While the Brain Remains King, the Heart Knows Best
Knowledge workers employed at universities are paid to use their high-skilled brains. This is an expected part of their labor, but also unavoidable, too. This results in a familiar impulse to funnel all decisions through a finely-tuned filter of rationality. Thus, knowledge workers are apt to over-intellectualize everything. As Max Weber once warned, it’s easy to get lost in rationalization and utilitarian thinking. At great peril, knowledge workers may divorce their hearts—filled with passion, emotion, values, principles, humor, and whimsy—in pursuit of instrumental decision-making.
Fortunately, labor struggles are not only about objective facts—they’re also emotive and embodied challenges. Such struggles can force workers to “get out of their heads” and bring all workers together, collectively and physically, in ways impossible as individuals. Workers who go on strike end up chanting together, linking arms, shouting and marching. By engaging with the heart, we can remind the brain of other “reasons” why striking is important. It’s one thing to “know” that strikes can deliver improved working conditions and greater workplace power, but it’s another matter to witness the transformative power when fellow workers come to terms with those truths via each others’ energy and passion.
The emotions of a strike are an important resource for unions. Administrators want to appeal to our brains, convince us that what we’re doing is unreasonable, unusual, and unconstructive. They try to use logical arguments and “data” to demonstrate how they and their directives are, in fact, right. But, despite this intellectual appeal, workers shouldn’t fall for it. Not only are admin arguments specious and spurious, their data partial and cooked, and their honesty often in question. What may matter more is that our hearts know otherwise. And having the force of conviction combined with fiery passion (anchored in our guts), we can exercise our bodies, and thus feel totally human, even in situation that are anything but humane. Rationality may tell us that university bureaucracies and their admins are “doing the best they can”, but out intuition and hearts tell us this can’t possibly be true.