SO, WHAT WOULD BE YOUR SOLUTION TO THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC?

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 27, 2020

Since this is a hypothetical question, and since I have no power, I can explain what I would do cognitively, intuitively and counterintuively, as if I did, indeed, have that requisite authority to attack this situation on all sides and at all levels. 

First of all, I would not look for solutions.  I would put an army of epidemiologists to the epicenter of the disease to investigate and determine disease patterns, risk factors involved and the relative health of the people and their animals in that center.  This in the short term might best protect them against the disease if they don’t already have it. 

The cause of the disease cannot be the primary focus, but it might subsequently surface counterintuively by leaving the door open to such factors as circumstances, incidents and recent and long range history that might at first blush seemingly have nothing concrete to do with the problem. 

This would require tackling the disease from the other side of the tracks where intuitive speculation and creative thinking complement conventional strategies of statistical analysis, disease quantification, and critical thinking. 

Numbers are always attractive to assessors of pandemics but they only make the population more restless and unsettled as numbers only track what panic has invested in the enterprise.       

A pandemic is the equivalent of a world war.  That said, I would not shut down the nation or freeze frame people in the isolation of panic.  I would however suspend the rights to life, liberty, fraternity and equality temporarily in this Global War, which would require price controls so that there could be no gouging or exploitation of the situation. 

At the same time, I would turn the nation’s colleges, universities, and related industries into war effort assemblies dedicated to the war effort making the necessary supplies and medicines to detect, classify, and evaluate pockets where the pandemic is currently flourishing. 

Within these pockets I would take stratified random statistical samples of the population in terms of Personality Profiles; Geographic Profiles and Demographic Profiles to get a sense of the maturity, fitness, mental readiness, and history to determine the level and sophistication required of the intervention.

I would not throw tons of resources at the zone indiscriminately or beyond the current projected needs of the situation.  Nor would I lock down an entire city because one or two zones are mini-epicenters until it was clear what the need might be, something similar to what China did. 

Moreover, I would turn the construction industry into a national army to build hospitals, clinics, quarantine facilities posthaste to isolate and treat those most suffering.

There would also be national rationing draconically enforced with violators sent to jail immediately without due process.  Hoarding in war is a criminal offense.

The national media at all levels: electronic, television, radio, assembly, in print either books, newspapers, magazines, handouts, or leaflets would be subject to judicious guidelines.  These media would be sanctioned similar to what happened in the United States in World War Two when media got into trouble when perceived to be “giving comfort to the enemy” by exploiting the vulnerable emotional climate of the times. 

To prevent the possibility that the nation might run out of food, fuel, clothing, medication, or health providers, I would encourage homeowners to tear up their pristine lawns and plant victory gardens, limit the amount of gasoline that could be purchased for nonessential jobs, turn homes into making clothes for the family from materials available, while policing the pharmaceutical industry so that it did not exploit the public by manufacturing only the most profitable drugs at the expense of those required for the pandemic, while accelerating the education of medical professionals to be available throughout the United States to apply their skills to the needy.

And finally, I would limit network and cable news reporting to what citizens can and should do during this challenging period, while limiting national press conferences to succinct broadcasts of what experts would have citizens do, putting a lid on politicians who seemingly cannot help themselves from fanning the flames of dissension and confusion. 

These politicians seemingly cannot escape from dangerous judgments, discriminating policies, or abortive suggestions. The complacent arrogance of politicians prevents them from seeing the extent of their failure until failure is everyone’s problem.  Even so, they continue to lament what is wrong, who is wrong, and why they are martyrs like peacocks in the wind standing helpless in the eye of the storm.

We will get beyond this, one day, but there is no guarantee learning will have taken place even though Western thinking has once again been shown to be inadequate bordering on dangerous to deal with this pandemic.  We are a complacent self-indulgent society and although my recommendations are a bit draconian they cannot or will not change the national mindset.  

THE DANGER OF BEING MISUNDERSTOOD

WHY NO LONGER SIGNIFICANT

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

© March 27, 2020

Readers’ eclectic references to The Fisher Paradigm & Coronavirus Pandemic:

Your comments on the so-called pandemic are mild, not negative. Ambiguous even. The reason I included the quote from Joseph Heath's book, “Enlightenment 2.0” is that it relates to the situation today, where our freedom of expression and movement is curtailed. There is a war-like atmosphere against the virus and most people accept it without questioning. When we question it, we are seen as irresponsible and part of the problem.

Reader One

The danger of being misunderstood" is a topic very much on my mind. Such danger does not exist with a computer programming language unless one makes a programming error. Methinks a way toward improving global society calls for a precise language with well-defined meanings for words and yet without being cumbersome. That is one tall order indeed, potentially impossible. But I am wondering just how far we can get toward such an objective. That's something I am playing with.

Reader Two

Great exposition of the writer's dilemma: to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help him God, or to prevaricate for self-preservation. In my case, as in Christ's case, the greater danger is being understood; hence, we must sometimes speak in parable when critics are out to silence us.

