Aspies For Freedom

Whay assume that one's dignity or lack thereof must be determined by whether or not they work? That is an assumption that many cultures other than the US/Great Britain do not share.

If you don't have to "work for a living", why work? If you work, and make enough to support your basic needs, why work harder?

We should be content in any situation, and alive to the beauty of the world around us right now, rather than constantly scrambling toward some hypothetical "better deal."

But that's not at all what you said a few post ago - you said that such people didn't have dignity.

Now the thing is, why do people get so het up about where 50 quid a week of society's money is going? Why not get het up about when 5,000 quid a week of society's money is going into the pockets of, say, a footballer? It's not magically any less society's money because it doesn't get paid by the government. And "the system" is much, much wider than just the benefits system.

Back to Bill Gates for a minute, if he really wanted to put his money to good use then he would try to reverse the appalling situation that he has placed the information systems of almost the entire planet in. I'm not saying just that it's a rubbish operating system, it's much more important than that: it's about who controls information and its flow and processing. That is already turning into one of the major issues in the world, affecting the lives of billions of people. And meanwhile Bill Gates gives a little bit of cash to fight malaria and suddenly he's a saint above reproach.

It's funny how the "parasites" who are so "lazy" that people get so wound up about are invariably people on the dole. What about the lazy parasites who, for example, live off inherited share dividends? And, by the way, who generally get rather more than £50 a week out of it.

Also, there is an assumption that people on the dole are doing nothing. Which is very often wrong. And so the question does need to be asked: why is it better for society for people to be (eg) flipping burgers than (eg) helping out at their local Oxfam, or bringing up their kids, or...

I wasn't talking to you there  :razz:

Ah yes, I thought that might be the case: lazy parasites are fine as long as they're rich  :roll:

I used the example of someone living off inherited shares because they do no work, and live off the money created by other people's effort. As I said before, it's not any less society's money because it doesn't come from the government.

Why is it OK for some people to do no work and live off money given to them and worked for by other people but not others?

Hear, hear, Theosoph. (My mother once thought of submitting a short story to a Protestant magazine, but decided not to once she saw that one of the things they sought was "evidence of hard work". As I understand it, the practice of art is painstaking effort to reach the impression of effortlessness; the farther-away from the rough draft state one of my poems is, the more it looks like I just jotted it down.)

I'm not sure what the difference between a "waste" of money or free time and a "positive use" of either would be, except happiness/contentment, and you seem not to believe that's a sufficient criterion. Money is there to be used, and if being "aimless" makes you content--as long as you continue to do your duty to your family, your friends, etc--why is that a bad thing? Life itself has little direction, and though change frightens me and I tend to over-plan, I have had to come to realize that there is no way I can know where I'll be in a year.

Chinese literature is absolutely packed with heroes who leave the competition and scramble of daily life, withdraw to their villas, and spend the rest of their lives writing poetry, painting, learning, becoming more cultivated, and enjoying wine with their friends. According to Confucianism, a mercantile, exchange-based economy--in and of itself-- (as opposed to farming, the "old way of doing things") is non-righteous and degenerate.

The other societies I had in mind were the southern European ones (cf. Theosoph, above)--especially the French, for which the question "What do you do for a living?" is so rude that they won't even put it on their census forms. Also, the hunter-gatherer tribes of sub-Saharan Africa: after they finish their day's food-gathering, food-preperation, making things, etc., they just take it easy. They tell stories, they make art, and so on. Anthropologists were mildly shocked to find that, on average, these people work only about 2 or 3 hours a day. (Farmers work a whole lot more, and people in the most modern societies work harder still.) These hunter-gatherers have no "generous social systems", and their "generations past" had no wealth to leave them.

Pardon me--were you referring to modern China? I'm barely familiar with that period of Chinese history at all. The novel to which I primarily allude here was written around 1750, and that was the latest Chinese work I've read, I think.

DW: every time you shop at somewhere that has shareholders, part of what you pay for the item goes straight to the shareholders. You don't get a choice to give that money. Every time you buy something there, you're giving money to people who could work and choose not to. You don't have a choice about giving them that money.

I'm not saying that it's good to be useless. I'm saying that there are a whole lot of better ways to be "useful" than only what you do to make money--moreover, a lot more to human life than being "useful."

I hold these opinions in part because my chosen field, poetry (Japanese poetry, no less), makes very little to no money in America. (Many poets in this country make money working as college proffessors.) The haiku magazine I referenced in my post of poems payed me $2 per poem the last time they accepted my work. Two poems, on which I spent much time, made me enough to treat me and my roommate to a Guinness each. The magazine in which most of my published works are published does not pay its contributors at all. Should, God willing, I publish a book of poetry, I doubt that very many people will buy it. Moreover, there is not a lot of demand to hire people with philosophy degrees.

Therefore, once I graduate, I expect to spend most of my life making espressos at a coffee shop, or some similar kind of job. But the job I will have, whatever it is, won't be the point of my life, or the criterion of my worth.

The point is in my previous post: it's not your family's money you're living off, it's the money of each shopper at each company you have shares in.

Because the trust fund babies aren't pulling money out of my pocket, taking it away from my kids.  Those lazy wastes of flesh who want to live "on the dole" are.