Another Idol Bites the Dust!

VOL 2000 Feb. 21, 2000

Outlooks I

Take It All Off!

Yesterday, I put up the link above for those who are curious enough to find out. Yes, it was about Dr. Laura Schlessinger. The first time I listened to her program must have been about four years ago in a car. I was with my sister in law at the time who remarked that Dr. Laura sounded like, "a little snit." She was reading my mind, that was also my impression. Funny how sometimes first impressions are often the best, the most lasting, etc. There were things that Dr. Laura was saying, to try and get people to be more aware of what they were doing that seemed refreshing at first. But the more I listened, the more I detected the "I'm always right" tone that told me I was dealing with a fanatic.

To what extent there were and are even hints of hypocrisy may well tell us plenty about this public character in time. We already know plenty about Rush Limbaugh and it hasn't hurt his appeal much. Of course there will always be plenty of people who support conservative politics without really thinking it through, same with the liberal politics. For both camps, there are ideas which are past their usefulness, ideas that are only given life by the beliefs of their adherents and no longer have any instrumental value for the future.

Again, and for convenience as a teaching method, the outlook these people have is more important than that of their leaders, spokesmen or commentators: it matters far more how the audience is seeing the world than what the public speakers for any subject or persuasion are saying. In this sense, since it is the spaces between spokes that also form the wheel, the outlook of any audience can be determined by examining their public spokesmen. And of course these spokesmen are being manipulated by those in authority who have decided that they have the airwaves they have.

Right now in the United States, there are more successful spokesmen with a conservative "blue league" political message in the burgeoning AM talk radio market than there are liberal "red league" ones. There have been a few notable attempts to put together liberal message talk radio shows; they tried to get Mario Cuomo to become a talk show host but it never took. The best of these talk shows with a liberal slant are those hosted by famous lawyers like Alan Dershawitz.

The conservative and liberal political outlooks are reflective of two complimentary world views that see the self in society in completely different ways. If we all just pause and consider all the people we have ever known, it is possible to see certain concerns, preoccupations, interests, etc. that many of them may have shared. What we are seeing are projections of a shared outlook. Here are a few shared outlooks;

This is a popular outlook whenever the future looks uncertain or foreboding. There was a great upsurge in this outlook prior to Y2K. It is easy to predict that this outlook will wane in favor just so long as no serious crisis is ever faced. If a crisis does arise, and it's of Biblical proportions, these people may or may not be prepared for it, but at least they will certainly have convinced themselves that they at least made the effort.

Of course a true believer has to have someone to believe in and this person is Jesus. Whether and to what extent Jesus would approve of either this outlook or the "sales tactics" of people acting in his name, is not known. A true believer may have a pessimistic view of the rest of humanity, but they tend to be pretty optimistic about those who believe as they do. This is not the only outlook that requires faith. In some sense all outlooks require some faith, but this is the outlook that requires a particular faith.

Other "true believer" type outlooks will replace the spiritual leader and ideology but will still act and feel essentially the same. Whether you're a Moslem or a Mormon, or anything else, to the extent that you view the propagation of your religion as the central purpose in your life, your outlook is that of a true believer.

This is one outlook that has traditionally delivered the biggest dose of dignity and meaning for the most people the world over for a very long time, several centuries at least. The true believer outlook is mixed up with politics to the extent that true believers like their government to be respectful of their outlook if not actively supportive of it, though this outlook cannot influence anywhere in excess of its actual numbers, for not everyone is a "true believer" and not all wish to be ruled by such an outlook. It is considered "narrow" by just about everyone else with a different outlook.

The true believer outlook demands an actual fulfillment in history so that whenever world events get into crisis, the veritable acts of God are expected at any moment. I sincerely doubt that any of these "true believer" outlooks will ever vanish until their prophecies are satisfactorily fulfilled. And in the meantime, there are other forms of these outlooks; the central figure, perhaps some writings, some principles, a prophecy, fulfillment, etc.; a storyline in which each person has some status as observer of the acts of God. This is one of the fundamental human outlooks.

Economic materialists are keenly aware of the value of time, time management is a way of life for them, "time is money" is their motto. They very often ignore anything and everything that is unrelated to their financial view of the world. This is a popular and pervasive outlook in American society at the moment. Oddly enough, it tends to spawn hedonism, selfishness, lives of studied formality punctuated with episodes of mindless abandon. These people are frequently positioned somewhere above the general level of middle class prosperity. A growing number are becoming the new super rich.

These people still constitute in one form or another the basic social block in most advanced countries around the world. Without them, nothing we take for granted would work very well for long. Theirs is a personal and realistic attachment and involvement with their chosen work. They wouldn't think about doing something less well than they could possibly do it. Most of these people at the top of their professions have really mastered them and are proud of their accomplishments.

