Abundance of Health and Food.

On January 29 2023, Robert Zaretsky who I do not know, a historian of sorts, wrote an article about the work ethic of the citizens of France. It makes for interesting reading and makes reference to a Michel de Montaigne who in 1571 wrote something that would have fit right into this collection of essays known as Sentient Musings that are also available in their original long form at our website (the website is often blocked by Google so you may have to type not search).

Consider Michel de Montaigne, who in 1571, fed up with his job as a magistrate in the city of Bordeaux, quit at the age of 38. Retreating to his library, he inscribed his reason on the wall of his study. “Weary of the servitude of the courts,” Montaigne declared, “I am determined to retire in order to spend what little remains of my life, now more than half run out … consecrated to my freedom, tranquillity, and leisure.”

He went on to invent an entirely new kind of writing — the essay — by which he launched an extraordinary experiment in self-examination. Yet he experimented lazily. “I have to solicit it nonchalantly,” he wrote about his memory. “What I do easily and naturally I can no longer do if I order myself to do it by strict and express command,” he wrote. For the man who transformed our way of reading and writing, he was seriously unserious. “If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there.” He added: “I do nothing without gaiety.”

A few centuries later, a fellow Frenchman proved equally industrious when it came to laziness. The radical thinker Paul Lafargue is famous today for a pamphlet published in 1880: “The Right to be Lazy.” Not surprisingly, then, that he depended on the financial support of someone else: Friedrich Engels, who did the same for Lafargue’s father-in-law, Karl Marx.

In an odd twist, Lafargue kept running out of money or being run into prison because he was busy making the case for the worker’s right to be lazy. Our natural state, he argued, is leisure. Yet industrialists and ideologues, to enjoy lives of ease, had inculcated in the rest of us the belief in the “right to work.”

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Perhaps at this point I should state that I do not fully agree that our natural state is leisure. It would get too boring to only be at leisure. We need a purpose, a reason to live. To me that purpose is to leave the Earth a better place than when I found it. Our natural state is also not to be in the rat race either. I know, I know some of you think my reference to rats has to do with The Director Ratcliffe or the graduates of VMI (Virginia Military Institute). I assure you it does not.
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As a result, Lafargue declared, the proletariat, “perverted by the dogma of work,” had betrayed its instincts and historic mission. “Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its passion for work.” Predictably, this did not go down well either in the workers’ paradise of Stalin’s Russia, which decried Lafargue’s apology for laziness, or Marxist historians, who derided him as a “hedonist.”

A century later, France produced yet another apologist for avoiding work, the influential theorist Frédéric Lordon. In his 2010 book “Capitalisme, désir et servitude” (given the more sensationalist English title “Willing Slaves of Capital”), he argued that today’s employers, rather than responding to worker resistance with a show of force, instead conjure a show of friendship. They are so friendly, Mr. Lordon warns, that we willingly swallow their promise that work is a “source of immediate joy.”

Mr. Lordon was a guiding spirit to the “rise up at night” protests in 2016, when demonstrators occupied public places across France to oppose the labor reforms proposed by the then-Socialist government. One of their demands was the creation of a universal basic income. This would, in effect, subsidize laziness — or, more accurately, a certain kind of laziness. While la paresse is a common word for laziness in French, so too is l’oisiveté. Deriving from the Latin otium, it means focused calm or even spiritual elevation, so very different from negotium, the sort of work that gets in life’s way.

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I won’t negotiate negotium, meaningless in its negativity. There is something uplifting about otium. We don’t live like hermits in a forest, we live in a civilized society. In order for the society to not descend into chaos and anarchy we should engage in productive work and creative pursuits. That is obvious, yet to take that apparent fact, and to then say it is an ode to capitalism is a bridge too far for me. So in one of these essays I will write an ode to capitalism. I will praise everything about it so you see exactly what the devil’s bargain is. Some things have to be praised in order to be fully understood.

Am I channeling Marx again? I have one book of his and I haven’t read it yet. I am too busy typing here. Must be a mental leak from a connected node or something.
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A few months ago, Sandrine Rousseau, a prominent member of the French Green Party, caused a stir when she called for a worker’s right to laziness. Along with practical concerns over whether they could continue jobs into their mid-60s that tax their bodies and spirits, France’s protesters also share the conviction addressed by Rousseau and Lordon, Lafargue and Montaigne. Our horizon, remarked a 20-something protester, holds nothing more than “working longer and harder.” An early retirement devoted not just to leisure but to volunteer work, she added, seemed increasingly distant.

Americans might well scowl at such claims. But if we pause to think, might that not be, well, a bit lazy of us?

This essay though was meant to be about the abundance of health and food. I won't bother. I will simply provide you with two photos and a song and a movie reference.

For Sentient Musings at sentientmusings.com
San Diego, CA
10:36 am on this year of our lord savior lol Sat Jun 27 2026

Only one of those two pictures is guilt free and healthy for you. As free citizens you can decide for yourself if you wish to stay fat, obese and participatory of a merciless industry that kills animals or guilt free and slim.