A Sense of Values

About a year ago, my youngest son, Gordon — then 27 — informed me that he wanted to leave the family business and embark on a career as a composer of serious music, something for which he has always shown considerable talent. As much as I would have liked for Gordon to remain in business with me, I raised no objections. On the contrary, I approved his decision wholeheartedly. I could readily appreciate why he was willing to abandon a highly promising business career to become a composer. And, to tell the truth, I was — and am — very proud of him.

Gordon wants to express himself in his own way, by doing what interests him most, by doing what he believes to be of the most lasting value. While the career he has chosen is not one in which he is likely to find great financial rewards, I believe that he has already found something far more important. He has found himself. He has discovered and defined his own standards of values; he has asserted his individuality and independence. To these extents, Gordon has already achieved a rare degree of success in life.

I have known entirely too many people who spend their lives trying to be what others want them to be and doing what others expect them to do. They force themselves into patterns of behavior which have been established for — and by — people with personalities entirely different from their own. Seeking to conform to those patterns, they dissolve into grotesque, blurred mirror images as they obliterate their individuality to imitate others. Rootless, dissatisfied, they strive frantically — and most often vainly — to find their own identities within the constricting limits of an existence alien to their natures, instincts and innate desires.

"I wanted to be a writer. My father refused to hear of it and insisted I go to law school and become an attorney. I make a good living now, but I'm bored and restless ..."

"I'd like to sell my business and buy a ranch somewhere, but my wife won't let me because she's afraid it would mean a loss of income and prestige ..."

"There's nothing I hate more than suburban living. I'd much rather have an apartment in the city, but all the other executives in my firm have homes in the suburbs — so I have to have mine there, too ..."

"I feel trapped, as though I'm caught up in a pointless rat race. I really don't like or enjoy my work, but I don't know what else I could do and still make as much money as I'm making now ..."

I've heard such statements as these made with ever-increasing frequency in recent years. Essentially, they are expressions of personal discontent — and even defeat — but they also reflect a constantly growing social illness of our time.

The post—World War I period was said to have produced a confused, insecure and disillusioned Lost Generation. There is, tragically enough, ample evidence to indicate that the post—World War II era produced a generation which has, in large part, lost its sense of perspective and purpose. It is a generation whose members are prone to substitute flimsy dollars-and-cents price tags for scales of lasting values and who meekly surrender their individuality and even their integrity as human beings. A glaringly obvious manifestation of this can be found in the social phenomenon of status seeking, which has become so widespread and prevalent that it looms as one of the principal motivating forces behind our contemporary social behavior patterns.

Now, I agree that the desire of human beings to rise above the mass and to gain the respect of their fellow men is a basic one. Within certain broad limits and subject to certain self-evident reservations it is a constructive and salutary motivation. The desire to excel has impelled countless individuals to make important contributions to the progress of civilization. But, as more than one observer has noted, the rationale of today's status seeking and the directions it takes are neither constructive nor healthy.

To my way of thinking, status may be defined as a form of recognition an individual's peers award him for above-average contributions to society. It is something that must be earned, a reward for accomplishment that is awarded at a degree proportionate to the value or importance of what the individual contributes toward the common good.

Nowadays, however, the tendency is to equate status almost automatically — and all but exclusively — with financial success. And, it seems that the achievement of status not only is, per se, considered an end unto itself, but that for many it has become the sole motivation and the only worthwhile goal.

Vast numbers of people have apparently convinced themselves that the amassing of money and the material things it can buy alone signifies achievement, connotes success and confers status. They pile up money and the material possessions which they believe are solid proofs rather than frail symbols of ability, achievement and success. They accept as manifest truth the shoddy theory that they can gain social position and the respect of others only by outearning and outbuying those around them. They have no interest in building anything but their own bank balances; they are not concerned with values, but only with the dollars-and-cents prices they pay for their possessions.

I've encountered more concrete examples of this distorted viewpoint than I'd care to count. Quite typical of them was my recent experience with a businessman who paid me a visit in London, arriving with a letter of introduction from a mutual acquaintance in New York. After spending more than two hours boasting about how much money he'd made in the last few years, my visitor informed me that he was on his way to France, where he intended to buy some paintings.

"I've heard that you're quite an art collector," he said. "I thought you could help me out by giving me the names and addresses of some reliable art galleries or dealers from whom I could do my buying."

"Are you interested in paintings from any special period or of any particular school?" I inquired. "Or are you looking for works by some particular artist?"

"It doesn't make any difference to me," the man shrugged impatiently. "I wouldn't know one from another in any case. I just have to buy some paintings — and I have to spend at least $100,000 for them."

"Why can't you spend less than that?" I asked, puzzled that anyone would set an arbitrary minimum rather than a maximum on what he wanted to spend.

"Oh, it's one of those things," came the straight-faced explanation. "My partner was over here a couple of months ago, and he paid $75,000 for some pictures. I figure that to make any kind of an impression back home, I've got to top him by at least $25,000 ..."

It is easy to see how this man judges values. I strongly suspect that it is also a safe bet that whatever he has done in life, his motives were always just as shallow and trivial as his purely status-seeking reasons for wanting to buy paintings. Unfortunately, there are many people like him. In my opinion, it would be difficult to find justification for their wealth; I do not believe they really earn — or, for that matter, deserve — their money.

I am a stubborn advocate of enlightened free-enterprise Capitalism and the last person in the world to question anyone's fundamental right to achieve financial success. I contend that a person who possesses the imagination and ability to "get rich" and goes about his money-making activities legitimately should be allowed every opportunity to do so. On the other hand, I firmly believe that an individual who seeks financial success should be motivated by much more than merely a desire to amass a personal fortune.

My own father was poor — very poor — in his youth, but he went on to build a business and become a millionaire. He made a great deal of money during his lifetime, but he did not make it with any intention of caching it away for his own exclusive benefit. He knew the value of money and had very definite ideas about its uses. My father considered his wealth primarily as capital, to be invested for the direct benefit of his employees, associates, stockholders, customers and their families — and for the indirect benefit of the entire public and the nation's economy. His attitude toward his wealth was governed by a maxim he took from Sir Francis Bacon: "No man's fortune can be an end worthy of his being." He loved the challenge of business, but the incentive was not to pile up money, rather to accomplish something lasting. I doubt seriously if his total personal and family expenditures ever exceeded $30,000 a year — yet, he was probably one of the first businessmen to build swimming pools and provide recreational facilities for his employees.

I learned much from my father and from my experiences in the bare-knuckle school of the oil fields, where a man was judged by his actions, not by the size of his bank balance or the size of his automobile. The lessons taught in the oil fields were blunt and trenchant.

I remember one instance when I hired a new crew to drill a well for me. I'd never worked with any of the men on the crew before. At that time, I was already worth several millions; the men knew this, but they knew very little else about me.

To my annoyance, the crew loafed on the job for several days. I finally realized its members were sizing me up. Once I understood what was wrong, the rest was easy. I took the first chance that presented itself to prove that I could scramble up the rig from floor to crown block as fast as any of the derrick men and that I was able to run a string of rotary tools as well as the drilling superintendent.

"All right, boss — you'll do," one of the drillers grinned after I'd passed my unofficial field trials. "Now it doesn't make any difference how much money you've got. We can get to work." And they did.

The astute, progressive and truly successful businessman does not think of his work primarily in terms of profits. He works to create businesses which not only produce materials, goods or services, but which also, to the greatest extent possible, contribute to the welfare of all. He knows that his business is first of all a working partnership among his employees, stockholders, associates and himself — a partnership in which he supplies a certain share of the capital and provides the direction and inspiration. He thus has a sense of responsibility (continued on page 99)Sense of Values(continued from page 72) to others and realizes that he can only make — and justify — his profits if he succeeds in accomplishing these aims.

I have been successful — and fortunate — in my business career. The money value of my holdings in the companies I own or control has been estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But this is a paper fortune and to me it is still a means and not an end. Only an infinitesimal part of my fortune is held by me in cash. My wealth is represented by machinery, oil wells, pipelines, tankers, refineries, factory and office buildings — by all the myriad assets of my companies. And those companies are continuing to produce goods and perform services — and to grow and expand. Thus, my wealth is continuing to perform useful, creative work. These are the worthwhile ends to which my wealth is a means, and which give money its real value.

I do not measure my success in terms of dollars and cents. I measure it in terms of the jobs and the productivity my labors and my wealth — invested and reinvested as capital in my companies — have made possible. I doubt very seriously if I could have reached anywhere near the level of success that I have reached if I'd employed any other yardsticks to gauge my progress during my career.

