’t understand how its government works behind the ropes. None of these people have the time to actual read the legislation, let alone write it. Their staffers don’t even write it. The shadow government does. The staffers tweak it and it goes forward. That’s how all the class B earmarks (things like $700K for cow burping or $823K to study how to teach South African males to wash their penises after sex) get added.

“Except for the sponsor, and maybe not even him, the members don’t know what’s really in a bill until the next election when an opponent digs it out and publicizes it. They voted for the defense budget or healthcare, and cow burping just happened to be hidden in it.”

Such careers are cathedrals in the air.

* * *

YOU KNOW YOU KNOW YOU KNOW -- NO I DON’T KNOW!

The late syndicated columnists Edwin Newman and William Safire must be rolling in their graves at how sloppy American conversation has gotten in this the twenty-first century. They were sticklers for proper speech.

Even the erudite President Barak Obama hiccups quietly “you knows” in his utterances, as if an apology for having resorted to the practice.

There is not a commentator, educator, or public figure who once he departs from the teleprompter doesn’t fall prey to “you knows.” For me, it is like screeching chalk across a blackboard.

Some athletes being interviewed after a game can string together ten “you knows” in a single sentence.

The problem is I don’t know, but I might want to know what you are thinking, if thinking is what you are capable of doing.

Imprecise language is a symptom not a cause of a collapsing apathetic society that is increasingly electronically connected but not cognitively much less socially.

We are out of control, and if you want to write books that are not read, write about it.

* * *

TATTOO NATION – SELF-ADVERTISING IDIOCY

When I was a US Navy Corpsman in the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, sailors would come back from liberty drunk with unwanted tattoos asking me what they could do about it.

We weren’t in the business of removing tattoos. I mention this because few who had submitted to the tattooing were proud of the behavior, but rather apologetic for it. They wondered how their wives or girlfriends, or even parents would react to such displays.

It was the 1950s, and the only ones displaying tattoos with palpable belligerence were bikers, ex-cons, and other groups that considered themselves renegades or outsiders. Put another way, they were selectively nonconformists.

Fast forward to today, and you cannot go to a shopping mall or public place and not see men and women, and even children, sporting tattoos, some on their entire arms, so-called “sleeve tattoos.” I have seen tattoos so offensive that it is clear that shock is part of the self-advertising.

You may ask why I find tattoos so offensive. First of all, I think the body is beautiful without purposeful disfigurement.

In the 1960s, when I was a field chemical engineer for a specialty chemical company, the Indiana Prison System – power plants – were my customers.

I saw convicts with tattoos covering their bodies advertising their hate, contempt, and bizarre affections.

Tattoos of criminals were a sorting process of internal gangs. It was their identity, their badge of belonging. They wanted the world to see what they couldn’t explain in words. I was amazed to learn from dealing with these inmates how many of them had had little schooling. No surprise, tattoos were often of misspelled words.

Curiously, today I see misspelled tattoos on people shopping at Wal-Mart, and other places.

Syndicated columnist David Brooks, who has a sense of humor about the tattoo idiocy, has noted that tattoos were once the domain of nonconformists, but now are the rage of the most "in" conformist groups of all, the educated, celebrities, and the affluent. Go figure.

* * *

WITH IDIOCY COMES SOME LIGHT

Despite the idiocy, there are silver linings to our clouds.

We have an African American President. I never thought that would happen in my lifetime.

The presidents of MIT and Harvard, as well as my own University of South Florida are women. It took women ninety years in a struggle for suffrage to settle into government mansions, Congress and the Senate, and into academia, and occasionally on mahogany row.

Then, despite fifty percent of black males dropping out of school before finishing high school, some of the those brilliant minds in our society are African Americans.

Somehow we persist, at least for the moment, despite these irritations, which I think are indicators of a collapsing society.

* * *

As I said earlier, we don't want to hear what we don't want to hear.

T. S. Eliot wrote in The Hollow Men, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

Recently, in Foreign Affairs (March/April 2010), Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson stated something similar: “Decline and Fall – When the American Empire Goes, It is Likely to Go Quickly.” He sees proximate triggers sufficient to shift from good equilibrium to a bad mess, citing the relationship between complexity and collapse.

Author William L. Livingston IV claims in "Design for Prevention" (2010) we are incapable of handling complexity, so we bypass it and handle problems we can handle. This sounds a lot like Congress.

My wonder is if the reason we retreat in tattooing and other aberrant behaviors is a panic escape from reality, as if we don’t want to know what's right around the corner because we are incapable of dealing with it. If this is the case, what is the advantage of being conscious of our acts?

* * *

COMMENTS FROM GERMANY TO CONVERSATION OF "THIS AND THAT OF A SUNDAY"

COMMENT FROM GERMANY TO CONVERSATION OF “THIS AND THAT OF A SUNDAY”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 11, 2010 (Veterans/Armistice Day)

* * *

REFERENCE:

The purpose of a dispositional conversation like the one cited here is to stimulate thought of the reader in the context of his or her cognitive biases.

Cognitive biases may be defined as our belief system. We acquire this belief system mainly unconsciously from our acculturation from birth onward and mainly from the outside, in.

How we think and what we believe is too often an incidental and accidental accumulation of cultural biases about people, places and things. Moreover, there is an American, European, and other cognitive biases that are centuries old, which may permeate our consciousness, based upon our exposure to them.

There is no escape from cultural biases, but they can be a prison if one is unable to be aware and accepting of them as being so, or without the understanding they make one no better or worse than someone with a different set of biases or a totally different belief system.

Most of my missives are used as a litmus test to introduce you, the reader, to yourself. There is no desire for you to think, believe or assume my biases. My interest is for you to be better in touch with your biases and to determine if they support or fail to serve you in your life.

* * *

A READER FRIEND FROM GERMANY WRITES:

Jim,

We recently had an outrage here in Germany because the Vice President of the German Central Bank, Mr. Sarrazin, has published a book with his views on some issues in Germany - immigration, work ethics, education, political mindset and generic roots.

The latter, “generic roots” was the one causing the outrage despite the fact that all the other topics are much more relevant to our general situation.

In the short chapter on generic roots, he was only citing some new scientific publications, but the question of "inherited intelligence" is a no-no in Germany. This is especially true with the left wing parties.

Therefore, we have here a full range of programs and provisions to help people from the working class to get a higher education and get into the pipeline for elevated jobs.

It is an open secret that this has not been very successful. But no one who depends on elections and voters would ever challenge the principle.

In the former DDR (Communist East Germany), it was even worse:

Only when you were coming from the "working class,” as if others do not work, were you allowed to study at universities. The result was the economic collapse of the DDR system. It was not the political pressure from the West.

Best regards,

Manfred

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

My children since they were born have lived in relative luxury traveling across the United States, vacationing in its four corners, while traveling and living in Europe and South Africa. They have attended private schools and took for granted being members of the American affluent class, that is, until I “retired” the first time in my thirties. Then a bit of reality hit them.

Their father didn’t work. He read books all the time, played basketball and tennis. And if he wasn’t doing that, he was writing.

When he was nearly broke, he went back to school full-time for six years consulting on the side. They no longer took long vacations across the United States much less the world, but still lived in relative luxury in an upscale neighborhood compared to what their father had experienced in growing up.

To this day, they scoff at the idea that they are working class as their father insists is his roots.

I am testimony to what is offered the America working class if one is willing to take advantage of the opportunity. As I explained to them, I have found at no time at no level in no job or situation in which others born to other circumstances had superior “inherited” gifts to what my parents had given me.

My four children show signs of the acculturation of working class, but they refuse to see it, only recognizing they have had the wits to do relatively well as part of the affluent class.

For example, my son, the tennis pro of a major American tennis complex, is in the upper one percent of American income, but still resents that he is not treated like a member of the club.

A daughter who has been in the upper 1 percent before the economic meltdown of 2008, reached inside herself and took on any job with dignity and purpose reminiscent of her working class origins.

Another son, who worked his way through high school into top management of a private manufacturing company, resented when the owners sons were given differential treatment although not as knowledgeable, ending the association. He is now an independent businessman doing well, but ironically, shows his wrath by looking and acting like a Florida cracker. Due to his astuteness, however, he was not touched by the economic meltdown.

Another daughter has never caught hold, and has been supported by the other three in ways that have been counterproductive to her establishing self-reliance.

Only my stepdaughter has risen to the challenge as I did in my day, and the only college graduate.

* * *

AMERICA, MANFRED, IS NOT EUROPE

Now, my grandchildren, some thirteen of them, from the ages of two to thirty-two have the disposition and acculturating experience, as well as the expectations of reaching – if they haven’t already – the upper echelons of American social and economic society, a society I have no interest in joining.

My extended family – cousins and their siblings – remind me of author William Faulkner’s Scopes of fictional Yoknapatawpha County (Mississippi).

In Faulkner’s fiction, the Scopes start out as tenant farmers and end up running the county.

What is different about my extended family, and something I cherish, is that it is not ostentatious about its power or wealth but quietly and inconspicuously controls things. Likewise, my extended family finds pride in its working class roots and is unapologetic about them.

One thing my extended family has in common with my family, however, is a palpable enmity to academia and intellectualism, as if bookish people are non-doers. They tolerate me but are not certain what I am about.

* * *

Moving from the personal to the public forum, America differs from Europe in another way.

France has had weeks of riots with tens of thousands of people entering the streets, going on strike, and disrupting commerce at its government’s austerity move to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62.

A Congressional Committee now is considering increasing the retirement age in the United States from 65 to 68 and there is hardly a ripple of protest.

* * *

Great Britain proposes increasing university education from four thousand British pounds ($6,400) per year to ten British thousand pounds ($16,000), or a 250 percent increase. Tens of thousands entered the streets of London recently in protest, destroying property and causing personal injury to police and students alike.

