Human Society

Origins

As Idle Theory explains the origin of human society, it is that men found that, working cooperatively, dividing labour between them, making and trading tools, they were able to live more idle lives than they could as self-supporting atomic individuals. Outside society, each man met all his needs through his own unassisted efforts, using one or two tools that he may have learned how to make. Inside society, he had access to many more useful tools, but also much higher value tools. And since human societies were more idle than atomic individuals, it followed that in times of severe difficulty, human societies would survive where human atoms could not.

This is the same explanation offered for the evolution of multicellular organisms - that multicellulars were more idle than unicellular, and therefore regularly survived crises which unicellulars could not.

But in both cases, the larger organization serves the interests of its component parts. In multicellulars, the idleness of individual cells is higher than that of single, atomic cells. In human society, the idleness of its individual members is higher than it would be if these individuals were to live outside society. If life within society was less idle than life outside it, then societies would disintegrate into their atomic individuals.

There is no sense in Idle Theory that human society is a "higher" sort of thing than the individuals who comprise it, and that these individuals exist for the service of society. On the contrary, society exists for the service of its individual members. Individuals in society have to pay to be part of society - in performing duties, in observing laws -, but are rewarded with an increased idleness that exceeds these costs.

Equality

Equality of idleness must always be the goal of human society. The principal argument for this considers an interdependent society with very low idleness. In this society, all luxuries have been dispensed with, because there is neither the idle time to make them or enjoy them. Everyone works near-continuously simply to stay alive. Such societies cannot support idle members who don't pull their weight in the struggle to live, but live off the work of others. Such people are a dead weight, a burden, who act to decrease the idleness of others, and to drive it to zero idleness and death.

This desperate circumstance is not very different from one where people take to the lifeboats of a sinking ship, with small rations, and few oars, out on the open sea. Whatever social privileges may have applied beforehand vanish once they step into that boat. All must receive equal rations, and all must work the oars. If they do not, they have no chance of survival, because they depend upon each other, some to row, another to steer, and others to keep watch for land or ships. And if they should fail to observe the strictest equality, they will all find enforced equality in death. It might be suggested that monasticism is a mode of life enforced by desperate circumstances.

This desperate circumstance is the bottom line of human society. At the other extreme, there is a society of perfect or near-perfect idleness. In this society, next to no work needs to be done. About the only things that people can make and trade are luxuries and amusements. In a perfectly idle society, there exists a de facto perfect equality of idleness.

Thus perfect equality is inescapable at the two extremes of idleness. Inequality of idleness is only possible in the intermediate zones, where some people can be more idle than others. But even here, equality should be practised, because any society may at any moment be overtaken by disaster.

Inequality

If human society exists to liberate men from toil, and to provide them equally with as idle a life as can be had, then what people do in their idle time should be subject to the barest minimum of restriction. If some people, of an industrious character, make and trade in luxuries and amusements of one sort or other, there can be no claim that these luxuries should be shared out equally in society. If one man busies himself in his idle time to construct for himself a pleasant mansion, with a swimming pool and a garden, while others prefer to sleep; then those who sleep cannot claim, upon waking, some equal portion of such the mansion, or their own equivalent mansions. They chose to sleep, while he chose to work.

The requirement of equality does not extend beyond equality of idleness. There can be no requirement that everyone have an equal share of luxuries made in idle time, that everyone have a pleasant mansion, a swimming pool, a pleasure garden. The uses of idle time are infinite. Some people may wish to live in such mansions. Others may prefer to play games. Others may study the world around them. And others may just sleep. The only constraint upon idle time activities is that they should not reduce the idleness of other persons. People should be let do as they like, so long as it damages no-one else.

Socialism and Liberalism

Socialism, as here described, is the political demand for equality of idleness. Liberalism, as here described, is the political demand for freedom to do as one likes in one's idle time, and particularly to make and trade goods without care for social equality.

There is not, essentially, any real conflict between these two demands. The problem arises on the one hand when Socialists extend their demand for equality into the activities of idle time. Then everyone must be the same, and live in the same house, and wear the same clothes, and do the same things. In this world, everything is the same, and human freedom is negated by the imposition of a drab and unnecessary equality in every aspect of life.

But a worse problem arises, on the other hand, when liberals insist upon the most general freedom of action, and inequalities of wealth (where wealth is taken to mean luxury) are permitted to extend to inequalities of idleness. In this world, some men are overfed, while others starve.

In the most idle societies, liberalism will flourish. In the least idle societies, socialism will prevail. The roots of socialism, in the West, lie in Christianity - in Christian charity and asceticism, and monastic communism - and the Christian hope the redemption of a fallen, toiling humanity. Socialism tends to portray the human circumstance as a treadmill of work, while liberalism tends to portray it as a playground. For socialists, human life is all work. For liberals, it's all play. Socialists tend to see the human condition as a continuing emergency - as life in a crowded lifeboat -, and often as an emergency of such magnitude as to justify draconian state intervention in every department of life. Liberals tend to see the human condition as a game - as party-time on a pleasure cruiser -, and seek to reduce state intervention, to deregulate. But the reality of human life is that it part work and part play, and not wholly one or the other

The conflict between socialism and liberalism is as much an argument about the meaning of words as anything:

To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to which he was attached. The new freedom [of Socialism] promised, however, was to be freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice in all of us, although for some very much more than others. Before man could be truly free, the "despotism of physical want" had to be broken... Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another word for power or wealth.
(F.A. Hayek. The Road To Serfdom. Ch 2)

Freedom, liberty, power, wealth - all these words have had their meanings so confused that they mean one thing to one person, another to someone else. In Idle Theory, an entirely different term - idleness - is used. Freedom from necessity (literally, not-idleness) is idleness, and corresponds to Hayek's "new" socialist freedom. Political freedom in Hayek's sense is the freedom to dispose of one's idle time as one wishes, without coercion or arbitrary interference by others.

The only thing back-to-front in Hayek's exposition is the historical order. The goal of freedom from necessity is as old as human history, and there is nothing "new" about it at all. The goal of political freedom, by contrast, is historically new, and has only emerged in recent centuries with rising social idleness.