A Simple Rule, Asked to Do Too Much Work
"Those who can work should work" sounds almost too obvious to argue with. Dignity through contribution, participation over idleness — a fair civic bargain. But the sentence hides a quiet trapdoor: the word can. Who decides what a person can do? And what happens to the ones who cannot, but are treated as if they simply will not?
This week's headlines, read together, answer that question more honestly than most policy debates do.
When the Law Itself Forbids the Work
Five years after the Taliban's return to Kabul, life there is reported in a familiar register: quiet endurance under rules that decide, by decree, who may work at all. Afghan women are not idle by temperament. They are idle by edict. If a government bans half its population from offices, classrooms, and clinics, then asks the world to notice how little that half contributes, it is not describing laziness — it is describing its own decree, wearing a disguise.
The lesson generalizes far beyond Kabul. Any time a society debates who "refuses" to work, the first honest question is not about character. It is about access. Was the door open?
When the Door Is a Locked Cell
Consider the men reportedly deported and held, bound and beaten, in a detention hotel in Equatorial Guinea. Consider the thirty-seven people who died gasping in an overcrowded Nigerian prison cell — many likely held not for grave crimes but for unpaid fines or unresolved cases, the oldest and cruelest form of debt bondage dressed up as justice. None of these people are choosing idleness. They are people from whom the very possibility of contributing has been physically removed, sometimes for reasons no court would defend in daylight.
A society that quietly tolerates such detention, and then elsewhere lectures its own poor about "getting up and working," is not applying one standard. It is applying two, and hoping nobody compares them.
The Golden Rule, Applied to Suspicion
Reciprocity is a useful test here: what you would not want done to you, do not do to others. Would you accept being called lazy while locked in a cell you cannot leave? While barred by law from your own profession? While recovering from an illness a bureaucrat has not bothered to verify? If the answer is no, then the accusation of laziness carries a burden of proof — and that burden belongs to the accuser, not the accused.
This is not an argument against the underlying principle. Work matters — for dignity, for solidarity, for a society's capacity to sustain itself without pretending its generosity is infinite. Mature democracies are right to expect participation from those genuinely able to give it, and right to keep the rules for judging that ability clear and proportionate, not a thicket of paperwork that punishes the honest and exhausts the caseworker.
But proportionate rules cut both ways. A rule that is simple enough to apply fairly must also be humble enough to ask, before judging: was the door open? Was the body well? Was the law itself the obstacle?
The Test of an Honest Society
Here is the standpoint worth holding, plainly: a society earns the right to ask "why don't you work?" only after it has removed the barriers it controls — unjust detention, discriminatory decree, unpayable fines turned into indefinite cages, illness left unexamined. Until then, the question is not a civic expectation. It is an alibi.
The distinction is not soft-heartedness dressed as policy. It is the difference between a society confident enough to ask honest questions and one that needs a scapegoat to avoid asking harder ones about its own laws, prisons, and decrees.
Work if you are able. Fair enough. But the harder, more useful sentence — the one that actually tests a society's decency — is this: first, make sure they are able. Then, and only then, ask why they don't.