Dr. James Fisher, Ph.D., is an industrial and organizational psychologist. He is a prolific author. Let me quote a short paragraph a blurb which I pulled (today 3/25/240 off a web site, called THE Peripatetic Philosopher. This website may be Fisher’s or something written by Amazon. Here is the direct quote: “The Peripatetic Philosopher
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial and organizational psychologist writing in the genre of organizational psychology, author of Confident Selling, Work Without Managers, The Worker, Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, Time Out for Sanity, Meet Your New Best Friend, Purposeful Selling, In the Shadow of the Courthouse and Confident Thinking and Confidence in Subtext. A Way of Thinking About Things, Who Put You in a Cage, and Another Kind of Cruelty are in Amazon’s KINDLE Library.”
My response: Dr. Fisher is a industrial psychologist who has written a book, Mirror Of The Psyche, A Study of Eric Hoffer’s Writings from the Perspective of The Fisher Paradigm. I plan to read and comment on pertinent content from any book or article written about Eric Hoffer—any that I know of.
Page 2: Fisher (F after this) notes that Hoffer (H) insists that genius is common among ordinary Americans. I concur. Any person of average intelligence, if fully maverized or maverizing, will accomplish, create, or think amazing things; it could be that becoming a living angel and great soul has the potential to unlock even a higher IQ so anyone can and should show the products of their applied genius to the world.
Page 12: F shares that his The Fisher Paradigm is an empirical paradigm that explores pragmatic concepts from a personality profile, where thought and insight are gained or intuited, immediate understanding, not so much conceptually crafted, long chains of reasoning leading to an argued position.
F sees his assessment system as subjective more than objective, intuitive more than cognitive, stimulated by a sense of the situation, not assessed using the methods of a social scientist. F is saying that H gains his insights intuitively not by applying the desiccated, removed statistical and logical hermeneutics used by a social scientist. F’s analogy might be right. Hoffer’s technique was to live, read, ponder, write and rewrite, but his thinking grew out of his experience; he did not reach his wise conclusions about people by being an armchair philosopher like Descartes, or by using the scientific method to test his hypotheses, as would a research psychologist.
Page 13: F reveals that both H and F have a genuine affection for the common man who values his individualism and personal freedom. It may be that one cannot feel a genuine affection towards, about, and show people directly and personally that that is how one feels, unless one respects that common person at equals, and, intellectuals are aristocrats that have no genuine affection or respect for common people. When one dislikes disrespects the common people, it is easy to look down on them as dumb and crass, in need of supervision and direction.
This is why I recommend the common person, about 100 million of us in America, become individuating supercitizens. We will be hard to control, impossible to boss, and completely unwilling to put up with elites, their tyranny and abuse, anymore.
Page 19 and 20: F comments on how individualism (Americans traditionally were individualistic in spite of their nonindividuating, their inherited Judeo-Christian altruist-individualist morality.) by has been sacrificed by 2020 as workers are like terminal adolescents and learned helplessness.
H had sensed in the 60s that the Leftist radicals were a cultural Marxist baby-mass movement which really did not become a postmodernist Progressive mass movement whose radical ambitions really begin to take over America after George Floyd’s death in 2020.
F seems to anticipate rational egoism when he writes on Page 20 that Americans have become utterly other-directed as the expense of being self-directed, and these self-estranged people seek an identity in a mass movement to escape from their ruined lives and frustration as spoiled selves.
Page 22: F writes that we are not obsolete but corporate society is. I agree; I am a proponent of anarchist-individuator supercitizens because all elites and all hierarchies are obsolete, and the masses as contented—not frustrated—common people need to own and run all institutions.
Page 40: I am not allowed to quote full paragraphs from F’s book without formal permission, and I would if I could, quote full, excellent paragraphs from Page 40.
F describes H’s works as more insightful than solution-driven and unconventional in problem-solving. F sees H as more intuitive than systematic, and insightful rather than argumentative.
I know that H is a truth-speaker and truth-lover of the highest order. His views capture what the world is, how it works, and how humans fit into the world. One should not prescribe until and unless one has accurately described how the world is; otherwise, one is an ideologue whose idealistic program is tainted by tendentious distortion and misunderstanding.
F describes H as seeking not answers but understanding, and if one gain catch a glimmer of what noumenally is, then it might also suggest to one how to proceed. F points out that H’s brilliant and lucidly communicated insights are intuitive as well as counterintuitive.
If truth is moderate or multi-valued more than one dimensional, or binary-valued, which it is, then, because people are born with low self-esteem, the only way that they can live with themselves is to speak lies and believe the lies they tell, so they can manage to go on living. When people run in packs, as people selflessly do, then the psycho-social communicative exchanges are riddles with lies, group-delusions, and contradictory points. When people are not feeling good about themselves, they are more passionate than rational or reasonable. Thus, they tend to exaggerate and take extreme, unrealistic stances on issues. These group fantastical and mundane collections of mutual spoken and agreed-upon fabrications become told so often, so repeatedly that they seem obviously, or intuitively true.
This is when a truth-seeker, a truth-teller and a truth-knower like Hoffer or Montaingne, compares and contrasts what is the moderate, dappled, complicated, moderate truth about everything—which they have uncovered, and they write it it pithily and with zing—perhaps to shock or out of delight taking a pin and puncturing people’s balloons of delusion, then this outsider’s insights, though intuitive, are counterintuitive to the lies, half-truths and nonsense regarded as gospel and intuitively accepted common-sense among grouped insiders.
Page 41: F points out that both he and H read widely but eclectically rather than systematically; their insights are intuitive more than cognitive; neither is metaphysical but are pragmatic.
I suggest that both were individuators, and that professional thinkers have the advantages of being professional and its drawbacks to, namely the degree of originality and creativity enjoyed by a thinker of brilliance and unique perspective has usually been beaten out of the group-living, credentialed professor, a member of a clique, an ideologue, whose brilliance, creativity, originality an intuition for the good the true and the beautiful is usually bled out of them, or severely curtailed and stunted.
Page 43: F notes that a million POD books written a year now, and thousands of blog sites and web sites abound, so what is new is the common people can now write a book. Great. Let them individuate, and then they will have something to say with a brilliant knack for saying it.
Page 44: F notes that H lived on Skid Row and had a very hard time of it, but, he never felt a grievance or resentment, that he was a victim. He believed in tough love, that if you are on Skid Row, it is your fault (true or not), and only you can compel yourself to become someone better and else. Hoffer is an individualist, and you must solve your old problems, it is not a collective problem or collective solution.
No comments:
Post a Comment