Reference: Madness, Sanity & Its Unfathomable Dichotomy

What Did You Learn, Unlearn from this piece?

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

A READER WRITES:

Dr. Fisher,

What you have taught me is, mainly, to cease brooding over the future.  I keep a catalog of favorite quotes and when son, Ben, was younger he accused me of always speaking in headlines.  Here I go again, quoting from three of my favorite persons, each can be fit into your form below. 

Eleanor Roosevelt: The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Abraham Lincoln: The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.

Winston Churchill:  If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

Mysticism clouds, especially the catholic mystic forms both Roman and Eastern Orthodox.  Ethos, pathos and logos, the three pillars of rhetoric Aristotle embraced, are present in your offering, however you leave a multitude of loose ends dangling as you ponder this need in mankind to worship.  Is it the community that is lacking?

Robert Thurman, the Buddhism expert, promotes the leveling of all popular religions into the state of peaceful understanding and respect.  For this state to evolve the three jewels of Buddhism must come together.  Buddha, the yellow jewel is enlightenment or the awaking.  Dharma, the blue jewel, is teaching or the reverse the learning face. Shanga, the red jewel, is community. 

You have exposed a mountain, mining it will be a gigantic chore.  Drawing it together again will be your triumph. 

Musing from the various religious orders, centuries old, from the Paulines, Jesuits, Dominicans...beyond to the Tao, to become one with Nature.  Will you get to spiritual and beyond to the soul?  RW

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear RW, 

You skip the essence of what I am saying to fixate on our cultural moorings -- East & West -- which I claim in this piece is not the problem but rather our chronic preoccupation. 

I am beyond these indices that you enumerate as they have long ago been internalized. 

This is not a blast against Americanism or Catholicism, much less Christianity, but an attempt to illustrate they are symptoms of a larger problem, our inability to understand ourselves choosing instead to intellectualize our problems away.  Of course, that never works.

We are appalled by our madness because we refuse to see it as part of our sanity.  What this age suffers from is too much sanity, too much rationality, too much certainty, and not enough madness.

A year ago today, July 19, 2014, a Malaysian commercial airliner  with 298 people on board was  shot down  over the eastern  Ukraine, a war zone. 

Was this madness?  Of course, in one sense it was, but sane to the rebels who claim the plane should not have been flying over their disputed territory.    

Madness, not sanity, frees the mind from the times.  It gets inside our cognitive dissonance.  Sanity defends the lie as we see in the case of these rebels, and by extension in the case of Vladimir Putin who obviously had a hand in this misguided action.

That is what I am saying. 

That is the essence of what is being said here. Americanism and Catholicism are merely peripheral to all that.    

What did you learn from reading this piece?  What did you unlearn if anything?  That is my interest.

Jim

Some Brooding of the Peripatetic Philosopher:

Madness, Sanity & ITS Unfathomable Dichotomy

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

© July 18, 2015

For the past several years, I have been pondering why religion, which once was so controlling of me has become peripheral and pusillanimous, concluding that it has lost its moral authority and vigor having confused its belief system with the phenomenon of believing.  

A belief system and believing are not the same.  Everyone has to believe in something to function, but less and less people need a belief system to do so.

This is not an imperative.  What is vital is the capacity, indeed, the audacity to believe in something greater than the self. 

*     *     *

At one point in my life, I felt the belief system of Roman Catholicism as if it were etched on my soul.  Then I experienced South Africa and the apartheid policy of the Afrikaner government (see blog: South Africa, Mindset & Self-Image – March 30, 2008).  I was a young man sent to South Africa by my company to facilitate the formation of a new company. 

Since this missive is about “Sanity and Madness & Its Dichotomy,” it relates to a particular brand of a belief system, in this case that of being born in America and reared in Roman Catholicism. 

Once in South Africa, belief no longer proved efficacious, but played havoc with my conscience, as I took these beliefs to be real, when they were a fallible fragile set of abstract ideas not to be trusted. 

Confident that I had the hubris to do the job, I relied on being American armed with American technology.  This I believed was sufficient to deliver structure and order to the limping universe I encountered in my work here as elsewhere. 

The conceit of my Catholicism and American ethnocentrism provided the impertinence to enter South Africa knowing nothing about the country or her people.  

This bankrupt recipe nearly destroyed me (see my novel, A Green Island in a Black Sea, 2014), but ultimately launched me instead into a world of ideas outside myself, giving me the power to write books and articles on what I have seen and done.

Who could have been more pitiful or pathetic than I was?  

I had been on automatic pilot with a belief system that found me believing the world revolved around me and my American and Roman Catholic sphere.  When it was shattered, for a long while I lost my capacity to believe in anything, especially myself. 

Believing is more important than any belief system.

It was 1968, only twenty-three years since the end of the Second World War.

