WHAT IS MY DREAM TRYING TO TELL ME?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2006
Freud made a point about "slips of tongue" showing the subconscious coming through at the most inopportune times. He also made a point that dreams often are the subconscious trying to get some kind of response from the conscious mind, or else the buried self, trying to tell the conscious mind to "get real." In any case, I had this dream I will share with you now.
I am driving along in my car listening to "All Things Considered" on National Public Radio, when the actor Jon Voight, whom I have been told I resembled at an earlier age, is interviewing the author of a new book, which has created a national sensation.
The book is called GROW UP PEOPLE! GET REAL SOCIETY! It is written by a physician named Dr. Sven Swisher (which sounds strangely like "Dr. Jim Fisher" out of Voight's mouth), who lost his wife the past year, and in bitterness and anger penned this book.
Dr. Swisher did so by first interviewing friends, acquaintances and strangers in New York City, where he lives on Park Avenue off of Central Park.
Voight informs the listeners that the book is "Number Six" on the New York Times bestseller list, and that Swisher has received a main selection of the Book of the Month Club with a check for $250,000, a check from The Reader's Digest for a condensed version of the book for $50,000, and the book is in its third printing having sold more than 100,000 hard bound copies to date.
The book described is hauntingly similar to my WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE? The more I hear of the book in the interview the more my heart sinks.
I arrive home and my phone is buzzing, which I never answer, with fourteen messages of congratulations on my "new success." I have forty-eight email messages of the same character. All of this makes me sink deep into my chair in a catatonic state of depression. Finally, I get the gumption to erase all the messages, and wait for Beautiful Betty to come home. When she does, I say, "Honey, I'm not going to write anymore?"
She looks at me, hangs up her coat, takes off her watch and earrings and says, "If I believe that, the sky would be black with flying pigs."
Then I tell her the dream. She listens and says nothing.
"Well?" I asked finally.
"Well, what?" she replies now slipping out of her clothes and getting into her leisure jump suit. We are now in the bedroom and I'm sitting on the bed watching her for reaction.
"Well, what do you think?"
She smiles now. "Somewhere in that question is, what do you want me to think?"
"Well?"
"Well, nothing. The world won't come to an end if you don't write. And you don't have to be Freud to know that. What you think your dream is telling you it is not telling you at all."
"Pardon me, my dear, but I didn't know you had a doctorate in psychology. I thought you were a bean counter."
Obviously, not offended, she replies, "Exactly, that is a bean counter analysis. You asked for it. That's it!"
"But you're not concerned if I don't write anymore?"
She doesn't answer. "Well?" I insist.
"My dear puzzled husband, you've got issues." I squirm. She continues. "You're a novelist who is trying to save the world from itself, and the world is not interested in being saved. It is interested in being entertained. I'm sure your namesake.."
"He's not my namesake. His name is Sven Swisher, Dr. Sven Swisher."
"Whatever. Now can I finish my thought before I forget it?"
"Of course, I'm a good listener."
She shakes her head in disbelief. "What I was going to say is that without reading this new book I'll bet dollars to doughnuts it is about 98 percent entertainment and 2 percent punishing criticism of its readers. Your book is the exact reverse of this."
I ponder this a moment, then answer, "I think you're right, but why am I like that?"
"Only God and that little gremlin in you know the answer. Write or don't write, do what you're always telling us to do, choose. Now, let me go. I've got to make dinner."
With that she taps me on the cheek, and leaves me sitting on the bed Buddha style, a little boy in an old man's body, wondering why she has all the wisdom in this household.
Be always well,
Jim
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Dr. Fisher is an organizational/industrial psychologist who continues to write despite his gremlins.
Monday, January 09, 2006
Friday, January 06, 2006
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, AND THE YOU HE IS WATCHING IS NOT THE SAME YOU THAT YOU WERE!
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, AND THE YOU HE IS WATCHING IS NOT THE SAME YOU THAT YOU WERE!
JAMES R. FISHER, JR., PH.D.
© DECEMBER 2005
PART ONE
Wise distrust and constant watchfulness are the parents of safety. A soul without watchfulness is, like a city without walls, exposed to the inroads of all its enemies.
William Secker (1650)
English clergyman
THE QUIET MIND
The Indian philosopher and mystical thinker, Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986), born in Madras, India, and discovered by Dr. Annie Besant, resisted her attempts to proclaim him the Messiah. The wealthy London theosophist aimed to build a religion around him. Instead, he traveled the world advocating a way of life and thought unconditioned by the narrowness of nationality, race and religion.
Early on, Krisnamurti recognized the “divided self” was endemic to modern man, making him vulnerable to such thinkers as Freud and Jung. Western man in particular, he noted, has come to accept the eccentricities and neuroses described by these men as belonging to him. Thus, Freudian and Jungian language has come to identify modern man’s fears and anxieties. Krisnamurti insists this has made him more anxious and confused rather than less so.
To demonstrate his point, Krisnamurti often uses parables. This is one. There was this painter that would come to the crevice of a mountain where a large tree grew out of the divide. He would set up his easel, place his canvas on it, roll out his paints and rags, and observe the tree, sometimes for hours, but never set paintbrush to canvas.
A man who had observed this unusual behavior several times, one day asked, “Sir, are you a painter?”
The painter nodded, “That I am.”
“Yet you do not paint. I have watched you these several days, and not once have you touched your canvas with paintbrush. Am I correct?”
“Indeed, you are.”
“Help me, sir, understand this as I am quite confused.”
“I am not ready to paint. When I am ready, I shall paint the tree.”
“When you are ready?”
“Yes.”
“Pardon me for my boldness, but when might that be?”
“When I become the tree and the tree becomes me.” Seeing that this further confused his interrogator, he added. “I am not yet ready because I am still the observer and the tree is being observed. When there is no subject, and no object, only the tree, when we are wed as one, I shall paint.” With that he collapsed his easel, restored his paints to his case and left without another word.
THE ANXIOUS MIND
We like other people to do our thinking because we find ourselves too busy to do our own. We let them dictate the agenda of our lives so that we can complain if it is neither wanted nor expected. When asked what we would do with our lives if we didn’t have to work, we are apt to reply, nothing or travel, bookends to a vegetated state.
Most of us wouldn’t have any idea what to do with ourselves if we didn’t have our miseries and boring work. The simple fact is we let life make choices for us and then sit around and wait to see how those choices turn out.
The only commodity we own is time, and it is slipping away as I write these words. It has taken me a lifetime to realize I came in with nothing, and I will leave with nothing. Chasing possessions is a poor way to spend the short time in between.
The second thing I’ve learned is that it is much better to limit my desires than to earn the income to satisfy what Madison Avenue romanticizes as what I need. Most Americans are slaves to appetites invented by advertisers, Hollywood, and television programming. We dress, talk, eat, drink, drive, and couple according to dictums of what is “in” and what is “out.”
The United States of America is called an “individualistic society,” when it is hardly individualistic at all. Take renegades. In my youth, rebels on motorcycles were about the only ones with tattoos. Now tattoos are “in,” and so everyone has to have one. Renegade identity in this instance has neutralized individualism, as there seems almost a frantic fear of not being accepted or belonging to some crowd. As a consequence, the contemporary mind is anxious, and identity inauthentic, for no one wants to stand out as different in a crowd. Most attention, then, is spent on “fitting in” and watching others to see if they are watching us.
When we run into walls the walls we run into are often the walls that our unconscious personality has created, or the walls that others tell us are there. We accept their words because they are respected, expert and authority voices, or voices outside the voice that is in our heads waiting to be listened to, but unlikely to go unheard.
Experts talk of a “glass ceiling” for women seeking careers, and many women would argue it is hardly glass or invisible, but solid impenetrable steel.
This expression of “glass ceiling” came out of the experiment with flies. An aerated container with a glass ceiling watched the behavior of the entrapped flies. Many would bounce off the glass ceiling and return to buzz around the chamber. After some time, the glass lid was removed, only to find the flies were no longer interested in challenging the clear passage to freedom, buzzing about in anxious captivity.
There are similar captivities of choice that are even more remarkable.
Recently, I had dinner with a successful man who is in his forties, who confided to me that he has over a million dollars of capital, not including his real estate holdings. He also proudly informed me that he carries nearly $50,000 in his checking account, and dreams of the day when he will have $4 or 5 million saved so that he can quit a job that he doesn’t particularly like.
“Why not $40 or 50 million?” I asked.
He looked at me oddly, causing me to add, “What would you do when you no longer had to work 70 or 80 hours a week?”
“Nothing,” he answered without hesitation, and then after a moment’s pause, “I’d do some traveling.” Apparently, thinking this too self-serving, added, “I’d of course provide for the education of my kids and grandkids.”
It was clear that while his financial goals were thought out his emotional and psychological goals were not, drifting instead into inanities. Nor had the thought occurred to him what he would do with a 70 or 80 hours gap in his weekly life.
After I left him, I felt a deep sorrow bordering on revulsion, not for him so much, as for the fact that he was in the upper one-tenth of one percent of American earners and he wasn’t aware that he was being programmed, manipulated, and watched like a puppet on a string being pulled and danced to puppeteer refrains while life was draining from him.
LIFE AS PUPPETRY
There are two aspects of this condition that I would like to cover briefly. One is the psychology of the cult leader that controls all our lives whether we know it or not, more so now than ever before. We have become dependent for most of our information and the decisions we make, not out of direct experience, but on the basis of what cult leaders and their acolytes insist are right for us.
Cult leaders constantly bombard our senses telling us what is important, and what is not; what we should think and feel and why; and what makes us anxious and what will make it all go away. They even create their own financial fortunes by telling us how to create ours. Cult leaders have decided what ails us providing trendy ideal type models, when all they are doing is explaining away their own hang ups.
The second aspect is the mentor’s personality in which rests the cult leader’s power. This comes in diverse shapes but its presence is unmistakable. The bearded, smiling, Buddha-like Andrew Weil (Healthy Aging) has it, as did the handsome Werner Erhard (est seminars) of another generation, as does the baldheaded Wayne Dyer (Becoming Spiritual), who is a constant presence on public television. They, and their legion urge us to practice a veritable religion of the self in which the individual determines his own behavior without needing the approval of an outside force, which is ironic, because they certainly are not a force from within.
What makes mentoring personalities dangerous is that they promote the illusion that our conscious and unconscious minds are on different playing fields that must me netted together with their guidance. They know cognitive processes are perceived to have a corresponding weaker hold on the more dominant unconscious processes. That is, reason is more pliable than gut intelligence, and so they dwell on our vanities.
G. K. Chesterton put it well when he said, “That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.”
George Bernard Shaw said it even more pungently, “God created us in his image, and we decided to return the favor.”
Weil knows that we fear death and are afraid to live; Erhard knew Generation X considered responsibility a prison and so he provided a solution; and Dyer talks in simple terms about complex ideas giving his audience pabulum philosophy to save them the trouble of working things out for themselves.
CHARISMA UNCOVERED
Charisma, as a psychological emanation, may be thought of as a supplement to personality or leadership characteristics that fills most easily the emptiness of another person’s psyche, especially those created by boredom, too much time on one's hands, depression bordering on self-pity, developmental deficits due to sloth, or simply self-indulgence.
Charisma, through its power to over stimulate in the short term, can effectively mask the narcissistically seductive and self-serving aims that are often blatantly evident in the charismatic personality of the cult leader.
A collusive bargain is struck between the cult leader-as-mentor and the individual who is seductively charmed. This person perhaps has come to think: Okay, maybe I am being manipulated, maybe it is just a bunch of hogwash, but it feels so good it’s worth it! Such people buy the books and pay the hundreds of dollars for the seminars, and go away happy, but never changed.
The mentoring personality-as-cult leader knows his audience and the nature of his seductive appeal. If for only a brief respite from the dog-eat-dog world, the receptive personality wants to feel special, wants somebody to pay attention to him and his needs, as well as his fears, dilemmas, and anxieties. He reasons that he is spending time and money in pursuit of his object, self-approval, concluding, even if I am being used, he (cult leader) wouldn’t be wasting his time on me, important as he is, since he could be anywhere with anyone else, but he is here with me.
The fatal flaw in this chain of reasoning is that no one is less discriminating than the cult leader. He must have an audience, and experienced confirmation of the merits of his ideas. Charisma, then, far from being selective, is a promiscuous engagement cloaked in the addictive power of an idea, be it in blissful long life, hedonism without responsibility, or spirituality without struggle.
There is a hidden agenda of denying a covert deadness and passivity of both the cult leader and his audience by consummating an ephemeral relationship that, while meaningless in terms of change, is however exciting in the moment.
Young people reading this may see the concern raised here as hyperbolic and irrelevant. They of course did not live in the time of Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin, or indeed, Joseph McCarthy. Hitler and Stalin took Germany and Russia into war and ran it with the newspeak right out of George Orwell’s “1984” in which Big Brother proclaimed, “War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.” Joseph McCarthy, on the other hand, was a rabble-rouser who played on the suspicious mind.
Orwell’s novel reflected precisely what these cult leaders were successful in establishing: palpable fear. Big Brother now is not less toxic, but comes to us more indirectly through subliminal stimulation in blind messages in film, television, music, and radio, while the constant eye of electronic surveillance invades our privacy. In “1984” newspeak, “personal privacy is self-imprisonment.” There is evidence this is accepted today without a whimper of protest. Big Brother is not only in our lives but has successfully changed our lives to a way in which we are not only alienated from what we were but self-hating for the attention.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CULT LEADER
We have this idea that charisma is important in leadership, when it is a manifestation of the puppeteer doing his thing. The cult leader first is a wounded human being who denies there is a connection between the idiosyncratic details of his actual deficit world and the utopian worldview he espouses.
Read biographies of Freud and Jung and you see how they became the cult craving figures that they are. They broke from each other: Freud succeeding with transactional analysis although it could not be scientifically replicated in experience, selling it successfully as “the new science” of psychology; while Jung reached down into cultural mythology and the collective unconscious to explain why man behaves as he does.
Both Freud and Jung, among others, have proven to be failures of great consequence in their appointed tasks, yet society calls them “great men” because society needs great men to believe itself in turn great for having followed their misguided leads.
It is not fair to single out these two men, alone, but this is a short piece, leaving educators, religious leaders, politicians, and others, who display similar behavior unrecorded.
In any case, it is part of the grandiose scheme of cult leaders to believe they transcend their personal deficits in the service of society’s collective unconscious, which puts them closer to Jung than to Freud.
The fact is that cult leaders, whatever their discipline or audience, suffer from a pathology of symbolism.
They see themselves, literally, as the symbols incarnate on a symbolic quest to do for people what they would not do for themselves. They carry the banner of liberty, equality and fraternity, or salvation, or the means to eternal bliss.
Cult leaders are analogous to schizophrenics, which I will subsequently address relative to “Big Brother.” I say this because of the loosened associations engendered in the meaning of words and ideas when the cult leader talks about such things. They are prone to a pathological spreading of cult symbolism. They do this when they focus on our fears, and attempt to persuade us to relax our freedoms to ensure our security. Symbolism, thus, becomes more real than experience and dictates behavior.
They use fear-speak as a suitable mechanism in defense of fear and gauge of their charismatic personality to project their identity with our concerns and how they plan to address them in our behalf. Thus, a single calamity can provide the pathology of symbolism to ride them to controlling our destiny, surrendering self-responsibility and freedom to them with open hands.
With this mechanism cult leaders can deny every scintilla of neurotic conflict, and project this onto society as its own deficit, thus externalizing an unbearable inner tension into a collective paranoia, creating an “us against them” mentality that we assume that belongs to us as well. Whatever they say we should do, we will do because we have not taken the trouble to reflect on what is going on.
Just when the cult leader’s magic is waning, he frequently admits to having failings, the Achilles heel of the great man, because the failings he admits to are always petty.
The cult leader sees himself as a historic figure with an opportunity to write the history of his times by acting as the great rebel, messenger of cultural salvation, or messianic genius matched with the demands of the times. No country or society is without such men.
This genius of cult leader has little to do with intelligence or intellectual acumen, in his mind, preferring to believe that mystical powers beyond his comprehension guides him to do the public’s good, and thus brings to birth a latent but expectant historical trend. Rules do not apply to such men, or rather existing rules, as they can be temporarily suspended to realize the greater good.
This profile could go on, but this is enough to visualize the aspect, realizing the cult leader cannot understand or accept without some devious maneuvering when he encounters sensitive observers who fail to be influenced by the weightiness of his mission, or how it is meant for them as well.
The disenchanted or opposition then become the dangerous and their names are added to some type of enemies list, when their greatest sin is that they failed to buy into the charade.
CULT LEADERS IN THE HOME AND THE DANGERS THEY REFLECT
Much as cult leaders can be upsetting to our lives if we allow them to become influences, a greater danger is the result of what happens when a mundane society buys into many of the constrains that are self-imposed.
A daughter does this when her mother dies at a young age, and she finds herself the servant of her brothers and sisters, and even father long after they should care for themselves. Her life is on hold until there is no longer any life left to hold onto. She does it first out of love, then obligation, then out of knowing nothing else, and then finally out of bitterness, never having had the courage to say, “Enough already!”
A wife does this when her husband keeps getting her pregnant and then drinks and gambles and runs around freely leaving her home to serve the needs of the children, and his needs, with no opportunity to know much less meet hers. She, too, should say enough already, and demand change, divorce, and if that is not likely, to leave.
A man in a job that he hates but pays him well and therefore claims he has no choice is a man who is servant to a master other than himself.
There are three types of people who live in this prosaic danger zone: there are the takers, those who play it safe, and those that never get enough.
The takers are like the husband described above who lives in reckless abandon treating his wife and children as possessions to do with as he pleases. Those who play it safe are what we call “normal,” or people who live, or try to live, within their means and possibilities while wearing blinders to what is happening around them. Then there are those who live constantly on the edge in reckless abandon treating everything they encounter as fodder for their grand design. (See PART TWO)
Inward life was stolen from the daughter who took care of her brothers and father at the expense of her own. The inward life was stolen by the wife that subjugated her needs to the voice of demands of her husband and society “to be a good mother and wife,” whatever the cost. And the inward life was stolen from the man who never found the gumption to do what he really wanted to do.
