Refusal of work

Refusal of work is behavior in which a person refuses to adapt to regular employment sometimes as a way to protest Wage slavery.

• Plato said that virtue has no master. If a person does not honor this principle and rejoice in it, but is purchasable for money, he creates many masters for himself.
  • Apollonius of Tyana, letter to Euphrates, Epp. Apoll. 15

• Practical life is not necessarily directed toward other people, as some think; and it is not the case that practical thoughts are only those which result from action for the sake of what ensues. On the contrary, much more practical are those mental activities and reflections which have their goal in themselves and take place for their own sake.
  • Aristotle, Politics, VII, 3, 8, 1325b16-20

• οὐ γὰρ δεῖν ἐπιτάττεσθαι τὸν σοφὸν ἀλλ᾽ ἐπιτάττειν, καὶ οὐ τοῦτον ἑτέρῳ πείθεσθαι, ἀλλὰ τούτῳ τὸν ἧττον σοφόν.
  • The wise man must not be ordered but must order, and he must not obey another, but the less wise must obey him.
    • Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982a.15, W. Ross, trans., The Basic Works of Aristotle (2001), p. 691.

• An intelligent man neither allows himself to be controlled nor attempts to control others; he wishes reason alone to rule, and that always.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères (1688), “Of the Affections,” #71

• Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins ... remain addicted to such things as running errands and messages, such as for kings, ministers, nobles, Brahmins, householders and young men who say, "Go here, go there! Take this there, bring that from there," the ascetic Gotama refrains from such errand-running.
  • Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, § 1.19

• 'Suppose there were a man, a slave, a labourer, getting up before you and going to bed after you, willingly doing whatever has to be done, well-mannered, pleasant-spoken, working in your presence. And he might think, ... "I ought to do something meritorious. Suppose I were to shave off my hair and beard, don yellow robes, and go forth from the household life into homelessness!" And before long, he does so. And he, having gone forth might dwell, restrained in body, speech and thought, satisfied with the minimum of food and clothing, content, in solitude. And then if people were to announce to you: "Sire, you remember that slave who worked in your presence, and who shaved off his hair and beard and went forth into homelessness?" ... Would you then say: "That man must come back and be a slave and work for me as before?"'

  'No indeed, Lord. For we should pay homage to him, we should rise and invite him and press him to receive from us robes, food, lodging, medicines for sickness and requisites, and make arrangements for his proper protection.'

  • Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 2, verses 35-36, pp. 97-98

• Don't give yourselves to brutes — men who despise you — enslave you — who regiment your lives — tell you what to do — what to think or what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine hearts!
  • Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator (1940)

• I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.
  • Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 79

• Let every man abide in the art or employment wherein he was called. And for their labor they may receive all necessary things, except money.
  • Francis of Assisi, First Rule of the Friars Minor

• We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
  • Buckminster Fuller, "The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In" by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30

• Ein Mensch, der um anderer willen, ohne dass es seine eigene Leidenschaft, sein eigenes Bedürfnis ist, sich um Geld oder Ehre oder sonst etwas abarbeitet, ist immer ein Tor.
  • A man who works at another’s will, not for his own passion or his own need, but for money or honor, is always a fool.
    • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), p. 46

• The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.
  • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2001), p. 204

• The leisurely person is independent in the sense that the value of his leisure does not depend on any consequence it may have, for example, the consequence that it restores his energy for the next day’s work.
  • Lawrence Haworth, Autonomy (Yale University Press: 1986), pp. 12-13

• Do not say, "when I have leisure I will study," for you may never have leisure.
  • Hillel the Younger, Pirkei Avot 2:5

• The most extraordinary spectacle, as it seems to me, is the vast expenditure of labour and time wasted in obtaining mere subsistence. As a man, in his lifetime, works hard and saves money, that his children may be free from the cares of penury, and may, at least, have sufficient to eat, drink, clothe, and roof them, so the generations that preceded us might, had they so chosen, have provided for our subsistence. The labour and time of ten generations, properly directed, would sustain a hundred generations succeeding to them, and that, too, with so little self-denial on the part of the providers as to be scarcely felt. So men now, in this generation, ought clearly to be laying up a store, or, what is still more powerful, arranging and organising that the generations which follow may enjoy comparative freedom from useless labour. Instead of which, with transcendent improvidence, the world works only for to-day, as the world worked twelve thousand years ago, and our children's children will still have to toil and slave for the bare necessities of life. This is, indeed, an extraordinary spectacle.
  • Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography (1883), Chapter X, pp. 156–157
• That twelve thousand written years should have elapsed, and the human race—able to reason and to think, and easily capable of combination in immense armies for its own destruction—should still live from hand to mouth, like cattle and sheep, like the animals of the field and the birds of the woods; that there should not even be roofs to cover the children born, unless those children labour and expend their time to pay for them; that there should not be clothes, unless, again, time and labour are expended to procure them; that there should not be even food for the children of the human race, except they labour as their fathers did twelve thousand years ago; that even water should scarce be accessible to them, unless paid for by labour! In twelve thousand written years the world has not yet built itself a House, nor filled a Granary, nor organised itself for its own comfort. It is so marvellous I cannot express the wonder with which it fills me. And more wonderful still, if that could be, there are people so infatuated, or, rather, so limited of view, that they glory in this state of things, declaring that work is the main object of man's existence—work for subsistence—and glorying in their wasted time. To argue with such is impossible; to leave them is the only resource.
  • Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography (1883), Chapter X, pp. 157–158

• Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!

She has become a dwelling place for demons,

a haunt for every unclean spirit. ...

Come out of her, my people,

lest you take part in her sins,

lest you share in her plagues;

for her sins are heaped high as heaven,

and God has remembered her iniquities.

• John of Patmos, Revelation 18:2-5

• The poor were wise, who, by the rich oppressed,

Withdrew, and sought a secret place of rest.

• Juvenal, Satire III, J. Dryden, trans.

• The “Secret place of rest” is Mons Sacer, where the plebeians hid after seceding from the Roman Empire in 495 BC

• To work for a living certainly cannot be the meaning of life, since it is indeed a contradiction that the continual production of the conditions is supposed to be the answer to the question of the meaning of that which is conditional upon their production.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Either-Or, H. Hong, trans. (1987), part 1 (I 15), p. 31

• That is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people’s time, not his.
  • Charles Lamb, “The superannuated man,” Last Essays of Elia (1833).

• As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” At once they left their nets and followed him.
  • Gospel of Matthew 4:18-20

• Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not to be the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery only if it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise their idleness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonor, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), W. Kaufmann, trans, § 42

• What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think, and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure—as a mere automaton of “duty”?
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist § 11

• No man, being a soldier to God, entangleth himself with secular businesses.
  • Paul of Tarsus, Second Epistle to Timothy 2:3-4

• Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them.
  • Paul of Tarsus, First Epistle to the Corinthians 7:20 NIV

• In our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture—and ourselves.
  • Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948)

• He who advises a sick man, whose manner of life is prejudicial to health, is clearly bound first of all to change his patient’s manner of life, and if the patient is willing to obey him, he may go on to give him other advice. But if he is not willing, I shall consider one who declines to advise such a patient to be a man and a physician, and one who gives in to him to be unmanly and unprofessional. In the same way with regard to a State, whether it be under a single ruler or more than one, if, while the government is being carried on methodically and in a right course, it asks advice about any details of policy, it is the part of a wise man to advise such people. But when men are travelling altogether outside the path of right government and flatly refuse to move in the right path, and start by giving notice to their adviser that he must leave the government alone and make no change in it under penalty of death—if such men should order their counselors to pander to their wishes and desires and to advise them in what way their object may most readily and easily be once for all accomplished, I should consider as unmanly one who accepts the duty of giving such forms of advice, and one who refuses it to be a true man.
  • Plato, Seventh Letter

• A man of business may talk of philosophy; a man who has none may practice it.
  • Alexander Pope, Thoughts on Various Subjects (1727).

