In 2003, I took part in a cross-country bicycle ride sponsored by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), the social-justice arm of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Our goal was to raise awareness about what the USCCB was doing to address the “root causes of poverty” in America. Besides riding our bicycles upward of six hours a day from state to state on our “Brake the Cycle of Poverty” tour, we would give talks at parishes and other community centers about “ending poverty” once and for all.

While I was a “lefty Catholic” at the time—helping to run a Catholic Worker house of hospitality, serving the poor in soup kitchens, and helping with refugee relocation, among other things—even I had doubts that such an endeavor (the elimination of poverty) was humanly possible. After all, didn’t our Lord say, “the poor you will have with you always” (Matthew 26:11)? How exactly does one “eliminate poverty” while respecting human agency? How do we help our brothers and sisters in need without enabling bad choices? Are there “deserving” and “undeserving” poor? These were questions I wrestled with while cresting the Sierra Nevadas and descending the Rockies as we traversed the country to bring awareness about the issue of poverty and how many Americans were falling through the cracks.

Twenty-plus years after riding from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., on that two-month awareness-raising campaign, poverty is still here.

Elon Musk, the self-appointed secular savior of the human race, recently put forth a bold proposal to “eliminate poverty” once and for all. From preventing people committing crime to eliminating the need for work altogether and providing a universal income, Musk purports that AI and Tesla’s Optimus robots “will replace all jobs.” Musk’s vision is one of “sustainable abundance,” in which “Working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables, instead of buying them from the store.”

While Musk seems ahead of his time as a business and social entrepreneur, his myopic vision of an egalitarian society that has eliminated poverty and human suffering should sound alarm bells for any Christian even vaguely familiar with the social teachings of the Catholic Church on the dignity of the human person and the role of work in society.

Pope St. John Paul II, in his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens, stated, 

Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature. 

Of course, the late pontiff was simply echoing the innards of Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (On Capital and Labor), where the pope seeks to define the relative rights and mutual duties of both rich and poor and speaks out against “crafty agitators [who] are intent on making use of these differences of opinion to pervert men’s judgments and to stir up the people to revolt” (RN, 2).

Is the issue of poverty an issue of “efficiency,” as Musk sees it, in which bureaucratic ineptitude and misappropriation is what undermines a viable solution to the problem of poverty and its elimination from the social and economic sphere? As Christians, we recognize that part of the Fall is that labor has become both our cross and punishment as well as what allows us to take part in the act of co-creation with God the Father. Labor, then, is both a sentence and an invitation to participation in God’s creative work.

St. Paul admonishes those who are able but not willing to work that they shall not eat unless they work (2 Thessalonians 3:10). Work is edifying. For men, it is tied up in our identity—work is what we do, what we are called to do, and it ties in with where we draw our dignity and sense of self from. In fact, men are nearly twice as likely to have mental health problems due to being unemployed than women. And young, single, idle men in developing countries are prime candidates for radical extremist groups to recruit.

The right to private property—reinforced in the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, among others—is derived from nature not from man (RN, 47). The World Economic Forum (WEF), highlighting a phrase from a 2016 essay by Danish author Ida Auken which has now become infamous (“You will own nothing and be happy”), is the very antithesis of the Church’s concept of subsidiarity. Its chilling prediction for the year 2030—less than a half decade away—seems to be a precursor to Musk’s vision of a future devoid of suffering, want, and economic inequality; a vision that seeks to eliminate not only the undesirable ends but also the good and God-given means (i.e., work/labor) which make man distinct as a creature and afford him dignity.

But work is not even just a means to an end—that is, affording man a livelihood and the ability to put food on the table for his family. Work is a good in and of itself for man, as John Paul II reiterates, “because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being’” (LE, 9). 

I might complain periodically about issues at work, or begrudgingly drag myself out of bed to head into the office on a Monday morning, but I am deeply grateful as a man for both the opportunity to work to provide for my family and the act of participation work affords me for my own well-being as a man and a human being. The thought of trading that in for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in which I am no longer required to labor under the sweat of my own brow is both chilling and an affront to all men who find their God-given dignity in work. Moreover, it is a violation of the Church’s priority of human labor (LE, 12).  Should human labor be replaced by a global entourage of Optimus robots which displace work for mankind, our dystopian 2030 future will be a nightmare not of forced labor but of forced leisure.  Tweet This

It’s ironic that one of the world’s leading capitalists has taken on a Maoist appointment of an egalitarian future in which suffering, disease, and poverty do not exist. This goes beyond a 21st-century version of The Jetsons’ “Rosey the Robot” that does your dusting for you. Should human labor be replaced by a global entourage of Optimus robots which displace work for mankind, our dystopian 2030 future will be a nightmare not of forced labor but of forced leisure.