Labor For Necessity, Create For God

As my medical leave nears its end, I have been thinking about the nature of work and its relationship to truth under economic constraint.

Somewhere deep within my soul feels that the human spirit needs labor in its life, and, even though I can only feel this as intuition rather than crystallized fact, this statement feels orientated towards truth as I record it.

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature[a] God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;

rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature[b] of a servant, being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!

Philippians 2:1-8 New International Version

The destruction of the self extends beyond just our "relationships with one another", for only in emptying ourselves in a similar manner to Jesus can we become permeable towards truth. God himself is truth. By placing our egos on a likened cross, thinking becomes a spiritual act that reaches towards God. Truth has a structure: the only way to intuit this structure is to purify the lens which we inherited from this world.

The thought I keep circling regarding my labor is that I don't want to confuse necessity of economics with truth.

The human consciousness, and consciousness in general, is one of the most miraculous gifts that was bestowed onto life. Inside the interiority of each man and woman is its own cosmos of suffering, anguish, hope, and love; it is not an exaggeration to say that each human constructs their own world within our shared world. To be a living thing with such interiority is such a fragile and transcendent thing that inspires both trembling awe and protective precaution. Any output that touches another human being has the chance to alter their interiority, and this is why any generative act is a moral act.

Free markets have their own theory of the good, which is to say that free markets dynamically determine what generative outputs are economically valuable. The value of what a software company produces is determined by that company's profit, which is its measurable performance in the free market. As such, we value profitable companies more than non-profitable companies.

The siren's call for profits penetrates even the lowest ranks of a collective structure like corporations or institutions. In the time of ancient Greece, the only way for a ship to reach its intended destination was through synchronized rowing of the lowest ranks, those who handled the oars. The success of the collective depends on each individual part in the system rowing towards the same destination.

This manifests in modern software companies as software developers inheriting patterns and ideaology that align their output towards the collective good of the free market. We must imagine that time to deliver products is critical for competing in a free market, and so we see object orientated programming across almost every company because it is easier to teach to new engineers, easier to onboard onto object orientated codebases, and easier to intuit. Functional programming is much more truthful of reality than object orientated programming, but in corporate software development 'less is more.'

In the case of academic philosophy departments, history of philosophy and bookkeeping is much more valuable than original contribution. There was a thoughtful and articulate paper in the European Journal of Philosophy which essentially clarified: "X person said this, Y person interpreted that incorrectly compared to Z person." This was the work of a professor, and indeed it was thoughtful. However, it does not progress human understanding of the morality of relationships. In the age of Plotinus, many people who claimed to be philosophers used the title to signify prestiege, accumulate students, and earn income. In the modern era, most people who claim to be philosophers are children playing with language games that contribute to safe literature. This is why there have hardly been any philosophers in the original sense of the word across human history.

All systems, and necessarily the workers within those systems, orient themselves towards self-preservation under some given constraint. There exists hardly any systems in the 21st century orientated towards truth and God, and very possibly there exists no such systems.

I can't help but reflect on this and its implications in what I do for work, and I think the only morally honest action would be to step away from generative work as my primary source of income. There is something inexplicably painful, when I remove the barriers that permit unconscious living, when I realize that I am a vector in a great plague being rewarded and spreading ideaology shaped by market forces instead of the pursuit of truth.

It is much more honest to create discrete parts and object as a machinist, or to fix pipes as a plumber, and in Spinoza's case grinding lenses, than it is to partake in generative work within a system. The former holds no implicit premises: either something exists and works or it doesn't. The latter has the possibility to affect the interiority of individuals and thus holds much more latent moral harm. Structural necessities make this an inevitability rather than a possibility.

I can only believe that generative work can only be moral outside of institutions.

In other words: labor for necessity, create for God.