COLLAPSE – WE SHOULDN’T BE SURPRISED BY THE SHAPE WE’RE IN!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 24, 2008
“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet and essayist
Early in 1968 before going to South Africa, I was invited by my company to speak in San Francisco at a Regional Meeting.
In the course of that visit, I went to Golden Gate State Park, and Haight Asbury.
Here I was young, successful, working close to seven days a week traveling across the United States, Europe and South America, and I come across literally scores of young people doing absolutely nothing, wearing tie-dyed clothes hair down to their waists -- men as well as women -- smoking something that smelled like burnt rope, a smell I had never encountered before.
If this were not remarkable enough, my cab driver asked me, "Do you want me to take you to a college sex club, cab fare is free if you do." I answered, "What in the world for?" He tossed his hands in the air, "Had to ask."
My audience at the Regional Meeting was people like myself, young and energetic, but who couldn't grasp what I was saying.
You see they wanted to know why I had been so successful, what my formula was. They wanted a simple step process to reach my numbers, when all I could tell them was this, "Once I realized the problem was not the buyer but the seller, my sensors exploded and I found I could read buyers where they were that moment, not before or after, but right then. That point forward we were on the same side of the desk working together."
I also told them that I took copious notes after each call, which I later typed with schematic diagrams of the plants, operating systems, and offices as I remembered them, and what they told me about the buyer and his operations. If there were handout booklets of the company history in the lobby, I read them and annotated them with my notes.
In the calm of my study or motel room, looking at these notes and memos, I would profile the person and the place for developing a strategy. I would use this on my next call with a major and minor goal of that call. I did this religiously despite how hectic my schedule might be. I told them it was a practice that got me a Phi Beta Kappa key in college, and a nice income now.
I had not read selling book, knew little or nothing about psychology, but was inclined to be introspective and to notice things that others were apparently inclined to miss.
I told the group that the buyer is crying out in so many ways to tell the seller precisely where he is and how he is and why he is that way. All the buyer wants is a sympathetic and understanding audience, which you, the seller can be. And just possibly, you may have what he needs but not necessarily what he wants.
The selling comes in persuading him to want what he needs. The barrier to this penetration is the difference between his expectations and what is possible; between his pocketbook and the relative costs, in other words, between needs and wants.
When I got through, they complained almost in unison, "That sounds complicated," when it was the antithesis of complexity. It might be hard work at first, I said, but the dividends are real. They weren’t convinced. They wanted a “how to” approach when I am not a “how to” man.
What I was saying and what they were unprepared to grasp is:
(1) It is more important to listen than to talk.
(2) It is more important to sell what the buyer needs and can afford than to sell the buyer what he is willing to buy but does not need and cannot afford.
If you sell “need,” it will augur better for the buyer and seller in the long run.
They thought it heresy when I admitted what they had heard was true, that is, that I had recommended a competitor’s system to ours because it was a better fit. "We don't cooperate with competitors," they almost shouted, "what does the word competition mean to you, anyway?"
“It means to me,” I said, “to serve the customer.” I left it at that as I knew there was no point in mentioning “at all cost.”
Nor did I mention what I wrote about in one of my books.
My company did not make feeding equipment except very primitive slug by-pass feeders. This was neither economical nor effective chemical treatment. I found a positive displacement pump manufacturer whose pumping equipment was the best in the industry, and also the most expensive. My hardest selling job was persuading the buyers to buy these pumps when we gave ours away free. All my customers eventually had these pumps.
One night I got a call in my home, and the pump seller asked, "What split do you expect from my commissions on these pump sales? You've sold more pumps for me this month than I have myself."
I answered, "I just want the pumps to keep working as effectively as they have," and hung up. I kept selling the pumps and never heard from him again.
Many of you weren't born by 1968, but I've felt that in that particular year things started to unravel.
Young people were full of themselves and used the Vietnam War to justify being irresponsible. Many of these rebels such as Abbie Hoffman (1936 - 1989) are now long dead having burned the candle at both ends.
Subsequent generations have followed their lead as the Hippies, Yuppies, Generation X and Y, and the "Me" generation.
When they have had no other choice but to grow up, at least a little, they didn't find it necessary to accompany it with some ethics and emotional maturity.
We find them today in jobs in real estate, Wall Street, and other occupations where "they were entitled," and used scams and questionable practices selling homes, insurance, real estate and credit cards, cooking the books, and of course many of them eventually found their way unto Mahogany Row, and into brokerage houses, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and elected office as well as jobs in industry and commerce, education and the church to continue their prestidigitation.
What do you think fueled the electronic age -- people who didn’t want to work but preferred messing around making electronic toys? Eric Hoffer correctly noted that all things start first with playthings, and then they become forms of work, but not the other way around.
So, we should not be surprised at all with the mess we are in.
JRF
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, A JOURNAL FOR THE FUTURE?
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, A JOURNAL FOR THE FUTURE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 24, 2008
“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (1922 – 2008), A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY (2004), his last book
Those of you who have read “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD” (2007) know that I have great affection for another Midwesterner and fellow outsider, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He died last year. True to his form, he combined savvy advice, cutting humor and an appreciation for the absurd. These are all evident in this last collection of wondrous memories, his family legacy, and his poignant, obstinate, unfashionable humanism.
On cigarette smoking, he writes:
“I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty-two”
And they haven’t killed me yet. He was eighty-five when he died.
When I was a student at the University of Iowa, and Vonnegut was a writer-in-residence there, I heard him speak. When I was a field manager with Nalco Chemical Company in Indianapolis, and he came to visit his family, I saw him on television. It was not until I read “A Man Without A Country” (2004) that I learned that he was a chemistry major and took a master’s in anthropology that I felt another professional connection, not to mention that he, too, is a junior, and comfortable being eternally an outsider.
Vonnegut is of German stock whereas I am of Irish stock, two tribes that have always had great affection for each other. He used humor, often gallows humor to cut through the pervading malarkey of his times, which overlap mine.
While eminently successful, he remains a controversial writer. Once he asked a friend, whom he considered wise, “Saul, I am a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling we are in two very different businesses. What makes me feel that way?”
His friend answered, “There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.”
Vonnegut and I have that in common, too, we respond to life and write out of our own perceptions, perspectives and experiences.
For the past quarter century or so, I’ve been responding to my experiences and perceptions derived from my early youth as a child (“In the Shadow of the Courthouse," 2003) to my initial encounter of work outside the protection of the chemistry laboratory (“Confident Selling,” 1970) to my growing cynicism of the complex organization despite my meteoric career (“Work Without Managers,” 1990) to a rallying cry for professionals to get off their asses and take charge (“The Worker, Alone!” 1995).
I then took a slightly different tact to address the individual who was looking for answers in all the wrong places (“The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend,”1996), followed by registering my total disgust with toxic leaderless leadership at the level of senior management (“Corporate Sin,” 2000) to the self-indulgent passive behavior of workers which was its consequences (“Six Silent Killers,” 1998) to putting the whole period of my career in absurd and cutting perspective (“A Look Back To See Ahead,” 2007).
We keep going down the same road, as Vonnegut pointed out, falling into the same ditches apparently learning nothing for the trouble.
We can write about “Watergate” but it didn’t stop us from having many subsequent “gates.” We can write about the “savings and loan” scandal, but it didn’t stop the run-on-trust that rocks the financial world from Wall Street to Hong Kong. We can have the egregious fiascos of Enron and WorldCom where executives become a law until themselves, but it hasn’t stopped a rash of similar excesses.
We have a toxic society, as Vonnegut pointed out, with people in charge without conscience. They are filled with no doubt because they don’t care what happens to people on Main Street.
The “mask of sanity” is the one worn by these poisoned personalities who still claim their innocence and feel as pure as the driven snow no matter what anybody thinks. It is not enough to be a millionaire, these poisoned personalities have to be billionaires, and then trillionaires, and the government is organized to protect them.
Society wears the “masks of sanity” while it finds the same people with these poisoness attributes rising to the top, which suggest the Orwellian like adage, “insanity is sanity.”
A man like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. passes without much notice, an aggravation but an entertaining one; an interloper who didn’t belong, a man who thought humanism meant being a free thinker and not a true believer, and a person that thought kindness the greatest of all virtues.
Although I have a similar chemistry and psychology foundation to his, I lack his skill and good humor. I’m in your face, and not just in the face of the high rollers but the heavy lifters as well.
The subtitle to “Corporate Sin” was “Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers.” I claim we have a generation of spoiled brats suspended in terminal adolescence afraid of failure so they have no real success, afraid of pain so they experience no real pleasure, afraid of risk so they have no real development, afraid of life so they exist but never find time to live. They take comfort in their latest technological contraption and text message everyone they can think of while no one is more lonely or lost then they are.
We have created a society of high-minded expectations and low-minded interests. The subprime real estate debacle took self-indulgent buyers as well as greedy sellers. The quest for a college education took entrepreneur educators and consumer driven students, who wanted a degree but not necessarily the experience of learning.
Consequently, grades have been escalated to the stratosphere but we still produce students that can’t think, or think only in terms of money, power, authority, and luxury.
“A Look Back To See Ahead” documented this, not for this generation, or the next, who will continue to create and fall into the same sinkholes, but for many generations in the future when someone will be asked one day, “How the hell could they have created such a mess for us?”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 24, 2008
“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (1922 – 2008), A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY (2004), his last book
Those of you who have read “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD” (2007) know that I have great affection for another Midwesterner and fellow outsider, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He died last year. True to his form, he combined savvy advice, cutting humor and an appreciation for the absurd. These are all evident in this last collection of wondrous memories, his family legacy, and his poignant, obstinate, unfashionable humanism.
On cigarette smoking, he writes:
“I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty-two”
And they haven’t killed me yet. He was eighty-five when he died.
When I was a student at the University of Iowa, and Vonnegut was a writer-in-residence there, I heard him speak. When I was a field manager with Nalco Chemical Company in Indianapolis, and he came to visit his family, I saw him on television. It was not until I read “A Man Without A Country” (2004) that I learned that he was a chemistry major and took a master’s in anthropology that I felt another professional connection, not to mention that he, too, is a junior, and comfortable being eternally an outsider.
Vonnegut is of German stock whereas I am of Irish stock, two tribes that have always had great affection for each other. He used humor, often gallows humor to cut through the pervading malarkey of his times, which overlap mine.
While eminently successful, he remains a controversial writer. Once he asked a friend, whom he considered wise, “Saul, I am a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling we are in two very different businesses. What makes me feel that way?”
His friend answered, “There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.”
Vonnegut and I have that in common, too, we respond to life and write out of our own perceptions, perspectives and experiences.
For the past quarter century or so, I’ve been responding to my experiences and perceptions derived from my early youth as a child (“In the Shadow of the Courthouse," 2003) to my initial encounter of work outside the protection of the chemistry laboratory (“Confident Selling,” 1970) to my growing cynicism of the complex organization despite my meteoric career (“Work Without Managers,” 1990) to a rallying cry for professionals to get off their asses and take charge (“The Worker, Alone!” 1995).
I then took a slightly different tact to address the individual who was looking for answers in all the wrong places (“The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend,”1996), followed by registering my total disgust with toxic leaderless leadership at the level of senior management (“Corporate Sin,” 2000) to the self-indulgent passive behavior of workers which was its consequences (“Six Silent Killers,” 1998) to putting the whole period of my career in absurd and cutting perspective (“A Look Back To See Ahead,” 2007).
We keep going down the same road, as Vonnegut pointed out, falling into the same ditches apparently learning nothing for the trouble.
We can write about “Watergate” but it didn’t stop us from having many subsequent “gates.” We can write about the “savings and loan” scandal, but it didn’t stop the run-on-trust that rocks the financial world from Wall Street to Hong Kong. We can have the egregious fiascos of Enron and WorldCom where executives become a law until themselves, but it hasn’t stopped a rash of similar excesses.
We have a toxic society, as Vonnegut pointed out, with people in charge without conscience. They are filled with no doubt because they don’t care what happens to people on Main Street.
The “mask of sanity” is the one worn by these poisoned personalities who still claim their innocence and feel as pure as the driven snow no matter what anybody thinks. It is not enough to be a millionaire, these poisoned personalities have to be billionaires, and then trillionaires, and the government is organized to protect them.
Society wears the “masks of sanity” while it finds the same people with these poisoness attributes rising to the top, which suggest the Orwellian like adage, “insanity is sanity.”
A man like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. passes without much notice, an aggravation but an entertaining one; an interloper who didn’t belong, a man who thought humanism meant being a free thinker and not a true believer, and a person that thought kindness the greatest of all virtues.
Although I have a similar chemistry and psychology foundation to his, I lack his skill and good humor. I’m in your face, and not just in the face of the high rollers but the heavy lifters as well.
The subtitle to “Corporate Sin” was “Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers.” I claim we have a generation of spoiled brats suspended in terminal adolescence afraid of failure so they have no real success, afraid of pain so they experience no real pleasure, afraid of risk so they have no real development, afraid of life so they exist but never find time to live. They take comfort in their latest technological contraption and text message everyone they can think of while no one is more lonely or lost then they are.
We have created a society of high-minded expectations and low-minded interests. The subprime real estate debacle took self-indulgent buyers as well as greedy sellers. The quest for a college education took entrepreneur educators and consumer driven students, who wanted a degree but not necessarily the experience of learning.
Consequently, grades have been escalated to the stratosphere but we still produce students that can’t think, or think only in terms of money, power, authority, and luxury.
“A Look Back To See Ahead” documented this, not for this generation, or the next, who will continue to create and fall into the same sinkholes, but for many generations in the future when someone will be asked one day, “How the hell could they have created such a mess for us?”
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Q&A ABOUT AN ARTICLE & A BOOK
Q&A ABOUT AN ARTICLE & A BOOK
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 14, 2008
SEVERAL WRITERS WRITE:
Is your book, THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND, in anyway connected to THE READER’S DIGEST piece “Do Unto Others…”?
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
The answer is, “Yes.” I took the first rule of that piece – “To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself” – and wrote the book, “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (DeltaGroup 1996). I wrote it because of the positive response to the article and the periodical’s skyrocketing “call for reprints,” and because I found most self-help book not helpful.
What THE TABOO attempted to do:
(1) Introduce the reader to himself: On the inner flap of the book’s flyleaf is this quotation: “We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone’s life without exception is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage. The sooner we realize that the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.”
(2) Deal with the United States of Anxiety: This is a crazy age, and craziness has become the norm, accepted as real with the focus always on looking for pundits and gurus, books and ideas to answers questions to problems of which we, alone, have the answers.
(3) Illustrate why conforming is the wrong prescription to coping: For the individual to realize identity, he must rebel against his acculturating programming, and then reintegrate it into a viable system that reflects his authenticity. Otherwise, the individual goes through life always looking for answers external to him, or becomes preoccupied solving other people’s problems while his own go unattended.
(4) Realize common sense is uncommon: What everyone knows to be true isn’t necessarily so. The herd mentality of true believers is a force to be reckoned with all one’s life. This force is predicated on the need “to belong,” “to be accepted,” “to be valued.” Lost in the equation is self-belonging, self-acceptance, and valuing self.
(5) Show how it takes six weeks to create a habit and a lifetime to overcome one: Fertile enticements to habit formation are “needs.” Good habits serve us; bad habits serve others. Smokers, drinkers, carousers, liars, stealers, gossipers, and druggies need others to legitimate their self-ruin. They cleverly use the leverage of “needs” to induce those innocent to smoking that first joint, daring them to try that first drug, challenging them to live “dangerously,” which are usually illegal and self-negating.
(6) Indicate the need for intimacy is real: We call it love, but love is not sex, yet love is sensual. It is neither being “the most beautiful,” “the most talented,” nor “the most anything,” as association or achievement cannot develop intimacy. Intimacy must first involve an honest appraisal, understanding and acceptance of self. The process is simple: self-awareness leads to self-acceptance and materializes into self-assertion. How do we know it is so? We are not afraid to say “no” when “no” is our best recourse, or when to go it alone when it is our most prudent course.
(7) Know that material affluence is no gauge to spiritual health or well being: The evidence is overwhelming. We live in a society of too much luxury and too many options with “good times” coming too soon. Nothing of value is ever realized without the cost of application, pain, struggle, risk, disappointment, discomfort, and inconvenience. When these factors are summarily avoided, as they have tended to be over the last several decades, we have the sick material society in which we live.
(8) Understand that pleasure is not bad; pleasure is simply not enough: It is normal to avoid pain and to seek pleasure, but when there is only pleasure and no pain then it becomes a dull ache in our side as pleasure is never enough. Boredom sets in, and we crave distractions. These lead to self-indulgence as we forget that we are dying all the time, and never find time to live and grow where pain resides.
(9) Demonstrate that there is a dual conundrum facing us every moment of existence: We are either self-creating or self-destructing. We are never static, never still. We are either experiencing self-realization or self-defeat, not in the eyes of others; nor in terms of the number of college degrees we have earned, or the number of zeroes in our bank accounts, but in terms of the level of our happiness. Happiness is not a function of being “the best and the brightest,” going to the “right” universities, pursuing the most “prestigious careers,” or being celebrated by others. Happiness is a function of following our own bliss and being involved in ennobling work, or love made visible. This can find us a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, or a myriad of other activities. All honest work is divine.
