The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  Other kinds of leaders, the prophets, sages, saints, sufis, gurus and zaddiks who have pointed away from the vanity of worldly ambition, have still not found how to put the qualities they exalt – wisdom, spiritual emancipation, loyalty, moral refinement and dedication to the welfare of others – into a financial balance sheet. Confucius’ injunction to the ‘profound person’ (juntzi), as opposed to the petty person – ‘Never impose upon others what you would not choose for yourself’ – remains the very contrary of what the world of work practices. Most success still involves big sacrifices, assuaged by therapy, and protected from criticism by the doctrine of being non-judgemental. Francis Bacon’s question, why people continue to seek power over others only to lose their own liberty, remains unanswered.

  There are alternatives to the ambition to be a leader. One is to be an intermediary, who neither receives nor gives orders and who helps those who have too little knowledge, or money or imagination or opportunity to acquire it from those who have some to spare. The service society might have been the paradise of intermediaries, but it too is often poisoned by greed or deceit. But the arrival of a billion young people for whom the world’s economy has no room, plus the growing disappointment of women finding that the role it parsimoniously offers them is not all that attractive, mean that ambition is waiting to be rethought.

  Agriculture, industry, service were all invented to respond to sudden huge increases in population. Today, many humans, aware that they may become centenarians, may find that climbing and falling off the career ladder is not the most amusing way of spending so many years, and that the idea of being a leader – for all the changes, profound and cosmetic, that it has recently undergone, without casting off entirely its heritage of the warrior chief who survives by defeating rivals and enemies – is less exciting than the more up-to-date one of being inspired by the example of the astronaut exploring the unknown. To give new meaning to work, so that it is more than the exercise of a valued skill, more than the enjoyment of collaboration with others, more than a price that has to be paid in the search for security or status, means using work to redefine freedom. This could be one of the great adventures of our time.

  It is an adventure that implies a renewal of attitudes to competition. How these are already beginning to emerge can be glimpsed in the history of women’s tennis. Chris Evert, world champion between 1974 and 1981, was obsessed by her determination to win at all costs, to ‘destroy’ her opponents. Her rival, the immigrant, nonconformist heroine of gay liberation, Martina Navratilova, wanted to become friends with her opponents, to win the affection of the spectators and to be accepted, despite her unconventional views, by her adopted country. Suzanne Lenglen (1899–1938) increased the appreciation of women’s tennis and introduced elegance into the game with ballerina-like movements and astonishing chic in her clothing and shoes. But I shall leave consideration of the unused potential of sport (and of outdoor activities and relationships with nature) to another volume, and meanwhile pursue, in the next chapters, the challenges of competition and ambition.

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  What is the point of working so hard?

  ‘I HAVE NEVER BEEN A VERY reflective person,’ said Sam Walton (1918– 1992) the founder of Walmart, whose family now owns the biggest business in the world, employing over two million people. But he was clear in his own mind about ‘the one element in my life that has made a difference to me’. It was the ‘passion to compete’. ‘Any competition is great,’ he said. He played tennis with a merciless determination to win; he boasted that no football team of which he was a member ever lost; and the contest of a man, a gun and a dog against a little bird – shooting quails – was for him the ultimate sport. He admired his father (a farmer and banker) for ‘squeezing others to the last dollar’, being willing to make a deal for just about anything – horses, cattle, houses, farms, cars – and readily trading his watch for a hog if that meant getting the better of a bargain.

  He summed up his father-in-law (a lawyer) as ‘a great salesman, one of the most persuasive individuals I have ever met’. Walton’s energy went into persuading people that he was giving them what they wanted. He ‘loved merchandising’ – ‘an absolute passion of mine . . . I really love to price an item, maybe the most basic merchandise and then call attention to it. So we would buy huge quantities of something and then dramatise it . . . I love to get in front of a crowd and talk up something.’ Successful business for him meant not merely reducing expenditure and increasing efficiency, but spotting how any object could ‘explode into big value and big profits, if you are just smart enough to identify them and take the trouble to promote them’. Working all hours, proud of every advantage astutely gained, his mission was to buy and sell at a lower price than anyone else could offer, and still make a profit. Competition made him feel alive, just as battles did to soldiers.

