The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'colorful line drawing of a man putting houses into a giant sack.'
Once upon a time, people in the US had places. Many owned their own homes while the rest paid affordable rent. People were grounded in their places, connecting through them to the larger environment. Now, people treat their places as useful but ultimately disposable. This didn't happen by accident. A series of events over the course of several decades stole our places from us, in part by tricking us into thinking about residential properties as nothing more than interchangeable investments.
This theft of place is important yet rarely talked about. What was actually stolen was an idea in our minds. An idea that had been there forever. This is the idea that we have a natural right to be in the world, doing all of the things that life requires in the space we inhabit. The control regime stole this idea from our minds and replaced it with the lie that our existence entitles us to nothing.
It has long been understood that society dispossesses us of the space and resources we're naturally entitled to. This very thing formed the basis for a version of Universal Basic Income proposed by Thomas Paine in his 1797 publication Agrarian Justice. Paine's scheme would've taxed property owners to pay income to the landless. The situation is considerably more complex today, but the logical basis for a UBI remains firmly intact.
The fundamental question is one of fairness. It's not fair that society robs us of our right to the world. Consciously or otherwise, most people are aware of what they've lost and they resent the theft. No group has yet organized a meaningful large scale response to this basic societal unfairness. Universal Basic Income is the obvious solution, but there's little political appetite for a UBI in the US at this time.
The theft of places overlapped the broader theft of individual economic power, which began in earnest in the 1970s. By the time my generation came along, our economic power was nowhere to be found. No one seems particularly upset about this. It's almost as if they don't understand how much they've lost.
The only sensible remedy for the theft of our economic power would be a restoration of our stolen power to us. In practical terms, this could involve anything from real living wages to the collapse of prices across the board to that UBI I keep mentioning. Even the best progress along these lines is likely to be messy. The control regime as it stands will go to great lengths to prevent us from getting our power back.
One of the regime's great recent successes has been to convince us to focus on race and gender and partisan politics instead of on the theft of our individual economic power. Mainstream discourse prescribes this focus and reflects the prevailing economic order. Everyone is talking about pronouns and no one is talking about getting ripped off by the system.
In my opinion, society should be free and it should be fair. Aspiring to freedom and fairness sounds grandiose, but it shouldn't. What are we even doing if the world we're creating isn't free and fair?
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