|
OR How To Succeed In Business Without Even Lying.
There's a classic line in that classic movie, Breaking Away, when our protaganist has the awful realization: "everybody cheats." Hot damn right, my son.
A conversation I just had with an acquaintance of mine sort of bundled together a few ideas along this line and I felt compelled to rant and rave about it. So here I am.
At issue is the concept of faking credentials to get a job.
Am I being too stuffy here?
Actually, if you answered yes, then your opinion's already falling on deaf ears. It irks me, this get-ahead-at-any-costs mindset. Maybe it irks me so much right now because this town -- Los Angeles -- is loaded to the gills (and then some) with that attitude. The entertainment industry, for example...well, just think of the careers of some of your favorite stars and you'll probably see enough such behavior by principals in their lives. Nothing matters -- truth least of all -- but the end result, and the end result is almost always money.
I wouldn't mind some of the filthy lucre myself, and have decided that I have no option but to make its rapid and significant accrual a bit of a priority now and for the next little while, but I've amply proven to myself my suspicion that money truly does take a backseat (in my mind) to just about everything. Call me naive -- I'm not, because I am totally aware of the other options -- but I'd rather live by my principles than to drift in a moral wasteland because my only principle is to get ahead.
That kind of attitude is foreign to many in this town, and my acquaintance is one of them. She essentially thinks I'm a gutless simpleton (worse, not a go-getter :o ) for not jumping at every opportunity even when it takes absolute, exaggeration-is-fpr-wimps lies to get me there. A thorough lack of familiarity with the realities of my field -- the conventions of academia and my research and career specialty are light years removed from the nebulous disethics of Hollywood -- doesn't help much, in that she can't see why I can't make up jobs, publications, and the like to boost my chances.
Worse, of course, is that I did all this schooling to likely end up in a job that maybe (if I'm lucky) starts at $50000 or so a year -- this makes me the ultimate sucker in her mind, as evidenced by her relating to me the example of a friend of hers who recently started a $100000/p.a. financial job despite not even graduating high school. This particular dude lied about his background, awarding himself a bachelor's degree in the process. He's supposedly good at what he does, too, and I know all too well how irrelevant a degree (or formal education) can be and how havign one or not having one has nothing to do with inherent worth or 'intelligence,' but, still...
To her, it comes down to "why would anyone bother going through all those years of school to land some low-paying job?" She even told me that the whole reason why I was peeved at her and this dude faking degrees is that I didn't think of that instead of wasting all my time in universities. Hey, if I had to do the university thing over again -- it was just about the end of me, in some ways -- I'd think hard about it, but money is NOT my motivation. I got into entirely the wrong field for that, and it's not like I lacked the ability to study in a way more lucrative one. I couldn't believe her. It's all about money, to people like her. Nothing else even figures into it. Why would I endure so many years of enforced poverty and abuse for a job that pays, relatively speaking, very little (and, worse, a job that is exceedingly scarce...I'm between 'career' jobs now, so to speak, and it can take years to land another one in my field)? Well, let me count the ways. Actually, let me not, because she still wouldn't get it.
The whole area of faking academic qualifications is a touchy one with me. As I just alluded, yes, I find degrees of any sort to have little to no inherent worth and I can cite multitudes of cases from my own experience in which non-degreed individuals could easily outstrip their degreed counterparts in many ways.
Still, perhaps it's an artefact of my having strived most of my life toward various degrees that makes me get seriously peeved about someone just faking it (or getting one mail order...same thing). I mean, scum like that little dweeb who wrote the Men are from Mars and "Doctor" Gray's PhD is from Uranus books trumpet their bogus degrees as a sales aid, or as a distraction to obscure the fact that their message sucks. And I know New Ager freaks who have the bad taste to call themselves "Doctor" after having done some kind of hand-waving crystal regression modality power source and-other-cool-words workshop at some totally unaccredited, out-of-the-back-of-a-VW-microbus 'university.' Actually, them calling themselves 'Doctor' is far less disturbing than when they loudly insist that they be addressed so, particularly when they're insisting to this boy, who earned his f***ing PhD the hard way.
