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On the border and beyond/13 - There is more to life than just work and much more than consumption
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 16/04/2017

"Live!  Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.... A new Hedonism— that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to you for a season..."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The capitalist religion wants to abolish the holiday. It declared a real war against it, which is accompanied by an explosion of entertainment and leisure offers that contain nothing, or too little, of the experience of the holiday. This is another expression of the now famous 'creative destruction' of the twenty-first century capitalism, which first eliminated the holiday and then started selling goods to us trying to replace it. But it cannot, because gratuity cannot be sold or bought. And so its entertainments leave just a great emptiness in us and a great longing for the real holiday, of which mostly children and young people have the greatest need. Only the civilization that knows the different times and free spaces of gratuitousness can be a culture capable of and characterized by celebrating holidays.
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Celebrating holidays is a basic and fundamental human need for men, women, young girls and boys, the sick and the old. You cannot live long without holidays. You may possibly survive, but without holidays, individual and social life becomes sad and slowly dies away. Holiday is the relational good par excellence, you cannot celebrate alone. Perhaps there are some things we can do alone, like amusing in front of the TV, smart phones and PCs; but for celebrating a holiday others, companions, children are needed. In the Bible, the concept of holiday is deeply tied to the seventh day, the Sabbath (Saturday). In the beginning of creation, the first one to celebrate was Elohim himself, who had to arrive at the end of creation and wait for Adam to be able to celebrate. Even God needs company to celebrate. He needs the company of his creation, the earth - he needs our company. If it is true that the Sabbath is the great gift of Elohim to the earth, it is also true that the Shabbat is the gift of reciprocity that the creation returns to the creator, because it gives him a chance to rest and celebrate along with us.
In the Shabbat we can and should make merry, visit friends and relatives, pray and sing together. The Shabbat is the mother of all biblical festivals and our Sunday, because it is a remembrance-memory of creation, the Alliance, and especially of the flight across the sea. Of the deliverance from Egypt, from slavery, from forced labour in brick factories. In biblical humanism, each holiday celebrated is a new liberation, a new sea passage, a new Exodus. It is a new Passover. The God of Israel is a different God because he does not want people to work forever. The idols, however, do not know the Sabbath, they do not know gratuitousness, the holiday, they want a perfect and perpetual worship.
Capitalist worship is characterized by being a religion-idolatry with no holidays celebrated. Until the twentieth century, with all its ambivalences and shadows, work culture had been a culture still on the side of life and, in the West, the heir of Judeo-Christian humanism, because it had preserved the boundary between work and holiday. There was much work done, even too much, but free men and women did not always work. There was time for rest and celebration. The blind forces of the capital would have liked, like all empires, all workers-slaves dedicated only to the production of their 'bricks'. But politics, churches, unions have prevented it, and so they have with-held the capital inside social and moral limits. In just a few years, however, capitalism has drastically and radically changed its face, and it has become something very different. Consumption has taken the place of work at the centre of the economic and social system, and all limits and boundaries were crossed. Work has an intrinsic limitation: we do not always work because we cannot work all the time. There is life outside of work that prevents work from becoming a perpetual activity. The innate toil of work is its first boundary. Consumption, however, does not know these boundaries, because - consisting of activities of pure pleasure - it does not have an internal limit. Many, perhaps all, would like stores that are open at any hour, at any time and in any place to satisfy all needs and whims. As long as the economic culture was spelled out by work, the shops were closed because the human work behind consumption commanded it and set its limits. And it set aside the time and space for holidays, it did not want a monopoly of either time or space. The closed shutters reminded everyone that life is greater than work and consumption. What makes us indignant and protest today is not that those dealing with blast furnaces in industrial enterprises, the police, the nurses and the emergency-room physicians have to work over the Easter holidays. Their work is not an enemy of the holiday, and those who meet these holiday workers recognizes their effort and are grateful for it.
Our culture centred on consumption does not see the hidden work behind it any more, or if so, it subjects and enslaves it to the ever-hungry idol. The only sovereignty recognised by the citizens-faithful of the mono-consumerist cult is consumer sovereignty, which is seriously undermining political citizenship. Work done for the idolatrous consumption is what denies the holiday and denies work.
This is why the struggle between capitalism and the holiday is very profound and radical. Large companies and banks, for example, are trying in every way to recreate the symbolic and emotional strength of the holiday, its ability to create a sense of belonging, team spirit, a 'sense of us'. The work culture of the past century has also been created by the popular, religious and secular holidays, by marriages and baptisms. Factories and offices have used that symbolic, social and spiritual capital they were receiving free from the communities in which their employees grew up and lived. The liturgies, processions, the days remembering the great sorrows and liberations fed the soul and all the virtues of the people, who gave these to their businesses for free while they worked, donating a much larger value in return for their wages. The capitals from which the profits of the companies came were (and are) worth much more than their private capital. Together with the men and women entering the company gates, civic, religious and moral values were introduced, too. No capitalist has ever paid for these - that's where the moral root of taxes lied, too, because in the profits there was much wealth donated to businesses by communities.
The individualistic and consumerist culture of capitalism of our time is wiping out these civil and spiritual capitals. Large companies feel the lack of it, even if they do not know how to identify the underlying reasons. And so they think that a company celebration/holiday, a convention or a drink on Friday afternoon could replace the capitals formed through several centuries. The symbols of the holiday without the popular and poor truth that created them only produces new griffins and minotaurs, hybrid monsters.
It is still too early to understand that the great famine at the doors of our economy is the dramatic shortage of spiritual, moral and symbolic capital, of which the companies have nourished themselves, but which are being used up faster than oil. The economy of sole consumption lives in an eternal present, without roots and without a future. Time, however, continues to run on earth. The scars and wrinkles of those who are around and besieging the temples of consumption, attracted by the same promise and illusion, are increasingly deep and painful, they grow and fill the world. And the club of the deluded, enchanted by the elixir of eternal youth, does not want to see them but it continues to produce them. However, unlike in the Oscar Wilde novel, the portrait with sores and wrinkles is not hidden in the attic: it is always in front of us. Only our eyes and our ability to be ashamed end up in the attic, for not wanting to see the real and ugly picture of what we are becoming. When will we begin to look at the wounds on the face of those who have been discarded by consumption, and start feeling responsible?
In a culture of work, to announce the liberation it brought about, the Bible gave us the Shabbat from work. In a culture of consumption, the biblical spirit should suggest a Shabbat from consumption, in order for us to say to the idolatry of our times: "you're not god, I am not your slave." Without a consumption-Shabbat we will not find a good relationship either with work or with the holiday any more. The blessed day when we decide to free up time and a place for non-consumer goods, to have a feast, to celebrate relationships, ties and gratuitousness would be the dawn of a new civilization.
The first request that Moses made to the pharaoh was to let the people free to go to the desert for three days to celebrate Passover (Exodus 5:3), which was an ancient festival of the transhumance of the herds. The pharaoh denied that permission, because slaves cannot make merry, because celebrating a holiday is already the beginning of the time of freedom. Without merrymaking, work is always slave work. And without time for the non-consumption of goods, slavery is perfect, because since the pain and fatigue are not there, consumption appears to us as freedom and we no longer feel the need for liberation.
Although we are no longer able to see them or recognize them, there are new pharaohs behind our work to ensure perpetual consumption and they do not want to leave us free to 'walk three days in the desert'. Maybe because they fear that the sea could open up again in front of us and we would never return. 
Happy Easter!
The series 'On the Border and Beyond' ends today. We have been through some new pages written together, new discoveries, new-old dialogues and new graces. From next Sunday I will continue the commentaries on the Bible, with the prophet Jeremiah. We shall venture across the border again, begging for other words to keep walking in our tremendous and wonderful time.
