On Dignity

  I’m warning you upfront:  This is going to be a little more serious than I usually am.  I’ll try to be a little more funny next time.

Abundant Sufficiency begins and ends with dignity.  Dignity is both its foundation and its ultimate end.  Dignity is its alpha and its omega.

What do we mean by “dignity”?  I’m talking about dignity in the original Kantian, Enlightenment sense.  The same way the UN charter talks about it.  It’s not something one possesses by virtue of good breeding or as a reflection of one’s state of mind.  It’s not top hats, bow ties, and silver tipped canes.  It’s not a sense of discretion or keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of adversity.

Dignity is inherent.  It is inalienable.  It is part of the condition of being human.  Everyone has it from birth, regardless of circumstance.  It cannot be conferred or withheld.  Dignity is intrinsically linked to our existence on this planet.  It is inseparable.

Kant linked dignity to rationality, our ability to have preferences and make choices, but I would argue that even that makes dignity conditional.  Even a newborn infant, who is incapable of making rational decisions in the same sense as an adult, has inherent dignity.  It feels, even if it cannot name its feelings.  It knows the presence of its mother just as it knows its absence.  I cannot say when dignity truly begins, just as it is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment that life begins, but we should all be able to agree that once a child is born, the umbilical cord is cut, and it begins its existence as a discrete entity, its dignity is intact and it deserves to be recognized and respected.  As soon as we start doing as Kant suggests, and linking dignity to rationality, we head down a slippery slope.  If rationality equals dignity, does less rationality imply less dignity?  That sounds a little too much like dismissing people as “low IQ individuals” or, worse, as “useless eaters”.

On a biographical note, I should mention at the outset, that I am writing from a relative position of privilege.  I’m a cis het white male with a master’s degree.  I’m not at the top of the pile, but I’ve enjoyed a lot of advantages and have almost never found myself on the margins.  Although an atheist, I’m nominally Jewish (although not in such a way that would be recognized in an orthodox community) and while I’m quite open about my cultural identity, I also don’t go around advertising it.  As such, I’ve barely ever encountered any real antisemitism in my life.  In fact, the closest I ever came was when a high school bully included Nazi imagery in some pictures he drew in an attempt to shock or disturb me.  However, I never had the impression that he had anything against Jewish people per se, so much as this was a salient detail about me that allowed him to, shall we say, tailor the experience.

I bring this up only because I want to own the fact that I’m not speaking as someone who has had my dignity denied in any systemic way.  I’m not speaking from experience so much as I’m expressing a deeply felt principle.  Moving on…

If we accept that dignity is unconditional, that it is an inalienable right inherent in every human being, the importance of human flourishing becomes readily apparent.  If we all have dignity, we all deserve to flourish.  It’s nonnegotiable.  

Yet our ability to flourish, unlike dignity itself, is highly conditional under the current order.  An accident of birth can elevate one person high above others, lacking nothing, or leave one to scrape out a subsistence level of existence.  The color of one’s skin or the language one speaks can signal membership in an elite society or mark one as less deserving of even basic consideration.  Dignity is something we all possess, but our circumstances can determine whether or not it is recognized, which seems wrong.  In fact, it’s more than merely “wrong”.  I would argue that the failure to recognize dignity in another person is unjust and inhumane.

The failure to recognize dignity in another individual can take several forms:  It can result in shame, humiliation, or even degradation.  These are all deplorable conditions.  They represent real harm.  But at scale, the denial of dignity has a far more insidious effect:  It results in abjection.

”Abjection” is most often connected to the work of Julia Kristeva in literary theory.  For Kristeva, abjection is a form of horror.  It represents something that exists both inside and outside of the social order, the most common examples being a corpse or human waste.  Judith Butler’s work, however, brings the concept into social and political theory, particularly into the realm of gender and sexuality.  For Butler, trans, queer, and intersex bodies do not fit neatly into hetero- or cis-normative schema, placing them in the realm of the uncanny.  They are almost recognizably human, but their existence threatens the schema.  

