A.R. Moxon's Blog

Streets: Part II - NOW

 

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The first question was this: How did we get here?

Let’s recap.

We live in an interconnected society—a natural human system, which contains within it many other interconnected natural human systems, all delivering value to its members in the way of natural human systems, that is: shared, foundational, generative, invisible, automatic, inextricable, configurable, and inherited. 

But: this system can be configured for harm. Intentional thieves who understand these basic truths can divert this shared, foundational, generative distribution of value than naturally arises from the very existence of community, stealing more and more for themselves.

This manipulation comes from failing to recognize who our neighbors are; of focusing on self or family or tribe or nation as the outermost limits of human connectivity, when in fact the natural human system extends across the entire globe.

Failure to understand that there are no limits to human connectivity result in foundational lies, which insist that there are some people who matter, and others that don’t.

A system configured along the lines of foundational lies creates injustice.

Injustice subverts a natural human system, to deliver harm and theft instead of value, to deliver loot instead of value. Injustice consumes people to benefit others.

Both the theft and the loot produced by injustice arrive to each individual within that society in the same shared foundational, generative, invisible, automatic, inextricable, configurable, inherited way the value is delivered.

Eventually there comes, for each individual who benefits from the unjust arrangement of an unjust society, a moment of realization of this inheritance.

The knowledge forces a choice. The choice is whether or not to accept the responsibility for the inheritance. The choice determines an individual’salignment with or against the injustice.

Failure on the part of those who benefit from injustice to accept this responsibility carries a far greater cost, which is to inevitably fall victim to the same harm and loss from which they have so long benefited.

Because a system that consumes people will eventually consume you, if you are a person.

Therefore, unjust systems are as unsustainable as a cancer or a virus.

And the defining quality of an unsustainable system is, it does not sustain.

And we are at the point of unsustainability.

Fixing an unsustainable system requires: first, knowledge of harm and loss; next, acceptance of personal individual responsibility; next, actually making the change; and, finally, paying the cost.

A lot of people don’t want to fix the system. They would rather make it even less just. They recently lost a battle, but they’re going to keep fighting to spread the spiritual virus of their bigotry and greed.

A lot of other people, who happily don’t want to make our system less just, still would rather not pay the price of fixing it, and would rather just get back to the way things were before they became aware of the cancerous growth of greed and human consumption within our natural human system—an urge toward false normalcy aligned not with health, but with a desire to inhabit the comfortably ignorant state that we once enjoyed, which is no longer achievable or practical.

Both perspectives will align our natural human system with a series of unsustainable lies.

Because of all this, we are still in pretty deep shit.

End recap.

•

He lost.

That is very very very good. I am beyond relieved. Hundreds of thousands of people will likely now live who would have died. We will have basic competence and a certain minimum level of human decency and minimum level respect for human life in the executive branch again.

For the next four years at least, we won't be held hostage to the whims of a white supremacist fascist.

I'm very glad.

The person who beat him was a man named Joe.

Joe seems like a nice enough fella. He loves his family. He loves his wife. He loves his dog. He has decades and decades of relevant experience. He speaks in complete sentences, and the things he say mostly align with observable reality, and are centered on matters of consequence rather than the latest demands of his own ego. He doesn't intend to simply abandon the country to the ravages of a pandemic. He won't encourage mobs of armed neo-Nazis, in or out of uniform. These are novelties these days. His vice president is the first woman, and the first woman of color, to hold that office. That's absolutely significant, particularly I'd imagine for the black women who formed the unbroken spine of his victory, which was made artificially narrow by legal structures designed to strip those black women of their agency and their voice.

Joe will be a far better president than his predecessor, in the same way that a casserole will make a better meal than a festering mountain of turkey shit. The point being: I don't even have to tell you what kind of casserole.

During the campaign, Joe faced a blistering range of attacks from his opponents, all of which amounted to "If this man gets into office, he will enact massive changes to the way things are, all of which are extremely obvious and needed changes to enormous and present problems that threaten all of our lives."

And Joe won by promising repeatedly that he wouldn't do any of those absolutely necessary things, or at least he won while promising not to do them. Meanwhile his opponents are still terrified, convinced that he will do all these awesome and desperately necessary things he's promised not to do.

There's a lot of talk now about healing, which seems to be centered on healing the people who aren't wounded—the ones who did the harming. The ones who would like to do a lot more harming.

There's a lot of talk now about unifying, without much talk about what we would unify around, or what we would hope to accomplish once unified.

There's a lot of talk about compromise, without much discussion about what—or who, because it's always who—we would give up, or what we expect to gain, or what the other side has ever given up in compromise. By the way, they haven't even conceded the election yet, and don't seem likely to.

There's a lot of talk about how people who we know want to demolish our democracy and hurt millions and millions of us aren't our enemy—as if that's something you get to choose, about people who are actively and enthusiastically attacking you. 

And all the people who cheered Trump, who refuse to believe any of this has actually happened and have already determined not to even recognize Joe's authority, are ready and eager to cheer for the next fascist and white supremacist, because that is what they very much want. 

And a lot of people are already encouraging us to bring them back into the very fold they're actively trying to destroy—not because these people have become any safer, but because doing so would make things feel normal again, and comfortable.

You know, like it was before.

For a lot of people it truly feels as if this was basically just a parlor game, in which they didn't feel the stakes, for which this was mostly about how they personally felt about things.

They'd like to do the work of reconciliation on behalf of abusive people who are still eager to abuse.

They'd like to perform forgiveness upon abusive people on behalf of the abused.

They'd like to encourage the those still being threatened and harmed to perform forgiveness upon those who still unrepentantly seek to harm them.

They'd like to enable reconciliation without reparation.

They'd rather not know things already known.

I suspect this is because if you know something needs to be fixed, then you face a choice, which is whether or not to fix it.

They'd rather not fix things that need fixing.

I suspect this is because if you fix something that needs fixing, then you have to do the work of fixing it, and then you have to pay the price of repair.

We have a lot of work left to do.

•

One of the things my family is doing during the pandemic is watching through streaming TV shows. 

Perhaps you can relate.

We did Parks & Recreation,which was about many things—including how die-hard anti-government libertarians who don't believe in any natural human system at all are actually very nice and steadfast and true, at least to people they like. We did 30 Rock, which was about many things—including how corporate conservative elitists are actually very nice to people they value, and it’s pretty nice to be one of those valuable people. We did Brooklyn 99, which was about many things—including about how the New York police are fun and well-meaning but very open-minded and inclusive loveable goofballs.

I liked these shows a lot, I should say. They’re very funny, well-acted, and well written. I’m just mentioning a few things I noticed that those shows were about, that I didn't really notice before.

We’re watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer now. It’s about many things, some of which I didn’t notice before—but I’m not here to talk about those things. I said all that to mention a point in the denouement of an episode, which concludes with a pyrrhic victory for our heroes, in which they sing (it’s the musical episode) the following lines:

The battle’s done, and we kinda won, so we sound our victory cheer.

But where do we go from here?

And that’s my question.

•

I am one who now knows things previously unknown. This is my confession of knowledge. I assume there are still many things I don’t yet know that I’ll learn, and so I assume there are many ways in which this confession will be imperfect. So: let the imperfections stand as a part of the confession.

We know things about ourselves that we hate to know, but there’s no going back. There are two questions we have to face, now that we have this knowledge. I’ll get to the second question in time. I chose to wait until after the election to raise the second question, because while the election mattered a great deal, it mostly determined how much damage and harm and pain and theft and murder there was going to be in the near term; not whether there will be any, or what we have to do about it. And these questions, which sound simple, but aren’t, are the same after the election as they were before, and so are the answers.

The first question was about conviction and confession.

The second is about repentance and reparation.

•

The first question was this: How did we get here?

Here’s the second question: What do we do now?

A.R. Moxon is a writer. His novel  The Revisionaries , is available now, with the paperback edition releasing December 1, 2020.

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0. NEXT

PART I: HERE
1. STREET
2. VALUE
3. CONFIGURE
4. NEIGHBOR
5. INHERIT
6. ALIGN

PART II: NOW
7. CONVICT
8. CONFESS
9. REPENT
10. REPAIR

Streets 6 - Align

 

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So that’s the first question asked: How did we get here?

To recap:

I live on a street. Perhaps you can relate.

The street is my street. The house is myhouse. I live in it. And yet if my suburban house were standing alone in a Michigan forest with me and my family in it, with no other houses nearby, my house would be a bizarre curiosity. Anyone buying it would have to take on the additional effort and expense of living in a wilderness. My house would be very hard to sell, and it wouldn’t sell for as much money as it would in my city. Indeed, it likely wouldn’t sell. The expense and effort and risk of living in such a way would be too prohibitive to manage, even among those who can afford houses.

(As an aside: It occurs to me that an ultra-modern house in the middle of a wilderness is one signature of modern ultra-wealth: a picture of one’s individual ability to live independently of any other—an illusion, yes, because even this picture relies on hidden supply chains, but the picture the illusion presents is of an elevated human individual having cut the offensive tether of our inextricable social connectivity. Which some might call The American Dream.)

Fascinatingly, this means it’s everybody else that gives my house most of its value—considerably more than I do. The value others add to my house is the greater value. It would be impossible for me to add more as an individual to the collective than the collective provides me through our natural human system. There exists a great and inextricable human interconnectivity that reaches its way everywhere, into everything: a natural human system.

A natural human system is natural. It grows out of something natural that no human ever built or bought or created.

A natural human system is human. It’s the way a society delivers the full momentum of its intentions to other humans, in a way that is shared, foundational, generative, invisible, automatic, inextricable, configurable and inherited.

And a city is, of course, people. Everybody around me. Everybody, actually. The ultimate natural human system is nothing more or less than our entire planet.

The configuration of a system reflects the true intentions of a city, because they reflect what actually happens—good and bad, just and unjust.

And the cumulative effect of both the good and bad are inherited, whether we intend it or not.

And so we all belong to one another, by which I mean: at the deepest levels of reality, we are all responsible for one another.

End recap.

Yours for only $12 million and helicopter fees.

•

Now seems like a good time to acknowledge the fact that I don’t just receive value from everybody else for my house. I also create value for my personal house by my individual choices. And, while these choices mostly bring value to me and my property, if I make good choices about my property, which benefit me, it will contribute to the value of all the properties around me. My personal maintenance and enhancement of my property benefits, to shrinking degrees, my neighborhood, my city, my state, my country, and the world. It matters.

I feel I should acknowledge this truth now, at this precise point, because I think my previous conclusions will have been extremely offensive to some people—especially any who have decided that the idea of a shared and interconnected life doesn’t exist, but rather the only value that exists is value that we ourselves create through our own personal choices and intentions—and so I’d like to assuage them.

I’m talking to the individualists now. Huddle in, individualists.

You do create value for society through your individual choices. Your decision to be a hard worker, for example, makes society better than if you had decided to be a drunken loafer—provided the work you do assists society rather than drains it for your own gain. Your decision to not personally show overt conscious intentional bigoted hatred to people in your life different from you does make the world better than if you had chosen to do so—provided it isn’t only a show.

Thank you! Well done!

And, also, to validate: Yes, we do create value for ourselves through our choices. We do earn things for ourselves by our ingenuity and determination and effort and skill. Our intentions matter. Our choices matter. Our decisions matter. What we personally individually think matters. Our achievements are real, and they matter. By working hard, or by making more wise choices than unwise choices, we frequently can create better circumstances for ourselves and others than we otherwise could, albeit within a range of possible circumstances constrained by any number of factors, including what choices the city decides should be available to me.

Rejoice, individualists! Celebrate the individual!

So yes, when I choose to (for example) maintain and enhance my home, I increase its value for myself, and I also help maintain value for the houses around me. That decision matters.

By my math this belongs to someone who works 9,500 times harder than the average American.

But see, we’re already getting into trouble, aren’t we? Because if my positive choices positively affect those around me, then it stands to reason that I’m also receiving the positive effect of the cumulative choices of everyone around me, too, right? And it comes to me automatically? And the effects of choices made before I was born play into this overall value? And my existence here, in my house on my street, and the value I receive, is all part of an overall strategy enacted by a collective group of people, reaching back generations? And we know (unless we deliberately choose not to know it) that overall strategy included an inheritance of unjustly diverted value, which afforded me a wider range of available choices than other people, yet a narrower range than others.

So what I’m actually doing through my choices is choosing whether or not to align myself with this invisible, automatic, inextricable, shared, inherited system of value, negative and positive, just and unjust, value and harm, within which I find myself. In so doing, I actually recognize the existence of an interconnected society.

Or I choose to live in an unsustainable lie, that insists I did it all myself.

I’m sorry, individualist. I tried. Reality intruded, as it inevitably does.

Listen—There is enormous value in the power of individual choice. It matters.

I’ll say it again. The individual is something that exists, and each individual is crucially important. (We’ll get to why presently.) It’s just that the effect of individual choice, as much as some individuals might insist otherwise, isn’t the only thing that contributes to reality, nor is it the most powerful contributor, nor could it be, nor should it be—any more than it would be possible (or even a healthy option if possible) for your personal house to be more valuable than all the other houses in the city combined. There is also collective value. It contributes more. It’s the context that makes most individual choices possible. And we’re all associated with it.

Your individual choices simply aren’t the outer bounds of human interconnectivity.

And then there’s this: you chose to be a hard worker, and a profitable one. But notice what that must mean. It’s something easy to miss unless you have eyes for it. Do you see it?

It means that being a hard worker was an available choice. It means that profitability was an available outcome of that choice.

Did you personally choose for those choices to be available? No.

It was an available choice because the shared, foundational, generative, invisible, inextricable, configurable, inherited natural human system within which you live, from which you partake far more value than you could ever give, provided you that choice.

The city decided to make that choice available to you (and many others), because it decided it needed there to be a someone who does what you do, and that someone turned out to be you. Isn’t that great?

Question 1: What if not everybody had the same choices as you?

Question 2: When did you choose to have a body and a mind that functioned well enough to do the work you do?

Question 3: When did you choose to be born in a place and within circumstances from which you could develop that body and mind to do what you do?

Question 4: The people who don’t have a body or a mind that function as yours, the people who weren’t born in a place with the opportunity to develop them … when did they make those choices?

These questions matter, even if you’re motivated only by self-interest. Even if they don’t apply to you, some day they will probably apply to you, or somebody you love.

If choosing to being profitable is the only way you receive your value … what happens if you’re no longer able to make that choice? What if you are one of the unfortunate sort of person, like me, who owns a body that over time will get old and sick? What if you’re like me, and you live in a dynamic world of unpredictable change, in which the reality today isn’t the same as the reality tomorrow, and some force arrives that constrains the available opportunities upon which you staked your fortune? What if the career you’ve chosen can be done by a robot? What if the illness you specialize in treating is cured? What if the value you provide is overtaken by human innovation?

If you live in a world in which every person is considered a part of the human family, and valuable for that fact alone, and fully as worthy of receiving the good and value,

But if you live in the sort of world I live in, where value is mostly determined by profit, then it’s death.

You’ll hear people say things like: If you can’t feed ‘em, don’t breed ‘em.

You’ll hear people say things like: Nobody who works full-time should be denied access to affordable health care.

Can you stop providing value? Or is it possible that profitability is only one metric of value, and even the least profitable person provides incalculable value along other metrics?

What should we say about a society that insists you can, or have, stopped providing value? Should we say that you, because of unfortunate circumstance, or bad choice, or inevitable decline, have stopped producing profit, are therefore worthless? Should we say that they’ve made themselves deliberately ignorant of all other ways of calculating human worth?

Should you then stop receiving value? Can you stop receiving value? What would we think of a society that tried to make sure you did? What do we make of a society that believed that, because of your perceived worthlessness, you should now die?

The good and bad choices you made, you made from the context of the range of available choices you inherited—and the range of choices before you will change. The value you individually added, you only added from the context of a society that enabled it.

And, very observably, not everybody gets the same choices.

You didn’t choose that reality, either. But it will define you, in a society that has configured itself to define people that way.

Read story. (Odette Yousef/WBEZ)

•

There’s the effect of individual intent. Intentional. Specific. Optional. Momentary. Tactical.

Then there’s the effect of collective intent. Automatic. Generative. Generational. Strategic.

They both matter. They both matter a lot.

One simply matters more, practically speaking.

The value of individual action matters more in only one way: you control it, albeit within constraints you don’t control upon the range of available actions.

Therefore, the most important choice you can make as an individual is deciding how to interact with the reality of your place within society—which first requires acknowledging that you belong to a society, and acknowledging that you exist in the context of that society in ways your intentions will never touch, and acknowledging the value you receive, not just the value you give, and acknowledging the ways others don’t receive the same value as you. To acknowledge how you have received that value—and, crucially, to accept whatever responsibility exists for where you are and what you have, and recognize who has choices and who does not.

Let’s return to a picture I recently provided. Suppose I’m driving and I strike an old lady with my car—let’s say on a totally deserted street, with nobody else in sight. I didn’t mean to—which matters, but surely you can see it’s not all that matters. If I’m sitting behind the wheel and the old lady is on the pavement, I have an opportunity that the old lady does not. I get to answer a crucial question with an obvious but difficult answer, which the old lady doesn’t get to ask. I have the responsibility here, because only I have opportunity to do anything about it.

In a practical sense that question really is the most important thing in the world, the entirety of your individual contribution, the sum of your individual value.

That question, again, is this:

Does this have anything to do with me?

Put it another way: do you want to admit you know who put your street there?

•

Try this: suppose you belong to a society that has done something good. Suppose you belong to a society that has organized in such a way that when the city decides, it represents the voice of all people as equally as possible.

Not all societies have done this, as I’m sure you know. In fact, in human history, this is a fairly recent idea, and its execution has been largely imperfect. In my country, which is the United States, it’s only been that way since 1968, when we passed legislation that finally recognized the truth that Black people were human being of equal value to everyone else, were recognized as the equal citizens they always deserved to be, and attempted to allow them to vote free of the many, many, constraints that had until then denied them. And in my country, this legislation made millions of people very very angry. They’re still very very angry about it, it turns out, and they’ve taught many of their children and grandchildren to be very very angry, too.

