I Hate The Things You Don't Think About
Sep. 30th, 2015 09:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kingtycoonYesterday I had this experience. This thing happened – and I had a moment of stillness out in the dark waiting for my bus at Euclid & Mayfield and it came to me – that was a really bad time.
APICs – This industry, manufacturing trade group puts on classes about how to manage supply chains. I went to my second round of these classes last night after doing the introductory classes last year. My job pays for this and it suggested that I go in the first place, so I did. At my job I have to digest training materials & then produce real training materials. The owners manuals & instructional guides produced by software developers. These people can’t write. There’s clarity & even accuracy – but there isn’t a touch of verve to engage the audience. Audiences is the thing – you can look at the training materials but can you present them? I do classrooms and have to engage the group & produce rubrics and training standards. That’s what I do, a lot of the time. It’s really like teaching school but a bit more fun since nobody really resents being there.
But that’s an aside- that’s a long meander. Let me paint a picture for you.
I’m in Independence near Pleasant Valley on Brecksville Rd. It’s closing in on 9:30 and I’ve just walked a mile in the dark over excavated sidewalks through a long stretch of factories and warehouses all set far from the road, all with ruinously expensive landscaping. The far out countryside as far as I’m concerned, the wilderness. I’m standing at the bus stop and its front of a house – a pack of teens comes out to sit on the driveway of their ranch with street facing garage door to watch me wait for a bus. I’m carrying the textbooks for my class and I’m anxious to get home, I’m thinking hard about what I’ve seen and what it means.
Here’s what I think: I studied history, philosophy, the humanities, I studied them hard and still keep up, abreast of what’s what. I studied those things – ancient disciplines molded over time into the canon of western knowledge. I’m very knowledgeable about the west, the east, the ancient world, about the history of thought & ideas, about the nature and lore of civilization. I see the complexities in these things, in culture & tradition & regard it as my function to discern from patterns in the complex array of events a few signal matters which can form a crystalline seed. Around this seed theories and ideas coalesce & from those a method of simplifying understanding can emerge. Making the unthinkably complex comprehensible by cleverness, wit & erudition – that’s the function of the scholar. So far as I’m concerned.
This is the Showing forth of the Inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassos, to the end that neither the deeds of men may be forgotten by lapse of time, nor the works great and marvellous, which have been produced some by Hellenes and some by Barbarians, may lose their renown; and especially that the causes may be remembered for which these waged war with one another.
This is how Herodotus started out when he invented history 2500 years ago. So that the deeds of great men should not be forgot & the cause of their feud be remembered. He recalled the war with Persia & was fascinated by it – what could have caused this? So he researched it and wrote down what everyone told him and then presented all of this as the cause. Straightforward analysis from complex & conflicting sources. That’s history & it’s been refined for 2500 years. Now Business. Business as a piece of academic study only came around in the 1920’s. It’s a hundred years old as something taught people in college.
And it’s been, for 100 years, utter bullshit. I sit in this class and look at this book – with its dearth of punctuation, with its reproduced powerpoint slides, with its futile, undescriptive flow charts. The imprecise terms of art all convoluted & acronymic – invented & added by some unseen arcane process. The book is written by cutting and pasting from dictionaries, themselves created by accumulation without even the faintest glance of the editor to add, or more tellingly, deduct from the obfuscating drivel. And this is presented as knowledge – as law, as a system.
It’s not of course. This is the repulsive fact of business training – that it takes simple & intuitive ideas and elevates them through obfuscation into a profession. No simply avid participant in these works could have conceived of these works alone, no, it is a society of professionals, a collegial bunch who pontificate on their own expertise & present their inarticulately described habits as definite standards & practices. It’s beneath absurd & in fact, insulting – because money is demanded, in exchange for this obfuscation, for this con, money is demanded and credentials – credentials to impress the inept & well led – are offered. You too can earn more through the clever application of nonsensical jargon meant to elevate your absurd function to a position of imaginary authority.
Here’s a secret, a secret about business. It’s easy. You can tell, because everyone does it. We’re all of us office functionaries, doing some preposterous repetitive task meant to produce, in aggregate, something that can be sold.
I congratulate myself, as I usually do, standing in these people’s yard, waiting on the 77F long after dark on how clever I am, to not drive, to not go in cars. I think of the car makers, the oil company, the insurance & finance businesses – I congratulate myself on having outwitted these behemoths by the simple application of a little will, persistence & fortitude. That’s right you fuckers – I can walk! You have to make room for vanity in everything you do, else, why the fuck bother? But I know that I’m comical, comical enough that suburban teens gather to stare at me while I stand in their yard waiting on the bus.
I ride up to downtown, eventually, and then back to Murray Hill where I walk up pas the graveyard –where Rockefeller, of all of them, is buried. Thinking about business, thinking about thinking, thinking about how, in my analysis – people miss the point. The reds, like me, the capitalists the varied flavors of Fabian schools that make the American political landscape. I think about the outlooks there and the different intentions – and how they don’t quite ever really address this thing – Business – this nihilistic institution bent on mechanizing the mind, formed around the simple idea that people have a utility & it must be wrung from them both as producers & consumers.
