GOING HOME

 

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 11, 2022

Life is a dream walking death is a going home.

Chinese Proverb

At my advanced age with daily life becoming something of a problem I wish to thank people who have been important in my writing, especially my wife, Beautiful Betty. American novelist Thomas Wolf wrote a moving novel in 1934, “You Can’t Home Again.” He was quoting a proverb that declared that past times although fondly remembered are simply of the past and cannot be relived. Yet we know they are to the very end of our lives.

Because of health issues, writing a few lines much less completing my work has been a challenge.

I apologize for not corresponding with you for some time given all your support.

This is equally true of Sir William Livingston, IV, Charles D. Hayes, Carole Gilbert, Ken Shelton, Manfred Fiedler, and Eric Rodts, whom I genuinely admire. They like you have shared their expertise and views with me for many years. Thank you.

Each of them has worked hard and unselfishly to communicate ideas consistent with an adult perspective.

Psychotherapist Eric Berne in “The Games People Play” (1964)  suggests that celebrities need the affirmation of many while scientists and philosophers need that of a few.

Someone reading my blog (peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com) anonymously suggested essays on my blog “deserved a wider audience.” I just smiled. Alas, the teacher will arrive when the student is ready, but not before.

That said literary agents recognize that traditional publishing is vanishing and are contacting Amazon and Kindle authors, among others promising all kinds of benefits before they, too, become redundant.

This amuses me as it is consistent with the games people play failing to realize many of these authors mentioned here are the wave of the future, and we found out already.

Some 60 years ago, I read Jacques Barzun’s “The House of Intellect” (1959) and knew I wanted to be a writer but had to wait. Then some 22 years ago, I read Barzun’s magnum opus, “From Dawn to Decadence” (2000) wondering how he could find the energy to complete this work at age 93 when I can barely find the energy to type these words before getting tired.

I’m not trying to compose a magnum opus to update In the Shadow of the Courthouse (3rd edition) and a complete profile of my works including “Confessions of an Existential Author.” My motivation is to possibly interest a university to include these works in its archives.

Clinton County Historical Society already has all of my published books but not my correspondence, published essays in periodicals, trade journals, and my blog to conclude this project. I once overheard my mother saying to my da when I was a boy, “Ray, We are all half finished when we die.” I am suffering from the same malady as he. It is why I am thankful, George and the others mentioned have been in my life.

Be always well,

Jim

Everything Changed After 1945*

Morality in the Mind of the Times

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

© November 8, 2022

 

THE NEW DIVISIVE AGE

Western society entered the 20th century on the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche's nihilism and atheism “God is dead," and Sigmund Freud’s sexuality, gender, and sex role identity. These ideas became popular after WWI and led to the unrestrained “Roaring Twenties” followed by the international economic collapse of “The Great Depression.”

British historical and novelist Phillip Kerr (1956 – 2018), best known for his Bernie Gunther crime novels, captures the essence of this in “Metropolis” (2019) published posthumously. This novel focuses on German societal decline, decadence, and obsession with sexuality after WWI, not unlike ubiquitous Western society morality today.

With the triumph of the West in WWII, Western Society transitioned from a “God-centered” to a “Man-centered” universe with the digital and analytics of the "Machine Age” driving the popular culture with the United States of Anxiety following in an uncertain world.

A quarter century earlier German-speaking Czech-Jewish novelist Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924) wrote the novel “The Trial” (1925) published posthumously. It opens with the line,

“Somebody must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”

It is Joseph K.'s 30th birthday when two policemen arrive at his boardinghouse to inform him that he was under arrest.

Kafka, a novelist, and short-story writer is widely regarded today as one of the major figures of 20^th century literature. His works fuse elements of realism and the fantastic to unmask the crushing reality of our changing times. In 1924, the year of Kafka’s death at age 40, Nazism, antisemitism, Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War Two were on the horizon.

Yet, it was Kafka, a minor clerk in an insurance company, who sensed the emerging insanity, and its decadence that historians, politicians, scholars, theologians, scientists, and people, in general, failed to anticipate as did Kafka’s Joseph K.

Throughout history, societal madness is perceived after the fact too late to avoid its damages. Seemingly, only artists like Kafka escape this limitation.  Consider the vanishing of a community.

THE VANISHING COMMUNITY

By 1990 the community of Clinton, Iowa, once a community of 33,000, had shrunk by a third, the industrial community by two-thirds, and the downtown area of department stores, office buildings, restaurants, and retail stores had virtually vanished.   

 

This was evident as Second Street snaked downtown and onto Cammache Avenue then out of Clinton onto Highway 30 with new landmarks along the way such as a Walmart, other supermarkets, motels, and fast foods stores (*The watercolor artist Carl H. Johnson of Galena, Illinois captures Clinton as it was in a series of prints, some of which are included in this book with permission).

This shrinkage was accompanied by double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment in the 1980s across the nation. A decade earlier there was the embarrassing defeat of the United States in the twenty-year war (1955 – 1975) in Vietnam where some 50,000 American lost their lives disproportionately African Americans.

The 1980s and 1990s or a quarter century after WWII suggest the United States had lost its moral compass and its way.

Ancillary to this was the Roman Catholic Church’s pedophile scandals of the sexual abuse of children in the care of Catholic priests and nuns that had not been dealt with for decades.

Once parents were aware their children had been abused, they demanded financial reparations at a time when the church could least afford such demands. Add to this less revenue was coming into the church’s coffers as fewer baptized Catholics were attending church services regularly including Sunday Mass while fewer young men and young women were becoming priests and nuns.

As society has become increasingly secular and less community-centered, voluntarism and community services have suffered. The new civil religion has made “greed good,” while paradoxically, in times of disaster (e.g., when communities are decimated by tornadoes, floods, mudslides, or hurricanes), then the collective will of the community resurfaces.

These thoughts occurred to me while researching this book. Clintonian Catholics would ask me to contact the Bishop of Davenport, The Clinton Herald, and The Davenport Democrat on their behalf while knowing I had no such influence. It was an act of desperation not unlike the fictitious Joseph K.

Many interviewed were Catholics, and echoed these sentiments, “This can’t happen, can it; it will blow over, won’t it? It makes no sense to raze our churches and schools and sell the land, does it?” It was inconceivable to the Catholic community that it could be erased as if it never existed when it had done nothing wrong, We know how denial worked for German Jews in the era of Adolf Hitler.

THE PUNDITS KNOW

Failure to face reality is like the ostrich with its head buried in the sand. Scholars are quick to tell us why after the fact.  That said, as honorable as their intentions, our culture cannot imagine the evil that exists within our species.   

Cognitive psychologist Canadian American Steven Pinker argues in “Rationality: What it is, Why it seems Scarce, Why it Matters” (2021) that while we are plagued with irrationality the rational pursuit of the rational can lead up illogically to crippling irrationality. Say what?

Neurologist Guy Leschzinger gives us a different slant to this dilemma in “The Man Who Tasted Words” (2022). Leschziner guides the reader through the senses and how, through them, our brain understands or misunderstands the world around us. Vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are what we rely on us to perceive the reality of our world. He explores how our nervous systems define our words and how we can be victims of falsehoods perpetuated by our brains. Leschzinger explains how our lives and what we perceive as reality are both ultimately defined by the complexities of our nervous system and not by our thinking.

A spate of books continues to appear such as “Useful Delusions: The Power & Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain” (2021). Journalists Bill Mesler, and Shankar Vedantam argue that self-deception can do terrible harm causing us to fail to act, yet self-delusion may also be vital to our success and well-being.  Say what?

Small wonder the complexities of life make it difficult to discern reality from illusion and what is prudent to do or not do. 

 

We have gravitated to a simplistic, shallow, and reductionist corporate climate that successfully has obscured the traditional anchors of family, church, and God treating them as redundant or as if they never existed. “We have lost our moral compass and our way.”

 
One of the benefits of "In the Shadow of the Courthouse" is that it is possible to show how radically society can and does change over time. Yes, this is an unusual approach but one this author felt appropriate for this third edition. Morality is always in the mind of the times, even for sleepy Clinton, Iowa.

GROWING UP IN A TIME OF WAR

It occurred to me that my generation of preteens was on the cusp of monumental change.  In 1945, my generation was coming of age when the role of the United States was leaving its halcyon days of isolation nostalgia to assume the uncertain role of a superpower.

