David Graeber's Thoughts on an Occupation

Yesterday I finally had the chance to hear David Graeber speak. The author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber is credited with being one of the architects of the consensus decision making at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I had hoped his talk at Bertell Ollman's Friday afternoon seminar would focus on Debt, as I'd been hankering for some sort of in-person Cliff Notes for the hefty volume that arrived, appropriately enough, under the Christmas tree two months back.

Instead Graeber focused on the rise of Occupy Wall Street, a decision that did not disappoint.  His talk revolved around the question of why this movement has caught the attention of the media and the imagination of the nation when other social movements of the past thirty years were largely ignored.

In answer to this question, he offered a series of possibilities: of course there is the advent of social media and the indignation that follows the immediate webcasts of police brutality. And there is the internationalization of the mass media, so that the earliest reports of OWS were carried by Al Jazeera, and in the Dutch, German, British and Japanese media, leaving the usually conservative American media compelled to cover the movement simply by force of peer pressure. A member of the seminar-sized audience reminded the group that the September 17th events had nearly perfect timing, coming as they did after the infuriating summer of 2011 where the U.S. Congress frittered away the possibility of a jobs bill while debating the increase in the debt ceiling and daring the financial industry to lower the government's credit rating (thereby, of course, dramatically increasing the debt due to increased interest rates.) Americans could not have been more disgusted with their representatives in that moment of rising unemployment rates and congressional stonewalling. The people were primed for someone, somewhere, to fight back against the forces of financialization and congressional intransigence.

But the most provocative idea from Graeber's freewheeling talk stemmed from his analysis of the content on the We Are the 99 Percent tumblr blog, where photos and text tell the stories of hundreds of indebted and unemployed, under-employed, or minimum-wage Americans who share a photograph of themselves with a note detailing their dire economic circumstances. Graeber observed that the preponderance of people posting on this site are women, and that among the men who have posted, most are either in the traditional helping professions of teaching or healthcare, or they are war veterans (our version of caring, mission-driven work for working class men). 

He went on to argue that the indignation that the Occupy movement tapped in to comes from a sense of moral outrage that goes something like this: I've followed the rules, I've done everything the society expects of me (worked hard, studied hard, gone to college, shouldered student and mortgage debt), and now, having entered into some caring profession, I have been rendered so indebted that I cannot even take care of my own family. Meanwhile, the folks on Wall Street have plundered and pilfered the economy, and we've been bailing them out.

The depth of this moral outrage, Graeber asserted, stems from a desire to pursue meaningful work that is thwarted by a system that punishes altruism and rewards greed and swindling.

Graeber continued with his analysis, extending it to the culture industry: For the most part, only the wealthy can afford to take up meaningful work, whether caring or creative.  The price of entry for a job in the arts, or the media, or most of the creative professions is a couple of years working as an unpaid intern — living on nothing in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Anyone without parents wealthy enough to support such a career launch is priced out of creative work—shut out of these fields.  This, he argued, explains the resentment of Americans toward what can be easily cast as a privileged intelligentsia in the media, the universities, and elsewhere.

Photo David Shankbone, October 6, 2011, New York City.
Used under a CC BY 2.0 Attribution License.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shankbone/

Graeber's talk led me to wonder whether the rise of OWS might be seen, at least in part, as a crisis in the work of care.  Traditionally care had been the unpaid work of women in the home, and to a great extent, it continues to be.  But the move of women into the professional labor force created a gap (this becomes a "second shift" for women who can't afford to buy themselves out of the work of care, but represents a market opportunity for entrepreneurs who find ways to sell in-home care services to those who can afford it.) This shift in how care is provided has created an underclass of low-paid nannies, nursing home staff, and in-home healthcare aids, and, at the same time, has priced most of us out of being able to afford care for ourselves and our families. This situation, in turn, creates a market for new financial instruments such as long-term care insurance. The work of care — the intergenerational debt we owe each other — becomes another site where financiers can step in and capture a percentage.

In Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life, I argued that the self-improvement industry's success is driven by American anxiety about remaining employed or employable, and married or marriageable.  I argued that self-help practices are a form of immaterial labor, where individuals are urged to work on themselves to secure themselves against individual obsolescence and that readers of self-help literature find themselves in a cycle of belaboring themselves in order to remain economically viable. But when work on the self, whether through self-improvement regimens, or through the more traditional respected avenues of higher education, leads only to further immiseration, one has to wonder how long it will be before so many belabored selves seek a new occupation.

Start with Why, or What's Up with That?

Start with Why author Simon Sinek kicks off the OpenText
Purpose-Driven Speakers series, New York, June 11th

While Oprah Winfrey has her "a-ha" moments — her trademarked tag for the personal epiphany — as a researcher, I have another important moment that I call the "huh?" moment.  The "huh?"  moment happens when you spot some new connection and say, "whoa, what's up with that?" 

