The Peripatetic Philosopher

CORPOCRACY AND "THE CULTURE OF CONFUSION" -- OMEN FOR THE FUTURE?

2010-01-01T23:09:00.000-08:00

CORPOCRACY AND “THE CULTURE OF CONFUSION” – OMEN FOR THE FUTURE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2, 2010

REFERENCE:

A perceptive reader shared the following thoughts in his reaction to my missive, “THE WAY IT IS, THE WAY WE ARE!”

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

Fun stuff is too difficult to turn away from. I get a couple of this multi-colored graphic filled pieces of political commentary every week. As the individual members of Congress called out by first name are all Democrats, the source of the message is clear.

More indicative of the dissonance that exists in public discourse is the fourth element of the your "Culture of" group. That is the Culture of Confusion resulting from unconscious competence.

On one hand, when the Government institutes expand social programs, it is on a slippery slope leading to communism. On the other hand, when the Government fails to pad the social program that benefits me, it is evil and should be voted out of office. This is the unconscious part. The computers, software and the Internet combine to provide even the unconscious the competence to communicate their confused and confusing views of the world.

Your introduction of unions into the discussion is appropriate. When has anyone in America, when given the chance, voted for sustaining pay rates over increasing them? In hard times, unions have even voted in favor of decreasing their ranks rather than take pay cuts. Your argument emphasizes that the people we elect are no different, nor should they be, than the people that elected them.

We are, as a nation, filled with distrust as we see the institutions, which appeared as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, fades away. The discomfort of those disorienting events drive many to lash out at the obvious targets, Bush, Obama, Republicans, Democrats, neo-cons, liberals. Congress earns the extra $10K as a kind of abuse pay. Meanwhile, the shadow government of big business lobbyists probably gets ten times that for pushing laws that contribute to the net income of the conglomerates they represent.

None of these multi-colored graphic filled pieces of political commentary ever address that.

The unconscious competence of the Culture of Confusion flourishes.

Happy New Year!

Michael

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

Happy New Year to you, too!

What you say is true. We have indeed entered the Culture of Confusion in unconscious competence in many respects. What is not so apparent is that institutional society lags in the storyline in the New Age. It has failed to appreciate or take seriously society’s new construction.

* * *

THE FAILURE OF CORPORATE SOCIETY

For the nearly the past forty years or since the Jimmy Carter Presidency, no fault of his, incidentally, Corporate Society has designed, constructed and institutionalized what Peter Drucker declared as “Corporate Society.” This society has failed again and again and again to realize it is anachronistic:

(1) Corporate Society has failed to realize a workforce of professionals educated in the sciences and technologies, languages and cognitions, philosophies and religions, economies and ecologies could not be treated as interchangeable pieces in a machine as workers in the past have been treated, and get away with it, or could it?

That is precisely how the professional workforce has been treated over the last forty years. Corporate Society has instituted a contrived system of meaningless performance appraisals and incentives, while confining workers to pigeonhole cubicles expecting them to dutifully react to inane directives of the leadership, a leadership nostalgic for compliant and obsequious workers of the past whom they could control by fear and intimidation.

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) and SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998) addressed the consequences of this mindset. Workers have retreated into passive behaviors that have played havoc with productivity and have destroyed corporate infrastructures from within to the point that few corporations are surviving on much more than life support.

(2) Corporate Society has failed to realize that the moral authority of society is the foundation upon which the economic society is built. Religious and educational institutions have ignored the changing nature and complexity of society’s citizens in terms of expectations and demands along with the disappearing barriers between parents and children, teachers and students, managers and workers, and elected officials and citizens.

Instead of updating and promulgating linchpins to bridge the gaps inevitable when a society is in transition, Corporate Society has attempted to finesse its citizens by jerry-rigging a defunct system with workplace slogans (empowerment) and cosmetic change (open door policy), bogus academic curriculums (cultural studies) and new slants on grading (students evaluating teachers), fooling no one.

Corporate Society is broken and its pillars are crumbling along with its walls. The storyline is that draconian measures no longer work as they did one hundred years ago. Society has been turned inside out and upside down with students now the teachers and professionals now the face of the future and not well-heeled executives. Corporate Society has suffered a backlash, as surely we should have expected.

(3) Corporate Society has failed to realize how important spirituality is to the most sophisticated to the least sophisticated. Everyone needs spiritual sustenance as much as bread to live, breath and function as human beings. When religious and educational institutions bought into the Corporate Society model, the die was cast. We are now plagued with its consequences.

A spate of books claims God is not only dead but is irrelevant; that all the violence and chaos in the world can be placed at the door of religious institutions. These books have a point. The Christian, Judaic and Islam religions, in many cases, have been contaminated with secular corpocracy. Clerics and followers in such cases no longer practice the sacred that is preached. They have instead been tainted with fanaticism and gotten caught up in the politics of the moment. Love is at the center of all major religions, but that love is crippled when poisoned with the fatal flaw of secular corpocracy.

(4) Corporate Leadership has failed because it is the architect of a failed system. Even as I write these words, there are people who think President Obama runs the country, that he is the most powerful leader in the world, that Pope Benedict XVI is the spiritual guide of more than one billion Roman Catholics, and his word is law through encyclicals. None of this is true. Such leaders have a bully pulpit, to be sure, but depending on their respective charisma and persuasive seduction, they fail or succeed at the discretion of the people.

Leadership since the beginning of time has been local, regional and specific to clans, tribes and now gangs. Afghanistan and Pakistan are not mirages.

Peter the Great knew this. That is why he roamed among his subjects in disguise to see how they thought and what they thought of him. How many leaders today would take such a chance? How many, if they did, would use what they learned and have the courage to lead more appropriately?

Peter the Great wanted to bring his backward Russian society of mainly illiterate serfs into the modern world, and knew he couldn’t do it with a pitchfork, but could do it by the sage wisdom of his moral authority.

* * *

Ask yourself, how many leaders you know would attend a conference much less wander incognito amongst their people where they could not display their credentials or mention the authority of their position? This is not a rhetorical question. When I was a Honeywell OD psychologist, I asked executives to attend such a conference, and they all refused.

* * *

READ THE TEALEAVES!

We have seen 100-year-old institutions such as Montgomery Wards disappear.

We have seen the “Big Blue,” IBM, stumble and retrogress into the postmodern age, as it failed to see the significance of the personal computer age.

We have seen Xerox engineers develop the personal computer only to have it stolen from them by two college dropouts, Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, who were working out of Jobs’ garage, when Xerox management refused to fund their engineers’ research.

We have seen Bill Gates literally steal the software and write a contract with IBM that would turn him one day into the richest man in the world.

We have seen Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University college students, create www.google.com in their spare time. Google was first incorporated as a private company on September 4, 1998, and first offered as an initial public offering (IPC) on August 19, 2004, which raised $1.67 billion, making them instant billionaires.

We have seen, on the other hand, the failure of Homeland Security and the US Government to react quickly and effectively to Hurricane Katrina, making a mockery of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of Homeland Security.

Meanwhile, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda play havoc with American Troops in Afghanistan and Pakistan with Al-Qaeda managing the same devastation in Somalia, Indonesia and other parts of the world. Corporate Society is flummoxed in the climate of turbulent change where terrorists with no national origin or allegiance control the game.

Rome, once again, has fallen, and we cannot rebuild it to its former majesty, not now, not tomorrow, not ever.

What have we learned fighting corporate wars against bands of renegades? Have we learned nothing? Can we not see that our failure is institutional as well as strategic? Do we have to be hit with a sledgehammer to realize this?

* * *

HOW LATE WISE!

Apple, Inc. has learned the hard way that it is hard to resist the urge to adopt the Corporate Society model.

Steven Jobs thought that Apple needed a true corporate executive to run the company. He hired John Sculley of Pepsi Cola fame to run Apple and Sculley nearly ran it into oblivion.

John Sculley was born, bread, trained, and programmed in corpocracy, and knew nothing else. He came from the management school of ITT Harold Geneen, who claimed a good manager could manage anything irrespective of the technology or industry. Geneen had no respect for culture. Incidentally, neither did the celebrated management guru Peter Drucker.

Geneen and Drucker saw culture as an aberrancy, something dreamt up by softheaded shrinks. Sculley attempted to impose Pepsi’s cultural corpocracy on Apple employees, who were of a different mindset, experience, spirit and inclination. It should come as no surprise it proved disastrous.

Bill Gates has essentially departed from Microsoft management but Paul Allen, a co-founder of the company is still actively involved. The culture is still nostalgic of its origins, but what happens in the future if the mind of that time is not leading the way? It is something to ponder.

* * *

BACK TO THE FUTURE

In the nineteenth century, most industry and commerce was conducted in guilds. There was no boss, per se, but co-workers complementing each other in tasks to get the work done. They were skilled craftsmen, and took pride in their work. Most education was on-the-job training, and not in trade schools or academic institutions.

When students were able to attend school, it was rigorous and comprehensive. The high school curriculum (see IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, AuthorHouse, 2003) in 1900 for a Clinton High School student in Clinton, Iowa rivaled and perhaps surpassed what a four-year college graduate today would likely experience in terms of range and depth of learning. Only 5 – 10 percent of Clintonians then graduated from high school in 1900, whereas today 90 percent or more do. But are they educated for life, for a job, or for anything?

* * *

Early in the twentieth century, tool and die makers worked as independent contractors. Henry Ford was a bicycle mechanic. He didn’t invent the automobile. He bought into the industrial engineering schemes of Frederick Winslow Taylor of assembly line production, and the rest was history.

Small manufacturers and tool and die makers combined to form General Motors. In doing so, they gave up their independence, falling in line to new rules and regulations, policies and procedures, and further surrendering their control of what they did for better pay and benefits as the union rushed in to establish parity.

In the early days, there was resistance to control. Like in all times of transition, independent guilds and private contractors were reluctant to cave in to Corporate Society.

(1) Guild workers didn’t have any organization, but were skilled and took pride in their work.

(2) They knew and respected each other, and valued their connection in terms of competence.

(3) When times got tough, they stuck with each other. They didn’t have a corporate umbrella upon which to rely or hide. Nor did they look to the government to bail them out of their distress.

If this seems radical, the “Skunk Works” of the Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Program is reminiscent of the guilds. It is famous for its aircraft designs of business, engineering and technical teams with a high degree of autonomy unhampered by bureaucracy of the wider organization.

These autonomous groups are several times more productive than conventional operations, and have brought designs in under budget and ahead of schedule. They are synergistic, electric and alive with camaraderie. Why not more in evidence? Corporate Society is still locked into the past.

Tracy Kidder won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Soul of a Machine” (1981), which tracked a “skunk work” like team in the creation of a mega computer, only to dispense with the team once the job was done.

* * *

Organized people in a corporate complex are wide open for exploitation because they think they are too big to fail and too secure to be exploited. Therefore, they fail to pay proper attention to the nuances of change. They don’t misread the tealeaves; they disregard them.

Employees of corporations who are of a passive, reactive and vengeful nature look around them and see how easy it is to manipulate the system to their unsavory ends.

The corporation, too busy counting its loot, disregards the behavior of these social termites until it is too late for damage control. What is the point of lecturing an employee after he has been late for work 167 times but no notice taken before? This was the case of one supervisor who came to me for advice. I asked him, “What was so special this last time?“ He scratched his head, and answered, “Nothing, really.”

* * *

Thomas Jefferson has been out of fashion for a number of years because he was so strongly for states rights, individual authority, decentralized federal government, and a more pastoral agrarian society. The Information Age may not look as Jefferson envisioned the future, but “cultural capital” and intellectual and spiritual innovation thrive in his kind of world while they collapse in Corporate Society.

Steven Jobs, Stephen Wozniak, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Marc Andreessen, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and many more like them are bringing us back to the future.

* * *

THE WAY IT IS, THE WAY WE ARE!

2010-01-01T07:47:00.001-08:00

THE WAY IT IS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 1, 2010

REFERENCE:

Reaction to my friend's disgust with Congressional raises, among other things.

* * *

George,

I wrote this and accidentally deleted it. Perhaps God was telling me "let well enough alone!" Since I cannot sleep, however, I've given it another go. You know my intentions are always sincere and respectful. So, I'll try again.

* * *

This is not an attempt to defend Congress or to justify the raises they have given themselves, but to point out some realities that indicate "the way it is" has a lot to do with "the way we are."

* * *

You are right. We could and should vote Senators and Members of the House of Representatives out of office when they are not doing the people's business to the people's satisfaction.

Yet, in point of fact, following Pareto's formula, more than 80 percent of them are likely to be reelected every time. Moreover, it is nothing for a Congressman to be reelected to 15 to 20 two-year terms, or for Senators to be reelected for 3 to 5 six-year terms. In fact, it is the rule.

* * *

Politicians, as I've pointed out in another essay, are in the seductive business. That was as true of Lincoln as it is of Obama. It is the nature of the beast. Politicians know how to divide and conquer, and have since the days of the Founding Fathers. So, this is no new.

As for the generous raises Congress has voted itself, my wonder often is how we can get people to run for elected office at all:

(1) A person needs a war chest of considerable amount to run for Congress, which means that the devil is in the lobbyist who is always whispering in his ear, "do this, not that."

Then, too, there is the business of campaigning for reelection, which takes more time than doing the people's business under the best of circumstances.

(2) A person has to maintain a home in the District of Columbia and in his home state, which means that the income and perks of public office, which at first blush seem generous, finds few ordinary citizens without private incomes able to run for much less stay in office without extreme economic hardship.

(3) A person has to be in physical, emotional and mental health to sustain the energy it takes to maintain a presence in politics.

* * *

My quarrel has always been with the social termites - the lobbyists - that write, edit and proofread what eventually comes out of the mouths of Congressmen. Lobbyists are a shadow government that is behind the scenes in healthcare and, yes, social security as well. Lobbyists create pork and Congress barrels it through into law.

* * *

I could go on but I'd like to turn my attention to ordinary sorts such as you and me, private citizens in this Great Republic, and how we are complicit in this affair:

(1) We believe the myth of a corporate society and have followed that myth as self-fulfilling prophecy.

I can remember when Iowa farmers would not take government handouts because they knew it would reduce their power and control of farming as independent businessmen.

Look across Iowa, Illinois and Indiana today, and what do you see, but giant expensive windmills on the premises? This is meant to showing farming country is growing green, but the green it is growing is in the coffers of Co-ops!

Corpocracy has taken over farming and driven it into the ground. The army of the night for Co-ops is the lobbyist. Have no doubt that ADM right in your backyard has an army of lobbyists on Capital Hill every day writing the lines that puppets in Congress move lips and legislation to.

(2) From the private citizen, the manager of work to the workers on down no one expected that anything could go wrong as long as they respectfully behaved as safe hires.

Ordinary workers led by the nose by unions bled their places of employment dry by asking for more and giving less, as if they were simply working for a wage and weren't owners of what they did.

In the 1960s I worked in the field with among my customers giant automotive plants, and saw the industry fading long before it did.

(3) From the private citizen, the manager of work to the workers on down had no conception of what life would be like without the automotive, chemical or appliance manufacturing plant in their community. These plants employed husbands and wives, brother and sisters, aunts and uncles, and had been doing so for generations.

When I was a boy visiting my uncle (the professor) in Detroit, GM, Ford and Chrysler assemblyline working families had more impressive homes and lived better than most professionals, including doctors of medicine.

(4) No one from the private citizen on down thought anyone or anything could take the advantage away from them. After all, as GM goes so goes the country! No one disputed that.

Yet, traveling in Europe in the 1970s, I could see European streets and most highways were not built for American cars.

(5) Workers, whether in the public or private section, took comfort in not being self-aware, self-reliant, self-directed, or self-motivated. That was the company's job through its managers.

Workers were programmed to be passive and submissive, and as long as the pay was good, where's the problem?

Since WWII, we have forgotten our roots. We were competent because we relied on ourselves. As we have increasingly relied on others, we have become increasingly incompetent.

I have expressed this in my books as going from "unconscious incompetence" (Culture of Comfort) to "conscious incompetence" (Culture of Complacency) when we sought what had once been our domain, "conscious competence" (Culture of Contribution).

We didn't think the gravytrain would ever end, hadn't given it a thought what to do if it did disappear, quit taking risks and paying the price but became addicted to shortcuts, and couldn't conceive that workers had as much to do with the collapse of the American economy as their leaders.

Just one data point. The United States entered 2000 producing 32 percent of the world's gross domestic product. We leave 2009 producing 24 percent. No nation in modern history except the Soviet Union has had such a precipitous decline in relative power in a single decade. It should give us pause.

What to do about it?

What we have always done in crisis - pull together; look for what we have and build on it rather than looking for scapegoats to blame.

We are a good and resilient people that have had the luxury of never having to grow up. The positive side of this adolescent state is that we have had the energy of youth, but know we need the sobering reflection of age. To that end I wish you and all of us well.

Jim

WINNERS AND LOSERS AND HOW EASILY THEY REVEAL THEMSELVES!

2009-12-29T06:17:00.000-08:00

WINNERS AND LOSERS AND HOW EASILY THEY REVEAL THEMSELVES

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 30, 2009

* * *

Everyone is a winner but also a loser. Winning and losing are inextricably connected. That is the nature of life. Winning becomes a problem when we need to win at any cost. Losing becomes a problem when we are so fixated with losing we cannot get beyond it. This is written to provide some insight from someone who has had his share of wins and losses, and is still standing.

* * *

In 1974, five years after I retired the first time, and four years after my first book CONFIDENT SELLING (Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1970) was published, I got a call from Cincinnati, Ohio from a division of Bristol Myers, Inc., the Dracket Company, makers of “Drano.” The executive vice president of Bristol Myers had read my "Confident Selling" and wanted to interview me for the position of vice president and national sales manager of the Dracket division.

This presented a peculiar set of circumstances:

(1) I wasn’t looking for a job, but was pursuing a Ph.D. in organizational-industrial psychology;

(2) I was using my G.I. Bill, which was quite generous for a full-time student and father of four. This was supplemented by doing seminars for the Professional Institute of the American Management Association across the country;

(3) I had not yet gotten the bad taste out of my mouth for corpocracy;

(4) I was teaching a course at St. Petersburg Junior College (now four-year St. Petersburg College) based on “Confident Selling”; and

(5) Although encountering failure after failure to get published after successfully launching my writing career with “Confident Selling,” I had run into a wall but still persisted in becoming an author.

An exchange of letters accompanied with incentives found me traveling to Cincinnati to interview for the job. The vice president of Bristol Myers from New York City treated me as if I was already hired. I left the company after three days of interviews with the job in hand.

The next four weeks, a man flew down from Cincinnati every week, and briefed me on company business to give me a running start when I got my affairs in order, acquired transcripts of my academic work to transfer to Xavier University, sold my house, found schools for my children, and other details.

Then the unexpected changed everything: OPEC in 1974 placed an embargo on oil, which essentially dried up American automobiles at the gas station pump. Dracket made its products from petrochemicals. Petrochemicals came from crude oil. Dracket, in a panic, placed an immediate freeze on all hiring. So, I was hired and fired before I assumed my new job.

* * *

That may seem traumatic but it wasn’t. It was comedic and made me, once again, aware of how fickle corpocracy is, and how quick to panic.

Still, I didn’t come away from the experience empty handed. The Bristol Myers vice president was a minority owner of the Cincinnati Bengals, and a personal friend of Paul Brown, the owner, general manager, and coach of the Bengals, and former legendary coach of the Cleveland Browns when the legendary Jim Brown played for him.

It was the fall of the year and the NFL was ending preseason play. “The other day I attended a Bengals practice,” the vice president told me, “and I noticed that some of the guys were working their butts off while others were jawboning and jiving. So, I asked my friend looking at these men, coach, how do you decide who will make the team and who won’t? The coach looked at me and said, ‘I don’t decide. They do.’

“Now, if you know the coach you know he often talks in riddles and this was yet another. I told him that didn’t make sense. ‘But it makes perfect sense,’ he answered. ‘Look at those guys over there.’ They were the ones doing nothing. ‘They've already decided they’re not going to make the team. When I tell them, it will only be anticlimactic, simple as that.’ I understood then what he meant.”

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A COACH TO PICK OUT WINNERS AND LOSERS

Anthropologists define winning and losing, sociologists chart these attributions, while coaches deal with the fact with grown men, men who are not likely to have matured beyond adolescence. Losers project how the die will be cast by dogging it, while winners are working their tails off. Most of us fall somewhere between these perimeters as winners hang out with winners and losers with losers. To wit:

(1) Young people of high moral character hang out with other young people of similar character.

(2) Bright students are attracted to other bright students.

(3) Motivated workers are a magnet to other motivated workers.

(4) Students who are aggressive, extroverts, adventuresome and defy the status quo find each other with little trouble.

* * *

Some years ago when I was counseling a young man who had spent time in Raiford, a maximum security prison in Florida, I asked him, a nice man in many respects, why he got into such serious trouble? He answered, “Trouble followed the people I hung out with.” But why those people? He replied, “They were the only ones who would accept me.” Billy, practically illiterate with little formal education, abandoned by his prostitute mother, and beaten often by her drunken lovers, discovered he had much in common with other damaged young men, and got caught up in petty crime that gravitated to felonies.

* * *

5) The bully is attracted to other weak-minded individuals. Bullies hide their cowardice in the patina of false courage. Bullies can smell fear and are quick to exploit it.

(6) Poor students hang together and make fun of excellent students who also hang together.

* * *

Where it gets more complicated is when physical attractiveness and popularity is the primary gauge of acceptance.

As fading as physical beauty, our culture is obsessed with it. We don't want to grow old so we never plan on growing up. We have made the cosmetic and plastic surgery industry a multi-billion dollar business. It then follows that sincerity between beautiful people is often like watching a pretend drama on screen, especially when conversation seldom rises above banal nonsense. This was once limited to Hollywood; now it is a problem of everyone of every age.

An index of this cultural proclivity is the prominence of cheap gossip, celebrity worship and bizarre self-disclosure, once limited to television, radio and gossip columns, now a staple of the Internet on FaceBook.

* * *

When nothing is personal or sacred to the individual, then winning and losing is a moot point because there is no “is” there. And when there is no “is,” then a society of gangs fills the vacuum, which is the case today.

Everyone belongs to some kind of a gang.

Check out anyone’s association, and you will see they qualify as gang status. Gangs are loose federations of individuals that provide identity with dress, manner, rites and rituals, as well as language, interests and values, less we forget, equal contempt for nonmembers.

Gangs strut their stuff as if the world is envious of them when they are prisoners of compare and compete.

Gangs think it is “cool” to paint their bodies with tattoos because it gives them gang status and identity.

Gangs think one political party is superior to another when they are both vying for the same thing and in the same way. All politicians are professional seducers. They woo people for a living. If they are clever, and good at what they do, they'll strike a popular chord, and will prosper. So, when you hear advocates of one political party or another, you don't hear the speaker's voice but that of the politician. Professional seducers trade on mass appeal, count on it.

Name any subject of value and you will reveal a multitude of gangs. Notice I have not called such status “tribes.” We once were tribes but the lines between tribes have been obliterated so that no tribes exist except in gang status. Notice also that I haven't limited gangs to the nefarious counterculture ethnic gangs that plague our cities. Gangs exploit what is precious to the wider culture, but in a less systemic or critical way than politicians.

* * *

We are now in an economic downturn, and have been sold on the idea that the problem is one of money. We have been programmed to associate money and jobs as interchangeable, when they are not.

We all need money to live on, but we need a job to have a sense of purpose, and somewhere to go and something to do. A job gives meaning to life.

We are not programmed to vegetate at any age. That is a myth that has kept medical doctors, psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies in business. Raised to prominence are gurus with their simple-minded theories of health, wealth and purpose. Meanwhile, as relief from this fact, we have the gossip and sexual innuendo industry of matrons, madams and gents promoting exhibitionism on television as if society has become a merry madhouse.

The purpose of life is what we do. We have all been put on earth to do something. Choosing not to find out what that is fuels anxiety, angst and aggravation. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I indicate on how we have stayed the same, missed the changes and left the future up for grabs.

* * *

Economic Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman is even more blunt. He calls the decade we are leaving the “big zero decade” with zero job creation over the decade, zero gains in homeownership (25% of all mortgages in America and 45% of mortgages here in Florida find homeowners owing more than their houses are worth), zero gains for stocks even without taking inflation into account, while the celebrated dot-com bubble has deflated.

Krugman adds, “What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.” Economics are always in a state of instability but the same people are the victims of this instability because they are in a state of perpetual denial and choose to never see beyond their noses.

* * *

Last night I was shopping late with BB in a department store in a large mall. One sales lady was complaining to a colleague about how tired she was, how long she had been working that day. The other young lady, who had been working equally long, but was listening patiently, said finally, almost voce sotto, “I feel lucky to have a job.” If you’re interested in stereotypes, the complainer was white; the accepting young lady was black.

* * *

Losers are the last to come into work and the first to leave.

Losers do exactly as they are told and no more, and often less.

Losers are quick to say, “that’s not my job” when someone needs help and is too busy to complete a task.

Losers are always waiting for the big break, the big score, the right connection, the right patsy to snow and exploit, or to make the well-heeled feel obligated to bail them out when they get in over their head.

Losers are knowers and never learners. They are too smart to take an entrance level job, or go back to school because they don’t want to sacrifice the time or make the commitment for fear of failure, plus there are no guarantees that the effort will be worth the cost. Besides, they might have to give up their beer, time with their friends, who also are knowers and would never think of going back to school and breaking their routine.

Losers want “theirs” but the last thing they are willing to do is to work for it.

* * *

When I was in my late thirties, I went back to school sitting in classes with students ten to fifteen years younger, and they would say, “Aren’t you a little old to be here?” When I got my Ph.D., one of my classmates, much older than I was, in his late sixties, was asked, “Now that you’ve spent all this time going through this ridiculous process, what are you going to do with your Ph.D.?” He smiled, and said simply, “Enjoy it.”

Over my long life, I have encountered far more losers than winners because winners have 80 percent of the power and money, and are only 20 percent of the people.

Winners also own 80 percent of the real estate and investment capital, enjoy 80 percent of the leisure, and live longer and more productive lives than losers.

If you think this is a phenomenon of capitalism, you would be wrong. This has been true in feudalism, communism, socialism and combinations of these isms. Opportunity to break this Pareto differentiation is possible in the United States, but less so in Western Europe, yet the differentiation holds firm.

Why? Because we are programmed from birth and inculcated with a culture, value system, education and mindset of exceptionalism. We are drugged with social, economic and cultural nets to break our fall and prevent us from failing and therefore from succeeding to a large extent.

* * *

Winners are not smarter, more gifted, or talented, or in any way superior to losers, except in one dimension: they are willing to take risks and endure the pain of failure, embarrassment and losing everything in order to grow and keep growing. We treat them as exceptional when they only stay with a problem longer.

Winners do not take risks with reckless abandon but with simple, persistent and determined effort with benchmarks along the way focused on the process not the outcome.

Winners get there because the pleasure is in the risk taking, and the delight in the process of failing and then succeeding in a continuous journey of highs and lows with progress measured in inches and not miles.

Winners are not focused on retirement, on wealth creation, per se, or on accolades and celebrity, but on the excitement of being alive in the spirit of work, enjoying the moment with every day an opportunity and challenge to encounter the unexpected. Certainty is not in winners’ vocabulary because they know certainty is a myth that losers embrace at the expense of gainful experience.

Losers are looking for guarantees, for the certainty that the company, the country, the government will bail them out of their excesses, or take the blame when their failure to be winners sinks the company, country, the industry and themselves into the tank.

* * *

No worker, whatever the profession or job, should expect more than a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. Beyond that it is nigh impossible of the 20 percent winners to carry the 80 percent losers for the long haul, as recent events have proven.

Are the fat cats on Wall Street winners because they get multimillion-dollar bonuses?

Hardly. They are one-dimensional personalities that believe money spells the difference between winning and losing in life. Beyond basic necessities for health and comfort, wealth is relatively irrelevant.

Two-thirds of the world is impoverished with the simple conveniences of a roof over people’s heads, food on the table, adequate schooling for the children, medical facilities for the sick, and proper drinking water and sanitation for all as if this described Paradise.

In my long life, I have seen people become spectacularly wealthy overnight, think like they were part of the elite, behave like they were living in a film, and then see the wealth disappear, along with their fair weather friends, and then blame each other for the crash. They were into fast cars, upscale dwellings, boats and all the other accouterments that define the wealthy from the rest of us, and yet in the end, they acted as losers.

* * *

An entire fantasy industry has played with the mind of instant millionaires, and that is the industry of self-help books, self-esteem psychologists, and men of the cloth promoting purposefulness.

We are in the age of canned goods and microwave dinners, which this fantasy industry has now borrowed with spectacular success. Self-help books are nothing more than canned goods, while self-esteem psychology relies on microwave theories to provide quick fixes. Add to the spiritual recipes of purposefulness and you have a description of the moral dilemma of our times: shortcutitis!

* * *

When I was a Honeywell psychologist, people would come to me and say they suffered from a low sense of self-esteem or self-worth. Bluntly, I would say, “What do you expect me to do about it?” They would look at me aghast. “Isn’t that your job?” I would smile, and say, “No, it is yours. And guess what? Do something worthwhile and you will discover self-esteem.” I would then turn my attention to that challenge.

PBS has a popular psychological evangelist who promotes self-esteem dribble, and people buy it because they want easy answers to difficult questions. They want to join the winners who represent only 20 percent of the people by taking short cuts, by attending seminars, reading self-motivational books, complaining constantly that they are surrounded by negativism, while never thinking of getting off their asses and doing something, including leaving and doing something else if the climate is too confining. They want inspiration without perspiration, which is like wanting to breathe without oxygen. They want instant relief from what is crashing down on them without doing anything other than complaining, acquiring a personal trainer, or something cosmetic like attending a seminar or reading a book to correct the problem. Ironically, corpocracy acts in the same way as the individual with the same dispirited outcomes.