The traditionalist places more value on his family, his country and his religion than most other outlooks. Matters of tradition structure the lives of these people and they are predominantly middle class. The middle classes of America, France, Japan, or Nigeria may share very few customs but their core values are probably very similar. This outlook is the one that really leads civilizations forward.

The things revisionists hate are all tied up together; they especially hate everyone else's rules but their own, they always assume they are smarter, better informed, have the "right" ideas, etc. therefore they really hate most people who they usually like to call "the masses" and imagine themselves leading, not necessarily to any better world, but just so they can be tyrants for a while, because since they lack the experience of running anything real, they tend to mess things up real fast and the results are that everyone who follows them suffers.

But that's ok since some other things these people hate are a good cause that ends, a party that ends, a Revolution that ends, no social crises real or imagined, other people accumulating more wealth than they have. Oh they particularly hate that one since revisionists are the closest outlook we have to the clinical definition of an aberrant delusional psychotic.

Destructiveness in one form or another is central to this outlook since nothing new can happen without something old being destroyed. This outlook is not new and has probably been around in one form or another throughout human history.

These people have sworn the death or transformation of the traditionalist outlook. Theirs is the outlook of certain professions involved in writing, information (particularly journalists), ministers, officials, education and the law. Theirs is the conceit of brains over brawn, including mathematical brawn. It is a real conceit because nothing the revisionist proposes is usually very smart. Their track record in fact is rather poor. They are frequently involved in "symbolic" rather than "real" gestures; they are the one's who advocate this or that symbolic gesture to show solidarity with this or that victimized group.

Communists are sort of a special blend of "true believer" and "revisionist" rolled up together. And yeah, there still are genuine commies. They have their enshrined leaders; Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, etc. and they pack their bookshelves with their writings and treat them as gospel just like any "true believer" would. But they don't really care about anyone else's fate but their own since this is basically an outlaw outlook, that is until they come to power. Then, it becomes a fascist outlook. The rest of us have had to endure one form or another of rule by revisionists from time to time. It's usually meant a drastic loss of civil liberties, including the right to laugh in their hateful faces, followed by a war or a famine or both as the basic institutions of civilized society crumble away. It has everywhere and at all times been the case that those who aimed to confiscate and redistribute wealth have been disappointed once they came to power and realized that the wealth resided with the people and their skills, people the revolutionaries had either killed, imprisoned or run off as refugees.

These then are a few of the major outlooks that people have had based in part on the ideas of Dr. William H. Pemberton, a professor of General Semantics at U.C. Berkeley some time ago. Pemberton addressed us at a day long conference I attended while an employee of IBM back in the early 1980's. Pemberton postulated the basic conflict between traditionalists and revisionists as well as of several more basic outlooks including the primitive, the scientist, the artist, the servant of mankind, etc. each with its own particular orientation.

Carroll Quigley's term "outlook" is in his terms wrapped up with various national cultures particularly on the European model. But he also postulates a traditional outlook that seems to encompass a great many people around the world he refers to as the Pakistan-Peruvian axis. He did not mean that these people were all essentially alike, but that there were many similarities in their outlooks. It was also interesting to note that Quigley, who wrote his great work in the 1960's decried the youth culture of his day as "Africanized"; as having more in common with the looser, less time dependent, lightly hedonistic cultures of central or western Africa. He really did not think that the future would take the turns it did because of this outlook, that those with it in the 1960's must have been living under quite a different outlook by the 1980's and this is to some extent what happened.

In part we have people like Dr. Laura and Rush Limbaugh and even Art Bell occupying the places they do because they have more resonance with the outlook of the people out there than say Mario Cuomo does. All three of these people have real problems that shake their credibility. Maybe it is best that they aren't perfect. That at least gives us all a chance to examine our own outlook. Here are a few questions;

There are probably other questions to ask to find out what each one of us is using to view the world around us; our outlook. This does not mean that we are seeing the world as well for us as we could or might like to be able to do. The next step is to begin asking questions that extend the first set of questions;

There are outlooks that are serene and apart from all the others. One is a contemplative outlook. A Taoist or a Tibetan, Nestorian or Trappist monk has an outlook that is based on centuries of living a life apart from all others. Another outlook is that of servant of humanity. A servant of humanity is a rare person who chooses a life of service to others. Their outlook is likewise above and apart from all the others. Even Mother Teresa had an outlook that was far from that of a typical true believer. These otherworldly outlooks require orders of genuine humility and simplicity that are beyond the average for most of us. It may not be necessary for us all to be as Mother Teresa was, nor can we all be that way, but we may be able to learn things from these outlooks that can benefit and temper our own.

The Polar Bear