QUESTION OF "MATURE ADULT WORKERS" -- Excerpt from THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (2nd Edition, December 2014)

QUESTION OF “MATURE ADULT WORKERS” – Excerpt from THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (2^nd Edition)

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

© October 15, 2014

Most workers within my experience take it on the chin as victims far more often than they fight for their jobs and rights as victors. They behave as dependent children to management, or counter dependent adolescents to the company. Workers fail to fight for their jobs and rights before they are put in jeopardy, because behaving as children, they fail to pay attention.

This could not happen to mature adults for reason:

Mature adult workers question work related decisions initiated by top management, because it is far removed from “where the rubber hits the road,” and therefore clearly ignorant of all the requirements of work. Mature adults put their special knowledge to work at the level of consequences in a timely fashion, or where and when problems occur. Mature adult workers find it easier to ask forgiveness than permission when something vital to operations must be done, now!

Mature adult workers question a company’s aberrations, such as its obsession with productivity criteria, fastidious bureaucracy or specialization, when production levels lag and diversity is ignored. Mature adult workers question a company’s philosophy which focuses on “not losing,” rather than driving hard “to win.”

Lagging production and failure to cultivate new markets ultimately translate into lost jobs and reduced security. If the market is shrinking, mature adult workers want a voice in the why.

Perhaps they have ideas which could make for a turnaround.

Mature adult workers question entitlement benefit packages.  These are treated like Christmas candy, which implies undeserved generosity of the company, for they are not tied to results.

Mature adult workers know there is no free lunch. They have seen their real wages decline precipitously, and their benefit packages, too. They want an end to the charade. Mature adult workers want the company to level with them, to treat them as full partners in enterprise, not just hired help. Executives are employees, too.

Executives have no more stake in the company’s future than they do — perhaps even less.

Mature adult workers are committed to a long term commitment to the company, while many executives attempt to put the best face on their watch in the interest of short-term career mobility.

Mature adult workers don’t need to be told their worth. They know their worth. They don’t need to be romanced with “touchy-feely” human resources programs. These turn them off and tune them out. They want full accountancy of the company’s health on a regular basis, not when the company is about to go belly up.

They resent the patronizing twaddle that attempts to keep them in line. They desire a reasonable voice in the conduct of business and a fair portion of the economic pie.

Mature adult workers resent slogans, campaigns, fads and copycat programs. What worked elsewhere worked because it was well suited to unique conditions. A plethora of failures in copy-cat programs, however, still fails to push this fact home. Mature adult workers question the emphasis on “quality participation,” when they see themselves herded into improvised meetings, where the level of discussion is restricted to nonoperational incidentals such as the company picnic, while executives, “down the hall,” vote themselves stock options for the next quarter. Selective differentiation hardly begets teamwork or quality performance. Nor does the frenzied pursuit of quality awards mean much to mature adult workers. They see quality in six-sigma terms or as a daily concern and not as corporate or executive gamesmanship.

Mature adult workers question the value of rhetoric, which advocates a culture of contribution, but supports the twin cultures of comfort and complacency. A culture of contribution is dynamic, rife with conflict and confrontation, a spirited exchange of ideas of equal partners. Conflict, not harmony, is the glue that holds a company to its purpose. Mature adult workers recognize pain, risk, uncertainty, failure and limits as necessary components of real performance. An investment in failure is acknowledged as the price of success.

Mature adult workers question cosmetic organizational changes brought on by real or imagined crises. Mature adults abhor solution driven approaches to structural problems, which they see as, at best, naïve if not faddish appeasements to stockholders.

They recognize that defining the problem is hard work, and nigh impossible if the working culture is driven by personality, not performance; by making an impression, not a difference. Making an impression has no place in a climate of purposefulness. Where making a difference matters, there is no fear of failure, so success can take hold; no place for arrogance, so confidence can be expressed; no need for pretension, so happy debate can lead to consensus strategies.

Mature adult workers are threatening, not only to the company, but to the existing social fabric of society. From attending school to taking a job, from paying homage to the church to the state, from birth to death, citizens are expected to behave essentially as obedient, disciplined, punctual and not problem children. Schools teach students to conform to authority. Jobs are described and managed in the same manner. The tenets of religious faith are written as if to starry-eyed children, while the conduct of government could not demonstrate a lower opinion of the human species.

Society is afraid of mature adult workers, afraid of the madness that adulthood demands, for with such madness things are seen much more clearly than by those who claim to be sane. Ergo, The Worker, they see society running from itself, cowering behind its authority and autocratic rule. The evidence is overwhelming. Self-hatred is manifested in society in the form of violence and crime. Love no longer recreates itself. Love has been replaced by pervasive hatred, which has become like the rich, aromatic stench of the garbage dump.

A paternalistic driven society prefers workers never grow up, that they remain perpetually obedient, submissive, indulgent and manageable children. With mature adult workers, control no longer resides in the parent-figure as overlord. It is in the mind, heart and hands of workers, where it belongs. The agony of our times is that children become parents, but skip adulthood. Parent figures, as an ideal-type, bully their children as they had been bullied. Bullying behavior is then repeated with family members, workers, worshippers, students and finally, with citizens. Failing to become mature adults, workers regress to learned helplessness and seek guidance, direction and control as if suspended in terminal adolescents as obedient twelve-year-olds in fifty-year-old bodies. Despite this characterization, the redemption of society still depends on the production of mature adult workers.

Even if the dedicated mission of society were to produce mature adult workers, it would most likely take the better part of a century to see it realized. Cultural conditioning of modern workers is that extensive. Most workers are programmed in self-negation, feeling a compelling need to conform to group norms, to avoid conflict and confrontation at any cost, to comply with arbitrary standards no matter how ridiculous, rather than to cooperate with a sense of commitment to something meaningful and to which they can believe.

Most workers value the thoughts of others over their own thoughts. They are isolated from a sense of their own worth. It is as impossible for them to think differently as the majority as it would be for them to defy gravity and fly.

It would appear they are not happy campers that they have lost their moral compass and thus their way. In the end as in the beginning, what is invaluable to the individual, worker and citizen alike, is trust. No trust is more important than self-trust.

*     *     *

WONDERING -- THINKING ABOUT THINGS BECAUSE THEY COME TO MIND!

 WONDERING – THINKING ABOUT THINGS BECAUSE THEY COME TO MIND!

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

© October 14, 2014

CONFESSIONS OF AN OCTOGENARIAN

When I was a youngster, then a young man, I found I had many anchors that kept me upright, focused, confident and inspired, feeling I was in tune with Nature, my fellowman, my Irish Roman Catholicism and God.  I was not self-conscious about these things, in fact, I was not consciously aware of them.  I just knew they were there to keep me safe.  That was more than eighty years ago.

By the accident of my birth, I’ve lived through The Great Depression, World War Two, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the War in Iraq and the War in Afghanistan, the Second Industrial Revolution, the Second Enlightenment or the New Age, The Information Age, and now The Millenniums.

Nature is still nature, my fellowman appears ambivalent, my Catholicism on life support, and God is an outlier or erased from the equation.

Strangely, and some might say perversely, I cling to what is no longer there, or is it that I behave as I do because those original structures burrowed so deep into my bone marrow that I know no other way to behave? 

