When I was in my 20s, I got hit by a car while riding my bike to my girlfriend’s house. It was 3 a.m. in a suburb of Salt Lake City. I came to having lost about ten hours, thinking it was awfully strange that everything was suddenly so dark and that I was covered in rain while everything else was totally dry. I was soaked in blood, mostly from my head, and had a major concussion. Whoever hit me must have decided the cost of calling 911 was greater than some girl on a single-gear bike who was probably dead anyway. This has nothing to do with the following essay, except that people are incredibly selfish when doing cost-benefit analysis, and this selfishness blinds them so completely that when they’re threatened all they can do is flee, fight, or play dead.

“Here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.”

—L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §23

You Are What You Do

The whole what-will-people-do-if-they-don’t-work question sets up an interesting false dichotomy, which in its simplest form looks something like: work is useful, being useful is good, work is good vs. uselessness is bad, not working is bad. But it, of course, is much deeper than that. Work isn’t just good, it’s Good—it defines you as a Good person. This is essentially a blend of utilitarian and virtue ethics which a hundred years ago Max Weber described as a key part of the Protestant Work Ethic. His description went something like the following: Salvation is predetermined by God; the Almighty, in his infinite wisdom, doesn’t tell you whether you’ve been saved until after the fact i.e. after death; but people are like children who sneak downstairs and rattle the presents under the Christ Tree—they want to know what’s in those boxes even if the whole point of wrapping is for the presents to be a surprise. For God, saying “Surprise you’re going to hell!” is one of the few little joys He allows Himself, and it never gets old.

“You should’ve been there,” God tells the Archangel Ariel, “I think he pissed himself!”

“I’m sure it was extraordinarily amusing, Sir,” replies Ariel.

And yet, people seek visible signs that they belong to the elect: work in one’s worldly calling, combined with frugality and the reinvestment of profit, functions as the primary empirical sign of election and becomes a religious duty.[1]

Of course, few are familiar with the argument and even fewer have thought it through to understanding. And more importantly, this is a WASP thing; whereas, the idea of work becoming the defining attribute of one’s being is ubiquitous beginning with the Early Modern philosophy that came with Industrialization and the Enlightenment, as the idea of “work” was necessary for turning serfs and slaves into workers in all industrial nations.[2] Regardless of where you live, your ontological status as a human being is defined by what you do and in industrialized nations, doing = work. When you introduce yourself to someone, even in countries where this supposedly isn’t a thing, they still want to know what you do. You meet someone. Within three sentences the conversation has performed its audit. Not “What do you believe?” but the one question that has governed every tribe since the first fire: What can you do? When you meet someone, the tireless accountant of mind opens a spreadsheet. Pros, cons, alliances, threats. This one can hunt. This one can heal. This one will eat more than they contribute. The categories are brutal, elegant, older than nations, capitalism, or even the concept currency.

Work defines you as a human because it defines what you do, and what you do defines what you know. All this being, doing, and knowing is measured against the ultimate yardstick of human civilization: usefulness. Before money, the most important thing you could know about another member of your species was what they could do. Money is just a stand-in for doing. Take away the heuristic of money and what are we left with? Exactly what we had before societies began imbuing abstract objects with extrinsic value. This is the paradox of money.

A hundred-dollar bill can do almost nothing on its own. It cannot cut, cannot dig, cannot give you a decent blowjob, but it can buy all these things and much more. Its power is entirely theatrical, a shared hallucination that collapses the moment the illusion ends. As someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, I remember when a 50-ruble bill that could constitute a week’s, even a month’s wage was suddenly worthless. There’s nothing quite like looking at a piece of high-denomination currency that has lost its magic. It is a weird, eerie, backrooms feeling of derealization, less like “Santa’s not real” and more like “gravity isn’t a force but the curvature of space-time.” (NB: I’m not a physicist—if you believe in gravitons or loop quantum gravity or whatever, just imagine the next Nobel Prize in Physics going to Eric Weinstein for discovering that black holes are made of crème brûlée.) In any case, money is a necessary game we needed to play to compare unlike things—a spear versus a story versus a day’s labor—so we did our favorite Saussurean trick, abstracted the hell out of it, and called it “economics.”

