“The question whether one might not imagine a world in which it was not necessary to work in order to live is really an idle one, since it concerns not given reality but a fiction. Asking it, however, is always an attempt to belittle the ethical view. For if it were a perfection on the part of existence that work was unnecessary, the most perfect life would be that of someone who did not have to work. It could then only be by attaching to the word ‘duty’ the sense of a lamentable necessity that one could say it was a duty to work. Duty would then express not the universally human but what is general, and here duty would not express perfection. Therefore I would reply quite properly that it would have to be considered an imperfection on the part of existence that man had no need to work. The lower the level of human life, the less the necessity of work is apparent; the higher, the more obvious it becomes. The duty of working in order to live expresses the universally human, and expresses the universal in another way too because it expresses freedom. It is precisely through work that man makes himself free, through work he becomes master of nature, through work he shows he is higher than nature. […] [What] struggle could be more formative than that of making ends meet! […] I shall not insist so adamantly on my rights as to challenge you to make clear just where in your aesthetics you deal with this matter; I merely leave it to you to consider whether in this struggle life loses its beauty if one does not will it so, or whether it does not gain a higher beauty. To deny that such a struggle exists is madness; to forget it because it passes you by is thoughtlessness, and inasmuch as one pretends to a view of life, callousness or cowardice. […]”
Yet here I finally depart from
Kierkegaard, on principle. It ought to obvious, at least to us in our present
age, that the truly conscientious individual would find no shortage of
worthwhile endeavours, having eliminated the felt need to conspire on behalf of
one’s own survival. Furthermore, it is precisely this gift for imagination
which endows the modern public servant, often from a young age, with a
sprawling, keen awareness of one’s own potential, and it is precisely this
sense of identity which is compromised most severely by day labour.
Additionally, while the conscientious individual has no shortage of plans to
benefit one’s own society, the felt need to survive is perhaps the most common corrosive
force in the life of the mind, acting both upon the conscientious and the base,
leveling the two alike, so that the unconscientious individual will find no
shortage of excuses for the evils of the world within the Ideal of Survival.
Thus, while the conscientious individual is squandered, the unconscientious
individual will prosper under any paradigm that pits all men against each other
(and including women in the struggle is no moral victory, accordingly). Finally,
it must be made clear that ANY work which is performed as a means to an end is
corrupt. A work ethic emerging out of such an enterprise is nothing more than individual
manipulation. The reason that the drudgery of a routine remains unsatisfying to
the conscientious man is that there is no guarantee that by performing it he
saves the World outside himself. The individual who TRULY cares for the
Survival of ALL Human Beings and Their Friends will never rest when only one’s
own ends are met, and it is no mistake that “making ends meet” sounds like “seeking
one’s own ends”. The pragmatism of the Work Force is quite often falsely “justified”
by the sheer difficulty of the labour, yet it only can be “justified” accordingly
by being filtered through a narcissistic egoism that’s engendered by the primal
“struggle to survive”, a struggle which so warps the minds of workers (and empowers
those whose minds are warped already) that the labour thus becomes more
difficult than it need be, ESPECIALLY for those who do it conscientiously.
Those who are sensitive and
conscientious often die of suicide once the awareness of their meaningless
routines and lifestyles, coupled with an underdeveloped imagination and the
pains of labour, gives birth to a number of fantasies of escape which take
precedence OVER the primitive drives. All men under such a paradigm cannot wait
to go home, since their commitment is a ruse, and those who will equate their
Lives with such a Duty will, by the same token, hurry towards the End of the
Shift. (Hence, suicide rates tend to be higher in men than they are in women,
for the “man” is charged more severely by tradition with work, and traditional
woman’s primary “labour” was, for a long time, the production of more men.) Of
the survivors, this much may be observed: that they are often liars,
hypocritical and eager to maintain the RUSE of true commitment while exploiting
their own power and subordinates. The struggle to survive becomes the very
birth of vanity.
[({Dm.R.G.)}]
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