The Total Work Society
November 5, 2015
GAIL L. AGGEN writes:
While the mortality rate is rising among middle-aged whites who are less-educated, the more educated ones are having their own problems, as this New York Times article, Stressed, Tired, Rushed: A Portrait of the Modern Family illustrates.
Beyond the obvious answers that the dissolution of the family as it traditionally functioned is the major factor in the misery, we might consider what has led to this decline and devolution. Absolutely, the family and our traditional way of life have been shredded by elitist ideology hammering away at us with its hedonistic, anti-God, perverse agenda. I am also thinking, however, about the economic factors that have been so crucial to the family’s collapse. Who or what caused these factors is beyond my level of expertise, but I would like to share some of my thoughts, based on my own experience.
For instance, I could stay home with my five children because we did not have the bills that people do today, i.e., Internet, Cable (it was available, but we didn’t want it), mobile phones – the things deemed core necessities today. The kids each got one good pair of shoes, twice a year, and we all wore second-hand clothes a lot of the time. Beyond that, we had no credit card debt because we didn’t even have a credit card for the first dozen years of our marriage. Our social life revolved around our church and the extended family. We put about 30 percent down on our first house from sources earned prior to marriage and from 10k that my parents gave us (God bless them). The house cost about two and a half times my husband’s yearly salary.
If the average yearly earnings of a single-breadwinner household are in the 50k range, as pointed out in this latest article, there are fewer and fewer places that one can get a house for 125k and still be living in an area where the father can earn 50k, and I might add, where the taxes on said house wouldn’t rival the principle and interest payment on it.
Along with the inflated costs of housing (not only home ownership, but the exploding prices of rentals), and vehicles, people have been led to believe that they must have all the other trappings of modern, American life: multiple cars, frequent meals out, tons of clothes, sprinkler systems for their lawns, jewelry, over-the-top parties and vacations, etc. Society now lives in denial about the real decline in wages because it has turned to abusing credit in order to have all these things. On top of the divorce, on top of the single parent families, the entitlements and overrunning of our borders, people are running themselves into the ground by real necessity and by a false idea of what they really need to live a good life.
It used to be that a blue-collar man could support his family with his job, but we all know where those jobs have gone. My hometown, Schenectady, NY with General Electric’s main plant there, used to be a gem of economic stability, and the home of men of great intellect and achievement. Our quality of life was spectacular. Now, it is a rundown, dangerous place, and the epicenter of nastiness in a region (upstate New York) that itself has been deemed the worst place in the country to live.
Ironically, however, just west of town and across the Mohawk Valley, where no one is paying close attention, the rolling hills and fertile fields have been bought up en masse by Amish families who are busily thriving and preserving their traditional way of life. Without any entitlements, these “less educated white people” are remarkably not killing themselves off by suicidal behavior. Despite their “backwards” way of life, they even have time for each other and enjoy a strong social life. Even their cows who still graze, free-range in their pastures probably have it better than the vast majority of the people in the city, while those poor, backwards white people who own the farms do without our modern American life, making their bodies strong and resilient in the fresh air and making a good living with the help of the many children they can somehow afford to have. Indeed, their exploited children kids actually get to spend time with their own parents while learning life skills and how to be moral, successful adults. It is also true that their unenlightened wives work beside them on their own homesteads, bereft of the benefits their feminist and sexually liberated counterparts have wrought for them in society, yet they somehow manage to muddle through life by just being the center and glue of their families, who will rise up and call them blessed and take care of them in old age, no doubt.
I know we cannot all be Amish, but it is clear that God has blessed this people, and they serve as an example of how hard work, strong traditional families knit together in faith-communities, and the rejection of materialism can produce good fruit in spite of all that the god of this age can throw at us.
Laura writes:
Thank you for writing.
Note the hypocrisy of The New York Times article on the stressed family. The Times promotes and glorifies stress all the time. And then it turns around and tears our hearts out by parading the wreckage before our eyes. If it didn’t have these occasional pieces bemoaning the demolition of the family, more people would see it for what it is — a propaganda arm of centralized money power.
You write:
Society now lives in denial about the real decline in wages because it has turned to abusing credit in order to have all these things.
Exactly.
We live in an economy ruled by debt money and economic cartels. What do you see all around you? Monopolistic cartels in every field. And the invisible hand of centralized power. In every area of life. And we’re supposed to believe this is “free markets?” Gimme a break. We live in the Total Work Society caused by pervasive, invisible debt and institutionalized, concentrated greed. Even people without jobs are working, engaged in the consuming task of finding jobs that are not there in a world which is competitive and anxious because there is always a sense that there is not enough. A society without leisure, choked by a “web of debt,” is enslaved.
