Americans love to obsess over the unemployment rates, as if job creation is someone else's responsibility. In my humble estimation, unemployment is the default state of being. No caveman ever woke up and thought, " Well, today is hopeless, there's just no work out there." There are no jobs in the natural world, except to find food and shelter for yourself and your family.
The advent of trade is where the concept of a job developed. To be looking for a job means that you have relied on trade so heavily that you neglected to provide those things for yourself. In modern society, this is true of everyone. Since the Agrarian Age and the subsequent centralization of farming, we've been slowly weaned off of our actual independence, not as citizens of a nation, but as human beings roaming the earth. The tradeoff? Convenience, advancement, and the "security" of an overgrown tribe. There's plenty of reasons why this was well worth the trade, then again, it depends on who you talk to. The Great Pyramids were a modern marvel erected in ancient Egyptian society, yet I wonder how the slaves who built them felt about it. If they had realized their freedom was possible, would they have taken back their lives and started something of their own? Clearly the risk of attempting escape only to be stranded in the desert wasn't appealing enough to most slaves, except maybe Moses and his crew.
Is the working class today in an analogous scenario? Is the Chinese workforce too desperate and impoverished to leave underpaying jobs, and are Americans too comfortable and oblivious to discover that alternate career options are even possible?
Throughout history, expecting jobs to be created for you and demanding for government subsidies to be provided is a blatant admission of dependence. It's broadcasting that you remain in submission to a master entity, and that you expect more in return than what you're currently getting. And for most people, that works just fine. It goes without saying; it's what we are born into. It's when taxes are increased and government services deteriorate that people start to wake up from the American Delusion. When an entire class of people have been kept from living a free and prosperous life, many of those people will start to steal what they need. It's not a matter of morals or ideals, it's simply cause and effect. If people in a poor area start dealing drugs despite the law and despite the threat of danger, why do you think that is? If there are no immediate opportunities to obtain basic needs and selling drugs pays 5 times the average job, guess what people are going to choose?
When people take on the mentality that every person is responsible for their own freedom, things start to take new shape. Freedom is not a matter of what we deserve, it's something that is, or isn't. When we assume nothing, it's all up to each individual. Even when someone gets a job, he is still responsible for himself. If someone else has the control to fire him, then he needs to be the boss of something on the side. As the side project starts to succeed, he will have more confidence and leverage in any pre-existing employment as well.
Currently, I don't work a salaried job; I take opportunities. That makes me " unemployed," or self-employed. It also makes me free in certain ways. Most people would say they want something stable, predictable. And I really can't blame them. Working freelance is too uncertain for most people, due to expectations. They want to wake up and expect to work their job and be compensated a consistent wage for their time, effort, and skills. But to me there lies a fine line between trading your time for resources and trading your life for a paycheck. When you get a "big boy job," you often chain yourself to the perks of convenience. You eventually get so comfortable with your employer paying you every two weeks, covering your insurances, and investing your money for you in a 401(k) that you become dependent. You can't imagine your life without those things, and therefore you can't imagine your life without your job. For me personally, that is where your life is no longer your own, at least to an extent.
If the people of America ever wake up from the Delusion, they'll start to see that they have so much more power that they realize. One day, millions of workers might even walk out of their jobs to start something of their own, instead of waiting for a raise. The people who intrinsically know that unemployment is simply a figment of our entitlement mentality are well on their way to taking back their lives, and the responsibility that comes with it.
Reply to @baah
Let's see. There is a difference between qualitative information and quantitative information. Mathematics and that which is relative to numbers and quantities is not open to interpretation, therefore it is certainly not open to debate. This is why modern science is based on quantitative research.
On the other hand, not everything can be quantified, and it is that which is relative to the qualities, the what, the how, the why, and so on.
Quantitative information is what is usually called "facts", and what nobody disputes. However, numbers alone don't do much good, and when you try to take them to other fields, the qualitative, hence the interpretation, comes into play.
What you call "facts" when you speak of needs, or when we speak of qualitative aspects, cannot be called facts, is the principle of falsifiability.
When we talk about what, why, and all these things, we only talk about opinions, opinions some more true than others, but always opinions and not truths.
Having clarified this, let's look at the needs.
There is a difference between defining what is the state of necessity, and the need itself. We both agree that in a state of necessity an act that would commonly be considered immoral is justified, right? the dispute would be in what we consider necessity.
People can not define for themselves when they are in need or not, is what I believe, because they can arbitrarily do immoral acts when they are not in real need, however, justifying themselves saying they are needed.
