The Peripatetic Philosopher ruminates about: God in the Middle -- Part Three

GOD IN THE MIDDLE

Part Three

 “The Inner Self as Legacy to the Enlightenment.” 

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

© February 8, 2019

The foundations of identity were laid with the perception of a disjunction between one’s inside and one’s outside.  Individuals come to believe that they have a true or authentic identity hiding within themselves that is somehow at odds with the role they are assigned by their surrounding society.

Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and The Politics of Resentment (2018)

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

It all started 500 years ago.  In the West, the idea of identity was born during the Protestant Reformation.  It was launched by a bold and apocryphal move by Martin Luther in 1517 to post his protests to Catholic Church indulgences on the Wittenberg church door.  The quiet Augustinian friar had struggled for ten years with his inner self while he read and taught and performed his duties as a priest.  Biographer Richard Marius in “Martin Luther” (1999) saw the monk as a Christian between God and Death:

He found himself in a state of despair before God.  He wanted the assurance of being acceptable to God, but could discover in himself only the certainty of sin and in God only an inexorable justice which condemned to futility all his efforts at repentance and his search for the divine mercy.”  

Luther came to understand that the Church acted only on the outer person through such rituals as confession, penance, tithing and worship of the saints.  None of which could make a difference in one’s authentic existence because grace did not need a church as grace was a free act of a loving God. 

Thus Luther was one of the first Western thinkers to validate the “inner self” over the external social being.  He insisted that man had a twofold nature: an inner spiritual one and an outer bodily being, but only the inner man could be renewed. 

This placed the individual, paradoxically, in the center of the dialogue on the nature of man.

By the single act of making faith alone the central doctrine of Protestantism, it undercut the 1500 legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church. 

That said the Church remained the intermediary between man and God, but it could only shape the outer man through its rites and rituals, ceremonies and works.  It could not touch the inner man by rationale and definition.

Luther was not the disgruntled teenager brought back to obedience by society, but rather through due diligence and initiative, he put on notice that society itself would now have to adjust to the demands of the inner person.  The idea of democracy would have to gestate for more than 250 years.

Nothing again would be the same in Christendom as this marked the beginning of the decline of the Universal (Catholic) Church and the rise of scores of alternative churches with God in the middle. 

Whether the monumental changes that led to modernity can be put at the door of Wittenberg and Luther or not, a series of propitious changes occurred in rapid succession.  

In 1439 Gutenberg had invented the movable type printing press.  Books now flourished in the 1530s with Luther’s translation of the Bible into German to create a sense of identity among the German people.  Translations of the Bible in other languages had the same affect. 

New ideas on trade and commerce sparked the creation of what would be eventually called capitalism.  This gave rapid rise to industrialization with new methods of producing goods and delivering services as material forces were being driven by new technologies legitimized by the changes in the way people thought about things.

On the plane of ideas, the distinction between the inner and outer, seeded by Luther, would occupy philosophers for generations to come as modern man struggled with the new idea of personal identity as identity with the Church faded. 

[My own empirical work over the past fifty years has found me exploring the deep layers of the “inner self” from the conscious to the subconscious to the subtext level of confidence which ensures identity is axiomatic.] 

Read the “Confessions of St. Augustine” and you will see that this Christian of the 3^rd and 4^th century took such a private introspective journey to uncover his “inner self,” although he did not disparage the Church in this quest, or feel the necessity of a new identity,  but remained an institutional Roman Catholic to the end.     

In that same vein, while rejecting the Universal Church, Luther accepted completely the legitimacy and underlying truth of Christianity. 

Marius in his Martin Luther biography (The Christian Between God and Death) documents the monk’s painful quest for personal clarity, questioning Church authority and the theology of penance. 

Then there was the auspicious timing of the “Reformation.” seeded as it was by the failed “Peasant’s War” of 1525 in which 100,000 of the 300,000 German peasant farmers were slaughtered by armies of the aristocracy of The Holy Roman Empire.

In that climate, Luther resolutely attacks the celebrated cleric, Desiderius Erasmus, who remained in the Church to lead the Counter Reformation, making the young monk a rebel with a cause in an intellectual army of one.

German American philosopher Hannah Arendt has an explanation for this while referencing her own disposition:

“One first has to think in dialogue with oneself and reach an agreement with oneself.  The principle of agreement with oneself is very old.  It was actually discovered by Socrates whose central tenet, as formulated by Plato, is contained in the sentence: ‘Since I am one, it is better for me to disagree with the whole world than to be in disagreement with myself.’”

This is consistent with the idea that one must conduct oneself in such a way that the principle of one’s actions becomes a general law – Kant’s categorical imperative –  based upon the necessity for rational thought to agree with itself.

[Those in modern times who agree with this rationale have likely been influenced by David Riesman’s book, “The Lonely Crowd” (1950).  Riesman came up with the idea of the “inner-directed” and “outer-directed” person, with the former personality self-directed and self-reliant, while the latter personality tending to be a conformist and pleaser, or part of the herd mentality.]

THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT & SOME OF ITS PHILOSOPHICAL LIGHTS

By the end of the 18^th century, the “inner man” was the core of modern identity and had evolved into a secular form.  Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau played a central role in this identity.  His thinking would lead to such modern trends as democracy, human rights, communism, the discipline of anthropology, and environmentalism.  For Rousseau, the natural goodness of the “inner self” was a theme tied to his political, social and personal writing. 

Luther believed in Original Sin and human beings as fallen creatures redeemable by God’s love, alone.  Rousseau in Discourse on the Origins of Inequality argued that the first human being as man in the state of nature was not sinful.  He romanticizes early man for whom sex was natural but not the family; where sin and evil – jealousy, greed, violence and hatred did not exist.  There was no original society.  For him, human unhappiness begins with the discovery of society. 

In Rousseau’s account, man’s descent into society began by the mastering of animals.  Man started to cooperate for his mutual protection and with that surfaced the idea of pride and the perception of relationships.  This was given expression in words: great, little, strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold, and other comparisons.  

The ability to compare and to evaluate other human beings was the fountainhead of human unhappiness. 

