Reject the roman maximalist machine

We are tired of the fight, and we are right to be.

Labor and Capital have been at war for 175 years — over who rules whom, the people who create or the people who fund the creation. Labor must demand more, or its children go hungry. Capital must take more, or its companies fail. Neither side can put down its weapons. There is no truce on offer. It is hopeless.

But the war runs on a lie: that we need more. Take the lie away and the war stops making sense. Labor can ask for less. Capital can keep less. Needing more is what keeps the guns loaded. Needing less empties them.

So we ask, plainly: where does this need come from?

Not only from the systems around us. From us. The hunger for more lives in the human heart, and any system that wants to rule us only has to feed it.

Rome knew this before anyone wrote it down. The good book tells of a dream: a statue with a head of gold, a chest of silver, a belly of bronze, legs of iron — each kingdom crueler than the one it replaced. The legs of iron are Rome. Rome did not invent the hunger for more. It organized it, armed it, and sent it out across the world — through its law, its roads, its ships, and the empires that copied its methods long after Rome itself had fallen. That machine is still moving. We call it the economy now. We call it progress. Same machine. New uniform.

This is the roman maximalist machine, and it cannot stop. It cannot want less — wanting less is its death sentence. It needs us hungry, so it can keep selling, so it can keep ruling.

We say: no.

People have said no before us, and lived to tell it — not as theory, as daily bread, held for generations.

New England's first settlers thought they were escaping corruption. What they built instead ran on land, labor, and people who were already there — the Abenaki, who had measured a good life by "enough" for a thousand years before the ships arrived: enough food, enough shelter, enough relationship with the land to keep living on it. That measure did not vanish when the ships came. It is still buried under these towns, pressing up through the thrift this region half-remembers, asking us to dig it back out.

Monks chose less on purpose, and they have not stopped choosing it in over a thousand years. A cell. A bell. A rule that says when to wake, when to work, when to rest, when to stop. No more tomorrow than today. That is not retreat. That is defiance, dressed in plain cloth and repeated until it becomes a life.

We are not lacking proof. We are lacking nerve.

Here is what we will not look away from: many of us already tried to walk free of one yoke, and walked straight into another. We called the old rules religious — rules about rest, about limits, about enough — and we called leaving them freedom. What we built in their place has no day off and no ceiling. It is a hunger that cannot be satisfied, and we serve it like a master. We traded a yoke that asked for obedience for one that asks for everything and calls it a choice.

The good book says the yoke is easy and the burden light. Ours is neither, and we built it ourselves. That is not a setback. That is failure — ours, plain, and it is time we said so.

So we are done asking which yoke is lighter. We know. We have always known.

It is time to take this one off. Reject the roman maximalist machine!