Professionalism, and pain

What is called professionalism is when pains (as are inevitable in any multitude or grouped reality-encounters) are unable to be admitted within the scope of that activity for which the pains are signs and quite natural 'reality markers'.

Professionals are people who have swallowed their pain (reality) to where they no longer know it exists, and have turned their digestion inside-out as a result.

Pain isn't a "value", but man is so inadequate before it that it becomes almost a value in how to open up that cloister of unhealth against the suppressed-denied encounter. Even though pain isn't a value it is quite easy to see how philosophers can take it as one.

(The analogy of mastery via repetition and self-limitation only works in so far as we change the meaning of pain, from one of signifying a reality to one of signifying a "creation", a utility.) Mastery as the "art pour l'art" of pain vis a vis what is denied the persistent reality-exchange -- thus the strong tendency to isolation in all mastery-work.

Professionalism is proud, mastery is shy. Professionals always digest the work of masters into their own terms, but they digest it. Masters are light within their cloisters, professionals have the weight of not only doing his thing, but perfecting the communal sense of how the thing is to be done. He swallows his pain, but it informs him as much as it informs the master: the master deals with it directly, the professional only indirectly, by promoting its good use in the excelence of his work.

Profess-ional, the word itself reveals the advertising at the heart of the notion. To profess something, transformed from verb to noun in classic English manner, "to be a professor", to have one's professing (not that about which one professes, but the act itself of professing) treated as a category in its own right!--... Damn. We have profess, profession (action become "career"), professor (he who professes "for a living"), and professional (total collapse of the entire concept-chain to the soft core of advertising).

So why has professional become termed with skill and mastery? The empty form does not require anything but to profess one's void state; thus the core of the matter is in the becoming-tool that formal emptiness allows, the "profession" takes over the professing and reverses the object-subject causality in perfect capitalistic style. One is to be a professional no more a "person", no more one who professes or who has a profession but now is one who literally is that profession and nothing else.

Ancient cultures like with the samurai had deep respect for mastery. Today we moderns have counterfeited that profoundity in a banal gloss of admiration for those people who vanish entirely into a line of work-- this is why only certain kinds of work can be associated with the idea of being a professional, since the psychological trick required to remain blind to the empty consciousness of the term is thrust upon itself in comic hilarity thus revealing the true nature, when for example we might talk about a "cashiering professional" or a "McDonalds burger-making professional" or "garbage hauling professional" although the term has become so plastic already that applying it to almost anything can no longer make most people even crack a smile or feel the least embarrassed -- every lowly job can be professional nowadays it seems, because modern man has embraced his comic tragic existence, like a clown.

Maybe a professional is the transition between a master and action. Maybe professionals have simply been left to their own devices too long, maybe there is fertility in their emptyness. A necessary abstraction, maybe, to cross the bridge from their old masters to new ones.

Capitalism is like a snake without a head.

It's finalized in the phrase "it's just business", which is only used to indicate that a grave hurt one has just inflicted doesn't really matter, or exist.

Another one of those phrases is "I'm a professional artist!" (I get paid for this shit, don't ask me to account for it, fool!)

Yeah, professionalism developed so as to allow for the introduction of mass quantities of unresolvable bullshit into life.