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We all have heard the catch-phrase that "salary is slavery". What do you think: is it true in your understanding ? Does the "middle class" is actually the occidental slave caste, like was the Zealots for Sparta ? What is a salary for ? What does it rewards objectively ? I've read this morning a really interesting thread in the "self-knowledge" section, in which we're taught that any "reward system" is, against the common perception of it - a threat, a misleading, a blocker for a proper learning and cognitive development. At a psycho-sexual level, the reward system is what differentiate the human sexuality from the animalistic one: most animals doesn't have (or, more accurately, cannot process what we call: "sex for pleasure") the possibility to enjoy sexual intercourse only for the sake of it, which means: they literally cannot "choose" voluntarily to have sexe, since they're biochemically drove by their hormones at distincts periods of the year (the rut). Pleasurable sex is then strongly linked to the cortex, the memory, the ability to manage and organize perception, etc. - en résumé, all the premises allowing for a "reward system". So what is concretely rewarded here ? As I see it - the notion or "reward" clash big time with objectivity: the pleasure can only be felt at a psychological level, as an emotion; a reward is then a evolutionary mechanism whose purpose is too reinforce some (possibly any) behaviour who make an individual felt "good" (here the concept of "goodness" remaining concretely undefined in most case - since the journey to virtue is, as we know, terribly painful, even if ultimately releasing). The fact is that a reward, intended or not, psycho-somatic (reflex) or purposeful (given by an other person) - have always the outcome to consolidate some of your behaviour. Now, just keep all these various information consciously present. The question I wanted to ask you is: Imagine that every of our basic needs (necessities of life: clean water & air, shelter, food, clothes, etc.) - are permanently satisfied through automation and mechanization ? For sure, I'm taking into account that people will limits their objective needs to the minimum: there's no serious place for inflation, greed, aesthetics in general - in the field of human needs: these are the volatile, intermittents goals of H wants. For example, there wouldn't be sort of "free pass" for obese nor that it would be luxuries for limited individuals. The key to understand what I'm saying is this: H needs are essentially objective, finite, defined, quantifiable, etc. What everybody needs at an objective level is a shelter, not a mansion; warm clothes, not a complete fashionable wardrobe. It's like in the late interview with AR when she were dressed in a red dress, talking about the fact that if you want to accede you imperatively need to use your reason - and then the camera shows us a young, pretty coquette lady rolling her eyes with a disgusted face: that Lolita hadn't understood the difference being involved here. Because that every of her H needs were automatically satisfied since her birth by daddy's money and that consequently she had never experienced any form or real deficiency - for her, the existence of some "means of production", the very philosophical notion of "work" was a conceptual fantasy, some "rude stuff" invented by vulgar people to mock the aristocrats to which she belonged by "birth right". Oops, I'm digressing again ! Don't worry - I'm not falling in any sort of marxist ideation: the struggle nowadays is no more "cultural", or in Marx's terms: "dialectical" - now it must be seen as a scientific problem, the solutions being absolutely technicals. So I'm not talking about the suppression of the right to the "pursuit of happiness" - I'm rather talking about the very means to make it possible, which are: the automation of the means of production regarding the H needs. In an techno-efficient economy in which all (remember that they are only a few, and finite) of your H needs would be assumed and assured by a global, automatized production - would you accept a salary to "reward" a job involving mainly creativity, arts, speculation, etc. ? Surely, the value/role of money is larger and more complex - and cannot be reduce to the phenomenon of the salary. People would trade concerning H wants until the end of the world: no problem with that. The only objective way to trade non-objective objets and/or values is effectively by using a common, standard medium of exchange - who serves then as an insurance policy, a malleable but tangible tool to regulate or manifest the subjective value of all the luxuries, dreams, fantaisies, etc., that H wants can generate punctually. But my thesis is simply that the use of money to "trade" necessary values and de facto needs - is inefficient, counter-productive and completely absurd. I simply cannot conceptualize a practicable "free market" without any universal automation of objective needs. The brain (and reason) cannot work is they aren't feed. Individuals would have to identify and measure their context/specific needs and reasonable life's requirements: we need only very few things to live well on a physiological level - all that outgrowth that is no more objective in the sense of necessity: it is playful, contingent. The only viable, logical salary for creativity and any work of the Mind should be the necessities of life. What do you think ?