the cult of

productivity

Welcome to today’s Open Class: Hustle Culture's Dirty Secret

3 May, 8:00PM-10:00PM

“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.” — Lily Tomlin

In today’s class, we’ll be examining productivity culture under a microscope.

Here's where it gets interesting.

The cult of productivity isn't a modern invention cooked up by Silicon Valley bros. It has a long, strange, deeply ideological history.

We'll start with Max Weber, who in 1905 traced a direct line between Calvinist theology and the spirit of capitalism. The Puritans believed that hard work was a sign of divine favour. You couldn't know if you were saved, but you could perform salvation through discipline, self-denial, and relentless industry. 

Then we'll look at Frederick Winslow Taylor, the engineer who in the early 1900s decided that human labour could be measured and optimised like a factory machine. His Principles of Scientific Management reshaped how we think about ourselves. Taylor is arguably why you feel guilty for taking a break.

From there we move into the present: the $14 billion self-help industry, the quantified self movement, and the rise of tools like Notion and Obsidian, which are beautiful, frictionless systems for organising work that often become a way of avoiding it. 

We'll also examine why productivity content is so disproportionately consumed by young people, students, and women — groups who, not coincidentally, have the most to prove within existing hierarchies.

And finally, we'll sit with the uncomfortable question at the centre of this class: if you stripped away the output and the grind, who are you when you're not being productive?

Over the next 2 hours,

We'll transform your understanding of social issues from "too complicated" to "rich with possibilities."

Max Weber

Max Weber

the Protestant Work Ethic

and the Spirit of Capitalism

In 1905, a German sociologist named Max Weber asked: why is capitalism most developed in predominantly Protestant countries? 

The answer he arrived at would become one of the most influential and contested ideas in modern social thought.

Weber's argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism goes something like this:

Calvinist theology, dominant in 16th and 17th century Europe, held that God had already decided who was saved and who wasn't, and there was nothing you could do to change it. This is predestination, and it is, by any measure, a terrifying idea to live with. 

So how did people cope? They looked for signs. And the most legible sign of divine favour, it turned out, was worldly success, wealth, discipline, a well-ordered life. Hard work stopped being merely practical and became devotional. To waste time was not just inefficient. It was, quite literally, a sin.

Weber called this the spirit of capitalism, which is the idea that profit and productivity were not just economically useful but morally loaded. 

And even as Europe secularised and God faded from the picture, the moral logic stayed. The theology evaporated but the guilt remained. The belief that work was virtue and rest was weakness outlasted the religious framework that created it.

Frederick Winslow Taylor

The Principles of Scientific Management

In 1911, an American mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor published a slim, deeply strange book called The Principles of Scientific Management, which changed the way the modern world thinks about human beings.

Taylor's obsession was inefficiency. Working in steel factories in Pennsylvania, he became fixated on the gap between how much work could be done and how much actually was. His solution was to measure everything. He suggested timing workers with a stopwatch and breaking every task into its smallest possible components. He proposed finding the single best way to do any given job, which is what Taylor called "the one best way"m and make every worker do it that way, every time, without deviation.

On the factory floor, this was brutal. Workers were stripped of judgment, autonomy, and craft. Taylor was explicit about this: thinking, in his system, was management's job. The worker's job was to execute.

But Taylor's ideas leaked beyond the factory and into offices, schools, hospitals. By the late 20th century, we had internalised Taylorism so completely that we started tracking our hours, measuring our output, optimising our morning routines. 

Vocabulary Bank

  • The measure of output relative to input

  • The social glorification of overwork, busyness, and relentless ambition as markers of moral character.

  • The management philosophy, derived from Frederick Taylor, that human labour can and should be broken into measurable, optimisable units.

  • Weber's term for the Calvinist belief that disciplined, productive work is a sign of divine favour and moral virtue.

  • The Calvinist doctrine that God has already determined who is saved, which also created the anxiety that drove believers to seek proof of worth through work.

  • An economic system organised around private ownership, profit, and the continuous accumulation of capital.

  • The drive to make any process as efficient as possible — applied originally to machines, now routinely applied to humans.

  • The practice of tracking personal data e.g. sleep, steps, hours worked, calories etc

  • A system of ideas and beliefs that naturalises a particular social order.

  • Chronic physical and emotional exhaustion resulting from sustained overwork and is recognised by the WHO as an occupational phenomenon.

  • The condition of insecure, unstable employment, which is a structural reality that hustle culture reframes as a personal motivation problem.

