LEADERSHIP REDUX -- JULY 2007
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Where is a leader when you want one?”
“He is at your mind’s door waiting to be invited in.”
I was eating my lunch today and tuned into PBS's Charlie Rose show. He was interviewing some young man who is an "expert" on leadership. I didn't get his name because I didn't stay with the program long.
Rose asked him what constituted a great executive and he spieled off something about a CEO that walked through his shop with a pad and pencil taking down observations and comments.
I lived through that phase. I also lived through the phase where the CEO would have a worldwide television hookup, and "talk to the troops" in the manner of a pontiff with well rehearsed remarks and many smiles.
I lived through off sights and training seminars where "experts" and HR professionals would take a group through this or that fad-of-the-moment. One of the longest such engagements was Quality Control Circles, which was a good idea, but for the wrong audience and the wrong time with very mixed results.
If it were the 1945-1955 period, it would have been a colossal idea, but it was launched in the 1980s when the workforce had changed the color of its color from blue to white, and 80 to 90 percent of a company’s employees were in the process of getting a higher education degree or already degreed, often in technical fields.
This, mind you, was before the computer took over and the personal became even more impersonal.
It isn't only people like Dan Brown who have successfully chased myths and made bundles for the trouble. Brown is famous for the de Vinci Code, but Tom Peters is equally famous for "a search for excellence" fame. Most of the companies he profiled, however, have crashed and burned or have been absorbed by hedge funds, split up and sold for huge profits. No leadership in this equation.
Leadership cannot be found in what a CEO did or didn't do, nor can excellence be searched for like a pony in a haystack.
Leadership has always been about people, not persons; and excellence is something you create, not something you search for.
You only have to look at the mess the federal government has made in attempting to manage the unmanageable with the broad umbrella of "Homeland Security," or the military trying to solve ancient political and tribal problems with military might, alone. Indeed, when you think things can't get worse, they do.
So, what is the answer?
The answer has been staring us in the face forever.
People are the key, not markets, not global economies, but people.
People are the leaders of what they do. They need the training, support, trust, consistency in policy and fairness in promotion and discipline to make them feel in charge of their work and therefore in charge of and responsible for the results.
Well, you’ve heard all that before so tell me something new?
The new is that people are the key, and this is simply an introduction to what lies behind that door. But before we turn the lock, we need to examine some detritus.
It all went haywire when children were all awarded is school and play equally for unequal performance. Fairness is a brutal concept.
When I was a freshman in college, there were about 3,000 of us. A little more than a third of those that started with me graduated with me. Many flunked out. In those days, students couldn't take the course over to change their grade. They had to live with their failure, and move on.
Today hardly anyone fails at anything and therefore few actually succeed in a real sense. They cope. They hang in there to retirement, or they become hardened and bitter and recalcitrant.
I'm not just talking about working stiffs on the line and in administration. I'm talking about CEOs that fail again and again, but never suffer for their failure, because, you see, there is this old boys' club that doesn't want to strangle the golden goose.
While people are writing books on leadership, and always thinking of it in terms of persons in the singular and not people in the plural, a false economy moves higher and higher on imported cheap goods and tighter and tighter bottom lines that only impact the people in the plural, not persons in the singular, not the CEOs, not the so-called "leaders."
We don't have leaders. We have pontiffs. And pontiffs are always attempting to solidify their power, confident that tradition will support them, while accepting collateral damage such as redundancy, merging, streamlining, and whatever new nomenclature is invented to cover their failure as the price of doing business.
I am heading for Europe, which is a microcosm of the US in about every way, and is apparently caving in to the same detritus. Take the Roman Catholic Church of Rome.
We don't have enough trouble with Islam, but Pope Benedict XVI has taken this moment to claim the primacy of Catholicism. He now is driving a wedge between Catholics and Protestants and Jews that Pope John XXIII attempted to repair with the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.
Pope Benedict is even going further by bringing back the Latin Mass to the enthusiastic approval of such conservatives as Patrick Buchanan, who incidentally once ran for president of the US.
In the more than seven decades of my life, leaders of the church and state and business have played quick and dirty with my conscience and loyalty, and I am not alone. Science has done the same by saying "we should do this" and then later say "we shouldn't," as they float in the same surreal world of their collective hubris.
People in the plural are caught in this quagmire.
There is a syndicated voice, a man named David Brooks, who seems to sees this with engaging clarity. He writes a syndicated column from his New York Times desk, and can be seen weekly on the "News Hour with Jim Leherer" on PBS television.
Today's column wasn't about leaders, but people in the plural, specifically young women and their music. He mentioned three songs and how these songs depict modern women in terms of dissonance and disconnection. He writes:
“This character is hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fed-up, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving. She’s like one of those battle-hardened combat vets, who’s had the sentimentality beaten out of her and who no longer has time for romance or etiquette.
“This character is obviously a product of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups. It’s also a product of the free-floating anger that’s part of the climate of the decade.”
He continues, “Once, young people came a-calling as part of courtship. Then they had dating and going steady. But the rules of courtship have dissolved. They’ve been replaced by ambiguity and uncertainty. Cell phones, Facebook and text messages give people access to hundreds of ‘friends.’ That only increases the fluidity, drama and anxiety.”
I mention this column and these remarks in this context because these young people are the litmus test of our society. It has gravitated to this, and it won’t change by declaring the primacy of a faith, or bringing back a Latin Mass. Nor will it change by celebrating the achievements of a few who have led businesses to profitabilty, often under suspect clouds.
Society, and the people that make up society are being punished by their leaders for not behaving instead of the leaders attempting to understand how things have gotten out of hand.
People need intimacy, need to belong, need to feel they are part of something bigger than themselves. They need to love in order to be loving. They need to trust themselves and often the reason they distrust themselves so badly is because of misplaced trust in their leadership.
If it sounds as if I have a harangue against the Roman Catholic Church, I would be misread. My soul has been cauterized by this faith, and I have come to accept that its programming, discipline, and continuity are as much apart of my writing as my spirit. I mention this only to gauge the context of this content. It is because of my church that I’ve always been fascinated with leadership.
Leadership, I have found, does not know itself because it projects the ideal of being rational, cognitive, disciplined and temperate, when all the transitions from stuckness to unstuckness have come when the temperate spirit was let loose into a fire in the mind. Martin Luther comes to mind in that sense. He would not be happy with Pope Benedict.
____________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). Check with the publisher for more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
Thursday, July 12, 2007
A MEASURE OF STUCKNESS: The Forgotten Legacy of Our Ideas!
A MEASURE OF STUCKNESS: The Forgotten Legacy of Our Ideas!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Do diddle di do,
Poor Jim Jay
Got stuck fast
In Yesterday.”
Walter De La Mare (1973 – 1956), English poet and novelist
Now that we are engaged in the quadrennial madness of presidential campaigning for the presidency, which is eighteen months away, but in which only the coin counting mafia are likely to survive to convention time next year, we might reflect on the legacy of some ideas.
The hopefuls talk is of change, of a fresh view of things, and decisive answers to the most perplexing problems of the time, while stuck in empty rhetoric.
Presidential campaigners smile a lot, are well organized, and know how to get people to pledge their hard earned money for their campaigns. It is a cultural carnival atmosphere that has been going on for more than two hundred years in this country, reaching new levels of absurdity and profligacy with each passing quadrennial cycle.
Campaigners are likely to spend a combined total of $1 billion before their respective party conventions to nominate a person for the office of the Presidency of the United States. Whomever is nominated and subsequently elected, that person no longer has a free ride toward cavalier foreign engagements.
A voice out of the past once swam against the current of the sharks. A hundred years before the Iraq War this American said:
"The transformation of native friendliness to execration; the demoralization of our army, from the war office down – forgery decorated, torture whitewashed, massacre condoned; the creation of a chronic anarchy, the deliberate reinflaming on our part ancient tribal animosities. These things, I say, or things like them, were clearly foretold. "
He was speaking of the American invasion of the Philippines in 1903 and the bloody and embarrassing consequences of that action. America was in quest of being taken seriously by the world community. This found it embracing the hubris and hegemony of empire, for which the Greeks, Romans, Spanish and English had set precedence.
On another occasion, 1896, Theodore Roosevelt, then commissioner of police in New York City, questioned the patriotism of anyone who dare criticize President Grover Cleveland’s belligerent policy in Venezuela. Teddy Roosevelt's bust now graces Mount Rushmore, a man who sounded suspiciously Cheneyist more than one hundred years ago.
Again, this man who found himself in the land of stuckness had the audacity to publish a public letter stating “that in this university we shall be patriotic enough not to remain passive while the destinies of our country are being settled by surprise.”
Five years and counting after the commencement of the War in Afghanistan and Iraq, these words echo a tired and unheeded refrain.
George Orwell is famous for saying, "in the new state peace will mean war," but this man said it a half century before Orwell’s novel “1984” was published in 1948.
Then there is the trio of Sigmund Freud and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf who are famous for their twentieth century “stream of consciousness” thinking and writing. This man invented the term, as well as the philosophy and psychology behind it in 1884.
Who was this man who was out ahead of so many others?
Well, for starters, he was a peculiar duck. He looked backward to see ahead, being behind or beside or above his contemporaries in thought, idea and deed.
He was the weird son of an even weirder father, a father who inherited so much wealth that he never had to work, and didn’t want his children to work either, but to explore and travel and become immersed in other cultures, languages, religions and traditions.
The father was a devotee of the esoteric and the bizarre, and so was this son, bouncing hither and yon between science and mysticism, while entertaining and even coming to believe some of the signature crackpots of his day.
How could someone with such a disorderly youth come to have such an orderly mind?
Simple. He was never stuck while remaining vulnerable to quacks all his life.
He was an enigma, an individual, and an explorer with his own moral compass without a roadmap.
His father led the way flitting from Calvinism to Transcendentalism to Fourierism to Free Love, writing unwanted and unread books about them all. This famous son was even more adventuresome and some of his madness has come to stay with us as the pathology of our current normalcy.
For instance, he ran experiments on himself from electric shock treatment, to the injection of serums from bull or goat testicles, practiced hypnotism and anesthetic trance, experimented with mind cures and consumed various mood-altering chemicals.
These drugs included mescal, chloral hydrate, amyl nitrate, veronal, and chloroform. Clearly, he had his psychedelic "Sixties" about a century earlier.
He also regularly attended séances and was a strong supporter of the Society for Psychical Research, convinced that he could communicate with his dead friend “from the other side.”
He was a great fan of the borderline kook Gustav Fechner, who thought the earth was divine and should be prayed to, as well as the outright crank Benjamin Blood, who promoted anesthetic trances and held that each letter of the alphabet has its own personality.
How did such an eccentric man become, which he did, the major American thinker of his time?
Even today, he is vastly read with many of his ideas so solid in the American consciousness that they are accepted as givens without thinking such as pragmatism – i.e., the pursuit of the possible with purpose, will and habit. For our devotion to this idea, Americans are known as “pragmatists” around the world.
He became a doctor of medicine, who never practiced medicine, a professor who influenced the thinking of other great men such as W.E.B. Dubois, George Santayana, and Bernard Berenson. For this, we acclaim him as the father of American psychology and pragmatic philosophy.
What set him apart was he wasn’t afraid to be different, wasn’t afraid to grow, change, sort out life’s ambiguities and discover his art and science in the mix, which Americans have subsequently adopted largely as their own.
He never claimed to be finished, or comfortable with where or what he was. He was constantly experimenting to experience resurrection and rebirth. He didn’t just serve up ideas; he measured them, and for it he touched truth.
I am speaking of William James, the quintessential American of more than a century ago, a man who doesn’t fit comfortably into any stereotype. Even when he believed passionately in another man, say Emerson, or an idea, say eclectic rather than systematic philosophy, he was not blind to Emerson’s shortcomings or the limits of his own radical thought.
Nor was James in any sense a perfect man. He was volatile, easily bored, and moody, subject to depression and insomnia. He was also something of a hypochondriac. In his quest for new ideas, he often neglected his wife and children. And he could be rude bordering on insulting, as in the case when he rejected an invitation to become a member of the American Philosophical Society. Not only did he reject the invitation, but he also found it necessary to be insulting to its members.
Yet, in general, because of his lack of false airs and openness, he was likable, approachable, and respected because he was real.
The darkness he saw in the motivation of the high and mighty sometimes encouraged his critics to see him as a heavy handed pessimist and cynic, which couldn’t be further from the truth. He simply carried the DNA genetic code of the America spirit in his genes. As a consequence, he has never been forgotten or his ideas ignored.
His first book, The Principles of Psychology (1890) is still in print. It established the sphere of his thought and his concrete observations on consciousness, its complexity and the fringes of subliminal or unconscious awareness around it. He was abreast of Freud’s views, but didn’t get into the messiness of therapeutic speculation that has encumbered Freud’s legacy.
Later, he subjected religion to his pragmatic test in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901 – 1902), which mounted the difficult question: does religion work? He concluded it does.
Religion, to his thinking, wasn’t the source of the world’s troubles, but quite the reverse. Religion is its antidote. The politics of religion is its curse.
We all share the legacy of his influence, a legacy founded on never being stuck, never being imprisoned by convention, never being afraid to embrace the weird or the absurd to find a kernel of meaning in what otherwise seems meaningless.
William James was authentically American, and his kind is unlikely to be found on the current campaign trail. The reason?
He culled a philosophy out of the detritus of his life, while these candidates are mouthing words, ideas and causes designed for popular acclaim without such a foundation, demonstrating a measure of stuckness that he never experienced, and would pain him now to know.
_________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Do diddle di do,
Poor Jim Jay
Got stuck fast
In Yesterday.”
Walter De La Mare (1973 – 1956), English poet and novelist
Now that we are engaged in the quadrennial madness of presidential campaigning for the presidency, which is eighteen months away, but in which only the coin counting mafia are likely to survive to convention time next year, we might reflect on the legacy of some ideas.
The hopefuls talk is of change, of a fresh view of things, and decisive answers to the most perplexing problems of the time, while stuck in empty rhetoric.
Presidential campaigners smile a lot, are well organized, and know how to get people to pledge their hard earned money for their campaigns. It is a cultural carnival atmosphere that has been going on for more than two hundred years in this country, reaching new levels of absurdity and profligacy with each passing quadrennial cycle.
Campaigners are likely to spend a combined total of $1 billion before their respective party conventions to nominate a person for the office of the Presidency of the United States. Whomever is nominated and subsequently elected, that person no longer has a free ride toward cavalier foreign engagements.
A voice out of the past once swam against the current of the sharks. A hundred years before the Iraq War this American said:
"The transformation of native friendliness to execration; the demoralization of our army, from the war office down – forgery decorated, torture whitewashed, massacre condoned; the creation of a chronic anarchy, the deliberate reinflaming on our part ancient tribal animosities. These things, I say, or things like them, were clearly foretold. "
He was speaking of the American invasion of the Philippines in 1903 and the bloody and embarrassing consequences of that action. America was in quest of being taken seriously by the world community. This found it embracing the hubris and hegemony of empire, for which the Greeks, Romans, Spanish and English had set precedence.
On another occasion, 1896, Theodore Roosevelt, then commissioner of police in New York City, questioned the patriotism of anyone who dare criticize President Grover Cleveland’s belligerent policy in Venezuela. Teddy Roosevelt's bust now graces Mount Rushmore, a man who sounded suspiciously Cheneyist more than one hundred years ago.
Again, this man who found himself in the land of stuckness had the audacity to publish a public letter stating “that in this university we shall be patriotic enough not to remain passive while the destinies of our country are being settled by surprise.”