I am constantly told I am unique, when I don’t feel so, that my interlocutor has never met anyone quite like me, causing me to raise an eyebrow, feeling disconnected from the person, and the comment.  If the person is angry with me, I am asked why I have to be that way. 

The answer is because I know no other way to be.

The cross examination continues: why are you so disciplined?  Why are you so consistently predictable, so robotic?  Then they remember that I have constantly reinvented myself, constantly in the face of authority without blinking, terribly opinionated to the point of arrogance, and yet in the face of these handicaps that I have managed to have an exciting and variable career.  Why is that, I’m asked.  Why do you not want to be like everyone else?

The answers, if one cares to know, are in all my books as I write with that empirical source material about a self that has been pleased to know his God, which has given him the mind and will, and yes, the tolerance to know and accept that self, and to understand that self as no big deal, only the energy and control that those original anchors provided, which was not always constant, which on occasion seemed to have deserted him, which was just enough source material to provide redemption when he would fall off the track allowing him to get back on it and to continue.

My occasional missteps have not been caused by a lack of self-control, self-regard, self-acceptance or self-direction.  My missteps have been a function of sorrow and disappointment seeing persons far more capable than I self-destruct because they have misplaced their moral compass and guidance system.  This has caused me to wonder why.

In a long life, where the world is viewed as an entity and organic whole as much as a person is, I have witnessed that world constantly losing its way, constantly getting caught up in the drama of the times or the latest fads, despite technological breakthroughs and new discoveries, finding too often that these have only led to new obsessions. 

I have concluded that, since life passes as if in an instant, there must be a subconscious drive to stay forever young and stupid, or as the saying goes, “for what else is there to life?”

It is, I suppose, why people are bent on collecting great fortunes believing they can put off death for a little longer, and bask in hedonistic Teflon glory. 

But everyone dies.  God made that the common denominator, everyone!  It is the great equalizer, as everyone gets old and wrinkled, feeble and feckless as a child.  No one can escape the fear of that reality, no one!

When you have a temperament like mine, you read a lot, reflect a lot, and yes, wonder a lot at why we are like we are and how we got that way.

Currently, I’m revising an essay I wrote at university in graduate school (“Search for the Real Parents of My Soul”) for an assignment with little comprehension that it would stay with me.  I took little note of its significance.  I’ve never been a Bible reader, per se, Old or New Testament, other than finding myself being moved by the Epistles read at Catholic Mass from the New Testament.

But for that assignment, I read the Bible, the Torah, the Talmud, and was fascinated imagining the men behind the words as well as the words themselves.  

I’ve never been one to dwell on the words of either the Old or New Testament as literally true, but nonetheless fascinating.  Nor have I ever accepted the literal story of Adam and Eve, although I find it metaphysically significant.

This turn of mind predates my scientific training in chemistry, physics and mathematics, and so it must have something to do with my basic construction or DNA, which brings me to ponder themes that I have always felt but have not been moved to articulate with anything other than passing reference, until now.

ALIENATION AND GOD

One theme is alienation, which means separation, and in the common use of the word, separation from ourselves.  French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) had much to say about alienation, seeing it as a product of the Industrial Revolution and mass production where workers were separated from the final product by doing assembly piece work.

Alienation can also be experienced when a person feels isolated from a group or an activity to which one should belong or in which one should be involved. 

Unemployment may generate a sense of political alienation.  It is why politicians harp on unemployment come election time, and then do nothing about it until the next election cycle.

Alienation has many synonyms: isolation, detachment, estrangement, distance, separation, division; loss or lack of sympathy; estrangement; or public alienation from the bureaucracy.

German philosopher, economist and sociologist Karl Marx (1818-1883) described alienation as a condition of workers in a capitalist economy, resulting from a lack of identity with the products of their labor and a sense of being controlled or exploited.

Psychiatry sees alienation as state of depersonalization or loss of identity in which the self seems unreal, thought to be caused by difficulties in relating to society and the resulting prolonged inhibition of emotion.

In sociology, alienation, a sociological concept developed by several classical and contemporary theorists, is a condition in social relationships reflected by a low degree of integration or common values and a high degree of distance or isolation between individuals, or between an individual and a group of people in a work or social environment.

In theater, alienation is seen as an effect, sought by some dramatists, whereby the audience remains objective and does not identify with the actors, while in law, alienation represents the transfer of the ownership of property rights.

The word alienation comes from the Latin verb “alienare,” or estrange, and has been with us a long time, a condition that was seeded in the late Renaissance, experienced momentum during The Age of the Enlightenment (17th and 18th century), and gained purchase when Western society moved from its spiritual foundation of being God centered to its secular godless materialism.

This occurred during the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, which was sparked into high gear by the American Civil War, and made palpable by the simple declarative sentence of German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche (1844-1900), “God is dead!” 

Whittaker Chambers writes:

Ages change, politics shift and slither – the conservative spirit does not change.  It adjusts – because it is the summation of human wisdom, and in a sense organic, it looks from the fastness of life, and bends or yields to what is passing, but maintains, as the light shines in darkness, what is everlasting because it partakes of itself.

Were I to have had these words, eloquent as they are, when critics assailed me, I could have described why they found me to be so different.  

The reality is that I have never left my roots, never abandoned those anchors described here, never felt cause to go with the flow and be like everyone else, because I have never felt self-estranged strange as life has often been, imperfect and flawed that I am, because I have never left my belief in God or retreated from that psychic energy that flows from that reality in and through me as spiritual source and connection.

This belief system is based on faith alone, and should I be wrong, should this be all that there is, then God or this Otherness still counts for something as it has given my life purpose and a sense of value.

THE POWERFUL AS POWERLESS IN THE “FASTNESS OF LIFE”

It was no accident that I drifted from a bench chemist to first a student than practitioner of the arts and sciences that dictate organizational development in life.  I must admit that I have never been comfortable in an organization although I feel strongly that our earthly geopolitical system is that, and only that, an organic whole or one organization.

We are all part of a single system with myriad functions and disciplines, characters and cultures, ethnicity and traditions, histories and languages, God fearing and the godless, but all connected to a single fabric which is the human race.

That said, while there is relativism in culture, I think there is a single truth with no ambiguity, and freedom has no conditions other than total freedom, and that freedom is in support of that singular truth.  

The fact that truth and freedom are tainted with the toxicity of human intervention makes this declaration no less relevant or true from my perspective.

Just as no one will ever reach perfection no one will ever experience pristine truth or pristine freedom.  It is the nature of man to be in conflict, first with himself, and invariably with others. 

The key to bridge to this gap is managed conflict, that is, direct confrontation given politely and often when there appears a miscarriage of fairness or justice, or when the rhetoric of authority fails to match the reality in the trenches. 

Not ever being comfortable conforming to an idea or directive that failed to resonate with me, I have been in constant trouble in every organization with which I have been associated, barring none.  Then you ask, how did you continue to survive in such settings?

For one, I made myself a value added commodity that those high in self-interest were willing to tolerate, and for another I was never afraid to lose everything, and start all over again, which I have done.

