Melting the Iron Law

Science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle once concocted a bit of wisdom which I've come to endorse quite heavily, which he called the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.  Loosely paraphrased, this dictates that "any organization, regardless of its original purpose, will inevitably be taken over by individuals who care nothing for that purpose, but only for the perpetuation of the organization itself".  So, if you start a charity called The Feed-The-Hungry-Babies Foundation or something, then no matter how much you care about feeding the hungry babies, the people that you hire to fulfill the Foundation's organizational needs (lawyers, accountants, PR specialists, and above all the people who solicit donations on your behalf, who are essentially salesmen, only the product is "feeling good about yourself because you helped this great charity fulfill its mission"), while they might care about the baby-feeding somewhat, care more about keeping their jobs.  Thusly, they will work to turn the Foundation into a more self-sustaining corporate monolith, and their work will result in the Foundation growing and bloating into a more and more bureaucratic, inefficient institution, whose baby-feeding activities are now distinctly secondary compared to the things it does simply to keep itself alive.  All the employees of this giant social machine are now collaboratively working to ensure that they keep their nice stable careers, and very few hungry babies are actually getting fed.  The babies are no longer the point, The FTHB Foundation Incorporated, LLC is the point, and it will only be a matter of time before it ends up buying some Monsanto subsidiary to expand its profit margins, and the new Strategic Vision Manager will "reclassify" the original baby-feeding department as being contrary to their new food-industry platform, which is projected to produce more sustainable earnings over the next six quarters, so fuck those babies really, we all have 410Ks and vacation plans to think about, and that's obviously what's really important.  That's what corporations do, that's their entire nature and purpose - they convince those within the Company stockade to disregard the welfare of anything that isn't part of the Company.  And thus, the Iron Law rules with an iron fist over the behavior of all such organizations; even if they're founded as charities or the like, they still have all the trappings of a corporate entity, and people who have worked for Berkshire Hathaway or Sam's Club Incorporated or the like will end up working for them too, any time they think it better suits their own selfish interests to insinuate themselves into that company instead.

I for one intend to see a day arrive when the Iron Law is provably false.  I'm very interested in figuring out what that would take.  Is it possible to incorporate a charitable trust or the like, and put bylaws into place which no amount of human selfishness and greed is capable of changing?  I don't know if there's any way to do this - what one person builds, another can pretty much always unbuild - but if some way of at least getting close could be found, then I'd like to see an institution founded under a charter which mandates its own dissolution, the exact moment that Job #1 is so much as rivaled in importance by the self-interest of its own workers.  Indeed, I'd go further - while every organization needs to grow and recruit new people in order to remain vital, this one would actively seek to avoid incentivizing anyone to join it, because it would not be interested in having anyone working for it who is even the slightest bit selfish.  If you need to be bribed into taking a job, then that job is not the right job for you; my hypothetical foundation would not want employees who desperately cling to their positions, but ones who are confident that they will land on their feet if and when I shutter the company's doors, rather than sacrifice one inch of its raison d'etre upon the altar of someone's personal avarice.

As one of those desperate, unconfident employees myself, I'm definitely guilty of perpetuating the Iron Law, which is one of the reasons I'm not really pursuing work in the nonprofit sector - I would be too likely to become the kind of parasite I despise.  I prefer to work in the corporate world, even though I hate corporations, because there I at least feel that I have a right to vampirically drain my salary out of their financial lifeblood, while contributing as little as I can get away with in exchange; such economies are the entire reason capitalism exists, the CEO is doing it too, so he can hardly fault me for it.  (Well, he can, but it won't sting me to realize it's true, as it would if I were working for a charity and realized that I cared more for my job than for its cause.)  Nevertheless, as an idealistic and deeply hypocritical zealot for the principles of justice and honesty, I continue to crusade in search of a purpose which can defy the Iron Law's bars, and remain pure enough in its devotion to deserve my allegiance.  Such an agency would never seduce people into its service with false promises of prosperity; it would tell them right to their face that the work is low-paying, frustrating, and capable of disappearing at a moment's notice.  And I, at least in theory, would gladly sign on regardless, because I would be one of the tiny handful of people who want to work there, in particular, not just for the sake of a paycheck, but so that I can feel good about what I'm doing with my life.

This is a Test of the Emergent BS

We as a society decided quite some time ago that we were uncomfortable with notions like socio-economic classes, hereditary castes, feudal arrangements, and other systems for separating people into non-equal categories.  America was founded in the name of equality, with a system of government known as democracy, and since the beginning, phrases like "all men are created equal" have continued to be our touchstone, despite the inherently misogynistic and theocentric qualities they contain, now that we're gradually coming on board with the idea that women are actually people, and that all non-Christians might not in fact be infidels born into damnation (which is so horrific that killing them, in order to save their souls, is the socially responsible thing to do).  We want to believe all people come into the world with a fair shake, that nobody is inherently better than anyone else, and that we are not only equal in value, but also possess a positive quantity of value, rather than just all being equally worthless.

Here's the problem.  Believing all of these things, we do a piss-poor job of actually making them true.  Instead, we simply find ways to make ourselves think they're true, and then blithely turn out backs on that reality, humming a happy tone loudly enough to drown out the screams of the people we've convinced ourselves aren't actually being murdered.

We want people to be equal, so what's our solution?  Capitalism - the most thoroughly un-egalitarian social system short of outright fascist dictatorship.  Mind you, it's ostensible opposite, communism, is the second-worst system at ensuring equality; placing any sort of Party in charge of ensuring the fair distribution of resources to the ostensibly-equal masses clearly doesn't result in Party members getting an equal share, at least not more than occasionally.  But even that's better than having everyone start out with an equal chance at poverty, and allowing a handful of people to earn wealth and comfort and power and prestige, all while a number of other people just as talented and deserving fail, largely due to all manner of random factors.  Our system has a lot of ways to help people succeed, and a lot of other ways to make sure they have very little chance to do so - we want people to be educated, but we refuse to send someone back to college on the taxpayers' dime after they've flunked out three times, and clearly they're not going to be able to afford their own tuition at this point.  So if you were sick the day you took the SATs and couldn't qualify for a grant scholarship, then some random bacterium has cost you your entire future, and now the path your life takes is set in stone, because society has all sorts of rules in place which limit your ability to correct for that sort of unfortunate circumstances, all because we're terrified of the idea that someone - who we claim to regard as our equal - is going to "freeload" at our expense.

