Human being is great only in labour.
Not everyone can feel the happiness of work. Some people were born as a contemplators, not workers, and labour for them is a burden, which takes a lot of strength and time. Other people are not as lucky: their area of business, which they have chosen, doesn’t correspond to their abilities, inclinations, behavior and psychological criteria. Work for them is a torture, slavery and a hopeless captivity without any perspective relise! Such people work either subjectively or evil only to live from hand to mouth.
Also there exist such people who are not adapted to systematic work. They are impetuous, work from inspiration, periods of increasing desire to work are mixed with periods of apathy.
Can they agree with the statement that human being is great only in labour? I doubt it. Even public patterns about happy life presuppose idleness. We can remember, for example, Russian, French and German fairytales. In these fairytales a lot of symbols of plenty without work exist – magic tablecloth, magic pot, wonderful tree which brings fruit all the year round. Even Bible says about work as of god’s drabs for Adam and Eve’s sins: “You should win your bread only by working hard”. All the legends mention the Golden age when people were careless and happy. At that time people could grow up to ten harvests a year and fish could be easily netted.
All these facts prove the idea that labour can not be initially desired lifestyle for the unconscious humanity.
On the contrary, people have always looked for opportunity to use the fruit of other people’s labour. During the development of civilization and growing specialization people obtained a chance to burter, e.g. I make kitchenware, and you make clothes. Moreover, people gained a possibility to choose profession, become professionals and accumulate experience. In European countries a professional is respected in the society and labour is considered to be almost a religion.
As for Russia it has been ashamingly (постыдно) kept at pre-historical level of development as it got rid of slavery not long ago. Perhaps this fact impedes the penetration of taste and love to labour into our mind, some people call it pride for work. Sometimes we tend to trick, cheat and get more then you deserved. Sometimes these desires are much stronger then the desire to work honestly, being able to report on each penny and say that everything I possess I have earned by myself. The most famous Russian writers tried to attract our attention to the fact that an ability to work is very harmful for our country. Dostoevsky in his “Teenager” wrote that Russia lacks practical people while Leskov who knew Russian people very well pointed out sadly that Russia lost its crafts.
Along with the famous writers depicted real professionals with much respect as well as they knew the real poetry of labour:
“ I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.” Jerome
“Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.” Carlyle
There are no heights and plunges in inspired labour. But there is labour which is obvious to everyone in the form of food, clothes, housing and roads. Moreover, there is a scrupulous labour of scientists and inventors. When we turn on the light coming home we realize that it was produced by a worker at the factory. But do we remember with gratitude about Edison at that moment? Furthermore, do we remember our genetics and selectionists’ work when buying seeds to plant in the country? Turning on TV we do not think even for a second that if we hadn’t had Einstein, Heisenberg who were busy working out such “useless” things as the structure of the Universe, we wouldn’t have such customary amenities of the civilization as a TV set, video recorder and computer. Perhaps someone knows that the word “robot” was invented by Capek and that Norbert Wiener istablished modern information technologies. In this respect we should think of Bill Gates as an intellectual parasite, who has discovered then used the knowledge of other people that had been invented far before him.
All of us are standing at the endless stair which comes from the ancient centuries. Each step of the stair is the result of the human beings’ craft and research. It depends on our attitude towards labour – whether the stair will go up to the future or stay at the previous level.