  But is competition an end in itself? In the past, shopkeepers and craftsmen used to be wary of it, and kept out of each other’s territory. Sam Walton, however, was so successful so quickly that he became wealthy enough to buy up his competitors, and the thrill of capturing or destroying one, and then another, made him think ‘we could conquer anything’. To talk of conquest is to borrow the ethics of the military, rather than to invent an ethic of one’s own.

  Sam Walton’s descendants now wage retail wars in fifteen countries; when their invasion is repulsed, as it was by Germany, they move on to another target, like India. Sam Walton never saw a reason to place a limit on his ambition. It was not money that he wanted, but excitement. A friend who knew him well summed him up as simply wanting ‘to be on top of the pile’. But he wanted to be that discreetly and modestly: millionaires who showed off their wealth by displays of extravagance horrified him.

  Sam Walton was proud of doing things differently, breaking everybody else’s rules, being more astute than others, even favouring mavericks who challenged his own rules. But it was not originality for its own sake that he valued; he was a mediaeval rather than a renaissance man; taking ideas from competitors delighted him; he watched them closely and visited them endlessly, so that his empire was an amalgam of other people’s inventions.

  His was not the first company to adopt self-service, but quickly copied the one which did; he borrowed the idea of giving employees shares in the company from the John Lewis Partnership, his encouragement of team work followed a visit to Japan and his Supercentres were modelled on those of Carrefour. At the end of his life he concluded that there was ‘a big contradiction in my make-up that I don’t completely understand to this day. In many of my core values, I’m a pretty conservative guy. But for some reason in business I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been. In the community, I really am an establishment kind of guy; on the other hand in the market place I have always been a maverick who enjoys shaking things up and creating a little anarchy. And sometimes the establishment has made me mad.’

  There was no contradiction. He was using the instruments of modernity to protect himself against it, and the awe-inspiring, up-to-the-minute technology he mastered behind his firm’s logistics was directed at preserving tradition. Though he often persuaded his customers to buy what they may not have really needed, everything he sold them was a bargain, at an amazingly low price, so that he and they believed they were actually saving not spending money; they were enjoying the satisfaction of demonstrating their loyalty to the ancestral virtue of thrift. Moreover, he was not urging his customers to be greedy or selfish, because they were buying for their families, and the preservation of the family against the onslaughts of modern licentiousness was the mission he and they shared.

  Small-town America was his religion, and also his wife’s, who insisted that they should never live in a town with more than 10,000 inhabitants. The headquarters of this giant corporation is still in the middle of nowhere, in the very small town of Bentonville, Arkansas. Walmart was modelled on the old idea of the family as an economi
c unit, and it was for long largely staffed by local people – with as many as thirty relatives working in the same store – serving local people. Their mission was not to encourage cold or obsessive consumerism, but to give people what they needed to win the respect of others. ‘I am a friendly fellow by nature, always speaking to folks in the street,’ said Sam. When he got out of the helicopter that he was constantly piloting to keep an eye on every one of his stores all over the country, he would sit down at the counter and help a saleswoman with her work, or pack up purchases at the cash desk, chatting and listening to what his employees said to him; and they felt that he really listened to them. He often did his interviewing of candidates for jobs in his own home, inviting spouses and children to come too. He urged his employees to talk to customers about ‘their chickens and pigs and cows and kids’ and maintain extreme courtesy in all relations, though his own enormous charm was occasionally interrupted, like lightning, by a lashing tongue.

  Sam Walton’s attachment to the past was reflected also in the traditional amusements he encouraged to ‘fight the monotony’ of small towns where nothing ever happened. ‘We have always tried to make life as interesting and as unpredictable as we can, doing crazy things to capture the attention of our folks and lead them to think up surprises of their own.’ Relying on local amateur talent, playing practical jokes, including cruel ones, dressing up in bizarre costumes, parading in the streets with cheer-leaders, interrupting routine with carnivals, even the Saturday morning strategic meeting of managers was unpredictably relieved by singing or comedy acts. Ten thousand shareholders were invited annually to Bentonville for a weekend of wild and raucous entertainment, in the hope that the strangers in Wall Street could ‘know us and understand us’.

