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The Laziness Lie
Were we all sold a bill of goods when it comes to ‘working hard’?
I’ve long thought about the intersection of work and spirituality. Every Sunday at church, in addition to gospel music, we would solemnly sing all four verses of a hymn. Usually those hymns were about work. This one in particular stems from a Bible verse. The hymn’s name is “Work, for the Night Is Coming.”
“Work, for the night is coming,
Work through the sunny noon;
Fill brightest hours with labor—
Rest comes sure and soon.
Give every flying minute
Something to keep in store;
Work, for the night is coming,
When man works no more.
I sang joyfully. Work! Work! Work! And somehow those words sank in. I worked. I didn’t sit still. When I rested, it was at night, in bed. Naps? Who took those? Too much work to be done.
There’s a lot to unpack with some of the hymns, but as I entered college and studied more, I often wondered if some of those songs were deliberately written or deliberately used to remind enslaved people to keep at it so they would never rest. If so, such songs were the ultimate Jedi mind trick.
That one hymn sprang to mind as I read the Devon Price piece in Momentum about the laziness lie. In part, Price writes that laziness was seen as the opposite of working, and that enslaved people—and others near the bottom of the totem pole in early America—were often told the solution to their woes is to work more. Bootstraps, anybody?
These exploited groups were also taught that working hard without complaint was virtuous and that desiring free time was morally suspect.
Then there’s this part:
These two origins illustrate the odd doublespeak at work whenever we call someone lazy. When we say someone is lazy, we’re saying they’re incapable of completing a task due to (physical or mental) weakness, but we’re also claiming that their lack of ability somehow makes them morally corrupt. They’re at once incapacitated and somehow to blame for it. The idea that lazy people are evil fakers who deserve to suffer has been embedded in the word since the very start.
