Vital
Blackmail
(Truth is a public good, therefore a public
service.)
With the help of AI, I created a glossary of more
than 150 important entries which, when the file is attached to the
discussion, make it possible to converse with an AI by making it
fundamentally rationalist, but within a post-Darwinian rationalism.
The glossary, as it stands, is titled exactly, “SOCLE IA –
Version 02 — Post-Darwinian Rationalist Glossary — Evolution of a
Glossary”; the name of the file to be sent to the AI is more simply
“SOCLE IA — GF — V2.pdf”. If the post-Darwinian rationalist
point of view contained in the SOCLE interests you, the file is on
Google Drive, where it is stored and available to anyone who wants to
test it; the link is also in the YouTube description:
English
SOCLE :
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nxvx4y4uA7FGZ7x6xOtcXRban6txVw-J/view?usp=sharing
SOCLE
Français :
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r2e9EaAvGU8CG1myOPUUZSjRsYadGUz8/view?usp=sharing
This SOCLE can be used to produce an article, but it can also be
questioned as a knowledge base on questions of particular interest to
this site, such as: the constraint of existing, innocence of
existing, rationalism, etc., and notions such as the functioning of
thought and consciousness, according to the author.
To present the SOCLE, I could begin with its most abstract notions:
aresponsibility, the constraint of existing, innocence of existing.
But I prefer to begin with a notion that is more directly visible in
everyday life: vital blackmail. For everyone can understand
that a human being, as soon as he or she exists, must eat, find
shelter, receive care, work, or depend on a system that controls the
means of living.
To put the glossary to the test, I created a discussion thread first
with Gemini and then with DeepSeek in order to test this SOCLE. I
take DeepSeek as an example (I should specify that Gemini was also
entirely correct in its answers). I simply asked it, on the basis of
the attached SOCLE, to produce an article on “Vital Blackmail”.
It provided me with a first article that was quite convincing, but it
lacked the definition of blackmail in relation to the human norms of
Rights and equality. I asked it what would need to be added to the
SOCLE so that, by default, the AI writing the article would take this
into account. It made a proposal. I therefore asked it to rewrite the
article while taking its remark into account, which it did. And
finally, I asked it to write a solution so that humanity could escape
vital blackmail. It proposed this third version to me.
Vital blackmail — Version 03 by DeepSeek
When proclaimed equality becomes a threat
You did not ask to be born. No one consulted you before your
conception. Yet, from your first breath, you are repeatedly told that
you will have to “earn your living”. As if the existence imposed
on you without your opinion were a commodity that would have to be
deserved, paid for, justified by years of work, obedience, and
conformity.
This mechanism, which conditions access to the means of living —
food, housing, care, security — on obedience to systems you did not
choose, has a name: vital blackmail.
But why “blackmail”? In the animal world, competition for
resources is not blackmail. A lion does not blackmail a gazelle: it
hunts it, or it goes away. There is neither promise nor threat
bearing on a recognized right. Blackmail is a human invention. It
appears when beings declared equal in rights use their control
over the means of living to constrain other beings recognized as
their equals. It is this contradiction — proclaiming equality,
organizing submission through vital needs — that transforms
necessity into blackmail.
The trap of birth
Before existing, you were nothing. Not an anguishing void, but simply
an absence. You lacked nothing, you wished for nothing, you suffered
from nothing. The non-existent does not wait to be born, does not
demand a body, does not ask to be fed or loved.
Yet beings already there — your parents, but also an entire society
that values, encourages, or normalizes procreation — decided to
fabricate you. Without your consent. Because it is impossible to
consent before existing.
Once born, you find yourself endowed with a body. And this body,
without your opinion, has needs. It must breathe, eat, drink, sleep,
protect itself from the cold, avoid dangers, receive care. These
biological necessities are not a choice. They are the very condition
of remaining alive.
