The Hit Man's Dilemma

The Hit Man’s Dilemma Or, Business, Personal and Impersonal Keith Hart PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESS CHICAGO Table of contents “Don’t take this personal, it’s just business.” 1 The moral dilemma in politics, law and business 14 Impersonal society as a modern project 25 Private property: a short history 43 The digital revolution 57 Intellectual property 78 The crisis of the intellectuals revisited 97 For Loula and Constance Conclusions 108 © 2005 Keith Hart Acknowledgments 114 All rights reserved. Further reading 115 Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC 5629 South University Avenue Chicago, Il 60637 www.prickly-paradigm.com ISBN: 0-9728196-8-1 LCCN: 2005921572 1 “Don’t take this personal, it’s just business” The Hit Man’s Dilemma is about the tension between the impersonal conditions of social life and the persons who inevitably carry it out. This relationship is poorly understood, perhaps never more than 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 2 3 taking his life? Perhaps the hit man is referring to his have their vitality in Particulars, and every Particular own attitude, not to the effect. Killing people is a is a Man.” matter of routine for him, a “business” (“the occupa - Apparently, keeping that distinctiveness poses tion, work or trade in which a person is engaged”). Or problems for which privacy offers a potential solution. there might still be an element of personal judgment This is especially so when we are confronted by “the involved, if his humanity is touched by the victim. public” and, confusingly, by “business” also, even More likely, an ethos of detachment makes the work though it expresses “private” interests. Business is easier, if at some emotional cost. Why should business supposed to be “impersonal”: “lacking personality, not be impersonal and, if it is, how can that be reconciled being a person; showing no emotion; having no with the person who practices it? personal connection.” But businesses can be persons Let’s explore this tension a bit further. too. In law, a “person” is “a human being or an orga - “Personal” is defined as “relating to a particular nization with legal rights and duties.” There are there - person, private; concerning a particular person’s fore real and artificial persons; and business corpora - private business interests; aimed pointedly at the most tions are the only organizations treated like individual intimate aspects of a person; relating to the body or citizens in economic law. Others such as churches and physical being; (law) relating to movable property.” So political parties, for instance, are not. And this right privacy seems to be intrinsic to whatever “personal” was won at a particular moment in history, the late means, but what makes it particular can be either nineteenth century. Since then, it has become more mental or physical and it seems to include rather than difficult to draw the line between living persons and be opposed to business. “Private” in turn carries a abstract social entities that are much bigger and freight of meaning: “secluded from the sight, presence potentially longer-lasting than any human being. I will or intrusion of others; intended for one’s exclusive use; argue that our political and intellectual culture has confined to the individual, personal; not available for become confused as a result, undermining the public use, control or participation; belonging to a prospects for a genuine democracy and reinforcing particular person, as opposed to the public; not for rule by a remote oligarchy. public knowledge or disclosure, secret; not appropriate No wonder the hit man is muddled. Business for public display, intimate; placing a high value on is supposed to be impersonal despite being usually personal privacy.” To complete this round of defini - transacted between persons as an expression of their tions, someone or something is “particular” when they private interests. Worse, there is no difference in law are “separate or distinct from others of the same cate - between Walmart and you or me, so why shouldn’t a gory, group or nature.” It is in the nature of persons to killer claim impersonal reasons for inflicting bodily be particular, or, in Blake’s words, “General Forms harm on another person? It’s all in the mind, after all. 4 5 Ideas are impersonal, human life is not. So, at one personal is when it takes place in the here and now, level, the issue is the relative priority to be accorded to “face-to-face.” But radical reductions in the cost of life and ideas. Because the encounter is live and there - producing and transferring information through fore already personal, the hit man has to warn his machines have injected a new dynamic into our rela - victim (and perhaps himself) not to take it so. It would tions, invoked by expressions like “virtual reality.” And seem that the personal and the impersonal are hard to so the current crisis over “intellectual property” is separate in practice. Our language and culture contain closely linked to a transformation that is pulling soci - the ongoing history of this attempt to separate social ety towards an increasingly global frame of reference. life into two distinct spheres. This is the core of capi - Modern corporations rely on extracting rents from talism’s moral economy; and gangster movies offer a property as much as on profits from direct sales; and, vicarious opportunity to relive its contradictions. Here as the saying goes, “Information wants to be free,” is a violent criminal claiming a detachment that would meaning that there is consistent downward pressure grace a bank manager. It is ludicrous, but then perhaps on prices for information-based goods and services. the two types of business are not as far apart as we are The social effort needed to maintain high prices in a encouraged to think. world of increasingly free production and reproduc - I will explore here the historical relationship tion is what drives the conflict highlighted by this between human personality and impersonal society, essay. focusing on the institution of private property. This Business, especially of the hit man’s kind, is has somehow evolved in only a few centuries from always personal at one level and impersonal at another. being a source of personal autonomy in a citizen The trick is to learn how to manage the tension commonwealth to becoming the means whereby a few between them. Moreover, his “business,” the work of huge business corporations seek to dominate world criminal gangs, is based on highly personal ties of economy. The question of money’s role in society is loyalty to “families” and systematic resort to violence obviously central to this; and indeed we will discover outside the law, in principle the opposite of the that the payment of money is often thought to render bureaucratic universe where most of us live and work. relations impersonal in capitalist societies. Meanwhile, We know that modern business corporations have property has shifted its main point of reference from been granted the same legal status as living persons. things to ideas; having once been “real,” it is now And so, just as the gangster thinks of himself as a crucially “intellectual.” This development is related to professional businessman, it turns out that corpora - the revolution in digital communications that has tions are quite capable of behaving like gangsters, with begun to shrink our experience of distance in human equal contempt for human life. This is not to claim relationships. For surely, what makes communication that corporate executives are always criminals, just that 6 7 the line between economic activities carried out within perhaps for all living creatures. He added a third and outside the law is harder to draw in practice than human universal, the drive for self-improvement, and their conventional separation would allow. explained the progressive trend of history as its conse - What the hit man would like his victim not to quence. take personally is a contract, an impersonal act So, from this perspective, we are isolated indi - performed for money, but one intended to inflict viduals who take part in societies that link us to the personal injury. His business is violence, which is rest of humanity in one way or another. Each of us, in supposed to be the antithesis of modernity. The hit order to be human, must learn to be extraordinarily man is both modern and a relic of feudalism, of an age self-reliant. I call this the “toothbrush syndrome”— when men ruled in very personal ways through the who will brush your teeth if not yourself? But writers threat of violence. Yet he cloaks himself in the in Rousseau’s time lived with the pain that modern language of “business.” It is confusing, but then our dental care has spared most of us. We also live in soci - times are confused. Maybe there is less difference ety and this requires us to learn to belong to others. between them and what came before than we would This isn’t easy, so that it often appears to us that the like to think. For this reason, Shakespeare, whose two principles are in conflict. Much of modern ideol - plays offer his extended reflections on the emergence ogy emphasizes how hard it is to be individually self- of the Tudor state out of feudalism, has much to tell interested and at the same time socially responsible, us about the awkward relationship between living even compassionate, to be economic as well as social, persons and the impersonal offices they must fulfill.

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