Eddy Elmer: Emotions, suicide, and Enron

Last week, the former vice chairman of embattled Enron corporation was found shot to death in his car. Clifford Baxter, 43, died of a single gunshot wound to the head; a revolver was found in his hand. Last May, Baxter had resigned from Enron after challenging the company's misleading accounting practices. Baxter is survived by a wife and two children, ages 11 and 16.

Baxter seemed to have it all—an MBA from Columbia, a great career, money, a wonderful family, and deep respect from his community for his endless support of children's charities. With today's appreciation of the potential severity of depression—and any man with even a modicum of conscience for the tremendous losses experienced by his employees would probably feel forlorn—we could attribute Baxter's extreme final act to understandable reasons. But I would like to offer an alternative view to this suicide.

To my mind, the modern business world seems to hold two, bipolar views on work-related emotions. On the one hand, even though managers are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of these emotions, it seems that the predominant view is still that "business is just business" and emotions should, therefore, be divorced from the workplace. On the other hand, we also have managers, career counsellors, and psychologists who believe that our careers form a large part of our identities. In their view, emotions are inextricably intertwined with the workplace (i.e., "If you challenge my work, you challenge me as a person").

I suggest that there appears to be no middle ground between these two polarities. Employees who see themselves as investing a moderate degree of emotion capital in their work (i.e., being neither too divorced from their emotions nor too preoccupied with them) may find that they are not understood by their colleagues, families, or communities. The discourse surrounding workplace emotions has been so dichotomous—emotions are either wholly "good" or wholly "bad"—that some workers find it difficult to choose those words that can describe their workplace satisfaction or dissatisfaction in terms of their more balanced philosophy of work. Some of their colleagues may ask, If business is just business, why are you upset about Enron's collapse? Other colleagues may ask, If business is a highly emotional affair, why are you working for a large multinational in the first place? Any displeasure with one's work is seen by others only in the context of these two competing views—not as a natural consequence of a more balanced approach to workplace emotions. For example, it becomes difficult to explain that one's extreme dissatisfaction with work is due to the fact that the work environment is no longer sufficiently ethical (a concern that is only moderately invested with emotion and, thus, cannot be explained satisfactorily in dichotomous emotional terms).

I suggest that this kind of polarity creates great distress in some individuals—a tremendous sense of isolation and alienation. When your own philosophy of work is seen as being neither "A" nor "B", where, then, do you belong? Under the right circumstances (a highly stressful corporate collapse), and coupled with an individual's personality traits (e.g., sensitivity, emotionality), this philosophical schism can create so much acute distress that suicide appears to be the only viable escape.

The taking of one's own life can also be seen as an employee's desperate attempt to assert himself in the face of an ignorant community. While it is obviously an extreme act, suicide may seem necessary for the individual to "rewrite" his life story such that it finally becomes consonant with his own views of himself and his work. If nobody sees me as the balanced employee that I am, then I will make them see.

While this is by no means an attempt to write a psychohistory of an Enron employee, it draws attention to the power of discourse in structuring how we empathise with one another's views of work and career. When we restrict ourselves to the words used in argument and counter-argument, we can no longer empathise with one another. And when we can no longer empathise with one another, we can no longer prevent such tragedies as Baxter's suicide. More frighteningly, we may not be able to prevent our own.

Permanent URL: http://www.eddyelmer.com/articles/baxter.htm

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Emotions, discourse, and suicide

Reflections on the Enron collapse

Eddy M. Elmer

Personal, 30 January 2002