A paradoxical form of detachment is manic engagement, an alarming collusive zest entirely different from the mandatory cheerfulness. The film Cool Hand Luke has a scene in which convicts are spreading gravel on a dirt road and, as usual, working as slowly as possible. Suddenly Luke (Paul Newman) begins to go at it with crazy zest. The others in the gang are at first puzzled but one by one begin to copy him. This bewilders and angers the guards – what are these clowns up to? Hurling shovelfuls of gravel like men demented, the convicts work so frantically that they eventually run out of road to cover. Then they lie about laughing hysterically while the guards impotently rage.
But the human creature likes to live in expectation and to establish differentials over others. So it is difficult to detach from hunger for promotion. And, in the era of entitlement, everyone believes that promotion is deserved. Even when a post requires specific qualifications and experience, those without either will confidently apply and be outraged if rejected. ‘I deserved it, ’ they rage in bewilderment – though it is inadvisable to enquire about the reasons for their entitlement. Or to ask the successfully promoted whether the extra money justifies the extra responsibility and stress. Promotion is self-evidently good.
The key determinant of work satisfaction is not money or even status but the degree of personal responsibility. Yet workers rarely acknowledge this. In a lifetime of employment I have never heard a colleague value autonomy, either as a key feature of a current post or a desirable feature of a new position – and often moving up the ladder involves a loss of autonomy. Come to think of it, I have never even heard anyone use the word. Yet autonomy is the one thing that makes professional life more fulfilling.
Management, of course, understands how promotion excites employees – and that promotions are often insufficiently numerous and frequent. So Performance Related Pay was developed as a permanent and universal incentive. Won’t people do anything for an extra few cents? Actually, no. The psychologist Frederick Herzberg, who spent the second half of the twentieth century studying work motivation, concluded that there are two sources of satisfaction in work – what he called ‘hygiene factors’, things like pay and conditions, and ‘motivation factors’ such as degree of control and the challenge of the work itself. But the hygiene factors are capable only of causing dissatisfaction. Poor pay will demotivate employees, but financial incentives will not have the opposite effect. Motivation may be increased only by greater employee autonomy and more challenging tasks.240 So in work, as in the rest of life, personal responsibility and difficulty are necessary for fulfilment.
And Herzberg identified two other flaws in the PRP theory. The first is that performance can be objectively and accurately measured; this is often difficult or impossible, leading employees to suspect that the true measure is the ability to curry favour. The second is the assumption that if one aspect of work is changed everything else will remain the same. In fact, everything is connected to everything else so, if one thing is changed, everything is changed. And the most important consequence of Performance Related Pay is the loss of goodwill. So, the very thing management hope to achieve – an increase in voluntary work – is often the very thing forfeited. The employees not receiving extra pay suddenly ask themselves why they should continue to take on extra work if their efforts are not recognized.
Introducing a financial incentive can actually destroy the natural satisfaction of doing a job well and reduce motivation. The psychologist Edward L. Deci asked two groups of subjects to solve a series of puzzles – but paid only one group for correct solutions. When time was up, both groups were allowed to continue working. The fascinating and heartening discovery was that the unpaid group worked on for twice as long as the paid.241 And Deci has also produced a survey of over one hundred other studies with the same conclusion – that extrinsic incentives are counterproductive.242
Equally heartening – and one of the most exciting episodes in my own working life – was the ignominious failure of a PRP scheme for lecturers. When the offer was first announced, managers smugly sat back awaiting a flood of applications. But teachers understood that teaching could not be accurately evaluated and that introducing rankings would be divisive. So they agreed that no one would apply. I was certain that a greedy few would find the temptation irresistible – but the agreement held and no applications were submitted. Then management, taken aback, invited certain people to apply – but this merely confirmed the suspicion that the extra money would go to favourites. So the favourites declined to apply for fear of being forever identified as management toadies. Finally management, in desperation, actually paid extra money into the bank accounts of the chosen – but the chosen, rather than keeping quiet as expected, withdrew the money, pooled it and shared it out equally among all the staff. The scheme was withdrawn, never to return – a victory that gave me new respect for colleagues, new pleasure in going to work and indeed new faith in the human race.
It is possible to upset the promotion machine by simply failing to apply for promotion. Of course, in many jobs, such a blatant lack of ambition would result in dismissal – but in public sector employment such as teaching it is perfectly feasible. If you have reached a position that pays sufficiently well and provides a fair degree of autonomy, why seek unnecessary stress? This is another way of refusing to play by the rules without actually breaking the rules. It removes the only leverage managers understand and makes them unsure of how to play the autonomous employee.