(10) Explain how the paradoxical dilemma is now, not tomorrow: We live in a leaderless society in which all the rules of old no longer apply or work, while all the rulers of old are lost in their own excesses and indiscretions. Meanwhile, followers wait for a correction that never comes, too lame to take control, too self-indulgent to see the handwriting on the wall, too self-absorbed to realize the future is a crumbling present, and Humpty Dumpty are us!
(11) Recognize that we are at war; it is not our borders, which need protection, but the boundaries of our minds, the frontiers of our wills: We have made a frontal retreat from our values to become fugitives to our fears, often taking residence in the violence of meaningless language. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Now we are in an age inundated with words without meaning. These words separate us from ourselves forcing on us the hard work to reconnect with ourselves in a world beyond words.
THE TABOO was published in 1996 to little fanfare. In nearly two decades, it has failed to lose its relevance. What is outlined here represents central themes of the book, which are alive with experiences of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances against the backdrop of the times.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
For more information see Dr. Fisher’s website: www.fisherofideas.com or check out his books on www.amazon.com.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 14, 2008
SEVERAL WRITERS WRITE:
Is your book, THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND, in anyway connected to THE READER’S DIGEST piece “Do Unto Others…”?
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
The answer is, “Yes.” I took the first rule of that piece – “To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself” – and wrote the book, “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (DeltaGroup 1996). I wrote it because of the positive response to the article and the periodical’s skyrocketing “call for reprints,” and because I found most self-help book not helpful.
What THE TABOO attempted to do:
(1) Introduce the reader to himself: On the inner flap of the book’s flyleaf is this quotation: “We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone’s life without exception is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage. The sooner we realize that the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.”
(2) Deal with the United States of Anxiety: This is a crazy age, and craziness has become the norm, accepted as real with the focus always on looking for pundits and gurus, books and ideas to answers questions to problems of which we, alone, have the answers.
(3) Illustrate why conforming is the wrong prescription to coping: For the individual to realize identity, he must rebel against his acculturating programming, and then reintegrate it into a viable system that reflects his authenticity. Otherwise, the individual goes through life always looking for answers external to him, or becomes preoccupied solving other people’s problems while his own go unattended.
(4) Realize common sense is uncommon: What everyone knows to be true isn’t necessarily so. The herd mentality of true believers is a force to be reckoned with all one’s life. This force is predicated on the need “to belong,” “to be accepted,” “to be valued.” Lost in the equation is self-belonging, self-acceptance, and valuing self.
(5) Show how it takes six weeks to create a habit and a lifetime to overcome one: Fertile enticements to habit formation are “needs.” Good habits serve us; bad habits serve others. Smokers, drinkers, carousers, liars, stealers, gossipers, and druggies need others to legitimate their self-ruin. They cleverly use the leverage of “needs” to induce those innocent to smoking that first joint, daring them to try that first drug, challenging them to live “dangerously,” which are usually illegal and self-negating.
(6) Indicate the need for intimacy is real: We call it love, but love is not sex, yet love is sensual. It is neither being “the most beautiful,” “the most talented,” nor “the most anything,” as association or achievement cannot develop intimacy. Intimacy must first involve an honest appraisal, understanding and acceptance of self. The process is simple: self-awareness leads to self-acceptance and materializes into self-assertion. How do we know it is so? We are not afraid to say “no” when “no” is our best recourse, or when to go it alone when it is our most prudent course.
(7) Know that material affluence is no gauge to spiritual health or well being: The evidence is overwhelming. We live in a society of too much luxury and too many options with “good times” coming too soon. Nothing of value is ever realized without the cost of application, pain, struggle, risk, disappointment, discomfort, and inconvenience. When these factors are summarily avoided, as they have tended to be over the last several decades, we have the sick material society in which we live.
(8) Understand that pleasure is not bad; pleasure is simply not enough: It is normal to avoid pain and to seek pleasure, but when there is only pleasure and no pain then it becomes a dull ache in our side as pleasure is never enough. Boredom sets in, and we crave distractions. These lead to self-indulgence as we forget that we are dying all the time, and never find time to live and grow where pain resides.
(9) Demonstrate that there is a dual conundrum facing us every moment of existence: We are either self-creating or self-destructing. We are never static, never still. We are either experiencing self-realization or self-defeat, not in the eyes of others; nor in terms of the number of college degrees we have earned, or the number of zeroes in our bank accounts, but in terms of the level of our happiness. Happiness is not a function of being “the best and the brightest,” going to the “right” universities, pursuing the most “prestigious careers,” or being celebrated by others. Happiness is a function of following our own bliss and being involved in ennobling work, or love made visible. This can find us a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, or a myriad of other activities. All honest work is divine.
(10) Explain how the paradoxical dilemma is now, not tomorrow: We live in a leaderless society in which all the rules of old no longer apply or work, while all the rulers of old are lost in their own excesses and indiscretions. Meanwhile, followers wait for a correction that never comes, too lame to take control, too self-indulgent to see the handwriting on the wall, too self-absorbed to realize the future is a crumbling present, and Humpty Dumpty are us!
(11) Recognize that we are at war; it is not our borders, which need protection, but the boundaries of our minds, the frontiers of our wills: We have made a frontal retreat from our values to become fugitives to our fears, often taking residence in the violence of meaningless language. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Now we are in an age inundated with words without meaning. These words separate us from ourselves forcing on us the hard work to reconnect with ourselves in a world beyond words.
THE TABOO was published in 1996 to little fanfare. In nearly two decades, it has failed to lose its relevance. What is outlined here represents central themes of the book, which are alive with experiences of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances against the backdrop of the times.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
For more information see Dr. Fisher’s website: www.fisherofideas.com or check out his books on www.amazon.com.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
PRESCRIPTION FOR SUCCESS: "DO UNTO OTHERS . . ."
REFERENCE:
Recently, the remarks of billionaire Bill Gates to high school students were circulated on the web, as they have been circulated in the past, remarks of a kind of tough love approach to getting people out of their counterdependency rut of complacency, a national disease.
At another level, there has been a powerful positive discussion of "how the brain works" on PBS in conjunction with my local affiliates Fall Fund Raising Campaign.
It turns out that the brain like the muscles and sinews of the physical body respond as well to exercise, what scientists call "plasticity," that is, the synapse of the brain and the neurons that make the connection grow if we embrace our resistance to new challenges, new experiences, and new opportunities.
The PBS television program cited, and I think far too many people can relate to this, that people rigorously challenge the brain for only about 25 to 30 years, and then put the brain in "coast mode" for the duration of their lives.
They become set in their ways, fixed in their thinking, and rigid in their beliefs. Afraid to fail, they resist new experiences and new adventures. They worry about how others see them rather than how they see themselves. They get into relationships that stifle their development, and take it to be their lot, as if written in concrete.
In other words, they are not in charge, and so their brain fails to grow, which finds them living in a cage of their own creation.
A number of years ago, I was doing consultant work with a community organization, and there was a young African American boy, about nineteen, that I sensed having great possibilities but who preferred to be bored, belligerent, and disruptive, seeing himself as victim rather than victor.
I went home and wrote down what I called, "Twenty Points of Light," and shared them with him.
Then, I thought the piece might be applicable to others. I had read where the CEO of "The Reader's Digest" had mentioned that "people problems" were the publisher's major concern. I took the audacious step to send my "Twenty Points of Light" directly to him, not expecting them to be published, but to be considered in dealing with his people.
In January 1993, I received a letter from him stating that he wanted to publish my work in his magazine. I agreed. The next month, or February 1993, I received a check for $2,000 for a two-paged article that "The Reader's Digest" said would appear in their June 1993 issue. Never before had I been paid for a work prior to publication.
Sure enough, my article appeared on pages 130 and 131. In August 1993, I received a letter from the CEO stating that they had received over 25,000 requests for reprints of the article in the first weeks after publication. The article follows.
JRF
PS Feel free to copy and share this piece if you so desire.
______________________________________________________________________
Where success with people begins and ends
"Do Unto Others..."
By James R. Fisher, Jr.
In my years as a corporate executive and then consultant, I've learned this: while technical systems change rapidly, the systems that govern our social behavior have evolved little in 2000 years. And we get what we want out of life only by working with and through others. To maintain that perspective in my life, I wrote down some rules that seem to flow from it. Here they are:
To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself.
The greatest hunger a person has is to be needed. Help create that feeling in others.
The greatest virtue is kindness. You can't love everyone, but you can be kind to everyone.
Don't try to impress others. Let them have the fun of impressing you.
Be enthusiastic. Nothing of consequence was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Be positive. Positive people attract others, while negative people repel.
You have greater impact on others by the way you listen than by the way you talk.
Gossip cheapens the one who gossips more than the one gossiped about.
Call a person by his or her name and use it often in conversation.
Communicate cheerfulness.
Differences are bound to occur and can be resolved if conflict is managed in a polite manner.
If you are given to making fun of someone, be sure it is of yourself.
Be genuinely interested in others. Get them to talk about themselves.
A smile doesn't cost anything and pays big dividends. Not only does it make you feel good, but it makes everyone else feel better, too.
Be the first to say, "Hello! Good to see you!"
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The golden rule is where it all begins and ends.
_____________
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., is an industrial psychologist and author of Work Without Managers: A View From the Trenches and Confident Selling for the 90s.
Recently, the remarks of billionaire Bill Gates to high school students were circulated on the web, as they have been circulated in the past, remarks of a kind of tough love approach to getting people out of their counterdependency rut of complacency, a national disease.
At another level, there has been a powerful positive discussion of "how the brain works" on PBS in conjunction with my local affiliates Fall Fund Raising Campaign.
It turns out that the brain like the muscles and sinews of the physical body respond as well to exercise, what scientists call "plasticity," that is, the synapse of the brain and the neurons that make the connection grow if we embrace our resistance to new challenges, new experiences, and new opportunities.
The PBS television program cited, and I think far too many people can relate to this, that people rigorously challenge the brain for only about 25 to 30 years, and then put the brain in "coast mode" for the duration of their lives.
They become set in their ways, fixed in their thinking, and rigid in their beliefs. Afraid to fail, they resist new experiences and new adventures. They worry about how others see them rather than how they see themselves. They get into relationships that stifle their development, and take it to be their lot, as if written in concrete.
In other words, they are not in charge, and so their brain fails to grow, which finds them living in a cage of their own creation.
A number of years ago, I was doing consultant work with a community organization, and there was a young African American boy, about nineteen, that I sensed having great possibilities but who preferred to be bored, belligerent, and disruptive, seeing himself as victim rather than victor.
I went home and wrote down what I called, "Twenty Points of Light," and shared them with him.
Then, I thought the piece might be applicable to others. I had read where the CEO of "The Reader's Digest" had mentioned that "people problems" were the publisher's major concern. I took the audacious step to send my "Twenty Points of Light" directly to him, not expecting them to be published, but to be considered in dealing with his people.
In January 1993, I received a letter from him stating that he wanted to publish my work in his magazine. I agreed. The next month, or February 1993, I received a check for $2,000 for a two-paged article that "The Reader's Digest" said would appear in their June 1993 issue. Never before had I been paid for a work prior to publication.
Sure enough, my article appeared on pages 130 and 131. In August 1993, I received a letter from the CEO stating that they had received over 25,000 requests for reprints of the article in the first weeks after publication. The article follows.
JRF
PS Feel free to copy and share this piece if you so desire.
______________________________________________________________________
Where success with people begins and ends
"Do Unto Others..."
By James R. Fisher, Jr.
In my years as a corporate executive and then consultant, I've learned this: while technical systems change rapidly, the systems that govern our social behavior have evolved little in 2000 years. And we get what we want out of life only by working with and through others. To maintain that perspective in my life, I wrote down some rules that seem to flow from it. Here they are:
To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself.
The greatest hunger a person has is to be needed. Help create that feeling in others.
The greatest virtue is kindness. You can't love everyone, but you can be kind to everyone.
Don't try to impress others. Let them have the fun of impressing you.
Be enthusiastic. Nothing of consequence was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Be positive. Positive people attract others, while negative people repel.
You have greater impact on others by the way you listen than by the way you talk.
Gossip cheapens the one who gossips more than the one gossiped about.
Call a person by his or her name and use it often in conversation.
Communicate cheerfulness.
Differences are bound to occur and can be resolved if conflict is managed in a polite manner.
If you are given to making fun of someone, be sure it is of yourself.
Be genuinely interested in others. Get them to talk about themselves.
A smile doesn't cost anything and pays big dividends. Not only does it make you feel good, but it makes everyone else feel better, too.
Be the first to say, "Hello! Good to see you!"
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The golden rule is where it all begins and ends.
_____________
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., is an industrial psychologist and author of Work Without Managers: A View From the Trenches and Confident Selling for the 90s.
Saturday, September 06, 2008
AN EXCHANGE: CRUCIBLE OF LEADERSHIP -- VOLUNTEERISM
AN EXCHANGE: THE CRUCIBLE OF LEADERSHIP – VOLUNTEERISM
JAMES R. FISHER, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 6, 2008
REFERENCE:
A good friend and fellow member of the think-tank, THE NAPLES INSTITUTE, is starting a new magazine to be called IMPACT. It is to have a philanthropy-focus showcasing charities, and articles to assist people in more effective ways of making change.
The writer here is a diligent philanthropist and astute entrepreneur who is quite spiritual but pragmatic in the sense that without material success an enterprise cannot possibly get off the ground. He has made significant interventions in one of the most impoverished communities in the State of Florida, bringing computers and state-of-the-arts technologies to children who otherwise would have no such access.
He has been supported of Dr. Fisher’s maverick spirit and work, and as his note indicates, continues to attempt to corral his spirit into a business perspective. The exchange is offered to show how friends can differ, even critically, and for the effort, gain insight into each other as well as themselves by honest exchange.
The referenced article, Crucible of Leadership, was posted earlier on this blog.
THE WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
I love - LOVE - the article. Tocqueville is one of my all-time favorites, and your analysis of our current political drama is dead-on.
I do have a request for revision, though. I believe that this piece wanders far a field, and what I'm hoping for is something tighter for our audience, which will consist of intellectuals, Danielle Steel readers with a social bent, and all in between. (Also, the election will be a vague memory by the time our December issue hits the stands and the mail).
What you wrote your friend and copied us spoke to a very specific issue: If you want to be a true leader, learn to lead volunteers. Without position power, you will have to persuade and inspire, rather than coerce. I know from first-hand experience what a new and challenging skill that is for a "boss." In my company, I expect you to perform because I'm paying you. With volunteers.... people vote with their feet.
A big part of what we're trying to accomplish through NI's Adam Smith Awards and as an ongoing theme in IMPACT is to mold the behavior of social- and business leaders. "Influence The Influencers," the sign that hangs on my wall across from my desk, says it all.
This may sound cynical, but I want to change people's behavior, much more than their souls. So even if you're just out for #1, I want to show that doing the right thing will advance your agenda. If people want to polish their leadership skills in order to help more people, great! They should volunteer. If they want to polish their leadership skills to win that corner office, great! They should volunteer, too.
The letter you wrote your candidate-friend, expanded with even more real-world examples from your days at Honeywell and elsewhere, would serve our inaugural issue perfectly. I know such a piece isn't going to be as stimulating to you as what you just wrote. I hope you don't mind.
Regards,
Ted
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ted,
You have not been the first one to accuse me of "wandering far a field." It is no doubt accurate. I write as I see things, and while my focus is often abstract my intentions are manifestly concrete.
Quite frankly, I am not a commercial guy, but write the truth as I sense it.
The question has been asked of me many times, "Who is your audience?"
I am my audience, and if I make connection with others, all the better. As my mail indicates, I do, of people of broadly different backgrounds but significant accomplishments in their chosen endeavors. While not necessarily agreeing, they find me "refreshing," whatever that means.
I am not a "Dick, see Dick, see Dick run: Jane, see Jane, see Jane run" writer. Nor am I an electronic acronym disciple but a 20th century person who has always walked and talked in the 21st century.
In "Confident Selling for the 90s," which was an update of its 1970s edition, I wrote about the old and new guard regarding sales people, but was thinking of everyman of the present century.
The book was published in 1992. For example, I saw our preoccupation with technicians (old guard) vs. strategists (new guard); short term focus vs. long term focus; loyalty to company vs. loyalty to self; employee vs. owner; crusader vs. communicator, and so on. In a sense, old stuff but actually not.
For instance, we Americans think of ourselves as members of an individualistic society, but we have been essentially a conforming society most of our history with a mantra of material individualism and expression.
Once tattoos were for renegades only, now everyone sports them. I mention tattoos because they are external signs of nothing going on inside. People show them to shout out whom they are when whom they are can only be discovered in what is not showing. It is a private conversation with self that no longer takes place. Individualism is such a conversation.
Moreover, individualism in a spiritual sense is the real basis of individualism of the new century. It is exploding across the globe as I write.
There is an abstract theme throughout this selling book, which is actually a confident thinking book. Please, be patient with my wandering.
The book, you see, is not actually about selling a product or service, but in believing in oneself. Once that is achieved, the rest is academic. Self-knowing and self-acceptance are the critical components of spiritual development for a concrete payoff. Volunteerism introduces the individual to that possibility.
It is not an accident that there are no other books like CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s except in exoteric bookshops.
