It’s this simple: If we – each one of us – wants to be coming from a place of justice, we have to prioritize giving every child a fair start in life.
That means reforming our family planning systems – through high incentives and entitlements – to ensure all future children minimum levels of welfare, approaching birth equity, and a meaningful role in their democracies. It means stopping pushing women to have kids.
Those systems make most claims about us making the world a better place misleading; our creation norm and paradigm contradicts and is busy undoing the things we claim.
How? Every day we do things that show we wish to be self-determining people, to be free and not determined by others. But there is a cognitive dissonance at work here blocking that from happening. The level at which we can be self-determining first depends on who we are – on our creation and our initial relations to others. If we don’t use fairness at that point, we end up with power differentials that subject some person to the power of others. We never constitute, or come together as free nd equal people under an ongoing condition of limited and decentralized power.
Take Action: The most just solution to our crises is also the most effective
Our nations are not constituted by god-like founders in the past. They are constantly being constituted by people, as we create and care for them – and the majority of people and whose rights matter, will live in the future. If we don’t start that process fairly, at Fair Start, we always come from an unjust place. We remain preconstitutional. We can do better.
1. Join us in this simple discourse, in which we admit to each other that every child’s right to a Fair Start limits our right to wealth and makes it partially subject to the needs of future generations. No nation, or its legal system, can claim any form of political legitimacy without prioritizing every child’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life, which transfers power – or constitutes – from the most powerful to the least.
Let’s come together from a just place.
2. Let’s urge the United Nations to make Fair Start – under Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – a universal standard. Nothing exists outside the frame of justifiable we, and it starts with the creation of future generations.
Why are we facing climate and other ecological crises, massive inequality, and decaying democracies? How did things not get better than they were in the past? As a new peer-reviewed book by folks at the Fair Start Movement makes clear, these problems derive from a massive power grab by elites in the middle of the Twentieth Century.
The core claim it makes, that fair family policies which – restore a biodiverse nonhuman world, ensure equal opportunities for children, and build democracies where each person actually has the capacity to influence outcomes – would override all competing interests and rights has been subject to five successful peer-reviews: The Primary Right, A Human Rights Approach to Planning Families, Constituting Over Constitutions, The Right to Matter, and Justice as a Fair Start in Life. But we don’t need peer-review to understand the claim. How could we reject these values and believe in any viable conception of freedom, especially as the loss of nature through the climate crisis seriously harms infants? How can we separate these values from our creation, and how could anything logically precede creation – or existential – justice?How could we actually choose who has power over us without the “first election” of a just family planning norm?
Rather than ensure equal opportunities for all, and ecological sustainability via properly interpreting Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, world leaders invented a family planning model that evaded their collective responsibility to invest in and protect future generations. They pretended an interpersonal right was personal. They went for “nobody else’s business” over actually protecting kids. And by using that nonsense to maintain the trajectories at the time, they went for growth over equity.
They faked justice, and human rights, to protect existing power structures. Yes, we all got scammed, and our children will suffer as a result.
But as the book demonstrates, there is no real justice without a Fair Start in life. And right now, taking resources from the top of the wealth pyramid – the one Nobel Laureate Steven Chu recently decried – and using those resources as better family planning incentives/entitlements would have ten to twenty times the beneficial impact on the the climate and other ecological crises, massive inequality, and decaying democracies we are faced with today relative to downstream approaches. Fair Start is justice and freedom, or ensuring the capacity to consent to the influence of others.
This is the bottom line: Unless we prioritize an ecosocial Fair Start in life, we are not coming from a just place. Precons won’t prioritize each child getting a fair start in life. Free people will. Full stop.
Making them first apologize and then pay, via Fair Start incentives and entitlements, is the most just and effective way to compensate future generations for things like the climate crisis, with impacts that are ten to twenty times more effective than the downstream measures other nonprofits are promoting. Don’t get scammed. First things first – let’s start by creating optimal and just populations.
