Culture, ethics and morality

How corporations control their workers

I used to feel a sort of grief. Not over losing someone, but over losing me.

The world at my feet

Someone I was at school with once told me that, when I left, the whole world was at my feet. He may have been right, but there are some people who don’t want the whole world at their feet.

Image: me, age 18, in one person’s eyes.

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to make it big, just like the guy who thought the world was at my feet. He did. But I didn’t. I failed. The failure, as I much later realised, stemmed from my unwillingness to bend to the three weapons that our societies use against us: culture, ethics and morality (of which more below). Y’see, I was uncultured, unethical and immoral.

You’re not a thief, are you?

When I was a youngster, a very young youngster, I came into contact with some very bad people. They frightened me. I tried to stay away from them, so frightened I was. I sometimes wonder if my fear of these people was in actual fact a sort of protection mechanism. Anyhow, on the whole, I stayed out of trouble.

When I went to secondary school, the school authorities wrote a letter of … welcome to my parents, which I was allowed to read. In it, it stated that it is expected that your son has by this age come to know the difference between what is his property and what is the property of others. That shocked me: that the school I was about to go to even considered the possibility that I might be dishonest. Shall we say, it was a shot across my bows. The school itself had been founded as a religious institution, and still vaunted the practice of religion. We had a chapel and a chaplain. We said prayers every second day in assembly. We probably prayed that every other boy in the hall had had a similar shot before his bows. The second master said there was no worse transgression of school rules than bad manners. After seven years, I’d been pulled up enough to know what religion was and what bad manners were. And then, off I traipsed into the world. Religion and bad manners were matters about which the world, however, had other ideas.

Steel Magnolias

In the film Steel Magnolias, there comes a scene where the mother figure buries her daughter. It’s a scene charged with emotion. It’s very well played by the actress Sally Field.

In it, in the span of five minutes, Field runs through the entire panoply of grief emotions. They’re recognisable. I certainly recognised having gone through some of them when I grieved about my loss of me. They are:

Cynicism.

Denial.

Grudging gratitude.

The mind and the heart.

Tears.

Anger.

Desperation.

Fury.

Why?

WHY?

Resistance.

Violence.

Laughter.

The last part of grief is always laughter. And grief doesn’t always come after someone’s death. You can grieve for your own life, as well as the loss of someone else’s. But, when you reach the stage of being able to laugh, you will know that, even though you haven’t freed yourself from the love that caused your grief, you have freed yourself from grief itself.

Wallow, or turn the page:

Now, those three aspects of control over our lives.

Culture: Erin Brockovich

The nature of our names, where we hail from (in France it is virtually impossible for a Muslim with a Muslim name to secure employment). But it extends to things like dress codes, or accents, or even shyness.

Owen Jones was just interviewed by Piers Morgan. Jones suffers from ADHD, but is a very astute journalist. J. K. Rowling, the Harry Potter authoress, accused him of snorting cocaine before the interview. That is cultural weaponisation: attacking how someone speaks or reacts, instead of focusing on what they say.

If you don’t dress the way your employer expects you to, you’re out. You don’t fit their culture. (Just look at what differentiates a girl with one ass from girls with two, in the clip below.)

Ethics: the British Broadcasting Corporation

This is something that gets expressed as respect. You must constantly show respect, for your colleagues, for your superiors and for the owners of the business you work for. Lack of respect will be thrown in your face without compunction. “Bad dog!” they will effectively say. “Down!”

The fact that high management are extorting the business’s clients or securing government contracts with bribes, has nothing to do with ethics. Ethics is what YOU do. Not what THEY do. What they do is run the business efficiently.

Image: The British Broadcasting Corporation’s Tim Davie, being questioned by the British House of Commons. He is accused by 100 of his own employees of applying one ethical standard within his corporation (impartiality) whilst seemingly shielding the State of Israel from counter-arguments against its policy in Gaza (partiality). Some people say that a speaker who uses expansive hand gestures is presenting an argument that is contrived, as if hand gestures fill in the gaping cracks in their argument. You might like to compare the hand gestures of Professor Carl Sagan in quite another parliamentary proceeding.

