So, I kind of recognize that the right might try to take aim at those who think like me and call us weird, citing that the anti work type people are "weird" for not wanting to spend all of their time working, and how we might be a liability to the democratic party. After all, I do understand my views are abnormal, kind of extreme, and I do fit the stereotype of a lazy person who wants to just live off of the tax payer's dime and "get crap for free." So, as such, I'm not only gonna try to defend my views, but I wanna flip the script on these people.
So, before I get started, one thing I'll admit that's what's weird is to some extent, culturally determined. Views that might make sense in a certain time and place might make sense to people with a shared cultural identity, even if they themselves seem "weird" to outsiders. On the flip side, we might consider things that are normal to others to be "weird to us." And much of our current "work cult" as I'll call it is a cultural construct that makes sense in this world, at this specific time, and in this specific context, but honestly? As someone who never "got it", it's "WEIRD."
With that said, let's get into it.
So...human nature. Are humans work happy, or are they "lazy"? I would actually argue that they're somewhat lazy. They work to do the things they need to do to feed themselves and take care of themselves, and then they don't want to work more than that. Our current attitudes toward work are actually culturally ingrained in us by modern society. I've read books about, and have written stuff based on these books, about how we got here on this blog, but long story short, our society has a history of violence and coercion that brought us to this point. We set up the rules of the current game of capitalism roughly 200 years ago, and at the time, it was poorly recieved among the working classes. Because in terms of many aspects of working conditions and the like, it was actually worse then the feudalism that came before. We forced peasants off of the land that they farmed during the "enclosure" movement in order to force people into cities. We then make all other options but to take work miserable. We criminalized homelessness and vagrancy. We forced people into work houses to force the work ethic onto people. In colonies, the British and the like would essentially forbid people from planting crops that were too easy to harvest (see, potatoes and the Irish). We enslaved the Africans. We genocided the Native Americans as they'd rather fight to the death than become slaves. We forced our will on the rest of the world to establish the system that has since become global capitalism. And in this effort, we basically forced this crazy work ethic on people and punished them for not internalizing it themselves. Either people could internalize it and become part of the system "voluntarily", or they would be forced to by literal force.
Nowadays, the system just "is". Leftists kind of understand it, for as deluded as they are by their own doctrines, but they are familiar with what we call 'capitalist realism", the idea that capitalism as it exists is so ingrained in our psyches and cultures, we struggle to imagine a world outside it. Even I "fall victim" to this phenomenon, in being a "human centered capitalist". I don't try to abolish capitalism, i actually think it's quite useful and has some upsides. And I also understand that trying to replace capitalism means replacing what we have with an entirely different system in which we'll have to rethink the logistics of from the ground up ourselves. And most who have tried such a path, like the leftists and the communists, and the anarchists, quickly find themselves over their heads and end up creating something akin to Soviet style communism instead, with all of its warts and flaws. And that's no better.
To some extent, capitalism "just works", but that doesnt mean that we cant reimagine it without the psychotic work ethic. So let's talk about the work ethic. The protestant work ethic, as the name implies, comes from Calvinism. It comes from religious weirdos who were...just weird. They had this idea of predestination, in which they were chosen by God to be saved, and they had to prove that they were saved through hard work and meager living.
Now, to the uninformed, this is a lot to unpack. So let's unpack a lot of the assumptions in this mindset.
First, let's go into Christianity, specifically protestant christianity based on biblical literalism. These guys believe God talks to them through this old collection of writings and stories known as the Bible. They believe that while God authored the Bible, that he did it through humans.
In the Bible, the world is about 6-10,000 years old. In the beginning, things were perfect. We all lived in a garden, everything was great, no one had to work, all they had to do was not eat fruit from a single tree. God specifically commanded them not to. but then a talking snake who was god's enemy allegedly entered the garden and tempted them to eat the fruit. So because of that, sin came into the world. Sin is rebellion against god. And because of that, humans die, women have painful childbirth, and men have to work for a living.
