Quote:
Hard work does not, in itself, improve character. For a talented and spirited young man, especially, doing menial labor for pitiful wages under idiot supervisors not only fails to build character—it can destroy it.
Man does not exist to labor for the sake of laboring. Work must serve a purpose. It must be fit to the nature of the one doing it. The modern liberal bureaucratic corporate state—with its hatred of excellence, beauty, and strength—actively seeks to destroy the natural hierarchy of labor and laborers.
Just because menial labor is sometimes necessary doesn’t mean that it is noble. It certainly doesn’t mean that it is beneficial for those who do it.
A life of hard toil is a peasant’s life. For the more noble type of man, however—for one who seeks glory and wisdom—such hard labor represents a decline.
Our society encourages the weak, old, and mediocre to sink their fangs into the young, strong, and excellent in order to drain them of their vital energy. The COVID lockdowns explicitly operated on this basis. Young people, at no risk of illness, were ordered to give up years of freedom and normalcy for the sake of those who’s prime of life had already long since passed.
This is a despicable inversion. The old should sacrifice for the young, not the other way around. That which is by nature better and stronger should be given deference and pride of place. In return, those who are in decline should be treated with charity and care. Modern America rejects the natural order. This is why a gaggle of octogenarian oligarchs like Anthony Fauci, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden run the country.
A society that embraces spiritual vampirism doesn’t actually benefit the elderly and weak. Feeding off the strength of the young comes at a deep cost—one that we are going to pay for on a society-wide scale in the coming decades. The rule of decline means death.
Western civilization, as a whole, finds itself caught in this trap. One wonders if there is anywhere left in our declining order where youth, strength, and ambition might still find an outlet for achievement and greatness.
If our civilization is to have a future we must find such a place and we must find such men. This, and not the menial labor of the groundskeeper or ditch digger, is the most pressing and serious work of our age.
I honestly don’t know what to reply to this middle-aged young man. Some of his points are worth considering, but others seem to come out with a whine.
The idea that school prepares a person for the experience of a job in the real world is ludicrous. The idea that menial work can be soul-killing has merit, but can also be found in the professions and not merely in manual labor.
I agree that the “most pressing and serious work of our age” is not the menial tasks of manual labor, but that must also be done, and people must be fed, garbage must be picked up, toilets must flush, homes must be built, people must be transported, students must be taught, the law must be kept, groceries must be sold, burgers must be flipped, chicken nuggets must arrive… and beer MUST be brewed.
Dreams don’t always come true, and hard work does not always get one to the dream. But…it keeps the bills paid, it feeds and cares for the children, and it gives to the hopeful person a sense of important purpose. Sometimes that is all we get. So…do what you can, where you are and try to make the future and society better for your having done so.
If one is a “talented and spirited young man” then whatever goal that is dreamed of should be pursued above anything else, but that implies a sacrifice of a different kind. And many make that sacrifice, women and men, and since we live well much longer now the dream may come in later years. Everything that one has experienced goes into the making of the person one will become, whenever the dream is achieved. I guess that is one of those platitudes that ring true, and I would add that we never stop becoming and we never know when we will be most important to the “serious work of our age.”
What we know is that civilization must continue as we go about that serious work, and that takes a lot of menial tasks of manual labor.
I assume that this is a Christian man with a sense of hopelessness. Odd struggle that he is having, and perhaps he blames his deity. Should I also assume that he is disappointed in his life and even depressed about not achieving his goals and that he thinks “the system” is chewing up men, such as he, instead of nurturing the “more noble type of man” to do that “most pressing and serious work of our age?”
And, the corollary is that we elders should leave it to the “talented and spirited young men” to do that work, yes?
Heavy sigh…
It sounds like what he’s describing is the problem created when Socialism takes over a society and the government becomes a parasite on it.
Of course hard work doesn’t pay off when the government is sucking up every profit you might make from it. And we now have a government that is not only sucking the life out of its host, its also injecting poison into it.
He’s not saying that laborers shouldn’t labor.
He’s saying that intellectuals shouldn’t choose to waste their time laboring when they don’t have to.
He’s for the division of labor, as free market advocates always are.
His contention is anti-Christian.
It’s very close, consciously or unconsciously, to Epicureanism - a far better philosophy for a good life than any other. In brief, it advises: pursue your pleasures, in particular the infinite delights of the mind. No gods.
Striving for “glory and wisdom”, or any success, is one thing. Achieving it is another. Failure is to be expected.
