Can Universal Basic Income End Our Cultural Obsession With Work? | Philosopher Andrew Taggart

Can Universal Basic Income End Our Cultural Obsession With Work?

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In 1948, German philosopher Josef Pieper predicted that society was headed for a dystopia he called 'Total Work'. With most of us in 2017 working too long, missing social events, working on weekends, and egging on our older years just for the retirement, practical philosopher Andrew Taggart believes we have reached the verge of that dystopia. He describes the conditions that are tightening around us—our lives are scheduled around the needs of our jobs, our time with family and friends is subordinated to it (in a 5:2 ratio!), and our free time increasingly resembles work, in vocabulary and in action: we run errands, aim to have "productive" days, try to rest so that we are fresh for Monday—the start of another week. Taggart thinks Universal Basic Income is the ideological push we need to begin questioning how we can cut loose from our cultural obsession with work, and how we might live in a world without it. Are we human beings, or instruments of productivity? Has our intense focus on work become pathological? For more, visit andrewjtaggart.com.

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ANDREW TAGGART:

Andrew J. Taggart is a practical philosopher and entrepreneur who teaches individuals and organizations how to inquire into the things that matter most. For several years, he has led a philosophy practice in which he speaks daily over Skype with entrepreneurs, business executives, artists, the ecologically minded, and seekers about the nature of a good life. He and those he speaks with have at least one common thought: “There must be more than this because this is not enough.”

In 2009, he finished a Ph.D., left the academic life, and moved to New York City with the goal to return the fundamental question of “how to live” to people’s everyday lives. He feels that in its very being, philosophy is a pursuit whose final aim is to help all people to lead the most excellent human lives that they can: considered, aware, vibrantly alive.

Andrew is a faculty member in Lougheed leadership at The Banff Centre in Canada, where he trains creative leaders, and at Kaos Pilots in Denmark, where he teaches social entrepreneurs and enterprising artists. He is the author of several books addressed to general readers, including The Art of Inquiry, Cultivating Discipline Lightly, The Good Life and Sustaining Life, and, most recently, Money Rules for Simple Living.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Andrew Taggart: 'Total work' was a term coined by Josef Pieper, a lesser known German philosopher from the 20th century, and he was concerned that after World War II there would be a time of total work. By that I take him to mean that work comes to be the center around which the world turns. Human beings start to see themselves chiefly as workers, and the entirety of life becomes more and more work, or work like. To see this we can begin to examine a number of what I might call tightening conditions. So the first condition would be the centrality of work. We've come to think that work is actually the center and everything else begins to turn around it. To see this more clearly we can think about the fact that we woke up to go to work today or that we are going home from work today. That we are preparing for work. That we are preparing to leave work. And this is happening all the way around the world. Meanwhile we’re adjusting our schedules, the rest of our lives, so that they are turning about it. So that would be the first condition. The second condition is subordination. That everything else in life comes to seem as if it’s subordinate to, and to be put in the service of, work. We can think of sleeping: the idea is that we wish to sleep well today in order to be focused and prepared for work. And that when we’re at work we wish to be as productive as possible. So sleep becomes that which is an instrument in the service of productivity. And we can play that game with all sorts of different instances.

The third condition is the resemblance claim. It seems as if everything else in life comes to resemble work, more and more. So you can think of, on a day off you are wanting to be as productive as possible, thinking about how much you got done. You can begin to think about all the ways in which you plan and schedule time with children. The terms that begin to mark out our lives even when we’re not actually working sound more and more work like.

And the last condition I think is the most intense and t...

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