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On the border and beyond/13 - There is more to life than just work and much more than consumption
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 16/04/2017

"Live!  Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.... A new Hedonism— that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to you for a season..."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The capitalist religion wants to abolish the holiday. It declared a real war against it, which is accompanied by an explosion of entertainment and leisure offers that contain nothing, or too little, of the experience of the holiday. This is another expression of the now famous 'creative destruction' of the twenty-first century capitalism, which first eliminated the holiday and then started selling goods to us trying to replace it. But it cannot, because gratuity cannot be sold or bought. And so its entertainments leave just a great emptiness in us and a great longing for the real holiday, of which mostly children and young people have the greatest need. Only the civilization that knows the different times and free spaces of gratuitousness can be a culture capable of and characterized by celebrating holidays.
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On the border and beyond/11 - Rites that consume life and the meaning of work
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 02/04/2017
"Generosity, nobility have disappeared, and with them the spectacular counterpart that the rich reciprocated to the miserable."
Georges Bataille, The Notion of Dépense
The many, too many people who work little, badly, or not at all, are not the only symptom of serious disease in the realm of work. Another serious sign of its bad condition, although still barely visible, are those workers who work too much, those who dissipate enormous energies in the new rites of businesses, the new sacrificial victims sacrificed to the new gods.
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In ancient civilizations sacrifice was characterized by a fundamental tension between the useful and the useless. However useless it may seem in human terms, sacrifice is a useful gift and pleasing to the gods-idols if it is an expression of a loss of ours. The sacrificial offerings activate the divine economy because they deny the human economy. In the Bible the perfect sacrifice (the olah: "make something rise") consisted in offering the best animals, which were burned and completely consumed by fire, leaving no remains usable by those who made the sacrifice: "And the priest shall burn all of it on the altar, as a burnt offering" (Leviticus 1:9). In order for the act of sacrifice to be completely useful to God it must be completely useless to man, or rather non-usable. The perfect sacrifice is, therefore, associated with a loss, with pure economic waste, with what philosopher Bataille called dépense. This idea is still dominant in the current meaning of the word sacrifice: sacrifying oneself for someone or something leads to a loss that the one who makes the sacrifice suffers for the benefit of the recipient of the sacrifice. It is a loss, a dissipation which acquires, paradoxically, a positive dimension.
It is at this basic level that sacrifice and gift meet. Among the many ancient practices of giving gifts (the so-called potlatch: "consume"), studied by anthropologists in the early years of the twentieth century, those characterized by the destruction of the "gift" in front of the rival are particularly interesting. Among the Tlingit people (living in the area of Canada and Alaska), for example, a chief stepped out in front of another chief and slew a number of slaves. A few days later the rival returned and slaughtered an even greater number of men. In these races, where the dissipative dimension is absolute and archaic, in their brutal transparency we can glimpse an analogous dimension that is spuriously present in our time.
Despite the novelty brought by the message of Christ in the culture of sacrifice, throughout and beyond the Middle Ages these archaic elements of the gift-sacrifice continued to be very much present. We do not understand that world if we don’t consider the magnificence of the rich and powerful, the great unproductive expenses for worship, the wastage of festivities and processions, the fireworks, the real races of dissipating gifts in order to create and maintain ranks and power in the city, and/or to earn some reduction in one's sentence in purgatory - there are still many, too many of the potlatch of the mafia in our countries and in our celebrations.
Later, in Christian spirituality, there evolved the idea that the sacrifice-gift is pleasing to God because it is an expression of our loss, a sacrifice, a fee - and it remained for centuries. The economic analogy for spiritual life necessarily led to the idea of a price, meaning that in order to get something (grace, blessing...) out of a relationship with God it was necessary to pay. And so even consecrated life in virginity was read and experienced as a choice of great spiritual value for a long time exactly because it was a gift-sacrifice of the most valuable part of the person. Saint Ambrose said that the virgin was "the victim of chastity." For Saint Gregory the Great virginity replaced martyrdom: "The time of persecution is over, but our peace has its martyrdom." There is an idea of sacrifice, an expression of a theology of atonement that we find still alive in the twentieth century, where resorting to the image of the holocaust, virgins are encouraged as "those who have made the sacrifice to persevere with constancy, and not take back or claim for themselves even the smallest part of the holocaust they have laid on the altar of God." (Sagra Virginitas, Pius XII, 1954).
The Protestant Reformation marked a turning point also in this culture of the gift-sacrifice. Luther identified the sacrificial mentality still present in the Church and in Christianity as the main reason of estrangement from the authenticity and novelty of the Christian event. And he was not wrong, because the culture of sacrifice-loss was a continuation of the pre-Christian economic and meritocratic theology. For Luther there was no Christian sense in refusing human gain in the hope of a divine gain: those sacrifices of ours are useless because there is no God on the other side who is interested in those losses of ours. The Christian God is not a hungry idol. Heaven is not to be earned by us because it has been already given to us as a gift. Hence also his criticism of convents, monasteries and the value of consecrated life as offered in sacrifice. And also the condemnation of conspicuous waste, the magnificence of worship, pilgrimages, holidays, idleness and luxuries.
Anything in civil and religious life that was useless expenditure for people was interpreted by the Reformation as a sacrifice and therefore as a mistaken kind of search for spiritual merit, as a behaviour that is contrary to the true Christianity of sola gratia. The gratuity of sacrifice was seen as a perverse gratuitousness, because if it is true that every gift is a renunciation of something just for the sake of someone else, this scheme does not work in relationship with God because the God of Jesus Christ does not need our sacrifices. In fact, the only good and true sacrifice is what he did for us by giving his life for love, and it’s once and for all, and the only form of reciprocity on our side is gratitude to God and love for our neighbour.
And so the gratuity of a human action was read as the highest form of spiritual non-gratuity. This interpretation of the futility and worldly loss as improper desire for otherworldly gain made the world of reforms to look at outright gratuitousness with suspicion, both in the civil and in the religious spheres, to consider it a bargain made on the wrong floor. These are the deep cultural roots that generated the idea that gratuitousness is something altogether negative. It is either useless or wrong, because it does not find a justification either in human economy (where profit rules), or on the spiritual level. What we find at the heart of capitalism and its "taboo of gratuitousness" is a deep sense of mistrust.
Calvin, later, with his "doctrine of predestination" pushed this revolution to its logical extreme. Since people have no power to change the divine economy, the only good and blessed deeds of ours are those for the human economy and its purposes. That's how work, profession and production take the place that idleness, waste and contemplation used to have in medieval culture, and anything that is not useful or rationally oriented at utility gets condemned. The only good sacrifices are those oriented at earthly and useful goals, and therefore also at work. An economic and work gain that cannot and must not become a merit for the sky, but is the only possible and commendable type of gain on the earth. Uselessness, loss, debt-fault and laziness are the one and only demerit of individuals and peoples. Gain and merit, chased away from paradise, thus become the absolute rulers of the earth.
But that's not all. In recent years of capitalism those dissipating practices, these free acts that are useful precisely and as much as they are useless, are coming back with more and more strength and pervasiveness. A new sacrificial cult - another paradox - was born in those countries where Protestant and Calvinist culture prevailed, criticizing futility and the "free" sacrifices.
The powerful have always used dépense as a tool to say and reaffirm their own power, and so to create a status for themselves, to humiliate their subjects. Endless lines, relevant answers that always come on the last possible day, intentional delays in appointments, useless waiting for "marking" the distance... Asking for and demanding sacrifices from subjects who have no purpose other than to humiliate people and reinforce hierarchies: these are social practices well known to all, today as well as yesterday. This happens in secular circles, but also in the religious ones, where the useless practices for the sole purpose of strengthening distances and powers are particularly dangerous because they are covered by a sacred justification and are often internalized by the victim as necessary and even as something good.