Rousseau denounces the shift from “love of self” to “self-love” or vanity, seeing self-interest is transmuted into feelings of pride and the desire for social recognition.  From hunters and gatherers, human beings became farmers with the necessity of accumulating property.  He writes in the Discourse:

The first person who having enclosed some land, took it upon himself to say “This is mine,” and found people simpleminded enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

Rousseau argues crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors followed.  He attempts to walk mankind back with the first lines of his famous The Social Contract:

“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

These “chains” are the constraints placed on the freedom of citizens in modern states.

Francis Fukuyama in “Identity” (2018) traces Rousseau’s sentiments to morphing to what are called today, “identity politics.”  We see this in the United States Congress where polarity and gridlock prevent consensus and cooperation, and therefore effective governance. 

What Rousseau asserts is that a thing called “society,” exists outside the individual.  Indeed, on the corporate organizational level, a mass of rules, regulations, relationships, injunctions and customs have become an obstacle to the realization of human potential, and therefore, human happiness. 

The reason for this French philosopher's continued relevance is that he saw a sharp distinction between the “inner self” and the “outer society.”  But unlike Luther, the freedom of the inner individual does not lie only in his ability to accept the grace of God.  But rather, it lies in the natural ability of the individual to experience the sentiments of existence free of layers of accumulated social convention.  In this sense, it is similar to Isiah Berlin’s idea of  “negative freedom” discussed elsewhere in these missives.

Fukuyama sees Rousseau’s secularization of the “inner self” from social convention as the stepping stone to the modern idea of identity and recognition.  In other words, the pressing dominance of social convention, now more intense than ever before through social media, is the foundation of human unhappiness manifested in a psychotherapy and drug dependent society.  Fukuyama writes:

The recovery of the inner self thus required divesting oneself of the need for social recognition; the solitary dreamer does not need anyone’s approval.

Of course, we know while much of what Rousseau espouses had merit he was wrong about man, early man or otherwise, being one-dimensional.  We also know that feelings of pride and self-esteem can be effectively manipulated by parents, teachers, preachers, bosses, advertisers, the media, entertainers, politicians and friends to ends not necessarily in our own best interests. 

It is no accident that we are essentially a robotic society given to be mobilized by special interests to their given ends.  We see this when asked to respond to why we think, believe, behave and feel about God, religion, work, marriage, the government, education or the basis of the choices we make.  That is because all the characteristics that make up the “inner self” are not fixed.  The evidence?

We may run away from the idea of God, for example, but be as resolute in our new belief system as we had been before.  The same relates to work and marriage and life in general.  We constantly run back into ourselves repeating the same errors in the new situation that we rebelled against in the old.  We cannot lose ourselves. 

German philosopher Immanuel Kant, like Rousseau, wrestled with this in terms of reason and moral choice.  Kant asserts that we can point to nothing as unconditionally good other than good will and the capacity for moral choice.  He did not see this as a Christian concept or in religious terms, but as the ability to follow strict rules of reason for their own sake.  

The human capacity for moral choice means that we are not machines subject to the laws of physics, but can be moral agents independent of our material environment. 

Because we have the capacity to reason, Kant insists, moral choice does not need to be treated as ends to other means, but ends in themselves.  

We manifest good will not because of what it will lead to but for its own sake.  Human dignity revolves around the human will where we are genuine agents of uncaused causes. 

THE “INNER SELF” & INDIVIDUALISM

German philosopher Friedrich Hegel accepted the link between moral choice and human dignity with the individual a morally free agent and not simply a rational machine seeking maximum satisfaction.  But unlike Rousseau and Kant, he put recognition at the center of the human condition.  He advised:

From birth on human history is driven by a struggle for recognition.

This drives the soldier to risk his life, not for territory, not for wealth, but for recognition itself as a patriotic citizen.  A worker doesn’t simply work for wages and benefits but for the acquired dignity and recognition of what he is doing.  

We know who we are by what we do.

For Hegel, however, it is not primarily an individual journey into the self as with Rousseau, but politically motivated.  The great conflict of his day was the French Revolution and the “Rights of Man.” 

By the early 19^th century, the elements of the modern concept of equal dignity for everyone under the law was the mantra of the American Revolution (1776) and French Revolution (1789) with the understanding that the dignity of the “inner self” rests on its moral freedom. 

The democratic upsurge that would unfold in the two centuries after these revolutions was driven by peoples demanding recognition of their political personhood. 

Expressive individualism would also be seeded by Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith and then British philosophers John Locke and finally by John Stuart Mill.  They put a pragmatic and empirical stamp on the movement towards capitalism in economics and to democracy in politics.

Smith’s laissez-faire philosophy was to minimize the role of government intervention and taxation in free market economies with the idea of an “invisible hand” guiding the supply and demand of commerce.  

Locke focused on human motivation and behavior, believing human nature allowed people to be selfish with the natural tendency to follow their self-interests.  

Mill was the most influential English language philosopher of the 19^th century whose work explored the consequences of a thoroughgoing empiricist outlook.  

These “Enlightened Age” thinkers believed that successful governance depends not on idealism but balance between individual freedom and political equality; between the state exercising legitimate power and institutional laws and accountability providing the appropriate constrains.  It was Mill, however, who put temperance into his philosophy advocating population limits and slowed economic growth.  He believed this would be equally beneficial to the environment and the public good.  He was a naturalist, a utilitarian and a liberal who cautioned:

“Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”    

THE “INNER SELF” BECOMES OBSESSIVE INTRODUCING A NEW MODERN ERA

The expression of the “inner self” soon became the key to dignity and recognition.    

Christianity universalized people being capable of moral choice.  This was secularized by Kant in the form of rational moral rules.  Rousseau added the idea that the inner moral self was not just capable of binary moral choice, good or evil, but was filled with personal feelings suppressed by the surrounding society.  

Dignity now centered on the recovery of that authentic “inner self” that society must recognize in every human being. 

Rousseau’s powerful idea is that each individual has an “inner self” buried deep within; that it is unique and a source of creativity; that this self has equal value to all others; that this self is expressed through feelings and not through reason; and that this “inner self” is the basis of human dignity, recognized in such political documents as the American Declaration of Independence. 

Rousseau’s influence is obvious in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther; in the paintings of Vincent van Gogh; in the novels of Franz Kafka; and in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche who expanded the scope of human autonomy with the figure of Zarathustra and individualism in Beyond Good and Evil.    

