THE ROBBER BARON MENTALITY

Obviously, we should never condemn the psychologically and spiritually healthy men and women who realize early in life that they have something valuable in the way of intelligence, determination, wealth, ambition, strength or courage to serve society through a sound quid pro quo. There is very little to be gained by becoming a contrarian. The old Rotary motto, whoever serves best, profits most, seems fair enough. Nevertheless, it has become painfully obvious that many anxious and confused Americans have either grown greedy or have been seriously brain washed by the incessant propaganda of the robber barons and their clever spin doctors. Some very powerful and very selfish persons are steering the American Republic toward isolation from the rest of the world and a suicidal collapse. From culturally neurotic anxiety, which Frank Herbert called the little death -- to the major self-deception that Ernest Becker named the ultimate human lie -- to the narcissistic yearning to steal everything valuable which spiritual leaders call the besetting sin, a clutch of narcissistic robber barons have chosen to sacrifice America and its people to their own ruthless greed.

Normal men and women, those who choose to live at peace with the world and share the benefits of cooperative toil, are usually psychologically and spiritually healthy enough to reject greedy ideologies and narcissistic evil. They are at peace with themselves. Emotionally mature souls who are mature enough to embrace persons of different races, cultures and classes, don’t need delusions of their own cosmic grandeur in order to feel a modicum of self-esteem. Maturing citizens understand that free and independent souls are nurtured largely by the spiritual, political and financial health of their societies. As a result, more and more thoughtful Americans are fearful and resentful of the ruthless schemes now being orchestrated by our new age robber barons. We hate the way that a few ruthless souls are ravaging the American middle class, dominating the world‘s wealth and fighting endless preemptive wars in which our sons and daughters are slain to gain obscene wealth and power for a few. Honest patriots, as opposed to flag waving frauds with their wicked agendas, despair of our Republic’s collapse into an American Empire consisting of a few wealthy lords and ladies and a majority of poorly paid plebes for whom blood, toil, tears and sweat form their daily fare.

Obviously, the United States isn’t the first affluent society to self-destruct for the benefit of a ruthless financial, political and religious aristocracy. Of the twenty-two civilizations that left their footprints on the earth, all but two collapsed from their rigid ideologies and destructive myths and the escalating realization of their ordinary people that the meager rewards of their labors weren’t worth the effort needed to win them. The Roman Republic was destroyed by the robber barons of its day, who then held their possessions, power and privileges so tightly that their rigid Empire couldn’t survive when the barbarians came to pillage. Roman slaves, such as Spartacus, then picked up their pitchforks and torches and joined the invaders. Of course, when push comes to shove, there is usually a lean and hungry society waiting in the wings. Our founding patriots patterned the American system after the Roman Republic with added elements from Greek democracy. And because they were cognizant of the dangers posed by the relentless greed of a narcissistic and neurotic minority, the founders developed a system of checks and balances that has now been overturned by our own robber barons and their ruthless vassals. Our anxieties and the existential frustrations that follow, along with the universal human need to blame someone besides ourselves for society’s problems, aren’t the result of fate. Neither are they God’s punishment for enacting gender and civil rights laws to empower women and minorities as many fundamental religious neurotics preach and hate radio bigots rage.

The wicked new American Empire is being created by a cruel cabal of twenty-first century neo-fascist robber barons, no more in number than a single Boeing 747 could carry on a single flight. They are being assisted by their reactionary neo-con politicians and fundamental neo-zealot preachers.

Because they yearn to corner all the wealth and power of civilization and to create a theocratic empire in which fundamental Christianity reigns supreme, the wicked triad of plutocrats, politicians and preachers is creating a financial, political and religious disaster of the first magnitude. The robber barons scheme to increase their own privileges even though such selfishness guarantees incessant social turmoil, more and more poor and homeless families, and the sacrifice of our young people in preemptive wars that serve the aristocracy. Of course, no one is greedy simply because he or she is greedy. There are always hidden reasons why some people are driven emotionally to use and abuse other men and women, why they are willing to destroy the American Republic in a raging lust for possessions, prestige and power. The majority of them have great suppurating wounds in their souls that all the wealth and power of the world cannot heal. They are driven to seek spiritual or intangible satisfaction through secular methods and they simply don’t work.

Ernest Becker published an excellent book about the often unconscious and usually self-defeating aspects of human emotions called THE DENIAL OF DEATH. Becker, like Otto Rank before him, revealed how narcissistic delusions about one’s superiority over the rest of humanity, are neurotic overcompensations used by fearful and frustrated persons to quell their hidden feelings of inadequacy. A significant percentage of the men and women who ruthlessly claw their way along in businesses like Enron and Arthur Anderson, in reactionary politics and the military and even the fundamental ministry, are desperately trying to convince themselves they are not really the inept, inconsequential wretches someone powerful and cruel branded them in their formative years.

Neurotic robber barons of all varieties struggle against remaining the powerless and threatened non-entities whom in their secret hearts of hearts, they still feel themselves to be. Such wounded egoists simply cannot find relief by considering themselves merely normal humans. Their hidden pain is so severe they must fabricate a pretense of cosmic superiority that seems to place them on pedestals far above the plebian peasants of humanity. In a real sense, most are identifying with the aggressive manipulators of their childhood. Their motto has become, if you cannot defeat the abusers of society, make a major effort to join them. The destruction of the Republic and the creation of an American Empire are wicked defense mechanisms against fears of inferiority used by fearful persons who have forced their way into high places. The continual clawing for possessions, power and prestige is a desperate attempt to escape the clamoring inner demons that flog them on and on. And yet, despite their delusions of grandeur, conspicuous consumption and a lack of compassion, narcissistic abusers must cope with the many vicissitudes of life. As the timeless Greek Tragedies reveal, ruthless power brokers also crash head long into the tragic quartet of human reality. They also must cope with the pain, rage, guilt and the death dread which everyone experiences to some degree but boil up so painfully within the psychological and spiritual unconscious elements of each crippled human soul.

Secular minded men and women who fail to realize that our species evolved with deep metaphysical needs and with consistent spiritual yearnings, who pursue only the pragmatic aspects of life, must constantly work harder and harder in order to feel good about themselves. Powerful narcissists may never ride a grubby bus, drink cheap jug wine or die in a crowded nursing home, butthey sacrifice many youthful ideals. Some cripple their marriages with egoistic affairs as Bill Clinton did, try more or less successfully to cope with their angst, bury their aged parents, fail at appearing godlike and become jaded, old and vulnerable, precisely like the poorest plebes they use and abuse for their own benefit. As Clinton confessed recently while promoting his book, all narcissists suffer from a dark and anxious aspect to their souls. Aging and decline and the life-long dread of death and extinction, although usually repressed into the unconscious, are great democratizing levelers. Some fortunate neurotic abusers and psychopaths eventually discover that their compulsive and obsessive pretensions, in the heroic Hellenic sense, are only illusions. Others live their entire lives with few redeeming virtues as they look out for I - MYSELF ALONE, never maturing into authentic and accepting persons spiritually or psychologically. They cannot believe that their fifteen minutes of fame and prestige have no more cosmic significance than summer thunder on the Great Plains.

Alas, it is the duty of existential philosophers, ministers, psychologists and psychiatrists to be a bit paranoid, to peer beneath the surface rather than take at face value the assertions of compulsive men and women who boast of being superior souls on the side of God and the angels.


Existential psychotherapists and philosophers consistently see deep pain, paranoia, rage and aggression simmering within the souls of narcissistic or neurotic persons. Karen Thompson, in her book THE WAR FOR GOD, revealed quite clearly the ego wounds and frustrations swirling within the unconscious aspects of seriously reactionary and fundamental manipulators. She reported that the frozen ideologies of true believers are symptoms of their discontents and their consistent paranoia about dangerous enemies lurking to betray them. She found that there are always serious psychospiritual reasons why some men and women become narcissistic, paranoid and defensive rather than accepting and open to new experiences and relationships. Greedy elites are frozen in their privileges, much as the Bourbon kings of France of whom it was obvious; They learn nothing new and forget nothing old. We must do due diligence in our important choices, but neurotics have over-learned from their early experiences and relationships that life is dangerous, people are dishonest and that one must remain alert and defensive at all times. Neurotics live with a sense of basic distrust about life, and a great many of the spouses and children of egoistic, anxiety driven persons, fare badly when trying to make their own way. Stanley, a psychology major at Olivet College, was the oldest son of a fiercely dominant man from Chicago’s Near North Side who reinvented himself as a very good neurosurgeon. As he did with everyone around him in his raging quest for wealth, significance and privilege, the father smothered Stan in his fierce determination to make the youngster worthy of his superior self. We all make subjective choices and some of them are disastrous, but the men and women who consistently behave egoistically and remain ruthlessly acquisitive, are overcompensating psychologically for their emotional and spiritual wounds. They are using defense mechanisms that lead to a modicum of relief but they also must endure the many conflicts their greed causes. The life-long mantra of narcissistic abusers, including virtually all the robber barons currently creating a ruthless American Empire, is;

More, more, more! Even vast wealth, power and prestige are never enough to give me satisfying feelings about myself -- not until society admits to my total satisfaction my rightful place among the godlike nobility whom the grubby plebs of the world must obey and serve. What good is my wealth and power unless I am accepted by the power elite, until there are sufficient numbers of peasants to envy me?

