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.

I went to a discussion held by a Catholic young adult group recently, and the topic was evangelism.  There were some good insights, but I came away less sure about the topic than I have been in the past.

A scene from my past gave me some insight into this subject, though.

In high school, there was one Mormon guy in my grade.  Well, there might have been others, but I only knew one who was quite definitely Mormon.  I knew because he talked about it to people, not in a bragging way but the way you might talk about your family life or your favorite TV show–it was part of his life, and other people knew it was part of his life.  It never occurred to me until recently that he actually suffered for his faith, though.  And he did, in terms of social stature, in ways that I can only see after over 10 years of retrospection.  I remember two incidents in particular.

First, he took up our history teacher’s offer to leave the class when we were watching a sexually explicit scene from Legends of the Fall.  He left to snickers from his classmates.  I don’t remember his comportment while leaving the room.  But here’s the funny thing: he didn’t have to do that.  The teacher didn’t require us to obtain parent signatures.  I don’t think my parents ever knew, because I don’t remember telling them.  This was unusual at my school–when we watched Schindler’s List in another history class, every student was required to obtain a release from parents.  But in this instance, when his parents wouldn’t know–only he would know–he chose to leave the class, regardless of what other people thought.

Second, there was the poll he took of other guys that several of us uncomfortable.  As part of a social studies project, he asked guys randomly if they masturbated.  He recorded the yes or no answer.  He elicited weird looks, particularly because none of us expected that he would ever mention sex to anyone else.  We all figured him for a prude.  And if we would have asked ourselves why he was conducting the poll, we might have assumed he was being judgmental.  But that would have been dishonest of us, because after the initial shocked reaction, he always said, “Come on, everyone does it,” implying, of course, that so did he.  This wasn’t an attempt to get blackmail but an honest, straightforward, intellectual inquiry into the sexual mores of his classmates.  He was curious to find out what his classmates honestly thought, and he followed that interest to its most uncomfortable extent, for us anyway.  It’s tough to fit this into the evangelism model, and I realize it’s stretched.  But I see it this way: we all knew he was Mormon, and we all had some perception of his church as morally repressive.  But he defied our expectations not by contradicting his faith; rather, he explored what the rest of us thought and felt without judgment or malice.

From talking about his faith plainly to leaving the room for an R-rated movie to inquiring about his peers’ sexual assumptions, this guy got something right about living God’s word in the world, without pretension or apology.  There’s something to be said for that.  I guess I’m saying it now, over 10 years later.