By the late 20^th century, the scope of the “inner self” and individual autonomy reached a fever pitch with the clamor to define one’s own existence as well as the meaning of life irrespective of what society, the government or the church promoted.    

In the Christian tradition, the “inner self” was the source of Original Sin, but now it was simply moral choice.  

A wave of promoters of self-esteem and personal improvement followed.  There was Abraham Maslow “Hierarchy of Needs,” Robert Schuller’s “Hour of Power,” who also wrote a book, “Self-Esteem: The New Revolution,” and Robert Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life.”  

More than 30 percent of the American upper middle class was in therapy complaining of lacking self-esteem and happiness, while being in the top 10 percent of the American economy in terms of income.  Today, they are supporting more than a half million psychotherapists across the United States.

Christopher Lasch argued against this trend in "The Culture of Narcissism" (1979) insisting that the obsession with human potential and self-esteem would instead lead to crippling invasive cultural self-indulgence.  This would in term lead to the depoliticizing of society in which social justice would be reduced to personal angst and psychological problems.  Lasch died more than a score of years before Donald Trump, a nonpolitician, would become President of the United States. 

Lasch could envision the long decline of the United States accompanied by the rapid rise of a therapeutic society dependent on psychotherapy.  Bernard Zilbergeld would confirm this prognosis four years later in “The Shrinking of America: Myths of Psychological Change” (1983).

Today, the question of identity has become central to the life of many Americans.  

We now have battles over ethnicity, sexual identity, sexual politics, sexual orientation, gay rights, racial equality (“Black Lives Matter!), gender politics, religion, God, the meaning of life, inequality, ecology, feminism, Native Americanism, capitalism, socialism, communism, social justice, human biology, education, liberalism, conservatism, self-esteem, dignity, recognition, freedom (negative & positive), happiness, social responsibility, moral responsibility, robotics, automation, good and evil, spiritualism, materialism, multiculturalism, war, peace, nuclear holocaust, environmentalism, global warming, civil war, national identity, ethno nationalism, radicalism, immigration, personhood, the common good, ethnic cleansing, hegemony, terrorism, civil religion, civil liberty, professionalism, work ethic, knowledge power, position power, politics of anger, polarization, gridlock, natural language, national language, citizenship, crime, wealth, poverty, celebrity worship, cyberspace, “Big Brother,” dystopia, and the beat goes on.

Identity and the “inner self” has come to underlie philosophy and the political climate today, yet identity and this buried “inner self” in us all is neither fixed nor given to us by the accident of birth.  This sense of identity can be used to divide or unite us, or pragmatically integrate us.  This will happen when we lose our fascination to stand apart and complain about everything. 

  

    

The Peripatetic Philosopher announces: Fisher's books have gone VIRAL!

Work Without Managers Has Gone Viral!

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

© February 1, 2019

Man’s inventiveness and his flashes of insight come not when he grubbing for necessities but when he reaches out for the superfluous and the extravagant.  Play is older than work, art older than production for use.  Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments (author’s bold emphasis).

Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey, Calvin Tomkins, 1967

Nearly thirty years ago, I wrote what was then considered an “angry book” while being named “One of the Ten Best Business Books of 1991” by Industry Week (December 2, 1991).  Business Book Review Journal (April 1991), however, named it “One of the Four Major Works of the Year in its Genre,” while adding: “Work promises to foster a controversy that will be instrumental in affecting a fundamental change in the American workplace.”    

These many years later there are discernible cracks in the corporate power structure and the architecture of the workplace, but only cracks.  That said professional athletics, mainly the players in the National Basketball League (NBA), are however about to open the floodgates to change. 

THE LABORATORY OF EXPERIENCE

It would be safe to say that I have been in the corporation most of my working life, but not of the corporation as I have never joined it in spirit.  The corporation has been a work environment of necessity that I had no other option but to join.  At the same time, I have never identified with or paid allegiance to the corporation, per se.  It has essentially been my laboratory.   

My introduction to the complex organization was first as a laborer in a chemical plant where I worked summers while attending the University of Iowa, familiarizing myself with chemical processes working in virtually all departments, while observing the management structure and how it used workers as if well-oiled machine parts.  Upon graduation, I was hired as a chemist with the same company’s Research & Development department. 

After a stint in the US Navy, as an enlisted man, impressed how naval personnel were treated at all levels. I joined another chemical company as a chemical sales engineer calling on all manner of complex chemical operations, public utilities, paper mills, automotive and other hi-tech manufacturing facilities in my role as service engineer and chemical consultant. 

During this period I experienced something that I would never experience again: that is, a level of freedom in the corporate world that otherwise does not exist. 

I was totally my own boss for as long as I was productive as a sales engineer with no one to bother me at all.

Success, however, led to promotion into the Industrial Division’s management team, where I rose to corporate management in the company’s International Division.  I would work in South America, Europe and South Africa. 

Only in my thirties, frustrated with the pettiness and peccadilloes of corporate management’s compensation, entitlements and incentives which I felt were totally unearned, offending my working class mind, I retired to pursue the soft sciences in graduate school totally abandoning the hard sciences.  I had reached the point where the workplace made no sense to me and I wanted to learn why. 

To my astonishment, graduate school was as much a corporate factory as the one I had left.  My professors preached the priestly message mainly from books they had read or had written without a scintilla of doubt although devoid of empirical work in-the-trenches or empathetic understanding of the workers who were so engaged.

With no interest in being an academic, upon acquiring my Ph.D. in social, industrial/organization psychology, I launched a consulting career joining other established firms as an organizational development (OD) specialist.

Consulting appeared a strange game.  Management paid a handsome fee to be told how best to run their operations, information attained by consultants asking workers-in-the-trenches what the problems were and how they thought they best be fixed.  

This worker and workplace intelligence was then fed back to management, along a justification of the consultants’ impressive fees by either furloughing or discharging a certain number of employees but never the “Winning Side Saddlers” (see this author’s The Chronic Problem: Typology of Leaderless Leadership, Journal of Quality & Participation, 2000, pp. 20-24). 

For nearly ten years, I consulted Fortune 500 companies in the private sector and large and small state and federal institutions in the public sector.  Common thinking supports the idea that “for profit” operations in the private sector display much greater meritocracy and accountability than do public sector operations.  That has not been my experience.  The two cultures appear equally inclined to favoritism. 

