cell913blog.com #78

Having just listened to Mary Trump described her grandfather as a ‘sociopath’ who considered all people ‘tools’ for the growth of his business empire, and then also describe her family as a family of ‘mysogynists’ in her interview with Jen Psaki on MSNBC, I suddenly ‘connected’ these two dots…misogyny and tools.

Albeit, in reference to the American economy, political culture and ethos, including the anima mundi, human resources have for decades, if not longer, considered the workforce in the same ‘frame’ as ‘raw materials’ to be ‘mined, processed, and disposed of as their usefulness came to an end. And a similar frame and perspective has spread like ink in a blotter (dating this scribe!), into the economies, politics, cultures and ethos of many, if not all developed countries. The pursuit of profit, the manufacture and ownership of the machines and the products they produce, have both far outweighed the significance of what is ultimately and tragically considered a ‘cost’ on the corporate profit-and-loss statement.

Whenever costs have to be cut, the first ‘disposable’ is human beings. Of course, there is a graduated scale of ‘disposability’ ranking in inverse order to the rung on the hierarchical organization chart, the lowest being the most disposable, with the highest considered only in the emergency of the public relations scandal or as a last resort.

Tools, to, the word Ms Trump uses for her grandfather’s framing of people, is exclusively a depiction that could and would come only from a misogynist. It is a male frame of mind that would make the link between the tool and the worker, from a variety of useful perspectives. First, it is purchasable, and thereby ‘owned’ by the executive; and then, it can be replaced with a ‘better model’ as soon as one appears, especially one that is more durable, less costly, and likely to produce more ‘product’ or ‘service’ while saving money; furthermore, it has no ‘ties’ of responsibility from the management, and as such is easily, freely and insouciantly dismissed with or without cause (even those phrases are recent legal inclusions).

So far, this argument has been made zillions of times by various advocates for workers, union organizers, social workers, and even economists. The last group has acknowledged the inverse proportion of not ‘seeing’ the full value of the worker and their lethargic if outright defiant attitude to their work. Absenteeism, hiding in the workplace, theft and other deviance from normal worker expectations are only some of the now clearly evident symptoms of what is essentially an historic management perspective on the drones of industry.

There are several roots to this deplorable, and unsustainable dynamic. And the relatively simple strategy of voting for and instituting unions, while somewhat effective, will never be able to supplant the deeply embedded, conventional and ‘class’ framing of workers as far less important to the enterprise than the executives, the engineers, the researchers, and the managers and messaging professionals. And here is where there is a case to be made that links misogyny and tools.

From the beginning of human history, the club, the bow, the gun, the shovel, the knife, the bucket, all considered extensions of the physical body, have been considered ‘primary,’ necessary, helpful, and worthy of mastery, especially by the men of the community. That is not to say that women did not use and master these tools; the recorded evidence, however, has come, again primarily, from the men who committed their stories to some form of record. The pen, and the brush, presumably along with the spoon, fork, cooking utensils came along as further imaginative additions to the survival of the family and thereby the community.

We do not need a litany of ‘tools’ in an historic timeline to establish the human dependency, reverence, amazement and commitment to design, create and both produce and distribute ‘tools’ that morphed into machines in the industrial age, capable of producing 'more’ with less physical effort, and at lower cost than the human hand. Thinking both of effectiveness and efficiency, two of the most influential guide words in a contemporary economy, embedding the notion of precision, accuracy, timing, quality control and elevated expectations into the design and operation of the machines, brought with that initiative, a corollary impact: that humans, too, could and would and even must be ‘more perfect’ especially on a moral and ethical scale. Indeed Lionel Tiger, the Rutgers anthropologist, in his The Manufacture of Evil, argues that defying biology, the culture that brough the machine also birthed a new (and both inescapable and unsustainable) requirement of ethical and moral ‘perfection’ that echoed, emulated and embodied the kind of precision and efficiency that ‘metal’ can be fashioned into.

Tied to these heightened expectations, requirements, judgements and their link to whatever God was the subject of worship, were the men, first and likely then the women whose ego’s were now subject to the kind of scrutiny, judgement, exposure and sheer intolerance, a level that can never be fully explained by the human instinct for power and control…over whatever and whomever it seemed to need to dominate. Implicit in that dynamic of judgement was the already embedded ‘power imbalance’ between men and women…the former ‘on top,’ the latter, ‘below’. The history of gender relations is not exclusively tied to the development of tools, machines and the moral/ethical framework that was concomitant with those developments. Neither can the gender question be totally excised from the ‘tool-machine’ thread.

Another accompanying trailer to the tool-machine-thread is the identification of effective, normal, respectable, honourable and highly ethical human beings with whatever they might produce, generate, create, build, design. This ‘doing’ culture, not only as a matter of identity but also as highly significant measure of ‘worth’ starts very early in the life of the North American child. Test scores, music festival awards, athletic medals, allowances for chores performed, monitored and evaluated and the transition into the ‘money-for-work’ economy. Classical conditioning, the kind of behaviorism that Pavlov developed with food and bell for his dogs, and Skinner advanced, while having application to some human skill development, falls far short as a legitimate and honourable ‘training’ model for highly educated, creative, sensitive and motivated adults.