Reader Three
We readers don't misunderstand you or disagree with what you write Doc, we just think your preoccupations and predilections lead to your inevitable rambling historical excursions, thereby preventing your readers from perceiving your position on say, pandemics. 

Reader Four

Agree wholeheartedly. I guess that the sharp turn in the road came when Harvard U.’s MBA program began to shout that the bottom line is the supreme concern of a business, not the product or service it provides. Thinking used to be that if you provide a fine product or service then the bottom line will take care of itself. Turning things around, the result is a downward spiral in quality. As for customers complaining, their voice is drowned by the noise of sales propaganda replete with utterly meaningless slogans. And me too, I read Edward de Bono and I believe I have a tendency to annoy people with doses of lateral thinking and then poking sideways into their stream.

Reader Five

So, what would be your solution to the Coronavirus Pandemic problem?

Reader Six

An author is not surprised when some readers are not pleased with his efforts. The relation between an author's intentions and a text's meaning may differ between the author and reader. A gap between what is written and what is understood is inevitable. This is especially true when the ideas are "from the other side of the tracks," as is the case with The Fisher Paradigm.

When a reader finds some value or truth in a text in the reading, he is sending the author a message of love and connection, and hopefully of some benefit. Of course, conversely, if the text goes against the reader's inherent beliefs, it is another matter.

Creative misunderstanding of words both spoken and written is common, yet writing and reading is crucial to understanding no matter how faulty the process.

The aim here is to remind readers that we have survived as a species because of the original equipment in our human machine, our brain, and more specifically our “reptilian brain.” We have been programmed in the West since the Age of the Enlightenment to think a certain way. It is no longer working, which is one of the reasons for The Fisher Paradigm.

Perhaps the weakness in this thesis is that it is empirically based upon how the author has survived as an individual in a long life while being aware of how outside agents have always been at work to compromise his reliance on his intuitive brain.  

IT IS NOT A STRAIGHT ROAD FROM WHERE WE HAVE BEEN TO WHERE WE ARE GOING 

We as a society always have to blame someone outside ourselves for our misery. It has resulted in society throughout the ages having a problem with maturity, self-analysis, self-responsibility and grappling directly with its perturbations.

We quickly point to social injustice, political ideology or some segment of society as being responsible for all that ails us. There always has to be a fall guy, someone or something outside ourselves that has brought calamity to our door and down on us.

Since the nuclear family is the hub of society, we see it in parents who cannot say “no” to their children; in grandparents who cannot say “no” to their grown children or their grandchildren; and great grandparents who cannot say “no” to anyone in the family even at considerable jeopardy and expense to their own lives.

This has spawned a “spoiled brat generation” that has in turn metastasized to a “spoiled brat society” that while being denied, has in turn spawned a palliative industry to focus attention away from the problem by dividing and conquering the receptive attention of these spoilers.

I am talking about politicians, columnists, writers, directors and intellectuals, television and sports moguls, opinion assessors, advertisers, corporations, executives and leaders who believe their role is to solve problems outside their own inimitable experience because they have a higher calling than the rest of us and so we should savor their attention. What do they produce?

They produce polarity. Polarity is an industry in which two sides differ with what is the problem, who is responsible for the problem, who are the “bad guys and bad girls” of the problem with leaders most prominent having an insane need to stay in power, not having the time or inclination to solve the problem, or to mitigate the circumstances of the problem, but having a surprising amount of time to castigate those with whom they claim caused the problem emphasizing how terrible “these people are,” which only exacerbates the problem, producing the only product of polarity, gridlock.

Once power was more important than people during the Age of Monarchies and the Age of Roman Catholicism. To solve this intransigence, the intellectual community gave birth to “The Age of the Enlightenment.”

WHY “THE AGE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT” WAS ONLY FOR A WHILE

Societies wear out just like everything else. The Roman Catholic Church was spending more than it was taking in no matter how much that might be. That led to the duplicitous practice of “selling indulgences” to ensure the buyer of going to heaven.

How a church of hundreds of millions of worshipers can be led to do that which is the equivalent of corporate suicide appears equally and absurdly the case with many American families living well beyond their means. I have known families who have gone through millions as if life was a “Game of Monopoly.”

The Church was like that. That is, until Martin Luther came along in the 16th century and led to “The Reformation.”

Monarchies were wearing out in the same manner from the 16th to the 19th century no longer with sufficient funds to rape and plunder in war to maintain their lifestyle. Such personalities as Hobbes, John Locke, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and Charles Montesquieu were at the ready in the late 17th and 18th century to promote a replacement idea with three concepts: the use of reason the scientific method and progress.

Reason would negate superstition and science see through blind faith to lead to better societies and better people. How did that work out?

Well, the success of these ideas resulted in the American Revolution and the French Revolution and democratic republics in North America and Europe with “progress becoming society’s most important product.”

Even Communist China in the late 20th and early 21st century has caught the “progress bug” becoming the most dynamic economic society in the world.

