I grew up believing that success and happiness in life are the result of hard work. For a long time, this was my primary ideology, one of the most basic beliefs through which I interacted with and judged society around me. It took a long time to realize that this made me a very lazy person.

While I may have worked hard in my individual endeavors, it nonetheless made me a lazy interpreter of other people’s situations. It made me a lazy citizen.

If I saw a successful or wealthy person, I would extrapolate from my belief in the value of hard work, and assume that that person was a hard worker. And likewise, if a person was poor or not successful, then that person must be lazy or foolish in some way.

The problem with all of that is that many people are born into wealth, and receive it through no merit of their own. Similarly, a tremendous number of people who live in poverty are unbelievably hard working people.

And many people, despite not being born into wealth, are born into positions of privilege. This means that some people’s (usually people who are white and people who are men) work gets them farther than the same amount of work from other people (usually people who are not men and people who are not white).

This belief in hard work essentially freed me from the responsibility of making the effort to learn the context and history of our social realities. It freed me from having to consider other viewpoints or experiences. It made me less compassionate.

In general, this is a pernicious flavor of laziness. The worship of hard work is often among a person’s root-ideologies. It determines many other opinions ideologically downstream. Those opinions in turn affect how we treat others. It also affects how we vote on public policy that may be beneficial to those members of society with less privilege than ourselves.

Meritocracy

One common term for this type of belief in the value of hard work above all else is ‘meritocracy.’ It’s the idea that everyone is rewarded with success in life according to how hard they work. The rewards are supposed to come regardless of age, sex, race, where a person was born, and other non-optional traits. Some correlations of this belief system are that the past doesn’t matter, historical inequality doesn’t matter, and policy that asymmetrically affects certain groups of people doesn’t matter. All that matters is the hard work a person puts in here and now.

This belief system creates a world view in which each person and each action exist essentially in a vacuum, independent of other historical or societal variables.

A whole bunch of recent documentaries, like Ava du Vernay’s Thirteenth and Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, and articles like Ta Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations do a wonderful job of putting contemporary social ills into a historical perspective. They refute the idea that everyone’s work is valued to the same degree. They prove that our actions and consequences do not exist in a vacuum.

They also highlight the very real damage that comes to whole categories of people (usually people of color and women) when we as citizens refuse to learn and consider the context of the uneven playing field that is our society.

In other words, such documentaries and articles (and countless other books, films, interviews, and personal testimony from millions of citizens) argue against the United States as a meritocracy. In so doing, they also condemn the continuation of lazy beliefs in this non-existent meritocracy.

The Protestant Work Ethic

Another term for the belief in the value of hard work, especially important to the United States historically, is ‘Protestant Work Ethic.’ As Church Reformers like John Calvin moved away from certain tenets of the Catholic faith in the 16th Century, the old signs of God’s favor (like fervency of belief, or the famous confessing with your mouth that Jesus is Lord bit) needed to be replaced.

The Calvinists adopted a belief system where you were preordained for either heaven or hell. The quest for adherents of the faith moved away from earning salvation to discerning if one was amongst the already-saved.

One sign of salvation that people sought after was that of monetary success through hard work and frugal living. This, the famous Protestant Work Ethic, is one of the founding ideologies of the United States, and continues to be a prevalent belief system for many of us.

In a nice article from October 2012 (during the 2012 presidential election, which explains the Bishop [Mitt] Romney reference), Robert S. Becker raises some issues with the Protestant Work Ethic:

What needs challenge isn’t work per se but the Protestant work credo and noxious linkages: 1) that worldly success signals heavenly election; 2) that will power alone (and the right Christian values) will overcome all uneven playing fields; and 3) that status (read: money) awards “winners” like Bishop Romney the moral right to rule the entire roost.

Related to his 2nd point, I would add another noxious (and somewhat ironic) linkage to his list: it makes those of us who believe in it lazy and dangerous.

If we believe that will power (and Christian values) will overcome all uneven playing fields, then we don’t need to learn or understand context. We already have all the answers we need.

A Proposed Hero from Our Shared Television Reality

Allow me to propose a role model for the overcoming of intellectual laziness inherent in believing that hard work overcomes all: television’s Dr. Gregory House. Although he may be less than satisfactory as a role model in many ways, he is anything but lazy in his thinking.

And the way that he isn’t lazy strikes me as especially important.

Dr. House’s specialty is the diagnosis of especially tricky cases. Especially those which his colleagues have been unable to figure out. One way House usually wins the day is through an extensive knowledge about weird, supposedly non-medical things.

This tremendous curiosity of his affords him a broad range of topics about which he’s very knowledgeable.

In Season 1, Episode 21, “Three Stories”, we are taken through the diagnosis of a supposed snake bite victim. After testing a snake found at the scene of the accident, House happens to know that one snake that was tested couldn’t be the biter, since it hadn’t had enough time to produce the amount of venom it had at the time of testing.

A particularly pesky student incredulously asks House if they’re really supposed to know how much venom different species of snakes produce. House replies that no, unless, of course, they have a snake bite victim as a patient.

Another of House’s useful tactics is his rigorous (often illegal) pursuit of context. He’s constantly having his medical team break into the homes of their patients to find any clues as to the exact nature of their condition.

And very often, a specific aspect of the patient’s environment is the cause of his/her sickness. One lovely and fairly extreme example comes from Season 3, Episode 18, “Airborne.” The patient is an elderly woman with sudden onset of seizures and other increasingly serious symptoms.

To reduce a great episode to a blurb, the cause of the woman’s sickness is not a spate of wild behaviors she’s suddenly chosen to indulge in at 80 years old.

The cause is the fumigation of her neighbor’s house with methyl bromide. This house is connected to her own via an underground pipe, which Dr. Chase, one of House’s underlings, discovers on his second trip to her home.

The patient herself didn’t even know about the fumigation, but was nearly killed by it nonetheless. Only the stringent search for accurate context led to a discovery of the real cause of the patient’s sickness.

The Point of All That

The point, besides indulging myself in talking about my favorite TV show, is that I believe the answer to the laziness-via-hard-work problem is in these examples from House.

As citizens, I believe that we must be curious enough to explore the world around us. Importantly, we must also be pertinacious enough to allow what we learn to change our opinions regarding our complicated social reality.

If we foster our natural curiosity as human beings and have the humility to change our opinions about why some people are successful and others aren’t, we’ll be better equipped to interact with empathy and responsibly with all members of society.

And when it comes to this huge fishbowl we’re all thrown into together, what’s good for the least advantaged among us is good for all of us.