Can you discern work that is and isn't beneficial to humanity's survival?

Answer 1

Yes. Of course.

Answer 2

The ground work for all benificial work is thought. Anything that corrupts that activity is not benificial to humanities survival. Of course there are far more complex descriptions to read and intellectually process and much of it is dualistic thinking rather than wholistic and logically analytical, and therefore one sided.

'Hegel’s Science of Logic

Highlighted text is Lenin's underlining. The ® access his annotations.

Volume One: The Objective Logic
Book One: The Doctrine of Being
With What must Science Begin?

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§ 88

It is only in recent times that thinkers have become aware of the difficulty of finding a beginning in philosophy, and the reason for this difficulty and also the possibility of resolving it has been much discussed. What philosophy begins with must be either mediated or immediate, and it is easy to show that it can be neither the one nor the other; thus either way of beginning is refuted.

§ 89

The principle of a philosophy does, of course, also express a beginning, but not so much a subjective as an objective one, the beginning of everything. The principle is a particular determinate content — water, the one, nous, idea, substance, monad, etc. Or, if it refers to the nature of cognition and consequently is supposed to be only a criterion rather than an objective determination — thought, intuition, sensation, ego, subjectivity itself. Then here too it is the nature of the content which is the point of interest. The beginning as such, on the other hand, as something subjective in the sense of being a particular, inessential way of introducing the discourse, remains unconsidered, a matter of indifference, and so too the need to find an answer to the question, With what should the beginning be made? remains of no importance in face of the need for a principle in which alone the interest of the matter in hand seems to lie, the interest as to what is the truth, the absolute ground.'

But here is the onesidedness of that, as 'truth' is given in this portion of this description as a single definite article rather than the multi or plural 'truths' for which serve the substance for absolute ground. Well, this could go on forever. chau.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlbegin.htm#HL1_67

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlconten.htm

Answer 3

Yes, pretty much any job most of us do on a day to day basis is completely trivial and irrelevant to humanity's survival.