China, as everyone knows, was once the epicenter of the Coronavirus Pandemic but now that has shifted to Italy, Spain and the United States. Scientists and healthcare professions across the globe are attempting to lower the bell curve of this terrible virus while others are looking for whom to blame for this interruption to their conventional lifestyle, which incidentally, is unlikely to ever return.

We are watching a global society becoming unglued. It may seem like a stretch but chances are this disruption will subsequently be as significant as “The Age of the Enlightenment” and “The Age of Reason” have been to Western society over the last 500 years.

Remember, we have had a 100 year hiatus since the terrible scourge of the Spanish Flu. The world population in 1918 was 1.8 billion souls; today in 2020, 8 billion people are packed into this tiny planet. In 1918, the American population was 103 million; in 2020, it is 331 million.

During the Spanish Flu Pandemic, between 50 and 100 million died to the disease, 675,000 Americans. It is estimated as many as 500 million were infected with the Spanish Flu in 1918.

In Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1991), it was mentioned that work would cease to be in great colossal complexes of thousands, and instead work increasingly would be conducted at home or in small groups; that managers were atavistic and management anachronistic; that knowledge power that now belonged to workers would superseded position power. With something akin to a rallying cry to that purpose, this was followed with The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995).

Nothing changed, and nothing has changed in the past thirty years with regard to power, position, authority, or organization except cosmetically until this Coronavirus Pandemic. Now everything will change whether you are ready for it or not.

WHAT ABOUT THE SOCRATIC METHOD?

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 26, 2020

An overview of the COVID-19 Pandemic as an equation in the The Fisher Paradigm:

A viewer challenged me to explain my reason for deprecating the noble Socrates of our Western tradition.  First of all, like Jesus, we only know what Socrates’s thought and believed from others, especially Plato.  Socrates was a sophist, something that Plato hated, and a gifted writer, something Socrates wasn’t, as his whole tradition was oral.   

We actually know Plato through his writing with Socrates the dominant character of his prose.  Plato, who was a student of Socrates, took over his ideas when the great philosopher was forced to take hemlock and commit suicide, giving Socrates back his ideas in Plato dialogues.

What we call the “Socratic Method” is the Socratic Method as expressed in Plato’s writing.

Today we use the term in a rather broad sense to cover our endless search for truth through asking questions rather than discovering creative approaches beyond the pale of what is conventional and known.  This is delimiting because the answers to what trouble us are not with old knowledge already experienced.  It is with what is not known but can be found out with due diligence beyond the Socratic Method.

We saw this reliance demonstrated in the business community in 1981 with the runaway bestseller “A Search for Excellence” by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, as tens of thousands of companies were ready to jump on any bandwagon that promised “excellence.” 

For twenty years, despite Business Week’s (November 5, 1984) cover story (“Who’s Excellent Now?”), a new industry of imitation was created consistent with the “Socratic Method.”

It was as if these authors discovered a truth about “excellence” and wanted to promulgate their good fortune. 

Sophists would say, and Socrates is included in this lot, “Why do we believe there is a truth to be found?”   

Edward de Bono would say, “If truth exists, it is relative truth, and it cannot be found but must be discovered.”  

I have suggested in my writing, “If truth is discovered, it will be your truth but not my truth.” I have since gone beyond that to show how critical culture is to an operation.  For example, A Culture of Comfort is going nowhere in unconscious incompetence; A Culture of Complacency is self-indulgent in conscious incompetence; while A Culture of Contribution is consciously competent with everyone on board in synergy enterprise towards excellence.    

Sophists were even more insistent that there is no such thing as truth; that truth is only an idea meant to persuade people to believe such a thing exists.

“The Socratic Method” rests on the assumption that the knowledge is there, somewhere to answer what is troubling us.  As we have seen, this is by no means always the case.  

Take the mania with which the Coronavirus COVID-19 is shutting down life across the world to a quasi-prison whether a pandemic situation exists or not in that pocket of society. 

The cause of the virus is not known and so the world’s best minds in the World Health Organization (WHO) and in the United States, in the Center for Disease Control (CDC) are following the dictates of the Socratic Method to a tee. 

The world is in Plato’s cave where a person is chained up so that he can see only the back wall of the cave.  At the mouth of the cave, Plato tells us, there is a fire.  Another person comes into the cave carrying an object.  The chained-up person cannot turn around but can see only the shadow of the person with an object that is thrown off on the wall in front of the chained person.

This allegory suggest we go through life looking for truth and chasing causes often only seeing and intimidated with shadows, which have captured our limited vision and then often mistakenly so resulting instead in our panic.

Socrates was trained as a Sophist, and Sophist were into rhetoric and persuasion, or argument for argument’s sake.  He was concerned with the search for knowledge because to him knowledge was virtue, and virtue would protect man from himself.  This has led to a circular argument that is still with us today: when someone acts improperly, we can always claim it is because he lacks perfect knowledge. 

Here is how that might be considered in the current pandemic with the scientific, medical, political and governmental contingent all on board. 

