So I got illegally fired on Friday the 13th. To avoid headaches like lawsuits, bosses offered a severance that's basically like 9 months leftist UBI. yoink I took it
I felt numb since then—like 90% of my complexity disappeared. No more Rube Goldberg mental machinery inducing me to do things I know aren't right. Unused to freedom, I learn about it from anthropologists:
Have you ever met someone who grew up in a more or less egalitarian society? They act like you'd think aristocrats should. Completely self-assured as if it never occurred to them anyone wouldn't think their feelings or perspectives were important
We were born to a species confronted with this choice…
- Burning our world
- Next-level society where we explode human possibilities
… and finds #1 pret-ty convincing. Are we… characters in a tragicomedy?
My freedom's 9 month limit implies I'd better:
- amplify wageslavery abolitionists
- not land back in a wageslave class (e.g. by becoming a capitalist, mani-hoarder [1], escaping such societies, committing suicide...)
Thought 1:
- Find wageslavery abolitionists: halfway advanced-seeming movements: leftist UBI, "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism"
- Personally escape wageslave class: helpful to accumulate skills & a slave army of software artifacts
Thought 2: Teamwork fundamentals: amplify others in achieving their goals. Keep doing that & I may bump into wonderful teammates who want to escape wageslavery with me
Thought 3: Efficiency means accomplishing multiple goals w/ a single action. Example: amplify activists in a way that increases my skills & software artifacts
Thought 4: I don't enjoy boss/subordinate relationships. My ideal team is an anarcho-syndicalist coven [2]. If that's not possible, perhaps something like chiefs in certain indigenous American tribes, who lead by persuasion rather than fiat & must make shows of working harder than everyone else ("What a nice early morning! Wellll I don't know about anyone else, but I'll be off to work...") [3]
Self-sacrificing Calvinist work ideologies dominate. Therefore I should also indulge in idleness & boredom:
There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern person thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.
— Bertrand Russell, "In Praise of Idleness"
Wage-slavery carries a morality of constant low-effectiveness work. ("If you have time to lean, you have time to clean!") Better alternative:
Most people who have ever existed have assumed that normal human work patterns take the form of periodic intense bursts of energy, followed by relaxation, followed by slowly picking up again toward another intense bout. […] Not only is it what humans will do if left to their own devices, but there is no reason to believe that forcing them to act otherwise is likely to cause greater efficiency or productivity. Often it will have precisely the opposite effect.
— David Graeber, "Bullshit Jobs"
[1] Mani is the term I use for "money." Like how anthropologists use Nacirema to remove connotations of "American"
[2] Coven sounds less dysfunctional than "mercenary team," since covens are influenced by Starhawk's work on consensus decisionmaking
[3] Apparently being a chief is a miserable job. But egalitarianism-in-the-small isn't easy, in my experience & historically:
Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence.
— Graeber & Wengrow, "How to change the course of human history"