If asked “What comes to mind when hearing the word ‘desert’?” Would it be wrong if one answered “equality”? One can then argue against equality and say that it must have been the natural cause of events, the pursuit of inequality, that drove man out of the desert into, what will be later referred to as, the “bank of the humanity.” Be that as it may, at least for as long as man was trapped in the desert, inequality was incomprehensible. For that who never left the desert, cannot reach beyond it. But “reach” should not be confused with “stumble.” If inequality was found at the bank of the oasis, it may be because rot is cannot be found where there never was life.

More importantly, a rot-less world like the desert has no place for “competition” either. Only in the history book one can say that man “struggled” his way out of the desert. Because if this man can never say “there is no life without struggle,” or vice versa for that matter, could it be perhaps that even if competition and struggle are not equivalent, they both belong to the same, albeit still up to this point, foreign language? For man in the desert was too concerned with the only thing there is under equality: the course of life. It turns out then that if rot comes after life, struggle comes after both.

Today things are very different however. Most recently, a chip can now be planted under the skin that allows a human being to control a computer and play videos games at the same time, using their mind. This chip can also “assist” the human cognitive system and may be able to resolve visual impairment for instance. Even for those born blind. Prosperous!

Regardless of the cost of producing it, this product will be at first affordable, accessible, only to the rich. Unsurprisingly, for “marketing” and “branding” can only do so much for profit maximization. With this exclusivity, an extra-element to the product would start to develop: a social status that would transform its purpose, from “to be used” to “to be consumed,” from a mean to an end. As it is produced more efficiently, the boundaries of accessibility start to loosen. With that we arrive to the inevitable bondage of overconsumption with overproduction: the product matures into an enterprise, putting an end to the notion of ‘visual impairment’ altogether, for instance.

A beautiful story indeed. One observation is hard to avoid, however: in this same world, prosperous and de-humanity seem to go hand-in-hand more than one might think. For if human progress was quantified in the past through a medium, progress in cognition for instance, prosperity here works in the opposite direction: by neutralizing cognition in the case of the chip. It is not that no one will be born blind anymore but we would just simply not know who was born blind or otherwise. A trip back to the desert then. While the desert remains a desert, man is no longer the same man. If in the past a man in the desert meant by induction man versus nature, the desert of tomorrow will maintain an urban identity: man versus man.

As for equality, in visual impairment at least, it may sound a bit too dystopian for those less-parasitic social beings it is because equality somewhere by no means implies equality, the absolute and the whole, the only equality there is. On the contrary, for otherwise it would not have to be singled out.

With all this in mind, here is a conclusion. If Jared Kushner can disregard the lives of millions for real-estate in a talk at Harvard, two questions, albeit rhetorical, may come to surface: “Who else?” and “Where else?”. As for what he particularly said, it is hard to argue it is not “prosperous.”

The same prosperity that started by calling Gazans “human-animals” until it turned them into something far more extreme: cannibals. Not those who feed off others human flesh. Those who have been starved to the point their organs started eating themselves.