* * *

Winners don’t dwell on being positive or negative. They don’t have that luxury, as they are too busy focused on the process of doing. They are not waiting for inspiration but exerting perspiration. They work long hours and don’t complain. They have no time for bromides or cliché but are in the business of giving their all and not worrying about what they will get for the giving.

Winners can be polite or brash, but in either case it is a matter of patience with them, as they hate to spend much time jawboning about things that move nothing in any direction other than forward inertia.

* * *

We have expensive clinics for drug addicts, alcoholics and the obese. People pay as much as $10,000 a week for some of these digs, when the cure for such addictions would be much more effective, much more permanent and much more meaningful were the suffering addicts to disassociate themselves with others with the problem behavior.

Addicts, whatever the addiction, are attracted to other addicts. To break connection with this downward spiral requires painful and complete separation. To do otherwise means the cure, as expensive as it might be, will not take for long.

THEN THERE ARE LONERS

Over the course of my life, living in many parts of the globe, experiencing various cultures and people, studying in various institutions, and reading thousands of autobiographies and biographies, I have been amazed at the disproportionate number of high achievers who described themselves as loners.

Most high achieving writers admit to being loners straightaway. You would think it fits them given that writing is a singular activity between the writer, his material and his mind’s ability to organize data into some semblance of thought or stories of interest.

But then I found this is not always the case. Popular novelists can be quite gregarious. This is especially true since the publishing industry sells authors the way the food industry sells cereal. Books are packaged, programmed, promoted and sold identical to Quaker Oats. It is no accident books appear on supermarket shelves the same as cereals where books outsell conventional bookstores. Popular novels have become a staple at Super Wal-Marts for example.

And like cereal, the popular novelist is likely to create the raw material of an outline of a story while a grunt does the dirty work of turning it into a book, sharing royalties and book credit, but leaving no doubt that the marquee of the product is that of the celebrated celebrity novelist. His name sells the book just like Quaker Oats sells a proprietary product.

Even dead authors are reaping the benefits of this new industry such as the late Robert Ludlum. Yet it fails to alarm the reader that the author’s latest novel differs little with his previous twenty or thirty because it follows a formula that the living grunt writer honors with great integrity. How do they get away with this? Ask a reader to describe the book just read two days after the fact, and you will find the reader has already forgotten the storyline. The industry is counting on this.

* * *

Formula thinking and writing offend the loner because the loner writes about the timeless. J. D. Salinger wrote a book about a young man’s angst and boredom written more than fifty years ago that is still a perennial seller, but he no longer publishes, and lives as a hermit. He has no desire to compete with potboilers.

Loners take the risks and endure the pain of embracing if precariously universal themes. Philip Roth is another American author who continues to write and live in the bosom of society that will also be read far after his earthly days, but alas, I think more enduring fiction will survive written by women. Herta Muller won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009 and Doris Lessing in 2007 both incidentally are European women.

Too many fiction authors, male and female, write the way the fat cats of Wall Street leverage residuals, measuring their literary significance by how many books they sell and royalty income they receive. Few if any of these mega-authors will be in print in 100 years.

* * *

It has been my privilege to know and study under several loners in the scientific and engineering community from high school on, and to marvel at their expertise and humility, far from the maddening crowd.

Such people provided tools to the Steven Jobs and Bill Gates of this world. These loners quietly applied their trade as these students soared to billionaire status. So, it has been over the past 500 years: the loners create and the entrepreneurs exploit. The hard work and heavy lifting, the grueling science of inquiry, wondering, pondering, failing and succeeding in a quest to understand Nature’s mysteries has been the isolated lot of loners, and the supple material of technologists. Loners are not complaining as they are in to process not product.

* * *

It is when this grueling work is done for glory that losers are treated as winners. This was the case when Rosalind Franklin discovered the stucture of DNA studying coal. She took the famous “Photograph 51,” which revealed the B form of DNA. James Watson literally stole this research as he now could see the DNA molecule was a “double helix.”

Franklin, after spending thousands of hours x-raying coal, suffered severe radiation damage to her system and died in her mid-thirties before James Watson, Francis Crick, and her boss, Maurice Wilkins, were awarded the Nobel Prize for her work. If this were not enough, posthumously, she was called the “Dark Lady” in Watson’s book, “The Double Helix” (1968) with no mention that she had died. Only the living are awarded the Nobel Prize.

Sobriquets that diminish a person have always offended me. I feel the same way about people called “nerds” or some other deprecating term to make them seem more odd and out of the mainstream, especially when they stir the mainstream’s drink.

* * *

The absurdity of the times finds the identity of people once on the fringe, such as people plastered with tattoos, now mainstream. People today would rather appear to look rebellious than to rebel, to seem unconventional when conforming to uncertain identity, to parade about with body paint symbols of values as if human billboards while professing no particular faith in anything.

Another absurdity, as we become increasingly amalgamated into a homogenous society the more we retreat into polarized monolithic biases, of either/or as if all goodness or badness was proprietary to one group or another, when that could never be the case in the best of circumstances.

* * *

In a celebrity culture, which we have at the moment, winners and losers are irrelevant as society’s awareness of itself is skin deep. The bottom feeders better known as “Main Street” have spent the past score of years living and behaving as if they were “Wall Street.” But now that mass excess has hit overload, they want to distant themselves from societal greed, fraud, corruption, and failure, as if they were not complicit in its creation.

* * *

In the beginning of the twenty-first century, money was loose in the United States, but from another angle it was tight. The end of the Cold War made money tight at the top. This was a result of a reduction in defense spending, heavy manufacturing shifting abroad, collapse of the automotive industry, and a general belt-tightening of the national economy as it made adjustments to a peace economy. The men at the top looked gloomily at this situation and contrived a counterattack. Money already loose to bottom feeders was made even looser to them so as to restore looseness at the top.

Credit became the new guise for men at the top to regain the advantage. Good credit, bad credit, or no credit, it didn’t matter, anyone could purchase anything from household staples to homes to automobiles to boats and other big-ticket items as the purse strings were loosened to the point of being nonexistent. Cash flowed back to the men at the top to eclipse the cold war economy.

Clever people devised ways to make the poor, the disadvantaged, the indulgent, and the derelict carry the red ink for them as they painted their world green with capital. With the Twin Tower terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, the decade of greed followed fueled by fear and paranoia. It loosened money even more for men at the top with the willing participation of bottom feeders in the charade.

When the collapse came, it was a complicit fall, which media and everyone else has chosen to ignore. It is the fault line in capitalism, and it has been so since the early eighteenth century.

* * *

RICHARD STARK NOVELS -- A REVIEW

2009-12-28T13:37:00.000-08:00

RICHARD STARK NOVELS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 28, 2009

* * *

Call me an intellectual snob, but I wasn’t aware of the Richard Stark novels until I saw an advertisement for them from the University of Chicago Press in The New York Review of Books, a journal of essays on books to which I have subscribed to for many years.

A writer myself, over the years since a boy, I have gone through the American and European classic novels, and then increasingly on to novels of the more superfluous and contemporary class of what I call escape reading, which includes a good number of mystery novels. Joyce Carol Oates is right. Once you read a typical mystery novel, a few days later you can’t remember the story much less the plot line.

In my undergraduate years at the University of Iowa, I was a chemistry major but was opened to a whole new world when taking two required core courses for a degree. They were “Modern Literature” and “Greeks and the Bible.”

Being an Irish Roman Catholic boy, I was familiar with the writings of St. Paul through the gospels, but I had never read the Bible, or, indeed, the Greek classics. The epistles of the gospels provided moral lessons, which the texts of the Letters of St. Paul provided grounding. I found Protestants were much more familiar with the Bible than I was, and so this was a further revelation of my ignorance, while my Jewish friends in college could quote the Old Testament as if it were a family heirloom, which it was to them.

Before such exposure, I felt all the answers were in science and mathematics and I didn’t have to bother my mind about literature, sentence structure, or any of those light weight subjects that went nowhere and ordinary people filled their minds with.

Because of exposure to these two core courses, I was moved to squirrel in electives far from my major in such courses as “Shakespeare,” “The American Novel,” and “Understanding Fiction and Poetry.”

Once I graduated, and now was a chemist in research & development, I returned to only reading science, that is, until I took a job as a chemical sales engineer in the chemical industry to make more money to support my family. It was then that I discovered the importance of those two core courses and the subsequent electives. They became the foundation to my understanding of people and how to deal with them. No surprise, I imagine, my first book was CONFIDENT SELLING (Prentice-Hall 1970).

* * *

Fast forward to the time of my first retirement in my mid-thirties, now with a passion to be a writer, yes, of novels and short stories, finding instead that I lacked the tools, the cadence, the sense and the connection such writers have with their readers. Curiously, now forty years later, I have written seven other nonfiction books, and only one novel, which was a memoir of my youth (IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE Authorhouse 2003). I am working on a novel of South Africa where I lived during the time of apartheid. I mention this because I find writing good fiction very hard work. So, I have great respect for those that do it well.

It was then that I timidly started to read such writers as Ross McDonald, to reread Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and others. I had worked around the world and had seen pathos first hand, finding that these writers, and others like them, looked into the heart of man with the ability to express what they saw honestly and convincingly. Increasingly, I found myself reading mystery novels, and there I discovered some of the best writing I had experienced, a genre I had always considered inferior to mainstream fiction.

* * *

It was how I came to read Richard Stark’s “The Hunter,” with one of the pen names of the prolific crime fiction writer, Donald Westlake. I have since read “The Man With the Getaway Face” and “The Outfit.” I am reading them in order as they were published, and plan to read all twenty-four of his novels under that pen name. I’ll tell you why.

Stark writes like a movie in your head. You forget that you are reading a book and hear the characters talking, are surprised and shocked by their actions, and wonder why you are not appalled by antics of the main character, “Parker.” He is paradoxically moral in an amoral way, visceral without the claptrap of stereotype, and has a code of conduct that is outside the law but works for him because he never abandons it. Secular and sacred society is irrelevant to him because he has no appetite for the ambivalence of truth or the ambiguity of justice.

Parker, however, is not a one-dimensional “American Adam” as depicted by actor John Wayne and described by Garry Wills as “the archetypal American displaced person who has arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killer for cleaning the world of things that need killing, loving but not bound down by love, rootless but carrying the center in himself, a gyroscope direction-setter, a traveling norm.”

Parker, alas, would find this pathetically romantic. He has no redeeming features to think of, although he resembles the American Adam but in three-dimensions. He is surviving in a jungle in which the world has become using his wits, which are considerable, to get in and out of danger to embrace the next episode he knows inevitably confronts him. He lives in a godless world where homicide is only an option of the last resort and the killing must be consistent with his godless code. He is a survivor in which the world has gone dead to meaning, where the moment only resonates with the prehensile mind.

Read “The Hunter” and you are introduced to a man who understands why his wife tried and thought she killed him, and why he had to kill his wife, and then why he had no other option than to look for and kill the man who made that her only option.

In “The Man With the Getaway Face,” the economy of style has the bite of a language of clarity and power, and of imagery that compares favorably with Graham Greene’s “This Gun for Hire.” Parker has killed the man who orchestrated his murder using his wife as his instrument. He then feels obliged to kill the man’s boss in “The Outfit,” which is akin to the Mafia. This set of actions has him on the run seeking anonymity in plastic surgeon. But with everything Parker does, it comes up with double crosses that he has to finesse only to again become finessed by them.

In “The Outfit,” his cover blown, and his new face now the object of the Outfit to permanently erase, Parker doesn’t run from contract killers but embraces the challenge against a stacked deck. He is a thinking man without portfolio, a man of the street, hard as nails, as resolute to exterminate his enemies as they are resolved to do him in. So, he hijacks their hijacked trucks, kills their hired guns, and disrupts their businesses, knowing all the time that this war has no end but simply new beginnings.

Crime novelist Elmore Leonard, an artist of the genre in his own right, celebrates the power and economy of Stark’s style. Leonard once advised never to start a novel with the weather. Stark goes one better: he sets the tone of the whole novel in the first sentence. In the three books I’ve read to date, here are the first sentences:

(1) “The Hunter”: “When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.”

(2) “The Man With the Getaway Face”: “When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger.”

(3) “The Outfit”: “When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed.”

You get a sense in the first novel of an angry guy, in the second surprised at the disconnect between the image in the mirror and himself, and in the third something abrupt and devastating has entered the sanctuary of his uneasy peace.

These are dark or noir novels of the underbelly of society where people live in what William Faulkner called “quiet desperation.” The twenty-four novels were published from 1962 to 2008, the year of the death of their creator, Donald Westlake. You only have to listen to the nightly television news of your city to know that Parker lives, breathes, and is plotting his revenge around the corner from where you live. This gives a sense of urgency, timeliness, and trepidation against the softness and denial in which most of us encounter our daily world, choosing not to see or experience the ugliness that poisons the air we breathe.

These are not detective novels, not police journals, not law and order court dramas, but gnarled, sinewy, scarred, knotted and gripping stories of life that feeds off society but pays it no mind. The women are as hard and as cunning as the men, while love is a word that has never entered either gender’s vocabulary. Why read these novels?

If you are an inveterate reader, read these novels for the prose, style and clarity of the writing. If you are a writer, read them to experience the humbling sense of being in the presence of a master of language and ambience. If you are a student of human behavior, read them to get a sense of the ugliness that hides in us all under the patina of beauty. If you are a philosopher, and who isn’t, read them to get a sense of why the world periodically goes haywire.

* * *

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME!

2009-12-27T16:06:00.000-08:00

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 27, 2009

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIRS OF 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003) was written as a snapshot of an important era in American history, an era that is long gone now with many of the faces and facts already fading away, but never dying. It was true across America, and Clinton, Iowa. The courthouse neighborhood was but a reminder of the strength, resiliency, purpose and passion of ordinary people called on to do extraordinary things in a time of war (WWII).

Many readers have asked me over the years to provide actual pictures of the era and the young people I write about with so much affection. That is my purpose here. I hope wherever you are that this helps you remember your own roots, which bring forth similar memories.

ST. PATRICK’S CHAMPIONSHIP BASKETBALL TEAM (1945 – 1946)

From left to right: Jim Holle, Bobby Witt, Bill Christiansen; back row, Jim Fisher and Bing Shepherd. Jim Holle went on to play basketball for Clinton Junior College, Bobby Witt for Illinois Normal, and Bing Shepherd and Bill Christiansen for Iowa State University.

THE CHAMPIONSHIP COURTHOUSE TIGERS OF THE CLINTON RECREATIONAL LEAGUE, SUMMER OF 1944:

From left to right front row: Dick Morris, Bill Benson, Phil Leahy, Bobby Witt, Dick Dunmore, Russell Annear; second row, Jim Fisher, Jim Holle, Walt Ferguson, Ken Tharp, David Cavanaugh, Chuck Holm; back row, Gus Witt, Jack Dunmore, Lyle Sawyer; front row, Rock Carver and Jackie Fisher. The baseball bats spell “CHT,” which stands for the Courthouse Tigers.

Phil Leahy was honored with being Clinton's first recipient of the Niles Kinnick Academic and Athletic Scholarship at the University of Iowa, where he earned a Bachelor's Degree in Chemical Engineering. Bobby Witt was three years a starter on the Clinton High Basketball Team, and a First Team All-State basketball player his senior year for the Stat of Iowa. Jack Dunmore and Gus Witt were professional baseball players on their way to the Major Leagues when their careers were interrupted by military service in W.W.II. Lyle Sawyer became an acclaimed high school teacher in Mexico and the United States. Chuck Holm and Bobby Witt became high school teachers and coaches. Bobby Witt is in the Illinois High School Hall of Fame of Coaches.

THE COURTHOUSE TIGER COACHING STAFF (in front of the Clinton County Jail):

Left to right: Lyle Sawyer, Gus Witt, Jack Dunmore, and Deputy Sheriff Jim Gaffey. In front of the group is Gus Witt’s dog, Hoimen, the Courthouse Tiger mascot.

FAST FORWARD TO 2009

Left to right: Taylor Fisher and Gus Witt. Taylor is my grandson and a baseball player at Camanche High School, Camanche, Iowa. Gus Witt has coached the baseball team at Mount St. Clare College, which then became Franciscan University. Today, it is an on-line university of some 20,000 students. Taylor Fisher is a senior in high school looking forward to playing baseball in college. Imagine some sixty years ago Gus Witt was coaching Taylor's grandfather over at the courthouse, and he still hasn't lost a step today.

FINAL WORD

Commentary on all these people can be found IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE.

Be always well,

Jim

PROFESSIONALS WAIT FOR PERMISSION TO TAKE CHARGE!

2009-12-25T05:01:00.001-08:00

THE DILEMMA OF OUR TIMES – PROFESSIONALS WAIT FOR PERMISSION TO TAKE CHARGE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 25, 2009

* * *

There is a central theme to Dr. Fisher's body of work, and that is "cultural capital." What is cultural capital? It is the grand total of will, resolution and intellectual capacity to exert change and sustain the momentum and direction of that change in a positive and synergistic direction.

Dr. Fisher’s books are linchpins in building a skeletal structure of possibility in a climate of chaos, confusion, conflict and creative opportunity. The world improves one person at a time, and that improvement is predicated on the individual showing the will to prevail with the capacity and maturity to accept and deal with the inevitable challenges of an ever changing and more complex world.

"Cultural capital" is the intellectual capital and the power of the people. Dr. Fisher has studied and tracked the process or acculturation and change as intellectual capital and power has transitioned and concomitantly “changed hands” over the centuries. It is this phenomenon that always finds lagging indicators holding up and sometimes even derailing smooth transitions from one dominate group to another. He has developed The Fisher Paradigm ™ to explain and track this observable fact with three interlocking spheres of influence: Personality Profiles, Geographic Profiles, and Demographic Profiles.

* * *

Over the ages:

(1) Explorers dominated in the fifteenth century led by such men as Vasco de Gama, Hernando Cortez, and Ferdinand Magellan.

(2) Theologians emerged from the Dark Ages of the sixteenth century to breathe new life into Western man in the persons of Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus.

(3) Pilgrims in their quest for freedom of religion and expression in the seventeenth century ventured to the New World to land on Plymouth Rock in North America, while a similar group of Dutch and French Huguenots established a colony at the Cape of Good Hope in Southern Africa.

(4) Lawyers were the force of the eighteenth century as commercial expansion and capitalism were thriving and King George III of England provoked the American Revolution and the subsequent independence of the Thirteen Colonies in North America, while the antics of King Louis XVI in France precipitated the French Revolution. Constitutional law translated rebellion into the rights of man.

(5) Engineers showed the way in the nineteenth century fueling the Industrial Revolution, the building of the Suez Canal and the Eiffel Tower, while introducing the telegraph, telephone, electricity, the modern factory and city, and establishing a new way to wage war with the American Civil War, the first fully technological war.

(6) Managers dominated the twentieth century with the invention of mass production and logistical control creating a well-oiled machine in which workers were essentially interchangeable parts. Modern management was born in WWI and perfected in WWII with battlefield success the product of a well-managed military industrial complex spelling the difference. It was the management of science and technology that proved the superiority of the West over the Axis Powers of WWII.

(7) Professional workers represent the twenty-first century with the cultural capital, that is, the intellectual capital and power to integrate its predecessors in the story of man. Professionals embody the collective wisdom of explorers, theologians, pilgrims, lawgivers, engineers, and managers. They are now on center stage, reluctant inhabitants of this singular focus. They have been educated, acculturated and programmed for another time, and lack the maturity, temperament, capacity and energy to take charge, but take charge they must. It is their century. Thus far they have treated their tools as toys and have attempted to escape reality in virtual reality living on the Internet, biding their time. The world waits for them to wake up and accept their new role.

* * *

It is the purpose of Dr. Fisher’s body of work and this blog to help them in that regard.

* * *

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D., BIOGRAPHY AND BODY OF WORKS!

2009-12-24T12:30:00.000-08:00

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., PH.D. BIOGRAPHY and BODY OF WORK

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 24, 2009

* * *

Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. started out as a chemist, then chemical sales engineer, then a Nalco Chemical Company executive. He retired the first time in his mid-thirties went back to school for six years, year around, to acquire his Ph.D. in organizational-industrial psychology, consulting on the side followed by becoming an adjunct professor. He then reentered the corporation as a psychologist for Honeywell, Inc., again being promoted to executive status by Honeywell Europe, Ltd., retiring for the second time in 1990.

He put himself through college working as a laborer in a chemical plant, has experienced college at all levels, undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate education. In the late 1950s, he was a member of the crew of the USS Salem CA-139 operating in the Mediterranean Sea. As a professional, he has worked at every level of the complex organization in both line and staff positions from production, research & development, sales & marketing, to mid-level and top management to the boardroom. He has lived and worked across the United States, South America, Europe and South Africa. He is now writing a novel of his time in South Africa during the reign of apartheid.

Everything he writes, whether nonfiction or fiction, emanates from his empirical experience. He identifies his work as "cultural capital," seeing Western society and its economy, social, industrial and cultural life in radical transition. Western institutions from the family, church, school, government, business and leisure are in shambles looking for a Sphinx to bring them back from their ashes.

Others have written about such things, but with Dr. Fisher there is a personal bite to his prose that ordinary people cannot escape, as they no longer have masters but are now masters of their own fate, something they would still rather pass on to others. They like to believe they have had no complicity in the collapse of the automotive industry or the failure of Wall Street in the recent past, that they were innocent and helpless victims of the charade. He will have none of it.

Dr. Fisher claims everyone is a leader or no one is, that "cultural capital" relates to the risk-taking, self-esteem, social cohesion, work ethics and habits, and relationships to power of everyone. The workforce, he writes, has changed from primarily manual power to predominantly brainpower, from blue-collar to white-collar, from unskilled to professionals. Yet, despite this changing workforce and climate, with power shifting from management to workers with decision-making primarily at the level of consequences of work, workers continue to be managed, motivated, mobilized and manipulated as if it is 1945 except cosmetically. The system, he says, is anachronistic and management is atavistic.

The hierarchical organizational structure is no longer effective much less relevant. Workers have the power but want to enjoy the fruits of such power without the responsibilities or accountability of such power. They want security and have traditionally been willing to sacrifice power for guarantees, but in the postmodern world no such reality exists except in virtual reality.

Dr. Fisher looks at problems from the perspective of ordinary people and therefore his books are not entertaining but gut wrenching.

* * *

CONFIDENT SELLING (1970) was written in six weeks and sent off to Prentice-Hall, Inc. without protocol as "Let's Take The Worry Out Of Selling." He discovered going from a lab rat or chemist to a chemical sales engineer that the greatest problem in selling was not the buyer, but the seller. He never read sales books but taught himself to sell on the basis of this premise, and became the most successful salesmen in his district, being promoted to an area manager, and then to an international corporate executive in a brief six years. Confident Selling was in print for twenty years (1970 - 1990), serialized in a national sales magazine, airline magazine, and the basis of college courses in sales psychology.

* * *

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1990) signals the rise of the worker and the demise of the manager in the work environment. It predicts the collapse of the automotive industry and the reluctance of management in every endeavor to share power with workers, and the consequences of this reluctance. It introduces to the reader the "social termites" that invade the workplace as six passive silent behaviors that destroy the workplace from within while remaining essentially invisible. Industry Week named it one of the ten best business books of 1991, the Business Book Review Journal named it one of the four best, The Wall Street Journal alerted management to its provocative indictment, while National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" gave it a positive review.

* * *

CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992) is an elaboration of Confident Selling with a more sophisticated toolbox and tool kit for the reader. It claimed that everyone whatever the nature of the work is in the business of selling, and that the buyer is not the problem but the seller, often failing to package, promote, and persist in the competitive struggle of putting the best face on his or her efforts. The idea that selling is "that profession" equivalent to intimidators and manipulators is characterized as not only a myth but the most destructive force of all in the failure of the individual to make adequate progress in his or her career and life. Confident Selling for the 90s was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for 1992. It is as relevant today as it was in the 1990s as awareness of the individual's challenge has not receded but intensified.

* * *

THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN! (1995) is a call to battle of professionals claiming they have no choice but to get beyond the charade of empowerment and cosmetic change and to take charge by taking action. The chapter headings alone tell the story: (1) An Upside Down World; (2) Silent Invasions; (2) The Price of Innocence; (4) Late Blooming Roses; (5) Architects of a Failed System; (6) Not Happy Campers; (7) The Challenge of Learning; (8) A Question of Control; (9) Going Against the Grain; (10) Life Without A Cause! Alas, virtually everything Dr. Fisher felt might transpire has, and yet professionals are still looking for someone else to blame or provide the miracle. The book is a wake up call and a description of the dilemma if it is not heeded.

* * *

THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996) is an attack on the fact that American culture programs its young to be self-hating. The book was a response to an article by Dr. Fisher published in the June 1993 issue of The Reader's Digest, which opens with the line: "To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself." It generated thousands of requests for reprints, and a call by The Reader's Digest for Dr. Fisher's opinion on such matters. Unfortunately, some readers saw it as a guide to self-assertion. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was instead a conversation with the reader to understand how he or she has become programmed to be so negative and self-hating, and what can be done about it. Self-assertion is not an end but a process, which requires reprogramming. The book shows how this can happen.

* * *

SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT'S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998) looks inside all the fault lines, all the end runs, and hapless interventions of human resources management that have resulted in a passive, reactive and dependent workforce. For the past sixty years or since World War II, corporate management and the unions have been complicit in destroying the will and independence of workers to (1) make choices; (2) make decisions; (3) act as individual contractors; and (4) mature into contributing adults. Systematically, management and unions have contrived, Dr. Fisher insists, to make workers counterdependent upon the organization for their total well being, which has found workers - both blue-collar and white-collar -- self-indulgent and suspended in terminal adolescence with the mindset of a twelve-year-old. Now, when workers are needed as independent contractors and partners in enterprise, the sixty years of programming are all wrong for the demands of the times. Consequently, workers have retreated into the arms of the "six silent killers" of passive behavior. The Conference Board of the Wall Street Journal advocates that SIX SILENT KILLERS is a book every executive in America should read and resolve to change, or suffer the consequences. The first decade of the twenty-first century has made those consequences quite palpable.

* * *

CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000) indicates there is no payoff in pointing fingers as managers and workers have both approached the abyss in equal ignorance. While the East and Wall Street continue to see themselves as the center of the universe, circumstances have proven them wrong. There isn't an institution that Dr. Fisher doesn't find guilty of "corporate sin." And what is corporate sin? It is the failure of leaders and workers to understand and deal diligently and effectively with the times. He shows how Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite (HYPE) have driven society into the ground while celebrating their crisis management strategies, which he claims only solve the problems they create. We have gone from a culture of comfort (unconscious incompetence) to a culture of complacency (conscious incompetence) while believing the Ship of State was being steered to a culture of contribution (conscious competence). Meanwhile, the initiative has shifted from the United States to the Far East, just as it did a hundred years ago from Europe to America. Meanwhile, he claims we have lost our moral compass and our way: "In a society without a moral compass, we easily become addicted to affluence and obsessed with irrelevance." Ten years after it was published, the Federal Reserve bailed out banks "too big to fail," and once functioning again, what did these banks do? They paid themselves $billion bonuses with the rationale, if they hadn't they couldn't compete. So, the more things go around they come around.

* * *

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003) is a personal snapshot of Clinton, Iowa in the middle of the twentieth century in the middle of the community and during World War II from the perspective of working class families and the eyes of an eight-year-old boy. Clinton was a thriving industrial community on the banks of the Mississippi River with a population of 33,000 dedicated to and involved in the war effort. There was no television, no mega sports, or manicured lawns. There was radio, movies, high school sports, the Clinton Industrial Baseball League, where men too young or too old to go to war played baseball for the fun of it. Clintonians had victory gardens where their front lawns once were, drove old jalopies, took the bus, or rode their bikes to work. It was a time when the four faces of the Clinton County Courthouse clock chimed every half hour, and therefore young people had no excuse not to be home in time for meals prepared 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 the Clinton factories or on the railroad. Divorce was as foreign as an ancestral language. It was a time in hot weather people often slept in Riverview Park, left windows of their homes open, and doors unlocked, bicycles on the side of the house unchained, and if they had a car, knowing neither stranger nor neighbor would disturb their possessions, left the keys in the car. In winter, schools never closed even when shoveled snow banks were four feet high. It was also a time when kids created their own play, as parents were too busy or tired to be involved. Clinton youngsters would never again know such Darwinian freedom, or its concomitant brutality. There was no point in crying or running to mother if you weren't chosen. Kids learned to find their own alternatives. It was a different time with people of a different mindset and it has been lost to nostalgia.

* * *

A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) shows a remarkable repeat of the same sins, the same misadventures, the same false steps as were true in the 1970s, when this original essay was first written. Dr. Fisher shows how young people were forced to participate and die in an unpopular Vietnam War, a time when political upheaval was in the air, when corrupt politicians and change agents had lied and deceived the public with the Watergate fiasco, when drugs were ruining lives, when morality took a holiday, when new forms of bigotry and hatred were hatching, when the automotive industry was in sharp decline, while foreign automakers were eating our lunch; when an energy crisis rocked the country with the OPEC embargo, when a paranoid president hunkered down and became a law unto himself, when Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, and left the future up for grabs. Dr. Fisher uses the device of a look backward because the indicators were all there that we were heading for trouble, a trouble that now consumes us at every level.

