One of the most beloved novels in the English language reveals a lot about society, human nature, and any convention that validates absurd standards, which includes today's job listings and applications You have to channel Jane Austen to remove yourself from the absurdity rather than get sucked into normalizing it.
What made me think of this mashup? A job application that was ridiculously demanding in terms of the number of questions that required essay type answers. Not only did it show no consideration of the candidate's time with a form that would take an hour to complete, but whoever set it up didn't even check that it made sense. It included a space demanding a passcode, which wasn't a test but an error on the employer's part.
After attempting to fill it out 2.5 times, I finally came to my senses and filled in some of the boxes by with a declaration that such questions should only be asked in the course of an interview and not in the initial application. I also pointed out that they were likely turning off many fully qualified applicants with this exceedingly time-consuming form.
While I was declaring my independence in this way (yes, I know giving up any chance of actually advancing to an interview with this company), I thought of Pride and Prejudice.
Austen's heroine refuses to be boxed in and accept unreasonable demands from others -- whether they are to marry her cousin or to believe that women must aspire to live up to unreasonable expectations to be considered accomplished. Elizabeth Bennet shows us how it's done.
She pricks balloons of hot air, subtly undermining rules that Mr. Darcy and others present as absolutely fixed. This is most striking when she offers her opinion on the requisite qualities of an accomplished woman in chapter 8 of Pride and Prejudice.
To see how this scene was treated in various productions dating back to the 1940 film that horrifies purists (for many reasons) but is still a lot of fun. See this compilation and identify your favorite in the comments.
Note that 2005 film shows Elizabeth not just closing her book -- the action shown in the earlier adaptions -- but audibly slamming it shut when Darcy mentions the importance of reading for an accomplished woman. In the text of the novel, though, Elizabeth loses interest in her book prior to that point and has shifted to watch the card game before the debate on what constitutes accomplishments takes off:
'It is amazing to me,' said Bingley, 'how young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are.'
'All young ladies accomplished! My dear Charles, what do you mean?'
'Yes, all of them, I think. They all paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know any one who cannot do all this, and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very accomplished.'
'Your list of the common extent of accomplishments,' said Darcy, 'has too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse or covering a screen. But I am very far from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I cannot boast of knowing more than half a dozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really accomplished.'
'Nor I, I am sure,' said Miss Bingley. 'Then,' observed Elizabeth, 'you must comprehend a great deal in
your idea of an accomplished woman.'
'Yes, I do comprehend a great deal in it.'
'Oh! certainly,' cried his faithful assistant, 'no one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.'
'All this she must possess,' added Darcy, 'and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.'
'I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any.'
'Are you so severe upon your own sex as to doubt the possibility of all this?'
'I never saw such a woman. I never saw such capacity, and taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe united.'
So what's going on here?
Miss Bingley and Darcy are constructing an ideal that Elizabeth knows is impossible to attain. Like the job listings that call for someone with both deep technical skills and advanced soft skills, as well as capabilities to create content in written, visual, and video form, these are demand for a combination that almost never exists in a single person.
When we see such job descriptions, we shouldn't feel that we come up short -- the gaslighting game Caroline Bingley intends in this conversation. Instead we need to draw on Elizabeth's confidence and refuse to accept the irrational views of others just because they have more money and/or status (but not intelligence) than we possess.
.
Elizabeth stands firm against gaslighting and will not be persuaded to ignore what she knows based on her own lived experience. As she has not seen anyone who combines all the accomplishments listed, she will not accept it as a feasible goal for any woman to aspire to.
Pride and Prejudice also shows us the foil to the independent Elizabeth -- the character who bows to those in power and who comes across as obsequious worm -- Collins. You definitely don't want to fall into line the way Collins does for Catherine de Bourgh..
What's possible?
Writing this made me appreciate the brilliance of Austen's planting the notion of what is attainable and what is not just before this exchange. Caroline Bingley raves about Pemberly's library and tells her brother he should take that estate as a model for his own:
'Neglect! I am sure you neglect nothing that can add to the beauties of that noble place. Charles, when you build your house, I wish it may be half as delightful as Pemberley.'
'I wish it may.'
'But I would really advise you to make your purchase in that neighbourhood, and take Pemberley for a kind of model. There is not a finer county in England than Derbyshire.'
'With all my heart; I will buy Pemberley itself if Darcy will sell it.'