Were such a proposal made in the United States, it would shut down higher education totally, and I mean totally.

The Florida’s state university system is increasing tuition some 10 percent and there has been protest, but nothing compared to that in Europe. Ten percent is not 250 percent.

* * *

This same Congressional Committee is advocating reducing the benefits of Social Security, reducing the mortgage exemption interest on Federal Income Taxes, increasing the amount retired persons on Medicare and Medicaid pay for treatment and prescription medications, and there has been nary a protest.

You see, in the American system, the process is decidedly cumbersome, time consuming and bureaucratic on purpose.

Before these recommendations go anywhere, they must past muster of a Committee of Fourteen before it can be presented to the House of Representatives, then it has to go through the US Senate, and then it has to convince the president not to veto the proposed legislation.

Along the way, it will change many times and be nothing like what was originally proposed, and even then, it will take years to reach its full fruition.

* * *

You play funny with the American electorate and you awake a sleepy lion. I will end this with a quote from Susan Jacoby’s “Freethinkers” (2004) that summarizes what I’ve attempted to convey here :

“When your own mind is your own church, it can take a very long time for future generations to make their way to the sanctuary.”

Be always well,

Jim

THIS AND THAT -- REFLECTION OF A SUNDAY -- A CONVERSATION WITH A READER

THIS AND THAT – REFLECTIONS OF A SUNDAY: A CONVERSATION WITH A READER

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

REFERENCE:

This has been modified from how it was received and answered in order to codify the ideas of the exchange. I should add that I have great respect and affection for this person, which might not be readily apparent from the exchange.


* * *

A READER WRITES (Hereafter noted as Reader):

Acknowledgement working class roots sounds strange alongside your seeming conservatism.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS (Hereafter noted as Dr. Fisher):

I consider myself as “working class” because that is my economic roots. My da was an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad, and on the extra board at that, never enjoying the security of a permanent job.

Your seeing me as “conservative,” and find it difficult to believe a “working class” person can be so described is interesting. Labels, especially ideological labels, have never stuck to me too well.

Never drinking or smoking, watching what I eat, and exercising regularly, I suppose, could be considered conservative. I would imagine conserving my energy and being focused in my studies throughout my academic training, and the same on the job could be so construed as well. But I don’t think that is what you mean.

Being a freethinker and secularly oriented for the most part, I suppose, is closer to the liberal, but I don’t think you mean that either. I have strong opinions, which some might consider radical, but I hardly think they fall easily into either conservative or liberal classifications.

Yet, I am a registered Republican who often votes Democratic, as I did in the last election for President Barak Obama, and for Charlie Crist for the US Senate race in the mid-term election that just ended, who ran as an Independent.

My cultural conditioning is Irish Roman Catholic. I owe much to that in terms of discipline, moral outlook, and views on such topics as the right to life and the death penalty. I am for the first and against the second.

Moreover, I don’t have trouble with sexual orientations other than my own, but wonder why we are so preoccupied when we spend so little time in actual sexual congress.

Life has taught me that the sins of labor and management have often been self-defeating for both. As a chemical engineer in the field, I often saw union workers hiding in tunnels of major corporations failing to complete their work so they would get overtime. I have seen managers accept outlandish bonuses that weren’t deserved, but were received because they had the right organizational politics (See Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers, 2000).

* * *

READER:

I, too, feel some umbrage for working hard to pay my way through college while most of my peers (not your HYPE designators) were inner-city girls on grants or the daughters of professionals (doctors and lawyers) living high on the family’s purse strings.

I’ve never grown bitter at “entitlements,” and believe that those rarely spring from the silver-spoon set’s magnanimity or guilt as you suggest. How then do we explain the phenomenon of wealth of this country that continues to trickle “up”?

* * *

DR. FISHER:

Your suggestion of “rich kids” was the daughters of doctors and lawyers where as at Iowa more often than not they were the sons and daughters of farmers. In neither case would I designate the parents’ rich. HYPE schools are fed by prep schools, and this is an entirely different kettle of fish. As I indicated in this piece, education in this stratosphere is incredibly expensive, given children of HYPE the opportunity to rule the waves. These children are programmed to lead, to rule and control. They are apart from us.

My point is that HYPE graduates who have little in common with the rest of us believe we want to be like them, only a cheaper version of them. So, they get in industry and find they can control us with entitlements. They get in government and sponsor programs to make us cheaper versions of them with entitlements.

HYPE got a way with this from 1950 to 1980 because the US controlled the waves of the world economy. We Americans as workers would make a little stir and they’d (HYPE in government and industry) would throw us another bone. Unions were complicit in this, obsequious to HYPE in industry, education and the professions, including sports.

We are now – HYPE as well as the rest of us – lapdogs in a decline stretching from 1980 to 2010. HYPE plays musical chairs in industry, education, government and the professions (e.g. AMA, etc.), and nothing changes only the tans of those in charge.

We have been surviving, just barely, the last thirty years (1980 – 2020) without leadership treading on our momentum.

Why no leadership? Because those in charge don’t trust us or trust each other; those in charge lack sincerity, those in charge are not flexible, and those in charge are committed to rhetoric rather than the courage of taking a stand and voting with their feet. Leaders are concerned about their legacy, polls, and establishing the best face on their watch no matter how cosmetic it is in actuality.

The call now is for austerity as unemployment is at “9.6 percent,” which is a myth, as it is closer to 17.6 percent as many people have been forced to work part time to underpaying jobs.

Over the past sixty years (1950 – 2010), we have literally as well as figuratively become a flabby nation in mind, body and spirit. We have forgotten what it means to struggle, to get off our duff and take care of business, to look to ourselves rather than others to save us, and to control our appetites and destiny rather than to look to personal trainers to do it for us.

Our education has gotten flabby, our religious institutions have gotten flabby, our government has gotten flabby, the workplace has gotten flabby, and increasingly we look like the Romans for the catharsis of violence in television and sport to assuage our consciences. We have become spectators to our own lives, watching people in power positions play musical chairs, and wonder why we live in forward inertia.

* * *

READER:

It’s ironic that those complaining about welfare cheats care not a whit about corporate entitlement cheats. Corporations bleed taxpayers dry, exhaust our scant resources, and rarely pay an equitable share of taxes (never mind the rates, what do they actually pay?). What do you have to say about that?

* * *

DR. FISHER:

Do corporations cheat? Of course, some do. Do the wealthiest among us cheat on their taxes and entitlements? Most likely some do.

We hear about wealth creators and think of it as so much spin.

And yes, the richest 1 percent of Americans is getting richer, a lot richer. In 1976, near the end of the thirty-year period of economic bliss (1950 – 1980), the top 1 percent took home 9 percent of income. Today at the end of economic bleak (1980 – 2010) the top 1 percent takes home 24 percent of income.

In 1980, when self-restraint took a holiday, CEOs of the top American companies earned 42 times as much as the average worker. In 2001 that rate had increased to 531 times the average worker; today it is 1,000 times or better. More significantly, back to my model of run away excess since 1980, four-fifths or 80 percent of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent, while wages of average workers stagnated or declined.

So, you have a point. In earlier times, this might cause revolt or even revolution, but not today. A flabby complacent society is too busy watching “American Idol” or some talking head to take charge of their lives by saying with their feet that they have had enough. I don’t anticipate this happening. Instead, they go to the polls, vote, and watch a new dog and pony show transpire into collapsing gridlock in Congress.

* * *

READER:

Do you deny that one of the best investments ever made in this country’s future was providing an education to vets returning from WWII? Or that Social Security and public education pay dividends? To privatize Social Security – as Republicans insist – would be ultimately prohibitive.

* * *

DR. FISHER:

Social Security was a stopgap measure during the Great Depression, which has been a political time bomb to touch, whatever the strategy. Yes, it has allowed many senior citizens to live with dignity in their golden years.

It worked reasonably well up to 1980 when more money was coming in than going out. But that all changed when the rest of the world caught up with us. Another mixed blessing was the fact that we are living longer, which means longer on Social Security. To illustrate, in 1930 the average life expectancy for both sexes (white) was 61.4 years; in 1980, it was 74.4 years; and in 2005, it was 78.3 years, or the possibility of being on Social Security 17 more years than at the conception of the program.

Even if the retirement age is increased to 70, chances are Social Security will be bankrupt before the United States reaches mid-century.

As for the G.I. Bill, my service obligation was between 1956 and 1962 with two years on active duty in the Mediterranean. For fulfilling that obligation, I was able to spend six years in graduate education on the G.I. Bill to earn my Ph.D. It provided a stipend for me at the advanced age of 36 with a wife and four young children. Were it not for the G.I. Bill, it is unlikely I would have had the life I have enjoyed. So, I hear you.

On the other hand, for every veteran that took full advantage of this ten others didn’t. That is the sad thing. My source? When I laid out my plan to the officer at the Veterans Administration, he laughed. “If you do this, you will be the first for me, and I’ve been at this for going on twenty years.”

* * *

READER:

We have no argument about the shame of education becoming “big business,” or maybe we do. You’re extolling the virtues of Ashford University, that California consortium, which has come into Clinton, Iowa with its hand out and in the aggressive stance of big business. It doesn’t expect to pay taxes, but to be given all kinds of property concessions as it has acquired church property. What do you say to that?

* * *

DR. FISHER:

Clinton, Iowa, my hometown, was on the cutting edge of the lumber boom at the beginning of the last century, largely because logs from Wisconsin and Minnesota could not economically negotiate the narrow channels of the Clinton on the Mississippi River.

The lumber boom faltered and then collapsed in the 1920s, and many wealth creators left town, sending the community into a tailspin.