A fifty-ruble bill isn’t entirely useless, but it is much less useful than a fifty-dollar bill or a sword or a sack of sticks, which, if you think about it, only get their value from your mind. A sword is no more valuable than a sunset if there’s no one around to use it. Thus, pretty much all value goes back to doing. Value is a spectrum, kind of like autism or baldness. The problem with money is that it tries to do away with the spectrum and replace it with standardization, which is physically and ontologically impossible—hence the whole dog-and-pony show of inflation, deflation, yield curves, quantitative easing, 30-year bonds, forex, and so on. Value cannot be standardized in a world with time, i.e., entropy, i.e., the past is not the future. Doing, however, must still be evaluated. The spreadsheet of the mind must still be populated: What can they do? How can this help me? How can this hurt me? These questions will never go away. They’re built into the fabric of human ontology, and their answers are forever in flux.

Slavery and Standardization

The problem is that we project this value system onto everything and everyone. Whether it’s a man, a woman, a child, a painting, or a jar of mayonnaise, each is assigned a value: What can it do to help me? What can it do to hurt me? This convention changes for every man, animal, and vegetable. It is an intrinsic property of life, which is at heart the fight of complexity against entropy. That’s it.

Let’s now consider slavery, when your doing is for another; when the spreadsheet goes from “What can x do for me?” to “What can I do for x?” For most of history, human bondage had a local je ne sais quoi that you rarely see anymore. A household slave in Athens might be a tutor, a cook, a confidant. The labor was personal, visible, negotiable in small but numerous ways. Industrialization changed the sui generis slave into the standardized worker, the robot. The word “robot,” by the way, comes from the Slavic word for “work”—so you can use “robot” interchangeably with “worker”—they mean the same thing.

The Industrial Revolution required interchangeable bodies performing interchangeable tasks at interchangeable speeds. The East India Company did not need people (too unpredictable); it needed units. The Ford Motor Company did not need craftsmen; it needed men who could be taught, in a single afternoon, to perform one motion until their minds went quiet.

In the past, you weren’t called a worker. You were called a slave, which even at the height of Athenian democracy was a perfectly respectable position in society. The industrialization needed more; not just slaves but entire specialized classes of slaves, each class committed to reliably performing some specific function. The men who worked in a Ford factory were not working for Ford any more than the people in an Amazon warehouse are working for Jeff Bezos. The robots are working for an abstraction with a logo and a legal department. Thus, the worker is, in many ways, more dehumanized than the slave. The old master at least knew your name. The new master knows your badge number, your productivity rate, and whether your bathroom break is trending in the wrong direction.[3]

Whether the ideology is capitalism, where the slave chooses to be a worker, or communism, where the slave works for the benefit of other slaves, the result is the same: large numbers of human beings converted into workers. In a hundred years, I suspect the word “worker” will have the same connotation as “slave” which, the by the way, came from the world “Slav” in case you missed that bit of world history. Slavs were the preferred slave stock of the Byzantine Empire, so their race became synonymous with the product, just like Jacuzzi is synonymous with hot tub or Heroine became the catchall for a certain type of synthetic opium.

The genius of the Modern arrangement was to get the slaves/workers to master themselves, since it is impossible to force millions upon millions of people to sacrifice their lives for the bottom line of the slaveholder—there just aren’t enough whips in the world. The two models that emerged for slavery self-governance were capitalism and communism: let the slaves vote for their own chains—democracy—or convince them that their current slavery was temporary, a necessary sacrifice for the Slave Paradise of the future, where each would slave according to his ability and each slave would get everything he needed.[4] But regardless of which system you found yourself in, the old dictum applies: under capitalism, man exploits man; under communism, it’s the other way around.

