"The sliver of sky that keeps me alive." That was the phrase I'd mutter to myself throughout my year on Wall Street as I walked around downtown Manhattan amid the skyscrapers on my breaks. That's what got me through that year about a score ago.
I had recently graduated from college with a co-major from the math and philosophy departments. The market had crashed, but I managed to land a job at Moody's Investors Service. Aspects of the job were interesting--I got to play with SQL database and C, which was moderately interesting. But mostly it was doing mundane fixes for the software that ran Moody's records of various companies.
The software was used by an entire floor full of clerical workers, "the poor shleps," "the people upstairs," who typed in data all day long, whose jobs were more boring than my own, but who I suppose at least got to commiserate with scores of co-workers.
After a while my boredom compelled me to barely work at all. I was stunned as I'd get paychecks I didn't feel were earned. Then it occurred to me: They weren't paying me for the work I was doing, they were paying me for work I wasn't doing. They were paying me for my passivity. They were paying me for my silence. They were paying me NOT to do certain things. To NOT apply my skills in certain ways that might threaten their interests.
My boss was actually a relatively decent guy. When I told him I was resigning, he seemed genuinly curious about my feelings. Told me about one time he quit a job and wanted to shout "Free at Last" a la Martin Luther King. I told him it was a Henry David Thoreau quote from "Civil Disobedience" that was echoing through my mind:
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders--serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as the rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few--as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men--serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.
During my obligatory bye-bye "interview" with a Human Resources honcho I advised him to pay for some programming classes for one of the sharp data entry people--one particular African American woman came to mind--who already knew the idiosyncrasies of their internal system. He seemed inclined to pass on the suggestion--he assumed that if they educated someone, that person would ditch them for another job in short order.
During this entire period, I derived some meaning by taking art classes. It was sort of liberating--unlike my work since this period, I'd walk out of the office at 5:00 or 5:30 and--in comparision to my life since--forget about my job.
For a time I would occasionally go to the old churches in the area--I think it was around this time that Dylan's "Ring Them Bells" came out--they seemed like a relief for a while, but then became part of the same mundane, exploitative existence.
A few months before I quit, a sense of ambition led me to start interviewing for other positions and I'd landed an offer from JP Morgan. It was in a snazzy new group dealing with secularized mortgage instruments of all things; this was a bit before the S&L scandal became front-page news. As best as I can tell, they were taking the (presumably good, unlike now) assets from S&Ls and selling them to head off the impending disaster for another spell. There was a company-wide hiring freeze at Morgan because of the crash, but they found some way to work around that and bring people on board for this group.
As I considered taking the job, I started getting chest pains. I could sort of fake my way through Moodys, but at JP Morgan, I'd probably have to both apply myself and give of myself. I talked to another analyst--we took a walk around the JP Morgan building. He was a PhD from MIT and had a background in physics and told me he had expertise with some arcane set of equations that seemed to have some application to finance, or so the folks at Morgan were hoping.
I asked him if this was what he really wanted to do with his intellect, he talked about how it was up to government to set the rules and corporations to play by them. If the system was flawed, it was the fault of Washington, not New York. I could almost hear someone in Washington saying they had to make the rules a certain way because that's what Wall Street needed.
One of the co-heads of the group described their mission as making money and getting their kids into "the right schools."
I turned down the job. I just didn't want to deaden my soul and accommodate myself to that system. The head of the group I'd report to said he though t I "didn't understand the opportunity we're offering you here." I told him that I understood, but felt another calling.
So corporate capitalism is having a hard time again. There's global poverty, increasing inequality, etc. and that's all fine, but not folks on Wall Street losing their shirts.
To me, it comes back to a fundamental incompatibility with human nature. It's actually my hope that a system that objectifies people can't function. That's a good sign. I don't want to help put Humpty Dumpy back together again. We need to find and articulate forms of social organization that make sense. I do want to minimize the painful convulsions, but be done it must be.
Let the real discussion -- and work -- begin.
I don't want the "promised land" to just be a sliver the the sky I mutter about. I want to be there -- I want it to be here on this Earth.
Thanks to Beau Friedlander at Air America for encouraging me to wrap up this piece -- was was written during a train ride from D.C. to New York -- when I mentioned it to him and for his edits.
[originally published at husseini.org on Oct. 4, 2008]