AN OPEN LETTER TO YOUNG PROFESSIONALS

 

 

 AN OPEN LETTER TO YOUNG PROFESSIONALS

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

© June 11, 2013

[1]     REFERENCE:

 

This is a rough draft of a piece to be included in the re-release of "The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain." (1995)(2013)  The book when first published anticipated the rise of the professional in the workforce without a passion for the role demands or recognition of what that role would require.  These professionals were interested in perks more than 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 responsive and responsible.  As this second editions is being released, a new generation is coming on the scene and the picture doesn't look too different, and thus the reason for this inclusion in the book.  

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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 with blame. You are into a new era where nobody knows what side is up.

The sharp division between values, natural and moral, even the assumptions of values may not only be different in principle but incompatible with the past for there is a contradiction between what people expect and experience today versus what tradition dictates. 

Tradition is not open or malleable to change as the times demand.  This is illustrated by its obdurate maintenance of the common good when the shift is now clearly to personhood.     

Through no fault of young people a dagger has separated the world before and after 1968 as the American Century ended a little early in that year.  Young people are the inheritors of that development.

Since 1968, we have had the Vietnam War, the first war we ever lost, the exodus of young males to Canada to avoid the draft,  Woodstock and the Hippie, and Yuppie generations, followed by the X, Y and Me generations, the OPEC embargo, double dip inflation and unemployment, the Contract with America of the Republican Party in Congress, the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, two Iraq Wars and a War in Afghanistan, the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, two attacks on the Twin Towers of New York City, ultimately demolishing the towers killing nearly 3,000, the War on Terror, the Civil Rights Movement, the Feminist Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, the HIV epidemic, Enron debacle, the ambivalence on 11 million illegals and immigrant policy, the economic crash on Wall Street and the real estate meltdown in 2008 nearly leading to the Second Great Depression, the bailout of Wall Street, and the automotive industry, the election of the first African American President, the economic tilt from the United States to China the Pacific Rim Countries and Brazil, the Information Revolution and Information Age with the creation of the Internet and handheld devices to allow instant communications, the Arab Spring, the collapse of the management paradigm, the rise of the professional worker, the decline of the blue-collar working middle class, the self-estrangement of institutional society from family, school, workplace, church and state at all levels of interface, and these are  only a few of the highlights of the cataclysmic change since 1968.  It appears as if no one is in charge as the country revolves around business as usual practices with infallible authority with no one willing or able to lead as everything seemingly stays the same, misses the changes and the future is left up for grabs.  

There appears a frantic search for anchors in dogmatic public and private policy from the pronouncements of think tanks, prophets, soothsayers, pundits, gurus or those in touch with unseen forces.  The rational and irrational have collided to produce an alchemy of contempt, conflict, cynicism, disgust, anxiety, depression and loss.  We are not happy campers.  We have lost our moral compass and our way.

In spite of this, the common mantra is, “Not to worry!  No reason for fury!”  National ineptitude, incompetence, inconsistency and failure ride on the optimistic hubris of the American psyche.  Rationalism not reason seems the order of the day.

Young people are coming of age in a barren period of American history.  Americans are exhausted and more importantly, so is the planet.  There is little point in looking for a priori truth for the past was built on a porous foundation of explanatory models that provide the rhetoric and rationale to explain away reality.  New values need to be created out of this wasteland. 

Nothing works anymore!  We continue to insist on two-dimensional strategies to solve three-dimensional problems, and wait for these strategies to work, which of course they never do.  We thought that science was guided by ethics and would discover the key to Mother Nature, that politics was science as it applied to groups, and that morality was a kind of geography of the mind.  Leadership, we find, is necessary but not sufficient to accomplish this task because everyone is a leader or no one is.  Missing is the will and the intelligence to recognized that one size never fits all if it fits anything.

We confuse means and ends and have ever since Machiavelli if not before. Following Plato, the belief has persisted that ends could be discovered only by specially trained experts, by sages, divinely inspired seers, philosophers, scientists, psychologists, the intelligentsia, by people like you fresh with your college degrees in hand.  Virtue was perceived as knowledge, values as action, and who better than the knowledgeable to power that process to action than the most virtuous.

Through the ages we have seen this is not always true if, indeed, it ever was as among these ranks have often been the most shallow, pathetic, naïve, and self-deceiving.  They have plummeted the economy into collapse and the nation into unnecessary wars.

This destructive element persists under hyperboles that declare groups “the best and the brightest,” or someone “genius” or “brilliant” or “gifted.”  Intelligence is not what it “is.”  Intelligence is what it “does.” When sobriquets are surrogate to “is-isms” than deeds are reduced to furniture of the mind.

When we fail, and young people are entering a spirited world that knows much more about failure than success, group identity has a tendency to move from one fanatic movement to another.  This has exhausted people and the planet.  It is time for a new Age of Reason with fresh minds competing in the marketplace of ideas.  It is time to leave the redundant institutional programming of the 19^th century and the bellicose self-flagellation and hubris of the 20^th century 

It was the Age of Reason in the 17^th and 18^th that gave birth to the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution when pursuit of liberty, fraternity and equality were the battle cry.  But, alas, even then as remarkable as that age, it failed to provide happiness and freedom for everyone, and led to the American Civil War.  Likewise, as much as we might congratulate our times for the Information Age, much of the originality of design belongs to that period and not ours.  Modern thought, science and philosophy owe much to these pathfinders.  We have been too busy exploiting their work to ponder originality in our own. 

Let us consider for a moment a few new realities that those of twenty-one years and nine months might note. 

·         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 that 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 emotional development of our sensibilities. Our bodies don’t have to be adult but our minds do to cope with life.

·         We once thought it normal to restrain sexual activity but now we feel self-conscious and even ashamed if we do.  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 fact.

·         We once thought it 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.

·         We once thought only celebrities were into drugs.  Then all at once someone we knew not yet in their teens were using drugs, and then it seemed everyone was using drugs, although illegal.

·         We couldn’t wait until we were 18 or 21, depending on what the legal age was in our state to go gangbusters and drink alcohol legally.

Now, 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, brother or sister, or best friend who has cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema, sexually transmitted disease, 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.

It is not your fault that you were born into “Pacifier Nation,” which has a tolerance for everything except the courage to be intolerant of anything, especially something harmful to your health.  Chances are you were introduced early in life to a plastic nipple pacifier instead of a mother’s breast or a warm bottle of milk to keep you quiet and apparently content.  This has been magnified to the point that as Pacifier Nation we have fast foods, fast cars, fast boats, fast life styles, fast morals and indiscriminate appetites as long as it is more. 

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 home had 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 or draconian policies for behavior.

You had little choice but to rebel, or 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 ton of prevention was worth a pound of cure.

Small wonder now that you are nine months and twenty-one years of age you have probably experimented with marijuana and other illegal recreation drugs to reach that same zombie state you remember as a child. In fact, many of these illegal recreational drugs are moving quickly in many states to legalization, as the “Sins of the Parents” who instituted this regiment of Ritalin and Adderall don’t know what else to do but to capitulate.

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. 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 for the Haight Ashbury crowd of San Francisco.

We live in an age of excess in which one billion more souls are on the planet since 1968 or two generations ago. You are the fortunate member of the two billion souls who share 80 percent of the wealth and natural resources while the other five billion souls share 20 percent or less of the world’s wealth and resources.  We have conflict and terror for this reason and this reason, alone, no matter how much the political and economic dialectics rotate around the axis of “us against them.”     

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 drugs, but in all our pursuits and endeavors. We have come to burn the candle at both ends collapsing it in the middle with a retinue of socially accepted maladies, including burn out, drop out, depression, anxiety, bipolar or schizophrenia, asthma, obesity, heart disease, and having some kind of elected surgery to look thinner, younger or more attractive so as never to grow old and therefore never have to grow up. 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 will generate whispers that you are sick in the head.  In a word, you young people are about to take ownership of this upside down world. 

It took the renegade spirit of those of “Ritalin Nation” babies to ultimately rebel from a regimented society to sponsor and create the Information Age that we now enjoy.  Ironically, one pacifier has replaced another, as the digital electronic mobile has replaced the plastic nipple.  

We become what we think, but we also become what we hate.  They are two sides of the same coin, as the moon has a bright and dark side, so do we.  Ritalin junkies, it can be imagined, couldn’t wait to escape the regiment of medication. The Jobs and Gates went off to college, and saw that sucked, looked around and decided what else could they do. They had always liked games, the weirder 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, they were looking to escape the common good. They were looking for a new pacifier that was of their own invention that would allow them to retrogress to that earlier period of pacifier contentment.

Throwing caution to the wind and convention aside, they embarrassed Big Blue’s IBM and GM and GE who were lock stepping to the past, and turned toys into tools that could be their constant pacifier 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.

How can anyone always be on?  We have only so much psychic and physical energy. Just as matter can neither be created nor destroyed but only changed so it is with us. You cannot cheat 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 on occasion 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.

·         You may be an unwed mother, or an absent unaccountable father.