We as a nation are not even close to equal; we are unequal in a staggeringly vast number of ways, and while the potential gulf between the highest point and the lowest might be slightly less severe than in some war-torn third-world nation, it's still pretty damn big.  Bernie Madoff got rich by swindling huge numbers of people out of their life savings, and is now cooling his heels in a comfortable minimum-security prison; meanwhile, hormonally belligerent black teenagers get shot dead in the streets by paranoid, trigger-happy, and possibly racist cops, just because they were brandishing a water pistol that wasn't a bright enough shade of blue to be obvious as a toy, given the poor lighting conditions.  Without speculating on how much of the difference between these situations lies in race, how much in money, how much in the difference between street cops and sentencing juries, and so forth, my point is simply this - they are different.  Madoff and his fellow financial wizards in their more-than-your-education-costing suits, whether their money-management schemes fraudulent or completely legitimate, simply occupy a different stratum of civilization than foul-mouthed and reflexively hostile "gutter trash" who would commit willingly commit murder over a nice pair of shoes.  If members of these two groups were magically transformed into each other, resulting in a silver-tongued "ghetto punk" with a high-class accent and a rich white man who swears at police while flashing gang signs, then the former investment banker would probably end up plea-bargaining his way into a shorter jail sentence even while his other half rapidly destroys his entire social circle and squanders 90% of his liquid assets - and they'd still probably never meet exactly in the middle of the gulf that had long separated them.

We're always going to have divisions like this in society; for the most part, we want it that way.  There's an inherent human desire for justice, coupled with selfish egotism (manifested both in excesses of desire and in irrational fears of loss); we work actively to prevent society from reaching a point where every single person enjoys the exact same lifestyle, regardless of how hard they've worked or what they've sacrificed from themselves or how lucky they've been, So, if we're going to have different groups of people, then I say we should openly admit it.  I think I've said before in this blog, that although a hereditary caste system would be an atrocity, there's a great deal of logic to the idea of a qualificational caste system, in which something more complex than, but functionally similar to, your SAT scores or your IQ test or your Meyers-Briggs Personality Profile or a Which Career is Right For You quiz (mix and match aspects of these and a thousand similar configurations, until you think you've got something good enough to work for everyone), is used to explicitly label you as a member of a particular social grouping, and the rules of society are written to openly acknowledge these categories, without any pretense that every one is as good as all of the others.  Someone who's unambigously proven themselves to possess all of the qualities that society has agreed to regard as Good, while suffering absolutely no detectable level of any of the characteristics deemed Bad, gets the highest possible rank in this system, and is treated like an international dignitary, religious figurehead, captain of industry or the like; someone who entirely fails all of the test's qualifications (or refuses to take the test altogether) is proven to be little more than a frothing maniac, and certainly receives few privileges.

It's entirely possible we'll never draft a set of selection protocols sophisticated enough that they deserve to be used as this kind of test; the human equation might well be beyond any and all humans' ability to solve.  But I think that a few attempts ought to be made, in spite of such catastrophic examples of it going horribly wrong as are provided by the novel/movie Divergent, just as I believe we ought not to be scared away from spaceflight by the existence of a billion crappily-written sci-fi flicks, about killer aliens and black holes and the potential next Challenger explosion and so forth.  Socioengineering is a field of study just like any other; it's possible to do it completely wrong, producing the equivalent of a collapsing bridge or an exploding nuclear reactor, but it's also possible to do it right, providing transportation convenience and clean energy.  And since nobody talks about the latter outcome on the news, because Michael Bay never makes a movie about it, because we as a rule find happiness boring and don't devote much emphasis to thinking about it, we spend very little energy toward practical efforts at getting happier, but lots of time thinking about what horrors might result if we tried and failed.

My point (assuming, rather charitably, that I have one, and am not just rambling incoherently about what bothers me) is this.  "Caste system" is one of those terms that tends to reflexively scare one's audience away (and my audience at this point is down to about two people from a one-time maximum of five, so maybe I should quit gambling on these), but it doesn't necessarily describe something utterly anathematic, just something that's possible to do entirely wrong.  The creation of different categories of human being is an inherent psychological need we have, and we always get utterly repulsed by the systems that other cultures have come up with, but that repulsion doesn't extend to systems just as bad which we never perceive, whether because they don't exist, or just because we are partially or completely unaware of their existence.  Often times, we hate and reject a proposed utopian social design, because we simply mis-perceive it as being something horrific (this happened with the socialized-medicine struggle; whether you happen to agree with the exact specifics is one question, but the absurd panic about "death panels" demonstrates how utterly irrational people are in the consideration of such questions); just as often, though, we tolerate atrocities because they're easily disguised or concealed.  A lot of the world's systemic injustices are completely fixable, but in most cases, if you don't put a face on a problem, nobody will care.  And if you put the on the wrong place, the "right people" will care less, and may begin actively opposing your efforts - when your cause itself has not actually changed, you've just catastrophically mis-stepped in your efforts to advertise it.

So here's my attempt at putting a nice face on an enlightened "social caste" system.  Let's say that we as a nation openly acknowledged the need to have higher and lower classes of person, but then made ourselves feel better about that desire by re-emphasizing that even the lowest of those classes deserves food, shelter, clean water, clothing, and a few other minimal necessities (we'll leave out education and healthcare for now, since those are the two really big and really questionable ones that seem currently impossible to solve).  So once we'd decided that these were our country's priorites, how would we integrate them?  Simple: grant everyone their necessities for free, as an automatic entitlement, while tripling or quadrupling or so the price of all luxury goods.  Such a system would widen the gap between rich and poor, but it would also make poverty a lot more tolerable, and although it would hurt the rich a fair bit in material terms, it would soften the blow by explicitly acknowledging the perception they inevitably have, that they're just better than other people.  Under this system, struggling 18-year-olds in college probably couldn't afford the latest Xbox, let alone a car - but they'd also never have to worry about flunking out and ending up sleeping on the streets.  Some might be willing to endure that risk in order to have an Xbox, but the majority would probably realize that a guarantee of safety is worth more than the possibility of being able to afford some fun.  And for those who could afford the Xbox even at its vastly inflated price, think of what a status symbol it would become!

