The workplace as a place of power can also be a place of control. Control is destructive because it reduces your own independence and autonomy. You are placed back in an infantile role where you are dealing with an authority figure. Because of our untransfigured relationship to our parents, we sometimes turn authority figures into giants. There is a crucial distinction here between power and authority. When you are awake to the integrity of your inner power, then you are your own authority. The word
When you are being controlled, you are treated as an object rather than as a subject. Often people in power have an uncanny instinct at working the system against you. I know a millionaire who made his money in the clothes trade. The women working for him were poorly paid. Every so often, he would sense the tension building up among them. One day he turned the radio on really loud. Then all the workers began to complain. He watched the aggression building up until finally a group came to him and asked that the volume be lowered. He refused. They became more militant and threatened to go on strike. He insisted on keeping the volume loud. When they were almost out on the street, he lowered the volume. His strategy was to let them have the impression that they had the power. Then they returned to work, feeling they had won a victory over the boss, even though he had staged the conflict from the very beginning. This happened forty years ago. In the modern workplace, unionization and the development of workers’ rights means that employers can no longer get away with such obvious manipulation. Still the work situation continues to exploit people. Management is now more subtle in its strategies of control and alienation.
The workplace can be a place of great competition. Management sometimes plays workers against each other. Consequently, when you go into work you are in solo combat with your colleague in terms of productivity. Your colleagues begin to appear as a threat. Where productivity becomes God, each individual is reduced to a function. It would be wonderful if the workplace were a place of real inspiration, with the work engaging your creativity. Your gift would be welcomed there; your contribution seen. Everyone has a special gift. Your life becomes happier when your gift can grow and come to expression in your place of work. You are freed to receive inspiration from others. Furthermore, because the gift of each person in relation to the overall work is unique, there need be no competition among the workers. This makes the workplace hospitable to the energies, rhythms, and gifts of the soul. There is no reason why every workplace could not begin to develop such creativity.
Work should not serve the owners and the employers alone. Work should also serve the workers and the community. Structures should be developed whereby workers are able to share in the profits. The entry of imagination and the awakening of soul demand that work be understood as contributing to the creativity and improvement of the larger community. A firm or corporation that has large profits should assist and support the poor and the underprivileged. To create optimal conditions of work should become a priority. Furthermore, awkward but honest questions should be engaged. Work that creates products that endanger people or nature should be critiqued and changed.
One of the most powerful and prophetic analysts of work was Karl Marx. He showed how work can alienate a person from his or her nature and potential. Certain work can dull and darken human presence. In our century, some of the most prophetic, trenchant, and illuminating critical thought has come from this tradition. The school of critical theory has delivered a penetrating evaluation of industrial society. It has revealed that history and society internally influence the structure of human identity. The nature of work and consumerism diminish and oppress the self. Critical theory has made a great contribution to the recovery of soul by identifying the subtlety and pervasiveness of these alienating forces. It cuts through the colorful but fictitious surface image that conceals the quiet suffocation of individuality.