Earlier, in the late 1950s, I was a sailor on the flagship of the United States Navy Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean on the USS Salem CA-139, a heavy cruiser with 1,400 men aboard.

The Sixth Fleet with 50,000 men and more than 50 ships including aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, destroyer escorts, submarines and LSD’s, and hundreds of aircraft paraded up and down and across the Mediterranean Sea as if it were its own private marina. 

With this arrogance in my innocence, I failed to comprehend reality as I was too wrapped up in my American glory and the infallibility of my Catholicism to be sensitive to the peoples encountered across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

When we conducted military exercises in the Mediterranean, this foolishness became euphoric.  The sun would be blocked out by the armada of planes across the sky, while the shoreline would be blurred by the flotilla of American ships that swelled in the Mediterranean to nearly one hundred showcasing America’s might. 

Once on liberty in Beirut, Lebanon and wandering into the poverty section of the city, I unwittingly engaged in snapping picture after picture of the people and the squalor that they called home. 

Several Lebanese youngsters climbed on me, on my shoulders and back, not to hurt me, but to stop me from taking more pictures.  We had a language barrier but I had never seen such palpable hatred in people's eyes.

That image of calloused disregard for people’s feelings has stayed with me for more than half a century.   What is worse, I didn’t think at the time I had done anything wrong.

Gradually, however, over time once I experienced more life, I came to realize that what I took to be my sanity was my madness, and that it was not only my madness but that of my American and Catholic culture.  On the other hand, paradoxically, even more gradually, I came to realize that my madness is where my sanity resides. 

DEGREES OF MADNESS

From the perspective of eight decades of living, I find my behavior as a young member of the United States Navy in the Mediterranean in the late 1950s and as a young executive of an American company in the late 1960s in South Africa not as reprehensible as I did initially, but more as a misplacement of several degrees of madness for madness is as essential to well-being and functioning as is sanity.

Madness in our culture, however, is linked to mental illness, which I have come to distrust as mainly psychobabble generated by a profession of educated mental health practitioners operating beyond good sense with impunity.

Mental health has become iatrogenic as the cure is often worse than the imagined disease.

This has led me to ask the question:

How is it possible to be sane in a culture that denies its madness while being as irrational or wacko as is our own?

THE GENESIS OF A BELIEF SYSTEM AND ITS DIFFERENCE WITH BELIEVING

In pondering this dichotomous riddle, I’ve come face to face with my Judaic-Christian culture, and now realize it survived best in the past when its leaders were blessed with madness. 

This is evident in my reading of book after book about early Christianity, a project launched in the 1970s after returning from South Africa, and one that continues to this day.

What I think these Christian scholars miss is that they see themselves outside the culture from which their scholarship springs.  Consequently, no matter how vigorous the research, contamination permeates the works. 

I am again talking about madness and sanity. 

A sane perspective dominates the scholarship of these studied perceptions when it was madness that gave birth to our Judaic-Christian culture 2,000 years ago, a madness that has become critical, indeed, fundamental to our survival notwithstanding Western Civilization’s emphasis on its sanity at the expense of this madness.

For the past few years, I have been reading these scholars on the early Christian Church, trying to resolve the dichotomy between what Jesus said, what he preached and believed to be his mission, which has not survived, and how diametrically opposed to this theology was that of Paul’s, which not only has survived but has become the essence of Christianity, be it Catholic, Protestant, Greek or Russian Orthodox. 

Consequently, for all intent and purposes, there is no Jesus in Christianity, only Paul and the Jesus that he has created.

My sense is that both Jesus and Paul demonstrated a kind of madness that was essential to their brand of leadership. 

Jesus was a Jew, thought like a Jew, behaved like a Jew, and the parameters of his mission were in the strictest sense in the context of that Judaism.  

There is no evidence anywhere that Jesus thought beyond that particular faith and culture, therefore, that he thought beyond anything other than continuing in the tradition of the prophecies of the Old Testament.   

Paul, on the other hand, was a diaspora Jew and reared in the tradition of Hellenistic Judaism as a Roman citizen. 

What Paul possessed was not Palestinian Judaism but the eclectic madness of Hellenism, Judaism and Romanism in the crucible of an irrational temperament as his mission went beyond Judaic culture and embraced the much larger Gentile world. 

It was this cauldron of emotional fervor that pulsates through Paul’s “Letters to the Romans,” the only extant record of the first century of the Common Era (C.E.), Anno Domini (A.D.) or Christian Era (C.E.), whatever you prefer.  

The New Testament is the compilation of an oral history in which there is no definitive proof of a single author.  While beautiful as it reads, it cannot be verified historically except in a most liberal interpretation of scripture.     

Given this, Christianity like other belief systems has been motivated to pursue war, carnage, torture and annihilation of nonbelievers simply because they chose to believe in different things and in different ways.   