So much of humankind’s hubris becomes self-defeating. Even Benjamin Franklin who loved the sophisticated pleasures of English life and lived in Great Britain for years, trying to break into the aristocracy, finally saw that the self-styled quality folk would never accept him except as a somewhat successful plebian tradesman. It is ironic; had the British upper classes been flexible to accept this competent and charming man who admired them and tried to join in their revels, their descendents might still have considerable influence over an American Commonwealth. As it is, as lickspittle Tony Blair has shown, England has become a quaint little land that is little more than the wagging tail of the Yankee dog. When Franklin finally recognized the aristocratic British scorn of everything American, he came home and became one of the Revolution’s brightest stars.

We can savor deeply the one goblet of sweet red wine life provides men and women. We can begin by investing our youthful potential bestowed by loving but imperfect parents and the flawed American system into purposeful activities and relationships. And even if we have not been as fortunate as some, we can still assume responsibility for our lives and strive to become what we can be. As Viktor Frankl wrote, there is no condition in life that cannot be improved by holding positive attitudes about it. He wrote the classic book, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, after spending three and a half years trapped in the anteroom of Hell, in the Auschwitz murder factory. Fortunately, as we mature, not even God himself can erase one jot or tittle of each person’s meaningful accomplishments from the Cosmic Record. No teacher obliterates a child’s mastery of the multiplication tables. No surgeon recalls a patient to undo a lifesaving operation. Fleming could not take back his work on penicillin. Neither God nor fate can negate the bounty of Borlaug’s miracle grains that saved more than a billion people from starvation. Whatever good we have created, has been written forever, is our own to savor and cherish as potential which may have been squandered, that we have transformed into reality. It doesn’t matter that we are not supremely creative in every given stage of life. Sometimes we need to rest. But we do have every right to relish joyously the satisfaction given us by the sound accomplishments and the good relationships we have enjoyed. On the other hand, we simply do not have any religious, social or political right to behave as robber barons who rip and tear every personal benefit from everyone else and from the very earth itself.

We really should support the honest people who meet society’s needs every day. One elderly man quipped that the merchants of his city have carried him for so long, he is naming them as his pall bearers. Especially exciting is the tide of global entrepreneurship sweeping across Asia and now swiftly spilling over into Africa and Latin America. It was born when one American educated economist from Bangladesh and a few friends escaped capitalistic orthodoxy long enough to invent a solution to Third World poverty through a system of very small banks. The system is only now reluctantly being copied by executives of the World Bank.

The small group of creative souls is organizing a larger and larger post communistic, post industrial system of rural micro banks that is supplying the ten and twenty dollar start up loans that incredibly have taken huge numbers of Bangladeshi families out of poverty in the last decade. You must remember Bangladesh -- the economic black hole of Asia. It is exporting rice and goods now and this generous economist and his team did most of it. This really is back street global economics that work as poor people, mostly women trying to feed and educate their children, borrow enough money to buy bamboo strips and permanent dyes and sea shells and wool scraps from which to create beautiful native crafts and a hundred other products. They then sell them for ten times the income previously offered by the aristocratic money lenders who strangled their lives. Some women have bought a cell phone or two and gone into business as the community telephone lady who, for what we would consider pocket change, can put every person in a village without running water or electricity, in contact with all the knowledge and wisdom of every library and university in the world. Or, for that matter, with a government doctor or a wholesale merchant in a distant city. Given the innate human desire to tinker with nature, to make life a little better, it would appear that this new information revolution is just now shifting into high gear. Of course, it helped that Norm Borlaug, a somewhat atypical Iowa farm boy, first kicked the doors open by developing strains of grain that double or triple each farmer’s yield. The new proto entrepreneurs not only borrow the ten or twenty dollars needed to escape poverty through focusing their family‘s energy without the interference of some bureaucracy, they can borrow up to thirty dollars if they really need that much capital to get started. The borrowers collectively own each local micro bank and have stopped asking village money lenders, the aristocracy and clergy for permission to succeed through their own initiative. And who says there are no more miracles when emotionally healthy people are spiritually minded in their quest for self-esteem? Imagine what it feels like to go to sleep at night knowing that you have almost single handedly created a micro banking world network that is making life meaningful for millions of men and women. The default rate is non-existent and the growing prosperity is obvious to everyone.

This is something the World Bank with its grandiose schemes for enriching a few robber barons ignored until forced to follow along. Bank executives always find it more cost effective to finance a consortium of generals, aristocrats and politicians that corners a nation’s traditional water supply and then sells a trickle back to the farmers for half of their annual income. And then they wonder why the peasants come, as Pat Buchanan said, over the hill with torches and pitchforks. Which is what world terrorism is all about and why it is increasing steadily in the era of Global Capitalism.

Courageous politicians who have the moral and spiritual courage needed to reject financing by the manipulative raiders of the fast fading Republic, deserve our support. Unfortunately, they seem to be shrinking in number year after year. Not only has the Republican Party turned violently narcissistic in order to serve the robber barons, much of the Democratic establishment, including Bill Clinton and John Kerry have moved over with them. Perhaps they must in order to be viable candidates in today’s climate of fear, frustration and aggression. Unfortunately, political propagandists have become so effective at pandering to existentially alienated men and women, that many voters consistently support politicians and preachers who are betraying them at every turn through their outright lies, television images and glib ideologies. There is very little objective reality in our political campaigning, everything is artfully spun in order to deceive the fearful, the naïve and the culturally neurotic because fear does sell better emotionally than hope in times of change and stress. While normal men and women use language to clarify their intentions, politicians and their mind bending spin doctors have become experts at speaking cleverly to conceal what they believe and to obscure what they are doing. Very little is real, virtually everything has become spin. At a recent press conference, George Bush successively smothered four successive questions he didn’t want to answer and spun them into something different and then answered his own questions with egregious deceptions. He is now claiming he never said that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin were co-conspirators in the 9/11 attack. Actually, for months during his run up to the Iraq invasion, he scared naïve and trusting Americans half to death by naming Hussein the arch terrorist with doomsday weapons that could be used within forty minutes. He pulled so many swift switches with the color code that almost seventy percent of Americans still believe that Iraq rather than Al Qaeda was responsible for the attack. The entire spin system is deeply deceptive, reality is what the propagandists say it is, until they get tripped up and declare that their previous Truth has become inoperative. According to J R R Tolkien who wrote the world class novel about illicit power and greed, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, politicians, preachers and plutocrats who grub incessantly for wealth and power, use so many rationalizations that they lose the ability to distinguish between good and evil. Fact and fantasy and good and bad choices become blurred, all run together in ways that lead to financial and military disasters for the countless naïve people they work so hard to deceive.

In his autobiography INSIDER, Joseph Callifano who grew up in a barely middle class family in Brooklyn, New York, tells about a brilliant career that led him to Harvard Law School and to service with Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter, along with international fame, considerable wealth and consistent service to humankind. Callifano emphasized that a man or woman who plans on succeeding through their God-given gifts of intelligence, creativity, strength or family fame, needs a moral compass that successfully navigates ambitious persons past the often appealing expedient but ultimately self-defeating choices of life. Otherwise, he said, we are pressed to compromise our values so often that we become prisoners of our own selfishness, becoming consistently self-serving in our well rationalized greed; unable to live a fulfilling spiritual life-style. Callifano testified that he found his moral compass in the spiritual teachings of his church. Many can say the same, although much of the church no longer remains a beacon to light the way for souls crossing the cosmic sea. Many fundamental and orthodox church leaders have compromised their ethical and spiritual integrity by joining reactionary politicians, have focused on a few spectacular issues that distract thoughtless persons from the major problems facing the vanishing middle class and the fast fading Republic.

