Why did we go back to in-person work?

Last month, the man who serves as both Chancellor of the University of Missouri and current President of the University of Missouri System (Mun Choi) declared that everyone must go back to work in-person on May 17. MU is the biggest employer in our area, so this has set the tone for every other employer. Between the university proper and MU Health Care, MU employs over 13,000 people in a city of about 120,000. Columbia is by far the biggest city in the area. (Edit: We believe Mun Choi’s order was just him passing along the order from the State of Missouri for all state workers to go back to in-person work.)

Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, with conservatives having sabotaged pandemic protocols like social distancing, mask wearing, and avoiding public places, thus having created the opportunity for COVID-19 to mutate faster than vaccines can be developed, manufactured and distributed. In fact, it appears that humanity may have basically failed at this point and that the worst is yet to come with COVID-19’s many children spreading faster than the original version of the virus. (This is a complicated issue, though, and though the situation isn’t really getting better, it also isn’t getting worse.)

We went back to in-person work anyway. In the fall, we will go back to in-person school as well. Why?

Many workers — the ones actually producing material goods — have to physically be at work. But again — why do office workers need to be in the office? I mean ever, under any conditions — nevermind the pandemic.

It’s a good question.

The answer is not “efficiency”.

When we first figured out that a huge portion of our workforce could do their jobs from home, the reaction from many people was outrage — as in, “I could have been working from home this whole time and you made me drive into work every day for nothing, you fucking assholes.” Next, though, people began to realize that there was efficiency to be gained by people working from home — both profit efficiency (the efficiency of bean counters) and resource efficiency (real efficiency). For example, they realized they would need less office space, parking spaces, and a great deal of other overhead associated with a person sitting for 8 to 10 hours in a space. They realized that many of the costs of having an employee could be externalized to the employee — and externalizing costs is one of the highest goals of the neoliberal bureaucrat. It’s literally what they think about during sex. Moreover, there were real savings to be had in terms of less electricity used and less gasoline burned.

These are the answers I’ve found for why we went back to in-person work:

  • Satisfying the insanity of American conservatives
  • Re-establishing the neoliberal dominance hierarchy
  • Satisfying the anxiety of the managerial class

These are all basically the same thing. Both far-right conservatives and near-right neoliberals love a dominance hierarchy, and it’s really hard to maintain one if the people who require domination are off galivanting in their homes, free from the oppressive eyes of their assigned dominants.

While capitalism has a natural tendency toward creating a dominance hierarchy that alienates workers from their work and facilitates a class of lazy, evil jackasses who don’t really do any work, it is just a tool that is secondary to the primary source of our societal problems. Bad people choose capitalism because they understand that it will facilitate their sinister goals, and while it is very hard for a tool like capitalism to be benign, it is people who chose the tool and chose how to use it.

Maintenance and expansion of the dominance hierarchy that aids bad people is the primary goal of our society — even above the needs of the capitalist system. When the needs of the psychopaths and narcissists that run our society conflict with the goals of capitalism, it is the needs of the psychopaths and narcissists that are satisfied first. The place where this toxic hierarchy is most literal is the management hierarchy inside a corporation.

I understand that people like to talk about how a corporation is inherently toxic — that somehow the emergent properties of the corporate structure are contrary to what every single person in the entire corporation would do. The assumption is that all people are good so they can’t possibly be choosing the evil of the corporation. Well, that’s not accurate at all.

Corporations are run by a board of directors; they are people and they decide what the corporation does. There’s no behavioral phenomenon that is beyond their control. They have nominal responsibility to stockholders, but can always just claim that whatever they did was ultimately in the best interest of the stock price. That board of directors is made up of ridiculously wealthy assholes who all sit on each other’s boards. In this way, they use the façade of the corporation to prop up a dominance hierarchy based on their own narcissism and psychopathy — and then when they are called out for the corporation’s bad behavior, they shrug and say that the corporation did stuff without their input because it has a mind of its own. It doesn’t.

