Today I'm
going to talk about work. And the
question I want to ask and answer is this: "Why do we work?" Why do we drag ourselves out of bed every morning instead of living our lives just filled with bouncing from one TED-like
adventure to another?
(Laughter)
You may be asking yourselves that very question. Now, I know of course, we have to make a living, but nobody in this room thinks that that's the
answer to the question, "Why
do we work?" For folks
in this room, the work we do is challenging, it's engaging, it's stimulating, it's meaningful. And if we're lucky, it might even be important.
So, we wouldn't work if we didn't get paid, but that's not why we do what we do. And in general, I think we think that material rewards are a
pretty bad reason for doing
the work that we do. When we
say of somebody that he's "in it for the money," we are not just being descriptive.
(Laughter)
Now, I think this is totally obvious, but the very obviousness of it raises what is for
me an incredibly profound
question. Why, if this is so
obvious, why is it that for the
overwhelming majority of people on the planet, the work they do has none of the characteristics that get us up and out of bed and off to the
office every morning? How is it
that we allow the majority of people on the planet to do work that is monotonous, meaningless and
soul-deadening? Why is it
that as capitalism developed,
it
created a mode of production, of goods and services, in which all the nonmaterial satisfactions that
might come from work were eliminated? Workers who do this kind of work, whether they do it in factories, in call centers, or in fulfillment warehouses, do it for pay. There is certainly no other earthly reason to do
what they do except for pay.
So the question is, "Why?" And here's the answer: the answer is technology. Now, I know, I know -- yeah, yeah, yeah, technology, automation screws
people, blah blah -- that's
not what I mean. I'm not
talking about the kind of technology that has enveloped our lives, and that people
come to TED to hear about. I'm not
talking about the technology of things, profound though that is. I'm talking about another technology. I'm talking about the technology of ideas. I call it, "idea technology" -- how clever of me.
(Laughter)
In addition to creating things, science creates
ideas. Science creates ways of
understanding. And in the social
sciences, the ways of
understanding that get created are ways of understanding ourselves. And they have an enormous influence on how we
think, what we aspire to, and how
we act.
If you think your poverty is God's will, you pray. If you think your poverty is the result of your
own inadequacy, you
shrink into despair. And if
you think your poverty is the result of oppression and domination, then you rise up in revolt. Whether your response to poverty is resignation
or revolution, depends on how you
understand the sources of your poverty. This is the role that ideas play in shaping us as
human beings, and this is why idea
technology may be the most profoundly important technology that science gives us.
And there's something special about idea
technology, that makes it different
from the technology of things. With things, if the technology sucks, it just vanishes, right? Bad technology disappears. With ideas -- false ideas about human beings will not go away if people believe that they're true. Because if people believe that they're true, they create ways of living and institutions that are consistent with these very false ideas.
And that's how the industrial revolution created
a factory system in
which there was really nothing you could possibly get out of your day's work, except for the pay at the end of the day. Because the father -- one of the fathers of the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith -- was convinced that human beings were by their
very natures lazy, and
wouldn't do anything unless you made it worth their while, and the way you made it worth their while was by incentivizing, by giving them rewards. That was the only reason anyone ever did anything. So we created a factory system consistent with
that false view of human nature. But once that system of production was in place, there was really no other way for people to
operate, except in a way that was
consistent with Adam Smith's vision. So the work example is merely an example of how false ideas can create a circumstance that ends up making them true.
It is not true that you "just can't get good help anymore." It is true that you "can't get good help anymore" when you give people work to do that is demeaning
and soulless. And interestingly
enough, Adam Smith -- the
same guy who gave us this incredible invention of mass production, and division of labor -- understood this. He said, of people who worked in assembly lines, of men who worked in assembly lines, he says: "He generally becomes as stupid as it is
possible for a human being to become." Now, notice the word here is "become." "He generally becomes as stupid as it is possible
for a human being to become." Whether he intended it or not, what Adam Smith
was telling us there, is that
the very shape of the institution within which people work creates people who are fitted to the demands of
that institution and
deprives people of the opportunity to derive the kinds of satisfactions from their
work that we take for granted.
The thing about science -- natural science -- is that we can spin fantastic theories about the
cosmos, and have complete
confidence that the cosmos is
completely indifferent to our theories. It's going to work the same damn way no matter what theories we have about the cosmos. But we do have to worry about the theories we
have of human nature, because
human nature will be changed by the theories we have that are designed to explain and help us
understand human beings.
The distinguished anthropologist, Clifford
Geertz, said, years ago, that
human beings are the "unfinished animals." And what he meant by that was that it is only
human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society in
which people live. That
human nature, that is to say our human nature, is much more created than it is discovered. We design human nature by designing the institutions within which people
live and work.
And so you people -- pretty much the closest I ever get to being with
masters of the universe -- you
people should be asking yourself a question, as you go back home to run your organizations. Just what kind of human nature do you want to help
design?
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thanks.
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