Noam Chomsky recently quipped that people today are often left with only two choices: “starving, or selling yourself to tyranny. Very libertarian.”
It’s the kind of line that lands with a laugh—dry, sharp, devastating. But it lingers, too. Because beneath the joke is a mirror: this is the “freedom” most of us actually live inside. You may not face the choice in its naked form every day, but it hums underneath the surface: obey or suffer, sell your hours or collapse, conform or starve.
And then I think of a conversation I had recently, trying to wrap my mind around global wealth. The raw numbers are staggering: the Gross World Product (GWP)—the value of all goods and services generated by humanity in a year—is around $107 trillion. Divide that by our global population of 8.2 billion, and you get about $13,000 per person. Narrow it to just adults, and it’s closer to $17,800.
Long division. Just pencil and paper math.
Enough, in theory, for every person on this planet to live with dignity. Enough, in theory, to escape Chomsky’s bleak binary. And yet—here we are. Surrounded by abundance, still starving in the shadow of it.
This is the absurdity that Zen Absurdism helps me sit with: the math says “there is enough,” but the mirrors we live inside say otherwise. The economic system reflects not our possibilities, but its own distortions—concentration, extraction, coercion. In Mirror Theory terms, it’s a funhouse mirror, reflecting a version of “freedom” that is warped into obedience. In Forcing Theory terms, it’s awareness under collapse: consciousness narrowed into survival loops instead of expanding into novelty.
The absurdity isn’t that there isn’t enough. The absurdity is that there is—and yet people starve. That we can do the division and glimpse a world of shared flourishing, and still watch as necessity is weaponized into tyranny.
So where does that leave us?
For me, it leaves me holding two truths at once. First: the cage is real. The choice between starving and selling is baked into the system we inhabit. To ignore it would be dishonest. But second: there are always cracks. Even within this coercive mirror, there are moments—art, friendship, humor, love, painting, even the ridiculous act of running numbers on a napkin—where freedom slips through.
That’s where resistance begins: not in denying the absurdity, but in insisting on more than the “choices” we are offered. In refusing to confuse survival-choice with soul-choice. In finding ways, small or seismic, to force expansion when the system wants collapse.
Maybe things get worse before they get better. Maybe the tyranny doubles down. But maybe the simple act of seeing the absurdity clearly—of naming the distortion for what it is—is itself a kind of freedom.
Because once you see the math, you can’t unsee it.
Once you recognize the mirror is warped, you can’t pretend it’s clean.
And that recognition, however small, is the start of another choice.
Not starving. Not selling. But becoming.