Fair Start Movement

Tag: Essays & Perspectives

Don’t get scammed: What is Distractivism and Why Does It Matter For Your Future?
Almost every horrible thing – from child and animal torture to deadly inequality, to unbearable heat waves – we see in the world today was fundamentally caused decades ago, circa 1968, by wealthy world leader’s decision to adopt minimalist universal child welfare and family planning policies.

In violation of human rights, these policies required no minimum levels of welfare for children in their birth and development, nothing to ensure they would have equality of opportunity in life, and no functional environmental protections. For all their talk of values, world leaders quietly used family policy to undo those values, profiting by removing these protections, and using the growth that would follow to force costs on others.

They used children as means, not ends, fundamentally and slowly degrading democracy from the inside out.

Google the term “baby bust.” You will understand that many made money by ensuring zero protections for the most vulnerable and numerous categories of entities – future children and animals – and they are using policy to ensure they can continue to do so. Encyclopedic-level research on these issues backs the idea that the most fundamental form of justice demands that we reverse what they did.

The most just and effective solution way to reverse the minimalist policies would be to treat birth and developmental equity as the fundamental human right. We could use that baseline to recoup extreme wealth (the true costs of which were placed on others) to fund family planning and birth equity entitlements that promote climate and biodiversity restoration, allow young women to equality of opportunity for their children, parental delay to ensure they have children where, when and with which particular resources that will allow the child to thrive, and through delay ensure a universal ethic of smaller or more ecocentric families.

One can imagine modifying GMI systems via a progressive scale of democracy-building payments, inverse to wealth and income and contingent on positionality, that either charged wealthy young women for having a child before their 27th birthday and/or without certain parental readiness benchmarks, or on the other end of the wealth spectrum, covered significant incentives consistently paid out for them to build birth equity and ensure delay. This scale could be combined with other factors that amount to “survive, self-determine, and thrive” financial kits for the most vulnerable children funded by the parents of the least vulnerable children. Dysfunctional versions of such GMI systems already exist and could be easily modified around a universal metric.

These would be climate-based, or self-determination enabling, reparations and the United Nations is moving towards authorizing them. This is what such a future funded with these resources – filled with free and self-determining people – would look like.

And because justice in our creation precedes all other forms of justice, we can take the necessary resources for that use by all means effective. Even just fighting for Fair Start reforms free and empower each of us by making us truly democratic, and relatively self-determining. Free people will not follow laws that prevent this liberation and protect concentrations of wealth and power at risk to millions of innocent lives.

We can move that money – which was made at cost to others – to improve birth and development or leave it at the top and millions will die.

Many concentrations of wealth and power have no intention of compensating those they have harmed, and one tactic they use to avoid paying involves using fake activism and nonprofits to decoy many away from this reform.

I worked for several such charities, was urged to omit the truth, and saw the lies firsthand. Concentrations of wealth and power often don’t openly oppose social justice movements. Instead, they imitate, coaptate, and redirect them.

