I urge you to read John Wilder’s blog post “The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed“, and Arthur Sido’s reflections on that topic at “Like The Matrix But Without The Cool Outfits“. The latter article is long and complex, but makes several valuable points. Here’s how it concludes.
When you look around you see a world that is designed to harvest your productivity. Many people in our society are part of the productive class, doing some sort of labor that adds some value. Lots of others, and this is a rapidly increasing percentage of the workforce, are part of what I called The Parasite Class. I wrote:
Our society is divided economically by doers and talkers. Doers are people who have jobs that have traditionally existed in Western society. 300 years ago we had carpenters. Today we have carpenters. The tools have somewhat changed but the job is basically the same. 300 years ago we had teamsters who moved freight. We have the same thing today although they drive trucks instead of horse-drawn wagons and chuck pop bottles full of pee along the interstate. Store clerks. Cooks. Farmers. Mechanics. There is something tangible they do. You can see if a shelf is restocked with cans of chicken soup or not. Either a corn field gets planted or it doesn’t. You can’t fake that. Did that load of toilet paper make it from the distribution center to the local Wal-Mart or not?
Then we have the talkers. Most of my professional career I was a talker. I didn’t do anything of note. I attended meetings, went on sales calls, received and replied to emails. I worked in offices or cubicles surrounded by other people who didn’t actually do anything. That didn’t mean it wasn’t difficult and stressful, it absolutely was primarily because we weren’t doing anything. Everything was made up so it was pretty tricky to do it right. It was all about managing people, and especially managing the people above you on the corporate ladder. The key was to convince them you were doing a great job when in fact you weren’t actually doing anything useful at all. It didn’t really matter if you worked super hard or if you spent your day getting more coffee, blogging and managing your fantasy sports teams because at the end of the day you hadn’t done anything either way. As long as your boss thought you were ticking the check-boxes, you were good to go and I spent many, many years getting pretty good at managing fantasy sports teams while convincing my bosses that I was hard at work. It is a world where sycophants and suck-ups thrive and where people with middling talent of any kind can climb the corporate ladder until they find their own personal sweet spot and then they lodge themselves into their corporate host like a tick, sucking blood and impossible to dislodge.
In my parasite jobs I made lots of “money”, had great “benefits” and a great “retirement plan”. Being self-employed I make less “money” and have basically no “benefits” but our standard of living by my measure is higher and I am far happier. Even still, the parasite class contributes labor. Showing up to sit in a cubicle and spending the entire afternoon tweaking a Powerpoint presentation still requires time and effort. It was amazing how absolutely exhausted I could find myself at the end of a day when I didn’t do anything useful. Quite the contrary, I often was more tired, stressed and depressed after a day in the office than now when I have a busy day working for myself.
Most of us are trapped inside of a system created for the benefit of others at our expense. These people are latched onto the American people, burrowed into us like ticks and sucking the lifeblood of our labor. They are completely dependent on us but constantly tell us how dependent we are on them. Talk about dividing up the country and they sneer at us as if we couldn’t possibly survive without them. What would we do without hedge fund managers manipulating imaginary stock prices or Federal flunkies moving paperwork from one folder to another?
If D.C. were to suddenly fall victim to some cataclysm and be wiped off the face of the earth, most of us wouldn’t notice other than people who receive Social Security benefits. Even SS is simply robbing younger generations to provide for older generations, something we used to do as part of our familial obligations, while D.C. takes a huge bite to facilitate taking money out of Oklahoma before sending it back to Oklahoma.
Should the same thing happen to the Midwest? It wouldn’t take long for people in the coastal urban areas to starve, for the lights to go off, and for goods and services to stop moving. As the Covid “pandemic”, winter storms and budget impasses have proved over and over, when you really look at who is essential in this country, it turns out almost none of them are in the lofty elite positions in D.C. or New York. Truck drivers, farmers, plumbers. Those are essential workers. Bankers and bureaucrats, HR staff and community activists? Those jobs are not only not essential, they inhibit the productivity and happiness of normal people.
One of the most red-pilling things you can do is to realize that you are being farmed for your productivity and then finding a way to side-step the system. How to do that is an entirely different post on it’s own but suffice it to say it can be done. Given the societal trajectory we are on, I would say it must be done for your own survival. Their plan is to force you into the cities where you can be controlled more easily. Find your own path outside of their system as much as you can, denying them your productivity and insulating yourself from their plans for The Great Reset.
