Does not external work react on the mind? It does, only if it has its constant suggestions to our intellect, which is the master, and not merely its commands for our muscles, which are slaves. In this clerk-ridden country, for instance, we all know that the routine of clerkship is not mentally stimulating. By doing the same thing day after day mechanical skill may be acquired; but the mind, like a mill-turning bullock, will be kept going round and round a narrow range of habit. That is why, in every country man has looked down on work which involves this kind of mechanical repetition. Carlyle may have proclaimed the dignity of labour in his stentorian accents, but a still louder cry has gone up from humanity, age after age, testifying to its indignity. “The wise man sacrifices the half to avert a total loss” — so says our Sanskrit proverb. Rather than die of starvation, one can understand a man preferring to allow his mind to be killed. But it would be a cruel joke to try to console him by talking of the dignity of such sacrifice.

— Rabindranath Tagore,
The Cult of the Charka

In fact, humanity has ever been beset with the grave problem, how to rescue the large majority of the people from being reduced to the stage of machines. It is my belief that all the civilisations which have ceased to be, have come by their death when the mind of the majority got killed under some pressure by the minority; for the truest wealth of man is his mind. No amount ​of respect outwardly accorded, can save man from the inherent ingloriousness of labour divorced from mind. Only those who feel that they have become inwardly small can be belittled by others…

— Rabindranath Tagore,
The Cult of the Charka

If the cultivation of science by Europe has any moral significance, it is in its rescue of man from outrage by nature, — not its use of man as a machine but its use of the machine to harness the forces of nature in man’s service. One thing is certain, that the all-embracing poverty which has overwhelmed our country cannot be removed by working with our hands to the neglect of science. Nothing can be more undignified drudgery than that man’s knowing should stop dead and his doing go on for ever.

— Rabindranath Tagore,
The Cult of the Charka

“Nature has made no shoemaker nor smith. Such occupations degrade the people who exercise them.”

— Plato, Republic (Bk. V)

“Now in regard to trades and other means of livelihood, which ones are to be considered becoming to a gentleman and which ones are vulgar, we have been taught, in general, as follows. First, those means of livelihood are rejected as undesirable which incur people's ill-will, as those of tax-gatherers and usurers. Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery. Vulgar we must consider those also who buy from wholesale merchants to retail immediately; for they would get no profits without a great deal of downright lying; and verily, there is no action that is meaner than misrepresentation. And all mechanics are engaged in vulgar trades; for no workshop can have anything liberal about it.”

— Marcus Cicero,
De Officiis [On Duties] (I. §150)

“What honorable thing can come out of a shop? What can commerce produce in the way of honor? Everything called shop is unworthy an honorable man. Merchants can gain no profit without lying, and what is more shameful than falsehood? Again, we must regard as something base and vile the trade of those who sell their toil and industry, for whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.”

— Marcus Cicero,
De Officiis [On Duties] (I. §150)

Why did Americans, in such large
numbers, adopt this uniquely sunny, self-gratifying view of the world? To some, the answer may be obvious: ours was the “new” world, overflowing with opportunity and potential wealth, at least once the indigenous people had been disposed of. Pessimism and gloom had no place, you might imagine, in a land that offered ample acreage to every settler squeezed out of overcrowded Europe. And surely the ever-advancing frontier, the apparently limitless space and natural resources, contributed to many Americans’ eventual adoption of positive thinking as a central part of their common ideology. But this is not how it all began: Americans did not invent positive thinking because their geography encouraged them to do so but because they had tried the opposite.

The Calvinism brought by white settlers to New England could be described as a system of socially imposed depression. Its God was “utterly lawless,” as literary scholar Ann Douglas has written, an all-powerful entity who “reveals his hatred of his creatures, not his love for them.” He maintained a heaven, but one with only limited seating, and those who would be privileged to enter it had been selected before their births through a process of predestination. The task for the living was to constantly examine “the loathsome abominations that lie in his bosom,” seeking to uproot the sinful thoughts that are a sure sign of damnation. Calvinism offered only one form of relief from this anxious work of self-examination, and that was another form of labor—clearing, planting, stitching, building up farms and businesses. Anything other than labor of either the industrious or spiritual sort—idleness or pleasure seeking—was a contemptible sin.

