WHAT HAS ALL THIS TO DO WITH BEING "YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND"?

WHAT HAS ALL THIS TO DO WITH BEING "YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND"?



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

© May 28, 2013



REFERENCE:



This is an excerpt from “Meet Your New Best Friend,” which is to be published in a second edition. This is inserted in the center of the text as the book represents a broad framework of what I see as a crippling problem of our time.



Paternalism, benign or otherwise, has run its course. So have emotionalism, disordered enthusiasm and sentimental rhetoric. Grand schemes devoid of personal experience and uncritical acceptance have too often been substituted for reason and have led to our being un-grown-up in our approach to life.

The dry light of reason supported by science has changed the boundaries of consciousness where sensible man can verify for himself without parental or institutional authority what as well as who is best for him, starting with being friends, first and foremost to and with himself.

Inequality, hierarchies, paternalism and nationalism have lost or are losing their clout as liberal rationalism is coming into its own, starting with the individual. Immanuel Kant has written:



“Beings who have received the gifts of freedom are not content with the enjoyment of comfort granted by others.”



We have seen and are seeing what comfort does. It not only leads to complacency but also demoralizes and wreaks havoc on motivation. The most important distinguishing characteristic of human beings is the freedom to act, to choose between what is self-enhancing or self-adverting. Unless a person can be said to be the true author of his own acts, he cannot be described as responsible for them. Where there is no responsibility, there can be no morality.

Inanimate life does not make choices. It behaves as it does by the causal forces of nature, which are outside its control. This is not so with us, that is, unless we are unable to control our minds and bodies to do what is best for us.

We have, as free men, the right to act rightly or wrongly, virtuously or viciously according to our lights. We have the free will to control external factors – physical, chemical, biological, physiological, geographical and ecological – by our internal psychological guidance system. If we choose to be at the mercy of causal forces, rationalizing that we can do nothing but “go with the flow,” then we might as well be a turnip.

Although causal laws may affect our bodies, they need not affect our inner self. The external world is dealt with by science. The internal world, which should be free to make choices, is a function of voluntary actions and the foundation of morality. If there is no such freedom, there can be no possibility of moral law.

The case for being your own best friend is a moral one. Morality cannot be imposed upon us, but we can, indeed, we must impose morality on ourselves to act rationally and freely in our own best interests. This will be, by extension, in the best interests of everyone we touch without exception.

We have reached the point with the rush of history and the calamity and complexity that it has enjoined to demonstrate autonomy (self-governance), meaning giving rules to ourselves, and the freedom from being coerced or from being determined by something or someone we cannot control.

The ideas expressed here are meant to demonstrate that we are ends in ourselves, and not means to some arbitrary ends of someone else. This is so because we are the ultimate authors of the rules that guide us and to which we freely submit. To suggest that this is narcissistic or egoistic is to miss the point.

Should we be made to submit to something that does not proceed from our own rational nature, and is inconsistent with it, is to degrade us as persons, and to treat us as children instead of as a grown up, as mere animals or as objects to manipulate as things to be managed.

To deprive ourselves of the power of choice is to do to ourselves the greatest imaginable injury. No matter how benevolent the intention with which it is done this does irreparable damage to our individual spirit.

Paternalism is the antithesis of being your own best friend. That said this effort here is not to make you more assertive against institutional paternalistic authority, but to offer you a framework for viewing your own reality differently by stepping outside external dependency to make friends with yourself armed with internal integrity and ethical authority consistent with your nature. What you do beyond that is up to you.

To be civilized is to be grown up, that is to say, to behave responsibly to others and not allow anyone to treat you as a child, or to barter your freedom away with entitlements for the sake of security and comfort, or flattery to do what is against your nature to do, or any other device that might compromise your internal integrity and self-regard.

Our corporate society has relegated its citizens to dependent children, which is the greatest of despotisms and destroyers of freedom. Writing 170 years ago (1843), Immanuel Kant had this to say:



“The man who is dependent on another is no longer a man, he has lost his standing, he is nothing but the possession of another man.”



To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve, and diminish them as persons. The same holds true of ourselves. We have seen what has happened to our world as a result of this faulty doctrine in the 20th century. The fact that it lapses into the 21st century indicates how little self-regard is yet to be appreciated.

Modernity is the culture of separation (what John Doone suggests, “ ‘Tis all in peeces. .”) and science leads the way with materialism obliterating spiritualism, and secularism finding little time, attention or room for the soul. With all the brilliance of science there seems little wisdom. Our fragmented, frantic world strives to make up imagined deficits, not by holistic thinking, but through a patchwork of inventions. Society, as expressed through technology, is too clever by half. Typical is the experience of a scientist who attempted to make synthetic rubber. Overnight the beaker solidified. He couldn’t extract the material by conventional means, so he burned it off. The heat generated was so intense that he measured it. Thus solid propellant fuel was created, a happy accident, making the jet age possible.

We are also happy accidents. We come into the world surrounded by strangers, in a strange place and time in history. The distinguished American entomologist Edward O. Wilson captures this sentiment in the first sentence of his fine biography, Naturalist (1994): “I have been. . .a happy man in a terrible century.” The strangers we first encounter—our parents and immediate family—have much to do with how we are formed. We see, hear, watch and behave like them. We imitate what we see, hear and observe. These strangers reinforce or correct our interpretation of experience, by applause or scolding. Our initial role in life is that of entertainer. From this we develop a high need to please others; to put a smile on their faces; to control them by giving pleasure; by manipulating them through exploitation of their weaknesses; and thus coming to exploit ourselves.

By the time we enter school we are professional pleasers. Now we are exposed to another set of strangers, teachers, who tell us what is true and important. We are compliant and pliable. What we see, hear and observe at school may not complement what we experience at home, seeding a budding conflict. When we attend church, Sunday school or the Temple, we learn of God and about….



* * *

SHYLOCK EXPOSED! A Reader writes of the reality of work today.

SHYLOCK EXPOSED! A reader writes of the reality of work today.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 18, 2013

A READER WRITES:

Yesterday was my 25th anniversary at my job. It was a proud day and a sad day. Not one word of recognition for those 25 years. Guess this is what happens when a corporation takes over and you become a number. Two days before they had a recognition ceremony for long term employees but I was not included because my anniversary was after the cut-off date. Just the way the ball bounces as I was told. I became a new employee on March 1st when the corporation took ownership so all those years of dedication and loyalty are a thing of the past. My anniversary date of May 17th was the icing on the cake and I am so happy with my decision to retire sometime this year.


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY! Knowing you and knowing your dedicated service to this institution and knowing your caring ways throughout the years, I am pleased, no I am proud that you have self-congratulated yourself for your devoted service.

Obviously, there will be no gold watch, no compensation package, no recognition banquet, no collection of friends and relatives and fellow employees to toast your celebration. You are alone in your recognition, your achievement and your appreciation of a job well done.

You have also with this note brought to light the stark reality of the institution made naked. Not only does the purchase of one corporation by another bring a wrecking ball to the enterprise, it disrupts and decimates the culture, the values and beliefs, the implicit rules and relationships, the modus operandi of daily activity. The institution is like Shakespeare's "Shylock" taking a pound of flesh, which is the heart, and leaving the body behind.

The wrecking ball has no conscience, no heart, no feeling for people as persons. It is a matter of dollars and cents, of profit before people, which has no sense. It is the infallibility of authority that believes power is purpose and is justified by the rationale of progress. Those in the corporation take it for granted that they have the power to drive that purpose.

It is not a new thing, not by a long shot. It is why I write books, why I have written such books as "Work Without Managers" and "The Worker, Alone" and "Corporate Sin" and "Time Out for Sanity" and yes, "Meet Your New Best Friend,"

You display that last book with consummate skill and bravado. I salute you for it. You are, indeed, your own best friend.

The corporate, so conceived, has been treading in very disturbing waters for a long time. It shows it has now touched the shore with your treatment where everyone can see it for what it is, a pecuniary and mercenary institution, and not human at all. Yet, without people, without people such as you, the corporation dies. It is a human institution that has become inhuman, and shall pay for its sins in the long run.

If you read my recent essay that I posted to my readers on what “Time Out for Sanity is About" (see www.peripateticphilosopher.com May 16, 2013), you should not be surprised about how you have been treated.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said a corporation is human because it is peopled with workers, but he was wrong, dead wrong. A corporation is Machiavellian to the nth degree, and you are now experiencing its insensitivity.

Corporation respect only power and money, people with clout or people who could hurt it, and therefore the corporation acts accordingly.

You are a little person, I am a little person who writes books, and we are little people who the corporation feels it can ignore or dispense with or dispatch at will without doing itself any harm.

The corporation would be wrong because you have had the temerity to write this note, and distribute it to your friends, not with rancor but with disappointment and sadness.

