What exactly is freedom? If you asked the Austrian Germanist and essayist Daniela Strigl, she might describe freedom as the right to be lazy. In any case, she recently published a piece on the subject and has clearly struck a chord.
Strigl’s “Gedankenspiele zur Faulheit” certainly attracted a lot of media attention. The author gave several radio interviews in which she philosophised on an academic level about laziness, its creative potential, its moral position and its social significance. Laziness is a state of freedom, she told Swiss radio.
According to Strigl, however, the right to be lazy is under pressure, whereby she does not understand laziness as uninspired idleness, but as the opposite of work. According to Strigl, the pressure on the freedom to be lazy comes from two sources. First, Calvin and Zwingli reinterpreted work as a form of worship. And then the “triumph of capitalism” did the rest.
According to Strigl, capitalism is a counter-movement to laziness. If laziness really describes a state of freedom, then one must conclude that capitalism is also a counter-movement to freedom. You hear it, you wonder and you ask yourself which real existing economic system is better for individual freedom, but you are left to your own devices with this question in this interview.
Funnily enough, Strigl’s book is being published at a time when another phenomenon is being discussed in the media with just as much interest and at just as high an academic level: It’s about the supposed laziness of Generation Z, the generation that – despite being the world’s “highly qualified” – allegedly doesn’t want to toil at work and prefers to spend its time on “personal growth”.
Interestingly, this phenomenon seems to thrive in the fertile soil of capitalist economic systems. So was Daniela Strigl wrong and capitalism, far from being the enemy of laziness, is on the contrary its enabler?
As far as the European-style “social market economy” is concerned, the answer to this question is yes. The redistributive state, with its progressive taxes and seemingly bottomless pots of subsidies, is a promoter of laziness in the Striglian sense. It punishes the industrious by distributing their hard-earned money through taxes and compulsory levies to those who deliberately take the liberty of doing the opposite of working.
Laziness can certainly be seen as an expression of freedom, and the liberal cannot help but grant freedom or laziness to everyone. But when the laziness of one person is financed by the work of another, there is something wrong with freedom. Then the state demoralises its workers, and the question of the right to laziness will eventually resolve itself in a completely unacademic way.
This column is a part of the Book “Neither reft nor light” and has been published here with the kind permission of the author.
