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We now attempt to understand this LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO THE WESTERN NIGHT.

The Western mind has been leery of demigods throughout its history, but vulnerable to such perceptions for its paranoia. The Western collective conscious is more single minded than pluralistic, more arrogant than humble and displays an implicit belief that the Anglo-Saxon Caucasian is superior to other races.

Faulty as this belief, it has established a cultural truth that the West was destined to first conquer nature, and then impose its collective will on the rest of the world. This “cut & control” extravagance has led to the question: Can the planet earth survive this self-indulgent man?

Now, paradoxically, the rest of the world, in an effort to catch up, as it were, is committing the same errors as the West, imitating Western extravagance to realize its own dominance, putting the earth and 21st century world in future jeopardy.

Not to worry, as with Western boxamania, problems are treated as effects irrespective of causes. The drumbeat thunders on in celebration of the progress being made as a myriad of problems are being solved, failing to realize that the problems being solved are most likely the problems being created. In boxamania, existence is mainly in the cocoon of Nowhere Land, which is the wasteland of excess.

It is the nature of Western culture, the character of its society, the slant of its religion, the take on what it is to be human, free and civilized, that by implication if not by intention is that to be white is to be Western or European. Is it any wonder that the world resents this arrogance?

It is the nature of Western culture, the character of its society, the slant of its religion, the take on what it is to be human, free and civilized that by implication if not inference that to be white is to be Western or European. Is it any wonder that the world resents this arrogance?

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NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART ELEVEN

THE IMPROBABLE CHRISTIAN ERA

The Peripatetic Philosopher ponders:

Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land –

A Segment from Part Ten

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

© May 20, 2016

FASCISM AS “NOWHERE LAND” BEGINS AND ENDS LIKE THIS!

We saw this with the dark charisma of Adolf Hitler, a never do well rabblerouser, poorly educated, but with a genius to identify the pathology of the masses with the rhetorical skills to translate this into a painless ride into Paradise, which turned out to be Nowhere Land.

Hitler built up the reputation as an iron man who stood up to the moneyed politicians with a message that he had the answer to Jewish bankers and industrialists who he claimed were responsible for Germany’s losing WWI. Hundreds then thousands came to his rallies to hear him make his apocalyptic predictions of a new Germany with pat solutions to the people’s most pesky problems. His incoherent and contradictory arguments had one thing in common: his German listeners were eager to hear facile explanations for their mounting misery, and Hitler knew just where to place the blame.

Germany had been stabbed in the back by politicians negotiating the Peace Treaty of WWI at Versailles, politicians that had betrayed the “frontier fighters” in that war, who had died in vain, as they caused Germany to lose the war. He vilified the current German government and ranted that the German Weimar Constitution was illegitimate. He next said that he would annihilate the threat of Communism that was campaigning vigorously to dominate German politics.

He identified Germany’s enemies as Communism on the left and ultra-nationalists and unreconstructed monarchists on the right. The big bugaboo was “Big Capital” and internationalists such as President Woodrow Wilson of the United States. He painted Wilson as a swindler with his unrealized “Fourteen Points” for a peaceful world.   The League of Nations, which Wilson advocated, was created but without the participation of the United States, as the politics of isolation still dominated the country.

Then quick as a dime, Hitler would paint a rosy picture of prewar Germany’s glory days in contrast to the “disgrace and defeat” that currently dominated German politics. He made complicated things seem simple and easily solvable with the right leader, warning his listeners, however, that the times called for firm measures and primitive perhaps even brutal actions.

Hitler’s skill at galvanizing his audience and striking deeper emotional chords than any other politician lay not merely in his demagoguery, but in his ability to see beyond conventional political issues to the underlying themes and yearnings of his listeners. His detractors underestimated his appeal with the confident expectation that the people would see through his diatribe, but of course, the people didn’t.

He called on Germans to reach for something bigger and broader – to embrace a sense of greatness – that lifted the people out of their doldrums and confusion, and buffered them from the reality that they were experiencing. Hitler wrote:

“The question of recovery of the German people is not a question of economic recovery. Rather it is a matter of regaining an inner feeling among the people, the only thing that can lead again to national greatness and, through that, to economic welfare.”

He was selling the goodness and the potential of the German people, not just a stronger mark and fair wages. When he announced the outrages of the Treaty of Versailles, and ranted about the usury against the people, he rhapsodized about creating a German culture single to none.

With his dark charisma, people felt he was talking about them, and the problems with which they could identify on a painful basis, not about abstractions. German self-esteem may have been shattered and offended, but Hitler was offering them a different picture of themselves as strong and honorable, indeed, as members of a master race.

The ingenious of his emotional strategy transformed events into mass entertainments where neither policies nor politics, per se, were on the menu, as these were superseded by an overlay and more dominant religious fervor that resembled a revivalist tent meeting. Consequently, he didn’t have to coerce his audience into being with him, it did so enthusiastically. Likewise, the more critics attempted to derail Hitler movement the more enthusiastically his audience grew in its loyalty to him.