I've found that, to establish his identity, to feel that he is a fully participating member of society, an individual must have purpose and feel that what he does has some enduring value well beyond the limits of his own personal interests. In order to achieve any contentment in life, he must derive genuine satisfaction and an equally genuine sense of accomplishment from his work. These are considerations at least as important as the size of the income he receives from his job, profession or business.

By no means am I suggesting that a vow of poverty — or anything even remotely approaching it — will provide an individual with a shortcut to ecstatic bliss. There is very little room for the wandering mendicant and his begging-bowl in our civilization. Human beings have progressed well beyond the stage where they can be satisfied with their lot while living on a diet of black bread and boiled cabbage. They must have decent living standards — all the necessities and many of the luxuries of life — if they are to be even moderately content. In order to have these things, they must earn money.

This does not, however, change the fact that there are many ways of gauging values besides placing them on a dollars-and-cents scale. A badly written, banal contemporary novel may sell for five dollars a copy, while a great literary classic may be purchased in paperback edition for 50 cents. Certainly the latter has infinitely greater real value than the former, regardless of the tremendous disparity in their prices. By the same token, there are many kinds of success other than purely financial success. I hold that an individual's standing in society should be judged by criteria other than merely his income, accumulated monetary wealth or the number and money values of his material possessions.

Past and present, there are uncounted examples of individuals who made priceless contributions to civilization, but who realized little or no monetary rewards from what they did. Innumerable great philosophers, scientists, artists and musicians were poor men all their lives.

Mozart, Beethoven, Modigliani and Gauguin — among others of comparable stature — died poverty-stricken. No one on earth could possibly estimate the value of the contributions made to mankind by such men as Dr. Albert Schweitzer or the late Dr. Thomas Dooley; yet, it's highly doubtful if either of them ever enjoyed a personal income as large as that earned by the average department-store buyer.

The architect who designs a breathtakingly beautiful building is often a poor man compared to the tenants who will occupy it. The engineer who builds a dam may well earn less from his labors than the landowner whose acres are irrigated by water from the dam. The architect and engineer have created and built; their success is no less great because they did not earn fortunes from their work.

Also largely overlooked in this age of treadmill scrambling for money and status is the fact that there are many forms of wealth other than financial wealth. One of the most genuinely contented men I've ever known was my cousin, Hal Seymour. Hal and I grew up together; we were always close friends and for long periods we were constant companions. Hal cared very little for money. Content to earn enough for his own needs, he good-naturedly turned down every opportunity I offered him for earning more. Working here and there — he was a topflight oil driller, photographer, miner, a master of many trades — he never had much money. But he managed to satisfy his desires to go many places and do many things — and he always enjoyed himself thoroughly with the armies of friends he made wherever he went. His aim in life was always to do whatever he attempted well. He realized this aim; he always gave more than he took.

Hal considered himself to be very wealthy in personal freedom. He was always able to do the things he wanted to do, and always had the time in which to do them. He seldom missed a chance to remind me that, in these regards, I was much poorer than he. Before his death a few years ago, he frequently wrote me letters which opened with the wryly humorous but meaningful salutation: "To the Richest Man in the World from the Wealthiest ..."

I'll have to admit that I envied Hal his abundance of time — which is one of the forms of wealth that people tend to disregard these days. Rich as I may be from a material standpoint, I've long felt that I'm very poor, indeed, in time. For decades, my business affairs have made extremely heavy inroads on my time, leaving me very little I could use as I pleased. There are books that I have wanted to read — and books I have wanted to write. I've always yearned to travel to remote parts of the globe which I've never seen; one of my greatest unfulfilled ambitions has been to go on a long, leisurely safari in Africa.

Money has not been a bar to the realization of these desires; insofar as money is concerned, I could have easily afforded to do any of these things for many years. The blunt and simple truth is that I've never been able to do them because I could never afford the time. It's paradoxical but true that the so-called captains of industry frequently have less time for indulging their personal desires than their rear-rank privates. This applies to little things as well as big ones.

It is not my intent to imply that I am in any way dissatisfied with my lot in life. Indeed, I would be more than ungrateful for the good fortune and advantages I've enjoyed if I were anything less than happy. Moreover, I am very gratified that I have managed to accomplish most of the goals I set for myself when I began my career.

The point I'm trying to make is that each individual has to establish his own standards of values, and that these are largely subjective. They are based on what the individual considers most important to him and what he is willing to give for a certain thing or in order to achieve a certain aim.

