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It works in their heads because they think billionaires and poor people both deserve their fate. It’s some kind of Divine Right thing.
and we’re right back to the doublethink – “Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Also packaged for new-agers and self-helpers as “The Secret” or “The Law of Attraction”.
It’s not doublethink. It’s the belief that separate classes of people exist - “hard workers” who “create value” and rightfully become rich - and “lazy people” who just work because they have to and would otherwise do nothing. The people who push this propaganda see themselves in the first group, and if they aren’t yet rich, that’s because the liberals and commies prevent it. And they see the majority of others in the second group.
Came to a recent epiphany that we have proof that people would still work even if basic needs were provided without worry…
Simulation Video Games
Many people, myself included, play a lot of job simulator games. I found myself asking, while playing some of these what makes this more fun than doing it in real life and the answer was almost always the pay for the job and the basic needs not existing.
Turns out, the old adage of giving someone UBI, and having it turn everyone into lazy layabouts, is bullshit. We may actually choose to work if we didn’t have to worry about how the cost of my labor would need to be spent to keep myself alive, and not merely extra to throw back in the system.
Shipbreaker, Power Wash Simulator, and Euro Truck Simulator are a few games I’ve enjoyed playing, but would never do IRL.
Yep, conservatives think they aren’t “poor”, just a temporarily disgraced billionaire. They’ll get it back in just a minute. You just watch.
Hey! Someone who understands the convoluted minds of conservatives!
I’ll point out though, this isn’t really a conservative mindset… It’s a capitalist mindset. The difference isn’t obvious since almost every conservative I’ve ever known is a capitalist.
Billionaires are special job creators without whom jobs could not be created. Prior to having billionaires we all wandered around aimlessly looking for snacks or TV shows.
Speak for yourself. I spent my time learning to play the harmonica and riding trains
Now that’s how you live a life
Billionares can afford great marketing?
I’d suggest the existence of billionares is a sign of a failed society is a more realistic meme
Failing society, metrics like income inequality and wealth concentration are projected to get worse!
Yeah who needs even 0.05 billions?
Many people would stop working because so many jobs are awful and not worth doing unless you need the to survive. The job market would have to undergo radical shifts due workers no longer being desperate and actually having power. Awful jobs would have to become decent or pay more to make it worth it.
Many jobs would just go away. Some would never come back. They were probably not useful anyway.
Some people would never rejoin the workforce. Much of that is good, like elderly people who should have retired long ago but don’t have savings. Some for worse… but it’s hard to say it would be any worse than what we have now.
And if people’s basic needs are not met through those shitty jobs and go month-to-month or worse, then it’s no different than waged slavery.
But how can Billy the manager feel fullfilled if he can’t boss around people and doing presentations of next quarters forecasts?
It’s so bullshit right now, I bet in the future people won’t understand why we didn’t have better lives with all the wealth we produce.
Hopefully they don’t wonder, hopefully we carve the reason into everything that can hold a message. So once the system buckles under its own greed, due to us poors being unable to purchase anything at all, our descendants can look through the remnants and heed the warning.
Everything you said is good & should happen.
They’re also the people that think minimum wage is enough, working a minimum wage job is easy (so much easier than their job), and, have and would never work a minimum wage job in their life.
Minimum wage jobs aren’t easy, but becoming a successful doctor or engineer or attorney is so much harder, but I guess that thought wouldn’t fit in your mind
Do you think doctors and engineers are billionaires? Lmao
Yours is a NONargument because it completely kills the discourse.
This you?
Im sure that there are cases of both.
Some people probably wouldn’t work if all their basic needs were met.(No judgement, i’d definitely consider it myself) And some billionaires probably are hard workers(although that is definitely not why they’re billionaires)
one of the main results out of the various UBI trials so far – even with a few so-called “freeloaders”, overall productivity goes up
For the most part, people like to work. To feel like they’re doing something, to be productive. This is within reason of course. The work should be something they enjoy, and no one likes being overworked.
and bullshit jobs will burn you out just as much as overwork
I absolutely don’t like working. But I like things. My basic needs are insufficient for me to be comfortable and happy.
I would choose to work so I could go to the movies, buy video games, eat and drink decadent things, pursue hobbies, travel, etc.
