I'm starting to think that for conservatives, the cruelty is the point...

 So, reading Elizabeth Anderson's book, and then having a discussion with a friend about fundie Christians, I kind of realized some things about conservatives, and especially Christian conservatives. I mean, I guess I kind of knew all along, but I kind of believe that many were simply misguided, as I was, and that if they eventually got to a certain point, they would realize that their ideas are bad and harmful, and they would then abandon them, wanting the world to be a better place.

But the more I look at how such conservatives act, the more I realize that the cruelty is the point, that these ideologies breed cruelty, and that for them, a better world simply isn't possible, their ideas of morals is so skewed that it is something akin to what I would consider actually evil. 

This really was made apparent for me reading Anderson's book about the work ethic being hijacked by conservatives. I don't really think the work ethic is worth saving, but the work ethic has skewed peoples' ideas of morality in a way that allow great cruelty toward their fellow humans. At the core of their worldview is a very low opinion of humanity, that they are inherently evil, and that they quite literally need the good to be beaten into them. Their morality is not based on any form of consequentialism, but a form of virtue ethics, and they don't care much about whether actions are good or bad in their outcome, but that people conform to a certain idea of morality. To a lot of conservative religious people, morality is about virtue or conformity with god's morality, whatever it is, and with the work ethic nonsense it takes a dark turn where conformity to that work ethic is moral, while rejection of it is immoral. And they feel like they have a mandate to "save" people by forcing their way of life on people through literal force. So they basically forced the poor, and often a lot of people overseas who did not share their culture or outlook on life to conform to it. They forced them to conform, and were cruel to them in order to make them comfort. They designed a system of actively punishing nonconformers and rewarding conformers. And that's how we got the economic system we got today. It isn't just that we have an economic system that doesn't serve people, that's the point. The system, in their mind, NEEDS to be cruel, to force people to conform to their sense of morality. So when you hear a story about republicans denying kids school lunches and stuff, the cruelty is the point. They literally want kids to be hungry so that they develop work ethic. They dont care if they starve, because to them, if society is not cruel to people, then people would become lax in their morality, and if that happens, society may collapse in their views.

The same is true with social issues. When conservatives are pro life and their approach to the issue is "don't have sex", while simultaenously trying to take away their birth control and sex education, the cruelty is the point. They don't seem to care that their system leads to higher levels of STDs and pregnancy. To them, the answer is simply, don't have sex. They care less about the consequences, and more about their morality. Sex outside of marriage is bad, we shouldnt try to reduce the consequences of "sin", because it isn't about the consequences, it's about the fact that premarital sex is bad in their worldview and people shouldn't be doing it. Again, the cruelty is the point, if a 12 year old has to give birth to a rape baby, then that's acceptable in their worldview. Because again, it's not about the consequences, it's about their morality. 

Conservatives like to, as I put it, roll around in their own crap. They see the world as fallen, they see humans as sinful, they dont believe that the world can ever be improved, and quite frankly, they DONT CARE if people suffer. To suffer is to be human, and the sooner people learn that and get used to that, the better. We shouldnt try to alleviate peoples' suffering because if we do it might change the incentive system to allow people to commit moral transgressions instead, and we can't have that, can we? 

And this is where I really started making the connection, but my friend said that it's like fundamentalists really like the idea of hell. And in a sense, they do. They like it like a conservative work ethic believer likes oppressing poor people. In their mind, hell is the epitome of what the human race has coming to it. They believe all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of god, and that the punishment for such a thing is "death", but not just any death, nooo, they believe in this long drawn out spiritual death of people being tortured for all eternity for their sins. They literally believe that god is so righteous that this is perfectly just, and his prerogative to do, while jesus saving us from this fate is generosity. We truly deserve it but through jesus we find a way to escape this fate, amen.

To me, this isn't just NOT the epitome of morality, this is the epitome of IMMORALITY. These guys are authoritarian psychopaths who want to drag the entire human race down into the hellish world they strive to create, and they quite frankly dont care about the consequences. They dont care if people suffer or die. To them, they deserve it by virtue of existing and being sinful in the first place. I used to think this was primarily a religion problem, as divine command theory leads to this, but some religious people dont share this morality, while some secular people do. It seems to be more of an authoritarian problem. Some people are so authoritarian they believe their morality is the only way that a human is fit to live and it needs to be beaten into them. Again, the cruelty is the point. Life is cruel, life ins't fair, this is the best we can do, don't bother making it any better. And I swear a lot of these people get off on the idea of other people suffering for not conforming to their morals, it's really sickening. 

