Devil Departments

Of all the evils that Satan or Lucy as the gender-confused devil prefers to be called unleashed upon the world in the twentieth century, human resources management or HR and public relations or PR are among the most insidious.   A couple of socio-economic transformations – first from a rural society with an agricultural economy to an urban society with an industrial-manufacturing economy, then from an owner-managed industrial-manufacturing economy to a corporate economy managed largely by professionals trained in management – the private sector equivalent of bureaucrats –with both steps thought up in hell and overseen on earth by the devil himself, brought about the establishment of HR and PR departments.   See James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941) for an account of the second of these transformations.  HR and PR are specialized fields within the more general field of professional management and the departments which bear these names are filled by people who have been trained in these specialized fields.   The theory on which professional management training, including HR and PR training, is based is the theory that the knowledge of how to properly run a company is technical knowledge, that is to say, knowledge that can be reduced to a technique – a set of instructions which followed will invariably produce the desired result – that can be written down in a manual, preferably in terminology distinct to the particular technique – technical language – so as to keep the secrets of the technique among the trained.   For an outstanding critique of technical knowledge in general, see the title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics (1962).   On top of the problems that are common to every kind of training in technical knowledge, however, there are a lot of things that are distinctly wrong with training in HR and PR.   Foremost among them is that it resembles the viruses, radiation, and other contagions that turn people into the walking, brain-devouring, dead in the ever-growing plethora of films, graphic novels and video games about a zombie apocalypse.

 

While that comparison may seem a little over-the-top, HR and PR types are notorious for wearing phony smiles plastered over their faces all the time and constantly projecting cheerful and friendly demeanours beneath which lie cold, calculating, minds that would not hesitate either to stab you or their own mothers in the back if they thought it would advance the company’s interests or their own careers (HR) or to throw anyone under the bus or tell any lie no matter how big if it will create the image they are looking for (PR).   HR and PR positions basically require the person who fills them to be soulless and training in these fields is a good way to kill the soul.

 

With HR the soulless nature of it is advertised in its very name.   Think about what the words “human resources” mean.   They mean regarding and treating human beings as if they belonged to the same category as land, money, trees, petroleum, or any other sort of material asset that businesses own and utilize.   The alternative expression “human capital” that is sometimes used makes this even more explicit.   While “human resources” was actually coined in the nineteenth century (by John R. Commons in The Distribution of Wealth in 1893), and the thing which we now use the expression to denote became recognizable in its present form around the time of the first World War, it was around the second World War that the thing was joined to its name and the name entered general circulation and usage.   It is interesting, is it not, that this was a little over a century after the British Empire outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, committed its navy to eradicating the trade, and abolished slavery within its borders, and a little under a century after the United States abolished slavery as an ex-post facto justification for the bloody internecine war she fought with herself in the first half of the 1860s.   Today, progressives rail against slavery more loudly and more often than the abolitionists ever did, in the hopes of convincing weak and foolish governments to tax people who have never owned slaves in order to pay people who never were slaves, on the absurd and utterly false grounds that slavery was the cause of all the problems facing people who have the same skin colour as the slaves most people think of when slavery comes up regardless of whether their ancestors were slaves or not.   At the same time corporations, by naming the department that is the intermediary between upper level management and labour “human resources management”, have demonstrated that in their way of thinking their workers are their property and that it is labour-contracted-for-between-free-agents that was abolished in reality, slavery in name only.   San Jose State University Professor of Economics Jeffrey Rogers Hummel appears to have been on to something when he entitled his history of the war between the American states Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1999).

 

In 1922, the philosopher Martin Buber published his Ich und Du, the translation of which was published in 1937 as I and Thou.   His thesis was that to each of us as a subject, “I”, everything else is either an object, an “it” which we experience and/or use, or a “thou” with which we relate as another subject.  Impersonal objects cannot properly be thous, but primitive people often treat them as such.   Modern people make the opposite mistake.   Other people can be either its or thous but to modern people they are far more often than not its rather than thous.   It is perceiving and relating to others as thous, however, that makes our lives meaningful and makes each of us fully “I”.   The ultimate and eternal “Thou” is God Himself.   HR zombies are trained to address people as thous in their endless, empty, and meaningless jargon, while in reality treating them as its.  

 

It has been observed over the last decade or so that the sort of left-wing lunacy that we once thought was safely confined to the asylums that are the campuses of academe is now being aggressively promoted in the corporate world.    Many corporations now require their employees to undergo diversity, inclusion, and equity training which is a form of brainwashing with progressive propaganda.   Companies in which the portion of their workforce that regularly interacts with the public faces an increased threat of bodily harm due to criminal violence now sometimes add insult to the risk of injury by requiring their workers to take “de-escalation training” as if it were their employees’ fault that some punk, just released on bail and high on meth, assaults and robs them and as if the garbage techniques taught in such training would work in such a situation.   It is through HR that this sort of madness has infected the management of so many companies.

 

PR is no better than HR.   Public relations, as we know it today, goes back to just before the First World War when Ivy Lee was hired by J. D. Rockefeller Jr. to be the spin doctor for his family and their oil company.   What Lee was to PR in practice, Edward Bernays, Lee’s friend and the nephew of Sigmund Freud on both sides of his family, was in theory.   In 1945 his Public Relations was published.   According to Bernays, PR was not just old-fashioned advertising, but a scientific method of analyzing public opinion and, utilizing insights drawn from psychology and sociology as well as the means of the new mass communications technology, reshaping public opinion.   It is no coincidence that this closely resembles the subject of his earlier, influential, work Propaganda (1928).   Indeed, the most significant difference between PR and propaganda is that listening to public opinion as well as shaping it is essential to PR.   This does not make it less mendacious and manipulative than its close relative.   On the contrary it makes it a more effective tool of mass manipulation.   It is also the reason why in today’s “cancel culture” PR departments insist that that someone be thrown under the bus every time the “woke” mob demands that person’s head as a sacrifice.   It is why todays PR firms are less interested in helping their clients present themselves in terms of the excellence of the goods and services they offer than they are in presenting them as the most devoted adherents of the cult of feminism, anti-white race hatred, and alphabet soupism on the block.  

 

It makes one positively nostalgic for the good old days when they pursued more worthy and benign efforts like promoting the oil and tobacco businesses.  

 

Let HR and PR return to Lucy in the hell whence they came.   They have already done enough to make earth resemble that place.