Ripping the left's "dignity of work" sentiments even more (and sketching out a new approach to property)

 So, I rewatched some clips from the DNC related to this subject, and I kind of finally "got" and fully conceptualized why I have such an issue with this stuff, and I want to turn this into a teachable moment. A few clips in question I want to focus on are Michelle Obama's "failing forward" comments, as well as AOC's "there's nothing wrong with working for a living" comments.

To quote them, this is what I'm focusing on.

Michelle Obama:

Kamala has shown her allegiance to this nation, not by spewing anger and bitterness, but by living a life of service and always pushing the doors of opportunity open to others. She understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt the business or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third, or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. No. We don’t get to change the rules, so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. No. We put our heads down. We get to work. In America, we do something. 

And with AOC:

Elected Republicans have attacked me by saying that I should go back to bartending. But let me tell you I'm happy to any day of the week because there is nothing wrong with working for a living. Imagine having leaders in the white house who understand that. Leaders like Kamala and Tim. 

Okay, so, I wanna unpack these statements a bit and go back to their ideological origins, and how we got here. Because this is actually pretty deep protestant work ethic stuff. 

So, as you guys know, I read some books on the work ethic and its origins, and meritocracy a few months ago. And...uh....I recognize this stuff as I see it. This IS protestant work ethic stuff. The protestant work ethic, when it hit politics, was ORIGINALLY, a populist sentiment. You gotta understand the world back then. We were in the waning days of feudalism. And the working class owned nothing. Feudalism was a system that went hand in hand with monarchy. The monarch was a ruler who was chosen by God to rule with divine right. The ruler owned everything. All of the property. They gave the property to landed nobles, who were essentially friends of the monarch, and loyal to them. basically, property was a giant political spoils system with the leader in charge, and those loyal to the leader who owned everything in the monarch's name. And then there were serfs, the little people. They were the ones who worked the land, and had to pay taxes to the noble who owned the land they worked on and the king or queen. And thus, that is the system that they had in the late 1700s. 

In a sense, while the protestant work ethic did come from Christianity, it did inevitably develop separate camps, that did evolve into the various ideologies we have today. Of course we have the more conservative version we're familiar with, that the rich use to keep the peasants in line as we transitioned from feudalism to capitalism, but we also had this more populist pro worker vibe too. Heck, Elizabeth Anderson was one of the more pro worker types who wanted to take back the work ethic for the left. That's why she wrote that book that I got a lot of this info from. 

And even Locke, with his original concept of property rights, linking property rights to labor was intended to be an alternative to feudalism, and it was actually kind of populist. It was like, no, those landed gentry arent entitled to property by divine right, the right to property comes from those who WORK for it, the WORKERS are entitled to it. And thus, a lot of pro work sentiments were born. 

In America, one of the reasons our own country has such a work fetish is because it was based on this doctrine. We are the world's oldest modern democracy. We are the ones who led the charge to get rid of the monarchy. No taxation without representation. And of course, the American Dream. Back in the 1800s, it was pretty progressive. people fled Europe and the problems they had over there, in search of a better life over here, and and here, we were this democratic, secular, expansionist society. So we developed this American dream, that if you come here, and work hard, and go west, you can get your own land, build your own life, and be left alone. It provided opportunities not available in Europe at the time. And that's kind of where our American dream stuff came from. Now, to be fair, a lot has happened in 200 years, we're no longer this young, growing expansionist society that basically operates under the rules of minecraft where we just go west and take what land we want from the Native Americans and build our dreams on it. There is no more land, most of the good land is taken, property rights are everywhere, and society is a lot closer to Europe. Except, because we dont have the same ideological evolution that Europe did, we still have this foolish notion of the American dream. But that's where that came from.

We saw similar sentiments in Europe any way, except they became Marxism and modern leftism. You know, labor theory of value, workers are entitled to all that they create, the owner class are parasites, it's really the workers who own all that they create, blah blah blah. And thus, we got a lot of populist pro worker sentiment in which people tend to identify with their work, and beat their chests about what hard workers they are while remaining antagonistic toward the ownership class. 

As you guys know, my own views...aren't this. While I do support an antagonistic relationship between labor and capital, I don't do it from the same ideological perspective. Again, I start from the perspective that work sucks, and work is evil. I don't have the protestant work ethic in my views. Because my views are an amalgamation of my own evolving views post deconversion from christianity, I developed my views primarily from a secular humanist perspective. I start off with the perspective that work is basically evil, but necessary. No one likes work, but we have to work to some extent. And what justified modern society for me, as an ex conservative, was the idea that things needed to be this way. It was a practical argument, that we need people working in order to produce food and things needed to survive. If we didn't all work, society would fall apart and people would starve to death. But then the recession hit and how could I justify this society where we had enough wealth where if it were all divided equally, we would all have, effectively, a middle class household, and the great inequalities of society? How could I justify a society in which we're literally talking about "creating jobs" for people to do, and how the entire labor market is effectively rigged against workers? Obviously, the facade fell for me. We DONT need to live like this. And it's INSANE that we do. And for me, the work ethic has always had a more right wing connotation where it was the elites brainwashing the peasants in society into working for scraps and being grateful for it.

And as I developed my own idea for society, my own conception of work and the good life is that, if anything, work is bad, we should try to minimize work, and we should try to organize society where we WORK LESS. Because our society is set up to keep us working in perpetuity as if we were in scarcity, even though we have the most prosperous society to ever exist, and anyone stable and middle class lives better than ancient pharaohs. It's INSANE. We have so much, but we still work like its in scarcity. When I was growing up, I would watch old cartoons like the jetsons, with the flying cars and the 9 hour work week. I always looked forward to "the future" and i always thought one aspect of it was that we could work less, because we would have automated so much work, that we wouldnt have to do it.