And I have to kind of condemn a lot of moderate liberal types too. In a lot of ways, these guys might actually share the same core viewpoint, they're just less insane about it. But at the end of the way they too believe that humans need to be forced to conform to a certain perspective, they are just more nuanced about the concept and more willing to admit that exceptions exist, and that there are people who can do everything right and still suffer. But they still believe that people who do not conform to their value system at all should still suffer. So in a lot of ways, they'll end up devising systems with lots of means testing modeled after the elizabethian poor laws, which show generosity to those who fall into poverty through no fault of their own, but still believe those who don't at least pay lipservice to their views should suffer. It's quite common here in america, and even social democracies. It's a huge reason i dont believe the progressive work ethic is a solution to the conservative work ethic. It's just less evil. But evil is still evil.

On the work ethic question if some level of economic coercion or wage slavery is absolutely necessary for the economy to function, then so be it. But it is only justified to the extent that it is absolutely necessary. And in the long term, that necessity should go down as we can automate more and more work, to the point that eventually we should be able to run the economy entirely via voluntary participants and machines. But that doesnt happen, because these "progressives" still believe that people should be forced to a labor. They're just nicer about it. 

Admittedly, even I could admit it is necessary if and only if we get to a point where without some coercion society would fall apart, but to me, it's a matter of compromising my ideals with reality. My long term goal is to liberate people from coercion. I just understand that there is a transition period where we go from where we are to my ideal where we might need to make compromises along the way. I'm simply not an ideologue to a point where I advocate for my ideas regardless of whether a pragmatic application is possible. 

Which brings me to the other extreme. Some progressives are so full of utopian ideas and empathy that they miss the point entirely. They will bash people and shame them and put them on blast over minor doctrinal differences or simply not going as extreme as them. At that point, they're simply not living in reality in my opinion, or they're picking a fight where I dont think a fight should be had. To some extent, even I recognize that there's only so much that we can do to alleviate suffering, and that at some point, maybe we need to pick our battles, and I just disagree with the left over what battles should be fought, and how. As I said, i do have a conservative side to my views that I am more willing to admit to at this point. But it's based primarily on my own ideas of pragmatism and recognizing the practical limits of doing things. If we can accomplish something and the costs are worth it, we should do it to alleviate suffering. I just differ with much of the left over what issues should be prioritized and how they should be approached. 

And yeah, I just felt like I should close out the year by writing about this. It's been stewing in my mind for a few days, and I believe this political rant is required. But yeah, I just dont get conservatism these days. My ideals are ultimately based in this reality, for better or for worse. if we can make the world better, we should, and we shouldnt make people suffer just to make them conform to arbitrary morality. However, nor should we waste precious political capital on addressing the wrong issues in the wrong way. Hence why I have a disdain both for conservatives, and a lot of leftists and tend to operate in a middle ground.

Defining "work" and what I find so objectionable about it

 So, when I mentioned being anti work, a friend of mine asked me to define it. I had to give some pause before coming up with an acceptable definition, and even consulted the dictionary in order to get some ideas in terms of what I mean about "work". 

Why was it so hard to define? It's not that I don't know what the term means, it's more the fact that I don't want to just consign the idea to wage labor under capitalism, which is the direction the "anti work" subreddit went where they basically just turned it into a circlejerk against capitalism while still being pro jobs and pro work under whatever weirdo "socialist" arrangement that they deem fit. No, I want to be against ALL work, under ALL systems, and I wanted a much broader definition than most "anti work" advocates advocate for, who often do weirdo philosophical dancing around the concept of being like "well im not against labor I'm just against work", no, paid employment is definitely a form of work I find detestable, but my ideas are much broader than that.

So what did I settle upon? From google's dictionary feature:

a task or tasks to be undertaken; something a person or thing has to do.

 There were other definitions. The others seemed to be "effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result" or something similar to that. But let's face it, everything takes effort. LIVING takes effort, getting out of the bed takes effort. Playing video games takes effort. Watching TV takes effort if you want to be engrossed in the program. By that definition, leisurely activities are all "work". That's too broad. And I'm certainly not against ANY form of effort exerted toward any purpose. I mean, this sentence is work. Everything is work, to live is to work, and the only way to not work is to not be alive. Again, too broad.

So why did I settle on this one then? Because it captures the zeitgeist of what I despise about the concept. "Something a person or thing has to do." HAS TO is the key word. To be compelled to do something, is to work. And if you consider my ideology and my core solutions to work, clearly I'm not against all people doing all things that take effort, I'm against people being forced to do things. The key to the definition is the idea that someone HAS TO do something. As I see it, HAS TO means that your consent isn't necessary. Your will isn't necessary. You HAVE TO do it. You often don't WANT to do it, but because of some force somewhere in the universe, whether it be an economic system, or a person, or even your own biological needs, you HAVE TO do something. If you dont do something, there's likely some consequence to it. At best it's simply "well that thing isn't done". But if it's something more severe like deprivation of resources, or external intervention from other humans, that's a problem. 