Large companies, however, are pushing very far in these sacrificial dissipating practices. Meetings set on Sunday when they could be held on Monday, at ten in the evening instead of the afternoon, on 24 and not 23 December, work calls even on Easter Sunday. Unnecessary losses of time and life, which have no productive purpose or efficiency. They are a pure dissipation dictated by the cult, a case of dépense where team members end up being self-inflicted, immersed in this new sacrificial culture where the deals are worth more if they are more useless and dissipative. Unsustainable and unnecessarily endless working hours, which often reduce efficiency and quality of work but serve to increase the value of the victim offered as a burnt offering. Business meetings where work problems should be discussed but instead they turn into exhausting and unnecessary rites that are only useful to consolidate roles and hierarchies. And it goes on till the actual sacrifice of the entire private and family life where the potlatch of pure destruction is repeated, a non-usable dépense for the corporate economy but essential for the cult because it is the sign of total and absolute devotion. New holocausts.
"Gifts" that later become instruments of competition and rivalry between workers and companies who compete with each other using their own totally free and unnecessary sacrifices-gifts as their language. This perverted gratuitousness is killing good gratuity and eating up what little was left of the work culture of the past centuries. It is obscuring the real value that some useless actions had and still have, that of being able to shout out a greater freedom.
Mankind took thousands of years to arrive at a concept of God who does not need to eat people or our things to be satiated, appeased or calmed. But people - the mighty - have never stopped wanting to be God. If we do not understand the neo-ancient sacrificial nature of contemporary capitalism, when the day comes in which we realise to have precipitated in a perpetual and absolute worship it will certainly be too late. Chances are that we wake up on a sacrificial altar, and the dances and songs for us will already have begun.
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On the border and beyond/11 - Rites that consume life and the meaning of work
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 02/04/2017
"Generosity, nobility have disappeared, and with them the spectacular counterpart that the rich reciprocated to the miserable."
Georges Bataille, The Notion of Dépense
The many, too many people who work little, badly, or not at all, are not the only symptom of serious disease in the realm of work. Another serious sign of its bad condition, although still barely visible, are those workers who work too much, those who dissipate enormous energies in the new rites of businesses, the new sacrificial victims sacrificed to the new gods.
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On the border and beyond/9 - For a market also directed by the "invisible hand": the gift
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 19/03/2017
"Even if the world we live in is less violent than any world of the past, this is only one aspect. The other aspect shows exactly the opposite: a frightening increase in violence and in the threat of violence. Our world saves more lives and simultaneously produces more victims than it has ever happened in the past."
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred 

Gratuitousness is the main taboo of capitalism. It is feared as the greatest danger, because if it were let to run freely in the territories of capitalism, they would be infected and its "poison" would cause its death, or - and it's the same thing - it would transform it into something substantially different. It is difficult to decipher the taboo of gratuitousness in our economy (and society) because it is covered by another taboo: that of the recognition of its existence. So to understand the profound relationship between gratuitousness and capitalism we must violate this first taboo, by starting to simply talk about it.
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According to an important anthropological tradition, the origin of civilization is deeply connected to two words: violence and the sacred. Even the Bible begins human history outside of Eden with Cain's fratricide. The death of the meek and righteous Abel becomes the first price of the foundation of human civilization. Founding myths of other cities (e.g. Rome) narrate similar cases of violence and murder, where sometimes even the gods are accomplices. Communities have had to learn how to manage people's violent impulses, to prevent their own destruction. The creation of taboos must be included among the tools to regulate and control violence in order to prevent it from becoming camouflage, repeated and explosive. Communities have paid a high price for these tools because they were applied on persons and actions that have led to the discrimination and not infrequently the actual persecution of those who were the subject of the taboo (women, lepers, the poor, the sick, entire peoples).
The relationship between a community and its taboos shows a radical ambivalence. On the one hand the taboo is all that you have to avoid, all you cannot touch, against which you should get immunized not to become contaminated and infected by its spirit (the mana). Furthermore, the words associated with the taboos should not be pronounced. The land of the taboo cannot be crossed. Communities have been changed, they have died and been resurrected according to the rhythm of the creation, violation and elimination of taboos. And, even if by completely different modes, the same ancestral rhythm of the earth keeps appearing in our history, too.
At the same time, the content of the taboo exerts a fatal and strong attraction, by developing some invincible traits in people: the taboo cannot be violated, but (and because) we profoundly wish to do so - it is the desire for vengeance on Cain ("whoever finds me will kill me") which produces his "mark" ("lest any who found him should attack him"): Genesis 4,14. His words are banned, but the temptation to want to pronounce them is strong. Based on what, for example, Freud calls "the taboo on the rulers," the kings cannot be touched by their subjects: a ban that aims to counter the deep passion-desire present in members of the community to kill the kings and rulers.
Objects, animals, people considered as taboo also have a dual characteristic: they cannot be touched, but they cannot be eliminated, either. The goal of the use of taboos is not the disappearance of the taboo, because if the taboos were to disappear, the impassable border would also be gone with it, the community would get contaminated and so it would fall exactly into the "sin" that the taboo was meant to avoid. The taboo and its marks must therefore be very visible; everyone must be able to recognize the totems.
We can understand a lot of capitalism, and in general, of economics, if we take its taboos of gratuitousness seriously. The relationship between gratuitousness and the market contains the anthropological traits of the taboo. First we find the original violence. Traditional or pre-commercial communities were based on two original and distinct principles: hierarchy and gift. Hierarchy was the instrument for the management of power, while gift regulated reciprocity in families, clans and communities. The advent of the market takes place after the killing of the gift, which must die in order to create the contract and commercial exchange in its place, which are characterized so as not to be a gift, not to be gratuitousness. Market economy does not question the hierarchy, what's more, it radicalises it - so much so that the capitalist enterprises are also the main location, along with the armies, where hierarchy continues to play a significant and all in all socially accepted role in the age of democracies.
At the origin of the market, however, there is a sort of primordial violence on gratuitousness-gift (even if it is neither perceived nor told as such by its protagonists). Even Cain's violence is linked to gift and to the economy. God did not accept his gifts; a denial that generated the violence on Abel, the elimination of the fragile brother who knew how to make gifts. Gratuitousness is as fragile and vulnerable as Abel, it is exposed to abuse, helpless and humble. But Cain is also the patron of the trades and the founder of the first city, which is named after his son (Enoch). And its very name has a strong assonance with the verb qanah: buy. Furthermore, in the Book of Genesis, the word "profit" (bècà) makes its appearance in the scene of Joseph being sold into slavery by, again, his brothers (37,28). The fraternity of the gifts is negated by the appearance of profit. In Rome, numus (currency) was the non-munus (gift). In modernity, at the heart of the founding myth of political economy, "the invisible hand", we find the argument that the engine of the wealth of nations is not the "benevolence" or gratuitousness of the traders, but their personal interests (Adam Smith). The visible hand that contained the gifts was replaced by the invisible hand of the market, which is not the Providence of the ancient times, because its nature is the absence of the gift.
Gratuitousness in the market cannot be profaned either, but must be visible and well in sight. The boundary around its territory coincides with the very limits of the market: the land of what's freely given begins where that of the market, the contract and the incentives ends. Gratuitousness begins beyond the company's gates, after we have done the shopping and go home. Everyone should see it, everyone must understand it without any complicated speeches: it is enough to see its signs and its totems: work place time cards, the duration of lunch breaks, the management of overtime, and especially the language. The words of the taboo cannot be uttered: woe to those who say the word gift or gratuitousness and its synonyms in the ordinary course of business.
