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North of Denver, housing subdivisions give way to rolling plains, long reaches of tall brown grass over a gently rolling landscape crossed by the draws of long-dried creeks and rivers. These tracts are not the boundary of Development but only an interruption. Continuing north, one will reach a highway, cross it, find more Development a bit further on, and continue on to observe a gradation from suburban Development into farmland but no specific variation beyond this. Little is within walking distance of anywhere, but a ten minute drive will bring one to a constellation of distribution nodes for food and other commodities. This is true regardless of one’s specific location, and neither is there any variation in the types of commodities distributed by the nodes nor any variation in the commodities themselves. Everything is everywhere.
The plainslands such as I have described have been enclosed by and for Development but have not yet been Developed, and I imagine that they have existed in their present state for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps far longer if they had been unaffected by deviations in the South Platte River. But this is something of an illusion: if we assume that a given area such as this has not been developed in any way, its state nevertheless exists in relationship with surrounding areas. Its ecosystem would have existed as a continuity with the surrounding environment: an area for bison to move through, for example, even if they didn’t remain there. An ecosystem is changed merely by enclosing it, and these tracts are now, aside from the grass, effectively dead. Prior to the agricultural revolution, there were, it has been estimated, about five million people on the entire planet. Today, such a population would be a reasonable estimate for a large city, and there are almost a hundred cities on the planet with that population or greater, with the total human population now rapidly approaching eight billion. These billions of mouths are sheltered, clothed, and fed almost exclusively by Development, but the primary function of Development—that purpose to which the vast majority of its mass and energy is directed—is to feed itself.
Why do people own cars? They’re incredibly expensive in terms of initial outlay, in terms of fuel and maintenance costs, and in terms of the environmental costs resulting from the pollution generated from their manufacture and use and from the infrastructure required to make them a viable option for transportation. Car commercials show pristine vehicles zooming through pristine wilderness marred only by the road itself or urban vistas mysteriously absent traffic. I certainly enjoy driving but would never do so if it weren’t impossible for me to survive without it. My experiences managing the working poor, which I’ll be discussing presently, have shown me that this is the case for many people. I could afford to work far less if so much of my income didn’t go towards the thing that allows me to work in the first place. My work sites are distributed all around the urban area in which I live, an urban area lacking viable public transportation options, and so I really have no alternative.
Car commercials tout the freedom afforded by car ownership, but I think that many or most people would choose to forego the massive costs involved if that were an option. What was once a voluntary means for the wealthy to decrease the time required to travel short distances has become a compulsory means for people to travel the often much longer distances mandated by modern life. This necessity further mandates storage containers and distribution nodes for the cars themselves, for their parts, for their tires, for the construction materials required to build roads, for the construction materials required to build the storage containers for those materials, all of which require land, further exacerbating sprawl and further necessitating the use of cars. This is what I mean when I say that the primary function of Development is to feed itself.
Humans—here inclusive of our human ancestor species—existed successfully on this planet for a full 2 million years, and while some theorists have postulated that human existence prior to civilization was, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, I doubt very much that this was the case. Animals, including humans, tend not to reproduce when under brutal stress, and Hobbes’ descriptors imply a survival difficulty under which 2 million years of continual existence seems remarkably improbable. I don’t want to romanticize pre-agricultural human life; I’m certain it was very difficult. But in the 12,000 years since the agricultural revolution, a mere half of a percent of the time that humans have existed at all, we’ve turned the planet into a dystopian, industrial hellscape on the verge of total collapse and the extinction not only of human life but of most other life as well. Clearly, sometime in the last 12,000 years or so, something went horribly wrong.
The American plains were once home to an estimated 60 million bison. What few bison now remain are commodities under private ownership. And it’s bad enough that a rich, thriving ecosystem has been replaced with tens of millions of square miles of pavement, homogenous distribution nodes, and storage containers for commodities and the people who buy them; but the bizarre simulation and fetishization of what has been consumed adds biting insult to grievous injury. Streets are named for trees which had been cut down to build the houses that line them, counties are named for peoples who had been systematically eradicated from those lands (and others named for those who had eradicated them), and on the tracts between the subdivisions, metal sheets have been erected, shaped and colored to resemble the bison who once lived there. Whenever I drive past them, I wonder what person or committee decided to build them and put them there, and what they were thinking when they did.
