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?
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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.
