Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City

10. What Drives Detroiters?

C h a p t e r 10 What Drives Detroiters? What you need, you know I got it . . . What I need is just a little bit of respect, just a little bit . . . just a little bit . . . —“Respect,” sung by Aretha Franklin in 1967 Resources of Respect People are people, and psychologists have observed some common behavioral and psychic characteristics that unite our species. What humans everywhere need are three basic sorts of resources: physical (like food, clothing, shelter, time, energy), social (like love, status, affirmation, community ), and psychological (like identity, esteem, efficacy, and purpose). We all strive to obtain, retain, and expand resources of all three types, though the physical is more basic in terms of biological survival. When people have attained a sufficient amount of all three sorts of resources, they will have gained what I call in shorthand “respect.” Given the crucial importance of the resources comprising respect, it is no wonder that their potential or actual loss creates psychological stress for humans. How people respond to such stress offers a provocative lens through which to perceive and better understand Greater Detroiters. Psychologists have suggested that these motivations can extend beyond individuals to groups and organizations as well. They have advanced two principles. The first states that resource gains and losses are not symmetric ; losses are much more damaging than similarly sized gains. This explains why so many organizations and cultures have frequent rituals and 242 Chapter 10 commemorative events attempting to restore resources lost in significant disasters. The second principle states that people must invest resources if they want to expand their stockpiles or protect them against potential losses. For example, individuals must continually invest resources in interpersonal relationships if they want love to be maintained or grow. Organizations must invest in developing the skills and behaviors of their employees if they wish to become more productive. These two principles lead to a corollary with crucial implications for Greater Detroit. Those with only meager resources and those suffering repeated events where resources were lost will adopt a defensive posture to conserve remnants. Confronted with the terrifying prospect that their resources may fall below the minimum threshold of acceptability, people and groups behave conservatively. They practice cognitive denial and hoard resources in the short-term, while avoiding investing resources to create a more secure or expansive future. Thus, ironically, such folks often respond in the short term to stressful situations in ways that produce self-defeating long-term consequences. Greater Detroiters are no different from other Americans in their motivations to secure respect: adequate physical, social, and psychological resources . What distinguishes them are the uniquely daunting obstacles they have faced in their search for respect. Greater Detroit creates these obstacles with its economic base and housing market, abetted by external media and federal government forces. Its economic base and housing market are “engines of anxiety”: fundamentally corrosive of the physical, social, and psychological resources that people expect to reap from their places of work and residence. How Detroiters have tried individually to cope with and collectively adapt to these corrosive forces at the heart of their metropolis has taken extreme—and extremely dysfunctional—forms. A good many men break down mentally and physically . . . [under the strain of] continuous application to one line of work. —Samuel Marquis, Ford Motor Company executive, 1918 A city which is built around a productive process . . . is really a kind of hell . . . Thousands in this town are really living in torment while the rest of us eat, drink and make merry. What Drives Detroiters? 243 —Reinhold Niebuhr, Detroit minister before moving to Union Theological Seminary in New York, 1929 It has been asserted that machine production kills the creative ability of the craftsman. This is not true. —Henry Ford, 1929 Life in Detroit . . . is empty as a dried gourd for the creatures of the assembly line. Empty and insecure. . . . It is a city of strangers. —Forrest Davis, first director of the Detroit Urban League, 1936 The Economic Engine of Anxiety Greater Detroit’s economy has been dominated by the automobile industry for over a century. Throughout these decades, it has tantalizingly offered a Faustian bargain to its people: you will gain immense physical resources relative to your skills, but you will need to sacrifice psychological resources to get them. Generations of Detroiters have willingly sealed the deal, with predictable and some unpredictable consequences for themselves and their metropolitan area. Like Faust...