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But if none of that stuff existed, there would be nothing stopping Jay-Z from taking your farm. In other words, you don't "own" shit. The entire concept of owning anything, be it a hunk of land or a house or a fucking sandwich, exists purely because other people pay other armed men to protect it. Without society, all of your brave, individual talents and efforts won't buy you a bucket of farts.

So when I say "We're all in this together," I'm not stating a philosophy. I'm stating a fact about the way human life works. No, you never asked for anything to be handed to you. You didn't have to, because billions of humans who lived and died before you had already created a lavish support system where the streets are all but paved with gold. Everyone reading this -- all of us living in a society advanced enough to have Internet access -- was born one inch away from the finish line, plopped here at birth, by other people.

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"On your mark, get set -- hey! Anybody else want to watch The Office?"

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So when somebody else asks for your help, in the form of charity or taxes, or because they need you to help them move a refrigerator, you can cite all sorts of reasons for not helping ("I think you're lying about needing help" or "I don't care" or "I'm too tied up with my own problems"), but the one thing you can't say is, "Why should you need help? I've never gotten help!" Not unless you're either shamefully oblivious, or a lying asshole.

Hell, if anybody could play the "I did this myself!" card, it's me. I mentioned earlier that I've made an unfair amount of money due to writing a novel about a zombie detective who only solves crimes of paranormal romance and then selling the film rights to said novel. If anything is a one-man show, it's writing a book. Nobody helped me with that. Well, I mean other than the friend who created the title character. And the publisher who spent the money to print up the copies and publicize it. And all of the previous novelists who established the medium and genre. And the public school system that taught me how to read and write, and that taught all of my readers how to read. And the people who built and maintain the Internet so that I would have a place to promote it, and the people who maintain the roads so that the books could be shipped from Amazon ...

You get the idea.

David Wong is the Executive Editor of Cracked.com and a NYT bestselling author; his long-awaited new novel is about cybernetic criminals and other futuristic shit like that. Pre-order it at Amazon, B&N, BAM!, Indiebound, iTunes, or Powell's. You can read the first seven chapters for free by clicking below:

For more from David, see 5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen and The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey.

David Wong is the Senior Editor of Cracked.com and the author of the New York Times bestseller This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It, available wherever books like that are sold.