'I am talking of possibilities, Charles.'
'Upon my word, Caroline, I should think it more possible to get Pemberley by purchase than by imitation.'
Bingley doesn't seriously expect his friend to sell his estate. He is making the point that an attempt to match a perfect model is not realistic. This bit of insight shows that Bingley is not quite as clueless a character as he is sometimes played in dramatizations of the novel. It also shows how well-crafted the novel is to lay this foundation of rejecting impossible aspirations.
What holds true of estates and standards for women's perfection also applies to job requirements and applications. Think of all the ridiculous laundry lists of skills and senior level experiences places demand -- often for a junior level salary. And then there is the application process that serves as another form of gaslighting to impress on candidates that they have to prove themselves by jumping through all these hoops just to have their application considered.
That's not a company that values people and their time. Remember this next time you face one of those monstrous applications. They're playing Caroline Bingley's game, and the only way to win is to refuse to play by her rules.
**Note added on Sept. 29, 2024: Sometimes these absurd standards aren't put into the job application itself but reveal themselves later when the applicants are invited to prove their interest and worthiness by investing hours in answering questions that used to be reserved only for second and third interviews. This is the actual Google doc that was shared with me to move on to the next qualifying round of a job with an upper range salary far below both what I was seeking and what this job should pay. I passed on the opportunity.
You don't have to be a Star Trek nerd to grasp the real point of this post. I don't count myself as one. For this bit of insight I'm going to retrofit something that Spock famously said in the 1982 movie The Wrath of Khan with one of the original series episodes.
No, it's not the episode in which Khan appears. It's one of the ones some fans consider the greatest episode of all: The City on the Edge of Forever. This one involves not just romance and saving the universe but time travel and a difficult decision to make in a form of galactic trolley problem.
This post will contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen this yet and want to first see it, go ahead and then return to this post.
The story gets going pretty quickly when Dr. McCoy stumbles through a time portal and ends up saving a woman named Edith Keeler (played by Joan Collins) from being run over in what turns out to be Chicago in the 1930s.
This is not an alien version but the real past with major consequences for the future.Those consequences soon come to light.
Here's the clip in which Spock shows what happens in this alternative timeline:
The way to hell was paved with good intentions
When Edith is spared the accident, she goes on to found a peace movement that is influential enough to prevent the US from entering WWII when it did. Germany succeeds in developing the atomic bomb first and wins the war. That's very bad with consequences that extend to the present of the Enterprise crew.
So even when Kirk declares, "I believe I'm in love with Edith Keeler," Spock responds, "Jim, Edith Keeler must die."
While he doesn't invoke the Vulcan saying, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few ... or the one," as he does in the 1982 film, this is definitely what's understood. One woman's life cannot outweigh consideration for the lives of billions of people under a monstrous regime that is extended many years and retains influence on generations.
When war is the only moral option
Star Trek is set in a more enlightened future in which humans have advanced beyond engaging in war themselves, though they do still have to fight to defend themselves from hostile alien forces. However, as the show was actually produced in the early 60s, its creators and actors had first-hand familiarity with the horrors of WWII and the possibly-well-intentioned-yet-still-deluded people who were pushing to avoid war at any cost.
The thing about that "any cost" is that it can end up being an even more terrible price than the war itself, horrendous as it was. A regime bent on genocide becoming a world empire is worse, as they see from the way the sustained ramifications of the change in history.
In fact, there were highly influential people like this, ranging from Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler for what he thought was the assurance of "peace for our time" to isolationists who may have really had antisemitism as their motive like Charles Lindbergh. Then there were countless others who were still haunted by WWI and believed that anything had to be better than that.
They fell into the same mistake that Edith Keeler does, and in reality the US entered the war very late only when Pearl Harbor forced it to take direct action. Over those years of delay, Germany continued to gain ground, and the people of England suffered terribly. Plus the Final Solution got underway, and 6 million Jews were killed, along with 5 million other undesirables, including the Roma people.
In the early 1960s, people were well aware of this relatively recent history, and that is reflected in this Star Trek episode. It comes to the clearly logical conclusion that even a good person end up doing something devastatingly wrong and has to be stopped for the sake of the many and many generations. Though it breaks his heart, Kirk prevents McCoy from preventing Edith from stepping in harm's way, thus allowing her to die as predetermined and for history to take the right course without Germany winning WWII.
