Americans are taught to think of themselves as the freest people in the world, perhaps in history — as the inventors, orginators, and champions of freedom. So why is it that they are the ones who have to choose between basic medicine — and feeding and sheltering their families? Why is it that they are the ones who are forced to make their kids do “active shooter drills”? If that’s freedom, then the word has no meaning whatsoever.

Now, this essay is going to be a tough read. It will probably make you angry. It will strike at the heart of one of the pillars of America’s sense of identity, and that is not an easy thing to hear. So I salute you for having the courage to even discuss it with me. Know that I don’t write it blame or shame or guilt anyone, but only in the spirit of understanding and gentle observation, which must precede any real transformation.

It seems to me that Americans are becoming some of the least free people in the world. That will sound like a contentious, bewildering statement to many, especially Americans, so let’s examine it. Nobody — nobody — else in rich countries is trapped in barbaric decisions that essentially boil down to your money or your life, your life savings or your health, chemotherapy or little Johnny’s college fund. And yet it’s also the case that even many people in poorer countries, by now, don’t live perpetually hounded by debts they’ll struggle with their whole lives long, or having their kids shot at schools, or having to pay the equivalent of a middle-class career just to educate a child, and so on — the majority being poor in a poor society is a natural limitation, but the majority being poor in a rich one can only really be the outcome of socially normalized and culturally sanctioned mass exploitation.

Americans are free, largely, to choose between different flavours of capitalist exploitation — this form of poverty, that form of isolation, that kind of fear and anxiety. But they cannot choose, very much, lives free of those things to begin with. Which one is genuine freedom? They’re caught, like prey, in between capitalism’s pincers —because it pays them barely enough to subsist as producers, yet demands more from them as consumers, as borrowers, every year — and the result is a new kind of deprivation, poverty in a rich country, powerlessness in a powerful country, a wealthy land of the broke and hopeless. Hence, the majority of Americans, 80%, now live at the edge, perpetually — no matter what they do, how much they earn, however much they try to save, what they accomplish. But living at the edge of ruin every day of your life, no matter what you do, isn’t freedom. It’s something closer to peasantry.

So what is freedom? That’s the nub of the question. Now, American thought, which is a feeble and barely existent thing to begin with, frames freedom around the idea of “coercion.” Coercion is a child’s idea — or a patriarch’s — idea of freedom: “hey, bro, nobody’s holding a gun to your head!” Ah, but does someone have to hold a gun to your head to shrink away your freedom? Or can they do it without a gun? With threats, like taking away your means of making a living, or saving for the future, or obtaining medicine, that are every bit as powerful as a bullet? If they can, then “coercion” is a meaningless notion, and so a society built atop such a childish idea will never be a free one.

And yet we don’t have to think much further than a bully to see that a lack “coercion” isn’t a valid litmus test of freedom: I don’t need a gun to intimidate, bully, and make you do my bidding, if I can take away your livelihood, shelter, safety, make you watch your kids starve and your spouse suffer an illness. If I control your subsistence, in other words—and that way have power over your very survival — I will never a gun in the first place. That is why the American idea of freedom has failed — hence, Americans live something suspiciously like exploited neo-peasants, bullied by a new class of capitalist robber barons, and all that is said to be all that “freedom” is, the chance to choose between forms of exploitation . But no one in their right mind should accept such a upside-down definition of freedom, which is an abusers’ one to begin with, calling cruelty kindness.

A better definition of freedom is compulsion — a lack of it. That is an ancient Greek notion, both Socratic and Aristotelian, but I digress. Compulsion means something like: being forced do something that you don’t want to do, because you are threatened with harm, with punishment, of some kind, perhaps to one’s very survival. Freedom at the most basic level is simply the absence of compulsion. I think most of us would agree with that — because it is a subtler and more mature idea than “nobody’s holding a gun to your head!” It allows the idea that people can be forced and made to act against their wishes with structural and institutional violence, hidden in plain sight — not just isolated acts of visible aggression.

