BLACK HOLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION - PART TWO

 

BLACK HOLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION



PART TWO



The structure of dystopian behavior

Once you become comfortable with the idea of dystopia as an attractor, because that’s how it behaves, you can look for the particular functionalities of dystopia that all attractors require to attract outliers. The mechanisms of action that animate dystopia comes in a set. Identify any one of them in service and you can be assured the others are operating as well. Unlike the situation with dystopia’s counterpart, Utopia, the mechanisms of action that drive organizational dysfunction lock into a mutually reinforcing static state. If any contributing player should deviate, the others automatically take up the slack.

One example of the self-healing nature of dystopia is the Nash Equilibrium of Natural Law, which led to Nash winning the 1994 Nobel Prize in Mathematical Physics. John Forbes Nash, Jr. (1928 – 2015) and his wife, Alicia, died in a car crash while riding in a taxi on the New Jersey Turnpike on May 23, 2015. Before this terrible accident, he was the subject of the popular film, “A Beautiful Mind” (2001). Nash is best remembered for his fundamental contributions to game theory.

Nash’s Law shows that any part of a dystopia that attempts to break the mold of “business as usual” practices will be pressured by the other parts to return to its statistical null position. It is the reason why the piecemeal approach to reversing organizational dysfunction is doomed from the start.

To understand how dystopia remains so “popular,” and number one around the world is to understand why Utopia is wrongly considered unobtainable. Start with the primitives of how collectives choose. Everyone gets a genetic inheritance at birth and years of social conditioning. Genes supplied us with a plethora of instincts, phobias, reflexes, and other knee-jerk reactions to events and perceptions. The express purpose of enculturation is to coerce you to suppress some of your instincts, like survival and productivity, and magnify others, like obedience to authority.

Social conditioning trains you to go with the flow. Don’t think for yourself, do as you’re told. “Ours is not to question why. Ours is but to do or die” (British poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1809 - 1892). To be a member of society in good standing you have to sleepwalk through the paradoxes just like your peers. Since the other members in your collective received the same enculturation as you did, that pretty much is it for crushing individual variety.

There are more ways than one to get things stuck on Tar-Baby Dystopia. Separate routes end up at the same place. Having the attribute of equifinality, each route to dystopia acts as a reinforcing rod. No effort, physical or mental, is required to hold on to dystopia. You are pummeled into emotional submission. The Pilgrimage to Utopia (P2U), in contrast, is on a single winding road up to the inflection point. Once the pilgrim gets his “zero entropy” message, he will choose routes to Utopia he thinks will best get him there. When the inflection event occurs, responsibility for a successful relocation switches from the interventionist to the individual pilgrim. Progress accelerates.

Using the Yin/Yang attractor axiom, it is easy to understand the opposite/complementary nature of dystopia/Utopia. Dystopia can perpetuate itself without the maintenance of any kind. For its trip to hell, blind drift brain-off works just fine. Utopia, in contrast, requires incessant and intelligent husbandry to remain viable. Never-ending effort, physical and mental, keep the characteristics of Utopia up to date. It’s a jolt on the psyche to emerge from a situation that punishes independent thinking to one that depends on it.

Turnpikes to dystopia

For an autocrat who wants to fashion a dystopia, there are many options. Abuse the employees, for one, works just fine. Most people think that organizational dysfunction, obviously bad and lose-lose, must be the handiwork of intentionally bad people. After all, what reason could good people have to sink their ship except divine destiny? So, the search goes on to find qualifying good people to construct the bridge, call them leaders, to drive the floating concerns away from dystopia towards Utopia. The fetish of attributing the cause to evil potentates thrives today. What organized religion has anything good to say about its pious impotent, bureaucracies?

The spotlight for this pilgrimage is on those roads to the dystopia that good people have built with implicit psychological coercions that drive organized society today. Three separate roadways to dystopia will be discussed as examples:

The Second Law of Thermodynamics (when energy changes from one form to another form, or matter moves freely, entropy (disorder) in a closed system increases).

When ideology is deemed infallible.

When labor relations are reduced to a zero-sum game.

The unavoidable tollway everyone must travel throughout their lifetimes is owned and operated by Nature’s 2nd Law. When they do nothing about the accumulation of entropy, toll unpaid, aspiring freeloaders are shunted to dystopia. When you do the exacting work of extracting entropy buildups, paying the toll and rent of Utopia, as you go, you are there.

Because it is project-challenged, dystopia is functionally unable to attenuate entropy. Every time it tries, usually, in crisis mode, entropy increases at a faster rate. In Utopia, viability husbandry, also known as entropy is the top priority activity. Nature has strict rules for extracting entropy and a blend of creativity and serious cognitive effort is Her directive #1. Avoiding entropy extraction, sooner or later, dystopia has to go parasitic to survive, like a government bureaucracy.

Infallible ideology

A second highway that gets you to dystopia also uses 2nd Law pavers. It starts with the hierarchy and its zeal for eliminating variations in human behavior to handle the multiplicity of obstacles. To have its workforce act as one, operationalizing the whims of its Big Kahma, the ideology of the concern is declared infallible. At first, it seems like a fair deal. After all, why change a system that is bringing prosperity to the organization? Why indeed.

The problem with any infallible ideology is that it is inherently unsustainable. Any way of life, good or evil, is constantly being degraded by the 2nd Law. That means every tick of the clock everywhere in the universe brings higher, never lower, disorder. In dystopia, entropy extraction, as a necessary chore, is ignored by its members as a threat to infallibility. How could infallibility need correction? In dystopia, the energy otherwise available for a positive task is spent in defensive routines. When infallibility is at stake, the utility function payoff is irrelevant. The 2nd Law is a nemesis to infallibility that cannot be defeated. When a conscious activity is not performed, for any reason, say hello to dystopia. You’ve arrived.

Nature will not allow defiance of Her laws to go unpunished, She will not intervene in how you leverage them. The 2nd Law allows you to reduce disorder locally by raising it faster globally. The mechanism of entropy extraction and relocation is a structure imposed on local disorder by work (force x distance). You do this disorder-extraction trick every time you make a bed.

Zero Sum

A particularly nasty road to dystopia is cemented in place by control theory. In any hierarchy of 4 or more tiers, ground-truth information about the operation can rise no more than 2½ levels without morphing into fiction. That means the top tiers are functionally excluded from issuing direct orders that can increase productivity. If it issues commands, based on GIGO, because it has the authority productivity dissolves away.

Here sits management, slowly learning that every time it meddles with the organizational profit-generator, the revenue crew, things get worse. It is face to face with the manifest limitations of the “unlimited” social power vested in them. Here’s 75% of the organization’s population, the workforce is outside of management’s span of control – for making things better. In due course, the head shed (i.e., the hierarchy) learns that the only tool in its workshed that influences anything below is its financial control. Frustrated that its unlimited authority and discretionary power no longer translate into control of organizational prosperity, management uses the only lever it has, which is financial, to assuage its now-raging retreat from dominance by attacking its revenue crew otherwise known as the workforce. The empirical dividers are filled with examples.

The challenge management has to face is to figure out how to use its iron grip on the treasury to dominate the people that populate its lower-level organization. Abandoning good sense to use the one effective tool they have to feed its hunger for domination ultimately drives the operation to ruin. Its answer, as history shows clearly, is to engage labor in a zero-sum relationship. Management exchanges organizational viability for direct control of how the non-management workforce lives. It can only affirm its domination by punishing its profit center. Say what?

Zero-sum gaming enters the scene whenever potentates acquire control of the chain of command. Holding all the financial cards is why management relishes zero-sum labor-management interaction. It is a tug of war full of emotion and competition – and rigged in management’s favor. Watch it navigate the organization over dystopia’s spillover, oblivious to the wreckage being generated. The fact that wage control makes productivity worse, known for two centuries, is deemed secondary to the satisfaction of its domination instinct. POSIWID (Purpose of the System is What it Does).

The Establishment spotlighted its dependency on financial control to get emotional payoffs during the 2016 political circus. One candidate, immune to financial influence, has shown the Establishment to be otherwise incompetent. While it is brilliant in raising money, it is clueless as to how to spend it to get what it thinks it wants.

The establishment's influence on media bias, through its financial control, also became obvious to the public. Establishment powerlessness is no flaw in the people in leadership roles. Impotent to solve big problems is built-in to Nature’s limits to hierarchy. The head shed is given legal latitude to do whatever it wants, but the only thing it can do is harm stakeholders. Nature gave the exclusive power to deliver and sustain Utopia to the workforce. But, you already know that.

Your early assignment as a candidate pilgrim will be to falsify these concepts and claims. Find exceptions in the record. Audit an application site. Design and run tests to controvert the assertions of incontrovertibility. Your advantage is that in finding one exception you have discounted the claim of natural law connectivity. The platform of natural law can support no exceptions.

The signposts of dystopia

No one has any problem recognizing dystopia when they encounter it. The psychological signs are prominent and many. Most people can make the correct determination by visiting the facilities even when no employees are there. During business hours, dystopias are unmistakable. There are objective, quantitative ways to measure dystopia dysfunctionality as well. Gathering the facts will give you a big advantage. Facts may not always trump emotion, but they always drive it crazy.

No social system can hide its value system from a pragmatic assessment. In dystopia, all you have to check on is its productivity. The first thing to note is that all discussion and record-keeping in dystopia is about production – exclusively. The factors of productivity are unmeasured and undiscussable, especially turnover.

