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Everything else. You are worth so much more than your productivity.
I'm glad I never got sucked into the protestant work ethic, since defining yourself based on your labour and the value you generate from that sounds woefully narrow-minded (this doesn't feel like quite the right word, but close enough).
It's probably helpful to at least expand 'productivity' to something beyond just what is useful for your work. Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work. Ditto spending time with friends and whatever else that doesn't have anything to do with work.
I hope we figure out what to do about disabilities, since the current status quo is inhumane in large parts of the world (and even in places with good benefits systems, getting that support isn't trivial).
"Have enough" is a static steady state. "Produce enough" now and in the future is a dynamic constraint.
The mechanism is economic surplus, to have the producers (productive people who produce needed goods and inputs to such) create more than they need. This generally requires increasing and maintaining productivity to have surplus.
Once you have a surplus the absolute maximum priority is to maintain it. Plant, machinery, systems, irrigation, fertilizer production etc etc.
The system is dynamic, surplus today is not surplus tommorow.
In my country we have a means to ditribute this excess, and it may even go to those in need, but the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus.
what i fail to understand is why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics. this is entry level material for engineering, mathematics and physics. are they not teaching it in CS?
That mindset, taken to the extreme, hides a kind of sibylline slavery, Idk if you get why.
It also makes for far less responsible and comfortable individuals.
Trying to be useful and auronomous is our obligation. Thinking others will do it and that it is automatically ok is not the best we can do to contribute.
How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.
Its everybody for themselves in US, fuck the rest, the more the better. Some 'society' it is. The more miserable and poor others are, the better you can exploit them right. How horrible the world would be if those folks stocking shelves in shops or trimming your hair would also have a shot for a decent life.
Middle class is for mediocre suckers, either your are a star (at least from financial perspective, usually the rest of life is very opposite of it) or a loser. Can't say I can respect that system, but as long as I am not part of it nor bombed by its military industrial complex to death I simply don't care. Folks can stay and be part of that system or leave, that part of freedom is still sorta there.
The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.
I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.
That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
Now you can go to Mercado Libre (the local version of Amazon) compare prices and see the reviews and buy them in 15 minutes. There are a lot of more choices and the prices are lower (or higher if you like fancy stuff). It arrives home at the afternoon.
Some software engineer has to program it. Does s/he deserve a few bucks for the time s/he saved all of us?
If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.
When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.
Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.
If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.
This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have".
Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?
If we valued time with friends, helping each other, and making sure everyone can live a vibrant life, we'd spend them on that. If we don't, they go toward status and class distinction.
At least what OP says produces no harm at worst.
Or at least, that's the logical consequence of that line of reasoning. If that's incorrect, where's the error in the reasoning?
But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.
It's productive in that it is hard and a sign of high intelligence. Don't believe me and swap it out with Candy Crush. Is playing Candy Crush productive?
This obsession about people with disabilities is weird. Yes, people with real disabilities exist. But focusing on pathologizing every day life is extremely harmful. This constant focus on "mental health" ironically worsens mental health. For instance, any mild discomfort is "anxiety". Most of these things are pretty normal range of emotions. Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015. This is obviously partly cheating the system, but it's also this harmful over-focus on "mental health"
Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/opinion/mental-health-exe...
That seems to check out with the period people started getting more addicted to social media, pandemic side-effects and increased awareness of mental health issues
I believe the amount of people dealing with crippling anxiety these days is higher than that 20% figure, and we are still under-diagnosing it
> Hard work is a good in it of itself.
Hard disagree tbh but that's more of a personal values discussion
I'm curious about this. Do you have children? Do you look at someone who does nothing hard in his life with indifference? Someone chooses to spend their life playing video games in their parent's basement. Do you think that's an equally admirable life than someone that spends his life doing hard things?
I think it's naive to assume that this phenomenon reflects an actual increase in disability rather than a cohort who has been raised to pathologize every human difference as a sign of some disability and then use those diagnoses to secure advantages in systems meant to help people with actual special needs.
There's clearly a lot of pretending going on. On the extreme end look at the numerous DID[1] "influencers". These folks are plainly pretending to have a debilitating mental disorder (which strangely never prevents them from going on podcasts and YouTube interviews) to curry fame.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder
If you enjoy it, then yes.
> Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
Hard work is good insofar as you enjoy it or it leads you to things that you do enjoy. Do those things if you enjoy them. Hard things are enjoyable too. I stopped doing most of them because I didn't enjoy them.
