The Hole In Our Soul

I have just started reading Charles Eisenstein’s The Ascent of Humanity. It is always dangerous to draw conclusions from a 512 page book when you are just 40 pages in, but the opening chunk of Eisenstein’s Ascent is more than meaty enough to chew on, especially when amplified by some serious synchronicity (more about which in a moment). Eisenstein is right up front with his central thesis that the current global crisis, a crisis best exemplified by the existential threat of climate change yet somehow even broader and deeper, is a blending of “the story of humanity’s separation from nature with the story of our individual alienation from life, nature, spirit and self.” And, just as importantly, out of this state of alienation we have launched our twin would-be therapies, which Eisenstein describes as “the Scientific Program of complete understanding and the Technological Program of complete control.” But these therapies, far from guiding us from a state of illness back to health, are revealed as a toxic form of self-medication. Eisenstein diagnoses us, bluntly, as addicts:

“The future of the Technological Program is one where all the problems are solved once and for all. Here and now, though, we are waking up to another kind of future, and with a hangover to boot: vomit on the floor, apartment trashed, the world a mess.”

Admiring the problem, getting off on the mess, these can be just as addictive as the technology with which we’ve made the mess. It is something I guard against in writing this blog, with, I fear, mixed results. I am convinced that pessimism is addictive in large part because of how much less effort it takes. Meaningful optimism requires an increasingly steep degree of intellectual rigor, making it at the same time increasingly rare. Which makes it so thrilling that Eisenstein’s project is unreservedly optimistic, whilst, in the author’s own words, “assiduously avoiding New Age clichés.” (I have a heart full of my own favorite New Age clichés, e.g. the bumper-sticker slogan “God bless the whole world, no exceptions,” but keep them there a) because they fuel the heart-work of loving my neighbor, and b) because they are safe there from my mind, which thinks itself fully rational, making it (my mind) the ultimate emperor with no clothes. This heart-mind split sounds exactly like Eisenstein’s “individual alienation from… spirit and self.”) Eisenstein’s optimism is certified the moment he proposes an actual solution: “to abandon the program of insulation and control, and the conception of the separate self on which it rests.”

In contrasting this solution with what he terms our current “off-separation from the universe,” Eisenstein asserts that “rejuvenation and wholeness have been, and will be, the consequence of a different worldview, one that has roots in primitive culture and religion, and that is the inescapable yet heretofore generally unrealized implication of twentieth-century science.” (emphasis added) Everything Eisenstein says, or at least everything I can imagine him saying 40 pages in, hinges on that one little word: “wholeness.” Because as I read this passage the typically inaudible unfurling of my memories sounded instead like a whole tray of plates smashing to the floor in the kitchen. The noise redoubled when I got to page 19 and Eisenstein’s description of “our lost wholeness”: “It is a feeling that something is missing. Some people call it a hole in the soul.” The noise was Slovenian philosopher Slvaoj Zizek’s dramatic take on Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece.

Shel Siverstein is most famous in my household for penning The Giving Tree, a book which my wife, Jen, loathes. (Jen sees in The Giving Tree an endorsement of naked self-interest and exploitation. I must admit that I was less than impressed by the boy-who-grows-into-a-man character in The Giving Tree, especially in his bald middle age. And the tree itself seems to me sad and undignified in its giving, needy rather than gracious.) But, having never read The Missing Piece, Jen has no opinion about it, while I only became acquainted with it via Zizek’s interpretation in the introduction to his Enjoy Your Symptom! Here is the plot summary, as quoted from Wikipedia:

“The story centers on a circular animal-like creature that is missing a wedge-shaped piece of itself. It doesn’t like this, and sets out to find its missing piece, singing:

Oh, I'm lookin' for my missin' piece
I'm lookin' for my missin' piece
Hi-dee-ho, here I go
lookin' for my missin' piece

