Working For Free

A Mug - British Slang. a gullible person; dupe; fool.

I do work for free, so it is hard for me to talk about this. I write my blogs for free, make videos for free, help people on our Church course for free, take time to do graphics for all our sites for free. I do interviews for free. I do it because I don't have much of an option, we live in a world where everyone wants everything for free and our sites rely on me and others working for free, otherwise the information we provide would never be discovered, and it has been hidden (occult) for long enough already, like thousands of years. Some are kind enough to buy the things I produce, such as books and products on some of the sites, which helps, and some even make donations, which help with the overheads of running a charity.

People ask: Why isn't the Church course free. Why do I have to pay an admin fee when I join your Outer Order. Running a charity isn't free. By law you have to pay for an Accountant every year. Also there are the hosting fees for the sites, the domain name fees, the cost of supplies and postage. They all mount up and that has to be covered before we can use anything for the causes we are raising money for, like Theomerla.

I am however, maybe, a hypocrite then when I say people shouldn't have to work for free. I am volunteering my time to the Church and Order, but that doesn't mean I don't need money to pay my bills with and other living costs. Everyone needs money in this kind of system.

Unfortunately, unpaid work has become so common that people have an embedded notion that they deserve no compensation for their work. So much so, that they even give arguments as to why this system should be perpetuated.

Freud called this defence mechanism "Rationalisation", more recently a very interesting line of research in Social Psychology has named this process "System Justification Theory" and has found strong evidence about how and why it develops.

System Justification Theory (SJT) is a theory of social psychology that postulates that people are motivated, often unconsciously, to bolster, defend, and justify the status quo–-that is, the prevailing social, economic, and political systems. The term “system” is, intentionally, loosely defined to include a wide array of such arrangements and institutions from relationship dyads to family systems, to corporations and organizations, to economic systems and governments, thus the effort is to identify the general social psychological processes that play out in variety of social establishments.

System Justification Theory seeks to address, from a social psychological prospective, the ultimate question of why despite the prevalence of systems of inequality, injustice, and exploitation, resistance and collective action for change, even by those who suffer most from such systems, are relatively rare.

In my opinion the exploited don't seek change, because that would mean they would have to live with the fact that they are being a mug right now, no one wants to admit they are being a mug, apart from me, I admit it. I do too much for too little, I have self respect and know I deserve more and that is why I will say that working for free is wrong. But in true hypocritical fashion I will say that I don't think that the other people who help out in our Church and Order are being mugs, because they know I am not getting anything myself, so have nothing to give them. Bit different than when a corporation asks writers, models, photographers or designers to work for free, for a job that they say will look good in their portfolio, when they CAN afford to give them something, they just don't want to.

I have been attacked for saying people should be paid for their work, called a hypocrite because I am doing everything here for free. And as I explain above, I probably am. Hopefully in the future it won't be a problem, Theomerla is the dream, and the dream is to be self sufficient and live in a care, share and trade type system... but that is only just getting started and we have a long way to go. So I and others like me will continue to be mugs as we work towards permanent change.

Big thanks to those who are supporting our efforts and anyone who wants to give any help, in whatever way you can, please speak up, we need more mugs like us. :)