Feb 20 2009
Should we tell disaffected young people that they’ll rule the world someday?
I’ve recently had an experience that has led me to some conclusions about something I’ve pondered for many years: whether we should tell disaffected or socially outcast young people that their day of victory over the bullies and the jocks is coming soon. That bullies and jocks eventually work for nerds.
Without going into proprietary or overly personal details, my recent experience was a training event mostly conducted by the Sales Department. Let me give you a brief primer on my (entirely false, as I found out) preconceptions of biomedical sales culture: the jocks become sales reps, the nerds become clinicians and (in lots of firms) executives. There’s certainly a nugget of truth there, but I think it’s far more prevalent in the pharmaceutical side of the industry than in the biotechnology side (where I work). Regardless of how true or false this maxim is in individual cases, I found that it was manifestly false, at least in my company. I prejudged some of the people surrounding me in the training as jocks I could not learn from. My faulty prejudgment cost me a good 3 days of disaffection and needless eye-rolling.
The reason I bring this up is that I’m now convinced that we should never tell young people who feel beaten down (physically or emotionally) that they’ll eventually run the world. This is stock wisdom that needs to be discontinued, and for good.
Now, it seems like the right thing to say, especially with the examples that the world presents to us. Bill Gates is frequently and perhaps appropriately cited; more mundane examples present themselves to anyone in practically any industry (eg, my boss holds a PhD and an MBA, and there are doctors of medicine and philosophy all the way up my company’s org chart). But I liken this strategy of bucking up the youngster to effusing about heaven to a jaded terminal cancer patient. The universal rule of the nerds and the splendor of heaven may both be realities worth looking forward to, but both are purely future realities. Hope of a management position and yearly bonuses, to bring us back to the disaffected young person, means little to a 16-year-old who has to eat alone at lunch, every day, every week, every month, every school year.
And then there’s the pathological consequence of such assurances, as evidenced by my hasty judgment of the good people around me. When you’re told “They’re just jealous of your achievement” and “You’ll be their bosses someday”, you build up a resentment toward anyone who resembles a jock. This can be fatal in modern capitalism, because lots of aspects of businesses, particularly the hypercompetitive cultures of sales and marketing departments, look like jock-run ventures. Of course, the root cause of this resentment is a deeply entrenched pride about one’s intellect and perceived achievements–and a perception that the jocks don’t contribute or contribute negatively. I’ve just recently been able to recognize these elements of my personality, present as they’ve been for years, as the result of pathological pride that’s enchained me for far too long.
I think this problem is particularly troublesome for Christian parents. Telling such things to a Christian teen is bound to stunt his or her spiritual development, because such children learn to think about human relationships in an adversarial, rather than community, context. It’s more painful–in the short term–to tell a child or teen to love and not hate the abusers at school, but–in the long term–this advice will help to grow and sustain inner peace.
