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
