You Abstract Working Mule of A Human
On our alienation through work and the absence of an identity
What I want to say when I write is always painted up in something else. I never get there, never finish, never say what I want to say. We’re like that, human beings—especially those of us who have spent time accumulating measures of apparent academic merit. We can’t say what we really want to say without “backing it up”. We discount our intuition. Data is primary. To forward a subjective assessment on this, that, or the other, is flawed and often irrelevant insofar as it cannot necessarily, be applied to the majority. What the majority agree, therefore, is what is. To change this, we must exercise influence over others. To stand alone is to shout into the vacuum.
Work is such a fundamental part of living that it is hard not to address what is detrimental to us in the doing of it. But what is work, and what lies beneath the apparent obviousness of it all? We are so sure what it is, and we are so sure that everyone must do it. Not to work is to be a parasite. It is to be an illegitimate member of society. But why? On the other end of the scale, there are those who do not work and have amassed fortunes on the backs of those who do. They have wealth, and so they are not parasites, surely? Not to ask why, not ask but demand answers to why things are how they are is to ignore the truth of our reality. But we’d rather not know. Carry on; nothing to see here. Distractions abound. The few control and direct the many—that is the truth. So how can the many be free, do we want to be free, and is it even possible?
Ultimate freedom implies a choice, and perhaps choice is illusory. Unless we choose death. Maybe we are all choosing death but in different ways. Being part of a collective, we forgo ourselves. We sacrifice a little or a lot. The nature of our reality enforces itself, not as we see it really, but as they see it—the collective. We are reared with it. The family structure forms the template for Fromm’s socially typical character. Mammy and Daddy leave and go to work, so I must do that too. Just as they have inherited the cookie cutter for work from their parents, I inherit it from them, although the cookies are of a slightly different recipe than before. And I take it. And then I’m 40 and tired of eating cookies no matter the recipe; the cookies are always shaped the fucking same. It is so fundamental and accurate until it’s not. I live, or I die on the discovery of this.
Hunger gnaws at my guts, and I can ignore it to the very end—to bring myself to my own end. What is it that I am that I can allow the organism to die? No, in fact, to kill it! I can take myself to the edge of a bridge if I’d rather be done with me sooner. But instead, I die a slow death at the hands of myself and in the minds of everyone else to whom I strive to please and to be productive—my father and mother in them. In the meantime, I work and eke out a living or at least try. To make myself worthy of praise or at least sufficient enough to be ignored, to blend into the background. So who am I, the worker? An abstraction, a mule hauling ideas and things around on the beck and call of some other who is merely a mule too. Who are these others to whom we subordinate ourselves? To whom do they subordinate themselves, or are they themselves the Gods?
What lies beneath the surface of our activity, our destruction of this place we call home and of ourselves? What lies beneath but the emptiness of something unidentifiable. Something that we so desperately try to fill with things that rot and pollute. We are mule carcasses, vessels of something we can’t understand, and our minds operate on its surface. It’s like a humming fridge…we are aware of the vacancy but cannot identify it given its essence. And so we work ourselves to the bone if we are deemed worthy of a job at all—made ourselves valuable and productive enough to be wanted, to be hired. And then the indoctrination takes hold, and we are lost to the work under the design of others.
Mammy is gone away, and so too is Daddy. Now I am alone and with all these others who are alone too. Who am I? My time will come, and I will take up the human imperative to work. Who benefits? Me? Hardly. I follow their lead and pursue the unobtainable thing that I have lost and that they have lost before me. That’s all we share—absence, loneliness, alienation from ourselves and from one another immersed in work, not of our choosing. Work is meaningless, and in the pursuit of the thing we’ve never had, we sacrifice one another for the sake of a means of accounting. We have become abstractions.
Auden said, “between labour and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; what from the point of view of society is necessary labour is, from his point of view, voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labour or work depends not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a labourer.” More often than not, however, personal interest has little to do with work because we are part of the system, a cog in the machine of enterprise. And if we find meaning, purpose, and personal interest, it is in spite rather than because of the job.
In his differentiation between workers and labourers, Auden said, “workers die of coronaries and forget their wives’ birthdays”. The same can be said of both women and men today. And what of their children while they work? Their birthdays are membered but for the hire of a bouncy castle and the imperative to put on a show. Workers were privileged, according to Auden. “What percentage of the population in a modern technological society are, like myself, in the fortunate position of being workers?” Auden asked. “At a guess, I would say sixteen per cent, and I do not think that figure is likely to get bigger in the future.”
Dress it up as you will. Parade in your experts of mind and behaviour, happiness and sadness, understand my motivation and become my surrogates. I will serve you and give you the best hours of my life. And when my time is done, I’ll no doubt retire to my field and eat carrots.