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in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

in the blind spot

Monthly Archives: November 2011

Sovereignty and Spooks

25 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power

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There were in ancient times many culturally acknowledged gods and demons with personal, local, or cosmic influence. Spirits were thought to account for a great deal of the day to day world, with recourse to powers, helpers, and operating methods unknown to mortals, and therefore capable of deeds which seemed miraculous. Each family devoted itself to the spirits of its dead, for example, expecting some help in return. Cities propitiated one or several local patron deities. As noted in an earlier posting, humans have imagined personalities in all sorts of natural phenomena such as trees, storms, and the universe as a whole. Emotion, purpose, or curiosity as explanations of events in the objective world have generally been preferred over ‘brute’ causal explanations, even when the imagined intelligent entity can’t pass the crucial test of carrying on an imitation game with us. Babies can do it but rocks and bushes do not do imitations.

Early philosophers rejected much of the world-view of good and evil spirits. Philosophical efforts were distinctive in removing rowdy and whimsical personalities from nature, the non-human part of the world. That was a main vector of ancient philosophy, a thinking out of nature without magical or spiritual assumptions, removing intelligences from nature. It was not accomplished at a single stroke, however. There were still important divinities in Plato and Aristotle, but they were more like impersonal forces, first or final causes without the capriciousness of persons. They were mainly characterized by eternal sameness rather than by the discretionary responsiveness of intelligence.

Materialism in Nature

Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers started materialist descriptions of nature in terms of elements: Water, Fire, Air, Earth, or combinations of these. Democritus of Abderra devised a theory of atoms in the void. The original program of materialism was to remove spooks from explanations of the world to liberate people from the fear of gods and of death, so to achieve existential happiness. Hellenistic Stoics and Epicureans defended the materialist metaphysics of Democritus as a secularizing project. In spite of their materialism, their focus was subjective and existential since the central question was how to use reasoning to manage fear and dread and live a happy life as an individual.

The philosophical campaign against unjustified attribution of intelligence to phenomena is still relevant, perhaps most importantly in considerations of sovereignty and nation states. Although nation states are pitched as semi-secular religions, they have no legitimacy as sacred powers. The assumed consent of people to function within a system of production and distribution, over which they have no effective control, can never accomplish the miraculous creation of a semi-divine sacred entity, the nation state. Yet each modern military/ industrial state is a territorial power demanding reverent devotion, worship, sacrifice, and obedience enforced by an iron fist of law, tax, and lethal military force. The state is an internally motivating culture of social control, accepting worship as a transcendent arbiter of life and death. However, states are merely mundane arrangements to protect a system for the concentration of wealth and power, and for armed forces recruitment. The state is focused on armed protection of accumulated private capital as well as of a hoard of national resources, treasure, and weapons. That is not entirely bad. States function as a framework for production of transferrable wealth, security of property and person, and decisions of justice. The state is the framework in which politics is acted out, and politics is class war (with elements of gender and inter-generational conflict) mediated into non-lethal forms. Politicians and government officials are political entrepreneurs and not prophets, not the voices of god or the hands of god, and not the voices or hands of some other spiritual entity arising out of the collective of the people.

Claims to legitimacy of sovereign power typically rely on the model of legitimacy established in ancient times from superstitions about gods and spirits, a mystery-based uber-parental ownership of worldly territories, including ownership of people. States still employ war to found sovereign authority, and so are based on terror and misery artfully made to appear sublime by a rhetorical shift of agency from the actual individuals in command to some aggrandized spiritual entity beyond accountability. An entity is invoked which is claimed to be superior to ordinary individuals and indeed sacred in some unexplainable and occult way. Human collectives certainly can be gigantic, terrifying, and unpredictably destructive, but that is as close to sacredness as they get. There is a fundamental identity between old-time religious mind-control based on terror of spirit-world spooks and that of sovereign elites in contemporary real-world societies.

