The Base Cost of Existence

Food for thought as the election approaches.

The above image was done using stable diffusion using the prompt 'clock implanted in head colorful.'

Whatever the results of the upcoming election, the US is heading into choppy waters. Civil conflict seems certain, with only its particulars in question. Where will trouble erupt? Who will be impacted? How bad will it get? Finding answers to these questions may prove more difficult than we expect, because most of the internet is censored now.

Given how quickly things are changing, there has never been a better time to get clear about our assumptions and our visions for the future. While legacy media keeps us hyper-focused on the same tired old handful of marginally relevant issues, society is being completely reorganized below the surface by emerging technology. The entire economy is transforming, and if we want to have a say in what that means, we may need to reexamine the nature of our participation in the system.

John F. Kennedy famously said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." This may have been true in 1962, but things have changed. In 2024, the whole idea of revolution appears antiquated and small. Overthrowing one set of clowns just to install another set of clowns in power isn't a solution to anything.

To me, the only revolution that would make sense would be a revolution of the mind. We don't need new clowns in office. And if we try to create new systems with the level of thinking that most people are currently operating from, we're obviously doomed. What could actually be of benefit, in my opinion, would be the wholesale abandonment of every lie on which our terrible systems are built, accompanied by a simultaneous mass awakening that put us into closer contact with our humanity, our obligations, and our true power.

Vacant Homes

There are about 15 million vacant homes in the US and about 650,000 people without homes here. So we could give every homeless person their own home and there would still be over 14 million vacant units. We could also go further and ensure that no one is saddled with burdensome rents, mortgage payments, or property taxes using a variety of schemes. Taking the matter to extremes, we could pass a constitutional amendment clarifying that every person has a right to the physical space necessary for their existence.

This would essentially eliminate the residential real estate industry overnight. The financial markets connected with this industry would also go up in smoke. A few million jobs would vanish. The companies and agencies profiting from homelessness and the fear of homelessness would also be out of luck.

Very quickly, the small segment of the population that had grown accustomed to receiving inflated rents and profitably financing mortgages would violently rebel against the loss of income. They'd run massive advertising campaigns and pay actors to protest in the streets. The foreign firms invested in the sector would cause all sorts of trouble. The courts would become even more clogged.

It would be a massive disruption with far reaching consequences. No one would be homeless or at risk of being homeless, but many property owners would likely rather destroy their own properties than see them given to the needy, and they might start a civil war over it. So we could solve homelessness overnight, but the cost of doing so would be steep.

Put plainly, there is no housing shortage in the US. The market is being strangled by a massive epidemic of greed that has made property owners delusional, but there's no shortage of housing. At some point prices are going to crash and big banks will take possession of an even larger share of our habitat. We could at any time stop this madness by changing our view of the land itself.

The basic idea of land ownership makes a lot less sense than the idea of land stewardship. Whatever property we inhabit, we are its caretakers, for better or worse. The Earth was here long before we came along and will be here long after we're gone. It doesn't so much belong to us as we belong to it.

Choices

It's unlikely that our beliefs about land ownership will change anytime soon. It's comparably unlikely that we'll abandon our overpriced and often deadly healthcare system in favor of more affordable and effective socialized medicine. Everywhere we look, we see systems like these working against the vast majority of us. Yet we persist in our folly.

This is partly because stories and belief structures that make us complicit in our own exploitation are encoded into our minds and bodies. We could in theory choose something different at any moment, but in practice our thinking has been as thoroughly compromised as our environments have. Fortunately, our systems are not laws of nature. Actually, they're completely made up.

We choose to organize our economy around the preferences of a tiny segment of our population instead of around all of our needs and the needs of generations to come. Yet this isn't a choice we're making freely. We're coerced, cajoled, and threatened into it. Most of us seem to have forgotten completely that we're all responsible for the world we're creating here together. Some of us were never even taught this basic truth.

