Chapter 1: Action, Politics, and The Workplace

I've always taken issue with bureaucracy and its structure; something of a personal affront I abide because its the only game in town. Some large part of that is certainly a lack of familiarity and a refusal to get better at it, but I think the distaste runs deeper than that. Its highly impersonal and often needlessly complicates things while simultaneously limiting the field of possible solutions and actions available. Don't get me wrong, I understand the utility. Complex problems need systematic approaches if they're ever going to be worked down and in many ways it has limited the arbitrary and capricious power of vested interests. However, in the tradition of reductio ad absurdum what began as a useful extension of division of labor and contractualism, when made the measure of all things, became a slave master.

Part of the issue is that, in good faith, we made every arena of human behavior into a job; and a job is a compartmentalized thing. Your job is what you do to earn a living, it's labor, and serves only to facilitate that cyclic refreshing. You are not (no matter what is said) a member of a team or guild addressing a work with your combined skill and know-how but simply one piece in a large machine that has not been automated yet. The human being is thus reduced to a set of expectations and limitations--your tasks are X and Y, you're attitude will meet expectations Z, your talking points are such and such, etc. The path then becomes, not to perfect a work or to achieve a goal, but to demonstrate that one can be refitted into a more advantageous cog-position, one that increases one's ability to consume, simulates the social admiration and support we crave, and gives us a sense of novelty and progression in our lives. It's a skinner box; its a freemium game.

This model is ubiquitous in our society and becoming more so around the globe, and is a logic structure that's bound us to a pretty catastrophic trajectory if we don't shake out of it soon. But on the small scale it also limits our ability as individuals to grow more capable and to create those same kinds of solutions we could desperately use. Working at a startup has done a lot to highlight this for me. The problems that come up are many, fast-paced, and multi-variant, but the approach taken is that of labor and its become like running a race with your feet shackled. As an employee's role and capabilities are already accounted for within the larger machine their proper role is to perform their basic set of tasks as efficiently as possible. Problems will be solved at higher levels and new instructions will be given as deemed necessary. Beyond that set of parameters the employee can be ignored as they have no greater contribution by definition, and in fact will disrupt proper functioning by pushing those limits. Within the logic established this is all entirely reasonable, each step follows naturally and inevitably from the last. The hidden oversight is that every logical equation is provincial; that is it is only as valid as its axioms and always as weak as what it deems irrelevant. It is a luciferian trap.

You can watch this dynamic play out in more personal arenas as well. A person pursues a career, or a significant other, or lifestyle that from the outside is obviously causing problems and suffering. Somehow though, they just can't see it and seem to just get deeper in. The problem, in short, is that they took stock of their situation, what they had at their disposal, and the maps others may have given them in the past and set out on a course to make something better--which is all for the good and the proper way to go about things--but almost definitionally their original plan could not account for everything. An individual cannot know beforehand what is safe to ignore or accuracy of their plan. Models and plans provided meaning and necessary psychological scaffolding though, and there is a perennial danger that we fall in love with the model and not the destination. The person then begins to see the world only through the lens of their creation and to reject or misinterpret contradicting signs. Its not that they're unaware that they're suffering but that they believe the only way out is through. This dynamic co-opts even our virtues thus making it even harder to know just how to proceed. Courage in the face of adversity, patience in the face of set-backs, forgiveness, mercy, dedication; any and all of these can become reasons to dig ourselves further and further into a swamp intent on swallowing us whole. Moreover, as the person invests more time, energy and hope into this the ego rebels against any suggestion that it may have been wasted, that they were wrong. The true course is set and to abandon it now would be tantamount to failure or suicide. Our goals and expectations mould our reality, but there is no guarantee we will build a place we can live in.

My question is this: What is the exact root of the problem, where does it come from and why does it persist? Moreover, why do we find it so difficult to see and to change if its effects are so widespread and pernicious?

To answer that I'm going to draw attention to some axiomatic aspects of the human condition (as I see it) and try to paint a picture of what exactly a social structure "is" and where it derives its inertia from. As well I'll highlight why I think this is not simply an academic matter but more like a critical diagnostic and maintenance routine we cannot safely ignore.

Its about to get a little dense so bear with me.

