If you think about the brutality of nature, which we are mostly isolated from, then yeah, organisms in general do have to earn their right to life through overcoming and eating other organisms.
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Which was the point of civilization. To isolate us from that hell.
Even in a civilization someone has to produce food so you'll survive. Civilization doesn't mean no one has to work.
If you do no work but because of civilization you still have food to eat, it means someone else is working to earn your living for you.
This bizarre meme implies work has no value, and was likely made by a wealthy university socialist that had everything paid for by their parents so doesn't understand the value of work.
This meme does not state no one needs to work. It states you don't need to earn your place among the living. You've already done so by virtue of being born. I think that is a noble goal for a society to uphold. Higher ideals are, of course, what separates us from the realm of animal urges. Once you begin to mix laws of the jungle back into society the point of our isolation from it is subverted. If we truly are the greatest Earth has to offer, surely we can figure so.
You can't eat higher ideals.
Even Marie Antoinette wasn't so disconnected from the peasants to say "let them eat higher ideals."
Someone has to work so you can survive. If you don't want to work, society will take care of you. You'll still be living, but you aren't earning it, someone else is earning it for you.
Once again, this is not saying society will take care of you and everyone will just sit on their bussies and no one will ever lift a finger. This is repealing the idea that you have to earn your stake to be considered human and alive in a world that has abstracted everything away to just getting funny paper. People will still farm and cultivate crops. There are people who want to do that now. Are you vehemently opposed to people just feeling and being accepted from birth? I for one think a society built on more welcoming foundations would see less crime and more work.
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Who here is saying "No one should work" no one except maybe the most high on their own farts anarchist is saying that. The end goal of marxism is "From each According to their abilities to each according to their needs" their will be work, The farm will be ploughed. THe difrence is all will be provided for.
And if I were to decide that I didn't want to work according to my ability, I would still be provided for?
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Less than two steps between that and eugenics, and one step between eugenics and genocide. We’ve seen and documented that. It’s a logical but sociopathic mentality.
Conversely, when we realise that we’re stronger together and act empathetically as a society, every one of us and all of society benefits. When we care for the least of us, crime goes down and we find geniuses who improve life for us all, who would otherwise die in anonymous poverty.
Living like barbarous animals – not rising above the ‘brutality of nature’, as you said – helps sociopaths who take advantage of our better nature to enrich themselves. Indeed, if we structure our society around that, as we have done lately, our society will devolve around the lowest common denominator (people like Musk or Trump).
We can and must do better than that.
Now now, clearly the libs infiltrated mother nature to make a system so brutal
We're always told the people at the bottom rung of society, the people doing "entry level" jobs just need to work harder and harder to earn a proper living...
But how does that work really? Unlike a lot of high level jobs, none of these jobs just exist for the sake of existing, most of these "entry level" jobs are essential to society (we saw that much during the pandemic).
Somebody has to do them or society just doesn't work, so don't the people doing these literally essential jobs deserve to be paid a fair living wage? They're working just as hard as the people above them, yet they're paid peanuts in comparison
I would say most of them are working harder than the people above them.
Ain't that the truth.
Id never worked harder than when I was working retail as a HS student. And the worst part is interacting with assholes who thought you were beneath them, which I think it's what this meme underlines.
was lucky to be well off to get an education which provided a way to land a cushy SW job. Mentally stressful at times sure, but I didn't have to take shit from somebody and worry if I could afford my next meal. And I see the same ego on the other side here, where people sneer or condescend towards min wage workers.
So many things we take for granted are just down to luck, or lack thereof.
Now I don't know how it would feel to be wealthy. Where money ceases to be something you need to think about on a day to day basis, but I think that's when it just becomes a status symbol, and you have to make more only because the Jones bought their 4th yacht, so of course you can't be seen with less than that! It never ends, and that's why I think rich-ass capitalists can never have enough, because in their mind the competition never ends and no amount is ever enough.
I said this on Reddit and they agreed that you don't deserve to be alive if you're not working, it's really a disease of the mind to believe this shit.
I mean it does make sense if you keep in mind that we traded having to hunt and forage for a system that let's you buy these things indirectly with currency.
You just need to leave out the whole thing of empathy and morality and reduce the whole system to a exchange of goods and services for money.
There is a difference between believing everyone owes a debt to the society and civilization you participate in to support those who cannot support themselves, and not deserving to live if you didn't fit into the rigid hierarchy structures we've built for work. But often these sentiments get mixed together.
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It’s more like you haven’t earned the right for other people to do the work of keeping you alive.
Human life requires work to sustain. Someone has to do that work. The most fair system is one in which that responsibility falls on the person benefitting from it.
ie, to be alive, you must contribute work. Because your life requires work to maintain.
I'm so torn on this meme because on the one hand I have the same gut reaction of "yeah, but youll die if you don't do jack shit in the woods, you kind of have to be useful to live".
