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Registered: 12-2017
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ROWERS: AN ALLEGORICAL TALE


THE ROWERS: AN ALLEGORICAL TALE

Once upon a time there was a mighty ship, powered not by sail or propeller but by human muscle. A great many oarsmen worked to move the ship through the waters of a vast ocean.

How big was this ocean? It covered such a vast expanse that several lifetimes were required to cross it. The people aboard that great ship knew this all too well. For generations they had travelled, ceaselessly pulling at the oars, moving the craft along. And in all that time, as seasons changed as and babies grew up to be adults who could replace those too frail with age to row anymore, the view hardly changed. Always, no matter which direction the eye looked, all there was to see was water, water, water, stretching all the way to the horizon.

Yet something, perhaps some ancient memory buried so deep it now manifested itself on the conscious as a vague yearning, insisted that there had to be more to this journey than an endless crossing of an ocean that just went on and on. That one day, there would be some sign that all this effort had at last been rewarded and a different life could begin.

But, here and now, everybody was raised to accept the situation. All aboard the ship had to keep rowing, keep moving the ship along, and this they would have to carry on doing until something changed, something that would indicate journey’s end.

Not that everybody rowed. A few took on the responsibility of coordinating the actions of the many who did row. They shouted out instructions and in heeding those orders the great mass of rowers worked as one, their oars rhythmically paddling, propelling the craft through the waters.

The instructors did not just issue orders to ensure the rowers worked proficiently. They also promoted an ideology based around the necessity to keep rowing. Most accepted this ideology as beyond question. Of course the fit and able had to pull an oar. Being a rower was what gave purpose to life. And think of all those who had previously pulled your oar. If the rowing were to stop now, all that our ancestors had struggled for would be for naught.

So they kept at it, rowing, rowing, rowing. Inevitably, the time would come for each individual when he or she could row no more, having finally reached a stage in their life when physical strength was no longer up to the task. A few became instructors. But mostly, these people, with great ceremony, were gently lowered overboard to be embraced by Poseidon, honoured for the rest of time in the memories of their descendants.

Then there were those who would not row, even though they were fit and able. For them, there was no ceremony for they had no honour. They were tossed overboard with all the dispassion with which one threw away garbage. Their cries as they floundered around in the waters, facing only death rather than the eternal embrace of the god Poseidon, served as warnings to those alive not to end up like that.

On and on the great ship travelled, seemingly without end. In fact, so many generations had passed by without knowing any other life that most saw no end to this existence even in their imagination. To be alive was to row. That was the purpose for which you had been born, to row, row, row until, finally, you earned the privilege of being embraced by Poseidon and remembered with honour.

But then, one day, there was a change. The view was not just of water stretching all the way to the horizon in every direction. There was something else out there, something nobody had witnessed for years beyond count. The people aboard the ship could put no name to this unprecedented sight, for they had long forgotten the name ‘land’. But as the land loomed ever larger, a feeling stirred in the heart. This had to be it, the journey’s end!

With a great whoop of joy the rowers pulled for the shore, working as hard as the instructors barked their orders. Near the shore, submerged just below the waves, there was a coral reef. In their eagerness to reach land the people sent the ship on a collision course with that reef. It tore a hole in the great boat’s hull and the ship began to sink. The waves pounded the wreck against rocks and razor-sharp coral, destroying it utterly before too long. But what did that matter? There, almost within touching distance, was journey’s end. Everybody leaped overboard and swam for shore. Powerful swimmers were they, having built up such muscular bodies from all that rowing.

The rowers stood on the shoreline and took in their surroundings. Everywhere they looked there was an abundance of foods and materials, enough to satisfy any need. Tears rolled down the eyes of those who contemplated a life lived doing something other than rowing.

But they were in a minority, and they had little authority to wield. The instructors did have authority and they were soon giving out orders. “Every man and woman of fit and able body is to procure for himself something like this”, they said in loud, clear voices, each holding up a branch of about two metres in length. So used to following the orders of their instructors were these people that just about everybody did as they were told.

Seeing the people now each had something that would serve for the purpose they knew had to be done, the instructors issued their next order. “You are to sit down, forming a single line, one person behind the other”.

The people did as instructed, each holding in their hand a pole-like object, feeling comfortable familiarity grasping that object and seeing in front of them the back of a person likewise holding their own pole.

“What are you?”, yelled the instructors?

“We are rowers!”, replied that great mass of people.

“What gives meaning to life?”, the instructors shouted.

“Rowing!”, came the reply.

“What would you do if you did not row?”, the instructors demanded to know.

It would be wrong, strictly-speaking, to say the reply was unanimous, but it very nearly was. And the near-unanimous reply was, “if we did not row we would have nothing to do”.

The instructors nodded sagely. The people had learned life’s lesson well. People rowed. It was what they always had done, it was what they always would do.

“Then...Pull! Pull! Pull!”.

And they did pull. They sat in rows, pulling their imaginary oars. Surrounding them was an island of abundant resources that could have permitted so many more purposes but they were blinded by an ideology that saw no purpose in life other than to row, and so row they did. Today. Tomorrow. Always.
4/6/2020, 5:34 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
greendocnowciv Profile
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Registered: 11-2017
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Re: ROWERS: AN ALLEGORICAL TALE


A well-written allegory.

As so many wait in their homes for enough people to take Trump Pills that this whole forced vay-cay can end...

None of us who are not retired, yet feel that their jobs are un-necessary, need to report back to work, once we are all able.

They are free to be wide-eyed and open to the idea that of all the jobs that surround us are actually partly nonsense and a kind of "make-work."

So if one thinks that is true of them and their job - heed the word of that truth, and forsake the BS job. In time, you will no longer be paid - maybe pretty fast.