Take the fact that I mention in the book's "Introduction" leaving Nalco in my mid-thirties making the equivalent in today’s dollars of nearly $500,000, saying, "If I wasn't doing my job, you'd fire me, right? Well, the company is failing me. So, I'm firing the company."
Was that madness? I don't think so. It was half a lifetime ago, and if anything, is more pronounced in me than ever before.
Ted, I don't write for intellectuals, or academics, and I have no idea who reads Danielle Steel, knowing only that she is a best selling author. I don't think in terms of "my niche," but in terms of an emerging world, in which the United States of America is going to have a less and less dominant role in the scheme of things, a role for which it denies as a possibility and therefore for which it is not prepared.
I see Third World Russia blackmailing the world with its oil and its nuclear bomb arsenal; I see atheistic China attempting to bridge the gap between it and the rest of the world with capitalistic expansion smothering out the need for spiritual nutrition with atheistic communism; I see India that rules like the abused child (product of the British Empire) that now abuses its own (diverse ethnic) family in a similar fashion, again, attempting to use economic and technological substantive growth to supplant its spiritual lapses; I see major South American countries repressed for centuries with draconian and mythic Roman Catholicism and oligarchic authorities trying to dissolve these ties and gain some purchase by attaching themselves to these emerging Third World Powers such as China, Russia and India.
I've not mentioned the "cradle of civilization," where the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates valley of ancient Persia are attempting to become postmodern bypassing the need of modernity, driven by ancient myths and abuses and clerical dominance.
Samuel P. Huntington wrote in his 1993 book, "The Clash of Civilizations" that "the conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating civilizations." He also charges in that book that "the very phase world community has become a euphemism to give legitimacy to the actions of the West."
Yes, Huntington has his critics, which I find inane such as civilizations don't control states, states control civilizations; no culture is an island, or the most absurd to my mind and the most optimistic that the power of prosperity and staying the course will neutralize the complexities. The latter is from the Wall Street Journal, the clerical guide to materialism.
In my wandering way, I mention six points (in this article) as benchmarks to the crucible of leadership, epitomized in volunteerism. I use these to illustrate what I see as the dangers of moral decline and rising decadence in the West. I do this implicitly as I often do in my writing.
I see this decadence as a manifestation of pointless wealth and self-indulgent preoccupation, starving the mind and heart of its necessary spiritual nutrition. The West has led the world down this decline despite the fact the West has 800-900 million people to the rest of the world’s nearly 5 billion. The Pied Piper of Progress has endangered this small planet with its excess while expecting Band Aid therapy to suffice to keep it extant.
Yes, the West does some things for the Third World, but why not an army of volunteers of 1 million or more in a Peace Corps from the United States; why not a confederation of nations of 10 million Peace Corps volunteers in a spiritual-material alliance rather than military alliances? Less we forget we are always on the brink of nuclear holocaust.
It is not cynical, Ted, to change people's behavior without changing their souls. It is impossible. True, surface change can occur when it is pecuniary advantageous to change behavior in the short run, but it is impossible, absolutely impossible, to do it permanently.
The great religious leaders of Jesus Christ, Mohammedan, the Prophets of the Old Testament, and Buddha, among others all essentially spoke with the same spiritual voice that was to be corrupted by their followers who wanted to change behavior without regards to their souls. It is not only Americans who like shortcuts. All of these leaders have been corrupted by this fundamental disregard.
You and I are not on the same page when you talk of "polishing leadership skills" as if they are a pair of Florsheins. We had fifty years of treating leadership as a "style," and now a batch of entrepreneurs are treating leadership as a condiment that can be attained by a collection of recipes, notwithstanding my friend's "Leadership Excellent" contributors, of which I have been one. These all miss the point.
We have gone way too far towards material success (the corner office) and need a decided correction towards spiritual fulfillment (a sense of a life well spent).
As for my writing being stimulating or not, it never occurs to me. I am one single person that has risen from very humble beginnings with an imperfect education, but a wide exposure to this world and how it works and fails to work, and I write from that perspective. Few read me, and even that few often find me contemptible because I don't say what they want to hear.
One of my favorite writers on education is the African American Thomas Sowell. He recently wrote this:
"The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer, and they don't want explanations that do not give them that."
I used the present presidential campaign to illustrate my point, which no matter how it comes out, will be a momentous change in the constellation that is America.
If America is an idea, then that idea also has had to make room for color in a way it has never made room before. Often in my work, I have known brilliant men and women of color who pined away their time in sub roles only because they were of color. That is changing as inevitably as night follows day because people of color dominate the world, and if they are not in positions of leadership than the world's very survival is in jeopardy. Yes, I wander but my wandering is always in focus.
When you have been enslaved or in subservient roles for nearly 300 years, you cannot make a correction in 50 or more years; nor can the world of color suddenly behave as if the West because it is not the West, and the West does not have answers for it.
Now, I'll get back to the "crucible of leadership" and why I think volunteerism is so important. You don't volunteer to influence, or if you do, you're going to be disappointed. You volunteer to serve. Service leadership is volunteerism personified. You don't talk about transformation; you demonstrate it, as you put it, with your feet, with your actions.
You ask for examples of volunteerism and the dismal problems that occur when it is absent. It is in my books and articles, more than a million published words. It is out there! What can I say?
Ted, I have neither the heart nor the head of the insurgent. I’m just trying to make sense of a senseless world to myself, and hope it may resonate with others. I don’t care if it offends. I am not trying to recruit converts. I don’t care if I lose friends. I actually only have one real friend, BB, and that is more than enough for me. And, finally, I have proven decidedly over time, I am not commercial. I can live with that. People are more likely to read me when my voice has been stilled, but they will read me. I have no doubt of that.
Be always well,
Jim
JAMES R. FISHER, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 6, 2008
REFERENCE:
A good friend and fellow member of the think-tank, THE NAPLES INSTITUTE, is starting a new magazine to be called IMPACT. It is to have a philanthropy-focus showcasing charities, and articles to assist people in more effective ways of making change.
The writer here is a diligent philanthropist and astute entrepreneur who is quite spiritual but pragmatic in the sense that without material success an enterprise cannot possibly get off the ground. He has made significant interventions in one of the most impoverished communities in the State of Florida, bringing computers and state-of-the-arts technologies to children who otherwise would have no such access.
He has been supported of Dr. Fisher’s maverick spirit and work, and as his note indicates, continues to attempt to corral his spirit into a business perspective. The exchange is offered to show how friends can differ, even critically, and for the effort, gain insight into each other as well as themselves by honest exchange.
The referenced article, Crucible of Leadership, was posted earlier on this blog.
THE WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
I love - LOVE - the article. Tocqueville is one of my all-time favorites, and your analysis of our current political drama is dead-on.
I do have a request for revision, though. I believe that this piece wanders far a field, and what I'm hoping for is something tighter for our audience, which will consist of intellectuals, Danielle Steel readers with a social bent, and all in between. (Also, the election will be a vague memory by the time our December issue hits the stands and the mail).
What you wrote your friend and copied us spoke to a very specific issue: If you want to be a true leader, learn to lead volunteers. Without position power, you will have to persuade and inspire, rather than coerce. I know from first-hand experience what a new and challenging skill that is for a "boss." In my company, I expect you to perform because I'm paying you. With volunteers.... people vote with their feet.
A big part of what we're trying to accomplish through NI's Adam Smith Awards and as an ongoing theme in IMPACT is to mold the behavior of social- and business leaders. "Influence The Influencers," the sign that hangs on my wall across from my desk, says it all.
This may sound cynical, but I want to change people's behavior, much more than their souls. So even if you're just out for #1, I want to show that doing the right thing will advance your agenda. If people want to polish their leadership skills in order to help more people, great! They should volunteer. If they want to polish their leadership skills to win that corner office, great! They should volunteer, too.
The letter you wrote your candidate-friend, expanded with even more real-world examples from your days at Honeywell and elsewhere, would serve our inaugural issue perfectly. I know such a piece isn't going to be as stimulating to you as what you just wrote. I hope you don't mind.
Regards,
Ted
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ted,
You have not been the first one to accuse me of "wandering far a field." It is no doubt accurate. I write as I see things, and while my focus is often abstract my intentions are manifestly concrete.
Quite frankly, I am not a commercial guy, but write the truth as I sense it.
The question has been asked of me many times, "Who is your audience?"
I am my audience, and if I make connection with others, all the better. As my mail indicates, I do, of people of broadly different backgrounds but significant accomplishments in their chosen endeavors. While not necessarily agreeing, they find me "refreshing," whatever that means.
I am not a "Dick, see Dick, see Dick run: Jane, see Jane, see Jane run" writer. Nor am I an electronic acronym disciple but a 20th century person who has always walked and talked in the 21st century.
In "Confident Selling for the 90s," which was an update of its 1970s edition, I wrote about the old and new guard regarding sales people, but was thinking of everyman of the present century.
The book was published in 1992. For example, I saw our preoccupation with technicians (old guard) vs. strategists (new guard); short term focus vs. long term focus; loyalty to company vs. loyalty to self; employee vs. owner; crusader vs. communicator, and so on. In a sense, old stuff but actually not.
For instance, we Americans think of ourselves as members of an individualistic society, but we have been essentially a conforming society most of our history with a mantra of material individualism and expression.
Once tattoos were for renegades only, now everyone sports them. I mention tattoos because they are external signs of nothing going on inside. People show them to shout out whom they are when whom they are can only be discovered in what is not showing. It is a private conversation with self that no longer takes place. Individualism is such a conversation.
Moreover, individualism in a spiritual sense is the real basis of individualism of the new century. It is exploding across the globe as I write.
There is an abstract theme throughout this selling book, which is actually a confident thinking book. Please, be patient with my wandering.
The book, you see, is not actually about selling a product or service, but in believing in oneself. Once that is achieved, the rest is academic. Self-knowing and self-acceptance are the critical components of spiritual development for a concrete payoff. Volunteerism introduces the individual to that possibility.
It is not an accident that there are no other books like CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s except in exoteric bookshops.
Take the fact that I mention in the book's "Introduction" leaving Nalco in my mid-thirties making the equivalent in today’s dollars of nearly $500,000, saying, "If I wasn't doing my job, you'd fire me, right? Well, the company is failing me. So, I'm firing the company."
Was that madness? I don't think so. It was half a lifetime ago, and if anything, is more pronounced in me than ever before.
Ted, I don't write for intellectuals, or academics, and I have no idea who reads Danielle Steel, knowing only that she is a best selling author. I don't think in terms of "my niche," but in terms of an emerging world, in which the United States of America is going to have a less and less dominant role in the scheme of things, a role for which it denies as a possibility and therefore for which it is not prepared.
I see Third World Russia blackmailing the world with its oil and its nuclear bomb arsenal; I see atheistic China attempting to bridge the gap between it and the rest of the world with capitalistic expansion smothering out the need for spiritual nutrition with atheistic communism; I see India that rules like the abused child (product of the British Empire) that now abuses its own (diverse ethnic) family in a similar fashion, again, attempting to use economic and technological substantive growth to supplant its spiritual lapses; I see major South American countries repressed for centuries with draconian and mythic Roman Catholicism and oligarchic authorities trying to dissolve these ties and gain some purchase by attaching themselves to these emerging Third World Powers such as China, Russia and India.
I've not mentioned the "cradle of civilization," where the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates valley of ancient Persia are attempting to become postmodern bypassing the need of modernity, driven by ancient myths and abuses and clerical dominance.
Samuel P. Huntington wrote in his 1993 book, "The Clash of Civilizations" that "the conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating civilizations." He also charges in that book that "the very phase world community has become a euphemism to give legitimacy to the actions of the West."
Yes, Huntington has his critics, which I find inane such as civilizations don't control states, states control civilizations; no culture is an island, or the most absurd to my mind and the most optimistic that the power of prosperity and staying the course will neutralize the complexities. The latter is from the Wall Street Journal, the clerical guide to materialism.
In my wandering way, I mention six points (in this article) as benchmarks to the crucible of leadership, epitomized in volunteerism. I use these to illustrate what I see as the dangers of moral decline and rising decadence in the West. I do this implicitly as I often do in my writing.
I see this decadence as a manifestation of pointless wealth and self-indulgent preoccupation, starving the mind and heart of its necessary spiritual nutrition. The West has led the world down this decline despite the fact the West has 800-900 million people to the rest of the world’s nearly 5 billion. The Pied Piper of Progress has endangered this small planet with its excess while expecting Band Aid therapy to suffice to keep it extant.
Yes, the West does some things for the Third World, but why not an army of volunteers of 1 million or more in a Peace Corps from the United States; why not a confederation of nations of 10 million Peace Corps volunteers in a spiritual-material alliance rather than military alliances? Less we forget we are always on the brink of nuclear holocaust.
It is not cynical, Ted, to change people's behavior without changing their souls. It is impossible. True, surface change can occur when it is pecuniary advantageous to change behavior in the short run, but it is impossible, absolutely impossible, to do it permanently.
The great religious leaders of Jesus Christ, Mohammedan, the Prophets of the Old Testament, and Buddha, among others all essentially spoke with the same spiritual voice that was to be corrupted by their followers who wanted to change behavior without regards to their souls. It is not only Americans who like shortcuts. All of these leaders have been corrupted by this fundamental disregard.
You and I are not on the same page when you talk of "polishing leadership skills" as if they are a pair of Florsheins. We had fifty years of treating leadership as a "style," and now a batch of entrepreneurs are treating leadership as a condiment that can be attained by a collection of recipes, notwithstanding my friend's "Leadership Excellent" contributors, of which I have been one. These all miss the point.
We have gone way too far towards material success (the corner office) and need a decided correction towards spiritual fulfillment (a sense of a life well spent).
As for my writing being stimulating or not, it never occurs to me. I am one single person that has risen from very humble beginnings with an imperfect education, but a wide exposure to this world and how it works and fails to work, and I write from that perspective. Few read me, and even that few often find me contemptible because I don't say what they want to hear.
One of my favorite writers on education is the African American Thomas Sowell. He recently wrote this:
"The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer, and they don't want explanations that do not give them that."
I used the present presidential campaign to illustrate my point, which no matter how it comes out, will be a momentous change in the constellation that is America.
If America is an idea, then that idea also has had to make room for color in a way it has never made room before. Often in my work, I have known brilliant men and women of color who pined away their time in sub roles only because they were of color. That is changing as inevitably as night follows day because people of color dominate the world, and if they are not in positions of leadership than the world's very survival is in jeopardy. Yes, I wander but my wandering is always in focus.
When you have been enslaved or in subservient roles for nearly 300 years, you cannot make a correction in 50 or more years; nor can the world of color suddenly behave as if the West because it is not the West, and the West does not have answers for it.
Now, I'll get back to the "crucible of leadership" and why I think volunteerism is so important. You don't volunteer to influence, or if you do, you're going to be disappointed. You volunteer to serve. Service leadership is volunteerism personified. You don't talk about transformation; you demonstrate it, as you put it, with your feet, with your actions.
You ask for examples of volunteerism and the dismal problems that occur when it is absent. It is in my books and articles, more than a million published words. It is out there! What can I say?
Ted, I have neither the heart nor the head of the insurgent. I’m just trying to make sense of a senseless world to myself, and hope it may resonate with others. I don’t care if it offends. I am not trying to recruit converts. I don’t care if I lose friends. I actually only have one real friend, BB, and that is more than enough for me. And, finally, I have proven decidedly over time, I am not commercial. I can live with that. People are more likely to read me when my voice has been stilled, but they will read me. I have no doubt of that.
Be always well,
Jim
Friday, September 05, 2008
CRUCIBLE OF LEADERSHIP -- VOLUNTEERISM
CRUCIBLE OF LEADERSHIP – VOLUNTEERISM
JAMES R. FISHER, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 4, 2008
“VOLUNTEER: One who renders a service or takes part in a transaction while having no legal concern or interest.”
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Tenth Edition)
In “Democracy in America” (Volume One, 1835), Alex de Tocqueville quotes a letter written by an aristocratic Frenchwoman who mingles descriptions of the weather with news of the torture of local peasants who were revolting against a new tax. The lady was not an unkind person, Tocqueville explains, but was full of kindness only for her own class. Her range of sympathies extended only to those who were equals. She could not imagine herself in a place of the peasants.
In America, Tocqueville found a surprising display of charities of all kinds, as well as of good Samaritanism among perfect strangers. This sympathetic attitude is not inherent in the culture of the Americans, Tocqueville argues, but is rather a product of equalitarianism.
He points to the inability of the white Americans to sympathize with the plight of the Negro slaves, whom they do not regard as equals. It is the limits of equality, and not the cultural outlook, that set the limits of sympathy.
Would this revered observer be surprised with America nearly 174 years later? We can only wonder. Today we have an African American running for the Presidency of the United States on the Democratic Ticket, and a woman as Vice President running on the Republican Ticket.
One of the consistent themes through all the current campaign rhetoric is how common these candidates are, or want us to believe them to be. No one would suggest that equality has reached the point of totally supplanting the aristocratic Frenchwoman’s perspective, but it is clear we have reached the point where the rhetoric if not the reality would suggest that is the case. Let us examine some aspects of this phenomenon of assumed shared aims more closely and attempt to understand why it is important, especially now.
