Unemployment is the Cure

Our collective obsession with jobs is killing us, and killing the planet. The whole idea of a "job" was invented by the leisure-class royal families of old Europe, working in cabal with the rising merchant class, to coerce people off their lands and into the assembly-lines of rote, repetitive toil in the time-clock factories of the Industrial Revolution. This was largely driven by a lack of trees to burn for heat, and for construction, and the need to get that nasty coal out of the ground to light the fires of mass steel production.

We should learn from the scene in the H.G.Wells-based movie "The Time Machine" (the one starring Rod Taylor) in which the passive Eloi hear the whistle and mindlessly enter the Morlochs' lair to be eaten. That pretty much sums up the last couple centuries for the 99% of us. The rest of it is just window-dressing. Patriotism drapery. Work ethic doily manufacturing.

This "jobs" scheme has been so successful that people now believe jobs are necessary, and that machines taking all our jobs away is a bad thing. It's the longest of all long cons ever conceived to convince endless armies of desperate workers to chase ever-rising productivity for ever-decreasing returns, while the "capital" accrues to those few who do not work at all.

"Work smarter, not harder" is the mantra of the con-man. And no one works "smarter" than the one who gets everyone else to do their work. Everyone hates labor who has to do it. So it's no wonder labor unions are reviled, while Wall Street is so idolized. "We shouldn't punish success", say our bought-off politicians, who see no relationship between the resources used up and the dollars in their bank accounts. But it's an accruing debt, which no one can pay. Our planet is telling us that.

The fundamental truth, with the force of physical reality behind it, is that profit is merely mass delusion. There is no "profit" in nature. There is no "added value" in terms of actual physical matter --there is just the transformation of it from one state to another, with a portion of it escaping as inchoate heat into space. The only known place in the entire Universe where negative entropy might exist is in the middle of a black hole. And don't ask me how you can "profit" from one of those.

If we want to "fix" our broken economic system, we first have to eliminate jobs. Most of them will either slowly or quickly kill you, and the absurd fixation on unemployment rates is just a ruse to preserve unequal wealth. The most "productive" societies do the most environmental damage, while the so-called least productive are preserving the Earth.

So this is the conundrum facing global civilization: Productivity vs. Ecology. Kill the former, and we save the latter. The opposite, which we are doing now, is killing us all.

Call me Utopian, but after seeing countless Sci Fi movies about our dystopian future, I have come to realize that most of us are pretty close to living in that nightmare reality right now.

Ages ago, when people asked the Buddha what the secret of happiness was, he replied "not doing". So I am convinced that 99% of our problems will be solved when we eliminate 99% of all the stupid jobs we do for the sake of someone else's "productivity."

We shouldn't be demanding jobs. We should be demanding a cut of the take.

Unemployment isn't the problem here, folks. It's the cure.