I work with a pretty smart, if heavily liberal, group. The great majority of us are college educated, not that that makes you smarter, necassarily, as you'll see below.
I was talking with two guys who sit near me. We were talking, bitching really, about having to attend what seemed like a pointless meeting later that week.
Younger Guy said how he worked at Wal-Mart when he was a kid, and at the start of a shift, they did exercises or clapped in concert. Older Guy mentioned that lots of company's do "indoctrination" stuff like that, including (somewhat wrongly, I believe) our company. He compared it to the Nazi Youth Program. His suggestion was that, like the Nazis, these programs were designed to build support and belief in the "mission" and program.
I believe that, yes, corporations do these kind of team building exercises to build moral, build a "team" sense and to create good will.
But I walked away at this point. I don't particularly believe that our company does stuff like that. And I think Older Guy was expressing a blanket anti-corporate mentality that I didn't want to support. I hate that mentality.
But I was compelled to get back up from my desk and reinsert myself into the conversation. Because, as I pointed out, the difference between shift exercises at Wal-Mart (as cheesy as they may be) and Nazi Youth Program (as indoctrinare as they may be) have one thing that is vastly different.
You can voluntarily leave Wal-Mart at any point. You left the Nazi's through only one method, and it was not voluntary.
I just don't get how educated people, and not just educated, but smart, can miss this fundamental distinction.
Maybe the purpose of the Wal-Mart clapping exercise and the Nazi exercises are the same: indoctrination. But the voluntary nature of the former makes all the difference.
No comments:
Post a Comment