Where I’m from & Where I’m going

Preface: The Organon

Another ostensible failure I thought after reading an email from the university congratulating me for earning a master’s degree in industrial-Organizational psychology—my second graduate degree. I had earned another master’s degree in experimental psychology/embodied cognition five years earlier. Just like my first time through graduate school, coming out on the other end had landed me back to where I was before my graduate training (career wise). After such a double loop— nonetheless —had failed to land me any closer to becoming gainfully employed, my feelings of rejection began a cycle of aggression, self-pity, and narcissism. Although the knee jerk response is to blame my choice of degree (e.g., why hadn’t you chosen more wisely?), this is not the case in my situation—really, let me explain. Following graduation my cohorts were either employed by prominent corporations or had been accepted to PhD programs at leading universities. LinkedIn is regularly prompting me to congratulate the promotion or new (better paying) employer of yet another one of my former classmates. Each of my degrees proved useful for my cohorts.

So, if my cohort had little trouble procuring gainful and relevant employment at top corporations, or easily securing placement in top doctoral programs, then what is wrong with me? We can eliminate the value or quality of my graduate school’s curriculum first. That leaves two options: either it is somehow my fault, or the blame lies with another (or others, but who?). The situation at hand is a hybrid of the two. After several peculiar encounters and humiliating faux pas (my heart was always in the right place) with increasing frequency and peaking shortly before the second graduation, I began to doubt myself, my talents, and my future (the latter, a constant concern since becoming an upperclassman during undergraduate). While I could easily acquire in-person interviews with corporate employers or university professors, it soon became clear that the issue stemmed from my personality rather than my knowledge, abilities, or skills (likely due to high levels of uncommonly paired personality traits: openness and conscientiousness, both well into the ninetieth percentile—less than five percent of folks score higher than me).

Fortunately, the sentiment of disfavor that I evoked was not shared by everyone involved with hiring/selecting. Around a third to half of folks had wanted to hire or accept me. Even when there was a plurality in my favor though, veto power typically overrides their backing. A month before the second graduation (I had not attended either) two of my professors scheduled a meeting with me under the pretention of improving my resume. Upon arriving in the professor’s office, I sat in the only available chair across from her desk and adjacent to him. Given my familiarity with taped police interrogations, the fact one of the professors sat in the chair closest to the door reminded me of the persuasion technique of placing an officer between the exit and the suspect, thereby inducing a trapped feeling intended to encourage confessions by eliciting a sense of vulnerability. Settling into my seat, the professor from behind the desk had superciliously asked me what I believed the true reason for our meeting was (the resume was a ruse). They met my na?ve answer with soft but derisive laughter.

Their honest reason for the meeting was surprising. Neither was it the insult I expected nor the big break I craved. The reason was quite straightforward: they glibly told me there was nothing more I could learn or benefit from them or the program. Joining professional groups and attending conferences was their suggestion, despite having already tried that in spades. Another proposal was to get mental health treatment for an undiagnosed neurodevelopmental disorder—the professor going as far as to ask the nurse if I had autism, to which the nurse thankfully admonished her for such careless speculation. Exiting the meeting, I was more confused than anything else. Quietly bewildered would be an apt description of my mood in the wake of that faithful meeting. Here I was, with valuable skills and knowledge derived from well over half a decade of graduate study where no one disputed my competency, yet still unemployed and undesired—a putative loser. What happened next, I could not have ever anticipated.

While the Grace of Jesus Christ saved me in the few years leading up to the second graduation, I was yet to cultivate a habitual prayer life of communing with God. But I knew that the best thing for me was to desire whatever God wanted me to; following my manufacturer’s instructions is paramount—how couldn’t it be? During the last few days of October 2020, my father convinced me to begin writing freely without aim or outline. Shortly after beginning to type, I found myself writing out the beginning of what was to become my conversion story: how I accepted Jesus Christ as the ultimate arbiter of my life and values. Once finishing the work (with a prayer) I was joyful to have articulated my faith journey; it helped me appreciate all that God had done for me hitherto. The writing helped me understand the role God has played in my life. By the middle of November, I was already back to delivering (gastronomical logistics) as I often had been. Service-sector employment was never in my wheelhouse; I want others to pay me for my knowledge. Palpable tension characterized this period lasting from election night to the inauguration in January. Given the electoral dispute, a suspension of normalcy followed that critical juncture. While my entire adult life I subscribed to skeptical (distrust & verify) interpretation of public affairs and politics, I had not lost the confidence that those running the system are competent regardless of any clandestine motives or esoteric agendas. Even though a loss of confidence began in March, it was only until the end of November that my confidence in public administration had finally collapsed. I would never be the same ever again—thank God.

