Chapter 12. When Your Best Just Isn’t Good Enough

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

One of the hardest things to accept about business, and maybe human behavior in general, is that most behavior doesn’t seem to be rational, but whimsical, irrational, and emotionally driven.  Decisions are based on emotion, and then the intellect is summoned to justify them.  Business could be gained and lost for some very arbitrary reasons.  My response to this was mostly terror.  On any given day I knew the wrath of the gods could descend on my head for reasons far beyond my control.  Since all of my contracts were on a month-to-month basis, I understood that on any given day I was only 30 days from bankruptcy court, if enough of my clients were to cancel my contracts at the same time.  No business was guaranteed, even if you were doing an excellent job, and the specter of economic death hung over your head all the time.  It was imperative to build relationships inside the client’s organization on at least three different levels.  Whenever possible I would build a relationship with the CEO of the corporation, my manager would build a rapport with his peer in the client’s organization, and we would try to match up our cleaners with the personalities of key people on each floor.  Generally speaking, it took all of us as a team to keep a tight grip on business.  Everyone was important, and I always told our people to avoid stepping on hands when climbing up the ladder, because those same hands could expedite the way down (or out the door!)  A disgruntled secretary in a client’s building could make our work life miserable.

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Chapter 10. Save the World, or Save Myself?

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

 

I apologize to my readers, for I have gotten ahead of myself in this story.  Picking up where I was at the beginning of Chapter 9, I had twelve part-time people working for me, and I was taking $800 per month out of the business to live on.  I had this dinky little office in the basement of a building near the apartment where Barbara, I, and our first daughter Meghan lived.  The office was about the size of a closet, one room, and there was this deep ditch outside the basement door to the building, with a wooden plank thrown across it as an entrance.  I paid $90 per month for this.  There was a large standpipe from the floors above that went right past my desk, and whenever anyone upstairs flushed a toilet, you could hear it whistling right past my desk on the way down into the sewer.  I had an old metal battleship desk I had bought from a customer for $25.  I was drowning in problems and had no idea where to turn to for help.  And I couldn’t think of whatever else I could do if this failed.  It was not uncommon at all for me to work 24 or even 36 hours straight before collapsing in bed.  I did not consider myself a businessman at all; I felt totally incompetent and foolish.  What kept me going was desperation and fear of failure.  Barbara and my combined, adjusted gross income that first year was $5600.  We were below Appalachian poverty level.  I’m sure we qualified for all kinds of government Welfare, but we didn’t even know it existed and it never occurred to us to ask.  It never occurred to us that we were anyone’s responsibility but ourselves.

I went to the town library and looked up trade journals and sent in a card to one of them.  I started getting junk mail, and eventually I saw an advertisement for a trade association convention to be held in Orlando, Florida.  I figured out what it was going to cost for Barbara and I to go down there, and it was about $600.  I don’t remember where we got the money from, but we went.  I was shocked.  I expected to meet a whole bunch of miserable sods like myself trying to stay alive, and there were some.  But I also met many very successful operators, some of them multi-national,  with literally tens of thousands of employees each. 

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Chapter 8. It All Falls Apart

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation. 

My star continued to rise, and soon I was requested to rewrite some of the lectures composed by some of the lesser talents in the Writing Department.  By this time I felt quite free about inserting much of my own philosophy in my writing.  After all it was all going to be reviewed and censored by others anyway.  So I lent my voice to the cacophony of dissent.  I wrote an article published in the Awake! magazine about the etymologies of words, and offered to write an article for the Watchtower   entitled “Are You a Thinking Christian?”  It bothered me that so much of the membership seemed to follow the route of least resistance and looked for a higher authority to tell them what to do when faced with the slightest conflict in their life.  They seemed incapable of abstracting principles from concrete situations and forming independent conclusions.  When I submitted my Abstract for the article, I received a letter in return from the Writing Department strongly admonishing me to build my article around prayer, meeting attendance, and regular door-to-door field service.  Only then did I realize the organization had a vested interest in the membership conforming to policy, and the last thing they needed was for them to become independent minded.  Later still I came to realize that the intended title of my article was in itself something of an oxymoron.  Not entirely however:   there were quite a few of us in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas who were attempting mightily to reconcile faith and intellectual integrity.  I never wrote the article.

