What Kind of Slaves Are We?
American office workers are not all that economically, socially and psychologically different from slaves
Office Space is a relatable to anyone who works in the corporate world because it points out the emptiness, aimlessness and tediousness of working in an office. The film’s plot revolves around a handful of white collar workers trying to escape the office world.
Fed up with his soul-crushing white collar work, Peter Gibbons, the main protagonist, concots a sophisticated plan to secretly transfer millions of dollars from his company’s bank account to himself. One of his friends/coworkers is apprehensive about joining it so Gibbons makes the pitch:
It's not just about me and my dream of doing nothing. It's about all of us. I don't know what happened to me at that hypnotherapist and, I don't know, maybe it was just shock and it's wearing off now, but when I saw that fat man keel over and die—Michael, we don't have a lot of time on this earth! We weren't meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.
Later in the film he explains his plan to his girlfriend. She points out to him he’s stealing money and committing a crime. Gibbons, unaware until this moment that he’s literally stealing, is taken aback and argues with her that he’s not and if he is, it’s justified.
In his head, he’s committing an act of rebellion against a system that oppresses and exploits him. Many employees, unconsciously or consciously, conclude this when they vandalize, launder money, destroy property, steal office suppliers, punch a supervisor and etc.
The most violent way they do it is through workplace shootings, according to Mark Ames’ book Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005) .
Ames argues that the workplace massacres in the 80s, 90s and 2000s were modern slave rebellions. First, just like modern workplace massacres, slave rebellions in American history were rare. Slaves knew they would be brutally crushed by the state.
Second, when rebellions occurred, they were small, similar to how workplace massacres are done by one person. Most slaves didn't participate. In fact, most were indifferent or helped their slave masters, either by taking up arms or snitching.
The third and biggest reason was that human beings, no matter the situation, can be conditioned into submissively accepting any environment they are in as normal.
…the broader reason why there weren’t more slave rebellions is simpler: most slaves didn’t want to rebel. This depressing fact is not limited to African slaves in America, but rather is a product of human nature and our ability to adapt, to be conditioned out of fear, and to serve. Frederick Douglass explained that slaves chose not to rebel out of fear of the unknown, which, he wrote, quoting Hamlet, had the slaves “rather bear those ills we had/than fly to others, that we knew not of.
The only people who led rebellions were people who were not mentally normal like Nat Turner, who had weird visions that inspired his rebellions. The people who conduct massacres are usually people who are more prone to snapping when pushed too far by their supervisors.
You really would have to be as crazy and schizophrenic as Nat Turner to not be affected; you'd have to have voices in your head louder than those around you to convince you that a slave rebellion was the right and sane response.
After a slave rebellion was put down, like after a workplace massacre is stopped, everyone called the rebel evil or corrupted, even though some sympathized with his anger. In the present day, we can’t see office shootings as rebellions against an oppressive system because we haven’t been distanced enough by time.
A big objection to comparing office employment to slavery is that we don’t have to do back breaking labor. That’s obviously true, but in many ways our existence is much worse and our slave-like conditions have been adapted to our technological age.
Many jobs that exist are utterly pointless, producing nothing valuable for society, whereas slaves in the past built structures and buildings, picked cotton and did craftsman work.
About 27 percent of adult male slaves in Charleston, South Carolina, for example, were skilled artisans like blacksmiths, carpenters and coopers, according to Thomas Fleming’s A Disease in the Public Mind. “They operated as virtually freemen. A slave carpenter or shoemaker would and could advertise his services, negotiate his own contracts and receive and pay money, and even live in his own house,” he wrote. “His slave status required him to pay a percentage of his income to his owner. Otherwise he was a relatively free man.”
On plantations, an equal share had jobs that required expertise. “They ranged from overseers to artisans to teamsters and gardeners,” Fleming wrote. “The idea that all slaves were menial workers is false. Even some women slaves held jobs as seamstresses and nurses for the master’s children.”
Building The White House
Your Life
In his book Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber argues half of work in society today is pointless, i.e. make-work jobs. These bullshit jobs are forms of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence. Most of these jobs are office jobs.
These jobs harm us psychologically and spiritually. Here’s Graeber:
Useless or insidious jobs that involve pretenses to public service are perhaps the worst, but almost all of the jobs mentioned in this chapter can be considered soul destroying in different ways. Bullshit jobs regularly induce feelings of hopelessness, depression, and self-loathing. They are forms of spiritual violence directed at the essence of what it means to be a human being.
Life at “the top” isn’t any better. In an interview with Eric Weinstein, JD Vance talked about the misery there:
I felt once I got to Yale there was this sense of relief. I felt that I would never have real economic scarcity of the kind that I had experienced when I was a kid. The weird thing is then you get to Yale Law School and everybody talks about how much they hate their jobs.
Like investment bankers are sort of the people who won the meritocratic game, the people who working at the best 50 law firms in America. They are sort of the people who won the game and yet they all hate their jobs. There’s something bizarre about winning every competition you are supposed to win and the prize at the end of the rainbow is a hyper noncreative and miserable position.
Our socioeconomic conditions are nearly slave-like. Since the 1970s, working class and middle class Americans have been receiving lower wages, have less wealth, working with higher costs of living, experience less job security and see fewer benefits while working longer hours and enduring more stress and supervisor mistreatment, according to Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (2020). Americans are living such a fragile existence that they are closer to being serfs, according to Kotkin.
In contrast, American slaves could buy themselves out of freedom with enough hard work:
Slave artisans frequently made enough money to buy their freedom. In the 1850s, with cotton soaring on the commodity exchanges, the price of a slave was high, perhaps $1,700 for a blacksmith. That a black artisan could earn this much money and pay his own living expenses and a portion to his owner is impressive. His slate status was in many ways more an artificial legality that a daily reality.
Like slaves, Americans work under politically repressive conditions. Most corporations are politically liberal and promote left wing causes, which employees are afraid to publicly disagree with. During the George Floyd riots, corporations sided with the rioters and ramped up antiracism training, to which employees could not refuse. In many cases, companies fired or reprimanded employees who are not sufficiently “woke.” When it comes to politics, you have to always agree with leftists.
The biggest objection to comparing modern employment to slavery would be the fact that at the end of the day we have more freedom and flexibility, which is true, but we are not as free and flexible as we think.
In Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, philosopher and mathematician Nassim Taleb makes the point that employees today are mentally enslaved.
By the 1990s … people started to realize that working as a company man was safe … provided the company stayed around. But the technological revolution that took place in Silicon valley put traditional companies under financial threat. For instance, after the rise of Microsoft and the personal computer, IBM, which was the main farm for company men, had to lay off a proportion of its “lifers,” who then realized that the low-risk profile of their position wasn’t so low risk. These people couldn’t find a job elsewhere; they were of no use to anyone outside IBM. Even their sense of humor failed outside of the corporate culture.
If the company man is, sort of, gone, he has been replaced by the companies person. For people are no longer owned by a company but by something worse: the idea that they need to be employable. The employable person is embedded in an industry, with fear of upsetting not just their employer, but other potential employers.