Resiliency and Self Reliance

To be resilient as an individual or as a community we must retain, nurture and in some cases recapture at least some degree of self-reliance. One of the defining characteristics of the 20^th century was “the separation of thinking from doing” and so diminishing our ability to be self-reliant. So says Matthew B. Crawford in, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.”

By mid-century, much to our chagrin in the West, sociologists were beginning to point out similarities between Soviet and Western societies. One of these was the increasing number of jobs that were being radically simplified. In both societies there was a growing separation of planning from execution. The social “machine” responsible in the Soviet Union was the state and in the West it was corporations.

Both Stalin and the Harvard MBA elite had become fans of Frederick Taylor’s work, “Principles of Scientific Management.” According to this new model, wrote Taylor, “The managers assume the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae.”

Once concentrated in this form, knowledge could then be doled out to individuals in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some “part” of a process. And, because simplified tasks require little on-going judgment or deliberation, skilled workers could be replaced with unskilled workers with lower pay.

When Henry Ford tried this new production style, workers at first felt revulsion at this devaluation of their work. By the end of 1913, if the company needed 100 new men they had to hire 963. To overcome this reluctance to degradation, Ford had to double wages for his workers – quite contrary to the new vision. But now workers became more willing to give their lives to meaningless, simplified work.

As we entered the 21^st century, most of the work available to the masses consisted of simplified tasks computers could still not do. Individual workers were not expected to “understand” or find meaning in their work – at least one rationale for part-time jobs with minimal pay and benefits.

This general milieu in which “thinking is removed from doing” has resulted in a loss of self-reliance for the many. They simply see themselves as insignificant cogs in the economic wheel. But they depend on that wheel to keep turning just to get by. Assuming that nothing can change, they are content to fill their days with deeply unsatisfying modes of work.

The tragedy is that once this wheel stops turning as predicted, such individuals are ill prepared to think their way toward self-sufficiency. And should they do so, by that time they have lost most of the traditional skills that kept their forefathers alive through difficult times.

Although the challenge is formidable, it is important that this generation finds ways to re-skill itself in order to become more self-reliant on more fronts and consequently more resilient as well.

Jack Heppner