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Chapter 4. Poverty, Up Close and Personal

he column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in t

 

Sometimes being a Witness kid was painful, sometimes not.  What I personally hated the most was being required to sit during the national anthem at school.  I felt so conspicuous and I felt it was one of the harder beliefs to defend.  Sometimes I would be derided, even kicked in the back by other kids.  I also got beat up a lot on the school bus.  My father had taught me that if I ever got in trouble at school I would get a whipping at home.  This was my introduction to justice, but I accepted it because it made about as much sense to me as Original Sin (you’re condemned from birth for something you didn’t do).  My solution eventually was to walk the two miles to and from school.  I told my parents I wanted the exercise.

Our school life had three basic groups of kids:  Academic (college preps), Commercial (secretaries and beauticians), and Vocational (the dumb kids).  At least that’s how things were perceived.  Kids can often by cruel, and since I didn’t fit into any of the three groups, I really had no group or clique to attach to at school lunches.  So school lunches became hell for me.  I obviously belonged to the preps, except I wasn’t going to college, so I was ostracized by them.  As a minority of one, without any support group, I became an open target to the VoAg boys, who delighted in throwing food at me or whatever other mischief they could think of.  The school faculty was not particularly sympathetic since they felt I brought this on myself, and my request for permission to spend the lunch period in the library was denied.  There was this one particular kid who took  delight in making my life miserable.  He had flunked two or three years and I found him very intimidating.  I had heard a story about how he had beat up a kid with a lead pipe.  One Sunday afternoon while participating in door-to-door activity, I was up in rotation in the car to take the next house and there was this same guy out in the front yard.  I expressed considerable concern, but agreed to take my turn.  I gave this kid my entire spiel and he stood there and said nothing.  When I concluded with an offer of some publications, he politely refused.  The following Monday he sent one of his cronies over to me in the lunchroom to tell me never to come to his house again.  The harassment in the lunchroom stopped from that day forward, however.  There was, however, the sense of total alienation from the outside world; we knew we did not belong.  And we knew that same sense of alienation was our badge of honor, proof positive of our righteousness.

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Chapter 3. The Sex Police

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

It was easier for those of us who were born into a Witness family than for converts.  We never missed the holidays because we had never celebrated them.  We saw everyone around us celebrating them, but that is not the same as having had to give them up.  Which brings me to the subject of making converts.  Many churches build on pre-existing ethnic, tribal, or racial ties.  For example, if you are Irish, you are probably also Catholic; if you are British, you are probably a member of the Anglican church; if you are an American  Southern black, you are probably Baptist.  Jehovah’s Witnesses have no such ties working for them.  The basis for their fellowship is therefore totally contrived.  Intellectual belief then is supremely important.  Jehovah’s Witnesses use an intellectual hook to catch their converts.

They want to show you the contradictions and misrepresentations common to all other belief systems.  They want you to question why you should stick with a belief system that didn’t bring you the truth.  And if they can demonstrate that part of what you believe is patently untrue, how can you have confidence in the rest of it?  It is for this reason that Jehovah’s Witnesses frequently know more about what your religion teaches than you do.  They have to study your beliefs to discover their flaws, so they can point them out to you. In most cases if they know as little as five Bible verses they can hit a home run against an adversary. 

As conscious beings, we humans have a spiritual need for meaning to our short lives.  For most of us, we accept what our familial culture has handed to us without subjecting our beliefs to much scrutiny.  This provides fertile soil for Jehovah’s Witnesses to cultivate by planting seeds of doubt.

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Chapter 2. The Politics and Business of Belief and Service

I remember once the organization was trying to unload some old publications.  Instead of throwing these pamphlets out, which is where they belonged, we ran a “sale” and gave bunches of them away for next to nothing.  But at least they weren’t going to waste.  My mother had the temerity to read one of them, something no one was expected to do.  It was entitled Judge Rutherford Uncovers Fifth Column.  As I recall, it was published in the early years of World War II and made some absurd predictions as to the outcome of the war.  We were distributing these pamphlets in the mid-fifties, long after the war was over, and the predictions made in this publication were embarrassing.  My mother wanted my father to explain how we were in good faith expected to distribute this material to the public.  My father told her that no one was expected to read it.

