Member-only story
True Freedom
I recently finished David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, a fascinating book about the predominance of useless jobs in both the American public and private sector. As an he is an anthropologist, the book largely consists of anecdotes taken from calls and emails with thousands of disgruntled Americans and Canadians who are fed up with their jobs. Graeber makes the argument that work has taken an almost religious role in our neoliberal hellscape combined with a form neo-feudalist patronage. No longer do we work to live, but we live to work. This results in a strange situation where those who perform the most useful functions in society aren’t payed well; their penance involves fewer drudgeries and thus needs less compensation. This attitude of working being “necessary” also prevents actual cost saving measures, such as the adoption of UBI or Medicare-For-All being pushed through our political system because they will take away from actual jobs.
I agree with Graeber when it comes to this diagnosis. Our attitude towards work, and the centralization of labor in the hands of the government and large corporations has trapped our society in system of status-posturing, drudgery, and waste.
However, I am not on-board with Graeber’s potential solution: UBI. The reasons for this are numerous. Our coming resource shocks will make it difficult for the state to support its population on what amounts to welfare. UBI…