But...we do. And a lot of it comes from the work ethic. We link property to work, and as such, we oppose all forms of redistribution and force everyone to work for living, driving them to compete for scarce opportunities in which they are abused and exploited like slaves. And we just assume that an absolute right to property is a good thing, when from my ethical perspective, all morality is merely social convention, and we can change it if we want. 

So...we live in a society that enslaves us, to serve these institutions that dont serve us. We condemn the masses to a lifetime of misery and scarcity and work, because of these institutions. We should change our institutions to actually make society work. We are the masters of our society. No gods, no masters. We are in charge of our own destiyn. We need to shake off these bad ideas from the past and start anew.

And you know what? I have a different idea of how property should work. Capitalists tend to often believe in inalienable right to ownership that drives insane income inequality and condemns the masses to being slaves. But leftists are so obsessed with work and jobs, that they literally define their entire worldview through class conflict, and can't ever get away from being workers. They adopt the same work ethic, just a slightly different and more populist iteration of it. 

And for me, I think both of these guys are insane, and stuck in these harmful ideologies of the past. So let's provide a new, pragmatic way forward, that acquiesces when necessary to material and practical reality, while also moving us toward those utopian 21st century sci fi societies I would like to emulate. 

So, let's sketch out a new system of property rights here.

For me, property rights are not a natural right, they are not an end goal of morality, like life, harm reduction, liberty, or pursuit of happiness are. Rather, property serves them. They are legal rights, and a rights of lesser quality than so called "natural" rights (ie, the end goals of morality in my perspective). 

To some extent, the idea that property is linked to work is good. It's PRACTICAL. One of the glaring failures of "communism" in American lore is the idea that communists have no work incentive. Tying property to work provides an incentive to work. And regardless of my personal feelings on work, work is still somewhat of a necessary for society to function. Someone has to work to produce our needs, and it only makes sense they get paid for it.

HOWEVER, if work is the sole legitimate way to acquire property, then that leads to a society in which we are enslaved, because we all must work. That his how we get a society that cheers on job creation. If we want a society without work, we need to somewhat decouple property from work.

This is where my economic ideas come in, UBI, Medicare for all, etc, we need to give people enough property in order to survive without work in order to make work more voluntary. Now, some might wonder if this will create excessive work disincentives that stop people from working. Social science shows it doesn't. UBI isn't generally enough to give people a really good life with all of the luxuries that they want, so people still have incentive to work. And that's the balance. UBI gives people freedom, but given the material realities of what a UBI looks like, it's not gonna be large enough to discourage enough workers from doing the essential work in society.

Over time though, as we automate more and become more productive, we should be able to create a society in which fewer and fewer people have to work, and/or we have to work less and less. This means we can keep raising the UBI to balance our material realities and our needs with our ideals to work less, and this is how, over a long enough period of time, we can move away from work altogether.

And you know what? This is good for workers too. Most workers would benefit from UBI as a wage supplement. UBI would give people more freedom to say no, stopping employer abuse and allowing them to push for better pay and working conditions. Unions could use UBI as a so called "permanent strike fund". And what gives more dignity to workers than allowing them to live as they want? A society of voluntary labors that are paid and treated well inherently have more dignity than those who are among the ranks of slaves, either in name, or in roundabout condition. 

And you know what? Over time, maybe we'll all become the landed nobles. Maybe we'll all be elites. Maybe we'll all be shareholders. The problem with pro worker ideologies is most of them can't see beyond defining people by their work and deriving their value from work. So these ideologies will never see past work. And this is why I cringe when people like Kamala Harris, or AOC, or Michelle Obama goes on about how there's nothing wrong with working for a living and blah blah blah. I know they're trying to be relatable, but YOU DON'T SPEAK FOR ME! Im not going to romanticize the struggles workers go through. I dont want AOC to go back to bartending. I want a society where robots make the drinks, or voluntary workers make the drinks while being paid well and working on their terms. I don't want a society where people HAVE to go back to bartending if they dont want to. The elites hate work. They see work for what it is. If the right is anything about work, a lot of the more non religious crazy factions are honest about it. They know it sucks, they know it's unpleasant, and they know that the purpose of most work is to serve THEM. They look down with disdain at workers, because they see them as merely their servants. Don't take pride in your servitude, working class. Seek freedom and liberty. Seek the power to say no. If you still want to work after that, so be it, but no one should be TOLD they HAVE to work.

And that is a flaw of the working class. They're conditioned to not believe any labor is "benieth them" and that they should be willing to do ANY JOB just to get a paycheck. They take pride in their servitude. They gladly and happily accept their station in life. Again. Work itself is not dignified. Workers are dignified. Because people are dignified. All people deserve dignity, regardless of work or not. It's just that some work has to be done, and if money motivates people to do it, all the better. Let them do it. but let them do it voluntarily. ANd a worker who can walk away from a job at any moment and be okay has dignity, because they have their freedom and independence. A worker who takes pride in their work but who can't say no is just a slave who takes pride in their servitude. Seek freedom, guys, seek freedom. 

And yeah, that's how I see it, and that's why this pro worker bullcrap the DNC is pushing pisses me off. These people don't speak for me. If you wanna bring dignity to work, bring dignity to the people who do the work by giving them their liberty. Otherwise, you're just cheering on your own forced servitude.