I Made That Mistake Once, Too
Dr. X posts this from Lake Wasapamanni:
"I remember thinking, as a teenager, that the only liberation from the suffering of life was in the oblivion of human effort. Maybe work makes you free, I thought. I never said this out loud, and a year or so later I learned they put it up on the gates of Auschwitz.
"This guy wasn't so lucky.
"The history of the phrase is interesting, though - I did not know it came out of Weimar."
posted by Latouche at Large at 9:53 PM
2 Comments:
(No one can say: Dr. X doesn't get around.)
The wikipedia article is not wholly convincing, and I think obfuscates the true terror and insance indifference of that phrase. But considering why it is so horrible, yet so close to what seems like decent advice, set off thoughts about the nature of work in the modern world.
I've thought about that phrase ever since I popped Reader's Digest Book of World War II and the section on the Holocaust - safe to say I had a better than average sense of it than most third graders.
That collection of World War II articles, clipped from the time, plus my father's own stories (too few and far between) helped form my love of this country. Our country faced the worst thing in history the world, genocidal fascism, and triumphd; and when it was over, and with the bomb we had the power to rule the world, we instead turned to our best instincts, our intrinsic sense of decency and equality as people, and built a peace.
That, at least, was the narrative, and I still believe that it was substantially true. It was a least, the default belief of most of the soldiers.
"Work will set you free." Why is that phrase so uttery horrifying?
"Work will set you free." Someone was there, setting up a camp to exterminate millions of people, and said: make a sign on the entrance: "Work will set you free." More likely, a useful bit of propoaganda to give people enough hope that by
accepting their fate, they could somehow escape.
At first blush, it's not so far off one of the perplexing truths of life, that substantive work, building, making, moving, changing, growing, serving, creating, is one source of the deepest pleasure in life. Foolishly or not I try to practice, what I've called "work-play," a sort of ideal condition of work that I see in all kinds of professions, particularly among artists, but all too rarely still- one does and acts and makes, in compromise and cooperation but under your control, and what you make, whether a thing or a service, is valued by others but is specific to you, and is done with some combination of interest and comradeship (sorry, only available word.) Note popular shows on the Discovery Channel: "Dirty Jobs," fisherman at sea, bike builders, special effects techie/artists. All portraits of enviable work, of hard work, but work with a kind of honor, a kind of self-determination and cooperation, where the individual is part of a group, but remains a full who can substantially control what they do, and whose expression is the substance of what they do.
Dirty Jobs is fascinating partly because almost everyone on that show, their knees literally deep in shit, says how much they love their jobs.
Work-play is a secret to happiness, and a font of true freedom: satisfaction, creation, and again, service - (note that retiring has a very bad statistical effect on your mortality. )
The total self-indulgence suggested by my own work choices are hopefully ameliorated by the idea that work-play is so valuable, and so increasingly rare, that it is worth giving up much materially, or more costly, the satisfactions of responsibility. My classes are filled with young men and women chaffing at an endless future of true wage servitude, with little expectation of anything more than doing okay, or doing anything but landing a job where all their conditions of work are set remotely for them. They try drawing, simply to see if there is any hope for another direction. The drawing class is sometimes the last fork in the road before creativity, independence, self-determination, and impulsive (rather than cooerced or incentivised) cooperation is snuffed out.
People come back from the Army -my father noted this after WWII - repulsed by the obsessive money grubbing that motivates so much of civilian society. One of the weird cultural secrets of our military is that it is a completely socialist organization: it is loved and hated by its members, but held as a whole in ridiculously high esteem. I think this is because it shows what is possibly when people have a sense of place, and are not motivated solely by narrow economic self interest. The result, lacking another word, is brotherhood.
(Throw in libertie and egalitie and it's pretty appealing.)
But also in military culture is always lurking the darkest of all cultural transformations: the obsessive cult of power, turning belonging to destroying, the destruction itself serving to reinforce the cultural belonging.
And so rose the Taliban. And so rose the militias of the Sudan. And so rose the Nazis.
"Work will set you free." The difference between an interesting bit of advice and an unquestioning road to total racial extermination is cultural. The difference is between unreified work, the practice of work as a full realized human being, and the undermessage of that insanely murderous phrase: only work will set you free.
"Work will set you free" - it is the phrase of fascists and totalitarians everywhere, but it is rising in a new way in the ideology of late stage capitalism: there are renewed pressures now, with the rise of a new, quasi-aristocratic social class, to view everyone outside of that class as simply a labor pool, but now, and much weirder, as a consumer pool.
The new ideal is to push technology to remove human beings from production, and to place them into a pool of culturally- managed consumption to drive that production and further, for some reason, enrich the new economic aristocracy.
With the culture now almost wholly dedicated to consumerist cultural production and consumption, the memory of what it is to be a person, to work in your own conditions, to be something other than an intersection of demagraphics, is becoming eradicated. (When I spoke earlier of our culture being raped, this is what I mean. Herbert Marcuse hadn't seen anything yet.)
It is notable that the message now, every day, in a thousand images, in ten thousand words. Our deepest desires are displaced to commercial interests so often, in such a ubiquitous drumbeat, we never notice it. All our loneliness serves it, all desire serves it, all the beauty of women serves it, all news serves it, all religion serves it, all work serves it:
Buying will set you free.
If there are exceptions, it because some of us still insist on playing with our work.
Again: How -- Gay -- Is -- Texas?
Post a Comment
<< Home