People in America should read your note whatever their status whatever their career level whatever their denial of the poignancy of what you say, as people in America like to believe the corporation "is a family," and that as family the corporation has people’s best interests at heart.

That is not true. People are a commodity, goods in the company store, that have a shelf life and a value and a disposable rate as if they were inanimate, but people are animate. Unfortunately, people are also docile and obliging and take their disregard and disrespect quietly into the night without a word as long as they earn enough to keep body and soul together.

You are different and I salute you for it. God love and keep you always because you, whom I know well, represent the best of us all.

*     *     *



Jim

ABOUT "TIME OUT FOR SANITY! -- Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age"

“Time Out for Sanity! – Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age.”


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

© May 16, 2013

REFERENCE:

This was prepared for the second edition of this book, originally titled, “A Look Back to See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s.”

About “Time Out for Sanity!”

I thought long and hard about writing this book. The problem was resolved when I convinced myself it could give the reader a new perspective on how we have come to be stuck in our false confidence with a possible way out.

While science is looking for a universal theory, social and economic thinkers seem to be looking for a ecumenical system that answers all the questions, public and private, scientific and historical, moral and aesthetic, individual and institutional. The result is that there is seemingly a constant clash between progressive and reactionary agendas. The obstructionists ignore the complexity of the problems being faced while progressives deny the existence of these problems and turn their attention to irrelevancies.

We see this in our institutions and commerce: in the family which has become an irrelevancy; in the school which despite pouring more and more money into education continues to produce an inferior product; in business with its infallible authority and business as usual practices despite nearly throwing the world as well as the country into another great depression; in the religious in which the focus has been more on preserving its viability than discharging its mission; and in government that stays the same, misses the changes, is unable or unwilling to face them, leaving the future up for grabs.

These institutions originally created to respond to real societal needs are no longer capable of fulfilling them. They have been so transformed into mere impediments to human progress, in so doing, breeding their own tensions and diseases while generating their own false remedies.

Strife, conflict and competition between and among these human institutions have become essentially pathological. What makes them abnormal is that they do not fulfill those ends that citizens-as-citizens cannot avoid having in common, which are common purposes that develop in society as a human entity with spiritual and material potentialities.

All forms of behaviour are not rational, that is, on a personal basis, for they lead to various degrees of self-distortion and frustration. To know what we must do, we must know what and where we are in the pattern of the processes that envelop us, which in turn determine the shape of our society. Yet, despite this view, it is possible for us to analyse the situation correctly but fail to behave accordingly.

Nothing is value free much as science would imply it is possible to realize objectivity with detached contemplation. The division between facts and values is a shallow fallacy for every thought involves an evaluation, no less than every act and every feeling. Values are already personified in our general attitude to the world, in our outlook that shapes our perceptions and the way we think, see, believe, understand, discover and know a thing to be true or not.

Another way of saying this is that the ‘self’ is not a static entity. The notion that we are dispassionate observers free from the stream of values that bombard our senses from our culture is profoundly fallacious. Worse it may be a disguised retreat or escape from the reality of experience posing as a rational dispassionate detachment, what existential philosopher Sartre calls simply “bad faith.”

In revisiting this original essay written in the early 1970s, it was like déjà vu, as everything seemed to change when nothing actually seemed much different. There were so many parallels with our present time that I thought it would be useful to take a “Time Out for Sanity!” Alas, the more things change the more they remain the same.

Armed with cell phones, laptops, Blackberrys, videophones, PlayStations, Game Boys, MP3’s, iPods, iPads, mobiles, and continually more sophisticated digital tools that have become increasingly escape toys, we have sidetracked our evasive minds from an obsession with sex of the late twentieth century (1970s) to an equally compelling obsession with cyberspace in the early twenty-first. Now, pixels have replaced people while synthetic gimmicks such as Viagra have been invented to keep our flagging libidos alive.

Unfortunately, not even the finest handheld electronics with their memory boards of microscopic dimensions can save us from the shock of being stuck in circumstances that look uncannily like that of the 1970s. Facts and values are fused together. Whatever our current proclivities, we are made what we are by the interplay of historical, social and material factors, and these values are determined by our tasks and preoccupations whether creative and enhancing or destructive and debilitating.

Look around you, as I did four decades ago, and tell me you don’t see people with glazed eyes running harder than ever before and getting nowhere. I suspect you have encountered the same clueless faces that appear as if they don't like what they are doing or where they are going, but have little idea what they would prefer to be doing or going.

To live is to act. To act is to pursue some goal, choose, accept, reject, pursue, resist, retreat, escape, or be for or against something or some aspect of something. The self-conscious know this; the unself-conscious merely act without thinking.

Values are therefore part of the very texture of living that includes thinking, feeling, or willing. Hence, we choose to act as if we were goods in a shop. The fact is we are where and what we are, taking in our notions and fancies, which may lead us to a static garden or perceptive objective. The rational and irrational are always in interplay in our temperament.

We are on the precipice of understanding that we have no characteristics, which are not shared with all other men. We are moving from man as the soul of the true believer, who took comfort in sacred books, pronouncements of the church, metaphysical insights, scientific enlightenment, or the general will of an uncorrupted society to understanding the world in its own terms. We are ready to deal with its machinery and the unalterable direction of its growth. We are on the precipice of growing up.

Four decades ago, a large rebellious contingent escaped into psychedelic wonderland. The escape today is of a contingent of more docile temperaments into some kind of electronics. It never occurs that these electronic wonders may eventually fry their brains until they have no memory of the damage, operating as if on a schizophrenic high that in some ways seems reminiscent of those chemically induced psychedelic highs of the 1970s.

This book is written in the hopes that it causes the reader to reflect on the choices being made, producing consequences more consistent with blessings than not. To that end, I wish all readers well.



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

Tampa, Florida

CONFIDENCE, COPING AND CULPABILITY

 CONFIDENCE, COPING AND CULPABILITY


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

© May 12, 2013

Confidence, the question of confidence, who has it and who does not, weighs on the mind of the times. These are not only difficult times but confidence forms threads to a wider pattern of an intricate complex of subtly interconnected ideas rather than belonging to a singular framework.

Our sense of reality has taken a jolt. The richness and diversity of human experience with its endless variety and individuality of things and people has come to cross currents, often spiraling into despair in terms of social intercourse and personal relationships.

Self-regard and confusions of aims lies beneath the surface of public life often in chaotic detail concealing actual motivation and projected experience.

We long after some unitary truth that will altogether transcend our problems and the distractions that plague mundane existence. In the course of a century, we have departed from our spiritual anchors of family and church to scientism and commercial secularism blurring our boundaries and introducing us to an alien world with its new litany of what is important, significant and admirable. In the process, we have left ourselves behind and with it our confidence and control.

Laws divide us between science and Utopia, effectiveness and ineffectiveness in every sphere of our lives as we are now relegated to reason and observation in a scientific age. We are also governed in a discoverable direction, where our course has been plotted more or less precisely, as if we were a clock and our movements were synchronized with a future that had no past and could never find a home in the present. That is the legacy of the twentieth century.

We fail to shrink from killing millions of human beings against accepted beliefs as to what is feasible and right, against what is thought right, by the majority. To survive, our institutions in one sense have had to be more malleable and our laws more elastic then at any other point in our history. Yet, we have yet to decide whether our creative or destructive capacities are to prevail.

Human beings can be radically altered, re-educated, conditioned and turned topsy-turvy, and yet while this is all happening (as it is now), to act as if nothing has changed and everything is habitual and normal as it has always been. Our unconsciousness to the human condition led Aldous Huxley to write “Brave New World” and George Orwell to pen “1984,” alas, with little notable impact.

We have become skillful forgeries as if pieces of synthetic antiquarianism grafted onto our inescapably contemporary foundation. Our fixed habits, our framework of things, our persons, attitudes and ideas, our uncritical assumptions, and our unanalyzed beliefs, leave us in the void, supported only by our language.

We think in words, as I am doing here, but fail to realize that our language, with its symbolism is suffused with our basic attitudes and mistaken beliefs, and therefore represents a retreat from reality, a comfort zone that is tissue thin.

It is only when our nerves touch other nerves which lie deep within us that we feel what we are feeling, think what we are thinking, and are conscious of the electric shock of life and what is genuine and profound. Otherwise, we go through life robotically with nothing touching our innermost private and quintessential thoughts and feelings. When that happens, we become furniture of our external world.

“Confident Thinking” is a book written to bring about consciousness, to put us in charge, in control, to allow life to vibrate with energy, meaning and joy, to make us the most intimate instrument in life’s endeavors, to assist us to think, feel and behave as we would like to as human beings.

Do not confuse problem-seeking solutions with solutions themselves. Nor should you expect the problem solving to be acquainted in the most intimate terms with the deeply ingrained territory of the subconscious where most of life’s answers exists, but seldom surface. This is the terrain of novelists and speculative philosophers, the world of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Nietzsche but not the world of H. G. Wells, Kant, Wittgenstein and Russell.

