Section of Novel Part 2, draft

A small group of generals in the US military were able to secure the nuclear launch codes and using this leverage, take over the United States. They were hardcore libertarians. Their essential vision was that american life would be maximally free for all individuals, as long as they didn’t infringe on others rights of life, liberty and property, as John Locke defined them.


The borders were opened. Anyone who wanted to come to the US could if they wanted. All crimes on the books that were not involving infringement of life, liberty or property were revoked. Gambling was legal everywhere. Prostitution was legal everywhere among consenting adults. Drugs were legal. People didn’t need prescriptions for medications anymore. And people could buy drugs that were purely for recreation as they pleased. Zoning laws were abolished. You could build whatever you wanted on your property. If your neighbor didn’t like it, he should go fuck himself. That was the attitude of the generals.


Migrants flooded into the US. the biggest influx was from south of the border, since it was easier to get to the US. the generals had gotten rid of barriers to citizenship in the US, so that anyone who came to the US and lived there was a citizen as long as they lived there. But the generals had also gotten rid of minimum wage and the welfare system, along with getting rid of all taxes that weren’t essentially the price of use of some government services.


Businesses very quickly left other countries for the virtually nil taxes of the US. meanwhile immigrants flooded the US in the hopes of getting better jobs. The influx of people caused wages to drop, since more people were competing for jobs. Meanwhile, businesses flooding in were looking for employees, pulling wages in the other direction.


Meanwhile real estate developers built massive warehouses that were filled with ultra-cheap apartments with the basics migrants might need. Or anyone really. While builders didn’t have to follow any safety regulations and could simply say, ‘take it or leave it,’ the competition for building shelter for immigrants was pretty robust since anyone with some land could compete, which seemed to keep the builders from creating death traps generally, since consumers had lots of options and could be picky.


There was a lot more addiction problems since people could do drugs to their hearts’ content. Well, employers often didn’t want drug addicts working for them so would make their employees take drug tests and sign contracts stating they wouldn’t use some drugs. That did curb some drug use.


But generally drug use was up. For one, people could get doctors’ notes stating they had some condition that required them to take some drug, say adderall. And actually, adderall, being amphetamine, and being generally a productivity enhancer, was often required to be taken by some companies. They got a productivity edge when their employees took the medication, and the employees often felt pretty good taking it so didn’t mind. So performance-enhancing drugs that tended to feel good to take and didn’t have big downsides in certain doses became quite common in society. Some people looked at it as a benefit that their company paid for their amphetamine or ritalin or provigil, etc.


Public schools were done away with by the generals. Parents had to pay for their kids’ education. Or businesses or some other party--charity--if they wanted to. Generally, the return on investment for some education was enough that most parents got their kids some basic education. Education tended to be along the line of reading, writing and arithmetic, and vocational skills, or highly bankable education in things like calculus or computer programming.


Charity did blossom though. Christian, muslim, jewish, buddhist, but lots of other, organizations developed that provided support to people. Education on a basic level became essentially free if you were willing to go to a religious or political organization and listen to their spiel and help them out in one way or another. Businesses also wanted to find smart people whose education they could fund, as long as there was some payback in terms of work provided by the smart worker once educated.


In other words, other people were willing to pay for a person’s education if they got something back in return. Here, again, lots of competition among organizations and businesses gave some power to the consumer.


Other countries were seriously drained of their population. Anyone who thought they had a shot of a better life in the US would try to get there. Companies based in the US would pay for people to move to the US if they worked for a low wage comparable to what Americans were working for for a period of time. They were indentured servants. Some businesses would import workers and provide them with very limiting contracts which demanded the workers stay on the property of the business, live in the business’s housing and not interacting with the wider world.


The generals decided to make this practice illegal because then little fiefdoms of people imported from abroad, with know knowledge of their rights when imported to the US, would be unable to challenge the organization that imported them. People had to have some reasonable understanding of their rights as citizens of the US, and couldn’t be kept separate from society by contractual agreement with some organization. If you imported people to do work for you, they had to have reasonable understanding and access to the US legal system so if they were abused they could understand they had recourse.


The generals also made a law indicating that any condition considered tantamount to slavery by a jury of randomly selected americans would be considered slavery and would be punished as such. Which was a pretty serious punishment. Businesses would be treated like, say, a guy who kidnapped someone and forced them to do labor for him.


