The Peripatetic Philosopher presents:

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND

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One thing that is apparent when you look under the hood of your ignorance you are likely to find a world teeming with undiscovered gems and to come to realize what you thought you knew, you didn’t, and what you assumed to be true, wasn’t.

This describes the “Golden Age of Arabic-Islam Arts and Sciences,” and what we in the West owe to Muslim scholars those many centuries ago.  Their discoveries touch every segment of our existence, and thanks largely to their diligence, especially in the Medieval “Dark Ages,” much learning was preserved that might otherwise have been lost. 

It is a human story about a vibrant people who have had their ups and downs the same as we in the West, and likewise, have had periods of splendid prosperity and debilitating collapse.  The Golden Age of Rome lasted for a thousand years, the Golden Age of Islam for 500, and the Golden Age of Greece about 200 years. 

Civilizations soar, fade and then collapse, but the contributions remain always with us.  This has been the story of man.  This profile of the “Golden Age of Arab-Islamic Culture” is presented in that same sense along with a quiet assessment of related follies, foibles and triumphs of man along the way.

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NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART SIXTEEN -- RISE OF THE CLERICAL SKEPTICS

The Peripatetic Philosopher presents:

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND

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“The Age of Faith” illustrates the resilience of man but reveals also his consistent plunge into typical insolence. Utopian hubris, a characteristic of “Nowhere Man” was apparent in this age as in the “Age of the Roman Empire.” A surfeit of riches is followed inevitably with a fall from grace into “Nowhere Land,” only to be rescued again by man’s prevailing will. This has been the endless story of man’s history.

After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E., it was improbable that Christianity would survive. Yet in 380 C.E., Roman Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity the religion of State in 380 C.E., only to have Rome collapse in 476 C.E. with the invasion of the barbarians from the North.

The shadow of the “Dark Ages” followed which hung over Europe like a shroud for 300 years or until Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the “Holy Roman Empire” in 800 C.E. He was called “The Father of Europe” for his leadership, a sobriquet he would share with St. Benedict who established the Benedictine order.

This was significant because while Europe was in recovery, and again feeling its oats, folly returned with the “Crusades to the Holy Land,” but Benedictine monks never lost their focus.

Over the centuries, they quietly recorded the accumulated knowledge of mankind that otherwise might have been lost during the “Dark Medieval Age.” These monks were also finding practical ways to do things that had material and social consequences to society, and for this, they became something of a bridge between the Medieval World and Industrial World that was to come.

In reading this segment, it is likely that you will see parallels to our times and the inevitable consequences when man behaves judiciously and sensibly, or recklessly and foolishly.


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NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART FIFTEEN -- OUR DEBT TO ARABIC CULTURE

The Peripatetic Philosopher presents:

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND

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We have lost our sense of identity as we think we are different than others, when that is an impossibility.  Life has become like looking into a mirror, seeing our reflection, thinking that is who we are and what life is about.  It is not.  Life is an open window with a world like ours only different.  Instead of embracing this difference, we are repelled and seek others with the same mirror image.

We fail to realize everything we have is not ours but everyone’s.  We are only renters of a cultural construct that goes back to the time of Cro-Magnon man.

We believe what we see is reality but it is not.  It is a function of the alphabet that was invented thousands of years ago: from letters, to words, to sentences, to thoughts, to ideas, to seeing the world sequentially.  The mind has adapted to this sequential reality which is limited.  

Our religions are also rented after thousands of years of tinkering, and more alike than different.  Christianity is a Hellenistic product from what St. Paul rented from Protagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle with the earth the center of the universe.  This was then refuted by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton so that the universe no longer fits with an easy reference to God or any theology.   

Alas, the human mind has been given a second chance with the supernatural placed in the closet while theories and disciplines surge from quantum mechanics to chaos theory, from the Big Bang and Dark Matter, to string theory with a new perspective on time, space, matter and energy. No longer do we see the universe as a tidy place, or nailed down to preconceived notions. 