The aim of science is to note the number of similarities in the behavior of objects and to construct propositions of the greatest degree of generality from which the largest number of such uniformities can be logically deduced. For the novelist and philosopher it is just the opposite. Feelings and introspections do not lend themselves to the rigidity of mathematics, yet science separated from the human 'being' is most real in its unintended consequences.

The novelist and philosopher sets forth, in unintentionally biased language, habits and thoughts, ways of looking at things and reacting to them, talking about his and the experiences of others in ways too close to be arbitrarily discriminated and classified. He is limited, strictly speaking, to what he is aware of and can absorb as a picture of what he perceives is going on. This is what 'to understand' is largely about.

Language describing ordinary experience is employed in the opposite manner of closed scientific language. Feelings and impressions, which in human behavior are most often treated as facts, are integral to normal experience, amounting to the massive integration of data, too ephemeral and ubiquitous to be mounted on the pin of some narrow scientific principle or process.

Language, so used, is not meant to develop an unassailable principle but is intended to communicate relatively stable characteristics of an external world, which forms the frontier of our common experience in a life largely consisting of manipulations.

I am referring to that sensitive self-adjustment to what cannot be measured precisely or weighed exactly or fully described at all, that innate capacity that exists in every individual called imaginative insight, or intuition, at its highest point of genius to which everyone is endowed, being that individual's understanding of life. It is the distinction that exists, for us all, between wisdom and folly.

Confidence is a metaphor for the inflation and deflation that oscillates within human existence, wherein the imagination grows overly luxuriant at the expense of vigorous observation, while wisdom is based on ‘understanding,’ or discerning comprehension rather than simple knowledge.

We live in the age of the professional, where knowledge is power, and 'power' often gets lost in what can be done and what cannot be done. Since education is constructed on what has worked, or knowledge, there exists a rigidity and loyalty to the past. We see this in the failure of our institutions to change with the times, with education still as infallibly structured as if it were the nineteenth century with diplomas and degrees having more currency than what people can do.

Possessing confidence, there is an element of improvisation, of playing by ear, of being able to size up the situation, of knowing when to leap and when to remain still, for which there is no curriculum, no formula, no general recipe, no specific set of skills required in identifying specific situations as instances in which general laws can be substituted for initiative and imaginative intervention.

Confidence is the practical genius that differentiates learners from knowers, and listeners from tellers. It is the difference between people having a center they trust that governs their behavior and directs their actions, and others who lack the capacity for doing anything without a detailed prescription.

When we are on top of things, our parts are all working in harmony with the imaginative music of our souls vibrating with a cadence unique to us. We behave confidently because we are confident. We may not be able to explain it. We need not worry, it is like being able to ride a bike without being able to explain exactly how we can ride a bike or why we prefer the riding

IS THERE A CRISIS IN CONFIDENCE?

President Jimmy Carter got into trouble during his administration during a period of double dip unemployment and double dip inflation by telling the American people in a fireside chat reminiscent of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s during WWII, in a cardigan sweater no less, that we had a “crisis in confidence.” Whether correctly stated or not, the president’s popularity tumbled.

Recently, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a column on how Americans’ self-confidence had also pummeled.

Brooks had asked readers to respond to him on the question of their self-confidence. A mother wrote that she might as well have her vocal cords cut because her children want her to stay calm, talk nice to the point of not wasting their time. A military man claims women shut down women who are confident more than men do. Another woman, a business owner, claims that workers don’t want her to interfere with their dress or manners, much less their work, and prefer her to act as if invisible, blending into the world as passively as wallpaper, more like a lap dog than a border collie. Another person pronounces that all men and women suffer equally from “under-confidence.” Men bluff their way through while women choose to be skeptical and to look for advice or simply remain passive.

In each of these instances, the projection of undernourished personal confidence centered on the need to please others at the expense of pleasing ‘self,’ preferring the role of victim to that of victor.

Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts shows a different aspect of what happens when our confidence deserts us.

Pitts writes of Brenda Heist who showed up at the police station in Key West, Florida stating she was a missing person. Eleven years ago, when the bottom fell out of her marriage, and she was turned down for housing assistance, three strangers found her crying in a park and asked her to hitch a ride with them. From that moment forward, her existence went into a tailspin of pastiche alliances, petty crimes, panhandling, trailer parks, common law marriages, sleeping under bridges, and working as a housekeeper. This lifestyle was mirrored on her recent mug shot, measured against her old driver license photograph. She looked at least a decade older than her actual age.

Pitts believes everyone thinks at one time or another of running from life, but it is just that, the thought and not the act. Yet, tens of thousands of people do it every year. Brenda Heist daughter says her mother can rot in hell, her husband doesn’t want her back, and the saddest part of all, she is so damaged that she doesn’t want herself either. With confidence, we embrace our resistance to life’s challenges and soar over them, but with despair, we run away from life until life catches up with us.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, always one to look on the dour side of things, while not engaging this subject of confidence directly, implies its relevance by default. Her subject is sexual harassment citing a Pentagon study estimating that 26,000 men and women in the military were sexually assaulted in 2012. Only 3,374 incidents were reported, as the majority of victims were afraid to lose a paycheck, while only 238 assailants were convicted. Dowd employed her column to profile United States Air Force Colonel Jeffrey Krusinski accused of sexual battery. Krusinski, it so happens, is in charge of the sexual assault prevention programs for the U.S. Air Force.

Dowd bolstered her column against Krusinski by reminding us of the Thomas-Hill hearings, in which Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was Anita Hill’s boss, and was accused by her of vulgar and insinuating behavior while in his employ. Thomas at the time was the nation’s top enforcer of laws against workplace sexual harassment.

It may surprise the reader but the angels and demons of our nature are often revealed by what we claim to be vehemently against rather than for, taking on a hue that reveals our personal obsessions rather than our high-minded motivations. Be skeptical of the person who crusades against common human failings, because that person may be revealing more naked truth about herself and her biases than those she reproves.

Confidence is an enabling disposition, and as revealed in “Confident Thinking,” exposes culpable behavior for what it is, how it takes hold, and why those who seem the most in control and confident, are more likely out of control and victim to their demons.

* * *

AN OPEN LETTER TO YOUNG PROFESSIONALS!

 AN OPEN LETTER TO YOUNG PROFESSIONALS




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



© May 1, 2013



REFERENCE:



This is a rough draft of a piece to be included in the re-release of "The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain." The book when first published anticipated the dramatic rise of the professional in the workforce without a concomitant passion for the role demands or the recognition (and acceptance) of what that role or those demands would require. These professionals were interested in perks not performance. It was not totally their fault. They had been managed, motivated, manipulated and monitored in a way to make them passive and reactive rather than responsible and accountable. By the irony of this republication, a new generation is coming on the scene and the picture doesn't look to this observer that much different, and thus the reason for this missive to be included in the book.



* * *



If you are nine months and twenty-one years of age, you are the newest generation. If you have just graduated from university, or about to graduate, and cannot find a job, don’t blame your parents, the government, in fact, don’t waste your time in projecting blame. You are into a new era where nobody knows what side is up.



We once thought we were a Christian nation in which everyone had freedom of religion. Now we apologize for calling Christmas, “Christmas,” and Easter, “Easter,” and saying “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Easter.”



We once thought English was our native language and now we apologize for not being able to speak or read Spanish.



We once thought marriage was between a man and a woman, and now we are ashamed to insist on this definition, as our clerics, politicians and media cave into the societal cultural demands to see marriage as otherwise.



We once abhorred premarital sex as much on pragmatic as religious grounds as it led to unwanted pregnancies, venereal diseases and disruptive sensibilities. Our bodies don’t have to be adult but our minds do to cope with life. Now, we feel self-conscious and even ashamed if we disclose we’re not active sexually before we are ready for the emotional baggage that can come with it. Instead, we hook up with relative strangers as if married couples or share our virtues with no social stigma in high school or earlier, and lead sexually active lives seeing no guilt or shame, much less consequences to sexual congress. We see it as being “adult” and sophisticated when this couldn’t be further from the case.

Once it was cool to smoke cigarettes surreptitiously justifying it because our parents did even though we might not yet be in our teens. Once, it was equally cool to have a nip of a beer, wine or whiskey left after our parent’s party before we were of age. Then it was gangbusters when we turned 18 or 21, whatever the legal age for smoking and drinking in our state.



If you are nine months and twenty-one years of age, you don’t have to look too far from where you’re sitting to see a mother or a father, uncle or aunt that has sclerosis, or cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema, coughing spells, unable to walk without a cane, or very far, or has a stint or two in their arteries to keep blood in their bodies flowing, or a double, triple, or quadruple heart bypass operations because after about nine months and twenty-one years, the time you have been alive, Nature’s revenge kicks in and levels loved ones who were simply doing what was cool.



t is not your fault that we are a pacifier nation. You didn’t ask for that pacifier when you cried and were hungry, had a little tummy ache, needed your diaper to be changed, or just felt restless. You couldn’t talk, didn’t have a language yet, but you could cry, as crying was your way to get attention to your discomfiture.