Clearly, these people are doing everything imaginable that could possibly be done, justifying the shutdowns, the confinements, the quarantines, and the abandonment of convention in the interim.  On the other hand, should this fail, should these draconian methods prove counterproductive or even disastrous, it will be because brazen citizens failed to hunker down and take the matter seriously, failing to do what was right.  Or might they have failed to do so because they weren't blinded by shadows?

   

FROM MAXIMUM CONNECTION TO MAXIMUM SEPARATION

Soon to be published as an e-book on Kindle  

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

©

March 19, 2020, First Day of Spring

Reaction to the pandemic is simply a reminder that what you learn about a system in happy equilibrium tells you nothing about system behavior in disturbance. To obtain system control, as per Ashby's law of requisite variety, you require the system characteristic equation. In industry such is obtained by disturbing the system in several different ways in tests. In social systems, we do not yet have this equation. That's why our progress is set by applying disturbances in a systematic manner - the story of your life as well.

William L. Livingston, IV, author of The New Plague: Organizations in Complexity, 1985


W. Ross Ashby was a British cybernetician interested in the phenomenon of homeostasis or the way complex systems operate in changing environments to maintain a relatively stable equilibrium within tightly defined limits (e.g., internal body temperature at 98.6).

Ashby came up with the concept of variety as a measurement of the number of possible states of a system. His "Law" of Requisite Variety posits the idea that for a system to be stable, the number of states that its control mechanism is capable of attaining (its variety) must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled.

Ashby’s Law was framed in the context of self-regulating biological systems, but it rapidly became relevant to a number of other systems. In colloquial terms, Ashby’s Law has come to be understood as a simple proposition: if a system is to be able to deal successfully with the diversity of challenges that its environment produces, then it needs to have a repertoire of responses equal to or exceeding the problems thrown at the environment. So a viable system is one that can handle the variability of its environment. Or, as Ashby put it, only variety can absorb variety.

Organizations traditionally cope with environmental challenges by reducing the variety in which they have had to cope. Mass production was meant to reduce the variety of its environment by limiting the range of choices available to consumers (Vance Packard’s “The Waste Makers,” 1960 wrote about how “planned obsolescence” impacted productivity and the national character). Product standardization was essentially an extrapolation of Henry Ford’s slogan that customers could have the Model T in any color so long as it was black.

But the rise of the Internet has made variety-reduction increasingly difficult if not impossible. By any metric the pace of change in our information ecosystem is of an order of magnitude beyond comprehension and therefore seemingly impossible to resolve. We have a greater knack for creating than comprehending.

In Ashby’s terms, variety has increased in proportion to its complexity. Given that variety reduction seems unfeasible in this new situation, the implication is that many of our organizations and social systems—ones that had evolved to cope with variety—are no longer viable. For them, the path back to viability requires that they have to find ways of increasing their variety. And that is the big question: how do they do that? That is the conundrum, or is it?

Livingston says, “In social systems, we do not as yet have this equation.” I wonder.

With THE FISHER PARADIGM, I look at the situation from an entirely different perspective. When I was at university, I was not fascinated with the laboratory in chemistry, but with biochemistry. Why so?

It started with an experiment in which I was involved regarding osmosis. The experiment related to the osmotic hydraulic equilibrium that the human body attempts to maintain between the body’s lymphatic system and its blood supply by passing through a semi-permeable membrane. What was fascinating is that the human body’s autonomous system manages systemically to practice Ashby’s Law despite human biological complexity or essentially without our involvement in the process.

We are currently consumed with nightmarish fear of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Another thing I learned in biochemistry is that our bodies contain the pathogens that could lead to such things as cancer, yet many go through life and avoid this unsettling state. Likewise, human existence is vulnerable to invisible microbial pathogens that are either dormant within us or festering in the animal and insect kingdoms.

Now, about THE FISHER PARADIGM, remembering fondly the homeostasis maintenance of a constant internal environment to such factors as body temperature, blood pH, and a multitude of other chemical reactions constantly occurring, I confess to practicing a kind of homeostasis in my external environment, a practice that I have gradually come to realize is part of my nature as a Homo sapiens.

It has to do with instinct, intuition and integration, and the idea of fight, flight, and survival. It is a social system predicated on our primordial brain, often referred to as the “reptilian brain.”

Everyone has this brain but society, indeed, civilization prefers to ignore our primordial nature which is bombarding our mind with how a situation reads in terms of instinct, intuition and integration translating sight into insight and action. THE FISHER PARADIGM is a modest attempt to bridge this void.

Only last night, I was telling Beautiful Betty that THE FISHER PARADIGM has a lot in common with the current pandemic of the coronavirus. “How so,” she asked. Then I reduced it to the equation that is representative of a dozen scenarios in the book:

Cognitive confidence has waned in the Coronavirus Pandemic

Intuition

· Personality – mankind is under siege

· Geographic – an invisible microbial pathogen is on the rampage

· Demographic – draconian focus on the crisis has reached the point of insanity

Fear and panic has stolen the mind of humanity

Maximum connection we find leads invariably to maximum separation. It happened with the Bubonic Plague, and is now happening with the Coronavirus Pandemic. Why has no learning taken place?


