VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 4

VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 4

There Was Never Only One Road

Did you lift your head in the last section? You are a champion, one who fought through hundreds of millions, a veteran of a hundred battles, and every hurdle you have carried through. This one too. Head up. Now let me show you the road.

Do not rush to tell me there is no road. You say there is no road because your eyes hold only one road, your job. The job is gone, so you feel every road on earth has closed. It has not. One road closed. Not all of them.

Let me ask you something. What does a person actually live on? You will say, on work, on money, money to buy food and clothes, to feed yourself and your family. Right. Now go one layer deeper. Do you want the money itself? No. You cannot eat money, cannot wear it, cannot live in it. What you want is what money buys: a bowl of rice, a coat, a roof over your head, the kids' tuition, the old folks' medicine. Money is only a bridge. What you actually want is on the far side of it.

And those things, that bowl of rice, that coat, that roof, where do they come from? They are grown, woven, built. Someone farms the grain, someone runs the loom, someone raises the walls. Things are not conjured out of money. Things are made by work. Money is only a ticket for dividing up the things that work produced.

Once you see that, I can tell you something no one may ever have told you before. All of humanity's suffering, across thousands of years, all the grabbing, all the working themselves to death, comes down at the root to one cause. There was not enough. Not enough grain to fill every belly. Not enough cloth to warm every back. Not enough houses for everyone to live in. There was never enough, so people had to grab, had to fight, had to labor dawn to dark, because you worked or you starved. Not enough meant someone got more, someone got less, and someone got nothing and starved to death. For thousands of years, humanity has been trapped inside that one word: shortage.

Back in the second section I told you a three-year-old is fed without working, given what he needs, because he is a person. And you probably muttered to yourself: sure, one child, we can carry one child. If everyone stopped working and just took what they needed, where would all the things come from? We would starve. And you were right. In the age of shortage, you were completely right. When there is not enough, not everyone can simply take what they need, and someone has to work.

But here is the very thing I am telling you now. For the first time, there is enough.

That thing you are so afraid of, the AI that took your job, the robots swapping people out, what are they doing all day? They are making things, like mad. One machine does the work of dozens, of hundreds. Twenty-four hours a day, no sleep, no complaints, no wages, farming, weaving, building without stop. And the result? Things beyond counting. So many things they cannot all be sold.

Go back to the first volume. Why did capital hit a dead end? Why did the world freeze over? Not because there was too little. The exact opposite. Because there was too much, so much no one could afford it, piling up in warehouses to rot. Mountains of goods on one side, and on the other, billions of people swapped out by machines with no money to buy any of it. See the absurdity? For thousands of years, human suffering was shortage. Now, for the first time in history, the cause flips. There is enough, more than enough, so much it overflows, so much it cannot be sold.

Sit with how enormous that is. For thousands of years, humanity dreamed of one thing, that there would be more, and more, enough that no one had to grab, or fight, or go hungry. Your ancestors dreamed it. Their ancestors dreamed it. Thousands of years, and no one ever saw it come true. And in your generation, the machines came, and the dream, physically, actually came true. There truly is more than can be used. This should be the greatest good news, the day humanity finally made it through. But because the old rules for dividing things up never kept pace, this enormous good turned into the strange calamity you are living: you pushed out of your job, goods rotting in the warehouse, people with no money to buy. The problem was never that there is too much. The problem is that the rulebook for dividing things is still stuck back in the age of shortage.

That one child could take what he needed because we could carry one child. What I am telling you now is that the machines have made things to a point where we can carry everyone. There is enough. Physically, actually, enough. Enough to feed everyone, clothe everyone, put a roof over everyone.

And you do not have to believe a single word of this book. Just look down at your own home. That rice cooker that cost you next to nothing. That TV, cheap to the point of disbelief. That electric car, a few thousand dollars and it runs hundreds of miles on a charge. Your kid's pile of toys. The shirt on your back. Turn them over and look at the back. Made in China.