        The threat to the hetero- and cis-normative schema is not merely a matter of confusion or category error.  It is an existential threat to the schema itself, threatening to expose that things like sexual orientation and gender identity have always been social constructions.  This creates cognitive dissonance for those who exist within the schema.  It is a profoundly uncomfortable reaction that demands a response.

        This is why homophobic and transphobic reactions often spill over into violence, whether physical or legal.  There is a desire to expel the abject individuals from society, requiring the violations against individual dignity named above.  This explains the desire to point to a “natural order” in which sex is strictly binary and “men cannot become women”.  It explains the desire to protect the categories of people our society deems “vulnerable”, such as women and children.  Bathroom bills and laws banning trans athletes from participating in school sports are framed as a rational response to a threat to people’s safety, despite statistics that prove that the threat is nonexistent.  It’s bigotry, without question, but it is bigotry rooted in a disgust reaction.  Disgust is a pre-conscious reaction, which means that much if not all of what we classify as “bigotry” isn’t the result of decisions people arrive at rationally.  They are reacting viscerally to something they regard as fundamentally “unclean”.

This is not to excuse bigotry.  Just because it is irrational doesn’t make it tolerable.  But it explains a great deal about the kind of people who are denied dignity and the language used to describe them.  It explains the tendency to ascribe what some would regard as unwholesome habits, such as eating cats and dogs, to outgroups like immigrants from developing countries.  It explains the use of dehumanizing language, describing such people as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our nation”.  When people become abject, they are effectively othered and dehumanized, making it possible to perform any number of outrages that one could not justify otherwise.   Aliya Rahman, a disabled woman who was detained for two days by ICE back in January, testified before Congress recently.  She described the guards at the private facility where she was held as characterizing detainees as “bodies”, as in “we need room for ten more bodies”.  This is abjection in action, being carried out right now in the United States on a grand scale.

This is, of course, only one example of abjection in the world today. There’s no shortage of examples.  Indeed, the challenge is in making ourselves feel anything at all in the wake of so much dehumanization, degradation, and death.  It’s far easier to close our eyes and hope that someone else will do something.  The problem, as we know, is that there is no one else.  There is only us, by which I mean human beings.  We may not be in a position to effect the change necessary to stop these atrocities, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything at all.

So what can we do?  The whole project of Abundant Sufficiency demands that the acknowledgment of, and respect for, the dignity of all people is nonnegotiable.  No one’s humanity is contingent.  While exposure to marginalized groups can have the effect of allowing those who carry and irrational fear or hatred to begin to recognize their humanity, it doesn’t always work.  History is full of examples of neighboring communities who retain enmity towards one another for long periods of time.  Familiarity can make what was formerly strange become commonplace, but it can also breed contempt.  Education can help, but there has to be more.

Abundant Sufficiency demands that the dignity of everyone be protected, but until we can build societal structures to do so, we have to take matters into our own hands.

That means making the recognition of common dignity a daily practice.  It means acknowledging the dignity of everyone, including people you might find a little gross or problematic.  The people we might characterize as “ghetto” or “trailer trash”.  The so-called “people of Walmart”.  When you see someone with obesity riding one of those little scooters in public, wearing pajamas outside the house, and wearing day-glo Crocs, remember that you are looking at a human being not a category; not a type.  Their humanity isn’t contingent on maintaining a certain standard of health or good taste or fashion sense.  

Possibly the hardest thing is to make sure that we are recognizing the dignity of those who would deny the dignity of others, even ourselves.  Yes, that includes people like Stephen Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.  People are not born hateful.  People are made hateful by hateful systems.  This isn’t to say that they aren’t responsible for their actions, but at the end of the day, their humanity is not conditional either.  Miller has done many repellant things and he deserves to face the consequences of his actions, but even those actions cannot abrogate his own claim to dignity.  

That being said, re:  Stephen Miller:  Fuck that guy.

