Post #139: Employment and Its Discontents

10 Sep. 2024

     The Marxist orthodoxy has busied and exhausted itself for more than a century and a half now with denouncing employment in the usual sense, by the proprietors of businesses, as inherently exploitative. The value added, they argue, belongs to the workers and is illegitimately appropriated, owing to their power, by the owners of the means of production.

     Much previously private property was brutally confiscated on these grounds and transferred into supposedly public hands. For employees, alas, nothing very fundamental changed. They still had to put up with supervisors and bosses, and not usually better ones. The work became less arduous in some cases, at the consumer’s expense, but the terms of employment usually deteriorated over time rather than improving as promised. Certainly they did not keep up with what was happening in free-market economies. (“You pretend to work, and we pretend to pay you” went the old joke in the command economies of yesteryear.)

     These pleasing red fiction, to those who took themselves to be the intellectual avant-garde of the coming communist utopia, never appealed much to the common run of mankind, who have been far more concerned, when it was left to them, about remuneration and benefits than about the supposedly alienated quality of labor. For a long time they dreaded unemployment far more than the horrors of employment, and alienation was brought out for ceremonial purposes only, rather than with any serious hope of remedying what most workers did not find particularly objectionable, so long as the compensation package was right. They’ve usually seen it, in the pragmatic light of common-sense, as an exchange not very different from others: my time for access to the goods and services implied in pay.

     Yet the irritation with having to “sell yourself” in this manner has never gone away, and it has probably tended, most of the time, to be strongest among those with least to complain about. Sweat-shop workers groan under the burden of practical vexations—working hours, pacing, breaks and time off, workplace safety, urgent medical leave to go see a doctor—not the abstract injustice of having to work for pay. To get such employment and escape rural poverty, they might have lined up in the rain, for miles, hours on end. It’s professors and trust-fund babies who reject the employed condition per se (“wage slavery”) as demeaning and humanly intolerable. Marx himself never really worked for a living, from what I know, beavering away at the British Library instead, on Engels’ handouts. Go figure.

     Not that the distaste for labor is exclusive to Marxist academic types. Thorstein Veblen proposed an entire scheme of economic interpretation, far from Marxist but in some ways even more hard-hitting (and certainly more compelling), in which employment is not unjust so much as inherently dishonorable. The honorable way of life is that of the hunt and the raid, the life of exploit and exacting goods and services by threat of force from those weaker than you are. The highest mark of class, in a ready extension of the principle, is simply the blatant and conspicuous waste of precious resources—ideally suited to demonstrate not in words but in deeds that you are so rich and powerful that you need not concern yourself with self-preservation in the least. Paradoxically at first, but with an incontrovertible logic of its own, the greater the distance to the things that sustain human life, the greater the prestige, not because the mighty of the earth need sustenance any less than lesser mortals, but because they can take their own provisioning for granted, as others cannot. To be more usefully productive and help provide for the common necessities of mankind could never, in justice, be considered wrong. But from on high, that is, from the inherently disdainful vantage point of the Veblenian elegant classes, anything utilitarian looks indistinguishable from the base and vulgar. If it cannot quite be dismissed as inherently contemptible, on account of its evident utility, it is nevertheless, as an object of care, categorically unfit for the lofty attentions of gentlemen of the old description, or their ladies.*

     Neither the Marxian nor the Veblenian perspectives are in the pink of health there days; they linger at the margins, but without the unspoken and unquestioned respectability that they once enjoyed among their respective votaries. Good riddance, perhaps. But a strange discomfort has taken their place, no longer carefully theorized as before, but more lackadaisical and diffuse. Why endure a job merely to put bread on the table, when it has become so abundant in the world? (And who wants to eat bread anyway: let them eat cake, or organic carrots, or boutique carrot cake!) Why earn a living by the sweat of one’s brow when one could spend one’s precious time gambling on meaningless but inevitable market noise, or find some idiotic niche activity that others will want to “follow”? Why not become an “influencer” or other such publicity hound who can convert, in the most modern of alchemist’s moves, being known (not to use a cruder physical analogy) directly into gold, without the quality of the product itself being more than a token concern? Fool’s gold or not, what counts is that the debased currency will be accepted by others, that any folly of yours will find its match in the follies of your contemporaries.

