Birth Right Housing
A suggestion that housing for the lifetime of a child should be a precondition of their birth.
We all need space in the world, a place we can be without undue harassment, a place where we can set the tools and systems that support our lives, place to come back to after work or pursuit.
In our current society, as we get older and move out of our parents house we rent or purchase this space from the existing society. While there is merit in this (it can be a mechanism to support the older generations), what it fundamentally means is that the younger generation is born a slave to the existing society, forced into indentured servitude upon their birth.
Some of this proposal stems from my understanding that many people in our society don’t consider if or why they want to have children, they just have them because that is what their peers are doing. There is a lot of pressure and impetus to having children. First off, there is a large element of of our media and storytelling that shows only family life (and not other ways of living that don’t involve having children). Further, much of our social lives (those normalized by society anyways) revolve our children’s activities, whether that be school, birthday parties, activities, etc. For people I know (women especially) they often feel shut out of social events that are child focused if they don’t have their own child.
I guess I’ve come to have a pretty cynical and jaded view of having children in this society. I think that the powers that be want us to have children so that we will continue the system in which they are masters and we are slaves. It is normalized in our society that we have children, we rely on a system for their delivery, and from a very young age we hand our children over to an institution (schools) to raise them for us.
I think having a child can be a great thing (perhaps one of the best), but to me it should come from a desire to continue what is good (that is, from a belief of you and your mate that what you are doing, the life you are trying for is good, and you both believe is worthy of being continued). Your child may not agree with you believe to be good, and that needs to be recognized, that you may bear a life that finds the world a painful and sorrowful place, and not treat the matter of whether or not to have children too trivially.
To me, you cannot approach having children with a sense of continuing what is good if your view is that you are having them so they can serve you (or serve others) as they (and you) get older. That to me is not any good, it is instead a tacit acknowledgment that what you really want is a manservant.
Perhaps a challenge today is the recognition by younger generations that they are not wanted, either by the system that pushed for them to be born, the community that they may have been raised in, or even the parents who bore them. From my crude understanding of the past, some of the reason we have formal marriage is sanctify two people having children together, to give the approval (blessing) to those two that acknowledges the community approves of you having children (from a few anecdotes I have read, formal marriage served to establish official descendants and heirs). While there are downsides to a sanctioning body to childbirth (it might be seen to constrain the fundamental rights of two people who wish to have children) it does provide some assurance that, having been approved, the community will support the marriage and the issue (offspring/children) produced by such marriage (that is, the offspring would be generally welcomed into the community). Or to say another way, the community would make space for them.
We seem to have lost this assurance, and there is no acknowledgement or sanctification prior to birth that the community will include them and welcome them in. We have some vague and implied “social contracts” from our system, but nothing that indicates any thought or review was given for the instance of each specific child. Some would say that our social contract works, and that we have social safety nets to ensure that no one is left out. To that I would say there are a substantial number of people living in tents, and that number seems to be growing. Further, a person who’s choice is either live on the street or spend their days doing pointless work so they can afford housing seems unlikely to feel that is a good social contract (such arrangement essentially tells a person that they must waste their life if they want to continue living it).
To me, having housing be a precondition to birth would provide some of the benefits of a sanctified marriage from the church. First, it would be a commitment from the parents, an effort they had to make in order to have a child, one that should cause them to test their commitment. Further, since our notion of property is a mutual recognition of another’s right to occupy a space, holding such property would also be a commitment from the community to that child.
I would see this right of having a place as something a person would hold for life, not something that could be sold or used as collateral (at least not easily and without some prudent review, waiting period, and plan). One could trade locations, but one always would have some primary location where they have a right to be. There is also a distinction between place and structure. A child would be given a place, which may or may not come without a structure (house). Over the course of their life, it would be the responsibility of the child (then adult) to fix, maintain, or improve their structure.
I think there could be many issues with such a proposal. For example, a child could feel trapped into this location, and that as a condition of their birth they were forced to stay in this one location. I think it also would cause concern about wanting to teach the younger generation the need for hard work, and the obligation to repay and the debt that we have to the works of the preceding generations. It might also make a child lazy, since that is one more thing they have been given, and one less thing that they have to work for (and their life less rich because they are not forced out into the maelstrom more to try to find their own way through).
I also think there could be many benefits. For one, the child starts from a better place of security, better founded knowing that whatever they try (within the limits of the law) that they will at least have a place to come back to, to rest, and go back out and try again. I also think (to the extent that such a proposition becomes widespread) it causes the parents and the community to consider whether they want to have a child, and serves as something of a test of their commitment to wanting to do so. I also think that providing place (or even housing) will not make the child lazy or unlikely to work for the existing system. There will still be plenty of needs (food, energy, medicine, entertainment, etc) that will require work for their provision, and so the younger generation will have to learn to work to provide those (and will mot likely have to work in support of existing systems for these, and thus will provide support to the existing generations).
Perhaps most fundamentally though, it is about about improving a system that is exploitative. Our current system of rents (or long term mortgages in which you might pay far more interest than you pay the previous occupant to quit xes claim on it). Our current system of housing traps the younger generation in a system of indentured servitude to the powerful (who either collect the rent or the interest). I know that we need to have protection by the powerful, that we need our children to have by the powerful, but we also want our children to have good lives, and not being forced to spend their lives toiling for their masters. If you and your mate cannot make space or find space in the world for your offspring (or you can’t convince your community or the powerful to do so), then perhaps you it would be worth us considering not have children (or at least consider whether their likely exploitation will allow them to still have a good life).
I sound very ungrateful here (and maybe I am). I have been given a lot, and cannot have asked for any more. I am grateful for what I have been given, but I also think that we should use our lives to try to improve them, for ourselves, and for others. I see housing as one of largest challenges in our current society, and an area and system that is in need of reform. Hopefully one can accept my proposal not as a rebuke of those who struggled before us to provide the life that we have now, but rather as a candid acknowledgment of issues and a concept for improvement.
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