It works in their heads because they think billionaires and poor people both deserve their fate. It's some kind of Divine Right thing.
and we’re right back to the doublethink – “Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Also packaged for new-agers and self-helpers as "The Secret" or "The Law of Attraction".
It's not doublethink. It's the belief that separate classes of people exist - "hard workers" who "create value" and rightfully become rich - and "lazy people" who just work because they have to and would otherwise do nothing. The people who push this propaganda see themselves in the first group, and if they aren't yet rich, that's because the liberals and commies prevent it. And they see the majority of others in the second group.
Came to a recent epiphany that we have proof that people would still work even if basic needs were provided without worry...
Simulation Video Games
Many people, myself included, play a lot of job simulator games. I found myself asking, while playing some of these what makes this more fun than doing it in real life and the answer was almost always the pay for the job and the basic needs not existing.
Turns out, the old adage of giving someone UBI, and having it turn everyone into lazy layabouts, is bullshit. We may actually choose to work if we didn't have to worry about how the cost of my labor would need to be spent to keep myself alive, and not merely extra to throw back in the system.
Shipbreaker, Power Wash Simulator, and Euro Truck Simulator are a few games I've enjoyed playing, but would never do IRL.
Billionaires are special job creators without whom jobs could not be created. Prior to having billionaires we all wandered around aimlessly looking for snacks or TV shows.
Speak for yourself. I spent my time learning to play the harmonica and riding trains
Now that's how you live a life
Billionares can afford great marketing?
I'd suggest the existence of billionares is a sign of a failed society is a more realistic meme
Failing society, metrics like income inequality and wealth concentration are projected to get worse!
Many people would stop working because so many jobs are awful and not worth doing unless you need the to survive. The job market would have to undergo radical shifts due workers no longer being desperate and actually having power. Awful jobs would have to become decent or pay more to make it worth it.
Many jobs would just go away. Some would never come back. They were probably not useful anyway.
Some people would never rejoin the workforce. Much of that is good, like elderly people who should have retired long ago but don't have savings. Some for worse.. but it's hard to say it would be any worse than what we have now.
And if people's basic needs are not met through those shitty jobs and go month-to-month or worse, then it's no different than waged slavery.
But how can Billy the manager feel fullfilled if he can't boss around people and doing presentations of next quarters forecasts?
It's so bullshit right now, I bet in the future people won't understand why we didn't have better lives with all the wealth we produce.
They're also the people that think minimum wage is enough, working a minimum wage job is easy (so much easier than their job), and, have and would never work a minimum wage job in their life.
Right? There's people still spouting that "all of that money from the pandemic" is somehow still sustaining the lives of thousands and thousands of people 4 years later.
I straight up told a coworker he's a "fucking dumbass piece of shit" if he thinks anyone is somehow still running on 2-3 checks of $1000 three years later, because either he's too stupid to realize that's only one week of pay for him or he has an ulterior motive for continuing to lie about something he knows isn't true. So which is it, dumb or lying, because we both know that's bullshit.
He stood there for a second staring at me and goes "yeah I suppose that's not THAT much..."
Of course absolutely nothing about his other right-wing bs changed but at least he hasn't brought up "pandemic money" again.
Seriously. They act like it's 1924 not 2024, when ~$3,000 was the equivalent of ~$55,000 today.
Im sure that there are cases of both.
Some people probably wouldn't work if all their basic needs were met.(No judgement, i'd definitely consider it myself) And some billionaires probably are hard workers(although that is definitely not why they're billionaires)
one of the main results out of the various UBI trials so far – even with a few so-called “freeloaders”, overall productivity goes up
For the most part, people like to work. To feel like they're doing something, to be productive. This is within reason of course. The work should be something they enjoy, and no one likes being overworked.
and bullshit jobs will burn you out just as much as overwork
I absolutely don't like working. But I like things. My basic needs are insufficient for me to be comfortable and happy.
I would choose to work so I could go to the movies, buy video games, eat and drink decadent things, pursue hobbies, travel, etc.
Enough food, enough shelter, enough mobility, and enough telecommunication ironically isn't enough for me.
I've been fortunate to never have been only scraping by. I don't believe many people would choose it and it absolutely baffles me that so many people believe that so many people would.
If all my basic needs were met I'd 100% keep my current job because I like my job.
I'd also move closer so I'm not driving an hour each way.
Yes it’s obvious from the fact that rich people exist, that people don’t stop working just because their needs are met.
For the abolition of work. Yes really, abolish work! Not "reform work" but the destruction of work as a separate field of human activity.
To save the world, we're going to have to stop working! — David Graeber
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. ...the love of work... Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists, and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. — Paul Lafargue
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. — Karl Marx
In the glorification of 'work', in the unwearied talk of the 'blessing of work', I see the same covert idea as in the praise of useful impersonal actions: that of fear of everything individual. — Friedrich Nietzsche
If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves. — Lane Kirkland
The bottom line is simple: all of us deserve to make the most of our potential as we see fit, to be the masters of our own destinies. Being forced to sell these things away to survive is tragic and humiliating. We don’t have to live like this. ― CrimethInc
