The Philosophy of Work [pdf]

> What we currently have, and have had for most of human history, is feudalism under many different names.

True.

Though this is the only stable outcome.

Even in communist country there are positions of power (which can be symbolically equated to lords).

Given group of people there is hierarchy. Given selfishness, people tend to use control to ensure more control.

A worker should be able to exchange skill for a task that needs to be done. Work is a good thing. In the best possible case, work is a safe, useful, purposeful behaviour that benefits the employer, the workers, and society.

> it made humans be much much less social, which is the main cause of inequalities

Freedom from prejudice is a fine principle -- I fully support modern law. But people are not all "equal", they have different abilities. And some people hold wealth and information for the purpose of control. It goes without saying that corruption, cronyism, propaganda and violence are social anti-patterns.

A just, accountable, fair, transparent system ("JAFTS") will pay people for the value of their work and skill. There will be useful work to do, and training to do the work.

An intelligent social system will invest in people and reward good work.

A compassionate social system will also care for all people's well-being. It is a smart investment.

History tells us not to expect that a dictatorship, oligarchy, or mob rule will achieve sufficient cultural enlightenment. So we fight these tendencies with democracy, education, and workers' rights.

Unless of course the socio-economic structure is unenlightened or stumbling towards something worse. In a dictatorship or oligarchy, either the power structure wins or the people revolt. History also tells us that people have enough sense to fight for food and shelter.

In a democracy, people must want to protect the principles of democratic society.

Giving someone food and shelter implies that someone else must work to provide that. Food doesn't materialize like it does on Star Trek.

I believe you want to demolish the casino. I don't believe you want to build a soup kitchen. I don't even believe you volunteer at a soup kitchen now, because I've met people who volunteer at soup kitchens and you sound nothing like them.

As to what I'd do if I 'won', it's funny you ask since I spent this morning thinking about just that. For one, I think that a lot of contaminated land, including spent mining sites, could be slowly rehabilitated by growing the right plants and fungi on them, possibly even harvesting some of the leftover valuable minerals and rendering harmless the toxic ones, providing inexpensive housing to people acting as a caretaker, producing rejuvenation in an expanding network of locations. For another, a lot of energy is being put into cleaning plastic out of the oceans but there is still not a lot of thought being put into what to do with the result. I believe that with the right templates, it would be possible to clean plastic out of the ocean and build large rafts for seasteading-style projects. With the proper designs I suspect it would even be possible to make these rafts a suitable habitat for marine life, increasing local biodiversity and saving the expense of hauling waste plastic from the ocean to a landfill on a continent.

I have other visions of a better world, but if I achieve even one of these I'll consider mine a life well lived. The thing is, I'm not naive as to how unrealistic these visions sound or how difficult they would be to realise. If the decision were made by reasonable bureaucrats in a world where their mandate is minimal starvation, I might as well give up. There is exactly one human being on earth insane enough to think these visions are worth pursuing. THAT is why I'm invested in winning. THAT is what you want to take away from me, and from everyone else who's ever had an insane vision of a better future.

You say you want to see the world burn. That sounds to me like the mindset of a man in a warband, and warbands get resources by taking them from their neighbours. It's always the farmers and craftspeople who suffer most when that way of thinking takes over, and I consider myself a small producer, so it should come as no surprise that I'm hostile to your way of thinking. I truly believe that if you burned the world as you imagine, you'd have taken over my house and the small food forest my family has grown, and either shot or enslaved me, long before you ever made a dent in the barricades of the billionaires that justify your rhetoric. I believe that because that's been what happened historically, and because if your goal was really to build a soup kitchen you wouldn't feel the need to set the world on fire first.

I'd like to close with an appeal to your humanity, because despite my belief that a small producer like myself is always the first target of warbands and warband-thinking, I don't begrudge the instinct or its necessity to the human spirit. If you believe in anarchist-socialism and want to fight, there is an experiment with that kind of government happening right now in Rojava, the Kurdish autonomous zone in Northern Syria. They are actively looking for people to join their cause, and from what I know of their system it seems like it could actually succeed without devolving into Stalinism. If you lent your effort to that, it would be an alignment of what your intellectual, moral, and instinctive stances seem to be. Please just consider it, and if the answer is 'no' then it would be worth aligning the reasons why with what you want for your immediate sphere.

Thank you for this, I appreciated reading it. It's depressing to see how many people's vision of the world is fundamentally negative and opposed to letting human beings live freely and flourish according to their own hopes and dreams.

That being said, I think the problem is that the pro-freedom side hasn't put forth a sufficiently convincing argument. Ridiculous Elon Musk fanboys should not be the representatives for freedom. We shouldn't be noted for contradictorily turning a blind eye to bailouts and rebates with expropriated money, as well as to police violence towards minorities, and for seemingly being more concerned with taking the last scraps of support from the poor rather than opposing the kleptarchic defence contractors and so forth.

We need to make the case that a freer society would mean less money taken from the poor and given to the rich, and less opportunity to get rich on monopolies enforced by state power, such as inappropriately excessive patent rights and copyrights, which are not just intuitively morally unfair but also antithetical to the principle that a competitive market provides a selection pressure for better ideas. If we can't put forward a convincing argument and be consistent in our principles, it's our own damn fault and we should quit whining about it.