Given that the universe is infinitely more complicated than a single person can understand, given that each moment brings changes to every single element of that massive web of interactions, given each person's infinitesimal access to reality (you get your senses and your experiences wherever you actually are without any real access to the entirety of the past, the future, or even other spatial locations); its a wonder anyone has managed to survive or exist at all. That organisms have continued given all that is stacked against them is evidence that some sort of solution was arrived at through natural selection and is where we should go for models.

At first blush morality and ethics seem rather arbitrary on our part; that humans have forced our own conceptions of right and good onto an indifferent universe. This is why such rules have to be passed on, taught and studied, and vary historically from culture to culture as they do. In fact this is very much what is happening but there is an unspoken assumption at the heart of this that aught to be examined. Namely, that human rationality and thought is somehow "outside" the natural order of things. Evolution precludes this assumption though and so we cannot accept it as given. If the human mind has grown out of the iterated generations in our lineage, if organisms who behaved "incorrectly" were eventually weeded out by the environment, then the ways in which our minds process information and propel us rests on a foundation of "true-enough" behaviors that have survived billions of years of environmental change and pressure. That you have anger in the way that you do, that you have the drives you have, even that you perceive space and color in the ways that you do are all indicators that those were "true-enough" solutions to the problem of how to stay alive that they became biologically encoded into your being. Your body and mind are a manifest hypothesis about what the universe is and how to behave toward it to receive what you need and want.

This is easily forgotten and overlooked given that we have such a tremendous ability to abstract cognitively and so it tends to feel as if we created the idea ex nihilo and then willed it into existence through action. This can be either true or illusory depending on precisely where one is standing. It can be said that something new was created through one's will, something that was not before and would not have existed otherwise, but where exactly does that will arise from? Why do you want what you want? Could you choose to want something else?

The point to hold onto here is this: your body and mind are repositories for "true enough" patterns of behavior and interpretation and it can be assumed that taken as a whole they represent a set of potentialities and limitations that facilitate survival and adaptation to the set of environments both physical and social your ancestors have been presented with up until now. That these are often at odds with each other is to be expected given that the exact "right choice" in a given circumstance is a moving target and may have multiple possible solutions.

Jean Piaget built a mountain of work I believe we have still yet to really integrate into our collective consciousness, but I think it helps to shed light on things here. In studying how children developed cognitively over time he pointed out an emergent moral system. In the earliest stages children learn through direct feedback from their environment. If I do A then I experience either pleasure or pain and am thus more or less likely to repeat A in the future. This can information may come from the world directly--touching a hot stove creates immediate pain, food brings immediate pleasure--but it may also come from the world as encoded at the social level--when I smile my mother smiles back, when I bite she screams and pulls away. Eventually though the child develops sufficiently to begin "understanding" rules that are passed down and forms a fairly articulated model of "right" behavior. This is known as heteronormous morality or moral realism.

At this stage the child accepts rules as something provide by an outside authority figure such as a parent or teacher. They can understand the rules when spoken or applied and fit them into a model of the world very similar to those physical rules they learned earlier on. Certain behaviors lead to certain outcomes and there is (or should be) a direct correlation between the two. Their parent says they need to play nicely with other children even if they want to take their toy or to throw a rock at them. The child does not understand this as an advantageous pattern of behavior but instead as a rule similar to gravity with an unshakable kind of reality to it. The rules are set and have always been this way. It is not until the child has experienced a sufficient breadth situations and contradictions that they can conceptualize a real autonomy of decision making.

Autonomous morality (or moral relativism) describes the stage at which the child is able to conceptualize the "why" of rules. They can abstract a person's thought process and state of mind enough to formulate models on why they may adhere to certain rules or not others. This also means that they can begin to choose amongst moral options and to grok moral responsibility. Early on a child will perform the rules of a game because those are the rules of the game; later on though they can come to realize that while cheating or hitting another player may lead to immediate gratification it can lead to fighting, other children refusing to play with them in the future, and overall less overall enjoyment than otherwise. The child can now make decisions based on how their actions will propagate through time and in many arenas of their lives. Key here is that not simply the consequences of an action are taken into account but also the motives of the other person. That is, they can begin to understand that a person may have simply made an error in judgement but is not inherently bad for having done so.