Over ten year period  (1993 to 2003), I felt the full impact of this as I made twelve trips to my hometown of Clinton, Iowa from Tampa, Florida a distance of some 1300 miles, staying a week or more interviewing some hundred Clintonians of my generation and those of the previous generation still alive to get a sense of this place, space, and circumstance.

In 1945, Clinton was a thriving blue-collar town along the banks of the Mississippi River with a score of manufacturing plants nestled along the southeastern part of the city critical to the industrial/military demands of WWII. Nearly all of Clinton's parents during this period either worked in these factories or on the railroad. I write:

Imagine coming of age in Clinton, Iowa in the middle of the United States in the middle of the century and the middle of this farm belt community of 33,000 snuggled against the muddy Mississippi River during World War II.

It is a working-class climate in which the author came of age “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” while the nation struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb.

There was no television, mega sports, big automobiles, or manicured lawns. There was radio, movies, high school sports, and the Clinton Industrial Baseball League, where men too young or too old to go to the war played for the fun of it. Clintonians had victory gardens, drove old jalopies, took the bus, or rode their bikes to work.

It was a time when the four faces of the magnificent Clinton County Courthouse clock chimed on the half-hour and threw a metamorphic shadow over young people’s lives. This made certain they would not be late for meals made from victory garden staples.

The courthouse neighborhood had most stay-at-home mothers in two-parent families. Few parents managed to get beyond grammar school, nearly all worked in Clinton factories or on the railroad. Divorce was as foreign as an ancestral language.

It was a time in hot weather that people slept with their families in Riverview Park. Left windows open, doors unlocked, bicycles on the side of the house, and if they had automobiles, keys in the car, knowing neither neighbor nor stranger would disturb their possessions. In winter, schools never closed, even when snowbanks were four feet high.

This is a narrative snapshot with core neighborhood activities of young people against the backdrop of the Clinton County Courthouse, St. Patrick School, Riverview Stadium, downtown Clinton and uptown Lyons, Bluff Boulevard, Mount St. Clare College, Hoot Owl Hollow, Mill Creek, Beaver Slough, Joyce Slough, many churches, schools, and three hospitals, including the US Army’s Schick General Hospital which brought the war to this place tending battlefield casualties.  There was also the USO, Chicago & North Western Railway and its boxcar manufacturing factory, Clinton Foods, Dupont, and many other industrial workplaces which were operating 24/7 in support of the war effort.  This was seen through the impressionistic eyes of a boy from the ages of eight to thirteen.

It was a time when kids created their own play as parents were too tired or too involved in the struggle to make a living to pay them much mind. Clinton youngsters would never know such Darwinian freedom or its concomitant brutality again.

This is not a history of the times nor is it a novel in the conventional sense of the word but rather the recollections of a time, place, and circumstance through the author’s confessed imperfect vision. “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” promises to awaken that sleeping child in the reader of every age.

*Excerpt from “In the Shadow of the Courthouse,” © James R. Fisher, Jr. 3rd edition 2022.

 

 

THE PARADOXICAL DILEMMA -- DISAPPEARANCE OF THE ADULT

[This was the part that I left off "THE OVERVIEW" but changed my mind. Yesterday, here in Tampa, Florida a father shot his three-year-old daughter in the head, killing her, then shot his four-year-old son in the head. He called 911 (emergency number) and said he accidentally shot his son and carried the critically injured child out of the house to the waiting police.]

Never before in the history of man has the general population been better educated or the technology of the culture more sophisticated yet the individual in this population has never been less in charge. Money, power, politics, and influence remain in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.

Those in charge have abandoned the CRITICAL PARENT and have resorted exclusively to the NURTURING PARENT. We see this in the family, the church, the school, the workplace, the government, the media, the entertainment industry, and the culture.

Society has been reduced to comfort and complacency at the expense of contribution leading to a phenomenon not sustainable where everyone is in charge resulting in no one being.

Denial is common to every generation as is human nature. We are in an era that no longer has the sting that it once enjoyed as responsibility, accountability, failure, guilt, embarrassment, and consequence has lost their purchase. Surrealism is no longer a fantasy escape from reality it is now a lifestyle.

One hundred years hence historians will be at a loss to find that many grown-ups existed during the previous one hundred years as the ADAPTED CHILD that clung to patriotism, nationalism, Americanism, and Christianity faded into the dominance of the FREE CHILD where it did not only never to have to grow up but had no need to apology for its narcissism for it looked into the mirror and saw only itself.

That image has failed to be comforting for once the mirror is put down the FREE CHILD is met with only confusion in terms of sex role and personal identity, personal worth, and role in life which results in anxiety, frustration, boredom, and a sense of being stranger to oneself. The expectation was the utopian world of Paradise and the good life without pain or failure, disappointment or unhappiness, guilt or embarrassment.

We may conquer space but we are a long way from conquering our inner space and continue to run away from ourselves. It is understandable if we are reminded of how simple humanity is as it can be reduced to a series of insightful equations.

BELIEF + BELONGING = BEHAVIOR

We are far more other-directed than self-directed in our culture as we want to belong. Our identity, comfort, and satisfaction are predicated on belonging to something bigger than ourselves. Consequently, being accepted by others takes precedence over self-acceptance.

PAIN + FAILURE + RISK = GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT

We like to think that success is a linear curve in which success follows success without interruption. Growth is actually in strategic leaps followed by a gestation period. This is a period of trauma, retrenchment, assessment, and assimilation of past failures and disappointments, a time when the learner is not concerned about letting the group down, not having to appear smart, and a time open to risks and enduring the discomfort of pain, a period critical to success but could be called the “plateau of failure.” The linear curve is the “phantom curve” to success.

The evidence that we have reached a plateau is we become knowers not learners, tellers not listeners, punishing others with our knowledge reduced to the curve of “playing it safe.”

What is often considered growth & development is that we “compare & compete” to the standards of someone else, which is imitation rather than effectively utilizing our own inherent ability. Quantum leaps are periods of success but of little real learning.

As individuals. we gravitate to the work environment often with little regard to the business of fit. We are an organization within ourselves with history, culture, and experience that molds us into the person we become. Our identity is essentially accidentally acquired but is largely organized by what we do. Purposeful performance is thus reduced to a “motivational triangle”:

FREEDOM + TRUST = CONTROL

Small wonder we are more confused given work is more ambiguous. Workers tend to hide this confusion and yes anger in nonconfrontational passive behaviors as they are likely to be treated by management as the CRITICAL PARENT and by the organization as the NURTURING parent both of which relieve them responsible for their actions as either the ADAPTED CHILD or the FREE CHILD.

In this scenario, there is no place for the ADULT for in an attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves you weaken their resolve and diminish them as individuals. This paradoxical dilemma has yet to be resolved in the complex organization and society.

Indian author Anil Ananthaswamy addresses this dilemma in “The Man Who Wasn’t There: The Strange New Science of the Self” (2015). He points out where mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes famously says, “I think, therefore I am,” current neuroscience identifies specific regions of the brain that when they misfire the self can move back and forth between the body and a doppelganger, or to leave the body entirely. So where in the brain or mind, or body, is the self located? Recent research into Alzheimer’s indicates memory creates our narrative self by using the same part of our brain for remembering our past and for imagining our future.

The Man Who Wasn’t There takes us on an emotional and scientific journey to arrive at a visceral understanding of that which is not understandable such as the senseless horrific behavior of ordinary citizens toward each other. Sociologist Erving Goffman covered this subject a long time ago in “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” (1959).

OVERVIEW – A Way of Thinking About Things

Uncertainty and the Human Heart

When I was a boy, the surprise in my reading was how often I found I thought as others did who wrote. Then it dawn on me we all have the same machine between our ears however some are perhaps better wired than others.

[An educator and historian once asked me, "Jim, what is your genre?" At the time, I couldn't come up with an answer somewhat surprised by the question. Later, after some pondering, I decided my empirical perception of my life and experience from my earliest memory to the present was my genre. Empirical knowledge (a posteriori) is empirical evidence, also known as sense experience. This acquired source of knowledge uses the senses, particularly by observation and experimentation. I have endeavored from my earliest efforts to use this methodology and convey this perception in my books and articles.]