There is no more powerful or dangerous a person than one of that temperament.  The person cannot be bribed, bullied, shamed or embarrassed into conformity or complicity.

The powerful are powerless in that scenario because their toolbox is a kit of fear, and fear rolls off the back of the fearless.  Morality is never stronger than the reality it speaks for.  

TECHNOLOGY AND GETTING BEYOND THE AGE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Readers about the globe applaud and question my views, which is my intent.  I have been happy to oblige readers of the benefits of The Age of the Enlightenment, given its emphasis on individualism, freedom and truth, but I have come to question its conceits, its rationalism, central ideas and works.  It has no place for God, and has embraced technology with unfettered lust.

This has advanced secularism, technological dynamism, individualism, capitalism, and the sheer size of intrusive spy-ism.  I have wailed incessantly on this topic, and must now admit that the enervating West will not retreat from this menu.  So prudence dictates that I maneuver within the interstices of these factors rather than howl against them.

Technology is out-of-control multiplying exponentially with such dizzying rapidity that Western cultures, which are already on life support, cannot assimilate technology’s demands, socially, economically, politically, or culturally.

My polemics have been directed against “the Machine Age,” which technology represents, and which I must confess will not disappear.  Yet, survival demands a tremendous adjustment to accommodate technology.

We have been reminded by apologists of technology's many blessings including an increased standards of living, unprecedented abundance of everything, and unrivaled opportunities for individuals, while being quiet about technology’s ability to deal death to millions with a single instrument of war.

Technology has multiplied the needs and hopes of the masses, as it has become the packaging machine to deliver those hopes in multiple products that everyone wants but not necessarily needs.

There is no longer currency in opposing technology, but rather still a need to incorporate it within our moral structure with some mechanisms of change and development to regain our spiritual connection within technology’s domain.

For after two centuries of enormous discoveries and innovations in science and technology, people are socially and morally dislocated and confused.  The evidence is overwhelming in our daily newspapers, television reports and the Internet.

Meanwhile, rather than $billions being devoted to reconnecting people in some degree of harmony and purpose with each other in this technological age, a shocking level of the national budget is devoted to developing war machines and surveillance instrument such as predatory drones, which only lead to increased alienation.

Scientific advances divorced from wisdom have been a factor in this dislocation.  Progress has clearly been separated from the service of the human spirit, which is not only deplorable but devastating, as the human spirit is the engine that drives humanity to purpose and renewal.

You need look nor further for the source of this dislocation than Western priorities.  They are contributors to the decline if not the disintegration of the West.

The remedy could be found in incorporating and integrating the energy and synergy of technology into the fabric of society by developing a new moral framework to relocate civilized people into finding spiritual harmony with each other.

I confess this is new thinking on my part.  I have remained comfortable rejecting technological discoveries pointing out what has been lost for what has been gained.  I am no longer of that mind.  Technology is the reality of our new mass modern existence.

Since the appetites of the masses have been continuously shaped by technology, which has amounted to dehumanizing social psychological and humanistic possibilities by innovating new desires and impulses of the masses severed from the good, why not reverse the trend?  Why not create a new spiritual guidance systems reconnecting the notion of the good with the masses?  Technology can do this if anyone can.

It could be done without technology sacrificing the demand for material abundance by balancing this demand with spiritual fulsomeness. 

The potential for breakthrough, although enormous, would not be quantifiable, first only felt, but once in play, the barriers at every juncture of society would began to crumble and then dramatically disappear. 

We are entering Russian American sociologist Pitrim Sorokin’s (1889-1968) promised six-hundred-year IDEATIONAL culture.  He writes:

We are seemingly between two epochs: the dying SENSATE culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming IDEATIONAL culture of the creative tomorrow.  We are living and thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred-year-long SENSATE day (Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937).

*     *     * 

REMINISCENCES OF HOW THE WEST SEEMS TO HAVE LOST ITS WAY

  REMINISCENCES OF HOW WE HAVE LOST OUR WAY

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

© October 12, 2014

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

Readers have asked why I have not gotten “more political” in my missives.

That surprised me because politics are all about power and control, and that imposition on our freedom.

The disposition of my writing has been to make clear our individual need for freedom, autonomy, self-regard, purpose and authenticity.  This, to my mind, amounts to a personal political manifesto.

Moreover, the inference of these essays is that we are unfree, and have misplaced our moral compass and spiritual guidance system, and consequently have lost our way.

The effort to republish a nearly book length essay given for a graduate seminar some forty years ago (“Search for the Real Parents of My Soul") is meant to bring attention to the roots of our tradition against the modern dilemma of the absence of limits in contrast to diminishing will and confused priorities about what is essential and good.  Why? 

Because the world in which we find ourselves today is hostile to freedom.  We see it at every turn even in these United States of America.  The fact that it has been given up voluntarily for safety and security with 24/7 intrusive ubiquitous surveillance does not escape the fact of that hostility.

To regain our authentic liberty we must take charge and display reasoned confidence in our capacity to understand the truth about ourselves.  We attain this knowledge through self-reflection with our soul reaching beyond itself to the foundation of its existence and rationality in our Western tradition.    

The Christian-Judaic tradition is in trouble, but it has taken a long time for that trouble to be so pervasive to be finally felt.  These reminiscences are my reflections on that situation. 

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME

We in the West consider our culture Christian-Judaic dating back to the birth of Jesus, and beyond Him to the early Christians.

Momentous change was in the air when Jesus was born, many thought it was the end of days, especially the Jews.  It was however the end of days for the Roman Empire as it eventually crumbled leaving a vacuum finding a rag tag Christian sect graduating to a persecuted faith then to become the State Religion of the Roman Empire, and in due course the Roman Catholic Church.

Catholicism would dominate Europe and Western Civilization for more than a thousand years.

Historian Pliny the Elder (23 AD – 79 AD) expressed in a letter to the Roman Emperor Trajan (53 AD – 117 AD) his discontent with the Christians:

“From their dirt, their lousiness, their mendacity, they argue with conviction that they are called to redeem the world.”

Pliny was baffled at the early Christians’ belief in their divine calling to redeem the world.  The Roman Emperor and his chief advisers were unable to view the Christians as a threat to Empire, while, at the same time, unable from a Roman school of thought to comprehend what the Christians were about. 

Even with the scourge of flagrant persecution could the colossal power of the Roman Empire counter the Christian narrative of the crucifixion of Jesus and His resurrection from the dead, which it saw as nothing less than pure absurdity or unfathomable poppycock.  

Rome had the army, the weapons, the wealth, the power, the political clout and control, yet Rome could not stem the tide or make inroads into the indomitable spirit of Christians. 

When persecutions and threats failed, Rome attempted to bribe Christians into the comfort of Roman citizenship as long as they would pledge allegiance to the Emperor and bow before the Roman gods, which Christians would not do.

Rome, devoid of the energy or the will to prevail, would fall in 476 A.D., while Christianity established as the state religion in 313 A.D. would continue to increase its dominion in the known Western world. 

Could we say it was a surprise, or could we say the “more things change the more they remain the same”?  This is mentioned in a different context as godless Communism would use a similar ploy to that of the Christians to move the cultural norm of the West from a confident Godliness and divine spirituality to godlessness and dialectical materialism.