Never could I have predicted the source of my radical change in how I understand who I am, what I am capable of, and what I am to do with my life would be a Supreme Court decision. Following my disbelief of the Supreme Court’s claim that around half of the states had no standing in a case regarding the federal election, my conscience swayed me to write out a series of questions, conclusions, and assertions regarding whether taking an oath to defend the Constitution made any real difference. Particularly, I desired to know what protecting the Constitution from domestic enemies really meant for Americans today; is it merely a ceremonial and/or anachronistic performance—another form of pageantry serving the modern demand for self-aggrandizement? I had come to realize the answer relied on whatever the purpose of America is: if America was not exceptional, then such an oath would present itself as an anachronism to contemporary international relations given the predominance of geopolitical multilateralism. However, if America is genuinely exceptional, then such an oath would be a legitimate civic duty. The latter scenario offers a reliable standard more than the sum of all Americans.

It quickly began to dawn on me that a robust, nested, and systematic theory of American Exceptionalism (?) for Americans living in the twentieth-first century—the age of information, communication, and virality—must exist. Since it is harder to die than to live in modern society (ca. 1950), folks often question or defy traditional institutions/legacies. When dying was easy people rarely challenged conventional wisdom. Now, living is so easy people need another reason to follow tradition besides mere survival. They need persuasion. Only ? can offer Americans the framework (what the Bible calls a stronghold—q.v., 2 Corinthians 10:3–6) to approach a postmodern world of shifting perspectives on truth, justice, beauty, etcetera. Everyone in this information age will have multiple encounters throughout their lives with the Socratic question—that is, criticism from every perspective and interest group. ? must pragmatically afford Americans certainty in the face of their doubt, resoluteness when observing their civic duties, and assuredness for any lack in their self-confidence as citizens of the most exceptional nation on Earth. Such a theory must also be systematic (coherent), operational (applicable to events), and transparent (open to scrutiny). No one else had shouldered the responsibility of formulating ?, so I naturally assumed the effort at utilizing my graduate training to build an interdisciplinary theory of ? integrating the domains of psychology (behavioral/social science), philosophy (theology/political theory), and American history.

Considering my prior interests heretofore, political science and history were the only major areas of social science I had not taken university courses in. My change of interest from micro (cognitive science & psychopharmacology) to macro (political economy & historical sociology) phenomena is a significant and unexpected shift in my oeuvre. Without a doubt, God had answered my prayer written at the end of my conversion story asking (in Jesus’s name) that my will becomes whatever He intended it to be and that I only desire whatever He wants me to desire. What else would sufficiently explain such a radical transformation of purpose and drive? Beforehand my sole objective in life was finding gainful employment in my field of study (industrial-organizational psychology, management, consulting, etc.), not constructing a grand theory of ? on my own as an unaffiliated scholar (sans grant funding or academic patronage). Nevertheless, the Holy Spirit had lit a fire in my heart like nothing else I have experienced, supplying all the motivation needed, all the while building my trust in God’s plan and His Grace for me. I was born to create ?.

