Posted on 03/31/2023 7:49:03 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
It is natural to desire respect. We are social animals; everybody wants to be important. We don’t want to feel like we’re being pushed to the outside of the herd or that the pack doesn’t need us. For healthy people in most circumstances this desire is useful in that it pushes them to become an essential part of the lives of family, friends, neighbors, customers, employers, and coworkers; helping and then becoming needed and appreciated.
That is all well and good. It’s as healthy as the desire for food and shelter. But all desires can turn to vice if they are not kept in check. Many of our cultural woes stem from a particular corruption of this desire for honor. This vice wears many faces and hides behind many names. But for the purposes of this article we will follow a popular trend and call it “elitism.” It is the inordinate pursuit of unearned influence over many people.
Recently, a somewhat embarrassing example of this elitism was presented on the pages of American Greatness under the title “How Hard Work Destroys Character.” It’s difficult to say whether the author was tragically underserved by the adults responsible for his upbringing or whether the strawman he erects is simply a literary device.
Josiah Lippincott assures us early in the article that “Digging ditches won’t automatically make you a good person.” It’s difficult to find many parents, even of the “boomer variety” (his words), who would make that claim. Similarly, one wonders who needs to be convinced that “Man does not exist to labor for the sake of laboring.” If these were truly moral precepts imposed on him in youth then surely pity is the appropriate response. If it weren’t for his multiple assurances of his intellectual superiority over common men...
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
Maybe he was thinking, Arbeit macht frei
Six Days thou shalt work and do all that thou art able.
The Seventh Day the same AND clean the stable.
There is a little truth in both articles.
The difference between people who work and people who don’t is striking. You need only briefly view the welfare classes and the idle rich vs your average blue collar guy to see it.
While work may not automatically build character the opposite is always psychotic.
Col 3:23
“And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men,”
Oh Tolerence. Same website as the original article from yesterday. Something about the sincerest form of flattery being-copying or something like that. It pushed enough buttons on that yesterday American Greatness had to do their own rebuttal.
The original article:
https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/27/how-hard-work-destroys-character/
i like the opening lines about our collective pursuit of “honor”. People want to be seen as important....which is why they pronounced great moral verdicts on climate change, etc., rather than taking the time/effort to be a productive and meaningful person within the realm of things they can actually influence.
honor has become celebrity....social media feeds this frenzy of course
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