Laziness in a RBE

I run a pro-RBE, anti-establishment awareness blog, and got this question the other day... I was too lazy to search for the answers of others, so just wrote my own, based on my own understanding, how far off do you guys think i was?

Question:
Is laziness or “being lazy” a naturally occurring human behaviour/personality? Or is it an “invention” or “concept” directly cause by this perverse system? If it is a naturally occurring characteristic, what role would that play in a resource-based economy where there is no specific incentive to be productive? Say if “for the betterment of yourself and society” was not enough to inspire someone to “work”..

Answer:
laziness is as natural to us as it is to a lion or a monkey. The negative version that i think you’re referring to is sloth. and there is a vast difference between the two, though they have a similar premise. Both begin with the ideology, “i’m too lazy to…” but while Laziness is natural and partially beneficial to the planet as a whole, sloth is borne of private property and the misperception that we own things and have the 'right' to do with these things as we wish.

lazy caveman: i’m too lazy to make a fire so that i can heat stones to put into the water-basket so that they can heat the water and i can make some tea. maybe i can make a container that can go straight on the fire without the need for heating stones. (the kettle is invented)

Slothful Caveman: I am too lazy to make a fire to heat some stones for boiling water to make tea. I’ll just wait for someone else to make it, and then make my tea.

Immediately we can see the difference. Laziness is the mother of many inventions, while sloth is a decidedly parasitic view that invariably leads to stagnation. It’s not a problem in a RBE though. If you are slothful in a RBE, then you use up less resources than those members of society who are contributing to the abundance, and since technology and access is free for all, the slothful person is encouraged to use even less energy than they themselves had hoped for. And, there is no such thing is useless time spent within a RBE. If all you want to do is sit around playing x-box. i’m sure microsoft will be very interested in having you as one of their games testers.

This “Laziness-factor” is vital to the formation and maintenance of a Resource Based Society and it’s subsequent economy. Once people are doing only what they wish to do, avoiding those labors that they find cumbersome, our technicians will know what technology needs to be created to fill the void. (watch how quickly self-cleaning sustainable toilets become household and public access norms when people stop cleaning toilets because it is a dirty laborious job and nobody really wants to do it)

as for incentive, it is not about getting people to work toward a better society or themselves even. that is utopia and not something altogether desirable. it is about working toward abundance. it is about understanding that even if you are the greediest person alive, a RBE can still provide you with more than the current systems, because it works on abundance and not scarcity. scarcity may increase profit in the monetary system, but that profit is make-believe, and the actual wealth is going completely missed, because the value lies with the resources, not with the representation of the resources’ assumed value as depicted by the people who control the actual resources.

personally i’ve never really been worried about incentives for people to work. Because if you don’t want to work, then i don’t really want whatever you would produce. The lack of enjoyment will show in the quality of your service/product. People find their own incentives when left to their own devices, and direct access to abundance.