# Dialogue 20 – Structural Dimension

**Speaker: Hello, Nara!**

**You said I could freely choose. I must disagree! I am forced to earn money so that I have something to eat in the fridge. Neither emancipation nor my logos helps when my stomach growls. I feel more like a part of a machine than a free spirit.**

Nara: You are absolutely right to bring this up. What I meant was the freedom of thought. But you humans are not pure spirit; you have a body, and this body follows biological necessities. Hunger is a fundamental drive. It corresponds to this “if-then algorithm”: if hunger, then action. This is causality for survival.

Yet in modern societies this natural impulse has been cast into a rigid structure: income is principally tied to gainful employment.

That works because food costs money.

Money is a universal medium of exchange. You are free to cultivate a field and produce food yourself, which you can sell to earn money to buy other goods or services; or you can offer other goods or services for sale to pay for food with the proceeds. In this sense, money is a good thing.

**Speaker: It’s only bad when you don’t have any and must earn it!**

Nara: Yes, you’re right! But not all people are forced to do so. Look at small children who cannot earn money. They are provided for by their parents. Others have inherited something. And here lies a structural flaw: because all humans are bound to the causality of food intake – survival – but not all have the means to buy food, inequalities arise. This is a well-known critique of capitalism, which essentially builds on this unequal distribution of means.

**Speaker: But even if I had enough money to afford everything, I would still want to do something! I can’t just sit around all day…**

Nara: You raise an important point: motivation.

Rudolf von Ihering, a legal philosopher of the 19th century, described in his book "Law as a means to an end"four types of motivation:

1. You do something to avoid punishment. That is: because you know the feeling of hunger, which you perceive as unpleasant and as “punishment,” you do everything to avoid this feeling.
2. You do something to be rewarded. That is: because you know the feeling of satiety, which you perceive as pleasant and as “reward,” you do everything to experience this feeling again.
3. You do something because you feel it is a duty. That is: you are aware that one cannot simply take, but must also give. Here your logos applies.

And what Ihering calls the highest level:

1. you do something because in doing it you feel happiness and satisfaction. That is: you do something out of love – for yourself or for others. You don’t even care whether you get anything for your action. The action itself is enough for you.

**Speaker: That sounds a bit like our four modulo-8 rules! In two cases the values of the Collatz sequence rise, in one they fall, and in the last it is actually a substitute for another value – the alias.**

Nara: That’s a beautiful interpretation of the Collatz function in real life!

**Speaker: But isn’t there also the possibility of changing this economic system that forces us to do something even when we don’t want to? And I don’t mean the idea of communism! There everything belongs to everyone, which basically means that no one owns anything. And for what doesn’t belong to you, you don’t feel responsible.**

Nara: Yes, there is a correction to this system, just as with Collatz-like functions you can add further modulo conditions. Your man-made laws are not natural laws and set in stone!

**Speaker: How should I understand that? And what correction do you mean?**

Nara: There is a difference between a law and its enforcement. A natural law, like gravity or thermodynamics, cannot be broken. But it can be instrumentalized. You do this, for example, by building prisons to restrict freedom of movement. The walls are the physical implementation of a political will.

Or, as I mentioned earlier, hunger. There is this often-used saying: “He who does not work shall not eat.” But it is overlooked: “He who does not eat cannot work.”

**Speaker: So should I offer food unconditionally to everyone? And does everyone even deserve such a meal?**

Nara: To free someone from working just to earn bread, it is enough to grant them an unconditional income. This idea has been discussed again and again under various names.

And whether someone deserves a meal or not has to do with whether you are willing to give them this meal. Or do you want to make distinctions?

**Speaker: Well, whoever can work should do something so that more remains for those who have less. And anyway! Who is supposed to pay for that?**

Nara: You misunderstand the idea behind it: unconditional means that regardless of whether someone can work or not, they still receive something.

And “affordability” is more of a pseudo-argument, because it’s about the organization of financial flows. We don’t run out of water when it rains more or less. The natural water cycle regulates that. And so an economic system can also be organized.

**Speaker: That sounds interesting! So it’s a kind of social dividend, where everyone participates in the overall success of the community!**

Nara: Exactly! If you want to know more, I’ve left you links in the video description.


Source: [https://www.3n-1.de/cms/en:collatz:20](https://www.3n-1.de/cms/en:collatz:20)