Productivity is production minus operating costs plus waste plus loss plus turnover plus stakeholder damage. The factors of operating costs include supplies, power, water, disposal, and rent on facilities. The factors of waste include what ends up on the scrap heap. The factors of loss include safety, quality, and turnover – all expensive insults to native instincts. Stakeholder damage control caused by dysfunctional operations is always material. The equation is not changed by politics or propaganda. In dystopia, no useful truthful accounting is made of these charges against production revenue.

When it comes to the effectiveness of what is produced, the mission, and accounting are even worse. Since the goal of the organization has never been defined in concrete terms, there is no way to measure what “effectivity” looks like. Management only measures what it values scratching productivity and effective ledgers from the list of candidates. How can you intelligently husband viability when no one knows how the place works? Well, you can’t. When it comes to productivity factors, none improve by themselves. If the factors are not tracked, the 2nd Law drives them worse. Causes sink to effects. Effects point nowhere. Another example of enigma damage:

In dystopia, a check on the training scene will provide an x-ray of the organizational value system.

What training does the organization do?

How does it set the goals of training?

How does it evaluate results against goals?

Training format?

Social science research has provided firm “rules” for running training programs. The science of training used the limits of human learning to determine the parameters of program delivery. In the same way, Starkermann used the stability limit of the social system to mark boundaries. The social science of training measures the line where learning stops and resentment begins. You’ve been there multiple times without being so aware. By using the ruleset as a reference standard, you can get an objective measure of the organizational value system.

The limits of human capacity, mental and physical, are of course non-negotiable. If the format of training sprawls beyond the limits to what knowledge humans can ingest in a training situation, training becomes counterproductive. In formatting the learning episodes, the rules established for productive, effective learning are accommodated. The requisite conditions are enumerated in the “stop-rule” list provided to the host. Experience shows management can be so jolted by the effectiveness of the episodes, that it will sometimes deliberately break the rules to halt the proceedings.

Training practices are a dead giveaway about dystopia policies – POSIWID. The charisma of the trainer does not affect a mismatched situation. In standard business-as-usual practices, training is conducted, if at all, without an objective basis. No effort is made to align training with organizational needs. Training is arranged to fulfill management’s political agenda but without explicit goals. The provisions of training are ridiculously outside effective limits. Measurements of training impact are never taken. Since the results of training are more often negative than positive, it begs the question – Why do it at all?”

Since training is tangible, the organization cannot hide the paradox of POSIWID. No organization that values its revenue crew would do negative-results training on purpose. Ineffective training fools no one. It does not fool the workforce as the objective of such training. It does not fool the faculty. It is a waste that tallies against production. When “good” training is done, such as the Pilgrimage to Utopia (P2U), it shows up quickly on productivity measures.

When you find a training environment incongruent with knowledge-based criteria, you are assured that all the other patterns of organizational dysfunction are also active. That’s why the social system is called dystopia.

A systems view of dystopia socio-technology

System dystopia has material pieces and parts of metal and flesh. It has a framework that holds these parts and pieces in place. The elements of dystopia are configured together in a dynamic system. Included is a subsystem that regulates its behavior by feedback to a set point. The system called dystopia is distinguished by how it acts through time, registers attributes, and disturbances. Understanding involves:

(1) Pertinent, significant natural laws

(2) Natural Law corollaries that clock organizations

(3) Doctrines of psychology

(4) Mechanisms of Action

(5) Toolsmithing

The first four inputs get processed into concepts that form the pilgrimage ideology – a paradigm that is incontrovertible. The fifth item is the experience-honed aids that help speed up the renovation process.

To understand what produces system dystopia behaviors, it is necessary to know the influence of natural law upon it. Since the system envelope of dystopia includes the humans that animate it, the dogmas of psychology in the arena need to be understood in terms of The action of the material system.

The choices of action the human elements make in dystopia are irrational by material and humanitarian standards, but that is where the canons of the psychological sciences come into play. In the husbandry of Utopia viability, actions of man and machine are natural-law rational – period. There is zero subjectivity in entropy extraction. Everything is in-your-face material.

Knowing the laws and doctrines that influence system behavior, leads to identifying and tracing the observable mechanisms of action that animate dystopia. Knowing the mechanisms of action (MoA) in play simplifies the task of quantifying dystopia before embarking on the Pilgrimage to Utopia. The difference is why you go.

Toolsmith provides implements for making sense of the paradoxes and dichotomies. Job performance aids are invaluable for seeing through the dystopian fogs and defensive routines to get at the truth.

Following the discussion of dystopia socio-technology, a walkthrough of what we find to be the most common life cycles of dystopia will be presented. This puts life into the interplay of Nature and men in groups. You will have no problems in recognizing the stations of the scenario, focusing on how dystopias are transformed by the pilgrims into Utopias.

Natural laws prominent in dystopia

It commences with the 2nd Law of thermodynamics focusing on viability, effectiveness, infallibility, and extraction. In terms of Control theory relative to the dynamics and Starkermann group social theory. With regards to Shannon’s Laws of Communication, it establishes that for any given degree of noise contamination of a communication channel, it is possible to communicate discrete data (digital information) nearly error-free up to a computable maximum rate.

The Conservation laws, also called the law of conservation, in physics, a principle that states that certain physical property (i.e., a measurable quantity) does not change over time within an isolated physical system.

Connectance is a measure of the number of links (L) or connections between species (S) expressed as a proportion of maximum connectance

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics

Much fuss has been made about the 2nd Law and for good reason. Its lightsaber action on degrading social systems is never off. Dealing with the incessant ravages of the 2nd Law is always first on the task-action agenda. Predicting the trajectory of any social system can be made with extreme reliability simply by noting how it handles 2nd Law entropy buildups. If productivity improvement is not the way of life, there’s no way that 2nd Law degradation is being neutralized. Business as usual cannot deal with novel challenges of any kind and entropy extraction is a creativity hog.

The 2nd Law is the major player in viability husbandry. Working at the atomic level, its insidious ravages on all things material are local and particular throughout the universe. It degrades the car and its driver with equal indifference. It is impossible to fool the 2nd Law, coming or going. That’s what makes the politics of infrastructure so unsavory to politicians. Lying to the public about neglected maintenance is a waste of time. They can see the degradation for themselves.

The effectiveness of any process is closely connected to the 2nd Law. Try and keep business as usual fixed and productivity goes down. Calling the operational dogmas infallible and then having to defend them as such makes for all sorts of contradictions and enigmas. There is no escape from this ridiculous relationship with infallibility. When productivity is not going up, it is going down. Keeping business as usual constant by edict destabilizes the organization.

The P2U elaborates on the work of entropy extraction. It is a central pillar of Utopia that keeps everything honest. Its effect on all things material is perforce measurable. Only the workforce, close to the action, can extract entropy. Anyone 2½ levels or more away from the production line is baggage.

Control Theory

As professor Starkermann often noted, control theory is a subject in the university’s engineering curriculum that no one is eager to take. It’s all about system dynamics. The mathematical physics of control is too recursive for a human brain to follow for more than a few cycles. Accordingly, all sorts of approximations and simplifications had to be invented to practice industrial control engineering. Like the 2nd Law, control theory equations feature the arrow of time. Computer horsepower has revolutionized the control designer’s workbench.

Control theory was used by Starkermann to calculate the 2½ rule. His models describe the progressive degradation in the quality of control information due to leak, lag, and friction. Starkermann’s work in the dynamic simulation of social systems, Starkermann.com, produced the tables of stability limits that led to the rule.

It is well known that the human brain has limits in its ability to remember, multi-process, and compute recursive equations, like French-American mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot’s (1924 – 2010) art which is provocative mathematics and subversive geometer on display. He left a beautiful legacy in visual art, for Mandelbrot was the man who named and explained fractals – those complex, apparently chaotic yet geometrically ordered shapes that delight the eye and fascinate the mind.

MANDELBROT FRACTAL ART

These limits show up in the 2½ rule and the ability to command and control towards a worthy target. By good fortune, it was discovered in 1960 that the technological limits in human processing approximated the limits of control engineering equipment then available for industrial application. This meant that the best strategy, hardware, and technology of industrial process control of 1960, clunky by today’s standards, was a good match for modeling human-human interaction. Accordingly, dynamic simulations of social systems made using the practical control techniques of the 1960s proved to be on-target. Rudolf Starkermann, who applied the control schemes to run his simulations, was extremely cautious in making claims of congruency. He didn’t have access to the proving grounds of reality that we exploit today. For the first decade of our collaboration, he held our testing antics in high skepticism in the social milieu.

Once the dynamic simulators were available for running experiments, it became obvious that Starkermann’s computer models were spot on. With the validation of model-man congruency, testing with the dynamic simulator exploded in all directions. To know how any two people in a group work together as a twosome is to know nothing about their behavior in a group.

The truth about the power gradient of the organization is appropriate subject matter for only one level in the hierarchy – the productivity protagonist level. To pass the truth of power, productivity, effectiveness, and stakeholder damage on to management will, in one stroke, affirm everything you ever learned about the “glue” that holds dystopias together. It is not a recommended experiment because it has no possible upside value, even if you weren’t smitten on the spot.