There’s a whole lot of harm being done in the world, and most of it must be addressed at a systemic level.  That means participating in the democratic process, if you happen to live in a place where that’s still a thing.  It means organizing.  It means voting for candidates who will try and mitigate some of the harm, or at least not inflict more.  But I’m not going to sugar coat it:  The real problem is the system we have.  It has to change and that can only come if enough of us demand it.  More on that in another essay…

We don’t have to wait for the rest of the world to recognize a person’s dignity in order for us to do so.  I’m not suggesting that if we all join hands and sing “Kumbya”, all of our problems will be solved, but we have to start somewhere and, as the Stoics tell us, the only people we have any control over whatsoever are ourselves.  We have a choice to make.  Are we going to be the kind of people who can bring about a world of genuine universal human flourishing? 

         As I said at the start of this screed, dignity is both the beginning and the end of Abundant Sufficiency.  By recognizing and affirming the dignity of all people, we’re taking the first step towards a world in which all people are finally allowed to live with dignity.  That’s a world worth fighting for.

A final thought:  A foundational figure for me is John Donne.  Not only was he a kick-ass poet (see “The Sun Rising”) but he wrote something that’s stayed with me ever since I first read it.  It’s a famous excerpt from Meditation XVII and it’s worth quoting in full because it’s just that good (italics are mine):

 No man is an island,  entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were;  any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

That italicized line says it all as far as I’m concerned.  I quote it all the time in conversation, which is why I’m not very popular at parties.  

Talk at you all next time.

Thine.

We Shouldn’t Have to Live Like This

  I work in education.  Several times a year, we have to practice “lockdown drills”.  For those of you who are not in the business, we’re practicing for the nightmare scenario in which there is an armed individual in the building.  The details aren’t important.  The point is that we are expected to lock our doors and practice pretending that we’re not there.  We’ve done it often enough that, once we’ve received an “all clear”, there’s a little ritual we do:  The students (who are high schoolers) spend ten or fifteen minutes reacting to the idea of having to prepare for such a grim eventuality.  Students tend to fall into one of two categories.  On the one hand, you have the kids who express a fatalist attitude.  “If someone comes in here with a gun, we’re all dead anyway.  What’s the point of this?  What’s locking the door supposed to do?  They’ll just shoot the lock!”

On the other hand, we have our junior John McClains.  They’ll describe in granular detail the amazing feats of strength, skill, and agility they would perform in the case of a school shooting.  “Man, I’d climb up into the drop ceiling, crawl over to the perp, drop down behind the guy, and snap his neck before he even knew I was there!”

Early in this most recent school year, however, following a lockdown drill, a student took me by surprise by not falling into either one of the above categories.  Instead, they just looked at me and said something I’ll never forget:  “We shouldn’t have to live like this.”

They were right, of course.  That’s not what was surprising.  What was surprising was the clarity of the statement.  The other kids aren’t wrong for reacting the way they do.  Confronting the possibility of violent death is difficult at the best of times.  Having to do it in school, in front of everybody, as part of a regular school activity?  That’s even harder.  It’s far easier to avoid looking directly at the problem and deflect through performative nihilism or heroism.  

But this student didn’t do those things.  They looked unflinchingly at the problem, at what it implied about the world we live in, and diagnosed it:  We shouldn’t have to live like this.

It’s obvious that “this” can be applied broadly, beyond the specific case of lockdown drills.  There are many other conditions in the world that we shouldn’t have to tolerate, but we do because it is part of The Way Things Are.  These things have become such a commonplace feature of the world we live in that questioning them is viewed as a waste of time and effort.  We’re embracing the same fatalistic helplessness as many of my students after a lockdown.

What are some of the things that we shouldn’t have to tolerate?  Medical bankruptcy comes to mind.  Not only shouldn’t health care be behind a paywall, the very idea that people can come to financial ruin because of something that not only happened to them through no fault of their own, but was also essential to their continued flourishing and/or existence should outrage all of us.  You took an ambulance?  Couldn’t you have just driven yourself to the hospital?  Or walked?  

How about homelessness?  There are actual human beings, in the richest country in the world, who are sleeping on the street tonight.  They are at the mercy of the elements, vulnerable to chance.  Why?  Because they don’t have sufficient green pieces of paper?  Because society tells us that people with addiction, mental illness, or who otherwise don’t conform to what we consider “normal” don’t deserve shelter?  Have you tried not having PTSD?  Have you considered getting a job?

