Destroying the Protestant Work Ethic
I shared this article on Faceballs near the end of 2016, but it's worth another look: Why the Protestant Work Ethic Is a Menace to Society by Robert S. Becker.
The replies I got were good, but some of my right-leaning friends seemed to miss the point. I believe they labeled themselves as "conservative" or "conservative/libertarian" or maybe even just "libertarian." All of the replies were about how we shouldn't worry about jobs going away. There will always be plenty of jobs! But who the hell wants jobs? Jobs suck and we should have robots and AI doing most of our stuff.
What I'd like to look forward to is a society where we embrace automation and love unemployment. Where technology brings us more time for leisure and creation, and individual worth is no longer tied to your employment status.
I know it's idealistic but it's a thought experiment that I'd encourage you to try. What would that society look like? Would it include stuff like universal basic income? Would it look like socialism? How would it go?
Hey brother. I saw your name floating around the stream and thought I would drop by. Cool topic. What I thought was even the most conservative or progressive are both caught in opposite sides of a dialectic. The primal stories from which the ethic comes link work with the Curse and being 'Naked and Ashamed." Work is what slaves do. It is the same in a capitalist or communist system. Both assume the rulership of a state which functionally is god. Kinda like asking how much piss you want in your coke. A little or a lot? :) or which STD would you like. My christian friends it seems have skipped over some of the most basic tenants of the story. 1. Dualism and dialectic (knowledge of good and evil) leads to shame and hiding and work. A seperation of a now divided self from god and creation and others. 2. Monarchy was/is not the Creator's intention. The story says that the prophet tried to talk the people out of it but they begged for a king, a system to rule them. Then over the course of history the idea of kingship became deified. The historical question seems to have been confined to which type of "kingship" is perferable rather than why is Statism the norm. Isms and ocracies and anities seem to me to be just different business models to extract "work" from the slaves or subjects or citizens or human resources or . . . Whatever label works. I heard Mark Passio say that Jesus was an Anarchist but most of his followers are Statists. I agree with him. As I read the story Jesus was not murdered because he did miricales or was nice or religious. He was murdered because he threatened the system in an existential way by saying religion is of satan, money (as it was being used) is slavery, and the State is not the creator or god. That the good news is that one can undo the curse and transcend the dualism by dying to a false, contrived, fear based sense of self and being "reborn" into their natural connection to the creator and creation. And here the intention is liberty and prosperity and self rule within the parameters of natural universal law (is-ness). That work is for slaves. He suggested we become children again and wear ourselves out playing. Or something like that. :) just rambling and typing with my thumb. Good new year to you. Peace abd Love and Liberty.
That is some interesting stuff to think about!
In the end its just words. And I hope it was ok to respond. I just had those thoughts as I read. Not trying to inject myself anywhere. Like I remind myself regularly ina Forrest voice. "I'm not a smart man, Jenny." :) Peace brother.
Yes, of course it's okay to respond. I didn't share that to yell into a vacuum. I want to know what people think. I'm also not a smart man, and it's hard to have innovative thoughts about stuff that completely rewrites how our society works.
Cool. I will see you around brother
I think about this all the time. What's with this obsessive creation of jobs? They're even artificially creating jobs that aren't needed so people can have jobs. Also, I grew up in the midwest, and the midwest is obsessed with work ethic. I call it slaves. The way I grew up was the longer and harder you worked at your job, and the more you hated it, the more virtuous you were. My family really values sacrificing yourself and your happiness for work.
It's a huge problem with our culture, for sure! We freak out when people are unemployed, when that is not the problem. We should be working toward everybody's health and happiness, not everybody's back-breaking 40 hours per week. Priorities!
I want people to get out of the employment paradigm and be free to create and invent!
Yes!!! Unless they don't want to. But the people who want to work shouldn't get to punish the rest of us by requiring everybody to work.
How would people survive if they didn't want to work?
That's something we need to figure out. There are some solutions like universal basic income (UBI), but there are also things like technological utopias or making sure that we reformulate society so that it takes care of its own, or something. It's all pretty utopian and idealistic. UBI might be the best solution but I still don't know how that would work over the long term.
Interesting.
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