A system like this wouldn't fix everything that's wrong with our country by a long shot.  But it'd be a nice start.

Trigger Warning - Rape Analogies

Consider this hypothetical scenario.  Having somehow come into ownership of a scrap of land which is not part of any country, state, county, city, or other legal jurisdiction, a group of people decide to create a new suburb, a gated community which is open only to what they consider the "right people".  Styling themselves as the Town Council, they draft a set of Bylaws which they're confident will make their town a fun, safe, and satisfying place of residence for an entire community; at first they hand-pick everyone who can come live there, but eventually those people start inviting their friends who start inviting their friends, and a large, vibrant community grows.  Because all of these people are cool and they're having fun living here together, it never occurs to any of them to, for example, commit rape against each other.  And they happen to overlook the fact that, when drafting those Bylaws, the Town Council neglected to specify anything about how rape is a crime, since they were perfectly (and sub-consciously) confident it would never happen, among the various cool people who were going to come live in their town.

Then, one day, a woman moves into the town, a somewhat disturbed woman who is absolutely phobic about the idea that she might be raped, with a completely unrealistic notion of how likely it is to happen.  And when she happens to notice that the law doesn't say anything about rape being prohibited, she flips out, and decides to hold a one-person protest rally outside the town hall.  There, she harangues every passer-by she can catch, lecturing loudly and stridently about how utterly necessary it is that every community, no matter how cool its people think they are, MUST make it explicitly illegal to rape anyone, or else they are tacitly sanctioning the act of rape even if it never actually happens.  Most people she's shouting at are good, decent folk who would never rape anyone, and to them, she's just being ridiculous and annoying.

But here's the key point.  If she keeps belting out that spiel at the top of her lungs, day after day, right outside where the Town Council are having their meetings, what does it say about them that they continue to not have a rape law on the books?  Whether they're intentionally ignoring her, or have just managed not to notice her, should not someone perhaps stop kvetching at the deranged woman's unreasonable behavior, and start trying to find out why her concerns - however little validity they have outside of the purely theoretical - are not being addressed?

What is all this an analogy for?  Believe it or not, it started with a GAME, of all things, and the original issue was pretty insignificant, but I've kept pushing the matter because I found it profoundly disturbing that nobody besides me could see a problem here.  Whether or not it ever actually happens, the ability to betray someone on the most fundamental level is an Alpha-Level Offense against the social contracts upon which gaming relies; if you can be "griefed" in the game, and have no defense whatsoever other than to stop playing with the jerk that did it, then I see that as a serious failure on the basis of the game itself.  Nobody in their right mind would want to live in a town that allows its citizens to rape each other, and a game which fails to police griefing is very much the equivalent on a smaller, more trivial scale.  But just because it's all fun and games doesn't mean it should be taken lightly; behavior in a game is a microcosm of behavior beyond the game, so if inappropriate activity is allowed to flourish, even if it never actually flourishes, the failure to actively curtail it sends a very bad message, about the people who are supposed to be taking responsibility for the space they've provided, whether that's the physical space of a city or the ideological space of a game.

Better late than never: My take on Gamergate

I originally wrote this bit in September, and while the Gamergate scandal is pretty much old news by now, it'll only keep getting older.  So since this was the soonest that my general disorganization would permit me to chime in, I thought I'd get my take on this flash-in-the-pan scandal out the gate before it became any more obsolete; I felt that I had something relevant to say, and it's just a pity I couldn't get it said sooner.

I now present the original text, without any subsequent revision.

****

Let's look at the Gamergate scandal.  It's pretty obvious why women are not welcomed into the gaming community; it's because gaming is about escapist fantasy, and for men in general (excluding those who've been "tamed" by women, or were born "different" as statistical anomalies), the single most important fact of the life they need to escape is the fact that they can't get laid.  (A general lack of power in their lives is concurrent with this, and often the two are conflated into fantasies of rape or harems and such - but most men wouldn't turn up their nose at sex where they got everything they wanted handed to them but were not at all in control of the process.)  Women can't understand this, because they don't have a NEED to have sex, constantly and for brief periods which only "reset the clock" for a matter of hours; for the most part they don't need to bring sex into their games at all, but certainly if they do, it'll be more like seducing a single partner for the duration of the game until finally achieving an LTR in the good ending, and less like having slutty elf maidens drop as treasure with every sixth monster you kill so that you can regain hit points by fucking them.

The bottom line is, men want games which objectify women, for the same reason they want games which glamorize violence, minimize social strictures, and award ridiculous quantities of wealth for trivial achievements.  Women getting into the industry are likely to object to this treatment of their fictional sisters, clearly proving that they aren't adequately cognizant on the "fictional" part (though they have a point, many of them men aren't quite on top of that one either).  Men don't want their entertainment watered down and deprived of one of its key features, and so when girls try to horn in, they resist.

A Hard-Line Stance Against Victim Enabling

In the wake of two recent incidents, I need to say something that I probably can't say anywhere else without cutting my own throat, and even saying it here is probably dangerous to my future employment possibilities and such, but I still believe it needs to be said.  We live in a culture of trigger warnings, sensitivity training, and the abrogation of any degree of personal responsibility, and I'm sick and tired of it.  So I'm going to say this, just once, and have absolutely no sympathy for anyone it offends.

If a person commits suicide, the cause of that event is that person's choice, and absolutely nothing else.

