https://tan2tents.podbean.com/e/you-arent-paid-to-think/
“you just don’t think”, explained my dad as he expressed his frustration with one of his son’s latest folly. We got a lot of laughs out of that one, but the truth is, he was hitting the nail right on the head. I wasn’t thinking about the work at hand, and that is why the errors occurred on such a regular basis. A truck getting stuck, it’s front bumper being torn in the effort of extracting it from the slough it never should have been stuck in in the first place. A harrow frame snapped off when a corner was turned too sharply and the cable wrapped itself around the driving wheel. Cattle that got the wrong feed; chickens that weren’t fed at all.
He was right, but really in the sense that we weren’t thinking about what we should have been thinking about: doing the things necessary to sustain all our lives on the family farm. I was blessed to live the life of a country boy, dressed in jeans and a teeshirt, cowboy boots and grime under my nails. I resented having to get up off the couch and head out to fix a fence, or to load a bunch of cattle for their final trip to town. It interfered with the things my brain was working on at the time. I had my own interests and they had very very little to do with my life on the farm. Mom never failed to be sure there was always food in the fridge and meals on the table, and for whatever reason, when resources are always nearby, you lose interest in how they got there and the problem of what would happen if that ceased to be the case.
The first time i began to realize that food didn’t just appear on it’s own was when i left the farm for greener pastures in the yukon. I was 19 and a check in the mail gave me the cash i needed to make the 2000 mile drive to whitehorse and start a new life there, free from cattle, wheat fields and being involved in the chores of the farm. (Interesting that when i spend some time back on that same farm, i now find enjoyment in the work i used to resent, the work i was at first pushed to do, then tolerated, then looked forward to expectantly. )
And work, whether it was forking manure onto a wheelbarrow, or welding a driveshaft together in a machine shop in whitehorse, began to be something which i no longer resented. It became a joy, especially when i finally grasped that i could be my own employer. When i finally learned to get along with my new boss, i learned I could create my own sort of business and even prosper in it. This freed me from being yelled at by a different boss or a colleague and the fear of being fired if i failed to perform satisfactorily. The world was my boss and they could never all fire me, at least not all at once. There was always another customer and another, and the higher the quality of my work and the more of it i did, the more people showed up.
As a side note, it’s been a strange phenomenon to discover that, when i am unable or unwilling to produce for people for whatever reason, they seem resentful and even angry at times, as if they somehow have a right to the fruit of my labor.
Somehow, someone is working to kill the work ethic. The problem is unlikely to have a single person as it’s source, but the discouragements to accomplishment are all about us these days, to the point where it is reasonable to consider if it is worth the trouble to put on pants and a cap and head out the door in the morning. One could understand why many have come to that very conclusion, and are now actively” nursing from governmental paps instead. Regulations, which someone has renamed “strangulations” (now who could that be?) Vexations taxations, which steal from the productive to hand them to the unproductive and the useless, while mostly sustaining the thieves civil servants carrying out their duties daily, and the fines and prizes for those who misstep, intentionally or unintentionally, have taken the fun out of working these days.
Currently, i am struggling through Ayn Rand’s ponderous tome, “Atlas Shrugged”, and every once in a while, like trudging through a field of tall weeds, a small clearing is reached and you see the sunlight streaming through unfiltered. To be fair, the book makes many many wonderful points throughout , but i almost put it down for good around page 212 with 800 stingily-spaced pages still to go. Using the justification of love for adultery was a fridge too far for my tastes. I like the idea of keeping a promise especially when it really starts to hurt too much, perhaps, but that’s just me. Beyond that, the general theme is that men don’t think. Ayn Rand and my dad were on the same page there.
Maybe you have noticed this universal tendency as well, that people seem to resent the process of figuring things out for themselves, and even for those who enjoy cranial activity, there is another problem with grasping some eternal truth. Sharing it is dangerous. As the japanese are fond of saying, “the high nail must be driven down”. The japanese are like that, they have a lot of fond sayings. Or as a colleague of mine in the welding shop i once inhabited testified, his foreman in a mine in Faro Yukon walked up and told him to slow it down a bit. Don’t work so hard. He quit to his credit. He slowed down all right. He slowed down quite a lot. And that is the correct way to deal with stupidity, by allowing and even assisting it to go all the way to it’s rightfully deserved conclusion, and as fast a possible.
Our two countries, the dsa and canada, especially canada, seem fascinated with the old idea of hoovering every resource possible from the productive under the pretense of sharing it with the unproductive and the useless. This is an old story of course, and it has been tried unsuccessfully all over the world but let’s give it another go of course this time it will work i just no it.
Socialism and capitalism have this in common: both involve man’s exploitation of man. Perhaps we should just accept that nice fact and enjoy being exploited by capitalists and socialists, those among us who still produce something useful, that is. If you produce nothing and never have, yet feel exploited, the feeling of being abused isn’t really a legitimate emotion in your case. But if you are the one getting up in the dark because a task needs completing and it will be dark again before it is done, perhaps it is time to consider how much of your production you really want stolen and shared with “those in need”, when “those in need” include people enjoying identical, large amounts of hot cash being auto-deposited into personal accounts every 2 weeks, whose destructive decisions don’t affect their own lives in the slightest, yet do such huge damage to our own.
In “Atlas Shrugged” the productive figures in the country, and especially the most gifted ones, the ones who dream up new and better ways of moving products from producer to consumer, who build bridges and office towers and ice cream machines, decide to withdraw their talents altogether from the country and view the results from a hidey-hole in the mountains. It’s an interesting idea, one that seems quite practical in fact. If those who work for themselves and see opportunity in providing a needed product for others, a product even essential for their lives suddenly heeded the cries of the exploited and dropped their workloads on their critics, would the critics pick up the ball and score a touchdown?
If those overlords of ours really “seized the means of production” without seizing also the ones who know how to use the means of production and forcing them to work at what they now do voluntarily, would the results be any more spectacularly successful than are today’s results? Because my suspicion would be that the keyboard artists in all those departments would be utterly lost at the controls of a five axis milling machine. At least at first. And the learning curve would take years, whilst starvation occurs much more quickly.
The skilled and the talented will it seems, always be the least respected and acknowledged amongst us, while the grifters and the financial string pullers will receive the polite nods and grins when they dine at fine restaurants and board their numerous flights of interest. That is to be expected. What is not expected is the sudden realization that our work is being used to fund our own destruction.
And that is something to ponder, isn’t it, even for those of us who do not think. It’s true we aren’t paid to think, but it’s also just as true that it really does pay to think.
But don’t think about it too hard, wouldn’t want to burn a belt in there somewhere.
Skulltripper 