Note on the idea of business and the present crisis

What is wrong with most ideas implemented by Americans in the name of happiness through success, or business, is revealed in the importance given by them to the implementation of these ideas.

Ultimately, all ideas become reduced to the same thing and as such exchangeable. They all reduce the meta-idea of putting ideas into action. What this means is that practice as implementation or enforcement (two ideas that are effectively equivalent), or technique guided by an authority that operates through speaking or issuing statements, that is, commands, is the fundamental idea of business. Business is about getting things done, and this idea transcends the capitalism/socialism divide and others that would merely be different in the identification of the "who" that is involved and responsible. Since business is about getting things done, all projects and tasks are equivalent for it. The point is to have tasks performed by workers under the leadership or command of authorities who create order by calling those subject it, and so, giving orders.

The command or imperative is the statement that correlates the world of language to that of action. When a justification is demanded, it is usually given by reference to either the necessity of the given action for its given purpose, or to Being, to what is, which is presumed to authorizes what can and should be.

Could the nihilism of this lead to some salutary reversal? If so, what is required for such a task (effecting this reversal) to make sense as a public and political one and not just an ethical and private one? If it is the latter, it will be like "religion" to the Americans, or, equivalently, "therapy": a private practice of mental discipline that fits or re-fits them for the given tasks in the public world of business. This task is reparative, in the sense that a worker is a tool that knows itself as such (the person as self-representing and so reflecting, as in Shakespeare) and so can be self-managing, self-authorizing, and know to get itself repaired in the case of break downs in time for the next day's tasks. American psychotherapies are mostly explicit about this today, as they offer patients guidance through the correct way to solve their problems by "thinking" about them (issuing and following commands that order statements spontaneously generated by a potentially wayward mind). In addition to its explicit content, which increasingly appears to anyone apt to notice this as having taken off its gloves and removed the mask covering its naked will to coercion or violence in the interest of power, the implicit meaning is hard to miss: you are being instructed in how to take instruction, given orders you must obey on how to obey. (To soften the impression, this obedience is now called "compliance," and it is supposed to be not to the ones giving commands but to the substance of what they are referring to and talking about. One must comply with the order or nature of things, with the way things are, which is to say, done; and thinking this way masks the fact that behind the opportunity this may give you is a threat). 
The old co-operativist and socialist idea of worker self-management failed because it could only institute on autonomous pretenses a more secure version of the managed society of laborers.

The current plague should cause many of us to rethink both our ways of being and doing things together and of being alone.

Maybe with this we should rethink our practices, our forms of working and leisure. To teach oneself to not just react to the stimuli that bring to us the world and others through technological devices could be enough if all you wanted was to save your self, or mind or soul, on some Walden or holy mountain. This would instantiate the desire that pervades all of Western culture for freedom from toils and for a more leisurely way of being, as in some Sunday of life or messianic world in which the reflectiveness of a Shabbat is generalized. This of course goes far to explain the popularity of "Eastern" practices of meditation and mindfulness, typically denuded of most of their moral and ethical appurtenances, since they attractively combine this appeal to a contemplative life with a readiness to do work of whatever kind. And these opposites, rather than being divided 6:1 as in Judaism with its insistence of separations between categories and divisions between the sacred and the profane (which do not necessarily or always prevent the former from appearing somehow within the latter, though they prevented many efforts to seek the immediate, and therefore essentially psychological and private, abolition of the distinction). It remains to be noted, crucially, that:

An ethics of attending to the given in its manner of being given must open onto a politics of refusing it.

There's a fine weekday task.