My unlikely hero during this time when I work in the bank, Sartre, declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 because he did not want to be institutionalised. He explained in the New York Review of Books that a writer must solely rely on his words rather than the power and authority of some organisation, no matter how honourable the circumstance was. I sometimes think that he was overly scrupulous of institutions and prizes (he refused all official awards) and that we mortal, being less talented than Sartre, need all the recognition that we can get. Still, I am sympathetic to him in the sense that being associated with an institution can have an impact on one's thought, in more ways than Sartre pointed at.
There is no one more free-thinking than the philosopher, and there are few things more institutionalised than the bank. Working in the bank is platitudinously different from getting the Nobel Prize in Literature. The difference that I want to highlight is that being in a bank overtakes you rather than influences you. It is not like adding "Nobel Laureate" after your name. It is when your customer sees you she sees not you, but the bank. In a rather wicked reverse, your face is not your own, but the bank.
In the weeks after my employment, I have received complaints from customers on issues that I have no control over. The bank is a leviathan of mechanisms and departments following myriad rules that have lost their reasons, or rather, reasons that I can't tell my customers because the interest of the bank does not coincide with the customers. After the financial crisis, you may assume that the distrust of banks is repeated ad nauseam, but people are complacent in the false sense of security. During training in customer's relation, the most memorable advice from the instructor is to forget my own emotions. The customers do not see you. The customers see a part of the bank that they can vent their anger at, and they receive the illusion that the bank is listening. A human face is surprisingly effective. No wonder Hilary Putnam put a human face to realism.333Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡytAlWo5sUk
Of course, the picture of philosophers as free-thinking bohemians is not accurate either. Timothy Williamson, the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, in a rare moment, chronicled the rise and fall of the influence of prominent figures and their herds in academic philosophy in the paper "How do we get from there?" (2014). He described vividly, how the room fell to a hush when he said Wittgenstein (a very important philosopher) was wrong and not for the first time, and how, during his student years, that philosophers started to be less fearful in criticising Quine (another very important philosopher). Institutions and authorities have enormous power. Philosophers are only human. To be successful, they have to strive for standards which are not explicit, keep on changing, and subject to trends and fashion. The reputation of Oxbridge and prominent journals makes us fall in line behind the likes of Williamson.
I think, as a point of sociology, that the structure of institutions and authorities pervades every aspect of the society. Hell, I wrote of that with regards to language in my thesis. It was naive of me to think that I can escape from that. But of course, life is about choosing which form of hardship we're willing to endure, isn't it?
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