Hitler was on his way to creating a fascistic state, that is, a dictatorial, authoritarian society with total intolerance for opposing views or practices. The government of the German Third Reich controls everything stripping citizens of their individual rights. Hitler’s expansionist policies led to WWII in which tens of millions of people died and many of Germany’s great cities were decimated and turned into rubble.

“It Can’t Happen Here!” (1935) was a novel written by Sinclair Lewis during the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, warning Americans "it could happen here!"

French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931), who lived in the shadow of the rise of Hitler, wrote more than one hundred years ago in The Crowd: The Study of the Popular Mind (1896):


The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.
Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation. The first is the destruction of those religious, political and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilization are rooted. The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries.

The ideas of the past, although half destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in the process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transition and anarchy.

While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase. The age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF THE CROWD.


We see this in the current American 2016 Presidential Campaign with the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party in Donald James Trump playing to the crowd and the lowest common denominator in American society. We saw this before in the megalomania of Adolf Hitler where he led the great nation of Germany to ruin.

Donald Trump’s supporters don’t seem to care what he says, and how many times he changes his stance on issues, as they are not interested in policies or ideologies. They are only devoted to him, as legions were once devoted to Hitler, that is, until the very end. Hitler proved to be Nowhere Man. Will “the Donald” drive the American electorate into Nowhere Land? We shall see.

THE LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO THE WESTERN NIGHT 

The Western mind has been vulnerable to a demigod as it has a history of being more paranoid than perceptive, more single minded than pluralistic, more arrogant than humble. By attitude or implication, it has conducted its business as if the Anglo-Saxon Caucasian is superior to other races.

Throughout the ages, the discovery of the advantage of this belief has established a cultural truth that the West was destined to first conquer nature, and then impose its collective will on the rest of the world. This “cut & control” extravagance has led to the question: Can the planet earth survive self-indulgent man?

Now, paradoxically, the rest of the world, in an effort to catch up, as if were, is committing the same errors as the West, imitating Western extravagance to realize its own dominance, putting the earth and the 21st century world in further jeopardy.

Not to worry, as with Western boxamania, problems are treated as effects irrespective of the causes. The drumbeat thunders on in celebration of the progress being made, the myriad of problems being solved, failing to realize that the problems being solved are the problems being created. In boxamania, existence is mainly in the cocoon of Nowhere Land failing to see the accumulated waste that excess has created.

It is the nature of Western culture, the character of its society, the slant of its religion, and the take on what it is to be human, free and civilized, that by implication if not by intention that only whites of European lineage have reached that distinction. Is it any wonder that the world resents such arrogance?

The world is moving swiftly away from the shadow the perspective of Nowhere Land and into the full light of a rainbow confederation of diverse races, ethnicities, religions, cultures, and characteristics, where democracy may not resemble the ideas the West clings to so passionately, ideas believed to be the only legitimate approach to world order.

Western man for the past thousand years has been dedicated to changing the world into his own image and likeness, while being disinclined to accept or even acknowledge the world as it is, or would have itself be.

This stubborn solipsistic view of the world persists with the best Western minds as they still hold to the Old Testament messianic concepts on the New Testament “end of day.”

Will reason and love enable man to be one with his fellowman and with nature, preserving his individuality and integrity or will Western man continue to dominate with his amnesia for “what is,” while staying safely in Nowhere Land clinging to beliefs that no longer apply?

There is no question that Western man has dominated with his quest for perfection and his control of historical time. Much of it can be attributed to his faith. As you shall see, Christianity transformed the spiritual into a pragmatic apparatus for social, political, military and cultural dominance of the indigenous peoples of the world.

Western man destroyed many ancient civilizations desecrating their sacred idols and abolishing their traditions replacing them with the Christian God, a God now of science in its ambivalent wisdom and ambiguous forays into the world of the so-called “infidels.” The West acted as if it possessed substantive truth, and in its magnanimity was moved to generously share its wealth and wisdom with the rest of the world. Nowhere Land and Nowhere Man were never more discretely defined. It is quite a story.

NEXT: NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND – PART ELEVEN

THE CHRISTIAN ERA

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART NINE

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The West’s fascination with NOWHERE MAN or Utopian ideas has been as addictive as breathing is to life.  There is a certain insanity to this as it entertains faulty perceptions, inappropriate actions and delusions of superiority. 

We saw this in 1095 when Europe launched the “Holy Crusades” to convert the Islam infidels of Persia to Christian beliefs, as NOWHERE MAN of the Christian West knew best, only to be soundly defeated at Tripoli by the Muslims in 1291, ending that misadventure. 

The West turned its attention to the New World in the 16^th century sending missionaries and soldiers to that unspoiled Paradise to convert the natives to the Christian faith, and in the process, destroying New World civilizations.

The implicit belief of the NOWHERE MAN invaders of the West was that it had a superior civilization and religion with a divine duty to convert this New World Paradise into the NOWHERE LAND of the West.  The corollary was that the few were ordained to rule and the rest were meant to follow wherever NOWHERE MAN might find himself.

A disruption in this Utopian continuity is personified in Andrew Jackson’s U.S. Presidency (1829 – 1837) where he took on the NOWHERE MAN of his time in industry and banking and drove him back into NOWHERE LAND.   He changed the American calculus of leadership, which now in the 21^st century has slipped back into NOWHERE MAN and NOWHERE LAND.   