Nor was it your fault that when you were full of zest with an appetite for life and couldn’t sit still and wanted to be doing something, running, jumping, yelling, laughing, talking, shouting at your heart’s content, only to find that this was all wrong; that you were supposed to hold your spirit at bay and behave appropriately at meals, in church, at school, that when adults were talking you were to be seen but not heard, to behave like a mannequin, cute but unobtrusive.



As you reached school age, a new regiment of pacifiers was introduced to quiet your spirit. You now had language. You could process information. Only now you found school more inhibiting to your spirit then had home been. It puzzled you when so many of our spirited playmates simply kowtowed to the demands of their parents, teachers, nuns, priests and ministers. The drill was now to be polite, obedient, punctual, passive, attentive, focused, predictable, and lovable within the confines of well-documented tyrannical policies for behavior.



You had little choice but to rebel, to retrogress to that child before language was your outlet. Only now the pacifier was not the innocuous plastic sucking nipple, but a regiment of Ritalin or Adderall given even to prevent your rambunctious prepubescent spirit from kicking in.



If this were not enough, with no idea what it meant, you were labeled with Hawthorne’s “scarlet letter” in the form of being called an ADD or an ADHD child. With no say in the process, you had entered the world of psychiatric doublespeak and doublethink, where a pound of prevention is worth a ton of cure.



Small wonder by the time you are nine months and twenty-one years of age you have experimented with marijuana and other illegal recreation drugs to reach that same zombie state you remember as a child. If fact, many of these illegal recreational drugs are moving quickly in many states to legalization. Soon, it will be possible to be on a high and have your feet never touch the ground until you die. Of course, chances are you won’t be able to do anything too productive during the interim. But not to worry, psychiatry, medical science and pharmaceutical research is covering your back with apologies and placebos and the rationale that give credence to “Pacifier Nation.” These drugs will soon be labeled as mind expanders as was LSD several generations ago.



We live in an age of excess, that is, two billion souls on the planet do. The other five billion hardly have enough to keep body and soul together.



We in the West and the rising Third World East along with Brazil in South America have gravitated to addiction as the norm. This is not only in the sphere of recreational and prescription drug excess, but also in all our pursuits. We have come to burn the candle at both ends collapsing in the middle with a retinue of socially accepted maladies, including burn out, being bipolar, schizophrenia, asthma, obesity, heart disease, and having some kind of elected surgery which have come to belie what is construed as a state of normalcy. We have legitimized being sick as a socially acceptable way of retreat from the grind, or from life itself. On the other hand, should anyone initiate such a retreat, say “dropping out” while being totally healthy, chances are it would be whispered that he or she was sick in the head. This is further evidence that you at nine months and twenty-years of age are inheriting an upside down world. .



I doubt if anyone would suggest that this electronic boom we now enjoy was inevitable, but I do, admittedly, in retrospect. It took the renegade spirit of those of “Ritalin Nation” babies to ultimately rebel from that regiment and the society that sponsored it once they were of age.



We become what we think, but we also become what we hate as well. I imagine these Ritalin junkies couldn’t wait to escape the regiment of medication. They went off to college, and saw that sucked, looked around and decided what else could they do. They had always liked games, the more weird and demanding the better. So, they gravitated to crude games and toys on printed wire circuit boards, and voila! They were home!



A generation or two ago, those of Ritalin Nation were not serious students of anything but opportunists. Freud would say they weren’t looking for a career, weren’t looking to contribute to the common good. They were looking for a new pacifier that would pass muster and be conceived and perceived as something of value added, something that would allow them to retrogress to that earlier period of pacifier contentment.



And voila! Throwing caution to the wind and convention aside, they embarrassed Big Blue’s IBM and GM’s and GE’s lock on commerce, and miraculously turned toys into tools, and then tools back into toys as constant pacifier companions not unlike that plastic nipple remembered affectionately so long ago. God is no longer in the machine but in the latest electronic wonder, and as they say in sport, “You’ve not seen anything yet!”



It doesn’t stop with what we have in our ear, on our lap or in our hand, always something because we cannot stand not to be doing something, listening to something, or chatting with someone 24/7 because we cannot stand for one second to be alone. The fact that you can probably identify with this temperament shows how pervasive the condition.



My point is how can you ever relax if you are always on. We have only so much psychic as well as physical energy. Just as matter can neither be created nor destroyed but only changed in its state of existence, so also is the case with us. You cannot cheat or change Nature. In Nature everything is connected to everything else. Everything in Nature has to go somewhere. Nature knows best. There are no free lunches in Nature. Science has proven this on innumerable occasions yet people try.



Athletes take steroids to get an edge, which destroys as it builds muscle and ultimately leads to entropic damage and even on occasion to an early death. Now we have energy drinks to enhance workers’ performance but with no idea what it is doing to their bodies. With food manufacturers, the worry is not what is ethical but what is legal. This finds them producing candy coated caffeine capsules or caffeine loaded energy drinks, and advertising them as safe as drinking water.



You may ignore these references as the utterances of a cranky old man, but few would deny we are in unchartered waters with little more than our optimism and hubris in support of our fancies. The world is quickly moving away from a white American-European dominated society, which is inevitable. What is not ineluctable is to go passively forward with no sense that there is any point of going against the current, when there is, and the reason for this open letter. You of nine months and twenty-one years of age can change the course of history if you but have the will to do so.



* * *



If you are nine months and twenty-one years of age, you may be an unwed mother, an absent father; you may be into drugs, alcohol, gambling, licentiousness or a myriad of counterproductive excesses that everyone reading this of any age knows of such hazards either personally, or within their family history or amongst their friends.





If you are using the shibboleths of codes to establish distinction from older generations, know all the celebration and integration, all the electronic Aps to networking, all the apprehension and disenchantment, actually differs little with that of your elders, as there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to fear, self-disgust, self-loathing and self-doubt, much less to isolation, disconnection and loneliness. We are a social animal but we need breathing room, too, which comes only when we have had some time with ourselves, alone, something that in the present age is in short supply.



In every age in the marketplace of ideas, despair resides, but there is no law that says you must buy into the despair because seemingly everyone else does. Existentially, self-alienation differs little from one generation to the next. It is just given different names: “the lost generation,” “the beat generation,” “the baby boomers,” the “yuppies,” “the me generation,” and so on.



At one time the greatest form of subtle torture was to strap a person to a chair to the constant dripping of water with no recourse to do anything about it but go mad. Today, there is no need to strap anyone to a chair because the constant drip through a myriad of media outlets, not to mention the personal ones as well, texting and tweeting, disenfranchises us from our normal lights. The irony is that no one notices as they are strapped voluntarily to the same kinds of electronic devices, and I haven’t even mentioned the subliminal torment that is a constant cacophonic roar to our subconscious.



Consequently, we go forward looking for answers outside ourselves when they all exist within us. We attempt to be everyone’s friend ending up being no one’s friends, because when we try to be everything to everyone we end up being nothing to anyone, including ourselves. It is a hard idea to digest but not everyone will ever love us; nor can we solve anyone’s problems but our own



Each generation looks expectantly to its elders with the demand, “Show me something new?” Well, there isn’t anything new. Despite all the technological progress of one generation to the next, people remain essentially the same only the toys change.



Each generation experiences success and failure, surprise and disappointment, pain and pleasure in the moment, and each generation differs as to how it embraces or rejects that experience. There is a dread of every generation to contemplate the future or to deny its hold on them.



* * *



If you think this is my preamble to give you some sage advice, and how to deal with the future, you would be wrong. Instead, I have some questions I would like to ask you.



What is it you would like to do?



Why would you like to do that rather than something else?



What is the relationship of your essence to your personality?



Chances are you don’t have a clue as to the answer to the first two questions. Few of us did when we were your age. We stumbled into the future ending up doing something or other, which proved either adequate or inadequate, more a matter of attitude than aptitude.



Our problem in my generation was more a matter of the third question, which is a balance or imbalance between “who we are” (essence) and “who we think we are” (personality).



Essence is what you are born with; personality is what you acquire. Essence is your DNA, which is cumulative, not only of your parents, but also of many generations in your family tree that preceded them, and contributed to the human being you happen to be in terms of potential. Essence is your exclusivity, your uniqueness. Essence you own. Personality is what you only rent because you cannot own what you can only acquire.



You may be inclined to disregard your essence, your potential, because of what sociologist Dr. Billy G. Gunter calls “ambient deficiency motivation.” ADM finds many of us, strangely, attracted to what we are not or what is the antithesis of what we actually are. That is to say, the emphasis is placed on our personality, or what seems thrilling or importance or being with it, in a word, being esteemed. Consequently, in this rag tag bone of the heart, we may be attracted to what we are not and what we do not own and cannot rightly possess.



