Hierarchy and Work

For thousands of years humanity got by with the gift economy. In the last few hundred years the exchange economy took a grip on most human activity.
Even so, there still exist many remnants of the gift economy.
All work is a form of service, and where work is done with an attitude of service, the gift economy carries on.
It is through service that we enrich ourselves and we enrich others. The very essence of what it means to be human is to live in society and to serve.
Without service we live alone, wrapped up in ourselves, going mad. Alone on a planet of seven billion.
Traditional family life depends on each person doing their allotted task. These tasks revolve around food, shelter and clothing. There is no question of not doing them.
There is no question of being ‘paid’ for doing them, no idea that time might be divided up into work and leisure.
Until very recently the important work was done by the women, and the men provided the extras. The care of the young and the old and the maintenance of the home and often the provision of food and clothing was often the gift of women.
When the man came to the woman with his gift he was duly honoured, some might say humoured.
With recent technological changes there is much less work for the woman to do in the home. The woman scorns the man’s gifts. Man and woman have learnt to serve themselves.
They work in large organizations, similar to the schools they were forced to attend when they were young.
The schools teach them that work is drudgery, that everybody exploits everyone else, to look out for number one, never to give, always to take.
The schools teach the people not to work with each other but to work with Authority.
They must ever look upwards to Authority, never across to each other.
They must work alone, with the aim of pleasing Authority, the one who dispenses rewards and punishment and smiley faces.
Their colleagues are not their friends, they are their rivals.
To give something away for free seems bizarre.
We perform our allotted task, and if we please our ‘superior’ we are duly rewarded.
We work for ourselves, slaves to exchange, working joylessly, insanely trapped inside ourselves. Success, ambition, self, fighting each other like rats in a sack.