It is not uncommon for those in the workplace, situated somewhere vertically along the corporate ladder, to blame what has gone wrong in the workplace on the line workers. It is instinctive if self-serving for managers to blame those without power and authority for what goes wrong in the organization, but they continually, desperately strive to deflect blame from themselves.
My reaction is that this is always at least partially true that line workers could work harder and smarter, but, most of the time, the managers are to blame for most of what goes wrong, due to their lackluster performance, mismanagement and wrong-headed thinking.
Does it follow from my assigning workplace blame primarily at the feet of Management that I believe that genuine change or reform must come from the top down? No, it does not. Lasting deep reform must occur from the bottom-up as the workers take real control of their personal and work lives to succeed in spite of bosses, politicians and the wealthy. Only each individual on her own can really solve her own problems.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
The One True Faith
Regardless of one's ideological bent, once one descends into proclaiming it to be the one true faith, one has become a fanatic touting his favorite ism.
So believing and rationalizing kills intellectual growth. This practice spreads evil, misinformation and ignorance among people. It makes all subject to conformity to the ideology of the rabid proponent.
We cannot live and believe as fanatics any longer, if it is our ambition to lives as free, knowing good people.
So believing and rationalizing kills intellectual growth. This practice spreads evil, misinformation and ignorance among people. It makes all subject to conformity to the ideology of the rabid proponent.
We cannot live and believe as fanatics any longer, if it is our ambition to lives as free, knowing good people.
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Why The Long and Tender Memory
My wife asked me to blog about why her bond with her dog (Chipper) that died 30 years ago is as strong today as it was then.
It is a great question. My initial response is that a strong, warm relationship with any person or pet has so many warm and wonderful connotations attached to it that the fond memory of the departed loved one or pet remain fresh in one's memory as if the connection was made just yesterday.
There may be other reasons for the graphic retention of the bond felt, but it could be that there was a meeting of the souls, not just the meeting of the minds. Where souls touch each other, that spiritual affiliation is more linked to the eternal, so the memory of it could even be everlasting.
It is a great question. My initial response is that a strong, warm relationship with any person or pet has so many warm and wonderful connotations attached to it that the fond memory of the departed loved one or pet remain fresh in one's memory as if the connection was made just yesterday.
There may be other reasons for the graphic retention of the bond felt, but it could be that there was a meeting of the souls, not just the meeting of the minds. Where souls touch each other, that spiritual affiliation is more linked to the eternal, so the memory of it could even be everlasting.
Human Nature
I have been reviled for being a conservative of that "worst" kind, one that believes that human nature is primarily depraved.
Without a deep and rapid change in our value system, it will be hard for humanity to survive, let alone thrive.
Without a deep and rapid change in our value system, it will be hard for humanity to survive, let alone thrive.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
They Are At It Again
With the murder of our ambassador and employees at the consulate in Libya on 9-11, it seems if anti-American elements sought a ruse to become offended and then attack American interests.
I was listening to an expert on Prager today and he made observations that I have been holding forth on for a couple of years. He noted that in Islam there is little self-criticism or willingness to modernize or forsake the divine right to take murderous, violent offensive at any slight of Islam, indigenous or foreign, real or imagined, minor or major.
97% of Muslim must give up mob uprisings. They must embrace Western values to temper their own fanatical leanings. They must eschew violence and holy war. They must tolerate minorities in their midst. They must denounce suicide bombings and the employment of terrorism to gain their ends. They must disassociate with the Muslim Brotherhood ambition for world conquest, setting up sharia law everywhere under a one-world caliphate.
This Israeli pundit noted that we need exposure to many cultures and countries, celebrating the differences and learning from each other.
M realistic fear is that they will start a world war and explode weapons of mass destruction. This being possible, we must build up our missile defense system to protect all nations. We must have a powerful military and be willing to fight them tooth and nail at every turn. We may want to invade Iran and Pakistan to shut down these terrorists havens.
I was listening to an expert on Prager today and he made observations that I have been holding forth on for a couple of years. He noted that in Islam there is little self-criticism or willingness to modernize or forsake the divine right to take murderous, violent offensive at any slight of Islam, indigenous or foreign, real or imagined, minor or major.
97% of Muslim must give up mob uprisings. They must embrace Western values to temper their own fanatical leanings. They must eschew violence and holy war. They must tolerate minorities in their midst. They must denounce suicide bombings and the employment of terrorism to gain their ends. They must disassociate with the Muslim Brotherhood ambition for world conquest, setting up sharia law everywhere under a one-world caliphate.
This Israeli pundit noted that we need exposure to many cultures and countries, celebrating the differences and learning from each other.