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NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART TEN

"LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO THE WESTERN NIGHT!"

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND

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In this secular 21st century society without a soul, capitalism has become the civil religion. Not only do profits come before people, but money is the central theme of that religion.

Money is the crucial "Energizer Bunny" for candidates running for the American presidency in this latest chapter of quadrennial madness. Money fuels the discourse as candidates talk about jobs and how they are going to make the American economy robust again. One candidate is not subtle about this; with him, everyone will have a job, a free college education and free healthcare. The other candidates promise the same but with more circumspect rhetoric.

“Socialism,” writes Oswald Spengler, “is nothing but capitalism of the lower classes.” What Spengler doesn’t say, but is also true, corporate welfare is nothing but capitalism for the upper classes. It is a case of choosing your own poison.

World peace and prosperity is not possible if the wealth of the world is literally controlled by twenty percent of the world’s 7.2 billion people. Many Second and Third World countries have been under Western powers for centuries and possess little of their own nation’s wealth.

Love, peace and prosperity is not possible in this neoliberal era of capital accumulation going to the few. Low wages and investment has limited consumption and forced workers to borrow beyond their capacity to repay. This casino economy has been in play since the 1980s across the West with deregulated labor, goods and investment markets, signaling the decline and ultimate demise of capitalism as the West has voted for going on the cheap.

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART SEVEN

IS NOWHERE MAN SOULLESS?

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, AUTHOR

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As we move ever faster from the sacred to the profane, from the spiritual to the secular, from the immaterial to the material, from the scientific to the technological, from the soul to the beast within us, from being fearful of what we don’t know to the hubris of feeling equal to all challenges, we find ourselves at the gates of NOWHERE LAND expecting them to be the gates of PARADISE.



Despite man’s conscious profundity, he has failed to escape his own animus, or to recognize that without the credit of a soul, there is little that holds us together as a species. Whether the soul is only symbolic, ephemeral or simply philosophic, it, alone, has held us together on this hostile planet called “EARTH!”



With the soul, we have the sense of possessing a moral compass and the confidence of knowing our way. The irony is that the soul persist even though it is denied.

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART SIX

NOWHERE MAN IN THE DYING

SENSATE CULTURE!

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We wonder how people who have everything could become engaged in fraud; how people who have more power than they can handle could become involved in corruption; how people with no taste for food could become gluttonous; how people with waning libidos could become engaged in shameful debauchery; how people who have everything but still envy people who have little.


Wonder no more. This behavior is evidence of the death rattle of the dying Sensate Culture of our magnificent 600-year-day as we transition through Nowhere Land as Nowhere Man to the Ideational Culture of our creative tomorrow.


Ideas have been a bane as well as a blessing. They have changed the world and changed us in the process. We have allowed ideas to take us wherever they might without much thought where that might be, or what impact these ideas might have on us and others. We take pride in being a conscious thinking animal, which in this transition our actions suggests an oxymoron.

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NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- Nowhere Man's "Cut & Control" Journey Through Time!

Like many writing projects, ideas are conceived and gradually developed in the mind of the author long before they are captured in a book or article.  That has been the case for this author with Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land.  For decades, I committed words to notebooks without uncovering the conceptual core of what I was thinking and trying to say.    

Then I read James Burke and Robert Ornstein’s The Axemaker’s Gift: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture (1995), a book that explained how society cuts existence away from the “way it was” into a new sense of reality, a reality that has gained something much desired but at the expense of something lost, possibly forever.  

The theme throughout these pages Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land will reflect that perspective and core idea.

So each new tool invented changes existence and represents the latest aspect of the “cut & control” phenomenon.  This has become the cultural reality of “Nowhere Man,” for each new tool has devalued what was and replaced it with a more valued tool.  No one worries about the cost or the loss, only the promise. 

The inventor of each new tool is celebrated, which urges him on to invent another tool.  People rush out to buy the new tool to make it part of their daily existence. No one seems concerned about the cost benefits involved as attention is only on the efficacy and convenience of the new tool.

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NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART FOUR -- "GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL!"

A few million years ago, there were tsunamis, hurricanes, and mudslides due to torrential rainfall.  Craggy mountains split off giant boulders that crashed into the valley, glaciers cracked off icy sculptures and thundered into the sea and snow capped mountains produced roaring avalanches.  

There were earthquakes as its plates shifted accompanied by volcanoes that spewed molten lava into the valley to form rivers of heat.  Long periods of drought interrupted by lighting showers led to forest fires that torched millions of acres whilst tornadoes cut through the land as if a menacing knife.  

Spring floods swelled the banks of massive rivers creating temporary lakes changing the landscape and redefining the continent with tectonic shifts. 

Then man entered the equation, and over tens of hundreds of years in existential progression first experiencing these phenomena then resolving to become their master.  In the process, he settled where nature could do him the most harm: along coastlines, in the shadow of awesome mountains and menacing volcanoes, on the banks of giant rivers to sporadically feel the full wrath of nature.  

Man's quest satisfied, he came to poison his adopted home as self-indulgent Nowhere Man turning Paradise into Nowhere Land.

