Arbeiten zum vergessen is a phrase associated with the post war years in Germany. It means “working in order to forget”. You fill your days with things to do because if you allow a little bit of space you might start reflecting on unpleasant matters. So, you put your head down and ensure you don’t have any free time. This work ethic is partly credited for giving rise to the wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) of the West German economy in the post war years. Arguably, the consumerism of that time served a similar purpose of forgetfulness. When you weren’t working, you were shopping or otherwise entertaining yourself. Nowadays we have the internet, Youtube, Netflix and a million other distractions. There’s an almost unlimited number of ways to fill up your day and prevent any pesky free time from causing troublesome thoughts to arise. Thoughts like “what am I doing with my life” and “what’s the meaning of it all.” The exact kind of thoughts that should be dealt with during the initiation/individuation process.
Although the baby boomers are remembered mostly for free love, rock festivals, protests and other rebellious activities, the truth is that it was a small but vocal minority who were driving those trends. Most boomers got a job and settled down in the suburbs with a house and 2.3 children. It was the era where it was still possible to work for a single company your whole life and get a gold watch when you retired. It was also the era when active participation in religion dwindled steadily as the Sunday church service was replaced by the Sunday drive.
I mentioned in the last post a phrase uttered by ex-Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, “work is our religion”. This is especially true here in Australia which is the most bourgeois society on the planet (Canada and New Zealand being the main competitors for the title. It’s not a coincidence that these countries had the most hysterical corona response). Once upon a time, I volunteered as an English teacher to refugees here in Melbourne. As part of the program, us volunteers were given a couple of days training during which we were shown a video of one of the sessions held with the refugees when they were being settled. The facilitator of the session stood in front of the group, who were mostly of African and Middle Eastern origin, and told them “you have to work. In Australia, everyone must work.” What she meant was “you have to get a job. You have to be in paid employment.” Why did she need to spell it out so explicitly? Because where they come from everyone doesn’t have to have a job and, in fact, the idea that everyone must have a job is fairly new even to western countries.
Ask the average person why everybody has to have a job and they’ll say it’s because there are things that need to be done. But, as we found out during corona, this is not really true. It turns out there are entire industries that are “non-essential”. So, we don’t really need to work. We work because work is our religion. Using the terms of this series of posts, we say that paid employment is the exoteric framework of society. That’s what the facilitator was trying to convey to the refugees. In order to fit in here, you must get a job. She’s right. By most metrics, people who are unemployed do worse than people who are employed. We assume this is because the unemployed are poorer but there’s much more to it than that. To be unemployed is not to fit in. It is to be a social outcast. For that reason, the unemployed are far more likely to commit crime, become drug addicts and have mental health problems.
To use another term from this series of posts, getting a job is an initiation. As with all initiations there must be a preparation and the preparation for the initiation of work has become incredibly long in the modern west. A full sixteen years is now the norm as even our universities have reoriented around what purports to be vocational training. Teachers and professors are therefore the elders and the process ends in your becoming a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. After tribal initiations, you might have been known by your spirit animal or the moiety to which you belonged. After an initiation into the religion of work, you’re known by your job title. “What do you do?” is usually the first question anybody asks a stranger.
The religion of work is so ingrained in western culture that most people couldn’t imagine life without it. But, a quick look back in history reveals that many cultures viewed work in a very different way. “Only slaves work”. That would have been the attitude of your average Athenian or Spartan in ancient Greece. If a citizen of those societies ended up working for a living, that was proof that something terrible had happened to them. They must have made some gigantic mistake. There could be no other reason to demean oneself by working.
In his classic essay “In praise of idleness”, Bertrand Russell pointed out that modern society has long had the technical and organisational means to almost entirely do away with work. This had been proven in the centralised economies of the war years. It would have been a trivial matter to rejig those economies to satisfy basic needs and allow every citizen in western countries to live a life of leisure. We didn’t do it and a big part of the reason why is because of the work ethic which is traditionally associated with Protestantism (Max Weber’s famous Protestant Work Ethic) but also has strong roots in the catholic tradition too.
