Remembering. And Asking “What Next?”
Imagine if Capitalism was just switched off one day. If the government just decided to admit that money isn’t real and the whole thing was being called off. Debts written off, no more payday, Absolute Jubilee. Landlords wouldn’t need to suck the lifeblood out of tenants any more because their own upholstered lives wouldn’t be dependent on wealth. Supermarkets wouldn’t charge anymore and could just become food distribution centres, under the benign new management of community organisers. We could all escape our bullshit jobs and do nice things (valuable cultural things, important altruistic things) for no pay instead.
Obviously this will never ever happen and, if it did, all sorts of forgotten and ignored problems would scuttle out of the cracks. It was an idle fantasy arrived at today while thinking about… Twitter again. Sorry.
I don’t think Twitter is really going to disappear, though lots of people seem to. And if it does go, what will people do when they find that they’re finally free?
Freedom from social media as we know it could really be the consequence, I think. Twitter is probably the last of the true mega-platforms, isn’t it? TikTok has more users but it seems less infrastructurally important because, unlike Twitter, it’s just a bit of fun. Nobody’s pestering me to join TikTok and nobody thinks I’m eccentric or a Luddite for not being on it. Shops don’t tend to have TikTok emblems in their windows like they do for Facebook and Twitter. Nobody says “oh, you have to be on TikTok!” It doesn’t seem to have the “necessary evil” strongarm nudge power of Facebook and Twitter. With ease, you can ignore it.
It seems that, were Twitter to shut down or vanish behind a paywall, you could get away with having absolutely no social media in your life at all. Nobody would expect it.
So what will happen when the age of “necessary evil” social media, of Big Social to coin an obnoxious phrase, is over? To start with, journalists might have to re-learn some old tricks; to actually ask penetrating questions instead of scraping Twitter for secondhand hot takes.
Many will continue in their “pivot to video” by embracing TikTok and whatever comes (or has come, probably) after it. But it will be diminishing returns as these platforms become sillier and less essential.
Others will return to a period of Internet time before the algorithms took over: platforms called dreamwidth and cohost are being mentioned and they look just like Livejournal. That would be nice. I still believe that the Internet is not the problem, only that the mega-platforms are damaging free will.
And maybe we can regress en masse even further to pre-Internet ideas. I for one am hoping to set up a small publishing press (real paper!) with a friend next year. New Escapologist might be back in paper too. Move over bits, atoms are back!
The death of Twitter obviously wouldn’t be as big as the death of money but there would be a similar sense of walking out into freedom again (a freedom that was there all along, really), of squinting in the sunlight and feeling its warmth on your skin (but was it always so warm?), of remembering, and asking “what next?”
Get yer atoms here, missus: treat yourself to a copy of The Good Life for Wage Slaves.
Hic!
Instant coffee just isn’t a draw anymore. The latest development in Gilded Cage technology is nothing less than the open bar. Boooooze!
Reader S draws our attention to a Wall Street Journal item about the lengths some firms are going to to get employees back in the harness:
some [businesses] are pulling out the stops–literally, on kegs, casks and wine bottles–in an attempt to make workplaces seem cool. Sure, executives could simply order people to return to their cubicles, and some have, but many want their workers to come back and like it.
It’s never enough to have a workforce under the thumb, is it? Wage slaves have to enjoy being stuck in a room with their better-paid overlords, puzzling over spreadsheets or just pretending to be busy while the sun shines and their kids grow up.
That means giving people what they want, or at least what bosses think they want. People like to wear comfy hoodies, right? OK! They miss their dogs when they go to work, don’t they? The canines can come!
A happy worker is a productive worker! It’s just interesting that the key to worker happiness is so rarely “higher wages” or “fewer hours” or “work from anywhere.” It’s always crap like this.
[Workers] love an afternoon cocktail, yes? Check out our new office bar!
So offices are filling with booze now. Well, why not? It’s not as if these places were conducive to concentration anyway.
And who better to emulate than our leaders in Downing Street? If they can run a whole country on the slosh, we can probably handle an inconsequential marketing concern.
