A Puzzle to Solve

39: Tackling Questions of Social Framework

Hello friends!

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Now, let’s get to the business.

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Is it possible to love the work we do?

There’s a man making lavender infused croissants in Nice, France. There are compost businesses collecting food scraps to make into soil. There’s a woman in South Africa who’s the country’s first black free diving instructor. Not only do I believe, but there is evidence to suggest, that people choose a variety of professions that do not yield the capital they could otherwise make in higher paying jobs. In fact, some leave high paying careers behind for less stress. Nowhere, though, is anyone truly free. We trade one supposed luxury for another, attempting to reframe our perceptions and modulate exceptions. In essence, we do a lot of work trying to gain the freedom denied to us in the current system. Our serotonin is drained and sold back to us. Myself included.

There are a few writers on journeys exploring other worlds and the idea of utopia, including

Elle Griffin

, who has a reading list of utopian works and

Claudia Befu

, who is writing cli-fi fiction. I am exploring a better world with my fictional planet Minos, far from Earth, which has violent origins in the struggle to fashion a new societal mold. What I also explore are central questions of how a society would look if we fundamentally changed our tenets. It is possible to love the work we do, but what would that work be? Before we talk about what work we will do, we must contrast our current state to explain why Minos chooses to provide without counting cost.

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels; ID: A puzzle made of multiple cubes.

How do we solve society’s puzzles?

I knit my brows walking through New York City, wondering how to make everything we have work. Lights, sanitation, housing, entertainment… It seems like an unsolvable problem. I forget that even a Rubrik’s cube is (officially) solvable in 3.47 seconds¹. Puzzles made by humans are constructed with an embedded solution. There is no infinite complexity, it’s about will power. Do we really care enough to find solutions?

Currently in the City of New York, Major Adams has been given authority² to dispatch police to do field observations of potentially mentally ill, houseless people, and transport them to an emergency room for evaluation. I thought about this as I heard a man beg for food on the street. Taxpayer dollars will be used to shoo this man away from encampments, to remove his waste when he has nowhere private to go, round him up at day’s end, and transport him to a facility he will have temporary abatements to much larger problems, but still have nowehre to go once he's discharged.

It is not hard to lose your home. Many American citizens are steps away from the street so there can be no illusions that moral failings or a lack of self control leads people to dark alleyways. We pay for a circuitous path, making housing unaffordable with low wage jobs that leave people on the margins, shifting houseless people around the city, arresting them for non-violent crime or mental health crises… What if we created a community of care where this same person was housed and was given enough to eat?

Now when the stomachs of the those that are thus turned out of doors grow keen, they rob no less keenly; and what else can they do?

• Utopia, Thomas More

Before we discuss the planet’s economy or management and distribution of resources, we should talk about some of the social framework of Minoans.

In a community with no circulating money among citizens, there is no need to work for a paycheck. In much of what I read, even in fiction, people bend and stretch themselves for the sake of having a job and earning money. Whether or not we would like to admit it, criminal activity on a small scale is for economic viability. Not having a choice or believing you have no choice are very much similar slivers of prism light which trace back to the same basic need. Minoans are free to pursue their passions, which in themselves create industries that keep them engaged and provide for the common good.

Everyone is housed and food is free to take, so there is no need to steal what is replenished without end. There is no need to pine for the good school system in the wealthy town when quality belongs to everyone. Many social ills are resolved with creating an environment where people thrive instead of struggle. They also focus on prevention and intervention using mental health professionals instead of law enforcement.

Meeting basic needs and cultivating communities of care mean that we do not create cycles of poverty, illness, and crime. Well fed and housed people, barring any mental or psychological aberration, are able to think and behave rationally. If they cannot, there are resources to help them do so. Social safety nets in various sectors allow citizens to feel fulfilled in any stage of life. These look like guaranteed parental support pre and post birth regardless of profession, readily accessible education, accommodations for the disabled, and development for all ages.

As much as we may discuss it in esoteric terms, stress has appreciable and long-standing effects on the brain³ which can begin in childhood and persist in unstable environments throughout a person’s life. Recovery is not a flash, but slow untangling of habits and patterns of behavior. It is possible that changing a person’s environment could change their brain. So Minoans are operating systems that cognitively shape their population.

What about moochers?

We are largely socialized to question another’s contribution or what they are taking without paying. We are highly suspicious of the person begging for daily bread yet pat multibillion dollar companies on the back for ally showmanship. Really, the one who we hesitate to give a dollar to for fear they will use it in ways we don’t intend, has much less power and much less choice. Poverty is a purposeful series of barriers placed before people which they may not be able to overcome. Without those barriers and coupled with valuing people rather than what they produce, we might find unexpected fulfillment in ways we did not imagine.

What we employ to help meet basic needs is welfare or social welfare⁴, which includes food stamps (SNAP and WIC), social security, and disability insurance, among a variety of other programs which are meant to meet basic needs.  The statistics on public assistance fraud have always been overblown to paint those needing the most help as entitled siphons, but the percentage among all sectors is about the same as tax fraud, which is around 15% as of 2021⁵. These programs are operated by different departments and the source of fraud is often the operators of the program (super markets and doctors’ offices), not the individual receiving the benefits. While we do negatively perceive “welfare”, it is not possible to broadly scrutinize them as a whole as wasteful. By contrast, tax evasion⁶ by the rich is a leading source of the tax fraud percentage. We are not nearly as vocifierous in our contempt on that front.

Core tenets of Minos include liberation and abundance. People are truly free. They have also reframed what it means to contribute, so not everyone has a limited vision of productivity. In addition, the game of stratifying people by wealth does not exist, so there are no games to be played with money, and power is more equalized among the collective instead of hoarded.

To be sure, I am neither a scholar of government programs nor finance, but I do know what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck, to feel the crushing weight of unending debt and the wish for a radical change to how we assess value in this world. I want my words to help me live without having to scrape for a thin platform at the highest tier.

In order to build a better world, however impossible it seems, we must make it so by imagining it first, then giving it name. I am doing that here in these newsletters and hopefully with you. There’s a difference between growing a tree bordered by cement and growing a tree in a forest. I want to see where the best point between the two lies.

But now that we’ve discussed a bit of the social structure, what about the real work?
I’ll be writing about that in the next newsletter. See you there.

What’s next?

• Personal updates (exclusive for all who subscribe to The FLARE)

• Economic structure of Minos

• Unlocked short fiction

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1. It’s wild how skilled these folks are. Check out the Guinness World Record 👉🏾 here.

2. “Mental Health Involuntary Removals”, based on a memorandum from the NYS Office of Mental Health (OMH)

3. Lipina, Sebastián J, and Kathinka Evers. “Neuroscience of Childhood Poverty: Evidence of Impacts and Mechanisms as Vehicles of Dialog with Ethics.” Frontiers in Psychology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 26 Jan. 2017, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5266697/.

This is a good read if you’re interested.

4. “Welfare.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 17 Apr. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare.

I went to a couple more links from here.

5. Pfeiffer, Robert S. “Welfare Fraud.” Federal Safety Net, 19 Apr. 2023, https://federalsafetynet.com/welfare-fraud/.

6. IRS. “The Tax Gap, Tax Gap Estimates for Tax Years 2014-2016.” Internal Revenue Service, 28 Oct. 2022, https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/the-tax-gap.