Nobody can be "driven" to suicide, and I've had it with society's insistence that they can.  The human urge to survive at any cost is the most powerful force in the universe; it has leveled mountains, conquered the horizon of space, and driven the mightiest (other) predators in Nature to the brink of extinction.  Absolutely nothing can defeat that motivating impulse, other than its own malfunctioning.  If a person does NOT feel the determination to survive at any cost, no matter what happens, then that person is GOING to kill themselves eventually; they will find some excuse, regardless of what anyone says or does to them.  It is absolutely never anyone's fault (not even theirs, since they did not choose to be born with a terminal disease of the mind); no amount of handling that person with kid gloves, respecting their feelings, giving in to their childish demands for attention and coddling and anything else they think might keep their misery at bay, is ever going to stop them from finding some justification for the act that they've been planning their whole lives.

So once and for all, we need to stop trying to silence people who say "mean" and "hurtful" things, because if a person doesn't have a self-destruct system hardwired into their brain, no amount of bullying can possibly change that - and if they do, no amount of bullying-prevention can save them.  This doesn't mean that I'm in favor of actual bullying - it's pointless, disgraceful behavior and it definitely should stop - but what it does mean is that no-one should be mistaken for a bully, just because they fail to walk on eggshells around a mentally fragile person who's trying to get everyone else to act as an enabler for them.  There is a very significant difference between being actively cruel and simply behaving thoughtlessly; the latter is perfectly acceptible, because we don't owe one another anything more than basic interpersonal distance.  And I'm tired of seeing people villified simply because they're not gentle and cuddly enough, when all the sweetness and love in the world can't stop a Robin Williams or the like from doing what their inferior genes have programmed them to do.  We as a species need to face the facts, even when they're painful - life is a take-no-prisoners game, and we cannot afford to waste energy trying to save those who are determined to destroy themselves.  Until we can isolate the root cause of depression, and cure it like any other disease, we need to simply accept that some people are doomed, and it's not worth the effort of trying to protect them, not when it comes at the expense of everyone else who lacks such debilities.

Against the Cowardice of the Corporate World

The modern workaday world is preoccupied, above all other concerns, with the avoidance of conflict, particularly violent conflict.  And I can certainly understand where they're coming from on that; I don't want there to be a great deal of bloodshed and havoc in my day-to-day life either.  But look at the alternative that we have been offered...the hiring process is increasingly done through a series of double-blind third-party contacts, and information is withheld whenever it might be slightly dangerous to admit the plain truth.  As a result, there is no accountability for anything, and the economy spirals ever downward, leaving legions of people unemployed or underemployed, unable to even guess what they're doing wrong in job interviews because they never receive any feedback, as the hiring manager doesn't want to risk upsetting them and possibly causing them to lash out.  Anyone who is perceived as a potential risk is simply shunned, because everyone is terrified of setting them off; rather than take even the tiniest chance of them going postal, society has agreed to give them an extremely high probability of becoming homeless and slowly starving to death.  Would it really be THAT bad to let someone get angry instead, yell and curse and scream, maybe throw a few things or break some furniture?  Even if they wreak violence, even if they kill a few people or blow up a small building - are they not still doing FAR less damage than the system designed to prevent them?  How many buildings worth of people die on the city streets during each harsh winter?  How many people are bottling their rage up inside, then taking it out on anyone who's vulnerable?  Why can't the hiring managers of corporate America just "man up" and take a punch on the chin every once in a while, rather than hiding behind a system that slowly strangles half the population of the entire country?

The Best and Worst Careers For The World - An Incomplete Index

It's been a busy summer here under the Sky that Watches; I've been working a job which, unlike the one I held when launching this blog, actually makes me work hard instead of working-hardly.  I have no Internet at this workplace, so dashing off a quick mini-entry during lunch is an impossibility, and the commute is even more onerous, leaving me little time save on too-short weekends.  Still, I've finally settled upon a topic which is so near and dear to me that, having thought of it and then risked forgetting all about it, I'm making the time to by-gawd-get-it-done.  That topic is work itself - specifically, particular fields of work, and whether they help the world more than they hurt it or vice versa.


Obviously, my personal opinions will influence this list of rankings somewhat, but I'm trying to be at least somewhat serious and objective.  I don't especially care for clowns, but if someone really wants to smear greasepaint over the parts of themselves that aren't stuffed into garish clothes and go caper about in public so that they can be mobbed by squealing children, it's really no skin off my back; they're not causing anything that I define as harm to the world.  No, my vitriol is reserved for professions that, even if some people like them for perfectly sane reasons, I consider to be inherently detrimental to the entire human race by their very existence, with any good they actually do achieve being outweighed by the harm they at least theoretically might.  Conversely, while I sing high praises for those who help the world in tangible ways, even more accolades are owing IMO to those who uplift it more subtly...building a bridge might help people go places, but this doesn't help much if they don't have any reason to travel, and so I prioritize the askers of "why" more highly than the answerers of "how", valuing their ability to imbue the world with meaning rather than merely to accomplish the pointless task of preserving an initially content-neutral existence.

We'll start the list with 5 jobs that uplift society or accomplish great things, followed by 6 (since I'm better at being negative) which fester like cancers in the soul of the world, and over time I'll try to come back and update this list periodically, adding more and more career fields as they occur to me, so that the list will grow gradually toward a middle and perhaps even unify into a comprehensive catalogue, every major field of work ranked according to the importance I believe it holds.  I may have to split some hairs in deciding which particular disciplines to rank separately, and when to lump several distinct strains of study into a single entry; these decisions are subject to later revision, but for now I make them without apology or overmuch concern. 

EDIT - Having allowed this list to stand at 11 items - six negative and five positive - for three months, I've thought of nothing else to add to it until today, when I shall add a single (mildly) positive entry in commemoration of a recent positive event, and then leave the list more or less symmetrical for a while.  I could fairly easily make this 12-item list into "four good, four bad, and four neutral", as the bottom two plusses are damned with faint praise, and the top two minuses are something in the vein of necessary evils; a world might be better off if it did not require either half of this category, but as it stands, the world we live in very much does, and so distinguishing them as "good" or "bad" is perhaps rather questionable.  Still, it makes a convenient narrative shortcut, so I will leave it as it is for now.