The fact is, just like humans avoid pain and dying, they should also be a bit "lazy", lazy meaning they inherently dont want to do the things that they have to do. A lot of progress happens when we invent ways to reduce our own burdens. We used to spend all day hunting for food and gathering fruits and vegetables. Then we developed agriculture, which should, in theory, make it easier. We grow food, the good isn't out there where we have to go far to get it, we are literally growing it, and then we consume it. It is supposed to make life easier for us than it would be otherwise. And making life easier is inherently good. 

 Now, to be fair, reading Widerquist, we all know that agriculture is where the problems started with a lot of more institutional work goes. When we started settling down and farming crops, thats when states stated forming and that's when other people would force other people to do work for them. People would be forced to grow crops. And this is bad, especially if you don't consent to such an arrangement. We humans have a nasty habit it seems of capturing other humans and forcing them to do undesirable work for each other, often at the threat of some force. And that's another reason I'm against "work". Often times, often times a lot of this work isn't really necessary. We have created systems to implicitly or explicitly enslave each other, and deprive them of their freedom. Instead of spending their time, which is, in my mind, one of our most precious commodities, doing things we want to do, we do things we have to do. All this talk of "work ethic" is just internalizing a slave mentality in which we subject ourselves to constantly doing things that we don't want to do, but have to do, while simultaneously shaming others for lacking said ethic. 

Again, for me, the purpose of work is the product. We work toward an end, toward a result, that's what the other definition of work is. The point isn't the process, it's the outcome. Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself. But what makes work ethic so despicable to me is to make the work itself the end. Work in itself becomes a valuable commodity, when in reality it should be seen as drudgery we wish to avoid. 

To go back to a point I was in the middle of making earlier before I so rudely interrupted myself, we should try to minimize work for ourselves. The purpose of all progress should be to reduce the amount of work we do. The point of agriculture was to allow the food to come to us, rather than us going to the food, making the process of gathering food to eat easier for ourselves, so that we can seek other pursuits. If anything, growing our own food, rather than going out and getting it by hunting and gathering is lazy. But it's intelligently lazy, which is the best kind of lazy. Intelligently lazy people are the ones who bring society forward.

Quite frankly, this intelligently lazy mentality is the mindset I wish to bring to the problem. Work ethic just makes us take pride in being inefficient. Rather than measuring things by the result, we measure things by the hours we put in. And an efficient worker is punished, because to one with a "good" work ethic, there is always more work to do. The reward for work is more work. And then you wonder why there are so many BS jobs and why reducing the work week barely loses productivity. Many office workers are so efficient they could do their whole 40 hour work week in 15 hours, but they spread it out and spend more time pretending to be busy to pad out their hours. A system that was more honest about the nature of work and did not glorify the work ethic would get as much done in as little time possible, and then spend the rest of their time doing things that aren't work.

But all throughout modern history, the rewards for increasing productivity is to be thrown out of their existing work, and then being given more work. Women used to spend the entire day cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry. They used to have to go down to the river with their basket of dirty clothing and spend half the day washing it to clean it. Now, we made machines that wash the stuff for us in an hour. Just gotta take the clothing to the machines, push the right buttons, and then let it go. And then after that, we have another machine, often right next to it, that dries them.

We used to have to cook with camp fires to cook our food, or stoves. Now we have microwaves that can make instant, prepackaged meals hot within 3-5 minutes. Admittedly the quality is inferior to a properly home cooked meal, but you get the idea. You can even go to one of the many fast food or take out places that can make many meals for many people very quickly, and often relatively affordably.The point is, over time things have been made easier, yet we still insist on working just as much or more than in the past.

Any time a labor saving device is introduced, rather than actually saving time, we just displace people and then insist they work somewhere else to keep up their productivity. Since 1750, we have grown over 20x over in the amount of stuff per person in the first world. We now have machines do harvesting for us, with only 2% doing agriculture these days. We are working on self driving trucks that will deliver the food to stores without a person needing to be there to get us through the process. We have self checkouts where we dont even need anywhere near as many cashiers any more to buy the food and check out. Heck, we can even have someone do your shopping for you so you just pick up the stuff curb side. But for every labor saving device we make along the way, we throw people out of work, and then insist on getting more work. And all throughout the history of the modern economy, people have suffered for it. We should celebrate people being let go for jobs. We should be like "hey youre not needed any more, go be free". But we dont do that. We let them go, cut off their means of subsistence, and then we make them get another job. We insist everyone work in an economy that doesnt guarantee enough work, and then we blame them for being poor when not all of the jobs provide good hours or benefits or pay or working conditions. Meanwhile the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Were more obsessed with numbers going up rather than what those numbers mean for people. And the protestant work ethic, which glorifies work as a process rather than as a means to an end, seems to insist that we must keep working in a "never ending race" as Mill put it in Anderson's book.

