What a concept earning a living is. They say nobody in this world is owed anything, but that everybody mandatorily and automatically owes their obedience to authority.
Now, how does that work exactly?
How is authority owed allegiance on the one hand, but everybody else owed nothing by comparison?
Sure, we can say the authorities have a military and police which is how they enforce everybody’s defacto allegiance to it.
That is the reality of the state’s authority not some fake ridiculous phoney social contract.
So, we essentially live in a world where the individual is owed nothing, but the state by comparison owed everything plus our lives.
Notice the complete absence of morals and ethics in all of that.
No, morals and ethics are just false appearances and impressions to make the entire system more manageable. They don’t actually symbolize anything that is actually real, but instead a fantasy warped out of denial. The so called moral high ground of an authority is just a way of creating its own immunity on everybody else to perpetuate its own acts. They are systems of make believe so that the power in control can appear to be benevolent and a saviour while giving those it holds captive the illusion that they’re being taken care of.
Just, what exactly is earning a living? Appeasement and obedience to the state?
The whole post said it all, but i’ll attempt an argument; firstly, earning a living is what we would have to do if separated from society, or if society had no state.
Take the example of feudal Japan [16thC] ~ their money was ‘koku’ and that related directly to rice [and means rice], a samurai lord then takes control of that and according to the amount of rice, he can employ so many workers and service providers. Communism/socialism is kind of based on the fact that it is the farmers and miners who create the wealth base ~ consider how many people are ‘workers’ i.e. doing jobs that aren’t producing that kind of base wealth!
However, nowadays those farmers and miners are mechanised, and so some workers are part of the base wealth. They need coordination [bosses, managers] and the financial institutions to finance all of that. Many jobs though do very little or nothing to add to that base wealth.
All in all I think we owe something to the state for holding it all together, but it owes us too because since prehistoric times they have taken away our lands [means to produce rice]. - so none of it should be a slavery as nothing is absolute.
I used to have a job and I would work hard and ask for more money, and they would tell me that I wasn’t worth more money, or that the position wasn’t worth more momey, or whatever. Then I quit working altogether, and now I have way more money than I would have ever thought. But if I want to go and buy a car, I can get in trouble if I pay for it all at once. If I don’t wanna pay all at once to avoid trouble, then I’ve gotta have “proof of income”, which is essentially like slave papers. They shouldn’t give a shit where I get the money from. I think it’s just bad business on their part. So now I’m working on getting some proof of income, or some fake slave papers. Then I can go and buy the car that I’ve already earned. I guess if I went to work in a restaurant and gave a corporation 40 hours of my week, then after I got stiffed by all the assholes eating I could just lie and say I made big tips, then pay taxes on em, then yeah…no…fuck all that noise.
As I said in another thread Smears, it’s very difficult to be a modern criminal, rebel, bandit, or outlaw in today’s era of bureaucratic technological surveillance big brother. Think you have problems now? Just wait until they try to usher in electronic currency with a super electrical control grid.
Prior to the industrial era the working class owned their own labor where they could negotiate its terms. They also owned their own areas of production that was passed on through many family generations.They owned their own instruments which they mass produced themselves.
The industrial revolution changed all of that with the rise of the machines. Suddenly only a few had access to the machinery, instruments, and areas of production. One couldn’t mass produce one’s own instruments either as dependence on others to create them for you became known.
What the technological industrial revolution did was essentially reduce all laborers to plantation slaves. One can become a specialist to break the cruel cycle if lucky however one would still be dependent on a corporation for a living as the means of production would still be corporately controlled.
Where i live the goverment owes its citizens life long unemployment fees. In the exceptional cases that you manage to get kicked from that system, there is still the welfare-system to fall back on, which you can’t get kicked from. The only way to avoid getting money from the goverment, is to outright refuse it or to disappear or something… here nobody HAS to earn his living if he doesn’t want to.
This is why I despise it when people have this perception of “people in general” as fundamentally lazy creatures who would do and produce nothing if given half the chance.
Earning a living is easy to understand for the self-sufficient. No work, no living. You have to earn your living, which as Amorphos brought up, is literally harvesting (which is where the word “earn” comes from) your living. You reap what you sow.
Put together a small team, and the workload becomes easier: division of labour. Inject some modern technology and knowledge about working methods, and the association between “earning” with “effort” is worn away, and given the sheer size of the world team (economy) that gave rise to these technologies and our collective knowledge, there’s basically zero necessary correlation between “earning” and “effort” at all.
Except there is.
But it’s not the government that’s forcing anyone to work, that’s stupid.
We would work and produce and “do things” anyway, sure, but not in the way most people do. People wouldn’t work in roles they didn’t like, or didn’t condone if they were free to do as they chose. There’s something else making them to this en masse.
