Labor Avoidance

The Origins of Inhumanity

Jon Huer

• Publisher: Hamilton Books
• Year: 2015
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780761865513
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Labor Avoidance is about work, something everyone hates, and something everyone longs to escape. At the same time, human nature is to sustain life that is physical, and thus constant labor is a necessity. This is what humanity, from Eden to our own post-industrial society, has always tried to reduce or avoid by making somebody else do it. Historically, this nature and origin of labor-avoidance is responsible for war, colonialism, slavery, and now, contract employment in market society. This book explores American capitalism and how labor (and the desire to escape it) has become responsible for so much human struggle and misery throughout history.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Between Nature and Society
• Our “Human Nature”
• The Origins of All Things
• Trouble in Paradise
• Eden Revisited
• Between “Here” and “There”
• We Must Still Eat to Live
• Somebody Else’s Labor
• Somebody Else’s Energy
• Somebody Else’s Life
• Romans, Nazis, and Americans
• To Work or Not to Work
• The Talented, Best, and Brightest Few
• The No-Labor Promise
• The Golden Age of America
• Capitalism Destroys America’s Golden Age
• A Day in the New Paradise
• Adam Smith Never Knew Capitalism
• To Work or To Play
• Master or Slave
• The Beginnings of Good and Evil
• From Tools to Machines
• Here Comes the Lazy Body
• The Sweet Stench of Power
• The Daring Escape that Failed
• What Was, What Is, What Might Have Been
• Two Variations and a Recapitulation
• Freewill and the Law
• Robinson Crusoe and “Friday”
• Crime as Short-Cut Labor
• The Obsolete Science of Economics
• Shared Labor, No Labor
• Jesus, Jefferson, Smith, and Marx
• The “New World” Becomes “Old”
• Bibliography
• Index