Later when I was at Bethel I found it most interesting how an organization based on faith endeavored to teach the flock not to act on faith in their business dealings, and to adjudicate their differences when they failed to act rationally with each other. It was only much later that I understood that to live at all “by faith” means to suspend rational judgment and accept what rational judgment will not support (or faith, by definition would not be needed), and that in order to live by faith, one has to compartmentalize one’s life.  The exigencies of daily survival often require a higher level of intellectual integrity than does one’s philosophy, and so usually these two parts of your life have to be divorced from one another.  It never occurred to me at that point in time that if living a successful temporal life required you to practice your beliefs hypocritically, this was a condemnation of your philosophy:  your philosophy was not life-supporting or life-enhancing, but quite the opposite.  And if your beliefs condemned you for seeking your own life and happiness as your logical highest achievement, your beliefs in effect put you at war with yourself, with unearned guilt as the result; self-esteem, if not outright impossible, becomes possible only by further compartmentalizing your life.  Our family practiced our beliefs with considerable integrity and consistency; we had little guilt and were very unhappy.

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Chapter 1. Becoming a Foot Soldier for God

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

My parents converted from the Lutheran religion to Jehovah’s Witnesses the year before I was born.  My father was a Pennsylvania Dutchman, and my mother was a war bride from England during the Second World War.  I was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania.  I was involved in Jehovah’s Witnesses proslytizing activities from earliest childhood.  Later I was often told about the time when I was two years old and standing with my parents outside the local movie theatre waiting for the moviegoers to exit the building and then “place” (Jehovah’s Witnesses’ euphemism for selling) the Awake! and Watchtower magazines.  When my offer was rejected by one man, I inquired “Don’t you want to live in the New World?”  My indoctrination was well in progress.

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Passion, Power, and Panties . . . Confessions of a Businessman Preface, part 2

What follows is the second half of the Preface, a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

Psychology is the discipline that studies the fears that prevent us from perceiving reality correctly or of acting appropriately upon the knowledge and awareness of reality available to us.  One of the greatest appeals of religion is that it seduces us into believing we can short-circuit this entire process and rely on another to shoulder the burdens of dealing with reality.  This relieves us of the onerous burden of choosing our Purpose, and obviates the need for self-directed action, risk-taking, and courage to take those risks.  It welcomes us to the world of victim-hood, for having borrowed the purposes, principles, and ethics of others, we surely cannot be held responsible for the consequences of our actions, and having chosen to avoid thinking in order to avoid choices, we find ourselves unable to face life and its greatest issues with a direct gaze and our heads held high.  We are hostages of vague fears.  We can never become a champion of our own happiness, and must live our life at the most mundane, concrete level.  We have condemned ourselves to living the life of what Ayn Rand called a second-hander.   We never experience the joys of ownership–of ourselves.  Where there can be no failure, there can be no success.  Failing to empower ourselves at the deepest level, we may even attempt to substitute power over others.

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Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman Preface

What follows is the first of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

Man has evolved over millions of years.  Of all recorded history, it took almost 10,000 years for his entire body of knowledge to double once.  It took about 300 years for his body of knowledge to double again (the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment), today it doubles about every 60 days (the Information Age with billions communicating with each other via the Internet).  Until recently, the one word that has characterized man’s development has been slow, with natural selection being the driving force.

 Man traditionally survived through his herding instinct, his need and desire to bunch together according to geographic, geneological , or shared-threat commonalities. These groups, or tribes,  competed with each other for resources, and often encouraged a sense of superiority among their members in relation to outsiders.  Herding provided a survival advantage in that even the less able among the herd were protected.  Such  a feeling of safety made it possible for them to contribute and succeed within their limitations, and if they successfully procreated, they also contributed  to the survival of that particular herd.  Such tribes often developed strong taboos about mixing and intermarrying with outsiders or other  forms of potential assimilation.   We know this today as ethnicity.  Ethnic “herding” tendencies have resulted in tenacious differences, each ethnic group becoming a sort of subspecies of Homo sapiens.  Some groups, as might be expected, have developed characteristics better suited for survival than others, and some groups have survived as parasites on others, something Nature allows.  An inherent problem with parasites is that their survival depends on the health of the host.  An additional problem, as the species evolves to a more conscious level, is the willingness of the host to tolerate their presence.

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