Comments on Donna's post re "What the CIO wants you to know (part III)": Pursuit of Happiness

We have instinctive problems with some CIO telling us that we have no right to be happy on the job for several reasons.

One is that intangible happiness is often offered as ersatz for pay raises, thus companies are motivated to speak about the pursuit of happiness at firm XYZ in lieu of offering higher salaries...in the same bait and switch General Motors used when it overcommitted to retirement benefits in lieu of pay raises in the 1960s and 1970s.

From the company's point of view, promising human flourishing as an intangible reward is better than promising a retirement in Boca Raton, because it is much more difficult for the employee to hold the company to an intangible promise.

Donna's CIO is here welshing on previous promises probably made at the company in question, where during the fat years, the company lured employees with the image of human flourishing: today, the CIO's job is to rhetorically revert to barenaked capitalism, wherein the theory gives NO assurance to the employee other than that the company will meet the economic terms "agreed" upon.

The problem, recognized as such in societies without as full a committment to laissez-faire as the US is that baldly stated, laissez-faire is just as out of the humanistic mainstream of Western thought (or, for that matter the humanism of nonfundie Islam or Confucianism) as Communism.

The more brutal the terms are expressed ("dis company doesn't care whether you is happy, we cover your paycheck chump on time, and dat's it") the more it is clear that the time spent at work is down the tubes in Marx's sense.

What I mean is this: humanism, of whatever global stripe, has a fundamental appeal to the unified human personality which includes, in Freud's somewhat dated but still valid categories, the id (the part of me that wants to meet Elizabeth Hurley), the ego (the part of me that wants some money) and the superego (the part of me that cries when I watch Chariots of Fire).

Pure laissez faire, unfortunately, equates "property" with "happiness"; the Founding Fathers of my country very nearly put "property" in place of "happiness" in the Declaration of Independence, but drew the line at what it would look like if a group of Yankee sharpers teamed up with a passle of slave-drivers whose happiness consisted in chattel property rights in black bodies.

That is: under a pure or *reinen* interpretation of laissez-faire, the employee *qua* employee has no right at all to seek happiness on the private property of his employer, while the employer has an absolute right to pursue happiness on his goddamn private golf course (how men seek happiness in golf is quite another question for a deeper intellect than mine).

Laissez faire admits that when the employee knocks off for the day he is THEN permitted to seek happiness by coding Visual Basic on his home system (you paid for that copy of Visual Studio, right chump?) or to watch his legal copy of Showgirls on his DVD.

Marx's problem with this was that the empirical length of the working day, and its natural tendency to expand, render the time lost to the pursuit of happiness (whether that pursuit be my low examples, or in some sort of Higher Thing such as God-walloping) a permanent loss which contradicts the claim of pure or *reinen* laissez-faire to be a category of humanism in the first place.

All world religions preach human fulfillment. The more primitive promise the most wretched pie in the sky or seventy virgins a day: the more advanced point to the quiet fulfillment of Quaker meeting or eleemosynary acts. It's almost tautologous that a religion do this DESPITE the fire and brimstone: for even as the Paris students of 1968 said under the paving stones lie the beach, the vivid fire and brimstone is Preacher's way of pointing to the higher fulfillment constituted in either going to Heaven or something even Higher such as "that Love which moves the sun and other stars" in Dante, or Nirvana.

The great American Puritan divine, Jonathan Edwards, preached Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, causing infants to wail, women to faint, and strong men to tremble in Colonial meeting house, on the way to what he knew to be Unspeakable Comfort, and this was despite its primitivism a humanism. Many writers, including my homey Adorno, have reread the religious enthusiasm of Edwards' time, from American Puritanism and the Quakers to German pietism, as the ordinary working slob's version of Voltaire, finding in both Voltaire, and in religious enthusiasm, the SAME "humanism" of non-negotiably demanding, of G-d, to be heard as one who desires not the Bad Fire, but who is willing to listen, like Job.

Pastor tells us that Job zipped up, but the paradox in the Good Book is that Job zips up strategically: he wants G-d to recognize his sufferings, he wants those sufferings to have meaning, he wants a shoulder to cry on, and he wants to be heard so loud that Heaven trembles, thus he SAYS (still not zipping up) "I will zip up, and listen".

[When managers demand "good listeners" and refuse to listen, they have, at times literally in America, with its increasing infection of bizness by Fundamentalism, misread, in my opinion, Job.]

The problem for Marx in the 19th century was that the Satanic Mill *completely denied* the hopes of the 18th century as far as most of our ancestors, my ancestors, Dan's forebears, and Donna's ancestors, were concerned, a denial not to be found in most books and more often found in certain things our Mother might say when she recalled the hard times.

"You're not here to have any fun".

"This company doesn't want your creativity. We want results, and we define what those are".

"You are terminated effective immediately".

"Joe doesn't like you and he's my boss. Sorry, but there it is".

The employee who is terminated before his pension has a chance to vest hasn't suffered, for Marx's angry ghost, the sort of loss a financier suffers on the Bourse, because the financier *qua* financier has effectively unlimited access, under the financial interpretation of Say's law, to credit: cf. Merchant of Venice.

The financier has suffered a measurable, quantitative loss, but Marx, despite his mastery of classical economic theory, chose, influenced by Hegel, to exit purely quantitative thinking to the space we inhabit as NORMAL PEOPLE: qualitative.

Qualitatively, the employee who quietly has put in a minimum, say, of one extra hour a day at one job in General Motors MIS for FORTY YEARS, and who loses his pension, has suffered an irreversible, qualitative loss that has put under erasure his humanity in a way contrary to both religious and enlightenment expectations.

[Cf. Mike Douglas in the 1992 film Falling Down, a computer nerd whose humanity has almost vanished who goes on a walking rampage through Los Angeles.]

[Hamas got elected because it recognized that people, without access to their jobs during Israeli clampdowns, still gotta eat. Islam is a humanism.]

The fact that this happens in the small, micro-economically, means only that "the executioners face is always well hid".

Now, such is the Beast that is us that this may only represent the best deal in terms of a sort of "factoring" of injustice. Perhaps we all have to endure some shit in order to avoid another Holocaust; in the Nazi holocaust, the engineering classes did just fine under Hitler and grabbed the Jews' property under a twisted Socialism. Hayek has shown me the truth: the selfish bastards in the neighborhood I grew up in would game Socialism out of all recognition.

But the philosopher should not endeavor to parse the CIO's language in any way to make it sound sensible.

It doesn't compile.

Even the evil Japanese prison guard in the Bridge over the River Kwai can say with a straight face, be happy in your work. But there are times in the corporation where this is not possible, and arbeit don't macht shit.

This is because AT BEST laissez-faire is a machine, a technology, which allows us to work together while staying somewhat free. It is a path. But for the same reason Jesus said "the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath" we have to avoid internalising CIO language, we can't take it with even the seriousness we give to computer code or a good computer book, like Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler.

But moral seriousness requires us also to remember that social machines like laissez-faire cannot be regarded with detachment and amusement, like many of these young whippersnappers regard it. We are all Willy Loman, enmeshed in the system.