After a lapse of several years, I joined a Fortune 100 hi-tech company as an industrial psychologist on a campus complex of 1,000 engineers, 2,000 support professionals, 480 supervisors, managers and executives, and 520 hourly workers in clean rooms and machine tool operations. 

Here I conducted seminars and OD interventions, did counseling of employees at all levels, including management, developed Assessment Centers, and designed a Technical Education Program that addressed professional skill competency issues, while providing technicians with a roadmap to full engineering status.   

The success of these endeavors led to a promotion as Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for the company’s European operations in Brussels, Belgium.  Europe was transitioning to the European Economic Community with the company interested in applying an OD specialist to its European operations.    

The curious thing about my European OD experience is that corporate management expected OD to operate as other consultants of the company had operated.  In other words, that OD would see management as its client and not the organization, per se.  It soon became apparent, since management held the purse strings, that OD was expected not to forget this fact in its deliberations or conclusions.  Alas, OD was expected to operate as Human Resources operates, and that is as management's union.

OD, however, is a diagnostic tool beholding neither to labor nor to management in the assessment process, but only to the organization as if it were a viable organism. 

But the fault, in any case, did not lie entirely with management as it was clear OD had failed to educate management in what it did or what management could expect from a successful OD intervention.  

In OD's detection and detective work, feelings becomes facts as morale (group feelings) and motivation (individual feelings) merge in functional purpose.  In other words, group will and individual competence are complements to successful performance as a collective sense of belief and belonging are critical to the task at hand.  OD knows and explores this from the vantage point of looking beyond the obvious, which I have called elsewhere, "exploring the problem in subtext."    

Returning from this assignment, still in my 50s, I decided to retire a second time to turn my attention to writing what I had learned over the years working in virtually every level of the complex organization as well as on four continents.  It has been from these notes, studies, profiles, published articles, interviews and interventions that have been the primary sources of my work and basis of my several books in this and related genres.

Others have been there before me pruning this same garden, but often with a special client or relationship in mind such as that of academia, government, industry or other special interests.  My approach has been more catholic as I have operated like a medieval priest in his secret laboratory worrying about the little man in this mammoth corporate world who is often smashed like a bug into inescapable compliance.  Whatever his education or prowess, submission is complete while he chooses to deny the regiment that has become his life.  Paradoxically, while everything on the surface seems to be humming along without a glitch, incipient catastrophe lurks ahead and the reason for these books.      

THE RATIONALE FOR A SPATE OF BOOKS FROM A WORKER IN THE TRENCHES

Management has been the architect of a failed system in virtually every institution of society from the family, the school, the community, the company, the government, the church and the environment.  It has fumbled along in narcissistic self-indulgence seemingly without a clue as to its creative destruction, while celebrating its technological hubris.   

America is an optimistic society and continues to believe the glass half full no matter what economic calamity, social upheaval, cultural conflagration, spiritual crisis, psychological embarrassment or military collapse occurs to threaten the very foundation of American society and its substantive history. 

America is a violent society and has been since its conception.  It is a reactive society to crisis with an inability to anticipate threats to its survival because its attention is always on another circuit.  It is a skin deep culture that prefers others to fight its battles electing “feel good” people to public office who echo the superficial sentiments by which most Americans live. 

Americans congratulate themselves on their ingenuity, entrepreneurial spirit and ability to turn their play into functional tools as has been the case with the explosion of our electronic wonders by college drop outs such as Jobs and Gates, who liked to play games in their garages, and in the process changed the world forever.  Meanwhile, the corporate world appears a slow learner.

General Electric, IBM, General Motors and old standby corporations such as Montgomery Wards and Sears got caught with their pants on fire.  GE and IBM recovered at the 11^th hour, while GM had to be “bailed out” because it was “too big to fail.”  Montgomery Wards, however, is gone, and Sears is on the cutting block.

Ordinary citizens working paycheck to paycheck have assumed that these people running things are a lot smarter than they are, and know what they are doing, when the evidence paints a far different picture. 

Clever advertisers have made diamonds a precious mineral which they are not.  A diamond is actually an extremely simple material.  It is pure carbon and is the hardest naturally occurring mineral, but the only thing separating it as a precious stone from coal is its molecular structure. 

Likewise, top executives of Fortune 500 companies are paid (with bonuses) 500 to 1,000 times as much as their hourly laborers.  Workers have accepted this differential if reluctantly believing these executives are critical to the success of the company, and therefore to their livelihood working in the trenches. 

It has gotten more complicated over the last several decades.  Professionals go into engineering and the sciences seeking employment in some solid Fortune 500 company, hoping one day to get into management, not because they love the idea of playing the power game, but because the pay structure euphemistically implies that managers are more valuable to the company than workers, whatever their education, when clearly this is not the fact.  It is an idea that died forty years ago but has been kept alive on life support by management ever since. 

That worked immediately following World War Two, when only 40 percent of Americans graduated from high school, but today, 80 percent are high school graduates with 40 percent college graduates with 20 percent of those graduates holding engineering degrees.

In terms of the hi-tech organization, 75-80 percent of the workforce holds academic credentials with 25 percent (as in the example given above) engineers.

The complex organization is dependent on knowledge power possessed by workers while position power the province of management often gets in the way of productive work.

To my sorrow, I watched highly qualified professionals retreat into “Six Silent Killers” (the title of one of my books) in passive but undetected behaviors that penalized the company contributing $ billions of lost productivity.  

All indicators are that management is anachronistic and managers atavistic but they hold on like Sears denying the inevitable.   

BOOKS BELOW THE RADAR THAT MAY BE LAUNCHING A REVOLUTION

It is rather ironic that someone such as myself would write a rash of polemically inspired books on the subject of work, workers and the workplace, indeed, on the complex organization when I’ve never been comfortable in its confines over my long career.  Yet, that has indeed been my fate.  I have neither had a privileged education nor an exemplary following to encourage such an endeavor.  Indeed, my message in the bottle has been largely ignored with a blip here or there by discerning readers or critics who have been paying attention to the colossal dysfunction of the complex organization with which modern society has been indulged. 

These in summary are some of my books that address this incipient catastrophe:

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1991)

Joining a hi-tech company as an OD psychologist in 1980, the timing couldn’t have been more propitious.  The company had a Quality Control Circle (QCC) program for hourly employees, who represented only 10 percent of the workforce, designed to inspire greater motivation.   

