Alpha's Troll and Cantarbaqash Corner LOL

[Alpha Blondy]

The Demise of the Work Ethic

 

By Sam Vaknin, Author of “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited”

 

Whatever happened to the work ethic? Where is the pride in the immaculate quality of one’s labor and produce?

 

Both dead in the water. A series of earth-shattering social, economic, and technological trends converged to render their jobs loathsome to many – a tedious nuisance best avoided.

 

1. Job security is a thing of the past. Itinerancy in various McJobs reduces the incentive to invest time, effort, and resources into a position that may not be yours next week. Brutal layoffs and downsizing traumatized the workforce and produced in the typical workplace a culture of obsequiousness, blind obeisance, the suppression of independent thought and speech, and avoidance of initiative and innovation. Many offices and shop floors now resemble prisons.

 

2. Outsourcing and offshoring of back office (and, more recently, customer relations and research and development) functions sharply and adversely effected the quality of services from helpdesks to airline ticketing and from insurance claims processing to remote maintenance. Cultural mismatches between the (typically Western) client base and the offshore service department (usually in a developing country where labor is cheap and plenty) only exacerbated the breakdown of trust between customer and provider or supplier.

 

3. The populace in developed countries are addicted to leisure time. Most people regard their jobs as a necessary evil, best avoided whenever possible. Hence phenomena like the permanent temp – employees who prefer a succession of temporary assignments to holding a proper job. The media and the arts contribute to this perception of work as a drag – or a potentially dangerous addiction (when they portray raging and abusive workaholics).

 

4. The other side of this dismal coin is workaholism – the addiction to work. Far from valuing it, these addicts resent their dependence. The job performance of the typical workaholic leaves a lot to be desired. Workaholics are fatigued, suffer from ancillary addictions, and short attention spans. They frequently abuse substances, are narcissistic and destructively competitive (being driven, they are incapable of team work).

 

5. The depersonalization of manufacturing – the intermediated divorce between the artisan/worker and his client – contributed a lot to the indifference and alienation of the common industrial worker, the veritable “anonymous cog in the machine”.

 

Not only was the link between worker and product broken – but the bond between artisan and client was severed as well. Few employees know their customers or patrons first hand. It is hard to empathize with and care about a statistic, a buyer whom you have never met and never likely to encounter. It is easy in such circumstances to feel immune to the consequences of one’s negligence and apathy at work. It is impossible to be proud of what you do and to be committed to your work – if you never set eyes on either the final product or the customer! Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece, “Modern Times” captured this estrangement brilliantly.

 

6. Many former employees of mega-corporations abandon the rat race and establish their own businesses – small and home enterprises. Undercapitalized, understaffed, and outperformed by the competition, these fledging and amateurish outfits usually spew out shoddy products and lamentable services – only to expire within the first year of business.

 

7. Despite decades of advanced notice, globalization caught most firms the world over by utter surprise. Ill-prepared and fearful of the onslaught of foreign competition, companies big and small grapple with logistical nightmares, supply chain calamities, culture shocks and conflicts, and rapacious competitors. Mere survival (and opportunistic managerial plunder) replaced client satisfaction as the prime value.

 

8. The decline of the professional guilds on the one hand and the trade unions on the other hand greatly reduced worker self-discipline, pride, and peer-regulated quality control. Quality is monitored by third parties or compromised by being subjected to Procrustean financial constraints and concerns.

 

The investigation of malpractice and its punishment are now at the hand of vast and ill-informed bureaucracies, either corporate or governmental. Once malpractice is exposed and admitted to, the availability of malpractice insurance renders most sanctions unnecessary or toothless. Corporations prefer to bury mishaps and malfeasance rather than cope with and rectify them.

 

9. The quality of one’s work, and of services and products one consumed, used to be guaranteed. One’s personal idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, and problems were left at home. Work was sacred and one’s sense of self-worth depended on the satisfaction of one’s clients. You simply didn’t let your personal life affect the standards of your output.

 

This strict and useful separation vanished with the rise of the malignant-narcissistic variant of individualism. It led to the emergence of idiosyncratic and fragmented standards of quality. No one knows what to expect, when, and from whom. Transacting business has become a form of psychological warfare. The customer has to rely on the goodwill of suppliers, manufacturers, and service providers – and often finds himself at their whim and mercy. “The client is always right” has gone the way of the dodo. “It’s my (the supplier’s or provider’s) way or the highway” rules supreme.

 

This uncertainty is further exacerbated by the pandemic eruption of mental health disorders – 15% of the population are severely pathologized according to the latest studies. Antisocial behaviors – from outright crime to pernicious passive-aggressive sabotage – once rare in the workplace, are now abundant.

 

The ethos of teamwork, tempered collectivism, and collaboration for the greater good is now derided or decried. Conflict on all levels has replaced negotiated compromise and has become the prevailing narrative. Litigiousness, vigilante justice, use of force, and “getting away with it” are now extolled. Yet, conflicts lead to the misallocation of economic resources. They are non-productive and not conducive to sustaining good relations between producer or provider and consumer.

