Violence and civilisation

[Seabass]

If ever you find yourself ranting and raving about how everyone else is brainwashed and only you can see the truth behind the curtain, then there is a probably a good chance you have been brainwashed.

[JimC]

If ever you find yourself ranting and raving about how everyone else is brainwashed and only you can see the truth behind the curtain, then there is a probably a good chance you have been brainwashed.

Mind control by our lizard overlords forced you to type that, and deep down, you know it!

[pErvinalia]

Frankly, rEvo's arguments are weird. We are living in a society which is absolute bloody paradise compared to anything ever before in history, or in any place on Earth. Here and now is relative heaven!

We have a consumer society. Wow! How terrible.

Man, what a load of crap. Try being a peasant in medieval England. Or a slave in Arabia. Or any ordinary person, anywhere, anytime, apart from the here and now, and see how you bloody like it. So, rEvo, you are talking a load of crap. Here and now is paradise.

As I said to Jim, this line of reasoning is a logical fallacy. You might want to consider that before accusing someone else of talking "a load of crap".

Sure, it is not perfect. Nothing made by humans is ever perfect. But it is better than before, and is improving all the time. Sure, there are problems, but there are always problems. Which problem would you prefer? To face the need to combat global warming, or (as has been the case in most of history) to face having your guts disembowelled by the next invading army, and your children killed and your wife and teenage daughter raped to death.

Violence is at an all time low. More people are fed properly as a percentage of the total than any time in history. We have better education, more security, better access to entertainment and to information than any time or any place else. And some people canot stop moaning. Wow!

It's obviously a point too subtle for you to understand. No surprises there. The point is that violence has passed its used by date (except in the minds of some neo-conservative hawks). We live in a different social structure to the type where violence could be an effective tool of control. The state has morphed along with that, and uses other means of control. Yes, it is better than outright violence, as I said earlier, a point you unsurprisingly missed. But that doesn't mean we aren't brainwashed idiots on the whole who are less happy than they've ever been in modern times and work more hours than they ever have in modern times. Yet all the while thinking that they are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires and temporarily not happy. It's just around the corner! All we need to do is just work a bit harder and shop a bit more and we will attain that happiness! Keep worshipping, you ridiculous religionist.

[pErvinalia]

If ever you find yourself ranting and raving about how everyone else is brainwashed and only you can see the truth behind the curtain, then there is a probably a good chance you have been brainwashed.

Empty rhetoric. Learn about human psychology and then you can comment authoritatively on these subjects.

[Blind groper]

To rEvo
You can talk about how we are brainwashed idiots, but that does not change the fact that things are far better.

How would you like to live in a time not too many centuries ago when everyone was brainwashed to the view that if you did not bow to the church you would go to hell?

Today we can think freely. Many do not, but I do.

[pErvinalia]

Time travel 100 years into the future. Just say your technological solution didn't come to pass. Will we be "far better"? That's the whole fucking point. Our "prosperity" is still to be paid for. If it gets paid for painlessly, then awesome, we've won. But if it doesn't, then there's going to be hell to pay.

Anyway, as I said, look at the trends (in the West) on a shorter time frame. Look at inequality. Look at work hours. Look at measures of happiness. Look at levels of poverty. These things have all been worsening for 40+ years. What makes you think that's going to reverse?

[JimC]

Time travel 100 years into the future. Just say your technological solution didn't come to pass. Will we be "far better"? That's the whole fucking point. Our "prosperity" is still to be paid for. If it gets paid for painlessly, then awesome, we've won. But if it doesn't, then there's going to be hell to pay.

Anyway, as I said, look at the trends (in the West) on a shorter time frame. Look at inequality. Look at work hours. Look at measures of happiness. Look at levels of poverty. These things have all been worsening for 40+ years. What makes you think that's going to reverse?

rEv, I'm not really sure that there is the objective evidence to support all of those pessimistic claims of decreases...

And that's what's needed, not just subjective feelings, which are strongly influenced by one's current emotional circumstances. Maybe BG and I are in relatively good places in our lives, and we are seeing things through rose coloured glasses, but the reverse is also possible...

None of which means that there are not issues in current western societies which deserve criticism, and change once the political will can be mustered, or that there are not ominous future environmental problems if we don't get our act together...

[pErvinalia]

These are all real phenomenon that are backed up by statistics. In my radical circle of friends, these statistics get discussed from time to time. Perhaps you two aren't aware of them.

[pErvinalia]

Just checking out working hours, it seems that they increased steadily to 2000's and then started decreasing due to the casualisation of the workforce, and then ultimately the GFC.

The average number of hours worked per week has decreased over the last three decades, falling from 35.7 hours per week in 1979 to 32.8 hours per week hours in 2009, largely due to an increase in the proportion of people working part time. The average hours worked by full-time workers rose during the 1990s, peaking at 41.3 hours per week in 2000, but decreasing to 39.7 hours per week in 2009.

The average number of hours worked per week by part-time workers increased slightly over time, from around 15 hours in the 1980s to approximately 16 hours from 2000 onwards.

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf ... 4.3.5.5%29

Although, it would be interesting to look at how they calculate this. Putting people on salaries and workplace agreements (a newer trend here) means that they only get paid for a set amount of hours, and don't recieve overtime. But they need to finish all their projects. My ex-wife as a teacher was a good example of this. She worked nearly as many hours out of class as she did in class. Also my ex-workmates on salaries at university as research officers regularly worked weekends and overtime with no pay. Are these things accounted for?

