Externalization, Efficiency, and Mal-employment

{Note: this essay was originally meant to be presented to my intentional community as a paper on our Ideas and Opinions board. It grew too long for that (3 pages is about the most people seem to be willing to read in that context) and so I have decided to post it here as hopefully helping to explain some part of the theory of Healthy Culture.--I-P }

Efficiency, Externalization, and Mal-employment         

A"healthy culture" editorial By I-P.

[Argument Summary: The concept of efficiency as it is normally understood imposes, in the area of "employment" and "labor", a psychologically, morally,(and ultimately, even economically) unhealthy practice of dissociated specialization that involves a kind of "externalization of costs and damages" to the wholeness of the individual-person. This externalization of mal-employment is the equivalent in Labor of the "externalization" of  costs, and damages to the wholeness of the aesthetic, social and ecological environment that is typical of industrial mal-production and of competitive capitalist culture generally. We should acknowledge that our participation in the culture of such one-dimensional "efficiency" is,  like our participation in capitalist culture generally, a necessary evil to be minimized rather than a positive value to be pursued and, in our choice of businesses and our approach to work in general, should be consciously trying to move in the opposite direction. Ultimately the work of being whole and good people is not something we can afford to"moonlight" at, but must be understood to be our main work; our main reason for being here. It's "efficiency" at that work--what I am calling Integrative Efficiency-- that should be the priority.]    

Part One: Pseudo-Efficiency

If efficiency means anything it would seem to mean not working against ourselves. If this is so then there must certainly be some consideration of what "ourselves" means in order to judge of efficiency. What I mean by "ourselves" is "our whole selves".

But I guess even this is controversial; Most people habitually fragment themselves when doing something, that is, they sort of take off their, "whole-person-in-the-world" "hat", and put on their "I am a "tofu packer" ("hammock weaver", "this-or-that-manager" etc) "hat", and proceed to understand efficiency in mostly quantitative terms relevant to those specialized tasks and specialized conceptions of themselves.

This process of identity dissociation, of invoking a specialized identity to exclude certain parts of ourselves from awareness and consideration in our work, is really the equivalent (in the "employment" or "labor" aspect of a sick economy) to "externalization", in the "production" aspect of such an economy. In other words, just as the destruction and neglect of certain aspects of our whole ecological and aesthetic environment can be "externalized" in our assessment of the cost and value of economic "production", so the harm to and diminishment of, large aspects of our own lives and experience can be successfully "externalized" (ignored) for the sake of some insanely circumscribed conception of a "bottom line" in the form of "efficiency" as "professionals".

Yet, unless it really is possible to stop being a "whole-person-in-the-world", (with a living body, heart, mind, and conscience that resists reduction to a one-dimensional constraints and criteria), the attempt at dissociated, specialized efficiency is going to be in conflict with our actual experience and functioning as a whole persons, that is to say; efficiency will begin to mean "working against ourselves" (see footnote)

But of course the truth is that, (both in the case of the whole --real--environment and of the whole--real--person), this kind of "externalizing" efficiency does not reflect reality. Thus it is not sustainable. Nor is it responsible. Nor is it even intelligent even in its own one-dimensional terms; it is not real efficiency in any useful sense at all.

 In other words, since being "a whole person in the world with a conscience etc" is of course, actually not a "hat" that one can temporarily replace at all; my heart, my whole mind, my whole body, my aesthetic, ethical and other sensibilities, and my role and responsibilities in the larger world, don't just disappear because I decide to they are not germane to what I am "doing". In real life, as in ecology, it is impossible to only be "doing" one thing, and the externalization and suppression, (when I am being an "efficient worker" or a "good Manager" or a "Professional" in the usual isolated sense) of any and everything else I am doing to the whole self-and-world that actually exists beyond my artificial boundaries, is expensive.

It is morally expensive in that it constitutes practicing a mundane version of the kind of "double mind" thinking that, for example, Robert Jay Lifton describes in his book, "The Nazi Doctors"(this might seem an over-the-top comparison, especially if one believes, unlike myself, in what amounts to "immoralities of scale", but bear with me). Those doctors did, precisely the identity "hat trick" that I described earlier; that is, they employed the ethically myopic conception of the "specialized efficiency" of a "specialized identity" embodied in the idea of doing their "job" well as "officers", and so deluded themselves into thinking that bracketing ones humanity (supposedly temporarily) is significantly different from just being inhuman; that the distinction between pawning ones soul and selling it outright is even worth quibbling about. (especially considering the nature of the "pawn broker").

