Jeff Schmidt > Quotes

“Take it from me, an authority on expertise: You can't trust experts.”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives

“the employer's control of the political content of the professional's creative work is assured by the ideological discipline
developed during professional training. And the employer's control of the workforce is maintained in part through the professional's elitism and support for hierarchy in the workplace.”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives

“When employers designate certain jobs "professional" and insist that employees have professional training – not just the technical skills that seem sufficient to do the work – they must have more in mind than efficiency. Hierarchical organizations need professionals, because through professionals those at the top control the political content of what is produced, and because professionals contribute to the bosses' control of the workforce itself.”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives

“Wanting things to be different from what they are is suffering. Attraction and aversion, greed and hatred, lust and ill will: These are the attachments that cause suffering. “I like that; I want more”—“I dislike this; make it stop”: Letting go of these attachments is the end of suffering. Release from this unsatisfactory predicament is the goal of life, whether we are aware of it or not.”
― Jeff Schmidt, 365 Buddha PA: Daily Meditations

“Indeed, the most difficult part about becoming a professional is adopting the professional attitude and learning to be comfortable adhering to the given ideological framework, which some students find quite alien. When students fail to complete professional training programs, they almost always do so because they have problems adjusting their attitude, not because they are unable to learn the technical tricks of the trade. That is, people who drop out of school usually do so not because they lack the ability to go farther, but because they are consciously or unconsciously unwilling to become the type of person the system demands. The greater the adjustment an individual has to make to behave in the expected way, the less likely it is that that individual will do so.”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives

“You finally complete your first paper, but even its appearance in a “highly respected” and thick biweekly journal sandwiched between two other equally dull and opaque articles fails to alleviate your growing boredom and disillusionment with a career in physics, a career that once seemed to promise excitement, glamor and importance. Are you going to spend your whole life in a mad, cutthroat ego trip just to see your name in print every six months? Or is the real pleasure in seeing your name referenced in someone else’s useless article?”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives

“The exam ends not only hundreds of hours of explicit preparation, but also thousands of hours of indirect preparation-courses taken, work done and problems discussed with the test in the back of the student’s mind. Students should not cavalierly label their alienated labor as merely temporary, as instrumental to get the degree but easily reversed afterwards. Performing intense alienated labor for an extended period of time changes the student. It dampens his creativity and curiosity, clouds his memory of his original interests and ideas and weakens his resolve to pursue them, while getting him used to doing protracted, disciplined labor on assigned problems. It is empty rhetoric to tell the student who has gone through the qualification process that he is free now to pursue in his career his original goals, for he is now a different person. What the student thought was a temporary concession to the system-“I’ll play along just enough so that I can get what I want from the system”-turns out to be the beginning of a forced, permanent adjustment to the system. The alienated work that the student did to prepare for the qualifying exam, work that was merely to assure his future, is his future.”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives

“Nothing reveals more clearly the degree to which employed professionals are alienated from their subjects than does the sharply contrasting behavior of the hobbyists or “buffs” in their fields. When hobbyists encounter one another at a social gathering, before long you will find them talking eagerly about the content of their subject of common interest, showing an excitement, enthusiasm, wonder and curiosity that is reminiscent of beginning professional students. This rarely happens when professionals talk casually with their colleagues. Unlike the amateurs, the professionals don’t talk much about the work itself: they often appear detached from their subject, as if they don’t derive much satisfaction from it. Yes, they “talk shop,” but their focus is so far from the content of the work itself that you would have a hard time if you had to guess what kind of “shop” they work in. A commercial bank? A junior high school? A government agency? A university department? Casual conversation among professionals tends to focus on the actions and personalities of employers and powerful figures within their fields—the standard gossip topics of the powerless. Their gossip is by no means idle, however, for the politics are central to their work as professionals.”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives

“As a professional, the teacher is "objective" when presenting the school curriculum: she doesn't "take sides," or "get political." However, the ideology of the status quo is built into the curriculum. The professional's objectivity, then, boils down to not challenging this built-in ideology.”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives

