i have a secret. i don’t share it often. not out of shame exactly but more a simple lack of satisfactory coherence. it is a messy, disorganized, half understood secret, composed mostly of vague romantic notions and retroactive suppositions. essentially i’m jealous of the people who lived in the far past. yes that’s right, i am jealous of the people who i’ve been taught i ought to pity. those without the miracles of modern medicine, those without the comforts and high standard of living the industrial revolution afforded. those people with shorter life expectancies. those people who’s lives were dangerous and difficult. it sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? well maybe it is. as i’ve said, i tend not to express these vague feelings. but the fact remains, they surface.

an example i have often found myself using is of the “if i were in some wilderness” variety. the context is always that of power relationships. the idea that people who i’ve never spoken to, perhaps never even met, not only hold power over me, but by deign of social, corporate, or governmental position, are also by default owed my respect and my submission. the example goes like this: “if i were in the wilderness i’d smash his head in with a rock and dump him in a ravine.” sounds crazy, i know, but what it boils down to is this, i can’t help but feel no one is automatically my superior, and that no one who has not earned it directly, or at very least indirectly, deserves my respect. this is a demand of modern life that always gets under my skin… sticks in my craw. i can’t help it.

so what does this have to do with our diseased, toothless, non-indoor plumbing having forbearers? well, it’s just this, i can’t help but suspect that in some important ways, these poor folks from the distant past were not only more free than we modern, educated, civilized folk are, but lead more meaningful lives. i know, i know. it’s ridiculous. how could a past full of emperors, czars, kings, peasants, surfs, caste systems, papal control, slavery, bonded labor, landed gentry, feudalism, witch hunts, writs of salvation, etc ad infinitum, be considered in any meaningful way more “free?” well. as i said right from the beginning, i don’t know exactly, but i still have such suspicions. i’ve said more than i care to admit that i’d trade much of our comfort, our long life, our ease of motion, our luxuries for something… well, something else. like most such fantasies though, no-matter what plan might be hatched to try and recapture something lost, (i’ll get a job hosing off the statues on easter island! i’ll move to alaska! i’ll…) the bottom line is, there is no going back. we can’t unlearn what we’ve learned or forget what we know.

anyhow, this has all been a needlessly long, meandering lead-in to a piece of internet lit which at first and even second glance seems to be of the utopian crank variety. it’s a piece called simply, abolish work. it’s long, and its premise seems silly in that it’s really hard to even imagine. no more work? silly or not much the same way i feel there is some grain of truth in my own irrational romancing of humanities difficult past i feel like within this screed there is a grain of value. the one is related to the other. this paragraph touches on it:

Usually work is employment, i.e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan (and this is even more true in “communist” than capitalist countries, where the state is nearly the only employer and everyone is an employee). Thus 95 percent of Americans who work, work for somebody else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or Nicaragua or any other socialist country, the corresponding figure approaches 100 percent. Only the embattled Third World nations—Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey—still have significant concentrations of peasants who live under the arrangement of most laborers of the last thousand years: payment of taxes (ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal begins to look good to many of us in the industrial world.

i guess that last sentence is really what precipitated the long intro.  in any case i’m curious what you all think about this. utopian piffle, pointless rant, just plain silly though it may be as an actual “plan”, (it was published at one point by loompanics after all) i’d like to know how this issue strikes the rest of you? do you ever think about it? does it bother you? do you romanticize some past age? do you get pissed off when your expected to tremble before some person you’ve never even met? do you feel like your job enriches you? do you feel satisfied with the arrangement as it stands? slog through this piece and tell me what you think. i’m curious.