Bertrand Russell & Buckminster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More
Via www.openculture.com
Why must we all work long hours to earn the right to live? Why must only
the wealthy have a access to leisure, aesthetic pleasure,
self-actualization…? Everyone seems to have an answer, according to
their political or theological bent. One economic bogeyman, so-called “trickle-down” economics,
or “Reaganomics,” actually predates our 40th president by a few hundred
years at least. The notion that we must better ourselves—or simply
survive—by toiling to increase the wealth and property of already
wealthy men was perhaps first comprehensively articulated in the
18th-century doctrine of “improvement.” In order to justify privatizing
common land and forcing the peasantry into jobbing for them, English
landlords attempted to show in treatise after treatise that 1) the
peasants were lazy, immoral, and unproductive, and 2) they were better
off working for others. As a corollary, most argued that landowners
should be given the utmost social and political privilege so that their
largesse could benefit everyone.
