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David Graeber addresses precisely this in several pieces that ultimately became the book _Bullshit Jobs_. Here is a snippet from a relevant interview[1]. "What

David Graeber addresses precisely this in several pieces that ultimately became the book _Bullshit Jobs_. Here is a snippet from a relevant interview[1]. "What happened? Well, I think part of it is a hypertrophy of this drive to validate work as a thing in itself. It used to be that Americans mostly subscribed to a rough-and-ready version of the labor theory of value. Everything we see around us that we consider beautiful, useful, or important was made that way by people who sank their physical and mental efforts into creating and maintaining it. Work is valuable insofar as it creates these things that people like and need. Since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been an enormous effort on the part of the people running this country to turn that around: to convince everyone that value really comes from the minds and visions of entrepreneurs, and that ordinary working people are just mindless robots who bring those visions to reality. But at the same time, they’ve had to validate work on some level, so they’ve simultaneously been telling us: work is a value in itself. It creates discipline, maturity, or some such, and anyone who doesn’t work most of the time at something they don’t enjoy is a bad person, lazy, dangerous, parasitical. So work is valuable whether or not it produces anything of value." [1]: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-thomas-frank-the-more-your-job-helps-others-the-less-you-get-paid https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-th...

antiterra 3y ago
This sort of Calvinistic ideal of work as an inherent virtue is what was behind the “Arbeit macht frei” slogans on archways at concentration camps.
- CP3f6kMA 3y ago
  No, I think Nazism was behind those words.
  - antiterra 3y ago
    It sounds like you might be suggesting I was conflating or blaming Protestant ideals for evil Nazi actions. Instead, I am pointing out an earlier cultural influence that persisted. In a way, there’s something far more sinister about the idea that a Nazi believed there was some sort of genuine freedom to be had, as opposed to it being outright malicious. “He seems not to have intended it as a mockery, nor even to have intended it literally, as a false promise that those who worked to exhaustion would eventually be released, but rather as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom” - historian Otto Friedrich
- gloryjulio 3y ago
  U will hear the same thing under commies, something like only labor is glorious(but of coz this only applies to the plebs but not their leaders)
- nate_meurer 3y ago
  Do you think it's virtuous for an able adult to demand that other people supply his survival and hapiness?
  - MrJohz 3y ago
    Survival, yes, and happiness to a certain extent. This is probably one of the most important realisations of the 20th Century, that by providing for the basic needs of everyone (and thereby essentially amortizing those costs over the entire population), we can produce overall better results for the country (measured in efficiency, production, happiness, etc). So by setting up a national health service in the UK, you ensure a base level of health across the whole country. By providing free education (and free higher education), you ensure that the workforce is more skilled, and able to make a wider range of choices. By providing basic housing, food, etc to those who need it, you prevent people having to opt out of society in order to survive. This sort of safety net is cheaper in the long run (it's worth watching Unlearning Economics' video "Free Stuff is Good Actually", which goes into detail on this point), but it's also fundamentally about freedom. If you have access to free education, you can make choices about your career and life that you just couldn't before. If you have free healthcare and financial support if you get sick, you can continue working for longer, but you'll also have more time to make bad choices and weird choices - the sorts of choices that are fundamental to healthy entrepreneurship. If you have a financial safety net, you can take more interesting risks, because the consequences are less severe. So yeah, I think if you believe freedom is a virtue, then I think you also need to see it as a virtue for people to be supplied with the tools that can give them freedom.
    - nate_meurer 3y ago
      You didn't answer the question. Taking for granted that insurance and social welfare safety nets are good for civilized society, it's also useful to recognize that they're not free; someone has to work to pay for them. Do you see any virtue in wanting to work so that others don't have to carry as much of your weight? Or do you only value the virtue in other people being willing to pay your way for you?
  - antiterra 3y ago

antiterra 3y ago

This sort of Calvinistic ideal of work as an inherent virtue is what was behind the “Arbeit macht frei” slogans on archways at concentration camps.

CP3f6kMA 3y ago
No, I think Nazism was behind those words.
- antiterra 3y ago
  It sounds like you might be suggesting I was conflating or blaming Protestant ideals for evil Nazi actions. Instead, I am pointing out an earlier cultural influence that persisted. In a way, there’s something far more sinister about the idea that a Nazi believed there was some sort of genuine freedom to be had, as opposed to it being outright malicious. “He seems not to have intended it as a mockery, nor even to have intended it literally, as a false promise that those who worked to exhaustion would eventually be released, but rather as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom” - historian Otto Friedrich
gloryjulio 3y ago
U will hear the same thing under commies, something like only labor is glorious(but of coz this only applies to the plebs but not their leaders)
nate_meurer 3y ago
Do you think it's virtuous for an able adult to demand that other people supply his survival and hapiness?
- MrJohz 3y ago
  Survival, yes, and happiness to a certain extent. This is probably one of the most important realisations of the 20th Century, that by providing for the basic needs of everyone (and thereby essentially amortizing those costs over the entire population), we can produce overall better results for the country (measured in efficiency, production, happiness, etc). So by setting up a national health service in the UK, you ensure a base level of health across the whole country. By providing free education (and free higher education), you ensure that the workforce is more skilled, and able to make a wider range of choices. By providing basic housing, food, etc to those who need it, you prevent people having to opt out of society in order to survive. This sort of safety net is cheaper in the long run (it's worth watching Unlearning Economics' video "Free Stuff is Good Actually", which goes into detail on this point), but it's also fundamentally about freedom. If you have access to free education, you can make choices about your career and life that you just couldn't before. If you have free healthcare and financial support if you get sick, you can continue working for longer, but you'll also have more time to make bad choices and weird choices - the sorts of choices that are fundamental to healthy entrepreneurship. If you have a financial safety net, you can take more interesting risks, because the consequences are less severe. So yeah, I think if you believe freedom is a virtue, then I think you also need to see it as a virtue for people to be supplied with the tools that can give them freedom.
  - nate_meurer 3y ago
    You didn't answer the question. Taking for granted that insurance and social welfare safety nets are good for civilized society, it's also useful to recognize that they're not free; someone has to work to pay for them. Do you see any virtue in wanting to work so that others don't have to carry as much of your weight? Or do you only value the virtue in other people being willing to pay your way for you?
- antiterra 3y ago