This is his body of work to date, which you can see is consistent with the theme of "cultural capital," which he pursues with unrelenting zeal.

* * *

A SHORT STORY IN VERSE -- ONE

2009-12-22T07:09:00.001-08:00

A SHORT STORY IN VERSE -- ONE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 22, 2009

The train station was a relic of the past, now a soot covered red brick block building with crumbling cornices that once flared out with energy and confidence. It is located stolidly on Nebraska Avenue at the entrance to Ybor City, the Cuban community that once displayed a booming Cuban cigar manufacturing industry. Now, the decorative streets are empty, the balloon lights of Seventh Street opague with age, the recreational square once alive with ageless bowlers now unattended, while the rich aroma of tobacco coming from factories and warehouses now only a stale odor. Only montages in Cuban restaurants show scores of workers carefully wrapping leaves of tobacco while the caller reads the daily newspaper to them in Spanish.

The past here was all but dead, as was Seamus “Dirk” Devlin, although only 38, as he made his way into the Amtrak Railroad Depot for a coffee.

The station's waiting room with its giant rafters in the ceiling and long benches far below was dark, dusty and dreary. Yet Devlin came here every day to wrap its deadness around him because of one bright candle of light, a young lady named Bonnie serving coffee. Radiant as her light, he noticed she had difficulty making change. He chose to give this little mind as in his deadness she was keeping him alive.

“I’ve written you another poem.” He had asked her to read his previous poems but she demurred. It soon became apparent she could not read. It saddened him to see one so lovely so handicapped in life. But then he thought, who is more handicapped them I?

She puckered up her nose, smiled shyly and said, “Please, Shaymus, read it to me, please!”

Devlin took a sip of his coffee, after adding cream and sugar, and felt his body once again become alive with its warmth, warmth he only felt of late when he was writing his poetry. “It is not very good. You might think it a bit sentimental.”

“Senti-what, what do you mean Shaymus?”

“Syrupy like the sugar I load my coffee with.”

“Oh, silly, I’d never think that. Please read it.”

So he did.

* * *

I close my eyes and I see you there, wild eyes, and a loving stare,

I open my soul and I see you there Irish nose and a lass so fair,

I dream my dream and I see you there, loving lips and a taste so rare,

I fly to thee and I see you there sensual form and a love to bare.

* * *

“That’s it!” He waits. Tears form in the corner of her eyes.

“That’s about me?”

“Well, yes, I mean, yes, yes it’s about you.”

“It’s so loving. It’s so different than your last poem about me.”

Devlin felt awkward. He knew what she meant but feigned being confused. She read his eyes.

“We live in different worlds, Shaymus. Mine is full of danger.”

“The world is a dangerous place.”

“Now, you’re doing it again. You’re saying something that has no meaning to me and saddens me when you talk that way. I pick fruit, Shaymus, and have since I was a little girl. My mother is an exotic dancer and we have a house now, but only until she has to find another job. Then we move on and I pick fruit with the seasons.”

“How old is your mother?”

“Thirty three. She had me when she was fourteen.” She smiles. “We’re practically sisters.”

“And your father?”

“Never met him. Have had a lot of uncles over the years that have bunked down with us, but never a father.”

“Any siblings, any brother or sisters?”

“No, why do you ask?” She puckered her lips.

“No reason.”

“You're married!”

“Yes.”

“Any children?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“More than one.”

“What do you do? You’re here practically every day.”

“Nothing much.”

“Nothing much? How can you afford that?”

“I used to work. I’m vegetating now. I mean, I’m a bit of a bum now.”

“You don’t look like a bum, don't apeak or dress like a bum. You look like somebody important. Shaymus are you important?”

“Alas, no!”

“Were you important?”

“No, never, Bonnie, I’m just an ordinary person.”

“When you talk like that staring at me, you make me nervous.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to be. It is just that your deep blue eyes are a bit fierce sometimes. How do you explain that?”

Silence.

“Do you have that poem with you that sounded like a song.” He looked puzzled. “The one where you describe me as Angel Hair.”

“I read that last time and you cried. I don’t want to make you cry.”

“Do you know why I was crying?”

“Because I upset you?”

“Because Shaymus you touched my heart. Please, read it again."

And so Devlin did.

* * *

Angel hair, spirit of steel, christened to this restless night,
Boil with beauty, flash with anger, live my love til dawn’s daylight.

Bonnie over the bounty, Bonnie over the sea, Bonnie restless Bonnie never stop fighting with glee.

Angel hair, spirit of steel, christened to this restless night,
Dance what moves you, glance where would you, live my love and claim thy right.

Bonnie over the bounty, Bonnie over the sea, Bonnie precious Bonnie, never stop living so free.

You, old as time, young as night, me, ever mindful, never time full, watching whence there looms thy light,

Born worn, girl woman of mind, nature naturing ever so kind, taste me with scent’s magic eyes, let us caress lest we surmise, be daring as the hour’s dim, thank God for love for nature’s whim,

Bonnie is as Bonnie was, the moment, restless moment, twas, the cause of joy, a new found heart, a love of birds, of sea, of wind and art,

Blessed be these merry atoms of eternity, a fool nigh old, a golden lass, locked in thought, the moments pass,

Bonnie over the bounty, Bonnie over the sea, Bonnie, lovely Bonnie, never stop flying to me.

* * *

She cried again, excused herself and went to the restroom. When she came back, Devlin could smell cigarettes in her hair and whiskey on her breath. She was however more composed.

“You are a strange man.”

“Yes, I suppose I am.”

“But a strange beautiful man. What do you want of me, Shaymus?”

The question shattered his composure yet he could not find his voice. She studied him.

“Life is such a puzzle to you, isn’t it Shaymus.”

He looked away.

“My world is not the answer. My world could kill you. The answer is in your world if it is anywhere. There is no love in my world, Shaymus, and you are in love with love. I can’t help you and it saddens me. I don’t know if love exists. I only know it doesn’t in my world, perhaps not in yours either but I still hope you find it.”

“We always end this way,” he managed finally, “have you noticed that? Here I am twice your age and you try to comfort me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because we live in different worlds and you refuse to see that.”

“Can I come by again?”

“I’ll think about it.”

* * *

A DIFFERENT CHRISTMAS MESSAGE!

2009-12-21T11:44:00.001-08:00

A DIFFERENT CHRISTMAS MESSAGE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 21, 2009

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

Sitting here at my computer, thinking of all my readers, and the many missives I've sent their way, knowing many of you personally but many more only through this medium, I am given to reflect a little on the reality of life, living, and the tenuous nature of it all.

It is the eternal conundrum of endings and beginnings that confounds us with the passing of time. It is the reason Christmas is a time of joy but also of sorrow, as it is so easy to forget that joy and sorrow are different aspects of the same thing, as are endings and beginnings.

* * *

The "Bill" of which this note was coined is a giant of a man, physically, intellectually, and philosophically. He holds more than 100 patents reminiscent of Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the great mathematician, and has written three books that I doubt many of you have heard of much less read, but books nonetheless which were life changing experiences for me.

He has been a friend for moving on to two decades since we exchanged books in 1991. Ironies of ironies, I visited him in 1991 at his consultancy office high in the Twin Towers of New York City, and then at his home in Bayside, New York, where he invited a potpourri of very interesting people in the engineering, business and academic professions.

The book I exchanged with him was my WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS for his FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES, both diatribes on corpocracy.

* * *

As often is my wont, I attack a subject from offstage, and this is no exception. I write to Bill of my moral dilemma from the perspective of a profile of my sister, Pat. It is a Christmas and New Year reflection of one getting long in the tooth.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to each and every one of you, and may you always be well.

* * *

THE MISSIVE TO MY FRIEND, BILL:

Bill,

This past year has been a strange one, but what year isn't?

As my pragmatic sister says, "You're ahead of the game, Jimmy, if you outlive the year."

She and I were born on the same day two years apart, still working, still building her war chest and still pragmatic as ever.

She has never worried a minute of her life about the things I take so seriously, was an indifferent student in school, but loved to work since a little girl, and has more practical gumption than I'll ever have, doesn't read my stuff -- too long -- but doesn't criticize me for writing it.

She has always had her two feet planted firmly on the ground, never has given one thought to soaring, goes to bed early, rises equally early, uses a cell phone, but seldom watches television or reads a book.

She would be as happy on the Irish bog as was her grandmother, whom she resembles, and I'm telling you this, why?

I'm wondering now if such people as she have never needed course corrections in the history of society because they knew the way without knowing it.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and Carrie,

And may you always be well,

Sire

PS. Betty sends her love, too.

PSS The other two books of my friend are THE NEW PLAGUE, and HAVE FUN AT WORK.

CONFIDENT SELLING and a Glimpse of Dr. Fisher's "OPEN LIBRARY"

2009-12-19T12:38:00.000-08:00

CONFIDENT SELLING – AS IT APPEARS IN DR. FISHER’S “OPEN LIBRARY”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© DECEMBER 20, 2009

REFERENCE:

People write and ask me how I got started writing. The short answer is that I’ve always been writing ever since a boy. The long answer is more complicated.

My first book was written while on assignment in South Africa for Nalco Chemical Company. It was called, "Sales Training & Technical Development" (1968), and was written for field engineers and salesmen in South Africa who lacked such a guide. I still hold the copyright.

When I returned to the states in 1969, a retired person in his thirties, I thought nothing would be easier than to become a writer. I acquired a national agent on the strength of some short fiction I wrote, but he was unable to place my work.

I then contacted the William Morris Literary Agency in New York City, explained my interest, and got a blistering reply from Mr. Morris. He claimed never before to have come across such a cockamamie request from somebody doing so well in the full flush of life, and wanting to give it all up for the uncertainty of being a writer. He said the writing samples I sent were promising but lacked commercial value.

Was I discouraged? No. Disappointed? Yes. If writing had been a job, I suppose I would have been discouraged, but writing was a vocation. A vocation is a journey and not an end. A vocation understands disappointments are part of the process.

So, I sat down in 1970 and turned out a manuscript in six weeks, called it "Let's Take the Worry Out of Selling," which was based in part on what I had written for the men in South Africa.

The manuscript was sent off to Prentice-Hall, Inc. without protocol. Within a month, it was accepted for publication without editing, and published as CONFIDENT SELLING in September 1970 with a 1971 copyright. Over the next twenty years, it sold roughly 100,000 copies with more than 20 printings.

CONFIDENT SELLING's incredible history is explained and what the book is about on "OPEN LIBRARY" (www.google.com) by typing in James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

CONFIDENT SELLING was printed in a monthly series in a national magazine, offered in shorter form in airline magazines, and was considered for an audiocassette and video version.

I mention the latter because the 11 o’clock television news anchor for Tampa’s ABC affiliate wanted to form a consortium around CONFIDENT SELLING to reach a wider audience. I told him Prentice-Hall held the copyright. P-H's demands proved excessive, so the project was dropped. I have never surrendered my copyright since. Trust me, an author has no rights of his own material once he gives up his copyright.

(Incidentally, I do have the copyright to this book and have had it since April 30, 1990 -- copyright registration number A 240727 -- as Prentice-Hall allowed it to lapse.)

* * *

Some of you wonder why I call the corporation “corpocracy,” or why I am so hard on the corporation. It is visceral as all my writings are based on my own experience. For example, I would not have received royalties for the serialized version of the CONFIDENT SELLING had I not seen my book on the cover at a magazine in a kiosk.

* * *

CONFIDENT SELLING'S CHALLENGE

If you're a sales person who's got what it takes to be the BEST, but you haven't proved yourself yet, or you have proved yourself, but you're finding it rough maintaining the tempo, here's a dynamic new confidence builder that helps you LEAP over the final hurdle TO SUCCESS TO CONTINUED SUCCESS! This book, your own private counselor, shows you HOW TO DEVELOP CONFIDENCE in your ability to sell. By the same token, it demonstrates WHY YOU SHOULD BE CONFIDENT. Here's the DOOR TO OPPORTUNITY -- self-reliance, self-esteem, not to mention self-discipline -- with YOU holding THE ONLY KEY to the biggest sale you will ever make, BELIEF IN YOURSELF!

* * *

FIRST SENTENCE OF CONFIDENT SELLING:
:
“This book is written for the person who has reached an impasse with him or herself.”

* * *

DESCRIPTION OF CONFIDENT SELLING

CONFIDENT SELLING is a breakthrough book in that it looks at the selling situation from the perspective of the seller, which it claims is the main obstacle in the selling situation. The assumptions the seller makes about the buyer, the buyer's interest in and ability to buy, are predicated too often on faulty information, information derived from the failure of the seller to sell him or herself on the cost benefit to the buyer to purchase the product or service.

CONFIDENT SELLING insists that selling is not a matter of intimidation or a matter of finessing the buyer into a mood to purchase the product or service being offered. On the contrary, CONFIDENT SELLING is about gauging the buyer's mood, readiness, need and ability to form a partnership with the seller. This requires the seller to think not as a seller but as a buyer, as the one that is to purchase the product or service and the consequences of such a transaction.

CONFIDENT SELLING argues that absolutely every endeavor in life is one between a seller and a buyer whether the seller is far removed from an actual selling situation of a product but is a doctor, lawyer, accountant, consultant, organizational administrator, priest, minister or rabbi, nun or teacher, factory worker, independent contractor or an employee of a public or private agency providing a service.

Selling, CONFIDENT SELLING, is saying is the noblest profession of all because it involves everyone in every pursuit every day.

* * *

The theme of CONFIDENT SELLING was elaborated with a new toolbox in the Pulitzer Prize nominated book, CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992), which is available on-line or at your favorite bookstore.

OF SPECIAL NOTE

Of Dr. Fisher's nine published books, two have been considered "breakthrough" books because they have defied conventional wisdom.

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A View from the Trenches (1990) signaled the moving away from the manager-employee algorithm to an emphasis on the emergence of the new workforce of professional workers. Dr. Fisher argued that workers were managed, motivzated, manipulated and mobilized as if predominantly blue-collar when they were predominantly white-collar or professional. Now, twenty years later, and more relevant than ever, tradition still treats workers as if knowledge is the domain of managers when it is now primarily the domain of professionals. Knowledge is power, and workers have the power, but still behave as it they don't. Read about WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS in the "Open Library."

CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992) is a breaktrhough book in that it sees the selling problem the reverse of how it is traditionally viewed. The claim here is that the obstacle to success in selling of anything by anyone in any profession is not that of the buyer, but the seller. Check CSFT90s in the "Open Library."

* * *

THE IMPORTANCE OF EVERYONE! A PLUMBER, ELECTRICIAN AND DR. STEINMETZ!

2009-12-18T13:34:00.000-08:00

THE IMPORTANCE OF EVERYONE – A PLUMBER, ELECTRICIAN AND DR. STEINMETZ!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 18, 2009

Over the weekend, our electrical heating and air conditioning system went out. At the same time, our hot water heater went on the blink. We were experiencing a mild cold wave in Florida and were not used to being unable to take a shower, use our electrical dishwasher or even to wash our hands in hot water.

Not being handy, we have what is called “Home Shield,” which provides such services at a hefty quarterly cost, which we have been paying for nearly twenty-two years, or since we returned from Europe and made this our home.

There are two things I have learned:

(1) The things that I can do well, and

(2) The things that I cannot do at all.

In my long life, I’ve never crossed that barrier so I have saved myself the embarrassment of having to pay for the damages I caused because I tried to do something myself of which I lacked the expertise.

So, today I had an electrician and a plumber come to my house, sort out my problems and with due diligence enjoy watching them solve them with panache.

The electrician had only to check the reset button in the air conditioner, and voila, heat and cool air were back.

The plumber had only to drain the water heater and replace the heating coil, and voila, hot water returned.

* * *

The speed, agility and modesty with which these two men did their jobs reminded me of a personal favorite of mine, the irascible and cocky German-American mathematician and electrical engineer, Charles Proteus Steinmetz (April 9., 1865 – October 26, 1923), who one day found himself consulting for General Electric.

The system electrical generators were down and GE was losing money, and quickly brought Steinmetz in to solve the problem.

He examined the machines, checked them with his instruments, and then asked for a rubber hammer. He gently ran his hand over the steel skin of the cylinder, marked it with a chalk, and then gave it a single blow at that spot. The system came alive the generators kicked in and operations resumed.

* * *

Later, the Director of Operations received a consulting fee from Dr. Steinmetz for $10,000. The director contacted the consultant and said, “Your fee of $10,000 seems extravagant. Five people have to sign off on this type of request and so I will need an itemized bill describing your services.” Dr. Steinmetz said that would be no problem. Here was the itemization of his charges:

$1.00 for hitting the system with a hammer.

$9,999.00 for knowing where to place the blow.

This was reported a number of years ago in The Reader’s Digest. Steinmetz, who had more than 200 patents to his name, suffered the ignominy of dwarfism and being a hunchback. He made his mind that of a super cerebral athlete. Indeed, much of General Electric’s rise to prominence is accredited to Dr. Steinmetz's inventions in the area of artificial lighting.

* * *

I told this story to the electrician and the plumber citing how important they were in their special knowledge, as Steinmetz was with his. We need electrical engineers, but we also need plumbers and electricians as well, and none more than the other, but all equally the same.

* * *

READER appreciates IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE!

2009-12-14T17:21:00.000-08:00

READER appreciates IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 14, 2009

REFERENCE:

A person I do not know and have never met but grew up in my hometown IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE has written a warm and moving letter about my book with that title.

The book was written as a snapshot of a time now long past in the middle of the twentieth century in the middle of the United States and in the middle of this sleepy community, Clinton, Iowa, on the banks of the Mississippi River, where young people grew up around the centrally located courthouse.

Like many other small communities across America, there was no television, no mega sports, no big automobiles, no manicured lawns because the nation was at war and there was rationing and victory gardens instead of lawns.

There was radio, movies, high school sports, in the case of Clinton, there was the Industrial Baseball League, where men too young or too old to go to war played for the fun of it. People drove old jalopies, took the bus, or rode their bicycles to work.

It was a time when the four faces of the magnificent Clinton County Courthouse clock chimed on the half hour throwing a metaphorical shadow over young people’s lives. This made certain that they would have no excuse for being late for meals prepared from victory garden staples by their mothers.

This community wasn’t the exception but the rule in that most stay-at-home mothers were homemakers in two-parent families. Few parents in this neighborhood managed to get beyond grammar school, and nearly all of the men worked in Clinton factories or the gigantic railroad yards, or on the trains from Clinton to Boone, Iowa, as this was a factory-railroad town. Divorce was as foreign as an ancestral language.

It was a time in hot weather that people slept with their families at Riverview Park, left windows open and doors unlocked, bicycles on the side of the house without locking chains. If they had an automobile, it was at the curb with keys in the ignition, knowing neither neighbor nor stranger would disturb their possessions. In winter, schools never closed even when snow banks were four feet high.

Idyllic? Perhaps. Accurate? Probably not. But it is the way it is remembered nearly sixty years later.

* * *

A READER appreciates IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE!

Dear Dr. Fisher:

RE: In the Shadow of the Courthouse

I wanted to write to you and make a few comments on your book, In the Shadow of the Courthouse. I can't begin to tell you how much I have enjoyed reading your reminiscences of growing up in Clinton and, more specifically, "In the shadow of the courthouse."

I was born in 1947 and lived at 220 1st Avenue for the first twenty-one years of my life. My father was the first baby baptized in the "new" St. Patrick's church in 1905 and was a mail carrier for over twenty years on a route that bordered the courthouse area.

When not playing ball, or skating at the Sheriff's office during the winter, I worked for Gordon Goetzle at Gordy's Standard Service across the street from the ball field. The names I remember such as Jakubsen, Cavanaugh, Witt, and many others are all a part of my history, although it came about a few years after yours. I clearly remember Gus Witt skating during the winter at the Sheriff's office and at Kahler's Marina and, as a matter of fact, I have found out that Gus still resides in the area in Camanche.

I was one of the first group of young men admitted to Mt. St. Clare and I'm proud to say that I was one of the fortunate Clinton guys to marry a "Mountie," we've been married 38 years and live in St. Louis.

I still keep in touch with the nuns from Mt. St. Clare and visited with them just recently at the Centicle. Tom McEleney was the best man in my wedding and I maintain contact with numerous other friends, especially with the advent of Facebook.

My real purpose in writing to you was to express my gratitude for your accomplishment in capturing what it was like to grow up in Clinton, no matter the time period, and how, although you may physically leave the city, you never can get it out of your mind.

I enjoyed every page and had great difficulty putting the book down. Incidentally, Howard Judd was my swimming coach for five years in high school, I swam varsity for him and the River Kings when I was a freshman and lifeguard at the pool during the summer working for Mrs. Judd (Elsie) and Howard.

Sincerely,

Steve W. Hoosack
Ballwin, MO

PS: If interested in your own copy of this book, contact www.authorhouse.com.

THE AXEMATKER'S GIFT -- THE DOUBLE-EDGED BLADE OF COMMUNITY HISTORY!

2009-12-13T09:32:00.000-08:00

THE AXEMAKER’S GIFT – THE DOUBLE-EDGED BLADE OF COMMUNITY HISTORY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 13, 2009

We Americans may wax nostalgic but we have no commitment to the past. We treat the present as the future and ride change as a meteor to oblivion.

We cut away the way it was to a new reality, a reality that we believe finds us gaining something desired but at the expense of something lost forever, and for which we can only pine away in our dreams for it shall never return.

When there is no permanence, no central core to existence, there is no attachment, nothing is sacred, everything is expendable like worn out shoes and old clothes. We have no roots. We become a homeless mind.

* * *

I grew up in a sleepy Iowa town on the Mississippi River called Clinton, Iowa. It was a time when most of us were too poor, and our parents too worn out from suffering through the Great Depression to consider the “cut and control” consequences of change, that is, from “what is” from “what was.” Although tired and weary, they had values, beliefs, and solid faith in a just God.

All changed when they were waken from their lethargy with World War Two.

Clinton, that sleepy town on the river, was also an industrial town with many factories producing sugar from corn, buttons for clothes, seeds for flowers and other plants, garments, candy, alcohol, feed for cattle, packaged chickens, wire shelves for homes, steel tubes for sundry uses, window, sashes and doors for homes, cellophane for industry and homemakers, beams for bridges, and fresh bread baked daily by a national firm.

Overnight, Clinton became a military/industrial complex, and an important contributor to the war effort as well as sending many of its sons and daughters to military service to fight and serve across the globe.

* * *

Clinton, at the time, had more than twenty Protestant churches, five Catholic churches, and a bustling business district on Fifth Avenue South at the South End, and on Main Street at the North End. It had five parochial grammar schools and twelve public grammar schools, two public high schools, and one Catholic high school. It also had boarding schools for girls at Mount St. Clare Academy, High School and Junior College and our Lady of Angels Academy and High School. It had the magnificent Riverview Stadium and River Front Park, Root Park, Chancy Park, and many smaller parks including two picturesque parks downtown. It had the “Big Tree” that separated the North End, or Lyons from the South End, or Clinton. It had the natural umbrella of gigantic elm trees that stretched from Fifth Avenue South and Fourth Street to Bluff Boulevard. The bluff was a winding road cut from the limestone hills that abutted it with eloquent homes on its crest.

At Christmas Time, the Iten mansion would be decked out in thousands of Christmas lights with every Christmas theme imaginable rising from the bluff to the heights of the home.

The Clinton Herald was the main organ of communication of this sleepy town of 33,000, and it did its best to bring Christmas and Season’s cheer to the community with colorful and thoughtful themes throughout the holidays. KROS (Keep Right On Smiling) was the community radio station, broadcasting news, but most particularly, the athletic contests of Clinton high school teams.

And then there was the Clinton Country Club on Fourteenth Street sprawling for acres with a carefully maintained 18-hole golf course, clubhouse and meeting place for the movers and shakers of the community.

* * *

More than 100 years ago, an Irish priest came to this sleepy town on the river and created St. Patrick’s Church, Rectory and School. I attended grammar school there, and it became the roots from which everything else has sprung. The good priest also created a hospital, Mercy, a home for nuns and young girls, Mount St. Clare, a home for the aged, Mount Alverno, and was an influence in having the Davenport Diocese purchase property of an anti-Catholic organization that became Sacred Heart Church, Rectory, and Grammar School.

One hundred years ago, a series of movers and shakers started to settle in Clinton. They would starts businesses, create jobs, and build school, churches, and a solid infrastructure. They were builders of permanence, one commissioning a world famous architect to build a department store. They also built an opera house and theatre for the legitimate stage. A world famous actress and clown grew out of Clinton’s soil.

And at mid-century, because many of these booming manufacturing operations hired poor Clinton kids to work in their factories during the summer, Clinton has contributed skilled minds across the United States to become movers and shakers in their own right.

* * *

But alas, the past is dead, the present tainted, and the future left up for grabs. There are no longer five Catholic parishes but one. There are no longer twenty Protestant congregations but half that number and many of them are struggling mightily today to stay operational. Mount St. Clare and the Lady’s of Angels are penny postcards of history no longer visible in the firmament. .

The company that converted corn into sugar, and was responsible for my getting a college education by employing me for five summers, is no longer a Clinton operation, but part of an international mega-corporation.

This mega-corporation has swallowed up the neighborhood of my birth, South Clinton. It no longer exists replaced by silos and hoppers, railroad tracks and loading docks.

The beautiful buildings of downtown Clinton, especially the one designed by the great architect, is now a HUD casualty. Other prominent downtown buildings have even faired less well as Fifth Avenue limps forward no longer the showcase it once was, when it bustled with droves of shoppers on a weekend. Discount stores on Camanche Avenue South on the periphery of Clinton provide staples while most Clintians visit the Quad Cities 38 miles away of a weekend for major purchases, or they gamble away their limited funds at the new Mecca, the lavish casino in the same Camanche Avenue neighborhood.

There is only one jewel left, a reminder of yesterday, a place called “Guzzardos,” a gift and bookshop. This warm and personal little shop keeps the tradition alive of picture book Clinton, stubbornly resisting change. It has also become a home for Clinton authors who return with books they have written.

The Clinton Herald, like newspapers across the country, struggles to stay in print, and is no long a Clinton paper, but a Clinton County organ, and KROS has been reduced to an AM-radio station.

Second Street, the seven-mile street connecting the North to the South is penciled with fast-food restaurants as is the case with many other small towns across America. Clinton High, which was once architecturally a beautiful campus, a landmark soft on the eyes, now looks more like a fortress than an open campus of learning.

Riverview Stadium and River Front Park, however, have been modernized, and a dike built from one end of the town to the other to prevent the raging spring waters of the Mississippi from drowning adjacent property. There are always pluses with the negatives, and this is a definite positive.

I’m not so sure the demise of the Clinton Country Club is a positive even if it is to allow expansion of the on-line university, Ashford University, an educational institution that has already erased Franciscan University, which had replaced Mount St. Clare Academy, High School, and College from the community. It may prove to be, but it worries me, at what expense?

* * *

All I do know is the “cut and control” phenomenon has become a cultural reality to this day. We take pride in progress as our most important product refusing or unable to see what we get for the progress compared to what we give up. What we give up never returns. That is a given.

Once you make the cut, you cannot mend the damage. You cut a highway through rich farmland; you cannot restore that land to productive crops. It is lost forever.

I wrote a book in 2004, NEAR JOURNEY’S END? CAN PLANET EARTH SURVIVE SELF-INDULGENT MAN? It was never published. We don’t like to think about the unthinkable. We just move through the queue like cattle to the slaughter until it is too late, and so it has been for the past 12,000 years since we moved from hunters and gatherers, taking only what we needed to survive, to agriculture and forming communities and hierarchies, developing better tools, exploiting the land, mushrooming in population . . . from past imperfect, to present ridiculous to future perfect where we believe we have answers to everything with the new god of science.

* * *

THE SILENT MAN IN THE PEW SPEAKS OUT!

2009-12-11T15:55:00.000-08:00

The Silent Man in the Pew Speaks Out

A Plebian View of the Roman Catholic Church in Decline

PART ONE

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC LAITY IN SEARCH OF ITS CHURCH

James R. Fisher, Jr.
Written in 1968
© November 2005

___________________________________________________

NOTE: This was never published. It was written just before I took on a life changing assignment. Only in my 30s, I was being sent to South Africa to facilitate the merger of our South African subsidiary with a British affiliate and a South African chemical company.

This essay was written only days before going to South Africa. The Church was in turmoil trying to assimilate the tenets of Vatican I and II, while the US was in chaos over saber rattling in Viet Nam. The disenfranchised generation of American youth born to baby boomer parents was now eligible for the draft. My generation went into the military without protest, but this generation was inclined to burn their draft cards or escape to Canada. I was leaving this all behind to take on the South African assignment. It was early April 1968.

A devout Catholic, I would emerge from this experience a different man. I went into Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and came out of it aware of the darkness in my own heart. I am now writing a novel of that experience.

Religion was one of my anchors as a youth, and I would imagine if I were a Jew I would have been considered orthodox. Garry Wills wrote a book in 2002 titled “Why I Am A Catholic.” I found the title amusing.

Roman Catholic indoctrination is so strong that if you receive it while very young there is little chance you can ever escape it no matter what games you play with your mind. I came to South Africa sure of my faith and my identity, and left in search of the real parents of my soul.

I make no apologies for the sophomoric style of this essay. Recording it now, unchanged, for the record, I see that I was a Catholic writer before publishing my first essay or book, and I think it is fair to say, after eight books and more than 350 published essays to date, I remain true to that identity.

My novel, which is to be titled “Green Island in a Black Seas,” relates to my struggle with South African Apartheid, my company’s duplicity, my Irish Roman Catholic faith, my marriage vows, my wife and four children, and a life that brought to the fore one word to describe everything: betrayal.

