2022 Wishes for the Great Reinventions
- Published on December 25, 2021
You saw, Friends, that the so-called Great Resignation was your Great Recognition, your chance to enlighten your lives and the lives of those you love. You were born free, and everywhere you lived in chains, but even though for some of you those were the real chains of State power and violence or poverty and economic dependence, for most of you those chains were just your mind-forged manacles of media, your dumbed-down corporatese, or your narcissistic hero narrative. And in November, as you roared through your Great Shake Off, the late David Graeber’s last gift reached you, containing all the intellectual tools we need to rewrite human social life, culture and politics in our greatest discovery and renewal since the Enlightenment.
For few has it been just a great resignation, because all of those who quit and lived are somehow moving on. And the rest of us are not just sitting still; we are changing what we do and how we do it. This series of posts will offer ideas to savor and use to help us all change our lives and help those who work “for” us change theirs, drawing on the wealth of current changes in the histories and prehistories on which we previously based our life stories.
Our lightning bolt epiphany is that over 2 million years of human prehistory our ancestors were not organized just in one way or not at all; they were, like us, humans often capable of freedom of thought and experimentation, and of love of one another and of happiness. With that freedom, we learn, they tried every form of social and political organization they could imagine, and their imaginations were greater than ours because they were not all colonized as we are by a mythic history that agriculture led to slavery and the industrial revolution to alienation, or by Hollywood’s capitalist version of the myth created by the fake anthropologist Joseph Campbell of the universal heroic entrepreneur that those of you who are white think offers your children the best chance of getting a useful education. Indeed, Graeber and Wengrow even show that our Enlightenment’s (Rousseau’s) view of equalitarian society was borrowed almost in whole cloth from Native American thinkers like Kondiaronk (depicted above signing the “Treaty of the Grand Peace of Montreal”). By “myth” here I mean that each of them may be good to think — both the historically dominant myth of the march toward civilized oppression through agriculture and industry and the new ahistorical myth of the universal entrepreneur can lead us to freedom from our mind-forged manacles, but they are also “myths” in that neither of them are true or necessary to our freedom. The rest of this first post will explore the dominant myth.
Our Dominant Myth of Resignation
Before Graeber and Wengrow, anthropologists generally believed that nobody ever needed to quit their “jobs” (roles) in the Original Affluent Society. People had all they needed and wanted, and there was no particular reason to try to get more than anybody else. Within a group (if not across groups), people looked out for the safety of others, and the abundance they enjoyed enabled leisure for creative pursuits. This is a powerful narrative, aligned with Rousseau’s, Durkheim’s and Weber’s views of what followed if not with any social contract before, but now we must see it, too, as a useful myth and observation of some societies rather than a summary of a static prehistory. Biologists think that competition between groups is how the human brain evolved, and some think group formation and cooperation may have been associated with cooking, which differentiated the cooks from the hunters. Perhaps so, but that sociobiological narrative or myth falls flat when the prehistoric experimentation with social structures so well documented by Graeber and Wengrow begins.
So before November we believed that the first person to ever say, “Take this job and shove it!” was probably an agricultural worker. That worker, we thought, was not leaving home to go where the prospective food was, or even better stuff like river cane that could be used for blowguns, flutes, fishtraps, waterproof shelters and baskets, vials, knives, and almost everything else including food. That worker, we thought, was leaving home to go to a workplace to grow or harvest a crop, and maybe according to the schedule of a separate person who owned the workplace, the crop, and perhaps even — due precisely to the risk of resignation, because labor costs were not as big a deal — the worker. Thinking of this worker as the Rosa Parks of her day, without a civil rights movement to back her up, we did not imagine that things ended well for her.
The authors of the Bible missed a great opportunity in connection with this original mythic refusenik. We have the original affluent Eden — check — but then the first murder condemns humankind to a life of agriculture, which is neither what happened nor even a coherent narrative. Worst of all, then they skip over the important part, the first resignation. Sure, they provide a great first resignation story later when Jacob finally gets away from Laban after two decades of unfair labor practices. The story of how Jacob becomes more prosperous than Laban while serving Laban and then escapes may be one of the great trickster stories, but the very completeness of this comedy points to an underlying original tragedy — the first resignation followed by murder or enslavement.
