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 9. Starting Over: From Rags to Regulators.

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. 

During the last few weeks at Watchtower, I began preparations for entering the outside working world.  Since I loved to write, I sought a job as a writer.  It took no time at all to discover that writers with  phD’s were falling out of trees.  My first obstacle was how to explain how I had spent the last nine years of my life.  Life in a monastery?  A waiter, bookbinder, letter writer for Jehovah’s Witnesses??  How to explain why I left?  To have children?  On the outside, people didn’t have to quit their jobs and relocate in order to start a family.  What was I qualified to do?  How much did I have to earn to survive, to support a wife and possible child?  I had no idea about any of the above.  I had never bought a car, established credit, learned a trade, or gone to college.  I was twenty-seven years old.  During the few disastrous  job interviews before we left Brooklyn, I did learn the short answer to why I left my last “position”:  “Career redirection.”   My first lesson in spin control.  Substance and unnecessary detail were not nearly as important as a few words that created a brief image.  I also learned a quick lesson right out of law school:  Never answer a question that hasn’t been asked.  Also,  never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.

Suffused with early rejection and a sense of impending disaster, Barbara and I decided to move to Youngstown, Ohio where she grew up.  Her parents encouraged us to stay with them until we got on our feet.  Our timing was impeccable.  Unknown to us, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, a steel company that was a pillar of the economic community was about to announce its closing, the first in a string of dominoes due to fall in quick succession and ultimately to devastate the local economy.  Unbeknownst to us, the biggest business in the Youngstown area appeared to be organized crime, and the economy was so bad even they were leaving town.  With tens of thousands thrown out of work, we came to Youngstown like two immigrants just off the boat and looking for work.  And like first-generation immigrants, because of being sequestered for over nine years in near-monastic existence, we couldn’t speak the language of the new world in which we found ourselves.  I couldn’t even begin to comprehend their thought processes.  It was massive culture shock, and we were too ignorant and innocent to even feel sorry for ourselves.

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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 7. From Manufacturing to Amanuensis

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. 

During this period of time, there were several other interesting developments.  My boss, Ralph Lindem, who was a very kind man who struggled mightily with his management responsibilities,  was bumped upstairs to Purchasing, and was replaced by John Adams, who was in his early thirties and very bright.  John quickly shuffled the deck of bindery leadership, put some young, bright men who were very loyal to him in charge of various departments, and in no time at all had the bindery humming.  Production improved quickly, and in contrast to his predecessor who had put in such long days, John was often to be found in the Bindery Office reading the New York Times, with his feet propped up on the desk, an impertinence Ralph Lindem would never have dreamed of.  When the Factory Overseer, a soft-spoken Swede named  Max Larsen  would wander by, John showed respect by putting his feet down, but he did so unapologetically.  This took chutzpah because, to me at least,  Max Larsen always conveyed the impression of an iron fist in a velvet glove.  Maybe John just knew how good he was at his job.  One of many business lessons I learned from John Adams was never to confuse activity with results.

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Chapter 6. Early Socialist Yearnings

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. 

During the first six months at headquarters we were enrolled in Primary School, later more aptly named Bethel Entrants School.  During this period we were required to read the entire Bible verse by verse, and annotate it, i.e. make notes on the meaning of each text in longhand.  We were also enrolled in the Bethel Theocratic Ministry School, which was exactly like the one I had grown up with, except that at Bethel, we had two counselors, the regular one and the Silent Counselor.  The Silent Counselor met with you after the program was over, and he was the guy you had to impress, for a very important reason.  If you obtained three consecutive good ratings from your Silent Counselor, you were appointed to the Bethel Speakers List.  Once on this list of approved speakers, you would be assigned once a month to visit a congregation within two hundred miles of Bethel, all expenses paid.  You represented headquarters, and you were considered one of their best speakers.  You were held in very high esteem, if not awe, by the locals in the congregation you visited, and it was not uncommon for many of them to show their appreciation by putting cash in your pocket.  So this privilege brought prestige, fun, travel and time away, and money.  The money issue was never discussed but it was always appreciated.  Generally speaking I’m talking about a few hundred dollars total from a visit to one congregation.  Ironically it was my experience that the poorest congregations usually contributed the most.  Later, in the real world, I was to make a similar observation that the wealthiest patrons in a restaurant were often the stingiest tippers.

The best part of being on the Speakers List is that on each visit to a congregation, you gave two one-hour speeches, one on Saturday night and one the following Sunday.  The one on Sunday was standard issue, written by headquarters writers.  The Saturday night speech, called a Service Talk, was a topic and content of your own choosing.  My first such presentation was “Are You Happy?”, and the second one was “Are You A Thinking Christian?”  It turned out that both subjects have been core elements of a lifelong spiritual quest–for rationality, purpose, achievement, and meaning.  With both subjects I found my audiences universally hungry for answers to the same questions:  It was easily apparent I was hitting a mother lode of interest.

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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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