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I don’t know if it’s crazy-guy germs or just bad luck, but a couple of days later I come down with a nasty cold/flu and have to call out of a few shifts. Candela is less than pleased, but because this is San Francisco, I can call out sick without fear of losing my job. If I’d been working there a little longer, I’d even have been able to call out sick without losing the day’s wages.* But the next schedule after I call out sick, I only get fifteen hours instead of my usual thirty to thirty-five.
Cutting someone’s hours is a common punishment in fast food and retail—and the subject of an important class-action suit currently in the works against McDonald’s. In 2014, the National Labor Relations Board brought seventy-eight charges against McDonald’s and some of its franchise operators for punishing workers who’d participated in Fight for $15 protests by, among other things, cutting their hours.
That puts me in good company. According to a 2015 survey of thousands of US fast-food workers by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, 79 percent had been burned on the job in the previous year—most more than once. And not everyone got off as easily as I did.
“My managers kept pushing me to work faster, and while trying to meet their demands I slipped on a wet floor, catching my arm on a hot grill,” said Brittney Berry, whose forearm was severely burned, to the point of nerve damage, at the Chicago McDonald’s where she worked. “The managers told me to put mustard on it, but I ended up having to get rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.” A third of fast-food workers surveyed had been told to treat burns with condiments like mustard or mayonnaise.
“One of my coworkers and I have to empty the grease trap without protective gear, and since we were never given the proper equipment or training, we just dump the hot grease into a plastic bag in a box of ice,” said Martisse Campbell, who works at a McDonald’s in Philly and whose hand was severely burned by boiling grease from a fryer. He was also familiar with condiment-as-salve suggestions—“Once, my coworker got badly burned, and our manager told him, ‘Put mayonnaise on it; you’ll be good.’”
what the acutal fuck????
Businesses used to accept Wanda’s inefficiencies as a necessary part of their workforce—humans sometimes need to socialize, go to the bathroom, take sick days, drive Mom to a doctor’s appointment, attend funerals, stay up until four with the baby.
But at this moment, techno-Taylorism, the decline of organized labor, automation, and the ongoing destruction of shark-cage worker protections have tipped the balance of power in the workplace way, way in favor of employers. It’s gotten so out of balance that even many workers seem to truly believe that the things that make them less efficient than sharks or robots are weaknesses—moral failings, like original sin.
So millions of people battle millennia of evolution every day, desperately trying to be something fundamentally different from what we are. And when we inevitably fail, we torture ourselves with guilt over not being born a shark, or at least able to plausibly imitate one.
Fuck that. You’re not a shark. You’re a human being. It doesn’t make you a bad person if your family and friends and dignity are more important to you than some job. That makes you normal. The true outliers are the Taylors, the Fords, the Bezoses, the Ayns—people whose work is their life and life is their work. People who thrive alone in the cold ocean. People who can’t or won’t understand that almost all other humans have very different values, needs, and priorities. People with massive control over how stressful our day-to-day existence is.
So why is America so crazy? It’s the inescapable chronic stress built into the way we work and live. It’s the insane idea that an honest day’s work means suppressing your humanity, dignity, family, and other nonwork priorities in exchange for low wages that make home life constantly stressful, too. Is it surprising that Americans have started exhibiting unhelpful physical, mental, and social adaptations to chronic stress en masse? Our bodies believe that this is the apocalypse.
And on top of that, people with power seem totally blind to how dire life has gotten for much of the country. The state of the union is always strong. GDP is up. Unemployment is low. Everything’s fine. They’re so insulated from the real world that they don’t or can’t understand that, for most people, our current system is obviously broken. That’s why Make America Great Again caught on while Clinton’s counter that America Is Already Great didn’t—people aren’t stupid. They know something isn’t right.
All the rat has to do is climb the wall to the other side and she’ll be free. Rats B and C will figure this out and clamber over to the other side pretty quickly; so will any random sewer rat.
But Rat A’s entire life has been nothing but unpredictable, inescapable suffering, and it’s crippled her capacity to imagine anything better. So Rat A will just sit there getting electrocuted forever, even when relief is a short climb away. It’s a phenomenon called “learned helplessness.”
Rat A is so tragic because her despair makes sense. All evidence in her life so far supports her idea that everything just sucks, forever, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. When she assures you that climbing the wall is a waste of energy, she’s genuinely trying to save you the pain she knows firsthand.