According to Viktor Frankl and most other existential psychologists, the vast majority of normal persons prefer living a peaceful life with people they love, developing a small corner of the world in which they belong. Very few persons feel compelled to endure the incessant battles needed to acquire great wealth and power. Most of us simply do not have the gnawing neurotic wounds that flog so many robber barons, reactionary politicians and fundamental preachers relentlessly on and on. Contented people realize that while wealth and power may be convenient at times, they are seldom worth the cost one must pay to acquire them. It is deeply disappointing for egoistic men and women to discover, after having expended a lifetime appearing heroic through grubbing for wealth and power, to learn that only the spiritual aspects of life are consistently satisfying. Possessions turn to rust and dust, our power is seized by eager understudies, we become satiated with pleasure and everyone soon moves beyond his or her fifteen minutes of fame. This eventual recognition is why so many people who become weary though excessive consumption cling desperately to a caricature of vigor through trophy lovers, hair transplants, compulsive exercise, botox treatments, Viagra, breast enhancement, face lifts, cryogenic preservation and the like.

Many if not most secular minded narcissists approach the final curtain of life with a major sense of loss: Surely just one lifetime isn’t nearly enough for such a unique and magnificent personage as myself. Even after becoming the most powerful politician in twentieth century France, Charles De Gaulle was overheard muttering late in life; Shipwreck! Shipwreck! My life ends in an absolute disaster. Existential philosophers and psychotherapists such as Soren Kierkegaard, Viktor Frankl, Otto Rank, Carl Rogers, Ernest Becker, Wayne Dyer et al, believe that unless a person has lived spiritually and ethically enough to face the end of life with equanimity, without lingering feelings of guilt and regret, he or she hasn‘t become an authentic human, has hardly lived at all. Even one Catholic power broker, a dominant Italian Cardinal within the Vatican Curia, a former candidate for the Papacy, confessed ruefully to a colleague;

If God gave me another life, rather than follow this deceptive and devious route to power, I would pastor a rural parish with just enough theology to preach decent sermons, hear confessions, assign penance and relax on the front steps with a bottle of wine and talk about their prospects with the farmers coming home from the fields and pastures.

Some jaded power brokers eventually seek redemption and an illusion of immortality through belated generosity. The quintessential robber baron Andrew Carnegie built scores of libraries, Carnegie Hall and contributed great sums of money to Carnegie-Mellon University, when he finally realized he could neither consume anything more nor take any of his immense fortune with him. In a yearning for a modicum of immortality, he directed his name be carved in marble over the entrance to every Carnegie Library. I doubt that he cares about his fame any longer. Carnegie was seeking absolution and indeed, he had much of which to repent after a lifetime spent using and abusing his battered and tattered workers as if they were inanimate machines to be discarded when they malfunctioned.

It is obvious that American governance has fallen into the hands of the narcissistic triad of robber barons, reactionary politicians and fundamental and orthodox clergy who betray society by obsessively serving their own interests. The ultimate selfish ideology that leads to greedy consumerism, the fall of the middle class, the death of the Republic and potentially fatal environmental disasters was found initially in the seminal THE WEALTH OF NATIONS from the eighteenth century. It can be summed up this way.

When every selfish person or organization subordinates morals and ethics to net worth, when every ruthless power broker and narcissistic manipulator insists that greed is good and rips everything valuable from weaker persons and from the earth itself, when companies, governments and political parties take every advantage of each subordinate, leaving the people with only enough of the profits of production to survive and to work ever harder without retirement programs, social security, medical care, good schooling and decent housing, the wonderful free market magic starts working.

In some miraculous manner, perhaps like the loaves and fishes Jesus blessed, everyone benefits from countless ruthless abuses. We can destroy the middle class goose that produced the golden eggs through its vast purchasing power but society shall continue to prosper because the robber barons and their narcissistic vassals will still be affluent, prestigious, and privileged.

NICE GUYS WIN!

Nice Guys Finish First! How can anyone with the brain of a cockroach make such a stupid statement? See how the author answered that question on a talk show and 'Everyone' in the audience agreed with him.

"NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST? How can anyone with the brain of a cock-roach make such a stupid statement?" So rang out the scorn of a killer talk show host when I was doing a book promotion at a major television station in Ohio. When I was on tour in Cleveland, John Clancy quoted Leo Durocher who said just the opposite -- “Nice guys finish last.” John also quoted from books that stressed the need to be a tough talking, no nonsense guy or gal who intimidated others and took what he or she wanted in his or her activities -- possibly following instructions given in a book called, "Succeeding In Business And Love With A Swift Kick To the Groin."

O K, I admit it, I made up that title but you get the picture. Clancy had done everything except put a dunce-cap on my head as he seated me on a stool before the cameras and, despite his complete ignorance of what I had written, proceeded to ridicule my leadership seminar for managers, pastors, teachers and other professionals. He held a copy of this book up for the audience of some three hundred people -- with tens of thousands more watching television from their homes, and asked;

Who can believe this drivel? Everyone on earth knows that a nice guy or gal hasn’t a choice in this lousy, rotten world. You gotta be tough and mean to be successful. Everywhere! How many agree with me that this stuff is nonsense? Raise your hands.

That was somewhat premature since no one in the audience had any idea what I was teaching in my book and seminar, but they voted as Kelly asked them to. Many had preconceived notions and about two hundred people in the studio agreed with John. He then asked, how many agree with -- he didn’t actually say it -- this dunce on the stool, but his non-verbal communication made his meaning quite clear. John was all geared up to take me apart for writing something he didn’t understand. He pointed to the overwhelming number of hands in the air and said; Take it from there, Professor! Let’s see how you handle this rejection of your entire concept. He sat down in the audience, as all three cameras zoomed in close -- to watch me sweat, I suppose. Then, because I knew what my program was all about and he didn’t -- I countered by agreeing with the host. I said;

If you consider a nice guy or gal a doormat, a wimp, a marshmallow -- I agree with you completely. Such a person doesn’t have a chance to succeed in a tough, competitive world in which many other persons are striving for the same things we want for ourselves. The tough-minded guys and gals will run over the wimps in a very short time. I however don’t think of the doormats of the world as truly nice guys and gals. I see nice persons as competent and intelligent men and women who understand the nature of influence, cooperation and persuasion power -- as those people who;

MANAGE INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS WITH KNOWLEDGE, WISDOM AND SKILL --

SHARE THE REWARDS OF ACHIEVEMENT WITH THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO HELP THEM SUCCEED --

CREATE COMMUNITIES OF COOPERATIVE ACHIEVERS IN WHICH
EVERY PERSON IS A RESPECTED MEMBER --

And that, I said to the group, is my definition of a nice guy or gal, of a decent, emotionally honest parent, teacher, manager, pastor, military officer or what have you! Persons who follow my three rules I’ve just given you are the really nice and successful people of this world.

I folded my arms and sat back on the stool -- waiting, for I had said all I intended to in defense of nice guys and gals. So, I waited and waited -- for John to recover from his confusion. I could almost hear the gears whirring in his head as first one camera and then another zoomed in on me and then on to John and panned the audience before coming back to me and John -- for almost a minute. And that is an eternity of dead time on television. The camera operators were getting frantic when John finally stood shook his head to clear his thoughts and muttered right on the air;

Well, I’ll be damned! I never thought of nice guys that way.

Most people don’t but we then had a great time on his show. I had convinced him that my approach is by far the best way to succeeding throughout life, rather than by clawing and screaming, trying to defeat everyone else, destroying the relationships that create friendship and love, clogging your arteries and corroding the plumbing that keeps you alive -- with bile and acids boiling through your vascular and digestive systems to eat away your health and life.

John had the people vote again and this time all but two men of the three hundred or so in the audience voted that nice guys and gals did indeed have a greater chance at success if they followed my view of sound relationships. The viewers immediately saw the wisdom in my approach and I trust that you also shall understand it that way! The next Sunday, after I’d returned home to Minneapolis, I drew my pastor aside, told him this tale and joked;

If you had my percentage of conversions, we’d have the largest congregation in the country!


MAKING YOUR LIFE COUNT

This report is about people and about succeeding or failing in life, since some degree of success and failure are the only real options that are open to us. It is written with the knowledge that neither power nor pleasure exists in a vacuum. Virtually everything good we do in life requires the cooperation of people in different ways. And every person whose help you need in order to succeed has his or her own agenda that is important to him. .

Therefore, you will have to over-power, out-skill, deceive, or persuade others before society will consistently allow you to share in the marbles, money, passionate lovers, prestige or promotions you want. Only in this way can you make your life count for something worthwhile.


