Management without thinking: American business practices from customer service through therapy to policing

What is wrong with American business practices, especially as far as customer relations are concerned, is partly explained by the destruction of our educational system, which has replaced thinking as an experimental work done through language, and that combination of poetic/rhetorical associations and logical argument that join in the writing-as-attempt-to-think with respect to a problem that is the "essay" (attempt) as Montaigne first defined it, -- this has been replaced by the recall, or repetition, of information as "fact" in the multiple choice exam. 

Our therapeutic practices, designed for a nation where "mental illness" partly means the excludability from public and meaningful life of individuals who appear deviant in relation to the normality prescribed by some set of tasks, but for that very reason partly also names a universal condition, fit this also, as they are about the self-representation of dysfunctional ideation, which is then subject to techniques of self-management aimed at contentment. Invariably marketed as ‘evidence-based’, this means that it is shown to ‘work’ according to the norms of contented adjustment and functionality of behaviors that supposedly drive both results and needs here. Therapies and psychiatric social control treatments are attempts to manage a capitalism in permanent crisis. If therapies are instrumental for some purpose, the good life targeted is not one of a freely productive use of the mind’s capacities, as in art, but more of managed impotentiality, as is needed to be a compliant worker and consumer/debtor.
Unlike psychoanalysis, which like science, art, and philosophy or "theory" at their best (theory thinks experience, of a life or through an artwork, history, or problem, in order to arrive at the best or most correct or useful of thinking, and it stops short of implementing the results and realizing itself in action, at which point it calls only for justification and no longer experimentation/invention and thinking), -- unlike psychoanalysis, "therapy" is not an exploration of a (particular) mind in its partly open, futural, and indeterminate character. The therapist knows and implements or enforces, puts into force and act through will and determination, the "correct" way to "think" about, that is, theorize, according to the dogma (right belief) about what gives itself to be understood and thought and how it must be (there may be sanctions for noncompliance or failure here).

How comforting it must be to know that the most complex apparatus in the known universe, and by far, the human brain/mind or faculty of thinking and imagining, is so readily reducible to given tasks the performance of which is so rudimentary and simple. This reassuring knowledge must be lost on some few of the many comparatively very well-educated professional workers who come to this country to study, usually in the scientific and technological fields that so drive our economy, often through military funding, and competing against Americans who either don’t how to think very creatively or with much rigor or care, or manage to learn skills of that kind in fields of study that are buttressed by lifetime debt peonage to the same kinds of financial interests that control all needs as consumer goods, including our health care system, and who lives or dies, and who works and lives in some intellectual freedom and who is systematically bullied and cajoled into understanding that there is no such thing, except as a cruel joke.

That many poorer people die from health crises that are statistically much smaller and more containable than comparable ones in the past is little comfort to them and their loved ones, but is also, sadly, one of the lesser fallouts of a society where everything is for sale but not very interesting to see, hear, read, or be much engaged with.

But who told you could do something interesting? Shut up, you lazy bums, and remember, you must gather your own straw for the brickworks; shut up already, stop thinking, mind your business, and get back to work. It’s for your own good, or freedom, chants the kapo under his or her breath while stroking their baton.

The possible need for therapy is latent in every business conversation with a presumptively lacking outsider to the operations to be managed, which is what consumers are now mostly reduced to. The customer is no longer right, in directed what we should offer him and how, but is a problem to be managed. Psychology replaces reason when this management cannot be democratic. For like workers, consumers, who are often also debtors, are to be managed. They are the objects of opportunities and threats, as in business management’s SWOT analysis. The moment a negativity that the manager cannot immediately control becomes visible, emotions, sympathy for them, recognition of impotentiality and lack, and so the need for correctional treatment by a therapy that rescues, saves, cures, or simply treats and manages, and keeps in control, are in play. 

Companies that one must deal with are stratified such that richer people get help from people who know how to think and allow them to. While poorer people only get orders and are expected to obey them. The customer service rep who is instructed to tell people this or that memorized script, or who ad libs something pretty similar, which often sounds like they are reading a script, they may have gone to an American high school. This is why if I object that they are not answering my question, they will insist that they are. 