Yet, Nowhere Man hides in the shadows as science is now tempted to play the role of high church when it comes to global warming and creationism. It seems apparent we never move too far from our penchant for absolutes.

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NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART FOURTEEN -- THE AGE OF FAITH

THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER shares an exchange:

Reader Advises on Utopia 

Re:

Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land

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

© June 18, 2016

READER WRITES:

Quite profound philosophy. Thinking in sets of attributes comes to mind. Think Venn diagrams.

This is my take on Utopia. Take heart, you have experienced Utopia. Fleeting, perhaps, but genuine enough. The only valid source of description about Utopia is from those who have successfully engineered Utopias and those who have lived there. The mathematical physics of set theory apply in full to the collection of behavioral patterns comprising Utopia.

Utopia is not the fantasy concoction of a non-participant, such as Sir Thomas More. Credentials plus guesswork does not validate Utopia. If it’s not auditable in situ, like dystopia, the object is not Utopia. If it was the paradigm of Utopia, it would have been implemented and self-sustaining.

Because of the force fields of natural law and the persistence of human nature, there is only dystopia and Utopia. All combinations are too transient to be called fleeting. There is no status quo or business as usual. Everyone is concerned with making things better.

Utopia is not a geographical place featuring Utopian architecture and cruise-ship services. The ingredients to configure and operationalize a Utopia are omnipresent. That Utopia can be shown to exist within every social system is the theme of the pilgrimage.

Utopia is an operationalized paradigm of social system functioning that requires no change to the as-received architecture. It is a scheme of relationships and attitudes based upon the “prisoner of position” principle. It meets the benchmark requirements of immortality established by Chris Argyris and the Theory “Y” criteria of Douglas McGregor.

When you are living in utopia your experience, through your cognition, constantly sends you messages that you are indeed in utopia. You know you’re in Utopia by the activities going on dedicated to maintenance and vigilance, compared to the working goals reported by those that happily do the necessary self-correction work. There are no attempts to ignore human nature or defy natural law.

In Utopia, everyone knows the state of affairs and the trajectory into the future on a continuous basis.

If a need is assumed for laws, regulations and enforcement, it is not Utopia. Oversight and engagement of the workforce, the pulling of rank, is the hallmark of dystopia. Without trust, husbandry of Utopia viability is impossible. External agencies for which one must comply are positive signposts of dystopia.

Utopia is a social system where the things important to viability and continuance are competently done by people who are happy to do them.

I suggest you balance your philosophical framework with a little Utopia-think. I promise you it will upset your audience more than your parade of takes on dystopia-man. And, it is a hell of a lot more revealing – and fun.

Republican presumptive nominee for President of the United States, Donald James Trump, acting like a Utopian, has shown in plain view the entire Establishment to be dysfunctional – both parties. Notice he doesn’t play zero-sum? If he wins, Democrat will merge with Republican as the anti-utopia party.

Cheers


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

It would appear that my response to your most recent note gave the impression I have little sense of the difference between utopia and dystopia.  It is apparent that the description (not the actual part, which there are twelve to date) is what readers think is the essence of Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land. It is not.  The description is a tease.

Thank you for your explanation of your sense of utopia relative to dystopia.  Clearly, we are addressing each other from our biases and experiences, and they do not compute.  I fail to see utopia in terms of natural law, science and mathematics as the engine to an idealistic paradigm. For me, utopia is the problem, not the answer.

My work is a description of a situation not a resolution of a condition. I think man, when he gets past his utopianism, mathematically or otherwise, he will find a way, or frankly perish.

The essence of NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND is just that. We are living as if this is utopia – building, progressing, exploring, creating, seeking, and using our new religion, science, to justify this mad dash to oblivion, which is Nowhere Land. This is, of course, also dystopia, but on the wings of misguided utopia.

Optimism and hubris are but stepchildren of utopia. That is what this book is about.

