the anarchy posts II

volume 1 - everything you know is wrong

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher
a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts,
build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders,
cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for
insects.
-robert a. heinlein

specialization

i don't specialize. specialization is anathema to my essence. in our utilitarian society i could easily consider this aversion to be a curse or berate myself for not conforming, (or worse,) but i prefer to embrace this quality. the world seems to require specialization. i abhor it. i prefer variety.

specialization is for insects, heinlein said, and he was right. humans are wonderfully complex, unique and interesting creatures. we were meant to do all those things heinlein mentioned and a million-trillion more.

we all have just one life and while we live in a utilitarian society, which demands some amount of specialization for survival, it is still unnatural to our species to focus on just a few disciplines. moreover, when an employer demands specialization, they degrade the human experience. 

in a factory environment it is easy to see the value in specialization.  a piece of machinery is fairly complicated and accomplishes an important task in the fabrication process over and over and over. it makes sense to have a person operate that machine so that man and machine become as one and achieve maximum productivity, (particularly on the investment that is the machine.)  there are certain human beings who can thrive in that environment.  those obsessive compulsives who enjoy repetition and live in their own inner worlds are perhaps best suited for this type of employment.  that person however, is a slim minority.  what would be ideal for most humans in a factory setting would be if the employer trained and offered skills in several possibly related tasks which could be rotated.  in that way the stakeholder in the business, (the factory worker,) works and lives in a few environments, stays trained and up to date on developments in multiple disciplines and in turn has a higher quality of life from the challenge and the variety which in itself nurtures focus or at least meets the human psyche where it naturally thrives.  where would you rather work?  in the same place every day on the same piece of equipment doing the same task repetitively ad nauseum?  or the living, breathing factory wherein you are truly part of a team, rotating through a variety of tasks, competing on several levels most importantly with some other factory somewhere which manufactures the same final product, challenging yourself to do a good job and staying current on all aspects of your employment? 

variety represents control and humans prefer to control their own lives as much as possible.  it is likely true that most crime is enacted either in order to exert control or as a result of decreased or diminished control.  in this way variety represents better human health. 

after all of the education that culminated in high school graduation i went to live on campus at a four-year university and while i was irresponsible and i was bored and i was unfocused and undisciplined and i preferred socializing to organized learning, the real reason i failed after just two semesters was because i did not want anything to do with the specialization of settling into a career. not only did it frighten me, it made me numb.  my young life had been marked by the constant institution of structure and order and in escaping childhood i hoped and expected to be able to increase my control and spend a season exploring my natural compulsions to learn and experience sans a grand plan.  it made dropping out of college a natural and easy choice. it felt like loosening the chains and emerging to the first sweet droplets of freedom.  still, one needs currency just to survive, to say nothing of partaking of life in leaps and gulps and wide-eyed, symphonies and feasts of interest and engagement and fascination.

it is natural that employment should be at odds to some degree with the human condition, (voltaire be damned.)  some discipline is certainly good.  (and as i have mentioned numerous times, balance is the one quality that should be sought above all others and in heaping portions.) 

i went into the air force for four years and learned the skill of firefighting. i enjoyed learning how to fight fire and how to give advanced first aid and emergency care. i felt like i was living when i learned how to climb ladders and tie knots in the air force fire academy. when i manned a handline going into a fully involved structural blaze and encountered a wall of flames behind a door my crew had knocked down with an axe and widened my stream of water to cover the door and thereby kept the smoke and flames at bay, my life and my days seemed to crackle with electric, human energy. when i gave first aid to dead babies or murdered stepfathers or crashed motorcyclists, i transcended firefighting and what it is or was to be a firefighter. at other times when my fellow firefighters seemed like caricatures, living for vacations at the river, drinking way too much and practicing infidelity in, (or outside of,) their relationships, when exercises droned on with role playing any number of firefighting or hazmat scenarios, or when hours in the station bent into days and weeks wasted watching tv and polishing trucks and waiting, waiting, waiting for something to shake me from my somnambulence, i became utterly clear i was not ready to settle into a career as a firefighter. 

i worked in a bookstore for a few years.  the first two years went by in a blink of an eye.  every week i discovered a new author.  in spite of low wages i was allowed to take home stripped books or borrow hardcover books sans the dust jacket and i got an employee discount on the books that did not fit into either of those categories.  during those years i lapped up the works of henry miller, (and his favorites which he so graciously shared with me; his reader: blaise cendrars, knut hamsun, and the inimitable louis-ferdinand celine,) milan kundera, albert camus, umberto eco, salman rushdie, ernest hemingway, fyodor dostoyevsky, and leo tolstoy.  i nibbled at the ideas of rousseau, keynes, nietzsche, adam smith and chomsky.  i inhaled biographies of my heroes and icons.  eventually, through no fault of the writers, the book store ran its course for me but it was a wonderful time. 

i worked for two years as a laborer and carpenter apprentice. i felt the exhileration of demolishing structures. when i hammered away at an edifice i could feel my own muscles flexing unto impact and the feel of destruction radiating from hammer's head through my angry right arm into my heart which ached to destroy as all human hearts do.  i learned architectural principles, how to hammer bags and bags of 16-penny nails, how to screw risers so they would not squeak, how to roll trusses and stack roofs and how to build things.  it was like learning how to be physically human.  i would never have any interest in lifting weights in order to increase strength but increasing strength in order to accomplish more at work or be more skilled was instinctive.  walking on one-and-three-quarter inch wide pieces of wood set 16 inches apart 12 to 25 feet above ground was a skill worth learning.  after 10 hours of working with wood i would often go to the park to play basketball for 90 minutes and my body was a finely tuned machine.  had i made a career in construction my body today would be beaten up and worn down and i still need it for perhaps another 40 years so that was not a viable career. 

eventually i found my way into a call center where i was tasked with giving good customer service, which as a member not only of the proletariat but also of that distinct class therein which is naturally inclined to subservience, came quite easy to me.  supporting an organization and providing customer service was like common sense to me.  it wasn't that it required not thinking but rather that the principles employed were natural to me and what i had done representing myself to that point in life every day.  in that call center i was promoted to a point where i made a living wage.  i dropped out of school again, which is my greatest failure.  i got comfortable and became absorbed in the act of finding or settling upon a mate.  still, initially it was fascinating practicing and discerning the components of customer service.  i became a trainer and as such i was able to dissect all aspects of what we did.  i broke down the idea of empathy, compartmentalized it into addressing it in the past, present and future, and trained others on first how to think about it and second how to deliver it successfully.  similarly i broke down my own ergonomics training to understand why the ideal positions were ideal, what repetetive stress injuries and cumulative trauma disorders were in plain language so i could deliver my own training of, to and for the people.  customer service is another way of saying how to win friends and influence people and in that way it is a life skill, hence why and how i was able to stay involved in that field for many years, (even if i refused to apply the principles of the same for so many years to my personal life like the proverbial south going oxe.)  moreover by moving from agent to lead to trainer to supervisor to account manager to manager i have been able to create my own variety.

this is a tough day and age in terms of utilitarianism.  it is the order of the day.  specialization is heralded as the culmination of human thought on productivity.  that conclusion is without regard for the stakeholder in any business who is the employee, (or worker.)  rather, the stakeholder is just another commodity representative of another part of the productivity equation neither more nor less than the machine itself.  forthat reason workers should always seek variety and diversity.  ultimately society needs to adapt work to the needs of the human stakeholder in such a way it blends and seeks balance between the production and serving the man, mankind and our various societies. 

everything you know is wrong.  specialization is for insects and does not serve the individual, which by turn does not serve society.