Basic Income for Attentional Autonomy

I like the idea of ‘Humans, humans everywhere.’ That’s my articulated moral north star. Many billions of us are acting this solution into society every day, even if we, from our own perspective, are just “going with the flow.” If you disagree with that premise, you can stop reading. If you think ‘Humans, humans everywhere.’ seems like a reasonable aim, let me promote what I think is the best idea we can apply to move our species in that direction, attentional autonomy, and a powerful mechanism to secure and support that social movement, basic income.

We need more physicists, more scientists, more engineers, more doctors, and more experts generally. The world has no shortage of people willing to raise their aptitudes to an expert level. The world has a terrible problem of reasonably enabling these people to slot themselves into positions from which they can build their skills. We need more volunteers, more true artists, more homemakers, and more full time family. There’s an overabundance of people with quintessentially helpful and acutely unprofitable interests. The world has a dreadful problem of discouraging, even punishing, the sole pursuit of these uniquely human activities. Attentional autonomy, at its most basic level, is already present for us all. In its primitive form, it’s an inseparable part of waking itself. I’m arguing for the popular provision of a more advanced form of attentional autonomy. Advanced attentional autonomy is the ability to pay attention to whatever you want, whenever you want, for as long as you want, without running the risk of destition as a necessary consequence.

To the credit of our founders, the American constitution does a lot of work to protect individual attentional autonomy in the concept of “liberty.” Unfortunately, our current culture has a grossly asymmetric distribution of advanced liberty. To be sure, the raw volume of human freedom enjoyed around the world today is the highest and most widespread it has ever been. Some basic tenets of capitalism are organically beneficial and have performed minor miracles for the last number of years. The ability of individuals to own and protect private property and the ability of a group of like minded people to work together and reap material profits, if their efforts are well received by the public, are two indispensable socioeconomic mechanisms that many people have died to protect. There’s a baby in this capitalist bathwater. Despite those effects, is should still be uncontroversial to see that, even though society is the best it’s ever been, society isn’t the best it can be. We can all see the persistent flaws in global capitalism, the fostering of gross wealth inequality chief among them. There’s an inheritance of personal liberty and attentional autonomy that being increasingly sequestered to only the wealthiest families generation by generation. Eventually, the dam of corporate-congressional bed fellowship will give way to the waves of unfairness they engender. Marx will have his revolution and it will be horrible for everyone involved. We have to do more as a country and as a culture to distribute advanced liberty to the common class to avoid completely destroying ourselves from the inside.

Let’s let “Liberty for all” be our mantra. To many Americans, fairness means being able to hoard as many resources as one can without paying any of it back to the public commons from whence those resources ultimately came. I’m inclined to argue that government partly exists to abate exactly that very natural human instinct; greed. Unabashed greed is like splitting the atom. Energizing for prosperity if monitored and harnessed. Apocalyptically disastrous if unseen and unchecked. It’s the specific behaviors by which individuals manifest their greed that makes all the difference. We all want a better society for our descendants and the continued flourishing of individual liberty. However, we often disagree on exactly which problems encroaching on the principle of individual liberty are the most pressing. Libertarians, for instance, think the tyranny of the majority and public largesse are the most pernicious modern threats to individual liberty. I understand that position and agree that to a large extent property rights need, and will need, popular defense. Still, arguing solely for that idea in light of gross global wealth inequality callously offers preferential protection for the personal liberty of the filthy rich over the economic liberty of the common person. I think the most socially poisonous erosion of liberty we face is the sustained plunder of the commons. A methodical robbery and hoarding of power that many have committed for generations in the name of liberty! 

Should power be distributed in a given society? I think so. That is an essence of democracy. How should power be distributed in a given society? It’s said that absolute power corrupts absolutely. I’ll propose that absolute power over others corrupts absolutely. Conversely, absolute power over yourself does not corrupt at all. Indeed, absolute power over yourself is the antithesis of corruptibility, especially in a society in which those near to you are also expected to exercise power over themselves. That is an essence of civility. Today, fetid private corporate power is engorged on the plasma of the common class and elected federal representatives perfume the air with platitudes and promises to tame our instinctual revulsion. Our officials are sweet warts bursting from the backs gargantuan carnivorous campaign funding toads. Power tends to concentrate at a single point. The social function of power might be analogous to the physical function of gravity. If all of the sun’s material were subject to its gravitational center, there’d be no humanity for us to spread. The inside of a given private business in its respective sector is usually a monarchy. That’s fine by me. The outside of the private business sector is a democracy. In a democracy power should go out to the people the way our sun has bathed us in her energy thus far. We need to build more, better mechanisms that spread power to balance the impact of the mechanisms we’ve built that concentrate it. Each individual should have ultimate power over their own attention today, tomorrow and for the rest of their lives; attentional autonomy. Every citizen is an important locus of social power. Power is money. Money is power. Money spread to the people is power spread to the people; basic income.