Another,

Peripatetic Philosopher’s Conversation with Himself

SECOND DIALECTIC - ECONOMICS

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

© October 21, 2015

 Peripatetic Philosopher (PP) “As hard as you are on religion, you seem equally hard on economists.  Do you have a thing about matters in general, or are you just naturally angry about everything?”

Himself (HS) “I’ll attempt to answer the last part of your question first.  No, I’m not angry.  I’m too old for that.  I don’t have the energy.  A quarter century ago that might have been true, but now I tend to be only sad. 

“We have gravitated to a senseless dichotomy in government with Democrats chirping, “Black lives matter” to Republicans chirping, “Billionaire lives matter.”  Neither group is monolithic, but you would think they were from the rhetoric.  The deep divide in the American people is however true.   

“Meanwhile, economists operate as if a third party interventionist with neither side listening to anyone.  Since the two parties cannot agree on what are the major domestic and foreign affairs issues, they talk past each other with solutions that resonate with neither side. 

“Economists in the pristine sanctuary of their analytics and complex algorithms, earn Nobel Prizes for Economics seemingly every year.  Once they do, they write books that commoners read but the patrician class ignores, which includes politicians.  Nothing changes.  

“Nearly 200 years ago, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville noted the insular character of the American people, and inclination to infighting in his classic study, Democracy in America (1834).  He made specific reference to encroaching modernity with its centralization of authority and growing bureaucratization to moral relativism. 

“Remember this was the Age of Jackson (1829-1837).  President Andrew Jackson used the foil of “Executive Order” and "Executive Privilege" to neutralize and emasculate the Judicial and Legislative Branches of Government.  Presidents ever since have used Congress as a whipping boy with presidential vetoes, including the White House's current occupant, President Barak Obama.     

“Small wonder that three quarters of the American electorate have little use for Congress, or little idea what the Judicial Branch does.  While the electorate swirls in political correctness, Congress treats optimism as if theology and pessimism as if an incurable disease.  

"With Congress acting as a “toothless tiger,” is it any wonder that it absorbs a cascade of inanities without a modicum of push back?  That is the reason for my sadness.”

(PP) “This is not helpful.  I’m not interested in your sadness.  God!  You can be boring!  I can boil your response down to two words, ‘collective dysfunction.’ 

“So, we’re going to hell in a hand basket, as if nobody has said that before.  Do you think showing you know a little history, and have a cutting way of denigrating the distinguished profession of economics changes anything? 

“Of course you don't.  You’re just blowing hot air.  People matter.  You’re always saying that.  Where are people in this discourse?”

(HS) “Em! Where are the people?  That is a good question.

“When I look about me, I see people running faster and faster, while remaining in place, deluding themselves that they are acolytes of progress, which is everyone’s favorite word, I could be amused but am instead saddened. 

“Do I have the answer?  No.  Do I understand the problem?  Perhaps not.  Then why do I persist?  For one, I have lived too long to go quietly into the sunset, for another, it is not in my temperament. 

“At one time, when I was young, in the 1940s and 1950s, there was some gravitas to people.  It was a period of quiet, unobtrusive, unspoken grace.  You could feel it, experience it, and know that it was real if you couldn’t define it.  Alas, it was taken for granted as if native to our American character and therefore could not be extinguished.   

“Danger was in the air.  Japan had attacked the naval station in Honolulu in Hawaii, ships were sunk, nearly 3,000 American sailors and soldiers killed.  One of my favorite cousins was in the navy on a repair ships next to the USS Arizona, which was sunk with all of its crew.  My cousin broke his back but survived. 

“As a boy not yet a teenager, older boys coached and counseled us over at the courthouse diamond where we played baseball, basketball and football.  These older boys could have dominated us, but they didn’t.  They could have embarrassed us, but they didn’t.  They instead helped us to get better. 

“When they turned eighteen, they all went into military service.  They didn’t avoid that responsibility.  Nor did they complain at the sacrifice.  This may read like idealism in steroids, but it is true.  It is one of the reasons I wrote In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003). 

“Perhaps I am nostalgic for those halcyon days when our parents worked hard in factories or on the railroad or went off into the military in support of the war effort.  Kids my age were mainly on their own in a kind of Darwinian jungle which was our combat zone as playground. 

“There were no commendations, no medals of achievement, no championship trophies, although we won several, no parents involved in the coaching, counseling, or even as spectators.  We were on our own, only the best got to play, and the others found other pursuits with philosophical ease as sympathy was not a relevant commodity.

“My courthouse teammates, all working class kids went on to become chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, consultants, executives, medical doctors, Ph.D.’s, lawyers, college professors, high school teachers, college and professional athletes, cross country truck drivers, factory workers, janitors, business owners, and even an author. 

 “Now seemingly everything is self-conscious, self-centered, tactile, superficial, inconsequential and superfluous.  People today bring attention to themselves for no other reason than society has an appetite for such things.  In my day, acting so weird would get little or no attention.  

(PP) “You’re doing it again.  Do you have any idea how self-serving this sounds?  Imagine someone reading this has been molested by a priest, a sister raped, a father in prison, a mother on drugs, or a person looking for work who has no skills?”

(HS) Shrugs.

(PP) ”I didn’t think so.  That is what is wrong with you as a writer.  You sound so frickin pure as if whiter than the driven snow.”

(HS) “But I was just ..”

(PP) “No, you were just showing off.  Admit it, you can’t help yourself.  So, please, get on with this.   Next you’re going to tell me we don’t have a single television drama that doesn’t have blazing guns, car chases, or raging hormones on display.

“We all know you prefer British television dramas to American, that there isn’t an American movie cerebral enough to your satisfaction, that you’re appalled at the pyrotechnics and guns blazing and gender ambiguities in popular fiction and film as proxies for plot, that no comedian much less television situation comedy has a scintilla of humor for you, and that the laugh tracks offend you.”

(HS) Are you through?”

(PP) “Not necessarily.”

(HS) “Well, let me ask you how you think Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Paul Robeson, or Ralph Waldo Emerson would do on stage today with a general audience?  

"These people once packed the house with general audiences, not a select courtier of well-heeled patrons as is the case today.  Today screaming entertainers purporting to be singers, uttering words no one understands, pack the houses.  Everything in entertainment is now psychedelic as if on artificial stimulants.”

(PP) “You’re doing it again, you're preaching.  You skirts the subject, go off on a tangent, then expect me not to notice, me!  Can you believe that?  I see you slipped the Great Negro baritone, Paul Robeson, in this group.  What have you got to say for yourself?”

(HS) “Don’t you see, fluff drives the economy, so fluff was bound to drive entertainment, or is it the other way around?  In any case, economists give it a good push to that fluff with their sanctimonious prattle?

“In my reading on the early Christian Church, I constantly ran into the Roman Empire, its tentacles stretching across the known ancient world. 

“I have visited many of its outposts as far east as Baalbek in Lebanon and Istanbul in Turkey, and as far west as England, France and Spain, the Balkans and Algeria in North Africa, and far north as Macedonia and Greece, and as far south as Egypt.  The telltale Roman relics of coliseums were to be found everywhere.

“It didn’t register when I was experiencing much of this, but continued to reside in my head for some reason.  It now feels like that 1985 film, “Back to the Future” with Michael J. Fox.  With a writer, nothing is lost.”

