Why Work Is Absurd and Economics Doesn’t Matter

Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash

Nearly every plan — and in reality, there is no plan — to save the world from climate disaster is an economic plan.

Why is that?

Nearly every person on Earth is on an endless pursuit of money. This isn’t ambition and a consuming desire to get rich. It’s the humbler goal, to eat and have a roof over one’s head. To stay alive one more day.

What makes this necessary is our existing economic system. We live within this system like a fish in water.

Now it’s easy to give the system a name — capitalism is often identified as the enemy. But it’s more than capitalism. It’s every system that enables an elite to force others to work for them, for most of their lives, often until death.

Whether you are working to meet the demands of the Chinese Communist Party, or Putin’s Kleptocrats, or the widespread Plutocrats best symbolized by Wall Street, you are caught.

And all of these systems — which seem to be in competition with each other — are united in exploiting you and in ruining the biosphere of our Earth with oil.

Ironically, the greatest danger in the world, and the worst abuse is where the world is united, not where it’s divided.

Obedience of the Masses

Your work is almost certainly useless and very likely destructive. Both you and the planet would be better off if you did not work.
This seems like a ridiculous claim. We have all been taught about the merits of work, of how it builds character, how work gives us a purpose, and how ambition focuses and energizes us. Idleness is the enemy. Or so we are taught.

What this means is that every moment you don’t use to earn money, to work in servitude to an exploitive and undeserving elite, you are lazy and useless and your life is empty.

The exact opposite is true. This bears repeating. The exact opposite is true.

Work is meaningless, work wastes your life, work is immoral because it demeans life, and because it’s a tool being used to make the Earth itself uninhabitable.

That the business and political leaders and systems of the world are united in destroying the Earth is half of the problem. The other half is our obedience. WE are carrying out their wishes, at a terrible cost to ourselves and our planet. WE have bought into their cruel and utterly foolish narrative. WE are acting as the agents of death, of our own death, of the deaths of our loved ones, and of the death of our planet.

Here’s the other side of the coin. WE have all the power. Because it is us, and only us, who can carry out the foolish scheme of our exploiters, WE can stop it.

This doesn’t require action. It requires INACTION. I am not the first to discover this. We’ve known for along time that “powerful people” get all of their power by hoodwinking huge numbers of people to do their dirty work. Time and again, we’ve realized that and “people power” has thwarted the evil intent of those in positions of authority.

Since this is so common, such an obvious pattern, it’s very impressive that this open secret has been kept from us. That’s why authorities ignore and diminish every instance where “people power” won. They try to continue pushing the “great men of history” myth. But history isn’t made by self-promoting big shots. History is made by people waking up to their power, wielding it, and easily shooing puffed up thugs and making them flee in terror.

Strong men are weak. The Shah. Mubarak. Ceaușescu. Milošević. They all give up and run once they don’t have armed stooges to hide behind. And, although it’s an industry and not one foolish man, Big Oil is vulnerable in exactly the same way.

The only thing that allows them to do anything is our obedience. As the Earth is being cooked in plain sight, we ARE waking up to both the challenge and the fact that it is US who must save Nature, in opposition to our leaders who are on the side of death.

No Place For Anger. We Win With Love and Noncooperation.

We are in a very good position to win this. The authorities are already losing their grip, and losing their ability to continue credibly repeating their lies. We know exactly where they have led us. We know exactly what we are up against.

We can see that the leaders of the world are in over their heads, that the hell on Earth that they unleashed is overwhelming them.

The only way for them to win is for us to be as foolish as they are. They can only win if we use violence against them. If we stir up hatred and fear within ourselves and become fools who fight fire with fire instead of water.

We won’t do that. We have learned the lessons of history and the lessons of successful movements. Movements that change the world for the better are built on love, not hate or fear. And they wield nonviolent noncooperation, not guns or bombs.

This Better World

We will create a better world. We will do this by ending Big Oil (and all fossil fuels) by refusing to do any work whatsoever in that industry. We will leave the oil in the ground and no force by any dictator can make us get it for them. Any attempt to force us will merely expose the desperation and impotence of leaders and authorities who are losing their grip.

Economics, as we’ve known it, will end. We won’t work for money and we won’t produce any worthless crap. We won’t cook our own habitat for someone else’s profit.

We aren’t insane. We are ending the insanity.

Instead, we will produce what human beings need—healthy food, medicine and the like—and give it to people so they can go about their lives and fully experience their short wonderful and astounding decades of consciousness, of life. We will do that out of mutual love and respect for our fellow human beings.

We understand that it’s cruel and absurd for anyone to go hungry or homeless just because they are unable or unwilling to work to enrich an undeserving elite. Instead of all of us working our entire lives for no real purpose, most of us will work a tiny bit—producing necessities—empowering all of us to live as human beings and not as mere human resources.

This will not be paradise, but it will be as close to paradise as imperfect humans can get. We are at a turning point in history. We can submit to fools, or we can take control and create the beautiful world and civilization that was always within reach, but obscured from our view.