THE WEST LOST ITS WAY AFTER WWII

The West after two catastrophic world wars (WWI and WWII) found the movement of Western Civilization away from the theology that formed the Christian culture to adopt many of the verities of upstart Communism.  These had been established when Russia deposed Czar Nicholas II in 1917, twenty-eight years before the end of WWII in 1945.

As the Roman Emperors were confounded by the imposition of God fearing Christians, the West was baffled by the appeal of Communism and unable to successfully grapple with its social, economic and political godless remedy. 

Each attempt to neutralize that appeal seemed only to enhance its existence and subsequent dominance.  Who can forget the embarrassing McCarthy Hearings and “Red Scare” of the 1950s?  Politicians and pundits, in a rage, attacked Communism’s threatening dogma, making little attempt to understand its widening allure, especially to intellectuals. 

Communism was an idea formulated by Marx and Hegel that had energy and imagination while the West seemed to be devoid of both. 

The West decried the misanthropic depravity of Communism and its totalitarianism, but what was the philosophy of the West? 

The hidden answers were in Christian assumptions of the Founding Fathers that no longer appeared to be true or viable in the United States.  They needed to be recovered, but by whom and why?

Whitaker Chamber posed the question:

“In a war for men’s minds, what is it that we are offering whose inherent force is so compulsive that it instantly seizes on the imagination of men and incites them to choose it in preference to Communism?”

Freedom and individualism were the answers as understood by the West since the “Age of the Enlightenment,” which was a cultural movement of intellectuals beginning in late 17th-century Western Europe.  It emphasized reason and individualism rather than tradition.  It spread across Europe and to the United States.

When Communism came on the scene, it unhinged the Western idea of freedom and individualism from its moorings in a similar fashion to how the Christians unhinged power and purpose from the Roman Empire.

With Christians, this was not by force but by a collective spiritual synergy without palpable markers other than belief in God, belief in God as the center of man’s spirituality, belief in the human soul, and belief intrinsically in human freedom.  With Communism, it was belief in a godless empire of central authority in a totalitarian state.    

The fact that Christian beliefs have eroded significantly in the West can be discerned from the noteworthy rise of cynicism, sarcasm, atheism, agnosticism, distrust and paranoia that is unusual for an open egalitarian system, while quite to be expected in a closed authoritarian system such as a communist state.

Since Communism has come on the scene, liberty’s veracity no longer seems as plausible or possible as an extended exercise in autonomy. 

Yet there is a role the Christian West might play to bridge Western Christians with Eastern Christians that thus far has fallen short of the mark.  

Imagine the status of Georgia and now the Ukraine, for example, had the West proven less ambivalent when a foreign country threatened the integrity of these two nations’ borders.  Had the West acted decisively it would have secured these borders, as well as its own.    

The West has drifted into skepticism and indifference when it comes to oppressed Christians in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. 

Closer to home, American churches, suffering declining attendance and escalating scandals, (re: sexual abuse scandals of Catholic priests), seem unable to see or deal effectively with the cultural intrusion that godless Communism has had on the US and other Western societies.  

You don’t declare Communism evil.  That only telegraphs its appeal.  You determine instead why it finds facile reception in the Western mind, and then you take steps to generate a more attractive alternative. 

This laxity in understanding what is at issue has been compounded with the rise of terrorists’ factions of Islam since 9/11, most recently ISIS, demonstrating a crippling if not diminishing capacity to thwart this threat and still maintain the freedom of Islam devotees to practice their faith without being hassled. 

When real or imagined threats to national security reach the consensus of those in government, a broad brush is likely to be brought out that taints the innocent along with the guilty.  We have seen this most recently with the harassment of people of the Islam faith, and we saw it with the “Big Red Scare” of Soviet Communism after WWII.

This hysteria produced Senator Joseph McCarthy and his madness of seeing scores of unnamed communists in the Federal Government.  Then there was The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives.  By dint of appearing before this committee many were blacklisted and unable to continue working as entertainers, intellectuals, writers, or in other occupations.

This committee was originally created in 1938 to uncover citizens with Nazi ties within the United States. However, it became better known for its role in investigating alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist ties.

In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security." When the House abolished the committee in 1975, its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.

The committee's anti-Communist investigations are often compared with those of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had no direct involvement with this House committee.  McCarthy was the Chairman of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate, not the House.

To put this in perspective, while the natural inclination of Americans is to crisis manage situations, history has not been kind to the US in its darkest hours.  Too often blatant attempts to control a situation show little evidence of civility or decorum.  Currently, the Christian West is vulnerable to decline if not derailment due to this predilection.

It would seem that the United States has been hobbled in its understanding of the Christian plight in its own midst which mirrors the plight of Christians in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. 

At the same time, Islam and Judaism and other great religions should enjoy the same individual freedom and autonomy that Christians enjoys in the West. 

Should great religions be diminished or destroyed that could be the plight of Christianity tomorrow.

Answers for Americans may be found in returning to our beginning by the recovery of individual freedoms and truths forgotten by the modern world and its progressive change.

Without this recovery, without this return to our cultural moorings, the meaning and purpose inherently part of our spiritual construction could appear senseless and our freedoms spineless.

Christians once understood the soul’s need for freedom to flourish.  In the face of this, life in the West instead has become a set of ceaseless attempts to secure material and economic status without concomitant consideration of proper ends.  

For what does a man profit, if he should gain the whole world but suffer the loss of his soul? (Matthew 16:26).

THE WEST WON THE COLD WAR, HAS IT LOST THE COLD PEACE?

Once the prevailing norm of Western society was that the universe was one of divine creation that afforded a ground and purpose to man’s actions, and the opportunities for such freedom to be heroic, devious, or more likely mediocre. 

Today, there is massive evidence that many believe Christian thought no longer serves man.  This is due to perceiving Christian thought in a mainly religious context failing to realize that Christian thought is a mindset, a cultural norm and construct that dictates pervasive behavior elementally from every quadrant of society high and low.

THE HEAD AND THE HEART

Christian thought is a conscious process that is most unconsciously manifested in behavior, and by definition, personal identity. 

The narrative of Christian thought no longer is believed to answer man’s existential anxiety as he retreats from his heart and embraces his head, believing his head, his cognitive sense of things, is superior to his heart, his instinctive or intuitive sense of survival.

The head has turned to philosophers of the Enlightenment, and to the scientists and rationalists that have followed. 

“The Communist Manifesto” of Karl Marx and its godless dialectical materialism is a manifestation of a philosophic mindset.  Freedom and truth are conditional under Communism where choice is no longer an option as a central totalitarian authority makes the choices for everyone as the placebo of depressing anxiety.

Christian thought makes it apparent that the proper understanding of freedom and truth can only be realized through suffering.  Every life is unique with an immortal soul that must embrace its fears and suffer the consequences of its actions rather than retreat or seek protection from them.

On the other hand, if truth is merely a construction of the will, or the outcome of dialectical material forces at work outside the individual, with no need for a center much less a moral compass, then suffering becomes pointless as a sign of resigned purposelessness packaged in powerlessness. 

In such a system, the heart is dead and the head belongs to the State.

