[CIMC-working] (fyi) "All the money, all the prestige in the world will never make up for the loss of your freedom."

[Chris Kaihatsu]

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From: Sunil/Dissident Voice <dissidentvoice@earthlink.net>
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 08:11:34 -0800
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
Subject: Choose Life!

Dissident Voice
www.dissidentvoice.org
January 16, 2003


"All the money, all the prestige in the world will never make up for the
loss of your freedom."

"You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary,
unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and
evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?"

--------------------------------

Dear Friends,

Since this past summer, Dissident Voice newsletter has featured the
outstanding work of British journalist George Monbiot. I found the
following essay while frolicking about his web site. It's some very wise
career advice to aspiring journalists. Though its intended audience is
writers and journalists, there is much here that people of different
professions will find important to consider; the piece very deeply
reverberates with me, a person struggling to find sustenance and liberation
through music.

Salud,

-- Sunil

___________________________________________________________


Choose Life
George Monbiot
http://www.monbiot.com/careers.cfm

Every week, sometimes every day, someone writes to me asking for advice
about the career they should take. I can't, unfortunately, respond to them
all, so I thought I should try to formulate some general guidelines, which
I hope people will be able to adapt to their own circumstances. This advice
applies only to those who have a genuine choice of careers, which means,
regrettably, that it does not apply to the majority of the world's
workforce. But if the people writing to me did not have choice, they
wouldn't be asking.

While this guidance may be applicable to some people working in other
areas, the examples I will use all come from journalism, as most of those
writing to me want to be journalists, and this is the field in which I have
mostly worked. Before you take it, I should warn you not to rely on my word
alone. I can't guarantee that this approach will work for you. You should
take advice from as many people as you can. Ultimately, you must make your
own decisions: don't allow me or anyone else to make them for you.

The first advice I would offer is this: be wary of following the careers
advice your college gives you. In journalism school, for example, students
are routinely instructed that, though they may wish to write about
development issues in Latin America, in order to achieve the necessary
qualifications and experience they must first spend at least three years
working for a local newspaper, before seeking work for a national
newspaper, before attempting to find a niche which brings them somewhere
near the field they want to enter. You are told to travel, in other words,
in precisely the opposite direction to the one you want to take. You want
to go to Latin America? Then first you must go to Nuneaton. You want to
write about the Zapatistas? Then first you must learn how to turn corporate
press releases into "news". You want to be free? Then first you must learn
to be captive.

The advisers say that a career path like this is essential if you don't
want to fall into the "trap" of specialisation: that is to say, if you want
to be flexible enough to respond to the changing demands of the employment
market. But the truth is that by following the path they suggest, you are
becoming a specialist: a specialist in the moronic recycling of what the
rich and powerful deem to be news. And after a few years of that, you are
good for very little else.

This career path, in other words, is counter-educational. It teaches you to
do what you don't want to do, to be what you don't want to be. It is an
exceptional person who emerges from this process with her aims and ideals
intact. Indeed it is an exceptional person who emerges from this process at
all. What the corporate or institutional world wants you to do is the
complete opposite of what you want to do. It wants a reliable tool, someone
who can think, but not for herself: who can think instead for the
institution. You can do what you believe only if that belief happens to
coincide with the aims of the corporation, not just once, but consistently,
across the years (it is a source of wonder to me how many people's beliefs
just happen to match the demands of institutional power, however those
demands may twist and turn, after they've been in the company for a year or
two).

Even intelligent, purposeful people almost immediately lose their way in
such worlds. They become so busy meeting the needs of their employers and
surviving in the hostile world into which they have been thrust that they
have no time or energy left to develop the career path they really wanted
to follow. And you have to develop it: it simply will not happen by itself.
The idea, so often voiced by new recruits who are uncomfortable with the
choice they have made, that they can reform the institution they join from
within, so that it reflects their own beliefs and moral codes, is simply
laughable. For all the recent guff about "corporate social responsibility",
corporations respond to the market and to the demands of their
shareholders, not to the consciences of their employees. Even the chief
executive can make a difference only at the margins: the moment her
conscience interferes with the non-negotiable purpose of her company -
turning a profit and boosting the value of its shares - she's out.

This is not to say that there are no opportunities to follow your beliefs
within the institutional world. There are a few, though generally out of
the mainstream: specialist programmes and magazines, some sections of
particular newspapers, small production companies whose bosses have
retained their standards. Jobs in places like this are rare, but if you
find one, pursue it with energy and persistance. If, having secured it, you
find that it is not what it seemed, or if you find you are being
consistently pulled away from what you want to do, have no hesitation in
bailing out.