PERSONALITY PROFILE OF THE CULT LEADERS AMONGST US
The radiance of charisma can be deceptive. The action of charisma may be a deflection and transformation of inner energy to glow and radiate outward into lines of force.
Seen in this way, it represents almost a manic projection, which may explain why manic attacks and bizarre reactions of hysteria are manifestations of charisma.
Yet, the charismatic personality may be no more than the forceful symptom of the psychic work that is necessary for transforming inner affects to outer effects, and therefore may not be so free flowing as it would seem.
There is an obvious connection between this mesmerizing power and the sleight-of-hand tricks of the magician in that the charismatic leader conceals the struggle that was required to produce the effect. Have no doubt that Freud, Jung, Weil, Erhard, Dyer, and many others of their charismatic persuasion have had their struggles. What they have “found out” they desire to share with the happy ease and simmering aplomb of effortless discovery. What is missing is how hard the charismatic personality works at being charismatic.
To understand why charisma works as well as it does, given its duplicitous nature, it must be understood that we are a “divided self” in which subject and object are separated by a convenient miasma. The charismatic personality penetrates this mist with narcissistic giving, by acting as though he is giving something that is not already possessed, and giving it grandiosely. The charismatic personality deflects the awareness of the recipient (who is being given little or nothing) from the actual frustrating present transaction to stimulate the promise of extravagant gratification in the future by appealing to natural greed and sloth.
You experience the flavor of this when the narcissistic appeal is that your weaknesses are actually your strengths, that selfishness is not a curse but a blessing, that greed is good, that workaholism is good for the soul. You get the point. It follows that the charismatic personality, who is obsessed with his impact on the recipient, will not fail to use the full power of his narcissistic giving to penetrate the fragile mind of the devotee.
The influence of charisma is awesome to those predisposed to it. Its effects can best be described with those of a drug. Charisma can often function as a euphoria-building, antidepressant drug. In its ability to make one feel good, charisma can seem a high, and part of the addiction. There is no place for reason, for fair exchange, or for humor as the line has been drawn and the charismatic addicted person cannot imagine crossing it.
There is some truth that we are attracted to what we are not and believe we should be, which makes us vulnerable to charismatic personalities with these apparent qualities:
· They have a significant aura of greater energetic drive than we do, which does not follow from an excess of cheerfulness, but may be an expression of an angry disposition, as is often the case with incendiary leaders of minority groups.
· They seem to have a sense of psychic surplus, which overflows and they wish to share with you.
· Close observation will reveal they are narcissistically self-absorbed believing themselves to understand the profound and to be driven by greater good.
· They have the ability to draw people to them by the psychic force of their personality, which sets up a force field magnetism not unlike iron filings to a magnet.
· This force field is their “promised land” which they are willing to share.
There is a connection between charisma and seduction, and in the prosaic sense, many a person has fallen victim to this fatal charm, often to his or her regret. The charismatic personality is energetic, charming and alive, and sets off goose bumps in you, failing to realize he is always talking about himself, resulting in your not being able to resist the charm of such a know-it-all, upbeat, and heavenly person, who sweeps you off your feet before you know it.
Likely to be missed in this heated climate is that the charismatic personality is obsessed not to be simply a “self,” but a personality, to be not larger than life, but larger than himself.
The charismatic personality strikes us as an embodiment of an archetype, more beautiful or handsome than is possible, more athletic and successful under pressure than is imaginable, more charming and knowledgeable than anyone could remotely attain. In a word, the charismatic personality is on another level, a paradigm of some elemental human force that connects him with the primitive and unconscious depths of our being.
We are in awe and think we have found our leader, our true love, or the answer to our prayers. So, we leave our wits behind and follow blindly leaving the sanctuary of our safe harbor and its moorings where good sense and security once resided.
It should be clear, then, that whatever the charismatic personality offers, be it whatever, it is not love, kindness, understanding, nurturance, empathy, or intimacy in any fundamental human sense. Should there be the promise of enlightenment and guidance, whether religious, political, philosophical, moral, or aesthetic, rest assured it will be delivered grandiosely, but never in a personal way. The charismatic personality abhors the one-on-one setting for reason. It exposes him as fraud.
So, it is not necessarily that face seen on television that is your charismatic personality of concern, but may be that face across the room on the couch in the living room, in a bar having a drink beside a stranger, at a conference of peers, or in coffee shop having a cafe au lait with a colleague who is married to your best friend.
We are most vulnerable to the charismatic personality, when our guard is down and he or she pursues a hidden agenda with indirection and sleight-of-hand finesse when our vanity and sincerity collide to not recognize the invasion.
SOMEBODY IS WATCHING AND THE WATCHER MAY BE UP TO NO GOOD
We are constantly reminded of identity theft. Mystery novelists use this as fodder for their stories. It illustrates another point. We believe bad things only happen to other people, and so we throw caution to the wind, and behave as if we can’t be touched.
The predator in a David Baldacci novel studies automobiles, their age, type, condition, and license plate numbers. He sees a vanity plate, which reads “DEH JD,” and knows the person is a lawyer. She goes to an ATM, and then throws the receipt into the trash. He retrieves it and has more information. He looks her up and gets her phone number, and so on. He does this for a number of potential victims with them all seemingly oblivious to danger leaving information in plain sight. For example, he sees a People magazine with the name and address of the person on the seat of a locked car. From there, he can go to the Internet and get all the information he needs. Paranoia, as a consequence, has become common defense.
It wasn’t like this when I was a boy. That all changed, according to Haynes Johnson in his new book, “The Age of Anxiety” (2005), with the terror of the 1950s called “McCarthyism.” Joseph McCarthy was the junior US Senator from Wisconsin, who claimed there were scores of communist in the government and the media. He used his charismatic personality to stir up blind fear and anxiety into mass public hysteria, convincing the US Congress to create an “Un-American Activities Committee.” Thousands lost their jobs for writing words like you see here, as it was the “Great Red Scare,” which was Communism.
While this mania was sweeping across the nation, “1984” (1949) by George Orwell was being published. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote an “after word” about it in 1961:
“George Orwell’s 1984 is the expression of a mood, and it is a warning. The mood it expresses is that of near despair about the future of man, and the warning is that unless the course of history changes, men all over the world will lose their most human qualities, will become soulless automatons, and will not even be aware of it.”
To give you a flavor of that novel and how it ties in with this piece, I conclude with a passage from “1984”:
“Crimstop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the Party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The key word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.” (1984, A Signet Classic Paperback, 1961, p. 175)
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Dr. Fisher is an organizational/industrial psychologist and former corporate executive who writes on themes that touch his fancy from time to time. Many of these subsequently are published. See his website and blog: www.peripateticphilosopher.com.
JAMES R. FISHER, JR., PH.D.
© DECEMBER 2005
PART ONE
Wise distrust and constant watchfulness are the parents of safety. A soul without watchfulness is, like a city without walls, exposed to the inroads of all its enemies.
William Secker (1650)
English clergyman
THE QUIET MIND
The Indian philosopher and mystical thinker, Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986), born in Madras, India, and discovered by Dr. Annie Besant, resisted her attempts to proclaim him the Messiah. The wealthy London theosophist aimed to build a religion around him. Instead, he traveled the world advocating a way of life and thought unconditioned by the narrowness of nationality, race and religion.
Early on, Krisnamurti recognized the “divided self” was endemic to modern man, making him vulnerable to such thinkers as Freud and Jung. Western man in particular, he noted, has come to accept the eccentricities and neuroses described by these men as belonging to him. Thus, Freudian and Jungian language has come to identify modern man’s fears and anxieties. Krisnamurti insists this has made him more anxious and confused rather than less so.
To demonstrate his point, Krisnamurti often uses parables. This is one. There was this painter that would come to the crevice of a mountain where a large tree grew out of the divide. He would set up his easel, place his canvas on it, roll out his paints and rags, and observe the tree, sometimes for hours, but never set paintbrush to canvas.
A man who had observed this unusual behavior several times, one day asked, “Sir, are you a painter?”
The painter nodded, “That I am.”
“Yet you do not paint. I have watched you these several days, and not once have you touched your canvas with paintbrush. Am I correct?”
“Indeed, you are.”
“Help me, sir, understand this as I am quite confused.”
“I am not ready to paint. When I am ready, I shall paint the tree.”
“When you are ready?”
“Yes.”
“Pardon me for my boldness, but when might that be?”
“When I become the tree and the tree becomes me.” Seeing that this further confused his interrogator, he added. “I am not yet ready because I am still the observer and the tree is being observed. When there is no subject, and no object, only the tree, when we are wed as one, I shall paint.” With that he collapsed his easel, restored his paints to his case and left without another word.
THE ANXIOUS MIND
We like other people to do our thinking because we find ourselves too busy to do our own. We let them dictate the agenda of our lives so that we can complain if it is neither wanted nor expected. When asked what we would do with our lives if we didn’t have to work, we are apt to reply, nothing or travel, bookends to a vegetated state.
Most of us wouldn’t have any idea what to do with ourselves if we didn’t have our miseries and boring work. The simple fact is we let life make choices for us and then sit around and wait to see how those choices turn out.
The only commodity we own is time, and it is slipping away as I write these words. It has taken me a lifetime to realize I came in with nothing, and I will leave with nothing. Chasing possessions is a poor way to spend the short time in between.
The second thing I’ve learned is that it is much better to limit my desires than to earn the income to satisfy what Madison Avenue romanticizes as what I need. Most Americans are slaves to appetites invented by advertisers, Hollywood, and television programming. We dress, talk, eat, drink, drive, and couple according to dictums of what is “in” and what is “out.”
The United States of America is called an “individualistic society,” when it is hardly individualistic at all. Take renegades. In my youth, rebels on motorcycles were about the only ones with tattoos. Now tattoos are “in,” and so everyone has to have one. Renegade identity in this instance has neutralized individualism, as there seems almost a frantic fear of not being accepted or belonging to some crowd. As a consequence, the contemporary mind is anxious, and identity inauthentic, for no one wants to stand out as different in a crowd. Most attention, then, is spent on “fitting in” and watching others to see if they are watching us.
When we run into walls the walls we run into are often the walls that our unconscious personality has created, or the walls that others tell us are there. We accept their words because they are respected, expert and authority voices, or voices outside the voice that is in our heads waiting to be listened to, but unlikely to go unheard.
Experts talk of a “glass ceiling” for women seeking careers, and many women would argue it is hardly glass or invisible, but solid impenetrable steel.
This expression of “glass ceiling” came out of the experiment with flies. An aerated container with a glass ceiling watched the behavior of the entrapped flies. Many would bounce off the glass ceiling and return to buzz around the chamber. After some time, the glass lid was removed, only to find the flies were no longer interested in challenging the clear passage to freedom, buzzing about in anxious captivity.
There are similar captivities of choice that are even more remarkable.
Recently, I had dinner with a successful man who is in his forties, who confided to me that he has over a million dollars of capital, not including his real estate holdings. He also proudly informed me that he carries nearly $50,000 in his checking account, and dreams of the day when he will have $4 or 5 million saved so that he can quit a job that he doesn’t particularly like.
“Why not $40 or 50 million?” I asked.
He looked at me oddly, causing me to add, “What would you do when you no longer had to work 70 or 80 hours a week?”
“Nothing,” he answered without hesitation, and then after a moment’s pause, “I’d do some traveling.” Apparently, thinking this too self-serving, added, “I’d of course provide for the education of my kids and grandkids.”
It was clear that while his financial goals were thought out his emotional and psychological goals were not, drifting instead into inanities. Nor had the thought occurred to him what he would do with a 70 or 80 hours gap in his weekly life.
After I left him, I felt a deep sorrow bordering on revulsion, not for him so much, as for the fact that he was in the upper one-tenth of one percent of American earners and he wasn’t aware that he was being programmed, manipulated, and watched like a puppet on a string being pulled and danced to puppeteer refrains while life was draining from him.
LIFE AS PUPPETRY
There are two aspects of this condition that I would like to cover briefly. One is the psychology of the cult leader that controls all our lives whether we know it or not, more so now than ever before. We have become dependent for most of our information and the decisions we make, not out of direct experience, but on the basis of what cult leaders and their acolytes insist are right for us.
Cult leaders constantly bombard our senses telling us what is important, and what is not; what we should think and feel and why; and what makes us anxious and what will make it all go away. They even create their own financial fortunes by telling us how to create ours. Cult leaders have decided what ails us providing trendy ideal type models, when all they are doing is explaining away their own hang ups.
The second aspect is the mentor’s personality in which rests the cult leader’s power. This comes in diverse shapes but its presence is unmistakable. The bearded, smiling, Buddha-like Andrew Weil (Healthy Aging) has it, as did the handsome Werner Erhard (est seminars) of another generation, as does the baldheaded Wayne Dyer (Becoming Spiritual), who is a constant presence on public television. They, and their legion urge us to practice a veritable religion of the self in which the individual determines his own behavior without needing the approval of an outside force, which is ironic, because they certainly are not a force from within.
What makes mentoring personalities dangerous is that they promote the illusion that our conscious and unconscious minds are on different playing fields that must me netted together with their guidance. They know cognitive processes are perceived to have a corresponding weaker hold on the more dominant unconscious processes. That is, reason is more pliable than gut intelligence, and so they dwell on our vanities.
G. K. Chesterton put it well when he said, “That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.”
George Bernard Shaw said it even more pungently, “God created us in his image, and we decided to return the favor.”
Weil knows that we fear death and are afraid to live; Erhard knew Generation X considered responsibility a prison and so he provided a solution; and Dyer talks in simple terms about complex ideas giving his audience pabulum philosophy to save them the trouble of working things out for themselves.
CHARISMA UNCOVERED
Charisma, as a psychological emanation, may be thought of as a supplement to personality or leadership characteristics that fills most easily the emptiness of another person’s psyche, especially those created by boredom, too much time on one's hands, depression bordering on self-pity, developmental deficits due to sloth, or simply self-indulgence.
Charisma, through its power to over stimulate in the short term, can effectively mask the narcissistically seductive and self-serving aims that are often blatantly evident in the charismatic personality of the cult leader.
A collusive bargain is struck between the cult leader-as-mentor and the individual who is seductively charmed. This person perhaps has come to think: Okay, maybe I am being manipulated, maybe it is just a bunch of hogwash, but it feels so good it’s worth it! Such people buy the books and pay the hundreds of dollars for the seminars, and go away happy, but never changed.
The mentoring personality-as-cult leader knows his audience and the nature of his seductive appeal. If for only a brief respite from the dog-eat-dog world, the receptive personality wants to feel special, wants somebody to pay attention to him and his needs, as well as his fears, dilemmas, and anxieties. He reasons that he is spending time and money in pursuit of his object, self-approval, concluding, even if I am being used, he (cult leader) wouldn’t be wasting his time on me, important as he is, since he could be anywhere with anyone else, but he is here with me.
The fatal flaw in this chain of reasoning is that no one is less discriminating than the cult leader. He must have an audience, and experienced confirmation of the merits of his ideas. Charisma, then, far from being selective, is a promiscuous engagement cloaked in the addictive power of an idea, be it in blissful long life, hedonism without responsibility, or spirituality without struggle.
There is a hidden agenda of denying a covert deadness and passivity of both the cult leader and his audience by consummating an ephemeral relationship that, while meaningless in terms of change, is however exciting in the moment.
Young people reading this may see the concern raised here as hyperbolic and irrelevant. They of course did not live in the time of Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin, or indeed, Joseph McCarthy. Hitler and Stalin took Germany and Russia into war and ran it with the newspeak right out of George Orwell’s “1984” in which Big Brother proclaimed, “War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.” Joseph McCarthy, on the other hand, was a rabble-rouser who played on the suspicious mind.
Orwell’s novel reflected precisely what these cult leaders were successful in establishing: palpable fear. Big Brother now is not less toxic, but comes to us more indirectly through subliminal stimulation in blind messages in film, television, music, and radio, while the constant eye of electronic surveillance invades our privacy. In “1984” newspeak, “personal privacy is self-imprisonment.” There is evidence this is accepted today without a whimper of protest. Big Brother is not only in our lives but has successfully changed our lives to a way in which we are not only alienated from what we were but self-hating for the attention.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CULT LEADER
We have this idea that charisma is important in leadership, when it is a manifestation of the puppeteer doing his thing. The cult leader first is a wounded human being who denies there is a connection between the idiosyncratic details of his actual deficit world and the utopian worldview he espouses.
Read biographies of Freud and Jung and you see how they became the cult craving figures that they are. They broke from each other: Freud succeeding with transactional analysis although it could not be scientifically replicated in experience, selling it successfully as “the new science” of psychology; while Jung reached down into cultural mythology and the collective unconscious to explain why man behaves as he does.
Both Freud and Jung, among others, have proven to be failures of great consequence in their appointed tasks, yet society calls them “great men” because society needs great men to believe itself in turn great for having followed their misguided leads.
It is not fair to single out these two men, alone, but this is a short piece, leaving educators, religious leaders, politicians, and others, who display similar behavior unrecorded.
In any case, it is part of the grandiose scheme of cult leaders to believe they transcend their personal deficits in the service of society’s collective unconscious, which puts them closer to Jung than to Freud.
The fact is that cult leaders, whatever their discipline or audience, suffer from a pathology of symbolism.
They see themselves, literally, as the symbols incarnate on a symbolic quest to do for people what they would not do for themselves. They carry the banner of liberty, equality and fraternity, or salvation, or the means to eternal bliss.
Cult leaders are analogous to schizophrenics, which I will subsequently address relative to “Big Brother.” I say this because of the loosened associations engendered in the meaning of words and ideas when the cult leader talks about such things. They are prone to a pathological spreading of cult symbolism. They do this when they focus on our fears, and attempt to persuade us to relax our freedoms to ensure our security. Symbolism, thus, becomes more real than experience and dictates behavior.
They use fear-speak as a suitable mechanism in defense of fear and gauge of their charismatic personality to project their identity with our concerns and how they plan to address them in our behalf. Thus, a single calamity can provide the pathology of symbolism to ride them to controlling our destiny, surrendering self-responsibility and freedom to them with open hands.