Nobel Laureate Werner Heisenberg’s (1901 – 1976) “Principle of Uncertainty” relates to the subatomic world of quantum physics but may apply equally to the changing behavior of homo sapiens whose narcissistic detachment from reality suggests that psychopaths in our presence are attempting to create a new nervous system for justifying themselves and our departure from sanity.

In any case, whatever your perspective, people appear to be running away from freedom and themselves into an uncertain cage of fantasy, anxiety, hysteria, and conformity.

Words

Words have been the primary vehicle to convey our thoughts yet seldom if ever has it proven adequate as a replacement for action. There are exceptions. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (November 19, 1863) at the site of the new cemetery to honor the more than 50,000 soldiers who “gave the last full measure of devotion.”

The three-day Gettysburg battle (July 1-3, 1863) marked a turning point in the American Civil War for one main reason: Confederate General Robert E. Lee planned to use it to invade the North and force an immediate end to the war, but due to his colossal failure at Gettysburg the South was forced to surrender unconditionally at Appomattox two years later (April 9, 1865).

Harvard president and scholar Edward Everett (1794 – 1865) was the keynote speaker at Gettysburg while President Lincoln was asked courteously to make a few remarks. Everett, a national orator, spoke for two hours, Lincoln’s remarks of 272 words lasted three minutes.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressed the Congress of the United States after the Empire of Japan destroyed the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu on December 7, 1941: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan." Congress declared war on Japan that same day, on Germany and Italy on December 11, and on Bulgaria on June 4, 1942. World War Two would change America and the world forever for that action.

Fast forward to now: climatic agony is global with thunderstorms, hurricanes, and disappearing coastlines. Communities across the globe are plagued with heat waves, raging forest fires, and torrential rains burying communities under mudslides, yet there is little evidence the public intends to give up its toys or change behavior. Delayed gratification seems severed from our conscience.

Pandemics such as Covid-19 alert the public to the need for an immediate and drastic change in behavior with scientists and pharmaceutical manufacturers taking action to meet that need while the public continued to behave ambivalently, passively, or indifferently consistent with Freud’s spoiled CHILD.

"Fat pills" became the forgiveness placebo provided by the pharmaceutical industry to appease a gluttonous consumer society with the promise of reducing obesity without the necessity of changing poor eating habits.

Since the time of ancient Greece, people have hidden behind deep polarities of situational life confusing the one and the many; lightness and darkness; the sacred and profane; mortal and immortal; words and deeds; teachers and the taught; age and youth; male and female; choice and willpower; past and present; life and death; birth, death, and rebirth.

Polarities are palpably evident following disruptive situations such as war. It was true of the American Revolution, American Civil War, World War One, World War Two, and now the saber-rattling of Russia in Ukraine and China with Taiwan. A mortuary climate hovers over our daily existence today with those in political power often behaving like spoiled children while the general public hides behind the nebulous phantom that it is the fault of the government, failing to realize they are the government.

Collapsing societies inevitably use a plethora of words as surrogates for action, words such as those of Edward Everett. The media today often sounds “Everett-like,” which does little to appease our collective conscience. Alas, we are tired of the white noise of television that assaults our minds but fails to quiet of our situational lives.

Effective oratory is invariably succinct as it echoes the poignant sentiments first found in the Bible, Shakespeare, and the Greek classics, words that understand the human heart are key to behavior. Rabble-rousers, demigods, and oligarchs eventually fade but their toxic damage persists for generations.

Ideas – Dramatizing the Obvious

American author and psychologist Robert Linder’s (1914 – 1956) “Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath” (1944) describes the rebel as a psychopath incapable of acting for the sake of others. 

 American film director Nicholas Ray (1911 – 1979) created from this work the popular film “Rebel Without a Cause,” in 1955 as entertainment. That said the film illustrated that rebellious and senseless behavior had invaded our youth and was on the rise.  Young people since WWII were shown to live in a state of constant narcissistic torment acting as if their own parents while pointing fingers at everyone except themselves.

Authors Linder and Ray recognize that words or the changing nature of our common American language were profaning youthful behavior and the civil tongue which had now become rough-edged with the “f” word common to language whatever the socioeconomic class.  Alas, the will of society had become rudderless. Language is now visual.  It is blatantly evident on cellphone screens imbued with barbaric apps.  It is as if history and culture have been reduced to a microcosm of the immediate.

The psychic havoc of the subconscious is prominent in past sins (i.e., Holocaust, atomic devastation, American slavery, et al) with new fears: "the fear of freedom" as Erich Fromm shows “Escape from Freedom” (1941); "the fear of death" as Ernest Becker exposes in “Denial of Death” (1973); "the fear of life" as Krishnamurti demonstrates in “You Are The World” (1972), stating:

In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either that key or the door to open except yourself (p. 158).

We have gravitated to a point in American history where the middle class and the upper class are now primarily neurotic conformists afraid of what they might lose when it is already lost. This is equally true of some segments of the working class. American class society is collapsing to a collective form of forward inertia in which we have become a mass media culture that appeals only to our lesser angels.

Ideas – Sigmund Freud’s "imaginings" persist culturally if not clinically.

The shadow of Sigmund Freud looms large in the climactic paucity of new ideas. Just as Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century declared the “death of God,” which introduced the public to the sweep of secular society to the “Age of Enlightenment,” Freud formulated his “seduction theory” in 1883 and published it in 1895 as a Study on Psychosexual Hysteria. 

Freud believed hysteria was rooted in the repression of unpleasant emotions that caused traumatic events in the patient’s sexual life. First, in 1896, he outlined a theory that explains hysteria as a reminiscence of sexual abuse that occurred during childhood.

It is not by chance that psychoanalysis was born in Vienna (Austria), and came of age there. In Freud’s time, the cultural climate in Vienna displayed a fascination with both mental illness and sexual problems in a way unique to the Western world, a fascination that extended throughout society even into the Imperial Court of the Monarch which dominated Vienna’s social life.

Freud’s imaginings plague us today, especially his prejudices about the mental capacity of women and their sexuality confessing women to him were largely a “dark continent.” He asked, “What do women want?” He never found a satisfactory answer.  His descriptive science launched a bevy of interpreters.

Eric Berne (1910 – 1970) – Transactional Analysis (T/A)

If you think we have moved on from Freud, think again. Mental illness and its treatment is a tapestry of confusion with its residence in psychoanalysis.  

This is equally true of sex role identity, and psychosexual obsessions, with Freud’s theory obvious in Alfred Adler’s psychology of individualism and his theories of introversion and extroversion, Wilhelm Reich’s invention of "free love," and the ultimate orgasm, and now more recently in psychoanalyst Eric Berne’s “The Games People Play” (1964) where he changed Freud’s Superego (the Moral Principle) to the self-righteous PARENT, the Ego (the Reality Principle) to the ADULT, and the Id (the Pleasure Principle) to the CHILD.

Thomas A. Harris (1910 – 1995) – Common T/A Stages

Berne sees us displaying all three of these behaviors in our human personality at various times giving the variance the name of “transactional analysis.” Psychiatrist Thomas A. Harris developed a practical guide to transactional analysis with his “I’m OK – You’re OK” (1967):

The phrase I'm OK, You're OK is the Ego or the ADULT with four "life positions" that each of us may assume at any time in our lives although not always appropriate. The four positions are:

1. I'm Not OK, You're OK – early childhood

2. I'm Not OK, You're Not OK – later childhood perceiving something is wrong at home

3. I'm OK, You're Not OK – still later in childhood becomes judgmental of parents

4. I'm OK, You're OK – matures into adulthood and develops a tolerance for his parents and himself as he is.

John M. Dusay: T/A -- Adapted/Free Child; Critical/Nurturing Parent

Psychiatrist John M. Dusay reinterpreted and expanded on the works of Berne and Harris and developed “EGOGRAM: How I See You and You See Me” (1977). He differentiates the PARENT behavior between “Critical Parent” and “Nurturing Parent,” the ADULT remains unchanged, while the CHILD is considered between the “Adapted Child” and the “Free Child.”  

Eric Erikson (1902 – 1994) – Youth, Identity and Society

Neo-Freudian psychologist Erik Erikson accepted many of the central tenets of Freudian theory but added his ideas and beliefs.

His theory of psychosocial development is centered on what is known as the epigenetic principle which is reduced to four states or conditions of human development: first, people grow; second, people grow in sequence; third, people grow in time; fourth, people grow together in a community. 