Severance of the heart from the head, and truth from freedom, results in the dependence of human action ultimately issuing into man’s hedonistic pursuit of nothing more than the orgiastic pleasure of his own ego.  

Is there any question that something like this has become accepted as a surrogate norm to the Western persuasion?

In Christian thought, man is servant and never wiser than when he comprehends his fundamental freedom. 

Man is not Nietzsche’s “superman,” nor is he legislator of his will over others, but is subject to the unpredictability of life discovering his dignity and civility in the freedom of human action directed towards and by a body of truth.

Whittaker Chambers, an American who acted as a Soviet spy on the American government during the 1930s and 1940s, defected, and sought redemption by becoming a passionate anti-communist, and Christian sympathizer if not a Christian.  He writes:

“For it is by the soul that, at the price of suffering, we can break, if we choose, the shackles that an impersonal and rigid Fate otherwise locks upon us.  It was the genius of Christianity to whisper to the lowliest man that by the action of his own soul he could burst the iron bonds of Fate with which merely being alive seemed to encase him.”

COLD WAR, COLD PEACE

At the conclusion of WWII in 1945, there was the prospect of World Peace.  Instead, the West entered a Cold War with the Soviet Union that lasted until 1989, when the Soviet Union crumbled into oblivion after a seventy-two-year reign, or did it?

Were this a treatise on the Cold Peace that followed the Cold War mention would have to be made of the inescapable conclusion that the Cold Peace has found godless Communism taking root in the West not as a dogma but as a lifestyle.  The evidence?

Christians find themselves apologizing for the Christian-Judaic culture that is the foundation of the United States of America, and Western Europe and much of Eastern Europe.  All seem to be retreating from this identity as well as from its constructs, verities and culture.

The Enlightenment’s Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) guided philosophy to becoming an autonomous discipline separate from science and religion, but able to qualify and validate the claims of both.  In emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition, the Enlightenment spread across Europe and into the United States.

Communism twisted the tenets of the Enlightenment to meet its agenda, while science became tantamount to a new religion as Communism’s dialectical materialism gave energy and purpose to science. 

Not only did science attempt to pass through the obfuscating wall of Nature to make new discoveries to benefit man, but science became the unwitting accomplice of technology to inundate the globe with tantalizing products, products that mirrored the fantasies of the head at the expense of the heart. 

To wit, a piece of metal called an automobile often becomes more important than a person, while a smartphone and Facebook often become more important than bona fide relationships.  This is evidence that Communism is still extant and winning the Cold Peace. 

The Western retreat from its Christian norms and traditions, taking flight into weapon of mass destruction while using its material wealth as leverage to its dominance, has resulted in the West going from crisis to crisis unable to meet or deal effectively with mini-conflicts emanating from the Cold Peace.

It seems that the West is devoid of the energy or the necessary will to preserve its own civilization.  While ISIS makes history the West makes politics.  Since 9/11, it has been clear that no imaginative strategy has been developed to deal effectively with this newest tyranny.

Up to this point, the West has enjoyed a measure of peace and separation through its distance from the carnage and displacement that that carnage generates, and through its prosperity and military capability, but its own sure fate has seemingly silently smothered its former spirit, and that gives one pause to wonder.

Communism is winning the Cold Peace, leaving the question, “Has the West gained the whole world and suffered the loss of its soul?” 

*     *     *

READERS' WRITE, "NEVER UNDERSTOOD SARTRE'S 'BEING AND NOTHINGNESS!'"

READERS’ WRITE, "NEVER UNDERSTOOD SARTRE'S 'BEING and NOTHINGNESS!'”

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

© October 6, 2014

It surprised me to hear from so many when I mentioned, actually in passing, Jean Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothing” (1943).  My sense is that someone, perhaps a teacher or professor or friend, told them it is a book that they should read.  My suggestion is that they first read man, and then tackle him as philosopher, playwright, novelist and political activist if not also Freudian psychologist.

Sartre is about freedom, individualism, situations, contingencies, words, and all of this in terms of existence.

Every author of some serious inclination is influenced when he was born, his relationship with his parents, friends, teachers, and the circumstances of his time.  Sartre was born in 1905 and died in 1980.  Being French and essentially a Parisian, he endured WWI and WWII where those wars were fought.  He writes candidly that his life was divided in two parts, before and after WWII.  Interesting enough, he lived thirty-five years before and thirty-five years after that war, reaching celebrity status after 1945 until the end of his life.

But more importantly, his youth was divided between his intimate relationship with his mother, his father died a year after his birth, and his mother’s remarriage when he was not yet a teenager.  He considered their relationship that of friends of equal interest and status, until the “betrayal” of her remarriage, when he felt disengaged from that intimacy, which he never found to his total satisfaction the rest of his life despite his legendary relationship with author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. 

Thinkers, and even distinctly individualistic thinkers such as Jean Paul Sartre, write out of experience, what they have read, relationships and what they passionately believe. 

My wonder is what my life would have been like without a university education for it was in a reading French class at university that I was first introduced to Sartre and existentialism, having not idea before that time that either he or it existed.  My mother read a lot but didn’t share what she read with me except peripherally.  Sartre’s mother was apparently of a similar mind. 

In that French class I was introduced to Sartre’s play, “No Exit” (Huis Clos), with the play and Sartre having a stunning effect upon me, long after I graduated and was moving towards an executive career in the corporation, a world Sartre despised. 

The original title of “No Exit” was “The Other” (Les Autres), written a year after “Being and Nothingness” exploring some ideas in that philosophical work concerning relations with “the other,” as he would put it.  The play concerns two women and one man condemned to live in hell for eternity. 

Considered by some critics as pessimistic, strangely, I considered it realistic, all twenty-years-old of me.  Critics justified their criticism on one line in the play, “Hell is other people.”

Sartre defended the line, saying that relationships with “the Other” are not always negative or poisonous; nor are they necessarily of a forbidden nature.  But should relations with “the Other” become twisted, all bets are off, and they can be literally like living in hell.

According to Sartre, “the Other,” and somehow I got this from the play, what is most important in life in order for life to have meaning, substance and importance is fundamentally our relationship in and to ourselves and our own understanding of ourselves separate from everyone else.

If this is missing, Sartre is saying, then life is hell including people.

WHY I ANSWERED THIS QUERY

Many who religiously read my blog are writers, would be authors, or original thinkers in their own right.  These queries come from all over the world, and often come with this question, “Am I too old to write?”  The answer is that writing has no age or academic, ethnic or cultural qualification other than a passion to express yourself without embarrassment.

On the other hand, Americans, when they query me, they don’t ask such questions, but boldly ask, “Can you make money writing?” 

It is the wrong question and I never answer it. 

Sartre rejected the Nobel Prize for Literature, and before that a prestigious decoration by the French government for his bravery with the French resistance against the Nazis in WWII.  He declined the honor stating that he was not a resistance fighter, but only a writer who resisted.

This is mentioned because “Being and Nothingness” is his “this I believe” and his life is a reflection of that belief.

BEING AND NOTHINGNESS

As I once told engineers and administrators, programmers and managers who came to me with questions about books they were reading for credit in college courses, “I am not an academic, and am only a reader of books like them.”  It was the 1980s when I was an organizational development psychologist at Honeywell Avionics, Inc. in Clearwater, Florida.

