Several close friends have been laid off or have been looking for work for a while. Some of them live in large cities, others in smaller communities. Others still in midsize places. Some are entirely online, others are mostly online. None of them are looking for work I’d call “mostly or somewhat offline.”
I have half-formed thoughts about this, but chief among them is: “Isn’t it kinda wild that we talk about work entirely in terms of having “a job”, and that if “your job” goes away then someone (what Republicans would call “job creators”) would “create a job”. But only if conditions are right, and only if taxes are low, and only if the economy can “support the job”, and only if, I guess, they’re feeling some part risk-taking and generous.
It’s wild that if we could somehow reanimate Ben Franklin or really anyone from before about 150 years ago, there are many things that might annoy, befuddle, or amuse them. (Indoor plumbing is my go-to for what I’d show Ben. “Where does it go? It just goes…away!”)
The list of things to be annoyed or angered about is large. But surely the notion that the entire nation, indeed much of the global population, exists primarily on the well-being of a few well-heeled individuals, operating within corporations that are “persons,” and work really only happens through and with those corporate “citizens”.
To someone of just 150 years ago, the idea that people were divorced from their work and merely slotted into “jobs” is a ridiculous notion. There is plenty of things to do to support yourself, they’d think. “Why, you could farm, sew, tend to the land and herd, build your house, preserve food, and…” on and on.
Someone like a Ben Franklin would look at our world today, and, even as urban a citizen as he was, would probably wonder how an entire civilization could be completely ignorant of self-sufficiency. “This must be how civilizations end,” he’d think. “These people can’t clothe themselves, feed themselves, shelter themselves, or stay warm.”
Absent a knob on the wall, how many people do you know could keep themselves warm in the depths of winter with nothing but their wits? I suspect many.
Not only do we not know how to start a fire without chemicals, but our ignorance also extends to how to eat, how to produce food in the best way, how to entertain ourselves on our own, and even how to communicate with one another.
The Great Digest tells us, “…the chief way for the production of wealth is that the producers be many and that the mere consumers be few…”
One wonders where we went wrong. Was it the military industrial complex? The industrial revolution? The steam engine? The cotton gin? Slavery?
Consumer mentality being what it is, the chief motive of our entire economy and culture is consumerism, the fear of missing out, and the maintenance of something resembling “affluence.” We are in a state of total consumerism and yet, most people can’t produce anything of serious biological need.
In school, we were taught that this dependence was a good thing. We’ve rationalized this by saying it’s an economic miracle and the benefit of capitalism. We can improve economic “efficiency” by allowing people to play games for a living, or make movies, or websites, or be politicians, or any number of other weird jobs because we can just buy everything we need from “someplace else.”
Thing is, “someplace else” has increasingly become a mystery. You have no idea what region of the country the meat in your freezer is from. You have little idea what state the vegetables in your fridge are from. The components in the chair you are sitting on come from parts unknown. Perhaps the wood was from a tree in Canada, the hinges from China, but the screws are from metal sourced from ore out of Russia. Who knows! Who cares?
Shouldn’t we care?
This goes beyond those people we all know who eat out for nearly every meal because “they can’t cook”.
Shouldn’t we care about ways to sustain ourselves? Shouldn’t we care about ways to sustain our communities?
When we talk about our economy being “globalized” or “industrialized”, what we should really be thinking is “homogenized at best, destroyed at worse.” That is:
- The stores in your community will be corporations from distant places.
- The skills you have as a human will atrophy to focus on consumption, not production.
- The work that you do to support yourself will be provided at-will by these distant corporate “persons”.
- Your ability to resist any of this is nigh impossible, simply because of “creative destruction”, “progress”, “industrialization”, and “global economic forces.”