It starts out on a grand adventure searching for the perfect piece to complete itself, while singing and enjoying the scenery. But after the circle finally finds the exact-sized wedge that fits it, it begins to realize that it can no longer do the things it used to enjoy doing, like singing or rolling slowly enough to enjoy the company of a worm or butterfly. It decides that it was happier when searching for the missing piece than actually having it. So it gently puts the piece down, and continues searching happily.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_Piece_(book))

The key moment comes when “It decides that it was happier when searching for the missing piece than actually having it.” For Zizek, this is precisely when “the it… constitutes itself as desiring subject through a lack.” If you have been reading this blog you know I have a penchant for reformulating Descartes’ cogito. So, at the risk of going to the well once too often, here goes. Zizek is essentially saying “I desire, therefore I am.” Or, since we only desire because of our constitutive lack, “I lack, therefore I am.” Eisenstein’s “feeling that something is missing,” his “hole in the soul,” is, then, simply the emotional tone and spiritual condition peculiar to a human consciousness.

Seen from this angle, The Missing Piece is the tale of Eisenstein’s longed for “wholeness” found and rejected; it is a reversal of Amazing Grace into “I once was found, but now am lost” that is, shockingly, as overflowing with gratitude as the original. Eisenstein’s pursuit of wholeness suddenly seems reminiscent of the scene in The Matrix: Reloaded when Neo learns from The Architect that the original Matrix was both a) a virtual utopia free of all suffering, and b) rejected by its human inhabitants for that very reason. The history of The Architect’s first Matrix is, at bottom, a retelling of The Missing Piece.

But if, per The Missing Piece and The Matrix: Reloaded, we homo sapiens have rejected wholeness, our preferred modus operandi is leading to another rejection, only this time it is Mother Earth herself rejecting the artificial heart transplanted smack in Her chest in the form of us “desiring subjects.” The choice between Eisenstein’s wholeness and Zizek’s lack begins to feel like choosing your last meal before execution.

It was with just such pleasant thoughts that I went to bed after reading the first bit of The Ascent of Humanity. The very next morning my work took me to a meeting held in an elementary school library, during which meeting I glanced at the bookshelf abutting our little round table. There, at eye level directly in front of me, were three copies of Silverstein’s The Missing Piece. “Aha,” I thought, “the universe is clearly endorsing Zizek, we aren’t meant for wholeness, and if we’re going to save ourselves and our planet we had better rescue desire from capitalism, perhaps beginning by collectively desiring a twenty-hour work week.” (I didn’t actually think all of this on the spot given that I was attending to the specifics of the meeting, but I could feel the thought’s “bow wave,” one of my new favorite terms and one which describes the experience of knowing what’s coming before it happens, i.e. like the wave pushed out in front of the bow of a boat. I played baseball for years and came up to bat hundreds of times, but only once did I ever have precognition of getting hit by the pitcher. Standing in the on-deck circle, I felt the wild pitch’s bow wave. Neither before nor since have I ever been struck with such vivid foreknowledge. We all know what we’re going to think next, e.g. I know that I will never vote Republican, so maybe my use of “bow wave” in reference to my thoughts is a bit of a misnomer. In any case, my wife, who knows me better than I do since her view of me isn’t clouded by my garden variety projections and denial, i.e. she sees through my bullshit, can also tell you what I’m going to think next. And she still loves me! “A man’s greatest treasure is his wife,” indeed.)

But there, just a few books down on the very same shelf, was P.D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother?, which was something of a miracle given that a book by Eastman has no business on the same shelf as one by Silverstein. Unless the books were shelved by genre instead of by alphabet, which changes the particulars but not the fact of the miracle; either way I was staring at two famous illustrated children's books that essentially tell the same story, but with much different endings. Here is the plot summary of Are You My Mother?, again quoted from Wikipedia:

“Are You My Mother? is the story about a hatchling bird. His mother, thinking her egg will stay in her nest where she left it, leaves her egg alone and flies off to find food. The baby bird hatches. He does not understand where his mother is so he goes to look for her. In his search, he asks a kitten, a hen, a dog, and a cow if they are his mother. They each say, ‘No.’

