Mouse jigglers and societal rebalancing
... a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest
The 70s band The Mommas and the Papas wrote a hit song called “Dedicated to the one I love” in which the key line is “And the darkest hour is just before dawn”. For some inscrutable reason I have a growing feeling that we are living in times of “just before dawn”. It seems like something is ready to break and we are about to see whether the result of the last ten years of chaos in the western world is to continue or to be radically altered by enough people saying with enough emphasis,
“Enough!”
If I am correct in this feeling, then the next six to eight months are going to tell the tale. I approach this time-tunnel with mixed emotions.
Nevertheless, it was with a good laugh and no small amount of relief that I read an interesting article in Zerohedge.com. First a story…
My first job following graduation from university was as an apprentice engineer at the large and well-established underground mine that supported my hometown. Everyone that I now worked with was a friend of my parents and at least twenty-five years my senior. It was a bit surreal seeing “Mr. X” from the perspective of a co-worker rather than as my Sunday School teacher, but they were as bemused by the change in circumstances as I was. Perhaps I was a bit of a “local boy makes good” because they cut me a lot of slack as I bounced from one screw-up to the next. I have written before of my penchant for throwing caution to the wind in attempts to blow myself up.
But old habits die hard. In one fairly typical exchange, one of my new colleagues, Bill Rogers, said with some emphasis,
“Lytle, my name is Bill. Call me Bill!” And my response?
“OK Mr. Rogers.” He just rolled his eyes.
I wasn’t trying to be snotty. I was just locked in an earlier paradigm.
Most of the underground surveyors were members of the local senior hockey team. The mining company made a point of providing employment to the best hockey talent that could be attracted to our small community. In fact, some of the talent was truly prodigious and of almost National Hockey League quality. For the year that I worked at the mine I pinched myself as I walked through the survey section of our bullpen. I was in awe of the men who surveyed the mine as they were my childhood hockey heroes.
One of the surveyors had timed out on his hockey career and was into the “golden ten” of his mining career. He was close to retirement and, when he came up from underground, he would do the calculations required to draft his survey. When completed and, as befitting his age, he promptly fell asleep at his desk. The world was not so benevolent and “flexible” in those days, so he had to mask his sleep. To do so he propped his head on one hand and, with the other, he had taught himself to hold a pencil and make circular motions on a piece of paper while fast asleep. To the casual observer, it looked like he was drafting. In my mind it was a prodigious talent.
On one memorable afternoon, some of the younger hockey cohort decided to test the depth of his sleep. As he snoozed on the high stool at his drafting table, someone lit the paper in his wastebasket on fire and then we all watched to see what would happen. What happened was what one would expect. As the smoke rose around him, his nostrils crinkled with the unexpected smell, his eyes popped open, he took stock of the danger he was in and then put a foot into the basket to stomp out the fire. His foot got lodged in the bottom of the basket and so he hopped around stomping the fire and trying to extricate his foot. It didn’t last long but it was insanely funny. He was finally saved when his buddies pulled the basket off his foot and put out the paper fire. It was one of those events in which you could proudly say that “I was there when Bill set the fire and Ted got his foot stuck in the wastebasket.”
The Zerohedge article[1] reminded me of this incident because it describes the lawsuit being brought by Wells Fargo Bank against employees who are using “mouse jigglers”. I had never heard of such contraptions and would certainly have used one had they been available during the “golden ten” of my career because I required and took a power nap every afternoon.
A mouse jiggler is a device that will move or jiggle your mouse at a predetermined time interval to ensure that your computer never enters screen saver mode during your 30-minute power nap. To the watchful, spying eyes of the information technology team, you are busily attending to the business of the bank even as you enter the more gauzily soft domain of your dreams. The mouse jiggler is the equivalent of my colleague’s remarkable, self-taught ability to make circles on paper whilst quietly snoring the afternoon away.
I was given a laugh when I read the article because it took me back to this nascent period of my career and the vision of a 60-year-old guy hopping around the office with a smoke billowing, wastebasket stuck to his foot. I was given a shot of reassurance because it brought back to me the remarkable creativity in the United States. I don’t know that the mouse jiggler was invented and built in the United States, but I will bet money on my assumption. Do I honestly think the Germans, British, or, totally unrealistically, the French invented this thing? Their at-work sleep is likely sanctioned by a collective agreement or government edict so why worry about a technological “work around”. Nope this is as American as apple pie.
And thank goodness for that – despite the absolute stupidity that reigns in Washington DC, lower Manhattan, Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, in the heartland of America creativity has not skipped a beat. That is immensely comforting to me. The nonsense can still be turned around.
Why do I say this? At the risk of repeating previous entries, this substack is based on the premise that societal worldviews are foundational to the freedom, creativity and economic performance of countries. It goes like this...
I assert that humans, by design, are made in the image of God and one of the fundamental aspects of that “image” is moral freedom and resultant creativity. If this is true, then higher levels of creativity within the dominant worldview of a country will result from higher levels of individual freedom and produce increased gross domestic product per capita. Therefore, evidence of creativity indicates continuing freedom and devotion to God (humility and a proper fear of or respect for God).
The “devotion to God” clause is important because pride and a lack of respect for God short circuits the linkages that I am asserting…
image-bearing leads to freedom leads to creativity leads to high economic output
In the early 20th century Max Weber wrote an interesting thesis (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) arguing that, in grotesque summary, the principles of Calvinism led to viewing work as a calling which, in turn, provided the creative energy of capitalism. However, almost a century earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America) had pointed out that the largely Calvinist Southern states were lethargic and devoid of creativity. Was Weber wrong then? No, he wasn’t wrong. The US South had based its economy on a refutation of the first link – that humans are made in the image of God which is the first step to freedom. By enslaving 4 million human beings, they had truncated their devotion to God and delinked their freedom from hope of economic success. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out in his Second Inaugural Address, both South and North paid a terrifying price to rebalance that devotion.
But it was rebalanced, and since then the United States has been easily the most creative and economically successful nation in the history of the world. My fear is that it is starting to delink from God again and that its creativity will attenuate.
Mouse jigglers offer a small but bright hope that my fears are premature.
[1] https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/well-fargo-fires-employees-over-mouse-jigglers.
The jiggling mice would be a good name for a rock band or a dystopian novel. For the latter think a cross between animal farm and 1984. lol.