The lessons we learn from violence can be applied to the Four-Hour Work Day

Violence has been embedded in human life ever since man drew a breath.

Arrival of the eight-hour day was
accompanied by much procession
 and celebration.

Subsequently the idea that we should injure, disable or kill the other has been normalized and so becomes, or has become, an understood and accepted way of life.

Many talk of peace, but it is a concept that few truly understand, illustrated when a world leader once said: “We tried peace for a month and it didn’t work”.

The idea that peace could be achieved in a month when the contrary, violence, has had millennia to be normalized draws a comparison in the understanding of a Four-Hour Work Day.

Driven by and living a life with allegiance to the profit and growth urgency over the past two centuries, we are psychologically ill-equipped to even seriously think about how we could build our lives around a process in which our traditional working hours were much shorter.

Each of us has been normalized to understand and accept that our happiness and wellbeing hinges entirely on working an eight-hour day, something that was introduced in a limited sense in New Zealand and Australia in the 1840s and 1850s.

However, most employed people had to wait to the early and mid-twentieth century for the condition to be widely achieved through the industrialized world through legislative action.

The idea of labouring for another with the intent of improving your lifestyle was a product, largely, of the Industrial Revolution, although the idea of working for another has been integral in human societies for centuries.

The concept of our time that work is good as it allows us to accumulate the goods that are the product of a way of life enriches the minority and enslaves the majority.

However, in what has been termed “managed democracy”, society is convinced that its adherence to this way of life enables, or entitles them to what is a democratic life, but without much thought can be shown to be inverted totalitarianism: a process that has every hallmark of democracy, but what is really societal control.

The Four-Hour Work Day will, if implemented thoughtfully, bring an equity that will permeate throughout society.