We can’t really become ourselves, and live authentic lives where we self-determine rather than determine the lives of others, without ensuring all children a fair start in life as the first human right.

Without this right in place, we have been able to exploit race/wealth based birth positionality and growth to benefit ourselves at deadly climatological other costs to others.

By concrete metrics (current emissions standards of around 400 ppm v. the under 280 ppm needed to rewild the earth) this means choices that seem like our own, to harm the environment for example, are really choices we are making for others – like future generations and animals.

 

 

This mistake in systems of rights let me, as a white public interest lawyer from a privileged background, make inaccurate claims about beneficial impacts that were being undone by inequity. Here is the fix – moving from birth inequity to birth equity and full autonomy. 

The current systems of family entitlements allows us to benefit while impacting the future majority in a way that will kill millions because each of us is not forced to account for the birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionality that gives some – mostly whites – a massive head start in life, and everyone living today the ability to make choices for others in the future instead of similarly making choices for themselves.

If we want to run life as a race, we should try doing it without a head start. We should do it with rules that are based on the values we all live, and rules that don’t immediately position some over others, that don’t exclude most from rulemaking and access to accurate criteria for assessing truth and value, or that ruin the track for future runners such that they die by the millions.

We should be runners, and not choosing for others in ways that don’t allow them to run.

We should understand that there is a difference between being popular, and being right. Millions dying from a climate crisis suggests we were not right, and should start all we do assessing why. Growth creating demand at cost to freedom, and even access to the criteria to accurately asses truth and value, suggest culprits.

 

 

By the numbers, most least lives that are anything but self-determining, or free. Why? Because this most basic rules was never in place: Young would-be parents have a first and overriding claim to societal resources if used to parent us into a better future, using metrics that combine to create a threshold above which children may be born, but beneath which no child should be born.

Without this it would be physically impossible to be free because we could not limit who has authority, power and influence over us. We could only try to limit who represents us – not who actually has – day to day – influence and  power over us.

Free persons will see themselves as first obligated to persons who will parent and empower their children into emancipation, rather than first ruled by those at the top of the influence pyramid, e.g. officials, the wealthy, CEOs, celebs, etc., because all entitlement to influence derives from the governed and their primary  and equitable positioning to self-determine, rather than government and current influencers, which have no inherent authority.

Would-be mothers who will physically constitute the future have the first right to use the most effective means to obtain the resources they need, to ensure freedom for all, and more of a right than the men with guns in government who masquerade as their representatives because there is no coherent, and necessarily primary, “we” without this override function. Those who wish to die orienting their lives from a position of freedom should consider this.

 

 

Here are eight metrics, and how then can be used to assured share equity entitlements, including reparations for climate harms. We cannot evade impacting all these values when we have children, hence

1. Welfare standards for birth, development, and emancipation – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than the right to determine the lives of others with the entitlements they assumed – as the standard for who we should be. An example might be flexible savings accounts containing ten thousand dollars, in place before any child is born, to ensure everyone can have at least one child safely if they choose to.
2. Equality of opportunity – ensuring that one’s birth and developmental positionality is not a dominant factor in things like the income or savings one accrues in adulthood. The savings accounts above would be funded by debt from wealthy families to further this offset.
3. Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections.
4. Successful parenting – ensuring that parents do no regret having children, including eliminating cases of neglect of abuse, through successful planning. Would-be parents contributing twenty-five percent  to the savings and debt accounts, including through credit earned by parental readiness training, would further this goal.
5. Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting  representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections.
6. Democratic, not economic, levels of trust – Metrics for trust among citizens must show their willingness to trust each other with legislation, and all lesser included forms of trust that implies.
7. Real efficiency – Ensuring outcomes, like gross domestic product, are based on the inclusion of others as equals, not exploiting others in disregard of the capacity of all to contribute highly. Partha Dasgupta’s modeling is a good measure of such efficiency. 
8. Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above.

The way many see the world today would be like seeing events in historic South Africa while ignoring the apartheid policy in place, and that policy benefitted those doing the ignoring. But in this case, the intergenerational and racial apartheid of assuming birth, developmental, and emancipatory benefits will kill countless more people. Concentrations of wealth and power – like those who have funded and thereby defined fields like child welfare and animal rights laws in a way that is doing more harm than good – did not create value.

They helped ensure rules for the game, and most importantly the first rule of who we should be in terms of the creation of power relations, to move the key costs on to others, and to create deadly criteria for truth and value (like demand created by not investing in birth and development conditions) by ensuring the average person could not patriciate in the rulemaking. Their wealth is owed back, and the demand overrides any government’s right to block it because the process of investing in equitable birth and development positionality is what makes governance inclusive, capable of representation, and hence legitimate.

National legitimacy, and the ability of nations to assign entitlements to wealth and to protect the lives and property of the wealthy, is contingent on human rights that empower subjects as political equals. This is the  first human right, the right to share equity – or an equal and influential role in self-determining limitation of the power and influence others have over you.

 

 

Whether nations are assuring the right can be measured with discrete metrics – metrics that were hidden by those structuring human rights in favor of using arbitrary standards, like market demand manufactured through low standards for child welfare and development. The sovereignty and legitimacy of nations derives from the sovereignty – or self-determination – of its subjects, and an easy measure is whether each new child born into the world is seen as capable of offsetting or countermanding the vote and voice of existing persons, relative to a neutral threshold.

That would show they are truly empowered as political equals, and we would invest heavily in them – starting with a reproductive rights model actually based on children’s rights to conditions of birth and development that ensured inclusion – to ensure they used that power responsibly. 

TAKE ACTION: Urge the United Nations to recognize their use of an arbitrary and deadly baseline for sovereignty and legitimacy, and to instead use measurable self-determination as the standard.