Arbeit Macht Frei

Why does no one question the "work ethic"?

Soviets, Nazis, and all manner of Americans absolutely worship work. You guys realize that’s a scam right? Quit vilifying “lazy.” It’s the economic version of calling conscientious objectors weak. If I can’t refuse, then I’m being forced. And there’s a word for forced labor. See title for a clue.

Reminder: We’re being forced to share 3% of the economic pie because a small number of billionaires and banking dynasties haven’t actually labored in generations.

And don’t blame nature, this one is on us. Hunter gatherers worked way less than us. Granted, the ideal state requires climbing the tech ladder, so thankfully at least some of the work we’ve already done hasn’t been wasted. But we could have achieved some functional parity with this in the real work very quickly as we climbed had we not poured all our effort into making a tiny sliver of a percent of the population the literal equivalent of gold hoarding dragons.

The only thing we should work for is construction of a benevolent/voluntary version of the Matrix. One where the vast majority of sentient life lives in a completely lucid dream state, freed from the hedonic suffering treadmill. Where automation and extremophile “realists” (The future equivalent of the Amish I guess?) guard the server. Like my head canon for Dyson Sphere Project.

And prior to that it’s easy to go nuclear AI robots, and before that some version of progressive tax funded basic income. Missed opportunities.

This really is the only way to square human nature with peace for all. This is the only way baseline humans can ever have a future without real war. Otherwise we’ll just keep handing power to monsters and killing each other until the protons decay.