-- By JessicaWirth - 15 Feb 2012

I've Seen the Other (White) Shoe Drop...

In December, 2009, my brother, then in his 3L year at another New York law school, got a terse email from a partner for whom he had worked the previous summer. The email doesn’t require an “in a nutshell” summary because the email was itself a nutshell: the partners were defecting; the firm was dissolving; his offer of full-time employment had been revoked. I won’t demean him by attempting to reduce the past three years—his struggle to find meaningful work, our family’s fear and concern for his mental well-being—to a thousand words, even though it would be illuminating. Rather, I tell his story to provide context.

I'm really sorry, Jessica, for both your brother and for you. Because I teach in this law school, and also hire lawyers for my non-profit, I deal daily with a distressingly large number of young well-pedigreed lawyers in your brother's situation. You understand, I know, that I am trying to begin, this spring, the longer process of teaching you how to avoid this outcome.

As you are telling your brother's story here "to provide context," it seems to me that one more question would help to elucidate the context. It's the question I ask all the lawyers in your brother's situation: why doesn't he have any clients?

...But I Persist in Disbelieving

Like many in this class, I am still considering working in “big law” after graduation. Perhaps this admission is shocking given what I’ve just disclosed, but I can’t see why it should be.

It isn't shocking at all, Jessica. It's perfectly understandable. In rapidly-changing social situations, young people with little experience who must strike out on new paths, different from the ones trodden by the last generation, will experience great anxiety at the thought of having to find their own way. Conformism is comfortable; innovation is scary.

But there are great pleasures available in pioneering, in inventing your way, in building your own practice. And you can learn to use 21st-century technologies of collaboration to pioneer alongside your contemporaries, in mutual assistance, and with the more experienced lawyers—including the most attuned of your teachers—who understand how the new world works and who can help you.

Every person in this law school knows, at least on an abstract level, what I know personally from watching my brother twist in the wind: the associate cogs in the big law machine are cheap, expendable, and apparently not even worth a five minute phone call when the other (white) shoe drops.

I am interested in understanding the following: why do I continue to consider pursuing a career path that I rationally understand is harmful?

Because you think you understand it, because it's there, and you haven't yet applied yourself to learning as much about the way of the future as you presently think you know about the way of the past. That which is visible at the moment (even if it is failing, and being ineluctably transformed) seems more secure than that which is not yet visible over the horizon.

In order to make a good judgment, however, one needs to see all choices clearly. You can study over the next two years the forces transforming the large metropolitan law firms serving large enterprises. If you don't also learn what you can about how to practice law in a more lightweight, independent, humane fashion using 21st-century organization methods—and in particular if you shut down with anxiety when I and other colleagues try to teach you about them—you will be less able to make good decisions about your future.

Functionalism Sheds some Light...

Most friends, acquaintances, and family members who ask me why I might want to work at a law firm accept as an answer some combination of the following: I need to earn a salary reflective of the effort and expense I’ve incurred attending law school; I seek to do interesting, intellectual work; and I hope that a prestigious law firm position will provide the training and legal seal of approval necessary to ultimately do the work I came to law school to do. I find these responses increasingly lacking when I view them through the functionalist lens propounded by Cohen.

I have tried to ask myself what each justification above actually does, not what it purports to do. For example, what is the significance of the fact that I will graduate law school with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt? It purports to be a limiting factor in my career trajectory: because I owe money, I must choose a path that will allow me to pay it back. What it actually does is nothing more or less than force me to make a choice about whether I will pay this debt back and if so, on what time table. The choice I make may trigger numerous outcomes, and I may have a higher or lower preference for each that I will try to estimate in advance of choosing what I will do. That I owe money doesn’t tell me what I have to do or what I should do, it only sets out a decision tree whose branches I define.

And not even that, really. Your practice will have a larger nut, by the amount of your monthly "mortgage" payment on your license. The capital asset that is your license will return you the amount of your "book," which is the income of your practice. Almost certainly, until your book is substantially more developed than it will be when you acquire your license, making your practice pay—that is, cover all the elements of your nut, including the expenses of the practice and the cost of the way of life you consider it minimally acceptable to lead—will be a struggle. But you will develop value in your license by acquiring skills, and broaden your book by acquiring clients, rapidly accelerating the return on the license. Using 21st-century organizational technologies to minimize your overhead, market your skills, find collaborators and referring counsel to cooperate with around the world, and improve your expertise in new areas by continuous learning, you can grow your practice faster than was ever previously possible.