And with weirdos like that there's the added risk that their quackery, legitimized by the fraudulent 'PhD' they attach to their names, will harm the poor gullibles who seek their services...ditto, in a way, for people like non-doctor Jon Gray. Not that MDs, for example, are to be trusted, either, but at least they might have some idea of what they're doing. Maybe. If nothing else, they've got malpractice insurance.
And it's not that I'm some PhD snob -- none of my degrees mean much to me in themselves, and I'm not impressed enough with them that I've even wanted to frame them. Not even sure where they're stored now, for that matter. It's irrelevant...I have them, nobody can take them away, and they are part of the key to a certain suite of career paths and the like. I worked hard for them, yes, and perhaps that what really makes me mad about fake degrees and the fakers who use them, whether for unearned 'glory' or for practical uses such as landing a job despite being underqualified.
The PhD, in particular, is a degree that I see basically as, at heart, little more than testimony to endurance (some would say pigheadedness or even foolishness...maybe even masochism). Sure, there's a certain minimum-acceptable level of academic intelligence and the like attached to it, but essentially it's a measure of 'sticktoitiveness.' That's especially true for fields where completing the thing can typically take perilously close to a decade.
Fakers who flaunt a PhD -- and I include recipients of honorary doctorates who label themselves a PhD -- did not put in that effort. They didn't suffer within the system and the academic politics. They didn't write the dissertation, or endure the oral exams and defense. People who've been awarded honorary degrees may well be at least as qualified as those who earned them and -- like others who never earned the degree -- more than capable of earning a PhD (or whatever). But, to me, a PhD is all about time served and those people just didn't put in the time. Therefore, their degree's not a 'real' one even if it's an honorary and above-board one. Therefore they shouldn't be able to go around calling themselves doctors.
I'm not being snobby about this -- the only times I've so far insisted on being called 'Doctor' was (i) when I signed up for telephone service (doctors got faster service in that jurisdiction, though I guess they might've meant MDs :-) ) and (ii) when an obnoxious MD tried to make me call him "Doctor" even in a setting to which it was irrelevant. I just find it offensive that someone can shortcut what it takes others years of hard work and sacrifice to achieve.
But I have digressed...
My acquaintance has herself lied on every job application she's ever submitted. Got away with it, too -- to say she has the gift of gab and could see ice to eskimos would be to understate. She's exactly the sort of person who thrives in Hollywood. For her most recent big gig she even downloaded, from some site that charges lots of money, a degree from a university she attended for less than one semester. Yes, I do find that rather disturbing. She says everybody does it. For every job. Maybe in her field, but certainly not in mine.
It all seems so very American, too, and not in a good way. This kind of behavior may be universal, but have we perfected it here? Is this the Land of The Big Shortcut? People here seem to want everything but are willing to work for nothing. And then they whine when it isn't just given to them. Waa-wahhhhhh, motherf***ers.
I suppose it makes sense when coupled with the willful intellectual laziness that is very much an American trait. Why study when you can cheat? Why go to university and suffer for x-number of years if you can download the sonofabitch from the Web? I thought that American Ingenuity was long since a myth, but maybe I'm wrong. Americans are great at perfecting shortcuts, ethical or not. Too often not.
In the same way that I've always winced at the thought that the business of America is business, I find the insistence that the (financial...always financial) ends justify the means in the American marketplace is very disturbing to me. I'm not saying that I'm always 100% honest, the proverbial Clean Marine, but there's a line there somewhere and so many people seem to be so far away on the other side of it that I can't even see them. Maybe that's why we don't understand each other -- we don't speak the same language. To me, personal integrity (meaning that, even if nobody else will be impressed by my behavior, at least I'll know that I usually try to do the right thing) actually means something whereas to them it's either an advertising soundbite or a plot device for some movie that celebrates the kind of behavior that's essentially foreign to half of the film's staff.
This stuff sucks, and the opposite viewpoint seems to prevail around here. Everybody cheats, it seems. And look where being above-board has taken me...
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