Were they to be of such a mind, they could see the influence of Sartre in my reading over the last six decades.  The evidence is in all my books.

Sartre is telling us that it is through individual choices that we create ourselves.  These choices are not determined by our history, what is past is past.  Having made a choice that doesn’t seem to be working out the person can make a very different choice to respond to changing circumstances.  I went from a chemist, to a chemical engineer, to a manager, to a corporate executive, scuttled it all, became a drifter reading books, playing tennis and vegetating for two years, then went back to school for six years to earn a Ph.D. in a totally different discipline, social/industrial/organization psychology, taught as an adjunct professor, then acted as a consultant, then went back into industry as an industrial psychologist, rose to a corporate executive again, then turned to giving seminars, writing books, and doing what I’m doing now, telling you about it. 

As you can see, I’ve followed Sartre’s boilerplate, which rules out any kind of essentialism or fixed givens including “I can’t afford to do that!”

We exist, and then through a continuous process that lasts until death, we constitute and reconstitute ourselves through the choices we make.  Sartre puts it simply, existence precedes essence!

The next factor Sartre entertains is the one that confuses and often conflicts us.  Because we are condemned to be free we are overwhelmed by the responsibility of that freedom.

This produces anxiety and a desire to flee from freedom.  What follows is a game we constantly play on ourselves.  We deny that we are free and then try to behave as if we were simply a BEING-IN-ITSELF.

Sartre calls this (this denial or great psychological dodge) refusal to accept that we are free as a matter of bad faith, or self-deception.  

In a condition of “bad faith,” we pretend that we are not free to make choices that circumstances dictate our choices that we don’t.

It is as if we fell into a role and we become the role and we did not choose to have the role, but yet we cannot escape the role. 

What we refuse to see is that none of this is true, not a single moment of it is true, because what has happened is that we are locked in to a constant frantic attempt to escape ourselves.  Consequently, we are unable to make choices, unable to set new goals, unable to change our circumstances.

We find ourselves defending ourselves by saying “that is just the way I am,” which is the epitome of bad faith.  We do this in an effort to deny the inescapable fluidity and instability and chaos that is indigenous to freedom.

Besides the self, Sartre also explores the Other.  This hammers home that the individual is not alone in a world consisting only of BEINGS-IN-THEMSELVES (or objects), but also must share it with BEINGS-FOR-THEMSELVES (or the Other).

Because we live in a world with others – BEINGS-FOR-THEMSELVES – we have no choice but are condemned to live in that world where there is a conflict to freedom.

Reality invades our consciousness and tells us that the Other threatens our freedom and makes us aware that the world is not our own.  We have to share that world.

We can develop the mindset that the Other steals our world away from us.  The Other invades our privacy, takes over our projects, and asserts the Other’s agenda and its will on us.  The Other rewrites our script.  We are no longer a solitary actor on stage, unique, driven by our individuality and freedom.

Sartre has an answer to this dilemma.  He offers three pessimistic solutions to our relation with the Other:

We can make ourselves into a desirable object, but this is simply an attempt to flee from freedom by placing ourselves in an obsequious, fawning or servile position of unfreedom (masochism):

We can attempt to dominate the Other (sadism);

We can attempt to be apathetic or indifferent to the Other and the situation, which Sartre claims is impossible, leaving us only with the other two options, which is to say, we are trapped both ways.

First, there is the internal conflict between BEING-FOR-ITSELF and BEING-IN-ITSELF.

Man, Sartre is saying, is condemned to a divided self, to be what he is not and not to be what he is.

Second, the BEING-FOR-ITSELF (individual) is condemned to an existence that is fundamentally irreconcilable with the existence of BEINGS-FOR-THEMSELVES (the Other).

According to Sartre, the individual can only be authentic when he accepts his condition as a useless passion.

Those familiar with my books know that I write a great deal about being authentic given this dilemma, and also these ideas in a different nomenclature and more pragmatic focus, especially in the “Fisher Model of Conflict and Stress Resolution” where reference is made to the “ideal self” and “real self” and  “self-demands” and “role demands” as they relate to “you” (being-in-itself) and “others” (being-for-itself) in the situation, which is described as the “Zone of Conflict.” 

How we see our situation in a given circumstance determines whether it will be “well defined” or “poorly defined.” 

This is mention as few of us writing about people, relationships, circumstances and their consequences can escape an indebtedness to Jean Paul Sartre.  This is shared for that reason.

*     *     *

KEEP THINKING!

KEEP THINKING!

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

© October 5, 2014

REFERENCE:

Perhaps no surprise to the reader, there have been a number of responses to “Christianity: Between the Old and Test Testament” – from “Search for the Real Parents of My Soul!”

In a previous exchange with this person, I addressed the phenomenon of consciousness, suggesting that two-thirds of our acts are driven by the unconscious, and that while we celebrate our conscious discriminating cognitive mind, we are more inclined to be driven by our emotions or feelings, whatever our discipline, orientation or belief system may be.  

Our rational integrity cannot be assumed to be flawless.

A READER WRITES:

I am sure as we became more conscious, we wondered what it was all about.  When we saw illness, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes, we developed fear, and we tried to explain those events to ourselves.  

Thus religions and the revelations from mentally ill people which we also could not explain became the explanation for what was not understood.  I doubt if someone today walked around the country claiming to be the son of god like Jesus or someone claiming an angel had revealed himself to him like Mohammed that too many people would believe in that reality and the person would wind up in a mental hospital and given drugs to relieve the symptoms.  

The fact that religions were created by humans to explain, alleviate fear and control does not justify their existence.  In the past leaches were used by doctors because they did not know any better.  The Buddha was not interested in finding an answer for himself.  

Immediately after he discovered an answer that satisfied him, he had to proselytize, and now it is a religion with temples and rituals.  No different than all the people who raised their arms in salute to Hitler in the rallies he held or the little red book of Mao.  

The motivation to belong and believe is strong.  It would be alright if a person wants to believe something, but it usually does not stop there for some people who have a need or desire to convert.  Until we understand that there is no answer etched into stone will we be able to accept that this is it.  Things happen that make no sense and that is the way it is.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I answered with hastily in our last exchange.  I mentioned Thomas Aquinas and didn’t want to quote him off the top of my head as I wanted to be accurate.

More than a billion Roman Catholics practice essentially his theology today, if not another half of billion Protestants.

Professor Garry Wills, professor emeritus at Northwestern University, and formerly studied for the priesthood, has a singular capacity to write pungently and clearly about such matters as Christianity, essentially from the perspective of Catholicism, which is my orientation.  I have read several books by him, including “Why I am a Catholic,” What Jesus Meant, and What Paul Meant.  

BB and I met Dr. Wills at a lecture in Tampa, and he signed twelve volumes written by him, looking inside the jackets to see if they had been read.  Usually I highlight my books, but with him I only turn the pages over.

He doesn’t just write on Catholicism but on politics, presidents, John Wayne, leadership and such things as the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence, America’s distrust of government, but I think he has a passion for St. Augustine of Hippo who has written at least two books on, one of which I’ve read but no St. Thomas Aquinas.

