A solution to human developmental stagnation

The human race seems doomed to repeat the same stupid mistakes over and over again because its intelligence walks hand in hand with its stupidity.  As a species the human race fails to learn the lessons of its history and therefore sleepwalks its way to ever more restrictive rule and towards the destruction not only of itself but also of the planet which is its home.

Homo sapiens sapiens is a remarkably intelligent, creative and resourceful species but the pace of its technological advancement far outstrips its wisdom to use the technology it creates, making for a dangerous situation.

This is only one of the deficiencies of the human race however.  The other is its insistence in its belief that it has somehow overcome its animal nature and the darker selfishness of the human condition which leads to war, discrimination, hate and a narrowing of focus from the needs of society and species to the selfish needs of the individual.

Is it any wonder that there are so many divides within society?

One of the greatest gifts the human race has is the ability to create communities, to come together to serve the collective needs of that community, but it is also its greatest curse because, in creating the communities that it does, it also creates animosity between competing communities.

Communities, in this sense, does not necessarily mean a geographic community but also those communities that share common values or traits – religious, socio-economic, racial, ideological, etc.  Each community has needs that require fulfilling and each community may need, at some point, to come into conflict with another to fulfil those needs as resources are finite but the needs of so many communities seems infinite whether that is truly the case or not.

Conflict can breed the most fertile conditions for technological advancement but also widens the gaps between communities because wisdom very rarely accompanies each advancement and enmity grows.

So called democratic nations swing between Left wing and Right wing administrations, each undoing the improvements created by its opposite because of the ideological basis upon which those improvements were founded so progress cannot be made in solving the needs of the entire human population within its borders.

To take the United Kingdom in 2017, the current Conservative government has stoked divisions within its borders, disassembled the achievements of the previous Labour administration and created a hostile environment for the disabled community through institutional demonization and persecution of that group.  Under such conditions, people with physical or sensory impairments or mental health conditions have been devalued as human beings and seen, in the main, as worthless.  How much the species would have lost in intellectual advancement had Professor Stephen Hawking grown up under such a government.

The only way to heal the divisions created by so many communities trying to co-exist is to make decisions based on the needs of the species rather than the needs of communities or individuals.  The poor are as much wealth creators as the rich; in fact, some might argue that the poor are greater wealth creators because they are the ones who produce the goods that create the wealth.  The disabled may not be able to contribute to society in some ways but they can in others, depending on their individual impairments.  Skin colour does not make anyone more or less valuable to the species or society.

Political ideologies are more complicated to overcome but not impossible to do so.  Left wing ideologies tend to view the human condition as social beings drawn to each other and able to work together towards common interests.  Right wing ideologies tend to view the human condition as individualistic beings who need to be controlled to work together to make a society work.  Both positions have some basis in truth but, as in everything, the truth lies somewhere between the two ideological positions.  To reduce this to a simplistic statement, it could be argued that followers of Left wing political ideologies tend to think with their heart over their heads whilst followers of Right wing political ideologies tend to think with their heads over their hearts.  Either position on its own risks the society it tries to create.  One cannot use their heart to make decisions without considering the intellectual implications of doing so and one cannot use their head to make decisions without considering the very real emotional implications of doing so.  The way to overcome this dichotomy is to find some middle ground between the two approaches, a synthesis that fulfils all needs and considers all variables – a species-level approach.

The species-level approach is also the way to amalgamate the needs of the various human communities by viewing every single human being as valuable in some way thereby elevating the needs of every individual to the same level.  Every human being has the potential to be something greater than the current societies allow them to be, whether that be due to their socio-economic status or level of physical, mental or emotional functioning, etc.  Every human being is special in some way.  Every human being can contribute to the species in some way if they are given the opportunity and the resources to do so.  No one is valueless.  No one is unnecessary.

If the human race looked at technological advancement and ecological challenges with a species-level approach, perhaps it would advance to a point at which wisdom becomes ingrained in decisions allowing wisdom to keep pace with its ever-advancing intellect.  Perhaps the human race would stop turning the planet it lives on into a toilet filled with chemical sludge and a toxic atmosphere in which each breath taken holds the potential for illness or death.  Perhaps the weapons and technologies of war could be put to better use in solving the over-population of the planet rather than culling whole portions of the most valuable resource – human beings.

Using a species-level system of thought, the human race might just be able to justify its existence to whatever entity runs the Universe.  It may never be perfect but the human race could be so much better than it is now.