There is a difference at work in all this, maybe even a competition or conflict of sorts, between different ideas of what is the use of language or thinking. This is why I think theory in our time best joins Marxist and Heideggerian themes. The still dominant empiricist, pragmatist, and Kantian schemes are bankrupt, and the proof is that all of them blindly and sometimes enthusiastically support a state apparatus and its normal use of terror, sometimes thought engaged for progressive ends, which is the substance of my quarrel with many liberals who think only or mostly about gender and race, a state that is essentially about controlling people in the interest perhaps also of the good or justice or the right that might must always want to be accompanied by, but in the interest really of big capital. As Marxists have long known, liberalism leads to fascism, in part because at the outset it is not very different. They have the same bottom line, which always takes one or both of two forms: work and pay, or obey the experts who are in authority. The Cold War institutionalized the false opposition between liberty through minimal government and managed provision of social goods that still drive ideologically, though not strategically, the variant thinking of at least classical conservatives (those who believe, as many once did, in constitutional government and not just rule by will and force) and those liberals who want to cater the poor, though, certainly, without empowering them in a way beyond the systems of management that they in their professional competence administer. In fact, progressives and liberals like power or domination; they want more of it for their benefit, or to be in the act of exercising it. Any left-liberal who in the morning admires Lenin for organizing a revolution might at the end of the day dream only of asking our militarized police, who treat poor neighborhoods like foreign countries full of presumed enemy combatants, to bone up on King and Malcolm at lunchtime, the better to harass and punish presumed deviants from liberal norms whose viral evil is prejudice, and not or not only poor minorities who merely commit blatant violent or property crimes. Equally moralistic, the two sides here will merely differ over the assignment of roles between perpetrator and victim, hatred of fathers or of sons (or daughters who, more often than not, rebel confrontationally like sons), resentment of the powerful or of the powerless. There is in this a topic that often divides left-liberals on race lines, though it certainly does not reduce to that. (“Black authoritarianism” and white and middle-class hyper-liberalism, two things that, race aside, are partly mirror images of each other. The historical roots of this problem are in, first, the fact that the existence of slavery in a society whose political conscience was formed by a liberal anti-republicanism (against monarchy, and constituting members of the polity as citizens rather than merely subjects), which meant that extreme ideas of authority and liberty existed in some cases side by side and in ‘abstract negations’ of the one by the other. And secondly, of course, that the defeat of post-slavery Reconstruction meant that the achieved ‘revolutionary’ character of the new regime linked the achieved liberty and democratic participation of slaves to the more purely industrial and finance capitalism of the North, and the continuance of this system in lieu of a workers’ revolution meant that racism would be opposed not against but through the state and its coercion, and opposed not as a social structure but an attitude. The above-mentioned divide and all that is related to it is a topic that must be thought and confronted if it is to cease being an obstacle for the left because of the way it divides us. Indeed, this is nothing other than the very way in which leftists proper divide from capitalist liberals, whose discourse has continually driven that of the liberal left in the absence of a popular democratic party that is explicitly socialist and therefore able to present ideas of a post-capitalist world that is so much freer, if only as a horizon, which, in defining them, opens up an otherwise nonexistent space, or deeply problematic one (whose effects include that left-wing academics tend to take centrist positions on practical matters affecting them, though this may change when they recognize themselves as severely exploited and unemployed).

The left thinks authoritarianism is a problem, and thinks it is rooted more in social systems than individual psychology and deviance. Conservatives and liberals sometimes do also, but they don’t usually have more than a superficial analysis of it. And liberal-leftists or progressives do not think it a problem at all. That is a problem. If the socialist left does not address it, then no one will politically, and no one will in a systematic and credible way. Historically, the left divided on this too, of course, as in Luxembourg versus Lenin, or Italian Communism versus the Soviet kind. Today, weakly but unmistakeable, the international anti-/post- capitalist left is reconstituting itself, and in very changed circumstances from those of 1968, or 1956, or even 1989. Certainly, the intellectual resources exist today for solving problems that conditions then did not allow, and those today might.

Enforcers do not think; they merely know. They have a certainty that ultimately reveals itself as based on how it shows itself, through the fist.  Managers of productive organizations whether driven by greed or ideology have a tendency to want to enforce norms having to do with property and necessity (of which most of our moral categories, especially when they also drive a politics, are forms). In this context, I sometimes think that the most important thing for us to do is to affirm that this system is not necessary, and a better life is in fact possible. You could even think this a kind of religious faith formulated, properly, in political terms. It is that, and more.