My next step was to shed my old persona as a graduate student seeking corporate employment. Revising my LinkedIn profile was anticipatingly uneventful. The number of those who had eventually decided to unfollow me were fortunately replaced by new followers interested in my work. By December, my new identity had finally billowed from the depths of my unusual personality into the world (publicized via social media avatar). I ran headfirst into my new identity as an independent scholar of American Exceptionalism (?) and quickly identified ?’s foremost (insidious) threat: paternalism. Given America’s pioneering of and reliance on civic voluntarism, any belief encouraging an external rather than internal locus of control regarding politics is fundamentally anti-American. Such beliefs are the premier weapon used against the Constitution on the domestic front in an information war: where every mind is the battlefield, knowledge becomes the ammunition, and beliefs serve as the weapons to defeat counter-beliefs and capture (influence) the mind (viz., unrestricted warfare). Influencing American citizens to believe technocracy is a more desirable form of governance for its impersonal, reliable, mathematical, or whichever proposed feature(s) is tantamount to sedition. In a sense, America’s largest vulnerability is also its greatest strength: a reliance on the civic virtue of ordinary (educated) folks. In discovering and claiming the identity God intended for me I had likewise found my spiritual enemies—threats to constructing the Kingdom of God for His glory on Earth.

After learning the history and philosophy of tolerance, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the notion of tolerance as benefiting the other was uniquely Christian. While the ancient Greeks—inter alia archaic peoples—believed one could gain wisdom or strength by learning to willfully bear any difficult or otherwise unpleasant situation (e.g., Stoicism), the recognition of tolerance as a civic virtue trailed the Gospel’s spread. Since only God can know someone’s heart and given His desire for one’s genuine trust (not catering to external pressures) built on intrinsic convictions, forcing another to adopt (your) faith is impossible—regardless of its verisimilitude. Contemplating the ramifications for governance presents theological reasons why America became the first modern nation. ? theory began revealing itself as a tripartite dissertation on legal anthropology (why ? is well suited for humans and their design), historical sociology (tracing ? through history while identifying and analyzing its path, critical junctures, and conversions/drift), and political theology (? as the political tool for building the postmillennial kingdom). Accordingly, governance is legitimate only to the degree it protects citizens that peaceably follow their conscience without fear or threat of doing so. The United States of America, as far as it inspires to guard one’s right to peaceably observe their moral convictions, is exactly the form of government which God favors in America.

My development of ? is significantly protracted by a quixotic effort to guarantee I do not offer the public a work of bricolage scholarship (i.e., based on what I already knew rather than what I have learned from the finest and latest research published in peer-reviewed journals/books). Providentially, I am learning a lot and collecting valuable references—indexing each reference with at least three tags. Once the mission of ? was clear the strategy for achieving it began emerging. Lately, I am engaged in three roles which amount to the preliminary tasks of developing ?. First is procuring data from the scholarly literature in political philosophy, American history, and socio-behavioral science. Second is reading the Oxford history of America series, for a robust (but unexhaustive) survey of major events and critical occasions throughout the nation’s storied past. Third is meticulously reading and carefully annotating scores of scholarly books/articles on research methodology in social science (psychology, political science, public policy, etc.) and philosophy (analytic, hermeneutic, pragmatic, etc.). Each of these three roles helps prepare me for research into ? by accruing the relevant scholarly literature, broadening the appreciation/applicability of America’s past, and increasing the chances other scholars (particularly those who are well-connected or funded by grants) will notice ? as a serious project worthy of consideration, respectively.

Upon completing the preliminary roles, I will write down each of the literature tags (scores of them) on notecards and arranged topically, thereby forming a geometric outline of ?. Once the notecards are in a satisficing order, my investigation of the research corpora I have meticulously procured can finally begin. At that point, I will study each of the topics in considerable depth (e.g., applying grounded theory) using my references as the source of content, for understanding relevant issues and deriving conclusions on the matter. Both the annotations and extemporaneous insights collected will become the subjects of periodicals and/or become a module of ?. Curious or otherwise noteworthy findings will be shared in public forums (e.g., social media) regularly as they are encountered. After studiously exhausting a given research topic, an essay or PowerPoint lecture will summarize the literature, integrate the topic’s theoretical coherence with ? overall, and offer curious public policy proposals or inflammatory appeals to common sense. Whenever I finish exhaustively researching each topic, the annotations and insights are then sorted, coded, and arranged corresponding to the outline. From there I plan to use annotations as citations and insights as content for the final dissertation, as if those ad hoc (or idle) observations were originally intended to detail the outline. Given the nature of ? as prose, it is reasonable to assume that upon completing the dissertation I will begin seeking analysis and criticism of ? from both the public and scholarly spheres, consequently augmenting and/or altering it in accord with truthful (or useful) evaluations.