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Satan Out of the Box: The Meaning of Labor, Today

“As long as you abide within my discourse, you are my students; and you will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” —John 8.32

 

For decades, now, people have been trained to believe that securing a “job” is a reliable way to be free.  In our trans-modern age,[1] the lie about that belief has been exposed most unapologetically.  In a regime-in-the-making where liberties are to be imparted mechanically by a central corporate (mercantile/mercenary) government, or a machine that is its own master—consummate Autonomous Self and historical/Hegelian self-realization of Kant’s own promise of enlightenment—we do not work to enjoy the product of our labor; for that product is mechanically delivered by an industry ominously reminiscent of Soylent Green (1973).  We then labor to forget, indeed abandon or betray our humanity.  Labor—the mythical “job”—comes to serve “objectively” as means of enslavement, rather than of freedom: work as ritualistic renunciation of our own freedom, of our humanity, of our dignity.  What our “job” is to achieve—its proper objective—is the reduction of the human being to a robot defined strictly or immanentistically (read totalistically) by a greater machine: a universal or global market in which the most precious piece of merchandize is your soul.
As long as labor was understood in the context of a natural pursuit of happiness, and thus in light of our inalienable right to a truth transcending socio-historical dictates, labor could still be a means to freedom.  For it was still compatible with the principle that “the truth shall set you free”.  That has changed in our post-rational age, or in the age of the Death of God, where we are raised to assume that “God does not see you”.  What happens when God does not see me?  What happens is that the ought is defined by the can.  That is where entire populations are directed to seek empowerment as key to happiness, or to reduce truth to power.  Our post-Christian mantra is: power shall set you free.  But what of the realpolitik warning against the corrupting effect of power?  That warning is mute in a society in which corruption is a necessary and thus entirely justifiable ingredient of ordinary survival—as long as you have the power to get away with it; as long as you can “buy justice” or convince the marketplace that your “corruption” is entirely in the best interests of the Free Market.  After all, do these interests not include the demolition of a traditional morality that stands for the absolute primacy of the ought over the can?  Defying, even overcoming the conventionally established ought is just what the globalist market does daily as it trades the ought for “profit”.  Religion pays; and so does corruption; even if our earnings are incompatible with freedom.
Having learned to turn the ought into marketable “values” that are nothing more than masks of empowerment, today we work to convert lies into the demolition of truth, or rather the establishment of a post-truth world.  We convert our “values” into raw power so that we may survive and buy a share of entertainment on the way.  We do this daily in our post-metaphysical societies.  Our subjectified ought’s are not only bracketed, but used as incentives for us to integrate into a regime in which our Master—Henry Adam’s “Dynamo”—is our friend and entertainment or distraction is our reward.  All that is spiritual is to be converted into what is merely-physical.  Thus must we no longer love souls, but bodies mechanically construed; bodies turned effectively into play-doh manipulated by technology, the machine that will allow us to “change the world,” which is to say, to convert all values into raw power.
No longer is the human body seen as clay (the Latin humus whence our “human”) shaped from within by the divine breath of life (spiritus), but as a socially-constructed “material” defined entirely by power-harvesting machines.  The assumption is that there is nothing strategically at work from within the body, so that what is at work from without or mechanically need not concern itself with any end other than its own perfection: the perfection of the Dynamo; dynamite, so to speak. 
Such is the “explosive” end of labor in our technocracies, namely the conflagration of all ends into means: all that we ought to do must come down to what we can do.  Anything escaping the trend must be unjust, inauthentic and thereby threatening the welfare of people devoted to a justice defined now as the elevation of power (means) to the rank of absolute moral imperative.
