Across all productive fields, humanity engages itself with two
connected forces of nature: resource, and its worker. The worker works the
resource and aligns it through various processes until it becomes a product
which, should the process be successful, be of 'greater' value than the
resource as it was.
[I say 'greater' with fingery quotations out of respect to
mathematics. As 'maticians may inform you nothing ever changes its value by
being a whole rather than the sum of its parts. 1,5 + 1,5 = 3, but 3 isn't
greater for being a whole number. Nor does the invested process (+) somehow
raise the value of 1,5 and 1,5. When I say it is of greater value, I mean it in
the sense that it is organised more efficiently. More efficiently for what? For
use as a resource in a secondary process.]
Career is in essence a declaration of resource. Doctors doctor
flesh in order to reshape it into a more effective format. In a similar fashion
engineers engineer wood and steel to shape machines. These are two examples of
shapers of physical resource, the primary field of science.
But careers are not restricted to the sciences. Politics, while
adhering to laws as science does, is not described as a species of shaping
something humans see as a natural resource. Namely, it shapes humans. In
particular, it shapes human resources by harmonising their emotive sentiments.
The atypical, functional politician acts as a medium through which resources
travel, redistributing them to the places they need be to have the most impact
for production. The clearest example of shifting human resources is the
Industrial Revolution, during which humans deterritorialised (converted their
wealth from the resource of land to the resource of labour) and moved to
monolithic cities where they had the best resources to work with. The other
aspect of this industry is not in moving people to resources, but resources to
people. In the same revolution, physical resources were moved from points of
natural occurrence to centralised storage where complimentary components with
no geographical synergy could at last react.
The trouble with this second kind of transportation (physical
resource to human resource) is that if at any point during the transfer the
resource stops moving, it falls into the hands of the politician. Another way
to look at this is to picture government as an ocean. In its most
high-functioning state, it exists solely as a medium for transport, declared
international and outside of the control of any single ruler. Should anyone lay
claim to any part of these international waters, they also assume ownership of
any cargo ships moving through them, and all cargo aboard. Should they believe
it necessary, they can seize said cargo as an asset of their rule and redirect
it as they see fit. This could not happen if the state did not make a sovereign
location out of what should have been a free territory. While larger
organisations (political parties) often seek to dominate the movement of
resources, smaller ones (corporations and businesses) operate as free merchants
through the same ocean of government, organizing their operations by a
different code of conduct (sadly often still restricted by sovereign law). In a
lot of ways corporations are smaller, individualised governments, kept in power
by the success with which they perform the task of managing production. This
distinction is initially rejected on the terms that our government is viewed as
our employee: we pay them a sum of money to provide us with a service, whereas
being part of a corporation means consumers pay us a sum of money for providing
them with a service. However if a corporation holds a monopoly over a market,
it means that they will at some point have to sell that service to their own
employees. If, for example, X became the sole producer of food, its
employees would still pay X a certain amount every month to survive.
This is no different from taxation. Income tax is an effective means of making
citizens of a country its employees, because the country then benefits from
whatever form of labour that citizen undertakes. As far as getting wages in
return from the government, our corporate employers, I can only assume that it
must cost an overwhelming amount to pay for the services I get from them, so
much so that there is a deficit on my salary at the end of the month, and in
everyone else's. Our only wages are cleverly disguised as untouched income, a
part share in the product of labouring in the country’s interest.
In these purely economic terms, a politician could still be seen
as a shaper of physical reality, because the corporate president still relies
solely on the production of tangibles as proof of their competence. The other
kind of politician - the dangerous one - is the one who sells human sentiment
rather than actual organisation. The resource they try to shape is an intangible: faith in
the ability to deliver on promises, the charisma to convince others of
integrity without evidence of it, a suspension of reality in the idea that the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts, rather than exactly equal to it and
damaged by each negative integer.
In principle, the vote is a good idea. Modern democracy relies on
the notion that every human being should have a say in who runs their
corporation - they each hold an equal share of stock in the company. But beyond
that, we still face the terrible limitation of existing within the jurisdiction
of a corporate monopoly. All we really vote on is a merger that shuffles around
the country’s management divisions. In a true democracy, we should be able to
sell our shares and invest in whatever company/country we believe will pay us
the most and provide us with the greatest benefit package. We should even be
able to start our own companies, with our own constitution for interactions between
its members. Federations are one step towards this, in the same sense
that one step south brings you closer to Antarctica. As far as that kind of
democracy goes, should you choose to leave the country, you don't even get as
much as a severance package. What's more with countries still existing as
land-based territories – something we realised was ineffective since the
Industrial Revolution – the prospect of founding a new enterprise is lost to the
prospect of either violent revolution or squatting on a lonely sandbar.