Five years and counting after the commencement of the War in Afghanistan and Iraq, these words echo a tired and unheeded refrain.
George Orwell is famous for saying, "in the new state peace will mean war," but this man said it a half century before Orwell’s novel “1984” was published in 1948.
Then there is the trio of Sigmund Freud and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf who are famous for their twentieth century “stream of consciousness” thinking and writing. This man invented the term, as well as the philosophy and psychology behind it in 1884.
Who was this man who was out ahead of so many others?
Well, for starters, he was a peculiar duck. He looked backward to see ahead, being behind or beside or above his contemporaries in thought, idea and deed.
He was the weird son of an even weirder father, a father who inherited so much wealth that he never had to work, and didn’t want his children to work either, but to explore and travel and become immersed in other cultures, languages, religions and traditions.
The father was a devotee of the esoteric and the bizarre, and so was this son, bouncing hither and yon between science and mysticism, while entertaining and even coming to believe some of the signature crackpots of his day.
How could someone with such a disorderly youth come to have such an orderly mind?
Simple. He was never stuck while remaining vulnerable to quacks all his life.
He was an enigma, an individual, and an explorer with his own moral compass without a roadmap.
His father led the way flitting from Calvinism to Transcendentalism to Fourierism to Free Love, writing unwanted and unread books about them all. This famous son was even more adventuresome and some of his madness has come to stay with us as the pathology of our current normalcy.
For instance, he ran experiments on himself from electric shock treatment, to the injection of serums from bull or goat testicles, practiced hypnotism and anesthetic trance, experimented with mind cures and consumed various mood-altering chemicals.
These drugs included mescal, chloral hydrate, amyl nitrate, veronal, and chloroform. Clearly, he had his psychedelic "Sixties" about a century earlier.
He also regularly attended séances and was a strong supporter of the Society for Psychical Research, convinced that he could communicate with his dead friend “from the other side.”
He was a great fan of the borderline kook Gustav Fechner, who thought the earth was divine and should be prayed to, as well as the outright crank Benjamin Blood, who promoted anesthetic trances and held that each letter of the alphabet has its own personality.
How did such an eccentric man become, which he did, the major American thinker of his time?
Even today, he is vastly read with many of his ideas so solid in the American consciousness that they are accepted as givens without thinking such as pragmatism – i.e., the pursuit of the possible with purpose, will and habit. For our devotion to this idea, Americans are known as “pragmatists” around the world.
He became a doctor of medicine, who never practiced medicine, a professor who influenced the thinking of other great men such as W.E.B. Dubois, George Santayana, and Bernard Berenson. For this, we acclaim him as the father of American psychology and pragmatic philosophy.
What set him apart was he wasn’t afraid to be different, wasn’t afraid to grow, change, sort out life’s ambiguities and discover his art and science in the mix, which Americans have subsequently adopted largely as their own.
He never claimed to be finished, or comfortable with where or what he was. He was constantly experimenting to experience resurrection and rebirth. He didn’t just serve up ideas; he measured them, and for it he touched truth.
I am speaking of William James, the quintessential American of more than a century ago, a man who doesn’t fit comfortably into any stereotype. Even when he believed passionately in another man, say Emerson, or an idea, say eclectic rather than systematic philosophy, he was not blind to Emerson’s shortcomings or the limits of his own radical thought.
Nor was James in any sense a perfect man. He was volatile, easily bored, and moody, subject to depression and insomnia. He was also something of a hypochondriac. In his quest for new ideas, he often neglected his wife and children. And he could be rude bordering on insulting, as in the case when he rejected an invitation to become a member of the American Philosophical Society. Not only did he reject the invitation, but he also found it necessary to be insulting to its members.
Yet, in general, because of his lack of false airs and openness, he was likable, approachable, and respected because he was real.
The darkness he saw in the motivation of the high and mighty sometimes encouraged his critics to see him as a heavy handed pessimist and cynic, which couldn’t be further from the truth. He simply carried the DNA genetic code of the America spirit in his genes. As a consequence, he has never been forgotten or his ideas ignored.
His first book, The Principles of Psychology (1890) is still in print. It established the sphere of his thought and his concrete observations on consciousness, its complexity and the fringes of subliminal or unconscious awareness around it. He was abreast of Freud’s views, but didn’t get into the messiness of therapeutic speculation that has encumbered Freud’s legacy.
Later, he subjected religion to his pragmatic test in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901 – 1902), which mounted the difficult question: does religion work? He concluded it does.
Religion, to his thinking, wasn’t the source of the world’s troubles, but quite the reverse. Religion is its antidote. The politics of religion is its curse.
We all share the legacy of his influence, a legacy founded on never being stuck, never being imprisoned by convention, never being afraid to embrace the weird or the absurd to find a kernel of meaning in what otherwise seems meaningless.
William James was authentically American, and his kind is unlikely to be found on the current campaign trail. The reason?
He culled a philosophy out of the detritus of his life, while these candidates are mouthing words, ideas and causes designed for popular acclaim without such a foundation, demonstrating a measure of stuckness that he never experienced, and would pain him now to know.
_________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
SUCCESS WARREN BUFFET STYLE -- WOULD YOU HIDE ME?
SUCCESS WARREN BUFFET STYLE -- WOULD YOU HIDE ME?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Success is not a measure of what you get but what you give.”
Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, and a billionaire many times over, prefers to talk to young people who are attempting to figure out their life’s plan rather than rich people who want only to get richer.
“They are primarily interested in how I can improve their portfolio,” he confesses, “because they have this narrow sense of what success is or what it entails.”
This is how this kind man began to answer a student who asked the question how would he define success.
Mr. Buffet smiled that kindly grandfatherly smile of his, and said, “I’d like to tell you a story about what I consider success, and I think it might surprise you.”
The story he told was of a friend of his who had survived the Nazi Holocaust. She was a little girl then, now in her seventies. She lost her parents and relatives in concentration camps in 1942, but managed to survive because others were willing at great risk to themselves to hide her.
“I have come to believe the absolute measure of success is simply that,” she told Mr. Buffet, “would someone be willing to hide you at great risk to themselves?”
It got the great philanthropist to ponder the question. He wondered, would my friends hide me? Would my family hide me? Would my children hide me if there were pressing danger and involve great personal risk to them?
This, for him, was the ultimate question. Would others show the compassion and caring, kindness and concern to shelter you from your enemies, from the terror that formed a ring of danger around you, from the hostile world that was collapsing in on you? They would be there, he concluded, when you had nowhere else to turn or to go, if you had been there for them in the conduct of your life.
Then he grew philosophical. To have a friend you must be a friend. To have others take risks and hide you, to consider you part of them and integral to them, there must be some semblance of behavior that exemplifies your life as complement to theirs.
Being successfully hidden at great risk to others would prove your inclusion in their community.
You cannot write a check for a $1 million and expect others to hide you.
You cannot intimate others to hide you when you have used race, religion, ethnicity, economics or politics to separate you from them.
They will hide you because you are part of them and they are part of you, and that is so because your life has been a textbook of caring, of doing for others what they cannot do for themselves, for showing kindness and understanding, tolerance and concern for others less fortunate who cannot seem to keep up, or who encounter misfortune through no fault of their own.
You have shown in your life that you are not separate from others, that you do not consider yourself better than others because you are richer or brighter, more accomplished or celebrated.
If that is the case, they will hide you. No success is greater than being hidden from your oppressors so that you can triumph another day.
Then he grew serious with his head bowed, and confessed that many still equate success with how much they have and not how much they can give of themselves to others.
They cheat and steal, bare false witness and lie to realize advantage over others, never dreaming of the day that they might need to be hidden from their enemies, enemies that chase and seek them out to crush and kill them, when their only crime had been being insensitive to the plight of other less fortunate.
Warren Buffet has willed the bulk of his multibillion dollar estate to the Bill & Kathy Gates Foundation, where he applauds the great work they are doing for others, work that he admits, he has not the organizational or delivery skills that they possess. A humble man, Warren Buffet is a humanitarian, who wears this badge quietly and unobtrusively. No question, he would be hidden.
______________
Dr. Fisher’s most recent book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/.
.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Success is not a measure of what you get but what you give.”
Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, and a billionaire many times over, prefers to talk to young people who are attempting to figure out their life’s plan rather than rich people who want only to get richer.
“They are primarily interested in how I can improve their portfolio,” he confesses, “because they have this narrow sense of what success is or what it entails.”
This is how this kind man began to answer a student who asked the question how would he define success.
Mr. Buffet smiled that kindly grandfatherly smile of his, and said, “I’d like to tell you a story about what I consider success, and I think it might surprise you.”
The story he told was of a friend of his who had survived the Nazi Holocaust. She was a little girl then, now in her seventies. She lost her parents and relatives in concentration camps in 1942, but managed to survive because others were willing at great risk to themselves to hide her.
“I have come to believe the absolute measure of success is simply that,” she told Mr. Buffet, “would someone be willing to hide you at great risk to themselves?”
It got the great philanthropist to ponder the question. He wondered, would my friends hide me? Would my family hide me? Would my children hide me if there were pressing danger and involve great personal risk to them?
This, for him, was the ultimate question. Would others show the compassion and caring, kindness and concern to shelter you from your enemies, from the terror that formed a ring of danger around you, from the hostile world that was collapsing in on you? They would be there, he concluded, when you had nowhere else to turn or to go, if you had been there for them in the conduct of your life.
Then he grew philosophical. To have a friend you must be a friend. To have others take risks and hide you, to consider you part of them and integral to them, there must be some semblance of behavior that exemplifies your life as complement to theirs.
Being successfully hidden at great risk to others would prove your inclusion in their community.
You cannot write a check for a $1 million and expect others to hide you.
You cannot intimate others to hide you when you have used race, religion, ethnicity, economics or politics to separate you from them.
They will hide you because you are part of them and they are part of you, and that is so because your life has been a textbook of caring, of doing for others what they cannot do for themselves, for showing kindness and understanding, tolerance and concern for others less fortunate who cannot seem to keep up, or who encounter misfortune through no fault of their own.
You have shown in your life that you are not separate from others, that you do not consider yourself better than others because you are richer or brighter, more accomplished or celebrated.
If that is the case, they will hide you. No success is greater than being hidden from your oppressors so that you can triumph another day.
Then he grew serious with his head bowed, and confessed that many still equate success with how much they have and not how much they can give of themselves to others.
They cheat and steal, bare false witness and lie to realize advantage over others, never dreaming of the day that they might need to be hidden from their enemies, enemies that chase and seek them out to crush and kill them, when their only crime had been being insensitive to the plight of other less fortunate.
Warren Buffet has willed the bulk of his multibillion dollar estate to the Bill & Kathy Gates Foundation, where he applauds the great work they are doing for others, work that he admits, he has not the organizational or delivery skills that they possess. A humble man, Warren Buffet is a humanitarian, who wears this badge quietly and unobtrusively. No question, he would be hidden.
______________
Dr. Fisher’s most recent book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/.
.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
CORPOCRACY & SMOKING -- GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER!
CORPOCRACY & SMOKING – GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Health is the greatest of all possessions; a pale cobble is better than a sick king.”
Isaac Bickerstaff (1735 – 1812), English dramatist
ABSTRACT:
We are packing to move on to Europe for a cruise in the Baltic Sea, visiting old haunts in England, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Finland, and some new ones in Estonia and Russia.
You have come to know me as a writer-in-cyberspace with what I read, think and reflect against the tapestry of my life.
Reading has always provoked thinking and reflection against that experience. I do this not so much to put you in touch with me as to put you in touch with yourself.
It is hard for us to give ourselves permission to reflect on our lives other than what that Great Seer in the Sky, the corporation, tells us we should think, feel, believe, as well as what is true and what is not, therefore, how we should behave.
I am a product of that corporation but have never joined it. From an early age, I was suspect of it motives, choosing instead to use it as my laboratory. This is made clear in my writings. Indeed, I’ve taken comfort in being an outsider in a world craving to be insiders, and have known a kind of freedom for the detachment.
This brings me to the subject of this missive, smoking and the cigarette industry. Allan M. Brandt does a valuable public service in his new book, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (Basic Books 2007). Some of his research and insights appear here, along with my continuing weariness of corpocracy, the new dominant force that touches us all. The cigarette industry is but one aspect of this colossus.
WHAT CIGARETTE SMOKING DOES
Repeated exposure to nicotine distorts the brain system responsible for cognitive awareness, and a sense of well-being, so that the smoker comes to crave the chemical.
WHO SMOKES?
Smoking rates are especially high among the poor and the mentally ill, perhaps because they can afford few other consolations and because the mild antidepressant effects of smoking make quitting especially difficult. Yet, across the board, one in five adult Americans today (2007) of all socioeconomic circumstances continues to smoke.
WHEN DID WE KNOW SMOKING WAS OF HIGH RISK?
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, practically everyone knew that smoking was risky. What they didn't know was that smoking was extremely risky.
Smokers who consume a pack of cigarettes a day are fifty times more likely to contract lung cancer than nonsmokers. According to the American Cancer Society, "about half of all Americans who persist in continuing to smoke will die because of the habit."
Diseases related to tobacco account for 20 percent of all deaths in the United States each year.
WHEN DID CORPORATE MALFEASANCE REACH ITS MOST CALLOUS LEVEL?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Health is the greatest of all possessions; a pale cobble is better than a sick king.”
Isaac Bickerstaff (1735 – 1812), English dramatist
ABSTRACT:
We are packing to move on to Europe for a cruise in the Baltic Sea, visiting old haunts in England, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Finland, and some new ones in Estonia and Russia.
You have come to know me as a writer-in-cyberspace with what I read, think and reflect against the tapestry of my life.
Reading has always provoked thinking and reflection against that experience. I do this not so much to put you in touch with me as to put you in touch with yourself.
It is hard for us to give ourselves permission to reflect on our lives other than what that Great Seer in the Sky, the corporation, tells us we should think, feel, believe, as well as what is true and what is not, therefore, how we should behave.
I am a product of that corporation but have never joined it. From an early age, I was suspect of it motives, choosing instead to use it as my laboratory. This is made clear in my writings. Indeed, I’ve taken comfort in being an outsider in a world craving to be insiders, and have known a kind of freedom for the detachment.
This brings me to the subject of this missive, smoking and the cigarette industry. Allan M. Brandt does a valuable public service in his new book, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (Basic Books 2007). Some of his research and insights appear here, along with my continuing weariness of corpocracy, the new dominant force that touches us all. The cigarette industry is but one aspect of this colossus.
WHAT CIGARETTE SMOKING DOES
Repeated exposure to nicotine distorts the brain system responsible for cognitive awareness, and a sense of well-being, so that the smoker comes to crave the chemical.
WHO SMOKES?
Smoking rates are especially high among the poor and the mentally ill, perhaps because they can afford few other consolations and because the mild antidepressant effects of smoking make quitting especially difficult. Yet, across the board, one in five adult Americans today (2007) of all socioeconomic circumstances continues to smoke.
WHEN DID WE KNOW SMOKING WAS OF HIGH RISK?
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, practically everyone knew that smoking was risky. What they didn't know was that smoking was extremely risky.
Smokers who consume a pack of cigarettes a day are fifty times more likely to contract lung cancer than nonsmokers. According to the American Cancer Society, "about half of all Americans who persist in continuing to smoke will die because of the habit."
Diseases related to tobacco account for 20 percent of all deaths in the United States each year.
WHEN DID CORPORATE MALFEASANCE REACH ITS MOST CALLOUS LEVEL?
