From the Thousand Words Wenhua.
It's Labor Day again, and many people's cognition is still stuck in the concept of "labor is the most glorious". In reality, Labor Day itself is designed to increase the rights and freedoms of workers by opposing "overwork".
Misconception 1: Labor creates human civilization.
The theory that "labor creates man" is taken for granted. Actually, this is wrong. All animals have to work – they have to forage for food in order to survive, and that's labor.
Some animals even bleed and fight desperately to get food. But from ancient times to the present, no monkey or tiger has ever been seen become human.
What makes a person human? It's not labor, it's reason. Human labor is a rational behavior that needs to be thought about and compulsory, and before labor, we must first think about how to do work, how to work less and work more, and all kinds of steps must be considered in advance.
Labor requires not only rationality, but also experience, and some labor seems relatively simple, but it is also accumulated by human beings over a long period of time. With what is the accumulation? rationality.
Because there is no reason, even if a monkey works hard for hundreds of millions of years, it is impossible to become a human!
▲Under the modern capitalist division of labor, "weak women" can also make cannonballs
Misconception 2: It is human nature to love labor.
The words lazy and lazy, lazy and lazy, are probably the most commonly used words to criticize a person who is greedy for comfort and pleasure and avoids labor.
But the fact is that the vast majority of human labor is forced by life.
Acknowledging the innate desire of human beings to pursue comfort is a good act of respecting human nature and a prerequisite for achieving a happy life.
The famous scholar Huang Zongxi once said, "Good and bad work, but also the love of Mrs." It is said that it is human nature to enjoy leisure and hard work, which is not only human nature, but also nature.
It is not human nature to love labor, but laziness is human nature. Every technological advancement is aimed at freeing human beings from heavy labor and enjoying life better.
The happier and happier life of human beings is not due to the increasing intensity of labor, on the contrary, to a large extent, due to the liberation of people from labor.
There is no shame in "good work and bad work", but it is a powerful driving force for human development and a better life.
▲ Machines can easily complete tasks that previously required a lot of manpower
Misconception 3: Entrepreneurs rely on treachery and exploitation to earn nothing.
"Bosses or businessmen seldom participate in labor, but they make the most money because they are treacherous and exploit the laborers. This misconception has continued from the era of heavy agriculture and suppression of commerce 2,000 years ago to the present day.
In fact, without entrepreneurs, there would be no enterprises, and "manual workers" and "mental workers" would not even have the opportunity to work.
The responsibility of an entrepreneur is to discover the market demand and allocate various resources to produce products and services that are in demand for the market. In other words, the responsibility of the entrepreneur is not to work, but to "discover the needs and allocate resources effectively".
Whenever a disaster passes, we often forget these lessons and continue to hate entrepreneurs. And the progress of a country, the life of each of us is inseparable from the wealth created by entrepreneurs.
It is precisely because of the adventurous spirit and wisdom of entrepreneurs that most people do not have, and the high income of entrepreneurs is the remuneration paid to them by the market.
The only thing in the world that can "get something for nothing" is poverty, and the only thing that can create something out of nothing is dreams.
Because labor is not necessarily "sweating like rain", nor is it necessarily "sitting on the desk", labor creation is a unique civilized behavior of human beings, therefore, our focus should be on creation, not simple labor.
As Professor Zhang Weiying said, entrepreneurs are the operators of risky undertakings, the pioneers of technological innovation and wealth creation, and all people in the market have to take their free ride.
▲As a result of the closure of a large number of enterprises, a large number of workers are unemployed, starving, or even homeless
Misconception 4: "Opportunistic" to make money is immoral.
In the market, many people do not personally participate in production, and can earn high profits just by relying on capital operation. This kind of "opportunism" that seems to be empty of profits is regarded by many people as an immoral "business without capital". Actually, this is a misunderstanding of finance.
If you have money but can't invest, you can only call it money and ability, but you can only be helpless if you have no capital. Just as a fish, in the hands of ordinary people, it is just a fish, but in the hands of entrepreneurs, it may become an ornamental role, and it may be exchanged for other items. It is precisely because entrepreneurs have the ability to allocate resources effectively.
Intelligence is the highest cost.
In the traditional era, our concept of wealth is more of a "material wealth view", which corresponds to hard value - that is, we only value the wealth created by labor, which can be seen and touched, and ignore the soft value, the wealth created by wisdom rather than simple labor.
▲In the 1920s, the Ford Motor Plant was producing Model T, and in 1925, it produced one car every 10 seconds due to the use of assembly lines
Misconception 5: Poverty is due to lack of hard work.
The phrase "hard work and getting rich" has almost become an axiom, but it does not stand up to scrutiny. The vast majority of ordinary people who adhere to this concept will start when the rooster crows and return at sunset, but very few of them can earn a decent family business.
The key here is that the creation of labor is also likely to be garbage, for example, a person who does not know how to cook will make a lot of good ingredients unpalatable.
The creation of wealth depends on human wisdom, and there is a difference between human and human wisdom, so it is normal to have more or less wealth.
For example, if someone discovers an iron ore mine and recruits a large number of workers to mine it, he can make a fortune without having to work on it himself, because before he discovered the iron ore mine, they were considered just ordinary piles of stones. What did he use to discover it? It is his knowledge or experience, which we collectively call wisdom.
For thousands of years, the concept of "labor creates wealth" has been deeply rooted, which is exactly what the emperor wants.
"Those who work hard govern people, and those who work hard govern people", this is a major contribution of Confucianism to the rule of imperial power, because only lifeless labor will be exempted from thinking time, and a person has lost the ability to think, and the only thought is the dream of food and clothing at sunrise and sunset. It is basically impossible for such a person to get rich.
Extending it one step further, this is also the reason why the imperial power era emphasized agriculture and suppressed business, and why the scholars were locked in the study - that is, people have no time to think, no leisure to create, so as to achieve the goal of "weak people and poor people".
▲ Excessive labor will only make the workers themselves lose the possibility of creating greater wealth
Today, although we have entered the era of market economy, these erroneous "views on labor" and "wealth concepts" that were popular in the previous generation or even more are still prevalent.
It is not the interests that determine a person's actions, and it is not the power that determines the actions of society, but the ideas we have. The concept of "poverty" and fallacy is more terrible than poverty itself.
If we fail to wake up to the fallacies of these basic concepts and revert back to a worse economic system, the collective return to poverty will no longer be unfounded – the disasters of the 20th century have at least shown that it is difficult for power and capital to take the initiative to learn the lessons of history.