[pErvinalia]

Unfortunately I had to return a really good book to the library after having it out for a couple of years, which has a lot of good stats on these subjects. It's called Growth Fetish, by Clive Hamilton of the Australia Institute. Highly recommend it.

[pErvinalia]

Inequality and poverty is definitely increasing. Surely you don't need me to provide stats on that?

[pErvinalia]

Regarding happiness, I can't find a lot of long term studies. That book I referenced discussed a number of studies. The following is from the UN:

In summary, the global picture has many
strands,
and the slow-moving global averages
mask a variety of substantial changes. Lives have
been improving significantly in Latin America
and the Caribbean, and in Sub-Saharan Africa;
worsening in the Middle East and North Africa;
dropping slightly in the western industrial world,
and very sharply in the countries most affected by
the Eurozone crisis.

http://unsdsn.org/files/2013/09/WorldHa ... online.pdf

But this is only over the period of 2005-2012 as far as I can tell.

Here's a graph from that report:

[pErvinalia]

Just found this good site that gives you "Actual hours worked per person". So I assume that includes non-salaried hours. If that's right, then it looks at if the hours worked have largely stayed the same, or fallen slightly (100-200 hrs per year) from the 70's to now.

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS#

[pErvinalia]

Sheesh, but then there's this, which mentions my point about salaried employees and overtime:

That much most people agree on. What's harder to pin down is exactly how much Americans are working. It may be more than our industrialized competitors, but is it more than we have ever worked before?

The short answer, according to the government, is that it is only slightly more and not so much that most people should really notice.

Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a very gradually rising trend through the 1990s that has only just recently tapered off, hovering somewhere just north of 40 hours weekly.

A Month More a Year?

The long answer is, of course, more complicated. It depends who you ask, and about whom you're asking.

Author Juliet Schor, who wrote the best-selling book The Overworked American in 1992, concluded that in 1990 Americans worked an average of nearly one month more per year than in 1970.

There are also volumes of surveys that ask people if they're working more than they used to. Generally, people say yes, of course they are. And they also estimate almost 10 more hours a week than the government does.

A Bunch of Whiners?

Critics pooh-pooh such studies, saying self-estimators are exaggerators, although most of those studies echo the same general trend as governmental figures — a bit of a rise through the '90s with a slight dip recently.

Dissenters to overworked-American theories say it's better to base studies on employers' reports of worker hours, which is what the government does, but that leaves out overtime hours worked by salaried employees.

Critics also point to what they say is a growing number of part-time jobs. How can people be working more if they are not working full-time?

Here's where you have to ask which workers we're really talking about.

Measuring Past the Punch Clock

That's what Schor's book tries to do, as well as two recent releases: The White-Collar Sweatshop by Jill Andresky Fraser, and The Working Life by Joanne B. Ciulla.

All those books have been embraced by a large part of the public that apparently feels harassed by the pressures of the workplace.

The authors all find evidence that many Americans are overstressed and overworked in trends that are not necessarily measured with a punch clock; trends such as road rage, workplace shootings, the rising number of children in day care and increasing demands for after-school activities to occupy children whose parents are too busy or still at work.

They aren't the only ones finding long hours in at least certain parts of the workforce. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released last year, more than 25 million Americans — 20.5 percent of the total workforce — reported they worked at least 49 hours a week in 1999. Eleven million of those said they worked more than 59 hours a week.

Sweat Under the White Collar

Who are these people? Fraser, after four years of interviews, concludes they are white-collar workers, who do not punch a clock and whose hours therefore are the most difficult to track.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93364

It would appear that it's pretty hard to pin down the exact figures of this.

[pErvinalia]

A bit more from that article:

But the anecdotal evidence presented by Fraser, Schor and Ciulla — and met by millions of people everyday — is that many Americans feel they are working more than ever.

An ABCNEWS.com poll released Monday found only 26 percent of Americans feel they work too hard. Although far more feel the opposite, that's still a lot of people and it's twice as many as the 13 percent who told a Harris Poll in 1960 that they felt overworked. And the percentage rises to about a third of people with kids, or people between 35 and 54 years old.

What Happened to 'The Little Woman'?

Even for people who are not actually working longer hours than they used to, there's an explanation for why some of them might feel over-burdened anyway, particularly men.

Experts who accept some of the arguments of both sides of the working-longer debate often focus less on individuals' hours worked, instead looking at household hours on the job.

In Overworked and Underemployed, a study in The American Prospect, Barry Bluestone and Stephen Rose argue that to really understand the situation Americans face, you need to look beyond individuals and numbers.

The overall figures for how many hours a week the average American works have been held down by the increasing number of part-time service and retail jobs in the economy. But since many of the part-time jobs have been filled by the increasing number of women in the workforce, and many of these women had previously been housewives, there are fewer hours when anyone is taking care of household chores.

Instead of coming home to find the refrigerator and cupboards stocked, dinner ready, the table set, the clothes washed, the house clean and the children entertained, men are coming home and finding they have to chip in, because their wives aren't "the little woman," anymore. They are now sharing duties as breadwinner, which means men have to share household chores. The situation is exaggerated when both spouses work full-time — particularly if they don't earn enough to hire help.

If people aren't spending quite as many more hours at work as they think they are, the fact that they aren't allowed as much leisure time once they're off work might account for the apparent illusion.