Chris Wright said something important — about the bullshit(ization) of American jobs

© 2018 Peter Free

 

14 August 2018

 

 

A fellow cynic speaks — with wisdom

 

Chris Wright reviewed David Graeber's (reportedly meandering) book, Bullshit Jobs.

 

Wright succinctly introduced his own interpretation of the escalating bullshit jobs phenomenon:

 

 

Ever since management began to take control of production away from workers, to centralize knowledge in its own ranks and reduce the worker to mere appendage of the machine . . . whole layers of unnecessary bureaucracy have existed.

 

Much of the bureaucracy has existed only to control and monitor the direct producers, to strip power from them and keep it in the hands of capitalists or their agents.

 

At the same time, it became ever more necessary to control markets and the public mind, through political and advertising propaganda. Hence the rise of the public relations industry . . . .

 

[T]he proliferation of bullshit jobs is itself a form of population control, of keeping people subordinate in hierarchical structures, socialized into submission, atomized and alienated from one another.

 

African-American men are kept under control by being locked up in prisons, while whites are funneled into pointless jobs where they can be supervised and indoctrinated.

 

The system hasn’t been consciously designed for this purpose, but the reason it’s able to expand is that it serves the interests of power-structures.

 

© 2018 Chris Wright, On “Bullshit Jobs”, CounterPoint (14 August 2018)

 

 

To see how piling BS atop BS works in practice

 

You will want to read Wright's complete essay.

 

What he said is humorously persuasive, even if not scientifically demonstrated. Anecdote, similarly experienced by millions, arguably presents us with workable hypotheses.

 

However, I suppose that testing these hypotheses, given their widely experienced truth, would itself qualify as a bullshit job.

 

 

The moral? — Cultural failure can be (partly) measured by — the number of people it takes to do something that doesn't need to be done

 

A similar index is counting the number of people that it takes to repress humanity — with the purpose of profiting greedy elites.

 

American voting patterns indicate that virtually no one understands these combined phenomena. Propaganda and fuzzy thinking persuade people to vote against their interests.

 

Ergo, the value of Wright's insight.