Beginning in the 1980s, a number of former smokers suffering from cancer sued the tobacco companies for having misled them about just how dangerous smoking was.
For a corporation to withhold accurate health information is not only against the law, it is also a violation of human rights, according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Facing ruin, tobacco companies launched an army of corporate attorneys on these former smokers and won many of their cases, and even when they lost, the resulting settlements forced them to change their message but not their devious tactics.
The cigarette industry’s main legal defense was based on an illogical set of assumptions: the risks of smoking were “unproven”; that consumers had been sufficiently warned about whatever risks existed, and thus the companies were not responsible for health problems. Some juries were actually convinced by these arguments.
WHEN DID IT ALL START?
The first mass-produced cigarettes appeared on the market in the 1880s in the United States. But cigarette smoking in America really took off after World War I. The nation was changing rapidly from ethnic concentrated communities into local communities with largely local economies driven by a new mass consumer culture.
The corporation was born which increasingly fed, clothed, transported, and entertained the masses under the broad umbrella of corpocracy.
Assembly-line production in everything from hand tools to automobiles to toothpaste enabled companies to produce goods ever more cheaply with brand advertising through newspapers, magazines and the radio vastly expanding their markets into every cranny of society.
At the same time, America’s moral climate was also changing becoming increasingly secular and individualistic. Smoking once considered vulgar and a degenerate habit, limited to people on the fringe such as merchant marine sailors, bourgeoisie artists and the dregs of society, came to symbolize the new liberated optimists of the 1920s. Everybody who was anybody smoked!
The themes of cigarette advertising were carefree, slick and therapeutic. Chesterfield cigarettes associated its product with sex, depicting couples languishing in the moonlight. “Blow my way,” the woman says, to her man who is smoking a cigarette. Philip Morris aimed at the sophisticated smoker; Lucky Strikes appealed to women on the rise with playfully rebellious slogans: “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”
Already in the 1930s, with suspicion about the damaging health effects of smoking and cancer, there began to grow more of a reassuring and “scientific” tone to the marketing of cigarettes.
Doctors were featured heavily in advertisements. In one ad for Camels, a handsome young physician wearing a head-mirror advises, “Give your throat a vacation. Smoke a Camel.” In another ad, an older doctor with a warm smile and a pince-nez holds a pack of Lucky Strikes and states, “20,679 Physicians say, ‘Luckies are less irritating.”
In the 1950s, when I was in college, practically every professor smoked in class as well as 90 percent of the women. Curiously, far less men appeared to smoke in class for some reason. Everything was seen through the smoke of this classroom haze. You would think a nonsmoker, such as myself, would complain, but we took it as part of the ambience to a college education.
Even so, by the 1950s, a link was revealed between smoking and lung cancer by epidemiological studies in England (Richard Doll and Austen Bradford Hill) and the United States (Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham). Moreover, they discovered lung cancer had tripled in just thirty years (1920 – 1950).
People were dying, but strangely enough, it failed to create much excitement, although an article in “The Reader’s Digest” had the caption “Cancer by the Carton.” Not to worry,
Americans demonstrated their insouciance by increasing their smoking rate in the 1950s by 20 percent.
WHY DON’T PEOPLE LISTEN TO HEALTH WARNINGS?
There is still no clear answer today. Some claim Americans are fatalistic, “You’ve got to die from something, why not enjoy it with cancer sticks?”
The clearest evidence -- despite the attempts of health promoters to direct volumes of research to the mind of the smoker, and to show the clear habitual nature of smoking -- is that the tobacco companies have cut them off at the pass.
Cigarette manufacturers have been highly successful in launching campaigns of half-truths and outright falsehoods to cast doubt on lung cancer studies. This has given people the impression that the habit cannot be all that dangerous if there is so much controversy around these studies.
Yet, smokers and nonsmokers, alike, know of someone within their intimate circle that has died of emphysema or some other smoking related illness. The danger is huge and there is little justification for controversy.
My own mother died of emphysema. Otherwise, she was the picture of health. It was not pretty to watch her die, as I have written (In the Shadow of the Courthouse AuthorHouse 2003). Yet, when I talked to my mother’s nurse, and said, “Seeing this would convince any smoker to quit.” She looked at me, and said simply, “I smoke,” and walked away.
Tobacco companies in 1953 issued a frank statement to cigarette smoking, which was published across the country in newspapers. The statement claimed emphatically that cigarette smoking was not injurious to heath, and that more research was needed into the question.
In typical corpocracy fashion, the industry created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC). This was meant to create the impression the industry was taking the health issue seriously. Its main function proved however to be public relations.
Having once been in research & development, I can imagine some underpaid scientists willing to receive tobacco company grants “to find possible evidence of a link between smoking and cancer,” and then to publish their “findings” with the full support of their grantors.
Part of my work in R& D was to find ways to circumvent patents held by competitors, whereas these scientists working for tobacco companies were often subtly encouraged to use these grants to search for causes of cancer other than cigarettes, for example, possible genetic or environmental linkages. They were even encouraged to find beneficial effects of smoking.
When these tobacco company-funded researchers found evidence that cigarette smoke was loaded with carcinogens, their results were suppressed. Incredibly, none of these scientists complained.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that a small number of tobacco-industry “whistle-blowers” came forward. Still, nothing changed. TIRC continued to issue the mantra: “There is no conclusive proof of a link between smoking and cancer,” although the tobacco industry had such proof locked safely away.
In the midst of this, the tobacco industry benefited from a general skepticism on the part of the public concerning statistics, and from the opposition of doctors toward the science of epidemiology, a relatively new discipline.
At the time, few doctors were trained in either statistics or epidemiology, and some may have sensed that the epidemiologists posed a threat to their position as the premier authorities on health issues.
In fact in the 1960s, the American Medical Association, a corpocracy in its own right, accepted $15 million in research grants from the TIRC, and then maintained from this research that the links between smoking and cancer were “unproven.”
This was despite the US Surgeon General in 1964 issuing a report confirming the linkage. The following year Congress passed the Cigarette Labeling Act, which eventually was watered down to a “warning” by the successful lobbying of tobacco companies.
The charade continued. A growing number of brands now came out with filtered versions. Filters are cosmetic and do not reduce the risks of smoking, but half of smokers believed they did.
“Light” cigarettes were marketed as “milder” when they were more addictive because the increased nicotine. Interestingly enough, the tobacco industry never claimed “low-tar” cigarettes were safer. The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association did it instead, claiming low-tar brands “were below the critical threshold of risk of disease.” There was scant evidence at the time in support of this claim, which we now know to be absolutely false.
In the midst of all this jockeying, tobacco companies put doctors and health on the shelf and returned to their original theme of cigarette smoking being more fun and an expression of freedom, rebellion and a ticket to inclusive company.
WHEN THE FANTASY BUBBLE BURST
By the 1980s, a smoker was dying every eight seconds somewhere in the United States. Cigarettes were killing more than 400,000 Americans every year.
Meanwhile, individuals and states launched suits against the tobacco companies. Not to be deterred, CEOs of these companies appeared imperiously confident before the US Congress, and challenged these figures while claiming cigarette smoking was safe.
Too many people were dying, many of them public figures, for this performance to prevent the fantasy bubble from bursting. In 1985, a New Jersey judge ruled that the public had a “right to know what the tobacco companies knew and know about the risks of cigarette smoking and what it did or did not do with regard to that knowledge.”
It turned out that the industry had for years suppressed its own research linking cigarettes to cancer.
In the 1970s, it had developed a cigarette that was safer but never marketed because it would amount to admitting guilt.
Then there was the problem that “low-tar” cigarettes contained less nicotine, and therefore were less addictive. So what did some companies in the industry do? They added more nicotine to their “Light” brands.
Today, smoking rates are down by 50 percent from the high of the 1960s. Some 40 million Americans have quit smoking; yet million of Americans still smoke.
More importantly, it appears that lung cancer rates have finally peaked. It is now apparent that changes in behavior are possible when people have the right warnings and sufficient supportive information to convince them that they should change. The horror is that until the twenty-first century most Americans had neither; nor do billions of people around the world that continue to smoke at alarming rates.
GENIUS OF CORPOCRACY
The genius of tobacco companies is that the industry continues to be successful in attracting “replacement smokers,” a euphemism for teenagers and young adults. These smokers have a sense of immortality with years ahead of them “to quit,” failing to realize they are being ticketed to replace dead smokers.
One of the many cruelties of smoking-related illnesses today is that smokers have a sense of shame for being so crippled by the disease of smoking, as if they deserve their fate, as if they, alone, are responsible for their cupidity. The disembodied corporation is by implication exonerated, after all, it is just a business confined to legal and not moral statues.
Few realize how heartlessly corpocracy has lied to smokers, how it has confused them with its campaign of reassurance; how it has abandoned them with this cavalier sentiment:
“Nobody forced smokers to smoke. In accordance with the law, we posted warnings on the cigarette cartons for them to read.” Therefore, we are neither complicit in nor responsible for their fate. It belongs wholly to them, the smokers.”
_______________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A Look Back To See Ahead (2007). For information regarding this book, contact http://www.authorhouse.com/.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
REFLECTIONS ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, JULY 4, 2007
REFLECTIONS ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, JULY 4, 2007
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS!
The Tampa Tribune on this Fourth of July in the year 2007 has an editorial cartoon on its editorial page created by someone named "Stanto."
The boxed picture to the left shows the "Founding Fathers" around an ornate table in formal dress of the late eighteenth century with the boxed caption, "LEADERS, THEN."
The boxed picture to the right shows the same ornate room and setting with virtually every seat empty with the simple caption, "TODAY."
It is no less than the great French leader Napoleon Bonaparte who is attributed to have said, "A picture is worth a thousand words." Indeed.
LEADERSHIP'S WISTFUL MIND
I have labored through many articles and books to point out this blatant void, as has Lee Iacocca of automotive fame. Iacocca's book on "where are the leaders" is no less tiring than my missives of a similar complaint. The oxygen has gone out of leadership but no one wants to hear it.
But perhaps something else is missing.
Perhaps we are looking back instead of ahead, using our rear view mirror to capture what is before our eyes, when it is not, failing to see what is looming over the horizon.
You need only turn your television on and listen to the people of Africa who are now being exploited by the Chinese as they once were by Europeans, sucking their vital resources from the ground, treating them as wage slaves, and giving them pittance for the trouble; or hear the complaints of workers in China, building the new massive economic state in a more controlled society where peasants from the countryside, illiterate and poor, are forced into the city to work while being denied their hard earned wages.
This is a mirror image of Europe in the sixteenth to nineteenth century when its own industrialization and Africa exploitation was rampant, or the United States in its nearly three hundred years of slavery.
Europeans and Americans have been there, done that, and now watch, and even participate in the new version of economic exploitation as Americans buy "China cheap" often of tainted food and toys, or American companies transplant their manufacturing and packaging plants to China shores in complicit exploitation of the poor and ignorant by proxy.
Closer to home we see the quadrennial madness of mannequins masquerading as persons of substance on the presidential campaign stump. They will spend when the dust settles as much as $1 billion in this pre-election campaigning to win the nomination of their party.
Not a single one of these campaigners will ask their constituents to tighten their greedy belts, make room for immigrants of suspect legitimacy, or wonder what motivates terrorists to be terrorists. Campaigners are in the business of reinforcing biases and appealing to the lowest common denominator in the elector's conscience. And the people are complicit in this charade because they like the attention phony as it is.
When you want a person's vote, you lie, you talk about change as if change is an anomaly when it is a constant, and you promise and promise and promise all the way to the White House, and then when you get there you deflect criticism with the distraction of fear or war or both.
This has been the menu of the seven decades of my life and it shows no evidence of changing.
Originality died a natural death when technology became the substitute for religion, the electronic age became surrogate for the personal, and the pace maker replaced the moral compass of the heart.
No one seems to want to bite the bullet and admit leaders no longer lead. Wall Street, which long ago left the track, distracts us from that fact by announcing that the United States now has a million millionaires.
Wealth is not wisdom. Wealth has shattered our perspective and fragmented our society. The only reason wealth has reached celebrity prominence is because celebrity is skin deep and reflects the wistful times.
Leaders no longer lead in the home, the school, the church, the factory, the military, the government, indeed, society. Consequently, we are operating on synthetic life supports in a vacuum masquerading as "business as usual," when there is nothing usual about it as all the oxygen has been sucked out of life. Spontaneity is a product in cyberspace not of the neighborhood.
There has been a disconnect between leaders and followers because of a simple fact, a fact that continues to be avoided as if in denial it will disappear, and that fact is that people are waiting to be taken where they want to go, when they don't know where that is, and leaders are in a guessing game as to where the masses seem to be heading, so as to quickly run to catch up and appear in the lead. Where is Erasmus when you need him?
This is not a national problem or even an international problem. It is global fact.
We are running out of room as well as on empty, and madness is in the air with the hope of quelling this madness with panaceas, which only exacerbates the situation.
Fear is the condiment of choice and saber rattling is still what leaders fall back on when they are lost in their own confusion.
After a century of war, the diet for war has not abated.
The poor, the disenfranchised, the ignorant, and the disillusioned fight these wars, and the collateral damage is to have 100 casualties of the innocent for every soldier lost, wherever the war is fought and for whatever the reason, the village is destroyed over and over again to save it.
In my latest book (A Look Back To See Ahead) I quote an essay of mine that was published in the St. Petersburg Times Evening Independent on January 1, 1976, the year of our two hundred birthday.
That was thirty-one years ago. I thought we were on the brink of growing up. I was wrong. Here is what I wrote in a chapter titled in my new book, "Leadership's Wistful Mind of Its Time":
"America is dead! Long live America! On the even our two-hundredth birthday, we have been shocked awake from our illusory dream. We have discovered belatedly that success is in the mind and not the body politic; that being Numero Uno is reaching after a child's fantasy; that progress carries the seeds of its own destruction. American remains like a child with the focus always on "becoming," rather than on "being"; on the competitive drive rather than on cooperation; on the illusion of progress rather than reality. But alas! Thanks to a decade of corrupt and incompetent leadership, the wasting of our natural resources, the impatience of youth, and discriminated minorities, the dream has died, and in doing so, we have embraced despair. We will not grow up. Thus, on the even of our two-hundredth birthday, we are in a mourning period for our cherished illusions and protected fantasies. In the end, time runs out on a nation's adolescence. The youth must die to give birth to the man. That is why I proclaim, 'America is dead! Long live America!'" (A Look Back to See Ahead, p. 71)
_______________
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is published by AuthorHouse. The book is published in both hard and soft bound copy with complete notes, index, and bibliography. Contact information of publisher: http://www.authorhouse.com/
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS!
The Tampa Tribune on this Fourth of July in the year 2007 has an editorial cartoon on its editorial page created by someone named "Stanto."
The boxed picture to the left shows the "Founding Fathers" around an ornate table in formal dress of the late eighteenth century with the boxed caption, "LEADERS, THEN."
The boxed picture to the right shows the same ornate room and setting with virtually every seat empty with the simple caption, "TODAY."
It is no less than the great French leader Napoleon Bonaparte who is attributed to have said, "A picture is worth a thousand words." Indeed.
LEADERSHIP'S WISTFUL MIND
I have labored through many articles and books to point out this blatant void, as has Lee Iacocca of automotive fame. Iacocca's book on "where are the leaders" is no less tiring than my missives of a similar complaint. The oxygen has gone out of leadership but no one wants to hear it.
But perhaps something else is missing.
Perhaps we are looking back instead of ahead, using our rear view mirror to capture what is before our eyes, when it is not, failing to see what is looming over the horizon.