Discovering you are in your own Matrix is just the first step, the next is to get yourself and your loved ones out.
There’s more at the link, all of it well worth your time to read.
We’re going to have to focus on this as our economy crumbles around our ears. Each productive American worker is effectively carrying on his or her back at present at least one non-productive worker: one whose efforts are basically producing nothing of value, but leeching off the value produced by productive workers. We can no longer afford that. In a time when every sinew is being strained towards sheer economic survival, there’s no room for parasites any more.
Peter
I found it a great relief and very rewarding to go from being a talker to a doer, a maker. I took to it so well that I am a maker in my off time, too, having made a wood shop out of my 3 car garage and making things as simple as wooden bowls or wooden fencing. There is a sense of fulfillment in being a doer, in making things that the dependent class will never have.
While this is a minor point compared to the sweeping social impact of the divide between talkers and doers, I feel it to be an undervalued one: part of the mental health crisis today, IMO, is related to people crying out for fulfillment in their daily lives, men especially. We NEED to be productive, if for nothing else than to stave off discontent.
The moment we joined in family and tribe we started working for someone other than just ourselves.
I've always worked as a producer. Most of my adult life was owner of companies with employees. My first real business at age 19 was supplying wood I cut, split, and delivered. I could not control overhead. The business went kerplop.
My next two were in the construction industry. One was insurance casualty repair, the first in my area. The other, residential remodeling, with the infrequent tenant improvement job.
I did six yrs of commercial fishing while also returning to college.
The woman I married worked in local government all her career. We fought like cat and dog over small business owner Vs government drone. Yes, I mean 'versus' in every sense of the word. To her, regulation is as necessary as the guy who actually provides a service or material. Obviously I rejected that perspective.
Many times I went to the SBA for advice. They feature a cadre of volunteers with business acumen. Sounds great, except those volunteers occupied a significant time of our meetings checking the boxes made mandatory by the gov program. Surely orhers have had success with the SBA. The main lesson to me was to avoid gov. assistance at all costs.
Then there is my bank and the ever changing policies concerning a vendor (me) handed down from on high (gov.) I won't say further because after 15 yrs of selling off my businesses this subject is still quite distasteful.
It looks like I am complaining and/or blaming others for a lack of success. I admit to the former and deny the latter. I will say a greater success eluded me and when I have wondered why, it is because business is hobbled by government. To say it is 'government' is inaccurate. It is the collection of misfits, each an individual, who act in union which is more precise.
Government may look nice on paper. It may look as it is needed. But it is those individuals in government given wide latitude in how to conduct their affairs. Never forget, your business is their affairs.
Example: I had an entire project red tagged (Stop Work) for three days and 12 employees standing around, plus an irate project owner all because a government inspector did not know the building code. The phone calls flew furiously back and forth. My in-person visits to the B&P Dept, all to no avail. How curious that of an entire Dept, there is only one guy who I must speak with. Also, that one guy is too often unavailable.
The stalemate ended when I literally drove around looking for that schmuck. His coup de grace as when he began asking me personal questions about my wife. She worked in the same building as he although 2 floors up. Other than his lust of flesh, they had no need for contact.
It is the government employees who deserve the hot anger of The People.
Thanks for the link Peter! I always worry that my longer posts turn people off from reading the whole thing so I appreciate it
This is what Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged is about. A very worthwile, but long read. —ken
Unknown, the difference is you choose to work for your family. How much choice do we have, assuming we even knew what we were doing, when it comes to the "tribe" in Washington DC and the centers of power that we work for now?
I am a high school teacher and a Harley mechanic. Honestly don't want to be a full time mechanic because I've done it before and I found it boring in the long run. That being said, even the conservative district in which I live is all about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and the other day we had training in Gender Identity by someone who lists on her (I assume) website that she starts every training by acknowledging that we live on stolen land. I am about ready to go back to my other life.
Not to mention learning to grow edible plants which is also not one of my skills.
This essay reminds me of when I worked as a "General Services Analyst" at Dupont's head office in Mississauga. It made me ponder the two and a half years I spent there and what I actually did. It was almost nothing.
Then I quit and went back to driving a cab. And I was actually doing something. Until the cocksuckers at City Hall "fixed" that business. After that, we spent most of our time with our thumbs up our asses.