Thinking and Freedom from Spooks

Freedom of thought is still rooted in the ancient philosophical struggle to be free of the oppressive fear of gods, ghosts, demons, and spooks of all kinds. In the transfiguration from Medieval Christendom to modernity, the centralization of social supervision characteristic of theocracy was not demolished but merely fragmented into a number of less all-embracing hierarchies, which learned to cooperate and compliment one another. Spooks continue to be identified as a variety of awesome abstract entities commanding patriotism such as the U.S.A., Russia, China, “the Dear Leader”, Capitalism, Islam, Christendom, IBM, Microsoft, the R.C.M.P. or even ‘the free world’. Modern societies are largely a landscape of mountainous commercial organizations. Every corporation is a mini-Vatican with its own brand-myth and corporate culture which includes company-spirit and a star-system of corporate celebrities. Corporations are not persons, they are spooks. Indeed, every high school is a training mini-Vatican with its religion of school spirit and sport team troops, its heroes and enemies. Fundamental questioning, criticism, or dissent is received like an offense against something sacred, like heresy. An appeal to the sacred answers all questions simply by killing thinking.

In their internal operations, corporations are force-fields of distorted reality, as detailed in a previous posting. Being presented externally as supra-individual persons with benign intentions and morality is just another face of the reality-distorting field they construct. Spooks are deliberately constructed distortions of reality for the purpose of diverting critical thinking and moral judgment away from organized crime, from acts which are unjust, immoral, or appalling, such as the mass killing and destruction of war; looting and despoiling the natural environment; disempowerment and exploitation of women and children for sexual or reproductive control; malicious blockade of a sub-group defined by race, ethnicity, or class; profiting from the misery of disadvantaged people; or evading just-process for the benefit of private interests. Given that reality, it is especially important to start questioning and investigating for injustice and criminality whenever any spooky ‘higher purpose’ or ‘greater good’ is invoked, whenever there is an appeal to something sacred or more awesome than the ordinary individual person.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Politics and the Personal Use of Thinking

18 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power, Subjectivity

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The Value of Stardom

There are important organizations promoting the concentration and centralization of property, power, and esteem, in a structure that makes up the social star system. Those organizations operate to express the beliefs, values, and tactics which achieve those concentrations and so create stardom. Stardom itself is the dominant value, and the organizations promote themselves as opportunities to achieve stardom. Stardom doesn’t have to be fame as played out in popular culture, but sometimes it is. The exercise of power and influence is not always ‘in the limelight’. The security of that system requires a nervous vigilance for threats and alternative visions which might divert energy away. There is an effort to spread the beliefs and values of stardom, and to promote their dominance in the community at large. A tsunami of star-system glamour-imagery is washed over public spaces and communications media. The message put about is that the world simply works this way, that the stars with remarkable accumulations must be permitted special liberties and immunities, must be admired and followed because they are the leaders who create and develop the community culture. In that way the star system functions as a social control mechanism.

Right-Wing Oversights and Misrepresentations

The star system as just described is the core element of right-wing political thinking. Devotion to stardom is devotion to inequality. So it is that the basic idea of the political right-wing is inequality itself. In addition, the claim is made that inequality is simply natural, and uniquely represents the spirit of nature.

There are fatal problems with these right-wing claims. Perhaps most important is the evidence that people do not need leaders or contracts to create cohesive social systems, language, or meaning in their lives. The creation of those fundamentals is broadly decentralized and nonhierarchical. Leadership is generally parasitic on innocently created social groups. Individuals do not need to be provided with identity by a collective or culture since we already have it with our subjectivity as described in previous blog posts. Additionally, that subjectivity is not savage instincts, lusts, aggression, delusional imaginings, or a blank hole to be filled with outside influences. It is a specific intelligent questioning which accumulates. It does not require close supervision or hierarchical placement to prevent it from harming itself or others.