Don’t get scammed. This is what their distractive – funded by those who wish to avoid admitting and paying climate reparations – looks like:
- Animal charities will focus on protecting a certain species, selling vegan food, or ending a practice like the use of intensive confinement, while quietly choosing child welfare and family policies that kill exponentially more animals than they are saving. In fact, many funders use that growth to sell more vegan products, in which they are invested.
- Charities that claim to protect children will focus on flashy campaigns that feed or clothe articular groups of children, while quietly choosing family planning policies that ensure more infants are born into and die in horrific conditions that violate their rights under the Children’s Convention.
- Charities that seem to promote racial and other forms of equity – using employment or minority business preferences – will quietly support family policies that ensure black children are born with 1/10th the wealth of white children, because of the history of slavery and colonization. By ignoring equity in creation as a means towards autonomy for all, they actually exacerbate the situation, entrenching a left v. right dynamic that could be avoided. For example, we use family planning as a vehicle to redistribute resources rather than government, because we value the efficiency of early intervention as well as the equity of a fair start in life.
- Environmental charities will focus on reducing certain levels of pollutants, saving a particular forest, or encouraging electric cars, while they are knowingly undoing the impacts of that work through growth-based policies that have ensured the ecocidal climate crisis.
- Human rights and democracy organizations will focus on abstract metrics for whether systems are just, like the performance of particular governments, or electoral processes, while ignoring the creation of actual power relations – at our birth and development – that would determine whether we are truly self-determining (envision a highly functional constitutional convention), or our votes are actually meaningless and in reality, we are ruled by others. A hallmark of these organizations is that they have backed, in the past and today, an unlimited right to have children that by destroying the environment actually prevents future generations from having kids in a safe and sustainable way. Freedom may best be conceived as the conditions of influence, and polarity, where organizations of free and equal persons can form, dissolve, and reform — more like bubbles than an extended organizational chart and the way to ensure those conditions is by taking the wealth created by years of bad family policy and using it instead to entitle young women to plan their families, and physically constitute free and just communities. Savvy freedom fighters will physically constitute nations, not be constituted by some document or documents to which they have, and can only have, little relation.
- Academics often back the work of these charities. Abstract academic debates about population ethics, often funded by concentrations of wealth and power reliant on inequity and growth, threaten to exacerbate the results of the climate crisis by forestalling law and policy reforms. Most of the academics in these debates contradict in their writings the basic values they exhibited throughout their lives, e.g., seeking minimum thresholds of personal welfare, expecting equal access to opportunities, participating in and adhering to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed, using and enjoying an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health, etc. Given their privileged intergenerational positionality, and the fact that they sent their lives generally relying on and participated in legal/political systems of coercive obligation that benefitted them at cost to others, they should at least begin from a default or provisional position of extending those values to future generations so that they can also debate these issues from the comfort and security these academics do.
- Everyone has used terms that expressed or implied public benefit that were inaccurate. Measured against the true north of human and nonhuman health, the background systems they usually did not question and in fact implied the legitimacy of, were benefitting the claimant while unleashing significant and increasing harm to infant humans and nonhumans alike. That true north – the harm – is what we can use, regardless of dysfunctional human political processes and language, to assess damages and create new policy. Avoid this untruth by asking the right questions. Look for words the persons and organizations you engage use – words like green, eco, sustainable, equitable, democratic, human-rights based, humane, restorative, regenerative. These and many other terms are inaccurate if not backed by consistent family policies that ensure minimum levels of wellbeing, equity, democracy, nature, and a sustainable right to have children for all, through birth equity entitlements and wealth GMI distributions that ensue parental delay and readiness, equal opportunities for all children, and smaller or more ecocentric families. Many are getting paid to omit the truth at deadly cost to others. Knowing these things – you can demand the truth.
TAKE ACTION: URGE ANY CHARITY YOU BACK TO ADMIT THEY ARE CHOOSING CHILD WELFARE AND FAMILY POLICIES THAT UNDO THE PROGRESS THEY ARE CLAIMING TO MAKE AND URGE THEM TO CHANGE COURSE. IN SOME CASES, YOU MAY BE LEGALLY OWED BACK THE DONATIONS YOU GAVE BASED ON CHARITIES’ GREENWASHING.

FOR WEALTHY INDIVIDUALS BEHIND THESE CHARITIES, FIND AND ENGAGE THEIR ADULT CHILDREN, WHO OWE THE REPARATIONS AND MIGHT BE WILLING TO COVER THEM.
November 10, 2023
Why Should We All Ensure Each Child’s Right to a Fair Start in Life?

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The Fair Start Movement is a reaction to many individuals and organizations claiming to do public interest work, the benefits of which they were simultaneously undoing with outdated family policies that quietly and slowly enriched a few at deadly cost to many. Fair Start works to identify and target these claims and the policies they hide, which 1) violate fundamental rights, exploiting the most vulnerable classes – nonhumans and future children, and ensure a future defined by inequity, antidemocratic systems, and ecological collapse.

Ask anyone claiming to do good to account for the fundamental creation of power relations, or how they are ensuring children are only born and raised in conditions that lead to democracies or self-determining persons thriving in biodiversity. We urge those making the claims and backing the policies that do not reflect this basic justice to instead choose 2) bottom-up investing in equitable family planning and child development entitlements that protect and empower children, and also restore democracies and biodiversity. This will save many lives, as child rights override economic growth, and ecocentrism replaces Anthro-centrism, as a baseline for policymaking.

Who is blocking freedom today?

If freedom is really about living some relative level of self-determination (relative because we are created by others), it probably requires creating and raising children in conditions that comply minimally with the Children’s Rights Convention and ideally in conditions of climate restoration and birth equity.

