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Policy, personal choice and polemics: why I am a dole bludger

By meika samorzewski - posted Wednesday, 30 October 2002


At a personal level this meant avoiding anything that might help the economy grow. This entailed avoiding any paid work, primarily because this reduced my ability to spend; the dole is barely enough to survive on. In addition it would mean I was not producing anything of value, which might tempt another into consumption.

I was an economic ascetic. I did it, as only the young can, in order to save the world.

Nineteen years later it seems no one has noticed. There are too many on the economic scrapheap for anyone to notice the sacrifice, let alone care. Indeed some may argue that the scrapheap exists as an incentive to others to work harder and consume more, in which case I portray precisely the opposite example to that to which I have aspired. My message is lost in the market hubbub of fear and desire.

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Nineteen years later and there is no getting off the dole even if I want to. No one can employ me as a bright young thing like they might have, but did not, ten years ago. No one can employ me as a 30-something experienced professional, because experience in the workplace is something I do not have. All this and more despite the fact I am not particularly stupid and surely I could help the economy grow if I was industriously employed. But there seems to be no process to include those who cannot or (as it was in my case) will not compete in the labour market.

In a more organic hierarchic feudal past those who desired less of this world could join a religious order. The deal was you helped others, whipped yourselves and looked otherworldly as much as you liked so long as you did not breed. Then the Order or Parish looked after you. The lack of sex involved in restraining from breeding became an additional way to self-flagellate. Necessity becomes virtue.

These days there is no such broadly supported ascetic option and the no-breeding clause is available in a much more enjoyable way. The closest we get is Green Corp, and while here the khaki worn by staff is a habit of sorts, management still wear suits - no cassocks there, so how is anyone to know the depth of your values? How will anyone know or judge you by your deeds?

Which is the worst thing for an ascetic on the dole. Nobody knows. At least if people knew it might make up for the failure of the anti-economic growth part of the plan.

The worldview I have just described in my young self has been called "dissident or egalitarian enclavist" by anthropologist Mary Douglas in a collection of essays entitled Thought Styles: Critical Essays on Good Taste (1996 London, Sage). There are three other thought styles. Each is a reflection or response to their perception of Nature. They are: -

  • Dissident or Egalitarian Enclavist - Nature is Fragile;
  • Conservative Hierarchist - Nature is Robust within Limits;
  • Rugged Individualist - Nature is Robust; and
  • Isolates - Nature is Unpredictable.
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Mary Douglas looks at these thought styles through the lens of artefacts and consumer choice, in particular the rejection of what other groups choose. It is important to note the object of choice and rejection can swap groups through the generations. Recently, hippies rejected shaving, and a century before so did Victorian moralists. The cultural artefacts are less important in themselves than their symbolic usage in a particular time.

What this means is that to a Rugged Individualist Texan Oilman, whatever the reality of Global Warming, they must reject "Global Warming", as it is an artefact currently given meaning by another thought style where nature is fragile, and "dammit, they're not getting into my head". It must be rejected even if it is true. This is because one's identity, one's sense of self, one's actual person might be extinguished if this thing, "global warming", is not rejected. There is nothing rational about this process. But it is this process that creates the bodied and ego-ed identity, the encultured individual, even as it shops with an economically rational hip-pocket nerve.

One may respond that the oil industry's views are primarily determined by its economic interests, and that is not an unimportant factor. But what about the 'redneck' with no real economic worth and only their identity to foist upon the world? What about the hippie who refuses to work for the oil industry in the first place? These people are what they are, and not what they are worth. They are what they reject.

Yes, oil companies are juggernauts riding along on the entitlement born in job provision and energy supply, but most people are not rich. Most people are poor. Poor in things, but everyone can always reject what's on offer. "Global warming" included.

Or in the case of my young self "Economic Growth" was rejected, as it endangered our fragile Earth. We use rejection, and some selection, to form our identities and create in part our circumstance.

As a result of my younger choices I am unemployable. As employers move through a list of applicants I will always be rejected well before any selection process begins using selection criteria. Employers are hoping to make a safe selection. A cull must take place first. No one else has ever selected me, others have always rejected me, therefore "we'll be damned if we take that risk".

But my symbolic rejection of the economy is of no consequence to employers whatsoever. I cannot even claim to have been discriminated against. They would be negligent in their duties if they employed me. Discrimination is only available for those who want to be a suit but are rejected as such because suits in the past have generally hidden pasty penises attached to well-fed accents (with children), which this applicant lacks - this is regarded as unfair. I could easily pass as such if I so chose but I reject it, and so I am in turn rejected. And this will be the case now even as I change my mind, or even fake it.

Unfortunately I cannot fake it and, it seems, will continue to be noticeable only as an unproductive cost to bean counters. Probably for the rest of my life. I have signed a life-support agreement with the Federal Government in which I get some cash as long as I look for work, and am willing to accept work. But they cannot give me work, only intensively assist my attempts. I am on my fifth or sixth such instance of assistance and it is not that I do not want or refuse to work. I have always accepted that has been offered. This includes three days work at $25 per day plus board at a mussel farm, offered while hitching on the Brooker Highway in Hobart at 8am one Sunday morning. I have never declined work. Never. I have accepted every offer of work ever offered.

However, all the work I have received in my 19 years of adult life adds up to the equivalent of one year full-time work. Most of that in the last five years. To compare it another way, my parents have held fewer positions in their combined 75 years of full-time permanent work.

Mine has been work offered randomly or through word of mouth. None of it has been full-time. None of it has been permanent. None of it has been through a formal written application. I have never been given a job interview following a written application. Only once has work entered my life through a job agency, the old CES.

Considering I am not stupid, have no marked disability, no criminal record and do not belong to a non-pasty-penis group, one would think that an economically rational system would have allowed the creative emergence of ways to include people such as myself in the productive economy. Surely I would be an asset somewhere. It's a pity I scare the suits. Maybe it's not rational after all. Goodness me.

There is another way. Unfortunately it requires education, and I doubt that either government or the market could supply the necessary nudges and pulls on people's consciousness. It requires attending to preference and the personal bias that allows us to be alive. Being alive is not entirely rational. Nor can it be entirely excluded.

This has to be done in discussion and debate. And when you read this piece and accept or reject it you are part of the process that will allow society to continue. It is here, at this notice, attending to our own desires in a (self-)critical debate rather than indulgent championing in propaganda and polemic, that it will be possible. Of course such a stage requires a safe environment: ecologically, economically, politically.

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About the Author

meika von samorzewski is a 37-year-old Australian male with a Master of Applied Science (Social Ecology). He has been on some form of social support since he was 19.

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