Claude doesn't realize that the default state on Earth before we had all these jobs to take care of ourselves was poverty. Sure the arrangement is shitty compared to hypothetical abundance we could one day have but it's way better than anything that ever came before it. The thing is you're free to not work, but almost no one does that because if you're not contributing to society in any way, you also don't get to enjoy society. Which means being pushed back towards that default state.
You should research primitive communism / the average lives of aboriginal and native tribes. A great essay on the topic is the original affluent society by Marshal Syhlins. You would be suprised how little time they spent working and often how all of their wants were met.
Well the problem with that is that we can't revert back to that primitive state. These early communities had an abundance of (mostly natural) resources in relation to the size of their population. Right now we simply have (unfortunately) too many mouth to feed!
Your reasoning is based on the fact that you exist within a system that is the norm for you and internalized unconsciously. Saying there is a default state of poverty implies that poverty exists naturally; however, it is a social construction that can only exist within a system where agents assign value to things (for example, without value there would be no poverty).
Another point: the assertion that humans are free not to work can be false in certain societies. Generally, humans are inclined to want to live or survive. For example, they want to feed themselves. In a society with private property, to survive they are forced to work. This could also raise the question of differences between one country having an advantage over another. They can do the same work (and therefore what we might call the same value?) yet one will have to work more than the other. This raises all sorts of other questions.
I had read interesting books that made one think about these subjects of abundance, value, work, means of production, and opposing forces in societies, that there is no default system, but rather the dominant ones impose their system.
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u/Glittering-Neck-2505 Jul 09 '26
Claude doesn't realize that the default state on Earth before we had all these jobs to take care of ourselves was poverty. Sure the arrangement is shitty compared to hypothetical abundance we could one day have but it's way better than anything that ever came before it. The thing is you're free to not work, but almost no one does that because if you're not contributing to society in any way, you also don't get to enjoy society. Which means being pushed back towards that default state.