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY REALITY
(1) INDIVIDUALISM COUNTS
There would not have been a successful Barak Obama candidacy for president without the people’s medium, the Internet. Hillary Clinton was all but the nominee until Obama used this new technology to recruit people and create a multi-million dollar war chest of funds from volunteers across the nation. True, more often than not these were young idealistic contributors with limited funds rather than old and established captains of industry and commerce.
Obama created excitement and enthusiasm with his theme of change and a new beginning. A nimble mind and gifted speaker, he chose to deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver on the forty-fifth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “I have a dream.”
The Democratic presidential nominee made an effort to reach a demographic, geographic and personality profile of a citizenry wanting to be heard. He enabled them to resonate as if with one voice. He recognized that the volunteer is an individual but finds its voice in the collective conscience.
(2) PUBLIC SERVICE vs. SELF-INTERESTS
Not to be outdone on this issue of equality and equal opportunity, presidential nominee for the Republican Party, John McCain, has had a reputation of being a crusader against the so-called concentrated powers of selfishness such as pork barrel legislation, the oil lobby, the Alaskan $200 million bridge to nowhere of Don Young and Ted Stevens, and the outrageous contracts to Pentagon contractors by lobbyist puppeteer Jack Abramoff.
Corruption kills volunteerism while integrity seeds volunteers who rise from every section of the country when they feel they are needed and respected as meaningful contributors.
(3) NATURAL DISASTERS AND THE RESPONSE TO THEM
We witnessed the fiasco of Hurricane Katrina that hit the city of New Orleans and other communities along the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, and the subsequent fumbling and bumbling of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). Not only was there a failure of coordination between local, state, and federal authorities, but also ordinary citizens were left out of the equation. They were made to feel they did not count.
This was especially true of those living in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. When the levee gave way there, and flooded the city taking hundreds of lives and leaving thousands scrambling for shelter, volunteers across the country rushed to help, only to find no one in charge.
Fortunately, this error was not repeated with Hurricane Gustav. Instead, there was coordination, cooperation, and sensible planning to enable more than 2 million citizens to evacuate the area safely. Unfortunately, more than a week later 1.2 million homes are still without electrical power.
Throughout American history, volunteerism has reached its zenith in dedication and selfless service during natural disasters. Yet, what Hurricane Katrina taught us is that volunteerism is not an occasional or emergency activity but needs to be part of the hard wiring of the collective psyche of society. When it is not, people wait to be led, and as Katrina proved, that can be disastrous.
(4) VALUES CANNOT BE TAUGHT, THEY ACCRUE, ERODE AND CHANGE
Many reading this know of World War II only from history books. It was a period of volunteerism on a grand scale. America was attacked by the Empire of Japan suddenly and deliberately on December 7, 1941 on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. Nearly 3,000 American military servicemen and servicewomen were killed or wounded, and the Seventh Fleet of the US Navy was virtually immobilized.
The United States was forced from a peacetime philosophy of isolationism into a wartime combatant society overnight. There was no sacrifice too great, no inconvenience too monumental for tens of thousands of young people to volunteer for military service, and tens of thousands of wives and mothers to choose to serve their country by working in defense factories. This collective effort grew out of the American culture and value system of the common good. It was not manufactured; it existed; it was the value system of the American people.
A value system cannot be taught. It accrues over time. Values are demonstrated in action, not in rhetoric. There is no substitute for this pervading reality.
Over the past fifty years or so, or since WWII, there has been erosion in the value of the common good. We have seen selfishness take precedence over service, what you can get over what you can give. It is obvious in the home and in the classroom, in the workplace and in the government.
In the process, we have confused rights with privileges. We have a right to a public education, but it is a privilege to learn. The honor of intellectual labor is not a college degree but the enlightenment, maturity, and understanding that such a privilege makes possible. Parents, teachers, priests and executives should differentiate the difference between rights and privileges. There was a time when only the upper aristocratic classes had access to scholarship and the privilege of enlightenment.
Tocqueville has an interesting take on this:
“There is no class in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary fortune and leisure and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor. Accordingly, there is an equal want of the desire and the power of application to these objects.”
We want the privilege of being wise without the effort. We desire an education but not the pain of its attainment. Students often hate the need for education but want to enjoy its fruits; parents are often afraid to be parents for fear their children won’t like them; teachers are afraid to be teachers complaining they don’t get enough administrative support; and executives are afraid to have honest feedback for fear it might compromise their intended course. Each of these dispositions kills self-expression and volunteerism.
Americans of WWII vintage generally think in terms of “what is good for the country is good enough for me." But Americans of the post Vietnam War era think more in terms of “the right to fail, the right to work, the right to civil disobedience, civil rights, human rights, or in terms of controlling their own destiny without any consequences for their actions." They have an antipathy for the collective reality. I have coined this disposition and orientation, personhood.
It has led to the Hippie, Yippie, X Generation, Y Generation, and the “Me” Generation, all in succession. Traditional American workers continue to value the common good while professionals increasingly have adopted the value system of personhood.
It appears personhood is a pivotal orientation, which is eroding as these “spoiled brat” generations come increasingly into leadership positions.
Americans who are now becoming 40, 50 and 60-year-olds have witnessed a perceptible gap between expectations and achievements; between the standing of the United States in the world with what they anticipated. They are disappointmented to discover the accumulation of wealth is a bridge to nowhere; while finding service to others, philanthropy, and volunteerism not only is gratifying but enriching to the soul.
This cyclic return to good sense could not be taught, but had to be experienced.
(5) THE WISDOM OF THE DIDACTIC IN ITS ASCENDANCY
We are in the age of a rebirth of volunteerism, which does not spring from emergency or crusader zeal, but from a spirit of natural connection. We are also in a transitional period in which institutional authority is disintegrating at a more alarming rate than the alleged dissolving ice caps in the Artic and Antarctica.
Authority is now a groundswell from the people, and not a trickle down condition from the top. Ordinary citizens have come into their own and never more powerfully than since the advent of the Internet and avalanche of bloggers. It is the Age of the Amateur.
Authority has moved almost imperceptivity away from defined authority to the amateur thinker. I write in “A Look Back To See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007):
“The amateur thinker can be defined as having the ability to articulate the world of ideas in broad philosophical terms comprehensible if not immediately applicable to the average man. He is a doer who thinks out of life. Compare this to the preference for technical language of the specialist. Specialization provides a place to hide from the masses in the cloistered abbey of omniscience. Instead of substance, the average man is offered the dribble of bastardized syntax of the technical in the vernacular. He is not the audience. He is a distraction. To console him he is given a few new words and terms that become popular without insight or understanding. In Iowa, we call that feeding slop to the pigs.”
The palpable evidence is in presidential candidacy of Barak Obama, a one-term senator of four years with no executive experience, and Sarah Palin, a vice president candidate and a one-term governor of Alaska for less than two years in a state with more moose and bears than people.
The African American Obama rose out of the bowels of mix race and a single parent upbringing while housewife and hockey mom Palin rose out of the same commonality. Much is made of the historical significance of this without realizing top down authority is dissolving while bottom up authority is just gaining its stride.
(6) A CASE IN POINT
A man I esteem is running for a city council seat in my local community. He emailed me his frustration with all kinds of people trying to give him advice on what to do and not to do. He thought the way they perceived him was the reason they pushed for his candidacy. I responded to his email in this manner:
“Your best counsel is yourself, and your best sounding board is your wife. Anyone beyond that has a vague idea of who, what, and why you are. They have a special interest in your candidacy but only know you in singular dimensions.
You have brought value added to whatever you have done, going into the US Army right out of high school, then qualifying for Officers Candidate School, rising to a full-bird Colonel, acquiring a college degree in business administration along the way, and always working within the community you found yourself to make it better. You are energetic, creative, yes, impatient, but we need that in people who run for public office.
You are not only a proven leader in the military sense but also more importantly, a proven leader in the volunteer sense. I know because I have worked and served with you in that capacity.”
I then shared with him my experience as a psychologist with Honeywell, Inc. I tried to get some executives who led with position power to do volunteer work. Leadership in volunteer work is demonstrated more through persuasion than authority. None took me up on that challenge.
Over the years, I told him, young engineers would come to me after attending a seminar on leadership, and say, “I’ll be a worker-centered leader when I’m a program manager.” Many of them became program managers and went on to being directors or above. Somehow in the transition they had forgotten the promise to lead by following, and instead asserted themselves as omniscient, or exactly as they had previously been led.
My friend had been commander of some 3,500 men and women, and was used to his word being the law. I know because the captain of my Flag Ship of the Sixth Fleet, USS Salem (Ca-139) was God incarnate as I would imagine the colonel’s people saw him. I didn’t meet him when he had that command authority, but when he was a community volunteer with no position power, but the power of his ideas, intelligence, social skills, and persuasion. These will all serve him well in elective office for volunteerism is the crucible of leadership.
_____________
A version of this piece is to appear in the first issue of IMPACT in December 2008.
JAMES R. FISHER, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 4, 2008
“VOLUNTEER: One who renders a service or takes part in a transaction while having no legal concern or interest.”
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Tenth Edition)
In “Democracy in America” (Volume One, 1835), Alex de Tocqueville quotes a letter written by an aristocratic Frenchwoman who mingles descriptions of the weather with news of the torture of local peasants who were revolting against a new tax. The lady was not an unkind person, Tocqueville explains, but was full of kindness only for her own class. Her range of sympathies extended only to those who were equals. She could not imagine herself in a place of the peasants.
In America, Tocqueville found a surprising display of charities of all kinds, as well as of good Samaritanism among perfect strangers. This sympathetic attitude is not inherent in the culture of the Americans, Tocqueville argues, but is rather a product of equalitarianism.
He points to the inability of the white Americans to sympathize with the plight of the Negro slaves, whom they do not regard as equals. It is the limits of equality, and not the cultural outlook, that set the limits of sympathy.
Would this revered observer be surprised with America nearly 174 years later? We can only wonder. Today we have an African American running for the Presidency of the United States on the Democratic Ticket, and a woman as Vice President running on the Republican Ticket.
One of the consistent themes through all the current campaign rhetoric is how common these candidates are, or want us to believe them to be. No one would suggest that equality has reached the point of totally supplanting the aristocratic Frenchwoman’s perspective, but it is clear we have reached the point where the rhetoric if not the reality would suggest that is the case. Let us examine some aspects of this phenomenon of assumed shared aims more closely and attempt to understand why it is important, especially now.
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY REALITY
(1) INDIVIDUALISM COUNTS
There would not have been a successful Barak Obama candidacy for president without the people’s medium, the Internet. Hillary Clinton was all but the nominee until Obama used this new technology to recruit people and create a multi-million dollar war chest of funds from volunteers across the nation. True, more often than not these were young idealistic contributors with limited funds rather than old and established captains of industry and commerce.
Obama created excitement and enthusiasm with his theme of change and a new beginning. A nimble mind and gifted speaker, he chose to deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver on the forty-fifth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “I have a dream.”
The Democratic presidential nominee made an effort to reach a demographic, geographic and personality profile of a citizenry wanting to be heard. He enabled them to resonate as if with one voice. He recognized that the volunteer is an individual but finds its voice in the collective conscience.
(2) PUBLIC SERVICE vs. SELF-INTERESTS
Not to be outdone on this issue of equality and equal opportunity, presidential nominee for the Republican Party, John McCain, has had a reputation of being a crusader against the so-called concentrated powers of selfishness such as pork barrel legislation, the oil lobby, the Alaskan $200 million bridge to nowhere of Don Young and Ted Stevens, and the outrageous contracts to Pentagon contractors by lobbyist puppeteer Jack Abramoff.
Corruption kills volunteerism while integrity seeds volunteers who rise from every section of the country when they feel they are needed and respected as meaningful contributors.
(3) NATURAL DISASTERS AND THE RESPONSE TO THEM
We witnessed the fiasco of Hurricane Katrina that hit the city of New Orleans and other communities along the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, and the subsequent fumbling and bumbling of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). Not only was there a failure of coordination between local, state, and federal authorities, but also ordinary citizens were left out of the equation. They were made to feel they did not count.
This was especially true of those living in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. When the levee gave way there, and flooded the city taking hundreds of lives and leaving thousands scrambling for shelter, volunteers across the country rushed to help, only to find no one in charge.
Fortunately, this error was not repeated with Hurricane Gustav. Instead, there was coordination, cooperation, and sensible planning to enable more than 2 million citizens to evacuate the area safely. Unfortunately, more than a week later 1.2 million homes are still without electrical power.
Throughout American history, volunteerism has reached its zenith in dedication and selfless service during natural disasters. Yet, what Hurricane Katrina taught us is that volunteerism is not an occasional or emergency activity but needs to be part of the hard wiring of the collective psyche of society. When it is not, people wait to be led, and as Katrina proved, that can be disastrous.
(4) VALUES CANNOT BE TAUGHT, THEY ACCRUE, ERODE AND CHANGE
Many reading this know of World War II only from history books. It was a period of volunteerism on a grand scale. America was attacked by the Empire of Japan suddenly and deliberately on December 7, 1941 on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. Nearly 3,000 American military servicemen and servicewomen were killed or wounded, and the Seventh Fleet of the US Navy was virtually immobilized.
The United States was forced from a peacetime philosophy of isolationism into a wartime combatant society overnight. There was no sacrifice too great, no inconvenience too monumental for tens of thousands of young people to volunteer for military service, and tens of thousands of wives and mothers to choose to serve their country by working in defense factories. This collective effort grew out of the American culture and value system of the common good. It was not manufactured; it existed; it was the value system of the American people.
A value system cannot be taught. It accrues over time. Values are demonstrated in action, not in rhetoric. There is no substitute for this pervading reality.
Over the past fifty years or so, or since WWII, there has been erosion in the value of the common good. We have seen selfishness take precedence over service, what you can get over what you can give. It is obvious in the home and in the classroom, in the workplace and in the government.
In the process, we have confused rights with privileges. We have a right to a public education, but it is a privilege to learn. The honor of intellectual labor is not a college degree but the enlightenment, maturity, and understanding that such a privilege makes possible. Parents, teachers, priests and executives should differentiate the difference between rights and privileges. There was a time when only the upper aristocratic classes had access to scholarship and the privilege of enlightenment.
Tocqueville has an interesting take on this:
“There is no class in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary fortune and leisure and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor. Accordingly, there is an equal want of the desire and the power of application to these objects.”
We want the privilege of being wise without the effort. We desire an education but not the pain of its attainment. Students often hate the need for education but want to enjoy its fruits; parents are often afraid to be parents for fear their children won’t like them; teachers are afraid to be teachers complaining they don’t get enough administrative support; and executives are afraid to have honest feedback for fear it might compromise their intended course. Each of these dispositions kills self-expression and volunteerism.
Americans of WWII vintage generally think in terms of “what is good for the country is good enough for me." But Americans of the post Vietnam War era think more in terms of “the right to fail, the right to work, the right to civil disobedience, civil rights, human rights, or in terms of controlling their own destiny without any consequences for their actions." They have an antipathy for the collective reality. I have coined this disposition and orientation, personhood.
It has led to the Hippie, Yippie, X Generation, Y Generation, and the “Me” Generation, all in succession. Traditional American workers continue to value the common good while professionals increasingly have adopted the value system of personhood.
It appears personhood is a pivotal orientation, which is eroding as these “spoiled brat” generations come increasingly into leadership positions.
Americans who are now becoming 40, 50 and 60-year-olds have witnessed a perceptible gap between expectations and achievements; between the standing of the United States in the world with what they anticipated. They are disappointmented to discover the accumulation of wealth is a bridge to nowhere; while finding service to others, philanthropy, and volunteerism not only is gratifying but enriching to the soul.
This cyclic return to good sense could not be taught, but had to be experienced.
(5) THE WISDOM OF THE DIDACTIC IN ITS ASCENDANCY
We are in the age of a rebirth of volunteerism, which does not spring from emergency or crusader zeal, but from a spirit of natural connection. We are also in a transitional period in which institutional authority is disintegrating at a more alarming rate than the alleged dissolving ice caps in the Artic and Antarctica.
Authority is now a groundswell from the people, and not a trickle down condition from the top. Ordinary citizens have come into their own and never more powerfully than since the advent of the Internet and avalanche of bloggers. It is the Age of the Amateur.
Authority has moved almost imperceptivity away from defined authority to the amateur thinker. I write in “A Look Back To See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007):
“The amateur thinker can be defined as having the ability to articulate the world of ideas in broad philosophical terms comprehensible if not immediately applicable to the average man. He is a doer who thinks out of life. Compare this to the preference for technical language of the specialist. Specialization provides a place to hide from the masses in the cloistered abbey of omniscience. Instead of substance, the average man is offered the dribble of bastardized syntax of the technical in the vernacular. He is not the audience. He is a distraction. To console him he is given a few new words and terms that become popular without insight or understanding. In Iowa, we call that feeding slop to the pigs.”
The palpable evidence is in presidential candidacy of Barak Obama, a one-term senator of four years with no executive experience, and Sarah Palin, a vice president candidate and a one-term governor of Alaska for less than two years in a state with more moose and bears than people.
The African American Obama rose out of the bowels of mix race and a single parent upbringing while housewife and hockey mom Palin rose out of the same commonality. Much is made of the historical significance of this without realizing top down authority is dissolving while bottom up authority is just gaining its stride.
