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In the last hundred years of industrial advancement, a great deal
of scientific progress has been made in the field of efficiency
studies. Known as human resources management among those who study
these things, the main quest has always been how to control human
thoughts and actions so that everything works to the maximum
benefit of those who control these human resources. Accordingly,
the most "efficient" system is one that controls the human
resources by eliminating the human part and turning them into pure
resources. In other words, their ultimate organizational goal is to
transform people into things. This is the quest of all efficiency
experts and human resources managers and what is commonly called
organizational behavior. This book is about the two best historical
examples of such "efficiently-run" resource management.
The way we live, work, and die-alone and with other Americans-have
so many hidden layers that we might as well say that there are two
Americas: one we think we know and the other virtually unknown to
us. Such a thought is compelling enough to motivate a sociologist
to start writing down what he thinks about the hidden America.
Then, what emerges from this effort is a picture of America that is
at once so familiar and so alien. It is the alien part of America
that troubles us, that scares us, and that pushes us to escape into
louder, more colorful, and more pleasant unreality. As our escapism
becomes more urgent each day, so does its testimony to the
emptiness and loneliness of our solitary existence. Huer discusses
this alien part of America in American Paradise.
We in the U.S. have deserved someone like Donald Trump as our
president for some time. Until now, by a string of luck, we had
mostly centrist presidents, both Republican and Democratic, some
with only a modicum of intelligence and humanity. With Donald
Trump, however, we finally ran out of luck and he is our sitting
president. Now, the spotlight is focused on him, but we easily
forget that he is, after all, a product of his own society. Trump's
rise to power owes itself to its own social-historical
circumstances: For decades now America's Consumer Society had
prepared the American voters, mostly White, to find someone like
Trump as their leader, by supplying them with around-the-clock
distractions that made them feel good, happy and falsely powerful.
Trump's ascendancy could not be possible without our consumption of
daily entertainment which makes us selfish, childish and idiotic
human beings. Such minds are easily affected by anxiety, anger and
vengefulness. In our daily sea of popular entertainment of mass
circulation, we have become trash cans--Mental Trash Cans--that
exist just to process trash that enters and leaves our minds almost
at the same time. This wasted mind, America's most celebrated
symbol of success that is created by its best and brightest, keeps
us away from one another as we become privatized citizens and
neighbors in our individual cocoons, lonely, scared, dumbed down,
living and dying our solitary unconnected lives. Into this vacuum
of intelligence and humanity, enter Donald Trump, the
entertainer-billionaire, now the President, who, with his brand of
populist Fascism, challenges the powers of entrenched Corporate
America and all of its mind-captivating arsenal. He successfully
conquered White Americans by separating them from non-whites, thus
revealing America's nationalism and racism, hitherto papered over
in its Liberal-Capital consumer paradise. The common Americans,
whether White or non-white, possess two prized items that Corporate
and Political America covets and wants to take from them, the
dollar and the vote: The American Masses, now as garbage-fed
children, are neither smart nor united enough to protect the two
critical weapons of their democracy. Trump's presidency proves it.
Labor Avoidance is about work, something everyone hates, and
something everyone longs to escape. At the same time, human nature
is to sustain life that is physical, and thus constant labor is a
necessity. This is what humanity, from Eden to our own
post-industrial society, has always tried to reduce or avoid by
making somebody else do it. Historically, this nature and origin of
labor-avoidance is responsible for war, colonialism, slavery, and
now, contract employment in market society. This book explores
American capitalism and how labor (and the desire to escape it) has
become responsible for so much human struggle and misery throughout
history.
This book explores the nature of power in persons, groups, and
nations by asking a question that we can understand in contemporary
terms: what would Bill Gates do if he had Hitler's absolute power?
It is a sociological question that exposes power as a tool of
control over the powerless, not as a psychological trait or manners
of personal interactions. With Hitler's power, any individual,
group, or nation could become as crazy as Hitler or as cruel as the
Nazis. Call from the Cave argues that the savage struggle for
power, exemplified in the free market system of America-history's
first and purest "natural" society-is in our very human nature. In
the footsteps of the ancient Romans and the recent Nazis, we push
on in every waking moment of our lives to expand our power and to
control the souls and minds of other human beings to do our
bidding. The book concludes that this is the very destiny of
humanity we cannot escape.
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Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
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R383
R318
Discovery Miles 3 180
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