      

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The Peripatetic Philosopher looks at a politician:

Bernie Sanders,

You Can’t have it Both Ways!


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

© March 20, 2016

“The Walton family of Walmart owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, Campaign speech, February 23, 2016

Note:

POLITIFACT confirms the senator’s claim, but what does it tell us?

AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL

Sam Walton was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma on March 29, 1918.  The family was constantly on the move with Sam attending eighth grade in Shelbina, Missouri, where he was the town’s youngest Eagle Scout in the state’s history. 

Sam, like most who eventually assume leadership roles, showed the aptitude early. 

Growing up in the Great Depression, now living in Columbia, Missouri, Sam did chores to help make financial ends meet for his impoverished family: he milked cows, bottled the surplus, drove that milk to customers.  

In addition, he was a paperboy for the Columbia Daily Tribune and sold magazine subscriptions.  He was voted “Most Versatile Boy” by his high school graduating class.

Think of how many young people you know today that fit this description, people who are destined to lead our country because they still have the opportunity to spread their wings and find out what they are made of.

After high school, he decided to attend college, hoping to find a way to better support his struggling family.  He attended the University of Missouri as a Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) cadet, again, doing odd jobs and waiting on tables.  He still found time to be active in extracurricular activities. 

Upon graduating in 1940 with a degree in economics, he was voted for his many services “permanent president” of his class.  

Such leadership designations often are accrued by young people in their formative years, signaling what the future is likely to hold for them and us.

Upon graduating, he joined J. C. Penney as a management trainee in DesMoines, Iowa, a position that paid $75 per month.  After 18 months with Penney’s, he was inducted into the US Army Intelligence Corps to serve in WWII, working in aircraft plant security and prisoner of war camps.        

FIRST STORE

In 1945, once the war was over, he looked around for doing something different. Penney’s still held his job for him, but he was intrigued with the variety store business, and decided to take a management position at such a store. He was 26.


Being a quick study, he decided he wanted to own his own store and innovate it in ways consistent with his ideas, and not have to follow company policy. 

With a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law and $5,000 he had saved while in the service, he purchased a Ben Franklin “Five & Dime” Store in Newport, Arkansas.
 
There, he pioneered many of the concepts that would become his brand. This included how the shelves were to be stocked, always kept full, and colorfully laid out.

His second store, just down the block, was a small department store. It just happened to be next door to his main competitor in town. He was always studying competition, observing and asking questions, a listener, not a teller; a learner, not a knower.  
He didn’t shy away from the more successful business people, but boldly confronted them to learn what their secrets were.


Success, however, has its ghosts lurking in the shadows. No enterprise is without surprises or disappointments. 

As it happens, his store was so successful that his landlord, who had a history in retail sales, refused to renew his lease desiring to reclaim the store (and franchise rights) for his son.

The landlord, however, bought Walton’s inventory at a fair price of $50,000. Using this capital, with the advice of his wife and father-in-law, he managed to purchase a small store in town, and the title to the building in a new location on downtown square of Bentonville, Arkansas. 

Opening May 9, 1950, the store was an immediate success. He was thirty-two.

TESTS AT A YOUNG AGE

Now, he had two successful but struggling stores 220 miles apart, one in Newport and the other in Bentonville. Never considering himself a good delegater, used to depending on himself to handle affairs, he found he now had to train people to adopt what became known as “the Walton way.” Many of these first employees were part of the Walton clan.

Once that was done, and both stores were hitting on all cylinders, he turned his attention to what he found most compelling, scouting out new locations and opening more Ben Franklin franchises.

Competition was great, and getting greater, as this was the zenith in the post-WWII baby boomer business expansion. It seemed that everywhere he turned he would run into a new hard charger ready to cut into his business success.


His only option, as he saw it, was to continue to grow and prosper.


True, Sam Walton had an economics degree, but he was in virgin territory with no family history in retail, and retail like every other industry was changing fast.


Young people, who wish to take a page from the Walton book, would be advised to understand that going forward often means to be limited to little more than instinct and intuition.

Having been a pilot in the war, he decided to purchase a small plane to cut down the time surveying businesses and scouting areas with but one aim, expanding the business.

By now, the Walton business was very much a family business with his brother James “Bud” and son John his direct reports, and all the women very much involved as well.

In 1954, at the age of 36, with his brother Bud, father-in-law, brother-in-law, and son, he opened a store in a shopping center in Kansas City, Missouri. From the beginning, as he hired new people, he encouraged them to set aside part of their salary to invest in the business.

Hundreds if not thousands who did so are multimillionaires today, some even billionaires.


This is for young people: imagine if you were an employee of Sam Walton, and you were not making a great deal of money, indeed, not really enough to live on, as was the case for many early Wal-Mart employees, and you were offered this opportunity and didn’t take it. Over a million former employees didn’t. 

Whom should they blame for this?

By 1962, the Walton clan owned 16 stores in Arkansas Missouri and Kansas (15 Ben Franklins and one independent in Fayetteville).

FRUITION, WAL-MART IS BORN

The first Wal-Mart store opened on July 2, 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas and was called “the Wal-Mart Discount City Store.” 