You might think that, as a noted booze hound, I’d welcome the news of free drinks for office workers. But on the actual clock? It’s a recipe for disaster.
A social lubricant, booze encourages camaraderie and honesty. And being honest at work, let’s face it, will get you sacked.
This is why the offer of booze at work will neither work nor last. As soon as one leery wage slave, tongue loosened by tequila slammers, starts speaking truth to power, they’ll take it away. After all, the drunks in HR won’t do anything to help.
Alas, by that time, you’ll all be back where the bosses want you instead of being paid to wear slippers. Don’t be fooled. I’m here to help you spot a classic trap.
Booze can blur the line between professional and personal relationships in ways that make certain workers—often less-powerful ones—feel uncomfortable.
Exactly. Look, if workers have shown they can be productive at home and if, as figures suggest, they prefer to work remotely, why do we need such desperate attempts to coax them back to the office? Why are our bosses so needy about getting us back into city centres and onto industrial estates in the age of the total digital connectivity? Why does it have to be the worst of both worlds?
It’s because they (not we) pin their identities, often their whole lives, on the idea of being a manager of people. Which is pretty darn sad when you think about it.
Ultimately, these people like sitting in rush hour traffic because it makes them feel important. They like to chair meetings while idly clicking at a biro. They like to stride around the corridors like they’re in The West Wing.
They like feeling big while others in proximity feel small.
Feeling small and drunk probably isn’t a good combination, so I’d encourage anyone tempted by an office bar to stay at home. Drink at night instead, with company — not a company (aha!) — like nature intended.
The Laziness Lie
Further to our recent post about the work of Dr. Price, their essay, The Racist, Exploitative History of ‘Laziness’ is a cracker.
“The hatred of laziness,” they write, “is deeply embedded in the history of the United States” and consequently the rest of the world:
The value of hard work and the evils of sloth are baked into our national myths and our shared value system. Thanks to the legacies of imperialism and slavery, as well as the ongoing influence that the United States exerts on the rest of the world both in media and in military force, the Laziness Lie has managed to spread its tendrils into almost every country and culture on the planet.
Strong, most excellent stuff.
They go into the etymology of the word, which conflates weakness with evil, and then into the use of “laziness” to justify slavery in America and oppression during the Industrial Revolution.
It’s the kind of thing I touched on in my “How the West Was Won (by Work)” chapter in Escape Everything! and again in The Good Life for Wage Slaves but didn’t quite have the expertise or guts to go into very deeply.
Colonial America relied on the labor of enslaved people and indentured servants. It was very important to the colonies’ wealthy and enslaving class that they find a way to motivate enslaved people to work hard, despite the fact that enslaved people had absolutely nothing to gain from it. They also needed to find ways to ideologically justify the existence of slavery because many people of the period recognized (as we do today) that it was a morally abhorrent institution.
Importantly, this history forms the basis of the Operating System on which we run today:
Decades of exposure to the Laziness Lie has had a massive effect on our public consciousness. It’s made many of us critical of other people and quick to blame the victims of economic inequality for their own deprivation. It’s made us hate our own limitations, to see our tiredness or desire for a break as signs of failure. And it has created an intense internal pressure to keep working harder and harder, with no limits and no boundaries. This ideology was created to dehumanize those whom society had failed to care for, and with each passing year, the number of people who are excluded in these ways seems to only grow.
What a wonderful essay. I am yet to read Dr. Price’s book, but I recommend it all the same.
See also: Overturning the Legacy of Slavery [with UBI] and Drapetomania.
Dole
I’m reading a compendium of nature writing by Kathleen Jamie. In a chapter of reminisces about her life in the 1970s, she writes of dropping out to work on archaeological digs with the oddballs and stoners:
The exams had been no triumph; if I’d thought about trying for university, which was not an easy process anyway, without a knowledgeable family or supportive teachers the idea was dashed anyway.
But you could sign on the dole. You could hide among the swelling numbers of genuinely unemployed, and claim a little money every week. That’s what people did: artists, diggers, mountaineers, would-be poets and musicians, anarchists and feminists. Anyone for whom the threat of a job, of conformity, felt like death.