Instead of having the absolute certainty of revelation (always dangerous for a researcher, and frequently rigid and wrongheaded for others), the "huh?" moment is that instant when new patterns or links emerge and you find yourself asking potentially interesting questions. This is not bewildered stupefaction, but the hum of curiosity.

I had one of these moments last week, when I clicked on a link (was it in an email, or on a site, or from a Twitter feed? -- I can't even recall) that mentioned that OpenText was hosting a series of talks on "purpose-driven" leadership.  I know a little bit about the "purpose-driven" concept as it fueled Rick Warren's runaway self-help bestseller The Purpose-Driven Life. And I'd just heard about OpenText a few weeks back when their Chief Strategy Officer Tom Jenkins was a keynote speaker at the Digging into Data Conference hosted by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Somehow two disparate areas of my research— the American obsession with self-help and the emerging field of digital humanities scholarship — had managed to intersect together.  Whoa, what's up with that? What does self-help rhetoric have to do with the marketing of content management systems?

My curiosity took me to the meeting room of a boutique hotel in the Flatiron District (what we in New York City used to call "Silicon Alley" before the dot-com crash) on a hot July morning to hear Simon Sinek, the first speaker in OpenText's Purpose-Driven Speaker Series.  The author of Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Sinek is a terrifically dynamic speaker, as you can see from his much-watched TED Talk, and has come up with a simple visual meme to articulate his message.  His "Golden Circle" is three concentric circles with Why-How-What radiating out from the center.  Purpose is central, while actions and methods, tactics and strategies, are peripheral.  While his name is a homonym for cynic, he seems to be anything but cynical.

In the midst of his talk, Sinek announced that he hates self-help books.  Look at self-help publishing, he said, gesturing broadly to create the angle of an upward graph line, it's a multi-billion dollar industry and what happens to it?  It just keeps going up and up and up.  If it really worked, he said, it'd be going the other way, and he gestured again the trend of a falling line graph.  The trouble with self-help is that's it's all me-me-me, he said.  For anything to work, it has to be about something besides yourself.

In 30 seconds or less, Sinek had summarized the premise of my first book, Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life. Well, perhaps not all of it, but much of it. Self-help culture, I argued, not only doesn't work, but becomes another layer of work that we're required to engage in that is almost entirely directed back upon ourselves. Self-improvement culture creates a workaholism on the self that results in a belabored self: a self constantly at work on itself. And while we are all focused on improving ourselves, trying to remain desirable in the marketplaces of love and work, our broader world is going to Hades in the proverbial, well you know.

So Sinek and I seem to have broad areas of agreement. Of course Sinek's critique of self-help could be just the shrewdest of marketing moves: dis the self-help industry and declare yourself a breed apart.  Create the un-self-help self-help movement. With a background in advertising, Sinek could simply be delivering a version of Apple's "Think Different" campaign for the motivational speaking circuit. But somehow I don't think so.  It seems to me that the Sinek and the marketing folks at OpenText have managed to wrench the "purpose-driven" rhetoric from its birth place at Rick Warren's fundamentalist Saddleback Church and render it secular, with a hi-tech TED-talk nouveau motivational panche. And that is very likely to sell OpenText's new content management tools for "purpose driven collaboration."  But it may also sell a certain sort of progressive social activism that I'd be eager to see thrive.

The only trouble I can see around the bend for Sinek's secular version of the purpose-driven life is that it's value-neutral. And there's the rub. What values will guide one's purpose? You could have any purpose at all, just as long as you can find folks to follow along. When you first ask why, your answer might be to restore the glory of the Confederacy and purity of the white race. Or your purpose might be providing potable drinking water to every community in the world. Starting with "why" doesn't guarantee that you'll be considering values such as the welfare of others, it only ensures that you'll appeal to your followers' desire to engage in meaningful action. I guess I'll just have to read Start with Why to see if Sinek takes up the important question of what sort of "why" is worth starting with.

What Doesn't Kill You . . .

Here at Self-Help, Inc. we normally think of the dangers of self-improvement culture as being those of over-promising and under-delivering. Self-help literature promises its takers the world, and when it doesn't deliver, lays the blame at their feet.

Sadly, self-help guru and Secret co-author James Arthur Ray's "Spiritual Warrior" program delivered: It promised that participants, many of whom paid more than $9,000 to attend, would have their lives changed forever. Indeed.

Two are dead, one is in critical condition, and eighteen others are hospitalized after a "sweat lodge" ritual went awry.

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once quipped that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. The problem: some things simply kill you.

Our thoughts are with the families of the deceased, 38-year-old Kirby Brown of Westtown, New York, and 40-year-old James Shore of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and with the other eighteen victims.

(Editorial note: This post originally contained a link to an ABC news story on the sweat lodge events, but that footage has been removed by YouTube, so we've substituted the New York Times print coverage. Also, this post notes that two died, but a third victim subsequently passed away.)