Mein Kampf
time more or less of unemployment is unimportant, even though it be a matter not of winning economic rights but of destroying political, social, or cultural values. If he has not become strike-minded, at least he is indifferent to strikes.
I have watched this process a thousand times with my own eyes. The longer I saw the game go on, the greater was my aversion to this city of millions, which first greedily sucked men in, then cruelly wore them to pieces.
When they came they still belonged to their nation; if they stayed, they were lost to it.
I too had been thus flung around by life in the great city; I had had a chance to feel the whole force of such a fate on body and soul. I discovered something else as well; rapid alternation of work and unemployment and the consequent perpetual seesawing of income and expenditure eventually destroyed many people’s sense of thrift and intelligent planning. Apparently the body gradually becomes used to living high in good times and starving in bad. Nay more, hunger destroys all good intentions of sensible planning in better times; it surrounds its victim with a constant mirage of well-fed prosperity. This dream grows to such morbid intensity that there is no more self-control the moment wages allow it. That is why a man who can scarcely get any work whatever stupidly forgets all planning, and instead lives greedily for the moment. In the end his tiny weekly income is upset, since he cannot plan even here; at first it lasts five days instead of seven, then only three, then scarcely a day, to be at last squandered the first evening.
There are likely to be wife and children at home. Often they too are infected by this way of life, particularly if the man is naturally kind to them, and even loves them in his way. Then the week’s pay is jointly dissipated in two or three days at home; they eat and drink as long as the money holds out, and go through the remaining days together on empty stomachs. Then the wife slinks about the neighborhood, borrowing a bit here and there, contracting little debts with the shopkeeper, and trying thus to survive the awful later days of the week. At noon they all sit
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