Right-wing political rhetoric claims to champion simple justice. The appeal is to individuals who have accumulated property through work, diligent application of their abilities and energy, and perhaps personal risk. Such people seem justified in not wanting the rewards of work and talent to be sucked away to support people who might seem lazy and stupid to them. Fair enough, but neither does accomplishment entitle anyone to control, exploit, or torment the less accomplished, and that is an assumption that typically accompanies such an appeal to ‘justice’. The star system as a social control mechanism lurks behind the rhetoric of rugged individualism, and meritocracy is a typical star-system. It is also important to acknowledge that nobody accomplishes anything without a lot of externalities provided by the contributions of many people, externalities such as the stability of law, health care, education, infrastructure development and maintenance, a fruitful and healthy environment, maybe summed up as a healthy human interconnectedness.

Rugged individualism as manifested in star systems takes just as much centralized administration and control as equality. That is why right-wing political forces always balloon the size, powers, and immunities of military forces, police, prisons, and secret intelligence operations and simultaneously reduce civil rights and the transparency of authority. Private property accumulators are terrified that their stuff is going to be revealed to public scrutiny, damaged, destroyed, or stolen. The more property a person has the more psychological coddling they need to feel secure, and the more pressure they can afford to apply to public officials to provide it. That becomes extreme as social inequality increases.

Psychological War

The personal use of thinking is to exercise and experience some agency, initiative, and control in a world where so much is beyond control. That was the point of Stoicism and Hellenistic humanism generally. Hellenistic Epicureanism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Skepticism all developed ancient Greek heroism turned inward, the personal use of thinking to act as an individual force in the face of nature and the gods. Their teaching was not competitive, hierarchical, or star-system enabling. The message was a profoundly egalitarian call to exercise creative subjectivity no matter how small it may seem in relation to world-historical events. Feel the transcendence of your subjective intelligence. Find happiness in the freedom, creativity, and transcendence of it. Nurture yourself in happy creativity and Epicurean delight, even when the whole force of nature, gods, and culture works to drown you out and leave you silent. Cultural star-systems are important in those silencing spectacles. The personal use of thinking is still egalitarian. Philosophy has always been a presentation of the thinking of an individual person, not divine revelation or decree from occult inspiration or authority of any kind. It is thinking that can be considered and evaluated, and so thinking that is an invitation and portal to thinking for every individual. The gift of philosophy is validation of the power of individual thinking, and so the self-subsistence of individual identity, freedom, and self-possession.

Given the dominance and force of star-system culture and organization it is not too wild to characterize politics as psychological war raging around us and through us. The stream of messages from standard news and information organizations is a reality distorting campaign in support of systems of stardom. Star-system culture is an enemy trying to disable your agency and creative initiative. Inequality as a political value is an enemy to most people because it specifically discounts and writes off most people. That is the foundation of class war. In that psychological warfare the distribution of property, power, and esteem is far less important than the distribution of self-possession. That is the psychological battlefield on which the war rages between attempts to disempower and efforts to self-empower people at large. Stardom is the opposite of self-possession. The personal use of thinking is to wake up to self-possession.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Ground and Sky

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

≈ 2 Comments

We are Grounded

Ground is important to us because we are pressed against it. Ground is what dwellings and furnishings are supported on, so we can say that when we stand on a floor or rest in a chair we are still pressed against the ground. We have merely provided ourselves with a convenient shoe. Ground is what we plant gardens in, and sometimes bury treasure and our dead in.

Being pressed against ground involves first that ground draws us toward its own centre with a force we have come to call gravity. The ground also prevents us from approaching its centre. That exclusion is a general characteristic of ‘material’ objects, manifested in 1) resistance to change in their shape and integrity (resistance to penetration is a form of this) and, 2) resistance to change of place or movement (momentum or inertia). These resistances can be overcome if enough pressure is brought to bear. The effect is our being held at our point of contact on a surface, fetched up against an impenetrable, pressing, presence.

Jelly

Our own presence on the ground is a body whose material is mostly a translucent jelly, in surroundings that are often hostile or indifferent. Simple survival requires us to defend ourselves against the surroundings, to devise shelter from weather and predators and we have to eat our surroundings to stay alive. That work produces a sense of personal force against the environment, a kinesthetic force of personality, even in the face of weakness from hunger, fatigue, illness, and injury. Some parts of the environment are very good to eat and contribute to that force of personality in being eaten.

