PREAMBLE

I grew up believing what I was told, the way most children do. Trust is the first language we learn. And yet, from the beginning, I was taught something else too: exclusion. I remember the early days of school, how invitations to birthday parties were handed out to an entire class except for me and the two or three other children who didn’t belong to the religious majority. My parents tried to make sense of it for me, calling the belief system dangerous, warning me of the ways people can be consumed by stories that shrink their world. I didn’t understand the theology, but I understood the feeling: the sensation of being marked, othered, denied entry into a room where everyone else was allowed to belong.

In high school, I gravitated toward and was pushed to the edges: the queer kids, the Black and Brown kids, the immigrant kids, the ones who already knew that belonging in America was never neutral. I didn’t have the language for systemic oppression yet, but I could feel the architecture of it pressing in around us.

Adulthood sharpened these lessons into something irreversible. I survived a violently abusive marriage and a dependence on alcohol that almost killed me. I accidentally took a life, someone else’s, a truth that carries the same one-way threshold as becoming a mother or losing my virginity. Once crossed, it is forever a piece of my internal and social identity. I went to prison. The State gave custody of my child to the man who had left me for dead in a driveway. And through all of it, my own harm, the harm done to me, the harm done by institutions, something finally clicked into place.

I began to see the sameness between the lies of an abuser and the lies of a government: promises dangled like carrots, safety used as bait not foundation, obedience demanded in exchange for love, dignity, or survival. These weren’t parallels. They were symptoms of the same sickness: patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, and the machinery of domination that enforces them.

And yet, somewhere in the midst of losing everything, I learned how to separate myself from the stories that had been written for me. I learned how to survive the shame of what I had done, not by denying it, but by acknowledging my humanity inside it. I learned that accountability is an act of self-respect, not self-erasure. I learned that internal validation is not optional; it is oxygen. And when I rebuilt myself from that truth, I understood something else: the systems that shaped me, punished me, and lied to me were never worthy of my allegiance.

I was told, by the systems and by the abusers, that they were the “good guy,” and they knew what was best. That is incorrect. That is a lie told to oppress and control.

My story is mine, but its bones belong to many. Millions of people in this country live in the margins where the State has chosen not to see them: people who are incarcerated, immigrants, queer and trans communities, Black and Brown and Indigenous families, people with disabilities, the chronically ill, the houseless, the poor, the working class, the single parents fighting impossible battles, the survivors who never received justice, the ones who fell between the cracks because the cracks were designed to let them slip through.

And if you are reading this, you are not outside that story. You are inside it. You are already breathing in the same poisoned air that asks you to prove your worth to systems that were never designed for your flourishing. If your healthcare sucks, if you can’t afford your rent or mortgage, if things are just too expensive no matter how much you save or how hard you work, if you need an abortion but can’t get one, if you are afraid for your own identity, if you are like me, existing on the margins, trying your hardest to just cling on, you belong. You are worthy of joy and purpose and dignity and love.

This preamble is the naming of the wound.

What follows is the refusal to be defined by it.

WHEREFORE

Wherefore, through lived experience: personal, political, and carceral, I have learned that the abusive partner and the abusive government are not two different beasts. They are expressions of the same ideology: domination as inheritance, control as currency, obedience as the price of safety. One rises in a home; the other rises in a nation. But their roots coil around the same origin: supremacy, extraction, hierarchy, power hoarded and weaponized.

Wherefore, harm does not resolve itself through negotiation with the source of harm. Survivors know this. Marginalized communities have shouted it into the void for centuries. You cannot plead with a system to stop hurting you when its identity depends on your compliance. You cannot convince a structure built on oppression to suddenly become benevolent. The government is not malfunctioning. It is functioning exactly as designed: protecting billionaires, consolidating power, prioritizing profit over life.

Wherefore, the strategy that liberates individuals from abusive partners also liberates people from abusive states: you stop feeding the monster. You gray-rock the system.
You deny it the fuel of your fear, your emotional labor, your unending attempts to make it see your humanity. You withdraw your participation from its illusions of legitimacy and build something wholly separate, wholly new.

