So let's just get back to where we left off...
***
"...people in an experimental setting will view allocations 'in terms of retaining what they have been led to believe is the rightful and direct consequence of their own, individual action" rather than in terms of "meting out just shares resulting from a common enterprise" (p. 16). This individualistic bias has been evident in other areas of psychology as well (e.g., Furby, 1979) and is consistent with the individualistic ideology in Western, industrialized society (Weber, 1930). (p. 160; The quotes were from Cohen (1983), as identifed a bit earlier in the paragraph.)Technically this was not a problem at all in the Vienna mission because this was exactly the type of thing that the socialization worked out of the newcomers. Also, "allocations" in the missions setting is not the same as in a corporate setting anyway so, you have to keep that in mind as well. Nevertheless, if they were used to thinking of their good works helping to get them ahead - such as moving up the academic ladder (there were a lot of teaching theologians in the bunch, remember). So that wasn't going to happen here. It was a group affair and any sign of a nail sticking up it was going to get pounded down - taking from a Japanese saying. And that was me really, because whereas they has put everyone else in positions relatively resembling the work they really did and using their skills, I was the worst fit and I just did not feel like I could ever ever accept the image they had of me, I don't care what the group concern was. No one had to face as total a remake as I would have had to.
And the thing is that even if I did accept the group pressure and everything went well and I became a successful part of the group and was given more ministry opportunities. The thing is that they would have still undermined the part of me that was all the background in Eastern European studies, religion in Eastern Europe, language studies, and being able to think for myself regarding all the studies I'd done in research about religion in Eastern Europe. They would have wanted me to give all that up as if I didn't have that and just rely on them. I wasn't supposed to come with all that background because that would make me more independendent, and it might even make me more knowledgeable than some of those above me so it was a threat to them probably. So that was unacceptable.
So all that would have had to go. And what would I have been left with? A shell of a person. A completely different person. But when I left Vienna what was I left with? A shell of a person. A completely different person.
I didn't think like this when I was there because some things were hard to grasp and wrap your mind around. It was a miracle I was able to understand as much as I did, I think. So I missed some things. And some things I'm not getting until now as I go through these articles.
I think the difference between staying and leaving, even though the above statements make it look like the end is the same, is that if I stayed I'd be grinding it out more and more so it would be continuing to have its effect and I'm not sure where it would have eventually led to. So you'd have to take that into consideration. All I can say is at the time I was scared spitless, which is how I was able to not tell anyone anything. It was the fear that kept me going and that fueled the poker face that hid all the thoughts and pain and anger they didn't know about underneath the sweet demeanor and endless agreeableness. So you know that's a whole lot of fear to be able to do that. I never ever had that kind of fear in the Soviet Union, even though I lost my child under questionable circumstances and the garbage I put up with my undoubtedly arranged husband 5 time zones from Moscow out in the middle of nowhere. Nope. I never had fear there, really, and the Vienna mission absolutely terrified me. And I'm talking about an Evangelical born-again Christian mission.
And I came home to the U.S. and I thought my sending church would be supportive and maybe check into what happened, but all they did was sort of take my had and say there-there, it'll be all right. That's how I felt. So I sort of drifted away from that church, absolutely disillusioned.
***
Another difficulty with psychological experiments on justice is the fact they are interpreted solely in terms of justice concerns, whereas one or more other motives are often involved such as politeness, fear of retaliation, status assertion, and impression, and impression management... Follow-up interviews indicated that children knew perfectly well that their self-interested allocations in response to the former instructions were not necessarily "fair." (p. 161)
These children were told to share "as you want" and then "so it's right." In Vienna I don't even think that the mission even really needed to do a lot of socializing into this, but I suppose that it could have come up here and there in the occasional individual. The thing is that as missionaries generally they should have been pretty high up on the moral ladder (although judging by how they treated me, that does raise a big question mark, doesn't it?), and as such I don't think the share issue was a major issue. At least it wasn't as far as I knew of. I think that if issues came up they might have wanted to keep them localized as much as possible (such as in a department), so then I might not have heard about it. Still, it wasn't that big of an organization and if something was at all common I think I'd have had an idea of it. But I don't remember it.
The thing here, then is specifically how I fit in the mission. The status assertion was a big one, really, and I don't think I can overstate it. The mission absolutely insisted not only in making me being a secretary, which is one thing and I had agreed to, but also in branding me and making me sort of forever join the ranks of secretary-hood. Really, it was like if there was a caste system, I was being sent down to the absolute lowest rank... well maybe the second lowest, because there was the gardener and the receptionist (as I eventually found out later) who was still lower.
There was that, but then it was silly, because I wasn't even a secretary, so it was stupid that they were so insistent, I thought. I had never even expressed an interest in becoming a professional secretary.
I most definitely had a fear of retaliation, but it wasn't a fear that an individual would retaliate, because the mission wouldn't allow for that kind of pettines, but that the mission would retaliate. The mission would retaliate for just not agreeting with it or attempting to fall out of line to do your own thing. But retaliation could be subtle or in your face. The subtle things the mission would deny knowing anything about and the in your face things the mission would deny having anything to do with retaliation. But you just sort of knew.
As to impression management, I'm a little more flexible there. I don't have to be front and center stage, which is why I didn't respond so well when I was given the uber-flattery when I first arrived. It was just too much and struck me as strange. I'm not the type that really needs it. Sure, I like some encouragement and acknowledgment, but not like that. So I'm willing to give some in impression management and I can sit in the background and I'm willing to just sit and watch and see what's going on. I'm okay with that. Does this make sense?