The religious origins of the work ethic are no coincidence and it is here we must differentiate between work and paid employment. Paid employment can be thought of as the exoteric form of work. It’s the societal structure that organises the activity. It should be counterbalanced by an esoteric side which we can call the spiritual aspect of work. This is the higher meaning of the work and it comes through to the extent that you feel your work is a manifestation of what we could call the spirit or even God.
The same is true for leisure time. The word holiday means “holy day”. It was not the time to visit the local shopping centre. It was the time to celebrate the sacred. Both work and leisure are sacred to the extent that through them you are celebrating and manifesting the spirit. A “religion of work”, on the other hand, puts the cart before the horse. Work should be in service of the sacred, not an end in itself.
The whole problem with work in the industrial era is that the sacredness has been taken out of it. This was true right from the beginning of the industrial revolution. The fire pits of the factories even looked like the flames of hell. Those fire pits have been replaced by office suites but from a spiritual point of view the situation is not really much better as I outlined in my post on the trauma of bullshit jobs. Similarly, the filling of leisure time with consumerism removes the sacredness from that activity as well. The religion of work and the associated religion of consumerism are just facsimiles of actual religion.
Thus, although work in the form of paid employment has taken up the role of initiation in our society, it is not a proper initiation in any sense of the word. Businesses are in business and must prioritise finances over people. Strangely enough, many people appear not to understand this. Back when the GFC hit, the company I was working at fired about 1/3 of its employees. I had fully expected to get fired myself but through a stroke of luck was not. What was surprising was how surprised my colleagues were. Many seemed genuinely shocked. “How could they do this to us?” was a phrase one of my teammates uttered. This was a middle aged man who had much more experience of work life than I did and yet he seemed unaware of the realities of the business world. He seemed to think the company owed him something other than the legally prescribed severance package.
In traditional religions, you only got kicked out if you became a heretic or an apostate. In the religion of work, you can be kicked out at any time based on unknown market forces. Nobody is responsible. Nobody can be held to account. It’s just the way it is. And if the market forces are severe enough, you may find yourself excommunicated into permanent unemployment with a skillset and experience that the economic gods no longer deem worthy. If work is our religion, it’s a heartless one. Wolfgang Giegerich was right, there is a brutality to it all. It is, in fact, an anti-human system or at the very least ahuman. Humans are merely incidental to the process. If they can be automated away or their jobs shipped overseas, all the better.
These free market forces just happen to also fit the archetype of The Devouring Mother: arbitrary, vindictive (from the employee’s point of view) and callous. The outward shows of empathy like “we value our employees” or “we encourage diversity” only apply as long you toe the line and as long as there is a need for you. It is certainly not the unconditional love of the true Mother archetype. And things are getting even more arbitrary now that your job can be judged “non-essential” based on unknown criteria cooked up by a room of unelected bureaucrats. No correspondence will be entered into and the judge’s decision is final. Sorry, not sorry.
As Sir James Goldsmith noted back in the 90s, the economy is supposed to work for the people and not the other way around. One way to look at the globalisation agenda of the 90s is that we deliberately put the economy above the people. Where that happened most clearly, however, was not the west but China. China instituted an old-fashioned form of uber-capitalism, albeit one wrapped up in a socialist façade. In China there are no labour laws, no health and safety laws, no unions and, in fact, almost no protection in law at all for citizens and workers. As bad as The Devouring Mother nanny state is in a country like Australia, it’s ten times worse in China. Hence the social credit scores and facial recognition and all the other wonderful technological innovations going on over there.
In March 2020, the west decided to copy China. Is that a coincidence? Is it a coincidence that the complete disregard for human rights, civil liberties, rule of law and democracy that we have seen the in west in the last two years mirrors the situation in China? The west shipped our jobs to China and with it our anti-human religion of work, consumerism and greed. To use an old phrase, we helped create a monster. In 2020, we got it all back with interest. There is a certain karmic justice to the whole thing.