I highly doubt you actually believe this, but I have been wrong before.
This is something that needs to change at the cultural level but is incredibly hard to change because in order to do so you need to convince most people that the foundational understanding of their worth as a person needs to come from somewhere else.
Good vibes are nice and all, but affirming each other isn't going to actually make the world more comfortable. Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity. Playing pretend on this topic is just going to lead to people being worse off.
Also coincidentally it’s highly correlated with who your parents happen to be. But its likely spurious…
The people who have lost the lottery by both by being not born into wealth and also being destined to suffer from physical or mental disabilities, well I guess tough luck..
> the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more
Wouldn’t phrase it exactly like that but yes you are right. However it’s very hard to figure out who those people are and to measure their contributions.
It so happens that being paid a lot for your labor doesn’t automatically means that you aren’t a net negative to the society . There are loads of people working in inherently parasitical or exploitative industries who make massive amounts of money but when you add it at all up they contribute significantly less than those people living from charity. Much of the economy is still effectively zero-sum.
We already don't do this with regards to normal people. Being a farmer isn't a particularly high-paying nor high-status job. I don't mind changing this around if we get a more humane world in return, but these issues seems orthogonal to each other.
As someone who spent four years reading 'the' Classics at uni, I doubt it's very true
you comment wouldn't read quite so well if you swapped classics for posting cat tiktoks and hanging out with strangers you bump into in the street. But what makes that inferior?
No. You can play Candy Crush for all I care if that's what gets you more enjoyment. The classic were just what were on my mind when I wrote that comment.
This comment reads as snarky post-modernism.
To learn how to read and write well, then you would do just as well, if not better, to read modern authors at the top of their fields. I wouldn't exclude thrillers. Reading Chaucer in old English, to stretch the point to breaking, is not going to give you any kind of edge. Maybe it will teach you a bit of French, but again, you are better off reading modern French literature for that.
I suspect you were not forced to read the classics as I was. Much of it is stuffed with overly flowery prose and immature ideas. It's mostly tradition that keeps them alive.
There is much personal satisfaction in literature, but I would place it much closer to leisure than work.
In Praise of Idleness
https://ia801002.us.archive.org/27/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.4...
I can't speak for Protestants because the denominations vary (though I doubt they would differ greatly on this point) but for Catholics "works of mercy" is defined as caring for the vulnerable, the elderly and tending the sick. It's not meant to shame those people into guilt.
Additionally, there are many other facets such as the spiritual works of mercy such as comforting the sorrowful or counseling the doubtful.
I think you are perhaps better off putting the blame on the Capitalism hustle culture that forces people to work day and night to be "productive" than Christianity.
I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.
"I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?"
was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?
> I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.
I'm not sure what's unclear about my first comment, but I'll try to rephrase with new words.
People are people and deserve to be treated humanely as such. Productivity is but one aspect of people, and not the only one you can ascribe any value to. People are more than their productivity.
Productivity is often just used to mean 'how much money you earn', but I find it useful to expand its meaning to 'how well you're doing what you're enjoying'. If you spend time reading books because you enjoy it, that's productive. If you spend time at work earning money, that's also productive, since money is needed to, ya know, stay alive, and thus let you enjoy life, for what it's worth.
My point about disabilities is probably better expanded by the article in question, unless you have any pointed questions at that.
> also the comment
> "I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?"
> was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?
The instance I had in mind was one where I was in danger of not having food to eat at the end of a month. I wasn't in any danger for that matter. I can get free food locally if I'm desperate. I can call a friend and ask for a favour (and friends have asked me!). But getting to that point is well beyond the point where my mind goes 'oh ffs, just end it, it's not worth the bother'. If someone is at that point, they should get help, but ideally, they shouldn't get to that point in the first place. Prevention is better than a cure (although we should work on cures too!).
Measuring someone's worth by their productivity sounds incredibly misanthropic, to a cartoonish degree. It's part of the same societal illness that only considers something worthy when it has a monetary value. Looking at some responses to your post (that should be very uncontroversial) is an interesting experience in that regard.
Luckily I don't have any disabilities, but I pity those that do. I think that society has a duty to help the less fortunate. That should be an uncontroversial stance too, but oh well
Life is not about how much you make or how much you're worth. It's about being worth something to someone. It's about having meaningful relationships.
