Personal Enrichment

 

The mechanisms of inequality of rights, 

and outline of an egalitarian human organization

(Truth is a public good, therefore a public service.)

This text brings together three distinct but inseparable elements: an analysis of personal enrichment, a Rational Declaration of Human Rights, and a Constitution of Associates.

The first text highlights a central mechanism of our contemporary societies: personal enrichment is not a deviation from the system, but one of its operating principles. Equality of rights is proclaimed, while inequality in the means of existing remains the rule, allowing a permanent form of blackmail to be exercised over human existence.

From this observation follows a necessity: any critique of personal enrichment remains incomplete if it does not rely on a rigorous definition of what a human being is and of what it is legitimate to impose upon them. This is the purpose of the Rational Declaration of Human Rights, founded not on morality or a mythical contract, but on a primary fact: every human being is manufactured, integrated and compelled to exist without having asked for it. Human rights are understood there as rational tools intended to limit the destructive effects of competition between beings compelled to exist, and to reduce the suffering it generates.

Finally, a Constitution of Associates is proposed, not as a foundation for human rights, but as a voluntary organization between human beings already recognized as equal in value. This constitution does not claim to be a supreme law: it organizes relations between associates in the strict respect of the previously established human rights, and aims to make mechanically impossible any domination based on the appropriation of another’s existence.

These three texts form a coherent whole. They constitute neither a political program nor a utopia, but a rational articulation between diagnosis, foundation and organization. Their aim is not to promise an ideal world, but to show under what minimal conditions equality ceases to be a proclamation and becomes a structural reality.

1 — Personal Enrichment

Modern democracies emphatically proclaim that all human beings are equal in rights. This assertion, repeated in constitutions and universal declarations, seems to offer a solid basis for any shared life: if persons are of equal worth, then their existences, their freedoms and their basic needs must be recognized with the same dignity. In reality, this proclaimed equality is contradicted by the very mechanisms that organize society. Economic inequality, far from being a marginal flaw of the system, is its inner operating principle.

The contradiction is simple: if human beings are equal, then one minute of one person’s life is worth one minute of another’s. Human life has an equal value, and this value ought to be reflected in the concrete means of existing. Yet money — which in our societies represents the power to live, to feed oneself, to find housing, to receive healthcare, to move around, to take part in the shared culture — is distributed according to criteria that have nothing to do with human equality. Equality in principle is immediately dissolved by a material inequality: the distribution of money and therefore of conditions of existence.

From then on, it must be said clearly: democracies artificially separate rights and the means to exercise those rights. They guarantee abstract equality, but refuse concrete equality. This decoupling is the fundamental ruse on which the social order rests: it allows the affirmation of equality while organizing hierarchy, domination and personal enrichment. To maintain this contradiction, a legitimizing discourse must be manufactured: merit. People are made to believe that enrichment comes from personal qualities, whereas society itself manufactures individuals biologically, socially and culturally, and randomly allocates to them bodies, brains and opportunities. Merit is not a cause, but a story, an ex post justification, intended to make people accept that some lives are worth, materially, a thousand times more than others.

The result is a paradox that has become invisible through habit: democracies affirm that all existences are of equal worth, but immediately organize an economic hierarchy that measures lives according to their market value. Thus, one hour of work may be worth a negligible amount or, on the contrary, a fortune, without this reflecting anything other than social position or the individual’s capacity for extraction. Salary is not the reward for responsibility, but the sign of a rank within a manufactured structure.

The very notion of responsibility illustrates this reversal. The error of a worker, visible and measurable, is immediately sanctioned: responsibility is applied where error is material. But the higher one climbs in the hierarchy, the more error becomes diffuse, delayed, non- measurable. Leaders — employers, high-ranking civil servants, presidents — claim gigantic responsibilities in order to justify their privileges, but their errors can practically never be attributed, evaluated or sanctioned. They bear responsibility in title, but not in consequence. The worker is held responsible because they are observable; the leader is protected because his or her actions dissolve into the complexity he or she controls.

This mechanism shows that proclaimed equality is only a symbolic framework intended to make an inverse reality acceptable: personal enrichment rests on the institutional fabrication of inequality. It is not a drift of the system; it is its function. If money were distributed according to the criteria of equality that should logically follow from human rights, then the hierarchical social order would collapse instantly: there would no longer be a workforce under constraint, no salary hierarchy, no hereditary accumulation, no power founded on wealth. Real equality would make impossible the structural inequality on which institutions and elites live.

Thus the raw truth is revealed: equality of rights is not the rule of society, but its founding myth. Personal enrichment is the mechanism that turns this myth into real hierarchy. Democracy says: “all lives are of equal worth.” The economy answers: “some are worth a thousand times more than others.” And it is that answer which governs.

As long as the means of existing — therefore money — are not distributed according to the same criteria for everyone, equality will remain a façade, a moral dressing for a system that rests on its opposite. Inequality is not an accident: it is the method.

“Equality of rights is only a proclamation as long as inequality in the means of existing remains the rule. That is why our world of nations reproduces feudal logics in a legally democratic form.”

The analysis of personal enrichment shows that economic inequality is not a drift, but a mechanism based on the use of vital needs as a means of constraint. This observation is not only a matter of economics: it directly engages the definition of what a human being is and of what it is legitimate to impose upon them. Consequently, any critique of personal enrichment that does not rely on clearly established human rights would remain incomplete, and any constitution that ignored these rights would mechanically reproduce the same forms of domination. This is why it is necessary first to establish a Rational Declaration of Human Rights, before describing an organization between associates, the Constitution of Associates, which is strictly compatible with it.

