Many Americans have recently started watching something new on TV: The ICE agents in action.

Of all the visible symbolisms of government power seen on TV — arrests, imprisonment, deportation, unpredictability, unaccountability — ICE agents in action have been most dramatic. They are often black-masked, black-clad, with no unit markings, and arrest people and ransack their homes. They don’t respond to repeated queries from their victims, and leave no adequate contact information; they display no human emotion, as if they are robots, with singular devotion to their duty. They are so different from the images of “American-style” law-enforcement that we almost expect them to click their heels and speak some unknown foreign tongue.

What makes the ICE agents look and act so heartlessly inhuman and un-American? Do they personally hate the immigrants? Are they so specially trained like Kurt Russell in the film “Soldier,” an “emotionless killing machine?” If neither is likely, then what has made them like that?

Then, upon further reflection, we are startled to realize that they are merely doing their job. It’s a simple answer and, therefore, simply terrifying: It’s our common jobs — yours, mine, everybody’s — that turn humans into non-humans!

Like most workers anywhere in America, these ICE agents are merely protecting their breadline. The simple truth is that, as cruel as they look and as brutal as they act, ICE agents themselves are all scared to death of losing their jobs. They give up so much of their humanity, and whatever else is of any value to them as human beings, just to do their job. In this great fear — is there anything worse than losing your job in America? — they are willing to forsake God, love, justice, or whatever else that shields their humanity.

When you travel through Europe or Asia, or anywhere outside America, exceptions are often made by local government officials to accommodate the particular situations that travelers may face, a minor infraction here or a lost document there. Finding yourself in such a bureaucratic fix, you appeal to their love of humanity, pointing out the frailty of human nature, and, lo and behold, often they relent. When we were stationed in Asia, we were saved a few times from getting traffic tickets just by begging for the policeman’s mercy. (Sometimes a little bribery works, too).

But not in America where only rules matter. American society has always been known as the most rule-bound nation in the modern world, with every rule upheld and no exceptions made. Not a single exception can be begged for, sobbed for, appealed for or even bribed for. ICE agents merely personify such harshness of reality that demands absolute obedience from everyone doing his (or her) job.

Still, our absolute obedience to our jobs only proves we are well trained for our jobs, as anybody can obey the rules. Our humanity shines through only when we break the rules to serve the human imperative. Almost unbeknownst to us, we have become so enslaved to our jobs that we have lost everything that makes us human — feelings, sentiments, a sense of right and wrong outside our jobs and their orders — just to stay employed.

Then, as Americans, we also realize that, unlike those in the Old World, we are not ordinary human beings, and have never been: Unlike in other nations and tribes where people prefer to live together, we Americans prefer to live alone in our own cocoons, not bothered by or connected to others.

But, to live independently and isolated from others, we need economic security in which our well-being is imperatively and exclusively tied to our jobs that supply us with steady incomes to sustain our individual lives. To be American is to live alone, and to live alone is, ultimately, to live for our jobs. Unlike the Old World people who rely on each other, we in America must rely on our jobs to survive.

Naturally, such a lifestyle is terrifyingly fragile: It’s a thin wall that separates everything and nothing. With a secure job, you have everything; without it, you have nothing and you are nothing for us. Only in America, our lives fall from everything to nothing on one simple pink slip that says, “You’re fired!”

To prevent such a catastrophe, we adopt the servility of a lapdog and the stoicism of an ICE agent: We must give up our humanity — that is, what makes us human — to keep our jobs and to enjoy life’s pleasures and comforts. The higher our job benefits are, the more absolute is our obedience as butt-kissers. Only the lowly workers, such as laborers and waitresses, have guts enough to stand up to their economic masters and shackles, and say, “I quit!” As the price for their true freedom and dignity, of course, they must drift from one low-paying job to another in the margins of American society.

Otherwise, American workers are the world’s best-trained service dogs. As Jay Gould said confidently about America’s worker obedience: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” we would rather forsake truths, harm the innocent and sell Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, than jeopardize our job security. We receive orders and we carry them out. As well-trained dogs, we may whimper and whine but we don’t revolt.

Remembering that America’s founders once tamed wild frontiers into the mightiest industrial power the world had ever seen, it is painful to witness their descendants competing with each other — to show who is the most-obedient lapdog or the most-shameless butt-kisser of them all.

Jon Huer, retired professor and columnist for the Recorder, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.