For most of human history the assumption has been that there are people who mattered most—and many many others who mattered much much less, and then masses of people who don't matter at all. The way it worked, we’d have king, or the landed gentry, or the patriarch, or the warlord, or the billionaire—and they will decide, and everybody else will obey, and that’s how it all gets done. We still have that situation in many places, even in places who have opted into this new innovation of equality, and in those places, the effects of those choices affect the people who live there the same way all collective action affects people, which is automatically and inextricably, etc.

But pretend for just a moment that you belong to a society that has chosen equality and enacted it perfectly. Everybody has a voice. For purposes of scale, everybody chooses representatives. But everybody gets to choose the representatives, without restriction.

In this hypothetical, you are born into a society that is dedicated to equality. Here’s what changes that fact: nothing.

If you don’t take direct action to abet it, you’re still a part of it.

If you don’t even know anything about it, you’re still a part of it.

Even if you’re actively working against it to change it,you’re still a part of it—though your choice to align against it may indeed someday change it, and that choice matters.

If you belong to an equal society your choice is not whether or not to be a part of an equal society. Your choice, if you are aware of the reality of your context, is whether or not to align with it, and in so doing, with the effort to preserve it or to change it.

The default, by the way, is to align with it. If you don’t know about it, then you are carried along in the current of your natural human system, which will do its work with or without your knowledge or consent or intent, even though you still participate in it.

We know this instinctively, I’d observe, we Americans. We’re very proud of having “freed the slaves,” for example, and for “saving the world in World War II,” and liberating concentration camps, and for founding the world’s oldest active democracy, and for the Civil Rights movement, and for being an economic superpower, and going to the moon, and so on.

We personally didn’t do these things. Yet we seem to understand that we’re a part of it, and we’re proud of that. It’s nothing we did, understand. It came to us automatically, inextricably.

Here in America, many of us like to inherit only the good.

This is our alignment.

This alignment exists on my street.

•

Now I’m going to ask you to stretch your imaginations again: suppose you belonged to that society that was not perfectly equal.

Imagine you belonged to a society that until fairly recently had not allowed women to vote, to own property apart from their husband, to make decisions about their own bodies, to participate in society. Imagine that when the city decided, it did not represent the voice of women. Imagine the full weight of that inherited inequality.

Imagine you belonged to a society for which this was also true for people who were not deemed white. Or who were not property owners. Or who were not Christian. Imagine the full weight of that inherited inequality.

Imagine that, even though this society now did permit people outside the original constraints to make their voices heard, it still had preserved many foundational practices that took these inequalities as assumed, and which allow them to still reverberate through the presumptions of its narratives and its halls of power.

In this hypothetical, if you were a man, if you were deemed ‘white,’ if you owned property, you’d benefit from all this—automatically, and if you were a woman, if you weren’t deemed ‘white,’ if you didn’t own property, you would suffer just as automatically. In this hypothetical, you would belong to a society founded in inequality. If you were deemed ‘white,’ or a man, or a property owner, or any other vector of inequality that might exist that hasn’t yet been explored in this example, then you would benefit. If you were more of those things, you’d benefit all the more. If you were all of these things, you’d benefit the most.

You’d have inherited more value—much of it unnaturally diverted. Stolen from others, to whom it otherwise would have come automatically.

Here’s what could change that fact: nothing.

If you don’t take direct action to abet it, you’re still a part of it.

If you don’t even know anything about it, you’re still a part of it.

Even if you’re actively working against it to change it,though your choice to align against it does matter— because that choice may indeed someday help change it—it doesn’t mean you’re not part of it, or don’t participate in it.

If you belong to an unjust society your choice is not whether to be a part of a just society or an unjust society. Your choice, if you are aware of the reality of your context, is whether or not to align with or against it, and in so doing, with the effort to preserve it or to change it. And until you acknowledge it exists, until you admit your context within it, you can’t align against it.

We refuse to know this, I’d observe, we Americans. We reject the notion that we enslaved the people we’re proud of freeing, that our heritage doesn’t only include a fight that ended with slaves freed, but also a fight to keep them enslaved and expand the territory of enslavement. We refuse to admit that we’ve inherited not just the moral weight of the Civil Rights Movement, but also the angry, energized, powerful, violent, and murderous opposition to it. We credit ourselves with defeating the Nazis, but refuse any culpability for having generated the racist practice and theory that energized and inspired them.

We Americans are very offended at the notion that we should inherit responsibility for harm. All the more so, the more we still benefit from that legacy of harm; the more male, and white, and straight, and Christian and wealthy we are. We’re so opposed to the very question “does this have anything to do with me?” that we never ask it, and we reject out of hand any who ask it. It is for us a disqualifying question. We give ourselves license to ignore anyone who ask it, for the offense of having asked.

Here in America, many of us love to inherit wealth, but refuse to inherit responsibility.

This, too, is our alignment.

This, too, exists on my street.

Your alignment with injustice doesn’t touch about your intentions for doing so. Finding a non-racist reason for joining with a white supremacist political party remains a racist decision. Finding a non-authoritarian rationale for joining with authoritarians remains an authoritarian choice. If you decide to join with a Nazi party for economic reasons, you’re still nothing more than a god damned Nazi.

And—your choice to oppose the harm and theft and abuse of injustice doesn’t free you from the responsibility you’ve inherited for benefitting from it—invisibly, inextricably, naturally. The attempt to free yourself from that responsibility reveals a deeper alignment with the injustice.

It’s not a question of being a part of the problem or part of the solution. We don’t face such easy dichotomies as that, no—it’s a question of whether or not we accept the extent to which we are already a part of the problem. Which we are, to the extent that we are beneficiaries of that problem.

Accepting we are already a part of the problem means we have to face a second choice, even less comfortable, which is whether or not to do anything about it.

Individualist, understand this: your alignment is the only real choice you’ve got.

It’s time for us to finally acknowledge who put our streets there.

•

It’s not all bad news for the individualist, though.

Individualist, here’s some very good news: The individual choice of alignment matters. It matters more than anything else you do. Here’s why: it’s the start of the good work of positive innovation.

Your choice is how what is broken gets fixed. It’s how what’s wrong goes right.

How? The same way you fix a street.

Remember: human intention has a momentum. Systems work the way people decide they should work. Which means that what people decide matters. To say something rather obvious, the only way systems change is if people change it. The only way they change it when people realize it needs to be changed, then decide it needs to be changed. And the only way they decide is by changing their alignment to the existing system.

In my experience, streets go from one place to another place. Perhaps you’ve noticed this, too. No matter where you live on your street, it still goes from one place to another place, and what those places are doesn’t change, unless you tear up part of the street and build a new one to somewhere else—a systemic change.

A system of injustice is always heading toward greater injustice. It has a slope to it, a path, a gravity. Think of a ball in a groove, or rain in a spout. Injustice is heading toward an unjust end as inevitably as water seeks the ground. A system designed to consume people for profit will always consume more and more people. To avoid this end, we can’t just put the ball back further up the groove; we have to change the system. To change the system, it is necessary to change our alignment with it.

And: this is true even if you’re motivated only by self-interest. Eventually a system designed to consume people will consume you, if you’re a person. Eventually you will become disabled, or sick, or old, or unprofitable, or something will happen—a global pandemic, to choose a random example—that will strain that system, force it to accelerate what it does to sustain itself, which is to consume people.

You can be personally individually opposed to the system consuming you without actually being aligned against the system, if you don’t want to pay the price of changing the system. You can even be opposed to the system consuming other people without being aligned against the system, if you don’t want to pay the price of changing the system. That opposition is situational, not systemic; simply an opposition to where we are in the system’s progress, rather than an opposition the system’s design. It’s a desire for deferment; to move the ball a bit further up the groove, move the rain further up the gutter. But the unchanged system will still always bring us to the same end. If we don’t change it, we can perhaps push the ball back up the channel … but we’ll inevitably find ourselves here again, and then somewhere worse.

Look where we are. Trump and all of it. Our systemgot us to this point. He released a new strain of that old virus, bigotry, which taxed that system, made it more vulnerable than it would have been. That virus must be defeated—but our vulnerability to viruses stems from a system founded in harm and loss, a system that consumes people for money. It’s a cancer, not a virus.

The question of alignment is so vital, because it addresses the question of whether or not we desire the system itself to change, even it costs us something—and changing an unjust system does always have a cost, particularly for people who benefit from the injustice.

The costs are these: The loss of the unjust value, and the disruption of change.

Here in my country, which is the United States, we do anything we can to avoid these choices. We’d rather reject the entire concept of systems before we face the questions that naturally come when you belong to a system. We’d rather die than face these questions. Increasingly, more and more of us are dying—increasingly of actual cancers and actual viruses, not because these things are preventable, but because the virus of racism has convinced so many of us to align with the cancer that insists that we don’t belong to one other, that life must be earned through profit, that those who cannot earn have committed an unforgivable sin worthy of death, and that violence redeems that sin.

As the intentional thieves who configured our natural human system divert more and more of the shared value of society only to themselves, cutting off more and more of it from more and more of us, those of us who still choose, because of the benefit we still receive, to align ourselves with the thieves, choose to align with the death.

Those of us who make that choice call this death “freedom.” Some of us call it “realism.”

It’s death either way.

The thing about an unjust system is, it’s unsustainable. An unjust system will need to be changed, systematically and dramatically, if it is to survive. The more unjust the system, the more dramatic the needed systemic change.

The thing about an unsustainable system is, it doesn’t sustain. You change it or it collapses. Virus and cancer: all either needs to devour a healthy system is for you do nothing— they’ll do the rest.

The only real choice an unjust society—which is an unsustainable society—has before it is this: a willing, guided change? or an unwilling, forced one?

The thing about systemic change to an unsustainable system is, it’s not optional. Change will come.

Death is a change, after all.

Time to ask the second question.

Read story (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

A.R. Moxon is a writer. His novel  The Revisionaries , is available now, with the paperback edition releasing December 1, 2020.

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0. NEXT

PART I: HERE
1. STREET
2. VALUE
3. CONFIGURE
4. NEIGHBOR
5. INHERIT
6. ALIGN

PART II: NOW
7. CONVICT
8. CONFESS
9. REPENT
10. REPAIR

Streets 5 - Inherit

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It’s a simple question. Who stole value away from other streets, and gave it to my street?

Answered with another question, one that has itself been previously answered: 

Who put my street there?

I did.

Wait. Me?

So what, now it’s my fault? But I didn’t do anything—how can it be my fault?

How could I have stolen value when I never set out to do so, when I never took any action to steal? How could I have stolen value when there are still other houses in my neighborhood much more valuable than mine, and other neighborhoods in which all the houses are much more valuable? How could I have stolen value for my house when I personally contribute so much of my time and energy to make sure that my house stays nice and retains its value?

Value was stolen? No. I reject the entire concept.

Or…

Value was stolen? Yes—but too long ago to do anything about it.

Or …

Value was stolen? Maybe—but really it’s just divisive to talk about. The real problem these days are people who still bring it up. Look at me֫—I don’t still bring it up, and I’m fine.

Or, maybe …

Value was stolen? Maybe. Sure. Yes. Observably so. But one thing has to be recognized, before any other: I didn’t intend that. That has nothing to do with me.

How dare you.

•

I didn’t intend that. That has nothing to do with me.

Two sentences, often expressed as one thought. A neat trick.

•

So, I had no intention to steal. And neither did you. 

Good job, both of us! 

Good job, our intentions!

It’s good to not be a thief with intention to steal. To be an intentional thief is a bad thing to be. I'm glad you're not one, and I'm glad I'm not one, either. I want to get that out there.

But: we all know there are thieves with intention. For example, we all know that about a dozen years ago, powerful men conspired to steal trillions of dollars of value from all of our homes, and none of them were prosecuted, and for a while we configured our society’s laws to make it harder for them to abuse the system in that way.

They stole value from my house and yours, and ran away with it. They got away. The city decided to let them get away with it, in the name of healing, in the name of looking forward, not backward.

They’ll do it again if they can—and they can.

They’ll steal value from your house the same way value was stolen from others. They’ll reconfigure our natural human system back into the old channels to optimize it even more thoroughly for theft. In truth, they’ve already done so. Once our system is perfectly optimized for theft, the theft will flow in the same way that value does: foundationally, automatically, inextricably, and inherited.

Who got all that loot? Well … my street did, to give one example. It certainly got some. And streets with corporations large enough to buy influence—those streets got a lot.

If you aren’t like me, maybe none of it came to you. Maybe for you, it was an experience of loss.

Some of it will come to me. Some of it will go to you, if you are like me.

Most of it will go to them.

The city will decide to let them.

Click for story.

And you and I, people of bountiful good intention but limited curiosity, we’ll pocket whatever bonuses  come our way as they loot the safe of public good. Thieves of intent will allow us to benefit, not out of largesse, but simply as part of the cost of doing business. They intend to get it back from us eventually, anyway. And when they decide to take it from us, how easy will it be? As easy as it was to take from those they robbed before. Easier, in fact, because now our natural human system—which has a momentum as regards intention—has become even more perfectly optimized for theft, and our incuriosity about the benefit we receive from it will have become so habitual, we’ll find it hard to understand how or why we’re being devoured.

A city built on treating people as consumable for profit will eventually consume you.

A city built on theft will eventually rob you.

Yes, and when your day comes, the city, built on practiced indifference, will exhibit as practiced an indifference to your fate as you yourself practiced, when it was not you but only your neighbor, who suffered the injustices of an unjust system.

Click for story.

Do you still think it’s got nothing to do with you?

•

Say this: Say I’m driving along and I hit an old lady with my car.

Or say this: Say I discover 12 million dollars deposited into my bank account, and I don’t know why.

There’s what I intend to do. And then there’s what happens.

Or: There’s what I’d like to think is true about me. And then there’s what is true about me.

Sometimes, when we’re lucky, those two things are even the same. But sometimes they’re different—there’s a gap. Reality carries us away from our intentions, in ways we can’t control—but control is the thing we all want to have at all times. It’s scary to have no control. And so, when things happen to us that are beyond our control—as they do for all of us—we like to disassociate from it.

A lot of people like to think that, no matter what actually happens, they can live only in the territory they can control; that they can stay exclusively on the side of the gap where their intentions live, and never visit the territory of what actually happens.

People have intentions, it’s true, and those intentions matter, from a moral perspective, a practical perspective, a legal perspective. It makes a difference if I ran down the old lady with my car because it malfunctioned, or because I was distracted checking my texts, or because I am the beneficiary of her will and decided it would be better to have her money sooner rather than later, or because I just like the sound my car makes when it hits old ladies. It makes a difference in how the law thinks about you, and it makes a difference in how I think about you, too.

What you intend matters. Hear me: it matters.

It’s just not all that matters.

Whatever I intended, the old lady has been run down, and it was my car that ran her down. And I have knowledge of it.

Whatever I intended, the money is in my account. And I have knowledge of it.

Knowledge.

My intentions matter, yes, but what would we all think of me if I said I had nothing to do with getting it, simply because I didn’t intend for it to come to me, and, deliberately incurious, quietly moved it over to an offshore account?

What would we think of me, if after I hit the old lady because my car malfunctioned, I drove away, as quickly as I could, hoping I hadn’t been seen?

Because after all, I hadn’t meant to run the old lady over. I was just getting groceries.

I hadn’t intended to take any money that didn’t belong to me; it just came to me.

I didn’t personally intend to cause harm, or to gain wealth.

It has nothing to do with me at all.

Right?

It’s a metaphor, of course. And it’s one with an easy answer, because it still deals with personal actions, personal decisions—right? It’s me who did the hit and run or who took the money, not some ancestor or even some unrelated party who only shares with me only geography. It doesn’t mean that a societal ill like (say) systemic racial theft is my fault. Somebody else stole that value, not me.

But notice what the personal decision in this hypothetical is. It isn’t the accident or the theft, which was in no way tied to your intention, but which nevertheless happened. It’s whether, with knowledge of it, I remain in that knowledge or flee from it. It’s whether I, in knowledge of my part in what is, take the responsibility, which I never sought, but which nevertheless is mine; the responsibility that I inherited, in the same way as I inherited the opportunity.

What if I discover that it was my father facing that choice, taking millions, which I then inherited? Does it still have nothing to do with me? What if I discover my father was unaware that his wealth was pilfered, but now I have been made aware. Does it still have nothing to do with me?

Or say this: Say I inherited that money from a fantastically wealthy great-uncle I’ve never met, and then years later I discover that he was not only a cocoa plantation owner, but a slaver—that I have a slaver’s money, and have over the years learned to depend on all the wonderful things that money can do for me—and not just me, but everyone in my community, too. Does it still have nothing to do with me?

Or what if I don’t even remember hitting the lady, but weeks later detectives finally bring the proof to my doorstep, proof which lines up suspiciously well to my memories of the night of blackout drinking, the dented car in the morning, the desperate hope it was caused by a deer, the equally desperate and until-now successful attempt to forget the entire incident? Does it still have nothing to do with me?

It’s not the particulars of the crime, but the knowledge of it.

I think you’d agree that my decision to flee the scene of the accident, or keep money that isn’t mine, are personal decisions carrying moral implications, revealing a deeper selfish intention. Let’s consider why.

I have recently-acquired knowledge of harm, of loss. The harm and loss are realities. My association with this harm and loss are realities. They are realities. They aren’t less real simply because my knowledge of the association is new. They aren’t made less real if I didn’t intend the association, or if I had no control over the association. I amassociated with this harm, this loss.

That association is going to cost me something if I accept the association, while if I avoid the association, it will provide me an opportunity to keep an unearned reward, or avoid a deserved consequence.

If I were not associated with this harm and loss, I could avoid paying that cost, and I could gain the reward. And so there rises in me a desire, understandable if not particularly honorable, to not be associated with this harm and loss.