Writing has provided sanctuary and retreat from confusion. Writing has made me aware you don’t have to be published to be a writer. You just have to make connection with yourself by connecting the letters of the alphabet. It is published here as an invitation to readers to ponder their own situation.

Note recorded this date: November 20, 2005

____________________________________________________________________

To a casual observer, it would seem that the Roman Catholic Church has always taken itself seriously. With an air of omniscience, it has conducted affairs of the Catholic world in a somewhat unapproachable, even unimpeachable hauteur. Wasn’t the Church man’s only means to eternal salvation?

Not long ago, this question would have been considered academic, in fact absurd, in the eyes of the average Catholic. Ecclesiastical thinking and activity had not trickled down to his level. This was not surprising. He had become conditioned to being spoon fed a definitive, catechetical approach to religious education. A comprehensive and conceptual understanding of the Church, her theology, philosophy, and history was not promulgated to the general laity.

The reason for this was quite simple. An authoritarian and paternal Church hierarchy did not feel it was needed. That is why the present remedial and ameliorating steps being simultaneously considered and implemented have been found both stultifying and confusing to many on both sides of the altar.

Church history indicates that this current situation is actually following precedence. Crises in the Church have invariably been followed by Vatican Councils, which in turn have led to new doctrines and dogma. The present contingency is similar to its historic predecessor but yet different. It differs in scope, mood, and ambition. A very real threat that mid-twentieth century man will finally reject Christianity has put the Church in a most conciliatory frame of mind. Worthy and necessary as Christian unity may be, there exists cold realities, which must be faced.

Catholicism has instilled beliefs, attitudes, habits, and practices with which only Catholics have been identified. Much of this has been somewhat symbolic, like not eating meat on Friday. Nevertheless, these are real and fixed in the minds and hearts of many who call themselves, “Catholic.” Such a preconditioned laity may attract obfuscation and conflict instead of harmony and a spirit of ecumenicism if they do not see Church history and thought in true perspective, as well as understand what is taking place today. The man in the pew must identify with the Church in transition, or all is for naught.

Born more than thirty years ago a congenial member of the Roman Catholic Church, this observer has no claim to authority. However, raised and inculcated in Catholicism in the traditional fashion has produced its effects and memories. For example, a dependence on dogma and doctrine is remembered instead of the beauty of Christianity. Even after reason prevailed, these tenets have merged and submerged, often obliterating rational clarity.

That is why an issue like birth control languishes in the mind of the Catholic, waiting, desperately waiting for Church sanction, even though logic and reason has already bombarded his mind with the answer.

Consequently, it is quite typical for the average Catholic to accept trauma, doubt, confusion, thought, and education as the natural progression to truth, understanding, and meaning as he is able to glean it.

This experience is necessarily private and usually committed to silence. But the times dictate that this must change. It is not the individual but the entire Church, which is now going through a painful reappraisal. Ultimately, it will be the cataclysm of all Catholic and Christian thought and interpretation, which will prove the destiny of this FAITH, and its relevance to this time.

Seldom does the man in the pew, the true plebian, express his will. This must not be. Perhaps one plebian view may encourage many others to unshackle their minds from wondering in silence about their world and their fate. Their responsibility to contribute to the dialogue has been obviated by history.

Three centuries after Christ’s death this did not seem so certain. The Church faced a great test. A Greek monk named Arius was preaching a doctrine that Christ was the Son of God, but neither consubstantial nor coeternal with the Father. This doctrine called Arianism was the reason for the Council of Nicaea. Here the Church solemnly proclaimed her belief in “ . . .one Lord, Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son, born of the Father before all time, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not created, the same in Being with the Father (consubstantial) . . .”

Today we know this as the Nicene Creed, which has become a touchstone of sound orthodoxy and Church unity.

A period of grace, power, and growth followed for the Church, only to be tainted by the spoils of such good fortune. It was Middle Age. Simony in the papacy and the episcopacy; marriage or concubinage in the secular clergy, and sporadic incontinence among monks contributed to the view that the popes and the religious were vulnerable, fallible men; that the papacy was not a fortress of order and a tower of salvation. Even so, it would be centuries before the doctrine of infallibility and celibacy would be postulated as dogma and doctrine respectively.

Simony was the ecclesiastical correlate of contemporary corruption in politics. Although concubinage and marriage weren’t openly condoned among the general clergy, the practice was common and not subject to the pressure of public ridicule and scorn. Nonetheless, this situation did test the fiber and substance of the Church’s unity and challenge its security. Quiet reform followed, complemented by a series of wise, scrupulous and discerning pontiffs.

The nadir of the papacy gave way to a new day in papal authority, supremacy, and popularity. Its splendor and magnificence greatly affected the temporal states and their balance of power. Even culture, education, and wealth were somewhat in the control of the Church. So great was her dominance that the temptation to dictate to the temporal community on mundane matters was a very real problem. On occasion, she would yield to this pressure, but never without finally retreating to a less advantageous position. This would be a less painfully learned.

Meanwhile, our progenitors of that day were satisfied to accept the Church’s dictums and doctrines with blind faith. They embraced a primitive type of ritualism and colorful pageantry with veneration. Lacking education and the opportunity to better themselves, they were moved less by the reality and drama of Jesus than by the chimerical preaching of fear.

Prepossessed with the negative, sin and hell was understood and preferred over the positive of grace and heaven. The existence of these uncomplicated souls, in fact their culture, was totally God-centered. This would not last.

Much like a centrifugal force, the villain, time, would come to act on man’s conscience to drive Him out of his centric, ultimately to the periphery of his mind. More on this later.

The intrigue of the Church hierarchy and royalty was completely foreign to the laity of the middle ages. Faith was a simple and pure commitment unshackled by lust, greed, and pride. The clergy and laity were essentially of two separate worlds.

These humble brethren considered the secular clergy several stations above them and the episcopacy beyond classification. Perhaps this explains why public protest of corruption in the Church was not proffered from this quarter. Unschooled, subjugated, controlled, they went through life isolated from the storm gathering overhead, sheltered in their simple, dedicated and honest Faith. The church would not receive its challenge from them. They were, indeed, the Children of God.

Much like a vintage wine aging gave the Church a delicate bouquet. Unfortunately, it was also intoxicating. The Church became more and more indurate to the realities of contemporary life. She lost touch with her people and control of her clergy.

It was at this moment in history that a distraught monk, Martin Luther, tortured by a hatred of authority, nailed his ninety-five theses to the Wittenberg church door. The Reformation followed, concomitantly an equally significant evolvement, The Renaissance.

This explosion was of sufficient magnitude to dislodge God from the center of man’s conscience and to trigger the centrifugal force of attending events. Truly, a new day was at hand.

The rebirth of learning and culture kindled in man a new awareness of the genius within him. It marked a time when he became preoccupied with his own glorification at the expense of Christ.

In such an innocent and innocuous manner, the seeds of existentialism were planted, only to wait centuries for man to harvest them.

Though the center of man’s existence shifted to man, this was indeed a self-conscious change. A taint of guilt was manifested in his preoccupation with religious themes in a disproportionate share of his creative endeavors. Science and the “Age of Reason,” which was yet to come, would ease his conscience and liberate his intellect from this confining abstraction.

Another factor contributing to and supporting Church reform was the industrial and economic revolution. Perhaps this sustained and polarized the Church split more than the theological and ecclesiastical questions of the day.

The agrarian nature of the Church was neither prepared for nor able to cope with the emergence of nationalism. Thus, while her spiritual control was being tested, a struggle for power and national identity was further usurping her influence over the state. Accordingly, the issue of Church-State separation would come to be tete-beche obfuscated by devious maneuvering on both sides.
Frustration of this age would lead to schisms, wars, and much suffering, a pattern repeated to this day. Man’s tempo of living would continue to escalate with passing time. The formula would change little:

Progress giving birth to new wealth, exposing old poverty; freedom producing
a mutated form of servitude; opportunity awakening sleeping discrimination;
growth inadvertently causing atrophy; contentment discovering and exposing
misery . . . . . .

would concatenate its way in a quasi-convoluted fashion into mid-twentieth century life. Skepticism, nihilism, isolationism, and unbridled apathy would come to be discovered, then forgotten, and again rediscovered with a new and frenetic frenzy.

Point-counterpoint would come to weave a melody maddening in its intensity through the conscience of man’s mind to snuff out forever the pure and the simple, never again an innocent and unconscious love of God.

Were it possible to go back, one might contemplate the effect the Soul of sixteenth century man might have on modern man. Would it assist him in channeling his energetic driving renewal spirit, and simplify the priority of his preferences? One must wonder.

So often trees and forest seem to merge and submerge into unity for him that bewilderment appears to be his constant companion. Twenty centuries of Church guidance has neither allayed his fears nor reconciled him to accept Christ’s simple changeless and ETERNAL TRUTHS.

The growing complexity of life around him acts as an endless distraction. Only two horrendous world wars have staggered him to attention and awareness of the grave dangers confronting him.

The Holocaust might be imagined:

Completely shipwrecked, the flotsam and jetsam of all ages appear before us.
Fragments of cherished beliefs and ideals of centuries can be seen surfacing, but
only fragments. The heavy bulky awkward shackles of righteous Christianity;
lugubrious and somber mores; stiff and pretentious society; and presumptuous
and greedy colonialism seem to coalesce, producing new densities of meaning and
relevance. Mired in the mud of time, the tissue of man’s fantasies.

Civilized man was finally discovering how fragile, what a put on, his civility. The atrocities of war had given him a new awareness of his depravity and the bestial character existing within his nature.

A critical focus on what he was as well as what he pretended to be, precipitated by this terrifying revelation, was inevitable. Everything now was suspect. It was now considered essential to disinvest himself from the trappings of society and the conventional ideals of civilization. Change, departure from his modus operandi, would be his first step. This would overcome man’s characteristic inertia and establish the required momentum to bring him into a new day. We now find ourselves in that day.

This collision of change had to strike a cornerstone of man’s foundation, religion. It can be said that the Roman Catholic Church did not ignore the tremors nor fail to record the vibrations. Aware that the laity and secular clergy were restless, and in a changing mood, the Church allowed a questioning of basic Catholic tenets. This is still in progress.

Final positions on celibacy, papal authority, infallibility, birth control, and many other issues are yet to be given. Even so, it appears safe to assume that a new religiosity may be added to a growing list of modern improvisations, which include a new sociology, economics, and technology. A more flexible viable one is replacing the staid structure. Moreover, a new disposition has been manifested:

What has been is truly passé; what is now is of central interest; what is to be is truly blasé.

Christianity, and its promise of eternal salvation, is no longer centermost in man’s life but rather on the periphery of his existence. He is quite active and busy, not in search of God, but of himself. Truly, man is unknown, causing him to grope and stumble in the darkness of his identity. Thus, this paradox unfolds:

Hope born out of despair; opportunity out of inequity; power out of the collapse of order
and authority.

Perplexed, he is a sometime tyro pretending to be the epicurean. Whereas he once understood the “good life” to be the purifying experience of hard work, he now pays some tribute to the philosophy of hedonism as if he understood it.

Since man is happier at work than at play, this has in effect made him an alien to himself as well as an emotional cripple. The overflow of this spirit and dilemma appears to have seeped into the Church.

From this progression, a new laity has come into being, dominated by affluence and quasi-intellectualism. It seeks a new role, new image, new sense of fulfillment, and a new power.

A cry for change, for renewal, has reverberated from every quarter. Vatican I and Vatican II gave it the hope it needed and the promise for a new quintessence. Time, patience, and understanding will determine if this is a true bridge to hope and a new and unity or just another ephemera. It will also put Martine Luther and Protestantism in a new perspective. Surely, today personifies the mod and thinking of this giant of man in the Church.

A strong and vibrant middle class has suddenly discovered Luther. Nearly five hundred years late, the laity and secular clergy are intrigued with Luther’s challenge to the papacy, the doctrine of infallibility, celibacy, freedom of conscience, and even the liturgy. Perhaps the only thing that is constant is change itself.

Summarily excommunicated and painted a devil by the then Catholic world, Luther now shines out in God’s heavenly firmament. Perhaps he knows that the contemporary of his celebrated antagonist, the Catholic theologian, is presently his staunch ally and stout defender. Theologians are not only listening, reading and studying Luther’s one-time-heresies, but are considering ways to implement them quickly into Roman Catholicism. Even though this may prove to be a providential strategy and a sound policy, one must still wonder why the rush.

Many pat and reasonable answers might be given, and in many cases, have been. It has been suggested that the Church has frankly been in error; that it has been out of touch with the present world; that it is horribly out of date. It has been suggested that, indeed, she is a pillar blindly standing in the road of progress.

Despite whatever validity these evaluations may have, they are not acceptable to this observer. That is why the picture of man in continuous struggle with his heart, mind, and yes, soul, has been proffered here. Much more is at stake. Simple easy answers will no longer suffice. Christianity, not only Roman Catholicism, has been losing popularity with the common man in this uncommon age. The essence of this challenge is that Christianity, not only Catholicism, is on the block with survival in the balance. Why?

Out of the maze of conflict and confusion has arisen a new man with a new sense of destiny. He sees himself walking among gods. His genius has created the ultimate weapon, synthetic life, interplanetary machines, transplantation of human organs, etc.

This discovery of god-like powers has moved him naturally into a new sense of cosmology and theology. He now sees himself as having the power of greatness within him, reasoning that he is truly the temple of the Universal God, or more traditionally, of Jesus Christ. His body is his church. A peripatetic philosophy of introspection has seized his mind. He welcomes no guidance, no interference, and certainly no authoritative control.

An eternal adolescent, man seeks privilege without responsibility, power without control, peace without sacrifice or restrain, and contentment without struggle.

History appears to have been surgically removed from his conscience by the scalpel of pride, and candid self-glorification.

Quite often, man is found wearing the façade of contentment, the veneer of complacency, betraying the fever which continuously rages within him. Might this fever be that of total disenchantment?

Whether it is fair to say that modern man is wandering aimlessly, uprooted and anchorless, certainly his direction, action and predilection give credence to such speculation. Arius must have felt his antichrist theology was ripe for the society of his day when it behaved in a similar fashion. The necrologists of today have sensed that society is now running concurrently with this philosophy, and therefore boldly published the obituary of God. Perhaps they have something.

Irrational as it may seem, society appears bent on feeding the fever with which it is being consumed. Once panacea were panacea were panacea. No longer would this seem to be so. Simple answers to man’s complex allusions sans struggle, sans searching, sans doubting, sans fear, sans the idea of God are offered to a deliriously receptive, hopeful battered mankind. Man is too numb and preoccupied to question their validity.

Such an attractively wrapped package of essence was certain to jar the very foundation of Christendom. Perhaps the effects it would come to have on the clergy as well as the laity, and their respective reactions to it, should have been predicted. No one was apparently watching the store.

This is not surprising. Society has come to expect professionals of all endeavors to maintain a frigid detachment in the heat of involvement. That is why the antithetical response of many religious to this situation leads one to wonder if they really understood what has taken place. Witness priests, brothers, and apostolate exhibiting their dismay and disillusion, and in many cases, defeat trying to compete for souls with the rampant iconoclasts. Thus broken, a steady stream of them can be seen quitting their rectories, convents, and monasteries for either the eerie promise of the sybarite, or to still the Siren’s call. For this lack of professionalism, they solicit sympathy and assurance while they proselytize a more comfortable faith.

Their new appeal is not to the strength in man’s heart, but to the weakness in man’s loins. Meanwhile, less conspicuous, but equally despairing are those who continue to wail from their sanctuaries and cloisters that, indeed, the religious life and priesthood of Jesus Christ is dead.

No longer is there a marriage of vocation to avocation for them, but rather a struggle betwixt the two. Perhaps there is no quiet, no true isolation. Could the clamor of the time be too much for the contemplative life? Too distracting to see what is happening and who is involved?

To a concerned plebian, this is difficult to fathom. It would seem that the mask of the time, the façade of intemperate indulgence has been accepted as the true face in the crowd, and not the disguise that it is. That a certain faction of the secular clergy has been so misled is a matter of record. Unfortunately, it seems to have cast even a larger shadow.

This is suggested sententiously from what appears to be a movement in the Church, as cautious, temperate, and enlightened practices seem to have loss their appeal at discovering root causes, while a wave of more dynamic, and expedient methods is being employed. This is disconcerting, but not the problem. The actual riddle is that compromise appears to be entertained when one knows that TRUTH cannot be mollified nor abated. Such a dilemma has developed because the Church and its obvious imperfections has become centermost when the ETERNAL TRUTHS should be.

One wonders if this rush to action is not an attempt to ameliorate symptoms rather than to treat causes. Could it be that defining the cause of man’s bewilderment in mid-twentieth century is more elusive than the problem? Perhaps this is why we hear a cry for a prophet to come forth.

Certainly, it would be reassuring to have a kind, affable, witty and sophisticated intelligence such as that of Desiderious Erasmus to step forward. The German’s had their Luther, but the Dutch had their Erasmus. In retrospect, it might be said that Luther was a good patient for his time, but a poor doctor. Erasmus might be said to be that doctor.

This quiet man, Erasmus, sympathized with much of Luther’s thinking, but chose to remain in the Church. Which man showed the greater courage?

Today this question might generate considerable discussion among the erudite, but not the common man. Luther touched man’s spirit and imagination. Erasmus touched only his mind. Albeit this tells us something of the propensities of man, it does not assuage Erasmus’s loss.

The temperament, genius and cold intellect of Erasmus produced a beautiful satirical study, “The Praise of Folly.” In a day when man was angry and threatening to his Church, Erasmus generated light rather than heat, giving man a new insight into the nature of his being. He wanted to call attention to the fact that the Church exists despite the combined inadequacies of the clergy and laity; that the Church was true because it was HIS, not ours; that the Church lived and lives because of and for HIM, not us.

Since FAITH is responsive to man’s deepest needs, he wanted to penetrate the blindness of our personal pride to see the light of the eternal Jesus. Practically forgotten today, this very slender volume is significantly apropos at this very moment in man’s history.

Erasmus illustrated man’s cynical flippancy and irresponsibility. He contented that this appears in man as the uninhibited force of natural instinct, and as the immense effort with which man struggles to achieve his ends, valueless though they may be. “Folly” reminds us that when people grow up, they suffer a loss of youthful energy and flexibility. Seeking the stoic ideal of god-like rationalism brings in its stead a sort of marble monsterism. “Folly” could also be a name for all man’s misdirected effort, for all his elaborate pains to gain the wrong thing:

There we see a woman dressed and pained, pretending to be young, valiantly chasing
a man and her spent youth; here can be seen a young man, collecting degrees, developing
impressive credentials, while responsibility and manhood fade from his sight; over there
we notice a respectable businessman, lying, cheating, misleading, and swindling the public
in order to make money so that his children can spend it in purposeless glee; and here again
we see a priest, the sacerdotal commitment found wanting, emerged in temporal life and
causes, pontificating his new theology and morality as he sinks into the quicksand of life.

This kind of contemporary imagery comes rapidly to mind as one invades the pages of “Folly.” The compulsion to wonder how Erasmus would view today is also there. Probably, it is safe to say that he would note mankind’s fumbling towards eternity with a tinge of sadness, but little surprise.

He would no doubt register only mild protestation at man’s arrogance before man. But before God? Surely, he would be somewhat alarmed. Perhaps he might indeed believe man had retrogressed. For comprehending the comedic figure of man before God was the quintessence of humility in his age. Puncturing the prideful pomposity of man was essential to understanding and tolerating oneself in the sixteenth century. Hopefully, this is not anachronistic nor hors de saison.

Even though we may not have spiritual heavyweights like Erasmus around to deflate man’s ego and give him balance, this is not so disturbing as is the knowledge that the need is neither accepted nor recognized. Rather a cult is developing to pay it homage.

New symbols, signs and aphorisms have been hastily created to demean conventional concepts, traditions and practices. Worthy as some of these new ideal and ideas may be, to summarily and willfully negate one’s heritage with a wave of hostility and condescension suggests paranoia. The symptoms are there.

Man is riding the crest of prosperity and a state of real, ideal and/or contrived euphoria envelops him. Once a slave to time, he now finds it weighs heavily on his hands. The fruits of his efforts have made time a luxury, producing a surplus of idleness, and this has made him uneasy.

Many jobs have been created with no productive end in mind, but only to fill the void. This has not been enough. Consequently, play has become hectic, demanding, serious, and more important than work. The awful rush to fill the dismal void of hours hangs like a sickness over man’s head. Consumption and possession have become obsessions; a compulsion to satiate oneself with food, sex, and material things is now viewed as a necessity. In man’s quest for life, meaning, peace, and purpose, man has often been left frantic, supported only by nerve pills and other placebos. His attention to Church, religion, family, society, state, and the old fashion values has been casually shifted to a perfunctory plateau of his mind. “Folly” is still his name.

One hears that times have changed, but that the Church’s life and function is petty, silly, anachronistic, irrelevant, and hypocritical by today’s standards. What is not said is closer to the nerve of the matter:

The Church and Christianity in general has been used by man as a crutch to shore him up
when the going got rough; when he was alone and desperate and had no one to turn to, he
could always find solace in his Church and with his God. The two were synonymous in his
mind.

Not so today. Comfortable, prosperous, modern man looks within himself for the answers. Prayer and supplication are not for him. Yet, with all that he is and has, he will readily admit to being empty, unfulfilled, and seeking, continuously seeking. This is an age when public confession of the most intimate thoughts is common. Nothing appears sacred or private between man and his God, a phenomenon that has produced an identity syndrome composed of anxiety, frustration and the essence of alienation. A common observation:

Thrusting out contemptuously, he projects and substitutes this sense of guilt to causes
outside himself. He cries for change but hopes to extricate himself from personal
involvement. His demands are implicitly or explicitly focused on the Church and her
responsibility to him.

Somehow, he has forgotten or erased from his memory that if the Church falls, he fails. If Jesus Christ is the TIMELESS TRUTH, then the answers must be there. Certainly, renewal will not suffice if man does not understand that the Church has not failed him, but that he has failed it. The Church reflects him. The bromides, platitudes, and formulae to instant happiness have never been relevant to man’s needs. They only compound his illusions and delusions. There is a danger that man’s caprice will tempt him to advocate the diminution of the Church, an ersatz Lord of Life being hastily put into focus.

A happening is not surprising in religion today. The last two generations have endured as much change as the balance of man’s history. That this ordeal of change has been a baffling experience is irrefutable. Losing his self-image, man appears to have developed myopia and a loss of depth perception as well, throwing him into punishing melancholy.

Man is restless for action, any action. One wonders if this affliction has not penetrated the staid structure of Roman Catholicism. It is one thing to articulate the ETERNAL TRUTHS in man’s vernacular, but quite another to adulterate them for palatability.

One theologian conversing with another might construe this statement to be unfair. It is, however, made by a plebian to reflect the silent dilemma of the Catholic laity. Truth is the essence of anything and cannot be altered is a dialectic he understands.

The silent man in the pew does not want to be considered a proponent of empiricism. If new insights into the TIMELESS TRUTHS of Jesus are discovered, he would prefer that they be carefully and definitively defined, painstakingly weighed, systematically categorized, and then providentially implemented into his religion. Filling the air with waves of speculation and testing the currents of acceptance will always be considered suspect and only produce chaos.

Personal involvement in change is a demanding emotional experience. One must give up that which he knows and understands relative to himself for that which is unknown and perhaps feared. Shedding one’s personal integument and assuming a new posture, image, association, status quo, and identity are painless only when done without conscious insight.

Just as one is ever losing and replacing his epidermis, contented man changes bits and pieces all the time without knowing it. Each time one accepts a new idea, new concept, something is quitted, something is lost. That is why the revolution of ideas is preceded by intellectual speculation. It prepares the way.

Mounting the current Christian renewal and ecumenical movement without such cultivation would seem absurd. Yet, this is the prima facie situation at the moment. After a wave of emotional altruism and generosity of spirit, it appears that the chill of self-doubt has set in, producing a silent retreat to the more comfortable known and understood ground.

If this is questioned, one need only observe who still controls and initiates the ecumenical: the clergy. This has been frustrating for the secular clergy, but what of the bewilderment of the laity?

No improvement has ever been made in the conventional and laborious process of making wine. The implementation of a more streamlined, truly catholic FAITH is analogous to wine making. No steps can be left out or hurried.

Christianity and Roman Catholicism are not going out of business. The link between them and the non-Christian world is likely to improve, as improve it must. Nonetheless, man’s self-image and identity with his God, now more nebulous than ever, must first receive attention.

Emotional posturing and psychological speculating have proven of little value. Though he needs guidance badly, this does not mean that he wants his Church to become entombed in his quagmire. Rather, he prefers that his Church view and understand his needs with providential detachment.

An Erasmus recognized this. A Thomas Aquinas provided the rationale for making Christian theology and philosophy a viable formula for a timeless Church. Why have their voices not been heard in modern times?

Modern man is a complex and enlightened individual, disciplined and cultivated, but nonetheless a child, always a child in his religiosity. Seeing his priests caught up in the period’s social and political activism, kneeling to the pragmatic cries of the day, does not contribute to his sense of essence nor does it give him a fix on his eternal salvation.

Man wants renewal, enlightened renewal, but not necessarily change per se. This might mean the digesting of Thomistic theology and philosophy, and the essence of revelations, that is, getting inside the thoughts and ideas of the FAITH. The laity has never been fed these before. This type of renewal would require energetic pursuit on the part of the laity but would give it a foundation of essence, something now missing. True ecumenicism could then proceed with speed.

The Roman Catholic Church in transition must accept her history, understand her laity, and patiently implement a more substantive educational program before true ecumenicism might be broached. Otherwise, the body Christendom could be weakened by her arrogant disregard for the dilemma of the silent man in the pew.

The End

James R. Fisher, Jr.
Completed: 8 April 1968
Anchorage, Kentucky
USA

HITTING THE WALL -- WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT!

2009-12-08T13:43:00.000-08:00

HITTING THE WALL – WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 7, 2009

* * *

Today I had lunch with a friend who I have known for nearly two decades, a man for whom I have been mentor, coach, counselor, consultant, as well as personal friend. We first met when I was consulting the organization in which he worked. I have watched him grow in competence and confidence, and watched his character flourish.

He recently contacted me by email, a man now in his mid-fifties, at the zenith of his career, making an excellent living, confessing he had hit a wall and was taking a month leave of absence.

Now, you would think this outrageous behavior in these perilous economic times when jobs are scarce and unemployment in Florida is more than 11 percent. You would expect him to fear being replaced.

That is the logical rational perspective, but when you hit the wall, that emotional barrier, that has no give and you constantly bounce off it bruised, battered, and disillusioned, fatigued, and depressed, you don’t think logically. You are looking for relief, as your body and soul are at war with each other.

Failure to recognize this, to deny this reality can result in physical and emotional collapse. When our health breaks, we are forced to take a time out, sometimes never to recapture our original momentum.

* * *

NO ONE ESCAPES THE WALL

Kurt Warner, the NFL quarterback of the Arizona Cardinals, suffered a concussion three games ago. He chose to sit out the next game. He is one of the premier quarterbacks in the NFL and has Super Bowl rings to prove it. Yet, his toughness was questioned when he sat out the game.

In an interview, he said that he was near the end of his career, had a wife and seven children, and didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances on his health that might jeopardize a long and productive life after football. That was a rational answer.

The irrational part was that although he hit a physical wall it made him aware of the emotional possibility of brain damage. Scientists now see a high statistical correlation between concussions of professional athletes in sport and early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. That was enough for him.

When you are that individual, and have to weigh where you are and what you are and what your real motivation for the future is, you back away from that wall. You do a retreat. In the case of Kurt Warner, it was for one game, or a week’s recuperation after the concussion.

Sunday night (December 5, 2009), the Arizona Cardinals played the Minnesota Vikings and Warner out dueled another great quarterback, Bret Favre, to a 30 to 17 victory. These two premier quarterbacks came from schools never in the national limelight, Warner from Northern Iowa, and Favre from Southern Mississippi, two individuals that have encountered and negotiated many walls in their careers, but have had the poise and creative skills to confront and dispatch them successfully.

Warner is now in the best graces of the team and fans, but has made a statement. His health and well being and that of his family comes first and everything else after that.

* * *

THE WISDOM OF RETREAT

Warner took the respite of a game while my friend has taken a month off to gain a fresh perspective before he goes forward. I was twenty years younger than my friend, only in my mid-thirties when I hit the wall in South Africa where I was facilitating the formation of a new company in 1968, taking a two-year sabbatical.

Living in South Africa's "apartheid society," being treated with colonial splendor by British South Africans, surrounded by the rich and beautiful, I no longer knew what I was working for as nothing made sense to me anymore.

I was making the equivalent of a half million dollars in today’s currency, lived on an estate in the city of Johannesburg, with four servants, including a chauffeur, gardener, house manager, and maid, all Bantu Africans, provided with two automobiles for the family, paying no taxes, and being treated as a very important person, when I knew better.

I never forgot I was the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad, and had nothing in common with these British public school colonialists other than my organizational and technical skills. Making my confusion more intense was the fact that I felt a kinship with Afrikaners, the Boers, the farmers, the white South Africans, who were very much like my down to earth people of Iowa.

Afrikaner came to power in 1948 and had instituted the draconian and appalling practice of apartheid, or separate development of the races. I could never reconcile my affection for Afrikaners with apartheid. It proved to be one of my walls.

* * *

WHAT IS THE WALL?

