Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 129
The past couple of shows I’ve been challenging my joyful and deeply held optimistic view of the natural human condition with research that reveals how we all quickly become blind to and blinded by our privileges—existing in a state of privilege inevitably distorts our views of how we got there and how we act, often radically. Once upon a Neolithic time we showed sophisticated political imaginations in our design of social structures that regularly deflated power and privilege—police forces that turned over personnel regularly to minimize abuse and a range of cultural conditions and pressures on those who accumulated wealth to share that wealth with the whole community.
I have always seen myself as an ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ populist and imagining how we might live together here and now in ways that privileged power doesn’t restrict our flourishing fulfillment has become part of my work. Something tells me that a culture and economy that values bottoms-up self-organization will, among it’s many benefits, carry natural and continuous governors on the accumulation of privilege.
Make sense? I am not sure myself. At this point it’s more something I can feel than something I can explain.
I am not predicting when a Universal Basic Income (UBI) will arrive but it seems inevitable that it will.
- Employee costs—wages, salaries, benefits—are roughly 70% of a company’s operating expenses.
- That means companies will be highly motivated to find ways to implement AI and other office automation technologies that replace jobs.
- At some point the elimination of jobs will result in a marked deterioration in the purchasing power of the marketplace.
- Businesses need to sell their highly profitable goods and services so it will be in their self-interest to support a tax that funds a UBI.
So yes, it’s a bit of a leap of faith that the bottoms-ups renaissance I believe will occur when a creative and entrepreneurial population is provided with a regular monthly stipend will not only revitalize the country it will also support individual freedom making coercion by powerfully privileged less likely in their lives.
I won’t ask you to make the same leap; instead over the next months I will look for ways to rationalize it for you.
Gosh, I’d love to hear your thoughts. carl@creativepopulist.com
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
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