At the same time, NBC television had an hourly program, “Japan Can! Why can’t We?”  Japan had this same QCC program and was eating America’s lunch in quality manufacturing of automobiles, electronics, household appliances and glass products.  A tsunami followed across the nation as everyone had to have the program my company already had in place and knew well its limitations. 

The main problem was that Japan is a group minded culture and the United States is an individualistic minded culture. 

Ignoring this discrepancy, corporations across America spent millions of dollars launching signatory programs such as “Participative Management.”  It was like pouring money down a rabbit’s hole as the problem of performance was never defined, and so employees took advantage of their companies’ laxity acting like spoiled children. 

In 1984, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a conference of executives, managers and military leaders who were caught up in this fever.  My subject was “Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View.”   

[As a result of that provocative presentation, for two years, I was on the equivalent of house arrest not allowed to give any speeches or to write any articles, having to turn in my engineering notebooks every week for review.  These notebooks that grew to nearly forty would become the basis of Work Without Managers.]

In 1986, I was promoted to Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for the company’s European headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.  Europe would become my sanctuary and laboratory where I would commence to collate my notes into WWMs.

In 1990 I retired from the company, and published the WWMs in 1991.

The focus of the next book in this genre was The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain.  Professionals continued to be phlegmatic despite now being in the driver’s seat in the 1990s with knowledge power which had already superseded position power.  

While management continued to get the perks, the promotions, the salary bonuses, and the largest percentage of the corporate pie, professionals were the architects of the world that only management enjoyed.  This slender volume addresses this discrepancy with a bit of reality.  It was published in 1995.

Professionals, while being non-confrontational in conflict avoidance with management at every turn, were passively demonstrating their angst in what I came to call “six silent killers”: (1) passive aggression, coming in late and leaving early doing as little as possible to get by; (2) passive responsive: never doing anything until told what to do, and then doing little more; (3) passive defensive: always having an excuse why a job doesn’t get done or done on time; (4) approach avoidance: accepting assignments with no intention of completing; (5) obsessive compulsive: always wanting what others have failing to attend to the work paid to do; (6) malicious obedience: spreading rumors and disinformation, withholding information critical to operations, and misusing company property.  SSKs was published in 1996:

CORPORATE SIN, originally published in 2000, addressed the masochistic clash of management and professionals that literally devolved into leaderless leadership and dissonant workers. 

As the United States became an industrial power in the early 20^th century with 95 percent of the workforce blue collar with little formal education, the formula for success was that “the very first requirement for man is that he be so stupid and phlegmatic that he more resemble an ox than any other type.” 

While Frederick Winslow Taylor could make that statement in his 1911 book, Scientific Management, it would not be politically correct today.  Even so, it could be argued that many workers are still held hostage to this same industrial engineering grid. 

Early in the 20th century, management programmed workers to be polite, obedient, loyal, punctual, passive, and reactive to management’s authority.  It was tantamount to suborn perjury to attempt to bypass one’s direct supervisor to seek answers from top management.

It is 90 years later with only 20 percent of the workforce blue collar and 80 percent white collar or professional, yet this prevailing behavioral norm still holds sway in many organizations.   

Incredibly, management took on the airs of a self-appointed aristocracy voting themselves larger and larger salaries and benefits, and then camouflaging these excesses by seemingly demonstrating benevolence in offering morsels to workers in the trenches.  

This CORPORATE SIN has been manifested and institutionalized at every level of American society with the possible exception of professional sport.  CORPORATE SIN was published in 2000.

EVIDENCE THAT THIS, TOO, WILL CHANGE

As Eric Hoffer has advised, play not work defines us, and play always gives us a clue as to the work climate of tomorrow.  

Kurt Flood, a much acclaimed Major League Baseball player, sued the league when it attempted to trade him from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies without his permission.  He felt like chattel in a medieval feudal system and took offense to the policy.   

It was 1970 and his legal success ended his professional baseball career but owners, general managers and managers could no longer treat players without dealing with the players or their agents. 

Despite this, MLB remains a top heavy and top down management industry.  

Not so the National Basketball Association (NBA) and its professional players.  

We have seen in recent years Lebron James go from an 18-year-old high school graduate to an NBA star first with the Cleveland Cavaliers while gradually evolving to the coach of the team as a player on the court, carrying this distinction further bypassing the coach, general manager and owner  to take in the reins to manage his own career.  

Indeed, he left Cleveland for the NBA’s Miami Heats where he earned an NBA Championship, then returned to Cleveland, enduring the protests of the Heats' management, to win a second NBA Championship for the Cleveland Cavaliers.  

Now, in 2019, he is with the NBA Los Angeles Lakers, again demonstrating he is in control of his career and intends to go wherever the basketball gods direct him.

Lebron James knows not only basketball but its entertainment value.  He is a successful entrepreneur and adept at performing many of the functions of coaches, general managers, and even owners.  He demonstrates this in being an effective recruiter of basketball talent to improve his team's chances of winning, while also studying the changing demographics of his sport and its audience.  

He is representative of the knowledge worker who has a full sense of his power and potential.  He stirs the drink and controls its content.  

Fully 80 percent of NBA players are African American or of color.  This has reached palpable significance in this league and promises to have widespread impact in professional enterprise beyond sport down the road.  

Meanwhile, nearly 70 percent of NFL players are black, but without the freedom or control of their destiny exhibited by NBA players.  Billionaire owners of the NFL remain like corporate feudal lords over the sport.  NFL owners pay the NFL Commissioner 40 million large to keep it that way, while ironically, sportscasters and sports analysts, many of whom once were NFL stars, fall in line to promote this corporate mindset.  In a word, the NFL is identical to corporate America to the extreme.

On the other hand, black players, once climbing in Major League Baseball, are now declining as many are choosing the NFL or the NBA for their professional career.  Neither the NFL nor MLB has reached the power grid of player dominance displayed in the NBA. 

NBA players, who pretty much choose who they will play for, may mimic Lebron James in his career management, but they have not reached his level of work without management that surely will be the measure of professional sport if not the wider society in the future.

