labor

You may cure yourself of a depression by forcing yourself to perform, in rapid order and with excruciating concentration, half a dozen or so unpleasant chores, especially if they have long been postponed. This is a kind of homeopathic purgative, a treatment of like with like.

To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to seat over lonely labor, to be given the chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy. As everyone else, I love to dunk my crust in it. But alone, it is not a diet designed to keep body and soul together.

And we beseech you, brethren, to know them which labor among you, and are over you in the Lord, and admonish you:
And to esteem them very highly in love for their work's sake. And be at peace among yourselves.

All slave labor is forced labor. So are all forms of labor where an individual has not got the educational or fiscal means to stand on his own in making a free contract with an employer, or where that capitalist has acquired the political and social as well as the economic clout to prevent evenhanded terms from being respected. What passes for the rational legal concept of a "contract" is unknown in American conditions of fact, for the vast majority of cases: most people hire their own labor out under conditions of duress, and the employer one-sidedly dictates the terms. That is how we got to a condition where the minimum wage for the working poor is not a living wage, and is getting worse and worse. Modernity is not more civilized than antiquity because it has legally abolished slavery; it is merely more modernized in recognizing that it is far, far cheaper and more prudent to rent slaves by the hour than to own them, which means you have to assume responsibility for their upkeep and care.

Men give me some credit for genius.  All the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly.  Day and night it is before me.  I explore it in all its bearings.  My mind becomes pervaded with it.   Then the effort which I make is what the people call the fruit of genius.  It is the fruit of labor and thought.

[Networking] feels "fake" because we know it involves the deflection of our natural human sociability to an ulterior end. Normally we meet strangers in the expectation that they may truly be strange, and are drawn to the multilayered mystery that each human presents. But in networking, as in prostitution, there is no time for fascination. The networker is always looking over the shoulder of the person she engages in conversation, toward whatever concrete advantage can be gleaned from the interaction-- a tip or a precious contact. This instrumentalism undermines the possibility of a group identity, say, as white-collar victims of corporate upheaval. No matter how crowded the room, the networker prowls alone, scavenging to meet his or her individual needs.  

Among other things, [books by Bruce Doyle III and Mike Hernacki] explain the importance of the "winning attitude" I have been urged to adopt: a positive attitude "attracts" or "fulfils", depending on which author's weird science you go with, postiive results, with little or no action on your part required. Herein, too, lies the answer to the question I once posed ...: would it be enough just to fake a winning attitude? No way, according to Doyle:

'People who just pretend to have a positive attitude may be more acceptable, but they will still attract according to how they are really vibrating-- the energy they are emanating will attract their circumstances.'

The obvious liberal rejoinders come to mind: What about the child whose home is hit by a bomb? Did she have some bomb-shaped thoughtform that brought ruin down on her head? And did my [fired white-collar workers] boot-camp mates cause the layoffs that drove them out of their jobs by "vibrating" at a layoff-related frequency? It seems inexcusably cruel to tell people  who have reach some kind of personal nadir that their probem is entirely of their own making. ...

But from the point of view of the economic 'winners'-- those who occupy powerful and high-paying jobs-- the view that one's fate depends entirely on oneself must be remarkably convenient. It explains the winners' success in the most flattering terms while invalidating the complaints of the losers. Patrick's clients, for example, came to the boot camp prepared to blame their predicament on the economy, or the real estate market, or the inhuman corporate demands on their time. But these culprits were summarily dismissed in favor of alleged individual failings:depression, hesitation, lack of focus. It's not the world that needs changing, is the message, it's you. No need then, to band together to work for a saner economy or a a more human-friendly corporate environment, or to band together at all. 

Career coaches can perhaps be forgiven for using baseless personality tests [Myers-Briggs, Enneagrams, etc] to add a veneer of scientific respectability to the coaching process. But the tests enjoy wide credibility, not just among coaches, but among corporate decision makers. .. . So why is the corporate world, which we think of as so fixated on empirical, in fact quantifiable, measures of achievement like the "bottom line", so attached to these meaningless personality tests? One attraction must be that the tests lend a superficial rationality to the matching of people with jobs. ... Of course, if the function of the test is really ideological-- to promote the peg-in-hole theory of employment-- they do not have to be in any way accurate of predictors of performance of satisfaction. They serve more as underpinnings of corporate etiquette, allowing employers to rationalize rejection or dismissal in terms of an inadequate "fit". We believe that there is a unique slot for each person, the tests announce-- even though we may fail to find it in your particular case.

"Frying-Pan Jack and I were in that camp, that's where he said to me, he'd been tramping since 1927, 'I told myself in '27,  if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.' You don't have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir. He said, 'I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it's true that the only real life I had was the life of my  brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to someone for eight hours a day,  for their particular use, on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition? Fat chance!'"

Don't Mourn--Organize!