The final stage of this development is an understanding of the process by which rules are made. Here the individual can begin comparing the rules against the more abstract "goal" of the whole endeavor. With this in mind they can begin speculating and experimenting with making new rules and entirely new games to better achieve this goal. For example, while a very young child may understand that you cannot throw the ball in kickball they will eventually come to realize that forcing everyone to only kick adds an element of challenge to the game that makes it more fun, keeps everyone on a level playing field and gives opportunities for each player to achieve in the eyes of their peers, and provides a universal standard of success by which to judge any action or inaction. In the final stage through the child can recognize that these rules prevent their friend in a wheelchair from participating, that their friend would have more fun playing than not, that it will generally improve their social circle and lead to more pleasure even outside of the game, and that exceptions to the rules can be articulated and negotiated as necessary to allow this more advantageous outcome. Here they know that the point of the game was to have fun and build bonds and they can change the game to be even better toward that end.

The point to take away from the above is this: while we do not initially understand why we do what we do precisely we initially adopt those "successful" behavior patterns handed down as instinct or instruction, and rightly so. However, through interacting with that system and our own experience we come to understand that it is a process and not an object and that we are constantly recreating it based on our own identity and understanding or ourselves and the world around us. Finally, that this basic model of progression is necessarily an outgrowth of the process by which natural selection has shaped organisms from the very beginning and cannot be treated as strictly arbitrary. That in observing child development we are seeing a particular manifestation of a much broader "natural law" inherent in the universe at large.

Dr. Peterson has elaborated, on a number of occasions, on research done on the relation between personality and political affiliation and this I think will nicely set up the final piece of this discussion. Without getting into the weeds of five factor personality theory I'll just lay some necessary groundwork out of the gate. A large library of data and analysis has led to the conclusion that a persons "personality" can be broken down along 5 basic dimensions. By understanding where a person falls across these dimensions you can have a rough idea of how they will interpret the world, react to circumstances, and generate/pursue goals. As well, given that position on any given trait falls along a normal distribution statistically we can infer that these traits have been "selected" by our evolutionary history and the range in which they are occupied indicates the degree to which that approach has been the "right" choice across the millennia.

I'll use neuroticism as an example case (neuroticism is the measure of how negatively a situation is "felt" by the individual). There is a loud noise nearby with no obvious source; whatever the state of affairs was before it has changed now. A person high in neuroticism would feel high levels of fear or anxiety and would be most likely to leave entirely or maybe prepare to defend themselves. A person low in neuroticism would feel much lower negative emotion and may simply wait and see what happens or go actively investigate it. So what is the right answer?

It's entirely ambiguous at this point. If the noise was a predator nearby then the highly sensitive person was "correct" in reading it as a threat and running away. The less neurotic individual is instead eaten and their traits are less likely to continue. If the noise was their child in danger or fruit falling from a tree then the low neuroticism individual was "correct" and may have secured themselves an advantage the high neuroticism individual would not. Even more complicated though, what if the sound was a person from another tribe whose intentions are unknown? What may seem to be an initially positive interaction may be the first steps in a conquest or the spread of a new disease. It may also lead to an exchange of ideas and resources that revolutionizes the way of life for everyone involved. Here the feedback between action and consequence can become so obscured by time and complexity that it may never be fully extrapolated or understood. So which approach is the best one?

Obviously the question is ridiculous as posed, but it points out an important fact. The way in which the human being has "solved" the problem of dynamic complexity and limited understanding is to spread that decision across a series of most likely outcomes. We call that suite of outcomes a person's personality or temperament. This was done initially in the realm of biology but has since been extrapolated into the social sphere in the guise of law, morality, wisdom, etc. Politics, for example, can thus be seen as a tool developed over time to coordinate these possibilities and temperaments into a collective will resilient and adaptable enough to propagate across vast time-frames and environmental shifts. Another way to see it is as an elaboration and extension of the same process pointed out by Jean Piaget in his research.

As Peterson points out one of the most predictive traits of conservative political leanings is conscientiousness--which for our purposes here can be understood as adherence to habit, preference for structure, and faith in traditional models. In contrast one of the best predictors of liberal political leanings is openness--which I'll use here as preference for novelty and re-categorization, creativity and faith in the future. What is important here is that a person's temperament heavily influences what they will "feel" are problems, how intensely they will feel it, how they are likely to frame both the problem and the solution, and those people and causes they will congregate toward. Importantly though, neither of these approaches is inherently better or worse than the other but instead represent stances in a dialogue that has been carried on over our entire history. They only work at all when they work together.