No culture escapes this madness.  It is part of its genius. 

People need their myths and illusions to cope with reality as the mechanism of survival, while zealots of any belief system have little tolerance for either nonbelievers or other belief systems.  It is this and for no other reason that religion has gotten a bad name. 

Ergo, the question of whether God is dead or not is irrelevant.  As long as MAN IS on this planet as a functioning human being, God exists.   God is part of the madness of man’s sanity.

As I read what Jesus is alleged to have said, it seems to be highly rational, but with the madness of the idea that he was the Son of God and the Son of Man. 

Madness, you see, is quite engaging.  It is essential to our leaders.  Today we call such madness charisma.  It is the magnet that takes us out of ourselves in order for us to see into ourselves. 

This charisma comes in many forms.  Abraham Lincoln had it in his quietude and relentless determination to preserve the nation as a whole.  A melancholy man, Lincoln used his madness to get beyond the biases and conceits of the people of his time, and for that we Americans celebrate him to this day. 

Look at leaders of any period, and were it not for madness, they would not be remembered.  Too much sanity produced a General George McClellan of Lincoln’s time and a Jimmy Carter of ours.

Without the spur of madness, Prime Minister Winston Churchill could never have gotten President Franklin Delano Roosevelt off the dime and engaged.  People point to December 7, 1941, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but that was anticlimactic as historians have shown. 

If you think I exaggerate, read biographies of Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Lincoln and Churchill, indeed, of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Gandhi and many others.  I assure you if they have penetrated your consciousness it was with their madness, not their sanity.

BI-POLAR NATION?

Plato understood the importance of madness, and in his writing he described what today we might call our “bi-polar” nation, for this madness is apparent in our creativity on the one hand, and in our paranoid leadership on the other. 

A polarized culture, such as ours, fails to understand the fundamental importance of madness as a bridge to its sanity. 

Evidence that we have misconstrued this polarization is seen in the anesthetizing of our youth when these young people show signs of creativity and/or leadership, that is, a difference with the herd.  

Alas, when people, young or old move away from the herd, we dispense a retinue of prescriptions of mind numbing drugs to reduce them to manageable complacent zombies.

These remedies are not dispensed by criminals but by mental health professionals who fail to understand the importance of our delicate brain chemistry between sanity and madness.

Without this madness complemented by sanity, there would be no science; no religion, and no culture to speak of.

Fortunately, sanity and madness is working overtime in us all, as it is part of our survival mechanism.

CAMPAIGN POLITICS & QUADRENNIAL MADNESS

Should you question the legitimacy of my thesis here, observe presidential politics over the next two years in pursuit of the party nomination for the Presidency of the United States.

Aspiring candidates of the Democratic and Republican Party will display bi-polar behavior to the umpteenth degree and no one will accuse them of being smitten with attention deficit disorders, which they will clearly resemble.   

Instead these aspiring politicians will medicate us with their brand of madness to induce amnesia if not catatonia as they intoxicate us with the absurdity of their pontifications. 

The “Theatre of the Absurd” will be on display with candidates without a prayer of winning the nomination spending millions of dollars gratuitously and maddeningly to advertisers on television and millions more traveling to every nook and cranny of the nation attempting to cajole the populace to take them seriously as candidates in this climate of quadrennial madness. 

But rest assured, the one that will succeed will not be the sane one, but the mad one with the most convincing lies.     

*     *     *

The Peripatetic Philosopher asks,

WHY DID ASHFORD UNIVERSITY FAIL IN CLINTON, IOWA?

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

© July 14, 2015

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

Clinton, Iowa is my hometown.  It is a place comfortable with hard working and successful people who prefer a low profile to dancing in the streets presenting themselves as the hotsy totsy, a mid-20th century US term for those who think they are a class above everyone else.  They find it necessary to drive cars they can't afford, live in houses mortgaged up to the hilt, acquire fancy boats that eventually go into receivership, and dress as if their stuff doesn't stink.

Clinton isn't like that.  I know Clintononian millionaires who dress as if they are on welfare, live in modest homes, drive ten-year-old, or older jalopies, don't belong to any country club, but value education, ideas, and hard work without complaint.

Into this midst comes Ashford University with a vengeance.  It is hotsy totsy, building Mount St. Clare College and grounds and renovating the campus for upteen millions of dollars.  Then they build an entire motel of scores of units to be converted into dormitories.  

Not by any means is Ashford University through.  It buys and demolishes the Clinton Country Club and constructs a complex of athletic fields and recreational facilities on the attractive grounds.  Then it acquires the naming rights to Riverview Stadium, one of the most attractive minor league baseball parks in the nation, a place I played many games as a youth in American Legion baseball, the men's Industrial League, and for the semi-pro team called the Lyons Merchants. 