Our body of translucent jelly has cores of rigid bone, and sensitive vulnerability. Hold your hand to a strong light, and red and blue blood vessels are visible inside. It is living jelly that springs and vibrates. It is sometimes tough and stringy, sometimes soft and floppy but always changing shape, giving way under gravity, voluntary movements, or touches from outside. In the belly and in large muscle bundles in thighs and shoulders it has liquid qualities. Skin communicates its own surface luster and the shape and structure beneath: muscle bulges around the wands, balls, and sockets of bone, red-blue blood in its pattern of tubes and capillaries, subcutaneous fat. Sometimes the muscle, bone, and skin structure feels like a container for liquid guts and belly organs, deep waters of the body. Thin, tremulous bands of muscle cover those deep waters, holding them in a tough but elastic and sloshing cellular column.

Muscle-Frame Opening

From birth, except for rare occasions when we are falling in open space, we feel the ground pressing on that body. Our skin is sensitive to the pressure and vibration of touch, to textures and temperatures. It might seem that much of our attention throughout life would be directed at warding off such a continuous assault. Yet, it is not so, because we manage to overcome the holding pressure and move. Since we cannot overcome it all at once, like space rockets do, in a great push into orbit, we overcome it in quantities sufficient for a little movement, again and again and again. We adapt the muscle structure of our body to hold ourselves poised on ground against gravity, and as part of that alignment, we adapt part of our body structure, a pair of movable limbs, as a flexible contact capable of pushing against ground with enough force to move away from the point of contact. We make our contacts with ground into a routine, a simple repeatable stepping, that we perform without much attention.

Even more important are sensations of strain that muscles make across joints in the bone frame of the body. A very rich and extensive array of distinctions is available in these sensations. Moving a particular finger is clearly distinguishable from moving a different one, and both are distinguishable from moving a leg or changing the posture of the back. A small movement is precisely distinguishable from a larger one, a slow one from a fast one, a slightly resisted one from a strongly resisted one.

Sensations of muscle-frame tension are sensations of directed pushing against a resistance or holding off a pressure. We sense the solidity of the object upon which we are bearing and the pressure of our body against the object. In ordinary standing we sense in our muscle tension the firmness of the footing and the force with which our body is pressing against that footing, normally the standard force of gravity on the particular mass of our body.

We are moving creatures in our very structure, and, except when we are falling, our movements are resisted by gravity at least, and quite often also by various obstacles. The space outside the surface of ground is largely not occupied by impenetrable presences, so if we propel ourselves in an unoccupied direction we move.

We use ground itself to propel ourselves. By its qualities of (relative) rigidity and immovability, ground provides us with something to push away from in directions we pick. We use it to push against when we want to travel in an open direction, and when we want to stop. This constitutes the region along ground’s surface as space in which we carry on controlled movements and play out our force of personality.

That we have enough leg power to overcome the holding pressure of ground does not negate the continuous presence of that holding pressure. Our overcoming it is not an annihilation of it, nor even a suspension of it. Our overcoming it is always a cost to us. It is an effort in which our vitality is reduced, and it always requires us to make up the reduction with food and rest.

When the only means you have of moving is the power of your own muscles the flat ground virtually rises up around you and closes you off from other places. Ground’s holding pressure constitutes a virtual upward slope, a gradual but important barrier to movement. Because of the costs of moving and barriers in specific directions we are easily marooned, stranded, at a particular place and with the material values of that place. The limits of kinesthetic force, costs of moving, and the resistance of barriers maroon each person at some particular place or locality most of the time. The material particulars of the place determine what becomes of the needs we suffer, what pleasures we have, what shelter we have, and what we are nourished or hurt by.

