Division of Labour (Part 1)

If there is one thing you should blame all your unhappiness on, it should be the division of labour.

Without dividing labour, capitalism would be impossible. It is fallacious to assume that because majority of the world is capitalist, that the happiest people live in so called free-market capitalist nations. While standard of living is often used as an indicator for the social success of a country, this is technically wrong. Standard of living is an economic concept, and not a social one.

What is division of labour?  It is dividing the population into individual specialisations instead of having everyone do everything. In the past, division of labour did not exist and thus, we did not have professions such as doctors, engineers, bankers, technicians and the like. Everyone did what everyone else did, and understood what each other did to a terrifying degree of familiarity by modern standards.

In modern capitalist society, labour is divided. You may be training to be an engineer while your father is a banker and your mother is a secretary. You may be solving differential equations and coding in Java while your friends are learning about the structure of the modern commercial organisation. In our modern society, interdependency is king. You can’t run a commercial entity without a proper labour force of accountants, engineers and technicians, even though each individual specialist has close to no idea what the next specialist is doing.

And this in itself, is what brings about so much unhappiness in our current society.

Before touching on the above statement in detail, I would prefer to use division of labour to illustrate the functionalist school of sociological thought, as it is definitely a better illustration than suicide as you will soon see.

To the functionalist, division of labour is of course, functional. Lets for example assume that an engineer gets paid a similar rate as a security guard, and enjoys a similar social status as a security guard. What would of course happen is that everyone will be security guards and nobody will be engineers. An engineer has to forgo 4 years of wages in order to train to be one, and that 4 years of training is definitely much harder than a 2 week WSQ course in security. This is why in a capitalist society, division of labour is inevitable as a capitalist society would cease to function without dividing its labour force.

The functionalist school of thought is  relevant for most professions in modern society. For example, doctors enjoy a higher prestige rating and renumeration than engineers due to the extra one year of training they have to under go. If the government suddenly lowered the wage doctors received to the same level as that of engineers, then everyone will be engineers according to the functionalist.

However Max Weber, of the Symbolic-Interactionist school of thought, formulated a counter to the functionalist view on division of labour through the use of a thought experiment. Lets for example assume an arbitrary society S divides its labour into a force comprised purely of farmers and doctors. One day, a plague sweeps the land and kills all the doctors. The farmers suffer from a much lower standard of living due to lack of healthcare, but they survive and society proceeds.

Lets now modify the plague virus such that it kills off all the farmers. The doctors, who possess almost no knowledge of farming, starve to death and society S becomes null. You may argue that the doctors could all become farmers instantly, but we are assuming that labour is divided almost perfectly the same way it is divided in modern society. I doubt you would be able to dig the ground as fast as a professional farmer in China even if you started learning today.

Through above illustration, I hope you now understand two of the main schools of sociological thought. As for why division of labour, and thus capitalism, is responsible for your unhappiness in our modern society, stay tuned for the next blog post (i.e. North Koreans are not as unhappy as you think they are).

Suicide

So lets talk about suicide. I wanted to do a stint about it a while back but never got the chance due to school work/tf2/whatever, but this blog post made me think again about this social phenomenon.

The main reason I feel that I am qualified to comment on this phenomenon is because I took an introductory sociology module last semester, and suicide to sociology is what 1+1=2 is to mathematics. If you don’t understand suicide, you will epic fail the rest of your sociology course. This is because one of the founding fathers of sociology, Emile Durkheim, actually published a ground breaking book about sociology explicitly titled Suicide in 1897. Interestingly, even though theoretical knowledge about suicide has been established more than a century ago, there is no effort being made to educate the greater masses about suicide.

Sociologists, being scientists, train themselves to elminiate bias or “think without emotion” when studying social phenomenon. This is easy to illustrate if you have studied physics. A person who has not studied physics will make vague statements about our physical world like “I don’t think a ball comes to a momentary rest when it is thrown upwards” while a physicist would be able to dispute this statement with formal proof. Similarly, a person who is not trained to think sociologically (or a layman) will make vague, speculative and often unfair statements about suicide such as “suicide is for the weak-minded” and “suicide is nothing more than the most selfish form of complaining ever invented by the juvenile mind“.

Social scientists prefer to explain social phenomenon on a structural basis. There are 3 relevant forms of suicide for modern Singapore society:

-Egoistic suicide. This occurs when one’s stake in society is so small, that the person’s death will not affect society much apart from those who know the person closely. This type of suicide occurs mainly among teenagers and divorced men.

-Altruistic suicide. This occurs when a person is so integrated and absolutely loyal to the society one lives in that one does not feel any need for individual gratification. This type of suicide occurs most often among elderly folk (who feel they are a burden) and soldiers (kamikaze pilots).

-Anomic suicide. This occurs when the institutionalised goals of society do not match that of the individual. The individual does not identify with established norms within society and thus feels no need to continue to pressure oneself with such norms. Anomic suicide rates usually spike during economic recessions.

Here are some interesting facts about suicide:

-Men are more likely to commit suicide than women.

-Young men are the most likely to commit suicide in modern society.

-Suicide rates are higher for those widowed, single and divorced than married.

-Suicide rates are higher for people without children than with children.

-Suicide rates are higher among Protestants than Catholics.

Is it fair to say that women are stronger-willed than men because they are less likely to commit suicide? This type of statement is biased, speculative and generally untrue. Women are less likely to commit suicide because most women feel that they have a stronger stake in society and this itself lowers the chance of egoistic suicide. It has absolutely nothing to do with willpower. The uncanny truth about some egoistic suicide is that they are more often selfless rather than selfish acts. It may perhaps be selfish for the people who know the suicidee personally, but does not shake society much as a whole. This is why you never see CEOs, or people with positions of great responsibility, commit suicide. It really, really does not have to do with their willpower.

Yes the truth is, society doesn’t care about those who are close to you. Society cares about your impact on her. She is a living, and breathing thing. There is a larger truth to how society operates and not many may want to see it, but those who do penetrate this barrier will be able to make greater sense of why they behave thus in our modern society.

For those who would like to learn more about suicide, religion, and other social phenomenon in general, I would recommend you to do an introductory sociology course in your nearest university. The module code for the NUS one would be SC1101E. It was overall an enlightening experience and unless you have something against essays, it wouldn’t hurt to do it at all.