Social Secuity

What if we were really rewarded for efficiency, or safeguarded from its ill-effects?

Rewards for efficiency are expressed in the form of targets, but we all know they encourage game-playing, because anyone who's in work has to struggle to stay there, and therefore puts across a persona that's working hard in the face of reduced resources.

Efficiency means more output per unit of input, and the "units of input" include jobs. Those without jobs are not hailed as harbingers of efficiency and the vanguard of the new age of freedom from work, but as scroungers, spongers, good-for-nothings and so on. Better to play the game of staying in work than to face that ignominy. Perform only as well as you have to to keep your job. Keep your head down, stay under the radar.

Thus we dwindle away our lives - assuming we're mainly paid for the amount of time we give over to work, but what if we were assured of real social security. What if everyone could work to reduce work, safe in he knowlege that they wouldn't at worst starve and at best be stigmatised for indolence or sloth?

This is the challenge we face as technological unemployment and enviromental catastrophe face us. We have to stop consuming our planet's resources just to make work to get money to spend on consuming our planet's resources (cyclic consumption).

Let's abandon this mutually assured destruction now.