Shannon’s Laws of communication

Formulated by the mathematician Claude Shannon, his law is a statement in information theory that expresses the maximum possible data speed that can be obtained in a data channel. His law instructs that the highest obtainable error-free data speed, expressed in bits per second (bps), is a function of the bandwidth and the signal-to-noise ratio. Shannon’s limits fit right into the box with the 2½ rule. When you are in an error-intolerant situation, like entropy extraction, errors in the message devastate goal-seeking.

Shannon also defined communication messages as errors if their transmittal did not obtain the action by the receiver intended by the sender. This ties into POSIWID. If your transmissions don’t result in entropy extraction, your intent, then your communication failed. That is why the first business of the pilgrimage is to define what “done” looks like. Then, communications success has a reference benchmark.

Everyone knows the man has limits in thinking and acting (visual of human coping). If his psychic internal energy is tied up in defensive routines and angst, the conservation of energy removes that energy from the supply available for productive work. The energy required for the transformation and the work of viability husbandry is obtained during the P2U by venting off this accumulated angst. You can witness the blowdown event for yourself right after the second-way station of the P2U.

Not everything in social system life is subject to the conservation laws. Subjective factors like creativity, trust, and confidence are not limited to the allocation of a fixed amount. It is important to distinguish which factors are conservation-law constrained and which are not. It is a trait of dystopia, and a counterproductive one, to treat the factors of productivity as zero-sum. They are not.

Connectance

The mathematical physics of connectance is highly significant to dystopia because it is so prone to its paralytic action. The law of connectance shows that any (social) ecosystem of moderate or higher complexity with interconnected elements, goes catatonic in disturbances. Specifically, if 16% or more of the communication lines among system elements are activated at the same time, the system freezes up. Since dystopia has far more connections than Utopia, it is vulnerable to disturbances that Utopia can handle with ease. Crashes that get media attention are always caused by connection. Earthquakes and volcanism are triggers of connectance that often paralyze nations and their rescue efforts for days.

In Utopia, self-sufficient units do not need political channels. Disturbances are detected early when they are easy to neutralize within the unit.

NEXT

Black Hole of Organizational Dysfunction: Part Three – TRANSITION

THE BLACK HOLE OF ORGANIZATION DYSFUNCTION - PART ONE

THIS WRITER’S COMMENT:

Included here is the initial phase of an article gleaned from William L. Livingston, IV’s website (Re: http://m-i-t-m.com/ae-platform/) in which I have done some editing. As time permits, there will be several segments to follow from this same article.

You will see that Livingston has an imaginative and original perspective on matters relating to utopia and dystopia in an organizational sense. His sui generis originality and creative disposition are on display on every page revealing a penetrating mind.

Professionally, his career has been that of an engineer, building nuclear power utilities throughout the Western World, including South Korea.

How Livingston came to my attention was an email from him in which he said, “Send me your book and I’ll send you mine.”

It was 1991 and my book, “Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches” had just been published. Livingston saw the book on display at an International Book Fair in New York City. His book had the title, “The New Plague: Organizations in Complexity.”

I found “The New Plague” fascinating, comprehensive, and compelling reading, and told him so in a subsequent email. He invited me to New York City and his workplace which was then the TWIN TOWERS. After that visit, he invited me to his home in Bayside, New York, a suburb of New York City, where his lovely wife, Carrie, feasted me to a wonderful dinner, while Sir William invited a host of his colleagues, men with remarkable credentials to discuss a host of subjects in his garden.

Thirty years later, we have remained constant friends, visiting him at his home now in South Eastern Florida. He has published several additional books while having a wide-ranging website that focuses on and well beyond cutting-edge issues. Livingston is the most remarkable but also the most modest and generous man I have ever met. I was not surprised when I learned he has over 100 patents to his name. I hope you find this article useful.

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

The Black Hole of Organizational Dysfunction

Dystopia

Note: When this book was prepared, the terms Dystopia and Utopia were widely used to describe the two complementary but opposite categories of the social system. As progress continued, we evolved away from those popular, but vaguely-defined terms. When you encounter “dystopia,” think organizational dysfunction. When you encounter “Utopia,” think happy prosperity.

General Remarks

Book 1 of the Pilgrimage to Utopia (P2U), “Philosophy,” presented the purpose of the pilgrimage. It is assumed the reason you’re here is that you are interested in joining one. Following along with the derivation of the paradigm of the P2U will acclimate you in part for the transforming experience. The more you learn what to expect on the P2U, the more likely you will make the right choice for yourself. When the flying monkeys appear, for example, you’ll have your pepper spray at the ready.

In these increasingly irrational, precedented, self-destructive times of human society, populated with people spastic on angst and cognitive dissonance, the starting block for the adventure in mutation is wherever on the globe you happen to be. This seething mass of organizational dysfunction comprises a society called, appropriately enough, Dystopia. You don’t have to market dystopia to the masses. The telltales of dystopia are everywhere.

Dystopia is constructed on the psychological bedrock of the sanctification of and the implementation of business as usual. It is an inelastic system that contains the seeds of its demise. Apply standard practice and the seeds are sown. Dystopian citizens have been described as old women of both sexes.

Some ingredients necessary to cook up a dystopia did not exist during the primitive ages of Homo sapiens. For small bands of humans, like Bedouin clans, “business as usual” was a glove-fit survival strategy. It was not long after the first cities formed, however, that written records of Establishment dysfunction started to appear. The walls of Jericho, like the passageways of the pyramids, were adorned with graffiti by the building workforce complaining about their dysfunctional Establishment. The scribes of Mesopotamia prepared thousands of cuneiform tablets, still being unearthed, ranting about dysfunctional administrations, tales which were concealed from their overlords by their then-private guild language. The endless cycle of the rise and fall of civilizations, enlightened or savage, makes the empirical case. What else could be the common denominator factor in dystopias other than terrible choices and the influence of natural law? Did cavemen have slaves?

Empirical evidence authenticates that dystopias are manmade artifacts turned by the lathe of business as usual. A function of group size and architecture, what works to keep the hunting band effective is crippled by the operational habits of big business. Any social system in too-big-to-fail mode is already in our oxygen. The willful withholding of intelligence, appropriate selection, punished by Nature, not man, keeps dystopia alive while it wrecks the neighborhood.

The ubiquity of dystopia does suggest a blueprint of Nature – a map on how it went from zero to dominate social life on planet Earth. Anyone who wants to adopt the way of life in Utopia and benefit from its payoffs should first understand the mechanisms of action that make dystopia, well dystopia. The reason is simple. Going to Utopia is a reallocation, refinement, and repositioning of what reptile-brain, caveman-you already possess. You don’t need to gain special knowledge. What you need to thrive in Utopia is a reconfiguration and amplification of the understanding, experience, and smarts you already have. Everything you need to animate your transformation is right there in your cerebral toolshed – in the drawer marked instincts.

As indicated in the previous book, Utopia is not a place, an Eden or a Shangri-La, where mystical supernatural powers keep things copacetic behind the scenes, like Disneyworld, while you hang out. Utopia is not architecture, an art form, a tattoo. A utopia is a group of people following an explicit system of behavior towards each other that renders their society prosperous and immortal. In the society of Utopia, you are encouraged to do your part to preserve its felicitous way of life and are given the discretion to do it your way.

Everything starts in dystopia

Utopias do not appear by magic ready for occupancy. Everyone begins in dystopia and ends up in Utopia by a transmutation process. The P2U is the paradigm that takes pilgrims from dystopia and deposits them in Utopia, enlightened and intact. Only the minds of the pilgrims mutate. Everything material stays the same.

The mechanisms of action of dystopia are illuminated by scrutable connections back to the mathematical physics running the universe. Dystopia is the yardstick by which the size of the initial benefit package of the pilgrimage, a windfall, is measured. Just understanding the craziness going on relieves a good portion of your paradox-driven angst. Understanding dystopian dynamics does not tell you how to do something about it, but it does sharpen your senses to notice its intrusions.

In building the algorithms of the paradigm, no use is made of empiricism, precedence, judgment, or stories. When your strategy of action is fully rooted in natural law, Nature’s indifference becomes an ally. Its corollaries work 100% of the time.

Initialization includes defining the functioning of dystopia in terms that can be used to examine and evaluate Utopia for quantitative comparisons. It provides an objective basis for a before and after measurement of the P2U benefit package contents. The pilgrimage delivers a huge windfall both in the financial$ and the humanitarian parameters, such as morale and turnover. The definitive proof of the pilgrimage value is the quantitative measure of actualized benefits against forecasts and the self-sustaining continuation of the windfalls (Argyris).

The organizational behaviors that compile into ubiquitous patterns and the patterns that compile into ubiquitous sets that distinguish dystopia from Utopia are familiar to all. What will be featured herein is how the behaviors exhibited in real-time are the resultant vectors of two measurable forces – human choice and natural law. Humans choose at the crossroads, then Nature channels. You can choose to jump, or not, but you cannot choose to hover. Volition doesn’t work on controlling gravity.

What you will learn about social system dynamics is that early-on pathway choices are constricted by Nature’s omnipresent force fields into channels so narrow that, for all practical purposes, little room is left for alternatives. In a dystopia, personality traits are inactive ingredients. In a mature dystopia, behavioral patterns are completely predictable.

In Utopia, personalities are prominent in their creative contributions towards increasing productivity. Like all individuals in autonomy mode, prediction of their behavior is low batting average. Raising productivity is a highly creative act that sits on a foundation of mutual trust.

