Despite having heard “Karma Chameleon” perhaps thousands of times, I never stopped to ponder the lyrics, although I have wondered about the separate question of whether songs so canonical and ubiquitous will be remembered or lost, even just a generation down the line.
But when “Karma Chameleon” came onto my playlist today, I happened to think about the key lines—something I somehow avoided doing for decades:
I’m a man without conviction
I’m a man who doesn’t know
How to sell a contradiction
A man who has no conviction? Who can’t explain to others—and probably not himself—the nuances and subtleties of understanding that you need in order to actually get anything done in real life (“selling a contradiction,” as he says it here)?
You know what these lines sound like: most people I’ve had to interact with in a professional setting since time immemorial.
In other words, there’s a canonical type of The Company Man, perhaps also called The Bureaucrat, who puts his convictions at the door. Who will just do what he’s told, without thinking about it. Thinking is hard, after all: if you do it enough, and do it well, it will lead you to dark places. Very dark. Easier to just not have convictions.
Of course, I’m talking about this in a facile and flippant way, but it’s tougher in real life. It’s just hard to fight for your convictions when your paycheck is on the line. As the saying goes, it’s hard to fight against something when your salary depends on it.
But what, really, is so bad about not having convictions? On an existential level, it implies deep and complex questions like, “Why do you exist?”—questions that you might want to meditate on, but which are outside the scope of this fun little article I’m trying to write right now.
In a workplace context, however, there’s an important point worth mentioning: your convictions are the result of your thought, judgment, and experience, all intertwined. If you don’t have convictions about what you’re working on, that means you probably haven’t thought much about what you do, or you haven’t done much. Anyone who has worked with WordPress or Haskell, or any technology in detail, for example, has convictions about that technology—be they good or bad.
Indeed, Boy George—I feel embarrassed I need to even say who he was! The Culture Club’s singer, who sang this song—continues with the next lyric to articulate the problem of not having convictions:
You come and go, you come and go
Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma chameleon
You come and go, you come and go
In other words, if you don’t have conviction, you don’t have loyalty (“you come and go”). And if you don’t have loyalty, you’re merely just working for some pocket change, not for anything deeper. Why do you exist, after all?
Note that this “come and go” is a challenge both for the employee and the employer. The employee, lacking loyalty, changes jobs constantly, seeking a better opportunity. This is no different from the girl (or boy) who goes through girlfriend after girlfriend (or boyfriend after boyfriend) because none is ever good enough; after enough girlfriends/boyfriends, you can’t help but suspect the problem might be in you, not the partner. From the company’s perspective, changing jobs so frequently makes it challenging to build a long-term team: just as they’re trained enough, they move on, and you’re back to square one.
The famous chorus uses the perfect word to describe this type of person: a chameleon. Chameleons change to blend in—so you can’t see their true nature. And the chameleon at work smiles at everyone and pretends to be BFF with everyone. But their true nature only comes out when shit hits the fan. And this is risky for everyone—including the chameleon, above all.
But it gets better! The song then continues expanding on this:
Loving would be easy if your colors were like my dreams
Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green
This articulates and summarizes this point well: reality is always different than your dreams. Dreams are neat and beautiful. Reality is much, much messier. Working with these people might be neat and beautiful in theory, but the reality will be tension, fights, complaints, and the challenges of adulthood. Of course, hopefully all done in a healthy way, as healthy adults tend to do.
And the other extreme is a warning as well. I’ve worked with people who fought for all their convictions every moment, and it made working with them impossible. One example that comes to mind is a gentleman who, during the course of our time working together, about once a week, made a suggestion—often simple, innocuous, and perfectly reasonable. But with every suggestion, he would append the words, “And if you don’t like this suggestion, you can fire me right now!” Fighting for every little thing as though every disagreement is the new Hitler needing a new atomic bomb to stop. (Minor forgotten footnote: the atomic bombs were used on Japan, not Germany. But do details even matter? How do we even know what really happened?)
The lesson there is: while too few convictions are a problem, so are having strong convictions on every little thing and always needing your conviction to prevail.
Perhaps the most important line of the song is the final chorus before the final repetitions: “Every day is like survival.” This not only encapsulates the argument of the song but applies to work as well: each one of us is fighting our own battles, both personally and at work with our teams. Knowing that each of us is fighting for our own survival hopefully gives us some empathy for our teammates, even as we’re fighting against each other—because while your teammate might be fighting you, he’s really fighting a much bigger battle with himself.
