{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

Even though the forums are gone, it's good to see the original whywork.org site is still available since there are many links to keen insights.

For example, What is a wage slave?"

I know this question has the potential of P-I-S-S-ing people off.

To put it into context, a note from Dead End:

2013.03.14

Reading Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle, recently translated – the UNCENSORED CANONICAL TEXT – is proving to be a spiritual experience for me, forcing me to acknowledge that my “troubles” have not destroyed me, but have actually connected me to the people I most identify with: the downtrodden.

downtrodden – tyrannized over; oppressed: the downtrodden plebeians of ancient Rome.

One of my favorite characters is a very minor one, Uncle Avenir (uncle of Innokenty Artemievich Volodin). He is a proud elderly peasant who hates the proletariat. He refers to them as the leading class. He says peasants commune with the soil, with nature, and that intellectuals are engaged in the noble work of thinking. The proles spend all their lives within dead walls making dead things with dead machines. How can they ever learn anything?

Uncle Avenir says that if you have a position to hold down, you have to truckle … and you have to be dishonest.

“I could not even stand being a librarian, let alone a teacher.”

Innokenty asks, “What’s so hard about a librarian’s job?”

Uncle Avenir replies, “Just go and try it. You have to trash good books and praise bad ones. You have to mislead undeveloped minds.”

What job can be done with a clear conscience? Certainly not police, soldier, guard, judge, or prosecutor. What does it mean to “truckle”? To truckle means to fawn, boot-lick, ass-lick, kiss-ass, brown-nose, to cower, to cringe, to grovel, kow-tow, knuckle under, succumb, follow, tag, tail. In general, to be an obedient dog, to follow orders. A truckler is a sycophant, what Mom calls a Yes Man. She does have some understanding of my rebellious spirit. She understands that I am not a Company Man. I am not a Team Player. I guess I am the polar opposite of a corporate drone. May I coin the term “anticorp”? I am an anticorp, an anticog in the Machine Age.