A disastrous mistake and a common one is to assume that the character profiles of organizational potentates have a bearing on choices being made for operations. The fact this fallacious assumption is wildly popular does not make it valid. It is the natural law that channels the choices being made in organizational functioning, not personality profiles. Nature compresses human behavior by setting strict limits to each role in the hierarchy – top to bottom. In the operational reality, managing at the natural limits by tall organizations begets dystopia. With the intelligent reallocation of the prerogatives on nature’s keyboard, always within Her limits, Utopias can rise.

When dystopia is latched in, all task action decisions are bowed by natural law to perpetuate dystopia. There are independent mechanisms of action that reinforce dystopia against disturbance, well-meaning or not. It does not take any form of physical or mental effort to maintain a dystopia. When the collective migrates from producer to parasite mode, as it must, its members have to be fed from the pantries of productive society. No handout, no survival.

In Utopia, “the chosen tier,” the productivity gatekeepers, the productivity protagonists, the front-line supervisors, the revenue crew, have free rein to husband Utopia – increase productivity. In exchange for autonomy, they have proudly taken personal responsibility for delivering fit outcomes.

In dystopia, no one is ever responsible for outcomes. If anyone claims responsibility and is not functionally positioned to deliver on the promise, such as a potentate, it is inauthentic. Excused from responsibility for consequences by role is why the perpetrators of the most destructive organizational crimes against society, e.g. 2008 Wall St., are never prosecuted.

In Utopia, productivity protagonists know that to better productivity, the workforce must be at one with the whole system of production, local and particular. Intimacy with system behavior can only be derived from the freedom to explore and test. To be constraint-free requires social system “permission” for rational action and forbearance for solution-candidate failures (British mathematician, Alan Turing, 1912-1954, father of theoretical computer science & AI). These conditions don’t occur in dystopia.

History of society as a succession of dystopias

There are copious precedents for every sort of Dystopia going on today. The graffiti of the workers on construction projects began when Establishments first had workforces to do their bidding. The library from the early Levant to circa 1930 CE about dystopias is over 5 gigabytes of .pdfs. You may have a copy of the collection on a thumb drive to peruse on your own.

The striking feature of dystopia, to us, is the regularity and monotony of its scenarios. There is little variation in how organizations orchestrate their collapse. One scandal is just like any other. Only the names change. History records the exploits of those orchestrating the fall of civilizations. The reason there is no history of collapse avoidance is there is no sense of collapse.

In Utopia, by contrast, workforce creativity is a constant buffer against monotony. Anytime productivity is going up, there is an exciting change for everyone. Since change is incessant and innovation is the cycle of inventing, trials and new ideas are immortal, and there is no collapse. With tolerance for error and failure, productivity schemes are Utopian trademarks with no room for dystopia.

Collectively, in the history of dystopia-building, the organization takes honest citizens who want to do good work and bends them to act against their proclivities. In Utopia, productivity sabotage is picked up as organizational errors for correction. In dystopia, you are expected to live among neurotic, inhumane actions and act like you don’t notice them. In time, the brain rewires itself to accept paradox as logically normal. Schizophrenic people make poor problem solvers.

After thousands of years of trying, it has become clear that an approach to remedy dystopia based upon prior strategies is destined to fail. The $350Trillion spent in the last 75 years to mitigate organizational dysfunction proves the case. This dystopian wreckage has never made any difference to its perpetrators. One of our workaday maxims applies: “Never underestimate the ability of the people to ignore hard evidence that conflicts with their acculturalization.” Head-in-sand is a perennial problem.

While the vast record of humanity speaks to the ubiquity of dystopia, it contains no theory of dystopia’s cause or how they became animated. Nowhere in the tonnage of empirical evidence of social dysfunction is a hint of why.

Since it is ubiquitous, society today wants us to believe that the norm of highly irrational, counterproductive organizational activity is a logical manifestation of divine will or predestination. “We’ve always done it this way.” “Pay no attention to the men behind the curtains” is the palace directive.

In the sphere of organizational dysfunction, any theory of action that hits its mark is self-corroborating. When your tests have failed to falsify your theory, you will be bombarded by unsolicited examples jumping out of the operational reality to grab your attention. The patterns of behavior associated uniquely with dystopia are everywhere.

Forecasting the vector of dystopia is easy because all dystopian decay and dissolve in the same way. It is a collective effort with no individual perpetrator responsible for the outcome. No one ever goes to jail for complicity in inflicting stakeholder damage. Crimes of obedience implement the crimes of command. This zero-responsibility condition of dystopia is why it cannot self-remedy. In Utopia, responsibility for prosperity continuation is singular and exact.

Today, as you well know, we have a society drowning in significant unsolved issues whose salvation is delegated to an Establishment that engineered the mess and is thereby unable to take authentic responsibility for a successful resolution (Austria-Hungarian Kurt Gödel. 1906-1978 was an original logician of the 20th century). The masses habitually clamor for a “true” leader to be placed in supreme command over a “government” that has over 25 levels of hierarchy. It’s hard to determine which is more clueless about the mechanisms of social action – the tsar who is fed by fiction-filled informants or the population who thinks that charisma can defy the rule. Suddenly, the mystery of the unnecessary fall of civilizations is no more.

The sociotechnical platform for deriving dystopia is the reference for explaining Utopia. For the empirical-evidence route, the affirmation that dystopia is manmade and impervious to disturbance is overwhelming. The empirical record includes cases where dystopias were transformed into Utopias, but none lasted long enough to establish a theory of action and validate the testing. No one ever figured out how to establish a Utopia on demand.

Empirically, the P2U (Pilgrimage to Utopia) is transmuting individuals from one way of life to another that is different in the Yin/Yang principle. The mutation starts in the way of life where they are, one hostile to initiative and discretion – its tyranny spanning millions of applications for the last two centuries. The P2U ends in a way of life that proved its high value to society for a millennium prior, in various applications. There is nothing uncertain about dystopia or Utopia. In this universe, no third state is possible. It is the generic pilgrimage connecting the two unprecedented realms.

The striking feature of man’s history is that most of what the sciences know today about organizational dysfunction was identified and well understood more than a century ago. The steps to the dystopia that follow each other in tandem by inherent necessity are universal. Among the authors that objectively described dystopia and its mechanisms of action are three USA presidents, a prime minister of Canada, a secretary of commerce, titans of industry, labor union pioneers, Senators, a governor, members of Parliament, German generals, professionals, university presidents, philosophers, and two Supreme Court Justices. A century ago, descriptions and discussions about dystopias and what to do about them were prominent in the literature and journals of the time. The issue of organizational dysfunction was new and raging. People who had experienced the rational times knew something was wrong. They noticed that every time industry expanded, whether automobiles, railroads, steel, coal, telephones, shipping, labor unrest reached new heights.

History clarifies that dystopia has been known at all levels of society for a long time. It also documents that the forces creating and maintaining dystopia have endured unchanged over generations, wars, and the specter of extinction. The record is convincing that every remedy tried for the last two centuries was a failure for the failed attempts had nothing to do with the people. Empiricism dramatically narrowed the possibilities of remedy.

History also highlighted that any attempt to fix dystopia that involves management was doomed. Even if management wanted to make Utopia work, it couldn’t. Bluntly put, there is no such thing as healthy management-labor relations. It is not a case of steering potentate-slave relationships but keeping zero-sum out of the arena of workforce interaction with management altogether.

Rudolph Starkermann, the Swiss thinker, provides a mathematical-physics explanation, using control theory, why management of a tall organization cannot command operational betterment through a management-labor relationship. It cannot know enough, timely enough to devise a fix that keeps on working. Any direct force applied by management, skilled incompetence, makes things worse.

The empirical record also shows that the Establishment was able to conceal the work of the frontier champions, 1882 to 1922, relating to fields of inquiry. Documentation from the 1940s to the present rarely includes references to the heroes. The discoveries about organizational behavior documented as novel to the authors are all heavily precedented during the era when telling it like it is was still considered a social-contract duty. How ironic that the captains of industry prevailed over the champions of Utopia and sealed the doom of their empires in the process.

The quoted excerpts from champion-era documentation cover all the pieces and parts of dystopia and much of what makes Utopia click. For the paradigm of transformation from dystopia to Utopia, the pilgrimage stations, no precedent has yet been found. Those who think this approach is preposterous, are encouraged to examine and evaluate implementation sites to discredit the paradigm. Is it not your duty to do so for yourself, your family, and your society? So, what are some distinguishing aspects of the pilgrimage?

· Every pilgrim possesses the identical hierarchical role as assigned by natural law.

· Management plays no role. The separation of the workforce from arbitrary authority is absolute.

· The payoffs from psychological mutation appear immediately.

· In fair exchange for unconditional autonomy, the revenue crew takes responsibility for viability husbandry, for increasing productivity. Legitimate responsibility for fitness has someone answering the phone.

The socio-technology of dystopia

For the sake of effectiveness and efficiency in knowledge development, a derivation of dystopia starts by placing it in the context of a level in abstraction. Dystopia is a name brand of a social system within a society of interconnected social systems. While there is great variety within the individuals of a collective, when it comes to group behavior, the collective itself exhibits no variety at all. A dystopia aims to be especially competent at eliminating variation in individual behavior to act as one in the service of the potentate’s whim.