• The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
  • Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness”

• Without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.
  • Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness”

• The first mistake belonging to business is the going into it.
  • George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, “Moral Thoughts and Reflections,” Complete Works (Oxford:1912), p. 231

• Men make it such a point of honour to be fit for business that they forget to examine whether business is fit for a man.
  • George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, “Moral Thoughts and Reflections,” Complete Works (Oxford:1912), p. 231

• It is not a reproach but a compliment to learning, to say, that great scholars are less fit for business; since the truth is, business is so much a lower thing than learning, that a man used to the last cannot easily bring his stomach down to the first.
  • George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, “Moral Thoughts and Reflections,” Complete Works (Oxford:1912), p. 231

• Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil.
  • Mark Slouka, “Quitting the paint factory: On the virtues of idleness,” Harper’s, November 2004

• You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards,
  So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod.
  • Solon of Athens, as reported by Diogenes Laërtius (trans. C. D. Yonge) The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (1853), "Solon", sect. 5, p. 25.

• Do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of heaven.
  • Gospel of Thomas, verse 6

• There is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.
  • Henry David Thoreau, "Life Without Principle", Atlantic Monthly (October 1863)

• A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.
  • Henry David Thoreau, "Life Without Principle", Atlantic Monthly (October 1863)

• It is above all the impersonal and economically rationalized (but for this very reason ethically irrational) character of purely commercial relationships that evokes the suspicion, never clearly expressed but all the more strongly felt, of ethical religions. ... The more a religion is aware of its opposition in principle to economic rationalization as such, the more apt are the religion’s virtuosi to reject the world, especially its economic activities.
  • Max Weber, Sociology of Religion (1922), p. 217

• The wide chasm separating the inevitabilities of economic life from the Christian ideal ... kept the most devout groups and all those with the most consistently developed ethics far from the life of trade.
  • Max Weber, Sociology of Religion (1922), pp. 219-220

• The fact that people with rigorous ethical standards simply could not take up a business career was not altered by the dispensation of indulgences, nor by the extremely lax principles of the Jesuit probabilistic ethics after the Counter Reformation. A business career was only possible for those who were lax in their ethical thinking.
  • Max Weber, Sociology of Religion (1922), p. 220

• Luther understands monasticism as a product of an egoistic lovelessness that withdraws from one's duties in the world. By contrast, this-worldly work in a vocation appears to him to be a visible expression of brotherly love, a notion he anchors in a highly unrealistic manner indeed and in contrast—almost grotesquely—to the well-known passages of Adam Smith.
  • Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), as translated by Stephen Kalberg (2011), p. 100

• The great genius does not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that surround him.
  • Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1906), p. 139

• We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
  • Oscar Wilde, Gilbert, in The Critic as Artist, pt. 2, Intentions (1891)

• Those who take money are bound to carry out the work for which they get a fee, while I, because I refuse to take it, am not obliged to talk with anyone against my will.
  • Xenophon, Socrates in Memorabilia, 1.6.1

• Now all the truth is out,

Be secret and take defeat

From any brazen throat,

For how can you compete,

Being honor bred, with one

Who, were it proved he lies,

Were neither shamed in his own

Nor in his neighbors’ eyes?

Bred to a harder thing

Than Triumph, turn away

And like a laughing string

Whereon mad fingers play

Amid a place of stone,

Be secret and exult,

Because of all things known

That is most difficult.

• W. B. Yeats, “To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing”

• The sage finds his place as a quail settles. ...
  If the whole world has the Tao,
  he is part of that well-being.
  When the whole world has lost the Tao,
  he develops virtue and avoids involvement.
  • Zhuangzi, The Book of Chuang Tzu, as translated by M. Palmer, et. al. (Penguin: 1996), p. 96

• Someone offered Chuang Tzu a court post. Chuang Tzu answered the messenger, 'Sir, have you ever seen a sacrificial ox? It is decked in fine garments and fed on fresh grass and beans. However, when it is led into the Great Temple, even though it most earnestly might wish to be a simple calf again, it's now impossible.'
  • Zhuangzi, The Book of Chuang Tzu, as translated by M. Palmer, et. al. (Penguin: 1996), Chapter 33

Autonomy Civil disobedience Conscientious objector Disability General strike He who does not work, neither shall he eat Idleness Laziness Leisure Monasticism

Nonviolent resistance Protestant work ethic Refusal Retirement Strike action Unemployment Universal basic income Wage slavery Work