But, as happened in some totemic civilizations, here, too, we are some specific times at which the untouchable subject of the taboo can and should be touched, sacrificed, ritually consumed in order to seize its mysterious and terrible force. And so in the business assemblies gift is evoked, pronounced and eaten to be then put back in its inviolable tabernacle the next day. We organize employee volunteer initiatives, social dinners to help the poor, to provide organised and regulated activities within the reassuring confines of the rules, limited to that carefully controlled time. These donuncoli, domesticated gifts, managed and controlled, are the new voodoo dolls, resembling the real person (gift-gratuitousness) with the hope of controlling it and subjecting it to witchcraft.
What are then the deep reasons of fear that gratuitousness causes in capitalist economy, to make it the primary taboo? The first reason lies, again, in its appeal. Even in the case of gratuitousness, like all taboos, the prohibition stems from a deep desire. We wish for nothing more than the gift: we yearn for it, it makes us live, it is our profound vocation. And if the economy is life, the charm of the gift (given and received) feels strong, much too strong in the economic life as well.
But nothing is more outrageous than gift, nothing is free any more. It is everywhere and it is free, but in the economic context its effects would be particularly devastating. Because it would break the rules of the contracts, it would undermine the hierarchy. If the companies accepted and embraced the register of the gift-gratuitousness, they would find themselves with people who are unmanageable, unpredictable and capable of actions that cannot be controlled by hierarchies and incentives, because they would be truly free. They would have to deal with workers who would follow their intrinsic motivation, working beyond the limits of the contract - that are too tight and small to contain the overflowing power of the gift. They would be faced with people who would not fit in the organization charts, the job-descriptions, people who would bring much more life and therefore much more confusion and noise with them - as it happens with living things. And if the managers of the companies recognized this gift as such, if it made them grateful towards their colleagues and employees, that free reciprocity and those strong bonds would be created in businesses that are the typical fruits of the gifts that are recognised, accepted and reciprocated. It would change the hierarchy which would become fraternal and therefore fragile, vulnerable, exposed just like the meek Abel; but fragility and vulnerability are the great enemies of capitalist enterprises and their immune cultures. To avoid the risk of recognizing the gift and the generation of strong ties, business culture and governance respond simply by denying it: this is how the taboo of gratuitousness is reborn and strengthened every day. The companies and the markets will protect themselves from gratuitousness to protect themselves from their own death.
But there is something else to say, too. In recent years, the taboo of gratuitousness has left the economy and the large companies to move progressively and quickly to civil society, to non-profit organizations, associations, movements and communities. The taboo is expanding and the house of gratuitousness on earth is becoming more and more cramped. The techniques and tools of management which until recently belonged exclusively to large companies and banks are now entering in many areas of civil society. The real - almost always invisible albeit very high - price of the entry of capitalist management into civil organizations, movements and communities is the gradual elimination of these places of the free gift. So, paradoxically, the taboo of gratuity is created right in the heart of the realities that were born from and for gratuitousness.
Who will break this taboo of our time? And if some prophet does it for us, will we be able to walk towards the land of free women and men? Or will we, too, cry in the desert, regretting having left the meat and onions behind along with slavery?
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    [metadesc] => Capitalism preserves the hierarchical principle of the ancient civilizations while removing and fencing the logic of the gift into residual spaces. And evil, little by little, is contaminating civil society and the non-profit sphere. The ancient house of gratuitousness on earth is likely to become more and more cramped. We have to return to our walk towards real freedom.
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On the border and beyond/9 - For a market also directed by the "invisible hand": the gift
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 19/03/2017
"Even if the world we live in is less violent than any world of the past, this is only one aspect. The other aspect shows exactly the opposite: a frightening increase in violence and in the threat of violence. Our world saves more lives and simultaneously produces more victims than it has ever happened in the past."
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred 

Gratuitousness is the main taboo of capitalism. It is feared as the greatest danger, because if it were let to run freely in the territories of capitalism, they would be infected and its "poison" would cause its death, or - and it's the same thing - it would transform it into something substantially different. It is difficult to decipher the taboo of gratuitousness in our economy (and society) because it is covered by another taboo: that of the recognition of its existence. So to understand the profound relationship between gratuitousness and capitalism we must violate this first taboo, by starting to simply talk about it.
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On the border and beyond/7 - The sacred tool that can buy anything. But how long?
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 05/03/2017
«In a world where money can buy anything, money becomes everything.»
Giacomo Becattini, From a Private Conversation
From the dawn of civilization, money has always had the invincible tendency to enter the territory of the sacred. The keepers of the sacred have always sought to keep the flow of money in its banks, but at certain times in history money and the sacred became allies and gave birth to idolatrous cults and many variations of the "markets of indulgences". In our time, the flooding of money has generated a much more radical and pervasive economic cult than that of the previous ages. But this new religious pathology is not generating antibodies and reformers who would be able to understand the seriousness of this new global market, and react effectively.
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The distinction-separation between the sacred and the profane is a fundamental axis of religions and cultures, even if the experiences that people have made and are making of the sacred and the profane are very different from each other and occupy the entire spectrum ranging from the sacred that attracts and seduces to the sacred that terrorizes because it is tremendous. Biblical humanism knows the same separation, but it is also interwoven by a large and continuous attempt to break the threshold that separates the sacred and the profane, the city and the temple. Its prophetic and wise spirit has been, in fact, a long and tenacious pedagogy to teach us that God's "place" was neither the tent nor the temple but the earth. The whole world is sacred because it is creation, and so the whole world is profane because Elohim is present on earth without becoming the earth or the things on it. For this, at the height of biblical revelation, we read that in the New Jerusalem, "I saw no temple in it any more" (Revelation 2.22 to 27).
The separation of the sacred and the secular was (and is) primarily a system of social control, creation and reinforcement of hierarchies and caste. The first and original distinction of the sacred and profane generated, in fact, the other, radical separation of the pure and the impure. The impure ones had no access to the sacred, the place of purity that, in turn, was such only because it wasn't contaminated by impurity. In the world of religions it has always been difficult to help and truly redeem the poor because, being generally unclean, they could not be touched by the pure.
The development of the economy and so that of money are deeply connected to this radical distinction made by and in the world. At the centre of monetary economies, however, we find an element that has proved decisive for the fate of Europe, the world and capitalism over time: money is exempt from the laws of purity/impurity. Unlike objects, animals, people and organic materials, money does not become impure when touched by impure persons or things - there are only rare experiences of leper colonies and leper villages in which only a special type of money circulated that could not get outside those boundaries so rigidly designed and managed by the "pure".
This special immunity of money is as significant as little explored. Unlike all other things that become unclean if touched by an impure being or object, money does not become impure from a contact with impurity. The first "tool" that medieval money changers used to test the non-falsity of coins were their teeth: they bit them on their rim - and so the first skill of those proto-bankers developed from their tooth sensitivity. A coin so pure that it can be put in the mouth. Pecunia non olet (money does not stink) expresses this ancient immunity, too, as well as the non-contaminating nature of money, which we find in various forms in all civilizations. At the same time, however, also because of the decisive influence of Christianity, money was also "the devil's excrement" in the Middle Ages, stinking, of course, by its nature and in itself. It stinks, but touching it does not contaminate. It is the only dung which does not make things impure. No wonder, then, that in Christian Europe those who managed money were mostly the Jews, confined to their ghettos, and that in traditional India mainly the pariahs had to perform the banking functions. The cast-away, because they were considered bearers of some impurities, and as they touched the coins they turned them into the only "thing" that can circulate among all without contaminating anybody - two "negatives" multiplied that magically become a "positive."
This special protection from impurity thus enabled the coins to be exchanged anywhere and by anyone: between Christians, Jews, Muslims, believers and non-believers, even with people that those religions considered idolatrous. We would not have had the development of commerce in the Middle Ages and then the birth of global capitalism without this special status of immunity and exemption that money had.
This special pass the coins enjoyed was also valid to enter the kingdom of the dead. It is a very old and widespread tradition to put coins on the body, over the eyes or the mouth of the deceased. The Egyptian priests refused the carrying of the dead along the Nile if their debts had not been settled before they died. And so, by extension, they put coins in the graves for the payment of the toll to Charon, or to pay off hypothetical unpaid debts or faults on arrival in the kingdom of the dead. In this creative "double game" between heaven and earth, money became the means to clear faults made in this life for the afterlife. This payment of the "obol", the fee for crossing the last threshold is very symbolic. Money that becomes the object that's most similar to gods and the most profane object at the same time, the thing that stinks the least and the one that stinks most, but is not subject to the first religious laws of impurity, which therefore can then be touched by everyone without any consequences.
So when the some Mediaeval possessor of money thought of using money to pay someone else to fulfil their own promise or a vow (the crusades, pilgrimages), or paying some poor to do penance and pray on their behalf, or even buying a discount of their years in purgatory or a piece of paradise, it wasn't anything innovative to do because those coins had always had a supernatural power and nature. In the biblical world and in the Gospels the "impure" money plays an important role. But the impurity of the coins was linked to the presence of images of kings, animals, or in any case, some idolatrous things. Even if not without difficulty and discomfort, the Jews, however, handled and touched the coins that seemed impure to them. There was only one place where those coins could not enter: the Temple. Only coins without idolatrous images were allowed inside it, and those pure coins were the language with which to communicate with YHWH through sacrifices and offerings.
The "disenchantment of the world" and the desecration of the earth are also - and perhaps mainly - the result of the pass that money received on all visible and invisible thresholds.
If we look at it carefully, we discover other interesting aspects hidden under the immunity of money. The exemption of the currency by the rules of purity and impurity has neither eliminated nor reduced the caste systems of the world - instead, it has only strengthened them and created new ones; it has exasperated them. First of all, the impure have always existed and continue to exist also in connection with money. They were and are those who are not in a position to own money; they are those who do not touch it. Because of another paradox of the economy, the impurity of monetary societies was founded by a non-contact: those who are impure cannot touch the money. They are unclean because they are poor, excluded, rejected from the havens of the rich and capacious, from the market clubs. Yesterday and today.
But there is still something more radical and therefore not visible to the naked eye. In ancient times, the money that passed between and beyond the various social classes allowed the rich and the Brahmins to use the services of manual workers and the poor without having to "touch" them, without the need to enter into a personal relationship with them. By paying something, usually very little, those who were in power by money could and can still make use of arms and hands without touching them. With the development of market economy and later financial capitalism, money has thus become the great mediator of our time, the tool that allows us to live close to each other but without touching each other in order not to get contaminated, not to be wounded by diversity. With the de-materialization of money that, thanks to technology, our era is witnessing, we have amplified the "spiritual" nature of money, which, just like the more developed gods, is not visible but it operates, acts, saves and condemns. The invisible electronic money is what increasingly gets to mediate our mutually immune relationships with each other, with the novelty that it is no longer even necessary to touch the coin, which has magically become a "zero mediator". We no longer see the pariahs that by touching money purify it with their impurities, but in the basement of our capitalism many people continue to launder our dirty money: new outcasts, the same old function.
Finally, there is a further, decisive novelty of our civilization of the invisible and all-powerful money when compared to the old ones. Until recently, things that could be purchased with money were, all in all, few and almost never decisive. Money could not buy the most important things of life, only a small part of health, a small part of esteem, a (less small) part of comfort and care. For millennia the coins could buy little, certainly not all, and above all these things were few and meant for few. The sacred nature and mystery of money depended also on its scarcity and therefore on the ignorance and incompetence that the great majority of people who came into contact with it experienced - similar to what the vast majority of people are experiencing about the new finance now.
Today, however, a lot can be bought with money, almost everything is on sale, we are being convinced that we can and must buy everything: from health to youth, from justice to beauty. And that's, in fact, the return of a new, global "market of indulgences", where paradise and purgatory can be promised and purchased with money, where the rich buy time, services, care, life from the poor. We do not pay a poor person to pray for us or go on a crusade or to Santiago de Compostela in our place, but to sell us a kidney, bear a child for us or help us to die.
Money still wants to buy paradise. And we allow it to happen, because we have forgotten how the real paradise was.
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On the border and beyond/7 - The sacred tool that can buy anything. But how long?
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 05/03/2017
«In a world where money can buy anything, money becomes everything.»
Giacomo Becattini, From a Private Conversation
From the dawn of civilization, money has always had the invincible tendency to enter the territory of the sacred. The keepers of the sacred have always sought to keep the flow of money in its banks, but at certain times in history money and the sacred became allies and gave birth to idolatrous cults and many variations of the "markets of indulgences". In our time, the flooding of money has generated a much more radical and pervasive economic cult than that of the previous ages. But this new religious pathology is not generating antibodies and reformers who would be able to understand the seriousness of this new global market, and react effectively.
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by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 19/02/2017
"Workplace spirituality seems to be a significant new management paradigm that business executives can use to improve their organizations by increasing, among others, the levels of organizational commitment, satisfaction and performance of their employees."
Sofia Lupi, La spiritualità nelle organizzazioni (The Spirituality of Organisations)
In the 'spirituality market' the ancient 'Gresham's Law' is making a return: bad money drives out good money. This law made a re-appearance every time two types of currency were being handled in the streets: the good and the false type, neither of them easily recognizable as such. Bad money infested the streets and the squares, and within a short time the good type would disappear from circulation.
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The meritocratic-capitalist religion which is more 'lightweight' and of a fast movement is displacing the traditional genuine faiths as it is replacing totemic cults by its major innovations. These in turn threaten to infect even the remnants of ancient faiths that get fascinated and seduced by the new cult. The first major operation of the latest generation of capitalism has been the reduction of religion and spirituality into merchandise. The second, very recent operation is a true masterpiece: making large enterprises the first consumers of these 'spiritual merchandise'.
Let's just think of corporate rites, the new fashion in large companies, where we find more and more liturgical forms and typical rituals of ancient idolatry. Working groups are left alone for a few days in the forests and deserts for collective initiations and 'team building'; increasingly bizarre role play games are used to enhance the team 'spirit'; 'escape room' sessions are held where people are locked in for a time to solve puzzles and manage to escape within a given time. Real social rites are replacing the exercises of 'trust' (deemed ancient now), where someone leaned and dropped backwards to show confidence in the other members of the group.
When, a few years ago, these adult games were introduced to some innovative companies, everyone took it a bit like a time for recreation, and we even had fun playing them. At some point, though, the game got out of hand, we stopped laughing and realised that it was all serious, very serious. And we believed it. We even believed in the traditional get-togethers, where all the employees were wearing the company uniform (or T-shirt) and singing the sad hymns of the company - all these are now replaced by more sophisticated liturgies. Among these is the 'company theatre', where employees act out plays that are written or reviewed by the consultants in order to sublimate work conflicts and frustrations. Or the so-called 'road shows', where top management goes to visit the departments and branches to meet their workers directly in their environment. Real pastoral visits, one could say, which serve as an alternative for ad limina visits.
