Inculcating a culture of work ethic into the majority of the population produces a surplus that may then be extracted and utilized by a specific class of people

Inculcating a culture of work ethic into the majority of the population produces a surplus that may then be extracted and utilized by a specific class of people who do not wish to work hard. Arbeit macht frei. As far as I am aware, every human culture has always demanded more work than strictly necessary from the working class in order to support a relatively small proportion of non-workers or light workers. At the band/tribe level, that is generally very young children and very old elders. Larger organization units tended to reserve some of the light work and non-work for administrators and enforcers. For a while, we have had concepts such as "education" and "retirement" that take the place of child labor and dying at your workstation, made possible by improvements in productivity in the working class. So for those whose hands never acquired a callus, it has long been necessary that other people do harder work. Indeed, we even had more odious lies, such as "you must work hard, because you are my property," or "work hard, or you will be removed, and your family will starve." Sometimes, the promise of promotion was not a lie. The very best of the hard workers were elevated to encourage the others, but never quite far enough that they might question what is really done with all that hard work. We have robots and power generators now. None of us can work harder, faster, or more cheaply than a fully automated factory running on raw materials and electricity. The former economic necessities are no longer required. But no one is prepared to come out and say "no one really needs to work hard any more, and you will only be able to reach the top by owning the most productive capital" because there are so many people out there who have been toeing that line their whole lives, working hard without reaching even a local maximum. The economy isn't entirely automated--not yet--and we still collectively need some people to work. No one wants to be the one chump in ten that has to bust their ass every day while everyone else just lies around goofing off. So we have the "bullshit job" phenomenon, to distribute and obfuscate who is doing all the actual work, making the other 9 put up the appearance of work for the sake of the one still actually doing the critical labor, or dividing up the work so that 10 people each do 10% of a real job and 90% flimflammery. What we should be telling the kids is "own something now, before it is too late."