We still believe that labor sets us free insofar as we believe that power is equivalent to freedom; or, given our learned conviction that freedom is best secured in the absence of given ends.  Where freedom is defined as power, or where “God cannot see you,” labor must be the way leading to it, as to the reduction of meaning to utility.  For what meaning other than utility can freedom have once liberty is severed from the intelligible truth—truth-in-logos, to echo John 8.32—that “shall set you free”?  Once truth is conceived as generated by power, rather than as guiding power (what we can do) transcendently—the only question we are left with pertains to the use we make of power.  What are we to do with the power we have gained by converting ends into means—and man into a tool in his own right?  What meaning does our power have in the aftermath of the Death of God?  What meaning could it possess aside from the very use we make of it?  To define the meaning or end of our power would be to exercise power, to create meaning as a byproduct of power.
What does our freedom come down to, today?  The shorthand answer is, enslavement.  Let us unpack this answer in terms of “integration in a machine demolishing man as end by way of converting him into a means”.  How is this “end” achieved?  Through labor, which must then entail the obscuring of the dignity of the human being (including the human person).
Evidently, those who respond to the obscurantist trend by appealing to “values,” traditional or otherwise, as support to counter the contemporary apotheosis of means, are misguided given that the apotheosis of means feeds precisely on values.  The regime of Empowerment is nothing other than a value-grinding machine converting values into fuel for the machine, given the de facto abolishment of a natural ought beyond “subjective” values.  Working in the name of values remains work in the service of a machine defining the worker as individually expendable peg.
The only way for labor to serve the interests of freedom—of genuine and irreducible freedom as opposed to mechanically licensed power—would seem to entail a recovery of the ought over and above all mutable values.  But how are we to understand the ought in question?  Is our highest ought an immutable Law defining or limiting our everyday behavior?  Is what is eminently Right (as Parmenides’s dike) a fixed rule telling us what to do?  “Do what is right!”—says the parent to the child.  But what precisely is the right end for the sake of which I labor and that allows me to see that one deed is more righteous than another?  What end justifies our works?  Is it a socio-historical or conventional end?  Saint Paul denied this much in Galatian 2.16, when stressing that “man is not justified by legal works, but by faith in Jesus Christ”; adding the gloss, “no mortal is justified by legal works.”  Working in accordance with the law will not allow us to transcend the compulsions of the flesh (σάρξ); it will not save us from death; it will not win us justice.  Given that the ought stands above death, our work must be grounded (i.e., it is essentially grounded, not in any convention, but in truth itself—eternal truth commensurate with our work.  But how can the two poles of truth and labor be commensurate?  John’s answer is logos.  To return to John 8.32, work is free only where it abides in a discourse that belongs to truth itself (John’s Jesus says, “in my discourse”).  As long as our work is rational in a classical sense; as long as it defines itself in the context of a discourse rooted in and open to truth as supreme ought, or as highest standard of all right and wrong, our work remains free.  No sooner, however, does our work take its bearings from anything falling short of “rational truth”—of truth incarnate in human discourse or dialogue (Matthew 18.20)—than it falls prey to physical compulsion, to death itself, failing to rise out of it.
In our post-philosophical times, where the love of wisdom is called to bow to the imperative of empowerment (including one-upmanship), work is tacitly defined as path of enslavement, leaving many young people seeking conventional crime as path to freedom.  What our youth deserves to know, what it is not educated to see, is that there is only one crime that leads to freedom and that is no conventional offense, but one against any regime (and its Prince of Darkness) that debases or dehumanizes labor by robbing it of its original context and natural divine end.
NOTE:
[1]“Trans-modern” designates, here, the final stage of modernity’s unfolding, whereby the post-modern destruction of modern reason yields to a reconstruction of reason as a global mercantile machine(ry) of value-production, where ends collapse into means, or where the human soul is de facto treated as the consummate commodity.
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Marco Andreacchio was awarded a doctorate from the University of IIllinois for his interpretation of Sino-Japanese philosophical classics in dialogue with Western counterparts and a doctorate from Cambridge University for his work on Dante’s Platonic interpretation of religious authority. Andreacchio has taught at various higher education institutions and published systematically on problems of a political-philosophical nature.

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