So yeah...we really are brainwashed...

 So I'm finally back home from Myrtle Beach. And I started reading/listening to the book "Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream" by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt. And uh...yeah. We REALLY are brainwashed. Only a few chapters into it, but basically it has already covered a lot of past thoughts on the idea of doing away with labor, and the idea of working less as we become more productive has been around for a while. it almost seems like a lot of these traditions of thought have disappeared over time, or were, perhaps, stamped out intentionally by propaganda to make us all wanna work all of the time. A lot of the ideas of this day just seem so nonsense to me, and looking at it in a historical context, it's easy to see why. We are raised from birth to want to work, and for work to be all there is. We are like slaves who don't know we're slaves. We act like if people don't work they'll fall into sin or moral decay, and we point to social science evidence showing that jobless people end up being dysfunctional in a lot of ways. But they're primarily dysfunctional in a society that is so structured around labor most people don't know how to handle free time. And society heavily sanctions people both formally and informally if they don't work. So...they basically have to work and face severe social consequences if they don't.

This wasn't always a thing in the past. In the past, there was a division of labor between the working classes who were slaves whose senses were dulled to the higher pleasures of life, as labor was all they knew, and the leisure classes where you got a lot of philosophers like Plato and Socrates, who focused on enriching themselves intellectually. And to be blunt, there was a certain elitism there. Some of them were like, yeah, while we sadly need these workers to do the work so those of us at the top can think, we can do our thinking for them because they're quite frankly too busy to think.

And this kind of echoed a convo I had a few weeks ago with some leftist job worshipper that if I recall I alluded to on this blog. And again, I don't like to pick on working class people much as I see them as victims and their situation is largely beyond their control, but one thing i hate is how some of these leftists take pride on themselves being workers. We saw this with AOC too and how she was talking about how she'd happily go back to bar tending. Anyway, in this debate, the guy I was arguing with said that people who don't work have too much time to sit around and think, and I retorted that they don't really think enough, because their minds are so dulled by labor that they CAN'T think. And in this context, the thinkers of old kind of thought similarly, and thought that they'd do their thinking for them hoping for economic growth and labor saving machines to eventually free people from labor.

And a lot of early advocates for reduced working hours kind of wanted that for themselves. They, much like me, realized that working all the time took them away from being able to otherwise LIVE a life worth living, and took away from intellectual pursuits too. These early labor advocates wanted more time so they could improve themselves intellectually and think about things. And it seems like that goal is lost. Somewhere the populism of people priding themselves on how hard they worked replaced the idea of the thinkers bringing a new golden age for the non thinkers. And the idle rich were castigated, and society seemed to shift toward dragging everyone down into the "working class" and getting rid of the idle rich. The resentment politics of the working class basically doomed us all to be workers. We see this both in capitalism and socialism in various ways. As we know, the protestant work ethic that belies capitalism effectively tied property to labor as a way to do away with the idle rich and their estates, and in socialism, we see another movement in which people end up being forced to all be "workers." And honestly, I hate this pro work populism. Even if it comes with good intentions, it really does reek of the destructive resentment politics that drag us all down. So even as we are able to produce more and more with less and less, we insist on all just working all of the time because rah rah work!

Of course, the book will eventually cover this, I only got to chapter 3 so far and it seems like it's a deeply historical book looking at the evolution of thoughts. I'm just combining the early readings with what I've gleaned from other discussion in other books. 

Idk, I just wanted to post this because quite frankly, I almost feel like I'm being gaslit, like society really does have this pro work narrative that is so powerful and so pervasive that anyone who doesnt toe its line is gaslit into thinking they're crazy or something. But no, we're not crazy, society is just literally that brainwashed. And I'm fricking saying it. Sorry, not sorry. 

Quite frankly, i think most people of antiquity would think we're nuts. I can tell just reading some of what people said. Like some detested the concept of a world in which we effectively conquered scarcity and could work <4 hours a day and we CHOOSE to work more. Some of the Christian thinkers even saw the concept of such materialism as sinful, asking things like, in order to make such a society work, we would need to tempt people into consumerism and buying things that they don't really need. Which...sounds exactly like modern society.

