What to do to not be a slave to the system?
When answering that question, intellectuals usually suffer from two defects: believing themselves to be all-powerful and proposing unrealizable utopias…
Aren’t those who speak the worst about “the system” usually the ones who live best with it?
That is the other defect of intellectuals who speak for those in power and thus manage to influence, grow and benefit.
Why don’t they usually think for people?
I have tried to reason with the people I know who get up every morning to work to pay for housing, school, groceries… And they do it, even if they don’t like the system that forces them to work on what they don’t want.
Doesn’t speaking against “the system” save you, to begin with, having to specify more?
When I talk about “the system”, I am referring to a technostructure that determines our lives in an increasingly global way, which takes shape – starting in 1989 – with the fall of the Wall and the beginning of the Internet.
How do you notice that the world has changed?
In the eighties I walked through Barcelona and the clothes, the food, the stores were diverse. Today, for example, the brands of everything are the same everywhere. And lifestyles.
But shouldn’t we work to pay them as much today as before 1989?
What has changed is that before we did not own the means of production. On the other hand, today you own your cell phone, your computer, your car… They are yours, but you put them at the service of the company.
We also put in our time and more and more.
You put in more time than ever! Most of us today answer work emails even from bed. But, on the other hand, the great factories of the 19th century are no longer in Europe, but in Asia, China, India, Vietnam… We no longer work only in one place.
How are we employees progressing?
In the increase of a certain bargaining power by owning some of the means of production of wealth; but in exchange for now working everywhere. You can go to another company with your cell phone, your computer, agenda and experience.
I would lose the brand that supports me.
But he has the means to create another. Before you couldn’t take the printing press with you; nor the designers or engineers, the machines in their factories; But today the factories are in Asia and they can set up consultancies and work with the best brand or several or create one. That gives them negotiating power.
And doesn’t that end up being more work?
The dark side of the new system is also the good: since work is no longer located in a factory or office, we work all day everywhere.
So that?
That is the question: if we go from the capitalist exploiting us to exploiting ourselves, we have lost. And neither unions, nor parties, nor churches will serve us anymore. Therefore, the division between classes, dominators, dominants, employers and employees will be increasingly diffuse and we will have internalized all that psychological tension.
Is this how mental illness increases?
Because we already carry within us the exploiter and the exploited, because our entire life – without office or schedule – is being devoured by work.
What is the alternative?
Until now the world has been globalized with utilitarianism: the good is what generates more and more benefit, ergo pleasure, for the master and thus for everyone; and that “more and more” is the global logic of profit maximization…
That logic unites us and degrades the planet.
It is the always more and more benefit with the less and less utilitarian investment that brings together all of humanity today.
How to be a postutilitarian?
Think of a carpenter who enjoys working with wood with his hands, designing it, explaining it to his few clients. And it is successful: more demand, more contracts, more employees, more stores…
Is that success?
I know that carpenter. He said no to more and more and preferred to continue being the craftsman whose success allowed him to choose his clients to continue doing what he liked. Success is no longer earning more at work, but being able to decide how you work.
What if you are an engineer or lawyer?
The same. You grant yourself an ideal and you put it above the pure logic of profit in a more artisanal than industrial way.
Size does not matter? Won’t the big monsters crush you? Is there a match?
Success is no longer growing more and more, but earning that space with your talent and effort to be who you want. That is to transcend the more and more utilitarian and stop being a slave to the system.
It depends on your talent and effort, but you will no longer put it at the service of more and more just because, but rather to gain the ability to decide who you are. And set the limits for yourself.
Nothing more ambitious.
If you make an effort to set an ideal and realize it instead of only serving the logic of more and more, you will win by deciding who you are… And then you can no longer lose.
