Reimagining The Work Ethic
And Unearned / Inherited Wealth
How does work relate to leading a good life? The protestant work ethic tells me I should work hard (implicit: for my overlords) to lead a good life. The communal work ethic says I should work hard for my community (we collectively become our own overlord). The selfish work ethic says I should work for myself (now I am my own overlord, ah… the confused ‘joys’ of self-domination).
The hedonistic work ethic says who cares, live for pleasure not work (a ‘lucky’ few of us throw out those slave-driving overlords, preferring instead to serve the equally enslaving internal instincts of compulsive pleasure).
The work/life balance ethic says, do work, and have fun (an attempt to serve multiple overlords). The hard variety says do both to extremes, live life to the max (be careful! any let up could cause you to ask difficult questions about the meaning of your life!). The down-shift variety says, do both at a level sufficient to support yourself and your family, live your life at a gentle pace, there’s no need to whizz that hamster-wheel off its bearings (finally, a work ethic that seems to have multiple interests, including my own, and possibly ecological ones, at heart).
The work smart ethic says there’s no virtue in hard work for its own sake (sounds rational), get the maximum reward for the work you put in, or put in the minimum work to get the reward you desire. The selfish/libertarian variety (common) says that any surplus time or reward is your reward for your smartness, for you to invest as you see fit. (Often implied bonus points for scamming the effort of others for yourself.)
Kahlil Gibran
In my opinion, Kahlil Gibran is the only one who really nails it:
Work is love made visible.
If I’m not making love visible, I’m not working, it’s as simple as that. I may be putting effort in to something, but it’s not work. And it’s something I want to be doing as little of as possible. Whenever I notice that I’m putting effort into something that isn’t making love visible… it’s time to get that bullshit (to use a technical term) out of my life as soon as possible.
Gibran’s philosophy finally gives the heart some say in what kind of work constitutes a meaningful life. The answer can finally come from within, with input from others, and the rational self, but crucially, also with input from that ineffable source of internal, intuitive, immediate, non-derived knowledge.
Work is love made visible has shades of follow your dream, but without the head-in-the-clouds unrealistic fantasy connotations of the latter. Work is love made visible is follow your dream grounded in reality and practicality. It is follow your dream after you’ve developed a dream you really believe in and is really worth following, and are willing to put in the work (yourself) required to make it real. It is follow your dream that works in our interests, not in the interests of consumer economies that profit from our insecurity, failure to follow our dreams, and inflated, unsatisfiable desires.
Here are some ideas that feel compatible with work is love made visible:
- The opinion of others might, if we are fortunate, be a useful guide, but does not in itself have any bearing on the value of our life’s work.
- The value of work in life is nothing to do with any externally or internally imposed ethical requirement, it is simply a natural consequence of our own fundamental need for fulfilment, of which being in action in life is just one component (being at rest and being in relation are examples of other components).
- Co-opting the effort of others without their informed, heartfelt consent is incompatible with Kahlil’s definition of work as love made visible. This type of behaviour (active exploitation) is at the heart of aggressively competitive versions of capitalism and globalisation common today.
- Receiving the co-opted effort of others without their informed, heartfelt consent pollutes the lives of everyone involved. (Passive exploitation: this occurs anywhere consumption is oriented around production from exploited land/labour/environment, ie, any of the globalised economy, and forms the bulk of the momentum of such structures.) It undermines the capacity of the exploited to work on making their own love visible, because they are likely distracted by having their efforts subverted by people who are more challenging (for any number of reasons) for them to love. It undermines the capacity of the exploiters (even if they are unwitting exploiters) to make their (our) work visible, because our model for work done is based on our experience of exploitation (as far as we benefit from exploitation), which undermines the strength of our model for work done being based in love.
- When our work makes our love visible, our love grows, and positively impacts those who come into contact with our work. When our effort is not making our love visible, we are likely to become resentful, and this resentment is manifested in the character of our efforts and negatively impacts those who receive our efforts.
The tragedy is that, what we learn through experience, we tend perpetuate, so when our conception of work is based in exploitation, we tend to pass that on (by continuing to exploit others, or benefiting from exploitation, and also by becoming exploited and vulnerable to exploitation ourselves), and so the economy (the web of work relationships) becomes ever more polluted with cycles of exploitative work. The silver lining is that anyone who can practice work as love made visible is equally supported by the same perpetuation-of-learning principle, resulting in the organic spread of a more positive work ethic through the economy.