Then he sees an old car, which cannot be his mother for sure. In desperation, the hatchling calls out to a boat and a plane, and at last, convinced he has found his mother, he climbs onto the teeth of an enormous earth mover. A loud ‘SNORT’ belches from its exhaust stack, prompting the bird to utter the immortal line, ‘You are not my mother! You are a SNORT!’ But as it shudders and grinds into motion he cannot escape. ‘I want my mother!’ he shouts.

But at this climactic moment, his fate is suddenly reversed. The earth mover drops him back in his nest just as his mother is returning home. The two are united, much to their delight, and the baby bird tells his mother about the adventure he had looking for her.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_My_Mother%3F)

The search for a missing piece is mirrored by a search for a missing mother, and both searches endure several false starts. But where Silverstein’s “It” finds the missing piece, only to throw it back and continue looking for satisfaction it doesn’t really want (thereby achieving satisfaction by never finding it, making life either a mystical paradox or absurd, which seem to be the only available choices for us desiring subjects), Eastman’s baby bird is delivered to its missing mother by its last, seemingly terrifying mistaken maternal object. As Snort, the embodiment of the industrial revolution, unexpectedly delivers the baby bird to its lost mother, one can hear Eisenstein in the background, riffing on the possibility that it is technology itself that will bring about the end of “The Age of Separation,” and deliver us unto “The Age of Reunion,” a “potential reunion that lies in the fulfillment, and not the abandonment, of the gifts that make us human.” The particular tale of separation and reunion told in Are You My Mother? is the children’s illustrated version of The Ascent of Humanity every bit as much as The Missing Piece is the children’s illustrated version of Zizek’s Enjoy Your Symptom! I would note that in both cases the children’s illustrated version came first.

So what was the universe telling me by putting both of these books on the same shelf right in front of my nose? Presumably, if the universe endorsed either wholeness or lack I would have encountered the corresponding children’s book, but not both. And it doesn’t seem possible that the universe was endorsing wholeness and lack; we don’t live in a universe of squared circles, after all. I am, it seems, left with the work of interpretation. So… if wholeness and lack are mutually exclusive, then perhaps a semantic shift is required. A shift from wholeness contra lack to a desire born from wholeness. The latter may be just as illogical as the former, if we grant that desire is just a byproduct of lack. But perhaps it isn’t always. And what would a desiring subject constituted from wholeness even want? She would want to give and, quite possibly, create.

Some would say that God, who by Her very definition is whole, constituted us with a lack, gave us our hole in the soul, so that there would be someone to receive Her gift. For us, achieving wholeness, then, would be to join in the Divine game of creation in order that we might give. (Our giving will be nothing like the Giving Tree's; if nothing else, we won't end up a stump.) What might we make, and to whom might we give? I seem to recall something about a “five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Here’s hoping we find wholeness before we take to the stars.

When Nothing Falls Apart

What do you do when your spiritual efforts aren’t just in conflict with your politics, but, in fact, in congress with the political opposition? I should back up for a minute and explain that despite, or perhaps partly because of being raised by politically and spiritually progressive Christian parents, the spiritual efforts that I am alluding to frequently come wrapped in eastern philosophical and/or religious packaging. I met my Jewish wife on a Buddhist meditation retreat (she has moved on from her interest in Buddhism, returning to her Jewish roots, but, thankfully, still lets her uptight WASP husband hang around), when I don’t know what to do I consult the I Ching, and on those (thankfully few) occasions when my life feels like it is about to fall apart I read the matriarch of Western Buddhism, Pema Chodron.