The moral imperative to combat the evil of terrorism
So what has this got to do with the present? In a situation in which one set of people feels justified in attacking another because they feel slighted or they just want what they have, or they believe in jihad, it is an untenable position to say that the attacked people cannot fight back because war is bad.
Yes, war is bad, but allowing evil to grow and flourish is even worse. Taking a passive stance, as so many Europeans did when Hitler extended his empire, make you complicit in evil.
That's the point of that episode. It was not acceptable to just let this alternative time line run its course. Kirk had not only allow an innocent woman to be killed but take an active part in preventing her from being saved. That was the only moral action under the circumstances. Refusing to do it would have been immoral, condemning billions just to be able to say, "I didn't kill anyone."
When people declare that the 9/11 attack was justified because the terrorists who did believed the United States needed to be taken down a peg, they are being immoral. An attack to kill thousands of innocent civilians simply because they are associated with an entity you hate is evil. Certainly, the United States went after the people behind it, and no one accused it of a war crime.
Dangerous naivete or just a double standard for Jews?
But when it comes to Israel, suddenly there's an impossible standard to meet of putting the lives of the attacking side ahead of your own men, women, and children. People seriously say that Israel may not bomb Gaza because civilians, including children are there. They may be as well-intentioned as the fictional Edith was, but what they propose is just as damaging.
"How can you (correctly) condemn the recent attack on Israeli citizens but say nothing about bombing civilians in Gaza.
Civilians whose food & water supply is cut off and who cannot escape.
HOW."
Chawla is presenting the false argument of two wrongs don't make a right here. That's not the case in war. Certainly, Israel will not rape, torture, and mutilate women, children, and civilians and make snuff videos of such events.
But to expect them to supply electricity and water to the people who continue to hold hostages they threaten kill on video and who continue to lob rockets at civilian areas and who slaughtered 400 cows to destroy the country's milk supply and who bombed the storehouses of food to create a shortage is frankly immoral.
It's literally empowering the people sworn to destroy you to do so because of some mistaken idea that Israel's own children's lives count for less than any other children's lives. Are they to be allowed to continue to perpetrate such atrocities unchecked because they use their children as human shields? That leads to more and more violence -- not peace.
Get the context right to understand the heinousness of what happened this past Saturday. Children were deliberately targeted and most brutally slaughtered, not to mention the women who were raped, and the other tortures and mutilations applied to the 1200+ victims of the most savage attack since the Holocaust.
And do not dismiss this with a naive thought like "Well, yes, that was terrible, but it already happened. Vengeance will not bring back the victims."
You think the worst is over? Think again. While this attack is definitely the worst to date, there's nothing final about it.
In fact, over 700 admitted Hamas supporters openly held a live meeting today on Twitter (X). I took a screenshot of the group the session called "I refuse to condemn the Palestinian resistance." Taking lessons out of Goebbels' playbook, they rationalize exterminating, torturing, and raping Jews. The Nazis claimed to have reasons for their genocide, as well.
What Churchill said
This is evil that must be checked. The Allies had to bomb Germany and harmed many civilians, including children, in order to win the war. It wasn't pleasant. They didn't relish the bloodshed, but they certainly celebrated the victory over evil forces, and this is the same situation in which Israel is at present.
This is why the rhetoric coming out of Israel right now that people are deliberately misconstruing as a call for genocide at worst or collective punishment at best is really an echo of what Churchill said during WWII.
"Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.
"If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science.
"Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years men will still say, 'this was their finest hour'."
House of Commons - 18 June 1940
There is no ethical imperative to keep your citizens in danger of murder, rape, torture, and being taken hostage to avoid any civilian casualty on the other side. No one would ever dream of demanding of anyone other than Jews who have barely made it through the 20th century genocide attempts.
Espousing a false moral code to limit what people can do to check evil allows it to flourish and for more innocent victims to fall prey to it. That is not the way. It's putting the needs of the few ahead of the many, to the ultimate devastation of all. That's the real lesson here.
What made me think of this mashup? A job application that was ridiculously demanding in terms of the number of questions that required essay type answers. Not only did it show no consideration of the candidate's time with a form that would take an hour to complete, but whoever set it up didn't even check that it made sense. It included a space demanding a passcode, which wasn't a test but an error on the employer's part. 