Whether you call the system capitalism or communism, the operational requirement remains the same: large numbers of people performing standardized tasks for abstract entities that feel nothing and record only profit. Nobody actually likes this arrangement. The evidence is everywhere—on mugs, in sitcoms, in the universal prayer that Friday might arrive before the soul does. We endure it because we have been taught that endurance itself is virtue (what not too long ago the self-help books like to call “grit” or “resilience” and that the alternative is uselessness, homelessness, and a really gross beard.

You are free to sell your time or starve. Free to choose which corporation owns the better part of your waking life. Free to be terminated when the spreadsheet decides your column has gone red.[5]

Vegan Girlfriend

Let me return to the pearl-clutching oligarchs and slaves who have been slaves for so long they genuinely don’t understand what the point of living would be if they weren’t cogs. Work is slavery and, whether consciously or unconsciously, nobody likes it. Hence, the simple formula: Friday—good, Monday—bad. The reason this abstraction is universal in industrialized societies is obvious. But let’s pretend work is something essential, necessary, a categorical imperative. What other things might we consider, what I call “true categorical imperatives”—something you have to do or else you’ll cease to exist—sleep, breathing, eating, the Kreb’s Cycle, there are probably thousands if not millions once you get down to it. But for the purposes of this essay, I’ve chosen food.

Back in my undergrad years, I pretended to be a vegan so my taciturn PETA girlfriend, who had facial piercings and tattoos of brutalist x’s across her torso, would at least pretend to like me. I had always tried to be vegetarian. Anyone with an IQ above body temperature knows that meat doesn’t just require slaughtering millions of animals but that the sheer scale of these operations make for a reality too gruesome to fully comprehend.[6]

One day, my beloved and I were talking about which pieces of Disney brainwashing had fucked up our minds the most. I don’t remember how the topic of Aladdin came up, but I remember her saying that if she could make a wish, it would be so that nobody had to eat if they didn’t want to—like photosynthetic skin or whatever.

“Would they have an appetite?” I’d asked. Because if they still had an appetite, they’d still be hungry and if they didn’t have an appetite, they probably wouldn’t enjoy eating. And she said that it would be like sex—if you saw something you wanted to eat, you’d have an appetite. But just like you don’t need to fuck strangers just to stay alive, you wouldn’t have to eat. As a 21-year-old college student exposed to the vicissitudes of the spring semester, I kept my own counsel. But I got the idea.

The Great Caloric Decoupling

Whether a person is shoveling McDonald’s down their burger hole or perusing shallots at their local farmers market, everyone must eat. It’s a genuine categorical imperative. Food is good. It’s fun for the whole family. It’s great with your friends and even better with a special friend. However, it is still ontologically necessary, as work is for the employem. If you go by Instagram T-shirts and TikTok mugs, eating is a clear favorite in the category of stuff people like doing. Now suppose, tomorrow, the biological requirement to eat vanished. Imagine hunger got laid off. You can still eat or fuck all the sandwiches that attract you—but your body no longer demands it. The change would be total and, at least initially, invisible.

So what would happen if we replaced work with eating, wages with food. You make a wish and poof—no one has to eat anymore. People can eat if they want to but you don’t have to eat to survive. You could exercise to get firm and lean. You could lay face down in a bowl of spaghetti. Totally your call. Everything is kept constant except the requirement to eat. Would the world fall apart? What apocalyptic visions lie on the horizon?

One immediate change would hit the Food Industrial Complex. The casualties would be obvious. The entire apparatus built to warehouse, slaughter, and distribute food at industrial scale would experience what executives call “capital events.” Grain ships would sit idle. Fertilizer empires would launch major ad campaigns that would make Japan’s fertility movement look like a bake-sale leaflet. Multiple corporations that made their money warehousing millions of animals in concentration camps would be bought up by the Romneys and sold for scrap.