As a typical software nerd, it took me decades to get that.
Bad things have often silver lining if one is looking with right kind of eye.
I've read that German society, for example, is largely based on contracts between the family unit and the state. Sweden, as a contrast, is largely based on contracts between individuals and the state.
As an example, Germany treats a married couple as a fiscal unit, Sweden abolished joint taxation in the 70s. Swedish parental leave is allocated per individual, and is mostly non-transferable.
In a lot of ways, individualism is produced by state contract in Sweden.
e.g. The claim: Planes are a very safe way to travel.
Followed by someone jumping up to say: I know a person who was injured in a rough landing.
Note I'm not claiming either the individual or family is the atomic unit here just pointing out that your contribution doesn't contradict or even narrow the argument.
∀x(X(x)⟹(Y(x))
and then they make it their mission to find the falsifying x sub 0 example.
Individual is part of nuclear family, nuclear family is part of extended family, extended family is part of tribe, etc. When one part is in need, the others jump in to help.
You come across the term a lot in old genealogy books. For instance in "The History and Genealogy of the Prentice, Or Prentiss Family" (from 1883) contains:
> All his immediate family, himself, wives, and children, are dead.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_History_and_Genealo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family%2C_Pr...
Ancient egypt? Roman times? Medieval times? Byzantine times? Pre-colonial Philippines? Pre-colonial America?
I think it may have started in the late 1800s at the earliest. I would need a bit more evidence to be convinced that your model of individual to nuclear to extended etc has been a thing longer than a few centuries, vs the vast majority of human life experience being in nomadic hunter-gathering, villages, farmland, and walled city-states. We just had clans which were all our family. A fellow villager wasn't much different than a cousin. The individual and nuclear family, not so much a thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Iddin-Sin_to_Zinu
[2] https://mymodernmet.com/ancient-egyptians-attendance-record/
Probably you're focusing too much on the parent comment's mention of nuclear family. Even that, despite only being named a few decades ago, is likely to exist to some extent. Even in some ancient tribe or village, most people would favour their spouse (or equivalent) or child over a cousin or niece/nephew if some dispute formed. That hardly seems controversial.
in which they lived in families, extended families and tribes as the primary units. I didn't understand your argument at all.
1. That's your assumption. They could really ask out of interest. They couldn't care less if that's your main source of income.
2. In some cultures this question will never be asked.
3. If they do ask and judge; what does that matter? If you dislike such personalities, avoid them.
The first question when you meet someone is often to measure your status.
In New Zealand, different cities had different questions. Auckland: where do you live (using suburb as a proxy for status), Christchurch: what school did you go to (status used to be highly linked to your high school), Wellington: what do you do (a lot of people move to Wellington to work and it has a very wide variety of professional and government jobs).
It depends somewhat on context since often status is implied by the situation you've met someone. I've even had people straight up ask: how much do you earn.
However if I sense they're just in it for the paycheck then I try to ask about hobbies or similar.
Without stable income it might be more like 20 years. (I wish you personally a long and bountiful life!)
I'm in a similar boat. As a 3rd child in a somewhat poor family, I do not have any inheritance and actually need to help my mom financially (though it's not a burden). My wife is also from a rural area and her inheritance is barely worth 5 (hypothetical) figures. We never got or will get anything given to us for free. We are in our 40s and we completely gave up on having children (though it was not overall a financially-motivated choice) or property (this one certainly is). Live day to day while I can work, and die without regrets when I cannot anymore. Thanks to AI that happens probably sooner than later.
Or that an unproductive member of society wasn't always scorned or at least viewed negatively by those having to produce.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200715153724/https://nmaahc.si...
Some Inuit practiced senilicide up through the 20th century.
"On the other hand, when food did run short, the old and sick were looked upon as drains on the community’s resources. Sometimes they were killed – thrown into the sea, buried alive, locked out in the cold, or starved to death. Far more commonly they were simply abandoned to die. The victim might be taken out in the wilderness and left there, or the whole village might pick up and move away while the old person slept. If the villagers were unexpectedly restored to prosperity, they might go back to rescue those left behind. An abandoned person would also be welcomed back as a full member of the community if he could manage to make his way back to the village on his own. But usually he couldn’t."
https://www.straightdope.com/21343302/did-eskimos-put-their-...
(His title is sarcastic. They aren't known to have done that in particular.)
Or the good ol days when you use to go to prison for having too much debt.