Wherefore, the work ahead is not to salvage the crumbling edifice of American governance but to recognize that its foundation was rotten from the start. Its collapse is not a crisis; it is an opportunity. The country that promised “liberty and justice for all” never delivered on either. But we can.

Therefore, having recognized the inherent dignity of every human being, having witnessed the devastation inflicted when systems deny that truth, and having emerged from the ruins of those systems with clarity instead of allegiance, I offer not a reform but a replacement.

THE DECLARATION OF DIGNITOCRACY

Dignitocracy begins with a single, unwavering truth: Every person is born with intrinsic dignity, and any system that does not center that truth is unfit to govern.

From that principle emerges a new model of governance, not built from the center outward, but from the margins inward. A dignitocracy starts where society has failed most profoundly: with the incarcerated, the houseless, the disabled, the poor, the chronically ill, the queer, the trans, the undocumented, the communities whose lives already reveal the fractures of the old world. By centering those who have been denied humanity, we build a system that can hold everyone.

In a dignitocracy, basic human needs are not commodities; they are guarantees. Healthcare is universal, public, and unconditional. Housing is a right, not a reward. Food, clean water, mental health care, rest, and time are not rationed according to one’s usefulness to capitalism. They are inherent to dignity.

A dignitocracy does not confuse punishment with justice. Justice is treated as a natural law, as constant and impartial as gravity, not something to be bought, bargained, or bent. Accountability is relational, restorative, and transformative. It seeks repair, not spectacle. It recognizes that harm emerges from unmet needs, unhealed wounds, and systems designed to fail entire communities.

In a dignitocracy, people may opt out of universal systems if they wish; they may choose private healthcare or private schooling or private housing, but they cannot dismantle the universal systems that protect the collective good. Opting out is a personal preference, not a political weapon. The baseline safety and dignity of others is non-negotiable.

A dignitocracy recognizes that humans flourish when given purpose, autonomy, and support. It does not demand labor as proof of worth. Instead, it invites contribution: in the form of creativity, caretaking, innovation, community service, environmental restoration, governance, or any number of expressions of human potential. Here, contribution is not coerced. It is chosen, because people who are safe and whole naturally wish to participate in the world that sustains them.

A dignitocracy abandons the mythology of scarcity, the idea that we must fight each other for a sliver of a pie that billionaires stole from us. It understands that wealth is not money but wellbeing: physical, emotional, communal, ecological, and spiritual. It is built on the radical belief that when people are given the tools to self-actualize, society becomes limitless.

This manifesto is a declaration that the old world: the world of fear-driven compliance, of structural cruelty, of weaponized shame, of coerced silence, is no longer worthy of our participation. Gray rock at scale becomes revolution.

The Declaration of Dignitocracy is a promise: that we can build something better, not by inheriting the broken blueprints of the past, but by returning to the only truth that ever mattered: every human being is sacred, and every sacred life deserves the conditions in which dignity can thrive.

BRASS TACKS: HOW DIGNITOCRACY WORKS

A dignitocracy is not a poetic concept; it is a possible, real alternative. At some point, the question becomes simple and sharp: how do people eat, where do they live, and who keeps the lights on?

In my vision, the answer is not complicated; it is just different from what we’ve been trained to accept.

Every able-bodied adult contributes twenty hours a week to the public good. Not as punishment, not as busywork, but as the most basic expression of living in community with other humans. Those twenty hours can look like a thousand different things: helping food move from farm to table, maintaining water systems and power infrastructure, staffing clinics and hospitals, running childcare cooperatives, teaching, keeping streets and public transit functioning, caring for elders, working in the offices that coordinate all of this. Some of it is hands-on labor; some of it is administrative; some of it is emotional and relational work that current systems pretend isn’t “real.”

In return for those twenty hours, each person receives a housing credit. One adult receives enough credit to cover a modest, safe, dignified home, the equivalent of a studio or one-bedroom space, and access to food at the grocery store without money changing hands. Two adults can pool their credits to support a larger home. Children add to the household’s credit: each child counts as an additional unit up to a reasonable limit, so that families can be housed and fed without being forced into poverty. Past a certain number of children, the system gently disincentivizes infinite expansion, not by punishing the children who exist, but by refusing to subsidize the idea that limitless growth is either sustainable or loving.

