Why Technology Didn't Produce Increased Leisure

[pbrower2a]

(05-22-2018, 02:55 AM)Galen Wrote:

(05-21-2018, 03:26 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(05-20-2018, 05:23 PM)Galen Wrote:

(05-20-2018, 11:15 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: To the demand "Suffer for my holy greed, you peons", we must prepare to respond as Patrick Henry did to the shakier George III...

"Give me liberty or give me death!"

You do realize that Patrick Henry had an armed populace to back up that demand.  Makes you wonder what the real agenda behind gun control really is.

When the 'armed populace' is connected to an authoritarian cause as were the Italian Blackshirts, the KKK in the South, Nazis and Commies in Germany around 1930, or Commie "Action Committees' in Czechoslovakia in 1948, then democracy is either dead or moribund. Firearms are usually servants of authoritarian causes.

And they inevitably try to keep them out of the hands of the populace to secure their hold on power.  The state has always been an authoritarian institution.

...and so is practically every private or public bureaucracy. Armed revolts against oppressive elites either fail or (because they are simply power struggles between splintered or competing elites) mere power struggles between authoritarian types.

Liberty, some scholars have suggested, is a quantifiable reality.  The question remains: which liberties are more relevant to what people? For rapacious plutocrats, the definitive freedom is that those plutocrats can monopolize and crush labor disputes.  For a mobster, liberty might come from corrupting the political and legal order and keeping out competition. For a commie, liberty might be the absence of capitalist exploitation. For a slave-owning planter it is that the security of ownership of one's workforce has no challenge. 

But none of these is the Common Man. What is liberty for a factory worker, an office clerk, a cab or bus driver, or a farm laborer? Or if you look at a more middle-class occupation, a schoolteacher or an accountant?


It's easier to describe freedom by describing its absence. 



It takes a great artist to show what freedom means as a positive image... admit it: Norman Rockwell, not appreciated so much when he was alive, is precious today as his world becomes at best quaint when gentrified and at worst seedy when left to the worst tendencies of human nature. Freedom of speech means that one has the right to disagree; without the freedom of speech we are stuck with the disagreeable. Sometimes what we say can be strident and unpleasant -- but if we can challenge what really is nasty we can challenge the nastiness instead of having to endorse it for mere survival.



Freedom from want may not mean that we get all that we desire, but it implies that the basic decencies of life are within reasonably-easy reach of people with modest talent and effort. I do not say that I have the right to enjoy lobster while in a house with a splendid view of San Francisco Bay or Cape Cod; I might have to settle for beans in a trailer in which any attractive view is from a TV screen or is some mass-market chromo. Certainty of being fed looks like a basic right in practice in a democracy. It's telling that there has never been a famine in a country with free elections, no matter how poor the country is. That includes even India and Botswana, countries that have been very poor and subject to vagaries of the weather. Thug Japan was on the brink of famine in September 1945, but the American occupation officers ensured that returning Japanese soldiers went to the farms and rice paddies for the harvest. The last famine in Europe was the Hunger Winter of 1944-1945 in the Netherlands, then under occupation of the Devil's Reich. Before and after the Second World War, the Netherlands was a net exporter of food. Yes, the Netherlands was exporting food between May 1940 and May 1945 -- to Nazi Germany, but not getting paid for its exports and not getting the first right to determine that the People got fed first. (The southern part of the Netherlands, liberated in the summer of 1944, never experienced the Hunger Winter of 1944-45).

To be sure, as Mohandas Gandhi put it, "The world can support all human need, but it cannot support all human greed". This remains true. Where there are free and competitive elections a reliable food supply matters far more than do wars for profit, show projects, rushed industrialization, indulgence of pampered groups, or subjection of minorities. Where there is no democracy, as in feudal societies, Nazi Germany, the Stalin-era Soviet Union, Mao's China, various colonial orders, Apartheid-era South Africa, and even food-rich "Ku Kluxistan", hunger and malnutrition are commonplace among those to whom the government has no meaningful responsibility.




Freedom from fear implies that one does not have the dubious responsibility to dread some death squad, secret police agency, criminal syndicate, or powerful clique able to order one about, separate one from loved ones, take away a career, or even kill one. Fear implies a debased life, even if the fear has nothing to do with politics. Maybe we can't give up our fear of cancer, heart disease, Parkinsonism, Alzheimer's, or vehicle crashes... but we certainly do not deserve a Gestapo, an NKVD, Tontons Macoutes, Mukhabarat, or Mississippi State Sovereignty Committee. Sure, if you cheat people with the mails or with wires you deserve the attention of the Feds... lots of people are in federal prison for mail fraud or wire fraud. Do the time if you do the crime... if the crime is murder, rape, robbery, arson, or drunk driving. Disagreeing with the government is not in the same league except under authoritarian and tyrannical regimes.



Freedom of worship implies the right to believe in something other than the official policy of the day when such is contrary to moral values and culture. Make no mistake: what is available to most people as a comforting religion generally reflects their cultural beliefs and affiliations. That means that one has the right to treat what most people consider normal respect for the Flag is a form of idolatry (as with Jehovah's Witnesses). That means that one has the right to reject all relevance of Jesus Christ as a prophet (Islam) or Lord and Savior (Christianity).  One has the right to reject pork (Islam and Orthodox Judaism), alcohol (Islam and many Christian sects), tobacco and sodas (Mormonism), and meat altogether. One has the right to express one's religious beliefs in attire. Of course, freedom from religion is also a right.

Source used for educational purposes: Smithsonian Magazine