How to Brainwash Your Employees
Most people are glad to come to work. They are afraid of unstructured time, and have no initiative to work unless compelled to do so–in fact, they are so afraid of free time, they must fill it up with “fun.” Work is the chief means of self-concealment in society. By working relentlessly at a few relatively familiar tasks, one avoids having to consciously attend to one’s life. By working a full week in the office one does not have to expose oneself to new situations, be a beginner, make love to one’s wife for hours on end, play with one’s children, care for one’s environment, go through the punishing experience of learning to be brilliantly creative or, hardest and most painful of all for the brainwashed adult, be still and content doing nothing at all.
Nevertheless you will discover, every now and then, someone who has slipped through the net, someone who hates being forced to work in ways and times that are alien to his nature, someone who has been raised and educated in an irresponsible and socially disruptive manner. To deal with such people and keep them pacified, imprisoned and brainwashed is more or less a continuation or refinement of the techniques used by teachers and parents.
As at home, you must keep your employees emotionally involved, tie their success to yours, and keep the environment awash with stress, tension, boredom, anger, embarrassment, or any other unpleasant pre-cognitive vibe. As at school, you need to keep your workers busy, tired, isolated from the world and from each other, in thrall to measurable standards, and unable to make meaningful choices about what they do or when they do it. These basic principles should be enough to keep the world of work operating smoothly. If not, the following guidelines should serve as both refinement and revision.
The essence of work is very simple: Profit comes before everything else. Businesses survive by making a profit for their owners, materially rewarding their thinkers, and keeping their workers alive. They do not survive by giving away or damaging profits. Profit-threatening states must therefore be punished by business and treated as more or less insane. Such states include generosity, honesty, initiative, appreciation of beauty, and full development as a human being. Attitudes that do not lead to profitable behavior also have no place in the office or factory: death, madness, and love. In short, the genuine inner world is illegal. The term you should use for this lawbreaking is “unprofessional.”
Professionalism has a few meanings. Normal people use the word to mean “responsible”–putting quality, instinct, or love first. The official or institutional use, however, means putting the institution first; not doing what you please, or when you please, not talking seriously about love, death, truth, or beauty, or doing anything unexpected; above all, never giving anything away. Employees are free to be unprofessional (i.e. to be themselves) in their free time–to talk of nobler goals than profit, to behave spontaneously, and to be as generous as they like with their own time and money–just as they are free to vote for their leaders in their free time, but all such frills must be abandoned the second they punch in.
Once you have instilled type-2 professionalism as a moral necessity in the workplace, you should go on to ally man’s innate need to belong with his socially generated fear of outsiders and create a “company culture,” or “team spirit.” This will be easy as the groups of people working together will form friendships and intimacies and start to think of themselves as a unified group–all you need to do is use the words “we” and “us” to refer to the company, the CEO, the shareholders and yourself, so that when your workers use the same words, they come to take on the official meaning.
An important way to maintain team spirit–as well as a very useful way to ensure that nobody has the time to feel alienated and depressed–is to make sure that crises are continually coming in. Again the profit-oriented structure of business will in itself ensure that there are never quite enough staff or resources to deal with the workload and that mistakes happen constantly, but if this is still not enough feel free to provoke crises by putting impossible demands on people by chopping up their time, reorganizing their workflow, increasing their targets, reducing the size of their departments, and, above all, filling their lives with bureaucracy.
There are four reasons for an excess of bureaucratic paperwork. The first is that the manager is superfluous; things usually work more smoothly when she is absent. Because she seldom does any real work herself (and works for the boss who never does), she does not really know what is going on, and needs paper to find out. The second reason is that the manager needs to justify her position; asking for, collecting, and reviewing paperwork gives the impression of work without the responsibility of having to be creative, intelligent, or attentive. The third reason is that the boss and manager rise to their positions by showing a preference for abstractions over reality; they find it difficult to interact with their fellows directly, and naturally seek a reassuringly indirect relationship with others through paper which, unlike [some] people, can be completely controlled. The fourth reason that managers and bosses need paperwork is that the point of society is the creation of wealth–which is a number on a piece of paper.
As with home and school you need not worry about learning all this advice. Simply by being a normal person, raised and educated in the normal way, you will be carrying around unconscious feelings of horror generated by being an isolated ego alone in a cold, random universe of perpetual antagonism and strife. These feelings will automatically ensure that you bend to groupthink, unthinkingly submit to the assumed emotional reality of society and uncritically yield to the unspoken threats to ego-security, self-esteem, and personal power that the workplace uses to keep workers in line.
With you, the unconscious manager, creating your own frantic insecurities, your organization can ignore honesty, cheapen beauty, enhance profitability, silence dissenting voices, and present a picture of reality that appeases system and self without ever having to tell you what to do or say. You will then find yourself in the exalted position of leading a passive, neutralized and atomized workforce safely nowhere. Darren Allen’s web site is http://www.gentleapocalypse.com/. See the previous installments in this series, How to Brainwash Your Students and How to Brainwash Your Children.