The strategy for increasing the prevalence of love in work is basically to stop participating in exploitative effort, whether as an exploiter or as the exploited, and to spend that participation opportunity on work as love. This is easier said than done! However, the rewards are boundless.
Unearned / Inherited Wealth
A question of some relation to this is, to what extent is unearned or inherited wealth socially acceptable or healthy?
Most of the opinions I am familiar with tend to fall into things you’d expect poor people to say (‘unearned and inherited wealth is a socially toxic scourge on the earth’) and things you’d expect rich people to say (‘my property is mine, I get to say what happens to it’).
Most of these arguments seem to essentially be self-centred (or ethically judgemental) opinions about who should get to have the toys (I want the toys, I haven’t got any, or, I don’t want to share my toys, or, I’m OK, but the toy hoggers are evil and deserve retribution), but we can also frame this, perhaps more usefully, in terms of work is love made visible.
Regardless of who has what toys, what course of action is best for me, in my actual circumstance as it is right now, to do my real work of making love visible?
My take on this is:
- in this present moment, whatever resources are reasonably available for use right now (however big or small) are the potential raw materials for creatively (and likely imaginatively) making ones love visible right now.
- ‘unearned wealth’ is a red herring. Nobody earned anything, everything is here by the grace of God (or by chance, if you prefer), we don’t get to keep anything, it’s all passing through one way or another and so are we. Anything I have now is only incidentally connected to the effort I put in in the past. I aim for the work I do to be an expression of love in the present moment, and to be unconditional on future results. All our wealth, however large or small, is unearned. The idea of ownership only weighs us down. Begrudging others their ‘unearned wealth’ only makes me resentful, denying myself the use of my ‘unearned wealth’ only weakens my ability to do my work.
- ‘inherited wealth’ is similarly also a red herring.
- (excessive) unearned and inherited wealth tend to be toxic to everyone because they tend to represent exploitative effort, which harms everyone involved; they represent the restriction of resources from being used to do work as love, and/or the use of resources to discourage work as love being done. However, the solution to excessive unearned and inherited wealth is not (in any meaningful or fundamental sense) to redistribute them evenly in an attempt to attain some vision of asset-based or opportunity-based equal ownership. Who’s doing the redistributing? How can they be trusted? Why would a million people with a belief in the primacy of private property be any better off with more equal shares than they are with less equal shares? (Redistribution is fiddling with effects, not causes.) In nature, different creatures get different opportunities based on what creature they are, where they are and all their other circumstances. People are no different. The solution to unearned and inherited wealth is for everyone involved to relate with that wealth not in terms of the past, but in terms of relations in the present. If I have no desire for the unearned or inherited wealth of others, and no compulsion to put my effort into it (by, for example, being employed by it, or resenting it), it has no power over me. If I have no desire for my own unearned or inherited wealth, it has no power over me either, and I can put it to the best use I can find for it, whatever that may be.
- the act of divesting from exploitative effort has the side effect of neutralising accumulations of personal wealth. Crucially though, the more love that divestment is done with, the less those accumulations find their way into other people’s accumulations where they do similar harm, just in a different circumstance. Divesting from exploitative effort and investing in work as love destroys exploitative wealth and replaces it with wealth as a social and ecological good.
- exploitative effort and work as love are extremes on a scale. Most activity falls somewhere in between, often different places depending on the context you are considering (eg, if I work for you, that may be work as love with respect to you, but on a global level there may be exploitative effort elements if my loving work incorporates things like ecologically destructive flying etc.), and it is our task to move towards the work as love end of the scale as best we can, and to reduce our contribution (by neither supporting nor resisting: what we resist, persists) to the exploitative effort end of the scale.
- divesting from exploitative effort and moving towards work as love can be done individually, and does not require the whole world to shift for ones own personal quality of life to drastically transform. However, it is much easier when more people around you are also moving in that direction.
Finally, those most affected by exploitative effort (either as ‘victor’ or ‘victim’, or more usually, both) are the ones least able to do or spread work as love. Although they must be involved in the solution, and we must work with them to the extent that we can do so as loving work (and not exploited effort), we should never look to them for the solution, or trust them with the solution (especially by giving them our effort), but instead look to ourselves, and align and ally with any examples in our lives we can find of people who are succeeding in making their love visible.