M realistic fear is that they will start a world war and explode weapons of mass destruction. This being possible, we must build up our missile defense system to protect all nations. We must have a powerful military and be willing to fight them tooth and nail at every turn. We may want to invade Iran and Pakistan to shut down these terrorists havens.
Monday, September 10, 2012
The Imperious Intellectual
She desperately hungers to rule others, and manage their affairs.
Her standards are impossibly high. Their motives must be lofty, grand, inspiring or selfless, or all that they touch or attempt is irredeemably tarnished.
If their work efforts or performance fall short of her standard of perfection, there can be no punishment too severe to be imposed on their for their shortcomings.
The kind, temperate, genuine intellectual is not drawn to managing the affairs of others. He lives in the real world. His standards are high but not impossible to reach. He praises and rewards more than scolds and punishes.
He accepts that people are weak, have bad days and come up short. He recognizes their impure fallen motives as useful for sublimation. He just keeps extolling them to learn from their mistakes, get back up, dust themselves off and try again and again until near perfection is theirs. In the real world that will have to suffice. In the real world as well as in the really real supernatural world, such achievement is valuable, acknowledged and appreciated.
Her standards are impossibly high. Their motives must be lofty, grand, inspiring or selfless, or all that they touch or attempt is irredeemably tarnished.
If their work efforts or performance fall short of her standard of perfection, there can be no punishment too severe to be imposed on their for their shortcomings.
The kind, temperate, genuine intellectual is not drawn to managing the affairs of others. He lives in the real world. His standards are high but not impossible to reach. He praises and rewards more than scolds and punishes.
He accepts that people are weak, have bad days and come up short. He recognizes their impure fallen motives as useful for sublimation. He just keeps extolling them to learn from their mistakes, get back up, dust themselves off and try again and again until near perfection is theirs. In the real world that will have to suffice. In the real world as well as in the really real supernatural world, such achievement is valuable, acknowledged and appreciated.
Your Job
Your job is to please God and do De's will. It decidedly is not to do what others expect of you.
Barack Obama
The President inserted into the political dialogue the idea that the successful entrepreneur did not build up her business on her own, but owes her success to the government and society, the matrix of privilege bestowing upon her all that she has become and achieved. There is some minor truth to this distorted point of view.
Sadly, the distortion is to de-legitimatize and underrate the achievement of the clever, striving individual worker or businesswoman.
The actual, greater truth is that succeeding is mostly an individual feat, acquired and gained usually in spite of the restricting, disapproving members of the community. Typically, the collective holds back the enterprising individual, more than encouraging or building her up.
Sadly, the distortion is to de-legitimatize and underrate the achievement of the clever, striving individual worker or businesswoman.
The actual, greater truth is that succeeding is mostly an individual feat, acquired and gained usually in spite of the restricting, disapproving members of the community. Typically, the collective holds back the enterprising individual, more than encouraging or building her up.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
New e-books just published
Hello, fellow mavericks!
I have just published Notes Towards a New Age, volumes 1 and 2, on Smashwords.com at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/224558
You can check them out for free, and download them at a nominal cost if you like them--only $1.99 for volume 1 and $.99 for volume 2.
Ed
I have just published Notes Towards a New Age, volumes 1 and 2, on Smashwords.com at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/224558
You can check them out for free, and download them at a nominal cost if you like them--only $1.99 for volume 1 and $.99 for volume 2.
Ed
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Those Without Dreams
People are not born without dreams. By preconditioning or choice, they elect to live their lives without a personal dream of a better tomorrow for themselves.
Where such unbending people form a clique, especially in a hidebound hierarchy where no one,is happy and no one is going anywhere, the clique becomes a mob prowling around chopping off the heads of any that still dream, show a smidgen of individuality, or stand out even a little.
Individuators dream big and incessantly. They live their dreams. They work each day to make them happen. They see a future filled with promise, splendid prospects and satisfying outcomes.
Toss the dreamer-doers into the political, social or workplace pots of stew with the sour, jealous, malicious non-dreamers and non-doers. The mixture is explosive. The individuators will be harassed and hunted as always.
But the world is finally changing for the better. The day of the individuator is here. God and De's people will take over this world. then the non-doers and the non-dreamers can go crawl under a rock with Lucifer, their master and mentor.
Where such unbending people form a clique, especially in a hidebound hierarchy where no one,is happy and no one is going anywhere, the clique becomes a mob prowling around chopping off the heads of any that still dream, show a smidgen of individuality, or stand out even a little.
Individuators dream big and incessantly. They live their dreams. They work each day to make them happen. They see a future filled with promise, splendid prospects and satisfying outcomes.
