"I have overcome the world."

If one merely opens ones eyes, the absurdity of the workplace, the inanity of it, is a situation-of-living characterized by insufferable temptation. And what is this temptation? Why the temptation to either conform or despair. To conform is to say, after getting a glimpse of things, “There is a good reason,” and to shut one’s eyes again and allow oneself to accept what is as what should be and ought to be. To despair is to open one’s eyes in the workplace and refuse to shut them again. To despair is to take it all in, to brace oneself against the blast of it and stand full-on into its force. At first there is courage: I am standing, my eyes are open, I am taking it in. Then there is a wrestling with the truth of what confronts you, and then, usually, there is depair. This despair is, given the context “workplace,” marxist in ideology and hostile, even angry, frustration in the impotence that, though aware, you can do nothing about it. The philosopher Michel Foucault /foo-KOH/ describes this latter option as such:

Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. This relationship of domination is no more a "relationship" than a place where it occurs is a place; and, precisely for this reason, it is fixed, throughout its history, in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations. It establishes marks of its power and engraves memories on things and even on bodies. Although there is resistance by those at the margins of these power structures, there is no escape from these structures, no possibility of leaving them to move to a different kind … those who exist at the margins, those who lie at the margins of philosophical and social power structures, can only seek to create their own histories, to define their own space, to resist the power structures merely by existing outside of them. (The [Michel] Foucault Reader. (Pantheon Books, 1984))

When one begins working as I did, at 15, one assumes that managers and other “adults” around you are appropriate to their jobs. They had a degree or had risen through the ranks so that there was a rightness that allowed them to rise above their peers. Only later, when one grows up a little, it occurs to you the naivete of this presumption.

Perhaps it is the day when you are made to answer for going to the bathroom. Or, perhaps it is the day you realize that you haven’t seen a raise in years, but your company can’t shut up about how much money it is making. It could be something as minor as realizing that the office doesn’t throw a party for your birthday, or at your child’s birth or whatever, but, amazingly enough, they are happy to use company funds to do so for management and they expect you to join in and contribute funds (a portion of your salary) toward the adulation of your betters! Business is full of a thousand little paper-cuts to the soul. And, over time, these little bloodlettings – the death of every cherished youthful idealism, of imagination and all the higher impulses of human living – they tempt. With each one you open your eyes, and there it is: do you accept the message? Do you accept the opinion of the ruling class? Or, do you despair and become a marxist? The so-called death of marxist ideology with the fall of the Soviet Union and other communist powers means nothing. It was this same class, the one acting demure at the onanistic office party, that was at the reigns of those powers. That man or woman “leading” the meeting, talking yap yap yap like they know something only because they are prettier than everyone else at the office, that’s one of those that supposedly gave it a try, right? Which is better for this class, that they profit from Marx's self-examination or that they “disprove” the whole thing and get on to the business of celebrating each other?

There is only one way of escaping these two equally unpleasant options: to take one’s value from the cross of Christ. Only the gospel of Christ can save one from being ground up between the battling gears of capitalism and marxism. Christ does not call us “consumers” or workers. He takes authority over the so-called authority structures of the world system, with its corresponding messages of value and meaning. He has already passed judgment on them and on his people, and has called one anathema and the other his children. The responsibility of the Christian, then, is to resist these messages, and to work within the invisible webs of these awful, soul-destroying relationships, as small pinpoints of hope, of value, of peace, of reconciliation, of love.