Since dystopia is taken for granted as the de facto operating template of societies around the globe, it comes as an unwelcome surprise that dystopia is not the only stable, natural, instinct-compatible, form of social organization. As a species, Homo sapiens has two viable options and, at all times, is free to choose between them – one or the other. Taking a top-down view of dystopia, systems-engineering think begins with its dynamical classification.

Fitting mathematical physics to the great historical record of human society shows that dystopias exhibit the dynamical properties of an “attractor.” It takes the properties of an attractor, like a Black Hole, to survive millennia of generations, various conditions, and disturbances and remain intact. To prove this law-reality congruency to yourself, observe what happens when your organization gets whacked with a large disturbance, perhaps a merger. The behaviors of crisis response are transient and return inside the carapace by the pull of the dystopian doctrine. It has its configuration, strategy and place, and contribution to make.

Since each social system is unity and dystopia cannot account for all of the observed behaviors of a human collective, there must be another attractor within the total operational domain of human society. To form a unity of social system functionality sets up a Yin/Yang configuration with two complementary and opposite behavior ensembles, each highly stable, with you the agent of the other.

Dystopia and Utopia are in a joint restriction, mutually exclusive, Hyde and Jekyll – one or the other. Natural law forbids a third attractor in this universe. Numerous experiments with mixtures, via dynamic simulations, exhibit explosive instability. GIGO (i.e., “garbage in, garbage out”).

Attractors can be nested in certain ways. Most dystopias have a Utopia or two functioning in a corporate enclave, known as a “silo.” Notice the oppositely colored dots in the classic Yin/Yang symbol. Utopias are often nested within other Utopias and they can exist adjacent to dystopias indefinitely. A Utopia cannot harbor a dystopia in any form within itself for long because its dysfunction is caught as contamination and assaulted as an error. There is no gain to be concerned about “bad” people in Utopia. That’s why so much goes into error detection. Saboteurs soon get frustrated with this error-centered exposure, “You can’t cheat an honest man,” and exile themselves back to a dystopia where their subreption (or “a deliberate misrepresentation; also: an inference drawn from it.”) and deception are emulated and graded.

Attractors feed on native instincts to draw in uncharacteristic behaviors to conform to a central ideology. In Utopia, the free-range instincts feature viability husbandry (productivity), workmanship (quality), or the square deal. In dystopia, the instinct unleashed for the top brass is domination. The authority vested in the anointed few dictates how the workforce under them is to live. In Utopia, it’s all about freely-taken responsibility for beneficial outcomes. In dystopia, it’s all about the social power structure in domination mode.

In dystopia, life goes along on well-trodden paths of tradition and custom. Having taken the route of least intellectual exertion, it reacts to disturbances with a staff of firefighters trained for the role. Crisis over, things resume exactly where they left off. The hindsight-based strategy is never shaped by experience-driven lessons learned. In dystopia, all maintenance efforts are crisis-driven and temporary. Dystopia is the fruit of deliberate intellectual lethargy.

In Utopia, proactive attention to viability continuance is a constant. Lessons learned shape foresight and spotlight prevention measures. Utopia is the cerebral Olympics, a relay race of sapient heroes that has no finish line. In Utopia the expenditure of effort for viability assurance is continuous.

Native instincts spring-loaded on hot-standby is the reason you can transmute your dystopian existence into an authentic Utopia so swiftly. Unmistakable benefits from the P2U begin to manifest before the journey is half completed. You can observe pilgrimage “episodes” going on in different places around the USA and witness individual pilgrims scaling up and over the attractor divider. Attaining psychological success is a special, heartwarming occasion.

One test of Nature’s Yin/Yang power that can be run in safety is multiplicity. Assign a problem to be solved to a group of two. Add a member and gauge the change in the productivity of the democratic threesome. Add a fourth member and again note the change in productivity. When you add the fifth member, you will observe the onset of group instability and a level of productivity below the 4-person group. Phase change. The 5-man democracy fails, as it must, sending productivity to hell while the group spontaneously selects a leader. The reconfiguration of the group into a hierarchy, forced by multiplicity (control theory), produces a step change in group behavior from Yang to Yin. There is a new administrative overhead to bear that may or may not be offset by productivity increases.

To track an attractor, all it takes is to monitor productivity over time. In a dystopia, productivity only gets worse. The defensive routines of dystopia will cover up the actual decay, but there is always a day of reckoning when the treasury runs dry. Do whatever it takes to truthfully quantify productivity and believe the meter readings. In Utopia, productivity only gets better. There will be bumps as candidates for improvement are tested in the crucible of reality, but the trend line will be up.

The index of productivity is so reliable, you can detect big-time deception in the works. When your measurements show productivity going down and the official propaganda of the firm is optimal performance and revenues, it is proof positive that collapse is getting near. There will be no graceful degradation. Think implosion. Forewarned is forearmed.

Once you are familiar with the prime movers driving dystopia mortality, you know which of your instincts, impulses, and reflexes to freeze-dry for storage. Yes, your genetic endowment has equipped you with everything it takes for citizenship in either dystopia or Utopia. But, dual citizenship is possible only under special conditions. The big impediment to reaching Utopia is your social conditioning. You were enculturated to be obedient, go with the flow, and follow orders. You witnessed the monstrous treatment of the non-compliant.

Thanks to high-octane brainwashing, you have acquired a prejudice towards resignation and conformance. Mimic your peers, however, and your passport and membership card are automatically stamped “Dystopian.” Note that crime syndicates in Salerno become dystopias in no way different than the bureaucracies of organized religion in the Vatican. These predictable outcomes attest to the commanding influence of natural law in force fields as collectives act out their options as channeled by natural law.

The attractor concept helps explain why the organization fights off attempts to “fix” its dysfunction. The people fear societal instability and they are right. Those who sustain dystopia are getting something valued back in return that is not supplied in Utopia. Since that “value” cannot be viability-enhancing, the payoff must be social-psychological.

At this time, we conclude dystopias are created and sustained for the compelling purpose of feeding the psychological dispositions of the potentates – the instincts of domination. This banquet for emotional success is unsustainable. It renders collectives mortal. Command from the top, perpetually clueless about what matters to organizational viability, leads to the withdrawal of efficiency in creating value by the workforce. Our ancestors called this reflexive defense “Ca’ canny” (i.e., the policy of deliberately limiting output at work).

Since Utopias produce more essentials than they consume, they can be immortal. Like 1938 DC-3s and 1954 Chevys in Havana. Just replace worn-out parts with equivalent ones – as you go. The paradigm that makes Utopia distinct from dystopia does not get obsolete. Utopian neighborhoods are always increasing productivity, keeping change as a norm. Better, faster, cheaper, is how Utopia's workforce feeds the treasury.

No effort is made to establish the case for making the pilgrimage to Utopia on the amount of damage being inflicted by dystopia. History has no example where the size of the pile of wreckage sustained led to an effective remedy. In a half-century of testing, no one was ever found bereft of experience with organizational dysfunction. No one in a room full of his peers would dare to claim otherwise. The historical record of “Ain’t it awful,” blood relative of a stakeholder protest, is huge for any “age” of mankind.

Everyone has matching stories. Protests about the unwarranted injury may strengthen the social bond among harmed stakeholders, but they serve more as an uncomfortable excuse for avoiding remedy. “We’re no worse than the others” and “It could have been worse” is the end-game theme. The focus here is on the derivations of the mechanisms of action that distinguish dystopia from Utopia. The more you know about dystopia, the more you know about the particular requisites of eternal vigilance.

As a confidence builder, one of the tools of the paradigm, POSIWID, can be used to help you strengthen the empirical case. The self-destruction imperative of dystopia can be synthesized from a quantity of POSIWID observations. You note what goes in and the processing of the inputs. The deliverable speaks for itself. You take the outcome deposit and compare it to the stated purpose. Given the continuing process, POSIWID sets the actual purpose equal to what is being delivered and tracks the action. When the outcomes continue to match the POSIWID goal, it’s a lock. In Utopia, everyone acts towards the purpose he espouses. The “box” around the goal, task action, and product is transparent. Your examination and evaluation are welcomed.

Note The next phase of “The Black Hole of Organization Dysfunction: Part Two” will commence with “The structure of dystopian behavior.”

ATTENTION: DEVLIN, THE NOVEL, LATEST EDITION

 FOR YOUR INFORMATION

Book 1: The Assignment, 450 pages, paperback, $19.95

Book 2: Unanticipated Consequences, 470 pages, paperback, $19.95

Book 1 & Book 2, each $2.99 as e-books

    DEVLIN BOOK DESCRIPTION

The year is 1968, the milieu South Africa. It is a year in which moral certainty for one Seamus “Dirk” Devlin is rudely dislodged from its comfortable moorings, demolishing his pollyannish concept of a promised future. Devlin, a young Irish American chemical engineer of provincial roots finds himself immersed in a country and culture he knows precious little about, charged with the daunting task of effecting the merger of disparate chemical enterprises into a fully functioning new conglomerate. Dirk performs this corporate sleight of hand in the foul atmosphere of APARTHEID, an Afrikaner diktat beyond his bucolic grasp. Here, a quarter-century past WWII, the United States stumbles into the future, uncomfortable under its new mantle—not just the grocery and hardware store of the world but, de facto, a global police service. No longer couched in Edenic bliss between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the U.S. is saddled with the prestige and the burden of free world hegemony, a role for which history did not prepare it, frequently performing with distasteful hubris. Exhibiting his formidable technocratic expertise, Devlin invariably projects that American conceit. Culturally programmed for another time and a different world, he soon finds himself exposed on a foreign stage, his moral certitude collapsing. The resulting psychological anguish introduces Dirk to a ‘self’ he did not know in an unfamiliar world that still holds the modern mind hostage. 

