So, I've done articles on this before, but I'm reading a book called "99% Perspiration" by Adam Chandler after it was recommended on Yang's podcast a few weeks back. And, while I'm not very far in it, I'm noticing a theme.
A lot of the American ethos of work is wrapped up in these narratives that we love to tell ourselves. As Chandler himself points out, most of these narratives are false, they're mythologies that tell weird alternative views of history that have little to no basis in reality, but these ideas are so powerful he feels the need to actually delve into them and discuss them.
Now, in my own book that I'm trying (and failing) to write well, I don't lean into this. As a matter of fact, as I said previously on here, I don't like symbolic interactionism much. Sure, it's valuable for sociology, but I don't find the cultural underpinnings of work to be very important in my worldview. Because I don't really strongly value culture. Culture is mere subjective reality that we create, and I could have told you from the start that most of these ideas are just feel good narratives that we tell ourselves. If anything, they're pure propaganda.
While I don't deny that there is a functionalist side of work where work is valuable in producing the goods and services that we need, after all, SOMEONE (or something) needs to do the unpleasant jobs that keep society going, I largely find the conflict side to be the main sociological paradigm regarding work that I find valuable. This is because if we look at work from a functionalist perspective, while having a negative dislike of the concept, we see work as a problem to be solved, an illness to be cured, an obstacle to be engineered around. And I do believe that we should use the full might of society to do that. And I believe that if we were focused on that goal as much as we are with "creating jobs" in the current world, we would work FAR less than we do today.
So why do we work? Quite simply, to increase shareholder value. Because the wealthy want us to. Our economy keeps growing, numbers on spreadsheet keep going up, and don't get me wrong, there are benefits to higher GDP functionally too, it should lead to higher living standards and larger defense budgets with which to defend ourselves against the illiberal and authoritarian regimes of the eastern hemisphere (ya know, the same ones Trump is selling out to). And let's face it, more stuff should be better.
But, as I kind of concluded writing some early drafts of my book, most people don't benefit from these living standards. Rather, they are kept poor and in precarity in order to continue to "Motivate" (coerce) them to work. We're basically glorified slaves. If we really go down the work rabbit hole, we're slaves, let's face it. And all of society is designed to distract us from it, and to gaslight us into wanting to spend our lives working and to not question the concept.
Let me ask, who does this benefit? Not the average American, it benefits the wealthy. We live in this Bioshock Infinite-esque style society where everywhere there's propaganda about how we need to work hard, keep working harder, hustle, blah blah blah, and you're actually made to feel bad if you DONT wanna spend your life working. But that's the point of the propaganda. It's so effective and so powerful that most people just buy into it hook line and sinker. They dont understand that life really is the matrix or plato's cave, or dero goi's 1984, except with the real propaganda being capitalist and religious stuff, and not telling people to get vaccinated from easily preventable diseases (really, I never saw a video that seemed so close to getting it but then took exactly the wrong lesson and believes religious and anti vax nonsense is the truth). They don't question things. And that's the problem. They dont actually question things.
Honestly, I think a proper exegesis of the work situation is this:
Yes, work has some functionalist value. However, the functionalist value is typically overstated and through technology, we could drastically lighten the load if we engineered society to minimize work rather than maximize it.
Most cultural narratives surrounding work are BS. They're propaganda to make us want to work and to gaslight us and make us feel bad if we admit that we don't want to.
The real reason we work is to continue enriching a class of ultra wealthy people who run society mostly from the shadows (although have been emboldened to be more "in your face with the current trump administration). We dont benefit from this work as much as we think. The main beneficiary are the wealthy people at the top.
That's the reality of work in our society. I don't care about grand narratives about how America is founded on work and blah blah blah. Most of it is mythology, and America has a history that was never particularly great. Some aspects of it are, but can we ever forget the slavery and genocide of the 19th century? Yeah.
With that said, there is a bit of a part 2 to this that discusses a completely different but related matter to this that I also want to write about today.
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