Old — but true — are the bromides that you can't have everything and that you can't get something for nothing. An individual always has to give — or give up — something in order to have or get something else. Whether he's willing to make the exchange or not is entirely up to him and his own sense of values.

Acknowledging all this, I nevertheless believe that there are certain values which, if not absolute in the strict sense of the word, are surely basic and can be said to be generally valid. I never cease to be amazed by the casual and even callous manner in which sizable segments of our population ignore these fundamental values.

It is estimated that more than 120,000 Americans take their own lives each year. This figure includes cases which are officially recorded as suicides and the cases of those who do away with themselves, but whose deaths, for one reason or another, are not recorded officially as such. A significant portion of these 120,000 annual tragedies are classed as economic suicides.

According to Dr. Thomas P. Malone, head of the Atlanta, Georgia, Psychiatric Clinic and an acknowledged authority on the macabre subject: "At least 30 to 40 percent of so-called economic suicides occur when a man is successful, not when he is failing. When a man has achieved the peak of success, often he has nothing left to scramble for."

I'm no psychiatrist, but it seems to me that anyone who takes his own life because he has achieved success and has "nothing left to scramble for" never had any worthwhile motives to scramble for in the first place. The goals he sought — and achieved — were meaningless. When he realized this he also realized that what he had actually achieved was not success but pathetic failure.

In a report which appeared recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Drs. Richard E. and Katherine K. Gordon revealed the results of an intensive study they made of families living in a typical contemporary status-seekers' suburban community. They determined that the diseases which stem primarily from emotional stresses — notably ulcers, coronary thrombosis, hypertension and hypertensive cardiovascular disease — were markedly more prevalent there than in communities in which status seeking was not such a dominant social factor. Anyone who has encountered specimens of the ulcer-ridden, tranquilizer-devouring and status-seeking Organization Man type and their nervously shrill-voiced, perpetually apprehensive wives will hardly be surprised by this revelation.

I, for one, am unable to see that the achievement of any degree of social status is worth the price of a man's life or the destruction of his or his family's health. Assuredly, there is something very wrong basically when human beings are willing to sell their lives and their health so cheaply.

Nor am I able to see that money or the dubious benefits conferred by the attainment of what passes for status are worth the price of one's individuality and personal integrity. I am apparently in the minority. It is becoming increasingly apparent that it's no longer fashionable to pay much heed to these considerations. Their value has been swept aside in the pell-mell rush to conform to what is regarded as the majority view — which regards the accumulation of money and material things and the gaining of status as the approved goals and places no ceiling on the price which can be paid for achieving them.

I consider it one of the major tragedies of our civilization that people have come to regard it virtually mandatory to imitate in order to win the social acceptance of their fellows. The end result of this can only be to reduce even the most brilliant individuals to a sterile common denominator.

Toady and lickspittle are nasty words. The average man would probably be inclined to use his fists on anyone who called him either. Yet, countless men will lower themselves to such absurd devices as wearing bow ties because their employers wear them, cutting their hair the way their superiors do, or buying their homes where the other executives buy theirs. They ape and echo the ideas, views and actions of those they seek to impress, proving nothing but that they are servile toadies. Imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery — but it is imitation, and flattery is nothing more than a pat on the head from someone who knows he deserves a kick in the behind.

I once obtained control of a company and was immediately — and far from favorably — impressed by the fawning attitude of the majority of the firm's executives. Most were obsequious yes-men feverishly trying to please the new boss so that they could further their own narrow ambitions. Wanting to see just how far they were willing to go, I called a special management meeting. At the meeting, I proposed a wholly impractical and ruinous scheme which, if implemented, would have quickly bankrupted the firm.

Of the nine executives present, six instantly expressed their approval of my "plans." Three of these men went to the extreme of modestly hinting that they'd been "thinking along similar lines" — something I could well believe from having studied the firm's profit-and-loss statements. Two very junior executives remained glumly and disapprovingly silent. Only one man in the group had the temerity to stand up and point out the flaws in my proposal.

Needless to say, the company soon had some new faces in its executive offices. The three dissidents remained; all are still associated with my companies and, I might add, are now in the upper income brackets.

It has always been my contention that an individual who can be relied upon to be himself and to be honest unto himself can be relied upon in every other way. He places value — not a price — on himself and his principles. And that, in the final analysis, is the measure of anyone's sense of values — and of the true worth of any man.