Erikson sees all people going through a series of eight stages with this central thesis prominent in a series of books: “Identity, Youth and Crisis” (1950), “Identity and the Life Cycle” (1959), “Identity, Youth and Crisis” (1968), and “The Life Cycle Completed” (1982).

Identity seems one of Erikson's greatest concerns. As an older adult, he wrote about his adolescent "identity confusion" in his European days. "My identity confusion," he wrote, "was at times on the borderline between neurosis and adolescent psychosis."

Born Erik Salomonsen when he came to the United States, he invented the new name of Erik Erikson which his daughter claimed proved a prophetic choice signaling a new career and providential acceptance.

More surprising is that this Vienna native came to the United States without a single academic degree, yet served as a prominent professor at Harvard, the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale. 

A Review of General Psychology (2002), ranked Erikson as the 12th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.

Erikson's Identity versus Role confusion (or diffusion) stage is characterized by the adolescent question of “Who am I,” during which time the youth is conflicted with dozens of values and ideas of who he should be and what he should think. 

This occurs from the ages of 12-20 years and bridges the gap between childhood and adulthood. Rapid bodily changes during puberty, changing roles, and social relationships can either make the adolescent feel more responsible and ready for adulthood or make him more anxious.

[As Eric Hoffer and others have pointed out the trauma and suspension of self-regard crystallized into psychopathology after WWII roaring to the “terrible 60s” and beyond seemingly only to accelerate in the disenfranchised late 20th century and into the 21st century.]

Bruno Bettelheim (1903 – 1990) – T/A and Autism

Bruno Bettelheim was a history major in Vienna with the assumed identity as a psychoanalyst when he entered New York City in late 1939. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim focused on the education of emotionally disturbed children and Freudian psychology more generally. In the U.S., he gained a position as a professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, leaving that institution in 1973 to teach at Stanford University.

Bettelheim's ideas, which grew out of those of Sigmund Freud, theorized that children with behavioral and emotional disorders were not born that way, and could be treated through extended psychoanalytic therapy, a treatment that rejected the use of psychotropic drugs and shock therapy. During the 1960s and 1970s, he had an international reputation in such fields as autism, child psychiatry, and psychoanalysis.

Much of his work was discredited after his death due to fraudulent academic credentials, allegations of patient abuse, accusations of plagiarism, and lack of oversight by institutions and the psychological community (see BETTELHEIM: A Life and a Legacy, 1996, Nina Sutton; and The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim, 1997, Richard Pollak).

At the Orthogenic School (1944 – 1973), Bettelheim made changes and set up an environment for milieu therapy, in which children could form strong attachments with adults within a structured but caring environment. He claimed considerable success in treating some emotionally disturbed children and wrote books on both normal and abnormal child psychology becoming a major influence in the field,  and widely respected during his lifetime.

Bettelheim was noted for his study of feral or isolated children, who revert to the animal stage without experiencing the benefits of belonging to a community. He discussed this phenomenon in the book “The Informed Heart” (1960). Even critics agree that, in his practice, Bettelheim was dedicated to helping these children using methods and practices that would enable them to lead happy lives provided given proper care and attention to adapt to their environment.

Bettelheim was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971. After retiring in 1973, he continued to write and taught at Stanford University.

His most widely read book was “The Uses of Enchantment” (1976) where he analyzed fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychology. In this work, he discussed the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children, including traditional tales once considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the Brothers Grimm.

Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose. By engaging with these socially evolved stories, he believed children would go through emotional growth and be better prepared for their own futures.

In the United States, Bettelheim won two major awards for The Uses of Enchantment: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the National Book Award in the category of Contemporary Thought.

However, in 1991, well-supported charges of plagiarism were brought against him for this book claiming he had copied from Julian Herscher's 1963 A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales. Depressed and in ill health, the much-achieving Vienna-born psychotherapist committed suicide on March 13, 1990.

In terms of skill in creating an audience, Freud had the literary flair of a novelist being able to spin captivating tales of his psychoanalytical research that were as enchanting and as compelling as novels. Likewise, his Vienna disciples, especially Erik Erikson and Bruno Bettelheim displayed similar gifts.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) – Man and His Symbols

Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Initially, he was a great admirer of Freud's work. After meeting him in Vienna in 1907, the two talked for thirteen hours straight, resulting in an intense five-year friendship. But from early on, Jung thought that Freud placed his authority above the quest for truth. Moreover, beyond that, there lay deep theoretical differences as Jung was unable to accept Freud's reductionism with the claim that the main drive in human life was sexual.

That said Freud liked having the Swiss Protestant psychiatrist as a colleague in his Jewish federation of psychiatrists to render it legitimate beyond his ethnicity. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology. Although their collaboration was short-lived, they rendered psychology the professional status it had not previously enjoyed, having its origin in theology and philosophy.

Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. He is acknowledged as one of the founders of analytical psychology, psychological types, the collective unconscious, complexes, archetypes, the differentiation of anima and animus, synchronicity, the shadow self, extraversion, and introversion. 

Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best-known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion.

Jung was also an artist, craftsman, symbolic builder as well as a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.

For Freud, Jung departed from science into the metaphysical world of religion. Freud questioned Jung's use of the “shadow self” to describe the unconscious or “undercovered self” of the personality. Our conscious ego, Jung claims, refuses to identify with its collective unconscious; that is, the anima or the feminine image in the male psyche, and the animus or the male image in the female psyche. To Jung, the anima/animus represents the "true self" rather than the image we present to others and serves as the primary source of communication with the collective unconscious.

Early on Freud saw the younger Jung as the heir apparent to his "new science" of psychoanalysis. Jung’s research and personal vision, however, made that impossible for him to follow his older colleague's doctrine. A schism was inevitable. This division was personally painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung's analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis.

Werner Erhard (born 1935) – A new identity and escape

John Paul Rosenberg was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father was a small restaurant owner who left Judaism for a Baptist mission before joining his wife in the Episcopal Church, where she taught Sunday School. They agreed that their son should choose his religion when he was old enough. John Paul chose to be baptized in the Episcopal Church, served there for eight years as an acolyte, and has been an Episcopalian ever since.

From the mid-1950s until 1960, Rosenberg worked in various automobile dealerships (starting at a Ford dealership where he was trained by Lee Iacocca, then Lincoln Mercury, and finally Chevrolet), with a stint managing a nearly defunct medium-duty industrial equipment firm.  This firm became successful under his management.

Rosenberg married in 1953 with the couple having four children. In 1960, he left his wife and their four children in Philadelphia, traveled to Indianapolis, and changed his name to "Werner Hans Erhard." He chose his new name from Esquire magazine articles he had read about West German economics minister Ludwig Erhard and the Copenhagen physicist Werner Heisenberg. 

He moved to St. Louis, as Werner, and took a job as a car salesman.  His wife  Patricia Rosenberg remained in Philadelphia with their four children relying on welfare and help from family and friends. After five years without contact, Patricia Rosenberg divorced Erhard for desertion and remarried. In October 1972, a year after creating Erhard Seminars Training (est), Erhard contacted his first wife and family, arranged to provide support and college education for the children, and repaid Patricia's parents for their financial support.  Between 1973 and 1975, members of his extended family took the est training, and Patricia and his younger siblings took jobs in the est organization.

The brief history of the Erhart est seminars (1971 – 1984) attracted celebrities, movie stars, rock & roll entertainers, Hippies, and Yippipies, as well as middle-class professionals and workers who felt they had lost their personal, religious, and political identity.

L. Ron Hubbard (1911 – 1986) – Sci-fi novelist & creator of a new religion

An American author, primarily of science fiction and fantasy stories, L. Ron Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology. 

In 1950, Hubbard authored Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health and established a series of organizations to promote Dianetics. In 1952, Hubbard lost the rights to Dianetics in bankruptcy proceedings and subsequently founded Scientology. Thereafter, Hubbard oversaw the growth of the Church of Scientology into a worldwide organization.

Born in Tilden, Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard spent much of his childhood in Helena, Montana. After his father was posted to the U.S. naval base on Guam, Hubbard traveled to Asia and the South Pacific in the late 1920s. In 1930, Hubbard enrolled at George Washington University to study civil engineering but dropped out in his second year. He then began his career as a prolific writer of pulp fiction stories.