·         You may be into drugs, alcohol, gambling, licentiousness or a myriad of other counterproductive excesses.

·         You may be using the shibboleths of codes to establish distinction from older generations.

·         You may know all the integrations, all the electronic Apps to networking that differentiate you from your elders.

·         You may feel self-disgust, self-loathing, self-doubt, isolated, disconnected, or alone.  That is because you are a stranger to yourself and have not accepted yourself as you are.  The way you are is the way you have chosen to be, and if it isn’t working for you, only you can chose to change, no one else can do that for you.

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,” “hippies,” 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 to 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, not to mention the subliminal torment that is a constant cacophonic roar to our supple 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. 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 and tools 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 this sound like a preamble to some sage advice, and how to deal with the future, you would be wrong. Instead, it formulates questions that you should ask yourself because you, alone, are the source of the answers:

·         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 (genetic gifts) to your personality (acquired tastes)?

Chances are you been too preoccupied to the answer 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 chance than choice, more a product of attitude than aptitude.

The problem of my generation, the era of the Great Depression, was more a matter of the third question, as we were pretty ignorant of balance or imbalance between “who we were and what we could do” (essence) and “who we thought we were supposed to be” (personality).  We stayed pretty much within the white lines that were assumed to be our designation which meant doing pretty much what our parents had done and were.

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 the antithesis of what we are or could be.

·         The profligate sinner to the priesthood.

·         The common criminal to law enforcement.

·         The CSI junkie to R&D chemistry.

·         The wallflower to radio/television shock jock or comedy.

·         The town gossip to journalism.

·         The inveterate liar to writing novels.

·         The constant screw up to management.

·         The spendthrift to accounting, banking or insurance.

·         The poor student to teaching.

·         The resentful of authority to politics.

The current emphasis is on personality, fitting in, or being consistent with the prevailing norm.  This is fad driven, and fads have a short shelf life. Consequently, when you could be almost anything in this rag tag bone of the heart world of ours many are attracted to what everyone else seems to think important instead of their obvious gifts.

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 sometimes throughout life.

The child also learns the power of guilt, shame and embarrassment in getting what is wanted, which is not necessarily congruent with what is needed to grow and develop consistent with essence.

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

Our bloated and deficit economy is the collective product of this mindset on a national basis, and an example of the culture, climate and character of the world you are about to inherit. 

If anything is advocated here, it is a better balance between essence and personality. You are entering a celebrity driven culture where personality (fitting in) has become dominant at the expense of essence. This translates into it being more important "who you are" than "what you are."  It is 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 that we are constantly changing masks in private as well as public to the point that it is hard to work out what is the mask and what isn’t. In other words, 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 at one stage but not at another. It is beholden to the mask changer to know which masks is being worn and in which situations, and to adjust these masks accordingly. Some might claim, “I don’t wear a mask!”  You know they are talking about masks when they say, “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.

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[1] The relevance of this was brought home today (June 12, 2013) by New York Times syndicated columnist David Brooks Op Ed piece on the NSA leaker of secret documents to the press by high school drop out Edward Snowden.  Brooks sees Snowden as part of an unfortunate trend of the age -- The Atomization of Society.  I see him as the personification of the rise of personhood among young people in the vacuum of duplicity of a paranoid nation.  Brooks writes, "Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good."  As the Peripatetic Philosopher, I track and have been tracking the incipient movement to complacency and complicity of spineless leadership over the past several decades.  Snowden, in my view, is not the exception but the rule of young people, and scolding him for being "atomizing" will not change the trend.  The end of duplicity and chicanery in all institutional life would be a powerful first step.   But we must first get rid of two-dimensional problem solving and entertain three-dimensional thinking.  Buying and selling fear is two-dimensional as justification for positive freedom (See Isaiah Berlin's "Four Essays on Liberty," 1969).    

SELF-REALIZATION AND SELF-DEFEAT

SELF-REALIZATION AND SELF-DEFEAT




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

© June 6, 2013

REFERENCE:

This is another excerpt of the second edition of “Meet Your New Best Friend” due to be published later this year.

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We are imperfectly formed. The best minds have throbbing doubts, and play special havoc with their lives. Stephen King sublimates his terror into spine tingling novels of horror. His horror becomes our entertainment. King doesn’t deny his demons. He puts them to work. As a small child, cartoonist Gary Larson was frightened out of his wits. His impish brother locked him in the basement, turned off the lights, then taunted him with imagined horrors. Larson never forgot his trauma. It put him in touch with his Far Side comic strip. The late Irish–American actor Charles Durning confesses, “There are many secrets in the depths of our souls that we don’t want anyone to know.” A producer, noting Durning’s intensity, once remarked, “Charlie, if you hadn’t been an actor, you would probably have been a murderer. Within you is a boiler ready to explode.” Durning admits,

“There’s terror and repulsion in us, the terrible spot that no one knows about—horrifying things we keep secret. A lot of this is released through acting.”

This actor’s journey took him from poverty through the Great Depression and World War II, where he was a much-decorated combat soldier on the Western Front, unto fame and wealth. The late novelist Michael Crichton, like Somerset Maugham, a physician turned prolific author, compared his bouts of depression to the weather. “Suns out today, cloudy today, cloudy this month.” He admitted to an interviewer of contemplating suicide, but never thought to take action because “I have too much respect for depression.” The Harvard educated doctor envied the insouciance of his friend, actor Sean Connery, who admitted to having ulcers at sixteen. Connery sees Crichton’s creative standards so high that they intimidate him. Crichton, who earned more than $22 million for the successful filming of his book, Jurassic Park, admitted to having a never ending fight with himself. This was not a war to be more, or have more, but to distill from his considerable talents something meaningful. The price is high, too high for most, for it demands one to embrace suffering and constant struggle.

Metaphorically, we all have rocks in our heads, snakes in our secret gardens. Our snakes, sunning themselves on these rocks, symbolize our fantasies and wicked thoughts. To deny their presence is to throw our lives off balance, out of control, as if suddenly pierced by their deadly venom. What we do is one thing; what we think is quite another. No one is absolutely good or absolutely evil, but a combination of both. If we ignore one at the expense of the other, we are bound for trouble. To respect our wickedness gives us an advantage. Others less self–accepting may stumble on their snakes at any time, whereas we, ever alert, gingerly step around ours. We can even use them, on occasion, as creative people do, to stimulate our visionary powers. Fantasies are an important source of energy, not so much to be acted on as to add dimension to our vision, to widen our horizons.

Creative artists are well acquainted with their snakes. They call them many names—curses, blessings, demons, crosses, redeemers, gods, devils, swords, punishment, inspiration—to name only a few. Many purposely provoke their snakes to frenzy status. Painter Vincent Van Gogh, now celebrated, did this with regularity. He called it his insanity. Completely ignored in his lifetime, could insanity produce such genius? He sold but a single painting, and that to an art dealer friend of his brother’s. While he battled his snakes, he painted magnificently. You sense his anguish in his excruciating precise brush strokes, the brilliance of his soul in his bold use of color. All the while he entertained the constant torment of doubt. Yet today his paintings sell for tens of millions of dollars. They depict the agony and ecstasy of an unquiet soul, and speak to our rootlessness and unsatisfied searching, to our agonizing refusal to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt.

Consider the creative process as metaphor: The artist’s snakes stare at him with their lidless eyes, tails posed ready to strike, vibrating with the rattle of death, their swollen wedged heads and long slithering tongues, hypnotic, as they take measure of him, their vulnerable prey. Now, they strike! In a flash, meaning implodes between conflicting forces of passion and intellect, madness and reason, pain and ecstasy, doubt and conviction, as the artist and art explode into one expression.

Mystical thinker J. Krishnamurti once wrote of this in a compelling way. There was this painter who went out every day, set up his easel and canvas, organized his paints, then contemplated his subject, a solitary tree penciled against the sky on this bluff by the sea. Day after day he did this without ever touching paint to canvas. A passerby observed this strange behavior on several occasions and was finally prompted to ask,

“Sir, are you a painter?”

The painter replied, “Yes, indeed, I am a painter.”

“Pardon my boldness, sir, but I come this way several times a week. I have yet to see you place a single brush stroke to your naked canvas.”

The painter smiled. “That is also true.” Sensing the stranger’s confusion, he added, “I will paint the tree when the tree and me are one, not before.”

“Surely you jest?” quipped the stranger. “That is not possible.”

“For you, my good man, perhaps not,” countered the painter, “for the artist it is not only possible, but necessary.”

Art is created only when the artist and the subject merge. Realism is not the aim. The artist’s interest is in what he sees with his mind’s eye. Form in his painting is substance. The forces of self-realization and self–defeat melt into a common force of expression. Conflict is resolved in creation. That is the power of art. It is a difficult process, taking great patience, endurance and, yes, immense suffering. There is no art without pain. Art takes a heavy toll. Few are willing to pay the price. Ernest Hemingway paid the price, as did Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Their benediction is immortality.