RETREAT OF THE SERIOUS READER & THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUES -- PART TWO

 

RETREAT OF THE SERIOUS READER -- PART TWO



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

© May 5, 2021


THE TIME MACHINE (1895)


“The Time Machine” (1895) finds H. G. Wells as a time traveler in the Victorian Age discovering the Earth in the future has become a utopia. The only problem about this future world is the time traveler’s device disappears and he is unable to return to his world, but must dig deep into ominous tunnels in a desperate attempt to return to his own time. The idea: beware of acquiring the gifts you wish for. Wells questions idealists who look for a perfect world, a world without pain and suffering, therefore a world without surprise, a world without disappointment, therefore no happiness, a world of constant thriving for perfection with class divide going full circle.

THE MACHINE STOPS (1909)

“The Machine Stops” was written by E. M. Forster in 1909. It is a sci-fi novel that predicted the rise of our dependency on what has become the Internet. The omnipotent “Machine” of the novel provides a society driven underground with all its needs. It even has instant messengers. It predicted our obsession with technology and our willingness to give our time, attention, and minds to the inane.

METAMORPHOSIS (1915)

In Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” (1915), unsatisfied salesman Gregor wakes one morning to find he has been transformed into a giant cockroach that cannot speak. As his family struggles to accept his new form, their horror turns into a terrible indifference. I read this in high school with its toxic themes of isolation and identity staying with me, as has “The Trial” (1925) and “The Castle” (1926). The first finds Josef K arrested one day and he has done nothing wrong; the second is a haunting tale of K’s relentless struggle to reach the Castle where he seeks employment. With both novels, you can reflect on the injustices and frustrations of your own life.

WE (1924)

Yevgeny Zamyatin's “We” novel influenced every perspicacious prescient novelist that would follow including George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eight-Four” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” Yevgeny, a dystopian novelist imagines what led to man, once conquered, came to be subsumed under totalitarian “harmony.” That is until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers discovers he has a soul. Like all citizens of One State, D-503 lives in a glass apartment building and is carefully watched by the secret police or The Bureau of Guardians. D-503's lover, O-90, has been assigned by One State to visit him on certain nights. She is considered too short to bear children and is deeply grieved by her state in life. “You’re in a bad way!” D-503 enlightens her, “You have developed a soul.” O-90's other lover and D-503's best friend is R-13, who reads his verse at public executions.

BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932)

Aldous Huxley vehemently denied the influence of Zamyatin in writing this novel, considered by many the best dystopian novel that was ever written. Among other things, Huxley anticipated stem cell research. Like Zamyatin, people are designated Alpha, Beta, Gamma, but not Delta, which applied to the intelligence-based social hierarchy. World controllers here have created a utopian society where everyone is "happy," as long as they take their happiness drugs, reminding up the psychedelic drugs of the "terrible 1960s." The hero is psychologist Bernard who alone is unhappy, feeling discontent, and longing to be free as he experiences reality. Brave New World warns of the dangers of giving the state control over new and powerful technologies. One illustration of this theme is the rigid control of reproduction through technological and medical intervention, including the surgical removal of ovaries, the Bokanovsky Process, and hypnopaedic conditioning.

IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE! (1935)

I first read this book when I was a boy during WWII. Adolf Hitler had come to power in 1933 and had invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Author Sinclair Lewis anticipated the spread of Nazism and totalitarianism and attempted to alert the American public to the danger of this happening to our own country. Lewis chooses to have an anti-immigrant demagogue wins the US presidency.

The novel was written in the wake of Mussolini and Hitler’s terrifying sweep of Europe before the actual Poland invasion. While President Franklin Roosevelt was reelected for the third time in November 1940 ensuring America’s neutrality, Nazis were ransacking Europe was blizkreiging bombing London. Everything changed on December 7, 1941, when the Empire of Japan’s navy and air force attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing nearly 3,000 American sailors and soldiers of the US Seventh Fleet and

ANTHEM (1938)

The Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand tells the story explores a world where individualism is banned with everyone working as collectives. Each person is assigned a place and space by The Council of Vocations. Our hero has a number, Equality 7-2521 who knows he is different and attempts to find his own vocation and falls in love. The story is highlighted with the message that we need to claim our own identity, individualism, and personal freedom by taking charge and fighting for our equality. No matter what inequality faces a person, there is no profit attempt to find equality in group norms, in the rhetoric of propaganda, in societal guarantees of security. It can only be found by going against the grain and breaking free of artificial constraints.

ANIMAL FARM (1944)

George Orwell in this epic fable shows how a revolution of the best intentions, such as the Communist Revolution of 1917 failed to follow the idealistic path that was anticipated. Orwell had experienced the same thing in the Spanish Civil War of the 1920s. He has the animals of the Manor Farm revolt to drive out the humans. The animals’ newfound autonomy is short-lived as a new form of autocracy and tyranny soon replace this. It soon became apparent that once all the animals were found equal some animals were clearly more equal than others, thus the drive for equality is an impossible proposition save for the freedom of opportunity. In the present divisive climate, we see this lesson Orwell shared with us 77 years ago has still not been learned.

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949)

Once Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States in 2016, publishers came out with new editions of NINETEEN EIGHTY- FOUR and IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE, making his attempt to govern responsibly nearly impossible. The American republic, especially the left was hungry for power after being surprised by this election. They fueled the 21st Century racial, social, and economic tensions that had plagued America since Reconstruction after the Civil War. Conveniently, President Trump with his consuming immaturity and cloying narcissism fell into their hands. Now, President Joseph Biden is celebrating his administration as he governs with cliché such as “I feel your pain.” Meanwhile, The Bill of Rights, American Constitutions, and the Federalist Papers have been set aside. Norm Dorn correctly muses: We may see a collision of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR and ATLAS SHRUGGED. Signs of both are evident.

George Orwell’s story takes place in 1984 with Winston living in a world ruled by state interference where even intimate thoughts are a crime. I have written often about this book but have not been seduced by its simplistic justifications. Alas, I see the reverse where States’ Rights are now being compromised with the central government ratcheting up the controls “for our own good,” dictating what individual citizens need without their participation in the process while the media echoes these political sentiments from the Internet managing as puppet masters from the wings advancing the president’s agenda.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1962)

This dystopian satirical black novel is set in a near-future society that has a youth subculture of extreme violence. The teenage protagonist, Alex, who narrates the novel, records his violent exploits and his reaction when state authorities intent on reforming him by having him watch extremely violent films vis-à-vis B. F. Skinner’s behavior modification – only to paradoxically produce the opposite result.

Anthony Burgess wrote it after he returned to Great Britain after an absence of some years to see much had changed. A youth culture had grown up in his absence – this was 1960 – where young people skipped school, hung out in coffee shops, were obsessed with pop music, and formed teenage gangs.

England was in the grips of fear, feeling helpless in how to handle the raging hormones of juvenile delinquents who were ubiquitously pockmarked across the country. The top tier of British society had splintered into internecine political polarity and warfare. Meanwhile, once sacred symbols of culture such as family, church, school, and the workplace had lost their influence and were abandoned; while public places, monuments and statues were being desecrated. Society was fractured while attempts to restore it to its former integrity through juvenile counseling, psychotherapy, and psychological behavioral reprogramming had instead driven society to the door of systemic collapse.

The inspiration for Burgess’s novel was the beating his first wife had endured at the hands of a gang of young drunken American servicemen stationed in England during World War Two. His wife subsequently suffered a miscarriage. The horror of that experience became the landscape of this novel.

Plagued with the intuitive memory of this tragedy, Burgess investigated matters of free will and studied with some skepticism the then-popular ideas advocated by Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner on behavior modification.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (1969)

Slaughterhouse-Five is a science fiction infused anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. that follows the life and experiences of Billy Pilgrim, from his early years to his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant during World War to the post-war years, with Billy occasionally traveling through time. The text centers on Billy's capture by the German Army and his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, a fabled city with a rich cultural and architectural history which had no strategic relevance to the war. The experience which Vonnegut himself lived through as an American serviceman stayed with him throughout his life. This work has been called an example of “unmatched moral clarity” and “one of the most enduring antiwar novels of all time.”

Slaughterhouse-Five is written through Billy Pilgrim's life experiences. The story is told through pre and post-war events. Billy can travel in time. Through this ability, the audience was able to get various scenes of Billy's life. The story however has no chronological order. Billy witness horror in the war. As a result, he begins to question the meaning of life. In the end, Billy comes to terms with his past. He realizes that life is simply out of control. As humans, we cannot control the past, present, or future. The story concludes with the same bird song. Perhaps it is suggesting that life is a meaningless and vicious cycle. Kurt Vonnegut uses science fiction to demonstrate what lies outside of human consciousness.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE (1985)

This is a dystopian novel by Canadian author Marget Atwood.  It is set in a near-future New England, in a strongly patriarchal, totalitarian theocratic state, known as Gilead that has overthrown the United States government. The central character and narrator is a woman named Offred, one of the groups known as "handmaids", who are forcibly assigned to produce children for the "commanders" – the ruling class of men.