Walls are emotional barriers that we run into when we can no longer escape ourselves. We may delight in distractions such as toys, promiscuity, or other dalliances but ultimately there is no escape.

In such instances, we don’t engage the wall the wall engages us. We can go bankrupt because we cannot afford our toys, or our dalliances are discovered, and we are shamed, embarrassed and suffer the consequences of a costly divorce, for once trust is broken it cannot be repaired.

When we fail to acknowledge the wall, the wall acknowledges us with unintended consequences.

The wall forces us to leave the ghost of ourselves to reveal the person we have become despite our attempts to disguise that reality in so many ways. We may attempt to postpone that confrontation with alcohol, drugs, gambling, or other aberrant behaviors, but all attempts will fail. The breadth of the wall is beyond comprehension and therefore impossible to avoid. The wall extends from the beginning of our life to its end.

So, whether we encounter it forthwith or deny its existence, the wall will have its due. That is what the wall is.

* * *

WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THE WALL?

My friend has always been creative. Throughout his life and career, he has been able to reengineer his approach to things, indeed, to reinvent himself over and over again as circumstances changed. He would develop new processes to attain his objectives.

But then he found he could no longer come up with new approaches that gave him satisfaction. He could no longer muster the motivation to take risks and endure the pain of possible failure. He had reached success and was a victim of the status quo whereas he had made his reputation helping people with bold new strategies. Now, he found himself simply going with the flow, and he resented it.

When he reached this wall, he did the wisest thing of all. He went to his boss and said, “I’m taking a month off.”

“Why?” she countered.

“I’ve run out of ideas. I’ve run out of ways to reinvent my job.”

“That’s not true,” she said.

“You say that, but you are not me.”

“Pardon me?”

“No offense intended, I’m just saying I no longer am satisfied with the job I’m doing.”

“You satisfy me and I’m your boss.”

“I’m glad I do but that’s not the bottom line. The bottom line is satisfying myself and if I can’t satisfy myself I need a time out to look at where I am, where I’ve been, where I want to go, and what I have to do to get there." He continued,

“A friend once told me when you take a time out miraculous things happen. The wall opens up and allows you to pass through and go on, happier, healthier, wiser, and more motivated than ever before.

“He warmed me that I will continue to run into walls as all creative people do as they go forward. It is not running into walls that is the problem, but what we do when we encounter yet another wall.

“The walls, he says, are simply stop signs demanding our attention. They comfort us once we are running on automatic pilot, not hitting on all our cylinders, drifting towards calamity.

“When a creative person is drifting, he says, the person is unhappy, in fact, he can become deeply depressed as nothing makes sense to him anymore: his job, marriage, family, friends, business associates, his socioeconomic status. Nothing can renew his vitality, as all his resilience is gone. He claims a person has no choice but to step back, to take a respite, not so much to think ponderously, but to relax and let his soul settle back into its normal place and space in his center.”

His boss may have been curious about his friend, but she didn’t probe. She has too much respect for him, and is looking forward to his return in a month.

* * *

THE WALL CAN BE A LIFE CHANGING EVENT

A forty-year perspective gives me the advantage of seeing how a wall can be a life-changing event.

I didn’t understand the wall the way I understand it today. Consequently, I kept battering against it hiding behind my work and my Roman Catholicism as if workaholism and faith would furnish a breakthrough. They didn’t. Instead, they exacerbated the situation.

My values, beliefs, loyalties and perspectives were disintegrating. My character was splintered and I was in shambles. It was in this quagmire that I found I was forgetting things and I had a memory like an elephant. My memory was a source of pride and it was abandoning me.

My marriage and family were in chaos; everything I held sacred was gone. When calamity clustered into a cancer, there was only one thing I could do, and that was to resign with no idea what the future would hold.

Even then, I had never forgotten my roots, never forgotten how my da’s employers had exploited him, never forgotten how the powerful treat the powerless. The irony is that I was part of the powerful but never joined the club.

My boss said, “How can you do this to us when we have done so much for you?”

“If I wasn’t doing my job, you’d fire me,” I answered, “I’m firing the company for the same reason.”

“James, you have a lot to learn,” my boss parried. “I doubt if you’ll ever be this successful again.”

He was talking about economic not spiritual success, the way he was trained to think. At the time, I didn’t understand the difference. I just sought relief from an untenable situation. I needed breathing room.

Incidentally, my boss was right about financial success. I’ve never reached that equivalent in income again, but I have been modestly successful financially. My rejuvenation has been spiritual which cannot be measured quantitatively.

Over a long life, I have gravitated to where I am now. It is where a professor told me when I was a twenty years old student at the University of Iowa I should have been from the beginning, a thinker and writer. I am not only a late bloomer but also a post late bloomer and I have to live with that. I may not live to complete my South Africa novel, as Vladimir Nabokov failed to complete his novel, “Laura” (2009), now absurdly offered in pasted together version by his son, Dmitri.

As an idea guy and writer, I’ve never been happier, never been more in tuned to my nature. I am, by nature, an introvert, not very sociable, finding people wear me out quite quickly. It took me a long time after hitting many walls to realize that I prefer privacy to social engagement, books and ideas to people, things that are free in nature rather than can be purchased in a store, that I am more a student of things than a doer of things even though my life has been engaged in doing with little time or energy left for contemplation, until these late innings of life with my Beautiful Betty, now in our twenty-fourth year of marriage.

* * *

There was a time when people would ask me what I thought, and I was so good at reading people that I would tell them what they wanted to hear. They would smile, I would get big orders, promotions, and be told, “You’re a very lucky man, James,” when I was increasingly miserable. After hitting the wall in South Africa, that all changed.

When people ask me now what I think, I tell them. The secretary to the CEO at Honeywell Avionics, when I was a psychologist there, asked me one day what I thought of her hairdo. I said it looked like a hornet’s nest. She cried. I moved on, only to be chewed out by my boss and to receive a scathing memo from the CEO, who happened to like me.

Honeywell Avionics, at the time, had one thousand engineers and scientists, two thousand professional support personnel, and one thousand blue-collar workers model building in manufacturing while creating instruments in the clean rooms.

In 1984, Honeywell Avionic’s Department of Contracts Administration (DCAS) was sponsoring a major seminar on Clearwater Beach, Florida for its customers among who were senior officers in the U. S. Air Force, U. S. Navy, Department of Defense, as well as other DCAS customers. The topic was “Participative Management,” the buzz expression of the day. A committee contacted me to give the keynote address. I said I would if I could say what I thought about participative management. The committee agreed.

In my capacity as Director of the Quality Control Circle Program, the largest at the time in the nation, I found participative management was a joke. It didn’t work because it wasn’t sincere. It was impossible to implement a system that worked in Japan, with a group oriented culture, when American workers were individualistic and resistant to enforced group norms.

Moreover, eighty percent of Japanese workers were blue-collar and only twenty to twenty five percent of American workers were. Most American workers were professionally trained and white-collar workers.

Participative management worked modestly well with blue-collar workers who were programmed to be reactive and management dependent, whereas white-collar workers saw themselves as independent contractors or in league with management.

That said the problem solving of blue-collar workers was limited to cosmetic change such as modification of workstations or the like but no substantive change in processes or procedures. White-collar workers were resistant to the idea of a contrived meeting climate of brainstorming and problem solving, feeling a sense of being patronized instead of reaffirming a partnership with management.

My speech was titled, “Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View” (It was given on March 30, 1984, and was published in this blog on its 25th anniversary).

For that speech, I was put on house arrest. My salary was frozen for 18 months. I could give no more speeches, publish no articles, and had to submit my notebooks weekly to my boss for checking. They became so voluminous that he quit checking in the third week.

Out of that 18-month confinement, the germ of a book surfaced in the notebooks. Then, as incredible as it may seem, once the eighteen months came to a close in 1986, I was promoted to Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd. I did not seek this assignment, but was pursued for me by my new boss whom I had mentored when he first came to Honeywell in 1980. He thought it especially suited to my organizational development (OD) expertise.

Even so, I found Europe suffering an exaggeration of what I experienced in the United States. Honeywell Europe had an equal reluctance to change. This was equally true of the American management team in Europe as it was for Honeywell's European executives. I knew then I was on to something.

* * *

A good part of the book, previously only a germ, was written while on that assignment. I returned to the United States, resigned in 1990, and published “Work Without Managers: A View From The Trenches.”

The Business Book Review Journal claimed "Work Without Managers" was the most insightful and prophetic book written on management to date, a book that predicted the demise of the automotive industry and the telling consequence of a workforce suspended in terminal adolescence, which applied as much to the white-collar as the blue-collar workforce.

The importance of the book has not been acknowledged readily except for the efforts of Dr. Thomas Brown of Industry Week and The Wall Street Journal.

In a strange way, the book is even more relevant and viable in 2009 than it was when written in 1990.

It is quite apparent companies can run into walls again and again until they go bankrupt as General Motors and Chrysler, unable or unwilling to change, or go out of business, as did 100-year-old Montgomery Wards.

* * *

People write books to be published, and they publish books that will not be deemed offensive to the hand that feeds them. That is management. The real estate industry and Wall Street were running into walls, walls not acknowledged, but walls they still attempted to circumvent with suspect practices, walls that always win in the end when they are ignored whether it is in a personal or corporate sense.

Voices on the periphery cried out that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were heading for trouble; voices sounded the alarm for the reckless practices of Wall Street and the insurance industry. Some voices published their views, but nothing changed. Economists were asleep at the switch, as was the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of Treasurer. Now these appointed office holders are celebrated for their eleventh hour rescue of banks too big to fail.

* * *

Much of “Work Without Managers” addresses the fact that we are a crisis-managed society that the crises we solve are only the crises we create, having little time or inclination to look outside the box. We are a knowing rather than learning society, and suffer for the malaise.

* * *

So, I said to my friend the fact that you recognized the wall is a tribute to your integrity, your authenticity, to your dedication to make a difference. You stopped and took a time out to reassess your status when you confronted the wall, and for that the wall will open up and let you through.

* * *

I wasn’t going to write this missive; wasn't even going to walk because it was rainy and cold. I was just going to work on my novel.

Once in a while a message hits you that whether you are a bricklayer or architect, a custodian or contractor, housewife or school teacher, whether you are retired or still working, that you cannot avoid encountering walls.

We run into walls in marriage, in dealing with our children, in relating to friends and relatives, in work and in play. In one sense, we are alone as we come into the world alone, and leave the world alone, so we cannot expect others to deal with our walls. The connection with ourselves is sometimes the last connection we acknowledge, the connection that confronts the walls. Ignore the walls and love can turn to hate and hate to boredom and boredom to depression. Such thoughts came to mind today as I walked.

* * *

LIVING WHILE DYING -- A MODEL FOR US ALL!

2009-12-04T20:13:00.000-08:00

LIVING WHILE DYING

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 4, 2009

REFERENCE:

Mary is someone I have known for many years. She was director of the Temple Terrace Library in Temple Terrace, Florida, a suburb of Tampa, Florida since the 1990s. Quiet, dignified, private, she was a human dynamo full of ideas and grace with the executive skill to make the branch library one of the busiest in Hillsborough County. She did it with love, devotion, dedication, and as it turned out, with the burden of declining health.

Mary has MSA. The acronym stands for “Multiple System Atrophy," a degenerative neurological disorder for which there is no cure. MSA is associated with the tectonic degeneration of nerve cells in specific areas of the brain. The disease causes problems with movement, balance and autonomic functions of the body, things we take for granted, such as bladder control.

The cause of the disease is unknown and no specific risks factors have been identified. Around 45 percent of cases occur in women with typical age of onset in the full flush of their productive lives, or in their 50s or early 60s. Such is the case with Mary.

Mary retired from her directorship, and went through a period of understandable emotional as well as physical difficulty in accepting the cross she has had to bear.

One day I ran into her at the library, and she said, “Jim, I’d like to get on the Board of Directors of the Friends of the Temple Terrace Library.” She was tired of nursing her disease and wanted to again be productive. I could see in her eyes the pain behind the passion and resolve. But it was only later that I learned what an ordeal ordinary daily life had become for her. A brave face has no room for self pity.

Since then, she has been an active member of that board. Thanks to her contributions, taking an active role on several committees, we are moving forward more efficiently. She is the most positive person I know, the most upbeat with a smile and a gentle laugh that melts you.

Mary sent me her "Time, MSA, and ME" that follows. I asked her if I could publish it. She said, “Yes, by all means.” Incidentally, Mary has a blog. Check it out www.mershanti.blogspot.com to learn more about Mary, the disease, and what others suffering MSA are doing. You will find they are living while dying, while, unhappily, many of us are dying while not finding time to live.

* * *

TIME _ and MSA _ HAVE MADE A CHANGE IN ME

Mary Satterwhite
© December 4, 2009

I was in session with my therapist today, talking to him about changes I have noticed in myself, especially during the past 6 months. Despite the losses in my life, right now life looks better than it ever has.

I used to be a self-driven Type A personality, always rushing and multitasking. Always busy, never idle, not able to just sit. Speeding from one thing to another. Not just speeding emotionally, but also driving. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

Now, the journey is just as important as the destination. A drive to the library is a pleasure just to be out and see other people. The grocery holds many wonders. New products, old friends, and familiar brands.

I just wish they would stop moving things around so you can no longer find what has always been right there, and now is somewhere unknown. But again, the journey takes over while you go in search of the missing item.

In the past, my dreams were of being shipwrecked and without a life vest. I held onto the rope in the hands of my therapist, hoping he could save my life. Now, I dream of swimming in a river with a strong current and know that I can exit the river at any time. I control when to leave the water.

So, as horrible as this disease is, positive things have happened to me because of it. This slow down in life, enjoying the pleasures of everyday things has occurred because life has suddenly become precious.

Where I used to want to die, now I find that life is a pleasant place to be. Simple pleasures such as the taste of an apple, watching the river flow by with leaves floating along, the ducks swimming and begging for a handout, the ospreys and their nests, and even the alligators with just their eyes protruding out of the water, all are special to me.

I am a nature lover, not a city dweller. I love the woods and the water, and not just underwater diving. I love to sit and watch the water and visit for a spell with a friend. To canoe down the river with friends, even for a couple of hours, brings me enormous pleasure, despite the physical pain that can accompany it.

When I see a path or dirt road leading back into the woods, I want to follow it. I have photos of wood paths on my screensaver slideshow. I want to go down those paths, wander along on the pine needles or oak leaves. Look up at the beautiful sky as seen through the tree canopy. What beauty there is in nature!

Things I used to feel I had to do, or people I had to do something with, no longer matter to me. I do not have to be with people who are negative or appear to try to bring other folks down.

I used to love to rain walk, back when I could walk more than 50 feet or so. I walked our two Rhodesian Ridgebacks in freezing weather, in rain, during hurricanes, and when the county was spraying for citrus canker with the helicopters dropping the poison on me.

When that happened, I would hurry the dogs under a tree where we would huddle under the canopy hoping to be missed by most of the poison. They supposedly had posted where they would be spraying every day, but somehow they managed to catch me anyway. We walked at 5 AM so I could get back and be showered and dressed and at work by 6:30. Later, I moved the walk up so I could get to work at 5:45 or 6 AM. Workaholic, Type A, hurry, hurry, hurry.

Now, I am no longer able to work and I sleep until 10:30 or 11 AM every morning. I walk the remaining Akita, Bear, from our yard to next-door and back and find that is all I can do. He appreciates even that little. My husband also walks him and spends a great deal of time with him. Without his sister, he is very lonely and appreciates every minute of attention he can get. He is still in mourning, though not as severely as we were afraid he was going to be, at least, not at this time.

You have heard the old saying, is the glass half empty or half full. I contend that it depends on whether you are looking from the bottom up or from the top down. As another saying goes, the devil is in the details.

I still long to return to Utila and revisit my old underwater haunts. To find the seahorses and the squid, to be cleaned by a cleaner shrimp, to marvel at the beauty of nature under the ocean, and, with luck, to once again be in the water with a whale shark. I realize I can no longer swim with one – but to have one pass by me as I float on the surface, to have it look me in the eye curiously as it glides by, would be a completion for me.

I have been in the water with a number of them over the years, but it has been a long, dry spell without a sighting. They come and go on their own schedule, not according to our wishes. Another unlikely wish is to be revisited by a pod of dolphin that enjoyed the company of humans. We spent 30 minutes one year with dolphin playing all around us, mimicking our every move, spiraling, leaping, diving, swimming under our arms as long as we did not reach out to touch them. What an unexpected, and awesome, experience. Yes, Utila is number one on my bucket list. I guess it always will be until I draw my last breath.

So, MSA has been a blessing in many ways. To be able to slow down, to write this journal or blog, and to hope to encourage others with MSA that there are positive side effects until the disease grabs them down and will not let them go.

To be bedridden and in pain, unable to communicate, those have been my worst nightmares, and I know many on the ShyDrager.org online support group are there already. Their caregivers communicate for them and for support for themselves as they deal with both grief and the anticipatory grief of losing a loved one, too soon. Until that time comes, I am going to keep on hanging in there and doing as much of what I love as possible. I thank my husband for making many of these loves of mine come to fruition.

Right now, life is good and that is enough.

Mary

A LETTER TO RACHEL

2009-12-01T08:28:00.000-08:00

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 1, 2009

REFERENCE:

Rachel is my granddaughter. We have had a close relationship since she was born. Only thirteen now, and an eighth grader, she has always been precocious what I like to think as an old spirit in a young soul.

We would often go to the Mall, the zoo, the art museum, or McDonald’s, or when she turned six, to ice skating practice.

She has always been taller than other children her age, and when she was attempting to ice skate at six, falling often on her face, picking herself up, and doing it all over again, people watching might have felt that she should be more adapt not knowing how young she was, thinking her at least the age of eight.

She is now an accomplished volleyball and soccer player on her eighth grade team, as well as an outstanding student, always at the top of her class, while physically, moving towards six feet in height. Her mother, my daughter, is six-two, and Rachel’s brother, 15, is six-five so height runs in the family.

During these excursions when she was little, she would ask me such questions that I felt compelled to write down the conversations that ensued, many of which were published in PERSONAL EXCELLENCE, a national magazine. On one occasion, she saw her name in the article but with my picture, and said, “Why is your picture here when it is all about me?” She had a point.

The short piece that follows is a mea culpa. She had started to read “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) by Ray Bradbury, a class assignment, and a book written during the “Cold War” when oppression and repression were on the rise, which she found “weird” making little sense.

I wrote her an email giving her some eleventh hour perspective on the book as the assignment was due the next day and it was already going on 9 pm. I am a high-strung guy and don’t do well when pressed, and this was such a case. As my readers know, typos and other errors are familiar company to me, but seldom errors of facts.

The final comment of this letter has to do with how I withdraw into myself when my work doesn’t go well, which makes the climate tense for others, and such was the case when Rachel shared her dilemma about this book.

* * *

A LETTER TO RACHEL

Rachel,

I'm embarrassed that you shared my quickly knocked off piece with your teacher knowing you had little time to read "Fahrenheit 451."

Now, in retrospect, I must admit to two gross errors. Burgess Meredith did not write "A Clockwork Orange," but Anthony Burgess did. Meredith is an actor and his name in my haste must have come quickly to mind.

The other error is even grosser. Ray Bradbury did not see "Fahrenheit 451" a book about censorship, but quite the contrary. He was attempting to illustrate how fragile freedom of speech and expression is, and that books are the citadel of that freedom, and should be protected at all cost, as those in power, whatever their ideology, like to manage ideas which includes what is written in books.

Bradburfy went to the far side of the idea by creating a vision of books not only banned, but also burned, and that people found reading books would be prosecuted. Taking people out of their comfort sound and widening their horizons is the function of art. Without art, we are all wound up toys in a robotic universe.

As I told you when you were a little girl, I will answer your questions as accurately as I can when you seek my assistance. I failed in this instance as I was in such a hurry to provide some perspective for you to this book.

I thought of writing this note before but thought that you would have rejected my little contribution, only because you had to read the book in a couple of hours, and then, what I love about you, registering your own reaction to the book.

It was and is an important book, but it is not wrong for you to not like it, or to find it confusing, or not worthy of the hype that it enjoys. In that sense, I'd like to share a memory of mine with you.

* * *

When I was your age, my Uncle Leonard, a professor at the University of Detroit, suggested I read, "Man, the Unknown" (1935) by Alexis Carrel.

The French physician was someone my uncle had met at an academic conference in the 1930s, a man who had won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1912. My uncle felt the book might stretch me a little intellectually. I had no comprehension of a Nobel Laureate at the time much less the words that I read. I was thirteen.

I read it again when I was in college and was shocked at its message and amazed that it had been a runaway best seller.

Dr. Carrel advocated enforced eugenics, that is, the systematic development of an elite society of a biological aristocracy. Now, this may not make any sense to you now, as the book made little sense when I first read it at your age, but I wish my uncle had told me the book advocated the extinction of deviant human types such as the mentally ill, the retarded, the criminal, and so on. This is what Adolf Hitler and Nazism attempted to do in W.W.II.

I share this with you because I don't want you to be afraid to have your own mind about books or anything else, and I certainly don't want you to build on ideas because someone won the Nobel Prize or is considered a genius.

Reading the classics -- contemporary or traditional -- provides a foundation for all your other reading but it must include your own critical review based on its relevance to your own understanding.

My uncle may have meant well, but I could have gone off half cocked if I did understand and internalized some of Carrel's ideas at that earlier age, and made them part of my mantra. Thank God, I didn't. I wasn't bright enough to do so. I shall never leave you in the lurch like that, never, if I can help it.

I have not been myself of late because my writing does not go well, and I apologize for that. I will try to be more myself in the future because I love and respect you very much.

Be always well,

Papa

WHAT KILLED LOVE? -- PART THREE -- WAS IT PHILOSOPHERS -- A READER RESPONDS!

2009-11-30T11:13:00.001-08:00

WHAT KILLED LOVE? PART THREE – WAS IT PHILOSOPHERS?

A READER RESPONDS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 30, 2009

REFERENCE:

This missive on love was so long it had to be divided into three parts:

(1) PART ONE: Introduction (Shadow of the Times); Abstract (overview of missive); What is Love?; What Killed Love – Was it Science?;

(2) PART TWO: What Killed Love – Was it Freud: Was it Society?; Was it Religion?

(3) PART THREE: What Killed Love – Was it Philosophers?; Was it Nietzsche?; Was it Capitalism?; Love is Enough!

The reader makes reference to the first two parts but his major comments relate to PART THREE.

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

Thank you for undertaking this complex and challenging topic. To refer to love as a topic seems odd choice. Yet, for the lack of a better word the exploration of an inexplicable sense subjects it to a bit of dehumanization. And taking the human out of love, as philosophers often do, renders it moot enabling endless examinations of its meaning and demonstration.

Yours is an apt description of philosophers (i.e., observers) on a hi-rise looking down on teaming people below. It describes many philosophers’ dispassionate attempt to debate the meaning of esoteric concepts a safe distance from the chaos.

The philosophers who bring true value to that discussion are those who have lived, stripped down to bare essentials among the workaday masses. Eric Hoffer comes to mind.

Often I read your pieces two or three times before responding, taking time in between readings to allow the meaning to digest.

I enjoyed Parts One and Two. You are at your stimulating, thought provoking best in those discussions. It was nice to reflect on those. In the midst of Thanksgiving Day morning activities, after preparing the turkey and putting it in the oven, I checked my email and saw the first exchange. It led me to read Part Three. Only because I didn’t sense in the first two parts any of the anger referred to in your email response.

Maybe my perspective is altered by all the “love” in the air. I don’t get the pessimism.

A year ago, I followed a drawn out path to accepting that I am older and am no longer wanted by the world in which I once thrived. Denial, depression, anger, lots of anger, reflection and reconstruction through the realization that worth is not measured by what some CEO is willing to pay you to do his bidding.

There is a lot to be angry about. Maybe that is what has killed love. Not the anger itself, but the expression of anger. It’s so much more public these days.

My grandson was doing a grade school science project on tornados. Data showed a dramatic increase from the Fifties to today. Is this because many tornados touched down on farmland, destroyed some crops, but were never reported? Wheat, corn and soybeans have been replaced by homes and the tornado has risen in stature.

My parents owned a tavern in the middle of the block on a residential street. It was a place people would come to drink after a hard day’s work and vent their anger about their bosses, politicians, their neighbors, their kids or whatever else irritated them at the moment. They would leave, sleep and awaken the next morning with their harsh words forgotten by most everyone who was in earshot the evening before.

Today, those words are immortalized. Not that they deserve to be. Anger without the hope (sorry) of solution leads to more frustration and more anger. Words that once reached a few ears now reach many ears and eyes.

If anything has “killed” love, it’s the Internet and mass media. Both have enabled an accelerated growth of the worst in human nature. Name-calling, blame without proof, rampant unfounded speculation, and every type of despicable pornography one could (and couldn’t) imagine proliferate in the unregulated and voracious Internet.

Nearly every example you mentioned allowed us time to reflect and recover.

Yes, Hitler rose to power during trying times and whipped up the tempest that consumed by some estimates 12 million innocents. While Jews bore the disproportionate burden of that mass murder, gypsies, the disabled, and several other minority groups were targeted in the attempted mass erasure of those who were different.

In retrospect, people point fingers at Western governments and even the Catholic Church for allowing this to happen. The reality is the spineless German citizens allowed and even relished these despicable acts. They, over time, made us realize the sin of silent protest. We learned from the Germans’ poor example to speak up and act, when our government is irresponsible.

I believe you put this quote in one of your pieces, “Evil occurs when good men choose to do nothing.”

So, genocide continues in Africa.

Wall Street may have affected love by heightening anger and emphasizing the chasm between rich and middle class. It has contributed to the creation of an out class of homeless destitute people reminiscent of the dust bowl/depression era.

And what is their cry? Reduce taxes! Let us hold on to more of our ill-gotten gains!

Drive the markets and housing values down and they get tax dollars to bail them out. Suck everyone back into a stock market built on hope and government welfare to big business and they get huge bonuses as if they actually had something to do with the recreation of wealth. Then, in a classic bite the hand that feeds them they are moved to criticize profusely the government leader who enriched them.

The anger doesn’t end. Love continues to fade. And, like Tinkerbell, love needs nourishment. There is still love, and it can’t be killed, only weakened. Love is a human interaction. It can’t be lost as long as we continue to be human.

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Currently, my thirteen-year-old granddaughter, an eighth grader, is reading Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953). She is a little mystified by the book’s theme, which incidentally, you touch on with your comment about the media and the Internet.

In "Fahrenheit 451," Bradbury makes clear, is not about censorship, but is a story of how television has destroyed interest in reading literature, leading to an obsessive interest in “factoids” or partial information devoid of real content, or relevant context, and I would add without notable attention to subtext.

The subtext is important as Bradbury wrote this book during the dark days of the "Cold War" when he thought, as it turned out correctly, that the next 40 or 50 years promised to be traumatic with reduced freedom and increased control in democratic republics.

The "Cold War" was a psychological war nourished by distrust, paranoia and fear. Books were burned in "Fahrenheit 451" because of that fear.

Today, with the proliferation of cell phones and constant texting along with ubiquitous and senseless entries into Facebook on the Internet, there is justification for your concern. For instance, I am amazed at how little our brightest children know about their own history or geography.

* * *

My general concern about love is not touchy-feely love, not “have a nice day” love, not love on automatic pilot, but love that breaks through all that somehow.

You only have to read your daily newspaper to know some kind of debilitating hate erupts in certain individuals with little provocation that results in murder and mayhem.

Yesterday, four young police officers in Parkland, Washington were ensconced in front of their laptops in a coffee shop, when a gunman came in and killed them. Their ages were 37, 39, 40 and 42. The four officers were having coffee and catching up on paperwork. I don’t know any of these officers, but I grieve for them, and in grieving for them, I grieve for us as well.

Something killed love in that shooter to cause him to go on a rampage. He wasn’t born with that killing hatred. We are part of the killer as much as we are part of the victims even though we would prefer to see it otherwise. We cannot detach ourselves from our times or our crimes. When love is killed in one of us, for whatever reason, it is killed in society as well, which means each of us.

* * *

While postmodern man is celebrating his achievements, we are at war on many fronts: shooting wars in Afghanistan and still so in Iraq, shouting wars in Congress, and splitting hair wars on the diplomatic and political front.

If I may be allowed a non sequitur, I use the terms “modernity” and “post-modernity” quite frequently.

By modernity, I am referring to the period after the Reformation or early fifteenth century to include industrialization, secularization, capitalism and the rise of the nation state. Modernity includes the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the American Civil War. Some would also include WWI and WWII as well as all the wars up to the 1990s.

Post-modernity is after the modern period, and as I use the term, refers to its arrival in late twentieth century, or during the early days of the Information Age, which we are now in, an age that is accelerating at such a pace that the past 30 years compare with the previous 300 years. Small wonder that love has suffered as humankind has been dwarfed by progress, incapacitated by it, and I contend, imprisoned by its many creations.

So, as you and I may have grown up in a much less hectic time, that was even truer of our parents, and of course, their parents. That doesn’t make any of it right, but it gives us some perspective on the problem. We are challenged to become self-responsible as never before against monumental distractions.

* * *

My thoughts regarding the German people are based upon my own experience. I cannot project my mind into the time of Nazism and imagine how I would have behaved were I a German citizen. If I were of the same temperament that I’ve been all my life, I would imagine blond haired-blue-eyed as I am I would have ended in a death camp for my mouth. But I don’t know how I would behave, do I?

* * *

As for Africa, you cannot program people for 300 years in colonial style subjugation and dominance, then withdraw the majesty and efficiency of the infrastructure of European efficiency, and expect the vacuum to automatically fill with a sufficient contingent of professionals to keep the ship of state on course.