Neither man ever grew up. Hemingway died at the chronological age of 61, while Mozart was but 36. They both played dangerously with their lives, the way young people do whom expect to live forever. The more pain they endured from their play the greater their art soared. They celebrated an adolescent zest for the illusory.

The creative process is a constant contest of the self with the secret self. It is not restricted to the artist. Anyone who attempts to create something instead of reacting to what others create experiences this. The process may be likened to an animal tamer trying to control a vicious predator set to devour him, with but a whip and chair as his defense. The tamer mocks the beast. He hits it viciously with his whip to bring out its anger, and then turns his back on the beast and walks away in defiance of the creature’s savage nature. Suddenly, as if struck by inspiration, the animal tamer pirouettes to face off with the beast, capturing it in a mid–air strike with the full impact of mortality in the balance. At that precise moment, when the beast is about to devour him, a thought materializes, previously hidden in the primordial recesses of his reptilian brain. Such bold and courageous persistence, more than strenuous effort, keeps the artist in touch with himself and the fact that he is always both the animal tamer and the beast at large.

Nor is living on the edge exclusive to artists. Many seek residence there because it suits them. They are bored with their lives, relationships, jobs, possessions, with their reasons for being. They are people in gilded cages often living on beautiful estates, trapped inside themselves. They have all the visual hallmarks of happiness as a marketable product: fine clothes, homes, cars, jobs and adoring friends with whom to play. They are trapped inside the mannerisms of their frigid public roles, incapable of expressing their true feelings, or what they are. They have successfully closed the gap between their public and private lives, as form becomes substance. Looking good is chosen over doing good, personality over performance, and career over family. Such people do not simply perform their corporate job. They are the jobs. This is their entire identity.

Dennis Rodman, the controversial ex-professional basketball player for the Chicago Bulls and San Antonio Spurs, embodies the torment when form wars with substance. Rodman colors his hair orange, green and other shades as his mood varies. He also sports many body tattoos and outlandish dress off the court—shiny tank top, metallic hot pants and rhinestone dog collar being common apparel. He has also dressed in flowing white of a drag queen bride. He sees this less as being risqué and more as a way to push the envelop of acceptability. An extremely gifted athlete, Rodman is however a rebel without a cause, a reluctant celebrity, who fights the system which labels him difficult.

He finds this unfair, and rightly so, because he sees himself trapped in the caricature of a one-dimensional black basketball player. No one could before or since rebound like Rodman and so there is toleration for his eccentricity. But the war goes on with–in him as he sees himself more than the job. He even dreams of suicide. “Sometimes I dream about just taking a gun and blowing my head off,” he confessed in Sports Illustrated (May 29, 1995). A multimillionaire, he lives on the edge as temperamental as any other artist fighting the continuing war between self–realization and self–defeat.

Corporate society, which has dominated our lives for more than a century, is not wicked. It is simply anachronistic. At least corporate society had the privilege of being able to say at the end of its era of influence, it made its own mistakes. Many might say it was courageous. It chose the technological path exclusively, which proved a misguided one, largely for its failure to understand and deal wisely with the social systems and the people in them.

But there you have it! Corporate society chose its fate. As for the average citizen, who went along for the corporate ride without complaint, he cannot make such a claim. He trusted corporate society to know what was best for him. He placed his confidence in its wisdom to be equal to all its challenges. For the past century, generation after generation served the corporate aims and religiously trusted corporate design to be the way to self-realization and the good life. Corporate society’s destiny became its destiny. Now, with the scandalous decline of corporate society into corpocracy, the average citizen cannot even say he made his own mistakes. He feels betrayed, but betrayed by whom? What dignity is there in that?

So what do such people do when faced with a breakdown culture? That is what we are talking about. Many embrace danger as a lark. They cannot seem to focus on anything real. Everything seems to slip out of focus, to be just beyond their grasp. They cannot feel. It is impossible for them to think for they have been stoned drones of corporate society too long.

Someone reading this who has not felt betrayed may think this extreme. The experience is frightening when the pain of discovery is in the mind, not the body; when a person realizes his corporate life was only a charade, while thinking, all the time, he was part of something real, meaningful, big. Living on the edge is but an attempt to cope with this discovery, to once more get in touch with feelings, even if it is through fear.

The artist is bent on self-realization through the painful process of creation, not comfort. There has never been a place for the artist in corporate society, so he has always been an outsider. Corporate society holds the bored artisan to its bosom, not the renegade artist. Ultimately, the corporate insider gravitates to self–defeat through adolescent self–indulgent practices. There is little sense of purpose to what he is doing. He is doing it mainly “for the hell of it,” or to escape monotony.

Compliance is the key to corporate society. Those who comply with its inanities are given comfort and made complacent. This suspends them in adolescence and insulates them from the pain of reality and therefore the need to grow up or take charge of their lives. Totally dependent, unable to focus on anything real or for very long, they are driven by excitement, danger and the unexpected. Shock is their therapy. They are captives to their fears, not driven by either their passions or convictions. They are most with themselves when they are free–falling from airplanes as parachutists, deep–diving for fauna several fathoms into the ocean’s cavity, or engaging in the madness of the triathlon.

This is because corporate executives wear the blinders of linear logic and miss most salient nuances. Unilinear people gravitate to corporations and then make it their civil religion. Corporate society never understands how working people think, feel and breathe. What is ironic is that once workers of spiritual depth and temperament are promoted into the elite ranks of corpocracy, they quickly forget their roots and become heretics to their forebears. Corporate capitalism lives in relation to this all-embracing ideology. There is no room for individualism, but this does not stop individualism from being pontificated as if a dogmatic encyclical from His Holiness, the CEO.

The executive class and its managers either believe in this civil ideology completely, or they are excommunicated, posthaste. Evidence of this captivity is free-floating anxiety and lack of identity. This description of captivity is a 20th century corporate phenomenon. In 19th century America, given a similar sense of captivity, the concern would have been expressed in terms of losing one’s immortal soul, an expression of individualism.

When Americans were individual entrepreneurs, when the home was one’s castle, when there existed ethnic and neighborhood pride, when people were poor but didn’t know it, when religion was a private thing, and one’s personal life was sacred, individuals shared a baroque spirit in their hearts and gave much room to a multifaceted eccentricity. Now, all of that is gone, replaced by corpocracy.

Americans are programmed but don’t seem to know it for rather then embracing fear and sublimating it creatively as with the artist, they are running from anxiety and depression into computer games, PlayStations, or using their mobiles as worry beads texting and tweeting most of their waking hours, which fails to allow their latent talent to bloom. Americans have become afraid of life.

A poignant example of this is the suicide of John Littig, 47, and Lynne Rosen, 45, who had a popular self-help radio show in New York City with the title “The Pursuit of Happiness.” They urged listeners to embrace spontaneity, which apparently included suicide. This happened in June 2013 and leaves the Freudian question, why fear life or something known for death, which is unknown? Freud answered his own question saying self-destruction won over self-realization.

The secret weapon of the artist is to know what he is running from and running towards. The artist is running from the sentimentality of hope and towards the reality of courage. Courage is the haven of identity hope its mirage. Courage gives the artist the capacity to find beauty by releasing his beast. Art involves far more perspiration than inspiration. Courage is the patient pursuit of a dream. The bored are on a treadmill as they run in place from courage in search of the miraculous. They deny the beast with-in, only to run into its nightmare. The self-help couple couldn’t help themselves.

The bored drive too fast, punish their bodies with too much or too little exercise, too much or too little food or drink, party until they drop, imperil relationships with meaningless affairs, anything to escape making a decision or having a heart-to-heart with themselves. What they do is not fulfilling; they are running on impulse overwhelmed by the mundane. John Littig was a motivational speaker; Lynne Rosen was a workshop facilitator and life coach, speaker and consultant. Elsewhere in this book, I have warned the reader that such people package their demons and sell them as a consumer product to others, suggesting the buyer beware!

People who put themselves on a pedestal as experts are likely to be more strangers to themselves than any member of their gullible clientele.



* * *

BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE


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

© June 5, 2013


REFERENCE:

This is yet another excerpt from “Meet Your New Best Friend” that will be published as a second edition this Fall.

* * *

Near the end of his career Sigmund Freud presented his most revolutionary theory, the concept of the death instinct. Freud contended that just as man is driven by the expectation of achieving pleasure, he is, at the same time, obsessed by the need to endure pain; to rehearse his demise by all matter of anguish.

Contrary to the wit of Walt Whitman, who proclaimed, “To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, every cubic inch of space is a miracle,” most men walk the earth with Little Abner’s dark cloud following them everywhere. In Freud’s attempt to describe the role of the death instinct in ordinary life, he made the somber discovery that hardly an aspect of existence is not vulnerable to its destructive force. For pampered souls of his time, it was hysteria, whereas hypersensitivity of political correctitude is ours.