Alissa Rosenbaum had lived her short life oblivious to the existence of workers and peasants except as shadowy apparitions, specters of irrationality, or properly subordinated social inferiors. Then oh my god: there they were in the Winter Palace and at her door, behaving as equals and asserting their collective will with the backing of state power. In the midst of food and housing shortages, her family lost their privileged access to resources. The family home was seized and her father’s pharmacy was nationalized. She had no framework for understanding what was happening other than the raw experience of loss. She was not aware of the injustices that motivated the Bolsheviks or the workers and peasants who supported them. She had no access to their aspirations, fantasies, and desires. All Alissa saw was resentment, envy, theft, bullying, and the exercise of illegitimate power by people who did not deserve it and could not exercise it rationally. She rewrote the vast canvas of social, economic, and political conflict underlying the Bolshevik revolution—between Russians and non-Russians, poor peasants and landowning kulaks, workers and bosses, nationalists and internationalists, Christians and Muslims, Marxists and populists—into a stark melodramatic clash between worthy individuals and the mob. Not a surprising reductive analysis for a sheltered and privileged twelve-year-old caught in the swirl of overwhelming events. But she stuck to it and elaborated it for the rest of her life.
sounds fair tbh
Andrei Taganov is a notable exception. Andrei is the son of a factory owner and a true-believing communist who served with Leon Trotsky in the Red Army during the civil war. He is consistently principled, unlike his comrades. He also bears the marks of the superior individual of Ayn Rand’s fictional universe. In her notes on his character in her journal, she writes:
Dominant trait: a born individualist who never discovered it. . . . He has an iron will and unconquerable strength. . . . He has an iron devotion to his ideals, the devotion of a medieval martyr. Capable of anything, any cruelty, if he is convinced that his aim needs it. Cruelty for the cause is, to him, a victory over himself; it gives him the sense of doing his duty against his sentiments. . . . The taste, manners, and tact of an aristocrat, but not conventional manners, just the poise and dignity of a man with inborn good judgement. . . . One of the few people who is absolutely untouched by flattery, admiration, or any form of other people’s opinion. Not because of proud disdain, but because of a natural indifference to it. Subconsciously he knows his superiority and does not need anyone’s endorsement.
not sure what to do with this, but interesting
Ayn Rand arrived on the scene in Hollywood without any clear understanding of the mode of business or the politics of representation developing there. Her initial astounding successes, dependent in part on her ability to assimilate as white, felt to her like pure individual achievement. Then she quickly ran into trouble that she could not comprehend. She arrived as Cecil B. DeMille’s adoring fan, but later dismissed him as a “box office chaser”—a dismissal signaling her failure to grasp the nature of the movies as an industry, where the motor powering profits was precisely box office chasing.
lol
This belief in the inherent moral as well as technological inferiority of “primitive” societies shaped her response to the concern of a Native American cadet at West Point in 1974. The cadet asked her how she squared her beliefs with the historical record of dispossession and extermination of American Indians. She replied that the Indians had had the land for five thousand years and had done nothing with it, saying further that “it is always going to transpire that when a superior technological culture meets up with an inferior one, the superior will prevail.”
whew
Most days I did the same things. Go out for eggs and coffee, walk aimlessly through the exquisite cobbled streets or down to the promenade to gaze at the East River, pushing each day a little further until I reached the park at Dumbo, where on Sundays you’d see the Puerto Rican wedding couples come to have their photos taken, the girls in enormous sculptural lime-green and fuchsia dresses that made everything else look tired and staid. Manhattan across the water, the glittering towers. I was working, but I didn’t have anything like enough to do, and the bad times came in the evenings, when I went back to my room, sat on the couch and watched the world outside me going on through glass, a light bulb at a time.
I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about wearing a stained or threadbare piece of clothing. I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished. If I could have put what I was feeling into words, the words would have been an infant’s wail: I don’t want to be alone. I want someone to want me. I’m lonely. I’m scared. I need to be loved, to be touched, to be held. It was the sensation of need that frightened me the most, as if I’d lifted the lid on an unappeasable abyss. I stopped eating very much and my hair fell out and lay noticeably on the wooden floor, adding to my disquiet.
I’d been lonely before, but never like this. Loneliness had waxed in childhood, and waned in the more social years that followed. I’d lived by myself since my mid-twenties, often in relationships but sometimes not. Mostly I liked the solitude, or, when I didn’t, felt fairly certain I’d sooner or later drift into another liaison, another love. The revelation of loneliness, the omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that I was in a state of lack, that I didn’t have what people were supposed to, and that this was down to some grave and no doubt externally unmistakable failing in my person: all this had quickened lately, the unwelcome consequence of being so summarily dismissed. I don’t suppose it was unrelated, either, to the fact that I was keeling towards the midpoint of my thirties, an age at which female aloneness is no longer socially sanctioned and carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure.
After Fromm-Reichmann’s death, other psychologists slowly began to turn their attention to the subject. In 1975, the social scientist Robert Weiss edited a seminal study, Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation. He too opened by acknowledging the subject’s neglect, noting wryly that loneliness is more often commented on by songwriters than social scientists. He felt that in addition to being unnerving in its own right – he writes of it as something that ‘possessed’ people, that is ‘peculiarly insistent’; ‘an almost eerie affliction of the spirits’ – loneliness inhibits empathy because it induces in its wake a kind of self-protective amnesia, so that when a person is no longer lonely they struggle to remember what the condition is like.
If they had earlier been lonely, they now have no access to the self that experienced the loneliness; furthermore, they very likely prefer that things remain that way. In consequence they are likely to respond to those who are currently lonely with absence of understanding and perhaps irritation.