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Chapter Two: 9am, Toil and Trouble
"God was ruthlessly brought in by the capitalists to control the minds of the masses. Crucially, the new, joyless creed of Methodism was preached to the labouring poor in church on Sunday. At church, they were bombarded with the idea that they were sinful, that all pleasure was wrong, and that the path to salvation lay in quiet suffering at this earth. God was reinvented as a sort of Big Brother figure, and it was His will that you worked hard. [English historian E.P.] Thompson writes: 'Not only the "sack" but the flames of hell might be the consequence of indiscipline at work. God was the most vigilant overlooker of all. Even above the chimney breast "Thou God Seest Me" was hung.' [...]
Around the same time, the thundering polemicist Thomas Carlyle did much damage in the nineteenth century by promoting the notion of the dignity or even the romance of hard graft. 'Man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream,' he wrote, adding: 'Every idle moment is treason.' It is your patriotic duty to work hard- another myth, particularly convenient to the rich, who, as Bertrand Russell said, 'preach the dignity of labour, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect.' Or as the late, great British writer Jeffrey Bernard put it when I went to interview him: 'As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work... of there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own fucking garden, wouldn't he?'"
[From How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson, soon to be released in the US, but I snagged a used copy from Amazon.uk...]
"God was ruthlessly brought in by the capitalists to control the minds of the masses. Crucially, the new, joyless creed of Methodism was preached to the labouring poor in church on Sunday. At church, they were bombarded with the idea that they were sinful, that all pleasure was wrong, and that the path to salvation lay in quiet suffering at this earth. God was reinvented as a sort of Big Brother figure, and it was His will that you worked hard. [English historian E.P.] Thompson writes: 'Not only the "sack" but the flames of hell might be the consequence of indiscipline at work. God was the most vigilant overlooker of all. Even above the chimney breast "Thou God Seest Me" was hung.' [...]
Around the same time, the thundering polemicist Thomas Carlyle did much damage in the nineteenth century by promoting the notion of the dignity or even the romance of hard graft. 'Man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream,' he wrote, adding: 'Every idle moment is treason.' It is your patriotic duty to work hard- another myth, particularly convenient to the rich, who, as Bertrand Russell said, 'preach the dignity of labour, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect.' Or as the late, great British writer Jeffrey Bernard put it when I went to interview him: 'As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work... of there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own fucking garden, wouldn't he?'"
[From How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson, soon to be released in the US, but I snagged a used copy from Amazon.uk...]