The battle for Humanity’s soul has begun…but I’m out

In 2005 I started to actively do work that would make the world a bit of a better place.  I started out helping individuals with their efforts to better themselves through education by becoming an adult learner support volunteer and, from there, became a Student Governor on the Board of Governors at my local adult college whilst bettering myself with several courses at the same establishment.

In 2009 my efforts went one step further to encompass the betterment of my local community by organising and presenting a depression awareness event that aimed to dispel the myths surrounding depression, give people a better impression of those with the condition and build a sense of community within the depressive community and beyond.  This was followed up in 2010 with a more generalised mental health awareness event which, although didn’t get the community bums-in-seats I was hoping to get, did smooth the way to inter-organisational referrals that helped a number of individuals.  I will never know how many people were truly helped by that second event because figures weren’t kept.

Back in 2009, I also became the Chair of the Thurrock Mental Health Service User and Carer Forum which had, due to the uncertainty of its support systems, was in a poor state and in the following 22 months tried to build it up into something that could sustain itself if the members wanted to do so.  I wrote a constitution and tried to run the group in such a way that maximised its effectiveness (whether I was successful I will leave others to judge).

I also became a columnist on my local news website, Your Thurrock, in 2009. Starting off with mental health and spreading to more general topics, it was only in 2010 that I set my focus on politics.  The debates between the leaders of the main parties awakened my political interest and, when the worst happened and the Tories got into power helped by the treacherous Lib Dems, I used my column to highlight the injustices that were to follow from that victory.  I highlighted the injustice of the Bedroom Tax, the lack of a true mandate for the Tories to govern and other issues but all I got was abuse from the Right-wingers who branded me, at one point, a “communist” because I’m a supporter of the welfare system and hold the bankers who caused the world banking crisis in contempt.  I got very little support from Left-wingers, who should have rallied to my defence, and what I did get was rather lacklustre.

Despite the fact that many of my columns seemed to be Left-wing, I am, in fact, non-partisan and try to remain as impartial as possible as people would have seen if Labour had re-taken power and the ferociousness with which I would have attacked Labour for any mistakes or hateful policies they tried to enact.  This was something that I didn’t have a chance to show given that I only started talking about politics in the aftermath of the Tory victory in 2010 and something that my Right-wing critics seem to ignore because it would weaken their position.

2010 was an especially busy year for me as I joined a mental health service user involvement project that sought to train service users to go out and obtain the information required by the Mental Health Commissioners of Essex to put the money where it was most needed in terms of the services it commissioned.  For the three years of the project, I and many others travelled Essex to get the information we needed to improve the services for the mental health community of Essex.  After three long years and many broken promises by the Commissioners later, the project failed spectacularly, resulting in no improvements and giving the service users who did the work in good faith a bad reputation within the mental health service user community.  We did good work and got burned for it.

In 2012/13, I became involved with a local university’s service user and carer involvement programme for their Social Work Faculty.  I did good work trying to improve the readiness of the social work students for the ‘real world’ beyond their lecture rooms and to give them the sufferer perspective on depression.  I was praised for the work I did by lecturers and students alike and then I got dumped by the programme in 2014 for daring to use an expletive in one of my sessions which was, in fact, a direct quote from a social worker about his or her own service user which led to her suicide.  A Left-wing, nanny State policy was used to stop me from participating in work that would have improved the service provided to thousands.  I was burned, discarded and left psychologically devastated at a time when I was also in the middle of a teacher training course I was taking to help me underpin the work I was doing at the university whilst also going through a divorce and in imminent danger of losing my disability benefits.

Due to the circumstances I found myself in back in 2014 with all my good work left behind me in ashes, I disappeared from public view not wanting to waste my efforts on an increasingly hostile world.  I would return to my isolation to observe Humanity’s fall from grace.

I have watched the UK get torn apart by the Tory insistence on chipping away at every fault line, pitting one group against another, until the whole edifice of UK society started to crumble.  Demonising groups of individuals is their method to make their draconian policies palatable for the gullible masses and they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

The EU Referendum was the final nail in the coffin for the UK’s soul because it chipped away at the one fault line left that even the Tories couldn’t control and allowed the Ultra-Right-wing to get a foothold in the country.  Hate fuelled by the Tories between different groups led to a nasty campaign that has allowed race-hatred to flourish alongside hatred towards the sick, the disabled, the poor and the jobless.