Gradually through the 1920s while embracing the challenges of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Clinton, Iowa arrived at the dawn of WWII in 1942 the hub of an important small but competent manufacturing center.

Clinton performed amazingly well during WWII, including building a huge U.S. Military Hospital, and arrived at 1945 a booming town of some 33,000 citizens. It rode the good years up to 1980, as did the rest of the country, only to once again fall on hard times with many industrial operations downsizing or going out of business.

Clinton is smaller now, perhaps 29,000 or so, with few industries, other than the large ADM complex, and the possibility of a new railroad center.

Clintonians are hard workers, but modest in their demands. As a consequence, Clinton was not hit as hard hit as other places with the economic-industrial meltdown and real estate collapse of 2008.

You know all this because you are a Clintonian but most of my readers do not.

* * *

My life has been a constant reinventing of myself, and I come by that naturally as I, too, am a Clintonian. I see Ashford University as a reinvention of Clinton, Iowa as an education center in light of the twenty-first century, and not the twentieth century model.

In the fifteenth century, Gutenberg invented movable type in printing. This led to the flourishing of the classical university system of Europe in the sixteenth century, along with the rise of Protestantism and the “Protestant Work Ethic” of Max Weber.

We are now in the Information Age, the electronic age, in which everything is likely to change form the way we once saw things, including education.

Ashford University has come to this quiet community on the banks of the Mississippi River, which is known for its integrity, industry, resilience, and openness to new ideas, and decided to invest “big time” in the possibilities of that climate and culture.

If I sound as if I am naïve about Ashford University, and its corporate motivation, I am being misconstrued. The university has to prove itself worthy of the support of Clinton, Iowa, but I sense that is already taking place.

Nor am I naïve about the disclaimers of the value of an online degree versus a traditional degree. Some are no doubt saying an online degree is a waste of time for workers striving to advance their careers. Consider this: according to a recent Society for Human Resource Management seventy-nine (79) percent of human resource officials said their organizations had hired job applications with online degrees in the past twelve months from accredited online universities. Ashford University is fully accredited.

My sense this is an exciting time in Clinton, Iowa, and I’m glad I was given a chance to see it unfolding.

* * *

READER:

My final question: do you not see yourself as a conservative?

* * *

DR. FISHER:

You see me as a conservative. Okay. Can a person who grew up in a working class family not be a conservative?

Some people might see me as conservative in my dress, manner, appetites, and disposition, but others might see me as liberal in my freethinking, secular views, and radical ideas.

I’ve never been inclined to drink or smoke not because of religious convictions, but as a matter of choice.

I would imagine I have the Protestant work ethic in my bones although I am an Irish Roman Catholic who doesn’t go to church.

I am a registered Republican who voted for President Obama in the last election, and for Governor Charlie Crist, who ran as an Independent in the U.S. Senatorial race for Florida.

I don’t support abortion or the death penalty.

Nor do I support the idea of English being the official American language although I speak and write in no other language.

I am a heterosexual but I have no problem with homosexuals.

I don’t believe one race or nationality is superior to another, but the content of our character the true determiner.

I played football, basketball, track and baseball in grammar and high school, but only follow baseball with passion today.

I have great respect and affection for a precious few people but it is not important that they have equal respect and affection for me. I don’t like them because they like me, or dislike them because they dislike me. I like them because I choose to like them.

I am a Christian but do not think Christianity is superior to any other religion including agnosticism and atheism.

My life has not been built around ideology but unraveling the mystery of my consciousness.

From this you can decide what I am. I am too busy being.

* * *

THIS AND THAT -- REFLECTIONS OF A SUNDAY

THIS AND THAT – REFLECTIONS OF A SUNDAY

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

* * *

When I read President Barak Obama’s “Audacity of Hope” (2008), I was impressed with him as a writer. The man has skills for powerful metaphor and painting pictures with words. As famous as he is for his rhetoric, his writing is even more seductive. Yet, as many readers of my missives know, l have little affection for hope much less its audacity.

Goethe disparaged hope as a poor substitute for courage. Eric Hoffer, writing during the Cold War in his book, “The True Believer” (1951) wrote:

“If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent, or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.”

Hope seems to connect with our consciousness when we are buried in fear. Hope is a passive voice that demands nothing. Courage is an active voice that demands everything.

You cannot hope your way out of your financial straits. You must have the courage to reinvent yourself realizing this is the first day of the rest of my life.

You cannot hope to have a meaningful life but you can find it with courage.

You cannot hope to leave the ranks of the unemployed but you can open doors with courage.

The fear is the culprit that moves us towards hope; fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, fear of finding out that our cultivated biases are nothing but hot air.

There is no audacity inside hope but there is inside courage, which is actually the meaning of the word.

* * *

The working class, of which I am a part of, which stretches across Middle America, went to the polls November 2, 2010 and kicked out a lot of Democrats in Congress and replaced them with a lot of Republicans.

Now, those same voters will wait for the newly elected to miraculously create jobs, reduced the deficit, and restore the United States to working class bliss, as it was in the 1950s and 1960s.
Meanwhile, this same working class would like the entitlements to remain, and possibly even increase, while taxes to remain the same, or even be lower, and for the National Debt to somehow be reduced to manageable levels with no sacrifice on its part.

Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman says kindly, “Americans have little knowledge or interest in macroeconomics.”

Politicians know this, with the blues (Democrats) being voted out on by promises of the reds (Republicans), with the two clashing at the interface to produce the purples of dysfunctional government in gridlock.

An interesting thought, this could all change if this working class that went to the polls and voted November 2 didn’t behave like Sunday worshipers. Instead, it stayed engaged. How? By making it clear to its representatives in Congress that it was ready for a reality check; prepared to leave its comfort zone and share the burden of necessary austerity to stem the tide of national decline and reverse the trend.

Will this happen? Yes, as soon as pigs can fly.

* * *

The working middle class has been suspended in terminal helplessness or adolescence from 1950 through 1980. The past thirty years the working class has been coasting on its reputation while the rest of the world nibbled away at its lunch. First it was Japan, then South East Asia, then a rejuvenated Europe, and now it is Brazil, India and China.

Our factories became obsolescent over the past thirty years (1980 – 2010), and our working class obsolescent in its skill base with them. It was why I wrote “Work Without Managers” (1990), “The Worker, Alone” (1995), “Corporate Sin” (2000) and “A Look Back To See Ahead.”

The psychic billboards were like scarlet letters printed on our unconscious, but to no avail. I have put this failure to our reluctance to take control of our lives, to our failure to grow up and face reality. I have not been wrong about that. Every aspect of our institutional life has been like the ostrich with its head in the sand.

The working class has been programmed to be first counterdependent on the organization for its total well being with management acting as its surrogate parents. Corporate motivation for this was to realize total control. Abdication of control to corpocracy (and Congress is part of this corpocracy) is a luxury the working class can no longer afford. It needs to get off its duff, and embrace the chaos in creative endeavors.

* * *

Where I was wrong is that I forgot our juvenility was the springboard to our prominence. We have been like a child on the planet too innocent and ignorant to resist plunging into the impossible to make it possible. As a result, we are the most copied nation since the ancient Greeks. Our juvenile mindset is redefining the twenty-first century.

Citizens of the world born after 1980 are changing the face of this small planet, redefining what it means to be a human being socially, culturally, politically and religiously through electronic connections. .

If you observe people of all ages in shopping malls, sporting events, walking down the street, they are reading, texting or talking on some handheld electronic contraption. Indeed, people in Haiti in tent cities constructed after the earthquake of 2010 could be seen on television using their iPhones, iPads and some other electronic device.

* * *

An interesting phenomenon is taking place. School is no longer a place, but a space.

Learning is not a curriculum but a tool necessary to make connection. Juveniles are alert to the application of science and mathematics when before science and mathematics were just dull subjects they were forced to learn. They are learning the importance of science and mathematics in their electronic games. They see the connection.

Philosopher Eric Hoffer had practically no formal education, and spent much of his life as a longshoreman on the West coast of the United States, where he poured out his heart in a few short books near the end of his life. He died in 1983 at the age of 80, and missed the past thirty years of our decline. I doubt if many people read his books today. That is unfortunate because he knew why America’s juvenility made it great. Here is what he had to say about juveniles in “The Temper of Our Time” (1964):

“The juvenile, then, is the archetypal man in transition. When people of whatever age group and condition are subjected to drastic change they recapitulate to some degree the adolescent’s passage from childhood to manhood. Even the old when they undergo the abrupt change of retirement may display juvenile impulses, inclination, and attitudes.”

Most would agree we are in transition as a world society with little agreement, however, on transformational principles. I suspect if Hoffer were alive today he would remind us that the juvenile mind is an open not a closed mind, a mind that unshackles itself from precedence if precedence is a barrier to tactile functioning, that a juvenile mind engaged could be the mind of a seventy-year-old or a seven-year-old.

* * *

I have often referred to Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elitism as HYPE, first writing about this in “The Worker, Alone” (1995). My quarrel is not with these institutions, per se, as it is with William L. Livingston IV in “Design for Prevention” (2010), although I agree with him that they are dedicated to hindsight thinking, but with the precedence and mindset of those so programmed.
Typical graduates of these institutions have lived entitlement lives in which preschool cost their parents upwards of $10,000 for preschool, $20,000 for prep grammar school, $30,000 for prep high school, and $50,000 for HYPE matriculation, and that is per year.

They know little or nothing about working two jobs to make college tuition after completing public grammar and high school, much less cleaning their own rooms, taking out their own trash, or counting on a best friend as a tutor when in academic difficulty than to have a professional tutor as HYPE is likely to have.