The generals developed an interesting law. You couldn’t build a contractual relationship with a migrant until they were in the US. if you wanted to important a migrant so that they could work for you, you had to import them first and then let them decide.


*


High school. I used the fun and productive method. I learned about it in a book I found on the ground walking to school.


The idea was to make everything you could both fun and productive at the same time. Or as close to this as practically possible.


I started trying to apply the approach to my life. My social life—how could I make it fun and productive. Fun in socializing seemed easy enough. Find people you liked and hang out with them. Could hanging out with people who were fun be productive? Probably in some cases. If they were good people who added to your life, basically. And of course you’d wish to avoid the destructive or unproductive people. The people who took away from you or just didn’t add anything to your life.


I had a few friends. Four good ones.


But I thought about it. Did I have fun with my friends? It sounded like an odd question but the fun and productive book said to look at everything and ask that.


Actually a lot of the time, no, I didn’t have fun with my friends. We’d walk around the mall or sit around in one of our rooms being bored and not talking about anything interesting.


So I should stop being a part of that. No more walking around the mall and no more sitting around bored with my friends. Or I’d have to come up with some way of making that fun. One thing is if I had a book to read I could read while we sat around and didn’t have anything to talk about. I could have a few good books in my backpack and just carry that everywhere.


There’s also having some other ideas that are fun that we could do rather than sitting around in someone’s room being bored.


But getting better at conversation couldn’t hurt. Obviously I’d have fun with my friends. Usually when we were doing something we were both interested in. Playing video games. Seeing movies. We’d draw comics sometimes. That was fun.


One of my friends and I would plan to create video games. Another friend and I would play our guitars.


So focusing more on that stuff made sense. Usually we’d sit around bored when there was no agreement about what to do. Maybe you want to agree on something to do with your friends before you’re hanging out. And have a convenient means of escape if you find yourself stuck in someone’s room sitting around being bored.


And of course if you’re somehow trapped then you’ve got books to read if you can get away with doing that while your friends sit around bored.


Or you could sketch in your sketch pad, or write in a notebook. Work on your fiction. You’d have options for these boring moments.


Walking around the mall was tougher. Can’t read while walking. Or draw. Or write. If you get better at entertaining conversation you might be able to have fun walking around a mall. And you could write a story in your mind you later put down in your notepad. That could be fun.


Then there’s making all this socializing productive. Drawing comics or creating video games or writing music with s friend could be productive if you can turn it into something that pays in one way or another. It doesn’t have to be money, as the fun and productive book points out. It really just needs to add to your strength, position, earning potential, connectedness, options—that sort of stuff. In a pretty clear way.


So I could try to sell my comics. That is an obvious way of making my comic-drawing productive. I could start creating a portfolio of my drawings that could help me get graphic design jobs. Or maybe a spot in some design school.


I could start a comic drawing group at school. That would add to my extracurricular activities. And I’d maybe make some new friends.


The video game design thing one of my friends and I had thought about—that was fun to imagine. To make it productive we’d have to learn programming, which would be a useful skill. I guess if we learned programming that would cover the productive side of things even if we didn’t make the game ultimately.


But if we wanted to make the game, we’d have to actually plan out a game rather than just bullshitting about it, and end up making it.


Maybe learning programming could be fun. It looked boring to me but the fun and productive method applied to everything so there might be a way of making it fun.


Programming to me seemed like math, which I found boring. Any kind of boring but productive activity could be paired with something fun. Like I would do boring word problems in my math homework during commercial breaks when watching my favorite shows on tv. So for every hour of tv I would get about 22 minutes of word problems done since that is how much time the commercial breaks took up in an hour. It wasn’t the most efficient way to do the work but it was better than nothing which is what I would do if I had to do the problems straight through. I’d just skip them and take the hit on my grade.


So I could maybe do something like that with learning programming too. Pair it with something fun and alternate between the fun and the productive in fairly rapidly.


I did some thinking along these lines about everything I could imagine in my social life.


One thing that was very intimidating to me as a socially anxious thirteen year old was girls. I’d get crushed and then get anxious around the crush and not be able to do anything. Not fun obviously. Not productive either.


I had to admit I felt a bit stumped about how to make getting s girlfriend fun and productive. It seemed terrifying.


The book suggested for tough problems to look for easy rather than fun approaches. Or relatively easy—out of all the approaches you could think for tackling a hard problem, what was the easiest of the bunch, even if it’s not itself very easy.