Fortunately, every reasonably intelligent and well adjusted person can learn how to predict the attitudes and to shape activities of the men and women you must influence regularly in order to make your life successful. It also shows you how to influence their choices in ways they approve by using sound methods of personal effectiveness. You can do these things by learning and using powerful techniques developed by some very good psychiatrists and psychologists. These methods are unknown to most people, although professional therapists, consultants and social workers have been using them for decades with much success.

Most people struggle through life the best way they can, succeeding once in a while, but more often failing because they never learned how to consistently make good things happen when and where they are needed. They simply blunder along -- accepting whatever the luck of the draw offers them daily, never really taking charge of their relationships in a mutually rewarding manner that keeps people cooperating with them.

Many persons try to succeed by using the values, attitudes, expectations, choices and skills they chanced to learn in childhood. Unfortunately, in this age of relentless change, when power and authority are shared by more and more people, to depend on what you picked up at random as a youngster is a poor way to shape your life into a successful affair. In our conventional behavioral patterns many mistakes have been handed down from generation to generation. At home you were probably socialized not to ask embarrassing questions of your elders. At school you were expected to memorize the correct answers. And if you are like many people, you are still waiting for someone to ask the right questions so you can show what a good student you were. Unfortunately for your welfare, no one is ever going to ask them, since most of the answers you learned in school are no longer appropriate. Yet -- millions of men and women who would never imagine crossing the country by covered wagon instead of jet aircraft, who would never take some medicine man's snake-oil cure, try to succeed in life by using methods that were outdated a century ago. And then they can’t understand why they aren't among the better achievers of society.

Today, men and women are coping with complex events that are affecting their lives in many crucial ways. Medicine, personal behavior, education, entertainment, sexual customs, politics, engineering and business methods are all changing more rapidly than at any time in history. We no sooner get comfortable than life rolls over once again, forcing us to learn an entirely new set of attitudes, activities and relationships!

And yet, not one of the changes sweeping over us like Pacific waves crashing onto a reef, has such critical implications when making one’s life count for something satisfying as the attitudes that people now hold toward power and control.

The Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney mystique (Tell the jerks what to do!) doesn't motivate competent persons any more. If it ever did! For example, since many disasters were caused by fighting the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. During our shameful wars against poor, dark-skinned Third World nations such as Vietnam, Libya, Panama, Granada, Hati, El Salvador, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq and others, many perceptive women and men have lost faith in our institutions. After the 9-11 attack on the Trade Towers, an F B I agent was questioning a Minneapolis man about the loyalty of a Muslim neighbor. He asked Anthony; does he ever criticize the American government?

Tony was flabbergasted for a moment before he blurted out -- Everyone I know criticizes Washington -- including myself and probably you! We see the Congress and state Legislatures consistently selling out to the highest bidder, business executives such as Enron and World Crossing stealing fortunes and disposing of the faithful employees who do great work at the drop of a point on Wall Street, the criminal justice system with politically ambitious district attorneys often convicting and executing always poor, mostly minority men who couldn’t possibly have committed the crimes for which they were convicted. The very flexible morality of primitive politicians, greedy business executives, fundamental preachers, powerful governmental officials and existentially enraged citizens who feel the execution of any minority man whether guilty or not is a good day’s work -- is a weak reed upon which to lean for wisdom and a satisfying life.

Not long ago a middle-aged local realtor told me of an experience he had with his youthful secretary. Dan said that Dianne was a hardworking, high-spirited employee who was competent and loyal enough to become his administrative assistant. He said, she reminded him of the flippant young secretary in the former T V series THE PRACTICE. But he began to notice, to his middle age displeasure, that she was dressing more and more casually, as if she were going to a picnic rather than to a business operation. So, he called her into his office and tactfully asked her to dress according to his code -- the long accepted business code set by such giants as I B M, General Motors and Honeywell. The young woman sat silently as he spoke, but when he finished, she stood up and said quite pointedly;

Who needs this formality in an informal business such as this?

Then she walked out of his office, returned to her desk, and continued to work harder and smarter for his small company than any assistant he had ever employed. As he related the story, Dan sighed deeply and said there was little he could do about her impertinence, unless, of course, he wanted to cut off his nose to spite his face. He could protect his ego against an outspoken girl -- could fire her and really teach her a lesson, forcing her to take unemployment pay, a month or two of subsidized vacation, and get a job with a company that would not be so stuffy about the way she dressed. But, he would be the real loser. He would spend a month trying to find a suitable replacement, another three or four months trying to help the newcomer learn the job, and another six months blaming himself for letting his ego cost him a year's efficiency in his office. He kept his mouth shut and retained a great assistant -- for he lacked the power to force her to comply with his requirements. Indeed life does go on and we must adapt, must cope with reality in order to succeed, even if doing so makes us suspect that the world is going to hell in a handcart, because humans hate change inordinately and yearn to freeze life as it was when we were first learning to mange it; even when doing so costs us a bundle. Many people do just that because personal prestige is more important to themselves than performance or profits, but it quickly leads to dysfunctional families, schools, companies, churches and communities.

The power that parents exerted over their families, teachers over their classes, and pastors over their parishes, has gone the same way it has with employers. It has passed into the hands of people who refuse to be coerced, so much so that for years I have not met anyone in authority who didn't admit that he has less power than his predecessors did a few decades earlier. For example, for generations, Marine Corps drill instructors were required by their macho commanders to drive their recruits brutally, shrugging it off when a few boots died of drowning or heat prostration, saying you cannot hope to make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Today, that abuse of power will quickly get a DI hauled before a court martial and condemned to a long stay in a military prison.

Because of this distrust of authority and growing spirit of independence and self-reliance, any attempt to use intimidation is usually more harmful than helpful, regardless of popular recommendations to win success through brute strength, to apply raw force. To succeed consistently with and through people, you must master sound personal methods for winning cooperation and commitment. I know of no other place to learn them quickly except here, for I have developed them from different approaches to cooperative relationships over the past forty years. Perhaps you could spend several years in a graduate program in psychology. But even then you would likely find that most university departments stress simplistic behavior control concepts that reflect their behavioral philosophy while failing to adequately deal with an existential or a life-style approach to success. Skinnerian Behaviorism proceeds on the assumption that all we need be concerned with is minute acts of behavior -- that human values, attitudes, expectations and relationships are immaterial to controlling others. I’m a firm believer in the use of rewards but my greatest complaint against behavioral technology is the assumption that the strong and competent persons we must cooperate with will sell out for peanuts -- for a few toys or a pat or two on the back. Face up to it, every strong person brings to each relationship his or her own needs and assumptions. No employee, student, spouse, in-law or voter is a blank page upon which we can write what we wish without resistance, counter proposals and outright rebellion when we behave as power freaks.

By selecting carefully from all across the field, I have learned many practical methods that will help you understand the importance of personality patterns, to avoid conflicts consistently and win the cooperation of many people so they respond to you in a positive manner. In addition to my work in academic and clinical psychology, I have also got down in the mud and blood of real life as lived by most women and men. In addition to teaching in two very good liberal arts colleges, I served seven years as a church pastor within a denomination to whom ideological beliefs were very important. I was Vice President of Manufacturing for a farm tool company, Manager of Engineering Research, Methods and Training for a huge eight thousand employee UniRoyal chemical manufacturing complex spread across twenty-two thousand acres and director of a Learning and Learning Disabilities clinic in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Thus, I had many rich experiences in both line and staff work before becoming Professor of Leadership Psychology in the Executive Development Conference at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Of course, when you start using the methods taught in my books, you shall realize while many people have an increasing sense of independence, most will cooperate when you help them succeed along with you. People want sound leadership for their activities, successful problem solving and low conflict organizations. Unfortunately, although they yearn to be self-reliant and competent, many men and women continue to interact in the negative ways they learned in childhood and have seldom examined again. This is very close to one definition of neuroticism;

Neurotics are persons who compulsively hold self-defeating attitudes and use harmful activities that failed in the past with the assumption that this time they shall succeed even though they have not been improved.

A woman who marries a succession of brutal and abusive men -- each time believing that she will succeed in winning their love and support, has a serious flaw in her emotional apparatus. So does a merchant who stiffs his or her customers and then plans on developing a successful store on repeat business. To help people feel good about cooperating with you, as a means of succeeding with a growing number of people, you must make the revolutionary effort to use the superb methods I have drawn together for your use.

Actually, there are only two basic psychological attitudes and expectations you can hold as you relate to the people from whom you want to win cooperation.