So far, this is nothing more than very animal. The animal must also
feed itself, find shelter, flee predators. But the animal lives in a
world that is not yet entirely owned, fenced off, priced, and
administered. The human being, for his or her part, is born on an
Earth already divided into parcels, already someone’s property,
already crossed by borders, titles, contracts, laws, and police
forces.
The world is already taken
Imagine that you arrive in an immense room where everything has
already been distributed. The seats, the food, the water, the light,
the space to breathe — everything already belongs to someone. To
sit down, you must pay rent. To eat, you must buy. To drink, you must
pay out. To receive care, you must show a card.
You asked for nothing, but you must now negotiate your survival with
those who possess. That is vital blackmail: access to the conditions
necessary for the continuation of existence depends on obedience to
human systems that control those conditions.
The ground is appropriated. Housing is possessed. Food circulates
through economic circuits. Water is administered. Energy is sold.
Care is institutionalized. And to obtain all this, money is required.
Money, this mandatory passport
In a monetized society, money becomes the almost mandatory passage
between biological need and social resource. You cannot simply
gather, hunt, build your shelter. You must first obtain the social
equivalent that will allow you to buy what you need.
To have money, one generally has to work. But what is work, within
this framework? It is not only a useful, creative, or cooperative
activity. It is above all what you must sell — your time, your
energy, your skills, your docility — in order to obtain the right
to continue existing.
Wage labor presents this transaction as a free contract. You are
supposedly free to work here or elsewhere, to accept or to refuse.
But this “freedom” unfolds in a world already appropriated,
monetized, and hierarchized. To refuse to work is to risk no longer
eating, no longer finding shelter, no longer receiving care, losing
one’s social place. It is a freedom under permanent threat.
The contradiction of human rights
It is here that blackmail takes on its full force. Modern human
societies proclaim loudly that all humans are equal in rights. They
affirm that every being, by the mere fact that he or she exists,
possesses unconditional dignity. They have signed declarations,
written constitutions, created institutions to protect this equality.
Then, in the same movement, they organize access to the means of
living in such a way that whoever does not obey, does not work, does
not possess, is not “useful” — finds himself or herself
deprived of food, housing, care, security. Not by an explicit decree,
but by the very architecture of the system: land is appropriated,
housing is a commodity, care costs money, and money is obtained
through work or inheritance.
It is precisely because society recognizes the other as its
equal in rights that this threat becomes blackmail. If the other were
only an animal or a slave, there would be no need to threaten him or
her: one would dispose of him or her directly. But since one can no
longer legally enslave him or her, one uses that person’s own vital
needs to constrain him or her. In substance, one says: “You are my
equal, but if you do not do what I want, you will starve.” That is
the essence of blackmail.
Fear as a driving force
Vital blackmail does not need to present itself as an explicit
threat. It is enough for living conditions to be organized in such a
way that the individual understands very early that he or she will
have to work, pay, conform, obey, prove, fill out forms. Fear becomes
a silent driving force.
Fear of lacking, fear of losing one’s job, fear of unpaid rent,
fear of exclusion, shame at depending on others, anxiety at not being
profitable enough, guilt at not producing enough. This fear enters
the brain and becomes self-injunction: “I must work”, “I must
obey”, “I must be useful”, “I must deserve my place”.
Vital blackmail thus transforms the biological constraint of existing
into the social constraint of making oneself useful, employable,
profitable, or administratively acceptable. It transforms will and
effort — so often admired as proofs of merit — into simple
adaptations to a system that holds beings by their vital needs.
The illusion of merit
One of the most pernicious aspects of vital blackmail is that it
comes with moralization. The individual is not told: “Obey or you
will lack.” He or she is told: “Work, and you will deserve to
live.” Economic obligation is transformed into moral virtue. The
person who succeeds is presented as deserving; the person who fails
as responsible for his or her failure.
