The Hitman's Dilemma: On business, personal and impersonal
Contents; 1. Don't take this personal, it's just business
Prickly Paradigm Pamphlet No. 18, Chicago (2005)
Part 1
“Don't take this personal, it's just business”
The Moral Dilemma in Politics, Law, and Business
Impersonal Society as a Modern Project
Part 2
Private Property, a History
The Digital Revolution
Intellectual Property
The Crisis of the Intellectuals
Conclusions
Further reading
To read further, click on Keith’s Newsletter at the top, select Archive, and scroll down.
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“Don’t take this personal, it’s just business”
The Hitman’s Dilemma is about the tension between the impersonal conditions of social life and the people who inevitably carry it out. This relationship is badly understood, especially now, when the difference between individual citizens and business corporations operating on a scale larger than some countries has become obscured. My starting point is a legendary remark made in a movie by a professional killer to his victim, “Don’t take this personal, it’s just business.” But, according to my favorite American dictionary, a “person” is “a living human being” and what could be more personal than taking his life? The hitman is referring to his own attitude, not to the effect. Killing people is a matter of routine for him, a “business” (“the occupation, work or trade in which a person is engaged”). There might still be an element of personal judgment involved if the victim touches his humanity. More likely, an ethos of detachment makes the work easier, if at an emotional cost. Why should business be impersonal and, if it is, what about the person who practices it?
Let us explore this tension a bit further. “Personal” is “relating to a particular person, private; concerning a particular person’s private business interests; aimed pointedly at the most intimate aspects of a person; relating to the body or physical being; (law) relating to movable property.” Privacy is intrinsic to whatever “personal” means, but what makes it particular may be either mental or physical and it seems to include rather than be opposed to business. “Private” in turn carries a freight of meaning: “secluded from the sight, presence or intrusion of others; intended for one’s exclusive use; confined to the individual, personal; not available for public use, control or participation; belonging to a particular person, as opposed to the public; not for public knowledge or disclosure, secret; not appropriate for public display, intimate; placing a high value on personal privacy.” To complete this round of definitions, someone or something is “particular” when they are “separate or distinct from others of the same category, group or nature.” People are particular persons or, in William Blake’s words, “General Forms have their vitality in Particulars, and every Particular is a Man.”
Apparently, keeping that distinctiveness poses problems for which privacy offers a potential solution. This is especially so when we consider “the public” and, confusingly, by “business” also, even though it expresses “private” interests. Business is supposed to be “impersonal”: “lacking personality, not being a person; showing no emotion; having no personal connection.” But businesses can be too. In law, a “person” is “a human being or an organization with legal rights and duties.” There are therefore real and artificial persons; and business corporations are the only organizations treated like individual citizens in economic law. Others such as churches and political parties, for instance, are not. This right was won at a particular moment in history, the late nineteenth century. Since then, it has become more difficult to draw the line between living persons and abstract social entities that are much bigger and potentially longer-lasting than any human being. I will argue that our political and intellectual culture has become confused as a result, undermining the prospects for a genuine democracy and reinforcing rule by a remote oligarchy.
No wonder the hitman is confused. Business is supposed to be impersonal despite people being usually involved in transactions in their personal capacity. Worse, there is no difference in law between Walmart and you or me, so why shouldn’t a killer claim impersonal reasons for inflicting bodily harm on another person? It is all in the mind. Ideas are impersonal, human life is not. At one level, the issue is the relative priority of life and ideas. Because the encounter is live and therefore already personal, the hitman must warn his victim (and himself) not to take it so. The personal and the impersonal are hard to separate in practice. Our language and culture contain the ongoing history of this attempt to separate social life into two distinct spheres. This is the core of capitalism’s moral economy; and gangster movies offer a vicarious opportunity to relive its contradictions. Here is a violent criminal claiming a detachment that would grace a bank manager. It is ludicrous, but then perhaps the two types of business are not as far apart as we think.
I will explore here the historical relationship between human personality and impersonal society, focusing on the institution of private property. This has evolved in only a few centuries from being a source of personal autonomy in a citizen commonwealth to becoming the means whereby a few huge business corporations seek to dominate the world economy. The question of money’s role in society is obviously central to this; and we will discover that the payment of money is thought to render relations impersonal in capitalist societies. Meanwhile, property has shifted its main point of reference from things to ideas; having once been “real,” it is now crucially “intellectual.”