LIFE WITHOUT A CAUSE

Maximum connection invariably leads to maximum separation as we are now experiencing, and it is clear people don’t know how to handle it. They are angry because they can no longer be on automatic robotic pilot and are confronted with the prospects of being alone as persons, people who have never learned to be alone or separated from the noise and commotion of others.

The inconvenience finds scientists looking desperately, first for a vaccine for the coronavirus, and then for the cause. The cause, as it was with the Bubonic Plague, is likely to be found in one of nature’s creatures that was the innocent carrier of the pathogen.

Perhaps this would be a good time to realize that life has no cause as much as we wish to give it such a noble role.

But our lives, all of our lives, have a symmetry that could be missed. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer points out that when we reach a certain age, and look back over our lifetime, it can be seen to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little consequence turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed this plot?

Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an unconscious aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed of the will within you. This has led me to THE FISHER PARADIGM and to sharing this missive with you.

THE BUSINESS OF PAIN

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 7, 2020

Author, Publisher, Consultant and Devoted Christian Writes:

Chronic and Acute Pain

Why we must suffer in our free solo climb.

By Ken Shelton

Why must pain be such an enigma and paradox?  If pain were more clearly seen as a consequence of sin or crime, or as a prerequisite to gain, we might all gladly accept it as a fair and wise condition of our mortality; but sadly we see the innocent and saintly suffer along with the sinners and criminals, sometimes as a result of collateral damage and at other times for no apparent rhyme or reason.  Do we then have cause to curse the gods or accuse them of malpractice and malfeasance or at least some mistake or misdemeanor?

Inventions and Interventions

            Today I again visited Spinal Interventions to assess what’s next in my attempt to “manage” or mitigate the chronic pain associated with stenosis, sciatica and neuropathy.

            I discussed different options, including the most recent inventions and interventions. Needless to say, everybody has a cure or claim for a cure-all for pain. Since pain is universal and since billions of dollars are spent worldwide to alleviate it, many players are in the pain game.

            I suspect all conceived human beings who have lived outside their mother’s womb for even a minute, or even been a late-term unborn baby still in the womb, have experienced pain. 

What and Why of Pain

            Pain is what we feel when someone or something hurts us. It comes in two forms: Acute pain is sharp, comes suddenly, is caused by something specific, and might last a few moments or few months; Chronic pain is ongoing and usually lasts longer than six months. This pain can continue even after the injury or illness has gone away as pain signals remain active in the nervous system. Some people suffer chronic pain even when there is no past injury or apparent body damage. Emotional effects of chronic pain include depression, anger, anxiety, and fear of re-injury. Common causes include nerve damage and injuries that fail to heal properly. Back pain, for example, may be caused by: poor posture, improper lifting and carrying, obesity, spine curvature, traumatic injury, wearing high heels, sleeping on a poor mattress, degenerative disks or disease.

            Why do we feel pain?              Pain can warn us of cause-effect consequences. When we experience acute or chronic pain resulting from inflammation, injury, insult, loss, rejection, abuse or assault, we see the why of pain and the connections between physical, emotional, mental, social and financial pain. We then have the chance to develop more empathy and compassion for others in pain, whether it’s intense but temporary or incessant and on-going.

Christ: Chronicle of Chronic Pain

            Pain is what links Christ with all persons. Pain is the impulse, the energy force that imprints sin and sorrow on a savior’s soul. Atonement is a two-sided coin: all about pain and suffering on one side, and on the flip side it is all about relief and joy. The imprints and impressions of atonement include the wounds in the hands, feet and side, but remember: the official cause of death was a broken heart, which is why he requires our broken heart and contrite spirit. He doesn’t ask that we be beaten and crucified, but he expects us to carry our cross without becoming addicted to opioids. Christ and his Saints then qualify to be representative chronicles of the acute and chronic pain of humanity, and Christ, alone, to be chief advocate.

My Response

It saddens me as it does my wife, Betty, to hear that you are suffering this triple barrage of painful maladies of stenosis, sciatica, and neuropathy. 

Yet, despite this punishing pain that never leaves you, a constant stream of calming missives are produced seemingly every day with another important book soon to be published, not to mention constant international travel to honor your commitments.  How do you explain this?

My sense is that in additional to acute and chronic pain, pain associated with our temporal bodies, there is psychological pain and psychological joy associated with our souls. 

Now, I know many of my own readers, those of a scientific nature, don’t acknowledge the soul although it is apparent in the psychological joy they express when they make a new discovery of Nature, win an honor in their profession, have a manuscript accepted by a prestige publisher, win a promotion or tenure at some university, or indeed, fall in love and get married, and experience the joy and wonder of becoming a parent. 

Now, psychological pain can become physical pain as you point out.  It happens when you lose influence in the life of a son or daughter who spreads their wings, turns their back on the family in search of their own identity.  I know of that pain, a more excruciating pain then my most recent open heart surgery, a pain that had no physical source.  And yet, for a time, it was totally debilitating. 

