Empty Success E-Book

Michael Andrick

• Herausgeber: Westend Verlag
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 277

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In the world of work, ambition seems to be a virtue. "Winners" advance their careers by energetically complying with other people's expectations. The industrial system moulds men into functionaries whose detached professionalism is at the heart of both the material wealth and ethical poverty of western civilization. How can we live in this system and maintain moral integrity? The answer is simple: We need to learn to be philosophers, for philosophy is the craft of life.

Leseprobe

W E S T E N D

MICHAEL ANDRICK

Empty Success

Philosophy for the World of Work

Translation editing, editing for style, proofreading byDaniel S. Fisher

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Content

1

The riddle of our normality

2

The Craft of Life

What is our Zeitgeist?

Concepts of Value

Telling our story

Philosophizing is the craft of life

What is morality?

The emergence of our situation

3

Morality and conformity

Becoming a member and remaining independent

The silent power of reflection

How functionaries die

How people stay alive

4

The order of prestige

Our self-evident principles and their predecessors

The pressure of centuries

Communication breakdown

The social framework of honor

Respect as a cult of authority

Ascribed Personality

Social Navigation

5

Redemption in success?

Distractive stress

Standardized identity: Introducing careers

Religion of the functionary

The Myth of success

The Dignity of profit

The pseudo-moral façade

6

How the ‘world of work’ replaces reality

A world of work?

The path to a world of ‘worlds’

Displacement of the real

Rationality and reason

Living in reality

7

Professionalism and the management of ‘human capital’

Professionalism as liberating obedience

Leadership is the art of change

Who can lead?

Moral pitfalls of change

The permanent moral crisis of leadership

The Alibi of Relativism

8

Ambition and death

Telling the truth

Approaching ambition

The emptiness of honor

Ambition is pseudo-moral madness

The usual fate

A personal way out

Prologue

The danger of machines transforming people is not particularly great; much greater is the threat that, alongside the machines, changed men will appear in the world: Men like machines, obeying impulses without having the possibility to examine them in their own way.

(Harry Mulisch)

We became – I can’t think of another word for it – too much of a herd animal… Indeed, a herd animal, a creature of habit; we were – when the orders came, we clicked our heels together and replied “Yes Sir!”

(NS war criminal Adolf Eichmann; from trial records cited by Harry Mulisch)

Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good, and let your will be your law?

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Dedication

Rebecka - I thank you with all my heart for your immense patience with me and my eccentric projects. And for the book title!

1The riddle of our normality

Why does so much happen in the world that people individually detest and regret? This question seemed to leap out at me from the pages of books and newspapers when I was a teenager, and has remained with me ever since. When I entered the world of work and became a family father, a certain intuition came to me: Somehow the answer to my question about the mystery of our normality must have something to do with what the world of work does to us. So I resolved to find out exactly what happens to us in the institutions that we pass through, and that often employ us. The result is a book for everyone who goes to work. It began as a lengthy diary entry; it evolved into a philosophy for the world of work.

At the outset, there was astonishment about myself and about us. In the industrialized world of today, our everyday life is based on the disenfranchisement and physical exploitation of people as ‘human resources’. It relies for its sustenance on the calculated destruction of the planet’s ecosystem. The gimmicks and gadgets of consumption that fill our leisure time are acquired for deceptively low prices; our all-inclusive vacations exploit underpaid service personnel so we can feast at lavish breakfast buffets that we travel to on government-subsidized jet fuel. The bill for our immense ‘purchasing power’ is paid in the Global South, where the balance is settled for us by the destitute of the southern social hemisphere not in Dollars or Euros, but through the suffering of their families, through hopelessness and despair.

This order of affairs is upheld by preferential, factually colonial trade policies and government subsidies of the rich countries, aided as required by military and financial coercion. While playing along with this rigged game in the daily routine of our working lives, the evening news assures us that “the world economy is growing.” So we recline comfortably and rejoice that all is well. Industrial society in its globalized form has all but devoured basic human empathy, sidelining human solidarity to make room for larger and larger transfers accruing to the bank accounts of those that know no hunger, but die of their gluttony instead.

We have created a remarkable culture indeed; the crew of just a single subway car in our cities unites in its daily work the most wildly disparate aims and pursuits, all coexisting as parts of our industrial civilization in morally indifferent comfort and equanimity. In our industrial order, many small actions being executed everyday amount to a global routine operation that each day ignores human suffering and the unfolding ecological catastrophies. Let’s take a closer look at our normality. What do we find?

We disseminate misinformation to protect profits, for example in the tobacco, oil or sugar industries; we generally devote a large percentage of our total economic activity to inflated, misleading marketing propaganda, for example, targeting parents and their children with advertisements for unhealthy food which makes their infants chronically (but profitably) ill at an early age; we produce anti-personnel mines that mutilate children at play after the soldiers have left; we devise papers with which we speculate on the declining price of precisely those ‘financial products’ that we only yesterday sold as an investment to our own bank customers, thereby destroying their savings. Recently, in the United States of America, Great Britain and Turkey (and formerly in Germany), we falsify ‘evidence’ to justify wars of aggression in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people are killed or expelled from their homes, and exposed to torture and rape, so that access to natural resources can be secured and the domestic military oligarchy can be maintained. We like to drive around in heavy steel cages with leather interiors and combustion engines; we use disposable products for everyday meals, ultimately feeding our plastic to the fish in the seas; we subsidize our agricultural products in such a way that farmers in poorer parts of the world become uncompetitive; and we let those who flee from the misery we help to create for them drown in our bordering seas, while welcoming the survivors with boarder fences studded with razor blades; we make health care a business in some places, thereby letting insufficiently rich people go bankrupt and die when they fall ill, and so on.

The constant “we” in these remarks may be offensive, but let’s hold off on that for the moment. Many of the results of our civilization are undeniably ghastly. This might seem obscure to us in the comforts of our daily lives and in the selective and affirmative picture of our world typically conveyed to us by commercial mainstream media. Some phenomena we just discussed can perhaps be ascribe to abnormally cruel individuals, criminal politicians, or the imperial politics of the current great powers. But most of these grievances are brought about by our own work and our own consumer behavior. And we authorize our representatives to perpetuate them - if only out of apathy, disinterest, and ignorance. All of the above mentioned practices are established in our society as the legitimate work of politics and gainful employment, or they represent legal pastimes in which we engage at our leisure and pleasure.

That is why the above facts and realities all correspond to professional titles that have an entirely ‘respectable’ status in Western societies. These include: public relations consultants, marketing experts or sales strategists, defense (i.e., attack) engineers and armaments managers, financial consultants or ‘investment bankers’, presidents of the United States, providers of security services, automotive engineers, farmers’ association representatives, interior ministers, travel agents, etc. These professions are almost never carried out by criminals, and yet they achieve shameful results with bureaucratic reliability – through co-production between various spheres of professional work.

But how does this happen? How does industrial society achieve our conformism - our practically unreserved complicity in line with almost any conceivable purpose, it be what it may? This question has to be posed simply because it is we who exercise the above professions. We run the industrial society that produces these disastrous results while we wallow in the vague and comfortable delusion that we ourselves are not responsible for the misery of the world. But it is obvious that we alone are responsible for this; there is no moral being on earth other than man who can bear responsibility for this state of civilization. So how do we conceal our factual actions from ourselves and from each other? How do we make each other unaware of what we actually know about ourselves and our actions on a daily basis, as if we were living in a state of permanent moral anesthesia? This is the riddle of our normality.

It should be noted here that this normality has not come about recently, it represents the confluence of many historical factors over a long stretch of time. In the more recent stages of this development in the 20th and 21st centuries, wars, brutal oppression of whole populations, and genocide stand out only as islands of particularly intense destruction. The answer to the question of how our present, individual everyday conformism is possible, must therefore also shed new light on this history. It will provide us with a new approach to questions like the following: How were the utterly merciless, cynically calculated campaigns to annihilate innocent peoples possible? How was it possible to impose an economic order throughout the world that is based on the wasteful consumption of raw materials - and that, in a form of ruthless rationality, destroys the environment and produces radical social and economic inequality?

