MIKE STH
Member
Registered: Feb 2000
Location: Moved to Clie Land
Posts: 331 |
Just found this from the book I mentioned earlier...wish I could find it in E-book, but check oout the following passage...it's a little long, but illustrates my point.
Excerpt from Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged" - pp616-627
"Well, there was something that happened at that plant where I worked for
twenty years. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they
brought a new plan to run the factory. They let us vote on it, too, and
everybody - almost everybody - voted for it. We didn't know. We thought
it was good. No, that's not true, either. We thought that we were supposed
to think it was good. The plan was that everybody in the factory would
work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need.
We - what's the matter, ma'am? Why do you look like that?"
"What was the name of the factory?" she asked, her voice barely audible.
"The Twentieth Century Motor Company, ma'am, of Starnesville, Wisconsin."
"Go on."
"We voted for that plan at a big meeting, with all of us present, six
thousand of us, everybody that worked in the factory. The Starnes heirs
made long speeches about it, and it wasn't clear, but nobody asked any
questions. None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of
us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he
felt guilty and kept his mouth shut - because they made it sound like
anyone who'd oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than
a human being.(emphasis mine...ring any bells?) They told us that the plan would acheive a noble idea.
Well, how were we to know otherwise? Hadn't we heard it all our lives -
from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers, and in every
newspaper we ever read and every movie and every public speech? Hadn't
we alwasy been told that this was righteous and just? Well, maybe
there's some excuse for what we did at that meeting. Still, we voted
for the plan - and what we got, we had it coming to us. You know,
ma'am, we are marked men, in a way, those of us who lived through the
four years of that plan of the Twentieth Century factory. What is it
that hell is supposed to be? Evil - plain, naked smirking evil, isn't
it? Well, that's whatwe saw and helped to make - and I think we're
damned, every one of us, and maybe we'll never be forgiven...
"Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people? Try
pouring water into a tank where there's a pipe at the bottom draining
it out faster than you can pour, and each bucket you bring breaks the
pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of
you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours per week, then forty-
eight, then fifty-six - for your neighbour's supper, for his wife's
operation - for his child's measles - for his mother's wheel chair -
for his uncle's shirt - for his nephew's schooling - for the baby
next door - for the baby to be born - for anyone anywhere around you -
it's theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures - and yours to work,
from sunup to sundown, month after month, year after year, with nothing
to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in sight for you but their
pleasure, for thw whole of your life, without rest, without hope,
without end.... From each according to his ability, to each according
to his need....
"We're all one big family, they told us, we're all in this together.
But you don't all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day -
together, and you don;t all get a bellyache - together. What's whose
ability and which of whose needs come first? When it's all in one pot,
you can't let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you
did, he might claim that he needs a yacht - and if his feelings is all
you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it's not right
for me to own a car until I've worked myself into a hospital ward,
earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth - why
can't he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability and
have not collapsed? No? He can't? Then why can he demand that I go
without cream for my coffee until he's replastered his living room?...
Oh well... Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to
judge his own need or ability. We *voted* on it. Yes ma'am, we voted
on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do
you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just
one meeting to discover that we had become beggars - rotten, whining,
sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as
his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn't
belong to him, it belonged to 'the family,' and they owed him nothing
in return, and the only claim he had on them was his 'need' - so he had
to beg in piblic for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher,
listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and
his wife's head colds, hoping that 'the family' would throw him the
alms. He had to claim miseries, because its miseries, not work, that had
become the coin of the realm - so it turned into a contest among six
thousand panhandlers, each claiming that *his* need was worse than his
brother's. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what
happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got
away with the jackpot?
"But that wasn't all. There was also something else that we discovered
at the same meeting. The factory's production had fallen by forty per
cent, in tht first half-year, so it was decided tht somebody hadn't
delivered 'according to his ability.' Who? How would you tell it? 'The
family' voted on that, too. They voted which men were the best, and
these men were sentenced to work overtime each night for the next six
months. Overtime without pay - because you weren't paid by time and you
weren't paid by work, only by need.
"Do I have to tell you what happened after that - and into what sort
of creatures we all started turning, we who had once been human? We
began to hide whatever ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks
that we never worked any faster or better than the next fellow. What else
could we do, when we knew that if we did our best for 'the family,' it's
not thanks or rewards that we'd get, but punishment? We knew that for
every stinker who'd ruin a batch of motors and cost the company money -
either through is sloppiness, because he didn't have to care, or through
plain incompetence - it's we who'd have to pa with our nights and our
Sundays. So we did our best to be no good.
__________________
"Stupid Handspring."
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05-26-2003 03:56 AM
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