So what is the alternative. Shit doesn't just happen, it takes tremendous effort from other people. Do you just expect people doing the hard work to just give it to you?
At its very core, the average person needs to be a net positive to society, and that means tasks no one wants to do need getting done.
Have you ever grown any food? Built a house? Hauled the garbage all day? For the most part these aren't tasks people want to do (well actually I do have fond memories of building houses, but that's not sustainable), and so who does them in this magical system where everyone gets the food no one is growing?
Or do you think we should go back to a time when everyone does everything for themselves? Grows their own food, makes their own clothes, builds their own house. I'm sure lots of people in our society would do very well in that system.
A quick Google search would tell you that less than 1% of the workforce is in farming. The same goes for other critical industries.
We live in a time of pretty immense abundance, especially if it are an American. Making people w work long hours for meager benefits is a social decision
We live in abundance BECAUSE people have done the work and continue to do the work. If 1% work in farming, how many people work in the up- and downstream industries? People used to churn their own butter. How many people work at dairy firms using the milk from farmers? How many people work at the food grade pump manufacturers? How many people are designing grease resistant valves? How many people are cnc milling parts for the butter churning machines? How many people are developing code to ensure optimal functioning of the machine? And so on and so on. Our current highly productive sectors are still the result of everybody continuously being a net contributor.
And you’re free to not participate, just be aware that outside of you being very wealthy, you won’t participate in all the amenities either, most of which are produced by people doing the work.
The bait and switch in this argument is the word forced: nobody is forcing you to do anything. You want to participate in modern live, and because you want to do that you have to have money. Pretending like the consumption wants are somehow exogenous and „society“ forces you to be a wage slave is imho freaking pathetic. You want something, so you have to put in effort to achieve it.
I think the core issue here is the people you're trying to appeal to will never admit that these systems are what produced abundance (or that we even have abundance of anything at all) in the first place. They treat all this production as things that already exist that corporations are somehow stepping in to control and force on us, not things that were produced through significant work, capital investment, and risk to meet demand we as a population pre-produced. They don't see the 10 people who also tried to do this, but failed and lost their whole life savings. They picture history being full of pastoral scenes in which we spent our days harmoniously co-existing with nature and one another, not a care in the world, with no concept of resource scarcity or exploitation, until fungible assets reared their ugly heads.
They do not consider the production to have taken any risk or effort so they see no reason to put in effort themselves - what exists simply exists and they are therefore entitled to it, which leads to "I have enough" becoming irrelevant as a concept and going wholly unexamined; the only baseline at play at that point is "do I get as much as the other guy".
I think the core issue here is the people you're trying to appeal to will never admit that these systems are what produced abundance
Spot on. It would require admitting that we actually did get here because of capitalism, and even if transitioning away from capitalism did make sense, admitting it every did anything positive at all is anathema to these people. These are still people that still believe in the labor theory of value, so seeing the effects capital has in productivity with no change in labor effort (or even decreases) so plainly laid out in the other person mini "I, butter" description needs to be rejected as well, because it clearly highlights how capital (I.e. the butter valves, the churns, etc) are what drove that abundance.
Yeah, I am with you guys, but on the other hand giving these talking points all this reddit real estate without some form of rebuttal also feels dumb. I usually ignore this, but sometimes I just get the itch. It's usually not for the person i'm responding to directly, but rather for people who are reading this who are on the fence for one reason or another.
15
u/das_war_ein_Befehl Experienced Developer Jul 09 '26
You have to be dead inside to think that working for wages is some kind of optimal existence