I have done only a few jobs in my life, being on a regular payroll. Something always felt odd to me about jobs. Filled with rites and rituals, they never seemed to care for what I was hired for. When I was in the tech world they didn't care about my value in coding and when I made a brief stint as a faculty they wanted me to do everything but teach.
In the chapter 'How to Legally Own another person' from Skin in the Game, Nassim Taleb deconstructs the need of businesses to have employees and covers through time, what exactly is of value to a company in having someone on their regular payroll. The short one word answer is 'Dependability' not skills or value exchange.
Free people are by nature not dependable for institutions, they incline towards questioning and are opportunistic. He provides the example of Gyrovagues, non-institutionalized wandering monks who kept their needs always below their means and in doing so were extremely hard to be subjugated by the Church system. Cut, a few centuries later, to the modern day 'Company Person' who is constantly owned not just by the company he works for but also by the idea that he needs to be 'employable' in an institution.
An interesting analogy that Taleb gives is that of Wolf and Dogs.
"Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you strong evidence of submission. Evidence of submission is displayed by the employee's going through years depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, his ritualistic and punctual arrival at an office, his denying himself his own schedule, and his not having beaten up anyone on the way back home after a bad day. He is an obedient, housebroken dog." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game)
While it might sound harsh, the comparison is not without its parallels. Just like humans domesticated wolves to be dogs over long periods of time, so have institutions domesticated the wild spirit of humans to that of the modern day employee.
The process of domestication is fueled by the temptations of comfort. Or as Kahlil Gibran says in The Prophet "Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral"
As Taleb notes "The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status"
The animation short film 'The Employment' beautifully captures the essence of what Taleb puts across.
But being a wolf, and in the wild means risk. The very risk that the employee is so averse to taking that he is willing to enslave himself. The gains are extremely high, but so are the downsides. Taleb reminds us through the story of the wild-ass, that "Freedom entails risk - real skin in the game. Freedom is never free."
The Gyrovagues are extinct, having been outlawed multiple times by organized religion who kept its institutional power through comforts and subjugation of freedom.
Wolves still exist though, most times outside of jobs, but sometimes in them too.
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