From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a "disutility"; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.
E. F. SchumacherThat soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of 'bread and circuses' can compensate for the damage done-these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence-because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.
E. F. Schumacher...liberation from constraints that operate at the level of ordinary humanity---limits imposed by space and time, by the needs of the body, and by the opaqueness of the computer-like mind. All three examples [Jacob Lorber, Edgar Cayce, and Therese Neumann] illustrates the paradoxical truth that such 'higher powers' cannot be acquired by any kind of attack or conquest conducted by the human personality; only when the striving for 'power' has entirely ceased and been replaced by a certain transcendental longing, often called the love of God, may they, or may they not be 'added unto you.
E. F. SchumacherIs there enough to go around? What is enough? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues economic growth as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of enough.
E. F. SchumacherTo organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.
E. F. Schumacher