SIDH Blog

My daughter stays on the first floor of an independent house in Bangalore. When she first moved into this house she tried to figure out how to get her garbage disposed. The landlady downstairs has her daily help take the garbage away and keep it in a place from where the BBMP van collects it. My daughter has no daily help and she realised that the BBMP van comes at odd hours and doesn’t stop at individual houses so it is difficult to catch it. The landlady suggested that my daughter speak to the BBMP workers who clean the streets outside and get one of them to carry away the garbage. It would then become the responsibility of the worker to ensure that the garbage got into the garbage van somehow. The landlady said that 100 Rupees per month is the maximum that we should pay for this service. A white-haired BBMP worker agreed to this and the garbage from my daughter’s house started getting disposed. Now, the white-haired BBMP worker comes sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 AM, so my daughter’s task is to have her garbage kept near her small side-gate downstairs before 7:00 AM. Whenever I have stayed at my daughter’s house I have noticed the brown paper garbage bag near the gate and when I look sometime later the bag would have vanished. I have met the white-haired BBMP man only a few times but I have always felt a deep sense of gratitude towards him. I have wondered why this quiet, smiling man would go out of his way for 100 Rupees per month and I have no answer to that question. I see the vanishing of the brown paper bag as a daily morning miracle.

The other thing that I want to juxtapose with this anecdote is the large number of pet dogs of all sizes and shapes that live in the somewhat posh neighbourhood that my daughter stays in. She has to come out on to the road using the side-gate to the house and she regularly finds dog-shit just outside the gate. It seems that the dog-minders find this side-gate a quiet place hidden from normal view and utilize it as a public toilet for their dogs. There are two types of dog-minders. A few are the owners of the dogs and a small percentage of these owners carry a strange device for collecting their dog-shit (how this behaviour has been normalized is a great mystery to me). However, most dogs are with professional dog-walkers, people who are paid to take the dogs of busy people for walks. Obviously, none of the professional dog-walkers carry the strange device for scooping dog-shit.

The dog-walkers get paid many times the 100 Rupees that the white-haired BBMP worker gets from my daughter. The difference is that the BBMP worker gets my daughter’s deep gratitude and the dogs, their walkers and their owners get her curse.

I was talking to a friend about his toxic relationship with an elderly relative and thought that the controversial insight that came up is worth recording in a post here.

Friend: I talked to my old aunt last night and couldn’t sleep after that because of all the random accusations that she threw at me. She is like a mother to me and I don’t know what to say when she uses her sharp tongue.

Me: Without going into the details of the random accusations that kept you awake at night, do you think that she was also guilt-ridden and couldn’t sleep at night because of what she said to you?

Friend: Of course not. She would have forgotten what she said immediately she cut the phone connection and would have gone to sleep like a baby.

Me: That is what I thought. So think of it like this — she says whatever comes into her head and then forgets it immediately but you lose sleep over it. You are sensitive and kind but you would have noticed that many people around us are both insensitive and unkind. That is not surprising because these are the qualities that get nurtured and rewarded in our hyper-competitive world. Since you are the one who suffers in the relationship, you are the one who has to do something about it — I think the way out for you is to avoid your aunt as much as possible.

Friend: How can you speak like that? Isn’t respecting our elders part of our tradition?

Me: Yes. I realize that what I am saying goes against everything that we deeply believe. In properly functioning social systems, there is a role, a place for us to broadly fit in. In this kind of system respect for our elders would probably be automatic. The elders in this system would have moved on the trajectory of fully ‘take’ mode as babies to more-or-less ‘give’ mode as old men and women. Whatever their swabhaava, angry or irritating or nice, I think that they would not come across as needy or childish. Things are different now. In the rush that all of us live in, most of us do not grow up out of our childishness and our sense of entitlement. We continue in a mostly ‘take’ mode. Unfortunately, it is the sensitive, if they are able to grow up without their sensitivity being extinguished, who suffer more in this unnatural state of affairs. I will still say that if it is clear that you are the one who suffers and the other person doesn’t, you had best avoid their company.

