"Free" Markets - The Modern Evolution Of (Wage) Slavery & How "Office Space" Can Help

"The idea of the salary is nothing more than the evolution of slavery. Historians won't see much of a difference considering that today most people work without making enough for rent and food." - @kyriacos , here

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Take a look at that curve. Most of us are sitting in that meaty, middle range - right around 100. About 95% of us are between 70 and 130. We want to grow up, socialize, have a family, and generally speaking be left alone to pursue our own endeavors that will typically not extend in dramatic fashion to the rest of humanity.

However, there is a small group at the very top of this curve, that top .1%, who find themselves both gifted and obsessed with certain particulars of the universe. Einstein, Edison/Tesla (depending on your team), Da Vinci, Galileo - these type of men may only account for one in ten-thousand in terms of ability, but their lives result in them achieving far more of a breakthrough for humanity than any ten-thousand of us combined!

I knew I'd get to use David Bowie as Tesla again.

The truth is, humanity is pulled forward by the very top tail of our IQ curve. But there are also those at the top with less benign interests. They will always try to restrict the forward progress of humanity for their own benefit, which will usually entail the retention of either physical/state or financial power.

Sultan Bayezid II, 8th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, was just such a man. Fearing the spread of the Printing Press, the internet of his day, would weaken his rule, he outlawed all printing on pain of death. You wouldn't want your slaves, ahem, citizens to be too educated, would you?

The esteemed Sultan, oddly enough, was a noted pro-semite. I wouldn't think about it too hard.

The "psuedo-free" market of today is the new, more benign form of slavery. Attempts to restrict the internet and any new creation within grasp, such as cryptocurrency, are today's attack on the printing press.

The truth seems to be that a large amount of humanity generally does not want to contribute more than the bare minimum required for them to survive at what they consider an acceptable Quality of Life. This isn't meant to be a judgment, survival is hard, and our systems our built around this reality in a way that encourages cooperation in a positive-sum game.

However, it took us a lot of enlightenment to encourage systems, at least in the West, that generally encourage cooperation on a social level even when all actors act 100% in their own interest. Previous human social systems throughout history generally solved this issue with (often arbitrary) slavery. That was only necessary until the widespread creation and acceptance of completely un-backed fiat currencies in the 1900s.

"Yeah, I was up to some other stuff while I was here, too."

The official un-backing of the US Dollar by President Nixon in 1971 would, technically speaking, mark the exact point that modern America became a plantation state.

de Gaulle, we didn't realize you wanted the account that could also withdraw...

Now, an international counterfeit ring handles the social function that global slavery used to be responsible for. The financial masters click a button, and they create 10000-years-worth of your salary in one second. This is then doled out to get 10000 of us to make us subservient for another year.

All checks on this system are controlled. Inflation is ruthlessly under-reported and hedonically adjusted - a ludicrous undertaking which claims that your $1000 TV costs half as much as your $500 TV if it's "4 times better". Better can mean it has one more USB slot, or 40 more pixels of HD you never see. Guess who defines better?

When this creates enough popular anger to result in legitimate change, new entitlements are created to "perpetually accommodate/enslave" the votes of generally vulnerable demographics. When the victim Olympics are over and there are no more demographics who can be bought, your borders and immigration systems will be compromised and new victim demographics will be shipped in, and you can be sure that they will be used to the kind of abuse that results in much of the world living on under US$40 per day. They will be bought for pennies if they see pennies as dollars.

"The best slave is the one who thinks he is free." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When you put yourself in the mindset of being able to create infinite currency (not wealth) at the press of a button, you'll be thinking like a national government for the first time. Do you see now why no entitlement or wealth transfer will ever be reversed or removed, if the party in power relies on the political clout of the group in question? Cost is a literal non-issue, at least when you have the reserve currency, and as long as you control inflation figures, cost is mitigated unfairly in your favor. Even in a non-reserve currency that is backed or restricted in issue, they're still spending money that isn't theirs, and will therefore apply wholly different standards to what acceptable use for it will be.

Corporations are playing a different variant of the same game. Every modern corporation employs organizational psychology to shame and embarrass you into a "work ethic" that none of the executives will ever have. There is literally a master's degree in psychology designed to focus solely on this task - Organizational Psychology. I should know, I have taken the track. Hard work is for the salary man, not the boss. The CEO at my last company was earning 2300 times the salary of entry-level management. Suffice it to say, an objective analysis of the company's performance would not have borne out his extreme value. At that level, failure pays almost as well as success.

You will be hard-pressured into working unpaid overtime, nights and weekends, staying through lunch, skipping or shortening breaks, etc. You will be soft-pressured into being ashamed to ask for your legitimate breaks and sick days. You'll constantly be asked for things that are unreasonable, but you will risk appearing not to be a team player if you object. Your health and life quality will suffer as you work sick. You may lose personal, family, or romantic relationships as you are literally turned into a "more-wretched-than-I-remembered" person. You will start to have a form of corporate-Stockholm-syndrome, where you will actually compare how many hours you worked with your friends (with more being better) as if you are competing in some kind of Corporate-Slave-Olympics.

You will not become an executive based on merit. Luck, sometimes. Personality, probably more effective than merit. But not work ethic and reliability. Those will be abused to the maximum amount that Human Resources thinks it can without having you quit.

And Sunday...all so that this guy's stock can go up a quarter of a point.

Stay tuned to my feed, where I intend to cover what I consider the best game-theory responses to this reality for most people: ethical corporate underachievement. Let's face it, some of us have careers (things we would do for less or no pay), but most of us have jobs (thing we would immediately quit for no pay). It's critical to develop the skills that allow you to stand up for your boundaries in the work place. And sometimes, you have to recognize when someone else has the secret of life for you:

"You know Bob, that'll only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."

Perhaps that wasn't just the silly throwaway line it seemed in 1999.

Copyright "The Prestige", "Office Space.; Image Source: Wikipedia