Now, if HYPE graduated and lived out their productive life in a cave of their own kind impervious to the rest of us, I would have no quarrel. My problem is that they typically want to save us from ourselves, to bless us with the same entitlements that they experienced, to see that we live in the image and likeness of them so that they might feel good about their generosity and magnanimity.

It is not only Europe or Third World countries that are led by HYPE type of souls, but the United States of America as well, and they have led us to where we are today, into the soup.

* * *

That said the HYPE paradigm seems to be eroding at its foundation the same way established religions are eroding at theirs. You can see it in less ostentatious places of worship and in the changing nature of what purports to be higher education.

HYPE centers of academia are becoming less relevant and too expensive to maintain. Silicon Valleys are emerging not only across the United States but also across the globe. Moreover, the HYPE paradigm is now receiving serious competition from the “on-line” phenomenon.

In September 2010, I was in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa and I saw concrete evidence of this. Ashford University is an on line institution spreading its tentacles throughout the community. It purchased Mount St. Clare College’s grounds and complex that had been renamed “The Franciscan University.” The campus stands high on a bluff in picturesque splendor, looking east to the Mississippi River.

A friend gave me a tour of Ashford University throughout the town. Its growth in the community in only a decade is surprising. Along with the college, Ashford University has purchased the Clinton Country Club and golf course, and is now busy building classrooms, sports and recreational facilities on the country club grounds including a track and soccer field.

The university has also purchased a Clinton motel, which is to be turned into a dormitory for students. Several facilities have also been constructed to house on line services. Everywhere I looked I saw the imprimatur of the university. Clinton, Iowa has been a booming college town. It is doing so to augment the demand for a place as well as an electronic space for alternative education.

Ashford University has top accreditation and education at a fraction of the cost to attend HYPE or even state universities. It has touched the consciousness of the working class. Time will tell if it is of transitional and/or transformational significance. Little blips on the radar screen such as Ashford University are encouraging.

* * *

I have often said I wouldn’t have anything to read if it weren’t for Jewish writers. Recently, I read a book titled,“ Literary Genius” (2007). It was edited by Joseph Epstein, whom I suspect is Jewish, but who discusses “25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature” with nary a Jew in the bunch.

The fact I have read all twenty-five authors listed gave me pause. My wonder is why Muriel Spark, Philip Roth, Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Chaim Potok, to name a few Jewish writers, didn’t make the cut. Hemingway and Faulkner did. I say, “so much for lists.”

* * *

BB has influenced me in enjoying television as she does. This enjoyment is gravitating to disgust with network and cable television entertainment and infotainment. Gratuitous violence is the name of the game of network television, which I don’t find entertaining. Nor do find all these talking heads anything but boring. My wonder is why police reporting dominates local metropolitan nightly news. I know crime, larceny and murder are out there, but do we have to make celebrities of these criminals? Newsprint is no better. The quickest way to a headline is to do violence on others. Sad.

* * *

WHY DO WE BEAT UP ON OUR PRESIDENTS AND ELECTED POLITICIANS SO MUCH?

WHY DO WE BEAT UP ON OUR PRESIDENTS AND ELECTED POLITICIANS SO MUCH?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 31, 2010 (HALLOWEEN)

* * *

In 1964, I was a young manager in the Industrial Division of Nalco Chemical Company. I was a very active lad which was somewhat foreign to my disposition: Secretary of the Zoning Board of Lawrence Township of Marion County (Indianapolis), on the Executive Board of Power Engineering, member of the American Chemical Association, columnist for the Lawrence Township newspaper, contributor to the Catholic Messenger, and chairman of the Young Republicans of Marion county.

It was in that role that I dined and discussed politics with Republican candidates for the House of Representative, Senate, Governor, and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater for President of the United States. Senator Goldwater’s son came to head up a rally we had for him, along with a series of appearances across the country. Alas, I did not meet his father.

It was in that climate that I experienced a sense of how brutal politics can be, how irrational and mendacious. People around me thought the world would go to hell if Lyndon Baines Johnson was elected president, while the nimble vice president and now president (due to the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy) was claiming Goldwater would create a nuclear holocaust in Vietnam.

The scare tactics worked. Johnson won in a landslide.

Looking now, a half-century later, that time was child’s play compared to today. It was, however, very much like Halloween during the whole campaign with the attendant vitriolic, ghoulish, macabre and morbid caricatures of the “enemy’s list,” which was those running for office of the other party.

The thing I remember most about these candidates was that sitting across from them in someone’s house in the kitchen having a cup of coffee they invariably dropped their scary masks and were decent human beings. But once out on the stump, their sleeping Frankenstein rose out of their bowles with fire in their eyes and hot air out of their mouths.

In that sense, if anything, fifty years has seen this disposition of the satanic and the saintly transmogrify into the grotesque. After the extended Halloween of mid-term elections next Tuesday, November 2, 2010, new bodies and many old will fill the House of Representatives and the Senate, but otherwise, it will seem as if nothing has changed. So much for spending a half billion dollars on political campaigning in our democracy. So late we are smart.

* * *

WHAT YOU SAY SPEAKS SO LOUDLY I CANNOT HEAR YOU -- FRONTLINE: OCTOBER 26, 2010: THE SPILL

WHAT YOU SAY SPEAKS SO LOUDLY I CANNOT HEAR YOU – FRONTLINE OCTOBER 26, 2010: THE SPILL

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 28, 2010

* * *

FRONTLINE is a television public affairs program. You watch it. You see BP executives’ parade by along with other oil company executives. You get a glimpse into Congressional hearings as minor theatre.

The hearings remind you of when your father took you out to the woodshed to give you a beating. He feigned the performance with you cooperating by yelling in pain for those up at the house thinking you got your just do. Congressional hearings are a similar charade of complicity.

* * *

The program was not limited to the April 20, 2010 oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, or the subsequent horrors of millions of gallons of crude contaminating the Gulf and its ecosystem putting thousands out of work, but covered a broader spectrum of BP insolence and ineptitude.

FRONTLINE also covered the fire and explosion at the Texas City Refinery on March 23, 2005 where 15 workers were killed and 17 injured. Lawsuits of that disaster continue to this day.

The program in addition covered the Prudhoe Bay pipeline leak of some 267,000 US gallons into 1.9 areas of land in Alaska on March 2, 2006. The fortunate aspect of this spill was that it was in the winter. It did not get into the ecosystem, and was successfully recovered.

* * *

ALL TOO HUMAN

The viewer of this program sees Chairman of the Board of British Petroleum, Lord John Brown, taking on the multiple personality of Caligula. At first, we see him as noble, moderate and engaged as he pontificates his vision of the BP Empire.

He is viewed in seminar with his minions, whom he sees as “turtles,” like obedient Ninja Turtles. Then we see him becoming increasingly detached and irritated after a series of BP disasters, only to retreat into the sanctuary of his arrogance until the BP Board clips his wings plunging him into the perversity of schadenfreude. Yes, the program hints at a scandal.

He steps down and his curly headed best boy Ninja Turtle, Tony Hayward, steps into the breach. We see Sir Tony again in seminar addressing his Ninja Turtles on how safety and security are going to be the watchwords of his watch. No sooner said then there is the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

* * *

These upper class public school boys know how to talk but not necessarily how to walk the talk. Hayward, a disarmingly charming little fellow, seems always to want to be somewhere else definitely out of the frame. He confirms this when he complains to reporters about the incessant demands on him, “I want to get my life back.” That remark blew up in his face.

* * *

In viewing the Brown and Hayward appearances before Congressional hearings, you get the distinct impression they feel bored and exasperated by having to tolerate such inane questions from such a mediocre panel.

Hayward, I suspect largely because of his insouciance, is relieved of control and sent back to England to join his mates at his yacht club and sailing regatta.

In steps the tall blond American, who once ran AMOCO, Robert Dudley. He assumes a low profile until the well is capped. Then, surprisingly, he starts making like this is not all BP’s fault, adding self-indulgence to the BP executive profile.

* * *

As these men paraded across the television screen, I thought of Nietzsche’s “all too human,” men charged with major responsibilities unable to escape their collective pettiness, failing not only to act as managers but even less as leaders. They pranced, prowled, postured and pouted, as I would imagine Nero and Napoleon once did. They are the prototype of what constitutes leadership today. And they are legion in every aspect of American society. They are also the one percent earning up to fifty percent of our collective wealth. We wonder why we are having problems.

* * *

WHEN A WHISPER BECOMES A SHOUT

Such men as Brown, Haywood and Dudley can be imagined sitting together with their minions coming up with the strategy, “We have to cut costs by twenty-five percent across the board.”

This is whispered in conference but shouted into the heavens at operational levels across the globe.

Top management whispers its short-range thinking and the die is cast across the corporate world to its remotest parts. No one thinks of unintended consequences. Expediency rules. That means what is most career enhancing and will cause the least fuss is followed. Union workers won’t be touched but vulnerable professionals without clout will be dispatched.

The greatest savings, however, will be found in operations by cutting back on maintenance, engineering, research, training and development, safety and security. BP has been doing precisely this for years.

(1) At Prudhoe Bay, they cut back on running a pig through the pipelines to remove corrosion and interference, and in some cases quit the process altogether. In addition, they quit hiring highly qualified inspectors in the field and put unqualified people into the jobs to show they had an inspection corps. Moreover, repairs and maintenance were cut back.

(2) The Texas City Oil Refinery was in start-up mode and its isomerization unit malfunctioned. A tower began to fill with gasoline, overflowed, and the excess gasoline flowed into a back up unit, which overflowed sending a geyser of gasoline into the air with a tremendous explosion. Operations were in risk denial with risk blinders on, as the instrumentation meant to monitor and prevent this from happening had not been repaired.