With this brief sketch of our enigmatic normality, we have cast light on a complex of issues requiring explanation. We now have to explore how this state of human affairs came about, which is as comfortable for affluent Westerners as it is absurd on the whole. And we need to understand what this state of affairs implies for our personal lives. An obvious starting point for this clarification would be the adoption of a historical perspective. The historian wants to know, for example, how exactly certain crimes were committed and, in each case, under what specific circumstances. At some point, socially accepted crimes - just like those that are part of our current global normality - will be placed in a broader context and in this way made more or less comprehensible.

This book, on the other hand, has the intention of adopting a philosophical approach to the mystery and solving it. We will address historical events here and there, but our guiding question is not how exactly something happened historically. The philosophical question in which we are interested is whether the typical patterns of events reveal a logic of their own. We are looking for the principle of our enigmatic normality, its driving motives, patterns of thought and behavior - and their origin. On the basis of which known forces and their interaction can we expect the dramatic grievances of our normality? How can the inhumane aspects of industrial society function just as systematically and smoothly as, for instance, the payment of social benefits in western social democracies? And if that is the case, how are we all somehow involved in this system? How can we protect ourselves from its unscrupulousness? And above all, how can we change it?

For me, philosophical research always begins with a few more or less linked initial insights and intuitions, coupled with a penetrating curiosity or indignation - in any case, there is a kind of frenzy for clarification that is driving me. The concrete combination of assumptions, suspicions and intentions that motivate this book, results from the peculiar mix of ‘ingredient experiences’ of my own life so far. I would like to mention these briefly because they shed some light on the style and also the dominant interests pursued in this work.

As a manager, I lead a rather typical professional life, but with an atypical academic background in philosophy and history. That is why I am familiar with the hopelessly boring and pointless alignment meetings among colleagues and with the no less oppressive boredom of high-brow, pseudo-intellectual waffling on Plato and Hegel in stuffy seminar rooms. However, I also know the fun of good cooperation on successful business projects and the fascination of an academic discussion in which the students actually come to understand and appreciate something of value and human importance.

My everyday life is characterized by rational work with mostly clear objectives, in the company that employs me. But my formal training is in the exercise of reason, independent of particular, preconceived ends (philosophy). Correspondingly, I have been able to try my hand at the intellectual treatment of broad questions as well as at the pragmatic resolution of economic problems. In this way, I have learned from my own experience about the structures and forces at play in our institutions. My expertise in the conceptual gymnastics of philosophy that fill my late evenings to this day shapes my writing as much as my business experience as a manager does. It is on this basis that I hope to offer some fresh perspectives on our world of work - without resorting either to intellectual jargon, or to the platitudes of business literature.

To get started, we will first want to take a step back from these introductory remarks, carefully preparing ourselves for a series of reflections that should, taken together, yield a sharpened understanding of our present society and situation. It is not that we ‘drop’ the thread of the initial diagnosis now, only to ‘pick it back up’ a few chapters later. On the contrary, we will now look at the fibers from which this thread is spun and whose fabric has become our reality.

The conceptual means by which we can recognize the pattern of this fabric more clearly, and ultimately decide if we like it, will be acquired step by step. Various aspects of the initial consideration of the riddle of our normality continually play a role; but it is precisely at the beginning of this intellectual journey that we also need to introduce some basic philosophical considerations. With these to build on, we can then work out, step by step, the logic of our fateful normality. One need not be an experienced philosopher to embark on this journey with me, but one must be determined to philosophize.

Chapters 2 and 3 provide a brief introduction to the practical significance of philosophy for social beings like us. It is especially close to my heart to show that philosophizing is not an expert activity detached from the lives of ‘ordinary people,’ but rather a natural activity for every human being. The fourth chapter explains how a specific logic of prestige and status emerged historically that has since come to determine everyday life in our work-centered societies and to structure our behavior.

The following four chapters then deal with different aspects of our lives in different ‘work-worlds’, or spheres professional routine. We will outline and attempt to fathom, first, the peculiar form of salvation that the rational pursuit of success seems to bring us (“Redemption in success?”). Next, we consider the distance from reality we may drift into while doing our daily work (“How the world of work replaces reality”). The following chapter deals with the interplay between professionalism and leadership that produces a mutilated form of human interaction in our institutions (“Distorted Humanity”). Finally, we will bring into sharp focus the ambition that drives our careers and that, upon closer analysis, actually turns out to be a specific kind of madness (“Ambition and Death”).

