Spinoza and the Unrest of Capitalism

In previous essays, I have explored in some detail how the dread of a pink slip in contemporary capitalist society exposes not only the anguish of anticipating financial hazards after losing a job, but also the existential self-doubts of losing the status that comes with having a “respectable” occupation. These vulnerabilities, however, are often accompanied by a profound ontological disorientation that suddenly comes to light when, except perhaps for the “fortunate few” who love their work so much that they never work a day in their life, we reckon with the anomie in which we have been living by equating freedom and happiness with the size of our bank account.

To be sure, we all need to pay the bills, and we should all learn how to manage our finances to ensure that we can weather the storms of life and enjoy some of the comforts that life in a capitalist society has been known to offer. But if we are to take seriously the cost-benefit mindset of homo economicus, the reified handmaiden of capitalism, then we would be remiss to ignore the costly bad faith of occupational choices that turn a being-for-itself into a being-in-itself. Or, in other words, how surviving the selective pressures of capitalism empties the mind and soul of the self-assurance and optimism that we once cherished in our youth that our thoughts and actions would be those of an authentic and autonomous self that feels at home in the world.

In all the hustle and bustle of life in a dynamic and disruptive capitalist economy, serenity of the soul is not something that can be bought and sold, no matter how many billions of dollars the self-help industry filches from the pockets of unsettled souls exiled in this land of heteronomy. Aplomb is a byproduct of internal harmony that comes with mature reflection and reconciliation, if only we can learn how to harvest this perspective from the gift of reason with which we have been endowed by nature. But this is undoubtedly hard, if not impossible, to do when reason itself has been eclipsed or, rather, stripped of its full powers of perspicacity by the distractions of trying to survive in a world of fetishized technology and unbridled commerce. Then, there is the daily grind of making the donuts, nine-to-five cubicle life, graveyard shifts, or cacophonous commutes to stifling corporate beehives where well-paid, imperious executives and managers regulate the rules and routines of our working lives to serve the bottom line. And when we spend our time worrying about a dressing down from the boss, we do not spend our time interrogating whether the boss is berating us with a deserved comeuppance or infantilizing us into meek submission. We live a life of perpetual unrest in which the only way to avoid exile from society is to be exiled from ourselves.