![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm working on a character. The society is a somewhat bleak take on the future, kind of cyberpunk, but politically not much different from present-day U.S. This character is a dissident troublemaker -- think Enjolras from Les Mis. I'm fleshing out his thinking by writing him a speech.
===
We are a technologically advanced people. We have become so precisely because we have evolved a class of wealthy masters who exploit us like cattle.
Economic development, which is normally measured and described in terms of production and consumption of goods and services, is ascribed to that social construct known as property rights. This includes the ludicrous notion of land ownership.
Most property rights are based on the libertarian notion that each of us should be permitted to enjoy the fruits of our own labor. To deny someone such a right is theft. But of whose labor is Earth the fruit? Who can honestly claim the right to exclude all others from a certain chunk of the planet?
And yet, without a system of property rights that confirms land ownership, we can have no such things as factories and airports and farms. And houses. To allow a standard of living substantially different from tent-dwelling nomads, we must have landowners. From then on, we become stratified.
The lower strata always both resent and covet the wealth of the upper. There is rarely any acknowledgement that, yes, those fat pigs are what have made human progress possible. Our gargantuan efforts to satisfy their gluttony are what have made us so keenly adept at fulfilling the widest variety of wants as quickly and efficiently as possible. The problem is that the masses have no taste.
We are the Goths and Vandals, angry at the Romans. They have used us and manipulated us and exploited us, and we want nothing more than to sack and plunder and destroy their empire. They play us against each other, and use us to fight their wars, so they may have better wines and more olives. We don't care about better wines. We don't care about olives. We want bread and milk and maybe some beef now and then. We want our children not to starve while we watch them throw cake to the swine.
But it is not the Romans we hate. It is the Senate. They use us to frighten each other, and they use us to frighten the poor Romans too. "You must pay your taxes, you must serve in the Legions," they say, "or we will be unable to defend you from them," and they point to us. They point to the Vandals and the Goths. They show you the Huns, and tell you to fear. And you obey the Senate, because you fear us.
They teach you to fear each other, too. They stress how you are different from each other. They constantly remind you to see yourselves in tribes, to be perpetually grouping in tight knots and small clusters and othering everyone else. If you can't see yourselves as one people, you can't act as one people, and you can't gain as one people.
But who would go back to following the herds? Who would give up bus routes, and hospitals, and baseball games? All of these things exist because we let the Senate harness us to their yoke, and whip us to death pulling, and keep us snarling at each other the whole time. So keep your gluttonous overlord pigs. But remember that bacon will do when you can't get beef.
===
We are a technologically advanced people. We have become so precisely because we have evolved a class of wealthy masters who exploit us like cattle.
Economic development, which is normally measured and described in terms of production and consumption of goods and services, is ascribed to that social construct known as property rights. This includes the ludicrous notion of land ownership.
Most property rights are based on the libertarian notion that each of us should be permitted to enjoy the fruits of our own labor. To deny someone such a right is theft. But of whose labor is Earth the fruit? Who can honestly claim the right to exclude all others from a certain chunk of the planet?
And yet, without a system of property rights that confirms land ownership, we can have no such things as factories and airports and farms. And houses. To allow a standard of living substantially different from tent-dwelling nomads, we must have landowners. From then on, we become stratified.
The lower strata always both resent and covet the wealth of the upper. There is rarely any acknowledgement that, yes, those fat pigs are what have made human progress possible. Our gargantuan efforts to satisfy their gluttony are what have made us so keenly adept at fulfilling the widest variety of wants as quickly and efficiently as possible. The problem is that the masses have no taste.
We are the Goths and Vandals, angry at the Romans. They have used us and manipulated us and exploited us, and we want nothing more than to sack and plunder and destroy their empire. They play us against each other, and use us to fight their wars, so they may have better wines and more olives. We don't care about better wines. We don't care about olives. We want bread and milk and maybe some beef now and then. We want our children not to starve while we watch them throw cake to the swine.
But it is not the Romans we hate. It is the Senate. They use us to frighten each other, and they use us to frighten the poor Romans too. "You must pay your taxes, you must serve in the Legions," they say, "or we will be unable to defend you from them," and they point to us. They point to the Vandals and the Goths. They show you the Huns, and tell you to fear. And you obey the Senate, because you fear us.
They teach you to fear each other, too. They stress how you are different from each other. They constantly remind you to see yourselves in tribes, to be perpetually grouping in tight knots and small clusters and othering everyone else. If you can't see yourselves as one people, you can't act as one people, and you can't gain as one people.
But who would go back to following the herds? Who would give up bus routes, and hospitals, and baseball games? All of these things exist because we let the Senate harness us to their yoke, and whip us to death pulling, and keep us snarling at each other the whole time. So keep your gluttonous overlord pigs. But remember that bacon will do when you can't get beef.