(PP) “Your point?  I hope somewhere in this side trip there is a point.”

(HS)  “I cannot help but think of today without thinking about yesterday and the Roman Empire.  Rome’s economic foundation was slipping away as well as its security while the Roman Senate was entangled in political irrelevancies.  Meanwhile, sanguine Roman citizens kept right on partying as if nothing had changed.  Sound familiar?

“While our national economy has been sluggish for more than two decades, experiencing a near total economic collapse in 2008, Americans are obsessed with the National Football League, which differs little with gladiators fighting in packed coliseums while the Visigoths and Germanic tribes of the north thundered south to literally obliterate Rome and the Roman Empire from the map.  

"The dreadful ‘Dark Ages’ followed.  Fast forward to now, football fans don’t get enough of the NFL in reality, they have made fantasy football a $billion business.”  

(PP) “Wait!  You’re not answering my question.  Explain what you mean by ‘the Dark Ages.’  Some readers may have no idea what you’re talking about.”

(HS) “’The ‘Dark Middle Ages’ is a term popularized by the writer Petrarch.

“The term emphasized the cultural and economic collapse of Rome in particular and Western Europe in general after the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in 476 C.E. This terrible period extended from the 5th through the 13th century.

“It was marked by a period of intellectual darkness between the extinguished ‘light of Rome’ and the rise of the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century.

"The period was noted for its lack of new Roman literature, contemporary history, or cultural achievement in the arts. It was also noted for its lack of building or industrialization of any significant kind. In other words, a step backward to a more primitive time.

“Knowledge that existed was conscientiously copied by monks in Spanish monasteries and elsewhere in elegant style for posterity, while popular culture became something of a pejorative and charitably did not survive.”

(PP) “As you have predicted for today's popular culture, right?”

(HS) “Indeed. Popular culture today insults rather than uplifts the senses. No, I don’t think in 500 years readers will look on our current age as culturally or economically inspiring.”

(PP) “That cynicism is surfacing again, please explain.”

(HS) “I’ll just make one reference, and let you assume the rest, is that agreeable?”

(PP) “Such as?”

(HS) “The price for gasoline has dropped significantly from its $4.00 per gallon high to about “2.00 now. People could be saving as much as $50 a month or $600 a year on gasoline purchases, alone, in the average household. What do you think most people do with that savings?”

(PP) “I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

(HS) “They buy more expensive gas, go out and purchase more expensive automobiles that are known gas guzzlers, spend more money eating out, or purchasing items that they want but don’t need. Paradoxically, they spend more than the $600, so have even less relative solvency than before the price of gasoline plummeted.

“This is counter intuitive to what economic textbooks say people will do when a sudden change in economic fortunes occurs. This is another reason I think behavioral economists are out to lunch.”

(PP) “So this is your roundabout way of getting back to the subject. You’re pathetic!”

(HS) “I am simply answering your question, so be patient, please.”

(PP) Shakes his head acquiescing.

(HS) “So, continuing, we are caught in a new form of socioeconomic enslavement that ubiquitously fills all the crevices of our desires.  It is as if the only way we can motivate ourselves is to be in constant debt.

“Consequently, we don’t work for a living.  We work to support a lifestyle because we are afraid to live a living. 

“We are bombarded 24/7 with subliminal marketing stimuli.  A single provocative message whispers silently in our ear like the devil on our shoulder, ‘See it now, have it now, experience it now, hoard it now, for tomorrow it may not be available, then what?’   

“We don’t see the silliness of this because everyone else is caught up in the same normal pathology. 

“To question this foolishness, as is my inclination, is to be seen as a ‘spoilsport,’ ‘pessimist,’ ‘fatalist,’ ‘pathetic introvert,’ ‘dull witted,’ ‘dead to fun,’ and other less generous terms.  Emperors don’t like to be reminded that their motivation is as nakedly apparent as is their behavior.

“Now, we have all sorts of disciplines outside of economics looking at behavior, people subject to the same pathology of normalcy such as practicing psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, politicians and physicians.  So, if we want help chances are, we need to look inside ourselves, and ask, why do I behave as I do?

“A nation doesn’t gravitate to economic insolvency to the tune of a $17 trillion national debt without a lot of enthusiastic cooperation from its constituency.  We Americans think (330 million of us) in the short term, always a dollar short of being solvent.

“I may take this matter up later, but suffice for now to limit it to economics, which finds most of us out to lunch concerning our economic health. 

“As the analytics have become more sophisticated with a bevy of economists winning Nobel Prizes for them, people continue to behave incongruous to statistical verities.    

“Consider this.  No economist prepared us for the 2008 economic crash that could have led to a second and more devastating Great Depression.  Indeed, in defense after the fact, they resorted to corporate speak as did the Federal Government, as did Wall Street, as did Corporate America.  If any learning took place during this great debacle, it is not yet apparent seven years later.”

(PP) “It is apparent you are enjoying this, but could you get to more specifics.”

(HS) “Doris Lessing, the Nobel Laureate for Literature, and a former Southern Rhodesian native, said she couldn’t write Volume Three of her autobiography because she’d have to use real names, and that would be hurtful to people. 

“No one wants to offend anyone, especially anyone in power, and so we go limply forward.  Nor do we want to hurt the tens of thousands of automotive workers who refused to see the handwriting on the wall, and develop new skills, while the union for the United Auto Workers was asleep at the switch.

“By the hollowness of American industry, denying the changing nature of the work, workers and the workplace, those in leadership positions continued to operate with infallible authority with business as usual practices. 

“When the economy was flush, no one questioned a policy of generous pay and entitlement benefits for workers irrespective of their obsolescent skills.  The assembly line requiring little skill in repetitive work was already on its way out 60 years ago with the introduction of robotics. 

“Couple this with the insatiable appetite of Americans to spend more than they make and you see why the UAW worker became the poster child of this decline.  This was aided and abetted by GM's CEO in the 1950s boasting that “As goes GM, so goes the Nation.” 

“I experienced Detroit's hubris in the 1940s when I visited my uncle in the summers during that period.  He was an economics professor at the University of Detroit.  I played baseball with the sons of GM fathers and mothers who worked on the assembly line at GM.  They lived in affluent neighborhoods alongside university professors and people in the medical and law professions.  My sense was that they were even more prosperous than their neighbors because my teammates had everything.   

“I said poster child, which is not meant to denigrate GM's or other hourly workers.  Quite the contrary, GM workers once represented a vibrant working middle class, which is now gone.

 “Although gone, Americans continue to behave as if the well-heeled working middle class still exists.  They seem overconfident and unrealistically optimistic of their capabilities and in their demands.  This is demonstrated by behaving poorly in crisis or taking naïve risks, while still being obsessed with the idea that all will come back as it was. This displays a loss aversion rather a passion to gain.   

“With this template, inequality has been growing.  Sure, economists write books about inequality, which soothes the conscience of workers as victims, but gives them no strategy to take charge of their situation.

“We celebrate the idea of the free market economy with the ‘invisible hand’ to correct when necessary.  But we don’t say much about the poorest of the poor who are likely to shop at convenient stores and pay top dollar for their potato chips, beer, cigarettes, candy, soda pop, and over the counter drugs.  We say it is their prerogative to make these unwise purchases. 

“While marketers make fools of us, we would have it no other way.  

