Does Work Make Us Free?

• Main Authors: Lorenzo Toresini, Giorgio Vallazza
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universitatea "Stefan cel Mare" Suceava 2012-12-01
• Series: Annals of Philosophy, Social and Human Disciplines
• Subjects: Magic; Reason; Unreason; Kant; Work; Labour; Legislation; Liberation; Organic; Nazism; Others; Slavery; CEFEC.
• Online Access: http://www.apshus.usv.ro/arhiva/2012II/002.%20pp.%2025-31.pdf

The origins of Man are in Magic Thought. The evolution of Human Beings over six million years is in fact the history of the rationalization of Magic Thought. The goal was the political control of masses through the fundamental mechanism of the feeling of guilt. Here we can find the roots and the basis of capitalism. The division of labour and the protestant spirit. The name “Unreason” was applied to Magic Thought as a part of this process. In the past, Reason gave psychiatry the mandate of rationalizing Unreason. Each of us is a Russian doll, in which each internal self represents all of our previous ages. Our society keeps magic thought confined to infancy. But reason is like a thin film which surrounds all the magmatic internal area of Unreason and the original Magic Thought. This film gets torn frequently and easily. Thus some people hear the voices of both living and inanimate beings, coming out of the wind or of streams in forests. And then Reason says that this is an illness – mental illness. Psychiatry acts as carrier of the “social mandate of control”. This is the mandate on behalf of Reason for Unreason to be rationalized. The truth is simply that what the collective mind, psychiatrists and justice call Unreason or Madness is actually other people’s Reason. From Immanuel Kant onwards, we know that the world is constructed by the self. We don’t know reality, which, by extraordinary intuition, he called “the thing in itself”. In fact, he was the first to understand psychosis. However, as the Ey rightly says, in this world of Reason the individual subject builds his own world through collaboration and in tune with others. But building the world also means building the self. Work is a form of slavery and a form of dependence. An addictive activity which hurts us and at the same time makes us happy. Work is simply a need for everybody. A need but also a right. This is one of the roles of States, which they delegate to the so-called free private initiative. In capitalism, which does not guarantee work for everybody, the state and society as a whole have simply given up on one of their responsibilities. Work makes us free to the extent to which it brings about integration. At the end of the day integration is the only true therapeutic practice. Psychiatry derives from the tradition of the total institution, which was invented with a single goal in mind: to exclude and repress subjectivity and diversity. From this point of view, particular damage has been caused by the distinction, made at managerial level, between the Health and Social sectors. The truth is that the real cure for mental illness, just as for any other disability, is integration. And there is no better integration than that which involves constructing the world together. As is known the phrase “work makes free” still has a sinister ring related to recent history, displayed as it still is over the entry to the Auschwitz concentration camp: “Arbeit macht frei”. This phrase, which is certainly not devoid of internal logic, was used to attempt to legitimize the horror of the camps. In fact, this logic had simply been adopted from the philosophy and practice of total psychiatric institutions. In accordance with what has been said so far, work as a therapeutic measure has no place outside a free contract with an employer, by making the most of the creative or technical abilities of each individual, which is underlined by the fact that each person is paid for what he actually produces.