Why Work Is Stupid
Like really, really, really ridiculously stupid
By MARTIN REZNY
After watching another interview with famous anthropologist David Graeber, I feel I should expand on my previous article about the virtue of laziness. I’m going to explore some ways in which our contemporary understanding of work is incredibly toxic and wrongheaded and has absolutely no place in any sensible vision of the future of humanity. Yes, I’m currently unemployed.
He Who Does Not Work, Neither Shall He Eat
A quick rain check first, do you agree with this saying? Just on the guttural level, instinctively? If you’re an American, you may not be very familiar with it, but we Eastern Europeans sure are. Even though the origin of this quote is the New Testament of the Bible, it really turned into a mainstream common wisdom in all of the communist states thanks to Lenin who found it to be an essential moral guideline.
The irony of communists using a Biblical quote as one of the cornerstones of their policy set aside, what it says is that work is a virtue in and of itself, while not working is morally repugnant to the point of saying it’s okay to leave those who refuse to work to die of starvation. While it may have been a sensible guideline for poor people living in a desert in the bronze age, maybe we should rethink it today.
Following this moral imperative, everybody in the communist states had to work, and it didn’t matter that even then there wasn’t actually enough work that needed doing. That led to the communist governments inventing a lot of entirely pointless jobs in which most of the people only pretended that they’re working. Oh communists, the silly fools, right? Well, we’re doing exactly that.
Maybe not so much in the government sector, but if perhaps as many as 75% of jobs have entirely disappeared off the face of the Earth today, no essential or meaningful operations or services would have been affected, including all of the farming and manufacture, education, or culture. It can be argued that it would make the world a better place for almost everyone and the planet.
Where’s the virtue in doing unproductive work, in all the pointless and unnecessary jobs in administration or marketing? In wasting of everyone’s time? Wouldn’t it make more sense to work less when work is not necessary? Why should we want to work more if no more work needs to be done? Why should that be rewarded, like at all? How does that justify starving non-workers to death?
We Have to Work Because We’re Morons
It’s really quite simple, we demand more work, no matter how idiotic or evil, and that’s why we can’t not have it. Politicians in democracies have to follow the lead of their constituents, and as long as that direction is beneficial to the rich and the established power, these demands will definitely become our everyday reality. If we wanted to give ourselves money, we would have that instead.
I’m not kidding, that would be called basic income and it is being seriously considered by economists and policy makers. The greatest obstacle to that is that most people have this strongly held and yet completely unexamined belief that there’s something wrong with people who don’t work all the time. Even more ridiculously, we are making work suck by wanting it to not be fun.
You’ve read it right, not only do we pointlessly force ourselves to work, but we judge anything too interesting, fun, or meaningful as not work-like enough, which is why many of us feel that people doing something enjoyable should not be paid for it. I’d like to think that it comes across how retarded of a mentality that is by simply stating it. Seriously, what’s wrong with us?
When have we become so masochistic and spiteful? Historically, the main source of this is probably the protestant work ethic first examined by Max Weber, which is not surprising given the previously established Bible connection. Coupled with the industrial revolution and horrific practices of early capitalism, a certain vision has become affixed in our imaginations.
Even though not even at the beginning of the 20th century had most people worked in the manufacturing industry, this idea of proper work being manual productive labor became the norm. The funniest part is that this has nothing to do with what constitutes the vast majority of jobs today worldwide, and even if it did, it’s exactly the kind of work that technology is making extinct.
Don’t Rage Against the Machine
As it’s usually the case, people long ago have already had problems similar to ours today and were simultaneously smarter and dumber about dealing with them. The dumber response to the work becoming obsolete is something you may have heard about, the 19th century Luddites, the machine breakers. Oh those dumbasses, right? We may not be breaking machines, but only just.
What we’re doing is intentionally stalling the application of automation, which means that instead of breaking machines, we’re preventing them from being built or used, ultimately accomplishing the same result. Whatever you choose to believe about this issue, unless you believe that most manual labor can be automated away, you’re objectively wrong. Again, we choose to work.
There may always be some jobs that cannot be done by computers or robots, but those will require a fraction of the population, much like jobs in agriculture have diminished during the course of industrial revolution from over 50% to about 1% in the developed world. Believe it or not yet again, it would be so few jobs that you’d have no trouble finding volunteers.
And this is where some of the oldtimey people were much smarter, mainly the scientists and engineers. The original vision of many people trying to further the technological progress was to specifically destroy the need for human labor, so that we can be freed toward leisure and higher pursuits. Predictions were made that by our time, the work day would be much shorter.
What those visionaries couldn’t predict was just how much we’d love to do work that we hate doing. It’s strange that this would be a controversial statement, but work is at best a necessary evil. It’s not good in any way to have to do more of it, and it’s outright imbecilic to do more of it when we don’t have to. I apologize for the blunt language, but I dare you to disagree.
And now it’s back to begging for shitty jobs for me, yay. Life makes no sense.
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