My personal decision is not whether or not the harm has been done, nor is my personal decision whether or not it has anything to do with me. It did, and it does, and my intentions toward those realities don’t matter a bit to those questions. My personal decision is first, whether or not to accept the reality my association with harm and loss, and then to decide whether or not I’m going to accept the consequences of that reality.

And that decision reveals my actual deeper intentions—the ones that matter.

If I don’t want to accept this reality, then I am going to want everyone to focus exclusively on my intentions as regards the harm and loss, and deny the fact that my decision to ignore the reality of my association with harm and loss is itself a personal choice that betrays my deeper intentions.

And there might be people who would benefit from my disassociation from the harm and loss, whose lives might be complicated by my association with a crime, who would not want to see me pay the cost, wo might want to see me keep the unearned reward.

And perhaps, those who would also benefit, might also focus exclusively on my intentions.

And perhaps, if the crime were not personal, but rather societal, you might find an entire society that has decided to focus all moral calculation on personal intentions to the exclusion of all else, as a way of avoiding any association with knowledge of the reality of their own association with harm and loss.

It may be that such a society, founded on harm and loss, would focus on the individual to the exclusion of all else. It might be that such a society would heap scorn on even the idea that we share an interconnected life together, even though it’s clear we do—because to acknowledge we share an interconnected life leads us inexorably back to the responsibility we desperately and pathologically wish to avoid.

Click for story.

Nor will any in such a society want to notice that the collective decision to disassociate from this reality is itself a personal decision revealing a deeper selfish intention. For a society caught in the desire to avoid the reality of association with harm and loss, any rationale forgiving the association would be popular and almost reflexively accepted, while any reminder of that association would offensive and almost reflexively rejected.

When you’re in a natural human system that is founded on harm and loss, there are always going to be things that are very very very important to not know—and it’s going to be very very very important for everyone else to not know them, either. And if the knowledge becomes undeniable, then it’s going to be very very important to focus only on past manifestations of it, framed in such a way that suggests they are pluperfectly solved. And a good way of doing that is to focus exclusively on what everyone’s personal intentions are.

What are people’s intentions? Easy: whatever each person says they are. 

Suddenly it would be impossible for me to ever be racist, or sexist, or otherwise captured by bigotry, for the simple fact that my stated intentions are good. I think: “racism is bad,” therefore I cannot possibly ever do anything racist, or benefit in any way from racism—now let’s all stop talking about it.

It would be impossible to say that someone else is racist, or sexist, or otherwise captured by bigotry, no matter what they say or do, because it’s impossible to ever truly know their intentions, so, since it can’t be addressed, let’s not address it—now let’s all stop talking about it.

It would be impossible for my family member or friend or loved one to be aligned with it, because they are so nice, so good, so generous, so kind, to me, and to others. Their personal intentions are so pure, and yes of course the world has its injustices, and yes of course those are bad we should work to fix them, but the people in my life didn’t intend it, so what can it have to do with them?

In a society founded on harm and loss, acknowledgement of association with harm and loss will be seen as condemnation. Statements of fact will begin to be received as personal insults.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with me. Didn’t I just say I thought injustice was bad?

How will I ever convince them of the truth if all I do is condemn them?

These aren’t irredeemable monsters, you know. I’d rather appeal to their better angels.

Click for tweet.

If I am a person of good intent in such a society, I’d go on giving these defenses, because deep down I’d know: When we don’t want to talk about something, it’s those talking about it that are seen as the problem. I do not want to be the problem. I’d rather be part of the solution, which, in a natural human system founded on harm and loss, is a comfortable silence.

You might even find people who recognize a racist statement, but save their real discomfort for calling somebody who said it racist— as if the project were not opposing racism, but rehabilitation of the racist; as if there were a tacit agreement that the racist is the protagonist in the story of racism; as if the racist is the true and only victim of their own racism.

Click for story.
If I were a person of "good intent" in such a society, I’d decide to not know that I benefit from harm and loss. Or, if I couldn’t make myself know that, at least I make sure it’s clear there’s nothing I could have done about it; it’s all too long ago; fixing it would be far too impractical politically and economically; and anyway it’s nothing to do with me.

And that decision would reveal my actual deeper intentions—the ones that matter.

If our society were as I propose, we might find it common for people within it to suggest that the real racists are the people who always “scream” about racism. That the real sexists are the people who always “scream” about sexism. When somebody blows a whistle on systemic abuses, we might find it common to find powerful people who want to know who the whistleblower is, while demonstrating almost complete incuriosity about the particulars of the abuse. Yes, an audit of the personal intentions of the person bringing knowledge of harm and loss might be very common, and any evidence that those intentions were impure might be widely published and amplified, a reason to ignore the very real abuses uncovered when the whistle blew.

A whistle screams, you know, if a whistleblower blows into it. We don’t like screamers. We abhor the incivility of it. We rarely consider who and what is making the screamer scream, or why.

But imagine a society with enough injustice in it to make people scream. Imagine a people within that society who diagnosed the problem, not as “injustice,” but as “screams.”

Click for story.

For such a people, intentions (which, let’s remember, do matter) become not just an important thing, but everything, everything, everything—not because they are knowable, but precisely because they are so usefully unknowable. They become a blanket that covers whatever you want covered.

I didn’t mean for that to happen. It has nothing to do with me.

Two separate statements, one true, the other false, and presented as one thought, so that the true statement might lend its truth to the false one.

Do you see how it all works?

Do you see how foundational this lie is?

Do you see how the first step to correcting any of the effects of this lie might be to recognize the lie, and the second might be to stop acting as if the lie were true?

The value for my street is intrinsic, and inextricable, and inherited … and stolen. Unnaturally stolen. This has nothing to do with my intentions. It has nothing to do with whether I was alive when the value was accrued. And I can’t separate myself from the theft, any more than I can separate myself from the value.

Within natural human systems, culpability travels the same streets as opportunity, as theft, as knowledge.

As individuals, we don't decide whether it happens—it does. What we decide is what to do with a very simple question.

Here's the question:

What does this have to do with me?

Yes, and who put my street there, anyway?

Time Magazine
Photo credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images; David 'Dee' Delgado—Getty Images

A.R. Moxon is a writer. His novel  The Revisionaries , is available now, with the paperback edition releasing December 1, 2020.

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0. NEXT

PART I: HERE
1. STREET
2. VALUE
3. CONFIGURE
4. NEIGHBOR
5. INHERIT
6. ALIGN

PART II: NOW
7. CONVICT
8. CONFESS
9. REPENT
10. REPAIR

Streets 4 - Neighbor

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Recap:

If our city is organized in such a way that it is unwilling to save people from death unless they are deemed worth it, then we are vulnerable, not only to the problem of the streets, but to any danger to which our city decides our lives are disposable.

People, generally speaking, want to live.

A city that decides to deliver death, then, can be presumed to be a city whose method of deciding has been stolen away from people.

If we are people who wish to live, then, we will have to fix the way the city decides.

End recap.

•

So, we’ve learned a present danger to my neighbor means an eventual danger to me, no matter how much it presently favors me.

This suggests that—even if I am only driven by self-interest—I would do well to watch for dangers to my neighbors, and then change our human systems to protect them.

How far will the change have to reach? To the very boundaries of the city.

A question: Where are the boundaries of our neighborhood?

I’ll answer with another question, an ancient one: Who is my neighbor?

•

Who is my neighbor? Well, there’s the people to either side of my house. No question about them. You’d probably want to include the people directly across. After that it can get fuzzy. Two houses down? Three? The next street over? Two streets over? Three?

What do I mean by “neighbor” within the context of the question “What are the boundaries of our neighborhood?”

Not my neighborhood, or your neighborhood, which have actual legally defined boundaries. The metaphorical neighborhood, the one that’s applicable to questions about our natural human system. The one that provides value and harm in ways that are invisible and inextricable and automatic and inherited, as naturally as rain falls on roofs, or fungus unites a forest’s roots, or streets connect houses to other houses. How far does thatneighborhood stretch?

To rephrase: what are the outermost boundaries of our natural human system?

To answer the question, I first think of all the obvious steps necessary to maintain or modify or improve such a system, which begins with knowledge—awareness of the need and an acceptance of responsibility to act, and then ends with resolve—a decision to act and an agreement to pay the cost.

A suggestion for a workable definition: the boundaries of the “neighborhood” are definable by the extent to which knowledge of connectivity can be achieved, the extent to which our actions deliver value to other people— shared, invisible, foundational, generative, automatic, inextricable, configurable, and inherited.

Our “neighborhood” is the system within which that value flows.

The way it flows reflects the priorities of the society that built the system.

Any change to the system, therefore, must first involve a change to that society’s priorities.

I think you change a society’s priorities, not primarily with better arguments, but with better stories.

Let me tell you a story.

•

Suppose this: a hundred billion light years from our planet, on another planet, there exists a civilization, living much as we do. The people on our planet don’t know about it. We have no knowledge of it, nor of any effect of our actions upon it. Thus, we feel no responsibility for it, because we could never maintain or modify or improve it or harm it, no matter how resolved we were to do so.

This hypothetical faraway civilization is not within the boundaries of our “neighborhood.” Its denizens are not our neighbors.

But suppose something changed in this scenario. Suppose we developed a quantum telescope—a device that allows us to observe this civilization in real time. Rather than detecting the report of light escaped millions of years ago, reaching us only now from a vastness of space, the quantum telescope detects intelligent life. It allows us to see all intelligent civilizations, exactly as they live, their now, or into their past, their then, or even their future, their will be. By observing the development of these civilizations—the discoveries they’ve made that we haven’t yet—we are ourselves able to hugely benefit, taking giant leaps forward in medicine, transportation, agriculture. In short, imagine an unimaginable lurch forward in our knowledge, made possible by a change in technology.

But suppose something further. Suppose when we train our telescope back to societies we’d previously observed, we discover something disturbing. The past of these far civilizations, the presents, the futures … are changed, and for the worse. The courses of their histories have now taken terrible turns, reach tragic ends and early extinctions.  We run tests. The results are conclusive: Use of quantum energy has led to effects we’d not anticipated. The fact that we have observed these civilizations has benefited us at present, but has changed the reality of their course for the worse. Without intending it, we appear to have … it seems impossible, but in some way we don’t understand, through quantum effects of observation, we seem to have stolen their potential. And the very weft of reality, at the edges farther from us but moving inward … is beginning to warp and skew. We’ve drawn upon something necessary and vital, used it as a resource, and there is nearly unanimous consensus among our foremost experts: to draw upon it further will speed the degrading effect. There is a growing understanding that engaging in these activities is creating paradoxes that threaten existence itself.

To go back to a point where we no longer know the things we’ve learned is literally impossible. To stop using our invention means losing much the benefit we’ve gained, and cuts us off from future benefits and growth along these lines. But … to continue to use it as we have is to subject entire civilizations to ruin, and to throw the natural order of the entire observable universe to hazard and chance.

We’re conflicted.

We say: but we didn’t intend to do that.

We say: but there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.

And we ask: what does this have to do with me?

But the fact remains that we hadn’t known, and now we do know.

Technology has changed us. A global society has suddenly become universal.

We train our quantum telescope to the skies, and we see civilization after civilization all beginning to work on similar projects.

They’re all building quantum telescopes.

Suddenly the universe is filled with neighbors.

•

It’s a science fiction premise, I know. I put it forward for the same reason that most science fiction premises are put forward, which is to demonstrate something true about our present reality.

Here’s what my sci-fi premise demonstrates: Innovation—new technology, new concepts, new ideas—often expands our knowledge. It also expands our potential, both for good and for harm, because it expands what we know, by introducing to us something that was always true about our natural human connection.

It was always true. We just hadn’t known. We learned through innovation. The innovation changed things in ways that couldn’t be reversed, and which nevertheless happened.

Innovation, by the way, is a natural human system. "Human" because humans can discover it, use it, and configure it, then inherit the effects of those configurations. "Natural," because innovation is never just created; rather, it’s the discovery of something that had previously been unknown, but which was always true, always there, always ready for humans to discover and configure.

Innovation is a new street, so to speak, which leads to a new location.

Innovation doesn’t change our priorities. It just expands the effects of those priorities, which provides us new opportunities to identify what those priorities are—the real priorities, the ones that reflect what actually happens.

In the story, we lived in an entangled universe, and we always did. Learning that truth didn’t make it true; it just made us aware. Ignoring it won’t make it stop being true, it will just make us deliberately ignorant in ways that endanger our future existence. The truth of our entanglement was always there, waiting for us to know it.

Our knowledge is something that changes, and as that knowledge changes, so does the scope of what we can maintain, modify, or improve ... and harm.

This suggests that the boundaries of “our neighborhood,” the answer to the question who is my neighbor?  is also subject to change. Or, not so much ‘change’ as new discovery. We learn that people we hadn’t thought were neighbors were actually neighbors all along.

Do you see it? To our perspective, our “neighborhood” is getting bigger, and our count of neighbors are increasing. But in truth, the neighborhood was always this size.

Yesterday our awareness was one thing. Today it is something different.

Let me tell you another story.

•

OK, let’s create a setting for this story.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, there was a distant planet called “Earth,” and when it had become a very old planet indeed, there lived upon it for a very brief time creatures called ‘humans,’ who—impressively—could stand upright and run for dozens of miles without taking rest, and who—less impressively, but more pertinently to this story—had enormous brains that allowed them to make marvelous connections between themselves and each other, and between themselves and other parts of the world—could make configurations, both intentional and unintentional, to their natural systems.

Let's say there was a time early in the history of these humans where the outer limits of human connection were defined only by the biological family. These ties provided the mutual interconnectivity that allowed for shared values, which allowed for trust, which allowed for cooperation, which allowed for cohesion, safety and survival. 

This arrangement provided each human with collective value that was automatic, inextricable, invisible, natural, and inherited, and available only within the boundaries of the family. It was well understood in these human families that each person would act within their self-interest, but it would have been seen as a dangerous and destructive corruption of the very bedrock of society to put one’s self-interest above the family interest in matters pertaining to the family. And it was clearly understood in human families that to harm one was to harm all, in a way that simply wouldn’t be relevant if applied to anybody outside of the family. 

For a brief while in the early history of human families, no knowledge of outside families even existed; but once that awareness was gained, there still didn’t seem to human families to exist any need for deeper knowledge of outside families, other than this awareness—they are not us. They are rivals for the resources we need. They are not to be trusted.

What sat at the bottom of this false belief was the great foundation lie: the people who are us matter, and the people who are not us do not matter at all.

These humans were families. They were familial.

Families weren’t without conflict or abuse, but they werea natural human system. Conflicts and abuses would arise when some member of the family decided that more of the natural benefits of their human system should come to them than they needed, at the expense of another who would receive less than they needed, and then managed to configure the family to reflect those unbalanced priorities, and solidify them into tradition.

What sat at the bottom of all these imbalances was the great foundational lie: some people matter more than other people.

Still, despite its shortcomings, the family was good. It was useful, and remained useful. But it wasn’t the end.

What happened was that, over time, some families realized something that had always been true but hadn’t yet been known. They learned that what they did affected the families nearby, and what families nearby did affected them, and that their conflicts over the resources they all needed actually represented a waste of energy and resource both, and could even risk the destruction of the resources upon which all the families depended. They learned there were actually enough resources for all the families nearby, and that families joined together over their commonalities of need and proximity could create a human system that generated much more influence and value than single families acting apart.

This was an innovation.

Here was the name of this new innovation: Tribe. 

The humans had been familial. They became tribal.

Some familial humans saw the innovation of tribe as a danger threatening to put an end to families entirely, and fought against the concept of "tribes" as a result. But they couldn’t stop the knowledge of the innovation of tribe, and so they couldn’t choose to not live in a world where it was true that tribes generated more influence and value, and so, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t live in a world where this truth was not known.

They were wrong, anyway. The tribe didn’t put an end to families, any more than the human family ended the individual—but it did put an end to the idea of the family as the outermost boundary of human connection. A tribe was simply a more effective natural human system than the family in many crucial ways, and it always had been. What the innovation of tribe did do was this: expand the possibilities of what a family could be, offer more choices in matters of forming families. And so, the family remained vital and important and honored structures within most human tribes. 

Still, over time, it was understood that while everyone would have more responsibility for and loyalty toward their family members than other tribal members, anyone who put their family over the interests of tribal cohesion would be seen as creating a dangerous and destructive corruption of the very bedrock of tribal society, because the tribe was a natural human system which, as a practical matter, created morevalue than the family—in fact, it provided the context within which families existed.

The problem with being familial wasn’t that the biological family was bad—it was uniquely good, in many ways that remained and continued. It just didn’t take human connectivity far enough, and so to try to make the family the outermost boundary of human connection meant living in a dangerous and unsustainable lie that would eventually fall to the truth.

The innovation of “tribe” simply went further into the truth of human connection.

The humans had innovated, and learned, and now there were moreneighbors. The tribal humans learned that more neighbors meant more resources and opportunity, not less.

The families that feared loss of resource were wrong, because the tribe is a natural human system, and natural human systems are shared, invisible, foundational, generative, automatic, inextricable, configurable, and inherited.

The family had been the boundary of the neighborhood. Now it was the tribe.

The tribe created new ties providing the mutual interconnectivity that allowed for shared values, which allowed for trust, which allowed for cooperation, which allowed for cohesion, safety and survival. The arrangement provided each human with collective value available only through the innovative creation of the tribe, while allowing them to continue enjoying expandedbenefits of being familial.

The innovation of tribe didn’t put an end to conflict or abuse among the humans. In truth, the creation of tribes involved moreconflict, and new abuses, as the bad priorities already configured within families inherited to tribal systems. For example: families resistant to the new concept of “tribe” were captured or conquered or forced to comply, or isolated and starved of resources as they tried to compete against a new more effective type of natural human system, by tribal humans who had no interest in the humanity of families not of their tribe; meanwhile, families who most benefitted within the tribe still tried to use their influence to configure this new human system, to unnaturally seize more influence, and to solidify these imbalances as traditions.