FIRST -- You can struggle against learning new ways of relating, persuading and leading others, never discovering how to shape life the way you want it to become.

SECOND -- You can accept the methods that change has brought to our society and its organizations, adapting to people with skill and wisdom and mastering new ways of reaching your goals through cooperation.

If you remain defensive, the best you can do is circle the wagons and fight a rearguard action against those who refuse to cooperate even if you avoid ulcers and your heart doesn’t split like a rotten melon. Then, circumstances and more adaptable persons will control your life. When you need to win the personal commitment of a suspicious stranger, a surly worker or rebellious adolescent, you shall have to do the best you can with whatever crumbs they toss to you. You shall struggle consistently. That route is already overcrowded with those who have no concept of what is happening in their lives - who have no idea of how to win interpersonal commitment beyond bullying those whose cooperation they need to succeed and attacking those who would make life satisfying if treated wisely and well. At least you will not be lonely in that circle of futility for most of the persons you know shall still be going around and around for the next forty years or so. But you shall not be living the rewarding, stimulating live which competent and successful women and women can enjoy once they learn how to focus their powers wisely along lines of excellence.

You will find, as you apply the concepts and procedures I teach, that they can become a normal part of your relationships with other people, an aspect of life they may not understand clearly but which they approve wholeheartedly. They will realize that you have become a more understanding, more rewarding person with who to live, work, and play, a real winner in the true sense of the word, and they will give you a depth of commitment you will probably find astonishing. I am personally thrilled that my oldest son, now with grown kids of his own, has used the concepts that appear in NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST as well in my other books like THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP and WINNING REPEAT SALES to become one of the finest automotive service managers in America. That is a documented fact, since his group recently tied for first place nationally in service satisfaction for the Saturn Division of General Motors.

There is no great mystery about this -- wise people like Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha and others have been teaching for thousands of years, that you must not only treat men and women as you need to be managed, but as they need to be rewarded physically, psychologically and philosophically. Then no one shall be surprised that you are indeed a nice guy or gal who:

MANAGES INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS WITH KNOWLEDGE, WISDOM AND SKILL --

SHARES THE REWARDS OF ACHIEVEMENT WITH THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO HELP YOU SUCCEED --

CREATES COMMUNITIES OF COOPERATIVE ACHIEVERS IN WHICH EVERY PERSON IS A RESPECTED MEMBER --


There really no other way to soar as if on eagles’ wings.


WISDOM FROM THE FULFILLMENT FORUM
From The Book, NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST By JARD DeVILLE
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CONTINUOUS CREATION - Logotherapy Mini-Course

In the beginning was -- hydrogen! Nothing else existed within the cosmos for countless eons after everything exploded with unthinkable energy during the first nanosecond of the Big Bang. In fact -- there was no Cosmos as we know it today. The universe was in chaos for an eternity and then, slowly but with irresistible force, gravity drew the swirling hydrogen clouds together into gigantic glowing globes that grew so dense and so violent that they cooked off as incredibly vast and powerful nuclear furnaces. Stars were born, lived for billions of our years, died and were then reborn in incalculable numbers. We have trouble wrapping our minds around that initial concept, for there are more stars in our Milky Way alone than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth. And there are up to four hundred million galaxies across the void! Perhaps you are beginning to understand what we feel when we use the term mind-boggling, with our belief that this is the greatest story ever told, that the Seminal Spirit, the very author of existence, can be welcomed as a loving companion into our lives.

The starter stars in each island universe, such as Andromeda or our galaxy, the Milky Way, spewed off immense clouds of radioactive stardust that is still being transmuted through cosmic alchemy into the ninety five or so elements needed to form more sophisticated stars and their planets. God isn’t finished with the Cosmos and its inhabitants -- the divine processes of Continuous Creation continue apace. Much as uranium is changed into powerful plutonium within a nuclear reactor, so simple hydrogen atoms are transmuted into new elements within the blazing nuclear engines. Then, as radioactive stardust spewing away from each star it is transformed further into the matter needed to create and support life, God's incredible processes continue on this cosmic scale. Astronomers have recently taken photographs of new stars popping off like strings of firecrackers along unimaginably long columns of altered stardust. Every day -- yesterday and today and tomorrow, hundreds of millions of tons of this stardust drift down to earth, growing our planet about an inch in diameter every million years. This only seems slow to us because we do not see with God’s perspective. Roberta and Jard certainly cannot explain the existence of life and loving souls without accepting the existence of a Cosmic Creator with a finger in every pie across the entire Cosmos!

We don't believe for one moment that the appearance of living creatures across our earth and sea and sky is the result of blind chance. There is unimaginable intelligence, incredible wisdom and limitless power behind the arrival of we the sentient end products of that eerie looking, green-glowing stardust -- and that entity is the loving God who enters into a covenant relationship with every soul who connects contritely and commits his or her life to spiritual growth and generous service others.

According to Cosmic researchers, the Cosmos seems to function beyond normal scientific principles in a near metaphysical or spiritual manner. Nothing shows this better than research into the origins of the universe -- cosmology. God has always functioned on an eternal time scale and that in itself causes some of the conflicts between science and religion. Of course, we understand that many persons within different religions have clung to concepts that are obviously impossible myths used by our ancestors to explain events they couldn’t comprehend. We know why many reject science as important to their beliefs. The principles of matter and life are not simple and very few things are what they appear to be to our unaided senses. Also, our understanding of nature through science keeps changing.

To Isaac Newton, atoms behaved much as billiard balls that bounce off of each other. Well -- billiard balls still bounce, but now, after Niels Bohr’s quantum mechanics insights, matter is better seen as waves of energy, as sub-atomic particles behaving much like minute electronic solar systems whirling in constant motion. In short, most of the apparently solid desk on which we work, is space and energy as empty as the long parsecs between the great spiral galaxies. If Jard could align his molecules with the desk’s empty spaces, he could ease his fist right through the wood. In other words, the skeptic who says show me God and I’ll live a life of faith, is much like a physicist who clings to Newtonian concepts.

Jard perceives the emerging of countless island universes, each one probably teeming with life, as God's vast existential vision of what was and is and forevermore shall be.

Bohr saw existence much the same way in his brilliant research. He told Einstein:

"Albert, you must stop telling God what he’s thinking. And you must stop telling the people what you’re telling God. You’re scaring the hell out of them."

The Cosmos isn't some vast clockwork mechanism ticking ponderously along as Newton thought and most persons still assume.

Actually, energy, time, space and matter fuse in a virtually mystical manner which reveals their essential metaphysical nature of everything that exists and that is what Einstein was saying with E = mc2.

If you look far enough back in time through astronomy, you find yourself peering right into the face of God doing a hands-on operation of the first magnitude. When Jard was teaching leadership psychology in the Executive Development Program at the University of Arizona, he made a significant discovery. When he openly confessed his spiritual faith, it was as if he were giving other professors permission to discuss their own awe about life. Several joined him and he eventually discovered that the astronomers and cosmologists working at the Arizona’s Kitts Peak astronomical laboratory, outnumbered earthbound scholars by two to one in the faith communities of Tucson. Like Jard, they were filled with awe by the magnitude of the cosmos, and being intelligent men and women, connected the reality of existence with the Lord of the Cosmos. We realize that the processes of creation are incredibly complex but God puts no value on ignorance. God is indeed the Cosmic Creator -- but to ignore scientific scholarship in the name of faith, is to ignore God's own methods used in shaping and using matter and life to majestic purposes. God waves no magic wand but follows the processes that he/she authored in the beginning. Here now, are two incredible discoveries.

FIRST -- Despite sounding manifestly impossible, minute bubbles of matter, smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, contain enough hydrogen to form vast spiral galaxies, each one containing billions of stars, galaxies that expand exponentially for billions of years. These cosmic bubbles of inconceivable density flow out of God's heart and mind to form entire island universes in countless dimensions. They are not only isolated from each other in space but also within time. There is no way to get from one galaxy to another even if we could travel faster than light. Not without mastering some exotic principles of nature we haven’t even glimpsed yet.

SECOND -- If those minute galactic bubbles aren’t beyond comprehension, consider a vastly more complex processes. The poisonous radioactive elements and compounds spewed off by the stars, the few dollars in chemicals that form your body, were transmuted into thinking and loving persons who once brought to life, perpetuate their species. Roberta says that she has trouble understanding a flea, to say nothing of the way children are conceived, programmed genetically to mature and grow to adulthood with seldom a glitch. And she had three of them -- children, not fleas!