Have you ever wondered why these things are so cheap? So cheap that foreigners cannot make sense of it, so cheap their officials stamp their feet and shout about Chinese overcapacity, about China selling too cheap and wrecking their rules.

That is not overcapacity. That is a group of people, in a place called China, doing something humanity never managed in thousands of years. They make the goods, enough for the whole world. And then, instead of jacking the prices sky-high to make a few people rich, they do the reverse. They push the price down to the floor, down to almost nothing but cost, so that ordinary people everywhere, farmers in Africa, workers in Southeast Asia, and you, can all afford them. Under the old rulebook, the price of these things would carry a big slice for the boss, for the shareholders, for capital. Made in China squeezed that slice out, cut it, and handed it back to you. A car that should have sold for tens of thousands, sold for a few thousand. An appliance that should have cost thousands, priced at a few hundred. That saved money did not go into anyone's pocket. It became a low price, and it landed in the hands of you and billions of ordinary people.

This is one way of living out that idea, giving the surplus back to everyone. It is already happening. Not a plan, not someday, but now, in the things sitting in your home this minute. If you have ever used something made in China, then you have already, quietly, been saved a little by this road, and you did not even know it. Half joking, if more than half the things in your house say Made in China on the back, you are already half Chinese, take it or leave it, you are already on this road, already living off its good.

So do you hear this road now?

The dead road the first volume showed you runs like this. Machines make the goods, the money all flows to a few, you are swapped out with no income, and however many goods there are you cannot afford them, and in the end everyone goes down together and the world freezes.

There is another road, a living one, and it runs like this. Machines make the goods, there is enough to go around, the share you earned by your own sweat stays yours, every bit of it, and the extra that the machines produced after they took over your work, that share is not the achievement of any one person, it is made by skill that all of humanity spent thousands of years building up, so that share goes to everyone, and you get a portion of it. You lose the back-breaking toil, but you do not starve. You have food, clothes, a roof.

Same machines doing all the work. Take the first road and you have no way to live. Take the second and you live, and live easier than before. The first volume showed you the first road walked all the way to its black end, black enough to make you stop wanting to go on. This section is walking you down the second.

And this second road was not dreamed up in some study. Someone is already walking it, right now, in China, behind that pile of cheap goods in your home. It is real. It holds. It is not a fantasy. Think about it. Whether a thing can reach everyone was never about whether the thing exists in the world. It is about whether its price can drop low enough that everyone can afford it. The old rulebook pushes the price up, and the higher it goes the more is made, so the good things stay forever in the hands of a few. This new road pushes the price down to bare cost, so the good things land in everyone's hands. The same object, price pushed up or pushed down, that is the fork between the dead road and the living one. Those unbelievably cheap things in your home are the hard proof that someone has already chosen down, already chosen the living road.

Right now you have one big knot left in you. I get the logic, there is enough, there is a living road, but why would any of it reach me? Cheap goods from China is one thing, but I have no job. Who hands me my share? How does it reach my hand?

Good question. And I will not lie to you: tonight I cannot give you an answer that lands in your bank account tomorrow. For this road to truly reach your feet, so that you not only pay less for goods but get a steady share of your own, that depends on setting the law back straight, on bending the system back into the shape that protects people, on everyone standing up together. That takes time. It is exactly what the chapters ahead will lay out for you, piece by piece.

So do not rush. Tonight you do not need the answer in your account. What you need tonight is to know this road is real, to know there truly is enough, and to set that no saving me thought down. A road that truly exists, that people are already walking, will find its way to your feet in time. How it gets paved, we will take slowly, chapter by chapter. For tonight, just hold four words steady: there is a road.

For tonight, take hold of this one thing. There is a road. More than one. The dead road of the first volume is not the only road there is. There is already enough, the living road physically holds, and someone is already walking it where you can see. Your door shut does not mean every door in the house is welded tight. There are far more doors than you think. For now, just remember this road truly exists. The rest, how to pave it all the way to your feet, we walk chapter by chapter.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.