From the beginning, Sam Walton promoted American products, and had the cunning insight to see the economic advantage to have American manufacturers provide the Wal-Mart brand for the entire chain.


As technology improved, and the science of stocking and tracking sales became more sophisticated, Wal-Mart became brutal in its negotiating strategy.


Sam Walton’s wife considered the Wal-Mart brand designed for middle to lower income shoppers who lived in small towns. That was the initial condition she advocated with new stores to open in only towns of less than 20,000.


Surprisingly, that strategy held for the first decade or so.

Today, Wal-Mart is the single largest employer in the United States, and is able to negotiate the best price for its customers that is possible. 

Yes, many products are now made outside the United States, but many American families would not be able to eat as well as they do were it not for the Wal-Mart prices.


Sam Walton came from very little. He had the determination and diligence to capture the American dream, and in doing so, where is the attention?  

It is not on how the creation of the Walton wealth was possible, and what we can learn from this, but instead on the actual wealth of the family. 


Young people, imagine what this means to you. In a short three-quarters of a century, a man out of nowhere, created one of the most powerful families in the world, economically, politically, socially and personally. He did this by dint of his will, good luck, and with an ability to pay attention and stay focused on an objective.


Sam Walton died in 1992 at the age of 74 of multiple myeloma, a form of leukemia. My da died of the same disease in 1958, three days past his 50th birthday. It is a bad actor and to this day there is no cure for the disease.


If interested in a candid story of this man, I recommend “Sam Walton, Made in America: My Story,” by Sam Walton with John Huey, Doubleday, New York, 1992.

FINAL COMMENT

Were Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist, to rule as President of the United States, it would be impossible for the Sam Waltons of America to ever rise above the poverty status into national, and indeed, international prominence.  What Sam Walton accomplished is one of the reasons masses of people across the globe rush to the American shores.


There were three things that the America that Sam Walton fought to preserve in World War Two that still remained viable when he was Honorably Discharged from the US Army:


(1) It was possible for him to use his mind, heart and energy to create something long lasting;

(2) There were few roadblocks to that opportunity as long as he stayed within the dictates of the law; and

(3) There was no need for him to feel embarrassed or guilty for the success earned.

Take away the drive, the leadership, the risk taking, the failures that lead to successes, and you cut the heart out of America. The Walton family has been diligent giving back to the United States.


It is the American mind employed that makes a difference, a mind that earns its way as it goes, and goes as it earns.

It may be a rallying cry at Bernie Sanders’ political rallies to make the Walton Family seem like a pariah, but imagine where those hundreds of thousands of Americans would be working today if Wal-Mart did not exist. 

Imagine, too, what food prices would be if there was no Wal-Mart in the supermarket competitive business.


You can’t have it both ways. A welfare state is a nation that believes you can get something for nothing when the nothing that is something is arbitrary confinement to the wishes of the state.  This is a truism that never changes.

CONVERSATION ON SUBTEXT WITH A READER

A Conversation with a Reader on Subtext!

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

© March 19, 2016


A READER WRITES  & DR. FISHER RESPONDS 

 THE READER

So...am I correct that you are saying that the subtext we all carry with us will impact how we view the content and context of our current life/affairs? 

It seems to me that the subtext, if that is correct, is the background of our lives and will be different depending on the time and place of our development. Consequently, though you and I are both from small town mid-west up-bringing, your subtext as someone whose formative years were during the late depression and WWII will be different from mine which results from growing up in the 1950s. As one psychologist put it years ago – “who we are depends on where we were when...” If that is all even close to what you mean by subtext let me know.

DR. FISHER: 

That is precisely what I mean by subtext.

But subtext is more than many faceted. Subtext applies equally to race, religion, nationality and culture, indeed, civilization, as they are all protean to its construction.

Subtext relates to us individually and collectively, and is marinated with our distinct histories. We bring our subtext in greetings to those with whom we interact and relate, and ultimately assimilate without conscious awareness of how aspects of that exposure finds its way into our own subtext.

In the end, we are always richer for the exposure and attention although that may not seem so at first.

Humanity is one body. Subtext may differ but it rises from that same source. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin writes that no subtext is superior to another but all can be identified through events.

The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and etymologist E. O. Wilson developed the theory of "sociobiology," claiming that our subtext remains with those who follow. It surfaces quite dramatically and sometimes radically when continuity leads to discontinuity to disruption to catastrophe, or simply to mock catastrophe in comedic relief.  The point is that subtext is not usually apparent.

The stock market crash of 1929 and in 1987, and again in 2008 was evidence of the subtext surfacing and going awry in mass hysteria.  Ironically, people who had no money to lose talked as if they did.  It was an opportunity for subtext to be on display.

On the other hand, the current divisiveness in the Republican Party is playing out as dramaturgic relief as The Donald (Trump) exposes the hypocrisy in subtext. His popular bombast reveals an uptight nation comfortable and complacent in its denial.

Everything is subtext to behavior but most people do not understand that.

