Newslurp

Getting ahead / Getting away

Arwa Mahdawi on ambition, and Amy Chu's Candace Chen gets in a pickle

By The Editors • 21 Nov 2024

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The hand of a carousel rider reaching out to grab the (literal) brass ring

nosha from Pennington, New Jersey, USA [CC BY-SA 2.0] via Wikimedia Commons

Today: Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead; and Amy Chu, artist and publisher of Camoot.Journal.

Issue No. 206

How to Get Ahead
Arwa Mahdawi

Candace Chen Needs a Friend: Part 2.5
Amy Chu

How to Get Ahead

by Arwa Mahdawi

Back in my 20s I had a tumultuous relationship with a woman—we’ll call her B—who was extremely ambitious. We were both trainees at a corporate law firm in London, which offered a handful of competitive placements abroad. They’d send you to a partner office in another country; you’d fly business class and get pretty swanky accommodation paid for by the firm.

B thought that neither of us should apply for the placements. Let’s stay in London together, she said. I was smitten and didn’t need convincing. Then, a few weeks later, B informed me that, actually, she’d secretly applied for a spot, been successful, and was heading to Australia for six months. She was very upset about this. Not because we’d be apart, but because she hadn’t got the placement she really wanted in New York. So that ended our relationship. We’ve lost touch since but do you want to know what she’s doing now? She’s very high up in British politics.

I don’t want you to think I’m still stewing about a slight from a very long time ago. I’d completely forgotten about this incident but it bubbled back up into my consciousness after Trump got elected and started handing out cabinet posts to friends and loyalists. Trump has never been bothered to put a respectable veneer on the way the world works, and his cabinet picks have been another example of this. He’s made it very clear: qualifications don’t matter in Trump’s world. What matters is loyalty to the king. Scheming and lying are rewarded. Integrity is not.

I’m not saying B had the morals of a Trump cabinet pick. But she had understood how the world works early on. She’d figured out how to climb first the corporate and then the political ladder. How to eliminate her competition and do whatever it took to get ahead. From the very beginning, she had her eyes firmly on the prize. As someone who has bumbled through life, I guess I can admire that to some degree. But I also worry that these are the sorts of skills the world rewards.

My daughter is three and a half now. She’s an incredibly curious tiny little human who is trying to understand all the different dynamics around her and I’ve been thinking about the sort of lessons I should be teaching her to set her up for success. (“Success.”) Obviously, I want her to grow up to be kind and thoughtful. I want her to value helping others more than she values money and status. But I also can’t lie to her and tell her that hard work always pays off. Or that the world actually values kindness. Increasingly it seems that we live in a world where integrity is punished. A world where cheaters nearly always win.

The past year has been a hell of a lesson in this. People all around the world have lost their jobs and career opportunities for speaking up against something as obviously unacceptable as the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Students’ life chances have been materially hurt—they’ve been kicked out of university, forbidden to graduate—because they took a stand against a livestreamed genocide.

Meanwhile, careerists in the Biden Administration have gone to work every day in the full knowledge that they are facilitating what one UN official called the worst humanitarian crisis he has ever seen in his 50-year career. One of the thoughts that has haunted me over the past year is how much suffering could have been prevented if just a handful of the most powerful people had taken a stand. If just a few of the top people in the administration had resigned, they might have prevented tens of thousands of deaths. They might have prevented children from being trapped under rubble, dying unbearably painful deaths. I don’t know what these people tell themselves. I guess they’ve brainwashed themselves to think that their complicity in the literal extermination of a people is somehow a good thing, or the best option, but deep down I think a part of them has to recognise that they’re just doing whatever it takes to get ahead. If they keep their head down in the Biden administration they’ll get a cushy corporate job when they leave.

And it’s not just the Biden administration, of course—although they bear the brunt of the blame. So many politicians and journalists and influential figures are complicit in excusing Israel’s atrocities. B, with her fancy job in British politics, is complicit. She’s not speaking up about Gaza, she’s not marching on the streets, because that’s not how you “get ahead” is it? You get ahead by aligning yourself with power.

Forgiveness is supposed to be a good thing. Parents, I think, are supposed to teach their children that you shouldn’t hold onto anger. That you should forgive people. But can I really tell my daughter that? Can I really preach what I can’t practice myself?

Gaza has been completely destroyed and I feel like a little part of me, the part that thought that humans were fundamentally good, has been destroyed as well. I will never forgive the people responsible for all this misery. And I hope that, buried deep down, they will never be able to forgive themselves. The shame would at least show they’re human.