Whether you agree or not - productivity is important. If there are more people that need support than those that can 'produce' the system does not work.
For all who mis-interprent the post and focus only on the anti capitalistic view of it, don't worry your body will tell you soon!
Keep an eye for the signals, gut and digestive issues, back stuck and oain, sleeping problems, light sensitivity and irritability. When this will start remember that the problem is probably your work or your working environment not you! And you should react to it!
This article should be eye opening, and support for disabilities should be always there. The abandonment of human beings is the biggest failure of societes.
claiming that is a just a result of industrial food is quite bold, even if yes thats probably cause of many many problems for humans.
It's a policy where, if you become disabled to the point where you can't work, it pays out $X per month, every year until you're 65. And if you're partly disabled and have to cut back your hours, some policies compensate you for those lost wages.
These LTD policies are expensive, but they DO give you peace of mind about this possibility.
It's kind of understandable, given that the risk is not all that low. But my guess would be that it's amplified by fraudulent claims in relation to psychological illness, burnout, etc. I asked my insurance guy to exclude those, but, apparently, it's something he can't do.
You can kind of see, how this works for a roofer: If you hurt your leg and can no longer climb a roof, the policy pays. What does it take for me to no longer be able to sit in front of a screen? Well, it would almost have to be something in the psychological realm. Sure, there's the possibility of an illness with chronic pain or cognitive impairment, but those are orders of magnitude less likely, so the psychological stuff is what completely dominates the high premia.
For anything more, this private insurance market works just fine for those who opt into it.
I've also been a social outcast for a while now. But putting my creative works out there makes me feel like I'm building the tools to appreciate myself and be appreciated by others. And knowing I can be appreciated, even if I'm not, is enough to give me a sense of self worth.
I’ve found that if I start something new, say learning to carve wood, I might compare myself to others in an unhealthy way, not improve as fast as I want to, or something else, and sorta psych myself out of it. I wonder if changing the framing from “doing” to “trying” would help
I hail from a culture that's decidedly Catholic, but at the same time shares this mindset.
To me it has more to do with farming and the culture around it.
On a farm you have to earn your keep and there's no space for "freeloaders". You work all day, every day and don't complain.
Attitudes are very different in places where there was a significant urban class in the renaissance era already.
...hmm. Not sure that this is quite state-of-the art in sociology today. Crediting a particular strand of a particular religion as the locus of a virtue that confers a clear fitness advantage in and of itself, and without recourse to any outside explanation, seems a bit off.
No, Weber is not the current state-of-the-art, but you can see how was a bit suspicious (given the evidence that Weber was working with) that the Reformation and the first meaningful economic growth possibly ever (the "Great Divergence") in history seem to have started at approximately the same time and in the same places (England, parts of the Holy Roman Empire, Holland).
We now have scholarship based on earlier evidence (it turns out that availability of the printing press massively increased the surviving sources we have about "early modern" Europe versus the earlier manuscript-driven ages, so our sources have a distinct bias toward the post-Gutenberg world -- and the printing press itself is probably a major node in the web of causes and effects that drive this transition!) and AIUI the best current guess is that the Black Death is what initially kickstarted economic growth (the "Little Divergence"), possibly by effectively ending serfdom in those places as agricultural labor become much dearer than before the plague. The Reformation, under this view of things, is more of a consequence of economic growth -- the ranks of increasingly numerous rich-and-influential commoners and burghers asserting their place in a social order defined by the Roman church -- rather than a cause of it.
You're also misreading the claim, the Protestant work ethic is not claiming any virtue on anyone's behalf. Weber's claim is making a casual connection between the development of capitalism and religious covenant. It's certainly not the prescriptive theory you're making it out to be.
There absolutely is. Labor can be fullfilling and give joy, but for most people it is just an easy tool on how to survive and hopefully have some comfort as well. Do not ever feel ashamed of your labor and even more, do not ever feel ashamed of not doing labor if you don't want to. You have one life in this universe. Make it a nice one.
It’s good that our society is doing this, and we could do better! but why do we have to characterize this existing herculean effort as “fundamentally hostile to bodies that cannot produce consistently”
POSIWID and its purpose is not providing efficient and effective healthcare.
Are you saying we're providing those things instead of food? Or that if we provided food we wouldn't need to provide those things?
If so, that's patently false. A lot more than food is needed to give someone a better standard of living.