So justice, as the author says, is one thing, but then you have these other issues too. The thing is that the mission does not negotiate with anyone - well, I don't know - maybe if you're a famous professor, but I wasn't famous enough, I guess, despite all the hype they heaped on me when I first arrived. So justice was what the mission decided it was, and that's the end of the story. At least, that was what my experience with the mission. If you didn't like it, tough luck Charlie, you could just leave. And maybe that's just what they wanted me to do because of my dad (and his work in the U.S. Star Wars - which they could have known about via the two U.S. military reserve chaplains comprising the H.R. department).
***
Thibaut and Walker (1975) found that perceived fairness of procedures affects satisfaction with those procedures, independent of outcomes. (p. 163)Since there were no objective written rules and guidelines - that were effective by any stretch of the imagination, I mean - then we were left to our own devices to determine what "fairness" might mean. Since we were all Christians and it was an Evangelical mission, the Bible might be a good place to start. Of course, there was the individual conscience, which in this case would be mine. And finally, there would be the social norms of the mission. The problem with that latter alter ego is that I never really understood it well; it always sort of eluded me. That being said, I did feel like I understood it better in certain areas than others.
This is a very serious issue and one that deserve biblical addressing, but I believe that some of my discussions on posts 164 and aspects of the discussion in post 218 deal with the issue fairly well. I think there may be one or two other places that I touch on it as well. It's not something to be taken lightly, in my opinion; God's idea of "fairness" isn't necessarily the same as ours, but He isn't an unjust Judge either. But it's hard, in my opinion, to isolate the issue of "fairness" from everything else regarding the mission, and how it is answerable to God for how it operated in general. These other posts address that a bit and I deal with other aspects of the mission in relation to Scripture elsewhere in the blog as well.
I suspect, although I can't know for certain, that members of the Vienna mission, learned with time to just not really think in terms of fairness, or to bury that type of thinking deep enough in their psyche for the duration of the time they were with the mission that it wasn't a problem for them. Alternately, some may have maintained their fairness reasoning just below the radar, where they could sense it, but it was undetectible to others. If this was the case, then there would have been others living secret lives more or less like I did, but they cooperated more. And they didn't have a father in Star Wars either probably to complicate things.
The management probably would have expected the theologians to live like this and wouldn't have gotten away with totally eraticating their id, if you will. But that's what it felt like they wanted to do with me. In this case, they thought that secretaries weren't intelligent enough and they could get away with doing this kind of thing with secretaries because they wouldn't have the intelligence to fight back and know what was going on.
Part of my problem was that I didn't have the prestigious position to rally support behind me. So that was a huge drawback against me. And to top it off, I was female. You know how much status females have in evangelical churches? Enough to be secretaries, for sure, and maybe lead preschool Sunday school. But in my church, women's ministry hadn't even evolved beyond support for missions.
So even if I did have something close to the knowledge of the theologians - especially when you count in the Eastern European expertise - I didn't have the prestige to rally support. And the more time went on the mission kept knocking me down more and more, which just knocked my self-confidence down. And if my self-confidence is knocked down and I don't have great prestige to start with (but I might have had some if I'd known how to work it when I got home), then what are the chances that I could rally support? And the mission had done everything it possibly could to discredit my testimony.
Under such conditions, what am I supposed to say, that I am jumping with joy and just oversatisfied with the fairness of the mission's procedures and the outcomes they produced? I don't think so? Do I think that the mission was biblical in its operations - in general, not just in how it treated me? No, not at all! That's a good chunk of why I had a hard time joining their inner circle. And why I'm glad that I kept my values intact.
People need to know what goes on in these kinds of missions, that it's not all cookies and cream. Lay out your values straight and plain so that people like me who don't like the type of values espoused by the mission in their actual day in and day out can have a chance to opt out instead of having the wool pulled over our eyes. Yes, that means supporters. There may be a few who don't like it.
***
This has taken hours to write and my day is half over. We still have a ways to go in the text too, so this is a very meaty text it's turning out to be.I had to go back over a lot of the older posts trying to find the links to the posts with the verses in them that I wanted, and I realized that in one of the times when I had had to make adjustments to the numbering systems it seems like the post numbers in the "Scripture Reference" page are off, so that's a bummer. I have so much to do and I don't see getting to it in the near future, so, unfortunately, it's going to have to stay that way. I'll just have to add a note at the top that I know that some of these are not correct and I'll get to it when I can which may be quite a while.
Well, I'd better go, so I have to leave at this. This is an emotional process for me, though. And it is all the harder now that I see that my family has been dying since the beginning of the blog. So they were some of the ones that had the front seats to all this, even though they were some of the problems too. And now I have to deal with my brothers and they think everything is all my fault. So now I feel very alone and my health just isolates me all the more. So it's rough. It would have been able to go through these notes like this a long time ago but you see how much time it's taking and when have I had this much time? Never. So realistically I never could have done it until now so it's just a miracle that all the pieces fit together that I even have these articles and I marked them up, because I'm commenting almost solely on the highlighted parts of the articles that I marked up in the 1990s when I copied the articles in Minneapolis. So at that time I though that this passage that I commented on today was important and here you are today and I still think it is important and I'm commenting on it today and none of the other parts of the article that aren't marked up; I'm not commenting on any of the unmarked up parts of the article. That's true almost completely on all these articles with very few exceptions. So these are things that have stuck with me all these years.