However tempting it is to make like the kid in the famous anti-drug commercial from the ‘80’s, (his “I learned it by watching you” achieving the impossible by matching the infant’s cry in both power and vulnerability), my eastward gaze is only partly due to my parents’ explicit endorsement of spiritual pluralism. Because if I had only learned it by watching them I would be consulting the I Ching on my way to church every week. But instead of becoming a Christian by trade and a pluralist by inclination, I have ended up a pluralist by trade and a wannabe eastern sage by inclination. The apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree, but it seems to have rolled in a ditch.

Apparently, I am not alone. Number two on the list of Stuff White People Like is “Religions their parents don’t belong to.” More specifically, “White people will often say they are ‘spiritual’ but not religious. Which usually means that they will believe in any religion that doesn’t involve Jesus. Popular choices include Buddhism, Hinduism, Kabbalah, and, to a lesser extent, Scientology. A few even dip into Islam, but it’s much more rare since you have to give up stuff and actually go to Mosque. Mostly they are into religion that fits really well into their homes or wardrobe and doesn’t require them to do very much.” (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/18/2-religions-that-their-parents-dont-belong-to/) The folks at Stuff White People Like are, on the surface, rather critical of the educated secular white folks they are satirizing. We seem to be nothing more than lazy, vain consumerists caught up in a perpetual adolescent rebellion against our parent’s core beliefs. On one level all that can be said is that the truth hurts.

But an alternate reading destabilizes the satire, recasting our throwaway “spirituality” as something of a cry for help. This reading hinges on the last, most damning words of the critique. Our search for meaning may occur on our tasteful living room couch not because we are so damn shallow, but because we lack the time and energy for absolutely anything else. Like dogs, #53 on the list of Stuff White People Like, our tasteful sofas cater to our needs and ask nothing in return. (Since men are nothing if not selfish, just ask any woman, it is no wonder that dogs are officially Man’s Best Friend. Sofas are a close second.) And, each day spent laboring in late capitalism like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill, when we return home to our fashionable apartments we know the boulder is already rolling back down, leaving us disinclined to give up stuff and go to Mosque (or Church). Because a) why give up stuff when everything is already lost and will be lost afresh again tomorrow, and b) our sofas are much more comfortable than church pews and we at least deserve a break before rolling the boulder back up the hill again tomorrow.

If all this sounds rather maudlin and indulgent of a generational weakness of character, e.g. it wasn’t that fun living through the Great Depression and they didn’t have any paying jobs or fancy apartments to retire to at the end of the day, then we should close the book and let the satirists at Stuff White People Like have the last word: two generations removed from “The Greatest Generation,” we are their complete opposite. They survived the Great Depression and then saved Western Civilization, while we overpay for coffee and are, essentially, decorators. I would only point out that America responded to the Great Depression and WWII with, respectively, the New Deal’s sundry Tennessee Valley Authorities and Rosie the Riveter. Confronting two existential crises, Western Civilization built stuff. Whereas now, Western Civilization is full of Stuff White People Like, none of which we built. We all have jobs making nothing. The verb decorate is defined as “to make something look more attractive by adding extra items or images to it.” Just so, we spend our lives making nothing look more attractive by adding extra items or images to it.

Note that the fruit of Sisyphus’ efforts is also always nothing. This nothingness at the center of our productive lives has its doppelganger in our spiritual lives in the form of Buddhism and its concept of no-self. As Pema Chodron explains, “’Examine the nature of unborn awareness.’ Who is this ‘I’? Where did it come from? Who is it that’s aware? The slogan points to the transparency of everything, including our beloved identity, this precious M-E. Who is this ME?” (http://lojongmindtraining.com/Commentary.aspx?author=3&proverb=3) While Chodron wants nothing but our liberation, in dissolving the self she has unwittingly cemented a connection as rigid and troubling as the vice grip on our beloved identities. Minus the self, our outward material condition is matched by our deepest inner truth: “there is no there there.” That Chodron would substitute the open space of big mind for the missing identity is completely beside the point; Western Buddhists have already filled that space with discriminating home furnishings.