Down, Up, and Sideways

Ground itself is opaque, so our orientation is mainly lateral to the pressure of ground. Our lines of movement go along the surface rather than into it. Not only do we have to give a lot of attention in the direction of our movement to avoid mishaps, but also the very possibility of moving through a region invites attention there for opportunities, resources, and dangers. We put the continuously pressing presence away from the centre of our attention, but not too far away. In doing so we constitute the direction to the ground as a fixture of our orientation, as “down” and “under”.

Places very near to one another are yet very different in their relative accessibility. Most of us most of the time find ourselves between two great inaccessible regions. Ground itself is one of these and it has in most places a very abrupt beginning, a surface.

The other great region of inaccessibility stands roughly parallel to the surface of the earth and extends in the opposite direction from “down”. It is not marked by a surface but rather a gradual increase in inaccessibility. It is the sky above the surface of the earth. About half the time it is full of light, sometimes glaring, sometimes hazy. When the sky is not full of light it offers a very different spectacle. Given these conditions the portion of the world accessible to us is rather ‘tablet’ shaped on the medium scale, a narrow space between an interesting sort of ceiling and a floor.

Although an individual’s sensitivities and perception are local and anchored at a locality, we are aware of the vastness of the world in which we are placed. We are aware that the vastness we do not see or know may contain and deliver threats and hazards. The moment is always unfinished, never possessed of a fixed essence. There is more to come, which we have a thought (a hand) in creating. We live in that ‘not yet’ as if it were an opening in which we might create a larger, unfolded, form of ourselves. Our questions point us into it. The light of our questions beams into the ‘not yet’ opening, the future.

When momentum does not account for what happens, a person tries to fit events into patterns from subjectivity, assigning subjectivity to otherwise separate and different presences. To recognize intelligence, other than personal subjectivity, is to recognize an entity moved by intuitions of predicament, value, and opportunity, a memory-based sense of the relevance of things, a sense of the future, and problems of achieving presence in the world. It is to distinguish a voice, actions which express desires, judgments, and sensitivities instead of movements due to mechanical momentum. You cannot see or touch another intelligence. You have to sense it in action. For example imitative action, especially mimicry with an original addition, is a declaration and communication of intelligence. Rocks and bushes do not imitate.

We recognize intelligence too much, sensing human-like personalities in the form of gods, ghosts, or spirits ‘behind’ all kinds of natural events and irregular occurrences. The assignment of intelligence to separate beings changes a person’s presence in the world into a being-with these others. Being-with is a sense of having an existence larger than personal privacy, of self-experience as something others might be aware of, share, and possibly meddle in.

When sensing personality outside ourselves we are recognizing questions and intentions that are not our own, and so recognizing other entities acting from intelligence. We are making sense of movements of people and animals by recognizing intelligence as a force. Empathy is difficult in that awareness of external personalities. Fear and enmity seem to be common. Toward the external personalities identified as gods, people do not feel empathy but fear. Still, beings moved by intelligence sometimes shelter each other from the boundless darkness, uniting by imitation as well as by physical closeness. The first experience of other intelligence is probably mother.

Humans have imagined personalities in all sorts of natural phenomena such as trees, storms, and the universe as a whole, and we might next imagine personality in computers and robots. Desire, purpose, or curiosity as explanations of events in the objective world have generally been preferred over ‘brute’ causal explanations. “Somebody did it.” “A spirit did it.” “God did it.” These are still accepted among educated people as sufficient accounts of why and how something happened. There is even an inclination to fall back onto such act-of-personality explanation where it is clearly not appropriate: “There is a little guy inside the machine who counts the money you put in and drops out the change.” Anyone who claims belief in god, gods, or a deity is irrevocably committed to subjectivity and its acts of reason, desire, or questioning as the final, ultimate, original, and primordial creative source and cause of everything that exists.