This step-by-step construction of our reflection is not merely useful for solving the riddle of our normality. It also corresponds to the philosophical task presented to each of us as individuals. Whether or not we will find contentment and make peace with our ambitions and individual fate depends very much on how we imagine the circumstances confronting us. This is, in fact, a tall order because the present in which a person finds himself is always more complicated than he can possibly understand.

Past suffering and euphoria, the flimsy patchwork of our memories, our immersion in the – digital or paper - ‘filter bubbles’ of like-minded people, and, finally, the half-digested, half-forgotten chunks of knowledge from our school days - all of this contributes to make us the particular person that we are. But it certainly does not lead us to an objective point of view, that is, to a viewpoint based in consideration and judgement that is fair to things and people. Moreover, it is the present and its greater and smaller rulers who have the power to distribute jobs and the amenities of life. We therefore have a strong incentive to accept the present conditions of society as “the solution” or “the way things have to be” - we do not primarily and naturally want to ask questions, criticize or enhance our understanding. We want admission to the club, and to participate and share in the rewards (or spoils) there.

It is therefore unrealistic to think that we simply understand our own present situation and assess it realistically. Nevertheless, we must understand ourselves in the context of the social moment we are in the light of the basic forces at play there. To set out on a journey, the first thing one needs to know is where one actually is. In order to imagine our surroundings correctly, it is necessary to reach into the past and to engage in a targeted exercise of reflection. One must consciously and deliberately examine the images and prejudices he has grown accustomed to in order to avoid being misled. In the course of the book’s progression, we will therefore repeatedly take up and examine familiar terms and ways of thinking, and while proceeding to use them, we will modify their meaning to enable fresh insights. This requires some work, but enlightenment entails work - just as life itself consists of working on oneself in the light of experience.

2The Craft of Life

What is our Zeitgeist?

Let us begin our approach to philosophy by thinking about language, the instrument of philosophy and the medium in which it has to take place. Our language is where our thoughts and feelings live, very much as one dwells in an apartment. The rooms, corridors and walls of this home are familiar to us. But we did not design and build them ourselves, we have simply grown up within them. The floor plan of our language allows some insights and views to come to us naturally, effortlessly. Other realizations, however, are obstructed as if by walls because our language does not offer us concepts and images with which we could render them insights.

Considered in its entirety, our language contains a certain image of reality. For example, an exploration of our use of big words like ‘freedom’ or ‘justice’ shows us what we actually mean by these terms. By the same token, analyzing ‘smaller,’ more specific linguistic habits can reveal our habitual view of the world with its many inconspicuous absurdities. For example, most working people in Germany call themselves Arbeitnehmer (employee; literally: “receiver or taker of work”). On the other side of the equation, we call the person or institution that employs us Arbeitgeber (employer, literally: “provider or giver of work”). But it is actually exactly the other way round, as Friedrich Engels once remarked: We give our labor to an institution in return for money, the institution receives, or takes, our work. In fact, working people are “givers of work” (Arbeitgeber), while companies, administrations and many other institutions are the actual “receivers or takers of work” (Arbeitnehmer). The language Germans are accustomed to obstructs them from gaining insight into this.

Each sentence we form is based on the whole reality that our language, viewed as an entirety, represents; each sentence leads us to a fixed point within the boundaries of this worldview. How we have learned to choose our words reveals the mental dwelling in which our thinking, feeling and doing has established itself. The ground plan of our language therefore shows the Zeitgeist of our present. The Zeitgeist tells us who we are, how we fit in among other people and into the world, and what we may hope for, fear, and realistically expect. The Zeitgeist rules the world through our thinking, speaking and doing. For example, the Zeitgeist embodied in the German language would have us believe that we are (grateful?) Arbeitnehmer (“receivers or takers of work”) and that others are our (generous?) Arbeitgeber (“providers or givers of work”). “Putting one word in the place of another means changing the view of the social world and thereby contributing to its transformation” (Pierre Bourdieu).