For example, the romanticism of being a priest may have special appeal to the profligate sinner; the idea of being an academic may fascinate when you have little interest in study or reading books; the desire to have a position of authority and be your own boss may be precluded by your incapacity for risk, responsibility or accountability, or you may aspire to be a parent to have your ego ideal manifested in another human being, but lack an interest in what parenting requires.



Essence, however, is not enough. We must also develop our personality. We start acquiring personality from birth. As a baby, we discover what works with our caregivers and what doesn’t; what results in satisfaction and what does not. The baby calibrates the benefit to pouting, tantrums, and tears, and uses them judiciously to its desired ends.



We also learn the power of guilt, shame and embarrassment in getting what we want, which is not necessarily congruent with what we need to grow and develop consistent with our essence.



It is no accident that several generations since the middle of the 20th century have been suspended in terminal adolescence as a result of learned helplessness, looking outside themselves for their security and total well being.



Our bloated and deficit economy is the best indicator of what those of nine months and twenty-one years of age are now to inherit. True, like Kafka’s Mr. K, they can claim they have done nothing wrong, but that will not augur well for them in the future.



* * *



If I am advocating anything here, it is better balance between our essence and personality. The fact that you as a young professional are entering a celebrity culture suggests that personality has become dominant at the expense of essence. It is now more important "who you are" than "what you are." The evidence is rather apparent when you consider the many masks we are forced to wear, as we go through life to accommodate constantly changing role demands (our jobs) and self-demands (our self-regard).



Masks are so much a part of our culture and personality that the masks we wear in public differ little from the masks we wear in private. In other words, we are constantly on, constantly adjusting our masks to be consistent with how we perceive the situation. We are still calibrating like that baby we were nine months and twenty-one years ago. Seldom, if ever, do we abandon our masks for fear others will see us as we are. Indeed, we change our masks so quickly, in private as well as public, that the naked eye cannot capture the change.



Some of these masks work for us, at one stage of our lives, but not at another stage. It is beholden to us to know which masks are most effective and in which situations, and to adjust these masks accordingly. To take the stand, that “I don’t wear a mask,” or to declare wearing a mask is disingenuous is to be naïve to the extreme. You know people are talking about masks when they say about another person not present, “He’s a nice guy but just a tic off.”



If this seems confounding, take heart in knowing that the mask you wear will consistently be appropriate if you don’t let external factors dictate your internal integrity. You have your best interests always at heart when you have a sense of humor about yourself and start treating yourself as your very best friend.



* * *

CONFLUENCE OF ESSENCE AND PERSONALITY

CONFLUENCE OF ESSENCE AND PERSONALITY




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

© April 28, 2013



REFERENCE:



Readers have written to me by e-mail and my website (www.peripateticphilsopher.com) wondering what has happened to me. “You haven’t posted a missive since February, have you been sick?” No. I have been busy working with Amazon to get my nine books ready for the Kindle library, and a new book ready for publication with the able of assistance of George Edward Daly of Alberta, Canada. We are getting these same nine books ready for re-release by a print publisher. Yes, all nine of them! I’ve signed a contract for these nine re-released books and for this new book. What follows is an excerpt from Confident Thinking, my newest book and tenth in a series, which will be published in late summer or early fall, 2013. All my books have been updated for the 21st century reader. Incidentally, there is no special reason for this excerpt except to say I am currently proof reading it.

JRF



* * *



Everything starts with the individual. The science of people in general and the individual in particular has not made equivalent progress to that made in the material world. Dealing confidently with complexity in this new century has left much to be desired.

Man remains essentially lost in description, an object analyzed, categorized, labeled, and identified, a subject opened to conjecture, bias and fantasy, but hardly understood. The idea of man varies according to metaphysical beliefs. A physical scientist and theologian accept the same definition of a crystal of sodium chloride. They do not agree on the same definition of man. The sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, ethnologist and etiologist have their definitions as well. .

We are late to make man a subject of pressing concern. Astronomy was already far advanced at a time when man’s physiology was relatively primitive. Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler reduced the earth from the center of the universe to a humble satellite of the sun, while their contemporaries had little idea of the elementary structure or function of the brain. Even earlier, the study of spiritual life and philosophy attracted greater men than the study of science and medicine.

Our mind is designed to contemplate simple facts and solve simple problems.

There is a reluctance to unravel the contradictions and aberrant behaviors of man. French philosopher and Nobel Laureate Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941) stated flatly, “The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life.” He claimed we love to discover in the cosmos the geometrical forms that exist in the depths of our consciousness. “You can see it,” he said, “in the exactness of our monuments, the precision of our machines, and the purity of our algorithms, all a fundamental character of our minds. Yet, geometry doesn’t exist in nature. It originates in us.”

We abstract from complexity simple systems that bear certain relationships to one another and reduced them to pure mathematics.

Alexis Carrel, Nobel Laureate for Medicine (1912) writes in “Man, The Unknown” (1935), “The knowledge of ourselves will never attain the elegant simplicity, the abstractness, and the beauty of physics.”

Three-quarters of a century later, little has changed. Carrel’s point was that while our universe is exclusively mechanical; man is not. He claimed that with each technological advance that civilization was threatened with more mental deterioration than any infectious disease.

Carrel goes on to say, “Modern civilization seems to be incapable of producing people endowed with imagination, intelligence, and courage.” Is this simply Nietzschean or are there grounds for concern? Perhaps a better question might be: has man’s development kept pace with his technological advancement? Science and technology have sprung from man’s brain, but what is the status of man’s moral equivalent?

Imagine if Galileo, Newton and Einstein had applied their intellectual gifts to the study of man, would our world be the same? Men of science do not know where they are going. They are guided by chance, curiosity, craving to explore the unknown, but always outside themselves as men.

Each is in his own world governed by his own laws.

From time to time, obscurity is penetrated with some meaningful discovery without prevision to its consequences. Einstein admitted as much. “I made one great mistake in my life when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification – the danger that the Germans would make them.”

We are now in a postindustrial society moving further from the idea of man while our factory programming and mentality continue to dog us, structured to operate as if our institutions were living factories with a physiology and mental landscape impossible to alter for fear the corpus might die.

Modern industry has been based on the idea of progress, progress in school, in health, wealth and happiness, in our careers, in production at the lowest cost so that the individual and the company can earn as much as possible. The individual who runs the machines with little consideration as to the long-term effects to his existence has embraced this concept.

Education today is essentially job training to package man as a conduit component to Electronic Age fruition. Man was passive before and after the Industrial Revolution. Now, he has taken a great leap backward to complete passive receptivity. We see this in his electronic games of virtual reality, spectator sports, celebrity watching, Internet surfing and vicarious recreation that makes atavistic television couch potatoes appear as activists.

The microchip continues to be reduced until it will be little more than the size of a grain of sand. Videophones, video watches, and lapel pin sensing devices will soon be as common as McDonald burgers leading to an obesity of the mind to match that of the body.

Inert science of matter has come to be matched by our own physical inertness. The power to clone animals has resulted in our cloning without having to undergo the science.

Protagoras was confident that “Man is the measure of all things,” when it seems he is a stranger in the world he has created. Man is capable of organizing this world for himself but not himself for this world. Why? It seems he does not possess the practical knowledge of his own nature.

Technology soars on the great advancements in the sciences of nature while nature through tsunamis, earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes, mud slides, avalanches and floods become increasingly hostile to man. “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall,” observes Einstein, “He will end by destroying the earth.” The science of matter has taken precedence to the science of man. Science has opted for the less challenging conundrum.

That said we shouldn’t wait for science to create a definitive mind map to guide us. We should instead develop confluence between our essence and personality on our own. There are certain facts we know:



· Everything in Nature is connected to everything else.

· Everything in Nature has to go somewhere.

· Nature knows best.

· We can’t change Nature.

· There are no free lunches in Nature.



This is as true of matter and it is of man. Confident Thinking is not rocket science. It is a practical guide to better understand and leverage us to more satisfying and effective behavior. While neurophysiologists dig into the neurons of our brains, theologians into our souls, psychologists into our consciousness, and sociologists and anthropologists into our work and play, we have the important business at hand of living and saving our planet from ourselves.

Society gets better one person at a time. To be useful to others we must first be useful to ourselves. To be comfortable with others we first must be comfortable with ourselves. This means we must know, understand and accept ourselves, as we are in order to accept others as we find them.

We are all more alike than different. We are all products of our experience. We are inclined to see others as reflections of what we see and understand in ourselves.

A society is an organism as real as the individual. If a society can only see other societies in its own image, then it is a blind society. Whatever its plans it will quicken its doom and ultimate demise. We as individuals must recognize this flaw. We must plan our work and work our plan to connect rather than to divide us.

