Unemployment: Best Indicator of Integrity

[Unidian]

I have come to believe, through both reason and experience, that the one of the best criteria for separating philosophical pretenders from the real deal is the issue of employment. It is my belief that many persons who are serious about fundamental insights will be unemployed for the following reasons:

1. Suffering is a major catalyst for developing an interest in "spiritual" matters. In many cases, those who develop such an interest will be the so-called "losers" of the world who are unable to do well in conventional worldly activities. Often, they will have a mental or physical condition which limits their economic and/or social pursuits, causing them considerable agitation. This suffering will lead them to explore the deeper questions of life. Most people do not get this opportunity because their competence in conventional worldly endeavors is sufficient to ensure that they remain satisfied with them.

2. Once a person has begun the process of acquiring philosophical insight, he or she becomes increasingly isolated from the values of the majority. Belief after belief is discovered to be without substance. Eventually, for many, there comes a point at which the conventional motivations underlying employment become insufficiently forceful to keep a person at work. In some cases, thinkers may need to remain unemployed beyond this point due to urgent commitments or circumstances. For many, however, this is quitting time. A thinker simply has better things to do than a job. He has uses for his time that are more consistent with his values, such as thinking, reading, playing, or simply "doing nothing."

With a few exceptions, I have become increasingly hesitant to take seriously any philosophical commentary by people who have jobs. Circumstances vary, but in many cases, their having jobs is a plain and obvious sign that their "spiritual" development is in some sense less than my own and therefore I need not pay much attention. I also think that if one were charged with the task of finding the more highly developed thinkers of the world, a list of disability recipients might be very helpful. Don't get me wrong - certainly not all or even a large fraction of the unemployed are substantial thinkers. Most are like anyone else. But if one needs to judge the relative development of an otherwise superfically similar group, the employment criteria could be very useful in separating the men from the boys (reversal of popular views intended).

To some, it will seem as if I must be joking about much or all of this. But I'm not, and certain others will recognize the truth of it immediately. Chances are, those who do will have long since become permanently unemployed, or at least had a period of long-term unemployment. I do believe it is theroretically possible to return to work after having given it up for philosophical reasons, but that is another matter for another thread, and I don't think it could happen without putting in a good number of years away from employment first.

[Elizabeth Isabelle]

I think that it is more of a case that employers and employment situations are so frequently so anti-truth. The exceptions would be ethical jobs (where the ultimate outcome is for good and non-destructive purposes - like organic farming, biomimetic construction, and certain other applications of science) that do not prompt (or worse, require) employees to break ethics along the way (lying, expecting women to entice customers through sexual displays, etc.).

[Trevor Salyzyn]

The truth is that there simply is not that much work to do in the fields that most people would like to work, so a lot of imaginary work gets done in these fields.

I concocted a plan...

1. learn modern farming methods
2. ???
3. become dictator of small African republic of Ethiopia

...and this 3-step plan, even with the missing middle term, shows more awareness of social realities than the average person's career aspirations. (Feed 1 woman and 2 children; sit at desk solving complicated and irrelevant puzzles for 8 hours a day so that these can live in dollhouse for 30 years. Do not get reimbursed.)

[Imadrongo]

How about those who have finished their philosophical inquiry and getting a job is part of their plans?

3. become dictator of small African republic of Ethiopia

Good luck. You are better off doing some military training to start with and then getting an army to back you up over there in Ethiopia. Otherwise assuming you ever manage to reach this position, extremely unlikely, you will be easily taken out.

[Dave Toast]

Step 2: Collect underpants.

[xerox]

...

[extinct]

Unidian:
1. Suffering is a major catalyst for developing an interest in "spiritual" matters. In many cases, those who develop such an interest will be the so-called "losers" of the world who are unable to do well in conventional worldly activities. Often, they will have a mental or physical condition which limits their economic and/or social pursuits, causing them considerable agitation. This suffering will lead them to explore the deeper questions of life. Most people do not get this opportunity because their competence in conventional worldly endeavors is sufficient to ensure that they remain satisfied with them.

1) where does spirituality come in? Getting to the truth of anything is a practical thing.
2) Seeking answers is a healthy thing and is the pursuit of active minds. Active minds are usually efficient at many conventional worldly endeavors.

Elizabeth Isabelle: I think that it is more of a case that employers and employment situations are so frequently so anti-truth.

Bing!

xerox: l have passive income from rental property, so l suck the blood from poor souls by using the earth itself to effect such tyranny. Oh and, the govt gets a piece of the action too, which it then doles out, thusly providing a neat illusory middleman between delusional money attached fools like myself and detached, honest, true and real folks who then accept govt handouts in service of their truth.

I also having always lived by my own means, respect some of the gist of your comments. However, does this (the above) also cover big business suckling at the government teet? Far more money flows upstream then down.

[xerox]

...