For me, Aquinas appeals to the head and Augustine to the Heart, I have tried to read his “City of God,” and have read his “Confessions,” and find him to be a most human man.  Were I to write on a saint, and at this late date it is highly unlikely, it would be on Aquinas.   Why?

I can best answer this by reference or should I say two books covering the same topic in which he makes a cameo appearance.  

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND I wrote in 2006, while previously I had written in 2004 NEAR JOURNEY’S END? CAN PLANET EARTH SURVIVE SELF-INDULGENT MAN.?

Content wise, these two books overlapped.  “Nowhere land” originally referred to utopia, and I see much evidence of this kind of self-indulgent mindset with contemporary Western man, thinking no matter how much he fouls up, science will rescue him, no problem!

Near Journey’s End was somewhat ecological, but like all my efforts, while reference was made at some length to ecology of the environment the greater emphasis was on ecology of the mind.  I was influenced by Gregory Bateson’s “Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), but I departed widely from his premise to my own.  

This is taken from NOWHERE MAN:

A French scholar, chronicler of clergyman William of Tyre (c 1130-1186), born in Palestine of French parents, analyzed Genesis from the perspective of natural history and questioned these descriptions in the context of their literal validity.  Tyre wrote a “History of Palestine from 614 to 1184,” which proved valuable to historians of the twelfth century Holy Crusades.

The key issues he addressed would come to question the very foundation of the Catholic Church as it was evident that logic and reason were on the horizon to be applied to Christian faith, questioning the validity of miracles, of the virgin birth of Mary the mother of Jesus, the divinity of Jesus, His death and resurrection, indeed, of the precepts and theology of Roman Catholicism itself..     

Scholars had to be careful to maintain the delicate balance between belief and unbelief, which now called for a new kind of thinking.  Christian faith was on trial.

In the second half of the thirteenth century, the controversy heated up as new views were evolving in the recently established university system throughout Europe.  This was a direct threat to the papacy of the time which enjoyed omniscient authority in matters of faith and morals.  The papacy enjoyed a special allegiance in terms of the pope’s ecclesiastic dictates under the pain of excommunication.

Such separation from the church could be of severe economic consequences as the church control the marketing economy as well as the social stratification.

To state it otherwise, anything remotely related to rational discourse outside the purview of the church was forbidden, although this was becoming increasingly untenable.  Rome was looking for a means out of this apparent impasse, and found it.

Deliverance came in the person of a Dominican intellectual who had studied with the great Albertus Magnus in Paris.  His name was Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). 

Quiet, unassuming, pensive and diligent, he had long had the same concerns as the church’s current critics, addressing these concerns in his opus magnum opus, “Summa Theologiae” (1266-1273), completing it shortly before his death at age, 49.

He argued in this work that philosophy examined the supernatural order in the light of reason, and theology examined the supernatural in the light of revelation.  Although reason was used in theology, revelation did not fall into the province of philosophy.  And philosophy could not contradict theology because truth could not contradict truth.

For Aquinas, then, faith and knowledge are not mutually exclusive.  He claimed belief took over at the point where knowledge ended.  Aquinas summed up his theory with this succinct expression, “To believe is to think with ascent.”

He is generally agreed to be the towering figure in medieval theology.  He is primarily given credit for applying the philosophical principles of Aristotle to Christianity.  The joining of these divergent streams of thought has had a substantial influence on theological and philosophical thinking.  It is worthy of note that Martin Luther, while rejecting the papacy and its excesses, embraced the essence of Aquinas.

With Summa Theologiae, a work in three divisions, God, Man and Christ, Aquinas attempted to summarize human knowledge.  In doing so, he released the full power of the inquisitive mind into secular hands, whereas before it belonged exclusively to the clergy, and bowed to the power of geometry, admitting God could not make the sum of the internal angles of a triangle add up to anything other than a right angle.  In his magnum opus, he defended Christianity in the area of natural theology, have little sense, however, that he had opened Pandora’s Box.

My only reason for sharing this is that good men, questioning men, such as Aquinas, were of a mind not unlike yours.  On the heels of his work, two kinds of knowledge came to dominate, that which related to revelations in the province of theology, and that which dealt with the natural world in the province of reason and philosophy.

Keep thinking.

*     *     *

PS Who knows, I might publish NOWHERE MAN on Kindle someday.

Subject: Re: CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN THE OLD and NEW TESTAMENTS -- continuation of "Search for the Real Parents of My Soul!" -- Exchange of views: IS RELIGION ON TRIAL?

 Subject: RE: CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN THE OLD and NEW TESTAMENT -- continuation of "Search for the Real Parents of My Soul!" – Exchange of views: IS RELIGION ON TRIAL?

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

© October 3, 2014

A READER WRITES:

All this history is interesting, but the most interesting aspect of the three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is that the form of government that all existed under, like the rest of the world, was dictatorship.  Whereas many other religions in the world believed in a more hierarchical structure, these three believed in a ruling dictator whose ultimate goal was control through punishment.  Which as has been said before is used by the priests or Imams to control the population.  For that reason I find no redeeming elements in religion.  The history just give evidence to this.  If a human being behaved like this god, they would be vilified if they had social stature and in prison if they did not.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Clearly, your reading of history and mine are somewhat in conflict.

Not only First Principles apply to Mother Nature.  First Principles apply to human beings, and have since the beginning of man. 

Religion, which you clearly have a problem with, especially the three major religions, originates with the witch doctors of early man.

Man has been blessed with a conscious mind, a vision to see and interpret what is seen, an ability to think and imagine, to fear and to dread, and the instinct to retreat from harm’s way when the odds of his survival are in jeopardy.

Early man cowered at the flash of lightning and the loud boom of thunder, as anthropologist James George Frazer (Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 1996) shows.  Man turned to his Sharman or witch doctor to quell his fears allowing such leaders to develop a coping rationale.  So, religion has always been with us.

The prototype of the Sharman or witch doctor has been uncovered in every prehistoric culture. It looked to the father figure to explain what was feared and to provide an escape mechanism to be able to move on.

Clever men assumed this role as a way to power and control, as well as a way to quell their own fears.  It worked like magic!

Freud was intrigued with religion and how the religious dealt with fear and anxiety, although a non-believer himself. 

He could see how the earliest practitioners of "magic and religion" identified the need for a strong parent or leader, what he referred to as "the superego," the judgmental part of our make-up which he called “the morality principle,” to gain and maintain control. Superstitions and anxieties were natural condiments of the discipline.  

The interesting thing about this is that Freud who had his own problem with religion managed to describe why it has been so successful.

While Judaism, Christianity and Islam believe in the same God, the same Parent or Father figure, beyond that they part their ways. 

What is also ironic, however, while they detest infidels, all three religions have assimilated, more or less, pagan mystical-magical aspects into their theologies and theocratic systems.   

Moreover, all religions, including Judaism, started out as sects looking for a leader, looking for Yahweh, looking for someone outside themselves to lead them out of isolation and fear. 

Four signposts religions have recognized to advantage:

We are born egotists.  It is a survival mechanism or instinct.  We all love ourselves.

We are all more interested in ourselves than in anyone else in the world.  It is the engine of our being, the fuel of our soul, and is always wanting for nourishment.