But there is also contemporary culture’s encouragement of change for its own sake. Employees now move jobs more and more frequently, not merely for more money or status, but because movement itself is considered to be necessary. The perception is that anyone who stays more than a few years in a job is a hopelessly boring old stick-in-the-mud. But it takes a year or two to become fully established in a new job, to learn the arcane rituals of a new workplace and be consistently competent long enough to inspire trust. So the irony is that people leave jobs just as they are about to enjoy the benefits of establishment and suffer instead the equivalent of being abruptly teleported to a strange city without a map, knowledge of the language or any clear idea of the reason for being there. As Nicholson Baker explains in The Mezzanine, there is only one place where a new recruit will feel at ease:
For new-hires the number of visits can go as high as eight or nine a day, because the corporate bathroom is the one place in the whole office where you understand completely what is expected of you. Other parts of your job are unclear…but, in the men’s room, you are a seasoned professional; you let your hand drop casually on the flush handle with as much of an air of careless familiarity as men who have been with the company for years. Once I took a new-hire to lunch, and though he asked not-quite-to-the-point questions as we ate our sandwiches, and nodded without comprehension or comeback at my answers, when we reached the hallway to the men’s room, he suddenly made a knowing, one-man-to-another face and said, ‘I’ve got to drain the rooster. See you later. Thanks again.’
Yet people put themselves through the torments of a new job on a regular basis – and Baker does not even mention the agony of trying to work out how to do double-sided copies on a new machine with a baffling control panel, while behind you is a growing line of colleagues just barely containing photocopier rage. Habituation is surely beneficial at least in the workplace where it allows routine tasks to be completed without thought. So habit, the curse of private life, is the blessing of work.
Then there is the vexing question of how much effort to put into work. Christ’s advice to imitate plant life was both impractical and unwise: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.’243 Work-ethic Protestants have obviously not been paying attention to the Good Book’s unequivocal incitement to shirk. But there are objections to shirking beyond the obvious dangers of being despised by colleagues or being sacked. Firstly, since everything influences everything else, shirking in one area will leak into others. But, mo
re importantly, shirking brings no satisfaction. As Buddha, Spinoza, Rilke and Frederick Herzberg have observed, we are born not to be lilies of the field but to seek out the difficult and strive for it constantly. This is why so many employees will undertake extra work without being asked and are insulted by the idea that financial reward is a necessary incentive. And it is often possible to enjoy the flow experience at work, the incomparable satisfaction of release from self and time. As Christ should have said, blessed are those paid to do what they enjoy, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
It is possible to enjoy almost any task. In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s autobiographical novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich prisoners in the Soviet Gulag are marched out in subzero temperatures to build a wall, without knowing where or why, but they throw themselves wholeheartedly into it and realize at the end of the day that they were happy at this task.244 So, if it is possible to be happy at freezing forced labour in the Gulag, it might even be possible as a cubicle serf sticking Post-it notes on a screen in an open-plan office. And a sensible work strategy might be: surrender to the task but not to the taskmaster, become absorbed in the work itself but never absorb the work ethos.
How then to resist surrender to the taskmasters? There is no easy answer. It was difficult enough when they wanted to be lord and master – and is even more complicated now that they want to be your buddy as well. But it is useful to bear in mind the thoughtlessness that Hannah Arendt identified as the cause of Adolf Eichmann’s behaviour and the psychology experiments on conformity, which show how easy it is for authority figures to command obedience, even for obviously sadistic acts like delivering electric shocks.
Similar conformity experiments on workplace compliance were undertaken by a team of Dutch researchers investigating the ‘administrative obedience paradigm’. Participants were instructed to administer a selection test to people described as job applicants (but who were actually researchers’ accomplices) and told that these ‘applicants’ would get the job only if they passed the test. The participants were also told that this oral test was intended to measure ability to work under stress. So, in the course of asking test questions, the participants (now addressed as ‘administrators’) were told to increase the pressure on ‘applicants’ with remarks critical of performance and personality; they were to begin with the relatively mild ‘That was really stupid of you’, and work up to intense personal hostility and abuse. As the test progressed, applicants showed symptoms of discomfort and stress and even protested – but any administrators who tried to desist were urged by an authoritarian researcher to continue. The apparently distressed applicants gave more and more incorrect answers, failed the test and, as far as the administrators knew, were not employed. Yet, despite increasing evidence of applicant distress and failure, 91 per cent of administrators complied with the urging of the researchers and continued the abuse to the end. Though, when a comparable group of ‘administrators’ were surveyed on how they might respond to such an experiment, over 90 per cent were adamant that they would never comply. So the degree of compliance was almost exactly the opposite of what participants predicted. And the results were the same when actual Human Resource managers, supposedly trained in the sensitive treatment of employees, were used as ‘administrators’.245 So much for ‘the people people’.
If an unknown researcher will be blindly obeyed, how much more overwhelming the desire to submit to an imposing boss in a grand office with power over livelihood?
Part of the answer is to remember that the boss may not be so imposing: according to Fromm, ‘The lust for power is rooted not in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of the inability of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.’246 This is another application of the rule that you don’t have to pretend to be what you are – power-seekers need the appearance of strength because they are not actually strong. The imposing figure behind the huge desk may well be as much of a fraud as the authoritarian researchers in the psychology experiments. And understanding this will make any boss less intimidating. Conversely, an unimposing figure behind a desk may be genuine. The best managers are often people who had no great desire to be managers. And who would want to manage the human creature, contrary at the best of times, and now impossibly so – feeling entitled to have everything but obliged to do nothing?
