Synthesized answer
The provided passages discuss a society that has established a law of equality, which has led to a decline in the people's energies and a pervasive apathy [1, 2]. This equality was achieved by suppressing individual differences and lowering standards to a common mediocrity [1]. The founders of this community made a mistake by ignoring inherent human tendencies and aspirations that drive progress [3].
The text suggests that the people are unhappy because they lack "downright hard work" [3]. Leisure has become the law, and the necessary labor to maintain the population is very light, with work hours diminishing over time [3, 4]. This has resulted in a situation where people seem to have no serious purpose other than to "murder time" [2].
Synthesized from the book passages below. Chat with the book on Feynman for follow-up.
From the book
ng of individual activity has finally produced its legitimate result--it has fatally sapped the energies of the people. It is a curious and interesting feature in one’s study of this people, to find that it is not the establishment of the law of equality which has been the cause of decay in this people, but the enforcement of the opposite law--the law it was soon found necessary to establish against inequality. It naturally and logically followed that if men are to be made equal, such equality can only be maintained by the suppression of degrees of inequality. Mentally, for instance,…
games, museums and shows? If a people are not happy under such conditions, what will insure content? Yet come with me. Let us walk through the principal thoroughfares, and watch the multitudes of people wandering listlessly up and down the streets; let us see them as they drift aimlessly into the theaters, museums, clubs; let us look in on them as they idly finger the new books and newspapers, yawning over them as they read, and you will agree with me, that the entire population seems to have but one really serious purpose in life--to murder time which appears to be slowly killing…
sloth of energy, I have come to two conclusions which have helped me to solve the problem of this people’s unhappiness. My first conclusion is that the people are dying for want of work--of downright hard work; my second conclusion is that in trying to establish the law of equality, the founders of this ideal community committed the fatal mistake of counting out those indestructible, ineradicable human tendencies and aspirations which have hitherto been the source of all human progress, to which I alluded in my last letter. First, let us take the subject of work. As all work, men and…
the very summit and to the full glory of the possession of their social, civic and political desires and aspirations? Is there not equality of sex? Has not leisure instead of labor become a law? Is not private property abolished--is not the land the property of the State--the wage system become a thing of the past, and the possession of capital made a crime punishable by law? Does not the State also exist for the people, educating them, training them for their work in life, distributing among them any surplus funds that the public treasury may accumulate, and furnishing for their…
She has gained her independence at the expense of her strongest appeal to man, her power as mistress, wife and mother. How can a man get up any very vivid or profound sentiment or affection for these men-women--who are neither mothers nor housekeepers, who differ in no smallest degree from themselves in their pursuits and occupation? Constant and perpetual companionship, from earliest infancy to manhood and old age has resulted in blunting all sense of any real difference between the sexes. Whatever slight inequalities may still exist between men and women in the matter of muscular…