Mini-Quiz
Have there been times in your life when you caught glimpses of God the Seminal Spirit as the ultimate personality?

Could the Cosmos have transcended its own laws in deriving living creatures from inorganic matter?

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THE LOVE PYRAMID - Mini Course From The Fulfillment Forum

We must insist on this right here -- up front. As St. Paul and many other brilliant scholars of the human condition told us, a satisfying life must combine faith, hope and love -- with the greatest element of all being love.


Certainly we have found nothing that even remotely takes the place of love in our lives and our relationships with each other, our children, their children and their children's kids. With love, virtually everything falls into place. Without love, nothing fits well into the mosaic of a meaningful life.

Also, after everything else you can say about humans -- after discussing the personality patterns, life-themes, values, attitudes and expectations we write about, we agree with psychological great -- Carl Rogers and with John the Beloved Disciple. There are only two kinds of people in the world. The two are not black and white, rich and poor or even male and female, as much as we appreciate that last arrangement that seems especially created for our benefit.

There are only persons who are capable of loving others and persons who do not love anyone except those who in one way or another contribute something of value to themselves.

We are all on a continuum from one extreme to the other; another; there really are only the two options. And may God have mercy on your soul if you connect with one of the loveless persons when you are young and naïve - and having said that, we must also report that the opposite of love is not hate. Hate is an entirely different emotion that is much more complicated than love. The opposite of love is simply -- indifference -- not caring what happens to another person, family, congregation, community or country. This is not as immediately damaging as hatred but it is much more widespread and therefore deprives those persons who need love and acceptance.

Nor only is love vital for satisfaction in our relationships, as a recent study of neglected Romanian orphans revealed, love is necessary for survival in our formative years. Love in infancy teaches us the basic trust that sets the stage for almost everything good that follows in each person's life. Some years ago, several of the nurses at Cook County Hospital in Chicago discovered, while caring for infants in the orphaned and abandoned children's ward there, that one of the beds apparently had supernatural powers. The last crib on the left in the ward, next to the broom closet, always held the healthiest, happiest child. They discovered that the infant's race, gender or nationality made no difference; the child in the end crib, over a two or three week period, had less colic, fewer infections and gained weight faster and went out sooner than any other kid in the ward. To say that this magic bed mystified the nurses and doctors was a major understatement, so they switched cribs and discovered it was not the bed but its position at the end of the long row that made the difference. The infants next to the broom closet always did best and were sent out for adoption the fastest of all. There was some skepticism at first but an examination of the infants' charts from the previous two or three years proved the nurses' point beyond any argument. It was more than a little spooky but they I deed found a magic place, next to the broom closet -- in which kids prospered best. And you know something they really had discovered the magic of love and life!

They called in specialists who examined everything from the floor wax, to the heating vents and the soap used to wash the bedding. Nothing could be found except that the end spot had a little higher bacteria count because of -- you guessed it, the untidy broom closet's dust and drippings. When everything kept taking them back to the dirty broom closet, when everyone was going a little crazy, Molly Sullivan called in a behavioral detective who studied their data and immediately reported there must be a human factor they'd missed. Molly started snooping and in just one night discovered the mysterious healing force. It was a loving American Indian woman.

Eleanor Bentbow was the night custodian, an Ojibwa grandmother, who worked the midnight to eight am shift through several of the wards. Her supplies were stored in the broom closet -- mops and brooms, solutions and waxes and soaps and cleaning rags stored beside the mysterious space occupied by the end crib. And, as Ma Bentbow worked through the long quiet night, she would pass back and forth, getting supplies for her different chores. As she came by, she'd stop by the end child, pat it a bit, tickle it under the chin, and if the duty nurse was gone from her station in the middle of the ward, snatch it to her ample bosom, rock it in her arms and sing it a few snatches of an old Ojibwa lullaby before kissing it good night and tucking it gently back to bed. Where it slept peacefully and grew strong because it had found an infant's sense of meaning in her love. It was all done, mind you, in direct violation of sound health principles, the laws of bacteriology and hospital regulations. Every night the loving grandmother spread bacteria, dust and muddy mop drippings all over the end kid. Along with her love! And life and love being what they are, the squeezings and dust didn't stand the chance of a snowball in July compared to her great loving heart! She was living and loving on a level that did not negate the science of Koch, Pasteur and Lister but indeed did transcend it. The nurses and doctors at Cook County understood this instantly and started writing that each child in the ward must receive so many minutes of Tender Loving Care (TLC) on every shift. And, incredibly, the illness and death rate in the ward plummeted -- swiftly fell far below the national average. Saints do indeed come in all sizes, shapes and colors!

Another vital factor we must discuss in the beginning is that while the love and sexual intimacy a couple shares is vital to satisfaction, the physical attractions of our youthful years are never enough to carry a man and woman through a life-time. In our FULFILLMENT course, a companion program to this, we have written extensively about existential frustration and alienation that occurs when men and women fail to find a consistent sense of purpose in their lives. As you shall learn in the unit about changing personal circumstances, obviously, society is changing swiftly -- a majority of persons have difficulty trying to keep life on an even keel. Scholars like Carl Jung, Carl Rogers and Viktor Frankl write that we 20th-21st century urban souls become confused neurotic when we fail to find strong sources of meaning in our lives. We cannot even find happiness by seeking it -- happiness is a fleeting by-product of living a consistently meaningful life. Like sleep during a restless night, the harder we pursue happiness, the faster it flees from us. When we spend our years seeking happiness through pleasure, possessions, prestige and power -- lacking a sense of purpose in our activities and permanence in our relationships, life remains secular and pointless and becomes conflicted with confusion and discouragement. And that is simply too much to expect the sexual relationship of a man and woman to overcome. Humans need more -- we believe that each person requires the crucial support that comes from living a complete life -- that occurs through:

Worshipping devoutly, relating warmly, serving faithfully, learning wisely, persevering bravely and playing enthusiastically.

Love and friendship, and we surely don't know where to draw a precise line between the two, present a great paradox of existence – and the more love you give away, even squandering it recklessly, the more love and friendship you gain. We've learned that we can love deeply and have compassion for as many people as we choose to love. There are no limits; there is no sexual scarcity although some neurotic people who fear and hate intimacy pretend there is so they shall not have to risk meeting their lover's needs. Of course, we also believe that chastity out of marriage and a monogamous relationship within marriage is by far the best, is the ideal for committed lovers.

Unless we develop mature attitudes and high expectations, no marriage can succeed. Most young couples who divorce and put their children under great stress simply abandon their marriages much too soon. There is a great deal to be said for toughing it out through the learning curve, for becoming better partners rather than shopping around for some wonderful and perfect lover who will cater to your every whim. You shall have to become a spiritually maturing person to whom your partner can relate in love and friendship, without becoming your stooge. Hang on until both lovers become more maturity along life's journey. Actually, in marriage as in most of life, much satisfaction comes from showing up when needed, just being there on time for the people who love you.

CHALLENGES

Fear, anxiety and frustration hamper both women and men in their search for lasting love and friendship. Karen Horney wrote a fine book called THE NEUROTIC PERSONALITY OF OUR TIME. One key concept was that persons who grow up deprived of love, who are neurotic about loving relationships, often fail to develop the personal acceptance that true love needs in order to prosper. Meg Dalton had been abandoned by her father as a girl, sexually abused by her mother's lover when a teen-ager and was battling through a stormy marriage in her mid-twenties. She distrusted and feared men although she'd married Tom and had a little boy with him. Meg doubted, from her painful experiences, whether any man could ever be trusted wholeheartedly. She said:

When my son slithered out of my body and I realized he was a male, I wept in frustration. My own child was one of those mysterious, dangerous ‘others‘. I doubted I could love him, could care for him as I would a girl. It was difficult to go beyond my old emotions and I fear he still feels my doubts

Two men had failed Meg, her own father who cowardly ran away; who should have loved and supported her even if he would not remain married to his wife and also her mother's lover when he seduced her as a teen-ager. Of course Meg's mother was disturbed enough to stay with a ruthless man who'd abuse an unhappy adolescent for his own egoistic pleasure. Women are often the brains and minds of men and women really do nature with some significant differences as women usually love more readily than men do. Men have enormous macho problems with love -- some of then genetic and some cultural. Every mental hospital and prison in America is jammed with men who had an absolutely terrible childhood because their parents were too immature to rear healthy, happy kids. Of course, we do realize that a great deal of the parents' confusion and despair comes from the secular society we've created with our ideologies of greed. However, the alienation and frustration of the age does not lessen our responsibility to love those persons for whom we are responsible. A great many of our problems are eased when our lives become more satisfying, when we deliberately find sources of meaning for our lives. Roberta insists that women generally handle love better than men do. Jard agrees with her.

