Some Thoughts on Modern Work

The modern economic system has two kinds of people: Obedient workers and surplus individuals.
You could call the obedient workers "career driven" people, but I'd say that's a euphemism for the actual personality type we're dealing with.

The greatest skill asked today of people is to be obedient. If you can accept whatever dehumanization is asked of you, you will succeed in this society. You're expected to be able to jump through all the hoops, without getting stuck in any of them, and if you get stuck in any, you're moved from category 1 to category 2.

The problem is that as long as everyone continues obediently executing every single ritual and a surplus of people remains, more and more complex rituals will be introduced that are only meant to separate the most obedient from the rest of society. First you need a high school degree, then a bachelor's, now a master's, if you don't want to be at the bottom of the pyramid. Since there is still a surplus of people, we now have unpaid internships, to pick the most docile of the docile.

Employers increasingly ask for a "4 year college degree". This is no longer a form of selecting for any particular skills (hence why any 4 year degree will do), it's selecting for a personality type that can hand in assignments in time and ahead of deadlines, that is popular enough to work well in groups, memorize arbitrary factoids, fill in meaningless paperwork, and overall be as malleable as a piece of play-doh.

The most successful are privileged with an inhuman ability to be obedient, without ever becoming demoralized, and always able to give whatever is asked of them. This is how they manage to get the type of nice jobs they have.

I see dehumanization as anything that seeks to rid you of your identity as an actual human being. The prime aspect of modern Western jobs, as compared to those in primitive societies, is that the appearance of class is eradicated, and the job contract is depicted as a voluntary engagement between two mutually dependent parties.

"Why do you want to work as a greeter at Walmart?"
"Well, because I would like to develop my communication skills, and I like to work in a team."

This is a unique form of humiliation, as you do not just chain a man's body, but you chain his spirit.

In slavery and similar historical situations, there was at least an understanding that the relationship was not based on consensus, but upon power struggles. As an example, a peasant who escaped his servitude for a year had legally become a free man. Most peasants did not choose this option, because they generally had it pretty good.

So how did we get in this situation? The reason, I would argue, is because we have lost our sense of class consciousness. Today, every mom and dad believes they're raising the next lawyer or doctor, because they were taught that they live in a meritocracy, and hence, if the child fails to become a lawyer or a doctor, the child has obviously failed. Worse off are the children born to lawyers and doctors that fail to live up to the expectation to become a lawyer/doctor, but they are generally too ashamed to even speak about their plight.

Part of the problem is the fact that parents believe that their child's intelligence entitles the child to move up the social ladder, whereas in reality it is obedience (more commonly referred to as discipline by the obedient) that allows the child to move up on the social ladder. No parent says "Well, my son will make a perfect med student, because he has no problem with being humiliated and constantly told what to do, every day of the week, with very little time off". No, they think their son will make a perfect med student, because he is intelligent. Hence they are met with disappointment.

It's inevitable that we have a sense of power struggle between different groups in society. There is no society that has successfully managed to make everyone equal. Even if we all earned an equal salary, people would still rather work as a college professor or a TV reporter than as a cubicle-slave. The problem emerges when people no longer recognize that they are part of a group, but instead believe themselves to have the ability to escape from one group into another.

We have to recognize as a society that social relationships are not based on consensus, but on power relationships that are difficult to change. This will at least allow us to maintain a sense of spiritual dignity.

What separates medieval labor from the modern work week is that medieval people chose their own pace of work. For the majority of medieval peasants, work for their lord constituted a minority of the time they spent working, and most work was autonomous. People grew their own crops, that they sold themselves, built their own homes, made their own clothing, etcetera. What this means is that workers had the ability to put their own creativity and personality into their labor.

Jacques Ellul wrote about this in the beginning of "The technological society". Because tools were made as one complete whole, medieval swords and ploughs had careful decorations, that differed from location to location, as they were the product of an artisan and his personal view on how such a tool should look.

Why this difference? When most labor is agricultural in nature, there simply isn't that much work to do. You can't make the plants grow faster through personal labor. Today on the other hand, we have the ability to... create jobs. Every politician promises us that he will create jobs, and hence, what happens in practice is that everyone is forced to take part in salaried labor, even when it represents a waste of their time.