That providing these things is something we are doing, that is good, and that is hard work actually.
I absolutely agree. We spend $30K/year per person (not per household, per person!) under the poverty line, and that's only on HUD, Medicaid, and Food Stamps. These resources should be lavished on those who actually need them. The tricky part is dealing with the perverse incentives which come with doing right by the disabled. The obscene abuse of military disability benefits is a case in point.
For the longest time whenever I'd meet someone at a party I would ask "so, what do you spend your time on?" because I specifically didn't want to box them into asking how they make money. I wanted to hear about their passions or hobbies or even the mundane tasks.
Instead, pretty much everyone told me about their jobs.
I prefer "what do you like to do", personally
My reading of this is that the threshhold for the USA government to withdraw financial (and other?) support for disabled people is too low, is that right?
This isn’t an argument to remove support—it’s an argument to remove binary thresholds with smooth ramps to incentivize people to work.
In general, step functions (earn 200 get benefits, 201 no benefits) are really really bad from a public policy perspective. If you want to get people out of these dependency traps then you need to taper them more effectively.
Even tapering them is problematic as you end up with astronomically high effective marginal tax rates, but it's better than a hard cut off.
Not that that's like ... a policy slam-dunk or anything. Even putting aside the massive hurdle of getting UBI enacted into law, you'd still have to cope with sources of unreported income, asset/gift valuation, and so on. But that second category are, at least, tractable problems as evidenced by most countries' tax codes having contingencies to deal with them.
When you suddenly become unable to "give anything" to others and become the one who must be given to, you feel a disconcerting sense of loss and powerlessness.
I don't think it really has anything to do with capitalism.
In the US, these two ideas seem conflated enough that they are often essentially conveyed as a single message: if you can't work, you're dragging everyone else down. That leads to the internalized ableism with its guilt and shame. It also leads to peer judgement and the fear of same.
We miss that much of the time, and it causes all manner of suffering.
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Bedridden and suffering from a neurological disorder, the author recounts the profound effect on her life caused by a gift of a snail in a potted plant and shares the lessons learned from her new companion about her the meaning of her life and the life of the small creature.
At the end of the day, I just want to be around people who care, having a good time together. Nothing seems worth doing if it doesn't eventually get you that.
I've always seen my "excess productivity" as something to spend building a society where people actually commune together, and where we have each other's backs.
I don't want to walk through a city and see people suffering or living on the street. I never assumed the solution was to hide them so productive people don't have to look at them. I assumed it was to support people well enough that we don't have this problem.
You never know when you'll be the next one to have bad luck.
As another commenter has pointed out, the surest ally in this case is family. Not all families are tight, but families are largely the ones who will take care of the indigent in a compassionate, long-term way.
The productivity topic is interesting. From my view, it really is _people_ that require you to be useful. Different social or political systems can be better or worse about this, but all of them are sort of playing with the same base human behavior.
Try being the one who constantly needs help from your friend. That friend will leave eventually. And they'll leave in an emotional sense. They'll sort of think less of you, or be a bit disgusted.
Try getting a woman to be sexually attracted to you if you constantly need her help or support. Outside of a few interesting fetishists, you're out of luck.
You don't even need to imagine the workplace scenario -- you already know how that works.
But picture a pre-industrial, barter economy. How well would you do when you're not able to contribute? There is history of people caring for the old, infirm, and indigent ... but remember that when you go that far back you're talking about kin-groups. You're taking care of your grandfather, or your great uncle. Not some random guy you happened upon.
I'm just not convinced. If there's not a market for your art, yes you will not be able to sell it and make a living. But, in other systems:
- Your art disagrees with the soviet government, so you are sent to a torture / labor camp to work until you die.
- The soviet government does not care about your art, but you're still in the soviet union and everyone is poor so no one can pay for your art anyhow.
- It's the 1600s Europe, and you're only sort-of in a capitalist society given modern definitions, but the Church doesn't like your writing so you've been locked up.
- Your are a subsistence farmer, and have absolutely no chance of creating art whatsoever given how busy and poor you are.
- You're a subsistence farmer, and somehow you manage to make art, but the only people you have access to are the ~2,000 people in your immediate vicinity, and none of them have any money to pay for your art to support you, and they are not willing to trade a chicken for a song.
vs.
