[continued from previous message]   
      
   accumulated and the minimum threshold of wealth necessary to exert   
   influence in society rises higher and higher, poverty becomes more and   
   more debilitating. It is a form of exile—the cruelest form of exile, for   
   you stay within society while being excluded from it. You can neither   
   participate nor go anywhere else.   
      
   Work doesn’t just create poverty alongside wealth—it concentrates wealth   
   in the hands of a few while spreading poverty far and wide. For every   
   Bill Gates, a million people must live below the poverty line; for every   
   Shell Oil, there has to be a Nigeria. The more we work, the more profit   
   is accumulated from our labor, and the poorer we are compared to our   
   exploiters.   
      
   So in addition to creating wealth, work makes people poor. This is clear   
   even before we factor in all the other ways work makes us poor: poor in   
   self-determination, poor in free time, poor in health, poor in sense of   
   self beyond our careers and bank accounts, poor in spirit.   
      
   “Cost of living” estimates are misleading—there’s little living going   
   on   
   at all! “Cost of working” is more like it, and it’s not cheap.   
      
   Everyone knows what housecleaners and dishwashers pay for being the   
   backbone of our economy. All the scourges of poverty—addiction, broken   
   families, poor health—are par for the course; the ones who survive these   
   and somehow go on showing up on time are working miracles. Think what   
   they could accomplish if they were free to apply that power to something   
   other than earning profits for their employers!   
      
   What about their employers, fortunate to be higher on the pyramid? You   
   would think earning a higher salary would mean having more money and   
   thus more freedom, but it’s not that simple. Every job entails hidden   
   costs: just as a dishwasher has to pay bus fare to and from work every   
   day, a corporate lawyer has to be able to fly anywhere at a moment’s   
   notice, to maintain a country club membership for informal business   
   meetings, to own a small mansion in which to entertain dinner guests   
   that double as clients. This is why it’s so difficult for middle-class   
   workers to save up enough money to quit while they’re ahead and get out   
   of the rat race: trying to get ahead in the economy basically means   
   running in place. At best, you might advance to a fancier treadmill, but   
   you’ll have to run faster to stay on it.   
      
   And these merely financial costs of working are the least expensive. In   
   one survey, people of all walks of life were asked how much money they   
   would need to live the life they wanted; from pauper to patrician, they   
   all answered approximately double whatever their current income was. So   
   not only is money costly to obtain, but, like any addictive drug, it’s   
   less and less fulfilling! And the further up you get in the hierarchy,   
   the more you have to fight to hold your place. The wealthy executive   
   must abandon his unruly passions and his conscience, must convince   
   himself that he deserves more than the unfortunates whose labor provides   
   for his comfort, must smother his every impulse to question, to share,   
   to imagine himself in others’ shoes; if he doesn’t, sooner or later some   
   more ruthless contender replaces him. Both blue-collar and white-collar   
   workers have to kill themselves to keep the jobs that keep them alive;   
   it’s just a question of physical or spiritual destruction.   
      
   Those are the costs we pay individually, but there’s also a global price   
   to pay for all this working. Alongside the environmental costs, there   
   are work-related illnesses, injuries, and deaths: every year we kill   
   people by the thousand to sell hamburgers and health club memberships to   
   the survivors. The US Department of Labor reported that twice as many   
   people suffered fatal work injuries in 2001 as died in the September 11   
   attacks, and that doesn’t begin to take into account work-related   
   illnesses. Above all, more exorbitant than any other price, there is the   
   cost of never learning how to direct our own lives, never getting the   
   chance to answer or even ask the question of what we would do with our   
   time on this planet if it was up to us. We can never know how much we   
   are giving up by settling for a world in which people are too busy, too   
   poor, or too beaten down to do so.   
      
   Why work, if it’s so expensive? Everyone knows the answer—there’s no   
   other way to acquire the resources we need to survive, or for that   
   matter to participate in society at all. All the earlier social forms   
   that made other ways of life possible have been eradicated—they were   
   stamped out by conquistadors, slave traders, and corporations that left   
   neither tribe nor tradition nor ecosystem intact. Contrary to capitalist   
   propaganda, free human beings don’t crowd into factories for a pittance   
   if they have other options, not even in return for name brand shoes and   
   software. In working and shopping and paying bills, each of us helps   
   perpetuate the conditions that necessitate these activities. Capitalism   
   exists because we invest everything in it: all our energy and ingenuity   
   in the marketplace, all our resources at the supermarket and in the   
   stock market, all our attention in the media. To be more precise,   
   capitalism exists because our daily activities are it. But would we   
   continue to reproduce it if we felt we had another choice?   
      
   On the contrary, instead of enabling people to achieve happiness, work   
   fosters the worst kind of self-denial.   
      
   Obeying teachers, bosses, the demands of the market—not to mention laws,   
   parents’ expectations, religious scriptures, social norms—we’re   
   conditioned from infancy to put our desires on hold. Following orders   
   becomes an unconscious reflex, whether or not they are in our best   
   interest; deferring to experts becomes second nature.   
      
   Selling our time rather than doing things for their own sake, we come to   
   evaluate our lives on the basis of how much we can get in exchange for   
   them, not what we get out of them. As freelance slaves hawking our lives   
   hour by hour, we think of ourselves as each having a price; the amount   
   of the price becomes our measure of value. In that sense, we become   
   commodities, just like toothpaste and toilet paper. What once was a   
   human being is now an employee, in the same way that what once was a pig   
   is now a pork chop. Our lives disappear, spent like the money for which   
   we trade them.   
      
   Most of us have become so used to giving up things that are precious to   
   us that sacrifice has become our only way of expressing that we care   
   about something. We martyr ourselves for ideas, causes, love of one   
   another, even when these are supposed to help us find happiness.   
      
   There are families, for example, in which people show affection by   
   competing to be the one who gives up the most for the   
   others. Gratification isn’t just delayed, it’s passed on from one   
   generation to the next. The responsibility of finally enjoying all the   
   happiness presumably saved up over years of thankless toil is deferred   
   to the children; yet when they come of age, if they are to be seen as   
   responsible adults, they too must begin working their fingers to the   
   bone.   
      
   But the buck has to stop somewhere.   
      
   People work hard nowadays, that’s for sure. Tying access to resources to   
   market performance has caused unprecedented production and technological   
   progress. Indeed, the market has monopolized access to our own creative   
   capacities to such an extent that many people work not only to survive   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)