There is a very old trick by which empires make themselves appear necessary: they persuade human beings that their value is measured by their usefulness to the machine.

The Pharaoh needs workers. The Roman Empire needs soldiers and taxpayers. The feudal lord needs peasants producing grain. The industrial capitalist needs labor. The modern corporation needs "human resources"— which is perhaps the most straight up Orwellian Skynet phrase ever invented, and if they cease to produce—through illness, age, disability, unemployment, or simply exhaustAion—they are subtly invited to regard themselves as having become less of a person. That is the great moral fraud of a production-obsessed society because a human being is not a commercial trader but also not even a unit of economic output.

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