Perhaps the greatest injustice of modern society is that nobody comes around in a big truck every Thursday and hands us a nice fat check just for being ourselves. When I bring up this problem to local, and, by letter, national leaders, they usually spout some sort of compulsively pragmatic rubbish like "that's impossible," or "there simply isn't enough money" and the conversation usually ends up coming to blows, which is quite difficult by letter.
Because of this injustice, most of us acquiesce to performing some task in exchange for our currency, currency which is then exchanged for goods and services. We hold jobs.
Often, especially for us youths, these jobs are pretty menial. We're far too bright for these jobs, we hope, because they're really boring and we're fairly certain that a motivated chimpanzee, after having attended the same training that we did, could perform our job as well we could, although often we smell better.
These slacker jobs with lousy pay we have at the video store, the clothes place, the book shack, innumerable restaurants, and the like may not be particularly challenging, but they have one great advantage: they may not be particularly challenging. This means that you can still have free time, a commodity which your foolishly more motivated pals probably crave. Plus, if you have a really slack-ass job, you have free time even while you're at work. I had this one summer job with a large pharmaceuticals company which was slack-ass to the point that I was able to read Moby Dick, Skinner's Walden Two, some case study book about those German twins that made up their own language, Heart of Darkness, and spend an hour on the phone every morning with friends abusing the 800 number.
Should I feel guilty about Sticking It To The Man so gratuitously? Should I lament that I did not utilize my work time for only company projects and the betterment of my employer? Absolutely not. In fact, I should feel proud to have held a slacker job and got paid for my own pursuits, because I am in very good company. Some of the greatest thinkers of our age have done their brightest work while screwing over some lame organization. The following are a half-dozen of history's most remarkable thinkers, and all accomplished their defining works while on company time.
Albert Einstein
A name now synonymous with frighteningly powerful intellect, Albert Einstein held a job in the Swiss Patent office for seven years. He began the job of technical officer on June 23, 1902 on a provisional basis; it wasn't until 1904 that he was accepted permanently. And though his salary was raised, he was not promoted from a Class III employee to a Class II because he was "not fully accustomed to matters of mechanical engineering." (One can picture Einstein's boss catching him doing physics, saying "Hey, Einstein, you don't gotta be a Copernicus to see that this ain't a patent application! Back to work!") Einstein's job responsibilities consisted of evaluating patent applications for fairly mundane, everyday devices, such as cameras and typewriters, and probably the occasional sponge. The job's pay, 3,500 swissfrancs at the start and 3,900 swissfrancs later, was lousy enough that he had to become a private physics tutor on the side. More importantly, the job was undemanding, and young Albert knew how to stick it to the man, writing at least five papers on Brownian motion (the study of the motion of liquids) while employed at the patent office, mostly on work time. While these early writings were not directly connected with relativity, they laid the foundations for later works by utilizing single theories and laws for disparate phenomena and for the acceptance of a reality separate from what is observed.
Albrecht von Haller
Haller, a botanist, physician, and poet, is credited with writing the first standard physiology text in 1757-66, the Elementa Phisiologiae Corporis Humani, as well as doing ground-breaking research on muscle contractivity and writing poems about mountains. It also seems that he did much of this work while employed by the Berne City Council as secretary in charge of keeping the minutes. There is even direct evidence that Haller was shafting his employers, as records show that he was once reprimanded for writing a scientific treatise as a meeting was in session-- but he was able to save his ass by reading back the detailed minutes that he had been keeping simultaneously.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx, the originator of the once-frightening economic/social system known
as Communism, is perhaps one of the most influential men in political history.
What most people don't know about Marx is that he was a lazy freeloader who
never held a real job. He read a lot, though, and had a lifestyle remarkably
similar to the perpetual grad students of today, consisting of reading, jotting
down notes for his earthshaking later works, and annoying his friends and
acquaintances, probably over coffee, about How Things Suck and How He Would Do
Things, and probably How Come I Can't Get A Date.
Karl was able to get away with this because he had an analogue to the duped parent of today's grad-schoolers: Freidrich Engles. Engles was a wealthy owner of some English textile mills, and while lauded in our times as a great socialist thinker, never utilized any of his progressive ideas of worker's reform in his factories, and Marx never pushed him to. Why? Because Karl needed his allowance and juice money. In fact, most of the correspondence between these two socialist giants can be boiled down to the phrase, "Please send money now."
Charles Darwin
"Charles Darwin as a youth appears to have been a complete waster," says
biographer L.R. Croft. Mr. Croft was not alone in his thinking, for Charles'
own dad told young Charles that "you care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and
rat-catching and you will be a disgrace to yourself and your family." With this
type of encouragement from home, it is no wonder that Darwin's first real job
was so lame. Not needing to worry for money because of his wealthy father,
Charles accepted a now-famous position on the man o' war H.M.S. Beagle. He was
not primarily the ship's naturalist, as is commonly thought, but rather a
gentleman's companion to the aristocratic captain, Robert FitzRoy. FitzRoy
desired someone of his own station to be his friend for the long voyage, and
the well-bred young graduate Charles seemed to fit the bill. Charles, however,
did not get along with his boss, a pompous racist who hesitated to hire Darwin
because of the shape of his nose. They quarreled often, and it was FitzRoy's
hatred of Darwin that allowed Darwin the extended shore treks through the
Galapagos islands and South America. FitzRoy was simply happy to have Darwin
out of his sight for a while, and Darwin took advantage of this by compiling
the voluminous notes on local species that eventually led to his theory of
evolution and natural selection. Guess he showed them.
Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday, the discoverer of electromagnetism and one of the first to realize its full potential, was stuck in a chain of underpaid, menial jobs that seem to have only gotten in the way of what he really wanted to do. Faraday first started work in Britain's Royal Institution as a laboratory assistant. This was in 1813, and his salary was 20 shillings per week. In 1815, he was reappointed at 30 shillings per week, and received the title of Assistant and Superintendent of the Apparatus of the Laboratory and Mineralogical Collection, which meant that in addition to his regular lab duties, he also had to look after and clean the apparatus and all those rock samples. Much later, Faraday became director of the laboratory, but his salary, [[sterling]]100 per annum, sucked at the start and stayed that way for 40 years.
Nicolo Machiavelli
Machiavelli, the 16th-century statesman who wrote the first practical manual on how to rule a nation, The Prince, shocked contemporaries, who likened him to the Anti-Christ, and impressed leaders from Napoleon to Kissenger with his coldly pragmatic ends-justify-the-means thesis. The Prince had another purpose aside from instructing would-be despots: to land Nick a job.
Before writing The Prince, Machiavelli was a minister in republican Florence. But once his regime was overthrown and the Medici dynasty returned to power, Nick turned to farming lettuce outside the city walls. Machiavelli desperately wanted something like his old job back, so he wrote and dedicated The Prince to Lorenzo de Medici, the new boss, in hopes of getting a job. Essentially, The Prince was the longest, most-read resumé in history. As such, it was an abject failure -- someone else got the job.