That is, if they still have a job making nothing (but money). Which is where the second key element of Western Buddhism, groundlessness, comes into play. Again per Chodron, with groundlessness “we are moving further and further away from concretizing and making things so solid and always trying to get some ground underneath our feet. This moving away from comfort and security, the stepping out into the unknown, uncharted, and shaky- that’s called enlightenment, liberation.” It’s also called Neoliberalism, which is defined as “a (supposedly) moderate form of liberalism that modifies its traditional government policies, as on labor unions and taxes.” (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Neo+liberal) This supposed form of moderation is actually spectacularly radical and explicitly does away with taxes for the wealthy and labor unions for the workers, who find themselves moving away from comfort and security while stepping out into the unknown, uncharted, and shaky. And that’s called freedom. (See the Right to Work Acts, which “guarantee” workers the freedom to benefit directly from collective bargaining without contributing to the collective, which taking without giving is the perverse, and, ultimately, mysoginistic fantasy at the core of Neoliberal capitalism. This Freudian reading is that Neoliberals treat their workers like they treat their women, i.e. as means to their own satisfaction, which is exactly why Miley Cyrus is waltzing around semi-nude and exactly why every post-pubescent girl at the summer camp I visited this summer wore jean-shorts that were little more than thongs. With Neoliberal capitalism, workers don’t get to have unions, and women don’t get to wear clothes.)

Slavoj Zizek has noted the congruence between Western Buddhism and neoliberal ideology, describing it thusly in his work On Belief:

“Although ‘Western Buddhism’ presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain an inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement….Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of technological progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination- one should, instead, ‘let oneself go,’ drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of this accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being…. One is almost tempted to resuscitate here the old infamous Marxist cliché of religion as the ‘opium of the people,’ as the imaginary supplement of the terrestrial misery: the ‘Western Buddhist’ meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamic while maintaining the appearance of mental sanity.”

So, granting all that, if I am after more than just the appearance of mental sanity why don’t I take after my wife and return to my own religious spawning ground? The answer is found in the second most important line from Stuff White People Like: “they will believe in any religion that doesn’t involve Jesus.” When exactly the religiously moderate form of Christianity died is open to debate, but I have my suspicions that it died on the same night that truly moderate forms of liberalism died, the night that Ronald Reagan was elected, which was the self-same night that Neoliberalism and evangelical Christianity were born again. Moreover, the death of religiously moderate Christianity spelled the death of religiously moderate religion. For fun, check the rolls of those bastions of religious moderation, the Episcopal Church and the Jewish Conservative Movement, which if you are inclined to religious moderation will either make you wonder what the religious version of threatening to move to Canada is, or leave you mouthing the delusion that “these things go in cycles.” Because the moderates who would have been in the pews or sitting next to their spouse at synagogue are now busy not meditating, i.e. busy not really practicing a religion (Western Buddhism) that isn’t really a religion.

Because it has, since 1980, become impossible to say the word Jesus without feeling like Pat Robertson, Christianity, for the religious moderate, is foreclosed. But since it is impossible to say the word atheism without feeling like Dick Cheney, who, despite being a Methodist, brings to mind a universe absent a supreme being, I am left with Western Buddhism. And since I don’t seem to be able to convince myself that I am not a self no matter how hard I try (Not sure which religion is technically harder- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which require one to believe in the existence of something impossible to believe in, i.e. God (See “I believe because it is absurd,” which I translate as “If it’s too good to be true, it’s probably true”), or Buddhism, which requires one not to believe in the existence of something it is impossible not to believe in, i.e. the self. This leaves us with Neoliberalism- believing in one’s self at the exclusion of all else, making a doctrinal belief in free markets a form of solipsism.), my only option is to redeem the Western Buddhist version of groundlessness.