Full employment is not a realistic goal in an industrialized world. But ample money is a realistic goal. Everyone deserves the basics. Everyone deserves the basics by virtue of being a human being, not by virtue of being a human dynamo. And there is enough to go around, contrary to what we are taught to believe. An economy founded on usury does not provide enough and is inhuman. Our monetary system depends on the creation of constant, dizzying growth to pay off debt, mindless consumerism and the centralization of economic power. Families are experiencing stress by design. Capitalism is oppressive.
There is hope. In economies that offer interest-free credit, such as those proposed by the Social Credit movement, there are ideals to embrace. See many great, informative articles on Social Credit here. These offer serious systemic solutions for the binds families are in today, not that any of it could be brought about easily or that economics is all.
The blinding rhetoric of Capitalism vs. Communism is losing its power. Neither represents economic democracy. Usury, the blogger Anthony Migchels writes, is “pure murder.”
It has nothing to do with ‘oh, it’s so honest, so reasonable, that 5% per year’.
Look at how complete nations are gutted to pay off some filthy rich trillionaires.
Billions of people live in desperate destitution because of Usury, dying prematurely, completely unnecessarily. People commit suicide, haunted to the grave by creditors. It tears families apart in financial stress. By the millions. Throughout the West. The World. It is purely genocidal, there really is no way to get around it.
And we have built our entire economy on this horrid plunder. On this monstrous sin!
When will we again see the simple truth as the ancients always did?
Banking is simply institutionalized Usury.
Capitalism is simply Banking.
The two rose to prominence together in Amsterdam, London and New York.
The whole Capitalist monopoly has been bought with the proceeds of compound interest lending. They are emasculating the West with interest on the debt. The Banks openly try to endebt us to the point where all our income is sucked up by debt service! Years of deflation have made our debts weigh even much heavier in real terms.
Look how the tumors of ‘the financial sector’ are metastasizing, with their ‘bonusses’, ‘derivatives’, LIBOR manipulation, asset bubbles, defaults, bribing politicians, evictions and repossessions, Gold manipulation, media power, globalism, bail outs, bail ins, fomenting of wars. It is all an outgrowth of the cancer of Usury.
We are already thoroughly enslaved through Usury, it’s not a doom scenario, it is the way we live!
In the aftermath of Usury prohibition in the medieval era, around the time of Luther, the main argument for allowing Usury was that without it people wouldn’t lend. And lending was necessary for the economy, the rationale went. There was (at least perceived) a scarcity of credit.
But today we can provide all the interest-free credit we will ever need at zero cost. In several ways!
The ‘time value’ rationale that Jesuits in Salamanca cooked up in the 16th century has been totally discredited and is irrelevant in a decent monetary system.
Notwithstanding credit and money scarcity, the medieval man worked only 15 weeks to feed his entire family in the Usury free economy. Bones found in England show that people there only achieved the same height as the late medieval Briton in the sixties of last century.
Compare that to the sweatshops of the 19th century, the heyday of Capitalist domination over Labor.
Imagine what our life would look like without Usury, and with plenty of dirt cheap credit plus today’s technology!
— Comments —
Sven writes:
Concerning the “Total Work Society”Post, this excerpt from GK Chesterton’s essay “Christmas and the First Games” caught my attention as I was reading this morning.
“Now it is very interesting to remember that there is another proverb, or traditional truth, about stockings in connection with peasants. It has often been said that the peasant put his small property into his stocking, stuck his little hoard of gold into his stocking, so that it might be safe from thieves and bankers. And the peasant was lectured about this, by no less than nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine lecturers on political economy and professional professors of economics or high finance. It was patiently pointed out to him that metal coins do not breed like maggots when left in a stocking; that guineas do not have little families of guineas as guinea-pigs do; that a stocking is not a nest in which a sovereign can lay half-sovereigns as a bird lays eggs; or, in more learned but less sensible language, that his money was not bringing him any interest. So that the only way to make money do what money cannot do, and the only true scientific scheme for proving there is a guinea-and-a-half when there is only a guinea, is to put it in a bank. A bank, as the nine thousand professors of economics explained to the stupid or stupefied peasant can never fail to pay interest. A stocking may wear out or have holes in it; thieves may break in and steal; but it is manifestly impossible for bankers to steal; and even a violation of nature’s laws for things in banks to be stolen; much more for them to disappear altogether, in so brisk and busy a center of speculation. Since banks cannot conceivably fail, argued the professors, you would obviously be a richer man, with somebody else’s money from somewhere somehow mysteriously added to your own, if you would take it out of the stocking and put it into the bank. The peasant was still dazed; but he was strangely stubborn. Since then, the situation has been modified in various ways; and a good many of the professors are wishing they had imitated the peasant.”
Laura writes:
The peasant would probably be better off with a basic banking account.