You need only turn your television on and listen to the people of Africa who are now being exploited by the Chinese as they once were by Europeans, sucking their vital resources from the ground, treating them as wage slaves, and giving them pittance for the trouble; or hear the complaints of workers in China, building the new massive economic state in a more controlled society where peasants from the countryside, illiterate and poor, are forced into the city to work while being denied their hard earned wages.
This is a mirror image of Europe in the sixteenth to nineteenth century when its own industrialization and Africa exploitation was rampant, or the United States in its nearly three hundred years of slavery.
Europeans and Americans have been there, done that, and now watch, and even participate in the new version of economic exploitation as Americans buy "China cheap" often of tainted food and toys, or American companies transplant their manufacturing and packaging plants to China shores in complicit exploitation of the poor and ignorant by proxy.
Closer to home we see the quadrennial madness of mannequins masquerading as persons of substance on the presidential campaign stump. They will spend when the dust settles as much as $1 billion in this pre-election campaigning to win the nomination of their party.
Not a single one of these campaigners will ask their constituents to tighten their greedy belts, make room for immigrants of suspect legitimacy, or wonder what motivates terrorists to be terrorists. Campaigners are in the business of reinforcing biases and appealing to the lowest common denominator in the elector's conscience. And the people are complicit in this charade because they like the attention phony as it is.
When you want a person's vote, you lie, you talk about change as if change is an anomaly when it is a constant, and you promise and promise and promise all the way to the White House, and then when you get there you deflect criticism with the distraction of fear or war or both.
This has been the menu of the seven decades of my life and it shows no evidence of changing.
Originality died a natural death when technology became the substitute for religion, the electronic age became surrogate for the personal, and the pace maker replaced the moral compass of the heart.
No one seems to want to bite the bullet and admit leaders no longer lead. Wall Street, which long ago left the track, distracts us from that fact by announcing that the United States now has a million millionaires.
Wealth is not wisdom. Wealth has shattered our perspective and fragmented our society. The only reason wealth has reached celebrity prominence is because celebrity is skin deep and reflects the wistful times.
Leaders no longer lead in the home, the school, the church, the factory, the military, the government, indeed, society. Consequently, we are operating on synthetic life supports in a vacuum masquerading as "business as usual," when there is nothing usual about it as all the oxygen has been sucked out of life. Spontaneity is a product in cyberspace not of the neighborhood.
There has been a disconnect between leaders and followers because of a simple fact, a fact that continues to be avoided as if in denial it will disappear, and that fact is that people are waiting to be taken where they want to go, when they don't know where that is, and leaders are in a guessing game as to where the masses seem to be heading, so as to quickly run to catch up and appear in the lead. Where is Erasmus when you need him?
This is not a national problem or even an international problem. It is global fact.
We are running out of room as well as on empty, and madness is in the air with the hope of quelling this madness with panaceas, which only exacerbates the situation.
Fear is the condiment of choice and saber rattling is still what leaders fall back on when they are lost in their own confusion.
After a century of war, the diet for war has not abated.
The poor, the disenfranchised, the ignorant, and the disillusioned fight these wars, and the collateral damage is to have 100 casualties of the innocent for every soldier lost, wherever the war is fought and for whatever the reason, the village is destroyed over and over again to save it.
In my latest book (A Look Back To See Ahead) I quote an essay of mine that was published in the St. Petersburg Times Evening Independent on January 1, 1976, the year of our two hundred birthday.
That was thirty-one years ago. I thought we were on the brink of growing up. I was wrong. Here is what I wrote in a chapter titled in my new book, "Leadership's Wistful Mind of Its Time":
"America is dead! Long live America! On the even our two-hundredth birthday, we have been shocked awake from our illusory dream. We have discovered belatedly that success is in the mind and not the body politic; that being Numero Uno is reaching after a child's fantasy; that progress carries the seeds of its own destruction. American remains like a child with the focus always on "becoming," rather than on "being"; on the competitive drive rather than on cooperation; on the illusion of progress rather than reality. But alas! Thanks to a decade of corrupt and incompetent leadership, the wasting of our natural resources, the impatience of youth, and discriminated minorities, the dream has died, and in doing so, we have embraced despair. We will not grow up. Thus, on the even of our two-hundredth birthday, we are in a mourning period for our cherished illusions and protected fantasies. In the end, time runs out on a nation's adolescence. The youth must die to give birth to the man. That is why I proclaim, 'America is dead! Long live America!'" (A Look Back to See Ahead, p. 71)
_______________
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is published by AuthorHouse. The book is published in both hard and soft bound copy with complete notes, index, and bibliography. Contact information of publisher: http://www.authorhouse.com/
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
CHARACTER MATTERS -- A JOHN McCAIN PERSECTIVE IN THIS QUADRENNIAL MADNESS!
CHARACTER MATTERS – A JOHN McCAIN PERSPECTIVE IN THE QUADRENNIAL MADNESS
James R. Fisher, Jr.
“It is impossible that an ill-natured man can have a public spirit; for how should he love ten thousand men, who never loved one?”
Francis de S. Fenelon (1651 – 1715), French archbishop
We are about to enter the quadrennial madness of presidential politics with people entering and bowing out of the race over the next two years. It is part of the American ritual of our best and worst moments, revisiting our national apathy and natural inclination to support a “winner.” That is why we have polls and are addicted to them.
Lost in the melee is the central issue that has kept our head above water in our worst moments. If you are not a reader of books, I hope that you are a watcher of the “American Experience” series on PBS television.
One of the surprising features of this series is that it puts flesh and blood on the skeletal remains of Our Founding Fathers and leaders throughout time, especially at our most critical moments.
For example when Benjamin Franklin was visiting France during the American Revolution to gain financial and military support, John Adams, who was to be our second president, was on a similar mission as well. Instead of combining their efforts, putting our fledgling nation’s best interests above their personal pride and ambition, both men were consumed with enmity and bitterness towards each other, nearly changing the course of American history.
You would see in this television series that George Washington had a Dwight Eisenhower kind of intellect, as did Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but all three men rose above their limitations because of their character.
They knew who they were and what they were about.
On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson, like John Adams, was the intellectual superior of his contemporaries, but of a flawed character that had a penchant for fortuity, which was not the case for Adams. The latter had a penchant for rubbing nearly everyone up the wrong side.
Likewise, his son, John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, was of superior intellect and character but not of a matching finesse. John Quincy’s greatest moments came when he was an ex-president and a member of the House of Representatives. There he displayed a powerful commitment to anti-slavery.
Neither Adams ever own slaves, but presidents before and after them did.
Currently, Time magazine features John Fitzgerald Kennedy (July 2, 2007) with the cover caption “What We Can Learn From JFK.”
The article is remarkable in its emphasis and omissions, making much of the man and little of his faux pas: e.g., little is made of his initiating the Vietnam War, the fiasco of the Cuban Invasion, where he lacked the will to give air support, his philandering, his precarious connection with mafia types and his hesitation to truly launch the Civil Rights Movement, while much is made of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was mainly self-generated.
It is understandable. JFK is the image Americans like to think of themselves: dashing, good looking, white, and above average. Profligacy has no place in this character image. It is as if JFK stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and (Theodore) Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore. It is Camelot of the Mind with a giant “what if” he had lived speculation.
Unfortunately, character is not something you wish for but something you are and demonstrate in what you do. The irony is that Time magazine doesn’t seem to realize it is illustrating our stuckness*** by exaggerating our sense of who and what we would like to think we are.
Some have wondered about my politics. Well, like my religion, they are not of a party or platform but of character and will that might lead us through our sick times and sick society. Who is that to be?
JOHN McCAIN, THE QUENTESSENTIAL AMERICAN
There is someone I find interesting. His name is John McCain.
John McCain may not get elected president, indeed; he may drop out of the race for lack of money, organization and support. But for me, he is the single character in the present firmament that seems real, flawed as this reality may appear.
McCain is not a good campaigner, not a good speaker, not robust or handsome, and certainly not dashing or debonair. Yet, I sense he has the will and the moral conviction to put American society back on its rightful axis.
In a strange way, John McCain, small, crumpled, white-haired, aging, disarmingly genuine and sincere in a humble way reminds me of John XXIII, the saintly pope that attempted to put a little reality and tolerance into his ancient Roman Catholic Church with the Ecumenical Council. McCain understands the United States, if it is to survive in tact, will have a more modest leadership role in the world. The Catholic church has not learned apparently from John XXIII's leadership, and so it continues to stumble forward. My hope is that America will be more fortunate.
John McCain credentials match his temperament. He has been a combat veteran in Vietnam, and a tortured prisoner-of-war, and yet he doesn’t believe in draconian measures against incarcerated “terrorists.” He has been a dedicated senator pleasing neither party in his stand on controversial issues such as immigration, where he is empathetic to the demands of ethnic minorities, and the war in Iraq, where he advocates more troops against criticism from all sides.
In a word, he is Jacksonian (re: president Andrew Jackson) in that he represents blunt reality as did Jackson, more than a century and a half ago. Like Jackson, he is his own man with the pain and struggle of his life as testimony to his philosophy and politics.
As this is written, he is low in the polls and declining while a television dandy and personality, Fred Thompson, threatens to enter the quadrennial madness. Thompson looks presidential; McCain is presidential.
Americans have not always chosen wisely, even in times of crisis, aggravating the madness of their dilemma. Is this to be any different? Time will tell.
__________
***Stuckness is the central issue discussed in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
James R. Fisher, Jr.
“It is impossible that an ill-natured man can have a public spirit; for how should he love ten thousand men, who never loved one?”
Francis de S. Fenelon (1651 – 1715), French archbishop
We are about to enter the quadrennial madness of presidential politics with people entering and bowing out of the race over the next two years. It is part of the American ritual of our best and worst moments, revisiting our national apathy and natural inclination to support a “winner.” That is why we have polls and are addicted to them.
Lost in the melee is the central issue that has kept our head above water in our worst moments. If you are not a reader of books, I hope that you are a watcher of the “American Experience” series on PBS television.
One of the surprising features of this series is that it puts flesh and blood on the skeletal remains of Our Founding Fathers and leaders throughout time, especially at our most critical moments.
For example when Benjamin Franklin was visiting France during the American Revolution to gain financial and military support, John Adams, who was to be our second president, was on a similar mission as well. Instead of combining their efforts, putting our fledgling nation’s best interests above their personal pride and ambition, both men were consumed with enmity and bitterness towards each other, nearly changing the course of American history.
You would see in this television series that George Washington had a Dwight Eisenhower kind of intellect, as did Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but all three men rose above their limitations because of their character.
They knew who they were and what they were about.
On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson, like John Adams, was the intellectual superior of his contemporaries, but of a flawed character that had a penchant for fortuity, which was not the case for Adams. The latter had a penchant for rubbing nearly everyone up the wrong side.
Likewise, his son, John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, was of superior intellect and character but not of a matching finesse. John Quincy’s greatest moments came when he was an ex-president and a member of the House of Representatives. There he displayed a powerful commitment to anti-slavery.
Neither Adams ever own slaves, but presidents before and after them did.
Currently, Time magazine features John Fitzgerald Kennedy (July 2, 2007) with the cover caption “What We Can Learn From JFK.”
The article is remarkable in its emphasis and omissions, making much of the man and little of his faux pas: e.g., little is made of his initiating the Vietnam War, the fiasco of the Cuban Invasion, where he lacked the will to give air support, his philandering, his precarious connection with mafia types and his hesitation to truly launch the Civil Rights Movement, while much is made of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was mainly self-generated.
It is understandable. JFK is the image Americans like to think of themselves: dashing, good looking, white, and above average. Profligacy has no place in this character image. It is as if JFK stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and (Theodore) Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore. It is Camelot of the Mind with a giant “what if” he had lived speculation.
Unfortunately, character is not something you wish for but something you are and demonstrate in what you do. The irony is that Time magazine doesn’t seem to realize it is illustrating our stuckness*** by exaggerating our sense of who and what we would like to think we are.
Some have wondered about my politics. Well, like my religion, they are not of a party or platform but of character and will that might lead us through our sick times and sick society. Who is that to be?
JOHN McCAIN, THE QUENTESSENTIAL AMERICAN
There is someone I find interesting. His name is John McCain.
John McCain may not get elected president, indeed; he may drop out of the race for lack of money, organization and support. But for me, he is the single character in the present firmament that seems real, flawed as this reality may appear.
McCain is not a good campaigner, not a good speaker, not robust or handsome, and certainly not dashing or debonair. Yet, I sense he has the will and the moral conviction to put American society back on its rightful axis.
In a strange way, John McCain, small, crumpled, white-haired, aging, disarmingly genuine and sincere in a humble way reminds me of John XXIII, the saintly pope that attempted to put a little reality and tolerance into his ancient Roman Catholic Church with the Ecumenical Council. McCain understands the United States, if it is to survive in tact, will have a more modest leadership role in the world. The Catholic church has not learned apparently from John XXIII's leadership, and so it continues to stumble forward. My hope is that America will be more fortunate.
John McCain credentials match his temperament. He has been a combat veteran in Vietnam, and a tortured prisoner-of-war, and yet he doesn’t believe in draconian measures against incarcerated “terrorists.” He has been a dedicated senator pleasing neither party in his stand on controversial issues such as immigration, where he is empathetic to the demands of ethnic minorities, and the war in Iraq, where he advocates more troops against criticism from all sides.
In a word, he is Jacksonian (re: president Andrew Jackson) in that he represents blunt reality as did Jackson, more than a century and a half ago. Like Jackson, he is his own man with the pain and struggle of his life as testimony to his philosophy and politics.
As this is written, he is low in the polls and declining while a television dandy and personality, Fred Thompson, threatens to enter the quadrennial madness. Thompson looks presidential; McCain is presidential.
Americans have not always chosen wisely, even in times of crisis, aggravating the madness of their dilemma. Is this to be any different? Time will tell.
__________
***Stuckness is the central issue discussed in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
Monday, June 25, 2007
AUTHOR FISHER REFLECTS ON HIS RETURN TO HIS ROOTS!
AUTHOR FISHER REFLECTS ON HIS RETURN TO HIS ROOTS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2007
Author Thomas Wolfe wrote a compelling novel, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940). It was his last novel published posthumously as he died two years before at the age of 38. In the novel, after being out in the world – these were the riotous years in Europe prior to WWII – he returns to his mountain home seeking the peace and quiet of his boyhood, only to find it caught up in the same nervous frenzy of his time.
When I first returned to Clinton after an absence of many years in the 1990s, many of my friends who had stayed were as congenial as ever. I spent twelve weeks during that decade researching IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, a snapshot of growing up in Clinton in the war years of the 1940s.
I returned in 2003 for a speaking and book signing tour of this book in Clinton and the Quad Cities. I have not been back since.
Thomas Wolfe has a point that the home you leave is never the home you return to, partly because you have a perspective of a world apart, in my case working and living for many years abroad, and therefore lacking the continuity of the elapsing daily life in the community since I had left.
Take the magnificent courthouse prominently displayed on the front cover of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. It is still there, but totally gutted and modernized inside, while St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, Rectory and School on the back cover have been erased from the landscape, the sanctuary of my formative years.
Already in the 1990s, the playground that introduced me to baseball, football, basketball, and ice-skating in the winter -- the lawn bridging the county jail with the courthouse – was gone. It had been replaced by a public safety building for the county sheriff department.
By 2003, the scores of taverns that snaked their way along Clinton’s seven mile promenade had been largely replaced by fast-food restaurants from the city limits south and Camanche Avenue to Second Street north and Lyons.
