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The millions of followers of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek have seen him more than once wearing a T-shirt that reads: I would prefer not to. Not everyone knows that these words allude to the phrase repeatedly quoted by the protagonist of the very short novel Bartleby, the Scrivener, by the American writer Herman Melville (universally known for another of his novels, Moby Dick). Bartleby is translated into Spanish by Jorge Luis Borges, whose name alone recommends it.
You, dear reader, must not miss this! (With this in mind, I refer you to a free online version) It is a terrible novel about two men: the narrator (an office manager always in a hurry to achieve maximum employee productivity) and Bartleby, one of those taciturn employees who does his job efficiently but, as he says, prefers not to do more than what he was hired to do. “I would prefer not to,” he responds repeatedly.
People wanted to see him as an anarchist, someone who refuses to play into the hands of the system or a peaceful resister who disobeys without attacking anyone. These visions, which idealize him, forget the character’s deterioration throughout the text. He is by no means a hero; he is at the limit of his ability to relate to the world, and he struggles to stay there because, beyond that limit, everything becomes confusing for him. Each “I would prefer not to” is a step closer to a danger zone from which the boss/narrator, a responsible man, must pull Bartleby again and again, not without remorse. Being also sensitive, the boss cannot help but recognize that he is dragged into something he does not want to do: harm a fellow human being. That is why he ends up lamenting what he and society have done to Bartleby: “O, humanity,” are the words with which he ends his narrative.
Let us start by acknowledging that being described as productive has become the highest award that society bestows on its members. I remember the surprise I felt 15 years ago when, for the first time, I received, also from a boss, the December 31 greeting of, “I wish you a happy and productive New Year.” I froze. Unfortunately, I have never understood (and I am afraid I am beginning to manifest Bartlebyian traits) the value of productivity as part of good wishes for others and personal purposes. If I were a sock knitting machine, I would understand, but as a human, I feel that the phrase “productive” does not even describe me as someone who makes valuable goods but only as a kind of object that emits results. I am supposed to understand that “productivity” means that those results are at least practical and sound, and I should be proud; however, the truth is that the well-intentioned word does not tell me anything except that quantity is expected of me: quantity of products, quantitative results.
The reader may be surprised at the extent to which this productivity boom now occurs. Are you aware of the opioid epidemic (substances capable of relaxing someone practically to the point of delirium, such as heroin and fentanyl) that has claimed hundreds of thousands of deaths from overdoses in the United States? Well, according to experts on the expansion of the drug market, this overuse responds to the social demand to stop the current frenetic race for productivity, which began in the eighties and nineties of the last century, of course with its corresponding associated drug, the stimulant cocaine, as much in line with that time as tranquilizers today.
Of course, the demand for productivity exists in all human orders, including that of thought. Much is said about it. Clearly, a few have been assigned the duty to think of ideas that allow society to organize so that productivity is maximum, and of course, the circle closes with the consumption of products. Nevertheless, while expectations about producing these thoughts are high, all human beings are expected to produce at least one type of thought that allows weighing and choosing the benefits of obedience. Bartleby barely reaches this minimum level, beyond which we can think he achieves no other productive thought. Instead, he gives the impression that lacking any other foothold, thanks to his work as a “scribe” in charge of copying legal texts, he finds in his transcriptions a kind of artificial thinking, a prosthesis to sustain himself in the world of productive thought while his sinks into who-knows-what depths. That is why, when the boss takes that option away from him, Bartleby sinks completely (and he does it in one of the saddest ways reported in world literature).
Now, when in less sad ways we turn to an unproductive thought that is mere wandering, a letting go of the reins and letting ideas take us where they will, we run into another fictional character whose completely unproductive life turns into powerfully rebellious madness. I am talking about Don Quixote of La Mancha, the forerunner of poor Bartleby (the latter, being modern and not baroque like the former, has no choice but to be mediated by productivity and the kind of mental health that modern society suggests). Whether or not we have read Cervantes’ novel, we all know that one of the ingenious gentleman’s favorite techniques for his way of life is to place total trust in misdirection, which he sometimes applies by letting go of the reins so that his heroic and famished steed Rocinante takes the course he wants. However, today (the same day as Bartleby’s nineteenth-century one), how can anyone let go of the reins if he is not a knight-errant imitating knights-errant of a bygone time, no longer existent and almost entirely fictional? If Bartleby spent his office hours imitating old scribes, and instead of producing legal copies, he began to write sacred texts or poems of courtly love in the purest medieval style, perhaps he would be saved. Even if fired, he could go out into the street to write on walls and sing his verses…However, he cannot: Like every modern human being, one last trace of productive responsibility is forced upon him.
