One For All

And All For One. "Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno" in Latin is the way we should have organized society. As individuals we contribute to the betterment of society, and society contributes to the betterment of its individual members. It's a perfect closed loop of eternal progression...

I learned of the phrase "One for all, all for one" through the story of the Three Musketeers. It's a beautiful slogan, representative of a tightly knit band of friends who would each give their life to save the others. This is a microcosm of what society should look like. We're all the same, with the same potential of becoming successful or a failure, we generally want the same basic things from life, happiness, love, belonging, bonding and a sense of purpose. No one wants to feel useless, be a disappointment to the larger whole of the society that gave life to them. That's our nature; we're social beings who have every basic need met through society. This has always been the case until we introduced the concept of private property, which created owners who became the One standing above the All. And since then, we've gradually been indoctrinated to believe in the story of The One Above All...

In the tribal communities that lived until the neolithic age, we lived according to the principles of the Three Musketeers; every able member of the tribe hunted and gathered food for the entire tribe, leaving no mouth unfed. The elderly and children didn't go hungry just because they weren't able to participate in the hunt. It was All For One and One For All, or All for All. But then we invented agriculture, assigned owners of the fertile lands, and this created a special class of people who had the power of feeding the masses. Or not. You either worked for one of the owners, started a business of your own, or starved to death. And that's where we still are. We've lost the plot ages ago, and never found our way back, even though technology has progressed so much that we could easily feed every mouth on the planet twice over.

I keep coming back to this fatal flaw in our humanity; we've forgotten that we're social creatures. We've split ourselves up, alienated ourselves from the society we owe allegiance to in a fever dream of individualism. That's so alien to my mind. How could anyone believe that the billionaires of our world have actually earned those billions? How could anyone, in their right mind, believe that the billions of poor people are poor because of individual shortcomings? That the billionaire deserves to be insanely rich and that most poor people deserve to be poor? I know why they believe it; it's because of that age-old story of The One Above All. It's the hugely mistaken belief that some people have more merit than others, that some are worth more than others, are more deserving than others. Those few at the top have always propagated narratives to justify their lofty positions, be it the many forms of Christianity that bestows special powers in kings and bishops, and bestows special merit to the hard work of the plebs, or the story of capitalism that bestows special powers in the billionaires, and normalizes the hard work of the employees who actually create the wealth.

We've lost touch with each other and with the planet that gives us life. And we can't change this state of affairs by simply changing laws within the current paradigm of capitalism. We can't simply redistribute our way back to the connection we once had with the tribe. Although it must be said that the redistribution of wealth, and thus the redistribution of power, is the only way to create a fairer, happier society with more freedom. That's why I've included the below linked video about FDR's plans to enact a second New Deal that would implement certain economical rights. And a Green New Deal is currently the only way to do something about the damage we've caused to the planet. But what we really need is that connection. The connection between each other and between ourselves and the planet. We're all in the same boat. We're all responsible for what we call "the human condition." We need to bring back fairness, decency, equity and kindness as fundamental pillars of the way we organize society. And we need to extend those courtesies to the planet as well. The ancient tribes lived according to the rules of primitive communism, without leaders, without money, without transactions, in a gift economy. Believe it or not, but that's what we need to find our way back to. One for all, all for one!

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