Modern society is overwhelmed by the complex of demands, its stability shattered, as was Freud’s period with the Industrial Revolution. The leisure class of society couldn’t cope with change, then, expressing its debility in a form of psychoneurosis known as hysteria. We are failing to cope with change, only now a wider segment of society is choosing to express its neurosis in such distractions as political correctness, or an obsession with technology as if a toy. This is especially in evidence with electronic games, social networks (Facebook et al), texting and tweeting for the sheer hell of it. To be fair, the positive aspects of this technological development has led to the Arab Spring (2010-2011) in the middle east, and the ability of these social networks to break through the barriers of nationalities, ideologies, theologies, cultures and political systems.

Psychoanalysis was Freud’s answer to the unique demands of an Industrial Society. His special gift was to look at the atom and see man, look at man and see society. In an age essentially devoid of humanistic invention, he continues to provide concepts to abate our anxiety if failing to contend with our psychosis. For one, his science, if you must call it that, involves talking cures, which are personal, subjective and based on observation and interpersonal examination of culture at the roots of its multiple belief systems. For another, were he less an original thinker or talented writer, with a novelist’s eye for imagery, it is unlikely our time would be deemed the Post–Freudian Period.

Constant often abrupt change is ripping asunder the underpinning of one’s cultural moorings. This has left society impotent to deal effectively with ever changing and accelerating demands. Crime, poverty, disease, chaos and madness are natural outcomes of a world out-of-control.

Freud was a visionary in that he saw the consequences of exploding technology. His science is art and necessarily tortuous and grimly paradoxical. His healing art consists in finding a kind of madness that the patient, and by extension family and neighbors, can live with. Few men have possessed the sort of talent that Freud brought to this delicate balance between sanity and madness.

Many others have attempted to bring sense to our collective nonsense including Carl Gustav Jung, Harry Stack Sullivan, and the young R. D. Laing.

What Freud and his followers dealt with during the 20th century was a kind of madness people have been willing to settle for, such as guilty childhood secrets, terrible traumas and the irrationality of sexual desire. More recently, chemical imbalance has become the newest madness. Still, since the beginning of the 20th century, madness meant hereditary taint, nervous fatigue, endogenous toxins and the like, around a strange nomenclature, which acted as proxy for “cure.” At the very heart of Freudian psychoanalysis was movement from one kind of madness to another. For the practicing analyst it was an opportunity to “play God,” taking the mantle from the priest and the scalpel from the surgeon to revive the atavistic appeal of the witch doctor.

There is precedence for this madness in Western society. The sainted and scholarly Thomas Aquinas in a moment of candor, reflected, “Christ was either liar, lunatic or Lord.” Since man is made in the image and likeness of God, chances are Jesus, the Christ, was all three, a precedence that is reflected in man to this very moment.

Criticize Freud if you must, but you cannot ignore his impact on our times. Only he fills the void between personal belief and societal betrayal. This is an age that is now suffering the consequences of being mainly spectator to its own existence. Things have moved so fast that most people have preferred to watch rather than participate, to avoid the pain of discovery, settling instead for pleasant comfort and non-involvement. Only he took aim at the colossal gap between man’s machines and his convoluted intellect.

More books are written about him today than ever before, the majority to sully his reputation. The main drill is targeted at demonstrating the ineptitude of psychoanalysis to cure mental illness. Psychoanalysis, no matter what practitioners may contend, is much less a remedy than a belief system. It fills the vacuum created by lethargic and inflexible dogma of institutional religion. All mental health professionals today feed from the trough of Freud’s creative energy, either directly or indirectly.

Freud’s detractors rightly see him as mystical. He claimed such saints as St. Francis of Assisi were saved from severe neuroses by their sainthood, their faith. He was not himself a believer in formal religion, but held almost a divine respect for the power of faith. This was for him an expression of the power of mind. Many physical scientists share this deference, even if they cannot quantify its power. He correctly envisioned the dwindling power of institutional religion, and its failure to first comprehend, and then deal with the changing demands of society on the individual. He also foresaw institutional religion becoming perverted numbing the individual’s awareness and acceptance of reality, and by this perversion, leading the individual toward, not away from corruption.

No style of writing is more seductive than Freud’s. He combines argument with myth, exposition with case history, and images that make their point in an original form. He created an intellectual edifice that feels closer to the experience of living, and therefore hurting, than any other system yet developed. When a human being has more self-contempt than self-love, more self-disgust than self-worth, more buried shame than pride, more self-ignorance than self-understanding, guilt drives behavior into the abyss of despair, controlled by competing wants, needs and obsessions. The individual is no longer human, only a being with an insatiable appetite for anger.

To have faith in something is powerful medicine. When the belief is in oneself, one moves beyond coping to prevailing. There is an equally compelling force always at work within us to destroy such faith, and in destroying it, to make coping nigh impossible. We are bombarded every day of our lives to harbor self-doubt, to disbelieve what we know to be true. We have a right to our own absolute truth; such truth is personal and need not be explained, justified or defended. It is what guides us as individuals. Many, however, confuse this truth with relative truth, that is, objective truth as it relates to others and to things held in common (empirical) evidence derived from mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology.

The confusion is often expressed in hypersensitivity, masquerading as political correctness. It is not enough for many self-doubters to have their own absolute truth. They must authenticate themselves by convincing others that it is their ‘absolute truth’ as well; that it is in fact the only truth. True believers are part of the herd mentality of true belief, a mentality which is not satisfied until it tramples on and destroys the personal truths of others, and of course, “Always for their own good.”

The idea with the herd mentality is to magnify differences, not what we hold in common as human beings; to emphasize differences by race, ethnicity, religion, region, occupation, social class, economics, physicality, nationality, color, speech, language, preferences, stature, dexterity, age, beauty, erudition and so on.

Freud provides an anatomical structure of the mind, a roadmap of the will, an invention that helps us to lift language out of the dank basement of despair into the sunlight of hope. Within this cognitive landscape exists many taboos, the chief taboo of which is against self-accepting, self-understanding, self-love, and belief in the power of self above all else. In a word, culture is stacked against knowing ourselves as best friend and ultimate ally in coping.

The topography of personhood is full of tragic comic possibilities. Friend is used in the context here of true friend. There are many we call “friend,” which are seldom true to the expression. A true friend is trustworthy, loyal, and faithful and devoted to the best interest of the friend. A true friend never knowingly hurts a friend. He helps the person become a better person, and all that person could become. We are loyal to a friend. We defend to the death a friend’s right to be himself. We have a friend’s best interest at heart. Yet the most difficult thing is to be our own best friend, as it is far easier (and more culturally acceptable) to put ourselves down and others up, whether they deserve it or not. What is deemed precious humility is actually self-effacement. Self-defeat is the cultural inclination at the expense of self-realization.

Two compelling and opposing forces are always at work in our nature. The creative forces are considerable, but so are the destructive forces. Part of our being is driven by the expectation of pleasure, while another is obsessed with pain. This buried torment is the wish to die, or to escape our fears, Freud’s concept of the death instinct.

Novelist Ernest Hemingway comes to mind for his well-documented self-destructive lifestyle, corroborated in his novels and short stories. Hemingway, the first celebrity author of the media age, was both full of self-realization and self-defeat. During his teens, he made a commitment to eliminate remorse from his existence and live a life without consequences. With equal resolve, he committed himself to participate fully in the joys of the modern world. He lived every day only for the pleasures taken, a life filled with glorious reward and pathetic ruin. Winner of the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature, he literally reinvented the English language. He was champion of bare-bone prose, and of a hard-drinking, hard-loving, hard-fighting lifestyle. Yet, it was his clinical depression that led to his suicide in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961 at the still productive age of 61.

Hardly an aspect of life is not vulnerable to death instinct’s destructive forces. Therefore, it is well for us to respect our inclination and vulnerability to the death wish.

Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, a physician who dealt with terminally ill patients, discovered an amazing fact, that is, that most people will themselves to live or die. What he determined is that the direction of this delicate balance is love. Hutschnecker writes in his book, The Will To Live (1951), when the terminally ill found love at death’s door, many of them, as if by a miracle, became once again well and able to resume their lives.

The destructive force or death instinct (Thanatos) in a person may combine with the life instinct (Eros) into masochism or, be redirected against the external world as aggressiveness in sadistic behavior. Put otherwise, the unchecked direction of this instinct determines whether it does harm to others or ourselves. If the aggressiveness directed outward meets with obstacles more powerful than itself, say, Law Enforcement or social convention, it may return to itself and increase the amount of self-destructiveness. Pivotal is the war within the individual between the life instinct and the death instinct. This conflict is a lifetime experience, which revolves around being human, and is directed at self-realization or self-defeat every day of our lives.

We see this dramatized daily in reckless youth, that is, young people doing harm to themselves or others. This is the Id or The Child expressed in two primal forces: sexuality (life instinct) or violence (death instinct), which may fuse and operate together in varying proportions. These dual forces have much to do with society and its discontents. English poet John Donne writes about these conflicting forces:



"Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go, rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, and dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well, and better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die."



* * *

HABITS AND THE HEART

HABITS AND THE HEART


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

© June 2, 2013

REFERENCE:

This is another excerpt from “Meet Your New Best Friend” that will be published as a second edition later this year.

