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.

These subspecies compete with each other, both economically and through warfare.  Typically these conflicts resulted in injuries and injustices that often turned into grudges that lasted for centuries or more.   Nursing these grudges and animosities often became a unifying factor; each group needing an enemy to blame things on.  The more insulated and isolated a tribe became, the greater potential for friction with neighboring, and competing groups.  Assimilation tended to produce harmony; tribalism produced xenophobia and conflict.  This conflict between assimilation versus tribalism survives today as globalization versus multi-culturism, the currently popular term for the celebration and apotheosis of differences. 

Many, if not most, of today’s behaviors are vestigial, appropriate to such long extinct eras, no longer relevant or effective, but universally engaged in out of unthinking habit or culture.  Our habits, traditions, cultures, religions and philosophies have one thing in common among most people; they are accepted or engaged in unconsciously, unthinkingly.  They are uncritically absorbed through our various cultures. To illustrate my point, consider the young girl who observed her mother cutting off the ends of the ham before placing it in the pan for baking.  When she asked her mother why she did this, her mother said she didn’t know, but her mother always did it.  Later the little girl asked grandma why you cut off the ends of the ham, Grandma replied because her mother always did.  Finally the little girl asked Great Grandma why she cut off the ends of the ham; she replied that in her day the pans were always too small for the hams to fit into. 

 For most inhabitants of this planet, the core beliefs that guide their lives are a function of geography, the random location of their birth, rather than some rational choice among alternatives.  People born in a Christian nation tend to espouse Christianity,  Chinese practice Buddhism, Japanese practice Shintoism, etc.  The point of this book is that these belief systems  are vestigial, totally inadequate to life in the Information Age, and all too often actually inimical to our well-being.  They get in the way, they hinder us from relating to reality consciously, productively, and achieving our greatest potential.  All of our progress in the last few hundred years has been a result of discarding traditions and attempting to discover natural laws and forces and then adapting them to our uses;  to discovering reality and then choosing how to harness it.  For example, in ancient times civilization was often centered around rivers whose annual flooding provided fertile soil for agriculture.  During the annual flood stage, portions of the population who did not flee in time often perished.  So the river became the source of both life and death.  Early man’s response to this was to personify the river, ascribing some form of consciousness to it or gods who ostensibly controlled it.  Modern man’s response is to build dams, irrigation canals, or dikes to control and direct the flow of the river.  Our technological success at harnessing the forces of nature  has been exponential, but we have attempted to drag along our vestigial traditions and behaviors and continue to use them as our guide to coping with reality on a personal level.  This is particularly true when the pace of growth in technological or scientific knowledge far outstrips our ability to adapt and we become frightened.  When we are scared our emotional response is to quickly revert to our ancient traditions and beliefs, including our oldest comfort zone of mysticism.  Even when these ancient beliefs contradict what we have established as scientific fact, we take refuge in them and they comfort us in their ancientness, and our desire to feel safe in something that has survived the ages, something that also requires no support or mental effort.  Doing so is a time-honored means of escaping reality when we find it too overwhelming. 

 So we have this lack of congruence between our understanding of the natural world and the eyes through which we look at it.  We see the natural world as reality and then attempt to interpret it through mystical traditions.  Of course the lack of congruence results in countless contradictions, self-doubt as to our personal ability to fathom the universe we live in, and mind-doubt or low self-esteem.  All of this is exacerbated by our desperate need to consciously accept and deal with our own mortality.

 The primary difference between man and the lower species is our self-consciousness, our self-awareness.  We can think conceptually, which means we can grasp the concept of self.  We can also grasp the concept of death, of self-annihilation, of self-obliteration.  As Ecclesiastes says, “the living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything at all. . .”  Being unable to cope with this brutal element of reality, we do what we always do when we cannot cope–we invent.  So we invented God and the supernatural and the hereafter.  No problem.  We really don’t die when we die, it only looks that way.  Enter the age of Political Correctness.  When reality is unacceptable, rewrite it or relabel it.

