EXCERPT: THE WORKER, ALONE! Going Against the Grain (2015)

A QUESTION OF CONTROL!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 1, 2015

“A violent order is disorder, and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.”

—Wallace Stevens. American modernist poet

REFERENCE:

This is another excerpt from The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (revised, expanded and edited from its 1995 edition, due out in late summer 2015).

The very process of control breeds disorder, just as certainly as a sensible tolerance for unavoidable disorder leads to control.  The more the obsession with control the greater the chaos. Everyone is bound and shaped by control.

Most workers attempt to control themselves — their tempers, desires, appetites — because it is safe. There is security in control. Control generates a certain sense of safety, a certain assurance that with control, they will not fail.  But is this prudent behavior?

When there is a need for control, chaos is always around the corner. Control manifests a division between the controller and the thing controlled. Virtue does not lie in such separation. This is so because control implies effort, the demand for security, all in the name of what is good. But control is the very denial of goodness, and is therefore disorder.

Does a tree strive for control?  Does the universe exert effort to maintain ecological balance?  The observer who separates himself from the thing observed is the source of failure, not success.

A mind which sees directly without the paralysis of analysis is a mind without division. It is a whole mind, a sane mind, a mind one with itself. On the other hand, a neurotic mind is a divided mind, a mind at war with itself, a mind obsessed with control.

When such a mind believes it has realized total control, the body cannot move. The person is utterly in the grips of its mania, its neurotic need for control. Such a person is not free, more likely paralyzed with fear, caged in his own obsession.

We see this in the artist who is involved in creative destruction.  Thought is scrambled from “what is” to what is perceived; integrity of the frame is then restored in one sense and destroyed again in another. This is called “art.” The artist, whatever the endeavor, is in the business of control, only that control is then euphemized to an expression of culture.

Control is the basic neurosis of the workplace. Management desires to control workers to ensure that they are productive; that time is not wasted; that the organization operates at maximum efficiency. But do these worthwhile desires materialize? No, because the greater the intensity of management’s obsession with control the greater the chaos. 

The organization is an organism not unlike the autonomic nervous system of the human body, more so now with its electronic connective tissue, and is thwarted from its mission by arbitrary policies and procedures that either deny or take away from this reality.

Control is a function of order, and order is an integral function.  Each worker and manager must embody order through their own volition; their own action. Together, worker and manager are one function. What they hold in common is productive work.

George Orwell wrote “A Homage to Catalonia” (1938) about his personal experience and observations in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Northeastern Spain, more particularly Catalonia, was in the midst of the most far-reaching social revolution seen to that time in Western Europe. 

Workers were running factories, peasants large estates, waiters restaurants, trolley drivers complex transport systems, municipal workers sanitation systems. It didn’t last as Fascist General Francisco Franco with the support of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany prevailed, but it demonstrated, if only in cameo, what people are capable of doing given the opportunity.

The differentiation of managers from workers is an arbitrary one, a division which causes chaos in the world of work. Because of the cultural inclination to separate the controller from the controlled, the analyzer from the analyzed, there is corruption, disorder, distrust, violence and much ruthless manipulation in the workplace. 

Consequently, the more hysterical the quest for control the greater the workplace paralysis. This is willfully ignored throughout the working world, because control is at war with freedom, when control and freedom are but a single entity.

This is not so with young minds. Such minds are not afraid to learn. They are not yet deeply burdened with knowledge and experience. To learn means to observe oneself without division, without analysis, without denial or the censor of “what should be” and “what should not be.” There is no question of control. There is only experience.

Cultural conditioning is anathema to learning, the curse to seeing things clearly, to seeing things as they are. What cultural conditioning promotes is the idea of self-control in the individual, and the appearance of harmony in the workplace, both bogus ideas. This conditioning is the reason there is such madness in society, for the idea of control is the very embodiment of emotional rupture and breakdown.