With this mechanism cult leaders can deny every scintilla of neurotic conflict, and project this onto society as its own deficit, thus externalizing an unbearable inner tension into a collective paranoia, creating an “us against them” mentality that we assume that belongs to us as well. Whatever they say we should do, we will do because we have not taken the trouble to reflect on what is going on.
Just when the cult leader’s magic is waning, he frequently admits to having failings, the Achilles heel of the great man, because the failings he admits to are always petty.
The cult leader sees himself as a historic figure with an opportunity to write the history of his times by acting as the great rebel, messenger of cultural salvation, or messianic genius matched with the demands of the times. No country or society is without such men.
This genius of cult leader has little to do with intelligence or intellectual acumen, in his mind, preferring to believe that mystical powers beyond his comprehension guides him to do the public’s good, and thus brings to birth a latent but expectant historical trend. Rules do not apply to such men, or rather existing rules, as they can be temporarily suspended to realize the greater good.
This profile could go on, but this is enough to visualize the aspect, realizing the cult leader cannot understand or accept without some devious maneuvering when he encounters sensitive observers who fail to be influenced by the weightiness of his mission, or how it is meant for them as well.
The disenchanted or opposition then become the dangerous and their names are added to some type of enemies list, when their greatest sin is that they failed to buy into the charade.
CULT LEADERS IN THE HOME AND THE DANGERS THEY REFLECT
Much as cult leaders can be upsetting to our lives if we allow them to become influences, a greater danger is the result of what happens when a mundane society buys into many of the constrains that are self-imposed.
A daughter does this when her mother dies at a young age, and she finds herself the servant of her brothers and sisters, and even father long after they should care for themselves. Her life is on hold until there is no longer any life left to hold onto. She does it first out of love, then obligation, then out of knowing nothing else, and then finally out of bitterness, never having had the courage to say, “Enough already!”
A wife does this when her husband keeps getting her pregnant and then drinks and gambles and runs around freely leaving her home to serve the needs of the children, and his needs, with no opportunity to know much less meet hers. She, too, should say enough already, and demand change, divorce, and if that is not likely, to leave.
A man in a job that he hates but pays him well and therefore claims he has no choice is a man who is servant to a master other than himself.
There are three types of people who live in this prosaic danger zone: there are the takers, those who play it safe, and those that never get enough.
The takers are like the husband described above who lives in reckless abandon treating his wife and children as possessions to do with as he pleases. Those who play it safe are what we call “normal,” or people who live, or try to live, within their means and possibilities while wearing blinders to what is happening around them. Then there are those who live constantly on the edge in reckless abandon treating everything they encounter as fodder for their grand design. (See PART TWO)
Inward life was stolen from the daughter who took care of her brothers and father at the expense of her own. The inward life was stolen by the wife that subjugated her needs to the voice of demands of her husband and society “to be a good mother and wife,” whatever the cost. And the inward life was stolen from the man who never found the gumption to do what he really wanted to do.
PERSONALITY PROFILE OF THE CULT LEADERS AMONGST US
The radiance of charisma can be deceptive. The action of charisma may be a deflection and transformation of inner energy to glow and radiate outward into lines of force.
Seen in this way, it represents almost a manic projection, which may explain why manic attacks and bizarre reactions of hysteria are manifestations of charisma.
Yet, the charismatic personality may be no more than the forceful symptom of the psychic work that is necessary for transforming inner affects to outer effects, and therefore may not be so free flowing as it would seem.
There is an obvious connection between this mesmerizing power and the sleight-of-hand tricks of the magician in that the charismatic leader conceals the struggle that was required to produce the effect. Have no doubt that Freud, Jung, Weil, Erhard, Dyer, and many others of their charismatic persuasion have had their struggles. What they have “found out” they desire to share with the happy ease and simmering aplomb of effortless discovery. What is missing is how hard the charismatic personality works at being charismatic.
To understand why charisma works as well as it does, given its duplicitous nature, it must be understood that we are a “divided self” in which subject and object are separated by a convenient miasma. The charismatic personality penetrates this mist with narcissistic giving, by acting as though he is giving something that is not already possessed, and giving it grandiosely. The charismatic personality deflects the awareness of the recipient (who is being given little or nothing) from the actual frustrating present transaction to stimulate the promise of extravagant gratification in the future by appealing to natural greed and sloth.
You experience the flavor of this when the narcissistic appeal is that your weaknesses are actually your strengths, that selfishness is not a curse but a blessing, that greed is good, that workaholism is good for the soul. You get the point. It follows that the charismatic personality, who is obsessed with his impact on the recipient, will not fail to use the full power of his narcissistic giving to penetrate the fragile mind of the devotee.
The influence of charisma is awesome to those predisposed to it. Its effects can best be described with those of a drug. Charisma can often function as a euphoria-building, antidepressant drug. In its ability to make one feel good, charisma can seem a high, and part of the addiction. There is no place for reason, for fair exchange, or for humor as the line has been drawn and the charismatic addicted person cannot imagine crossing it.
There is some truth that we are attracted to what we are not and believe we should be, which makes us vulnerable to charismatic personalities with these apparent qualities:
· They have a significant aura of greater energetic drive than we do, which does not follow from an excess of cheerfulness, but may be an expression of an angry disposition, as is often the case with incendiary leaders of minority groups.
· They seem to have a sense of psychic surplus, which overflows and they wish to share with you.
· Close observation will reveal they are narcissistically self-absorbed believing themselves to understand the profound and to be driven by greater good.
· They have the ability to draw people to them by the psychic force of their personality, which sets up a force field magnetism not unlike iron filings to a magnet.
· This force field is their “promised land” which they are willing to share.
There is a connection between charisma and seduction, and in the prosaic sense, many a person has fallen victim to this fatal charm, often to his or her regret. The charismatic personality is energetic, charming and alive, and sets off goose bumps in you, failing to realize he is always talking about himself, resulting in your not being able to resist the charm of such a know-it-all, upbeat, and heavenly person, who sweeps you off your feet before you know it.
Likely to be missed in this heated climate is that the charismatic personality is obsessed not to be simply a “self,” but a personality, to be not larger than life, but larger than himself.
The charismatic personality strikes us as an embodiment of an archetype, more beautiful or handsome than is possible, more athletic and successful under pressure than is imaginable, more charming and knowledgeable than anyone could remotely attain. In a word, the charismatic personality is on another level, a paradigm of some elemental human force that connects him with the primitive and unconscious depths of our being.
We are in awe and think we have found our leader, our true love, or the answer to our prayers. So, we leave our wits behind and follow blindly leaving the sanctuary of our safe harbor and its moorings where good sense and security once resided.
It should be clear, then, that whatever the charismatic personality offers, be it whatever, it is not love, kindness, understanding, nurturance, empathy, or intimacy in any fundamental human sense. Should there be the promise of enlightenment and guidance, whether religious, political, philosophical, moral, or aesthetic, rest assured it will be delivered grandiosely, but never in a personal way. The charismatic personality abhors the one-on-one setting for reason. It exposes him as fraud.
So, it is not necessarily that face seen on television that is your charismatic personality of concern, but may be that face across the room on the couch in the living room, in a bar having a drink beside a stranger, at a conference of peers, or in coffee shop having a cafe au lait with a colleague who is married to your best friend.
We are most vulnerable to the charismatic personality, when our guard is down and he or she pursues a hidden agenda with indirection and sleight-of-hand finesse when our vanity and sincerity collide to not recognize the invasion.
SOMEBODY IS WATCHING AND THE WATCHER MAY BE UP TO NO GOOD
We are constantly reminded of identity theft. Mystery novelists use this as fodder for their stories. It illustrates another point. We believe bad things only happen to other people, and so we throw caution to the wind, and behave as if we can’t be touched.
The predator in a David Baldacci novel studies automobiles, their age, type, condition, and license plate numbers. He sees a vanity plate, which reads “DEH JD,” and knows the person is a lawyer. She goes to an ATM, and then throws the receipt into the trash. He retrieves it and has more information. He looks her up and gets her phone number, and so on. He does this for a number of potential victims with them all seemingly oblivious to danger leaving information in plain sight. For example, he sees a People magazine with the name and address of the person on the seat of a locked car. From there, he can go to the Internet and get all the information he needs. Paranoia, as a consequence, has become common defense.
It wasn’t like this when I was a boy. That all changed, according to Haynes Johnson in his new book, “The Age of Anxiety” (2005), with the terror of the 1950s called “McCarthyism.” Joseph McCarthy was the junior US Senator from Wisconsin, who claimed there were scores of communist in the government and the media. He used his charismatic personality to stir up blind fear and anxiety into mass public hysteria, convincing the US Congress to create an “Un-American Activities Committee.” Thousands lost their jobs for writing words like you see here, as it was the “Great Red Scare,” which was Communism.
While this mania was sweeping across the nation, “1984” (1949) by George Orwell was being published. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote an “after word” about it in 1961:
“George Orwell’s 1984 is the expression of a mood, and it is a warning. The mood it expresses is that of near despair about the future of man, and the warning is that unless the course of history changes, men all over the world will lose their most human qualities, will become soulless automatons, and will not even be aware of it.”
To give you a flavor of that novel and how it ties in with this piece, I conclude with a passage from “1984”:
“Crimstop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the Party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The key word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.” (1984, A Signet Classic Paperback, 1961, p. 175)
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Dr. Fisher is an organizational/industrial psychologist and former corporate executive who writes on themes that touch his fancy from time to time. Many of these subsequently are published. See his website and blog: www.peripateticphilosopher.com.
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, AND THE YOU HE IS WATCHING IS NOT THE SAME YOU THAT YOU WERE!
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, AND THE YOU HE IS WATCHING IS NOT THE SAME YOU THAT YOU WERE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2006
Who controls the past controls the future
Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell (1902 – 1950)
Novel, 1984 (1949)
PART TWO
We have had a phenomenon in the recent past that defies explanation. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States has continued to climb impressively over the past decade or so, while the actual wages and benefits to workers has, during the same period, continued to decline.
Yet, there have been few protests, even less litigation and no mounted employee boycott or rebellion.
Nearly two decades ago, I reminded corporate America that its entitlement program was approaching $3 trillion dollars or equal to the then national debt, and accelerating. I pointed out that entitlements were driving companies to bankruptcy and were not tied to performance but were given across-the-board to everyone indiscriminately (see “Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches,” 1990). My book was considered an “angry book” and was discounted on that basis.
Repeatedly, I have written about “leaderless leadership,” outlining the pusillanimous and disastrous initiatives of human resources.
People have never been a long suit of corporate leadership. Corpocracy feels more comfortable in the management of things than in the leadership of people. It has been willing to abdicate this role to human resources throwing money at the problem rather than taking the reins to understand, appreciate and leverage a changing workforce to high performance. Human resources have made such a mess of things with a series of interventions transforming the workplace culture from comfort to complacency skipping contribution (see “Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge,” 1998).
Now, we find the American workforce quietly acquiescing to pay and benefit cuts as if they were the actual designers of this failed strategy. They were not. They are its victims. In the grand scheme of things, these workers have failed to participate in the economic boom, distracted by comfort and bribed with entitlements, benefits now being taken away from them. Even pension plans are going defunct. This situation defies understanding. While 85 percent of American workers have found their actual spending power reduced, the other 15 percent have found their good fortunes increasing by leaps and bounds. Something is wrong with this picture.
THE PAST IMPERFECT – THREE KINDS OF PEOPLE
The typical organization is represented by three kinds of people. There has been little movement or change between these categories with consequences yet to be felt. Internal stress and external demands are straining towards collapse and no one is paying attention.
“Foot Draggers”
Every organization has “foot draggers.” They represent 15 percent of the workforce and are considered “losers” or “takaholics.” They have little interest in the health of the organization and refuse to grow up.
Ambivalent leadership is inclined to vacillate between ensuring workers are management dependent or counter dependent on the organization, assuming the role of surrogate parents to these workers as dependent children. This is palpable in 50-year-old workers with the emotional maturity of 12-year-old obedient and passive children.
“Foot draggers” are self-indulgent and suspended in permanent adolescence. Driven by impulse and sensory gratification, they are the darlings of compulsive management that would save them when they are in fact unsalvageable. “Foot draggers” like to play the role of the martyr and there are always ambulance chaser managers bent on saving them from themselves.
“Followers”
“Followers” are appeasers that desire to play it safe and aim to please. They represent about 70 percent of the workforce. Descendents of workers of compulsory education where they learned the three r’s (reading, riting, rithmetic), they were groomed to run the machines of exploding factories in the early 20th century American economy. The subtle curriculum of this required education was training in discipline, obedience, punctuality, conformity, politeness, passivity, and submissiveness.
Stated otherwise, American education was never designed to provide an enriching intellectual and living experience for the majority where one could learn to appreciate the arts and the possibilities of leisure. Webster’s dictionary makes it brutally clear that education was designed to make a machine of man to do a job.
By no accident, then, public education created this monster and we are saddled with it now. Even our universities, which once escaped this stultifying confinement, have become factories producing professional workers to man technology. It should therefore come as no surprise that few American geniuses in matters of the heart were outstanding students: Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to name a few.
“Followers” display moderation in all their actions. They are safe hires, seldom taking chances on or off the job, living within their means, never moving off the dime or displaying what they think or feel. It is not because they don’t think or feel. It is simply they are as much a stranger to themselves as everyone else.
“Followers” are a perfectly controlled species and demonstrate this disposition by being nearly inconspicuous to a fault.
“Hard Chargers”
The final 15 percent are the “hard chargers.” These “workaholics” think nothing of working 70 or 80 hours a week, while the cushion of their efforts is never great enough. They must have more, do more, and achieve more. If they have six-figure incomes, they must be millionaires. If they are millionaires, they must be multi-millionaires. It is not that money, per se, is important to them. It is as composer Billy Rose put it, how you measure up with the upper crust in America.
Work is a narcotic. Paradoxically, “hard chargers” mirror “foot draggers,” only to the opposite extreme. They both are compulsive; both driven toward reckless abandon; both inclined toward the dangerous with a feeling of invisibility; and both are governed by their own rules.
Whereas the “foot draggers” are out-of-control, “hard chargers” are obsessed with being in control. Both maintain individualized identities: “foot draggers” as victims and “hard chargers” as vanquishers. Incongruously, political “conservatives” are notable within both their ranks being equally inclined to be critics of the disadvantaged. Whereas “foot draggers” are predisposed to martyrdom, “hard chargers” are prone to grandstanding.
Both “foot draggers” and “hard chargers” are gamblers, but “foot draggers” always lose because they “have to win,” whereas “hard chargers” always win because they expect losing is part of the odds embraced to winning.
PRESENT RIDICULOUS – OPPORTUNITY AS COMPLIANCE, FREEDOM AS PRISON
A peculiar thing has happened which nobody seems to notice.
Take American autoworkers. They once enjoyed the same economic success (“As GM goes, so goes America!”), as most professionals, including doctors, lawyers and engineers. The ranks of these workers are shrinking fast, their pay decreasing, and benefits disappearing to the point of being nonexistent.
In the 21st century, many sons and daughters of these autoworkers have college degrees and professional careers. But with all the education, their spending and benefit power is unlikely to match that once enjoyed by their parents at mid-century.
As a boy, I spent my summers in Detroit at the home of my uncle who was a professor at the University of Detroit and a practicing psychologist. I played baseball with children of these autoworkers and visited their homes. I also visited the homes of my uncle’s professional colleagues. There was no comparison.
Middle class wealth in Detroit at mid-century was skewed towards these blue-collar workers. Now that class and wealth are gone.
Closer to home, my da had a seventh grade education and worked as a brakeman on the railroad while I was able to become a chemist, then a salesman, then an executive retiring the first time in my mid-thirties, mainly because the “rat race” made little sense to me. I would later go back to school and acquire my Ph.D. and become an organizational psychologist for a high tech company, and later a corporate executive for the same firm.
It was in that climate I experienced the “present ridiculous.” A study indicated company workers were motivated primarily by comfort, not job challenge, as the system was designed towards making them audience to rather than participation in the decision-making. As a consequence, most workers did as little as possible to get by.
Management, confused by this response, had human resources implement interventions meant to bring these workers on board by feeding them more benefits and making more concessions. This strategy drove workers more deeply into dependent compliance.
When you are not made to feel part of the problem, then the solution, no matter how perfect, is not your solution. You don’t own it because you feel as if a renter, not an owner.
This was made dramatically apparent when I was in attendance when the general managers and his direct reports were discussing how to distribute the quarterly bonus of some $5 million.
One director said, “We had a great quarter. Why don’t we share it with the troops?”
Another director clearly flabbergasted with the idea said, “Are you saying they expect a bonus?”
“No,” he answered, “just think it’s a good idea.”
Quickly, the disconcerted director made some calculations. “Can you imagine what that would do to our bonuses?” Typical bonuses were in the four figures for a quarter. Then seemingly to realize his position was too self-serving, he added, “They would get $400 at best. How would that motivate them?”
“The amount isn’t my point. The symbolic gesture would be clear: they count for something. I think it would spur them on to greater effort next quarter.”
“Bad precedence. Terrible precedence,” the astounded director continued. “What about our motivation? We made it happen? They didn’t! Well, didn’t we?”
Nods around the room, including that of the general manager, the point was conceded. The discussion was over. I stayed clear of the director that had made the suggestion to dispel the fear that it was my idea, which it wasn’t. I was as surprised as everyone.
An opportunity was missed. Over the next several years, I never heard the idea brought up again.
THE PRESENT RIDICULOUS PERSONIFIED – DELTA AIR LINES!
A number of years ago the employees of Delta Airlines were so happy with the company that employees purchased a jet liner out of their own pockets. It cost tens of millions of dollars.
That same company is now at death’s door struggling to stay afloat without a thing to hold on to except monumental concessions by these same rank and file workers.
It could be said that in this modern era of electronics in which planes take off and land essentially without human involvement that pilots are overpaid air bus drivers.