The novel explores themes of subjugated women in a patriarchal society and the various means by which they resist and attempt to gain individuality and independence. The novel's title echoes parts of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which is a series of connected stories (such as "The Merchant's Tale" and "The Parson's Tale").

The Handmaid's Tale won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987; it was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula War, the 1986 Booker Prize, and the 1987 Prometheus Award. The book has been adapted into a 1990 film, a 2000 opera, and a 2017 television series.

FATHERLAND (1992)

Similar to “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), author Robert Harris asked, “What would it be like if Hitler had won the Second World War?” Harris paints a gripping picture in FATHERLAND, set in the “terrible 1960s” long after the Nazis have won the war. Conspiracies are everywhere that could unravel Hitler’s triumph and redefined history. Twenty years after Nazi Germany’s victory and a grand celebration is planned for the Fuhrer’s seventy-fifth birthday. This coincides with the imminent peacemaking visit of President John F. Kennedy. Meanwhile, Berlin Detective Xavier March is called on to make a routine investigation of a corpse washed up on the shores of a lake which turns out to be the body of a high-ranking Gestapo commander. What he uncovers is a terrifying and long-concealed conspiracy that is doomed to spell the end of The Third Reich. The novel subverts some of the conventions of the detective novel. It begins with a murder and diligent police detective investigating and eventually solving it. However, since the murderer is highly placed in a tyrannical regime, solving the mystery does not result in the detective pursuing and arresting the murderer. The contrary occurs in the novel: the murderer pursuing and arresting the detective. The novel was an immediate best-seller in the UK and has sold over three million copies and been translated into 25 languages. Throughout the novel, Harris gradually explains, in a fictional backstory, the developments that allowed Germany to prevail in World War II. The author explains in the Author's notes that except for the backstories of the fictitious characters, the narrative describes reality up to 1942, after which it is fictional.

NEW CENTURY DYSTOPIAN FARE LACKS THE “CUTTING EDGE”

Perhaps it is that since METAMORPHOSIS (1915) and WE (1924) that the world is gotten too used to anarchy, totalitarianism, communism, socialism, inequality, conspiracy, brutality, barbarism, nihilism, discrimination, duplicity, chicanery, and being overcrowded that authors don’t feel they have an audience for the imaginative products of the authors listed here. There are too many distractions too many “off-ramps” to creative thinking. Treachery and deception, murder and mayhem, exploitation, and insurrection have become the new norm. Politicians say, “they feel our pain,” that they are for “all of us” and yet we know when push comes to shove, when they promise us everything including the kitchen sink, that when everything implodes, it is the “WE” of Yevgeny Zamyatin that are likely to suffer. That is the serious consequences of the retreat of the courageous writers and the alert and knowing reader.

Consider NOUGHTS & CROSSES (2001) by Malorie Blackman. She depicts an alternative 21st Century Great Britain beset by racial tension and eruptions of violence. This has become so common to be “oh hum.” THE WOOL TRILOGY by Hugh Howey (2014) for fans of “The Hunger Games,” in other words, an escape from reality. Then there is a bevy of 2018 dystopian novels of which these are representative: THE WATER CURE by Sophie Mackintosh where a family flees to an island to escape a mysterious sickness attached to men. CHINA DREAM where totalitarianism invades the lecherous Ma Diode’s sleep. EVE OF MAN by Giovanna & Tom Fletcher is about the mysterious decline of female births, a girl is born after fifty years of none, and is called “Eve.” We have become the equivalent of the “puppet on a string.”

EVERYONE'S AN AUTHOR

EVERYONE’S AN AUTHOR

 

The seeds of this modest little book were planted a few years ago when I gave a talk at the Temple Terrace Public Library, Tampa, Florida, on May 20, 2014.  Author Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Hemingway, unable to be present to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm, December 10, 1954, due to ill health, had United States Ambassador, John Cabot read this acceptance speech:

“Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate, but eventually, they are quite clear, and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.”

Phase One of being an author

Although we are all talkers, that we all have stories to tell, despite the delight we derive in sharing these stories, we still construct barriers that block us from ever starting to write them down.

But there is no barrier greater than “I can’t do it.  I can’t write.  I’m not smart enough to write.”  These barriers are clinchers.  They stop us dead in the water.

I’ve never been the smartest kid on the block, but that has never been a barrier to me.  I've never stopped to say, “I’m not qualified to write.”  It never occurred to me to be relevant.

One person who has known me all my life said, “I never thought you'd turn out this way.” 

"How is that, Gussie?"

"You know, as a writer, that kind of deep stuff."

What he didn’t say but implied was, “Where'd you get the arrogance, Fisher, to think you could write?”

It wasn't arrogance.  It was a need, a need to express myself in words, symbols, language to make a connection with my thoughts and feelings, beliefs and biases, loves and hates, dreams and fantasies, to make peace with my demons and dreads.  Writing gave me a modicum of control.

The other thing is it made me feel comfortable in my own skin, comfortable with what I am and am not, can and can’t do, where I need help (weakness) and what I do well (strength).  Writing introduced me to myself.  In other words, I’ve never let others define me.

Moreover, I’ve always been attracted to people smarter than I am, people from whom I could learn. This has included dead authors. My granddaughter, Rachel, is like her grandfather in that sense, and she is an outstanding student.  I've been an outstanding student at every level of my education, receiving my share of academic honors despite an occasional misstep.  I'm not saying you have to be a good student to be a writer.  F. Scott Fitzgerald was a terrible student but a great writer so was William Faulkner, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  With my insecurity, I needed the affirmation of academia.  

I went from a Catholic grammar school to a public high school, and although an “A” student in the Catholic school, I was put in classes where “C” students were the norm.  I suppose – in this Protestant community – a Catholic “A” was the equivalent of a Protestant “C.”

Language was important in the Catholic school, especially grammar.  My teacher in my freshman year of high school was struggling in diagramming a complex sentence before the class and became frustrated in the process.  I went to the board, erased her work, and diagrammed the sentence properly, returned to my desk with a smile, and was promptly sent to the principal’s office with a pink slip. It kept me out of the National Honor Society, although I graduated in the top 10 percent of my class, as I did at the University of Iowa, and in graduate school.  I have received every academic honor offered at every grade level throughout my academic career with this high school exception because I paid attention albeit with periodic aberrant behavior that put my status in some jeopardy.

This is told to readers as I come from the lowest end of the food chain, and have known from the get-go that to climb up the ladder there would be no help, no safety net, no golden parachute, no convenient off-ramps to cool my jets, no one or nothing to break my fall.  I was on my own nickel, and I was going to do it my way or it was for sure the highway.

To put it another way, if I can write books, anyone can write books.  The only real qualification to write is to demonstrate the courage to start.  You can't worry about what others think or whether you're qualified or not.  No one owns that crystal ball.

Five things have worked for me as a writer: (1) I am not afraid not to be smart; (2) I'm not worried about letting the group down; (3) I'm not afraid of failure; (4) I accept the pain and the risk of coming up empty, which I often have; (5) when I succeed, and I have on occasion, I have no delusions of being other than the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad.

Readers of my books -- several people tonight have noted how wide and diverse my career -- try to define me, thinking I am an extrovert.  I am an introvert.  People are my laboratory, and all my works emanate from that laboratory.  I prefer only the company of my wife, Betty, and my books.

People wear me out.  This (tonight) wears me out because I leave my energy behind when I leave. 

Writing to me is serious business.  It requires thinking, and thinking is like meditation, not something you do with others.  We live in a society enamored of “groupthink,” which I appall.   

The satisfaction from writing comes in the doing, not in the concluding.  We make too much of the product, not enough of the process.  Stephen King has all the money he will ever need, but he is a compulsive writer, and admits it, once comparing it to trying to give up cigarettes.

So many books are written today because authors sense a connection with Aristotle’s “rational man” in this most irrational of times.  It has been my experience if you read for pleasure you will write for pleasure, too.

Phase Two of being an author

The newspaper lady in the back who is writing a book about the role God has played in her life can appreciate what my mentor told me about my audience, which is top management and professionals:

One is “More is less."

Two is “You know that it (could that be God?) knows, and you know that it knows that you know, and you know that it knows that you know that it knows that you know.”

So, this limits gamesmanship.  Neither the writer nor the reader can play dumb.  This cuts to the quick.  My mentor is wise and knows that I will struggle with this until it is my own.

Phase Three of being an author

Everyone has a story crying within to be told, and I suspect, that is the reason you are here.

How do you get started?  How do you put yourself in the mood to begin?

Abraham Lincoln wrote and rewrote his “Gettysburg Address” while traveling to that destination, feeling he had failed, as he was not an orator.  He spoke for a few minutes, while celebrated orator Edward Everett spoke for two hours. 

Lincoln understood my mentor's admonition subconsciously if not consciously.  Less proved more and Lincoln made the connection; Everett did not.  Lincoln had a wheezing voice in his massive body, while Everett had a booming voice in his stout diminutive one. 

Everett was a performer; Lincoln was a communicator.  Lincoln was meditative, Everett was charismatic.  Lincoln was an introvert; Everett an extrovert.  Lincoln was writing to himself; Everett was speaking to an audience.  Lincoln made a spiritual connection with himself and hit his target; Everett was a mechanic and spoke over their heads.  Our times more resemble Everett than Lincoln.  This should give us pause.