It has been said by untraceable sages that “all lives, seen from the inside, end in failure”.
That is almost certainly true. There may be some exceptions.
So strive upwards and enjoy, enjoy, while you can.
And as Candide - ie. his author Voltaire - says at the end of the book of his misadventures, let each of us cultivate his own little plot.
There are of course many - outside our civilization - who have no little plot and for whom laboring is the only choice.
And our civilization is fast decaying.
It could perhaps recover if Trump is re-elected.
Yes, that’s what civilization needs. Young men ambitious to attain the wisdom and glory of a PhD in politics; to climb that paper mountain; to achieve rugged-individualist Boys’ Own Adventure greatness in the “Statesmanship” department of a college; to be brave Substack heroes.
How awful for Joshua and his ilk to have his talents thwarted by that nineteenth-century “character-building” ethos foisted on him by the vampiric old. How terrible for him to have spent those formative summers in degrading physical work, far beneath his mountain-ascending mind. (Though I do sympathize with young men who were taught to believe that being a good man and a good citizen meant fully taking up the man’s burden to provide for, protect, and sustain his dependents, only to have that “reward” of hard work and increasing responsibility be demonized as ill-gotten spoils of race and gender war.)
I hate to be the bringer of bad tidings to Josh. Academic work in the social sciences is the new menial work - even at counter-woke Hillsdale. Thankfully, GPT4 will replace all these under-paid drudges. Ditch-digging, groundskeeping, water-carrying, ploughing, vacuum repairing, cultural commentating - all equally replaceable by machines. What will Josh be paid to do - and by whom - when that happens?
I am fearful to ask, but …Claire, are we in a bit of an agreement, here?
I was just considering my life of work as a teen, a college student, a young married person, a poultry farmer with children, an out-of-work poultry farmer briefly and then still a poultry farmer, crop farmer, general doer of everything that needs to be done that is menial manual labor at 69…and with a near future that will be the same…and then I thought of poor Josh and his unfulfilled dream as a talented and spirited middle-aged young man, who is depressed and discouraged and disappointed in how he has been used by me and others like me, who are elderly now and living off his despair.
And I thought of an appropriate hand gesture accompanied by harsh mom-talk, and I wondered when he failed to decide to pursue his dream to find the work he would love to do that fulfills him and makes him feel special and important, and I thought to myself, I should tell him to “Go for it! Wait no longer to be the force for change that you have wanted to be, that you thought you should be. You aren’t decrepit and useless now, enjoying your old age courtesy of the sweat of young, spirited, talented men. Now could be your time to shine!”
“Well…that is, if you have no other obligations, cuz then you would have to choose to abandon all of life’s little complications, but make no compromise to fulfill your destiny.”
But, I don’t think he will listen to somebody that has worked in menial manual labor to support her family and get ahead and shared her husband (for 25 years or so) with the county in which they live, so he could try to make changes that helped everyone and kept local government where it should be and doing what it should do, while she held the fort, so to speak. And, somehow, I feel fulfilled, happy and hopeful, and I am the person that I am, because of all my experiences, although I am not the person, whom I dreamed of being when I was more spirited. The only menial, manual labor of all that I have done in my life that was hard drudgery was the brief time between poultry growing, when I worked in the food preparation unit for a local nursing home. OMG, those people deserve 20 to 30 dollars an hour currently for what they do and how fast it must be done with no stopping, day after day after day. I think I was paid 7.45 bucks an hour and should have been paid 15. There are people that do menial manual labor that work long, hard days and nights…and you know what? They often have a lot of time to think about important matters, to worry over an idea. They should run for Congress.
“Vampiric old” I love it! 
A woman’s work is never done.
For readers who were annoyed by Josiah Lippincott’s article - the topic starting this thread - here is a riposte to it.
The argument can be entertaining for supporters of both sides.
A fine reply. Thanks, Jillian, for posting it.
At one point, Josiah mentions that “here he is in his middle age” or something along those lines, and I was wondering what is thought to be middle age, now?
I remember recently being surprised that people in their early 40s consider themselves to be middle-aged. And I thought to myself, “No, you are just a kid” but maybe it was because they still acted rather like a kid, despite the fact that they had children and worked a full time job to support their family. Maybe middle age is from 40 to 60?
Where does anyone else fall in their determination of the term “middle-aged?”
I guess I’d say, shoot for 100, and 50 is right in the middle!