Nothing is ever wasted. Curiosity is a blind impulse that obeys no rule. We may go down many false roads before we find the right one. Our minds are as naturally given to exploration as lower animals. We are intrigued with machines but forget we mirror the same complexity in our human anatomy and physiology. Our curiosity extends quite naturally to outer space but not so naturally to inner space. We are drawn to the terrain of the unknown. But it seems to stop when the curiosity turns to human behavior. We remain a puzzle to ourselves. Cartoonist Walt Kelley’s Pogo states the obvious, “I have seen the enemy, and he is us.”

We hear variation of this, “We are our own worst enemy!” No matter how many false turns we make we are picking up valuable material along the way.

No one escapes the morality of his time. It surrounds us and bombards our senses with its stimuli while we think we are exercising free will. Therefore, we should give pause before we make choices recognizing that the influence is always present. There is a natural confluence between our essence and personality, which is our failsafe protection to sanity and survival.





* * *

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE


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

© February 23,2013

REFERENCE:

Someone commented on my blog regarding my most recent essay (A Way of Looking at Things: “Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer”) with the question and comment, “Why do you write these essays? You can’t be making much money doing this.”

I often get comments on my blog and invariably they are anonymous. By the accident of this gargantuan task I committed myself to, of going through my clutter of literally thousands of pieces of published material over the past quarter century, and scores of unpublished works, including several book sized manuscripts, I occasionally come across something that surprises, no, astounds me, something that I have kept, but forgotten I had. In this case, it was an e-mail from a reader.

Novelist Don DeLillo claims writers write to save themselves as individuals. I can relate to that. More basically, however, I believe I write to ease the discomfort if not the pain of those living in these most tumultuous times.

We are culturally programmed to be so self-estranged that denial of our circumstances fails to cover it, alas, if we ran into ourselves in the mall chances are we would smile as if at a stranger.

On September 26. 2004, a reader wrote an e-mail to me after reading the Peripatetic Philosopher’s essay, “Who Put You In The Cage?” It is apparent that he has embraced his resistance to self-knowing, and is not afraid to admit it.

A READER WRITES:

When I encountered your essays originally, they “resonated” with me. I was feeling very much alone in my thoughts. It was very comforting to me that your thinking and analysis was consistent with what I was feeling, that the world was stark raving mad, not me.

You were ahead of your time, and maybe I was, too. It’s hard to know what others are experiencing or feeling, they are just too damned careful about revealing their thoughts, afraid in fact.

Today, I find more and more people willing to admit that they are fed up with the whole system and ready to do something about it. Most don’t know who to blame. Tragically, they don’t trust their own feelings or judgement. Reading your material is confirmation, I believe.

It is difficult for me to pick only a few essays (of the Peripatetic Philosopher). I like them all. These are some of the ones I have read:

Corporate Culture

Being Your Own Best Friend

Staying Employable in an Age of Downsizing

Leadership & Excellence in the 21 Century

Survivor’s Manual

Dealing with the Crazy 90s

Organizational Development

Advent of the Professional Worker

The Critical Need for a New Paradigm of Organization

The Lost Soul of the Engineer

Career Story: The Case of Hamilton Madison

The Cage

Who’s in Charge?

The American Worker and the Phantom Challenge

Parable of the Cage

Shifting Management Paradigms

Killing the Spirit

Victim, Inc.

Morale Management

Customer Expectations

A Letter to Ordinary

Words are Dead

A World Without the Power Elite

People are Different, but Predictably Different

Wake Up Call

Education?

Seductive Selling

Betrayal

Human Nature and Work

Conflict Management

OD is DA

War Room of the 1990s

America Asleep

The New Plague

Why Care

Difficult People

DR. FISHER COMMENTS:

As I’ve said elsewhere, we are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Writing is a way of making contact with an audience of one, ourselves, thus overcoming our bondage to loneliness, meeting that self as our new best friend. When the reader connects with what the writer has written, he or she connects with that audience of one. It was Cervantes that said, “There’s no book so bad that something good may not be found in it.” That is because the reader scripts the material to fit the reader’s own novel.

                *     *     *



A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS: NO. 33 --- Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer!

A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS: NO. 33 – Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer!




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

© February 22, 2013



REFERENCE:



Not since March 4, 2005 have I published an essay in this series. That last essay, No. 32 was titled, “Religion and the Ways of Man.”



We have had an uncommon shift in “the ways of man” in terms of sensibility, sociability and civility since that time.



Our society teeters on the brink not so much of economic collapse as social conflict and disintegration. Chaos and conflict, distrust and mischief disrupt our lives by innuendo, lies, deceits and rumors. Personality assassination has become fader for the electronic social media.



Since 9/11, we have retreated from our best inclinations into combative paranoia. We no longer trust human nature to be human.



This distrust has given birth to the idea that terrorists or miscreants lurk around every corner, justifying personal arsenals and police in every school. At the very least, it is reasoned; school principals should be armed with guns and teachers with mace.



A president once said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Now fear is our most important product. Fear justifies draconian measures to combat veiled threats with surveillance cameras everywhere complemented by pilotless drones policing the skies.



Trust, temperance and common sense have been the price for this folly.



From my window on the world, people contact me and share their misgivings, apprehensions and insecurities. Often, it is personal and close to my own experience.



KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE AND YOUR ENEMIES CLOSER



Once, competence, confidence and congeniality were enough to ensure success in one’s chosen profession. That is no longer true. In this contentious climate of avarice, envy, hostility and distrust, a person needs to be on his or her guard as little is, as it seems.



It has taken me a long life to recognize this terrible truth. For in nearly everyone’s inner circle, no matter what the enterprise, Othello’s Iago lurks in the midst. By guile, cunning and ill will, an Iago, armed with disinformation and malicious obedience, can derail a career or a marriage. Iago does this by appearing to be one’s loyal friend when the aim is to compromise or sully one’s reputation by destroying a relationship or a career.



If it hasn’t happened to you, be aware it can at any time. It happened to me more than once in my career, and each time that it did, I retreated into the conceit that no one could hurt me but myself. Not true. People can hurt you when they play Iago and you do nothing.



In my most recent case, now some years ago, as an executive in Europe with an American company, a friend told me that one of my direct reports was going over my head to my superior and whispering Iago like morsels of mischief into his ear, such as I wasn’t happy in my job, I didn’t respect him, and I didn’t do very much. I laughed at this nonsense because none of it was true, and so I did nothing.



Eventually, like Othello came to believe his wife Desdemona was cheating on him, my boss came to the conclusion that I didn’t care. Iago managed to confirm this by giving my secretary a bogus date for an important company social event. When BB and I didn’t show up, it was proof of my insouciance. Matters went downhill from there.



What I should have done, and I share this with readers so that they might nip the situation in the bud should it happen to them, is this:



(1) Explored what my friend was telling me that Iago was saying about me, weighing its credence, not flippantly disregarding it entirely as I did;



(2) Watched Iago closely, a person, who incidentally, was always telling me how great I was and how I was the best person the United States had ever sent to Europe in my position. Taking that with a grain of salt, I should have let Iago know in a subtle way that I knew what he was about;



(3) For damage control, I should have gone to my boss and delicately explored our relationship, gradually coming to the issue of trust, duty, dedication and responsibility, studying his reaction to the surfacing of these concepts vis-à-vis their relationship to my function;



(4) Taking nothing that Iago said at face value, I should have played his game insofar as warming up to him and keeping him as close as humanly possible.



(5) If this failed, I should have sent him back to his home country.



Of course, I did nothing of the sort.



* * *



It is not an uncommon problem. CEO Lee Iacocca at Ford was let go by Chairman of the Board Henry Ford II, after The Ford Motor Company had one of its greatest years ever under Iacocca’s leadership.



“Why are you firing me?” Iacocca asked in exasperation, pointing out Ford’s P&L success. “Well, sometimes,” Ford answered, “you just don’t like somebody.”



Now, it doesn’t take an astrophysicist to see that Iago was lurking somewhere in the midst. But Iacocca, proud, arrogant and self-righteous, didn’t think anyone could hurt him. Somebody always can, no matter how high one flies, and often it is the least suspected individual in one’s firmament.

*     *     *

GRANDPARENTS DAY: MUSIC TO THE SOUL IN THE CLASSROOM AND ON THE BASKETBALL COURT!

GRANDPARENTS DAY: MUSIC TO THE SOUL IN THE CLASSROOM AND ON THE BASKETBALL COURT!




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

© February 7, 2013

We have been attending the Tampa Preparatory School’s Grandparents Day for years, and have seen our grandson, Ryan Carr, complete his studies there, where his sister, Rachel, is now a junior (this year Grandparents Day was on Friday, February 1, 2013).