(And perhaps freedom is also, then, the presence of impulsion — which means that when one isn’t forced to do something doesn’t want to do, only then is there room for what one does want to do, be, become. These are mutually opposing pairs, in other words, compulsion and impulsion. Freedom is not being compelled by external punishments and harms. Only then can one be impelled — by one’s own sense of morality, duty, ethics, purpose, whatever intrinsic motivation there might be. That’s a subtle and delicate question, which I’ll return to shortly)

Now. Do we see this rule — freedom as the absence of compulsion , the lack of a severe threat of harm, to one’s survival — operant anywhere in America? In fact, we precisely the opposite.

American society is built upon an omnipresent, relentless, and constant form of compulsion — the loss of one’s subsistence. Underneath all the niceties and myths about America as the land of the “free”, there is the perpetual, looming threat of true disaster and catastrophe: that one might no longer be able to put bread on the table, afford medicine, have shelter, and so on. In short, American life is governed by the threat that one might lose the most basic elements of human subsistence altogether. And that threat never really wavers, or shrinks, much less vanishes. If anything, it seems to grow. American life is based upon society, culture, and the economy constantly threatening the survival of that very life.

Isn’t that bizarre? Weird? Sad? A little unfair, even?

Now, many Americans have internalized this rule so much so that they will probably say: “so what? That’s just how it is!” My friends, that is not just how it is. No other society in the world — especially not rich ones — operates like this. It’s true that in poor countries, people often face this plight — but it is not a social choice, it is a limitation of resources. Only in America is compulsion by the threat of the loss of subsistence the fundamental organizing principle of everything — society, culture, economics, law, politics.

Let’s think about that for a second. “Nobody’s pointing a gun at your head!” — that’s the litmus test for a lack of “coercion.” But how different, really, is saying “you won’t be able to eat, feed your kids, have shelter, medicine, or safety, if you don’t do what I tell you?” It’s not very different, is it? Both threats operate at the level of severe punishment to the point of the loss of survival. They are both forms of punishment which threaten a person’s, maybe a family’s, existence — not just superficial luxuries and niceties, but the truest and deepest thing it has. They both trigger, and act upon, the three great human fears — of abandonment, of expulsion, and of annihilation. They are both threats to the integrity of life — they both threaten exactly the same thing: to take it away.

(Let me make that crystal clear. If I threaten to take away your PlayStation 5 and your gaming chair, it is not a threat to your existence, your life, your survival. It is merely a superficial punishment. But if I threaten to take away your power to feed, clothe, shelter, and heal yourself — and your kids — then I am threatening your life. Am I not?)

Hence, we see Americans forced to make choices that truly free people would never make. Elderly people living in their cars, chasing seasonal work at Amazon warehouses (Merry Christmas!) Choosing to die when they have cancer, instead of have chemotherapy — so that their families can afford a home, food, and electricity. Young people living at home, unable to afford to start families, who are barely even having sex anymore. And, of course, the ultimately choice that a truly free person would never make — to kill themselves, at a sickening, heartrending pace.

These are the wages of a society based on compulsion, my friends. Are you beginning to see what I mean yet, when I say that American has become one of the least free societies in the world?

Threatening to take away your life unless you do capitalism’s bidding is the omnipresent principle by which America operates now. Sure, you have a “choice” not to do what capitalism wants — but the choice is that you probably won’t survive. But can you live if you don’t have food, shelter, medicine, or safety? I can’t, and if you think you can, my friend, you are only fooling yourself. And yet everything is based on this threat which never goes away. I said “everything”, and I mean everything. The law codifies this principle. Culture lionizes it — only the strong should survive. Society is organized according to it — the middle class is largely gone, and what is left is a strange, dystopia, bipolar society of a tiny number of rich, using the principle of compulsion to force the new poor to do their bidding.

Hence, nobody else, really, is locked into the terrible, weird, and gruesome dilemmas that Americans are — your money or your life, your kids or your health, and so on. People in Canada and Europe aren’t. But nor are people in poor countries — they can’t afford chemotherapy, or maybe there are no hospitals, so there is no true choice to begin with. Only Americans are denied opportunities to live so frequently and fully, by being presented with exploitative dilemmas disguised as “choices.” They are denied opportunities to simply go on living in the most basic ways — sometimes, to flourish and make the most of themselves, and sometimes, to survive, because life itself has become unaffordable.

