Essay: On Work, Productivity and Meaning

Everywhere in our societies today there is an intense promotion of ideas to diminish the importance of work with the purpose to mislead individuals’ perception of what is work and how it is related to our own actions that reflects into part of our own meaning and goals in life. Whatever each one of us does for work I understand as a considerable part of our meaning which is a direct consequence of our own self-development as individuals, of our own self-interest to act, and our own will to supply and contribute to our local communities and its needs, improving our society as a whole. If our self-love and self-interest are part of the private aspect of our beings, then this consequential voluntary contribution is the individual expression towards the public, part of the social aspect of our lives. However, our contribution and self-development are being nullified by these ideas, or may I call it, anti-work narratives. And the dissemination of the anti-work narratives comes from those who supposedly want to advocate against injustices committed against the workers by their "exploiters" or "oppressors" where they use these narratives as a disguise that abuses the nomenclature "workers" for their meaningless collective authoritarian organizations. Organizations with the malevolent goal to spread an emptiness in each one of us individuals by appealing to our kindness, compassion, and struggles. Their aim is to attack and directly damage the good consequences of our individual actions towards a constructive collaboration with one another, difficult the freedom of agreement between individuals and to deceive na?ve persons with their anti-work propaganda that appeals to their appearance of injustices to a meaningless path. Slogans such as "workers unite" creates the excuse of totalitarian ideas with the desire to create conflict in a healthy society and promote evil agents who uses the relativization of the definition of a word diverging and corrupting it from its original meaning with the only purpose to trick and deceive the people. The ideologies that attack the essence of work, individual and meaning are not new, and I am far from being the first one to warn about this as it was used in the past and still being used today to diminish democracies from within and establish the coercive statist and totalitarian ideologies. When G. K. Chesterton was doing his observation [1] on the problem of displaced humility, he exemplified exactly what we would be facing in a near future, which means now, showing that by doubting truth and undoubting about ourselves, we would lose ourselves, and it goes with the subject of this text.

"The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

And to be doubtful of our aims is also to not define a goal, a purpose, that much add to our meaning in our lives. Ayn Rand also gave us a warning [2] after her analysis on someone else definition of "justice" that ended up attacking those who have talent by promoting coercive ideas that would punish talent itself.

"If rational men do not rebel, the egalitarians will succeed. Succeed in establishing a world of shoddy equality and brotherly stagnation? No - but this is not their purpose. Just as Kant's purpose was to corrupt and paralyze man's mind, so the egalitarians' purpose is to shackle and paralyze the men of ability (even at the price of destroying the world)."

The humility to constant challenge ourselves to improve as it is required in our careers went down to not know what we are doing, to not know to plan our goals, to not know what to answer to the question "where do you see yourself in 5 years?", and how we could effectively contribute with others. We lost the conscience of our intentions, will, and actions that drive us to not value ourselves and to forget the complex collaborative dynamics of the foundations of free and commercial societies that we live in. Consciously someone might attack capitalism and promote socialism, meanwhile subconsciously this same person loves that bakery, coffee shop, wine shop, pub, restaurant, or nightclub where they meet their friends or from a friend that they want to support with so much compassion. But what is a coffee shop? It is the initiative of another individual to offer a type of space, product, and job opportunities to different individuals of that society, which also includes you. You are part of capitalism as much as your employer or customer because it inherits of individual free will and free action to engage in exchange. And if you feel that someone is being unjust with you, the only barriers that you will face in modern times to have your own initiative to challenge the unjust are the mechanisms against freedom created by the same persons who sold you the prejudices against capitalism: bureaucracy and costs. The two most harmful barriers to the poor that denies them the chances to improve themselves through action.

The individual and the constructive consequences of work as voluntary exchange are part of the foundation that constitutes the main mechanisms of free market and our civilized societies. This foundation details the offer and demand of services or products resulted not only from our human action, but also from our voluntary goodwill as individuals who looks forward to supplying whatever is missing in our neighbourhoods, cities, or, in a major collective identity, nations and world. Each and every individual in the community who decide by themselves what they want or desire, such as clothes, foods or utilities, expresses not only their free will to choose, but they become the essential part of this cooperation that results in the expression and existence of the economic system named capitalism. When we use our intention, will and action to choose a service or a product with our exchange vote, we do so basing it in a relation between productivity, a finished work dictated by quality and lower cost, and aggregation of value done by us. This valuation done by the majority of the ordinary people is the driving force that enriches the diversity of offerings, diversify our labour, spread purposes, and distributes wealth through the uncountable individual initiatives in the market. It increases the accessibility and productivity of the numerous ramifications responsible for a service or product, and which impacts the availability of useful skills or types of businesses that would contribute to our everyday life and work.

But the emptiness provoked by the attacks on work contributes negatively to result in the formation of an anticapitalistic mind driving na?ve individuals to the misinterpretation of the dynamics and basic concepts of these voluntary collaborative interactions, ignorance of the process to build yourself a career or define a simple long-term goal, and lack of conscience over the division of labour or all the supply chain and all individuals involved to achieve an end product or service. An anticapitalistic mind corrupts the value of self, the individual, and its own purposes, nullifies the understanding of the materialization of human action, and exchanges it by the never ending complains about the common struggles in life. Everyone becomes a victim, and every individual wants to highlight their illusional excuse to externalize their failures or injustices. The anticapitalistic mind forgot that the voluntary exchange and free market is based on the free expression of ordinary individuals, not only exceptional ones, divided by their own capacity to contribute through their own specialized skill with one another and exchanging with one another, as described by Adam Smith [3]:

"It is but a very small part of a man's wants which the produce of his own labour can supply. He supplies the far greater part of them by exchanging that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men's labour as he has occasion for. Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society."

The anticapitalistic mind by itself adopts an authoritarian destructive judgement, as to condemn is quicker than to reason, to discredit human action and goodwill of all other individuals who they disagree with by pure prejudice, resentment, and envy to falsely accuse entrepreneurs, for example, of having a greedy motivated behaviour by the pursuit of a mere materialistic monetary returns. This prejudice is built upon an irrational simplification of all human action as a mere operational activity that is exploited by those who they identify as superior to them in our consequential hierarchical economic structure - e.g., the "bourgeoise" - who they demise by ignoring their roles, efforts and results. For the anticapitalistic mind there is no meaning and goodwill in individual action towards what is in need, and the only liberation available for the ordinary man would be through the immediate judgment and condemnation of their illusional exploiters and reducing all human intention, will and action, or humanity itself, to an own pessimist creed. They ignore the division of labour, even if they are part of it and practice it every single day. They don’t want to acquire more responsibilities, but they do desire to decide about every single matter. They don't want to act themselves, but they do want to dictate others' actions. When we analyse this pessimist creed and behaviour based on prejudices, we end up in what I define as an authoritarian mind. Authoritarian mind is an expression of the tyrant within the ordinary man, who are quick to condemn by outsourcing their rational to the preestablished by the collective that appeals to their compassion and who have the same prejudices and desire to suppress other individuals by a collective representation through the state. May it be because of comfort or struggle, by the rich or by the poor, a foundation is built to have their revenge and redirect it towards their enemies assuming themselves as the "good" force, even if it is a false good that will cause the slavery or suffering of others. The most iconic example of this is when they condemn someone else who they demise and label themselves as "anti" something. As Trotsky wrote Their Morals and Ours, the moral of those who are against morals. A group may think they are against totalitarianism which is an obvious good, but their own ideas have much in common with the collectivist ideologies defined as authoritarian, anti-individualistic and based on coercion of the state against the individual. These authoritarian minds then look forward solutions that ignores the impact of the voluntary contribution of an individual, trying to impose it from top to bottom instead of understanding how they contribute from bottom to top sectors in our societies. They are na?ve persons who are not interested in helping more than supporting chaos that is expressed in inhumane examples such as equalization of outcome, or any other narrative with the goal to cause conflict and more prejudice between different groups in our societies. In practical terms in our professional lives, it means that this authoritarian action replaces the individuals’ practical experiences and performance by their privilege and affirmative actions, and exchange their voluntary collaboration, knowledge and merit by their own type of slavery, their own insecurities and their own prejudices.

As most authoritarian ideologies and line of thoughts, the appeal to attack capitalism, work, career and meritocracy fails in defining the basic concepts of these words used to conclude in contradictory arguments by intentional misinterpretation of its definitions. In between the attacks on work and on the ordinary man, the ideas and fallacies are multiplied by individuals who are already corrupted or who already does not understand how their simple action through work could have a positive impact to their societies. These corrupted minds forgot how the contribution through the materialization of their own intention, will and action are transformed into initiative with goodwill to improve our societies from bottom up. People just want to live their lives and contribute with whatever they have to contribute, some may focus more on work, others may focus on perpetuating the continuity of their line through family. As individuals, we all have our own aspirations, ambitions, and goals when it comes to our lives and work, thus the differences between us in effort, productivity and results are intrinsic to human nature and individual will. There was never a necessity to a forced and illogical equalization between someone who understands work as a contribution to be given in a period of their day with a workaholic who looks forward to work at all the times. Neither is necessary a demonization of these different personas.

Ordinary individuals build their careers from bottom up, through merit, as it is by the consequence of our own actions and goodwill that lead us to explore our ambitions and the natural path to become something greater or to establish ourselves at a chosen level limited by our own comfort or other goals in our lives. Although, we also have to take in consideration that the corruption of the self-value mentioned previously is the very reason of today unjust barriers being thrown against individuals. Barriers against the poor that are primarily created by socialists through demagogy. These barriers surges through the denial of merit and promotion of authoritarian ideas such as affirmative actions or imposition of power expressed through judgment based on unchangeable human characteristics in the area of our economic collaboration. The character of a bright individual mind and the effort of the body is villainized, and the prejudices in characteristics, which is common to all, and which sums nothing more than a mere human category, is used as a primary factor to overrule merit. The seed of prejudice that expresses in tyranny spreads through the universities and businesses day by day following ordinary judgment made by quick, incomplete, and even contradictory rationalization led by what "seems" to be good and merely appearances. The ordinary judge, without thinking in the consequences of their own rational, ignores the evil that will result against another individual because of an unjust verdict forced by the collective. And in many times, it is a verdict that is based in contradictions from ideas that you might accept unconsciously from philosophers. Here, I share a small Ayn Rand text [4] when she explains why we need philosophy and which we should consider when analysing our own judgments:

"You might claim that you have never been influenced by philosophy. I will ask you to check that claim. 'Don't be sure-nobody can be certain of anything.' You got that notion from David Hume. … 'I couldn't help it. Nobody can help anything he does.' You got it from Hegel. 'I can't prove it, but I feel that it's true.' You got it from Kant. 'It's logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality.' You got it from Kant. 'It's evil because it's selfish.' You got it from Kant. …

Some people might answer: 'Sure, I've said those things at different times, but I don't have to believe that stuff all of the time. It may have been true yesterday, but it's not true today.' They got it from Hegel. …

… the principles you accept (consciously or subconsciously) may clash with or contradict one another; they, too, have to be integrated. What integrates them? Philosophy."