2 — Rational Declaration of Human Rights

(founded on the constraint of existing, it is independent of and precedes any Constitution)

Preamble

Every human is manufactured and integrated into the world without having asked for it, while there is no benefit in leaving nothingness. Their existence is the result of biological and social processes that precede and surpass them. This constraint of existing is a primary fact, prior to any morality, any law, and any social organization.

Humans demand rights for themselves in order to protect their existence, their integrity and their living conditions. Such a claim can, however, only function on the basis of reciprocity: no one can legitimately demand for themselves what they refuse to others.

Humans are animals capable of describing themselves, partially understanding themselves, and anticipating the effects of their own organizations. Human rights do not aim to deny human animality, but to limit its destructive effects when beings compelled to exist are put into competition and must coexist. By establishing rights, humans thus seek to reduce the suffering produced by this competition and to move closer to a general well-being, the only rational horizon for lasting coexistence.

This Declaration does not grant rights: it makes explicit those that necessarily result from the constraint of existing, from human manufacture and from the logical reciprocity between individuals of equal value.

Article 1 — Constraint of existing

Text: Every human is compelled to exist. No human is the origin of their own existence.

Commentary: This article establishes the fundamental fact from which all reasoning becomes possible. What is not chosen cannot found responsibility, debt, nor hierarchy of value between individuals.

Article 2 — Innocence of existing

Text: Every human is innocent of existing. No human can be held responsible for the very fact of their existence.

Commentary: Innocence of existing is the direct consequence of the constraint of existing. It invalidates any attempt to found a moral, economic or political obligation on the simple presence in the world.

Article 3 — Human manufacture

Text: Every human is manufactured by biological, familial and social processes they did not choose.

Commentary: Differences between humans are differences of manufacture, not of merit. No characteristic — physical, mental, cultural or social — can legitimately serve as the foundation for a hierarchy of value.

Article 4 — Factual equality of existences

Text: All human existences have equal value.

Commentary: This equality is neither moral nor legal: it is factual. One minute of human life is worth one minute of any other human life, regardless of its social or economic use.

Article 5 — Unconditional right to exist

Text: Every human has the right to the means of existing by the sole fact of their existence.

Commentary: This right depends on neither behavior, nor usefulness, nor prior contribution. It directly follows from the innocence of existing.

Article 6 — Prohibition of existential blackmail

Text: No one may use the natural needs of existence — food, health, housing, security, well-being — to force a human being to act, obey, work or submit.

Commentary: When survival conditions obedience, there is no freedom but a mechanical constraint. This article neutralizes the fundamental mechanism of domination analyzed in personal enrichment.

Article 7 — World without owners

Text: The planet belongs to no one.

Commentary: The world is not a good but a material condition of human existence. Absolute appropriation of the planet is incompatible with the factual equality of existences.

Article 8 — Absence of existential debt

Text: No human owes anything to another human or to a society by the very fact of existing.

Commentary: Any debt must result from an explicit choice. Since existence is not chosen, it cannot found any obligation.

Article 9 — Universality

Text: These rights apply to every human, regardless of any association, border or social organization.

Commentary: Human rights precede any possible constitution and cannot depend on it.

Article 10 — Primacy

Text: No law, constitution or organization can be legitimate if it contradicts the human rights thus deduced.

Commentary: Human rights are not founded by law; they found every possible law.

3 — Constitution of Associates

(voluntary organization between humans already recognized as equal in value)

Preamble

Humans, recognized as equal in value and innocent of existing, choose to associate to organize their material and social coexistence. The present constitution does not found any human right. It only organizes relations between associates, in strict respect of the Rational Declaration of Human Rights.

Article 1 — Voluntary association

Association is a choice. No one can be compelled to associate by deprivation of their means of existing.

Article 2 — Equality of associates

Every associate has an equal vote in collective decisions, regardless of their capacities or function.

Article 3 — Purpose of the association

The association aims at the collective organization of the means of existing, in respect of the factual equality of existences and without personal enrichment.

Article 4 — Absence of domination

No associative mechanism may produce material, economic, political or symbolic domination of one associate over another.

Article 5 — Production and use

Production is organized as an associative activity. The goods produced are intended for use and to meet needs, not for the accumulation of power.

Article 6 — Functional disappearance of money

The association aims at the uselessness of money. Any transitional instrument of accounting may grant neither power, nor accumulation, nor domination.

Article 7 — Distribution of tasks

The tasks necessary for collective life are distributed among associates, taking into account the real capacities of each, without hierarchy of value.

Article 8 — Management of scarcity

Rare goods are allocated by public, transparent and revisable rules, incompatible with any lasting appropriation.

Article 9 — Revision

Any associative rule may be revised by the associates, provided it never contradicts the Rational Declaration of Human Rights.

Article 10 — Non-heritable constitutional status

No associative rule may definitively bind humans who did not choose the association. Every generation retains the capacity to redefine its forms of association.

4 — Note of articulation

• The critique of personal enrichment shows that inequality is not an accident, but a mechanism.

• The Rational Declaration of Human Rights establishes what a human is before any organization.

• The Constitution of Associates then organizes, and only then, the relations between humans who choose to associate. This reversal is necessary for equality to cease being proclaimed and to become structural.

End — E. Berlherm

(The obligation to exist implies the innocence of existing permanently, which is true for wolves as for sheep.)