Without further ado, let us begin with the best of the best.

1.  Artists
For the moment, I can't think of any contribution to the world more meaningful than the painting of a pretty picture, the crafting of a fine sculpture, the capturing of a once-in-a-decade Kodak moment, the assembly of a geometrically-inspiring tile mosaic on the floor of a public building, or any other creation of visual arts to be displayed for others's eyes, for the purpose of adding beauty and virtue to the world.  For the moment, I'm separating certain other fields of art out and focusing simply on things that you look at, those worth a thousand words and requiring active attention, as I believe their purpose is different; you read literature (even comic books, though they can double as art quite effectively, and some are more one than the other - Jack Kirby's art is almost certainly of greater immediate worth to the world than Stan Lee's writing), and you hear music whether or not you listen to it, but art that your eye simply flashes across for a split-second has little impact on you, while you need only take a fraction of a minute to fully appreciate a visual masterpiece on at least the most basic level.  This "golden mean" between the environmental omnipresence of sound and the active-engagement-requirement of text is probably what elevates pictorial works to what I consider to be the pinnacle of spiritual relevance (and the medieval Church agreed with me, which I firmly believe plays a large role in why they achieved such prominence); you can "grok" a painting/sculpture/frieze/etc. at a glance or scrutinize it for hours, but either way, it takes you beyond the limits of reality into a realm of pure human-mental creation.  There is no higher statement of purpose for our lives that I can think of.  Bill Hicks said it best, literally rather than profanely:  "Fuck artists!"  And do it quickly, before they starve.
(It should be noted that the creators of such works as "The Lights Going On And Off" or "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living", if they qualify for membership in this profession at all, are certainly not the members I intend to applaud with this list; while I consider it eminently possible to be an artist by trade even without ever turning a dime of profit, artwork created solely for the sake of being sold for an elevated price does not qualify as "art" in my book.  Individuals like Martin Creed, Damien Hirst, or for that matter Jackson Pollock are not adding much in the way of cultural heritage to the human species; they're not uplifting our souls or ennobling their nature much, if at all, and the fact that they spawn arguments over what qualifies as "true art" only suggests that they are in fact "anti-artists", who by their existence attack and disrupt the very field that they claim to participate in, and no more accomplish the goals of "traditional" art than a creator of bio-engineered pathogens qualifies as a doctor.)

2.  Authors
Despite being a member of this category myself (at least on an amateur basis), I rank it less than superlatively because, ultimately, I believe it makes a less valuable contribution on a pound-for-pound basis.  While certainly stories are valuable things to possess, they are also relatively easy to conjure for oneself; it takes just as much talent to write well as to paint well, but it takes far less talent to write adequately, and there are far more adequate writers out there supplying whatever demand there is for merely-adequate writing.  Likewise, books take longer to consume than visual artworks, and offer a greater possibility of leaving the audience untouched when he or she gives up on the effort required to apprehend their worth; in short, writing of less than stellar quality is not only plentiful, but of sharply limited usefulness.  Thusly, one more artist is of more immediate value to society than one more writer; while I'm not saying that only the best of writers should write, I am saying at least that a person whose primary vocation is "writer" had best do more than simply "write something"; a unique niche might still have unmet needs, but the "mainstream", whatever exactly it might be, has plenty enough of "just whatever" to satisfy its appetites for quite some time, and those aiming to be successful need to have either superlative skills or an "angle" of some sort.  With all this said, those who do have either of those things are still making an immense contribution to the world...not only can we always use more life-changing literary masterpieces, but also every bizarre new genre that's invented by a writer seeking to explore uncharted territory, perhaps to compensate for a not-quite-sufficient degree of talent with more ordinary works, ultimately expands the mental horizons of humanity's inner world, and that is a priceless and wonderful thing indeed.  We don't need any more mediocre hacks to clog our bookshelves with pabulum we'll never find time for and have essentially already seen, but we definitely can always profit from someone trying to blaze a new trail, even if it ultimately goes nowhere...and if you're not sure whether you're a trailblazer or not, it almost certainly can't hurt to try.

3.  Musicians
I don't want to make it seem as though the creative professions are the only ones I value at all; this was meant to be a Top Ten list (followed by a Bottom Ten), but it's taking too long to write the shortest articles that I feel are worth writing, so I'm not going to have much room in this first draft.  In any event, music has had far too powerful an effect on my life not to get a superlative ranking here; I literally can't sleep without some compositions, and others play a close second fiddle (yuk yuk) to caffeine in getting me woken back up, so my very lifestyle has a rhythm which the music industry conducts expertly.  Whether you create new music or simply perform the works of others, either way your value to the world is tremendous; there is not really a practical limit to the number of live shows that we can benefit from having performed, in order to give us someplace good to go on the weekend.  The only reason why music ranks as low on this list as it does, is that it has a greater potential than the previous two to go horribly wrong; while certainly artworks and writings have been used for evil ends before, they are nowhere near as viciously effective as music which is created to corrupt or brainwash the listener.  While the blame lies on those engineering the mind-virus rather than those who simply propagate it, the fact remains that music can be a very dangerous weapon in the wrong hands, and thus it cannot claim to be as purely beneficial as its sister-arts.
(An honorable mention should be given to the movie industry, which is too thoroughly a constellation of jobs rather than a single one to find any place on any remotely economy-sized version of this list; I might as well mention them here, since the soundtrack is as integral as any other element to the creation of a cinematic wonderwork.  Movies duplicate the first three entries on the ranking by nature and purpose; they provide dazzling spectacles as well as stories and a life-transforming rhythm, and are thusly a great positive influence on the world.  But they also drink deeply from the wells of some of the professions at the bottom of my list...they exist primarily as shameless cash-grabs, often harmfully influence the public consciousness, and are bolstered in a structurally necessary fashion by some of the most destructive branches of law.  Taken as a gestalt, Hollywood is neither good nor evil, though it is certainly juggernaut-like in its power and dominance; above all, however, it is not a single job, and the one that it most nearly resembles is probably this one, so it gets shoehorned into the footnote of this entry for now.)