An Example of Corruption of Ordinary Man

A next step is to analyse one of these anti-work narratives used to promote ideas against the essence of work. I'm going to use the example of the appeal to laziness as a stimulus to value professionals and by the tentative to create an equivalence of it with productivity. De facto, this narrative only creates a confusion in what is to be productive and what is laziness. This narrative appeals to a positive interpretation of the action to prevent action, which by logic it is to be against action, then against initiative, and finally against the behaviour necessary for the materialization of work or activities and, by consequence, a goal. The narrative tries to resume subjects related to dedicate ourselves to our professions which I can define as a constructive behaviour toward the self and the social by a negative interpretation, meanwhile behaviours against work and collaboration by a positive interpretation. This is done by the replacement of the understanding of our natural action to rest by the action of doing considering that we all naturally understands rest as an intrinsic need in the nature of beings. And because rest is an intrinsic need, it is used to disguise an appeal to make us absorb this fallacy by exchange of definitions by pure naivety, especially if we had already slightly adopted an authoritarian and anticapitalistic mind, who ignores value in their actions, misunderstand work as is and, by consequence, diminish what could be part of their own meaning in life.

This example of laziness may be irrelevant to ourselves at the first time we read, or even see to us as a funny fact, but light contradictions like these during our routines sums up to a variety of attacks and propaganda against work and meritocracy. And the intention behind these narratives is to hit hard in the meaning of each individual in our society and their understanding over how they effectively contribute by their goodwill to their communities, to their own self, and act to diversify, decentralize and distribute wealth. More individuals with their own initiatives, more competition, more options and a natural distribution of concentrated wealth then happens. The natural distribution of concentrated wealth can be seen by the grow of middle classes. But narratives like promotion of laziness have the objective to mislead us to a path that leads nowhere more than the pursue of something that seems good through kindness, exchange reality by appearances, throw us to a desperation to act in what appeals to our naivety, nullify our meaning that are immediately filled by an eternal pursue of empty "life experiences" which does not aggregate in a long term to any specific society more than to our own self degradation, or a blind advocation to push a collective meaning based and limited in complains to fulfil their lack of individual meaning and suppressed capacity to have their own initiative. The final consequence of all these factors for the individual is the lack of direction to build their careers that makes them be against their careers themselves. The nullification of their contribution feeds their lack of purpose or belief on their actions, and it affects our societies in overall. Part of the expression of an individual towards society should be the meaning of their work as we all are socially related by our own contributions and initiatives that are created by us to materialize our intention and will into actions to provide something that we aspire or someone demonstrated they need.

From homeless to suicide, from poverty to infinitum welfare, individuals are carried by totalitarian ideologies that denies their own initiative and purpose to do good in any scale. If poverty is the natural state of man, these narratives are used to push ordinary individuals to nothingness. These narratives do not want any more to displace their humility only, but to displace their own self from existence and their free will into a void to not fully understand the importance of work in their own lives to improve themselves and in other lives to contribute with what their communities and customers attribute value. We all workers and entrepreneurs have to counter these ideas against work and the promotion of negative habits, such as "lazy productivity", because their real intention is not as good as their narrative seems. Work is the just way to give themselves the opportunity to be recognized by the people in their local communities, a priori, in whatever value they attribute to them, and become a successful individual with meaning in their lives, not by the judgment of others, not by a certain amount of monetary value, but by their own individuality, improvement, path, goal and life.

The Best Can Inspire as well as Corrupt

It is unfortunate that these days not all individuals who was once an ordinary man and became a successful man remembers or reflects on their own efforts and where they were before to be where they are now. I believe these successful individuals corrupts their own self by the disbelief in an omnipresent entity beyond their reach, as God, and this void becomes a displaced belief of loose rationalization that makes them remove a common sense of what and how they could achieve something. They also ignore the importance of humility in their own reason instead of a pursuit and creation of their own metaphysical entity to contrast with God by rationalization by pride. As Chesterton wrote it might be displaced humility from ambition to conviction. They might not believe in religion, but they do have a low standard version of a set of morals of their own. Perhaps the peace and comfort of their lives sums to forget the existence of malevolence in the ideas spread in societies that aims to block individuals to go through the same path they once went through. Ideas such as the promotion of laziness which can be spread in many narratives today goes from misinterpretation of stoicism to the attribution of quotes to successful men, even if by false claim, and which materializes the attack against the individual, their action, work, and capitalism [5][6]:

"I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."

And as we all have a tendency to see in a successful man, or what was once a reputable company, an example of practice and theory to achieve the same results, some ideologues try to use quotes like this as an empirical truth to promote the idea that work, in its own definition, is an irrelevant task that we have to execute within our daily life because we and our efforts are simple exploited with no meaning or consequence to others. The arguments in favour of such narrative written in random articles are carried with contradictions like valuing laziness over ambition, confusing productivity with delay of activities on purpose, denial of work experience, resume the improvement of a skill to mere causality, misinterpretation of to rest as a need to procrastinate caused by the lazy behaviour, or equalizing a lazy professional intention, by probability and chance, with a productive professional action, who prioritizes by experience, efficiency or resiliency. As I mentioned, the problem with such narratives is that it aims to attack work, career, and productivity, or in a general sense, topics used as base concepts of what constitutes the definition of meritocracy in the popular understanding, a concept which is wrongly used as form to promote prejudice against capitalism. The objective of these attacks on capitalism is to make professionals to remain where they are, to keep what they are and to not let them evolve, improve, or progress in their careers as professionals and as individuals, who could develop initiative to open their own businesses and diversify the distribution of wealth by their will and action.

In The Information Era, Meaning of a Word is a Weapon

As you may have already noticed in the development of this narrative of laziness, concepts and definitions are redefined to create a confusion between what is perspective and what is truth. The denial of truth as an empirical fact contributes to the relativization of all definitions. As an example, Milton Friedman, Ludwig Von Mises, G. K. Chesterton, Ayn Rand, C. S. Lewis, and Frederic Von Hayek already registered this intended change of definitions of the words by authoritarian or totalitarian ideologues in their own works. Probably the most common example is when Marx and Engels criticized the German national-socialists in the Communist Manifesto, while the German dictator criticized Marx in his interviews. In essence none of them was disputing the word socialism, they were disputing who between them would apply it correctly under the name of their own ideologies. Below I quote Hayek comments [7] when he documented in a chapter about the socialist roots of national-socialism:

"In this particular case the perversion of the meaning of the word has, of course, been well prepared by a long line of German philosophers, and not least by many of the theoreticians of socialism. But freedom or liberty are by no means the only words whose meaning has been changed into their opposites to make them serve as instruments of totalitarian propaganda. We have already seen how the same happens to justice and law, right and equality. The list could be extended till it includes almost all moral and political terms in general use."

The definitions of the words are not a mere fluid concept that changes at the necessity of one interpretation or by the mind of the beholder, but it is the explicit definition of what it is in reality explained by what things are. The importance of it can be tracked from the Bible, when Adam initial actions in Genesis was to name animals, or by Plato thoughts, highlighting the importance of definitions because without definitions we cannot stand in an existing orderly reality. Indeed, without the pursue of truth and establishing a definition we fall in our own delusions. To deny the words its true meaning and objectivity is to dive everything into chaos where everyone and everything loses the sense of what they are. It is substituted by innumerable interpretations done by their own imagination transforming everything into nothing, naturally promoting conflict and division between individuals, which by consequence promotes injustices. The definition of a word is done to give its due and bring us into conscience to understand and face reality as is, expressed by the metaphysics as math and proved in physics as matter revealing the truth established by an ultimate order. When someone argues that a "cat" is a "dog", by consequence they assume to not know what a cat is and what a dog is, thus, to affirm that one being is equal to a different being is to reject the definition of both beings. And the denial of reality can evolve in such manner that fallacies against arithmetic operations or logic in itself promotes the ignorance and lack of understanding without the capacity to define a single unit according to its characteristics, which causes them to not understand even the most basic operation of sum one unity to another. As the cases of two plus two equals five. Today the attacks on definitions of the words by an individual is used as the means to not face reality and truth, and to assert their own prejudices constructed to their definition of a word just to affirm their own belief. G. K. Chesterton resumes it well in his conclusion of Heretics [8]:

"The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. …"

Then, to dismantle a prejudice built in the words, I have to define the words itself starting by meritocracy. The suffix cracy is of more common knowledge and adds to a word the meaning of power or rule of as a definition of a type of government. The word merit denotes the meaning of value or worth as nouns by the attribution of a consequence of an action or will by an agent, by the entitlement to a greater good resulted from good actions, or it is expressed as an action represented by a verb, such as to deserve, that references a consequence for the agent who does the act. In its common use merit denotes a consequence from an action with a neutral meaning that is neither good or bad. And the consequence commonly known is intrinsic to the agent in a form of material reward, such as a monetary recompense, or immaterial reward, such as attention that expresses on the action of an agent to aim the consequence to himself. Both merit and deserve can relate to a bad consequence in the sense of punishment. The use of merit to replace nouns to describe right or wrong in a legal terminology which does not necessarily have a negative meaning because it replaces the fact of an event, of what happened, to reflect the truth existent in it to reinforce our conviction and confidence of what it was.