First they steal some shoes because their toes are going to fall off, and then they steal a pair of new shoes because the ones they have can wear out soon and then they will need to steal a pair again, they are foreseeing, and so on, because the change is subtle.
When do I believe that they would be in real need? When they can not discern if what they do is right or wrong. Why do I keep saying this? Because if they know they have other options, then the choice is already arbitrary. When there is no distinction between what is necessary and what is correct, there are really no options. When there are several options, people can deceive themselves to take the easier option saying that they are in need when they really are not.
Also, if people know that what they are doing is not correct, they are able to take other option, because as I said, if they were not, they would believe that there is no such option.
I think I've been quite clear and direct this time. If you think I miss something or that there is an inconsistency, or if you have any refutation to do what I said, I wait for it.
I agree with almost everything you say. Unemployment is a condition practically exclusive of developed countries, in poor countries and in the third world there is no such thing, and to believe that someone is going to take responsibility for the fact that you think you don't get opportunities is completely meaningless.
Man is the one who creates the opportunities, nobody else, to believe that opportunities are relative to everything except oneself is the beginning of decadence; at some point the land of free men became the land of freedom, and then the land of freedom became a free country, and then the free country became a liberal state, and that's basically the transition towards slavery, when we externalize freedom. Men are no longer free but in a matter of the "freedom" that the rulers give them.
The same analogy we can make when talking about the "land of opportunities". The change is always subtle.
On the other hand, in the following we will have to disagree.
It seems to me that what is established in this part contradicts, in a certain way, the previously mentioned. Freedom is not something that is taken away, it is something that has been lost little by little and by consensus, people have voluntarily chosen to change their freedom for security, and only when freedom is lost to such a level that people begin to feel chained, is that the idea of freedom is again taken.
The theft or moral degradation has no justification. Since when to be in conditions of need gives the right to attack others? that is inconceivable.
Of course when there is a disconnection between the laws of the State and the morality of the people there will be chaos, robbery and misery, because one of the things that history has taught us with repeated evidences is that by simple laws you cannot govern men.
However, there are always opportunities for men who seek it, as in the same way freedom is always waiting to be taken, and those who choose to steal, kill, or do any immoral act to live, unless they are in a total state of savagery, they don't do it for "necessity", but for ease.
And thieves wear shoes, so it's never justified.
But as I said, in the rest, we agree. Good post. Regards!
I agree with what you say, in fact, that's why I specify:
When people enter a state of real need in which, almost, they stop being self-conscious.
But that is something that in the developed countries has little, very very little, existence. The poor in the United States or Europe are not even remotely comparable to poor people in Africa, Asia or Latin America. This is what I meant when I said that they had shoes, although I should have said "new shoes".
Do you think that people in poor countries don't have needs as well, don't also live in hostile environments, and even though they may not have winter in Africa, they may have other problems such as water shortages?
The difference is that people from developed countries got used to living on the state, subsidies, or the charity of others. They became dependents. How is it possible that someone, come into adulthood, does not have a shelter to protect themselves in winter if it is a cyclical event?
In poor countries this does not happen. That returning to the objective of the publication, is because they don't have such concepts as unemployment.
Of course it is up to us, to the "outside observers", to make such a distinction, and although you tried to contradict me, you gave me the reason to give, also, your opinion.
Only in a state of unconsciousness in which man can't discern between the good and the evil of his actions, is he justified, because he was incapable of doing anything else, but at the moment in which any person believes that he can subjectively decide when his "needs" are more important than those of others, then the whole society begins to collapse.
By the way you forget that those who steal for "needs" end up leaving other people unable to meet their needs. And I would bet every time that those who need more are the second and not the first.
If I, guiding myself through extortion, agreed to do wrong to others for "my needs," then I would become the same as the extortionist, and continue the cycle of aggression. Putting others also, who have nothing to do, in similar situations.
Is that justified? As a thief stole me years ago, I am "enabled" to rob other people?
Don't think I'm talking about judges and courts, if I were talking about the state, then again we should admit that most people in the world are free, because they have freedom guaranteed by law, or that everyone is democratic, simply because based on the law, only a handful of countries declare themselves non-democratic.
Of course we are all human, and we make mistakes, and we would probably do immoral action because of extortion, I will not even discuss that. But the case you are raising is truly exceptional, and it does not really represent the issue we are dealing with, because it would be misleading to classify an act out of extortion in the same way as an act out of necessity.
My answer is in a new thread.
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