4.  Engineers
As a great believer in social progress despite its many pitfalls, I must eventually give some acknowledgement to those who achieve more than mental creation; the engineer is pretty much my definition for a person who actually accomplishes something, and I instinctively ascribe to them a solutions-focused and no-nonsense approach to life which, though I acknowledge is not universally found to equal extents among all their members, I still consider to be part of the job's essential nature - and to be a quality which would be of immense benefit to pretty much every member of society who isn't in the previous three categories.  We ought all to be builders of one sort or another, I feel, and those who build structures meant to support the weight of thousands need to prove themselves fairly well trustworthy before they're likely to be awarded the necessary contracts (though tragic exceptions do of course occur, and I may never feel entirely safe crossing a bridge again after what happened on I-35W a few years back).  In general, I think anyone who has what it takes to become a structural designer is an asset which society needs to cultivate the holy living fuck out of, and this is not much less true of most other professions which can lay a non-bullshit claim to the word in their title (such as electrical engineers, who are certainly no less valuable than rebar-and-cementmasons to the creation of our glorious modern world).


5.  Doctors and Nurses
Personally, I have an intense distrust of the medical profession; I prefer to tend my own illness and avoid being billed for the next ten years, and to simply endure any condition which is less than life-threatening.  But I recognize that while some of this is rooted in genuine skepticism toward the purity of Hippocratic altruism in a for-profit hospital system, or in a belief that modern medical science is only a relative rather than an absolute improvement upon shamanistic practices ranging from herbalism to trepanning, most of it is just garden-variety paranoia that I shouldn't consider worthy of basing a social philosphy upon.  While the skills and motivations of a physician are almost certainly not perfect, the chances are good that they're well above the median; ultimately nobody volunteers to spend that much time around people who are bleeding, vomiting, and soiling the bedsheets unless they have at least some altruism in their nature, and so I'm inclined to think that practicioners of medicine are probably more nearly good people than the opposite, even if I'm not ready to trust them very damn far as yet myself.  In general, a healthy world is a better one; I think the Establishment takes this principle much too far, but if the hypochondria were dialed back a bit and the Asclepians reserved their attentions exclusively for those who needed them, regardless of financial motivations either against necessary care or for the reverse, they'd be critical ingredients for that ideal world I want to see achieved within my lifetime.  And, after all, if my leeriness toward hospitals doesn't eventually abate, my lifetime isn't likely to be incredibly long, so I should definitely try to steer myself in the direction of valuing healers and caregivers as much as my lunacy will permit.

6.  Accountants, Taxmen, Bankers Etc.
The fact that I'm adding this somewhat flattering entry is triggered by, but not actually related to, the fact that a person who happens to be an accountant recently did me a favor.  I'm not here to thank him or anything; I just got to thinking about my overall opinion of his profession, and decided it was worth mentioning here.  Rather than being a sort of necessary evil as I would regard both doctors and soldiers as being, accountants are a category that I am largely neutral upon (whereas lawyers I have somewhat conflicted views upon, mostly disliking them but admitting that the best defense against a bad lawyer is a good one, much as with the military, and certainly not marking the entire breed as having quite as inherently negative a nature as anything to do with money-making).    Having taken accounting class in high school, I quickly (though not quickly enough) came to the conclusion that it was excruciatingly boring; even today, I cannot help but mentally stereotype an accountant as an inherently dull and petty bean-counter type, who has nothing better to do than track every piddling detail of an organization's expenses, trying to account for every penny and never let so much as a candy wrapper go unanswered-for.  But at the same time, while I can't envy or even admire that kind of mentality, and would find it annoying any time I was on the receiving end of it, I cannot help but feel as if it is objectively correct behavior.  Everything does have a cost, after all, and tabulating those costs very precisely is responsible behavior.  Accountants' job is to keep track of the truth, in all its fine detail, and I do believe that's a somewhat beneficial thing to do, at least up to a point; outside the realm of caricature, every accountant is a human being, and there are probably very few who live up to the worst stereotypes of their nebbishy fixation.  At least as long as they are reasonable, their determination to check up on a company's millions and make sure they aren't misplaced, helping to ensure that the paychecks of every employee down to the smallest mailroom clerk do not simply vanish, qualifies them as beneficial agents within society, if not terribly exciting ones.  This sort of qualification also extends to other "check up" types within the tremendously complex corporate and fiscal world - tax assessors, collections agents, compliance officers and regulatory bodies, etc.  And as long as we're talking about money, I figured I'd toss in a quick mention for bankers, who I really intended to have in the negative half of this list, but that's based on a lot of the same issues as lawyers, soldiers and doctors - there are some bad apples out there who give the whole field a terrible reputation, but in general, there is at least some redeeming merit in the pursuit as a whole.  Eventually I should probably split bankers out into an article of their own, but for now they can live here, as they at least share with accountants the tendency to take the Little Guy's money just as seriously as that of Mr. Big, and to care for the money itself even if they do not necessarily care for the person.

-6.  Soldiers
The only justification anyone ever really offers for why their country needs a military is that other countries have one; I continue to firmly believe that the magical disappearance of all war-making capability from the world (all military hardware, every weapons depot and command post and quartermaster's station, all manuals of battlefield tactics or boot-camp indoctrination, and all knowledge or inclination that might result in the replacement of these things from the minds of all involved persons) could only possibly be to our complete and instantaneous benefit.  The urge to violence is an atavism within our collective psyche which is long overdue to be flushed down the psychic john into the sewers of history; having invented the capability to annihilate ourselves a thousand times over, we need to stop accepting that any excuse ever justifies resorting to even the least of these methods.  If all formal militaries worldwide simultaneously shuttered themselves by unanimous agreement, and fully annihilated their entire infrastructure in the process, the only thing we'd have to worry about would be informal armies that amounted to little more than undisciplined mobs armed with sticks and rocks, and these wouldn't be especially dangerous to a civilian populace that were pretty much identical to them, only with the advantage of defending their home turf.  The continual escalation of combat capability in every major nation has long-since become self-sustaining and purposeless; it will end only when we all come to our senses and recognize what a colossal waste it is, and every person who voluntarily submits to the grip of that insanity-engine is one step away from the moment when it finally runs out of power.  If you want to serve your community, go work at a soup kitchen, and if you want to make your country safe, go work at a soup kitchen in one of the countries that thinks America is evil.  Because if you pick up a machine gun and go strut around that country "pacifying" it, you're only proving that belief to be right, and there's another guy just like you in that country who is just as eager to kill for his homeland.  Don't be part of the problem; do the much harder work of waging peace instead.

