And nine months after that, the Doe Fund recommends the men for placement with one of their hundreds of employer partners. Today, Doe Fund graduates work as security guards, pastry chefs, auto mechanics, maintenance workers, data entry technicians, home health aides, baristas, butchers, and dozens of other careers. On average, their new jobs pay $10.85 an hour. Many pay much more, some as high as $39 per hour. Rick Norat went into pest control, like his friend Pete.
As we know, the data tell us that money does not buy happiness. So let’s forget about the salary and ask what really matters. Are these men happy? Ask Rick Norat that question and he stares back at you for a moment, and repeats the question.
“Am I happy?”
He digs into his pocket and retrieved a brand-new iPhone. I thought he was going to say he was happy because he had an iPhone, and all my theories about attachment would be shot! But no: He opened up his email and pulled up a message from his boss. It was sent that morning, an urgent request for an emergency bedbug job. “They needed someone desperately. Right now. And they called me.” His speech is slow and deliberate. “I’ve become a go-to guy for the company. I am needed. I have a purpose. Do you understand? These people need me. I’ve never had that.”
This is what the rest of America forgets. This is what people forget when they demean “dead-end jobs.” This is what people forget when they buy into the lie that struggling people are just thrilled to rely on government aid instead of their own earnings. And this is what all of us miss who wake up every morning and take “pushing the bucket” for granted.
Work gives people something welfare never can. It’s a sense of self-worth and mastery, the feeling that we are in control of our lives. This is a source of abiding joy. There’s a reason that Aristotle wrote “happiness belongs to the self-sufficient.” The social science bears this out. Studies show that people who receive public support are twice as likely as those not receiving public support to report feeling worthless.10 “Very happy” people work more hours each week than those who are “pretty happy,” who in turn work more hours than those who are “not too happy.”11
Notice how this is precisely the opposite of what popular culture conveys. We are all supposed to view work as drudgery: Work is a drag. Work is boring. Work is punishment.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. As we saw earlier, the best data consistently show that more than eight in ten Americans like or love their jobs. And incredibly, that result holds steady across the income distribution. This notion that “knowledge work” is fulfilling, but everyone who works in a garage or a restaurant loathes his or her life, is an incredible act of condescension masquerading as concern.
The truth is much more egalitarian. Again, economic mobility is crucial, and stagnant wages are a huge problem for American families. But this doesn’t change the deep truth that work, not money, is the fundamental source of our dignity. Work is where we build character. Work is where we create value with our lives and lift up our own souls. Work, properly understood, is the sacred practice of offering up our talents for the service of others.
Some don’t get this. They see low-wage work as punishment, which is why they oppose work requirements for welfare. And, let’s be honest, conservative rhetoric often sounds like we seek to force people into the drudgery of work. Both of these approaches are misguided. We don’t want to make people work. We aim to give every American a shot at the blessing of work, to rescue our fellow citizens from the misery of idleness.
Aim at anything less, and we’re failing to live up to the example of the Men in Blue.
LESSON 3. VALUES MATTER MOST IN LIFTING PEOPLE UP.
By sharing the blessing of work, the Doe Fund helps its trainees pull themselves out of material poverty. But it imparts something greater than financial stability. The program helps them learn and live the values that are the sword and shield of a successful life.
In a misguided attempt at compassion, some try to explain away personal failures by making reference to people’s brutally tough environments. Who are we to look down at people who make bad decisions, when they are confronting situations far worse than anything we have dealt with?
The call to humility and self-awareness is admirable, as far as it goes. But the underlying presumption here is rotten. At its core, this attitude embodies what Pope Benedict XVI called “the dictatorship of relativism.”12 Don’t judge! It says that the ethical standards to which we should be held scale up or down according to our salaries. Too often, the message of our bureaucratic society is: If you’re poor, you can’t be held to the same standards as the well-off. If you slept in Grand Central Terminal, or if your grandmother turned your living room into a crack house, we shouldn’t expect you to live an upright life. You don’t have to treat people with respect. You don’t have to stay sober or provide for your children.
Creating a separate set of moral standards according to socioeconomic status is not an act of mercy. It is a crime against the poor. It is an abdication of our social duty to hold one another accountable. It is shameful that our self-styled elites are so afraid to preach the very secrets to success they so readily practice in their own lives.
Pretend that you were given a choice between leaving your kids a huge trust fund and raising them to have good values. Which would you choose? It’s a no-brainer. You’d choose values every time. You know that if your kids have the right values, they don’t need the trust fund. They might not get rich, but they are going to earn their own success and be all the happier for it.
When we refuse to hold people to high standards, we aren’t taking pity on them. We are robbing them of their opportunity. This is the kind of discrimination that President George W. Bush used to call “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”13 We should find this kind of bigotry intolerable.