In the worst case, the boss is a bully and, therefore, more dangerous but also even weaker than the ordinary power-seeker. The classic bully mindset is kiss up and piss down – and the craven subservience of the kissing up should expose their extreme weakness. When it comes to pissing down, bullies attack only the most obviously vulnerable, so absence of fear is often sufficient protection. The most appropriate attitude is contempt, though this should be circumspect because bullies are vindictive. Hannah Arendt has argued that revolutions occur when contempt for bad governance becomes so widespread and corrosive that the system simply collapses – a theory demonstrated by the fall of communism.247 So it may be useful to spread and intensify contempt for the bully boss by slyly fomenting sedition in the photocopying room.
Considering the centuries of sweat expended on the earning of daily bread, it is surprising how little guidance has been offered on the conduct of this near-universal necessity. Of course, thinkers have been remarkably successful in evading the burden of paid employment and have refused even to soil their minds with the problem. But literary writers have also largely avoided the subject of work, even though most of them have work experience to draw upon and the workplace is a stage where disparate, incompatible people are forcibly confined together for long periods and suffer violent emotions such as power-hunger, greed, lust, hatred and rage. It may be that the experience of work, with its shocking expenditure of time and energy, is just too appalling to contemplate. Or that the deadening effects of habituation make it impossible to raise to the level of the imagination. But it is a curious and significant fact that there are hardly any novels set entirely in the workplace.
This is what makes The Mezzanine so valuable. It is full of perfectly observed details that provoke instant recognition and remind the reader that the workplace is not at all dreary, but instead rich and strange, full of human oddity and absurdity. Here is the narrator describing a secretary’s cubicle:
In the shadow of the shelf under the unused fluorescent light, she had pinned up shots of a stripe-shirted husband, some nephews and nieces, Barbra Streisand, and a multiply-Xeroxed sentiment in Gothic type that read, ‘If You Can’t Get Out Of It, Get Into It!’ I would love someone to trace the progress of these support-staff sayings through the offices of the city; Deanne had another one pushpinned to a wall of her cube, its capitals in crumbling ruins under the distortion of so many copies of copies; it said, ‘YOU MEAN YOU WANT ME TO RUSH THE RUSH JOB I’M RUSHING TO RUSH?’
Unfortunately, The Mezzanine covers only a lunch hour. Extended to a full day, it could have been the Ulysses of the workplace, and its privileged readers could have felt like Homeric heroes on the morning train. This book is determined to celebrate even work – and quotes with delight from Marcus Aurelius: ‘Manifestly, no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!’ There is even a tip on how to enjoy private exuberance and zest at work:
One time, while I was locked behind a stall, I did unintentionally interrupt the conversation between a member of senior management and an important visitor with a loud curt fart like the rap of a bongo drum. The two paused momentarily; and then recovered without dropping a stitch – ’ Oh, she is a very, very capable young woman, I’m quite clear on that’. ‘She is a sponge, a sponge, she soaks up information everywhere she goes’.
‘She really is. And she’s tough, that’s the thing. She’s got armor’. ‘She’s a major asset to us’. Etc. Unfortunately, the grotesque intrusion of my fart struck me as funny, and I sat on the toilet containing
my laughter with the back of my palate – this pressure of containment forced a further, smaller fart. Silently, I pounded my knee, squinting and maroon-colored from suppressed hysteria.
12
The Absurdity of Love
What is more appealing than an intimate candlelit dinner for two? But first there is the choice between eating locally and going into town. Staying local restricts the range of restaurants but requires no travelling and permits an aperitif in the comfort of home. Town provides more eating options but involves a journey on public transport and an aperitif in a noisy, expensive city bar.
This evening, the couple decide not to travel. But the local restaurants are just so last century. How many decades since Italian, Chinese and Indian were happening cuisines? And these stick-in-the-mud local restaurateurs seem never to have heard the term ‘new wave’. What the area desperately needs is a good Vietnamese restaurant.
Then he wants to choose in advance and make a reservation, while she argues that this may mean the horror of an empty restaurant.
‘What’s wrong with an empty restaurant?’
The question is so unbelievably obtuse that she turns her eyes to Heaven for patience and strength, eventually finding the heroic forbearance to say calmly, ‘We’ll just stroll along and find somewhere.’
So they stroll and, frowning, peruse the familiar local menus. Knowing that his secret desire is for Chinese, she says coldly, ‘Everything will be doused in gloop.’ Knowing that her secret desire is for Indian, he issues a harsh laugh: ‘You put on four pounds just by reading the menu.’
There remains only the Italian, which neither of them really wants and which exposes them once again to the appalling maître d’ who is simultaneously obsequious and domineering. Once this man actually tried to seat them in the basement. And now he asks if they have a reservation when he knows perfectly well they do not. She requests the window table and the mattre d’ explains with an utterly insincere hand-wringing apology that this table is reserved. What is the man thinking of? Not only should a sophisticated and attractive couple be placed in the window, they ought to be paid to sit there and attract something other than a clientele who make the place look like a retirement home canteen.
The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) Page 18
