How it started#
I want to write a work. The method is mostly worked out, but I am stuck at the topmost cell: which question does this work exist to ask?
I cannot produce that one sentence. The material is overflowing, there are plenty of candidates, and I just cannot decide. So I did something slightly odd: I asked an AI to be my Socratic midwife and deliver that question out of me.
There was one rule only, which it set itself, and which is the key to the whole thing:
A midwife does not give birth herself. It never writes that sentence for me. It only brings out the child that is already in me, and then helps me tell whether it is a real child or a phantom.
Below is the whole delivery. My words are as I said them, translated from Chinese; its words I have lightly tidied. The two voices differ a great deal in tone, and that is kept on purpose.
First contraction: don’t be pretty yet, push#
Midwife: You can’t get it out, most likely not for lack of material (it is overflowing), but because you want to give birth to a beautiful child in one go. Your gift is polishing things until they shine, but don’t polish now, push. The first and only question, and you answer only this: if you were allowed one sentence, as blunt as a curse, so bare that you yourself would find it too exposed, to say the thing you have seen clearly on your own for twenty years and no one has yet caught, what would it be? Don’t write it as a question, don’t cite anyone. Just the sentence you usually swallow.
Me: Why are there poor people in the world.
Held up to the light: a child’s sentence#
Midwife: The child is out. Don’t carry it off yet; hold it up to the light first. Its strength: it is a child’s sentence. “Why are there poor people in the world” is what a six-year-old asks. The real questions Socrates delivered almost all look this naive. You didn’t polish it. Good.
Now test it. For this question the library has a thousand answers, and you have read them, and for twenty years not one has caught you. That means what you are asking is not the literal sentence: “why are there poor people” has answers, while the question that “no one has caught you on” has no answer on the shelf, so they are two questions. The real child is hiding under one of the words in this sentence. Say it aloud and listen to where your stress falls:
Why · in the world · are there · poor people
Me: The stress is on “in the world there are”, pointing at the background world in the sentence and at the rich who do not appear in it. I think the rich person’s greatest asset is not money but enough poor people; the poor, forced to get through each month, do dull service jobs they dislike, and what the rich enjoy is not money but service. To make sure their money can buy service, there have to be great numbers of the poor filling every post of social infrastructure and every service job.
An extension of this: if AI productivity explodes in the future and not so much labour is needed, will the poor be liberated into lives like the rich, or simply abandoned and sacrificed?
An argument, not a question#
Midwife: Your stress falls on “in the world there are”, and your finger points at the rich who do not appear in the sentence: you hold up the visible (the poor) to make everyone look at the one hidden behind, unnamed. This child is yours.
But what you just delivered is an argument plus a question, and they have to be tested separately. Your “1” is not a question but an answer: “the rich person’s greatest asset is enough poor people” is a proposition you have already thought through and already believe. The danger is here: if you use the work to prove it, you have built a machine for preaching a truth. That is sermon, that is counterfeit, not art. What you already have the answer to cannot be the central question.
Your “2” is the child that is actually crying: when AI makes labour unnecessary, are the poor liberated or abandoned? The shelf has no answer to this, and you cannot answer it yourself. And the two are two edges of one blade: if the reason the poor exist has, from the start, been “useful to someone”, then when the machines make them no longer useful, that reason evaporates. At that moment we will find out whether we ever regarded them as people, or only as labour that walks.
Me: When the poor are no longer “useful”, rather than being abandoned they would be left to fend for themselves. The rich would build walls and live their affluent lives; and when the poor need to trade for goods, they would still have to find ways to serve the rich. So the poor cannot be liberated, and it is not a productivity problem but a social and institutional one.
You swapped the culprit#
Midwife: Stop. You just did what I warned you about: you answered. “Abandoned / left to fend for themselves / it’s an institutional problem” is a closed, pessimistic conclusion, a proposition, not a question. If you use the work to prove “the poor can never be liberated”, you have built the machine again, only this time it preaches despair.
And you swapped the culprit: you said “not a productivity problem but an institutional one”, but institutions have no hands. Last round you admitted that one of the fingers on that hand is yours (you stand on the side that builds the machines and supplies the productivity); this round you removed yourself from the scene and hid behind the faceless word “institution”.
You also won’t let go of “the poor still have to serve the rich”, yet that fights your own premise: if AI does everything, the rich need no one to serve them. Why cling to it? Because you dare not look at the deeper layer: the exploited are at least still useful to someone. The real abyss is not worse exploitation but becoming a surplus person nobody needs. Not oppressed, just not needed.
So take the knife back into your own hand and answer this: when I no longer need you, not exploiting you, simply having no use for you, do I still owe you anything?
Me: There is no definite answer, only a few possibilities. Because before AI, history already had many explosions of productivity, and the same problem was never solved.
