"Who is my neighbor? It's an ancient question. There must be an answer by now.

Well, there are the people to either side of my house. No question about them. You'd probably want to include the people directly across from me. After that, it can get fuzzy. When does the neighborhood reach its boundary? Two houses down? Three? Probably not. The people further down the street still feel like my neighbors. The next street over? Two streets over? Three? What do I mean by "neighbor" when I ask who is my neighbor?

I could look to the legally defined boundaries. Just go to Google maps and you can see the name of your neighborhood—"Godwin Heights" or "Flushing Meadows" or "Velociraptor Park" or whatever—and click on that name to see the exact boundary. To me, that way of defining the neighborhood seems precise but still somehow arbitrary. I'd propose that instead we look to our natural human system—the one that delivers value (and harm) 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?

I think about all the 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. Here's a suggestion for a workable definition of the boundaries of the neighborhood: The outermost boundaries are definable by the extent to which knowledge of connectivity can be achieved, and the extent to which our actions deliver value (or harm) to other people.

I feel like I still haven't gotten at what I mean.

Let me tell you a story.

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 this planet. 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 or harm it. This faraway civilization is not within the boundaries of our "neighborhood." Its denizens are not our neighbors.

But suppose something were to change. Suppose we were to develop a quantum telescope—a device that allows us to observe this faraway civilization in real time. Rather than detecting the report of light that escaped its source millions of years ago, the quantum telescope utilizes relativistic technologies, allowing us to see all intelligent civilizations across the entirety of their time; to look at how they live in their present, or peer into their past or their future. By observing the development of this civilization—including discoveries they will eventually make—we gain huge benefits, taking giant leaps forward in medicine, transportation, agriculture. We experience an unimaginable leap forward in our knowledge and abilities, made possible by a change in our technology—an innovation.

But suppose something further. Suppose when we train our telescope back to societies we'd previously observed, we discover something disturbing. The pasts of these far civilizations, their presents, their futures…are tragically changed now. The courses of their histories have now taken terrible turns, and 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 our reality, but has changed their course for the worse. It seems impossible, but in some way that we don't understand, we seem, through quantum effects of observation, to have stolen their potential. More disturbing still, the very weft of reality, starting at the edges of the observable universe, 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 that to draw upon it further—either by making further quantum observation or continuing to use the advancements gained thereby, which have become embedded into our daily lives—will speed the degrading effects. There is a growing understanding among us that to go on living as we have risks creating paradoxes that threaten existence itself.

We're conflicted.

We say: But we didn't intend to do it.

We say: I wasn't even alive when it was decided to do it.

We say: There's nothing we can do about it anyway.

We say: Yes, we could change. But why should we, when nobody else is going to?

We say: What does this have to do with me?

These are the things we say. They're the things we always say, when awareness dawns.

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

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

We train our quantum telescope once again to the skies, and we see something new: civilization after civilization, all building quantum telescopes.

Suddenly an empty universe is filled with neighbors."

— A. R. Moxon: Very Fine People, pp. 152-155

Do you see it?

Do you see us, right now, in that brief story?

I bet you do. This is the power of storytelling. Stories give us the ability to see to the truth of things that seem too big, too complex in reality to grasp and comprehend.

Very Fine People is full of little stories like the one I quote here, and that's what makes this book exceptionally useful as a tool for understanding where we (in the USA) are today, in this moment.

This essay about neighbors has so much more good stuff in it. So much important stuff. I'll share more when and where I can, but if you can find this book at a library or a used bookstore, or if you can afford a new copy, pick it up. Read. Sit with the stories.

Then share your own.

#Books #Quotes #Essays #Stories #ARMoxon #VeryFinePeople #Society #Neighbors

"At an earlier time, I named a series of foundational lies, which I believed created a spirit that desires genocide and slavery. I still believe that.

You might think of a foundational lie as a virus—a thing that exists only to promote itself, which has no place whatsoever within a healthy system, which will eventually consume that system if left unchecked. You might think of a natural human priority configured around a foundational lie as a cancer—a corruption of something that under optimal circumstances would exist in a healty system, but now exists only to grow itself unsustainably.

Imagine the most extreme example of my earlier picture: a system so unfair that every bit of value the city generates—every wage, every increase to property value, every bit of food, all permission to drive on the street or walk on the sidewalk, all permission to access shelter, every drop of rain—goes only to one person.

Let's make that person me. Hey, it's my example.

