Work, though necessary and often good, has a tendency to turn the mind of the worker against the institutions by which she is employed. Spend any amount of time in a dead-end job, whether well paid or not, and you may just end up desiring a revolution if for no other reason than that you wish to experience something new, and the uprising would give you a reason to skip work on Monday.
Such is the plight of our industrialized world. Many of us have all the means required for survival and none of the meaning. The notion that an individual employed in a clean, managed, and safe environment could have their mental life so agitated that they could lash out unexpectedly and oftentimes, violently. Often the individual in her distraught state may even choose to take their own life as opposed to living continually in their manicured environment. By all appearances, such a phenomenon Seems antithetical to the modernist idea that society and its advances civilize the individual to such a degree that they inevitably become happy and healthy.
Broken Pencils
I once worked with a man who would arbitrarily smash various items in the office. For example, he would spontaneously break a pencil or tear a stack of papers in half. I never asked him why though I worked closely with him for over a year. I now suspect that such behavior was an outpouring of those pent-up frustrations that accumulated from being caged in a cubical for far too long.
I have immense sympathy for workers in such a state. However, I think each of us possesses at least some fragment of that desire for chaos within our souls. The desire to smash something if only to make our experience something different and unexpected. Of course, such a desire may not be innate but rather a product of our current system. As our world becomes ever more systematized and sanitized, we will find less and less room for those curious twists of spontaneity that make our lives ever so slightly unpredictable.
A Meditation On Determinism
It is the unpredictability, for better or worse, that gives life its luster. Suppose life were reigned in and uniformly manufactured. In that case, we might be able to, with enough sophisticated technology, account for all the variables of life and thereby read the entire story from start to finish without any deviation or surprise. You may think such a state is already achievable, as the determinists believe, but I do not.
I do not think that our lives are winding down to a point predictable by our ever-expansive technology. The reason I do not think such a future is before us is for the same reason my coworker broke all of those office supplies—the human capacity to provide style to substance. The environment was utterly controlled, yet he found a way to stray, To err in unexpected ways. With all the tools and technology in the world, what employer, in their fervor to take away all enjoyment from the workplace, could have predicted that he, this random entry-level employee, could find pleasure in the snap of a pencil or the misshapen bent of a paper clip.
In his own way, he was providing his own flair to the controlled and determined portions of his environment. But, of course, each of us does this in a much broader sense with our very existence. We have been determined in a variety of ways, from our genetics to our place of birth, to our socioeconomic status. Nevertheless, we each give a different expression to those determined qualities.
A child born with a congenital disease, given only a few short years to live, inspires the world and leaves a lasting impact wider than many who live a full eighty years, unpredictable.
The Moral
Man is not a machine made for continued capital advancement. Our purpose is not to better control our environments, maximize our production, and live in a systematized fashion but rather to furnish the determined portions of existence with those acts of spontaneity that are unique to each individual.
As of yet, I have mainly painted an amoral picture. You can swerve in any direction, whether good or evil. Ted Bundy undoubtedly made many spontaneous choices in his life, and we could all agree it was for the worse.
I feel as though a slight moral coloring should be added lest every middle manager accuses me of driving up the expenses for office supplies by advocating for the spontaneous destruction of said office supplies.
I must make it clear that I am not advocating that you smash all your pens and rip up all your paperwork simply to inject chaos into your life but instead that you make motions to express yourself in unique ways that slight towards the good in service of the virtuous life.
Taking such a stance of spontaneous goodness towards life may help you avoid being agitated to a point where you lash out negatively. The impulse will work its way out one way or another. Better that it aims toward the good, noble, and virtuous life, the only mode of life capable of being sustained.
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Nice article! Somwhat related, I’ve been think about determinism as it comes to different cultures. Consider the game Plinko from The Price Is Right. To what extent are our lives (Plinko chips) simply a byproduct of each of the pegs that knock us around in our progression through life? Many look at other cultures, especially those objectively worse like the Nazis or even the current issues in Afghanistan, and they say I would never act like that. And yet, wide swaths of each cultures population subscribes or succumbs to the same general worldview. Like Plinko chips following a relatively predictable path.
I like your idea of spontaneous goodness because it resists this. It goes against the prevailing winds and gives meaning and purpose in the process. We need those as much today as any time before. The broken pencil image will stick with me!
Thanks for the kind words! I like the plinko analogy too! It looks like we both gave each other lasting images.