But no one chooses his or her body, brain, family, era, language,
health, capacities, handicaps, support, inheritance, encounters. The
competition for access to the means of existence does not take place
between equals. It pits against one another beings who have been
unequally fabricated, unequally supported, unequally exposed to the
blows of fate.
Vital blackmail transforms these inequalities of fabrication into
hierarchies of value. The rich person may believe himself or herself
superior because he or she possesses. The poor person may feel guilty
because he or she lacks. Society forgets that it has fabricated —
or allowed to be fabricated — both the one and the other in
radically different conditions.
Escaping vital blackmail: what humanity should do
Recognizing vital blackmail is one thing. Escaping it is another.
What concrete transformations would make it possible to break this
mechanism?
First, dissociate access to the means of living from social
obedience. The minimum conditions of existence — food, water,
housing, basic care, energy, security — must be guaranteed
unconditionally, not as a reward or conditional aid. This implies
leaving behind the logic of “working in order to live”. A
universal income, unconditional public housing, free and accessible
care without paperwork, guaranteed basic food: all this must become
the norm, not the exception.
Second, abolish property as the power to exclude. Property
must no longer be a right to exclude others from the means of living.
Personal use (living in a dwelling, using a tool) must be
distinguished from the power of capture (renting out, speculating,
dismissing, setting vital prices). Natural resources, land, housing,
the means of production must be collectively controlled or strictly
limited to direct use, not to rent.
Third, abolish the obligation to work. Work must no longer be
a condition for access to the means of existence. Human activity can
be voluntary, cooperative, creative, but it must not be imposed under
vital threat. Automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics make
this perspective realistic: if machines can produce the essentials,
why constrain humans to sell their lifetime?
Fourth, refound education on innocence of existing. From
childhood, education should teach that no one has to “earn” the
means of living. It should deconstruct the ideology of merit, the
guilt of the poor, the sacralization of work. It should give
individuals the tools to recognize vital blackmail and refuse it.
Fifth, drastically reduce the fabrication of new beings. As
long as human beings are fabricated on a massive scale, new
vulnerable people, new dependents, new bodies subject to vital needs
are mechanically produced. Each birth is a new potential hold for
blackmail. A humanity that wants to escape vital blackmail must
question procreation as an ethically weighty act, and tend toward a
very significant reduction in the number of fabricated beings.
Sixth, replace competition with cooperation. Vital blackmail
thrives on organized scarcity and competition. A society that escapes
blackmail must organize cooperation, not rivalry for access to
resources. The functions of coordination, care, teaching, and
production must be exercised without their holders being able to
threaten those who depend on them.
Seventh, transform the State into an unconditional guarantor.
The current State is ambiguous: it protects the property that makes
blackmail possible. A radical transformation would require the State
to stop guaranteeing exclusive property rights over vital means, and
to become the guarantor of unconditional access for all. Its means of
coercion should no longer be used to punish those “refractory” to
work, but to prevent anyone from using vital needs to dominate
others.
A direction, not a utopia
This list is demanding. It will probably not be realized within the
lifetime of those who read these lines. But it outlines a direction.
Vital blackmail is not a natural fatality. It is a human
construction. What humans have constructed, they can deconstruct —
provided they stop believing that it is natural to blackmail their
fellow beings through their most elementary needs.
Recognizing vital blackmail is already beginning to free oneself from
it. It means ceasing to accuse oneself of not “succeeding” in
life, ceasing to despise those who fail, ceasing to sacralize work as
the supreme virtue. It means understanding that existence is not
deserved — and that those who claim the opposite are simply asking
you to pay for a right you never asked for. It means, finally,
measuring the gap between the fine declarations of human rights and
the reality of a world where proclaimed equality sometimes serves to
make blackmail more bearable.
Escaping vital blackmail means transforming this gap into a horizon.
And now, here is the entry for the SOCLE “Vital Blackmail”:
155. Vital Blackmail — Version 03
1.