It reminds me of how the job of coal handler continued with the railroad long after trains ran totally on diesel fuel. Vestigial workers are apt to hold on long after their role has played out.
Now these pilots are being subjected to a second humiliation in less than two years. They have seen their $275,000 salary reduced to less than $200,000 with a 32.5 percent pay concession in 2004. This pay cut was meant to save Delta. Now, these same pilots are being asked, and have accepted a salary cut from $170,000 to about $146,000, or another 14 – 15 percent pay cut concession.
How many of us could take a 50 percent cut in our income and do it without complaint? Careful, don’t answer too quickly!
In my experience, most of us! We would likely behave precisely as the Delta Air Line pilots are now behaving for at least two reasons: we are mainly “followers” and into comfort and other-directedness rather than being self-directed; into security without pain rather than opportunity with some risk; and secondly, we have bought into the idea that the situation is “not our problem,” mainly because we have had little or no input into the problem.
Meanwhile, the airline executives, who own the problem, take comfort in complaining about the sins of deregulation, the fluctuating value of the dollar, escalating crude oil prices, competition from low budget air lines, the crunch of entitlement programs, government security requirements, and on and on. In other words, it is their problem but not their fault.
Clearly, nobody is in charge. Leaderless leadership reins supreme! The airline industry is not alone in suffering this malaise, as it is endemic to most institutions of our times.
My wonder is how much longer American workers will continue to take it on the chin while the GDP continues to grow with only a privileged few participating in the boom. That old adage, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” is in fact true. While the incomes of the top 15 percent persists in climbing, the income of the bottom 85 percent continues to decline at a depressing rate, creating an ever-larger delta differential.
An engineer once told me, “I get paid a dollar more an hour than I can afford to quit and do what I really like.” That same engineer is now working a job several dollars less an hour than he once earned, as his place of employment has been reduced from some 2,000 to less than 400 engineers now. Prudence proved “ present ridiculous,” as he still isn’t doing what he “really liked” to do.
FUTURE PERFECT – THE PARALLEL PARANOID UNIVERSE OF PANIC
We are all living in a schizoid world.
If you have any doubt, why would we build houses on swamp land, or on land that Mother Nature washes down the sides of hills in a moderate downpour, or along beaches that disappear in an instant from a hurricane or tsunami, or where mudslides devour villages because the trees that secured the soil above are gone, or why would we turn our cities into hostile gas saunas that pollute the air we breathe, or why would we produce nuclear armaments we don’t intend to use, but whose waste could contaminate our environment forever should they leak their venomous poisons into our soils and streams, or why do we randomly destroy the sanctuaries of exotic plants and animals, or, indeed, why do we allow others to steal our own inward lives putting trust in their voices while not being able to hear our own?
Luce Irigaray in “Elemental Passions” (1992) speaks for us:
“But am I a not a reminder of what you buried in oblivion to build your world? Where am I? There and not there. In the space of your dreams. And how can I return from that landscape, which I do not know? From those surroundings, which I cannot see. Where I take place only in you. And you fallen into the depths of me, into that dark abyss, which you imagine me to be.”
She is speaking of people doing stupid things because others say they should. This is tantamount to self-abandonment and negation of self-responsibility. Life is not fair and we will go to our grave with such complaint.
This life lived in the awareness of always moving to the will of others until that will is “swallowed” is what is called “schizophrenia.” This division, this hesitation and detachment, this self-alienation is embodied in the pervasive tendency to passivity. It is a kind of living and acting as if one’s life was a fiction created by someone else to fulfill his or her purposes and not one’s own.
Michael Foucault in “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” (1979) is looking at culture, but could just as well be addressing the cage we put ourselves in. He writes, “We come to know who we are by understanding how others see us and expect us to behave.”
The tendency for internal division is the architectural figure of speech that explains how our institutions have become cages by design with us their willing occupants.
This is so because of a radical separation between the observer and the observed, keeping the latter in constant surveillance. It is a cultural phenomenon that “the self” is not only a given but has become a “divided self.” We experience this division when we become a subject within ourselves, or when others objectify us as their subject. The extreme of this is when people are paralyzed to act because they are obsessed with what other people will think when they do.
Stated plainly, we don’t trust ourselves and we fail to trust others. Fear rules. And fear is guided by paranoia, which makes existence a total prison.
The other night a television news commentator stated that she had no idea why people resented all this intrusive electronic surveillance. “It saves lives,” she said, referencing the instance where a pedophile had raped and killed a little girl, but was quickly apprehended because surveillance cameras at a carwash caught the abduction.
Freedom is losing to the slavery of fear. The other day a shopper’s car in my area was broken into at a shopping mall, and the shopper blared to the television reporter, “Why isn’t there surveillance cameras in the parking lot? They should be everywhere. How else will we be safe?”
Imagine not being able to escape the ubiquitous eye of surveillance scrutiny no matter where you go. We are all in George Orwell’s “1984 world.”
No one mentions that ninety-nine percent of citizens are law-abiding who would be forced to conform to these intrusive demands, or that the sanctity of privacy was once a guaranteed right of American citizenship.
Consider this: since the person would never know when he or she was being watched, he or she could never cease to be vigilant. The self would have to observe the self. Paradoxically, this situation has already given rise to a sense of freedom in the prison of constant surveillance, the enslaved self bent on scrutinizing and subduing a “lower” or more objectified part of one’s own being.
Orwell wrote about this dualism in “Animal Farm” (1945). The paranoid person is both the observer and observed giving the person trouble identifying with these polarized roles of self-presence and/or observing-consciousness. A team of psychologists has used this “cut and control” phenomenon to proffer the idea of an imaginary eye looking down on one’s actions (see “Sanity, Insanity and Common Sense,” 1980), providing subjective health from the perspective of objective reality. The book promises a “groundbreaking approach to happiness.” In Orwell-speak “hell is happiness; happiness is hell.”
Insofar as one identifies oneself with the mind, one will be identifying with a being whose essence is always elsewhere, always perpetually watching from a remove. Louis Sass in “Madness and Modernism” (1992) sees the situation as a variation of the master/slave dialectic, considering those to the extreme of this lived experience, schizophrenic. He writes:
“Each self – observer and observed – comes to be defined almost completely by a relationship whose essence is distance and difference; thus the prisoner’s body would have to be experienced by the prisoner as a body-as-perceived, a body for the distant observer; when the observer’s being would be reduced to a single function, the being-who-observes-me-from-afar.”
“Big Brother is watching you, and the you he is watching is not the same you that you were!”
These sources are quoted to give evidence that there is professional awareness of the apparent collapse of integrity of the integrated personality in this age of living on the edge. Haynes Johnson in “The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism” (2005) suggests we have witnessed a half century of mounting hysteria producing this inevitability. Likewise, in an increasingly cookie cutter sterile world, Foucault claims the tendency is toward paranoia and self-policing in the face of four-corner electronic surveillance. Earlier, Sartre claimed simply that the inauthentic self is a product of people never doing what they most desire to do, caged in their fears, which bars the expression of their unencumbered passions.
This characteristic self-conscious subjectivity finds routine experiences becoming “shreds of evidence” vulnerable to suspect interpretation at the expense creativity, passion and the epiphanies they may contain.
A celebrated columnist that covers technology said recently on the “News Hour With Jim Lehrer” that he is never without some gadget. He has an iPod or video cell phone to entertain him should he be eating, dressing, exercising on a treadmill, sitting in a doctor’s office, or traveling by air. No quiet time for him. The eye is always focused on a subject with him as the observer. His fractured mind personifies the divided self with the hubris of having a hold on the good life while living in the serenity of the modern electronic prison.
No matter how he may retreat into the depths of these thingamajigs, he is lost in what James Joyce states in “Finnegans Wake” (1939) as “fathomglasses to find out all the fathoms,” later warning, “mustforget there’s an audience.” Once you forget, you are no longer self-conscious, and now in control, for you as subject-object have merged as one.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dr. Fisher is an organizational/industrial psychologists and former corporate executive who writes on themes that touch his fancy from time to time. Many of these subsequently are published in journals and periodicals after first appearing here on his blog: www.peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2006
Who controls the past controls the future
Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell (1902 – 1950)
Novel, 1984 (1949)
PART TWO
We have had a phenomenon in the recent past that defies explanation. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States has continued to climb impressively over the past decade or so, while the actual wages and benefits to workers has, during the same period, continued to decline.
Yet, there have been few protests, even less litigation and no mounted employee boycott or rebellion.
Nearly two decades ago, I reminded corporate America that its entitlement program was approaching $3 trillion dollars or equal to the then national debt, and accelerating. I pointed out that entitlements were driving companies to bankruptcy and were not tied to performance but were given across-the-board to everyone indiscriminately (see “Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches,” 1990). My book was considered an “angry book” and was discounted on that basis.
Repeatedly, I have written about “leaderless leadership,” outlining the pusillanimous and disastrous initiatives of human resources.
People have never been a long suit of corporate leadership. Corpocracy feels more comfortable in the management of things than in the leadership of people. It has been willing to abdicate this role to human resources throwing money at the problem rather than taking the reins to understand, appreciate and leverage a changing workforce to high performance. Human resources have made such a mess of things with a series of interventions transforming the workplace culture from comfort to complacency skipping contribution (see “Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge,” 1998).
Now, we find the American workforce quietly acquiescing to pay and benefit cuts as if they were the actual designers of this failed strategy. They were not. They are its victims. In the grand scheme of things, these workers have failed to participate in the economic boom, distracted by comfort and bribed with entitlements, benefits now being taken away from them. Even pension plans are going defunct. This situation defies understanding. While 85 percent of American workers have found their actual spending power reduced, the other 15 percent have found their good fortunes increasing by leaps and bounds. Something is wrong with this picture.
THE PAST IMPERFECT – THREE KINDS OF PEOPLE
The typical organization is represented by three kinds of people. There has been little movement or change between these categories with consequences yet to be felt. Internal stress and external demands are straining towards collapse and no one is paying attention.
“Foot Draggers”
Every organization has “foot draggers.” They represent 15 percent of the workforce and are considered “losers” or “takaholics.” They have little interest in the health of the organization and refuse to grow up.
Ambivalent leadership is inclined to vacillate between ensuring workers are management dependent or counter dependent on the organization, assuming the role of surrogate parents to these workers as dependent children. This is palpable in 50-year-old workers with the emotional maturity of 12-year-old obedient and passive children.
“Foot draggers” are self-indulgent and suspended in permanent adolescence. Driven by impulse and sensory gratification, they are the darlings of compulsive management that would save them when they are in fact unsalvageable. “Foot draggers” like to play the role of the martyr and there are always ambulance chaser managers bent on saving them from themselves.
“Followers”
“Followers” are appeasers that desire to play it safe and aim to please. They represent about 70 percent of the workforce. Descendents of workers of compulsory education where they learned the three r’s (reading, riting, rithmetic), they were groomed to run the machines of exploding factories in the early 20th century American economy. The subtle curriculum of this required education was training in discipline, obedience, punctuality, conformity, politeness, passivity, and submissiveness.
Stated otherwise, American education was never designed to provide an enriching intellectual and living experience for the majority where one could learn to appreciate the arts and the possibilities of leisure. Webster’s dictionary makes it brutally clear that education was designed to make a machine of man to do a job.
By no accident, then, public education created this monster and we are saddled with it now. Even our universities, which once escaped this stultifying confinement, have become factories producing professional workers to man technology. It should therefore come as no surprise that few American geniuses in matters of the heart were outstanding students: Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to name a few.
“Followers” display moderation in all their actions. They are safe hires, seldom taking chances on or off the job, living within their means, never moving off the dime or displaying what they think or feel. It is not because they don’t think or feel. It is simply they are as much a stranger to themselves as everyone else.
“Followers” are a perfectly controlled species and demonstrate this disposition by being nearly inconspicuous to a fault.
“Hard Chargers”
The final 15 percent are the “hard chargers.” These “workaholics” think nothing of working 70 or 80 hours a week, while the cushion of their efforts is never great enough. They must have more, do more, and achieve more. If they have six-figure incomes, they must be millionaires. If they are millionaires, they must be multi-millionaires. It is not that money, per se, is important to them. It is as composer Billy Rose put it, how you measure up with the upper crust in America.
Work is a narcotic. Paradoxically, “hard chargers” mirror “foot draggers,” only to the opposite extreme. They both are compulsive; both driven toward reckless abandon; both inclined toward the dangerous with a feeling of invisibility; and both are governed by their own rules.
Whereas the “foot draggers” are out-of-control, “hard chargers” are obsessed with being in control. Both maintain individualized identities: “foot draggers” as victims and “hard chargers” as vanquishers. Incongruously, political “conservatives” are notable within both their ranks being equally inclined to be critics of the disadvantaged. Whereas “foot draggers” are predisposed to martyrdom, “hard chargers” are prone to grandstanding.
Both “foot draggers” and “hard chargers” are gamblers, but “foot draggers” always lose because they “have to win,” whereas “hard chargers” always win because they expect losing is part of the odds embraced to winning.
PRESENT RIDICULOUS – OPPORTUNITY AS COMPLIANCE, FREEDOM AS PRISON
A peculiar thing has happened which nobody seems to notice.
Take American autoworkers. They once enjoyed the same economic success (“As GM goes, so goes America!”), as most professionals, including doctors, lawyers and engineers. The ranks of these workers are shrinking fast, their pay decreasing, and benefits disappearing to the point of being nonexistent.
In the 21st century, many sons and daughters of these autoworkers have college degrees and professional careers. But with all the education, their spending and benefit power is unlikely to match that once enjoyed by their parents at mid-century.
As a boy, I spent my summers in Detroit at the home of my uncle who was a professor at the University of Detroit and a practicing psychologist. I played baseball with children of these autoworkers and visited their homes. I also visited the homes of my uncle’s professional colleagues. There was no comparison.
Middle class wealth in Detroit at mid-century was skewed towards these blue-collar workers. Now that class and wealth are gone.
Closer to home, my da had a seventh grade education and worked as a brakeman on the railroad while I was able to become a chemist, then a salesman, then an executive retiring the first time in my mid-thirties, mainly because the “rat race” made little sense to me. I would later go back to school and acquire my Ph.D. and become an organizational psychologist for a high tech company, and later a corporate executive for the same firm.
It was in that climate I experienced the “present ridiculous.” A study indicated company workers were motivated primarily by comfort, not job challenge, as the system was designed towards making them audience to rather than participation in the decision-making. As a consequence, most workers did as little as possible to get by.
Management, confused by this response, had human resources implement interventions meant to bring these workers on board by feeding them more benefits and making more concessions. This strategy drove workers more deeply into dependent compliance.
When you are not made to feel part of the problem, then the solution, no matter how perfect, is not your solution. You don’t own it because you feel as if a renter, not an owner.
This was made dramatically apparent when I was in attendance when the general managers and his direct reports were discussing how to distribute the quarterly bonus of some $5 million.
One director said, “We had a great quarter. Why don’t we share it with the troops?”
Another director clearly flabbergasted with the idea said, “Are you saying they expect a bonus?”
“No,” he answered, “just think it’s a good idea.”
Quickly, the disconcerted director made some calculations. “Can you imagine what that would do to our bonuses?” Typical bonuses were in the four figures for a quarter. Then seemingly to realize his position was too self-serving, he added, “They would get $400 at best. How would that motivate them?”
“The amount isn’t my point. The symbolic gesture would be clear: they count for something. I think it would spur them on to greater effort next quarter.”
“Bad precedence. Terrible precedence,” the astounded director continued. “What about our motivation? We made it happen? They didn’t! Well, didn’t we?”
Nods around the room, including that of the general manager, the point was conceded. The discussion was over. I stayed clear of the director that had made the suggestion to dispel the fear that it was my idea, which it wasn’t. I was as surprised as everyone.
An opportunity was missed. Over the next several years, I never heard the idea brought up again.
THE PRESENT RIDICULOUS PERSONIFIED – DELTA AIR LINES!
A number of years ago the employees of Delta Airlines were so happy with the company that employees purchased a jet liner out of their own pockets. It cost tens of millions of dollars.
That same company is now at death’s door struggling to stay afloat without a thing to hold on to except monumental concessions by these same rank and file workers.
It could be said that in this modern era of electronics in which planes take off and land essentially without human involvement that pilots are overpaid air bus drivers.
It reminds me of how the job of coal handler continued with the railroad long after trains ran totally on diesel fuel. Vestigial workers are apt to hold on long after their role has played out.
Now these pilots are being subjected to a second humiliation in less than two years. They have seen their $275,000 salary reduced to less than $200,000 with a 32.5 percent pay concession in 2004. This pay cut was meant to save Delta. Now, these same pilots are being asked, and have accepted a salary cut from $170,000 to about $146,000, or another 14 – 15 percent pay cut concession.
How many of us could take a 50 percent cut in our income and do it without complaint? Careful, don’t answer too quickly!
In my experience, most of us! We would likely behave precisely as the Delta Air Line pilots are now behaving for at least two reasons: we are mainly “followers” and into comfort and other-directedness rather than being self-directed; into security without pain rather than opportunity with some risk; and secondly, we have bought into the idea that the situation is “not our problem,” mainly because we have had little or no input into the problem.
Meanwhile, the airline executives, who own the problem, take comfort in complaining about the sins of deregulation, the fluctuating value of the dollar, escalating crude oil prices, competition from low budget air lines, the crunch of entitlement programs, government security requirements, and on and on. In other words, it is their problem but not their fault.
Clearly, nobody is in charge. Leaderless leadership reins supreme! The airline industry is not alone in suffering this malaise, as it is endemic to most institutions of our times.
My wonder is how much longer American workers will continue to take it on the chin while the GDP continues to grow with only a privileged few participating in the boom. That old adage, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” is in fact true. While the incomes of the top 15 percent persists in climbing, the income of the bottom 85 percent continues to decline at a depressing rate, creating an ever-larger delta differential.
An engineer once told me, “I get paid a dollar more an hour than I can afford to quit and do what I really like.” That same engineer is now working a job several dollars less an hour than he once earned, as his place of employment has been reduced from some 2,000 to less than 400 engineers now. Prudence proved “ present ridiculous,” as he still isn’t doing what he “really liked” to do.
