Jobs, Jive, and Joy: An argument for the Utopian Spirit.

What follows in this text is the path to radical hedonism as one approach to contend with climate catastrophe and civilization collapse.

This extended essay has its origins with my mother’s job history and my recognition that she lived through both Upton Sinclair’s Jungle as a worker in Chicago’s Stock-Yards and, alternatively, she experienced the beginnings of American scientific management—the precursor of what we today refer to as Human Resources. This latter job was with Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works, located on the western border of Chicago. It was there that she participated in the company’s extensive after-work program of leisure activities. It was simply called the Hawthorne Club.

The titles to the sections of this essay, The Club, Time, Play, The Work Ethic, Beyond Work, and Coda:Strategy, may give a clue that there is a theme winding its way through them.

If you think that the theme that slips in and out of these pages is the nature of work, you would be partially correct. A more significant theme is actually leisure. Or more precisely, the demise of the original intent of leisure as the collective experience of joyful conviviality.

The dominant theme, though, is the pursuit of simple pleasures that have disappeared from the core of our lives to be replaced by glitzy commoditized husks that don’t satisfy our needs. In this essay, the pleasure seeker may appear as a harlequin, or a committed pioneer of the utopian spirit, or a fedora-wearing radical hedonist (1).

Between these covers we traverse a route through a gallery of horrors—the work ethic as an aspect of the Judeo-Christian tradition that corrodes our daily life—and, alternatively, we romp in the seductive fields of both fanciful and practical dreamscapes.

Certainly, contending with climate catastrophe and civilization collapse (CC2) requires a cultural revolution to match the devastation before us. The outlines of which are proposed here.

(1.) In the 1880s, long before the fedora became popular for men, French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt popularized the fedora for a female wearer. The word Fédora is the name of a play by the French author Victorien Sardou, where Bernhardt played Princess Fédora Romazov. [16] It soon became a common fashion accessory for many women, particularly among activists campaigning for gender equality during the late nineteenth century.[17] The fedora was eventually adopted as a defining symbol of the women’s rights movement. (Wikipedia)