Clinton was once famous for its collection of taverns. Also missing were the Chicago & North Western Railroad Shops along Camanche Avenue, once the primary employer of many members of my Irish-Norwegian clan.
If they didn’t work for the railroad, they worked for Clinton Foods, which has undergone many iterations of owners. My da once worked for both. Incidentally, if not for Clinton Foods, which employed me for five summers while attending the University of Iowa, I suspect my life would have turned out quite differently.
Like Thomas Wolfe, however, there are bittersweet memories as my roots rise out of South Clinton, which has been swallowed up by the current iteration of Clinton Foods (ADM) with the punctuation mark of a golden dome to mark its territory.
People of my generation identified with the neighborhood of their birth: south of the tracks (South Clinton), off Camanche Avenue (Chancy Park), above the big tree (Lyons), and so on. New neighborhoods have sprung up, but the old ones are still holding firm, except South Clinton, which is no more.
I mention this because my sense of place has never left my mind. This is where my values were first formed. Those values have given me an amazing freedom, and indeed security, to listen to my own drummer and to know I have real roots with real people.
Splitting grammar school between Lyons (St. Boniface) and the courthouse area (St. Patrick’s), then high school (Clinton High), I experienced cultural shock going from private to public school that apparently is now a thing of the past, for there is no St. Boniface or St. Patrick’s.
The catholic school system of the 1940s with the nuns of the Sisters of St. Francis and the priests of the Davenport Diocese represented a total cultural immersion in the ancient tradition of Catholic programming. I have never outgrown this as a thinker or writer.
The movement of the casino from offshore to Clinton’s beautiful riverfront offends me. I see gambling as part of the new plague and write about it in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. In this convoluted climate, people are looking for something for nothing; for luck as substitute for misplaced pluck. It is actually evidence of being stuck, which is the subject of my book and on how to become unstuck. A casino is not the answer. It is part of our societal sickness.
Today, the nuns are gone in Clinton as elsewhere, priests are few and far between, and the public school system, which in Clinton has always been excellent, is greatly challenged in these flippant times.
The strength of Clinton is its people. They nurtured and launched me into the world. People of Clinton to whom I owe a special debt include Gussie Witt, Jack Dunmore, Lyle Sawyer, sheriff Ky Petersen, deputies Chris Stamp and Jim Gaffey, Bobby Witt, Del Ploen, Billy McKinley, coach Ed Rashke, coach Dean Burridge, of course, my parents, as well as Sister Mary Flavian, Sister Mary Helen, Sister Mary Gertrude, Sister Mary Cecilia, and Father Anthony Geertz.
It is no accident that the first and last sentence of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE is of Bobby Witt. It was because Bobby was my ideal: open, fun, funny, intelligent, athletic, caring, modest, and there, always there. He also had a way to puncture my cockiness. Once I told him I had a photographic memory. He didn’t say anything until we attended a movie at the Rialto. After the film credits rolled, he said, “Did you see the credits?” I nodded. “Okay, hot shot, repeat them.” It is how I remember Clinton as I prepare to visit it once again.
____________
An edited version of this is to appear in The Clinton Herald in August 2007 prior to Dr. Fisher's book speaking and signing tour in the midwest.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2007
Author Thomas Wolfe wrote a compelling novel, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940). It was his last novel published posthumously as he died two years before at the age of 38. In the novel, after being out in the world – these were the riotous years in Europe prior to WWII – he returns to his mountain home seeking the peace and quiet of his boyhood, only to find it caught up in the same nervous frenzy of his time.
When I first returned to Clinton after an absence of many years in the 1990s, many of my friends who had stayed were as congenial as ever. I spent twelve weeks during that decade researching IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, a snapshot of growing up in Clinton in the war years of the 1940s.
I returned in 2003 for a speaking and book signing tour of this book in Clinton and the Quad Cities. I have not been back since.
Thomas Wolfe has a point that the home you leave is never the home you return to, partly because you have a perspective of a world apart, in my case working and living for many years abroad, and therefore lacking the continuity of the elapsing daily life in the community since I had left.
Take the magnificent courthouse prominently displayed on the front cover of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. It is still there, but totally gutted and modernized inside, while St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, Rectory and School on the back cover have been erased from the landscape, the sanctuary of my formative years.
Already in the 1990s, the playground that introduced me to baseball, football, basketball, and ice-skating in the winter -- the lawn bridging the county jail with the courthouse – was gone. It had been replaced by a public safety building for the county sheriff department.
By 2003, the scores of taverns that snaked their way along Clinton’s seven mile promenade had been largely replaced by fast-food restaurants from the city limits south and Camanche Avenue to Second Street north and Lyons.
Clinton was once famous for its collection of taverns. Also missing were the Chicago & North Western Railroad Shops along Camanche Avenue, once the primary employer of many members of my Irish-Norwegian clan.
If they didn’t work for the railroad, they worked for Clinton Foods, which has undergone many iterations of owners. My da once worked for both. Incidentally, if not for Clinton Foods, which employed me for five summers while attending the University of Iowa, I suspect my life would have turned out quite differently.
Like Thomas Wolfe, however, there are bittersweet memories as my roots rise out of South Clinton, which has been swallowed up by the current iteration of Clinton Foods (ADM) with the punctuation mark of a golden dome to mark its territory.
People of my generation identified with the neighborhood of their birth: south of the tracks (South Clinton), off Camanche Avenue (Chancy Park), above the big tree (Lyons), and so on. New neighborhoods have sprung up, but the old ones are still holding firm, except South Clinton, which is no more.
I mention this because my sense of place has never left my mind. This is where my values were first formed. Those values have given me an amazing freedom, and indeed security, to listen to my own drummer and to know I have real roots with real people.
Splitting grammar school between Lyons (St. Boniface) and the courthouse area (St. Patrick’s), then high school (Clinton High), I experienced cultural shock going from private to public school that apparently is now a thing of the past, for there is no St. Boniface or St. Patrick’s.
The catholic school system of the 1940s with the nuns of the Sisters of St. Francis and the priests of the Davenport Diocese represented a total cultural immersion in the ancient tradition of Catholic programming. I have never outgrown this as a thinker or writer.
The movement of the casino from offshore to Clinton’s beautiful riverfront offends me. I see gambling as part of the new plague and write about it in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. In this convoluted climate, people are looking for something for nothing; for luck as substitute for misplaced pluck. It is actually evidence of being stuck, which is the subject of my book and on how to become unstuck. A casino is not the answer. It is part of our societal sickness.
Today, the nuns are gone in Clinton as elsewhere, priests are few and far between, and the public school system, which in Clinton has always been excellent, is greatly challenged in these flippant times.
The strength of Clinton is its people. They nurtured and launched me into the world. People of Clinton to whom I owe a special debt include Gussie Witt, Jack Dunmore, Lyle Sawyer, sheriff Ky Petersen, deputies Chris Stamp and Jim Gaffey, Bobby Witt, Del Ploen, Billy McKinley, coach Ed Rashke, coach Dean Burridge, of course, my parents, as well as Sister Mary Flavian, Sister Mary Helen, Sister Mary Gertrude, Sister Mary Cecilia, and Father Anthony Geertz.
It is no accident that the first and last sentence of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE is of Bobby Witt. It was because Bobby was my ideal: open, fun, funny, intelligent, athletic, caring, modest, and there, always there. He also had a way to puncture my cockiness. Once I told him I had a photographic memory. He didn’t say anything until we attended a movie at the Rialto. After the film credits rolled, he said, “Did you see the credits?” I nodded. “Okay, hot shot, repeat them.” It is how I remember Clinton as I prepare to visit it once again.
____________
An edited version of this is to appear in The Clinton Herald in August 2007 prior to Dr. Fisher's book speaking and signing tour in the midwest.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
THINKING ABOUT RELIGION & GOD
THINKING ABOUT RELIGION & GOD
JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
© June 2007
“Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.”
Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman
My da once told me when I was a boy to never get embroiled in a discussion of politics, religion or race, and he was Irish, which makes this suggestion an oxymoron.
In a way, religion embraces everything including politics and race.
Religion has succeeded, for example, to generate selective forgetting by insisting on its territorial imperatives. How else can we explain the thousands of religions and the hundreds of dominations. Yet, the fact remains there is but one race, and that is the human race.
No other race exists except in the mind, which is the playground of religion.
Religion throughout our Western history has displayed the full range of human emotion from the sublime to subterranean.
Dante showed great skill in this with his "Divine Comedy." He found himself lost in dark and frightening woods, and as he was trying to regain his path, he came to a mountain, which he decided to climb in order to get his bearings. Strange beasts blocked his way, and he was forced back to the plain. As he was bemoaning his fate, the poet Virgil appeared and offered to conduct Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and blissful Paradise.
This is all like a dream, and it might well have come to Dante as such, along with his Beatrice, the soul of his beloved.
Beatrice is more prominent in a less well known work of Dante's, "The Vita Nuova" (the new life). This work is a celebration in prose and poetry of the great poet's love for Beatrice Portinari.
When Dante first saw Beatrice he was nine and she was eight. He was so affected by the sight of her that his "vital spirit" trembled, his "animal spirit" was amazed, and his "natural spirit" wept. He was in love, and to know love as love was meant to be known.
Notice that love, even in the very young, embodies life, instinct and lust, all essential components in the heart of man that give expression to his humanity.
If you read the definitions of religion in the dictionary, you discover the seeds of the problem immediately.
Religion is defined as "the state of a religious; the service and worship of God or the supernatural, commitment and devotion to religious faith or observance, a personal or institutional system of religious attitudes, beliefs, practices, or scrupulous conformity to a system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith."
Dante (1265 - 1321) was fighting through this narrow view of religion in the dawn of the Renaissance, long before the Medici’s and Michelangelo and da Vinci would take on prominence.
The foundation of the early Christian Church was by such Church Fathers as Tertullian (160 - 220). He was a harsh theologian whose influence was demonstrated centuries later with "The Inquisition." He ranted against heathens and Jews, and heretics while championing asceticism. No one was a greater influence between Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, as his rigors proved endemic to Latinity followers for centuries.
Somewhat later, Saint Benedict (480 - 550) came along. Benedict had an outlook characterized by prudence and moderation in a framework of authority, obedience, austerity, stability and community. His product was the domestic life, which, obviously, was common to few but still influenced many.
This gentle saint had a rather harsh view of married love. If the "husband was transported by immoderate love, his intercourse with his wife so ardently in passion would be a sin."
James Cleugh studied the impact of this psychology in his book "Love Locked Out: A Survey of Love, License and Restriction in the Middle Ages" (1970).
The startling nature of this study is that the source of many problems of the twenty-first century life appears through the lens of this period of repression, suppression, suspicion, and guilt that were being programmed into the religion of Western man.
This psychosexual obsession with "locked out love" has had aberrant manifestation in scandal after scandal with the contemporary clergy. As Cleugh points out, it "gave birth to pornography in the middle ages."
Cleugh sites that unnatural fear of the natural has festered like a cultural plague throughout the ages.
Saint Benedict's aversion to sexual love was an invitation to make it an obsession. Love is the diet of the mind as food is diet to the body.
Obsession is fed by the perversion of the natural object be it of food or sex, or, indeed, of religion.
Society, for one, has become obsessed with obesity. It hasn't reduced obesity but increased it. At the same time, placing society on a diet has created a multibillion-dollar industry, which is constantly being replenished by the turnstile of recidivism. People today think constantly about food. It has become the narcotic of the pathology of normalcy and its bi-product is a bloated culture.
When you force people to stop smoking, all they think about are cigarettes. It is like an inverted chemical equation -- always getting the opposite reaction of what is desired or expected.
So, as Cleugh points out, if you tell people they can't have sex, or that they shouldn't enjoy sex, or thinking about sex is not healthy, then they are going to be obsessed with sex, when sex in the most active members of society in chronological time is fleeting at best.
It is psychological time that is the killer. Obsession is fueled by psychological time.
The irony is that if you choose to be master of psychological time, then you eat to live rather than live to eat, and you quit smoking "cold turkey." No drugs, no patches, no diets, no gurus. And sex emanates naturally from romantic to physical love and is expressed in other ways such as a look, a touch, or a caring remark.
Young males believe there is something wrong with them if they are not obsessed with sex, and girls think there is something wrong with them if someone is not hitting on them constantly. It is a double bind that has created a whole new industry of gurus that pander to these obsessions.
Men of the cloth have taken a back-seat to the shock jocks of radio and television, and the pop artist that weave sexual themes into their lyrics often of a barbaric nature. Then there are those "doctors of this and that" who probe willing psyches on the tube, persons who appear to have little clue they are being used and exploited if not abused, reminiscent of obsessed clerics of the past.
These new advisers, often rich and famous, have been given the power by a passive society to tell them how to run their sex, personal and dietary lives, only to exacerbate their problems and fuel their turmoil.
When the natural becomes unnatural, when the pathological becomes the norm, the other side of religion surfaces and dominates. The spirit is driven out of religion and it becomes a shell game.
Religion is not a church but a mindset and as such, it can be engaging or cruel, reassuring or defeating.
Madonna knows this and has used religion to exploit the popular mania, as have sex clubs, the phone sex and pornography industry, and now the Internet. Still, the answer is not to restrict these ventures under rights provided by the first amendment of the United States Constitution. The answer, it seems to me, is to allow young people to experience their religious education, entertaining their doubts in a safety zone of trust where they can discover for themselves what is relevant and what is not.
Children are not own by their parents but only pass through them. It is however an equal problem when children own their parents.
Unrealistic, you say? I don't think so. We are moving into a truly multicultural society in which fences and walls, psychological and physical barriers cannot hold back what Alvin Toffler called "the Third Wave." Toffler envisions a gyrating economy, a "blip culture," the post-nuclear family, the "electronic cottage," the stripping away of the nation-state, and the shift in politics from totalitarian to twenty-first century democracies.
Toffler is a mechanic. He thinks like a mechanic, and sees the future in mechanistic terms with more sophisticated "Machine Age" thinking.
But such thinking is still geared to a "machine age" focus and projection. We have left the Machine Age even if we don't know it. Were all these things Toffler envisions to take place, there would still remain the problem of cultural man and entropic spirit.
He is part of the organic landscape every bit as much as other plants and animals, and is not the master of nature but simply a factor in nature, subject to its laws and limitations. Thus far his intelligence has failed to make this connection.
At the heart of culture is language and religion, and at the heart of language and religion is man with a capacity to love and an inclination to hate, a lust for power and a fear of death. This will not change as man has not changed in tens of thousands of years.
Religion has always been a vehicle for man to run away from life and nature and into what is often called "God." God exists but in the heart of man, not outside of him. As soon as we separate God from man, we run into all these obsessions, all these religions that separate man-from-man and man from himself, which are founded in fear, not in trust, and are devoid of spiritual connection with all of life.
We have been stuck a long time in this "Sensate Culture" that Pitrim Sorokin wrote so eloquently about. Sorokin even predicted more than 70 years ago that we would become obsessed with sex in the dying Sensate, and that the church and religious would lose their way. I don't expect to be around for "the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow," which may take a hundred or two hundred years to become truly established. But it will come. Tensions now are but signs of the restless spirit for embracing it.
That said man is not patient and he forgets that a habit of a lifetime, say smoking or eating too much, or insisting on believing "this or that" cannot be precipitously changed with a patch, a diet, or a new messiah. Man is stuck with himself on this small planet, which is shrinking all the time, so he had better get used to sharing toothpaste with the neighbor next door who looks and speaks and thinks differently than he does. Religion, after all, is of the mind but affects the body. It has always been so and it will always be so.
