Without Task or Purpose

• Published in: Commonweal Vol. 151; no. 7; pp. 17 - 19
• Main Author: Corbin, Ian Marcus
• Format: Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Commonweal Foundation 01.07.2024
• Subjects: Employment; Human agency; Loneliness; Social life & customs; Society; United States > US
• ISSN: 0010-3330; 2163-3797

[...]if this prevailing framework is inadequate, we still need to understand what it is that we all seem to want-or, rather, need-and how to get it. Since we know that the mere presence of others is not the opposite of loneliness, then what is? The human species has developed in contexts of shared agency, from families cooperating to find food and protect their young, to religious communities collectively pursuing holiness and good works, to tribes pursuing the directives of their local shaman via ceremony or warfare, even to criminal gangs cooperating to defeat their rivals. Full human agency requires both "task and purpose," as the U.S. military puts it: I need to have in mind a purpose of deep-ideally ultimate-importance to me, and I need to have tasks before me that I have the power to take on and that move me in a meaningful way toward my purpose. Management science was founded in the early twentieth century by the theorist Frederick W. Taylor with the specific goal of eliminating as much know-how, judgment, and decision-making power as possible from the jobs of factory workers, who in an earlier era might have been craftsmen exercising creativity and taste in the production of useful goods. For many Americans, home ownership- the main engine of wealth accumulation-seems forever out of reach, as real estate is snapped up by private equity and baby-boomer homeowners cling to houses far too large for them and block the construction of new housing in their communities.