A Couple of Good Items on Killing the Job Culture

Bill Richardson at BWR Montag:

I sat down a few minutes ago to set the priorities for the day and it was a nice little exercise - the wage-slave tasks seem a little less daunting and I have a plan to slough through them. Then, when I turned to bang out some quick thoughts for this space, I had an epiphany: Those aren't my priorities, they're an organized to-do list for the job.

At least in my head, my top priority has been to find an alternative to my wage-slave job that would enable me to keep paying the bills. When I sit down to work out my daily tasks based on my priorities, I haven't been including tasks that would lead toward my personal freedom - which, as we've been concluding lately, is the only freedom I have any control over. Because I haven't been treating it as a real priority - it's simply been the item at the top of my wish list.

Steve Pavlina (via Deconsumption). Steve Pavlina's "Ten Reasons You Should Never Get a Job":

3. Lifelong domestication.

Getting a job is like enrolling in a human domestication program. You learn how to be a good pet.

Look around you. Really look. What do you see? Are these the surroundings of a free human being? Or are you living in a cage for unconscious animals? Or have you grown to love the color beige?

How’s your obedience training coming along? Does your master reward your good behavior? Do you get disciplined if you fail to obey your master’s commands?

Is there any spark of free will left inside you? Or has your conditioning made you a pet for life?

Humans are not meant to be raised in such cages. You poor thing…

5. Way too risky.

...Does putting yourself in a position where someone else can turn off all your income just by saying two words (i.e. “you’re fired”) sound like a safe and secure situation to you? Does having only one income stream honestly sound more secure than having 10?

The idea that a job is the most secure way to generate income is just plain silly. You can’t have security if you don’t have control, and employees have the least control of anyone. If you’re an employee, then your real job title should be professional gambler....

6. Having an evil bovine master.

When you run into an idiot in the entrepreneurial world, you can turn around and head the other way. When you run into an idiot in the corporate world, you have to turn around and say, “Sorry, boss.”

Did you know that the word boss comes from the Dutch word baas, which historically means master?

Reminds me of something a local anarchist said in her program on the public access station: it's in the basic human behavioral programming, when somebody keeps following you around and bugging you, to either get away from them or stomp the shit out of them. It's called the fight or flight response. At work, you chew Rolaids instead. We're not biologically designed to live under constant stress and harassment.

10. Becoming a coward.

Have you noticed that employed people have an almost endless capacity to whine about the problems at their companies? But they don’t really want solutions – they just want to vent and make excuses why it’s all someone else’s problem. It’s as if getting a job somehow drains all the free will out of people and turns them into spineless cowards.

Wow. That one hits me a little closer to home than I'd like. But I try to use my current wage income in ways that reduce the size of the income stream I'll need in the future, and thus be less dependent on an employer's whims. Which is probably a good thing, because by the time I have to look for another job it will probably be standard procedure for HR Nazis to Google the applicant's name, in which case I'll be on the equivalent of a "no fly" list.

If you can’t call your boss a jerk now and then without fear of getting fired, you’re no longer free. You’ve become your master’s property.

When you work around cowards all day long, don’t you think it’s going to rub off on you? Of course it will. It’s only a matter of time before you sacrifice the noblest parts of your humanity on the altar of fear: first courage… then honesty… then honor and integrity… and finally your independent will. You sold your humanity for nothing but an illusion. And now your greatest fear is discovering the truth of what you’ve become.

I don’t care how badly you’ve been beaten down. It is never too late to regain your courage. Never!

9. Loss of freedom.

It takes a lot of effort to tame a human being into an employee. The first thing you have to do is break the human’s independent will. A good way to do this is to give them a weighty policy manual filled with nonsensical rules and regulations. This leads the new employee to become more obedient, fearing that s/he could be disciplined at any minute for something incomprehensible. Thus, the employee will likely conclude it’s safest to simply obey the master’s commands without question.

As part of their obedience training, employees must be taught how to dress, talk, move, and so on. We can’t very well have employees thinking for themselves, now can we? That would ruin everything.

Fortunately, thanks to the state's schools (the first state "public" school systems were created about the same time as large-scale factory employment) people are already used to being told how to dress, talk, and move from around kindergarten age.

God forbid you should put a plant on your desk when it’s against the company policy. Oh no, it’s the end of the world! Cindy has a plant on her desk! Summon the enforcers! Send Cindy back for another round of sterility training!

Free human beings think such rules and regulations are silly of course. The only policy they need is: “Be smart. Be nice. Do what you love. Have fun.”...