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The Perversity of Human Capital and Anglo-Saxons

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A while back I traded in my romantic pen, beard, and large red glasses for G-mail, sweaters, and contacts. I decided I spent too much time lamenting about the world and not enough time fixing it. And for the most part, I was happy with this change until I realized that I had started to use terms like “human capital.” “Human capital” is a term people use in all sorts of official business type things – corporations, marketing, nonprofit work, public policy, and government.  The unfortunate part about terms like “human capital” is that no matter how much you disapprove of such terms, they invariably show up in your vocabulary if you spend enough time in official business type things.

And so I was at a meeting on Thursday, and the words kind of tumbled out of my mouth without even thinking about it. “What we have here is a human capital problem.” And then I cringed. Human capital seems like it should be an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp or cheap college or something like that. Humans are not capital. They are people. Individual people.

In my Medieval English Literature class right now we are learning about the Anglo-Saxons as we read Beowulf. In Anglo-Saxon law, everything had a price. Your nose was cut off in an argument? Six shillings to you from the perpetrator! Even your life was given a price. The Old English word for this price is “weregild,” literally “man price.” My friend very insight-fully asked in discussion whether we still have a concept of weregild. Initially, I thought no. We are popularly taught that human life is invaluable. When someone is murdered now, the murderer doesn’t pay the victim’s family; they are locked up to protect the rest of society. It seemed obvious that we have evolved beyond weregild.

But then, what exactly is “human capital?” Isn’t weregild really what we are talking about when we talk about “human capital?” Sure, we would never say that one man is financially more valuable than another, but we do say that one man is more valuable than another. That is the whole problem of human capital. It assumes that there is a group of people out there that your organization needs that your organization can’t have and that the way to get ahead is to find and woo that group. This is horrible thinking. Everyone brings value to a project. If you have a group of people who are intensely passionate about your organization, you should find a way to use their talents to help you. Figure out how to plug them in and watch as creativity begins to overflow.

My friend from class said that we might as well walk around with dollar values tattooed on our foreheads. At least that way we would know where we stood. I’m afraid she might be right.

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Planning Unicorns

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I’m a planner. This used to really worry me. Men aren’t planners; moms are. Men should be spontaneous so that they can make women fall in love with them by doing crazy things involving rain and late nights. And if men aren’t spontaneous, it’s a defect. They need a woman to teach them how to be spontaneous. So for a long time, I refused to embrace my planning.

Not everyone is a planner. But the thing about being a planner is that non-planners are always telling you how great being a non-planner is. There aren’t too many planers romanticizing the planned life. That’s mostly because they are too busy planning. If you’ve ever been a planner who wants to be a non-planner, then you know how messed up the whole situation is. You take on lots of responsibility because planners like responsibility. And then you get frustrated that all of your non-planner friends are living fine lives, and so you give up for a little bit. That’s when you get behind, and being behind is hellish for planners.

The world needs both planners and non-planners though. Both are heroic. Both are creative. And we need passionate people in both categories. I recently started thinking about things that I like. I came up with some interesting things. For example, I really love Mondays. I get energized by them. I like being around people who are learning, working, talking about real issues, and planning, and all of that starts happening on Mondays. I also love watching my Google Calendar fill up. It seems the busier I am, the happier I am. I like to be a part of things. And I like to be around people, but I like to be around people when they are doing something important. Being around people doing unimportant things makes me sad (I’m horrid at most parties). And all of this together made me realize that I am a planner.

That kind of changed everything. I’ve always been someone who has fancied that he’s a romantic. And I always thought that my pragmatic side was in direct conflict with this romanticism, and I like the romantic side better. He’s the one who writes poetry, and daydreams, and comes up with bold new ideas. But what I didn’t realize was that the romantic side was actually a part of my pragmatic being. I am romantic precisely because I’m pragmatic. My best creative thinking happens when my days are entirely structured, when I go from class to work to coffee with a friend, seamlessly. On those days, my pragmatic brain is synthesizing material in really cool ways, applying information from one event to the information from the next event.

I ran across this short film a few days ago. The filmmakers were given six lines of dialogue as part of a contest, and they had to fashion a short film around those six lines. The six lines kind of function as a story by themselves. (There’s a unicorn in one line). And so you feel like you know what the story is going to be about. But in reality, you have no idea. The filmmakers are actually able to be more creative because the audience is already expecting something, and they get something completely different. I think planning is a lot like this. Planning doesn’t stifle our creativity. It allows us to use creativity in new ways!

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Freudian Thoughts

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Sigmund Freud

I really dig psychology. I’m taking a Psychology of Personality class this quarter for my psychology minor. And I’m loving it. It’s a two-hour lecture class, and typically these kinds of classes rarely hold my interest, especially when you can typically read all of the information in the textbook, but I am enamored by this course. We are working our way through the history of psych of personality, and so, like all good psychology, we start with Freud.

Freud was a pretty interesting fellow. He wrote a lot of stuff that people took to be really sexual and stuff when it kind of really wasn’t. Also, he didn’t write about women very much because they were a “dark continent” and he “never really understood them.” And for those reasons, Freud is usually written off as a crazy person. It’s sad, though, because while people don’t think Freud was right about everything anymore, he certainly got some stuff right or said some things about the world that are useful.

Freud had this one really interesting theory about child development. Without going into too much detail, Freud thought that we all go through the same stages of development and that during these stages of development we are obsessed with different erogenous zones. Erogenous zones is just a fancy way of saying parts of the body that give us pleasure. So first, we are obsessed with the mouth. And that’s all good, we get food that way and that makes us happy. Then we go into the anal stage, which has to do with potty training, and then the phallic stage, which has to do with discovering our genitals and so on and so forth.

So basically the whole thing goes that when we are in each stage, we don’t really know about the next stage so we think that the happiness and pleasure we are experiencing from our current stage is the greatest of all the happiness and pleasure we will ever experience. And it’s like, obviously there are greater pleasures than being fed. But when a baby is in the oral stage, everything has to do with the mouth. All objects pass through the mouth because when the mouth is your pleasure center, if something doesn’t work with your mouth, it’s no good for you. If we could just tell all babies that there are greater pleasures than mouth pleasures, then we could fix the whole babies choking on things problem.

Us adults exist in the genital stage, where we have supposedly realized that reproduction causes the greatest pleasure. But this whole notion kind of strikes me as odd, as if there is some end point to development – that one day, we wake up and if everything had gone perfectly from birth, we would be perfect adults. That doesn’t seem right to me. I think we kind of go on developing, and I think that’s why sex permeates our culture in a lot of ways. If we believe, like the baby with his mouth, that the end-all be-all of human existence is sex, then of course we are going to put it everywhere and in everything.  I wish someone would tell us that there are greater pleasures than reproductive pleasures.