I recently enjoyed some time in the woods of northern Idaho at Theory Underground’s R3treat. On the third night of that event, we were invited to deliver lightning talks to community members and family friends who were not familiar with TU’s work at all. It was an exercise in addressing a non-academic audience, attempting to engage them with big ideas without jargon.
My talk was called “Rewilding the Professions.” You can either read the transcript below, or watch/listen to the YouTube video of my talk. Enjoy!
Thank you everyone. Very happy to be here. Thank you to the McKerracher’s for all their hospitality and for the beautiful thing that they’re building here that we can all participate in. Alright, keep it five to seven minutes.
I sit in a lot of boring meetings, and I have a fake email job. Most of my career has been in a fake email job, call it white collar, mostly. Being in meetings, taking requests, shuffling emails around, meeting with people, following up with those people.
And people like me are paid more than workers — the people who actually do the work, the people who actually go out and interface with reality while I simply move around the information about what they’re doing.
I think that’s a problem. I am critical of professionals, even though I am one — professionals, managers, white collar folks, the college educated, all of these types, they’ve played the school game and society has given them more and more stickers. So now we’ve got the big sticker that lets you make more, make just a, just a little bit more than you need maybe.
And I was sitting in a boring meeting when I realized that there’s a slogan that perhaps captures something of what I want to do, which is “rewilding the professions,” — rewilding the professionals. But, I’m going with professions right now.
And this is relevant to people who are not professionals, to those who are blue collar, to those who are doing the real work that us with our email jobs are chattering about. Because 99% of the people in the government are not directly appointed by you. You don’t get a say in who they are. And they get a lot of say in your life though.
They get to decide how policies are implemented. They get to decide how the money gets used, and they get to decide whether your document at the DMV is acceptable or not. These are the professionals, and I think that they need to be re-wilded because a culture has become predominant amongst the professionals, a culture defined by safety, consensus, and control.
Now, professionals are very focused on what is safe and secure. They want to reduce risk as much as they can. They, they pay attention to the risk factors, and if they can control and reduce those risk factors, well then they can make everyone safer. Isn’t that wonderful? How could you possibly oppose that? You’re literally killing people if you oppose that. So, safety.
Safety, understood as the reduction of risk. Importantly, a little substitution there, but. Maybe safety is not the most important thing in the world. Let’s put a pin in that.
Consensus. The professionals are ruled by consensus. They get together and we talk. We talk about best practices. We talk about what’s working for you. We get together in our professional groups and we produce guidelines, the best practices, and we go, we are all gonna do this because these are the best practices that we’ve all determined. If you start to question the best practices, you are breaking from the consensus.
And in fact, you may even be undermining and calling into question the very discipline or the profession. Everyone who is a prof, who is a professional is very afraid of breaking the consensus. Consensus controls a lot.
Finally, we have control. Professionals are blind to their own role in society.
Professionals have a personal belief about who they are, which is that they are selfless public servants who have given up everything to serve the public on a daily basis, that they are looking out for the best interest of everyone. And how dare you get in the way.
This belief about themselves makes them very useful for those in power who would like to have more control over your life. Because the more control you have over your life, the more you can screw it up, the more control they have over your life, the more they can reduce your risk factors.
Right now the California Office of Emergency Services, um, I implement software for emergency management teams and I work with the Cal OES, is considering a proposal to track vehicles during an evacuation of an area.
Now, why would they do that? Reduce risk. Model the situation. Understand why people leave when they leave, how we can have the optimal outflow of vehicles and when do people return? When is it safe to return?
These are the things professionals think about. How can we get information about the real world? Model it to understand it, and how can we better intervene in that world?
But the process of getting information and then acting on that information involves control. You cannot have information about something that you do not control. To control, to get information about something, you have to freeze it in time and make a picture of it.
It has to stand still. You’ve gotta put a pin in the butterfly.
[Is that the end? One minute. I get. One minute. Oh sweet.]
You put a pin in the butterfly and that’s the only way you can get information about the butterfly.
Ultimately, I see professionals as useful idiots who create new vectors for control and tyranny in our society.
What makes it so difficult for professionals to realize this is that they believe that they are serving your good and that you are standing in the way of your own good. And I think all of us know that at times we do stand in the way of our own good. However, a culture of safety, consensus and control, this culture, which reigns amongst the professionals is interested in you.
And I think we need to re-wild the professionals. They have spent too much time in school. They have taken too many tests. They’ve received too many stickers to get back in touch with reality. And I think that there are some different virtues that we can cultivate. Thank you.
Thanks for reading! Just a little heads up — I’m re-doing my old website Samsara Diagnostics right now, and will be migrating much of my writing and my email database (you, my dear reader!) to this upgraded website in the near future.
I’ve gotten a bit divided by posting so much here at Substack, especially because of the discovery features which have fed me a consistent stream of subscribers. However, I’m trying to bring my work under one heading, and hopefully crafting a more central place for all of my projects to live. I do expect to continue to post in Substack Notes though, as I vastly prefer it over Twitter.
Great talk. I am in full agreement. What I think complicates this situation a bit is that it's not just a matter of controlling of people but also of controlling (more often of failing to control) corporations, billionaires and the destructive inhuman flows of capital. This has to do with the degradation of the environment, climate change, pollution, deforestation etc. but also with the destitution of a perpetually increasing economically superfluous mass of human beings. The rewilding of professionals, as I see it, would mean freeing them from their domestication by capital (as Camatte says) and truly seeking to serve humanity and the earth rather than "gain stickers".
As Foucault shows, the states safetyism, psychological and physical healthism, education etc. often has its roots in this domestication, ensuring the fitness of citizens to assist in the accumulation of capital. But I think a dedomesticated professional class can nevertheless have a significant role in at least mitigating the destruction and suffering brought about by the impersonal economic machinery for which our civilization, including such a class itself, depends on its existence.
I would also say, however, that a true rewilding of professionals, their descent from their towers to live with the hoi polloi would mean the communising of our global civilization into communities heterogeneous to that civilization. It would mean them, for example, growing food with other uneducated people. I think at the present time both approaches are needed: professional mitigation of the destruction ensuing from capitalism eating and consuming the last profitable oil reserves, and the communising of societies to open up paths towards a new earth.