Get a Job!

"He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people.  He could never cross it and explain to them his position, - the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism.  There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them.  Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job.  That was their first word and their last.  It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas.  Get a job!  Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked.  Small wonder the world belonged to the strong.  The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery.  A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped."

Jack London

Martin Eden

Deer Lake

So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned upon him that the difference between these lawyers, officers, business men, and bank cashiers he had met and the members of the working class he had known was on a par with the difference in the food they ate, clothes they wore, neighborhoods in which they lived. Certainly, in all of them was lacking the something more which he found in himself and in the books. The Morses had shown him the best their social position could produce, and he was not impressed by it. A pauper himself, a slave to the money-lender, he knew himself the superior of those he met at the Morses'; and, when his one decent suit of clothes was out of pawn, he moved among them a lord of life, quivering with a sense of outrage akin to what a prince would suffer if condemned to live with goat-herds.

"You hate and fear the socialists," he remarked to Mr. Morse, one evening at dinner; "but why? You know neither them nor their doctrines."

journal entry from 2015 or

Martin Eden

Jack London