And that’s just the basic stuff.  We also shouldn’t have to tolerate politicians who use scapegoats to direct public outrage against vulnerable people.  We shouldn’t have to tolerate armed and masked government agents in our streets.  We shouldn’t have to tolerate corruption at the highest level.  We shouldn’t have to tolerate an Attorney General who protects child molesters.  We shouldn’t have to tolerate an embarrassing conman who forces the world to participate in his personal psychodrama.

I say the above at the risk of alienating some readers.  My examples are drawn from current events in the United States.  They date-stamp this essay, making it less timeless and universal in its scope.  But the things that are happening right now, in early 2026, deserve attention because there is real harm.  There are powerful people in the world who are making things worse at scale, in addition to the systemic harms that are always running in the background.  We shouldn’t have to accept either of these things, but the more immediate harm must be addressed up front.

The mention of “masked agents” brings us to what’s been happening in Minneapolis over the last few months.  Anyone who has been following the news should know what’s been happening.  The Trump administration, in an effort to perform strength by increasing the deportations of undocumented immigrants, has empowered ICE to round people up for detention, in many cases regardless of their actual immigration status.  

The people of Minneapolis understand that they shouldn’t have to live like this.  And they aren’t accepting The Way Things Are.  They are confronting the agents of ICE and CBP as trained observers.  They are filming ICE and CBP agents at work.  They are protecting their neighbors by making people aware of what’s going on, honking their horns, blowing whistles, and refusing to let the masked agents in unmarked vehicles work anonymously.

And they are doing it at enormous personal risk.  By this point, everyone knows the names of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two individuals who stood up to ICE and CBP, refused to turn away from the suffering of others, and paid with their lives.  Renee Good was shot three times in the face by an ICE agent because she had stopped in the middle of the street in the middle of a raid.  Alex Pretti was shot ten times in the back, after being disarmed by CPB agents.  Not only were they killed, they were defamed by members of the Trump administration.  They were called “domestic terrorists”.  They were accused of attempting to kill the agents who took their lives.  Of course, the footage taken from dozens of angles quickly revealed the truth:  That neither Good nor Pretti posed a threat to anyone.  They were simply trying to mitigate the harm the Trump administration has unleashed on a vulnerable population.

This is only one example of a profound injustice that ordinary people have decided not to tolerate.  There are others, at home and abroad.  The people of Minnesota provide an example of resistance and we would do well to heed it.  Any act of resistance to injustice of any kind has to begin with the recognition that the status quo is untenable.  It’s tempting to choose the path of apathy, telling ourselves that resistance is useless.  It’s also tempting to believe that only through the extraordinary action of extraordinary people is resistance possible.  Alex Pretti and Renee Good show otherwise.  So do the countless individuals throughout the United States who are standing up to ICE and CBP every single day, not by being action heroes, but by acting collectively.  There are always more of us than there are of them.  That’s our power.  It’s worth recognizing that standing up involves personal risk, but a better world is worth fighting for.  We shouldn’t have to live like this.

Declaration of Principles

  Early in Citizen Kane (1941), a brash young Charles Foster Kane takes over the New York Inquirer, a struggling morning newspaper that Walter P. Thatcher’s bank acquired in a foreclosure.  We immediately see that the young millionaire has big plans for the paper:  He tells the aghast editor-in-chief that the news goes on for twenty-four hours a day and that he plans to release multiple editions daily; he immediately begins trafficking in yellow journalism, groundlessly speculating on the fate of a missing Brooklyn woman and preparing to ambush her unwitting husband by sending a reporter to pose as a policeman; he also sets about increasing his paper’s circulation by poaching the staff of the Chronicle, a rival daily newspaper.  

On the flip side, he also takes up populist causes, exposing corruption in businesses that he is personally invested in.  Early in the morning, just as the first edition of the new Inquirer is being put to bed, Kane drafts a “declaration of principles” that he plans to run on the front page, swearing to fight for the rights of the downtrodden.  Bernstein, Kane’s business manager, advises him not to make promises he can’t keep.  “These’ll be kept,” Kane solemnly replies.