Nor does this mean that you shouldn't take "work experience" in the
institutions whose worldview you do not accept if it's available, and where
there are essential skills you feel you can learn at their expense. But you
must retain absolute clarity about the limits of this exercise, and you
must leave the moment you've learnt what you need to learn (usually after
just a few months) and the firm starts taking more from you than you are
taking from it. How many times have I heard students about to start work
for a corporation claim that they will spend just two or three years
earning the money they need, then leave and pursue the career of their
choice? How many times have I caught up with those people several years
later, to discover that they have acquired a lifestyle, a car and a
mortgage to match their salary, and that their initial ideals have faded to
the haziest of memories, which they now dismiss as a post-adolescent
fantasy? How many times have I watched free people give up their freedom?

So my second piece of career advice echoes the political advice offered by
Benjamin Franklin: whenever you are faced with a choice between liberty and
security, choose liberty. Otherwise you will end up with neither. People
who sell their souls for the promise of a secure job and a secure salary
are spat out as soon as they become dispensable. The more loyal to an
institution you are, the more exploitable, and ultimately expendable, you
become.

None of this, of course, means that you can start doing precisely what you
want to do straight away, and be remunerated as you might wish. But there
are three possible approaches I would recommend.

The first is simply to start how you mean to go on. This is unlikely, for a
while, to be self-financing, so you may need to supplement it with work
which raises sufficient money to keep you alive but doesn't demand too much
mental energy. If you want to write about the Zapatistas in Mexico, earn
the money required to get you out there and start covering them. If you
want to make it pay, you must be enterprising. You should investigate all
the potential outlets for the stories you hope to come across: magazines,
newspapers, radio and TV stations, websites and publishers.

You should have a clear view of what you want to cover before you go, plan
it carefully and find as many contacts as you can from among people with
some knowledge of the issue. But at the same time you should be ready for
stories you don't anticipate, which might find a home somewhere unexpected.
You might for instance come across a wildlife story while you're there,
with which you could help finance your trip by writing it up for a wildlife
magazine. You might supplement your earnings with a travel piece, or
something for an architectural magazine or a food programme. Editors are
sometimes delighted to receive material from outside the box (though more
often they simply won't understand it). Work in as many media as you can,
and be persistent.

Be prepared to live and travel as cheaply as possible: for my first four
years as a freelancer I lived on an average of five thousand pounds a year.
In seven years working in the poor world, I managed to keep my expenses
down to three thousand pounds a year. This is a good discipline for any
freelancer, however well you're doing. If you can live on five thousand
pounds a year, you are six times as secure as someone who needs thirty
thousand to get by. In Britain, however, the possibilities of thrifty
living have now been clouded somewhat by student loans: many people looking
for work are already burdened by debt.

Work hard, but don't rush. Build up your reputation slowly and steadily.
And specialisation, for all they tell you at journalism school, is, if you
use it intelligently, not the trap but the key to escaping from the trap.
You can become the person editors think of when they need someone to cover
a particular issue from a particular angle (that is to say, your angle).
They then respond to your worldview, rather than you having to respond to
theirs. It's surprising how quickly you can become an "expert" in a
particular field: simply because so few other journalists will know
anything about it. You will find opportunities, and opportunities will find
you.

The second possible approach is this: if the market for the kind of work
you want to do looks, at first, impenetrable, then engage in the issue by
different means. If you want to write about homelessness, for example (one
of the great undercovered issues of developed societies), it might be
easier to find work with a group trying to assist the homeless. Learn the
trade by learning the issues, and gradually branch into journalism. Though
this takes you a step or two away from your ideal, at least you will be
working with the people experiencing the issues which interest you, rather
than with the detached men and women in the corporate newsrooms who have
themselves lost their dreams, and who know as little about the real world
as the careers advisors who helped land them in those jobs in the first
place.

The third approach is tougher, but just as valid. It is followed by people
who have recognised the limitations of any form of engagement with
mainstream employers, and who have created their own outlets for their
work. Most countries have a number of small alternative papers and
broadcasters, run voluntarily by people making their living by other means:
part time jobs, grants or social security. These are, on the whole, people
of tremendous courage and determination, who have placed their beliefs
firmly ahead of their comforts. To work with them can be a great privelege
and inspiration, for the simple reason that they - and, by implication, you
- are free while others are not. All the money, all the prestige in the
world will never make up for the loss of your freedom.

So my final piece of advice is this: when faced with the choice between
engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the
"necrophiliac" world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the
apparent costs may be. Your peers might at first look down on you: poor
Nina, she's twenty-six and she still doesn't own a car. But those who have
put wealth and power above life are living in the world of death, in which
the living put their tombstones - their framed certificates signifying
acceptance to that world - upon their walls. Remember that even the editor
of the Times, for all his income and prestige, is still a functionary, who
must still take orders from his boss. He has less freedom than we do, and
being the editor of the Times is as good as it gets.

You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary,
unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and
evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?

** George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at the Department of Politics in
Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at
the University of East London. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian
newspaper of London. His articles and contact info can be found at his
website: www.monbiot.com

=========================================================
Dissident Voice is a newsletter dedicated to challenging the lies of the
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"To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair
inevitable."  -- Raymond Williams

Editor: Sunil K. Sharma

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