And that's the part about this that sickens me so much. There is no end point. There is no off ramp. If we keep going as we are, 100 years from now we might have $300k GDP per capita, but the problems of poverty and overwork and capitalism will remain the same, if we dont just collapse ecologically from overusing the earth's resources to the point that what we're doing lacks any form of sustainability. 

The point of all of this STUFF should be to make people happy. TO make their lives easier. To make us spend less time doing "what we have to do" and more time doing what we want to do. The point of growing food was to make things easier for us. The point of automating jobs is to make things easy for us. Over time our actual NEEDS for physical labor from humans should DECLINE. All of this technology and advancement we're doing that makes us so able to do so much more with less, should have us eventually doing less, rather than the same or more. But because of the work ethic, nothing is ever good enough. It's literally the ideology of cancer. Growth for the sake of growth. 

Now, I'm not ANTI growth, I want to make that clear. I'm for BALANCE. We have our physical needs and wants. We need some level of work to accomplish them. I just think that over time, we should move away from this system where we all need to be going ALL OF THE TIME doing things we HAVE to do, not want to do. 

Over time, we should HAVE to do less. As we accomplish mastery over this planet and can meet our physical needs increasingly easier where not as much labor is NECESSARY, and then instead of doing the things we HAVE to do and having that occupy all of our time, we should have a leisure society where we do what we WANT to do.

What is the point of life, if we just spend all day every day doing what we have to do? We HAVE to get up at 6:30 AM. We HAVE to get ready for work. We HAVE to drive to work. We HAVE to start work at 8 AM, we HAVE to leave work at 5 PM, we HAVE to go to the store to get groceries on the way home, we HAVE to cook dinner, and maybe, just maybe, we will have a couple hours of time to ourselves before bed before we HAVE to get up and do it all again the next day. Why do we live life like this? THis is hell. We have made hell for ourselves, here on earth. Our lives are a busy blur of being filled with things we HAVE to do, with us only able to occasionally do things we WANT to do. It should be inverted. Everything we HAVE to do should occupy at most only a few hours of our time every day, and we should spend most of our time doing that which we WANT to do. Every hour spend doing the things we HAVE to do is an opportunity cost. it costs an hour of doing that which we WANT to do. Why do we waste our lives like this? I dont believe this nonsense from fundamentalist christianity that I am put on this planet to do trivial BS day in and day out. If I have any purpose at all, it's to tell you guys that WE SHOULDN'T BE FRICKING LIVING LIKE THIS!

And that's why I find this so disagreeable. We could either live in heaven on earth, a society in which we spend most of our time doing that which we want to do, being intelligently lazy and streamlining our lives to minimize the amount of time that we have to spend working, or we can be in hell, beating our chests about how much we work and how little sleep we get and blah blah blah and taking pride in basically being abused and sacrificing our lives doing things that dont really mean anything. I mean, I'm sorry, the protestant work ethic is nonsense. Youre wasting your lives. And due to the coercive processes thereof, you're wasting ours too, because obviously you cant just enjoy your life of christian asceticism by yourself, no you have to force it on everyone else and subject me to this nonsense too. 

Why is this not our #1 issue in society? I feel like we're all brainwashed. Our time is our most important commodity and we are squandering it on pointless labor. I dont derive a sense of purpose from "work". I just see the myth of sisyphus in action, being forced to roll a rock up the hill for all eternity. And sisyphus, being aware of his fate, aint happy either. No, he's NOT happy. My internal sisyphus is SCREAMING for liberation from this nonsense.

Seriously people, if fundamentalist christianity is false, then we should not be living this way. Even if it were true, it just makes us slaves, as I would see making beings with free will then requiring them not to use it is a cruel thing for a being of infinite power to do. You kinda have a responsibility to what you intentionally create in my opinion. And if you create a sentient being that has its own feelings and free will, you should respect its freedom and independence enough to not want to beat "work ethic" into them. You think god cant make automatons to do what he wants? he's god, he can do what he wants. 

Seriously, everything about this mindset is just so cruel and backwards. I cant believe we're still living like this in the 21st century. Especially when much of the 20th was based so much on reason and secularism. Seriously, somewhere along the way, we went from fantasizing about flying cars and exploring the universe to...this, and it's really fricking sad. 

We are wasting our lives, and to go further, imposing this system on people is cruel and literally a form of spiritual violence. Screw work ethic, screw work, we should minimize work and maximize leisure, and any growth above the minimum to sustain our needs should be done among voluntary participants who wish to bring society forward (or for their own personal gain, as financial rewards for such a thing are still good). We shouldnt force everyone to work all the time with no end goal in mind, just endless accumulation of wealth. This is a sick system, and it needs to go. Im not gonna argue against all capitalism, I dont believe the problem is capitalism itself. I just want to see an end to the work ethic and a balance between our needs and other higher needs like the need for leisure, freedom, and time to be able to do whatever we want.

