The Job

The Protestant work ethic is the most outdated, abusive, brutal, ratty, ruthless, violent, plutocratical, autocratical, authoritarian, hierarchical, imperialist, despotic, deceitful, dictatorial, tyrannical soul-thieving fascist hoax ever shoved down the throats and beaten into adults and children's hides in all the continuous psychosis of human history.

Perhaps I should get off the fence here:

I don't like the job system, I don't like commodity labor, I don't like a social order that forces labor in an age of abounding surplus, when a grand narrative of our titanic Cultural Heritage is all around--(or perhaps our "Titanic" cultural heritage)-- and although I enjoyed many side-benefits of the jobs I took, I balked at selling my energy, body, soul, mind, time, freedom, and imagination to someone else's dubious project, thus annihilating or grossly marginalizing my own life and production. O me of little faith, perhaps Christ's admonishments would have proven true if I had, like Picasso at age 10, refused to do anything but my art.

I found that Canada in the 1980s and 1990s, affected by the great entelechy of the 1960s, afforded me much opportunity to devote my best hours (in my case morning) to the joy of my own production.

Even I initially wrote "the joy of my work," but hey: "work" was one part of it. And that work got its value and energy from play! "Grace flows in from the infinite spiritual world."(Frederic W.H. Myers, quoted by William James in The Varieties Of Religious Experience)-- that is Play! Play has a relationship with freedom, spielraum, leibensraum, vision, fantasy-- its keel is natural ecstasy, related to the earth. To play is to be alive in the mythical. It is to weave story from blood.

Relegating a calling to evenings (tired) and weekends (trying to catch up) doesn't cut it.

In my early 20s jobs were plentiful, a person could quit and get re-hired or find an equivalent job. That changed, apparently around 1973, the time of the "Mideast oil crisis"; then came the acceleration of the "neoliberal agenda."

A numinous light, touched with duendé flared bared over the planet in the late 1960s, and now in Millennial times we still live out of the long shadow of it, the Utopian implications of the moon landing eclipsed by Giant Denial called the neoliberal agenda, the "political-corporate nexus," "late monopoly capitalism," "post-Cold War hyper-Capitalism," "top-down globalization" with its commercial parody of Festival/Carnival fronting obsolete Victorian, Puritan, Calvinist values--which in turn fronts ancient fear: a clown-mask on a cold, white austere stone angel with a cobweb in its eye. Especially the Protestant idea of an elect of God (the million- and billionaires). In the cold umbra and penumbra under the mockery of festival (Happy Face on a Grim Reaper) grow such strange creatures as PR flacks, brokers, dot-com and quant geeks, moguls and supermoguls, Wall Street traders, offshore tax havens, debt-leverage imperialism, fiscal drift and partial de-indexation, bank rates and prime rates, consortiums, task forces, hardliners, cabinet shuffles, party hacks and scrums, policy wonks, wholly owned subsidiaries, hot money flows, bond ratings, the gnomes of Zurich and the oracles of the IMF; destabilization, privatization, warlordism-- the "private sector" and their old, exhausted zero-sum ganes.

The knot at the end of the rope of that denial is where duendé perhaps can still be glimpsed: death sports.

Values that insist on, preach, promote and create scarcity-- even starvation-- for the many-- out of the tremendous wealth now up and running. Anangke-- and its inevitable bottom-line: murder.

"An age of exhausted whoredom," as Joyce put it. The structure of the job system of wealth distribution assumes those ridiculous values. We, myself and many others, question the assumptions, on this website and elsewhere.