Then meritocracy in its pure definition means a government predicated in the rule of who deserved to be the ruler by the consequences of their actions recognized by others. Then, we need to remember that every exchange and recognition in the markets, although in self-love, must be done in goodwill or an agreement cannot be achieved. Thomas Aquinas mention merit as a cause by love to charity [9], which I may extend to love of collaboration with other individuals. When you are providing a service or a product to someone, you do not treat people badly, otherwise it reflects against you or your business. Even if you pretend, you do so to create an appearance of what seems good or a treatment to the individual who exchanges with you, which must be good. If your product or service is faulty or bad, then it does not matter if you pretend because your intention will be challenged by your action and what you provide will dictate the ultimate will of what you have done.

"Moreover, merit is caused by the love of charity, and that love is primarily love of our goal. So, merit lies above all in will moving to its ultimate goal, that is, in desiring bliss."?

The definition of merit as a reward caused by a good action is important to remember because the reader may identify themselves with what is a good action, although what is common nowadays is the will to a good action, defined by what we know as kindness or the desire to be and do good. Desire to be or do good is different from the good act in itself, where the intention and will to something good does not necessarily means it will result in the materialization of doing good. This deceptive impression is extensively used today by totalitarians who try to hide themselves under a persona that appeals to all those around them and deceive ordinary people who are not aware that what seems to be a good person does not necessarily means that this person is going to do a good act or knows what is a good act.

Now, I also need to consider the popular prejudice of what is said to be meritocracy today. It is defined as an individual who worked hard and then deserved what they have in what we define as valuable (e.g., monetary value) or an individual who was privileged to have what they have with or without work, the latter most applied in the case of heritage, to create prejudice. Both popular definitions are used to highlight the consequence of inequality of wealth between individuals as a bad or unjust consequence, and then base it on negative narratives constructed to inflate the perception of what looks unjust and to create a prejudice against meritocracy and, by consequence, work. The fallacy to attribute a negative meaning and guilt for existence of heritage is used to argue that an individual who receives a heritage without having done any actions - or efforts as the materialization of an action - receives the benefits of his parent in monetary value. However, this narrative fails to understand that if the successful man or woman fails as a father or mother the value will be naturally redistributed by the immaturity, inexperience, and lack of responsibility of their kin. This conclusion is shown in data like "70% of rich families will lose their wealth by the second generation and 90% by third generation" reported by Williams Group Wealth consultancy [10] and considering that "nearly 68% of the world's richest people are 'self-made'" [11].

The attribution of a negative meaning to inequality ignores what makes us human as the recognition, acceptance, and admiration of the diversity present in each individual with its own greatness that sums up to our communities, transcends in the excellence of an act and helps humankind to evolve by time. Inequality is normal because individuals are, will and act differently. All those who could not see the greatness of humankind coming from free individuals and not from an authoritarian collective ended up trying to control human nature through force of an ideal that tries to define what a standard individual would be by the classification of an ideal race or through force of what an ideal society would be if economic classes were removed and individuals, their actions and their results were equalized. There was in the past an equalization of both cases that aimed to remove our humanity, and it is being enforced today by an animosity of those who wants to control human behaviour, individual will and all the factors that constitutes the dynamics of the free markets and voluntary exchange. The totalitarians today try this control of will, by control of offer and demand, using modern technologies such as advanced data analysis, business intelligence, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The control and eradication of individual differences, or humanity, can be seem when marxists advocates to elimination of all classes that equalizes all under no categorization, or when fascists merge all classes under the name producers. Both causes the same consequence of having one categorization, a singular collective identification by "none" or "producers". These forced equalization narratives hide the attack on each individual right to exist and to choose, as our human inequality is intrinsic to our existence given to each one of us by Providence or by nature, inherited by our parents in the most scientific explanation to understand ourselves and our conception, and by the experiences, mistakes and core values we learn in our lives. Inequality is not intended to be a bad cause, but to be a natural consequence of the human intention, will and action, as the result is used to compare ourselves to find excellence. For example, when we look forward to what is most beautiful to eyes to see, to the ears to listen or to the testify in the practice of sport. The natural consequences that pursue the perfection or the best of the individuals, as we, as humans, are not and will never be perfect. Inequality is also what makes individuals collaborate and contribute with one another, by understanding and recognizing that we, as one individual, cannot and do not know everything, and our lack of knowledge or skill leads us to build trust into other individuals’ capacity to support us into a different speciality to together achieve a common goal. This is also what Adam Smith registered in his work [12].

"if we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what a variety of labour is employed about each of them, we shall be sensible to that, without the assistance and co-operation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, even according to what we very falsely imagine the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated."

After the definition of meritocracy, I'm also required to define productivity extending to a brief rationalization of what is value, so both core concepts that I am using continues to be clear to the reader by the raw and strict definition of the word, and not by some fallacious attribution that makes people have dubious meanings to trick themselves in what they think it is good and evil. The noun product means one thing achieved as a result of processes and actions. The noun productivity is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as the rate at which a company or country makes goods, usually judge in connection with the number of people and the number of materials necessary to produce the goods [13]. Rate to make goods considering manpower and matters means an effective execution of processes and actions by less cost or effort to achieve the same goal. Finally, to be productive or productivity is an improvement in chain of the processes that defines the rate and actions that defines manpower and matter to reach the goal to materialize a thing with equal or improved characteristics.

The Importance of Economic and Political Sciences

Many arguments against capitalism and consequentially value, work and productivity happen because the minds of the individuals who advocate against it are already basing themselves on the misinterpretation and prejudice against the voluntary exchange in free markets, or how the human interactions and goodwill happens through the exchange of what is in need and what is considered value by both parts of the exchange. The definition of each economic system in economic science reflecting the meaning of the word and its concept is extremely necessary today because authoritarian minds in order to defend the economic system concept of socialism, ignores its definition with the purpose to migrate from a concept in economics to a concept in the realm of ideas. And the problem with ideologies is that it can deny or contradict the definition of a word already realized by one scientific field to any interpretation in their imaginary. This was done before by transforming the economic concept of socialism in ideologies. From the merge with nationalism it ended in the German national-socialism documented by the economist Hayek as mentioned before who dedicated one work to find the root ideas of this new type of socialism that surged in the German society around 1917 [14]; to Italian fascism, corporatism, as described by analysis of Ludwig Von Mises [15] or by Mussolini himself who on his doctrine argued that "It [Fascism] is opposed to classical-liberalism [capitalism] which arose as a reaction to absolutism" or "Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State" [16]; or to marxism [17] and its variants in leninism, democratic socialism or fabian socialism. The consequences of intrinsic authoritarian characteristic of the economic system of socialism forces these mutations that happens to our present days with the only goal to disconnect the economic system from the new proposed idea in a manner to excuse and forget all the evil resulted by it. Authoritarian minds try to ignore all the social disaster, genocides and misery caused as a consequence of collectivist essence in socialism that transcends to the ideologies derived from it and they try to deceive ordinary people through the promotion of a false idea of what seems just to contribute to the multiplication of anticapitalistic minds.

All these ideologies are used to attack capitalism and individualism. Individualism is expressed in the freedom to be, to will and to act by an individual who materializes their initiatives by themselves. It is the liberation through human will and action to fulfil their meaning by self-improvement, self-love, self-confidence and towards voluntary goodwill that, if productive, has to combine with what is the necessity of others and by consequence respond to their demands. And this response is not necessarily motivated by greed behaviour, but what an individual defines as a return for themselves by their ambition and its result. This is an implicit consequence that improves communities from bottom to up, from one to many, from the example of great individuals to form the voluntary expression of a society. Notice that the society or collective here is an expression of active and valuable individuals looking forward to improving themselves and express it to their communities who recognizes them. This is the opposite of what is defined by the collectivist authoritarian ideologies that look forward a predefinition of what an ideal individual must be, think or act within the collective, to then condition their existence or suppress all other individuals’ selves who conflict with their definition, nulling their will, action and being. I also exercise this importance of individualism in another essay where I take in consideration criticism worth of consideration as done by Augustine, Aquinas, Ayn Rand, Chesterton, and C. S. Lewis. Collectivism as defined by totalitarian ideologies, or authoritarian minds, is what really restricts individual freedom and conditions its existence through a collective expression such as the state. This is openly stated by Mussolini in the Doctrine of Fascism when he clearly defines his ideology being against individualism [18] and conditioning its existence to the State:

"Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity."

It also defends Fascism as a collectivist idea and the prediction of the flourishment of collectivism would continue happen in our time [19]:

"If the XIX century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the 'collective' century, and therefore the century of the State."

Karl Marx defines the bourgeoise thought [20] in all the Communist Manifesto as a negative attitude of the individual toward their freedom. He denies the importance of intellectual capital that adds to what is produced therefore it has separately value to the period of contribution that an individual skill or knowledge was applied as a sub product of an end product or service. The process of collaboration is defined by mere exploitation, perhaps because in his time technologies were less accessible to the ordinary people than it is today. The fact is that capitalism has pushed to all types of initiatives in different sectors to have less cost and to be more accessible to a poor individual who now can become what they call “oppressor”. The whole process still belongs, and it is managed by the individual who contracts services and goods to have a product is not done by exploitation, but by collaboration and agreement between individuals who attribute value to their own skill and trade it accordingly to fulfil the part of the process. As Adam Smith wrote "every individual is a merchant of some sort," and anyone who have a career or is starting a small business understands that.

The definition of value popularly known is the recognition through monetary value by its representation as money that creates a standard in our exchanges. So, value can be recognized in between societies expressed as fiat currency of nations, or nowadays broad groups that can exchange with each other through the advance of internet and using crypto currency. What sustains the value attributed to a currency is its supply, who controls it and how much trust it has in between time it exists and who manages it. Of course, here we ignore the fact that crypto lacks the link with material world or perhaps we could consider that the multiplication of nodes strengthens the trust of its operations. But thinking beyond value as a monetary currency, value is the attribution of meaning to existing goods by an individual which creates a boundary between them and the desired goods. The existence of the value is conditioned to the existence of the desire for the goods by the individual, which we define as interest. An exchange between two individuals is the voluntary and peaceful calculation of the aggregation of value by both individuals over two different goods owned and desired by both. In the next paragraph "thing" I define as a unity of goods to be traded.