HIjacked book reaction in a nutshell

 To sum up the last article, I'd like to offer this simple approach to it.

"Why did the conservative work ethic fail?"

Because it forced people to work.

"Why did the socialist work ethic fail?"

Because it forced people to work.

"Why did the progressive work ethic fail?"

Because it forced people to work.

"So the problem with the whole world and all of our economic ideologies stem back to the protestant work ethic?"

Bingo.

Note, I guess I won't say ALL problems. There are other systemic issues with the various ideologies in question that need to be addressed, but is the work ethic a core problem with all of them? Heck yes. Probably the progressive version more than others because it already attempted to solve the other issues of the other systems rather successfully. 

But yes, I would say the big problem with the world today is the work ethic in general.

Reacting to Elizabeth Anderson's "Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back"

 So, a friend suggested I read this given it's intensely relevant to my interests and my own projects, and I did, and now I'm basically reviewing it. 

Honestly, I have mixed thoughts about this book. While it is, on the one hand, an extremely informative cataloguing of information, documenting the history of the protestant work ethic from its inception to modern times, and going into all of its different forms, I do ultimately come to a different conclusion than this book. In my own analysis of the past, all of these old ideologies have an "old book" problem of being stuck in the past, unable to deal with the 21st century's problems. Alternatively we can frame it in Bob Black's way of "all of the old ideologies are conservative because they all believe in work". Either way, I come to the same conclusion that I've expressed in other recent posts: that the problem is the work ethic itself, that the work ethic can be saved, and the only true solution to our problems is to liberate workers and work from it. As long as people are forced to labor under some sort of regime, directed by others (whether this takes the form of employers, the state, other workers, etc.) or even themselves, then people are not truly free. And the problems with the work ethic will inevitably rear their ugly heads again.

I mean, Anderson did have a lot of good points in her book. She actually documented the rise of the work ethic as envisioned by Calvin, and how Locke's motivations weren't right libertarianism as he was often claimed, but the protestant work ethic. This doesn't, in my mind, make these guys any better. Basing your entire economic system on religious fundamentalism is messed up regardless of intentions. And Locke appropriating it for his purposes doesn't make it any better. Still, it does slightly soften my condemnation of them relative to what it would otherwise be. Yes, F these guys for creating such harmful ideas, but ultimately, back then, we had the opposite problem we had now. Without ANY work ethic, most just worked to meet their subsistence, and rarely any more. This meant that if people were ill, or elderly, etc., that there would not be enough to go around. The work ethic was intended, at least once it got beyond Calvin himself, to encourage everyone to work so that they could share with others via charity. If everyone worked only for themselves, and there was never any surplus, then poverty would always exist. The solution was to encourage people to work more so that everyone could have their needs met. So...was the work ethic functional, despite its flaws? Yes, it was. But that doesn't make it a good thing in the long term. Just because religious fundamentalism happened to get something right for once, albeit for twisted reasons does not make this a good idea at least in the long term. It did establish the basis for much of modern capitalism and its growth, for better or for worse, but just because something worked back then for a specific purpose does not mean it is good to hold NOW. And that's if I'm being as charitable from a functionalist perspective as possible. 

Anyway, in Anderson's mind, the big villains were the conservatives of the early 1800s. Ya know, the ones that implemented the poor laws and then repealed speenhamland and then forced the poor into workhouses. The conservative aristocracy did not really value the poor much. They believed they were lazy, stupid, didn't know what they were doing with their lives, and that they needed the work ethic to be FORCED onto them. Their poverty allegedly demonstrated their lack of work ethic and virtue and they needed to make the poor miserable to make them work. Combine this with the enclosure of land forcing people off of the rural countryside and into cities, and you got tons of desperate people looking for factory work.

The english were also quite horrible to people outside of the country. They believed the irish were lazy and forced the work ethic on them. The irish mostly grew potatoes before this because they werent very labor intensive. And this made the english unhappy because their lack of work ethic showed an internal failing in their eyes, and they needed to be put to work. And obviously, they imposed the work ethic overseas as well wherever they could, basically enslaving the rest of the world to their way of life. That's why I wrote that article about the savage vs the civilized. The non english people half way across the world don't spend all of their time working? They're savage, they're only civilized if they adopt the protestant work ethic. That's why I felt the need to differentiate given me looking down on a lot of foreign cultures as of late. But my own looking down is based on not adopting liberal values like democracy, freedom, secularism, etc. I dont give a crap about work ethic. If anything I hear these 19th century accounts of people who gain access to fertilizer and then instead of using it to grow twice as much, they work half as hard, and I think they have the right idea. But not european colonizers. Much like as outlined in Widerquist's books about private property, basically imperial powers took over the world and basically forced everyone into wage slavery, where they still remain today. And then we have the gall to act like we're doing foreign countries a favor by giving them jobs in sweatshops, ha! Fricking neoliberalism...