No sin goes unpunished, and the sins of Western dominance of Third World countries are now coming home to roost.

* * *

I must admit this triad of missives on love has generated the least response from my email address book of any of my 450 posted missives over the years. I sense one of the reasons is that I’m hard on Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism.

I will leave this world as a Catholic writer whatever I write as Nietzsche could not escape the umbrella of his Protestantism.

I don’t write to please. I write to describe what I see. And I see Western Civilization has created the many problems it is facing today, and yet it will not face that fact.

* * *

Most readers – when they write – mention my “negativity.” I don’t see myself as negative in the least, but angry, yes.

Where I differ with you is that I don’t think anger kills love, but bursts it free of its prison to express itself. Don't disparage your anger, and you haven't. How do I know? Because if you had, you couldn't write these beautiful prose or the insightful thoughts that you do. Anger is the furnace of your ideas and springs alive in reflective commentaries. I thank you for them.

As for love, this is a love letter as all my writings are love letters.

Be always well,

Jim

SUMMING UP OF A YEAR OF QUIET DESPERATION

2009-11-30T06:08:00.000-08:00

SUMMING UP OF A YEAR OF QUIET DESPERATION

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 30, 2009

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862), Walden

* * *

TO MY EX-AGENT

It is obvious by now that you've never heard from John Wiley & Sons about the publication of “Creative Selling” and “Confident Thinking.” Don't you think that is a little discourteous and odd?

I'm dropping any interest in that line of thinking, and moving on. My life has been a series of decades of change, and I guess this new one promises once again such an omen.

During this past decade I've seen the rise and fall of The Naples Institute (TNI), your withdrawing as my agent, the surprising silence of driving force for TNI, who incidentally wrote me recently saying he joined a corporation and has his entrepreneur spirit on hold as well. The world proceeds forward in quiet desperation.

MY BLOG

I've probably said all that I can think of saying and so my missives, which have already tapered off, will most likely fad away. There are some 450 missives published on my blog as matters now stand. I no longer make any effort, however, to see them published.

LIVE AS A NOVEL

Life is a series of connections and disconnects, and of course, reconnections. What is positive about this is that people stay connected to me only as long as they need me and then move on. Hopefully, they then connect with others who need them to keep their courage alive. It is courage that is in short supply. We possess more hope than we need.

Schopenhauer was right. Life is like a novel unfolding with all the parts fitting nicely into place as the book of life is moving to its epilogue. I find this somewhat liberating. I will now worry less about the state of the nation and state of the world, or my role in it, which one might assume reading my missives has been to provide a primer of one man's perspective of the world "as it is."

THE UNREALITY OF THE TIMES

There is little reality in the world today, but unreality is a luxury the world can no longer afford. We focus so much on fiscal responsibility and currency fluctuation when it is individual responsibility and emotional currency that are in jeopardy.

My tolerance, indeed, my capacity to accept the patina of what has become society has hit the wall. When you hit the wall, and we all do at some time in our lives, whether we will admit it or not, the best action is to retreat, move back and laterally to renegotiate alternative action. It is obvious society is not capable of this, which makes it all the more essential that the individual does it on his own to survive.

HOLLOW MEN

My luxury is that I can read and write, think and wonder at my heart's content. My misconception was that people were of a mind to be stimulated to do the same. T. S. Eliot was right. We are hollow men. Why I would attempt to change this is a matter for others to ponder. Hollowness was true in Eliot’s lifetime why should it be any different in mine?

ANGER AS MOTIVATOR

Once I was told that my greatest motivation was anger. I now know that to be true. The problem with anger is that you come to own everyone else's problems. My anger has been how the system is geared to exploit us little people. What has confounded me, but I must accept it to move on, is that most people don't mind being exploited and will continue to find celebrities and heroes more real than themselves, and will continue to be distracted by all the toys the rich invest in and the nerdy create, to keep 10 percent in control of the other 90 percent.

The Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League built a one billion stadium, and now a family of four must fork over $758 to attend a single game. How do people react? They fill the stadium. I rest my case.

What better way to deal with anger then to write a novel?

THE SOUTH AFRICA NOVEL TO BE

My reason for being so tentative about my South Africa novel is that I've always felt inadequate to translate what I learned into a moving commentary of a time, place and space. There is much anger in this book. It is testament of a confused lad in the middle of his meteoric rise only to find that he could not escape identity with the "have nots" while breaking bread with the "haves."

That said working on the novel, whatever it turns out to be, will be my hobby until it or I am finished. If this sounds like a New Year's Resolution, it isn't. I've never made them and don't plan to start now.

I wish you well in the remainder of this year, and a happy and productive one in 2010. Believe me it will be a challenge.

Be always well,

Jim

"WHAT KILLED LOVE?" -- A RESPONSE AND EXCHANGE

2009-11-26T07:51:00.000-08:00

WHAT KILLED LOVE – A RESPONSE AND EXCHANGE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 26, 2009 (Thanksgiving Day)

REFERENCE:

Published in three parts – because of its size – was this essay. It was only posted two days ago, and this is the holiday season, so it is not a surprise I have not heard from those who asked to have the three pieces sent to them. One person has responded with a comparison of my effort with a book titled “The Age of Empathy.” I was not familiar with the book and took it to mean this was, indeed, the age of empathy, which I feel is the converse of the case. This explains the exchange. What it doesn’t explain is my leveling with the reader with my motivation. It is in the spirit of candor that this is now posted.

* * *

A READER WRITES:

We just got our Internet back up (our router had died) so I am still wading through a mass of emails. I read (scanned) "What killed love" and from what I read, it is not very different from the Age of Empathy. I will have to read your blog more carefully in order to really know. Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
Mary

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Mary,

Happy Thanks Giving to you, too. I'm not familiar with "Age of Empathy," but certainly wouldn't call this that age.

Jim

* * *

THE READER RESPONDS TO DR. FISHER:

It is actually an analysis of greed vs. empathy and looks at past ages (and at monkeys since he is an ape specialist - and we are certainly ages). He points out some examples of the maternal drive to take care of infants but also the case of males killing babies. And, no, this is not an age of empathy. I think, in general, given the right circumstances, most humans are more greedy than empathetic. However, also given the right circumstances, a great number of us do show extreme empathy to victims of natural disasters (Katrina, etc) and dip into our pocketbooks to help others in need. A nice juxtaposition. Take care.
Mary

* * *

DR. FISHER REPLIES TO THE READER’S EXPLANATION

Mary,

You are divine! I apologize. It so happened that I looked up what "The Age of Empathy" was about, and I totally agree with your assessment of the author's point of view vis-à-vis mine.

He apparently hits you with a feather and I hit you with a baseball bat. God only knows why I do it. God also probably knows as BB tells me, that I write out of anger, sadness and disappointment, and more for my own equilibrium than the readers. I think that is not quite true, but fair and close.

For example, I was first trained as a scientist and remember with regret how much we thought we were above the fray, that we were a kind of elite that understood what others didn't, and were therefore anointed to pass on our wisdom with sober condescension.

There were exceptions. Dr. James Van Allen (1914 - 2006) was in the physics department when I was at the University of Iowa. He was already famous for having discovered the Van Allen Radiation belt that surrounds our planet. Like many Iowans are inclined to be, he was down-to-earth and disenchanted with the East coast intelligentsia, and refused an opportunity to teach and do research once famous at MIT or Harvard or Cal Tech. He stayed at Iowa, and was modest to the end.

Another man was at Iowa when I was there. He was at Iowa's famous writer's worship that over the years has drawn the best authors of the land. He was a fellow Midwesterner -- Indiana -- and his name was Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I was enthralled with him and although I only audit some of his classes I felt a kinship with him. He once told his students to go out and interview people in their occupations and then write about it.

One student visited the Iowa City power plant with all its turbines and high-pressure boilers. He came away with a sense of the man that would resonate with that milieu. By chance while I was with Nalco Chemical Company, I became consultant to high power plants, and remembered that assessment, which was quite accurate.

Years later, when I came back from South Africa, where I was a corporate executive for Nalco, facilitating the formation of a new company, and had retired -- I was 35 -- after experiencing South African Apartheid, I ran into a professor who developed a theory of "ambient deficiency motivation."

Dr. Gunter's idea was that we are attracted to what we are not or think we should be. The sinner to the priesthood, the criminal to being a police officer, and so on. He never did much with that theory but it has resonated with me since and I wrote about it in my novel, "In the Shadow of the Courthouse" (2003).

Why am I going on? Good question.

I had an estate in South Africa -- imagine that a poor kid from Iowa -- and became well acquainted with my Bantu gardener, whom I write about in my novel still under construction, "Green Island in a Black Sea."

Josiah acquainted me with the religion of animism, while a professor neighbor aquatinted me with the sophisticated structure of the African native tribes. Imagine dealing with this in an essentially police state with a policy of separate development of the races, where roughly 4 million whites dictated the life of some 14 million natives, and you get an idea of the dilemma of a good Irish Catholic boy, his Church, his company, and, indeed, his American culture.

South Africa changed me, and I would imagine you could say I've been a different person ever since. Anger, I suppose, is a motivator, and now that I'm moving into my last years I'm trying to get out of my system what I see -- and what is there for everyone else but disinclined to see -- clumsy as my attempt might me.

Incidentally, you are the only one I have heard from thus far having sent this three-part "What Killed Love?" I sent it only to those who requested it, but I think I understand. My views on religion, science, society, philosophy and government don't follow party lines. I think love is the answer but modernity and post modernity have systematically and systemically destroyed its relevance as well as resilience. We are now in a loveless society bent on destroying our planet as we attempt to save it with technology.

When I say South Africa changed me, I don't want to give the impression that I was by-the-numbers a conventional conforming individual before. It was just that I felt I was living a lie, that corpocracy -- what I call the corporation -- exploited the exploitable wherever I worked, South America, Africa, the Middle East, and, yes, even Europe.

Mary, as a very poor boy as a child, I believed! My Irish Roman Catholic faith was an anchor; my country was an anchor. I believed businessmen were honest and honorable, on an on, the whole nine yards.

Idealism is not a happy place to be in a radically changing world. Social justice was important to me and I was a practitioner and benefactor of social exploitation. I would not have the comfortable life to write these words have I not so benefited.

I suppose every human being at some point in his life comes face-to-face with what he is and isn't. South Africa was mine. BB says I don't write to be published, and she may be right. I suppose I write so that a record of one individual's struggle with identity and authenticity can be recorded.

Thank you for listening,

Jim

WHAT KILLED LOVE? -- PART THREE -- WAS IT PHILOSOPHERS?

2009-11-23T02:03:00.000-08:00

WHAT KILLED LOVE?

PART THREE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 23, 2009

WAS IT PHILOSOPHERS?

We have survived the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter Revolution, Freudianism, and now are in the postmodern era with a decidedly dystopian aspect.

The “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” have been busy. The twentieth century featured:

(1) The White horse of Conquest with first Adolf Hitler’s failure and then Lenin and Stalin’s more subtle attempt to spread global Communism leading to the Cold War.

(2) The Red horse of War ended the nineteenth century with the Spanish American War only to be followed in the twentieth century by WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, and several smaller bloody civil wars of ethnic cleansing across the globe.

(3) The Black horse of Famine made a wide swath across Africa due to drought, pollution, civil war, and the failure of government. Of the world’s six billion souls one billion go to bed hungry every day with a child dying of hunger every six seconds. Add to this the misery of the AIDS pandemic that cuts another swath across the globe, but never more fatally than in Africa.

(4) The Pale Green horse of Death saw over 100 million dying in twentieth century wars and tens of millions more dying of AIDS, numbers far in excess of the Black Death of the Middle Ages. There was the Nazi Holocaust in which six million Jews perished. And then there was United States dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tens of thousands perished but it ended WWII in the Pacific. As society has grown more technologically sophisticated, military and civilian casualties have grown exponentially. More died in twentieth century wars than the previous ten centuries of mortal combat combined.

Science is the new secular religion with technology its acolyte. The sacred cannot be separated from the profane. Philosophy is lost in this conundrum as philosophers are all too human. Although they see what others take for granted, ponder it, sense trends buried in it, their hard and soft wiring, experience and consciousness limit their ideas. We sometimes forget that.

Imagine a philosopher is looking out of a bay window on the top floor of a prominent building with darting humanity happily scurrying about below. In one sense he is separated from the heat and tension of the moment, but in another overwhelmed with its implications. Compelled by his nature to make sense of things, he paints the activity with the broad brush of his intellect and biases.

Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein come to mind. They attempted to bypass man’s ambiguity, staying within the hygienic realm of mathematics. Alas, even there they couldn’t escape their roots. This leaked through their brilliance to reveal a common despair as both men thought of suicide. Wittgenstein once told a friend that before he discovered philosophy he endured nine years of loneliness and suffering. Russell hid his loneliness in being a bit of a rake.

* * *

Dsytopian philosophers have noted an increasingly loveless world. To widen consciousness of this fact they often chose poetry, allegory, fiction and science fiction as vehicles of expression.

Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World” (1932) presents the bizarre world of cloning.

Yevgeny Zamyatin in “We” (1921) paints a portrait of a totally controlled environment (OneState) organized around mathematical precision. People no longer have surnames but are designated by numbers, and marched in-step while dressed in identical clothing.

Ayn Rand in “Anthem” (1938) has the personal pronoun “I” disappear from language. Individualism is extinct, as mankind has entered a new dark age of total communal collectivism.

Poet T. S. Eliot reduces man to a cipher in “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday.”

Margaret Atwood in “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985) visualizes the Republic of Gilead (a.k.a. United States) as a wasteland of nuclear, biological and chemical pollution after a terrorist attack. The population has been rendered sterile with leadership wiped out as the President and all members of Congress have been killed.

Kurt Vonnegut in “Player Piano” (1952) pictures a totally mechanized society that has eliminated the need for anyone to work. This creates a running conflict between the wealthy upper class of engineers and managers who keep society running, while everyone else, who have nothing to do, being replaced by machines.

George Orwell in “I984” (1948) introduces Big Brother who is watching our every move with audio and visual electronic devices. Big Brother has created a new vocabulary of meaning which is the flip side of what had meaning before: war is now peace, evil is good, and hate is love.

Anthony Burgess in “A Clockwork Orange” (1962) has criminals taking on the role of the police. Law and order are a thing of the past. Free will is neutralized and manipulated with chemical and visual programming. Burgess slang entered the popular culture of the time.

In Lois Lowry’s “The Giver” (1994) a utopian world spins off into dystopia. Jonas is selected to be the inheritor of the position of “Receiver of Memory,” where all the memories, of the time before “Sameness,” were stored. As Jonas receives the memories from the previous receiver (The Giver), he discovers how shallow his community has become and aborts the role.

* * *

One might complain that these pedestrian philosophers unfairly attack a caricature of the technological revolution. Remember they are looking down from their elevated perch far above the commotion and maddening crowd.

Love is noticeably absent in these dystopian imaginings. They do however target the failure of religious fundamentalism, misguided technology, scorched earth environmental policy, teenage angst, indifferent parenting, precocious sexuality and juvenile delinquency, genetic modification and bioengineering, the relentless drive of amoral corpocracy, and the cruelty and wickedness that transpires when man’s humanity is unhinged from its roots.

* * *

WAS IT NIETZSCHE?

Nietzsche was different. He saw the rise of secular society and the problems likely to face a postmodern Western civilization. Well informed in Scriptural, historical theology, and doctrinal subtleties of the West, his account of Christian theology in the postmodern world has proven prophetic. As was the case with Freud in his psychological revolution, however, Nietzsche has been misread and misunderstood.

The son of a clergyman, he attacked Christianity because there was so much of its moral spirit in him. His philosophy was an attempt to balance and correct by violent contradiction his irresistible tendency to gentleness, kindness and peace. Often those most controversial and provocative have great affection for that which they attack.

At eighteen, he lost his faith in the God of his fathers in a calamitous cultural crisis. Left godless, he spent the remainder of his life looking for a new deity. He thought he found one in the Superman. He wrote that he had taken the change from God to Superman easily. He didn’t. He had the habit of easily deceiving himself. In fact, he displayed his cynicism as if he had lost everything in a single throw of the dice.

This was so because religion was the marrow of his life. Now, empty of meaning and his once revered anchor, he was forced to go forward. As happens with great men, the struggle often mirrors the struggle of the times.

In any case, he escaped in writing, most poignantly about his new teacher, Zoraster, and his new god, Superman. Yet, in all of his writings, the soul can be seen to rise stubbornly and overflow with a desire for banal love and societal connection. He denied this, of course, but the shadow of the Christian God he abandoned was always there. That is most apparent in his famous but ambivalent report, “God is dead!”

Nietzsche has a madman running through the streets crying, “God is dead!” He presents the madman in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1961) as a sincerely religious and concerned man for the spiritual condition of the modern world. Nietzsche is affirming that the meaning of life is to be found in human terms, that spirituality was never more important. His claim is that it cannot be found in a church or in a god but in the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.

The audience of the madman is of a scientific and material persuasion. This audience prides itself on having renounced religious superstition but is unaware of the brewing crisis. It cannot imagine it has lost anything as it rearranges its life around entirely secular goals. It doesn’t notice the lost, in part because it has maintained the habits that religion had always fostered, particularly the habit of faith, having replaced faith in God now with faith in science.

This new faith, Nietzsche is saying, is no improvement over the old. He combines his statement of “God is dead” with a critique of modern faith in scientific materialism. A knowing society imagines it has replaced fables with facts, but Nietzsche sees the dominance of scientific accounts as substituting one self-denigrating myth for another. If anything, he is saying, the scientific myth is worse. Faith in God eroded our confidence in our own human powers, he argues, which is the basis of his cynicism, but at least it encouraged the belief we have dignity as creations of God whom God took seriously.

The myth of science by contrasts, he insists, suggests the belief that our existence is accidental and that we are organisms on an obscure planet on the periphery of the universe. His problem with religion is its projection of our power onto God, that forces a sense of worthlessness without God, but this is nothing compared with the nihilism he sees that science promotes.

Nietzsche hopes for a rebirth of spirituality with a renewed appreciation of life and nature and man. The shift of the West from a Christian to a secular culture was inevitable, he claims, as the Christian account became more abstract and increasingly divorced from personal experience. Christianity lost connection with people. Failing to recognize man’s changing consciousness and requirements to cope in a more demanding world, Christianity declared war on the body, denounced man’s liberating passions and appetites and relegated them to sources of sin. This made man increasingly self-conscious, self-negating, and uptight.

His problem with Christianity is well known. His counsel for mending the spirit is not. He encourages the embracing of life experience, of asserting our individual virtues and powers, but offers no “how to” formula. He speaks of the “innocence of the senses” and for approaching the world openly, naturally, without trying to improve our wounded sense of inadequacy, but to learn to love the world and ourselves on its terms.

This is a side of Nietzsche seldom captured, the side that would embrace life and love in deference to Christian sin and atonement. He had the madman crying through the streets, “God is dead,” but the evidence is equally compelling that love was dead as well.

* * *

WAS IT CAPITALISM?

Recently, a woman was interviewed on Nightly News with Brian Williams on NBCTV. She is a Bank of American credit card holder. She has seen her service charges increase from 7 to 15 to 30 percent on the unpaid balance of her credit card in a matter of months. She carries a credit balance of more than $10,000 on her card. Economic circumstances forced her to use her card excessively during this past year, and now she is being punished for doing so.

Bank of America, knowing that in February 2010, usury limitations are going to be placed on credit cards, a bank which took billions of taxpayer dollars in bailout funds, is willing to essentially extort money from those least able to pay while it can. This is not an isolated incident.

Democratic capitalism has become an oxymoron.

Democracy sponsors drift. It gives permission to institutions to do as they please, which means democracy lacks a coherent and interdependent approach in crisis in the enthronement of liberty and chaos. Democracy worships mediocrity and distrusts excellence. Democracy literally frustrates the possibility of responsible leadership, especially in crisis, as those elected represent the lowest common denominator of society, as voters vote with their hearts not their heads.

Capitalism encourages greed. Capitalism is an economic and social system in which capital is privately controlled by an elite few. More than 50 percent of Americans may own stock, but the wealth creators or the top 10 percent control the economy. Labor, goods and capital are traded in free markets, and profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries. That is the comic book version.

The reality is that investment and commercial banks that handle electronic transfers take huge risks leveraging capital to the tune of as much as $45 invested for every $1 actually held in securities. With such leverage, Wall Street is able to amass gigantic profits justifying bonuses totaling billions, but with the potential of reeking havoc on the economy when it tanks. Then Wall Street falls to Main Street to bail it out, as in the recent subprime real estate meltdown.

* * *

Americans are paying for this directly, but also indirectly like that lady with the $10,000 credit card debt. She is going to pay and pay mightily for it, not the banks, not the big brokerage houses. They are safe. They have returned to their lair. They have sold taxpayers on the myth that they are too big to fail. Now, a year later, these banks are operating with the same amoral avarice and zeal as they had before. Lobbyists on Capitol Hill are ubiquitously pulling the strings for them with the Federal Reserve and the Federal Government obligingly responding in puppet fashion. Have no fear, the more things change the more they shall remain the same.

Capitalism postulates the idea that the invisible hand of the free market forces self-interest, competition, and supply and demand to reallocate wealth and regulate resources in society. After repeatedly finding this to be false, the myth and the belief still hold as the puppet masters are in charge.

* * *

In the span of eighty years (1929 – 2009), we have had a Great Depression and a Great Recession. We are a debtor nation and have seen the U.S. dollar decline against foreign currency, especially the Euro. The national debt continues to balloon, the trade deficit to climb and seventeen million American workers are unemployed with another 10 million underemployed.

The economy has changed radically from jobs in manufacturing to information technology, from blue collar to white collar, something that was apparent thirty years ago. Yet nothing was or has been done systemically to deal with the drift other than to mount cosmetic changes. Gas guzzling automobiles were anachronistic decades ago, but Detroit continued to produce them. Medical insurance is the highest per capita in the world yet 40 million Americans are still uninsured. More money is allocated to education yet our students in math and science skills compare unfavorably with nations allocating far less to education. Given this, how do you suppose most Americans are feeling? The answer is apparently terrific!

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index surveys 1,000 Americans daily, 350 days a year to measure prevailing attitudes. It has found people are more optimistic today than they were a year ago (88% versus 84%). They have higher expectations in matters of finance and love (70% versus 61%) and 87 percent of those surveyed expect this holiday season to be happier than the last even though they will spend less money.

This defines COMPLACENCY in capital letters. Not a note of worry about joining the unemployed much less the underemployed. Be optimistic, man, think positively, wish for the best, have the audacity to hope! Sound familiar?

Will it be too late when we finally “get it”? Is our arrogance so impenetrable that we’re incapable of embracing reality? Freud writes in “The Future of an Illusion”(1961):

“An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is it necessarily an error . . .It was an illusion of Columbus that he had discovered a new sea route to the Indies . . .The part played in his wish is very clear . . .What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. In this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions . . .In the case of delusions, we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with reality.”

* * *

Reality, economists tell us, is that 2010 and 2011 are likely to be tougher years than 2009. The loss of American jobs to Europe and Asia is expected to continue, not decrease. Lobbyists can be expected to continue to promote corporate self-interest. Corpocracy, in defiance of the congressional agenda, will continue to cut jobs to improve its bottom line. If this is a recipe for happiness, my wonder is what constitutes misery? Apparently, our civil religion, money, remains the opium of the people.

How long can a false positive hold? How long are working Americans willing to take it on the chin? I don’t know the answer. The spirit lives in a body that has to be fed, clothed and housed, and a mind that needs the pride of some kind of life supporting work. Americans love to work. Industry is a romance of the spirit that cannot be denied. Take work away from Americans, and they might as well be dead. This is counterfeit capitalism. Are you listening?

* * *

In “How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization” (2005), author Thomas E. Woods, Jr., gives the Church credit for capitalism and free markets. Woods makes reference to the work of fourteenth century Jean Buridan (1300 – 1358) who showed how money emerged freely and spontaneously on the open market, first as a useful commodity and then as a medium of exchange.

Fast forward to the sixteenth century. Capitalism truly took off in concert with the Protestant Reformation. Economist and sociologist Max Weber studied the influence of John Calvin and the French theologian’s idea of “The Elected,” or the chosen. Weber found the response to Calvin’s secular theology spectacular. He attempted to capture this in “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”(1958). Weber writes:

“The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism . . . Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least the rational tempering, of this irrational impulse.”

There was little restraint evident with “The Elected,” as it came to dominate Europe economically changing the face of capitalism forever.

* * *

Fast forward again to the nineteenth century and the “Robber Barons.” They exemplified White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite, and set the stage for the making of money to become America’s civil religion. Carnegie, Mellon and Rockefeller showed no Weber restraint. In fact, they hired thugs as union busters, created monopolies and held the United States in economic hostage to their demands in steel, oil and timber as they had control of shipping and the shipping lanes, as well as the railroads and railroad lines.

* * *

Now, in the twenty-first century, the broken world cannot be mended with wishful thinking. Two questions come to mind with regard to material (economics) and spiritual (love) needs of man:

(1) What matters most: money or happiness, and are they mutually inclusive?

(2) What has freedom to do with love and happiness and economic success?

Earlier I suggested that we have no middle class; that the majority of us are members of the “the working poor”; that that includes those making as much as $350,000 a year. I sense that Weber’s bourgeois capitalism is on life support here, but not yet dead.

That notwithstanding, the working poor still sees itself as rich but suffering “Puritan anxiety,” or never being “rich” enough. Tempering the rational with the irrational impulse has faded to a dream, as the pressure to have more toys, toys it cannot afford, has not yet peaked. Voodoo economics and counterfeit capitalism now prevail.

The idea no one can ever have enough money is equated with happiness and tied to economic security. Consequently, want is made out to be need, optimism is preferred to reality, wishful thinking is substituted for purposeful action, and frantic cell phone and texting traffic is an escape from thinking.

Are statistical surveys arbiters of self-denial? Pollsters have yet to figure out that people are inclined to say what media has programmed them to think. Virtual reality has become reality without anyone noticing. Complacency is a trance as real as an acid trip in the 1960s that never ended.

* * *

There is nothing wrong with being rich if the price is not too high. Nor is there anything romantic about being poor. But when you are poor because you cannot stop spending, you kill your capacity to love, your freedom to do, and your power to have control of your life.

The proper goal of society is not to deify millionaires and billionaires but to distribute economic wealth so that wealth creators and wealth consumers are on the same page.

As to the matter of freedom, its price has been too high for most Americans to embrace. They have given freedom up without a fuss. We have become increasingly controlled and increasingly the same. Being daffy or dotty, or being out of step with others has disappeared in a culture of sameness. We have become true believers in being connected, and thus have lost our capacity for individual identity. The result? An amalgamated homogenous machine of mass mediocrity.

* * *

Isaiah Berlin has reduced this perplexing polarity to positive and negative freedom.

Negative freedom refers to freedom without constraints, without interference from other people. We display negative freedom to the extent that we have total control of our actions without encountering barriers. It follows therefore that negative freedom places strong limitations on the activities of the state.

Positive freedom is less an individual proposition than a group norm. The state has essential control of our life within a network of constraints and barriers meant to protect us from others and ourselves, or from disturbing or threatening interferences. Homeland Security is an organ of positive freedom.

No surprise here, the rich favor negative freedom. The poor favor positive freedom. The rich prefer as little interference as possible from government regulators. Wealth creators – entrepreneurs – believe positive freedom or regulation neutralizes their efforts. The poor expect support from unions, government agencies, and the United States Congress for their socio-economic welfare. The poor seek protection from those that would exploit them and are willing to give up freedom for such guarantees.

Positive freedom thrives in a climate where there is a disinclination to take charge or responsibility for outcomes. Security is considered more precious than freedom, failing to realize that security so realized is a recipe for counterdependence and subjugation.

On balance, negative freedom is precious but few believe they can afford it. Positive freedom, if not inherently paternalistic, involves external manipulation and control. Working in a corporation in a hierarchically structured organization with managers and workers precisely defined along sacrosanct lines is the epitome of positive freedom. Ironically, managers and engineers think of themselves driven by negative freedom when the workplace climate is the antithesis of such freedom. The command and control hierarchy of corpocracy is a reactive rather than a “take charge” environment. That said it is sobering to realize we all live in a corporate culture. We are a crisis-managed society ever reacting rather than anticipating our problems.

Currently, Congress, the State Department, the Defense Department, and National Security are pointing fingers as to why nobody picked up on Major Hasan’s religious fanaticism before he killed thirteen soldiers at Fort Hood. This failure was consistent with a pattern. Nobody apparently saw the terrorist attack coming on the Twin Towers, the economic meltdown coming, or even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. My wonder is why this is not more troubling.

* * *

The rich are inclined to be inner directed; the poor outer directed. The poor tend to abandon their power as a rule to union leadership and corporate management. There was a time early in the last century, however, when workers had control of their work, but unions persuaded them to give up control for pay and benefits. Now, most of these jobs are gone and the freedom surrendered for job protection and security with them.

* * *

In the perpetual struggle between security and freedom, workers stand in the front line. Now in the era of Homeland Security, surveillance has been ratchet up so that not even the affluent can escape Orwell’s “Big Brother.”

Disembodied voices boom out their futile admonitions at shopping malls, airports and workplaces. Cameras track out our every turning as we walk the streets, looking down from tall buildings, while cameras at traffic lights register vehicles going through stop signs. Then there are always unmarked police cars roaming the streets and sitting on hills waiting to tag vehicular violators. It is also possible that cell phones and Internet activity is monitored. Yet, still more sinister than these irritations is the creeping privatizing of security to corporate contractors. Life appears to be increasingly imitating Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange.”