* * *

Two pivotal and opposing ideas have much to do with where we find ourselves today, and why we feel so confused, perhaps even lost. One idea is that man is a thinking being, superior to Nature’s instinctive creatures. This gives man a sense of identity with a Supreme Creator, a feeling of divinity, “made in the image and likeness of God,” clearly separate and superior to Nature.

With the advance of science and the explosion in technology, certitude of a Supreme Creator has diminished. There is a sense that the dust will never settle; that modern life is best defined by its loses:

· The rise of agnosticism,

· The confirmation in Darwinian theory that we are wholly a part and not separate from nature and the animal kingdom,

· The recognition that our political and cultural traditions are flawed and not universally valid,

· The inability to come to grips with cultural pluralism and accept the peoples of the world as they are.

The other idea is that the modern world and its technological majesty is equal to the challenges of the future without any subjective dalliance into the mystical or metaphysical. American educator John Dewey and current futurist Alvin Toffler represent part of an army of defenders of modernity.

Dewey’s commencement address at Smith College in 1890 touches the feelings of modern man. “Science,” he said, “had expelled God from Nature, and Nature in ceasing to be divine, ceases to be human.” Toffler sees us in The Third Wave (1980) of history. The first wave was the Agricultural Revolution, the second wave the Industrial Revolution, and now we are in the third wave the Technological Revolution. He announces nothing will be as it once was putting an exclamation point to Dewey’s declaration.

Such defenders choose to see the march of science as inevitable; that the intellectual and moral crises of the modern world presents more opportunity than danger, more gain than loss, more good than bad.

Ambivalent man, knowing not which way to turn, counters by discovering a remarkable capacity to continually reinvent himself. One instrument of reinvention is for man to run from nature and himself, to deny the reality of his confusion. Self-escape is a matter of habit and the heart. This has given way to the divided self, which is so prominent today.

The 17th century English poet John Donne aptly expresses the process of separation and individuation. Donne lived in a world where the ties of kinship obligation were already loosening. Pilgrims cut themselves loose from British tyranny and their feudal village obligations and colonized America. Individualism, a word actually coined by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th century, was the driving force of these early colonizers in the 17th century. Four centuries later, individualism remains the primary American driving force in context if not in content.

Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (1835):

“Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends (which) leaves the greater society to look after itself.”

We are now witnessing a further progression of that withdrawal, the withdrawal from family and friends into the crippling torpor of self–estrangement and self–negation. “We have met the enemy,” as cartoonist Walt Kelley’s Pogo reminds us, “and he is us!”

What we see, especially in America, is that man has separated himself from everything, from God, country, culture, state, community, family and friends, from his roots. Left is the naked self in an alienated world. That world defines itself in terms of progress, or what succeeds, not what fails, what is gained, not what is lost. It is the world of technology. God, too, has come in for quite a bashing, replaced largely by apathy or nonchalant agnosticism.

Creationists, who have every right to believe as they do in the literal word of the Bible, can find scant support as the Darwinian imagery of survival of the fittest strikes a more responsive cord with progressives.

“Making it” is the new god, while faith has taken a tumble. Man has lost his power to believe, and with it the ability to see beyond his narrow purpose. He can’t distinguish what he wants to believe from what he should believe. Like a stranger in a crowd, urban Americans manage a passable existence only because they don’t know what to believe. If they knew what to believe, they would be beating down their neighbor’s door to share their discovery. Instead, they encapsulate themselves in walled prisons with eight foot fences, double dead–bolted locked doors, electronic surveillance security systems, and cell phones programmed to call “911” at a moment’s notice.

As the German sociologist Max Weber has reflected, “The magic has gone out of the world, and with it, the spiritual certainty of man.” The disenchantment of the world has progressed to the disenchantment of man. Modern man ignores this, however, as he gambles everything on science and technology to make matters right:

· The miraculous cure,

· The fail–safe strategic weapons system,

· The life–enhancing drug,

· The happiness pill.

But is this likely? With the death of the magical, can the burden of man’s authenticity be so shifted?

Science and technology are treated interchangeably as if the same thing, but they are not. Science is about discovery. Technology is about harnessing science, or about power and control. Science has no agenda. It explores the unknown as an end in itself, while technology always has a definite agenda: that is, to convince, you, the consumer to buy what it has to sell.

What science and technology have in common is little sense of conscious constrain or, indeed, of ultimate consequences. Were this not so there would be,

· No planet threatening nuclear arsenals,

· No world wide depletion of natural resources

· No faulty and out of balance ecosystems.

Technology demonstrates the baser instincts of man, an appetite for more, more control, power, influence, more of everything including money. Technology is short term, expedient, application oriented, bottom line responsive.

Science is long term, impractical, intuitive and responsive only to its own contemplative lights. With such differing agendas, ironically, many scientists and their respective institutions of research have climbed into bed with technologists so that it is hard to tell one from the other. The English poet Matthew Arnold depicts this dilemma as “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.”

Belief, which is so crucial to life, is not a product of intellect, but of the human heart. The heart cannot be manufactured. Technology can kill the heart, but never create it.

Everything is false here. Science scoffs at those who claim to have a soul. Spirit is given short shrift. If the soul exists, scientists persist quantify it!

Meanwhile, technology builds its elaborate systems outside of man, not inside him. Like another uniform or hair shirt, technology creates a world that looks good, but doesn’t necessarily feel good, because it fails to touch man’s inner life. Without that spark, without enchantment in man’s nature, his soul shrivels and dies. He may have everything and nothing at all, for he is on automatic pilot, existing, not living. God is dead to him and the magic of God that once was so critical to his nature is gone as well! Man feels as if part of a global village wandering in space and going nowhere.

* * *

WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS ISN'T NECESSARILY SO

WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS ISN’T NECESSARILY SO



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

© May 31, 2013

REFERENCE:

This is an excerpt from “Meet Your New Best Friend” that will be released as a second edition in the fall.

* * *

Parenthood is the most important job in the world and there are no qualifying examinations. Albeit not intended, more often than not, precious few parents seem to remember what it was like to be a child. Forgotten is how they became themselves. Each generation, for some reason, desires to save its progeny from the truth of its own life experience. Parents seek to protect their offspring from reality, from the pain, risk, embarrassment and missteps that first gave them identity, later to sustain them with character.

The process is a familiar one. The route to self–knowledge is not through parental wisdom. Even if this route were a viable one, few would take it. It is through life’s school of hard knocks that most find their way. Even formal education has little impact. It is a poor substitute for experience. Going from the womb of home to the womb of grammar and high school, and then unto the womb of the university or the job teaches little about life or living. No formal curriculum fulfills that purpose. Life must be lived, not contemplated to have meaning. For life to be lived, there must be encouragement at home and in school to experience it first hand.

Well intentioned parents, teachers, religious leaders and others are frequently mistaken when it comes to what is best for us, as the person in us is starting to express itself. Many have forgotten the trauma of youth, the boredom, the confusion, and hence the inherent lackadaisical quest for identity and authentication. As Immanuel Kant once wrote, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” So, it is with our youth and, indeed, with our life.

Yet as we were programmed before, young people are programmed now. They are conditioned to hear, but remain silent, to be treated to half–truths, and trustingly to swallow them whole. There is seldom the sharing of doubt, or mention of the grip that fear and failure have on a normal life. What youth has always heard is the echo of Life’s triumphs, not Life’s failures.

It is Life’s failures, however, that have made Life’s triumphs possible. Therefore, young people sense something is wrong when they are struggling to crawl and are expected to soar without ever learning to walk through the foreboding brier patch of life.

Parental expectations, if these youngsters only knew, are often misbegotten dreams of their own failures. A tinsel of lies leaves little room for the young person to gain an insight into his own essence. Such an insight is essential to see the possibilities of future triumphs through the inevitable veil of frustration and failure.

Human frailty and folly are indigenous to human nature, not an incurable disease. To stumble or fall from grace does not shame one for life. There is never a magic time to start over. It could be 16 or 60. Everyone falls from grace, sometime, but not everyone can admit it, or pick themselves up by the bootstraps and get on with life. Acknowledgment of the fall is the first step toward recovery, even redemption. The parental temptation to construct an elaborate montage of overt triumphs superimposed on covert failures is a mistake. It smothers out the truth.

A human bond is created between parent and child when the parent’s real experience is shared discretely, timely and in its naked honesty. This bond gives the child permission to be a human being.

The whole business of deception and denial starts with confusion over goodness and evil. Goodness is not the absence of evil. Goodness is not even the triumph over evil, as anyone knows who has ever managed that feat. The capacity for good and evil are inherent within our character, inseparable, as they are part of the same whole. Interestingly enough, evil is “live” spelled backwards.

An affinity for evil actually moves us away from life’s possibilities, and therein resides the sin, whereas an affinity for good moves us toward life’s possibilities. The inherent problem is that we must embrace our natural resistance to life to discover our goodness. Goodness is never a done deal. Goodness requires work. Evil, on the other hand, requires only going with the flow. That is the distinction, the problem, the possibility and the opportunity, depending upon our perspective. Fear of evil is the obverse side of good. Good, then, moves us toward life’s realization for us, but always with the full understanding that evil is a constant and irascible companion on that journey.