Scientology became increasingly controversial during the 1960s and came under intense media, government, and legal pressure in some countries. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hubbard spent much of his time at sea on his fleet of ships as "Commodore" of the Sea Organization, an elite quasi-paramilitary group of Scientologists.

Hubbard returned to the United States in 1975 and went into seclusion in the California desert after an unsuccessful attempt to take over the town of Clearwater, Florida. In 1978, Hubbard was convicted of fraud after he was tried in absentia by France. In the same year, eleven high-ranking members of Scientology were indicted on 28 charges for their role in the Church's Snow White Program, a systematic program of espionage against the United States government. One of the indicted was Hubbard's wife Mary Sue Hubbard, who was in charge of the program; L. Ron Hubbard was named an unindicted co-conspirator.

Hubbard spent the remaining years of his life in seclusion in a luxury motorhome on a ranch in California, attended to by a small group of Scientology officials. He died at age 74 in January 1986. Following Hubbard's death, Scientology leaders announced that his body had become an impediment to his work and that he had decided to "drop his body" to continue his research on another plane of existence. Though many of Hubbard's autobiographical statements are fictitious, the Church of Scientology describes Hubbard in hagiographic terms and rejects any suggestion that its account of Hubbard's life is not historical fact.

Whereas est seminars are no more, Scientology has a contentious existence to this day in Clearwater, Florida operating mainly under the radar of detractors and speculators. Its continued existence is yet another reminder that the American conscience is still far from at peace.

Thomas Stephen Szasz (1920 – 2012) – Retreat from Sanity

Freud’s world from its initial stage was strong on description and less convincing neurologically. This is changing but the shadow of Freud still lurks in our collective conscience and the practice of mental health. 

Maverick psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has compared the treatment of mental illness to that of the Spanish Inquisition seeing Christian history has much in common with today's institutional psychiatry. He writes of this in “The Manufacture of Madness” (1970), and “The Myth of Mental Illness” (1974), while admiring Freud’s brilliance and his systematic style of work, Jung’s humanness and sensitivity to man’s moral and religious nature, and Adler’s common sense and directness.

Szasz writes, “It seems Jung and Adler must have been superb psychotherapists which Freud was not.” Szasz acknowledges that brain disease and brain damage, and brain defects exist but “they cannot be cured with conversation.” In terms of behavioral science, he believes that science belongs on the side of the people it studies rather than aligning itself with a society that wants to control differences. He opposes all involuntary hospitalization, pointing out “there are many crimes committed in the name of mental illness” from the abuses in private practice to our system of criminal justice.

In “Second Sin” (1973), he writes, “If a man says he is talking to God we say he is praying; if he says God is talking to him we say he is schizophrenic.” He adds, “treating addiction to heroin with methadone is like treating addiction to Scotch with bourbon.” He sees mental hospitals as “the POW camps of our undeclared war and unarticulated civil wars.”

Szasz sees fundamental similarities between the preoccupation of the people with religion and religious matters, especially with the religious deviance called “heresy,” and the therapeutic state characterized by the preoccupation of the people with medicine and medical matters, especially with medical deviance called illness.

He explains, “a symbiotic relationship developed between medicine, especially psychiatry, as the prestige and popularity of organized religion diminished following the Enlightenment. Medicine took over many of the functions formerly performed by churches. Physicians became the new priesthood and it has been psychiatrists, especially who have played the roles of priests. They are our secular and ‘scientific’ priests.”

More specifically among psychiatrists, Freud’s presence has been the most pervasive as he possesses the imaginings of a novelist with a descriptive talent to reduce many “diseases” in mental health to conversation treatable with psychotherapy.

[Notice I fail to mention the cadre of organizational efficiency experts who would return operational health to the workplace by focusing exclusively on management such as Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (1960); David McClelland, The Achieving Society (1961); Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, The Managerial Grid (1964); Frederick Hertzberg, Work and the Nature of Man (1966); J. M. Juran, Quality Control Handbook (1974); Peter Block, The Empowered Manager (1987); Rensis Likert, The Human Group (1967); W. Edward Deming, Out of the Crisis (1986); Peter Drucker, The New Realities (1989); Michael Hammer & James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation (1999). 

Systemic organizational behavior, like economics, is mainly intuitive and reactionary rather than reliably effective with analytics and mathematical algorithms. Well-meaning as these experts, they collectively have failed to note the radical shift from “position power” of management to “knowledge power” of late 20th century workers, especially professionals. Ironically, the Covid-19 pandemic forced management to finally loosen the screws one turn with “Work Without Managers” (1991)  finally entering the conversation.]

Legacy of Freud & his followers – Dependence on Descriptive Science

The legacy of Freud is that mental illness as Szaz has pointed out is a myth justified by descriptive science. This diagnosis has resulted too often to the branding of those so designated. To wit, children disruptive in the classroom are commonly diagnosed as suffering from ADHD or ADD, controllable by a retinue of drugs whereas nutritionists claim a more reliable approach would be to reduce the offenders' diets to far less sugar.

Likewise, children have been misdiagnosed as being dyslexic or autistic as we learn by reading the biographies of Bruno Bettelheim. The same could be said of a person being “bipolar” based on a description of observed pivotal behaviors supportive of that diagnosis. Again, a retinue of drugs is likely to be administered as a corrective measure. Medical practitioners consistent with Freud’s descriptive science continue to identify all kinds of syndromes and disorders sometimes to embarrassment.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA), DSM-I, and DSM-II pathologized homosexuality as a disease before 1973. Thereafter, DSM III and subsequent editions of the manual removed the diagnosis of “homosexuality” from the second edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).

The psychic havoc of our times subjects the individual to the calculus of the state machine that falls back on labels rather than scientific studies aggravating the problem rather than resolving the behavioral issue.

We are gluttons for simplistic explanations of what we construe as atypical behavior. Russian British philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909 – 1997) claims we are afraid of freedom preferring others to do our thinking and evaluating. He sees this as a drift toward “positive freedom” where the state takes care of everything at the expense of “negative freedom” where the individual as a private contractor trusts his situational judgment.

That said a pure state of “negative freedom” or “positive freedom” would be chaotic. The character and context of man collectively are impressionistic with an instinctual sense of survival.  Behavior follows this dictum.

Americans live in a conscious climate of violence with imagined or anticipated fear.  This finds us with the compulsory need to find refuge in the collective will of the state.  Even so, certain citizens prefer to live on the edge marginalized in the quiet prison of the mind in primitive isolation from the boring sickness of society expressed in the rebellious imperative of the self as a literary option. British writer Colin Wilson (1931 – 2013) exploits this state in “The Outsider” (1956) profiling such artists as H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The “outsider” acts according to his desires, while the “insider” behaves as the group would insist.  These polar extremes describe our world today.

WHAT IS THIS EXISTENTIAL AUTHOR UP TO?

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

Copyright July 19, 2022

This anthology covers the life and thoughts of the author, born during The Great Depression when Hitler was coming to power covering events in his life over nine decades from his early years with no knowledge of his parents until five years old, then growing up in his preteens during World War Two in the middle of the 20th century in the middle of the United States in the middle of an industrial Mississippi River community on the eastern crescent of the State of Iowa “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” (2003).

From his earliest memory, he recorded his sense of things having been born on the wrong side of the tracks, however rising in position and power through institutional life but never joining the club. Having no special allegiance, he has written more than a score of books over the last several decades on the changing morality and mind of the times seeing an increasing societal imbalance between passion and reason resulting in a rudderless existence apparent in our corporate-dominated media culture of politics, religion, education, the military, and scientific community.


Dr. Fisher is looking for a home for his existential writing in a university library.  Dealing with the culture of his times,  he sees it in transition with the new religion, Technology, its movers and shakers the new priesthood of this corporate society.

He confronts this chaos primarily in terms of work, workers, and the workplace differing from others who view this in terms of perception. He sees the human condition today as an ontology in existential philosophical terms, or through the science of “what is,” or reality. He is aware he may be seen as an upstart and of no consequence while taking existential angst and turning it into an art and truth forum!

WATCHING THE NEWS CAUSES DEPRESSION -- "TIT" FOR "TAT"

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

© July 12, 2022

READER WRITES

Here are some interesting links! Wow. I couldn’t believe all the case studies and TONS of articles noting the correlation between Current Events or “News”, Reading/Viewing/Listening, AND Depression!