It is poets and philosophers, and sometimes social scientists that throw down the gauntlet when we are heading to extinction, not engineer, not scientists, and surely not the likes of Douglas McGregor and Christopher Argyris. 

Their problem, and the problem of most knowledge peddlers of the 20th century is that people were the problem, and that if those that led people were more sensitive to people as human being, all would be well. Moreover, it became a given that corporate society, the society that had evolved out of war, was not only legitimate, but inevitable.

The focus was always on people as something to fix, not on the fixers being people.

What has happened during the One Hundred Year War of the 20th century is that people have emerged somewhat tentatively but nonetheless actually out of the crowd, into alienation, and then somewhat hopelessly, back into the crowd.

In 1947, after WWII, English poet W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973) published “The Age of Anxiety.” Change was in the air.   American author Anatole Broyard (1920 - 1990) writes:

“It seems to me now that Americans were confronting their loneliness for the first time.  Loneliness was like the morning after the war, like a great hangover. The war had broken the rhythm of American life, and when we tried to pick it up again, we couldn’t find it – it wasn’t there. It was as if a great bomb, an explosion of consciousness, had gone off in American life, shattering everything.”

What produced the hangover has led to addiction, hubris, arrogance, narcissism, self-righteousness and painting the dark mushroom cloud of our consciousness into utopian irrationality and excess.

This has given birth to existentialism, Freudianism, psychotherapy, plastic surgery, and the narcissistic burning of the candle at both ends still believing the possibility of living to 100 with a miraculous concoction of drugs.

Suddenly, we took French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) to heart: “One’s self is not an extension of the world but merely, and quite inevitably, another object contained with it.”
Dislocated from reality, just when we thought we were protected individuals by the rights of our American constitution, the 20th century annihilated our individualism. 

Following this was the absence of personality finding us all in an emotional anemic daze, waiting for someone to rescue us. Alas, there is always an army with that in mind, only these gurus and sycophants inevitably drive us more deeply into despair.

The irony, and Dostoyevsky wrote many books on this subject, is that we live today in a paraxial relationship to utopia and dystopia.  The Russian author says, “We are incapable of either dying or being born again,” but simply existing waiting to be saved. 

We are inauthentic to ourselves so how can we be authentic to anyone else? There is little civility or respect when there is no self-respect.

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE MAN addresses this status but the effort is not meant to correct, to create some new laws, or to put people back on the “right” path. It is simply to show “what is.”  The rest is up to the individual.

Perhaps that is how we differ. You have corrective strategies. I do not. You look at the situation in terms of utopia in a resolving paradigm. I see utopia the principal preoccupation leading to the wilderness I describe.

Is this nihilistic? I don’t think so. I think it is reality. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855) claimed “Truth is subjectivity.” I argue that feelings are facts to most people, and that they behave consistent with those feelings.

In 1945, President Harry S. Truman (1884 – 1972) dropped an atomic bomb on our collective conscious across the globe, not just in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shattering our individual identity and fragmenting our collective conscious resulting in our descent into an obsessions with the irrational. 

Like it or not, we act like Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land. We are not happy campers; we have lost our moral compass and our way.

American sociologist David Riesman (1909 – 2002) was ahead of the curve when he published The Lonely Crowd (1950), providing a description of the American psyche, post-WWII. He could see modern man was becoming increasingly inauthentic to himself as an individual with him seeking credibility in a collective conscience provided by a media-driven corporate society.

Three distinct types of men were evolving: (1) the tradition-directed man; (2) the inner-directed man; and (3) the other-directed man.
Today, we see the devolving of the tradition-directed and inner-directed man to the evolving dominance of the other-directed man as the consciousness of our times. This is the mind of the crowd, the mind without a conscience, the mind that always looks for answers outside the self.

So, nearly seven decades later, we see what happens when safe, secure and carefully planned communities devolve into gang war zones in the shadow of magnificent metropolitan glass houses and sprawling suburbs of postage-sized plots of brick and mortar as dwelling spaces.