Americans are not happy with these countless checks and regulations but they are not alone. It has become a condition of urban life in Europe as well British author Anna Minton shows this in her new book, “Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City” (2009).

The affluent, and now many moderate earners have embraced positive freedom by migrating to gated communities or luxury condominiums. These are controlled, and pan optically spied on by private companies whose rules, regulations and sub-clauses prescribe behavior as tightly as a prison. Similar private companies keep a watchful eye for vagaries and eccentrics in commercial malls that might threaten the ethics of consumer conformity. Such segregation is carried out in the name of security. But does it work; do barriers, guards, and cameras make people feel safer? Minton says they don’t. In fact she claims they make people more fearful.

* * *

The paradox of the times is the more we seek security the less secure we are; the more dependent we are on mobile electronics the greater the barriers between us; the more physically we isolate ourselves from each other the more afraid we are to open our doors to strangers; the more we accede power and control to others to alleviate our fears the more fearful we become. Positive and negative freedom is not mutually exclusive but a complementary proposition.

It is a matter of balance. That is where love comes in, self-love, as it will not tolerate unreasonable intrusion. Self-love will embrace its insecurity not run from it; self-love will say, “No, thank you,” when unwanted protection is offered but not asked for; self-love will say, “No, I won’t go,” when what is asked of us is contrary to our self-interests.

Modern walls are being built around us because it is profitable business. The old saw still holds true, the more others do for us, whatever the nature of the doing, the less we are free. Yes, there is crime on our streets but there is much more peace. Remember that.

* * *

Finally, capitalism has become counterfeit because:

(1) The economic level of consumer confidence has tanked;

(2) Consumers have lost trust in producers, in banks, and elected politicians as custodians of the economy; they expected them to play fair ball and they haven’t;

(3) People in general have had their fill of predatory corporations such as Enron and predatory capital managers such as Bernard Madoff; this bad faith has translated into being fed up with financial institutions in general;

(4) Ordinary wage earners and small investors feel let down and exploited by a Federal Reserve too chummy with Wall Street at Main Street’s expense. It has allowed the dollar to continue its decline and jobs with it;

(5) The narrative of economists has been cheery before, during and after the economic meltdown. The story line has been replete with mathematical models these economists favor, which have proved to be as reliable as reading tealeaves. What is more confusing is that many American economists have won Nobel Prizes in Economics parading these mathematical models.

China and India are showing there are many routes to growth and development. Americans have always trusted the system, but now are not so sure. They don’t know the answer or whom to trust. They feel as if left in limbo. They need guidance, but please, no more explanatory models! Tell us where we are, no more claptrap! If forecasting is voodoo economics, tell us. If you don’t have a clue, tell us that, too. Stimulate our spirit with a little candor. That is where love resides. Behavior will follow including a synergy usually only reserved for wartime or national disaster.

* * *

LOVE IS ENOUGH

Man has left the cave but the cave has not left man.

Man no longer fears the beast of nature because he can make machines stronger, faster and more killing.

Man can explore the depths of the oceans, and the remote planets of our universe. He sends satellites into space, and instantly communicates with people across the world by cell phone or the Internet. He can control planes and trains by remote control, clone life by genetic manipulation, tear down or create mountains. But he cannot stop the killing, the unnecessary starvation of millions of innocent people.

Man cannot rise above war, or rapacious crimes against humanity. Nor can he stop himself from heating up the planet or persuade himself to live in harmony with nature. Who does he blame? Not himself. Not his excesses. Not his lifestyle. Not technology. Man blames God and religion for his twisted soul.

Yet, God and soul emanate from instinctive love, a love that makes the world go around. Nature is bridged by science and religion by love, complements that make this hostile planet a tolerable earthly home. Science solves one mystery and creates ten others. Technology takes science and creates wonders at breakneck speed failing to note, much less measure, what has been lost for what has been gained.

Science is important but love is enough. Love gives meaning and balance to life. Without love, man is a runaway killing machine with an incessant appetite for war.

Rogue nations fueled by hate threaten the very survival of man. Secular society has replaced religion with science, looking past its abuses to create bionic man and woman, impervious to growing psychic depression.

The soul cannot be quantified nor can God or love. A billionaire cannot buy love, but a homeless person can possess it, as it is priceless.

Love is to the soul what nourishment is to the body. If you look at the great religions, God and Love are intertwined and interchangeable.

* * *

There is much talk in this secular age of romantic love, sexual love, possessive love, but these are but expressions of lust, not love. We speak of marital love as being a 50-50 proposition, as if love were a capitalistic expression. Marital combat is the result, which is a zero sum game that leads many to divorce. Marital love is a 100-100 proposition, or agape love. It involves respect, trust and acceptance of each other, unconditionally. Anything less is Eros in disguise looking for a replaceable love object to beef up a waning libido. Viagra is part of love’s great deception.

* * *

We live in a paranoid age. We accuse the Taliban and Al-Qaeda of atrocities when we have no familiarity with our own. We see Islam as a satanic religion and label anyone to question Christianity an anti-Christ. Most religions are fundamentally based on love. Something we sometimes forget.

Will love as it once was appreciated come back? Not in my lifetime. We are too enamored of things, too dizzy with technology and global configurations to realize everything, the world over, are local.

But is there still love? I don’t see it; I don’t feel it; I don’t hear it; I just hear noise. I hear noise in music, I see it in art, I read it in literature. I don’t think our best days are ahead of us. I don’t think we are through our worse.

Consider these sobering words of Anton Chekhov in “The Wife and Other Stories” (1985):

“There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him – disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others”

* * *

PS. Forgive me for how clumsy my attempt has been to convey the critical nature of love. Hate is so much easier to express, love so difficult to convey.

WHAT KILLED LOVE? -- PART TWO -- WAS IT FREUD?

2009-11-23T01:50:00.001-08:00

WHAT KILLED LOVE? PART TWO

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 23, 2009

WAS IT FREUD?

Sigmund Freud knew better. He was not only a doctor of medicine but also a student of neurology. He had studied the great religions, the Greek philosophers and the early cultures of man. He was singularly ambitious and desperate to make a difference. His greatness was a manifestation of his egoism. Krishnamurti claimed Freud was swept away by his own conception of self and the problems with which he wrestled. “The Western world,” the mystic added, “was shamelessly inclined to adopt the great physicians neuroses as its own.” It is an engaging story how Freud succeeded.

* * *

He took many false steps, some working with a dentist, where they experimented with cocaine. Some gave them credit for discovering Novocain. In his persistence, he proved quite the fictioneer, that is, having a natural novelist’s panache at case descriptions. His agile prose reveals a poet’s sense of nuance and a novelist’s grasp of gravitas. Yet, as Janet Malcolm (“The Purloined Clinic,” 1992) has noted, Freud’s talking cures are as porous as a sieve, albeit still very much in vogue today.

Psychiatry has vacillated between the absurd and the ridiculous as esteemed psychiatrists and authors R. D. Laing (“Wisdom, Madness & Folly,” 1985) and Thomas Szasz (“The Manufacture of Madness,” 1970) have pointed out. Now, in the early twenty-first century, psychiatry is relegated to pill pushing and brain anatomy, while Western society remains preoccupied with Freud’s erogenous zones.

Szasz is brutal. He claims psychiatry is not an advancement over the superstitions and practices of witch-hunts. Nor is it a retrogression from the humanism of the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment period, but an actual continuation of the Inquisition. All that has changed, he argues, is the vocabulary and social style.

* * *

Freud began his psychiatric practice in Vienna treating the very rich, mainly women, suffering from boredom and unrequited love after being shelved by their prosperous but possessive husbands and lovers. He burrowed into these psyches to expose their early sexual awakenings for answers. It was a prescription for provocation. Novelist John Updike once said, “We want to read about life in full tide, in love, or at war, the wretched childhoods, the fraught adulteries, the big deaths, the scandals, the crises of sexuality.” Freud understood this, laying more claim to his novelistic bent.

Materialism failed to placate restive minds for loveless lives. Starved of affection and erogenous fulfillment, the affluent, who had everything and nothing at all, found solace on Freud’s couch. “Citizen Kane” (1941) gave an American twist to this hysteria with the symbolic “rosebud” of the film, a snow sled that stood for sexual angst.

Freud distilled the psychosexual hysteria from his clients’ panic and then reported it to his readers with the breathless thrill of schadenfreude. His focus on Eros was bold, but consistent with his conviction that repressed sexual love was the underlying neurosis of Victorian bourgeois society. There, Catholicism had locked love out with its dogma, while Protestant Puritanism had placed a chastity belt around sexual mores. Given this programming, he wasn’t short of clientele.

His initial patrons in Vienna were Jewish as were his professional medical associates. This changed when Protestant Carl Jung joined the group. Freudianism would prove far more successful in the United States than Europe. Americans conveniently misread his thesis as they were looking for an excuse to let it all hang out. Western society on both sides of the Atlantic dared now to cease to be Christian but instead attempted to out-Christian each other, while following a theology of more, which led to pervasive decadence.

The Jazz Age and Roaring Twenties of the last century considered Freud “Dr. Feel Good,” giving them permission to put their anxieties behind in libidinous liberation. “The War to End all Wars” (i.e., WWI) had been successfully concluded with the world everyone’s oyster.

“War,” exclaimed Thomas Mann as the European powder keg exploded in 1914 with World War I, “is purification, liberation, and an enormous hope.” War, in other words, is beautiful. For a hundred years, aggression had lurked beneath the surface of bourgeois culture splitting the social order into insiders and outsiders with the infrastructure in shambles. Polite society had lost its way while power was changing hands from the aristocracy to corporate barons, and women were coming out from under the shackles of domesticity and one dimensionalism.

Freud, they mistakenly believed, had taken the wraps off morality. Modern man was entering an undefined period. Peter Gay captures this in a most readable study: “The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud: Vols. I – IV” (1984 – 1995). In this study, Gay traces “The Education of the Senses” (Vol. I) through “The Tender Passion” (Vol. II) on to “The Cultivation of Hatred” (Vol. III) to “The Naked Heart” (Vol. IV). It was the Freudian Age with sensual man being put through this Austrian’s strainer.

* * *

With a bow to Sophocles, Freud identified the “Oedipus Complex,” as a son’s desire to kill his father and bed his mother, and the “Electra Complex,” as a daughter’s desire to kill her mother and bed her father. Sexual fantasies, Freud believed, were repressed in early childhood only to lead to hysterical symptoms in adulthood.

In “Freud: A Life for Our Time” (2005), Peter Gay shows how the creator of psychoanalysis delved into his own subconscious to lead to a new age of thinking. The wonder is how the twentieth century so willingly and enthusiastically took his findings to be its own. Whatever you think of Freudianism, you must admit he had an uncanny way of reducing life’s grammar to easily understood principles:

(1) The Morality Principle: The “Superego” identifies how we should behave. This is the domain of the parent or the authority figure. Authority can be either nurturing or critical but it is always judgmental. It dictates the moral tone and code of how we are expected to think, behave and judge others.

(2) The Reality Principle: The “Ego” identifies how we actually behave. The adult is the mature individual who sees, accepts and deals with reality, or “what is,” defining and solving our problems, not denying them or pointing fingers.

(3) The Pleasure Principle: The “Id” identifies how we want to behave. It is the restless child in the man. It is the person suspended in permanent adolescence and arrested development no matter what age. It is the spoiled brat, the person who is unwilling or unable to grow up. The impulsive “Id” blames others for its failure to make satisfactory progress. The “Id” personifies a current cultural concern (see Diana West’s “The Death of the Grown-Up,” 2007). With the “Id” there is little capacity for delayed gratification. The cry is, “I must have it now, see it now, be it now!” It is the “nowness” of everything that is central to the “Id” character.

Freud could see a repressive (parental) culture spawning a juvenile society (see “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 1961) with the soul of the child under the armor of the warrior. The evidence today is alarming. Patriarchal institutions -- governments, religions, educational institutions and corporations – have become pusillanimously top heavy and lethargic being continuously frustrated by apathetic constituencies, urban gangs and rogue nations.

No one is in control. Everyone is posturing and lecturing, while rhetoric has become surrogate for leadership, which is skin deep. To be fair, so it has been off and on since the beginning of time, especially during transitional periods. We are all marching forward wearing blindfolds with a cockiness that is scary.

The Office of the President of the United States resembles that of a potentate but often acts like a puppet on a string in the discharge of its duties.

There are 545 members of Congress (445 in the House of Representatives and 100 Senators) duly elected by 307 million Americans. Precious few act as the voice of the silent many.

Governance is a function of some 55,000 lobbyists in Washington, DC who dictate trade policy. The fate of the economy is in the hands of former Wall Street insiders who are now running the Department of Treasury. This has become something of a laugher as lobbyists and the appointed let the elected hold public hearings while they pull the strings off stage.

Taxpayers are where the buck stops. In praise of folly, taxpayers received modest checks from the stimulus package, but now they may have to pay back nearly twice as much as they received in the form of income taxes. In Florida, the unemployment compensation tax for small businesses is set to go up by 1200 percent in January or from $8 to $100.31 per employee. Misguided fiscal policy has made these draconian measures necessary.

* * *

American corporations, fronted by an army of lobbyists, keep putting the brakes on healthcare reform legislation while claiming to be passionately for it. Few things are what they seem. There are some 60,000 American military personnel fighting in Afghanistan, but more than 60,000 private military and civilian contractors operating there at the US government and taxpayer’s behest.

This shadow militia of hired guns represents the child in armor playing cowboy at the government’s expense, sometimes with acute embarrassment as we saw in Iraq. Blackwater Security, a private military company, paid Iraqi government officials a million dollar bribe to cover up the massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in September 2007.

Freud wasn’t the first to see through the complicit gamesmanship played between the lines of the sacred and profane. He was but one of the more eloquent voices. The State Department, incidentally, was found to be complicit in the Blackwater Security cover up. Freud saw hypocrisy at the root of modern society and the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity. He writes in “The Future of an Illusion” (1961):

“If religion brings with it obsessional restrictions, exactly as an individual obsessional neurosis does, it comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.” Then he goes on to say, “It tallies well with this that devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.”

This was years before jihadists and al-Qaeda crossed our consciousness, but the germ of Holy War was not far below his radar. My sense is that he would see delusional man in charge today across the global spectrum.

* * *

Not so long ago the child on a rampage (Pleasure Principle) was personified during the HIPPIE revolt of the 1960s and 1970s. Young people took Freud at his Eros word and made love not war, burned their draft cards and escaped to Canada, or formed communes and polygamist relationships. They attacked the system that gave them the right to express their angst while embracing self-indulgent self-destructive lifestyles with impunity.

This hysteria had much in common with Freud’s first clients in Vienna. The unfulfilled Viennese turned to self-absorption. Peter Gay called this “the naked heart.” Young people in the 1960s did the same. Such academic luminaries as Harvard professor Timothy Leary advised them to “tune out and turn off” from the material culture of their parents. Leary gave them permission to trip out, as their parents had been too busy making money to love, protect and nurture them.

So, they became their own parents and an authority on to themselves. They rebelled against the system that killed love and escaped into psychedelic dreams. Parents, teachers and other authority figures lost control, gave up, and retreated off stage. Home, school, and work were reduced to combat zones.

Not surprising, they created a society that mirrored the one they held in contempt. They thought that they were free, but were they? The HIPPIE movement was as dictatorial and repressive as the society they had abandoned. Hippies claimed they didn’t trust anyone over thirty, looked down on anyone who was not of their kind, that dressed, talked, believed, or behaved differently than they did. They came to worship their genitals as their new god as primitives had centuries before.

Hippies now are AARP old, seemingly still unable to shake free of their societal angst. They created, and now are custodians of, a one-dimensional society where sameness rules, still struggling with identity. This struggle is a legacy passed on to their children, and their children’s children. The psychedelic haze of yesteryear has transmogrified to texting, twittering, Facebook and surfing the Internet. Everything is connected in disconnection; only acid trips are now virtual reality escapades.

If sameness were not enough, people have become billboards of self-advertising, no matter the social status, with identity personified in tattoos, body piercing, hair pieces, and wide exposure of naked flesh regardless of how unflattering it is to the naked eye.

Freudianism has become Orwellian. Not only is war interchangeable with peace, hate with love, conformity with individuality, the ridiculous with the sublime, but the profane with the sacred. After all, Freud elevated description to the level of solution, as solutions are more fun than testy problems. Everything is upside down while those in charge don’t seem to mind the discomfort of standing on their heads:

(1) A general declared in the Vietnam War that he had to destroy a village to save it.

(2) The Secretary of the Treasury and Federal Reserve Chairman in 2008 claimed greedy irresponsible banks and investment houses were “too big to fail,” and so taxpayers had no choice but to bail them out. No one had a vote on this.

(3) Credit card companies, part of the grand scheme of these reckless rogues on Wall Street, tossed ethics aside once bailout money brought them back to profitability by imposing usury fees on the very taxpayers that rescued them. Justification? They needed to make a profit.

This brings me to my next consideration.

* * *

WAS IT SOCIETY?

There is evidence we are experiencing a dystopian nightmare. The times defy logic. It is as if we cannot help ourselves.

Who would have thought Wall Street, months after being resuscitated with billions of taxpayer dollars, would return to its old ways awarding itself bonuses in the billions?

Who would have thought after putting Watergate and Nixon’s “enemy list” safely away in the archives of history that the Obama Administration would launch an attack in the same paranoid Nixonian fashion on the conservative Fox News Network reminiscent of those earlier days?

Who would have thought Afghanistan would become chillingly reminiscent of Viet Nam?

Who would have thought a dysfunctional healthcare and educational system, costing more than any other on the planet, but failing on both fronts, would be redesigned and repackaged costing more than a trillion dollars over ten years, meaning it will actually cost three or four times that much, as cash as solution has always found Congress doing little more than breaking wind?

Who would have thought that the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidency, which collapsed on its “guns and butter” policy, would rise from the dead with the Barak Hussein Obama “guns and butter” presidency?

Something is terribly wrong with a society that has little capacity to learn, or courage to change other than rhetorically, choosing instead to repeat its missteps or misdeeds ad infinitum. When a society has leadership afraid to lead, hesitant to create enemies or lacks the courage to oppose friends, then it is a society on life support as it is killing love which is the energy of resilience.

* * *

We are not happy campers and have misplaced our soul, the site of our moral compass and viable center. We have settled on distractions.

Everything in the mind emanates from the soul. It is not something that can be measured by any kind of mechanistic or electronic probe, for it is a nonmaterial something that guides us nonetheless. The soul is something we share with the ancients who lived thousands of years ago, and who expressed it in paintings on the walls of caves as they hid from the wild beast, who were far larger, faster and stronger than they were, but lacked their consciousness.

Consciousness was not enough then. Consciousness is not enough now.

* * *

WAS IT RELIGION?

Primitive man invented religion to connect his frightened center or soul with the reassuring spirit world or God beyond his comprehension. It was necessary as he was conscious of being alone in a hostile mysterious planet.

Man invented time to measure his presence in a timeless universe for he gradually became aware of his impermanence. Yet, he was reassured by the mysteries of darkness and reappearing light, of the clap of thunder and bolts of lightning in the sky that came when the heavens opened up and showered him with life’s essential substance, rain.

Man witnessed the earth as it changed colors, became naked and fallow, then like magic bloomed again, and he worshiped the heavens for this.

Man’s religion took thousands of years before it became anthropomorphic, before he saw man in the image and likeness of his God. Primitive religions, fragments of which are buried deep in our collective human psyches, reappear in some form in all religions, as they are based on mystical wonders and intangible fears that make us human beings, human.

Man is different than the animal and plant kingdom that was here first. This makes man forever an interloper. He must not forget that.

Animism is still prominent in African religions. It is a belief system that finds a soul in everything, animate and inanimate. All religions believe in a soul. Whether the soul is real or not, the fact that people believe in it makes the soul real. The concept of soul is reconfirmed in art, music, and architecture, in cultures that have emanated in the past 12,000 years across the planet. That apparently is not enough.

Man must know. He must understand. It is the nature of man and his restless mind. He is not content to live in harmony with nature. He must conquer it, solve its mysteries so that he may “have dominion over the earth and subdue it.” It prompted Albert Schweitzer to observe, “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”

* * *

The new religion is neural theology. It entered the fray more than a decade ago attempting to find the “God spot” in the brain by doing brain scans of nuns. It was without success. In this age of science, the sublime can become ridiculous with the intensity of the search. Balance is seldom a factor in human consciousness in an obsessive quest for understanding. Are we not still searching for the Holy Grail?

It was Francis Bacon who said in his “Essay of Vicissitude of Things”:

“Solomon saith, there is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon given his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion. We peel away the darkness to reveal the light only to encounter more darkness.”

* * *

If you look at the great religions of man, God and love are inextricably wrapped into the politics and life of the time. Unconditional love of Jesus, alas, did not survive his death.

The early Christians were stumbling in the dark until Paul came along in the first century Christian Era (CE.). At the “Incident at Antioch,” he confronted Peter about the role of gentiles in the Church, a blowup that revealed Peter’s incomprehension of Paul’s ambition. From that point forward, Christianity became Paul’s faith. His Acts and Epistles gave structure to the faith, but also a retreat from the unconditional love and message of Jesus, as Paul advocated a conditional love of sin and atonement.

Apostle Paul is pivotal to the Church. Early Christian scholars track the apocryphal second century writings of Peter and James, Thomas and Judas, some who believed Paul a tool of Satan. In “What Paul Meant” (2006), Garry Wills discredits such claims or the legendary belief that Paul was anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and critical of the teachings of Jesus. The evidence suggests Wills argument is weak.

Everything changed with Paul’s conversion in Chapter 9 of the Acts of the Apostles when he fell off his horse on the road to Damascus hearing the Lord say, “I am Jesus, whom you persecute, arise and go into the city, and persecute me no longer.”

Imagine Saul now Paul, an epileptic, tent maker, and fractured figure of assorted complexities, physically blinded by the event for three days, suddenly sees the Christian message as his appointed task. Passionate by temperament, intellectually gifted with an indomitable spirit, his life reversed direction.

Apostle Paul abandoned the Jewish roots of his fathers and created a proselytizing faith among the gentiles, clearly expressed in the “Letters to the Romans.” The skeletal structure of this new religion was sparse in its reference to the teachings of Jesus but dense in what Christians should believe and how they should live. His Christology of atonement, that Christians are redeemed from sin by Jesus’ death and resurrection, centered around baptism as the free gift of membership in the Mystical Body of Christ.

Scholars dispute all of this with various interpretations because of the sketchy accounts and histories extant of Christian leadership in the first century.

* * *

Fast forward to St. Augustine. His foundational work on the gospels in the fourth century brought attention to grace as a gift, on morality as the life of the Spirit, on predestination as the rationale for eternal life, and on original sin as confirmed by Paul's "Letters to the Romans."

Augustine was a late convert to Christianity. Born in North Africa in the fourth century (354 CE), his mother was a devout Catholic, his father a pagan. He received a Catholic education but was not baptized until a man.

During his youth he had a series of love affairs, but was a serious student of philosophy. His youthful dalliance would trouble him the rest of his life. It would also influence his repressive theology and philosophy

At the age of 32 (386), he read an account of the life of St. Anthony of the Desert and heard a childlike voice tell him, “take up and read.” He took this to mean Christian theology. In 391 at the age of 37, he was ordained a priest. Five years later in 396 he became Bishop of Hippo. The rest is history.

* * *

The theology of Original Sin and the necessity of Baptism to remove it is largely that of this saint. It was Augustine that visualized Hell as a terrible place. Hell had only been a vague notion before. As a man of the cloth, he painted sexual love with Satan’s brush. Before his time, Satan was also a vague notion. Now, Satan took on an anthropomorphic character, a dastardly creature that evolved, over time, into a red devil with horns and a tail, the personification of evil. Augustine didn’t create this caricature but he did help seed it.

This would have unintended consequences. James Cleugh in “Love Locked Out” (1963), shows how this increased, rather than reduced, promiscuity fueling a new industry, pornography. A mental chastity belt confined love making to marriage and procreation. This Augustinian influenced dogma commenced to see sex and love in dualistic Manichean terms of immorality and sin. My wonder is if St. Augustine would be surprised to learn that some sociological studies indicate a disproportionate number of prostitutes have a Catholic background.

* * *

Dante Alighieri would perfect the imagery of Hell (“Inferno”) in his “Divine Comedy” (1320). Dante, who was an engineer as well as a poet and artist, created Hell on a grand architectural scale marrying the grotesque with the comical. For instance, fortune-tellers in Dante’s Inferno have to walk with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, as that was what they had tried to do in life. Catholic popes are depicted as the greatest sinners of all, residing in the ninth or lowest circle of Hell for their pride and corruption.

Still, Hell down through the ages has frightened little children with images of sinners burning for eternity in fire and brimstone. Priests and nuns used this in my day to get students to behave, and it worked.

Fear, not love, has been the prescription for order. Consequently, there appears little evidence that the Jesus message has survived. Jesus never spoke of the “seven deadly sins” (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride) much less mortal sin. These descriptions didn’t come into vogue until the fourteenth century.

Christianity is an evolving religion, and has changed progressively from its conception more than 2,000 years ago. It still professes to be about love but appears obsessed with sin. Blame it on St. Augustine. He was fixated with sin (see his “Confessions”). Catholicism in particular and Christianity have an Augustinian aspect. With television evangelists, love is silent; sin is loud. Hell and the seven deadly sins are largely part of their corporate theology.

* * *

Religion is dominated by politics, by the need for power, not love, for strength, not goodness, for souls, not spiritual fulfillment. The Catholic Church was founded on politics. Constantine in the fourth century made it the religion of the Roman Empire. The Catholic Church for centuries had its own army, and was a powerful feudal landlord, as a matter of fact, it still is.

The Holy Crusades were a religiously sanctioned military campaign waged by Christian Europe to restore Christian control of the Holy Land. These wars were fought over a period of nearly 200 years (1095 – 1291), depleting the treasury of the Church, France and the Holy Roman Empire. They fueled mistrust and hostilities across the empire, and were not holy and certainly not Christian. They had far reaching political, economic, and social consequences extending into contemporary times.

* * *

It could be argued that without the Roman Catholic Church there would be no Western Civilization. Modern science was born in the Church. Catholic priests developed the idea of free-market economics five centuries before Adam Smith. The Church invented the university. Western law grew out of Church canon law, which was introduced by St. Augustine and St. Aquinas. Indeed, the human aspect in all its sublime to ridiculous sojourns can be traced back to that foundation. With such formalism, love hardly had a chance.

* * *

Love was not on display in the twelfth century when the Church resorted to an ecclesiastical proscription of torture and execution for heresy. The interrogating body formed for this work was known as “the Inquisition.” Dark as the Inquisition, it still survives. Twentieth century Pope Pius X, later canonized a saint, renamed the Inquisition the “Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office.” Then in 1965, it was renamed the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” which it remains to this day. Punishment in the modern era is more likely to be ostracism from Church membership in the Mystical Body of Christ.

* * *

Whether you believe in God or the Christ of Christianity, there is historical evidence that Jesus did live and died on the cross, and that his death was an expression of love. Christianity since has claimed to be the religion of love although it has often stumbled and displayed quite the opposite. Distortion of message and fanaticism is seemingly common to all religions. Lest we forget Christian missionaries supported by sixteenth century Spanish Conquistadors annihilated Latin American cultures and decimated their pagan religions and imposed Christianity. How’s that for love?

* * *

WHAT KILLED LOVE? -- PART ONE -- INTRODUCTION

2009-11-22T20:09:00.001-08:00

WHAT KILLED LOVE?

PART ONE -- INTRODUCTION

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 23, 2009

* * *

SHADOW OF THE TIMES

Hate, violence and death are on parade.

U. S. Army Major, and Board Certified Psychiatrist, Nidal Malik Hasan, murdered thirteen and wounded more than thirty at the Soldier Readiness Center at Ford Hood, Texas, the largest military personnel facility in the United States.

A Russian émigré living in Germany claimed he ‘hated foreigners’ then stabbed to death a young pregnant Muslim mother in a court of law in Dresden, Germany. He also wounded her husband. Alex Wiens was in court to appeal his conviction for spewing racial epithets at Marwa el-Sherbini in the presence of her three-year-old daughter. The slanderous behavior occurred in a Dresden public park when the young mother asked Mr. Wiens if she could use his swing for her daughter.

In Tampa, Florida, four teenage boys, fourteen to sixteen, beat and raped a thirteen-year-old boy without remorse because he was ‘a retard.’

A young gay man in Kingston, Jamaica on his way to Catholic Mass was murdered without much public dismay. Jamaica has zero tolerance for homosexuality.

In Jefferson City, Missouri, a fifteen-year-old girl dug two holes in the ground, and then plotted the right time to murder and bury her victims. Without provocation, she strangled a nine-year-old girl, cut her throat and stabbed her to death, then buried her. Why? She wanted to know what it felt like.

* * *

We live in a culture of hate, a culture of violence, and a culture of death. If you have any doubt, check the subject matter of most popular television programs, films, rap music, novels, and then play this against the central theme of the nightly television news.

Here in Tampa, Florida a day doesn’t go by that there are not multiple murders, hate crimes from graffiti painted on people’s garage doors or public buildings to diatribes on talk radio. The most heinous crimes appear on the back pages of The Tampa Tribune such as ‘a Haitian man, 33, in Naples, Florida kills his wife, 33, and his children 9, 6, 5, 3, and 11-months.’ Another Tampa man hits his beautiful wife on the head with a hammer, douses her with inflammable fluid, and then torches her. She is now in hospital in critical condition with burns over 80 percent of her body. ‘Now I am the monster you thought me to be,” he gushes.