Why? By definition children can’t become relatively self-determining as they grow – rather than be determined, ecologically and socially, by wealthy and powerful others – without these conditions. If we are really self-determining and politically equal, that means we are invested in and empowered enough to offset each other’s capacity for self-determination equally as nations grow, so that each person can influence the rules under which they have to live and be free enough – as if in a functional constitutional convention – to look into each other’s eyes without fear or deference.

That is the beginning of freedom in terms of fundamental power relations, actual relations. If we don’t offset as our numbers grow, something is going wrong at the base of our democracies. This fact also gives us a qualitative basis for determining and meeting optimal world population ranges that track what many decorated theorists have suggested.

Why does this matter? Today most political systems do the opposite, urging women to have children with no minimum standards for care in order to create wealth for a few, at cost to values we all share – minimum thresholds of personal welfare, expecting equal access to opportunities, participating in and adherence to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed, use and enjoyment of an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health, etc.

Here is an example of how our law does the opposite, using family policy to undercut self-determination.

Could we reverse that and become free?

A test case.

Would it be wrong for a young woman with little wealth or income intending to become a mother to demand birth equity resources – resources that simply ensure a level playing field for her child and thus offset the harm – from a wealthy family that externalized the deadly environmental and social costs of its wealth upon the child she wished to have? What if that family exploited that birth inequity and growth to not only harm her future child, but ensure that child would be likely to work for little money for the wealthy family and their children? What if the young woman were black, and whose child would have 9/10th less wealth than white kids because they would be black, and the white family she asked could afford to share by choosing to have fewer children?

What if the wealthy family had made their money by lying, greenwashing and otherwise hiding the true costs of their wealth?

What if the young intending mother were unable to even challenge the injustice of birth poverty and ecological injustice through participatory democracy where her voice actually mattered, because those systems never really represented the constituents they claimed to? What if she intended to use the resources she secured to engage in better way of planning for – and thriving in – families, one that left the racist ecocide and other mistakes of former generations behind?

Consider this fact: People, not documents, constitute nations, and the creation of their power relations through birth and development – by definition and inevitably – determines whether they are relatively self-determining or determined by others. These relations are part of the implied “we” in every statement, the often-unspoken presence of the dominant political/legal system – usually the nation – from which the statement is orienting. How would you ever really account for inclusive power relations to allow a say in what the law should be without starting at creation, and accounting for the move from minor to adult that makes persons full citizens capable of making the rules.

You would not, and the failure to halt the climate crisis is evidence of this. And there is a clear formula to assess reparations. The would-be mother would truly be constituting democracy, speaking the truth and logic of self-determination to power.

The border of freedom is not between nations, but in how we have and raise children. And becoming free involves empowering them, and each other, through birth equity entitlements, delaying having kids until parents are ready to parent well, and a universal ethic of smaller or more eco families.

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October 28, 2023
Why Fair Start Is the Best Investment You Can Make

We started Fair Start because if you look at most public interest organizations, the claims they make about success in their work omit the impacts of family policy, and are thus misleading, and in a way that has fundamentally exacerbated the climate and political inequity crises we face today and caused massive harm.

That’s the problem Newsweek recently covered in two editorials here: One regarding the deception, and one regarding the solution – using wealth at the top of the economic system that was made by externalizing climate and inequity costs to fund birth-equity based family planning entitlements.

It’s the most just and effective way to protect children, animals, the environment, and human rights and democracy. It reorients us and our actions from a fundamentally unjust position to a just one. Documents do not constitute just societies – humans do, and humans and their fundamental relations are a product of the basic norms that account for their creation. This is less about population and more about power, and how we can become free from others.

While that may sound abstract there are dozens of laser-specific ways to implement the change, and the turn our current system on its head.

We end the lies, and the harm they cause, by treating every child’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life – including climate restoration through birth equity – as the first and overriding human right under international law. This is not charity. This is justice.

This is mandating these outcomes as a human right:

Be effective.

Changing the standard for family planning makes any donation to Fair Start and partner organizations like Rejoice Africa more effective, by changing the lives of billions over decades using basic values found in the Children’s Rights Convention, than dumping millions into groups that knowingly undo their own progress.

TAKE ACTION: End the lies and model true justice instead, bending the arc of growth above down towards justice, by engaging in the Seeds for the Future campaign.

April 5, 2023
Why Is the United States a Mass Shooting Epicenter? We Were Promised Town Hall Empowerment, and Got Shopping Malls Instead.

Mass shootings often flow from a sense of disempowerment, not simply mental illness.

