Paradise Regained: Prospects for a New Social Order in the Third Millennium
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--restriction, but does not mandate that he be on the move. Freedom of speech allows person to express an opinion but does not force him to speak out his mind. Freedom of religion permits one to worship any or no deity, but does not mandate that one must be a believer. Freedom of assembly and of association permits one to socialize with anyone but does not dictate that one must not be a recluse. Freedom to work does not qualify as freedom because it does not include in itself its opposite, i.e. freedom not to work. It is an oxymoron. It is like saying that a slave is free not to slave, or a man who has to work is at the same time free not to work. A horse is born a horse and is doomed to be nothing but a horse until his death. He has no choice but to repay to the society the debt for his fodder of oats. He is fed and work is forcefully extracted from him. There is no dignity in it. Saddling him with a ruby-studded saddle would not add even one iota to his dignity. Presently our human dignity is supposed to come from being designated as a worker, and then from a paycheck and a job description: the more money and the less dirt, the greater dignity. We could then sweeten the indignity of our human situation by spending our income on entertainment, which would lift our spirits. A slave, however, does not become hoodwinked into thinking that he is free by just having his spirit lifted by spending the money earned. Setting him free, by guaranteeing his inalienable right to be free from hunger and cold would permit his own creative genius to do the lifting up of his spirits for him. Dignity is not related to the rate of pay or to the kind of labor one performs. Cleaning the septic tanks for no wages is more dignified if one does it out of one’s free will. Dignity resides in freedom. To be forced to work is undignified at any price. Although there is no dignity in being confined to be just a worker, there is even less dignity in being displaced from the workplace and becoming reliant on meager welfare, or to be given even more menial labor at lower rate of pay. In the final analysis, freedom not to work is neither revolutionary idea nor something with which we are unfamiliar. The idea is shocking because it is expressed in stark naked terms, without any qualifying subordinate clauses. As such it is unrecognizable. Freedom not having to work for food staples sounds milder and more reassuring. It is equivalent with the phrase ‘labor-saving devices.’ We ought to be free not to work by washing dishes by hand,--
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About the Book
Freedom from being starved into employment in order not to die of starvation is that last bastion to be overcome to regain the Paradise Lost. Freedom to work cannot be regarded as freedom, if "not working" is not also an option. Money is a medium of exchange. A person who is not in the market for anything that money can buy needs no money. He ought not be forced into employment just to pay for his food. A private enterprise can neither be private nor free under a government, which is not democratic, as it requires violent dictatorial powers to impose its ideas on its subjects. Western democracies, although claiming separation between the church and state, labor under the biblical injunction, that "man shall eat bread in the sweat of his brow' as a punishment for Adam's original sin. This makes them capitalistic, in that capitalism is the product of interaction between private enterprise and Christian ideology. Their weapon of indoctrination is the bread-gun called money. The power of money resides in its threat to life of those who do not have it. The unconditional access to free food staples would empty this gun of its bread bullets and deprive money of its power. Thus humans in the current millennium would regain their dignity left behind in the paradise they had lost.
About the Author
Walter Prytulak was born in Western Ukraine under the Polish rule. He has lived under the dictatorship of several ideologies of -ism: nationalism of Poland, communism of the Soviet Union, fascism of Hitler's Germany, and lastly capitalism of Canada. He is a proponent of a government purged of all clerical and secular ideologies, permitting the private enterprise to function free of its interference. Walter Prytulak is a physician, at present practicing clinical psychiatry in Ontario, Canada.