What is the purpose of work?
When you think about it, it's to earn enough to feed ourselves and provide a shelter, something we're eminently able to do if provided with a patch of land large enough to grow our own food and it contains enough material to build a shelter. That's how we used to survive until we started to sell our land to others or powerful people took it from us and called themselves aristocrats.
The actual reason is specialisation. I we were to fall ill, then we'd need the assistance of someone who had enough spare time to delve into the medicinal properties of herbs and have enough surplus to pay them - but we'd need to pay them in a form if surplus they lacked. If a band of marauding settlers from another family raided our settlement we'd need the assistance of some friends - we'd possibly form a militia.
Someone would inevitably sell their patch of land in return for an income from any surplus and that person buying the land would gain the benefits of scale and become specialised in land ownership.
The irony is that the whole system we currently have would create itself again from scratch and we'd all end up, possibly over a long time, working for other people in order to feed ourselves and build a shelter, buying our food from specialists and using specialists to build our shelters.
We call this progress, but I'm not so sure it is. We can become so specialised that an unforeseen collapse in one aspect or element of the society can have catastrophic consequences for the rest of it.
Margaret Thatcher was once castigated for saying there was no such thing as society. She was taken out of context; what she meant was that society is not an independent entity on its own - it depends on people contributing to it.
I mean, how else am I going to obtain an AUX to optical cable for my new speakers without going to a specialist? One that works, that is...
Someone would inevitably sell their patch of land in return for an income from any surplus and that person buying the land would gain the benefits of scale and become specialised in land ownership.
The irony is that the whole system we currently have would create itself again from scratch and we'd all end up, possibly over a long time, working for other people in order to feed ourselves and build a shelter, buying our food from specialists and using specialists to build our shelters.
We call this progress, but I'm not so sure it is. We can become so specialised that an unforeseen collapse in one aspect or element of the society can have catastrophic consequences for the rest of it.
Margaret Thatcher was once castigated for saying there was no such thing as society. She was taken out of context; what she meant was that society is not an independent entity on its own - it depends on people contributing to it.
I mean, how else am I going to obtain an AUX to optical cable for my new speakers without going to a specialist? One that works, that is...
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