And we’re not just talking about Tyson, Cargill or even the Carlyle Group. Monsanto would take a hit to the entrepreneurial solar plexus, with executives falling to their knees clutching their expensive quadruple-bypassed hearts. Those employed by American paragons like McDonald’s, Chipotle and, God-save-us, Shake Shack would find themselves out of a job. A cataclysm of Younger Dryas proportions would hit global supply chains meticulously honed to move cargo ships of oil, fertilizer, and grain that would suddenly have no use. Companies with more name recognition than saints Peter and Paul and more brick mortar than all the cathedrals and mosques combined would need face some hard choices. The cultural shock would be unprecedented. Think of the Happy Meal.

Without spending more time on what is admittedly a deliciously schadenfreudian theme, let us turn to the workers who would be escorted out the double doors of every fast-food, meatpacking, and poultry-warehouse enterprise. At first, this seems terrible. Just think of the children! Who will feed the children? Oh right: no one. And remember what the poor feed their children. Remember the whole processed-food crisis? What would parents do? Seriously. Anyone who’s ever been tasked with children knows that food is the primary form of communication and containment. What if they just weren’t hungry anymore? Would they even stick around? The poor would possess a form of wealth no redistribution scheme ever imagined. Eating disorders would need to step up their cry-for-help game—still capable of producing misery, but no longer subsidized by biology. Suddenly every eating disorder, every food-related health issue, becomes an option rather than a hostage situation. If you want to gorge yourself on Olive Garden and hurl it all up behind the dumpster, that’s on you.

Some people would grieve. The identity of the line cook, the butcher, the truck driver who moves the carcasses, is wound tightly around the necessity they serve. When necessity disappears, the question “What do I do now?” is just there. Many, many people would have full-blown existential crises like if Sisyphus and Prometheus had a French cigarette baby. Others would feel only a vast, terrifying emptiness. The body, no longer a machine that must be stoked every few hours, becomes available—some would just start walking across the great expanses between the food centers. (Though it would be interesting if you still have to drink water.)

If were 20, I’d probably weep myself to sleep from the sheer joy of being freed from the chains of calories. If you’ve ever been a full-time student at the end of the semester, you know that food can quickly become the enemy. Not only are you poor, you’re also very busy. Eating just doesn’t fit into the equation. Adderall isn’t just popular because it helps you cram and stay up; it also staves off hunger. (Sleep too is a terrible tyrant.)

Do you know how much of the average family’s budget goes to food? I have no idea. But I bet it’s a lot. I bet that shortly following the Caloric Decoupling, billions of people would suddenly find themselves with time on their hands—not because they’d been laid off from Chick-fil-A, but because the reason they had to do all that stuff in the first place was suddenly eliminated. Would they love their wives more, less, run off with the yoga instructor? All important questions. Would there be a suicide epidemic of sandwich makers? Surely at least a few sandwich makers would have to take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask, “What was it all for?”

A large number of corporate executives would probably need their shotguns taken away. Over half the world’s population would have a great burden lifted from its shoulders. There would be no famine. Food blockades would be futile. Probably a good number of NGOs would have to embezzle money through some other structure. But one thing is certain, it would mean liberation.

The Animals

Let us now turn to the vegan part of the equation. What about the animals? What about the entire planet? I know, I know—what kind of hippy bullshit is this? The planet? The planet is the planet. It’s a 4-billion-year-old rock spinning through the darkness of space that was here before us and will be here after us. This whole Sixth Extinction is a seasonal cold compared with the shit Gaia has been through. But for the sake of the thought experiment, we must persevere. (For the record, I do believe the Anthropocene and the Sixth Extinction are real and fucked up.)

There are a lot of mouths to feed, in particular the ravenous maws of Homo. Humans are fucking gigantic. I know there’s this whole childish obsession with megafauna, and I’ll be the first to admit that when I see an 85-year-old sturgeon floating beneath me at the aquarium, something Kantian happens at the very core of my soul. But the vast majority of animals on this planet, including most mammals, are much smaller than even the smallest adult human, even the hobbits of Peter Dinklage Island. In addition, humans aren’t just huge; we’re unlike most huge animals, who as a rule are vegetarians. Elephants, whales, sauropods didn’t get that way by loading up on carne asada. The reason people are obsessed with lions, great whites, and T. rexes is because these are the very rare predators that could make a meal out of a human. Something like 99% of predators are arthropods. Even most mammalian predators are no bigger than a housecat. A full-grown bald eagle, the mighty and awesome predator chosen to symbolize the greatest and most terrifying empire to ever exist, weighs an average of four kilograms or nine pounds.