As British “New Age” philosopher Alan W. Watts might say, “Nothing is more hopeless than planned happiness.” 

No one seems more bored and alienated today than highly successful people. They fill the reality television shows, newsstands with magazines, pulp fiction bestsellers, and drug rehabilitation centers with stories of their mind-numbing dissatisfaction with work, life, marriage, and prospects for the future. Social pathology has become the norm.

Finally, your comment is insightful but troubling: re: Donald Trump, acting like a Utopian, has shown in plain view the entire Establishment to be dysfunctional – both parties. Notice he doesn’t play zero-sum? If he wins, Democrats will merge with Republican as the anti-utopia party. 

Missing here is the significance of the Democratic candidate for President, Senator Bernie Sanders, who is quite utopian in his vision, not so much in his running for president, but more in his reminding us, like Chicken Little that “The Sky is Falling!” 

The "sky is falling!"  You cannot leave 90 percent of the people out of the conversation and expect everything to be copacetic.

Donald Trump is utopian in a dystopian way because were he to be elected President of the United States, he would not only throw both parties into anti-utopianism, but possibly the globe into revolution. He epitomizes Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land, and this is being said by a lifelong Republican.

THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER candidly responds:

A Reader Describes

NOWHERE LAND IN NOWHERE LAND

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

© June 17, 2016

A READER WRITES:

Your current work is really describing the social “system” called “dystopia.” Its attributes and characteristics come as a set (he provides the set).


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

It is interesting how this series -- NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- is being perceived by readers.

Over the past several years, I have been reading rather extensively from the inconceivable rise of Rome from but a fledgling little city-state to the world's most dominant empire, through the improbable rise of Christianity to the most dominant religion, indeed, culture in the Western world, to how it has seeded modern civilization if unconsciously through the Protestant Reformation and American/French Revolutions into the corporate society that dominates the planet now, a domination that is the antithesis of the Laws of Nature.

The subtext of this advance, over time, going back even earlier to the rise of the chieftain and the shaman in prehistoric times, is that conscious man is mainly unconscious as he puts one foot in front of another going forward into the next space and place, unaware and uncomprehending the consequences of his actions.

Some twenty years or so ago in reading Christian scholars -- and always Dostoyevsky -- I sensed, but not very clearly, the duality of our nature as man, and that includes utopia/dystopia.

Although hardly qualified to exploit this ambivalence, I have made the attempt for my own satisfaction. Call it my entertainment.

The theme kept reappearing as I read, distilling my particular sense of things, then capturing these thoughts in an occasional "Fragments of a Philosophy." My works are peppered with these fragments.

Over several months, I knocked off a complete manuscript (never published) "Near Journey's End? Can Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent Man?"

One day I picked this manuscript up again and reread it -- I have that tendency -- and saw how harsh I can be. Call it anger or disgust, or whatever, it gets the juices flowing.

Truthfully, I've never been too concerned about readers. I don't expect them to agree, but if they are thinking at all beyond existing I suspect they might find something of value in my writings that connects. I am not into the proselytizing business.

It is an amazing what freedom a writer enjoys when he can write to his heart’s content without a deadline, an agent, or a publisher.

After reading a series of dystopian novels, and rereading T. S. Eliot's "Wasteland," I got a sense that man has always been "nowhere," lost in space and place, and that he operates mainly but cleverly on automatic pilot.

Man is constantly inventing and reinventing "mind toys" that give him a sense that he is in charge, when he is not, which drives him ever deeper into "nowhere land," as I see evident every day.

Take Shanghai, China. It just opened the most gigantic Disney World ever with buildings skyscraper high too boost tourism. It is a $5.5 million investment. Meanwhile, millions of Chinese are starving or without adequate housing or jobs.

What China is doing the West has been doing for centuries. It is called capitalism.

