Human Aren't Lazy

Humans aren't lazy. Laziness must be taught. Show me a lazy person and I'll show you someone who learned somewhere that effort was a waste of time and that no real benefit would come of it. This usually happens in schools. This is a tragedy, almost beyond belief.

Have you ever known a pre-school kid who wasn't a bundle of energy and excitement? It kills me to admit that I've known several and they were products of brutal and dysfunctional homes. Every other kid I've ever known hasn't learned that life isn't worth the effort until they began to attend schools, and most managed to maintain interests outside despite them.

One must patiently demonstrate that hard work yields no meaningful rewards over a sustained period. Negative feedback helps, verbal abuse and threats of physical punishments, occasionally the punishments too, help. The purpose is to prepare consumers to engage in meaningless drudgery to afford expensive necessities made that way deliberately to require consumers to engage in meaningless drudgery so that some corporate executive or share holder can skim off whatever real value is created by meaningless drudgery.

There are plenty of jobs that this has been a suitable preparation for, our current "recovery" features them and almost nothing else. And we continue to teach kids to be consumers rather than creators despite all those corporate executives and share holders having decided they should not pay people for meaningless drudgery, it would be better to get interns to do it on their parents dime. To repair this will require a comparable investment to that mal-investment we call "education" in showing people that to the extent they make efforts to improve their lot, they will benefit materially and psychologically from their actions and the harder they work the more they will be rewarded.

The good news is that wherever this has been tried, it has worked. If people are allowed real benefits from making the world a better place, they will make a better place in it. The problem for executives and shareholders is if you allow this, people will decide for themselves what makes their lives better and likely won't want the bullshit goods and social structures corporate profits depend on.

Apparently our corporate titans at Davos would rather have the mass of humanity simply die than give up the control they impose through their economic dominance. There is no other explanation for the corporate indulgences in every facet of our current economic model. Everything we need to make the world a better place is in the hands of people who are quite happy with things just as they are, and if you're not happy with this best of all possible worlds, for them, you are quite free to starve, or get cancer, or robbed or whatever misfortune you can't afford to avoid.

It is a set of decisions made by the powerful to allow us to better ourselves, or to insist as they now do that our efforts be directed toward bettering them. Having invested over the post Buckley vs Valeo era in the necessary modifications to our governing structure to optimize all its branches for the needs of corporate executives and the commercial empires they control, these executives and business institutions have apparently decided it is better that most people just quietly die off rather than improve the world.

We don't have to let this happen, though its so far developed that whenever organization to oppose it starts, corporations and the government they own coordinate both propaganda and police action to disrupt, discredit and re-direct. And of course, the people most victimized by these changes are just those who have learned helplessness in school, those who have learned to be "lazy" because nothing has ever worked for them. None the less, trends that can't go on for ever, won't.