  • The historical process by which religious frameworks lose social authority.

  • The idea, championed by thinkers like Tricia Hersey, that deliberately doing nothing is a political act against systems that reduce humans to their output.

Tools like Notion, Obsidian, and countless productivity apps represent a fascinating contemporary twist on Taylorism, except now, you are both the factory and the engineer. These platforms are frictionless, customisable, deeply satisfying to organise, which is precisely the problem. There is an entire genre of content — the "setup video", the "system tour", the aesthetic study space — built entirely around the organisation of work rather than the doing of it. 

But perhaps the most telling detail is who consumes this content most. Study after study, and a glance at any algorithm, confirms that productivity culture skews young, skews female, and skews toward people in high-pressure academic or early-career environments. 

These are precisely the groups who exist within hierarchies that have historically demanded they work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously. Hustle culture does not fall equally on everyone. It lands hardest on those who have already been told, in a hundred subtle ways, that their natural worth is insufficient — that they must earn their place in a room that was never designed with them in mind.

The Self-Help Industrial Complex

Worth an estimated $14 billion in the United States alone, the self-help industry has monetised so many of the anxieties surrounding productivity.

The pitch is always some version of the same issue: you are not the problem, but your habits are.

If you just fix your morning routine, which is hopelessly wrong right now, you’ll be much more successful.

The implicit promise is transformation. A more productive you is waiting just on the other side of the right system. If the system doesn't work, the blame loops neatly back to you, for not committing hard enough.

Yet this is nothing more than elegant ideology. The self-help industry repackages the structural conditions that make people feel inadequate (job insecurity, rising costs of living, the collapse of work-life boundaries) into personal deficiencies with personal solutions. 

General Paper & Politics

Common Student Fears:

  • "I don't know enough about history/politics"

  • "What if I sound ignorant or insensitive?"

  • "Politics is too controversial — what if I offend the examiner?"

  • "I might get the basic facts wrong and lose marks because of that"

  • "Other topics seem safer and easier"

Reality Check:

  1. Examiners want critical thinking, not encyclopedic knowledge

  2. Politics essays often have the richest examples and clearest arguments

  3. You encounter politics daily — trust us, you know more than you think!

  • Immediate Consequences:

    • USA PATRIOT Act (passed 45 days later)

      • Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism

      • The PATRIOT Act sparked intense debate because it allowed authorities to hold immigrants indefinitely without court proceedings and permitted law enforcement to examine personal property and documents without informing or getting permission from the owners.

    • Muslim Registry (2002-2016)

      • NSEERS was a post-9/11 program (2002-2016) that required certain non-citizens to register with authorities through fingerprinting, photographing, and interviews. Registrants had to provide detailed travel plans, update officials about changes, and use only designated entry/exit points.

      • Targeted travelers from specific countries (24 of 25 were predominantly Muslim)

        138,000+ individuals registered by 2003

      • 13,153 placed in deportation proceedings

      • Bush administration claimed it caught 330 "known criminals" and 3 "known terrorists"

      • However, produced zero terrorism convictions despite 93,000 cases

      • ACLU and immigrant rights groups called it religious and ethnic profiling

      • Obama administration dismantled the program in 2016

    • Visa restrictions for 26 countries

      • These countries were predominantly Muslim (North Korea was the exception)

    Long-term Consequences:

    • Millions of deportations under "security" justifications

    • "Special Interest" country designations

    • Enhanced screening for specific nationalities

    • Hate crimes against Muslims increased 1600% in 2001

      • Yet 99.9% of Muslims had no connection to terrorism

    • NATO Article 5 invocation: For the first time in NATO's history, the 9/11 attack on the US was treated as attack on all members

    • The UN Security Council Resolution 1373 was a unanimous passage that required all countries to deny funding/support to terrorists

    • SWIFT banking system allowed tracking terrorist funds across borders and international banking cooperation froze millions in terrorist assets

    • Countries began extraditing terrorism suspects to US for prosecution

    • Al-Qaeda's narrative: "Holy warriors defending Islam against Western crusaders"

    US view: "Terrorists targeting innocent civilians"

    • Osama bin Laden's claims: Retaliation for US military bases in Saudi Arabia, sanctions on Iraq, support for Israel

    • Western response: No political grievance justifies mass civilian murder

    The problem is that, as a propaganda tool, terrorists can claim "legitimate resistance" for motives.

