As long as competition is a prerequisite for work, then what you are defending is not a work ethic but a competition ethic. For the unfortunate fact that competition is a prerequisite for work, I blame the market, not the state, though the latter is to blame for plenty of considerably more serious atrocities. If you want to castigate people for not being winners, you’re entitled to your sick and twisted opinion, but please don’t advertise it as castigating people for not being workers.
The competition ethic.
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5 responses to “The competition ethic.”
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With Thomas Jefferson, “I have sworn … eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Unfortunately most of us are forced to maintain a dual-forked system of ethics. One fork is the sovereign prerogative of a free and unfettered conscience. But we must also maintain a second fork of ethics that are imposed upon our outward behavior as a consequence of negotiations with the ethical biases of others, some of whom may hold considerable negotiating advantages over us. That never ceases to suck. That is why we either go into the wilderness (I hear land is still cheap above the Arctic Circle) or we organize.
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[…] ideologues never hesitate to point out. Their punishment for failure to market themselves (which is NOT the same thing as failure to work) is the humiliation and subjugation of being dependent on others, whether that is family, friends, […]
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Hence Basic Income, a way to reward noncompetitive creation/generation of things.
And we will always “compete” but in the sense of overlap, not in the sense of negation, of elbowing each other to take a seat in the Titanic.
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[…] ideologues never hesitate to point out. Their punishment for failure to market themselves (which is NOT the same thing as failure to work) is the humiliation and subjugation of being dependent on others, whether that is family, friends, […]
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