Aporia: the constant that never moved#
Midwife: Now you are standing in the right place. “No definite answer, only a few possibilities”: this is what a central question should look like. Socrates called it aporia: not ignorance, but a genuine, productive being-unable-to-answer. Before, every time you touched this you fled and closed up; this time you stayed in it.
And the historical key you handed over in passing is heavier than you think: if every surge of abundance failed to solve it, then it was never a problem of abundance. So your question is not “what will happen to the poor” (that is sociology, the shelf has answers) but the constant that did not move through any of these productivity explosions. Steam, electricity, computers, AI: the ink grew each time, and one thing did not budge: “do I owe a person I do not need” has not shifted an inch from antiquity to now.
That is what you have seen for twenty years and nobody caught. Now strike out “history”, “the poor”, “the rich”, all the third persons, and leave the sentence that contains you, in the first person. You, now, say it.
Me: (Why) society always has classes.
You struck yourself out again#
Midwife: “Always” you got right: you caught that constant, keep it. But in front of me you took two steps back.
One: you struck yourself out again. I asked for the first person, and the subject you gave was “society”, the largest third person in the world; you even shoved “why” into brackets, pushing the one asking further away.
Two: you swapped the living for the dead. Two rounds ago you held words that cut: “surplus people”, “nobody needs”, “do I still owe you”. In this sentence you took them all back and substituted “class”: a clean, safe sociology term with textbook answers by the bucket. Whatever has answers on the shelf is not your question.
And what you yourself want to ask is “how people ought to be” (the ought); “why does society have classes” asks why the world is as it is (the is). You used the is to dodge your own ought.
You are one substitution away: throw out “society” and put “I” in; throw out “class” and bring back your word that hurts; keep “always”. Say it again, this time with yourself inside the sentence.
Me: I can never become financially free and join the rich class.
A wound, not a question#
Midwife: In this one you did not hide. Every time before, when asked to put yourself in, you fled into the third person; this time you reached into your chest and took out the ugliest piece: “I can never become financially free and join the rich class.” It is painful, undignified, it sounds like self-pity, and precisely because of that it is real.
But I have to tell you: this is not your central question; this is the wound that question has been guarding. That whole cool sociology of yours earlier was powered by this hot private fear: you are afraid you are the useless one, left outside the wall, needed by no one. One face of the coin is the wound (I am afraid of becoming someone no one needs, so I desperately want to climb inside the rich’s wall); the other is the ethics (should we owe anything to a person no one needs): they are one coin.
And this is the cruellest cut: the wall you long to climb inside is, by your own analysis, exactly those people who “build walls, live in plenty, and owe nothing to anyone outside”. So the salvation you dream of is to become the very kind of person you most want to interrogate. Your redemption and your sin are the same movement. That is why you cannot answer “do I still owe you when I don’t need you”: because you are straining with everything you have to climb to the side that “need never owe again”.
Twist those two halves into one sentence: first person, you inside it, and it is at once the wound and “how people ought to be”.
Me: My ethics say there should not be a wealth gap, but I also don’t think I should force other people to follow the rules I consider right, so all I can do is find a way to make myself rich enough.
A trilemma clean to the point of cruelty#
Midwife: This time there is no “society”, no “institution”, no safe word. You have pinned yourself into a contradiction you genuinely cannot walk out of, and all three clauses are “ought”, all first person. It is a trilemma clean to the point of cruelty:
- My conscience says: there should be no wealth gap.
- My conscience also says: I may not force anyone to live by my right and wrong.
- So the only move left to me is: make myself rich, that is, jump by my own hand into the very gap I condemn.
Your conscience forbids the disease and forbids the medicine, and leaves you one road: go and catch the disease yourself.
And that second clause, “not forcing others”, is no bit-player: it decides the form of this work. You cannot build a machine that herds people to a vote and preaches a truth; you can only hand over a lens and let people walk in and find it for themselves.
You have already said the words; only a punctuation mark is missing. You wrote it as a resigned full stop, but the living thing is the question mark this trap forces out. And it long ago stopped being only about money; money is just the room. Take those three clauses of yours, close them on a question mark, and say it once more.
Me: My ethics say there should not be a wealth gap, but I also don’t think I should force other people to follow the rules I consider right, so all I can do is find a way to make myself rich enough?
The sentence that came out#
My ethics say there should not be a wealth gap, but I also don’t think I should force other people to follow the rules I consider right, so all I can do is find a way to make myself rich enough?
Looking back, I did not let it write, and I did not swap in the prettier version it offered me; I just took my own three clauses and pressed the question mark myself.
That is the only rule of the whole thing: the child has to be mine. From “why are there poor people in the world” to that final question mark, every step was my own; what it did was keep pushing me back onto myself.
As a side note, that second clause, “not thinking I should force other people”, also set the form of the work: I cannot build a machine that corrects people, only something people walk into and discover for themselves.
The question is there. What remains is how to hand it to the next person, and that part I have not started.