But since then the story has taken a twist. The side effects of globalisation had already been building in the west in the form of real estate and asset bubbles and general decline in the quality of life. To take just one example from Melbourne, the length and quality of the average person’s commute, whether on public transport or by road, had become steadily worse in the years leading up to corona. Many people were already feeling the pinch of this hidden inflation. The religion of work was already bursting at the seams. Then corona hit and now you have mandatory gene therapy and masks to add to the top of the list of “inconveniences” just to earn a living. To this day, many workers still have to wear a mask at work even though they are vaccinated not to mention all the other arbitrary rules enforced without rhyme or reason.
All that would have been bad enough, but now we’re seeing the return of not just hidden inflation but real headline monetary inflation. The religion of work entails participation in the consumer economy. It also entails the notion of building wealth, what is called The Australian Dream (copied from The American Dream). But neither the consumer economy nor the building of wealth works with rampant inflation. If we think of this as the Holy Trinity of the Religion of Work – employment, consumerism, building wealth – all of these are now directly under threat. No surprise then that the effect of all this is that some people no longer want to work. In seemingly every industry in Australia there are shortages of workers at the moment. Companies complain that they can’t even get people to interview for jobs.
Part of what the rebellious baby boomers were complaining about was that the esoteric content of work and leisure had already disappeared. That’s also what Jimmy Carter was talking about in his addresses to the nation in the late 70s. The religion of work has lacked esoteric content for a long time. Nevertheless, it has fulfilled the exoteric function of ordering society in the post war years. What happens if that structure breaks down? There will be practical consequences. After all, not all jobs are “non-essential”. Some jobs actually need to get done for things to continue working.
But the more interesting consequences might be cultural. If work loses its ability to provide exoteric structure to society, what will replace it? We would need something new to fill the void and that is where Spengler’s second religiosity becomes relevant. We’ll talk about that more in the next post.
All posts in this series:
The Age of The Orphan Part 1: The Path of Learning
The Age of The Orphan Part 2: Defining the Archetype
The Age of The Orphan Part 3: A Short Theoretical Introduction
The Age of The Orphan Part 4: Initiation, culture and civilisation
The Age of The Orphan Part 5: Ok, boomer
The Age of The Orphan Part 6: The Spirit of the Depths
The Age of The Orphan Part 7: The Metaphysics of Archetypes
The Age of The Orphan Part 8: The Current State of Play
The Age of The Orphan Part 9: How to learn to stop worrying and love The Matrix
The Age of The Orphan Part 10: Work is our religion
Simon – as someone who’s never had a steady or full-time job, let alone from 9 to 5, I’ve experienced a good deal of social stigma & judgement. In fact, one sort of stigma or another has often applied to the various jobs I have done. And people often change the subject if they find out I rarely get paid for the work I choose to do. All of which has made me increasingly unemployable. Which of course would be irrelevant if I had an entrepreneurial instinct instead of a kind of horror of the self-marketing imperative. Certainly I’ve lived among unemployed (& employed) criminals, junkies & crazies. But I know others who, like me, maintain a creative discipline w/o reaping social &/or monetary rewards.
You sometimes refer to initiation/individuation as if the two were interchangeable. Traditionally, initiation is undergone as a coming of age (like walkabout), while Jung saw individuation as the work of the second half of life. Where do you think individuation belongs in the life cycle?
Shane – that’s a great question and one that I’ll be dealing with in the next post. I’ve been using initiation in a religious sense as induction into a metaphysics. Did Jung mean individuation as the same thing or was he talking about something else? There’s not a clear answer to that. Some people accused Jung of “starting a cult” which would imply the religious sense. On the other hand, we can see individuation as “just” a psychological process.
Interesting. Tonight I saw a Jungian analyst talk about the difference between Jungian-style individuation & Eastern-style spiritual liberation. Apparently Jung believed Eastern disciplines were unsuitable, even dangerous, for Westerners. Was he right? The talk & the ensuing discussion explored that.