FUTURE PERFECT – THE PARALLEL PARANOID UNIVERSE OF PANIC
We are all living in a schizoid world.
If you have any doubt, why would we build houses on swamp land, or on land that Mother Nature washes down the sides of hills in a moderate downpour, or along beaches that disappear in an instant from a hurricane or tsunami, or where mudslides devour villages because the trees that secured the soil above are gone, or why would we turn our cities into hostile gas saunas that pollute the air we breathe, or why would we produce nuclear armaments we don’t intend to use, but whose waste could contaminate our environment forever should they leak their venomous poisons into our soils and streams, or why do we randomly destroy the sanctuaries of exotic plants and animals, or, indeed, why do we allow others to steal our own inward lives putting trust in their voices while not being able to hear our own?
Luce Irigaray in “Elemental Passions” (1992) speaks for us:
“But am I a not a reminder of what you buried in oblivion to build your world? Where am I? There and not there. In the space of your dreams. And how can I return from that landscape, which I do not know? From those surroundings, which I cannot see. Where I take place only in you. And you fallen into the depths of me, into that dark abyss, which you imagine me to be.”
She is speaking of people doing stupid things because others say they should. This is tantamount to self-abandonment and negation of self-responsibility. Life is not fair and we will go to our grave with such complaint.
This life lived in the awareness of always moving to the will of others until that will is “swallowed” is what is called “schizophrenia.” This division, this hesitation and detachment, this self-alienation is embodied in the pervasive tendency to passivity. It is a kind of living and acting as if one’s life was a fiction created by someone else to fulfill his or her purposes and not one’s own.
Michael Foucault in “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” (1979) is looking at culture, but could just as well be addressing the cage we put ourselves in. He writes, “We come to know who we are by understanding how others see us and expect us to behave.”
The tendency for internal division is the architectural figure of speech that explains how our institutions have become cages by design with us their willing occupants.
This is so because of a radical separation between the observer and the observed, keeping the latter in constant surveillance. It is a cultural phenomenon that “the self” is not only a given but has become a “divided self.” We experience this division when we become a subject within ourselves, or when others objectify us as their subject. The extreme of this is when people are paralyzed to act because they are obsessed with what other people will think when they do.
Stated plainly, we don’t trust ourselves and we fail to trust others. Fear rules. And fear is guided by paranoia, which makes existence a total prison.
The other night a television news commentator stated that she had no idea why people resented all this intrusive electronic surveillance. “It saves lives,” she said, referencing the instance where a pedophile had raped and killed a little girl, but was quickly apprehended because surveillance cameras at a carwash caught the abduction.
Freedom is losing to the slavery of fear. The other day a shopper’s car in my area was broken into at a shopping mall, and the shopper blared to the television reporter, “Why isn’t there surveillance cameras in the parking lot? They should be everywhere. How else will we be safe?”
Imagine not being able to escape the ubiquitous eye of surveillance scrutiny no matter where you go. We are all in George Orwell’s “1984 world.”
No one mentions that ninety-nine percent of citizens are law-abiding who would be forced to conform to these intrusive demands, or that the sanctity of privacy was once a guaranteed right of American citizenship.
Consider this: since the person would never know when he or she was being watched, he or she could never cease to be vigilant. The self would have to observe the self. Paradoxically, this situation has already given rise to a sense of freedom in the prison of constant surveillance, the enslaved self bent on scrutinizing and subduing a “lower” or more objectified part of one’s own being.
Orwell wrote about this dualism in “Animal Farm” (1945). The paranoid person is both the observer and observed giving the person trouble identifying with these polarized roles of self-presence and/or observing-consciousness. A team of psychologists has used this “cut and control” phenomenon to proffer the idea of an imaginary eye looking down on one’s actions (see “Sanity, Insanity and Common Sense,” 1980), providing subjective health from the perspective of objective reality. The book promises a “groundbreaking approach to happiness.” In Orwell-speak “hell is happiness; happiness is hell.”
Insofar as one identifies oneself with the mind, one will be identifying with a being whose essence is always elsewhere, always perpetually watching from a remove. Louis Sass in “Madness and Modernism” (1992) sees the situation as a variation of the master/slave dialectic, considering those to the extreme of this lived experience, schizophrenic. He writes:
“Each self – observer and observed – comes to be defined almost completely by a relationship whose essence is distance and difference; thus the prisoner’s body would have to be experienced by the prisoner as a body-as-perceived, a body for the distant observer; when the observer’s being would be reduced to a single function, the being-who-observes-me-from-afar.”
“Big Brother is watching you, and the you he is watching is not the same you that you were!”
These sources are quoted to give evidence that there is professional awareness of the apparent collapse of integrity of the integrated personality in this age of living on the edge. Haynes Johnson in “The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism” (2005) suggests we have witnessed a half century of mounting hysteria producing this inevitability. Likewise, in an increasingly cookie cutter sterile world, Foucault claims the tendency is toward paranoia and self-policing in the face of four-corner electronic surveillance. Earlier, Sartre claimed simply that the inauthentic self is a product of people never doing what they most desire to do, caged in their fears, which bars the expression of their unencumbered passions.
This characteristic self-conscious subjectivity finds routine experiences becoming “shreds of evidence” vulnerable to suspect interpretation at the expense creativity, passion and the epiphanies they may contain.
A celebrated columnist that covers technology said recently on the “News Hour With Jim Lehrer” that he is never without some gadget. He has an iPod or video cell phone to entertain him should he be eating, dressing, exercising on a treadmill, sitting in a doctor’s office, or traveling by air. No quiet time for him. The eye is always focused on a subject with him as the observer. His fractured mind personifies the divided self with the hubris of having a hold on the good life while living in the serenity of the modern electronic prison.
No matter how he may retreat into the depths of these thingamajigs, he is lost in what James Joyce states in “Finnegans Wake” (1939) as “fathomglasses to find out all the fathoms,” later warning, “mustforget there’s an audience.” Once you forget, you are no longer self-conscious, and now in control, for you as subject-object have merged as one.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dr. Fisher is an organizational/industrial psychologists and former corporate executive who writes on themes that touch his fancy from time to time. Many of these subsequently are published in journals and periodicals after first appearing here on his blog: www.peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com
Monday, December 26, 2005
IS OUR QUEST FOR SUCCESS KILLING US?
IS OUR QUEST FOR SUCCESS KILLING US?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
Corrupt influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; it loads us more than millions of debt; takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution.
Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797)
English Statesman
Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.
Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.)
At one point in my life, when my work took me about the globe, I thought what ails the world was the “American Disease,” CORPOCRACY. In my writings, I go against the grain and claim business is the prime practitioner of this disease if not its architect.
I have come now to understand that corpocracy is only symptomatic of this disease. For the reader not familiar with my work, I claim CORPOCRACY consists of ten elements of management:
· It is insensitive to its employees;
· It supports company politics at the expense of productivity;
· Secretiveness is the controlling aspect of communication;
· Documentation is its principle product;
· Endless meetings get in the way of productive work;
· Its focus is internal while its language is external;
· Its planning is proxy for action;
· Individual initiative is suspect for you never know where it might lead;
· It is isolated from operations by the insulation of mahogany; and
· It overtly praises while covertly discouraging innovation.
Corpocracy, outlined here, is the working (not the theoretical) model of most multi-national corporations despite all the electronic wizardry of the moment. The evidence is palpable with a predisposition to treat people as things to be managed rather than people to be led.
We see this from the recent New York transit strike over the 2005 Holiday Season to the constant battle of Wal-Mart to put a halo on its business by a full-court public relations campaign, rather than quietly dealing with internal problems directly. We see it, too, with employers of steel workers, autoworkers, airline employees, and retail clerks across this nation, and now it is infecting other parts of the globe as well.
Missing in the paradigm is that most people, wherever they are, prove to be quite reasonable. They want a living wage, but along with the living wage the respect, dignity, trust and freedom to do the job. Not all pay is in coin.
The curse is that we are addicted to progress, and progress is impersonal.
People are a thing in this equation, which finds them being hired and fired at whim as the economy fluctuates, and it fluctuates radically because progress is its most important product.
The fall back position of corpocracy is that entitlements are killing companies, which I addressed nearly a score of years ago (Work Without Managers 1990).
The disease, I have come to concede, is not corpocracy. Success is the disease. No company can ever have too much success, even if its success is at the expense of killing the land, killing the sea, killing the air, and killing the spirit of the workers who grind at the core of progress.
Success is the narcotic that has found companies losing their moral compass and way. Sartre says an authentic life is lost when what people do has little to do with what people would prefer to do. It is the same with companies.
Companies have jumped aboard the treadmill, which goes faster and faster. Rather than get off when they can't keep up, they attempt to slim down to stay on. They do this by cutting and trimming, and downsizing, and reorganizing, and reengineering, and doing whatever is the current fad to stay aboard.
It never works because companies lose their identity in the frenzy. Companies are dying like the land, the sea, the air and the spirit of their people that they have unwittingly killed.
Success has resulted in the world being turned inside out with the natural perverted to the unnatural, the good to the bad, and the sensible to the ridiculous. Small wonder that we have corruption, collusion, wire fraud, bribery, duplicity, chicanery and scandals of all description. A singular appetite for success with reckless abandon feeds this beast.
Once sensible people viewed a little comfort, a roof over their heads, clothes on their back, food on their table, the company of family and friends, and a job to go to enough. The rest was fluff.
It is this fluff that has made success a disease, and its master driver, corpocracy.
This finds research scientists painting spots on laboratory animals at the Sloan-Kettering Research Institute to corroborate research data. It leads renowned physicist William Shockley, a Nobel Laureate, to fudged research data on race to show whites superior to blacks. It results in Dr. John Darsee, a brilliant young doctor, creating fictional medical studies, getting gullible and lazy famous medical scientists to “co-author” these works.
Once these works were published and found bogus, scores of papers and abstracts had to be rescinded, damaging literally thousands of works where other medical scientists had referenced Darsee’s works.
It underscores the blatant denial that cigarette smoking is harmful to your health of a panel of tobacco CEOs before the US Congress, when they held the overwhelming evidence of this fact in their bulging files.
Most recently, an esteemed South Korean scientist, Hwang Woo-suk, admits his stem cell research is unhappily counterfeit. A national hero, the drive to achieve, to win adoration and acclamation was too heady for this scientist when success was the Siren.
Even the great discovery of DNA and the “double helix” by James Watson and Francis Crick is not without its chicanery.
The key to the discovery was the exhaustive basic research work of the late Rosalind Franklin. She spent thousands of hours in refractory X-ray analysis of coal, exposing herself to excessive amounts of radiation. Exposure to this took her life in her mid-thirties, or before the Nobel Prize was awarded to these two men, along with her boss, Maurice Wilkins.
Incidentally, Wilkins gave the vital X-ray photograph of crystalline DNA in A form to James Watson without her knowledge. Once he and Crick saw this photograph the rest, as they say, was history.
Watson in his best selling book THE DOUBLE HELIX (1968) referred sarcastically to Dr. Franklin as “the dark lady,” because of her singular dedication to research and little inclination to small talk. Watson and Crick were model builders far removed from the laboratory. The American biochemist, Linus Pauling, already a Nobel Laureate, was hot in pursuit of this prize as well, but an ocean and a continental coast away from his enterprising fellow American Watson.
Science is grossly Machiavellian when reduced to transparent success.
We live in the so-called “scientific age” with miraculous scientific breakthroughs taking precedence in status to billionaire CEOs, or to corporations growing ten percent per year. The marvel of success has shifted and with it our moral moorings.
While some think a McDonald’s on every square mile of the planet typifies American crass materialism, others believe industrial global expansion mirroring that of the United States is killing the planet. If true, it would seem the quest for success has become iatrogenic, or the economic cure worse than the disease treated.
While half the people in the world have no decent housing, clothes to protect their bodies from the elements, enough food on their table, or even a job to go to, but instead are subjected to unimaginable terrors, the other half of the well-fed world are dying from too much of everything.
Dubious success is a disease that fractures the soul, kills the spirit, and plays havoc with the capacity for moral goodness. It is not because success is necessarily bad; it is because it has been turned inside out exposing devious motivation.
Look at history and you see war and terror are at root dissatisfaction: the “haves” look for justification, the “have-nots” for satisfaction.
Traditionally, religion has assuaged this division. Now, it is part of the problem, as science has eclipsed its roll and is meant to provide the solution. The new knights of the periodic table, however, are proving just as vulnerable to this crippling disease of success with its driver, corpocracy. Einstein was on to something when he said, “Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.”
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Author’s note: Dr. Fisher’s books and articles address this concern, with an in depth discussion in his not yet released book, “Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
Corrupt influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; it loads us more than millions of debt; takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution.
Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797)
English Statesman
Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.
Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.)
At one point in my life, when my work took me about the globe, I thought what ails the world was the “American Disease,” CORPOCRACY. In my writings, I go against the grain and claim business is the prime practitioner of this disease if not its architect.
I have come now to understand that corpocracy is only symptomatic of this disease. For the reader not familiar with my work, I claim CORPOCRACY consists of ten elements of management:
· It is insensitive to its employees;
· It supports company politics at the expense of productivity;
· Secretiveness is the controlling aspect of communication;
· Documentation is its principle product;
· Endless meetings get in the way of productive work;
· Its focus is internal while its language is external;
· Its planning is proxy for action;
· Individual initiative is suspect for you never know where it might lead;
· It is isolated from operations by the insulation of mahogany; and
· It overtly praises while covertly discouraging innovation.
Corpocracy, outlined here, is the working (not the theoretical) model of most multi-national corporations despite all the electronic wizardry of the moment. The evidence is palpable with a predisposition to treat people as things to be managed rather than people to be led.
We see this from the recent New York transit strike over the 2005 Holiday Season to the constant battle of Wal-Mart to put a halo on its business by a full-court public relations campaign, rather than quietly dealing with internal problems directly. We see it, too, with employers of steel workers, autoworkers, airline employees, and retail clerks across this nation, and now it is infecting other parts of the globe as well.
Missing in the paradigm is that most people, wherever they are, prove to be quite reasonable. They want a living wage, but along with the living wage the respect, dignity, trust and freedom to do the job. Not all pay is in coin.
The curse is that we are addicted to progress, and progress is impersonal.
People are a thing in this equation, which finds them being hired and fired at whim as the economy fluctuates, and it fluctuates radically because progress is its most important product.
The fall back position of corpocracy is that entitlements are killing companies, which I addressed nearly a score of years ago (Work Without Managers 1990).
The disease, I have come to concede, is not corpocracy. Success is the disease. No company can ever have too much success, even if its success is at the expense of killing the land, killing the sea, killing the air, and killing the spirit of the workers who grind at the core of progress.
Success is the narcotic that has found companies losing their moral compass and way. Sartre says an authentic life is lost when what people do has little to do with what people would prefer to do. It is the same with companies.
Companies have jumped aboard the treadmill, which goes faster and faster. Rather than get off when they can't keep up, they attempt to slim down to stay on. They do this by cutting and trimming, and downsizing, and reorganizing, and reengineering, and doing whatever is the current fad to stay aboard.
It never works because companies lose their identity in the frenzy. Companies are dying like the land, the sea, the air and the spirit of their people that they have unwittingly killed.
Success has resulted in the world being turned inside out with the natural perverted to the unnatural, the good to the bad, and the sensible to the ridiculous. Small wonder that we have corruption, collusion, wire fraud, bribery, duplicity, chicanery and scandals of all description. A singular appetite for success with reckless abandon feeds this beast.
Once sensible people viewed a little comfort, a roof over their heads, clothes on their back, food on their table, the company of family and friends, and a job to go to enough. The rest was fluff.
It is this fluff that has made success a disease, and its master driver, corpocracy.
This finds research scientists painting spots on laboratory animals at the Sloan-Kettering Research Institute to corroborate research data. It leads renowned physicist William Shockley, a Nobel Laureate, to fudged research data on race to show whites superior to blacks. It results in Dr. John Darsee, a brilliant young doctor, creating fictional medical studies, getting gullible and lazy famous medical scientists to “co-author” these works.
Once these works were published and found bogus, scores of papers and abstracts had to be rescinded, damaging literally thousands of works where other medical scientists had referenced Darsee’s works.
It underscores the blatant denial that cigarette smoking is harmful to your health of a panel of tobacco CEOs before the US Congress, when they held the overwhelming evidence of this fact in their bulging files.
Most recently, an esteemed South Korean scientist, Hwang Woo-suk, admits his stem cell research is unhappily counterfeit. A national hero, the drive to achieve, to win adoration and acclamation was too heady for this scientist when success was the Siren.
Even the great discovery of DNA and the “double helix” by James Watson and Francis Crick is not without its chicanery.
The key to the discovery was the exhaustive basic research work of the late Rosalind Franklin. She spent thousands of hours in refractory X-ray analysis of coal, exposing herself to excessive amounts of radiation. Exposure to this took her life in her mid-thirties, or before the Nobel Prize was awarded to these two men, along with her boss, Maurice Wilkins.
Incidentally, Wilkins gave the vital X-ray photograph of crystalline DNA in A form to James Watson without her knowledge. Once he and Crick saw this photograph the rest, as they say, was history.
Watson in his best selling book THE DOUBLE HELIX (1968) referred sarcastically to Dr. Franklin as “the dark lady,” because of her singular dedication to research and little inclination to small talk. Watson and Crick were model builders far removed from the laboratory. The American biochemist, Linus Pauling, already a Nobel Laureate, was hot in pursuit of this prize as well, but an ocean and a continental coast away from his enterprising fellow American Watson.
Science is grossly Machiavellian when reduced to transparent success.
We live in the so-called “scientific age” with miraculous scientific breakthroughs taking precedence in status to billionaire CEOs, or to corporations growing ten percent per year. The marvel of success has shifted and with it our moral moorings.
While some think a McDonald’s on every square mile of the planet typifies American crass materialism, others believe industrial global expansion mirroring that of the United States is killing the planet. If true, it would seem the quest for success has become iatrogenic, or the economic cure worse than the disease treated.
