The Immorality of the Job Hunt

The sooner more Americans come to understand that we’re all in this together the sooner the quality of life for everyone will improve.

Salem-News.com

(CALGARY, Alberta) - What’s the point of living together in a society if there are no benefits to the association? If it turns out that there’s little point, then lawlessness makes just as much sense. Actually, America is close to that situation already in its belief that a free-market, every-man-for-himself ethic is best. It is only demonstrably best if you are one of the haves.

Last July, the C. R. England truck driving school in Indiana advertised for an administrative assistant at $13/hour. They got at least 500 applications and one person was hired. What of the other 500 or so?

I believe this to be a question of morality that our Western society ignores and in that ignorance is ensuring its own downfall. American society is in decline and as the case of C. R. England will show, the opportunities for resurgence are minimal, if they exist at all. At issue is the fact that America has lost its sense of community—if it ever really had any!

In looking for the one hire, the company’s recruiter, Stacey Ross thought the fair way to handle things was to just go through the applications starting with the first received. She ignored the significantly overqualified candidates immediately; a former I.B.M. business analyst with 18 years experience; a former director of human resources at another company; and someone with a master’s degree and 12 years at Deloitte & Touche, the accounting firm as just three examples.

She ended up going through about half. The rest never even got a look.

I question, not the methodology, but the outcome of this system!

Most Americans don’t get it!!

In 2003, when he was with The Weekly Standard, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a column titled: “The Triumph of Hope Over Self-Interest” in which he wondered why people didn’t vote for their own self-interest. This has long been my main critique of democracy: People can usually be counted on to vote against their own best interests.

Brooks’ basic conclusion is this:

“Americans live in a culture of abundance. They have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley, with the next job or the next big thing. None of us is really poor; we're just pre-rich”. (my emphasis added)

Not any more. The opportunities are now in China, India—offshore, generally.

Which returns me to the ethics of job hunting.

People in Western society believe in the pre-eminence of individuality, with Americans at the forefront of this mythology. Here are the facts.

Let’s say your name is Fred and your parents are Bob and Carol. You were born on Oct 18, 1962. Those four pieces of information establish you as unique in the cosmic history of the human race. Pretty impressive. But are you special? Not at all; you’re only unique, just like everyone else.

Consider if Bob and Carol had never met; or that one of them had been killed in a car accident as a teenager. Result: you’re never born and that potential story never happens. But it goes beyond that. You are irrevocably tied to Bob and Carol and equally irrevocably tied to everyone they are tied to.

The human race is a social web of interconnected people, each unique in that each person is at a particular place in that web and, of course, no two people can occupy that same place. Each one of us is special in the sense that none of us could be taken out of the web without changing the entire web. This was already known, well before the establishment of the United States, as described by the 17th century poet and theologian John Donne (1572-1631) who wrote in one of his meditations

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."

Most Americans, in a false culture of every-man-for-himself, where greed is an acceptable personality attribute, don’t accept this philosophy, despite the irrefutable evidence.

The ethic of every-man-for-himself was actually possible at the founding of America, in that any person who did not believe in sociability could just move on and eke out a living elsewhere. People were not dependent on a social web to survive but could trap, catch or shoot their own food. They could chop down trees to build their own shelter and use animal furs to make their own clothing.

This is not even remotely possible today. To eat, you have to go to a supermarket and buy the already prepared and processed food. There is no opting out of this system.

All the habitable land in the United States is in private hands. If you want have a decent roof over your head, you’ll have to persuade someone to let you have a shelter they control. Persuasion in every case involves money. This is where jobs and living as a member of society intersect.

The economy is controlled by a relative handful of people, and their interests are not the same as yours. To begin with, the economy is controlled by a relative handful of extremely large corporations, banks and insurance companies. They own and controlthe majority of the politicians on every level that ordinary people vote for.

The corporations are not averse to economic blackmail. If they don’t get tax concessions, government handouts, etc., they will threaten to move the jobs elsewhere. Always they put economic interest ahead of social interest. If they can increase their profits by moving to a country of lower labour costs, they don’t hesitate. They’ll weep crocodile tears about the people they have to lay off, but they are the only winners.

But as Brooks wrote in his column: “Nor are Americans suffering from false consciousness. You go to a town where the factories have closed and people who once earned $14 an hour now work for $8 an hour. They've taken their hits. But odds are you will find their faith in hard work and self-reliance undiminished, and their suspicion of Washington unchanged.”

That may have been true in 2003, but is it still? I wouldn’t be surprised if it is, as Americans, as a people, are incredibly deluded.

Self-reliance? Not possible in the incredibly complex web of today’s society. Tiffany Block got the England job. Before she was hired she said “I felt like, I’m 28 years old, and I don’t have a job, what am I doing with myself?” She felt that she was personally responsible for her joblessness.

I’m reminded of something that Canadian historian James Gray said about his experience in the 1930s Depression.

When Gray applied for relief in 1931 he said that “at home were my wife and daughter, and my mother, father, and two younger brothers. Applying for relief might prove the most humiliating experience of my life (it did); but it had to be done, and I had to do it. The deep-down realization that I had nobody to blame but myself made the journey doubly difficult.” (emphasis added)

I can already imagine some of the comments to this story by people who will blame the unemployed for their own predicament. Such comments will be made by people who have jobs or are financially comfortable. What they fail to understand is that their position, no matter how self-reliant they believe themselves to be, can be undermined in a moment.

If the company they work for decides to move elsewhere, or goes out of business in this economy, they are out on the street. They have no control over this. If they are self-employed, their business can be lost just as quickly in this economy. And if they have money and believe themselves to be secure, it too can disappear in the blink of an eye. Just recall the people who went through Madoff’s mill. Even with millions of dollars to start with, a few of them emerged on this side destitute and near homeless.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t take responsibility for what we can be responsible for. If you have a job, you’re responsible for the kind of job you do and even for keeping that job. But if the company disappears out from under you, you can’t be responsible for that situation. If you believe you are responsible, you are only fooling yourself.

The sooner more Americans come to understand that we’re all in this together the sooner the quality of life for everyone will improve. Here in Canada, the Depression (let’s call it what it really is) hasn’t hit as badly, but the same applies here.

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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which explains why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary.

He has been writing exclusively for Salem-News.com since March 2009 and continues to work on a creative non-fiction book which he began in 1998. You can write to Daniel at: Salem-News@gravityshadow.com