To reflect means to question the spirit of the times. To pose a question actually means to rehearse the rebellion against our sentences: against the claim of their supposed truths to our faith and our loyalty. To ask questions is to pause in speaking and thinking; questioning means interrupting the normal course of events and flow of things at the handrail provided courtesy of our Zeitgeist, in favor of reflection. To ask many questions means rehearsing the rebellion against the whole worldview of our Zeitgeist. Only with this fundamental reflection do we begin to exist as persons and not just as a walking and talking result of our life circumstances. Our reflection is essentially self-assertion; struggle against the customs and habits of mind and of action that hold us firmly in their grip. In other words: Only questioning and reflecting turn this sentient ego, in which all manner of perceptions arise, stir and disappear again, into a self - into myself. “Personality (...) is the simple, almost automatic result of thoughtfulness” (Hannah Arendt).

In order to live life as ourselves - i.e., by our own lights and precepts and not simply as incarnated expressions of what we have been accustomed to - we must escape the regime of the Zeitgeist. In many instances, people manage this without notable effort or endless brooding, simply by virtue of a propitious combination of experiences and encounters over the course of their lives: Their family lets them feel that they are wanted and loved, allowing them to develop a secure sense about who they want to be as adults; they find their way with a sense of agency and calm. Over time, they discover what it is that is worthy of their best efforts; what others say and want is interesting for them, but not decisive. Many, however, are not this lucky - something disturbs their circles or is missing from them that could grant them this calm self-determination. A guiding feeling for the meaning and direction of their lives does not arise in them, instead, a stubborn and unsettling question surfaces: How did I come to be this way? And what is it about myself that I just cannot seem to be satisfied?

To address this question, to come to ourselves, we need an explanation of our Zeitgeist - a philosophy of our present that makes comprehensible for us how we have learned to think, speak and live as we do now. Only on this basis can we ourselves then ask, reflect and act – for one thing, in order to forge our own path in life within the constraints of our society; but also, and equally important, to contribute alongside others to shaping the politics of our society. Without having a philosophy of our present age at our disposal, it is really just our Zeitgeist speaking through us. We live then as puppets of the past, and perhaps, if we are ambitious, as the puppeteers of the present, but without thereby coming to ourselves. Let us therefore begin our philosophical journey where it will end: let us start with ourselves, and hope that we will find greater clarity and sense of purpose than we can muster at the outset.

Concepts of Value

“Coming to oneself” - that sounds as if the self is already there, like a particularly precious object in the household of our soul. If that were true, one would only have to see through certain distractions and properly focus on it. But that is not the case. One’s self is not already there, and it is therefore wrong to think that one could simply concentrate a little more on it to find and stay the right course for one’s life. We all say ‘I,’ but no ‘I’ is simply and directly, unproblematically and immediately a self.

Only the ‘I’ that tells of itself makes the self; my self is the story of who I am. Only in this sense is it ‘already there’: I can draw myself again and again as a silhouette from memory, each time a little different. This narrative means everything. It shows my idea of what is worth my effort, on which path my life as I conceive of it may succeed and how it could escape my grasp. My story is alive only in the silent conversation of reflection and in trustful exchange with others; my reflective narrative is an expression of my concepts of value and has no yardstick, no standard except for these to be measured by. A person’s moral concepts are crucial to his life because they guide his aspirations, ground his fears, and determine his ambitions.

I imagine the things we value in life to be absent from view for us, or at least perceived only vaguely - that’s why I speak of concepts of value (Wertvorstellungen), and not straightforwardly of values. This particular choice of words indicates that I do not directly and reliably recognize the value of certain things, certain behaviors and attitudes. I merely imagine or believe that they have a value. The difficulty with moral concepts is not only my personal problem; the fact that I am used to talking and thinking in this way rather expresses a certain knowledge that is characteristic for our culture.

