Unemployment is the result of a lack of democracy. A democratic society can never have unemployment. The greater the level of unemployment, the lower the level of democracy.
Abdullah Öcalan speaks the truth in those lines.[1]
After all, people are not tools. That is, human beings are not implements that have been made to be employed in accomplishing some purpose. Persons are not like hammers and nails: they are not products that have been produced to serve as means for achieving ends beyond themselves.
When I began my own career as a professor of philosophy, the faculty and staff of colleges and universities were regarded as and called “personnel.” At a college or university, the department charged with overseeing matters pertaining to faculty and staff was accordingly called the “Personnel Department.”
I remember when that all changed back in the 1980s, and what used to be called personnel departments came instead to be called departments of human resources. That happened no less at the University of Denver, where I was employed, and other universities and colleges across the country than it did at American manufacturing companies and industrial corporations.
As I experienced it then, that change of name actually struck me as a refreshing breath of truth. After all, in modern society nature itself had long before the 1980s been reduced to no more than “natural resources.” Nature had thus become no more than a storehouse of potential power to be exploited by humans, thereby fulfilling Rene Descartes’ intent of developing a foolproof “method” whereby humanity could establish “dominion and control over nature” (I have added the emphasis to bring out the key notion).
Now, during the 2020s, there is a growing movement to change names once again, and to make Human Resource Departments into Departments of Peoples and Cultures. That just means that management is becoming more aware of the value of disguising itself behind the pretense of being there to serve employees rather than their employers.
Such lies often prove helpful for improving the bottom line.
A small stock of human resources from various peoples and diverse cultures
* * *
In his own 1956 afterword to Lolita — the book itself originally being published a year earlier by The Olympia Press, after being rejected as pornographic by various major publishing houses — Vladimir Nabokov remarks in a parenthesis that “reality” is “one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes.” “Reality” is everywhere and always just what passes for, what’s to be counted as, what’s real—what is. “Reality” is what they, the powers that be at any given time, tell us we have to accept as real, as what truly is. All else, they tell us, is fantasy, illusion, mere image.
But in the face of such all-encompassing mere “reality,” it is in actually only in our dreams that what truly is can speak to us, and it is only in our art that the truth of what is sets itself into work. It is in our imaginations, dreams, fictions, and artworks that we truly live, not just “survive” amidst all the wastage of globalized consumer capitalism, with its washing machines and cars, its televisions and mortgage payments, it’s “little poisons for the day, and little poisons for the night,” as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra put it long ago.
No wonder that, if that’s all there is, we do indeed want to break out the booze — to allude to an old Peggy Lee song that sums it up well. In liquor or drugs or sex or romance novels or movies or cutting our flesh or chewing our own skin, we escape “reality.” When “reality” is where our society stores us all up as no more than human resources or the equivalent, in what other ways can we possibly look for what truly “is”?
Indeed, in such a no-place excuse for a place as our current unreal “reality” proffers us, daydreaming, drug-usage, and other such activations of our imagination’s capacities become politically subversive acts. What’s more, It takes deep courage to perform such politically subversive acts of imagination. When all that surrounds us is “reality,” such daydreaming becomes a way of “speaking truth to power,” to borrow a phrase. To imagine is to make “reality” vanish like smoke, like a dream one wakes from, dismissed as a phantom in and by our very fantasies — those subversive acts of “merely imagining” — to adapt an image from one of the Psalms.
In the contemporary global consumer market that is our “reality” today, it is in fantasy that what truly is must find its place, the place denied to it in such “reality.” In acts of courage such as daydreaming, it does just that.
“Be not afraid,” Jesus tells us in the Christian Gospels. What a dreamer![2]
[1] Beyond State, Power, and Violence (Oakland, CA: 2023), pages 304-305. An English translation by Michael Schiffman and Havin Guneser of Bir Halkı Savunmak, originally published in 2004 in Neuss, Germany, by Mezopotamien Verlag.
[2] The second, closing section of this post is a reworking of some paragraphs from “Confession of Fear,” the first chapter of my 2013 book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life, available for purchase in the “Archive” above this post.