(Disclaimer: I apologize if the post comes across as preachy. I wrote it because I see that, as Pawanji often says, all of us are both the victims and the victimizers. I see that I inflict my childish ways on others and others inflict their childish ways on me. The point of the post is that some people feel all this more than others.)

In August, 2013, the American anthropologist David Graeber wrote a tentative essay about the pointlessness of most modern jobs. The essay, that went viral, was later expanded into a book published in 2018, ‘Bullshit Jobs – A Theory’. The book used poll data from UK, where 37% of the people polled identified their jobs as ‘bullshit jobs’. The following is an excerpt from the preface to the book:

“I would like this book to be an arrow aimed at the heart of our civili­zation. There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work-not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assis­tance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement. The main political reaction to our awareness that half the time we are engaged in utterly meaningless or even counterproductive activities—usually under the orders of a person we dislike—is to rankle with resentment over the fact there might be others out there who are not in the same trap. As a result, hatred, resentment, and suspicion have become the glue that holds society together. This is a disastrous state of affairs. I wish it to end. If this book can in any way contribute to that end, it will have been worth writing.”

In his book, David Graeber divided bullshit jobs into five major types. The following is the Wikipedia excerpt about the types:

“The productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, but instead to “bullshit jobs”: “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” While these jobs can offer good compensation and ample free time, the pointlessness of the work grates at their humanity and creates a “profound psychological violence”.

More than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and five types of entirely pointless jobs:

1. Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters;
2. Goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists;
3. Duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;
4. Box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers;
5. Taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals.”

I have seen some videos of David Graeber talking about the book and have just begun reading it. It looks very interesting.

I came across an article that I thought had many important insights about the Western political establishment. Here are some excerpts:

Excerpt 1:
A breakdown of diplomacy doesn’t quite describe how bad things have become. The behavior of US and European leaders has become increasingly unhinged and any semblance of rationality has been abandoned. It is impossible to listen to western leaders without coming to the conclusion that something is very wrong. Firstly, they seem to have created an upside-down fantasy world where Freudian projection rules and opponents are demonized. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are both Satan himself, Russia is still losing, and the West is still almighty – as well as the pinnacle of justice, freedom, democracy and culture. Secondly, they can’t seem to be able to open their mouths in public without insulting the non-western world.

Excerpt 2:
You can’t just hire anyone [to be part of the political elite] for a cultural and literal genocide and there aren’t really many options. You could seek out psychopaths but you might have loyalty problems with them, and strangely, some of them actually have principles. What you need is a person who likes, or even needs to force his will upon others and interfere with their lives. You need a person who has unwavering zeal for the cause and is incapable of backing down. You need a person who can rationalize any actions while not being affected by them. You need a person who can be brainwashed and controlled like a trained monkey. You need a person who can destroy his own home without realizing what he is doing. You need a narcissist. . . . But what are narcissists and why are they ideal for the demolition work on western societies? A narcissist is a person with self-awareness so low that he can’t develop a self-identity without the help of others – and who has been told that he is better and/or smarter than others. On top of that, he has high emotional neediness and dependence on others.

Excerpt 3:
The Ukraine war and the loss of control over the non-western world have caused economic chaos in the West – which will be followed by social chaos. This is bringing the whole house of cards down far too fast and they [political elites] fear they might lose control. They need to react and solve those problems – but they don’t know how – because they are incompetent. All these challenges and failures are causing their models of self to be challenged, which has serious emotional consequences for them – so they escalate on every level. They shout at people, insult people, make up delusional explanations, and then retreat into absolute denial. Everybody can see this – including the leaders of the non-western world. Nobody wants to talk to our political elites these days, because a narcissist who is losing control is not pleasant to be around.

(The full post is available at:
https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/what-is-wrong-with-the-western-political)