“It was 1984, and journalist Bernard Kalb had been on the State Department beat for eight years. As a veteran of the New York Times, CBS News and NBC News, Kalb knew the frustrations of trying to squeeze information out of tight-lipped government officials like State Department spokesman John Hughes, whom Kalb faced almost daily. In his 38 years of reporting. Kalb had dealt with countless government spokespeople, and so when Hughes decided to leave the department and move back home to Cape Cod, Kalb at first anticipated just another routine change of faces. But the change was to be unlike any in Kalb’s experience. On 28 November 1984 Secretary of State George Shultz announced that he had recruited someone to replace Hughes as his assistant secretary of state for public affairs. State’s new mouthpiece would be—that’s right— Bernard Kalb. And so for the next two years Kalb’s former colleagues struggled to squeeze information out of him—with no greater success, of course, even though they addressed him at press conferences as “Bernie.”

How did the Reagan administration know that Kalb, seemingly a longtime adversary as a journalist, could be trusted to speak for its side and routinely tell journalists less than he knew? The answer, put simply, is that Kalb was a professional. At one level, journalism and public relations are conflicting professions, yet the hack and the flack have the same essential qualifying attribute. The administration expects its spokespeople to answer questions at contentious press conferences without making even the slightest ideological slip. Kalb, with his decades of experience maintaining the very strict ideological discipline that is required of New York Times and network television news reporters, had the essential skill for the new job. The administration knew that his transition would be an easy one and that they could train him to be a public relations professional in a matter of days; to train a nonprofessional for such a job would take years. Politically, professionals are interchangeable parts.”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives

“Like a beautiful brightly colored flower without fragrance Is the well-spoken word without action.   Like a beautiful brightly colored flower full of fragrance Is the well-spoken word and the deed that matches the word.   DHAMMAPADA 51-52”
― Jeff Schmidt, 365 Buddha PA: Daily Meditations

“An unsatisfying work life is much more than a 40-hour-per-week problem, because of its profound effect on your morale while you are off the job. You may be pained to think of it as such, but your job is probably the biggest project of your life. It is probably the only activity to which you will ever devote the most alert of your waking hours with such disciplined regularity, day after day after day. During no other period of comparable length in your life will you make an effort of this magnitude on any project of your own. Thus, for all practical purposes, your life’s work is at stake, and so it is understandable that your most serious struggles are to control it, not to sell it at a higher price.”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives

“If you are a professional, coming to understand the political nature of what you do, as part of an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional, can be liberating. It can help you recover your long-forgotten social goals and begin to pursue them immediately, giving your life greater meaning and eliminating a major source of stress. It can help you become a savvy player in the workplace and reclaim some lost autonomy. And, ironically, it can help you command greater respect from management and receive greater recognition and reward, without necessarily working harder.”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives

“Ideologically disciplined thinkers, especially the more gung-ho ones, often give the appearance of being critical thinkers as they go around deftly applying the official ideology and confidently reporting their judgments. The fact that professionals are usually more well-informed than nonprofessionals contributes to the illusion that they are critical thinkers.”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives

“The U.S. socioeconomic system, like the hustler, makes false promises, the principal one being that social mobility is available to all who work hard. By its very nature, a hierarchical system cannot possibly keep such a promise. The number of positions at successively higher levels decreases very quickly and is always less than the number of hardworking people who want the positions. This structure sets many ambitious workers on a collision course with the reality of limited opportunity. When they are finally hit with the tragic disappointment, they may become angry or resentful, and so the hierarchical system must engage in widespread cooling out. It does this not only to protect its agents who stand at the gate and do the dirty work of exclusion, but also to make sure that those who have been disappointed do not become opponents of the hierarchical system itself and enemies of its power elite. It is vital to the system that the losers serve the hierarchy respectfully, and not sabotage it, when they find themselves with jobs that have lower social status than the society of “unlimited opportunity” had led them to expect. Cooling out is therefore an integral part of the socioeconomic system. Those who say “That’s life” should understand that there is nothing natural about a system that kills the spirit of large numbers of people by first putting them in a position where they need opportunity, then promising them virtually unlimited opportunity and finally making them losers.”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives

“The criteria by which individuals are deemed qualified or unqualified to become professionals involve not just technical knowledge as is generally assumed, but also attitude—in particular, attitude toward working within an assigned political and ideological framework.”
― Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives