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THE SELF-DECEPTION ALL-STAR

-- By AndrewCascini - 13 Apr 2010

The Problem

Go read my law school application's personal statement. It’s bullshit.

I wasn’t attempting to deceive admissions, though. It wasn't that I didn't want to go to law school; I felt inexplicably drawn to attend. But to get admitted, I had to explain why I wanted to go. Since I couldn't explain why, I needed bullshit.

I delivered like a champ.

The Adviser

Like any sane person I wanted to get the hell out of Ann Arbor after graduation, but unlike any sane person I wanted to live and work in the economic wasteland of Michigan for the rest of my life. At the beginning of my senior year I visited a university career adviser. She told me, considering the recession and my history degree, that my most realistic options for working in state were learning a trade or going back to school.

The Rational Man

A trade? I shuddered at the thought, but that's not how The Rational Man would respond. The Rational Man would gather the data before rejecting a life of labor out of hand. I was the Rational Man, wasn’t I? So I created an Excel spreadsheet comparing job prospects. I had columns for the salaries and I found vocational stability projections. I also knew I wanted a fullfilling job, so The Rational Man put a column labeled – I shit you not - “fulfillment potential.”

My spreadsheet listed law school (which I didn't know a damn thing about), separated and highlighted, up at the top. Two rows lower was a list of fifteen choice industrial occupations.

The Money

Average salaries for these jobs ranged from around $35K-$60K – good money in Michigan. But after law school, thought The Rational Man, you can get these wonderful firm jobs. NALP reported that they were paying first year associates over 100K per year! Overjoyed, I put "100K" in the "salary" column next to law school.

The Social Utility

What do plumbers do? I asked myself. Plumbers unclog toilets, the Rational Man responded. What do lawyers do? Lawyers help people and advance society, of course. Also, maybe I owe society the benefit of utilization of my intelligence. Any individual with normal faculties could be an electrician, I assumed for some reason, but only the smartest can be lawyers, I assumed for some other reason. Thus, by going to law school I would ultimately be efficiently benefitting society. With such exhaustive analysis complete, I gave law school the top score under “fulfillment.”

Law school. At last, I had arrived at my choice like The Rational Man I was.

The Truly Rational Man

My conclusions came up lame. I knew this at the time too.

The Money in Earnest

Bullshit. Law school, when analyzed strictly from a financial investment perspective, is a poor decision for nearly all applicants, all things considered. That didn't even begin to consider the highly bimodal salary range for lawyers if I wasn't "fortunate" enough to work in a firm. In terms of balancing earning power to risk, law school was the clear loser.

The Social Utility in Earnest

Also bullshit. The notion that I was “too smart to not go” was narcissism gone wild. My stellar grades and aptitude test scores were poor empirical measures of intelligence, and even if we assume they were perfect indicators of brilliance I had also ignored the thousands of people in Michigan alone who, because of a whole myriad of repressive social processes, were unable to be evaluated by these methods. As for social impact, I'm not sure how to go about measuring the “utility” of a profession. Even if we could, I'm not sure how to categorically weigh lawyers against, say, plumbers. Is a good plumber really worth less to society than a good attorney? Is there any reason to think that I would be a good attorney? There should have been a column for “megalomania factor” on my spreadsheet.

What had really motivated my decision? My mind reeled, so I ignored it. I got in to Columbia, so I went.

Eureka

One week ago, I read the following words:

"During the predatory culture, labour comes to be associated in men's habits of thought with weakness and subjection to a master. It is therefore a mark of inferiority, and therefore comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate. By virtue of this tradition labour is felt to be debasing, and this tradition has never died out."

I set down my pencil and closed my eyes. I have found it.

It didn't matter what being an electrician versus a lawyer was truly about, because the image of becoming “an attorney” became a proxy for achievement in my mind's eye. I'd reckon it has something to with those fancy glass doors. A plumber, a construction worker, an industrial worker - even to the son of an auto working family, those were repugnant positions of futility, of toil. Despite the spreadsheet, I evaluated prospective professions not by actual qualities, but by their projected appearance. Worse, I "stacked the deck" through self-deception by looking at certain statistics in order to make going to law school seem to be the best choice. Cloaked in the process of rational decision making, I reverted to anthropological needs by taking the bait and swallowing the hook. Agency versus contingency indeed.

The Crossroads

So now what? It’s time to stop thinking about this present absurdity and start thinking about where to go from here. I must first decide whether or not to come back. I’ll be distracted by a legal job this summer, but my mission still must be to constantly ask myself without deception whether I’m enjoying my life or whether I’m hating it. If it’s more of the latter than the former, I’m getting out.

After my small awakening, I won’t be led by the nose to the profession that projects strength if it makes me weaker in the end. If I’m not here next fall, I might be holding a plunger.

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