
In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1932) [pdf] - jacobsimon
https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Praise%20of%20Idleness.pdf
======
fenaer
I have attempted to portray similar ideas, in regards to a universal wage, to
friends and family. Each time I'm met with "What stops some people from not
working" and they refuse to move past that. They see people who work less, or
don't work as a detriment to society.

What sort of changes can be made to change people's viewpoint on hard work as
a virtue?

~~~
jdmoreira
I always pitch universal wage and refusal of work to most people with whom I
have meaningful conversations. By their reaction I'm certain that these ideas
will be unpopular for the rest of our lifetime.

The best you can do is to keep preaching them if you believe in them. If the
other person is a thinker, most people don't want to be thinkers, you might
try to pitch them post-scarcity economics or explain that historically people
never worked as much as they do nowadays. Also explain that most human
progress came from 'play time' not 'work time'.

You won't change the world, just accept that, the world does not want to be
changed. Most people invest a lot of effort in complying with the status quo.
It takes generations to change this kind of social conventions.

Also,

"Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without
the need for any official ban ... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a
body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept
without question... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds
himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable
opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or
in the highbrow periodicals ... If liberty means anything at all it means the
right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -George Orwell

~~~
andyjdavis
My wife and I travel a great deal and have had the chance to spend at least a
little time in relatively undeveloped areas where people still fish, farm and
so on to provide some or all of their regular diet.

Note that it being a primarily agrarian situation is important. The situation
is very different for poor people working in factories for example.

>or explain that historically people never worked as much as they do nowadays

One striking thing is how much free time people in these areas have.
Particularly in the afternoon its really common to see lots of people
(children, adults and old people) simply hanging out.

Typically they have very limited capacity to store food so once you have
enough fish for the next day or two, for example, there is very little value
in catching any more. Although there are periods of very hard work (planting
crops and harvesting crops in particular) there are plenty of occasions when
the day's work is done relatively quickly. Your home is adequate against the
weather, firewood is adequately stockpiled and your family's food supply is
secure for the near to medium term so there is little value in performing
additional work.

~~~
LunaSea
But their life expectancy is lower and elder people live with their their
children. They have no healthcare and a low level education.

All these things make it so that a person or family is much more independent
of their government.

They might have more free time but they don't have a lot of the other things
that contribute to the quality of life we have in the western world.

It's disingenuous to think that it is possible to have a universal salary
while maintaining a decent quality of life.

------
myth_drannon
I like "How to Be Idle"/ Tom Hodgkinson

"From the founding editor of The Idler, the celebrated magazine about the
freedom and fine art of doing nothing, comes not simply a book, but an
antidote to our work-obsessed culture. In How to Be Idle, Tom Hodgkinson
presents his learned yet whimsical argument for a new universal standard of
living: being happy doing nothing. He covers a whole spectrum of issues
affecting the modern idler—sleep, work, pleasure, relationships—while
reflecting on the writing of such famous apologists for it as Oscar Wilde,
Robert Louis Stevenson, and Nietzsche—all of whom have admitted to doing their
very best work in bed"

~~~
bigmanwalter
Thanks for the book recommendation.

Noticed from your profiler that you are Montréalais like me :)

I truly believe that growing up in Montreal, rather than almost any other
North American city, makes one far more likely to appreciate funemployment.
How blessed we are.

------
getdavidhiggins
There are all different types of work, with different 'rewards'

\- Work for the mind - mental brain training. Reward: Getting a leg up on your
competitors. In the caveman days; different language hacks meant tribes could
figure out how best to kill prey, and hunt a lot better. These days, the task
of hunting has been abstracted away by a Mc Meal™. The thrill of the hunt
could be lost?

\- Work for the body - getting fit. Reward: Physical strength, stamina, and
endurance. Johhny emissions wastes $20.00 to get his Mc Meal™, gets a bad back
from sitting in a car, and leads an otherwise sedentary life. If Johhny
walked, he could get fit, boost his endorphins, and have the added bonus of
burning off a Mc Meal™ a lot faster.

\- Work for others - Helping others out. Reward: Feeling good. Endorphins,
confidence, self-worth, creating joy for others. Johnny doesn't help others.
He's an Internet troll leaving racist remarks on Youtube and Twitter all day.
His sleep suffers because of that. He becomes cagey around others, and rarely
looks others in the eye. Johnny helper takes joy knowing that another line of
code in the Git repo helps about a million people live their life better.
Johhny helper ignores the comment sections in websites, and knows a problem
can't be solved on the same plane it was created.