Other emotional pains are associated with depression, loneliness, failure in relationships or business, getting old, self-estrangement, not being taken seriously, uncontrollable anger, or as you mention, sliding down the slippery slope into Nowhere Land of Nowhere Man with drug addiction, or some other self-negating dysfunction.

Your strong religious convictions come at a time when this as an operational motive is not as popular as it was when I was a boy. 

My sense is that you have survived and prevailed these hapless attempts to meliorate your pain through modern medicine because of the palliative of your unflinching Christian beliefs.

Two world wars within a single century have left us an anchorless society, suspended in permanent adolescence attempting to compensate for this loss of spiritual confidence with mindless consumption and insatiable materialism.  Science, including medical science, has been unable to fill the spiritual void left by the retreat from the spiritual sanctuary once provided by religion. 

Now, we are faced with a new plague, the coronavirus, with the young Chinese doctor who was first scorned for alerting the world to this disease, now dead of the disease at 34.

This is not to suggest that the world is wicked, that modern medicine has not been a boom to humanity, nor that we are any less spiritual beings than we once were.  It is suggesting, however, that pain is common to us all, and much more manageable with the antidote of love.

       

OFFER WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED

This is an offer to read CONFIDENCE IN SUBTEXT completely free.  All you have to do is request the book by through your e-mail address.  If not interested, that is okay, too.  What follows is the Introduction of the book.

 Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION – You deserve to be self-confident!

PART ONE 
CULTURAL DOMAIN

ONE – It’s Hard to be Confident When Our Culture Makes us Feel Otherwise!

TWO – A Counterintuitive Idea: Please-Self in a Culture of Self-Deprecation

THREE – Cage of Human Inattention as a Closed System FOUR – The Subtext of Life & Its Meaning!

FIVE – When the Incidental becomes the Accidental becomes the Norm, then there is No Place for Self-Confidence!

SIX – Continuity/Discontinuity: A Mind Self-Ignorant of Itself!

PART TWO  
PSYCHOLOGICAL DOMAIN

SEVEN – Confidence & The Most Important Sale !

EIGHT – The Secret Language of Relationships

NINE – Self-Realization & Self-Defeat!

TEN – The Dissembling Nature of Identity & Its Costs

ELEVEN – Understanding Others

TWELVE – Be Your Own Best Friend!

THIRTEEN – The Palliative to Anxiety

FOURTEEN – Is it More Important to be Love or Respected?

 FIFTEEN – Confidence, Coping & Culpability

 SIXTEEN – The Confluence of Essence & Personality 

SEVENTEEN – Who are You, Where are You, Right Now?

EIGHTEEN – If it doesn’t start early, chances are One’s Identity will be like riding a Roller Coaster!

NINETEEN – Just say, “No!” – The hardest word in the English Language to say!

TWENTY – The Soul of the Enabler versus the Chameleon 

TWENTY ONE – Virtues of Enablers

TWENTY TWO – Prisoners of the Mind

TWENTY THREE – What would you do if nobody found out?

TWENTY FOUR – Self-Esteem notwithstanding, it is what you are that counts!

PART THREE 
WORK DOMAIN

TWENTY FIVE – Who is in charge?

TWENTY SIX – Choosing a Profession & Taking Control of Your Life! 

TWENTY SEVEN – Teaching Smart People how to Learn!

TWENTY EIGHT – Love what you do!

TWENTY NINE – How Losers become Winners! They never quit! 

THIRTY – Life is what we make it, not what others make of us! 

THIRTY ONE – Are you trying too hard?

THIRTY TWO – The importance of everyone! Plumber, Electrician, Dr. Steinmetz

THIRTY THREE – Genius realized! Getting first published at age 96!

THIRTY FOUR – When Men Won’t Work & the Women Who Carry Them!

THIRTY FIVE – Men like to Soar; Women like to Stay Rooted!

THIRTY SIX – Taking charge! The best Expert is one’s own Experience!

FINAL WORD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

YOU DESERVE TO BE CONFIDENT!
BUT WHAT IS CONFIDENCE?

The brave man is not he who feels no fear, for that were stupid and irrational; but he whose noble soul subdues its fears, and bravely dares the dangers nature shrinks from.

Joanna Baillie (1762 – 1851), Scottish poet

We all have our own idea of what confidence is. Confidence is often defined in terms of believing in something or trusting someone else. For example, "We have every confidence in our staff." That is not how it is defined in these essays. Confidence is defined in terms of subtext or subconscious; in other words, the interplay between the conscious and the subconscious mind in acts of behavior.

Confidence in Subtext is evident when people know when to “go for broke” and when not to; when to develop a relationship and when not to; when to take a promotion and when not to; when to join a company or community or organization and when it would be wise to take a pass; when to invest and when not to; when to buy a home, an automobile or some other major purchase and when not to; when to take the advice of others and when not to; when to go it alone and when not to; when to leave a profession, a job, a community, a relationship, a church, school or company and when not to; when to counter-intuitively push the hot buttons of someone else and when not to; and when to be emphatic, say in a sales call, and when not to.