Or, you can raise an annuity against your license, by putting it in pawn to a large firm that pays you an apparently lavish salary. Their incentives will be to control your practice and your workflow completely, working you to exhaustion, keeping you dependent, reducing wherever possible both your skills and inclinations to survive as an independent, substituting instead the skills and emotions suitable to life as their servant. They will compete you against an increasingly globalized legal workforce, in which well-trained lawyers in societies much larger and much poorer than this one will work much harder for much less money. They will, as you know, throw you out remorselessly, without retraining you, the minute you aren't making as much money for them as someone else to whom they can pay the same or a smaller salary. When that happens, you will get back a license to which little value has been added beyond the name cachet of the people who just fired you. But you will have been overworked, hurt, pissed on and demoralized for some years, before being humiliated by being fired, which means that you will be less fitted for the activity lying before you than you were when you started.

This analysis, which holds when I look to the kind of work I want to do and the training I need to do it, is not liberating as one might think. Rather, it is anxiety-inducing. Whereas previously I could convince myself that I at least had good reasons for persisting in my belief that pursuing a job in a law firm “made sense,” I now do so absent any justification I can provide to myself that I find sufficient. This is psychologically perplexing because I consider myself a rational person.

Of course you consider yourself a rational person. We all do. But that's nonsense. Our primary mental processes are unconscious and pre-rational. That recognition about human psychic nature, which we call by the name "Freud," the recognition about biological nature we call "Darwin," and the recognitions about social nature we call "Marx," were the most important intellectual achievements the 19th century bestowed on the 20th.

Dealing with the discovery that our rational processes are secondary rather than primary, and that the patterns of our behavior—from our smallest economic transactions to the most intimate and influential personal relationships we form and dissolve in our lifetimes—are unconsciously created and maintained, is acutely stressful. We do almost anything we can to avoid understanding ourselves. Many of the most powerful agencies of social control that rule us recruit their power by helping us to avoid self-understanding, by flattering our sense of "choosing," of "rationality," by associating security and self-stability with a conveniently false view of ourselves.

If we are to become powerful agents in society ourselves—if we are to be free to do what we want on behalf of those we choose to fight for, if we are to build our lives so as to have material well-being in the context of a meaningful life spent doing justice—we should begin by overcoming our inability to see ourselves, unsparingly but lovingly, as we are.

...But not Enough to Overcome Cognitive Dissonance

Eben mentioned cognitive dissonance once briefly in class, and I looked it up because I do that in law school classes to understand the words professors use so that I, too, can learn law-speak or at least how to fake it.

And, as you found, it isn't a term from the law at all. I hope that wasn't disappointing.

Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory is that people are motivated to eliminate dissonance by altering conditions or adding new ones to create consistency in their internal belief systems. There are several ways of doing this, including changing one’s behavior, changing one’s moral judgments of one’s own behavior, or adapting one’s sense of self to make room for the discordant behavior.

You've left out the most important: repression of a portion of the cognitive stream that causes dissonance. And by leaving that out, you don't come to the other most important primary process in this context: dissociation, the splitting of self, rather than the "adaptation of sense of self" you euphemistically substitute.

My cognitive dissonance is that I consider myself a rational person, yet I am making an irrational choice.

With the result that you want to repress your understanding of the actual nature of human psychic life: you want to ignore Freud, the way some people are unconsciously compelled to ignore Darwin or Marx.

To make this gel, I first attempted to make the behavior (my choice) seem rational via the justifications I discussed above. These did not hold weight when I considered them fully. More recently, I see myself attempting to change my judgment of my own behavior. I do this in several ways, most notably through comparing myself to my law school group (everyone I know is thinking about firm positions), comparing myself to my broader social network (I know people at firms, and they are still functional adult people with families and some degree of happiness), and comparing myself to a conception of myself that I have generated over the course of my life (even if the preponderance of people who work at firms are unhappy and unfulfilled, I won’t be because it is not in my nature).

What I have not done is changed the discordant behavior by deciding not to pursue the irrational choice. The only explanation I can provide is that making such a decision requires confidence, which I lack.

That's a painfully personal example of the process whereby, refusing to understand ourselves unsparingly but lovingly, we wind up unloving ourselves. You aren't at all without confidence: you wrote this essay, which is both a great achievement and a work of great self-confidence. You are punishing yourself with a negative self-judgment ("I am unconfident") for the failure of your rational "knowing" to overcome the deeper unconscious roots of your thinking and behavior.

You might want to think about how many situations in social life you see around you, in which people perform the task of negative self-judgment for not rising rationally superior to their real unconscious natures: in their bodily relations to food and drugs, in their sexualities, in their aggressions. In, to be all Freudian about it, work and love. And how often, if they fail, we do it for them: how much, in fact, our doing it for them is how we wind up being just to the poor, and kind to the rich. That will help you write a much stronger next draft.

You might also think about how to come more candidly, unsparingly but lovingly, into awareness of your own unconscious motivations in the matter of your career choices. That will help you live a much happier and more productive life.