If you’ve actually seen Citizen Kane, you know that he doesn’t keep those promises.  The film follows Kane as he compromises one principle after another, not in the pursuit of wealth, which he already has, but in search of purpose.  He spends his life looking for something, anything, to fill the vacuum left in his heart after his mother sent him away to escape his abusive father and his hardscrabble roots.  Kane owns so many things that many of them have never been unpacked from their shipping crates.  After he dies, Kane’s belongings are cataloged for storage, with countless articles of ephemera—including the sled he was pining for as he died—consigned to the furnace.  

I didn’t intend for this to be an essay about Citizen Kane, but it’s my all-time favorite movie and I’ll grab any opportunity to talk about it.  

The point is that, before I get into the nuts and bolts of Abundant Sufficiency, I want to write a little declaration of principles of my own.  Will I keep them?  At this point, I certainly intend to.  The problem with declaring a principle is that you’re likely to be held to it.  Back when they started, Alphabet (then Google) adopted the slogan, “Don’t be evil”.  That seems like a pretty simple principle to stand by.  But fifteen years later they quietly abandoned it when they reorganized under a new name.  Somehow, the experience of the past decade and a half proved that not being “evil” was too much of an ask in corporate America.  Of course, I can’t compare myself to a fictional newspaper magnate or a massive computer company.  I’m just Zu Tzu, a silly little guy with some silly little ideas.  

Nevertheless, it’s my intention to state here at the outset that I will never monetize Abundant Sufficiency for profit.  I have no plans at present for selling branded merch, but if I ever do, it will be for fund-raising purposes only.  I’m interested in alleviating suffering, not profiting from it.

There are elements of Abundant Sufficiency that relate to personal practices, but I do not intend for it to become a “lifestyle brand”.  I will never sell you courses or modules with promises of self-improvement.  Adopting the principles of Abundant Sufficiency may well improve your quality of life, but I won’t gatekeep those potential improvements by putting them behind a paywall.  As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not an expert or a guru.  I don’t have the answers to life’s questions.  I’ll never claim to have such answers.  Abundant Sufficiency will not cure erectile dysfunction or fight the germs that may cause bad breath.  They won’t make you a penny richer or an inch taller.  They won’t firm your glutes or strengthen your chin.  But they might make you a tiny bit happier and a little bit wiser.  I say that they “might”, I won’t say that they “will”.  

Finally, I swear that I will never allow Abundant Sufficiency to become Goop-ified.  If you already have money, good for you.  It will undoubtedly be a lot easier for you to put these ideas into practice, but it’s not for the already-well-off.  This isn’t a way for rich lefties to salve their consciences.  Learning to hop off the consumer treadmill may well make you happier, but that’s just the beginning.  Once you realize how much better life can be when you stop chasing status symbols, the next step is to ask yourself:  Why can’t everyone have this?  And once you realize that everyone should have the ability to live in dignity and basic material comfort, you need to join the effort to help liberate others.  A $500 Abundant Sufficiency-branded notebook isn’t going to accomplish that, which is why nothing like that will ever exist as long as I have anything to say about it.

We live in a world that we have made through the choices we’ve made, as well as the choices we’ve refused to make.  We’ve allowed enormous wealth to pool into the hands of very few people.  Once we make ourselves understand how immoral it is for one person to have hundreds of billions of dollars while another has nothing, not even a roof over their heads or food in their bellies, the moral catastrophe that we’ve allowed to perpetuate unchallenged becomes so blindingly obvious that we cannot unsee it.  That recognition demands action.  Maybe Abundant Sufficiency isn’t the solution, but I’ll do my damnedest to make sure it doesn’t become part of the problem.  See you next time.

What is Abundant Sufficiency?

This is my second stab at starting some sort of public forum in which to post some ideas I’ve had kicking around for a while.  About a week ago, I attempted to start a Substack on Abundant Sufficiency and I immediately regretted it.  I deleted my account within an hour of putting up my first couple of posts.

