Transcription
The myth of Cisphus has captivated humanity since the days of ancient Greece. But in recent years, it has achieved an unprecedented mimetic chokeold and level of blas fascination which would make even the Atakans blush. Further, the nature of its memeing that it is employed so humorously in that comedy is the final bull work of grief before acceptance reveals that this state of infinitely fruitless labor is not just near, but that we may have surpassed it in hopelessness already.
Labor used to be a thing which was spiritually intensive. Upon being exiled from the earthly paradise, God said to Adam, "Cursed is the ground because of you. With hard labor, you shall eat from it all the days of your life." And from then on, man acquainted his toil with his fruits. And in a strange way, by exhausting himself in the tilling, hunting, weaving, and building of his realm, he was able to indulge in that godly intoxication of creative fatigue which every person experiences when sitting down after a long day of work. When they look out upon the order they have made and say, "It is good."
Then civilizations formed and writing was invented by the accountants. First as a medium of commerce, not for poems or for recipes, but for receipts. One of our earliest remnants of human script is simply a customer complaint for a shitty copper shipment. And even people back then argued that the agricultural revolution was a sham and that we all really belonged in the wild, not doing all this backbreaking work in the big city. Yet the spirit of the work remained, for humans remained within the labor. If anything, the soulful fervor only increased over the millennia as the guilds formed. those of potters, cobblers, smiths, and more. The workers developed fraternities around their vocations. Vocations from vocar meaning to call, their callings as opposed to occupations, things which simply keep you occupied, like a toilet or a defeated country. They had oaths of secrecy punishable by death. They had temples, heroes, and gods like Balder, Hermes, Vulcan, Prometheus, divine figures who imbued mortals with celestial gifts. The work was dignified and done with the hands, manus, hence manual labor as human as human could get. Artisan used to be a thing which meant something, not a buzzword on a bag of potato chips.
Then things changed with the advent of industrialization. Machines replaced the beasts and the slaves. Urban centers boomed and humans accepted squalid conditions and wages. They became not makers of things but operators of capital. The action of the hands was lost. The cold metal of machinery and from that point on the spirit which imbued our items was lost. The animism and magic disappeared overnight and the merit of our labor became ignoble. Not to suggest I agree with his solutions, but it is no wonder then why Marx was such a reactionary force in the mechanized zeitgeist of the 1800s given how rapidly the quality of existence in fact its very nature changed in his lifetime. The circulation of capital realizes value while living labor creates value. The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together. Machinery makes man obsolete, absolving him not of the sin of labor, but of the responsibility which previously gave him value. The machine makes man inherently worthless as a result. That's why you have people competing against each other for minimum wage jobs which slaves of old would have bulked at.
Recent times boast of having championed the principle of human dignity, said Julius Eve. This too is mere rhetoric. If there was ever a civilization of slaves on a grand scale, the one in which we are living is it. No traditional civilization ever saw such great masses of people condemned to perform shallow impersonal automatic jobs. In the contemporary slave system, the counterparts of figures such as lords or enlightened rulers are nowhere to be found. This slavery is imposed subtly through the tyranny of the economic factor and through the absurd structures of a more or less collectivized society. And since the modern view of life and its materialism has taken away from the single individual any possibility of bestowing on his destiny a transfiguring element and seeing in it a sign and a symbol, contemporary slavery should therefore be reckoned as one of the glooiest and most desperate kinds of all times. I credit this to technology. I believe it is our machines which have decreased our statures. In one of her lectures, Camille Pagia points out how design used to be bold, daring, drawn in long strokes with the arm. Now everything is hunched over, done with the fingers, icons dragged and dropped like dead bodies, corporate corpses, utterly soulless. There's a reason why in Dune the butan jihad revolt against the machines was defined by the single axiom, thou shalt not disfigure the soul.
Labor is the burden beneath which the soul experiences hypertrophy and by which one soul bequeaths life force to another thing. That is why the heroic acts of Hercules were called the 12 labors. That is why when a woman starts giving birth, it is called going into labor. Labor literally is the process of life making a vital genesis. Technology steals this catharsis. Our toils have shrunk and us with them. We approach an asmtote of puniness until one day we will be nothing at all. These will be the last men of nature. The hollow men who TS Elliot foresaw. We will be coaxed into our smallalness. Not freed from labor but excluded from it. Because technology does not rescue, it subjugates. It proitizes more vehemently than any language, ideology, or religion. This year, I guarantee you more humans will spend more hours before the altar of a Microsoft logo than any star, crescent, or crucifix. A Buddhist in Tokyo will experience more or less the exact same life as a Catholic in Manhattan. And we will call this progress.
It is not possible to make a lasting compromise between technology and freedom, said Ted Kazinski. Because technology is by far a more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through repeated compromises. When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily remain optional. In many cases, the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves forced to use it. Thus, science marches on blindly without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists, of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research. The enthusiasm for progress is a phenomenon peculiar to the modern form of society, and it seems not to have existed prior to the 17th century or thereabouts. This is the great paving of human experience, the eradication of human biodiversity into one homogeneous, sleep-deprived goop. Given that no person can behold the fruits of their labor, it is no wonder why they rely on the new faith of consumerism. Because this at least gives a person some totem to hold, which rationalizes the fact that their hours on earth have manifested into something tangible.
In the age of machine, men become redundant. Some of our leaders even worship this fact, desiring to become more than human rather than simply more human. But there is no freedom from the self. No oculus, no magic ball, no technology can unshackle you from your own shadow. The absurdity of white collar labor is that it is finger work which insists on being appreciated as life-threatening and time-sensitive. We used to fair seas, clear ways through forest, and have stories to tell about these feats. But what epic poems will the next millennium study of us? Things used to be carved in stone. Now we have 20-minute brainstorm sessions scribbled onto a whiteboard, erased by lunch, Panera again. Everything is ephemeral, abstract, invisible. But if not taken seriously, then one is doomed for poverty. We've swapped manual labors for menial ones. And we have called this modernity. Through our work on earth, we seek to transcend ourselves, but there is no patron deity of juric. It's no wonder atheism has become so predominant in the current age. Because the act of creation has been sapped of its devotion, love, fidelity, in short, its soul.
There used to be spirits in every item once saw, thumbrints, and every piece of potted clay and shaped metal. Now all we have is that sterile seam of injection molding, the scentlessness of plastic, the apathy of modern manufacturing. Now without the manu just fracturing, endless mindless replicative making, which of course is the definition of cancer. Kimu said, "One must imagine Sisphus happy, but honestly in this age that is easy. He wrestles with a boulder. His labor is large and he grows with it. One could only hope to be worthy of such a sizable suffering in which their spirit blossoms in proportion to their burden." This tragedy, though sad, is still rampant with meaning. The gods could have given him any futile task, but they gave him one which matched his merit and the dignity of his flesh. Not even the Greek gods, who we know were so clever in their punishments, were cruel enough to embarrass him with something small, like pulling a lever or project managing or fingering a spreadsheet into the dust of Hades. No, that would be too inhumane even for them. that punishment would be reserved just for us to be pricricked to death by little and persistent tasks in which no single one might exalt us but that the sum of which would thwart us thoroughly. This is our curse that our bones break beneath the weight of such in glory that there is no way to prove our heroics that we all end up feeling defeated by the end and yet have no bruises to show for it and that is not even a tragedy for it has no meaning, no theme, no lesson and produces no tears but only size. Alas, we no longer live in the age of suffering, which creates meaning, but of mere busyness, which creates nothing but more capital. We dwindle in a dimming age, not of callings, but of occupations. Our labors have become minuscule, and we have chased them comfortably down the hill towards total oblivion. Thanks.