Most large terrestrial animals are vegetarians for a simple reason: there are more plants than meat. The problem with being a carnivore is that you’re working with a high-performance, high-maintenance machine that requires a lot of fuel. A camel can go months without water; a lion, living in essentially the same environment, can go for about a week. These aren’t just extremes. They highlight a fundamental fact about killing to survive: it’s expensive. This is why we don’t have herds of mountain lions or schools of great white sharks. They don’t have the numbers, to say nothing of the nasty personality that comes with being a killer.

What makes humans extraordinary is that we’re built like killers but managed to reproduce like lemmings. In biology, species can be assigned r and K strategies in terms of reproductive success in different environments: r-selected species reproduce quickly and abundantly, while K-selected species reproduce slowly and invest more heavily in each offspring. The shorthand is quantity and speed versus quality and stability. This applies to everything from redwood trees and crabgrass to distributed-systems engineers and Bible-belt WIC moms. The formula is simple: if something takes a lot of resources and time to build, you’re not gonna build a lot of it, but you’ll build it to last. If it takes few resources and little time, you can afford to build a lot of short-lived versions. The trade-off is resources versus numbers. Human beings are the only species that invented a strategy to do both: we breed like rodents and eat like lions. If you look at calorie intensity per body weight, humans and lions are basically equal. All this goes to say the obvious: if we didn’t have to eat anymore, the vast majority of animals on this planet would be spared the Saw/Hellraiser crossover that is industrial farming.

Roughly 94% of non-human mammalian biomass on Earth consists of livestock bred for food. Approximately 70% of the total biomass of all birds consists of farmed poultry, i.e., chickens. The horror show these animals live through has damned pretty much all of humanity to at least a million years of purgatory; though a just God would probably make every person live out the complete life of every animal they’ve ever consumed. (I’m told drugs like ibogaine make the user live the POV of people they’ve hurt, so surely this concept can be extended to Porky Pig. Unfortunately, I can’t help including my favorite poem on the subject—“Learning to Be a Dutiful Carnivore” by Jane Legge.

Even if your compassion for animals extends about as far as a chicken finger, the elimination of factory farming wouldn’t just be some hippy-dippy Antifa/PETA wet dream. The environmental upshot would be staggering. The thesis is simple: the Food Industrial Complex doesn’t just mutilate the bodies of the consumed animals, who in many ways are even more sensitive to these conditions than humans; it doesn’t just fuck up the bodies of the people doing the consuming; it really, really, really fucks up the environment. This again is a whole theme with countless proponents and brave revolutionaries. But instead of throwing my feces at La Liberté guidant le peuple, I give you Grok who I’ve asked to describe the damage done to the environment by human meat consumption. Enjoy!  