Toss the dreamer-doers into the political, social or workplace pots of stew with the sour, jealous, malicious non-dreamers and non-doers. The mixture is explosive. The individuators will be harassed and hunted as always.
But the world is finally changing for the better. The day of the individuator is here. God and De's people will take over this world. then the non-doers and the non-dreamers can go crawl under a rock with Lucifer, their master and mentor.
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Wrong Orientation
Hercules Poirot was stumped in one of his cases: The eloquent Christie writes something like this: "If one knew what to look for it would be easy. But one does not know what to look for. And so one looks in the wrong places or for the wrong things."
A similar perplexing difficulty has long plagued philosophers. They did know what they were looking for so they looked in the wrong places for the wrong things.
Mavellonialist philosophy is rather quirky an may even be self-contradictory. But somehow it works. Somehow God is telling us that this is how the world is wired. Now we know where to look and what to look for; as a result delving further into this philosophy will yield wondrous, exciting new findings. Enjoy the hunt.
A similar perplexing difficulty has long plagued philosophers. They did know what they were looking for so they looked in the wrong places for the wrong things.
Mavellonialist philosophy is rather quirky an may even be self-contradictory. But somehow it works. Somehow God is telling us that this is how the world is wired. Now we know where to look and what to look for; as a result delving further into this philosophy will yield wondrous, exciting new findings. Enjoy the hunt.
Blue Collar Philosophy
What is so special about this blue collar philosophy that I keep advertising as worth pursuing and living?
Let us start with that first principle, that the middle is the way. This being assumed, let us go farther by concluding that living according to this principle requires that we juxtapose and blend incompatible and contradictory elements. Let us go further: let us then sit back, observe and analyze how these elements collide, and then we reach out and grab the given-off sparks of insight that benefact us.
The practical and everyday inform and limit the excesses and rigidity of the brilliant but narrow theoretician. The Platonic and ideal uplift and provide illustrative, life-changing ideational possibilities for the plebeian worker and trader. Though both sides deny and downgrade the value of the other, they are inadequate and incomplete without each other. Each will arrive at dead ends without the guidance of the other.
This leads us further to blue-collar philosophy. The philosopher that works with his hands is somehow rational (inductive logic) in ways that a pure mathematician is deficient in. This fecund rationality is missing among academics, but is gratuitously available at the finger tips of millions of workers in business, trades and service industries.
But they do not realize that they enjoy in abundance this intellectual blessing, or arrogantly and narrowly dismiss any kind of thinking as the province of effete, helpless intellectuals. The blue collar intellectual brings special gifts to the table, though most worldly workers sneer at being intellectual, and even make a virtue out of the serious failure to be intellectual and think daily, a basic ingredient for each of us to develop and utilize our rational faculties while we individuate, thereby answering God's basic call for each of us.
Blue collar thinking provides contrast to the narrow specialization of academic functionaries in their cubicles dreaming no dreams and not living life. Blue collar thinking is impure, imperfect, anti-syllogistic, amateurish and incoherent. But it works and provides us with brand new ideas.
On the ethical side of the coin, an intellectual working in the world will not ever be a fanatic. For the extremist intellectual craves totalitarian, ruthless and genocidal control over millions of citizens to coerce them to obey his vision of how they need to think, speak, act and love. The cruel excesses and gross impracticality of the purist true believer would have few followers where most or all members of the middle class in future society individuate, intellectualize, and yet are out in the world of free enterprise. The temperateness of the Renaissance citizen will disallow her to ally herself with or support brilliant zealots, cruel and heartless, driven mad by their power-lust to impose their Weltanschaung upon the masses, the outcome of pure deductive logic, group passion, pursuit of purity and ivory tower intellectualism divorced from commerce on the street.
Let us start with that first principle, that the middle is the way. This being assumed, let us go farther by concluding that living according to this principle requires that we juxtapose and blend incompatible and contradictory elements. Let us go further: let us then sit back, observe and analyze how these elements collide, and then we reach out and grab the given-off sparks of insight that benefact us.
The practical and everyday inform and limit the excesses and rigidity of the brilliant but narrow theoretician. The Platonic and ideal uplift and provide illustrative, life-changing ideational possibilities for the plebeian worker and trader. Though both sides deny and downgrade the value of the other, they are inadequate and incomplete without each other. Each will arrive at dead ends without the guidance of the other.
This leads us further to blue-collar philosophy. The philosopher that works with his hands is somehow rational (inductive logic) in ways that a pure mathematician is deficient in. This fecund rationality is missing among academics, but is gratuitously available at the finger tips of millions of workers in business, trades and service industries.