Living has to be maintained continually by effort. We need to be taking in food, water, and breathable air which are unevenly and thinly scattered. The survival of a body requires coverings and shelter. Embodiment brings the necessity to work. Work is required to produce food, shelter, clothing, and other necessities of life. That is especially problematic because everybody wants to escape from work to enjoy and wonder at the mysteries of nature and intelligence. It has been customary, culturally structured, for people to unload tedium, fatigue, discomfort, and filth onto others when they can. Based on that, tedium, fatigue, and filth, ordered onto you by someone in a more powerful position, are defining qualities of the experience of work. Humans have always had disease, injury, fatigue, hunger, weakness, and old age. Anchored to the ground, the human body is at the mercy of wild nature, disease, parasites, predators, and hostile marauders, in a situation that is often out of control.

Considering all this, humans worry about survival and well-being, and not just because of uncertainty about invisible spirits. Such worries support formation of collectives. There is a longing for grandeur, the supra-individual nation, social-class, race, Church, or even civilization.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

There is lots of evidence that, for most of human presence, the landscape of the night sky looked far better than the clutching ground. In a world without urban crowding and smog, and without artificial lights, the awesome beauty and fascination of the universe as revealed in the night sky likely had an importance quite lost to modern minds, in fact seeming more real than the world on the ground. Life on the ground has been nasty, brutish, and short. People struggle, fight and run, get sick, hurt, tired, weak, and enslaved. People looked up at night and saw a landscape of soft light. It was huge, bigger by far then the turf below, and movements were few and slow. The daily drift from east to west is unvarying, recurring in a continuous pattern. The movement made it seem alive, yet without vulnerability.

Because the rotating pattern of stars does not change, in contrast to things close to the Earth, including the moon and planets, the starry sky was taken as a model of eternal being. It occurred to some that the realm of stars did not change because it was a vision of perfection. The fact that stars are immeasurably high and distant, pure light, and incomprehensible did not stand in the way of interpreting them as sacred and peculiarly real.

The night sky was an early inspiration for the idea of a transcendent world, everlasting, completely primal, and sacred. That world was imagined to have a different kind of Being, subtle, ethereal, pure luminosity, and immune from organic growth and aging processes, wear, tear, random change, or decay, the Being of Eternity. It was separated and different from the ordinary surroundings of human lives, but there is a historical pattern of people believing that the sky above creates and moves the earth below, the idea of the sky as a top-down causal and creative force. It seemed to be the foundation and source of ordinary surroundings, apparently creating them as a sort of imperfect echo or model of itself. The sky is the primordial clock, apparent driver of time. The night sky is always drifting or coasting (and falling) around a set of complicated cycles. Intelligence brings time to the brute actuality of nature. The great firmament of the night sky had a message for intelligence: together we hold time.

Intelligence has an analogous relation to the brute actuality of unintelligent nature. Both stars and subjective intelligence separately were sources of an impression of a kind of Being more subtle and sublime than the material world-of-work, but the star-world is easier to point toward. People of ancient times used qualities from the star-world to express intuitions of their self-experience, of intelligence and thought. The star-world gave them an image of an ethereal, subtle, and present-but-separate kind of existence suggesting thought itself. In the delicate beauty of the clear night sky they thought they saw a reflection of their own invisible Being.

Interpretation of the star world has been complicated. An element of gnosticism asserted that events in the world experienced by people are controlled and determined by the great stellar patterns of the zodiac. These celestial powers were sometimes conceived as demons, fallen angels, or lesser gods called archons. Those powers author the fate of individuals and humanity as a whole, but they are not ultimate powers. There is a higher and greater power which can be touched by individual persons. Inward awareness and contemplation of the highest deity can achieve release from the zodiac powers, and profound self-determination. The gnostic claim is that authentic self-determination is the best life, and it can be achieved only by that very special inward mental accomplishment.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Employment as a Force-Field of Distorted Reality

08 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Hierarchy, Leadership

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People are objectified in terms of the job they perform, and they are diminished and misrepresented by that. Within organizations there is an assumption that the job category occupied by an individual is a representation of that person’s character and personality, and individuals are treated differently according to their place on the organization chart. There is an assumption that individuals choose a job as a way of expressing personal identity. However, people do not base personal identity on being fitted into a box such as a job category or organization. Instead, we construct a sense of identity with the whole range of Plato’s “three-part soul” (from the Republic): appetites that inspire us, impulses to make a distinctive mark on the world, and innocent curiosities. Of course we should add considerations such as loving attachments also. Happiness is related to the flow and fate of these and other personal creative impulses. An individual’s participation with an organization may have connections with some of these but will not completely engage any of them. That is how an individual’s “fit” with his or her job is a kind of being squeezed into a box which is too small.