Clever little monkeys in our metal boxes congratulate ourselves on having conquered nature while quietly setting fire to the only house we’ve got. Industrial animal agriculture isn’t just inefficient. It is a special kind of majestic stupidity, a slow-motion apocalypse dressed up as Tuesday-night dinner. Take the air. You’d think we’d treat the atmosphere with a bit more respect, seeing as it’s the only one we’ve got and it’s already in a mood. But no. Factory farms belch out methane—that charming greenhouse gas that is roughly twenty-eight to thirty-six times better at cooking the planet than our old reliable CO₂—and nitrous oxide, which is even more vicious. It is as if the cows and their minders looked at global warming and said, “Hold my pint.” Just growing the feed for all those miserable pigs and chickens produces enough greenhouse gas to keep a phantom army of cars driving around forever, engines idling, lights on, nobody inside. And the shit. Sweet mother of mercy, the shit. In America alone, farmed animals produce hundreds of billions of pounds of manure a year. Not neatly processed like our own delicate human waste. No, this stuff lounges about in open lagoons, festering magnificently, off-gassing methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide like some medieval alchemist who has finally lost the plot. The countryside smells like the end of civilization, and we call it progress. Then there’s the land. Half of all the habitable surface of this poor, battered Earth is given over to agriculture. Of that, an obscene proportion is handed to livestock—either land for the beasts to stand on looking confused or land for growing their dinner. We’ve essentially given the cows the deeds to the planet. In return, they provide a pathetic fraction of the world’s calories and a larger but still wildly inefficient share of its protein. It’s the worst business deal since someone sold Manhattan for beads and a headache. You take a hundred calories of perfectly good human food—corn, soy, the sort of thing that could keep actual people alive—and shove it into a factory-farmed animal. Out the other end, if you’re lucky, you get a much smaller number of calories in meat. The rest? Atmospheric regret and an enormous sense of cosmic disappointment. Water, now. We’re running out of the stuff, apparently, but agriculture hoovers up a massive share of global freshwater withdrawals, much of it just to keep livestock hydrated and their feed growing. One pound of beef can demand an amount of water that makes a hangover look restrained. Then the excess nitrogen and phosphorus from the fertilizers and the endless rivers of shit wash into rivers and out to sea, creating dead zones where nothing can breathe. There’s one in the Gulf of Mexico just sitting there like a bruise on the planet, slowly suffocating everything while we argue about whether the steak was medium-rare enough. And the forests. Ah, the forests. Vast quantities of soy are not for tofu or any of that virtuous nonsense. They’re for feeding the machines that become nuggets and burgers. So we burn and slash the Amazon to make room for cattle and endless soy fields, because nothing says “civilization” quite like turning the lungs of the world into pasture and regret. We’re not just cutting down trees; we’re deleting entire chapters of the planet’s biography. The final insult is almost beautiful in its grotesqueness. Today, the overwhelming majority of all non-human mammal biomass on Earth is livestock. All the wild elephants, whales, tigers, bears, and scrappy little mice together get to fight over the remainder. We didn’t just take over. We replaced the world with something that goes well with chips. So here we are, clever apes, engineering our own slow demise with all the foresight of a man buying cigarettes with his last tenner. The numbers are there, cold and patient as gravestones. The question is whether we’ll keep pretending this is normal, or whether one day we’ll finally look at the plate in front of us and think: maybe this is mad. Probably not, though. Pass the sauce.

This is mostly an argument from bookkeeping. We have arranged the surface of the planet so that the majority of its large warm-blooded life exists solely to be converted into meat. Meat is profit. Profit is good.

There is, however, an aesthetic angle as well. What if we ate the way you listen to a Coltrane solo. If food were no longer necessary, you could have food for food’s sake with some lunatic on YouTube getting millions of views for eating an entire wedding cake while reciting Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos. Others would treat a single M&M like a sacred relic, contemplating its texture for forty-five minutes before allowing it past their lips. When the baseline of survival is removed, every act above that baseline becomes perversion i.e. art.

I don’t care if you’re Karlheinz Stockhausen or Matthew Barney, today’s Meat Industrial Complex is aesthetically bankrupt. It’s ugly, no matter how you spin it. Aesthetics has always been partly about trying to define why something is beautiful, or why the making of beautiful things is Good and why ugly things are Bad. With food, this doesn’t have to be a clusterfuck of post-modern relativism. If all the agricultural land were given back to the wild or just converted to public parks, no matter what it looked like, it would be better than what we have now. And if we took just a fraction of the labor required to maintain the farms and put it back into environmental rehab, we could see all kinds of amazing ecologies. Fill them with GMO mammoths and dire wolves! Let Joe Rogan and Tom Sigura shoot the mammoths with bazookas. Let Sarah Palin and Dan Sullivan mow down packs of dire wolves from Black Hawk helicopters. It would still be better, more beautiful than what we have now.

