Герман Садулаев - The Maya Pill

Yes, I careened across the globe from the White Sea to the Indian Ocean and back again; tried on a monk’s cassock, then ragged blue jeans; walked around clutching a string of wooden prayer beads, then the handle of a Makarov pistol. I scrambled the best, formative years of my life in the geometric Brownian motion of an unfathomable fate. Now what’s left of me spends its days in voluntary servitude as an ordinary office drudge, a cheap white-collar worker in an off-the-rack business suit, my double chin spilling over the necktie leash around my fleshy neck.

I’ve merged into a class totally devoid of class consciousness. I’ve become what is demeaningly designated as “lower middle class,” the baseline standard for poor taste and ineptitude, unenvied even by blue-collar workers, who merely detest us for getting to work in warm, dry offices, while manual workers spend their days up to their ears in shit and engine oil, poking around in the guts of broken machines. No, they don’t envy us; sometimes they actually earn more than we do. Successful people, the upper middle class, hold us in contempt, whereas for high society we don’t even exist at all except as an anonymous throng of pathetic losers, barely visible behind the wheels of the junk cluttering up the road and getting in the way of their limousines and sports cars.

In songs and jokes we’re “mid-level managers,” MLM for short. The term is not to be taken literally; it implies that there are other managers on an even lower rung, but there’s actually no one below us; the next level down is the flames of hell. So when you think about it, we managers don’t really manage anyone—there’s no one there. But “manage” has another meaning as well: to control. In the strictest sense of the word, we’re not really managing—but in fact we sit at the controls of the entire global economy.

I shall now speak out on behalf of the insulted and injured, the proletariat of our new epoch. Lend me your ears!

In stuffy, crowded, overstaffed offices from San Francisco to Qingdao, decrepit air conditioners rattle noisily in the background, or worse, there’s no AC at all. Amid the din and shouting, with Windows on the verge of collapse, the MLM presides. A telephone receiver is permanently attached to his ear, and he himself is plugged into the computer network like a mere appendix to the keyboard. There he sits, building the economy, hastening the march of progress, propelling mankind inexorably onward toward its inevitable collapse.

Not stockholders, who care only about their dividends, not the masters of business standing regally over the fray like Kutuzov and Napoleon at Borodino, themselves subject to the flow of history and lacking free will; not the top managers who claw bonuses for themselves out of each and every deal and preen before fitness-club mirrors; and certainly not the actual workers in the factories, who could give a shit about any of that—no, it’s the office worker: the manager of sales, procurement, logistics, export, import, marketing, human resources, and whatever the hell else—it is he who determines the fate of the world, he, the very embodiment of efficiency, who implements the laws of economics.

An exhausted and alienated import manager in France compares pricing and supply proposals and selects some product from China after rejecting an Italian company’s bid. Meanwhile his director flies to Rome on company money, stays in a Radisson or Hilton, drinks himself under the table at some banquet in an Italian restaurant, and seduces the host’s wife, and now he needs to get a contract with the Italian company, if only to justify his own existence and his exorbitant salary. The exhausted and alienated import manager couldn’t care less; it makes no impression on him, even when he finds out that it was the director of the Italian company who delivered his own wife to the drunken French director’s bed (and she’s not his wife anyway, but an “export escort” hired especially to seal the deal). All the import manager did was compare prices and terms and select the Chinese product.

If the director digs in his heels, the import manager won’t argue, he’ll give in. He has a secret weapon: covert sabotage. Almost immediately things start to go wrong with the Italians. Deliveries are delayed; the paperwork is mixed up, work at the plant grinds to a halt, and the entire transaction comes up a loss. The director gets taken down a peg at the next stockholders’ meeting, and deliveries begin coming in from China.

Because that’s what made sense from the beginning. And the exhausted and alienated manager, who doesn’t stand to gain or earn bonuses from any of these deals, all he wants is for everything to balance out, to make sense, and to benefit the business. It gives him a feeling of functional harmony and insulates him from an awareness of the absurdity of existence.

That’s all.

Thousands upon thousands of import managers the world over make the same kinds of decisions, and terrestrial exports soar to celestial heights.

When he’s done with the world economy, having finally directed it into the proper channels and calculated all the trends and vectors, the exhausted manager sets off for home.

And immediately starts in on the economy from the other side.

He buys up mass-market clothing, fills the seats in chain restaurants, clears stuff off the supermarket shelves. It’s not easy; he can’t cram everything in, but he keeps on trying: eating and drinking, drinking and eating. Periodically he stuffs some new, pointless item of clothing into the one miniscule closet that itself takes up nearly all the space in his apartment. And who, if not he, can consume all that stuff coming out of the world’s factories? He’s tired, he’s miserable, but he knows how to laugh, he seeks out entertainment, and after all, who, if not he, will fill the dance clubs and concert halls? Occasionally he’ll even buy a book and read it, a bestseller, just to keep up with things, to follow what’s going on up there in first class. It was written for him, after all; and he’s the one drenched in the toxic spit of their scorn: Yes, I’m a piece of shit, a loser, he agrees, and keeps on reading. Who knows, he might hit the lotto jackpot and wind up in the penthouse of the Tower of Babel, and, if so, he’ll be able to take advantage of what his reading has taught him about the difference between a genuine thirty-five thousand-euro watch and the one that’s not so genuine, the kind that your basic dimwit can pick up for fifteen hundred American dollars.

He believes in God, believes in the President, believes in the Law, believes in the Market, believes in Science, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy. He takes out loans for his condo and his car, he maxes out his credit card for a serving of yogurt. It’s his way of issuing credit to the economy, a bond of trust to the government and to society as a whole.

The most deranged among them even bring children into the world.

He is an optimist.

He is Hegemon, he is mankind in the twenty-first century.

Respect this man, bland and faceless though he may be.

Rejoice in his blandness. For when he becomes aware of his true class interests, he will turn the world upside down, without even reaching for a weapon. Everything is already in his power. And if this million-handed mid-level manager should collectively decide to press the delete key, he will erase the Universe.

Now this is how the story goes :

That day I pulled up to the office as usual in my gray Renault with its funny-looking, stunted little hood, and wedged the car into an improvised parking place on the lawn in front of the building. I got the lanyard with the Smart Card out of my pocket and draped it around my neck. This is my personal collar, the visible mark of my servitude. Nine-to-five slavery , they call it in the advanced capitalist countries, where over the course of their many decades at the reins of power the liberal socialist parties have trained employers (i.e., exploiters) to observe the eight-hour working day (including lunch break). In my case that comes to nine-to-six; here in the former land of triumphant socialism those eight hours do not include your lunch break.