No wonder, then, that a final frontier of large enterprises is the spirituality in management, which is experiencing a real boom nowadays. There is a multitude of conferences, courses and books on very fascinating topics like 'love and forgiveness in management', 'how to train spiritual leaders', 'interiority and leadership' and much more. And so the gurus of every ancient and modern 'religion' are invited in the company, as long as they are able to increase the 'spiritual capital' of enterprise, cultivating the corporate karma. 'Meditation rooms' are beginning to appear in company buildings where you can spend a few minutes (of a precise quota) to recover spiritual energy. The production of real liturgies and corporate prayers is also well in course, as a way of starting work meetings or the company 'spiritual retreats'. These ‘secular’ rites and liturgies are well known for a long time in the world of economy. But  they were secrets until recently, known by just a few people, and strongly opposed by the churches and the world of work. Today they are public, popular and praised by (almost) everyone.
One area where this wave of spirituality is particularly evident and dangerous is the variegated world of leadership. Leaders and leadership, expressions decorated with ever more creative adjectives, are becoming the first watchwords of this new religion, fitting perfectly with the meritocratic ideology. Words such as manager, executive, head of office have become old and outdated, tied to a capitalism that seems too trivial. This is why these new terms emerge (always pronounced in the sacred language English): now we have leaders. These, unlike the old leaders, must have charisma, charm, attractiveness. In new enterprises it is essential to obtain the consent of the soul and the heart, not just that of the contract, and only a leader can earn this type of commitment of the spirit. Because of the very nature of leadership, we cannot all be leaders. So consultants and professionals are called in who can recognize the signs of a call to leadership in workers. They go through selections, training and get started on their mission, which in its essence is to manipulate the consent of the people guided by them, leading them to give voluntary consent to the leader's proposals. The ultimate goal of the leader is in fact to achieve the deliberate and free commitment of followers to the group objectives, which are internalized and followed thanks to the ability and the charisma of the leader. It is the definitive end of hierarchy and coercion: the leader has the gift of transforming external orders in internal ones, where every follower, by adhering closely to the leader's directives obeys only to him/herself, realizing the greater autonomy of the worker-follower. The dream of a 'fraternal production system' is finally realized - it is no longer based on conflict and fight, but on the free and reciprocal consent of the heart.
Therefore, if we try to read between the lines of the newest theory and practice of leadership we discover, and sometimes we read, that the figure of the ideal leader is that of the prophet, that is, someone who is followed freely and joyfully because of the strength of his charisma, for his authority, for its spiritual charm. Someone who has the ability to internally convert his followers without the need for command or control, because workers internalize his word, becoming fully independent and a law unto themselves. And above all, they are happy to follow him.
The latest generation of leadership can therefore be seen as spiritual leadership, creating a new form of meritocracy: 'spiritual meritocracy' (Shawn van Valkenburgh). By putting together meritocracy and spirituality, this corporate new age of the third millennium is making a perfect implementation of the retributive-economic religion against which Job, the prophets and later Christianity had struggled with all their might. And what is shocking is that everything is happening not only in the silence of the world that is a friend of real work and the people, but also of a good part of the ecclesiastic world and, in general, of the 'true religions'. Among the gurus invited to speak about spirituality to the managers there are more and more monks and priests, and the number of leadership courses for pastors and 'leaders' of religious communities is increasing, organized and sold, of course, by the same consulting companies and business schools.
Unfortunately, the promoters and disseminators of these quasi-theories do not know that the biblical prophets and founders of authentic charismatic movements have never considered themselves as leaders. The most important prophets of the Bible (from Moses to Jeremiah) show resistance when they receive the call of God, because they do not feel to be leaders, let alone wanting to become one. The very thought of being leaders terrorizes them. However, where many men who longed to become leaders gathered spontaneously were the prophetic schools that were producing multitudes of ‘prophets by profession’ and, above all, many false prophets and charlatans. The first law that the great biblical wisdom left us reads: 'beware of those who present themselves as candidates to become prophets, because they are almost always false prophets', deceivers, or, we might say today, simply narcissists. History and real life tell us that you become a 'leader' not wanting to become one. But above all they tell us that when communities designed classes of leaders they ended up simply failing in the best case and forming monsters in the worst, even when they were driven by good intentions.
Only a few decades ago when the union tradition and the culture of real work were still alive and alert, these phenomena would be denounced as the worst abuses, they would be fought and, above all, ridiculed and mocked, this new sub-culture would be flooded and made to sink by disdain and laughter. Today, however, in the spiritual and ethical crisis in which we have sunk, these manipulations are presented as innovation, humanism, participatory governance and modernity, and are received with enthusiasm.
Today, we must ask businesses for more secularism, much more secularism. Let them do their job and resize their imperialist designs in the world and in the soul. Firms do not need either prophets or salvation, but they should leave more free space for us, a piece of free land where we can grow plants and flowers that we like. Companies can do many good things, but not all. If they honestly want to increase the welfare of their workers (and there are such), having understood that the cultivation of spiritual life makes them live better, companies should leave their workers adequate time to develop and cultivate these essential dimensions of life, but outside of the workplace. With their family, with their friends, with their communities. They should not seek a monopoly of lives and souls. The spirituality that is good and gives life requires more air than is possibly there in the offices, more sky than what you see from the windows of companies, more light than that of the LED lamps. And above all it needs two words which, after all, are one: freedom and gratuitousness. Art, faith and prayers are among the most beautiful and sublime human expressions if and because they are not finalized and they are nothing other than beauty, faith, prayer. The only end they can have is the infinite. But when we try to direct them, to finalise and to use them, these wonderful things become caricatures, toys, sometimes even monsters. Behind the offer and demand for spirituality that is emerging from capitalism there are certainly good intentions, mixed with a lot of manipulations and much ingenuity. But the most important effects in social and organizational realities are the unintentional and medium term ones. If today we underestimate the movement of company spirituality, if we do not criticize but encourage it, tomorrow if we want to go to mass in the city we will have to ask to be hosted by an enterprise. It will be a secular and highly spiritual kind of mass, it will be offered to us for free. And we shall give thanks for it.
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    [metadesc] => The production of corporate rites and liturgies is another eloquent sign of the idolatrous-religious nature of our capitalism. Leadership theories are a high expression of this new worship. We must not underestimate this wave of corporate spirituality.
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by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 19/02/2017
"Workplace spirituality seems to be a significant new management paradigm that business executives can use to improve their organizations by increasing, among others, the levels of organizational commitment, satisfaction and performance of their employees."
Sofia Lupi, La spiritualità nelle organizzazioni (The Spirituality of Organisations)
In the 'spirituality market' the ancient 'Gresham's Law' is making a return: bad money drives out good money. This law made a re-appearance every time two types of currency were being handled in the streets: the good and the false type, neither of them easily recognizable as such. Bad money infested the streets and the squares, and within a short time the good type would disappear from circulation.
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On the border and beyond/3 - This market devours life and provides just a little money in return
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 05/02/2017
"(C)apitalism is a pure religious cult, perhaps the most extreme there ever was. Within it, everything only has meaning in direct relation to the cult: it knows no special dogma, no theology."
Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion (translated by Chad Kautzer)
The capitalism of the nineteenth and twentieth century was animated by a Judeo-Christian spirit, a spirit of work, effort and production. But we no longer understand the spirit of our capitalism if we continue to look for it inside Christianity or the Bible. Market society in recent years has been increasingly resembling a religion, but the traits that it is taking make it more akin with the Middle Eastern cities of three thousand years ago, or the Greek and Roman ones of some later centuries. With their public spaces occupied by many statues, temples, steles, altars, shrines, and their private spaces filled with amulets, household gods and a huge production of household idols. And their many sacrifices, around which their life, parties and death were ordered. The Judeo-Christian humanism was, above all, an attempt to empty the world of idols and free it from the sacrifices. It was an only partially successful attempt, because the tendency to build idols to worship has always been too strong in men.
