Standing and the Human Body

Legitimacy Foundations Paper 1

This paper is about you.

It is about your place in this world. It is about the constructs you were taught from childhood to the present day, and the growing sense that those constructs no longer apply. It is about constitutions—national, state, and global—and the language they use to describe our most fundamental relationships. And it is about the gap between those words and the reality they are meant to govern.

This paper concerns human standing: what it actually is, where it resides, and what it would mean to confront the emptiness of the rhetoric and documents from which that standing is supposed to flow.

In the United States, nearly every foundational document begins with language like this, from the California Constitution:

California Constitution — Article I, Section 1
“All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.”

Read that twice.

Read the first line three times, with a dictionary.

These are powerful words. They simply do not describe the lived reality of any person in California or in the United States today.

In practice, people have become units of the economy. You possess value as an economic unit, not as a person with life and liberty for your own continuity and purpose.

This requires saying plainly what follows.

An economy is the system by which claims on human effort, time, risk, and material reality are recorded, transferred, and settled. Institutions make those claims. Institutions operate through process. Rules govern institutions; procedures execute; metrics trigger; liability is diffused; authority is abstracted.

People do not run institutions. They operate within them, under constraints they did not author and cannot fully stop.

Those with resources are the only ones positioned to establish defaults and formalize systems. What results is compelled participation: a condition of structural servitude, where refusal is penalized, responsibility is dispersed, and standing does not return to the individual.

Our economy now operates primarily through monopoly and coordinated pricing structures rather than competitive value formation. Prices are no longer set by cost and contribution. They are set to maximize extraction. Disposable income is eliminated by design.

That is why people are broke.

Notice how liberty and freedom quietly disappear from this reality, despite their central place in constitutional language.

This disappearance is selective.

The law already recognizes non-market essentials. Police, firefighters, and the military are treated this way. Certain human attributes are treated this way as well: children, voting rights, bodily integrity, and due process. They are not auctioned. They are not priced. They are not withdrawn for non-payment.

The question raised here is simple:

If these are non-market essentials, why are people not?

We are not labor, productivity, or skills. We are people.

This paper does not argue for socialism. It does not endorse it. It does not require it.

It names an existing asymmetry. Corporations are insulated from risk, supported through failure, and protected by public backstops as a matter of routine. Ordinary people receive no such insulation. They are expected to absorb instability personally, even when loss produces foreseeable bodily harm.

Risk is socialized upward. Survival is individualized downward.

Over time, this converts survival into leverage. Access to healthcare, shelter, and essential services becomes conditional. Participation is described as voluntary, but refusal carries consequences that make the choice illusory.

Our law already recognizes that certain things cannot be priced, excluded, or withdrawn without violating dignity. This paper asks why that recognition does not extend to the human body itself.

2025