Economic development -- Social aspects; Social evolution; Social problems; Work
Right beside our rashly generalising ancestor laboured the primeval
squaw, working patiently, working eagerly, working most efficiently, out
of the overflowing energy of the mother instinct, with the power of
recreative love. Not because of anything to gain or anything to fear,
but because energy must have expression; and the expression is in
proportion to the energy, not in proportion to the return. Later, in the
fall of the matriarchate and the inception of our dramatic androcentric
period, the woman was made a slave and her labour became slave labour,
not to its improvement. Later again men were made slaves; their activity
was coerced by these two primitive stimuli, the fear of punishment, the
hope of reward; mainly the former.
In that first period of co-ordinate activity among men, the
irreconcilable male energy was forced into service by the immediate
pressure of pain and fear. Slavery was one step short of slaughter, as
such accepted, as such hated. All that deep-rooted aversion to
labour—sense of scorn for it, shame in it, honour in being free of
it—was superimposed upon humanity at this period, and has never been
fully outgrown. This terrible period, its wrong, its shame, its agony,
its hopelessness, deeply impressed the growing brain of man, and, as
this period was of great duration, it made possible to our minds the
prodigious concepts of eternal torture.
Later, in the second stage of coerced action, that of wage labour, we
have the reward used instead of the penalty. We will not whip the man if
he does not work, but we will not feed him unless he does.
Our governing concept being that action is produced only by these means,
we must needs use one or the other. Since we believe that if the slave
were not in fear of punishment he would not work, or that if the
employee were not in hope of pay he would not work, we act upon our
belief consistently enough. We have outgrown the period where we
believed we had a right to enforce labour by inflicting punishment; but
we have not outgrown the only less primitive belief that we have a right
to enforce it by withholding the reward. We do not yet, to any extent,
recognise the other forces under which human beings act.
Closely allied to the Pay concept and following it, a more concrete
expression of the same general thought as applied to industrial
activity, comes our universal economic fallacy, the Want Theory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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