The World Owes You A Living

 

Wise Old Men

 

 

 

I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

…The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

Bertrand Russell
In Praise Of Idleness

The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another's labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.

 

Leo Tolstoy

 

 

click to hear James Hillman


 


How did they get conned into thinking that they're lucky to have that job, at six or seven dollars an hour, and that their women have to go off and work? I'm talking about men to start with, and that the women have to go off and work, and that the children have to go God knows where -- and so on and so forth. Where did the idea come from that you're "lucky" to have a job? A job without benefits, a job without pension, a job without health care, a job without any permanence whatsoever.

James Hillman

 

Within the technological ensemble, mechanized work in which automatic and semi-automatic reactions fill the larger part (if not the whole) of labor time remains, as a life-long occupation, exhausting, stupefying, inhuman slavery.

 


Herbert Marcuse

The danger to liberty lies in the subordination of belief to the needs of the industrial system.

 

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Greek word ponos, or "toil" was a term used by Hippocrates, that father of medicine, to describe the fight of the body in disease.

 

Marshall McLuhan
click to hear Noam Chomsky

 

Why should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure?

 

Noam Chomsky

If the misery of our poor be determined not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

 

Charles Darwin

"Most

"Work" in this age is stupid, monotonous, brain-rotting, irritating, usually pointless and basically consists of the agonizing process of being slowly bored to death over a period of about 40 to 45 years of drudgery; Marx was quite right in calling it "wage slavery." Most people know this, but are afraid to admit it, because to dislike "work" is regarded as a symptom of Communism or some other dreadful mental illness.


Robert Anton Wilson

In actual fact the work ethic has become obsolete. It is no longer true that producing more means working more, or that producing more will lead to a better way of life.
The connection between more and better has been broken; our needs for many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet- unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact.


Andre Gorz

Man has created such sources of mechanical energy that he has freed himself from the task of putting all his human energy into work in order to produce the material conditions for living. He could spend considerable part of his energy on the task of living itself.

 

Eric Fromm

What is needed, surely, is a change of attitude. One must return to the Aristotelian definition of leisure as the freedom from the necessity of labour, by which he meant the necessity of being occupied at any task which you had to perform but didn't want to. Leisure has nothing to do with time; it is a state; and the idea of "using" time is foreign to the idea of leisure.

We come back, then, to freedom. Leisure equals freedom. A society that truly values freedom must also truly value leisure. Leisure also connotes cultural and intellectual activity as well as community service. (In Greek times almost everybody played the flute or the lyre.) John Farina argues that the really free men of our time are the educated men of leisure: the Vincent Masseys, the Winston Churchills, the John Kennedys. They are free because they are free to make a choice, unfettered by want, ignorance, or the narrow prison of the "job."

Is it too much to expect that in the New Democracy of the future this kind of free choice will be available to all?

Pierre Berton,
The Smug Minority, p. 77

 

 

 


click for buried berton treasure

 

If men were not disposed to continue selling their living activity, the impotence of Capital would be revealed; Capital would cease to exist; its last remaining potency would be the power to remind people of a bypassed form of everyday life characterized by daily universal prostitution.

 

George Woodcock

 

 

 

 

All around me men are working;
but I am stubborn, and take no part.
The difference is this:
I prize the breasts of the Mother.

Lao Tzu

 

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