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.

To choose our own Purpose is a very self-ish process; it must be done alone, with our own Happiness as the highest goal .  It requires maturity; we must be old enough to know ourselves.  It requires self-esteem:  we must value ourselves above others; otherwise we will substitute the values of others for our own.  It requires courage; the courage to step outside the universal culture that teaches us that others lives and values are always superior to our own; the courage to reject Groupthink and rely instead on our own judgment and mind, and the courage to act in a way that is a departure from the herd and invites it’s ostracism.  It requires independence; the willingness to think alone, to choose alone, to stand alone.  It requires a ruthless committment to elevating one’s thinking to a fully conscious level; to acknowledging fully that we are making choices, and accepting responsibility for those choices, knowing full well that some of them will be mistakes for us to correct, and that we must be willing to pay the price of those mistakes.  Independence is not a state aspired to by those afraid to be alone, or those unhappy with the company they’re keeping when they are.

Individuality and independent thinking are severely restrained by tribes or other groups; independent thinkers are hard to control and a threat to the group; this is why virtually all education fostered by governments or religion focuses on conformity.  Teachers are usually more concerned with obedience than with learning.  In the history of man’s domination of his fellow man, groups are important because when you control the head of the group, you can steer the herd.  The great irony of this fact of human existence is that there is no such thing as a herd brain, and all the great strides forward made by the human race have been due to independent thinkers who challenged the thinking of their group and time.  Throughout history there has been a direct relationship between intellectual freedom and innovation and economic prosperity.

 The mythologies of the world contain many examples of admonitions against the evils of independent thinking.  Actually any thinking at all has been the enemy.  Example–Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge of good and evil–’for in the day you eat of it God knows you will become like Him knowing the difference between good and evil.’  Eve, taking the fruit first, becomes the first feminist, wanting to make her own choices.  According to Holy Scripture, all the ills of history ensued as a consequence.

 Life’s greatest and most crucial choices derive from the First Choice of whether or not to impose our own terms on life or to accept the terms life imposes on us.  Accepting the divine route is often a form of fatalism, an abdication of the responsibility to choose, foisting this responsibility onto an unknown and unknowable, ineffable something or someone in the great somewhere who will do this for us and spare us the excruciating mental effort to do it ourselves.  This also implies accepting the authority of self-appointed intermediaries between us and the ‘spiritual realm’, those who enjoy access supposedly denied to the rest of us, thereby empowering the priesthoods of the world.  If you have to ask how they know what you don’t, you are obviously not a member of this elite group and cannot know.  From the moment you accept this premise, you have sold yourself into intellectual slavery to them, having disqualified yourself as competent to choose without their validation.

 This is the story of a life that led to the discovery and adoption of these premises.  The life is one of particular interest to me–it is my life.  I write this story now only after being encouraged to do so by countless numbers of people who have known about my unique past.  From infancy I was raised in a closed society, that of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are sometimes referred to as a soft cult (they do not engage in head banging, physical violence, or forced sex; but they do exert an extraordinary psychological influence on their members).  My experience is remarkable primarily because of what it taught me about the power of belief.  What was so extraordinary to me was not the closed minds in the society I left, but that I found so much more of the same everywhere else.  When I left Jehovah’s Witnesses, I had to rediscover and recreate my own identity, for I did not know which of the countless premises I held in my mind were my own and which were the product of my indoctrination.  This meant that in order to have any kind of authentic intellectual life, I had to take out every belief I had, from “universal truths” (which I frequently found were neither universal nor true), to how I felt about the color red, and choose which were mine.  I had to discover the “I” in me that I had been taught so very long ago to repress.  Like a refugee from a distant land of oppression who enters a free society, and who is shocked at how much a free people take for granted, so I was shocked at how many in an intellectually free society chose not to think for themselves.

 This story then, comes in two parts.  It is about my life inside Jehovah’s Witnesses, and it is the story of coming out of that society and experiencing life outside for the first time at the age of 27.  As you will learn in the pages that follow, I was not merely a member of this religious group, but served the first nine years of my adult life in a somewhat monastic existence at their world headquarters in Brooklyn, New York.  So my leaving them was far more than leaving or changing churces; it was in fact learning how to survive in an unnknown world outside the walls of headquarters.  In the act of leaving, I lost my sense of meaning, my career, my marriage,  my identity, and my friends.  What was even more shocking, however, was what I learned about the world outside, one I grew up in but was never a part of.   When a blind person achieves sight for the first time as a young adult of 27, they may see more than those who were never so deprived.  When that person who was blind for 27 years is also told that he had been able to see the entire time, when in fact he achieves clear vision, he is determined to see with his own eyes, and not to see what others tell him to see.  When I left Jehovah’s Witnesses I made a committment to myself never to let another human mind get between me and reality.  I already knew that people believed for emotional reasons and occasionally saw a need to support their pre-determined beliefs with some form of rationality.  I wanted to do the opposite.  I wanted to see and experience life in the scientific model, gather information and then determine if and how it integrated with what I had already tested and accepted as true.  When a contradiction  occurred, I had to re-examine my premises.  Of special import were First Premises, the core beliefs that form  the framework on which a human being hangs all others.  I had an insatiable appetite to know what IS as opposed to what I or others wished for.  The first great mistake I made was to assume that most others would share this desire.    I had no idea what lay ahead of me. 

 This then,  is the tragi-comic story of my struggle to discover the nature of reality, of what is, of the immense life-altering consequences and challenges of its discovery, and of the ruthless committment to reality I developed in order  to live life without contradictions between what I believe and what I do.

To be continued.