I have given an outsized example as I said, but my point is not only that what those people did is an extreme example of the copout that, in smaller ways, we all make when we split our understanding, identification, experience, and assessment of ourselves in this way, but that their ultimate "performance" during war time was the cumulative result of the many "rehearsals", they went through in the course of their previous lives of being "efficient workers" in the same, (or some other) sick system. One could say that every previous experience those doctors had in  the kind of work that obliges and rewards such double-mind thinking (in the name of efficiency, "survival", or anything else) was actually a kind of small rehearsal for and practice in, the great self betrayal, that they eventually made. Our own "work scene" can also become more like those kinds of rehearsal/training grounds if, in the name of "efficiency" or anything else , we continue to give more attention to necessary evils than positive values (or even worse, confuse the two).

I understand that "efficiency" in the narrow sense, if one is good at it, can be "fun"; that many people enjoy pretending that they are only doing one thing, that they have no existence or responcibilities beyond the present narrowly circumscribed and defined task, the performance of which is to be assessed only in terms of speed or some other purely external measurement. But I suspect that this kind of fun only feeds (and so can only be "fun" for) a certain part of ourselves (probably the same part that is capable of being hypnotized by video games or other ethically myopic distractions) while being completely frustrating (and sometimes even harmful to) other parts of our wholeness as persons.  I have also noticed that such an approach to work--especially when accompanied by great gravitas--is often being used as a kind of ethical displacement (or as I've said "ethical myopia"), so that the energy that should be going to the work of inner and outer healing as a whole adult person is being displaced and re-channeled into an obsession with a certain level of finish in some task that, taken in and of itself, not only has nothing to do with what really needs to happen (either in the world or in oneself), but is actually destructive and at best a necessary evil. It is as though the constant existential conscientiousness and courage required to actually be a good person in an essentially sick and eroding society has pretty much led to that imperative being abandoned altogether and replaced with the ideal of being a good "worker", "manager" or even a "good communard" (to the extent that that title is used as an escape or distraction in this same sort of way).

Most of the preceeding was in regard to the "moral" or ethical expensiveness of a one-dimensional conception of "efficiency". But specialized conceptions of efficiency are also expensive (and so really inefficient and unintelligent) because the regular maintenance of the " inner externalization" that this approach to working requires, is expensive. It has to be maintained by things like the regular consumption of anesthesia in the form of legal and illegal drugs, visits to the chiropractor and hospital, treatments for carpal tunnel syndrome, treatments for emotional stress related to work anxieties as well as general psychological anxieties relating to the stress of having to ignore or repress the claims of conscience and of ones "inner adult", etc etc...And this is only to mention things that (because they cost time and money) would be considered "internalities" even in a business sense, especially for people who share such expenses.

Moreover, many of these forms of anesthetically motivated mal-consumption, besides being economically expensive themselves, are doubly destructive because, like most forms of anesthesia, they become addictive just because of their temporary effectiveness in facilitating denial by driving below the surface, the very pain (the pain of the meaninglessness involved in working against, rather then toward, ones whole self) that is pointing to a need to change the system. By this time the work itself (which can also be a distraction in its own way) is usually well integrated into a general, and often very "comfortable" lifestyle-routine of benumbed distraction, addiction and denial.

Given all of this, from the point of view of the more holistic conception of efficiency that I will outline below, reluctance or "inefficiency" (in the usual sense of the word) in such work  is often just reluctance to externalize in this way; to pawn ones soul; to "work against oneself", against ones conscience, against wholeness, against the future, against our body/minds and their natural rhythms, against Freedom. It is a sign of the successful (or unsuccessful) struggle of our more whole and real selves against our fragmented and fear-based self-image. Ultimately such "inefficiency" is the conscious or unconscious revolt of some part of our better selves against meaningless slavery and the lie of the carrot of future freedom and lasting approval (or at least higher rank as a slave) that leads us into that slavery in the first place.

This being the case, rather than calling this more whole, most essential and less enslaved part of ourselves a bunch of names and brainstorming how we can finally defeat it and become the more "efficient" (and so less human, healthy, and good), we could actually decide to acknowledge that the whole economic system we are more or less forced to participate in sucks; Of course it sucks because of its externalization of costs and damage to our physical and aesthetic environment, but it also sucks because of its equal tendency to encourage a mind set the does the the same thing to costs and damages to our own wholeness as individual-persons (It also sucks  for many other reasons not mentioned here). What follows from this seems to me to be some ongoing attempt to re-conceive of efficiency as "minimally working against our whole selves", (or much better, as maximally working towards inner and outer wholeness) and to redesign the way we work so as to affirm such a value and make the work maximally meaningful and nourishing to our whole selves and the world. Where this maximum is still too meaningless and toxic, the intention should be of progressively phasing out that kind of work and replacing it entirely.