I should explain that I stepped away from social media in 2016, right after we all learned how Facebook and Twitter were used to manipulate the American electorate and help elect Donald Trump, back when the very idea of a Trump presidency seemed to be the worst thing that could possibly happen.  Ah, sweet 2016 era me!  How naive I was!  How I wish I could return to that state of blissful innocence, before we all learned how bad things could really get!

Anyway, in the intervening years, as we’ve seen things spiral increasingly out of control, I’ve counted myself as one of the fortunate ones.  I’ve opted out of the daily outrage cycle.  I’ve watched as Twitter, already one of the worst places on the internet, has turned into the vanity project of a delusional billionaire.  I’ve watched Twitter clones rise up like those alternate Supermen that emerged following the death of the Last Son of Krypton at the hands of Doomsday.  Remember that?  Memories..

I’ve watched as Facebook became Meta and Mark Zuckerberg went all in on the idea that we’re all just dying to interact with our coworkers as bizarre avatars that may or may not have legs.  I’ve watched as Crypto, NFTs, and AI have cycled through being the Next Big Thing.™  Every stupid thing that’s happened over the last decade looks stupid enough at a distance.  I can only imagine how much stupider it is when you watch it scroll past on your infinite Feed of Bad News all day, every day.

Anyway, as soon as I started my Substack I realized just how much I didn’t miss social media.  No sooner did I post the first version of this essay than Substack began urging me to “engage”.  Read these hot takes!  Look at this video!  Like!  Share!  Subscribe!  Be sure to hustle for clicks and views!  Clicks and views are the food of the gods!  You aren’t complete without clicks and views!  Look at the metrics for your post!  Look at them!  Don’t you want to see how many people noticed you?  All those eyeballs mean that you’re a real boy!  You only exist when someone is watching!  Didn’t you know that?

So I immediately deleted my account and I thought of another way to do this.  Honestly, if I could, I’d just publish this as a little pamphlet that would sit, unread, in that little magazine rack near the entrance of the public library where the free publications go.  But even I’m not that masochistic, so I decided to just do this as an old fashion blog.  The kind people used to do before the whole internet was just four websites on people’s phones.  Nobody is going to read it, but I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing it's there.  Maybe somebody will stumble upon it and find something worthwhile to think about.  Maybe not.  I don’t care.

After all that preamble, welcome to Abundant Sufficiency.  I’m the guy who writes it.  I’m not going to tell you my name because who I am isn’t important.  You can call me Zu Tzu.  I’m not Chinese.  I’m not a “master” of anything.  I’ve read a lot of Chinese philosophy, though, and some of it has informed my thinking, so I thought it fitting to choose a name that honored that influence.  If you want to tell me that I’m engaging in cultural appropriation, feel free.  You’re probably right.

  I’m just a guy who has some ideas about how we could all work together to make the world a better place.  I’m not selling anything.  I don’t want anything.  I have an idea that I call “Abundant Sufficiency” and I started a blog so I could talk about it.  So what’s it all about, Alfie?

Put simply, “Abundant Sufficiency” is the idea that there is enough for everyone to have enough.  Obviously, it’s a little more complicated than that definition would suggest.  First, we must ask what we mean by “enough”?  Do we mean enough to exist at a subsistence level?  From my perspective, “enough” means enough to live with dignity.  It means having enough to eat and a place to live.  It means having access to quality health care and educational services.  To be sure, there are people in the world who have these basic necessities, but there are far, far too many people who do not.

If you live in the industrialized world, you very likely have access to some or all of these things, although not all of them may be provided without cost.  If you are fortunate enough to have a job that pays well, a roof over your head and clothes on your back, you may wonder why you should be bothered with the idea of Abundant Sufficiency.  If you live in Western Europe, you probably have access to state sponsored medical care and higher educational opportunities at little or no cost.  However, if you live in the United States, these things are not guaranteed.  When you ask why healthcare and education aren’t provided by our government in the United States, you are likely to be told that it’s just The Way Things Are.  In fact, there’s a lot that we accept as The Way Things Are.  Food costs money.  Housing costs money.  These things, too, are The Way Things Are.  Practical people with degrees in economics and political science will tell you that The Way Things Are is very obviously The Way Things Are Supposed to Be.  To question such things is foolish at best, and counterproductive at worst.  Why not just accept it?  There’s nothing you can do to change it, after all!