    • "Inspire" magazine (2010): Online publication teaching bomb-making, targeting methods

    • Anwar al-Awlaki’s youtube videos inspired multiple attacks

    • The Boston Marathon bombers (2013) were radicalised through online Al-Qaeda materials and YouTube videos

    • The Times Square bomber was also inspired by Anwar al-Awlaki's online content

    • The Fort Hood shooter (2009) corresponded with al-Awlaki through email

    • The Charlie Hebdo attackers (2015) used online training materials from Al-Qaeda in Yemen

Kiasu-ness and productivity culture in Singapore

Singapore is, by almost every metric, an education success story. Consistently topping global rankings in mathematics, science, and literacy, the city-state has built a system that the rest of the world routinely holds up as a model. Education ministers fly in from Europe and America to study it.

The United States’ mission?

Denying terrorists a safe haven in Afghanistan.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan shortly after the 9/11 attacks against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and after Afghanistan rejected the American President’s demand to turn over Al Qaeda leaders.

President Bush calls for the reconstruction of Afghanistan in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute. “By helping to build an Afghanistan that is free from this evil and is a better place in which to live, we are working in the best traditions of George Marshall,” he says, evoking the post-World War II Marshall Plan that revived Western Europe.

But the United States and its allies do not come close to Marshall Plan-like reconstruction spending for Afghanistan.

The U.S. Congress appropriates over $38 billion in humanitarian and reconstruction assistance to Afghanistan from 2001 to 2009.

https://www.cfr.org/timeline/us-war-afghanistan

Yet after nearly 20 years of war (from 2001 to 2021), it became evident than the U.S. military was unable to transform Afghanistan into a modern, stable democracy.

You can't impose democracy at gunpoint. The US tried to create a Western-style democracy in a society that:

  • Had no democratic traditions

  • Was organised around tribal/clan loyalties

  • Saw foreign occupation as illegitimate regardless of intentions

  • Had different cultural values around governance and society

This explains why the Taliban returned to power so quickly in 2021 — the US-backed government was always seen as an artificial construct.

"The collective punishment of communities for the actions of a few is always wrong."

Because of 19 hijackers' actions, 37 million Afghans were punished with 20-year war. In fact, more Afghans actually died than Americans in 9/11. At the same time, traditional governance in Afghanistan was actually dismantled and replaced with Western models, while rural communities were bombed for suspected Taliban connections.

Global Ripple Effects

Blowback Theory suggests that aggressive foreign interventions actually inadvertently create new enemies and threats.

  • Drone strikes kill civilians, radicalising survivors and communities

  • Military presence in Muslim countries was used as recruitment propaganda

  • Torture and detention abuses became rallying cries for extremists

  • Abu Ghraib photos damaged U.S. credibility and became recruitment tools

  • "Enhanced interrogation" techniques at CIA black sites violated international law

  • Guantanamo's legal limbo involved holding detainees indefinitely without trial

Discuss the view that all countries have an equal responsibility to counter terrorism

All countries:

Every nation-state globally, regardless of:

  • Economic development level (developed vs. developing)

  • Size and population

  • Geographic location

  • Political system

  • Historical involvement in conflicts

    Consider if this should include failed states? Micro-nations?

Equal responsibility:

Identical expectations regardless of circumstances

  • Equal in what sense? (financial contribution, military involvement, intelligence sharing, legal frameworks)

  • Should contributions be proportional to GDP/resources or truly equal?

Counter terrorism

  • Prevention (intelligence, border security, education)

  • Response (military action, law enforcement)

  • Addressing root causes (poverty, political grievances)

  • International cooperation and information sharing

  • Legal frameworks and prosecution

  • All nations bear equal moral responsibility to counter terrorism because terrorism threatens universal human rights and democratic values. Moreover, effective counter-terrorism requires each country to contribute according to established international legal frameworks. As such, shared responsibility is both a moral imperative and a practical necessity.

  • The expectation of equal responsibility among all countries in countering terrorism is flawed because nations vary drastically in their economic capacity, security infrastructure, and proximity to terrorist threats. As such, differentiated responsibilities based on capability, resources, and direct security interests is more practical and morally justifiable.

