Not seen those, but sounds true to life - though you probably get a bit more leeway, where it's more effort than it's worth to get rid of you & have to find a replacement. They need maximum drama for the TV too...

Now I'm trying to think about how best to respond when having to deal with institutions and their robotic servants. It rather defeats the object to start behaving like a robot yourself, trying to speak the same language, game the system, play by its rules etc. Going back to RD Laing the solution seems to be to emphasise the suppressed authentic self at every available opportunity to the point where it eventually wins out over the inauthentic system-serving self. But then if the system isn't reformable, then you're never going to get anything but grief for taking that approach. Unless you manage to avoid institutions completely (an impossibility in the current time). The ML approach was to try and peel journalists away from working for the corporations and join the alt media and/or be freelance writers. This for me was/is the most radical part of their outlook, assuming that the corporate press is impervious to change (in fact it changes you), and that the only solution is to starve it of support and talent and feed energy into the alternatives instead. Has this actually worked, though? Seems to me like another area where 'the old world refuses to die, and the new world cannot be born' (Gramsci approximately).

I guess the problem is that the dominant inauthentic self gains its power from the fact that without it we don't get to eat or have a roof over our heads in the current society. Therefore there will always be limits to how human we can be within the constraints it imposes. We need a new way of living that doesn't force us into these toxic relationships, poisoning us psychologically as part of the same process. We can't truly care about the poor, the wild plants & animals, the oppressed people around the world, even ourselves & our immediate loved ones when the system that feeds us requires us to adopt the role of exploiter (or on the other side of the equation, the subordinated exploited).

Basically it's an argument for going on the offensive: the old world is not going away and it's strangling every attempted birth of the new world before it can even get out from the cradle. Therefore we have to destroy it. I'm not seeing another way at this point. How best to go about that task is another question...

cheers,
I