Alienation and monotony

If every day is devoted to making money, the monotony of the goal inevitably makes work monotonous. If I devote each day wholeheartedly to the task immediately before me, and put all the intellectual energy I can summon into doing it well, now work suddenly blossoms with astonishing variety.

To the manager of the factory, all widgets are alike. Everything reduces to a single currency and a single goal. But to the woman making widgets, each individual widget represents a unique moment of life and a unique goal. The key to enjoying work is never to adopt the factory owner’s view toward work. As soon as you do, your days fall in a march to a single goal and your work becomes as monotonous as his.

Devotion to mammon makes our lives monotonous, because mammon is monotonous. Every dollar is the same as every other. Those who rule corporations are poor role models for workers. The best of them know this. They don’t pollute the worker’s ethic of excellent work with an ethic of mammon worship that would corrupt workers and make excellent work impossible.