I am pointing out all of this right now mostly I guess to influence, not only the criteria behind the choice of whatever new businesses we choose to take on (as well as how we choose to conduct them when we do decide that), but also to encourage reflection about the kind of work we are already doing and the way we are currently doing it. If we could be more conscious of the various ways we put our souls, bodies, hearts, minds, "in pawn" during whatever work we do, we can begin to try to creatively minimize the extent to which this is necessary and, once getting the hang of this, begin to make institutional changes that further facilitate it.

Without naming this tendency to "inner externalization" in the kind of work we do (and, just as important, in the way we do it) as the destructive force it is, and without resolving to work as much as is possible toward progressively making the work we do work for rather than against our whole selves and world, entropy will continue, as it tends to do in the void of conscious and conscientious intention, insight, and intervention, to lead us further and further down the denial and rationalization-filled road of (increasingly "efficient") self betrayal.

I don't want you to get the impression that I think the way we currently work has yet completely succumbed to the, (essentially corporate) conception of efficiency that I have been debunking. At least people still seem to try to make most work "pleasant" rather then simply get it done as fast as possible. The problem though, (and this point would require at least another paper to treat decently) is that this situation is not sustainable for the reason that working For rather than Against ones whole self, is more than just making work "pleasant" in the normal sense. It is in fact something most people have never (or almost never) experienced consciously because they have never fully experienced or attended to their whole selves at all.

Certainly the educational system and most peoples upbringing (in which they are intimidated into trading their wholeness as individuals for "acceptance" as a "good boy" or "good girl" by the generally impatient and ignorant giants on whom they absolutely depend) is just as much of a training in great and little self-betrayals as subsequent work life usually is. Thus having no really reliable conception or experience of what real inner and outer freedom (the freedom express and increasingly and responsibly to, discover, and evolve into, our real whole authentic selves) even is, we settle for a relatively pleasant form of slavery, the best case scenario of which being that of being our own "masters" (which of course means being our own slaves). But becoming aware of and working towards actualizing, affirming, and "internalizing", ones wholeness as a person is not (any more than affirming and "internalizing" the wholeness of the ecosystem is) a matter of "mastery", but of true awareness and true Friendship with of all of ourselves, all of each other, and all of our shared world.

It might be a stretch to call work in this direction "working toward efficiency" but, given that such work is, in the light to our inevitable death, the only work that ultimately has real meaning, I have no problem calling any arrangement  that actively or passively discourages us from making it a priority in our lives, not only highly "inefficient" but ultimately insane.

{footnote: In the context of the sort of Newspeak that reigns in the sick culture of corporate capitalism (in which what is called "the Free Market" is really a "slave market" in so far as its actual impact on most people goes), the fact that efficiency in real terms is pretty much the opposite of what it is in market terms is not surprising}

--I-P

Part Two: Integrative Efficiency

It seems a bit lame to end this essay with only a weak gesture toward a positive conception of efficiency and without trying to give some examples of what it might look like to work toward it, even  under the constraints of the current eroding economic environment. I think that in the first place doing such a thing involves a clear conceptual distinction  between what I call the "work of Living" and the "work of surviving". I think making such a distinction will prepare the way for practical attempts at the integration of the two.

By "the work of Living" I mean the work of "coming-together inwardly and outwardly" as a whole individual person. By coming-together inwardly I mean working toward living in a way that brings together and nourishes equally, ones mind, heart, body, and intuition--the "cardinal points" of ones whole self as an Individual subject--and that minimally involves any kind of externalization, repression, sedation, and/or censorship of any of those four aspects of oneself. Coming-together outwardly is inseparable from this as it means working toward healthy authentic engagement with others in the very social venues of Life that correspond to the four just-mentioned aspects of the individual. Thus the "civil" venue--the venue of "strangers" whom we want to engage and befriend as fellow-citizens of the world, is--or should be--the primary social venue of concern for the "mind". Healthy engagement in the Local venue, or neighborhood nourishes the Heart or "inner child" in us ("it takes a village to raise  a child"), and so on as the table below suggests:

Its not the point here to try to fully explain or justify these correspondences and they certainly don't represent rigid categories. I bring them up only to help explain the following: that the work of Living means trying to make sure that whatever one is doing maximally nourishes the whole Individual: that it nourishes the inner adult in us by having some kind of relevance to healthy coming together--to healthy culture--in the civil venue of a citizen-of-the-world;That at the same time our work be somehow also made to nourish and heal the Heart, perhaps because it is done in such a way that it can be sensed to be a ornament and a help to the Neighborhood {note; there is much that can be said of the harmful narrowing of the "provence of the heart" to the familial venue that happens in the "nuclear family"-style of dissociated culture, but I will forbear here}

