Today i'm going to talk about work. and the question i'm going to ask and answer is this, why do we work?, why do we drag ourselves out from bed every morining?. And we may be asking yourself that very question. But now i know we have to make a living but no body think that's the answer to the question, "why do we work".
for most people the work we do is challenging, is engaging, it stimulating, it's meaningful and if we are luck it might be even be important. So we wouldn't work if we didn't get paid, but that is not why we do what we do. And in general, i think we think that material reward are pretty bad reason for doing a work that we do. When we say of somebody that he is in it for the money, we are not just being in descriptive.
Now i think this is totally obvious, but the very obviousness of it raises what is for me an incredibly a profound question, why is it that majority of people who work, the work they do has non of the characteristic that get us up and out of bed and off to the office every morning. most of the people that work often do it for pay and there are certain no other earthly reasons to do what they do except for pay. so the question is "why?".
And here is the answer, the answer is "technology", i don't mean the kind of technology that we all know, that type of technology that has developed our lives, i'm talking about another type of technology, the technology of ideas, i call it "idea technology".
In addition to creating things, science create ideas, science create ways of understanding. and in the social sciences, the ways of understanding that get creative are ways of understanding ourselves and they have great influence on how we think. What we are inspired to and how we react. if you think that your poverty is God will, you pray. if you think your poverty is as a result of your own inadequacy you shrink into despair, and if you think your poverty is a result of oppression and domination, then you rise up in revolt.
One of the father of industrial revolution, Adam smith, was convince that human's where by there very nature lazy and would not do anything unless you make it worth their while and the way you make it worth their while, was by giving them reward. and that was the only reason any one ever did anything. so the work example, is merely a example of how false ideas can create circumstances that end up making them true. it is not true that you just can't get good help anymore. it's true that you can get good help anymore when you give work to do that is demeaning and soulless.
Now, we all need to ask ourselves a questions,