How hollow and full of filth man’s heart is…”

Pascal PENSEES (On Diversion #171)

Diversion…why is this etched so deeply in the ethos or the fabric of man? I ponder my own life and find myself in the daily grind of the white-collar life: a gauntlet full of unrealistic deadlines, arduous management demands, nursery school antics/rivalries, and hollow corporate promises.

As I write this essay, I seek to have an “out-of-body” experience - an emotional detachment from the corporate cult-like devotion that has become “second-nature” for many of us 9 to 5ers.

The startling fact in my “attempted” third-person observation is that we not only accept this glorified “galley-slave” mentality as normal - but, in fact, we embrace it as if it were the means to happiness. We have an illusion that our personal martyrdom to our seemingly aspiring careers will somehow yield us certain joy. What is the origin of such madness? Have we become so calloused to the daily ritual beatings we receive in the workplace? Do we even perversely relish this corporate madness with sadomasochist pleasure?

How does one make sense out of this brewing cauldron of nonsense? Criminal psychologists have coined a clinical term for this leap into irrationalism in a hostage situation…it is called the:

“The Helsinki (as in Helsinki, Finland!) Syndrome”: It is has been known in hostage crisis situations for the captives to actually come to the protection and aide of their captors when the rescuers rush on the scene. In a sick and demented way, the captive identifies himself with his captor. As SWAT team members encroach to take down the assailant, the kidnapped will even hover over their terrorist to shield them from harm. As you read my diatribe towards diversion, do you find yourself doing the same thing? Are you scrambling around (allegorically speaking) to shield and protect your “captor”?

Before you think I am about to go on a Karl Marx-like tirade on the maladies of corporations and their rapine of the middle class American, think again. After closer inspection, one should see that there has to be a deeper cause for this phenomenon. Its existence has a derivation more primal than simply being chalked up as us becoming a by-product of our corporate environment? What if this corporate “house-of-pain” we look to for our value and worth actually fleshes out what already exists within us? Instead of thinking that the griminess of day-to-day company “busyness” ends up building our makeup…how about recognizing that it only ends up revealing it?

In order to find out what that primal cause is - allow me to digress a bit by establishing a logical foundation for cause. Aristotle, over 2300 years ago, defined a system of levels or “degrees” of cause. For any “cause” - there are five independent and component “causes” that make up that one “cause”. These five causes are:

Please do not be overwhelmed by this ancient academia…these components are readily apparent in everyday observations that we experience. Take for instance a sculptor sculpting a statue:

The sculptor (efficient cause) takes his chisel (instrumental cause) and whacks on the granite (material cause) to make a statue (final cause) that resembles Ulysses S. Grant (formal cause). Easy enough? Or take the example of a hit-man taking out a contract. Tony the Tongue (efficient cause), orders Machine-Gun Kelly (instrumental cause) to shoot, a delinquent customer (material cause) in the head (final cause) in order to kill him (formal cause). I could go on-and-on on examples of the system of causes, but the primary cause is the efficient cause. All the other causes are contingent upon the initiating action of the efficient cause (i.e. the sculptor and Tony the Tongue).

Where does the propensity to run the corporate rat-race fall in the continuum of causes? I assert that it is not the primary or efficient cause. Why? Because the desire to jump in the hustle-and-bustle of the rat-race is something that has to be acted upon. Why? Because the environment, in and of itself, does not have the power of volition. Shakespeare quoted in the play Caesar, “The trouble does not lie in the stars, Brutus, but in us.” The efficient and primary cause has to be us or something in us.

One can sit down and grapple over pre-adolescent traumatic experiences that molded one's work ethic. As I write this, I try not to be insensitive to the authentic travails many have experienced (me included) in their childhood “formative” years. The pain is very real and the impressions very strong - yet, could those childhood years been the first manifestations, or a material cause, of something that already resided within us?

Who is the “sculptor” (efficient cause) that has been chipping away at this most “disfigured bust” (i.e corporate mentality or, simply, just us) that we have created? In a world without God, the fingers get pointed all over the place. Blame abounds everywhere - but finds itself nowhere.

Yet, in the economy of an infinite, personal God, the blame finds its appropriate place.

Us.

How is that? In the worldview of the Christian, one realizes that there was a historic space-time fall. This is a moral fall from grace originating from a historic Garden of Eden incident that has deeply affected man to this very day. Genesis 3:17-19 unfolds to us the origin of the primal cause within us:

With this divine anathema or curse in view, we must realize that the “normal” hustle-and-bustle we so identify ourselves is really “abnormal” and “fallen”. Now I am not propounding that we turn in our two-week notices and head for the hills (although I am sometimes tempted to do so!), but to gain an awareness of how deep the cause of such a mentality comes from. What can save us from this futility, this curse…the Apostle Paul in Romans 7:24-25:

Christ not only saves us from our sins, but he saves us from ourselves. As a believer, I am not innocuous to the stress and rigors of the demanding workplace. But I run no “rat-race”…I know where my True North resides. And as Christ changes my nature everyday to conform to his, I gain the realization that the workplace no longer is a perpetual and circuitous rat wheel anymore - but indeed has become a forum, a veritable arena to glorify my King. I can truly proclaim the Latin phrase, “Coram Deo!” meaning “to consciously live my life in the eyes of an Almighty God!”

I leave this discussion of mine with the words of a marvelous theologian, St. Augustine. Augustine himself was a man feverishly striving for personal distinction before he found Christ. Augustine compares selfish ambition to a wayward woman…one you think you can use (and abuse!) - but in the end, she ends up using (and abusing!) you: