Gregory's ServerUrsula Le Guin: “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”
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16 comments
@serapath @spencerbeswick it's not a coincidence that Graeber was an anarchist and this quote is from the (fictional) words of an anarchist revolutionary in LeGuin's The Dispossessed.   @spencerbeswick @Guy @spencerbeswick Having just reread Tehanu, it doesn't seem to me at all pitched towards younger readers? (Frankly, I think the original trilogy is a form of literature to which age categories don't really apply. But the fourth book would be a hard sell to younger readers, being completely about middle age and womanhood.)  @Guy @spencerbeswick I believe she's the single most important author in the development of SFF into a modern art form @spencerbeswick I would add gardening to her list. It brings a connection from the smallest critters to the entire cosmos. Miracles all. William Morris pamphlet on this topic: “Here, you see, are two kinds of work - one good, the other bad; one not far removed from a blessing, a lightening of life; the other a mere curse, a burden to life. What is the difference between them, then? This: one has hope in it, the other has not.” (WM, ‘Useful Work vs Useless Toil’: @spencerbeswick i love that research has now completely confirmed this & people still choose to believe that humans need jobs & will simply do nothing at all unless literally extorted under threat of starvation, illness, & total expulsion from society. 🙃  @spencerbeswick So, fund them, Ursula. We can provide a list of excellent starving musicians, for starters. Do they not count? The hunter, after all, has a blessed, glorious, more important than human life, gun. Perhaps if musicians all packed heat we'd make a buck after performing for 4 1/2 hours in some bar for drunks requesting the same song over & over, then barfing on our equipment. Music is all cost, no income. Even artists on canvas do tremendously better, so why not start there? Werdz. @spencerbeswick Is that a quote from "The Dispossessed", or where can I find it in context? Thanks in advance!   @spencerbeswick Yeah. When I get called by a scammer I ask them "do you feel happy when you wake up in the morning knowing that you are going to have to spend your day trying to scam people?". I don't usually get to the end before they hang up, though. |
@spencerbeswick
I feel reminded of David Graebers Book: Bullshit Jobs