I don’t think that this is an idea on which an individual would have landed on their own. Don’t get me wrong: the stupidity of an idea alone has never been much of a bar to its being given serious consideration by the human mind, but stupid ideas considered at the individual level tend to be incentivized at that level—one imagines some sort of individual benefit. For example, I remember seeing, in the early days of the internet, videos of people lighting parts of themselves (especially their groins) on fire. They do this not because the idea is intrinsically appealing—although I wouldn’t put it past humans to light themselves on fire just to see what would happen—but because they believe it will garner attention.
For this reason, I think that the idea metal bison in a field must have been incentivized somehow. I imagined that it went something like this: some mid-level bureaucrat was handed an objective by his superiors to “enhance community branding” or something to that effect. This objective was brought up in a committee meeting. A brainstorming session ensued, during which bureaucrats, wanting to contribute so as to appear valuable, tossed out whatever ideas came to mind. Ideas were filtered based on cost, viability, and predicted effectiveness, and metal bison in a field came out on top. Then the mid-level bureaucrat could say to the top-level bureaucrats that the department had succeeded in its objective to enhance community branding, and a bad idea was executed by many people when an individual or small group acting independently would never have even considered something so monumentally stupid.
I actually sent some emails by way of investigating this, and while I wasn’t able to confirm the details, the general picture of the process that I had in mind seems to have been largely correct: the neighborhood in question had hired a design firm to “make the community more recognizable;” the design firm in turn had hired a local artist. It’s not at all clear where the exact idea first appeared in the chain of command, but the fact that no one person is clearly responsible for these eyesores is exactly the point I’m making.
We have a word for this sort of phenomenon, of course: groupthink. I have in development a couple of ideas which generalize from this phenomenon and others. I’ll be talking about those ideas further on, but first I think it would be helpful to have a few more examples under our belts.
My first job after getting back from my military deployment to Iraq was with a private security firm. As I understood the situation when I was hired, their clients hired them to provide them with security guards who then worked at the client’s offices, stores, factories, what have you. In this way, the client firms could outsource their security needs to an expert provider, rather than having to figure out how to manage their own security without necessarily knowing how best to do so. That was the idea, anyway, as I understood it at the time.
I applied for the job of a front desk security guard for the security company itself. As part of the application process, I took a test using computers in their office dedicated to that purpose, as did all applicants for any position within the company. The test was one of ethics; its purpose was to assess my ethical standpoint, quantify it, and relay that information to the company so as to inform their hiring decision. Many of the questions asked about my own ethical behavior; whether I had ever stolen from companies for which I had worked, for example. As with all of the test’s questions, I answered them honestly. But other questions concerned my beliefs concerning the ethics of others. An example of such a question might be approximately stated, “I believe that most employees steal from cash registers: true, mostly true, somewhat true, mostly false, or false.” Like most veterans, I was quite cynical about human behavior and tended to answer these in the affirmative.
I got the job. As it turned out, my role was less security guard and more secretary. Most of those who came into the office were applicants for other guard positions. I guided them through the necessary procedures and worked with HR to assess and hire candidates. After three months, I was promoted to the middle management position of field service manager. The security company kept standard office hours but many if not most of its employees worked swing and graveyard shifts. My job, then, was to drive around the city after hours, check on guard posts, perform some security checks myself at various sites, and, in general, manage the business while the office was closed. As I was often one of the only members of the office staff with whom the employees interacted, I continued to work closely with HR.
One evening after a meeting at the office, I went out to a bar with some of the HR staff. Over drinks, I lamented of the problems caused by the test that applicants were required to take, and that I had taken. I had noticed that average candidates—measured against a sort of vague hypothetical ideal candidate relative to the company’s interests—often passed, and while clearly underqualified candidates rarely did, the most qualified candidates—typically experienced security guards with police or military experience—almost always failed as well. We were, as a result (and also because of the shamefully low wage offered), chronically understaffed, especially with regards to our armed security guard positions, which required more experience.
The HR administrator to whom I was talking—who had also been the one who had conducted my initial interview with the company—was entirely aware of the issue and, being privy to the details of each test, understood the underlying problem. Remember those test questions which asked not about my own ethics but about my beliefs of the ethics of others? The test disqualifies those who report that they believe that others are likely to steal or to be dishonest, as, statistically (she told me), those who believe that others are likely to steal are more likely to do so themselves. Additionally, those who report never being dishonest or stealing themselves are disqualified as well, because the testmakers apparently believed such people were not being honest.
