Many people condemn laziness without enquiring into it’s cause
Under the one name, laziness, a series of results due to different causes have been grouped, of which each one could be a source of good, instead of being a source of evil to society. Like all questions concerning criminality and related to human faculties, facts have been collected having nothing in common with one another. People speak of laziness or crime, without giving themselves the trouble to analyse the cause. It is much the same with mental illness or medical issues, as modern medicine tends to target the pathology of an illness rather than preventing it. They are in a hurry to punish these faults without enquiring if the punishment itself does not contain a premium on ‘laziness’ or ‘crime’. Such punishments are Illogical consequences and are only met with attempts to circumvent the punishment rather then correcting the action itself. This is why if a free society saw the number of idlers increasing in its midst, would no doubt think of looking for the cause of the laziness first, in order to address it, before having recourse to punishment.
References
- Kropotkin, Peter. (1892). The Conquest of Bread Chapter 12. Objections (p. 214).