New pleasure in mechanism

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth's surface.

Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: 'I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man's noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.' I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.

Site editor's note:
The empowerment, ease and comfort which technology to an extent brings along is the means of how those who currently hold power, the authorities and in particular, the commercial corporations, seem to have shifted the accent from a crude type of promotion of the work-slave mentality, as exemplified by the Christian creed 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do', or the denigrating view of the historical elites who considered leisure their prerogative - now being subject to democratic taboo, towards a more refined manner of upholding the work-slave mentality among the masses (Russell's 'actual worker') by means of adding a strong element of seduction. The seductive element of pleasure and status giving rise to the modern consumerist and tech-fanatic. Even the political authorities of the day, while often taking recourse to standard demagogic slogans like 'the hard working civilian', targeted at basic maintenance of the mentality, in this respect, in their policies, appear to be increasingly subjugated to a refined mix of the marketing machine of corporations--where-money-can-be-made and the ideological--where-power-can-be-obtained narratives of progress as defined by technology nerds and self acclaimed visionaries (the latter distributing motives of alleged noble tasks by means of ideology).
This all to the extent that the mentality of the virtue of industriousness is not only legitimized and propagated to and among the masses, but it is accepted from top to bottom, so that even the rich today are subject to it, the hierarchy being almost solely defined in terms of income, property, the ability of obtaining items of luxury, and going with the flow of what by means of massively distributed ideology is alleged to constitute progress.

While the manner of obtaining is morally reprehensive, the parasitical practices of the historical elites, the status given to leisure, and the way their leisure to degrees has been used to enhance civilization abides at least to some intelligent logic, while the contemporary collectively accepted work mentality is little more than turning society into a stupefying colony of blind ants, where even the collectively increased  leisure time has become a means of extracting money from the pockets of the masses. That is, stupefying, where it not that this striving to improve life by means of technology is a never ending scheme in which there is intelligence, as it has become the new vessel of political, financial power and status mongering, a continuation of narratives of alleged progress and the virtue of industriousness have to be distributed and inculcated perpetually without too much fundamental critical evaluation. The contemporary elites, the new riches which in the capitalist system emerged from the masses, different from the historical elites of whom many where still people of mind and culture, are not people of mind and culture. Their adherence to the work-slave mentality follows from the fact that for a part of them there is nothing to pursue, and for others contemporary society offers no higher things to pursue than power, status enhancement and wealth, and they can at least pursue this in a less cumbersome manner than the masses at large, their jobs allowing them to not be engaged in boring repetitious tasks, to have the status of supervisors, to be able to spend time in board rooms, business lunches and dinners, and to be able to travel the world while working. In short, their obsession with work being derived from the obsessive craving of power, status and wealth in a context of nothing higher being available, caused by a correlating mix of individual limitations, and collective societal inability.