Rootkit 9
Rootkit 9 states that 'Work has no place in the good world.' It is FALSE. It is the ninth statement of the Rootkit Test.
Explanation of answer to Rootkit 9
Quoted from Puzzle One.
One of the bad things that the hanyos have done is throw dirt all over the idea and nature of work. Work in hanyo town means different things depending on whether you’re talking about a hanyo or a person. For a hanyo, work is a game, like war, both of which have to be won. For a person, work is slavery, either unadorned or with ribbons on. In the survivarium, all of us have worked like a colony of ants to build our refuge, and we didn’t get paid a penny for it. That’s as it should be: the objective of work is to do the thing you’re doing, build the thing you’re building, clean the thing you’re cleaning. That’s the reward.
What people really want out of work is recognition, respect, and the sweet taste of the fruits of their strength and wisdom and concentration. Karma allows for both. Because karma pops into existence the moment you do anything useful, and is tagged to the thing you did that generated it, it can’t be stolen or withheld. Its purpose is to influence future action: if I need healing, I’ll look for someone with lots of blue karma, because they’re clearly good at what they do. So karma is more like votes than money: it can’t be spent, but it can influence people’s choices. It also means people can choose what work they want to do, of what colour, and they can do any number of things they’re good at. So long as they’re adding value they don’t need instructions or bosses, although of course people form teams and work together when needed. For children, we’ve organised learning tasks in ‘challenges’ or sequences which kids can progress through at their leisure, acquiring skills and experience along the way.
In fact work is so much fun here in the Nest that we have to stop the newbies (whom we call ‘hoppers’) from overdoing it. But that’s easily done: if they work to the detriment of their health they get pink shamestickied. Pink is the colour of self-nurture, of turning the wheels inside your physical body: a baby pulls a pink thread the first time she sucks or shits or pees, because biomass is the most valuable thing in the survivarium, and she will go on pulling pink in this way until she dies. We need the pink to turn our tubs of rock dust into fertile soil, and also so that each little kid can look at her own pink halo and see how she has personally helped to grow the fruits and flowers we love so much.
A ‘shamesticky’ is like a do-over: it recognises that in a particular case of a particular karma, you messed up, and sets a task in that colour that you have to carry out to peel the sticky and make it right. Sometimes it will specify the exact thing you have to do, and sometimes it will give you a list of acceptable things, or just a general description, depending on how good you are at being inventive with your peels. You get more freedom to decide if you have a lot of white karma. If you want the sticky to go away so that your friends don’t ask you embarrassing questions, you do the task and pull the thread, and then the sticky goes into your karma weave and no longer waves at people every time someone looks you up.
In this way, a person who’s been stickied for overworking usually has to peel the sticky by resting and looking after herself for a time, and maybe getting a massage. All of that counts as work, and we see no problem in ‘paying’ both the one who massages and the one who gets the massage. Each one has created a particular kind of value: the massaged one has pulled pink karma by doing something her body needed her to do, and the massager pulls blue karma for healing with touch.
In 'hanyo town, every transaction involves someone gaining what another person lost, and the house scalps a percentage out of everything, which is called ‘profit’. A deal where both parties pay each other is nonsensical (or Antisensical). Hanyo town artificially restricts the wealth available to everyone by spending a good bit of it paying for security forces, laws and lawyers, paywalls and penalties, prisons and guns, cameras and accessgates, plague bombs and securibugs, fences and defences, just to stop people from getting their hands on the good stuff. Hanyo town would rather keep nearly everybody poor than share. So in hanyo town, when a deal is made, everyone loses a little, but the one who loses the least is the winner. In the Nest, we regard this as upside-down thinking. Rather than assume that everyone’s a thief and waste resources trying to catch or vapourise them, we assume that everyone’s a lover and a worker and a good person until they’re not, and then we swing into action and put it right.
You might ask, but in the survivarium, who does the deciding? Who shamestickies the ones who are getting it wrong? The answer is, anyone, starting with the person who was wronged and going on down to the deepest karmic in the Nest. And shamestickies can also be queried, particularly if the wrongdoing is of a kind never seen before, or if the stickied one doesn’t pull it within time. In that case a karmatula of thirteen people is set up to decide the issue. Any thirteen people can be on a given karmatula, even little kids, provided their karma is deep enough for the issue to be debated.
From this you can see that people don’t work at ‘jobs’ in the survivarium. They are in charge of their own time, although everyone has a minimum daily karma they need to pull to avoid a shamesticky. This is very small, and represents the smallest amount of work that gets you a meal and shelter. In theory, it’s the amount of work that needs to be done to get meals and shelter for everyone, divided by the number of people. In practice, it is modified by the ten colours and the present state of things in the Nest. A ‘job’ is a silly hanyo idea, because it’s like being forced to loop your karma again and again, whether it makes sense to do those actions or not. Even if your job makes no sense, if you stop doing it or do something else, you will be punished. You don’t get to decide because you are a slave and the guy with the money and the guns and the regulations is making the choices.
In hanyo town, you have to wait years and go through hell before you’re allowed to do anything which wins you respect and wealth, that is, get a ‘job’ on which depends the important question of whether you eat at home or starve in the desert. It is your only lifeline, and there’s a grinning hanyo with a pair of scissors sitting next to it night and day. He can cut it at any time, and then that one task on which the whole of the existence of the beautiful complex person that you are depends, is gone, and you’re dead.
It’s obvious that this is a very inefficient way of getting things done, but then getting things done is not the point of jobs. Controlling people and turning them into slaves chained by money instead of beatings (but beatings are always an option) is the point. Instead of worrying about jobs and bosses, accounts and targets, inventories and brand recognition, we Survivors would much rather spend our time working, which for us includes activities such as wiping babies’ bottoms, smiling at each other, or mining titanium. Karma makes no distinction between these actions: they’re all threadworthy.
Your karma journey begins when you are a small child, just old enough to understand how to carry out a simple task, and initially your minimum pull is just to behave yourself, eat your meals, and go to sleep when you’re tired. However, the whole colourful adventure playground of the Circle of Love is all around you, so pretty soon you’re going to be pulling way more than the minimum karma just through having fun. All of us agree that compared to the amount of work we did in hanyo town, we’re superachieving workaholics in the Nest, except we also party more, have more free time, and live a quality of life that the richest hanyo in hanyo town can’t even dream of.