In short, capitalism (and it’s internal sub-structures, like corporations) facilitates and protects a hierarchy ruled by narcissists and psychopaths. They certainly see capitalism as a means of “creating wealth” (stealing wealth from working class people), but wealth itself is part of the capitalist machine and a tool of domination.

DominanceChris Hedges talks about the managerial class quite frequently; at first, I was dismissive of his tendency to blame everything on them, but upon closer inspection, he’s completely correct. The whole point of the managerial class is to maintain and facilitate the dominance hierarchy, and then to take credit for the accomplishments of their underlings. In turn, the manager’s manager takes credit for their accomplishments. The management hierarchy is the simple capitalist hierarchy (capitalist vs. worker) but with a number of internal iterations. You can imagine a company with 100 employees where a single man named Carl is doing all the actual work, but the CEO claims all the credit; between them lie 98 middle managers, each taking credit for the work of the person below them.

Not working is one of the goals of capitalism. Workers under capitalism are working to retire — the sooner the better. Managers are working “smarter not harder” which means pushing tasks off on underlings and then taking credit for that work. Yes, conservatives like to go on and on about the value of hard work, yet their stated goal the entire time is to retire or become rich, and both of those things mean not working. What they really mean is that they expect submission to the narcissists’ dominance to be rewarded. When most people see a person who is high up on the hierarchy not working, they call them a success; when they see someone at the bottom of the hierarchy not working, they call them a failure. The difference between the goal of capitalism (not working) and the goal of the underlying hierarchy (reward for submission) illustrates that capitalism isn’t the bedrock of our society.

Under this system, many people have jobs primarily so that a manager can have underlings even though that is not at all efficient. I’m not kidding. If you’ve ever had a bullshit job, this is why that job existed. A bullshit job is a job that the person doing the work realizes is completely unnecessary, and yet they’re getting paid for it. Bullshit jobs can have low pay, but more often than not, they pay pretty well — the higher the salary of the underling, the more status that gives their manager.

David Graeber calls this “managerial feudalism“: Employers need underlings in order to feel important and maintain competitive status and power.

Manager anxiety comes from the fear (mostly subconscious) that people will realize that the manager is unnecessary. This dovetails with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) perfectly in that narcissists have an enormous amount of anxiety regarding people realizing that they aren’t as amazing as they pretend to be. Importantly, this includes the narcissist worrying that their inflated image of self will be destroyed and they themselves will have to accept that they are not better than everyone else.

A culture of narcissism happens in any society ruled by narcissists because the ideas of the ruling class will inevitably be the ruling ideas (to paraphrase Marx). A side-effect of living in such a culture is that otherwise good people will support and facilitate the narcissistic structure because they’ve been led to believe it is good, correct, and inevitable. That’s why we sometimes have a “good manager” — a person who protects the employees below them from abuse while simultaneously working for the benefit of the entire corporation (a very socialistic approach). But make no mistake — a good manager is an anomaly that will either be destroyed (if they stick to their ethics) or re-purposed to help the narcissists.

I’ve been trying to make sense of this whole “back to in-person work” thing for a while, but it was The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses’ Brains by Ed Zitron that really allowed me to get some clarity about it. I suggest you check it out. I suspect that Ed is like me — not a professional writer but rather a person stuck in a corporate environment who produces writing in their free time — because that piece could use some editing. However, it also contains gems like these:

We incentivize management as a control mechanism rather than a motivational and organizational mechanism in an organization, meaning that most middle managers are glorified cops.

Cops are not really necessary. Their purpose is to ensure compliance with a dominance hierarchy.

Middle managers are often graded on the work of their team, which means that they are actively incentivized to steal work and do little of their own.

Just as the capitalist claims the value of the work done by working class people, the manager claims the value of the work done by their underlings.

The reason that remote work is so threatening to a lot of corporate thinkers is that it largely devalues the middle management layer that corporate society is built on. When you’re in person, a middle manager can walk the floors, “keep an eye on people” and, in meetings, “speak for the group.” While this can happen over Zoom and Slack, it becomes significantly more apparent who actually did the work, because you can digitally evaluate where the work is coming from.