(That is what the threat of the loss of subsistence really means, when you think about it. Decode it: what does it really say? It says: “your life is too expensive for you to afford to fully live.” Hence, a society founded upon the threat of subsistence will always be one of people forced into the kinds of terrible dilemmas Americans find themselves in — but never live to their potential and possibility.)

So off Americans go, to jobs that exploit them miserably, never being paid a penny more — which pay them a pittance, while mega-rich capitalists are worth, at this point, trillions. What real choice do they have? It’s either that — or the loss of survival, by way of the loss of their subsistence. Their healthcare is attached to that “job”, as is their only source of “income”, which is the only means they have to constantly win shelter, medicine, money, and so survive, and so forth. That is what I mean when I say that American society presents people with the charade, the masquerade of “choices” — in the same that a mafiosi might shrug and say “if you want your legs broken, that’s up to you.” That isn’t freedom, my friends. Freedom is the absence of compulsion — remember?

So where does this rule of compulsion according to the threat of the loss of subsistence come from? It’s correct to say that it’s a capitalist rule. Capitalism ends up here — no matter how hard you work, or how much you accomplish, it will always leave you at the edge of subsistence. Why? Because it’s operating principle is to exploit you — and that means to pay you the least, while working you the hardest, and charging you the most. So the perpetual threat of the loss of subsistence is the inevitable outcome of a capitalist society. People instead live lives which are constantly threatened by calamity, ruin, the loss of survival looming day after grim, bitter day. Soon enough, their psychology comes to hinge around fears of abandonment, exclusion, and annihilation — you can see how that leads to authoritarianism and paranoia and rage easily enough, but I digress. America is organized by the threat of the loss of subsistence because it came to be ruled predatory capitalism in the same totalist way the Soviet Union was ruled by one-party communism.

Still, it isn’t just capitalism. The rule of compulsion, of threatening people with the loss of subsistence, of survival, has old, old roots in America. It is also the second principle of slavery, isn’t it? That I can deny you the basics of life — or perhaps even life itself? The first one being, of course, that you are not really a person to begin with. It is also the idea of segregation, too — your people must provide for themselves, we will not lift a finger to help one of you. So this rule — that a person can always be threatened with the loss of subsistence, and that is perfectly fair, just, and reasonable — is a deeply American idea. But organizing a society on compulsion is also a fatally bad, ruinous, catastrophic idea.

Why? Because, of course, it is also why America is in such a profound mess — what I call a state of collapse, though of course you’re welcome to dispute that word. People who live under the constant threat of the loss of survival and subsistence are not going to be happy people. They will not feel they are a society of equals. They will find it difficult to be kind and humane to one another. They will tend to be angry and resentful and lash out. Such a society will never develop the gentle bell curve of prosperity that brings with it, by way of a broad, comfortable middle, stability and democracy — instead, it will be a large number of poor, being dominated by a small number of rich, and those rich will have to themselves inculcate values like cruelty, greed, contempt, ruthlessness, and inhumanity to go on ruling the poor. Is that sounding a lot like America to you? Then you see how the rule of compulsion produces a collapsing society.

But when the bulk of the people themselves are on the constant brink of ruin, catastrophe, and despair — where else can a society find itself, but right there, too?

That is the problem, my friends. A society — a modern one, at least — cannot and should not be a place governed by the rule of compulsion, the perpetual threat of the loss of subsistence and survival. It must do the very opposite: provide every citizen with the guarantee of subsistence and survival, which can never be removed. No matter how voracious the appetites of those who wish to take those resources for themselves are. In past eras, those people were invaders — unfortunately, today, they are capitalists and hedge funds and robber barons. So modern societies must build buffers against all those insatiable, mindless, implosive appetites — not invading tribes at the gates.

Or else it will end up like America. A place that proudly thinks itself free — even while, every day, the idea of freedom is made a grotesque mockery of, in the name of even more money, wealth, and power for a tiny few, who just might be the least deserving of all.

Umair

November 2018

America operates according to a rule of compulsion — which is a capitalist rule — and that rule has left it “unfree”, which is to say, exploited.

How does this rule of compulsion, of threatening people with the loss of subsistence, operate in the real world? Let’s do three examples. Healthcare is tied to jobs — so if you don’t “work”, you don’t get medicine. But “work” is not