Enough food, enough shelter, enough mobility, and enough telecommunication ironically isn’t enough for me.
I’ve been fortunate to never have been only scraping by. I don’t believe many people would choose it and it absolutely baffles me that so many people believe that so many people would.
If all my basic needs were met I’d 100% keep my current job because I like my job.
I’d also move closer so I’m not driving an hour each way.
Right? There’s people still spouting that “all of that money from the pandemic” is somehow still sustaining the lives of thousands and thousands of people 4 years later.
I straight up told a coworker he’s a “fucking dumbass piece of shit” if he thinks anyone is somehow still running on 2-3 checks of $1000 three years later, because either he’s too stupid to realize that’s only one week of pay for him or he has an ulterior motive for continuing to lie about something he knows isn’t true. So which is it, dumb or lying, because we both know that’s bullshit.
He stood there for a second staring at me and goes “yeah I suppose that’s not THAT much…”
Of course absolutely nothing about his other right-wing bs changed but at least he hasn’t brought up “pandemic money” again.
Seriously. They act like it’s 1924 not 2024, when ~$3,000 was the equivalent of ~$55,000 today.
Why is Anthony Fantano wearing lipstick
Lipthony Stickthano here
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Also it’s crazy to think that someone who has that much money works harder (proportionally to the amount they make) than someone who can’t even take a piss break without fear of being fired.
(sorry for the 2 deleted comments, my client bugged out big time)
I still see the other 2 comments but that may just be a federation thing.
definitely is. on my instance it shows as deleted but not when i check on yours
so “people won’t work if their needs are met” is patently untrue
It’s not true or untrue for “people” as a monolith. People differ.
Lots of people are happy to do literally nothing productive, if they could. And lots of people hate being professionally idle, so much so that they can’t stand not finding at least a part-time job, even after they’ve “retired”. At my current job, we had a 99 year old who was basically FORCED to retire (for the second time, she had ‘retired’ already, before she came to work here) by management, after she had a health scare at work. She was literally angry and grumbling about it during her retirement party, lol.
Different people are wired differently. Nuance is important.
Well you’d need to define productive, bc if by productive you mean work 9 to 5 esc job then sure maybe, but people like doing stuff especially when they can do that with others
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Sure, but is it proportional to the money they make? Fuck no.
Well, almost nothing would be. Yours is a NONargument because it completely kills the discourse. But that’s beside the point. Some billionares do work hard because they happened across a smart idea and they were able to make it flourish.
Not saying that Bezos in 2023 deserves all the money he has because I dislike Amazon, but you still can’t deny that it was an idea that changed in just a decade the entire way a society thinks about shopping.
Why is an overwhelming, correct argument that ends the discourse a bad thing if you already admit it’s correct?
Kills the discourse = disagrees with my opinion
So because he had an idea and workers realized that idea for him and those workers make that idea be maintained for him makes it fine for them to be exploited? Also I doubt that those people at the top manage shit, they just have another workers manage this stuff for them.
That’s just dingeneous and completely disregarding how things actually work. Did he clean the bathrooms? Of course not. But he did coordinate his team of workers by creating other teams of worker where at the end there were people who coded and shipped everything. If you think that would be easy to do you have a rude awakening waiting for you lmao.
I mean to say, that it is probably the hardest or among the hardest roles.
JFC…
Following this logic you don’t work very hard.
The one who works hard is the worker you depend on. That worker can go work elsewhere, but you need him. Pay him his worth, because he’s literally the support pillar. I’m sure you know what happens when there’s no support pillar.
It’s not because you tell people what to do that you work harder. Those people could have done it themselves, but they didn’t have the money to start something as big as amazon. It’s all about how much money you have to invest, not hard work.
Some billionares do work hard because they happened across a smart idea and they were able to make it flourish.
Smart ideas with money to invest = hard worker
Smart ideas but poor = ???
Yeah plus even if they don’t have the ideas working in a warehouse moving stuff is harder than talking and arranging things with people
i’d take a life of “how am i gonna spend this money wisely” over a life of “how am i gonna make it this month”
What I was just trying to say smart idea = hard to realize idea. Whether you have money or not. Clearly money helps.