Confidence is belief and trust in oneself. It is being comfortable in one’s own skin and therefore equal to the tasks at hand, but confidence has nothing to do with feeling certain.

Nor does the confident person display superiority or preeminence in any way. On the contrary, the confident person recognizes limitations, but is resolute in developing within those limits. He knows that he may sometimes falter, prove less than equal to the task, but will not get down on himself. Instead, he will learn from experience and trust his Confidence in Subtext.

This confidence is not learned in a book, taking from a course, attending a seminar, or following a set of rules. It is using the gifts that everyone has but in which  we have not been schooled in how to use them.

Norman Vincent Peale published “The Power of Positive Thinking” (1952) after WWII, which was a collection of inspirational essays. It captured the mind of the time looking for a simple formula to regroup and go forward after the terrible trauma and sacrifice of that Great War.

Dr. Peale advised his readers in this self-help book that confidence can be attained by positive thinking through practice, training, and knowledge by talking to people. It was a rote agenda that fit the natural American inclination to optimistic thinking.

This rationale has survived despite a retinue of seemingly constant disappointments. It is all right to see the glass half full, but it is equally sensible to wonder how to fill the other half of the glass. The confident person doesn’t approach the issue of confidence mechanistically, programmatically, or ritualistically. These tools are passé.

He does it by thinking with his whole body not just his mind. His confidence is derived from engaging his subtext. And what is subtext? Subtext is allowing the subconscious mind to connect and integrate with the conscious mind. In other words, the intuitive mind connects and is integrated with the cognitive or rational mind as thinking is now with the whole body; with both sides of the bicameral mind. Often what surfaces is counter-intuitive to what one would expect to think or consider doing in a given set of circumstances

Confidence in Subtext cannot be taught. It can only be experienced. Confidence in Subtext is accumulative in learned experience.

In chemistry, the valence of the atom determines the vigor with which atoms combine with other atoms of the opposite charge. The higher the valence the greater the activity.

Confidence in Subtext mirrors this physical chemistry phenomenon. To state it another way, the confident person embraces rather than retreats from his anxieties. I learned this first hand as a chemical sales engineer making cold

calls to prospects in the field. At first, I didn’t want to make the calls. My hands would sweat, my temples would ache, and I was afraid I would stutter, embarrassing myself and looking stupid. But I had no choice. I had a young family to feed and I was a long way from my home roots. So you could say I had motivation. You could also say I was terribly self-conscious which is antithetical to Confidence in Subtext as this book intends to show.

Once I broke the ice, once I made that first call, and then the next, and the next after that, I learned an important lesson about confidence. My contacts were found to be as nervous as I was; apprehensive and suspicious that I was there to take advantage of them. I didn’t think this; I felt this. Their nonverbal behavior was speaking to me, loud and clear, which I ignored at first. But finally, after much anxiety, I started to listen; and in listening I played back to them what I felt they were feeling; what they were saying without saying anything. Or if they said something provocative, “Your products are too expensive,” I would play back these exact words so they could hear what they had said.

Once we worked through this awkward stage by talking and listening, developing common ground, and getting to know each other. In the process, we found we were not buyer and seller; we were not adversaries, but partners attempting to solve a problem.

Confidence is the bond of trust within oneself and between the two parties without mentioning the word or thinking about the idea of trust. The relationship has moved beyond words where the buyer and seller are not only on the same page, but anxious get off on the same dime!

It is natural, given our programming, to shield our minds of ideas that appear counterintuitive. The shield of resistance is for self-protection and is normal. Time and good intentions, rationalists insist, reduces the icy distance but not before encountering some combative resistance.

But rationalists would be wrong because this is thinking in terms of “chronological time,” or one-step-at-a-time, when Confidence in Subtext is a factor of “psychological time,” or thinking and acting, right now!

Once we think with our whole body; once we break through the wall of our own distrust; once we establish self-trust, Confidence in Subtext is allowed to provide insight into the situation. The barriers of distrust are dissolved without making that appeal.

Confidence in Subtext is what happens when two people fall in love at first sight! A data bank of complex and detailed information floods the mind, information with which neither party is aware, processes them in an instant.

The mind, body and spirit are focused on giving, not getting. This is learned behavior through experience. It is where the unknown and unpredictable are encountered; where criticism and disappointment are endured; where surprise and failure are components of success. Experience can build to confidence if we are willing to tap into our subtext with all its nuances. But alas, many of us have damaged subtext, and this too, will be addressed in these pages.

By nature, I am shy, introverted, reclusive and an introspective person. In the field, I found this not a handicap but an asset. Also, I am more comfortable listening and processing information than talking. I didn’t understand it at the time, but listening eases the discomfort of others by putting them in control giving them power over the situation. The result is that you are in control without being in control and therefore able to assess the subtext of the situation without appearing to be doing so.

