I Am Not a Cooperative Cog
It was just another day of preschool. I dropped off my son at the usual time and picked him up three hours later. His teacher posted fun pictures of classroom activities on the school app. We continued our routine at home. Also in the school app, though, the teacher notified us that registration for the next year of preschool had opened. I thought of how we had been assured at the last IEP meeting that another year of preschool was an option; but I thought we had plenty of time yet to think it over. So when my husband picked up the mail and tossed me a thick envelope of kindergarten registration information, I figured it was no big deal.
The next morning, I actually read the kindergarten letter. Their records showed that our child would start kindergarten in the fall. Registration was only open for about a month, and before the deadline, we had to bring in his immunization records, birth certificate, early childhood screening report, and everything. I froze like a rabbit facing a snake. What was happening? Or rather, what had happened to the kind, understanding people who had promised to support us in our special education/possible homeschooling journey? A brief talk with one of the teachers cleared up almost nothing. I came home with my son after school and had a complete breakdown. Pregnancy hormones were probably a large part of it. But also, how could they assume so much? How was I supposed to know by mid-February where my son would need to be in September? And why did they automatically, callously, mark him down as a certainty for public school kindergarten just because we had used the public school preschool for a year? I screamed and railed against the system, the mindless robot that was trying to control our lives.
That was over a year ago. I’m still in the process of trying to figure out what to do next, talking with the people who work closely with the government robot and interpreting their system-speak into actions. But this episode illustrates one reason I want to homeschool my children: I don’t want their lives dictated by a one-size-fits-all, top-down standardization.
In college, I had a similar experience with my professional development classes and with many of my professors. Everyone assumed that everyone wanted the same thing: a successful career in their chosen field. And that might have been true for most of the students there. It was a technical college, after all, and I was in the accounting program. But the assumption was that that goal was all that mattered. Posters and advertisements everywhere promised to make us better office workers so we could rise to the top of the office world. Again, as if that world were the only one that existed.
In this business-centered mindset, people were not only equal; they were interchangeable. I was first and foremost an accountant, not a white woman. Our professional attire all looked roughly the same: shirts and jackets with lapels, dark and bland in color, with uncomfortable shoes and tight waistbands. We had no individuality except being better or worse at our jobs. And this is apparently what a lot of people are striving for. Women, we’re told, can and should do anything that men can do, and vice versa. People of every race, every class, and every age should be able to succeed in exactly the same way. This, we’re told, is equality.
No, I reply. This is sameness. And it is impossible.
(Side note: please understand, I don’t mean to disrespect anyone who works in the public school system or is successful in business. More power to you, if you can work with all that automation and still keep your humanity! What I want to criticize is the attitude that idealizes such systems.)
About a minute into this confrontation, Mr. Huph (the boss) begins a speech about a company being “like an enormous clock” that “only works if all the little cogs mesh together”. He never gets to the meaning of his metaphor, but it’s pretty clear from the context. Mr. Huph is demanding that Bob (secretly Mr. Incredible) stop being his helpful, heroic self and become a “cooperative cog”, mindlessly churning out profits for his insurance company.
The thing about cogs and other machine parts is that they are interchangeable. If one breaks or wears out, you can simply replace it with another one that is functionally the same. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, there has been a prevailing attitude that treats people the same way. We can be mass-produced in public schools, placed in our proper slots in the giant corporate machine, and made to churn out profits or products until we wear out and are replaced. And before anyone condemns this as a capitalist attitude and offers socialism as a solution, I deny that. Socialism aims to make people more interchangeable, not less. Everyone is a worker and a comrade, no better or worse off than anyone else; and if anyone is better off, then it must be because they oppress others. It couldn’t be natural talent or wisdom, since we’re all the same, aren’t we?
Yes and no.
We are all human. As such, we share certain human traits and inherent human dignity. Equality means treating people as people, not allowing any category or group to be treated as less than human. But when people start insisting on a 50–50 split of men and women at every level of every industry — or trying to get everyone to go to college for free, regardless of whether or not they should or even want to — that’s not equality and human dignity anymore. That is mechanistic sameness.
People are people. People are also individuals. And individuals are complicated and messy.
Intersectionality, to its credit, tries to take that into account and recognize everyone’s unique experience and needs. But it fails because of its own too-narrow focus on power and oppression. Every bad experience must be due to some kind of oppressive “ism” or “phobia”, so the solution must be to march along with the party line of social justice activism. The personal is political, and the individual problem is only one symptom of a systemic crisis. And so we get yet another top-down, one-size-fits-all approach, as people are sorted into neat little categories of victim, oppressor, enabler, or ally. Individual traits and responsibility are swallowed up in group representation. Instead of cooperative cogs, we become weapons in the hands of various ideologies, slammed against each other until we break. And once again, we’re easily replaced.
At the same time, there’s nothing wrong with being part of a group, or being like other people. It’s not even wrong to want to be like other people; that’s a very human desire. And so is the desire to stand out, to be exceptional. We can see it in ourselves and in many a protagonist; “I Just Want to Be Normal” (like Mr. Incredible’s daughter Violet), or “I Just Want to Be Special” (like his son Dash). How do we make sense of all this?
Both of these desires can be summed up in one: I Just Want to Be Loved.
What we want most of all is to be valued and cared for. If the people around us seem to value normalcy over uniqueness, we’ll try to be normal and stifle our uniqueness, and vice versa. It’s a search for approval that gets us striving to meet the standards of society. We go wrong by making the standards too extreme. Normal and Special can both become idols. When they do, we lose the love we crave.
It’s impossible to love a machine part. Maybe it can be appreciated for doing its job; but more often, it’s ignored until it fails, because why would you love or thank something for just doing what it’s supposed to do? Cooperative cogs run in the background, invisible and silent if they’re working properly. So if we idolize the Normal, we lose love not only for the different, but for everyone.
It’s also impossible (or at least very difficult) to love a complete alien, someone with whom we have nothing in common. The more we insist that “you can’t understand my situation because you don’t share my unique experience,” the more people will give up on trying to understand or connect with each other. Idolizing the Special or the Different ironically leads to a lack of love for anyone different from the chosen group.
So what am I saying that everyone should do?
Nothing. That’s the point.
In a very generalized way, I can exhort everyone to love the people in their lives and work toward the good of their community. But I can’t dictate what that looks like for everyone. I can’t make my experience the standard for everyone. Because I am not a cooperative cog. And neither are you.