Again, I know it might seem hypocritical saying it as I come back from vacation, but it isn't really, given the vacation was my parents' idea and I was kinda just along for the ride. But yeah, I'm actually not big on that kind of consumerist culture. I despise the idea that we make people work making fancy drinks and elaborate dinners that cost way too much money. I'd really prefer a more simple life that doesn't have such things.

But...as we know, we have a society in which poor people provide goods and services to middle class people who are overpaid doing jobs that are often not very essential to society, and then rich people profit from it all. And as we know from COVID, yes, we can work less, a lot less, but most of these people don't wanna give up their creature comforts, and they VOTE, and our politics inevitably trend right because of this. I kind of feel like modern consumerist culture is "wicked" to use a more "christian" term. I mean while luxury in and of itself is not a bad thing, I really do think that the exploitation of millions under capitalism to produce those things IS bad. And the fact that so many people would refuse to make even minor sacrifices to their life style to free people from servitude is sickening. Again, if people are willing to work, and businesses are willing to pay a wage, and people are willing to buy, and others are willing to sell, I got nothing against that in theory. I just resent the fact that many of those workers arent TRULY there by their own accord but are driven there by economic desperation. And that the glue that holds all of this together is this de facto forced labor that has the pretense of being voluntary but is anything but. 

Given all morality is functionally subjective, I can't really say that a society in which people choose to work more for higher standards of living is any better or worse than one in which people choose to work less but live more frugally. I mean, these are two different dimensions of "progress" and people are neither right nor wrong to favor either one inherently.

HOWEVER, I would argue a society that forces people to work to produce insanely high standards of living and luxury for some, is just as "evil" as one in which people are too lazy to make even the essentials for themselves where people suffer materially from literal scarcity.

In other words, I cede the point that if people work so little it leads to scarcity and suffering from said scarcity in the form of poverty, lack of basic needs, and reduced life spans with more suffering, that that's a bad thing. Yes yes yes, we cant have a society where no one works and we all starve to death. But likewise, a society that keeps people artificially poor to make them work so that some enjoy massive luxuries is also evil.

If any objective morality exists for me, it's kind of related to those three so called "natural rights" from the declation of independence. Not because "natural rights' are justified in some form of weird deistic divine command theory, but because if we really sit back and think about what morality is about, it's about this. Preserving life, reducing suffering, but also not overtly infringing on peoples freedom in order to accomplish this. As for freedom, there are two kinds. Negative liberties in the right to be left alone, but also positive liberties in the form of being free to actually pursue what makes one happy. We could very well make happiness a goal of morality, but i think that could itself be corrupted by dystopias involving forcefully injecting people with happy drugs like "we happy few" or other similar dystopian fiction. Rather, I believe in people having the right to pursue what makes them happy, and being able to reasonably accomplish that. 

A society of perpetual scarcity from sloth tends to run afoul of these standards. But so does a society in which everyone is forced to work all the time, whether it be for growth, or even some weirdo shared solidarity as "workers."

Honestly. I think a society in which we all become like the idle rich of antiquity is likely better than this weird populist vision of us all being workers beating our chests over how hard we work. I think a society in which we can all attain the ranks of bourgeoisie is better than one in which we all become "workers." A society in which we all own and gain passive income is better than one in which we must all work for our bread. 

In that sense, I really do think something is deeply dysfunctional with modern society, as well as many of the most well established counter ideologies to it. As Bob Black once said, the problem with all of the old ideologies is they all believe in work. Capitalism, socialism, who cares? It's an antiquated debate, despite the views I invoke being more antiquated than that. Because at least those old thinkers had some idea of working less being heaven on earth, instead of being obsessed with work and growth and productivity like the thinkers of today. 

I look at what we are doing today and it's just like a wish come true but corrupted. A massive monkey's paw so to speak. We're rich beyond our wildest dreams on a societal level, but we also work as much as, if not more than we ever did. Something is deeply wrong and deeply dysfunctional about this. And we should call it out and try to fix it. No, if you hate working, there isn't something wrong with you. The rest of society is literally just that brainwashed by these bad ideas.