Which corporations and nonprofits are benefitting from unsustainable and inequitable family planning – the biggest driver of the climate and inequality crises – while pretending to further environmental and social justice? Federal Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosure requirements provide an opportunity to find out and act. Support Fair Start’s campaign for an executive order to require disclosure of policies and advocacy around the biggest factor of all – families – so that we can hold bad actors accountable.
Why not be effective?
We are urging the Biden Administration to do what should be painfully obvious by now – actually account for the greatest driver of the climate and other crises that gave need for a new ESG disclosure framework: Our family and population growth policies.
Why report at all if we do not account for the underlying driver/multiplier, and the volatility inherent in it?
We need to know who, among us, promotes putting an unlimited number of children, without any guaranteed levels of preparation, equity, or influential role in their democracy, into an increasingly degraded ecological future.And in terms of the past, we need to know which groups said they were making progress, knowing the growth they supported was undoing that progress the whole timeand moving wealth away from effective investments in children and into the hands of people at the top of the wealth pyramid.
Governments are failing children’s right to an eco social fair start in life. We know that early childhood experience is pivotal to lifetime outcomes. Why are we waiting for adverse childhood experiences to occur before acting?
Children deserve equitable conditions, right from the beginning. A fair start in life is the first human right – it overrides all others. It is what children are entitled to under the Children’s Rights Convention, and what allows them to eventually be free from the power of others, and truly self-determining. Because legitimate governance derives from people, who derive from the norms that create them, there are no such things as just societies, political legitimacy and freedom without the sort of Fair Start reforms discussed in this site. Without them we are always proceeding from, or reconstituting our political societies, from an unjust position.
Ensuring an eco-social #fairstart in life for all kids can have ten to twenty times the long run impact on the key social and ecological crises we are facing today relative to other interventions.
The UN has been obligated to interpret the promise of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that of a right “to found a family,” in a way that would protect the right for all generations equally. This includes those in the middle of the Twentieth Century, and those in 2050 for example, equally. It should have also interpreted Article 16 consistent with other human rights obligations, like the Children’s Rights Convention, and well as the Sustainable Development Goals.
Mountains of evidence show young persons are not able to exercise their right equally because of many population-driven threats to the children they would have, including significant birth impacts. In other words, the UN failed to interpret and administer Article 16 correctly.
In fact it caved to member state pressures to maintain large and unsustainable families and population growth rates in the Twentieth century, and violated future generations’ rights to safely and sustainably found their families under Article 16. Because men – under enabling from the UN – pushed women to have large families in the past, younger generations today have to worry about having even one child, given the ecological future that child faces. Moreover, women who were pushed to have children under the growth paradigm enabled by the UN’s modeling – and have children despite the risks of Covid-19 – are dying in massively disproportionate numbers. We need to hold those who enabled this accountable.
Activists should start by engaging the relatively wealthy children of UN officials, in this special form of lawful and peaceful constitutional dialogue and social change, geared around our just desert to family planning incentives/entitlements. There is nothing more just than targeting an extant minority for the benefit of the countless future majority. This process will build, targeting the concentrations of wealth and power – both public and private – most responsible for the climate and other crises we face today, including those that most benefited from past, inequitable and unsustainable interpretations of Article 16.
Take action: Urge United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres @antonioguterres to speak out and act to protect all generations’ right to found a family.
Who has the most at stake when we have children? The children, given the impact on their lives. One would think, then, that in designing family planning systems our governments – which undertook that task in the mid-20th Century – would make them child-centric. They did not – largely because that would have entailed investing heavily in each child, and cooperatively giving each child a fair start in life, or things like minimum levels of well-being, equity relative to other children, an effective voice in their democracies, and a natural world.
Instead governments, and the interests that control them, lied and intentionally misinterpreted Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the right to have children. They treated the act of having children as something self-determining for the parents, rather than other-determining, for the children we have. They did so, employing the concept of privacy, not to protect people but to protect their concentrations of wealth from collective obligations to invest in all children.