     Big names don’t necessarily get so outsized for doing anything especially well. Sometimes it may be so; more commonly, it’s a matter of striking a temporary nerve, for better or for worse, or it just happens for no good reason at all, and the reward comes largely from being known itself, sui generis, with only the most tenuous connection to what one happens to be known for, which is usually an afterthought, when it is not altogether forgotten in the hubbub. With such vast swaths of our entertainment-driven economy converted into a giant casino with any imaginable game for fame and riches on offer—something Neil Postman warned about in graphic colors forty years ago already, and Paul Krugman reiterated in his millennial musings for The New York Times Magazine in 1996**—why bother with something as hopelessly humdrum and annoying as bread-and-butter employment with an outfit (you choose the industry) that produces some semi-tangible return on investment and not just bragging rights in the virtue-signaling and trend-chasing parade, or a few lottery tickets for the IPO-jackpot drawings (the casino again, but for the more snobbish clientele than the online-poker proles and the celebrity suckers). But no, that would be so, like, twentieth-century…

     How much easier to brush the silly idea off by making an even sillier face, retreat to the comfortable cave of your ingrown phone, and click the unpleasant sensations away. Sulk if necessary, or plead trauma if pressed. Next. (Believe me, I too would dearly like to click away the unpleasant sensations;  they are altogether too much for my feeble equanimity. Perhaps you could all be settled on some remote colony in outer space, as per Musk’s vision: I would be all for it if I could only get myself to believe that you would make it there, rather than changing your mind two hours into the enterprise, on account of inadequate phone coverage.)

     Not that I am any stranger to the keen distaste for having to go to work (or worse still, having to look for a job, horror of horrors). I’ve done both in all-too many configurations that I remember with acute discomfort: a paper route, several kitchens, stacking yogurt at a department store, a beer stall, a beverage counter, office work of the dreariest kind, a book store, and possibly a few more workplace traumas whose memory I have not yet recovered, as too frightful to confront. The teaching jobs too have come in many varieties (not to mention the endless applications, by the hundreds), with the saving grace that they have generally been more forgiving and congenial than what came before. But my escapes always felt narrow, the dreads miles wide, and anyway the saga continues, so I am not ready to breath any sighs of relief.

     Not to belabor the point, I understand the problem well enough, and I feel it acutely—not on Marxist grounds (too contrived) or from a Veblenian angle (much truth in it, only too hard-edged to be altogether bearable), but on the ancient philosophical principle, canonically expressed by Aristotle, that a life of well-used leisure, the contemplative and philosophical life, that is, the life well-lived, requires a measure of material independence. This I’ve never had, and my existence from paycheque to paycheque (in a few good years: in many more bad ones, from deficit to deficit, without land in sight) has tormented me for decades. I am not proud of it, and I would gladly wish it away if the fairy were to give me a golden opportunity. Only unlike the current crop, I can put my miseries, such as they are, in perspective, and shut up about them in most contexts, namely around everyone whose living looks incomparably harder than mine. Easily 95 percent of mankind, I would estimate, not by way of boasting (I wouldn’t dream of doing so with my weakness!), but with deep regret and profound respect for so much patiently borne drudgery that I could not endure for a day.

     Great fortunes, it has been said, and great careers too, are not made in a day or even a lifetime, but take two or three generations to make. The foundations are laid with back-breaking toil and meagre returns; upon those modest beginnings (blood, sweat, and tears indeed) something bigger is eventually built up. The third generation then reaps the full rewards and perhaps begins frittering the hard-won harvest away. By the fourth generation, the sense of entitlement has become unshakable, whatever substance remains, or not.

     Great brats likewise are not the product of a season. The war-generations bleed, dig, toil, and die; with their children, smug self-indulgence enters the picture along with the beginnings of affluence and a thin silver lining of naïve but at least sincere idealism. Which, getting disappointed, as was inevitable, opens the doors to disillusionment and confusion, hand in hand with efforts at reconstruction and stabilization: thus the transition to the grandchildren of the wars. By now the blood has long dried, the walls on which it was once sprayed have fallen, the wounds have closed and left behind only old scars; the very soil has healed, even around Verdun, the horror has receded from memory, and history comes to an end for a while, as affluence displaces grinding poverty as the characteristic human condition—the age of the brat has dawned.

     I understand their discomfort and their deep need for infantile remedial measures, these pitiable strawberries and snowflakes that are entering the adult world so reluctantly and tentatively in many cases, when the inevitable can no longer be put off. (Peter Pans I have called them, in #126, with no intent to flatter; perhaps they are so far gone that they will take it as a compliment anyway.) What awaits them, at work or anywhere else, is not pretty—never has been, never will be, despite all the shiny surfaces and pretenses that are commonly put up around the sordid banalities of everyday working life. An endless Tupperware party, in most cases, as a friend of mine once put it to me, or a honky-tonk parade. That it could all be so much worse, and usually has been in the course of human events, should offer some consolation; but alas, much of the potential good news may be getting canceled in a cruel twist of historical irony.

