National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" devoted eight minutes this week to having Shereen Marisol Meraji interview Tricia Hersey, the author of Rest Is Resistance. From the transcript:
HERSEY: Rest is a form of resistance because it pushes back and disrupts white supremacy and capitalism.....
MERAJI: I really want to talk more about tenet No. 1 - rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy....
HERSEY: Oh, my God. This is about more than naps. Thank you for saying that. I say it so much. It's a paradigm shift. It's mind-altering. It's culture-shifting. It's a full-on politics of refusal. We have been brainwashed by this system to believe these things about rest, about our bodies, about our worth, this violent culture that wants to see us working 24 hours a day, that doesn't view us as a human being but instead views our divine bodies as a machine.
And so when I think about the first tenet and this idea of disrupting and pushing back, for me, when we are on - in a system that we're on that's under capitalism that doesn't look at people as people - they look at profit. White supremacy - they don't see the divinity in all of us. And so these two systems working in collaboration, we can push back against them....
HERSEY: ...You know, when I think about hobbies and how everyone is, like, monetizing their hobbies right now, and I'm like, no, that's capitalism telling you...
MERAJI: Yeah.
HERSEY: ...That you need to, like, monetize crocheting. Like, my sister is a beautiful fiber artist, and she says to her, that's the most meditative, restful state, when she's crocheting blankets for people. And she refuses to sell them. She's like, if I do that...
MERAJI: It'll be stressful.
HERSEY: ...Then it will become capitalism, making it not fun. And it's all linked back to trying to make money...
MERAJI: There's this point you make in the book, which for me is so key. You say resting and recharging and rejuvenating is not so that we can grind more. It's not so that we can prepare ourselves to, you know, give more output to capitalism. That is not actually what this is about...
HERSEY: Not at all.
MERAJI: ...At all.
HERSEY: Not at all. People get it twisted and think that's what it's about because a lot of corporations are pushing this idea. They're saying, have our employees rest more. You guys can have a nap room here so that you can be more productive when you come to work, so that we can pay less in health insurance premiums. So we're not resting to get ourselves more riled up to be on capitalism's clock. We are resting simply because it is our divine and human right to do so.
I'm all for rest—the Bible tells us that even God rested on the seventh day of creation. But resting doesn't have to be in opposition to capitalism. In fact, if you think of rest as part of some battle against capitalism, it might make it lest restful. The capitalism is what helps efficiently to supply that comfortable mattress and pillow that you are resting on, and also makes available the heat or air conditioning that makes the resting environment comfortable. It's easier to rest in peace when you can know that the economy is strengthened by competition and choice, private ownership and voluntary exchange, rather than dependent on the centralized government control, leading to scarcity, that comes with alternatives to capitalism such as socialism or communism. Under non-capitalist systems, government-sponsored radio programs such as NPR might be the only available news outlets, and privately owned alternatives such as the one you are reading now might be banned or unavailable. And in non-capitalist systems, books questioning the system might be banned, and authors questioning the system, instead of benefiting from the private publishers such as Little, Brown that published the "Rest Is Resistance" book, might risk being thrown in prison or tortured for their dissent.
It's symptomatic of the confusion that afflicts so many these days that some people, or radio programs, can't even take a nap these days without turning it into an attack on capitalism.