We are an imitative society, a compare and compete society, a corporate society, and now a global society that doesn't seem to realize that our unconscious tendencies represent our collective deathknell as we destroy our guest place on this planet, but we cannot help ourselves. We are not in charge, but we have never been in charge. We go from one crisis to another, mainly self-invented, but nonetheless devastating.

Am I mad? Perhaps. Unhinged? That could be true, too, but one attribute that I have always believed I possess and that is conceptual skills. I can pile one idea/event/happening/situation on top of another over time, and they provide me with something resembling a picture. That is the case with the current project, being provided to readers in tiny segments for mastication.

That said several times I have thought of stopping this nonsense, this NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND but something just keeps pulling me forward.

All our inventions -- morality, ethics, humanity, science and philosophy -- fail to understand that we don't belong here, that we are guests of a planet that has no conscience, that doesn't believe in good and evil, right and wrong, happiness and sadness, it just "is," and its "isness" is that finds us increasingly corrupting its hospitality for our insane purposes.

*  *  *  *  *

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A sense of having a mandate is a dangerous thing for a government, or indeed for any corporate body.  It is equally true in a presidential campaign, as we see unfolding in 2016 by the Democratic and Republican Parties for President of the United States. 

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the presumptive nominees, but political life, like life in general, at its deepest level cannot be viewed simply in the short-term.  It must be viewed also in the long term with a visceral connection to the “collective will” of the people.  Will that happen?  We shall see. 

Alas, there is little evidence of a seamless connection of this “collective will” with either candidate within their respective parties much less with voters as both political parties have been ruptured by discord.  This climate of dissension appears endemic to this most divisive age.  This happens when trust between the people and its leadership disappears.   

It is a dangerous time when too much space separates the “collective will” of the led from the leadership.  Should that breach be ignored, should public opinion be manipulated to the point that the “collective will” of the people is problematic, then we find ourselves in Nowhere Land. 

The problem with a mandate is that it is never about the leadership, always about the “collective will” of the people. This is not limited to the people as a collective in the nation, but to the private citizen in the community as well.

The political mind of the times too often displays a utopian complacency thinking that “collective will” mirrors its own self-interests. This prevents such a mind from seeing the world clearly, the problems of the world truthfully, and its own motivation honestly. Whatever the case may be, this has led to another important crossroads in American as well as world history. 

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NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND – PART THIRTEEN – OUR COMMON HERITAGE – CULTURAL DIVERSITY!

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Christianity and “The Jesus Story” is an improbable narrative with Jesus, the messianic Jew, being lost in a Christianity that would become a Gentile faith. 

Historic Jesus was born to the peasant class in the small hamlet of Nazareth in Judea.  He spoke Aramaic, the language of the working class, grew up without formal schooling among fisherman and farmers.  Chances are he could neither read nor write, but was well versed in the oral history of Jewish Law and the Old Testament. 

“The Jerusalem Group” he headed was a Jewish Reform Movement meant to restore moral and spiritual integrity to the Jewish Temple.  This led to conflict with the High Priests and Elders, leading to his “Crucifixion on the Cross,” a death limited to egregious criminals, being buried in a rich man’s sepulcher with reality and myth then taking over as he left no written record.

The next improbability was the role of Paul turning Jesus’s ministry from the Jews to the Gentiles, while the Gospel writers, penning accounts of his life and ministry 40 to 100 years after his death, romanticized that period so that these Gospels cannot be trusted as representative of Jesus or his life.

The “Siege of Jerusalem” in 70 C.E. destroyed the Second Temple, decimated the Jewish faith, destroyed Jewish Christianity, but launched Christianity as a “Gentile Faith” to flourish in the Mediterranean while being persecuted by Rome.

Equally improbable, this all changed with Christianity becoming the “State Religion of the Roman Empire” in 380 C.E., leading to the Roman Catholic Church and a Christianity of more than 1 billion Catholic souls today.  

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NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART TWELVE -- A SENSE OF MANDATE! 

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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!

DESCRIPTION

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.