     Arrived at what could be singularly commodious circumstances, it seems the rules of the game have been getting redefined. A blinding hunger for coin has, of course, been man’s most typical preoccupation for as long as there has been gold or silver or any other money; but to amplify this crude inducer of misery and maximize its deranging potential, a more refined obsession with net-worth data is very useful, ideally made available at a click for any imaginable figure of prominence worldwide. (It is important that the hunger for getting rich not be encumbered with any particular purpose or directed to any concrete end. Any such solidity might help to ground the mad frenzy in some kind of reality beyond itself, which must not be if the derangement is to be made perfect.)

     Next, be sure to spread the habit of ranking absolutely everything by performance, or what passes for it, throughout as much of human society as you can, and implicate everyone in constantly making shallow judgments of this sort, assigning stars to others as if they were judges at an all-encompassing beauty pageant. Finally, round it all off by establishing a new ideal of life (transposed as much as possible to a parallel, virtual reality) whereby what counts is not striving for physical happiness and accomplishment (by whatever measure catches your fancy), thus not becoming a successful hedonist if that were ever possible (a dead-end, to be sure, but one with some living to be done before one hits the wall), but merely convincing others, to the point of bitter envy, that you have succeeded where they have not. (The fact that you are, in reality, no happier than they means not your defeat, but your triumph: you have fooled them into believing your life superior, and that is all that counts!)

     Bingo: not a drop of hot blood or guts or real passion required; no inch of skin in the game needed, not a trace of those “strong, lusty, red-eyed devils” that, according to Marlow in Heart of Darkness, “sway and drive men—men, I tell you”:

But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly… They wandered here and there like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.

As such scenes of bad magic require, we find, in the middle of it all, a steaming cauldron with the wicked witches’ brew whose preparation I outlined above, guaranteed to poison the mind immediately upon impact, and more than that, not only easily brought to a boil and kept on a merciless simmer with virtual ingredients alone, but acquiring its maximum potency when it is kept furthest away from anything that might give it weight and gravity by connecting it to any more sanguine human passions!***

     A generation that has grown up on such skewed parameters does not deserve loathing, contemptible as they may appear. They did not make themselves, after all, one might say in their defense—though I do wonder about their infernally over-developed herd-instinct: is that not the driving engine of the whole nasty mechanism, and is it not theirs, if anything is? Be that as it may, guilty or not, what is so pitiful calls for compassion. Of course the cohorts in question are incapable of seeing themselves, and perhaps anyone, in such a harsh light: they shrink from severities, these lilies of the field, save social ostracism, at whose subtle gradations they excel, and in which they are setting unprecedented standards of ruthless cunning and mercilessness.

      No doubt they imagine themselves the very flower of the species, these night-shade growths, not clinging creepers or luxuriating weeds. Man lives by his conceits, and woman no less, by hers; in that respect, at least, the current lot is probably no weaker or worse than the devils that preceded them. As for the prospects of recovery, which would require a shocking admission, to oneself not least, of how poor a figure one is really cutting before higher judges than oneself or one’s times—it seems unlikely. That the study of history and the classics (note the lower-case) has been quietly abolished in much of the supposedly educated world is probably no coincidence. Just as well: perhaps what the current lot would see in the mirror would be too cruel for anyone to tolerate. (Or maybe even this could be shrugged off? I wouldn’t put it beyond them.)

     Let us hope that I am merely fantasizing, that the historical angle I am imagining is either mistaken or wrong-headed, and that our brave new world looks a living hell only to a few curmudgeonly old farts. As one of the youngsters in question had the cheek to say to me the other day, in  Berlin, where postmodern sentiments are perhaps most truly at home (#132), “The problem will have to get solved biologically”—meaning, by the dinosaurs dying off.

     “Perhaps so,” I replied, more than a little taken aback by what he did not even understand to be effrontery. “But we are not quite dead yet, and you may expect us to put up a fight on the way out.”

     “I know,” he murmured with averted eyes, very meekly and sadly. It would have been impossible not to feel sympathy with him then.

*A very abbreviated and simplified version of the argument that Veblen advances, to devastating effect, in the first four chapters of his Theory of the Leisure Class. It would be hard to explain, without some resort to Veblenian thinking, why there should be a market, among economically savvy human beings, for cars ten or a hundred times more expensive than a highly serviceable mid-range model, when one might hope to get, by any reasonable appraisal, not more than fifty percent more car for one’s money, at most (when all is said and done and the loud pretenses to the contrary have been laid aside as evident self-deceptions, though perhaps sincerely believed). The inadequacy of the conventional, utility-focused angle becomes apparent when one considers that the practical benefit of fancier models can even be demonstrably lower than that of more economical alternatives, without therefore diminishing the appeal of the former in the least. A Lamborghini in stop-and-go urban traffic not only fails to perform impressively, it underperforms a Toyota Camry! It is not meant to provide a better ride, but to attract attention more reliably, and that is just the beginning.