"Isn’t it strange that the American Cancer Society has been amazingly successful at reducing the number of adults smoking cigarettes, not only showing cigarette smoking is harmful to health, but establishing that it is uncool?  But alcoholism is treated as a disease and those so addicted get our sympathy of being “sick” rather than being uncool.  

“Invariably, there is a call for the government to step in and increase regulations, when private institutions, such as the American Cancer Society, are far more successful.  ACS recognized that competition and the free market, which the cigarette industry enjoys, can cause serious problems.”

          

(PP) “Is this what you call being specific?  I think not.  It is just more of your soap box routine.  You go on and on and on.  Try to be a little less visceral and more visual, okay?”

(HS) “Fair enough.  My dissertation adviser was an Indian, who had escaped the caste system of India to earn a Ph.D. in organizational psychology.  He was surprised by my suggestion that the United States had a similar caste system albeit self-imposed.

“Like him, I had escaped this caste system of the working class by seeking and earning a university education.  Many peers, female as well as male, brighter and more able than I was, self-imposed the status of permanent working class by staying in jobs, or staying in the region, never venturing far from the base of the known, the comfortable and the familiar all of their working lives.

“Complicating this self-imposed caste system further, many sought and earned university educations, but found the demands of an unfamiliar and repressive world not to their liking, returning home, with broad marketable skills, but no such jobs in the area, becoming shadows of their hidden potential, again for all their working lives. 

“The third tier to this self-imposed caste system, and this seems endemic to the American character, is to look for heroes, for people to admire, to adore and fawn over, or fantasize about,  considering them light years beyond their own station and capacity to emulate. 

“It is easier to look up to others than to look up to oneself.  We admire the skills in others but not in ourselves.  We see this in the corporate structure of our society where knowledge workers assume subservient roles to position power. 

“Compounding this servitude, these knowledge workers acquiesce to position power earning only a fraction of what those in position power earn.  This is despite their superior knowledge and skill. 

“Little note is made of the fact that the company would surely tank without them, but could get along swimmingly well without most of its management. To question the status quo is treated as irrational.  It is insanity (I profess this in book after book) to go along with this charade.”

(PP) “Can you be a bit more specific?”

(HS) “The caste system with its involuntary unemployment, intimidating rat race and the continuing problem of personal identity has made the complex organization anachronistic and its management atavistic.  Is that specific enough?”

(PP) Waves his hand to go on.

(HS) “This departure from sanity, probity, normalcy, and the sensible is demonstrated by all the attention given to the New York Stock Exchange where irrational exuberance flourishes. 

“Investors are no more emotionally grounded than the poorest of the poor who shop daily in convenient stores.  There is a herd mentality to the stock market as there is a herd mentality to young people sporting tattoos all over their bodies. 

“People making millions behave no more wisely than people making tens of dollars.  Human psychology is a mystery even to those practicing it for a living.

“The free market system is designed to exploit human weakness, not compensate for it.  This is not because marketers are malicious or venal, but because the market makes them behave as they do.  Those who fail to exploit people will be out of a job.  Exploitation is the operational word.”

(PP) “Why, if these marketers are not necessarily bad people, why do systemic harm?”

(HS) “They don’t see it that way.  In capitalistic enterprise, marketers see it as their job to move people to act.  Marketers didn’t create this prevailing norm.  They simply set it in motion.

“A capitalistic society is driven by greed and progress, words treated as synonyms.  Given this penchant, no individual ever has enough greed; no company ever has enough progress.  The individual always needs more, the company always a greater return on its capital.  It is the nature of the beast, which is the economy.”

(PP) “That is as cynical as your take on religion.  Do you see why you are seen as a pessimist?  What in the hell do you believe in, anyway?  Please!” 

(HS) “I believe in ideas, especially the idea that people can control their own destiny by exercising discipline, making sensible choices, by seeing the world as it is, not as it is painted to be, and by trusting their experiences as their best teacher. 

“I believe in a sense of proportion, balance, a sense of true humor, not the sick humor of television comedians and situation comedies, but the humor of seeing human frailties for what they are with empathy and understanding. 

“I believe in competing only with oneself, in finding the music of the soul and the rhythm of the spirit to effectively utilize one’s inherent ability. 

“I believe in reverence of Nature, giving back to Nature what Nature has given to us by being a good custodian of Nature.

“I believe in God because God has always been there with me when I behaved poorly, or so stupidly that my life could have ended then, only to have Him come to the rescue again and again.

“I believe in my wife, Betty, as the most intelligent and balanced person I have ever known in my life, and who is so much wiser and understanding than I will ever be.

“I believe in my children who have my same strengths and weaknesses, as do their children who are the promise of tomorrow.

“I believe in life as a duty, a responsibility, and an obligation to use the gifts God has given us to make the most of our time on earth in the service of others. 

“At the same time, I believe our first loyalty is to self for any loyalty without that first loyalty is counterfeit.”

(PP) “I didn’t ask for your emotional biography.  Clearly, I must be more astute when I ask you a question.  Considering that, why do so many people go haywire?”

(HS) “People don’t actually go haywire.

“Much of what happens to people, much of what they believe is happening to them is not happening to them.  Therefore, the question as constructed does not deserve an answer.”

(PP) “Wait, I’m already confused.  Please explain.”

(HS) “It is so dangerous to step out of what is considered ‘normal behavior’ that when people do so they are immediately found to be strange, disturbed, mentally ill, confused, or moribund. Do you realize mental illness is as much an invention of man as is religion?

“Even what we call ‘morality’ is only the mind of the time.  

"We have had a dramatic shift in beliefs, tastes, ideas and values over the past one hundred years.  Yet, despite how proudly we congratulate ourselves on our urbanity and sophistication, for no longer burning witches at the stake, we still put people in mental hospitals and prisons because they are difficult and we don’t have time for the ‘why’ to that. 

“People don’t go haywire, society does, and society has been haywire for a long time, that I can attest to, but only that. 

“Our culture of panic has been driven by crisis management, in other words, a totally reactionary society.  

What is a greater madness than Wall Street with all its sophisticated analysts having nothing better to do than follow numbers on a screen all day? 

“Given our propensity to react to crises, we have an equal propensity to create crises, which we do with amazing alacrity.  

"The problems we solve are the problems we create.  We have mismanaged industrial pollution, for example, and so for the next hundred years or so, we’ll behave like busy little beavers feeding these crises with another set of busy little beavers following to solve these crises, until one day someone will recognize the insanity, and stop, or the earth will become such a wasteland that we’ll have to find another planet to do our mischief.    

“Can you imagine a more gigantic problem than nuclear waste?  We have created nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs with the waste of these nuclear materials likely to be around for 1,000 or so years.  So, what do we do?  We build more nuclear power facilities, while more nations seek the capacity to make nuclear bombs.  Why?  Fear and paranoia have become permanent house guests of the human mind that never leave.”

(PP) “I’m not saying you’re right, but if true, and I believe a lot of people, learned people, would take exception to your hyperbole, how did this start, why did it start?”

(HS) “Education wasn’t always job training.  A high school graduate in 1900 from my little town was more enlightened than a college graduate today with an advanced degree.  I’ve written about this elsewhere but suffice to say here that he learned to read German and French, as well as being comfortable in American English.  He had four years of mathematics, four years of science including geology, chemistry and practical mechanics.  He also had four years of English including British, French and American literature, and could not graduate until he could write a coherent essay  That essay had to be grammatical correct with perfect punctuation and spelling.  In other words, he was educated for living in the world.

