Slavery, Post-Scarcity, and My Vegan Ex-Girlfriend’s Dream

When I was in my 20s, I got hit by a car while riding my bike to my girlfriend’s house. It was 3 a.m. in a suburb of Salt Lake City. I came to having lost about ten hours, thinking it was awfully strange that everything was suddenly so dark and that I was covered in rain while everything else was totally dry. I was soaked in blood, mostly from my head, and had a major concussion. Whoever hit me must have decided the cost of calling 911 was greater than some girl on a single-gear bike who was probably dead anyway. This has nothing to do with the following essay, except that people are incredibly selfish when doing cost-benefit analysis, and this selfishness blinds them so completely that when they’re threatened all they can do is flee, fight, or play dead.“Here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.”—L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §23 You Are What You DoThe whole what-will-people-do-if-they-don’t-work question sets up an interesting false dichotomy, which in its simplest form looks something like: work is useful, being useful is good, work is good vs. uselessness is bad, not working is bad. But it, of course, is much deeper than that. Work isn’t just good, it’s Good—it defines you as a Good person. This is essentially a blend of utilitarian and virtue ethics which a hundred years ago Max Weber described as a key part of the Protestant Work Ethic. His description went something like the following: Salvation is predetermined by God; the Almighty, in his infinite wisdom, doesn’t tell you whether you’ve been saved until after the fact i.e. after death; but people are like children who sneak downstairs and rattle the presents under the Christ Tree—they want to know what’s in those boxes even if the whole point of wrapping is for the presents to be a surprise. For God, saying “Surprise you’re going to hell!” is one of the few little joys He allows Himsel