The Problems of Work 1956 Chapter 3

Chapter Three: Is Work Necessary?

An understanding of life is necessary to the living of it. Otherwise life becomes a trap. To so many of us in the work-a-day world this trap takes the form of WORK. If only we didn’t have to work, how many delightful things could we do! If only we had some other way of getting money... Travel, vacations, new clothes... what a host of things would be ours if only we didn’t have to work!

It is almost an educational factor of our society that work, duress of, is the root of our unhappiness. We hear unions and welfare states as well as individuals basing all their plea upon a reduction of work. Getting rid of work by virtue of reduced hours and the introduction of automatic machinery has become the by-word of the mid-twentieth century.

Yet the most disheartening thing which could happen to most of us would be the loss of all future jobs. To be denied the right to work is to be denied any part of the society in which we live.

The rich man’s son, the moneyed dowager, neither of them works. Neither is sane. When we look for neurosis and folly in our society we look toward those who do not or cannot work. When we look over the background of a criminal we look at “inability to work”. Somehow the right to work seems to be bound up in happiness and the zest of living. And demonstrably the denial of work is bound up with madness and insanity.

As the amount of automatic machinery increases in our society, so increases the percentile of our people who are insane. Child labor laws, injunctions against overtime, demands for many papers and skills and conditions of being alike combine to reduce the amount of work that can be done by an individual.

Have you ever seen a retired man who pined for his desk? Today “the doctrine of limited work” educates us to believe that at such and such an age we must stop work. Why is this so popular when we can see for ourselves that the end of work is the end of life in most cases?

Speaking politically for a moment, from the standpoint of sanity. Man more dearly needs the Right to Work than he does an endless number of pretended freedoms. Yet we carefully discourage in our children and in our society those people who MAKE work. Unless work is made there will be no work to do. Work is not something which springs ready-made into our sight. Work is something that is created. New inventions, new markets, new systems of distribution must be created and brought into existence as times change and old methods, old markets, old systems become inadequate and wear out. Somebody created the jobs we do. When we work we either do a job created by ourselves or by another.

It is not enough to coast along in a job. The job, day by day, has to be made by us, no matter who created it in the first place.

To work is to participate in the activities of our society. To be refused a part in the activities of our society is to be cast out by it.

Somebody invented the difference between work and play. Play was seen to be something that was interesting and work was seen to be something that was arduous and necessary and therefore not interesting. But when we have our vacations and go and “play” we are usually very glad to get back to the “daily grind”. Play is almost purposeless. Work has a purpose.

In truth, only the constant refusal on the part of the society to give us work results in our distaste of work when it exists. The man who cannot work was forbidden the right to work. When we go back in the history of the notoriously unable-to-work criminal, we find that he was first and foremost convinced that he must not work -- he was forbidden to work whether by his father or mother or school or early life. Part of his education was that he must not work. What was left? Revenge upon the society which refused to let him take part in its activities.

Let us re-define work and play. Play should be called “work without a purpose”. It could also be called “activity without purpose”. That would make work be defined as “activity with purpose”. Where we have fault to find with working, it grows out of our own fear that we will not be permitted to continue work.

There is nothing wrong with automation, with all this installation of machines to do our work, so long as the powers-that-be remember to create ADDITIONAL WORK for us. Automation could be a blessing to the whole world, PROVIDING as many new jobs are invented as were disposed of by machinery. THEN we’d have production And if the powers- that-be didn’t fumble their basic economics and created enough money for us to buy all the new products, THERE would be prosperity indeed. So it isn’t automation that is at fault; if automation leaves people unemployed, SOMEBODY wasn’t permitted to invent new jobs for us. Of course, if every new business is flattened by restriction and if every man who would invent work was prohibited from doing so, then and only then would automatic machinery bring about our down, fall.

Despite the much-advertised joys of vacations and endless play, such things have never been other than a curse for Man. The earliest mention of it was by Homer in the Lotus Isles. And didn’t that crew go to pieces.

No, definitely there is more to work and working than having to have a pay-check. Of course there are jobs more interesting than other jobs. Of course there are positions which are more remunerative than other positions. But when one contrasts the right to have a position with NO right to have one, then one will choose even the less interesting and poorer paid tasks.

Did you know that a mad person could be made well simply by getting him convinced that he has some purpose in life? Well, that can happen. It doesn’t matter how thin or artificial that purpose may be, mad people can be made sane with it. One instance comes to mind of a crazy girl for whom nothing could be done. That was the point in her case -- nothing could be done for her. But one night near the asylum an auto accident occurred and an overworked doctor, seeing her near, ordered her to do some things for the victims. She became well. She became a staff nurse. She was never insane thereafter.

Now, no-one pretends that we are all mad if we don’t work. But it is an astonishing thing that we drift in that direction when we are forbidden to labor.

Great revolutions occur out of a mass inability to work. The crowds rebel not because they are angry over privileges, which they always say, but because they have gone mad, having no work. It is truth that revolutions cannot occur when people are all employed. And it doesn’t matter how arduously they are employed either. Revolutions occur when people have been too often forbidden to work. They go up in madness and the state often comes down in ruins. NO revolution ever won anything. Life evolves into a better condition by means of hard work, not by threats.