That redemption takes the form of struggle. We don’t know whether our efforts to finally cut the one constant thread of human history, the war of the powerful few against the huddled masses, will amount to anything whatsoever. There are at least as many reasons for pessimism as there are for optimism. It is a struggle. And, if I may be permitted in a paragraph about groundlessness to reach back over the gap between myself and my faith, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The gap reasserts itself in the shifting ground beneath our feet. No matter how hard we wrestle, we may lose this struggle. And yet we may win. And still we may lose. The gap of groundlessness, for me, is the gap between a victory already won, in an empty tomb, and a battle that yet teeters on the brink.

If the victory is already won, we are on firm ground. In the last speech before his assassination, a speech explicit in its condemnation of economic injustice and its call for unified struggle, Martin Luther King attempts to plant us in that ground:

“Like anybody, I would like to live- a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

He was shot dead the very next day.

Where is this mountain, this protrusion of solid ground? Down here in the lowlands of Western Buddhism, it’s all groundlessness. I hope we win. I will try my very best. I pray that my best, our best, is better than nothing.

Find Your Passion!

A piece in the current edition of Johns Hopkins Magazine highlights JHU alum and motivational speaker Jay Shepherd’s “’Five P’s’ of occupational happiness,” the first of which, of course, is passion. If we are to believe Shepherd and basically everyone else who has ever opined about the proverbial color of one’s parachute, passion is to workplace satisfaction as winning is to sports, i.e. it is something of a cure-all. The first and most important step in landing one’s dream job is, per the “passion for your work” belief system, dreaming about said job. Like many of our contemporary reigning ideologies, the “passion for your work” narrative is total poppycock, and ignores the fact that most people dream about not having a job at all not from a lack of insight into their own passions, but in order to devote themselves full time to these very passions. We all know what color our parachutes are. It’s just that for most of us, The Wall Street Journal fanatics notwithstanding, that color isn’t green.

In his wonderful collection of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes, Nassim Nicholas Taleb succinctly captures why we dream about giving up work for our passions instead of translating our passions into paid labor, why, if we restrict ourselves to the primary colors, we avoid dreaming in a combination of yellow and blue. But before turning to Taleb, I should note that if one first learns, as I did, that yellow and blue make green from the Glad sandwich bag advertising slogan, is it any wonder that the boundaries around permissible happiness are erected at the outer limits of one’s dream job? As a child when I dreamed of happiness it was most often as a multimillionaire athlete- instead of enjoying sports for sports sake I fantasized it into a profession. As a college student my friends and I gave serious consideration to opening a tavern together- it wasn’t enough to sit around drinking and enjoying one another’s company. And as an adult I imagine waking up to find my name on the New York Times bestseller list- writing for pleasure could only ever be masochistic because the only possible pleasure would be the pain of not getting published. So, pace what I said above in paragraph 1 and the start of paragraph 2 about what we’re really dreaming of, perhaps the truth is that while we’d all like to imagine that if we won the lottery we’d quit our jobs and devote ourselves full time to whatever our own version is of e.g. photographing the indigenous wildlife, we’re all much more likely to end up becoming someone’s boss. Which makes Taleb’s take on what it means to be alive all the more damning: “You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.”

If Taleb is correct, as I believe he is, then “the dignity of work” is one of the greatest lies ever told, and there can only ever be “the dignity of leisure.” As members of the unhappiest profession (per official Forbes magazine rankings), lawyers know this. See Shepherd’s description of how a bunch of lawyers reacted to one of his motivational speeches on the “Five P’s”, as quoted in Johns Hopkins Magazine: “Nobody threw any tomatoes.” In the magazine Shepherd’s line is described as a joke, and perhaps it is; I have yet to figure out a way to tell my wife something serious without first joking about it (in what I’m sure she would describe as a painfully unfunny fashion.) Shepherd’s speech to the lawyers about the importance of passion reminds me of the time I was at a Jewish gathering in celebration of the holiday Tu B’Shevat, the “new year” celebration for trees. Several folks had been asked to prepare short readings for the celebration, and one individual, who happened to be Israeli, began a nice story about a tree that was used to make a cradle for a baby, which sounded nice, but was then used to make a boat for a miracle worker who could calm the seas with a word, at which point everyone started to get a little antsy. When the story continued and the tree was being used to make a crucifix the entire room erupted in a single voice: “That’s a story about Jesus!!” No one threw tomatoes at the reader, who, by way of explanation, had only read the first paragraph of the story before deciding it was a perfect tale to tell at Tu B’Shevat, but, needless to say, we didn’t get to hear how the story ended. Just so, I’m surprised Shepherd made it through all “Five P’s” without the lawyers exclaiming in unison, “Hey, this story’s about happiness!”, and heading for the door.