There is no money involved in this baseline. The housing and food systems operate on credits, not cash. The shelves are stocked, the apartments maintained, the farms supported, the clinics funded, because people have already given their twenty hours. The guarantee is not charity. It is the structural acknowledgment that no human should be homeless or hungry in a society with enough.

The other twenty hours of a person’s week, because I am not interested in a forty-hour workweek as a sacrament, belong to them. That time is for building a life: raising children, making art, starting a business, learning, resting, healing, tending to the land, mentoring others, exploring their purpose. If someone wants to plug those twenty hours into capitalism, to freelance, consult, create products, participate in markets, they can. Capitalism becomes an overlay, not the skeleton. It becomes elective, not compulsory. You can opt into it, but you no longer have to sell your soul and your health to avoid starvation.

Certain seasons of life require different arrangements. New parents, for example, are not asked to split themselves in half to keep the machine running. In a dignitocracy, new parents receive a generous window, two years, in which their caregiving counts fully as their contribution. They are raising a human being; that is labor enough. People with disabilities, chronic illness, or limitations that prevent them from contributing in the same way simply live for free. Their existence is not a problem to be solved. Their presence is part of the social fabric, and the measure of a dignified society is how easily they can exist inside it without constantly proving their worth. Elders who have already contributed for decades do not spend their final years terrified of losing housing or healthcare. They have already given to the commons; the commons now holds them as they age.

Underneath all of this is a simple question of scale. Does this “real world math” work?

Take a country the size of the United States. We’ve got roughly 333 million people. About 78 percent of them are adults, which gives us around 260 million adults. From there, we take out the people who should not be asked to give twenty hours: elders (about 56 million), adults with severe disabilities that limit work (around 20 million), pregnant and postpartum parents in their two-year window (about 7 million at any given time), full-time caregivers for disabled or aging family members (a few million more), and adults whose chronic illness makes consistent work impossible. After all that, we’re left with roughly 169 million able-bodied adults who could participate in the 20-hour contribution model.

Each of those 169 million people gives twenty hours a week to the public good. That’s about 3.4 billion hours of labor every single week. If you convert that into the familiar 40-hour workweek, it comes out to roughly 85 million full-time workers whose entire job is to keep people housed, fed, educated, cared for, and supported. For context, the current U.S. full-time workforce is about 133 million people, and a huge chunk of those jobs are in sectors that exist mainly to feed capitalism, not human wellbeing: predatory finance, for-profit insurance, bloated bureaucracy, marketing designed to manufacture need, and entire industries built around managing the fallout of poverty and neglect. In other words, 85 million full-time-equivalent workers devoted solely to public good is not a fantasy. It’s more than enough to run farms, build and maintain housing, operate healthcare, keep infrastructure intact, educate children, care for elders and disabled people, and handle governance, especially once we stop pouring human energy into systems that only exist to extract, manipulate, and police. In a dignitocracy, that energy and labor are redirected toward life.

Will this require careful design, iteration, and humility? Of course. Any living system does. There will be questions about how to assign roles, how to rotate people between tasks, how to ensure no one is stuck doing only the hardest or most unpleasant jobs. Those are governance questions, not reasons to abandon the idea. We already solve complex logistics for supply chains whose primary purpose is profit; we can certainly solve logistics for a system whose primary purpose is dignity.

The point is not that every detail is already perfected. The point is that the numbers add up to possibility, not fantasy. Twenty hours given freely to the commons in exchange for housing and food is not utopian. It is a rebalancing of what we already have.

In that world, you would not be owned by your job. You would not stay in an abusive relationship because you’re afraid of losing your home. You would not sacrifice your health to keep insurance. You would not have to choose between feeding your children and paying rent. You would know, at a bodily level, that the basics of your life are secure.

From that ground, you could finally ask: Who am I, really, when survival is no longer the loudest thing in the room?

That is the brass tacks of dignitocracy. Not an impossible dream, but a system built on a very simple trade: I give twenty hours to keep us all alive, and in return, I am free to become fully human.