-5.  Lawyers
While it is possible for one to practice law for good purposes, and of course a society with no laws at all is not likely to function very well at all, I still feel confident that I can state with complete accuracy that Law, as an institution, does far more harm than good, simply by virtue of its inherent inflexibility.  Politicians pass laws which don't need to be made, and policemen enforce laws which don't deserve to be upheld, simply out of the misguided belief that The Law Is The Law, and that it is somehow superior not only to any individual human but to any number of same - logically, it can only follow that it is superior to Humanity as a whole, and that eventually it will achieve sufficient power and independence to judge us all guilty of capital crimes against its own monolithic perfection.  On the forefront of that Skynet-like evolution are the middlemen between the aforementioned cops and congressmen - those whose profession consists almost entirely of arguing about what the Law is and is not.  (I believe I mentioned my opinion of those who preoccupy themselves with definitional wankery in the footnote to #1, above; it goes triple here, since the subject is both more "life-and-death-in-importance" and less "interesting-enough-to-be-worth-discussing".)   The fact that it is somehow not obvious to the prosecutor and the defense attorney, upon both of them walking into a room to argue opposite points of view, that one of them must be wrong, a liar, and unworthy of the opportunity to try and win everyone over to believing his wrongful lies, with naught save a more skillful persuasive tactic than his opposite - that alone more than suffices to indict the entire profession in my eyes.  When sums of money far exceeding any possible definition of reason quickly become involved, that is only sour-egg-mayo and rancid butter on the shit sandwich that lawyers are serving mankind in the first place, claiming that otherwise we should have nothing to eat at all.  But common sense and human decency are a delicious eight-course buffet, and we can start enjoying the meal as soon as we, collectively and unanimously, tell these $5000 suits where they can get stuffed.  We must stop acknowledging their arguments as valid substitutes for the absolute and unchangeable truth of the world, even if we're not yet perceptive enough to know exactly what it is; we should still trust it a hell of a lot farther than we should them.

-4.  Priests
Religion is, at best, a questionable blessing upon humanity; there's a good chance that a completely rational and non-superstitious human race would never have left the Olduvai Gorge and would eventually have died off from some local calamity, and certainly without the Catholic Church's iron grip on medieval Europe and Islam's comparable influence on Arabia and north Africa, it's unlikely that the whole "civilization" concept would ever have gotten past the level of small regional empires constantly destroying each other in wars over territory.  The concept of obedience to a central authority, while it has its downsides, certainly also produces measurable results; marching under the Cross or Crescent, taking seriously the concept that all humanity ought to be unified under that one banner, these two branches of the strange tree called Monotheism (with the unfortunate Jews, naturally, residing at its crotch) collectively bore impressive fruit, for without the concept of a single God who required ever-increasing acts of devotion, Mankind might never have aspired so high and reached so far, eventually creating a world in which we ourselves are half-become like unto the Gods as pre-Christian empires might have imagined them.  The question lies in whether religion retains any of that usefulness now that we've literally ascended beyond the sky, building a "babel" called the International Space Station from which we can get a God's-eye view of the entire planet below us, and a halfway decent squint at theunimaginable vastness beyond.  The conflict between old-fashioned Terracentrism and the modern scientific viewpoint, which posits that we are all but insignificant and that the cosmos is basically devoid of apparent meaning, is at the crux of the question of what religion is worth today; many men of the cloth are still finding ways to bring comfort to the human spirit, but many others have become utterly blinded by the absolutism which they believe to be crucial to their teachings (not without reason, since it was necessarily presented as exactly that during the aforementioned forging-of-civilization era).  Motivated by mad dogmatism and an inability to believe they could possibly be wrong about the things they were so sure of, these people become street-corner shouters, pedophile priests, the Westboro Baptist Church, and so forth...religion gives them an easy excuse for insufferable behavior, and because God fails to smite them for using his name to justify their petty atrocities, they assume they must retain his absolute and unwavering support, and proceed unhesitantly to greater and greater excesses in his name.  Ultimately, blaming the priest for the sins of his congregation might be little better than blaming a doctor for not managing to save his patients - but there is such a thing as being too incompetent to retain your practicing license, and even those preachers who don't rouse the self-righteous rabble in their flocks, often don't try hard enough to quell them before they collectively do something stupid and horrible in the name of the church's doctrines.  In naming religion as one of my antisocial categories, I am taking the stance that whatever good individual religionists may do, they are doing in spite of their tool's bad nature rather than because of its value, and that ultimately they are only strengthening its potential for harm every time they use it, even to heal or build.