I leaf through my book, distaste overwhelming me, I think about the 3 hours I spent in the class, about the 3 hours of commuting I do to attend it, about how it is that all of us are thwarted & abused by business and its pernicious demands.
APICs – This industry, manufacturing trade group puts on classes about how to manage supply chains. I went to my second round of these classes last night after doing the introductory classes last year. My job pays for this and it suggested that I go in the first place, so I did. At my job I have to digest training materials & then produce real training materials. The owners manuals & instructional guides produced by software developers. These people can’t write. There’s clarity & even accuracy – but there isn’t a touch of verve to engage the audience. Audiences is the thing – you can look at the training materials but can you present them? I do classrooms and have to engage the group & produce rubrics and training standards. That’s what I do, a lot of the time. It’s really like teaching school but a bit more fun since nobody really resents being there.
But that’s an aside- that’s a long meander. Let me paint a picture for you.
I’m in Independence near Pleasant Valley on Brecksville Rd. It’s closing in on 9:30 and I’ve just walked a mile in the dark over excavated sidewalks through a long stretch of factories and warehouses all set far from the road, all with ruinously expensive landscaping. The far out countryside as far as I’m concerned, the wilderness. I’m standing at the bus stop and its front of a house – a pack of teens comes out to sit on the driveway of their ranch with street facing garage door to watch me wait for a bus. I’m carrying the textbooks for my class and I’m anxious to get home, I’m thinking hard about what I’ve seen and what it means.
Here’s what I think: I studied history, philosophy, the humanities, I studied them hard and still keep up, abreast of what’s what. I studied those things – ancient disciplines molded over time into the canon of western knowledge. I’m very knowledgeable about the west, the east, the ancient world, about the history of thought & ideas, about the nature and lore of civilization. I see the complexities in these things, in culture & tradition & regard it as my function to discern from patterns in the complex array of events a few signal matters which can form a crystalline seed. Around this seed theories and ideas coalesce & from those a method of simplifying understanding can emerge. Making the unthinkably complex comprehensible by cleverness, wit & erudition – that’s the function of the scholar. So far as I’m concerned.
This is the Showing forth of the Inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassos, to the end that neither the deeds of men may be forgotten by lapse of time, nor the works great and marvellous, which have been produced some by Hellenes and some by Barbarians, may lose their renown; and especially that the causes may be remembered for which these waged war with one another.
This is how Herodotus started out when he invented history 2500 years ago. So that the deeds of great men should not be forgot & the cause of their feud be remembered. He recalled the war with Persia & was fascinated by it – what could have caused this? So he researched it and wrote down what everyone told him and then presented all of this as the cause. Straightforward analysis from complex & conflicting sources. That’s history & it’s been refined for 2500 years. Now Business. Business as a piece of academic study only came around in the 1920’s. It’s a hundred years old as something taught people in college.
And it’s been, for 100 years, utter bullshit. I sit in this class and look at this book – with its dearth of punctuation, with its reproduced powerpoint slides, with its futile, undescriptive flow charts. The imprecise terms of art all convoluted & acronymic – invented & added by some unseen arcane process. The book is written by cutting and pasting from dictionaries, themselves created by accumulation without even the faintest glance of the editor to add, or more tellingly, deduct from the obfuscating drivel. And this is presented as knowledge – as law, as a system.
It’s not of course. This is the repulsive fact of business training – that it takes simple & intuitive ideas and elevates them through obfuscation into a profession. No simply avid participant in these works could have conceived of these works alone, no, it is a society of professionals, a collegial bunch who pontificate on their own expertise & present their inarticulately described habits as definite standards & practices. It’s beneath absurd & in fact, insulting – because money is demanded, in exchange for this obfuscation, for this con, money is demanded and credentials – credentials to impress the inept & well led – are offered. You too can earn more through the clever application of nonsensical jargon meant to elevate your absurd function to a position of imaginary authority.
Here’s a secret, a secret about business. It’s easy. You can tell, because everyone does it. We’re all of us office functionaries, doing some preposterous repetitive task meant to produce, in aggregate, something that can be sold.
I congratulate myself, as I usually do, standing in these people’s yard, waiting on the 77F long after dark on how clever I am, to not drive, to not go in cars. I think of the car makers, the oil company, the insurance & finance businesses – I congratulate myself on having outwitted these behemoths by the simple application of a little will, persistence & fortitude. That’s right you fuckers – I can walk! You have to make room for vanity in everything you do, else, why the fuck bother? But I know that I’m comical, comical enough that suburban teens gather to stare at me while I stand in their yard waiting on the bus.
I ride up to downtown, eventually, and then back to Murray Hill where I walk up pas the graveyard –where Rockefeller, of all of them, is buried. Thinking about business, thinking about thinking, thinking about how, in my analysis – people miss the point. The reds, like me, the capitalists the varied flavors of Fabian schools that make the American political landscape. I think about the outlooks there and the different intentions – and how they don’t quite ever really address this thing – Business – this nihilistic institution bent on mechanizing the mind, formed around the simple idea that people have a utility & it must be wrung from them both as producers & consumers.
I leaf through my book, distaste overwhelming me, I think about the 3 hours I spent in the class, about the 3 hours of commuting I do to attend it, about how it is that all of us are thwarted & abused by business and its pernicious demands.
