When you consider how other mammals behave, it's obvious that everyone else does what they have to, and no more. There isn't another mammal species out there doing more than it needs to. Even in mammal communities where hierarchies occur, the lower ranking members tend to have a much easier time of it than humans do.
We have a story that work is a virtue. Work is particularly a virtue for poor people who would otherwise do terrible, sinful things if they weren't kept busy. This creates a convenient cover for the way in which affluent people living a leisured life exploit the work of those who get to enjoy very little.
It's very easy to accuse a person of laziness and very hard to prove that you aren't being lazy. The accusation tends to be aimed at people who are vulnerable - those who are living in poverty, who are ill, disabled, living on the streets, addicted. Laziness puts the blame for this onto the shoulders of the people who are struggling. Meanwhile the story continues that if we just gave people stuff so they weren't suffering all the time, they'd just sponge off those who have more, because laziness is their defining quality.
There's no evidence to support this story. Give people the resources they need to contribute to their communities, and most people will act on that. The right wing idea of multigenerational households where no one works turned out not to be real, when it was finally investigated. Meanwhile at the other end of the economic spectrum, if you can sponge off the government in the form of massive contracts, or off workers in the form of massive shareholder revenues, that's apparently not laziness or getting a handout. We need to rethink this.
It's not a natural thing to work far harder than you need to so that someone else can make a profit out of you. Our bodies did not evolve for that. We're all supposed to have time to rest, socialise, groom ourselves, lounge about in the sun, play, chew the cud. This is life, as mammals live it. We did not evolve to work relentlessly, and this is why our bodies and minds suffer when we try to do that. Capitalism is neither natural nor inevitable and there is nothing lazy about craving a gentler life at a more natural pace.
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