The conscientious temperament contains the wisdom of the past, as encoded in our social system as a whole. They feel most strongly the danger inherent in altering structures older and more complex than we can understand. Conscientiousness is the force that maintains what was built, saves for the future, and preserves structures from damage or decay. They know most deeply that meddling with how things are done can have unpredictable and catastrophic consequences that won't be apparent for years or centuries to come. The internal combustion engine led rapid climate change, much of World War I, a global economic reliance on oil and the subsequent conflict in the middle east, globalization as we know it, and the urban/suburban divide with all its many socio-economic ramifications; to name a few.

The openness temperament contains the promise of the future, a projected in art and new endeavor. They feel most strongly the failings of the current order of things and recognize the need for improvement and adaptation. Openness is the force that updates what was built, charts the course for the future, and makes the tools and structures that will replace what is currently in use. They know that entropy will make obsolete everything that is built and that the world will not wait for us to catch up. The internal combustion engine freed up a tremendous amount of free time, obliterated tasks that were backbreaking and poorly paid, led more rapid dissemination of information and independence for individuals, and allowed for revolutions in resource production and quality of life improvement for billions of people; to name but a few.

Now as you might imagine 5 dimensions, each of which is in fact a spectrum and can be subdivided into more specific components, leads to an enormous number of potential personalities and approaches to life. The focus on conscientiousness and openness is only to give some substance to the idea I'm drawing attention to. What matters is that the ways in which our societies as a whole have developed, the ways in which we've failed and succeeded, the systems we have settled upon and argue about today are neither arbitrary nor intractable but instead represent an ongoing process of refining both our causal understanding and our teleological planning. They are an extension of our nature and the process by which we came to be.

The main idea then is this: a culture, philosophy, religion, or society is the kind of outcome produced when creatures such as ourselves are presented with a world such as the one we live in and attempt to understand and perfect that relationship over the course of thousands or millions of lifetimes.

And with that, I believe, I'm finally prepared to bring this all together. If it is true that our needs, desires, distastes, and perspectives are the result of a process of refining that stretches back to the first life-form on earth. If it is true that our society is both our creation and a primary factor in how we are shaped to begin with, and that it represents the crystallized wisdom and foolishness of our species as a whole. And if it is true that this whole symphony is an ongoing dance of unbelievable complexity that demands the courage to persevere as well as the courage to entirely rewrite in ever changing measures. If true, then I believe we have reached an important point of decision in the story of our society and our species as a whole.

If Hannah Arendt is even partially correct about Labor, Work, and Action representing the tree fundamental aspects of the human condition then we have worked ourselves into a very tight spot. It looks to me like we have placed the logic of labor at the core of our society and are paying the price of it. It a logic that says that if only we had enough material success, and removed enough necessity, that we would be fulfilled. It fails to account for the fact that the products of labor and temporary and consumable and so the task can never really be complete. When crystallized into an economic system that logic makes creating demand for something heretofore unnecessary in the name of economic health or success seem totally reasonable. If every person could get what they needed without much effort or expense then our entire society would fall apart; our entire system of resource distribution depends on everybody consuming as much as possible of everything forever if anyone is to get anything at all. In this then Marx was on the right track in his predictions for capitalism. It need for efficiency and expansion led to a commodification of every possible facet of life until there was nothing that was not converted into something exchangeable, consumable, and profit making. It created a society that has place only for the animal in us.

However, in making profit and production our golden calf we were forced more and more to destroy or convert those structures that facilitated and rewarded work and action. Those parts of human nature that are most aspirant an unique are thus denied or crushed wherever they raise their unwelcome heads. Our need to create and make lasting additions to the human project, our need to express ourselves in a tangible way, has been crushed under the logic of labor and employment. Perhaps the company has a goal, but it will not be yours, instead you will be paid for acting the role of component piece in that company's larger aim and there is no room for deviation in a well tuned watch. Moreover, the goal of the company is predetermined to be some flavor of economic success and mastery which is itself simply a slavish adherence to the logic of labor writ large.