But I digress. 

In Anderson's mind, all of this is a perversion of the original work ethic. Anderson sees the work ethic as good and noble, and just thinks this conservative version based on cruelty and authoritarianism is just a perversion of it. She even talks about more liberal and socialist thinkers who discussed it, like John Stuart Mill, and David Ricardo, and Marx, and how they all supported more middling or progressive work ethics. Mill was a mixed bag who, while better than his conservative counterparts like Bentham, Burke, and Malthus, still seemed horribly authoritarian to me, despite being the dude who wrote fricking ON LIBERTY. I mean...really, can we get past this idea that the work ethic needs to be beaten into people? Please? Anyway, Ricardo and Marx ended up inversing it. They ended up developing variations of the labor theory of value, which, rather than driving resentment downward toward the poor, drove it upward toward idle classes like landlords, estate owners, and of course, the bourgeoisie. And these guys wanted to give workers more value for their work while having social programs for the deserving poor, and they basically wanted to force the elites and the rich out of their cushy lifestyles based on simply owning things and into ahving to work too. And as you guys know, I kind of have mixed views on that. While I do think that no one should be able to own so much that they end up exploiting others as a consequence of their ownership, I dont resent people who are idle and simply have property inherited to them as inherently bad. Because again, to me, the work ethic is what ultimately sucks. People being forced to work is what ultimately sucks. Wage slavery is what ultimately sucks. While those at the top are often responsible for exploiting the poor as a consequence of their ownership, I'm not really one of those types who want to abolish all inheritance and force the rich to work. This is, in part, because I recognize that here in America, we dont have the idle rich the Europeans used to. The rich here DO work hard, I think anderson mentioned later in the book that CEOs put in 60-70 hours a week, we do tend to embrace the work ethic a little differently here and it takes the form of meritocracy. I'll come back to that later. I just want to point out that I'm less inclined to want to seize entire estates and adopt "eat the rich" mentalities because here in America, things do manifest differently, and I swear a lot of leftists care more about punishing the rich than in uplifting the poor, as evidenced by my analysis of their policies. 

And of course, Marxism eventually rose out of this, and was just as horrifying as the conservative work ethic. Much like the conservative thinkers of old, these socialist weirdos had their own work ethic visions imposed on people and this didn't make peoples' lives better, but rather imposed tyrannical systems on them. Marx himself didn't really have a good idea of what communism would look like, and most attempts that have been devised ended up ending as horribly as your most charles dickens-esque 19th century dystopias. 

So....we ultimately ended up getting reformist traditions toward the end of the 19th century and the 20th century. And these led to the social democracies of Europe. And for Elizabeth Anderson, these are the real deal. They made work good for people, finally, apparently. And she goes on about their generous safety nets, and long vacation times, and how the workers have freedom. But...she still insists on forcing people to work. She believes in reciprocity, like most social democrats, which means that for the benefits society gives us, we need to put the work back in and give back. A feel good sentiment that undermines the whole thing.

And seriously, this is my issue with socdems and people like Anderson. I don't care how much you try to dress up the work ethic, as long as youre basically forcing people to work, it's not good enough. Socialist and liberal traditions never really undid or compensated people for the original sin of wage slavery. Everything is about making work "good" for people, rather than freeing people from it. And that is why we've backslidden in my personal opinion.

And yeah, she went on about that too. How neoliberalism is bringing back the conservative work ethic, and how the late 1900s and the 2000s so far resemble the early 1800s in attitudes. And history is repeating itself. She sees this as the second hijacking of the work ethic. The first being the conservatives of the 1800s. But then the "progressive" work ethic made work good for people, and now neoliberals are imposing austerity on people. And me, living through this crapshow in America, a country that, in Anderson's mind, never properly adopted a progressive work ethic but went in a more moderate direction of social liberalism, is getting it worse than anyone. But Europe is regressing too.

And now she thinks that we dont need to abandon the work ethic, we just need to go back to the social democrats and reclaim it again. Ok, how many times are we going to do this? As is commonly said, those who dont learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This entire book is a long two hundred plus year history of the work ethic. And we've seen this happen time and time again. Weirdo protestants come up with this idea, conservatives force it on humanity and it leads to horrifying results. Then socialists adopt it, and it leads to horrifying results. And then liberals and socdems adopt it, and it kinda sucks less, but is then repealed and coopted by the conservatives again. When will it end? I'll tell you when, WHEN WE ABANDON THE FRICKING PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC.

The work ethic, is, in my mind, the ring from LOTR. It is something considered very precious and valuable, and also something that represents great power. And that power is the power of the dominant class to oppress all other classes. In capitalist countries, it's the economic elite, but as we saw under communism, they end up getting their own oppressive class imposing crap on everyone else too. And then liberals kinda come in, make the situation bearable, think they solved the problem, but never go far enough to actually solve it, since worker freedom and well being is highly dependent on the reforms and workers are given little to no autonomy themselves, they simply operate within the reforms that mask the symptoms but don't solve the problem. 

