The Evisceration of the American Work Ethic

A sign reading 'Go straight home and Isolate' in Australia. Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

Commentary

“I can’t seem to hire good and reliable people anymore,” the manager of an Apple store told me over the weekend. “I don’t get it. They aren’t motivated by money. They can’t show up on time. They are not driven to do better. There is no personal ambition. Something is wrong.”

His own plan is to leave the company and start his own small shop, if only to relieve himself of the great burden of personnel management and hiring. He has a few friends he trusts, so he'll work with them to build something new from the ground up, a local company serving local customers—one that doesn’t need to scale up in order to be profitable.

This story I’ve heard from many managers and owners over the past year. Something is wrong, not just with the economic environment, but with people themselves. Where’s the ambition? Where’s the drive? Where’s the passion for excellence that comes from within? Where’s the desire to work hard, achieve, take risks, and embrace every opportunity with a burning desire for a better life?

People today are rightly terrified of the inflationary trends and the real prospect of a recession. They’re seeing their savings depleted and their retirement funds melt from impressive to not-so-great. Everything seems broken, from government to media to industry.

All of this seems awful, but we might actually be experiencing a deeper crisis that’s of a more spiritual nature. It goes to the heart of what we used to call “the work ethic” and reaches even deeper into the whole question of the meaning and purpose of life. This isn’t easily fixed.

Deirdre McCloskey’s magisterial trilogy (“The Bourgeois Virtues,” “Bourgeois Equality,” and “Bourgeois Dignity”) on the history of the rise of prosperity argues a challenging thesis. The questions the books seek to answer are the really huge ones. How did it happen that through most of recorded human history, the idea of progress wasn’t as pressing as the struggle to survive against the odds? Infant mortality, sickness, starvation, and servitude—a near state of nature—were the norm with few exceptions that pertained mostly to the elites.

Beginning in the late Middle Ages and extending through to the birth of modernity, something changed dramatically. We gradually became rich. Lives lengthened. The idea of progress became universal. Along with that, the notion of universal human rights became a prevailing political ethos. Laws reflected that. This dawn of a new form of civilization was characterized by the rise and entrenchment of a universal commercial culture, but with that also came the advance and beautification of art, music, philanthropy, culinary skills, manners, dress, technology, and everything else we associate with civilization.

Usually, economic historians reach for technical explanations for the radical changes in history. It’s because our technology improved. People could be secure in their property, and this created the opportunity to accumulate capital and invest. It’s because we invented the rule of law and turned against the practices of slavery and serfdom. It’s because diplomacy came to be favored over war. It’s because of better medicine, better farming techniques, the invention of the factory, and so on.

McCloskey said that while all of these factors contribute, there was something more fundamental at work. It was a gradual change of values that we can summarize as a bourgeois ethos: a conviction on the part of the vast majority that life can be better and the determination to make it so. This cultivated a new spirit in the world and universalized it.

Ultimately, she argued, it was the philosophical and spiritual change that enabled and built all the rest of the vast machinery that came to characterize the prosperity that defines our age. This is bound up not with a particular technology, but fundamentally with a belief structure. This is ultimately what drove the change.

People began to take responsibility for their lives and discover the tradeoffs that come from sacrificing consumption now for investment, production, and prosperity later. The field of vision changed from short-term survival to long-term thriving. The notion of human dignity came to be eternalized and widely recognized. The conviction that the fruits of prosperity could belong to everyone and not just the elite swept the world and gradually wiped out old-world forms of despotism.

So much for the history lesson. What about our time? Prior to March 2020, we had come to take bourgeois virtues for granted, for the most part, although, of course, the decline was present. The ethos was still in the air. Everyone should work hard. We should save. The young should prepare themselves for success and embrace every opportunity that comes their way. The shape our lives took was fundamentally up to each individual. That is the whole point of freedom itself.

The shocking and dramatic change hit us with the COVID-19 pandemic policy. Seemingly out of nowhere, governments closed businesses, locked churches, shuttered schools, and threw the whole liturgy of life into complete upheaval. Shockingly, agencies all over the country distributed leaflets telling us who was essential and who was nonessential. They told us to stay away from each other. They covered our faces.

Two features of these egregious actions stand out to me. Suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, businesses weren’t allowed to function, all enforced by government bureaucrats. And suddenly and seeming out of nowhere, many millions of people were pushed into forced idleness, told to entertain themselves on laptops. For weeks. Then months. Then a year or more. You can’t see your aging parents—too dangerous. You can’t gather with others. You can’t attend funerals. You and everyone you know are a disease vector and nothing else.

Here’s a look at what this change in the matrix did to the civilian labor force in a chart expanding over 20 years.

Civilian Labor Force Level. Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker

My theory is that this experience shattered the philosophical basis of societies that had grown up around bourgeois values. It took away our freedoms. It sent a message that our lives aren’t our own, but rather belong to states and bureaucracies. The media all day and every day echoed the same message. And if you resent it or doubt “the science” behind the whole preposterous experience, you’re a lousy proponent of “freedumb.” If you don’t take your mandated medicine, you’re worthy of exclusion from all public life.

This whole experience was celebrated by The New York Times as a “medieval” solution to a virus that was necessary and innovative. What it did, in fact, was institutionalize techno-feudalism. The message that it conveyed to an entire generation was truly devastating.

Looking at the numbers for labor force participation, you can see that something is profoundly wrong. Millions of people are missing. It isn’t explained solely by early retirements or mothers leaving the workforce because they can’t find child care. There’s more going on here: a demoralization. A loss of ambition. A rejection of bourgeois life. An evaporation of the work ethic, but also more—a loss of faith in the idea of progress itself.

This shift not only affects people who have chosen to reject work completely. It also applies to those with privileged positions in corporate structures in which the money magically keeps flowing to bank accounts, the bills are paid, and the routine of pretending to produce, but actually not really doing much at all has become a norm. It feels a bit like a racket, but people have somehow become accustomed to it.

A turn to a culture of sloth, sadness, and substance abuse is a symptom. The real problem is much deeper. With lockdowns and mandates, governments toyed with and then broke the most fragile thing, the philosophical and spiritual foundations of modernity itself.

This is the existential worry, and it’s potentially more devastating to the social order than inflation, recession, or any other technical measure of decline. A shattering of the value structure that built civilization itself is very hard to quantify. But I suspect that as you have read this piece, you can think of cases yourself in which all of the above applies.

Rebuilding after the disaster is going to require far more than technical fixes or a change in leadership. It depends on rediscovering meaning, ambition, virtue, and the value of a life well-lived. This only happens one life at a time.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.