this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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If you think about the brutality of nature, which we are mostly isolated from, then yeah, organisms in general do have to earn their right to life through overcoming and eating other organisms.
Which was the point of civilization. To isolate us from that hell.
Even in a civilization someone has to produce food so you'll survive. Civilization doesn't mean no one has to work.
If you do no work but because of civilization you still have food to eat, it means someone else is working to earn your living for you.
This bizarre meme implies work has no value, and was likely made by a wealthy university socialist that had everything paid for by their parents so doesn't understand the value of work.
This meme does not state no one needs to work. It states you don't need to earn your place among the living. You've already done so by virtue of being born. I think that is a noble goal for a society to uphold. Higher ideals are, of course, what separates us from the realm of animal urges. Once you begin to mix laws of the jungle back into society the point of our isolation from it is subverted. If we truly are the greatest Earth has to offer, surely we can figure so.
You can't eat higher ideals.
Even Marie Antoinette wasn't so disconnected from the peasants to say "let them eat higher ideals."
Someone has to work so you can survive. If you don't want to work, society will take care of you. You'll still be living, but you aren't earning it, someone else is earning it for you.
Once again, this is not saying society will take care of you and everyone will just sit on their bussies and no one will ever lift a finger. This is repealing the idea that you have to earn your stake to be considered human and alive in a world that has abstracted everything away to just getting funny paper. People will still farm and cultivate crops. There are people who want to do that now. Are you vehemently opposed to people just feeling and being accepted from birth? I for one think a society built on more welcoming foundations would see less crime and more work.
Sure there are people that want to farm. But are there people that want to want to deal with sewage? Why do you think plumbers earn more money than other trades?
I want to run a cafe instead of what I'm doing right now. I don't want to be a waiter of wash dishes or anything like that. I just want to design the menus and decide on how it's decorated. Is that the job I'll have in a socialist utopia, or will I have to do a job I don't want to do? What if there's already too many cafes, or not enough people that want to be waiters or was dishes? I won't have to do anything but I'll still be provided for?
In the end there will always be people doing jobs they don't particularly want to do. Someone's gotta unclog the sewage when the elite of the socialist society plug the pipes with the overabundance of shit they spew out.
How about capitalism? How many MBAs does the world need? Marketing consultants? Advertising cosultants? IT consultants? Consultant consultants? There are countless jobs that serve the machine and no other purpose that benefits society. Somebody will do the necessary jobs. There are more incentives than you realize. For instance, what if I want more than my UBI pays me? Plumbing has entered the chat. The only reason you defend this system so hard as the epitome is because nobody has experienced anything else but this. Its scary I know, but there are more ways than one to exist, and every system has its trade-offs. But our social contract between our governments in clearly broken, we are clearly strung along on the whims of shareholders and capital. Say what you will, but I think we can do better than "those people deserve to starve son, they have no jobs."
Who here is saying "No one should work" no one except maybe the most high on their own farts anarchist is saying that. The end goal of marxism is "From each According to their abilities to each according to their needs" their will be work, The farm will be ploughed. THe difrence is all will be provided for.
And if I were to decide that I didn't want to work according to my ability, I would still be provided for?
In no capitalist society that I know of will you be executed for not working - you have a right to life
What you don't have the right to is someone else to provide for you if you don't give anything back
That said I'm fairly sure with the amount of automation we have everyone should need to put in a whole lot less work than they do to keep society afloat
Yes you do. Lots of people are on disability benefits, unemployment, a pension, or are literal children. And those programs should be expanded to cover everyone who doesn't work, not just those who can justify their existence to a government form.
In the case of someone who can't work for one reason or another there's obviously an exception because that's not something they can help
Children do contribute to society by getting an education and having a childhood to develop into well adjusted adults who contribute later on,
Unemployment benefits presumably are for people actively searching for a job
The elderly have already contributed more than their fair share raising their children
Using the phrasing people who don't work implies including people who are able but just don't want to
There's nobody like that. You're talking about imaginary people. All human beings have a natural drive to do useful work.
What are you saying? That you wouldn't give anything back if not for the threat of homelessness and starvation? I don't need a threat to make the world a better place.
I'm sure I'd give something back but I'm also sure most of it wouldn't be of much use to anyone else, I'd be working on stuff like mods, niche tools for myself that probably 3 people on earth would find useful, and stupid ideas for fun like some streamers get to
Listen, I don't think it'd be as disasterous for anyone with a passion. The people who would be fucked and have to adjust are the ones whose only goal is get money. Imo thats not a healthy way to be a human as it usually has a price tag of everyone else. Theres constant suffering every day and most of it is in the name of profits. Shit, my boss acts like it'd murder him to get me 10k more a year so I am not below the american median when in reality the company wouldn't even count that as pocket change, I see the revenue and expenses every day. The sociopaths control and benefit from this system and you defend it. Its like a strange stockholm syndrome.
Passions don't necessary line up with something that's beneficial to society is my point.
Absolutely the distribution of wealth at the moment is far from fair and I wish we could fix that, but I still think short of everything being automated even in a utopia where we do everything perfectly as a society people still have to do jobs they don't want to because there are jobs noone wants to do that need doing
I highly doubt anyone has a passion for working in the service industry, cleaning up the messes kids make at school or collecting people's rubbish but they're jobs that need doing and people do them because they're compensated for them
"Damn, this argument I made up for OP really sucks! What's even worse is the fanfiction I made up for them, woah Nelly!"
The nice thing about the society is that we don't need to give a shit about that
Less than two steps between that and eugenics, and one step between eugenics and genocide. We’ve seen and documented that. It’s a logical but sociopathic mentality.
Conversely, when we realise that we’re stronger together and act empathetically as a society, every one of us and all of society benefits. When we care for the least of us, crime goes down and we find geniuses who improve life for us all, who would otherwise die in anonymous poverty.
Living like barbarous animals – not rising above the ‘brutality of nature’, as you said – helps sociopaths who take advantage of our better nature to enrich themselves. Indeed, if we structure our society around that, as we have done lately, our society will devolve around the lowest common denominator (people like Musk or Trump).
We can and must do better than that.
Your comment would have hit much harder as a rejection of cruelty and advocacy for kindness if you haven't thrown sociopaths under the bus. Most sociopaths are poor people, and they're all disabled.