Abundant Sufficiency questions The Way Things Are.  Perhaps it is foolish and/or counterproductive, but it’s worth doing if only to satisfy ourselves that there really are no alternatives.

To begin with, what is it that people need?  As we observed earlier, human beings need food, shelter, and healthcare in order to stay alive and be healthy.  We need education to improve our minds and nourish our spirit.  We also need community, because we are a social species.  It’s worth asking whether our current economic and social systems provide these things or not.

Social programs aside, it is a universally accepted belief that if one does not work, one cannot eat.  Our present system tells us, quite plainly, that There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.  If one wants to nourish the body, one must sweat to earn it.  It’s one of the first things that Adam is told when he is expelled from the Garden of Eden.  And to many of us, this seems to be a fair proposition.  But is it?  Is it really a good idea to accept an edict handed down to a naked man whose only crime was eating a piece of fruit?

.

I’m writing this from the United States of America.  It’s a country that likes to position itself as The Greatest Country in The World. It’s obviously not.  But it’s a good idea for a country.  At least, it started as one.  Yes, the country was created by the descendants of religious extremists, pirates, tax cheats, and criminals.  Yes, the men who articulated the philosophical foundation for it were smugglers and land speculators who were less concerned with lofty ideals than their own bottom lines.  Pobody’s nerfict.

But there are still important ideas at work here, however flawed their authors, and these ideas are worth unpacking.

 As an American, I was raised to venerate the Founding Fathers of our nation and to regard their writings—particularly the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Bill of Rights—as tantamount to holy writ.  One of the most famous phrases, drawn from the Declaration of Independence, is as follows:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable (or unalienable) rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  

The first part of that quotation, “that all men are created equal”, usually gets all the attention, and rightly so, although I do think that we often underestimate just how radical a proposition that was in its time.  It’s the second part that I want to focus on, however.  That our “in/unalienable rights” include “life”, “liberty”, and “the pursuit of happiness”.  MLK famously took the United States to task for its failure to fulfill the first part of that quote, but I’m going to argue that we’ve also failed to live up to the second part as well.

In making this argument, I will also draw on another great American document:  FDR’s Four Freedoms speech.  Americans love to talk about the first two freedoms cited by FDR:  Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion.  Both of these freedoms are guaranteed by the first amendment.  But we don’t hear quite as much about the other two:  Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear.  These are not enshrined in any law or statute, despite the preamble to the Constitution stating that, among other things, its purpose is to “promote the general welfare”.

First, what do we mean when we talk about an inalienable right to life?

The phrase “right to life” has been hijacked by the anti-abortion movement, but I would argue that, in its original context, it referred to a right to self-determination.  But before you can decide what to do with your life, you need to be able to maintain it.  I would argue that a “right to life” implies a “right to a living”, and that a “right to a living” means unfettered access to the means of prolonging life.  In other words, it is immoral to place such things as food, shelter, and healthcare behind paywalls.  Just because we have always done so doesn’t make it right, nor does it mean that we have to continue to do it.

Next, we must turn to the inalienable right to liberty.

Americans love liberty.  During Barack Obama’s presidency, adherents of the Tea Party movement delighted in colonial cosplay.  We often crow about our right to free speech, a free press, freedom to worship as we choose, our right to face our accusers in a court of law, and to a trial before a jury of our peers.  We speak often of our constitutional right to bear arms and our right not to self-incriminate.  But what is liberty without life?  If we do not have the basic necessities of life, how can we be free?  

We also privilege our rights over our responsibilities.  Every adult American is expected to do three things in exchange for all those lovely freedoms:  We’re supposed to pay taxes, we’re supposed to serve on juries, and we’re supposed to vote.  Yet every election cycle, we bemoan how politically disengaged our electorate is and how few of us vote during off-years.  Even during presidential elections, less than half of all eligible voters actually cast a ballot.  