“Now, educational institutions have become factories or job training facilities.  Since jobs constantly change as technology changes, universities are always behind with redundant curriculums.  Consequently, tens of thousands of college graduates are saddled with irrelevant training to the jobs available.   

“We launched into a paperless factory with computers being treated as if the newest god when we have no idea where that technology is going to take us, or how it will compute with our ability to absorb its vicissitudes.     

“The great irony is that society has programmed us to a culture that no longer exists with credentials that are meaningless while still promulgating that ‘everyone should have an opportunity to a free college education,’ failing to answer the question, for what or why?

“Like magicians pick pocketing the mind, politicians flippantly chant this mantra for no other reason than self-aggrandizement.  No surprise, they are controlled by lobbyists who dictate the agenda of what is important and what is not as the quintessential marketers of the nation.  Alas, it is a ‘lose-lose’ proposition for all.”

(PP) “So you see no sun over the horizon, only dark clouds?”

(HS) “No, I’m saying no such thing.  John Maynard Keynes stated in 1930 that by 2030, the standard of living of everyone would be eight times higher, and people would have to work only fifteen hours a week, time beyond that available for leisure pursuits. 

“Well, people are working more, not less, when they have jobs, but that is to keep up their ever escalating standard of living.  As for leisure, Americans treat it as if a disease.  True, the standard of living has risen substantially, but not the sophistication of those enjoying it.”

(PP) “About that sun over the horizons, according to you, there is nothing to look forward to.”

(HS) “I don’t look at it in those terms.  Americans seem only inclined to demonstrate prudence in times of danger.  That was demonstrated in WWII, but not in the Korean War, Vietnam War, or subsequent wars.  Danger has to be felt to be experienced.”

(PP) “So the sun is delayed?”

(HS) “I’m afraid so.”

(PP) “No wonder you title this a ‘dialectic.’”

  

Early in the a.m., the

Peripatetic Philosopher’s Conversation with Himself

FIRST DIALECTIC - RELIGION

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

© October 17, 2015

Peripatetic Philosopher (PP), “You’ve always threatened to publish a conversation with yourself, am I correct?”

Himself (HS), “True.”

(PP) “Why haven’t you?”

(HS) “No one wants to know what I think, but what they think that I know.”

(PP) “Isn’t that being a bit cynical?”

(HS) “I wish it were.  People are afraid to be cynical, especially Americans.  Optimism floats our boat.  Everything is milk and honey.  Were we to get a dose of reality we’d go back into our cave.  It’s the American way.”

(PP) “Pardon me for correcting you, but you don’t mean cave, you mean cage, right?”

(HS) “Cave, cage, what does it matter, you get the point.”

(PP) “That is one of your critic’s criticisms.  You dance around ideas as if walking on hot coals, can’t wait to get off, and leave nothing behind.”

(HS) “If you say so.”

(PP) “It is not me that is saying so but…”

(HS) “Yes, I hear you; I leave people dangling, I get the point, can we move on?

(PP) “If you insist.  Given your eclectic approach, and since I have no specific order to these questions, I’ll just continue as the mood strikes me, is that okay?”

(HS) “Fine.”

(PP) “Let’s discuss your take on religion.  I can’t decide if you’re for or against religion.  You must admit more than a little ambivalence towards the subject, do you feel that is fair?”

(HS) “Tell me, how could religion be viewed otherwise than ambivalent?”

(PP) “Now don’t get angry.  No one is going to see this.  I just want some honesty for once.”

(HS) “Now who is exercised?  I see religion as necessary because man is an intruder, interloper, alien, have it what you will.  He doesn’t belong here.  He’s never understood that he doesn’t fit into the scheme of things.  

"When it comes to the planet, man’s not that important.  It’s not entirely his fault.  Imagine one day he wakes up and discovers he has a conscious mind.  Imagine the terror.  One day he wakes up and he’s aware of himself and everything around him.  

"Can you imagine the shock, the fear?  Suddenly, he is aware of this hostile planet he finds himself, knowing if he doesn’t get his stuff together, it is curtains, if he doesn’t find the wits and will to survive. 

“Accidentally, with the ricocheting neurons in his three pound instrument between his ears, he discovers fire and finds fire terrifies the beast about him, and that awareness gives him one of his first tools of protection.  Next, he develops rudimentary tools to deal with these beasts, and to kill them for food, clothing, and shelter. 

“The more clever among men, and there are always those a bit more clever than others, who have the same fears and experience the same terrors, but find a way to embrace that trauma, make it work for them. 

“Lightening, and thunder, torrential rains, floods and mudslides, earthquakes and hurricanes, all manifestation of Nature without a conscience, Nature that rules with a cruelty that knows no guilt or remorse, is quickly used by the clever men to make Nature the first god.

“Those who describe that god become the first priests, and in that way these clever men discover power and control and dominance over other men, and so it has been since the beginning of man.

“Only one-tenth of one percent of men in the long history of man have ever had the gumption to use that natural fear and terror exclusively to their advantage while the other 99.99 percent coward in the grips of that fear and terror.”

(PP) “So are you saying that religion was the first medium of the dominance of the few over the many, therefore all religions are either bogus or corrupt.  I’m not sure I’m hearing what you are saying.”

(HS) “No, I am not saying that at all.  

"I’m just pointing out how it has always been.  My assessment is simply meant to put religion in its proper context.  

"Religion was the first ideology to capture man’s attention when he had no interest in reality.  That has never changed. 

“Once man discovered consciousness with all its terror, someone had to step outside this terror, while still in its grips, and that first man was the priest.  

"Man’s terrors have changed with his circumstances.  New surrogates of a priestly bent have surfaced with the shifting consciousness of reality.  So, it has been down to our present day.  

“We wail about the one-tenth of one percent who control the economy, but no one does anything about that reality.  That is why the phenomenon has always been with us.

“Once sin and guilt controlled our consciousness, now it is safety and security.  

"The god has not changed, only the consciousness of that god has changed.  It is the same old fear and terror wrapped in a new suit of clothes.  Man’s needs a new rationale to justify his existence whenever the aspects of his circumstances change.  Consequently, only the costume changes, man doesn't.” 

(PP) “There you go again, you’re not answering my question.  No wonder your readers get so annoyed with you.  I will ask again, do you think religion is bogus?”

(HS) “You like metaphor, so I’ll answer that question in metaphor. 

“Imagine religion is an automobile, and it seems to fill every fissure of our consciousness, that is, to be everywhere in existence, not one religion, but hundreds even thousands of religions. 

“Now imagine you lift up the hood of that automobile to see what kind of magical system that is hidden under that hood.  

"You envision mystical components beyond human comprehension, only to discover all you see is ‘smoke and mirrors.’  

"These obscuring embellishments purporting to hold the key to the truth of our human existence are instead the repository of irrelevant information.  There is nothing preternatural to this discovery at all.”

(PP) “Did I hear you correctly, ‘smoke and mirrors’?”

(HS) “Precisely, speaking in metaphor, ‘smoke and mirrors’ is used to explain the hold of the irrational on our reptilian brains.  We have not departed too far from that primitive man terrified by the lightning and thunder.  We still live in terror.  Yet, thanks to ‘smoke and mirrors,’ we have been propelled forward in ways that nothing else could.