People cannot be happy if they have to become smaller than they really are to “perform” jobs, and they always do. There are the fragile egos of supervisors to contend with and often those persons do not like to see the people they supervise as anything but smaller than themselves. The pretense required is profound and generally pushed to a level of semi-consciousness because it is just the way the world is.

Incumbents of higher office like to understand themselves as part of a meritocracy instead of, say, a ‘greed-ocracy’, an ‘ego-ocracy’, or a ‘bully-ocracy’. Everyone must collude in the myth that the supervisory system is a meritocracy. The result is that workers must act toward those incumbents as if their merit were greater in some general unspecified way. Every worker must be careful not to give holders of higher power anything that might give offense which could be a motive for retribution or disfavour. The higher you go on the organization chart the more calculated is everything presented to you. That might make day to day life pleasant for higher levels but is a stress for everyone else and can result in disaster.

Everything management communicates is calculated to uphold the meritocracy myth and present supervisors as “on the ball”, decisive, and smart. Much is hidden so employees do not have opportunity to assess and find fault with decisions and practices. People are unhappy at work because of false inequalities which are normalized there, indignities of hierarchical inequality. There are special indignities of inequality for women and visible minorities. Whole categories of people have the experience of being diminished by the culture of their employment, and by the general culture of objective market-values. In addition there are distortions of world-view imposed by corporate culture.

Below grand narratives of general contentment, there are complaints and dissatisfactions. There are ways in which working a job is similar to being on the rack: compulsion, insult, indignity, fatigue, sweat, and tedious repetition. People make the best they can of these conditions because they need money to survive. Even Stoics admitted that it is not possible to be happy on the rack. The counter-examples, martyrs and saints, fit a religious-style appeal to higher inspirational powers. Nobody could defend the claim that the only employees who perform well are those who accept their employer organization as a quasi-divine inspirational power. Yet within organizations there is a culture of denial that doing a job is often intrinsically repulsive. That is a reality distorting force.

It is still possible to have episodes of fun at work. Unpleasant aspects can be “bracketed” psychologically and so placed at some emotional distance from the present moment, much as people normally know that there is a great deal of misery in the world but insulate that knowledge from day to day routine and so avoid being crushed emotionally by grief in the world at large. Everyone needs a lot of this every day. Indeed there are always positives to employment that are good reasons to be happy: evading the great indignities of unemployment and poverty, and having access to things bought with earned money.

If bracketing off negative experience becomes important in an organization’s culture, then that culture has much in common with a collective delusion in which people agree to support one another in focusing on a strictly edited misrepresentation of reality. The whole culture of organizational hierarchy says, “Be very careful what you do or say, because it is not safe to be spontaneous!” That must be quite common, since the challenge of “speaking truth to power” is proverbial. Power is a feature of organizational hierarchy.

The organization of work is an oddly private domain, like an authoritarian family. “A man’s home is his castle” is still interpreted to mean that ‘the boss’ can do what he chooses to do within his organizational domain, and no one may question it. All values are trivialized by the overriding value of stardom itself in that star-system hierarchy.

It is remarkable how little difference has been made in employment organizations, in the organization of production, by scientific research in social sciences and psychology. It has made work more mechanical and formulaic.

These are remarkable realities which co-exist with the now ever-decreasing benefit-packages, pension plans, and decent pay-scales provided with the best modern employment. These abusive and injurious realities form a pattern of corporate value-culture undermining each individual’s interpretation of his or her own experience.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

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