6.17.2006
Survival of the Idle
Meet my new hero, Chris Davis. Davis claims that Darwin had it all wrong when he posited the universe as a fundamentally competitive place: "The more perfectly adapted to its environment, the less an organism would need to struggle. The organisms that are struggling are by definition having trouble with their environment. Human beings have, over their history, gradually struggled less. They developed tools that speed up the work needed to fulfill basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter." What this increased efficiency has in theory produced is more idle time: "It is in this idle time that humans can do as they wish, rather than as they must, and they can think, talk, and play — i.e., act as free moral agents."
In the article he doesn't really talk about people's obsessive need to fill this idle time with productive behaviour, but it turns out that there's an entire community devoted to "Idle Theory" called whywork.org. Their basic point is that "the cult of the job" subscribes to a false logic that "automatically equates having a job with making a living." As shown in the article, Davis' own life exemplifies the argument that an alternative to wage slavery can exist.
