I'm unemployable because I can't do this.

“Hi, howareya!”

Sometimes I begin to wonder why it is that I am absoultely unfit for a career in business.  I have plenty of the necessary qualifications, but, the essential reason has always come down to this:  I cannot just shake hands with some dude in a suit, and say “Hi!  How are ya!” without having every ironic alarm in my psyche go off.

It’s always been this way.  I’ve never fit in, and they know it, and I know it.  If I tried to do a corporate job of any kind, it would be an obvious instant disaster.  American guys really do have this ‘hat guy’ mentality, which is at its core wholly jock, with a thin veneer of scholastic ability.  If you were disciplined at sports in high school, and got Bs, then you are ideally suited to business.  But if your abilities, or at least, if your critical thinking abilities, go much beyond this, then you just can’t do it.  Well, I guess that lots of people are too critically minded, and yet somehow they manage to turn that part of their brians off, so that they can conform. 

Why is it that business works this way?  At base, it’s because business is inherently immoral.  It requires, at its most fundamental level, that you are out for your own monetary gain, at the maximum expense of others.  If you don’t play it that way, then you are a goner.  You will never succeed, unless you manage to find some creative niche, or other haven within the corporate world.  I know it can be done.  But generally, the ‘me vs. them’ attitude is required–even though it must equally be masked under a veneer of mutual benefit:  “hey, we’re both profiting from this!” 

If you just got Bs in high school, i.e., if you have about average smarts, then the psychologists tell us that you don’t really have the capacity for high level moral reasoning, and so you’re essentially pre-insulated from these feelings–it’s often quite a blessing not to be plagued by too many ironic feelings. 

If you are smarter than this, then you could theoretically have the moral sense to understand the basics… but if you are not educated enough in history and the arts to have developed a strong moral sensbility (or if you naturally don’t have an exceptionally strong philosophical/theological/moral sense), then you can probably suppress your knowledge with the justificaiton that “hey, everyone has to do this… it makes the world go around.” 

And I can of course dig it — more than most ‘liberals’, in fact.  Since I study economic history I do realize that business has not only been essential to the development of most things that we today hold dear, it is in fact far more responsible for this than anyone, including most historians, realize (I’m working on this problem right now). 

So, yes, I get it, that business is basically necessary, even essential to enabling most of the good things in life.  But that doesn’t mean that I can, on any given day, when actually confronted with the “hi howarya” handshake, actually turn off my ironic sense enough to realize that, essentially, everything that the other dude is saying to me is doublespeak.  It’s all a farce.  I require honesty in dialogue, as much as can be; I could never have a career where I was always spinning yarns, all in the name of ‘selling product.’ 

I guess that I always realize that the basic operation of business, i.e., “selling product”, is a very base thing.  It’s a silly thing, it’s banal.  We move crates of x from one place to another.  It’s such a shame that so many careers are necessarily built around this.

At any rate, I have a solution.  It’s that we all recognize that selling product is banal (the way European businessmen generally do), and then don’t focus our lives around it. 

My real problem, then, is that American businessmen have grown up in a culture which is basically devoid of ideas, apart from the religion of business (and often, a religious fundamentalism which reflects the extent of their moral bankruptcy).  And so I find it impossible to shake hands, and say “hi howarya” with a dude whom I know actually more or less believes that selling product is his highest goal, the highest good. 

For centuries, European literature has put these dudes in exactly the place that they should be in:  it has exposed the banality of business transactions for what they are.  The church, in fact, has always been opposed to business, and profiteering, and even came up with a special sin for this:  usury.  All businessmen are in essence usurers, and if they don’t have other things in their lives, other goals, other ideals, then all they have is usury, and they then fall into the category of Usurer proper, which the church has always maintained earns you a nice place in the fifth circle of hell. 

It’s time for American businessmen, and the american culture in general, to remember that business is necessary, but it’s a necessary evil.  It should not be the paradigm and ideology that controls and overrides everything in life (which, despite what many of my business friends would protest, is, in fact what overrides and orders their lives, even though they don’t realize it).  We need to re-remember the usury doctrine, and begin to emulate the Europeans, who generally speaking do a much better job of living life for things other than business. 

This would make American businessmen much more empathetic, much more humane, less prone to fundamentalist bigotry and all of the other narrowmindedness that comes with it.

And it would mean that their handshakes have something behind them other than the guile of the usurer. 

And then, I could perhaps fit into the business world–then, I could perhaps contemplate a career in business without recoiling. 

And then, businessmen might even begin to understand me, who I am, what I stand for… and they might even learn to like me!

P.S.  While writing this, I’vd had that old Depeche Mode song “Everything Counts” in my head – and, guess what, the first image in the song is that of a business handshake.  Perhaps I’ve been shaped more by what I listened to as a teenager than I care to believe.  Or perhaps, the song just stuck with me because it’s always rung true… anyway, here’s the lyrics:

The handshake
Seals the contract
From the contract
There’s no turning back
The turning point
Of a career
A career of being insincere

The holiday
Was fun packed;
The contract,
Still intact

The grabbing hands
Grab all they can
All for themselves
After all

It’s a competitive world
Everything counts in large amounts

The graph
On the wall
Tells the story
Of it all
Picture it now
See just how
The lies and deceit
Gained a little more power

Confidence
Taken in
By a sun tan
And a grin

The grabbing hands
Grab all they can
All for themselves
After all

It’s a competitive world
Everything counts in large amounts

The grabbing hands
Grab all they can
Everything counts in large amounts

It’s almost creepy how much this accords with what I’ve written above:  especially the point about ‘everything counting’ –i.e., ethics, empathy, sincerity — these things should count more, than selling product.  So, perhaps, I should change the title of this post to:  I’m unemployable because I am a Depeche Mode fan?

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