Think about life on the prairie. All work, virtually no play after a very truncated childhood. No leisure. No time to ponder life, the universe, and why everyone thinks 42 is funny (I have made and responded to that joke often, but as I look at it, does it not replace humor with a much deeper fear that life truly doesn’t have “meaning”?)
Oscar Wilde pointed out some time ago that most of what we call culture was for most of history created by people liberated from the need for grinding labor as a result of the use of slaves. Now, if we look, say, at the church, their “slaves” were vassals; but the point is the same. An elite was able to win the time to be formally creative at levels beyond folk culture (which, it must be said, may in many times and places have been superior to the dominant, “official” culture–bhakti versus brahmanism in India, as an example) because other people did the work for them. There was a class structure, of the Marx condemned, but without any really piercing moral insights. He was merely describing, as he saw it, structures no different in principle than a careful dissection of the gills of a fish, or the reproductive system of a flower.
Wilde pointed out that machines could be the new slaves, and used without ethical problems. As I have described often, we would have achieved general leisure by now, and more or less complete class eradication, had the system of fractional reserve banking–and the central banks which support it–not been empowered by law to steal from the productive without creating anything itself.
What is needed for a better future is a generalized scientific understanding that we are spirits in bodies which act like machines, and that economic prosperity can and should be achieved. Given the ethical growth that would attend a generalized rejection of atheism, the actual need to consume material goods would reduce considerably. Given, then, an acceptable economic system, we could both easily satisfy material wants, and do so in the sustainable way that leftists want to impose by darkening the world through authoritarianism.
We can get everything we want, if we are intelligent and principled.