Mitt Romney's plan is a 'suicide note"

The idea of the Four-Hour Work Day would be an anathema to the like of US presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

US presidential candidate,
Mitt Romney.

In fact such a thought would be abhorrent to most anyone indoctrinated by our growth-based economy and the developed world’s way of life.

The embrace of a Four-Hour Work Day demands a change in mindset that few of us can comprehend, not want to comprehend for the simple thought of the idea can illicit panic, an almost impulsive grab to hold onto what we have.

The world’s climate is, because of human intervention, bolting out of control – “bolting” may seem like an extreme claim until we consider the changes that now threaten humanity have occurred over about the last 200 years and the world itself is about 13 billion years old.

Without the warming we have caused, the world would have been slowly sliding into a rather cool stage, but the reverse is happening, the world is getting warmed and our weather quite different from the near ideal conditions humanity has enjoyed almost from when they first came down from the trees.

The trouble for humanity began, oddly when we came to understand how to cultivate and harvest food.

The resultant security of food stocks brought with it the exponential growth of human numbers and then we further entrenched our place on earth with the understanding of how we could exploit fossil fuels (ancient sunlight) enabling the supplementation of human energy.

With this seemingly free energy and a rich and a growing food supply, human numbers continued to burgeon, bringing bonuses for those who understood how to exploit that situation and so while the population grew “fatter”, so did their wallets.

The cacophony of claims and counter claims around the present US presidential campaign has a focus on the economy, jobs and energy, but appears to be saying little , or nothing, about how the US, and the world population, can prepare for a world which will be entirely different.

Pandering to populous views, Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, has promised energy independence for America by 2020.

His deluded comments what science is telling us, and have been for years, and in their story headed: “Mitt Romney's Disastrous EnergyPlan”, Rolling Stone magazine has described his plan as a “suicide note”.

The idea of a Four-Hour Work Day would rid us of the Romney suicide note and replace it with survivable, but different and difficult times; not resolving what’s ahead, but bringing-on circumstances which we might endure.

Absolute sense, backed by the reality that nature doesn't negotiate

Fossil fuels are nothing
than "ancient sunlight".

The idea of a Four-Hour Work Day makes absolute sense in terms of adapting to climate change, but is laden with unresolved difficulties when applied to what exists.

How, for example, does a hospital care for patients over 24 hours? What does the self-employed person do whose financial fidelity depends on them working 60 hours a week? What does a farmer do? What does a professional endurance sportsperson do when their chosen sport demands training sessions of six-hours? How do traditional industrial businesses operate? What happens to the fly in–fly out people who work 12 hour days within the resource industry? What does a truck driver do?

All those things, of course, can only be resolved through negotiation between humans, all of which must be tempered by the irrefutable certainty that nature simply doesn’t negotiate.

Just 200 years of exploiting the world’s ancient sunlight (that is all our fossil fuels are) has seen humans change the atmosphere to such an extent that no matter how we behave in the short term, the world’s climate has changed.

The core idea of the Four-Hour Work Day is to bring a decided economic equity to the world and within that slow the damage we are causing to our atmosphere by making everyone, especially most in the world’s developed nations, poorer and so less able to consume and subsequently reduce our need for that “ancient sunlight”.

Should businesses, whatever they are, be able to see profitably in working past the four-hours, then they would need to hire another group of workers as the Four-Hour Work Day is just that, no overtime and no double shifts.

To understand the Four-Hour Work Day it is essential we escape from present mindsets; we abandon the growth imperative; we learn to put people before profit; we need to grasp the idea that true human happiness and contentment is not to be found in gathering fanciful baubles around us, but in connecting with those around us, our neighbours and others who live in our street, things that are greatly enriched when we work, in a traditional sense, fewer hours.