When you see politicians use nazi tactics again, looking for angy people to enlist in quests against imaginary or innocent enemies, it makes sense to try to innoculate for the discourse that is likely to follow. When resources are scarce as they where in the runup to WO II, people will talk about who deserves to be fed, who is usefull. In those days there was open discussion of this topic and some scary thinkers where not to shy to share their views.
Usefullness of humans is not a thing. Of course the basic ‘utility’ of a person is to keep him or herself alive. If there are kids those have to be kept alive. That would be the bare minimum. But usefullness is not really defined as something towards the individual, but towards others. The use of a person is not determined by the person but by the people that person is usefull to. If that is the case then the question can be “what kind of relationship gives others the right to determing a persons usefullness”. There are two kinds, one is that the person loves the others and is usefull to them. The other is that the person is made artificially needy.
In the case of love the others will not really think about it much, although a tweeting chick in a nest is clearly trying to make its parents usefull. Love causes an individual to consider the other part of him/her self, and so the use of that person grows when viewed from the outside, but not in the experience of the person. Life becomes a bit harder, but there is more to live for.
Before WO II some writers said that if a person can not explain his/her usefullness it would be kind to them to euthenize them
In the case the person is made artificially needy others are usually actively involved, but it can also be the person him/herself who becomes passionate about a life goal that is demanding. The most basic artifical need is the avoidance of pain inflicted by others. These are slave labourers and prisoners, but also employees in companies that have to work ungodly hours to retain the approval of the boss. There is no love for that boss, although the Stokholm-Syndrom may set in, there is existential fear which hinges on the feedback from the boss.
Other artficial needyness is caused by programming, this can be advertisement or movies or imprints left by social media use. The invidual may not be aware of a stimulus placed specifically to create an itch, and this itch (usually a social threat of exculsion) has a life of its own in the persons mind and will start to shape his/her thoughts and dreams until the person wants something. The artificial need is created. Modern life is a constant battle against these kind of impressions.
Most of our needs are artificial
The question of a persons utility, meaning whether he/she does something to reduce the needs of others, except in case of love, seems entirely forced. And one can ask where that forcing originates. One thing is clear, that forcing is external, brought on by other people with needs. Today it is clear most if not all people in the western world experience artifical need, the need for money. This need is created by keeping opportunities and freedoms from them. You could say that the need is created by the cost of things, but that’s not the essence, the essence is that the person can not access the thing he/she ‘needs’.
For example : There is land, it produces food, but there’s a fence, and you are not supposed to take the food. This makes sense but on the other side there is this : If you want to own land, you need money, and not a little bit, but a lot. So even if land is available, you can not get to that land and use it. This then creates an artificial need in you to somehow make money (more on this mechanism below).
This means : You wil have to do things you didn’t think of for people you don’t know to get money, and then you will not earn enough to buy land, but only to buy produce from someone that does have land. But, and that is so strange, you are not necessarily usefull to that someone. You may even be harmfull to that someone. So in order to meet your basic needs you have to be usefull to someone, but not to the people that actually help you satisfy your need, and this process can be endless!
Debt is an artificial need induced to force you to be usefull
The same mechanism of artifical need described for money was invented by the church a long time ago. Their mechanism was to tell you you needed redemption from sin. They held the keys to that redemption as representatives of the punshing God, and if you obeyed their rules you would be redeemed. When the printing press was invented this turned into an actual cashcow for the churches, they printed indulgences, letters of redemption, that you could buy with money, and so the church became insanely rich, and the people in the end revolted.
If you take the example of your need for food, and find that you may be a seller of some material that poisons the land yet by that usefull role you can attain food your usefullness can not be towards the farmer but has to be towards someone else. It is of course whoever is in control of the money system, or to whom that money system is usefull. Its simpel to spot who those are, those are the people that are not in the real world manipulating real things. They are the ones that create the ‘order’ that generates the ‘need’ that forces you to be usefull.
Now this post is not an attack on that order, it is in its best form an order born out of love. Today it is not born out of love, the economic world order is born out of fatalism and lack of imagination. Slowely we are seeing a change there, but the bankers, CEOs etc are still mostly looking at money, which means they are blind to the actual utility or even harm of actions they enable to fellow humans. We say that industry does NOT care about human lives.
This post is an attack or a warming to people who want to define the usefullness of others. There is none. You are not allowed to. If you are a strong person and you grow a lot of crop you can’t eat yourself, naturally you have to share it. So people who can not grow that crop because you are strong and monopolized the land, you can not say they are useless. In todays economy if people are excluded because they are not needed, they are not useless. They should not be penalized. They should be included and resources should be shared. If you think these people have a low desire to be usefull to themselves, inspire them to that desire. Uplift them. Why isn’t that the norm?
Uselessness is not a problem if there is no real neediness
In the current economy people are not being uplifted. They are being made more needy all the time. Not only mentally, by presenting them with images of a life only a few could ever actually live (in terms of resources), but also physically, by keeping common medical treatment from them. (It is 100% true that medical care is a miracle of cooperation and actual care. It is surprising that the people who are the key to making that work earn so little.). Today in our economy there is one need most of us have, and that is the need for fossil energy. We share that need with companies that run trucks, machines, produce plastic or cook food etc. We find ourselves forced to need money by the creators of the economic order, and then we have to compete with machines in terms of usefullness towards company CEO’s.
In today’s economic order, when it has been destilled to its money based essence, you find your life is in danger when you are not fighting to be usefull. Not to your fellow human beeings, because voluntary work is NOT rewarded, but towards the economic order. It is a lossing battle because you compete with machines running on fossil fuels that are made increasingly intelligent and potent. The people that want utility will soon make it more clear that some people are useless. But they forget that the means to be usefull are kept from most of us (the cost and inaccesibility of land is the main culprit), and the utility of whatever they find usefull can be questioned (do we need running shoes or toasters?).
Our point is not to be useless and happy, our point is that until all resources are put at the disposal of people who want to be usefull (to themselves primarily) nobody has the right to start talking about it. You say I am useless? Give me a piece of land! Stop telling people they can’t be happy without an enormous villa! As natural resouces are being rapidly destroyed by an army of articially needy workers in the fossil economic order, the discussion will soon start.
We think the only and most powerfull defence is to build renewable energy sources so that usefull things can be done at a lower price or for free. Others have said that the drive for more renewable energy is in its heart socialist (but we are not communist!).