What sat at the bottom of all these imbalances was the great foundational lie: some people matter more than other people.

Logic demands there would be more conflict, and more danger of abuse—this was, after all, a more efficient human system. It would naturally be more efficient at delivering its corruptions and harms in the same way it delivered its benefits—and there would grow among tribal humans the awareness that the harm this new and efficient system could deliver might, if unchecked, compromise their entire territory.

So among tribal humans there grew an awareness, checks, taboos: that to harm one was to harm all, in a way that simply wouldn’t be relevant if applied to anybody outside of the tribe. However, no common cause with outside tribes existed, nor any need for that common cause, other than this awareness—they are not us. They are rivals for our resources. They are not to be trusted.

What sat at the bottom of this false belief was the great foundation lie: the people who are us matter, and the people who are not us do not matter at all.

And so, the tribe was good. It was useful, and remained useful. But it wasn’t the end.

What happened was that some tribes realized something that had always been true but hadn’t yet been known. They learned that what they did affected the tribes nearby, and what tribes nearby did affected them, and that conflict over the resources they all needed was a waste of energy and resource, and could even risk the destruction of the resources upon which all tribes depended. They learned there were actually enough resources for all the tribes nearby, and that tribes joined together over their commonalities of need and proximity could create a human system that generated much more influence and value than single tribes acting apart.

This was an innovation.

Here was the name of this new innovation: Nation. 

The humans had been tribal. They became national.

Some tribal humans saw the nation as a danger threatening an end to tribes, and fought the concept of nations as a result. But they couldn’t stop the knowledge of the innovation of nation, and so they couldn’t choose to live in a world where it wasn't true that nations generated more influence and value, and, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t live in a world where this truth was not known.

They were wrong, anyway. The nation didn’t put an end to tribes, any more than the tribe put an end to families or individuals, but it did put an end to the idea of the tribe as the outermost boundary of human connection. What the innovation of nation did do was this: expand the possibilities of what a tribe or a family could be, offer more choices in matters of creating tribes, or forming families. 

And so, the family and the tribe remained vital and important and honored structures within most human nations. A nation was simply a more effective natural human system than a tribe in many crucial ways, and always had been. Still, over time, it was understood that anyone who put their tribe or family over the national interest would be seen as creating a dangerous corruption of the larger society, because the nation was a natural human system which, as a practical matter, created more value than the tribe or the family.

The problem with being tribal isn’t that the tribe was bad—it was good, in many unique ways that remained and continued. The problem with tribalism was that it didn’t take human connectivity far enough, and so to try to make the tribe the outermost boundary of human connection meant living in a dangerous and unsustainable lie that would eventually fall to the truth.

The innovation of “tribe” simply went further into the truth of human connection.

The humans had innovated, and learned, and now there were moreneighbors. The nationalist humans learned that more neighbors meant more resources, not less.

The tribes that feared loss of resource were wrong, because the nation is a natural human system, and natural human systems are shared, invisible, foundational, generative, automatic, inextricable, configurable, and inherited.

The tribe had been the boundary of the neighborhood. Now it was the nation.

The nation created new ties providing the mutual interconnectivity that allowed for shared values, which allowed for trust, which allowed for cooperation, which allowed for cohesion, safety and survival. The arrangement provided each human with collective value available only through the innovative creation of the nation, while allowing them to continue enjoying the benefits of being familial and tribal.

The innovation of the nation didn’t put an end to conflict or abuse among the humans. In truth, the creation of nations involved moreconflict, and new abuses, as the bad priorities already present within families and tribes were inherited to national systems. For example: tribes and families resistant to the new concept of “nation” were captured or conquered or forced to comply, or isolated and starved of resources as they tried to compete against a new and more effective type of natural human system, by nationalist humans who had no interest in the humanity of tribes not of their nation; meanwhile, families and individuals who most benefitted within the nations tried to use their influence to configure this new human system, to unnaturally seize even more influence, to solidify these imbalances into tradition, and codify them into law.

Logic demands there would be more conflict, and more danger of abuse; this was, after all, a more efficient human system. It would naturally be as efficient at delivering corruptions and harms in the same way it delivered its benefits—and there would grow among nationalist humans the awareness that the harm this new and efficient system could deliver could compromise their entire country.

So among nationalist humans there grew an awareness, checks, taboos: that to harm one was to harm all, in a way that simply wouldn’t be relevant if applied to anybody outside of the nation. However, among nationalist humans, no common cause with outside nations existed, nor any need for that common cause, other than this awareness—they were not us. They were rivals for our resources. They were not to be trusted.

What sat at the bottom of this false belief was the great foundation lie: the people who are us matter, and the people who are not us do not matter at all.

And so, the nation was good. It was useful, and remained useful. But it wasn’t the end.

What happened was that some humans within nations began to realize something that has always been true but hasn’t yet been realized. They learned that what they did affected the nations nearby, and what nations nearby did affected them, and that conflict over the resources they needed represented a waste of energy and resource, and could even risk the destruction of the resources upon which all nations depend.

What sort of resources? Oh, things like soil that produces food. Vegetation. Breathable air. Drinkable water. An ecosystem. A planet that continues to sustain life. In other words, the future of human existence.

What happened was some people in nations learned something that had always been true but hadn’t yet been known: that there were actually enough resources for all the nations, and that nations joined together over their commonalities of a shared human need and a shared human planet could create a human system that generated much more influence and value than single nations acting apart.

Here was the name of this new concept: Planet. The humans were nationalist. They became planetary.

I recommend we set our story about the humans right here, in the midst of a great shift from nationalism to planetary thinking.

Let’s make this planet the humans live on spherical. Globular. We could call the planet “the globe.” We could call their planetary thinking “globalism.”

Here’s what’s going on with our humans.

Some of the tools of globalism these humans have developed are empire and commerce and alliance and war and incorporation—which are largely the same tools used by families and tribes and nations, too. Some of these tools are imperfect, which means they can be improved, and should be. Some of them are bad, which means they can be abandoned, and should be. “War” in particular is a real stinker. "Incorporation" is perhaps the most popular, at this particular moment in our story.

Let's talk about war and incorporation.

So, in our story, the human innovation of planetary thinking hasn’t put an end to conflict. Our nascently planetary humans are still governed by the bad priorities already present within families and tribes and nations, shaped by bad ideas with no place within a healthy system, that have configured their natural human systems into something potentially unsustainable, inherited up from families and tribes and nations into the global system. In truth, the creation of globalism has involved more conflict, and newabuses. There have been, and are, nations resistant to the new concept of “global,” who have been captured or conquered or forced to comply, or isolated and starved of resources as they tried to maintain insularity rather than compete against a new more effective type of natural human system. There are nations that most benefit within the global system of empire and commerce and alliance, who have used their influence to seize more influence and more benefit. It’s some of these conflicts between nations that humans call “war,” and it happens a lot. Alliance is a much more effective way of managing conflict than war. The humans know this, and yet war has not ceased; rather, it has increased.

In the story, nationalist humans will have innovated a lot of ways of warring between nations—which is generally seen as involving physical combat. 

They also have created "incorporation," increasingly elaborate and effective systems of finance and commerce and jurisprudence, which are able to deliver astonishing amounts of wealth and benefit to some humans. Unfortunately, the "incorporation" is aligned to the same foundational lies, configured for abuse, to deliver inherited theft and harm to some with the same level of astonishing efficiency as it employs to deliver the inherited plunder to others. 

The nationalist humans still have incorporated war and theft because there are families and tribes and nations, who wrongly see the planetary view as a danger threatening to put an end to families and tribes and nations entirely; because there are families and tribes and nations infected by the oldest viral human lies, that some people matter than others; that the people who are us matter and the people who are not us do not matter at all.

And we readers will clearly see that just as their precursors were wrong, they too are wrong. The global view won’t put an end to nations, any more than nations put an end to tribes or families or individuals, but it has already put an end to the idea of the nation as the outermost boundary of human connection. And yes, in our story there will still be nations that fear the idea of a global humanity and resist it, to the determent of all. All nations in our story do this, in fact, to one extent or another. It’s here the humans in our story find themselves, caught in the teeth of this centuries-long transition between a nationalistrealization and a globalist one, applying old harms on a global stage, in ways that compromise the entire planet.

Here’s the conflict of our story, the stakes: Either the humans will learn to move into the truth of a connected planet, and, having reached the furthest imaginable boundary, begin at last to address their oldest foundational lies, or they will deny that truth and remain in the lies. Either they will move into new and sustainable models of living, that recognizes the responsibility of global connections, or else they’ll go on putting their tribe or family or nation over the planetary interest, and in so doing live an unsustainable lie.

If that happens, our humans will go extinct. 

Pretty big stakes!

If we write the story with skill, our readers will hope that the humans do not go extinct.

Eventually (and in our story we might introduce at least one crisis that makes this timeline more immediate), our humans are going to have to understand that anyone who puts their nation or tribe or family over a planetary interest would be seen as creating a dangerous corruption of everything including nations, tribes, and families, because, unless these humans make some sort of unimaginable interplanetary discovery, the planet is the natural human system.

We might even write the story so that planetary humanists were starting to realize that actually what humans were going to need to do to survive was not only learn to live in harmony with other humans, but with all other systems on the planet—that in fact the natural human system was only a component of a natural system upon which all humans relied in a way that was shared, foundational, generative, automatic, inextricable, configurable, and inherited.

The humans in our story won't be able to go back from global humanity, because global humanity, like all innovations, is the discovery of something that was always true. They can’t separate themselves from it, because innovation is part of a natural human system as well, delivered to our humans as automatically and inextricably as are the benefit and harm.

If we follow the pattern of human development, we, reading the story of these humans, must conclude that a peaceful joined noncompeting globe will simply be a more effective natural human system than the nation, just as the nation was a more effective system than the tribe, and the tribe more effective than the family. 

If the pattern of human history is to be trusted, a unified cooperative globe would create more value and potential and opportunity than the nation or the tribe or the family—would, if our humans let it, create new ties providing the mutual interconnectivity that allows for shared values, which allows for trust, which allows for cooperation, which allows for cohesion, safety and survival. 

We readers might begin to suspect that such an arrangement might, if the humans let it, provide each individual with collective value that is automatic, inextricable, invisible, natural, and inherited, and available only through the innovative creation of a unified non-competing globe—an arrangement within which it would be clearly understood that to harm one was to harm all, in a way that extends to the very boundaries of planetary existence. No common cause with outside planets will yet exist, nor any need for that common cause, not because the humans seek no common cause, but because there remains within human awareness no common cause left to seek.

But let's end there for now.

Let’s make this a happy ending. Let’s say the humans lead themselves into the new truth their innovation has uncovered.

The problem with being nationalist, our humans will discover, isn’t that the nation is bad—it’s good, in many ways that still continue. The problem with nationalism is and always was, it didn’t take human connectivity far enough, and so to try to make the nation the outermost boundary of human connection meant living in a dangerous and unsustainable lie that would inevitably fall to the truth.

No, the humans learn, the nation isn’t bad—it’s uniquely good and useful, and remains so. But it won’t be the end.

Planetary thinking simply goes further into the truth of human connection.

The nation will have been the boundary of the neighborhood. But now it is the planet. It always was.

The nationalist humans will have learned that more neighbors meant more resources, not less.

And our humans will have innovated, and learned, and now their entire planet is full of neighbors. Logic insists that the families and tribes and nations that fear loss of resource will have been proved wrong, because the report of human history demands that more neighbors means moreresources, not less; and the globe is not a natural human system, it is the natural human system.

But story can’t start with the resolution. We’ll need to make this a conflict, so the story really has some fizz. Let’s start the story at a point where it really looks bad; as if our humans are going to cling to the old unsustainable lies—choose extinction over expansion, life over death.

What would be the situation that threatens a bad ending? What would that look like?

Well … if we were to find that these humans were still captured by our worst priorities, the ones most aligned with harmful ideas that have no place in a healthy society, they might find themselves with a leader who always puts himself before anybody else, who always puts his family ahead of any tribe to which he might belong, who always puts the interests of his tribe before that of the nation he leads, and who always puts his nation’s domination over the global sustainability of human life.

Worse, our humans might have chosen that leader, and be seriously considering choosing him again.

Yes. We might start there.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

•

It's a sci-fi premise. It’s not meant as anthropology or history.

Understand, I am aware that progressive innovation of natural human systems of family and tribe and nation didn’t happen anything like as cleanly or uniformly as presented here—but these innovations did occur, and I think the fact that it happened gives us significant insight into the question of who our neighbors are.

It’s worth repeating the reason we’re contemplating neighbors. We’ve learned a present danger to our neighbor means an eventual danger to us, no matter how much it presently favors us.

This suggests that—even if we are only driven by self-interest—we would do well to watch for dangers to our neighbors, and then change our human systems to protect them.

How far will the change have to reach? To the very boundaries of our city—our natural human system.

Which demanded the question: What are the boundaries of our city?

And then, as answer, another question, an ancient one: Who is my neighbor?

 

•

A question: Who is my neighbor?

An answer: Who isn’t?

•

Another question: Who is your neighbor’s neighbor, if not you?

•

So: Who stole the value from my neighbors, and who gave it to me?

And who stole the land for my house, my street?

Who stole value away from my neighbor’s street, and who gave it to my street?

I’ll answer it with another question, one I’ve already answered:

Who put my street there?

A.R. Moxon is a writer. His novel  The Revisionaries , is available now, with the paperback edition releasing December 1, 2020.

< Back |  Forward >

0. NEXT

PART I: HERE
1. STREET
2. VALUE
3. CONFIGURE
4. NEIGHBOR
5. INHERIT
6. ALIGN

PART II: NOW
7. CONVICT
8. CONFESS
9. REPENT
10. REPAIR

Streets 3 - Configure

 

< Back | Forward >

Let me say some obvious things about streets.

A street has direction. It leads from one place to another. It leads from the same place today as it did yesterday, and to the same place today as yesterday. Where our streets are built—where they start and where they lead—reflect our community’s historical priorities, which we have inherited, regarding which places are important for people to be able to easily travel, and which are not.

If a street isn’t maintained, it will fall into disrepair. If the disrepair isn’t remedied, it will get worse, not better. A city that won’t maintain its streets will eventually become a city incapable of creating or receiving the value of transportation. So: we maintain our streets, if we’re wise. And so, simply by observing the conditions of our streets, we can make determinations about our community’s current priorities; not just which places are important for people to be able to access, but which places are moreimportant.

And, which are less important.

If we want to make the street longer, we can extend it, but it will still lead out further in the same direction. If we were to decide that where the street led wasn’t a useful destination any longer, or if we realized the destination was harmful, or if for some other reason we wanted it to no longer lead to the destination it did, but to some other place, we’d need to greatly modify the street we had, to the point that it would begin to seem like a different street entirely.

If we wanted to allow easy access to some new location that had as yet been afforded no street, we’d need to build an entirely new street. A casual observer would easily be able to detect the new priority within our community. A place that had not previously been important to access has now become important. There is a new airport on the outskirts. A road has been built to the airport. The airport is important. If no road were built to the airport, the airport would be a boondoggle.

If we no longer cared about a location that we previously deemed important, we might stop maintaining the street, and allow it to fall into disrepair. A casual observer would easily be able to detect the underlying truth about priority; about a place the community once valued, which it values no longer—and, if there are people still living on that street, about those people, too.

And the people living there would also understand, of course. They, too, would understand at a glance what message was being delivered through their neglected and decaying street.

You might say that our streets are a tool—one of many—whereby a community delivers its priorities—its real priorities. The ones that can’t be denied, because they are what’s being done.

Photo credit: Tamar Charney

And, if we were to chart the full history of changes to our streets—of enhancement; creation, modifications, construction; and also of neglect, removal, and demolition, too—we could conceivably create a map of our community’s historical and ongoing priorities regarding human access.

So, our streets are configurations of our community. They, like all human systems, are changeable. Configurable. They will deliver the more core and underlying priorities of the part of the community that has power to decide on priorities. That’s the human part of the system.

Let me say some obvious things about configuration to human systems, once again using streets as illustration.

If we wish to maintain our streets, or extend them, or modify them, or build new ones to serve new needs, we would have to … do it.

But some time before we do it, we’ll have to realize that there’s a need to do it.

And some time after that, but still before we do it, we’ll have to accept that doing it is our collective responsibility.

And some time after that, but still before we do it, we’ll have to determine to actually do it, and make the necessary plans.

And some time after that, but still before we do it, we’ll have to agree to pay what it costs.

And some time after that, the cost will actually have to be paid.

And only once all those steps have taken place will the street actually be changed or maintained.

If these steps don’t take place, then the change won’t happen. The street will remain as it is.

Streets are configurable. People made them. People can change them.

We can set them upon a foundation that is even, or uneven.

We can use materials that are sturdy, or shoddy.

If they’re uneven or shoddy, we can make them better.

Or … we can make them worse.

We can configure them to generate opportunity and value and health equally for all. Or we can configure them to steal opportunity and value and health from some and give to ourselves.

This configuration will reflect our community’s priorities—the real priorities.

And the natural qualities of a natural human system mean that the theft and harm will be delivered to those it victimizes in the same way that the opportunity and health is delivered to those it favors: in a way that is shared, invisible, foundational, generative, automatic and inextricable.

That's the natural part of the system.

As I said: obvious.

I think these are very plain and obvious things to say. I’ve learned that this is an age in which it has become useful and necessary, even powerful, to state plain and obvious things.

____

Let me say some obvious things about human priorities: They tend to have a momentum. They act upon reality, and create effects. Those effects bend reality toward that priority, making reality more aligned with that priority, making it easier for that priority to further bend reality toward itself. They lead from one place to another. And so, like the streets, human priorities, too, have direction.

A priority, unchecked, increases its effects. Left entirely unchecked, it will eventually reach a state in which the priority’s intention is indivisible from reality itself. So, a priority based upon a desire for a sustainable system will allow itself to be checked toward sustainability, while a priority based upon an unsustainable lie will eventually check itself toward unsustainability; will inevitably destroy that system itself in favor of itself.

