The devolution/evolution of human labor…

In the past, human labor took the form of tribute. Its motivation was servitude to one’s betters.

At present, work is conceived of as a commodity. Its motivation is financial recompense.

In the future, work will become gift. A service to fellow man. Its motivation will be love.

PAST

Sun heavy as a stone in the witnessing sky, blazing these hours turned decades, becomes the strength in heart, the will in limbs, reducing me, and my ten thousand brothers, to fingers of the many-handed architects, the lashing-voiced foremen, while the obelisks erect, the pyramids climb knowing when stars touch the horizon exactly, and the lion-man adorned with the crown of clairvoyance achieves a face… to see what was and will be, including the redemption of my ten thousand brothers several lives hence, under the warming scorching living sun deity. We submit without submission and make of our toil a cosmic sacrament. Let the desert fill with swamp reeds and crocodile channels every springtime.

Some few are schooled as scribes, silent under penalty of death in the holy secrets of the etched or painted symbols, weaving as if by some darkened magic the word that issues from each god’s larynx, certain in the perception that the god below is but the lips and tongue of the god above, unnamed and unutterable.

PRESENT

Not long ago, many of us coaxed green things from the brown giving earth, fructified by fickle sky and warmth, on lands bequeathed of lords or dukes, keeping what must nourish our kin, titheing what masters and knights require, who defend us from marauders, the wide scope of our world bounded by what our indentured legs can walk in one weary day.

Yet others, more fortunate perhaps, but less protected from the Evil One, were funneled by grace into guilds for apprenticeship, married for a lifetime to the skilled lore of cobbling shoes or forging spears or fashioning wheels.

Still rarer yet, some risked by miraculous temptation becoming learned in the reading of language, printed by some obscured demonics, and told of how planets danced governed by numbers not motioned by Powers and Principalities, how living things emerged not from swamp mud but via miniscule mechanism concealed within a seed grain.

Now we convey ourselves in bewitched carriages powered by harnessed forces almost none of us comprehend, along engineered mostly smooth pathways, sometimes bucolic sometimes ghastly, sometimes with ungodly velocity, sometimes choking and still as if in a mass stupor of a congested beehive, to arrive in unsacred huge rectangular prisms and operate for some hours arcane devices which translate our mostly mental labor into vague and distant aims, overseen by egotists striving and competing with goals quite arbitrary and personal often entirely removed from public enterprise. And we do this beyond youth, beyond maturity, navigating a peculiar landscape for obtaining minimal incremental advantages, enabling our more efficient acquisition of items imagined to heal our mutual alienation. But we call this freedom. And are told to.

Yet, some few mark alternate pathways, treading boots on less walked routes, employing ourselves out of our hearts, some well renumerated, many not, striving against hope and doom, to cleave to what is loved. Some give self and time, purely for inner edification, in splendid unpredicatable manners. Some skirt all rules and guidelines, by grace unchained by gold or silver, seeking as warriors do, intuiting their pending psychic imprisonment within a matrix beneath a sword of perpetual Damocles. Some nurture, and sacrifice with a joy unexplained, heralding a future…

FUTURE

Economy and human rights and creative activity operate in independent spheres, harmonized. What time we do not allocate to ourselves, we look for ways of spending in useful endeavors, nourished by the brotherly sense of striving and contribution, alert and sensitive to the others in our midsts.

In the past, human labor took the form of tribute. Its motivation was servitude to one’s betters.

At present, work is conceived of as a commodity. Its motivation is financial recompense.

In the future, work will become gift. A service to fellow man. Its motivation will be love.

_______RS

[ Image : Modern-day person emulating Christ’s washing of a follower’s feet. ]

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