The dole doesn’t exist in the way it did in the 1970s. We have Jobseeker’s Allowance now and Universal Credit. Doom, doom, doom. I don’t say we should bring back the dole exactly (though it would certainly be a positive step back to a happier time) but that Universal Basic Income be brought in to give the opportunity of quiet freedom to everyone who wants it. (And if you don’t want it and would prefer to work hard for loads of money, a progressive tax system would slurp your share of UBI away so you wouldn’t have to worry about it.)
Kathleen Jamie used her time on the dole (and by the way, we more commonly call it “the brew” in Scotland) to attend those archaeological digs, to experience the world a little, to meet new people, to sense the depths beneath the feet.
As well as being a well-earned break after years of unasked-for schooling, the dole could evidently be a useful airlock between life chapters in which to marshal one’s thoughts instead of foolhardily hurtling into the next thing. It grants the sort of space that is useful to anyone but essential to future writers and musicians and thinkers, people who might make a contribution greater than the gains of typical white-collar servitude.
UBI now please. Or if that’s not affordable, bring back the old-fashioned dole. If it was affordable in the 1970s, it should be affordable in the age of the iPhone.
For more old and new ideas, The Good Life for Wage Slaves is available now.
Cube City
Reader Antonia draws our attention to this news item in the Guardian:
Welcome to cube city. Xu Weiping, a Chinese multimillionaire, has a vision for the future of office work in the post-Covid-19 pandemic world: thousands of office pods where each person works in their own self-contained 3m x 3m cube.
Xu reckons the coronavirus pandemic will have such a fundamental impact on the way people work that he is converting 20 newly constructed office buildings in east London into 2,000 of the individual cube offices.
Urgh.
Still, as I hinted before, three-metre by three-metre is a far bigger cube than I ever had when I worked in an office. I started out with a desk that was perhaps 1.5m wide; I would not have been able to touch the shoulder of a co-worker but we would have been able to touch fingertips with ease. Management then moved us to a tighter working area in which the desktop was a meter wide at most (perhaps 85cm) and we would have been able to touch each other’s shoulders with ease. So in a way, Cube City would have been preferable to Concrete Island (the name I give to my old workplace in The Good Life for Wage Slaves).
For all the ingenuity and spacial generosity of Xu Weiping’s human battery farm, the thought remains: why bother? Why go to the effort to put shoes on and squelch yourself onto a packed Tube carriage to reach a place in the isolated docklands that boasts such fabulous features as “a kettle, fridge, microwave, videoscreen and fold-down bed as well as a chair and desk.” I mean, just stay at home. Got distracting kids or dogs or something? Even some really swanky noise-cancelling headphones won’t set you back as much as cube tenancy and a commuter pass.
I’m writing this from our dining table in case you’re wondering. I’m wearing slippers. Freak Zone plays quietly on the radio while my partner draws in pencils on her £20 LED drawing board. It’s lovely.
The Good Life for Wage Slaves is out now in deluxe paperback format and e-book.
Locked Down After Lockdown
The idea that office life is over is almost certainly overdone. Not everyone loves typing away on the sofa day after day, panicking about being out of the corporate loop.
Bloody hell. Imagine “panicking about being out of the corporate loop.” Excuse me while I fill a whole bucket with sick.
But for those lucky enough to have the choice to work from home, the collective near-death experience we’ve endured as a nation may be prompting a re-evaluation of what matters. Commuter dads [for instance] who once rarely saw their children awake have got used to the casual intimacy of being around them all day long.
Nope. Sorry. I’m going to need another bucket. Not for the sentiment (which I agree with) but for the phrase, “commuter dads.”
Don’t worry, things improve. The columnist asks if office life will soon be a thing of the pre-pandemic past. Spoiler: it won’t be, but some Escapologist-pleasing changes might yet be afoot.
The piece goes on to describe some of the post-lockdown measures currently being proposed to revolutionise working practices in light of the need for social distancing. Among them are a wonky but surely beneficial “four days on, ten days off” modality and our old friend, the Four-Day Week.
Personally, I’d settle for the sort of open-ended furlough for workers (and non-workers) of all stripes in the form of UBI. Eh, readers?