Occasionally, over the years, I've published "Fragments of a Philosophy." It was quoted in a missive on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) August 30, 2009, titled "The Subtext of Life and Its Meaning." It remains the most popular piece I have ever posted:

“There is general denial of the subtext of life. It is contained in a kind of culture that exists apart from the kind transmitted by schools and universities, a kind of culture that once flourished in typical neighborhoods across the country, but is gone now. It helped to stem lawlessness, greed, corruption and other social diseases. It was a kind of social resistance that is lacking today, something upheld by average citizens, but by people in authority as well. There was a subtext of restrain undefined, unwritten, unspoken, but nonetheless felt, practiced and experienced.

“Today, the gap between people’s dreams and experience is too large. People have resorted to living life on the edge, running without thinking, on automatic pilot in the rhythm of the content and context of things without a sense of restrain or penalty. We see this in general apathy as people react to the lead stories on television nightly news and in the headlines of morning newspapers regarding murder, mayhem, rape, fraud, and malfeasance with irritations but little more. It is the ghost in the room.

“The mind is homeless. It lacks roots. Most people aren’t from where they are. A kind of isolation from a sense of place and space breaks people. Easily forgotten is that shameful acts are committed by people, wounded human beings.

“Once upon a time, they were children, little ones running down the street at the start of school with their backpacks bouncing in cadence to their happy feet. They were on their way to school and on their way out into life. One wonders watching this parade if there goes a thief, a wife beater, an addict, a drug dealer, a murderer, a rapist, an embezzler, a gang member, a prostitute, a pimp, a drag on society, someone on the fringe that will garner those lead stories that we essentially ignore.

“Is this predetermined? Quite the opposite. But only if people use their intelligence and good will to get beyond surface issues of class and race, status and wealth, education and profession, immigration and ethnicity, religion and ideology, language and culture to consider the subtext of life to uncover what destroys social restrain and how to prepare the damage.

“The world gets better or worse one person at a time. Apathetic or psychopathologic behaviors occur because people are not acquainted with the subtext of their lives and therefore enslaved to surface issues. It was the same a hundred years ago and is likely to be so a hundred years hence.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy” (unpublished)

* * *

THE READER: 

What is happening in the world is that at any given time the current content and context are what develop the subtext that will be the life background baggage for those who are at that time in their formative years.

DR. FISHER: 

The subtext can include baggage, but it is not background.  Oh, no!  It is always there working its ways to the fore but just not always apparent.  In any case, acknowledged or not, it influences events.  

The subtext is what is.  It is what drives events.  

The source of subtext is the subconscious (individual or collective) from which the content and context of behaviors are displayed and ultimately managed or mismanaged.  

You could liken subtext to values if you like or collective history but only as a gauge.  The subtext is there, fully operational, but not apparent.  By that I mean that during periods of order surface consistency give the mocking sense that all is well when it never is.

Great disruptions, personal or societal, bring the subtext to prominence and to the confusion of those in charge, who are so schooled in denial that "what is" does not get much attention.  We have seen this in love and war, politics and religion, especially in politics and religion.    

It is during these periods of disruption, such as our current "Age of Technology," that subtext is neither acknowledged nor challenged.  It is avoided by more wondrous technology.

To be fair, there has been more change in the past 30 years than the previous 300.  So, rather than acknowledge subtext, and deal with its root attributes, we call this the "Age of Anxiety" and develop drugs to treat the condition, or writes books to describe it, and on and on.  

We valiantly avoid doing anything constructive about it, which would start by addressing the nature and function of subtext relative to the current age.   

THE READER: 

Hitler had not attacked the US and yet we declared war on Germany and in less than 4 years the US alone killed at least 2 million Germans.  In the 1940s there was no question in our collective mind that Germans were bad and in need of killing.  Hence it was a short war.  

DR. FISHER: 

Oh, dear!  That great justification, attrition!  

Here it is an expression of content (numbers) and context (dead Nazis) as it was also used in Vietnam, but without any attention to the events (including Vietnam history), which were driving subtext.  I will have more to say about WWII shortly. 

The US military routinely published its daily successes in Vietnam in terms of "body count" (Vietnamese killed) on the television nightly news as if a war of attrition was the answer to a war without a purpose.

That attention shows a total ignorance of subtext, and yet no one in power or public life at the time seemed to see the absurdity.

The French ruled Vietnam for more than a century, the subtext of a colonial power.  When France fell to Germany in WWII in 1940, this colonial power base was disrupted.  Finally, in 1954, France lost the First French Indo-China War, and Vietnam received its independence, being divided into North and South Vietnam as if you could separate a common people without disruption. 

Not surprisingly, that solution aggravated the problem of the subtext of Vietnam as a common people wanting total independence from foreign influence.  

President Kennedy stepped into this South Vietnam quagmire in support of a corrupt South Vietnam regime with American advisers and trainers.  

From that point forward it became a descent into the subtext of hell with more than 55,000 Americans in the military losing their lives in a cause that history hasn't treated kindly.  A generation of young Americans who protested against the war and refused to join in the fight were consumed in subtext and eventually stopped its advance.  

The subtext has a very long pull from the collective or historical subconscious of a people.  The book I'm now writing, NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND, is an attempt to give subtext to the American madness that currently dominates the content and context of our times, which is optimism in the face of reality of a pessimistic future.

To give you a closer sense of how pervasive subtext can be to history, consider WWII.  It all started long before even WWI.