Every person you meet wants to feel important, to be somebody, to count for something.  This is the fragile ego showing itself.  It is so fragile that it can be manipulated to its peril.

We crave the approval and affection of others, so that we may in turn approve of ourselves.

This may find us retreating into self-love, and in turn being rejected for this, and as a consequence becoming fixated in self-hate. 

Our culture prefers us to have more regard for others than for ourselves, which explains the appeal of those inclined to become “true believes” and join the crowd hysteria.

Complicating this even further is our programmed dependence.  We often refuse to recognize how easily we can be seduced into complacency and inaction. 

Organized religions know this is part of our character.  They know: 

We want freedom but we need security;

We want wealth but we need certainty;

We want happiness but we need comfort;

We want fame and fortune but we need acceptance;

We want adulation but cannot tolerate criticism;

We want success but cannot abide failure.

This can be reduced to two simple equations:

Pain + risk = growth

We want growth without the pain of embarrassment or without the risk of failure, which is an utter impossibility.

Belief + belonging = behavior

We are a social animal attracted to a belief system that makes us comfortable as we are seeking others who think and believe as we do.

It is why religions and political systems clash. 

Religions deny they are political systems and political systems deny they are religious.  One cannot exist without the other.  Passion and rhetoric are their tools.

Traditional religions are declining in popularity if you consider church attendance, at least in the West.  So what is the new religion?  Technology and its toys of distraction, at least in wealthy Western societies.

But in two thirds of the world, where 4.4 billion souls have no access to the Internet, religion, often religions of the fringe such as the jihads have replaced priests and rabbis and Imams sending out messages of hate to those that feel exploited.  It is an old formula, and it has always worked.  

Are Judaism, Christianity and Islam dictatorial?  I don’t think so.  They are inclined however to be closed rather than open systems. 

They are also hierarchical, in fact, they invented that organizational structure. 

With prehistoric man, everything evolved from the witch doctor or Sharman, first as clans and tribes before the family came into being, with the religious leader the judge, jury and executioner imitating the specter of a god.

But because so many of these splinter groups, these terrorist cells, claim to be advocates of a legitimate religion, is it fair to say "religion poisons everything"?

That was the late Christopher Hitchens' take ("god is not Great! How religion poisons everything," 2007).

True, there were the Holy Crusades that weren't very holy, armies and assassins of the Catholic papacy, and let us not forget the Inquisition. 

Roman Catholicism has had its warrior popes, as has Islam had its warrior Imams.  Judaism’s High Priests have been known to betray the Law of Moses by adopting the ways of Hellenism regressing from the diet and discipline of Judaism for the Greek ways.  None of these great religions has a flawless history, but they have given man faith and direction despite their human limitations.  

That said where would Western Civilization be without the Catholic Church? 

Modern science was born in the Catholic Church;

Catholic priests developed the free-market economy 500 years before Adam Smith;

The Catholic Church invented the university;

Western civil law grew out of Catholic Church canon law;

Catholicism, despite the stain of the Inquisition, can lay claim to insisting on the sacredness of human life from conception.  

Christopher Hitchens, for whom I have some regard, could rant with eloquence, but I think history will proof his book on God an embarrassment.  I am aware he was playing to an influential audience of atheists and church haters.

God is not Great is a rant with rampant inaccuracies and incomprehensible assertions on nearly every page.  He had the talent for a prosecutor style of the competent essayist but for some reason abandoned that style. 

Hitchens' diatribe is evidence of how deep in the bone marrow are our emotions that color our better sense.  We are far more a feeling than a thinking being.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT THIS STUDY

This study was first written forty years ago, and promptly forgotten, I thought. 

But as I write it now, or better yet retype it now, as I have no other record of it other than my bound hard copy, I find it gave me permission to see why I was so angry after South Africa, and why I behaved as I did.

I was hurting and confused when I retreated from South Africa and apartheid in 1968, and blamed it all on my religion, especially my priests with their authoritarian ways. 

Writing this for a graduate seminar was cathartic, and strangely, not consciously, insightful of my paradoxical dilemma.  Now I see:

Religion from the dawn of man provided two pragmatic things and two idealistic things.

Religion provided leadership and organization in a pragmatic sense.

Religion provided a will and a way to live and the motivation to love beyond the limits of one's own person in an idealistic sense, and therefore a survival sense as the human race.

This survival strategy, as imperfect and flawed as it is, has lifted man out of himself so that it could return less full of himself and more attuned to the demands of humanity.  Without this survival strategy man would have perished a long time ago.

We make so much of man's inventiveness, and his capacity to think but we give little credence to the importance of his emotional health and capacity to live and behave civilly with other human beings. 

The weapon of mass construction is love and humor that provides man with balance and perspective.

Often in the history of man, he has been in the Manichean struggle between self-realization and self-destruction, self-love and self-hatred, self-directed and other directed. 

He has championed his capacity to think but seldom given equal regard to his capacity to feel. 

Never has this been more evident than now where people routinely retreat into alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, or become workaholics, chasing the mechanical rabbit of their minds around a never ending circular fixation.    

People cannot handle silence; cannot be alone; cannot trust their own thoughts but must be with others; must find out what others think and believe and how others behave as they want to be in sync with the prevailing norm to feel legitimate, authentic.

This is an attempt to keep at bay our fears and natural paranoia, and what is the greatest fear?  It is to be loved and loving, especially to love and respect ourselves, nothing is harder.   

This paradox is the perfect arena for religion, but the dilemma is that organized religions are obsessed with the same demands as everyone else and therefore the forward inertia.

The precepts of most religions are uplifting and positive, but as you point out, religions can become impatient and judgmental, resorting to dictatorial measures forgetting the fundamentals of their mission.  It happens.

Do you think it is happening more now than before?  My study suggests otherwise. 

Perhaps we are more aware that our religions cannot save us from ourselves, as they once attempted to do.  Now, we are on our own, and therefore the terror. 

In early Judea before the Christian era, Sadducees held to the literal interpretation of the words of Moses, or Talmud Law, believing in "an eye for an eye," while the Pharisees were more pragmatic, adjusting to the demands of the times. 

Pharisees have survived in Rabbinical Judaism to this day, but the Sadducees have disappeared.

The history of religion presents the same play only with different characters on stage.  As the “Search for the Real Parents of My Soul” continues, this will become more apparent.

Thank you for your comments.   I hope you accept mine in the spirit that they are given be you of a completely other mind.

*     *     *

REFERENCES:

James George Frazer, The Illustrated Golden Bough, 1996

F. Adamson Hoebel, Anthropology: The Study of Man, 1966

Roger Lewin, In the Age of Mankind, 1988

Lucy Freeman, Freud Rediscovered, 1980

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Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., Purposeful Selling, 2014

Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., Meet Your New Best Friend, 2014

Christopher Hitchens, “god is not Great! How religion poisons everything,” 2007

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., How The Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, 2005

James Raymond Fisher, Jr., A Green Island in A Black Sea: A Novel of South Africa during Apartheid, 2013

James R. Fisher, Jr., Who Put You in the Cage? 2014

James R. Fisher, Jr., Search for the Real Parents of My Soul, unpublished