Lords & Serfs Part 5 - The Demand

What we are asking for, why vagueness is the enemy, and why the arithmetic has always been in our favor

Nobody is coming. That is the most clarifying thing this series has tried to say. The man with the most power in the world told us plainly, at a White House press gaggle, that he does not think about anybody. The court that surrounds him has been planning in private for generations, in a redwood forest, in a language of market efficiency and program integrity and fiscal responsibility that means, translated honestly, that your hunger is a revenue line item and your community is an externality. The regulatory bodies designed to protect you are funded by the industries they regulate. The political system designed to represent you is responsive to the people with the resources to access it. The lords have never been coming. They have been extracting.

This is not an argument for despair. It is an argument for clarity. Once you understand that nobody is coming, once you stop waiting for the system to reform itself, for the lord to become generous, for the regulatory process to produce a different outcome than the one it was designed to produce, something shifts. The question stops being when will someone fix this and becomes what do we do now. And that question, asked seriously and answered specifically, is the most dangerous thing a serf has ever asked.