For many reasons it’s popular today to want to eliminate divisions between people in an effort to unite. But sometimes divisions are crucial, in identifying racists and racism for example. The same can apply to a new form of division that could move the world towards intergenerational justice, including human rights and democracy, ecological restoration, and birth equity. This form of division can sweep together all of the repressive “isms,” and address them all at once by focusing in on the fundament of injustice: The way we plan families, and the impacts on the most vulnerable and numerous category of entities, future children and nonhumans.
This is how it works:
Because of cognitive dissonances the vast majority of people do not account for how power, and human freedom or self-determination, actually operate. Their use of language will show this. Instead of accounting for humans’ dynamic and intergenerational nature, and for how subtle forms of power to which we do not consent dictate our lives – like childhoods (ours and others’ with whom we interact), inequity, changes in our environment, etc. – our brain will default and refocus on icons, like celebs, politicians, institutions, and business leaders. We will ignore how we actually constitute ourselves into groups and create the power relations that actually determine the extent to which we consent to others’ influence over us.
Precons are those who, even when shown the relations behind the icons, choose to ignore them, and as such cannot orient from justifiable forms of social organization like Fair Start.
Those who refer to the current trend towards reduced fertility rates as “baby bust” are emblematic of this class of persons, and their isolation modeling. They are not accounting for the welfare, equity, self-determination, political empowerment and ecological positioning of the babies to whom they refer. They just want to use those babies as economic inputs to grow the icon of the U.S. economy, usually to grow their own investments. They ignore how these births will improve, or degrade, justifiable, inclusive, and legitimate communities – communities where each voices carries less weight as they grow. Precons, and preconstitutional thinking, for example, seek to make us consumers rather than citizens.
More simply, precons cannot ethically account for the power relations between the things they objectify.
Beyond the baby bust, precons take no steps to ensure minimum levels of empathy and socialization in all children, a prerequisite for social cooperation and democracy, because they don’t really believe we are or should be engaged in such things, but are willing to rely on top down rule by violence as a form of governance. Precons hide the actual power relations behind icons, allowing a cycle where big government to blames big business, and vice versa, for oppression, when in reality it is the concentration of power driven by massive and incapable populaces that are fundamentally at cause. That distraction allows those at the top of our political systems to move the average person even further away from any role in their own governance.
In contrast, free (or reasonable) people do the relational math between people. They will choose to reject iconarchy in favor of actual relations, and choose to create those relations in ways that maximize self-determination. They will constitute – which simply means to limit and decentralize power – just communities. Liberating our species involves identifying precons, and using them as negative examples in family planning/reproductive justice reforms to ensure future generations are more capable of dealing with human power than we and prior generations have been. It also means finding those who most benefitted from converting citizens into consumers by maintaining preconstitutional family planning systems, and holding them accountable to pay the costs of what they did in the form of funding Fair Start family planning reform.
Take action to engage in such reforms, and to help us constitute a better world.