The Doe Fund rejects this discrimination. It tells people who can barely keep treading water that they can be held to the same moral standards as anybody else, and they will prosper as a result. The program sets high expectations for every single man who walks through its doors—and challenges them to exceed these standards.
Everyone who chooses to join Ready, Willing & Able is required to sign a contract. The document lays out exactly what is expected of them and what they can expect from the program in return. Each part of the contract reflects core Doe Fund values. The trainees agree to abide by these values. In exchange, the Doe Fund promises to pay, house, and feed them, and to provide work, education, job placement, and graduate services after they depart.
This includes the values of honesty and integrity. Participants must be truthful with others, including staff. There is also the value of orderliness: trainees agree to wear appropriate clothing, maintain personal hygiene, be truthful with staff, and keep their rooms clean.
Recognizing the core value of thrift, the Doe Fund also deducts mandatory savings from their paychecks, which go into a bank account set up for each client. Once they are placed in jobs, they agree to save at least 60 percent of their net earnings. By the time they leave the program after nine to twelve months, these formerly homeless men have a nest egg that they can use to commence their new lives.
Next is the value of personal responsibility. Part of this is agreeing to work every day, and paying a modest rent out of their pay. But this also involves responsibility toward family as well. If they have children, they are required to identify themselves to the city’s child support enforcement office. A portion of their checks is then deducted for child support—because living a moral life means providing for your family. “When you leave here,” Naz instructs every trainee, “you are going to be the head of a household.”
Then there’s the value of sobriety. If they want to see those paychecks keep coming, they need to stay clean and sober. No exceptions. Twice a week, the Doe Fund conducts random drug tests. But what happens when someone fails? Is he immediately kicked out of the program?
Worse: The privilege of work is taken away. The man’s fellow trainees will start
asking, “Hey, why aren’t you out there pushing the bucket?” He will have to explain to his friends and colleagues that it’s because he started using drugs again. These guys are afraid to lose their income, of course. But more acutely, they don’t want to have that conversation. Part of friendships and communities is accountability, a key part of personal responsibility. Just as any of us might select a workout partner whom we don’t want to disappoint, positive peer pressure helps lock the Doe Fund trainees into the lifestyles they want to be living.
What is the result of all these values? “They are cognitively being restructured,” Naz explains, “whether they realize it or not. Everybody knows that if you do something for thirty days, every day, that’s a habit. So we’ve reversed the addictive process.” The Doe Fund gets people hooked on moral values.
When people protest that the Doe Fund expects too much from the homeless, George has a reply at the ready. He testifies that homeless men want to be held to high standards. They want to live upright, values-based lives. “Every guy that we get through—every man—what’s common is that they want to be fathers to their children. What I hear over and over again is that their father wasn’t there for them, and they want to make sure they are there for their son or daughter.”
Thanks to the Doe Fund, the Men in Blue can be vectors who pass on good values to their children. As a result, their kids are far less likely to end up on the streets, on drugs, or in jail. In a recent meeting with graduates, George asked, “How many of you when you first came to the Doe Fund considered yourselves role models for the community and your family?” Nobody raised their hand. Then George asked, “How many of you now are role models to your family and community?” And they all raised their hands. That’s how they see themselves.
The Doe Fund understands that all the material relief in the world won’t build a sustainable life unless it’s paired with positive moral values, and the expectation that those values can and must be met, no matter if you are a billionaire or living on the street. That’s true nondiscrimination, and the secret to success.
LESSON 4. HELP IS IMPORTANT, BUT HOPE IS ESSENTIAL.
In the 1960s, a young psychologist named Martin Seligman was conducting experiments on animals when he noticed something curious. The research team he was working on started out by exposing dogs to unpleasant electric shocks that the animals could not escape. Twenty-four hours later, they placed the dogs in a cage where they would again receive shocks—but this time, there was a way out. If the dogs would merely jump over a short barrier into a different section of their cage, the pain would cease. But they could not do it.
In the phrase that Seligman would go on to make famous, the dogs had “learned helplessness.” Their futility to stop the first day’s shocks had crushed their ingenuity, squelched their spirits, and blinded them to escape routes they would have ordinarily found instantaneously.
The scientists tried removing the barrier so the dogs merely had to step across the cage. But still the dogs refused. They even tried actively guiding the dogs, opening a little window and calling to them—“Here, boy!” But even after all this, half the dogs remained trapped and continued accepting the shocks. It was only when the scientists forcibly led the hapless pooches across the cage that they finally saw the solution.14
Human beings can learn helplessness, too, as Seligman found in later experiments.15 In fact, humans are more vulnerable to learned helplessness, because people are capable of “vicarious learning.” They can learn to be helpless by watching other humans encountering uncontrollable events.
