Fear

I listened to a speech given by Sherron Watkins, who worked at Enron for several years leading up to the company’s bankruptcy and who is generally credited for being one of the first to blow the whistle on the fraud that was occurring. It was interesting to hear her view of how the general company-wide incentives were the ultimate cause that led people to abandon their morals. But what interested me the most was the upper management’s ability to manipulate employees’ fear of being fired into making them keep their mouth shut. It made me think a lot about why it is that people are so afraid of being fired. Personally, I know that if I were to lose my job, I could rent a smaller apartment, live on rice and beans, and survive. It is an unappealing scenario, for sure. I would much rather live in the apartment that I am living in now and occasionally be able to go out to eat than the alternative. Relatively speaking though, going to the smaller apartment and living on rice and beans is a much smaller fall for me than for most people. Perhaps the degree of fear that one has in being fired is directly correlated to the level of lifestyle they are living. So, for someone with a nice house, a couple of nice cars, and a few toys, it would be much harder to live in that small apartment and live on rice and beans than it is for someone like me. How much harder would it be for someone who lives in a mansion, owns a 30-foot yacht, and has a second home in Vail? And, how much more apt would a person with that lifestyle be to abandon their morals then the average Joe in order to maintain their lifestyle? My train of thought led me to a verse in the Bible, Matthew 19:24. And perhaps in order for a person to be able to avoid the temptation of abandoning their morals to maintain their lifestyle, they would need to live in a modest house, and maintain a modest lifestyle, so that they neither have the fear of losing it nor the pressure of maintaining it.