You might think of a priority based on a lie as a virus. A thing that exists only to promote itself, which has no place whatsoever within a healthy system, which will eventually consume that system if left unchecked.

Imagine the most extreme example: a system so unfair that every bit of value my street generates—every wage, every increase to property, every bit of food, permission to drive on the street or walk on the sidewalk, permission to access the homes for living or storage—goes only to me, and to me alone. The only result can be that eventually my neighbors are crushed, leaving me alone, receiving only the value I can deliver to myself, for however long that lasts.

In time, I would become a bizarre and unsustainable curiosity. Having cut every other human out of my natural human system, I have made an unnatural human system; a system that no longer generates the value that a community of humans naturally makes. Eventually I, too, will fail—not despite the fact that I have all the wealth, but because.

If I live in a system that eats my neighbors, I live in a system that will eat me in the end—even if I'm the one the system feeds.

Story here

An unjust system is an unnatural system.

An unnatural system is an unsustainable system.

And the defining quality of an unsustainable system is, it doesn’t sustain.

____

Think of a recent picture I’ve provided. Think of the rain, a natural occurrence, necessary for life, which my house receives invisibly, automatically.

Imagine something: Imagine a city where a few people decided to capture the rain. Imagine they built a series of gutters and downspouts and barrels and cisterns, so that when the rain fell on all the houses, they could divert most of it away from some of the people and bestow it to a select few others. Imagine a city comprised of islands of perfect lush green, swimming in a vast sea of blasted and parched and unnatural desert. Imagine a city that manufactured drought during a rainy season, then horded water, unused, in times of drought.

Or, less metaphorically: imagine a city that recognized the intrinsic value that a collection of people naturally generates—inextricable, automatic, inherited, shared, invisible—and decided to configure it to capture all that value for themselves.

Imagine, if you can, a society founded on a series of unjust lies—a series of propositions which, like a virus, have no place in a healthy society; which, like a cancer, grow out of systems that would otherwise be necessary for health; and which, like both virus and cancer, exist only to propagate themselves at the expense of health until those systems were consumed.

Suppose the founders of this society had learned that they could maximize the foundational, generative value that is the natural output of human society, by stealing all value away from millions of other humans, and giving it all to themselves. Suppose they did this by utilizing the idea that it was not only possible but desirable, not only desirable but righteous, for human beings to own other human beings as possessions. Suppose they founded their society on the proposition that the Owners should be the only people within the society allowed to partake in the collective will of the natural human system they’d built, and to control all the value delivered, and to parcel value out to the Owned only to the exact extent to which such an allowance would profit the Owner.

I would suppose that such a society would begin to believe, at the very core, that some people have value and others do not.

I would suppose that such a society would conclude that a person’s value is a matter of power and wealth, and to lack power and wealth is to lack any value.

I would suppose that such a society would conclude that for those who lack value, life must be earned by providing profit.

I would suppose that such a society would conclude that for a valueless person to receive some value beyond the profit they could provide would be a grotesque and offensive theft; that a person who could not be used for profit had not earned life, represented theft, and had therefore earned death.

I would suppose that such a society would believe violence to be an acceptable way to redeem such a debt against such a valueless thief.

Photo credit: Jim Vondruska

If my theories are correct, such a malicious idea would do what unjust lies always do: it would collapse the system. It would make institutions that in a healthy system would be vital to continued health into something grotesque and malicious; would make these institutions susceptible to practices, ideas, and intentions that have no place in healthy society. Eventually these foundational injustices, built on foundational lies, would devolve into unrest and internal war until either they captured the system entirely, or else they were defeated.

A society founded on many such lies would likely face a series of such collapses.

An Alabama State Trooper swings his baton at the head of the then-25-year-old Congressman John Lewis on March 7, 1965. ( Everett Collection Historical, Alamy Stock Photo)

For example: such a society might find itself into an observable historical cycle, whereby all resources and power would become unnaturally allocated with fewer and fewer people, until most people struggled to find what they needed to survive even though plenty existed all around, and found themselves with less and less recourse to effect any change, while a very few ruthless people managed to capture for themselves more resources than they could ever possibly use, which they would credit to themselves as proof of their right to own it.

Ku Klux Klan parade in DC in 1927 (GETTY IMAGES)
If such a society managed, through some combination of luck or effort to push back these unsustainable scenarios, it would be necessary for them to engage in the same practices any survivor of cancer or virus finds it necessary to engage in, if they were aligned with ongoing health. There would need to be a diagnosis— acknowledgement that the unjust lies and their unjust practices existed; then there would need to be a short-term change—radical, targeted, painful—to eliminate the threat; then a long-term remedy—a permanent, holistic, watchful, strategic, systemic restructuring—to monitor for and prevent recurrence.

But if they refused?

If they did that … then, if my theories are correct, you would inevitably see the healthy systems compromised and captured by the same old foundational lies, until everywhere you looked you would see the terrible old assumptions: that some people have value but most do not, that wealth is the measure of value, that the valueless must earn life through profit, that being unprofitable earns death, and that violence redeems.

A woodcut from the abolitionist Anti-Slavery Almanac (1839) depicts the capture of a fugitive slave by a slave patrol.

And such a system would inevitably begin to collapse.

Can you imagine it?

As a novelist, I might be able to manage such a thought experiment.

Let’s see … what would it look like?

____

Imagine a fictional city. Let’s call it something random, like, oh … Randopolis, in the land of Galtopia.

Let’s say Randopolis was the sort of place built on the sort of foundational lies I’ve just described.

Imagine they believed the lie, that some people had value and some didn’t.

Imagine they believed the lie, which attributed worth to wealth.

Imagine they believed the lie, that for anyone without wealth to receive any value equaled theft.

Imagine they believed the lie, that violence redeems.

And imagine that these people believed these lies to such an entrenched state that when they founded their city they owned other human beings as property.

Imagine a city like Randopolis, that had captured the natural human systems of society; had harnessed the mechanisms by which humans provide value to one another, and subverted it to unnatural ends, to instead deliver harm and theft to many for the enrichment of themselves.

To assist our world-building efforts, we might give this subversion a name, like injustice.

Imagine the more powerful members of Randopolis decided to optimize for injustice—to purposefully engineer the mechanisms by which cities decide things, so that when the city decided things, certain types of people were much more likely to be included in making those decisions, and all others were much less likely, so that the concept “the city decides” inevitably meant, in ways both visible and invisible, only a select type of people. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the favored people who resembled the historical Owners: mostly older, mostly whiter, mostly wealthy, mostly male. Imagine that this happened to such an extent that it became an assumed thing, to the point that whiteness and wealth and age and maleness became the default assumption for decision-making in Randopolis, even an automatic and invisible assumption, a comforting thing, and anything breaking this mold was seen as a break from precedent, a special case, a risk—identity politics. In fact, for the first let’s-say 150 years of Randopolis’ let’s-say 250 year history, this restriction was not just an assumed preference, but codified as law.

Imagine the underlying configuration of such a foundation.

Imagine the ongoing inheritance of such a configuration.

Imagine now that because Randopolis had decided, over the course of generations, to route the value that a collection of people naturally generates, so that some received most of it while others received less, it so happened that no matter what sorts of remedies they put in place to configure against these unjust effects, the effects would inevitably come through, because the deeper intentions of Randopolis had never changed—the deeper intentions, the ones that matter, because they reflect what actually happens. These intentions came through because human intentions have a certain momentum. The effects of Randopolis’ founding lies always told the tale, not because those making the decisions always consciously believed those who the system robbed deserved to receive less (though they often did believe that), or because those making the decisions always consciously decided they’d rather keep more for themselves (though often they did so decide) but because the deepest intentions of Randopolis had become inseparable from reality in ways that were invisible and inextricable.

Imagine if for decades, people who had been stolen from in this way inherited that loss. Imagine they were systemically and not-so-secretly considered, simply by their existence, to be considered not victims of theft, but to be loss of value itself, to the point that houses were perceived to lose value simply by having such a person live within it, or even in proximity to it.

Imagine if that perception became so powerful that people treated it as reality. Imagine that those who had inherited all the stolen value used the fear of loss of value to remove all their stolen wealth elsewhere, to avoid sharing it with those they perceived as representing that loss—and so more value was withdrawn. Imagine that when this withdrawal applied to certain functions that are essential to a sustainable society—like for example schools—it was framed as choice, and notice how the framing conveys an assumption about who is permitted to choose.

Imagine if the people who were perceived as loss of value had once upon a time been the slaves that had built the older foundational roads, whose value the rest all inherited. Imagine if they were allowed to be perceived as loss of value because their ancestors had once been property, and, having repatriated their selves back to themselves, had stopped being property. Imagine that by no longer being property their former owners decided their very bodies represented not freedom for the freed, but theft from the owners.

Imagine if, in Randopolis, when people talked about the manumission of enslaved people, they said things like “we freed the slaves,” as if freedom itself were a gift that had been bestowed by Owners to Owned, rather than a natural right unnaturally stolen and rightfully returned.

But let’s go back further. Let’s imagine that this example of theft of value and displacement wasn’t just a single event, but a cycle. A foundational pattern. An intrinsic cultural methodology, to be found, once one had eyes to see it, everywhere; quite literally, everywhere. Imagine if the land upon which the houses and streets of Randopolis had been built by enslaved people had been stolen from somebody else entirely, and the people who lived there previously had been send off to live elsewhere. 

Imagine if that value, which had once belonged entirely to them, no longer did, and, it seems, never would again? Imagine a theft so total as that.

In Randopolis, these were assumptions so rooted in the public consciousness of those who benefitted from it, so buried beneath the soil, that they were entirely invisible to their consciences, even as they picked and ate the fruit of those unnatural roots. Imagine if all of this was, to those who never suffered the consequences of these decisions, but who mainly reaped the benefits, largely invisible, and automatic, and inextricable, and shared, and inherited.

And because injustice inevitably occurred in their society, the citizens of Randopolis began to conclude, that injustice was an inevitable reality, rather than to suspect that they were foundationally unjust.

You’d be able to see this sort of dynamic play out wherever you looked, literally anywhere—in Randopolis, remember—the fictional city I’m asking you to imagine.

Watch:

Imagine if in Randopolis the city decided at some point to build its streets primarily to convey cars. Imagine the city decided to put only cursory thought into the fact that some people possess insufficient wealth to own a car. Imagine that a city did this, until Randopolis became a much more difficult and expensive place to live if you didn’t have a car than if you did. Where not being able to afford a car made it less likely you’d be able to afford one in the future, either.

Imagine if some of the people involved in making such decisions owned car companies, or companies supporting or fueling the automobile industry, or owned large interests in such companies, or were friends with people with such interests. Imagine if most of the rest received generous payments from such companies to assist them in holding their plum positions.

Imagine something more: Imagine the streets in Randopolis were built in such a way as to cut some people in the city off from easy access to the rest of the city. Imagine if streets in those parts of the city were not maintained. Imagine if the city decidedto do this.

Imagine if the city decided to divert less of its investment to those cut-off streets than others, year after year, decade after decade, until one could easily perceive which streets Randopolis had deemed worthy of investment and which it did not, and, by inference, the people living on those streets.

Imagine if the city decided to send municipal forces down only some streets to enforce laws, but not others, year after year, decade after decade. Imagine they were sent down streets that were presumed theft, presumed threat, presumed poverty, to secure “safety” for streets that were presumed safeness, wholeness, wealth. Imagine that over the years these forces were more and more equipped like military, like soldiers. Now imagine that the effect of all this policing was that the people who were perceived as presumed theft were charged with far more crime than any other, and as a result they also became presumed danger.

And so, the people who had inherited the injustice of theft also inherited even the culpability for the crimes committed against them, which was used as license for further theft.  In Randopolis.

Imagine if year after year, decade after decade, the people living in houses on those streets had the shared, intrinsic, inextricable, inherited value of those streets deliberately diverted away from their street, and into all the other streets.

Imagine if for decades (in Randopolis), the city decidedto help certain types of people own houses, while at the same time the city decided to not help other types of people own houses, or even to make it much more difficult, or impossible. Imagine after time those who had received this assistance were able to leverage the value they’d gained from having their houses to actually be able to buy other houses, which they would then rent to those who hadn’t been given the opportunity to create such value. Imagine if the city decided that these rented houses only needed to have as much value put into them as the owners decided they wanted to put. Imagine that, in Randopolis, a system was invented by which those who sold houses all tacitly agreed not to sell property in areas that had received stolen value to such people. 

Imagine it were easy to do so, because those who lived on streets with stolen value all just so happened to have darker skin. Strangely, even though the neighborhoods whose value had been stolen contained mostly people with darker skin, no individual person with lighter skin could remember ever discriminating against any person with darker skin. Somehow it was just something the city decided, without deciding to, with no intention. Almost as if it had happened invisibly, automatically, inextricably.

And imagine then, that those in Randpolis who had inherited the benefits of all this diverted value were able to leverage that stolen value against the lessened value of the plundered areas, to purchase those areas as discount at an investment, and realize fantastic profits as the presence of the assumed value of their selves, who had inherited a deliberate disproportionate value, replaced the assumed loss of value of those who had inherited a deliberate disproportionate loss, and so the city decided to once again invest in the maintenance of the streets, to allow value to flow once again into a place that had for decades seen the natural flow of value deliberately cut off.

Imagine some of the older streets, paved new, covering over the older roads, built on land stolen by others, contructed by child labor, underpaid labor, or by slave labor, allowed to fall into disrepair, until people perceived valuable arrived to bestow their assumed value upon them.

Imagine all that unnaturally diverted and stolen value. Think of the centuries of theft. Think of the centuries of inheritance—because natural human systems are inherited. As with the benefit, so with the harm.

Imagine a land optimized for injustice, as it slid into complete injustice.

Imagine a land where only a few people held almost all the value and influence the society provided.

Imagine a land where they used that value and influence mostly to try to get the rest.

Imagine a land that had become an unnatural human system optimized for injustice.

Imagine a land built on a bad foundation, as it began to collapse.

Imagine Randopolis.

Imagine millions of people believed they could actually live by this maxim.

____

A hypothetical: say we discovered that the streets were discovered to be the cause of 95% of all cases of cancer. What if the very composition of our streets was discovered to contain some substance, which over time had become radioactive. Suppose they had made our streets so radioactive that they were causing active fatal harm to the people who used them. An asbestos of transportation, let’s say. What then?

Well, then: we’d need to replace all the streets. How many? All of them. How far? To the very boundaries of the city. Or we’d have to accept that the streets would kill us.

It would be the same steps for a smaller modification as for a larger one: Realize the need. Accept our responsibility. Agree to pay. Then actually pay.

Enough of us will have to want to enact these steps, so many that the city would decide it would be done.

Or, if the city refuses to change them, we’d have to conclude that this is because our city refuses to enact one of these steps. Which means either we have refused to enact them, or else that we are no longer what is meant when we say “the city decides,” and the controls have been unnaturally stripped from us.

Say we came to the point where most of us had decided to take these steps, yet those who held the controls by which the city decidesstill refused to take them. Either they refuse to accept the need, or they refuse to accept responsibility, or they refuse to determine to act, or they refuse the cost.

If this were our situation, then we will have to reach the conclusion that the problem of our radioactive streets is only the immediate problem, that the larger undergirding problem is that the way that our city makes decisions has been unnaturally misaligned, intentionally stolen. We’d have to conclude that such a city has decided to filter decisions on whether or not to let people live or die based on whether or not they were worthy of the effort—that it was a city aligned along matters of profit, rather than matters of life. That it was a city willing to take all the value an individual provided it, and then finally extend none back—and was a city that had learned ways of performing such an action.

But hey, listen to this: What if we only fixed someof the streets?

What if we only fixed the streets that were predominately … crazy hypothetical here, but oh, let’s say, let’s say white?

Or what if we only fixed the streets that had houses on them that were, to use a completely insane hypothetical that you’d never see in the real world, worth $1 million or more?

I think we’d have to conclude that the city had decided to let the streets kill some of us, based on our race or our wealth.

Which would suggest that each of us has a valuation, beyond which our lives are not valued.

Which would mean there exists some danger that would cause our city to abandon each of us, because—as we’ve learned—the opportunity and the health that society passes to us is automatic and inherited and invisible, but so is the injustice — the theft and the harm.

Which means that I have now learned that my community’s priorities—the real ones, the ones that are undeniable because they are what is actually happening—have bent reality toward the consumption of people to secure profit, and they have now reached a momentum that can no longer be denied.

Which means that as present danger to my neighbor means an eventual danger to me, no matter how much that danger presently favors me.

Which means that—even if I am only driven by self-interest—I would do well to watch for dangers to my neighbors.

If the way the city decides has become as broken or useless or harmful as our streets, then it is unable to solve problems—any problems. It might even start to organize itself around the principle like “government is the problem”—that solving problems of people isn’t a suitable matter for cities to engage in. If our city is organized in such a way that it is unwilling to save people from death unless they are deemed worth it, then we are vulnerable, not only to the problem of the streets, but to any danger to which our city decides our lives are disposable. If we are people who wish to live, we will have to change the way the city decides.

____

It's a science fiction premise. I put it forward for the same reason most science fiction premises are put forward, which  is to demonstrate something true about our present reality.

Here's what my sci-fi premise demonstrates: when the city deliberately decides not to fix a problem, something needs to be fixed about the way the city decides things, because it represents a clear indication that our natural human system has been optimized for injustice, which will eventually consume everything, including ourselves. Today's threat to my neighbor is tomorrow's threat to me, because to live in a system that eats my neighbors is to live in a system that will eat me in the end—even if I'm the one the system feeds.

It is a wise society, then, that takes care of its neighbors.

How will we fix the way the city decides? The same way we change the streets. The same steps: Realize the need. Accept our responsibility. Decide to act. Agree to pay.

How much will have to change? Everything misaligned.