It is easy to deny we are equally capable of good and evil. Some truly believe they are more full of goodness than others, or that they have little or no evil in them. They are wrong. Oh, how wrong they are! Good and evil are in balance when we come into the world. The balance is tilted one way or the other largely by our conditioning and life experience. But the capacity for either one is inherent in our nature.

Good is sensed as little more than a bore. Our fascination with evil is astonishing. Goodness is hardly of interest. It is as if goodness is not nearly as delicious or exciting as evil. Yet to blatantly celebrate evil is not condoned by society. So, we go to great lengths to experience evil subliminally through creative pursuits or vicariously through our fascination with the depraved behavior of others, especially celebrities. Books on satanic serial killers sell in the millions. Evil played off against good is high drama, the fodder of writers such as Stephen King. Celebrated figures turn true confessions of their hidden evil into bestsellers. As indicated in the last chapter, it should come as no surprise to learn authors of inspirational tomes on faith and goodness are often addictive personalities and closet companions of evil, being heavy drinkers, inveterate smokers and philanderers to boot.

Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, celebrated author of The Road Less Traveled (1978), confesses as much in his book, In Search of Stones (1995). He claims he writes so well of evil because he knows evil first hand, which (in turn) has put him in touch with his goodness. It is this combination, this awareness that makes him such a compelling author.

Contemporary religions have trouble with this reality. It is as if they are in a wrestling match with evil and only by pinning the devil to the mat will they win the support of the parishioners. They fail to recognize that by giving the devil such exposure, such prominence, it enhances the parishioner’s fascination with evil as well as exposing theirs. Instead of selling goodness, they play into the hands of the purveyors of evil. As long as the clergy and laity proclaim the diabolical nature of satanic entertainment, for instance, such music, film, art and books will flourish, and continue to sell in the mega-millions. Madison Avenue couldn’t dream up a more effective promoter.

The clergy’s negative campaigning realizes negative impact. Pronouncements of evil do not beget goodness in return. On the contrary, the clergy are actually selling the product, evil, that they purport to abhor. Our times are obsessed with evil and we need desperately to hear the “good news,” what the Gospels were meant to communicate. The clergy would have us believe that there is more evil now than at any other time in man’s history. Not true. There are more people. But there is no more evil in our times than any other, nor no less.

The clergy reduce good and evil to a choice, “either/or,” which incidentally was the title of the Danish religious thinker Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 classic: either salvation through good works or damnation through evil deeds.

Few are buying this message. Anyone who takes a little time to reflect on the world around him knows that it is a rather precise mirror image of what goes on in the world within him. It could be disconcerting if he paid much attention to the incredible emphasis paid to evil, crisis, trauma and Armageddon; and the scant attention paid to good deeds and good days. His saving grace is that about 95 percent of all the information thrown at him misses its mark completely. He has become hardened to the ranting of those who cry, “crisis or damnation,” with every other breath. Sigmund Freud claims man needs religion as illusion to deal with the future, but not the religious. It is their home in the now.

The media, especially newspapers and television, support the clergy’s theme as they give wide attention to evil, little to goodness. Why not! Evil sells shampoo, hair spray, automobiles and psycho–thriller films, such as Quentin Tarantino’s amorality graffiti, Reservoir Dogs (1992), True Romance (1993), Natural Born Killers (1994) and Pulp Fiction (1994).

What makes evil more enchanting than goodness is theatrical violence. Tarantino epitomizes a kind of Post–modern primitive, neither especially immoral or amoral, but pre–moral, a kid whose Id loves the shoot–’em ups in the movies. This grown up child of the Pleasure Principle hasn’t thought through the echoes or consequences in the real world. Violence, it would seem, is not to be taken seriously, but found to be funny, entertaining. What appears to interest Tarantino is not violence, per se, but fiasco, the sense that life is a mess, even in fiction. His characters are wonderfully at home in the world of accident. For him, there is no interest in being realistic, because the world isn’t. With his peculiar brand of innocence, nothing is a matter of good or evil. It is like a dance sequence in a film, all style.

Immaturity has been taken to another level with current video games of this electronic age. We can see children as young as three or four playing these violent games with reckless abandon. Small wonder they become addicted to them well into their maturing years.

Goodness is envisioned as bland and lifeless, while the exact opposite is true. Actually, goodness is muscular, virile and strong. Evil is flabby, weak and lazy. Remember, goodness takes work, and evil goes with the flow. Artists, such as Tarantino, expose the hypocrisy of the whole idea of a moral universe, a culture which professes to be God-fearing, but acts self-sufficient; a culture which seeks an innocuous creed which consoles and reassures, which provides soul ease and aims to satisfy, a culture which displays little interest in being uplifting or challenging. Paint won’t make it any prettier.

* * *

THE IMPORTANCE OF DISOBEDIENCE

 THE IMPORTANCE OF DISOBEDIENCE

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

© May 29, 2013

REFERENCE

One of the things you are bound to encounter, when you write against the grain of popular culture, is misunderstanding; the second is blow back.

I've experienced both from one reader of THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).  She checked the book out at the library looking for a book to be more self-assertive, "and it was telling me everything that was wrong with me!"

No, it was encouraging the reader to be self-aware leading to self-acceptance and therefore to self-understanding.  I'm sorry it failed to do so.

TTABYOBF deals with a number of relevant concepts, including the importance of rebellion, that is, of disobedience.  Taking control of your life, which is the necessary precursor to "growing up,"  requires making sense of all the things you have been told are true against what your experience has taught you.  This is an emotional bridge to cross.  Perhaps that explains why so often this bridge is avoided.

Alas, the only way you can do this with rational sophistication is by assessing your experience and knowledge of living against what cultural society is continuously bombarding your conscience to the contrary.

Society, and its institutions always lag behind the needs and sensitivities of the time because they have such an investment in "things as they are."

It was the original reason why I wrote this missive, and why I post it again.

SOCIETY AT WAR WITH ITSELF

“Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing, heav’nly Muse.”—John Milton (Paradise Lost)

“Wherever there is authority, 

There is a natural inclination to disobedience.” —Thomas Haliburton, Nova Scotia humorist

The solution to a society at war with itself is revealed in a much misunderstood concept, disobedience.

There is a time to obey and there is a time to disobey. Before we attain status as an individual, while we are in the process of being molded into a person, it is a time in our culture to obey. But to discover our own identity, to understand what we are about and why we exist for the future, it is necessary, even prudent, to disobey.

Most disobey to unshackle themselves from the conditioning process of The System at some point in their lives. The splendidly perfect child may not find the courage until middle age. Generally, however, the process happens quite naturally during late adolescence. Society has never found the measure of understanding this natural disturbance to deal with disobedience properly, choosing instead to give the conduct an assortment of negative connotations and to see it explicitly in shameful terms.

The System is not a sinister force designed to corrupt the individual. The System is society’s institutional acculturation process, the total impact of conditioning that shapes us into the person we become. This conditioning starts from the moment we are born, long before we have any conscious say in the matter. We are squeezed and pinched, pushed and prodded into what eventually and hopefully becomes a human being.

Experts note the remarkable importance of touching in our early physical and psychological development. Research shows babies held for long periods of time become healthy faster. Human touch also demonstrates long-range psychological benefits. Babies who enjoy constant human touch during their nursing or formula feeding period are more affectionate and gregarious, as they get older.

A husband or wife cold to the touch probably had little to do with the creation of this disposition. The same is true of the neighborhood's outlaws. Love in the form of touching is powerful medicine to the human spirit. It appears critical to development as a human being. There is no substitute for the warmth of human caring.

Touching is an uncommon practice with children of today’s generation. Society is characterized as insensitive. Touching and holding take time and patience. Time impacts the schedule of our hedonistic culture; time which most are unwilling to sacrifice.

Substituted for this lack of touching are things, material possessions. It is no accident that unloved children turn into consumer crazed adults for they equate possession of things with love. Therapy for them is a new toy, a relational gadget, which they can show off to the envy of others. But it never works.

Love is priceless and no amount of having can ever be substituted for genuine caring.

Touching, being in short supply, affects society vertically across socio-economic classes. Money cannot buy affection. The lack of affection leads to disaffection, which ferments into rebellion—the discontent and resentment of authority.

The role of parent, with which the rebellious youth identifies authority figures, is a failed role, an unloving role, perhaps even an abusive role. The pain of loss is expressed in the behavior of the nihilist or the anarchist. The seed once damaged is unlikely to ever bear fruit. It is more likely to putrefy the environment with the stench of social pathology. We are seeing this manifested in runaway crime in our streets and run amuck behavior in our classrooms.

Yet there is always hope. Redemption is discovered when we recognize the way we are, and have the will to choose to be different. It involves a progression:

There is a process of craving affection (which is normal as a child) to discovering the capacity to love as a fully grown up person without the craving. This is the natural road from immaturity to maturity. A key to know where we stand is expressed in terms of love:

Do I love you because I need you (immature love)?