God then chose this group of people out of all the world's people to be HIS people, and they had to cut off the tip of their...things....to show that they were of god's people. And then he wrote this collection of stories and commands through him to show humans god's perfect law. And god was a control freak. And while the rules made sense in a certain concept, and most of it had to do with primitive attempts at cleanliness and avoiding disease, in a modern context, these rules are often plain WEIRD.
Anyway, as it turns out, humans are sinful and horrible rule followers, so god got pissed and felt morally obligated to smite them and/or send them to an eternal torture chamber for disobeying god. There is original sin, which everyone gets just for existing, and then all humans commit their own transgressions against god, often simply for living their lives. In christianity, HUMAN NATURE is sinful, and peoples' natural urges lead to sin, and people need to actively fight their own nature in many ways to avoid sin.
Anyway, God solved the sin problem by sending his son, who is also himself, to earth, so he can be a human blood sacrifice, to himself, to absolve us from sins against the rules that...he created. In the olden days, people would absolve themselves of sin for doing things like sacrificing goats (the name "scapegoat" comes from this fact), and now we sacrifice this holy human who is also god to god, so that we can be absolved from sins. Because the only way to forgive sins is through blood and death apparently. This is the best system an all knowing all perfect creator could come up with. Idk, to me, it's just WEIRD.
Anyway, because this dude WAS God, he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, and anyone who believes in him gets eternal life. Like....brutally honest, it's "weird". Christianity is "weird". It's something I noticed when we left it. We kind of had all of these lessons sound normal growing up in it, but it ended up being kind of...weird.
And now, a lot of the pushback against the GOP being weird is often because the more radical bunch of extremists of this religion want to push their weird ideas on the rest of us. But yes, the whole thing is weird.
But back to "work." I didn't go into what christianity is, just to bash christianity. No, I did it to set up the historical context for the protestant work ethic. So Calvinists basically are a "weird" Christian sect that believes that those who are saved from God are "predestined", and they believed, because christianity is closely related to asceticism and pleasure denial because of the "sin" fixation, that the way to show one is saved is to live a meager life devoid of pleasures, and to instead invest in hard work. But one can't enjoy the fruits of their hard work, as indulgence would be sinful, so they're just expected to give away their money or something.
Anyway, some Christians decided to push this idea society wide, which is how we got the work ethic. The idea was kind of to keep people working all of the time so they'd never have time to fall into sin, and to create a surplus of resources that would then be used to give to the poor. But the poor won't get this for free. No. Because the Bible says "those who do not work shall not eat" at one point (verse cited explicitly without its historical context in this case), they can't just feed the poor. They have to save their souls by forcing this work ethic onto them as well. So charity to the poor got linked to being coerced to work, and this idea caught on and was implemented by early capitalists.
Which is how we got to this secularized version of this where we are all to spend all of our time working and developing this work ethic, and we need to actively punish those who don't work. We like to act like it was essential at one point, but never in the history of capitalism itself was it. Sure, humans have always had to toil to some degree to survive. For much of society it was necessary just to not starve to death. But what makes it different under capitalism is the fact that we do create this surplus of resources, and then we insist on people working all of the time to create more and more and more of a surplus.
And here we are 200 years later living lives of luxury beyond our ancestors' wildest dreams, but we are often stuck on the edge of poverty intentionally in order to keep us working. We love to act like this is just how the world is and it's necessary, but no, these ideas came out of a specific cultural context, and in abstract just seem...weird.
And they are weird. Honestly, work should be seen as an evil. We should seek to minimize how much we work. As we gain the ability to create a surplus, sure, we can use that to enrich ourselves, but we should also allow ourselves to work less, and to make work more voluntary as a result. Maybe we won't grow as much if we did this, but maybe growth isn't the end all be all of everything.