I Fled Shrieking From That Madhouse of Boredom
I’ve been reading an humongous tome of autobiographical essays by “Designated Bad Seed” of science fiction, Harlan Ellison. I love his alive, cantankerous writing so much, and these essays have reconnected me with a deep well of pluck I’m sorry to say I’d forgotten about. Thank you, Uncle Harlan, wherever you are.
What I’d like to tell you about today, my fellow Escapologists, is a particular essay from this book in which Ellison describes working a drudge job for Capitol Records in 1953. He describes a first day of anxiously working quickly, fearing being judged not good enough by “the Demon God of Industry”, and then being told to slow down by a co-worker because his pedal-to-the-metal processing power makes the others look bad.
He talks to a long-serving Wage Slave, “a mouse of a creature” who has been filing bills of lading for eleven years, against his dream to “just go with the wind.”
The terror that froze my soul cannot be put into words. […This man was] set irrevocably on a cubicled routine of pointless chores making money for Gods on far mountaintops… and I saw what my future would be if I left my life in the hands of those prepared only to dole out thirty-six dollars a week for another human being’s existence.
Sensing a future echo in utero, Ellison’s had enough:
I grabbed up that sack of bills, leaped out of my chair, sending it crashing to the floor, and with all my strength and lungpower flung them into the air, screaming “FUCK IT!” Amid the bills-of-lading snowstorm, I fled shrieking from that madhouse of boredom and dead dreams on West 57th Street, never to return.
As far as I know, to this day, Capitol Records has an unclaimed check for one-half day’s work, in the name of Harlan Ellison.
Hah! Great isn’t it? I really just wanted to share this inspirational moment with you–you fine people with eyes on the door–but I also recommend The Harlan Ellison Hornbook more generally to anyone with low blood pressure.
Start Big: On Ends and Means
It is easy to see the beginnings of things and harder to see the ends. — Joan Didion
[dropcap]Listen[/dropcap]. I might have discovered a previously-unobserved source of human misery. If we can work out how to escape this thing, we can probably all be a lot happier.
We might even be happier at work and not want to escape it if only we could escape this problem. We could be happier at school, happier in our own heads and, yes, happier on the toilet.
I know it sounds grandiose to go claiming a new discovery and all, but describing sources of misery–revealing them for what they are–and working out how to escape them is sort of my job now. And I’m digging deep.
So what is this newly-discovered reservoir of despair? Pop-Tarts? Well, that’s a good guess, madam, but no; the misery inflicted by their kind is already a matter of record. What I want to talk about today is:
a mass failure to begin with the end in mind.
Or possibly:
a tendency to confuse ends with means.
Wait! Wait! It know it sounds oblique and may not be as actionable an improvement as, say, escape from social media, but you’ve just got to hear me out. Trust me, I have a headful (it’s a word) of thoughts and some strong anecdotal evidence!
The idea of “starting with the end in mind” comes, I’m embarrassed to say, from a self-help book I’ve not read properly on grounds of not wanting to rot my mind any further than it’s already been rotted by such things. Self-help books are like the sun: sources of energy that that should never be looked at directly.
But it’s rather good. I know “begin with the end in mind” sounds platitudinous like “start as you mean to go on” or something, but it’s really not so vacuous and the further I travel in time from that book, the more and more its significance occurs to me.
It’s about having an actual end point–a finished product and/or situation–in mind before you start doing something. It’s also about not confusing means with ends: going to work, for example, is a means (i.e. the mechanism required to make money to live on and also to contribute to some sort of a product or service) that is too often seen as an ends (“I am, finally and inherently, a proctologist. My arrival in the world of proctology is a final result. Just as I’m a husband and a flyfisher and a worshipper of Cthulu, I’m a proctologist.”).
We fail to begin with the end in mind sometimes as individuals (one might join a gym with a general hunch that it’s healthy and that it sounds good when you say “so I’ve joined a gym”) but, more significantly, we fail to begin with the end in mind as societies too and the result is that individual people are plopped into situations and environments without knowing what’s really going on.
