2. Dependence on Luck
Our status also depends on a range of favourable conditions that could be loosely defined by the word luck. It may be merely good luck that places us in the right occupation, with the right skills, at the right time, and little more than bad luck that denies us the selfsame advantages.
But pointing to luck as an explanation for what happens in our lives has, regrettably, become effectively unacceptable. In less technologically sophisticated eras, when mankind respected the power of the gods and the unpredictable moods of nature, the idea of our having no control over events had wide currency. Gratitude and blame were routinely laid on the doorstep of external agencies, with reference made to the intervention of demons, goblins, spirits and gods. Throughout the story of Beowulf (circa A.D. 1100), for example, we are told that the success of man depends on the will of the Christian God; describing his defeat of Grendel’s mother, Beowulf himself asserts that “the fight would have ended straightaway if God had not guarded me.”
As our power to control and anticipate the behaviour of our environment has increased, however, so has the concept of luck or of guardian deities lost its potency. While few would deny outright that luck retains a theoretical role in mapping the course of careers, the evaluation of individuals proceeds, in practical terms, on the assumption that they may fairly be held responsible for their own biographies. It would sound to our ears unduly (and even suspiciously) modest for someone to ascribe a personal or professional triumph to “good luck,” and more significantly in this context, pitiable to blame defeat on the opposite. Winners make their own luck, so goes the modern mantra—an aphorism that would have puzzled the ancient Roman worshippers of the goddess of fortune or the faithful heroes of Beowulf.
It is alarming enough to have to rely for one’s status on contingent elements. It is harder yet to live in a world so enamoured with notions of rational control that it has largely dismissed “bad luck” as a credible explanation for defeat.
3. Dependence on an Employer
The unpredictability of our condition is further aggravated by the likelihood that our status will be bound up with the priorities of an employer.
In the United States in 1907, a book entitled Three Acres and Liberty seized the imagination of the reading public. The author, Bolton Hall, began by taking for granted the awkwardness of having to work for someone else, and so advised his readers that they could win their freedom by leaving their offices and factories and buying three acres apiece of inexpensive farmland in middle America. This acreage would soon enable them to grow enough food for a family of four and to build a simple but comfortable home, and best of all, relieve them of any need ever again to flatter or negotiate with colleagues and superiors. The balance of the book was given over to detailed descriptions of how to plant vegetables, construct a greenhouse, lay out an orchard and buy farm animals (one cow was sufficient for milk and cheese, explained Hall, and ducks made for more nutritious eating than chickens). The message delivered by Three Acres and Liberty had been heard with growing frequency over the previous fifty years in both Europe and America: in order to lead a happy life, one must attempt to escape reliance on employers and instead work directly for oneself, at one’s own pace, for one’s own rewards.
Such calls had come in response to an opposing trend: during the nineteenth century, for the first time in history, a majority of people ceased working on their own farms or in small family businesses and began bartering their intelligence or their strength for a wage paid them by someone else. In 1800, just 20 percent of American workers had an employer other than themselves; by 1900, the figure was up to 50 percent, and by 2000, 90 percent. Employers were also getting larger: whereas in 1800, less than 1 percent of the American workforce was employed in an organisation having five hundred or more employees, by 2000, the figure stood at 55 percent.
In England, the transition from a nation of small agricultural producers to one of wage earners was accelerated by the loss of much commonly owned land, a resource which had enabled the rural poor to survive by growing food for themselves and letting their live-stock—a cow or a goose—roam free to graze or forage. From the eighteenth century onwards, the majority of “open” English fields were enclosed behind walls and hedges by powerful landowners. Between 1724 and 1815, more than a million and a half acres of land were privatised. According to traditional Marxist analysis (strongly challenged by historians but revealing nonetheless), the enclosure movement heralded the birth of a modern industrial proletariat, defined as a group of people unable to be self-sufficient and hence left with no option but to sell themselves to an employer at a rate and under conditions heavily weighted in the employer’s favour.
Now as then, the travails of being an employee include not only worry over the duration of one’s employment but also the everyday humiliation of many working practises and dynamics. Because most businesses are shaped like pyramids, with a wide base of employees giving way to a narrow tip of managers, the question of who will be promoted, and who left behind, typically becomes one of the most oppressive anxieties of the workplace—and one that, like all anxieties, feeds off uncertainty. Compounding the misery is the fact that because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its opposite may have an apparently haphazard relationship to performance. The successful alpinists of organisational pyramids may not be the employees who are best at their tasks, but those who have best mastered a range of political skills in which ordinary life does not generally offer instruction.
Despite the surface differences between modern businesses and royal courts, perhaps the most penetrating advice on the requirements for survival in the former was provided by a succession of clear-eyed noblemen who lived in the latter in France and Italy between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. In retirement, these men collected their thoughts in a series of cynical works written in a tart, aphoristic style—works that continue even today to test the limits of what we would like to believe about our fellow human beings. The observations of Machiavelli (1469–1527), Guicciardini (1483–1540), La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) and La Bruyère (1645–1696) give a prescient indication of the manoeuvres that workers may, outside their regularly advertised roles, have to execute if they wish to flourish.
On the need to beware of colleagues:
Men are so false, so insidious, so deceitful and cunning in their wiles, so avid in their own interest, and so oblivious to others’ interests, that you cannot go wrong if you believe little and trust less.
GUICCIARDINI
We must live with our enemies as if they might one day become our friends, and live with our friends as if they might sometime or other become our enemies.
LA BRUYÈRE
On the need to lie and exaggerate:
The world more often rewards outward signs of merit than merit itself.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
If you are involved in important affairs …, you must always hide your failures and exaggerate your successes. It is a form of
swindling, but since your fate more often depends upon the opinion of others rather than on facts, it is a good idea to create the impression that things are going well.
GUICCIARDINI
Youu are an honest man, and do not make it your business either to please or to displease the favourites. You are merely attached to your master and to your duty. You are finished.