But they do not realize that they enjoy in abundance this intellectual blessing, or arrogantly and narrowly dismiss any kind of thinking as the province of effete, helpless intellectuals. The blue collar intellectual brings special gifts to the table, though most worldly workers sneer at being intellectual, and even make a virtue out of the serious failure to be intellectual and think daily, a basic ingredient for each of us to develop and utilize our rational faculties while we individuate, thereby answering God's basic call for each of us.
Blue collar thinking provides contrast to the narrow specialization of academic functionaries in their cubicles dreaming no dreams and not living life. Blue collar thinking is impure, imperfect, anti-syllogistic, amateurish and incoherent. But it works and provides us with brand new ideas.
On the ethical side of the coin, an intellectual working in the world will not ever be a fanatic. For the extremist intellectual craves totalitarian, ruthless and genocidal control over millions of citizens to coerce them to obey his vision of how they need to think, speak, act and love. The cruel excesses and gross impracticality of the purist true believer would have few followers where most or all members of the middle class in future society individuate, intellectualize, and yet are out in the world of free enterprise. The temperateness of the Renaissance citizen will disallow her to ally herself with or support brilliant zealots, cruel and heartless, driven mad by their power-lust to impose their Weltanschaung upon the masses, the outcome of pure deductive logic, group passion, pursuit of purity and ivory tower intellectualism divorced from commerce on the street.
Consecutive Aptitudes Required
There are many ways to measure intelligence, some more effective than others. Perhaps an informal but instructive technique, for increasing one's intelligence rather than just measuring it, would be for one to cultivate one's capacity for alertness or watchfulness.
The watchful person is very sensitive to what is going on around him right now. Each of us enjoy this natural capacity if we do not distort it with psychological, fogging agents. Also, by coming to love the truth and live in the truth, the individual can rely on what his instincts--the constructive urges for sure--are urging him to avoid or do; he ordinarily will want to heed and follow his hunches. What reality is providing him can be sensibly reacted to by him through applying his judgment and experience, and through his knack for crafting quick but accurate inferences on scant information and a few environmental inputs. He is thus able quickly and productively to maximize how things are unfolding to his benefit. By what he hears, sees and and senses, he will turn situations to his advantage, and for the well-being of the community at large.
He lives in the moment always. His connection to natural and artificial as it appears and is playing out right here, right now is a one-to-one correspondence. He is realistic and alert; not allowing noisy distractions, group think, personal values, his wishful preferences, or his idealistic worldview to impose an alien, ill-conceived construct upon bare reality. He will not allow his intellectuality to partially or utterly color his watchful intake of what is going on inside and outside at this moment.
Then and only then, as an individuator, he will bring in his faculty of critical thinking to assess and examine the meaning of what is occurring and self-assess his response to such input. He will compare, contrast and generalize what he has learned and encountered.
Then his sense of wonder about the fascinating beauty life and the universe will allow him to profit from this watchful, continuous monitoring of reality as it is happening. He will extrapolate from his realistic, epistemological foundation to decide how to live and how to proceed. But constantly and forever does he exert himself to be in touch with goings-on in this world and the next world, receiving their stimulus and messages as they are, with the interpretive overlay added only afterwards, and then continually revised as required.
The watchful person is very sensitive to what is going on around him right now. Each of us enjoy this natural capacity if we do not distort it with psychological, fogging agents. Also, by coming to love the truth and live in the truth, the individual can rely on what his instincts--the constructive urges for sure--are urging him to avoid or do; he ordinarily will want to heed and follow his hunches. What reality is providing him can be sensibly reacted to by him through applying his judgment and experience, and through his knack for crafting quick but accurate inferences on scant information and a few environmental inputs. He is thus able quickly and productively to maximize how things are unfolding to his benefit. By what he hears, sees and and senses, he will turn situations to his advantage, and for the well-being of the community at large.
He lives in the moment always. His connection to natural and artificial as it appears and is playing out right here, right now is a one-to-one correspondence. He is realistic and alert; not allowing noisy distractions, group think, personal values, his wishful preferences, or his idealistic worldview to impose an alien, ill-conceived construct upon bare reality. He will not allow his intellectuality to partially or utterly color his watchful intake of what is going on inside and outside at this moment.
Then and only then, as an individuator, he will bring in his faculty of critical thinking to assess and examine the meaning of what is occurring and self-assess his response to such input. He will compare, contrast and generalize what he has learned and encountered.
Then his sense of wonder about the fascinating beauty life and the universe will allow him to profit from this watchful, continuous monitoring of reality as it is happening. He will extrapolate from his realistic, epistemological foundation to decide how to live and how to proceed. But constantly and forever does he exert himself to be in touch with goings-on in this world and the next world, receiving their stimulus and messages as they are, with the interpretive overlay added only afterwards, and then continually revised as required.
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