So is capitalism. So is the corporate hierarchy. Heck, the society we live in right now is man-made. Why does that matter as an evaluation criteria?
Yes, food and shelter have always required work. The difference is that they have required work by the person for the person. Or by the person for their family. Or by the person for their tribe. This meant that you worked only as much was actually needed - i.e. subsistence - and no more.
That is a very different set up than what we have now. The cost of healthcare alone makes subsistence living impossible.
What? It's perfectly possible to receive "subsistence healthcare" in today's society--just never go to the doctor or take any medicine. If you want to splurge, do some research online, and you'll gain knowledge leagues ahead of "subsistence" medicine.
What I meant by "subsistence living" is working enough to cover the essentials, and no more. These essentials include food, water, shelter, and healthcare.
The problem is the last one: it is astronomically expensive, which means that subsistence living still means working a ridiculous amount of hours.
So if you want a better standard of living than Caesar or Charlemagne or Washington could have dreamed of, you have to work, yes. Is that shocking or unreasonable? I doubt the men I just named would have thought so.
Lets just talk food - the work required to produce enough food to feed 1 person is astronomical and completely inefficient if everyone did it for themselves. In order to reach some efficiency (i mean, you aren't gonna just eat raw wheat right?!), there must be specialisation. Which means that if you were to really live alone, you'd have to aquire all the skills and all the equipment in order to produce food.
You can substitute food for anything else, and the story is the same.
The world as it is now, is pretty m uch the result of specialization over the millenia, your job (if you have one, or your business) is in fact some form of specialization, and it is this specialization that allows each and every one to eat, because they contributed back something they specalized in.
I'm a dual Polish/US citizen. Poland has better life expectancy according to the CIA Factbook than the US does. Poland had an average income of 240usd per year as recently as 1989. It's about $20k today. Still can provide better life expectancy than the US. Shame.
I'm a Swedish/Australian dual-citizen, and although both countries have higher costs of goods, it seems a most reasonable price to pay to have functioning public health care.
No. Subsistence living is entirely possible - there are millions of people doing just that somewhere in backwoods wherever, across a multitude of political systems and states, all over the world.
What you want as "subsistence living" is not its definition. What you're talking about is "how much labor cost it requires to maintain your current lifestyle in this current political system".
EDIT: I was late on this reply I guess.
You don't seem to understand what subsistence living means.
You do know that in agrarian societies this meant 12 hours a day 7 days a week with no holidays ever? And that children worked in the fields instead of going to school?
People don't subsistence farm because they don't want anything more than the bare minimum for survival. They subsistence farm because the bare minimum for survival is the best they can manage.
I have two questions for you that you should think about.
Question 1: Why is it that, as our productivity increases, we find more things to "fill up" our workday, instead of working fewer hours for the same output (which would satisfy our needs)?
Question 2: Forget about need. Do people actually want the things they are working for today? Or is it that we are socially conditioning them, from the moment they are born, that a consumption-based lifestyle is one they need to strive for?
We aren't unique in this regard either. My cat needs air, water, and food. My cat wants attention, affection, and canned wet food.
Question 2: I wasn't socially conditioned to want the fan that keeps me cool when it is hot. I wasn't socially conditioned to enjoy beer. I wasn't socially conditioned to like literature. Sure, some people are working for things they have no real use or desire for, but IMO there are plenty of things that improve life beyond the truest basic needs, that are worth continuing to strive for. Amusement, art, intellectual pursuits, athleticism, etc...
Is it? There are several hundred million Buddhists who might disagree with you.
>>We aren't unique in this regard either. My cat needs air, water, and food. My cat wants attention, affection, and canned wet food.
Your cat wants attention, affection and canned wet food because as a pet it has gotten used to those things. There are a billion felines out there that are quite happy with living alone and marking their territory and hunting for and munching on raw meat.
>>You don't need much more than a pile of sticks to sleep under, food, and water, but I bet even you would agree this is not satisfying.
It depends. I love to go cross-country backpacking and the only things I bring with me are the bare essentials: tent, sleeping bag, food and water, clothing and some emergency supplies.
>>Question 2: I wasn't socially conditioned to want the fan that keeps me cool when it is hot. I wasn't socially conditioned to enjoy beer. I wasn't socially conditioned to like literature. Sure, some people are working for things they have no real use or desire for, but IMO there are plenty of things that improve life beyond the truest basic needs, that are worth continuing to strive for. Amusement, art, intellectual pursuits, athleticism, etc...
Your argument is shifting away from what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that you do not have to work 40+ hours a week for any of those things. You only have to do it because our capitalistic society is engineered that way.
Think about it like this: the productivity of the average worker has increased tremendously over the last century. Yet, instead of reducing work hours to account for the fact that we can produce the same amount of goods and services in less time, we have opted to work the same number of hours (or even longer in some cases) to produce more than society needs.
Even if everyone worked 20 hours a week, you could still enjoy your beer and athleticism and art and intellectual pursuits. In fact, you would have more time for them!
It is not an inherent human quality. Our ancestors in the African Savannah weren't going out of their way to acquire material goods. They were lean.
Then how do you explain the necklaces, earrings, headpieces, etc etc etc found in the histories of tribes all around the world all through history?
Can you imagine a tribesman thinking, "man, I should work extra hard today and bring home more meat so I can afford that necklace the other guy has"?
Buddhism is much older than capitalism, so I somewhat doubt that.
> Our ancestors in the African Savannah weren't going out of their way to acquire material goods.
They were, once they developed the means to derive use from them (making them goods, rather than valueless objects.)
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Before that, hunter gatherer groups worked even less because they were so few and the food so plentiful.
They were imperialistic, mercantilistic, corporatist, fascistic, communal, the list goes on.
Adam Smith invented capitalism as a response to the mercantilism of 18th century England.
They all were. Not in social sense, but in the economic one. The challenge makes no sense. What is capitalism? As long as you let the markets work and don't interfere with people decisions on the market on a permanent basis this is capitalism. As you let the capital flow and accumulate. Once you impose restrictions to it based on ideology based in distrust to free economy or marktes, you don't have true capitalism. I.e. in communism private property is banned. Actually in some instances communists were propagating the idea of moneyless society. You haven't had such an assault on the idea of making money before socialism was invented. The first person who traded results of their labor for results of labor of someone else was a capitalist. And that's how it has always worked. Actually, even imposing penalties on people for doing trade, owning property, etc. as was common in communistic states, didn't change people's behavior who still wanted to enrich themselves. Meaning we are capitalists by design, it's as natural as eating meat. Might be inconvenient morally, but the facts are facts. Smith merely discovered/noticed the phenomenon and gave it a name. So not soon later it could have been and was attacked, but as long as our DNA doesn't change we are and will be capitalistic beings.
It's a recent invention, and requires much vigilance and restraint to be kept alive. In many ways it is already gone.