 With the advent of self-consciousness, the discovery of I, we also had another problem:  A search for meaning in our life.  Since I know about I, what is the point of I?  Why am I here?  With the introduction of modern civilization and the division of labor, we have time on our hands as well–the sheer act of survival no longer consumes us, and for the first time in history the working classes  have discretionary time, so the new problem is, What to do with my life, my time?  With a bewildering array of choices, we need guidelines, direction, or principles by which to direct our life, a role traditionally provided by religion, a primitive form of philosophy that is rapidly losing it’s relevancy.  Earliest religion was not a worship of gods, per se, or even worship necessarily, but a form of animism, ascribing consciousness to the animal world that it did not possess.  Long before the scientific era, and in the absence of reliable information, man resorted to invention, and his explanations of the natural world were usually a mythologized and supernatural embodiment of plants, animals, and fellow humans as he experienced them.  The gods he invented mimicked his natural world.  Eventually his religion narrowed to the idealization of the best and the worst in human nature, and man created gods (and devils) in his own image. 

 In the process of natural selection, religion too must evolve or die out.   All philosophy, religious or secular, Eastern or Western, primitive or modern, is an effort to find transcendence, and to compose an integrated view of existence that makes our life more meaningful.  Such efforts to integrate knowledge into a meaningful whole have resulted in religious movements, ideologies, and creeds that have spilled across political and tribal borders, and further served to divide and subdivide the species.  Conflicts over resources often ceased or went into remission when the conflicts reached a point of diminishing economic returns, when the continuance of the conflict resulted in more loss than any potential gain from winning.  Religious or ideological conflicts, however, never experience such a point of diminishing return and usually never end until one side or the other is completely vanquished or some form of assimilation takes place.  In premodern times philosophy was largely the domain of the idle wealthy, or sponsored writers and thinkers, all people who for one reason or another had the time to engage in such pursuits.  An irony of human history is that most great movements, religious or otherwise, were begun by members of the wealthy or upper middle class, for these were the only people with the time to think beyond the tyranny of the urgent and who were not consumed with the sheer act of survival.  The fact that you are reading this book may be ample proof that such is no longer the case.

 With regard to a meaning to our life, we have two fundamental choices:  One, that a meaning to our life has been assigned by the supernatural and that part of the purpose of our life is to discover it.  This is commonly referred to as spirituality, a search for meaning through God.  We look for meaning through study of Holy books, oracles, astrology, psychics, palm reading, Tarot card reading, fortune telling, alleged clairvoyance, etc., ad infinitum.

 The second possibility is that there is no supernatural, and therefore there is no assigned meaning to our life for us to discover.  It then becomes encumbent upon us to create our own meaning for our  life, a sort of Mission Statement from which we derive our overall goals, direction, happiness and self-esteem.  In creating and choosing a purpose for our own life, we assume the traditional role of God, making these life-altering choices for ourselves.  Our success in making choices is dependent on our ability to perceive accurately, to focus, with no guarantee of success. This process is an act of Creation, and the foundation cornerstone on which is built the superstructure of our life.  The Purpose we create for our life is the embodiment of our greatest values and the fountainhead of those principles by which we choose to be guided.  Self-esteem is a measure of our ability to harness the facts of reality to achieve our goals.  Self-esteem requires action  and courage.   Fear of failure can cause us to shrink from making choices, paralyzing us, abdicating our position of being in charge of our own life, and leaving a vacuum for the first available imposter or Significant Other to fill.  Or we can be overcome with the cost of foregone opportunities implied in every choice, and get caught up in analysis paralysis.  We may delude ourselves into thinking there is safety in not making choices, or we may seek to avoid responsibility and accountability for our actions.  We may secretly hope that if we allow decisions to be made for us by others, or “just let life take it’s course” we will not have to account for our situation in life, to ourselves or to others.  “It just couldn’t be helped.”  In doing so, we fail to realize that even refusing to choose is a choice.  As my friend Dick McKee once told me, ‘those who have not the will to impose their own terms on life must be prepared to accept the terms life imposes on them.’  Hence the philosopher who said “I have never seen a subjugated people who didn’t deserve it.”

To be continued.