With regards to my own ethics, I had reported honestly that I had never stolen anything and was fully honest with the companies I had worked for, and with regards to the ethics of others, I had answered that I believed that others likely lacked that honesty and integrity, as I understood those concepts at the time. So I asked her, “How did I pass?”
“You didn’t,” she said. The company’s employee management infrastructure itself would not allow someone to be hired without a passing test, but after enough times interviewing candidates that, one, she knew would make good employees, and that, two, were good people who needed a job, she started—on rare occasions—creating fake results and inputting those into the system to allow her to make the hire. I had been one of the people for whom she had done this.
The test itself was not managed by the security company; they had outsourced it, just as companies hired them when those companies needed to outsource their security. The testing company likely based their test on a variety of statistical information about individuals’ likely behavior given their answers to certain questions, but had no real understanding of the specific needs of a security company—nor did really anyone above the middle management level, I discovered—and so this HR administrator was required to subvert company policy, risking her own job in order to perform it. Her job description entailed contradictory terms: “Adhere to company policy” and “Hire the best individuals for the job.” The company’s profits derived from the margin between what a given company paid us for each guard’s work hours and what we ourselves paid the guard, so wages were crushingly low, and those applying to work with us were often quite desperate. She was doing what she could to help.
The security company’s bureaucratic nonsense was hardly limited to HR, though. As I soon found out, the company was not really selling security services at all and in fact sometimes discouraged or prohibited its employees from actions that were obviously necessary to providing anything more than a superficial degree of security. But in fact, superficial was all that was required. A company’s assets are typically insured, with coverage including losses by theft or vandalism, and the insurance company is the one that requires that its client companies have private security. It doesn’t have to be good security, it just has to exist so that the insurance purchaser can check that box on the form.
So the total ecosystem of which I was a part consisted of the security company, our employees, our client companies, their consumers, and the insurance companies, all of whom had conflicting interests and who were seeking to offload costs and risks onto each other. If a company had an in-house security operation and something went wrong—say, an expensive piece of equipment was stolen—the insurance might blame them, and then the company would have to fight a lawsuit for coverage. But with outsourced security, the insurers don’t have a legal leg to stand on. They would have to go after the security company, which I suspect is difficult because, while there’s a contract between the security company and the client company and between the client company and the insurance company, there’s no contract between the security company and the insurance company. The client company could sue us, but really had no reason to as their losses were covered.
Capitalism is often touted as the most efficient and cost-effective economic system precisely as a result of overlapping self-interests: both companies and consumers share an interest in, for example, minimizing costs. But there is no incentive to minimize costs when, rather than being borne directly, they can be simply redistributed.
Risk is a matter of probability and uncertainty. Actual costs incurred vary widely from person to person. It’s impossible that everyone be able to financially prepare for any possible eventuality, and it would also be wasteful: for those with low incurred costs, money they saved toward that purpose would be wasted. Insurers smooth that unequal distribution of cost by pooling both risk and resources, but some of these resources must necessarily go towards the costs and profits of the insurers themselves. It is better for individuals and companies to have insurance rather than to handle costs directly because predicting individual costs is impossible. However, once that risk is pooled by the insurer, it becomes stochastic and therefore predictable and therefore profitable. In this way, both consumers and insurers benefit even though the total costs incurred are greater than what they would be under their natural distribution. The insurance company grows by pooling more risk, but this only further increases total costs.
Consider two customers who purchase insurance against some particular form of cost. Suppose that one of these two customers incur costs above the cost of the insurance, and the other customer does not (had the customer paid the costs directly instead of having insurance, the customer would have spent less money overall). For the first customer, the insurer is a boon; for the second, a kind of oppression. Of course the second customer agrees to this entire situation because the agent cannot predict what costs they will or will not face. But this is exactly what is meant by smoothing—someone is oppressed so that someone else may be helped—and the more risk that is accumulated, the more smoothing that must occur to compensate for it. It is the unequal distribution of risk which is smoothed. This is possible in this case because the consolidation of risk prior to its redistribution renders it stochastic.
Stochastic means “predictably random.” Rainfall, for example, is stochastic: while prediction of individual raindrops is impossible, one can discuss in a more general way how much rain is falling over a given area in a given time and how it is distributed. The stochasticity of collective risk is an emergent property, a property that doesn’t exist at the level of individual risk but which emerges when risk is consolidated. The study of emergence in philosophy and the sciences generally concerns properties which do not exist at the individual level but which emerge at the collective level. I posit the existence of a contrary phenomenon, demergence, in which properties that exist at the individual level disappear at the collective level or transform at that level into something very different.
