Fancy job titles

One of the gripes of modern society is that we want more, more and more. Part of this need for more is that a job title must reflect something of stature - essentially, so that others can think that one is more special. A title, whether it be a job or academic title, for those of low self-esteem or with a chip on their shoulder based on some self-perceived quality equating weakness, will provide a cure to this weakness. Therefore we have extreme cases such as the leadership in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPR Korea, popularly known as 'North Korea') where Kim Il-Sung, leader of the country from its founding 1948 until his death in 1994 was known as the 'Great Leader' for the last 3 decades of his rule. His son and successor Kim Jong-il has been bearer of many a title, most famous of which was his title in the 1980s and early 1990s as 'the Dear Leader'. After his father's death, for a brief period he assumed the title of 'Great Leader' from his late father, while Kim senior was posthumously referred to the somewhat demoted title of 'Respected Leader'. Alas, the new old title for Kim Junior was just not enough for his hagiographers, so Kim Jong-il in the late 1990s was promoted to the new, more descriptive title of 'The Great Leader of Party and People'. This title didn't last long, nor was it particularly accurate as Kim Jong-il had (and still hasn't) assumed any official functions in the DPR Korean goverment (such as President or Premier) nor any official leadership rule in the ruling Korean Worker's Party. No, he's just the Supreme Commander of the National Security Council, the real power in modern-day, Songun (Military-first) Korea. So what is his title? For the past decade, it's just 'The Leader' or 'Supreme Commander'. Rather modest and more apt titles than the overblown titles of past.

The Korean Kims are still an enigma and not much is truly known about who they really are as humans. However, when analysing their political counterparts in pre-1989 Romania - the Ceaușescus, much is known about their nature and character. Noteworthy was their need for titles. Being the archetypical Balkan peasants they were, Nicolae and Elena really took badly to that stark distinction people in the Balkans place between urban and rural populations. Perhaps more so than pretty much is the case everywhere in the world, Balkan urban dwellers see their rural kin as backward, uncultured cretins while they themselves epitomise education, progressive thinking and modernity. However, in practice, the urban people who make the most of this belief usually themselves are only a generation or two away from those same village people they so despise. Naturally, as Nicolae Ceaușescu and Elena Petrescu were born in villages and arrived in Bucharest as young, unsophisticated villagers, they received the brunt of this prejudice. The way they ended up coping with this ongoing chip on their collective shoulders, despite being at the pinnacle of Romanian society in the 1960s to 1980s, was to award themselves titles. Nicolae Ceaușescu had his state media apparatus dubb him 'The Genius of the Carpathians', amongst other monickers, but his main title was 'Conducător', which has the meaning of 'guiding leader'. His wife Elena, oblivious to how inadvertently she was displaying her lack 0f self-esteem and education, eventually was awarded with not just one but three academic titles and was ludicruously addressed as 'Academic Doctor Engineer Comrade Elena Ceaușescu'.

Now where is this all leading to? Well, the Economist has an interested article about how there's an inflation in job titles in our modern, sophisticated Western society. This lack of self-esteem coupled with the need to be seen as someone important has resulted in people having fancy job titles, much like the same way Kim Jong-il is the 'dear leader' or our self-delusional Romanian Academic Doctor Engineer. On a closer note, I once worked in a re-insurance company. A majority of the people working there had been there for decades and essentially had no desire to move on from the safety of their positions. However, they also felt quite threatened when someone new would start work there, especially if they presented themselves as professional and ambitious - qualities these people lacked. What I later discovered was that when looking a list of employees, much to my surprise, they all had 'manager' in their job titles. There was an 'assistant account manager' and 'vice-assistant recoveries manager'. So essentially 80% of the office was a manager, but you could hardly say that they were managing anything. Essentially, in order to placate these people into continuing to work doing the same mindnumbing paper pushing they have been doing for the past few decades, management awarded them with fancy job titles. Well, it worked.

Here is a link to the Economist article for your reading pleasure http://www.economist.com/node/16423358?story_id=16423358&fsrc=nlwhig06-24-2010editors_highlights

Enjoy

The Great Supreme Respected Academic Commander Doctor Engineer King Comrade