verging_on_random

Life is for working

May 3, 2007 on 11:15 pm | In Uncategorized |

“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” –Theodore Roosevelt

Our current government would heartily agree. Well actually they’d leave out the ‘work worth doing’ bit … they just think life is about working. The more the better.

This fundamentalist belief in the absolute virtues of work is revealed again in this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald. The forthcoming federal budget is apparently going to contain ‘incentives to encourage older people into jobs.’

Why should the government be offering older people ‘incentives’ to get jobs? Well according to Tip Costello:

“Nobody has to feel unwanted or unused, and now my message is to people in their 40s and 50s, who were being put on the scrap heap a decade ago, ‘you’re wanted, you can be used, we want you in the workforce too’.

I suppose there might be people in their 40s and 50s who stopped looking for work because they felt they were ‘on the scrap heap’ but I can’t say I’ve met any. I know a few people of that age who don’t work full-time any more and they do it by choice. I’m not sure how they’ll respond to being told they can be ‘used’ but I don’t think they’ll react very positively. They’ll be quite angry I suspect at the suggestion that it’s any of the government’s business whether or not they choose to work. Just like many couples felt it was none of Smirking Pete’s bloody business how many children they might decide to have.

This kind of mentality reflects the maniacal obsession that the market fundies have with material outcomes. This obsession is the start and finish of their lives; the sole benchmark against which they evaluate anything and everything. According to their twisted values, the only meaningful purpose of a life is to work. Once you stop working, you’re ‘on the scrap heap’. And the purpose of having kids is to make sure there’ll be enough people working in a few years time to keep Teh Economy growing so we can all get richer and richer for ever and ever amen.

It’s a bit like the early settlers’ attitude to land: the Aborigines weren’t entitled to it because they weren’t exploiting it for productive purposes. They just let the land sit there … appalling irresponsibility, when it could have been turned into a saline wasteland in just a cnetury of overuse. Translated to modern life, that attitude says if you’re not using your life to do paid work, then you’re basically a wasted space. All human activity must be evaluated against this one single question: is it producing things to help Teh Economy?

If you think I’m exaggerating, try this other quote from the same story (my emphasis):

The budget will include $30 million to establish a neuroscience research centre at the Prince of Wales Hospital which will focus on preventing or treating diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. The aim is to keep health costs down and people working longer.

I remember a time when people would have looked for ways to prevent disease because it was worth doing for its own sake. It would ease suffereing, make human beings’ lives more enjoyable, allow their friends and families to enjoy more time with their loved ones before the inevitable end. Apparently these are no longer valid reasons to undertake medical research. No, these days we try to keep people healthy so we don’t have to spend money on them, and most important of all, so they can keep bloody well working and make Teh Economy grow.

Cos for the Howards and Costellos of this world, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of business owners and managers out there, that’s the Meaning of Life. Teh Economy. What sad people they are.