I write a quarterly column called For What It's Worth for the Michigan Bar Labor Section publication LawNotes. Below are links to my columns from 2014 forward. Earlier columns are collected in Opinions, the book I did with Stuart Israel.
It was mid-day in mid-July in lower Manhattan. I am not the first to observe it felt like the inside of a dog’s mouth. I was in town to hear a case. We were taking a lunch break, and I was eating a sandwich on a park bench when a Haredi man walk by. Haredi are the ultra-Orthodox Jewish men you often see in New York City. He was wearing the clothing that marks a member of his tribe: black suit, white shirt, black shoes, long black coat, and a high-crowned black hat. The hat is so closely linked to the Haredi that they are sometimes known as black hats.
I allowed myself to indulge in the pleasure of mental ridicule. How absurd he looks, I thought to myself. Imagine wearing an overcoat on a day like this!
Usually when you see someone dressed that radically out of sync with the weather he is pushing a grocery cart full of plastic bags. Either because mental illness is accompanied by damage to the internal thermostat or because homelessness compels people to use their body as their closet, we tend to think that people who wear long black coats in the summer are homeless or crazy or both. But this guy was neither. He was merely wearing his tribal uniform. What an absurd tribe it must be that requires its members to make themselves so uncomfortable, I thought.
But then I had an epiphany. I noticed that I was also very uncomfortable, and I realized it was because I was also dressed in my tribal uniform.
I am a lawyer. When I am at work I wear dark wool suits, black shoes and long-sleeved, starched white shirts. I wear high black socks. I wear a neck tie – a special silk ribbon carefully knotted in a specific way so it hangs to a point just below the waistband of my dark wool pants. I would no more wear a short sleeved shirt or short socks than I would wear a nose ring.
It is not a matter of fashion. No one would describe me as well dressed. My suits are boxy and shapeless. There is nothing about them that makes me look attractive or fashionable. I wear them for no better reason than because this is what members of my tribe wear.
Yes, it’s 93° and I’m wearing a wool coat. Yes, it’s as humid as a rice cooker and I have my collar buttoned up and a slip knot pulled tight around my neck. To any sane person, I look like an idiot. But I do it because this is what people like me do. I am not likely to change. I’m too old and too set in my ways. And I too closely identify with my tribe to violate any of its norms. It’s a matter of identity.
For a moment I realized that my tribe is no less absurd than the one that compels its members to wear black hats or the one that compels its members to wear ear gauges, tattoos and nose rings.
It is possible that my epiphany may make me pause before I ridicule the members of other tribes. Perhaps at last I have taken a small step toward empathy toward others whose tribal identities make uncomfortable demands.
I went to one of those big commercial parking lots near the airport a while back. You know the drill. You pull in and they direct you to a section. There are arrows and signs pointing the way. You get to where they’re parking, and you get on the bus.
Everything went as it’s supposed to. There were half a dozen of us on the bus when the driver got a call from the office. There was an unhappy customer in a distant section of the lot who wanted to get picked up. We went over to get him. When we got there the driver explained to the guy that he wouldn’t have needed to call the office if he had followed the arrows and parked where he was supposed to.
The guy did not agree. In his mind the parking lot was entirely at fault. No one told him where to park. The arrows were completely unclear. There was no way he could be expected to follow such totally inadequate directions. And furthermore, the driver was an expletive deleted expletive deleted. I pointed out to the guy that the rest of us had managed to follow the arrows and get where we were supposed to be. He said I was an expletive deleted expletive deleted too.
I’ve been thinking about that guy ever since. It seems to me that if I pulled into a parking space at one of those lots and I didn’t see a bus or any other customers, before too long it would occur to me that I was in the wrong place. I would look for the busses and go over to where they were. Or, if I called the office it would be to apologize and say, “Excuse me but I seem to have gotten confused. What section are you parking in today?”
But this guy didn’t do that. He didn’t think he had made a mistake. He was completely convinced he was blameless. Other people had made a mistake and inconvenienced him, and he was furious about it.
I have come to believe that this guy is incapable of forming the thought “I made a mistake.” He just can’t get his mind around the concept.
I mention him because I recognize this guy. I see him all the time in my practice. Sometimes he’s on the Union side, and sometimes he’s on the Employer side. Sometimes he’s the Grievant, and sometimes he’s the HR representative. But the personality type and the symptoms are the same. These are people who don’t just believe they are right, they are incapable of conceiving the thought that they may be wrong.
I asked my wife the shrink about it. She explained the difference between Axis I and Axis II. These classification systems change, and I’m oversimplifying, but the gist is this: Axis I patients have mood disorders. They are anxious or depressed, and they are miserable. Axis II patients have personality disorders. They are not miserable; they make the people around them miserable. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is an Axis II condition that has been in the news a lot lately.
People with this kind of problem are difficult to deal with. They do not play nicely with others. They don’t engage in the ordinary give and take of social interaction. They do not listen. And they take up an inordinate amount of everybody else’s time, talent, resources, and psychic energy. They are exasperating.
So I was complaining about it to my wife. I said I see the same personality disorder over and over again. It isn’t fair, I said. How much time is it appropriate for the rest of us to spend dealing with the problems of the small number of people with personality disorders?
She said, “Of course the people you deal with are difficult. That’s why their cases get to you. If everybody was reasonable and rational both of us would be out of work.”
I see the point. But still….
© 2016 Barry Goldman