Meanwhile, Corporate America pays professional engineers, chemist, accountants, programmers, psychologists and other credentialed knowledge workers a dollar more an hour than they believe they can afford to quit, or test the market for interest in their skills.  There is movement, to be sure, among the ranks and files, but it is pathetic compared to what is displayed in sport. 

  

The Peripatetic Philosopher confesses, "The world he once knew no longer exists!"

 “The world as I understood it, no longer exists!”

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

© January 31, 2019

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Volume 2 (1834-1835), p. 106


“I don’t say he’s a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (a 1949 play). Willie Loman’s wife is admonishing her sons that respect must be paid to their father who first suffered a pay cut and then was fired after 36 years of continuing service to the company at the age of 63.


THE COLLAPSE OF RELEVANCE IN “POST WORLD WAR TWO” SOCIETY 

Tocqueville noted the unbounded optimism of Americans who were apt to imagine that their whole destiny was in their own hands. There were no limits to what they could do for themselves. They were programmed to believe anyone could go from rags to riches with the plasticity of promise.

The fact that ninety percent of Americans moved little towards the specter of such a destiny failed to register concern. They were lottery hopefuls, reasoning that although the odds of winning might be a billion to one, somebody always wins, right, so why not them?

Arthur Miller stuck a pin in this illusion in a slight but poignant play in 1949.  "The Death of a Salesman" first appeared on Broadway four years after the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan and their allies to the United States, Great Britain and Russia.

Miller anticipated the mad rush of the upward striving American middle class bringing a little reality into the dutiful plodding of fictitious Willie Loman.  

Loman is no longer young, past his prime, the camaraderie and support of colleagues now gone, plagued with self-doubts, while stubbornly denying to himself that he has outlived his corporate usefulness, contemplates suicide as his only option to these intractable circumstances. 

This scenario has been repeated ad infinitum over the past seventy years not as fiction but as reality finding many Americans anxious, psychosomatic and cynical.

Fewer people than you might imagine arrive close to where they expect to be. They treat life as a game wearing as many masks as they believe necessary. As one person reflected:

“I have an extraordinary number of masks I can put on or take off. The question always is: is there, or should there be, one face which I should present as my authentic face? I’m not sure there is one, or there should be one. I tend to think a person with many, many faces, as is the case with me, can never appreciate the idea of a home much less happiness.”

Then there is my generation of The Great Depression, people born in the 1930s, who experienced the disruptive reality of economic deprivation, then World War Two in which 100 million people perished, eclipsing the lives of a generation of young people in Germany, Japan and Russia. 

That was not the case in the United States.  War never came to the continental United States. This has had monumental significance giving rise to the expression that the 20th Century was "The American Century."

Once the world was on the other side of this terrible conflict, Americans appeared to have lost touch with the past, with their essence, faith, ideals, values, limits and control. 

Local ties, religious beliefs and a sense of community were now less important. Budd Schulberg's clever little novel asked the question, "What Makes Sammy Run?” (1941).  It was a time where anything goes as progress became America's most important product.

Baby Boomers (1946-1964); Generation X & Y (1965-1976); Millennials (1977-1995); and now Centennials (1996 - ) ramble ahead with little sense much less interest in America’s decline.  Ergo, little learning has taken hold.

We have become a rootless society of homeless minds living in the aberrations of a past that never existed while looking to a future that clearly doesn’t include us. 

It is difficult to assess how an audience might react to the candor of this reader who writes from the bowels of the rootless nihilism into which he was forced at an early age. 

His words remind me of the screeching noise I once found unsettling as Sister Mary Cecile moved a piece of white chalk swiftly across the blackboard of our eighth grade class at St. Patrick’s Catholic School. 

That teacher and that artifact post-WWII are frozen if disturbing music to my soul. Why? Because they were real as are this reader's words.  

Words have lost much of their traction with audiences since that world changing war, but not for a boy who escaped Nazi Germany, or for me whose discomfort was limited to screeching chalk across a blackboard.

The title of this missive is taken from the words of the celebrated American journalist Joan Didion (born in 1934) who chronicles her angst not in anger but in perplexity as an expression of Everyman to the pathos of our times.

The mindset of today's America carries an echo of the 18th century’s “Age of the Enlightenment” when European philosophers dipped their quills into ink and created the mantra of the “inner self.” This was a provisional idea that eventually became holistic and the rationale for the American and French Revolutions, an idea that has reverberated most loudly over the past 70 years with the common cry, “me!”

Citizens of the United States and the European West find delayed gratification intimidating, while existentially desiring to have it now, be it now, experience it now, if not directly, vicariously through entertainers, sport celebrities and other idols, creating a passive society engrossed in escapism and wishful thinking. Is it any wonder the Western world is sliding into irrelevance?

A READER WRITES

I’ve been reading the novels of John Cheever and am currently half way through “ Falconer “ about a drug addict who goes to prison and serves time in prison for the murder of his brother. He was born into a family whose father did not want him to be born. Over time he became a drug addict and goes to prison.

Cheever’s personal life was not a happy one either. The “Falconer “is a depressing book, and it got me to thinking again about the world into which we are all born.

As far as we know we have no choice in our birth, and we are put into a world without any knowledge of why we are here. It’s like a prison from which the final escape is death.

During our existence we either search for an answer of why we are here or we accept someone else’s answer. Many of the people who are in charge are corrupt, and we stumble throughout our existence with no path to anywhere.

In my own life my birth occurred a few months in Germany before the start of WWII created by Hitler a nothing in WWI who became a hater of Jews and destroyer which also destroyed my family. We then came to the US after my mother married an American soldier who was nice in Germany, but changed after we got here.

We are driven by our environment and our genes and as far as I am concerned we have very little choice in any of it.

In your writing you find the way things are going disturbing, but from my experience and knowledge of history, it has always been like this. There have been moments of seeming progress, but there is always someone or a group trying to upend things. So it goes as we serve our time here in this world.

MY RESPONSE

I find it rather intriguing that you open with reference to John Cheever and one of the few novels he has written. I haven’t read this book but have read “The Letters of John Cheever” (1988), “The Stories of John Cheever” (1978), and a memoir of the Cheever family by his daughter Susan titled “Home Before Dark” (1984), and a novel by his son, Benjamin, titled “The Plagiarist” (1992).

