Bad employee

One of Franklin's most familiar writings from his popular miscellany, Poor Richard's Almanack, was a farewell essay of sorts, in which he collated many of the Almanack's adages and aphorisms encouraging readers to work hard in their own self-interest.*  The essay is popularly known as "The Way to Wealth," wealth being a goal Franklin assumed his readers would find powerful enough that they would allow it to govern their behavior, but also a goal he felt was elusive enough that he himself worked tirelessly to explain and promote it.

Franklin's adages are designed to make clear what is still evidently murky to hapless citizens who squander wealth and time they could better use otherwise, as though adding taxes to those they resent, those the (English) government levies, by effectively taxing their own idleness, pride, and folly.  What will get through to these people?  At one point Franklin's pseudonymous speaker, Father Abraham, attempts a change of perspective:

If you were a servant, would you not be ashamed that a good master should catch you idle?  Are you then your own master?  Be ashamed to catch yourself idle, as Poor Dick says.

I find this rather a profound insight. In a world of externalized authorities, a person may fear to be seen betraying a master – at least, a "good master"'s – trust.  The master is "good," and the master's objective witness of the servant's idleness is experienced as a searing attack on the self: shame.  Yet acting on her own behalf, this same servant may brazenly indulge in idleness aplenty.  The opinion of the servant about herself is apparently less vulnerable to her awareness (omniscient in this matter, if not objective) of her idleness.  She serves her master well, and herself poorly.

Note that Franklin-Abraham doesn't urge his hearer to correct her mistakes merely by thinking of herself as her own employee and master, however.  To do so would evidently not be enough to reduce idleness (though the premise that we are all our own masters is not asserted here with total confidence, but more coyly posed as a rhetorical question).  Franklin-Abraham has recourse not to his usual exhortation but to disincentive: he urges the listener to feel more shame, to duplicate her master-authorized shame in thinking of her failures of herself.  Shame is, for most of us, definitionally punishing to feel.  Implicitly, Franklin-Abraham argues, to avoid the shame, avoid failing your good-master self (or, perhaps, being caught by yourself).

Yes, it's been that kind of week**: 

The usual Wednesday pileup and more besides.***  Even in the week supposedly devoted to it, I can't say I've seen much improvement in resolution, at least on my own behalf.  It is always easier for me to complete the tasks set me by others, as in Franklin's analogy.  (Such tasks, which took up Tuesday and Thursday, are what save this week's chart from looking worse than it does.) 

I may have adopted the virtue project in order to amend my Resolution and Industry problems, but doing so hasn't changed my habitual failures of the will.  As Franklin himself noted with that initial surprise when he attempted moral perfection sans charts (see my first entry), merely knowing what you should do and wanting, at some level, to do it, isn't on its own automatically effective.

Does this call for another system within a system?  Tomorrow: becoming my own boss.



*In the essay Franklin performs a curious disappearing act, hiding his beliefs behind the form of the adages themselves, which purport to be a part of folk culture, emerging (rather effectively, as time has passed) as if without an author at all; Franklin also conceals himself behind a double persona, putting the adages in the mouth of "Father Abraham," a generic "plain clean old man, with white locks" who is overheard quoting Poor Richard's doctrine by "Poor Richard" himself , who re-records his own words in turn.  Franklin begins the essay in the person of Poor Richard by celebrating his own supposed obscurity as an author, an obscurity which permits him at times to advance his own doctrine "by quot[ing] myself with great gravity," as he proceeds to do at length while pretending merely to record a canny speech.

**N.B. By request, I am changing the chart so that the non-featured virtues are easier to identify.  Franklin just used initial letters, but that was for his own use.

***Another tranquility blot, to my surprise!  This one related to fleas, I'm afraid.  But they seem to be gone now, courtesy of aggressive laundering and diatomaceous earth.