We can put Fiat to rest, but we have to go to the root.

The key step is recognizing Fiat. And don’t try to “fix” Fiat. Everything you feel uncomfortable about is pointing you in the right direction. Grow a community and together imagine an alternative to Fiat, then live accordingly.

Fiat is the result of systemic inadequacy, not yours. It has never really been about whether you and you cannot be qualified enough, or smart enough, or prepared enough. You are destined to lose.

It is about the barriers that are designed to keep us as non-owners in the first place. It is owners looking around and saying that the biggest problem you face isn’t your health and your integrity.

What owners say is that the problem is us. Anything to keep our concentration on our own inadequacies, not the system that is set against us.

Which means that our job isn’t to see Fiat at all. You are fish and Fiat is the water you live in. That is according to the owners.

Our focus must be not on fixing ourselves and more on healing a broken world. Marginalized people have been leading that fight against systemic injustice for generations, but in an unfocused way. Now all of us need to take all the energy we use to change ourselves and put it toward changing the world.

If we do that, we can create a society in which we see Fiat and we laugh and celebrate.

Getting there will be the work of what is left of my lifetime. Use the Radical Foundation as your measuring stick and fix the world.

Make our case, lead our movement, pursue whatever it is we want to pursue. Live as if Fiat is the past and a made up system, because it is.^∇

ENDNOTES

Heavily inspired by Reshma Saujani ’s commencement speech at Smith College. She is the founder of Girls Who Code <https://girlswhocode.com/about-us> and the author of Brave, Not Perfect <https://radicals.world/dCfTUG>