Do I need you because I love you (mature love)?

The answer tells us who is in control. What follows is a journey into our society and us as individuals. It is a bumpy ride so fasten your seat belt.

THE ROLLER COASTER TO SELF-KNOWING

When people start to entertain their own thoughts, begin to sense the quality of their own hearts, experience the conflict between what they are told and what they uncover for themselves, we have the making of disobedience.

This disobedience is both healthy and necessary. It is the only path to maturity. Disobedience is the route to personal identity as an individual. It establishes a human being as a person and not as a clone of others.

Without disobedience, individuals never become persons wholly on their own terms and in their own right. They attempt instead to live up to the expectations of others. Not only is this impossible, it can prevent a person from becoming all that person could become. The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it best:

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”

This takes giving yourself the benefit of the doubt. It means seeing yourself as the person you would like to become, and then being a friend to that person in a supportive and encouraging manner. The kindness you show yourself when it counts, the tolerance you display when you fall short of the mark, and the love you demonstrate when there is no love about you will ensure you become that person.

Disobedience usually manifests itself at puberty. With the constant assault of the senses via television, radio, newsprint and now cell phones, the Internet and all the ubiquitous social and emotional connections, it can happen earlier. If anything, this acceleration has thrown the individual and society off course and into a nihilistic zone of constant confusion where priorities are continuously muddled.

Still, at this stage, it can be controlled and guided through the obstinacy of the headstrong "know it all" mindset of the youth to an agreeable conclusion, not necessarily through secondary processes such as family support, counseling and education, but more likely through the primary role of the individual finding this new balance within himself to be his own best friend.

Without self-acceptance during this traumatic period of chaos, doubt, confusion and rejection, the individual is unlikely to negotiate the No Man’s Land of disobedience and arrive safely on the other side to maturity.

Instead, the individual is apt to spend most of his days in suspended adolescence, a puppet on a string to titular authority. Before a person can show genuine kindness to another person, he must first be able to show kindness to himself.

The disobedient person, with the courage to accept the responsibility of the condition, recognizes the primacy of The System. He first attempts to find himself within society and to bend the rules to accommodate his developing awareness and personal belief and value system. Outright rebellion is the Court of Last Resort. Unable to find meaning and measure for himself in The System, he goes to the extreme.

Rebellion views traditional values and beliefs as either unfounded or irrelevant. This is sophistic, but such an individual is too committed to “throwing the baby out with the bath water” to sense anything but his own existence.

Life is senseless as experienced and therefore everything beyond the self “sucks.” Keep this differentiation in mind. Disobedience–rebellion remains pivotal as we continue in development, and both disobedience and rebellion have their function in the person who will ultimately reach maturity.

The first signs of change are traumatic for parents as well as for the child, but inevitable.

A CASE IN POINT

Mary was a single parent of a thirteen-year-old daughter. Mary worked in an electronics firm as an assembler. She was proud of her daughter who was tall for her age, beautiful and a high achiever. One day Mary broke into uncontrollable sobs at her workstation. When her supervisor tried to console her, she displayed erratic behavior. She became abusive of the supervisor and went into an incoherent tirade, ending with “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

Totally perplexed, the supervisor sent her to the company psychologist. “She is one of my best workers,” the supervisor said, “what has gotten into her, I don’t know, but she is not herself. Help her if you can. She is a good people.”

The first thing Mary asked when she met with the psychologist was, “Can I smoke?” The psychologist smiled. Mary knew it was against company policy. “If you must, yes,” he said.

“Now, may I ask you a question?” An icebreaker is often the most critical stage.

Mary looked away, grabbed a pack of cigarettes from her purse, stamped the cigarette hard on the desk, then like a hairy armed bouncer, lit it, took a deep drag, then looked defiantly at the psychologist, as she blew smoke over his head. “It depends,” she said.

“Fair enough,” he replied. He pretended to be looking through her file, which he had read already.

“Do you like working here?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like your work?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like your supervisor?”

“I thought you were going to ask one question. That is three,” she said studying him.

He put his right hand over his heart, “I plead guilty as charged.” She broke into a guarded smile.

“Yes, I like my boss. She’s a gem.”

“So, I think we can assume this is not work related. This is personal.”

He waited for her reply. Her look expressed volumes. There was hurt in her eyes. Real pain. Still, she said nothing. He waited. It was obvious she was torn between defensiveness and disclosure. Could she trust him?

“It’s Champagne, my daughter,” she said finally. She then went on to describe her daughter in the most glowing terms, a conscientious honor student, churchgoer, always punctual, never lies or talks back, always polite, always tells where she is going, popular but ‘not yet boy crazy like her girlfriends,’ tidy, industrious and so on. She sang her daughter’s praise for twenty minutes. Her face was aglow as she expressed her maternal pride. She stopped suddenly, breaking into tears. The psychologist gave her a tissue. She thanked him, wiped her eyes, the tissue black with mascara.

“I don’t know what to do. I am at my wit’s end.” She then sobbed, clenching and reclenching her fists, as her supervisor had described.

As she continued to sob, the psychologist remained composed, quietly waiting, making no attempt to move on. The catharsis seemed to exhaust her, but also to relax her. She was ready to tell the rest of her story.

Champagne was not coming home after school. She was lying about where she had been; not going to church; staying out past curfew (Her mother had an 11:00 p.m. curfew); being seen with boys. Her room was a mess. She failed to make the honor roll in the first two grading periods of the year, a first! She skipped school and hid a letter of suspension from the principal that was mailed to her mother. Cigarettes were found in her purse. She denied they belonged to her, denied ever smoking. Now she was even talking back to her mother.

“So what do I do, doctor?” she said defiantly. “I understand you have all the answers.”

“What seems to be the problem?” the psychologist said without sarcasm. “What I have. . .” He didn’t get any further.

“What seems to be the problem?” she screamed. “What the freaking hell seems to be the problem?” she repeated hysterically. “You’ve got to be joking?” Her face an expression of disbelief, coated with anger.

“No,” he repeated.

“Buster! You know what? You beat all!” She grabbed her purse, spun around in her chair and nearly leaped to the door. All the time she was shaking her head, expletives leaking out of her hair.

“Wait!” he said. “Please! Wait!” he continued in a quiet voice. “I’ve listened to you. Right? You owe it to me to hear me out.” She hesitated, turned back. “Please!” he said again. She slumped into the chair, looked at her watch. “You’ve got two minutes!”

He smiled. “I’ll hurry,” he said, letting her know she was in charge. That was a good sign. “What I hear,” he began, “is your fear. I also sense your love for your daughter. She is your life. You want for her all the things that you have been denied. You also want to save her from the hurt and pain you’ve experienced.” Mary rummaged through her purse for another cigarette. She was not going anywhere. Her eyes were downcast, fixed on her lap as if doing penance. She smoked furtively, picking off the tobacco from her lips. She was enveloped in a cloud of smoke.

“It is hard for us to realize it sometimes,” he continued, “but what made you the person I see is that experience. Your daughter is taking those first precarious steps we all must take to become a person. Up to now she has been a windup doll, a robot, a machine . . . .”

He studied her. There was doubt expressed in her sad eyes, but she was listening. “She was your machine,” he added, “and you provided all the meaning to that machine. None of this was hers.”

“Now she is struggling to become a person in her own right, no longer your or anyone else’s machine. She is struggling to find out who that person is. Identity is a horrendous problem to her. She will experiment. She will test. She will flirt with danger. She lives in her head. She dreams. She fantasizes. She romanticizes her experiences. She embraces danger everyday but sees herself immortal.”

Mary bolted upright with these words. The psychologist decided to go forward more gently.

“She will change her dress. Use cosmetics. Change her hair. Her nails. Her language. Yes, perhaps even her name and certainly her behavior. Be a tease. Fantasize she is a party girl. Life is her laboratory. She may even get a tattoo for she is flirting with the idea of a more glamorous persona. This is common.

“She will also start to question things, like the value of school, going to church, of working for a living, her relationships. All this is normal, healthy. Also necessary. You smoke. She will try it. If you drink, she will try that, too.

“On the other hand, if you neither smoke nor drink, no guarantee she won’t experiment with them. None. There are no guarantees at all at this stage, just as there were none when you were young. Youth is precarious, exciting, enchanting, and dangerous. But the dangers are so great today and so final in consequence, that the need for vigilance is real. Your concern is important to her. No doubt. She wants you to worry. She wants you to care. She wants to know there is someone who loves her when she finds it difficult to love herself.

“What your daughter needs now is not a mother, but a friend, a confidante. A mother’s love got her to this point. She must find a way to cross the barrier to love, respect and trust herself, to be equal to the challenges ahead without you looking over her shoulder.

“She needs you now as her best friend. She needs that person in whom she can confide and not be judged, who will tell her the things happening to her are part of life, not to be feared. She needs to know her best friend has been there before and understands.

“Tell her she is okay, so she can tell herself that, too. A friend doesn’t have to be perfect. Indeed, perfection is not what a person expects from a friend, but understanding and support when she feels less than perfect.