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Those people would be NOTHING if not for all other workers. It’s a team game and the entire team should be rewarded and treated with respect. I’m not saying we should pay every job the same wage, I’m saying that all of the money shouldn’t flow to the few select people while the rest gets scrumbles.
Being in charge of a team is literally the hardest part of the job.
Having power does not imply great effort to hold it. The bourgeois state does that, all Billionaires need do is collect profit while they sleep, or take a visit to Epstein’s island.
How much you make has never been related to how hard/strenuous the work is.
Ditch digging is a body-destroying job. But because basically any able-bodied person can do it, no individual can command a very high wage for it, because the more potential candidates there are, the more likely that there’s someone who’s willing to do the same job for less than you’re willing to do it for.
On the other side, if there’s hypothetically a very specialized job with 5 openings, 1 each at 5 different companies, and you’re the one and only person with the required skillset to do it, you can basically name your price, and those 5 companies will fight each other to get you.
Acquiring skills that are as valued and rare as possible, is the way to accelerate your earning, not working as “hard” as possible.
Yeah they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, with nothing more then a couple of million from their parents.
Names.
Uhh… you know, that one guy… uhhh… and the other guy too…
People can live comfortably and still work hard. It’s almost like poverty doesn’t encourage work, but infact only makes life more difficult and stressful in myriad ways, ultimately decreasing effective productivity.
Pull your head out of your ass and breath reality.
People are really inconsistent in general. Most people don’t seem to have a defined moral code even when they’re religious. This is a really good example of the issue, though. I’ve seen this too and it’s hella frustrating. I don’t know if there’s really a solution. Capitalism encourages this phenomena though, for sure.
Billionaires are often workaholics. They work extremely long hours because they’re obsessed with winning, with crushing the competition. I’m sure there are also plenty of billionaires living it up Great Gatsby style but those obviously don’t fit the “hard working billionaire” stereotype.
The point was the other way around, we are not supposed to believe people with basic needs met don’t work.
I mean, its not like they’re just going to tell you “lol no, I paid some mug to do all the work, with money I inherited, and took all the credit and money” (actually how they earned it) now is it?
No, we know they work harder than we do and obsess about winning which is how they did it. We know this because they told us so.
No follow up questions or thinking allowed!
So I have been asking myself why I held some of my beliefs, and the answer is that I “learnt” them at a really young age, maybe 4-10 years old. It was an age where I basically knew “nothing” and I guess I filed it away for clarification later and that “later” never came. All of a sudden I’m much, much older and asking myself why I even believe this strange thing and the answer is “they got me when I was young”. If I wasn’t exposed to other thinkers who asked me to re-evaluate my ideas, I might never have questioned them.
People do stop working when it’s all provided. Anyone with simple pattern recognition has seen that happen, not everyone of course, but a lot give up. Like this pattern I noticed of people saying stuff like this pretending to be altruistic and empathetic but really are just salty they don’t have the money to lie around all day.
I won’t deny that a portion of the population would definitely do this, but I don’t think it’s a majority. There’s a nontrivial number of people who would stop working because they don’t need to anymore, eg, working mom’s with supportive spouses who work a menial job just to help cover the bills. They would definitely leave their work and spend time with kids and being a homemaker. Some would quit and do nothing because they’re lazy. Sure.
I don’t think that’s the majority of the workforce. Many people, such as myself, do it mainly because they want to be productive and/or help people. Those like me, who are also happy with their employer (I presently am quite pleased with my boss/management), would not really do anything differently.
I think the root of what you’re seeing is that if the basic needs were covered, people would quit bad jobs. Bluntly, there are a lot of bad jobs out there. I would venture a guess to say it’s the majority. If someone hates their workplace but they need to make rent, they’re more likely to stay with a bad job so they can have a place to live; these people, if their needs were met, would walk out in droves. That would be enough to move the needle over to a majority.
My argument from your statement can be rephrased as: if we met everyone’s needs, they would have no reason to stay working at jobs they hate.
Which is very much true.
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That’s not what UBI tests have shown us in practice.
Anecdotally, a close friend of mine made enough to retire several years ago and now he just works a job he finds fulfilling instead of the highest paying one. IMHO humans instinctively want to contribute to the tribe.
Bullshit.
Oh look. A list of studies. No results, except the Manitoba one that demonstrated my point.