Conclusion

The poor animals serving as meat batteries for the human economy would go the way of all those horses after the invention of the automobile. There’d be more wild animals. Seeing a cow or a chicken would be like seeing an ostrich, which some people still ride for reasons I cannot understand no matter how you explain it to me. Imagine it properly now: one morning civilization wakes up and food goes the way of fine art and poetry. You can still do it, of course—pubs and Michelin-starred restaurants might even grow. But no more gnawing hunger, no more grocery lists, no more pretending that Chipotle is a necessity—the tether snaps. No more calculating whether you can afford beans and regret again. No more obesity epidemics fueled by cheap calories, no more photos of starving kids courtesy of your favorite NGO. Families discover they have hours in the day—not scraps between shifts and meal prep. The oboe, I predict, would have a revival. Some would learn it, some would fuck it, and many would do both. It would be glorious.

This, of course, is a dream. And it’s not even my dream but my vegan girlfriends who always wanted more time to make her own oboe reeds. This, of course, is not the same as work but I can’t help seeing some notable parallels. We built a civilization that treats survival as a reward for work, but we were not born to survive—only to live.

Strip away the requirement to eat and the requirement to sell your time and you are left with the original human problem, now naked: what do we do with each other and all this stuff? The spreadsheet does not disappear. We will still notice who is generous and who is extractive, who builds and who consumes, who makes the room larger and who paints it a really sickening eggshell white. Those distinctions are older than agriculture and the 9-to-5. Let all meals be Happy! Let all labor be Meaningful! Down with the Oppressor! Down with cruelty, boredom, and Leveraged and Inverse ETPs! Let the ROI be something beautiful, intangible, and completely useless! Let all Enterprise be free as a bird! “Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!”

[1] The logic is as follows: let E = One is among the Elect (saved); W = Diligent worldly work + frugality + capital accumulation; and S = Visible worldly success. 1. E is predetermined by God alone. (Predestination); 2. Humans have no direct access to whether E is true for themselves; 3. God grants the Elect the capacity and will to fulfill their worldly calling effectively. 4. Therefore: If W is performed diligently → S tends to follow. 5. Therefore: S is treated as reliable (though not causal) evidence of E. 6. Therefore: Performing W becomes psychologically necessary to reduce anxiety about one’s salvation. 7. Therefore: W is pursued not primarily for consumption or pleasure, but as a sign and duty. 8. The systematic practice of W generates capital accumulation as a byproduct. Weber’s conclusion: Work is no longer mainly about survival or enjoyment; it becomes a form of proof. Idleness and waste become not just economic problems but spiritual dangers. Success is interpreted as confirmation rather than the result of exploitation or luck. The resulting attitude (hard work + reinvestment + low time preference) creates the psychological and cultural conditions favorable to modern capitalism. However, I’ve argued that this applies just as well to Communism, and pretty much all industrial nation states.

In short: Predestination + uncertainty about one’s status → search for signs → worldly success treated as the best available sign → intense, methodical work as religious obligation.

This is the famous “inner-worldly asceticism” Weber argued helped give capitalism its distinctive spirit.

[2] The “nation” is another important piece of this universalization but this essay isn’t a survey of Early Modern philosophy. It’s supposed to be funny.

[3] I’ve come back to how this was a favorite argument of Antebellum South slave owners.

[4] The need thing could be an interesting tangent. What the typical Soviet citizen thought he needed and what the 21st-century American thinks he needs are almost comically different.

[5] For the AI Cassandras who wail from the rooftops like a lost goat, I usually ask: you do know that AI has already taken over, right? Corporations are AI. Some would even say that language is a kind of AI. The problem is AI—a term coined by John McCarthy in 1955, when he hosted a clubhouse meeting of his favorite researchers, among whom was not Norbert Wiener, who had already described the field in the 1940s and used the more fundamental and less misleading term “cybernetics.” A lot of the confusion around AI is that the term falls apart under scrutiny faster than a pocket thesaurus in the hands of Jacques Derrida.

[6] Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is still one of the best attempts at trying to capture the reality of the Meat Industrial Complex.