By no means, Ashford University was not through.  It constructed banks of buildings where operators handled on-line courses across the nation if not the world.

One thing Clintonians know and that is you don't live on gonna be's or gonna have's.  You live in the moment and build towards the future with intelligence, industry and modesty.  They know you cannot eat the picture in your mind of the ideal meal.  A lot of unobtrusive effort out of the spotlight must be endure before you can put that meal on the table.

Apparently, Ashford University stormed into Clinton with no idea of the history, the fortitude, the resiliency of the place, and the special place schools and churches have in the community.  This university did what several entrepreneurs have done in this flippant electronic information age.  It ran on optimism and not pragmatism.  Clinton is a pragmatic place.  Now, Ashford University is leaving and Clintonians, not Ashford, has to pick up the pieces and move forward.  

What I find amusing about this is how outsiders look at those of us who grew up in the Midwest.  While I was at the University of Iowa in Iowa City in the 1950s, Life Magazine ran an article on American universities.  It said of the University of Iowa "it is definitely not for the sophisticated."

That comment has stayed with me all my life as a badge of honor.  We in the Midwest are not about how you see us, but how we handle the business of living, which we are inclined to do quietly and unobtrusively, out of the spotlight building a solid foundation upon which to live, not sand castles in the air.

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

Paul Fain says it all in the online piece that follows:

WHY ASHFORD UNIVERSITY LOST ITS ACCREDITATION

Paul Fain © July 10, 2015

The Western Association of Schools and Colleges dealt a stinging blow to Bridgepoint Education Inc. on Monday by rejecting the for-profit’s accreditation bid for its Ashford University. The decision could mean regional accreditors will take a more assertive role in the debate over for-profit higher education.

Ashford fell short in several broad areas, according to the association, including its lack of a “sufficient core” of full-time faculty members, large numbers of students who drop out and questionable academic rigor in some areas.

The biggest problem identified by the accreditor and its review team was the university’s rapid growth, which has made the publicly traded Bridgepoint a high flyer among investors. Ashford enrolls more than 90,000 students, up from 10,000 just five years ago.

“The challenges that this rapid growth and enrollment model present to management, quality and student success cannot be overstated,” said Ralph A. Wolff, WASC’s president, in a letter to Elizabeth Tice, Ashford’s president and CEO. “Although the team found that Ashford has sought to keep pace by building its infrastructure to support this large number of online students, many of its promising initiatives are recent, some only undertaken within the last year.”

For example, the report by a (comparatively star-studded) team that reviewed Ashford’s bid found that 128,000 students withdrew from the university over the last five years, a time during which Ashford enrolled 241,000 new students, meaning that more than 50 percent dropped out.

“This level of attrition is, on its face, not acceptable,” Wolff wrote.

The site visit team said that Ashford’s students, many of whom are not academically prepared to succeed in college, might not be getting the support they need at the university. They also singled out Ashford’s emphasis on boosting enrollment versus investment in academics.

For example, Ashford employed only 56 full-time faculty members in 2011, with 2,458 part-time faculty members and 875 instructional staff, the report said. (Since then, the university reported hiring 43 new full-time faculty members.) As for student support services, Ashford has 14 writing specialists and 38 instructional specialists on staff, both inadequate numbers according to the accreditor. In contrast, the university employed 2,305 staff members in enrollment services.

“The team was concerned that this does not suggest an optimum alignment of institutional resources with stated mission and priorities,” according to the report.

Anchor Identity' in Iowa

WASC was not critical, however, of Ashford’s residential campus in Iowa, which has been a poster child for the purchase of struggling nonprofit colleges by for-profits.

The accreditor had nothing but praise for Ashford’s “on-ground” location, saying the university had made a substantial investment in improving the campus and supporting its residential students.

“As the team noted, the Iowa campus serves as an ‘anchor identity’ for thousands of online students and is highly valued and supported,” Wolff said.

That campus, which enrolled 973 students last fall, is a former religious college that Bridgepoint purchased in 2005. As part of the deal, the company got the college’s regional accreditation, through the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

Critics have denounced the purchase of a college’s accreditation as being like a taxi medallion. And Bridgepoint, with its sparsely attended Iowa campus and rapid online growth, became a symbol of the perceived excess of for-profits. Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and antagonist of the industry, has been particularly hot about Bridgepoint.

The Higher Learning Commission in 2010 rejected similar purchases of two struggling private colleges by for-profits, signaling a less favorable view of the industry -- a shift that played a significant role in Bridgepoint's decision to seek accreditation elsewhere.

Ashford officials were “disappointed” by WASC’s decision, they said in a written statement. The university now faces a difficult dance to keep its accreditation, a crucial step because its students would not be able to receive federal financial aid if the university no longer held regional accreditation.