The Base Cost of Existence

I've done the math. My existence costs about $2.30 an hour. Sleeping or awake, working or sitting at the coffee shop, every hour that passes costs me an average of $2.30. Now, my life is very humble. Many people would be hard pressed to exist on twice this amount. For reference, a single chronically homeless person costs taxpayers about $44,700 per year, which breaks down to about $5.10 per hour.

Personally, I think it's insane that the base cost of existence isn't zero. And I think it's more insane that people try to rationalize this state of affairs. The money to cover this base cost of existence doesn't just appear by magic, nor do the funds magically vanish when spent. Like all dollars in our system, the money is invented into being as the principal amount of a debt attached to a repayment obligation.

There is literally never enough money in the system to repay all of the debt because the amounts owed for the interest on our debts is never created at all. This interest can only be repaid with money that was created to establish new debts. So artificial scarcity of national currency is a structural feature of our system. And newly created dollars don't flow to the people who need them. They flow to the companies most capable of vacuuming up more money than they borrow.

The base cost of our existence doesn't just vanish. It's paid to these companies and to the government that supports them at our expense. These predators and parasites have effectively stolen the world from us. They've stolen our very lives, holding them hostage to force us into using our limited time here on Earth to serve their terrible agenda.

Unspoken Commitment

Part of me doesn't fully understand why we don't simply murder every single one of these predators and parasites. The harm they've already done to us and the planet is incalculable. And, driven by delusions of perpetual growth, the harm they plan to do to in the future will likely be even worse. At any time in history, if some group of people started poisoning everything and enslaving everyone, this group would be slaughtered without a second thought.

True, it would in our situation be mechanically challenging to kill all of the people stealing value from our lives, but I don't think that's why we're showing such remarkable restraint. Nor do I think we're simply too sick and complacent to muster a mass rebellion. Instead, I think we've evolved culturally to the point that we're unwilling to meet even the most depraved abuses of our control regime with violence.

From a moral standpoint, we know violence is wrong. From an ethical standpoint, we all want to see the use of violence minimized. Theoretically, our control regime is granted a monopoly on violence only so it can use minimally sufficient force to protect us against those who would expose us to violence. In practice, all violence in society serves the control regime, making it an ineffective tool of rebellion.

Our broad unspoken commitment to nonviolence, whether arising from morality or utilitarian calculation, is one of our greatest strengths. When envisioning a better future, everyone pictures peace. No one pictures clocks implanted in our bodies, siphoning away our vitality hour by hour while soldiers stand by, ready to kidnap and imprison us the minute we try to remove the implants. No decent person wants this future, yet it's an appropriate metaphor the control regime's plan.

Without force, we're left with communication. Creative expression. Diplomacy. Social coordination. Economic competition or withdrawal. These and other tools at our disposal are far more powerful than any gun. Or ballot box.

Work With Instincts

In my own life, I have a headache disorder that's always challenging me to respond to harm with something else. During a cluster headache attack, the pain is so intense that it's impossible not to move in response. Along with involuntary screaming and flailing around uncontrollably, head punching is a common coping mechanism for people with the condition. When I first started getting cluster headaches, I'd punch myself in the head as hard as I could again and again without even thinking about it, lashing out instinctively against the attacker in my skull.

It didn't feel good, but it did provide a place for me to put my energy. Over time, with great effort, I retrained myself not to punch my head during an attack, but to instead punch a metal pole. In order to avoid breaking my hand while doing this, I had to further train myself to channel my body's energy into slower, smoother movements. Eventually, I stopped striking object altogether during attacks, and learned to respond to their brutality in more fluid and gentle ways. This doesn't stop the headaches, but it does reduce their collateral damage.

In society today, the control regime can attack us in a million terrible ways. Our instinct may be to lash out. It's perfectly natural to respond to an attack by lashing out against ourselves or our surroundings. Yet such instincts are usually self-defeating. The solution isn't to repress the instincts, but to work with them, allowing them expression without allowing them to take control of the the expression.

For more of my writing, check out my scifi novels and my Hive blog.