Humans have specific needs if they are to function properly. Some of these needs are known, but others are discarded by Empire. The Free Path seeks to mark all of these needs and sketch them out as part of the formal ethics of the system, in order to prevent people from sacrificing essential needs out of ignorance or deceit.
- The Needs of the Guts – Biological Needs
- The Needs of the Heart – Psychological Needs
- The Needs of the Brain – Recuperative Needs
The Needs of the Guts
The Needs of the Guts means biological needs. You need food, calories and nutrients are what your body uses to run and build itself. You need water, water is life. Cells cannot function without water. You need shelter, your body cannot withstand extreme temperatures. You need rest and sleep. Your body repairs itself and defrags your brain when you sleep.
Without this you die
This is not negotiable. Your body requires upkeep. This is the baseline. Without this, everything else falls apart.
The Empire seeks to gatekeep access to the needs of the Guts as a method of control. Daniel Quinn says the easiest way to tell if you are among the people of Empire (whom he named takers), is whether or not the food is under lock and key. Activists have argued that mortgages were encouraged in order to tie people to payments they could not easily divest from themselves. They had to make payments, and so they needed jobs. Colonial powers would institute head taxes on colonized peoples to force them to work with the colonial power’s economy.
Empire wants to control your access to things you need to live.
Empire wants the ultimate coercive power. Empire wants the ultimate blackmail material. Empire wants to force you to buy your life back. And if it can manage the trick, Empire wants to make you pay for own oppression.
The needs of the guts are the foundation to Self-Sufficiency. If you can’t provide this for yourself you will either die or join Empire.
The Needs of the Heart
The Needs of the Heart are your psychological Needs. You need to feel that you can affect your situation. If you feel helpless, unable to affect your life, you will plunge into depression. You need to feel that you possess the tools and skills to face the future. If you feel ill equipped to face the future, you will plunge into anxiety.
Without this you go mad.
You need to feel that you have a meaningful purpose, one you freely chose. These are the most easily ignored of your body’s needs. But you need these things. And if you lack them, your brain will begin to malfunction. Lacking these things, your coping mechanisms will suffer, and these problems will self-reinforce. Left unaddressed, these problems will continue to worsen until you cannot mentally function.
The Empire seeks to deprive people of the needs of the heart in order to forestall rebellion and dissent.
Empire wants you to feel helpless like a dog in a skinner box tormented by electric shocks. Empire wants you struggling with low dopamine and serotonin. They want you dependent upon alcohol and caffeine to modulate yourself. They want you dependent on prescription medication. Because the closer to the edge you are, the easier it is to coerce you. The closer you are to the edge, the less likely you are to rebel.
If you ignore the Needs of the Heart, your ability to defend yourself will be muzzled, and your ability to resist will erode. If you can’t provide this for yourself, then you will remain trapped by Empire.
The Needs of the Brain
The Needs of the Brain are your recuperative Needs. You need sufficient sleep, as mentioned in the Needs of the Guts. Sleep is how you clean your brain. Sleep is how you heal your wounds.
You need sleep.
But beyond sleep, you need rest. You need down time between projects. You need breaks between crises. You are not a machine, you cannot work nonstop with nothing more than precisely eight hours sleep per night.
Without this you despair.
Without sufficient recuperation and restoration time, you will fall into despair. You will fall into nihilism. You will lose the ability to feel joy. The world will become gray. And this will make taking care of the needs of the guts and the needs of heart more difficult as well. And this will make the situation worse.
Empire seeks to push people to survive upon the absolute minimum of the Needs of the Brain in order to maximize production and increase growth.
Without proper recuperative time, your thoughts will become muddied. Your cognitive processes will slow and misfire. You will be easier to deceive and manipulate. Without proper recuperative time, you will find it difficult to do anything but the essentials, and you will remain trapped by Empire.
The Needs of the Brain are essential to maintaining your critical thinking capacity. If you cannot provide this for yourself, your will remain trapped by Empire and you will think it is your own fault.
Recommended Reading
- Food, by Susan Powter
- Your Body’s Red Light Warning Signals, by Neil Shulman
- In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan
- When the Body Says No, by Dr. Gabor Mate
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 