What many people find with the word "business" is that it really does not have any stable and articulable meaning. Those engaged in it extoll "business" as a field, as a calling, as a better way to be important and powerful. However, none can define, in exact terms, what business really is.
We shall see that business is based on method, it has rules, it maps onto the problems of early life experience, and that in the face of repeated failure, (while the business person remains ever-positive), the business man may be saved by the deeming provision of a statute.
But what of the business person who does not understand the method of another business person? Might that trigger the inarticulable "rule-of-three"?
Now read on . . .
Method in Business
Poe's Narrator is also the subject of the story. He has no name. But he is a very positive person. He identifies himself as "I", and claims himself to be a businessman, a methodical man - with method being the thing. That is his identity. He proceeds to describe his hate of eccentric fools, who are fools specifically because have no understanding of method.
His first stated rule was that true method appertained to the ordinary and the obvious alone. His second rule was that a regular businessman could be spotted by his regular habits of accuracy and punctuality, which in his case, was evidenced by the quality of his day-book and ledger.
However, our Narrator described the method of a genius as eccentricity, subject to a certain "rule of three", which unstated rule defined a genius as an ass. He hated genius, and all geniuses were arrant asses. The business of a genius was no business at all. Any person setting up in anything but an ordinary trade was characterised as a genius, and therefore, an ass. To this rule, our Narrator offered no exception.
Unassailable Preceptual Rules
Method could not possibly be the highest part of business unless justified by special rules, stated in the form of precepts. Our narrator set out the following five important preceptual rules of business, each of which either insinuates its opposite or is self-evident.
- Any person setting up any out-of-the-usual trade, is by the rule-of-three an ass.
- In biography the truth is everything, and in autobiography it is especially so.
- The day-book is a thing that don't lie.
- Money is nothing in comparison with health.
- Corporations have neither bodies to be kicked nor souls to be damned.
Early Childhood Injury
Our narrator ascribed his warmth to method, and dislike of genius, to a certain childhood injury. As a toddler, his nanny had swung him around because he was crying without apparent cause. During this swinging around, he injured his head on a hat that was sitting on a hidden a bed post. Nowhere in the story of his childhood injury were his parents to blame. Further, the only people in the entire story who were to blame were his various employers. And further, his nanny shared no blame for this injury, because she did not know, and could not possibly have known, there was a bed post inside the hat. His nanny was not a genius.
Regularity of Method in Eight Major Fields of Business
The following were our Narrator's eight lifetime lines of business.
- The Tailor's Walking Advertisement line: rigid adherence to system - our Narrator was a walking advertisement, whose role was to bring in customers for his employer tailors.
- The eye-sore line: strict integrity, economy and rigorous business habits - our Narrator built mud hovels next door to newly-built palacial buildings and was paid to leave the area.
- The assault and battery business - our Narrator induced people to assault him then sued them for damages, ascribing his success to his childhood injury.
- The Cur-spattering profession - our Narrator caused his muddy dog to spatter dirt onto a well-dressed person, and then was paid to clean up the person.
- The Organ Grinding - our narrator played his organ badly, until paid to stop playing it and to leave the area.
- Out of work - our narrator classed this period as one of his jobs.
- The Sham post - our Narrator presented forged letters to recipients and secured payment for the postage.
- The Cat Growing way - our narrator rode the wave of statute when the legislature put a statutory price on cats' tails, at which he bred cats and farmed their tails.
Review
Our Narrator suffered from nanny identification. He lived his formative years under the control of a nanny who apparently was no genius. She injured him when he cried, instead of understanding his childhood needs, because of the rule that crying was bad. She masked the presence of his parents and she taught him personal servitude.
Our Narrator had recalled the horror of his early childhood in his five stated preceptual rules, and reproduced his inauspicious beginning in his mode of survival. His being swung around as a child sounds like cycles of repetition ending in injury. He repeats these cycles in his business affairs, each "line" of business ending in some kind of injury to him. This repetition compulsion is apparently beyond his conscious control.
As for the imago in his transference, it is always his nanny, as a non-responsible and non-responsive other, appearing in business as bosses, clients, and victims, who have method but who have no discernable soul to the child observer.
Readers will enjoy reviewing Explaining Organizational Regression – Violence and Aggression.
Sources:
Edgar Allan Poe, The Business Man
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