On Loafing (III)

I do not wish to rehash old topics endlessly, but I think the recent amount of work I received for the holidays necessitates another post on this subject. Just so that I set my priorities right.

There is something to be said about idleness; after all hard work is only justified if you are doing useful work, otherwise I think it is better to be doing nothing at all. Given most people's staggering propensity of screwing things up, I think it is more important to keep them gainfully idle, than to find avenues for them to mess things up. And also, given that there are more stupid people than smart ones, it follows that if you have to choose between one or the other, idleness would probably be the better choice. You know you can't be headed the wrong way if you aren't doing anything.

I am not sure who instituted hard work as a virtue; even the (pretty severe) God of the Old Testament insists that one in every seven days should be kept for rest so it can't have been from the beginning of Time. One can always pull the old line in defense of hard work and insist that society just wouldn't work if everybody thought like me - which is flawed, of course. It is true that society would only run if there are people who are not idle (all the time)- the whole point is that you just have to make sure you aren't one of them.

Victorian gentlemen would have agreed - although they told the masses that hard work is a virtue, they abstemiously refrained from it, as they would never be so immodest as to aspire to perfect virtue. In the same way, I suppose, most leaders have the (often) strenous task of convincing people to work hard, so that they wouldn't have to.