- You have the most niche art you can imagine, (eg: Dark Souls analysis, or Harry Potter fanfiction where Snape gets pregnant and is constantly embarrassed by it) but due to (lousy, imperfect) platforms such as Patreon and the internet you can get enough patronage to support yourself, even if it's just barely.
I'm just not convinced that artists are doing worse now (in terms of per-capita artists) than other times in history, or under other systems.
(I think about the "worst system, except for all the other systems" quote often)
Socialism is not necessarily cuddly. "To each according to his contribution" is the one sentence description of it after all. I want socialism, because it's "to each according to his contribution" but "to each according to his contribution" isn't obviously this nice cuddly we-take-care-of-everybody type thing.
I'd call the New Deal an attempt to bring discipline to go from capitalism to free markets, to control excesses, prevent monopolies and otherwise preventing people from locking down the economy so that there can be competition, and that's a goal compatible with socialism, because it does bring us closer to "to each according to his contribution" but it isn't an attempt at creating socialism, but of breaking capitalism down to create a market economy with free markets (capitalism is not a market economy, capitalism is the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others, so capitalism and a market economy with free markets are actually things that are extremely incompatible).
"Capatalism" means something different in the USA than it does in say France. In the USA, any attempt to keep check of or reign in capatalism is seen as socialism, and governemnt overreach. In France it's seen as common sense, though they would still say they practice "capatalism". Similarly, taking care of people that can't take care of themselves is obvious in France, but seen as nearing socialism in the USA.
It's important to note, because when people go for things like "democratic socialism", they may not be against what they think they're against.
The author of this post apparently lives in Porto.
I guess this is the basis of my critique: the author seems to be writing as though capitalism is robbing him of some ideal that would otherwise exist: invoking the so-called "Protestant work ethic" to describe a system that took over the world and made us all worse off.
That doesn't feel right to me because I don't think previous economic systems did better at protecting the vulnerable. (But I'm not sure, that's why I framed my comment the way I did!)
Most replies to me are framed more as either "do what Europe does" (but the author lives in Europe!) or "we haven't gotten there yet" - which...sure! We shouldn't accept the status quo. But that's a different argument.
I find this to very much be an American thing. In (Continental) Europe you don't get asked this until later (if at all). It doesn't define you like it does in the US.
People keep mindlessly saying this but I have never seen evidence for it. Before money was ever invented the idea was already there that if you're healthy you can sustain yourself. All 'capitalism' did was saying "and most people nowadays perform abstract services in trade for an abstraction of a promise of a pinky swear saying "if you trade this pinky swear to me you'll get some food".
It's not 'economic systems that are fundamentally hostile to bodies that cannot produce consistently', it's a fundamental reality of life. Either you are capable of getting enough food for you and your family, either directly by farming, gathering or hunting, or you are not.
Yes, you need food. Guess what, we have plenty of food. But the system for allocating food says this guy doesn't get any because he's disabled.
We have plenty of food because of capitalism (particularly the fact that we have plenty of incredibly cheap food grown by a tiny fraction of our population).
I'm not saying it's an ought situation or even an is situation; it's that I disagree with his diagnosis of what causes it.
I've worked 96-hour weeks for six months at a time. Even working nonstop, I can't save any money. I don't have enough to buy a house, and I'm exhausted. I've done so many different kinds of work, but no matter how much I work, the money just doesn't accumulate. It's not that I haven't tried.
Good jobs are only in big cities, and to live in a big city, you have to pay rent. If I pay rent, my salary doesn't accumulate. I can't even think about getting married.
I really gave it my all, but I don't know anymore. Why is my life like this? By the time I paid off my student loans, I was already in my mid-30s, and I still can't even think about marriage.
I just work and try hard, but the money doesn't add up. It feels like my life has gone wrong. I used to laugh at people who gambled or traded coins, but now I feel like a fool for working so diligently
Worth and productivity are synonyms in direction, wouldn't a better phrase not track either? It's difficult to answer anything other than naught without some mental gymnastics because the words themselves are implicit.
How about happiness? That is one human quality that is not directly tied to any of worth, value or productivity.
It is so much beneath him to ask for help from others, he’d rather change the world so that he doesn’t have to ask — instead of expressing some humility.
I also have a lot of pride in myself, and I feel deeply for the author. However it looks to me that he’a banging on the wrong door, and instead of waiting for all the people in the world to change a lot, he could change himself a little.