(6) A CASE IN POINT
A man I esteem is running for a city council seat in my local community. He emailed me his frustration with all kinds of people trying to give him advice on what to do and not to do. He thought the way they perceived him was the reason they pushed for his candidacy. I responded to his email in this manner:
“Your best counsel is yourself, and your best sounding board is your wife. Anyone beyond that has a vague idea of who, what, and why you are. They have a special interest in your candidacy but only know you in singular dimensions.
You have brought value added to whatever you have done, going into the US Army right out of high school, then qualifying for Officers Candidate School, rising to a full-bird Colonel, acquiring a college degree in business administration along the way, and always working within the community you found yourself to make it better. You are energetic, creative, yes, impatient, but we need that in people who run for public office.
You are not only a proven leader in the military sense but also more importantly, a proven leader in the volunteer sense. I know because I have worked and served with you in that capacity.”
I then shared with him my experience as a psychologist with Honeywell, Inc. I tried to get some executives who led with position power to do volunteer work. Leadership in volunteer work is demonstrated more through persuasion than authority. None took me up on that challenge.
Over the years, I told him, young engineers would come to me after attending a seminar on leadership, and say, “I’ll be a worker-centered leader when I’m a program manager.” Many of them became program managers and went on to being directors or above. Somehow in the transition they had forgotten the promise to lead by following, and instead asserted themselves as omniscient, or exactly as they had previously been led.
My friend had been commander of some 3,500 men and women, and was used to his word being the law. I know because the captain of my Flag Ship of the Sixth Fleet, USS Salem (Ca-139) was God incarnate as I would imagine the colonel’s people saw him. I didn’t meet him when he had that command authority, but when he was a community volunteer with no position power, but the power of his ideas, intelligence, social skills, and persuasion. These will all serve him well in elective office for volunteerism is the crucible of leadership.
_____________
A version of this piece is to appear in the first issue of IMPACT in December 2008.
Monday, August 11, 2008
A Personal & Professional Response: HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!
HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!
Reference:
Dr. Fisher's essay was written to acknowledge the 63rd anniversary of the American B-29 bomber named Enola Gay, which took off from Tinian Island in the Marianas to drop a single atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945.
More than 80,000 mainly civilians died in less than a minute, and led to 140,000 deaths in later years. In that instant, most of Hiroshima ceased to exist.
Two days after Hiroshima, on August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan (as agreed to at Yalta in February 1945 by president Franklin D. Roosevelt, prime minister Winston Churchill and commissar Joseph Stalin).
An atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 10, 1945, with 40,000 mainly civilian deaths, which eventually led to over 100,000 deaths.
On August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered.
Japan's formal unconditional surrender to the Allied Forces was presented in a document to General Douglas MacAruthur aboard the U. S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.
Humanity had acquired the power to destroy the world and mankind. Sixty-three years later the world trembles in the shadow of the atomic bomb's mushroom cloud.
WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
Apologies for the delayed response.
Minus hospital time in Pearl Harbor, my father spent the time from late 1942 to mid-1946 in the South Pacific, almost all of it on an escort carrier CVE-84, USS Shamrock Bay. He missed Midway, but caught most of the action thereafter. In July 1945, his carrier was part of a task force headed toward Tokyo Bay to join other American forces building there for the final assault on the Japanese home island. Although he’d survived a lot of stuff he shouldn't have, including the kamikazes at Leyte, he was 100% convinced that this was it. The reason being, the ordnance hold of their ship, and those of the others, was loaded with poison gas. One bomb or torpedo and they were all goners.
Based on what they'd seen on Iwo, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa, they were convinced that the Japanese would dig in even more fiercely on their home island. It would take forever to root them out of the mountains and caves of Japan. So, the primary battle plan was the widespread use of gas through aerial bombing. The ground invasion would then focus on ‘mopping up’ operations. Casualty projections were 500,000 – 750,000 Americans, 1.5M Japanese military, and over 4M Japanese civilians.
Roosevelt didn't believe in the bomb, and undertook the project only after considerable nagging by Einstein and others who knew the Germans were working on it. We built four bombs, and used one at Alamogordo, leaving three. The Japanese didn't know that. For all they knew, we were building them hand over fist. Shifting to Dresden, some believe that the firebombing was revenge. More likely, it was an attempt to break the will to fight. Our strategic bombing of military and industrial targets made war fighting difficult, but the fire bombing of Dresden brought despair to the German people, and coupled with their disaster on the Russian front, broke their will.
When Truman took over, he took a more pragmatic stance. He was willing to try the bombs, and if they didn't work, he could still follow the primary plan. They worked in that they convinced the Emperor that we could / would annihilate the Japanese race. He stepped in, ended the war, and was almost assassinated for his trouble.
In the end, about 175,000 people died. That's a lot of folks. However, if you had to make the decision, would it be more moral to incur the casualties of the primary plan rather than use a nuclear device? I’d have to recheck my data, but I believe more Japanese were actually killed in the incendiary attacks on Tokyo leading up to August 1945 than in the atomic bombs themselves. The bombs accomplished a second objective as well. They sent a message to the world that said, “We have it, we’ll use it. Don’t mess with us again.”
It’s easy for artists and poets to wring their hands, but as usual, it’s with less than total context. The Japanese bemoan the events and build memorials, but I see them building no memorials to Nanking.
Atomic weapons are horrible things, but it is their very horror that gave them value – they forced even politicians to constrain their military adventurism. They kept the cold war an economic contest. The good news is their time has passed. Both candidates for President have said they will downsize and DE-alert nuclear weapons, and frankly, the time has come. The Russians welcome that too, as they want to do the same. Nuclear weapons are expensive to maintain and dangerous to have around. The only limit to how fast we can downsize is how fast we can destroy the material in civilian reactors. (It’s not good to have plutonium around in any format.) We can however, DE-alert immediately. It only requires Presidential order.
Unfortunately, we cannot un-invent technology. Neither can we keep the technology to ourselves forever. We’re going to have to face nuclear terror, it is inevitable. However, the time of major powers hoarding thousands of weapons is gone. I see the world’s major powers downsizing to dozens of weapons, not thousands; just enough to be a deterrent. As I write this, USSTRATCOM is doing their homework to determine what to downsize and when to downsize it in anticipation of a new President. I know this because I am personally involved in these exercises. My career today focuses on modernizing the technologies to permit us to go to the minimum number necessary for deterrent. (Every target we can hit conventionally is one more nuke we don’t need.) Good riddance I say.
What of the future? It’s my observation that people who have something worthwhile to lose, don’t much like war. It’s my hope, my dream, that as economic modernization and uplifted lifestyle spreads around the globe, the people themselves will back away from war, leaving the politicians to waggle their tongues and weenies at each other. That’s what they’re best at anyway.
v/r
e
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
e
Thank you for a sage and thoughtful personal and professional response. Man has a future if there are more with a mindset such as yours. I am humbled to have my reflections of this tragedy placed in such meaningful perspective. We are on the same page. May temperance prevail.
Be always well,
Jim
WRITER WRITES AGAIN:
I know this has been beat to death, and I apologize for responding yesterday after you cried uncle; I was working through emails up from the bottom.
I’ve been thinking though, about the civilian target thing. It seems to me that reticence about hitting civilian targets is a product of modern media – bringing into people’s homes the true brutality of war on civilians. Civilians have always gotten the dirty end of war. I could think of no war in history where civilian targets were not attacked, and as you go farther back, the sacking of civilian targets for plunder actually becomes the objective. In modern times, I think attacking of civilian targets reflects a frustration that sticking to military targets is not bringing the conflict to the desired ends. Civilian targets are soft and indefensible.
When the cold war began, both the US and Soviets targeted each other’s cities. As American missiles grew more accurate, the warheads grew smaller, and the targets switched to 100% military. The Soviets today are 50 – 50, targeting both our weapons and our cities. Perhaps, the reticence of attacking civilian targets actually reflects progress in the maturity of our species? Wouldn’t that be Grande? As demonstrated by Gen Giap in Vietnam, all you have to do to win is break the opponent’s will to fight. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to annihilate him. Maybe we’re gradually evolving to where Sun Tzu was in 400 BC – to win without fighting is the highest glory.
Reference:
Dr. Fisher's essay was written to acknowledge the 63rd anniversary of the American B-29 bomber named Enola Gay, which took off from Tinian Island in the Marianas to drop a single atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945.
More than 80,000 mainly civilians died in less than a minute, and led to 140,000 deaths in later years. In that instant, most of Hiroshima ceased to exist.
Two days after Hiroshima, on August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan (as agreed to at Yalta in February 1945 by president Franklin D. Roosevelt, prime minister Winston Churchill and commissar Joseph Stalin).
An atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 10, 1945, with 40,000 mainly civilian deaths, which eventually led to over 100,000 deaths.
On August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered.
Japan's formal unconditional surrender to the Allied Forces was presented in a document to General Douglas MacAruthur aboard the U. S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.
Humanity had acquired the power to destroy the world and mankind. Sixty-three years later the world trembles in the shadow of the atomic bomb's mushroom cloud.
WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
Apologies for the delayed response.
Minus hospital time in Pearl Harbor, my father spent the time from late 1942 to mid-1946 in the South Pacific, almost all of it on an escort carrier CVE-84, USS Shamrock Bay. He missed Midway, but caught most of the action thereafter. In July 1945, his carrier was part of a task force headed toward Tokyo Bay to join other American forces building there for the final assault on the Japanese home island. Although he’d survived a lot of stuff he shouldn't have, including the kamikazes at Leyte, he was 100% convinced that this was it. The reason being, the ordnance hold of their ship, and those of the others, was loaded with poison gas. One bomb or torpedo and they were all goners.
Based on what they'd seen on Iwo, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa, they were convinced that the Japanese would dig in even more fiercely on their home island. It would take forever to root them out of the mountains and caves of Japan. So, the primary battle plan was the widespread use of gas through aerial bombing. The ground invasion would then focus on ‘mopping up’ operations. Casualty projections were 500,000 – 750,000 Americans, 1.5M Japanese military, and over 4M Japanese civilians.
Roosevelt didn't believe in the bomb, and undertook the project only after considerable nagging by Einstein and others who knew the Germans were working on it. We built four bombs, and used one at Alamogordo, leaving three. The Japanese didn't know that. For all they knew, we were building them hand over fist. Shifting to Dresden, some believe that the firebombing was revenge. More likely, it was an attempt to break the will to fight. Our strategic bombing of military and industrial targets made war fighting difficult, but the fire bombing of Dresden brought despair to the German people, and coupled with their disaster on the Russian front, broke their will.
When Truman took over, he took a more pragmatic stance. He was willing to try the bombs, and if they didn't work, he could still follow the primary plan. They worked in that they convinced the Emperor that we could / would annihilate the Japanese race. He stepped in, ended the war, and was almost assassinated for his trouble.
In the end, about 175,000 people died. That's a lot of folks. However, if you had to make the decision, would it be more moral to incur the casualties of the primary plan rather than use a nuclear device? I’d have to recheck my data, but I believe more Japanese were actually killed in the incendiary attacks on Tokyo leading up to August 1945 than in the atomic bombs themselves. The bombs accomplished a second objective as well. They sent a message to the world that said, “We have it, we’ll use it. Don’t mess with us again.”
It’s easy for artists and poets to wring their hands, but as usual, it’s with less than total context. The Japanese bemoan the events and build memorials, but I see them building no memorials to Nanking.
Atomic weapons are horrible things, but it is their very horror that gave them value – they forced even politicians to constrain their military adventurism. They kept the cold war an economic contest. The good news is their time has passed. Both candidates for President have said they will downsize and DE-alert nuclear weapons, and frankly, the time has come. The Russians welcome that too, as they want to do the same. Nuclear weapons are expensive to maintain and dangerous to have around. The only limit to how fast we can downsize is how fast we can destroy the material in civilian reactors. (It’s not good to have plutonium around in any format.) We can however, DE-alert immediately. It only requires Presidential order.
Unfortunately, we cannot un-invent technology. Neither can we keep the technology to ourselves forever. We’re going to have to face nuclear terror, it is inevitable. However, the time of major powers hoarding thousands of weapons is gone. I see the world’s major powers downsizing to dozens of weapons, not thousands; just enough to be a deterrent. As I write this, USSTRATCOM is doing their homework to determine what to downsize and when to downsize it in anticipation of a new President. I know this because I am personally involved in these exercises. My career today focuses on modernizing the technologies to permit us to go to the minimum number necessary for deterrent. (Every target we can hit conventionally is one more nuke we don’t need.) Good riddance I say.
What of the future? It’s my observation that people who have something worthwhile to lose, don’t much like war. It’s my hope, my dream, that as economic modernization and uplifted lifestyle spreads around the globe, the people themselves will back away from war, leaving the politicians to waggle their tongues and weenies at each other. That’s what they’re best at anyway.
v/r
e
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
e
Thank you for a sage and thoughtful personal and professional response. Man has a future if there are more with a mindset such as yours. I am humbled to have my reflections of this tragedy placed in such meaningful perspective. We are on the same page. May temperance prevail.
Be always well,
Jim
WRITER WRITES AGAIN:
I know this has been beat to death, and I apologize for responding yesterday after you cried uncle; I was working through emails up from the bottom.
I’ve been thinking though, about the civilian target thing. It seems to me that reticence about hitting civilian targets is a product of modern media – bringing into people’s homes the true brutality of war on civilians. Civilians have always gotten the dirty end of war. I could think of no war in history where civilian targets were not attacked, and as you go farther back, the sacking of civilian targets for plunder actually becomes the objective. In modern times, I think attacking of civilian targets reflects a frustration that sticking to military targets is not bringing the conflict to the desired ends. Civilian targets are soft and indefensible.
When the cold war began, both the US and Soviets targeted each other’s cities. As American missiles grew more accurate, the warheads grew smaller, and the targets switched to 100% military. The Soviets today are 50 – 50, targeting both our weapons and our cities. Perhaps, the reticence of attacking civilian targets actually reflects progress in the maturity of our species? Wouldn’t that be Grande? As demonstrated by Gen Giap in Vietnam, all you have to do to win is break the opponent’s will to fight. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to annihilate him. Maybe we’re gradually evolving to where Sun Tzu was in 400 BC – to win without fighting is the highest glory.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET! A Thoughtful and Emotional Response
HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET
A Thoughtful and Emotional Response
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 7, 2008
“Examine what is said, not him who speaks.”
Arabian Proverb
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
That is an evocative piece from beginning to end. Thank you for sharing it with us.
I have to tell you, my immediate reaction to any perceived criticism of the atom bombing of Japan in 1945 is quite visceral. My blood began to boil as I started reading your missive. There are some truths the defense of which I take as a defense of all I hold dear: the sanctity of our Constitution, the righteousness of the Union in the Civil War, the treason of the Confederacy, its leaders, and its entire population in the same, the need for Good nations to act swiftly and decisively to protect the weak from genocide, as in the Balkans in the 90's or Darfur today, and the bombing of Japan in 1945 among them. The fact that there are those among us who question my positions triggers the fight part of my fight-or-flight animal response in a way that rarely happens in other situations. After all, I am an adult, and in most other cases I can control my baser emotions, such as rage or jealousy.
I have taught English to hundreds of adult Japanese students, and the fact that they look upon themselves as innocent victims in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appalls me. To this day, the Japanese are not taught of the horrors of the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the Korean Comfort Women, or any of the many other atrocities perpetrated by their citizen-soldiers. Indeed, they are taught in school that the US was the aggressor in WWII because we cut them off from oil and rubber imports, and their nation would have crumbled had they not "defended" themselves. This travesty is akin to German Holocaust denial, but on an intentional cultural-wide scale.
The bombing of Japan is all the more important to me because of my own father's experience. He turned 18 in November 1944, and signed up for service that same day. He went through basic training to head off to Europe, but had an operation that kept him stateside. His buddies sent him letters from the front. When he had finally recovered, he was redirected to prepare for the invasion of Japan instead. He knew very well that he likely would have been among those estimated hundreds of thousands or one million American servicemen expected to die in the case of an invasion of the Japanese home islands. In all probability, I write this email only because Truman ordered bombs dropped on Japan.
...But it has always bothered me that we chose cities rather than military targets. I haven't got an answer for why that was okay. And so, as I read your piece, I ordered myself to simmer down and let your words sink in. They didn't change my mind about how we ended the war, but they did reinforce my belief that we erred morally in choosing civilian targets.
I look forward to reading your novel. I'll buy it soon. Your talent as a novelist seems even better than your impressive talent as a business writer.
Regards,
T.C.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for a thoughtful and candid reply to this evocative essay. Its intention was the same as Norman Cousins book, MODERN MAN IS OBSOLETE (Viking 1945). The thinking of the 1940s and 1950s, with which we have been locked stepping is irrelevant, and even disastrous.
On this small planet, where water, not oil, will be the call to arms, community, not conflict is the planet’s only salvation. Manuscripts of mine that have addressed this issue have never found a publisher. We can live without oil. We cannot live without water.
The atrocities of the Empire of Japan in China (Rape of Nanking), in the Philippines (Bataan Death March) and Korea, which you list, all happened as well as the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, 1941.
