Between 1948 and 1968 in the wake of World War II, the United Nations and member states were obligated to use objective values and human rights to limit the power of nations over their citizens, in order for those nations to remain legitimate, sovereign and authorized to make laws and enforce them, as well as to entitle wealth and property. Underlying this process was the assumption that sovereign governments have no inherent authority, but derive it from the sovereignty / self-determination of their citizens.
At the most fundamental level, in the entitlements surrounding generational wealth and families, the United Nations and member states did the opposite. They treated the act of having children as an act of self-determination for the parents, rather than other-determination for the children born and the communities they would comprise.
This defined freedom as the powerful determining the vulnerable, for current over future generations and rich over the poor. It made liberty doing whatever you want to do, and autonomy as somehow existing outside of collective equity or democracy where each person eventually can offset the influence of others in a measurable way, and control through rulemaking who has influence or power over them.
Yes, a woman could choose to terminate her pregnancy or not as an act of bodily autonomy, but not be free from dying (with or without a child) in a growth-exacerbated heat wave because she could not afford air conditioning. That sense of bodily autonomy was not freedom after all. This gave the average person enough room to harm their own progeny, and it defined our criteria for assessing truth and value, our language, our capacities to influence the world around us.
It limited what it meant for us to “be who we should be.”
As many theorists have seen, this is the fundamental paradigm to overcome, this corruption of freedom, to do the most good.
All policy starts with who we should be, or children’s rights and the line or threshold of true self-determination below which children should not be born, and above which children may be born.
You either agree to that line as a primary obligation or not. That line is set to a threshold of zero based on hard metrics linked to physical conditions in the world, and it is much is easier to see and achieve in a collective setting like care modeling than a nuclear family.
This is a binary choice between acting obligated towards bottom-up systems of investment and inclusion, or top-down systems of governmental violence that exploit low levels of child welfare to create growth that kills animals and destroys nature.
One either chooses higher climate and related damage assessments (on eight levels at least) based on true freedom, or lower assessments that continue the paradigm of the powerful determining the vulnerable. The former is the standard for terms like “green/sustainable,” “democratic” or “inclusive” that would have saved those dying in the crisis. The latter is the standard rich investors use to make money.
We can test anyone for which side of the binary they fall on by asking them regarding claims they have made about values and impacts, relative to the facts of children entering the world on the day the claims were made. Ask them about the horror stories – the abuse, the ecocide, the disenfranchisement, the power differentials – arising from the zero entitlements and functional protections for children and animals as children entered the world.
If they will not admit undoing of the values and impacts as well as benefiting at deadly cost to others, relative to what children needed (the line) as they entered the world, and alter their obligations based on their inaccuracies, they are choosing to continue to harm others by using the same fundamental system the caused the crisis.
Ranking those who make that choice to find the most influential, and targeting those who matter the most in terms of the harm they do is one tactic to ensure change. Among those most problematic are actually those decoys from social justice funded by wealthy investors, those that seem to do good but are meant to hide how creation drives inequity.
They will define values like “green, :”mercy,” or “inclusive” to benefit the rich children of investors, not the truly vulnerable. This clouds the criteria for assessing truth and value. We can’t legitimately create economic demand by violating children’s rights, including the rights to sufficient levels of education to understand how power works. We can’t fill shopping malls that drive animal suffering and extinction by cutting citizens off from being born and raised into town halls. Those who do, and pretend to further animal rights, do more harm than good.
Consider that understanding self-determination in this way changes the legitimacy of nations to use violence under the guise of being representative. How could they legitimately uses it to halt would-be parents who would need resources in order to meet the line, and thus be truly inclusive, legitimate and authoritative?
Focusing in the vulnerable in this way also makes permissible registering the children of wealthy families and engaging them directly when they reach the age of majority because family transfers of privilege can be seen as primary and be openly discussed rather than hidden behind the veil of privacy. Many concentrations of wealth and power have shown themselves to be impervious to moral persuasion, and will continue to hold and use illegal entitlements until they think their children will not benefit but lose from their doing so.
This last change is crucial – many will justify to themselves choosing fundamental injustice if they believe they are doing it for their family, especially their children. Many in the Fair Start Movement have known law professors that lied about the impacts of their work, and the liability they were creating, to ensure more wealth for their kids. To smash the illusion of continuing to see family as somehow outside of the social contract, and to instead ensure truth and justice, mean disincentivizing this sort of excuse.
TAKE ACTION: Back true freedom at the UN, or engage key targets to show their lies and reorient them.
