Amerika

If nature has a goal for humans, we have no idea what it is, so we use our big brains to make up our own goals. This clashes with the need of organizations to use us as their tools, and so they have other plans for us that often do not make it into public view.

In the beginning individuals ideated a goal of staying alive as hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers: plant and hunt enough to eat enough. To do that requires having children to help mom and dad. This worked until the children became adults at which time the children farmed, and the old parents did the menial work that they could.

What the homesteaders did not know is that there are other people with other goals that can override their own goal to stay alive, such as war in the extreme case, or a children’s education law forcing them out of their homesteads, which could be just as extreme.

Once women were emancipated, married women left for work every day, leaving their children at a facility with other adults to emancipate them further. Sending the kids to boarding school means that the school raises the children instead of educating them (typically the problem in perpetually uneducated Africa). However, even in Western society, the father could not do the homestead thing without help, so he left it to find a job at an organization thereby undermining the goal to be alive.

What this means is that the social space between family members not only increased but increased beyond the goal of the family to stay alive. This sort of mini-diaspora started treating each other as welfare recipients, sending each other feel-good messages/letters and money when needed, maybe even getting together on Independence Day to celebrate a past goal that has now become irrelevant. The same goes for a typical Class of ’94 get-together after ten years.

In my own life I have experienced societal goals such as becoming independent and self-reliant while my own goals became somewhat misty-over-the-horizon and perhaps far-fetched happiness. But recently I saw this remarkable passage of historic proportions I was never told about:

Virtu was needed by a society in order to deal with the economic, social, cultural, political, and technological forces that were plunging it into the future, in the face of which the failure to act would result in its decline.

In my mind it means that we are always being plunged into the future, and if we do not act (not even knowing what that act might be), or at least always be open to the idea of acting and indeed working within which we are being plunged into, decline shall be the outcome in the next future awaiting us.

The next level deduction is that being successful in the first future can very easily result in decline during the next future because the virtu or perhaps the goal did not change with the new future.  The reason for decline in this argument is twofold:

1. The individual goal did not change in a new future.
2. People stopped work somehow (because they may be old) or worked in the wrong direction because the original goal is wrong.

If you go back in time to the early twentieth century when organizations started to formalize, it was deemed a novel idea to get a job with medical aid and pension contributions. People were excited with the idea that this was even possible (which it was, then), so they enthusiastically raised their children, and schools educated the same children, with the idea to a get a job in a company that would enable them going up through the ranks providing a better future for future children.

We now know that the only generation that will benefit from pension payouts is the boomer generation. The novel idea or goal of having a job as your sole means of support has failed within a few generations and the reason is that organizations have different goals and more importantly they see the future differently. In fact, they change the future to suit them, not us.

This means the current Western societal goal is artificial. This also means any work done to advance this goal will only undermine the individual’s goal (if it even existed). If I advise my grandchildren today, it is that they should work as a contractor and save their own retirement funds without going to a fund. In fact, they should only use banks for current payments and receipts, not for savings. The same applies to insurance and medical aid where cooperatives will be a better option. Unfortunately, it requires some math proficiency which uneducated children will not be able to do.

However, while working towards a family goal remains critical, it is also important to work (hard) at organizational goals. For example, my wife worked for a company in the finance department, then she moved to the sales department, and while that causes a lot of stress during the audit and tax processes, the most stress she has by far, comes from the shareholders (the board of directors) playing politics.

The deficiency in current Western politics is on display precisely because businesses now assume the role of that political leadership. The deduction can therefore be made that a new future is being thrust upon us and that we should change our goals accordingly. Our new future will involve some alternative to the way things are currently done.

The mistake most of these options make is a failure to engage with the reality of survival, instead of ideology on typewritten pages. Blood, sweat, and tears is required to be successful, i.e. to stay alive. The alternative is already visible in the form of alternative intelligence. In the eighties machines and processes were automated, in the new twenties humans are being automated because their corporate driven future will turn them into the precariat, the new version of proletariat, and we know how that worked out.

The future will involve society outside the auspices of bureaucracy and commerce. The corporate job has failed us just like the modern cradle-to-grave state, which ended in a fog of immigration riots in France and the USA. To escape futile goals, we must tie them all back to the primary goal: survival and thriving as individuals, which requires a civilization that must not then hijack our will to live for its own organizational purposes.

Tags: jobs, organization