_________________-
Note: Themes such as this are perused in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007).
JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
© June 2007
“Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.”
Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman
My da once told me when I was a boy to never get embroiled in a discussion of politics, religion or race, and he was Irish, which makes this suggestion an oxymoron.
In a way, religion embraces everything including politics and race.
Religion has succeeded, for example, to generate selective forgetting by insisting on its territorial imperatives. How else can we explain the thousands of religions and the hundreds of dominations. Yet, the fact remains there is but one race, and that is the human race.
No other race exists except in the mind, which is the playground of religion.
Religion throughout our Western history has displayed the full range of human emotion from the sublime to subterranean.
Dante showed great skill in this with his "Divine Comedy." He found himself lost in dark and frightening woods, and as he was trying to regain his path, he came to a mountain, which he decided to climb in order to get his bearings. Strange beasts blocked his way, and he was forced back to the plain. As he was bemoaning his fate, the poet Virgil appeared and offered to conduct Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and blissful Paradise.
This is all like a dream, and it might well have come to Dante as such, along with his Beatrice, the soul of his beloved.
Beatrice is more prominent in a less well known work of Dante's, "The Vita Nuova" (the new life). This work is a celebration in prose and poetry of the great poet's love for Beatrice Portinari.
When Dante first saw Beatrice he was nine and she was eight. He was so affected by the sight of her that his "vital spirit" trembled, his "animal spirit" was amazed, and his "natural spirit" wept. He was in love, and to know love as love was meant to be known.
Notice that love, even in the very young, embodies life, instinct and lust, all essential components in the heart of man that give expression to his humanity.
If you read the definitions of religion in the dictionary, you discover the seeds of the problem immediately.
Religion is defined as "the state of a religious; the service and worship of God or the supernatural, commitment and devotion to religious faith or observance, a personal or institutional system of religious attitudes, beliefs, practices, or scrupulous conformity to a system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith."
Dante (1265 - 1321) was fighting through this narrow view of religion in the dawn of the Renaissance, long before the Medici’s and Michelangelo and da Vinci would take on prominence.
The foundation of the early Christian Church was by such Church Fathers as Tertullian (160 - 220). He was a harsh theologian whose influence was demonstrated centuries later with "The Inquisition." He ranted against heathens and Jews, and heretics while championing asceticism. No one was a greater influence between Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, as his rigors proved endemic to Latinity followers for centuries.
Somewhat later, Saint Benedict (480 - 550) came along. Benedict had an outlook characterized by prudence and moderation in a framework of authority, obedience, austerity, stability and community. His product was the domestic life, which, obviously, was common to few but still influenced many.
This gentle saint had a rather harsh view of married love. If the "husband was transported by immoderate love, his intercourse with his wife so ardently in passion would be a sin."
James Cleugh studied the impact of this psychology in his book "Love Locked Out: A Survey of Love, License and Restriction in the Middle Ages" (1970).
The startling nature of this study is that the source of many problems of the twenty-first century life appears through the lens of this period of repression, suppression, suspicion, and guilt that were being programmed into the religion of Western man.
This psychosexual obsession with "locked out love" has had aberrant manifestation in scandal after scandal with the contemporary clergy. As Cleugh points out, it "gave birth to pornography in the middle ages."
Cleugh sites that unnatural fear of the natural has festered like a cultural plague throughout the ages.
Saint Benedict's aversion to sexual love was an invitation to make it an obsession. Love is the diet of the mind as food is diet to the body.
Obsession is fed by the perversion of the natural object be it of food or sex, or, indeed, of religion.
Society, for one, has become obsessed with obesity. It hasn't reduced obesity but increased it. At the same time, placing society on a diet has created a multibillion-dollar industry, which is constantly being replenished by the turnstile of recidivism. People today think constantly about food. It has become the narcotic of the pathology of normalcy and its bi-product is a bloated culture.
When you force people to stop smoking, all they think about are cigarettes. It is like an inverted chemical equation -- always getting the opposite reaction of what is desired or expected.
So, as Cleugh points out, if you tell people they can't have sex, or that they shouldn't enjoy sex, or thinking about sex is not healthy, then they are going to be obsessed with sex, when sex in the most active members of society in chronological time is fleeting at best.
It is psychological time that is the killer. Obsession is fueled by psychological time.
The irony is that if you choose to be master of psychological time, then you eat to live rather than live to eat, and you quit smoking "cold turkey." No drugs, no patches, no diets, no gurus. And sex emanates naturally from romantic to physical love and is expressed in other ways such as a look, a touch, or a caring remark.
Young males believe there is something wrong with them if they are not obsessed with sex, and girls think there is something wrong with them if someone is not hitting on them constantly. It is a double bind that has created a whole new industry of gurus that pander to these obsessions.
Men of the cloth have taken a back-seat to the shock jocks of radio and television, and the pop artist that weave sexual themes into their lyrics often of a barbaric nature. Then there are those "doctors of this and that" who probe willing psyches on the tube, persons who appear to have little clue they are being used and exploited if not abused, reminiscent of obsessed clerics of the past.
These new advisers, often rich and famous, have been given the power by a passive society to tell them how to run their sex, personal and dietary lives, only to exacerbate their problems and fuel their turmoil.
When the natural becomes unnatural, when the pathological becomes the norm, the other side of religion surfaces and dominates. The spirit is driven out of religion and it becomes a shell game.
Religion is not a church but a mindset and as such, it can be engaging or cruel, reassuring or defeating.
Madonna knows this and has used religion to exploit the popular mania, as have sex clubs, the phone sex and pornography industry, and now the Internet. Still, the answer is not to restrict these ventures under rights provided by the first amendment of the United States Constitution. The answer, it seems to me, is to allow young people to experience their religious education, entertaining their doubts in a safety zone of trust where they can discover for themselves what is relevant and what is not.
Children are not own by their parents but only pass through them. It is however an equal problem when children own their parents.
Unrealistic, you say? I don't think so. We are moving into a truly multicultural society in which fences and walls, psychological and physical barriers cannot hold back what Alvin Toffler called "the Third Wave." Toffler envisions a gyrating economy, a "blip culture," the post-nuclear family, the "electronic cottage," the stripping away of the nation-state, and the shift in politics from totalitarian to twenty-first century democracies.
Toffler is a mechanic. He thinks like a mechanic, and sees the future in mechanistic terms with more sophisticated "Machine Age" thinking.
But such thinking is still geared to a "machine age" focus and projection. We have left the Machine Age even if we don't know it. Were all these things Toffler envisions to take place, there would still remain the problem of cultural man and entropic spirit.
He is part of the organic landscape every bit as much as other plants and animals, and is not the master of nature but simply a factor in nature, subject to its laws and limitations. Thus far his intelligence has failed to make this connection.
At the heart of culture is language and religion, and at the heart of language and religion is man with a capacity to love and an inclination to hate, a lust for power and a fear of death. This will not change as man has not changed in tens of thousands of years.
Religion has always been a vehicle for man to run away from life and nature and into what is often called "God." God exists but in the heart of man, not outside of him. As soon as we separate God from man, we run into all these obsessions, all these religions that separate man-from-man and man from himself, which are founded in fear, not in trust, and are devoid of spiritual connection with all of life.
We have been stuck a long time in this "Sensate Culture" that Pitrim Sorokin wrote so eloquently about. Sorokin even predicted more than 70 years ago that we would become obsessed with sex in the dying Sensate, and that the church and religious would lose their way. I don't expect to be around for "the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow," which may take a hundred or two hundred years to become truly established. But it will come. Tensions now are but signs of the restless spirit for embracing it.
That said man is not patient and he forgets that a habit of a lifetime, say smoking or eating too much, or insisting on believing "this or that" cannot be precipitously changed with a patch, a diet, or a new messiah. Man is stuck with himself on this small planet, which is shrinking all the time, so he had better get used to sharing toothpaste with the neighbor next door who looks and speaks and thinks differently than he does. Religion, after all, is of the mind but affects the body. It has always been so and it will always be so.
_________________-
Note: Themes such as this are perused in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007).
Sunday, May 20, 2007
WHY LEADERSHIP MATTERS -- REV. JERRY FALWELL'S LEGACY!
WHY THE REVEREND JERRY FALWELL'S LEADERSHIP LEGACY IS IMPORTANT
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2006
"Early on, a leader learns that he is in essence the complete follower. He comes to understand that no leader can lead anyone where they haven't already decided to go; that leadership is not all about the leader, but all about the led."
James R. Fisher, Jr., A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007)
AN UNSTUCK MAN IN A PERIOD OF STUCKNESS: 1956 - 2006
We live in an era without leaders or demonstrable leadership, stumbling along in the palaver of rhetoric against the constant torment of violence. This is driving us deeper and deeper into an irrevocable abyss.
This pathology has become so ingrained that it is not recognized. It has come to be considered normalcy, contaminating not only American institutions but also that of our entire Western society. Everyone and everything appears to be accelerating while nothing is moving at all. We are stuck with our toys and tools but without the motivation to move forward.
We have lost our moral compass and thus our way, that is, with the possible exception of one man, whom some saw as a buffoon and others as a joke while he was on his way to creating a leadership legacy that cannot be denied, and which we would be well to study.
The critics and supporters of the late Reverend Jerry Falwell are lining up now to sing his fulsome praises or vent their passionate anger.
The critics suggest he was homophobic, xenophobic, and an intolerant religious extremist if not also a racist -- he claimed sympathy for South Africa's apartheid policy. They see him as having formed an unholy alliance with Reagan and then the Bush father and son presidencies, placing him at the door of this triumvirate responsible for most of our current problems. No question he has made it easy for his enemies to justify their enmity.
Supporters are of another mind. They don't dodge his damning evidence, as he often confused and confounded them, yet they have never wavered in their belief that we as a people are most like him, as he is most like us. In a word, he made connection.
Obviously, there is merit to both these views as he was not an icon but a man who understood what leadership was and wasn't and for that it would be well to pay attention to his leadership legacy.
Recently, on the PBS "News Hour with Jim Lehrer," there was a discussion of the reverend's legacy with a graduate of his university and an evangelical Christian critic. The latter agreed with much of Falwell's theology but not his politics, while the former student claimed Falwell had changed his life.
The most interesting comment made during this exchange, however, was that by his critic. "Falwell's success," he suggested, "could be attributed to the fact that many, who would not openly want to admit it, shared his sentiments on same sex marriages, miscegenation, abortion, gay rights, homosexuality and lesbianism and other moral concerns." This connection with the silent majority commenced fifty years ago.
A MODEST BEGINNING
In 1956, the Reverend Jerry Falwell opened the Thomas Road Baptist Church with only thirty-five members. He quickly saw the advantage of spreading The Word via radio and then moving into television with the "Old Time Gospel Hour." Ironically, he was preaching to white middle and lower class Americans a message that had already been created and resonated with African Americans, which he borrowed from observing their ministries.
Unlike many leaders in the exploding evangelical movement, he never suffered from the belief that "it was all about him." To the very end, friend and foe alike, found him a gentleman, courteous and humorous, never taking himself too seriously, or his leadership role for granted, or as a right unto himself.
He let nothing diminish from his focus or his mission. It remained crystal clear to him to the end as he combined vision with service.
In 1971, he didn't build a religious village as Jim Bakker did, but Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Today, the university serves a community of twenty-thousand students. Currently, a member of the US Congress is a graduate of this university.
In 1979, he founded the lobbyist group the "Moral Majority" with the goal of "exerting significant influence on the spiritual and moral direction of our nation."In 1983, US News & World Report, a newspaper not known to take shortcuts to the story, deemed him one of the 25 most influential Americans.
When Jim Bakker's PTL Ministry collapsed in 1986 consumed in scandal and debt, he didn't turn away from the problem but guided it through bankruptcy. He was much more charitable than was I:
"Only in America," I wrote, "could two otherwise ordinary people rise and fall so quickly as did Jim and Tammy Bakker. Their 'Praise the Lord' (PTL) television club was a resounding success, largely due to their commonplace familiarity. They were like the couple next door. But somewhere between their house and the homes of million of Americans, Tammy's mascara and war paint and Jim's cherubic grin became diabolical. Essentially nice people, they got caught in the war of ratings and the insatiable appetite of television for dollars. Long before Jim's sex scandal surfaced, the PTL Club had become 'show biz,' departing from its religious and spiritual intent. It became entertainment with a capital 'E.' When that happened; the Bakker's commenced to behave like superstars with other people's money. The mansions, the Mercedes, Tammy's shopping sprees -- all became part of the scam that led to Jim dalliance with Jessica Hahn. When that happened, they became a born again disaster."
(Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1990, p. 121)
The fall from grace of the Bakker's has happened again and again, not only to the religious, but also to virtually every other institution in these United States without exception. Scandal has become commonplace especially to those in leadership roles.
VARIATIONS OF FAUST AND MEPHISTOPHELES
People in leadership roles have repeatedly misread their role demands being often flummoxed by their self-demands. The desire is not so much for knowledge, as it was with Goethe's Faust, but for power. It would appear they have come to see leadership as all about affluence, influence and celebrity, or all about them when leadership is always all about the led.
Such leaders would lead on the sense of how people should be not as they are, and as an instrument to the leader's will and not necessarily that of the people's. This is a universal problem impossible to place in a locale or time, as it exists today as it has always existed with self-indulgent leadership.
The Reverend Jerry Falwell has seldom fallen into this trap.
He lost his appeal to the US Supreme Court in 1988 when he challenged the 1983 parody of him in the adult magazine, Hustler. This came at a time when his broad base "Moral Majority" had already been galvanized into a political movement. So successful was this movement that it was given credit for the rebirth of the Republican Party, and conservatism, as well as the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency for two terms.
Smarting from this Supreme Court defeat, what does he do in 1989, or ten years after the Moral Majority was founded, and now a force to be reckoned with? He dissolves it, saying, "Our mission is accomplished." He never confused role demands with self-demands. His personal angst was not allowed to contaminate his leadership mandate.
No doubt Falwell appreciated the wisdom in Lord Acton's remark, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." He would have no part of such corruption.
ALL TOO HUMAN
That said it seems equally apparent that his life was consistent with Nietzsche's suggestion that we are "all too human." This was displayed in his inability to save himself from being used, or, indeed, to save himself from himself.
Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas says it is not inconceivable to imagine Christian fundamentalists, evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics ever mobilizing into a voting block without his leadership; nor can Thomas see Reagan being elected twice, father Bush once, and son Bush twice without his "Moral Majority."
But what so often happens to good intentions is that the means become the ends, in this case, as the focus was shifted from theology to politics, from moral renewal to getting Republicans elected to congressional office. The good reverend allowed himself unfortunately to be used.
On the other hand, he correctly identified the rage of the rank and file middle Americans in the 1980s with the liberal intrusion on their sacred traditions. Americans had had enough of the Hippies, Yuppies, X and Y generations and the "me" self-indulgence that accompanied narcissistic consumerism. In the midst of this mania, he, alone, cut black from white and attacked the gray, as America was stuck in crass materialism and Teflon spiritualism.
FALWELL'S FAUX PAS
Where he overstepped the mark was when he got obsessed with the Tinky Winky. This character of the Teletubbies on children's television, according to him, displayed a veiled homosexuality. Then he made matters worse with his outrageous statement that pagans, homosexuals, abortionists, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and other groups were partly responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001. He later would apologize but the damage was already done.