(3) A hurricane hit an oilrig but did not cause damage to this forty-story tower. The collapse of two stanchions was due to a valve meant to discharge water in such an emergency. It had been installed backwards taking on water instead leading to the collapse.

(4) The oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico failed to use the proper mud and cylinder protection for the well. Maintenance procedures had been cut back or abandoned as part of the twenty-five percent cost reduction program. When Tony Hayward was asked about mud and cylinder protection, he claimed total ignorance as if that was not part of his job. “That’s operations.”

* * *

It is easy to point fingers at BP executives as if this cost cutting business was an isolated case, which it isn’t. The pressure to be profitable results too often in putting profits before people, and shareholders before good sense.

(1) The Prudhoe Bay disaster could have been avoided with a $100,000 investment, instead it cost millions;

(2) The Texas City Oil Refinery disaster could have been avoided with an investment of $1 million, instead it cost tens of millions;

(3) The faulty installation of the discharge valve for the oilrig in the hurricane could have been nothing; instead it cost millions to get the rig operating again;

(4) The oilrig disaster in the Gulf could have been avoided by following maintenance procedures for about $1 million; instead it is costing tens of billions of dollars and irrevocable damage to the ecosystem and the economic stability of the region.

* * *

LIVINGSTON HAS IT RIGHT

William L. Livingston IV, author of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), addresses the problems of organizational bondage with insight, penetrating logic, and courageous indifference to sacred cows.

He recognizes the flaws of institutional society, its infallibility and inability to learn from its mistakes much less its excesses. He sees management in its present iteration as an obstacle to progress. And he sees education from our most esteemed institutions to the common denominator of primary and secondary education in rigid conformity to hindsight thinking.

Livingston is an engineer, and the society that we all enjoy is the product of engineering. It has taken the science of research and developed that science into products and services that have created modernity.

One wonders if his book might find a different audience than the one he seeks. That was true of Jonathan Swift and his “Gulliver Travels” (1726). It was meant as a political satire aimed at the English people, and became a children’s classic. I sense that Livingston’s work meant for engineers surviving in a litigious climate might become a social commentary of our times.

* * *

THE WORLD IS LEAVING THE UNITED STATES BEHIND

From 1950 to 1980, it was said, as the United States goes, so goes the world. That was my era. It was also the time when a world decimated by World War Two in which tens of millions lost their lives. It was a world hungry for American products and services.

It was easy for a poor boy to get an education, to rise in the corporation, and to experience a privileged existence that was new in his family’s history. Detroit ruled and the big three automakers created the working middleclass by generous pay and benefits. Companies across the nation emulated Detroit.

Organizations grew fat and lazy with as many as twelve levels of management when there had only been three during the war. Public schools, public transportation, public parks and libraries, public recreation centers, public highways, bridges, dams and millions of miles of railroad tracks made mobility a common experience.

Working class philosopher Eric Hoffer once said, “The difference between the United States and the rest of the world is maintenance.” He was referring to how well kept our infrastructure, and how dedicated we were to excellence.

* * *

The last thirty years, 1980 to 2010, have seen much of the American dream, upward mobility, and being better off then our parents fade. Stability has given way to flux, confidence to fear, moderation to greed. Manners have given way to vulgarity, trust to deception, ambition to short cuts, and education from enlightenment to job training.

* * *

Alas, President Barak Obama has had the misfortune to come into office when the United States economy is shrinking for the first time in sixty years. Globalization and the technological revolution are the culprits in this tectonic shift, but many prefer to focus on Obama’s place of birth, religion and loyalty rather than the reality that drives our times.

We like to think of the United States as the lone Super Power, as No. 1, challenging anyone who would suggest otherwise. Rome was once in our shoes, so was Great Britain, and now it appears to be our turn to decline.

* * *

Thomas Friedman discusses in his column today (October 28, 2010) a report headed by Charles M. Vest, formerly MIT president, titled “Gathering Storm.” The report concludes, “In spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated in the past five years.” Here are some US rankings:

(1) Sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness;
(2) Fortieth in rate of change over the last decade;
(3) Eleventh among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25-to-34-year-olds who have graduated from high school;
(4) Sixteenth in college completion rate;
(5) Twenty-second in broadband Internet access;
(6) Twenty-fourth in life expectancy at birth;
(7) Twenty-seventh among developed nations in proportion of college students receiving degrees in science and engineering;
(8) Forty-eighth in quality K-12 math and science education;

Friedman writes:

“A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by the best scientists and engineers.”

* * *

We like comfort food, comfort lifestyles, comfort information, and comfortable demands placed on us. Comfort was an unknown luxury to anyone born in the 1930s of modest circumstance.

My generation when young could look back and remember bread and unemployment lines. We accepted the fact that we had no safety net; nobody to bail us out if we got into trouble because nobody we knew had any money or influence. We gutted it out. Some of us got lucky, and got an education and rode the 1950s to the 1980s with relative ease.

Looking back, we now feel blessed. There is a strange sense of freedom when you know it is all up to you. There were, of course, distractions but nothing compared to what there are now. There were temptations, again, but nothing compared to today. It is perhaps impossible for young people to understand how puritanical were social constraints.

The main difference was the world was thought to be America’s oyster and we behaved according to that inflated confidence. The last thirty years (1980 to 2010) have given Americans the feeling that the world is running on another track.

Double-digit unemployment (9.6 unemployment is a myth) could be with us for another generation or more. We still glory in our press clippings, in our celebrity while our healthcare costs are more than most other advanced societies but inferior in delivery. Our education is more expensive than other advanced societies and as “Gathering Storm” shows leaving something to be desired.

The irony is that other Third World countries such as China and India are now competing with us not only economically but also in terms of obesity and associated diseases with obesity. We have exported our appetites but not our modesty and discipline. So, I think Friedman is wrong to blame government alone. This is much bigger than government. It is the idea that once was America.

* * *

FIRE IN THE MIND: NEUROSCIENCE AND THE FISHER PARADIGM©™®

FIRE IN THE MIND: NEUROSCIENCE AND THE FISHER PARADIGM©™®

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

* * *

“There never has been any doubt that, under certain circumstances, emotions disrupt reasoning. (On the other hand) reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior. The counterintuitive connection between absent emotion and warped behavior may tell us something about the biological machinery of reason.”

Antonio Damasio’s “Descartes’ Error” (2006)

* * *

Reference:

It has been a lifelong fascination of mine to understand why I have been successful given my contrary disposition. Trained in science I gravitated to technical sales without any training, but experienced alarming success. Then I was promoted into corporate management, again without any training, and managed further success, but experienced disenchantment with corpocracy. High strung, bookish, a loner, and narcissistic, I retired in my thirties, went back to graduate school to find answers acquiring a terminal degree in industrial and organization psychology. Consulting in organizational development (OD) followed. At every turn, I was reprogrammed in cognitive rational vertical, and critical thinking, but experienced success despite rather than because of this programming due to counterintuitive lateral and creative thinking, all of which I picked up as my life unfolded. My passion over the past forty years has been an attempt to communicate this in such a way that others would find it useful to them. Alas, I must admit in this attempt I have not been successful. Perhaps Antonio Damasio, a pure scientist, may have the answer.

* * *

Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist. He spent twenty-nine years (1976 – 2005) at the University of Iowa where he was M. W. Van Allen Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology in the Medical School. He is now at the University of Southern California where he directs the new Brain and Creativity Institute.

Feelings I believe have been the key to my success, and Dr. Damasio has researched and written two powerful books on the subject: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (2006) and The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in Making of Consciousness (1999). He has come to believe we think with our whole bodies. I have no doubt.

These books hold special interest to me as he charts the power of feelings and mind in decision-making with an interesting set of hypotheses. He sees the brain-body-mind as a single entity. His prose is straightforward although he does go into neural anatomy, neurophysiology, neuropsychology, and brain chemistry in support of his theses. The discussion here is germane to neuroscience as it relates to consciousness and decision-making. .

* * *

He looks at feelings, culture, experience and mind in holistic terms, which is a departure from conventional neurology and traditional medicine. I am not a neuroscientist or a medical doctor, but have found evidence in his hypotheses supportive of my work in OD. In fact, my career has benefited from taking feelings seriously, listening to their messages that have bombarded my senses.

Feelings have no language but can read an individual or a situation more accurately than the mind can alone. It was the basis of the “Fisher Conflict Model of Conflict Resolution” (see Confident Selling for the 90s, 1992), and subsequently led to the creation of THE FISHER PARADIGM©™® (see www.fisherofideas.com, blog entry January 10, 2010).

The motivation to create this paradigm was to demonstrate the limits of cognitive thinking is in the decision-making process, and to show how consciousness involves the whole person and not simply the brain for wont of a better way of putting it.

Success in OD has come as a result of sensitivity to the conflicting stimuli encountered in interventions, and then letting that data percolate through the senses often translated into counterintuitive proposals for action. Feelings are like a FIRE IN THE MIND that ignites the situation with meaning beyond words and what is expected.

That said it is difficult to penetrate cultural programming and see and feel the situation with fresh senses. It demands thinking without thinking, that is, allowing your whole person to speak to you.

Damasio sees a convergent of BODY-MINDED BRAIN as the factor that leads to this increased consciousness in the decision-making.

It is a triangular typology as is THE FISHER PARADIGM

(1) Personality Profile (person),
(2) Geographic Profile (place) and
(3) Demographic Profile (thing).

The convergence of these entities generates intuition, something outside the norm.

Damasio’s triangular typology might be expressed as:

(1) The mind (self);
(2) The topographical (body), and
(3) Consciousness (brain).

The convergence of these entities generates decision-making action. What follows are liberal quotations excised from Damasio’s work with occasional comments or references to THE FISHER PARADIGM.