Nevertheless, its efficiency and publicly acclaimed success, have made it a central ‘training method’ for corporations and governments even into the twenty-first century. Immanuel Kant has reminded us not to be the ‘means to another’s ends’ in a kind of warning against abuse by those with power over us. The detailed, intricate, onerous task of first identifying and then separating the ‘desired ends’ of one person or agency, and then of discerning how and why ‘the means’ (skills, experience, attitudes, perspectives, values and motives) that I might bring to that ‘end’ are or are not compatible is often left to both chance and need.

If I need work and an income, I will obviously be far less likely to withhold my ‘work’ from the expressed invitation and desire of an employer for my ‘skill set’ as the HR parlance puts it today.

Nevertheless, the identification of ‘doing,’ and ‘building,’ and ‘generating,’ and ‘producing,’ and ‘selling,’ and ‘persuading,’ and ‘deciding,’…..the list is endless has become a ‘measuring stick’ for what we call normality…and, it says here, a recipe for sabotage.

Universities have become machines training students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) to the death and demise of the liberal arts. We are complicitous in a culture whose aphoristic posters hung on the walls of classrooms back in the 1960’s which read, “Learn to Earn!” It was, and still is, the declared public and political definition of the purpose of learning to ‘earn a living’…as if earning a living were the highest and solitary purpose of acquiring an education. ‘Tools’ in the quiver of the employers, at best a reduction of aspiration to a function, fails to aspire and to inspire and thereby motivate ordinary adolescents to a more complicated, nuanced, critical and creative ‘vision’ of their adult lives.

The whole onslaught of brainwashing in a corporate, capitalist and elitist culture, given the highly successful billionaires at the top of the pyramid of income scales, renders not only the language, the perspective, the highly valued attitudes, aspirations and even the dreams of both children and their parents to a high-paying, highly rewarding socially, and exclusively gated-community life of a new and burgeoning elite. Their ‘achievements’ are so trumpeted, the numbers of billionaires skyrocketing, the eyes of our young so fixated on their role-modelling, that one mother, on hearing of the graduation from law school of one of her daughter’s friends, sardonically complained to her daughter, “See, now why could you not have graduated from law school like her?” To which her highly educated daughter responded, without skipping a breath, “So mother, have we not become successful enough for you?”

Competition for the so-called elite universities is ravaging some families’ psyches, depending on the feelings of adequacy/inadequacy of the parents. And from much anecdotal and research evidence, the inadequacy quotient seems to outrank the adequacy quotient. I once calculated the report card mark of a grade twelve student of Asian ethnicity at 58%. The next day he returned to tell me that he was unable to show his parents that report card and had ‘deliberately erased his grade.’ This scribe as a twelve-year-old hid the Christmas report card in order to prevent a fractious visit from two aunts over the holiday, after receiving only a 63% in History. The consequences of what was deemed ‘deception’ were traumatic.

“Performance anxiety” is only one of the many ‘descriptors’ that march up and down the streets of our neighborhoods, masquerading as ‘anticipated rejection’ in the event of a failure and the judgement that can and too often will follow a disappointing ‘performance.

Men, fired from their jobs in the dot-com-debacle, in Silicon Valley, continued to shower, dress and return to the workplace from which they had been fired…only to cower in a recently jointly purchased (or rented?) motorhome parked in the parking lot unable and unwilling to inform their spouses of their firing. Losing one’s job, as president Biden often reminds us, (a job is much more than a pay cheque, from his father’s memory), is for millions analogous to a death. It is the death of one’s identity, one’s self-acceptance, one’s social standing, one’s friends, and one’s hopes and dreams. It is also very often the literal loss of one’s family.

Riding the various expectations, conventions, identities, storms and deaths of millions of lives in North America is our fragile, individual, personal and highly sensitive ego. And it is not only our ‘fault’ that we succumb.

The ‘system’ is so stacked against us in the form of what we are expected to ‘produce’ and to ‘do’ and to ‘prove ourselves’ that we stumble, fall, and then have to pick up the pieces. Having come to define ourselves, especially the men of the twentieth century, as ‘doers,’ ‘producers,’ and ‘agents,’ and ‘salesmen,’ and ‘performers,’ of many kinds, we are both unable and unwilling to consider any other form of identity.

In a binary, highly judgemental, dismissive, social-media-generated, success-addicted/failure-avoidant, competitive social and corporate and political, not to mention moral and ethical ethos, it would be reasonable to posit that ‘resisting this strait-jacket’ of the performing ‘ego’ qualifies as closer to ‘normal’ and mentally ‘healthy’ than to fall victim to it.