His failure on a personal basis was not recognizing when his views were laced with nonsense; his failure on a corporate basis was not recognizing when his movement and the church were being perceived and used as an appendage to the Republican Party. Thus, unwittingly, his influence was interpreted as yet another instrument to pamper and forgive a special group for its excesses. He proved in the process that leadership is human and not always heroic, that a leader's fragility is forgivable if not his dalliance with the truth.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM FALWELL LEGACY
Leading is a lonely profession, and the temptation to exceed the role and responsibility is always with the leader. Remember how the devil attempted Jesus on the mount. No leader is ever immune to possible corruption.
The second thing is that a leader can never get heady with his power, influence, impact or success. He is an instrument of the will of the people and never rises above that ground level.
The third thing is that the goodness that resonates with the people must make connection with the goodness in the leader's own heart. If goodness has been cauterized from his soul in his rise to leadership, once he gets there, he is doomed. There is no help for him for there is nothing left in him. He cannot see the motivation and requirements of the led because he is walking in a desert in which his own heat is already destroying him, and will in turn destroy the people.
The fourth thing is to recognize people think in terms of their own satisfaction, which is often at the expense of that of others. The leader must recognize and weigh through this to discover the crystal of commonality because he cannot be swayed by special interests.
The reason is clear; the majority is often wrong. It is wrong because it does not think but often acts like a mob. The mob never considers or thinks about the minority, except in terms of bias and stereotypes. The leader can ill afford for the majority to get too locked into self-interests. Human combustion is a function of this locked in-ness, fueled by a leader's weakness of will and vacillation in crisis.
A leader can be guided by, but not become summarily trusting of polls, pundits, personal advisers, or loved ones because they have a vested interest and limited vision of the now. The leader must consider his decisions in the more encompassing framework of the not yet now.
The fifth element of leadership is courage. Courage is not the absence of fear but the embrace of it in body of instinct. A legion of a hundred thousand voices of the past will visit the leader, not in his ear, but through his bones because he is an evolutionary phenomenon. Leaders have struggled before him with the same riddles and questions.
Every leader who is in touch with himself knows of what I am speaking.
These voices of the past are schooled in experience, culture, history, success, failure, salvation and damnation, death and resurrection, defeat and renewal.
Courage is the recognition when to advance, when to fall back, and when to do nothing. Courage is the quality of embracing apprehension when fear is the leader's only companion.
Courage is the recognition that no situation is ever impossible or as improbable as it may seem; nor is any situation exactly like any other before it, and therefore must be judged with naked eyes and an open mind.
The sixth thing is that the leader walks with destiny. In his every action, he is writing his and his people's history, and therefore can never have the luxury of worrying about what people think, say, or write about him in the immediate, or even threaten to do to him.
A leader is as likely to generate as many enemies as friends, as many who hate him as love him, as many who see him as their destroyer as their champion, making all such preoccupations meaningless and counterproductive.
And finally, the leader who leads establishes and leaves a legacy, something upon which to build into the future.
LEADERSHIP REDUX
The most fatal flaw in current leadership is that it is all about the leader, all about the charismatic pretense of his character. The leader has become a media performer.
Unfortunately, leadership is not a beauty contest, not about a glib or anecdotal mind with sound byte fluidity; nor is it necessarily in our prevailing image and likeness.
A leader has the presence, knowledge, will, courage, and decisiveness to make the strategic moves with the most telling long-term consequences that the well-defined problem demands. This is not likely to happen when role and self demands are confused, or when history is misread, misused, or ignored.
We are moving out of a half century of stuckness caused by this lack of leadership and we have called it everything but leaderless leadership.
Reverend Jerry Falwell, flawed as he was as a human being, never became confused about leadership, and his legacy of Liberty University is proof of that fact. He never forgot leadership is all about the led. His goodness drove him and it made connection with the common good.
_______________
Preorder information: A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: checks in the amount of $20 to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2006
"Early on, a leader learns that he is in essence the complete follower. He comes to understand that no leader can lead anyone where they haven't already decided to go; that leadership is not all about the leader, but all about the led."
James R. Fisher, Jr., A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007)
AN UNSTUCK MAN IN A PERIOD OF STUCKNESS: 1956 - 2006
We live in an era without leaders or demonstrable leadership, stumbling along in the palaver of rhetoric against the constant torment of violence. This is driving us deeper and deeper into an irrevocable abyss.
This pathology has become so ingrained that it is not recognized. It has come to be considered normalcy, contaminating not only American institutions but also that of our entire Western society. Everyone and everything appears to be accelerating while nothing is moving at all. We are stuck with our toys and tools but without the motivation to move forward.
We have lost our moral compass and thus our way, that is, with the possible exception of one man, whom some saw as a buffoon and others as a joke while he was on his way to creating a leadership legacy that cannot be denied, and which we would be well to study.
The critics and supporters of the late Reverend Jerry Falwell are lining up now to sing his fulsome praises or vent their passionate anger.
The critics suggest he was homophobic, xenophobic, and an intolerant religious extremist if not also a racist -- he claimed sympathy for South Africa's apartheid policy. They see him as having formed an unholy alliance with Reagan and then the Bush father and son presidencies, placing him at the door of this triumvirate responsible for most of our current problems. No question he has made it easy for his enemies to justify their enmity.
Supporters are of another mind. They don't dodge his damning evidence, as he often confused and confounded them, yet they have never wavered in their belief that we as a people are most like him, as he is most like us. In a word, he made connection.
Obviously, there is merit to both these views as he was not an icon but a man who understood what leadership was and wasn't and for that it would be well to pay attention to his leadership legacy.
Recently, on the PBS "News Hour with Jim Lehrer," there was a discussion of the reverend's legacy with a graduate of his university and an evangelical Christian critic. The latter agreed with much of Falwell's theology but not his politics, while the former student claimed Falwell had changed his life.
The most interesting comment made during this exchange, however, was that by his critic. "Falwell's success," he suggested, "could be attributed to the fact that many, who would not openly want to admit it, shared his sentiments on same sex marriages, miscegenation, abortion, gay rights, homosexuality and lesbianism and other moral concerns." This connection with the silent majority commenced fifty years ago.
A MODEST BEGINNING
In 1956, the Reverend Jerry Falwell opened the Thomas Road Baptist Church with only thirty-five members. He quickly saw the advantage of spreading The Word via radio and then moving into television with the "Old Time Gospel Hour." Ironically, he was preaching to white middle and lower class Americans a message that had already been created and resonated with African Americans, which he borrowed from observing their ministries.
Unlike many leaders in the exploding evangelical movement, he never suffered from the belief that "it was all about him." To the very end, friend and foe alike, found him a gentleman, courteous and humorous, never taking himself too seriously, or his leadership role for granted, or as a right unto himself.
He let nothing diminish from his focus or his mission. It remained crystal clear to him to the end as he combined vision with service.
In 1971, he didn't build a religious village as Jim Bakker did, but Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Today, the university serves a community of twenty-thousand students. Currently, a member of the US Congress is a graduate of this university.
In 1979, he founded the lobbyist group the "Moral Majority" with the goal of "exerting significant influence on the spiritual and moral direction of our nation."In 1983, US News & World Report, a newspaper not known to take shortcuts to the story, deemed him one of the 25 most influential Americans.
When Jim Bakker's PTL Ministry collapsed in 1986 consumed in scandal and debt, he didn't turn away from the problem but guided it through bankruptcy. He was much more charitable than was I:
"Only in America," I wrote, "could two otherwise ordinary people rise and fall so quickly as did Jim and Tammy Bakker. Their 'Praise the Lord' (PTL) television club was a resounding success, largely due to their commonplace familiarity. They were like the couple next door. But somewhere between their house and the homes of million of Americans, Tammy's mascara and war paint and Jim's cherubic grin became diabolical. Essentially nice people, they got caught in the war of ratings and the insatiable appetite of television for dollars. Long before Jim's sex scandal surfaced, the PTL Club had become 'show biz,' departing from its religious and spiritual intent. It became entertainment with a capital 'E.' When that happened; the Bakker's commenced to behave like superstars with other people's money. The mansions, the Mercedes, Tammy's shopping sprees -- all became part of the scam that led to Jim dalliance with Jessica Hahn. When that happened, they became a born again disaster."
(Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1990, p. 121)
The fall from grace of the Bakker's has happened again and again, not only to the religious, but also to virtually every other institution in these United States without exception. Scandal has become commonplace especially to those in leadership roles.
VARIATIONS OF FAUST AND MEPHISTOPHELES
People in leadership roles have repeatedly misread their role demands being often flummoxed by their self-demands. The desire is not so much for knowledge, as it was with Goethe's Faust, but for power. It would appear they have come to see leadership as all about affluence, influence and celebrity, or all about them when leadership is always all about the led.
Such leaders would lead on the sense of how people should be not as they are, and as an instrument to the leader's will and not necessarily that of the people's. This is a universal problem impossible to place in a locale or time, as it exists today as it has always existed with self-indulgent leadership.
The Reverend Jerry Falwell has seldom fallen into this trap.
He lost his appeal to the US Supreme Court in 1988 when he challenged the 1983 parody of him in the adult magazine, Hustler. This came at a time when his broad base "Moral Majority" had already been galvanized into a political movement. So successful was this movement that it was given credit for the rebirth of the Republican Party, and conservatism, as well as the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency for two terms.
Smarting from this Supreme Court defeat, what does he do in 1989, or ten years after the Moral Majority was founded, and now a force to be reckoned with? He dissolves it, saying, "Our mission is accomplished." He never confused role demands with self-demands. His personal angst was not allowed to contaminate his leadership mandate.
No doubt Falwell appreciated the wisdom in Lord Acton's remark, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." He would have no part of such corruption.
ALL TOO HUMAN
That said it seems equally apparent that his life was consistent with Nietzsche's suggestion that we are "all too human." This was displayed in his inability to save himself from being used, or, indeed, to save himself from himself.
Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas says it is not inconceivable to imagine Christian fundamentalists, evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics ever mobilizing into a voting block without his leadership; nor can Thomas see Reagan being elected twice, father Bush once, and son Bush twice without his "Moral Majority."
But what so often happens to good intentions is that the means become the ends, in this case, as the focus was shifted from theology to politics, from moral renewal to getting Republicans elected to congressional office. The good reverend allowed himself unfortunately to be used.
On the other hand, he correctly identified the rage of the rank and file middle Americans in the 1980s with the liberal intrusion on their sacred traditions. Americans had had enough of the Hippies, Yuppies, X and Y generations and the "me" self-indulgence that accompanied narcissistic consumerism. In the midst of this mania, he, alone, cut black from white and attacked the gray, as America was stuck in crass materialism and Teflon spiritualism.
FALWELL'S FAUX PAS
Where he overstepped the mark was when he got obsessed with the Tinky Winky. This character of the Teletubbies on children's television, according to him, displayed a veiled homosexuality. Then he made matters worse with his outrageous statement that pagans, homosexuals, abortionists, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and other groups were partly responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001. He later would apologize but the damage was already done.
His failure on a personal basis was not recognizing when his views were laced with nonsense; his failure on a corporate basis was not recognizing when his movement and the church were being perceived and used as an appendage to the Republican Party. Thus, unwittingly, his influence was interpreted as yet another instrument to pamper and forgive a special group for its excesses. He proved in the process that leadership is human and not always heroic, that a leader's fragility is forgivable if not his dalliance with the truth.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM FALWELL LEGACY
Leading is a lonely profession, and the temptation to exceed the role and responsibility is always with the leader. Remember how the devil attempted Jesus on the mount. No leader is ever immune to possible corruption.
The second thing is that a leader can never get heady with his power, influence, impact or success. He is an instrument of the will of the people and never rises above that ground level.
The third thing is that the goodness that resonates with the people must make connection with the goodness in the leader's own heart. If goodness has been cauterized from his soul in his rise to leadership, once he gets there, he is doomed. There is no help for him for there is nothing left in him. He cannot see the motivation and requirements of the led because he is walking in a desert in which his own heat is already destroying him, and will in turn destroy the people.
The fourth thing is to recognize people think in terms of their own satisfaction, which is often at the expense of that of others. The leader must recognize and weigh through this to discover the crystal of commonality because he cannot be swayed by special interests.
The reason is clear; the majority is often wrong. It is wrong because it does not think but often acts like a mob. The mob never considers or thinks about the minority, except in terms of bias and stereotypes. The leader can ill afford for the majority to get too locked into self-interests. Human combustion is a function of this locked in-ness, fueled by a leader's weakness of will and vacillation in crisis.
A leader can be guided by, but not become summarily trusting of polls, pundits, personal advisers, or loved ones because they have a vested interest and limited vision of the now. The leader must consider his decisions in the more encompassing framework of the not yet now.
The fifth element of leadership is courage. Courage is not the absence of fear but the embrace of it in body of instinct. A legion of a hundred thousand voices of the past will visit the leader, not in his ear, but through his bones because he is an evolutionary phenomenon. Leaders have struggled before him with the same riddles and questions.
Every leader who is in touch with himself knows of what I am speaking.
These voices of the past are schooled in experience, culture, history, success, failure, salvation and damnation, death and resurrection, defeat and renewal.
Courage is the recognition when to advance, when to fall back, and when to do nothing. Courage is the quality of embracing apprehension when fear is the leader's only companion.
Courage is the recognition that no situation is ever impossible or as improbable as it may seem; nor is any situation exactly like any other before it, and therefore must be judged with naked eyes and an open mind.
The sixth thing is that the leader walks with destiny. In his every action, he is writing his and his people's history, and therefore can never have the luxury of worrying about what people think, say, or write about him in the immediate, or even threaten to do to him.
A leader is as likely to generate as many enemies as friends, as many who hate him as love him, as many who see him as their destroyer as their champion, making all such preoccupations meaningless and counterproductive.
And finally, the leader who leads establishes and leaves a legacy, something upon which to build into the future.
LEADERSHIP REDUX
The most fatal flaw in current leadership is that it is all about the leader, all about the charismatic pretense of his character. The leader has become a media performer.
Unfortunately, leadership is not a beauty contest, not about a glib or anecdotal mind with sound byte fluidity; nor is it necessarily in our prevailing image and likeness.
A leader has the presence, knowledge, will, courage, and decisiveness to make the strategic moves with the most telling long-term consequences that the well-defined problem demands. This is not likely to happen when role and self demands are confused, or when history is misread, misused, or ignored.
We are moving out of a half century of stuckness caused by this lack of leadership and we have called it everything but leaderless leadership.
Reverend Jerry Falwell, flawed as he was as a human being, never became confused about leadership, and his legacy of Liberty University is proof of that fact. He never forgot leadership is all about the led. His goodness drove him and it made connection with the common good.
_______________
Preorder information: A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: checks in the amount of $20 to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
OUR CLICHE CULTURE COMES HOME TO ROOST
OUR CLICHÉ CULTURE COMES HOME TO ROOST
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2007
“Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy when great ones are not in the way. For want of a block he will stumble at a straw.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist
THE MISCHIEF OF METAPHOR
We see people “looking at the glass half full or half empty” as a convenient way to identify their disposition, but what does the expression mean? What does it tell us, if anything?
It is an expression outside of us provoking no action but suggestion an inside preference.
Likewise, our inclination is meaningless if we judge the situation outside its context. There are times when optimism is healthy and times when it is sick, as there are times when pessimism is healthy and times when it is sick.
A situation is never an either/or proposition. Take self-esteem. Books, videos, and a constant barrage of television gurus promote formulas for self-esteem. But you cannot wish yourself esteemed. You must earn it. You earn it by fighting through low esteem. And you do this by getting unstuck.