The university said it plans to appeal the WASC ruling. It will also participate in a reapplication process, by submitting a report in response to the decision. The commission permits a follow-up site visit, as early as next spring, and could consider the reapplication by June 2013.

In the meantime, Ashford will need to work on its status with the Higher Learning Commission. Bridgepoint said in a corporate filing that the university intends to maintain that accreditation until it can be transferred to WASC. That might not be easy. The Midwestern accreditor advised the university that it has until the end of the year to demonstrate that it is in compliance with requirements that it have a "substantial presence" in the region.

“It is expected that the institution would need to consolidate a significant portion of its educational administration and activity, business operations and executive and administrative leadership” in the 19-state region the Higher Learning Commission oversees, according to a Bridgepoint corporate filing. Without that consolidation, the commission could give Ashford the boot.

In the wake of WASC's decision, Bridgepoint's share price tumbled Monday by 34 percent.

While Ashford was shot down in its initial effort to look westward, WASC took another action Monday that was a win for a for-profit. (See related article today.)

The commission allowed UniversityNow, a for-profit that runs the competency-based New Charter University, to purchase Patten University, a struggling religious college located in Oakland. UniversityNow also got Patten’s regional accreditation as part of the deal.

Sound familiar?

Concern about Academic Rigor

WASC was under plenty of pressure to get its review of Ashford right. Harkin and other for-profit critics were watching closely, as were the industry’s advocates and investors.

The commission put together a team of heavy hitters to handle its site visit. Leading the 12-member team was Stanley O. Ikenberry, a professor and president emeritus of the University of Illinois and former president of the American Council on Education, the main association of college presidents. Others included Jane Wellman, an expert on higher education finance and executive director of the National Association of System Heads, and Sally Johnstone, vice president for academic advancement at Western Governors University.

The group’s 73-page final report did not give a thumbs-down to Ashford, leaving that judgment to WASC -- a common approach in regional accreditation.

“Whether or not the team report contains a recommendation with regard to accreditation status varies from accreditor to accreditor,” said Judith Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, in a written statement. “In any event, the authority to make the final accreditation decision rests with the accrediting commission.”

However, the team described a wide range of problems its members found at Ashford during a review that included five days of visits to Iowa and San Diego. And because the issues were in multiple realms, the commission chose to deny the university’s bid.

The report praises Ashford and Bridgepoint for their cooperation with what was described as an intensive review. It also said Ashford’s faculty and staff are dedicated to its mission, including affordability and accessibility.

“The leadership of the institution is mission-focused, energized and passionate about the purposes of the institution,” according to the report.

Ashford has begun a series of initiatives to better cope with its rapid growth, the team found. But that work is too new to judge, and its leaders are green.

“While there is excitement about the new efforts, the atmosphere appeared at times to verge on frenetic. The team observed a lack of organizational maturity and capacity to take the institution to the next level,” the report said. “Partly, this concern regarding capacity stems from the narrow range of experience demonstrated by the staff and in part from the limited academic leadership depth available to the massive online programs.”

As for academics, Ashford had conducted systematic reviews of only six of its 80 academic programs. And the commission found that the university had not thoroughly assessed the quality of its online course offerings. As a result, the commission said it had “serious concerns about the rigor of coursework, which varied from course to course and was not always at the appropriate level.”

WASC posted the full site review on its website today, as part of a path breaking effort by the agency to increase its transparency (which is likely to put pressure on other accreditors to follow suit). While public colleges often make their accreditation reviews available online, regional accreditors do not. As such, the review provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a private institution, one that is both large and controversial.

The review also included a survey of Ashford’s students, yielding a response rate of more than 30 percent and a largely positive view of the university. (Survey results are available at the end of the team's report.)

Harkin said in a statement that he was pleased with WASC’s “careful and thoughtful” review of Ashford. “I continue to have serious concerns about whether Bridgepoint Education and their school Ashford University – along with other for-profit schools – are providing a quality education to their student population, the majority of which are enrolled online.”

A READER RESPONDS:

Jimmy,

There’s always a story behind the story.

I suspect this one goes something like this:

For-profit colleges have the potential to obsolete (outcompete) the fat, bloated public university system.  The need for profit forces efficiency, which the public schools do not have.  Not only is modern academia a major industrial complex (rice bowl, jobs program, etc.), it’s the primary political programming mechanism for the progressive left.  It’s not going to fall without a fight, and a big one.

If one reads the accreditation rationale, it’s basically saying Ashford was flunked because it wasn’t big and fat, like us.  It didn’t have lots of services (of questionable need to students), and it didn’t have lots of snouts in the trough.  Today’s universities can and do add all manner of ‘services’, used by only a sliver of students, for which all have to pay without choice.