     To be economically savvy in the conventional sense, that is to say, concerned with value for money and the efficient use of scare resources, may be admittedly virtuous, but it is never elegant. To establish a claim to the latter, one must, among many other things, be visibly comfortable squandering precious resources with no  discernible disquiet over the egregious waste. Hence the Lamborghini. (Sure it provides employment to lesser mortals: so do Honda and Toyota, in much larger numbers, perhaps even with better benefits.) It is also here, not coincidentally, that the modernized dividing line runs between the bourgeois ethic and the aristocratic code. (The more archaic version, discussed at some length by Schopenhauer in chapter IV of his Aphorisms, was drawn and enforced around the traditional nobleman’s “honorable” readiness to force compliance and submission via the threat of violence in general and the duel in particular.)

     What to the bourgeois is a distinguishing virtue (frugality and economic prudence), to the traditional aristocrat has ever been merely petty, déclassé, and altogether unworthy of notice (witness the nobleman’s haughty disdain for tradesmen’s bills as opposed to “debts of honor” incurred by gambling), except perhaps in derision and mockery. Both classes may come to acquire, or affect, traits of the other—such that a modern aristocrat wishing to appear economically prudent may become as common a sight as a bourgeois playing the wastrel—but these are hybrid forms, not pure specimen.

**Postman’s all-too prescient prophecies about amusing ourselves to death I have mentioned enough times before (see #26 and #64) to fear repeating myself. The book should be mandatory reading for everyone under fifty. Krugman’s piece on “The Future” appeared on 29 Sep. 1996 (p. 106). I quote: “Luckily [for some, ed.] the same technology that has made it impossible to capitalize directly on knowledge has also created many more opportunities for celebrity. The 500-channel world [if only, ed.] is a place of many subcultures, each with its own culture heroes [quotation marks, please, ed.]; there are people who will pay for the thrill of live encounters not only with divas but with journalists, poets, mathematicians, and even economists [a Nobel helps, or even a Riksbank Prize, ed.]. When Andy Warhol predicted a world in which everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, he was wrong [right, he should have written everyman, in one word, ed.]: if there are indeed an astonishing number of people who have experienced celebrity, it is not [only, ed.!] because fame is fleeting but because there are many ways to be famous in a society that has become incredibly diverse [incredible does not imply laudable or admirable, ed.]. Still, the celebrity economy has been hard on some people—especially those of us with a scholarly bent [Amen, ed.].”

***Such is the depressive potency at issue here that one should not be surprised to see mood disorders soaring, even after the impact of drastically changed diagnostic dynamics has been factored in (as too often it is not). The more surprising thing is that anyone of reasonably sound mind should be able to survive such a devastating onslaught at all, especially given how peer-pressure reinforces it to levels probably unimaginable for outsiders. Nor should one try to imagine it too vividly, lest one’s residual powers of mental self-defense give way in the attempt.

P.S.: What is to me so disturbing, nay distressing, clearly cannot apply to anything as broad as an entire generation (something I already conceded in my rather severe note to #126, the one to which I also refer a little further down). It is a climate of opinion I am talking about, a spreading mental bug that is by no means exclusive to the younger cohorts, or universal among them, but that has taken hold of them to an alarming degree.

     No doubt there is much happening with the young today that is laudable, even admirable, and cause for hope; how could there not be, among so many millions in such dynamic times? Even where my unfavorable impressions do apply, it is only a relatively few, worldwide at least, who actually live as I describe (or parody, arguably). Behind them, however, are a great many who expect or at least aspire to do so eventually—and that is my main concern. We have not just taken some decidedly bad cultural turns, it seems to me, but our very thinking about the good life is in the process, I fear, of getting vitiated on a grand scale—leaving the old life of the mind, once as proud a ship as the Titanic, though also as flawed and fallible, to sink every day a little further into a vast sea of vulgarity that is as devoid of sense and sensibility as the icy waters of the North Atlantic are inhospitable to the shipwrecked. A few survivors may get spared, but not many; there are not lifeboats enough; they are once again not thought necessary, except here and there, mostly in first class.

     But why should we be overly concerned with one ship, you may protest, when so many other fascinating vessels are thriving in the new atmosphere? I leave that question for the reader to ponder and answer for himself: what hopes went down with the Titanic, along with the follies and foibles? What did the sinking represent, beyond the silly Hollywood myth, that makes people still think about it today? What came after? Needless to say I am not talking about the floating monument to human vanity to which a serious seaman like Joseph Conrad might strenuously object: “a banal luxury hotel satisfying the vulgar demands of a fatuous few who have more money than they know what to do with” (“Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic,” 1912). I am talking about the world that went down with it, not much later, and that contained much worth mourning, even if not everything about it was good, which is never the case, and cannot be.