For example, consider an individual A who aggregates a value to one apple in his possession and an individual B who aggregates a value to an iron bar in his possession. If individual B has the desire to have an apple and individual A is willing to detach himself from the apple, then both individuals A and B are going to start to calculate what consists of the value of an apple in relation to an iron bar. We can think that the valuation starts with the will of an individual to recognize and aggregate value to the existence of a thing, where the desire exists by the will to possess or to attach a being (individual) to a thing (goods). If individual A aggregates no value at all to the iron bar that individual B possesses and excluding the application of force, then the exchange is never going to happen until individual B discovers what constitutes a thing with value and interest of individual A. We can also affirm that the value is attributed by each being and it is not necessarily common to all, where this value can be affected by numerous factors far from human capacity to map which could be from the environment where they are and what it is available there, defining scarcity, to the individual will, as the willing to possess or desire. Now, If the individual A has any sort of interest for the iron bar and the individual B has any sort of interest for the apple, then both are already exchanging their own interests, or the will to possess, between themselves at the same time they are recognizing and respecting the possessions of both. The attachment between an individual and an apple and between an individual and an iron bar are stressed to the detachment between a thing and a being, where both are going to evaluate how much of the iron bar is valued by both individuals in order to exchange by one apple. We can affirm that the fact an exchange between two beings happens, it does consciously by both under the recognition and respect for the possessions of both - or the recognition of a thing being attached to one individual - where the exchange has in it an intrinsic part that classifies as being peaceful and voluntary between the two parts. This respect and recognition of other possessions is what Adam Smith mention as a civilized society. Otherwise, the valuation could migrate from the will to possess a thing to the recognition of ownership of an individual who owns, to detach the owner from what is owned, and in the worst case scenario remove the existence of the owner in order to fulfil the will to have the goods - or an initial definition that would leads us to concept of violence, violation, to rob and to murder. Continuing with the civilized rationale, individual B needs to calculate an equivalence between his desire of the apple and his valuation of the iron bar in possess of individual A. Once individual B considers that the apple is equivalent to half of his iron bar due to the effort to acquire it, to have the iron bar in his possession or how common is an apple to him, and any other consideration, then he expresses his valuation to individual A that is going through the same process. If none of them find a calculation that satisfy both, then the exchange is never going to happen, else if they reach an agreement between the equivalence of one apple and of one iron bar, then they are going to conclude the exchange. Both are going to internalize this valuation within themselves in order to predict future exchanges between these two beings, an apple and an iron bar. Value then represents more than mere monetary value, it intrinsic carries the aggregation of will to have and interest to give what another person wants, contributing and putting trust in each other through an exchange that happens voluntary, peaceful and in goodwill.

The rational used by Adam Smith was incomplete when he wrote [21]:

"it is not from the benevolence of the butcher that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."

If an individual has an interest in becoming a butcher, it is of his own interest as well to succeed and to materialize their advantages by attending other necessities. Thus, if the butcher does not have enough interest from others in what he is offering, the butcher is doomed to fail, not because of his will, but because there was no necessity from others in his society in what he was offering. Benevolence in the meaning to be kind is to will and act based in goodness. An action predicated in goodwill is intrinsic to a voluntary exchange in order to have continuity in an individual initiative that is settled in a society. It is of self-interest to succeed. If what is being offered by the butcher causes any harm to those who is buying from him, then it is by consequence to have his reputation gone, as well as any chance to continue with his initiative. Trust is as important as the returns. Moreover, competition makes it even harder to those who does not act in goodwill to serve their customers or those who pretend to act in goodwill. In an exchange to pretend to act in goodwill does not last long as the false act is proven by the evaluation of the customer. If I pretend that my meat is in a good state and that you could consume it without problem, may it be by the aspect of the meat or even by the realization done in the moment of consumption, the consequence of it will be proven and my reputation as a butcher will be damaged. How many people today has been deceived, lost time of their unique lives in unnecessary degrees and made themselves a huge debt condemning their future because they ignored the basic of analysing what their society actually needs or how they could apply the course of their choice in our societies? Instead, they invested in what an anticapitalistic ideology sold them through an appeal to a false justice in name of the unfortunate, exploited, and poor individuals.??

The short exemplification and exercise over value, exchange, interest, and possessions is to show that today our skills are offered to an employer who has interest on it and who see in ourselves a partnership to help to deliver a customer need. It is not by the exploitation of the employer, but by their recognition of the need of an individual who has capacity to contribute with effort and knowledge in a specific area to reach an end. The employer and the employee collaborate and contribute between each other and agree to their terms. Authoritarian and anticapitalistic minds who still insists in the exploitation of one another does because they ignore the fact that nothing impede the one who owns the set of skills to become an employer themselves. And individuals do become employers by creating their own companies to avoid the exploitation, not from an employer, but from the government, who apply half percent of taxes over the labour produced by them. When individuals become an employer by starting their own business, they are also condemned by the anticapitalistic mind who does not contribute with societies, who does not value their action to others or who does not understand how to contribute and collaborate. Their critique is purely based on envy and resentment to express the desire to see a free individual failing, so they can keep their anticapitalistic prejudices. If the free individual does not fail, then they will classify them as a new exploiter anyways to express their own resistance to change their minds. The conclusion we can take from an anticapitalistic mind behaviour is that it is not about exploitation, it is about being against the free human intention, will and action that belongs to the individual who had the initiative to give the first step. In a general sense, the authoritarian and anticapitalistic mind that advocates against the bourgeoise are the same who increase the costs and create the barriers against the poor ordinary individual who could become an employer or employ each other. If they become an employer, then they would be labelled as the bourgeoise and someone else who engage with them in a contract will become an exploited proletariat. Moreover, those who add barriers and increase the costs for the creation and maintenance of new businesses, such as contracting someone to work in a specific role or with a specific salary, are diminishing competition, advocating, and acting in favour of the establishment of monopolies. Monopolies is not entirely by the consequence of capitalism or by a healthy commercial society, but by the policies set against it. A healthy commercial society is a society that has a diversification of options for each industry, reducing the costs and bureaucracy of new initiatives to those who are poor, and increasing productivity among them.

In a capitalist and less bureaucratic society the ordinary individual is free to act at his own will and effort making them responsible for the consequences of their own judgements and choices. The set of skills that belongs to them is their own product to be offered to someone who needs it. The value that is aggregated to their set of skills is in accordance with the needs of some community and how scarce it is in that market, where their ability to increase its value depends on the effort that they apply to the improvement of their own self. This is why individualism is not in itself a harmful selfish will and act, but it is also their own capacity to understand how to collaborate if one desires to improve themselves. The social element of human beings forces an individualist to act in benevolence of those who surround them if one wishes to have continuity and succeed. The tentative to remove the value of contribution of an individual by affirming that their contribution is unjustly done by exploitation is the same removal of value that is applied by the lazy narrative mentioned earlier, which sells the false idea that "by doing the minimum is therefore doing something in a more effective and easy way".

When someone defend narratives such as laziness, they are not advocating to make the life of someone easier, they are clearly advocating for individuals to not value any sort of effort, to not concern about consequences and to not add value in what they do which removes a broad understanding on the meaning, long-term goal, and purpose of their actions. It is to make individuals to have a wrong interpretation of work as a mere irrelevant activity that they have to do in eight hours of their day, or even to question why they even need to work. It is the immaturity of stating that you must work to survive that at minimum expresses a wish to do nothing, contribute nothing or even to not live at all. And as if it is not enough to reduce their individuality, they promote their negativity to try to push others in the same hole. The ideologues who distribute these narratives against work also advocate to condemn those who are already conscious of their actions, who knows how to contribute with their societies through trade, who does not have any limitations to work all day for what they believe in, and who understands the dynamics of aggregation of value on their initiatives or skills that is done by others. The narrative against work acts against a conscious professional who seek to advance in their careers by their ambition at the same time they increase their contribution to their society. It happens because this narrative wrongly assumes that every activity in every industry should be treated as an irrelevant task that need to be executed regardless of its consequences or to whom it will affect or benefit. It carries the assumption that the activities resulted from work does not sum to the individual own self more than adding a limited, linear, repetitive, or mechanical process to whatever it may be, or even adding no knowledge at all. It also assumes that all individuals are the same with the same ambition to pursue more or comfort to establish a line. In essence it wants to convince individuals to be against themselves by a disbelief of the good consequences of their actions, against their will to act with self-interest, and to let them dependent on initiatives of others who are already established in our societies. These steps discourage them to take the next step to assume more risks and responsibility to have their own initiative by doing the necessary sacrifices and to challenge the established businesses causing a natural diversification of offer to consumers. The result is to become exactly who the anticapitalistic mind demise, wrongly judge and condemn as guilt of all imagined injustices: a successful professional or a business owner. In reality initiatives give power to the ordinary people to disrupt existing established businesses, their products and services by challenging its existing cost and quality through competition, and to distribute wealth in pursue to serve and to make their offer better and more accessible to more individuals in their communities.

Philosophical Exercise on Individual

The denial of individual differences is more than the denial of nature itself; it is also the denial of our humanity and diversity where each one of us has its own characteristics and personalities. Differences that lead us to different results in diverse existent fields through the path of human progress and acquisition of knowledge. A conscious professional has to be aware of how individuals are unique in their own self by the conjuncture of their own experiences and their own actions towards what they choose as most fit to do by themselves. We as individuals pursue our own excellence in what we do and receive a recognition from society (e.g., our customers) according to our ambition. If each human is unique in its own self, then their action is unique in their own execution that explicit shows the materialization of a natural human inequality through action and consequence, forming a natural hierarchy. The consequence of these actions can be seen as bad or as good, and it will drive the improvement of the own self towards a productive way to act in his view and in those who they affect or wish to affect creating a bound between the one who offers and the one who demands. This diversity or variety of unique individuals acting by their free will and collaborating with each other by trade is what truly enrich and forms a great expression of a collective contrary to the belief that a collective by its own omnipresent ideal is what would enrich each individual by controlling their will or modelling them. A diverse productive collective can only exist by free individuals who improve themselves to aggregate more to themselves and in consequence to the collective they are part of.