As I see it, we live lives that are stuck in protestant work ethic thinking. They're lives based on self denial, and asceticism, and pleasure denial, where we demonize laziness, we demonize rest, and it seems like, if anything is considered bad, or evil, or "weird" in our society, it's daring to be "lazy" and say what many of us are probably thinking, but none of us can say for fear of the social or financial consequences. That work itself, is "weird". That the work ethic as we practice it, is "weird". That our society is "weird." These ideas arent natural. Nothing about them is natural. If anything, they arose in contrast and in conflict with our natural impulses, and spread because of weird ascetic mindsets from christianity, and are replicated through force and common lies we tell ourselves about the state of the world. but it isn't us who are weird for not wanting to work. it's society that's wierd for forcing us to work to keep creating a surplus in a never ending fashion, where we act like we can just keep growing forever, or that growing forever is preferable, and that this won't come back to bite us in some sort of resource crash or ecological collapse. Even if we didn't. The whole thing, to me, comes off as so irrational, since the economy should exist for humans, not humans for the economy, and living in a way where we are forced to work all the time to generate more and more growth and profits is just plain "weird." We're denying ourselves the pleasures of this world, because we're too busy working. And for many, religion is what keeps people docile and complacent to this system, as christianity teaches people that this world isn't fair, but that we'll all live better in the next. If there even is a next...
Hence why the far left calls religion the "opium of the masses", because it's this mass delusion to stop people from recognizing they're being taken advantage of by these religious worldviews. It kind of keeps them docile and going on about how this world is fallen, and we cant change anything about them, and that oh well, guess we gotta suffer in this life to live well in the next. But honestly, to me, this is also just plain "weird" and we should want to live for today. We don't know what comes next, if there is a next life. If atheism is true, then we are kind of wasting the only life we have working for the sake of growth we never truly enjoy, and we have to ask "what's the point?" And if reincarnation is true, then we still have to ask, well, should we be wasting our lives working? Even if there are other, more pleasurable lives, should we have to suffer in this one?
I mean, and that's the thing. These ideas only make sense within the cultural confines of protestant Christianity and its quite frankly "weird" mindset. And for the rest of us, these ideas are not only weird, they're harmful.
As such, as someone who rejects the Christian worldview, i think we should push back just as hard against the work ethic and this weird fixation on work that our society has just as hard as we push back against project 2025, or JD Vance and his crazy ideas. Because it's all interrelated, and it's all part of the same worldview, and the same battle between worldviews that our society is fighting. The culture war isn't JUST about christians and their weird views on social issues being imposed on the rest of us. it's everything. it defines their entire theory of everything. And that includes this weird fixation on work that society has. As I see it, my anti work views are, in a sense, just another front of that culture war. And the mainstream views of work are, in a sense, just another front in the culture war except expanding into economics. It's all related. For these fundie christians, everything comes back to fundie christianity. For me, I act as a foil to this by coming back to secular humanism, and my own iteration of human centered capitalism is really just an extension of my secular humanist philosophy, in which we choose to live for ourselves, and make rules for ourselves, rather than living according to the arbitrary dictates of some psychotic, "weird" creator god who insists we do things his way or burn in hell for all eternity. It all goes together. It truly is a clash of worldviews. And always remember, we humanists, we're NOT the weird ones. We're the RATIONAL ONES. We're the ones who subject all ideas to reason and critical thinking and dont just accept things based on faith. THEY'RE the weird ones who believe strange ideas without much evidence and introspection, and then insist that all of society must be run this way. It's fine if they want to live a certain way. It's not fine to make ME live that way, or anyone else. And that's why I push back against this crap.
I understand that most people dont have their minds set up to think this way. Mainstream ideology is kind of insidious like that. it just comes off as "reality" until people question the ideas, at which point, they just start sounding increasingly weird. And then one day you wake up and realize you don't believe that stuff any more. It happened to me, and I hope it happens to everyone at some point in their lives. Because you kind of need to break down the illusions of this world, before you can build your views up again into something that is actually based on reason and evidence. Many of our social structures will survive this test. But others won't. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Get rid of what which doesn't work, stick with what does.
And yeah, that's how I feel about this. So sorry, not sorry, I'm not actually the weird one here. I'm actually the rational guy in a world that is weird. At least that's how I see it, at least. Why should I continue to give fealty to ideas that don't serve us and are harmful and antithetical to my being? So yeah, sorry, not sorry, I'll never apologize for my views on this subject unless literally coerced to somehow. And if it's coerced, is it genuine? Of course not. Then it's just ceding to power and tyranny, which rips the mask off of everything anyway.
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