Amerika

This one has been making the rounds, but, it serves as an observation that modern life leaves nothing for the future especially in careers:

Children existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, so it became the norm at every level of society. That’s all gone now: I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value—he will live in another universe. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then he accepts that life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience; past and future generations mean nothing to him. That’s how we live now. For a man to bring a child into the world now is meaningless.

Jobs make you into a robot. Aristocracy makes each person have a place without being equal. One does not work at all, but the other mostly works. Even when it fails, it is better off that its alternative in the long term.

Instead, we get the standard human behavior: a compromise, more aimed at reducing risk to the present tense than creating something positive in the future tense.

Jobs are jails. Democracy is slavery. Socialism is control. Until we overthrow these things that “seem” good but are actually toxic, we are doomed to live among our own failures.

Tags: careers, equality, jobs, michel houellebecq, modernity, servitude