Governments and special interests opted to ignore basic values and the needs of future generations, and embrace a strategy that would ensure population-based economic growth, exploiting children as consumers, workers, and other forms of economic input. They used people to create profits. The move converted politically empowered citizens into consumers, workers, and taxpayers with almost no influence over the systems they are subject to. These concentrations of power used people against people, filling the word with uneducated and vulnerable followers wiling to give up values, like democracy, for higher incomes. These concentrations did not produce actual and objective value as much as they exploited patriarchal policies mass producing people in violation of human rights, including the right to participatory systems from which we could reasonably asses values, costs, and benefits. Every crisis we face today, from the population-driven climate crisis, to the overcrowding and poor public health that causes pandemics, to massive political and economic inequity, flow from this maneuver, or the scam one Nobel Laureate recently described.
Empirically, the most just and effective response to these crises is to target the growth-based concentrations of power, and their modern adherents and beneficiaries, to limit and decentralize their power into future generations, through Fair Start distributions of wealth as ecosocially equitable family planning incentives and entitlements. We can go into a future ridden by climate and other crises with more and more unprepared and unequal people, or with fewer and highly prepared people. There is no real choice to make here.
How can do we we proceed? How can we bend this arc of growth?
We all grew up with the myth that we were abstractly “constituted” in nation states by founding fathers in the past. That is inaccurate. For human rights and democracy to make any sense, it is more accurate to say we are constantly and physically constituting, as new generations join the dynamic “We the People” of us. For those things to make sense, we have to correct the self v. other determining lie, discussed above. Again, think a switch to child-centric and values-based family planning, or physically constituting through a just creation (or re-creation) norm – the norm which no other norm can precede.
Think getting past the systems of coercion and incentive that the scam described above maintains, the systems by which we are determined by others. Instead, imagine reaching the self-determination/actualization of democracy where our voice matters and we trust the people around us. In this process we find a binary distinction between those free people sufficiently other-regarding to constitute democracy through child-centric collective family planning, and those who are not – people who in the end we we would reasonably exclude from constituting, or precons. A classic example would be those who reject the values above and who see people as a resource, rather than an end in themselves. If the creation of persons represent the truest border of human power – to follow a “one border” thesis – we can envision precons on one side, and free people on the other. And whether someone or some group embraces child-centric and fair family planning is the test.
Government and its rules derive from people, who derive from their creation. A just creation norm is the ultimate obligation, and there are no just systems without it. Put another way, to be free people we have to first orient the formation of power relations around the justice of child-centric and fair family planning, over the inevitable resistance of the precons described above.
This is not an abstract proposition. Imagine a group of people, in quantity and quality, you would need to host an effective constitutional convention. That is what a truly free and equal “We the People” means, and falling fertility rates globally signal a sea change in our species that makes a shift to a qualitative, people-not-population, and Fair Start revolution feasible. Bending the arc of growth around this change, towards values and equity, is an act of self-defense, defense of others, and liberation.
These facts are indisputable: 1) Many benefitted from the scam describe above by placing costs – ecological and social – on others, in violation of multiple universal human rights that allow us to constitute as free and equal people. 2) In order to most justly and effectively compensate future generations, who should be treated as a majority and whose rights matter, for those violations we have a fundamental right to target those most responsible and who benefitted the most from blocking the process of constituting. They hold power over us and future generations because people with guns defend the status quo, and not because it is just. 3) We best do that by taking and using portions of their concentrated power and wealth, measured against the relevant fundamental baseline, to constitute free and equal groups of future people via the effective vehicle of Fair Start incentives/entitlements.
In other words these entities, like Exxon, should pay for the costs they externalized on others. And they must do so by complying with the first human right – Fair Start.
Take action: Fair Star will be urging the Biden Administration to issue an executive order that would require U.S. firms to disclose their past, present and future role in promoting that Ponzi demography and the harm it caused. Contact info@fairstartmovemeny.org to participate.