[DHodges]

Surely it is beneath you to chop your own wood and carry your own water. You are diligently working on things that are very very important (or, maybe, doing nothing), and must not be distracted or disturbed.

Anyway, LOL, and good luck with that.



WU WEI
The Sage is occupied with the unspoken
and acts without effort.
Teaching without verbosity,
producing without possessing,
creating without regard to result,
claiming nothing,
the Sage has nothing to lose.

[extinct]

Sadly, for lack of an honest (un-compromised), satisfying, goal, I have spent much of my life chopping wood and getting water for others. LOL

[Unidian]

Surely it is beneath you to chop your own wood and carry your own water. You are diligently working on things that are very very important (or, maybe, doing nothing), and must not be distracted or disturbed.

Yep. I'd only add that it isn't a matter of "beneath," but simply an issue of freedom. Also, as Chuang Tzu points out, "doing nothing" is a very misunderstood activity. Engaging in spontaneous, free expression of one's time is a very substantial activity indeed. I'm fond of saying that if I actually wanted to "do nothing" in the sense of spending all my time involved in meaningless and wasteful activities, I'd get a job.

Anyway, LOL, and good luck with that.

Okay, LOL, and good luck with... whatever it is that makes you feel entitled to mock me.

[Cory Duchesne]

For people who don't want to work, there should be shelters provided where people must go. At these very minimalist shelters they should be given no choice but to literally chop their own wood, grow their own food, store it, etc. If they want to experience more power through material items such as a computer, then they should have to do the extra labor to pay for it.

There should be no handouts to people unless they are debilitated due to some sort of illness.

Yep, that last little sentence there drops us very nicely back into ambiguity and dilemma, to the point where the previous paragraph hardly solves anything.

[Ryan Rudolph]

Cory wrote:

For people who don't want to work, there should be shelters provided where people must go. At these very minimalist shelters they should be given no choice but to literally chop their own wood, grow their own food, store it, etc. If they want to experience more power through material items such as a computer, then they should have to do the extra labor to pay for it.

But sages do have a major work handicap compared to mediocre people, they are more sensitive to suffering, they have a difficult time staying interested in laborious tasks, many of them are spatially clumsy, so I don’t believe the government should force these highly conscious individuals to do anything. The genius, which is our elite in society shouldn’t be pressured into any sort of situation, as then they would be totally dependent on the intelligence of the policy makers, which is an undesirable situation. The excessive wealth created by the stupid can be used to pay for the small minority of sages or partial thinkers that lives in any given society. Taking advantage of the current safety nets is probably the best option for the highly conscious at this time.

I just don’t believe there is anything wrong with the present system in countries like Canada and Australia. The social structure accommodates conscious individuals just fine. What you are advocating requires a large deviation away from how the open capitalist system functions, what you are advocating is similar to what communist Russia did in the past.

For instance: Most fertile farm land in Canada is privately owned, so the government would have to buy out large areas of farm land from conventional farmers and to allow these conscious people to work the land, which would cost millions of dollars, and they would have to invest money into keeping the land up to date with supplies, equipment and so on. They also would have to build large dormitory buildings, which would cost hundreds of thousands, and pay many employees to live on site to oversee the estate to make sure everyone is pulling their own weight, and not abusing the rules.

How much money do you think this endeavor would cost the tax payers annually? Then you would have to deal with runaways, and trying to keep enough farmers on site at all times to keep the system working properly. I imagine it would be quite the headache, and economic black hole myself.

It is very similar to how a dictatorship treats their citizens, and no economy is sustainable like that. The intellectual elite should experience uninterrupted idleness, with very little manual labor.

Moreover, to pay for this type of operation annually would actually cost more than just having the small minority of people living off of social assistance.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

To some, it will seem as if I must be joking about much or all of this. But I'm not, and certain others will recognize the truth of it immediately. Chances are, those who do will have long since become permanently unemployed, or at least had a period of long-term unemployment. I do believe it is theoretically possible to return to work after having given it up for philosophical reasons, but that is another matter for another thread, and I don't think it could happen without putting in a good number of years away from employment first.

There's a lot of truth in what you write there Unidian. And as you already hint at: it's a relative truth: unemployment or any detachment from "conventional worldly activities" works very well for specific people in specific circumstances. It certainly is much like a certain stage in spiritual development of many, a stage which doesn't necessarily will be followed up, since each stage has the lure of portraying itself as a finality, a completeness unto itself. That's the principle that powers the stage as well as the final blind spot.

At other times it's more about the psychological make-up, the distribution of our energy, the ease of becoming distracted that dictates the submerging into the noise or the quiet, living with the quick or the dead. But it needs a lot of wisdom to tune this without over time creating a bonding way worse than the earlier 'involved' life.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

For people who don't want to work, there should be shelters provided where people must go. At these very minimalist shelters they should be given no choice but to literally chop their own wood, grow their own food, store it, etc....