While half the people in the world have no decent housing, clothes to protect their bodies from the elements, enough food on their table, or even a job to go to, but instead are subjected to unimaginable terrors, the other half of the well-fed world are dying from too much of everything.
Dubious success is a disease that fractures the soul, kills the spirit, and plays havoc with the capacity for moral goodness. It is not because success is necessarily bad; it is because it has been turned inside out exposing devious motivation.
Look at history and you see war and terror are at root dissatisfaction: the “haves” look for justification, the “have-nots” for satisfaction.
Traditionally, religion has assuaged this division. Now, it is part of the problem, as science has eclipsed its roll and is meant to provide the solution. The new knights of the periodic table, however, are proving just as vulnerable to this crippling disease of success with its driver, corpocracy. Einstein was on to something when he said, “Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.”
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Author’s note: Dr. Fisher’s books and articles address this concern, with an in depth discussion in his not yet released book, “Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?”
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
AN IMPRESSIONISTIC YOUTH MANY CHRISTMASES AGO!
AN IMPRESSIONISTIC YOUTH MANY CHRISTMASES AGO
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© Christmas 2005
As dreams are the fancies of those that sleep, so fancies are but the dreams of those awake.
Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1649 – 1697)
English Author
The Christmas Season was always a nostalgic period in my hometown of CLINTON, IOWA on the banks of the MISSISSIPPI RIVER, which often froze over because of the cold. Of particular significance was the ITEN CHRISTMAS DISPLAY, which the Iten family always erected on their majestic estate on South Bluff Boulevard.
Frank Iten, who with his brother ran and then sold the ITEN BISCUIT COMPANY, which was known in those mid-twentieth century days as The Snow White Bakery. The company was sold to NABISCO, which wanted to gain the patent rights to the brothers’ saltine cracker formula. So, now you know the origin of “Saltine Crackers,” an invention of two enterprising brothers in a little town of 30,000 on the Mississippi River.
The Christmas Display was a hobby of these two men that grew in eloquence and elaboration over the years, becoming a tourist attraction bringing people from far and wide to view this winter delight.
Author and Clinton historian Gary Herrity has poignantly captured the sense and sensibility of this attraction in his columns in The Clinton Herald, noting that the Iten brothers employed a couple dozen men to design, build, construct and set up the elaborate lighting and sound system to bring the display to state-of-the-arts perfection. This was the era before electronics, computers, or touch-of-the-button synchronicity.
This is all also mentioned here because Iten Christmas Display plays with the mind of an impressionistic youth in the Christmas following World War Two, when the display was moved.
What follows has appeared in a published story and will reappear in another form in the present novel I am writing, titled THE TRIPLE FOOLE.
I was a student at St. Patrick's Grammar School on Third Street and Fourth Avenue North, which has since been erased from sight if not history this past year. I had attended a Friday Novena, which is a series of Catholic worships on nine successive Fridays, with my mother, and was going to Warren's Grocery store on Fourth Street and Fourth Avenue North, or west instead of directly north to my home.
My mother was going straight home as the temperature was between 10 - 15 degrees below zero on this early December night. Christmas was weeks away, but the Christmas spirit had already lightened my mood in anticipation. It was a time when Christmas was treated as the Holy Season, and the focus was on the celebration of the birth of Jesus. The Clinton Herald was resplendent throughout the season with pictures of the Nativity Scene, the Madonna, and of the Three Wise Men.
I might add that this was a very devout period of my life, going to mass and communion every day, trying never to swear, think bad thoughts, or lie, preparing myself for what I thought was to be my vocation, as a priest in the Jesuit order. It was my mother's wish and I thought God ordained.
It was a very dark moonless night, crunchy cold, too cold to snow, but it had snowed the previous week. So, each step I took made that crunchy music with my feet like stepping on eggshells.
As I approached Fifth Avenue North on Fourth Street, after going to Warren's, on my way to Six Avenue North and home, I heard this ethereal music and saw this misty light emanating from Congregational Hill, what we had always called "Hoot Owl Hollow," but which had been purchased by the Congregational Church.
A faint light and even fainter sound emanating in that direction startled me. Instinctively, I stopped, made the Sign of the Cross, and then a vision of the poor children of Fatima crossed my mind. Between May 13 and October 13, 1917, The Lady of the Rosary, or the Madonna appeared at Fatima in Portugal on six occasions to three simple shepherd children, giving them profound messages for the Church and the world, many of which came true. I shuddered with the thought that I was about to be visited by the Blessed Virgin Mother, and I was not ready! I was not worthy!
I actually fell to my knees in the snow directly by the side of Kirkwood Elementary school, where the cylinder fire escape shoot snaked down from the second floor of the school, a slide I often crawled up to slide down, shivering now, not so much from the cold as from the idea that I was either losing my mind or about to have a beatific vision.
Not only was I not ready, I knew nobody would believe me. I wanted to retrace my steps from whence I had come all the way back to St. Patrick Church, but my legs wouldn't move. How can I escape the Virgin? I asked myself, answering, I can't!
My mind was oblivious to the few passing cars, and fortunately, no one else was on the street it was so cold. Then I made out the music as "Silent Night."
I picked myself up, so embarrassed and humiliated that I shouted with a vapor trail leaving my mouth, "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!"
I swore I would never tell a soul, not even my best friend, Bobby Witt, and never did, until I wrote about it. Not yet a teenager, it was, however, an experienced that changed me. I promised myself that I would take life seriously, but never myself. Only a boy, I realized how impressionistic my mind was, and how impressionable I was. It is probably why I became a chemist, and later a psychologist.
Some who think me a bit cynical, were they to know what I share here, could trace it like a wire back to its source where wisdom and folly reside.
If you read my more than a million published words, the hint of that night is buried in there somewhere, which all started when the location of the Iten Christmas Display was changed.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© Christmas 2005
As dreams are the fancies of those that sleep, so fancies are but the dreams of those awake.
Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1649 – 1697)
English Author
The Christmas Season was always a nostalgic period in my hometown of CLINTON, IOWA on the banks of the MISSISSIPPI RIVER, which often froze over because of the cold. Of particular significance was the ITEN CHRISTMAS DISPLAY, which the Iten family always erected on their majestic estate on South Bluff Boulevard.
Frank Iten, who with his brother ran and then sold the ITEN BISCUIT COMPANY, which was known in those mid-twentieth century days as The Snow White Bakery. The company was sold to NABISCO, which wanted to gain the patent rights to the brothers’ saltine cracker formula. So, now you know the origin of “Saltine Crackers,” an invention of two enterprising brothers in a little town of 30,000 on the Mississippi River.
The Christmas Display was a hobby of these two men that grew in eloquence and elaboration over the years, becoming a tourist attraction bringing people from far and wide to view this winter delight.
Author and Clinton historian Gary Herrity has poignantly captured the sense and sensibility of this attraction in his columns in The Clinton Herald, noting that the Iten brothers employed a couple dozen men to design, build, construct and set up the elaborate lighting and sound system to bring the display to state-of-the-arts perfection. This was the era before electronics, computers, or touch-of-the-button synchronicity.
This is all also mentioned here because Iten Christmas Display plays with the mind of an impressionistic youth in the Christmas following World War Two, when the display was moved.
What follows has appeared in a published story and will reappear in another form in the present novel I am writing, titled THE TRIPLE FOOLE.
I was a student at St. Patrick's Grammar School on Third Street and Fourth Avenue North, which has since been erased from sight if not history this past year. I had attended a Friday Novena, which is a series of Catholic worships on nine successive Fridays, with my mother, and was going to Warren's Grocery store on Fourth Street and Fourth Avenue North, or west instead of directly north to my home.
My mother was going straight home as the temperature was between 10 - 15 degrees below zero on this early December night. Christmas was weeks away, but the Christmas spirit had already lightened my mood in anticipation. It was a time when Christmas was treated as the Holy Season, and the focus was on the celebration of the birth of Jesus. The Clinton Herald was resplendent throughout the season with pictures of the Nativity Scene, the Madonna, and of the Three Wise Men.
I might add that this was a very devout period of my life, going to mass and communion every day, trying never to swear, think bad thoughts, or lie, preparing myself for what I thought was to be my vocation, as a priest in the Jesuit order. It was my mother's wish and I thought God ordained.
It was a very dark moonless night, crunchy cold, too cold to snow, but it had snowed the previous week. So, each step I took made that crunchy music with my feet like stepping on eggshells.
As I approached Fifth Avenue North on Fourth Street, after going to Warren's, on my way to Six Avenue North and home, I heard this ethereal music and saw this misty light emanating from Congregational Hill, what we had always called "Hoot Owl Hollow," but which had been purchased by the Congregational Church.
A faint light and even fainter sound emanating in that direction startled me. Instinctively, I stopped, made the Sign of the Cross, and then a vision of the poor children of Fatima crossed my mind. Between May 13 and October 13, 1917, The Lady of the Rosary, or the Madonna appeared at Fatima in Portugal on six occasions to three simple shepherd children, giving them profound messages for the Church and the world, many of which came true. I shuddered with the thought that I was about to be visited by the Blessed Virgin Mother, and I was not ready! I was not worthy!
I actually fell to my knees in the snow directly by the side of Kirkwood Elementary school, where the cylinder fire escape shoot snaked down from the second floor of the school, a slide I often crawled up to slide down, shivering now, not so much from the cold as from the idea that I was either losing my mind or about to have a beatific vision.
Not only was I not ready, I knew nobody would believe me. I wanted to retrace my steps from whence I had come all the way back to St. Patrick Church, but my legs wouldn't move. How can I escape the Virgin? I asked myself, answering, I can't!
My mind was oblivious to the few passing cars, and fortunately, no one else was on the street it was so cold. Then I made out the music as "Silent Night."
I picked myself up, so embarrassed and humiliated that I shouted with a vapor trail leaving my mouth, "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!"
I swore I would never tell a soul, not even my best friend, Bobby Witt, and never did, until I wrote about it. Not yet a teenager, it was, however, an experienced that changed me. I promised myself that I would take life seriously, but never myself. Only a boy, I realized how impressionistic my mind was, and how impressionable I was. It is probably why I became a chemist, and later a psychologist.
Some who think me a bit cynical, were they to know what I share here, could trace it like a wire back to its source where wisdom and folly reside.
If you read my more than a million published words, the hint of that night is buried in there somewhere, which all started when the location of the Iten Christmas Display was changed.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
IDEAS CONTROL THE WORLD -- OUR DEBT TO PLATO!
IDEAS CONTROL THE WORLD
OUR DEBT TO PLATO
Ideas control the world.
James Abram Garfield (1831 – 1881)
Twentieth President of the United States of America
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
If you want to identify the source of the joy and sorrow, the pleasure and the pain, beauty and ugliness in the world, you would do well to see the connection of these emotions to ideas that have spawned them, ideas once born were doomed to be interpreted and reinterpreted until they often meant the exact opposite of what they were intended to mean. Take the idea of brotherly love.
Religion for all its assertions that it is the righteous possessor of truth is at root an idea. This was brought home to me in Time magazine (December 12, 2005). Andrew Sullivan, in his interesting article, points out that the new German Pope Benedict XVI’s draconian measures against gays for being or becoming priests are inconsistent with the idea advocated by Jesus to hate the sin but never the sinner; that “he who would be without sin cast the first stone.”
It would seem that ideas like everything else erode with time and are reduced to acronyms such as, “WWJT?” – or – “What Would Jesus Think?”
Author Sullivan reminds us that Jesus wasn’t into stereotypes. Take Mary Magdalene. She was a sinner in the biblical sense, but Jesus did not reject her, but embraced her as a person worthy of love. Jesus believed pigeonholing people into categories was not only wrong, but also not useful.
People of ideas don’t have to write books, be revered by the public or courted by people in power. People such as Socrates and Jesus captured the spirit and weaved the invisible themes of their times into a tapestry of thought that would grow in prominence far after their parting.
WESTERN THOUGHT AND AN UGLY LITTLE MAN
Socrates was an ugly little man in the physical sense, but beautiful in a soulful sense. He wandered about Athens engaging his fellow citizens in debate without portfolio or prominence. Plato, on the other hand, was tall and handsome and born around 427 B.C., when Socrates was 42.
In his late teens, Plato became enraptured of this peculiar man, as did several of his aristocratic friends. They followed Socrates through the streets of Athens, accepting with good humor as he reduced their patrician arrogance to students lost in a wilderness, a wilderness that he understood and walked every day.
The importance of ideas is as much on how they arrive in the fabric of society as to whoever becomes the personification of their expression. You will see in this series of little essays that the men of ideas may have relevance to our time, but it is also important to note that their ideas were created out of the world they inhabited, a world that often misunderstood them as well as their ideas.
PLATO’S TIME
Plato came of age during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the war in which Athens suffered a total and humiliating defeat in 404 B.C. He was twenty-three when the war ended.
Sparta then imposed a dictatorship of thirty tyrants, some of whom were Plato’s relatives and Socrates’ fellow students. This led to corruption, chaos, confusion, and rebellion with democracy eventually being restored.
The irony is that it was the new democratic government of Athens that tried Socrates for religious heresy and corrupting of the youth of Athens. He was executed in 399 B.C. by choosing not to recant his ways or to admit the charges of corruption by swallowing hemlock. Plato was then twenty-eight, and never held democracy in much esteem thereafter.
This wrenching event found Plato turning his back on public life, inspiring him instead to turn to philosophy. But first, after the execution of Socrates, he had to flee to safety with other followers. Plato took temporary refuge in Megara in Greece with the philosopher Euclides. He then traveled widely in Greece, Egypt and Italy and commenced to write his dialogues in the format of the conversations Socrates had had with his fellow Athenians.
A decade later, now thirty-eight, he traveled to Syracuse in Sicily to study Pythagorean philosophy, eventually returning to Athens in 387 B.C. at the age of forty, founding his Academy. Aristotle was among his young students with whom we will learn more in a later essay. The Academy discussed philosophy and mathematics and lasted until A.D. 527, or nearly a thousand years.
He returned to Syracuse in 367 B.C. at the age of sixty in an attempt to mold the city’s young tyrant, Dionysus II, into a philosopher-king, which was his utopian idea of governance. It failed to take hold. He revisited Syracuse six years later in 361 B.C. to attempt the process again. It failed so miserably that it placed him in personal danger and he had to flea for his life.
He never made such an attempt again, but turned his complete attention to the dialogues that featured Socrates as the protagonist. These secured his reputation. He died at the age of eighty in Athens in 347 B.C.
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME
Plato lived in a transitional period both for Athens and for the Greek civilization. There was a literary boom in his time as histories and philosophies of the past were recorded and critically studied.
Meanwhile, religious rituals and myths of the gods and titans were coming under greater scrutiny after the death of Socrates, as scholars and philosophers were adopting a more worldview compared to Greece’s more relaxed ethnocentrism.
A whole set of traditional values had fallen into doubt led by itinerant philosophers known as sophists. They preached that morals were relative and not specific. For a fee, sophists provided instruction in rhetoric and debate selling people with the idea the only measure of what is right or true is who comes out of the debate on top.
Sophists capitalized on the vulnerable void left by the disenchantment of citizens with ancient myths and religion, as the Greek world moved toward a more rational aspect.
Old values no longer computed with what people were experiencing in their own lives, and therefore these values were losing their relevance. With no new values to replace them, moral relativism became popular with sophist bravado being taken as wisdom.
It was a time when man was searching for understanding of the world and his place in it. This thirst for knowing would give birth to Western mathematics, science, psychology and ethics, as well as Western philosophy.
Sophists were relatively new in Plato’s day, but he considered them from the first the enemy of virtue. His Republic is his answer to sophist relativism, using dialogue to find a solid grounding for moral values posing questions of popular positions, and then using dialectics to cross-examine these positions to recognize and refute sophist errors and assist readers in making positive discoveries in rational principles.
Plato perfected this style over time by the systematic process of dividing a position into parts and then making generalizations that would advance the idea.
For example, Plato’s “theory of forms” maintains there are two levels of reality: the visible world of sight and sound. We can recognize beauty in a painting or hear it in a voice, and therefore have a general sense of beauty whichever form it takes.
This capacity to recognize beauty is abstract and therefore invisible and lives in the mind. We take the conceptual beauty with us as memory and it lives in our minds as an extension of us.
Plato, however, does not develop this theory of forms, as he apparently felt no such need. It was self-evident. In essence, the “theory of forms” represents his attempt to cultivate our capacity for conceptual and abstract thought, something we still struggle with to this day.
In the Republic and Phaedrus, Plato describes the soul as divided into three parts: sensual (appetite), spiritual, and rational. He explains our psychological complexity partly to provide justification for philosophy as the highest of all pursuits, and being representative of the highest part of the soul, the rational part.
Psychology grew out of philosophy. What is interesting is that psychology has never found a more comfortable home since leaving its philosophical roots. At various times in the past century, psychology has mimicked mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and science, never quite leaving religion. There are more than sixty disciplines and sub-disciplines in psychology today. Small wonder the expression “homeless mind” has come into prominence in recent decades.
Plato acknowledges and seeks to explain the fact that we all experience inner conflict. This is the basis of his psychology. But his theory seeks not only to explain this inner conflict but also to present the rational part of the soul as superior. Philosophy, according to Plato, is essentially the practice of refining our rationality.
Another contribution of Plato is that he recognized the importance of education as an aspect of community health and well being. He would be appalled to see that education has become essentially job training instead of life enhancing.
Perhaps hard to believe, but Plato was into pre-natal care with exercises for pregnant women to ensure the healthy birth of their babies.
Plato grew to maturity in a transitional society in which corruption was rampant, moral standards had been discarded, and people were easily inflamed by seductive and hollow sophist rhetoric. He saw his fellow Athenians eating, drinking, and indulging in unrestrained sexual hedonism and concluded his generation was hopelessly corrupt. He recognized a society with a corrupt soul is not inclined to listen to arguments of the efficacy of virtue, or that a virtuous life is a better life. So, he redirected his energies.
