|
|
|
|
|
|
by rayiner
2629 days ago
|
|
|
I’m not Chinese, but the sentiment is pan-Asian. You can’t build an industrial superpower from a country of rice farmers by working 40 hours a week. (Nor did the rice farmers work 40 days a week before industrialization!) Certainly, the US didn’t do it. (See: “Protestant work ethic.”) The 40-hour work week is something we adopted after our ascendency. It’s a luxury for the already rich. It’s possibly a luxury for those who face little outside competition—we will see if it survives the rest of the world catching up. |
|
|
Nowhere in that is a blanket "Thou shalt do and ask no questions, lest you be punished."
There isn't Japan. Blind obedience went out of style in 1945, and should stay gone. We all know where that leads.
"A son who does not admonish an unreasonable father leads his family to ruin.", Confucius [paraphrased] again.
The 40 hour work week isn't even a luxury. It's required if you want some semblance of social stability. Industrialization was revolutionary in that tooling, factories, and infrastructure created an environment where work could happen 24/7/365. That doesn't mean it should, especially to the benefit of a few, at the cost of the livability of life for everyone else. Industry is meant to cure societal ills, not to act as a building block for exponential manufacture of new societal ills to be fixed by the very root cause of the original malaise.
I may not be Chinese, and may not fully understand current pan-Asian culture, but I weep at the tragedy I see unfolding whereby a culture seems to be cannibalizing itself into something nigh-unrecognizable from what it once was.
It seems to be happening everywhere nowadays.