At any rate, judging by the author's 4.3k subscribers, he is doing fine. Whether you react with a heart emoji or revulsion, broadcasting sob stories into the internet is productivity -- in the attention economy, something that only exists in rich, capitalist societies.
It’s always there in the subtext of a lot of alt-med and the sort of pure-eating wellness stuff, that if it doesn’t work then you’re just not trying hard enough and your mindset is wrong. Still got cancer? Well clearly you didn’t juice, enema and positive-think enough! That’s the flipside of every “you can heal yourself!” assertion.
I feel very sorry for this person, as much as I aspire to be out of work one day, I aspire to be out of work on my terms and with enough financial resource to support myself, and I fully expect to still be able to support myself. This is very different from having to face the fact you can’t, and adjust to that fact and then struggle like hell just to survive on barely adequate provision.
Tech people in particular seem to see themselves (ourselves…) as capable, independent and entirely autonomous beings. Being forced to reframe your whole existence must be very tough.
Also what's all this about the body that never breaks. We have insurance schemes because there is uncertainty about the human body. What are annuities? Contract law allows for exemptions for acts of god like if a hurricane hits you.
Listen, this person's life sucks. And it's important that society not abandon them. But that doesn't mean they can talk nonsense. This kind of suffering theology where we believe someone whose life is hard has access to some deep truth has no basis in reality. In fact, I'd argue that their thought is far more likely to be disordered.
The benefits cliff is a real problem (and the UK seems intent on making it worse). But "ooo nasty capitalism doesn't force people to pay for art"... Come on. And disabled people have it better than at any time in history. The UK is bankrupting itself to pay for PiPs and other benefits (and pensions unfortunately).
But rhe fact they keep going on about capitalism demonstrates their main problem. In reality we don't live in capitalism or neoliberalism, but a space where government legislation and taxation determines most things, and if you think more of the same is going to magically solve things, you've been sold a pup. It's hard to start a business (capitalism) mainly because of government economic control.
At best we have a situation where the top companies and government have converged with one another and co-operate whether through the World Economic Forum or otherwise.
The digital ID thing we see just now is driven by governments worldwide.
But anyway, you are clearly one of the people I'm describing.. unfortunately, it is unsustainable system both from an economical and environmental perspectives. And I won't argue about mental health, which you would probably label as lazy commie or something.
Are you excited to go to Mars? like heaven but for capitalist?
The reality of it is that the reason why it hurts is you're essentially being kept alive artificially. As at any other time period you'd have just starved to death or died to freezing a winter or two later, putting an end to the misery.
Can you still have fun moments and learn to live your life as a glorified leech? Sure, a lot of people do so, and our society has decided that's for the best.
And in case you or someone else has an issue with the term leech here I'm going to be extra clear: you need to face reality to get over this pain. Accept what you have been forced to become. Then you can make an effort to life with your lot in life, and potentially find acceptance to the cards you've been dealt.
Probably wasn't your fault and almost certainly unfair, but that's just how life is
I would, however, encourage the author that maybe the answer to their question at the end of the article lies in the very world view they rejected half-way through: Christianity. Yes, in the Christian scheme of things, hard work is a virtue and laziness a vice. But to see this as the direct root of ableist capitalism is a severe twisting of the actual Christian teaching.
On the contrary, the Bible simply resounds with two truths, throughout the Old and New Testament:
1) We are to care for those who cannot care for themselves. We have a God-given duty to provide for our family members, community members, and fellow citizens who (for whatever reason) are dependent on our help.
2) Our worth as humans does not depend on who we are, what we can do, how much we own, or any other property residing in ourselves (which may change at any moment). Our worth comes directly from the fact that we are created and loved by an unchanging God. We have worth because we are valuable to the One who made us!
"There were no needy ones among them, because those who owned lands or houses would sell their property, bring the proceeds from the sales, and lay them at the apostles’ feet for distribution to anyone as he had need." Acts 4:34-35
The Catholic Church has an ancient tradition asserting the inherent dignity of the human person (imago Dei), regardless of circumstance, including the very recent Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) subtitled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.
In our supposedly rational age we've discarded structures which encoded timeless wisdom because we didn't recognize the value. We thought we'd outgrown it, but it turns out that now is when we need it the most.
This isn’t to say that the purpose of Christianity is to fix these social problems, but it’s easy to forget how central generosity and compassion are to the Christian message. “Money Cult” by Chris Lehmann is a good exploration of how American Christianity corrupts these truths.