Action, our recognition that we exist in a multiplicity we must both conform to and affect, is traditionally represented in the world of politics. In the modern world though the great leveling of public sentiment through mass media, advertising, sound-biting, spin, and sheer scope has crushed the realm of action in a similar way. To gain the necessary traction in politics a person needs to somehow craft a message so broad and universal that more than half of all people across all demographics, geographic locations, socio-economic positions, individual experiences, and temperaments will take the time to vote for you to represent them on all issues for the term of your office; all of that while keeping in mind that the message needs to be short, memorable, and infinitely reproducible in many forms. This too is the logic of commodification and advertising as applied to our most personal and interpersonal natures.

That I feel so trapped at work, that I stay because to leave means courting starvation or simply playing the same game in a new location, that this feeling does not abate regardless of what position or rank I find myself in is thus to be expected. Given the above the great machine that was to be my birthright has instead been turned into a weapon tailor made to treat me like, and convince me that I am, no more than the most animalistic parts of myself; that my role and greatest aspirations can be captured in the right product and the cycle of labor and sleep. If Hannah Arendt is correct though, then we are willfully ignoring deeply encoded truths about what we as organisms are and how the universe as a whole operates. We have fallen in love with our own idea and chose to let it strangle us instead of admitting we may have made mistakes.

I would argue that the massive increase in psychological disorders in the most technologically developed nations, the rise in obesity, the drug addiction, and the constant recurrence of violence are indications that our "solution" to the great problem is incomplete and contradictory (at least in part). Issue around climate change, social inequality, resource consumption, and international authority should also point to areas in need of attention. Instead the entire apparatus seems to have entirely locked up but is still adhered to with an unquestioning fervor by the vast majority of any given population. Even now, in the midst of a global pandemic the debate has somehow become whether people should be expected to die of starvation due to economic depression or to die of infection in the name of economic health. We argue about how to wield the power of our vast materialism but rarely if ever about whether it should be wielded at all. Both the government and corporations are bound entirely to the logic of economics and statistics; both need to create and manage a consumer base and to provide a successful product, both use advertising and branding to create the needed demand and expectation, both rely on a constant stream of income to operate and so are encouraged to seek the most lucrative sources of it, etc. Put perhaps more plainly the only difference between the government and a corporation is the scope and the semantics.

What is required of us in such times is to take careful stock of where we are and what we want and to plan our course accordingly. If the system we have built is unsustainable in the long term then we benefit not at all from pretending otherwise. The goal of kickball was never truly to win the game but to enjoy ourselves with people we enjoyed for as long as possible. That someone holding a team at gun-point because they refuse to change the rules or play another game would be obviously insane; our current situation is more complex, but no different in its pattern. If we can no longer speak to each other and form common cause, if we can no longer pool our perspectives through debate and iteration, if the necessities imposed by our own design deny us the life and experience we designed them to produce then we need to change things.

We need a conversation and a collaboration, to best capture both what aught to be preserved from the old and to incorporate the new we so desperately need. We need a recognition of what exactly it is we are trying to achieve and a set of rules that might actually get us there. We need to stop pretending that the laws and customs we have grown accustomed to are not written in stone but instead part of our ongoing maturation as a species. That we are the fallible masters of our own destiny and can always design a better mouse trap. If we do not, if we instead choose to believe that our understanding is all encompassing, that the logic of now is the logic of creation, that the walls of possibility are both immovable and known; then its only a matter of time before reality tears it apart entirely. The universe is savage and unforgiving and does not shy from demanding the ultimate price for a even simple mistakes. Eating a mushroom because it looks tasty might be the last thing you ever do regardless of how much you thought it was safe at the time. In the same way the forces of climate, psychology, sociology and entropy will not hesitate to take their due simply because we were so very sure we knew what we were doing. A person who cannot feel pain, who can't adjust their actions based on environmental evidence, doesn't tend to live very long even now.

The challenges are large, but no larger than they've always been throughout history. Every crisis is simultaneously a divine decree to grow wiser and more capable. Whether we build an ark or drown in the flood though is up to us and will come down to how we choose to act and interact in was both large and small going forward. Whatever the great philosophies of labor and materialism may preach to you the only thing that has ever changed anything was the simple and sustained choice to act and work toward it. A company, a society, any collective at all cannot neither choose nor act on its own. The right to choose, the ability to imagine, the power to create is vested solely in the human being and until we truly believe this to be true we'll stay the slaves we chose to make ourselves into.