Lying Flat

Context: Work is a False Idol

Note: A newspaper article regarding the endemic failure of capitalism in China that is itself pay-walled and inaccessible seems suitably ironic as to leave hyper-linked here.

It is interesting that this “movement” of self-propagating behavioural and information idioms or tropes might be rendered or interpreted as threatening to economic prosperity but the underlying problem must surely be that economic prosperity is never equitable under any ideological or political framework humanity has yet arrived at; much less meritocracy, much more luck and nepotism. Regardless, human beings are not well-equipped to simply function as cogs in machines that conduct hyper-surveillance and panoptic judgement as measurement and disciplinary control upon every thought, act and behavioural morsel of self-worth or individuality those people possess.

Mature systems analysis suggests not only that such an austere framework of work in which any half-intelligent person is aware that they are being gamed is going to generate reflexive dissociation and disengagement, but that the narratives and mythologies of (any aspirationally) expansive authoritarian empire are now quite catastrophically anachronistic and, in effect, positively incentivise this kind of volitional detachment from the hollow and haunted parade of simplistic caricature and slogans that such systems approximate to. Alienation is in this context a function of repression, it is not chosen.