Frankly Speaking...

"...the best of us did not return."

Apparently, though I don't remember initiating this, I am a fan on Facebook of Donald Trump's page for the Celebrity Apprentice. One of the posts they made which recently showed up on my news feed asked the question, "Would you backstab to get ahead in the workplace?" Seeing as how I don't even remember signing up for updates from the page, I didn't comment on it, and it left my mind for awhile. The above quote from Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning made  me think of it again.

One of the themes in the powerful narrative that Frankl presents us is what happens to people in horrible situations. Do we abandon our values, our morals, and our very identity as it is stripped away from us? Or do we still have them to cling to when we suffer? We've spent time in class discussing this very idea and question.

I think that it's much more important to hold onto morals and to who you are than to trade them for something. Naturally, this is much easier to say than to do, especially in a situation as dark as the holocaust where life and death were dependent on that very decision. But whenever possible, it's important to hold onto who you are and the values you hold than to trade them off. If you loose those, you might as well be dead. Your identity, who you are, is important, and what are you without it?

The Apprentice practically runs on the famous motto, "it's nothing personal. It's just business." But we're human- our entire lives have personality to them. The workplace, albeit less personal, is still a place where people interact and where people are people. Our world functions with relationships and with people and personalities. I don't think that business is an excuse to remove identity and justify wrongness in order to get ahead.

Frankl's narrative helped me get that idea. Even in the darkest situations, where everything is removed from you and life and death hangs in the balance, morals and identity shouldn't be abandoned, but clung to. The choice wasn't to live or die, but to die whole or live empty. Of course, this was one of the worst chapters of human history and that decision was very real and very hard- I by no means mean any disrespect to the survivors of the holocaust. If anything, I simply mean that if there is a choice to keep your identity or relinquish it for an advantage, that your identity is more important. Frankl's narrative is a more extreme account of that idea.

A comment on The Apprentice question of backstabbing to get ahead read, simply, "it's nothing personal, it's just business." Frankly, I disagree.