But then I think about our society ...... the billions of dollars going to rich people who do nothing, the millions of people who work in jobs that are useless, or the millions who work jobs that actively harm society, and in that context, the amount and type of work does seem like bullshit. It's not like going into your marketing firm 5/7 days of your life means a farmer gets to work less. People like to comfort themselves with vain thoughts like 'we all just gotta do our partfor the system to work', but that's objectively not true. Lots of parts of our system are objectively bullshit and are excised completely through new laws and legislation and society keeps working fine, in some cases much better.
"Earning a living" doesn't state that people should die if the choose to be a grifter or a thief or some other dishonest person that takes from others and doesn't contribute to society. It just means those people didn't earn their living.
In a functional society everyone should contribute to better the society. "Earning a living" is a statement of pride in contributing to society value equal to or greater than the value you get from it. If someone is making a living through dishonest means so isn't earning a living, it can be something they should be ashamed of
Note that socialist societies have similar expressions like "from each according to their ability to each according to their need". The intent is the same, encourage people to contribute to society. What if I don't contribute according to my ability and just want to take what I need? Does that statement imply I'll be sent to a gulag if I don't contribute according to my ability? OMG socialism says I don't deserve to live!!!
This meme is mainly talking about workers who are worked to death to "earn a living". Capitalists who leech off of workers do not deserve to be alive.
Of course, that's not the case for those who are physically unable to work to the same extent as others. Basically, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
We have more than enough resources for everyone, so long as the working class can control the means of production instead of the capitalists who try to hoard all the wealth.
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I'm pro unconditional basic income, but I would argue that it's more about you having to make sure you have everything you need yourself. No one would say to someone who lives completely self-sufficient that he needs "to earn a living".
I mean if you think about it, the default of humanity is to die of thirst assuming we were to do nothing so 'earning a living' is just a realistic expectation for any society.
If able, you should provide enough to society to make it worth meeting your basic needs. They give you food, water, shelter, you give them back enough to compensate them for that effort.
At its root, this is what cash should be, a measure of what society owes you. You make other people's lives X much better, and they do the same for you.
We should really be trying harder to get cash to meet this goal. A person making 60k a year for 45 years is $2.7 million dollars. You can buy a person's lifetime of effort for $2.7 million.
Bill Gates is worth $131 billion. That's the lifetime effort of 48,500 people. He hasn't improved our lives that much. Something is clearly out of sorts. There's nothing one person can do to deserve the lifetime effort of a thousand people.
How much time has personal computing saved in your life? Are you really sure Gates hasn’t produced 48k lifetimes worth of saved time by his efforts?
It doesn't matter. One person can't put forth 48k lifetimes worth of effort, and they don't deserve that much in return.
I promise the dude hasn't worked harder than the combined efforts of 48 thousand people.
We can reward talent, and we can reward effort. But no combination of those two is as ridiculous as our reward structure. Our reward structure is flawed because people with money make the rules, and their primary rule is that people with money should have more money.
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Being evil pays really well. Sometimes.
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Actually, "earning a living" is an example of an idiom, and it is not meant to be interpreted literally. It just means aquiring the income necessary to pay for the basic expenses of modern life. You may also notice that people rarely find themselves inside of pickles or with butterflies in their stomachs, but before you get angry that someone is suggesting you should break your leg, remember that figurative speech is fairly common.
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That is 100% true in a capitalist society. You are measured by your ability to produce.
Edit: Apparently this needs some clarification. You are measured by your ability to produce for your owner.
It's also true in the woods, if you don't do anything useful you'll just die.
... or by your ability to steal from others and getting away with it.
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Thank you Mr. Skeletor. It is important to get the occasional outside perspective on living from an undead evil villain. Nyeh.
You need to consume to live. This means you need to manipulate your surroundings in order to survive. So you need to work to have your basic needs meet. You don't just get to live with zero effort.
This is the natural order, yet paraplegics live, why? Because we live in a society that attempts to circumvent the natural order in many ways, for the good of all.
You should take a broader materialistic look on society, who does the work (the working class), who benefits from the work (the owner class), and instead of focusing on amping up people to devote their lives to serve the interests of capital, instead focus to reframe the goals of society to serve the interests of workers, which includes working less, or even not at all. Work is not labor.
That's an entirely different argument. I agree with you on that topic. Reframing capitalism to fit human well being is what we should do. But feeding everyone for free with zero work from anyone just isn't possible. Saying there are starving people because capitalism is just straight up wrong. There have always been starving people and probably will always be. Feeding everyone is logistically crazy difficult. If it ever did happen it would take a ridiculous amount of work and money from a lot of people.
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Thank you brave friend. I came here to say this.
I’m so fatigued by the sentiment behind this meme and so many others.
Ergh… there’s something intruding on my video game playing… what an inconvenience… boo hoo…
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Youths of today discovering idioms of yesteryear going, "mm technically, this implies..." as if that wasn't the obvious, intended implication to begin with.
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And yet we get born. Motherfuckers!
That's exactly how it happens.
You do have a right to be alive, if you can gather the food to put in your mouth and get shelter (in most climates), and defend yourself from predators.
'Earning a living' is just some way people can do that. But you still need to defend against the predators.
When you become a billionaire you should be forced to earn a living. Prove to the world why we shouldn't eat you this year
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