"Lazy Slob"

[Kwing]

I read a really excellent quote from Buckminster Fuller. I wouldn't exactly say it got me thinking, because I had already been pondering this, but he says it better than I could have:

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

I took a look at a graph (pictured below) and it made me realize something else. The lack of paid maternity leave is a problem, but as I began to compare these things I realized it was a symptom of a bigger problem. People need paid leave because they depend on income. In other words, they aren't paid enough in the first place in order to take leave, whether this is for leisure, family business, etc. Most people are only a paycheck or two away from homelessness, meaning that the horrors of poverty slowly advance on all of us like some great looming shadow.

Weirdly enough, there's a huge moral judgment that's passed on anyone that isn't obsessed with their work, as if everything has to be earned and downtime should be associated with guilt or shame. "Why can't you work hard like the rest of us? I struggle too, but I'm too busy doing something about it to complain!" Congratulations, your just-world hypothesis is telling you to feel good about your miserable living situation. I hope you feel proud of your pathetically low income which you insist is anything but, and I'm sure you'll feel better if you keep chastising anyone unfortunate enough to have less than you do.

You can't use your own struggles to minimize someone else's, even if you know the magnitude of your own problems is greater. It's all too easy to blame someone that can't defend themselves, but taking that attitude is a dead end. The poor have nothing to give you. You can take away their food stamps and welfare if you want, but once that money goes back to the people that 'really deserved it' you'll realize what a waste of time it was to take it in the first place.