That fundamentally flows from family planning in the United States today, a system supported on the political left and right by elites who see women having fewer children as a threat to their profit margins. It’s a system designed to fill shopping malls with lots of people and politically disempower them in the process.

Imagine a political/economic system that relies on constantly adding new people to it to create “economic growth” – new consumers, people who will eventually become cheap labor and compliant taxpayers as they age. There are no minimum levels of welfare set for the children being born, and whether one is born into poverty and likely to struggle their entire life, or obscenely rich and likely to enjoy that privilege until they die is a matter fortune, some magical thing that makes it so.

But that’s not the story of American freedom.

The story we were sold is that the United States was the land of self-determination, and democracy – hence the Second Amendment, because ultimately power derived from the people, not politicians.

The reality is our day to day lives are being determined by Exxon as the company degrades our and our children’s environment, politicians who cannot – just based on the numbers – their constituents, parents who raise their kids by torturing them (five die a week at the hands of their parents), and billionaire inheritors overseeing people who don’t make enough money to survive.

Where is the freedom in that? We don’ have to live in town halls – but our day to day lives are not free if our day to day relations do not reflect that level of personal empowerment.

Target those who have the power to tell the truth about what drives mass shootings in America, and how to fix the problem.

TAKE ACTION: Urge the New York Times lead to spend less time pushing women to have kids and more time ensuring those kids will be empowered. In an economy you may not relate to Mr. Kahn. But you should live in a democracy, and in that he’s just another citizen – like you. Engage him.

February 21, 2023
Children Are Dying Because of the Way We Plan Families. Why is Joe Khan – Head of the New York Times – Making it Worse?

Right now most political systems around the world base their family policies on a lie, that the act of having children should be based on parental autonomy, what parents want, rather than child equity, or what children need. Decades ago rich world leaders created this lie in order to avoid paying their fare share to collectively invest in children – through things like planning incentives – and to ensure them what things like the Children’s Rights Convention promises. They preferred to exploit the unsustainable growth that not investing created, and the growth-based economics that created the climate crisis.

That approach, chosen over things like Fair Start’s parental readiness policy, ensured the “privacy” that lead to the Turpin family torturing their children in secrecy for years.

Faced with this reality, and the fact that the New York Times rose to influence upon that unsustainable growth, its lead – Joe Khan – simply wants more growth. On balance, the outlet’s reporting (much of which should be labeled as opinion) pushes women to have more kids, irrespective of the conditions in which they are born, in order to enrich people at the top of the economic pyramid who – per one Nobel Laureate – rely on growth to make money through investment.

If you wanted to do the most good in this world, and to change the arc of our future to ensure the freedom and democracy things like the Children’s Convention could create, you would target Kahn and other concentrations of influence (online or in person) to admit the truth of what they do, and support changing course. Freedom is impossible without fairness because we have no way to consent to the influence of other people, and to bring that liberty we can focus on these concentrations to pay what they owe, what they took by imposing the costs of their power on our freedom.

This is something you can do.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Joe Khan at @nycscribe, or engage him in person, to admit that he’s harming children and the environment by supporting unsustainable growth that benefits a few.

February 1, 2023
Family Planning Reform Starts With Wealth Equality

Big players in climate destruction owe reparations to women and children impacted by their careless greed. Governments owe them basic human rights.

When Exxon, other companies, and many governments adopted the Paris Agreement standard for climate policy, which allows significant emissions and warming, these entities were making decisions about what the world should look like. And that vision, for them, sets a baseline against which to measure what’s a cost and what’s a benefit.

But they made a huge mistake. If you believe in freedom, it’s impossible for a group of people to define what the world should look like for everyone. The baseline, or what the world should look like, is instead itself a group of relatively self-determining – or free – people. This is why so many Nobel Laureates are focused on family reforms.

That requires limiting the power each individual or government entity has over others by ensuring a restored, natural and biodiverse environment for future generations. It requires that all children are empowered from the beginning by having a fair start in life.

It is time to ensure that all children are born with equal opportunities (unlike in the world today, which allows the rich to control the lives of the poor), as well as more functional democracies where each voice can actually be heard.

How could we know what’s a cost or benefit, or the rules that allot them, without being organized as participatory groups capable of making such decisions? Wouldn’t capacity to participate first depend on the quantity, and civic qualities, of the participants?

How could we be self-determining or free in an anthropocentric world dominated by a singularly human-centric viewpoint, rather than a natural or nonhuman one that allow humans to consent to the power of others?

