Governments That Don't Exist

I sometimes think of myself as working for a government from the future. Not via time travel, not quite. From my values I derive a politic that calls for a certain civic duty and obligation of governance, and I can illustrate that unity of individual and collective rationale as a place one might imagine living in. A kinder place, girded by accountable institutions. This future may not be immune to famine, but it handles it very differently than we handle privation today. It isn't my invention, either; by synthesizing centuries of accounts of liberation and decolonization, one can make a high ethic tangible, so real you might remember it. It may sound simple, even utopian, when put like that, but, why would I give my life to anything less?

Governance I would call civilized isn't... practiced, in America. Promises I consider foundational to the fabric of a civil society are menacingly undermined, avoided, and poisoned. The people go hungry. They die in the cold. Illiteracy grows like a rampant infection. Even one's attention is colonized. The profits of our wages fuel colonial atrocities. At industrial scales, animals are submitted to cannibalism in nightmarish reflections of the cruelty humans systematize to visit on each other. Governance as I recognize it is notably, maddeningly absent.

I cannot say there is no governance. Governance occurs, whether it's civilized or not; that's how a social species survives. In its absence, people die. Slowly, quickly, and strangely, the void destroys them. So who, or what, is governing us?

Now, we just had an election, in which a bunch of pillagers decided to eat their own face. Governments hold elections, right? We went to the polls, we counted the votes, and we sat in our well-lit climate-controlled homes to watch the results come in with a glass of wine that never went empty until the bottle did. That feels like having a government, right? People in buildings far away deciding to take our lives apart. I'm told my vote was necessary to prevent this but also that my vote means I consented to this. A nerve-stapled dead man sat down with a rapist and told me to stay polite as the killing machine changed ties. You call that a government?

I don't think you have a government, but I think you understand who is doing the governing on a visceral level. You feel it when groceries cost your paycheck cost your time cost your body cost your life. That isn't whatever happens is Warshingtown. That's a methodology that belongs to something bigger, much bigger, than any body of feeble plutocrats. It doesn't belong to the corporatist coven that coddles illiteracy with pretty pictures and psychohazard adtime. It doesn't belong to Jeff Bezos. It belongs to the bug up his ass. Calling it capitalism or colonialism fails to capture the grave complexity of this dynamic, even as analyses of those terms and their context are necessary to grok it. The scale of its influence is so totalizing in our lives that I feel as though even how we speak to each other will have to radically change before we understand what it means to love each other enough to hold a meaningful society.

I'm not suggesting a conspiracy. We upright hairless molerats don't have it in us. We gather in the warm and the dark and we chase what tastes and feels good. Chuck Schumer is not a complicit mastermind. He's a bribed idiot, like everyone. However much the cadre of the super- and ultra- and mega- and hyper- wealthy may resemble a unified front, they are not a conspiracy in the way law understands. They are behaving as agents within something that produced their parents as it produced them as they gave their children to be produced in turn, just as my parents did. Something acculturated them, structured their opportunities within a framework of privileges and privation, and expensed it with incredible violence. That thing virulently precludes any society worth calling civil.

So I work for a government that doesn't exist. In its realm, people don't go hungry; even in famine, the balance is shared. We've got public cafeterias, assured housing, healthcare so good you don't even think about it, and you know there's trains end to end. I bank at the post office and the library hosts my email. I don't have an office for my work, because the thing I work for doesn't exist, but the rationale that animates this civic duty doesn't need an office any more than your email job ever did. If the task of governance is the work, then let's do the fucking work. Feed people. House people. Sustain them in direct and loving ways. Build and earn trust. Show up for each other, do the work of governance, until we've erected institutions that can assure that covenant in durable, adaptable, accountable ways. After we have done all that, however many generations from now, then I can show up to my boring basement spreadsheet job where I help make sure food costs nothing. That's what my government means to me.

What does yours mean to you?