In response to President Hu Jintao’s fourth virtue for China’s men and women (“Work hard; don’t be lazy and hate work”), I offer this startling passage from a famous book by the Hegelian philosopher Kojeve:

An animal at liberty is never lazy, for if it were, it would die of hunger or not propagate. Man can be lazy only at work, precisely because work, properly so-called, corresponds to no vital necessity….Work is always a ‘forced’ work. Man must force himself to work, he must do violence to his ‘nature.’ And, at least at the beginning, it is another who forces him to it and thus does him violence.