This also relates to your thrive/survive theory. A society in extreme survive mode cannot tolerate “burdens”—it needs 100% of the populace to contribute. Infants may be a special exception for the few years until they can start contributing, but other than that if you can’t work for whatever reason you die—because if the society will have to allocate to you more utility than what you can give back, it’ll lose utility and die. This is extreme survive mode, there is no utility to spare.
As we move thriveward, we get more and more room for “burdens”. We don’t want to leave our disabled and elderly to die once they are no longer useful—we only had to do that in extreme survive mode, but now that we have some surplus we want to use it to avoid casting away people who can’t work.
This presents us with a problem—if we can support a small number of people who can’t work, it means we can also support a small number of people who don’t want to work. Whether or not it’s true, the ruling assumption to this very day is that if left unchecked enough lazy people will take up that opportunity that the few willing to work will crumble under their weight.
So we need to create mechanisms for selecting the people that will get more support than they contribute. At first it’s easy—we don’t have that much slack anyway, so we just pick the obvious people, like the elders and the visible disabled. These things are very hard to fake. But eventually we run out of that, and can afford giving slack to less and less obvious disabilities, and even to people just ran out of luck—e.g. lost their job and are having trouble getting a new one, or need to stay home to take care of family members.
And these things are much easier to fake.
So we do still try to identify these lazy people and make them work, but we also employ deterrents to make faking less desirable. Lower living conditions is a natural occurring deterrent, and on top of that society adds shame and lower social status. If you legitimately can’t work there is not much you can do about it so you suffer through these deterrents. If you are just lazy, it might be better to work anyway because while not working won’t get you killed it’ll still get you shunning looks, disrespect, and that shameful feeling of being a burden on society.
This has false negatives and false positives, of course, but overall it was good enough a filter to let society live and prosper without throwing out too many unfortunate members.
But… thanks to this mechanism, working became a virtue.
This was useful for quite a while, but it makes it harder to move on. If it’s shameful not to work, and everyone who don’t have a special condition have to work, then society needs to guarantee enough work for everyone or we’ll have a problem. Instead of having to conserve the little slack we have and carefully distribute it, we now need to conserve the find ways to get rid of all that slack because people need to feel useful.
(note that this is a first world problem. Humanity is spread out on the thrive/survive axis, and there are many places when you still need to work to survive and not just to feel good about yourself)
Some of the methods we use to achieve that are beneficial (as long as they don’t screw up, as they sometimes do) - letting kids study until somewhere in their twenties, letting people retire while they still have some vitality left, letting people have days off and vacations, etc. But there are also wastes for the sake of waste, like workfare or overproducing, which we only do because work is a virtue and we need to be virtuous.
At some point technology will get so far, that we’ll be able to allow a majority of the populace to not work. Some say we are already there. So we need to get out of this mentality fast—because we can’t let too many people feel like they are a burden on society.
I’m… not really sure how that “virtue” can be rooted out...
This also relates to your thrive/survive theory. A society in extreme survive mode cannot tolerate “burdens”—it needs 100% of the populace to contribute. Infants may be a special exception for the few years until they can start contributing, but other than that if you can’t work for whatever reason you die—because if the society will have to allocate to you more utility than what you can give back, it’ll lose utility and die. This is extreme survive mode, there is no utility to spare.
As we move thriveward, we get more and more room for “burdens”. We don’t want to leave our disabled and elderly to die once they are no longer useful—we only had to do that in extreme survive mode, but now that we have some surplus we want to use it to avoid casting away people who can’t work.
This presents us with a problem—if we can support a small number of people who can’t work, it means we can also support a small number of people who don’t want to work. Whether or not it’s true, the ruling assumption to this very day is that if left unchecked enough lazy people will take up that opportunity that the few willing to work will crumble under their weight.
So we need to create mechanisms for selecting the people that will get more support than they contribute. At first it’s easy—we don’t have that much slack anyway, so we just pick the obvious people, like the elders and the visible disabled. These things are very hard to fake. But eventually we run out of that, and can afford giving slack to less and less obvious disabilities, and even to people just ran out of luck—e.g. lost their job and are having trouble getting a new one, or need to stay home to take care of family members.
And these things are much easier to fake.
So we do still try to identify these lazy people and make them work, but we also employ deterrents to make faking less desirable. Lower living conditions is a natural occurring deterrent, and on top of that society adds shame and lower social status. If you legitimately can’t work there is not much you can do about it so you suffer through these deterrents. If you are just lazy, it might be better to work anyway because while not working won’t get you killed it’ll still get you shunning looks, disrespect, and that shameful feeling of being a burden on society.
This has false negatives and false positives, of course, but overall it was good enough a filter to let society live and prosper without throwing out too many unfortunate members.
But… thanks to this mechanism, working became a virtue.
This was useful for quite a while, but it makes it harder to move on. If it’s shameful not to work, and everyone who don’t have a special condition have to work, then society needs to guarantee enough work for everyone or we’ll have a problem. Instead of having to conserve the little slack we have and carefully distribute it, we now need to conserve the find ways to get rid of all that slack because people need to feel useful.
(note that this is a first world problem. Humanity is spread out on the thrive/survive axis, and there are many places when you still need to work to survive and not just to feel good about yourself)
Some of the methods we use to achieve that are beneficial (as long as they don’t screw up, as they sometimes do) - letting kids study until somewhere in their twenties, letting people retire while they still have some vitality left, letting people have days off and vacations, etc. But there are also wastes for the sake of waste, like workfare or overproducing, which we only do because work is a virtue and we need to be virtuous.
At some point technology will get so far, that we’ll be able to allow a majority of the populace to not work. Some say we are already there. So we need to get out of this mentality fast—because we can’t let too many people feel like they are a burden on society.
I’m… not really sure how that “virtue” can be rooted out...