That is where we have to start. And today’s populace was created to fill shopping malls – not town halls. We know this from the ubiquitous references to a “baby bust” in reaction to falling fertility rates. We are used to creating lots of people with the economic capacity to consume, work, and pay taxes, not fewer and highly developed people capable of collectively operating a democracy where each sovereign voice actually matters.
Our current family planning policies, which encourage economic growth irrespective of individual levels of child welfare, fair starts in life, and environmental consequences, have made things worse. The United States is a largely unrepresentative democracy where family planning policies are designed to create large future populations of consumers, workers, and taxpayers, rather than a sustainable number citizens capable of collective self rule. They create people for shopping malls, not town halls.
By starting at the source, and using Fair Start family planning to decentralize concentrations of power, including governments, large corporations, and wealthy families and individuals, we can shift resources to empower and free future children
Let’s first address the root questions of who we are and should be when we talk about amending the Constitution, and embrace reforms that will enable future generations to take the idea of amending more seriously.
TAKE ACTION: Urge the NYT editor @ @deanbaquet to take human rights and democracy seriously, and embrace Fair Start as the fundament of justice.
Given this, did the United Nations intervene decades ago to protect women and children through aggressive family planning programming meant to ensure compliance with the Children’s Rights Convention, and to free women from the structure that treated them primarily as mothers? It did not, instead choosing to embrace the isolation modeling that treats the act of having children as as something left to the subjective whims of the parents, and nobody else’s business.
This was a major missed opportunity, laying the foundation for the birth and development of a ballooning number of children in conditions that would ensure the chaos we see today. In creating its system, the UN bent to pressure from male-dominated members – including the United States – who saw population growth as an easy way to create economic growth.
What’s the solution? Had the United Nations adopted and implemented the correct interpretation of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the right to found a family, which treats the provision as the dominant human right and child-centric in nature (focused on the most vulnerable entities, and those with the most at stake), this situation could have been avoided.
Systems of governance and their laws derive from people, who derive from their creation. Justice (distributive, procedural, retributive, ecological, intergenerational, etc.) and the rule law therefore begin in the dynamic formation of our first relations, or ideally, as we physically and constantly reconstitute democratic communities through forward looking child-centric family planning reforms under Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
We scam ourselves and others out of justice by pretending to do it downstream, after the fact of the formation of our power relations, and usually because we personally benefit from doing so. That scamming is rampant in civil society and politics, where those purporting to protect animals, the environment, children and other vulnerable categories of persons utterly fail to do so – and mislead – because they embrace inequity in creation, and the resulting power differentials that make formal and downstream law ineffective. This is especially so for the most vulnerable, like animals, for whom formal law offers little protection.
Why focus on our creation? It is not fortune, or the will of a god, that some are born poor and others rich or in other inequitable positions of power. The belief in fortune is part of a myth meant to preserve power structures, and to justify our using future generations as unequal economic inputs who will concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few. The core of that myth is the isolating idea that having children is matter of personal privacy, and that such privacy protects parents. If we really care about people we will be collectively focused on the wellbeing of future children, who have more at stake than their parents, and future generations more generally, who vastly outnumber persons alive today. Our failure to focus forward in this way fundamentally created the ecosocial crises we face today, like the climate crisis, as we avoided ensuring ecological justice in our creation and instead opted for downstream – and now utterly failed – corrective environmental interventions.Environmental groups curried favor with concentrations of power that rely on population growth, despite the risk – now a reality – that their conservation programs would eventually be undone by that growth and the climate crisis it created.
Evading the constitutive fallacy allows us to avoid the lie of seeing ourselves as constituted into nation states – where we have little role over public affair and are hardly self-determining – by god-like founders in the past. First deriving justice and rules from that ancient process would require ignoring the formation of the power relations that justice is designed to shape. Committing that mistake or fallacy means denying people the relative self-determination, or fairness, of constituting just communities where their voice actually matters, and ignoring the drivers of our daily experience in favor of the abstraction of celebrities and politicians, divorced from the creation and reality of the lives of the people with whom we share the world. The verb form, constituting, instead empowers people, and focuses us linguistically on relative self-determination rather than being determined by others.
