blog 16 - speech - cole knight

Do you guys remember Mario Kart? Spending hours and hours of yet-to-be- returned effort just trying to beat your fastest score on Rainbow Road, until that one fateful afternoon where you just got it. Every turn, every drift, every wheelie was immaculate. You could feel it; this was the one. And when your score finally appeared, you felt complete. Even though it was only, like, half a second over the “gold” time trial score, you had won; you didn’t care about the margin. The next day you would go into school, or, if you were one of the lucky ones, you would just hop on your iPod touch right then, and tell all your friends about your amazing accomplishment, and with the caring and pride in others that, for some reason, we seem to outgrow around age twelve, they would beam and congratulate you, maybe even telling the pretending-to-be-interested teacher about their friend’s victory. Those were the days. The days where the line between life and play were blurred to the point of nonexistence. Why did they have to go away? They should never have. And today I hope to discuss a framework by which we can achieve that blissful Nirvana by first demonstrating the problems with our current work-life balance, next by exposing the culprit behind American workaholism, and by finally proposing what I hope to be a worthy solution.

How many times in the last month have you heard your parents say the following all-too-familiar phrase: “I don’t want to go to work tomorrow?” But, curiously, the next morning they get up at the same time, to the sound of the same alarm, and make the same commute to the same 9-to-5 that they expressed their disdain for just less than twelve hours before. Why do they do that to themselves? The answer, of course, is money. Money that is a fundamentally artificial construction. This is a critical issue, because, as a 2011 lecture by Asher Horowitz of York University points out, “once the traditional community (which understood itself as natural) is broken down, human beings become, essentially, potentially useful or threatening objects.” (Horowitz 3) In other words, the role played in our community by wages dehumanizes us, treats us as objects to be used or opposed. And even the father of capitalism concurs. Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, writing that “the man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.” (Smith 734) Smith himself agrees that the unrelenting utilitarianism of work dehumanizes us to the point where we can’t even hold a conversation. This fact underscores the transition away from joyful selflessness that I briefly discussed at the outset. You and I have now completed the metamorphosis from person to worker, and, in the process, we have lost something that is impossible to overstate the importance of: our humanity.

So whose fault is this, other than just “capitalism,” which, I promise, I’m not going to try and dismantle over the course of these eight minutes. On the contrary, it is something much more insidious: racism. It’s a surprisingly rarely discussed fact that this nation’s ascent to the top of the global economy owes itself to the continual exploitation of people of color, a tradition that began with slavery and has continued through the 21st century, where, according to the the Economic Policy Institute, white men have seen just a 1% increase in hours worked, compared to 16% for black men, and 22% for black women. (EPI 2) The fact that the labor force is so dependent on the economic stagnation of certain demographics has not cooperated with the admittedly slow transition towards racial equality over the last century and a half, and, as a result, the 15 hour work week predicted by John Maynard Keyes has eluded us. By a lot. The fact of the matter is that the white owners of production need the nonwhite means of production to continue working if they want to retain their obscene profits, even when those workers have produced more than enough for the economy to continue functioning. And, since so many Americans work for the same coalition of powerful people, it is virtually impossible to break the cycle.

But I still want to try. Maybe I just like Mario Kart too much and want to be able to spend my days perfecting my drift around that critical second turn on Daisy Circuit instead of trying to prevent myself from falling into inescapable destitution and poverty, but I think there has to be a solution to our absurd reliance on money somewhere. Sadly, however, that somewhere is not the United States. The concept of an unaltered free market goes so hand-in-hand with our country that we colloquially refer to its most fortunate participants as “the American dream,” so it would be contradictory to try and solve it with something so inherent to the very problem we look to alleviate. I’m not saying we need to abandon our Americanism; rather, we need to adopt a certain cosmopolitanism that appreciates the perspectives of others just as it appreciates those of ourselves. Our problem isn’t that we’re capitalists; it’s that we refuse to even so much as acknowledge anyone who isn’t. As Natalie Wynn, more commonly known as LeftTube content producer Contrapoints, points out, “The West is in many ways an inherently supremacist concept. It’s thought to be more civilized, more holy, and more cultured than the non-west.” (Wynn, 20:17-20:26) And by ignoring the possibility that there exists more equitable and humane alternatives outside of the cultural bubble we surround ourselves with, we deprive ourselves of any hope for a workable alternative. And before you worry that adopting, or at least considering, indigenous and Eastern values would ruin the creativity and passion experienced in the American market, remember that the Mario Kart we all adore was invented and produced in a country with a four day workweek, no military, and a language made of characters. Perhaps, then, the key to recovering the caring and joy that we lost when we put down our controllers for the last time is to trace it back to its roots. And we just might collect some humanity along the way.

Works Cited

Contrapoints. “The West.” YouTube, created by Natalie Wynn, 13 July 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyaftqCORT4

Horowitz, Asher. “Marx's Theory of Alienation.” Department of Political Science | Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, York University, 11 Mar. 2011.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. American Home Library Co., 1902.

Wilson, Valerie, and Janelle Jones. “Working Harder or Finding It Harder to Work: Demographic Trends in Annual Work Hours Show an Increasingly Fractured Workforce.” Economic Policy Institute, 22 Feb. 2018.