Here’s a small sliver, a mere fraction of a fraction, from the thousands of results using a simple Google search of (no quotes) “News +Depression”.

wowzers L

Healthline Article:

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-to-balance-staying-informed-and-not-being-overwhelmed-by-stressful-news

GoodRx Health:

https://www.goodrx.com/health-topic/mental-health/is-news-bad-for-your-mental-health

Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/29/tech-tips-news-anxiety/

Study Univ. of California San Francisco:

https://psychiatry.ucsf.edu/copingresources/politics

WebMD:

https://www.webmd.com/balance/stress-management/news/20220224/how-to-manage-headline-anxiety

Many “tips and tricks” suggested, of course, from the articles above conveying their take on news/life balance

THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER RESPONDS

These references to the media sources indicate, ironically, how much we are prisoners to our computers and app sources.

One of my books, WHO PUT YOU IN A CAGE, looks at how natural it is for us to prefer the cage to freedom.

We put ourselves in jeopardy because we con ourselves into thinking "we want to be informed" when google, Facebook, et al, play on our emotions. These sources intend to advertise us to buy something, an idea, a product, or an emotion to connect us while purporting to be altruistic.

Media has one function -- to sell us something through diffusion, acculturation, or invention.

Our minds use one mechanism to take information from the sensory field in which we exist to create new ways to act and think about the world all the time automatically, largely unconsciously, expectantly, and with error.

For a time, I watched Fox Cable News and Tucker Carlson until I came to feel he was as much a load of beans as was CNN. I do use GOOGLE as if a history book knowing many of these sources are subject to error. I use e-mail as I am using it here but I am not connected to any social media networks and use my cell phone only to keep in touch with my family.

Being an old man, I am certainly no model for the younger generations. It is their time and they are stronger, wiser, and more gifted than my generation as we experienced a much less noisy existence. God bless them one and all!

Although I have had nine years of university training in two widely different disciplines, I never bought into ideas that failed to match my empirical experiences. The filters of my prism have given me much freedom, which I believe is reflected in many of my books. It doesn't mean that I am right but it does display a reason to cherish freedom as freedom is a choice.

Often my hematologist and cardiologist and my primary physician ask me if I am depressed, given my chronic condition. I always want to answer them with a question: how could I be depressed when I, a very average person in every way, could expect the life that I have had? But instead, I simply say, "No."

THE READER RESPONDS “TIT” FOR “TAT”

“These references to the media sources indicate, ironically, how much we are prisoners to our computers and app sources”

How Ironic? Was the New York Times, circa 1950, imprisoning? Maybe… how about the NYT circa 2022?

The links w/in the original email were not solely computer or app-specific. “CNN”, “FOX”, “San Francisco Chronicle”, and “Twitter”, would all fall w/in “news sources”. i.e., potential causal agents for depression. Let’s save a Section 230 discussion for a later date :P Think in terms of “objective news”… further, “may cause depression when overdone”.

“We put ourselves in jeopardy because we con ourselves into thinking "we want to be informed" when google, Facebook, et al, play on our emotions. These sources intend to advertise us to buy something, an idea, a product, or emotion to connect us while purporting to be altruistic.”

Is there any objectivity to be found in 2022? Epistemology/Ontology aside… where can one seek objective facts (or “truths”, lol), in your humble opinion? *Also, the original email WAS NOT noting, solely, social media news sources. Like you, I too, don’t have an appetite for social media indulgence. ALL NEWS sources potential causal agents for depression.

“Media has one function -- to sell us something through diffusion, acculturation, or invention.”

BINGO! J I couldn’t agree more. Hence my question about where, in your humble opinion, can one seek objective fact in 2022. Everyone has an agenda. Everyone has “skin in the game” in their narrative called life. Who’s on first?

“Our minds use one mechanism to take information from the sensory field in which we exist to create new ways to act and think about the world all the time automatically, largely unconsciously, expectantly, and with error.”

Say more? Vacuous

“For a time, I watched Fox Cable News and Tucker Carlson”

That sucks. I’m sorry to hear. How long did you watch Cucker Tarlson before his “beans” clicked? Do you recall a singular event where you said “that’s it, bullshit”? Also, where did you leave your critical thinking skills (at first)? Why no questioning of his sources, devil’s advocate type thoughts while he engaged his (you) audience with dialogue (agenda)?

“Being an old man, I am certainly no model for the younger generations. It is their time and they are stronger, wiser, and more gifted than my generation as we experienced a much less noisy existence. God bless them one and all! “

Bullshit. Stomp the Tierra hard while you’re here. You have an audience, kind of, so stay inspired. “older, wiser, pursuit of wisdom (def. of philosophy)”. You have a lot to offer folks. J

“It doesn't mean that I am right but it does display a reason to cherish freedom as freedom is a choice.”

Lot of “grey” in the world. Right and Wrong mentalities are detrimental, absurd, and passive-aggressive (IMHO). Good questions lead to good answers (good answers lead to better questions) :P I.e., “right” is not always static (always, operative word)… a better question to the last answer is often on the horizon.

“Often my hematologist and cardiologist and my primary physician ask me if I am depressed, given my chronic condition. I always want to answer them with a question: how could I be depressed when I, a very average person in every way, could expect the life that I have had? But instead, I simply say, "No."

Time is precious, even Jeffrey Bezos can’t buy himself more time (as far as I know… so I get it). BUT, for kicks, next time say to your hematologist or cardiologist when answering a query as to if you’re depressed… “no I am not depressed, but would you kindly give me a happy ending?”

THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER AGAIN

It always surprises me when my writing gets such attention. Whenever it does, I am flattered as the reader is reflecting his or her mind and not mine. Bias is the powerful acculturation of our conditioning. For example, I find CNN as offensive as FOX however I doubt that you do.

One time a consulted client -- who withheld $3,500 owed to me -- claimed my analysis sounded too much like an academic tome. My analysis was quite critical of her management style that was preventing the operation from getting its work done and what to do about it.

This CEO was already under fire with several newspaper columns and magazine articles noting her bizarre practices.

Once my report was made public, the press bombarded me with telephone calls asking me to "give my side of the story." I didn't as a good friend had recommended me for the job and he was a director under the CEO. She was eventually relieved of her position but I had no part in that. My friend survived the ordeal. BB said, "This is a side of you nobody sees."

I would put it another way. I am not into throwing gasoline on a raging fire.

Thank you for your spirited reaction to my missive. Your keen observations are appreciated.

FORGIVE ME FOR THIS QUIET RANT

  James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 2, 2022

Times have changed; now parents don't educate their children anymore, but the children educate their parents.

Manfred Fiedler, a German citizen, former Honeywell Europe colleague, and friend for more than 30 years.

Manfred's reflection on my “Conditional & Unconditional Love” follows my comment on author Ken Shelton’s “Conditional Love: I grew up thinking it was universal.” Ken and I were formed as writers by our parents as children; he with a strong father; I with a resolute mother. This eclectic rant however does not deny the validity of Manfred’s evaluation.

THE SENSE OF SELF IN A WORLD OF NONSENSE

The Austrian-American management Guru Peter Drucker (1909 – 2005) dismisses the idea of culture saying, “I have no idea what it is,” while creating his philosophical and practical foundation for the modern business management corporation but as it turns out without legs.

Culture is in and about everything because everything is a consequence of culture be it what we call God to the diverse vehicles of religious belief systems to the way we behave in groups.

We have had one hundred years of military and Cultural Revolution including two world wars. Revolutions produce qualitative change. These revolutions have resulted in directional, behavioral, and psychological changes as defined by many things including work, workers, and the workplace.

The world is now one place with a myriad of cultural intersections to make a person, a person whatever his original ethnicity and culture. What existed before is gone; what exists now is shaping what comes next.

Higher levels of power have atrophied giving rise to lower levels of power concentration. Power at this new level although not well defined can unleash violence and disruption rather than harmony and stability as the shift in the distribution of power from upper to lower levels is at first erratic. Once power stabilizes, however, it will elicit a new set of cultural assumptions. We are amid this cultural dynamic forgetting that more often than not what appears at first different seldom means better.

When you are as old as I am, you tend to reflect somewhat eclectically about the strangeness of your time denoting the strangeness of how consistently your contemporaries keep pushing against the water.