In short, politics sucks.
The third kind of worker is the technician. The technician is a
very basic kind of worker who isn't held in the same inventive sphere as other
workers - they are the hands of nations. Many of them are very talented - they
devote the whole of their understanding to a single resource, be it a form of
software, a mechanical device or a tool such as a spade or a pickaxe. Sometimes
the line between the technician and the inventor blurs, particularly when there
is the way to improve the use of a resource that others haven't considered by
being too far removed from the link in the chain of production. Other
technicians are bad technicians, because they assume that a flaw in the
resource denotes a flaw in reality - particularly regarding software. Through
intimate contact with binary logic, they assume binary logic constitutes of all logic, and they see
what is on their screen as true physical reality rather than a representation
of a narrow set of variables in regard to a specific problem. The bad
technician is the one who mails an invoice costing $10 in postage to demand an
outstanding $2 from a client. The bad technician is the one who looks at two
conflicting reports and insists one is true arbitrarily because it came from
'their' system, like when a banking notification says that a sum of money has
come through from a client and that same client is blacklisted later for not
paying money into that account. Pure AlphaVille.
Technicians are dangerous because they lose touch with the world
outside of their particular resource, and ultimately struggle to interact with
it. This is very possibly true of all workers operating in broader spheres. The
scientist often cannot understand the differently-ordered mind of the artist,
and the artist cannot accept the 'consensus makes true' attitude of the
politician. Technicians are very plentiful in the world, and are narrowed the
most through their restriction to singular resources. They are the most likely
to be encountered, and the most likely to annoy people. Now you know why. Hope
that helps.
So in terms of resources, we have now looked at Scientists for
Physical resources, Politicians for Human (bonding) resources, and Technicians
for Specialised resources. We might even add the Industrialist as the
counterpoint to the technician, as they have an eye on whole areas of
production in organising how one resource is transformed into another. Last we
come to Artists; those who exemplify the use of Mental resources. While it is
true that the mind is a tool used in working any kind of material, the artist
is particularly concerned with shaping the mind, not using the mind to shape.
They do this through a variety of media used to challenge norms of perception,
which directly manipulate how the mind interprets data. While some see this
simply as entertainment, it is impossible to ignore the effects games and TV
serials have on perception. In the worst cases, these can be used to improve
combat reflexes and desensitise soldiers to violence. In the best, games can
improve strategic cognition, and books can make us aware of alternatives to
social norms. I stress emphasis on the last bit.
Within the world of resources, there are only finite materials
available to work. Politicians fight over voters just as scientists fight over
hadron colliders. I believe that this more than anything else is what drives
advanced species to specialised work, because after a certain level of
efficiency portions of the population are left without a purpose. To regain one
they must move into unclaimed territory, or compete for the resources which
have already been claimed.
This is why it is likely technicians who specialised in hunting
and gathering later moved on to science as agriculture. Once these resources
were controlled, politicians would branch out into human resource in an attempt
to maximise group efficiency. Then industrialists would develop to fill the
void left by bad politicians by truly organising collected resources. Last of
all would come the artist. With the physical world claimed, human relations
networked into iron-tight castes, jobs taken by both the industrialist and the
technician, the only unclaimed resource is that which existed in the primitive
cyberspace between human minds. Artists attempt to occupy this space, pushing
into its frontier as resources in other locations became increasingly
restricted. We still do. This perhaps explains Charles Bukowski's claim that
suffering is essential to art; the more oppressive the physical world, the
fewer resources from which to eke out life. The more our human bonds give way
to scorched earth, the more desperately we are driven into our minds (or out of
them, into virgin psychoses) as the last provider of material which we might
shape to regain a sense of purpose.
This too is probably true for all other forms of workers. Artists
may even be viewed as oppressors for committing exhibitionism, an act of
invading another's psyche through art. A love of science could be brought about
by the infringement of art's chaos in a worker's life.
What this shows us is a trend reflected throughout human history
running parallel to the matrix of our social development. Just as nations
declared sovereign control of resources and forced out those who disagreed with
that ownership (rebels, pirates and pariahs), only to have those same outcasts
eventually contribute to independent states with codes of their own, so too do
outcasts from ‘filled’ career groups move into others to ply their trade when
resources are controlled. This is the danger of enforced monopoly. When it
occurs, inhabitants of its region move out – like that same idea of a
centralised city undergoing industrial revolution, but in reverse. The city
empties, the monoliths are deconstructed. When that happens, fewer resource
collisions occur and technologies fail to progress.
Doctors, masons, painters and prophets take heed: The story of
Babel was misinterpreted. The only metropolis that will ever succeed is one
where those of divergent tongue are not cast out and scattered. It was the
unity of its language that made Babylon fall.