The interconnected nature of modern terrorism demands equal responsibility from all nations because terrorist networks operate globally and threaten the fundamental principles of human security. This transcends borders. The 9/11 attacks, while occurring on American soil, involved terrorists who had trained in Afghanistan, planned in Germany, and included hijackers from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Clearly, terrorism exploits weak links in the global security chain regardless of a nation's size or wealth. When countries like Somalia or Yemen fail to control their territories due to limited resources or political instability, they inadvertently become safe havens for terrorist groups that may eventually threaten distant nations. This can be seen with Al-Shabaab's international reach and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. As such, every nation benefits from international security and thus bears moral obligation to contribute within their means. The 2004 Madrid bombings and 2005 London attacks proved that terrorists view all democratic societies as legitimate targets. This means that no country can consider itself immune from future attacks simply because it hasn't been targeted yet. Moreover, international law principles establish that sovereignty comes with responsibility; nations that will not police their territories create security externalities that burden the entire international community. Clearly, shared responsibility is a legal imperative under UN Charter obligations to maintain international security.

However, expecting equal responsibility from all nations in counter-terrorism efforts is impractical and inequitable. The 9/11 attacks primarily targeted the United States, killing nearly 3,000 people and causing over $3 trillion in economic damage, making America the direct victim with the strongest motivation and justification for leading the response. In contrast, smaller nations like Bhutan or Pacific island states had minimal connection to the attacks and pressing domestic priorities unrelated to terrorism. While the U.S. possessed the economic prowess to pursue Al-Qaeda, expecting developing countries like Bangladesh or Honduras to contribute equally to military operations in Afghanistan would have been unreasonable. Similarly, the 2015 Paris attacks illustrated this disparity when France, as the direct victim, led the military response against ISIS in Syria, while nations like Rwanda or Nepal, despite being UN members committed to international peace, could not realistically be expected to provide equivalent resources given their limited military capabilities and lack of strategic interests in the region. The successful dismantling of terrorist networks requires targeted expertise, substantial financial resources, and sophisticated military technology that only a few developed nations possess. As such, it’s clear that effective counter-terrorism depends on leveraging the unique strengths of capable nations rather than demanding impossible equal contributions from all.

  • The first sentence of your paragraph must directly answer the essay question! As a general rule of thumb, your examiner should be able to figure out the essay question just by reading this sentence.

  • 2-3 examples per paragraph make for a strong argument. Try to pick examples from different regions and industries for scope.

9/11 and the Internet

Conspiracy Theories

Meet Oliver. Like many of his friends, Oliver thinks he is an expert on 9/11.

He spends much of his spare time looking at conspiracist websites and his research has convinced him that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, of 11 September 2001 were an inside job.

The aircraft impacts and resulting fires couldn’t have caused the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to collapse. The only viable explanation, he maintains, is that government agents planted explosives in advance.

He realises, of course, that the government blames Al-Qaeda for 9/11 but his predictable response is pure Mandy Rice-Davies: they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Quassim Cassam, for The Intellectual Character of Conspiracy Theorists

“The towers collapsed due to pre-planted explosives rather than aircraft impact and fires”

“Government officials had specific advance warning but allowed the attacks to proceed”

What we DO know…

From the 9/11 Commission Report,

Binalshibh claims that during their time in Spain, he and Atta also discussed how the hijackings would be executed. Atta said he, Shehhi, and Jarrah had encountered no problems carrying box cutters on cross-country surveillance flights.

The best time to storm the cockpit would be about 10–15 minutes after takeoff, when the cockpit doors typically were opened for the first time.

Atta did not believe they would need any other weapons. He had no firm contingency plan in case the cockpit door was locked. While he mentioned general ideas such as using a hostage or claiming to have a bomb, he was confident the cockpit doors would be opened and did not consider breaking them down a viable idea.

Atta told Binalshibh he wanted to select planes departing on long flights because they would be full of fuel, and that he wanted to hijack Boeing aircraft because he believed them easier to fly than Airbus aircraft, which he understood had an autopilot feature that did not allow them to be crashed into the ground

It’s your turn:

"The collective punishment of communities for the actions of a few is always wrong." How far do you agree?

How do I tackle this question?

When tackling the question of whether collective punishment is "always wrong," you need to examine the fundamental tension between security concerns and moral principles. 

The strongest argument against collective punishment rests on the principle of individual responsibility — the idea that people should only be held accountable for their own actions, not the actions of others in their community. This principle is deeply embedded in human rights frameworks and international law, including the Geneva Conventions. 

Historical examples have demonstrated both the moral horror and practical failure of such policies, from Japanese-American internment during World War II to Israeli house demolitions in Palestinian territories. In fact, punishing entire communities for the actions of individuals often has the unintended consequence of radicalising moderates, as explained by the blowback theory.

Now on the working document, craft your own paragraph in response to this essay question.

We hope you found this a transformative class!

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