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Consider the censorship of literature: "fat" is replaced with "enormous" in Roald Dahl’s books for inclusivity.
While this feels like a restriction, it is an alteration. To alter (despite the insipid logic inspiring it) is simultaneously the "freedom" to generate or create, though censorship does so in a negative sense.
To amend or reshape as a tool of bland political correctness is a waste of existing freedoms; a folly which threatens future freedoms.
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We tend to map our reality, values, and principles onto our situations. We project onto others what we wish, which often blinds us to the fact that a person, business, or politician has operating principles of their own. We actively deceive ourselves into living in the world we wish: this can be beautiful and dangerous.
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The joy of manual labor is not only the ability to produce something tangible.
More importantly, this is a skill you can get good at; your skill speaks for itself.
In white-collar office politics, there are seldom straightforward measurements. Every action is fraught with navigating the politics of choice and opinion, hierarchies, and turf management, while metrics are a sliding scale of ad-hoc rationalization.
Yes, you can still be micromanaged and overworked doing manual labor, but the appeal is in the objective proof that transcends petty politics.
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On a T-shirt, I saw Bart Simpson writing over and over on a school blackboard: “I will not trust what the government tells me.”
In this illustration, the educational institution does not trust the system that enables and supports it, opting to programmatically promote cynicism and rebellion.
Bart has merely traded one authority for the coercive discipline of a tyrant: the pursuit of truth through rationality begins with doubt, which (in this instance) is enforced through shame.
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You must choose: European progressive values and resultant taxes (social safety and education) or Wild West free market chaos, corruption, and cheap living (with lagging infrastructure and abundant labor).
Check your political philosophy against the countries that embody it: is this really what you want?
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Evolution plays a numbers game in which survival is based on vast losses.
Applied to politics, one strategy is population growth equating to value proliferation, another is infection for utilization, and a third is hivemind colonization.
Survival requires confrontation (genocide), adaptation (symbiosis), or resources applied to stagnation (equilibrium).
Nature is agnostic to your moral conceits but as tactics for consensus amplification, they are tremendous survival protocols.
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Solidarity is found in work, in manifesting a shared purpose. Workers can also find communion in refusing to work, shifting "non-work" into political work.
Yet, the daily negation of production has a psychological cost.
"Doing nothing" to manifest change has an inverse logic, requiring more communal discipline than the simple satisfaction creation.
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Once upon a time, politics was about material conditions: more food or fuel. We have transcended survival into arguing over ideology. This is a success.
Yet, ideology is firmly bound to identity.
When you lose an ideological battle, your material conditions remain relatively stable, yet a vital blow has been struck at how you relate to the world. This makes our politics more dangerous by being less grounded.
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Serious, grave people full of concern, caring, and -most importantly-compassion often attempt to decide how the world should be for everyone else.
The trap is obvious: considerate goodness is, of course, something we must support. But whose goodness leads to whose sacrifice, for whose "greater good?"
As promising, judgmental people rush to out-empathy each other, there are ways to help the greater good that do not decide, but provide options.
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The role of governments is to provide some level of safety and security to the citizens in trade for taxes and the collective good.
When we are too sick to think, too sick to function, our world closes to survival. To have a voice, to hold the government to the social contract, we must remain healthy.
Timothy Snyder’s "Our Malady" is a good text to read on this topic.