Instead, he turned his attention to children. His focus was on teaching children from an early age to live virtuous lives and to seek wisdom. That was the aim of his Academy. Education, he insisted, provides the child with a tolerant as well as discriminating mind, a mind that can be molded into embracing rather than denying reality with the goal to make for a better world. No one has ever improved on this idea, or indeed, on this agenda.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Author’s note: This is one of a series of Dr. Fisher’s essays on “Ideas Control the World.”
OUR DEBT TO PLATO
Ideas control the world.
James Abram Garfield (1831 – 1881)
Twentieth President of the United States of America
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
If you want to identify the source of the joy and sorrow, the pleasure and the pain, beauty and ugliness in the world, you would do well to see the connection of these emotions to ideas that have spawned them, ideas once born were doomed to be interpreted and reinterpreted until they often meant the exact opposite of what they were intended to mean. Take the idea of brotherly love.
Religion for all its assertions that it is the righteous possessor of truth is at root an idea. This was brought home to me in Time magazine (December 12, 2005). Andrew Sullivan, in his interesting article, points out that the new German Pope Benedict XVI’s draconian measures against gays for being or becoming priests are inconsistent with the idea advocated by Jesus to hate the sin but never the sinner; that “he who would be without sin cast the first stone.”
It would seem that ideas like everything else erode with time and are reduced to acronyms such as, “WWJT?” – or – “What Would Jesus Think?”
Author Sullivan reminds us that Jesus wasn’t into stereotypes. Take Mary Magdalene. She was a sinner in the biblical sense, but Jesus did not reject her, but embraced her as a person worthy of love. Jesus believed pigeonholing people into categories was not only wrong, but also not useful.
People of ideas don’t have to write books, be revered by the public or courted by people in power. People such as Socrates and Jesus captured the spirit and weaved the invisible themes of their times into a tapestry of thought that would grow in prominence far after their parting.
WESTERN THOUGHT AND AN UGLY LITTLE MAN
Socrates was an ugly little man in the physical sense, but beautiful in a soulful sense. He wandered about Athens engaging his fellow citizens in debate without portfolio or prominence. Plato, on the other hand, was tall and handsome and born around 427 B.C., when Socrates was 42.
In his late teens, Plato became enraptured of this peculiar man, as did several of his aristocratic friends. They followed Socrates through the streets of Athens, accepting with good humor as he reduced their patrician arrogance to students lost in a wilderness, a wilderness that he understood and walked every day.
The importance of ideas is as much on how they arrive in the fabric of society as to whoever becomes the personification of their expression. You will see in this series of little essays that the men of ideas may have relevance to our time, but it is also important to note that their ideas were created out of the world they inhabited, a world that often misunderstood them as well as their ideas.
PLATO’S TIME
Plato came of age during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the war in which Athens suffered a total and humiliating defeat in 404 B.C. He was twenty-three when the war ended.
Sparta then imposed a dictatorship of thirty tyrants, some of whom were Plato’s relatives and Socrates’ fellow students. This led to corruption, chaos, confusion, and rebellion with democracy eventually being restored.
The irony is that it was the new democratic government of Athens that tried Socrates for religious heresy and corrupting of the youth of Athens. He was executed in 399 B.C. by choosing not to recant his ways or to admit the charges of corruption by swallowing hemlock. Plato was then twenty-eight, and never held democracy in much esteem thereafter.
This wrenching event found Plato turning his back on public life, inspiring him instead to turn to philosophy. But first, after the execution of Socrates, he had to flee to safety with other followers. Plato took temporary refuge in Megara in Greece with the philosopher Euclides. He then traveled widely in Greece, Egypt and Italy and commenced to write his dialogues in the format of the conversations Socrates had had with his fellow Athenians.
A decade later, now thirty-eight, he traveled to Syracuse in Sicily to study Pythagorean philosophy, eventually returning to Athens in 387 B.C. at the age of forty, founding his Academy. Aristotle was among his young students with whom we will learn more in a later essay. The Academy discussed philosophy and mathematics and lasted until A.D. 527, or nearly a thousand years.
He returned to Syracuse in 367 B.C. at the age of sixty in an attempt to mold the city’s young tyrant, Dionysus II, into a philosopher-king, which was his utopian idea of governance. It failed to take hold. He revisited Syracuse six years later in 361 B.C. to attempt the process again. It failed so miserably that it placed him in personal danger and he had to flea for his life.
He never made such an attempt again, but turned his complete attention to the dialogues that featured Socrates as the protagonist. These secured his reputation. He died at the age of eighty in Athens in 347 B.C.
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME
Plato lived in a transitional period both for Athens and for the Greek civilization. There was a literary boom in his time as histories and philosophies of the past were recorded and critically studied.
Meanwhile, religious rituals and myths of the gods and titans were coming under greater scrutiny after the death of Socrates, as scholars and philosophers were adopting a more worldview compared to Greece’s more relaxed ethnocentrism.
A whole set of traditional values had fallen into doubt led by itinerant philosophers known as sophists. They preached that morals were relative and not specific. For a fee, sophists provided instruction in rhetoric and debate selling people with the idea the only measure of what is right or true is who comes out of the debate on top.
Sophists capitalized on the vulnerable void left by the disenchantment of citizens with ancient myths and religion, as the Greek world moved toward a more rational aspect.
Old values no longer computed with what people were experiencing in their own lives, and therefore these values were losing their relevance. With no new values to replace them, moral relativism became popular with sophist bravado being taken as wisdom.
It was a time when man was searching for understanding of the world and his place in it. This thirst for knowing would give birth to Western mathematics, science, psychology and ethics, as well as Western philosophy.
Sophists were relatively new in Plato’s day, but he considered them from the first the enemy of virtue. His Republic is his answer to sophist relativism, using dialogue to find a solid grounding for moral values posing questions of popular positions, and then using dialectics to cross-examine these positions to recognize and refute sophist errors and assist readers in making positive discoveries in rational principles.
Plato perfected this style over time by the systematic process of dividing a position into parts and then making generalizations that would advance the idea.
For example, Plato’s “theory of forms” maintains there are two levels of reality: the visible world of sight and sound. We can recognize beauty in a painting or hear it in a voice, and therefore have a general sense of beauty whichever form it takes.
This capacity to recognize beauty is abstract and therefore invisible and lives in the mind. We take the conceptual beauty with us as memory and it lives in our minds as an extension of us.
Plato, however, does not develop this theory of forms, as he apparently felt no such need. It was self-evident. In essence, the “theory of forms” represents his attempt to cultivate our capacity for conceptual and abstract thought, something we still struggle with to this day.
In the Republic and Phaedrus, Plato describes the soul as divided into three parts: sensual (appetite), spiritual, and rational. He explains our psychological complexity partly to provide justification for philosophy as the highest of all pursuits, and being representative of the highest part of the soul, the rational part.
Psychology grew out of philosophy. What is interesting is that psychology has never found a more comfortable home since leaving its philosophical roots. At various times in the past century, psychology has mimicked mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and science, never quite leaving religion. There are more than sixty disciplines and sub-disciplines in psychology today. Small wonder the expression “homeless mind” has come into prominence in recent decades.
Plato acknowledges and seeks to explain the fact that we all experience inner conflict. This is the basis of his psychology. But his theory seeks not only to explain this inner conflict but also to present the rational part of the soul as superior. Philosophy, according to Plato, is essentially the practice of refining our rationality.
Another contribution of Plato is that he recognized the importance of education as an aspect of community health and well being. He would be appalled to see that education has become essentially job training instead of life enhancing.
Perhaps hard to believe, but Plato was into pre-natal care with exercises for pregnant women to ensure the healthy birth of their babies.
Plato grew to maturity in a transitional society in which corruption was rampant, moral standards had been discarded, and people were easily inflamed by seductive and hollow sophist rhetoric. He saw his fellow Athenians eating, drinking, and indulging in unrestrained sexual hedonism and concluded his generation was hopelessly corrupt. He recognized a society with a corrupt soul is not inclined to listen to arguments of the efficacy of virtue, or that a virtuous life is a better life. So, he redirected his energies.
Instead, he turned his attention to children. His focus was on teaching children from an early age to live virtuous lives and to seek wisdom. That was the aim of his Academy. Education, he insisted, provides the child with a tolerant as well as discriminating mind, a mind that can be molded into embracing rather than denying reality with the goal to make for a better world. No one has ever improved on this idea, or indeed, on this agenda.
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Author’s note: This is one of a series of Dr. Fisher’s essays on “Ideas Control the World.”
Thursday, December 08, 2005
NEAR JOURNEY'S END & HORNS OF THE DILEMMA!
My book NJE & The Horns of the Dilemma!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
Reference: an email to a concerned friend regarding the state of the planet with reference to my book, not yet published, Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?
Ned,
Last night the spokeswoman for the Inuit Eskimos was on Jim Lehrer. She was talking about how climate change at the polar cap is negatively impacting the whole lifestyle of the natives, as well as the animals. She was one of the delegates at the Montreal Conference on Global Warming. She also was quite gracious finding satisfaction that her people's situation managed to get on the agenda. But she expected little satisfaction beyond that. Sad.
Then I happened on a segment on the BBC concerning a small nation in the Himalayas called "Butan." People of this nation have suffered similar plight to that of New Orleans. When lakes formed by melting snow, snow that never before used to form such lakes, the security the communities below are put in jeopardy.
What happens is that the walls of these lakes overflow their weak natural barriers, and cascade down the mountainside. One city was nearly wiped away in the 1990s.
A statistic was thrown out that startled me. A diplomat from this country said that there are over 200,000 such lakes in these mountains, and the possibility exists that his entire country could one day be wiped out.
Mention was made also on this program that US accounts for one-quarter of the CO2 pollution of the planet. This was not new, and of course the US leads in leaderless leadership, and there is little sense that this will change. On the contrary, the US has become the Pied Piper to oblivion, as if everyone is marching to the end of the earth and falling off in merry cadence.
But what was most astounding of all was to see, while France and Germany are reducing their emissions in double digits, countries such as Portugal and Spain and Ireland are increasing theirs in double digits.
I experienced this directly when I was with Honeywell Europe in the 1980s as these countries were then on the initial phase of their late Industrial Revolutions. And then of course there is China, our imitative twin, which is the second greatest polluter on the face of the earth, and doing everything it took us a century to do in a score or so of years.
I had a modest agenda for my book, Near Journey's End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?
I am neither a crusader nor even a well-informed scientist on global warming or pandemics for that matter.
What I am, at least I thought I was, was capable of framing a problem and how its nascent incipiency has developed into what it is today with my "cut & control" explanations over the past few thousand years.
My book was not meant to be a compact "WOW!!!" book nor was it meant to be, but an opportunity for the reader to see how religion, politics, government, culture, history, science and man's eternal solipsism measured his superiority in a gauge called "progress." The book is peopled with the heroes of our Western civilization, which might be the planet's greatest enemies.
As much as self-interest dominates man, I know that chances for him to wake up are not good. One pandemic won't be enough, but a series of pandemics and "natural disasters" -- disasters created naturally by man's artificial disruption of nature -- will have to hit him again and again and again.
When they do, and I have no doubt that they will, I would like for this book to be available so the reader can see where man has been, where he is now, and where he is going, and why.
I don't expect man to wise up and make the major sacrifices because I think it is going to take a series of major disasters to get his attention.
Just as Catholicism and the Inquisition kept man in the Dark Ages, science and its dogmatic hubris has put man into a Dream World.
President Bush is right. Had the US imposed the Kyoto Accords; tens of thousands of American jobs would be lost, threatening the American economy. I think it would be closer to millions of jobs and possibly throw the country into a major depression.
As one scientist said from this conference in Montreal, being somewhat empathic with the president, "Fossil fuels will have to be replaced by other sources such as solar energy and nonpolluting other means. Science and technology have to find the answer, and they will." I wish I were so confident.
Not only the US but also the world sits on the horns of the dilemma.
Be well and have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
Reference: an email to a concerned friend regarding the state of the planet with reference to my book, not yet published, Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?
Ned,
Last night the spokeswoman for the Inuit Eskimos was on Jim Lehrer. She was talking about how climate change at the polar cap is negatively impacting the whole lifestyle of the natives, as well as the animals. She was one of the delegates at the Montreal Conference on Global Warming. She also was quite gracious finding satisfaction that her people's situation managed to get on the agenda. But she expected little satisfaction beyond that. Sad.
Then I happened on a segment on the BBC concerning a small nation in the Himalayas called "Butan." People of this nation have suffered similar plight to that of New Orleans. When lakes formed by melting snow, snow that never before used to form such lakes, the security the communities below are put in jeopardy.
What happens is that the walls of these lakes overflow their weak natural barriers, and cascade down the mountainside. One city was nearly wiped away in the 1990s.
A statistic was thrown out that startled me. A diplomat from this country said that there are over 200,000 such lakes in these mountains, and the possibility exists that his entire country could one day be wiped out.
Mention was made also on this program that US accounts for one-quarter of the CO2 pollution of the planet. This was not new, and of course the US leads in leaderless leadership, and there is little sense that this will change. On the contrary, the US has become the Pied Piper to oblivion, as if everyone is marching to the end of the earth and falling off in merry cadence.
But what was most astounding of all was to see, while France and Germany are reducing their emissions in double digits, countries such as Portugal and Spain and Ireland are increasing theirs in double digits.
I experienced this directly when I was with Honeywell Europe in the 1980s as these countries were then on the initial phase of their late Industrial Revolutions. And then of course there is China, our imitative twin, which is the second greatest polluter on the face of the earth, and doing everything it took us a century to do in a score or so of years.
I had a modest agenda for my book, Near Journey's End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?
I am neither a crusader nor even a well-informed scientist on global warming or pandemics for that matter.
What I am, at least I thought I was, was capable of framing a problem and how its nascent incipiency has developed into what it is today with my "cut & control" explanations over the past few thousand years.
My book was not meant to be a compact "WOW!!!" book nor was it meant to be, but an opportunity for the reader to see how religion, politics, government, culture, history, science and man's eternal solipsism measured his superiority in a gauge called "progress." The book is peopled with the heroes of our Western civilization, which might be the planet's greatest enemies.
As much as self-interest dominates man, I know that chances for him to wake up are not good. One pandemic won't be enough, but a series of pandemics and "natural disasters" -- disasters created naturally by man's artificial disruption of nature -- will have to hit him again and again and again.
When they do, and I have no doubt that they will, I would like for this book to be available so the reader can see where man has been, where he is now, and where he is going, and why.
I don't expect man to wise up and make the major sacrifices because I think it is going to take a series of major disasters to get his attention.
Just as Catholicism and the Inquisition kept man in the Dark Ages, science and its dogmatic hubris has put man into a Dream World.
President Bush is right. Had the US imposed the Kyoto Accords; tens of thousands of American jobs would be lost, threatening the American economy. I think it would be closer to millions of jobs and possibly throw the country into a major depression.
As one scientist said from this conference in Montreal, being somewhat empathic with the president, "Fossil fuels will have to be replaced by other sources such as solar energy and nonpolluting other means. Science and technology have to find the answer, and they will." I wish I were so confident.
Not only the US but also the world sits on the horns of the dilemma.
Be well and have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Jim
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER'S DILEMMA!
The Philosopher’s Dilemma
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
A philosopher and an oyster have each their respective stations. The oyster fulfills the law of his existence (whatever it be) as long as he lives, and at length for the nourishment of the philosopher. The philosopher leads a life of learned ease, which he employs in ingeniously arguing (or attempting to argue) away the first instinctive principles of nature, reason, faith, and religion.
Charles Moore (1790)
Philosophers, unlike scientists in general, tend to show rather than to hide their feelings, that is, in the era of Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Robeck, Montaigne and Donne. When mathematicians and scientists moved from their respective disciplines into philosophy, in the era of Russell, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger, in other words in more recent times, feelings were there but disguised in arguments that drifted far from these sensory moorings. Feelings connect us to community, not intellect, and when feelings are well disguised, and intellect is celebrated as if some magic wand we may wave at a problem, situation or condition, we have the world that we experience today in all its contradictions.
A philosopher, if he is to be of any moment to his age, it would seem to me should not only know but acknowledge a distinction between the general laws of nature and the human powers of matter and motion, and the particular movements of an individual body in that climate, culture and time.
The philosophers who were more openly expressive of their feelings lived in a more believing although increasingly skeptical climate, where man was not so highly and hastily exalted. These philosophers communicated by a sense of the Deity, while the latter, the philosophers in more recent times, saw matters were more within the compass of man’s agency, and the discharge and satisfaction of these matters, more depended on the individual’s free will for their direction.
No matter what the argument, if you go deeply enough, and ferret through all the claimers and disclaimers to the core expression of value, and philosophy no matter how much the philosopher may insist it is “value free” philosophy is forever value laden, you will see that the doctrine of local good, otherwise better known as the “common good,” has all but disappeared from the consciousness of postmodern Western man, replaced, as it were, by a doctrine of the private good, better understood as “personhood.”
In the quote above of Charles Moore, it is taken from his book titled A FULL ENQUIRY INTO THE SUBJECT OF SUICIDE. So, while Western man believes that in his God-centered universe life is precious, and has always been so, think again.
Man has been moving away from the consensus belief in self-preservation and towards the justification of self-murder for centuries, and nearly on the same schedule as man has moved away from a centrifugal Deity.
Long ago, argument was given that “a man’s life is his own property, and therefore may be disposed of at a man’s own pleasure.”
Such arguments were more common in academia in the last few centuries than in general society, but eventually shop talk finds its way into the fabric of social existence.
Fore example, in most recent times, it has not been the physical deed but spiritual death that has been the instrument of self-murder. This has been epitomized in a lifestyle that has created a scourge of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, lung cancer, stomach cancer, genital cancer, AIDS, workaholism, ambition, exhibitionism, celebrity worship, mental illness, jealousy, envy, sloth and rage.
Things have become more important than persons, and persons equate and justify their station and existence on the basis of things accumulated at the expense of a dying soul. The will is a nobler power of the soul than is the intellect. And the will, in Freudian terminology, no longer has the superego as a “lid on the id.” Intellect has surrendered to the child of the universe.