How do we create a fair start for all – ensuring each person as the capacity to consent to the power and influence of others – without accounting for how people are created and nurtured into adulthood?

The bottom line is that a diverse, inclusive, international coalition must debate the issues and create meaningful, realistic policy that can be implemented globally. We want a town hall, not a shopping mall. Only in the former are we truly empowered, but our family planning policies are crafted to create people for latter. Nothing provides greater evidence that our current family planning system creates commercial, rather than empowering political relations, than the ubiquitous reaction to falling fertility rates as an economic baby bust.

Fact: Population growth-based economic gains were created by intentionally violating the Children’s Convention, ensuring children would be born and raised in conditions that violated the Convention’s standards. Instead of making the first norm something that created normativity, we used growth to degrade it.

The Children’s Rights Convention should be our guide, shifting away from seeing people as population to a vision of constituting ourselves dynamically, and qualitatively. It presumes restorative laws and policies that protect wilderness and biodiversity, evading the harm our current anthropocentric policies are inflicting on children. It demands basic human rights that would ensure democracies in which people can meaningfully participate. It’s what lies behind the concept of “We the People,” in the United States Constitution. It’s of freedom from, and freedom to. It’s an alignment of values that often, downstream, appear to conflict.

What does seeing the baseline as who we could be, rather than what we do, change things? A focus on who we should be would precede and override all other obligations, including property rights. Just government derives from the people, who should operate from a just position (or creation norm). We cannot assign property rights that deviate from that position by degrading our natural ecology or ignoring the needs of future generations.

Based on our model – which has been subject to a 1/2 dozen peer-reviews – we can take wealth Exxon Mobil and others collected by degrading the baseline (the environment) while externalizing costs to others, primarily generation after generation of women and children, with or without the government because no obligation can precede or override the existential justice of being free and equal people. It always comes first. And if we could not restore nature and empower people as such, which we can, the baseline serves as a way to measure how compensate future generations.

We wish to restore empowerment to those affected – to incentivize / entitle / repair ecosocially just and restorative family planning. We want to support women’s right to plan a family, and incentives/entitlements work. And yet our systems have avoided them for decades simply because wealthy leaders did not want to open to door to redistribution, and the logical end-point of fairness that is inevitable.

The guidelines for doing so are concrete and actionable, consisting of mostly of the standards we use to protect the rights of extant persons, like good democratic representative ratios, birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Convention, metrics to assure equality of opportunity, the restoration of the nonhuman world, and realistic measures of parental readiness. Using the correct baseline for fundamentally structuring our societies, in turn, moves us toward a concrete range for optimal world populations.

Help us shift the foundation we all share – the norms that create and develop us – toward a just position. In a true democracy the norms that emancipate us should be derived from life experience and development, and not top-down pressure from iconic influencers, government coercion or market incentives.

TAKE ACTION: Urge @Exxonmobil to adopt Fair Start reforms.

June 8, 2022
Why Some Funders Resist Giving All Kids a Fair Start in Life

The longer we delay replacing dysfunctional family planning policies with the Fair Start model, the wider the gap between rich and poor will grow. At the same time, Having Kids and other organizations that support giving all kids a fair start in life rely on wealthy philanthropists and foundations to help fund this reform. While many funders want to, and want to eliminate giving their own kids a massive head start in life, others want to pass their privileged positions in life along to their kids.

In one extreme case, a family of billionaires is enabling their young children – through a family foundation – to drive the direction of several policy reforms, including the type of legislation progressive environmental groups would be allowed to introduce. Consistent with a trend that was thoroughly documented in a recent New York Times bestseller, the parents would prefer to enable their kids to disproportionately shape public policy, and in ways that make the average voter irrelevant.

What’s wrong with this picture? In a true democracy, there is no justification for giving some kids wealth and power at birth while allowing other kids to die from starvation, neglect, and abuse. But that happens in the United States and elsewhere all the time – and many of us just treat it as something that is beyond our control.

In a true democracy, we have to level the playing field for all kids. We have to move towards true equality of opportunity at birth. That’s what it means to constitute ourselves as free and equal people, and it’s the only way to understand what phrases like “We the People” in the United States Constitution, and other constitutions around the world, mean. Our constitutions must be interpreted to apply justice intergenerationally, and our failure to do so is driving the ecological and social crises we face today.

We owe our kids more than a world filled with rich families constantly passing their wealth and power forward, while other kids are born into conditions where statistically they have no chance to succeed.