Despite my decision to isolate myself from the rest of society, I did get involved in a couple of marches in London and I have spoken out through my blog but what I have done has been largely ignored so I returned to my isolation and my role as the observer of The Fall.

The Tories are now going towards the Ultra-Right despite what some commentators say and they are now more openly fascistic than they were, bolstered no doubt by the rise of the Ultra-Right forces and sentiments within certain groups.

The one glowing beacon of hope was the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party but, scared by the danger he poses to the status quo, he is being systematically attacked by elements outside his party and from within.  Corbyn may have huge support but I’m afraid that, in such a hostile environment, he may not be able to turn things around.  Without a significant miracle, the UK’s soul is already lost to the Ultra-Right.

Having been abused by the Right and burned by the Left, I now sit outside the battle and have no reason or inclination to get involved again.  Should the future of an Ultra-Right-wing UK become a reality, I will surely be one of those who will be earmarked for the UK’s version of ‘The Final Solution’ because of my depression and I will die (as this is my fondest wish since the age of 11, I don’t see this as a negative thing) and so I see no reason to fight.  If a miracle happens and Corbyn’s supporters turn the tide, I will be safe but remain depressed.  I have no stake in the future as I have no children and I will be either dead at the hands of British Nazis or safe but forever depressed so, again, no real reason to get involved in what I increasingly see as your fight as I no longer feel a part of the human race.

The problem is, the threat to Humanity’s soul has spilled out into other countries and it could have been avoided if people had learned the lessons of history.  The Ultra-Right is in ascendance and Humanity has only itself to blame.

I tried to warn people and they ignored me.  I’m not a crank who believes he can see the future; I’m a man who tries to learn the lessons of history.  I could see history being repeated and can extrapolate the future that will evolve from current events if they are not changed.

Hitler was far from an aberration as he was once thought as.  Hitler was the forerunner of the dark times ahead for Humanity.

I will rise or fall with Humanity but I have tried to do my bit to improve lives and society and failed.  The fight is yours alone now because I’m out.

Basic income policy article sent to Jackie Doyle-Price

Below is the full text of a letter I have just sent Jackie Doyle-Price, my local MP.  I wonder if she’ll even read it?

Dear Ms Doyle-Price,

As one of your constituents and as I know that one of your stated political interests is welfare, I was wondering if you had read the following article from The New York Times?  It outlines a novel idea for a policy of a basic income.  Perhaps you could put this forward as an idea for use in the UK to your colleagues in the Cabinet who could actually make a decision on this idea?

Switzerland’s Proposal to Pay People for Being Alive

By ANNIE LOWREY

November 12, 2013

This fall, a truck dumped eight million coins outside the Parliament building in Bern, one for every Swiss citizen. It was a publicity stunt for advocates of an audacious social policy that just might become reality in the tiny, rich country. Along with the coins, activists delivered 125,000 signatures — enough to trigger a Swiss public referendum, this time on providing a monthly income to every citizen, no strings attached. Every month, every Swiss person would receive a check from the government, no matter how rich or poor, how hardworking or lazy, how old or young. Poverty would disappear. Economists, needless to say, are sharply divided on what would reappear in its place — and whether such a basic-income scheme might have some appeal for other, less socialist countries too.

The proposal is, in part, the brainchild of a German-born artist named Enno Schmidt, a leader in the basic-income movement. He knows it sounds a bit crazy. He thought the same when someone first described the policy to him, too. “I tell people not to think about it for others, but think about it for themselves,” Schmidt told me. “What would you do if you had that income? What if you were taking care of a child or an elderly person?” Schmidt said that the basic income would provide some dignity and security to the poor, especially Europe’s underemployed and unemployed. It would also, he said, help unleash creativity and entrepreneurialism: Switzerland’s workers would feel empowered to work the way they wanted to, rather than the way they had to just to get by. He even went so far as to compare it to a civil rights movement, like women’s suffrage or ending slavery.

When we spoke, Schmidt repeatedly described the policy as “stimmig.” Like many German words, it has no English equivalent, but it means something like “coherent and harmonious,” with a dash of “beauty” thrown in. It is an idea whose time has come, he was saying. And basic-income schemes are having something of a moment, even if they are hardly new. (Thomas Paine was an advocate.) But their renewed popularity says something troubling about the state of rich-world economies.

