Shop Class as Soulcraft

 The latest issue of Motorcycle Classics recommended this book and in my opinion its awesome. I'm sure its because it provides backing for my world perspective; actually more than backing it, but adding to it and doing it with a scholarly tone. Oh yeah, the guy is a motorcycle mechanic, the only way the book can get better for me is if he quotes Howard Bloom within it.  

 Here is a few paragraphs from the book, I'm only about 30 pages into it so these are from the introduction:
"Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right. In managementspeak, this is called "ingrown." The preferred role model is the management consultant, who swoops in and out and whose very pride lies in his lack of particular expertise. like the ideal consumer, the management consultant presents an image of soaring freedom, in light of which the manual trades appear cramped and paltry: the plumber with his butt crack, peering under the sink.
With such images in their reads, parents don't want their children to become plumbers. yet that filthy plumber under the sink might be charging somebody eighty dollars an hour. This fact ought, at least, to induce an experience of cognitive dissonance in the parent who regards his child as smart and wants him to become a knowledge worker. If he accepts the basic premise of a knowledge economy that someone being paid a lot of money must know something, he may begin to wander what is really going on under the sink, and entertain a suspicion against the widely accepted dichotomy of knowledge work versus manual work. In fact, that dichotomy rests on some fundamental misconceptions. I'd like to offer an alternative account, one that will give due credit to the cognitive richness of the skilled trades. In  pursuing these questions, we arrive at insights that help to explain why work that is straightforwardly useful can also be intellectually absorbing."

"Constantly seeking self-affirmation, the narcissist views everything as an extension of his will, and therefore has only a tenuous grasp on the world of objects as something independent. He is prone to magical thinking and delusions of omnipotence. A repairman, on the other hand, puts himself in the service of others, and fixes the things they depend on. His relationship to objects enacts a more solid sort of command, based on real understanding. The repairman has to begin each job by getting outside his own head and noticing things; he has to look carefully and listen to the ailing machine." 

"The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of new. The craftsman is then more possessive, more tied to what is present, the dead incarnation of past labor; the consumer is more free, more imaginative, and so more valorous according to those who would sell us things. Being able to think materially about material goods, hence critically, gives one some independence from the manipulations of marketing, which diverts attention from what a thing is to a back-story intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor  differences between brands."