In response to this:

Did this religion of professional work start in the 1950’s? Could have been synergetic with the WWII patriotism. What a vicious cycle, people who love the professional culture, ideology, and rituals who spread the idea that you are personally disadvantaged unless you subscribe to this allegedly prevalent system, so people subscribe and the system becomes prevalent. Even before becoming prevalent, though, people who want the system to become prevalent are confident and mislead people into thinking it is prevalent, and so they join up in a tragedy of the commons. Next time you see someone with an overly clean desk and an excessive zeal for office supplies, formal cloths, ‘professionalism’ sanctioned social interactions (the arbitrary templates where gossip is permitted or even recommended but many instances of non-maliciously motivated honesty, or just acting natural and not so ‘fake’, that you would find between people in any other social situation is blasphemy), who actively spread and enforce their culture, who look confident, posture and all, (even/especially if they’re friendly (less suspicious)) that they know how to correctly act, causing that tragedy to occur, give ’em the ol’ stink eye for me, would ya? Don’t give a stink eye! Haha I’m kidding about seriously desiring their punishment. That’s humor, for ya. But it would be nice if more people were self-conscious about what it is they’re doing, the deceit of their tragedy-inducing confidence, BEFORE they became so deeply emotionally attached to the games, before they so intimately internalize them and, indeed, become drones for these parasitic memetic/cultural systems, a process that begins immediately after infancy. It’s terrible when an old generation has existential distress when their games are ripped out from underneath them, and it’s terrible that these games spread this way, and that people, who wouldn’t otherwise be (maximally) interested in this or that particular game are intimidated into the game, often a severe zero-sum game, where they might be trapped for the rest of their lives in bad faith, toiling away at it and speaking the creeds in defense of it. Whether you oppress with your culture or you are oppressed by a culture, we all aren’t that different after all, because we humans all are oppressed by the phenomenon of culture itself, prevented from reaching way greater potentials (and how might you evaluate the greatness of a potential outside of cultural values? Probably utilitarianism-like, cognitive frameworks which don’t posit the objectively valuable things like heroism, honor, big daddy, etc.., cultures invariably depend on….Anyway, this is a good discussion for (or, rather, pertains to) those who are disturbed by the thought of losing their culture, their forms of prestige, popularity, valor, or whatever social reward objective correlate posits they think they are fundamentally dependent on. People have trouble conceiving themselves attaining happiness or fulfillment or whatever ultimate valuable (which is almost certainly hedonic tone) without their culture. But subtly they misconceive what it would be like for them, their consciousness, to be beyond their current perspective. Even though in words they might appear to be contemplating possibilities beyond their current persuasion, they often fail to, because it is such a fundamental and subtle thing to do, requiring them keep vivid track of so much of their reasoning and schema. When trying to suspend a certain body of frameworks and systems and assumptions, insidiously they creep back in. First of all, most people aren’t even aware they can think beyond them. Their concept of what it is to think and consider is actually limited to thinking within such social paradigms. But if you’re trying to question a system, schema that originate from the very system you’re trying to suspend insidiously pose as necessary, neutral, universal, etc., things beyond the old paradigms when they really aren’t. Little under-cover mental viruses. In my opinion, many representative philosophers and people in academic and analytic philosophy in general fail to work free of this effect. They fail to detect and address their social bias, in very basic ways, for instance positing according to predicted language use (“common sense intuitions” are the worst), not according to evidence for the existence of some entity to be posited.) When will it be that culture doesn’t oppress, that people don’t repress critical or otherwise free thinking, that people don’t have so much socially motivated reasoning (the large majority of one’s thoughts and beliefs are really just predicted social strategies, not true reflection more free of the frames and biases of culture)? When will our interests and our sources of meaning and fulfillment, like the currently socially permissible or even required ones, be replaced by those NOT so bad for us? When will we “be not afraid” of questioning our very fragile personal, interpersonal, moral, and social institutional views, risking never getting them back, so we don’t have to live like this, as cultural sustenance, forced by oppression into forcing by oppression, as conduits of oppression?

 

– Anonymous Source