To continue;not only should any given activity feed the heart and mind, it should also and equally feed and nourish the body and so benefit directly or indirectly the culture of the household or Familial venue. Finally, the "work of Living" means the work of including, attending to, and satisfying  the Intuition, so that the activity makes sense in terms of "ultimate things" (as a challenge to the separative ego perhaps) and as a healthy "soulful" gesture to others. As is usually the case, the distinctions expressed here are only relative distinctions, describing the essential "cardinal points" of Individuality and Personhood; of course in reality a complete gradiated continuum is involved.

So working towards making every action an affirmation of  togetherness in ways such as I have described is, when it is done consciously and in the context of a life committed to pursuing inner/outer healing, what I mean by the work of Living--which I could also call the work of Individual-Personhood or the work of Healthy Culture.

The "work of Surviving" just means the work of pragmatically coping with the cultural erosion of the dominant culture so as to be able to continue trying to progress in the work of Living. Of course, in a healthy dynamic it is the intrinsic joy and meaning of the work of Living that motivates the work of "surviving" and ultimately--in a certain sense--even replaces it altogether. On the other hand, the work of surviving without the work of Living, is just a kind meaningless slavery and double alienation; alienation inwardly, between the aformentioned aspects of ones whole self as an individual (invariably involving the inner repression and externalisation above alluded to) as well as alienation and phoniness between oneself and others in the 4 outer, social venues of Personhood.

Now the work of Living, of pursuing healthy coming-together inwardly and outwardly as I have described, certainly seems like a tall order given the state of both ourselves and of the dominant culture, but what I want to show now is that, with the proper Life-Logical understanding and integrative Intention and Imagination, it is suprisingly easy to make, within the necessary constraints of a given situation, even the most mundane chore of "survival" into as much of a "work of Living" as it can be.

{note: The example of this that I use here is what, at Twinoaks, the intentional community where I live, is jokingly called "Serfing" (as in being a "Serf"). Everywhere else it is called "house-keeping" or doing ones chores} 

So the question then when it comes right down to it is; how can something like weaving a hammock chair, like "Serfing", like washing dishes or mopping the floor, be done in such a way as to nourish my mind, heart, body, and Intuition in the way described above.

Well it helps here to remember that Healthy Culture consists of Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, and Infrastructure, and that even washing a dish can be understood as a ritual of togetherness or a ritual of apartness. Just approaching the act from this point of view, and trying to make of it more a ritual of togetherness is already something that is nourishing to my inner adult since it turns the action into a kind of experiment in healthy culture that I can share (as I am doing now) with others as an example that can be transposed in its essentials to any other action.

Such an experimental ritual naturally involves washing the dish as much as possible, like a whole "individual-person" rather than like a "Dishwasher" or a "Serf". For me this aspect of the experiment starts even before the I reach the kitchen since, for me Serfing is much more like "Surfing",in the sense of surfing on the tides of my energy level and only choosing to wash the dishes at all when I have "inner consensus" of mind, heart, body, and intuition to do so.

Also, because of my ongoing studies of body movement practices like David Gormans, "Learning Methods" and the "Alexander Technique" (both of which uphold an ideal of boyant effortless action, so that conciousness of effort is regarded as a sign of working against oneself in some way), the act of washing a dish can become for me a kind of meditation and an opportunity for listening to the messages of my body and heart; am I holding the dish more tightly than necessary?; am I supported, light, effortless, and balanced on my two feet or am I unconsciously leaning against the sink in some effortful and anxious way? Why am I unconsciously coercing and stressing myself in this way? Are my heart and intuition, through my body, trying to tell me something by these unconscious gestures? etc..). On the one hand, whatever awkwardness or imbalances I find will be the welcome substance of further learning. On the other hand, these being temporarily absent, my body is nourished and my heart is charmed by my own elegant and effortless action. My heart is also free to enjoy the way the light reflects on the dishes though the window, the sensuous beauty of water, to creatively ornament the experience with song etc, (of course this kind of approach to the activity will usually mean slowing it down enough for such things).