When everyone goes to college, it ceases to become a discriminator unless one goes into an area like medicine or engineering where the rigor of the course material limits the graduates.  We’ve got a country full of kids with six figure debt working at Starbucks.  How long is that going to work?

Education is ripe for revolution.  That should give the press something to jaw about. Thank God, I’m tired of hearing about some stupid old flag.

Cya Jimmy,

E

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

E,

This is pure gold.

You leave out, however, that Ashford University spent money and expanded like crazy and actually duplicated much of the anachronistic model that you describe so well.

Everyone pays the Piper when they do that whatever the business, but always those who can least afford it pay the most..

Today, if you managed a glance at the Business Section of The Tampa Bay Times, that is, if you still read newspapers, you would have seen that the American Booksellers Association and the Association of Author's Representatives and Authors United have asked the Justice Department to review online retailer's practices, especially giant Amazon.com.

These disgruntled power cells fail to mention that authors and their agents and by extension, book sellers have been in collusion for years careful to see what books are on the shelves and hyped and what are not. 

Then if you have ever read on the publishing industry, itself, which I have done, the business model is no model at all.  They sell brands and celebrities, not ideas, careful to protect their membership in the sainted left. 

The irony, and this I also write about, is that less and less people are reading books at all, but yet nearly a million books are published a year, and that is not including the vanity press which is striving.  Imagine all those wasted trees. 

Amazon.com has treated me better than any other source of book selling.  In fact, it went to great lengths to see my books back into print, when due to my incompetence, I loss the manuscripts when my computer imploded.   They had to scan all my books into print.

I have a personal contact with Amazon.com's Kindle Director, and can see what you say applies to publishing as well as education.

But it goes beyond that as I have attempted to show in CORPORATE SIN.

While we're talking about fat, I've been on that corporate gravy train twice in my life, once with Nalco Chemical Company, and once with Honeywell Europe Ltd., collecting on the myth that senior executives are worthy of so much more than the minions that actually do the work.

The CEO of Honeywell, while I was involved, whose performance was close to a "D" grade, managed a multi-million dollar severance package while Honeywell's stock price plummeted on his watch. 

This was not only wrong.  To this lapsed Irish Roman Catholic, it was a mortal sin.

In THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (now in its final form for its second edition), I write about the possibility of revolution, when, indeed, that is precisely what we seem to be experiencing, or at least its velvet version.

As usual, you write like an angel, but with a saber in hand rather than a harp

Jim  

THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER WRITES:

 Self-Confidence, Something Everyone Deserves to Have!

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

© July 6, 2015

“When young, we trust ourselves too much, and we trust others too little when we are old.  Rashness is the error of youth; timid caution when old.  Manhood is the isthmus between the two extremes, the ripe and fertile seas of action when, only, we can hope to find the head to contrive, united with the hand to execute.”

Caleb Colton, Nineteenth Century English Clergyman

“Trust men and they will be true to you, treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nineteenth Century American poet and essayist

THE MOST IMPORTANT SALE YOU WILL EVER MAKE

This, I suggested, in the opening lines of my first book, Confident Selling (1971 1^st Edition, 2014 2^nd Edition), which was less about selling and more about confidence.  With confidence, you can do anything your mind envisions.

People flew in from California and drove down from Minnesota to discuss the book with me, intrigued with its departure from the conventional boilerplate of selling into a dissertation on confidence.

“Confidence,” I write, “is the antidote to fear; fear rooted in self-ignorance.  With self-understanding comes confidence followed by tolerance for our own false steps and failures.  As we face down our fears, we rise above obstacles we once thought were utterly beyond our control.”

Now, why would I say that?  Why would I write about confidence, fear and control in the same paragraph?

The simple reason is that I found a very average person such as myself, average in about every way, could do precisely whatever he set his heart and mind to do without protocol or substantiation from anyone else. 

If I thought it, the deed was already half done.

People, of course, took this as arrogance or self-centered narcissism to the extreme.  

People always have a litany of reasons to discourage us from what our hearts and minds tell us we can do if we but take the first step.  Confidence is required to do so.

But you see that is the problem.  

People don’t claim to have that  confidence and therefore do not take that first step.  They wait for approval.  They wait to assay the risks.  They wait for someone to push them over the line in the sand.  They wait until the line becomes a wall.

I've known people who are better writers than I am who have never published a word.  They failed to write because they took comfort in the idea that they could be great writers but were afraid to find out.

I've known people smarter than I am, and had all the attributes to successfully pursue a college education, but never took the first step to find out, taking comfort in the idea that they were smarter than people with the credential. 

I've known people who could have had a great international career, but didn't want to leave the safety and comfort of home and the familiar.

They hang out with people who say they are where they belong while envying those with the confidence to move on. 

They wait for confirmation that they are on the right track when they are not on any track at all. 

You know who these people are. They hang out together. 