That Jung’s life’s work spans both spiritual & psychological studies distinguishes him sharply from Freud (& accounts at least partly for why today’s supposedly irreligious mainstream ignores him – religion being the collective version of individual spirituality). So if Jung conceived of individuation as a process of psychological integration w/ a goal of individual wholeness, it makes sense that he’d see Eastern religious practices as inadvisable.
Shane – I think Jung’s position was Kantian in that he said we can’t ultimately know about the existence of the spiritual/God. We can, however, know about the psychic and the psychic processes map onto the religious concepts quite well.
Amen Simon!
A thumping essay, and I too have been rather troubled – not to mention – also inconvenienced recently because of all of this stuff. What is an interesting unreported upon side effect of the Great Resignation is that if you do keep your shingle out providing services to the public, you’re getting smashed. And ultimately that story makes no sense to me – how are these unencumbered people happily enjoying the times whilst also earning a living?
Hey, did you notice that the Chairman Dan quietly extended the powers the other day for a further three months. That’s why people working hospitality have to continue to wear masks whilst the wider public does not. That doesn’t seem to be a very science based response. And have you noticed the ‘help wanted’ and ‘position vacant’ signs everywhere?
I was recently asked to do a job at the coming election but knocked it back due to the mask mandates.
Things are very strange.
Cheers
Chris
Chris – yeah, the question of how people are supporting themselves is an interesting one. Perhaps with all the lockdowns people were shown how to make it work purely by accident. Now that they know it can work they are just going along with it. Also, it doesn’t take that many people to drop out for it to become a problem. Only 1% would do it. Like prices, staff shortages are determined on the margins.
Hi Simon,
Ah, of course a small change in drop outs has produced a notable change on the street. Makes sense. I’ve heard people suggest that the situation is due to a lack of overseas backpackers. That story doesn’t pass the pub-test, because before the last four month long lock down things weren’t like they are now. Businesses back then didn’t seem to be having the sort of staff sourcing issues that they’re having now. Like the local bakery wouldn’t have employed backpackers – no way, and yet they’re short staffed.
Of late I’ve been wondering if the last lock down was a step too far. Authorities have been known to over do things, and I have this odd hunch that a lot of goodwill (and the energy to regroup and get back into the fray) was used up in that incident. And people are genuinely fearful, especially the younger people I encounter (which is super weird when you consider the actual risk for that group of people). And that’s also despite the huge incidence of community experience with the health subject which dare not be named. Dunno.
Just prior to the Great Crash in 1929, only about 10% of the US population where involved in share market trading. And not all of those speculators would have been leveraged (i.e. using debt to buy shares). When the share prices dropped, plenty of people were left with negative equity (i.e. the debt was greater than the value of the shares held) – those people were subject to margin calls by the banks (i.e. the banks wanted the cash difference between the new value of the shares and the debt). This prompted a negative feedback loop of speculators having to sell shares to get the cash to meet the banks margin calls, which further dropped the share prices and produce more margin calls. And on it went until it hit rock bottom.
We might be in the midst of such a negative feedback loop with employment. I don’t really know, but as you wrote, some stuff actually has to happen in order to keep society rolling along. I keep wondering at what point is these policies are really going to smash some things.
Cheers
Chris
Chris – one of the things I hear through my family is the number of people in the lesser known trades who can’t find anybody to train up. Thinking of things like steel fabrication and other subsidiaries of the mining industry. Those are all non-glamorous jobs which require hard physical labour. Who’s going to do them when the current generation retires?
A “religion of work”, on the other hand, puts the cart before the horse. Work should be in service of the sacred, not an end in itself.’
An Early Buddhist version of working for the sacred is to work not for the sake of material things and sensual pleasures, but to craft and accumulate internal wholesome qualities that lead organically to ever increasing levels of happiness and wisdom. “You can’t eat your money” but even moreso “Money can’t buy you love”. Working on the spiritual virtues that lead to solid relationships, however, can foster true (as opposed to base and vulgar) love: harmlessness, courage, reliability, forgiveness, empathy, compassion, contentment, humility, perseverance, truthfulness, frugality … These qualities lead to integration, long-term peace and prosperity. Modern globalised culture praises the opposite. Those anti-virtues lead to dissolution and destruction of mind and society.