Life is confusing and frightening, right? Well, I think a big part of that is that we’re too often led into tight quarters where the end has not been explained to us. The end is too often poorly defined in the minds of those telling us what to do too: the “end,” often, might not even exist. When we go to work, we don’t know what The Company is really in service of and we don’t know what that thing it’s in service of might itself be in service of higher up the totem pole of society: all we can do it turn up, complete the tasks assigned to us, and take home the paycheque. All we’re left with is means.
[dropcap]Many[/dropcap] of the hopeless jobs I’ve been pressed into over the years probably felt hopeless to me because I didn’t know what they were for. And on those rare occasions I did have a sense of what they might be for, they were usually so far into the suburbs of anything worthwhile, that the handing in of Mr. Notice wasn’t far behind.
Someone of my father’s generation might say that the ultimate purpose of a job is besides the point and that you should just be happy to be working and be getting paid for it. Just turn up, punch the clock, do the work, get out. Simple. But that’s because he worked in secondary industry with a clear and tangible purpose at all times; he didn’t know boredom–true, soul-rusting boredom–in the way that we do. It’s hard to sit on a chair, watching a clock tick down, or faffing with Excel without being told what this is all for. I mean, even if the Prime Minister just went on TV to say, “Look, almost all of your jobs are actually pointless. But we’re morally unprepared to pay you to stay at home, so we’ve had to invent busywork for you. Sorry about that. But, just to be clear, your sitting on that ergonomic swivel chair is the whole end as well a means.” At least that would be something.
It drove me nuts, this sense of alienation. I have a natural impulse to visualise the end result of things. I can’t help it. You’re probably the same. If I’m writing a chapter for a book, for example, I need to know in my gut how it relates to the other chapters, how it fits into the broader scheme of the book, and how that book slots into the world library. I can’t help but imagine what sort of cover the publisher will give to the book and how attractive or ugly it’s likely to look or on people’s nightstands. That’s normal, isn’t it? Does a parent-to-be not preemptively picture the face of their wee one? It’s a natural impulse surely, not just another case of me being a delicate petal.
If your job was to report to a factory and to drill equally-spaced holes into six-inch lengths of metal tubing and then to pass it down to the next person, you’d probably be told at some point that you’re making flutes. You might then reasonably suppose that said flutes go off to market where they make (a) money for your employer and (b) music for ears and that (b) music if not (a) money is an inherent good and therefore an end. I suppose this job, being repetitive, would get boring after a while but at least you’d know what the heck was going on, just what all of your hole-drilling was in aid of.
Some white-collar workplaces have “mission statements.” Maybe there was one tacked up on a notice board or laminated and Blu-Tacked to a load-bearing pillar in your last office. Those mission statements are supposed to dovetail elegantly with everyone’s job descriptions so that everyone knows just how they contribute to the organisation’s agenda and how their duties relate to everyone else’s duties and how everyone–despite our varying degrees of happiness, busyness, and reluctance to be there–is actually on the same page and serving the same Grand Vision. It seldom works like that though does it? In the private sector, missions mutate to keep up with market forces (and are bogus to begin with since the mission of any company is to “make money” for a boss or for shareholders, any talk of “a passion for jell-o” or “bringing twiglets to the world” being obvious nonsense). In the public sector, mission statements tend to be so willfully obfuscating and are rendered in such twisted perversions of language that nobody can relate to them much less understand the bloody things. The effect of all this is that people just have to turn up, perform the tasks they’ve been told to perform, and not to trouble themselves over what it’s all for, what Great Machine they’re helping to drive into the future.
This hunger for meaning–a need for basic orientation–was rarely met in any of my white-collar jobs and it was maddening. You’d be welcomed into the office on Day 1, given directions on your daily activities over the course of perhaps a week, but a wider sense of what all of this was in aid of was either assumed or explained exclusively through an HR-prepared induction pack of contractual waffle and out-of-date “organograms.” It was a bit like being stuck in the trunk of a moving car with a hood over your head and being asked, for reasons unknown to you, to solve a Rubik’s cube. It’s not impossible, it’s just tedious and pointlessly mysterious.
