Did We Sign Something?

Every animal does work. Hunt, build, defend, raise young, move with the seasons. Every social creature negotiates rank, contests space, falls in and out of favor. None of that is unusual. What is unusual is what we have set underneath all of it: a layer where belonging itself has to be earned, repeatedly, by going through motions whose meaning is kept on a ledger you never see, in order to be permitted to continue being here.

Wolves disperse. Chimpanzees hold grudges, kill rivals, withhold food. Hierarchy and exclusion are everywhere life is. The troop is the ground. Hierarchy happens on the ground. Conflict, ranking, even violence happen on the ground. The ground is not what the conflict is over. The ground is the substrate that the rest sits on.

We have a system where a member has to produce something whose value is kept on a ledger elsewhere — counted, recorded, weighed against the right to remain — as the condition of belonging. The setup that ties belonging to abstracted production is a particular and recent human arrangement entangled with agriculture, with states, with wage labor. Egalitarian foraging societies that anthropologists have spent the last century actually living with — the Hadza, the Ju/'hoansi, scattered others — work hard, coordinate complex tasks, manage conflict and exclusion, and do not tie a member's right to be there to their output. The work happens. The belonging is the ground the work happens from. What we treat as the nature of things turns out to be one human arrangement among others.

There is certainly a scalability question here; eight billion is not thirty, and the ledger is, among other things, a technology that lets strangers coordinate without knowing each other. However, the ledger coordinates; fusing belonging to it is separate, and the whole weight of our lives rests on the fusion. Whether there can be a scalable technology that coordinates strangers from the ground rather than above it is an open question.

We do not require a six-year-old to produce title to existence; we feed them, shelter them, give them belonging. We just stop doing it at some arbitrary formal age — though the preparation for the transition has been running for years — after which the same person, same nervous system, same need to be among others, has to begin producing the title that was given freely the year before.

We live our lives as though we've signed something. You can go looking for it; the terms, the day you agreed, the office where it's kept. But there's no document. There's no one who drew it up. What we are inside of is not a thing we agreed to — it is something we keep doing. We produce our belonging, continuously, and the producing is so constant that it has stopped looking like an act and started looking like the world. And when it is questioned, an explanation is already waiting. Competition is just how people are. People won't do anything unless they have to. Without the pressure, no one would contribute.

This is what a condition mistaken for nature sounds like. The strongest signal that something is a construction we have built — and forgotten building — is when we cannot picture the alternative even in outline. Part of why we can't picture it is that the construction has filled the room where the imagination would stand. Part of it is that the thing has not been built yet, and we cannot picture in detail what we haven't made. The inability to imagine the alternative is not evidence that it's unworkable.

All of our visible arguments — capitalism against socialism, left against right, who should hold which institution, what fraction of which pie goes to whom — happen entirely inside the producing. They are rearrangements of who gets to perform which dance and at what rate of pay. None of them ask whether the dance is the floor. The argument underneath, the one the visible arguments are noisily preventing, is the one about whether existence and belonging are the ground or the prize.

A species that has to continuously produce its own legitimacy spends most of its waking days in the act of producing it. The textures that only grow when their substrate is uncontested — long attention, slow making, depth of attachment, the kinds of relation that need decades of trustable ground beneath them — are exactly the textures the producing crowds out. The crowding can be seen in the shape of our individual lives, our friendships, our towns, our political conversations. They are all running on a thin layer. The thinness is not a failure of individual effort. It is what the producing costs, simply by going on.

What sits in the place where the real things would be is often a ghost form; the friendship that still looks like friendship after the substance has thinned, the team whose form persists because the form is what makes the extra hours feel like devotion rather than work, the warm and cheery trim wrapped around platforms whose actual business with us is something else. Some of these are residues, where the thing was alive once and the shape outlived it. Others were engineered from the start to look like belonging in order to do something else; the shape was never the thing.

These are not empty husks. They function. People perform inside them, get paid through them, organize their weeks around them. They continue to exist precisely because the shape is load-bearing for the producing. If the friendship stopped looking like friendship, you would leave; if the team stopped looking like a team, the loyalty would stop flowing through it; if the platform stopped wearing the form of its original purpose, no one would keep sending themselves to it. The form has to keep haunting — or keep wearing its costume — or the extraction stops working. This is the deeper cost: not only that real belonging gets crowded out, but that what occupies its place imitates it well enough to keep us producing.

This is also why it is so hard to see clearly from inside: we are always in the middle of doing it, and releasing it feels like giving up on belonging itself. It is the same kind of misreading as thinking that unbracing is collapse. Standing can happen without bracing. Belonging can happen without the producing. All the producing ever does is make belonging perform itself, over and over, against the threat of unbelonging — to hold a right that was never the kind of thing that is produced.