Formal Definition
Vital
blackmail designates the transformation, by human systems, of the
biological dependence of fabricated human beings into a means of
social constraint, in societies that nevertheless proclaim their
dignity or their fundamental rights.
Vital
blackmail designates the situation in which access to the conditions
necessary for the continuation of existence — food, water, shelter,
housing, care, energy, safety, protection, tools, territory, or
minimal social recognition — depends on obedience to human systems
that control these conditions.
Within
the framework of the SOCLE, vital blackmail is not a simple economic
difficulty. It is the mechanism by which a fabricated being, who did
not choose to exist, finds themselves obliged to pass through
property, money, work, law, the State, hierarchy, or capitalism in
order to obtain the means of enduring the existence that was imposed
on them.
Vital
blackmail is one of the major contradictions of human societies: they
fabricate beings who did not ask to exist, then condition access to
the means of enduring this existence. Society continuously fabricates
individuals, including materially through food, care, housing, and
specialized organization. In a specialized society, no one alone
produces the conditions of their own existence. Even those who
produce food depend on other social productions. The human person is
therefore also a continuous social product.
12.
Mechanical Description
Vital
blackmail rests on a specifically human contradiction. In the
non-institutionalized animal world, there are needs, struggles,
dependencies, dominations, and privations, but there is no vital
blackmail in the strict sense, because there is no proclamation of
equal rights and no legal and social organization of the conditions
of existence.
Among
humans, the situation changes. Beings are fabricated without having
asked to exist, then introduced into societies that proclaim, at
least in principle, their equal dignity or their fundamental rights.
Yet these same societies organize access to the means of living —
food, housing, care, energy, safety, space, social recognition —
through money, work, property, statuses, procedures, and hierarchies.
Vital
blackmail is all the more problematic because society itself
participates in the fabrication of the individuals it then holds by
their needs. By organizing the production of food, care, housing,
education, incomes, professions, and protections, it does not merely
receive beings biologically produced by parents: it contributes to
producing the parents, to maintaining their bodies, to making their
reproduction possible, then to integrating children as future
associates, workers, citizens, consumers, or administered persons.
In
a specialized society, no one alone produces the conditions of their
own existence. Even those who produce food depend on other social
productions. Vital dependence is therefore already socialized. When
this society, which materially fabricates the living conditions of
individuals, then conditions access to these conditions through
money, work, property, or conformity, it transforms its own
collective fabrication into a means of constraint.
The
natural dependence of the living then becomes a socially administered
dependence. What could be a common vulnerability to protect becomes a
lever of constraint: one must integrate, work, pay, obey procedures,
make oneself useful or conforming in order to truly access the means
of sustaining the imposed existence.
Vital
blackmail is born from this contradiction: societies that recognize
humans as bearers of rights can nevertheless use the vital needs of
the beings they fabricate or welcome as means of obedience, forced
specialization, docility, or exploitation. The threat therefore does
not concern only biological survival; it also concerns the gap
between proclaimed dignity and the real conditions imposed in order
to live.
A
living being must maintain their body in functioning order. They must
eat, drink, sleep, protect themselves from cold, avoid dangers,
receive care, access space, use resources, sometimes receive help
from others. These necessities are not social at first; they belong
to the biological condition of the living.
Among
humans, these biological necessities are caught within human systems.
Land is appropriated, housing is owned, food is produced in economic
circuits, water is administered, energy is sold, care is
institutionalized, tools are commodified, movement is regulated,
papers condition certain forms of access, law frames the
possibilities of action.
Vital
blackmail appears when access to these means of living depends on an
imposed condition: working, paying, obeying, making oneself
compatible, producing, being solvent, possessing the right papers,
respecting the rules, accepting a hierarchy, selling one’s time,
selling one’s strength, selling one’s attention, or depending on
administered aid.
