Patrick Spaet argues that the Western obsession with work ethic strains credulity:
Our attitudes towards work are extremely schizophrenic: we secretly aspire to sloth, while we loudly praise work. There isn’t an election poster that doesn’t promise more jobs. The call for more work is similar to the Stockholm syndrome, in which the victims of hostage-taking eventually develop a positive relationship with their captors. We constantly hear the drivel of “growth,” “competition,” and “local prosperity,” to convince us that we have to “tighten our belts,” because only that way are “secure jobs” possible–while everything else presents “no alternative.” A wage increase isn’t in the cards, because otherwise the company will go broke. We can’t tax too much, because otherwise the job generators will go abroad. All of these things have become the consensus–even among the wage slaves themselves.
This situation is all the more schizophrenic in that we take every opportunity every day to escape toil and work: who voluntarily uses a washboard, if he has a washing machine? Who copies out a text by hand, if he can use a photocopier instead? And who mentally calculates the miserable columns of figures on his tax return, if he has a calculator? We are bone idle, and yet we glorify work. The Stockholm syndrome of work fetishism has befuddled our minds. It is the paradox of the present: the religion of work has attained the status of a state religion, at exactly the point in time when work is dying. The sale of labor power will be as promising in the 21st century as the sale of stagecoaches in the 20th century.
Spaet, who published a version of this piece in the German paper Die ZEIT over the summer, goes on to remark on the considerable debate it stirred:
Some commentators pointed out that a lot of work is unpaid as well as underappreciated, like housekeeping, care work, and parenting. Yes, it’s a shame that this work, which is mostly done by women, doesn’t get the credit it deserves. It’s a vicious result of the pervasive work fetish that holds that only paid work is valuable work.
Other commentators were quite hostile: “Nobody has a right to be lazy,” they argued. “Those who don’t work are doing harm to society. They are just social parasites.”
Well, this is a prime example of the work fetish. And commentators like this one overlook the fact that most existing jobs are bullshit jobs. As Henry David Thoreau put it: “Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.”
The Dish 