What your Japanese students told you, however, was true. Japan was in a state of panic, a burgeoning population with no natural resources, being cut off from these resources by the United States and others, provided theater for the radical war mongering voices.
Japanese historians today admit it was a war Japan could not win, but felt it had to launch. As one put it, “We have awakened the tiger.”
Killing for whatever reason is not natural to man. It is why men at war suffer mightily adjusting to peace. Yet, in war, man is not only given permission to kill, but wins accolades for the killing.
You wonder why a nonmilitary target was chosen for the atomic bomb. It was meant to send a message, and did.
Hate and ignorance are the supple soil for fanaticism.
For this to work, the target must be dehumanized and demonized. I remember a slogan on the side of bread trucks during WWII, “The only good Jap is a dead Jap.” Sixty-three years later, Japan is an ally and an important trading partner. Go figure.
You are a passionate and compassionate man, and do a lot of good. I know this to be a fact. People of passion have strong opinions. The important thing about one’s opinions is to understand their nature, and whether they serve one or not. My service to you is that I have reintroduced you to yours.
Be always well,
Jim
PS Iris Chang, then 29, won the National Book Award for nonfiction with “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II” (Basic Books 1997). I saw her on the "PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer" being interviewed after she had won that prestigious award.
I was devastated learning later that this quiet bright modest young lady with so much talent committed suicide. If you haven’t read her book, I recommend you do so, a book which must have been very painful to research and write.
Another book, a novel by Gerald Seymour titled “The Walking Dead” (Overbrook Press 2007) deals with suicide bombers from the perspective of the whole insanity from recruitment to incineration.
We live in a time of madness with a 1940s mindset. Meanwhile, we distract ourselves with electronic toys.
A Thoughtful and Emotional Response
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 7, 2008
“Examine what is said, not him who speaks.”
Arabian Proverb
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
That is an evocative piece from beginning to end. Thank you for sharing it with us.
I have to tell you, my immediate reaction to any perceived criticism of the atom bombing of Japan in 1945 is quite visceral. My blood began to boil as I started reading your missive. There are some truths the defense of which I take as a defense of all I hold dear: the sanctity of our Constitution, the righteousness of the Union in the Civil War, the treason of the Confederacy, its leaders, and its entire population in the same, the need for Good nations to act swiftly and decisively to protect the weak from genocide, as in the Balkans in the 90's or Darfur today, and the bombing of Japan in 1945 among them. The fact that there are those among us who question my positions triggers the fight part of my fight-or-flight animal response in a way that rarely happens in other situations. After all, I am an adult, and in most other cases I can control my baser emotions, such as rage or jealousy.
I have taught English to hundreds of adult Japanese students, and the fact that they look upon themselves as innocent victims in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appalls me. To this day, the Japanese are not taught of the horrors of the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the Korean Comfort Women, or any of the many other atrocities perpetrated by their citizen-soldiers. Indeed, they are taught in school that the US was the aggressor in WWII because we cut them off from oil and rubber imports, and their nation would have crumbled had they not "defended" themselves. This travesty is akin to German Holocaust denial, but on an intentional cultural-wide scale.
The bombing of Japan is all the more important to me because of my own father's experience. He turned 18 in November 1944, and signed up for service that same day. He went through basic training to head off to Europe, but had an operation that kept him stateside. His buddies sent him letters from the front. When he had finally recovered, he was redirected to prepare for the invasion of Japan instead. He knew very well that he likely would have been among those estimated hundreds of thousands or one million American servicemen expected to die in the case of an invasion of the Japanese home islands. In all probability, I write this email only because Truman ordered bombs dropped on Japan.
...But it has always bothered me that we chose cities rather than military targets. I haven't got an answer for why that was okay. And so, as I read your piece, I ordered myself to simmer down and let your words sink in. They didn't change my mind about how we ended the war, but they did reinforce my belief that we erred morally in choosing civilian targets.
I look forward to reading your novel. I'll buy it soon. Your talent as a novelist seems even better than your impressive talent as a business writer.
Regards,
T.C.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for a thoughtful and candid reply to this evocative essay. Its intention was the same as Norman Cousins book, MODERN MAN IS OBSOLETE (Viking 1945). The thinking of the 1940s and 1950s, with which we have been locked stepping is irrelevant, and even disastrous.
On this small planet, where water, not oil, will be the call to arms, community, not conflict is the planet’s only salvation. Manuscripts of mine that have addressed this issue have never found a publisher. We can live without oil. We cannot live without water.
The atrocities of the Empire of Japan in China (Rape of Nanking), in the Philippines (Bataan Death March) and Korea, which you list, all happened as well as the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, 1941.
What your Japanese students told you, however, was true. Japan was in a state of panic, a burgeoning population with no natural resources, being cut off from these resources by the United States and others, provided theater for the radical war mongering voices.
Japanese historians today admit it was a war Japan could not win, but felt it had to launch. As one put it, “We have awakened the tiger.”
Killing for whatever reason is not natural to man. It is why men at war suffer mightily adjusting to peace. Yet, in war, man is not only given permission to kill, but wins accolades for the killing.
You wonder why a nonmilitary target was chosen for the atomic bomb. It was meant to send a message, and did.
Hate and ignorance are the supple soil for fanaticism.
For this to work, the target must be dehumanized and demonized. I remember a slogan on the side of bread trucks during WWII, “The only good Jap is a dead Jap.” Sixty-three years later, Japan is an ally and an important trading partner. Go figure.
You are a passionate and compassionate man, and do a lot of good. I know this to be a fact. People of passion have strong opinions. The important thing about one’s opinions is to understand their nature, and whether they serve one or not. My service to you is that I have reintroduced you to yours.
Be always well,
Jim
PS Iris Chang, then 29, won the National Book Award for nonfiction with “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II” (Basic Books 1997). I saw her on the "PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer" being interviewed after she had won that prestigious award.
I was devastated learning later that this quiet bright modest young lady with so much talent committed suicide. If you haven’t read her book, I recommend you do so, a book which must have been very painful to research and write.
Another book, a novel by Gerald Seymour titled “The Walking Dead” (Overbrook Press 2007) deals with suicide bombers from the perspective of the whole insanity from recruitment to incineration.
We live in a time of madness with a 1940s mindset. Meanwhile, we distract ourselves with electronic toys.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!
HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 6, 2008
“On Monday, August 7, 1945, I read in The Clinton Herald that yesterday “President Truman reveals a U.S. Army Air Force bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.”
“I never heard of such a bomb or such a place. On Thursday, I read that the day before, Wednesday, August 9, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Each bomb, according to The Herald, was a single missile 2,000 times the blasting power of the largest bomb used previously in the war. I try to fathom this destructive power and the reason for it.
“I listen to my da’s railroad buddies celebrating these bombings with a kind of excitement I hadn’t heard before. ‘Understand it leveled Hiroshima to the ground, and all their papier-mâché huts with it,’ says one. ‘Not a Jap standing,’ says another. ‘Did even a better job at Nagasaki,’ says a third. ‘Heard on the radio tens of thousands killed and tens of thousands more critically wounded in both attacks,’ says a fourth, ‘and we didn’t lose a flier.’ Finally, my da concludes, ‘Won’t be long now.’
‘Thank God for that!’ they echo as one.
“’Does Japan have that huge an army in those two cities,’ I ask innocently, seeing that as the only justification for such an attack. All eyes turn to me in stunned silence. Usually, they don’t even notice me. Then they break out into uproarious laughter. Their eyes go watery. Fists to the eyes stay their tears; legs kick the floor until the house shakes, and some even hold their stomachs in raucous hilarity. I didn’t mean it to be funny. What’s so funny about tens of thousands of people dying? Does war make people like that? I ask my mother who is in the kitchen reading. She says, ‘you wouldn’t understand.’ I ask my da after his railroad buddies leave. He says simply, ‘It saved thousands of American lives.’ Both answers are inadequate.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003 AuthorHouse), pp. 301-302.
* * * * * *
Today, August 6, 2008, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) featured the BBC (Great Britain) and the DW-TV (Germany) News as it does every day, Monday thru Friday, which I watch religiously.
Were it not for this coverage, I might have forgotten how moved and confused I was in 1945 when Hiroshima was bombed. That day and that scene, I thought, had made an indelible mark on my soul, yet were it not for these two foreign news sources, it would have passed from my attention completely.
The BBC showed some 45,000 mourners in Hiroshima today at the shrine of those who lost their life that August morning so long ago. The BBC reporter said, “Some 140,000 lost their lives in little over a minute, tens of thousands subsequently died from radiation, while many sicknesses to this day can be traced to radioactive contamination.” The reporter said nothing about psychological or emotional damage.
I hope other American news sources to which I am not privy covered this 63rd anniversary because it is that important, that significant in the annals of man.
Lest we forget, this conflagration was the greatest single destruction of human life in a single event in recorded history. Writer Norman Cousins felt such profound guilt over the bomb’s use on human beings that he immediately wrote a slender volume, MODERN MAN IS OBSOLETE (Viking Press 1945), which became a national bestseller.
Cousins opens with these lines:
“The beginning of the Atomic Age has brought less hope than fear. It is a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend. This fear is not new; in its classical form it is the fear of irrational death. But overnight it has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehension.”
Science, he goes on to say, has eclipsed man. Man can see that piety is obsolete, faith is obsolete, mysticism is obsolete, prophetic vision is obsolete, and any modern man can see he is obsolete. Cousins sees a terrible revenge for making men obsolete, for making their inventions more relevant and powerful and more controlling than they are.
He ends the 49-page book with an absurd course to the future, and he says in all seriousness since man is obsolete:
“Let him dissociate himself, carefully and completely, from civilization and all its works. Let him systematically abolish science and the tools of science. Let him destroy all the machines and the knowledge which can build or operate those machines. Let him raze his cities, smash his laboratories, dismantle his factories, tear down his universities and schools, burn his libraries, rip apart his art. Let him murder his scientists, his lawmakers, his statesmen, his doctors, his teachers, his mechanics, his merchants, and anyone who has anything to do with the machinery of knowledge or progress. Let him punish literacy by death. Let him eradicate nations and set up the tribe as sovereign. Let him, in short, revert to his condition in society in 10,000 B.C. Thus emancipated from science, from progress, from government, from knowledge, from thought, he can be reasonably certain of prolonging his existence on this planet.
“This is a way out if ‘modern’ man is looking for a way out from the modern world.”
I read that little book at my uncle Leonard’s in Detroit the summer of 1946. He was head of the department of finance & commerce at the University of Detroit. He asked me what I thought, and I told him, not understanding sarcasm or absurdity, that I thought the author was quite mad.
“No, Jimmy,” my uncle said, “he’s quite sane. It is madness that he fears and madness that he desires to prevent.”
Sixty years later, we have the genocide of Pol Pot of Cambodia who killed millions of scholars and professional people to drive that society back into the Stone Age.
There are the lawless tribes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey who resemble today what he warned about then when lawlessness prevails.
We have had ethnic cleansing in Serbia and Bosnia, and in many other places in Africa.
There is even fear that terrorist possess nuclear suitcase bombs, bombs more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, that could kill millions in a single blast if detonated in a major city of the world.
Sense and sensibility were expressed in the appendix to this little book with excerpts from THE FEDERALIST on The Making of the Constitution of the United States of America (1788). Cousins’ ultimate declaration for modern man to survive is to make war obsolete.
Incidentally, it was many years later that I learned the answer to my question to my da’s railroad buddies: was there a significant military presence in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped?
There was not. In fact, more than 95 percent of the casualties were civilians, people like you and me, people who get caught up in the hysteria of the times and forget that we are all human beings and members of the same human race.
I was but a boy when that conflagration happened, a curious boy, and one that followed the war almost in an obsessive-compulsive manner in The Clinton Herald. So much so, as I point out in my memoir-as-a-novel, Sister Mary Helen allowed me to update the class daily on events when I was in the fourth grade.
By another curious accident, I was at the University of Iowa when author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a visiting scholar, and I heard him talk about his novel, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. I was chemistry major but loved literature, and was always taking electives outside my discipline.
Vonnegut was at Dresden, Germany as a prisoner of war during the fire bombing of that city in February 1945. Dresden was not a strategic military target, but an ancient and historic city. Why, then, did British bombers attempt to bomb the city into antiquity?
Vonnegut suggested the revenge bombing was for the German V-2 rocket attacks that destroyed much of London in 1943 – 1944. He captured the Dresden insanity with the novelist’s eye and quoted statistics of the tens of thousands of bombs dropped compared to the single one dropped at Hiroshima.
He wondered why the crew of the Enola Gray, or the Allied observers who went into Hiroshima afterwards had failed to write novels of the earth shaking event. I wonder to this day if any of them ever did. Biographies have been written, true, but mind wrenching novels? I don't think so.
We can talk of the shame of the Nazis and the Holocaust, the shame of Russian Siberia in the handling of dissidents, and the shame of the Japanese Bataan Death March in the Philippines in 1942, but why no expression of remorse for Hiroshima?
I didn’t understand as a boy, and I don’t understand now as an old man. It could happen here lest we forget.
* * * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 6, 2008
“On Monday, August 7, 1945, I read in The Clinton Herald that yesterday “President Truman reveals a U.S. Army Air Force bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.”
“I never heard of such a bomb or such a place. On Thursday, I read that the day before, Wednesday, August 9, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Each bomb, according to The Herald, was a single missile 2,000 times the blasting power of the largest bomb used previously in the war. I try to fathom this destructive power and the reason for it.
“I listen to my da’s railroad buddies celebrating these bombings with a kind of excitement I hadn’t heard before. ‘Understand it leveled Hiroshima to the ground, and all their papier-mâché huts with it,’ says one. ‘Not a Jap standing,’ says another. ‘Did even a better job at Nagasaki,’ says a third. ‘Heard on the radio tens of thousands killed and tens of thousands more critically wounded in both attacks,’ says a fourth, ‘and we didn’t lose a flier.’ Finally, my da concludes, ‘Won’t be long now.’
‘Thank God for that!’ they echo as one.
“’Does Japan have that huge an army in those two cities,’ I ask innocently, seeing that as the only justification for such an attack. All eyes turn to me in stunned silence. Usually, they don’t even notice me. Then they break out into uproarious laughter. Their eyes go watery. Fists to the eyes stay their tears; legs kick the floor until the house shakes, and some even hold their stomachs in raucous hilarity. I didn’t mean it to be funny. What’s so funny about tens of thousands of people dying? Does war make people like that? I ask my mother who is in the kitchen reading. She says, ‘you wouldn’t understand.’ I ask my da after his railroad buddies leave. He says simply, ‘It saved thousands of American lives.’ Both answers are inadequate.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003 AuthorHouse), pp. 301-302.
* * * * * *
Today, August 6, 2008, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) featured the BBC (Great Britain) and the DW-TV (Germany) News as it does every day, Monday thru Friday, which I watch religiously.
Were it not for this coverage, I might have forgotten how moved and confused I was in 1945 when Hiroshima was bombed. That day and that scene, I thought, had made an indelible mark on my soul, yet were it not for these two foreign news sources, it would have passed from my attention completely.
The BBC showed some 45,000 mourners in Hiroshima today at the shrine of those who lost their life that August morning so long ago. The BBC reporter said, “Some 140,000 lost their lives in little over a minute, tens of thousands subsequently died from radiation, while many sicknesses to this day can be traced to radioactive contamination.” The reporter said nothing about psychological or emotional damage.
I hope other American news sources to which I am not privy covered this 63rd anniversary because it is that important, that significant in the annals of man.
Lest we forget, this conflagration was the greatest single destruction of human life in a single event in recorded history. Writer Norman Cousins felt such profound guilt over the bomb’s use on human beings that he immediately wrote a slender volume, MODERN MAN IS OBSOLETE (Viking Press 1945), which became a national bestseller.
Cousins opens with these lines:
“The beginning of the Atomic Age has brought less hope than fear. It is a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend. This fear is not new; in its classical form it is the fear of irrational death. But overnight it has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehension.”
Science, he goes on to say, has eclipsed man. Man can see that piety is obsolete, faith is obsolete, mysticism is obsolete, prophetic vision is obsolete, and any modern man can see he is obsolete. Cousins sees a terrible revenge for making men obsolete, for making their inventions more relevant and powerful and more controlling than they are.
He ends the 49-page book with an absurd course to the future, and he says in all seriousness since man is obsolete:
“Let him dissociate himself, carefully and completely, from civilization and all its works. Let him systematically abolish science and the tools of science. Let him destroy all the machines and the knowledge which can build or operate those machines. Let him raze his cities, smash his laboratories, dismantle his factories, tear down his universities and schools, burn his libraries, rip apart his art. Let him murder his scientists, his lawmakers, his statesmen, his doctors, his teachers, his mechanics, his merchants, and anyone who has anything to do with the machinery of knowledge or progress. Let him punish literacy by death. Let him eradicate nations and set up the tribe as sovereign. Let him, in short, revert to his condition in society in 10,000 B.C. Thus emancipated from science, from progress, from government, from knowledge, from thought, he can be reasonably certain of prolonging his existence on this planet.
“This is a way out if ‘modern’ man is looking for a way out from the modern world.”
I read that little book at my uncle Leonard’s in Detroit the summer of 1946. He was head of the department of finance & commerce at the University of Detroit. He asked me what I thought, and I told him, not understanding sarcasm or absurdity, that I thought the author was quite mad.