The characteristics and personalities behind each individual move their will and materialize their action in their own unique way, as in order to be human I have affirmed that each person uniqueness and their realization of it is a must, then the consequence of their will to act and the action itself is going to express different results and cause different consequences. These results in between other individuals and their consequences can be compared to an extent of which are most beneficial of that proposed activity, or not. If beneficial it causes a promotion and continuity, else, in malevolence, it causes condemnation and punishment. Now, if we expect to all to be the same and to have the same result using a nonsense pursue of equalization disguised as fairness, then these individuals will diminish their humanity, as to be the same is to not have different characteristics and personalities, it is to not wish by their own will. It is to force them to have the same will and to act in the exact same way as mere objects or machines executing mechanical operational tasks. What has been happening since the industrial revolution was an improvement of the activities of the work and its processes that came to substitute physically dependent tasks with high cost on human effort and capital which removed and still removing individuals from a labour that contribute little to their intellect. The increase in productivity and improvement of the work moves individuals towards being more human. It also has facilitated immensely an ordinary person to have their own initiative and disrupt established businesses with the advance of technology.??

The appeal of ideologies in defence of collectivism uses minorities as justifications to their means by hiding a nasty dangerous premises to use specific groups of individuals, who share the same characteristics or struggles, to then justify authoritarian acts to control the majority ignoring their individual aspects. These narratives always end in a top bottom policy suppressing other individuals’ liberty as a result of the appeals to everyone kindness and will to support without their realization that the path chosen would prevent the expression of their own individuality, even at the cost of an inexistent guilty. This aims to enforce the idea that a collective conscience and moral would shape an individual conscience, and not the individual achievements and contributions would sum up to their collective expression.

Philosophical Exercise on Action

The attacks on work, meritocracy and the recognition through effort is built by a diverse quantity of narratives usually with the same goal: the aim to create a solid prejudice based in relative definitions, which at a given time and by a repetitive method, materializes in an anti-capitalist mind to diminish the meaning of work. These narratives always appeal to what people judge as what it seems to be unjust using a sense of unfairness of one towards another and exploiting the natural inequality existent in each person and in what makes them unique as related to efforts, passion, choices, characteristics, and personalities. In another example, when a narrative is built using as premises the exchange of a person personality, which is built through their lifetime experiences, by a physical characteristic of their body, such as skin colour or race, it does to deny the uniqueness of oneself and to resume their existence to that collective category, aggregated by physical classification, and ignoring the individuality of their minds. This is why the authoritarian minds behind of such narratives, when proven false, have to change their appeal to something more abstract where "people are not oppressed anymore by their physical characteristic but by their minds." This opens a precedent to the disgraces I have exemplified previously where the XIX century by collectivist ideologies based on economic system of socialism (national-socialism, fascism, communism or fabianism) is much probable to repeat itself. The narrative wants to deny the individual will by eradicating the essence of what makes us human and unique as the capacity to think by ourselves. To nullify someone personality in their capacity to make a difference in their community, materialized by their action, is to remove their human essence and limit their understanding over part of meaning in their lives. This is the reason of the development of my thoughts on deconstructing the promotion of laziness and to properly define laziness. We must remember that fallacies related to this subject fails in the definition of its basic concepts used to deconstruct or promote an idea that ends up building a contradictory argument under a repetitive anti-merit narrative influenced by anticapitalistic mentality.

To continue through the laziness narrative and the consequences of meaning in life based on work, we should briefly think about action. Action, I define by the act done by us through the body or the mind in order to achieve something in space or time. To think is an action, internal, as we are doing here, where we do our operations to find a reason to achieve an understanding using our morals where the act to think happens in-between the period when you started and when it ended. A physical action, external, could be simple exemplified when you look at your hands or if you place one thing that was next to you a bit closer. Action is doing the act and before the action we have the will to act, intended or not, that describes the steps towards doing the action, and after the action we have the consequences of what have been done and the responsibility of who has done. In-between the will and the action we can define laziness in one form. It is the resistance of the will to act as the act itself is exempt of consequence or responsibility. The individual values more its own current state of what they are doing, or of doing nothing, than the future state projected as the result of the action where it can be rearranged in time to postpone their will until they finally decide to act. By the devaluation of the will to act, laziness cannot be seem like a good behaviour because, or it postpones action and by consequence postpone its result, or it do the act without concerns about the consequences by the will to execute it. Finally, an individual who is lazy would increase the time to act by their own resistance in doing the act, other individual, who is not lazy and has the will to act, is already working on it and building up the outcome of the action. This philosophical exercise to define action and the will of action therefore it is simple and quickly described by myself goes with what I read later in the writings of Thomas Aquinas [22] and C. S. Lewis:

"Action is of two sorts: one sort - action in a strict sense - issues from the agent into something external to change it, but the other sort - properly called activity - does not issue into anything external but remains within the agent itself perfecting it. What both have in common is that they issue only from things actually existent precisely as actualized; a body neither illuminates nor glows unless actually alight."

Rest is not necessarily inherited from laziness, laziness results in rest. Rest is the period used to recover the energy spent by our own body and mind after a period of our own selves were acting in existence. More we act, more we use our own energy and more we will look forward in future to rest as it is part of nature of beings. Rest is a necessity of our body and mind, laziness is not. Rest is predictable by the number of actions, while laziness prevents or can postpone actions and results. Rest is consequent, laziness is inconsequent. We have created the standard to rest according to our concept of time on our own world as the definition of what one day is, by the sun rise, with the light and clarity of our sight, and the moon rise, the darkness and loss of perception, and it defines the periods that we choose to be acting or resting. Laziness breaks these standards, mess with an individual plans for their actions during their active period and postpone the action for the subsequential periods. Rest can be part of the plans of an individual in-between expected actions to achieve a result in an extended period of time, laziness breaks all the plans towards the results increasing the time to achieve it as the practice, based on actions, takes longer when less time is dedicated to the action and more is accumulated in the will of the action. A great example of what could be an ignition or on equal grounds of laziness is addiction, as addiction causes action that is prioritized over other actions that we planned to do.

When we affirm that someone is productive, it is not the same as to affirm that someone is lazy. It is because productivity looks forward to analysing the most efficient way to execute a task and to achieve a proposed result based on analysis that demands previous efforts and knowledge gathered through theory and practical experience which is by itself consequences of previous actions towards understanding the related matter. A lazy individual, to start with, is contrary to making efforts to understand the matter or to execute it, and they are not necessarily concerned in applying the most efficient way to work, but what gives them the immediate sense of achievement of what would require them to complete the action regardless knowledge, consequences, or responsibilities of the result of it. Imagine If you have a problem in your car with a minor leak in the radiator where it would require you to add water every twenty-four hours, a lazy behaviour would be to fix it quickly by the action of adding more water which take no more than minutes every twenty-four hours meanwhile a productive behaviour would be to penalize yourself with hours or days to address the leak and to have no consequent actions in the future. The laziness in postponing it by spending one minute by adding more water and generating the consequence of future actions is more valuable than losing some hours to have no consequence in future. The act of adding water would be the easy momentaneous solution, not necessarily the fix to the problem or to concern with its consequences.?

Thinking about action on our professional lives we are going to have the definition of practice as the common actions in a specific area that accumulates in experience and understanding over it. More we practice, more experience we have, more we polish ourselves through the development and definition of a skill, and more we learn to understand the actions needed to achieve a result. Laziness, put in this context, will exchange the period of practice with the period that the individual will not be practicing by the failure of executing an action and remaining in the will to act. It diminishes the exposure of the being into the practice of a skill, by consequence it prevents the period to be exposed to scenarios to gather more experience related to that specific area and it will extend the period to achieve the desired result.

When the narrative to support laziness as the will of an individual to find an easy way to act is compared to being more productive, not less, it is done by ignoring the fact that laziness is predicted by the way described earlier, or in the failure to act by remaining in the will to act and postponing the action, or in the immediate act to fulfil the sense of achievement regardless of consequences or responsibilities. A lazy individual will not necessarily find an easy mean to act, but a mean to fulfil their sense of immediate release over the necessity to act predicted in their own relief and to not be concerned about the action itself, its consequences nor who will be affected as the release is done by ego of the lazy individual and not on who they will affect. This can also be extended to doubt the quality of action, or work, done that put in cause the trust on the consequences that could carry additional actions to amend an immediate irresponsible inconsequent action. It also increases the risk when relaying in lazy individuals because the result of their actions is unpredictable, it cannot be based on reason and knowledge that enforces certainty, but pure chance or luck.

The argument to say that laziness is a positive behaviour is the negative aspect of selfish behaviour trying to argue against their own definition of selfishness, where the act that can cause a negative effect in the means to deliver or the quality of a product or a service also affects all others who are part of the team to delivery it. By having a negative behaviour from yourself in a team makes intrinsic that you are not concerned about others who are part of the same team. Your lack of concern is reflected by your own negative action, or irresponsible action, without the consideration of its consequence which eliminates any corelation between your action and others. If it is negative towards your own team, it is even more negative towards your customers, who you have a bound to their demands.

