Member-only story
Quiet quitting was about justice…and fear. We must lay the groundwork so we can progress to noisy quitting.
Whatever the salary, a job is a place where a person is a servant and a slave, usually in the service of an unworthy cause. This is true not only under capitalism, but under every hierarchical system. Whether we are serving the wealthy shareholders of Wall Street, or Stalin, we are working to prop up some awful group and an awful “cause.”
But we work — timidly — because we need money to live and money is hard to come by. So we anxiously seek and accept “opportunities” to waste our best hours and days and years in service of the owners’ quarterly profit (not yours) or the dictator’s latest 5 year plan. It’s largely the same under either.
What’s odd here is that the leaders in business and government produce nothing. YOU and people like you produce EVERYTHING, including all the actual human necessities like food, shelter and medicine. These “leaders” are in control for two reasons: 1) we accept their rules and we obey them; 2) they have armed enforcers and a culture of obedience.
We operate under systems and rules that project an illusion of legitimacy, but most of us recognize that those are essentially lies. We know how corporate money ensures that only corporate servants (and not public servants) will hold office. We know that…
