Work - Productive, Useful, Worthless, and Bad.
How productive is a king?
What is work?
In physics work transfers energy from one place to another.
If I'm pushing a box along the floor then the work is the amount of energy I have to apply to move the box times the distance the box moves.
Let's add a stipulation here: for the purposes of this discussion, work is done by a person to accomplish some end or other.
So we might say that work is a person applying energy to something to accomplish an end.
In that light, almost everything we do is work.
But not all work is the same.
Let's consider a very much simplified case.
Say we have a king.
The king is supported by food and drink and shelter and transportation provided by his subjects.
Those subjects produce enough of all that stuff to support the king, and themselves and their families and more besides.
I'd call those subjects productive people.
Trying to stay away from conceptual boundaries here I might imagine the king's goldsmith.
Let's imagine the smith to be a wonder who does all the operations needed to make a gold cup - from prospecting to mining to smelting to manufacture.
The gold cup is beautiful. It sure took work to make it. But you can't eat it and it won't keep you warm and is no better for drinking from than a ceramic cup.
So I'd place the goldsmith in the useful category.
Full disclosure - since I'm an artist that is the category that fits me best.
Here in Vancouver there are a lot of homeless people. I mean a LOT. There are big homeless encampments in parks where the lucky ones have tents. And every day as I go out shopping for food I walk by people even less lucky who sleep on the sidewalk by the soup kitchen in the cold and rain. I notice that they are often busy with something or other - I can't really tell what but I can see they are intent and engaged. An extreme among them are people with toters full of junk (to my eyes). I mean stones and twigs and bits of cloth. This all gets dumped on the sidewalk and sorted through and then abandoned. I'd say they were working at whatever they were doing but I'd call their work worthless.
These forms of work, productive, useful and worthless, are either beneficial or at least benign. I think most people engage in all three forms at various stages in their lives or even all within a day.
The last category of work; bad, is different. It makes things worse.
People do work hard at being bad, and we are all the worse for it.
A favourite example of that for me is Rush Limbaugh. He has a huge following that believes his deranged take on society.
He's been a malign influence that contributed significantly to our contemporary polarization.
Yet he shrugs and ducks responsibility by claiming that he's just an entertainer.
He works hard at it. He's good at it. "It's just my job. I do it for pay" (shameless cultural reference - bows to Dylan)
Other examples abound - we would be better off if pig farmers who pollute waterways didn't do their work.
Same goes for companies that clearcut mountains.
(Again - trying to give clear examples that are far from category boundaries.).
But the devil is in the details. These days it's common for people to be out in front of stores pressure washing the sidewalk. It's even escalating. Now there are big scrubbing machines for sidewalks!!!! Personally, I can hardly imagine an activity more useless than scrubbing a sidewalk. And I have to just shrug and walk by. But I kind of think it's bad. The compressor is very noisy (noise pollution) and puts out a cloud of blue exhaust that wouldn't be tolerated from a truck (air pollution). On the other hand - it gives the poor schmuck running the machine an hours work when he needs the bucks. (I've been that schmuck :-)
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.