If I take only myself into consideration, I think I know which things I value and why. But from another person’s point of view, this, my conviction can only be considered soberly as a set of specific value concepts. For it actually turns out differently, what different people think that they have recognized as valuable. So we live with the difficulty that our subjective insights into what is valuable are constantly challenged by other people’s value judgements. These others judge in the same way as we do, based on their own special life experience. We can recognize these differences as long as we are at home in the same mental dwelling place, i.e., in the same language as the others. However, real, substantial differences remain.

From this reality we learn to talk about our concepts of value and to put them into perspective before any possible discussion. We talk about our values, i.e., what is important to us in life, while at the same time questioning them. We do not treat any other significant concept with which we navigate our world in such a manner; we do not, for example, speak with the same fluency of our ‘concept of freedom’ or our ‘concept of justice’ - we simply speak of freedom and justice. But we speak of concepts of value.

This hesitant, problematizing attitude with regard to our personal values is understandable and perfectly justified. Unlike statements, for example, about the world of material things we share - tables, chairs and ashtrays - we do not believe that our society has a natural consensus of opinion on questions of value. That is why we do not readily trust ourselves to have convincing answers to questions of value, nor in our society do we learn to cultivate a desire for such knowledge in the first place. This, however, stands in tension with the earlier statement that our life as a person crucially depends on the concepts of value we hold.

How many times have we heard someone ask: “What is the right thing to do in this situation? What should I do?” No matter how many times we may have heard and discussed such questions, these experiences certainly fade in the face of the never-ending negotiations around the question “What do I (really) want?” that we tend to go through with ourselves and others. If we report on the course of our individual lives with their respective twists and turns, we often talk about what we liked at what time - what was pleasant for us, what began or ceased to bring us pleasure. This is often a point of departure for explaining what we ended up doing or leaving undone.

I am referring here to a mentality, a habitual state of mind that can be observed in us - not to a ‘mistake’ that we make. For this intellectual attitude is not absurd. As regards our concepts of value, we “play it by ear.” In the course of our lives, only concrete experiences show us the unique richness that a certain attitude, a certain relationship to others, or a certain good brings to our life. One has experience after it would have been needed. For example, it cannot be fully understood and appreciated in advance that having children of one’s own changes everything - and that therefore the question whether life is ‘better’ with or without children is nonsensical.

Though understandable, the mindset that tells the story of one’s own life as the story of changing likes and dislikes, is completely caught up in the given Zeitgeist: If we merely explain what we like, we are in fact only explaining what concepts of value we have been taught - or else we are simply revealing what we have unconsciously adopted. We recite, so to speak, the Zeitgeist (just as we would recite a memorized poem) and allow it to lead us in this or that direction, in the course of our changing involvements, entanglements, and experiences. In this state of mind, the crucial question of which destination is worthwhile aiming for – the question of what is actually of value to us - is not yet posed. In this way, we do not learn the craft to live as a self, as ourselves.

In each epoch this craft of life can be different; perhaps in some periods of our European history it was not even necessary as such because a strong and tightly interwoven community gave us credible answers to questions of value before we had to ask them. In any case, however, we must understand what this craft of life is today and for us. To succeed in this, we must above all reflect on our peculiar alienation from the considerations of value that we have just remarked upon. This phenomenon has to do with how the individual can experience the value of things for himself.

A close-knit tribal or feudal society directly conveys the practical meaning of certain demands on the individual. The justification of these demands is obvious and subsequently creates the idea that something is of value. Respect and obedience to father and mother, for example, are not controversial when it is only they who can feed us and when the only religion we have ever known commands such obedience. Reliability in the observance of one’s own duties rewards the member of such a society with the acceptance of those with whom he will be associated for a long time, if not for his whole life.

In European modernity, by contrast, experiences conveying to us a sense of the value of practically anything are more complicated than that. These experiences are no longer as small-scale, immediate and directly convincing as they were in pre-modern times. Above all, value-related experiences here and now are not so regularly linked to concrete people who are of lasting importance for our well-being. The people who remain with us today for part of our journey - schoolmates, army comrades, neighbors - are like passengers in a tram who unexpectedly get on and off again, who may be close to us in the meantime, but who will not usually form part of our permanent circle of friends and associates. Even between parents and their children, the rule of law has introduced regulations to guarantee certain entitlements regardless of the quality of personal relationships.