Your job can shape your politics

It is easy enough to see how a person's job -especially a profession- can shape social class loyalties. We completely take the division of labor for granted and seldom think how it also shapes consciousness in general.

Is a young priest or minister free to re-think the existence of God after he is ordained ? Can a young banker suddenly begin to think in very unorthodox ways about the nature of money ? Can a young American military officer salute the flag every day and suddenly start questioning U.S. imperialism ? Can a young public school teacher suddenly start thinking that public education is mostly brainwashing ? Can an apprentice mortician suddenly start thinking of the funeral industry as a grotesque racket ? Can a young medical doctor opening an office suddenly start thinking more freely about non-profit medicine ?  Not so stupid was the rebellious 60s slogan: "Don't trust anyone over 30".

As if somehow normal "maturity" must preclude any bold idealism and thinking. I recall the young psychiatrist, Robert Lindner, formulating the 11th Commandment of American society in the 1950s (and today still): "Thou Shalt Conform". Lindner's book "Rebel Without A Cause" was the source of the famous movie starring James Dean. Almost all of us get stuck in ruts and this warps our thinking. The only way out for many of us is booze and drugs-and perhaps wife-beating on Superbowl Sunday.

I made it my business to read just one chapter of "Rough Justice" by David Heilbroner: "An Unsentimental Education". It describes his early days as a young prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. A grim experience with crude social realities  often changes young Ivy League lawyers. Many of them start to think like the cops on the street. The world of crime and punishment is hostile to all academic theory:

 "Scott said he was already worried about becoming too hardened by the job ". This lawyer friend of the author was shocked by another colleague who was " practically a Marxist... before he came here ", talking about private property as a form of theft ( "which didn't go over too well with some of our professors.") In court this young Lenin ( who was also a lawyer ) showed how much he had changed. He was just brutal with a pathetic low-life shoplifter : "Your Honor, the People recommend thirty days in jail "

I suspect that Young Lenin quickly associated EVIL with all those accused of a crime in the august halls of justice.  Evil were all the scumbags the cops and the prosecutors had to deal with everyday. Divine all the prosecutors and the Just Judges.  Divine also were those oh-so -respectable ruling class clients. No, MONEY doesn't smell like the creeps in the jail cell.

In a like manner many once idealistic social workers begin to loathe the pathetic " losers " who walk into their dreary buildings that mock human dignity. They too begin to identify not with the oppressed " losers " but with all the successful people, especially the visibly wealthy.

But life is tricky. I worked for a year in a very blue collar job with a guy who imagined he was being groomed for management.He had a nagging wife always calling him at the office and a sickly young daughter ( no doubt a driving force for his ambition ). He was elated about taking a seminar in "firing people" -of all things!  The seminar taught him not to get soft-hearted about firing employees. Show you have the RIGHT STUFF and escort the bums right out the company door. I explained to him that I was just not ambitious enough for his job, lacking the RIGHT STUFF. Well, it turned out that this stressed out married man had a serious cocaine habit. He was caught and busted in a downtown Providence hotel room ( he had borrowed one hundred dollars from me just before payday ). Poor guy - HE was immediately fired from his promising job. I wonder if he finally began to identify with our society's "losers."

 If you want to think freely about life, you must live very much like old Socrates in ancient Athens. They say he cared nothing for material things. "Know thyself", he insisted. Who can find their true selves in the insane work place ? Every capitalistic place of employment should have this sign on the front door : "Let all who enter here abandon all hope." (From Dante's "Inferno" )