All this time, Intuition will perhaps be nourished by the inner struggle against "image-consciousness", ego, and fear of vulnerability involved in my trying to make this action a ritual of healthy culture at all. For example, the growth involved in dealing with such thoughts as "what will happen if others see me pursuing holistic rather than corporate efficiency by working more slowly than I otherwise might?"  or "how is my ego doing being deprived of the security of the normal misguided approval of the ethical myopia of  "end-gaining" and conforming to default notions of efficiency?". Dealing with such thoughts and feelings help integrate the soul and its concerns into the act and make the action meaningful from that perspective.

There is another issue relating to intuition that has to do with staying available to integrative imagination, inspiration, and creativity; with not becomming so blinkered by the present, past, and future that eternity is excluded and the unexpected unpredictable yet vital insight, experience, or idea has no access to the consciousness. One might say that there is a kind of "Integrative Muse" or "Holy (meaning "healing/wholistic") Spirit" which a person should never become so absorbed as to exclude entirely; a kind of psychic door to which  one should always reserve some degree of attention and hospitality should the Unexpected Guest arrive...keeping such a state of inner/outer attention alive is also something that tends to require slowing down and working in as flexible and unhurried a way as circumstances allow...

There are many other ways to pack meaning, and so life, into such simple actions which I have necessarily left out of the above example. The number of angles for such conscious adaptation is only limited by ones creativity, good faith and the details of the specific situation. What all such ways have in common is that they stem from the intention to make the action as much of a ritual of healthy culture as circumstances will allow and to make even ones relative failures at this serve as useful lessons for the future. My dishwashing situation admittedly has wider margins than many others: a person with a dishwashing job at a restaurant would certainly have much narrower margins for modifying the same task (if he or she thought the job was tactically worth keeping at all), but it is not so much the width of the margins as the creative determination to take advantage of (and, if possible, widen) them that is the point.

Of course its not the case that just washing dishes "creatively" (still less creatively doing some more common and more unsustainable and essentially crazy and meaningless corporate task) will ever by itself be sufficient as a form of cultural activism, even though it might end up being (like any other action) ones last act on earth. In themselves such creative adaptations only have meaning as  parts of a whole life devoted to furthering inner and outer healing in the largest as well as the smallest venues. In other words, their larger meaning is in their being a part of an active and ongoing larger "conspiracy". Thus, the act of taking the dish-washing job at all should itself be justifiable in terms of some larger unfolding plan having to do with ultimately replacing the general sick culture that the work is itself a necessary adaptation to. (For example; the person washing dishes in the restaurant might be saving the money to travel to some place where they can join others who are interested in experiments in healthy culture). Otherwise the inner Adult, whose concern in all of this for a good future for everyone, is not fed, and so the act itself will not be a Living or truly efficient act.

The efficiency of working in the way I am trying to describe is efficiency on the integrative level of inner and outer healing, of meaning and joy, and it may still be hard at first to see how it can be called "efficiency" at all. Perhaps to truly appreciate it as efficiency requires a little bit more in the way of understanding the cosmology of healthy culture in relation to time.

The concept of time in which what I am describing represents efficiency, is not the linear and purely quantitative conception of time embraced by the dominant culture of apartness, but the Integral conception of Time that is an aspect of the Cosmology of Healthy Culture. Such efficiency is a kind of artistry--a dance--in the context of  that Integral Time; a dance in which the concerns of the present, the future and the past and eternity are coordinated and nourished in each action just as the whole Integral Individual-Person is. In fact whenever possible, the considerations represented by these aspects of Time act as the cross-threads through which we sight and choose, among practical possibilities and prospects, the desired place or situation for the dance in the first place, as well as being the criteria informing what it is to be and how it is carried out.

Such a Dance, when it is really happening is literally happening outside of the dominant sick culture and can itself function for those who witness it as a door--or at least a window---to a healthy one. As such it is both the means and the end of such a culture; a kind of living centripetal eddy, actively slowing a current that is otherwise going centrifugally out of control...The efficiency involved in such a dance is the efficiency that really matters; the efficiency in bringing healthy culture into the world and the world into healthy culture....

The possibility of consciously choosing and cultivating this kind of integrative ("Life-Dance") efficiency over the fear based, one-dimensional corporate  ("death march") efficiency of meaningless surviving, is tied up with other fundamental choices; the choice of Truthfulness over denial, of Love over Fear, of Togetherness over Apartness, of Healthy Culture over Sick culture in ourselves and in our community. Such a conscious choice (the various choices I named really amount to just one choice) is of course certain to effect much more than the labor scene. This paper is just an attempt to explain and show the need for such a choice in relation to that scene and to the ideas of efficiency and "work" in general. Health and Sanity being what they are, equally good arguments for making such a choice can be given in any other aspect of our lives.