“No, Jimmy,” my uncle said, “he’s quite sane. It is madness that he fears and madness that he desires to prevent.”
Sixty years later, we have the genocide of Pol Pot of Cambodia who killed millions of scholars and professional people to drive that society back into the Stone Age.
There are the lawless tribes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey who resemble today what he warned about then when lawlessness prevails.
We have had ethnic cleansing in Serbia and Bosnia, and in many other places in Africa.
There is even fear that terrorist possess nuclear suitcase bombs, bombs more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, that could kill millions in a single blast if detonated in a major city of the world.
Sense and sensibility were expressed in the appendix to this little book with excerpts from THE FEDERALIST on The Making of the Constitution of the United States of America (1788). Cousins’ ultimate declaration for modern man to survive is to make war obsolete.
Incidentally, it was many years later that I learned the answer to my question to my da’s railroad buddies: was there a significant military presence in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped?
There was not. In fact, more than 95 percent of the casualties were civilians, people like you and me, people who get caught up in the hysteria of the times and forget that we are all human beings and members of the same human race.
I was but a boy when that conflagration happened, a curious boy, and one that followed the war almost in an obsessive-compulsive manner in The Clinton Herald. So much so, as I point out in my memoir-as-a-novel, Sister Mary Helen allowed me to update the class daily on events when I was in the fourth grade.
By another curious accident, I was at the University of Iowa when author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a visiting scholar, and I heard him talk about his novel, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. I was chemistry major but loved literature, and was always taking electives outside my discipline.
Vonnegut was at Dresden, Germany as a prisoner of war during the fire bombing of that city in February 1945. Dresden was not a strategic military target, but an ancient and historic city. Why, then, did British bombers attempt to bomb the city into antiquity?
Vonnegut suggested the revenge bombing was for the German V-2 rocket attacks that destroyed much of London in 1943 – 1944. He captured the Dresden insanity with the novelist’s eye and quoted statistics of the tens of thousands of bombs dropped compared to the single one dropped at Hiroshima.
He wondered why the crew of the Enola Gray, or the Allied observers who went into Hiroshima afterwards had failed to write novels of the earth shaking event. I wonder to this day if any of them ever did. Biographies have been written, true, but mind wrenching novels? I don't think so.
We can talk of the shame of the Nazis and the Holocaust, the shame of Russian Siberia in the handling of dissidents, and the shame of the Japanese Bataan Death March in the Philippines in 1942, but why no expression of remorse for Hiroshima?
I didn’t understand as a boy, and I don’t understand now as an old man. It could happen here lest we forget.
* * * * * *
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
WHAT WE REALLY KNOW, WE DON'T!
WHAT WE REALLY KNOW, WE DON’T!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 5, 2008
“Knowledge is but folly unless it is guided by grace.”
George Herbert (1593 – 1633), English poet
When I read carefully skewed quotations from an author’s body of work, I think of the more than a million words I've published in my adult life over the past forty years, not including all the words I have posted on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com).
How easy it would be to craft a case to use my words against my best intentions. It is the danger of being a writer and having your thoughts recorded for posterity, thoughts that are changing, maturing, and being redefined as you move into differing moments of your experience. This occurred to me as I read the political traffic concerning the approaching presidential election.
The paradox of politics is that it has a momentum of its own but nonetheless subject to being personalized. We as a people choose individuals or have them chosen for us to lead. It is true in all aspects of our lives. Politics is not confined to government. Politics pervades every aspect of our existence.
Politicians differ little from ourselves, only they have taken a stride of separation away from us to be celebrated or castigated as the case may be. In the end, we get the leadership we deserve.
Leadership is a reflection of how we think, feel, and behave and embodies our fears, biases, dreams, fantasies, as well as our secret hates and loves. There is a national psyche as well as a personal psyche and no one exploits this better than politicians. We are not simply blue or red states but clusters of attitudes and values.
The irony is that the persons who receive credit or blame or are made scapegoats are only part of the momentum and mainly fortuitous benefactors or victims of this force.
The problem with facts and statistics is that they are subject to misinterpretation or selective interpretation. When people are reduced to numbers, or identified in select categories, the human goes out of being.
This is not new but a product of communication from the time man first invented language. There are predators and prey in all of the animal kingdom, and with man the predator and prey are often opposite sides of man's conscience. Politicians jump on this predilection to ride its momentum, which has a mind of its own.
For example, when I was a boy, I was told Iowa’s only president, Herbert Hoover, caused the Great Depression. Time has proven he was a scapegoat. The actual cause was the "anything goes" insouciance of the Jazz Age and the "Roaring Twenties," which included wild speculation on Wall Street after WWI.
Proof that we never learn is the new century's brand of insouciance. Were it not for some safeguards, God only knows where we would be. Blame it on oil or the sub prime fiasco, but who caused this? People did. We did. Everybody did. People we put in leadership positions didn't have the bottle to say, "Hell, no, we can't do that." They went along because their thinking machine was stuck on "more."
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was given credit for pulling us out of the Great Depression when it was World War II. We were still in the depression in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, which changed the momentum.
More recently, president Bill Clinton was given credit for the economic rebound in the 1990s, which was actually fueled by the late economic policy changes of George H. W. Bush, another case of momentum.
The beautiful thing about our system is that the transition from one administration to another, although heatedly contested during the primary campaign and presidential election, once a winner is declared, the American people usually rally around the elected president.
I say "usually" because that was not the case with Abraham Lincoln. He had to be secretly escorted to Washington, D.C. for fear of being assassinated. I was reminded of this in a book I picked up recently, "Lincoln: His Words and His World."
Imagine the "Great Emancipator" was considered a lightweight, unqualified for the presidency with his single term in the House of Representatives, a "country bumpkin" from Illinois, poorly educated, although a successful lawyer.
Cartoons of hate couldn't have been more vicious in their attacks on him. Known for his silver tongue, cutting humor, and storytelling, even these were lampooned. His mind was crafted in language like a fine carpenter but this, too, was used against him. Fortunately, the momentum of the times was ready for him. Were the waffler general George McClellan to have been elected president, we might have been two nations today.
When I was a lad in high school, I read two books that have stayed with me all my life. Sinclair Lewis called his book, “It Can’t Happen Here”; the other was, "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle) by Adolf Hitler.
The Lewis book was about fascism finding its way into American society, in other words, that it could happen here!
Hitler, the little corporal from Austria was jailed in 1923 after his failed "Putsch" rebellion. This gave him the opportunity to write his book. He had had a history of failure from his earliest days. He blamed the Versailles Treaty in Paris after WWI, which was not as draconian as alleged, for Germany's economic woes. He then played on German pride with ideas spelled out in "Mein Kampf."
It was all there, the idea of a "master race" lifted from Nietzsche, and disposing of the "Jewish Question" with a rationale that Jews were an impediment to Germany's triumph.
For his failure as an artist, he blamed Jewish authorities in Austria and not on his lack of talent. Thus, a personal angst became successfully translated first into national identity, Nazism, and then national shame, the Holocaust.
We have two decent men running for president, but they both ride the momentum of two costly wars that rose out of the terrorist attack of 9/11. George W. Bush, whom I think a decent man, was caught up in the moment and we know the rest.
What do we really know? If the truth were told, we don't know anything. Our minds are locked into selective memory, selective data, and selective justification. I have a son who is so cynical that he refuses to register to vote. Sinclair Lewis was speaking to him in "It Can't Happen Here."
People on Dr. Don Farr's Network are not like my son. I expect that 100 percent of them will vote. I applaud them for this. I would hope, however, that some of them suspend certainty and explore the momentum to which I speak.
The next president is not going to change the momentum. The momentum has too much of a will of its own, and it is not limited to the United States. The next president has to find a way to deal with this momentum outside traditional channels as friends and enemies in the international community suggest war as an option might best to be left behind.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 5, 2008
“Knowledge is but folly unless it is guided by grace.”
George Herbert (1593 – 1633), English poet
When I read carefully skewed quotations from an author’s body of work, I think of the more than a million words I've published in my adult life over the past forty years, not including all the words I have posted on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com).
How easy it would be to craft a case to use my words against my best intentions. It is the danger of being a writer and having your thoughts recorded for posterity, thoughts that are changing, maturing, and being redefined as you move into differing moments of your experience. This occurred to me as I read the political traffic concerning the approaching presidential election.
The paradox of politics is that it has a momentum of its own but nonetheless subject to being personalized. We as a people choose individuals or have them chosen for us to lead. It is true in all aspects of our lives. Politics is not confined to government. Politics pervades every aspect of our existence.
Politicians differ little from ourselves, only they have taken a stride of separation away from us to be celebrated or castigated as the case may be. In the end, we get the leadership we deserve.
Leadership is a reflection of how we think, feel, and behave and embodies our fears, biases, dreams, fantasies, as well as our secret hates and loves. There is a national psyche as well as a personal psyche and no one exploits this better than politicians. We are not simply blue or red states but clusters of attitudes and values.
The irony is that the persons who receive credit or blame or are made scapegoats are only part of the momentum and mainly fortuitous benefactors or victims of this force.
The problem with facts and statistics is that they are subject to misinterpretation or selective interpretation. When people are reduced to numbers, or identified in select categories, the human goes out of being.
This is not new but a product of communication from the time man first invented language. There are predators and prey in all of the animal kingdom, and with man the predator and prey are often opposite sides of man's conscience. Politicians jump on this predilection to ride its momentum, which has a mind of its own.
For example, when I was a boy, I was told Iowa’s only president, Herbert Hoover, caused the Great Depression. Time has proven he was a scapegoat. The actual cause was the "anything goes" insouciance of the Jazz Age and the "Roaring Twenties," which included wild speculation on Wall Street after WWI.
Proof that we never learn is the new century's brand of insouciance. Were it not for some safeguards, God only knows where we would be. Blame it on oil or the sub prime fiasco, but who caused this? People did. We did. Everybody did. People we put in leadership positions didn't have the bottle to say, "Hell, no, we can't do that." They went along because their thinking machine was stuck on "more."
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was given credit for pulling us out of the Great Depression when it was World War II. We were still in the depression in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, which changed the momentum.
More recently, president Bill Clinton was given credit for the economic rebound in the 1990s, which was actually fueled by the late economic policy changes of George H. W. Bush, another case of momentum.
The beautiful thing about our system is that the transition from one administration to another, although heatedly contested during the primary campaign and presidential election, once a winner is declared, the American people usually rally around the elected president.
I say "usually" because that was not the case with Abraham Lincoln. He had to be secretly escorted to Washington, D.C. for fear of being assassinated. I was reminded of this in a book I picked up recently, "Lincoln: His Words and His World."
Imagine the "Great Emancipator" was considered a lightweight, unqualified for the presidency with his single term in the House of Representatives, a "country bumpkin" from Illinois, poorly educated, although a successful lawyer.
Cartoons of hate couldn't have been more vicious in their attacks on him. Known for his silver tongue, cutting humor, and storytelling, even these were lampooned. His mind was crafted in language like a fine carpenter but this, too, was used against him. Fortunately, the momentum of the times was ready for him. Were the waffler general George McClellan to have been elected president, we might have been two nations today.
When I was a lad in high school, I read two books that have stayed with me all my life. Sinclair Lewis called his book, “It Can’t Happen Here”; the other was, "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle) by Adolf Hitler.
The Lewis book was about fascism finding its way into American society, in other words, that it could happen here!
Hitler, the little corporal from Austria was jailed in 1923 after his failed "Putsch" rebellion. This gave him the opportunity to write his book. He had had a history of failure from his earliest days. He blamed the Versailles Treaty in Paris after WWI, which was not as draconian as alleged, for Germany's economic woes. He then played on German pride with ideas spelled out in "Mein Kampf."
It was all there, the idea of a "master race" lifted from Nietzsche, and disposing of the "Jewish Question" with a rationale that Jews were an impediment to Germany's triumph.
For his failure as an artist, he blamed Jewish authorities in Austria and not on his lack of talent. Thus, a personal angst became successfully translated first into national identity, Nazism, and then national shame, the Holocaust.
We have two decent men running for president, but they both ride the momentum of two costly wars that rose out of the terrorist attack of 9/11. George W. Bush, whom I think a decent man, was caught up in the moment and we know the rest.
What do we really know? If the truth were told, we don't know anything. Our minds are locked into selective memory, selective data, and selective justification. I have a son who is so cynical that he refuses to register to vote. Sinclair Lewis was speaking to him in "It Can't Happen Here."
People on Dr. Don Farr's Network are not like my son. I expect that 100 percent of them will vote. I applaud them for this. I would hope, however, that some of them suspend certainty and explore the momentum to which I speak.
The next president is not going to change the momentum. The momentum has too much of a will of its own, and it is not limited to the United States. The next president has to find a way to deal with this momentum outside traditional channels as friends and enemies in the international community suggest war as an option might best to be left behind.
Be always well,
Jim
Sunday, August 03, 2008
AMERICA'S BLUES as reported by THE ECONOMIST
AMERICA’S BLUES – As reported by The Economist
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 3, 2008
“Melancholy is a kind of demon that haunts our island, and often conveys herself to us in an easterly wind.”
Joseph Addison (1672 – 1719), English essayist.
Seldom have I read such a concise piece as this article that appeared in the Tampa Tribune, Sunday, August 3, 2008 in the "Commentary Section." It is titled "Red, White and Blues: America's Funk." You can find it on the newspaper's website (www.TBO.com) should you be so inclined.
You have heard me rant about its main points. The rant has become reality. That is what happens when the bottom falls out.
Some main points of the article:
(1) The American swagger is gone as 8 out of 10 Americans are in a depressing funk.
This change is blamed on the hapless administration of president Bush, but that is to be expected. We like to raise our leaders above us to treat them more than human only to tear them down as less than human when our appetites and indulgences drive everything south. We never blame ourselves.
(2) It is American capitalism, stupid!
The August 11, 2008 issue of Time magazine is dedicated to "The Economy." Pundits and Bill Gates tell us how to make capitalism work, and for an old codger such as myself, it sounds strangely like the same palaver I heard in the 1950s when Sputnik reduced education to a whirling nightmare; the 1970s when OPEC's oil embargo, the Iran Hostage Crisis, Watergate and Vietnam warranted the title in my book WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) of "Incipient Catastrophe."
Why catastrophe? I found the circumstances reminiscent of the "fall of Rome." The 1980s confirmed this with Japan eating our lunch, and buying the store.
"WWMs" was written nearly two decades ago when it was clear Detroit was living in a dream world with the die cast. Like a house of falling playing cards, we were all falling prostrate to its momentum.
(3) Consumer confidence an oxymoron?
The Economist list of contributors to the angst adds up to a big headache with an aspirin cure. My wonder is if this article will have any impact.
Last year when I was in Europe, the Euro was worth about $1.20; today it is about $1.59. Gasoline had not yet spiked; so more and more SUVs and trucks glutted the highways and byways.
The Economist points out that "America's beer," Budweiser, is now owned by little Belgium. This gets some people’s attention.
Less attention is given our spiraling debt of $ trillions and $ trillions owned primarily by foreign note holders. Consumer confidence is indeed an oxymoron as we are all mainly renters not owners (although we think we own what we own) and walk the economic tightrope without ever looking up, down or around.
(4) Forever looking for a sure thing. The Economist reports "many Americans feel as if they missed the boom."
Does that explain the rash of casinos across the land? Imagine a growth industry that produces nothing but false hope?
Hope is a passive word; courage is an active word. We have been reduced from doers to hopers.
The Economist reports that "between 2002 and 2006" the incomes of 99 percent rose by an average of 1 percent a year in real terms." How many saved a dime?
It reports further that as impressive as this rise, the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise 11 percent per year "between 2002 and 2006." Then the article hits us where it hurts: "three quarters of the economic gains during the Bush's presidency went to that top 1 percent."
There is deception here. It implies that this is a unique trend indigenous to this sitting president, alone, when it has been a consistent pattern.
In the 1970s, I was teaching a graduate seminar at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida for students of Golden Gate University of San Francisco, California. I presented a set of statistics very similar to those the present article for the United States since WWII.
Several students stayed after class, stunned and incredulous. I gave them references to check out my assertions. They did not want to believe the system was weighed against them. They wanted to believe capitalism’s invisible hand was for all as Adam Smith had promised.
Yet, since the beginning of capitalism, 80 to 90 percent of the wealth has been controlled by 10 to 20 percent of the people. Accessibility to wealth was then and remains now mainly a myth. Time's August issue will not change that.
It is why my books and articles have been provocative. They represent an attempt to engage the ordinary person to do the things that give him or her a chance at some independence and security.
It takes the realization that credit card companies, banks, and commercial enterprises with their tantalizing discounts are not in business for this purpose, but to rest personal independence and security from one to add to their own coffers.
Their economic strategy is for you to want to own a house that looks like those of the rich, a house you can't afford but will give you a sense of connection to the wealthy.
They want you to buy a boat that you can't afford, or some other luxury item that will make you feel as if you are affluent.
They want you to buy clothes you don't need, an automobile you can't afford when the one you are driving is working fine, but isn't the latest model.
See the trend?
It is the cloying need to make an impression convinced that it is your patriotic duty to work and spend paycheck-to-paycheck so the top 1 percent can maintain that ever-increasing edge.
