1 Servitude
We resent restraint, but we don’t want to be free. And though we chafe at duress, we all need to find some person or some cause to depend on. We cast off the encumbrance of choice, but we hit back at those who would dare to take it from us. We are born rebels, because we are born serfs. We long for liberty only with a view to selecting our own kind of subjection. We know neither what it is to be truly free nor what it would be to serve loyally. We are content to sell our liberty. But we bite and claw at those who would come between us and our borrowed wants.
Those who drudge as uncomplaining servants of their own compulsions scream if the least curb from outside is laid on them.
We submit with alacrity to a slavishness which is real, present and enduring, in order to win a release which is distant, ephemeral and fake. ‘All ran headlong to their chains,’ as Rousseau wrote, ‘in the hope of securing their liberty.’
We are urged on by a servile self-regard and a busy futility. We are cringing but not humble. We cling to our self-importance, but we cede our self-reliance.
Why do subservient people make a footstool of themselves, and then squeal when their masters plant their feet on them? Some who bite the hand that feeds them are glad to lick the fist that beats them.
Slavery has oftentimes been more galling, but when has it ever been more willing? Proud of our servitude, we feel sorry for those who lack a place in the system of subordination. We seek relief from all our ills in a more highly paid serfdom. What most of us yearn for is not liberty but a more lucrative yoke. Our wages plate our chains with gold. ‘Most things free-born,’ as Charlotte Bronte wrote, ‘will submit to anything for a salary.’ We love our gilded collar, and every morning we put it on with pride. We are imprisoned by our desires, and we hope to win our freedom by satiating them. ‘We must,’ Jefferson wrote, ‘make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.’ But who these days would choose a rugged freedom that could profit just as well from an affluent vassalage?
A noble soul hates slavery more than death. But we love our sumptuous slavery more than life.
2 Work
Freedom belongs to the dimension of time, greed belongs to the dimension of space. So we are glad to waste our time in order to acquire or tour through more space. The rich still own lots of room, but now brag that they have less time than the poor. They used to be proud of possessing more leisure than the rest of us, now they are proud to be so short of it. Work, the inveterate demeaning affliction of the many, has become just as much the vaunt of the few. All now honour it, because all now sense that they have no choice but to do it. These days it’s only the most destitute who can afford not to work, and they alone are condemned to bear the ennui and reproach of leisure. We have made life rushed and bustling enough to match our sense of our own centrality. The hardest burdens to lay down are the ones that break our backs. We are all now as busy and indispensable as cabinet-ministers, overseeing our broad portfolio of vital interests. ‘Increased means and increased leisure,’ according to Disraeli, ‘are the two civilizers of man,’ but we have sold our leisure to augment our means. What we leave for our heirs will be not a lavish civilization but a meagre economy.
The poor have no choice but to sell their time, since they have nothing else to sell. And now the rich are just as eager to sell theirs, since they have nothing else to do with it.
Why do we let our greed poach from us the hours which are the sole good that we can call our own? We are now paid so well for our labour, how could any of us bear to enjoy leisure?
We value money far dearer than time, since there’s no way that we can make a great deal more time than our peers or show it off to them. Our time is our own, and so it’s scarcely real. Wealth gains its reality by being paraded before others. Time is an intrinsic good, and is therefore of far less value than money, which is a status-marker.
The right use of money is to buy more time. But we have so little use for our time that the best we can do with it is to try to make more money.
The devil finds hands for idle work.
‘Money,’ as Emerson wrote, ‘often costs too much.’ Few wares are worth the days and hours that we have to waste to earn the cash to buy them. But we can’t resist the lure of money since it is such an enviable way of using up the time that we take to get and spend it.
Work is the refuge of the intellectually unemployed.
Paid work prostitutes your real vocation. True work ennobles, but employment degrades. But we can now see no discrepancy between a calling and a career. ‘All paid posts,’ Aristotle said,
‘absorb and demean the mind.’ Work for the joy of the work, not for its wages. If you have to be
paid to do it, then it can’t be worth the doing, but only worth the pay. Labouring for others doesn’t alienate you but integrates you. And it’s your alienation that might have forced you to rely on your own resources, and inspired you to find your path to the truth. You need a great deal of leisure if you’re to get your true work done. But most of us now rush at such a dizzying clip that we have no time to shape what might last. As Kraus notes, democracy ‘makes no provision for those who have no time to work.’
The rest of us work for our living, artists must work for their lives.
Even the luminous moment wins its worth only by being transfigured into the hard lustre of a lasting work.
Your own work is always easy. If it’s not easy, then it’s not yours. If you find it hard, you have not yet hit on your true calling. ‘All that is good is effortless,’ Nietzsche said. ‘What is divine runs with light feet.’ With no strain Ulysses strings the bow, Aeneas plucks the bough of gold, and Arthur draws the sword from the stone.
Those who get nothing done are nonplussed by how little others get done.
3 Dependence
Those who have no work of their own are keen to serve as the tools of others. They strive to make themselves indispensable because they are slaves to their own ambition, and they do so by enslaving themselves to the ambitions of others.
Why are the haughtiest people so proud to serve a world that is not worth mastering? They need to have the courage to grapple with the world, because they lack the courage to retreat from it. The brave must come to craven accommodations with the world, since they are too weak to defeat their lust to bend it to their will.
Few of us have independent means, still fewer have independent ends. Some people are as self-reliant in small things as they are subservient in big ones. They stick obstinately to their own how, while wantonly misappropriating another’s why. ‘Many are stubborn in following the path they have picked out,’ as Nietzsche tells us, ‘few in following the goal.’ They are parasites of purpose. The noble have high aims, which they choose freely, and work at on their own.
Delegate anyone else to mark out your goals for you, and you have sold your soul as a willing slave.
Is it crazier to live in such a way as to win the approval of others, or to dream that you can live without it? When I try to rely on myself, I rely on the regard of others than those whose regard I
rely on most of the time. And when I try to think for myself, I let myself be fooled by those who are not the usual ones to fool me.