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The prophets, the wisdom tradition (Ecclesiastes) and then Jesus have operated an extraordinary religious revolution also because of their radical struggle against idolatry. They tried to remove the idols from the temples and churches to create an environment free from things, one where you could hear the voice of a free and liberated spirit, its "thin voice of silence". Christianity has also surpassed the ancient sacrificial logic forever, because the sacrifice of people offered to God was replaced by the sacrifice-gift of God given to mankind, establishing the era of gratuitousness. But today, after two thousand years, capitalism - first fighting gratuitousness and then trying to put it to income - is reintroducing some archaic sacrificial practices in its own cult.
The sacrificial culture of capitalism can now be glimpsed everywhere. Consider, for example, how food and cooking have been turned into a spectacle on TV and in the media in recent times. In various cultures eating was a fundamental practice, always communal, the heart of family relationships, friendships and the maximum expression of solidarity. People ate together because food is the first resource, the decisive one for communities, and therefore it must be shared, "constructed" socially, not left to the natural play of the force and power of individuals. Food is the first language of fraternity, and through the universal institution of hospitality it is also open to those who knock on the door. That's why the place of eating was the house, the intimacy of the tent. The preparation of food was a private matter, generally entrusted to women, who were the producers of the meals that transformed the scarce products of the earth into conviviality and the goods into relational goods. Confidence in the person who cooked was the first word in the discourse on food. The sideboard (in Italian: "credenza") did not only preserve foods, it also kept the confidence and credence in the primary relationships of the home.
Eating in public, in the square, however, only happened on the occasion of festivals, which in the pre-Christian world were associated with animal sacrifices offered to the deity. The animals offered were then baked, cooked and eaten together in public. Christian civilization has transformed those ancient festivals, and to overcome the archaic sacrificial logic it has discouraged cooking, eating and drinking in public. On Christian holidays there was dancing, singing and games in public, processions were held, and above all the Eucharist was celebrated: the good (eu) gratuitousness (charis), in another dinner, another bread and another wine. But everybody ate at home, and the preparation of food remained something private and feminine. The great spectacle that food and cooking are being turned into is taking us back to the culture of the sacrifices, the sacred banquets offered to the idols, to cooking in the square. To understand the invasion of cooks and meals, it is not enough to resort to sociological aspects only (having to relearn how to cook, or questions of health): we must also discover their religious and sacrificial nature. The idols are continuously eating, they are never satiated.
In these new rites, celebrated by male priests, the food completely loses its intimate and familiar nature. Its solidarity and its sharing are totally deleted, leaving their place to competition and race. The good words of home become insults, the bread that falls to the ground is not kissed after it is picked up, only the echo of a shout is heard, cooking is no longer surrounded by good words and relatives of commensality: it is completely and only play, entertainment, business. And we forget and deny the basic rule of early education passed on by mothers to their children for millennia: "don't play with your food" - because it is too serious, the most serious of all, sacred. However, this ancient-new sacrifice of the food makes nothing and no one sacred, and it makes us fall back into a world full of parrots and victims: panem et circenses.
But sacrifice is also a keyword of new global corporations. To understand the universe of the corporate "sacred", we must not stop at its most superficial aspects - such as the presence of coaches in companies who try to mimic the old spiritual fathers; the use of words taken from the spiritual language, as "mission", "calling", "faithfulness", "merit"; the fake initiation of rites and liturgies by pseudo-marketing; the disesteem of the word "old" that by now has become a dirty word or an insult ("you're old!": all idolatrous cults worship youth). These phenomena are epidermal symptoms of something much deeper and rooted in the organism of capitalism.
After having used (until a few years ago) the lingo and metaphors taken from military life or sports, the big capitalist enterprises are now realizing that to buy the hearts of their employees they need a stronger symbolic code, and they're taking it from the religious sphere. But, even here, the symbolic register is not taken from the Judeo-Christian religious culture, or even from other major religions (Islam or Hinduism). These great forms of spiritual humanism are too complex and resilient to be easily manipulated by business. And so, with a leap back, passing thousands of years, they return directly to totemism and its sacrifices.
Sacrifice is a key word in the cult of business. Nothing more but sacrifice is asked of the workers of large companies: the sacrifice of their time, their social and family life. Work has always been strain, sweat, and so in a sense also sacrifice. But the sacrifice of the corporate culture of the twentieth century was transparent to those who made it and those who received it. The trade union movement had managed to contain it within political limits, and when it exceeded these limits it was not called "sacrifice" but "exploitation." We always knew that behind a lot of work there were far-away "gods" who lived from our sacrifices and the exploitation of our work in the fields and factories: but we were aware of it, we were suffering a lot, and we struggled to reduce or eliminate these injustices. Today the semantic manipulation of our age is managing to present the "more” of the sacrifice (the excess part of efforts - the tr.) as a form of free "gift". We are more exploited by rich gods now than we were yesterday, but, unlike yesterday, we have to be happy for our sacrifices and internalize them as a free gift offered. The sacrifice required of the workers by big companies is a necessary act to be able to hope in the "favour of the gods," that is, in making a career, earning a lot, having respect and recognition from above. But those who refuse to make these sacrifices and are committed to defending a boundary between business and family, those who do not accept requests to stay in the office until eleven at night, are left out of the number of the elect, and often develop severe guilt for being losers.
Furthermore, as in the sacrifices to the old gods and idols, offerings and vows could never pay off the debt of those making the sacrifice - today in these companies the more of our time and life are given, the more of them are required, until one day our offers get exhausted... But on that day, management will offer to us the "free" service of the right type of coach that will help us get back on our feet and to the altar to offer more sacrifices. The idol does not sacrifice itself; it can only receive sacrifices from its followers. The invisible and distant gods feed from the sacrifices of the workers, and they are developing a more and more vital need for it. But the stroke of genius of this type of capitalism lies in being able to cover the sacrificial structure of the "labour market" with "contracts". What they actually ask us is a sacrifice, but its true nature is hidden very well by presenting it as a free contract. Because they make payments, businesses become totally disconnected and ungrateful towards their faithful. And on the day when the market opportunity and profit change, they do not feel indebted to the many sacrifices they have received, they seek tax havens; and with a few thousand Euros - at best - they repay the sacrifice of a lifetime, the sacrifice of life. The sacrifice of the ancient cults had to be alive: the gods were offered animals, children, virgins, rarely plants (libations), but never objects. The new gods are also demanding life and offer money in return.
The sacrificial nature of this capitalism is not so much a moral property of people; it actually regards the system as a whole. Its first sacrificial victims are the very executives and managers, who are priests and victims at the same time.
The likely and gloomy scenario on the horizon of our civilization is a rapid growth of this new idolatry, which is gradually shifting from the economic sphere towards civil society, schools and health. There is no opposition in its path of expansion because it draws on those religious symbols that our culture no longer has the categories to understand. Those who want to understand and maybe control the economy and the world today must study less business and more philosophy and anthropology.
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On the border and beyond/3 - This market devours life and provides just a little money in return
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 05/02/2017
"(C)apitalism is a pure religious cult, perhaps the most extreme there ever was. Within it, everything only has meaning in direct relation to the cult: it knows no special dogma, no theology."
Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion (translated by Chad Kautzer)
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On the border and beyond/1 - Between market and gratuitousness, finding new ways
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 22/01/2017
"We can love nothing but what agrees with us, and we can only follow our taste or our pleasure when we prefer our friends to ourselves; nevertheless it is only by that preference that friendship can be true and perfect."
F. de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (English translation: J. W. Willis Bund, M.A. LL.B and J. Hain Friswell)
In our time, loneliness grows along with the desire for community in us which we try to satisfy with methods and tools that end up, too often, increasing it. The market society needs individuals without strong and too deeply rooted ties, and it has the economic and political means to make them more and more so. People with significant interpersonal relationships, with a cultivated inner life are just imperfect consumers who are difficult to manage.