Here in Sri Lanka, in response to the negligence and corruption inside traditional Buddhist institutions and as a side-effect of colonialism (admiration for the “masters”), people have talked about developing a form of Buddhist Protestism. This could be a good thing, but it requires awareness that the Western Protestant work ethic actually led to the destruction of esoteric work.
The Buddha made it really clear that his policy was contentment in relation to material things and “unrelenting” and “manly” striving for the sake of wholesome internal qualities, aka esoteric prosperity.
It’s a man in a black-gorilla-suit in the room. Should be obvious, but the mind is so easily distracted. The hippies got it right when they rejected capitalism, but sought their dopamine hit from illicit sex and drugs instead – so that version of happily- ever-after was never going to last.
The integral guilds I mentioned earlier would be places where people with various and complementary exoteric skills would be bound together under inspiring esoteric vision (generally under long-standing traditions/genres). The vision I’m working on right now is villages where everyone seriously believes in karma and rebirth and makes serious, internally regulated efforts to keep the Five Precepts. A simple idea for creating islands of resilience and peace in a burning madhouse of a world. Old-timey exoteric folk religion plus integral leadership. The latter factor should be preventative against the hoodoo, voodoo, naivety, stupidity and corruption that religion is probe to. New stuff that is much like the old stuff (and indistinguishable to the casual observer) but not quite and better. De-industrialised Dharma.
My theory, which I haven’t tried to verify with any rigor, is that the early Protestant work ethic did actually tap into a form of meditation that comes through semi-skilled work. I think I’ve mentioned this to you before. It’s noteworthy that actual trade guilds were dominant in Europe at that time and very much featured an Elder – Orphan organisational structure. So, I think the original Protestant Work Ethic really was Esoteric in nature. It got degraded over time mostly once capitalism had destroyed the guilds. I think your Integral Guild idea has a lot in common with the actual guilds of Europe as they once existed!
Simon.
“I think your Integral Guild idea has a lot in common with the actual guilds of Europe as they once existed!”
Excellent. Good to think there are precedents in the written record to back the vision. You mentioned previously that you yourself have had mystical experiences while doing repetitive labour. Many people would report similarly.
The medieval European guild got corrupted by the triumph of materialism manifest in Capitalism. But that complete rejection of the spiritual domain was anticipated by the rebellion of the Protestants against the Catholic Church. It seems to me, when we do a wholesale reject the traditions from which we spring, we are psychologically driven to justify the act by working on surface structures that make us appear superior. Deep structures are hard to rely on as “proof” of our goodness. The logical conclusion of this bent is to reject the spiritual in lieu of the material as gross reality is more obvious. So, the crazier we get, the more we are driven to LOOK sane or beautiful or young or tolerant or crazy or angry … whatever version of the good we happen to believe in.
But not every version of “the good” (as in “tasteful” – symbiosis of form, function and feeling) is capable of creating good art and craft. This is where the nexus of authentic religion, guilds and old families come to the fore. The perennial problem is how to prevent temples, guilds and families that are successful on account of deep spiritual practice from becoming intoxicated with and corrupted by worldly power and wealth. How, in other words, to prevent Elders from degenerating into Tyrants or Devouring Mothers in the first place. It’s a question that bears some deep thought as, in times of civilizational descent, the natural instinct is to find a way out of the descent. But it is not natural at all to think about how to prevent descent in a time of prosperity. Many great thinkers have come to the conclusion that decline is inevitable. I agree, history is cyclical, but the historical Buddha did teach ways to consciously stretch out the periods of prosperity …
I think it’s more complex than that. The Protestant movement was hijacked by the mercantilists and kings for political purposes. Also, it probably shot itself in the foot with a number of its reforms that meant well but were highly impractical.