In our dominant narrative, the breakup of families by agriculture and slavery continued on the factory floor. Blake saw the factories only from the outside and called them satanic mills, but they arguably became worthy of that name on the inside much later thanks to the Time Studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor. By breaking up “skilled” work into replicable tasks, Taylorism improved productivity and profits first in the factory and then in the office. Many of the jobs resulting were more suitable for “oxen,” as Taylor once acknowledged. That was all supposed to change with computers and Peter Drucker’s “knowledge workers,” but just before the end of the 20th Century, management consultants turned workers back into oxen, or put them out to pasture:
When as an anthropologist of work I started with a big old company in the 1980s, the retiring head of the department gave me a tattered card that he said he had carried in his wallet for his entire working life; it was a cartoon of a man yelling “I quit” as he peed on his desk. But that guy would never make it to retirement after McKinsey changed corporate life in 1997 with “The War for Talent,” lionizing the top managers, justifying enormous increases in their compensation, and spreading the faith that their retention was the only chance of corporate survival.
On the corporate side, the dot com bubble’s burst and fakes from Enron to Theranos tempered judgments of what followed, but in the world of entertainment almost every drama, game and “reality” TV show became about becoming the sole survivor, until we made the most ruthless participant in any of those games our national leader. In Squid Game, some of you probably enjoyed seeing the nice laid-off auto worker who never gave up his values, Gi-Hun, triumph over “the smartest guy in the room,” Sang Woo, even though Sang Woo ended his life by finding a moral core that will forever elude some of our leaders.
Let us end for now with a story of quitting told by a man with a very strong moral core and keen powers of observation, whose racism however prevented him from understanding what his eyes clearly beheld. In 1867, the peerless botanist John Muir, toward the end of his Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, was wandering at night in the pine woods near Gainsville, Florida, when he noticed a light. He crept “cautiously and noiselessly” through the grass, and “came suddenly in full view of the best-lighted and most primitive of all the domestic establishments I have yet seen in town or grove.” By a glowing log fire sat a man and a woman.
I ventured forward to the radiant presence of the black pair, and, after being stared at with that desperate fixedness which is said to subdue the lion, I was handed water in a gourd from somewhere out of the darkness. I was standing for a moment beside the big fire, looking at the unsurpassable simplicity of the establishment, and asking questions about the road to Gainesville, when my attention was called to a black lump of something lying in the ashes of the fire …[which] proved to be a burly little…boy….
Their “radiant presence” shows that he glimpsed the numinous beauty of this family in their wild new home — having just obtained the most basic, natural yet entirely new right to live together as a family to raise that child — and he might even have recognized that he was looking upon the bravest and most elevated home that he had ever beheld according to his own “wild is superior” lights. Muir was blind to this brightest of blooms, a tableau of the establishment of an independent family in the face of hundreds of years of forced separation on the auction block and in the plantation, to be continued, for example, through the criminalization of poverty and the child welfare system. Muir was treated to generosity and water without any of the lengthy grilling to which all of the wealthy white Georgians he admired had subjected him, even though this encounter took place right after our country’s greatest paroxysm, and for all this family knew the grizzled white man sneaking out of the dark pines could have shot and killed them all.
The Biblical Jacob, my first corporate boss retiring with (sadly) his best flourish, Gi-Hun’s triumph in Squid Game, the family seen in the woods at night by Muir; these are all triumphant stories of resignation and renewal under our powerful, dominant myth of oppressive civilization. If any of these protagonists had the opportunity to absorb The Dawn of Everything, they would be energized by the opportunity to improve everything in our lives. But what if they like some of our children have drunk too much diluted Joseph Campbell and are committed to living their lives within a “universal” hero narrative? I hope that for them resignation will be just another monster they slay on their way to their golden fleece, and even more hope that they have the opportunity to slay the monster of the heroic self. Because what I wish for them and for all of us is to use all freedom we gain from shaking off our mind-forged chains with love, understanding and compassion for all others and our world. These origin stories and our ability now to shake them off are only the beginning of actions to change our lives.