* * *

INSTITUTIONAL MEDICINE IS NOT HOLISTIC

The mind has been of little concern to mainstream medicine; in fact, the chief focus of the medical specialties to the present time is on the study of the brain, brain diseases, and neurology.

(Comment: Charlie Rose on PBS has had a twelve part series of the top scientists in neurology and brain medicine and not one word was devoted to mind.).

The net result of this has been a remarkable neglect of the mind as a function of the body.

The mind has been left as a major concern of religion and philosophy.

The body has been cut off from the mind. Psychosomatic illnesses have been considered just that, in the patient’s head.

Discounted is the placebo effect, that is, when a patient is not given a medicine but a placebo, yet registers similar or more positive results.

The fact that psychological disturbances can cause diseases of the body is just being taken seriously. Psychopathology can be increased when the human heart is in conflict with itself.

The rift with Western medicine between body and mind has seen a substantial increase in an alternative focus of medicine including acupuncture and herbal medicine.

Modern medicine has “cured” a number of dreaded diseases such as small pox, diphtheria, polio, and controlled a number of others.

Current success of alternative medicine is a symptom of public dissatisfaction with traditional medicine, especially those rooted in non-Western traditions of medicine, and a compensatory response to the problem.

Bruised feelings, desperate pleas for help from pain and suffering, the loss of a sense of inner balance, the desperate cry for happiness, to which most humans aspire, is not likely to diminish soon.

With all the genome research, with all the identity of certain diseases or conditions with genes, much of each brain circuitry at any moment of adult life is individual and unique, truly a reflection of the individual’s history and circumstances.

To understand in a satisfactory manner the brain that fabricates human mind and human behavior, it is necessary to take into account its social and cultural context. And that makes the endeavor truly daunting.

Complicating this further individuals operate in collectives of like thinking and believing humans.

The most elaborate social conventions and ethical structures by which we live, however, must have arisen culturally and been transmitted likewise. The mind and behavior of such individuals operate in a specific cultural and physical environment.

Said another way, individuals are not shaped merely by activity-driven circuitries and even less do genes alone shape them.

Life is about choices. Pain and pleasure are the levers required for instinctual and acquired strategies to operate efficiently. These levers control the development of social decision-making strategies.

The brain plots the pain-pleasure representation of a local body state change. This is a somatosensory (body feeling) perception derived from the skin. The second results from a more general change in body state are an emotion. The perception in that landscape is modulated further in the brain by neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, for example, endorphins (the body’s own morphine), which are important in the perception of a “pleasure landscape.” This can cancel or reduce the perception of a “pain landscape”

(Comment: in other words, feelings can give a clue to the state of the landscape if alert to them).

Suffering puts us on notice. Suffering offers the best protection for survival.

(Comment: When you experience unease, stimuli is bombarding your consciousness telling you what is about. It is an alarm, a signal to direct your attention to envelop the landscape not bothering at the moment to process the information but only to collect it. Patience allows the information to seep into your consciousness unravel itself of its complexities into constructs that eventually provide relevance and meaning.).

* * *

THE BODY-MINDED BRAIN OR THINKING WITH YOUR WHOLE PERSON

The body provides a ground reference for the mind.

When a memory of the seen landscape is formed, that memory will be a neural record of many of the organismic changes just described, some of which happen in the brain itself and some of which happen in the body proper.

This is the landscape of homeostasis and a state of functional balance. The body proper is not passive. The body acts continuously on the environment (actions and explorations did not come first) and the environment acts continuously on the body. This interaction is necessary for survival and to avoid danger. Perceiving (danger) is as much about acting on the environment as it is as it is about receiving signals from it.

The idea that mind derives from the entire body as an ensemble may sound counterintuitive at first. The body contributes more than life support and modulatory effects to the brain. It contributes a content that is part and parcel of the workings of the normal mind.

* * *

[Comment: This is taken from THE FISHER PARADIGM.

In the 1970s I was a contract consultant to the Fairfax County Police Department. In the process of interviewing scores of detectives, when I brought up a sensitive issue, they would adjust their shoulder holsters.

Fast forward to Washington, D.C., after going to a play, and having dinner with the Secretary of State of Iowa, I called FCPD for a ride back to my hotel in Fairfax City, some twelve miles away. The officer couldn’t pick me up for an hour so I went walking down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was 2 a.m. I suddenly noticed three black youths walking parallel to me across the street. They ran across the street about 10 yards from me on my side of the street, jiving as I approached. I sensed danger but didn’t break my stride.

Two things passed through my mind. I remembered that a US Senator had been accosted and nearly killed recently in this manner, and then I remembered how detectives adjusted their shoulder holsters. I was aware of my stature, six-four, two twenty, in a three piece suit and topcoat, ramrod straight posture, quickly imitating a police officer, having spent some nine months with them, adjusting my phantom holster, and saying, “A little past your curfew, isn’t it boys?”

They first looked at me stunned, and then quickly recovered moving aside for me to pass, saying as I did so, “There goes the fuzz.”

When I shared this with the police officer who picked me up at 3 a.m., he said, “You probably saved your life.”

Lessons learned:

(1) Think with your whole body, mind, and brain;
(2) Remember we are all animals with an instinct for survival;
(3) Self-preservation is the animal’s code;
(4) We have the same alarm system as other animals;
(5) Don’t discount intuition;
(6) Be alert to what instinct is bombarding your brain to tell you;
(7) OD educates you to think with your whole person and to use all your senses.

We think and feel with our mind that is in our whole body and not simply isolated in our brain.]

* * *

Damasio continues:

Let us return to the example of your midnight walk home (comment: Damasio’s example dovetailed with the one above). Your brain has detected a threat, namely the person following you, and initiates several complicated chains of biochemical and neural reactions. You will be aware3 that you are in danger that you are now quite alarmed and perhaps should walk faster. The “you” I will call “self” is based on activities throughout your entire body, that is, the body proper and in the brain.

What the brain constructs to describe the situation, and the movements formulated as a response to the situation, depend on mutual brain-body interactive chemistry.

Making mind arise out of the whole body rather than out of a disembodied brain is compatible with a number of assumptions:

(1) The brain generates not only motor responses (actions), but also mental responses (images in the mind). Those images enhance survival by a greater appreciation of external circumstances, perceiving more details about an object, locating it more accurately in space, refining motor responses, predicting consequences by way of imagining the scenario and planning actions conducive to achieving the best imagined scenario (Comment: adjusting the phantom shoulder holster imagining myself as if a plainclothes police officer).

(2) Since minded survival was aimed at the survival of the whole person, the primordial representation of the minding brain had to concern the body proper in terms of the structure and functional state, including the external and internal actions with which the person responded to the environment (Comment: I did not break my stride imagining myself in mind as well as in body deportment a police officer).

We are actually far more aware of the overall state of the body than we usually admit, but it is apparent that as vision, hearing, and touch evolved, that attention usually allocated to their component of overall perception increased accordingly. Thus the perception of the body proper more often than not was left precisely where it did, and does the best job: “in the background.”

I am not suggesting that body representations dominate the landscape of our mind (moments of emotional upheaval excepted), but the images of body state are in the background and ready to spring forward. I prefer to think that the body remains “in the loop” for reasoned outlined.

I am immensely interested in the subject or consciousness and am convinced that neurobiology can begin to approach the subject, confining my comments to one aspect that is pertinent to the discussion on images, feelings, and somatic (body) markers. It concerns the neural basis of the self, the understanding of which might shed some light on the process of subjectivity, a key feature of consciousness.

The self recognizes and understands the situation. The self locates the problem from the vantage point of selfhood. The frame of reference is not different from the one they would use were they referring to a problem with their knees or elbows.

You cannot have a self without wakefulness, arousal, and the formation of images, but technically you can be awake and aroused and have images formed in sectors of your brain and mind, while having a compromised self.

(Comment: Damasio then goes into pathological alterations of wakefulness and arousal that cause stupor, vegetative state, and coma, conditions in which the self vanishes entirely. Our interests here is in the healthy engaged self.).

In using the notion of self, I am in no way suggesting that all the contents of our minds are inspected by a single central knower and owner, and even less that such an entity would reside in a single brain place. I am saying, though, that our experiences tend to have a consistent perspective.

(Comment: This is important in the scheme of OD work.).

I imagined this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. The source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the person, and the slowly evolving elements of his autobiography

(Comment: Damasio emphasizes autobiography. Somehow I realized the importance of this long ago, and have used it as a source to my OD work. Readers have commented on this, wondering if I am self-conscious about this. The answer is “no.” OD work has no depth without its biographical nature and narrative.).

You might imagine this biographical narrative as a representative picture (a sort of file) that is held in the association cortices of many brain sites rather than as a filing cabinet. This defines our person. Over and above such categorization, there are unique facts from our past that are constantly activated as mapped representations: where we live and work, what our jobs is precisely, our own name and the names of close kin and friends, of city and country.

We have a dispositional memory, a collection of recent events, along with their approximate temporal continuity, and we also have a collection of plans, a number of imaginary events we intend to make happen or expect to happen. This is memory of the possible future.

This endless reactivation of updated images about our identity constitutes a sizable part of the state of self.

What is happening to us now is, in fact, happening to a concept of self-based on the past, including the past that was current only a moment ago. At each moment of the state of self is constructed from the ground up. It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade.

The concept of self is a coordinated activity of multiple brain regions, but our self, or even better our metaself, only “learns” about that “now” an instant later. We are hopelessly late for consciousness.

DAMSAIO’S TRIANGULAR TYPOLOGY

When the brain generates a set of responses to an entity, the existence of a representation of self does not make that self know that its corresponding subject is responding. The self cannot know. However, the “metaself” might know, provided:

(1) The brain would create some description of the perturbation;
(2) The description generated an image of the process;
(3) The image of the self-perturbed would then be displayed in a rapid interpolation of the image that triggered the perturbation.