George McDonald says that most of the Doe Fund’s clients arrive having faced “unimaginable hardships, incredible violence, bleak, soul-crushing circumstances from the time they were just little children.” From early ages, they have been conditioned by their own experiences and the hopelessness that surrounds them to believe that they cannot help themselves. That they are destined to lives of poverty and despair. That the “American Dream” is a delusion.
This is why our approach to helping the poor over the past fifty years has been so destructive: It reinforces learned helplessness instead of combating it. Dozens of assistance programs that seem sensible in isolation add up to an overarching message that nobody intended to convey: “You can’t do it, so we’re going to carry you.” That is the last message a person suffering from learned helplessness needs to hear.
The Doe Fund confronts this constantly. Naz asks the men what they really want out of life. “Food stamps?” he asks. “That’s all you dream of? That’s all you want? You can go wherever you want to go. Are you going to settle?” The Doe Fund teaches the poor not to settle. It helps the homeless help themselves—by replacing learned helplessness with hope.
But what does “hope” mean in this context? Virtually everyone in Washington talks about “hope,” but few understand what they’re saying. Ordinary Americans know that hope is vitally important, but it can also feel insubstantial and insufficient as a political goal. And when you actually dig into the data, both those instincts prove to be well founded.
After decades of research, psychologists have learned that hope comes in two very different varieties. First, “hope” can be a vague emotional state that is disassociated from practical reality. We hope for world peace. We hope that the Seahawks make it to the Super Bowl. We hope the government will do something nice for us. The problem is, when we talk about “hope” in this way, we’re implying that we have no personal say in the matter. We don’t “hope” for goals that are actually within our own reach.
This kind of thinking has consequences. If we allow this passiveness into our speech, it creeps deeper into our psyche. Psychologists conduct experiments where they prime people to think about this vague, emotional kind of hope. And afterward, they find, their subjects have reduced feelings of personal control.
The second kind of hope is very different. Call it “practical hope.” Instead of a fleeting emotion, psychologists say practical hope is the combination of two mindsets. The first is the belief that a pathway exists between me and my goal—that it can be done. The second belief is that I, personally, have the agency to walk down that path—that I can do it.
“It can be done” plus “I can do it.” This kind of hope affects our thinking, too—but in a much more positive way. Studies demonstrate that practical hope makes happiness and success more likely. Practical hope proves to be an accurate predictor of students’ academic performance and of adults’ life satisfaction. It even predicts differences in athletic performance that are not explained by the athletes’ natural talents.
This research is extremely important for our purposes. When politicians say the government needs to give people “hope,” that can mean one of two things—and the two are nearly opposites. On one hand, it can mean removing people’s destinies even farther from their own control, persuading them that fixing their lives is somebody else’s job. That is the false hope of the last few years—the hope that says, “I sure hope that the government helps me.”
But the other kind of hope empowers people. It tells them that a happy life full of meaningful work is within their reach—and that they, personally, can build it. This is the American Dream. This is the restless optimism that built our nation. This is the hope of generations of immigrants who came to America in search of a better life. This is the hope that animates the conservative heart.
The Doe Fund understands this. It infuses the trainees with practical hope. It tells every man that independent living can be done and that he can do it. That’s why, a quarter century after its founding, the Doe Fund has produced 22,000 alumni. That’s why it has the reputation that makes it magnetic for so many troubled men. The program replaces learned helplessness with practical hope.
Of course, America’s hope shortage is not limited to the homeless. The number of long-term unemployed in America is at record levels today, and dependency on food stamps, Social Security disability insurance, and other government assistance is
growing.
America is slipping into the quagmire of learned helplessness. We desperately need a hope agenda for the whole nation. We need to remind every American that it can be done and that they can do it—and we need to build an economy that lives up to that promise.
THE AMERICAN DREAM
So there you have it: the formula for the conservative heart, right from the Doe Fund’s living laboratory. All we have to do is remember four principles:
1. People are assets, not liabilities.
2. Work is a blessing, not a punishment.
3. Values matter most in lifting people up.
4. Help is important, but hope is essential.
But to put these principles into action, conservatives need to get into the game. We have the secret for lifting people up and helping them lead lives of dignity. Instead of keeping it to ourselves, we need to start sharing that secret with the world. And we can begin by embracing the work of social entrepreneurs like George and Harriet McDonald.
George and Harriet believe these things in their hearts. They don’t think the principles that animate the Doe Fund are limited to helping these men; they see them as central to the whole American Dream. “I think we are the American Dream,” George says. “I put it right on their sleeve. When we designed the uniform, we put a flag on their sleeve. I said I want them to be larger than themselves and part of America.”
Richard Norat believes in the American Dream he has learned at the Doe Fund. “My American Dream is to be a part of the society, be a part of the community, to be able to earn a wage, to be able to make money to buy what I want, to live comfortably and not be afraid of someone taking it from me, knowing that I can wake up in the morning and I have a place to go to make my money, to have a job.”
The Conservative Heart Page 10