I was thinking about all this recently and it occurred to me that a sense of not really knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing–a feeling of being lost at sea when you’re dutifully standing right where the world has told you to be–is probably the source of untold unhappiness at work.
[dropcap]At[/dropcap] school–another time in life when perfectly happy and intelligent people are gaslit into worrying we might be misanthropes or stupid–we are seldom told what the lessons are about: why we’re being told these things, what they have to do with us. A general understanding may have been instilled in us about the importance of “passing maths” so that we can graduate high school and move on to the next artificially-maintained stage of life and on and on and on, but it all seems so absurd and irrelevant when you’re sitting there at a desk, being told about Ox-Bow Lakes.
In Geography–a subject I generally liked–we had a teacher who was good at getting us through exams. His trick was to teach “facts” by rote. It worked. We all passed Geography with flying colours. By “facts” he really meant “details.” A geography exam could not be blagged, he said, on general views or ideas about the world. You had to be able to write “the Cotswolds” or “1978” or “the Maasai Mara.” Points were awarded for these details. He gave us all sorts of wacky mnemonic techniques and bashed these facts into our heads until we could recite them automatically without even switching on the conscious parts of our brains. Now I think about it, it must have looked quite eerie from his perspective and rather like something from Children of the Corn. “Ox-Bow Lake, sir,” we’d all say in chorus, “Jurassic limestone, sir.”
I did not find this strategy objectionable at the time because learning facts divorced of context was at least easy and it meant I could get back to making out with my girlfriend or reading comics or whatever it was. And yet now, as an adult, I find myself wondering what an “Ox-Bow Lake” might actually be. I know they’re a kind of lake. I can draw one from above. I can even tell you about how it is formed and how it relates to “meanders,” to “eutrophication,” and to “natural erosion.” But I don’t know what much of that really means or where one one of these fabled Ox-Bow Lakes might be. Are they in England somewhere? Are they in Africa? Mars? To this day, I have no understanding–intellectually or viscerally–of what, really, an Ox-Bow Lake is. I can just parrot some words I learned by rote.
Surely, I wonder now, there must be better ways of teaching kids. Surely no marker of exams ever thought “Oh yes, this youngster really understands the essence of the Ox-Bow Lake.” It’s all so “phoney,” as Holden Caulfield–whom we did not study in English class–would undoubtedly say.
What I’m saying here is that these geography facts and so much else at school were endured in isolation with no end in mind: no reasonable context was given for any of it. The lessons started at the wrong end of things: before teaching this sort of deeply specialised nitty-gritty, shouldn’t we be told something general about life (like, where we are now, historically-speaking, and on which operating systems, geopolitically-speaking, do our lives run) and then, should we graduate to such ludicrously granular specialities as needing to know about the various types of freshwater lake and their formation, about how it all relates to us and our place in the world? Just like “orientation” in a job, how about some orientation from schools on the relevant basics of present-tense Life on Earth?
(Curious to know if there’s a school of thought on this, perhaps called “contextual learning,” I looked it up. It turns out there is but despite the general theory being noble–“teachers […] present information in such a way that students are able to construct meaning based on their own experiences”–the rest of it is really a lot of softy twaddle and involves hands-on “experiences” instead of the noble Aristotelian tradition of classroom- and book-learning, which is a lot of pedagogic wisdom to throw in the bin. You went too radical, Contextual Learning!)
So a kid is not schooled “with the end in mind,” nor is end of schooling kept in mind at all, only the means (which consists, if memory serves, of getting the regulation backpacks and calculators, sitting still, respecting your teachers, not chewing gum, and doing homework on time — urgh). If the end of school is to prepare students for life in a practical way, it’s obviously not fit for purpose. If the end of schooling is to teach an understanding of the world, it’s not doing that either. But I don’t really know what the end of school is because it was never explained. It’s just something everyone had to do.
Imagine if the Prime Minister came on TV again to say “I’ve been talking to the Secretary of Education and, essentially, we just want to keep young people off the streets, alright? So sit tight, grow up, and then you can do what you like.” Again, at least it would be something.