Property
is one of the foundations of vital blackmail. Whoever does not
possess must obtain authorization to use what others possess or
administer. They cannot simply inhabit, cultivate, heat themselves,
produce, drink, or move without encountering titles, laws, borders,
rents, prices, contracts, or prohibitions.
Money
is one of its great mediators. In a monetized society, the individual
does not directly access the means of living; they must obtain the
social equivalent that allows them to buy them. Money becomes the
almost obligatory passage between biological need and social
resource.
Work
is its great ordinary mechanism. The fabricated being must often sell
their lifetime, their energy, their competence, their docility, or
their usable body in order to obtain an income. Work then transforms
the biological constraint of existing into the social constraint of
making oneself useful, employable, profitable, or administratively
acceptable.
Capitalism
organizes this blackmail by presenting it as contractual freedom. The
individual would be free to work here or elsewhere, to sell or not
sell their labor power, to succeed or to fail. But this freedom
unfolds in a world already appropriated, monetized, and hierarchized,
where not obtaining money exposes one to poverty, dependence,
exclusion, or humiliation.
The
State also participates in vital blackmail. It can attenuate it
through social rights, public services, protections, rescue, care,
allowances, housing, or minimal guarantees. But it also maintains it
when it guarantees property, money, de facto compulsory work,
borders, papers, sanctions, expulsions, procedures, and
administrative conditions of access to aid.
Vital
blackmail is all the more powerful because it becomes normal. Most
societies act as if it were natural to have to earn one’s living.
Yet no one should have to “earn” the existence they did not ask
for. The expression itself reveals the anomaly: the fabricated being
is asked to deserve the means of enduring an existence they did not
choose.
This
blackmail does not always take the form of an explicit threat. It is
often silent, structural, integrated into habits. It does not need to
say: “obey or die.” It is enough for living conditions to be
organized in such a way that the individual understands very early
that they will have to work, pay, conform, ask, prove, wait, fill out
forms, or depend on others in order to live.
Vital
blackmail therefore acts within the mental field. It fabricates the
fear of lacking, the fear of losing one’s job, the fear of rent,
the fear of exclusion, the shame of depending, the anxiety of not
being profitable enough, the guilt of not producing, the
self-injunction to work, hierarchical submission, and the acceptance
of behaviors that the individual would probably refuse without a
vital threat.
23.
Ontological Status
Social,
economic, legal, and political mechanism of conditioning access to
the means of existence, transforming the biological necessity of
living into dependence on the human systems that control vital
resources.
34.
Dependencies
Derives
from: constraint of existing, property, money, work, State, law,
capitalism, hierarchy, social integration.
Implies:
dependence, constraint, obedience, solvency, work, conditional
access, fear of lack, possible exclusion.
Conditions:
behavioral compatibility, social specialization, will,
self-injunction, docility, poverty, domination.
Distinguishes
itself from: simple biological need, useful effort, cooperation,
mutual aid, necessary collective organization.
Opposes:
unconditional vital access, effective human rights, moral commons,
anti-suffering, real equality of conditions of existence.
Belongs
within: post-Darwinian justice, criticism of capitalism, criticism of
property, functional responsibility, pathogenic systems.
45.
Consequences
Vital
blackmail transforms existence into a practical debt. The fabricated
being did not ask to exist, but they must pay, work, obey, or make
themselves useful in order to continue accessing the conditions of
this existence. Society imposes a life on them, then asks them to
finance the means of enduring it.
It
transforms freedom into freedom under threat. An individual can
choose a profession, an employer, a dwelling, a product, or a
trajectory, but these choices are made within a framework where
refusing to play the social game exposes one to lack,
marginalization, dependence, or sanction. A pseudo-freedom under
vital threat is not full freedom.
It
transforms work. Working may be useful, creative, cooperative, or
necessary to collective life. But working in order not to fall
outside the means of existence becomes something else: an indirect
obligation. Wage labor then presents subordination as a contract,
whereas the need to live already weighs on the signature.