— Barbara Ehrenreich,
Bright-Sided (chapter 3)

Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Elements of Calvinism, without the theology, persisted and even flourished in American culture well into the late twentieth century and beyond. The middle and upper classes came to see busyness for its own sake as a mark of status in the 1980s and 1990s, which was convenient, because employers were demanding more and more of them, especially once new technologies ended the division between work and private life: the cell phone is always within reach; the laptop comes home every evening. “Multitasking” entered the vocabulary, along with the new problem of ‘workaholism.’ While earlier elites had flaunted their leisure, the comfortable classes of our own time are eager to display evidence of their exhaustion—always ‘in the loop,’ always available for a conference call, always ready to go ‘the extra mile.’ In academia, where you might expect people to have more control over their workload hour by hour, the notion of overwork as virtue reaches almost religious dimensions. Professors boast of being ‘crazed’ by their multiple responsibilities; summer break offers no vacation, only an opportunity for frantic research and writing. I once visited a successful academic couple in their Cape Cod summer home, where they proudly showed me how their living room had been divided into his-and-her work spaces. Deviations from their routine—work, lunch, work, afternoon run—provoked serious unease, as if they sensed that it would be all too easy to collapse into complete and sinful indolence.

— Barbara Ehrenreich,
Bright-Sided (chapter 3)

“[T]hose who are placed in positions which demand the surrender of personality, which insist on strict conformity to definite political policies and opinions, must deteriorate, must become mechanical, must lose all capacity to give anything really vital. The world is full of such unfortunate cripples. Their dream is to ‘arrive,’ no matter at what cost. If only we would stop to consider what it means to ‘arrive,’ we would pity the unfortunate victim. Instead of that, we look to the artist, the poet, the writer, the dramatist and thinker who have ‘arrived,’ as the final authority on all matters, whereas in reality their ‘arrival’ is synonymous with mediocrity, with the denial and betrayal of what might in the beginning have meant something real and ideal. The ‘arrived’ artists are dead souls upon the intellectual horizon. The uncompromising and daring spirits never ‘arrive.’ Their life represents an endless battle with the stupidity and the dullness of their time. They must remain what Nietzsche calls ‘untimely,’ because everything that strives for new form, new expression or new values, is always doomed to be untimely.”

— Emma Goldman,
Intellectual Proletarians

“The people who give themselves up to manual labor are never promoted to public offices, and with good reason. The greater part of them, condemned to be seated the whole day long, some even to endure the heat of the fire continually, cannot fail to be changed in body, and it is almost inevitable that the mind be affected.”

— Xenophon, Economics

“Work takes all the time and with it one has no leisure for the republic and his friends.”

— Xenophon

Knaves, who in full assemblies have the knack

Of turning truth to lies, and white to black,

Can hire large houses, and oppress the poor

By farmed excise; can cleanse the common-shore,

And rent the fishery; can bear the dead,

And teach their eyes dissembled tears to shed;

All this for gain; for gain they sell their very head.

— Juvenal, Satire III

The poor were wise, who, by the rich oppressed,

Withdrew, and sought a secret place of rest.


Once they did well, to free themselves from scorn;

But had done better, never to return.


Rarely they rise by virtue's aid, who lie

Plunged in the depth of helpless poverty.


At Rome 'tis worse, where house-rent by the year,

And servants' bellies, cost so devilish dear,

And tavern-bills run high for hungry cheer.

— Juvenal, Satire III

“Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.”

— Étienne de la Boétie,
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

But scarce observ’d, the knowing and the bold,

Fall in the gen’ral massacre of gold;

Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfin’d,

And crowds with crimes the records of mankind;

For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,

For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;

Wealth heap’d on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys,

The dangers gather as the treasures rise.

— Samuel Johnson,
The Vanity of Human Wishes

Let hist’ry tell where rival kings command,

And dubious title shakes the madded land,

When statutes glean the refuse of the sword,

How much more safe the vassal than the lord:

Low sculks the hind beneath the rage of pow’r,

And leaves the wealthy traitor in the Tow’r,

Untouch’d his cottage, and his slumbers sound,

Tho’ confiscation’s vultures hover round.

— Samuel Johnson,
The Vanity of Human Wishes

“It is a great piece of folly to sacrifice the inner for the outer man, to give up the whole or the greater part of one's quiet, leisure and independence for splendor, rank, pomp, titles and honor.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer,
The Wisdom of Life (chapter 2)

“No sooner does a divine gift reveal itself in youth or maid than its market value becomes the decisive consideration, and the poor young creatures are offered for sale, as we might sell angels who had strayed among us.”

— John L. Spalding,
Aphorisms and Reflections (p. 21)

“If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation.”

— John L. Spalding,
Aphorisms and Reflections (p. 62)

“Mercenary is whoever thinks less of his work than of the money he receives for doing it; and social conditions which impose tasks that make this inevitable are barbarous.”

— John L. Spalding,
Aphorisms and Reflections (p. 168)