4. The End of Labor, The Demise of the Cage
The origin of human labor is simple to understand: in an era of extreme scarcity, everyone had to work to support themselves and their families. A look at our close relatives, chimpanzees, reveals that dominance is a group management mechanism among them. We believe early humans most likely inherited this form of management, as it has been the most effective method to date for organizing large-scale collaboration, managing resource conflicts, ensuring collective security, and governing complex societies. Concurrently, human dominators naturally adopted labor as a core tool for maintaining their domination.
There are two reasons for necessary labor: to secure one's own survival and quality of life, and to procreate and continue the species.
You can also view it this way: active participation in labor offers two great rewards.
First, it enables you to achieve the highest possible quality of life.
Second, it allows you to ascend to the upper echelons of society and receive significant procreation-related prizes: abundant sexual rewards (the monopolization of sexual experiences) and social privileges (tax reductions and subsidies, congratulations, and celebrations).
Indeed, the dominators' most precise form of confinement stems from their total control over labor. The iron cage of labor not only binds the body but also steals time, occupies attention, distorts emotions, and weakens cognition. This manifests as:
- Creating scarcity to occupy attention: Low wages and unstable employment maintain widespread pressure to survive, making "improving one's life" the sole focus of attention. Individuals are forced to dedicate all their energy to the struggle for survival.
- Extreme distribution disparities to amplify hate: The immense chasm of wealth and power makes different classes resent each other, constantly escalating social conflict. Emotional energy is replaced and amplified by hate.
- Suppression of Labor Values: For example, portraying "upward social mobility through hard work" as the only legitimate shortcut, while suppressing and excluding those who question it, making people spiritually dependent on the labor system.
- Long Working Hours and Fragmented Tasks: Glorifying "diligence" and "overtime," submerging individuals in endless busyness and fragmented tasks. This severs the continuity of thought and emotion, preventing deep connections with oneself and with others.
- Conspicuous consumerism to create greed and inadequacy: Dominators and elites flaunt luxury goods, scarce resources, and complex manufactured items to create status symbols and unending desire. Simultaneously, these luxuries and rare goods consume or even waste vast amounts of public resources, leaving most people in a state of insufficient supply and psychological imbalance even as productivity increases.
- Weakening cognition: Long-term repetitive, low-challenge labor keeps thinking abilities at an execution level, lacking abstract, systematic, and critical thought. Coupled with information overload, entertainment-saturated content, and fragmented dissemination, people become accustomed to instant gratification and superficial understanding, unable to form deep cognitive frameworks, ultimately losing grasp of social structures and their own situations.
In this system, love is divided, diluted, distorted, or even replaced by hate. Individuals have no time to attend to their inner needs, and emotional connections are severed by the pace of labor and class disparities.
Therefore, it is labor that creates the conditions for the institutionalized mass production of hate! Only when the iron cage of labor crumbles can people reclaim their time and cognition, cleanse the toxins of hatred, and rebuild the capacity to love.
The development of AI will dramatically increase productivity, inevitably leading to the disappearance of the labor cage. The governance consensus of "domination" in the human world will then have nothing to depend on. The era of a great transformation in human governance has arrived!