To constitute means first and always accounting for the future generations impacted by our lives and ensuring that their creation is just, via Fair Start reforms or comparable modeling that uses the entitlements future children deserve as a correlative incentive to ensure – universally – small, sustainable and well-planned families. This includes ensuring minimum levels of welfare, a move towards birth equity, restorative environmentalism or rewilding, and physically constituting participatory democratic communities along the physical borders of human power. If we don’t do this, we are relying on and furthering an illegitimate system that undemocratically exploits the most numerous and vulnerable category of entities – future generations – in a way that retards freedom, or relative self-determination, for all. The freedom that comes from our existential role as sovereigns in a democracy precedes and enables the personal freedom and empowerment we experience, as workers, consumers or otherwise, in that democracy.
What’s an example of moving past the constitutive fallacy? Consider what rules for containing Covid-19 are most just, balancing public health, personal choice, and the maintenance of one’s livelihood? To answer this question we would have to be constituted into relatively self-determining groups or democratic communities capable of answering the question, and our having first done that would have likely evaded the overcrowding, poor public health, destruction of nature, etc. that drove the pandemic. The same revision in thinking would apply to the climate crisis, and dozens of other problems.
Practically we can do this – as free and equal people – by limiting and decentralizing existing concentrations of private and public power, taking the resources the people in those concentrations hoarded by externalizing costs, and instead investing them in Fair Start reforms as the entitlements/incentives described above. We may do so because the act of constituting overrides downstream rules, like property entitlements. This will happen over the opposition of preconstitutional people, or precons, who simply block justice. We can test the progress of this process – the ongoing first and fundamental election – by looking for its application in the pronouns in our language, and to see whether we are constituting together the persons those pronouns explicitly and implicitly refer to.
This past Fourth of July, two everyday people Cassie and Matt – exemplified what it would mean to constitute communities that are actually free, in part by compensating future generations for the harm we have caused them through the climate, inequity and other ecosocial crises.
They are living the truth that justice for future generations overrides all other obligations, including property rights. Older generations lied about the “private” nature of family planning to protect concentrations of wealth and power from distributive obligations to future generations. That lie is fundamentally blocking justice.
Cassie, an activist and nonprofit professional said this about family planning:
Current corrupt concentrations of power push a growth model that promotes unsustainable family planning policies. They see us ordinary people as economic inputs in their machine, to use for our reproductive and other labor. It’s our job to fight that narrative and elevate the worth of every individual to have their basic needs met, on day one. My partner and I hope to adopt children one day and I feel the urgency to ensure that my future child, and all children, have the resources and opportunities that are their right.
Matt, a donor to the Fair Start Movement, said this:
I support the Fair Start Movement because I know that any claims I have to property and wealth are subject to ensuring every child a fair and equitable start in life, the first and overriding human right. I’m willing to step forward, as a donor, and say that. I challenge others to do the same.
Together, they are exemplifying a real new deal, one that fixes the fundamental source of the biggest problems in the world today, and leads to a comprehensively liberated state of affairs. It’s not about population. It’s about people, the vast majority of people, who will exist in the future. It’s about putting their interests first. And if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for a child. Government derives from the people which derive from their creation. A just creation norm thus precedes and overrides everything else, including the government assigned property rights that have created massive power differentials between rich and poor.
We can spread this modeling, and this simple discourse: “Part of your wealth is my and my future child’s family planning entitlement and incentive.
TAKE ACTION:
1. Do you feel your child or future child deserves a level playing field and equal opportunities in life, relative to wealthy children – the many millionaire and billionaire kids who will impact your child’s life? 2. What if your child or future child had a human right to that fair start ? Would you advocate for policies, and direct action, to ensure that right? 3. If you are someone with wealth, would you be willing to speak out in support of that right and those policies?