Morality: Philadelphia

A single parent, two jobs, latchkey kids, homosexual, transgender, visiting night clubs, advertising for a man in the small ads? And don’t forget your social media posts. These all add up to a moral judgment. It doesn’t matter how well you do your work. If you’re morally deficient, you’re out (but not before you’ve signed their NDA).

Do you remember the Tom Hanks film Philadelphia? In it, his senior partner, played by Jason Robards, sneers at another partner, “Andy brought AIDS into our offices, into our men’s room” (as if Hanks should’ve been pissing into a bottle in his office rather than bring AIDS in there). It was irrelevant that, to catch AIDS from Hanks’s character, they needed to indulge in sex with him (the way they react, it would actually have been a viable sub-plot). The important thing was he brought it to us, as if he’d caught a fatal viral disease just to spite them (HIV, or AIDS, was the first disease in history that was your own silly bloody fault, but it wouldn’t be the last: heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol and Covid-19 would follow). Anyhow, Tom Hanks (in the movie) was morally deficient, regardless of how good a Philadelphia lawyer he was.

Standards in international affairs: Ukraine

These three things, culture, ethics and morality, are not just used against workers and other members of our societies, but also in international relations, particularly those with divergent traditions to the western, Christian model: China, Iran, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America, Russia. It is easier to castigate these civilisations than to try to understand them. Understanding them takes effort, and often ends up as a contemplation in the mirror: “If I don’t trust them, they must be dangerous. They are incapable of trusting me, because I know no trust. I must destroy them, because I cannot find it in me to trust them.”

What sometimes confuses me is why the west trusts Ukraine. The answer is, that, while I believe there is every reason to trust Ukraine, because I’m not an international diplomat, the reason the west trusts Ukraine has nothing to do with trust. It has to do with keeping alive an outlet for their armaments. It was only later in the Russo-Ukrainian War, especially with America turning its coat, that western suppliers of arms to Ukraine came to be confronted with the idea that they may actually need them for themselves; since then, they’ve been dithering between whether to supply Ukraine to the eyeballs, so it can defeat Russia for once and for all, or hold a bit back in case Russia invades them.

When Ukraine was attacked by Russia, Russia itself was condemned, and Ukraine was embraced and comforted. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a remarkable leader and a remarkable statesman, but he is very dependent on western help in even keeping his country with its head above the water in its fight with Russia.

Did you notice how these factors played when he visited Washington, D.C.? Culture: he was immediately picked out for not wearing what everyone else was wearing. Have no fear: if he had been wearing the finest-cut suit available in all of Jermyn Street, Trump would still have remarked upon it, because culture is one of his biggest weapons. The second-biggest is ethics. In tomorrow’s blog, you can hear Karoline Leavitt tell the world how extremely ethical Trump is. But when he was in Washington, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was accused of failing to say thank you. That’s the ethical weapon: respect. As far as morality is concerned, the Ukrainian leader is married with two children, so Trump didn’t have much leverage there; but, boy, has he criticised Pete Buttigieg whenever he got the opportunity. Voilà: culture, ethics and morality at work as weapons of state.

With America on Ukraine’s side, as it previously was, it of course had to supply them with armaments. Not the constant stream of anything and everything they needed, however, like Israel. They got drip-fed armaments. HIMARS, okay, eventually, but not to be fired into Russia. We don’t want to provoke them. Tanks, well, eventually Germany relented and so did everyone else. Aircraft—boy, was that blood out of a stone.

Ukraine is supported by the west with the arms that the west has to supply. And the west’s best interests are served when the supplies go on the longest; so, from the outset, the aim has been to drip-feed Ukraine enough matériel to keep the patient alive, without giving it the means to cure the disease. But trust them? Oh, that would be going a bit too far. NATO: sidelines; EU: sidelines. Nice picture opportunities, but, trust? Come on, are you kidding?

Мої дорогі українці, я вам довіряю. Бо, як приватна особа, моя довіра покладається на мене, а не на політику.