Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I have in the last week come to the conclusion there are a vast number of aliens among us. And no, I don’t mean alien conspiracies, lizard aliens or space aliens, though the way this year is going, I might have to apologize to the people I laugh at for believing in those.

I mean that a vast number of young people, ostensibly and obviously human, born of human parents, have lived in conditions so different from the rest of humanity throughout history (and most places) and been taught so little of the real world that they’re effectively aliens.

Which is why stuff like the anti-work movement exists.

I’ve always assumed these were a few deranged people who smoked the bad pot, or something.

I mean, how can you be anti-work. To exist in the world requires work. Biologists call what an organism does to survive “How it earns its living.” And well, it’s obvious if you know anything about economies, or work, or you know, how food gets to the table, that “I don’t want to work, I just want to do my art” is not … viable. Not over a large amount of people.

If you’re not making a living, someone else is making it for you, and while at some point that’s viable—I made almost nothing for years, but I contributed in other ways, and my husband wanted me to do those things and the writing, and we collectively deemed it worth it. But he was working for my benefit, and it did limit our options—if it’s a private arrangement, it’s not a viable SOCIAL arrangement.

Yeah, sure, primitive societies might not have work as we view it, but Lord, do they have work. It might be short bursts, but it’s usually dangerous and often maiming. And it leaves you exposed in—to us—unimaginable ways.

Since the seventies, the left has been talking about the “inevitable” future where the robots did all the work. This is bullshit, which they would understand if they understood reality (which they don’t.)

Even in the world of magical robots, robots will need to get fixed/adapted to new situations/ improved. And if you just said “Robots can do that” you fail. Because that is when you hit “Facebook bot” level of understanding of what robots can and can’t do.

Can we greatly improve things, so people’s work is less … onerous? Sure. But to the point of no work? Um…. no. Partly also because….

Okay, so I have a friend who is an end-of-life nurse (Actually, weirdly, I have three of those. Uh.) I was told that when people have nothing left they want to do/need to do, they die. The age doesn’t matter. To an extent health matters only marginally. There are people alive who should long since have died, but they have things to do, so they stay.

Reviewing the history of my family, this would seem to be true.

And before you say “But I’m really driven to do my art” or whatever…. dude, dude, dude. Art you don’t get paid for/that no one wants/has no meaning in your daily life will not keep your interest. Trust me. I speak “I struggled for years to produce because I saw no result to what I did.”

So the land where we all “just do what we want” is called “civilizational collapse.”

But that’s okay, because robots don’t actually work that way.

However I didn’t realize how widespread the crazy was until…..

Okay, so a few weeks ago, friends were talking about the Little House In The Prairie” books, which I read as a kid but didn’t remember AT ALL.

I binged them through the final days of house closing, even though it meant giving money to Harper Collins. In the process I found copyright is held by a child of a literary agent, and realized there were no direct descendants (though there are collateral ones) of the family. So I did a research dive for my satisfaction.

Holy mother of crazy idiots, Batman.

So, I kept stumbling into sites that said Pa was a “Terrible provider” because sometimes they were near starving. And, oh, yeah, they were evil because they tried to steal lands from “Native Americans” and her treatment of race was wrong, and and and…..

But what stuck out to me is these people had no clue how hard life was, back then. Or in many places in the world now. That you could do “everything right” and still almost starve. Or that, you know, agriculturalists have been pushing out hunter gatherers since the dawn of agriculture, because hunting and gathering is a really inefficient use of land, and more people can make a living in agriculture, and that’s how things work out.

That’s when I realized, in horror, that these people are aliens among us. They not only don’t know: they don’t know what they don’t know.

And some of them have power and come up with fantasies like “the great reset” and think that will work on real people.

Aliens. They’re utter and complete aliens.

And they’re destroying humanity.

 

Reprinted from According To Hoyt for February 17, 2022