In most Developed world nations, one will at some point be evicted for their home for inability to pay taxes.

But wait! Until then, one can wait, not working.

And one may be a renter - forced to pay to one of those accursed landlords.

As one sits foodless, one can scavenge at waste-bins as some homeless notoriously do. Once there, one can also follow the signs seen in those parts of town to a free charity meal.

One may even gain weight! Those free meals can be a mite starchy, and absolutely niggardly with the meat.

A moneyless lifestyle may work until finally evicted - and by George, it may still be working much later! One's lifestyle will get a bit "earthy," sure, but is one not searching for more reality, and less "fakery" in ones existence?

Say "buh by" to the fakery and falseness of jobs and working! Embrace the world of no money, or never much of it, except for those who hand it to you out of pity.

If that appeals, of course.



4/6/2020, 10:09 pm Link to this post PM greendocnowciv Blog
 
Spikosauropod Profile
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Registered: 06-2007
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Re: ROWERS: AN ALLEGORICAL TALE


EX, that was a really depressing allegorical tale. It reminded me of horror movies where people do the exact thing the audience wincingly hopes they will not.

I get what it is about. It is more of your preaching about BS jobs. The thing is, I will do a BS job if someone will pay me enough to do it. If they pay me enough, I will be saving for the day I reach that allegorical island. And I will be smart enough to quit rowing and eat the fruit.

Of course, I will get fat...and may even long for the hard days of rowing. Did you know that people pay for machines to row on that go nowhere:

Image

It is really good exercise. People in that kind of shape have terrific sex.

Well, so long for now.
4/6/2020, 10:27 pm Link to this post PM Spikosauropod
 
Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Registered: 12-2017
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Re: ROWERS: AN ALLEGORICAL TALE


When I posted this story on Steemit nobody guessed it was about jobs. One person thought it was about coronavirus and people following the BS advice of doctors.

You won’t be surprised to learn that you guys are closer to guessing what this is about. Really it’s a comment on all those people who say ‘new jobs will replace the ones we lose to robots’ but never say whether or how those new jobs will be good for anything other than keeping us all jobbing.

Spiko said he would do a BS job if it paid enough. Actually, BS jobs tend to be well-paid, comfortable and ‘respectable’. It’s just that the work you are doing is mostly pointless and if your job did not exist society as a whole would either not notice or would improve. On the other hand if your job is so vital society would be brought to its knees within days if its employees stopped working, there’s a good chance that you are poorly paid and treated with disrespect.

BS jobs challenge people’s conceptions of work in a couple of ways. They challenge conceptions of how capitalism is meant to work, because it is imagined to be all about efficiency and cost-cutting in the name of seeking higher-profits through selling value-added products and services. So when it is said that there 37-50 percent of jobs serve little to no public good and are mostly or entirely BS, a lot of people say something like ‘such jobs cannot exist under capitalism and therefore anyone who says a job is pointless is mistaken’, which is really just a circular argument saying ‘in a free market this cannot happen and therefore it is not happening’.

BS jobs also challenge economic models of human behaviour. This is because economists model humans as rational agents that seek out the maximum-possible reward for minimum-possible effort. If that were true, people who were paid to do very little would be the happiest workers of all. And yet comments from those who do feel their job is BS are more typically like this:

“What’s it like to have a job like this? Demoralising. Depressing. I get the most of the meaning in my life from my job, and now my job has no meaning or purpose. It gives me anxiety because I think that at any moment someone is actually going to realise that nothing would change if I were not here. It also makes me afraid that other people in the office think the problem is me; that I’m choosing to slack off or I’m choosing to be useless”.

In trying to figure out why being well-paid to sit around all day long should lead to such depressive thoughts, Graeber reckoned, “at least a galley-slave knows he’s oppressed. An office worker forced to sit for seven and a half hours a day pretending to type into a screen for $18 an hour, or a junior member of a consultancy team forced to give the exact same seminar on innovation and creativity week in and week out for $50,000 a year, is just confused”.

4/7/2020, 12:29 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
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Re: ROWERS: AN ALLEGORICAL TALE


>Did you know that people pay for machines to row on that go nowhere:<

Those are exercise machines. People use them to keep fit; their not trying to go anywhere with them.

Ok I know you are only joking. But I would point out that in my story the rowers did actually reach the promised land so in some sense their efforts were not wasted. Translating the allegory into its true meaning, we might say it is a comment on:

A) The practical need for everyone who is fit enough to job to job.

B) The ideology that everyone who is fit enough to job should job

For much of the story, the practical need to row was as strong as the ideology that said rowing was what gave life meaning. Similarly it can be said that for 5,000 years or so it has been the case that there was a great practical need to keep just about everyone jobbing and so the ideology of ‘everyone fit to job should job!’, served to guide us toward a better future (just as the ship in the allegory is ultimately heading for the promised land even if no-one is quite sure where it is).

But what happens if the jobbing ideology remains strong even though the practical need to job has diminished? In that case jobs or ‘rowing’ become less a means to an end but an end in themselves. When experts confidently predict that if all current jobs are automated away thanks to AI, robotics, molecular assemblers and what-have-you, there will be new jobs to replace them, it is never said that those new jobs will be good for anything. I don’t think these commentators care that the jobs are good for anything because the point is to keep people boxed in to that narrow way of thinking that sees ‘work’ exclusively in terms of ‘jobs’ (such that people contemplating a future of amazingly creative and liberating technologies and insist that if jobs don’t exist there is ‘nothing to do’).

‘Solving’ the ‘problem’ of automating away current jobs by increasing the percentage of BS jobs to 100% would be a way of ensuring life as we know it continues. But it just seems to me to be a waste of all the efforts of those doing useful employment.
4/7/2020, 4:47 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 


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