Put otherwise, we have lost our capacity to distinguish voluntary, violent, and mixed actions, having no standard by which to measure them other than a drive in which no one is at the controls.
The success of voluntary actions depends on having a good or a bad will on check. Violent action is action that has an external principle which, when opposing cannot be resisted by the active or suffering man. A tsunami may sweep a man up without recourse, while a man may voluntarily walk away from a fight that has no purpose other to fuel his pride.
Mixed actions arise externally by force, and internally from the will, which find us wavering and vacillating. Recently, a young lady while driving home from work at dusk in Tampa hit and killed two young boys in an African American neighborhood. The right thing to do was to stop, and render aid, and comfort, but she went home. Her parents in collusion with her attempted to hide the act, justifying it in the belief that she, being a white woman, was in danger for her life having killed the children in a black area. This is the private good taking precedence over the local good.
What prompted this discourse is that I have had an interesting reaction to a recent missive of mine (“When did God make color a sign of quality?”). I attempted in the piece to understand why an African American businessman was treated as a criminal by Wal-Mart when he attempted to purchase $13,600 worth the Holiday gift certificates for employees, when his company had been doing business with Wal-Mart for years. My question: was it only because he was black?
Most of my respondents were from white people, as I am white, and all of them were reasonable, intelligent and perceptive of the situation. Missing was an expression of feelings for the man and what he experienced. I can’t imagine, myself, ever being treated this way and not being seriously injured, but I am a feeling philosopher.
The responses were overwhelmingly intellectual but not one of them implied an understanding or what it must have felt like to be black and so treated. One African American respondent admitted that he had never been so treated, and considered being lucky. But was it luck, or something deeper? That is what I hoped to learn.
As always, I am appreciative of people willing to share their views, and I always learn from them.
But my point, and the reason for the philosopher’s dilemma is that the question goes beyond simple argument to a mindset of the private good versus the mindset of the local good that I feel is endemic to our times.
The young lady mentioned above was tried and put on house arrest for two years, meaning she will serve no prison time but will remain at home. Only a year ago, a black man and immigrant to this country, driving a truck in my area of Tampa Bay, hit and killed a youngster. He did not leave the scene of the accident, but attempted to render aid. He was tried for vehicular homicide and sentenced to ten years in prison, which he is now serving. I might add that he had no police record, was not emotionally or physically impaired, in other words, had no drugs or alcohol in his system, and yet he begs the question of my earlier piece, which I sense is not soon to come. My hope is that virtue wins out for this young woman and young man and that they find solace in their souls for embracing the future even though the hand of justice was not blind.
© December 2005 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., the Peripatetic Philosopher.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
A philosopher and an oyster have each their respective stations. The oyster fulfills the law of his existence (whatever it be) as long as he lives, and at length for the nourishment of the philosopher. The philosopher leads a life of learned ease, which he employs in ingeniously arguing (or attempting to argue) away the first instinctive principles of nature, reason, faith, and religion.
Charles Moore (1790)
Philosophers, unlike scientists in general, tend to show rather than to hide their feelings, that is, in the era of Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Robeck, Montaigne and Donne. When mathematicians and scientists moved from their respective disciplines into philosophy, in the era of Russell, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger, in other words in more recent times, feelings were there but disguised in arguments that drifted far from these sensory moorings. Feelings connect us to community, not intellect, and when feelings are well disguised, and intellect is celebrated as if some magic wand we may wave at a problem, situation or condition, we have the world that we experience today in all its contradictions.
A philosopher, if he is to be of any moment to his age, it would seem to me should not only know but acknowledge a distinction between the general laws of nature and the human powers of matter and motion, and the particular movements of an individual body in that climate, culture and time.
The philosophers who were more openly expressive of their feelings lived in a more believing although increasingly skeptical climate, where man was not so highly and hastily exalted. These philosophers communicated by a sense of the Deity, while the latter, the philosophers in more recent times, saw matters were more within the compass of man’s agency, and the discharge and satisfaction of these matters, more depended on the individual’s free will for their direction.
No matter what the argument, if you go deeply enough, and ferret through all the claimers and disclaimers to the core expression of value, and philosophy no matter how much the philosopher may insist it is “value free” philosophy is forever value laden, you will see that the doctrine of local good, otherwise better known as the “common good,” has all but disappeared from the consciousness of postmodern Western man, replaced, as it were, by a doctrine of the private good, better understood as “personhood.”
In the quote above of Charles Moore, it is taken from his book titled A FULL ENQUIRY INTO THE SUBJECT OF SUICIDE. So, while Western man believes that in his God-centered universe life is precious, and has always been so, think again.
Man has been moving away from the consensus belief in self-preservation and towards the justification of self-murder for centuries, and nearly on the same schedule as man has moved away from a centrifugal Deity.
Long ago, argument was given that “a man’s life is his own property, and therefore may be disposed of at a man’s own pleasure.”
Such arguments were more common in academia in the last few centuries than in general society, but eventually shop talk finds its way into the fabric of social existence.
Fore example, in most recent times, it has not been the physical deed but spiritual death that has been the instrument of self-murder. This has been epitomized in a lifestyle that has created a scourge of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, lung cancer, stomach cancer, genital cancer, AIDS, workaholism, ambition, exhibitionism, celebrity worship, mental illness, jealousy, envy, sloth and rage.
Things have become more important than persons, and persons equate and justify their station and existence on the basis of things accumulated at the expense of a dying soul. The will is a nobler power of the soul than is the intellect. And the will, in Freudian terminology, no longer has the superego as a “lid on the id.” Intellect has surrendered to the child of the universe.
Put otherwise, we have lost our capacity to distinguish voluntary, violent, and mixed actions, having no standard by which to measure them other than a drive in which no one is at the controls.
The success of voluntary actions depends on having a good or a bad will on check. Violent action is action that has an external principle which, when opposing cannot be resisted by the active or suffering man. A tsunami may sweep a man up without recourse, while a man may voluntarily walk away from a fight that has no purpose other to fuel his pride.
Mixed actions arise externally by force, and internally from the will, which find us wavering and vacillating. Recently, a young lady while driving home from work at dusk in Tampa hit and killed two young boys in an African American neighborhood. The right thing to do was to stop, and render aid, and comfort, but she went home. Her parents in collusion with her attempted to hide the act, justifying it in the belief that she, being a white woman, was in danger for her life having killed the children in a black area. This is the private good taking precedence over the local good.
What prompted this discourse is that I have had an interesting reaction to a recent missive of mine (“When did God make color a sign of quality?”). I attempted in the piece to understand why an African American businessman was treated as a criminal by Wal-Mart when he attempted to purchase $13,600 worth the Holiday gift certificates for employees, when his company had been doing business with Wal-Mart for years. My question: was it only because he was black?
Most of my respondents were from white people, as I am white, and all of them were reasonable, intelligent and perceptive of the situation. Missing was an expression of feelings for the man and what he experienced. I can’t imagine, myself, ever being treated this way and not being seriously injured, but I am a feeling philosopher.
The responses were overwhelmingly intellectual but not one of them implied an understanding or what it must have felt like to be black and so treated. One African American respondent admitted that he had never been so treated, and considered being lucky. But was it luck, or something deeper? That is what I hoped to learn.
As always, I am appreciative of people willing to share their views, and I always learn from them.
But my point, and the reason for the philosopher’s dilemma is that the question goes beyond simple argument to a mindset of the private good versus the mindset of the local good that I feel is endemic to our times.
The young lady mentioned above was tried and put on house arrest for two years, meaning she will serve no prison time but will remain at home. Only a year ago, a black man and immigrant to this country, driving a truck in my area of Tampa Bay, hit and killed a youngster. He did not leave the scene of the accident, but attempted to render aid. He was tried for vehicular homicide and sentenced to ten years in prison, which he is now serving. I might add that he had no police record, was not emotionally or physically impaired, in other words, had no drugs or alcohol in his system, and yet he begs the question of my earlier piece, which I sense is not soon to come. My hope is that virtue wins out for this young woman and young man and that they find solace in their souls for embracing the future even though the hand of justice was not blind.
© December 2005 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., the Peripatetic Philosopher.
Monday, December 05, 2005
WHEN DID GOD MAKE COLOR A SIGN OF QUALITY?
When Did God Make Color A Sign of Quality?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830)
English critic
When I was in graduate school as a mature adult, having gone back for my doctorate after a career spanning the United States, South America, Europe and South Africa, I thought I had experienced the ultimate in societal prejudice in South African apartheid.
For those of you not familiar with this policy, the Afrikaner government of white South Africans, after coming to power in 1948, created this policy of “separate development of the races.” It was designed to send the majority of South African Bantu or blacks into several different homelands, homelands that were outside the urban-industrial wealth bearing regions of the country, while expecting the Bantu and Coloreds, or those of mix races to carry identity cards to validate their presence in the white areas.
Moreover, the policy was such that a person of race could be held ninety days without charges, and this could be extended another ninety days should the courts so desire. When I lived there, the white population was about 3.5 million mainly of Dutch, French Huguenot and British ancestry, while 14 million were Bantu and Coloreds.
I lived there in 1968 when apartheid was being fully enforced. It is gone today with the majority Bantu population now in power. What made the policy especially disconcerting to an American is that I was in South Africa at the same time Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was being assassinated, which made it hard to defend our American policy of tolerance and freedom.
Still, at the time a young man in my thirties, the South African experience was so wrenching that I resigned my executive position with a chemical company, and did little more than read, write a little, and try to understand what I had experienced for a period of more than two years. At the end of that period, I went back to school.
During this self-imposed sabbatical, I wrote some articles on South Africa attempting to create a balanced view, but abandoned a project of writing a South Africa novel. Now more than a quarter century later, I still haven’t written the novel, and I still try to understand how my company, and my fellow Americans with whom I worked were not as deeply wounded by the incongruity of my company’s principles and actual policy in the field.
Some of my colleagues accused me of being an idealist, others a romantic, and still others of being a breast-thumping liberal. I saw myself as none of these, but only as a person growing confused seeing the company playing games of duplicity, while purporting to being upstanding and holding to the beliefs that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Then only the other day I read of Reginald Pitts, a black man, who carries out an assignment of a white colleague, who wasn’t available, to buy season holiday gift cards from Wal-Mart, something that his company has done for years to the tune of $50,000 per year, and he is subjected to the nightmare of being treated as if a criminal attempting to pass a bogus check of $13,600, something that had never happened before to anyone in his company on a similar assignment. And I was outraged. South Africa came back with a vengeance.
A Wal-Mart spokeswoman stated, “Our company is built upon respect for the individual and we have no tolerance for discrimination of any type.”
The statement made me think of my company in South Africa. It not only made such statements but put out brochures to that same effect. But in practice, and I know directly from experience, if you were too familiar, too relaxed, and too accommodating to Bantu, as I was my driver, and the servants in my home, you were called on the carpet with a statement to the effect, “This is not your country. Do you want to get deported?”
My point is that the offending party in this case, the Wal-Mart person who might be reprimanded or possibly even fired for this prejudicial behavior, is not the boogeyman.
It goes far higher up the tree, if it is anything like my own experience. The rhetoric, the official policy, and all the company’s talking heads when the mike is on will serenade the listener with the same melody of tolerance. It is, however, the casual conversation one hears among executives or employees during relaxed periods on the job, or in the privacy of their homes far away from the crowd that you are reminded from the highest to the lowest in the pecking order what is the prevalent mindset. Then there are those sidebar conversations, like the one that I alluded to, where you are told the lay of the land, but “don’t quote me on that.”
We have seen it with Katrina in a most blatant way, but we see it every day in little ways, ways that irritate but are not life threatening as they were with Katrina. Reginald Pitts, who experienced this shopping nightmare, sadly, may speak to the rule rather than the exception.
Curtis Stokes, who is a 37-year-old Tampa vice president with the Fifth Third Bank, a member of the private University Club, an exclusive Tampa business and professional organization, and a father, and first vice president of the Hillsborough County (Tampa) chapter of the NAACP, said he isn’t surprised at what happened to Mr. Pitts. He says people see him first as black, and stare at him with fear in their eyes, why he doesn’t know. He has had undercover security officers trail him in department stores, cops pull him over when he’s driving a block from his Tampa Palms home, one of the upscale neighborhoods in Tampa. “It’s one of those things no matter how you dress or act, you’re a black guy at the end of the day.”
What is especially sad about Mr. Stokes’s remarks is that he is now teaching his seven-year-old son to dress and act in non-confrontational ways, to act essentially invisible so that no harm will come to him. I heard about the same words from my driver in South Africa for his son. “You’re a Kaffir,” he told his child, “remember that, don’t look them (whites) in the eye, just go about your business.”
A few years ago, when Barry Bonds had yet another tremendous year, a Tampa businessman said to me, “He’s one hellava black player.” I corrected him, “He’s one hellava player who happens to be black.” He looked at me as if I were tilted, turned away and said, “Whatever.”
This problem is not one of color but culture, and it is deep in our society’s veins, and cannot be changed without a cultural value transfusion, especially now that Caucasians are increasingly the minority in the world’s population. Ignorance is no longer bliss.
The referenced articles appeared in The Tampa Tribune, Nation/World section, December 3, 2005.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830)
English critic
When I was in graduate school as a mature adult, having gone back for my doctorate after a career spanning the United States, South America, Europe and South Africa, I thought I had experienced the ultimate in societal prejudice in South African apartheid.
For those of you not familiar with this policy, the Afrikaner government of white South Africans, after coming to power in 1948, created this policy of “separate development of the races.” It was designed to send the majority of South African Bantu or blacks into several different homelands, homelands that were outside the urban-industrial wealth bearing regions of the country, while expecting the Bantu and Coloreds, or those of mix races to carry identity cards to validate their presence in the white areas.
Moreover, the policy was such that a person of race could be held ninety days without charges, and this could be extended another ninety days should the courts so desire. When I lived there, the white population was about 3.5 million mainly of Dutch, French Huguenot and British ancestry, while 14 million were Bantu and Coloreds.
I lived there in 1968 when apartheid was being fully enforced. It is gone today with the majority Bantu population now in power. What made the policy especially disconcerting to an American is that I was in South Africa at the same time Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was being assassinated, which made it hard to defend our American policy of tolerance and freedom.
Still, at the time a young man in my thirties, the South African experience was so wrenching that I resigned my executive position with a chemical company, and did little more than read, write a little, and try to understand what I had experienced for a period of more than two years. At the end of that period, I went back to school.
During this self-imposed sabbatical, I wrote some articles on South Africa attempting to create a balanced view, but abandoned a project of writing a South Africa novel. Now more than a quarter century later, I still haven’t written the novel, and I still try to understand how my company, and my fellow Americans with whom I worked were not as deeply wounded by the incongruity of my company’s principles and actual policy in the field.
Some of my colleagues accused me of being an idealist, others a romantic, and still others of being a breast-thumping liberal. I saw myself as none of these, but only as a person growing confused seeing the company playing games of duplicity, while purporting to being upstanding and holding to the beliefs that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Then only the other day I read of Reginald Pitts, a black man, who carries out an assignment of a white colleague, who wasn’t available, to buy season holiday gift cards from Wal-Mart, something that his company has done for years to the tune of $50,000 per year, and he is subjected to the nightmare of being treated as if a criminal attempting to pass a bogus check of $13,600, something that had never happened before to anyone in his company on a similar assignment. And I was outraged. South Africa came back with a vengeance.
A Wal-Mart spokeswoman stated, “Our company is built upon respect for the individual and we have no tolerance for discrimination of any type.”
The statement made me think of my company in South Africa. It not only made such statements but put out brochures to that same effect. But in practice, and I know directly from experience, if you were too familiar, too relaxed, and too accommodating to Bantu, as I was my driver, and the servants in my home, you were called on the carpet with a statement to the effect, “This is not your country. Do you want to get deported?”
My point is that the offending party in this case, the Wal-Mart person who might be reprimanded or possibly even fired for this prejudicial behavior, is not the boogeyman.
It goes far higher up the tree, if it is anything like my own experience. The rhetoric, the official policy, and all the company’s talking heads when the mike is on will serenade the listener with the same melody of tolerance. It is, however, the casual conversation one hears among executives or employees during relaxed periods on the job, or in the privacy of their homes far away from the crowd that you are reminded from the highest to the lowest in the pecking order what is the prevalent mindset. Then there are those sidebar conversations, like the one that I alluded to, where you are told the lay of the land, but “don’t quote me on that.”
We have seen it with Katrina in a most blatant way, but we see it every day in little ways, ways that irritate but are not life threatening as they were with Katrina. Reginald Pitts, who experienced this shopping nightmare, sadly, may speak to the rule rather than the exception.
Curtis Stokes, who is a 37-year-old Tampa vice president with the Fifth Third Bank, a member of the private University Club, an exclusive Tampa business and professional organization, and a father, and first vice president of the Hillsborough County (Tampa) chapter of the NAACP, said he isn’t surprised at what happened to Mr. Pitts. He says people see him first as black, and stare at him with fear in their eyes, why he doesn’t know. He has had undercover security officers trail him in department stores, cops pull him over when he’s driving a block from his Tampa Palms home, one of the upscale neighborhoods in Tampa. “It’s one of those things no matter how you dress or act, you’re a black guy at the end of the day.”
What is especially sad about Mr. Stokes’s remarks is that he is now teaching his seven-year-old son to dress and act in non-confrontational ways, to act essentially invisible so that no harm will come to him. I heard about the same words from my driver in South Africa for his son. “You’re a Kaffir,” he told his child, “remember that, don’t look them (whites) in the eye, just go about your business.”
A few years ago, when Barry Bonds had yet another tremendous year, a Tampa businessman said to me, “He’s one hellava black player.” I corrected him, “He’s one hellava player who happens to be black.” He looked at me as if I were tilted, turned away and said, “Whatever.”
This problem is not one of color but culture, and it is deep in our society’s veins, and cannot be changed without a cultural value transfusion, especially now that Caucasians are increasingly the minority in the world’s population. Ignorance is no longer bliss.
The referenced articles appeared in The Tampa Tribune, Nation/World section, December 3, 2005.
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