This is the age of Darwinism where the gap between a cockroach and a human isn’t measured in terms of love or a soul, but by the passing millennia. One wonders if death and hate through the vehicle of violence have become less somber. Has the dark side of human nature become almost friendly? Have we as a society become tired of life? The words of Apostle Paul come to mind, ‘Death, where is your sting?’

* * *

It didn’t start this way at birth. A child comes into the world loving its mother, curious of its surroundings and early associates, innocent of self-loathing. A child is born embracing life in communion with others. Hate and violence are learned behaviors.

“Love is a natural expression of life. Love is majestic at birth but thereafter vulnerable to pain and depletion as life is embraced and the reality of experience kicks in.

* * *

Love has been killed. Many have killed love. Most prosaically, we could say work is one of love’s killers. Work was once love made visible. Work no longer is love, visible or otherwise, but predicated on power and profit, not service and satisfaction. We are attracted to work that fills our pockets not our souls. Few are in work that they love. Most have contempt for what they do. They choose to believe circumstances have so imprisoned them, failing to realize choice is a cage of weakness of will.

In this darkness of circumstances, we have become “the working poor.” We have no middle class. It is a myth we cling to; it has evaporated except in the coldness of governmental statistics. Most Americans (80%) are slaves to the job whether they earn $20,000 or $350,000 a year. They live to work, not work to live. They are wound up machines on automatic pilot programmed to the mantra of their masters.

Corporate capitalism finds workers addicted to credit cards, excessive mortgage payments, indulgent lifestyles, expensive gas guzzling automobiles, and other extravagances that mimic the rich while vulnerable to having their jobs cut out from under them at any time at corporate whim without any apparent recourse.

By the same token, corporate welfare depends on the robotic demand and conspicuous consumption of the working poor as it accounts for two-thirds of the GDP, which means it must buy what it doesn’t need and can afford, saddling itself as perpetual debtor never creditor. Should the working poor reverse this and become creditor rather than debtor, the economy would collapse, and corpocracy with it, which cannot be allowed.

Multi-billionaire Warren Buffet has understood this heresy but has not been humbled by it. He is a common man with an uncommon touch, living modestly despite his great wealth, as his grasp has never exceeded his reach.

Money is America’s civil religion. Money has no soul. Money promotes competition at the expense of cooperation, profligacy at the expense of prudence, subjecting the working poor to hell on earth. This represents the sullied progression of capitalism from ‘creative destruction’ and freedom to fail, which it was meant to advocate, to ‘too big to fail’ and counterfeit capitalism. The love of work, which is who we are, has been cut out of the heart of Economic Man. This is how work killed love.

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

* * *

ABSTRACT

“How the brain works” was the subject of discussion on PBS with Charlie Rose with a panel of distinguished American scientists. The brain has fascinated man for ages and still defies his probing.

The program dealt with consciousness, brain neurology, various areas of the brain and how they function, and how genes and the billions of brain cells connect with their synapses to result in thought, experience and behavior.

The claim is, there have been extraordinary advances in brain science in this new century. Scientists are becoming more confident such terrible diseases as Alzheimer’s, autism, and Parkinson’s among others can be better understood, and if not cured at least stopped in their advancement.

A notable comment was that pharmaceutical therapy dealing with brain disorders has not been effective and continues to make little progress, yet we are a pill dependent society.

At the other end of the spectrum on the History Channel, exorcism was discussed, the practice of driving out evil spirits from a person. This ancient practice of thousands of years continues unabated. The late Pope John Paul II in fact engaged in it when a parishioner had a fit while he was saying Mass. In the light of scientific inquiry, exorcism would seem absurd if not diabolical. Yet it is not only practiced, but the Church of Rome has a college dedicated to training priests to become exorcists.

In the midst of all this, the mind, which is the blueprint of the brain in action, continues to mystify scientists on how it works.

As I walk today, these thoughts percolate through my mind but take an unexpected detour to the matter of love. Love was not mentioned with this panel of scientists. Nor was love discussed on the program devoted to exorcism. Scientists have little inclination for such dalliance, yet good and evil evolve from the hard and soft wiring in the brain where love resides until it is damaged by our early programming.

My wonder is what has happened to love, the social inhibitor that gives balance and resilience to the human spirit. I can only conclude we have killed love as I see us lost in a “mind field” of terror. We have become enemies of each other because we are in a war with ourselves. We have lost the saving grace of love. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the world in which we reside.

Scientists, I suspect, are unmoved by my concern. Their sights are too lofty on such matters as the brain’s topography, and too noble in their quest for conquering physical diseases to be distracted by societal diseases of the spirit. After all, love and the soul are not readily quantifiable. My sense is the more scientists pursue material mysteries, the more they are frustrated by the immaterial world.

Man is full of himself. Yet he continues to thrash about blindly unable to get on top of such issues as global famine, global warming, global war, or other essentially behavioral issues of man. The Church thrashes about with exorcism. Medical psychiatry thrashes about with frontal lobotomies. The human soul has lost its moorings. A recipe of erotica failed to create stability in the high Middle Ages; nor has the somber Puritanism of modernity managed it any better. Now, in post modernity, the soul is looking for love in all the wrong places.

* * *

WHAT IS LOVE?

We live in the Darwinian Age. Everything seemingly is evolving accept love, which is a constant. Theology has been stripped of the miraculous. Biology has become bionic. Strength is preferred to goodness, pride to humility, intellect to passion, and power to love.

Critical philosophy is preferred to philosophical poetry, science to art, intellect to instinct, logic to mysticism, optimism to pessimism, and fear to love.

There has been no shortage of the chemistry of emotion. Love is an emotion, but the need and capacity to love is not a simple synaptic connection in the brain nor can it be reduced to an emotional affect.

I walk today through my Florida neighborhood in record-breaking October heat (92 degrees) drifting away into muddled thought. Systematic thought no longer interests me. Thoughts roam through my conscience as automobiles speed by, cyclists push me to the curb, and joggers remind me I am old and slow as their happy feet dance by. They pay me little mind, but yet we are connected in love and life. We are love itself manifested.

* * *

My aim here is not to dream up a new theory, develop a new religion or philosophy, but to cause readers to think, to be less awed by what prominent voices have to say, as in truth their views emanate from their own peculiar darkness. My hope is that readers will seek the light of their own ways. .

Four loves that I would like to mention are Agape, Eros, Narcissism and Altruism.

(1) Agape is unconditional love. It is the love of a parent for a child. It is the love expressed by Jesus for all humanity in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as well as in the apocryphal gospels of Thomas and Judas, Peter and James. It is the love that has no boundaries. It is love most generous.

(2) Eros is sexual love. It is the lust of the flesh, the desire for pleasure and physical fulfillment. Eros is the secret will to power, to possess, to master and to subjugate. Eros is jealous love, yet as romantic love it inspires affection and friendship. It is conditional love, something given for something received. It is needy love, which is helpless against the demands of passion.

Whereas Agape cannot be quantified, Eros is obsessed with quantification and qualification. Eros debates, describes and calibrates love listing pros and cons, assets and liabilities of the beloved as if a commodity to be purchased. It evaluates and measures performance and ecstasy. Eros is based solely on need and need fulfillment. In fairness, Plato claimed Eros helps the soul recall its knowledge of beauty. He saw it contributing to an understanding of spiritual truth.

Eros is the wellspring of storytelling and poetry, of philosophy and art, of literature and music, of architecture and mysticism, of lying and treachery. Eros is the love that can never be satisfied and therefore it must constantly renew its demands to survive. It is love most egoistic and least generous. It is love that worships the body and forgets the soul.

(3) Narcissism is self-love, the most confused and baffling of loves because it has been misrepresented from the first. Narcissus in Greek mythology pines away for love of his reflection in a pool and is turned into a flower. What should he have seen looking into the pool but himself?

Narcissism involves personality traits such as self-esteem and self-image, but it is still more fundamental. It is the love and respect that emanates from deep within the self, not as an object to worship but as a compass to guide, direct and control behavior.

There can be no love of others if there is no love of self. Contempt for one’s self results in the same contempt for others. To attempt to love others empty of self-respect is to be false and disingenuous. The pejorative of self-love is self-deceit expressed in vanity, conceit, egotism and selfishness, and ultimately, self-hate. A generous spirit rises from one not needy but full of love, one that becomes more loving in the giving.

(4) Altruism is love of others. Altruism is an essential part of humanity. It comes into play when we are self-forgetting and reach out to assist others in need. It is the love expressed when we leave the comfort of our home to help flood victims of a raging river, when we volunteer at hospitals, soup kitchens, schools and churches to assist the disadvantaged, when we do something selfless even though we may never be found out.

Albert Schweitzer personified altruism. He gave his life to science and art until he was thirty. The balance of his life was given to humanity. A celebrated classical European musicologist (organ), composer, theologian, and philosopher, Schweitzer left this world to study medicine. Once a doctor, he set up a hospital in French Equatorial Africa at Lambarene, a deserted mission station, to treat leprosy and sleeping sickness. There his ethical principle “reverence for life” was fully worked out in relation to the defects he saw in European society until his death in 1965 at the age of 90.

The Peace Corps, Doctors without Borders, missionaries, and other volunteer organizations display altruism as they step out of their comfort zone to serve others, thus erasing boundaries between race, religion, ethnicity, language and culture. Unfortunately, this flies in the face of the opposite trend, which we will now discuss.

* * *

WHAT KILLED LOVE?

WAS IT SCIENCE?

Science has flourished in Western society for reason. Christian and Judaic belief systems separated nature from religion. Genesis (The Bible):

“Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over the earth and subdue it.”

Conversely, religions of the Far East were pantheistic with nature and religion intertwined discouraging inquiry into nature’s mysteries.

* * *

The idea of the soul is a distraction to science. With science if it cannot be measured, it does not exist. It is precisely because of this that mystics and philosophers and great religions have flourished. With them, it is a matter of faith and wonder.

We are in a scientific age that is as dogmatic and righteous as was the great Roman Catholic Church in its heyday. We expect scientific objectivity, but not dismissive contempt for the soul. Whether the soul is or isn’t, it exists in the mind of most cultures and religions of the world, and therefore impacts behavior. The soul cannot be ignored but it resists as well being found out. It is the eternal conundrum that connects modern man with his primordial roots.

* * *

That said the late Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of the genetic molecule DNA with James Watson, developed an interest in the brain and human consciousness. This led to speculation about “the soul.” Crick after Kant dismissed the idea that the soul could exist if it were impossible to detect and measure.

Science now finds one Galen Strawson postulating about neural metaphysics. He claims the self exists but is not a human being. He holds that experiences are events in our brain, and if there is a self, which is our subject it, too, must be in the brain. This is a departure from Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.”

Crick and Strawson are saying if the “soul” and “self” exist they must reside in the brain, the residence of the mind. Scientists are the latest pioneers plowing through the iffy territory of brain topography with neurophysiology and genetics, among other disciplines.

Crick’s “The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul” (1994), while complex and confusing in its inquiry, leaves the reader essentially empty in the end. The same is true of Strawson’s “Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics” (2009). The soul or self fails to materialize in the brain or to be refuted as existing elsewhere.

* * *

Scientists are forever undaunted. Now they are measuring blood flow to the brain in an attempt to identify love, creativity and happiness. This is part of the drive to understand how the brain works, and to arrest if not cure disturbing diseases that find residence there.

Magnetic Resonance Imagining (MRI) has gained stature. These $3 million tunnel machines are designed to examine what is happening in the brain. A person placed in the machine is asked to fix attention on God, love or happiness to see what magnetic resonance field is created. Blood flow patterns to the brain are hoped to reveal important clues to these elusive human emotions.

Color-coded maps of the brain form labyrinths of thought that are displayed on screens, which then can be interpreted. Pepsi and Coca-Cola have been doing this for years in neuromarketing campaigns. So, if it works with colas, why not on love?

It seems predictable that fMRI’s (i.e., function of this technique) would attempt to measure genius along with inspiration for art, the nature of love, and an appreciation of beauty, followed by correlation of these findings with brain activity. My wonder is what Leonardo de Vinci’s brain might have revealed. Genius he was, but also known to be a bit of a scatterbrain with an unreliable attention span, and a tendency to abandon pet projects before completion. .

Bizarre as it may seem, once Einstein had died, his brain was stolen from his body, secretly sliced in sagittal sections, chromatically dyed, and then analyzed to discover his genius. Nothing of significance was found. My conclusion: we think too much.

Passion was the breadth and depth of de Vinci’s character. It compelled him to investigate an infinite multitude of mysteries leaving him little time to surrender himself to their completion. James Watson of DNA fame claimed not to be particularly intelligent but avidly curious. Einstein made the same claim, but added the difference with him was that he stayed with problems longer than his colleagues.

* * *

We live in a paradoxical age of waning curiosity and obsessive self-consciousness. This is displayed in runaway technology. No one seems concerned with what is lost for what is gained. Technology always lags science by hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. Archimedes may have invented the first crude computer, and he died in 212 BC. Technology always piggybacks on earlier science. Likewise, art frames its time.

Matisse took apart and reconfigured the components of color, but my sense is he was unconscious of the neural landscaping and neural sculpturing of his efforts. Van Gogh logged his perceptions in frantic flushes of color seemingly unconcerned with the mathematics of a world within or without. When he put brush to canvas in Arles in 1888, I doubt he saw the eye as the mind’s passive receptacle for all the stuff pouring into it from the outside. Picasso kept devising new periods of his paintings to escape a triangular straightjacket. These artists knew without knowing, which is the residence of art.

Let us say that neuropsychology, genetics, neurobiology and neurophilosophy succeed in their ultimately quest to determine how the brain works, how it forms concepts and translates these into acts, what then will be left of the imagination? Will there ever be a painting to rival the eyes of Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” Michelangelo’s “Sistine Chapel,” Cézanne’s “Mount-Sainte-Victoire”?

These artists didn’t question the soul, which is present in their works. Art today is angry and self-conscious. It reflects minds groveling in self-pity in the sinkhole of despair. Works of art today are often filled with contempt and hatred expressed in vile desecration of cultural icons such as Andress Serrano’s the “Piss Christ.”

One of the panelists on the Charlie Rose show made the distinction between the silicon of the computer and the organic construction of the brain without disclaiming the brain being something of a computer. The computer given its widely acclaimed advantages and advancements does not have a soul and is incapable of love. Since we are becoming increasingly slave to electronic devices, it would seem science and technology is playing their part in the death of love.

One experiment I read about in graduate school involved a volunteer couple that professed to being very much in love. The couple was essentially starved, eventually presented with food, studying how they would react. They shared the simple meal. This was much less sophisticated than psychologist Arthur Aron’s attempt to measure love by blood flow analysis to the brains of people claiming to be in love. Researchers concede that love is a possible intuitive designation, but still wonder if there are “love spots” in the brain. Be confident science will try to isolate them if there are. Beyond that, there is likely to be little agreement.

* * *

THE MEAGAN DREAM

2009-11-04T02:02:00.000-08:00

THE MEAGAN DREAM

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 3, 2009

BACKGROUND

Meagan was our calico cat who died while we were in Europe in 2003. BB and Jennifer were quite close to her. I got to know her on my own when we were in Europe in the 1980s, so Meagan was quite old when she passed on.

Meagan would jump up on my desk or my computer while I was working. I would pick her up and put her outside the door of my study, and she would sit there until I opened it to go for more coffee. Then she would scoot back in, and repeat her behavior until I finally relented and left the door open.

We had this huge place in Brussels with high ceilings and large rooms. I'm something of a cleannik and would vacuum whenever I saw cat litter on the carpet. European litter would stick to Meagan's paws, but it must have seemed like punishment because once the vacuum cleaner came out she would fly to a rafter, head for one of the bathrooms, or camp high on the woodwork overlooking the fireplace.

Meagan never liked the vacuum cleaner, so I would forewarn her, "I have to vacuum now." Hearing the word, "vacuum" would find her moving slowly out of sight and harm's way. It was when I didn't warn her that she would show panic.

Over the years as a writer with BB in her professional job as an accountant and business manager, the two of us home, alone, I would talk to her about my writing, my ideas, about my concerns, even my angers.

Meagan would sit there attentively with her ears perked up acting as if she was listening no doubt thinking she shared the space with a disturbed man.

No athlete in my experience could leap from one bookcase to another, or from one tall stanchion to another with such grace and poetry. Even flying from the carpet to a sofa or chair was a matter of exquisite grace and poetry. I would tell her that if I had had such athleticism I would have been a professional basketball player. She would cock her head to the side as if to say, "Don't you wish!"

Our affection for each other was gradual, very gradual, as I came into her space unannounced with little interest in domesticated animals much less a highly athletic and intelligent cat. It didn't take me long, however, to respect her independence, appreciate her self-reliance, or marvel at her hygiene, dutifully licking her paws and constantly grooming her beautiful calico coat. Why I should dream of her now is as much a mystery to me as it might be to my sharing it with you, but here it is.

THE DREAM OF MEAGAN

It is very hot. I am in the city. I have taken off my jacket and long sleeve shirt and tied them around my waist. I am carrying Meagan under my right arm. Meagan is small and light and yet my wet T-shirt is matted to my skin and her beautiful coat is matted and snarled with sweat as well. I can't put her down because I'm afraid she will run off and get lost. Since I am already lost and struggling to find my way, I am consumed with that possibility.

As a rule, she doesn't like to be held. I don't like it. But it would seem there is an understanding this is the best of all possible worlds for us at the moment. I say this because she makes no attempt to jump down and run off.

We have been walking down narrow streets, climbing streets that seem almost perpendicular, always coming out more lost than ever. Nothing seems familiar. People pass by and ignore us as if we are invisible.

Meagan and I are not only hot and sweaty, but also hungry and thirsty because we haven't eaten or rested for hours.

Finally, we come out of the claustrophobic and stultifying heat of the city into the open countryside. There are no trees; no relief from the heat as the sun beats down on us unmercifully.

"I've got to put you down, Meagan," I say, "and you can walk beside me like a dog walks beside its master." She turns her head and looks up at me with pinpoints of contempt. "Honest," I continue, "you'll find it will be cooling and far less clammy not having to share my body heat."

I put her down, and start walking. I look back. She has not moved. Dust is blowing in her face but she's paying it no mind. She is standing there on all fours staring at me.

"Now what's wrong?" I ask, "Is it what I said? Is it because I compared you to a dog?"

She cocks her head to the side. Her ears perk up. "Well, I'm sorry. I'm not myself. I'm lost. I'm tired. And if you want to know the truth I'm just a little bit desperate. So, I could use a little understanding." She doesn't take her eyes off me.

"You ought to know by now I'm not at my best when I'm upset. Well, I'm upset now, okay? All I know is to go forward. I don't know anything else. I haven't any answers. If we don't get some water soon, I'll tell you this much, it'll all be academic. Understand?"

Meagan still doesn't move. "Have it your way. I'll get down on all my fours and say I'm sorry for bringing up the subject of dogs, okay?" I get down next to her and she jumps on my shoulder. I get up and cradle her in my arms. She snuggles her head in the crook of my neck and purrs. "I don't believe it. You would rather be hot and clammy than feeling the cool breeze?" I shake my head. She snuggles closer.

Then for the first time I feel her blood throbbing through her little body, feel the rhythm of her heart, and know she is as scared as I am, that she feels we might be in the hands of destiny and won't come out of this alive. Knowing this, her pulsing body tells me she wouldn't mind a little discomfort. I squeeze her gently. She purrs knowing why.

The road is open, dusty and seemingly endless, as if it will drop off to nothing. A piece of debris catches me in the eye and I feel my eye tearing. I shiver a little feeling sweat trickle down my spine. I look down to see if Meagan notices. She only snuggles closer. Somehow this feels reassuring.

At last, up ahead there is a gas station with an attached broken down building made into a restaurant. No cars are outside. Flies are everywhere and the screen door has holes in it. A bell jingles when we enter.

"No animals allowed in her, mister," a lady says with a flabby face hair in curlers and a cigarette dangling from her lips.

"This isn't an animal. This is Meagan my cat and we just want a drink of water."

"Got any money?"

I shake my head, "No."

"Got a credit card?"

"No."

"Then you best be off."

"All we want is some water."

"What's the problem, Myrtle?" A voice cries out from the back room.

"No problem, Oscar, this fellow is leaving, aren't you, mister?"

With slumping shoulders brushing the flies off both of us, I push the screen door and feel the dust blowing in my face. No sooner did I experience this, and try to wipe my eyes then Meagan squirms frantically, her paws scratching my arm as she leaps to the ground, reminding me of how she acts when I'm about to take her to the vet's.

She runs off and I followed her to the back of the place where there is a rain-collecting basin. How she knew it was there I don't know but she did. She cups her front paws under her and buries her face in the watering lapping it up nosily as if she has never tasted water before.

I drop down beside her, cup my hands into the water and gulp it down but still noting its slightly metallic taste, but it is a feast nonetheless. We will survive!

Then I wake up.

THE FALLACY OF HOPE

2009-10-21T23:43:00.000-07:00

THE FALLACY OF HOPE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 22, 2009

* * *

“My principal design was to inform you, and not to amuse you.”

Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Anglo-Irish poet, satirist and clergyman

* * *

THE AUDACITY OF HOPE EXPOSED

You that read me know my disdain for the concept of hope as compared to the idea of courage.

Courage is active and positive. Hope is passive and wishful thinking.

Courage requires doing something even if it is wrong. Hope looks to someone else to do the dirty work.

Courage operates from a position of taking control. Hope surrenders control expecting someone else to manage the outcome.

Courage entails risk, possible failure, and often setbacks. Hope places that responsibility and authority on someone else.

Courage doesn’t react to circumstances. It anticipates them and takes action. Hope shields itself from action by projecting blame when things go awry.

Courage embraces the challenge with gusto. Hope is prisoner to outcomes.

In baseball, a ground ball can be zooming at an infielder at 90 mph. He can charge the ball and embrace the challenge or sit back and play for a good hop. Should he choose the latter, chances are the runner will cross first base before his throw gets there, or he’ll be fooled by the hop and commit an error.

Major League infielders charge the ball. Amateurs often look for the good hop.

There is no audacity to hope when not structured around courage.

* * *

In my long life, it would seem increasingly so that there is little difference whether the Democrats or Republicans are in power. Neither party seems able to escape an obsession with hope.

Both parties are controlled by corporate masters through an army of lobbyists who eclipse the political democratic process by dictating the corporate will.

Eisenhower called it the “military industrial complex, but now it permeates every quadrant of American society. It is evident in the current charade on healthcare, as it was and continues to be evident in the administration's ambivalence towards the War in Afghanistan.

The agents of the puppet masters are not elected to public office but they control the day.

Barak Obama got my vote, despite being disparaged by his campaign book, “Audacity of Hope” (2006). I forgave him for this, thinking it was simply a campaign strategy to get elected, confident, once elected, he would display the courage that change necessitates.

What I see thus far feels strangely like déjà vu, or Bush all over again. Columnist and former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan claims President Obama is not a natural decider. Obama is proving the pundit correct. I have worked for such men. They see themselves as prudent not realizing they are paralyzed with fear of making a decision.

We have a president-in-training with practical no corporate decision making experience. This was also true of Abraham Lincoln, but he was a successful practicing attorney in Springfield, Illinois, and was considered reasonably wealthy when he took office.

President George W. Bush had an executive background. He turned his back on his family’s fortune (something his brother, Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, didn’t), left the northeast and went wildcatting for oil in Texas, struck it rich after many failed attempts, and established his own successful company. He became a majority owner of the Texas Rangers of Major League Baseball, and continued in that capacity until he sold his interests at a handsome profit.

Bush's nemesis was the neoconservatives who owned him, including Vice President Chaney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. They talked him into a preemptive War in Iraq, when Afghanistan was where Al-Qaeda was entrenched. He is now saddled with that legacy thanks to the neocons, who have gone on their merry ways unscathed.

* * *

More than 10,000 books have been written on Lincoln. I’ve managed to read a few. I think it unfair to compare President Obama to him or his presidency. Lincoln is remembered for his eloquence, for the Emancipation Proclamation, and for winning the Civil War, but the man he was is buried in subtext.

Lincoln may have been honest, but he was also tough, some thought vicious, as he never acted in half measures.

When he was a young man he was quite a wrestler, long, sinewy, and deceptively strong. He would allow his opponent to flex his muscles, make scary, and then quickly pin him to his opponent’s embarrassment. Lincoln didn’t believe in telegraphing his moves but exploited his rival’s weakness with animal like agility.

During the Civil War, Lincoln had a pusillanimous general-in-chief of the Union Army, George Brinton McClellan, nicknamed “The Young Napoleon.” He was a man with impeccable military credentials, good breeding and flawless sophistication, but otherwise a spineless wonder when it came to making decisions on the battlefield.

McClellan was also insubordinate. Lincoln removed him and for a time was general-in-chief of the army as well as commander-in-chief of the nation. Lincoln, by all accounts, was decisive, cold, calculating, and unyielding to the enemy in his battlefield strategies. After the war, there was an effort to try him as a war criminal citing these directives.

A talent for leadership is derived from a sense of character that is not always obvious or limited by pedigree. Lincoln went deep into the ranks of his generals before he found Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman to lead his army to a bloody but decisive conclusion, one in which Grant often had huge casualties for his victories, while Sherman’s “March to the Sea” left in his wake a scorched earth.

There was nothing tentative here.

* * *

A surprising role model for our inexperienced president might be President Andrew Jackson. Jackson and Obama, at first glance, might seem like an odd couple: Jackson was crude, intemperate, could be a bully, and yet mastered the eastern establishment and became the people’s president much as Obama did in his getting elected.

The “Age of Jackson” followed the Jackson presidency.

My sense is that under the cool detachment, fine manners, savoir-faire eloquence of Obama is a man of grit that hasn’t yet been allowed to surface. He has by most estimates a fine mind, perhaps finer than most men who have held that office, but a fine mind is not enough. Nor does the job require an intellectual, which he is also said to be. "Give intellectuals everything," advises author Eric Hoffer, "but never give them power."

Jackson was far from an intellectual. He preferred his own counsel to that provided in books, no doubt influenced by the fact he was self-educated with practically no former schooling. He had fought in the Revolutionary War as a fourteen-year-old boy, and every war thereafter up to his presidency.

Jackson was a self-made man as well acquiring considerable wealth by the time he was president, having practiced law, farmed, and served in Congress. He knew Wall Street and the banking lobby in real terms, not abstractedly and academically. He would take on the banking industry and beat it at its own game.

To say Jackson was decisive is to understate his impact. He sized up his enemies and the odds and took action. It didn’t matter whether it was political opponents, members of Congress, his cabinet, eastern bankers, or foreign powers.

Lobbyist and influence peddlers were as endemic to Jackson’s Washington as they are today, but he would have none of them. He dispatched them without a second thought. Nor would he let members of his own cabinet, mostly the Washington elite, dictate his agenda.

When members of his cabinet failed to include the wife of his Secretary of War, he dissolved the cabinet, and appointed his friends. For this, his administration was known as the “spoils system.” That said every president since has benefited from the "Office of the President" that he created, making it the most powerful branch of the federal government.

* * *

President Obama, too, has surrounded himself with like-minded people, many from the financial industry that happen to be key players in the Wall Street meltdown and subsequent recession. He has also shown an inclination to media pundits, thinkers not doers, influence peddlers, not decision makers.

He would be well to note how Lincoln took office. Lincoln was wise in knowing what he did well (his strengths) and what he did not do so well (his weaknesses), appointing a cabinet of competent men who thought him a country bumpkin, and not worthy of the presidency. By doing so, he magnified his strengths and neutralized his weaknesses. In the process, he became stronger and more resilient than any member of his cabinet, and was on his way to greatness.

When we surround ourselves with others of similar weaknesses we reinforce and magnify our own. If the weakness is decision making, this can lead to the paralysis of analysis

* * *.

President Obama is making nice with Europe, and it would appear, Europe loves him for it (70 percent approval rating) far more than Americans do (50 percent approval rating) if you can believe the polls. He has made nice with Russia by withdrawing the Bush Missile Defense Shield from Eastern Europe, but in terms of quid pro quo has received nothing for the concession.

Any executive knows there is a world of difference between being nice and being effective. You can make nice when it is effective, but being effective is not always making nice. Being hated by some no matter how noble or appropriate the action is par for the course.

Jackson and Lincoln had similar challenges and acted similarly, preserving the nation at any cost. They recognized the dangers and did what was necessary, not necessarily popular. Controversy was white noise in the background. Courage was the order of the day, not hope.

* * *

With all the major problems of the nation and the world, radio talking heads and the Fox News Network have gotten President Obama’s attention. This is unfortunate. Legitimizing these chatterboxes puts the president in a bad light. I would imagine someone has advised him of this strategy. That person should be fired immediately. He or she is no friend to the administration.

Incredibly, Time (September 28, 2009) had Glenn Beck’s picture on the cover of its magazine, a person I had never heard of before. I know who Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Howard Stern are, but have never listened to them, much less this man with his tongue stuck out on the cover of Time. Wonderful!

The measure of these talking heads’ appeal, and others like them suggests we have lost our pride and dignity, our good manners and sense of proportion, our reasoned thought, and intellectual balance.

Have we lost so much confidence that we can no longer do our own thinking? Do we need these interlopers to do it for us? Are we to rely on people who short circuit the issues to lay on us their biases? They have a right to their opinions, to promulgate them in any media they prefer, but we don't have to accept them as our own. That seems bizarre, but come to think of it, this is a bizarre age.

* * *