Grandparents Day is always a festive occasion as the Head of School, Kevin Plummer, takes pride in showing off the school, students, and teachers. Students work their special magic in a musical variety show in the gymnasium. Once that is completed, everyone retires to the classroom. Grandparents can then see their progeny at work. This is followed by a luncheon. On this occasion, we were able to see Tampa Prep play a basketball game against its archrival Berkeley Prep, winning in an overtime 72-70.

A single theme ran through the day, which was “music to the soul” as these future leaders of tomorrow were efficiently guided through their activities by faculty, coaches, and administrators with unobtrusive Mr. Plummer as their conductor.

The comments that follow are personal and partial for which grandparents are allowed. Excellence is clearly the predicate of the movement of these young people as if they seem to sense that with special privilege comes special responsibility, which is another definition of leadership.

IN THE CLASSROOM – AP CALCULUS

When I was in high school, there was no special designation of advanced placement (AP) courses, although about a score of us out of a class of some 200 took four years of math, four years of science, two or more years of foreign language, four years of English with an assortment of other courses (required or otherwise) of history, social science, psychology and music, home economics, shop, etc.

After taking algebra, geometry, and trigonometry through my junior year, my senior year focused on college algebra, spherical trigonometry and analytical geometry. College algebra is called “pre-calculus” at Tampa Prep, and our Rachel completed that course in her sophomore year. She is now taking “AP calculus,” which I was unable to take until I entered university.

Currently, Rachel’s AP calculus class of some five girls and thirteen boys is studying differential equations in the graphing of functions at the point the tangent line of the x and y axis touches the graphed curve.  The slope of the tangent line equals the derivative of the function at the marked point.

The process of finding a derivative is called differentiation. It has application to nearly all-quantitative disciplines including applications in physics, such as where the derivative of the displacement of a moving body with respect to time is the velocity of the body, and the derivative of velocity with respect to time is acceleration.

Mathematics is often intimidating, especially the mathematics of college algebra and beyond. That was not the case with me as I was blessed with a wonderful math teacher at Clinton High School in Clinton, Iowa by the name of Leonard Herkleman. He made math approachable, understandable and accessible, and for that I am eternally grateful.

MR. BUTCH JALBERT, CALCULUS TEACHER

On this Grandparents Day, we had the privilege of attending a class in AP calculus taught by Mr. Jalbert, who has been teaching mathematics at Tampa Prep for the past 36 years. I felt the same music to the soul here that I felt those many years before in college algebra with Mr. Herkleman.

My BB claims to be intimidated by mathematics. I argue that her problem wasn’t mathematics, as she is quite an effective business manager at Hillel Academy of Tampa (Florida), but not having had access to a teacher whose love of mathematics translated into music to the soul.

On this day, Mr. Jalbert was conducting his normal class in which his students were looking at several graph functions and asked to write the derivative at the marked point of the various convoluted curves.

He also asked the students to explain what they were doing, what the designation was called, and how they would write the derivative. It would be easy for the reader to visualize this were the reader to see the electronic board capturing this magic in the classroom. I say this because my BB said in an aside, “I think I understand what he is doing.” Of course, she did. This was a credit to Mr. Jalbert.

When we were leaving, I thanked this teacher for the fine class. He smiled, “Some of it coming back to you, yes?” I wanted to say, not as much as it would if I had had someone like you in college, but instead just smiled back.

RACHEL CARR

When Rachel was six – she is now sixteen – I used to drive her to the ice skating rink where she was learning to ice skate. It was difficult for her to learn, and she often fell literally on her face, but would pick herself up without crying or embarrassment, struggle to stay on her feet, and continue until she mastered the challenge. I didn’t know then, but I was witnessing what would define my granddaughter’s approach to life.

Mr. Plummer, in a conversation with us after the luncheon, made special note of the brilliant student that Rachel has become, pointing out that she has maximized the benefit of these environs and should be heavily recruited for college. She, like many other students majoring in advanced application courses, should find the transition to university a seamless one in no small way because that six-year-old girl picked herself up from the ice a decade ago without crying and moved on.

During those years of taking Rachel ice-skating, we would have conversations coming and going that became articles in Personal Excellence, a trade publication to which I was then a regular contributor. These articles would feature my picture as well as byline. Rachel would read these articles and say, “Why is your picture always there instead of mine?” I would tell her, “Because I wrote the article.” She would look at me sternly and say, “Don’t you think that is a little unfair? After all, it is not about you. It is about me!” The six-year-old had a point.

ON THE BASKETBALL COURT

It was reassuring to see the magic to the soul in the classroom displayed as well on the basketball court. Similar music is involved in both places.

The mind, heart and soul in the rhythm of the chemistry of the body guide performance in physical and mental activities alike. They require the same attention to detail, the same embracing our natural resistance to pay the price, to confront failure (defeat) in order to entertain success (victory). Neither academics nor athletics are defined exclusively by such arbitrary measures as I.Q. or natural ability. Heart is the defining variable.

It was Wimbledon Champion Arthur Ashe who said many years ago that if athletes applied the same energy to the classroom they did to sport there would be no limit to the profession they might master. Malcolm Gladwell concurs. Stated broadly, he argues in “The Tipping Point” (2000) that 80 percent of influence and power available goes to the 20 percent who repetitively do the things that guarantee such dominance, whereas the other 80 percent share in only 20 percent of the spoils because they refuse to put forth the effort, preferring to complain about their disadvantage.

YONI WASSER

One of the reasons I wanted to attend this basketball game was to see Amy Wasser’s son play basketball. Amy is head of school of Hillel Academy of Tampa. She, like my mother when I played athletics in high school, attends every one of her son’s basketball games. Yoni, on the varsity since a freshman, is now a junior, but not yet a starter.

He is also small compared to many of the other lads, but has never allowed this to interfere with the music to his soul for basketball. In this highly contested game, he played several minutes giving me an opportunity to enjoy seeing him play.

He, like most basketball players, is much more adept at ball handling and dribbling than in my day. Actually, basketball today is a different game.

In my era, there was no three point shot, no dunking, no carrying the ball while dribbling, no taking an extra step before shooting, and no touching another player on defense. If the same rules of my era applied today, I suspect that nearly everyone would have fouled out by the end of the first quarter.

The rule changes have made the game more exciting, faster paced – there were no time limits before shooting in the offensive court – and more entertaining for the fans. Moreover, basketball players today are in much better physical condition than in my era, doing full court presses and fast breaking on nearly every possession. Clearly, players are far more athletic, perhaps because of this, than in my era.

What I found remarkable in Yoni, and he seemed embarrassed when I mentioned this, is that he was a coach on the floor. It was clear that he is a student of the game, spreads the players out when on offense, handles the ball well, while keeping his dribbling to a minimum, always looking for the open man.

On defense, he is so nimbly athletic that he can press his man effectively man-to-man, which not only takes a great deal of agility but energy as well, and can rotate into a zone press with equal alacrity, always keeping himself between his man and the basket.

You can only teach this discipline to a degree, and then the prehensile mind of the player combined with the fluidity of his autonomic nervous system responds athletically to the situation to maximize the advantage of the player. Translated, this is the music to the soul on display on the basketball court, as it was displayed earlier in the classroom at Tampa Prep and, I’m sure, at Berkeley Prep as well.

Student athletics school the body and the mind to be engaged synergistically. Several of these boys on both teams will move on to promising college athletic careers. All players, however, whatever their pursuits in the future, will use the lessons learned here to take them to the next level in life. To that end, I thank them, the faculty, the administration, and Mr. Plummer for making Grandparents Day such a blessing this past Friday.

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THE DISCONNECTED CONNECTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF ANXIETY!

THE DISCONNECTED CONNECTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF ANXIETY!


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

© February 2, 2013

EXORDIUM (An introduction to a treatise or discourse)

Our psyches are constantly peppered with warnings concerning the nature of our times. You see them every day on the opposite page to the editorial page. I invariably go first to the sport’s page of the morning newspaper at breakfast at 5 a.m. to wake up, and then to the op-ed page to get my brain working. The disputation and perturbations of the day here are sometimes quite serious and others quite mundane, but all express the United States of Anxiety. It is a wonder that we ever move off the dime.

Mayor Bill Foster of St. Petersburg (Florida) wrote a column on the op-ed page of the Tampa Bay Times defending his stand of holding the Tampa Bay Rays (Major League Baseball) to St. Pete’s Tropicana Field until 2027, although it has the lowest attendance in the major leagues with less than 300 season ticket holders.

Satirist and sometimes personality assassin Daniel Ruth has had fun with the mayor’s stance in a column on these op-ed pages to which Mayor Foster was reacting in this column. The mayor claimed he deals in facts and not opinions, implying that there is no credence to Ruth’s column or the legitimacy of the Rays’ ownership desiring to move to more economic digs. That ownership has countered playing the fear game suggesting that major league baseball may have no other option than to move the Rays out of Tampa Bay “if” the team is not released from its contract with the city of St. Petersburg through 2027.

