Where Does Your Value Begin?

A System Built for an Outcome

Look at what we allow to happen to our own people.

We ignore them. We criticize them. We put an artificial ceiling on their worth and then act surprised when they never rise above it. We let a system exploit them, arrest them, cage them, displace them, and then, when the system is ready, put them to work for wages that could never support a baseline of survival for anyone. And through all of it, the public is fed a belief that makes this feel normal. Deserved, even.

That is not an accident. When a society is designed to exploit some people for the benefit of others, it needs a mechanism to make the exploitation acceptable. It needs a line, a starting point for value that isn't existence itself. It needs race, or status, or sexuality, or substance. It needs a reason for you to look at another human being and see less.

We know this because we have watched it happen.

The History of the Dividing Line

Race did not decide slavery by nature. It was built into law, on purpose, step by step.

In 1662, colonial Virginia passed a law declaring that a child's status would follow the mother, so that children born to enslaved women were enslaved from birth, no matter who their father was. Value was now assigned at the moment of birth by the condition of the womb.

Then came 1676 and Bacon's Rebellion, when poor European servants and enslaved Africans took up arms together against the colonial elite. That alliance terrified the people in power. What followed was a wave of laws that pried those groups apart, culminating in the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, which handed poor whites small legal privileges and stripped Black people of nearly everything. The message was simple: you may be poor, but at least you are not them. A dividing line was drawn so the people at the bottom would guard the system instead of overthrowing it.

That is the mechanism. That is how it works. Give people a reason to see each other as less, and they will do the work of oppression for free.

And when slavery was abolished, the mechanism didn't die. It changed clothes. The Thirteenth Amendment banned slavery "except as a punishment for crime." Almost immediately, Southern states passed Black Codes and vagrancy laws that made it a crime to be unemployed, to be out at night, to gather in the wrong place. Arrested men were leased out to plantations, mines, and railroads under convict leasing. Arrest them. Displace them. Force them to work. The same design, written in a new ink.

So when I say the system is designed to produce exactly the result we see today, I'm not speaking in metaphor. I'm reading from the record.

No Other Species Does This

Here is something worth sitting with. No other species on this planet has written policies, built institutions, and designed mechanisms to destroy its own kind, all while fully understanding what it is doing.

We are the only ones. We comprehend the suffering. We see the people on the streets. We hear the cries. And we build the policies anyway, and then we ignore the outcomes.

So I'll ask you again: are you a product of a system, or are you a member of your own species? Which comes first?

Self-Worth Is the First Target

If you wanted to control a person, where would you start?

You wouldn't start with chains. You'd start with belief. You would teach them, early and often, that they are worth less. You would make sure no one ever told them that their worth was theirs to claim. Because a person who knows their own value is very hard to exploit, and a person who has been taught they have none will accept almost anything.

Self-worth is something we all have control over. But not everyone has been taught that. And a person who was never taught can be manipulated, limited, and controlled by the beliefs other people place on them.

We do it to each other in small ways every day. Someone tells me they're going to do something big. I don't believe I could ever do that thing myself, so I tell them they can't either. I hand them my limitation like it's wisdom. And if they believe me, they won't. I didn't just stay small. I made them small too.

This isn't just a feeling. Researchers have measured it. In the 1960s, psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told teachers that certain students were about to "bloom" academically. Those students had actually been picked at random. By the end of the year, many of them had improved more than their classmates. The only thing that changed was what the adults believed about them. Expectation became outcome.

Now flip that. Imagine what happens to a child when every adult around them expects failure.

That is why the most important thing a society can do is refuse to limit people with its own limited beliefs. When we do it, we don't just hold back one person. We hold back all of us.

Who Gets Broken, and Why

Let's talk about the streets.

According to the federal government's own count, more than 770,000 people were homeless on a single night in January 2024, the highest number ever recorded. Tens of millions of Americans use illicit drugs in a given year. These are not two separate stories. They are overlapping symptoms of the same design.

So who is most likely to end up there? Who is most likely to be introduced to drugs early, and why?

In my view, and the evidence backs it, it is the children who were labeled disruptive. The children who were displaced. The children who went through foster care. The children with no parent watching over them. The landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences study in the 1990s found that people who went through five or more childhood traumas were many times more likely to report problems with illicit drug use than people who went through none. And study after study has found that a large share of young people who age out of the foster care system experience homelessness within just a few years.

Here is what I believe is happening. A system designed for a certain outcome has to break a child away from their natural direction. A child's natural direction is to grow, to explore, to become. A system that needs a permanent underclass cannot allow that. So the child is pulled away from home, from stability, from anyone who might tell them what they are worth.