“A friend makes no attempt to make her daughter into a Mother Teressa or the Blessed Virgin Mother. A best friend helps to understand the dancing hormones in her child’s body, to accept the anguish in her young heart, to appreciate her possibilities without surrendering her will. A best friend helps her deal with her fears and not be afraid to love. Love and fear are constant throbs in her young heart. Confusing. Tempting. Exciting. Scary.

“Give her a little slack. Not too much. Just a little. When she screws up, let her know you know. Knowing she is not getting away with anything is an important kind of punishment.

“Tell her always, no matter what, that you love her. She needs to hear this in order to love herself. Express your disappointment, too, but show her that being disappointed is not the end of the world. Help her to learn to love herself despite her imperfections. Make it clear you are always there for her. This will help her learn to be there for herself. Linus in the Peanuts cartoon is not the only one who needs a blanket to feel safe. We all do.

“You are still her teacher, but the education is now daughter centered, no longer mother centered. Disappointed as you may be, she needs to be more disappointed.

"There is no leverage in saying, ‘How could you do this to me after all I’ve done for you?’ That is mother centered. Say instead, ‘Champagne, how could you do this to yourself?’ Disappointment is the most fitting punishment.

“Control of behavior must move from your eyes to hers, from your center to her center. Once established, flirting with danger will have less and less appeal. You are showing her by being her best friend how she can learn to be her own best friend. It is what you really want, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she replied weakly. “I want so to be the perfect mother,” wiping her eyes. “I’m not, you know,” wondering if the psychologist could see through her.

* * *

BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND -- AN EXCHANGE

BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND – AN EXCHANGE


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

© May 28, 2013

A READER WRITES (re: What has all this to do with being “your own best friend”?)

Jim,

Some interesting thoughts here and well expressed. Just a couple of points.

You say, “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.

and, “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.” How do you feel about the philosophy of Ayn Rand?

You quote Kant:

Then you say, “Our corporate society has relegated its citizens to dependent children, which is the greatest of despotisms and destroyers of freedom. Writing 270 years ago (1743), 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.”

That seems like a rather excessive assertion. Who among us in independent? Certainly not the most powerful. In fact I would rank them among the most dependent. Certainly not the weakest for whom mere survival requires dependence. This isn’t something that results merely from the corporate society. The first time two guys went out to hunt together and the beast they selected for dinner injured one who was then cared for and fed by the other one who managed to kill the beast, dependency occurred and was accepted and it worked for the good of the group and individuals in it.

Modern society, corporate or otherwise with it’s increased specialization increases the manner and ways of dependence, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sure, in a sense the farmer owns you because you would starve without him, but then you also hold him dependent because he would not be able to pay for his seed if you didn’t buy his product. It has been only through this interdependence that we have been able to raise the condition of man ever higher and it is in those parts of the world that have most vigorously embraced it that the greatest achievements have been made. Neither Salk nor Sabin were independent actors. They were highly dependent on prior knowledge advanced by others and thankfully they found it in their own rational best interests to freely accept the dependence they had to, to achieve their ends. I think they and Gandhi and even Kant were more than “but the possession of another man.”

Take care,

Ted

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Ted.

This is thought provoking, with which my book, in fact, all my books are meant to generate. I am familiar with Rand's objectivist philosophy but I am not an advocate of her views, which are very materialistic, while mine are moralistic, or you might even say somewhat spiritualistic.

I should say I am advocating the antithesis of her views, as she is, if anything, an atheist, which I am not, and a capitalist to the nth degree, which I am not as well. I’m associating myself in this missive to you as something as my moral imperative. Being your own best friend has been centerpiece to my philosophy and life

The key word in your response is interdependence.

You cannot be interdependent unless or not before you are reasonably well self-directed, self-determined, self-motivated and independent making choices from inner directedness sponsored by self-governance or autonomy.

You cannot go from dependence to interdependence. It is a bridge too far, and no one ever finds away to cross it. Dependence breeds on and of itself with comfort, complacency, and want, constant want, which is translated into need.

If as human beings, we do not look first to ourselves, but always to others for help before we determine our own strengths and weaknesses we will (and have) progressed to the society we have today. If we program our children to be suspended in terminal adolescence, we create a generation very much like the baby boomer generation and “me” generation down to the present.

If we do not teach our children to be inner directed and to make choices in their own best interest, we will have the generations that we see we have now, which has been spawned over the past seventy-five years.

If when someone eggs us on to have a cigarette or drink alcohol when we are ten or twelve or older, if someone teases us for being a goody good when we won’t experiment with drugs, or become active sexually when we have no idea what it entails, when someone makes fun of us for taking books home and studying our lessons and doing our own work, we may not be too popular with the “in” crowd but we will be our own best friend, and decades later, we will look back on such a wonderful existence we will want to share its reality with others.

We have bred dependence into our system. Dependence is what our child rearing, educational system, and our working establishment has bred into us. The book has a broad framework and looks at this situation somewhat analytically and you might even say microscopically. I have enough confidence in my craft that I think with pruning I have made my case more comprehensible if not necessarily reinforcing for those enslaved to current manners and mores.

That said you cannot go from powerlessness to interdependence. The point I am trying to make with this book is that before you can love and respect another you must first love and respect yourself; before you can aid and comfort another you must find the means and opportunity and have the motivation to aid and comfort yourself. It doesn’t work the other way around in my experience. I have always thought being able to say “no” is one of the most beneficial words in the English language.

From my vantage point, the examples you have given, except for the hunting one, apply to a minority of souls and not the majority. Most people I have run into in my long life do not seem to recognize that they are endowed with reason that allows them to solve their own problems; that attaining material wealth with all its accoutrements – the cars, the boats, the fine homes, the fine clothes, the fine lifestyles – may generate envy or rise out of one’s own envious spirit, but things will not bring peace and inner contentment because it requires none of these, only the freedom to make choices as one’s own best friend. We are dominated by an acquisitive society, what Christopher Lasch called a narcissistic society just prior to the Information Age, only to die before he saw how prophetic he was.

Modern society, in my view, has created a cancer and that cancer is corpocracy. What Rand thought was so important is a pejorative to me.

We speak of individualism and claim the United States of America sponsors individual initiative, but I think that is quite misleading. In our society, the true self is not the individual but the corporation. We identify with the corporation, the individual is but an element in the corporation, and if he should cut himself off from it, he becomes a limb without a body, a meaningless fragment that derives its only significance from its association with that system, with that whole.

It has been with us a long time in our culture, our churches, our schools, our races, and our classes, but corpocracy has perfected it to generate only a collective self and form of life to be lived by conforming individuals while acting free when actually be unfree, when meaning and purpose is the group norm and not the individual’s prerogative, when the values that the individual embodies are institutional values with its infallible authority, an authority for which there can be no appeal, and a subservience so pervasive that it is not even noticed.

Within this climate, and it is the climate in which I see us, it is difficult for a man to hear the voice within him, for if he does hear it, it is tainted with outside morality as he is blinded and deafen to what matters most to him because he no longer has the will or the way to find it. Specialization has not only driven this man into a machine of changeable parts, but also into what Kierkegaard called a non-person.

Specialization, which most people think is a good thing, and inevitable, has fed this monster corpocracy and continues to feed it until one day I am certain it will die. Society has bought the corporate model and society is dying by crime, malfeasance, violence, genocide and suicide at a level we never anticipated. We have become insensitive to our own societal sickness.

Take B. F. Skinner, the psychologist with his operant conditioning. We have seen this programming repeated in education. Psychologists who have followed Skinner’s model want to stamp out ignorance and prejudice, superstition and cruelty, misery and injustice by treating us as unthinking animals. This programming has been tantamount to brainwashing with the lofty purpose of producing a peaceful and well-adjusted and contented flock of human beings, but obviously on automatic pilot. Thank God it has failed!

Kant wrote of the freedom and dignity of the human personality insisting that required a person to be independent and free of such mechanisms not only of men but of nature, too.

Modern compulsory education, as Alvin Toffler ("Future Shock") wrote about so wisely, was a late 19th and early 20th century program to train workers who could read a little write a little and do simple math. It was not to enhance them as humanistic human beings. Corpocracy from the beginning has been exploitative by using men as means, not as ends in themselves, and so it is to our day.

This is a particular form of inequality whereby you make men, by persuasion or coercion or something in between, do the corporate will not necessarily the will of individuals. It was bad in the beginning but impossible now, as the goals by which we conduct our working lives, whatever the discipline, are known to corpocracy but not to us. Put bluntly, we are not in charge.

We have invented a whole terminology to describe this: anomie, alienation, exploitation, degradation, humiliation, dehumanization, it goes on and on. .

We will always have people who need help but our aim should not be to cage them in helplessness but show them away out of it, if possible.

Ted, it is so hard to get people’s attention. It was hard 170 years ago. It is even harder today. Reading Kant and Kierkegaard, I can not help but think, I would have been more at home in their times than my own because thinkers and writers think and write cosmetically and they did not, nor do I.

Be always well,

Jim


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