[dropcap]Politics[/dropcap] meanwhile is a veritable haven of failing to start with the end in mind and getting wound up in means. Everyone’s got their tribe and nobody wants to ask what the end of that tribe really is. Your first encounter with politics probably involved a political party broadly aligned to an ideology or–more likely–your witnessing a reaction to a party-political statement by someone whose opinion you valued at the time. You’ll have heard your dad complaining about Reds or your mum complaining about Blues and it’s enough to get you started on a lifetime of political opinion-having.
One needs to step back and ask what it’s all for. In the United Kingdom, where I live (and will continue to live until my actual country of residence, Scotland, votes to leave the UK in favour of Europe in a couple of years) the Conservative Party aren’t even slightly interested in what it’s all for. They aren’t so much interested in running a country as holding onto power (and therefore money and limelight and future consultancy or public speaking opportunities).
A Labour Party campaigner I used to follow on social media before I quit had two passions in life: campaigning for a Socialist Labour Party and getting them into power; and what she called “self-destruction.” She’d routinely post pictures of evidence of scarring or of drinking and smoking too much. It didn’t look like she was seeking help or anything: it was more a case of “Self-Harm Pride” or something. I swear I wasn’t being judgmental–go ahead and self-destroy if that’s what you’re into–but I wondered if the Socialism didn’t conflict with the self-destruction. I was too shy to ask.
I don’t look at social media any more, but I asked a young Socialist in the pub what he thought about this. “Isn’t destroying yourself just doing the Tories’ job for them?” I suggested. “If the Tories want to make their cronies rich through privatisation and to punish the poor by inflicting austerity measures and dismantling the welfare state, isn’t it just helping them along to abbreviate your own life and compromise your own wellbeing?”
“Maybe,” he said, “but looking after yourself is what a Libertarian would say.”
He could be right, I suppose. Whenever I do that political compass thing, my position is firmly in the Libertarian left. But it makes me wonder what the point of Socialism could possibly be if it’s not to raise the quality of life of individual people. Even Jeremy Corbyn (while discussing automation in 2018) has referred to “a chance to raise living standards and give people more control of their own lives.” Because that’s the point. It’s not about righteous fighting (which is a means, not and end) while willingly suffering (even inflicting) hardship and rejecting the good life on class grounds. What’s the point of that? Self-destruction isn’t “solidarity;” in damaging yourself–whether actively like the activist I’m talking about or passively through self-neglect–you’re harming a member of the crowd you’re trying to save. You’ve confused means with an end.
[dropcap]At[/dropcap] work, at school, and in politics it would be good if the actual “end” could be kept in mind. Performing actions without understanding the end is, I’m increasingly convinced, the origin (even the epicentre!) of alienation and therefore the font of misery. We probably wouldn’t want to escape those institutions so badly or to engage with them so half-heatedly if someone would just take the time to explain what’s going on, how everything fits together in the world, and what the “end” of everything really is. This is more and more important the higher one goes in thinking about society: work, school, and politics are but elements of a world. What about the social world at large. How do we want to live? To trot out a hoary old Wildean wit-nugget:
a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of utopias.
And that’s my point. Utopia–whether we’re talking personal and individualist or social and wide-reaching–is an end. And without that end in mind, any project you undertake is doomed. So. Begin with the end in mind. Build it into the foundations, my tolerant and long-reading friend, bake it into the brownie while the brownie’s still still a dough, start with the end and work, like a writer of detective novels, backwards from there. Don’t mistake means for ends. Don’t sweat the small stuff: if you want to run a project or plot any course of action, or if you want to know how to spend your days: START BIG.
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This essay began life as one possible introduction to a book called The Good Life for Wage Slaves before being set to one side and repurposed for an online readership. If you liked the essay, please consider buying the book.
An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 52: Bank Holiday
It’s an extremely sunny bank holiday here in Scotland.
There was a nice vibe on the street this morning. “Gosh, this is alright,” I thought, “We’ve not done such a bad job of building a world.” Yes, the fine weather had a lot to do with this mood but it wasn’t only that. It was the sense of quiet industry and the leisurely getting about. I felt, unusually, that I could relate to the people I saw. They weren’t rushing everywhere. They were scrubbing steps, cycling, putting out sandwich boards, walking with a light jacket slung over one shoulder, arranging things in windows.