This development is related to the revolution in digital communications that has begun to shrink our experience of distance in human relationships. For surely, what makes communication personal is when it takes place in the here and now, “face-to-face.” But radical reductions in the cost of producing and transferring information through machines have injected a new dynamic into our relations, invoked by expressions like “virtual reality.” And the current crisis over “intellectual property” is closely linked to a transformation that is pulling society towards an increasingly global frame of reference. Modern corporations rely on extracting rents from property as much as on profits from direct sales; and, as the saying goes, ‘Information wants to be free’, meaning that there is consistent downward pressure on prices for information-based goods and services. The social effort needed to maintain soaring prices in a world of increasingly free production and reproduction is what drives the conflict highlighted by this essay.
Business, especially of the hitman’s kind, is always personal at one level and impersonal at another. The trick is to learn how to manage the tension between them. Moreover, his “business,” the work of criminal gangs, is based on highly personal ties of loyalty to “families” and systematic resort to violence outside the law, in principle the opposite of the bureaucratic universe where most of us live and work. We know that modern business corporations have been granted the same legal status as living persons. And so, just as the gangster thinks of himself as a professional businessperson, it turns out that corporations are quite capable of behaving like gangsters, with equal contempt for human life. This is not to claim that corporate executives are always criminals, just that the line between economic activities carried out within and outside the law is harder to draw in practice than their conventional separation would allow.
What the hitman would like his victim not to take personally is a contract, an impersonal act performed for money, but one intended to inflict personal injury. His business is violence which is supposed to be the antithesis of modernity. The hitman is both modern and a relic of feudalism, of an age when men ruled in very personal ways through the threat of violence. Yet he cloaks himself in the language of “business.” It is confusing, but then our times are confused. There is less difference between them and what came before than we would like to think. For this reason, Shakespeare, whose plays offer his extended reflections on the emergence of the Tudor state out of feudalism, has much to tell us about the awkward relationship between living people and the impersonal offices they must fulfill.
The hitman’s dilemma is to be or not to be human, whether to give an idea, “business,” priority over life. What does it mean to be human? Rousseau claims in his Second Discourse (on inequality) that the two fundamental drives of human beings, which we share with the higher animals, are self-interest and compassion. The first says that every individual has a direct personal interest in self-preservation. The second is the Latin form for the Greek “sympathy” and its equivalent in Germanic English is “fellow feeling.” He believed that our self-interest, a solitary quality, is moderated by an instinctive feeling of sympathy for others, for others like us, but also perhaps for all living creatures. He added a third human universal, the drive for self-improvement, and explained the progressive trend of history as its consequence.
From this perspective, we are isolated individuals who take part in societies that link us to the rest of humanity in one way or another. Each of us, to be human, must learn to be extraordinarily self-reliant. I call this the “toothbrush syndrome” – who will brush your teeth if not yourself? But writers in Rousseau’s time lived with the pain that modern dental care has spared most modern people. We also live in society, and this requires us to learn to belong to others. This is not easy, so that it often appears to us that the two principles are in conflict. Modern ideology emphasizes how hard it is to be individually self-interested and at the same time socially responsible, even compassionate, to be economic as well as social, we might say. Under these circumstances, when culture is set up to expect a conflict between the two, it is hard to be both. Yet the two sides are often inseparable in practice and some societies, by encouraging private and public interests to coincide, have managed to integrate them more effectively than ours. Our hitman does not live in one of these, however, since he must separate “business” from fellow feeling in his work.
At the heart of our public culture lies an impenetrable confusion. On the one hand we think of ourselves as distinctive personalities, on the other we are submerged in an abstract universe where people, things and ideas cannot be distinguished from each other. We no longer know how to act or in what context of mutual interdependence, since we either fail to connect with society or lose ourselves in it. The feminists were right to insist that the personal is political. Politics too is often necessarily personal. But, if we relied on people alone to make society, we would be back to feudalism or its modern equivalent, criminal mafia. There must be impersonal institutions that at least in principle work for everyone, regardless of who they are or who they know. But, as long as we remain trapped in a narrow concept of individual personality, the impersonal engines of society lie far beyond our grasp. What place is there for the humanity of individual persons in the dehumanized social frameworks we live by? This is the hitman’s dilemma, and it is ours too.