Which neighbors will we have to protect? All of them.

How far will the change have to reach? To the very boundaries of the city.

Because the good news is, if human systems can be configured, it cuts both ways. If we’ve configured our streets for harm and theft and injustice and collapse, we can also configure them for health and restoration and justice and sustainability.

How do we change the configuration? By changing our priorities—because priorities have a momentum that bends reality.

It starts with priorities—real ones, ones that cannot be denied, because they reflect what is actually happening.

Yes, and how do we change our priorities? The same steps we use to do anything. The same steps we use to build or change or maintain our streets.

Realize the need. Accept our responsibility. Decide to act. Agree to pay.

If we don’t do it, it has to be assumed it’s because we don’t want to.

I think these are very plain and obvious things to say. I’ve learned that this is an age in which it has become useful and necessary, even powerful, to state plain and obvious things.

TOM WILLIAMS / CQ-ROLL CALL, INC VIA GETTY IMAGES

A.R. Moxon is a writer. His novel  The Revisionaries , is available now, with the paperback edition releasing December 1, 2020.

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0. NEXT

PART I: HERE
1. STREET
2. VALUE
3. CONFIGURE
4. NEIGHBOR
5. INHERIT
6. ALIGN

PART II: NOW
7. CONVICT
8. CONFESS
9. REPENT
10. REPAIR

Streets 2 - Value

 

< Back

So, the street in front of my house is a part of a system of streets—a natural human system, a delivery system for the natural values provided by human community.

Every system has observable qualities. If one is curious about a system, I think it’s useful to observe and catalogue that system’s qualities.

So I think I’ll do that.

•

Remember, this system in which I take part is natural. If you trace it back far enough, it’s established on natural resources and values that nobody bought, nobody sold, nobody made. Wide river or vast reservoir or shoreline, rich topsoil, natural minerals, teeming forest, you name it. And so a natural system of humans sprang up, which believed it would need a human where my house is, and I became that human. I give my house value and meaning, and also my street. And I give my neighbor’s house value and meaning, and they similarly enrich mine. There is a community, and I share in it. And that community has a collective will, and I share in that, too.

This value the streets provide: it’s shared.

Shared.

Your street is there now. Maybe you can look up from your screen and see it, maybe not, but it’s there, ready to offer its gifts of transportation and interconnectivity from your house to the very borders of your country, and beyond.

Do this: close your eyes and picture your street.

Now: picture the potential for transportation it provides. What does that potential look like? I mean the physical thing. Does it have physical form? Is the form you chose a metaphor?

If you’ve seen the potential for transportation that all the interconnected streets provide, let me know. I never have.

My street, too, is a delivery mechanism for the value a community provides. It does this so effortlessly that, in the manner of water to fish, or sky to birds, it’s practically undetectable for me and all those who receive it. Until I started writing this, I rarely thought about my street. You could almost say I didn’t see it. I have never seen the potential for transportation it provides.

This shared value the streets provide: it’s invisible.

Invisible.

It’s the context from which everything else springs. Any trip I take, no matter how far I go, begins with my street, and only continues as it does because of the existence of other streets. If the streets weren’t there, I’d be far less likely to get there, or to even know they exist. Almost every possibility available to me, no matter how smart I am, no matter how innovative, no matter how successful, none of it would be possible if there weren’t a community to share in it. I may go to many different places, but to a very real extent what places I go, and how I get to those places, is determined by the placement of streets. So this is another way that streets resemble the whole of a natural human system, which provides all the context for all my potential action. I may know more than anyone else, but who taught me?  I may provide many jobs, but who provided the labor to fill those jobs? My innovations may provide incredible value, but who is there to appreciate it, and remunerate me for my contributions? No matter how skillful, or intelligent, or hard-working, or diligent, or innovative I am, this value we all share is why I’m able to apply those skills to anything more than my own cabin alone in a wilderness.

This shared, invisible value the streets provide: it’s foundational.

Foundational.

And: imagine my neighbors weren’t there. Imagine mine was the only occupied house on the block. My residence on an otherwise deserted street would start to seem like a bizarre curiosity, or at least the emptiness of all the other houses would seem to me an ominous sign.

It would be difficult for me to sell such a house—far more difficult than it would be for me to sell the exact same house in a fully occupied neighborhood.

This leads me to an odd conclusion: my neighbors lend more value and meaning to my house than I do, even though they don’t live in it. And even as we lend our street meaning, all the other people in the city lend more meaning to us and our street than we lend to them, even though none of them live on our street. And this favorable unbalance exists in the relationship between each of those other people and their own streets, and all the other streets—including mine—that are not theirs. And, in fact, the more I’m able to grow from this foundational soil of shared value, the more I owe to it. The more success I’m able to create for myself, I’m able to create only because this foundation exists, which generates more potential and opportunity for an individual than that individual would ever be able to generate for themselves. The more people, the more opportunity, potential, resource. A city of a million can do more than a city of a hundred. Isn’t that odd? The more there are to share, the more the system generates to be shared.

This shared, invisible, foundational value I derive from my street—it’s generative.

Generative.

There is no procedure set for this value, this meaning. There’s no account into which this value and meaning will be deposited, no wait time for the receipt.

It’s just there, automatically.

We can’t not get this value. They can’t not give it. How could you live in a city and not live around its streets, or benefit from their existence?

And the people who live in the city don’t live there in order to give our street value. It’s not done through any intentional act on their part. As long as we live here instead of somewhere else, the streets will go on delivering us the value of living here. And if we go somewhere else, then the streets there will deliver similar value in the same way. We seem to have a shared life in some mysterious way, which finds its center-point simply by existing here, instead of there. The value and meaning we give to each other is connected in way that is inextricable.

This shared, invisible, foundational, generative value I derive from my street—it’s automatic and inextricable.

Automatic. Inextricable.

How interesting.

•

Remember, this natural system in which I take part is human. It involves humans. Humans have taken something that naturally occurs, and they built something around it. In so doing, they’ve taken what was natural and made it something else.

My street was built sometime in the 70s or the 80s. I know, because my house was built in 1990, and because I happened upon a map of my city drawn up from the late 60s and my street wasn’t on it, though some surrounding streets were.

It’s new, my street. When the construction crew showed up, they put a street where no street had previously been.

However, my city was founded around 1840 or so, long before construction crews knew how to pave for cars; long before cars, in fact. Many streets in my city—the very streets that lend my street more value than my street lends them back—have been there for quite a while, and were, at some point, modernized.

And: Streets need to change over time, to be improved. Sometimes a new street must appear to meet a new opportunity, or that opportunity will never be realized. Existing streets require maintenance or they lose value. And—since streets give a city value, and the city returns a small portion of that value to the streets, which makes the streets more valuable, which allows the city to receive more value—a city that chooses not to maintain and improve its streets makes a foolish choice, to slowly become less and less able to produce and deliver value in a changing world.

My city was wiser than that. My city maintained and improved its streets, and so became a modern city.

The shared, foundational, generative, automatic, inextricable value that comes to me from all my city’s streets, delivered all the way down to my street … it can be changed, enhanced. It’s configurable.

Configurable.

My city decided to modernize its streets—a reflection of their already-existing value, an investment in the continuance of that value. A belief that there would be, in the future, people to use those streets, to enjoy that value, and to naturally provide value through their presence.

And so, any number of people did the dance that people do, when they temporarily manifest the collective will of a group. Representatives chosen, decisions made. Then the city planner, then the foreman and workers, then the residents and shops.

And so there they are, older streets made modern, climbing up and down hills, winding around parks, tracing the courses set down by others, long before I was born. Taken together they connect a community; lend value to all the other streets just as the other streets lend value to them. They lend value to my street.

My street wouldn’t ever have been built, if the older streets, modernized and improved, hadn’t been there to suggest the possibility of my street.

The people who put those oldest streets there didn’t do it for me. Yet I am here.

There was no intentional act at the time to enrich me specifically. Yet I am enriched.

In some way, without intending to, I’ve inherited the value of those streets, laid down 150 years ago. And there’s literally nothing I can do to divest myself of that inheritance. It comes to me as naturally as the rain that falls on the roof—my roof. Is it my rain? I suppose you could look at it that way.

The shared, foundational, generative, automatic, inextricable, configured value of my street … it’s inherited.

Inherited.

The configurations made to this natural human system of streets affect me based on where I live, not on what I think the streets should do. They provide their value based on how those who configured them, acting as part of our shared will, decided they should affect the me they thought would live there, the me that I became. If the city decides that my street should receive only the best, they I will receive only the best. And, if the city decides that my street is worthless and deserves nothing at all, I will receive nothing. How I personally feel or what I believe about these configurations to this natural human system doesn’t enter into it at all—my neighbors and I will all share in this configured inheritance in the same way we share in everything else in our natural human system, that is: foundationally, generatively, automatically, inextricably.

So this inheritance has nothing to do with intention. I receive it even if it accrued years, decades, centuries before I was born. Nor is the value I gather from that inheritance something I can separate from myself. I receive it so effortlessly, it would be possible for me to receive it without even being aware of it, as a tree received nutrients from its roots without a thought to fungi connecting it to its forest, the way its leaves receive rain without a thought to anything like a cloud.

To recap: My street is part of a natural human system in which I partake, established by a will in which I partake, to deliver value that is shared, invisible, foundational, generative, automatic, inextricable, configurable, and inherited, delivered to me not because of anything I did; delivered all because there was a need for a me, and I have become that me.

How interesting.

And I wonder: how have we configured our streets? How are we configuring them? How will we configure them in the future?

And I wonder: what else might I have inherited through this configuration?

What other good?

What other harm?

What I like about the street metaphor is, it's not a metaphor.

A.R. Moxon is a writer. His novel  The Revisionaries , is available now, with the paperback edition releasing December 1, 2020.

< Back

0. NEXT

PART I: HERE
1. STREET
2. VALUE
3. CONFIGURE
4. NEIGHBOR
5. INHERIT
6. ALIGN

PART II: NOW
7. CONVICT
8. CONFESS
9. REPENT
10. REPAIR

Streets 1 - Street

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Here’s my situation: There’s a street in front of my house. Perhaps you can relate.

Let me describe this street. It’s rather hard, mostly smooth, mostly flat, made of some sort of composite material, beveled slightly downward at the edges to accommodate rain runoff, pocked here and there with lids covering access points to sewer and water infrastructure. We call these access points “manholes,” though I assume women will also fit down them.

The street is connected to the houses lining it by a series of umbilicals we homeowners call our “driveways.” This street is connected to some other streets, which connect to still other streets, which connect to other streets, some of which arrive at other locations within the city, others of which lead out of the city, to other cities. Maybe you have a similar setup.

It’s the street where I live. This makes it my street.

I drive on the other streets, too. They’re lined with houses. People live in those houses. I suppose the people in those houses think of the streets I drive as their street. Almost an unconscious thing.

I drive on theirstreets. I don’t ask first. They’re very cool about it. They never complain. And I pay their hospitality forward, too; other people drive down my street every day, and they don’t ask permission either, and I’m extremely cool about it, though my dogs are not cool about it.

They bark.

It's not very effective.

I use my street every day. It’s how I go places. If my street was gone, I’d miss it. I’d have to hunt for parking somewhere a block away, trudge out to my car whenever I wanted to use it.

If everyone else’s streets were gone, I’d miss them, too. Interestingly enough, if all the streets disappeared, I’d miss everybody else’s streets more than I'd miss my own. Moreover, if all of their streets were gone, it wouldn’t really matter if my street were still there. I’d have to walk everywhere, or get a vehicle that could handle cross-country driving, like an F-Series truck, maybe, or a brace of oxen.

The value of mystreet depends, intrinsically, on all of theirstreets. And the value of theirstreets depends, in part, on mine. And, it seems, the collective mass of streets provides me more value—much more, in fact—than my own specific street.

The value and benefit of our streets are entangled with each other, inextricably. You can’t take one away without diminishing the rest.

Each one by itself would be a bizarre curiosity. Together, they connect a community. Which leads me to a set of perhaps surprising conclusions: there is a community, that actually exists. And: I’m part of it.

None of this happened because any of us—me, my neighbors, you, your neighbors, and everyone in between—actively intended to do it. It even happens if we don’t like each other. It happens pretty much exactly the same way for me and my neighbors even if we disagree with each other on literally everything—if fact, what we believe or intend or think has literally no impact on the benefit we receive from our street, or any inconvenience we would receive if the street were demolished. All that really matters, from a practical purpose, is that we are where we are, at this point in time.

Everyone I know has a street, in some manner of speaking. 

I don’t know anybody who constructed their own street.

How interesting.

•

Question: Who put my street there, in front of my house?

Who put yourstreet there, in front of your house?

Who put my street there?

Have you ever wondered?

•

Literally, I mean. Who did it? Who’s the one person who is responsible for my street?

It’s not a confusing question, but I don’t find the answer immediately obvious.

Do you know who put yourstreet there?

I mean, I presume at some point there was a construction crew, a group of people who did the actual labor of clearing the ground and digging the trenches for water and gas and sewer and electrical hookups to the various plots, then tamping it smooth, and grading it, and then maybe laying down gravel, and then a layer of boroscite, and maybe then five layers of muscelinated grist of various elasticities and torsions, and then the final layer of toprock before planating the asphalt surface.

I would like to be clear: I don’t know how it’s done at all. I am utterly clueless. In fact, I just made up most of those words I used.

But … the road crew knew. After all, they did it. But I wonder: did any one of them know exactly every step of it? Is there any one person among them who could, all by themselves, build the street?

Maybe so.

After all, I assume they had a foreman of some kind, who had the plan for the street, and understood each piece of it, and directed the operation from start to finish. But could the foreman have operated each machine used in the construction? Did the foreman have the actual physical knowledge of each step and how to practically enact them? Put another way: if the foreman had been left alone, could the street have still been built, however slowly, and, if so, would it have been as skillfully done?

Even if the answer is ‘yes,’ can you say the foreman put the street there? Did the foreman decide on putting my street there instead of somewhere else?

What about the plan the foreman followed? Did the foreman make the plan? Probably not.

Probably there was some sort of city planner, a highly trained civic engineer, perhaps an architect, who understood the proper way to build the street, who drew up the plan, and the methods, specifications, regulations. Perhaps the same city planner was even the one who coordinated the efforts, who assigned the foreman and the road crew, who organized supplies.

But even in the unlikely scenario under which the city planner did every bit of this work, could it be said the city planner builtthe street?

First of all, could the city planner have done all the labor? Would the city planner have been in possession of all the same tactical practical physical knowledge as the foreman? Even if so, of course, you have all the industries that made the materials and tools and equipment that came in from elsewhere, which the crew used to build the street.

But even if you take away all that support … why did the city planner decide to put the street there?

I assume the city planner decided to do that because she was assigned to do it. And she was probably assigned to do it because there were going to be houses put there. So there was zoning and registration and parceling and all of the civic activity that’s necessary to have construction come out and build houses to which a street might be connected, to connect to other streets, without which the houses would have little value to the city.

I presume it’s because the city decided there needed to be a street there.

Wait.

The city decided? Thecity? Decided?

A city is a collection of buildings, isn’t it?

Who is “the city?”

Who put my street there?

•

I’m being coy, of course.

We know what is meant by ‘the city,’ when it comes to zoning decisions, and it isn’t a collection of buildings.

We know why the street is there.

My street is there because somebody decided to build houses there, and houses need streets.

Someone decided to build houses there because somebody decided they wanted a house there, either to live in, or to sell to someone to live in.

But they wouldn’t have wanted to do that, I presume, if there hadn’t already been streets and houses nearby—would they? I mean, conceivably, the construction crews that put the houses on my street could have put those same houses in the middle of one of my state’s many forests, but they didn’t.

Why?                                                                                  

I'm only speculating here, but perhaps it's because out in the middle of the woods, the houses would have had very little value. Likely nobody would have bought them. And no city would agree to build a street for them. They’d rot away, unlived in, unknown, a bizarre and eerie curiosity for a hiker to find, or a wolverine.

The city agreed to build a street for those houses because the city decided there would be value to adding to the city, in the form of more people. And people need houses. And houses, of course, need streets.

And so the street was decided upon.

But we know it wasn’t the city. It was the people in the city. They decided.

But we know it wasn’t allthe people. It was the people appointed to the task of making those determinations. They decided. When we say the city decided, we actually mean them. Those people, in that moment … they were the city; a brief and targeted manifestation of our collective will.

Our? Of course. All of us. We decided on themto be “the city.” At least, those of us that participated in that decision making process did. And then there were others of us, who perhaps were too busy or disinterested or disaffected to participate directly, but who nevertheless hold a certain set of opinions about what is good and desirable, and that set of opinions lends itself to a general and shared knowledge set, which we might call "common knowledge" about what is good and desirable, which would inform our appointed decision-makers decisions in many ways, some of which they probably wouldn't even consciously think about. 

And then they decided. And, if they were good at being the city, they listened to what the "common knowledge" thought of that decision, and also remembered previous similar decisions, and tried to replicate what had worked for the most people from those previous decisions, and tried to avoid what hadn’t worked for most people from those same decisions.

And in that way, as best they could, they represented our collective will.

A collective will. And streets are a delivery mechanism—one of many—for that collective will. Streets are how the collective will delivers transportation to itself.

And then the city planner, drawing out the plans for the street, became a brief targeted manifestation of our collective will.

And then the foreman, and the workers.

And then, finally, me.

Because our collective will decided that a street should be there, for people to live in.

And they were right. There are people living in those houses. I’m one of them. We live in the houses, connected to the street, and we drive on the streets, and we give value to the city. We don’t live there in order to give the city value, but we give it value all the same. Nor can we not give the city this value, unless we choose to move away, and give some other city our value.

But of course, there was a time before any streets were built, when people decided to live here instead of there. It wasn’t a random decision. Some natural confluence occurred that people recognized as providing some sort of natural value. In my city’s case, as with so many cities, that confluence was something human beings naturally understood: water. Water sustains life. It allows agriculture. It allows easy transportation to other cities down-river, who made the decision to settle here instead of there for the exact same reason we did. For my city, as with so many cities, our first street was one we had no hand in building at all—a river.