HOW “CONFIDENCE IN SUBTEXT” IS DIFFERENT

Confidence in Subtext is a departure from books discussing confidence as it is asking the reader to think differently on purpose. This book is about countless examples of people who have used Confidence in Subtext without actually knowing they are doing so. It is a new concept but actually an ancient practice.

Two examples are given here that do not appear in the book. The first example is when I was a novice chemical sales engineer in the field and about to lose my job for a faux pas.

After traveling two weeks with the area manager of Nalco Chemical Company, I was asked what I had learned. I candidly replied, “Nothing as the calls had all been social calls.  You never asked any customer what was needed to improve their operations with our chemical systems.”

I was given a score of marginal accounts to service, and told to find a new job within six weeks. I could upgrade these marginal accounts and call on competitors accounts in my area. One competitor’s account was huge with three plants in the town of Connersville, Indiana where Philco Corporation manufactured refrigerators and air conditioners.

“I’m here to save your job!”

The main Philco plant was several acres under roof with the superintendent’s bull pen in the middle of the plant. It was chaos with corroded and clogged pieces of pipe on his desk indicative of failed systems in Nalco’s technology. After waiting an hour in this bull pen, with workers answering phones reporting crises in several production lines, the superintendent came in, lit a cigarette, sat on the end of his desk, and said, “You’ve got five minutes, sport, what have you got for me?”

“Matter of fact,” I said, “I’m here to save your job.”

It was my Confidence in Subtext that found me blurting out that outrageous remark, but it had foundation.

Our competitor had had the business for 25 years and were obviously not paying attention to poor maintenance. Nalco hadn’t called on the plant in several years because of this long term history. Looking at the superintendent, his disheveled and nervous state, feeling with a rush his out-of-control manner, the declarative statement came out. I received a blanket order and a three month trial for the three plants. A few years later when I was promoted to Nalco’s corporate management team, Nalco still had the account, and the superintendent still had his job.

To Sell What Mr. Blue Will Buy You Must See Mr. Blue Through Mr. Blue’s Eyes

Now, as a member of corporate management, I was sent to Paramaribo, Suriname not to save this operation of an international Alcoa account, but to appease the local Alcoa management for our dilatory service. Nalco Chemical Company was responsible for the chemical water treatment of the massive electrical utility that powered this aluminum smelting operation.

When I arrived, the Managing Director told me a story about the superintendent of this utility and the impact of his holiday with no one knowing where he had gone. The plant shut down after a violent electrical storm. “We lost millions of dollars during that delay,” he added. “Before we located the superintendent in Switzerland.”

I asked if I might make an attempt to talk to the superintendent since I was here, the Alcoa compound being some 60 miles away in the bush. “There is little chance he’ll talk to you,” the managing director advised, “but since you’re here you can give it a try if you like.” Then, he added discouragingly, “But I don’t see the point. He doesn’t want to work with your people anymore, and he’s made that point quite clear.” I said nothing. Then he added, “If he does see you, and you give him any grieve, I’ll have your job!”

The guard at the compound stopped my car at the gate, walked over and said, “I don’t think he’ll see you. He’s mad as hell at your company.” I gave the guard my note, and asked him if he would call the superintendent and read the note to him over the phone. He read the note, Dear Mr. Superintendent, after traveling these thousands of miles, would you have the courtesy of firing me and my company to my face?  

Twenty minutes later in a cloud of dust a Jeep arrived with a sandy haired and bearded young American in equally sandy work clothes and boots waving me to come through the gate. He got out of his car, told me I had guts to “come out here,” and then blasted Nalco for what seemed forever. Again, I didn’t say a word.

Finally, he smiled, “You had balls to write that note.” All the time he was studying me. He asked me where I was staying in Paramaribo. I told him. “What do you think of living out here for a couple of weeks?” I said, “Fine!”

“You don’t mind giving up that cushy pad with all those beautiful women?” I just smile. “Then I’ll have your gear shipped out here. I want to show you something.”

For the next four hours, I was audience to a slide show of all the things wrong with the power utility relating to chemical water treatment failures; failures Nalco never addressed because “Nalco never had boots on the grounds.”

When he finished, he asked me what I thought. I told him it was clear he was into quality maintenance, addressing chronic problems at the source, and required the chemical engineering expertise on site to see that these conditions were resolved; and once resolved, prevented. Then I added that clearly Nalco had not been providing such services and he was right to be angry with us.

In Confidence in Subtext language, he was angry because no one paid attention to him until he was not available when the utility was shut down. Outside the compound, there wasn’t a house, a building, or even a tree on the horizon. The note got his attention; the next two weeks renewed the 

contract with Nalco with a consulting agreement that would justify sending Nalco’s chemical engineers to assist this superintendent.

It was such counter-intuitive work as these two examples that got the attention of my minders, while at the same time confounding them. It was the reason I went back to the university to acquire a Ph.D. to understand the nature of this phenomenon that I came to practice. The university did not have the answers as it was a factory like the one I had left. It had to be worked out in my consulting work and to eventually come to be described in this book.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., April 25, 2017