The old European patriarchal system so dear too many fearful, primitive men is a disaster in our swiftly changing society. The concept of the father as the family's commanding officer who issues the commands in a military model, with the mother who carries them out as his executive officer and the children as rank and file soldiers who salute and obey without question, no longer works. Many macho men have a John Wayne/John Rambo attitude in which a real man loves nothing except perhaps his horse and his gun. They live with a tough arrogance that drives many women and children mad. Police officers and career soldiers who are among the most macho, swaggering men of our society -- tough guys who believe that serious social problems can be solved with a club and a gun. They are willing to use violence when they cannot intimidate others. Serious relationship problems are common among such men. Cops and soldiers have the highest divorce rates in the country today. If they cannot dominate and control, they are at a loss in keep their relationships sound. These include the aerial cowboys who got staggering drunk and assaulted even women naval officers in the Navy Tailhook scandal a few years ago; and the Army training officers and sergeants who went to prison for abusing their power over teenage female recruits by forcing them to have sexual relations with them. Many wives leave such men after a few years in search of less domineering mate -- but the tough guys are always the marrying kind. The men in the Chicago Police Department have been married by an average of three times before they have twenty years on the job. Most soon remarry and repeat the unhappy process several times before finally retiring with several families spread across the country.

Many women have problems with love also. Some never seem to learn the difference between men who use and abuse them to Tend their needs and see the food is cooked -- as Mr. Doolittle sang in MY FAIR LADY -- and those who actually care about women per se. This difference between men who want sex while fearing and detesting the feminine characteristics that make a woman who she is -- and men who love women as women, puts many naive girls at risk in their search for love and acceptance. Every school we taught in had at least one woman teacher who was married to a janitor. With teaching being an avenue out of the lower economic classes into the middle class, a considerable proportion of women teachers marry laboring men. They are more comfortable with them than with upwardly mobile lawyers, physicians and managers. They can identify with a man who sits on the front steps and drinks beer from a can in his undershirt because their fathers had! And because their working class fathers often slapped their mothers around when frustrated, some tolerate their husbands' casual violence. After all, we are usually tempted to assume that life as we learned it is the way it should always be. It gets worse for many women.

About one young woman in five has a major eating disorder that comes right out of our Hollywood culture and the way women are portrayed in movies and on television. They are caught in a vicious cycle of weight gain and loss that becomes harder and harder as their bodies try to protect them from starvation during their childbearing years. Far too many women become fixated in an impossible quest, dieting and bingeing, ignoring everything their bodies are trying to tell them, trying desperately to remain a seventeen year old idealized girl sold to American women and men by vested interest groups that will do anything to make money at our expense. Up to a quarter of the women in the U S and Canada are on diets at any given time because of pressure put on them by advertisers and the motion picture industry. We as a society are sending young women mixed messages. We are telling girls they can have wonderful careers, compete successfully with men in business have loving husbands and children -- as long as they look like movie stars.

We believe it is their preoccupation with this impossible ideal that cripples so many girls from junior high school to the early college years. Before puberty, little girls run and play, plan great projects and have fabulous dreams about the future, anticipating lives of achievement and satisfaction. But as every teacher and school counselor knows, the onslaught of puberty destroys this happy anticipation for many girls. Grades fall, serious mood swings occur and many girls take lovers to prove to themselves they really are lovable. As a boy matures he sees his increased weight and size as a positive sign, he is becoming more competent in sports, more masculine. Sad to say, almost all girls are taught just the opposite by parents, teachers, counselors, and by the boys they've become fixated on. Research reveals that teachers -- even women teachers, expect more of boys in class and offer them many more opportunities to grow intellectually than they give girls.

Almost every advertisement, every movie, every book, every boy, tells girls over and over again that any size or weight increase beyond the slenderness of a fashion model or movie star is a personal failure. Every girl who becomes anorexic or bulimic, we are convinced, is terrified of maturing into womanhood because the men and boys who define beauty have dictated for American women an impossible goal. Our ideal of beauty comes naturally to no more than six percent of all women. The rest have to starve and batter themselves in a life-long battle against nature. Anorexic girls are desperate to remain childlike, so they won't be humiliated by their broadening hips and breasts blooming into womanhood. They have accepted the current Hollywood fantasy of beauty so the boys will see them as desirable as movie stars. A moment with food on the lips -- is forever on the hips, has become American women's' nightmares as millions are torturing themselves in an unending struggle to look more attractive to men that detracts from everything else they try to accomplish and become.

We're convinced that healing for women caught in this self-destruction cycle begins with a spiritual awakening and progresses through finding a lasting source of meaning that goes beyond a fixation with one's body shape. Dieting and re-dieting is terribly harmful. It leads to women as talented as Karen Carpenter and Sandra Dee killing themselves through self starvation in order to maintain an impossible ideal that adds neither more nor less to a woman's worth, ability to learn and potential for achievement. This comes from the legitimate need to be loved that has been co-opted by vested interests that want more and more money, power and prestige. Get into a spiritual fellowship where you feel you belong, find a spiritually minded lover and life shall be a great deal more satisfying than struggling futilely to remain seventeen for the rest of your life. Fortunately for lovers, the man and woman relationship of honest and accepting love is the best we've ever seen.

As Ernest Becker wrote in his Pulitzer Prize winning book THE DENIAL OF DEATH, many humans do have serious problems with everything that is connected to our sexual needs. Nothing else in life has so many cultural and social restrictions and punishments that trouble us from infancy to old age. For a thousand years now, love, intimacy and sexuality have remained a deeply troubling aspect of life for a great many neurotic theologians and leaders within the church. Those aspects of life that give us sexual pleasure and produce our offspring have been very difficult for some priests and ministers to manage without turning cruel and violent. Thank God, some but not even most elements of the church have finally matured past the cruel medieval neuroticism that sees sexuality as an evil part of life that God hates. This ancient belief that sex is sinful and thus forbidden by God except for the concession to perpetuate the race came out of the raw neuroticism of powerful medieval churchmen who justified their psychopathic fear and hatred of women. We feel the greatest single sin of the institutional church, after blessing the vicious wars our political primitives orchestrate, has been its treatment of women. Husbands owned their wives and children legally and could treat them as private possessions without suffering the church's condemnation for a thousand years.
Because so many medieval theologians narcissistically saw themselves as God's special holy men, who struggled to resist sexual temptation by lustful women, they tortured and murdered many unfortunate souls and turned all women into second rate believers. Burning women at the stake was a favorite way of controlling feisty females as the church did with Jeanne d' Arc and many others. Of course, only within the last fifty years or so has any religious hierarchy seen the lay members as forming the church rather than the clergy being the church. This has been true of Protestant denominations as well as the Catholic movement. It was well into the 20th century before the Methodist Church chose lay delegates to their annual conferences and committees. Not until the sixties did the Methodist, Lutheran and other denominations accept women as pastors. The Episcopalian church fought against female equality ferociously until the eighties, and according to Roberta, the Southern Baptists and Catholics still considers women inferior souls who cannot teach congregations anything of value. Apparently, she says, you must have a penis in order to think worthwhile spiritual thoughts -- in order to serve God!

A loving couple that matures in faith, hope and love, through grace within the physical, psychological and philosophical aspects of life, will love far more deeply than they did during the simplistic and usually naive sexual urges of youth. Jard especially likes the way playwright Arthur Miller put it in his play AFTER THE FALL, Quentin (actually Miller himself) said to his wife Louise (Mary rather than Marilyn Monroe);

I came in just now and I had a tremendous wish to come out to you. And you to me. It sounds absurd to say the world is filled with lovers rushing to meet each other. The city is filled with lovers!

Indeed! Love will mature when we get past the domineering concepts that immature men and women use against each other because they have selfish needs to prove themselves superior at the partner's expense. Life seldom becomes rewarding until we become better persons rather than trying to shape the lover into something different. Of course, as Roberta says:

It's every woman's duty to find a perfect man and immediately try to improve him.



THE LOVE PYRAMID

To be at its best, love must mature up through the motivational pyramid shown here. To stop in one of the lower tiers is to limit the joy a person can enjoy in a lasting relationship.