You are correct. The Cheever family was dysfunctional to the extreme, but John Cheever turned that domestic tension into art as few surpass him as a short story writer.

I enjoyed Cheever’s short stories and letters, and his children’s mainly cathartic biographical studies of the family’s turmoil that led to his father’s art. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose family went from some prominence to disgrace and bankruptcy, so did John Cheever’s parents.

Remarkably, Cheever managed to make a living writing for such publications as The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly magazine, receiving several honors, which included a stint at my own University of Iowa’s famous Writer’s Workshop. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was in residence at the workshop when I was a student at Iowa.

THE MESSAGE IN THE BOTTLE

There is nothing you say here that I can or desire to dispute. I must admit, however, that I smiled to myself remembering some words Cheever once wrote about himself and his writing:

I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss – you can’t do it alone.

This gave me pause as I write from my soul irrespective of whether readers will connect with what I have to say or not. My arrogance is not complicated. I believe that if you write honestly about life as you understand it, such as the honesty you show here in your writing, you will find an audience.

We are a common species.  Someone will read this exchange and feel the benefit of connection with your candor because it is an expression of the integrity of your soul.  Leastwise, that is my sense of writing as an art form.  We are both readers.

A good bit of my reading is of authors, many long dead, whom I hope to learn something of their commitment to this singular and isolated process of putting words together in the hope of generating some meaning to the reader.  With so many distractions today, I doubt if it finds many readers who display such curiosity.

You have the temperament of a writer, indeed, of a poet as you have stepped into two supposedly related if not identical cultures, one German, the other American, and have managed to build a productive life by distilling the essence of both into your soul, your life, and your life’s work.

You have a beautiful wife and adoring children and grandchildren and that does not come easy in the best of instances. It only happens when you work with tireless zeal and commitment to that purpose knowing that you have the role as catalyst to that nuclear setting.  This is repeated throughout the world many times over to include some seven billion souls.  It is the Ozone Shield to our sanity.

Is there purpose to life? Does life have meaning? Or are we simply detritus in a universe of mainly dead matter, the flotsam and jetsam that washes up on shore like the “Red Tide” to stink of dead fish to which no one pays attention?  Or does life really matter?

I know the answer to none of these questions. Quite frankly, I’ve never thought about life in such terms. 

Are there bad people in the world? Of course. Are there more bad people than good people? Absolutely not!

I grew up in a household in which the great struggle was to avoid bill collectors, and to make it from one week to the next with a roof over our heads, food on the table, and a modicum of love to ride us on through the next crisis, which we knew as a family was always just over (if not on this side of) the horizon.

My da constantly complained while my mother proved a magician at keeping creditors at bay while making wonderful meals out of fruits and vegetables out of the garden, while challenging the forbearance of our Irish family grocer who exhibited the patience of Job.

It was a happy home despite this.  My da never had to file for bankruptcy protection existing as he did below the creditor’s radar.  

It was also a cheerful home because we relished the company of each other, having reached the status of a family when I was five, my sister three, my brother one with my second sister not to be born for another nine years as the United States entered WWII.

Irish Roman Catholicism, the Chicago Cubs and the Democratic Party were central to our existence if not necessarily in that order.

My da never went to Mass but would die for his faith; my mother said the Rosary every day, and went to Mass and Communion every week. I took after her with regard to these three passions until I was out into the world.  While still holding on to my love for the Chicago Cubs and belief in God, my devotion to the Irish Roman Catholic Church and the Democratic Party waned.

Why am I telling you this? 

I cannot quench your foreboding, or ease the pain you have endured as a young person. Nor can I answer why human institutions continue to stumble, fumble and bumble into the future as if with blinders on.  Every institution known to man since the beginning of time has been so engaged and, sadly, so often falling short of its appointed task.  

We sometimes forget "we are society."  Society is not something "out there!"  It is in our living room. 

John Cheever whom you opened your remarks with played to The New Yorker magazine’s Calvinistic crowd of self-conscious achievers who delighted in this author's clever portraits of  the in-crowd sophistication of its intellectual elites.  Cheever, of course, an outsider to this coterie, was a tortured soul who distilled his art with formula packaging not unlike that delivered to the same audience by John Updike.

Updike was also a wonderful short story writer but a better novelist, especially his Rabbit series.  Here he tells the story of an ordinary bloke and great seer of reality through the refracted prism of that character's mundane life. 

Updike was a wordsmith of the first order with prose that crackled like exploding firecrackers on the page to Cheever’s Valium.

Alas, the message in the bottle is neither exploding prose nor sedative tranquilizers but the reality of our imagination against the imagination of reality which we use to carve out a life as authors of our own footprints in the sand.

Destiny is not relevant because destiny never happens. We have only the moment; best we enjoy it as long as we can.

You have touched many lives in your many careers including that as an officer in the United States Army, as a teacher and artist, as a father and husband, grandfather and solid citizen. 

Your life has been the message in the bottle that gives meaning to life.

Thank you for sharing.

GOD IN THE MIDDLE -- PART TWO

 

GOD IN THE MIDDLE 

PART TWO 

The Peripatetic Philosopher on Personal Identity or Who floats your boat?

 PERSONAL IDENTITY

Or

WHO FLOATS YOUR BOAT?

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

© January 7, 2019

REFERENCE

A writer here shares the odyssey of the growth of a man.  Life can be of many chapters with the spirit of invention.  Or it can be an accidental affair that locks a person into circumstances deemed beyond his capacity to change. 

People slip into such roles often to envy others who have escaped, believing they must be gifted, special, different or simply lucky.  A more mundane explanation is that preparation has a way of meeting opportunity. 

Whatever the circumstances, rationalization seldom proves either comforting or useful, but instead to chaos, confusion, and even bitterness.

Our toxic culture promotes comfort and complacency, self-pity and self-indulgence.  Rather than encouraging self-reliance, it finds us looking to family, the church, the company, the government or, indeed, our friends to bail us out of the consequences of our poor choices.  Unwittingly, society has participated in this charade creating dependence on surreal demands and false expectations. 

The irony is that most people today for the first time in human history are in an earthly paradise walking on acres of diamonds. 

As readers familiar with The Peripatetic Philosopher know, he often gravitates from the personal to the societal, as reflected in The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1995):

To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons.  The same holds true of ourselves.