There is no wisdom to self-control. Control is paradoxical.  Those consumed with a need for control, lose it; those not bothered with control, have it. What is more appropriate is self-organization, self-order. Workers and managers worry far too much about changing or controlling each other, or other things which disturb them. This is guaranteed to create frustration and conflict, because the only thing workers and managers can change or control is themselves. Order flows from this.

For the past quarter century we have had a bombardment of ideas on how to manage change. Actually, change in the workplace is of only secondary importance. Change will come about naturally, over time, once workers and managers bring about change in themselves. Order comes from within. To establish order takes more than good intentions, more than a change in attitude.  Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way workers and managers view the world. Such radicalism requires the individual going against the grain.

As long as there is the analyzer, the supervisor, the director, the administrator feverishly consumed with maintaining order, there will be the problem of chaos. It is such censors who create the problems by failing to understand the dynamics of control.

Unfortunately, as matters now stand, from the moment of birth to the moment of death, workers and managers seem consumed with the need for control of each other. The “must” and “must not,” the “should” and “should not” are stenciled on their brains.

This posed little problem when society was moving at a snail’s pace. No longer. The world is exploding with people and burgeoning technology. Flexibility, not rigidity; creativity, not conformity are now requirements. If anything, less control is called for, thus establishing a climate for the controller and the controlled to merge.

Control has developed a bizarre aspect in this new era of 24/7 cable news programs with journalists as simplifiers and codifiers of complex multi-dimensional conflicts and perturbations across the globe, situations that defy understanding much less explaining.

Yet, these intrepid globe-trotting journalists, such as Thomas Friedman, for instance, jet off to Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria, and a few days later appear on PBS television’s Charlie Rose program, and tell us exactly what’s wrong, and exactly what those in power should be doing about it, and why they are not. By contrast, the generation of scribes that came out of World War Two, such as Edward R. Murrow, and William L. Shirer were more circumspect, aware of distortions having seen only a corner of events, and therefore were much less inclined to come off as pundits.

Control implies conformity, imitation, following a particular principle, set of rules, an ideal all the way to respectability. Respectability is a moral dimension which better fits another place and another time. Morality is in the mind of the time, and it changes, not because of some great evil conspiracy, but because the requirements of the times demand it. Respectability cultivates a reverence for “what should be,” not “what is,” or reality.

Therefore, the very process of control breeds disorder. Disorder is brought about by the censor, the analyzer, the do gooder, the “true believer,” the pundit, the one who tries to impose what he thinks is right, instead of qualifying what he is saying or reporting from his limited perspective. Journalists have become “instant historians” in this age of instant everything. The mind of the censor is never a clear mind, capable of candid observation, because such a mind must ferret through various forms of authoritarianism, through vertical hierarchical arrangements, or must gingerly follow some system, guidebook, principle, or form of belief to which it is helplessly tethered. Such a mind does not belong to itself. It is lost to itself, impossibly entangled in the maze of its own stultifying conditioning. Alas, it is the mind of the expert, of the pundit.  It is the mind of the times.

The conflict between the controller and the controlled is programmed into workers and managers alike. They are actors in a drama in which they have no creative involvement. Religious and social sanctions control, shape, direct and cement the societal will to its purposes. Jesse Bering calls this The Belief Instinct (2011), which he finds very real, but questions its validity. In any case, so has it been throughout history. This makes most workers spectators to their own lives.

The controller, whomever he may be, proclaims, “I have the answer!” The answer invariably represents a proposed solution to a fragment of the problem, likely a new fad, gimmick or the rhetoric that provides expedient relief, but seldom a cessation to the aggravation.

The proclaimed answer is tied to the past, to what is known, not to the present or the present situation. It is old knowledge in a new suit of clothes. But reality requires a mind fresh, clear and undivided, a naked mind. Such a mind has no answers, nor does it worry about being offensive, stepping on toes, causing embarrassment, being prohibitively expensive, or fomenting argument.   Nor does it worry about acceptance, or going against the grain.