A fatal notion of things, half false & half stupid, began to pervade educated & semi-educated minds: "the worker" becomes the real person, the real nation, the meaning & aim of history, politics, public care ... he is made the saint, the idol, of the age.
The fact that all men work, and moreover that others - the inventor,
the engineer, and organizer - do more, and more important, work is
forgotten.
No one any longer dares to bring forward the class or quality
of his achievement as a gauge of its value. Only work measured in hours
now counts as labour. And the "worker," with all this, is the poor
unfortunate one, disinherited, starving, exploited. The words "care" and
"distress" are applied to him alone.
No one has a thought left for the
countryman's less fertile strips of land, his bad harvests, his losses
by hail and frost, his anxiety over the sale of his produce; or for the
wretched existence of poor craftsmen in strongly industrialized areas,
the tragedies of small tradesmen, fishermen on the high seas, inventors,
doctors, who have to struggle amid alarms and dangers for each bite of
daily bread and go down in their thousands unheeded.
"The worker" alone
receives sympathy. He alone is supported, cared for, insured. What is
more, he is made the saint, the idol, of the age. The world revolves
round him. He is the focus of the economic system and the nurseling of
politics.
Everybody's existence hinges on him; the majority of the
nation are there to serve him. The dull lump of a peasant, the lazy
official, the swindling tradesman, are legitimate targets for mirth, not
to mention judges, officers, and heads of businesses, who are the
popular objects of ill-natured jest; but no one would dare to pour the
same scorn on "the working man."
All the rest are idlers, egoists; he is
the one exception. The whole middle class swings the censer before this
phantom. No matter what one's own achievements in life may be, one must
fall on one's knees before him. His being stands above all criticism.
-- Oswald Spengler