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We do not understand the extraordinary success that the capitalist market is having in the past two or three decades unless we pay enough attention to its main device: the destruction of free non-market goods. In fact, these are increasingly replaced by merchandise, which try to respond to the famine of the first type of goods (and in their own way they succeed, too) but continue to fuel it at the same time. The new culture of work and consumption produces individuals with increasingly fragmented relationships. At the same time, large multinational companies offer new forms of communities on the net that while accompanying our solitudes do nothing but increase the number of lonely hours we spend gazing at the screens of our phone, computer or TV. The GDP is growing thanks to our effort of responding to the loneliness generated by the market with the same market - and so the share of income that families spend today on phones, internet refills and fees has exceeded the part spent on food.
The consequences of this new form of 'creative destruction' - which destroys free goods and creates merchandise with a price - are seriously undervalued. Let's just think of social exclusion and poverty. Traditional communities were generally common goods, freely accessible even to the poor, and, in some cases, especially to the poor, who compensated for the less economic goods they had with more relational goods. The poor were often not poor in all: they had community and festive riches which made them less poor. The strong trend of the new poverty of the third millennium is the creation of poor people who are thoroughly poor. When we were children, for example, the social organization of our townships and villages (almost) prevented us from becoming obese: our entire life was made up of natural and necessary movement. Our cities and our social and economic organization are (almost) natural causes of obesity. But then, with the stroke of the most impressive collective genius of our era, capitalism has made it all a business of gyms, swimming pools, fitness clubs and special foods in order to combat the obesity that the market society creates - simply by paying. And so the poorest children (and adults) are often also the most obese, because they cannot access the 'cures' that the market sells.
Growth and profits achieved thanks to the resolution of the damage created in making more profits (and income) – this is the great 'social innovation' of the capitalism of our time. The mechanism of this creative destruction is very radical, and it is applied primarily to the same community. Traditional communities were only minimally elective: we get to chose a wife and some friends but not our parents, brothers and sisters or children, nor our neighbours and the other inhabitants of our village. All these companions of our life were inherited, a matter of fate but above all body, flesh and blood, with all their typical injuries and blessings. Post-modern communities are only elective: we get to choose almost everything, we would like to choose everything. We only like weak ties, disembodied and chosen ones; and so we forget that people are living and real precisely because they are different today from those we chose yesterday. The flowering of a life means staying true to all that has changed, continues to change and that we did not chose in the people we love - every marriage pact is a mutual yes to a faithfulness to what the other will become, an alliance to welcome and love the "not yet" (of ourselves and the other) that we do not know and will not be able to control. (Yet, 'you've changed', 'you are no longer the man I married' are the words we most often say when leaving each other, as if we had not married that 'change' and that 'no longer the same', too).
An important place in this argument is occupied by the theme of authenticity. In the twentieth century, authenticity - sincerity, genuineness - was also a feature of the market. Businesses, cooperatives, shops and banks were human affairs through and through, with the same vices and virtues of life. And so they were just like life. Then we started building a corporate culture and an increasingly artificial marketing, to create a commercial where we all know that the goods presented are not the same as what we're going to buy, to sell extremely fake financial products, to form relationships with our colleagues, clients, suppliers and leaders following protocols and incentive schemes. It's a commedia dell'arte where everyone can play their role thanks to the mask that covers their face - and so we no longer see the blush on the cheeks and the tears in the eyes of the other. A certain artificiality and non-sincerity have always been part of the ethos of the market - anyone attending the fairs and markets of yesterday entered into a world of seducer sellers who spoke of the fantastic features of some miraculous products. But we were aware of it: that kind of artificiality was part of the folklore and rituals of that world, of every world. That artificial element was explicit, known to all, and thus it became - paradoxically - authentic and sincere. We all played 'merchants of the fair' to some extent, but we knew it.
At some point, however, that first market culture was amplified, inflated and exaggerated by the large multinational corporations and by the global consulting companies. It has become a proper ideology, and that first good feature of artificiality of market relations has grown a lot, even too much. Gradually, and without realizing it, we forgot the non-authenticity of many practices, and we gave them the consistency of reality. The management of work has become technical, that of the people is now called human resources, marketing is a science developed in neuroscience laboratories. The game has become reality, and that first genuineness has left the scene.
But once again, the market is finding a solution to the evil it created. The search for authenticity in the market is in fact one of the most important and profitable trends of today's capitalism. Consumers seek authenticity in the products and services they buy. We want to find it in food, where everything that we think to be genuine is worth more; when we look for a truly Neapolitan restaurant in Naples, and a truly Lisbon one in Lisbon. Even in 'social' tourism we want to see indigenous people who are authentically indigenous, and poor people who are genuinely poor. Hand-crafted beer and ice cream are preferred because they bring something of that authenticity that we have decided to always look for. A well-prepared chef is not enough, we would like someone who really believes in what they do and say that they do. A farmer doing biological cultivation is not enough: we want to meet him while working in his fields and speaking to us in dialect in order to verify the authenticity of the story that he tells us with his goods.
A first side effect of this interesting new phenomenon is regarding the price of these products. This authenticity is generally associated with a high price, sometimes very high, therefore, again, one that excludes the poor. Furthermore, authenticity is not only a characteristic of the products, it is also a dimension of persons. So if we take a careful look we realize that we are asking the market to provide precisely the gratuitousness that it has expelled from its offices, shops and banks, especially in the past few decades.
In this colourful world of authentic markets some future scenarios open up that are worth paying attention to. One of them concerns the great growth of new market communities, where the consumption of the same product or brand brings people together in new forms of 'tribes'. What we see today as products of identity formation only (in food, in music, in clothing, in cars, motorcycles ...) could become a widespread and generalized phenomenon tomorrow. In these tribes of consumers the object becomes the construction element of the 'community'. That is how archaic forms of a totemic cult come back to life, since the relationship between people is a side effect of each individual's relationship with the thing. The faithful (faith-fidelity is everything here) offer sacrifices of time and energy to something that, by nature, is not at all a free gift - the product has a selling price, it has its profits that do not go to the worshippers but to the owners of the brand who use the free labour and promotion performed by their faithful. There are new idolatries-religions consisting of only worship, filling the earth with fetishes and doing away with gods.
Biblical humanism fought the idolatry of its time also to free man from the original debt that characterized the totemic and pagan cults of the surrounding peoples. The covenant with a God who creates out of an overflow of love was also the liberation from the cults for objects, those of the totems and taboos of the ancient world, where the objects enchanted and chained people with their magic and with their occult powers. Should the disenchantment of the world and the battle against the Jewish-Christian humanism that we are witnessing produce a simple return to new totemic cults of objects in the end, we would be facing the worst failure of western humanism, the destruction of two and a half millennia of human and spiritual development.
But other scenarios are also possible, some different narratives can already be discerned on the horizon of our complicated and beautiful era. To observe and understand them we will place ourselves 'on the border and beyond'. We will set up our lookout post on the dividing line between gratuitousness and market, between communities and people, between the totems and authentic spirituality. Let's expect everything and anything, and - bon voyage.
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On the border and beyond/1 - Between market and gratuitousness, finding new ways
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 22/01/2017
"We can love nothing but what agrees with us, and we can only follow our taste or our pleasure when we prefer our friends to ourselves; nevertheless it is only by that preference that friendship can be true and perfect."
F. de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (English translation: J. W. Willis Bund, M.A. LL.B and J. Hain Friswell)
In our time, loneliness grows along with the desire for community in us which we try to satisfy with methods and tools that end up, too often, increasing it. The market society needs individuals without strong and too deeply rooted ties, and it has the economic and political means to make them more and more so. People with significant interpersonal relationships, with a cultivated inner life are just imperfect consumers who are difficult to manage.
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