If automatic machinery threw enough people out of work -- even though the machines were producing a plenty -- there would be a revolution. Why? Because by robbing them of work, people have been robbed of a purpose in life. When that goes, all goes.

A good purpose, a bad purpose, it does not matter, so long as a purpose exists. WHY?

Now, do not think we have strayed very far from the last chapter. We haven’t. Here is an understanding of life. Life has certain stable data that ARE the stable data of livingness.

Once grasped, then life -- and that part of it called work -- can be understood.

Life is basically a created thing. But it has many elements in it creating against many other elements in it. A confusion occurs whenever two or more things start creating against each other. Thus life, viewed impartially, can seem to be a confusion.

If one were to sit amongst all this livingness, all this creatingness, all this warfare, without any purpose -- such an existence in its entirety would be fatal. To be part of a universe, a civilization, and yet to have no purpose, is the route to madness.

The exertion of energy, the exercise, the time spent, the things done are all of a lower order of importance. Just to have Something To Do and a Reason To Do It exerts a control over life itself. If you have no purpose, you have no purchase on the small first particle necessary to make the whole understandable. Thus life can become a terrible burden.

In the United States a quarter of a century ago, and in other lands as well, there was something called a depression. It came out of a lack of understanding of economics during a period of transition into a machine age. During it a great president saw that work had been denied to his people. He created work. He thought he did it to get money into circulation to buy all the things the country could now make. Therefore he did not really rescue the bulk of his people from despair. For the work he gave them was to be carelessly done, poorly done. All that was being demanded was time spent on the job. He had a wonderful opportunity to turn a country into a beautiful thing. But the work given had no purpose.

Men who detest one job or another detest it because they can’t see where it is going or can’t believe they are doing any important thing. They are “working”, that is to say, they report and go through motions and draw a pay-check. But they aren’t truly a part of the scheme of things. They don’t feel they have anything to win.

In our civilization the Stable Datum to the confusion of existence is WORK. And the Stable Datum of work is Purpose. Even if the purpose is just getting a pay-check, it is still purpose.

Any of us, probably, could do more important things than we are doing. Any of us could use some changes in our tasks. But none of us, and still stay alive and sane, could do without something to do.

When we grow timid in the face of circumstance it is because our Purpose, our Stable Data, have been invalidated.

It is, as we have shown, rather easy to knock a person into a state of confusion. All you have to do is locate his Stable Datum on any subject and shake it. This is a trick we all use. For instance, we are arguing about economics with a friend: we don’t agree with him. We ask him where he got such an idea. He says somebody wrote it in such-and-so. We attack the writer or the paper and discredit it. In other words, we win our argument by shaking his Stable Datum as nearly as we can find it.

Life is competitive. Many of us forget we are part of a team called Man, in contest with who knows what else to Survive. We attack Man and attack our friends. In the course of holding a job, it seems only natural that here and there in the organization would be people who were so insecure in their own tasks that they seek to spread insecurity around them.

Having drunk of confusion too deeply, having too few Stable Data, a person can begin to dramatize confusion, to spread it, to consciously try to make everything and everybody confused. One of the favorite targets of such people is the Stable Datum of Work. Although usually such people cannot even do their own jobs they are very anxious to make others tired of theirs. They “cut down the competition” by carving up the Stable Data of others.

Beware these people who come around and inquire “sympathetically” about your health because you look “overworked”. It is almost easier to get “overloafed” than overworked. Beware these people who want you to sign a petition to shorten the hours to be spent on the job. The end product of that is no job. And beware, too, the fellow who is always taking it “out of the firm” because the firm can afford it. Remember, that firm is part yours, no matter if they fire you tomorrow. Such people are trying to pull out from under you the Stable Datum of Work.

If you are afraid of losing your job, it is because you suffer already from too many forbiddings to work. The only way to hold a job is to make it every day, to create it and keep it created. If you have no wish to create and continue that job then there must be something at cross-purposes with purpose. There is something wrong between what you think would be a good purpose and what purpose your job has.

Government jobs are an interesting example because, so often, nobody seems to care really whether the job has purpose or not. Too often the purpose of having a government job is just to have a government job. Here in particular one has to understand about life and work itself, for a government job has to be created continually to continue. And if it seems to have no purpose then one should look over government itself and get at its purpose, for the purpose of the government as a whole, in some part, would be the purpose of the job held, no matter how small.

Anyone suffering from a distaste for work must basically have a feeling that he isn’t really allowed to work. Thus work is not a stable datum in life. And he must have, as well, some cross-purpose about the purposes of his job. And, too, he usually is associated with people in his job who are trying to make work into something less than tasteful. But he is to be pitied because he is unhappy. He is Unhappy because he is confused. Why is he confused? Because he has no Stable Datum for his life. And a Stable Datum for life itself is the basis of good living as well as good job orientation.