Nobody did anything to get the river. The river was there, delivering its value, and so people came to it, and from that natural delivery system, we built more systems of our own to deliver value to those living there—things like barges, docks, locks, fish ladders. And houses.

And streets. In a very literal sense, my street can be seen as a branch off a river.

My street … at its very origins, it wasn’t something purchased or earned. It was a natural gift. It’s natural.

Natural.

But, if I and my neighbors weren’t there, the houses would have no value and meaning, nor the street—unless others came and lived there. If there were no people living in any of the houses, the city would have no value, no meaning. It would be a bizarre and eerie curiosity.

We need there to be a community. A community needs there to be us. And so it comes to be.

The street is there on my behalf, because it was decided somebody should be there on everybody’s behalf, and that somebody turned out to be me and my neighbors. If it hadn’t been us, it would have been somebody else, unless nobody else came, in which case the houses, unlived in, would eventually cease to exist, and so would the street.

We need there to be a community. A community needs there to be us. And so it comes to be. And so we come to be. Because we are humans.

Human.

A street is a part of a natural human system. And I am a human. Thus, I exist, in a very observable way, within a system. To perceive it I just have to walk out to my mailbox and look both ways.

How interesting.

Who put my street there?

I did.

A.R. Moxon is a writer. His novel  The Revisionaries , is available now, with the paperback edition releasing December 1, 2020.

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0. NEXT

PART I: HERE
1. STREET
2. VALUE
3. CONFIGURE
4. NEIGHBOR
5. INHERIT
6. ALIGN

PART II: NOW
7. CONVICT
8. CONFESS
9. REPENT
10. REPAIR

Streets: Part I - HERE

 

< Back | Forward >

So: he’s a liar.

So: he’s a fascist.

So: he’s an authoritarian.

So, he’s using his office to enrich the businesses he still owns and from which he still profits.

So, he encourages and celebrates police violence, and advocates the use of military force against peaceful protest.

So, he’s using the exact language and phrases of white supremacy and neo-Nazis and fascism, pursuing their exact desired policies.

So: he’s deliberately demolishing all norms and standards of a functional democracy, in service of demolishing democracy, in service of himself.

So: he’s working to put himself entirely above the law, and, even more, positioning himself as the law, as someone whose authority must not be questioned, to whom loyalty is irreducible from patriotism, for whom criticism must be understood as not just criticism of the country but as an attack on it.

So, he used the power of his office transactionally, first to try to destabilize the coming elections, then to try to punish political enemies by imposing medical sanctions on his own citizens during a pandemic; premeditated manslaughter at best, genocide at worst.

And: His entire party has rallied around these efforts, in support of them, almost as if somebody doing what he is doing was the plan all along.

And: His followers, his true believers, millions and millions strong, all cheer for him, and the worse he gets, the more that he perfectly embodies all of the worst things any of us warned he might become, the more they seem to love him. They cheer and cheer and cheer, and they tell us to get over it, and they say “fuck your feelings,” and then they tell us they love the way he makes us weep, because they love to drink our tears. And they take to the streets and government buildings with guns to win back their never-lost right to honor murderous soldiers who fought to preserve chattel slavery, or to establish their right to spread a virus to the satisfaction of their own convenience. And they laugh and laugh and cheer and cheer and yet they never seem to get happy.

They cheer for a system that is optimized for the abuse of the marginalized by the powerful, not because they are powerful, but because seeing the abuse of the marginalized comforts them that they are not marginalized.

And: Comfortable masses, tens of million strong, seem not to worry about any of this, as long as it doesn’t touch them personally; seem willing to overlook any outrage to any other person, seem capable of finding any handy excuse in any given moment to separate themselves from the inconvenience of caring.

If you think all the quite obvious truths listed above seem hysterical, overwrought, scolding, divisive … then you speak the language of the comfortable masses, for whom the report of abuse is seen as the real abuse, who resent the screams of the victims far more than the screams of their attackers, because the screams of the victims seem to dare expect some sort of moral response, while the screams of the attacker ask only for complicit silence, which is the preferred posture.

They keep silent in a system that rewards comfortable enablement of abuse of the marginalized by the powerful, not because they love abuse, but because they love comfort and reward.

There are others of us, who have conformed enough to the needs of a country that consumes people that we’ve been kept relatively comfortable; who are now, in this rough authoritarian age, coming to these inescapable realizations, which are new only to us. The tumor at last distends the belly, and now we know.

And there are those of us for whom this is no revelation, because for these—not white enough, wealthy enough, male enough, abled enough, cis enough, straight enough—this has always been the country they’ve known.

So. Here we are.

And the question is: what next?

Next? Well, either he wins, or he loses.

 Either he gets what he wants, and his party get what they want, and his cheering hordes get what they want, or else they don’t.

If he wins, it’s a grim matter but at least it’s a simple matter. We have enough of a trendline to see exactly where we’re headed. We’ll see the full-throttle victory of all our old worst historical traditions and the death of all our best aspirational dreams for ourselves. We’ll see the final death gasps of whatever shreds remain of our tattered global reputation, and the irrevocable end of our oldest alliances. We’ll fully commit to being an authoritarian kleptocracy, a theocratic genocidal white ethno-state, which exists to line the pockets of the very wealthy and to profit off the bodies of the rest—who are controlled for as long as they’re useful, then discarded when they aren’t. There will be some semblance of something they’ll call “elections.” There will be some semblance of something they’ll call “the news.” There will be troops whose ostensible purpose is to protect our borders, ranging far from the border, and others whose ostensible purpose is to protect our citizens, occupying our neighborhoods; all of them acting as they see fit to create the sort of general and specific terrors that comprise their only true mission. There will be locations that will be called something less overt than “concentration camps”—indeed, there already are such locations, but there will be more of them, and they will grow more efficient, and more secret.

There will be many who will die because they’ll no longer have what’s needed to survive in a country that has been architected in such a way to digest and destroy unprofitable people. In such a country, all one has to do if they want to kill masses of people is arrange things so the people you want dead can no longer be profitable.

Yes, that’s what they’ll do.

If not, why are they already doing it as much as they’re able? If not, why are they already doing it more and more, the more and more they find they’re allowed? It’s not comfortable to know, but those not knowing it reveal a willful effort to not know obvious things.

And if we win? If he and his party lose? If we actually manage to halt their advance?

Well. If he loses, then a somewhat more hopeful matter, but not so simple. Because we’ve learned things about ourselves, and our country, and our friends and neighbors, and our systems of administration and authority, that we can never un-know.

We now know who will look the other way, and what they’ll look the other way for. We know who will find reasons to accept unacceptable things, or become confused about obvious truth and obvious lie. We know now what people will stand for. We know now what people will cheer for. When the chips are down, you find out what people are like when the chips are down. And then you know.

We’ve watched the message of an openly fascist, openly corrupt, openly white supremacist president grow, and spread, a new strain of an old virus, against which we’d stopped being vigilant; optimized for a world of international television and internet media, a sensationalized version of our country’s oldest sins. We’ve heard those who would cheer this spiritual infection of hate, who would gather in red-capped throngs to spread this soul rot between each other. We’ve seen the enthusiasm of some, the eagerness, the joy, at the thought that they might once again become great; that in a nation that was listening to more and more voices, they might become the only voice; in a nation that was seeking diversity, they might once again become not just the default consideration but the only one; in a nation that was imperfectly seeking equality, that they might again become the sole priority. We’ve seen the quick acceptance of others, as they opened themselves to this new infection of old lies, seeking some advantage they might press, as more vulnerable populations first felt the effects.

We’ve heard all the excuses they give themselves for all this. And we’ve heard all the threats they’ve offered, the war they’ve promised to deliver, if they don’t get their way. We’ve seen the sunglasses hat goatee warriors on the steps of government buildings toting their private massacre weapons, and we’ve noticed that our police show them far more deference than others who present far less threat to a peaceful order, whose cause is justice rather than selfishness. We’ve seen the cops rioting, brutalizing the crowds every night with military equipment and thuggish tactics.

And they aren’t going to stop cheering for it, even if we depose their beloved hate goblin. They’re not going to stop expecting it, or demanding it, or fighting for it. They’ve seen the white supremacist authoritarian anti-democratic state that Donald Trump would bring, and they very much want it. They think it's great.

But there’s more.

We now know that, even though Trump is a disruption to the status quo in some ways, he isn’t only a disruption to the status quo. In many ways, he is a part of that status quo’s inevitable progression. He’s the result you can expect to see, in a society that believes that we have no shared society beyond individual desire, that life must be earned, that wealth is how you earn it, and that violence redeems. We can see that Trump isn’t a disruption to business as usual, but rather a pure distillation of that business.

In other words, even though he spread a virus, Trump isn’t a virus. He’s the first unignorable tumor—for those of us comfortable enough to have ignored the previous symptoms. Yes, he’ll have to be removed completely, but afterward things are going to have to be different. If they aren’t, then we’ll find ourselves here again.

We’ve heard all the excuses the more comfortable among us make for not making significant changes afterward, for going back to how it was before, to not having to think about politics anymore. Even many opposed to the spiritual virus of MAGA America aren’t interested in quarantining it. Some aren’t interested in vaccinating against it. Some don’t think it will be necessary to engage in radical transformation, to create permanent new systems and safeguards to detect and protect against new future strains. Some want only to remove the tumor of Trump, then return to the exact situation that allowed it to grow.

And we’ve heard all the justifications they give themselves for all this.

They’re not strangers, these cheering throngs, and they’re not strangers, these complacent masses. They’re the people we grew up with and live around. They’re us. They’re generous, many of them. Capable workers. Well-intentioned. Happy, smiling, friendly. They love their kids. They go to church. They work hard. They pay their taxes. They walk their dogs. They love us, some of them. Yes, and we love them, many of them—and if we seem so angry, perhaps the reason is that the anger we feel toward these friends and family and neighbors, while appropriate and honest, is easier than the deep sorrow and mourning they've inflicted on us, by so willingly, eagerly, or complacently aligning with a man who has no redeeming characteristics, who pursues atrocity, energizes hate, demolishes democracy, and promotes an empty promise of tawdry glory that's as chintzy and false and stupid as everything else about him.

We share a country with them, whether they’ll admit it or not. We share families and tribes and country and world. We are all tied together in a natural human system. 

There are people who know about the virus of hate and what to defeat it, who know about the cancer of greed and want to fight it …

… and people who know about the actual virus and want to spread it, who know about actual cancer and want to profit from it …

… and people who have deliberately decided not to know, and are working very hard now to not know.

Many of them are, to quote our Glorious Leader himself, “very fine people.”

I am one who now knows things previously unknown. This is my confession of knowledge. I assume there are still many things I don’t yet know that I’ll learn, and so I assume there are many ways in which this confession will be imperfect. So: let the imperfections stand as a part of the confession.

We know things about ourselves that we hate to know, but there’s no going back. There are two questions we have to face, now that we have this knowledge. I’ll get to the second question in time. It seems likely I won’t post this question until after the election, but that’s fine, because while the election matters a great deal, it’ll mostly determine how much damage and harm and pain and theft and murder there’s going to be in the near term; it won’t determine whether there will be any, or what we have to do about it. And these questions, which sounds simple, but aren’t, will be the same after the election as it is before, no matter the result, and so will the answers.

The first question is about conviction and confession.

It’s this: How did we get here?

A.R. Moxon is a writer. His novel  The Revisionaries , is available now, with the paperback edition releasing December 1, 2020.

< Back | Forward >

0. NEXT

PART I: HERE
1. STREET
2. VALUE
3. CONFIGURE
4. NEIGHBOR
5. INHERIT
6. ALIGN

PART II: NOW
7. CONVICT
8. CONFESS
9. REPENT
10. REPAIR

Streets 0 - Next

Next

This is not the proclamation of an expert. This is the confession of a fool.

In the months after the 2016 election, while still reeling from the permanent demolition of the reality I'd known, and the betrayal of every fine principle I’d thought our nation shared—by institutions and people I’d thought trustworthy, into open white supremacy and authoritarianism—I wrote an essay called Sky. It was my lament.

Near the end of the first year, I posted Bubbles. It’s a series of essays about a nation I’d failed to see, and the terrible lies I saw it has been founded upon, the spiritual desire of such terrible lies, and what I perceived as our role in that world, which is to live as good stories, as works of art.

I learned what they were about by writing them, and then thinking about them after.

Here, then, is the next one.

It’s the thing that comes at the end of my four-year revelation of American menace and cruelty. I’m calling it "Streets." I don’t know what it’s about yet, other than that—like those that came before—it’s about where I’ve arrived, and how we got here, and where I think we should go from here, if we're interested in survival as a nation and a species—an open question, I realize.

The things I’ll be saying are things I’ve learned recently, but they aren’t things recently true. Only my awareness is new—and yours, maybe. There are others who’ve known all these things, and more besides, for a long time. How long? Their whole lives. They’ve been telling us about it all along, and we haven’t heard until recently.

We? I. I haven’t heard until recently.

Heard? Listened.

I have to conclude we haven’t wanted to know.

We? I. 

If you’re one who has been wise to these matters your whole life, I hope my words honor your experiences, and I apologize for all the ways they will fail.

If you’re a fool like me, still reeling even four years later from new knowledge of old truths long known, this is for you. I’m hoping to put words to how my frame has moved over four years—about what is broken, and how healing could occur.

Three years ago, I wrote that you don’t move people’s frame through argument or debate, but by telling stories. 

I still believe that.

Let me tell you two stories; Here, and Now.

___

Here: let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that there's a virus. Let’s pretend it’s deadly. Let’s say it’s a novel new strain of an old structure that we’ve known about for a long time. In this story, the virus appears quickly, and it spreads quickly, rapidly becoming a global pandemic. It harms a lot of people, and many of those it harms it kills. In some places, people are better prepared for a virus, and less people get infected, and less people die as a result. In other places, people are worse prepared for a virus, and more people get infected, and more people die as a result.

Now, imagine that one reason this virus spreads so effectively is because a large number of people who get it—perhaps even a majority of the people who get it—are asymptomatic. Unaffected, they transmit it freely. They aren’t in danger themselves, but they’ll put other people in danger, simply by walking around. Some people will be harmed, and some will suffer permanent damage, and some will die, because of these asymptomatic super-spreaders, who will never even need to know that they were the cause of all this needless pain.

Now, let’s pretend it's discovered that the best way of containing such a virus is for everybody to agree, for the sake of those who are most vulnerable, to do some things that are inconvenient. Let’s make up some random examples … let’s say … they’d need to wear something on their face that is very slightly uncomfortable, and to keep to their houses as much as possible, and to avoid travel and social contact, and perhaps to spread out during necessary human interactions, for a few months. And, let's say that the best way of defeating such a virus was for governments to invest heavily on meaningful and sustained financial relief for people whose livelihoods depended on engaging in newly risky behavior, and also on a vigorous, nationally coordinated testing and tracing regime led by expert epidemiologists—in short, on knowing as much as possible about the virus, and then on spending what it costs to combat it.

We might dare hope that in time the virus in our story would be defeated. That, provided the virus is not too deadly and efficient, enough people would eventually survive the virus to produce antibodies making themselves immune, or a vaccine would be developed, and then this virus would no longer harm and kill people when it infected them. The virus would then seem, for all intents and purposes, to be gone—but it wouldn't be gone, of course. Viruses mutate, grow, change, and eventually evolve to new strains. So, any society that was wise and knowledgeable about viruses would invest in vigilant prophylactic systems to monitor and guard against outbreaks—in short, they would commit to knowing as much as possible about viruses in general, and then on spending what it costs to contain them.

Let's pretend that, in our story, most countries decide to do exactly this. But, in our story, there's one country that, though it has more resources than any other, decides instead to ignore the virus. 

Can you imagine this? A society containing millions of people who absolutely refuse to participate in the minor discomforts needed to contain the virus, who oppose on the basis of cost all government intervention that would relieve those suffering very real distress because of the virus, framing their decision along lines of personal individual risk and intention and freedom; millions of people who deliberately fail to understand that they might be spreading the virus, who cite only statistics to support their contentions and ignore all others; who demand proofs of things already known and then refuse the proofs when they are given; who verbally (sometimes even physically) attack any who ask them to honor minimal levels of public health and social consideration. Pretend these people decide to be confused about all reports about the virus’s spread. Imagine many of them even choose to believe rumors that the virus is a hoax. Pretend such people become very angry when they see other people engaging in the minor inconveniences that would contain the virus—almost as if the sight of people exercising knowledge about the problem convicts them of their decision to align with ignorance.

And: let's pretend that in this society there exists a well-funded corporate media infrastructure fully committed to validating the choices of these deliberately ignorant people, and increasing their ignorance by broadcasting further disinformation, false equivalencies, and outright lies. Imagine such an apparatus, wearing the trappings of authority and trustworthiness, but aligned to delivering to their viewers reinforcements of their ignorance, fully dedicated to confessing that ignorance as wisdom, to urging their audiences toward increasingly extreme and aggressive acts in defense of that ignorance.

Before long you might decide that such a society was committed, as a first priority, to ignorance of things already known, in order to satisfy the temporary indulgence of their own convenience.

Before long you might even have to conclude such people have alignedthemselves with the spread of the virus, no matter their stated intents.

In our story, these people don't align themselves with the spread of the virus by actively spreading it. They align themselves with it by simply refusing to know things that are already known, because they don’t want to accept the responsibility that comes with knowledge, because they are intent on avoiding any inconvenience that might come with that responsibility.

Or: Imagine a government that decides only to fight the virus to the extent that corporate profit is protected, and, outside of those bounds, will simply exercise a practiced ignorance that the virus exists, or else claim the virus has been contained and now exists in the past, or is simply an unchangeable part of the new way of things. Imagine the leader of such a government who decides to suppress testing, because the report of infection makes him look bad, and without such report, the full truth of infection won’t be known.