"What the irrational can achieve, the rational cannot comprehend much less achieve.  We like to think our cognitive biases are the key when it is our emotions that drive us to overcome all matter of challenges." 

(PP) “But that’s madness.”

(HS) “If you like, but man has always been a little mad since his beginning. 

"It is this madness, after all, this ‘smoke and mirrors,’ that has propelled him to survive on this hostile planet, which is not actually his home because he refuses to treat it with the majesty and care of a home as the other plants and animals of Nature do without the authority of man's consciousness.  

"Plants and animals survive on instinct and the evolutionary forces of Nature.  Man is not so wise, so lucky.”

(PP) “So you are saying that this ‘smoke and mirrors,’ this religion is bad, bogus?”

(HS) “On the contrary, I see religion as quite necessary, even essential, that man cannot live without the allusion of connection to something beyond his conscious mind.  It is the reason the story man invented about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden has relevance.  That story has never been understood, not even by those who wrote it, for its true significance.”

(PP) “But, of course, you do!”

(HS) “It is quite obvious that once you look at the importance of fear and terror in man’s consciousness, and his sudden awareness that he is here on this hostile planet, but doesn’t sense that he belongs, that out of necessity, he had to invent a reason for finding himself here.  

"The Adam and Even story explains it all perfectly.  

"Man was driven out of the Garden of Paradise for eating the forbidden fruit, and for that act of disobedience, he must suffer deprivation, sin and guilt as his punishment.  

"Now, the ‘forbidden fruit’ was simply his sudden consciousness; his sudden awareness that he was in Nature, and misguidedly believed himself to be separate from Nature, which was a fatal error from the beginning.

"A mythology, again of necessity, had to be created for man to cope with this newly discovered reality.  I have no trouble with the story, only with its general interpretation and therefore its presumed meaning and relevance.

“Man has never been comfortable as man, not with himself, not with his nature, which is part of Nature, not with this earthly dwelling.  

"Religion as ‘smoke and mirrors’ came to the rescue and gave man some sense of liberation from his doubt.  In a way, it saved him from himself and his free floating anxiety.  

"Man came to believe he was above Nature, outside of Nature, and that it was his lot to control Nature to his will; to be Nature’s master, to dominate and submit Nature to man's needs, to his purposes, even if this meant the destruction of Nature, which we know has come to past.  

"Thus ‘smoke and mirrors’ has saved man in one sense while destroying his home and himself in another sense.”

(PP) “Hold on, you’re doing it again.  You’re making a quantum leap and leaving me still thinking about what you said previously about ‘smoke and mirrors’ and ‘religion,’ implying the Sacred Text of the Old and New Testament of the Bible are inventions of man.  Now you’re sounding like an atheist.  Are you?”

(HS) “Now it is you who is making the quantum leap.  

"No, I’m not saying that at all.  I am a man like every other man, subject to this ‘smoke and mirrors’ the same as everyone else, a person who lives with the same terror, and realizes how hard religions, all religions work in an attempt to reassure us when, if they could get beyond the ‘smoke and mirrors,’ they would realize that every religion, barring none, is a total invention of man, but a necessary one.  And therefore, all religions are the same.   

"As for agnostics and atheists, they are looking for something else under that hood.  Not finding it, they are very upset.  I’m talking again about only seeing ‘smoke and mirrors.’  

"Atheists and agnostics have concluded that 'smoke and mirrors' has no legitimacy as it has no verifiable components.  The irony is that people of this persuasion are more primitive than religious believers as they want religion to be what it cannot be, and in their disappointment, have created a religion of disappointment which is atheism.”

(PP) “So are you saying one religion has no more legitimacy over another religion?”

(HS) “It is not a question of legitimacy, it is a question of necessity.  

"I am saying that the ‘smoke and mirrors’ under the hood has kept man’s madness in check, to a point.  

"When this had unprecedented legitimacy, its arbitrary standards as desultory as they might be under close inspection, kept man reasonably civilized.  

"You might even say reasonably sane.  But man has found science, and science has become his new god.  It is the same god, not a different god, and like those first priests that could make up any kind of story they could think of about thunder and lightning, and man acquiesced to that authority, science does the same by revealing secrets of Nature for others to exploit.  

"Now, the authority is not ‘smoke and mirrors,’ per se, but ‘facts’ supported by hypotheses, theories and proofs of Nature supposedly to man’s benefit, but more likely to his ultimate demise.”

(PP) “Wait!  Wait!  You’re doing it again, you’re leaping to another subject. Now, science is bad, and religion is good?  You cannot have it both ways.”

(HS) “When I say to 'man's ultimate demise,' I am simply referring to man's history.  He seldom if ever thinks of unintended consequences to his discoveries.  We see this with nuclear fission.

"Alas, I wish I was a better communicator.  Science and religion are aspects of man, not mutually exclusive to each other.  

"They are manifestations of man’s rambling roaming nomadic homeless mind nervously replacing one anchor with another anchor, and always becoming obsessed with whatever anchor is his current preference.  

"Man's conscious mind is aware that he has turned the earth into a dying planet, and that eventually he will have to move on or perish with the likes of the dinosaurs.  That is the ‘smoke and mirrors’ of science.  It is irrefutable that man is leaving the earth a wasteland.  

"So, scientists are hell bent on finding another planet beyond our galaxy that can become man’s home that they can dominate and one day destroy with equal unanimity.  

"Man with his conscious mind cannot save himself from himself.  That is why we frantically search the universe for a planet that will sustain life, sustain us.  Science knows this planet is wearing out.”

(PP) “That is the most cynical thing you’ve said thus far.  I didn’t think you could top your cynicism of religion, but this tops that.”

(HS) “You find me cynical?  I don’t think so.  I don’t feel cynical.  I wish I were.  I wish others were.” 

(PP) “Then are you trying to make like Charles Darwin or Henry David Thoreau?”

(HS) “Neither.  Alexander von Humboldt comes more quickly to mind, the Prussian naturalist.  

"Humboldt died in 1859 at nearly 90 and seemingly saw this small planet in about every conceivable way.  He concluded from his extensive work about the world that the earth was a single unified organism.  Imagine that saying that nearly 200 years ago.  

"He said, ‘Everything is interaction and reciprocal.’  Everything!  

"Today ecologists talk about ‘the web of life,’ but the invention is Humboldt’s.  How many people know about this man?  

"He said quite correctly, with regard to Nature, ‘man is nothing in the larger scheme of things,’ and he isn’t, when it comes to Nature.  

"I experienced colonialism in South Africa during apartheid, which exploited a black majority race, whereas Humboldt saw colonialism exploiting the natural resources of a region without regard to the indigenous people.  

"In the late 18th century, he was writing of climatic excesses, such as industrialization, dam building, deforestation, and the like.  He could see that this would inevitably lead to extinction of the human species on this planet.  The only hope he could see in his day was for man to see the wilderness as a spiritual and meditative refuge from the hustle and bustle of modern life, and that …. What?”

(PP) “I not laughing at you.  I’m laughing with you.  You cannot help it, can you?  You have to get up on your soap box and start preaching.  Once you get a head of steam under you, your penultimate caveats start cascading out of your head.  Alas, it is one stroke before midnight for man, so what?”

(HS) “So you think I’m inhaling some of that ‘smoke’ from ‘smoke and mirrors’?”