We are by nature social animals with a strong urge to belong to the dominant group. Leaders for eternity have exploited the wisdom of this simple equation:

Belief + Belonging = Behavior

 

Since a small child, when I didn’t know what parents were, I lived with my sister, first with a foster mother and then with relatives. What I felt in my aloneness was complemented by the consistency of my Irish Roman Catholicism.

Once my birth mother and birth da appeared and were there for us at the age of five and three, my self-direction was influenced by my mother. This has provided the freedom I would not otherwise have enjoyed impacting my life as a person, and as a writer.

Given this predilection, I marvel at how much people gauge their lives on what others think failing to imagine how they think.

WE HAVE BECOME A ROBOTIC SOCIETY

We increasingly exist on automatic pilot sustained by a juvenile culture celebrating what others define as achievements seemingly unaware of how hope controls our behavior. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) suggests:

“When courage is lost all is lost. It would be better to never be born.”

We rely on hope to intervene and correct our situation passing the responsibility to leaders when too frequently they have another agenda. Hope is a passive virtue; courage is an active asset.

Some ideas pass through the filters of our perceptual prism, others do not. Many of us can relate to philosopher Eric Hoffer’s (1902 – 1983) observation that many workers busy themselves doing other people’s jobs without having sufficient time to do their own, while others cannot relate to psychologist Stephen Pinker’s (born 1954) assertion claims that world violence is on the decline (Better Angels of our Nature, 2011).

Philosopher Rene Girard’s (1923 – 2015) “Mimetic Theory of Desire” has an explanation. He sees people are vulnerable to what other people claim to be true. Girard insists this is so since we don’t have an inner desire of our own that finds us desiring what we see others around us desiring. In other words, people imitate models who endow objects with value. Girard writes:

“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”

This leads to a natural rivalry between individuals, and groups, and eventual scapegoating through media outlets, political parties, religious pulpits, and even nations. An American general once said of Vietnam, “We have to destroy Vietnam to save it.”

We now see Vladimir Putin of Russia repeating that general's refrain in Ukraine. Rene puts it in these words:

“Societies unify their imitative desires around the destruction of a collectively agreed upon scapegoat.”

This scapegoat mechanism as hypothesized by Girard sees societies unifying their imitative desires around the destruction of a collectively agreed-upon scapegoat.

The innocent, often unaware of this mechanism, march to the slaughter. The July/August 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs (What is Power?) devotes several articles to Putin and how he has misread history, failing to see the limits of military power while gravitating to the folly of strength. Putin's Russia with its preemptive invasion of Ukraine has as a consequence become a dangerous nation.

In a more minuscule sense, behavioral experimental psychologists find mice trapped in a limited space eventually attack each other. The world population took tens of thousands of years to reach 2 billion in the third decade of the 20th century. Today in the early 21st century, or less than one hundred years the world population is now 8 billion with genocide, homicide, suicide, famine, and senseless wars sporadically reoccurring across the globe.

Social psychologist Erich Fromm (1900 – 1980) writes in “Escape from Freedom” (1941) that we fear the responsibilities of freedom preferring to enslave ourselves to some authoritarian authority to control our lives hopefully in a positive way.

Eric Hoffer in “The True Believer” (1951) called this in essence the “herd mentality.” Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909 – 1997) in “Four Essays on Liberty” (1969) defines the nature of freedom in terms of “negative liberty” or what Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802 – 1882 defines as “self-reliance.” With “positive liberty” we voluntarily sacrifice freedom to an external authority that places limits on what we can and cannot do.

A complement of the two is necessary for a community or state. Still, the authority of government, labor unions, the church, and the social will of the community can put us in a cage. I present this issue in pragmatic terms in “Who Put You in the Cage” (© 1998, 2nd edition © 2018). A book review columnist writes:

Whether of our own making or not, we all reside in some kind of cage. There is an exit ramp but few acknowledge much less take it. It can be the cage of a bad relationship that we endure as if there is no other option; a mountain of biases that confines us within its walls, refusing to see how they are self-imprisoning; a job we hate in which we feel trapped by its demands; the cage of debt that wreaks havoc with our lives for our lack of prudence; the cage of ill health brought on by eating, drinking, or smoking too much while avoiding exercise; the cage of never being able to say “no” to our children or friends when that would be best for everyone; the failure to cut ties with people who distract us from our purpose; the cage of status and celebrity worship that makes strangers more real to us than family and friends; the assuming of a lifestyle we cannot afford that finds us always anxious and tense. These are cages with which we are all familiar. Social psychologist James R. Fisher, Jr. penetrates these cages and provides a strategy for acknowledging the cage, then shows us how to extricate ourselves from that confinement. The second edition has been revised, edited, and enhanced with illustrations, photographs, graphics, schematics, tables, and graphs out of the author's empirical work and personal life for the reader's pleasure.

THE NATURE OF MORALITY

Morality is in the mind of the times. Some follow the rules of the church, others follow the civil authority of the state, while still others find a way to walk the difficult line between the two as Desiderius Erasmus (1469 - 1536) did some five hundred years ago with sarcasm, wit, humor, and the celebration of the absurd thus avoiding the risk of being mortally punished. The behavior of Erasmus is the morality of today.

Consequently, morality, as dictated by the decision-makers of the state and the church, is hardly morality.

We are all at heart opportunists with survival instincts in play rising from our unconscious minds. Psychoanalyst inventor Sigmund Freud has provided the language for this justification. Many are willing to sell their souls for the price of belonging as dictated by significant others as demonstrated by those who stormed the United States Nation’s Capital buildings on January 6, 2021. 

 

Why? Not to satisfy their angst but that of their deposed leader, President Donald Trump, failing to think how stupid an act this would turn out to be while having no sense of the consequences in terms of their own survival.

Erasmus was a Rotterdam priest and scholar, who chose to embrace negative freedom amidst the moral dilemma of his times (i.e., The Protestant Reformation) by simply writing “In Praise of Folly” (1511) at the home of his friend Sir Thomas More in England then publishing it anonymously in France.  He claimed later that it was written as an amusement for More by celebrating the satirical pleasures of youth and the intoxicating piety and foibles of the aged as exemplified by theologians consumed with secular power and personal ambition. 

 

His specific targets were bishops, monks, and the Roman Papacy itself which had reduced Christian ideals to pomp & circumstance through pilgrimages, festivals, relics, and devotional aids. In his bald acerbic style, he attacked superstitions and the abuses of Christian doctrine satirizing people and groups of the 15th century who had exercised power in Europe.

Sir Thomas More, on the other hand, was a Renaissance humanist, and King Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor of England until 1532 when he refused to sign an oath in support of the king’s request for special dispensation to divorce and remarry in defiance of church law. 

 

After More refused to rebuke the Roman Papacy, he was beheaded on July 6, 1535. Four hundred years later, Pope Pius XI (1857 – 1939) canonized More as a saint in 1935.  Pope Pius XI canonized many others as saints while he was a bit of a rascal as the Supreme Pontiff (see “The Pope Who Would Be King,” by David I Kertzer, 2018).  Sainthood has always given me pause.

More’s martyrdom suggests his internal spiritual belief system came to clash precipitously with the civil authority of the state. Given this, how should we appraise the countervailing actions of Erasmus? 

 

More was idealistically “other-directed” while Erasmus was pragmatically “self-directed.” Erasmus was essentially guided by negative freedom with a pragmatic appreciation of positive freedom while More seems to have had only an exclusive appreciation of positive freedom as exercised by the church.

It should be noted that Erasmus followed the exploits of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation but chose to act as a reformer within Roman Catholicism leading to the Counter-Reformation.

This rant now spins off onto other ideas.

NIETZSCHE: GOD IS DEAD!

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) is given credit for the "God is dead" declaration signaling mankind's retreat from the spiritual with a new kind of material secularism as a consequence of The Protestant Revolution of the 16^th century and the concomitant rise of a capitalistic society, first in the West and then today throughout the Eastern world anchored by the communistic state.

Nietzsche was simply stating an obvious mantra of the “The Age of Enlightenment” of the 17^th and 18^th centuries and the arrival of the secular age.

Once Christianity no longer dictated social mores through parents, a flood of thinkers surfaced most notably Freud and Jung and their army of interpreters.

The “Industrial Revolution” accelerated this Enlightenment with the American Civil War (1961 – 1865) changing social consciousness only to be further disruptive with WWI and WWII.

