Sorry for going AWOL for a few days (and skipping “Battlestar Galactica” and blogging about it)—-had a wedding to go to, and you know how that can be sometimes. I haven’t had time to write, but thanks to the wonders of the iPhone, I had a little time to read blogs, and I’ve been watching this “going John Galt” thing with interest, though I haven’t managed to do more than peruse the long threads that erupted in Jesse’s posts about this. I know what I need to—-a handful of libertarian-leaning conservatives, who think of themselves, Ayn Rand-style, as just rationalists with a selfish bent have been exposed as being highly irrational and actually members of a cult of selfishness, and they’re lashing out. It’s been fascinating to watch a bunch of people who claim they’re just all about the rationalist love of money (as if love isn’t an oft-irrational emotion) get more worked up about a 4% tax raise than losing half of their savings to a stock market crash that was due to laissez faire economic policies. The cat’s out of the bag—-they aren’t motivated by rational self-interest. They’re motivated by irrational hatred and loathing of people down the economic ladder from them, and would apparently sooner dump their entire life savings towards the care and feeding of stock brokers than give people down the ladder a chance to do better by themselves, which means they might move into the neighborhood one day. The whole thing got me to thinking about how our society coddles the self-delusions of our moronic wealthy, though, particularly when it comes to a couple of American assumptions about work and wealth.
The work thing has been fascinating, especially after Tigerhawk’s naked plea to be treated like he’s superior to the rest of us because he supposedly works harder, which in and of itself is laughable in a country where many working class people have to have two jobs, and women have long, unpaid domestic shifts, even in some of the wealthier homes. Men like Tigerhawk, after all, only get to work that much overtime because some woman has given up her career ambitions to take care of him. But even taking the claims that they work harder at face value, I have to ask the question: So what? I’m less interested in how much you work than in how productive you are, what motivates you, and what your work does for society. Sir Charles addressed some of this—-middle-aged lawyers who can’t get their work weeks below 100 hours a week are probably bad lawyers, and lots of the people who pull down those enormous checks for burning the midnight oil at some professional job are not only not giving to society in the same way that teachers or carpenters are, they’re probably taking away from society. If you’re up late trying to figure out how to cut labor costs at some corporation to increase the size of your bonus check, fuck you. You’re not virtuous because you put in a 50-hour work week. There’s a lot of weeks where, when I count it up at the end of the week, I probably worked 50-60 hours. But that’s not why I consider myself a good person. It’s my actual morals and the fact that I work at making the world a slightly better place that makes me feel good about myself.
I have a bumper sticker on my laptop that says, “Toil Is Stupid”. It’s a Devo slogan, and while it initially seems like a pretty obvious slap at the Protestant work ethic, it’s interesting to see what strong reactions it gets. (I did a Power Point presentation once, and when I opened my laptop, the whole room burst out laughing.) I like it, because it’s sort of the ideal of what punk could be—-by lashing out at everything, questioning certain strongly held values for the hell of it, perhaps you can actually learn something about yourself and the world. Rarely do we question the mandate that toil is a moral virtue, which allows some idiots—-idiots who fear homeless people and think that having a new car every year makes them better than the rest of us—-feel like they deserve to be giant jerks because they put in some pointless extra work at their pointless jobs before returning to their pointless homes, where they can safely pull into the garage and never sully their pointless selves with exposure to the outside world in the time it takes to walk from the car to their front door, which is uncluttered by anything as quaint as a porch. Virtuous people who are motivated not so much by the quality of the work they do, but by plain old babbitry, a desire to load up on nice cars and big houses to show off to neighbors you probably don’t even bother to know, though they’re a lot like you, so who would?