The crux of the matter is the shift from an eighteenth-century moral politics of persons acting within institutional frameworks (as envisaged by the writers of the United States constitution) to one where personal and impersonal agency have merged, to the detriment of our ability to distinguish between living individuals and abstract social entities. The place of morality in public life inevitably suffers when impersonal interests overshadow personal responsibility. This is the metaphysical ground for politicians to be widely perceived as immoral and bureaucrats as inhumane.
The result is rising lawlessness and imperialism, even fascism, on the part of transnational corporations and national governments taking their lead from Bush’s USA. Effective resistance to privatization of the cultural commons requires us to build a public space where personal morality and universal human interests can find common ground. If we wish to understand the obstacles such a project would face, we must revisit the entire modern history of capitalism. There is a geographical dimension to this history too. World production is now being relocated in Asia, while control of global economic institutions remains firmly in the hands of the West. The culmination of national capitalism in increasingly strident attempts to control the “neo-liberal” world economy from America and Europe coincides with the most significant shift in economic power since Germany and the United States challenged British hegemony over a century ago.
The information age has raised the significance of intangible commodities. Increasingly we buy and sell ideas; and their reproduction is much easier by digital technologies. The larger corporations have launched a campaign to assert their exclusive ownership of what until recently has been a shared culture to which all had free and equal access. by Aggressive policies of corporate privatization have forced people who never knew they shared a common infrastructure of culture to acknowledge it. Across the board, separate battles are fought, without any real sense of the common cause that they embody, involving music, the moving image, the internet, software, GMOs, pharmaceuticals, and the universities.
The hitman’s dilemma is a metaphor for the moral problems inherent in building modern society on impersonal institutions. This leads to a division between personal agency and the impersonal conditions of that agency that is hard to sustain. I begin the main body of the essay with the anomalous relationship between morality and politics, law, and business in works of fiction, especially in movies and plays. Here I juxtapose West and East, gangster flicks from Hollywood and Bollywood, historical tragedies by Shakespeare and Kurosawa, to show the universal contradiction between the conduct of public institutions and the living persons who embody them.
Next, I approach the problem through the modern history of impersonal society, starting with the attempt to construct separate spheres of personal and impersonal relations in capitalist economies, then taking in bureaucracy and scientific knowledge. This leads to a short account of private property from its modern origins in the liberal revolutions of seventeenth century England to the instrument of corporate global domination it has become today, focusing on the confusion that arises from the collapse of the legal distinction between living persons and business corporations. This is related to the process whereby the struggle for control of economic value has moved from one over land and labor to “intellectual” property.
The digital revolution in communications defines our moment in history in speeding up the formation of world society as a single interactive network, has introduced a new dimension to personal and impersonal culture, “virtual reality.” The result is the world war launched by transnational corporations, with the full complicity of the US and other governments, to privatize the cultural commons. The idea of “intellectual property,” referring to copyright, patents, and trademarks, lends a spurious conceptual unity to what might more accurately be described as “information feudalism.”
This attempt to establish a new kind of global command economy uses technologies that are inherently progressive and revolutionary. Nor is it the first time that corporate monopoly has been undermined by the restless forces of innovation. The American movie industry was moved to Hollywood a century ago as a way of evading the restrictions imposed by Edison’s east coast monopoly. Now it seeks to impose its own monopoly on the “piracy” rampant in Asia and elsewhere. The shift in world production from West to East will only be slowed down if western governments grant their corporations the rigid controls they seek.
Finally, I examine the crisis of the universities and of intellectuals in general. For our problem is to learn to think clearly as much as to act effectively. How is democracy attainable unless each of us can find moral grounds for personal judgment in a world driven by impersonal forces that we can never fully understand? What is at stake here is the need for a new humanism that meets the measure of our common humanity. In this version, people must work through the institutions of money and machines, not against them.