They are waiting for the right time to make a move.  They are waiting until they have enough education, or money, or support, or love and affection to take the risk.  

They are waiting and then one day they run out of life.  

They are the gonna be’s and the gonna do’s, and always going to do these things tomorrow.

They never make it because they never made the most important sale in their lives, belief in themselves come hell or high water. 

THE BUSINESS OF CONFIDENCE – THE GROUND FLOOR

Now, I have a confession to make.  I come to confidence from a poor boy's background, but one who grew up in a home of two loving parents, especially my mother.  

From the get go I was a disappointment to my da, being put back in the first grade for "not being there."  In retrospect, I believe my teacher and her principle thought I was retarded.  That was the 1930s. 

Family was a new experience for me as I had been shuttled around from foster parents to relatives for the first five years of my life, when my mother was mainly in hospital, and my da had to get his Irish restlessness out of his soul (I write about this in my novel, “A Green Island in a Black Sea”).

Coming from a strong Irish Catholic American family, for some strange reason, I was put in the public school, instead of the Catholic school.  It was not a good fit.

Being big for my age, I was bullied from the first by older boys my size, and was terrified to speak.  That is what I remember of that experience now as an old man. 

Today they would most likely call it “autism,” but whatever it was it disappeared once I was with the Sister of St. Francis at St. Boniface and then St. Patrick School.

The nuns loved me, and I loved them.  As for my mother, she decided I would be a lifelong project to make me into a duplicate of her brother, who had two Ph.D.’s from the University of Iowa in Economics and Psychology. 

Mention is made of this because to gain confidence it helps to have a reference point, an object, symbol, or some source with which one can identify.  

Confidence often identifies with one's hero or some simpatico person.  

For me, it was my mother’s older brother.  That was part of it; the other part was she emphasized my assets: my athleticism, memory, my unimaginable focus and attention to deal, and my natural inclination to listen with discernment.  

These aspects of my disposition became as natural to me as breathing, plus I had an equally natural inclination to work hard on my interests.  

My da had little education, dropping out of school after the seventh grade at St. Patrick’s.  My mother graduated from high school at St. Mary’s and was a reader of nearly a book a day for most of her life.  She encouraged me to be a reader.

Reading is not only a gauge to explore the unknown but a window to knowing the self.

THE BUSINESS OF CONFIDENCE – 

IDENTITY

Athletics came to define me.  I was recruited to the public high school where I was already more than six, two and 180 pounds, and would grow two more inches.  

When you play football, basketball, baseball and run track competitively in high school, studies can become less a priority.  My mother had a different view.

One day she asked me, “Who are you, Jimmy?”

The question stunned me.  Who am I?  Then before I could answer she added, “What are you?”

My head was spinning.  I stutter when excited, and I stuttered incomprehensibly. 

“Your father thinks it is time you quit school go to work on the railroad and help support the family.”

I waited.  I was finishing my freshman year in high school.

“I told him," she continued, "You’re going to college, and he nearly swallowed his cigarette.”  

She chuckled.  “He asked how the hell are we going to afford that when it is hard for me to put food on the table.”  

There were six of us, including my parents, and he was on the extra board of the railroad, never would have a regular job.   

She chuckled again, “Do you know what I told him?”

I waited again.

“I told him everyone is going to want you; everyone will be wanting to give you a scholarship.”

The varsity basketball coach had moved me up to the varsity at the end of basketball season my freshman year, so I took her to mean an athletic scholarship.  

It soon was clear that was not the case.  She was thinking of an academic scholarship.

“You're going to become a scholar like your Uncle Leonard.  

"You’re going to pay more attention to your studies from now on, and athletics are going to be a distant second.  Is that clear?”

If it wasn’t clear, it proved to be the case as I won a merit scholarship for tuition at the University of Iowa.  I kept it for my five years there.

Looking back, that little episode would define me.  When my mother was not there, she was in my head.  I have found myself throughout my life when I hit a bump in the road, asking myself:

Who are you, Jimmy?

What are you, Jimmy?

People have tried to define me, to get a handle on me, often seeing me different if not the most difficult person they have ever met.  

It is not that I am so different.  It is that I’ve never been seduced by trends, fads, popular lingo, or notions of the day.

Things that gave others a sense of belonging proved to have little purchase with me. 

My passion was found in ideas, ideas often in conflict with my cultural programming.   

When at a crossroads, and there have been several in my life, I’ve taken the road less traveled without apology.

THE BUSINESS OF CONFIDENCE: 

WHAT IS CONFIDENCE?

Confidence is not having a sense of superiority, or inferiority as you can see from this brief biography.  Confidence is being engaged.

Confidence is the ability to act to completion on something of value to you.