Take action: Urge Congress to adopt legislation that would start to move the United States in the direction of giving every kid a Fair Start in life.

March 15, 2022
Growth Economics Created the Climate Crisis. Why Are Politicians and Media Pushing Women to Have Kids? Ask NYT’s Editor

Fact: Falling fertility rates and eventual population decline will have the most beneficial long-run impact on the climate and other ecological crises. And yet influential media like the New York Times, and politicians pushed by businesses that rely on unsustainable growth, continue to urge women to have more kids. That is what even progressive Joe Biden is trying to do with his Ivanka Trump-inspired increased child tax credits.

For demographers and other population experts population decline is the expected and desired outcome of decades of family planning interventions meant to end and reverse unsustainable population growth. Why the media alarmism then?

Between the time those interventions were begun and today, neoliberalism and unsustainable growth-based economics that externalizes costs – like the climate crisis and birth inequity, has become the zeitgeist. The Times itself wrote about the same. But fanciful ideologies aside, growth remains unsustainable. The more interesting question is how the arc of population growth became so high to initiate the climate crisis, and who among those who have benefitted from that mistake will pay to compensate the future generations who certainly will be harmed – through no fault of their own.

Justice begins with an ecosocial #FairStart in life.

TAKE ACTION: Engage and urge the Times editor and his family to address the #FairStart question, and how we will redistribute power – including influential media platforms – to compensate future generations.

June 1, 2021
Who Are “Precons” and Why Do They Matter?

For many reasons it’s popular today to want to eliminate divisions between people in an effort to unite. But sometimes divisions are crucial, in identifying racists and racism for example. The same can apply to a new form of division that could move the world towards intergenerational justice, including human rights and democracy, ecological restoration, and birth equity. This form of division can sweep together all of the repressive “isms,” and address them all at once by focusing in on the fundament of injustice: The way we plan families, and the impacts on the most vulnerable and numerous category of entities, future children and nonhumans.

This is how it works:

Because of cognitive dissonances the vast majority of people do not account for how power, and human freedom or self-determination, actually operate. Their use of language will show this. Instead of accounting for humans’ dynamic and intergenerational nature, and for how subtle forms of power to which we do not consent dictate our lives – like childhoods (ours and others’ with whom we interact), inequity, changes in our environment, etc. – our brain will default and refocus on icons, like celebs, politicians, institutions, and business leaders. We will ignore how we actually constitute ourselves into groups and create the power relations that actually determine the extent to which we consent to others’ influence over us.

Precons are those who, even when shown the relations behind the icons, choose to ignore them, and as such cannot orient from justifiable forms of social organization like Fair Start.

Those who refer to the current trend towards reduced fertility rates as “baby bust” are emblematic of this class of persons, and their isolation modeling. They are not accounting for the welfare, equity, self-determination, political empowerment and ecological positioning of the babies to whom they refer. They just want to use those babies as economic inputs to grow the icon of the U.S. economy, usually to grow their own investments. They ignore how these births will improve, or degrade, justifiable, inclusive, and legitimate communities – communities where each voices carries less weight as they grow. Precons, and preconstitutional thinking, for example, seek to make us consumers rather than citizens.

More simply, precons cannot ethically account for the power relations between the things they objectify.

Beyond the baby bust, precons take no steps to ensure minimum levels of empathy and socialization in all children, a prerequisite for social cooperation and democracy, because they don’t really believe we are or should be engaged in such things, but are willing to rely on top down rule by violence as a form of governance. Precons hide the actual power relations behind icons, allowing a cycle where big government to blames big business, and vice versa, for oppression, when in reality it is the concentration of power driven by massive and incapable populaces that are fundamentally at cause. That distraction allows those at the top of our political systems to move the average person even further away from any role in their own governance.

In contrast, free (or reasonable) people do the relational math between people. They will choose to reject iconarchy in favor of actual relations, and choose to create those relations in ways that maximize self-determination. They will constitute – which simply means to limit and decentralize power – just communities. Liberating our species involves identifying precons, and using them as negative examples in family planning/reproductive justice reforms to ensure future generations are more capable of dealing with human power than we and prior generations have been. It also means finding those who most benefitted from converting citizens into consumers by maintaining preconstitutional family planning systems, and holding them accountable to pay the costs of what they did in the form of funding Fair Start family planning reform.

Take action to engage in such reforms, and to help us constitute a better world.

April 11, 2021