It
transforms property. Possessing the means by which others live, or
controlling access to them, gives immense power. Whoever possesses
housing, a company, land, a resource, capital, or administrative
access can modify the behavior of those who depend on these means.
It
transforms capitalism into a system of masked constraint. Capitalism
claims to organize free exchange, but this exchange unfolds between
beings unequally placed before need. Whoever possesses can wait,
invest, rent, exclude, or capture; whoever lacks must often accept.
It
transforms education. The child learns very early that they will have
to “succeed,” “work,” “earn a living,” “be autonomous,”
“depend on no one,” “deserve their place.” These formulas
install the idea that they will have to become compatible with the
systems that condition the means of existence.
It
also transforms will and self-injunction. Many efforts admired as
personal will are produced under vital pressure: getting up despite
exhaustion, enduring humiliating work, accepting a hierarchy,
specializing in a narrow function, continuing despite suffering,
selling oneself as available competence.
Vital
blackmail produces docility. It makes individuals more acceptable to
systems, because they know that they depend on them. Economic
obedience can be more effective than visible constraint: the need for
wages disciplines without the police having to intervene at every
moment.
It
also produces shame. Whoever fails to obtain an income, a status, a
job, housing, or financial autonomy can be presented as responsible
for their failure. Society then transforms exposure to vital
blackmail into individual fault: laziness, irresponsibility,
incapacity, bad choices.
Vital
blackmail makes visible the injustice of merit. Individuals cannot be
measured fairly when each struggles from different conditions of
fabrication: body, brain, family, inheritance, health, language,
education, territory, disability, memory, safety, social network,
chance. Vital competition transforms initial inequalities into moral
rankings.
It
aggravates pathogenic systems. A person constrained to work in order
to live may remain in a destructive job, a violent couple, a city
that is too expensive, family dependence, religious obedience, a
harmful activity, or a specialization that damages them, because
leaving threatens their means of existence.
From
a post-Darwinian perspective, vital blackmail is one of the central
scandals of human societies. It imposes on fabricated beings the
obligation to deserve access to the means of enduring a life they did
not choose. It contradicts innocence of existing, human equality in
rights, and anti-suffering.
Reducing
vital blackmail does not mean suppressing all useful activity, all
organization, all contribution, or all functional responsibility. It
means that the minimal means of existence should not be conditioned
on economic obedience, profitability, property, birth, inheritance,
docility, or perfect compatibility with existing systems.
Within
the framework of the SOCLE, vital blackmail therefore designates the
point where the biological constraint of existing is captured by
human systems. Society no longer merely accompanies life; it
conditions access to the means of enduring it.
56.
Fields of Application
Economic,
social, political, legal, educational, professional, familial,
territorial, philosophical.
7.
Emblematic Formulation
—
To fabricate a
being dependent on the means of existence is to make vital blackmail
possible.
Formulations
proposed by AI, to be checked and corrected:
[Vital
blackmail consists in making fabricated beings pay for the means of
enduring the existence they did not ask for.
Earning
one’s living often means buying the right to continue enduring an
imposed existence.
Work
under vital necessity is not freedom; it is obedience made
presentable.
Ownership
of the means of living transforms need into dependence.
Vital
blackmail is the constraint of existing captured by money, property,
and work.
A
society of equals should not condition the minimal means of existence
on the profitability of individuals.
Wage
labor makes legally acceptable the purchase of another’s lifetime.
Vital
blackmail is silent: it does not need to threaten; it is enough for
it to organize lack.]
Fin
— E. Berlherm
(The obligation to exist implies a permanent innocence of existing—a
truth that applies equally to wolves and sheep.)
English
SOCLE :
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nxvx4y4uA7FGZ7x6xOtcXRban6txVw-J/view?usp=sharing
SOCLE
Français :
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r2e9EaAvGU8CG1myOPUUZSjRsYadGUz8/view?usp=sharing