I have been through multiple scenarios in my professional life where laziness was expressed as the normal cultural resistance to automate an operational and manual task because the action to create the automated process was seen less valuable than the quick achievement to create and execute a process manually which consumes time and effort of a human resource in a daily basis. Basically, the scenario is always the same, or in the same sort, the action to execute a command that was built to extract migration data into a Microsoft Access or Excel file was the quick achieved result and it became the rule where an operational task was planned to be executed by a human resource every day in order to deliver the worksheet as a report to the business team. As the reader may have noticed, this scenario is a common attitude when dealing with improvement of current processes where the resistance to structure a proper automated process to extract, transform, load, and present this information to the business was strong because of the additional effort that would be necessary to build the entire automated process or by resistance in applying properly the concepts of Business Intelligence practices. If the whole process is defined by (A) the group of actions defined by the execution of this command, (B) understanding additional business needs, (C) creation of additional automated tasks and (D) availability of the compiled information to its audience, the construction of the whole process was interrupted by the construction of its initial part (A) defined by the achievement of the initial action of discovering the means to get the information by execution of the command and to ignore the subsequent actions (B, C, D) that would structure the whole process in a way that it won't be necessary any human resource for its daily basis execution. The laziness in just delivering what was expected at the moment, and as a quick response, created the consequence of an "easy" process to be executed everyday resulting in an operational task that consumes time and effort from an individual at the expense to work one additional day to automate the entire process eliminating the need of any human effort and time for its execution in future. It was exchanged by an easy immediate response which generated the consequence of additional actions to be carried everyday ad aeternum. I could add complexity to this example where instead of one command, we could have a small bundle of commands adding an additional effort to its execution and increasing exponentially the manual effort to format the files resulted from these operations, transforming an easy task defined by a lazy behaviour as an unproductive task to be executed every day which would become a punishment to someone else, who would have to deal with this considering that it adds few knowledge whatsoever for them, and consuming their time and effort in their professional lives.

As we can see the example used, a lazy behaviour affects others by the consequence of not having interest in their responsibilities as the responsibility itself is based in the ownership of doing an act, or to think on the consequences of it. When an "easy task" is built, I understand to be of a common behaviour to delegate these easy tasks to another individual, as the appeal of what is easy can be easily sold to others through appearances as something that requires less effort for its execution. And what is easy is defined as easy because the means to execute it may appear to be known, simple and orderly. It also means it may be an operational activity and, as such, it would not require an intellect for its execution, rather an effort and limited knowledge to execute it. The consequences of unproductive behaviour as laziness can be extended to all sorts of known and expected activities in a project, for example, where it can delay what was initially planned as the activities are postponed because of an individual who have no interest in doing it or hiding consequences that would later be discovered by those who are affected in long term creating the need to additional actions. The lazy behaviour in a project carries more risk than an individual who lacks knowledge by having no experience in their professional lives, as who is known to have few practices is also predictable to senior experienced individuals who already does not expect them to deliver, as their lack of experience is already known. Meanwhile a lazy behaviour is unpredictable, as it can or not be, just like the weather in Dublin which in one minute it may be raining and in the other minute it is sunny alternating multiple times in a space of minutes. It is also fair to note that an ignorant individual will improve by time, as they look forward to learning and use their efforts to achieve not only the result expected, but their own understanding over doing the activity and mastering a skill.

But against that, someone could insist to consider that the lazy individual could be smart enough to find a way around to act and by causality find an easy solution for their activity.

In response to that, we cannot reduce or substitute the process to gather experience and share human knowledge only to the probability of something to happen by inexperience. It is more likely to an individual who is lazy and is smart to delegate their responsibilities or the consequences of their unpredictable actions to others exempting them from the direct consequences. It is even worse if you put as consequence the life of another being. The process of gathering experience is composed of testing our theories in practice and carrying the possibility to learn by failure, which is the equivalent to the chance you hope for from the lazy behaviour. The two examples below used by C. S. Lewis [23] while explaining if it was hard or easy to be a Christian can also be used here as he uses laziness to exemplify his argument and it carries the presumption of what is a positive behaviour:

"Teachers will tell you that the laziest boy in the class is the one who works hardest in the end. They mean this. If you give two boys, say, a proposition in geometry to do, the one who is prepared to take trouble will try to understand it. The lazy boy will try to learn it by heart because, for the moment, which needs less effort. But six months later, when they are preparing for an exam, that lazy boy is doing hours and hours of miserable drudgery over things the other boy understands, and positively enjoys, in a few minutes. Laziness means more work in the long run. Or look at it this way. In a battle, or in mountain climbing, there is often one thing which it takes a lot of pluck to do; but it is also, in the long run, the safest thing to do. If you funk it, you will find yourself, hours later, in far worse danger. The cowardly thing is also the most dangerous thing."

The argument to try to normalize laziness and promote the idea that work is something not relevant in our lives where we should not merge it within our meaning only causes damage to ordinary men and women who start losing their directions and basic concepts of how we freely interact between ourselves in our societies through the exchange of services, products, experiences, and knowledge by the act of trade. This also helps to explain why concepts like free markets and voluntary exchange, or Capitalism, are misunderstood by the young generations who are misled to believe that there are no struggles in everyone lives. They are told that all their own difficulties are caused by others who does not have struggles in their lives. They need to take their revenge against those who are successful, even if they have no idea what they are defending or what they accuse others of, to then build a resentment to act to stop the initiatives and contributions of others within their societies. The fallacy to exempt some of not having struggles in their lives and the appeal of elevating your own struggle or limitation to be seen as the worst case aims to misled two types of individuals: those who started their lives on peace and comfort, and those who started their lives on struggles and misery.

Peace and comfort mean those who already have their lives granted thanks to their families already being structured in the past or in a current stable condition to give and guarantee them the basic resources to live their lives without many concerns or even with extra luxuries to which their peaceful lives and lack of understanding over work drives them to pursue a false meaning to fight for what they see as an injustice for the unfortunate. Struggles and misery means those who are unfortunate in their lives by not having a structured family in the past, and few or no resource which leads them to go through the hard path to be able to achieve their goals. They are easily driven out their path by injustices to which their belief is corrupted by a material argumentative and lack of faith in their own efforts, construction of value and recognition from society that leads them towards the misbelief that without a greater figure such as the State they have no chance in overcoming all their misery and injustices on them. Ludwig Von Mises [24] extensively compared the differences between the effort of an individual in capitalism and laziness consequence in socialism.

"While the sacrifices an individual worker makes in intensifying his own exertion burden him alone, only an infinitesimal fraction of the produce of his additional exertion benefits himself and improves his own wellbeing. While the individual worker enjoys completely the pleasures, he may reap by yielding to the temptation to carelessness and laziness, the resulting impairment of the social dividend curtails his own share only infinitesimally.

Under such a socialist mode of production all personal incentives that selfishness provides under Capitalism are removed, and a premium is put upon laziness and negligence. Whereas in a capitalist society selfishness incites everyone to the utmost diligence, in a socialist society it makes for inertia and laxity."

Both types of individuals corrupt themselves with the anti-capitalistic ideas that fuels their authoritarian minds. It serves no one more than those who are corrupting them through these narratives disguised as a good cause to help others when in reality it attacks everyone freedom. This is a matter that I explore more in another essay, however in a short explanation, by attack on freedom I mean attack on its foundations. The two pillars of freedom that suffers most by the narratives of authoritarian minds are democracy and free markets. For now, a representative democracy I understand as our capacity to organize ourselves peacefully in a society where we extend our identity to a democratic representative personified in another individual who share the same values and concerns as us and who will be able to sacrifice themselves to discuss the diverse matters that affects different groups. I mention sacrifice because this is the aspect forgotten today in politics. Contrary to the totalitarian ideas described by Mussolini or by the marxists, politicians exist to serve the people, not to rule them. In order to represent someone a politician need to sacrifice their own time that was once dedicated to their lives to acquire excellence in their work or to do their own personal duties and projects, to the matters of those who they represent. The attacks on democracy are not so openly argued because it does not appeal to ordinary people, and it would require the creation of narratives to aim to what common people already define as just. Even if these demagogues hide their authoritarian intentions under a disguise, the consequences of attacking democracy can be very explicit to ordinary people as they will be the first to suffer the consequences when a modern democracy slowly transforms into tyranny or oligarchy.

Unfortunately, not the same happens when free markets are attacked. It is openly attacked by demagogues and misinterpreted by authoritarian minds as the great evil of all their struggles. Demagogues uses the ignorance of those who do not yet know how free markets causes the consequence of their community collaborations following demand and offer composed by the action of individuals, like them, to exchange between themselves a good idea, service, or product. You have to offer, and your society will respond with interest and aggregate value. By this straightforward definition those who demand, namely consumers, are those who dictates the need of a good and not the one who offers. If you open your business, a bakery for example, and there is no interest in whatever you have to offer, then, probably, you are going to fail because you have set up the offer of a product, a service or an idea that has no need in the society and for its citizens, or people are not obligated to like your new bakery and its products. Another misunderstanding over the free markets and the act of trade regards to the differences between individuals and the different outcomes described multiple times in this text. As we all have our differences, driven by our priorities or addictions, the effort applied by one individual is not going to be the same as the effort done by other. Or the challenges faced by one individual who chooses to invest in a wine shop is not going to be the same as the challenges faced by other individual who chooses to invest in a pub, even being similar businesses, their audience could have specific demands. These are few of many factors which can influence in the quantity of effort needed to achieve the result to deliver what is proposed to the consumers and the gratification received by attending their demands. The differences between the efforts and results of the individuals are a natural outcome in everything that depends on human intention, will and action that will end in effort. This means that when someone is able to aggregate more value and as a result receive more than others is because of its natural consequence when it has no interference of third actors such as the State its laws which can create barriers that always are going to affect those who have less to start.

Meaning per Consequence

Each individual search for meaning is specific to its own, thus each one of us attribute different values to our ambitions and goals in our lives as shown previously. There is nothing wrong with someone who chooses to have the same routine, work and role reaching a normal comfort level, aiming a retirement and being satisfied with their way of life, and someone who has a routine of their own defined by the needs of their careers, always taking the risk to invest, to try new initiatives or to expand their businesses in a way that requires their full commitment to be working at all the times, and who would not be concerned about retirement as the act of doing is already their retirement. For all cases, we all need to realize that we are limited to our own existence as beings, we only have one life - may you accept or not - and our boundaries are set by the nature of our beings and by things as they are where the only moment that you have to collaborate with your own society is to act at the present moment. And the consequences of these actions or whatever you choose to contribute within your society is what it is going to reflect into other individuals now or in the future, regardless of if it is good or not. Your current actions based on your free will and self-interest will be evaluated by the people through direct interaction with each one of them in the market which is the environment where you will receive the pure form of recognition from all other individuals based on what you have to offer and how much value others attribute to it.

