My Work is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror by Thomas Ligotti
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pearls to Swine

There is a peculiar aspect of corporate sociology that never seems to get discussed or analyzed - any lack of ambition for status and promotion by an employee is perceived as a subversive act. I suspect the reason for such a perception is that a lack of ambition connotes an absence of loyalty, or at least respect, for the collective enterprise. The insufficiently motivated are feared for what they might not do as well as for what they might do, namely, the unexpected. Ligotti understands this syndrome.

This aversion to the unambitious means that corporate culture involves a certain kind of perverse trust - that every one of one’s workmates wants the same thing: recognition, advancement and reward. Colleagues perceive this as a common bond. Subordinates derive a kind of comfort from knowing the rules of the game. And one’s superiors can feel relaxed about knowing which motivational buttons to push as required. Ambition, the desire for what others want, is the glue that holds corporate society together. Remove that desire and the corporation disintegrates into something less than a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, discussing the various things that no one wants.

Lack of ambition, therefore, is a potential corporate disaster. A person without ambition breaks the rules just by existing. It matters not that they contribute effectively to joint efforts, or that they demonstrate competence in their jobs. They are a threat. More than that, they are an aberration, a sort of corporate zombie without an understandable life-force. They can’t be killed by the usual corporate tools because they are not alive. These are the corporate undead.

Oddly, the corporate undead are also afraid. Not of death within the corporation obviously. But of exclusion from it. Their ontological state of static existence within the corporate fold is essential for living outside it. Their worry is one of exposure and expulsion, that their true status as having life only outside their membership in the corporation becomes public. Having such an external life is frowned upon as disloyal. Having one’s only life there is sacrilegious and warrants exile. The corporation does not like being exploited by those whom it is naturally meant to exploit.

Wanting to be left alone might seem a strange motivation to join a corporate group. But what alternative is there. Our world is corporate. It doesn’t run on the principles of competitive economics or socialist directives but according to corporate policies. Making a living means accepting that fact. In the minds of the undead this provokes not just fear but also horror, the anticipatory dread of a world order that despises what one is and will do all it can to crush resistance. There is no salvation from the corporate pressure to conform, to come back to life as its employee, or, the only alternative, to simply cease to exist.

Paranoia is not an inappropriate or unhealthy reaction to such a situation. Zombies like the undead are dangerous because they are in a constant state of angst. That this condition is situational is not visible from inside the belly of the beast, as it were (another reason for insisting on minimum life outside the corporate). For the non-zombie, reality only emerges after the fact: “... looking back from the deathbed of your entire life in the working world, you would be left exclaiming, ‘What was that all about!”

Frank, Ligotti’s protagonist, knows that he is living a nightmare: “... the paradox of always being afraid: while the pangs of apprehension and self-consciousness may allow you to imagine yourself as a being created of finer materials than most, a certain level of such agony necessarily drives you to grovel for the reassurances and approval of swine, or dwarfs if you like, who function as conductors of a fear from which they themselves do not appear to suffer.” Sometimes under the right conditions, however, the nightmare can be made apparent to everyone.

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