But it’s not just the lawyers who are unhappy. A recent Gallup poll found that amongst the global workforce, only 13% of workers like their jobs. ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2013/10/10/only-13-percent-of-people-worldwide-actually-like-going-to-work/ ) 63% are described as “not engaged,” while the remaining 24% are “actively disengaged,” which is a polite way of describing the difference between those who dislike their jobs and those who hate them. When I read the dust jacket for Taleb’s book I found the description of his central project, unmasking “modern civilizations’s hubristic side effects- modifying humans to satisfy technology, blaming reality for not fitting economic models, inventing diseases to sell drugs, defining intelligence as what can be tested in a classroom, and convincing people that employment is not slavery” (emphasis added) a touch hyperbolic. In America, after all, we are not even 150 years removed from the war that ended slavery qua slavery. But as I read more about the Gallup poll it occurred to me that it just might be my status as an American that was blinding me to the truth of Taleb’s assertion that “There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.” The poll found that the United States, along with Canada, had the highest proportion of workers who reported liking their jobs, at 29%. That figure, 29%, is uncomfortably close to the 30.4% of Americans who hold a Bachelor’s degree. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/education/census-finds-bachelors-degrees-at-record-level.html?_r=0 ) And because I live and work among the happy 30%, I have no real notion of what it’s like to be a wage slave, my teenage summer gigs at McDonald’s and my quarter-life crisis nadir during a two-week stint stocking the shelves at a liquor store notwithstanding. No real notion that Taleb is waving the truth in front of a nose that I don’t even realize I’ve stuck up in the air.

The 13% of global workers who like their jobs is a figure just close enough to another number to give me pause. As defined by Wikipedia, Stockholm Syndrome is “a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome ) And just how many hostages experience this “phenomenon?” Again per Wikipedia: “The FBI’s Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly 8% of victims show evidence of Stockholm Syndrome.” And almost exactly half-way between 13% and 8% we find 10.9%, which is the exact percentage of Americans with advanced degrees, who, I humbly submit, are the pool from which the very happy, the 8%, are drawn. Subtracting the lawyers, who are incapable of happiness, should easily get us down from 10.9 to 8%.

To be crystal clear, I am suggesting that the happiest of the happy, those who don’t just like their jobs, but those who actually love them, are suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome, one in which they (or we, given my advanced degree and overall job satisfaction, which easily meets the 13%’s “engaged” criteria ) have so aligned themselves with their captors that they take “What’s good for IBM is what’s good for America” as an article of faith. In his novel The Pale King, David Foster Wallace captures exactly how this happens in a passage describing “the soldier personality, the type that believes in order and power and respects authority and aligns themselves with power and authority and the side of order and the way the whole thing has got to work if the system’s going to run smoothly.” If you’re a soldier, you will, assuredly, “want to line yourself up with the real power. Have the wind at your back. Tell them listen: Spit with the wind, it goes a whole lot further.” And if you’re a soldier with an advanced degree, you’re already this close to being one of the 8%. To put a twist on a phrase from Slavoj Zizek: Enjoy your syndrome! Or, to translate it into motivational self help-speak: Find your passion!