I'm reminded of Gautama, who realized that being by being a beggar and living off of scraps, he caused a lot less suffering than by being a prince.

It is the same situation here: if someone refuses to work, he is very likely going to find a way to survive -- by living off of scraps -- that causes less suffering than he would have caused through a lifetime of greed. A man should not be punished for deciding that table scraps and idleness is better than hard work for palaces.

[Cory Duchesne]

Ryan, Trevor and others - good points.

I think if someone wants to get paid enough to survive for being a spiritual thinker, then Canada, Australia and other places do have a decent set up: e.g., present oneself as a spiritual thinker to some authorities and become diagnosed as mentally ill. That's why I said that there should be handouts to those who are considered ill. And that's why I said that the factor of who is ill and who isn't makes things so complicated that my post hardly had any worth. (the worth it did have was largely in the decent responses it provoked)

Basically, I just dislike seeing young people who have no real serious interest in thinking living on the streets, paying money to get tatoos, earings, dogs, drugs, etc. I wonder: if they were deprived of the power to spend money and were instead given only a sustainable agricultural system to survive, would they become much wiser human beings?

Similar to what Trevor said: If someone is deprived of power, he is very likely going to find a way to survive. With that considered: I'm just saying that the way people survive could be a lot more ennobling than it presently is, if only they weren't given access to the empty egotistical extraneous pleasures that they miserably prioritize their life around.

It's kind of like the situation with the natives. These people would be far better off if they were deprived of the means to alcohol and gambling, and instead were granted access to only the bare necessities. You want alcohol? Invent it. Make it yourself or shut up.

I wrote something that kind of resonates with this - optimizing gene expression

[DHodges]

Okay, LOL, and good luck with... whatever it is that makes you feel entitled to mock me.

The reason I mock this is because it smells really, really bad.

It smells like an argument from someone trying really hard to justify - to themselves - the way they live their life. It gives that smell in part because of the implication that anyone who doesn't do it that way must be lacking in integrity. It's self-righteous.

It could be that you are being completely and straightforward here. Could be, but it doesn't smell that way to me. It smells like rationalization.

Step 2: Collect underpants.

Indeed.

[Imadrongo]

I'm with DHodges on this one. Unemployment -- indicator of laziness, alternate income, or some non-monetary pursuit. Creating threads about the integrity of unemployment -- indicator of laziness or failure to be employed being rationalized with one's religion.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

Why is "the virtue of work" not a rationalization, when "the virtue of idleness" is? This seems biased.

Many women, for instance, have no problems not working their entire lives, and have nearby men work diligently to build palaces to surround them. Their idleness does not need to be rationalized: it is simply far more interesting and personally meaningful to sit around.

Oftentimes, calling work virtuous seems to justify the fact that you have been blackmailed, bribed, or otherwise pressured into doing meaningless activity. Unless your job is tied directly to, say, agriculture, you better find a damn good reason why you are doing it; otherwise, you may as well be doing the same puzzle over and over again for years on end.

[Imadrongo]

Unless your work is tied to agriculture? A typical dumb comment by Trevor that he would back up for pages if I bothered replying to him that long.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

Okay, I'll bite. What job do you have, and how do you justify it as being useful to anyone?

[Imadrongo]

Okay, I'll bite. What job do you have

None. Full time student.

how do you justify it as being useful to anyone?

What do you mean? Any "job" is automatically useful to someone assuming they are paying you for it. Beyond that, why do I need to justify it?

[Trevor Salyzyn]

Neil,

... why do I need to justify it?

Because that was the point of this exercise. I said that agriculture is the primary productive labour. You disagreed, but are now incapable of giving me any specific answer as to what is better than being a farmer. I would hazard that you can't think of an answer, so you'd rather try a smoke screen.

[Imadrongo]

Neil,

... why do I need to justify it?

Because that was the point of this exercise. I said that agriculture is the primary productive labour. You disagreed, but are now incapable of giving me any specific answer as to what is better than being a farmer. I would hazard that you can't think of an answer, so you'd rather try a smoke screen.

I don't care if agriculture is the primary productive labor or not -- what does that matter? Why are you pretending we are debating this? :rolleyes:

[Trevor Salyzyn]

Neil, you are doing a very poor job at justifying the value of labour. Idleness does not need to be rationalized if labour has no value, or if labour is counter-productive. You have yet to offer evidence that there is any labour other than agriculture that a person can do without needing strong justification as to its value.

I can so easily imagine that someone like Unidian, who abstains from labour, is more capable of doing philosophy than someone who works all the time at a trivial job, that I am willing to grant him the general rule that idleness is necessary for philosophic integrity.

And... just to get this out of the way: simply because you can't see the relevance of someone's questions does not mean there is no relevance to them. Eye-rolling makes you look unwilling to learn and unapologetically rude. It has no place in a philosophic discussion.