Of those three basic civic responsibilities, only two are even mandatory, and yet many of us actively spend time plotting to avoid doing them.  Jury duty is regarded as an inconvenience at best, and a positive burden at worst.  And Americans really, really hate paying taxes.  Many of us regard it as a form of theft.  And when the “tax-and-spend” Democrats are criticized by Republicans, they are often derided as “O.P.M. Addicts”, with O.P.M. meaning “Other People’s Money”.

I would argue that true liberty cannot be achieved without liberation.  Until we are free from want and fear, none of us are really “free”.

Finally, we come to the inalienable right to pursue happiness.

Originally, Jefferson intended to include John Locke’s original trifecta:  The right to life, liberty, and property.  Why was property removed and replaced with “the pursuit of happiness”?  I’m not sure.  Perhaps a “right to property” could be read as a call for a redistribution of wealth.  Maybe not.  But declaring a right to “pursue happiness” is a curious addition, when you think about it.  Happiness is, at best, only a temporary state or condition.  No one can possibly be happy all the time.  

Perhaps the idea was that, even if one cannot achieve happiness, one should have the right to seek it.  If we accept that interpretation, that suggests that Americans should have the right to seek a state of general satisfaction; an opportunity to be at peace with the external world.  Is such a thing even possible when one is living paycheck to paycheck?  When one is facing down crippling debt?  I would argue, no.  It is not.

Taken together, it’s clear that Abundant Sufficiency requires us to completely rethink our relationship with money and with the idea of work.  For there to be enough for everyone to have enough, no single person can have too much.  No single person can control the means of production.  And that brings us to the Billionaire Problem.

Put simply, billionaires should not exist.  I’m looking at you, Elon.  You too, Zuck.  But I’m also looking at Warren, Bill, and George.  There is simply no such thing as a “good billionaire”.  We like to think that these captains of industry earned their fortunes, but such a thing is physically impossible.  At a rate of $100,000 a year (a payscale that implies real labor), it would take someone ten thousand years to earn a billion dollars.  Even at a rate of a million dollars a year, it’s still impossible to achieve in a human lifespan.  So if they don’t earn it, how do billionaires get their wealth?

The answer is simple.  They take it.  They siphon it off of our labor.  Once you have money, making more money is simple:  It accrues.  You barely have to do anything to turn a small fortune into a larger one.  Even simply leaving it in a savings account increases its value.

The truth is that money has a different purpose depending on how much of it we have.  For us plebs, money is a unit of exchange.  We trade our time and labor for it, and we trade the money we earn for the goods and services we need.  This was always what money was intended to do.  It’s a useful fiction in this way.

By contrast, as we've already discussed, for the wealthy, money is used to make more money.  And the more money you have, the more money you’ll make.  This isn’t what money was made to do.  Capitalism, put simply, is a hack.  A flaw in the system that Adam Smith noticed and codified.  It’s a bug that became a feature.  A glitch in the Matrix.  And the modern world was built on that glitch.

Okay, maybe it’s not quite as simple as that, but it’s undoubtedly true that pretty much everything these days runs on debt.  When people can use credit to buy things, that means prices can keep creeping up beyond what people are capable of paying in cash.  And more and more of us wind up with crippling consumer debt, which we’re told is the result of our own profligacy.  If you just learned how to manage money better, you wouldn’t be in this mess!  It’s certainly not that we produce products you don’t really need, manufacture desire through marketing campaigns that inundate you twenty-four hours a day, give you access to credit to pay for those things, and tell you that you can pay it back later!  No sir!

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Abundant Sufficiency won’t solve every problem, and it certainly won’t do it all at once, but it recognizes something essential:  You matter.  Not because you’re a member of one group or another.  Not because you’re rich or poor.  Just because you are alive.  And if you matter, everyone matters.  Everyone deserves to thrive, not just survive.  Everyone deserves the time to enjoy their limited lifespans.  Everyone deserves community.  Everyone deserves love.  More than anything, everyone deserves to be useless.  The value of our lives shouldn’t be conditional.  

That’s what Abundant Sufficiency is.  It’s a personal philosophy and a social and political project.  In upcoming entries, I’m going to expand on many of the ideas I’ve only touched on here.  I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but I have faith that we can figure out how we can make the world better together.