Now, I mention this because within opinions there are many facts, and within facts there are selected opinions. In more sophisticated language, opinions and facts represent a combination of cognitive and cultural biases. Few of us, whatever our pedigree, say precisely what we mean, or mean precisely what we say, as these agitations interfere with our perspective and point of view.

It is however interesting to report that opinions or biases, if you prefer, husband data in support of the views of the discriminating minds whenever ideas escape Pandora’s Box of conventional thinking.

Admittedly, baseball is a pretty mundane subject, and if the Tampa Bay Rays choose to leave the bay area, the world will not implode, but the mechanism in play here is just as common to science as well as philosophy, psychology, anthropology, political science and sociology, to name a few serious pursuits.

People who pause to ponder, observe and transform information into thought, with the best of intentions and the most impeccable credentials, can be totally right or totally out to lunch. We make progress in life as well as in sport slowly and not always wisely.

* * *

PERICULUM IN MORA (There is danger in delay.)

Since the 1990s, or for a quarter century, we have been riding a watershed moment to technological explosion, as the computer age, the Information Age has become a train wreck to convention. It is changing us in ways we don’t fully understand but feel powerless to resist the momentum is so strong.

At the end of the 19th century, and by 1913, thanks to the ingenuity and risk taking character of the bicycle mechanic turned automaker Henry Ford, the Model T, which represented the progression through the alphabet of multiple failures (A through S), the socioeconomic and behavioral fabric of society was changed radically. In that year:

(1) Ford was producing 1,000 cars a day, a process Ford established that took worker ownership out of workers’ hands producing to piecework on an assembly line. Workers hated the work so much that quit in droves, making it necessary for the company to constantly retrain workers at considerable expense to the automaker.

(2) Henry Ford came up with the wage of $5 a day and created profit sharing with workers. Thousands turned up to work at Ford, as the wage was double what unskilled workers could make elsewhere. Many were immigrants from more than fifty countries speaking one hundred languages. Ford made conditional of this wage and employment that these workers learn English and adopt the American culture, the majority did. With this move, he created a market for his automobile, quieted the critics of alienation of workers for the monotony of the work, and seeded the incipient working middle class, while Americanizing an eclectic of otherwise splinter groups.

(3) The Model T was accessible to the working class ($800 versus $2,000 for competitors’ models), which gave workers a level of mobility and freedom never known before, and rapidly changed the psychosexual behavior of car owners.

Henry Ford never completed eighth grade, but was a mechanical genius, while his friend, Thomas Edison, never went to school. They were bold visionary, without the breeding or credentials of the gentry, but seeded the twentieth century to reflect their own mental roadmaps. Both men, always in a hurry, never had time to look back, or to second-guess themselves. In contrast, academics and scholars did that for them. Edison gave us 24-hour daylight with his electric power plant, and Ford gave us Detroit that would stir the American economic drink for the twentieth century.

There were 57 American car companies at the beginning of the twentieth century; there are now three. Momentum is everything. He who hesitates is lost. Success is chased by failure to oblivion for most. It is no different at the fin de siecle.

* * *

We find now a cadre of young Turks, often college dropouts, such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, redefining this new century with a new set of monumental changes to human existence. Is it more dramatic than the twentieth century? Time will tell.

What is apparent is the introduction of a new impersonal communications universe that introduces a new kind of alienation. Now, it is not work, but the self separated from itself and living in virtual reality. Ron Sachs, a media consultant, writes on the op-ed page of the Tampa Bay Times that there is a “rush towards connected detachment” that a generation of the young is pushing everyone.

While the automobile shrunk distances across the land, Internet technology has shrunk the planet into Hillary Clinton’s “global village.”

Sachs writes, “We’ve largely forgotten what our own handwriting looks like. We are too snug in our modern communications cocoons, opting for exchanges that provide empty soulless solitude rather than enriching human interaction.”

We have a famous Notre Dame football player, Manti Te’o, with a three-year relationship with a virtual reality girlfriend that, once the hoax was exposed, dramatized a new kind of social toxicity. His access to this girlfriend was totally through electronic communication. Sachs continues, this “demonstrates that too many people are living their lives virtually.”

Virtual reality in advanced societies has resulted in fully 80 percent of those able to text from 5 to 75 voluntarily confining themselves to the narrow stalls of technology. It is changing language and expression to the disconnected connection of a miraculous handheld electronic device.

As everything gravitated to the automobile in its myriad of social-cultural vicissitudes, we are in the midst of the same addictive power of the various iterations of the iPod and iPad. More astounding, we are already feeling this impact after only a decade into the twenty first century.

Owen Felltham in “Resolves” (1623) wrote, “Nothing wraps a man in such a mist of errors as his own curiosity in searching things beyond him.” We have evidence of this as we retreat further from each other and ourselves.

HINC ILLAE IACRIMAE (Hence these tears)

Academics and yes, amateurs like myself, try to make sense out of the nonsense of their times. Times change but people remain pretty much the same. They go from victory to defeat to paranoia whatever the age, and seem surprised when they land on their feet.

On these pages, I’ve shared with you the struggle of Gustave Le Bon to penetrate the meaninglessness of the crowd, as did Eric Hoffer a few generations later. I’ve also shared with you the works of Soren Kierkegaard and his search for the common man who his time largely ignored. Most recently, I shared a work of Friedrich Nietzsche and his dichotomy of the “Superman” and “the Last Man” to explain how Western man had tired of an apathetic God he felt he no longer needed.

Remarkable about these men and their works is that they sought the core values of their times, and how environmental factors – technology and science – were forcing men into the safety of the “true believer” crowd, or retreat into conspicuous materialism.

Today, economists and statisticians have replaced such wonderers – mayor Bill Foster would call opinionated – with their hypotheses and replicated verifiable data. The uncertainty principle, however, is more certain in everyday life as well as in science then ever before.

David Brooks is a journalist and columnist for the New York Times, and often appears on the op-ed pages. In his social and political analysis, he is careful not to offend anyone who may see him or herself as a social-political “thinker.”

The dinosaur party, once known as the National Republican Party (NRP), is seen as trying to recover from four years of nay saying to find some kind of relevance by excoriating itself in a current confab meeting somewhere in the dessert.

NRP gutted itself in the recent presidential campaign attempting to make a case about half of Americans not paying any income taxes, and then confounded this problem by managing to insult people of a different lifestyle than conventional, different ethnicity and belief system, thus ensuring defeat at the polls, hence the tears.

The Republican Party is trying to change, says Brooks, but “change is hard because people don’t only think on the surface level. Deep down people have mental maps of reality – embedded sets of assumptions, narratives and terms that organize thinking.” Translation: NRP has no defense against virtual reality except then to deny its existence.

* * *

Enter the economists and statisticians. Brooks mentions economist Mancur Olson and the statistician and social apologist Charles Murray who he implies understand this topography and these demographics. Olson argues in “The Rise and Decline of Nations” (1982) that aging institutions get bloated and sclerotic and retard national dynamism. Notice the metaphor of aging and the central economic issues of the day. Murray insists in “Losing Ground: American Social Policy” (1984) that America is coming apart at the seams, dividing into two nations, one educated and stable with opportunity, the other uneducated and unstable with little opportunity. Like most such thinkers, once they state the obvious they think there work is done, when what they tell us 99 percent of us already know.

Brooks claims most people never change their underlying narratives or unconscious frameworks, but when the Olsons and Murrays of the world come down hard on these frameworks the policies and programs that follow too often make the situation worse or iatrogenic.

Olson and Murray are governed by data that is crafted to make tantalizing sense to materialize into action, whereas Le Bon, Hoffer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are mainly -- releasing themselves from the nonsense -- governed by their lights to understand the meaning of the midnight shadows, letting people make of the attention what they will.

Murray wrote a controversial book, “The Bell Curve” (1994), the title coming from the statistical curve of the I.Q. It proved controversial as it argued (in part) the genetic differences in I.Q. between whites and blacks. This argument was featured in only a couple chapters, but enough to have the book denounced by such scholars as Stephen Jay Gould who saw no such differences (see “The Mismeasure of Man,” 1981).

ALEA IACTA EST (The die is cast)

It is what it is, and it is best we embrace our resistance to that fact as history has shown that programs and policies don’t change events, often they simply exacerbate them, people do, and people do when they are ready to change.

Where Olson and Murray, and the others seem to be right is that people, whatever their current predilections, are part of a consistent organic whole. William Faulkner said in his Nobel Laureate speech, “man will not simply survive, man will prevail.” In the 24,000 years that man has walked this earth, he has always found a way to correct his false steps and overcome his anxiety. His disconnected connection is simply the latest self-made hazard to overcome. His constant mantra, resurgam (I shall rise again.) acknowledges this fact, or is it an opinion?

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