The description does not use language although it can be translated into language

(Comment: This is similar to the epiphany process toward intuition as described by THE FISHER PARADIGM. Insight registers as a feeling without language in a subjective characterization.).

Having an image alone is not enough, even if we invoke attention and awareness, as they are properties of a self as it experiences images. Having both images and self is not sufficient either. One would not understand what the references consist of, or what they achieve. How subjectivity would emerge from such a process would be entirely mysterious.

[Comment: Damasio suggests a third-party neuron ensemble in a “convergence zone” that supports the images of the object and the images of the self in a reciprocal interconnection that subjectively brings the fontal brain (thinking) and the limbic system (feeling) into play.]

An object that is being represented, a person responding to the object, and a state of the self in the process of changing because of the person’s response to the object – are held simultaneously in working memory and attended, side-by-side in early sensory cortices.

(Comment: Feelings become facts on a subjective basis and are treated as such.).

Subjectivity emerges during the latter step when the brain is producing not just images of an object, not just imagines of the person’s responses to the object, but a third kind of image, that of a person in the act of perceiving and responding to an object.

(Comment: This describes my reaction and behavior with the three boys mentioned earlier.)

Language may not be the source of the self, but it certainly is the source of the “I.” Francis Crick’s hypothesis on consciousness is focused on the problem of image making and leaves out subjectivity altogether.

(Comment: This is not surprising as scientists are committed to objectivity often at the expense of their subjective nature. In OD work, subjectivity is crucial to success as we see, feel and think regardless of the stimuli with our whole person.)

* * *

MY FINAL WORD

At the core of human consciousness is the consciousness of feeling, experiencing self, the very thought of oneself connected to yet separated from significant others. With the OD practitioner, this is the primary tool in his toolkit. This is a modest attempt to make this apparent.

* * *

WOW! REACTION TO “CLICHÉS THAT HAVE WORKED FOR ME”

WOW! REACTION TO “CLICHÉS THAT HAVE WORKED FOR ME”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 14, 2010

* * *

REFERENCE:

This has been the greatest response of the some 562 missives published on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) to date.

There is a consistent theme to the reaction to this missive, and because of that, I’m sharing two representative comments. There was, however, reference made to the length of the missive by some suggesting it was informative but a bit too long.

I pondered this. My inclination is to read THE NEW YORK REVIEW, THE LONDON REVIEW, FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND THE SMITHSONIAN. Many essays in these publications are as long as 10,000 words. Length has never bothered me, but I have trained myself to be a fast reader. I'll have to work on this.

Another common comment is that there is an edge to my writing. I find that true of many of the writers I read.

One reader has reminded me how indebted I am to my wife, "Beautiful Betty (BB), to which I concur. He implied that she has softened me, or rounded off some of my rough edges.

Speaking to that, several years ago, during a seminar I was conducting, I admitted to this edginess. After that seminar, a lady came up and asked, “What do you read?”

“Books and periodicals,” I answered putting my stuff together to leave.

“No, that is not my question,” she smiled demurely. “What do you read? That is my question.”

I told her I read novels, biographies, histories, books on psychology, sociology, philosophy, theology, and such.”

“What kind of novels?"

"Dostoyevsky, Camus, Sartre, Joyce and writers of that ilk. Mysteries. I tend to read every novel my favorite mystery writers have written. I read some of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and …”

“I get the point. What type of biographies?”

“All kinds! Of historical personalities, philosophers, religious leaders, men of the soft and hard sciences, medicine.”

“What kind of histories?”

“Mainly American and Western Civilization, but also of Eastern religions through Western interpreters. Pardon me, but where is this going?”

“Be patient. I’m not through. What don’t you read?”

“What don’t I read? I’m not much into sci-fi, or comic novels, don’t read true crime or horror. I have read Steven King, but liked only THE STAND. I don’t read celebrity biographies or many national bestsellers. Does that help?”

“My reading differs with yours, but I sense you are a prisoner of your reading the same as I am. Think about that.” Then she left.

If she is right, and she may be, my inability to write more clearly or poignantly could boil down to what I read. Obviously, writers have influenced me. Still, it is a handicap readers in the end are the final determiners. In any case, readers of this piece have been more than generous.

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

Thank you for this piece. It is the best you have written in months, maybe even more than a year.

Always, when you write from the heart there is so much more meaning than the academic pieces. Those are very good, however, and informative and greatly appreciated.

When you write about life, there is a very different tone. You even seem to use the language differently. It is softer but still hard-edged, like a velvet gloved iron fist.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) was somewhat like that. In this piece, you have obviously advanced your ability to tell a story with heart.

Everybody wants to be a critic, and I apologize if that’s what this sounds like. It’s difficult to explain why this resonated with me to the extent that it did.

Michael

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

Thank you for your comment. It is deeply appreciated. I write the best I can every day, and hopefully, the practice will help me deserve your comments.

Be always well,

Jim

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Jim,

This is one of the most powerful pieces of writing I have ever read. You put in a nutshell what life is, and should be about. I thank you for this piece of prose. It has impressed and influenced me in more ways than I can express. Thank you.

Mary

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Mary,

Your comments are humbling. Thank you.

Be always well,

Jim

CLICHÉS THAT HAVE WORKED FOR ME – CONVERSATION WITH MY COLLEGE BOUND GRANDSON

CLICHÉS THAT HAVE WORKED FOR ME – CONVERSATION WITH MY COLLEGE BOUND GRANDSON

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

* * *

When the sun is setting on a long satisfying day, it is easy to forget how it rose with worrying uncertainties. The same could be said for a life. Every life is an adventure with a story to tell.

Recently, I had a brief visit with one of my grandsons, a college bound young man I see far too little of as he lives up north. He has grown tall and straight, quiet but funny, with an engaging personality and a captivating smile.

It has not been an easy road to his eighteen years. He has seen more of life than a young person should and still remain wholesome but he has. If anyone deserves to find happiness, and to succeed in life, he does. He has paid his dues.

What is most engaging about him, he doesn’t consider his situation unique. Nor does he believe it makes him special. It doesn’t. It does imbue him, however, with maturity rare for his generation.

He has been forced by circumstances to make the most of difficult circumstances, and to take nothing or anybody much less anything for granted. He is light years ahead of most eighteen-year-olds. So, I felt somewhat taken aback when he asked me what was the key to my success.

It is easy to wax philosophical with this ambivalent word, success, and sidestep the failures and regrets that have been part of the journey.

That said it was clear he wanted something to grab hold of when only truisms came to mind. He knows little of our family history, of the mainly accidental journey through which I, and now he have sprung from our mainly Irish family tree.

I sat there wondering what to say, realizing I have enjoyed an incredibly blessed life often despite rather than because of what I am. How to share this? I told him I could only express what seemed to work for me. “That is what I want to hear, bumpa,” he said.

* * *

THE IMPORTANCE OF PASSION

The most important thing to have is passion for what you do. Passion not only energizes you but fills your body and soul with spiritual health that sustains you when the unexpected occurs, or when the inevitable disappointment throws you off stride.

Passion is not the drive to become but the satisfaction of being who you are where you are doing what you are doing.

The purpose of life at every stage is what you are doing, not what you plan to do or hope to become but what you are doing right now.

Passion fills your body and soul with joy. Consider this. You work on something with all your being. It can be a sport, a project at school or around the house, anything that drains you to the limits of your energy. How do you feel? Exhausted? Of course.

You take a shower; feeling clean inside and out, refreshed, satisfied knowing you have done your best. Something happens. You start to feel your energy returning. You see everything more clearly. You are ready to go forward, ready to accept the consequences of your investment in time, energy, and sacrifice.

There is a simple formula that describes this:

PAIN + RISK = GROWTH

From the time we are small, we like to stand against the wall and see how much we have grown since the last time we measured ourselves. Growth is important to us. It is easy for us to think of growth in terms of our physical stature. It is less easy for us to think of growth in terms of our mental, psychological, emotional and moral stature.

Early on, we have a passion for things, a passion to dress ourselves, to do what we like, yes, and to do what we are told not to do.

We see others older than we are and want to be, do, and enjoy what they are allowed to do. We want to imitate them and to derive the benefits they have amassed by simply being older. We don’t see who and what and how they are in terms of passion much less pain and risk. We see them only in terms of what they are allowed to do versus the way we are treated.

The pain of growing physically is something everyone experiences. Yet even physical growth involves risks that either enhance that growth or retard it. You are eighteen and have seen more than most teenagers have seen in terms of how taking risks that are not life enhancing can retard your physical well being, and more importantly, can damage that precious mind of yours.

A life is a terrible thing to waste, true, but even that idea is subjective. If you are following your passions, whatever they are, your life will not be wasted.

Some may say you should be this or that because otherwise “you are wasting your talent.” Implied in this is that you are wasting your life. A life that follows its passions is like a plant that seeks the nourishment of the sun, settles in nutrient soil, and an enhancing climate for growth.

The problem with this is that that sun, that soil and that climate become revealed to us, if we have the alertness to heed that revelation, which occurs in a series of tectonic shifts in our experience. It is almost like osmosis. It permeates our temperament, in most cases, with an ultimate epiphany, but it has been working to that moment from the beginning.

You tell me you have no idea what you want to be. That is all right. Listen to your gut; yes, I said your gut. It will tell you if you are on the path of your passions. That means you must pay attention to what gives you satisfaction, to what puts a sparkle in your eye, and a bounce in your step. There is no honest work that is not worthy of passion. There is no honest vocation that is not worthy of passion. There is no fulfilling relationship, despite what others may tell you is wrong for you, that is not worthy of passion.

