My substack is getting a new name and a new vision. Introducing the Humane Code.
Let me explain…
If you haven’t listened to or read this conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates (anything Coates does is worth reading) and Ezra Klein (Klein also writes), I would highly recommend it.
I found this part of the conversation fascinating.
Then let me flip that question a bit. Why are we losing?
We’re losing because there are always moments when we lose.
See, that feels very fatalistic to me.
It doesn’t feel fatalistic to me. It feels like the truth. Let me express what I mean.
I’m Ta-Nehisi Coates, I’m the writer, I’m the individual, right? But I am part of something larger, and I’ve always felt myself as part of something larger. I have a tradition, I have ancestry, I have heritage. What that means is that I do whatever I do within the time that I have in my life, whatever time I’m gifted with, and much of what I do is built on what other people did before them.
Then, after that, I leave the struggle where I leave it, and hopefully, it’s in a better place. Oftentimes it’s not. That’s the history in fact. And then my progeny, they pick it up, and they keep it going.
I am descended from people who, in their lifetime, fought with all their might for the destruction of chattel slavery in this country. And they never saw it. They never saw it. In my personal belief system, they died in defeat, in darkness.
So I guess the privilege that I draw out of this, the honor that I draw out of this, is not that things will necessarily be better in my lifetime, but that I will make the contribution that I am supposed to make.
Ta-Nehisi is placing himself as a black American in the struggle against slavery. He could just as easily (and did later in the conversation) place himself in the larger human struggle toward equality for all humans.
I see myself as part of the struggle toward equality for all humans.
In my previous work life, I worked with college students to help them identify the leadership within themselves, to find empowerment.
Now I work within the food system, trying to find opportunities for partnership towards shared goals and shared risk across the food value chain. It’s difficult work.
We struggle as humans to see each other as in a shared struggle and part of a shared lineage. I wonder how different things might look if we did.
Lest you think you are not part of the same struggle, the struggle we all experience is the struggle against capitalism. Struggling to pay your bills or the struggle to put food on the table are the struggle against capitalism. We all struggle individually, so we are all part of a collective struggle to survive this system.
In my own journey, I realized around the age of 30 that if I continued on the path I was on, I was going to be under an enormous amount of stress financially and unable to achieve many of my other goals because of lack of financial freedom.
I took the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace class, which gave me a strong strategic direction for my money, and I set about remaking my career to create more financial opportunity. The latter is detailed in my book that I’ll be relaunching soon under the name “The Agile Career” (more on this later).
What I didn’t realize was I was creating opportunity to be free from capitalism’s chains on my time as well. By using the construct of the system, pursuing making more money and using money more effectively as a tool by paying off debt and investing, I started to build a life where capitalism didn’t have as much control over my time or my mind. Financial freedom created other freedom.
I am developing a thesis that this works for other “greater good” kinds of goals.
Some theories
if you want education to be better, you have to think like a capitalist
if you want the earth to take care of us, you have to think like a capitalist
if you want to empower a specific oppressed minority, you have to think like a capitalist
So many people try to build projects for the greater good as, functionally, charities. Charities are always subject to the god of capitalist efficiency.
The question is how you can get the greater good aligned with capitalist efficiency.
It’s difficult work, but this is the goal of the Humane Code.
Why the humane code? I work in technology and I believe technology can be a crucial part of this journey in enabling us to be more human and focus on things that matter to us.
I hope you’ll come along with me on this journey. I don’t have answers. I may never have solutions.
But I want to do my part in our collective struggle to build a better world.