Bartleby borders on schizophrenia. As long as the boss tolerates and keeps him in the office, he appears to the reader as the last chink in the chain, keeping the social beings we are from falling into the infinite abyss of madness. However, a little nudge will bring him down. We all listen to the silence he leaves when he falls off the cliff, and we say, “Well, he is gone,” trying to close the book without attaching any importance to the incident. Yet, it turns out that this abyss is part of all of us, of each one of us! That is when we hear a voice asking, “Who is next?” and, terrified, we scramble from that bottomless pit. Taking the reins of productivity and its ally, responsibility, we fly at a gallop in hellish fear, and the further we go, the more we celebrate our triumph. “Poor Bartleby!” we keep saying while success and prizes dazzle us. We cling to them, applauded by all, pondering those achievements as the purposeful end of human life and forgetting that we are fleeing from something at the very center of human thought.
Half-forgetting because, always quixotic, we inevitably return to that point where success is not enough for us, and we yearn for something in which we sense our true being, our authentic depth. “Defeat has a dignity that noisy victory does not deserve,” Jorge Luis Borges tells us without straying from the theme he wove into Bartleby.
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A group of psychiatrists from the University of Granada, Spain, give us revealing and horrifying information for those who live in large urban centers where the “individual and his material achievements” are exalted. After stating that these achievements “are ideals that schizophrenics in general fail to achieve” because they lack “the internal means to play the roles that society demands of them,” these experts cite a study by the World Health Organization (WHO) that explains that schizophrenia has a much more favorable evolution in “less favored sociocultural contexts;” that is, in contexts in which “there is more emphasis on the collective and less on individuals.” These environments could result “in less existential suffering, as the social pressure to succeed and be normal decreases.”
I do not think this only applies to people with schizophrenia. I would go so far as to say that all so-called “mental illnesses” correlate with what society demands of them. I have already discussed this in a previous article about so-called “disabilities” and differences. One of the most common conditions in our times is depression, which is clearly associated with uselessness for work and daily tasks, lack of concentration and difficulty in making decisions, unachieved goals, and guilt for failing. In depression, the subject continually looks at himself as if from the outside, judging himself.
We would have to ask ourselves if, in describing the condition called mental disorder, we are not only referring to the limited capacity of the sick to act as the mentally healthy expect them to do, without pondering what they themselves consider their capacities. Does someone who lets go of the reins really have nothing to contribute to the world? (“To come to the pleasure you do not have, you must go by the way you do not enjoy,” the mystic St. John of the Cross, creator of one of the most sublime poetic works of all time, said of his own experience.) Aren’t we, the productive actors, the ones who, with our demands, end up pushing the schizophrenics, depressives, bipolar, obsessives/compulsives, and others similarly diagnosed to a place where they stop contributing altogether and immerse themselves in that “symptomatology” so well described in all psychiatric studies: absence of self-esteem, isolation, loneliness, anguish, and the feeling of emptiness? Are these real symptoms of mental disorders, or are they the reactions of some people before the treatment they receive for their way of being and their preferences?
Is the meaning of life really at the forefront and not at the bottom? Is it really in producing and not just in listening and contemplating? Kant said that the most intelligent person is the one who tolerates uncertainty the most. Are the crazy, singularly intelligent beings the ones we nevertheless want to force to report their discoveries to us productively and responsibly?
My fundamental question is: In this society in which so many new problems seem unsolvable, where skepticism cloaks the population as never before, isn’t it time to care for the madness of the insane and the genius of autistic people who perhaps safeguard unsuspected solutions that one day they will be ready to share with us?
Thinking of us as teachers and educational leaders, wouldn’t it be our first responsibility to reduce the pressure for productivity on our students and on responsibility and values based on individual development and competency, not only to prevent the overflow of those who are on the edge but, instead, leverage these so-called “madnesses?” Are there meaningless thoughts, unproductive fantasies, and disruptive gazes arising in leisure that would perhaps prophesy solutions to problems that not even the sciences of complexity can solve?
Let us never forget that just as a good leader moves his group forward at the speed of the slowest, the excellent teacher regards the pace of the one who seems to lag, respectful of the infinite value residing within him. Moreover, let us always remember that while we try in vain to belittle the way of life of the lost, great sages dream of a life of wandering and keeping secrets that no knowledge can give us. Diogenes, the ancient Greek who dwelt among the garbage and lived in a barrel, was considered the wisest person of his time, and the remarkable quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli, who is described as the new Stephen Hawking, says that if he could authentically live the life he wants, he would be a vagabond. Let us admit that it is something we all dream of in some way, intuiting that the loss of all responsibility and all productivity does not imply the loss of meaning and that perhaps it even signifies something more in line with the demands of our times, which are fed up with unbridled productivity, which for now seems to have as its only solution that true dream of opium that also in our country runs the risk of becoming an opioid crisis.
Translated by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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