You’d expect a bank holiday morning to be quiet and it was, but it was hardly devoid of activity. The shops — small business and supermarket chains alike — all seemed to be open, their keepers and shelf stackers setting up as usual. Even our local Post Office was open for business, though the actual deliveries I believe have stopped until Tuesday. There were still a few white-collar commuters about (Britain’s largest employer, the NHS, does not close for bank holidays) but a far smaller number of cars than usual. This made a huge difference; it meant fewer decibels, noticeably cleaner air, less hostility and impatience, and opportunities to cross the roads in a leisurely manner instead of waiting for a light to change or for a gap in the traffic. It struck me as a pretty good pace of life and I wished it could always be this way. Things hadn’t ground to a halt but it wasn’t stupidly busy either, no harried faces, no sense of dread.
I mention this to say that a slower pace of life doesn’t mean an end to industry, an end to meaning, an end to money-making or getting from one place to another. It just means balance. It means enough people sleeping ’til 10 and having leisurely breakfasts and enough people keeping the world running. Why, we could take it in shifts! It would mean less pollution and fewer heads exploding with stress and anxiety. Wouldn’t that be good?
The art gallery my wife works for is open. The florist I pass each morning is open, as is the library. The pubs and restaurants soon will be. The universities are open. Public transit is running, albeit to a limited timetable. The Deliveroo fleet will be out and pedalling this evening.
So if all of these useful people are on duty as usual (and various street markets and the likes are opening especially for the bank holiday) why are the streets so quiet? Who exactly is off work and off the roads and in their beds? Could it be the bankers? Well, yes, it’s a bank holiday. But that can’t be so many people. The major international bank I use has only one branch (let’s generously assume 40 employees) and will surely be automated out of existence soon. So who are these people with a day off today and another on Monday?
Oh, it’s the people with bullshit jobs! The ones in jobs which aren’t really needed at all and which, in fact lead to the harried faces and the grief and the fumes and the rat-like scurrying!
The Skypark, I noticed, stands empty today. Ten or so stories of glassy desolation.
A bank holiday morning, dare I say, is a good real-time, 3D visualisation of how the world, perhaps post-UBI, could look without bullshit jobs. Cleaner, calmer, more leisurely and at peace.
Dangerous Nonsense!
Here’s a Conservative MP called Nick Boles on Universal Basic Income, pretty much confirming what we always knew we were up against:
The main objection to the idea of a universal basic income is not practical but moral.
Its enthusiasts suggest that when intelligent machines make most of us redundant, we will all dispense with the idea of earning a living and find true fulfilment (sic) in writing poetry, playing music and nurturing plants. That is dangerous nonsense.
Mankind is hard-wired to work. We gain satisfaction from it. It gives us a sense of identity, purpose and belonging … we should not be trying to create a world in which most people do not feel the need to work.
Isn’t that the most delicious (not to mention adorable) thing you’ve ever read? Caught red-handed! Just in case anyone thought we were being paranoid, this is what the critics of the post-work society actually think.
The objection to freedom is not that we can’t do it but that we shouldn’t, because Work — brutal, superegoic knuckling down — is All. Apparently, we should just carry on toiling, no matter how pointlessly, until the whole world is used up.
This obsession with work is one of the only things standing in the way of our luxury, automated post-work society (which is why the destruction of the Work Ethic is key to the manifesto of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams). No wonder there’s a “moral” objection from people like Boles; we can’t have citizens going around “playing music and nurturing plants” like a bunch of toga-wearing hippies. Only obsolete graft is good enough for our people!
It does not occur to people like Nick Boles (or else they willfully dismiss the notion) that time might be occupied more pleasantly and usefully than in full-time employment, and that “work” is not the only way to find meaning in life. Art, craft, husbandry — “dangerous nonsense”!
(Elsewhere in UBI news, it looks like we’re getting some trials in Scotland; and Berlusconi has put it at the core of his Presidential campaign in Italy).