Someone asked: “How do you get your thoughts and the way you speak to translate to make sense on the page?”

Lincoln, who was essentially self-educated, an autodidact, read a lot, and loved the music of language, and came to master its rhythm and make it his own.  For the rest of us, we have to simply practice, practice, and practice.  Even then, it is difficult to match precisely what we think with what appears on the page.

My wife Betty chimed in, “Jim talks to himself.  He talks out loud as he thinks about what he is about to write.” 

Yes, that is true.  I must hear how it sounds “out loud” before I commit it to the screen.  That said I write and rewrite and rewrite some more, as it takes several attempts before it makes sense to me, and resembles what I am thinking.  Still, I am subject to many errors because I am an imperfect editor. 

When I was back in my hometown researching my book on my youth (IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE), I would walk through the streets of this small town, tape recorder in hand, talking as I walked.  Three African American boys stopped and stared at me.

One boy said, “Look at that man?”

The second boy said, “What?”

The third boy said, “Can’t you see?  He’s talking to himself.”  He rolled his finger in a circle by his ear, "Crazy, man!"

“I’m talking into my recorder,” I said.  “I’m writing a book.”

“Oh, yeah," they giggled in unison, "He's writing a book!"

Talking to myself is my way.  It is not the only way, but it seems to help me match my thoughts with what eventually gets written.  Now, it is hard to find cassettes for my micro recorder.  Society has moved beyond my limited technology, but human behavior has not, which makes writing a constant as people throughout history remain essentially the same.

Phase Four of being an author

Genius is not rare, but pervasive.  We often look for it in all the wrong places.  That is also true in the case of writing.  Genius has a conceptual foundation, not a recall foundation as displayed on such television game shows as “Jeopardy.”

A few years ago, the Temple Terrace Public Library had a writing contest for young people nine to twelve to write what the library meant to them.  Some forty young people participated.  I had the privilege of being one of the reviewers.

Some of these essays were so pristine they looked as if they came out of a published book; some had a vocabulary that indicated more than a little help from a parent.  Then there was one handwritten essay that stood above all the others.

It was captivating from the first sentence.  For this writer, the library was a dream fulfilled.  He said when I walk into the library -- and I’m paraphrasing now -- it opens up to me as if it belongs to me, and it directs me to where I want to go.  I pick up a book, and my whole world changes.

I wrote in my evaluation that this essayist should one day be a writer.  I wasn’t there when they gave out the prize.  Nor did I know that this writer had won.  I understand that a little African American boy in the back of the room, rushed up to accept his prize grinning from ear to ear, saying to no one in particular, “Can you believe this!”

Phase Five of being an author

My daughter, Laurie, is a professional model.  We share one common thread of professionalism, rejection!  We are familiar with being rejected.

I came back from South Africa in 1969 something of a broken man after experiencing that assignment (see DEVLIN – A Psychological Novel – on Kindle), having retired (the first time) only in my thirties, writing to The William Morris Agency in New York City asking that agency to represent me as a writer.  I had no idea how absurd that request was. 

I told the agency that I "had retired" from my high-paying executive position to write books.

The William Morris Agency wrote me a blistering letter in reply, stating it thought it had heard everything, but that I took the cake, nothing was more maddening than what I had done or proposed to do.  I still have the letter.  I never heard from the agency again.

Hemingway advised a would-be-author to write about what he knew.  I had written “Sales Training & Technical Development” in South Africa for the new company.  So, when back in the States, I wrote a book on selling, which I completed in six weeks, and sent it off to Prentice-Hall, calling it “Let’s Take the Worry Out of Selling."  Two weeks later, it was accepted. 

It was published with the title, “Confident Selling," published in 1970 with 1971 copyright.

The book sold 25,000 copies in the first two months, and was in print for 20 years, only with Prentice-Hall’s copyright, not mine.  Caution: don’t give up your copyright if you can help it.

That was so easy that I sent other manuscripts off to a bevy of publishers receiving form rejection letters, enough to paper a room. 

Discouraged, I turned my attention to reading books, then going back to school to earn my Ph.D., not publishing again until 1990 with Work Withoug Managers (1991).

At the same time, I launched a website with a blog, finding an open market for my essays in trade journals, newspapers, and periodicals.  None of them paid me a sue.  Only Reader’s Digest did when I sent them "Twenty Points of Light."  It was accepted in January 1993 with a check being received two weeks later for $2,000, saying the piece would be published June 3, 1993.  You have to sell a lot of books to make $2,000 in royalties.

The following month of that publication, Reader’s Digest informed me in a letter that requests for reprints of that short article had passed 30,000.  The first line of that piece: “To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself.”  This led to my writing of "The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend" (1996).

Phase Six of being an author

If you think publishing a book is like winning the lottery, think again.  If you want to be famous, want to be a celebrity, make a lot of money, read the blistering letter I received from the William Morris Agency.

There are hundreds of thousands of books published every year, especially in this era of print-on-demand books and e-books in which the authors don’t make expenses.  I’m one of such authors.  I lost a bundle early in my writing career thinking everyone would want to read my works.  Not true.

On the other hand, if you have the confidence and have a passion to write if only your family reads your work, this could make it worthwhile.  Remember, publishing is a business, and publishers have to find a lot of willing gamblers for them to afford to give large advances to celebrities whose book sales seldom match their advances.

A friend of mine is writing her family history.  She is as genuine as they get.  She was as a young girl, and now a grandmother with the same vigor and élan that she had as a youngster.  She is writing her story, which should be appealing because she has lived a fascinating life.

My favorite cousin, who died a few years ago, wrote a book for his family titled “An Insignificant Life.”  I’ve never been able to read it because I become all choked up after the first few pages.

Robert earned a BSEE, went into the US Navy and became an officer in Naval Intelligence, and found himself in the Arctic at an outpost monitoring the Soviet Union’s nuclear program.  He was at his post in 1952 when Russia detonated its first hydrogen bomb, years ahead of what the CIA and NSA expected. 

He alerted his commanding officer, who told him to call the White House, which he did with trepidation.  Later, he went back to school and took a Ph.D. in economics, and became an economist for the State of Colorado.  Insignificant my foot!  But modesty was natural to him from his Norwegian side of the family.

Phase Seven of being an author

We desire to be authors because we want to make a connection, to get outside ourselves to connect with ourselves in another way.  That is the mystique of the social network.  How many here are on Facebook – most everyone.  Do you feel connected?  Of course, you do.  We seek the approval of others to approve of ourselves. 

It is too funny.  We are not a reading public.  Less than 10 percent of Americans are regular purchases of books, yet nearly everyone tweets, which requires reading.  Put all the tweets together after a day, and it would likely make a fairly good-sized book.  But it is not considered reading, certainly not book reading, so it is absolved from that connection.  Who knows, maybe book reading one day will reach 11 percent.

The Information Age has made everyone readers despite themselves.  I’m a fairly good typist.  Now I learn typing is passé with all you need is two thumbs.  Can you imagine that?

Phase Eight of being an author

I would encourage you to have a conversation with yourself, keep a diary, scribble notes, write poetry, or fragments of philosophy, as I did in the early 1970s.  One day you will pick it up and say, “Wow!” 

In my case, what I had written some thirty years ago seemed as relevant as if it had just been written.  “Time Out for Sanity! Blueprint for an Anxious Age” was the title, which TATE Publishing will release later this year which was so generated.  It occurred to me that my books are chapters of the same story:

·      why do we remain stuck,

·  why do we treat ourselves so poorly,

·  why do we keep running from ourselves?

In the 1970s, the narcotic of our escape was psychedelic drugs, now it is the societal ubiquitous mobiles of social media.  The irony is while we are prisoners 24/7 to our handheld electronic devices thinking we are networking with others we have little or no time to network with ourselves in wondering.

I am a confessed wonderer.  That said, my books have no answers but attempt to ask the right questions.  I believe that the problems we experience once honestly defined reveal the answers.

Twenty-four years ago WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS was thought to be angry, if not crazy, yet in 2014, it is clear we don’t need managers.  We don't need them at all, yet we still have them, and chances are 24 years hence we'll still have them.  See why I think we are stuck?  Our lies and deceits become our Tar Baby, and we get stuck on this barrier, ignoring the problems we face and solving the problems we don't face.   

This is what I write about so I'm not surprised if I'm not a household name to you.   I'm encouraged, however, to hear from people like Eric, Klaus, and Ted who are in the audience.  They stimulate my mind when they write, as they cut through all the folderol, and penetrate the nonsense. 

Some of you may have your own strong views but are afraid to share them.  You shouldn't.  We are all trying to get inside the limits of language to the ideas buried inside.

My writing is meant to inspire people to have more confidence in themselves, and to take charge and control of their lives, as tenuous as that may be. 

Our culture isn’t serving us very well, yet it refuses to change.  It is hard to get a sense of ourselves in a time of pervasive sameness.  The lady writing about God in her life says she isn't religious but spiritual.  Did we ever imagine a dichotomy between the two?  It is hard to be spiritual in a secular world, and equally hard to be religious.   That doesn’t mean that we need to abandon the spiritual or religious but does mean we cannot count on others to carry our burdens, not politicians, pundits, priests, or prognosticators.  I think that is wrong.  That is why I write.© James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., May 20, 2014.