By Sheldon Greaves

There is an assumption that lies behind much of the opposition to efforts by people of good will to provide aid and support to people who find themselves in tight economic times. That myth is that if you provide people with food, shelter, clothing, and medical care, they will all turn into lazy parasites who will sit around all day and do nothing. Worse, this is used as a blanket characterization of people on public assistance, usually by people bent on eliminating that assistance, sometimes even in cases where the recipient is unable to work due to disability or age. The truth is that few people work harder than the poor, who often take second or even third jobs to stay afloat. In addition, they must find ways to obtain things like child care or health issues that others can take care of with the swipe of a credit card or a monthly insurance premium.

The question of latent parasitism has arisen again as part of discussions over a universal basic income (UBI), which may be our best answer to an increasingly automated economy with fewer jobs that require humans instead of machines or software. Critics wonder whether we as a society could tolerate that much leisure. The horror!

The truth is, people have a basic need to be doing something with their lives. When we look at people who win the lottery, about 70% stay in their jobs. The ones who don’t and decide to just live off their winnings soon wind up unhappy.  By contrast, most poor people do not spend their time sitting around doing nothing. A similar thing happens upon retirement. Housing, food, medical care is (we hope) no longer a problem, but people have trouble adjusting until they can find something interesting to do. The fear is that one will, as the poet wrote, “rust unburnished, not to shine in use.”

But let’s take the ultimate example. Imagine a population for which food, shelter, and medical care are all provided. However, this system prevents people from doing anything. In fact, they are forced, essentially, to spend their days doing nothing. In other words, we are talking about prison.

Consider the implications here. The first is that thwarting the natural desire to do something with one’s life is how our society punishes its worst malefactors. The second is that people are driven to be engaged in something, and will go to extraordinary lengths to do so even when their basic physical needs are met. In the case of incarceration, being allowed to something–anything–reading books or taking a class or even picking up garbage along the highway is considered a reward. Failing that, inmates will do just about anything to keep their minds occupied. There’s an interesting scene in Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in which the protagonist, an inmate in a Soviet gulag, risks breaking prison rules in order to finish building a brick wall, waiting until the very last second before he jumps back into the truck to return to the camp. He draws enormous pleasure from this simple act of creative rebellion, and the satisfaction of doing something that makes use of his skills.

One of the more significant books, in my opinion, to appear in the last year or so is David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, which explores this and related matters in considerable detail (Graeber gives a good summary of his thesis here). Graeber, an anthropologist, not only destroys en passant the myth that we are all a bunch of leeches just waiting for a sugar daddy, he exposes the crisis of meaningless, useless, and even counterproductive jobs that we create because (among other reasons) we entertain this delusion that people cannot be trusted with their own time, or to mind their own business. It’s become so bad that there is now very real, active resentment towards those people who have jobs that are actually meaningful, such as school teacher. There is a school of thought that they should be paid less because having a meaningful job constitutes a form of compensation. But that’s another rant.

I not only support a UBI, I see it as an inevitable consequence of the direction our economy is heading. But I also think that for far too long, a toxic philosophy of work and leisure has prevented our society from realizing a much greater potential, one that could create a social richness and texture beyond the dreams of our shriveled and distorted “work ethic.”