The days when a job can be treated as an object or a role in which someone simply performs are over. It is no longer sustainable or ethical to objectify work in such a way. In fact, objectifying work is a mark of moral degradation and human destruction. Whether in an office, factory, hospital, the police service and judiciary or government, divorcing our essential moral and ethical humanity from the tasks we perform for pay is an unsustainable travesty of our humanity and human justice.
We’re all familiar with jobsworths, they are a familiar figure of ridicule and derision, and yet, to some degree we are all in the same boat and, these days, the issue of the tasks we perform at work and their negative impact on both us and on society as a whole is reaching critical mass. Today we are increasingly being held hostage to work, forced to abandon our moral compass for fear of losing our jobs or, at the very least, facing disciplinary action. Whist this is not new, there is a growing dehumanising management bureaucracy that is determined to impose ever greater obedience to company policy even whilst protections in the work place are being stripped away by central government.
At the high end of this moral decrepitude and the courage it takes to oppose it are whistle blowers, those who pass their tipping point at which they can perform at work without taking a moral stand and speaking out. Edward Snowden, who leaked documents on secretUSsurveillance programmes, is being hounded across the globe for daring to speak out, but we do not need to look to such lofty social circles to see the moral rot in action. Any and everyone who performs tasks that they find even mildly distasteful and who have maybe never examined their ‘role’ in moral terms is participating in a rot that touches us increasingly at every level of our lives. Whenever people perform a task aware or unaware of the moral implication to their self they are allowing their self to become hostage to moral corruption and decay. This is not radical and nor is it rocket science, it is simply the unnatural process that gives rise to every jobsworth and it does not require a great deal of soul searching to see it for the simple truth it is.
However, this is just to scratch the ugly event horizon of the black hole into which human ethics and morality are falling. Modern vulture capitalism and consumerism are a long way past the event horizon and are sucking the life out of the global community. In a recent expose of Primark, children can be seen on the streets ofIndiadoing work for Primark for as little as 7 pence an hour and the company was quick to make disclaimers on this exploitation. I’ll come to consumers in a moment, but giant corporations like Primark, Coca Cola, Tesco and the like are the high profit earning end of a chain of exploitation in which the only winner is the corporation. In the intense competition of high street consumerism suppliers and communities are driven into the ground in the service of the great god corporate profit.
Now we come to the great silent consumer complicity in ethical and moral bankruptcy. It would be naive in the extreme to pretend that a tee shirt bought from Primark for a pound is anything other than the end game of exploitation at every stage of the production process and yet £1 in every £10 spent on clothes in theUKis spent at Primark. I have only been into Primark twice (different stores) and was astonished at the careless treatment of the stock on display. It was literally thrown every where and that behaviour is something I have never seen before in any store other than in scenes from spring sales in maddened stampedes of consumer greed. What struck me is that this was the essence of the care less attitude of consuming taken to the extreme. It seemed to be the ultimate expression of a lack of respect for any and everything including self respect. What was going on there if not the out playing of human degradation in mindless consumerism? Is this the ultimate fate of the unquestioning devotion of the televisual slaves of modern society stripped of all considerations of moral worth or value?
There is nothing sustainable about this situation just as there is nothing sustaining in it. It is long term degradation for short term gratification. Those who are held in poverty on the supply side of corporate greed and those caught in the consumer dream world are all ultimately the victims of corporate greed. Poverty breeds poverty, especially when it is enforced or coerced, whether that is physical or mental, It is worth bearing in mind that we each live with a separate and unique perception of reality, no two are the same and we group ourselves by a coalition of consensus, be it a right wing, left wing, religious or anything else. There is only one way to check this perceived reality out and that is by checking it out against reality itself, through enquiry, fact finding, questioning and abandoning those perceptions which are based on prejudice or are found to be empirically false. Opinion, which it is often boasted we all have a right to and yet, thank goodness, has never been enshrined in law, is a hot bed of false assumptions and if the law was based on opinion we’d all be in trouble.
The law, social justice and human development are all dependent on our innate sense of morality, if this were not so we would not be capable of making or establishing laws at all. That being so, it is the responsibility of each individual to re-engage with their moral self and to live life with our moral sense fully engaged and to learn to take a stand on moral issues. We can no longer rely on the law of the land or government, we never really could (the game has always been rigged), but now with a government gone feral, that is putting private gain above public interests and well being, attacking the people left right and centre, it falls to the people to be fully aware and fully morally engaged.
Cameron says thatBritainmust be able to compete in the global markets, well; actions speak louder than words and what he is doing, far from acting to raise wages in countries likeIndia, is draggingBritaineven downward, attacking workers rights and protections and forcing people into poverty by removing social protections, legal protections and the welfare state.Britainis in a state of government enforced collapse, high streets are failing, food banks are proliferating, the welfare state is becoming ever more punitive, and government policy is imposed accompanied by propaganda and downright lies. Justice then lies with the people to call government and corporations to account by challenging injustice whenever and wherever it is found. But therein lays a problem… Courage.
It takes courage to make a stand, stepping outside our comfort zones, putting our heads above the parapets and, of course, standing firm against the inevitable onslaught of criticism and self doubt. A willingness to suffer heartache and hardship is not an easy choice to make and is something that requires daily renewal. As this unholy mess continues to unfold courage may well be the key issue and deciding factor in the history of our country and the world.
