At 11:52 PM 10/20/2005, Tom Walker wrote:
>Allow me to repeat something that Cary Tennis said in his advice column
>because the two responses appeared to have brushed it aside in favour of
>wounded outbursts at trivial side issues.
>
>"Although you're by yourself, you're not alone. That is, your same
>isolated condition is replicated hundreds of thousands of time throughout
>the system. You are part of a huge class of exploited persons. You just
>don't talk to each other. Each of you is in your own cubicle worrying
>about your own boss and your own workload and your own lack of pension."
>
>"Strangely, this overworking of people, this destroying of workers' lives,
>is happening to many hundreds of thousands of people and yet in some sense
>it is not happening to a group; in every instance it seems as though it is
>happening to you alone, and it's a problem you alone must solve. No matter
>that macroeconomic and cultural forces are at work to replicate the same
>crushing, inhumane circumstances from coast to coast. Still, we think it's
>we as individuals who are at fault, and it's we as individuals who must
>solve our problem -- even though it is systemic and replicated throughout
>society! Why do we think that? Because we are stupid? Maybe. We might be
>really stupid. It kinda looks that way sometimes. Or maybe we're just scared."
>
>Wow! I mean WOW! Does it get clearer than that? A structural,
>macroeconomic, cultural process that hundreds of thousands (a vast
>understatement) see as something happening to them alone. Need a
>theoretical treatise on the structural problem? They're out there...
>Pierre Bourdieu, Ulrich Beck, Andre Gorz... and many more.
>
>So why do YOU think folks focus on the "advice" Tennis gives or on some
>inept aside he makes about roofers? And I'm not just talking about LBO. I
>looked through the table talk responses on Salon and people commented
>about house prices, whether the couple had really done all they could to
>cut their expenses (so they wouldn't need the second job so
>desperately) and what would be the likely consequences of various other
>PERSONAL strategies. Is it because the point about it being a collective
>problem not a personal one is too obvious to merit comment? Or are people
>that stupid that they couldn't grasp out what Tennis had said? Or are they
>scared to engage the issue on a level that might have real consequences --
>that might actually address the problem directly rather than pick at its scabs?
>
>The Sandwichman
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