Roland's Alternate Reality of Philosophy

Work to live, Live to work?

I figured for a first post I’d write on something I feel is at the very root of our existence and my own anxiety; very hard work, and before you criticize me for my stance, please, read the full post, then go hog-wild in the comments!

My thesis statement is this: it is unethical for us as conscious, thinking, and intelligent beings to have to work to live.

The most common reaction to this claim would be to call the claimer lazy or worthless. If one doesn’t work, what can they expect? For others to support them in their lives? They just don’t have a good “work ethic”. If they don’t work, then inevitably the work of existing, of harnessing energy, falls upon others.

Of course I don’t dispute this because its true. Generally, we must work hard to live, and in the first world, we must work less to live pretty well, while others work more for us but what I am attempting to make here is a metaphysical claim, not an economical or sociological one, and to do that, we must first talk about human nature.

Humans have evolved from a natural world of violence and selfishness. Life forms have evolved to the complex level of biology and intelligence now because of the unfathomably huge amount of suffering of every life form before us. Every lifeform before human civilization has suffered pain, hunger, and of course the pain and utter fear of inevitable death. Even know only a small percentage of human civilization does not suffer from most of these thanks to the poverty of countless others, and even then we’re stricken with the moral dilemnas from these; of living above others, the poor, third world countries, and then personal problems like the highly probably disease of cancer.

All life before us lived relatively quickly, and painfully. One group of life forms kill others, and the other group spends their time cowering in fear from the killers that must eat them for sustenance. Plants have it lucky, for they do not have a mind to experience it but are killed and eaten all the same. One could even say that animals have it easy as well since its arguable whether they have a consciousness, but that is dubious and all the same it still supports the argument since from our perspective, animals go through the same pure horror of pain and death.

And now here we are supposedly advanced from our dark pasts, oh so suddenly pulled from the depths of mindless horrible survival. From the Earth’s perspective, our “civilized” time on the earth is only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a blink of an eye of the whole of the Earth’s life.

Now we can come back to the metaphysical claim; What is our very human nature? What is the “proper” way of living? According to the basics of life before us, the conventional answer is hard work. Hard work is noble, virtuous, heroic even. He who can work hard and industriously in life and make a “hard honest living” for themselves is considered the best type of human.

Why?

Because this person contributes to usbut does not take away. They contribute back to us in friendship, as an example of a way of living we wish to emulate, but they do not live off or take from our own hard-work. So naturally, many assume that this person is the ideal, their life of the highest value. They are the pinnacle of human species. But are they really? We assume, perhaps rightfully so, that it is inherently good for one to be entirely self subsistent, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, to live off the sweat of their brow. Now that we live in an age of enlightenment though, we are beginning to see that it might not have to be so.

As I’ve illustrated earlier, we have a picture of our ugly and mindless past. We can see how we’ve tragically have gotten here, through endless suffering of life to create the naturally selected intelligent products of human beings, but is it right? According to our system of ethics, it is not. Many stay stuck practically so in this world and devise system of ethics accordingly so; How can we operate in a world where we must be dependent on each other?

What I assert forth is a future world where it is not an assumption that we must use others in some capacity to live. A world where truly we are only intellectually inclined.

To go back to the original argument, I say it is unethical that humans must work hard to live. Essentially we are coerced or forced into work where more often than not it is mindless hard work more suited for an automated process. Asking humans to do that is devaluing them, objectifying them, it is limiting our potential and forcing us to do what we cannot inherently enjoy.

There is no reasoning behind the idea that hard work is inherently valuable, aside from the practicality of our current reality. Humans should not have to work to grow food through the slow inefficient means of photosynthesis, using the self-interested mechanisms of plants that only slowly, reluctantly give away their energy to us; or the farm animals that eat these plants and even more inefficiently give us energy through their murder.

This is primary problem of life, that of food, energy. If humans were truly non-reliant upon anything in the universe for energy, only then could we live up to the highest ideal of our highest systems of ethics, and that ideal is not causing any undue burden upon any others.

Many systems of ethics have come about that all attempt to say how we should interact with each other, and only because we must interact with each other to survive. Some lean to the more extreme selfish point of view that we should be almost entirely selfish, Ayn Rand’s objectivism being a great example of this, and then some entirely the other way and erroneously attempt to prescribe a system of entire selflessness, or perhaps self-subsistence, with Buddhism perhaps being a good example.

So really if all of this posturing and theorizing is impractical and not based in reality, what can I offer in way of a solution? I don’t offer it, instead modern technology offers it. We are close to the point where our own biology is no longer kept a secret from us, where our minds and genomes are no longer inaccessible, mysterious puzzle pieces of our very being. We are close to self-directed evolution; the singularity. For too long have we been entrapped by the mindless processes of our bodies, the limitations of our minds, the limitations of energy and change available to us that limit the previous two points flexibility.

To put it in other words, it is the melding of biology, the mindless binding vessel, with the artificial machine the materialization of our ethics and our will.

The hypothetical solutions are numerous and varying. We could harness solar energy for ourselves, become photosynthetic for ourselves, have fusion reactors for ourselves, become truly unreliant upon others and the mindless hard, sad and primitive work that provides so many the means of a comfortable relaxing existence.

Who could deny this?

It is from reasoning like this that I feel existentialism and nihilism’s roots were founded upon. They have seen that most of human culture is really all based off the fight for personal survival, stomping and romping over others in the attempt. Religion is merely a feeble tool created to make sure others don’t kill everyone else, child bearing, often seen as the ultimate goal in life is also a feeble tool from evolution to pass on our genetics, and the virtue of hard work is merely a valued tool because you don’t fuck with others. As these three things have dead ends in terms of meaning, what is there that can have meaning? Is there such a thing?

The answer is your own self and motivation. You make your own meaning. From this we naturally arrive to the excitement of intelligence and its creativity, the wonder of the world and our creations, and the search for interesting things.

The path to these should not be accomplished through the endless sweat and depression of hard work. I feel that a lot of people realize this on some level or another, and it is rightfully so a great cause of depression and anger in the world. We are sad and angry at the very nature of our existence.

~Roland