In a corporate environment, the main reason we have meetings is so the manager can re-assert their dominance; it’s much easier to do this in person. This means you can quantify how bad your management hierarchy is by how often you have meetings, and you might even be able to figure out who the worst managers are if you can determine who is insisting on all these fucking meetings. (In contrast, anarchists have meetings to determine consensus and share information.)

Zitron’s essay is fantastic, but there are hints at the same truths in the mainstream press. For example, Fortune published The psychology behind why some leaders are resisting a hybrid work model and you can see that the writer almost gets it. For example:

A major factor in leaders wanting everyone to return to the office stems from their personal discomfort with work from home. They spent their career surrounded by other people. They want to resume regularly walking the floors, surrounded by the energy of staff working. They’re falling for anchoring bias. This mental blind spot causes us to feel anchored to our initial experiences and information. 

I have to laugh thinking about all those sad managers jonesing for the rush of walking past submissive workers nervously glancing over their shoulders and typing faster to seem more productive. They feel “unanchored” because the dominance hierarchy they love is gone — instead, the employees are at home enjoying egalitarian relationships with their family members and simply doing their jobs rather than worrying about some asshole’s ego.

The Fortune article talks about how the managers are just sure that their employees love being dominated and are truly desperate to get back under the watchful eye and loving guidance of their patriarch. It’s gross. Overall, though, it describes managers desperate to reassert their control (dominance) of employees on behalf of the people above them.

Another concern — which comes in a distant second to maintaining the dominance hierarchy — is that capitalism wants to claim the total value of the worker while they are working. They don’t see you as a person paid to accomplish a particular set of tasks, but rather as a resource that they own completely during your contracted work hours. (That’s why they want 100% of your life if you are salaried.) If you are doing anything that is not directly related to providing value to the corporation — even thinking or having emotions about non-work things — that is a violation of the capitalist’s ownership of you. You aren’t a person, but rather a labor resource.

Managers are claiming that they are very concerned that people are doing non-work activities — including working a side hustle or developing a new business — during their work day. (See, for example, the tweet from Jeremiah Owyang at the top of Ed Zitron’s essay.) If we take a very strict view of how capitalism wants the world to be, the worker who is doing non-work stuff during the work day is violating the whole contract of capitalism (as I described it above). However, my opinion is that this anxiety about whether or not workers are devoting their whole person to the corporation is really cover for what managers really care about: Maintaining that dominance hierarchy — especially, maintaining the illusion that managers are necessary. Again, you could call this managerial feudalism.

Beyond explaining the rush to get everyone back to in-person work, I hope this helps to explain why neoliberals and conservatives cooperate with one another so often. Neoliberals claim to be working toward a perfectly quantified and rational capitalist hierarchy (supposedly free of irrational prejudices), while conservatives clearly support more traditional hierarchies (and love those irrational prejudices), but both are actually supporting the same culture and hierarchy of narcissistic dominance. The differences in how they see the hierarchy are more a matter of perception — like a Rorschach test — rather than a reflection of real material differences in those hierarchies.

I’ve focused on internal management hierarchies here, but the same logic of re-asserting dominance applies to all kinds of “getting back to normal” — including things like restaurants opening back up for eat-in dining. Conservatives like to eat in restaurants because it gives them the opportunity to dominate someone. They want the school system to take care of their kids because they want to be served and they don’t want to take care of (serve) their children. It’s all about re-establishing the dominance hierarchy — a dominance hierarchy designed for and by narcissists.

The idea of a culture of narcissism transcends Marx’s historical epochs (primitive communal, slave, feudal, capitalist) because it reveals a common thread running through them all — a thread that must be cut if we’re to truly rise above barbarism. If we fail to address the culture of narcissism — and keep allowing narcissists to rule us — a revolutionary change will always result in a new set of narcissists in charge, which means a new historical epoch rather than a resolution of that cycle and the establishment of a more democratic system.