… it’s the market. If people fundamentally don’t need to work hard to literally earn their living anymore, the tendency would be for people to barely need to try.
But we have a system that runs directly counter to this natural tendency. One that rewards certain people with greater material choice if they can get away with distorting humanity in one way (slavery to the wage), into something that can be passed off as beneficial to humanity in another way (rampant consumerism).
New necessities are fabricated and pushed to take the place of real ones, keeping the need to “earn” your living as high as ever.
Apparently people have collectively submitted to our own market dictation that we must lead double lives - slaves by working day so that we may be faux-pampered brats in our spare time. Apparently all in the name of tricking ourselves back into feeling the same necessity that we already afforded ourselves a break from.
And obviously not in equal measure from person to person…
It is plausible [near to definite] that in the future machines will do all the grunt work, then we wont need so many people on the planet and the 'need to work will be rubbed out. That doesn’t mean govt’s will allow that to occur, we will probably just end up paying for things that are long past their cost [should be free]. Eventually and with environmental issues at their heels, perhaps we will finally end up with a free society.
Ha.
That possibility has been round the corner for centuries now. The whole point of my post was to explain why it never happened.
The economic system we’ve had for the last 200 years simply won’t allow it, nor will it ever - even though it has seen us becoming more than capable of achieving it.
Why does everyone keep saying it’s the government’s fault?!
Seriously, is the government forcing us into having to work this hard to “earn a living” when there’s not actually any need anymore?
No.
It’s not the government that drives this, it’s the open market. People have no choice but to buy into market pressures to negotiate our way into the world of “entitlement” to private property… the “prices” of which are dictated by the market.
The current open market economic system is what forces us into living this ridiculous fiction of “needing” to earn a living when there would be absolutely no necessity under a better economic system.
In our ancient past one would earn a living by providing for themselves and their own immediate survival. In today’s world earning a living involves working for others just to exist at all. Major difference Silhouette.
Moving along in conversation.
The concept of earn is a interesting one because traveling to root or crux of it we see that it rests upon a moral evaluation of the right and proper way to attain possessions. Therefore, the division of labor rests upon moral evaluations.
People are owed something because they provide a product or service. The authorities provide us a product or service (see Hobbes, see Locke, see lots of philosophers for details). If YOU provide a product or service, then somebody owes you something too. Earning a living just means providing a product or service such that people owe you something, and when they pay what they owe, you use that payment to provide for yourself more than you could have on your own.
I dunno where you got the idea that the individual is owed nothing. That’s only true if you don’t do anything for anybody else.
I don’t think it’s natural law at all. The OP was complaining that authority is owed something, but the individual isn’t. I was just pointing out that individuals are owed something in the same way, and to the same extent, and for the same reasons, as the State, so the inconsistency he imagines isn’t there. The nuance of who/how much/why is kind of another thing.
I think the easiest and closest-to-universal way to decide what is owed is to base it on what is agreed to. If I agree to pay you X for Y, and you give me Y, I owe you X. That gets around the idea of relative value pretty well by relying on honesty/expectation instead.
An exaggerated position, if representative of the OP.
Whether or not Ty is a practitioner of hyperbole, I agree with what he’s trying to get at - which you touch on here:
If honesty/expectation can be relied upon, then I agree that relying upon it gets around the problem of deciding the criteria on what to base the trade of unlike products and services, whilst simultaneously supporting liberal morality. This sentence is consistent from first to last if individuals choose honesty and stick to expectation when trusted with liberal morals.
But they don’t.
Herein lies the problem. People can lie, but more importantly they can deceive. And they can take advantage of situations adverse for some. A combination of deception and exploitation of this kind (taking advantage) results in “consent” not actually being consentual - along with the liberal morality being shattered. This happens. Thus, individuals (without authority) get screwed and end up “owing” authorities more than authorities “owe” them. I’m relieved you do not present the balance as natural law as it isn’t.
Oh, please, everybody who is born into civilization is born straight into perpetual captivity Uccisore. You either are deemed capable of producing a product and service they need or they enslave you to rent out your miserable lot in life. Don’t bullshit me. The social contract is bullshit. It’s more like a social ultimatum enforced by gun point.
Silhouette, I don’t take kindly to your hyperbole comment. Believe it or not, I’m very well capable of seriousness at times of my choosing in a given conversation. Yes, often enough I joke around as the joker mocking this despicable world, but there are times where I try to make sense of it just like everybody else.
Yeah, and protecting us from that fact to some degree is one of the services the State provides, and the reason why we owe them something. Not everything, but something. That the State itself can easily become a perpetrator of the problem and not a solution is why limiting the State's power as much as possible is good too.