(PP) “How would you describe it otherwise?  You read, you ponder, you write.  Do you know why?  Do you have any real purpose?  Or are you just ventilating for the hell of it?”

(HS) “If you think I’m going to get defensive, I’m not.  I write because I am.”

(PP) “No explanation beyond that?”

(HS) “None!”

(PP) “Well, then, don’t you think you ought to go to bed?”

(HS) “That’s the first intelligent question you’ve asked.  Good night.”

(PP) “Goodnight.  But before I go, I would like to discuss other topics with you in the future in this format.  Is that possible?

(HS) “We’ll see.”

(PP) “Couldn’t have it any other way.”   

      

  

  

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

Demographic Profile

THANK GOD FOR DIFFERENCES!

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

© June 21, 2009

© October 13, 2015

NOTE:

This is the last excerpt of “Self-Confidence: The Elusive Key to Health and Happiness before it is published later this year.


“Management deals best with what it knows, which means people are often managed as things. People do not behave, react, or forgive the way things do, which is the basis of conflict. Relationships imply conflict. As sociologist Georg Simmel observed, conflict can be the very glue, which binds people to a task. Yet conflict is considered a pejorative. Disagreement is considered disruptive when it is a vital precursor to agreement. Managed conflict keeps the organization on course and is essential to its health.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Six Silent Killers” (1998), p. 119.

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY OF A MIND SELF-IGNORANT OF ITSELF

After reading the novel "Train" by Pete Dexter, winner of the National Book Award for "Paris Trout,” I could not find his books on the shelves of either Barnes & Noble or Borders.
Thanks to the Internet I was able to order all his published works at discount prices, which made me wonder how could someone write so well, so honestly and poignantly and not have an audience. I answered my own question.

It was another nail in the coffin of our current cultural discontinuity.  But that is not why I am writing this today. I am writing about the marvel of television that despite all its inanities manages to connect us to the continuity of "minds alive" on noncommercial television’s Public Broadcasting System, or PBS and C-Span and its “Book Beat,” as it is better known, proving not everyone is asleep. 

That said commercial television has its merits for a baseball fan.  To take a break from reading, I checked the baseball games on television -- Reds and White Sox, Red Sox and Braves – and during a commercial break, I wandered over to C-Span. There I caught Jay Wesley Richards lecturing on his book, "Money, Greed and God" at the Enterprise Institute.

Richards is an advocate of "intelligent design," which rejects the theory of natural selection, or Darwinian evolution, arguing that the complexities of the universe and of all life suggest an intelligent cause in the form of a supreme creator. In contrast, Darwinian evolution is the theory of evolution by natural selection.  It was first formulated in Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species" in 1859.  Darwin, and others discovered that Nature represents a process by which organisms change over time out of necessity for survival.  These changes are manifested in heritable, physical or behavioral traits.

Richards is a passionate young man with a point of view, an educated perspective, and a convincing way of presenting his argument. Knowing that he was an apologist for "intelligent design," I wondered if I would have listened to his ideas on capitalism (which he sees as the solution not the problem), missing an opportunity to experience an engaged mind.  I must confess I might have done so. If I had, it would have been my loss.

We don’t grow wiser only listening to those who espouse what we already know to be true, or think to be so.

He covered a lot of territory that I have considered often with a different slant but honestly not from his point of view. He reads Ayn Rand (on selfishness) the same way I've read her, but has a different appreciation of greed and interpretation of self-interest even though my sentiments are similar. I feel uncomfortable bringing a theistic point of view into my thinking and writing although, I suspect, Richards has had similar training to that of my own.

This is further evidence that our cultural moorings influence how ideas and information are processed, then interpreted and become assimilated into our thinking.  Stated another way, we are never freely engaged no matter how disciplined or structured or how arduous our training. Ideas seem to always be tainted by our initial exposure to and in life.

It is difficult to get out of the cage of our cultural programming, which is most apparent when we give matters of some discontinuity a rational twist to continuity, often not realizing we are doing so.  Social psychologist Leon Festinger might suggest our views were tainted with a bit of cognitive dissonance.  He claims we are inclined to process new information so that it fits comfortably in our minds with what is already there; otherwise, it is likely to be rejected. [1] 

Richards breaks down words into their Latin origins, and defines them in those etymological terms. For example, "altruism" does not mean "selflessness" but "other directed," from the Latin "alter." An individual doesn't abandon "self-interest," but is "other directed" to promote self-interest in relating to significant others. This is consistent with Freud’s "quid pro quo," or something gained for something given. In such terms, self-interest is not only critical to success, but essential to survival.

The author demonstrates his finesse in making this connection, while intrinsically establishing a different set of biases to my own.  So, his connection in one sense becomes a disconnection in another sense to my thinking, or his continuity leads to discontinuity between us.  Simply put, he believes in “intelligent design” and I believe in Darwinian evolution.

Clearly, we can we speak a similar language but differ widely in its application, interpretation and meaning. 

The irascible curmudgeon Christopher Hitchens in January 2008 had a debate on “intelligent design” with Richards.  Hitchens loves combat, his opponent loves congenial discourse.  What an odd couple!  On stage was Richards, boyish, clean cut and well groomed and Hitchens, overweight, disheveled needing a shave and haircut.  Hitchens is the darling of agnostics and atheists of the liberal left, and Richards, a passionate defender of theistic Christian conservatism.

It is refreshing to see television sponsoring discussions of people of ideas, allowing them to have free reign in that climate. This exposure may reduce the screws of intolerance a twist or two. 

We live in an age where people off the rails of conventional norms have difficulty being heard.  It is even more difficult for them to get into print much less find an audience.  Kudos to C-Span and PBS for providing this small window compared to the panoramic screen that commercial television offers to our collective lowest common denominator.  As long as we have this small window, ideas will not die.

Richards referred to a book about "bees" in which he described how combative, self-interested, and conflicting were these bees, while being terribly productive. An experimenter introduced a chemical to make the bees less aggressive, and the hive fell apart.

Edward O. Wilson at Harvard has been telling us for years that the smallest creatures on earth, insects, behave precisely as man, or is it the other way around? [2]

Anyway, conflict has been a thesis in my books on organizational development (OD). Managed conflict and polite confrontation is the glue that holds workers on task.  It is harmony that leads to discontinuity and functional collapse, not conflict.  Harmony is the antithesis of productivity, and like the bees, dissolves cohesiveness.

We have had eighty years of increasingly harmonious organizational life, thanks to the auspices of Human Resources (HR) management.  The faulty thinking that this entails goes back to 1927 and Elton Mayo’s study of the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric in Chicago.  The study found that manipulation of various hygiene factors – changing the lighting, moving workstations, or changing working conditions – resulted in increased worker productivity. 

This led HR to give workers everything but the kitchen sink, which first created the Culture of Comfort, which then led to the Culture of Complacency at the expense of the Culture of Contribution.  The latter is necessary to generate productive work.

How bizarre this quest for continuity can lead to discontinuity was revealed by the experimental program at Bethlehem Steel and the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA).  These two major companies launched in the 1960s a furlough experiment with their veteran workers.  John Strohmeyer writes about this in Crisis in Bethlehem (1986) showing how it all went awry. 

The plan was for Bethlehem Steel and ALCOA to give senior workers 13-week paid furloughs every five years when these workers were already the highest paid in American industry, and had more entitlements and benefits than nearly any other American workers.  Strohmeyer refers to this “as the crippling goose that laid the golden egg.” 