If Toynbee and Spengler are correct, the substitution of spiritual Elders by political and military ones is part of the cycle of civilisation. It’s the big question whether or not we can learn to use that cycle the way we work with other cycles of “nature”. I guess that would be up to a future civilisation which might be able to take the lessons we have learned and work with them.
“I think it’s more complex than that. The Protestant movement was hijacked by the mercantilists and kings for political purposes. Also, it probably shot itself in the foot with a number of its reforms that meant well but were highly impractical.”
Ah yes, but why was it prone to hijacking in the first place? Weber, correctly I believe, points out the Protestant work ethic as what made Protestant economies and militaries so successful. The desire to demonstrate exoterically that one is one of the chosen is a big factor in that ethic.
The more pressing issue is how to be not too concerned with exoteric shows and yet maintain the political and military integrity of one’s own society against attacks from societies who have sophisticated economies and weaponry on account of that vanity — the basic conundrum of pre-colonial SE Asia. The strategic thinkers in the non-violent movement need to be taken more seriously, IMHO. Takes a lot of imagination though, as the fully-fledged implementation of such strategies is unknown in the histories of academia. Gandhi and Ashoka are just a dip in the baby pool compared to what is described in the old Buddhist literature.
‘If Toynbee and Spengler are correct, the substitution of spiritual Elders by political and military ones is part of the cycle of civilisation. It’s the big question whether or not we can learn to use that cycle the way we work with other cycles of “nature”.’
They’re half-correct, I suspect. My practice tells me that they are correct in relation to the patterns that emerge in general. But the mark of a good teaching is that it provides a refuge to the storm-cycle. To the extent that individuals mature themselves (ie. individuate) inside of good teachings they are immune to the storm. The same applies to collectives. It’s just that in major civilizational downturns, such collectives are an extreme minority and the storm acutely dangerous, so the level of individuation needed to maintain resilience is commensurately high. If we follow the basic premise of this blog, that individual psychology and collective psychology follow the same principles, it is theoretically tenable to allow for the consciously cultivated micro-environment concept in environmental studies to be applied to social studies. We have the choice to winnow the wheat from the chaff. Ultimately, no one can forcing us to eat the chaff.
This approach avoids the kind of fatalism that Giegerich propounds. Another version of Give in to the Darkside, Luke … and you’ll be happy.
It’s a chicken and egg problem. One way to read Luther is that he saw the perceived corruption of the Church as evidence of total corruption. In fact, the Church may simply have been accounting for the simple fact that most people are not ready for enlightenment. Thus, all Luther really achieved was to move the corruption from inside the Church where it arguably could be controlled to where it was no controlled. I’m not sure if that reading is true, however. The Church really did seem corrupt all the way to the top in those days.
Does the old Buddhist literature have a conception of civilisational cycle and decline? I’ve been wondering if that is a new thing that 19th century Europe discovered.
Bhikkhu Jinasiri and Simon (if I may), thank you for the ongoing conversation here and on the other posts, it is a pleasure to read.
I note many parallels with the history of Buddhism in Tibet. I’m not aware of any singular reference, but having studied many stories and hagiographies of teachers throughout the past millennia as part of my practice the constant interchange of esoteric and exoteric is unmistakable. Degeneration of the political systems is a constant, with regular renewal from a much cleaner esoteric source. Unfortunately few seem to recognise this and focus almost exclusive on the exoteric (the good and the bad).
Simon: If you don’t mind, could you forward my email address to Bhikkhu. I would love to correspond with another in the Dharma who recognises much of the well publicised exoteric trappings are lacking.
Daniel – The alternation between Esoteric and Exoteric may well be a “law nature”. I’ll be addressing this exact issue in upcoming posts, but there is a theory that evolution shows a progression towards the Esoteric but, as I mentioned in another comment to Jinasiri, we keep slipping back to the Exoteric. Of course, Christianity would say we have fallen from the Esoteric and must try to get back to it.
P.S. I’ve forwarded on your email address as requested.