Go to a cocktail party in Berlin, and there is always someone spouting off about the benefits of a basic income, just as you might hear someone talking up Robin Hood taxes in New York or single-payer health care in Washington. And it’s not only in vogue in wealthy Switzerland. Beleaguered and debt-wracked Cyprus is weighing the implementation of basic incomes, too. They even are whispered about in the United States, where certain wonks on the libertarian right and liberal left have come to a strange convergence around the idea — some prefer an unconditional “basic” income that would go out to everyone, no strings attached; others a means-tested “minimum” income to supplement the earnings of the poor up to a given level.

The case from the right is one of expediency and efficacy. Let’s say that Congress decided to provide a basic income through the tax code or by expanding the Social Security program. Such a system might work better and be fairer than the current patchwork of programs, including welfare, food stamps and housing vouchers. A single father with two jobs and two children would no longer have to worry about the hassle of visiting a bunch of offices to receive benefits. And giving him a single lump sum might help him use his federal dollars better. Housing vouchers have to be spent on housing, food stamps on food. Those dollars would be more valuable — both to the recipient and the economy at large — if they were fungible.

Even better, conservatives think, such a program could significantly reduce the size of our federal bureaucracy. It could take the place of welfare, food stamps, housing vouchers and hundreds of other programs, all at once: Hello, basic income; goodbye, H.U.D. Charles Murray of the conservative American Enterprise Institute has proposed a minimum income for just that reason — feed the poor, and starve the beast. “Give the money to the people,” Murray wrote in his book “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State.” He suggested guaranteeing $10,000 a year to anyone meeting the following conditions: be American, be over 21, stay out of jail and — as he once quipped — “have a pulse.”

The left is more concerned with the power of a minimum or basic income as an anti-poverty and pro-mobility tool. There happens to be some hard evidence to bolster the policy’s case. In the mid-1970s, the tiny Canadian town of Dauphin ( the “garden capital of Manitoba” ) acted as guinea pig for a grand experiment in social policy called “Mincome.” For a short period of time, all the residents of the town received a guaranteed minimum income. About 1,000 poor families got monthly checks to supplement their earnings.

Evelyn Forget, a health economist at the University of Manitoba, has done some of the best research on the results. Some of her findings were obvious: Poverty disappeared. But others were more surprising: High-school completion rates went up; hospitalization rates went down. “If you have a social program like this, community values themselves start to change,” Forget said.

There are strong arguments against minimum or basic incomes, too. Cost is one. Creating a massive disincentive to work is another. But some experts said the effect might be smaller than you would think. A basic income might be enough to live on, but not enough to live very well on. Such a program would be designed to end poverty without creating a nation of layabouts. The Mincome experiment offers some backup for that argument, too.“For a lot of economists, the issue was that you would disincentivize work,” said Wayne Simpson, a Canadian economist who has studied Mincome. “The evidence showed that it was not nearly as bad as some of the literature had suggested.”

There’s a deeper, scarier reason that arguments for guaranteed incomes have resurfaced of late. Wages are stagnant, unemployment is high and tens of millions of families are struggling in Europe and here at home. Despite record corporate earnings and skyrocketing fortunes for the college-educated and already well-off, the job market is simply not rewarding many fully employed workers with a decent way of life. Millions of households have had no real increase in earnings since the late 1980s. Consider the current debate over fast-food workers’ wages.

The advocacy group Low Pay Is Not OK posted a phone call, recorded by a 10-year McDonald’s veteran, Nancy Salgado, when she contacted the company’s “McResource” help line. The operator told Salgado that she could qualify for food stamps and home heating assistance, while also suggesting some area food banks — impressively, she knew to recommend these services without even asking about Salgado’s wage ($8.25 an hour), though she was aware Salgado worked full time. The company earned $5.5 billion in net profits last year, and appears to take for granted that many of its employees will be on the dole.

Absurd as a minimum income might seem to bootstrapping Americans, one already exists in a way — McDonald’s knows it. If our economy is no longer able to improve the lives of the working poor and low-income families, why not tweak our policies to do what we’re already doing, but better — more harmoniously? It’s hardly uplifting news, but minimum incomes just might be stimmig for the United States too.

Annie Lowrey is an economics reporter for The Times. Adam Davidson is off this week.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the subject either by mail, e-mail or on any media outlet this gets debated on.

Regards,

Myles Cook

If I get a reply, I’ll post it right here!