Seriously, the reason the new deal ultimately ended up "failing", and the same with social democracies of Europe, is they were only as good as the reforms. The things that hold social democracy together are unions, regulations, and safety nets. But if the unions end up collapsing, and the regulations aren't updated or repealed, and the safety nets are given stricter eligibility requirements, and the like, guess what? You're back to living in the 1830s all over again. Which is where we are as a society. And me, I look at this, recognize these problems, want to do something different, but then I get weirdo leftists like Anderson who are like "no, the work ethic isn't broken, we can fix it". No, no we want.

What we need is a rejection of the work ethic. We need to value freedom and autonomy and having peoples' basic needs met above the work ethic. We need to move beyond forcing people to work for their basic needs. As Anderson points out, we have internalized it to the point that even my basic income proposal wouldnt reduce work ethic that much, we still have a forward facing supply curve of workers or whatever. If anything, my ideas give people true freedom. if people still want to work, and many will, as many people wanna do something with their lives, and many people want more than a poverty line level UBI, then we can both ensure our basic needs are met while maximizing freedom. But we can't maximize freedom, as long as we stick to the idea in any which form, that people need to be coerced to work. It doesnt matter if it's conservative, socialist, or liberal/reformist. We need to get rid of this idea that humans are to be dominated, that they need to have this idea forced onto them, and that this is more important than true freedom. What we need is a basic income as a right of citizenship, treated as seriously as we would any negative freedom in the constitution. If anything, a UBI is a prerequisite for people to be able to truly exercise their freedom. If we, in America, really care about life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (NOT PROPERTY), then we need this. Because unless people have their basic needs met with no conditionality, they are not free. They are dependent on whatever entity provides for them, be it employers, the state, or markets themselves. We need to get rid of the idea that a job somehow provides people independence, it certainly does not. It makes people directly dependent on others, and basically enslaves them to their employer. Unless people can realistically say no, then they can't be free?

I think Karl Widerquist said it best of leftist and liberal thinking: "if you're an egalitarian, why do you want to be the boss of the poor?" It's a valid question. And this is the problem Anderson's ideology has. She seems to be so close to getting it, but doesn't seem to realize that as long as reciprocity, or some form of enforced work ethic is a thing, people aren't really free. People are only free when they have the absolute power to say no. 

Of course, Anderson scoffs at basic income. As I said in the interview I posted yesterday, she called it a "tech bro fantasy". She really seems to believe we can save the work ethic. But again, that's where i differ from social democrats. I embrace the thinkers of the likes of Phillippe Van Parijs and Karl Widerquist who seem to go full on against reciprocity. Van Parijs more than Widerquist I would say. He actually ruffled a lot of feathers over the past 40 years or so promoting his "real libertarian" philosophy. Something about the idea that people not be forced to work drives him mad. Even John Rawls came out against him. It's baffling to me. And that's why I think his ideas are necessary. All of these ideologies are so work centric and we actually need one that isn't.

The traditions were always there. Anderson mentioned them. She talked about Max Weber's iron cage, and Keynes wanting reduced work weeks, and David Graeber in BS jobs. And those guys are right up my alley. I mean, I agree, the protestant work ethic is an iron cage that enslaves humanity by subjecting them to horrible anxiety. Keynes talks about how at this point not only have we overcome the scarcity problem (in terms of how it was originally presented by the original purveyors of the work ethic), but by now we should be able to work like 15 hour weeks. His predictions are actually correct, the problem is the darned work ethic. And of course BS jobs exist because we insist on subjecting people to this system of jobs and a lot of people end up pretending to work just not to have more pressure exerted over them directly, leading to a lot of jobs that dont need to be done, done. Our incentives are messed up. If youre honest, you lose your paycheck. The reward for being efficient at work is more work and possibly losing your job. That's the problem with the economy. It's the darned, freaking work ethic. 

Of course, Anderson doubles down, and argues even if we wanted to shift toward a life of leisure we cant because we have to spend the next century working to avert climate change. My sister in political theory, did it ever occur to you that the reason climate change is a problem is because of the work ethic? John Mills proposed capitalism as a race without end, with the runners running forever, and the economy ever growing. But it is precisely that growth that drives climate change. While efficiency standards and even a green new deal would help stave off the consequences, at some point, we're gonna have to stop prioritizing growth at all costs. It's not healthy for us, OR the planet. 