I may or may not be the first one to use the term “demergence” in this general way; the first usage I’ve been able to find in any sense is in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2003, originally published in 1920), in which Freud hypothesizes that the death drive of individual cells—their apoptosis, their programmed deaths so as to avoid the problems generated by continual growth and reproduction—demerges when those cells are collectivized into a body, manifesting in a different form at a higher level of organization. The phenomenon of general demergence can be observed in the famous bystander effect: a single person witnessing an accident will feel compelled to call emergency services, but if a group of people witnesses an accident, it is possible that no one will call emergency services because no one feels individually responsible for the outcome and they may each believe that someone else will or already would have called emergency services if that was in fact the necessary course of action given the circumstances. Responsibility demerges from the individual at higher levels of organization.
The American anthropologist David Graeber describes his own take on this phenomenon in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, which is based in part on an essay he published in 2013, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”. Graeber defines a bullshit job as having the following characteristics:
- Paid employment which is…
- …so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that the employee cannot justify its existence, though…
- …as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case
An early example in Graeber’s book features Kurt, a German employee of a personnel management firm subcontracted by a logistics firm subcontracted by an IT firm subcontracted by the German military. Kurt’s job is to travel long distances to military bases in order to move computers from room to room, a job that could be easily accomplished by the military personnel themselves but which has become entangled in several layers of administrative, bureaucratic bullshit. Bullshit jobs have proliferated in Western society in particular over the last century. In Graeber’s estimation—which he derived both from statistical analysis and from hundreds of anecdotal reports from those who hold or have held bullshit jobs—about 50% of all work is bullshit, an estimate which includes both jobs that are completely bullshit as well as bullshit aspects to jobs which otherwise perform legitimate functions. Beyond this is an inestimable amount of what he refers to as “second-order bullshit jobs,” jobs which are essentially necessary (such as janitorial services) but which have greatly expanded in order to serve the first-order bullshit economic sector.
Graeber cites several factors underlying the proliferation of bullshit jobs. Among them is that corporate capitalism is, as he describes, essentially feudal, with CEOs who invent titles (i.e. bullshit jobs) and grant them to vassals (upper management employees) in exchange for their loyalty and support. These managers in turn invent their own titles and employ their own vassals, and the blue collar workers serve as serfs. And what caused this transition from production-oriented capitalism to managerial feudalism? Graeber describes the market value of a commodity as the degree to which it can be quantifiably compared to other commodities. Using Graeber’s example, if a pedicure is $50 and a ticket to the Glastonbury music festival is $200, then a ticket to the Glastonbury music festival has four pedicures worth of market value. Values, on the other hand (for example, family values, religious values, aesthetic values, personal values) “are valuable because they cannot be compared with anything. They are each considered unique, incommensurable—in a word, priceless” (2018, p. 188). In other words, with the advent of money—a higher level of economic organization—value (i.e. market price) demerged from values in general.
Reading Graeber’s book, I had to ask myself, “Is my job a bullshit job?” I have several jobs, of course, as I think most people do nowadays. This—what I’m doing right now, making this podcast—is one of them, and it is definitively not bullshit. Neither is the work I used to do as a musician for the performing arts, a job which has been largely abrogated by the pandemic. My job as a tutor, primarily in mathematics, is, however, quite borderline. Math is certainly important and I think a good and important thing for people to learn, but very little of my time is spent on the direct learning of mathematics for its own sake. Rather, most of my time is spent helping people with homework or studying to pass standardized tests. My employment is predicated largely on the ostensible learning of mathematics being a state mandate. If people weren’t forced to learn math, in other words, they wouldn’t hire me to help them or their children do so. More frustrating still, that which is studied in math classrooms can only be called mathematics through an egregious abuse of language; it is, at best, rote calculation, entirely absent any real mathematical thinking and entirely useless beyond its serving as a test of obedience and procedural compliance.
I am, under Graeber’s model, a duct-taper: my job exists to fix problems that are not natural aspects of human life but which are, rather, created by the system itself. Under my old security job, I was a box-ticker, responsible for confirming or creating documentation for the various procedures which constituted the operation of the insurance ecosystem.
