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 my house. 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 some.

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?

Question 5: Can you stop providing value? We live in a society that clearly believes that you can, because it clearly measures human value by the metric of profit, and people can certainly become profitable—indeed we know that all people eventually will become unprofitable, eventually. Or is it possible that profitability is only one metric of value, and even the least profitable person provides incalculable value along other metrics?

Question 6: If you can stop providing value ... 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? 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? Or should we say that this is a society that has made itself deliberately ignorant of all other ways of calculating human worth?

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?

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

Because here's the crucial thing: the value you provide will eventually be overtaken in time, either by innovation or by age or illness. The realities of forward human progress or the realities of a temporary human body will get you, one way or another.

This is inevitable. So, given this inevitability ... what kind of world do you want to create?

If you lived 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, then an innovation that replaces your life's work might be exciting, if your life's work was devoted to solving a problem that is now solved. Or, even if the innovation removes from the society the tangible financial value of what you do, the natural distress of that would be curtailed, because you'd live in a world where profit and production was not the measure of your worth, and in which far more metrics for value than profit existed. If the thing that were no longer financially necessary were merely a job to you, then it would be the opportunity to do something else. If it were something you'd have done even without getting paid, then maybe you'd go on doing it anyway.

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

The good and bad choices you made, you made from the context of the range of available choices you inherited—and remember, the range of choices before you will change. 

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

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.

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 an example I provided in the last chapter. 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 at best 1968, when we passed legislation that finally recognized the truth that millions of people still refuse to accept—that Black people are human beings of equal value to everyone else—legislation that recognized them 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 angry about it, it turns out, and they’ve taught many of their children and grandchildren to be very angry, too.

For most of human history the assumption has been that there are people that 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. 

And you are a part of it.

And you don't get to choose about that.

You can choose to not like it, but you're still a part of it.

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 husbands, 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 asks 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.

If you are aligned with injustice, that alignment is a fact that largely overwhelms 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 is when people realize change is needed. And the only way they decide that is by changing how they are aligned relative 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.

As an individual, you can be personally 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 to 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 system got 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 cancerous system that consumes people for money.

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 that comes with change.

Here in my country, 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 aren't 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 am associated 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 be 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 that neighborhood 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.

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 develop 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. Because the quantum telescope utilizes relativistic technologies, it allows us to see all intelligent civilizations across the entirety of their time—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. More disturbing still, 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 risks 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 of 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 were a 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 more value 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 more neighbors. 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 expanded benefits 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 more conflict, 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 more neighbors. 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 more conflict, 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 new abuses. 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 nationalist realization 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 more resources, 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

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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?

 

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A question: Who is my neighbor?

An answer: Who isn’t?

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

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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.

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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