In other words, it is not about half measures, not about looking for approval, or reasons to succeed.  Likewise, it is not about finding excuses to abort the chase or back down from the target.

Confidence is about commitment, commitment involves involvement, and involvement means you are already half way there; so stay the course!  

It doesn’t mean going to the “right schools” or working for the “right companies,” or having the "right" pedigrees,  or hanging out with the “right crowd."  It can be all or none of these.  They are incidental to the process.

Nor is it about pursuing the favorite career-of-day because everyone says that is what you should do.  

You know in your heart what you love to do, so do it with a vengeance!

Confidence is being well acquainted with your own history, with your failures, successes, your false steps, your disappointments, your surprises, your embarrassments, as well as your triumphs. 

Confidence, which may surprise you, is not mechanistic but a process of growth and that never peaks, but may have several valleys.  

Yes, one's confidences dips and vacillates, but that only strengthens your resolve. 

Confidence has a lot in common with moral rather physical courage.  

I see young people today building up their muscles and flashing tattoos all over their bodies as signs of personal identity when it is just the opposite.  It is playing to the crowd identifying with the herd. 

Confidence is quiet.  It is engaged.  It has no need for show, or need for kudos.

That does not mean that confidence does not have a goal.  Indeed, the confident person wants to make the sale:

·      The completion of his work to a satisfying degree;

·      The completion of his dissertation to a Ph.D.;

·      The winning of the love of his life;

·      The finding of the job that he seeks;

·      The seeing that his children are launched successfully into life;

·      The advancement to the position sought;

·      The feeling of love and fulfillment in life.

There are many obstacles to these desires and they are primarily self-imposed because of the lack of confidence or the will to work to their full realization.  

What detours people from these goals are often bullies, clear and simple, bullies from the outside or bullies from the inside; bullies disguised as friends or advisers.

THE BUSINESS OF CONFIDENCE: 

BULLIES FROM THE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

“To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself”

This first line was penned in an article in The Reader’s Digest (June 1993).  Subsequently, a book called The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1995, 1st edition, Meet Your New Best Friend, 2014, 2nd edition) was written with this theme in mind.

The focus was on the inclination to trust secondary sources, including the views of friends and family more than one’s own counsel.  

Never being so inclined from an early age, I have come to regard bullies as the quintessential ugliest face of humanity.

We think of bullies as the neighborhood tough in which everyone cowers.  We outgrow that tough during our early years.  But we face bullies in the system every step of the way throughout life.

You meet them in teachers and preachers at school and church, in employers and colleagues at work, in pundits and politicians on the tube,  in newspapers, magazines and television news, in psychiatrists, psychologists, family physicians and friends who claim to be in the know on what is best for you, and if any of this takes, you are owned by them, and a stranger to yourself.

When confidence is compromised, there is no chance for the authentic self. 

Many of these secondary sources may mean well, but they are not you, and they are not privy to the length and breadth of your experience.

We are also bullied in the military as anyone knows who has gone through basic or boot training in the army or the navy, the marines or the coastguard.  

Strangely, the military, I have found is a kind of bullying that puts us in touch with ourselves, quite the opposite of the others alluded to here. 

To my surprise, I loved the navy, every moment of it, and had no problem being kicked into shape as I felt I was being treated fairly and consistently in the protocol of what it meant to be a fighting man. 

There are no bullies that equal academic bullies, as they have little power and even less prestige, but they have the grade or the withholding of the degree or the credential at their discretion.  

Mean spirited academics want to break your will, and make you grovel at their feet, as I can attest, which nearly cost me the letters after my name. 

I persevered, and was too good a writer and researcher to be denied my Ph.D.  

If you think this an exaggeration, fully 50 percent of those who complete the course work to a Ph.D., fail as an ABD (all but the dissertation).  

As I’ve repeatedly mentioned in Corporate Sin (1^st edition, 2000, 2nd edition, 2014) and other books in this genre, academics and corporate executives have much in common. 

They have the power over us that we have willingly given them.  Once we surrender our power, the expectation is that they will treat us with kindness and caring; that they will be supportive and appreciative of our interests; that they will be fair and considerate.  Unfortunately, power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely.  

Consequently, we find too frequently they exploit this advantage with reckless abandon.  For the attention, we have the world we have today.

A factory mentality of academia and industry has no place in the 21st Century.

Our only hope is to have the courage to take charge and map out an agenda consistent with our intuitive strength and the natural guidance system of our internal moral compass.  Should we do that, not only will we be more engaged and happy, but everyone else around us will be engaged with the same synchrony

Confident Thinking (1^st edition 2014) concludes with this suggestion:

“It is a time when we can no longer depend on others in decipher the road maps of our mind.  Our mind has become homeless.  That mind, Milton reminds us, is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.  The choice is ours to make. May you make that connection and soar to grace, greatness and fulfillment.”

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