Some might be mystified as to why the incentives of capitalism fail to avert such wasteful inefficiency. To paraphrase Dan Olson of the excellent YouTube channel Folding Ideas, no one really cares what’s going on under the hood as long as the line goes up. Anarchist political writer Kevin Carson offers the following explanation in his publication Capitalist Nursery Fables (2020):
[C]orporate management has the same relation to the corporation’s capital… that the Soviet bureaucracy had over the means of production it claimed to administer in the name of the people: That is, it’s a self-perpetuating oligarchy in control of a large mass of capital which it has absolute discretion over, but did not itself contribute and does not personally stand to lose. In this environment, corporate managers’ standard approach is to hollow out longterm productive capacity and gut human capital in order to massage the short term numbers and game their own compensation, leaving the consequences to their successors after they move on….
p. 11
The main point I want to get across is why this is a significant existential threat to independent thought and to Satanism itself, which I know is very important to me and my audience.
Imagine that a commodity exists called a widget, and that some people in the world are widget enthusiasts who represent the general market for widgets. Widgets fall into two categories: A-widgets and B-widgets, and widget enthusiasts express a strong preference for one or the other. B-widget enthusiasts can use A-widgets for widget-related activities, but do so only reluctantly, and the same is true for A-widget enthusiasts and B-widgets. Let’s say A-widget enthusiasts represent 70% of the market and B-widget enthusiasts represent 30%. Widget companies who want access to both markets require two different manufacturing lines, two different ad campaigns, and so forth. If they only needed to manufacture and market A-widgets, they would have access to greater economies of scale and thus would be more profitable. So a given widget manufacturer might switch to only making A-widgets, thus forcing their B-widget customers to use A-widgets instead, despite their preference for B-widgets. The free market ostensibly solves this problem through competition: the B-widget enthusiasts are now an underserved market and some other manufacturer can step in and capitalize on that. But remember that B-widget enthusiasts only represent 30% of the total market. The A-widget-exclusive manufacturer will grow faster and will eventually be able to out-compete, out-market, or just buy outright any B-widget-exclusive manufacturers remaining. Over time, B-widgets will become a thing of the past and B-widget enthusiasts will be homogenized into the A-widget market.
This is obviously a colossal oversimplification of capitalist economics, but this is exactly what we see in practice: a homogenization of the market.
Remember that Christianity is not only a religion, it’s a market force. As David Graeber describes in chapter 6 of Bullshit Jobs, the underlying justification for our collective social attitudes towards work and economic systems is a theological one. In Genesis chapter 3, God curses Adam and Eve as punishment for their disobedience: “…cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field, by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground….” (17-19). Pointless, menial labor is, from this perspective, our God-ordained lot in life and thus a moral virtue. Beyond that, you think that megachurches aren’t hiring marketing consultants so they can maximize their market share? Hillsong Church, one of the largest megachurches in Australia, is also the owner of Hillsong music, which serves as both a marketing and a revenue stream. Jason Holtman, then an executive working for the video game company Steam, said in 2009 that “[Video game] pirates are underserved customers.” The market sees Satanists not as a true force of opposition but as underserved Christians, an untapped customer base just waiting for homogenization and exploitation for profit… or maybe the waiting’s over. Maybe the world’s most prominent Satanist religious organization already hosts a webstore featuring apparel, coffee mugs, and hot sauces. Maybe, if you act now, you can buy your very own ticket to a Satanic-themed convention with access to a “Satanic marketplace,” the value of religious symbolism having demerged from the values of the sacred.
Oh, wait, I stand corrected: the convention is already sold out. But don’t worry, shoppers are still welcome to patronize the marketplace (TST’s SatanCon, n.d.), because nothing says “Eternal Rebel in opposition to arbitrary authority” like enthusiastic participation in the hegemony and the commodification of the sacred.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Carson, K. (2020). Capitalist Nursery Fables: Center for a Stateless Society.
Community Development | City and County of Broomfield—Official Website. (n.d.). Retrieved January 24, 2022, from https://broomfield.org/211/Community-Development
Freud, S. (2003). Beyond the Pleasure Principle: And Other Writings. Penguin Books.
Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon & Schuster.
How Megachurches Are Using Cutting-Edge Marketing Strategies to Grow. (2019, October 17). Market Business News. https://marketbusinessnews.com/megachurches-marketing-strategies/216929/
Rossignol, J. (2009, January 19). Valve: “Pirates are underserved customers.” Rock, Paper, Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/valve-pirates-are-underserved-customers
TST’s SatanCon. (n.d.). The Satanic Temple. Retrieved January 24, 2022, from https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/tst-satancon