  Though Sam Walton would not have called himself pious, simply valuing church-going and Sunday school as pillars of stability, his employees and customers increasingly found in their involvement in Walmart a religious justification for their patience in accepting their humble role in society. The corporation’s management adopted the gospel of Servant Leadership, propagated by the founder of one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, BBDO, Bruce Barton (1887–1967), the son of a clergyman and a staunch conservative opponent of Roosevelt and the New Deal. His bestseller portraying Jesus as a businessman popularised the idea that business was a spiritual calling, so shoppers and salespeople were encouraged to see themselves not as automatons, like factory workers obeying orders, but as helping their fellows in Christian service, serving their neighbours and enabling families to lead honourable lives. Walmart reconciled religion and business, becoming the largest merchandiser of Christian goods, but nonetheless remaining business-like and open on Sundays. The religion many customers adopted, while maintaining the Biblical superiority of the male, consoled women by exalting motherhood, elevating domesticity into a Christian rite, persuading men to make the family the centre of their interests and attacking abortion and homosexuality as the great threat to the family. The company teamed up with other business giants to support small Christian colleges against what they considered to be the subversive anti-authoritarian influence of the major universities. Sam Walton was even suspicious of what he dismissed as ‘the charity business’, and preferred to make donations directly to local causes himself, maintaining that his corporation was a public benefactor by saving customers’ money through its low prices. He said he wanted Walmart to be ‘a force for change’, but the most important change it has made has been to grow. Despite Sam’s delight in doing things differently, Walmart’s 8,500 stores around the world, trading under fifty-six different names, are more or less clones of its original self. Trade unions are shunned and complain in vain that most workers are kept on the very lowest wages and that the share of profits they receive is minute; they deny that Walmart is providing employment, claiming that it causes more job losses by driving rival shops into bankruptcy. Walmart’s American customers are now predominantly the one-third of the country who have lost in the struggle for prosperity, and who sustain their pride by adherence to the age-old values of neighbourliness against the anonymity of the city. In the twenty-first century, three-quarters of them voted for President George W. Bush. The ‘Walmart Mom’ is a political force.

  It may seem that there is no reason for Walmart to change. Financial analysts are satisfied that it has a winning formula for making a steady profit, and even more in times of recession; its expenditure on advertising is one-quarter that of its nearest rival, and its sales are six times greater, so it can get bigger discounts from its suppliers. Its ability to save on costs is so technically perfect that even the thermostats in every store are controlled from Bentonville. It has become the most successful business in the world, but also the one with the most enemies, repeatedly assailed by protests and lawsuits and accusations of hypocrisy, as, for example, that many of its staff never get a share of the profits, because they have to serve for two years before they qualify, by which time those on low wages may have moved elsewhere. Whereas in the 1950s the CEO of General Motors, which was then the model of a successful business, was paid 135 times more than assembly-line workers, fifty years later the CEO of Walmart earned 1,500 times as much as the ordinary employee; a factory supervisor at General Motors, in charge of two or three thousand workers, used to be paid five times as much as them; but a district store manager at Walmart earns ten times as much as his sales staff. Retail wages used to be half of manufacturing wages; today they are down to two-fifths.

  If the most successful company in the world has not said the final word about the best way of spending one’s time on earth, and if most people still feel that they are not as well rewarded for their labours as they deserve, and that dedicating their lives to earning a living has not produced the result they wish for, then what is the alternative to earning a living? What is the alternative to sacrificing one’s energy making money, obediently doing what everybody else seems to be doing, in the hope that whatever meagre wealth one can accumulate will make it possible, at last, often too late, to embrace all those parts of life that one has not touched or even seen?