Everything changed after 1945 in the United States in the 20th century.  The 1960s were marked by soaring college dropouts such as Steve Jobs, Stephen Wozniak, and Bill Gates who would change the world, leaving behind GM, IBM, academia, and other societal institutions, except corporate management now better known as “Corporate America.”

Management became empirical with its pyramidal structure, infallible hierarchy, and authority, successfully selling America on the idea it was necessary as the new civil religion of American society. Corporate Management enjoyed infallibility once only enjoyed by the Roman Papacy and the Roman Catholic Church and Roman Emperors. 

 

Remarkably, although managers are today atavistic in the 21^st century and management mainly anachronistic, it still stirs society’s drink remaining the seat of power in academia, commerce, industry, politics, the military, and the government.

THIS INVISIBLE RANTER IN A TRANSITIONAL AGE

When young having grown up in the era of The Great Depression and WWII, the simple life has always had much appeal to me. We of that age never questioned our biological identity of male and female nor was our sex-role identity complicated. We were too busy in survival mode with little time for self-conscious self-indulgence. Gender and sex-role identity has become ghoulish confusion ever since. Society seemingly has become a free-floating phantom bringing to mind the American educator and poet Hughes Mearns’s (1875 – 1965) poem, Antigonish:

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish I wish he’d go away

Society now chases phantoms such as wealth, prestige, celebrity, fame, and power only to release ghoulish paranoia, anxiety, depression, cynicism, antagonism, jealousy, envy, hatred, and despair.

A PERSONAL ASIDE

WWII launched an explosive rise in technology moving inexorably from the atomic age to the electronic age into the information age and the Internet where privacy and freedom have disappeared replaced by ubiquitous Big Brother surveillance with frantic incessant gossip with the mundane mutating to the superfluous and ridiculous.

Trained as a chemist, my Periodic Table, alas, has proven to be more abstract than the Chemical Periodic Table. Still, having to make a living to support my young family, I spotted an enticing advertisement in Chemical & Engineering News that the National Aluminate Corporation was looking for chemical sales engineers. C&E News displayed an attractive field test kit in its ad that found me rationalizing that the bridge between the lab and the field was not too far.

National Aluminate Corporation was a water treatment company started by a salesman and a chemist in 1920 after WWI with a close association with The Aluminum Corporation of America (ALCOA). ALCOA used this fledgling company to treat its steam power plants and water systems across the globe.

I joined the company in 1958 after returning from serving in the US NAVY on the flagship of the Sixth Fleet operating in the Mediterranean with a graduate fellowship in my pocket to study theoretical chemistry at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut the following fall. I needed to find additional income in the short term to complement the fellowship as I had a wife and two small children ages two and six months to support.

Never having sold anything before, I went off to Nalco Chemical Company (as the company was now called) for a month’s technical training at Nalco’s Chicago headquarters with not a minute of training on selling.

There had been no mention when hired that I was on a three-year technical training program expecting to acquire my professional engineering license before its conclusion at a current salary less than I had been making in the R&D laboratory.

Two things happened simultaneously, I pissed off the area manager when I road with him, answering what I had learned after traveling with him for a week, “Nothing,” I said, “They were all social calls. You never asked for an order.” On the other, we were expecting our third child scuttling the possibility of honoring the chemistry fellowship.

The Monday after riding with the area manager I came to Nalco’s district office to be greeted by the district and area managers, “We don’t think you are cut out for this kind of work. We’ll give you some marginal accounts to service for a month, given you have a family, by then you had better line up another job.”

An incongruity in my personality surfaced. I tend to be high-strung but in crisis, everything seems to slow down. I found myself saying, “Can I upgrade these accounts and get the commission?”

The two managers snickered through the smoke of their cigarettes, looking at each other, and nodding, why not. Not done, I asked, “Can I call on our competitor accounts?” The “why not” reappeared.

Two weeks later, I sold the largest competitor's account in the district in ten years by saying to the superintendent of the three-plant complex of Philco in Connersville, Indiana when asked by Philco’s superintendent, “Sport, you’ve got five minutes, what do you have for me?”

After spending an hour alone in the operations bullpen in the center of this seven-acre plant, all the technical problems that can occur in an industrial high-power boiler system were on display.

I said simply, “I’m here to save your job.” And I did, getting a three-month blanket order when I didn’t know Nalco’s products and had never surveyed any system much less a complex one. The area manager was needed to assist me but was never able to fathom how I sold the account.

That success was not a fluke as success followed success with Nalco sending a total of 78 other sales engineers to ride with me for a week, along with two executives from Nalco’s Chicago headquarters one of whom would become the Director of the Industrial Division, and eventually Executive Director of Nalco’s International Operations, and my boss when I was elevated to V.P. reporting to him.

Now at age 30 and the father of four, the West Coast Regional Director asked me to come to San Francisco to address the Regional Managers Meeting on how I sold Nalco’s products.

I had read widely but never on selling.  As a consequence, I had no cohesive selling methodology. For the better part of a month, I pondered my reading of such authors as St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, Eric Fromm, Eric Berne, Erik Erikson, Goethe, Gurdjieff, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Rollo May, Alan W. Watts, Nietzsche, Bruno Bettelheim, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward de Bono, Gustave Le Bon, Jacque Barzun, William James, Sholem Asch, Abraham Maslow, Rene Girard, Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, James Joyce, B. F. Skinner, Joseph Campbell, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Aldous Huxley, Sartre, Camus, et al, finding these authors fed my intellectual curiosity but would put this group to sleep.

Several of the guys who traveled with me went back to their districts and said, "Fisher doesn't sell as we do." True, I didn't emphasize the prowess of Nalco, a leader in the specialty chemical industry, a company with only $50 million in sales but growing. Dow Chemical made a bid to acquire Nalco, but management at the time said "If successful, Dow would acquire empty plants and offices as Nalco workers weren’t for sale." To put this in perspective, Nalco is now Ecolab, a company that acquired Nalco for $5.38 billion in 2011.

In the early 1960s, Nalco's selling strategy was consistent with selling in general irrespective of the industry. Selling was "winning through intimidation," anticipating and overcoming objectives, penetrating the prospect’s resistance with the penalty of delay, or wowing the prospect with the company's technical prowess, none of which were appealing to me.

THE WISDOM OF CONFIDENT SELLING

From the beginning, I sensed that the selling situation was a partnership between the buyer and seller that was mutually enhancing and not an adversary relationship.

It is an inordinate advantage to the seller if he is self-accepting, that is, he likes himself as he is, warts and all, and as a consequence is inclined to accept the buyer as he is. This state of tolerance allows the seller to see the buyer as an individual and not as a mark.

I knew from my Nalco service work that the problems prospects were likely to encounter mirrored the problems of my customers.

Trained as a chemist, I knew a product was not sufficient to reduce systemic problems but a system’s approach could. With a natural proclivity to schematics, I would often get behind the desk of a prospect with him peering over my shoulder and create a diagram of his system highlighting possibly troubling areas. This approach proved something of a hypnotic selling strategy.

Some other colleagues who traveled with me went back to their district managers and said, “Fisher reads minds, and that is why he is so lucky.”

Untrue, what I was doing was reading behavior. I also read the culture of a prospect’s office space. A chief engineer, superintendent, powerhouse foreman, or operations manager creates a work or office climate consistent with how he thinks and feels. This is not difficult to interpret if you trained yourself to make the connection between interests, beliefs, values, and yes, biases, which are on display.

Then there is the use of language which indicates a person’s level of curiosity; whether he is primarily visual, verbal, linear, conceptual, abstract, logical, or intuitive, and whether a left brain or right brain thinker.

I did not share too much of this with my San Francisco audience; nor how people contradict themselves forgetting what they had said before which is inconsistent with what they claim to believe. We call it lying but it is much more complex than simply lying. How could I explain this to an audience of salesmen who lie for a living? Nor how could I describe the spiritual connection I often feel in the selling situation? The buyer frequently reveals his soul without knowing it as the plant superintendent did at Philco in Connersville, Indiana. These themes were developed in my first book, Confident Selling (©1971, 2nd edition © 2014).

I ended my talk emphasizing the partnership between seller and buyer with this little cliché:

Find a way of accepting yourself as you are, and you will be inclined to accept others as you find them. With this state of tolerance, all barriers to a profitable exchange are removed.