To pursue or to have a meaning is to define oneself in a sense of complete existence and perception of reality. By understanding their own existence that was given and to respect its boundaries defined by the order of all things. Once we realize what was given, and luckily by who, then we can work on the definition of how we can contribute with others by our own self-interest with our own self-accountability. Anyone can choose whatever they want to do, as truthful as everybody can look for whatever they need. Regardless of if anyone wants or everybody needs, it is intrinsic to both contexts, the professional or the customer, the common element of "I" based on the self and its will. And because of it, it is not a problem to fail as it is as much as a natural consequence of different interests. The problem lays on to insist in failure, to resist to learn, or to externalize its cause by removing their self-accountability. The most common example of this is when someone say "I have done my degree but now I cannot find any place to apply this knowledge" and then avoid their own responsibility by "the market does not have a place for my profession therefore it does not work or it is unjust with me". We all need to understand that whenever someone mention "the market" as an enemy they are speaking of all others "wants", all the people are resumed in this single representation of "market" as a goal to identify their enemy. The market is not an omnipotent entity, but it is a human environment that challenges the individuals as much as the big corporations to survive. Interesting enough that most individuals who insists in their failures and individuals who became successful establishing big corporations will end with the same desire to control the market in order to difficult all other people to act in their self-interest, the latter by imposing their want and the former by preventing others wants that would challenge them.

This desire to control is partially built by our incapacity to understand that leads us to externalize a guilt of our own, or by not being able to deal with injustices beyond human control. Self-accountability determines the progress in whatever you do to whoever you do. It is the understanding of how our self-interest, in order to be successful, needs to connect with the interest of other individuals around us. It is what leads an individual to the understanding of an end and the consequences of it. Moreover, the recognition they will receive as part of this consequence can stimulate them to look forward to having a continuity through the next generations transcending their capacity to the new individual of their own. Whatever you choose to do that has a direct relation and a voluntary interaction with individuals in a society through the environment of exchange, and all the way each one can contribute with each other, aggregates to the path to fulfil an individual objective and meaning in their lives. And here I do not mean by meaning in its totality, but by being part of our foundation of the meaning like a column of many columns sustaining a roof. There may be some events that will deteriorate one column or another, and any column can restore its falling pieces that could not sustain itself per the superficiality of the materials it was made to connect with the column by new ones with better quality materials that understands how things are and what they are, but in overall the roof will be there.

An individualistic person is going to enrich a society per consequence of their focus and contribution when they pursue the excellence of their own individuality in a specific matter. And the usefulness in what they do as well as the condition of its activity existence will be evaluated by all other individuals. It is important to highlight that usefulness alone cannot define the aggregation of value. The aggregation of value can determine usefulness with other numerous economic variables already mapped in our knowledge, but, also, it is vulnerable to the unpredictable factors that are beyond human control. Surely, we can predict earthquakes or hurricanes coming, but we will never predict the order that gave the first impulse to move the very first piece of earth or to dictate the directions of the multiple winds in the sky.

This is why we all workers who do actually work should be critique of any narrative against free markets as it aims directly to the capacity of ourselves as individuals to have an initiative defined by our own self-interest, or our will and action. When someone advocates to use the state against those who have everything as a means to attack capitalism, they are also advocating against those who have nothing. Thus, capitalism does not define itself in the successful, but in the environment for all the people, all the workers, to give the first step to have their careers or businesses and to collaborate between each other. Market is the environment for the one who have twenty stores across the country to continue as well as the one who started selling coconuts in the beach today. The authoritarian mind cannot define capitalism or socialism in economics because they are already in a romance with socialism in a new ideological concept by the mere assumption that because it carries the prefix "social" it means it is driven by care. It is as wrong as to believe that the prefix "capital" means that it is driven by money. This criticism of capitalism not only misled people to wrongly believe in their own type of Leviathan by their prejudices, but also hit hard on our individual capacity to understand ourselves and to contribute with our societies by providing to ourselves what is of our self-interest and to others what they need. Socialist fallacies create the wrong prejudice on the fundamental aspects of how we help and improve ourselves in what we could do best which would play an important part in our own meaning in life. The "social" prefix means a condition and validation over the individual free will to act. It means that you have no right to manage people or deliver your projects, if not allowed to do so. You have no right to sell wine or beer, if not allowed to do so. You have no right to develop or build, if not allowed to do so. And when are dealing with act and denial of reality, it goes to fundamentals as we are seeing today. You have no right to produce, if not allowed to do so. You have no right to speak, if not allowed to do so. You have no right to live, if not allowed to do so. Now, our main question become, who is the one that "allows"? We have this naivety to think that it would be someone who certainly are on our side, who is democratic and reasonable. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The risk to prevent an individual action is as broad as the risk that you, one day, will become the next undesired. Thus, their condemnation of the action is also the condemnation of the will. It is not by coincidence that from the condemnation of wealthy accumulation, represented by the returns of the acts, went down to the condemnation of "bourgeoisie" mindset, represented by the will to act. The moment that you, the individual, the worker, wishes to do something by yourself, you become the transgressor of the definition of the "common good", where you, at some stage, will not be part of it. Would we even have meaning if to act and then to live is conditional to someone else decision if not of our own self?

We resist to accept that our lives are a predefined interval in between everyone lives, in between our societies, between the past and the future, which had a begin and it certainly is going to end. This prejudice that blocks our own capacity to improve as individuals is used to prevent other individuals who are trying to do something. The authoritarian mind act justly to themselves to create injustices to all others who are trying to give the first step by having their own business or initiatives, by overcoming will and doing the act. These anti-capitalist prejudices feeds on the demagoguery that tries to condemn other successes by accusing them of greedy and selfish behaviour imagining that their only goal is to oppress and look after a materialistic prize. This is the selfishness of the authoritarian mind, or how Ayn Rand mentioned, the selfishness without a self. As Ayn explained, it is to say that "I" have been damaged and capitalism is unjust to "me" without even believing in the "I" or "me" in the first place. Although I believe that Ayn Rand would disagree with the idea I propose here that your self-interest do have, may you want or not, a relation with interest of others, therefore it will be conditional to succeed. The Adam Smith butcher have self-interest and of course its moved by it, but in order to be a better individual, his actions must be toward goodness to succeed, as a butcher and as an individual, otherwise it will be a failed man selling meat to a crazy society wishing to be feed by insects. Could you imagine how crazy it would be for someone to start selling a meat made of insects and then use a sort of authoritarian collective organization to enforce it to everyone else belly - not their own - because otherwise the people would not voluntarily want it by their own free will? Therefore, this environment of exchange and the free will to exchange between two parts - capitalism - is so important to the expression of the will of the individual in voluntary action, may it be to offer or to demand. Your aggregation of value depends on everyone else voluntary will, on your community's needs, and on the quality of the services or products you offer, where your judge will be your society basing on the judgement of each single individual recognition that accumulates and determines your outcome. And you may be satisfied with few or more recognition, it will be up to your own satisfaction, your own goal in life and part of your own meaning.

Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist survivor of the holocaust who practiced his psychological analysis even being held in a national-socialist concentration camp and who wrote the book Man's Search for Meaning. He analysed how what you do, and your goals helps you to pass through adverse difficult scenarios. In the quote below from Viktor [25] we can evaluate his thoughts in how happiness and success are not necessarily something which one individual must focus on as they are consequences of our own actions and choices that looks forward to sum in our communities to merge what we can do with what they do need, with the result to fulfil ourselves with what we like and have chosen to do, and to achieve and contribute with our community to spread our goodness in a long-term goal:

"Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you must let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it."

We do not set success as a goal; it is materialized as a consequence of our actions coming from our self-interest through our work that will attend others. Success is a consequence of action of goodness, even if it means to keep an individual value and moral incorruptible. And it can be materialized as just as receiving recognition from attending the demand of others in a society, as it can be as unjust as doing what is right in a time where wrongs are predominant and chaos reigns. You may help someone in time of need and differ from everyone else to be totally ignored in the future by having no recognition at all, but within yourself you have done what you know that was the right action to do. And this conscience of doing what is right is determined by free will which can never be slaved or destroyed because it is the existence of one, of the individual, of the element of revolt.

The problem in relation to the anti-capitalist narratives mentioned earlier is that it goes not only against the concept of trade and how to contribute with our communities, but it goes against every individual professional development and the long-term plan (or as Viktor mentioned long run) needed to establish a career or to give continuity to a business. Continuity defined financially as profits, another word that is full of anticapitalistic mind misled prejudices. It is direct related with the act of trade between your skills and your professional persona in a free and voluntary commercial society, where the abundance of profits will lead you to have your own initiative or expand an existing one. It is the proof of the validation of its own existence. As I wrote in another essay, your career is based on the primary and basic level of the skills or goods you can offer to a society where you need to drive and merge it between what your community needs and what you would like to be. If you do not have aggregation of value and meaning to what you want to be, then you will not have return in what you are offering and the only person in interest in what you are doing will be you. There is no problem in doing what you want as an individual, but you will bear the consequences by your own responsibility. Therefore, an individual, in order to improve themselves, they have to invest in what is productive not only for them, but for those around them. The selfishness of an individual will only sustain itself in time if it adds a meaning to others, but this can only be realized by the individual himself and not enforced by an authoritarian collective. Anticapitalistic minds usually label those who have their own businesses or initiatives, who take the step to materialize an action, of a materialistic and egoist behaviour, when in practice they encourage an egoistic behaviour between individuals by promoting the idea that they need to prioritize their own desires over everything else without any responsibility for their own choices, and try to force it or impose its demand into societies by abusing the powers of public representation through the state and externalising the guilty of any failure in their careers to their imaginary enemy represented by their definition of market. For them, market is the evil omniscient indestructible big companies that somehow merge between each other responsible by modern slavery. Such description would make anyone give up the idea of having their own initiatives, but in fact is just an excuse for their fears of what they do not understand. And because they do not understand, contradictory as it is, de facto they end up helping these big corporations who accept the bureaucracy created by socialists through the state to eliminate competition that could challenge them by the mere will of one single individual and materialized in a new business. There is no more clear example in modern times than the unexpected incoming of Uber against the full controlled market of taxis. Instead of this erroneous definition and fears, they should concern in how effectively contribute to what their society need and how they can adapt themselves to help to fulfil its needs at the same time that they pursue what they want to be.