-3. Advertisers, Salesmen, and Everything Between
The fact that this list is shorter than it needs to be is becoming painfully apparent; while I sprawled across three closely related categories with my top three entries on the social-benefit registry, the bottom three are all crowded with broad swaths of vaguely related social evils.  Commerce as a whole is pretty much the most virulent strain of social ills, and all three of these final entries are related to it, but this one isn't directly about the exchange of money itself; rather, it's about persuading the person from whom you're hoping to get money (or other valuables, though generally those will turn into money eventually) to cooperate with your wishes, and more generally with changing people's minds in general.  Somehow, when you mention the word "brainwashing", people instantly shrink from a mental picture of Nazi hypnotists convincing you to hold still for a cranial auger, yet they don't even blink as they stare into a television that attempts to transmogrify their opinion of how many months' salary they should trade for a car or a cruise or a piece of jewelry.  I don't indict advertisers as harshly as marketers or sellers, because at least the advertisement wing of the franchise tends to be creative; there are some highly entertaining commercials out there, and the persuasion is usually subtle enough that it's not too hard to push away.  But even so, like a mountain being slowly beaten to sand by the rain of millenia, our free will can only survive so long in the face of the sustained, omnipresent, from-every-direction assaults of the combined advertising industry, which might be telling us to buy Product A or Product B today, or to save up until we can afford Product Y or Product Z, but is absolutely never telling us not to buy anything at all (even an ad for a savings account is trying to swindle you into "paying" today's money, in exchange for a marginally greater quantity of money in the future, but the bank wouldn't offer that trade if they didn't stand to derive much greater profit, today and tomorrow and the next day and beyond, by convincing you not to keep it for your own immediate use).  As advertisers and salesmen deploy their long- and short-range weapons to cut away your resistance, market research aims their shots and stabs toward your most vital organs; a marketer is by far the most useless of these three types of antisocial capitalist scum, since his job is explicitly to reduce a vast collection of datapoints to its lowest common denominator, ignoring every aspect of the truth which doesn't directly contribute to improving the ability of his company (whether employer or client) to extract more money from the customer than their product is worth.  Collectively, these three interrelated fields are all aimed at robbing you of control over your own actions and enslaving you to the ever-fleeting carrot of your own wealth; the process has by now progressed to such an extent that it is basically impossible for any of us to escape the trap.

-2.  Realtors and Landowners
The very concept that land can be owned is a much more recent innovation than the human consciousness that spawned it; while the primitive tribesmen who first invented subsistence farming might have considered the ground they tilled "theirs", this claim ultimately made no difference until some other person came along and disputed it.  There being an absolute limit on how much arable acreage any one person can farm, there would have been little point in stealing each other's land, and thus little reason to consider it owned in the first place, up until the first predecessors of the feudal system arose; when the concept of empire was invented, people began declaring themselves the owners of lands they didn't farm, and demanded tribute from the tenants on "their" land in exchange for some service, usually "us not killing you" or perhaps in the more noble cases "us killing that guy before he kills you".  Feudalism was present in Babylon and Egypt and Rome, pretty much by definition as all of those were "empires", but it reached its absolute zenith in the aptly-named Dark Ages, when a given parcel of land was the property of about ten guys who each owned successively smaller numbers of other parcels, and only the guy whose number was zero actually lived there, giving slices of his pie to all those other assholes that claimed to be protecting him, but would happily kill him and protect someone else if he tried to keep more than the tiniest crumb of crust for himself.  We have progressed nowhere near far enough away from that system.  The concept of land ownership is and has always been ludicrous; the Earth was here before we came along and will be here long after the last of us dies, so the notion that it could be our property is an absurdity on the face of things.  Yet, because of how far the capitalist system has been allowed to sink into its own wallow and somehow never entirely drown, we now live in a world whose landlords beggar the wildest dreams of the medieval dukes, barons, and even kings!  Donald Trump could buy and sell Henry the VIII with the change in his pocket, and nobody today seems to think this is odd.  By claiming ownership over stretches of countryside so large they don't even fit on a single map, today's plutocrats manufacture insanely vast quantities of money from an invisible line drawn on the ground, which exists only in the collective imaginations of everyone they can bribe or bully into cooperating with them.  And the insanity is further compounded when, having seized the land out from under people's feet, the magnate rents it back to them at exorbitant rates, surrendering none of his ownership and demanding to be paid simply for the fact that "their" space is being occupied.
(The same logic will eventually drive some future descendant of Donald's to laser-etch the Trump name onto every molecule of oxygen in the air, and charge the posthuman populace of that era for the very privilege of breathing, which they will happily surrender in exchange for bread-pills and a 3-D television they can watch the circus on.   I weep for the foolishness that did not call bullshit on all this insanity the moment the Renaissance nailed Feudalism's coffin shut; why, oh why, did we ever pull out the stake in its heart, by letting the revolutionaries who had seized the King's palace begin renting it out to their fellow plebs?  Harvey Dent must have been thinking of Robespierre and the Bolsheviks when he came up with that famous quote in "The Dark Knight".)

-1.  Stockbrokers, Insurers, Economists, etc.
Perhaps I'm not quite doing justice to the previous entries by putting them less-negative than this one; certainly, there are good businessmen doing good business out there, and even more certainly, a world completely devoid of business is a virtual impossibility, so any evils inherent in commerce might well be of the "necessary" variety.  But on the basis of my personal feelings about money's potential to go horribly awry, I'm going to go ahead and put the Cult of Mammon up there as the greatest single danger to our enlightened future.  Corporate CEOs and middle managers and stockholders and assorted organizational functionaries, these are all contributors to the harm that capitalism causes, but they are symptoms of varying severity more than they are the disease; I'll likely be mentioning them a little further up the list.  What gets the Absolute Worst mark, however, are those individuals who don't just hoard money, but manipulate it, create the illusion that it does or does not exist where the opposite is true, finessing it like a rapist expertly pleasuring his unwilling victim, and ultimately promulgating the very concept of financial wealth as existing independently of what it represents, the labor and valuable goods which money is supposed to simply stand in for.  Exercising the law of Supply and Demand, to name only the least arcane of the principles involved, enables these invisible-handsmen to obfuscate the hard reality of the world in favor of various layered smokescreens; they set prices based on who wants the product worst, rather than on the product's objective value, and they may even claim that this objective value does not exist, despite the fact that the product is an object that you can hold in your hand or a service that takes time and energy out of your life.  Profiting from the hard labor of others, and then devaluing that labor itself as having lost "equity" due to factors such as "inflation", playing deceptive games with "market share" and "hedge funds" and "expected returns" in order to trick people into paying for empty promises or gamble with their entire future...the villainy of this entire field is so deeply-rooted that I can barely even think about it without beginning to succumb to a frothing rage.  (The fact that most of the work which I am skilled to do is in service of these industries, at the absolute lowest level of influence yet still under the umbrella of their creeping toxicity, helps not in the slightest with letting me see even the tiny bit of silver lining which I suspect might conceivably exist.)