Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by antiterra 1131 days ago
This sort of Calvinistic ideal of work as an inherent virtue is what was behind the “Arbeit macht frei” slogans on archways at concentration camps.
3 comments

Do you think it's virtuous for an able adult to demand that other people supply his survival and hapiness?
Survival, yes, and happiness to a certain extent. This is probably one of the most important realisations of the 20th Century, that by providing for the basic needs of everyone (and thereby essentially amortizing those costs over the entire population), we can produce overall better results for the country (measured in efficiency, production, happiness, etc).

So by setting up a national health service in the UK, you ensure a base level of health across the whole country. By providing free education (and free higher education), you ensure that the workforce is more skilled, and able to make a wider range of choices. By providing basic housing, food, etc to those who need it, you prevent people having to opt out of society in order to survive.

This sort of safety net is cheaper in the long run (it's worth watching Unlearning Economics' video "Free Stuff is Good Actually", which goes into detail on this point), but it's also fundamentally about freedom. If you have access to free education, you can make choices about your career and life that you just couldn't before. If you have free healthcare and financial support if you get sick, you can continue working for longer, but you'll also have more time to make bad choices and weird choices - the sorts of choices that are fundamental to healthy entrepreneurship. If you have a financial safety net, you can take more interesting risks, because the consequences are less severe.

So yeah, I think if you believe freedom is a virtue, then I think you also need to see it as a virtue for people to be supplied with the tools that can give them freedom.

You didn't answer the question. Taking for granted that insurance and social welfare safety nets are good for civilized society, it's also useful to recognize that they're not free; someone has to work to pay for them. Do you see any virtue in wanting to work so that others don't have to carry as much of your weight? Or do you only value the virtue in other people being willing to pay your way for you?
I don’t see how that’s relevant to the idea that work (regardless of how useful or enabling of survival) is an inherent virtue.
For many of us, work is partly motivated by the desire to avoid making other people carry our weight. Do you not see anything virtuous about that?
You’re still talking about something different than work for work’s sake.
No, I think Nazism was behind those words.
It sounds like you might be suggesting I was conflating or blaming Protestant ideals for evil Nazi actions. Instead, I am pointing out an earlier cultural influence that persisted. In a way, there’s something far more sinister about the idea that a Nazi believed there was some sort of genuine freedom to be had, as opposed to it being outright malicious.

“He seems not to have intended it as a mockery, nor even to have intended it literally, as a false promise that those who worked to exhaustion would eventually be released, but rather as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom”

- historian Otto Friedrich

U will hear the same thing under commies, something like only labor is glorious(but of coz this only applies to the plebs but not their leaders)