  How far can one get following the European answer to Walmart, which is IKEA? Ingvar Kamprad (born 1926), who founded it at the age of seventeen, came, like Walton, from a small town in the middle of nowhere (in southern Sweden), which remains the headquarters of his firm. He too sought to perpetuate the traditional rural values of hard work and thrift, but whereas Sam’s Ten Rules for Building a Business were all about commitment (‘I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work’), appreciating one’s colleagues and celebrating success with them, giving customers what they want and a little more (‘the two most important words I ever wrote were on the first Walmart sign: Satisfaction Guaranteed’), the Nine Principles in Ingvar’s Testament of a Furniture Dealer added a vision of ‘the joys of discovery’, ‘developing ourselves as human beings’, ‘becoming freer human beings . . . with a more natural and unconstrained way of life . . . creating a better everyday life for the many people’ with limited financial resources, contributing to ‘democratisation all over the world’, and producing ‘cheerful’ and more beautiful goods that give long-term enjoyment. ‘Why do poor people have to put up with such ugly things?’ asked Kamprad: it was unfair that only the rich should be able to afford beautiful things. ‘I have always disliked the harshness of American capitalism,’ he said, ‘and I do admit I do have some socialist principles . . . I can combine the good in a profit-making business with a lasting human social vision.’

  His nostalgia for the simple life of rural Sweden did not divert him from being both fearful of the future and imagining how it could be made wonderful. After every task accomplished he would say ‘most of the job remains to be done’. There was always a ‘glorious future’ to look forward to. He refused to sell shares in his company because he was determined to remain free from the demands of greedy investors who might deflect him from his goal.
Instead of paying dividends, he preferred to save money so that he would not be in danger of being bought up by rivals. ‘Always think and prepare for bad times,’ he repeated. Profits were hoarded in a non-profit foundation that would ensure perpetual independence with an impenetrably complex set of legal arrangements as protection from taxation by governments and from the apocalyptic collapse of nation-states that he feared. He wanted to preserve not the past but the achievement of his lifetime, to ensure immortality not for his soul but for his business, and ‘eternal life’ for his ideals, which he called the ‘sacred concept’. ‘We are a concept company. If we stick to the concept we will never die.’ Wealth was ‘too burdensome’ for any individual to bear and while bequeathing an influential role to his children, ownership of IKEA was locked into the Foundation.

  There was a substitute for religion in IKEA, secular and unmystical, with humility as its watchword and something of the Viking cult of soft-spoken egalitarianism as its ritual. Whereas Sam Walton called his employees ‘associates’, Kamprad saw himself as the father of his ‘co-workers’, defining leadership as ‘love’. In the firm’s early days, which he remembered as the happiest, ‘we were working as a small family’. There was a subtle difference between his ideal of the family and Sam Walton’s. ‘We were as if in love. Nothing to do with eroticism. We just liked each other so damned much.’ He chose his co-workers because he liked them, for their common sense rather than their paper qualifications, after day-long conversations that sometimes went on long into the night, valuing above all high social purpose and a readiness to try their hand at anything. An economist in charge of the finances was promptly sacked when he assumed airs implying that it was the accountants who really ran the firm. IKEA was Kamprad’s family, not a family of blood kinship or of neighbours, but an ever-expandable one that included all who wanted to share in his search for a socially responsible life. Their meetings were emotional and earnest, with Kamprad showing his affection effusively with hugs, enjoying singing folk songs, holding hands, expressing a visceral pleasure in togetherness. Though he was the undisputed boss, he talked constantly about his ‘defects’ and apologised grovellingly for his ‘stupidity’ in being attracted by pro-Nazi views in his youth. (His family only migrated to Sweden from Germany just thirty years before his birth: ‘I was brought up by a German grandmother and a German father.’) His first marriage ended in divorce because ‘I was a shit.’ ‘Lack of self-confidence, difficulty making decisions, disastrous organisational skills, and horribly poor receptivity are all faults I fully recognise in myself . . . I am never satisfied. Something tells me what I am doing at the moment has to be done better tomorrow . . . I am such a nervous person, I have to be at the airport an hour and a half to feel safe and I am fearfully ashamed if I arrive at a meeting a minute late.’ He was not ashamed to admit that he was an alcoholic – ‘a good way of forgetting’ – and also dyslexic. All he claimed for himself was ‘a certain nose for business and a reasonable dose of peasant common sense’ .