Vacations Perpetuate Voluntary Slavery in Contemporary Societies

As some readers might know, I detest everything and anything which is justified by empty appeals to infinitely malleable words such as laws, rules, civilization, culture, religion or ideology. In my opinion, any appeal based on these respectable sounding words are just different versions of the same scam- namely the abuse, exploitation and impoverishment of other people under the guise of intentionally diffuse and seemingly objective authority. The ephemeral nature of these allegedly universal concepts is especially obvious when you start studying the effects of failure in older civilizations and nations. Let us now ask a few questions about the belief systems and self image of long dead civilizations, nations and empires.

How many people still worship the supposedly omnipotent gods of older civilizations which went extinct or were destroyed? Do you see temples devoted to Zeus, Jupiter, Minerva, Apollo etc being treated as anything beyond archeological sites? What about the supposed divinely ordained systems of governance in each failed civilization and empire? What about their claims of the inherent 'correctness' of their belief systems, customs, rules and lifestyles? A skeptical reading of history keeps showing us that all subjective mental models of the universe are simply adult versions of fairy tales. But how is any of this connected to my contention that the concept of vacations, as we know them today, helps perpetuate voluntary slavery in contemporary societies?

Before we go any further let me say this; I am not anti-vacation or pro-work by any definition of those terms. In fact, I have long held the view that doing something you don't care about, or actively hate, to justify the continued existence of a deceptive socio-economic system which only pays you enough to barely live is slavery in all but name. It is especially reprehensible for this to continue at a time when the increases in non-human productivity make it possible to provide universally high standards of living without everybody working hard or in some cases, at all. Most contemporary jobs, occupations and vocations are therefore nothing more than sophistic names for voluntary slavery. These “jobs” do not serve any purpose or have utility beyond making a small percentage of equally pathetic and decaying human beings feel in control.

It is really about paying people to torture themselves doing largely useless stuff which they don't care about. But what do dystopic systems based on paying people to torture themselves have to do with vacation time. Well.. it is about the nature of torture. See, if you torture people continuously they might stop caring or just die. That means you have to find a whole new set of people to torture. Finding new subjects for torture was easy in the old days when almost every woman has 7-10 live births. However the rapid advances in medical sciences within the last 100 years coupled with the widespread availability of contraception had caused a severe and irreversible reduction in the number of naïve newcomers who could be tortured through work.

Therefore it became necessary to create concepts like vacations to allow the tortured voluntary slaves to partially recover and retain some hope for their future. It is no coincidence that countries with multi-generational low-fertility tend to have more vacation time that somewhat primitive ones such as the USA. The substantially longer duration of vacations in west-European countries is therefore not about any real moral superiority than their inability to find enough naïve newbies to torture through work. It is worth noting that the USA has finally entered that zone (low fertility + rapidly declining economic future) within the last decade. Of course, I do not believe that American corporations, in the short sightedness, will see the writing on the wall.

What do you think? Comments?