Temporary Life 4: Attitude Is Servitude

On the wall of the elevator lobby of a Pacific Gas and Electric Company office, where I temped for about four months, was a poster depicting a rocket blasting through the stratosphere, above which were the words, “Attitude Is Altitude.” Of course no amount of positive thinking could have propelled anyone to the top of that company, which hired its executives laterally out of the top business schools and multinationals. And most people regarded it as an absurdity that actual impediments or qualifications should be attributed to an attitude (Webster’s Collegiate definition 3a, “mental condition with regard to a fact or state”), however negative or positive.

It took me some time to figure out why there was all this positive-attitude propaganda in the American white-collar workplace. Meanwhile, the drawbacks of a positive attitude were clear from the start: first, it was an attitude—you could assume it in regard to almost anything, from the beneficial to the depraved—thus it was somewhat arbitrary; second, having encountered a number of very positive fanatics, liars, lunatics and sociopaths in my time, it was anything but a mark of moral excellence or mental health; third, it mattered much less than the ability to do the work.

At first I feared that valuing a positive attitude over competence would result in a bunch of unproductive “can-do” schmoozers enjoying unwarranted favor for their preposterous and annoying positivity. And, yes, a few pathologically positive ghouls were in circulation, annoying the fuck out of those who had things to do. But most folks in the downtown offices were in it for a paycheck. To them, a job was a job, not a showcase for mental and emotive ascendancy. Most were, therefore, impervious to the motivational propaganda issuing from the offices of the managers and corporate consultants. Still, I’d see quotes pinned to cubicle walls like “Workin’ hard for the money,” as if they were defending themselves against this motivational spin by a show of sweat-of-thy-brow common sense.

So, what was all this motivational propaganda about? Not only was it preposterous that attitudinal correctness should supercede competence, but it put managers in the role of attitude shapers, extending their influence across the labor-brain barrier, where it had no business. Granted, this was the early 1990s, an era marked by an unprecedented flatulence of perception-shaping euphemisms and acronyms from the gluteal lobes of organizational blowhards. Meanwhile, the actual social and historical conditions were such as you’d find in any recession: job insecurity, job scarcity, crime, scams, idleness, crumbling infrastructures… But the perception shapers were blowing HR PR so hard that it amounted to a campaign of positive denial: companies were “downsizing” and “restructuring” (firing and obsolescing) while they were promulgating boundless positivity in a best of all possible worlds.

A typical example of the sort of language that issued from this false-positive culture was the catch phrase can-do. In this phrase we have an affirmation of being both capable (”can”) and active (”do”). It describes no other state but that of readiness and willingness. Life, on the other hand, is conditional, excluding us more than it includes us, showing us more of what we lack than have, paining us more for what we can’t do than can, even limiting us to doing and thinking only one thing at a time—to being only one being at a time. The phrase can do pays no heed to the conditions of life because it is designed to deny them. It is fundamentally an attitude, and, specifically, one that expresses loyalty, compliance and servitude. Like so much white-collar motivational ballyhoo, it serves the affirmation-seeking sentimentality of those in charge more than the actual well-being of the peon.

In the offices of Blue Shield, after a particularly nasty round of layoffs, large buttons were distributed that read, “I Value Blue Shield’s New Culture—Ask Me How.” Needless to say, nobody wore them but a few frightened middle-managers, and nobody bothered to ask them how they valued Blue Shield’s “new culture,” lest it be taken for sarcasm. In Blue Shield’s Healthtrac newsletter (volume IX, number 3, page 1), an anonymous writer published the following: “Eleven Proven Ways to Get along Better with Everyone.” Riddled with solecisms and misspellings, the eleven platitudes ranged from keeping promises, considering the effects of what you say, giving compliments, suppressing anger, abstaining from gossip, to being funny. As sensible as it is to be considerate, trustworthy, generous, temperate and a barrel of laughs in an atmosphere of mistrust, resentment and cynicism, the “eleven ways” were immediately ignored or mocked.

While all this motivational pap, team talk and positive attitudination seemed mawkish and cultish, it was familiarly so. It reminded me of those New Age motivational therapy cults, such as LifeSpring, that had gulled my parents back in the 1970s. What I encountered in office culture was the usual Puritan work-destiny paradigm—making a religion out of work—decked out in the latest pop-psycho drag. This motivational propaganda espoused the same Panglossian premise that the self-renovators of the ’70s had—namely, that the only thing between people and paradise is how they process experience, which is to say that, like Intel, it’s “all inside.”

This concern with the internal state of people was not always associated with earning a living. Its induction into the professional context started in the 1950s, with organizational psychology and the rise of the big corporation. As the social sciences established themselves, large business organizations were regarded as social systems to be studied, and programs such as “organizational behavior” found their way into business management schools. The social revolution of 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of individualized learning and self-development, with corporations instituting such programs as “sensitivity training” or, in an organization where I recently worked, “cultural competence.” Throughout the 1980s, as the U.S. shifted from an industrial to an information economy, the necessity of lean manufacturing, downsizing and corporate restructuring fueled a consulting boom, much of which focused on disarming the disgruntled. By the 1990s, when I entered the white-collar world, job security and inter-company mobility were all but dead, and corporate-culture consulting was all the rage.

Many of these corporate consultancies evolved out of pop-psychology group-training seminars. The most famous example of these was EST (Erhard Seminar Training, or “to be” in Latin), founded by Werner Hans Erhard (Paul Rosenberg by birth). In the early 1960s, Erhard sold correspondence courses in the Midwest, then became a training manager for Encyclopedia Britannica’s “Great Books” program, then took a job with the Parent’s Magazine Cultural Institute as territorial manager, which brought him to San Francisco. One fine day, while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, he had an epiphany that everything was “perfect as it is,” which suggested that humans might be ‘trained’ to stop making a prejudicial, prepossessing and presumptuous hash of their lives. EST convinced a generation weary of the negativity of the civil rights struggle, the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal to refer it all to, not society, but the self.

The success of EST spawned LifeSpring, the next most popular New Age experiential training cult, founded by John Hanley, one of Erhard’s EST colleagues. LifeSpring, like EST, basically dismantled the biases, preconceptions and habitual thought patterns by which people psychologically managed the intensity and variety of experience. Its trainings deconstructed the safe and familiar ways in which people processed experience, discouraging rational remove and encouraging immediate expression and personal exposure. Its trainers employed dialectical rhetoric to expose inhibitive and dismissive habits of thought, thus allowing participants to discard these for more spontaneous and honest expressions. Indeed, some of the students of EST and LifeSpring shed their prejudices, fears and inhibitions and realized the possibility of expressing themselves honestly. Others filed law suits.

Erhard disbanded EST in 1984 and established Landmark Education in 1987, the branches of which (The Vanto Group and Teknico, both business consultancies, and the EST-derived personal training, The Landmark Forum) offered corporate and organizational training seminars throughout the 1980s and ’90s. In fact, Landmark still pushes its goods to this day, training over 200,000 participants and banking about $76 million yearly. All this goes to show that the attitudinal gurus and mind managers are still at it, and to as little effect on the actual world we live in.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2009, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

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