Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives
January 5th, 2012Be warned: If you are having difficulties with maintaining appearances at work, this book won’t make it any easier.
For understanding the professional, the concept of “ideology” will emerge as much more useful than that of “skill.” But what is ideology, exactly? Ideology is thought that justifies action, including routine day-to-day activity. It is your ideology that determines your gut reaction to something done, say, by the president (you feel it is right or wrong), by protesters (you feel it is justified or unjustified), by your boss (you feel it is fair or unfair), by a coworker (you feel it is reasonable or unreasonable) and so on. More importantly, your ideology justifies your own actions to yourself. Economics may bring you back to your employer day after day, but it is ideology that makes that activity feel like a reasonable or unreasonable way to spend your life.
Work in general is becoming more and more ideological, and so is the workforce that does it. As technology has made production easier, employment has shifted from factories to offices, where work revolves around inherently ideological activities, such as design, analysis, writing, accounting, marketing and other creative tasks. Of course, ideology has been a workplace issue all along: Employers have always scrutinized the attitudes and values of the people they hire, to protect themselves from unionists, radicals and others whose “bad attitude” would undermine workplace discipline. Today, however, for a relatively small but rapidly growing fraction of jobs, employers will carefully assess your attitude for an additional reason: its crucial role in the work itself. On these jobs, which are in every field, from journalism and architecture to education and commercial art, your view of the world threatens to affect not only the quantity and quality of what you produce, but also the very nature of the product. These jobs require strict adherence to an assigned point of view; and so a prerequisite for employment is the willingness and ability to exercise what I call ideological discipline.
This book is about the people who get these jobs and become members of the ideological workforce—that is, professionals. My thesis is that the criteria by which individuals are deemed qualified or unqualified to become professionals involve not just technical knowledge as is generally assumed, but also attitude—in particular, attitude toward working within an assigned political and ideological framework. I contend, for example, that all tests of technical knowledge, such as the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) or the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), are at the same time tests of attitude and that the examinations used to assess professional qualification are no exception. I consider in detail how the neutral-looking technical questions on such examinations probe the candidate’s attitude. The qualifying attitude, I find, is an uncritical, subordinate one, which allows professionals to take their ideological lead from their employers and appropriately fine-tune the outlook that they bring to their work. The resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology. The political and intellectual timidity of today’s most highly educated employees is no accident.
As attitudes and values have come to play an increasingly important role in the production of goods and services, employers have faced a choice: either hire huge numbers of managers to direct every move of the large number of employees who now do politically sensitive work, or hire employees who can be trusted politically and merely check the results of their work. Employers have pursued both strategies simultaneously. But the first one is limited by its cost, and so today every country in the world, from the United States to China, has a growing cadre of people trusted to do work that requires making decisions based not on detailed instructions but on an assigned ideology.
Related: They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer
I have worked in quality assurance for 25 years in aerospace. As a union represented lead inspector, I was hated by management because I represented passengers, Airlines, shareholders and the US government via the code of federal regulations administered by the FAA which mandated my job role. I found that the vast majority of manages at the corporation I worked for were sociopaths. Frightening, self serving yes-men who viewed quality assurance as a total waste of money and they believed, sincerely, that the airlines felt that the extra costs for inspection were an initiating waste of money…and that was Quality assurance management. Production management is worse.
More recently, I’ve worked as a quality engineer until QA management decided that my failure to become a sociopath like them while they committed conspiracy and fraud was unacceptable. After 34 years of honesty, dedication, loyalty and commitment that has not wavered, I was fired and apparently blackballed. I’ve been unemployed for 14 months and I’m broke and disgusted with ideological drone mentality. It’s been difficult being destitute, but it’s better than being bereft of integrity and a conscience.
btw- the US department of transportation’s office of inspector general buried my complaints and told me and the dozen others who complained to “call the hotline and leave a message. Don’t send us any more email.”
Fuck their dime store money grubbing ideology: The corporation almost killed 40 people by ignoring my ideology and complaints resulting in catching an aircraft on fire in flight.
Here’s the Kicker: future potential employers will read what I wrote above and the ones that are collectively too stupid to commit themselves to first rate quality before dishonest profits will read it and immediately nix me. That’s a real shame because I know that doing it right from the beginning is FAR cheaper than thrashing through complex fabrication, assembly, installation and systems integration and never getting it correct or efficient. 15 years in emergent manufacturing taught me that. However, managers of such people and disciplines aren’t needed, thus they create chaos out of self preservation and are hated by those who don’t need them. As I said…sociopaths. Welcome to the land of opportunity if you live to kiss someone’s undeserving ass.
If you don’t like that, hire a mindless bitch you can push around. Truth and teamwork aren’t defined by “management” and nobody is fooling me.
this is why ive finally come round to the idea of anarchy or marxism myself. every time id try anything at work remotely resembling efficiency or teambuilding it was immediately stomped out by management, who eventually came around to see me as a threat to their power, heh. their way or the highway as they say, but i realized these people are very much drunk on teh little power they get as middle managers, and even the good people in taht position wound up internalizing and emulating the values and behavior of their higher ups. approval seeking seems to be all tahts tought in public education these days, and it has gotten america to where we are today.
i keep my faith everytime i think taht maybe all those people cant be wrong by remembering Hagbard Celine’s
snafu (situation normal: all fucked up) principle:
Communication is only possible between equals a.k.a. In a hierarchy, people inevitably distort the truth when dealing with their superiors, in order to curry favor or escape punishment. As a consequence, said superiors operate from an increasingly distorted view of the world, resulting in bad decisions.
give these management structures an opportunity to fail, and they will, allowing room for new systems to grow in their place, for better or for worse.