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

This is equally true for a country and society, indeed, for a civilization.

A READER WRITES:

The way I see life is you have to walk your own way and not worry about what others think. As I moved through life from engineering, to religion, to English lit, to comparative lit, to the military, and finally to what I wanted to do which was to pursue art, it led to a satisfactory life. That is what I encouraged in others when I taught art. You learn the skills involved with creating, and then you pursue your own vision. Finally as you live you try not to impose your way of thinking on others. The persons who invented all the innovations over the centuries did not think like everyone else. The major problems in the world are caused by people who think it’s my way or the highway which is currently happening worldwide.

MY RESPONSE:

We all must float our own boat. Whatever our point of view, sometimes that boat is a bit crowded. If only people read more, they would understand what this reader means when he says, “Persons who invented all the innovations over the centuries.”

For example, our lives often parallel Homer’s Odyssey more than that of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

English poet John Donne (1572 – 1631) was able to write in the 16th century:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.

Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) in the same period, wrote:

To thine ownself be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou cast not then be false to any man.
Yet, today, every man is seemingly an island unto himself and the last person to trusts is himself. How did this happen?

BEST OF TIMES, WORST OF TIMES

Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) in his novel “A Tale of Two Cities” (1859) was writing about the turbulent French Revolution (1789):

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . .”

Work Without Managers (1991) opened with this quote, a reference that seemingly refuses to fade.

These are “the best of times,” yet more police officers died of suicide than in the line of duty in 2018. Likewise, more men and women serving in the military died of suicide than in combat in that same year.

In 2012, 56 million people died throughout the world: 120,000 from wars; 500,000 in crime related deaths; and 800,000 from suicide, while another 1.5 million died of diabetes.

Yuval Noah Harari writes in Homo Deus (2017): 

Sugar is more dangerous than gunpowder.

In terms of the conveniences of life; the comforts of our homes; the ease with which we travel and communicate with friends near and far; the entertainments and respites from the stresses of life that are available to us through multiple media, including the Internet; the medicines and healthcare systems accessible to us providing the possibility of living into our 80s or beyond, not to mention enjoying climate controlled homes with air conditioning and heat pump systems, along with precision controlled automobiles; indeed, today, we are able to live more comfortably than potentates, popes, monarchs and emperors of five hundred to a thousand years ago. It would be insane to be unhappy with all this, right?

Well, clearly, we are not. Indeed, with all this we are not happy campers because in the process of accumulating all these toys of comfort we have lost our moral compass and our way. We have lost the will to take responsibility for our lives.

We have forgotten happiness is not a matter of satisfying our needs, but a mindset. Philosopher Alan W. Watts claims:

“As soon as you define happiness, you lose it.”

Nor is happiness a matter of satisfying our needs. Happiness is finding satisfaction in doing what we love, as the writer (above) has found in art. Needs, in any case, are often confused with wants, and wants, like greed are impossible to satisfy because greed always wants more. 

Advertisers know this and are skilled in pushing the “want button” for all it is worth. This limitation is not confined to us ordinary souls. A friend of Saul Bellows, Nobel Laureate for Literature, once told me while having dinner with him in Chicago, “Saul could never get over the fact that he could only win the Nobel Prize once.”

Bestselling authors, due to publishers’ demands or personal greed, once they write a bestseller, often keep rewriting the same book again and again, sinking into despair when sales fall off, some even committing suicide, as writing for them has become a trap of no escape.

Acclaim, no matter how exalting, can never fill spiritual emptiness, and spiritual emptiness is predicated on devolving into a one dimensional life and career. Escape requires due diligence often taking a “time out” to reassess where you are and where you are going, as this writer indicates in his storied career finally reaching his desired vocation, that of the artist.

THE CROWDED BOAT OF SOCIETY

Oswald Spengler (1880 – 1936) wrote “Decline in the West.” To this day, he is widely criticized for his outrageous assertion that the Western world was witnessing its last season – “the winter time” of a Faustian Civilization.

Spengler considers the European-American culture one of the high cultures, and such cultures have a lifespan of about one thousand years of flourishing, and then experience inevitable decline. He writes:

“Western Man is a proud but tragic figure because, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows that his actual goals, whatever they may be, will never be reached.”
Sound familiar?

In these “Tutorials,” it is suggested that the reality of our imagination and the imagination of our reality have come to clash with one another creating artificial constructs of our existence only to be treated as truth personified.

In point of fact, everything we have created has sprung from our imagination with the ephemeral consistency of smoke if we look at it closely.

We see this on Wall Street where the Dow Jones Industrials have plummeted more than 2,000 points in recent days based on FEARS, not on the actual financial performance of the companies listed. This is crazy, but craziness has become the norm.

If anyone has had the opportunity to visit the Mayan ruins, they know that Maya was once a great civilization. The Maya civilization was at its peak in 909 CE in population, art, architecture, engineering, and social sophistication. One hundred years later it lay in ruins.

Maya, after growing in cultural refinement over a thousand years, cities and towns came to be abandoned in a matter of decades. It remains a mystery to this day as to why.

That said it appears Maya people exhausted their natural resources, the primary sources of their energy, as they polluted their lakes and canals, and deforested nearly the entire region by the tenth century.

Fewer trees meant less rain, leading to droughts coupled with soil erosions from mudslides, as soil blew away on the wind, reducing the ability of Mayans to raise food. Forests capture moisture from the air and recycle it, increasing rainfall. With deforestation the Maya found themselves without a buffer. Violence increased as cities warred on cities, and crime became the target of dwindling resources. Mayans became victims of conditions created through self-indulgence, something we are experiencing in our own world today.

It is the reason for Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent America (2018), which was written not to alarm but alert, not on a global bases but in a personal sense. We get better one person at a time.

Scholar and computer scientist Ramez Naam in an otherwise optimistic work (The Infinite Resource: the power of ideas on a finite planet, 2013), writes:

Forecasts now show seas rising three to six feet by the end of the twenty-first century, enough to displace millions of people from coastal cities and villages. In the United States, nearly all of New Orleans, and large chunks of Miami, Tampa, Virginia Beach, and New York City are three feet above sea level. On our present course and speed, a child born this year is likely to live to see the day when some of these cities are just memories.

Personal and collective identity have a way of merging in harmony or chaos. Which is to rule?