The masterminds of this program envisioned the furlough experiment to be an effective way to induce workers to greater productivity and more effectively manage manpower requirements.  It was anticipated that many of these workers would use this “paid for free time” to pursue educational opportunities (which these companies also paid for), travel and enrich their lives, or pursue favorite hobbies they never had time for before.  What do you think most of them did?

They acquired second jobs to increase their income.  This led to something approaching a nightmare.  When workers returned to their regular jobs, because they needed the additional income to maintain their new standard of living, many attempted to manage two jobs, performing poorly on both. 

Instead of seeing the futility of this, and how they were equally responsible for the continuity leading to discontinuity, they took their wrath out on management. 

From an insightful point of view, there was some merit to this, as these workers exposed the fact that they were behaving at work mainly as dependent twelve-year-olds in fifty-year-old bodies.  

These companies had unwittingly developed a counter dependency that was only exacerbated by this intervention.  In assuming responsibility for their total well-being, workers became obligingly suspended in terminal adolescence.  No thought was given to how this program might rupture and/or reinforce this dependency.  It was telling evidence of how vacuous was the idea and how clueless was the management of these workers’ psychology.

The experiment compressed rather than broadened these workers’ horizons while diminishing them as proud and engaged workers.

Work was all they knew and what they knew came to fill the void of the 13-week furlough.

We are so late smart when it comes to understanding what makes us tick and what does not. Continuity and discontinuity are normal fare in the life of the individual and in the collective life of the workplace, and by extension, society. 

Remember this, whether you are an advocate or adversary of the theory of evolution or “intelligent design,” you can learn a lot about yourself, especially in the other thinker’s camp.

No one has a monopoly on ideas. But there is no better way of understanding oneself than to entertain ideas outside the realm of one’s own thinking and experience.  

The steel and aluminum workers in the 13-week furlough experiment were as self-ignorant and on automatic pilot as those workers in 1927 at the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric in Chicago.  Those in the social and behavioral sciences have been misreading ordinary people for a century now, and management has been unwittingly their sponsor.  May I remind you that management is still in charge?

Notes:

[1] Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA., 1957.
[2] Edward O. Wilson in Naturalist, Inland Press, Washington, D.C., 1994.  Wilson gives a definitive appraisal of the dynamic world of ants, which has more than a little in common with our own.

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

Demographic Profile

 THE WORLD IN DISORDER

 AN EXCHANGE BETWEEN TWO READERS – CARL AND SIMON

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

© September 17, 2014

“They who say all men are equal speak an undoubted truth, if they mean that all have an equal right to liberty to their property, and to their protection of the laws.  But they are mistaken if they think men are equal in their station and employments, since they are not so by their talents.”

Voltaire (1694-1778), author of Candide (1759)

WE ARE NOT ALL THE SAME!

This may seem self-evident, but many act as if we are all the same.  No two individuals look alike, so it shouldn’t surprise us that no two individuals think or act alike, much less are equally endowed with the same ability.  Yet, we can become frustrated to the point of anger when people don’t comprehend things as quickly as we do, or behave as we think they should. 

Carl and Simon are two readers who regularly react to the postings of my missives.  They however display a different take on what I have to say, which is not only quite all right, but to be applauded.  Thinking gets us in touch with who and what we are, and in a way, introduces us to ourselves.

While everyone seemingly agrees that death and taxes are certainties, why are so many of us less comfortable with differing belief systems or such matters as the rich and the poor, the gifted and the common, the ambitious and the lazy, the fortunate and the luckless?   

Could it be that we fail to accept ourselves as we are, and therefore have a problem accepting others as we find them?  Do we not see that equal opportunity is not the same as equality?  We have a right to equal opportunity, but we don't have the same talent, as Voltaire reminds us. 

We are all different, unique, and should be happy that we are.  Diversity of interests and talent makes for a dynamic and energetic society.  We are bound to differ widely in skills, abilities, energy, passion, commitment, and drive.  It is the nature of being human.  Then there are those who “seize the day,” and others who wait for the day to seize them.  Admittedly, some are born into special circumstances that gives them a considerable edge.  It happens!

*     *     *

On PBS television, Ken Burns presented a documentary on the Roosevelts, profiling the lives of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt.  They came out of a patrician class as did Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip of Greece, as they were both great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria. 

Intermarrying within the aristocracy has been common.  Then we have the gentrified Sir Winston Churchill with an American born mother.   Cousins Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt rose to the Presidency of the United States, while another cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, became the wife of FDR, and the First Lady. 

Perhaps less grand but nonetheless notable, we have the father and son, George Herman Walker Bush and George Walker Bush rise to be President of the United States. 

Theodore Roosevelt took a passive pastoral nation to hegemony prominence in the early 20^th century, while the Bush family bridged the 20^th century with early 21^st century with their presidencies.  So, while we Americans claim to be a classless society, blue bloods commonly rise to the top in America’s leadership roles.   

Ken Burns’ video history of the Roosevelt family is not a hagiography, but a balanced view of the family’s heroics and flaws, frailties and vanities, which mirror our own national psyche. 

For example, Theodore Roosevelt was compulsive to the point of madness with blind ambition. His real and imagined deficiencies coupled with his obvious assets finds his bust atop Mount Rushmore, along with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, was a party animal. This prompted Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to say “He has a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.” As it turned out, that is what the nation needed in World War Two.

His wife, First Lady Eleanor, was stable, mature, balanced and effectively engaged in social and cultural issues.  She was also insecure and suspicious of her husband’s many flirtations.  Quietly, she did amazing things for the poor and disadvantaged as well as military veterans and their families during the war while her husband, the president, took the bows.  That said she was a notable asset to his four successive reelections to the presidency.   

The Roosevelt’s were born to wealth, status and privilege.  They turned their attention to the service of the nation.  We have not often seen their kind, nor their kind of leadership. Some would argue that FDR, with his comprehensive economic “New Deal” policy during The Great Depression, may have spawned our eventual national codependency on the Federal Government, rather than sponsoring our collective initiative to socioeconomic independence.     

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected as president for the first time when I was born.  I grew up captivated by his personality and his homespun warmth listening to his “fire side chats” on the radio.  His picture was on the wall of our modest working class home along with Pope Pius XII, two equally patrician men of the times. 

The president and the pope were groomed from birth for command.  It was not necessary for them to define that role or assume that commitment.  In contrast, our age is obsessively self-conscious of who leads and who is meant to follow.  The consequence of this is palpably evident in the political gridlock of the United States Congress.  In everyday life, it is simply manifest chaos. 

We once took charge and defined the times.  Now we wait for events to define ours.

For the past quarter century, I have been pondering this matter, looking back to see ahead, noting how often we repeat the same chronic problems and embrace the same tired solutions.  These observations have been reduced to missives.  Many respond to them sharing their views.   

Such is the case of Carl and Simon.  They have taken the time to think through what I have said and react to it based on their own values, beliefs and experience.  I applaud them for it as I learn from them.  In that sense, this process is a way of introducing us to ourselves.

In “Meet Your New Best Friend” (2014), I write:

We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts.  Everyone’s life, without exception, is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, playing out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage.  The sooner we realize this, the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.