All value in my city—everything needed for a person to live—now goes to me, and to me alone, which means my neighbors receive none. The only destination this configuration could ever arrive at would be the one in which all my neighbors were crushed in the gears of my intentions, unable to provide our natural human system with value; leaving me alone, receiving only the value I can manage to deliver to myself, for however long that lasts. In time, I would become a bizarre and unsustainable curiosity. Having cut every other human out of my natural human system, I would have made an unnatural human system; a viral system that no longer generated the value that a community of humans naturally makes. Eventually I, too, would fail—not despite the fact that I have hoarded all the value, but because.

These lies contain their own deaths within them, you know. Unsustainable things don't sustain. A cancer dies with the body. A virus will die, once it runs out of bodies."

— A. R. Moxon: Very Fine People, pp. 149-150

#Books #Quotes #ARMoxon #VeryFinePeople #Society #HumanSystems #Cancers #Viruses #Lies

"I write speculative fiction sometimes, which can get weird. It's OK with me. I like weird.

Let's try a speculative scenario, something super weird.

Let's imagine that in a society just like ours, some foundational aspect of the streets was found to be harmful in a way that threatened everyone. Let's say for example that they had been built for individual personal vehicular transportation rather than highly scalable public transportation, and that this configuration created congestion and isolation and hazard, and made life increasingly difficult and dangerous for increasing numbers of people, and made ownership of individualized private vehicles a prerequisite for participating in society, which made cities far less livable and more difficult and dangerous to walk around in—and beyond that, the strain on non-renewable resources and the impacts on the environment that attended the consumption of those resources by these vehicles created effects that endangered the stability of all societies and the lives of everyone in those societies.

I warned you, I do sometimes come up with very weird fictional premises. Maybe that one is too far out there, too speculative. What if we made it something simpler, then: what if some part of all the streets, some chemical in their composition, were radioactive and deadly?

What then?

Well…if we valued the lives of people in our system, we'd need to replace those streets.

How many? All of them.

How far? To the furthest extent of the problem. To the very boundaries of the city. To the very foundations that create the hazard. In other words, the solution would require active, persistent, determined, informed, and transformative action.

At what cost? At whatever cost it took.

Otherwise, we'd have to accept that the streets would kill us, because we valued the money we would save by neglecting the streets rather than paying the cost to repair and enhance them more than we valued the lives of the human beings harmed by our harmful streets.

Right?

Like I said: obvious.

But hey, listen to this: What if we only fixed some of the streets? What if we only fixed the streets where most of the residents were deemed to be "white?" Or what if we—"unable to see color," but having inherited a system whereby those deemed "white" were more likely to own generational wealth, homes, and other property—only fixed the streets lined by houses of greater value?

That would work out, I suppose, provided you are someone wealthy enough to afford a valuable house, and provided the thought of your neighbors dying while you live is acceptable to your conscience.

But suppose human intentions are like streets. Suppose human intentions have a direction, too, and that living in a murderous system that is designed to see human life as disposable to financial convenience may become a problem for you tomorrow, if you are a human. Remember, every street has a destination. And no street ever reached its destination by accident. And a system that eats people will eat people.

But hey, listen to this wrinkle: Imagine in our scenario that most of the people want to fix the streets, but the city still refuses. What then?

I think we'd have to conclude that some portion of us are no longer what is meant when we say "the city decides." I think we'd have to conclude that the controls over our natural human system have been unnaturally stolen. We'd have to conclude that the problem of our radioactive streets is only the immediate problem, and that the larger undergirding problem is this: The way that our city makes decisions has been unnaturally misalligned, intentionally stolen.

We might call this theft "injustice."

Before we could reconfigure the streets, we'd have to reconfigure the means of configuration itself—the way the city decides. How far? To the furthest extent of the problem, to the very boundaries of the injustice, at whatever cost necessary. The solution would require active, persistent, determined, informed, and transformative action, aligned to a compass that views as its true North a justice founded in love—that is, a justice that ensures the inherent dignity, legal equality, and provision for basic human need, of all human beings, even those aligned against that compass setting. Or we'd have to accept that our unnaturally corrupted human system, designed to kill people for financial convenience, would kill us, if it ever became financially convenient for it to do so.

Right?

