Work Ethic, Salon-style

Say there's this guy who has a job he doesn't care for. He never lifts a finger, but he sure loves collecting his paycheck. He tells himself he can't leave: he'd have to find another job, or start his own business, and then he's going to have to work for a living! To prove to himself that he's not a bad person, he couches his decision to stay in more pleasant, more acceptable terms: He's a social animal, he'd miss his co-workers, some of whom have become good friends (he refuses to think about the fact that as long as he behaves like a sloth, he's making his "friends" shoulder the burden).

You and I might not muster much sympathy for him. We might think that he essentially steals from his employer, that he deliberately screws the company's clients and shareholders, that there cannot be an excuse for this.

But not Salon's advice columnist Cary Tennis. Tennis thought about the poor man's predicament "all evening," then had a nightmare about it. And he Understands! Oh, does he Understand! Because Tennis has never met an overprivileged whiner he didn't instinctively smother in kneejerk cuddles, he tells the guy that it's the fault of the free market. Capitalism sucks! It dehumanizes us! It reduces us to, to... He strains briefly for a metaphor and is rewarded with a flash of insight that, to his mind, is almost frighteningly original: It reduces us to a cog! In a machine!

And so the second coming of Das Kapital get underway. Writes Tennis:

[I]f a machine is very large, your function might not be missed for a long time. If you are but a cog in a cog in a cog, and that cog is but a minor cog in a giant cog that itself is simply part of an even gianter cog that itself could be said to be an entity, if a minor one, that ultimately reports to the machine itself, then it is possible that this could go on for years. When machines become very large, some of what they do is superfluous and will not be missed by anyone.

He's loving this. He's frenzied now. He builds on the shrill metaphor like a compulsive Sarah Winchester kept adding onto her crazy mansion. To make his point, he throws in terms like "belts," "vacuum system," "seals," "rod," "cam," "sensors," and "flange."

And he keeps this up paragraph after paragraph, reflecting at one point that the "thinking cog" is "an anomaly in itself"; and at another point that "because the machine was poorly designed, it may turn out that the machine works better when we do nothing."

Reality check. Like all of us, the subject of this sympathetic handwringing was born with free will. Like all of us, he shapes his own fate. His choice? To be a parasite, a mooch, and a thief.

Millions of Americans, many with an impeccable work ethic, find themselves unemployed. They would love to have a nice white-collar job, and an income, and good health insurance, and to feel useful and respected and purposeful again.

Somehow, I don't think they'd be very impressed with the mewling disingenuousness of poor Mr. Cog and his soft-hearted enablers.

Comments

[Jeff the Poustman]

Meaningful work that excites us is an amazing gift. But work that simply allows us to feed, shelter, and clothe ourselves and our loved ones-- even if we find it tedious-- is also pretty damn good. We degrade ourselves whenever we dog it.