Why are you here?
Who threatens you?
What should you do?
Who are your people?
What is good?
What Comes Next
What is a human for, when machines can do what humans do?
What gives life meaning when work does not?
Who gets to eat when there is plenty but no wages?
Why are you here?
You are here because your people made you. Not just your parents, but your whole line going back before memory. Their lives led to you, both those of your blood, and those who shed their blood for what made you. Their blood is in you. Their work is in you.
You are not a sorry accident floating in vast emptiness. You are part of a line from past to future. Old and real. A purposeful lightning bolt, its flash revealing what was hidden in darkness.
You are here to carry the fire of life your ancestors carried. To not let it sputter out. To pass it to those who come after you. This is the biggest purpose there is.
The ones who told you that you were just a single self, free to make yourself into anything, owing nothing to anyone? They lied. They wanted you weak and alone so they could sell you things and “safety” to fill the hole. But you are not alone. You never were. You belong to a people, and they need you, and that is why you are here.
Who threatens you?
We are threatened by those who want to dissolve us into nothing, like a flock of chickens to be culled by fire after the threat of a bird flu. They say your people do not exist, or should not exist, or are evil for existing. Those who want to erase every difference, make a gray world of nowhere people belonging to nothing.
Some of them come from outside. They want what your fathers and mothers built but do not want to become part of what built it.
Some of them are inside but have turned against their own. They were taught to hate their people, and they do, and they want to tear down everything so they can feel clean.
And behind both of these are those who profit from your division, your dilution, your dissolving. The ones with no loyalty to any land or people. The ones who move money across borders and care nothing for what happens to the places they touch.
They want you weak, separate, alone, consuming, barely alive.
They are the true enemy, and they hide behind the others.
What should you do?
Stand with your people. This is the first and last thing.
Find your excellence, do whatever it takes to let it course through you. Work, if there is work. Care for your family. Raise children who know what they are. Protect your skill, your bonds, your intimacy with the land. Do not apologize for existing.
Do not let them make you ashamed. They will try. They will tell you your fathers were evil, your ways are backward, your love for your own is a sickness. This is an undermining sortie against your strength. Do not let it in.
Obey those who reflect life itself, those of your people who show aretḗ. Those who are fit to life. Now is the time for holding together.
And when you call each other, go. There may be times when more is needed. You will know when. You will feel it. And you will go.
You will be angry at each other. You will be frustrated. This is a sign that you are actually doing something together. Follow one aim, and these moments will be something you laugh at together, later.
Who are your people?
You know who they are. You feel it when you see their faces, hear their voices, walk in places they built. You feel it when you can move with them toward one thing.
Your people are the ones who shed blood and sweat for what you care about. The ones who do not need to be told how to be- they already know because it is in them as it is in you.
Not everyone you live alongside is your people. This is not a cruel thing to say. It is just true.
A man can love his own children without hating other children. You can wish others well without pretending they are your people.
The lie you were told is that everyone is the same, everyone is interchangeable, a human is a human is a human. But you know this is not true. It’s not even true of cogs in a machine. You feel it. You have always felt it. Now you can say it.
Your people are those who, when real trouble comes, will stand beside you regardless of shared blood or flag. Will help you repair your roof. Will share their fuel. Will pass you ammo. Will feed your children. Who raised you, or the people you love. You know who that is. Trust what you know.
Your self must be offered to them, as meat was to the gods.
Oath-bound, fates joined, in doom and destiny.
You will have to go first, and alone.
A spear-tip.
What is good?
What is good is what makes your people stronger, healthier, more numerous, more itself.
Children are good. Big families that stay together are good. Strength is good. Beauty is good. Loyalty is good. Growing is good. Land that you own and tend is good. Stories that help you grow life, these are good.
What is bad is what divides, dissolves, weakens, confuses, sterilizes, uglifies, betrays.
For too long you were told that good was whatever was good for school or a factory. This is the custom of a dying people, the habit of a herd prepared for slaughter.
A living people knows what is good because they feel it pulling them toward spreading life and away from crystallizing death.
I am not asking you to be perfect, as the perfection of an ideal is simply another way to get you to freeze, so that you can be driven like cattle. I am asking you to find your base, get up, and be alert.
What Comes Next
What is a human for, when machines can do what humans do?
You were never here to do tasks. That is what the taskmaster told you so they could buy your time, the only real currency, for baubles, and to “let” you use the land, water, and air that is your birthright. You are not a task-doer. You are a life-mover.
For too long humans were used as machines. Now the machines will be machines, and humans will be human again. It is a balancing.
The machines can count things, make things, and now, think things. Let them. This frees you to do what only a human can do: continue your line, raise the young, tend the old, keep the stories, grow the bonds that hold a people together.
Your meaning is not in your labor. Your meaning is in your existence as a link in a chain that goes back before memory and forward past your death. No machine can be that.
No machine heart can beat with the heaped-up yearnings of your people.
Only yours.
What gives life meaning when work does not?
Belonging gives meaning. Duty gives meaning. Excellence gives meaning. Hunger, thirst, and lack show meaning.
You will serve your family, your community, your people, through exploration of ways to live. There is always work in this action, but it is not the work the market pays for. It is the work of being human among humans.
Raise children. This is the deepest work. No machine will do it well. And we will honor you for doing it, not leave you alone and poor in friendship as the old order did.
Care for your place. The chair, the street, the town, the land. Make it beautiful. Make it yours. This is work that feeds your breath.
Sit with the old. Learn what they know. Be with them as they die so they are not alone. This is work.
The market told you that only paid work matters, and when pay stops, you feel worthless. That was a lie. The pay was always the smallest part.
The work that matters is the work of growing life together, and we will not end it here.
Who gets to eat when there is plenty but no wages?
Your people will eat. This I promise.
The plenty is real. What was cold is also becoming warm. The machines will help make more than enough for everyone, or the Earth herself will. The old lie was that you had to earn your food by selling yourself to that which took all land to sell back to you. But one day there may be no one left to sell yourself to, and food will still grow.
Those who belong will be fed. This is what it means to belong to a people- you will not starve alone. People feed their own. They always have in times of crisis.
How? The ones who own the machines will share. They will share because we will make them, or because they know that if they do not share, there will be less left to own. The plenty will flow to those people who can talk clearly with one voice and a big stick.
But remember: what you get is for your people. Not for everyone. Not for the world. You cannot feed the world. You can feed our own. Others must find their own way, take or make their own machines, grow their own plenty. We wish them well. But our bread is for our children.
This is not cruelty. This is the only way it can work. A people that tries to feed everyone feeds no one. A people that feeds its own can actually do it.
Some of you will read this and think, “what will happen if we all think like this.” We will not all think like this, as that is not what students are trained for. Most are not you. Even so, there will be different peoples. And we will all come together to fight a common enemy. After that?
May the best tribe win.
