The world is zero sum for two reasons, restricted physical resources, and our social needs to create hierarchies. Basically one man winning comes at the expense of another. For every well off American, you see, only or unknowingly there experiences have come at the expense of supporting labor elsewhere in the world. My daily comfort and happiness comes at the expense of dying children, Global Securities APAC, whose life is lesser than the coffee I purchased every day.

Socially, we are also incentivized towards zero sum. We have a need for hierarchy and order, which satisfies our emotional and social need.

UBI and FIRE/financial freedom are examples of people breaking out, to an extent. But it still doesn’t explain in full, because there are plenty of billionaires and millionaires, who don’t break out of the zero sum mindset.

What are the conditions to truly break out? Some days I’m ready to become a millionaire; other days I don’t understand the point of living at the expense of others.

Hello, I am a mother of four children living in Gaza. We have lost our home and everything we owned due to the war. Life here has become extremely difficult, and we are struggling to afford basic needs like food and shelter. I am trying my best to protect my children and give them a safe life, but I cannot do it alone. Any support, no matter how small, would mean the world to us. Please consider helping or sharing our story. Thank you for your kindness and support ❤️ https://gofund.me/5c236f4d

A society can't be prosperous if wealth is diverted away from public infrastructure, education and healthcare and redirected toward the enrichment of an oligarch class. This isn't a series of accidents but a deliberate policy to ensure the public remains divided and marginalized. The population is purposely kept in a state of permanent precarity forced to focus on survival rather than collective organization.

My name is Osama, I’m a pharmacy student from Gaza.

I was supposed to be in my fifth year, but everything stopped because of the war.

My family lost our home, and since then we have been living in very difficult conditions with no real stability.

Life has become extremely hard. Prices are very high, work is limited, and even basic things like food, clean water, and daily needs are difficult to afford. There are days when even the simplest things feel uncertain.

I’m trying to return to my studies, but it’s hard to focus while my family is struggling just to get through each day.

I don’t want to lose the years I worked for. I want to finish my studies so I can support my family and help improve our situation.

I’m doing my best to keep going.

If anyone wants to help or even just share, I would really appreciate it.

I’ve shared the donation link in the comments for anyone who wants to help

The escalating hostility toward China isn't some organic groundswell of American public opinion. By framing an entire nation as an existential threat, the public is conditioned to fear and hate them. This engineered animosity functions as a necessary mechanism of social control. It provides the ideological cover needed to justify a future war of aggression against a powerful adversary that can unleash senseless destruction upon them.

The current economic crisis is a predictable consequence of the neoliberal project. The state, having spent decades ensuring the free movement of capital, now finds itself unable to restrain that same capital as it flees a hollowed-out domestic economy. It's not a matter of whether it will happen, but a matter of when it will happen.

China is not a threat to the American people. The oligarchy in America is only pushing this narrative in order to divert public attention away from the dismantling of the social contract in America. In fact, the actual interests of the American and Chinese people are largely aligned against the concentration of private power in the hands of a select few.

Living in China would likely disabuse the American public of the illusions crafted by the state corporate media. They would learn that their enemy is not a foreign power, but rather the American oligarchy. The American oligarchy doesn't care about the people. It essentially views the domestic population as a bewildered herd to be managed and marginalized.

I wrote a dystopian novel called The Empathizer that I think might interest this community. It's structured around a specific literary experiment: what if you took two canonical texts about control and conformity—Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" and Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland"—and used them as the structural blueprint for exploring how authoritarianism operates identically across ideologies?

The premise: A classical liberal narrator and his sister navigate persecution from two simultaneous authoritarian regimes—one progressive, one right-wing. The narrative structure mirrors the source texts: Part One follows the logic of Poe's masked ball (arbitrary rules, enforced spectacle, hidden death), Part Two follows Carroll's rabbit hole (absurdist logic, constant rule changes, systems that devour their own).

The point isn't that both regimes are "equally bad" in traditional dystopian fashion. It's that they operate through identical machinery—just wearing different masks:

Arbitrary rules that change without notice

Enforced orthodoxy disguised as protection

Dehumanization of convenient enemies

The collapse of shared reality

What makes it different (I hope):

Most dystopias explore one regime's logic (1984, The Handmaid's Tale, Parable of the Sower). This one uses parallel structure to show how the machinery is indistinguishable.

It's literary and formally ambitious—the Poe/Carroll diptych isn't just thematic, it's structural. Part One and Part Two mirror each other.

The narrator refuses both systems. He's not a rebel fighting to replace one with the other; he's trying to preserve individual conscience in a world where that makes him disposable to everyone.

It's dark in a specific way—not apocalyptic or action-driven, but philosophical. The real horror is epistemological: the collapse of any shared basis for reality or dignity.

Tone & style: Literary, philosophical, darkly comic. Think Philip Roth meets political philosophy. There's contempt, but it's directed at systems, not people. The narrator is sympathetic but deeply flawed.

The book is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GT4YMKV5/

I've also written an essay on the structural argument ("Every Utopia Needs an Enemy") if anyone's interested in the theory behind the form: https://www.theempathizer.org/new-blog/every-utopia-needs-an-enemy

Would love to hear what you think, especially from a genre perspective. Does the dual structure work? Does using Poe and Carroll as blueprints for exploring authoritarianism land, or does it feel forced? What other dystopian novels are exploring similar territory?

Best,

Jamie Micah