If the way the city decides has become as broken or useless or harmful as our hypothetically fatal streets, then our natural human system becomes potentially unable to solve problems—any problems. Our natural human system might even start to configure itself around a principle such as "government is the problem"—the idea that solving the problems of people isn't a suitable matter for cities to engage in. If our city is organized in such a way that it is unwilling to save people from death unless they are deemed worthy of life, then we are all vulnerable, not only to the problem of the streets, but to any danger that makes us unprofitable. This suggests that if we are people who wish to live, we will have to be willing to perform radical transformative structural reconfiguration, not only on our city, not only on the ways in which the city decides, but on our spirit itself—our foundational beliefs and assumptions—and not just in any direction, but in a direction that leads us toward inclusiveness, completeness, plurality, and equality. This suggests that, should I discover that the natural value delivery system in which I exist has been unnaturally stolen and corrupted, the greater danger is not in radical structural reconfiguration, but in refusing to pursue radical structural reconfiguration.

Remember, cancer and virus require only your silence. They'll do the rest.

What happens when a system that eats unvaluable people runs out of unvaluable people to eat? What happens when something changes dramatically, and you are suddenly less valuable?

If human intention is like a street, it will eventually reach its destination.

Eventually it will find you and me.

Let's try another speculative scenario.

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

Imagine a city that recognized the intrinsic value that a collection of people naturally generates—inextricable, automatic, inherited, shared, invisible—where a few people decided to configure it to capture all that value for themselves, and then expected to be praised as the givers of water when they allowed a bit of it to trickle down. Imagine, if you can, a society founded on a series of unjust lies—an unnatural human configuration of our natural human system.

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

I would suppose that such a society, founded on human enslavement, would always turn themselves, whatever their stated intentions, back toward slavery. I would suppose that people in such a society would believe, at the bedrock level of their assumptions, that some people have more value and others have less, or even none, or even a negative value. I would suppose that such a society would behave as if a person's value is a matter of power and wealth, and to lack power and wealth is to lack any value. I would suppose that such a society would conclude that for a valueless person to receive some value that diminished the profit they could provide an Owner would be considered a grotesque and offensive theft; and would eventually conclude that person who could not be used for profit had not earned life, represented theft, and had therefore earned death. I would suppose that such a society would believe the violence of neglect or the violence of brutality to be an acceptable way to redeem such a debt against such a valueless thief.

And then that society would configure itself to control and harm valueless people. You'd know this was the configuration of this society, no matter what individuals within that society said their individual intentions were, because this society would control and harm people, and justify it on a metric of cost and profit. And those with access to the power to change this configuration would not do the work of reconfiguration, which would reveal their deepest intentions.

And they might even configure their streets and roads so that the value of transportation was maximally available to those who could afford increasingly expensive personal vehicles, and almost non-existent for those who couldn't. And they might defend and expand this configuration, even when it became clear that this configuration made cities and towns far more inhospitable and dangerous to people, even once it became clear that the operation of these personal vehicles was a major factor in a global threat to all of their lives.

Oh man. I'm back to the same extremely unbelievable scenario as before. My friends will tell you I do that sometimes. Maybe this all seems too far-fetched to you. As I said, I write speculative fiction, which often requires a real stretch of the imagination."

— A. R. Moxon: Very Fine People, pp. 143-149

#Books #Quotes #ARMoxon #VeryFinePeople #Streets #Cities #Societies #SpeculativeFiction

Sizzling essay (so good):#ARMoxon cracks the code on the conservative/supremist mindset.

Basically, their world is divided into Live-ers and Die-ers, Winners/Losers, Heroes/Victims and an INCLUSIVE society denies any such division. The fear is that if the "others" are allowed to be Winners and Live-ers, "we" are under threat to be Losers and Die-ers. Since admitting our shared vulnerability & humanity is absolutely unacceptable, "we" MUST crack down and restore the natural order where "we" aren't ever going to lose or die.

This essay explains so much more like how perceived/manufactured scarcity REQUIRES we define people as deserving or not, as valuable or not.

** Really worth the read **

The Die-ers
https://www.the-reframe.com/the-die-ers/

#Conservatism #GOP #Fascism

"The idea that we can create paradise by increasing the killing is a very popular notion here in the rather backward and underdeveloped country of the United States. I mean 'backward and underdeveloped' in a moral sense. In an economic sense, the country holds vast wealth…."

~ A.R. Moxon

#USA #CapitalPunishment #DeathPenalty #immigrants #violence #Trump #ARMoxon
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https://www.the-reframe.com/killing-our-way-to-paradise/?ref=the-reframe-newsletter

"Despite being a shrinking minority, Republicans and their base of white supremacist mostly Christians believe that to rule is their right, and that anyone else who gains power represents a de facto oppressive tyranny, and a de facto violent threat that justifies whatever violence they deem fit.”

#ARMoxon #USPolitics #RepublicanParty

https://www.the-reframe.com/the-rot-goes-to-the-core/