You Ain't Gotta Stay
Think about morality enough and you'll get really confused. I've gone around in circles with right and wrong, objective and subjective, should and must. What makes a good person? What kind of thoughts does a good person have? Is it okay for me to question an issue when no one else does? These are things no one can really answer for you--indeed, these are things that, I think, can never really be answered conclusively.
It's like what I started at Kinko's. New employees at the store are essentially thrown into the sea without a life jacket. If you can somehow stay afloat while customers periodically come by and try with all their might to drown you, you're doing well, it might be said. Other employees are often too busy to teach you (and certainly do not take the initiative, as I hope I would try to in their position), there is no training program, and customers expect their services rendered now, not whenever you've fiddled around with a machine enough (and ruined enough of their originals) to learn how to properly run things.
At the end of the day, after hours and hours of torture for a few bucks, the temptation is to go to someone with seniority and ask, "What should I have done here? How is this to be handled generally?" I did a lot of that at first--much more than I do now. The issue there is that they can't tell you. They'll tell you what they would have done, but that reflects on their values. Another person will tell you something completely different, and yet another will yell at you for trying to abide by what seemed like good advice. Is there a lesson in all that? Maybe "Don't put too much stock in anyone's advice" applies. Question everything, in other words. Keep plugging away until you settle into place with your own blend of "dos" and "don'ts"; if that blend is questioned or insulted, consider the underlying assumptions your critic is making and move on.
To put it into more nerdy terms, you are a unique piece of hardware. When you're looking around for compatible drivers, would you install a random device's drivers and assume everything will be okay? Keep searching and troubleshooting until things are running smoothly, and from them, all you need are periodic updates. Once you know what helps you run smoothly, you'll know where to get them.
It goes back to fundamental thrusts people make, I guess. I have a manager who's very customer service oriented, often at the cost of corporate policy and respect for employees. I have a supervisor who's extremely unconfrontational, trying to please everyone but becoming very long-winded and inefficient in the process. I have plenty of coworkers who just don't care; they'll do what seems right at the time, but forget about it afterward. And then there are those who stick by policy, becoming cold and detached in the process. It's a strange thing how much you can learn about people by watching them solve conflicts and considering what it says about their values. If you watch them closely, you may find something new to consider and integrate into your own belief system.
But to judge blindly from your own subjective corner of the world may be a mistake. There's a certain beauty, I think, in according each person respect as a human capable of abstracting their own ethics. Society is really just a big jungle of animals watching, learning, and doing their best.
Everyone's ideal, of course, is to be able to do everything. It took me a while to really grasp that. In order to achieve certain goals, other things must be sacrificed, however important they may be when seen as their own ends. It might be more accurate to say, for example, "This employee really finds policy crucial" than to complain, "Here's someone who doesn't care at all about his customers." It's not "Those terrorists have no respect for human life." I heard that a lot my senior year of high school (specifically in September of 2001), and my personal thoughts on the matter were guilt-inducing, to say the least. "We know what they did," I thought to myself, "but they also gave their own lives. And even if they hadn't, what was their reasoning? What did they value more than life? Could it be that they do value life, but felt it had to be sacrificed for something greater?" I know now that I'm not fundamentally immoral (and neither is any human being on this planet, goddamnit); the very act of questioning absolute evil reveals how deeply concerned with morality I am.
In such respects, everyone has his/her unique worldview and personal system of weighing matters of importance. I have mine, of course, and thinking about all this doesn't put me an inch above anyone else. I think it's good to consider one's values--it probably clarifies exactly the kind of person you are so that you may act more consistently with your nature and take criticism in stride--but really, isn't ignoring one's values a value judgment in itself? Isn't any suggestion circular?
Maybe abstractions about morality are just another piece of this subjective puzzle after all. Feel free to have them, but don't feel too guilty if you don't.
It's like what I started at Kinko's. New employees at the store are essentially thrown into the sea without a life jacket. If you can somehow stay afloat while customers periodically come by and try with all their might to drown you, you're doing well, it might be said. Other employees are often too busy to teach you (and certainly do not take the initiative, as I hope I would try to in their position), there is no training program, and customers expect their services rendered now, not whenever you've fiddled around with a machine enough (and ruined enough of their originals) to learn how to properly run things.
At the end of the day, after hours and hours of torture for a few bucks, the temptation is to go to someone with seniority and ask, "What should I have done here? How is this to be handled generally?" I did a lot of that at first--much more than I do now. The issue there is that they can't tell you. They'll tell you what they would have done, but that reflects on their values. Another person will tell you something completely different, and yet another will yell at you for trying to abide by what seemed like good advice. Is there a lesson in all that? Maybe "Don't put too much stock in anyone's advice" applies. Question everything, in other words. Keep plugging away until you settle into place with your own blend of "dos" and "don'ts"; if that blend is questioned or insulted, consider the underlying assumptions your critic is making and move on.
To put it into more nerdy terms, you are a unique piece of hardware. When you're looking around for compatible drivers, would you install a random device's drivers and assume everything will be okay? Keep searching and troubleshooting until things are running smoothly, and from them, all you need are periodic updates. Once you know what helps you run smoothly, you'll know where to get them.
It goes back to fundamental thrusts people make, I guess. I have a manager who's very customer service oriented, often at the cost of corporate policy and respect for employees. I have a supervisor who's extremely unconfrontational, trying to please everyone but becoming very long-winded and inefficient in the process. I have plenty of coworkers who just don't care; they'll do what seems right at the time, but forget about it afterward. And then there are those who stick by policy, becoming cold and detached in the process. It's a strange thing how much you can learn about people by watching them solve conflicts and considering what it says about their values. If you watch them closely, you may find something new to consider and integrate into your own belief system.
But to judge blindly from your own subjective corner of the world may be a mistake. There's a certain beauty, I think, in according each person respect as a human capable of abstracting their own ethics. Society is really just a big jungle of animals watching, learning, and doing their best.
Everyone's ideal, of course, is to be able to do everything. It took me a while to really grasp that. In order to achieve certain goals, other things must be sacrificed, however important they may be when seen as their own ends. It might be more accurate to say, for example, "This employee really finds policy crucial" than to complain, "Here's someone who doesn't care at all about his customers." It's not "Those terrorists have no respect for human life." I heard that a lot my senior year of high school (specifically in September of 2001), and my personal thoughts on the matter were guilt-inducing, to say the least. "We know what they did," I thought to myself, "but they also gave their own lives. And even if they hadn't, what was their reasoning? What did they value more than life? Could it be that they do value life, but felt it had to be sacrificed for something greater?" I know now that I'm not fundamentally immoral (and neither is any human being on this planet, goddamnit); the very act of questioning absolute evil reveals how deeply concerned with morality I am.
In such respects, everyone has his/her unique worldview and personal system of weighing matters of importance. I have mine, of course, and thinking about all this doesn't put me an inch above anyone else. I think it's good to consider one's values--it probably clarifies exactly the kind of person you are so that you may act more consistently with your nature and take criticism in stride--but really, isn't ignoring one's values a value judgment in itself? Isn't any suggestion circular?
Maybe abstractions about morality are just another piece of this subjective puzzle after all. Feel free to have them, but don't feel too guilty if you don't.