What’s the first word coming to mind when you hear conscientious? Though it might be objector (an interesting topic for another day), in this post I’m focusing on conscientious workers and why, as a concept, it’s highly revealing of the rapid societal transformation we’re experiencing.
Inspiration for this post came from a remarkable interview the French-Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis gave in 1991. Castoriadis is not very well known in the Anglophone world – he wrote in French – but his societal analyses are remarkably prescient. If you haven’t done so, take a look at my post on the collapse of criteria – based on this very interview I’ll be examining today, too.
In a nutshell, Castoriadis makes an intriguing argument regarding conscientious workers as a dying breed. According to him, to work conscientiously is meaningless in capitalism from a systemic point of view. Capitalism relies on conscientious workers, but does not produce them; they are remnants of older societies.
It goes without saying that the repercussions are monumental – and dystopian.