Up until WWI, the aristocracy controlled every aspect of life of the European Western world.  The pull of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, alone, is impressive.  Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was a grandchild. Other grandchildren included queens of Greece, Norway, Romania, Spain and Sweden and the Tsarina Alexandra of Russia.  

WWI broke up this comfy aristocratic status but not its aristocratic subtext.  We are still feeling it to this day.

By the end of WWI, the high aristocracy collapsed.  The tsar, a relative of King George V of Great Britain, was overthrown and he and his royal family murdered by the Bolsheviks.  The great disruption didn't end there.

In the 1920s, the royal families across Europe had to find new ways to make a living as the aristocracy was in a state of collapse.  Take Germany's aristocracy as palpable evidence.  By 1938, nearly a fifth of the senior ranks of Heinrich Himmler's SS Gestapo were filled by holders of titles of nobility.  The subtext goes ever deeper.  

The Third Reich of Hitler's Germany had a cozy relationship with King George and Queen Mary, current Queen Elizabeth's parents.  Her father even taught her the Nazi salute as a child.  

Many of the English aristocracy were fond of Hitler's Germany and believed he had restored political and social order.  They also saw him as a perfect foil to communism.  That was the content and context of the times with many with royal ties advocating an Anglo-German alliance.  

Great Britain's Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, gave an appeasement speech (Munich Agreement) in 1938 essentially conceding the Czech Republic to Hitler while ceremoniously declaring, "We have peace in our time."

This speech was given one year to the month before Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, launching WWII.

Appeasement was but a mask to the prevailing subtext of those in power in the British government.  Many prominent Brits were willing to make huge concessions to Hitler to avoid war.  One man understood the subtext of events and their meaning, and he saved the day for the West.  

Were it not for Winston Churchill being elected Prime Minister, it is difficult to imagine Great Britain not capitulating to the will of Adolf Hitler.  Chamberlain resigned eight months after the start of WWII, the war going badly at the time, with Churchill taken office on May 10, 1940, and having to resist Nazi sympathizers in Great Britain from the first. 

THE READER: 

In the new century, based on changed subtext we have a very different context and content.  We accept Islam as the religion of peace and are careful to sort out the bad Muslims who have hi-jacked the religion, from the good ones.  The war being, for that reason, more nuanced is longer but we are killing far fewer.  That is not business as usual for us – that is progress.

DR. FISHER:

I hope what you imply is true, that our subtext reaches such maturity.  It is possible.

The People of Islam are victims of history as were the Japanese, and as are we all. Demagogues throughout history have adulterated the subtext of a people to present aspects of subtext in a twisted content and context to further their aims.  

Yet, the subtext of a people's history can be ripped from the bowels of their beliefs to present ugly aspects of that subtext.  No history is without this occasional momentum, not even ours.

The al-Qaeda terrorists present themselves as fighting a holy war, but what they want is power and the pride and identity of that power with their people.  They are using religion the way Roman Catholicism justified the the Inquisition, or forcing Jews to become Christians, and the list goes on.  No people or history is without the ugly side of subtext.    

Interestingly, your last word is "progress," seeing tolerance for Islam and Muslims a sign of progress.  I see it as a common sign of decency for differences. 

 Everyone thinks progress is good, at least most Americans. General Electric once boasted "Progress is our most important product."  Progress is as deceptive a word as is Islam or Christianity.  African Americans understand what I mean by this.

Everyone influenced by such words thinks they understand and are simply dealing with the content and context of matters when it is subtext that is ruling the day, and not necessarily wisely.  

For example, Spain wouldn't be as Spain is today without the invasion of the Moors from North Africa in the eight century.  Nor would Europe be Europe without the Moors who would dominate well into the sixteenth century.  The Moors brought with them art, literature, architecture, mathematics, science and culture to the continent, a culture of black men who were then called "Negros" and who also taught discipline, military expertise and tolerance.   

Shakespeare would capture something of this with his "Othello" in the sixteenth century.

My views, I must confess, were influenced by a nun.  I had the good fortune of having Sister Mary Cecile as my seventh and eighth grade teacher in grammar school at St. Patrick's School, who taught me about the Moors and about their influence and culture.  It has never left me.  

No, I have no love for terrorists of any stripe, but I have no fear of a new mosque going up in my neighborhood, or of a family of Muslims moving in next door.  

Thank you for stirring up my little gray cells.  Keep thinking and reflecting.

And always be well,

Jim 

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares an essay from a new book:

Search for Identity

James R. Fisher, Ph.D.

© February 17, 2016

NOTE:

This is one of the previously published essays in periodicals and trade journals that will appear in my new book, A WAY OF THINKING ABOUT THINGS.  It will be Kindle e-book.  At the end of this piece, you will see where and when it was published.

*     *     *

With the crumbling of unfailing spiritual symbols, we have become untethered from ourselves as person and each other.  We grovel in the uncertainty of our personal identity.  We are no longer sure who or what we are.

We have retrogress from “making one’s way” to being obsessed with “finding oneself.”  The urgent question is no longer “What can I do?” but “Who can I be?”  Who has taken precedence over what?  We see this in everyday life as people struggle with the question who is right not what is right. 