Becoming *** PHILOSOPHICAL *** Purpose/Permanence
Doing *** PSYCHOLOGICAL *** Power/Prestige
Having *** PHYSICAL *** Pleasure/Pain

PHYSICAL LOVE -- (Pleasure/Pain) Love that is limited to the physical aspects of a relationship is focused largely on arousal, passion and tension release. It makes little difference who the partner is. Any compliant body can be used, for the person is secondary to the pleasure being received by the user. Such physical passion can be shifted from one sexual supplier to another with little or no regret or concern, from one seduction to the next, as Joe Namath boasted when he slept with a thousand women in his first few years of playing professional football. Such a person can go from one prostitute to another, from one singles bar to the next, from a tryst with one lover to a new one. One night stands, sexual fantasies, pornographic movies and books and wily seductions occur within the physical aspects of love. When one person is used for another's pleasure, even if both agree in advance, it is little more than mutual masturbation. If the other person is abused or damaged in the relationship, he or she can be discarded and replaced with no more regret than for a piece of malfunctioning machinery. Many adolescents, in the first wild rush of sexuality, relate to one another at this primitive level. Unfortunately, many adults fail to mature beyond it. They continue romancing, marrying, divorcing and romancing again in a madcap search for a perfect partner, chasing the wild excitement of youth in a stage that needs a lot more stability in order to be satisfying.

Only this morning as this chapter is being written, we attended the funeral of a friend who made a great deal of money through his knowledge and energy. Donald Knopf was as hard a worker as we've ever known, not only for himself but for the poor and needy of the community. He gave an enormous amount of time and money to helping people with problems. Nevertheless, as his friends and relatives filled the front pews, we've never seen such a complex mix of brothers and sisters, half sisters and brothers, cousins, in-laws and former wives in our lives. At the age of fifty-five Don was still falling in and out of love like a teen-ager, still drifting from one woman to the next, giving her several children before falling out of love and seeking a better partner. He never did think in terms of becoming a better husband and father rather than wanting a perfect lover who would let him feel the sexual excitement of youth again. He never matured into the second and third tier of a loving relationship and if he enjoyed a long succession of sexual partners, his dozen children from several families have had a difficult time growing up without a father.

PSYCHOLOGICAL LOVE -- (Power/Prestige) In this aspect of a relationship, physical arousal, pleasure and satiation occurs as in the physical but the affection doesn't stop there. This is a deeper relationship that binds lovers together as they mature through the more complex needs and activities of adult love. The lovers not only desire one another for what each offers, but both have a deeper investment in the other's health and happiness. They trust each other with their egos, because loving another person makes you vulnerable as well as calling up protective feelings. This is the level at which many good marriages and love affairs function, especially in the more mellow middle years and while the lovers do care deeply about each other, they may still have difficult times. After all, while you and your lover love each other, differences of opinion and a variety of needs remain. Few couples never quarrel just because they love one another. Jard knew two young people who lived together as lovers without making the final commitment of marriage. Mildred was a graduate student in psychology and Henry an executive in a huge corporation. She said, when she was being offered a teaching and research job in a distant university:

I love Harry, I really do, but he cannot leave town with me. Changing companies now would cost him a vice-presidency at 3 M and I cannot ask for that. But then, I cannot see that my research and teaching about childhood learning is any less importance to society than selling glue and sandpaper. If I insisted he come to Columbus, he's soon resent me and If I turned down my offer there to stay here with him, I'd soon feel I'd given up too much after having worked so hard for my doctorate. I have to be true to my own vision of a fulfilling life.

Millie and Harry flew back and forth for a year or so but eventually drifted apart and met and married other lovers. Perhaps it was just as well they found someone else, for their careers meant more to them when they separated than the relationship.

PHILOSOPHICAL LOVE -- (Purpose/Permanence) This third aspect of love includes the passion from the physical and the sense of belonging from the psychological as it continues to include crucial spiritual elements of a lasting love relationship. The lovers have matured beyond the limitations of psychological games that cause pain to become tender and compassionate. They live with a lasting sense of purpose and permanence in the affair for they know they belong together for life. The lovers support each other against all attackers; see the relationship as being spiritual and having mystical overtones. There is neither a desire to find a substitute sexual partner nor a determination to play a dominance game through which the lover is manipulated and used. Such a love affair has taken on a lovely patina of faith, hope and love as well as grace, a glow that is shared in mutual satisfaction. The development of love at this level takes time, although for many it comes long before the later stages of one's life. The whirling of two eccentric personalities around different centers of gravity sooner or later abraid a loving fit although for some time it may include considerable smoke and flying sparks!

To best focus your love in the philosophical aspects of life, mature as a person and behave as a loving soul:

BECOME WARM AND ACCEPTING OF YOUR LOVER -- Perceive the other as a viable and independent personality rather than as a second rate appendage to yourself.

BECOME ENCOURAGING AND SUPPORTIVE OF KEY CHOICES -- Help your lover become more and more knowledgeable and wise about life's opportunities.

BECOME TOLERANT OF LIFE'S INEVITABLE GROWTH FRICTION -- No two persons ever mature at the same rate - one will grow, causing tension and only later will the other catch up.

It's common for psychologists and counselors to recommend we accept the people we love for what they are. However, that isn't good enough for by accepting them as they already are, we may be condemning them to mediocrity. We must accept the persons we help for what they have the potential to become. Don't nag, of course, but help others mature consistently through the channels of fulfillment. Your spouse, your children and your friends and relatives deserve this of you.

Always accept the fact that you can control only one half of a relationship, your half, while your lover controls his or her half. Trying to control another adult's half is a quick step to a relationship disaster for no individual worthy of love and respect will let a neurotic control freak dominate themselves, their children and their choices.

Remember;

The only way two lovers can agree all the time is when one them stops thinking.

The only way to keep an accepting lover is to become an accepting lover.

The fact that we disagree and occasionally quarrel doesn't mean we are not in love.


Two people in the very elastic harness of marriage seldom mature at the same rate and that spells trouble in many relationships. A woman who's been a secretary for twenty years and comes home one evening to announce she's been accepted in a law school program is rocking her family's boat. So is the middle manager who informs his kids, attending an exclusive and expensive private school, that he's taking a year off work to write a novel, that they'll have to attend a public school and stop buying designer clothes.

Growth friction can be compared to movement between the earth's great tectonic plates. The silent, hidden movement can be so slow as to remain invisible for a long time although stresses keep building. Finally, the pressures become greater than the resistance and the landscape lurches into motion as an earthquake. Sometimes windows are broken and crockery smashed. Some long-standing buildings cannot take the strain and they collapse. Just as many marriages do when the relationship cannot stand the changes occurring in them because the lovers mature at different speeds and in different directions.


PROJECT # ONE -- LOVE LEVEL IDENTIFICATION

To discover the level of your love for another person, physical, psychological or philosophical, in the pleasure/pain, power/prestige or purpose/permanence aspects of existence, complete this project.

FIRST -- Relax comfortably in a chair or on a bed.

Visualize in your mind the image of the person you now love or most recently loved in an adult relationship. Think of the reasons you loved this person, recall his or her good points in the physical, psychological and philosophical aspects of life. Fix the image of that lover firmly in your mind.

SECOND -- Accept the fact or a terrible tragedy.

Through an automobile accident or an unexpected illness, your lover dies suddenly. He or she is gone - there's no doubt about it. You are left alone. Accept your loss, mourn it deeply, feel frustration and anger but in time you realize you must continue living. There is your job to do and children to love, friends to support -- so you start adapting despite the deep loss.

THIRD -- Receive a great gift from God.

Through the remarkable science of cloning, God offers you a perfect double of that dear, lost lover. The clone is perfect in every detail. He or she looks talks and thinks like the lover, makes love the same way and supports you in the same manner. He or she wants your support also.

There is only one catch in your miracle. You and your newly restored lover didn't share the mutual experiences and relationships you had in the past. Both the good and the bad are missing from the relationship you and your original lover shared. You are starting at square one now.

NOW -- To identify the level at which your current love is operating, transfer your love to the newly cloned lover. Tell how you shall do that.

If you can readily transfer your love to the new lover, your love is operating at the pleasure/pain or physical level.

If your love can be transferred with some new experiences and a growing relationship, it is functioning at the power/prestige or psychological level.

If your love cannot be transferred without an entire galaxy of mutually satisfying experiences, your love is currently at the purpose/permanence or the philosophical level.

Jard & Roberta DeVille; Taught leadership psychology at the University of Arizona; published psychology books, seminars & psychological assessment instruments. They wrote 'Lovers For Life' and other Courses/books together. Visit http://www.fulfillmentforum.com for FREE Courses and E-Commerce Tools.