------
jdmoreira
If anyone is interested in reading more about 'Refusal of Work' \-
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refusal_of_work](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refusal_of_work)
\- I would recommend

The Right To Be Lazy (1883) by Paul Lafarge

The Abolition of Work (1985) by Bob Black

------
nazgulnarsil
BI is a massive political hurdle. A much smaller one is:

1\. Dismantling the disincentives to hiring more people for fewer hours each

2\. Dismantle the "40 hours is full time" as a legal fence that prevents
people from wanting to drop under it (sharp benefit cut offs instead of
gradual phase outs)

~~~
sokoloff
I think the hurdles or disincentives to hire more people are more structural
or inherent than they are legal.

In a lot of types of work, it's wildly more efficient to have fewer people do
the work. Imagine if your development team of 5, each working 40-ish hours a
week became a development team of 20, each working 10-ish hours a week.
Progress would grind to a halt because most of the time would be spent on
coordination. Every minute of coordination (standups, etc) is now 4x as
expensive, and you probably need 4x as many minutes at a minimum. Everyone has
to come up the learning curve, so your organization learns at 1/4 the speed
(on an hourly basis), etc.

I can readily see how production-type work could be reasonably efficient with
fewer hours and more workers, but even there, I'd still prefer to employ fewer
workers, paying them more, and selecting from the top quartile of the
workforce, who may be willing to trade more hours per week in exchange for a
shorter working career in years.

------
arvinjoar
While I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment I think a lot of the economic
thinking is a bit too simplistic, especially in our current age. For example,
whether you invest in your government or not, your government will still be
able to find funds for the war chest, by printing money if nothing else (or as
it works nowadays, the central bank buying government securities). Another
problem I can identify is that some _hard work_ requires a lot education, we
need nurses for example. What would happen if nurses only worked 20 hour
weeks? Maybe there's a clever answer for this too, but I think we really need
to think hard about this before we advocate anything politically. It makes a
lot of sense to promote idleness as a virtue though, so go on and praise play
(it is the hacker way, after all)!

~~~
icebraining
_For example, whether you invest in your government or not, your government
will still be able to find funds for the war chest, by printing money if
nothing else_

That's a bit of a simplistic view of "government" as well, though. I mean,
Greece's would certainly like to print some money right now :)

~~~
arvinjoar
Yes, that's true, I also thought of the ECB hindering many national
governments from doing this. But if Greece decided that it was time for war,
they'd probably pull out of the euro project.

My point was that the economic model presented was too simplistic, that my
model is also too simplistic doesn't distract from that point too much in my
opinion.

------
amelius
> Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men,
> more respected than either of the classes of workers. There are men who,
> through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of
> being allowed to exist and to work.

It almost sounds like they are talking about the creators of mobile
ecosystems, or about the gatekeepers of the internet.

------
chernevik
The moral basis of the work is its repudiation of various parasite classes:
priests, warriors, rentiers, even Party apparatchiks (albeit only in a
footnote).

And yet it never stops to wonder why these parasites keep recurring, or how
they might use these very arguments to recur again, or what might be done
about that.

~~~
SomeThings
In the US, the self-proclaimed hardest workers are the conservative
Republicans and they support the Church and the Industry of War like no one
else. Besides, aren't the scientists today's clergy?

------
bernardlunn
Bertrand Russell worked hard to write that. Work that we love to do falls into
a different category.

~~~
wk_end
Indeed, Russell is famously misquoted[1] as having said "Time you enjoy
wasting is not wasted time".

[1] [http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/11/time-you-
enjoy/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/11/time-you-enjoy/)

~~~
NobleLie
Didn't know this was a misquote. Thanks. Still, it fits great in this thread's
context obviously.

Although I like and appreciate the point of it, this time one enjoys "wasting"
shouldn't have initially been labelled wasted if it was actually enjoyed.
Maybe I'm picking on the words too much.

Perhaps this quote is intended to invoke a sense of strange loopiness. It's a
proper defense to those who might feel guilty for being the type of idle that
Russel describes. Once understanding it, one must wash away any notion (or
criticism from society) that they are wasting time.