Passion has no interest in competing and comparing. Passion has no interest in being what everyone else says is important. Passion has no interest in celebrity, in making people envious, in stimulating admiration. Passion is all about the effective utilization of your inherent ability in the service of others, which is the best way to serve yourself.

* * *

THE IMPORTANCE OF DEVELOPING A SKILL BASE

Your grandfather has had a passion for ideas and learning all his life. When he was a little boy, he was surrounded by men who never stayed in school very long, who hated school, hated formal education, thought reading books was effeminate, thought that the world was against them because of their ethnicity and religion.

They were of the opinion that the die was cast, that they were of a class and cast system with no options other than to gather around the kitchen table smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee complaining of how they were exploited at work by their bosses.

They talked in stereotypes. I didn’t know what that word meant but they repeated it enough that it stuck in my mind. “All rich people were corrupt.” "All politicians were crooks except President Roosevelt.” “All pious people were hiding something.” “People who dressed to the nines were putting on airs.” “All people with fancy homes were trying to keep up with the Joneses.”

Sitting around that kitchen table in gossipy collusion they seemed to derive pleasure from the practice. I noticed my mother, who was hard of hearing, poured coffee and cut pieces of fudge cake for them, and emptied their ashtrays but didn’t say anything. In fact, my da seemed to enjoy the company with no need to participate. I found that odd.

It was my mother who broke me out of my trance. She became my coach, counselor, mentor and friend pointing out the importance of a “skill base.” She didn’t use that expression. She talked of how I was to escape the kitchen table. My mother did not look at things in sophisticated language, but in earthy, pragmatic and perceptive ways.

It may seem cold but nonetheless true. She saw me as a commodity for sale, an amorphous bit of protoplasm with certain possibilities that would take nurturing and grooming. She started on me from the age of five when she came into my life after spending much of those earlier years in hospital.

It started with my appearance; the way I looked carried myself spoke and even walked. She said, “You are going to be tall, good looking, with a massive body that people cannot help but notice. Don’t ever forget that.” Well, of course, I did and paid for the trouble. But she was right about presence. It counts for more than it should.

My mother was a reader, a fast reader. She could read a book a day, smoking her cigarettes and drinking her coffee. Since she had poor hearing, it might have been compensation for that fact. In any case, she persuaded me that books had power and would open my mind to see itself, naked.

She told me that life was not a career, but a series of jobs. The first real job of a child, she said, was attending school. “If you don’t have a passion for school,” she said, “it is unlikely you will have much of a passion for other jobs.” She added, “Don’t blame your poor performance on your teachers. The most important teacher you will ever have is yourself. Pay attention to that teacher.”

This made little sense to me at the time. I asked her to explain. “What happens in school when you are prepared when Sister (the nun at St. Patrick's School) calls on you?”

Puzzled, I said, “I answer.”

“What is Sister’s expression?”

Still puzzled, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Does she smile? Does she compliment you?”

“She smiles.”

My mother lights a cigarette on the butt of the one in her mouth. “Progress, Jimmy, is a series of smiles and frowns in every job you will ever have. The more smiles you can produce the greater the progress you will make, and the greater the progress you make the more freedom you will enjoy.”

“Does da cause a lot of smiles?”

“Jimmy, and I don’t expect you to understand this, but your father is one of those people that has never reached the level of smiles or frowns. He is taken for granted and treated that way.”

“You are right. I don’t understand.”

“What I’m trying to say is he is not treated as a person because he could disappear tomorrow and nothing would change and nobody would miss him other than us.”

I started to cry because I had seen instances in my own presence when he was treated poorly. Anger welled up in me. I had a temper. My mother watched me through a smoker’s haze.

“You look like your father right now.” I wondered if that was good or bad. “He gets upset, which is all right if you know why you’re upset, and do something about it, but he doesn’t. Anger is not bad if you know what caused it. It is my job to help you use your anger to bring more smiles than frowns to those that have authority over you.”

* * *

Now, why am I telling you this?

It wasn’t until I came back from South Africa in 1969, half a life ago, that I realized that my drive, my passion, the multifaceted skill base that I had developed that put me in such demand was not a matter of my self-invention as I had thought. It was a result of the attention of my mother.

I, as a parent, thought my job was to create an affluent climate in which my children would find their own way, as I thought I had found mine. How arrogant.

I had forgotten those conversations with my mother, forgotten her prodding, of saying when I came home from school with three A’s and a B, that it wasn’t four A’s.

I never urged my children on as she had me. I left your mother and your uncles and aunt on their own, on what I guess could be called automatic pilot. I did them a disservice. They found their own way, but without my help. My mother installed a moral compass in me, a direction finder. Do my children have such a guidance system? I don’t think so.

My mother’s wisdom and drive contributed much to my surprisingly easy life. Some may say she lived through me, and perhaps she did The point is she understood her son’s personality was much like his father’s, and therefore knew that she had her work cut out for her to see her son got more smiles than frowns.

Discipline, direction, pain and risk, and making choices that enhanced what I had to offer came because of the compass my mother installed in me. You have had to install yours in yourself. That is admirable, and much more rare.

* * *

THE POWER OF PERSONALITY

It is a gift to be liked by most people as you are, to be able to make them laugh and feel comfortable and not threatened, to take pleasure in seeing you succeed and being happy for you.

You could have a chip on your shoulder but you don’t. In that sense, you are the superior of your grandfather. I say this to give you some sense of how I’ve handicapped myself with my personality whereas you have not. I confess that I think personality is rated much higher than it should be. I would prefer it be in balance with our essence, that is, our talent. That said we tend to surround ourselves with people like us, which exaggerates our weaknesses at the expense of our strengths.

Over the years, I have hired people and interviewed many more as part of an interviewing team. I have always rated competence higher than personality. Stated another way, being qualified for the job has been my primary interest.

My colleagues often differed with me on this seeing the most important criteria:

(1) Being comfortable with the person, and
(2) Seeing the person fitting in the organization as it is.

Once these criteria were satisfied they assured themselves that the person was also qualified or that he or she would prove to be so in time.

It should then come as little surprise that performance appraisals, promotions and raises were likewise associated with these same criteria.

I am speaking to the choir, I know, because you have already worked this out. You listen, study, observe and absorb information with a smile without saying anything, or you make a joke to relax others, and not appear threatening.

Even so, there will be some people who will be more comfortable with you than others. It is not always the people with whom we are most comfortable that are best for us.

For example, I appreciate people with ideas. I am attracted to people who question things, but they don’t always like me to question their thinking. They may withdraw, go silent, and no longer seek my input much less my questioning mind. That is all right with me. I still contact them. Why? I appreciate their minds. I’m not interested in their approval. To put it another way, I’m not looking for friends or to influence people. I’m looking to learn. Ideas turn me on.

You are a social person and like the company of friends. Choose friends, as my mother would say, wisely, that is, that enhance you as you are and as the person you want to be. Your grandfather’s friends are primarily ideas, and ideas are often in books, ideas often of people who no longer walk this earth.

It took South Africa for this to register. I love privacy and the freedom to think in the loving company of your grandmother Betty. It has nothing to do with me being a good or great thinker. It has everything to do with the person I am and choose to be. There are no absolutes in this calculus, only the flawed personification of the personal. Ultimately, life is all about choices.

* * *

THE POWER OF BEING

We have this idea that security is the end all, that we should do everything to enhance our security. We as a society have given up much of our freedom and privacy for this security. We even stay in jobs we hate because of security. We think one day we can embrace the security of retirement when we have never found time to live. .

The greatest threat to being is not security. That is like putting the cart before the horse. The greatest threat to being is fear of life.

So, many people work themselves to death; burn the candle at both ends to keep their stress levels down, and then limp into old age broken in body and spirit needing transplants or a score of prescription drugs to keep them vertical.

You are a good listener. I have not always been one. Several people along the way told me I should be doing what I’m doing here, writing, but I put it off until “I could afford it.” Now most passion is spent, most of that light that could change random thoughts into gold is gone. Do I exaggerate? I don’t think so. Most scientific breakthroughs were made when men and women were young; the same is true of great art, literature, and music.

Now, I know I said earlier you should listen to your gut. I repeat it now because your gut is that voice that bombards your senses. It is that nudge from inside that speaks to you. It would be wise to give it a listen.

I work harder now at my writing than I ever did at a well paying job with much less to show for it economically. That may surprise you but it is true.

The irony is that had I started a writing career when I was nineteen as a professor advised me this would all be academic. For you see, do what you love and the money will follow. I don’t need the money now so I am content to entertain myself by scribbling.

* * *

THE IMPORTANCE OF LUCK

It is safe to say that I have had more than my share of luck in life.

In fact I have often fallen into things. For starters, I was born at the right time in the right place with the right industries opening up, while the world was exploding in Post-WWII expansionism.

I also developed the right skill base at the right time when there was a demand for such skills. Again, through the encouragement of a mentor, I managed to get a Ph.D. when such alphabetic letters after your name got people to take you seriously.

I would like to end this cliché driven conversation with yet another cliché:

Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

My mother once told me that I was insecure. I would have to agree. It is why I am so self-centered. Alan W. Watts taught me the wisdom of insecurity. My mother had no idea who Watts was. She knew there was only one way for me to deal with my insecurity, and that was by being prepared. I took her advice to heart.

Luck is always out there waiting to be grasped like a brass ring. Luck demands that we do our best and accept the consequences of the doing, that we treat ourselves as our best friend by being kind and understanding of our limitations. This is the only way to be sincerely kind to others.

When you see people who are hard on others, count on them being much harder on themselves. Kindness is a virtue of self-acceptance.

Finally, life was meant to be our story, a story that others can build on, like I hope you can build on mine.

With love,

Your Bumpa