People as persons are searching for a “new self” with a multitude of personal trainers, charismatic gurus, Zen masters, psychologists, psychotherapists and astrologists, who are at the ready to show them the way. 

Identity however is a fragile mechanism that is largely not of our making as we grow from the outside in, not the inside out.  We become everyone else before we break free, if we somehow manage to do so, by rebelling against the programming of our parents, teachers, preachers, friends, and favorite heroes. 

 Beyond these limitations, identity is created from experience.  Identity is sensitive, not flamboyant, private, and not public. 

Nor is identity found in the latest technological fad.  On the contrary, the latest hi-tech widget can further isolate the individual from a sense of his or her unique self. 

Technology has unwittingly become the universal pacifier for anxiety in the form of the latest handheld electronic gadget.  So employed, it ceases to be a necessary tool, but a convenient a prop. 

For example, Apple, Inc. has discovered that annually repackaging its iPhone in tantalizing colors ensures that people like a herd of robotic junkies will rush to purchase it no matter how superficial its modifications as it has become a toy of the mind.

Identity has shifted from the self to super heroes and celebrities while masculine and feminine roles have merged into gender neutral.  We are no longer sure what it is to be a man or woman.  We have also lost pride in work and joy in our craftsmanship.  We are pressed into mediocrity to fit into a cybernetic machine that programs us not to make waves and to be safe hires on the job, forfeiting our individualism. 

As a status obsessed society, we have an abundance of status symbols without status, a plethora of information sources but little new knowledge.  History and tradition are playing on another channel. 

Place and Space

There is no longer a hometown as most everyone is on the move.  A rarity is a person who lives where he was born, where values and beliefs have roots, where the distant voices of youth still ring true.  Every day bulldozers crush landmarks of this hollowed past to make room for the new with little pause as to the impact on identity.

Evidence of this is that the young no longer look to the old for what has proven true.  Instead, the old mimic the young in their ephemeral obsessions.  No one wants to grow old or grow up or be left behind.  Indeed, no one claims to be comfortable with the past. 

Society has replaced its moral compass with the existential.  We have lost our way relegating history to the attic of our minds. 

If the past is prologue to the future, are we embracing the future blindfolded?  The void of place is now filled with empty space.  Everyone seems anxious to be somewhere else doing something else than being where they are doing what they are doing.  This pathology of normalcy has reduced connection to an electronic grid of text messages.

Space has taken over place.  Homes, hotels, shopping malls, athletic arenas, churches, and educational institutions are all bigger and more imposing, but have acquired a tragic sameness no matter where you find yourself.  The quiet sanctity of place has been reduced to monotonous and predictable opulent self-consciousness.

Mobility defines our rootlessness as we chase after each other in Brownian motion in other-directness with little sense of our own self-direction.  Obsessed with knowing the right people and being on the right track, we find ourselves gullible to opinion makers, polls, bestselling books, lifestyle fads and cliques.  We are willing to place our security hostage to the celebrated and acclaimed to see that our children attend the right schools, pursue the right professions, live in the right neighborhoods, and hang out with the right people. 

With place, there is a sense of belonging; with space, a sense of rootlessness.  Place nurtures us; space collects us.  Place tells us who we are; space erases identity.       

Lack of Identity Rituals

Identity is a ritual that unfolds through living, learning and experiencing life. 

Identity is neither totally self-created nor indiscriminately imposed by others.  It is learned and earned behavior by embracing fear, anxiety, insecurity, and embarrassment rather than retreating from such inevitable psychological encounters.  Identity is a private affair and not found by flaunting our stuff. 

Young people bleach their hair, streak it with blaring colors, cut it short, grow it long, or shave their heads, all to draw attention to themselves.  They paint their bodies with tattoos or wear clothes that shock.  They scream for heroes, vicariously transporting themselves from the mundane to be preoccupied with violent sports.  They plunge off jagged cliffs into shallow pools, swim into the depths of dark caves, climb treacherous mountains, or bungee jump from great heights, canoe through the rapids of perilous waters, or drop out of school and life. 

They are terrorized by the boring and the mundane, and can only feel themselves alive when living on the edge.  Curiously, adults are aping their behavior because they have lost interest in leading. 

In a society with no one in charge, sentiments of doubt prevail.  Romantic love, family unity, patriotism, morality, civic pride, school spirit, the transcendent majesty of religion and natural beauty have been shelved for the synthetic.  

In this void, identity rituals are not only desirable but necessary.  It gives people a sense of place and space through belonging, energizing routinized existence to meaningful connection with family, church, school, and community. 

The lack of identity rituals is largely the reason for the poverty of sentiment.  Sacred anchors have been replaced by pseudo-symbols of commercialism with synthetic rituals.  The rites of passage have been replaced by the mania of spectator sport -- NFL the Super Bowl, the NHL, MLB, and other sports revenues – eclipsing Hollywood and commercial television. 

These rituals fail to recharge our emotional batteries the way Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Presidents’ Day once did.  Current identity rituals have lost touch with touch.  We seem ashamed to proclaim our heritage and for that self-alienation fill the void with self-estrangement.

Personal Excellence magazine, November 2000