In point of fact, it is dangerous to view every situation as optimistic when clearly there are good reasons to see some situations in pessimistic terms. We need the dark clouds that promise rain as much as we need the cloudless skies that guarantee sunshine. It is as unnatural to be always “up” as it is to be always “down.” Life has a rhythm to it and we are designed to be resilient, not rigid. When we claim to always be on top of everything, it suggests we are stuck. There is an old popular song about “laughing on the outside and crying on the inside” that is closer to the mark.
What determines whether we are stuck or not is a matter of how we look at and define the situations we experience. Stuckness is the rigidity of a mind that will resist seeing the situation and circumstances for what they are.
This is not a matter of talent or genius or the generosity of circumstances. It is simply a preference for seeing conditions, as they should be not as they are. When we are rigidly judgmental, we are either stuck in optimism or pessimism, which are equally damaging.
Stated another way, when we stop growing, we don’t vegetate. We start to die. There are people in their teens embracing the dying process, which they call “boredom,” whereas there are people in their seventies and eighties that are still growing.
Sometimes, the metamorphic glass is indeed half full and other times it is half empty. So, to suggest it is half full when it is half empty is to stumble over it as if it were a metaphoric straw.
It was in reflecting on this as I had a coffee at McDonald’s today waiting for my Beautiful Betty to join me to select luggage for our European trip. My mind turned to wondering why we always seem to look at problems from the outside or the same perspective. We do it so repeatedly that two puzzlers came to mind while trying to think over the cell phone chatter that surrounded me.
THE CLICHÉ OF LEADERSHIP
Having just left Barnes & Noble, after inspecting new books on leadership, including a new one by Lee Iacocca and several by John Maxwell, the leadership guru, as well as others of note, I could not help but notice these books were all about the leader and not one of them about the led. They were no less leadership prescriptions than books that came out of post-World War II from such authors as Douglas McGregor, or Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, in other words, indicators of our stuckness in leadership style.
Maxwell has a fetish about the “leader within” while Iaccoca addresses the problem of leadership as if he is the Supreme Pontiff of ecclesiastical leadership. Iacocca does not appear a bit self-conscious in issuing dogmatic encyclicals from his exalted throne, whereas Maxwell sounds like a retread of a priest of the 1970s who was then harping about the “child within.” The good priest never thought it an incongruity to bypass that elusive “adult within” in his quest for personal validation.
Should the reader be able to clone himself into Iacocca or to discover the leader within of Maxwell, the problem of leadership would still remain unresolved because it is the wrong focus.
When only ten percent of the workforce was well educated, and workers obediently marched to the beat of their masters, workers could be duped into such cadence. Not anymore.
Ninety percent of the workforce now is as privy to everything as is its management, plus better educated than most managers who would claim to be their leaders. Therefore, it behooves leaders today to recognize that leadership is all about the led, and not about the leader. This is true of students, parishioners, the military, buyers and the voting constituency.
The focus of leadership should be on the led, and what the leader can glean from that focus to make the led all that they could be.
This is not epiphany stuff.
Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century could already see that there was a disconnect between the ruling class and his people. He wandered among them incognito to get a sense of this, and to assess the trust level of his leadership. He needed this to gauge a momentous disruption of stuckness in feudalism. He could see the handwriting on the wall. Russia was a crumbling feudal empire and the West was leaving Russia in its dust. He knew leadership was not all about him but all about the people. His pressing problem was how to use this understanding to pitchfork his people into the changing modern world. Once he got a sense of his people, he embarked on a series of sweeping military, fiscal, administrative, educational, cultural and ecclesiastical reforms, many of them based on Western European models. All classes of Russian society suffered from the impact of these reforms, including his own son who died leading a conspiracy against his father. Becoming unstuck exacts a price. No platitudes are going to engineer a necessary process to completion. This can only be accomplished by embracing our natural resistance to change.
THE CLICHÉ OF POVERTY
There was a great economic depression in the late nineteenth century, but even a greater one in the early second quarter of the twentieth century. The Great Depression of the twentieth century put the focus of capitalistic democracies on the elimination of material poverty.
The United States came to stir the world’s drink as Europe was decimated by the destruction of World War II, while the United States was left intact with its industrial and management might operating at full steam unimpeded by such devastation.
A new mentality rose out of this conflagration. Economic Man with the mindset of progress was now committed to obliterate material poverty. To a considerable degree it was successful in the United States as many who had been poor for generations came to capture something of the “American Dream” in wealth and relative luxury. A vibrant middle class seemed to have been created, but was it so vibrant?
Americans, it would seem, have never associated luxury with rest but instead with the pursuit of more. This has translated into new activities; new acquisitions and symbols of new status with “bigger and better” becoming the new mantra.
For more than a half century, this has been going on with many new problems, problems that never existed when material poverty was a lifelong status. Ironically, we were a happier and more integrated society when we were poor. Wealth has made us poorer in spirit as a function of our material prosperity.
Similarly, the functional family has been replaced by the dysfunctional family; the active individual has been replaced by the obese couch potato; the comfortable stability of regional heritage has been replaced by everyone and every place looking the same; while the center of life which once rotated around the axis of family, church and school has been replaced by a potpourri of distracting activities that are centrifugal rather than centripetal.
The most egregious sin in America is for an activity to be an end in itself, such as reading a book, pruning roses, or going to school. Everything must have instrumental and terminal coordinates or the activity is judged a waste of time. We are an action-oriented society even if we delude ourselves with passive participation.
Consequently, one size does seem to fit all as the richest and poorest in quest of eradicating material poverty are as likely as not to be involved in crime, violence, illegitimacy, drug addiction, divorce, obesity, AIDs, homicide, suicide, corruption, and every other expression of spiritual poverty.
Spiritual poverty has been ignored as if the magnitude of material abundance and prosperity would be sufficient to eliminate it from the face of the earth. We make a big deal about philanthropy when it would not be necessary if our values were a little more in balance.
For instance, the welfare system treats those that use it as second-class citizens. Some gravitate towards it because of need, others because it is easy. The irony is that it is a sin to be materially poor, but being spiritually wanting doesn’t seem to get much attention; yet the evidence suggests that as a society we are.
When all the energy and focus has been put on progress, there is little energy left for spiritual poverty. The charge could be made that the welfare system has kept more people in place (and down), or spiritually impoverished and dependent than any other factor.
No one feels good about getting something for nothing. We feel good about ourselves when we are respected for our contributions.
When we either have too little or too much, society suffers a spiritual breakdown.
We see this as good paying jobs are sent abroad. We see this as young people drop out of school. We see this in the failure of young people to be trained in skills to qualify them for well paying jobs. We see this in young girls reaching puberty too early, and having children while still being children. We see this in adults in trusted positions in the home, school, church, workplace, government and military abusing their positions and compromising or corrupting those around them by their actions. Scandal has become so normal as to suggest the normalcy of pathology.
The evidence is overwhelming: the rich and poor of this nation are equally spiritually impoverished.
Spiritual poverty has been beyond the pale of society-at-large to do anything about it. We have created a society where no one is in charge, where boundaries are meaningless or nonexistent, where continence is considered repressive, and self-control oppressive; where freedom is considered doing whatever one pleases when that is the greatest enslavement.
Leaders are looking for a formula on how to be successful instead of learning how to lead the led, while people chase the buck thinking that wealth is the palliative to all their spiritual and material poverty.
Such stuckness is another reason why I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
PREORDER INFORMATION: checks in the amount of $30 (plus $5 S&H) for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2007
“Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy when great ones are not in the way. For want of a block he will stumble at a straw.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist
THE MISCHIEF OF METAPHOR
We see people “looking at the glass half full or half empty” as a convenient way to identify their disposition, but what does the expression mean? What does it tell us, if anything?
It is an expression outside of us provoking no action but suggestion an inside preference.
Likewise, our inclination is meaningless if we judge the situation outside its context. There are times when optimism is healthy and times when it is sick, as there are times when pessimism is healthy and times when it is sick.
A situation is never an either/or proposition. Take self-esteem. Books, videos, and a constant barrage of television gurus promote formulas for self-esteem. But you cannot wish yourself esteemed. You must earn it. You earn it by fighting through low esteem. And you do this by getting unstuck.
In point of fact, it is dangerous to view every situation as optimistic when clearly there are good reasons to see some situations in pessimistic terms. We need the dark clouds that promise rain as much as we need the cloudless skies that guarantee sunshine. It is as unnatural to be always “up” as it is to be always “down.” Life has a rhythm to it and we are designed to be resilient, not rigid. When we claim to always be on top of everything, it suggests we are stuck. There is an old popular song about “laughing on the outside and crying on the inside” that is closer to the mark.
What determines whether we are stuck or not is a matter of how we look at and define the situations we experience. Stuckness is the rigidity of a mind that will resist seeing the situation and circumstances for what they are.
This is not a matter of talent or genius or the generosity of circumstances. It is simply a preference for seeing conditions, as they should be not as they are. When we are rigidly judgmental, we are either stuck in optimism or pessimism, which are equally damaging.
Stated another way, when we stop growing, we don’t vegetate. We start to die. There are people in their teens embracing the dying process, which they call “boredom,” whereas there are people in their seventies and eighties that are still growing.
Sometimes, the metamorphic glass is indeed half full and other times it is half empty. So, to suggest it is half full when it is half empty is to stumble over it as if it were a metaphoric straw.
It was in reflecting on this as I had a coffee at McDonald’s today waiting for my Beautiful Betty to join me to select luggage for our European trip. My mind turned to wondering why we always seem to look at problems from the outside or the same perspective. We do it so repeatedly that two puzzlers came to mind while trying to think over the cell phone chatter that surrounded me.
THE CLICHÉ OF LEADERSHIP
Having just left Barnes & Noble, after inspecting new books on leadership, including a new one by Lee Iacocca and several by John Maxwell, the leadership guru, as well as others of note, I could not help but notice these books were all about the leader and not one of them about the led. They were no less leadership prescriptions than books that came out of post-World War II from such authors as Douglas McGregor, or Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, in other words, indicators of our stuckness in leadership style.
Maxwell has a fetish about the “leader within” while Iaccoca addresses the problem of leadership as if he is the Supreme Pontiff of ecclesiastical leadership. Iacocca does not appear a bit self-conscious in issuing dogmatic encyclicals from his exalted throne, whereas Maxwell sounds like a retread of a priest of the 1970s who was then harping about the “child within.” The good priest never thought it an incongruity to bypass that elusive “adult within” in his quest for personal validation.
Should the reader be able to clone himself into Iacocca or to discover the leader within of Maxwell, the problem of leadership would still remain unresolved because it is the wrong focus.
When only ten percent of the workforce was well educated, and workers obediently marched to the beat of their masters, workers could be duped into such cadence. Not anymore.
Ninety percent of the workforce now is as privy to everything as is its management, plus better educated than most managers who would claim to be their leaders. Therefore, it behooves leaders today to recognize that leadership is all about the led, and not about the leader. This is true of students, parishioners, the military, buyers and the voting constituency.
The focus of leadership should be on the led, and what the leader can glean from that focus to make the led all that they could be.
This is not epiphany stuff.
Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century could already see that there was a disconnect between the ruling class and his people. He wandered among them incognito to get a sense of this, and to assess the trust level of his leadership. He needed this to gauge a momentous disruption of stuckness in feudalism. He could see the handwriting on the wall. Russia was a crumbling feudal empire and the West was leaving Russia in its dust. He knew leadership was not all about him but all about the people. His pressing problem was how to use this understanding to pitchfork his people into the changing modern world. Once he got a sense of his people, he embarked on a series of sweeping military, fiscal, administrative, educational, cultural and ecclesiastical reforms, many of them based on Western European models. All classes of Russian society suffered from the impact of these reforms, including his own son who died leading a conspiracy against his father. Becoming unstuck exacts a price. No platitudes are going to engineer a necessary process to completion. This can only be accomplished by embracing our natural resistance to change.
THE CLICHÉ OF POVERTY
There was a great economic depression in the late nineteenth century, but even a greater one in the early second quarter of the twentieth century. The Great Depression of the twentieth century put the focus of capitalistic democracies on the elimination of material poverty.
The United States came to stir the world’s drink as Europe was decimated by the destruction of World War II, while the United States was left intact with its industrial and management might operating at full steam unimpeded by such devastation.
A new mentality rose out of this conflagration. Economic Man with the mindset of progress was now committed to obliterate material poverty. To a considerable degree it was successful in the United States as many who had been poor for generations came to capture something of the “American Dream” in wealth and relative luxury. A vibrant middle class seemed to have been created, but was it so vibrant?
Americans, it would seem, have never associated luxury with rest but instead with the pursuit of more. This has translated into new activities; new acquisitions and symbols of new status with “bigger and better” becoming the new mantra.
For more than a half century, this has been going on with many new problems, problems that never existed when material poverty was a lifelong status. Ironically, we were a happier and more integrated society when we were poor. Wealth has made us poorer in spirit as a function of our material prosperity.
Similarly, the functional family has been replaced by the dysfunctional family; the active individual has been replaced by the obese couch potato; the comfortable stability of regional heritage has been replaced by everyone and every place looking the same; while the center of life which once rotated around the axis of family, church and school has been replaced by a potpourri of distracting activities that are centrifugal rather than centripetal.
The most egregious sin in America is for an activity to be an end in itself, such as reading a book, pruning roses, or going to school. Everything must have instrumental and terminal coordinates or the activity is judged a waste of time. We are an action-oriented society even if we delude ourselves with passive participation.
Consequently, one size does seem to fit all as the richest and poorest in quest of eradicating material poverty are as likely as not to be involved in crime, violence, illegitimacy, drug addiction, divorce, obesity, AIDs, homicide, suicide, corruption, and every other expression of spiritual poverty.
Spiritual poverty has been ignored as if the magnitude of material abundance and prosperity would be sufficient to eliminate it from the face of the earth. We make a big deal about philanthropy when it would not be necessary if our values were a little more in balance.
For instance, the welfare system treats those that use it as second-class citizens. Some gravitate towards it because of need, others because it is easy. The irony is that it is a sin to be materially poor, but being spiritually wanting doesn’t seem to get much attention; yet the evidence suggests that as a society we are.
When all the energy and focus has been put on progress, there is little energy left for spiritual poverty. The charge could be made that the welfare system has kept more people in place (and down), or spiritually impoverished and dependent than any other factor.
No one feels good about getting something for nothing. We feel good about ourselves when we are respected for our contributions.
When we either have too little or too much, society suffers a spiritual breakdown.
We see this as good paying jobs are sent abroad. We see this as young people drop out of school. We see this in the failure of young people to be trained in skills to qualify them for well paying jobs. We see this in young girls reaching puberty too early, and having children while still being children. We see this in adults in trusted positions in the home, school, church, workplace, government and military abusing their positions and compromising or corrupting those around them by their actions. Scandal has become so normal as to suggest the normalcy of pathology.
The evidence is overwhelming: the rich and poor of this nation are equally spiritually impoverished.
Spiritual poverty has been beyond the pale of society-at-large to do anything about it. We have created a society where no one is in charge, where boundaries are meaningless or nonexistent, where continence is considered repressive, and self-control oppressive; where freedom is considered doing whatever one pleases when that is the greatest enslavement.
Leaders are looking for a formula on how to be successful instead of learning how to lead the led, while people chase the buck thinking that wealth is the palliative to all their spiritual and material poverty.
Such stuckness is another reason why I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
PREORDER INFORMATION: checks in the amount of $30 (plus $5 S&H) for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
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