One of the many products of poverty in a technologically complex and stratified society is the constant movement that is required to maintain one’s life on
limited resources. In an environment that requires so much intentional human
attention to maintain, one has to move faster, and attend to more elements in perpetuity to
keep afloat. Because one receives so little amount of social resources from a given activity, one has to do more to sustain one's own self and immediate community, which in the aggregate, serves to sustain an increasingly topheavy and functionally useless ruling elite, which has emerged out of the abundant surplus that generations of intense work have produced.
This causes a structural peculiarity in the impoverished self that is responsible for a whole galaxy of behaviors and materializations throughout one’s lifespan. One enters a state of constant motion, accompanied by an anxiety of rest and idleness, which can be both productive and destructive in different contexts.
Indeed, this basic instinct accompanies the protestant work ethic in its many forms, with its emphasis on the simple virtue of work itself. Left to itself, the ethic produces a material abundance that reproduces its original founding instinct, as there is simply so much material volume to attend to in order to reproduce society.
This causes a structural peculiarity in the impoverished self that is responsible for a whole galaxy of behaviors and materializations throughout one’s lifespan. One enters a state of constant motion, accompanied by an anxiety of rest and idleness, which can be both productive and destructive in different contexts.
Indeed, this basic instinct accompanies the protestant work ethic in its many forms, with its emphasis on the simple virtue of work itself. Left to itself, the ethic produces a material abundance that reproduces its original founding instinct, as there is simply so much material volume to attend to in order to reproduce society.