Imagine a government that decides not to invest in monitoring and guarding against the next virus, or even dismantles existing apparatuses and safeguards in order to save a pittance in expenditure.

Before long, you might decide that such a government was not committed to the health of its citizens. Before long, you’d have to conclude that such a government had deliberately chosen ignorance of things already known, in order to satisfy the temporary benefit of other interests.

Before long one might even have to conclude such a government has aligned themselves with the spread of the virus, no matter their stated intents. They’d say that they are against viruses—of course they are. But any observer would know better, if they had eyes to see it.

In our story, this government doesn't align themselves with the spread of the virus by actively spreading it. They align themselves with it by simply refusing to acknowledge things that are already known, because they don’t want to accept the responsibility that comes with knowledge, because they are intent on avoiding any cost that might come with that responsibility.

End of story one.

___

Now: let’s pretend there’s a disease called cancer, and that there's a person who has it. Let’s say it’s been growing in this person's body for a very long time. Let’s say it’s crept, stealthy and invisible, for long months and years. Let’s say it’s only made certain localized parts of the body less comfortable as it grew, twinges and aches that in retrospect might have been considered warnings to heed. Now let’s say that for the first time there is an unignorable visible sign; a tumor grown so large it distends the belly. Let’s imagine a doctor who runs some tests. She prescribes immediate surgery to remove all affected tissue, an aggressive campaign of medication and treatment, frequent testing, and, after recovery, a radical change to diet, exercise, and environment.

Now let’s imagine a patient who ignores all symptoms and refuses all the tests. You’d have to assume that—for whatever reason—they don’t want to know the frightening truth. Right?

Or let’s imagine our patient refuses the treatment, because in their estimation the treatment was too radical. You’d have to assume the patient had decided, for whatever reason, that the treatment was no longer worth the pain or the cost; that they'd decided instead to let matters progress on their established course, with all the likely consequences that choice entails. Correct?

But now imagine our patient refuses the lifestyle changes, insisting that diet and environment don’t affect risk factors for recurrence; insists that their body isn’t a system; that what’s happening in one organ in the abdomen can’t possibly affect any other part of the body. Imagine our patient decides, despite all available evidence and the exhortations of multiple oncologists, that the tumor is the only problem, that the cancer from which it grew doesn’t exist, that the clear proofs of the environmental factors that fostered it are unproven. You’d have to assume they’d decided that the likelihood of a recurrence wasn’t worth the effort to prevent. Yes?

And ... imagine our patient makes these decisions without facing the reality of what those decisions mean—refuses treatment and measures meant to prevent recurrence, not from a difficult but clear decision that the fight is no longer worth the pain of treatment or change, but because they imagine that the fight can be won—despite any evidence—without any cost beyond a surgical removal. Imagine our patient makes their only priority a return to the familiar comfort of their life exactly as it was before they received the knowledge of the diagnosis, and expects health to come as a result.

Before long, you’d have to understand our patient as somebody committed, as a first priority, to not knowing things that are already known, in order to try to return to a previous state that is no longer attainable.

Before long, you’d understand our patient is putting their entire body in grave danger, not because they've made a measured, aware, and purposeful decision about their being, but simply because they don't want to acknowledge the reality in which they now find themselves. Before long, you'd have to conclude that his patient is aligned with the spread of the cancer, whether or not they intend to be.

Our patient doesn't align themselves with the spread of the cancer by actively spreading it. They align themselves with it by simply deciding to not know things that are already known, and not taking active steps to oppose it.

Or: Imagine our patient exists within a healthcare system that made payment a higher priority than treatment and prevention. Imagine this healthcare system instructed doctors and hospitals to refuse to allow the tests or treatments, unless it could be first established that the patient had the ability to pay.

Imagine a healthcare system that let people die if treating them wasn't profitable. Imagine one structured so that existence of a health condition made it less likely for that person to receive health care, simply because treating an unhealthy person is more expensive than treating a healthy one.

Before long you might decide that such a system was not committed to health. Before long you’d have to conclude that such a system had deliberately chosen ignorance of things already known, in order to satisfy the temporary benefit of other interests. Before long you might even have to conclude such a system has aligned itself with cancer and every other type of disease, no matter the intents of well-meaning  people within such a system. It's administrators will tell you that they are against cancers—of course they are. But you will know better, if you have eyes to see it. 

This system doesn’t align itself with the spread of cancer by actively spreading it, but simply by refusing to acknowledge things that are already known, because it doesn't want to accept the responsibility that comes with knowledge, because it is intent on avoiding any cost that might come with that responsibility, and on reaping the benefits that come from the existence of the problem.

End of story two.

___

It seems to me that viruses and cancers have a number of clear similarities and intersections. Both are opportunistic, both committed only to the spread of themselves. Both are systemic, in that what they consume are healthy systems, first destabilizing them, and then, if left untreated, compromising them to the point of failure.

Both, then, ought to be treated, generally speaking. Surely we all agree on that point.

In both cases, effectively treating them involves: first, knowledge that they exist; then a short-term change—often radical, often targeted, to eliminate the threat; then a remedy—a permanent, holistic, watchful, strategic, systemic restructuring—to monitor for and prevent recurrence.

In both cases, aligning against the spread requires active, persistent, determined, informed, and transformative action.

In both cases, aligning with the spread requires only passivity.

Virus and cancer: all either needs to devour a healthy system is for you do nothing—they’ll do the rest.

The differences between viruses and cancers are also instructive.

A deadly virus has no place whatsoever in a healthy system. The treatment for such a virus is to contain it, expunge it, and eradicate it. A perfectly healthy system will have no deadly viruses whatsoever. A virus spreads by mutating a new form for which a healthy system has not yet developed a defense. The remedy against a virus is eradication: to monitor for new strains to detect them, contain them as they're detected, and eliminate them once contained.

To give a layman's understanding, a cancer typically grows when a system improperly prioritizes a part of a itself that would otherwise be healthy and natural: bone, breast, lymph, lung, liver. Treatment for a cancer is meant, hopefully, to restore the tissue to a right balance within the system, removing the cells committed to an unhealthy growth while saving the cells that the system needs. After treatment for liver cancer, for example, a recovering person will still have some part of a liver, just one hopefully free of cancer. And: though liver cancer springs from the liver, the existence of liver cancer doesn’t mean that livers in general are bad. And: a cancer frequently spreads because of environmental or lifestyle factors. The remedy for a cancer often involves testing and monitoring of the entire system, to ensure all of it is working in a way that is healthy and sustainable and fitting.

With a virus, the challenge is keeping it out of the system entirely. You defeat the viral attack on the body’s systems, then keep vigilant against the next mutation of the virus, because if you don’t, it’ll grow, and spread, infecting more and more, taxing our response systems, and making us more vulnerable, especially those of us who were vulnerable already, including those of us with … cancer.

With a cancer, the challenge itself is systemic. A tumor is often merely the most unignorable symptom of a systemic vulnerability, demanding radical changes to the configuration of body and lifestyle. In many cases, in order to preserve the body, things cannot go on as they have previously, because to return to such a state makes disaster inevitable, and failing to make radical changes compromises the entire body, making it susceptible both to recurrence of tumors and even external factors, like … viruses.

When we find our systems compromised by either cancer or virus, we should not avoid radical and transformative change, if we would align with health. We should seek radical remedy and transformational change. We should desire them as if they were survival itself—which they are.

And, if we would align against recurrence, we should never avoid a systemic restructuring, no matter the expense. We should seek it. We should desire it as if it were survival itself—which it is.

And, if we care about health, we must never refuse to know what we know about either virus or cancer.

The cost of ignorance is, eventually, everything. The cost of knowledge, however painful, can never exceed it.

Each chair = 10 lives.

___

So: it’s time to talk about the United States and the world. 

These days, talking about the United States and the world means talking about the fascist white supremacist who is currently the Republican President of the United States, and who is—and I still cannot believe I am typing this—Donald Trump.

A.R. Moxon is a writer. His novel The Revisionaries , is available now, with the paperback edition releasing December 1, 2020.

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PART I: HERE
1. STREET
2. VALUE
3. CONFIGURE
4. NEIGHBOR
5. INHERIT
6. ALIGN

PART II: NOW
7. CONVICT
8. CONFESS
9. REPENT
10. REPAIR

Streets 1 - Street

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Here’s my situation: There’s a street in front of my house. Perhaps you can relate.

Let me describe this street. It’s rather hard, mostly smooth, mostly flat, made of some sort of composite material, beveled slightly downward at the edges to accommodate rain runoff, pocked here and there with lids covering access points to sewer and water infrastructure. We call these access points “manholes,” though I assume women will also fit down them.

The street is connected to the houses lining it by a series of umbilicals we homeowners call our “driveways.” This street is connected to some other streets, which connect to still other streets, which connect to other streets, some of which arrive at other locations within the city, others of which lead out of the city, to other cities. Maybe you have a similar setup.

It’s the street where I live. This makes it my street.

I drive on the other streets, too. They’re lined with houses. People live in those houses. I suppose the people in those houses think of the streets I drive as their street. Almost an unconscious thing.

I drive on theirstreets. I don’t ask first. They’re very cool about it. They never complain. And I pay their hospitality forward, too; other people drive down my street every day, and they don’t ask permission either, and I’m extremely cool about it, though my dogs are not cool about it.

They bark.

It's not very effective.

I use my street every day. It’s how I go places. If my street was gone, I’d miss it. I’d have to hunt for parking somewhere a block away, trudge out to my car whenever I wanted to use it.

If everyone else’s streets were gone, I’d miss them, too. Interestingly enough, if all the streets disappeared, I’d miss everybody else’s streets more than I'd miss my own. Moreover, if all of their streets were gone, it wouldn’t really matter if my street were still there. I’d have to walk everywhere, or get a vehicle that could handle cross-country driving, like an F-Series truck, maybe, or a brace of oxen.

The value of mystreet depends, intrinsically, on all of theirstreets. And the value of theirstreets depends, in part, on mine. And, it seems, the collective mass of streets provides me more value—much more, in fact—than my own specific street.

The value and benefit of our streets are entangled with each other, inextricably. You can’t take one away without diminishing the rest.

Each one by itself would be a bizarre curiosity. Together, they connect a community. Which leads me to a set of perhaps surprising conclusions: there is a community, that actually exists. And: I’m part of it.

None of this happened because any of us—me, my neighbors, you, your neighbors, and everyone in between—actively intended to do it. It even happens if we don’t like each other. It happens pretty much exactly the same way for me and my neighbors even if we disagree with each other on literally everything—if fact, what we believe or intend or think has literally no impact on the benefit we receive from our street, or any inconvenience we would receive if the street were demolished. All that really matters, from a practical purpose, is that we are where we are, at this point in time.

Everyone I know has a street, in some manner of speaking. 

I don’t know anybody who constructed their own street.

How interesting.

•

Question: Who put my street there, in front of my house?

Who put yourstreet there, in front of your house?

Who put my street there?

Have you ever wondered?

•

Literally, I mean. Who did it? Who’s the one person who is responsible for my street?

It’s not a confusing question, but I don’t find the answer immediately obvious.

Do you know who put yourstreet there?

I mean, I presume at some point there was a construction crew, a group of people who did the actual labor of clearing the ground and digging the trenches for water and gas and sewer and electrical hookups to the various plots, then tamping it smooth, and grading it, and then maybe laying down gravel, and then a layer of boroscite, and maybe then five layers of muscelinated grist of various elasticities and torsions, and then the final layer of toprock before planating the asphalt surface.

I would like to be clear: I don’t know how it’s done at all. I am utterly clueless. In fact, I just made up most of those words I used.

But … the road crew knew. After all, they did it. But I wonder: did any one of them know exactly every step of it? Is there any one person among them who could, all by themselves, build the street?

Maybe so.

After all, I assume they had a foreman of some kind, who had the plan for the street, and understood each piece of it, and directed the operation from start to finish. But could the foreman have operated each machine used in the construction? Did the foreman have the actual physical knowledge of each step and how to practically enact them? Put another way: if the foreman had been left alone, could the street have still been built, however slowly, and, if so, would it have been as skillfully done?

Even if the answer is ‘yes,’ can you say the foreman put the street there? Did the foreman decide on putting my street there instead of somewhere else?

What about the plan the foreman followed? Did the foreman make the plan? Probably not.

Probably there was some sort of city planner, a highly trained civic engineer, perhaps an architect, who understood the proper way to build the street, who drew up the plan, and the methods, specifications, regulations. Perhaps the same city planner was even the one who coordinated the efforts, who assigned the foreman and the road crew, who organized supplies.

But even in the unlikely scenario under which the city planner did every bit of this work, could it be said the city planner builtthe street?

First of all, could the city planner have done all the labor? Would the city planner have been in possession of all the same tactical practical physical knowledge as the foreman? Even if so, of course, you have all the industries that made the materials and tools and equipment that came in from elsewhere, which the crew used to build the street.

But even if you take away all that support … why did the city planner decide to put the street there?

I assume the city planner decided to do that because she was assigned to do it. And she was probably assigned to do it because there were going to be houses put there. So there was zoning and registration and parceling and all of the civic activity that’s necessary to have construction come out and build houses to which a street might be connected, to connect to other streets, without which the houses would have little value to the city.

I presume it’s because the city decided there needed to be a street there.

Wait.

The city decided? Thecity? Decided?

A city is a collection of buildings, isn’t it?

Who is “the city?”

Who put my street there?

•

I’m being coy, of course.

We know what is meant by ‘the city,’ when it comes to zoning decisions, and it isn’t a collection of buildings.

We know why the street is there.

My street is there because somebody decided to build houses there, and houses need streets.

Someone decided to build houses there because somebody decided they wanted a house there, either to live in, or to sell to someone to live in.

But they wouldn’t have wanted to do that, I presume, if there hadn’t already been streets and houses nearby—would they? I mean, conceivably, the construction crews that put the houses on my street could have put those same houses in the middle of one of my state’s many forests, but they didn’t.

Why?                                                                                  

I'm only speculating here, but perhaps it's because out in the middle of the woods, the houses would have had very little value. Likely nobody would have bought them. And no city would agree to build a street for them. They’d rot away, unlived in, unknown, a bizarre and eerie curiosity for a hiker to find, or a wolverine.

The city agreed to build a street for those houses because the city decided there would be value to adding to the city, in the form of more people. And people need houses. And houses, of course, need streets.

And so the street was decided upon.

But we know it wasn’t the city. It was the people in the city. They decided.

But we know it wasn’t allthe people. It was the people appointed to the task of making those determinations. They decided. When we say the city decided, we actually mean them. Those people, in that moment … they were the city; a brief and targeted manifestation of our collective will.

Our? Of course. All of us. We decided on themto be “the city.” At least, those of us that participated in that decision making process did. And then there were others of us, who perhaps were too busy or disinterested or disaffected to participate directly, but who nevertheless hold a certain set of opinions about what is good and desirable, and that set of opinions lends itself to a general and shared knowledge set, which we might call "common knowledge" about what is good and desirable, which would inform our appointed decision-makers decisions in many ways, some of which they probably wouldn't even consciously think about. 

And then they decided. And, if they were good at being the city, they listened to what the "common knowledge" thought of that decision, and also remembered previous similar decisions, and tried to replicate what had worked for the most people from those previous decisions, and tried to avoid what hadn’t worked for most people from those same decisions.

And in that way, as best they could, they represented our collective will.

A collective will. And streets are a delivery mechanism—one of many—for that collective will. Streets are how the collective will delivers transportation to itself.

And then the city planner, drawing out the plans for the street, became a brief targeted manifestation of our collective will.

And then the foreman, and the workers.

And then, finally, me.

Because our collective will decided that a street should be there, for people to live in.

And they were right. There are people living in those houses. I’m one of them. We live in the houses, connected to the street, and we drive on the streets, and we give value to the city. We don’t live there in order to give the city value, but we give it value all the same. Nor can we not give the city this value, unless we choose to move away, and give some other city our value.

But of course, there was a time before any streets were built, when people decided to live here instead of there. It wasn’t a random decision. Some natural confluence occurred that people recognized as providing some sort of natural value. In my city’s case, as with so many cities, that confluence was something human beings naturally understood: water. Water sustains life. It allows agriculture. It allows easy transportation to other cities down-river, who made the decision to settle here instead of there for the exact same reason we did. For my city, as with so many cities, our first street was one we had no hand in building at all—a river.

Nobody did anything to get the river. The river was there, delivering its value, and so people came to it, and from that natural delivery system, we built more systems of our own to deliver value to those living there—things like barges, docks, locks, fish ladders. And houses.

And streets. In a very literal sense, my street can be seen as a branch off a river.

My street … at its very origins, it wasn’t something purchased or earned. It was a natural gift. It’s natural.

Natural.

But, if I and my neighbors weren’t there, the houses would have no value and meaning, nor the street—unless others came and lived there. If there were no people living in any of the houses, the city would have no value, no meaning. It would be a bizarre and eerie curiosity.

We need there to be a community. A community needs there to be us. And so it comes to be.

The street is there on my behalf, because it was decided somebody should be there on everybody’s behalf, and that somebody turned out to be me and my neighbors. If it hadn’t been us, it would have been somebody else, unless nobody else came, in which case the houses, unlived in, would eventually cease to exist, and so would the street.

We need there to be a community. A community needs there to be us. And so it comes to be. And so we come to be. Because we are humans.

Human.

A street is a part of a natural human system. And I am a human. Thus, I exist, in a very observable way, within a system. To perceive it I just have to walk out to my mailbox and look both ways.

How interesting.

Who put my street there?

I did.

A.R. Moxon is a writer. His novel  The Revisionaries , is available now, with the paperback edition releasing December 1, 2020.

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0. NEXT

HERE
1. STREET
2. VALUE
3. CONFIGURE
4. NEIGHBOR
5. INHERIT
6. ALIGN

NOW
7. CONVICT
8. CONFESS
9. REPENT
10. REPAIR