And that child is going to rebel. Of course they are. Rebellion is the healthy response of a spirit that refuses to be broken. But the system is ready for that too. There is an environment waiting, built for exactly that child: the suspension, the juvenile record, the corner, the needle, the cell. The rebellion itself becomes the justification for everything that follows.

Ask yourself this: if every one of us were a follower, would we still have slavery?

The answer is yes. Slavery ended because people refused. Because people rebelled. Because people who were told they were property decided they were human beings and acted on it, and because others stood with them. The very trait the system punishes in a child is the trait that has freed us every time in history.

So what kind of person does it take to change a system designed to divide us? And what mechanisms have been built to stop that exact kind of person before they ever get the chance?

The Leash of Public Perception

The children who were targeted to maintain the status quo are very often the same adults you see on the streets today. They were broken early, and then a second mechanism was attached to keep them there. I call it the leash.

The leash is public perception. It is the way society was trained to look at them, talk about them, and dismiss them. Loser. Nobody. Worthless. Junkie. Bum.

Every time we look at a person that way, we tighten the leash. Because if that person has never been taught the power of their own self-worth, they may start to believe us. And if they believe our perception, it becomes their reality. We keep them exactly where they are, and then we point at them as proof that we were right all along.

That's the trap. The system breaks them, and then it recruits us to keep them broken.

Drugs do not determine a human being's value. Status does not determine it. Money does not determine it. Race does not determine it. The value of a person was established in the plain fact of their existence, an existence that you did not create and have no authority to discount. And if you believe in a higher power, as I do, that value was set before any of us ever drew a breath.

Why Did We Build This?

When we have this many people homeless, and so many more struggling just to hold on, in a system designed by a person or persons, we have to ask the obvious question.

Why did we create a system that we knew would hurt our own species and others? Who does that?

Systems do not build themselves. Laws are written by people. Budgets are passed by people. Policies are signed by people who can read the data and see the outcomes. Every structure that keeps a family on the street, every rule that turns a child's trauma into a criminal record, every contract that turns a human being into a profit line, has a name and a signature on it somewhere.

Turn the Examination Around

We spend a lot of energy examining the worth of the person on the street. So let's turn that examination around for a moment.

If we are going to examine worth, let's examine the people who write policies that intentionally allow others to struggle, and then ignore the results. Let's examine a society that allows the wages of its working people, hard-earned through sweat and sacrifice, to be taxed and then spent on killing members of our own species in other lands. Let's examine a culture that looks away from suffering because looking would cost it something.

Put those examinations side by side, and I would argue our society, as it stands, comes out ranked below the very drug user it looks down on. The person struggling with addiction is often a victim of what was done to them. The architects of that suffering chose it with full knowledge.

A nation that kills its own species, anywhere on this planet, cannot claim to represent a higher power or God. Not honestly. The two cannot live in the same house. You can't pray to a Creator on Sunday and fund the destruction of that Creator's children on Monday.

Right now, our society is creating all the conditions and all the limitations necessary for a small group of people to extract and exploit everyone else. That is the truth, and pretending otherwise is part of how the mechanism survives.

So What Do We Do?

We start where the system doesn't want us to start. We start with value.

We start by teaching every child, in every school, in every neighborhood, that their worth is theirs, that it begins at their existence, and that no one else gets to set its price. That is why civic ownership and self-worth are at the foundation of the education work in my campaign. A child who knows what they are worth is a child who can't be easily recruited into the design.

We end the business of profiting from human cages. As long as someone makes money every time a person is locked up, the system will keep finding reasons to lock people up. That's why ending for-profit incarceration is part of my platform. You cannot fix a machine while someone is being paid to keep it running.

We stop tightening the leash. Every one of us can do this today. The next time you pass someone on the street, refuse the story you were taught about them. See a member of your own species. Speak to them like one. You may be the first person in years who has.

And we stop handing our limited beliefs to the people around us. When someone tells you they're going to do something great, don't give them your ceiling. Give them your belief. You have no idea how far it might carry them, or how far it might carry all of us.

Choose Your Species

So I'll leave you where I started.

Where does your value for another human being begin?

If it begins anywhere other than their existence, then you were taught it. And anything you were taught, you can unlearn. You can choose to belong to your own species before you belong to any system. You can choose to be the kind of person that systems of division are designed to stop.

That choice is the beginning of everything that comes next.

I am a piece of the collective essence of this world that never gives up and needs every other piece to be whole.

— Vinnie Cordova
Cordova 2028: Moving Forward Together