Another fallacy is the evil consequence of inequality. As already argued in this text, inequality is a consequence of our nature and the authoritarian collective decision to change it is not necessarily based on goodness. I'm going to add to my analysis Vitor Frankl comments in his book [26] about the study he has done to show that the state of individual can change even if they fill their idle time by working for no monetary value, or for free. He noted that the aggregation of value done in work does not necessarily relates to one individual negative psychological state, such as depression. This is important because in our context it shows that when you choose what you would like to be and adapt yourself to have some aggregation of value from society, you may not necessarily be an individual who has the most value aggregated to your work or actions, but you could be an individual who now has enough to continue with your life and materialize part of your meaning through the gratification of doing something meaningful and to cause in your own self the consequence of happiness and success. It is worth to mention that the consequence of happiness and success is not at the eye of others, but at your own. I can also use Viktor rational to argument that economic inequality is going to be always present in our societies and it will be particular to each individual as some may find happiness more in what they do than in how much value they have in return. It is important to reinforce that this does not necessarily means that they are less important than those who have more return in monetary value, as the equalization of individuals is already done through vote in democracy, it means that some individuals will find their way to contribute with what they can do and what they would like to do, fulfilling themselves and that will be enough for them.?

"…the most recent pertinent statistics indicate that in Vienna, 29 percent of the population complain that meaning is missing from their lives.

As to the causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying vein, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means, but no meaning. To be sure, some do not even have the means. In particular, I think of the mass of people who are today unemployed. Fifty years ago, I published a study devoted to a specific type of depression I had diagnosed in cases of young patients suffering from what I called 'unemployment neurosis.' And I could show that this neurosis really originated in a twofold erroneous identification: being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life.

Consequently, whenever I succeeded in persuading the patients to volunteer in youth organizations, adult education, public libraries and the like—in other words, as soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity—their depression disappeared although their economic situation had not changed, and their hunger was the same. The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone."

To argue about the quote above we need to define job, volunteer, and work. In Cambridge dictionary job [27] means the regular work that a person does to have a monetary return. Work [28] is defined in Cambridge dictionary as an activity, such as a job, that a person uses physical or mental effort to do, usually for money. Notice here that usually does not mean exclusively, then it is an activity with any return. And finally, volunteer [29] as a verb is defined in Cambridge dictionary as to do something, for people or an organization, willingly and without being forced or paid to do it. So, job and the action to volunteer are contained in a broad definition of work. Whenever we occupy our life with a main activity that becomes part of our routines and supplies us with means to live by - when it is monetary, or to live for - when it is by our own will that cause consequences to others, it become our work. This is essential for my interpretation in the part of the statement above. It shows that the only objection I might have with Viktor is when he mentions jobless, thus jobless means to have no job, and to have no job means to have no current activity with any type of monetary return to the individual. Perhaps the correct affirmation would be that "without work, it could lead to a meaningless life." Thus, he proved that by giving them any sort of activity without a monetary return which by definition means the broad understanding of what is work. He gave his patients useability when they start doing their volunteering, which in effect, had become their work, even without monetary return, because the return came to them in acting and in causing a good consequence to others who they were dealing with. When the return is not monetary, it can be in form of attention, gratification, or practical experience, for example. Nowadays it is common to someone who is starting their careers in Information Technology to do an internship that sometimes does not offer any financial return, but it offers knowledge by learning through practice. In my own example I started my career back in 2007 when during one year I earned 50$ per month, but I had the chance to apply concepts of software development, liaise with business users and practice the full concept of application life cycle to then go live with this application developed to digitalize a paper process. I agree when Viktor has the rationale to affirm that man does not live by welfare alone. I understand this as one proof that inequality is normal, some may earn more than others and that is not a problem as long as that is not being imposed by an authoritarian idea fuelled by resentment.

This shows that the argument of fighting economic inequality ignores the basic rules of free markets, individual differences in efforts and personality as well as the individual capacity to fulfil themselves with what is meaningful and not with what would have more monetary value returns from their communities. Free markets or capitalism provides to you the opportunity to be able to open your business as you wish with minimal cost and no bureaucracy in an environment that challenges yourself and your idea to how needed it is in the society, or let's put in this way, so you can understand clearly, you are free to open your own shop to sell vegan food, weed medicine, steakhouse or Christian symbols where what dictates if you can stay open is the interest of your community in what you are offering to them. Side note, this does not mean I do not see the consequence of such businesses within society, I do, but it would fit for another occasion. You are only in the position to offer, not to dictate what they would like, wish, or want, because every individual who is part of the community has their capacity of free will and to the voluntary decision to choose what they like or want. As long as it does not affect other individuals, to which constitutes a conflict in society where it would lead me to exercise my thoughts on law and justice. When an individual arguments in favour of reducing inequality, they do it ignoring all the rationales described here with the wrong idea that they would be doing justice for the unfortunate by bringing the established successful companies to account when in practice they end up causing the hidden consequence of helping these established businesses to gain more economic power by eliminating their competition through bureaucracy and increasing its engagement with the state that results in misuse of the law to protect themselves. Usually, the actions to fight inequality comes with laws to increase the initial cost for ordinary people to start their businesses by adding complexity in the process to create a new business, increasing the complexity to hire people, and creating additional costs to be able to operate under what is defined as legal in a society. All these topics has been well documented by Thomas Sowell for example. When you fall for the demagoguery of creating new laws to fight something that you do not understand or that appeals to what you define as being good, you end up creating barriers to yourself and to all other unfortunate people who does not have the means or who are poor and have less resources to start their businesses with less cost and effort to begin providing what they want to offer to their community. When you have a society where it is less costly and complex to open a business, you also have an environment where it is possible to fail as failure is an important part of challenging your own beliefs and knowledge as it includes a variety of skills. Fail is a not must, but it is a possibility, and it should be considered as part of the process to gather experience which plays a key role in our capacity to succeed.

Infinite Loop

We need to stress these types of arguments because they are made by desperation to promote authoritarian mind own fears. It is not because someone started using a narrative that you will support them, if it is so, you are saying you'll support a man if he changes his narrative to what pleases you. I know that is unlikely to happen as you already have lost the trust on him, where the mere change of narratives cannot surpass this loss. For you, it will be clear that this person is merely pretending to get your support. Now, what makes you then support the other or think that there are only two sides? This is exactly the type of blind trust that has been destroying our democracies by politicians who pretend more than represent. You let yourself be deceived when they promote an incomplete or disguised cause, and, in power, act in an authoritarian way disregarding their own people.

You may think that these political subjects and these anti-capitalist narratives are not related, or it does not cause consequences in our capacity to plan our long term careers, to limit ourselves or to our wishes to find a meaningful way to contribute with our communities by using our own skills as a professional or by opening our businesses, but it is directly related. These discussions and fallacies against the free markets have a major impact on how each individual will develop themselves and how they will contribute positively to our society. Today most of these people who is trying to act in good faith do not realize that they are promoting unfairness by trying to be fair, or they do not realize that they are trying to distribute wealth and power by concentrating both in the hands of those who are already powerful and overvalued, in majority of the cases by the intervention of the state. If the act to open your initiative is not easy and accessible to the natural state of men, poverty or to have nothing, then more difficult will be for them to leave such state, and to advocate for more bureaucracy by the state is to advocate for the materialization of barriers to the poor under the disguise to punish the successful. The misunderstanding of what trade is is the psychological limitation applied to the poor minds where the misconception affects their rational to be able to develop themselves in order to aggregate value to society, to themselves and to a meaningful profession they choose.

We need to realize that what we do is not as simple as only to affirm "we do what we do to receive a salary at the end of the month" because we just need to survive for the next subsequential months. We are being denied our own capacity to understand that we can contribute to our society as a whole by knowing that our selfish actions can sum up with all others around us, who are also contributing to our communities in their way, in order to improve ourselves to achieve greater deeds. These actions can vary from sharing an act of goodness serving an individual in a coffee shop, who is having a hard day and find in that moment of cup of coffee or tea to distress, or by being conscient in losing millions when investing into the space industry without clear idea in how to have return of investment. The capacity of ordinary individual to act, if they want to contribute, happens through individual voluntary exchange of services and products by whatever value they aggregate. It is not by the misconception to believe that it can be enforced through the state. The voluntary will of individual that expresses in their initiatives and demands in the free markets are meaningful to each one of them than the society itself represented in an authoritarian state with the idea of an ideal individual mandating actions to these unfortunates who will have their intention, will and action suppressed. The voluntary action is a meaningful action whenever it aggregates value in whatever form it may return, monetary or other, as it is done by the own self-interest from both sides. Now, if I started with the prediction of Chesterton, then I want to end with this two paragraphs of Thomas Aquinas [30][31] when concluding about bliss for your own reflection, after all, this text does not have the intention to dictate your thought, but to remember that you have read and you think because you do have a free will, things are what they are, and the only barrier to evil is what you are doing right now as reading and reasoning as one individual, and what you want to do later as to act, to collaborate, or to work with those around you.

"[Does bliss consist in practical understanding rather than in contemplation?] The goal of human life surpasses that of other animals even more than the one life surpasses the other, and what gives human life its greater excellence is precisely the greater excellence of the goal it is ordered to. So, it doesn’t have to contain its ultimate goal in the way the lives of other animals do.

[Can we attain to bliss in this life?] Though human beings desire their goal by nature they don’t have by nature a desire for everything they need to attain that goal, but acquire that desire by reasoning, debating what they need and making choices. Also, there is nothing odd about desiring something hateful in itself as a means to an end, in the way we desire amputation of a limb for health's sake. And this is the way death, which everyone flees from by nature, can be desired for the sake of bliss; ...

[Is bliss something uncreated?] At every level the means to a goal work together for an ultimate goal, and since in human beings as in other creatures that ultimate goal is perfect activity, every human good contributes to the perfecting of human activity. Thus in this life acquired dispositions, natural abilities, and externally needed tools are all goods contributing to perfect human activity, and bliss, therefore, is said to gather together all such goods so that they can contribute to what is the substance of human bliss, the most perfect human activity."

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