Theodore Roosevelt struggled with this proposition of identity all his life, while his cousin, Franklin, never gave it much thought until he was cut down with polio in his thirties.  

Life is always crying out to get our attention whatever our nature or the particularity of our birth.    

CARL RESPONDS:

You are right, I am not angry.  I find the ignorance of human nature interesting.  I have learned many things from students and, hopefully, them from me. 

While studying art, the concepts that were used to teach drawing came from a book “The Natural Way to Draw.” I used that method in my drawing classes. 

What I found was that just as everyone can learn to write, everyone can also learn to draw if they make the effort.  However, just as it does not mean everyone who learns to write will become a great writer, so it is also true that everyone who learns to draw does not achieve the same level of success. 

After I got my MA degree in art education, I started teaching art classes to 7th graders.  One of the ideas pushed in the art education classes was that the teacher should put all the students' works on the bulletin board no matter the quality. 

After the first two weeks, students started asking why certain pieces were on the bulletin board because they thought they were not very good.  After that lesson from my students, I only put “A” work on the bulletin board.  After that, students would work hard to get their work on the board. Interesting, huh?

For anyone who would disagree with that, I would respond that in sports as in everything else, everyone is not equal.  Inequality, in that sense, is inevitable. 

We can all learn something up to a point if we work hard, but everyone will not achieve the same level of quality. 

That is the same in all parts of life including economics.  If people are given things without effort, they will never work to achieve more.  That is what I have learned, and that is how I teach.

SIMON RESPONDS:

These "welfare" discussions are so tedious. Less than 10% of the federal budget is allocated to the poor.

There are actually people who are living in cardboard boxes. Yes, there are other forms of welfare that are not included in my ten percent. That would be Social Security, Medicare (not Medicaid), and corporate subsidies.

Still, 10% is less than half the defense budget. It is also less than half of what the federal government pays in pensions.

That's the crux of my argument. "Taking from the rich" is not "giving to the poor." There's a bit of (well, maybe a lot of) narrow-mindedness that informs most of these arguments.

We tend to blame systems for things we don't like. It's not my fault seems to be the mantra favored by the have nots as well as the haves. In the end, every war, every disturbance, can be traced back to two things - money and religion. Money usually takes the lead and religion follows on as an excuse.

The reality is most of us work hard to get what we have. Others, through laziness or bad luck are trumped by the aggressors who experience good fortune and become the statistical outliers.

When those with good fortune are asked to pay a bit more in taxes to improve the infrastructure that allowed them to become rich, it's only fair, don’t you think?  

DR. FISHER COMMENTS:

If readers feel Carl and Simon seem to be talking past each other, it may be because they are commenting on the most sensitive subject of equality and inequality from their own experience and perspective.  

When we wax with candor, our own personal biography surfaces and reveals what truly moves us to get up in the morning and “seize the day.”  It is such disclosure that is good for the soul. 

It doesn’t follow that anyone is right or necessarily wrong but it does show how hard it is for us to be on the same page discussing the same issues.  Imagine the magnitude of this problem when we bring in the mix of different languages and cultural values. 

The world is in disorder for reason.  Peoples across the globe are being forced into this electronic age without the necessary cultural, economic or educational foundation.  We see people on America’s streets with iPhones and other electronic gadgets who cannot afford their rent.  

We are moving to global interdependence and are exercised because people in the fast food service industry make less than $10 an hour, when more than 2 billion souls across the globe don’t make $10 a month.  

Change starts with conversation.  Expressing our views, voicing our concerns and articulating beliefs openly provides a small window of opportunity to promote common understanding that eventually will benefit us all.    

The Peripatetic Philosopher responds:

  A Reader Responds to

“JUST SAY ‘NO!’”

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

© September 30, 2015

NOTE:

As the reader reacts to this referenced excerpt, I am sorry I made him late for his exercise class, but am pleased that the piece made him reflect.  “Self-Confidence: The Elusive Key to Health and Happiness” is written just for that purpose, to make readers think and reflect.

A READER WRITES

Dr. Jim,

You have made me late for the gym.  Okay, I have made myself late for I wouldn’t say “NO!” to your excerpt from your book.

I enjoyed it a lot.

That is probably because I think I actually understood much of it, and found I agreed with it.

Many years ago, I told a contemporary that I felt my job as a parent was to raise my children in a manner that ensured that they no longer needed me by the time they finished school.

He objected to that idea saying that he wanted his children to always need him.  I told him I wanted them to want me, but not to need me.

While I suppose my daughters remember many more lectures, I only remember deliberately giving them the advice of being truthful, and what it meant to be truthful, and the fact that this included the business of being truthful to yourself.

The second advice was about controlling your debt, and the reasons for that and how if uncontrolled it would ultimately and unquestionably lead to issues regarding truthfulness.

Moreover, I certainly concur with this paragraph in your piece:

“Another factor that needs much more attention to explain success and failure vis-à-vis IQ is the character, composition and nurturing capacity of the environment. 

“Minorities and inner city children are unlikely to have the climate to grow intellectually that is available in the suburbs.

“Then there is the business of parental involvement, psychological encouragement and readiness to be there when their children need mentoring. In a word, self-confidence and success go well beyond an IQ index.”

That leads me to the business of “America’s failing schools.” They are about this and not really about inadequate funding, inadequate facilities, or inadequate teachers.

Unfortunately, breaking the cycle is enormously difficult under the best of circumstances, but because our society only permits blaming the schools, etc., rather than admitting the real reason for the failure to learn we cannot hope to fix the problem.

Anyway, thanks for another good thought piece.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS

Your relationship to your daughters reminds me of an Erich Fromm observation in “The Art of Loving” (1978):

“Mature love says, ‘I need you because I love you’; immature love says, ‘I love you because I need you’.”

You express mature love, your friend expresses immature love.

Regarding education, what you say has merit. But the problem is even more basic than that. It is also – the way educational needs are handled – an indication of mature versus immature love.

We Americans are proud to continuously announce to the world how generous we are, and it is true, Americans are very generous.

You get inside that generosity and you see we have a more basic problem with intimacy.

We would rather throw money at a problem and hope some of it sticks than get involved and committed in solving of the problem.

It has not always been that way. Alexis de Tocqueville, when he came to America in the 1830s, and wrote “Democracy in America” (1834) found Americans involved and enthusiastically volunteering to help others.

In a word, being intimately committed and involved was not a problem then, but it is a societal issue today.

We have become insular and distrustful of others, especially strangers. So, we wrap ourselves in what we perceive to be security by staying close to our ethnicity and socioeconomic class.

Out of guilt, or perhaps collective memory, Americans have no trouble throwing money at problems. It is the capitalistic way.

You can see the evidence everywhere, the rise of privileged prep schools for affluent children so that they will qualify for prestigious academic universities, and won’t have to mingle with the less advantaged; in exclusive affluent residential communities that only the affluent can afford; while the rest of us build fences around our houses and minds in an equal attempt to live in a secluded world a safe distance from such thorny problems as education.

Show me the intimacy in Facebook, or those obsessively committed to tweeting and texting, or indeed, to young people who are afraid of the intimacy and commitment of marriage, while preferring to enjoy all its conveniences without its concomitant responsibilities.

Societal problem, including education, which is so fundamental to the survival of society, will never be adequately handled when most of us prefer to observe life a safe distance from each other, which paradoxically, includes an equally safe distance from ourselves.