Besides, I dont buy the green new deal nonsense. It's made up of the same work ethic that drove the original new deal, the one that thinks that the answer to everything is "more jobs". They want this overly expensive jobs programming retooling our entire economy to be green, and I dont deny that there are aspects of this that are useful and attractive, but quite frankly...it seems like a lot of work, and it isn't worth it. We can allegedly avert the worst effects of climate change with 1/10 of the resources in a "build back better" style deal like Biden wanted to do, so why don't we just do that?

And the answer is the economic ideology of the progressive work ethic, that glorifies jobs programs, something that the British did in the early 1800s in enforcing the protestant work ethic on people in the first place. To a bog standard leftie, the answer to everything is more jobs, just from the government. They think they can fix the work ethic, without abolishing it, and that has never actually worked. 

So sorry, Elizabeth Anderson, I don't like your solutions. While yes, a progressive work ethic that raises up workers, gives them a better quality of life, and some leisure is better than the iterations of the idea that seem to be driven by cruelty, that doesn't make the progressive work ethic a good thing. It's just less bad. What we need is a rejection of the work ethic and to give people their liberty. And that's my final verdict here. The book is good, but this person is seriously misguided in their solutions. You would think that given the sordid history of the work ethic that you would turn against it entirely, but her main thesis is basically "well no, it's these people who are bad, here's how my own version of this that has been tried before to mild success can fix this". Well, at least she didn't go full tankie like communists do. Social democracy actually does have a solid track record. I'd rather not be a luddite though and fight against progress to try to preserve jobs of all things though. As I always like to say, 20th century solution to a 21st century problem. We need 21st century solutions to 21st century problems.

Election Update 12/29/2023

 So, you know what? I'm probably just gonna do these monthly at this point, although I might ramp it up closer to election day next year.

At the end of the year, things don't look good for Biden. 

Trump is at 2.3% in polling nationally, which puts Biden about 5 points underwater of where he needs to be to roughly tie Trump in the electoral college. 

As for the state level data:

State	Margin	Z Score	% D Win	% R Win	EV if D Wins	EV if R wins
Maine	Biden +11.0%	-2.75	99.7%	0.3%	143	398
New York	Biden +10.0%	-2.50	99.4%	0.6%	171	395
Washington	Biden +10.0%	-2.50	99.4%	0.6%	183	367
New Hampshire	Biden +8.6%	-2.15	98.4%	1.6%	187	355
New Mexico	Biden +8.0%	-2.00	97.7%	2.3%	192	351
Virginia	Biden +4.0%	-1.00	84.1%	15.9%	205	346
Colorado	Biden +4.0%	-1.00	84.1%	15.9%	215	333
Minnesota	Biden +2.5%	-0.63	73.6%	26.4%	225	323
NE2 (estimated)	Biden +1.9%	-0.48	68.4%	31.6%	226	313
Wisconsin	Tie 0.0%	0.00	50.0%	50.0%	236	312
Pennsylvania	Trump +1.0%	+0.25	40.1%	59.9%	255	302
Nevada	Trump +4.0%	+1.00	15.9%	84.1%	261	283
Michigan	Trump +4.8%	+1.20	11.5%	88.5%	276	277
Arizona	Trump +4.8%	+1.20	11.5%	88.5%	287	262
Georgia	Trump +5.2%	+1.30	9.7%	90.3%	303	251
Texas	Trump +8.0%	+2.00	2.3%	97.7%	343	235
Iowa	Trump +8.0%	+2.00	2.3%	97.7%	349	195
North Carolina	Trump +9.0%	+2.25	1.2%	98.8%	365	189
Florida	Trump +10.0%	+2.50	0.6%	99.4%	395	173
Ohio	Trump +10.0%	+2.50	0.6%	99.4%	412	143
ME2 (estimated)	Trump +10.0%	+2.50	0.6%	99.4%	413	126

Yep, as I said, almost 5 down in the electoral college. Michigan and Arizona share the tipping point status. Trump needs both of them to win, while Biden can win with one of them. 

All in all, Trump has a 88.5% chance of winning, the same chance I gave Biden in 2020 in my final analysis. Biden only has a 11.5% chance of winning. This isn't good. For most of the year I've had closer to a 70-30 split, so seeing it go this hard toward a 88-12 or so split is not really good. 

The likely electoral outcome is also split two ways because Wisconsin is literally 50/50 right now. if Biden gets it, it's 236-302 in Trump's favor. If Trump gets it, it's 312-226 is Trump's favor. Doesnt matter either way as Biden will lack the electoral votes, it is worth mentioning. 

So yeah. I'm ending this year electorally on a pessimistic note. Biden looks like he's screwed. The democrats look like they're screwed. The fascist looks like he's gonna win the white house next year. And that should scare all of us. It was all fun in games with all of the crap he was talking in 2016 but given his literally incited an insurrection and he's saying all kinds of crazy authoritarian things....guys...I'm scared. Can we NOT elect this guy again? Please? I know Biden aint great, but at least he won't let the country descend into an even darker age.