No one can understand how an oil company can have $15 billion in quarterly profits when most people can't afford the gas to drive their car.
Few can understand why medical prescriptions cost so much when pharmaceutical companies have $ billion in quarterly profits. Drug companies insist "it takes years to develop a new drug," but they don't mention the government funded subsidized research. Notice the medical and pharmaceutical professions are less in the business of prevention than in ameliorative treatment.
We are not happy campers; we have lost our self-restraint and are paying dearly for it.
(5) Globalization is under fire.
We loved reading Tom Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” with his glorification of "this electronic age," that is, until free trade and immigration policy became scapegoats to our economic crises.
Politicians always have scapegoats in their pockets to get our dander up, and of course we believe them because they're in the know.
The Economist could not have said it with more bitter irony: panic is on display "when a nation built on immigrants is building a fence to keep them out."
Politicians on both sides of the aisle are endorsing some form of this asinine immigration policy instead of going back to the genesis of the problem, which is the double standard of work and respect. This, too, will blow up in our face.
We cannot have it both ways: cheap labor and cheat policies. People will put their lives at risk as long as survival is at stake.
We never seem to learn from history. As for globalization, we treat it as if it were a new thing. Globalization has existed since the days of the Romans.
We are a consumer driven economy and have never thought about the price of its intemperance.
(6) What about nation-building at home?
The paradox about nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq is that we have failed schools, failing children, and a falling apart infrastructure at home. The Romans allowed this to happen at home as well. It wasn’t terrorists that crippled Rome, but its own excesses. This left it vulnerable for the Visigoths and Germanic tribes of the north to plunder the city and collapse an empire.
(7) Resilience, how real?
The Economist points out that the United States is good at fixing itself, good at rebounding from its excesses and false steps. It claims the US has this capacity because it isn't stodgy and taciturn like Europe.
The Economist suggests self-correction will deal with the collapse and rubble of our misbegotten ways. New life, new innovations, new bursts of inspiration will absolve America of all its sins. Why not? It has always been so before, right?
This resilience sounds very much like "adolescent rebound" where the child has never had to experience the pain and struggle to grow up, or like America's nearly quarter millennium history.
Psychological characteristics may help to describe this collective phenomenon. To wit, personality is the "acquired self." Personality is what is not one's own. It is the "invented self."
Essence is our inheritance. It is what we are born with. Essence cannot be lost, cannot be changed or injured as easily as personality. It is our "real self."
Personality can be changed almost completely with the change of circumstances. Personality can be lost and injured.
Essence is the basis of one physical and mental makeup. It involves natural propensities, talents, our native intelligence, and innate capacities.
Personality is learned behavior consciously or unconsciously.
By unconsciously, I mean the inclination to imitate or attempt to be like someone else even if not compatible with one's own essence. Personality can be reduced to acquired tastes with all sort of artificial likes and dislikes subliminally bombarding the psyche.
When personality is developed at the expense of essence, we become pleasers, true believers, people who need to belong so they go along, people who are captives to self-designed cages.
When personality begins to dominate essence, we become less healthy as we are attracted to what is bad for us and to dislike what is good for us.
Normally, when essence dominates personality, personality can become quite useful. But if personality dominates essence, this can produce wrong results of many kinds.
Personality is not bad. We must have personality to live a social life. Personality and essence should grow parallel to each other with one not outgrowing the other.
Cases of essence outgrowing personality occur among uneducated people. These people may be very good, and even clever, but they are incapable of development in the same way as people with more developed personalities.
Such people often find comfort in using derogatory words to describe minorities or people not as naturally gifted as they are. They are also quick to reduce others to simple stereotypes. Media, advertisers, and politicians study and exploit these propensities with great proficiency.
Cases of personality outgrowing essence are often to be found among the rich and famous, the cultured and privileged, the movers and shakers. They fawn and spawn each other as the celebrity culture.
They often rise to head corporations, educational institutions, charitable foundations, religious institutions, the entertainment industry, media, and government because they embody what current society promotes. Rhetoric trumps reality in the new world order.
Essence in such cases remains in a half-grown, half-developed, half-realized state. Expediency and serendipity prevail at the expense of patience and plodding more essential to release significant essence.
What does this mean, and why do I mention it here?
We have rather implicit but rigid norms for personality and essence.
Quick and early growth of personality and essence to such norms can stop growth and development at a very early age. As our self-indulgent society might suggest, it has.
We are taught to be polite, obedient, submissive, passive, punctual, engaging and conforming, good natured, happy and obliging from preschool on, while we are expected to be modest about displaying our talent or specialness for fear of appearing elitist.
The result is that many grow up physically mature but emotionally immature acquiring high academic, business, professional or political status without growing up, acting in essence as if age of ten or twelve suspended in terminal adolescence. It is why leaders today often appear as if they have never left the sixth grade.
Consequently, while submerged in the wonder of electronics and the sophistication of a postmodern society, there seems a preference for underdeveloped essence when it comes to maturity.
Why else would there be such infatuation with gratuitous violence in entertainment, electronic games, spectator sports, or gamesmanship in business and politics? A competitive society is driven by imitation, replication, and duplication while trumpeting bogus creativity. China and India have fallen prey to this code.
If you want to look at the problems of society, look to the repressed development of essence in our young people. Jean Paul Sartre has said modern society lacks authenticity. He was referring to the artificiality of personality and the warped development of essence. Boredom, he claimed, is indicative of a society intimidated by adulthood.
(8) The Economist “slam-dunk” world of rhetoric.
“Countries like people behave dangerously when their mood turns dark.”
“America is not just hurting allies and trading partners but itself.”
“Credit crunch is in part the consequence of a flawed regulatory system.”
“Lax monetary policy allowed Americans to build up debts and fueled a housing bubble that had to eventually burst.”
“Lessons need to be learned.”
“Over-unionized and unaccountable American school system needs the same competition as its universities which are the envy of the world.”
Then on to health care, the rise of China, and then ending with, “Everybody goes through bad times.”
This rhetorical litany of disaster ends with this softball: “America has had the wisdom to take the first course (i.e., learn from its mistakes) before. Let’s hope it does so again.”
I must confess I thank God for the American blues, for the high cost of gasoline, for the credit card crunch, for the falling prices of homes, for the drop out sufferers, and why?
Because the abstract anodynes of enlightenment fail to move us off the dime, circumstances do. We have needed something to break through our sleepwalking.
Lord Byron’s knew something of our dilemma:
“Melancholy is a fearful gift; what is it but the telescope of truth, which brings life near in utter darkness, making the cold reality too real?”
I take no comfort in hope. I look for the courage to wake up America!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 3, 2008
“Melancholy is a kind of demon that haunts our island, and often conveys herself to us in an easterly wind.”
Joseph Addison (1672 – 1719), English essayist.
Seldom have I read such a concise piece as this article that appeared in the Tampa Tribune, Sunday, August 3, 2008 in the "Commentary Section." It is titled "Red, White and Blues: America's Funk." You can find it on the newspaper's website (www.TBO.com) should you be so inclined.
You have heard me rant about its main points. The rant has become reality. That is what happens when the bottom falls out.
Some main points of the article:
(1) The American swagger is gone as 8 out of 10 Americans are in a depressing funk.
This change is blamed on the hapless administration of president Bush, but that is to be expected. We like to raise our leaders above us to treat them more than human only to tear them down as less than human when our appetites and indulgences drive everything south. We never blame ourselves.
(2) It is American capitalism, stupid!
The August 11, 2008 issue of Time magazine is dedicated to "The Economy." Pundits and Bill Gates tell us how to make capitalism work, and for an old codger such as myself, it sounds strangely like the same palaver I heard in the 1950s when Sputnik reduced education to a whirling nightmare; the 1970s when OPEC's oil embargo, the Iran Hostage Crisis, Watergate and Vietnam warranted the title in my book WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) of "Incipient Catastrophe."
Why catastrophe? I found the circumstances reminiscent of the "fall of Rome." The 1980s confirmed this with Japan eating our lunch, and buying the store.
"WWMs" was written nearly two decades ago when it was clear Detroit was living in a dream world with the die cast. Like a house of falling playing cards, we were all falling prostrate to its momentum.
(3) Consumer confidence an oxymoron?
The Economist list of contributors to the angst adds up to a big headache with an aspirin cure. My wonder is if this article will have any impact.
Last year when I was in Europe, the Euro was worth about $1.20; today it is about $1.59. Gasoline had not yet spiked; so more and more SUVs and trucks glutted the highways and byways.
The Economist points out that "America's beer," Budweiser, is now owned by little Belgium. This gets some people’s attention.
Less attention is given our spiraling debt of $ trillions and $ trillions owned primarily by foreign note holders. Consumer confidence is indeed an oxymoron as we are all mainly renters not owners (although we think we own what we own) and walk the economic tightrope without ever looking up, down or around.
(4) Forever looking for a sure thing. The Economist reports "many Americans feel as if they missed the boom."
Does that explain the rash of casinos across the land? Imagine a growth industry that produces nothing but false hope?
Hope is a passive word; courage is an active word. We have been reduced from doers to hopers.
The Economist reports that "between 2002 and 2006" the incomes of 99 percent rose by an average of 1 percent a year in real terms." How many saved a dime?
It reports further that as impressive as this rise, the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise 11 percent per year "between 2002 and 2006." Then the article hits us where it hurts: "three quarters of the economic gains during the Bush's presidency went to that top 1 percent."
There is deception here. It implies that this is a unique trend indigenous to this sitting president, alone, when it has been a consistent pattern.
In the 1970s, I was teaching a graduate seminar at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida for students of Golden Gate University of San Francisco, California. I presented a set of statistics very similar to those the present article for the United States since WWII.
Several students stayed after class, stunned and incredulous. I gave them references to check out my assertions. They did not want to believe the system was weighed against them. They wanted to believe capitalism’s invisible hand was for all as Adam Smith had promised.
Yet, since the beginning of capitalism, 80 to 90 percent of the wealth has been controlled by 10 to 20 percent of the people. Accessibility to wealth was then and remains now mainly a myth. Time's August issue will not change that.
It is why my books and articles have been provocative. They represent an attempt to engage the ordinary person to do the things that give him or her a chance at some independence and security.
It takes the realization that credit card companies, banks, and commercial enterprises with their tantalizing discounts are not in business for this purpose, but to rest personal independence and security from one to add to their own coffers.
Their economic strategy is for you to want to own a house that looks like those of the rich, a house you can't afford but will give you a sense of connection to the wealthy.
They want you to buy a boat that you can't afford, or some other luxury item that will make you feel as if you are affluent.
They want you to buy clothes you don't need, an automobile you can't afford when the one you are driving is working fine, but isn't the latest model.
See the trend?
It is the cloying need to make an impression convinced that it is your patriotic duty to work and spend paycheck-to-paycheck so the top 1 percent can maintain that ever-increasing edge.
No one can understand how an oil company can have $15 billion in quarterly profits when most people can't afford the gas to drive their car.
Few can understand why medical prescriptions cost so much when pharmaceutical companies have $ billion in quarterly profits. Drug companies insist "it takes years to develop a new drug," but they don't mention the government funded subsidized research. Notice the medical and pharmaceutical professions are less in the business of prevention than in ameliorative treatment.
We are not happy campers; we have lost our self-restraint and are paying dearly for it.
(5) Globalization is under fire.
We loved reading Tom Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” with his glorification of "this electronic age," that is, until free trade and immigration policy became scapegoats to our economic crises.
Politicians always have scapegoats in their pockets to get our dander up, and of course we believe them because they're in the know.
The Economist could not have said it with more bitter irony: panic is on display "when a nation built on immigrants is building a fence to keep them out."
Politicians on both sides of the aisle are endorsing some form of this asinine immigration policy instead of going back to the genesis of the problem, which is the double standard of work and respect. This, too, will blow up in our face.
We cannot have it both ways: cheap labor and cheat policies. People will put their lives at risk as long as survival is at stake.
We never seem to learn from history. As for globalization, we treat it as if it were a new thing. Globalization has existed since the days of the Romans.
We are a consumer driven economy and have never thought about the price of its intemperance.
(6) What about nation-building at home?
The paradox about nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq is that we have failed schools, failing children, and a falling apart infrastructure at home. The Romans allowed this to happen at home as well. It wasn’t terrorists that crippled Rome, but its own excesses. This left it vulnerable for the Visigoths and Germanic tribes of the north to plunder the city and collapse an empire.
(7) Resilience, how real?
The Economist points out that the United States is good at fixing itself, good at rebounding from its excesses and false steps. It claims the US has this capacity because it isn't stodgy and taciturn like Europe.
The Economist suggests self-correction will deal with the collapse and rubble of our misbegotten ways. New life, new innovations, new bursts of inspiration will absolve America of all its sins. Why not? It has always been so before, right?
This resilience sounds very much like "adolescent rebound" where the child has never had to experience the pain and struggle to grow up, or like America's nearly quarter millennium history.
Psychological characteristics may help to describe this collective phenomenon. To wit, personality is the "acquired self." Personality is what is not one's own. It is the "invented self."
Essence is our inheritance. It is what we are born with. Essence cannot be lost, cannot be changed or injured as easily as personality. It is our "real self."
Personality can be changed almost completely with the change of circumstances. Personality can be lost and injured.
Essence is the basis of one physical and mental makeup. It involves natural propensities, talents, our native intelligence, and innate capacities.
Personality is learned behavior consciously or unconsciously.
By unconsciously, I mean the inclination to imitate or attempt to be like someone else even if not compatible with one's own essence. Personality can be reduced to acquired tastes with all sort of artificial likes and dislikes subliminally bombarding the psyche.
When personality is developed at the expense of essence, we become pleasers, true believers, people who need to belong so they go along, people who are captives to self-designed cages.
When personality begins to dominate essence, we become less healthy as we are attracted to what is bad for us and to dislike what is good for us.
Normally, when essence dominates personality, personality can become quite useful. But if personality dominates essence, this can produce wrong results of many kinds.
Personality is not bad. We must have personality to live a social life. Personality and essence should grow parallel to each other with one not outgrowing the other.
Cases of essence outgrowing personality occur among uneducated people. These people may be very good, and even clever, but they are incapable of development in the same way as people with more developed personalities.
Such people often find comfort in using derogatory words to describe minorities or people not as naturally gifted as they are. They are also quick to reduce others to simple stereotypes. Media, advertisers, and politicians study and exploit these propensities with great proficiency.
Cases of personality outgrowing essence are often to be found among the rich and famous, the cultured and privileged, the movers and shakers. They fawn and spawn each other as the celebrity culture.
They often rise to head corporations, educational institutions, charitable foundations, religious institutions, the entertainment industry, media, and government because they embody what current society promotes. Rhetoric trumps reality in the new world order.
Essence in such cases remains in a half-grown, half-developed, half-realized state. Expediency and serendipity prevail at the expense of patience and plodding more essential to release significant essence.
What does this mean, and why do I mention it here?
We have rather implicit but rigid norms for personality and essence.
Quick and early growth of personality and essence to such norms can stop growth and development at a very early age. As our self-indulgent society might suggest, it has.
We are taught to be polite, obedient, submissive, passive, punctual, engaging and conforming, good natured, happy and obliging from preschool on, while we are expected to be modest about displaying our talent or specialness for fear of appearing elitist.
The result is that many grow up physically mature but emotionally immature acquiring high academic, business, professional or political status without growing up, acting in essence as if age of ten or twelve suspended in terminal adolescence. It is why leaders today often appear as if they have never left the sixth grade.
Consequently, while submerged in the wonder of electronics and the sophistication of a postmodern society, there seems a preference for underdeveloped essence when it comes to maturity.
Why else would there be such infatuation with gratuitous violence in entertainment, electronic games, spectator sports, or gamesmanship in business and politics? A competitive society is driven by imitation, replication, and duplication while trumpeting bogus creativity. China and India have fallen prey to this code.
If you want to look at the problems of society, look to the repressed development of essence in our young people. Jean Paul Sartre has said modern society lacks authenticity. He was referring to the artificiality of personality and the warped development of essence. Boredom, he claimed, is indicative of a society intimidated by adulthood.
(8) The Economist “slam-dunk” world of rhetoric.
“Countries like people behave dangerously when their mood turns dark.”
“America is not just hurting allies and trading partners but itself.”
“Credit crunch is in part the consequence of a flawed regulatory system.”
“Lax monetary policy allowed Americans to build up debts and fueled a housing bubble that had to eventually burst.”
“Lessons need to be learned.”
“Over-unionized and unaccountable American school system needs the same competition as its universities which are the envy of the world.”
Then on to health care, the rise of China, and then ending with, “Everybody goes through bad times.”
This rhetorical litany of disaster ends with this softball: “America has had the wisdom to take the first course (i.e., learn from its mistakes) before. Let’s hope it does so again.”
I must confess I thank God for the American blues, for the high cost of gasoline, for the credit card crunch, for the falling prices of homes, for the drop out sufferers, and why?
Because the abstract anodynes of enlightenment fail to move us off the dime, circumstances do. We have needed something to break through our sleepwalking.
Lord Byron’s knew something of our dilemma:
“Melancholy is a fearful gift; what is it but the telescope of truth, which brings life near in utter darkness, making the cold reality too real?”
I take no comfort in hope. I look for the courage to wake up America!
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