So, on a forum I frequent, this phase came up, and I felt like it was worth discussing. This is going to be odd given my worldview, but I honestly kind of dispute this.
Here's the thing. The perspective of anti work comes from a position of relative privilege, in terms of societal development. The idea that everyone has to work is based on the mindset of economic scarcity, essentially that there is not enough resources to go around, and therefore everyone needs to work to earn their keep. This has been demonstrably true for most of human history. In hunter gatherer societies, they didn't just give people food willy nilly. Most had to work for it in some form. And in agricultural societies up until the 1800s or so when capitalism and the industrial revolution became a thing, people had to work to plant crops and feed people. Most worked in agriculture and lived hard lives doing so. And it made sense that if you didn't, that you would probably starve. To encourage people to work in such conditions, they had to withhold food from them if they wouldn't. otherwise there wouldn't be enough and people would starve anyway. And if someone is going to starve, then it should be the people who don't contribute. Makes sense, doesn't it?
The problem is, modern society is so far beyond this living standard in the industrialized world that it is ridiculous. We have a society of gross excess. The problem is often finding enough work, let alone enough useful work for people to do. Seriously, we don't have a stuff crisis, minus some COVID related supply chain issues. We have a jobs crisis. We have all of this wealth, but it's all poorly distributed, in part because we insist people must work to earn their keep, which floods the market with cheap labor, which means wealth gets siphoned to the top. It's absurd. Our economic model is absurd. It's based in scarcity, but we've evolved beyond the level of scarcity where this philosophy makes sense.
And I think that's the real tragedy of the above phrase that this article is about. It's not necessarily that believing that humans don't deserve food by default is a victim of propaganda. I believe that's a natural position to take and arguing the opposite is actually the claim that needs to be justified. Which is why I spend so much time on it on this blog. My observations of society as it exists are that this mentality is woefully outdated and harmful. But that's the problem with the phrase. The real problem with not believing that people don't deserve food by default is they are victim to outdated scarcity thinking, without understanding how plentiful basic needs are, how poorly they're distributed, and how absurd it is that we insist on creating more work rather than challenging our long held traditions on the subject.
Maybe this is propaganda. After all, the propagandists frame this in a way that this is the natural order of things. But they're not really wrong. It kind of is. It's modern society that is an aberration. But I don't believe its insidious, or a problem with capitalism or whatever. Most socialists even seem to still preach the gospels of scarcity and work. Most people are united in these doctrines whether on the left or right. Really, we don't understand how wealthy we are. You kind of need to be educated in that subject. And I guess that's why I dedicate so much time to figuring out the logistics of accomplishing a post work society. Because I believe that we should evolve beyond work. But we must evolve beyond it as we are able. We shouldn't buy into wishful thinking or write off all criticism as just propaganda. Most people are literally uninformed and still operate on a scarcity level. And this applies not just to capitalists, but socialists too.
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