I split myself between two distinct frames of contemplation. How to extend humanity further into the future and how to how to amplify the beauty, wonder & magesty of human experience within existence.
The two play within each other. The Sustainability of human life means more time to increase Wellbeing. Greater wellbeing means more stability as we move into an ever more uncertain future.
Sustainability & Wellbeing.
Survival & Freedom. In a different lingo.
Freedom is a word I have a difficult relationship with, as so much is carried in it, often with excess disregard for the importance of what is carried there.
Freedom to choose how to pursue wellbeing often translates into being manipulated or excluded from wellbeing. Freedom to Fail is really licence for society to fail you. What Freedom to Fail acts as a faux convergence for is Freedom to Experiment & Freedom of Non-Partisipation. Both of which require a reliable social safety net, not the absence of it.
A reliable social safety net can present a risk to sustainability, if structured poorly, because of freeloaders. So the obvious solution is to create a government system to sort the freeloaders out of the social safety net. This gradually degrades into a new kind of freeloader over time, corruption.
This very basic presentation of the territory of the Ideal of Freedom demonstrates the source of the principle split of Left & Right in America.
But this is a false dichotomy. These values aren't in some form of fundamental tradeoff. There are a Class of solutions that simultaneously reinforce both Sustainability & Freedom across time.
I don't have a final name for this Class yet. Not as a separate conceptual entity. Antifragile is a technical term for things that grow stronger under stress. That would be part of the name if the understanding is more realized.
I don't have a fully realized definition of this Class of solutions yet. UBI is a model that doesn't solve the systemic risk side perfectly, but solves much of the freedom side well. Enough money that survival pressure is hard to capture & manipulate against people to control their behavior. (Freedom of Non-Partisipation.) Not so much money that the incentive to participate in society is lost, encouraging experimentation.
If fundamental resources cannot be taken away, easily at least, then sustainability is also improved, as the loss of fundamental resources, & the hoarding of them, is a primary cause for conflict.
UBI has one weak point in that the risk of collapse is shared between all people. If we structure the model right, then we collectively encourage ourselves to do work that supports us all, and the risk is minimal. If structured poorly, we all prefer for others to do the work, and so the risk gradually expands, until society collapses. For UBI to work, it requires a simultaneous cultural revolution. A shift in collective mindset. For us all to shift gears to do productive work we enjoy, instead of productive work we get paid for, and unproductive activities we enjoy.
This kind of culture would be both high in Freedom and high in Sustainability. Eventually it wouldn't need UBI to support the culture, it would become at every layer the Class of systems that are antifragile and mutually reinforce both Sustainability & Wellbeing.