 

10. Moral relativism is the mirror image of rampant individualism. Social cohesion and discipline diminished, ideologies and religions crumbled, and anomic states substituted for societal order. The implicit contracts between manufacturer or service provider and customer and between employee and employer were shredded and replaced with ad-hoc negotiated operational checklists. Social decoherence is further enhanced by the anonymization and depersonalization of the modern chain of production (see point 5 above).

 

Nowadays, people facilely and callously abrogate their responsibilities towards their families, communities, and nations. The mushrooming rate of divorce, the decline in personal thrift, the skyrocketing number of personal bankruptcies, and the ubiquity of venality and corruption both corporate and political are examples of such dissipation. No one seems to care about anything. Why should the client or employer expect a different treatment?

 

As Weber observed largely correctly, the Protestant work ethic underlies the rise of modern capitalism. Calvinism regarded work as a form of worship and success as proof of divine approval. Protestants of all creeds valued time – God’s-given gift – and sought to maximize its benefits.

 

But the Puritan and Non-conformist empathic values of a Commonwealth wherein everyone is equal before God and therefore deserves to be treated well and with respect were abandoned along the way. Even the infusion of Jewish values – charity, community, industriousness, the idea of progress and self-betterment, learning, and pragmatism – in the late 19th century failed to stop the erosion in communality and the rise of malignant, short-sighted narcissism, the anathema of the work ethic.

 

11. The disintegration of the educational systems of the West made it difficult for employers to find qualified and motivated personnel. Courtesy, competence, ambition, personal responsibility, the ability to see the bigger picture (synoptic view), interpersonal aptitude, analytic and synthetic skills, not to mention numeracy, literacy, access to technology, and the sense of belonging which they foster – are all products of proper schooling.

 

12. Irrational beliefs, pseudo-sciences, and the occult rushed in to profitably fill the vacuum left by the crumbling education systems. These wasteful preoccupations encourage in their followers an overpowering sense of fatalistic determinism and hinder their ability to exercise judgment and initiative. The discourse of commerce and finance relies on unmitigated rationality and is, in essence, contractual. Irrationality is detrimental to the successful and happy exchange of goods and services.

 

13. Employers place no premium on work ethic. Workers don’t get paid more or differently if they are more conscientious, or more efficient, or more friendly. In an interlinked, globalized world, customers are fungible. There are so many billions of potential clients that customer loyalty has been rendered irrelevant. Marketing, showmanship, and narcissistic bluster are far better appreciated by workplaces because they serve to attract clientele to be bilked and then discarded or ignored.

 

http://www.sunofindia.com/the-demise-of-the-work-ethic/

[Alpha Blondy]

Wadani;920241 wrote:

I dont think it'll be this year, but for sure by 2014 insha'Allah. U gonna be there for a couple more years right? Or u planning on making a return to London soon?

i've renounced the WEST. i have no intention of ever making a return to London. you should come here, i think you'd have more value here. i'll be around until 2014, so i'll see you around, then. LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL.

[Alpha Blondy]

i'm out y'all.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

LOOOOOOOL

[Alpha Blondy]

 

interesting....food for thought.

[Alpha Blondy]

[Alpha Blondy]

jeudi sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooir. i feel good, the weather good and all is good. LOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

[oba hiloowlow]

Nabadoon Al salaan sare i was browsing this forum and i just had to say hi to you ileen your the Nabadoon LOOOOL. my attempt to GTFO starts now. Bye Y'all

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Happy International Mother Language day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

i have been speaking somali all day LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL.

[SomaliPhilosopher]

Hey, is the mall in Hargeisa, I think it was funded by Dahabshiil, finished? It was under construction when I was there

[Alpha Blondy]

^

Dec 2012

 

 

---------

 

at present

 

N.B - this isnt my picture. i got it from a friends LOL fb. LOOOOOOOOOOOL.....i hope you don't mind.

[Alpha Blondy]

oba hiloowlow;920353 wrote:

Nabadoon Al salaan sare i was browsing this forum and i just had to say hi to you ileen your the Nabadoon LOOOOL. my attempt to GTFO starts now. Bye Y'all

Imam Oba,

 

thanks for salaanta sare sxb. aad ayaad uugu mahadsantahay ruunti......i'm a little confused about ''your attempts to GTFO starts now''? maxaad ka wada hadaalka?

[SomaliPhilosopher]

Hmm visuals, it has been an awfully long construction project. Do most kids have access to education in Somaliland? I am familiar with the "free education" initiative by the government. Nevertheless are some students for whatever reason excluded or lack access?

[oba hiloowlow]

Alpha Blondy;920414 wrote:

Imam Oba,

 

thanks for salaanta sare sxb. aad ayaad uugu mahadsantahay ruunti......i'm a little confused about ''your attempts to GTFO starts now''? maxaad ka wada hadaalka?

Nabadoon

 

I was studying so when i posted that i was going back to the studies,

[Alpha Blondy]

this is NOT a Q&A thread. i've already created a thread for those purposes. here: http://www.somaliaonline.com/community/showthread.php/68101-Live-and-Exclusive-from-Hargeisa-Q-amp-A-with-Alpha-Blondy

 

this is a trolls thread. why are you so interested in SL anyways? you're a weird guy S.Poow. i'm a little disappointed by your actions ruunti.