Utopia: Hope & Faith Part III
In the midst of my hope, faith, and near-enemies series I got drawn into debates on LinkedIN about a clip from one of Rutger Bregman’s TED Talks framed as “Why do the poor make so many poor decisions?” Drawing on actual science of human performance, Bregman makes a clear and compelling case that poverty causes chronic stress resulting in reduced functioning, period. This is an antidote to centuries of dog-whistle theories and policies conflating poverty with inferiority or moral failings — both still powerful forces in our culture today. Of course, it is a 3 minute clip taken from a 16 minute TED Talk derived from a six and a half hour audiobook based on a life’s work… so it doesn’t cover all the bases… nor does it need to. It is a primer and an invitation. We are in the habit of mistaking ‘conventional wisdom’ for ‘wisdom’ even when it is wisdom’s near enemy. We like the energy-and-attention-savings that habits and conventions and traditions bring, but we are often inadequately curious about when those things have outlived their usefulness and no longer earn their keep.
I’m extending the invitation; both of Rutger Bregman’s books are worth reading (although we’ll be reviewing content from Utopia today.):
First, a further preview, with commentary slanted by my own perspective, of the three highlighted callouts on the front jacket of Utopia for Realists.
- 15-Hour Workweek. Contemporary capitalism is structured on keeping a pool of desperate unemployed workers with no other way to eat or care for their families besides taking whatever low wage, poor conditions, and often dangerous jobs are available. This reality not only creates much of what we call ‘street crime’ it also bolsters a culture of exploitation. This is not an accident, it is an operating condition of the system we’ve designed. A better way to design the system would be premised on full-employment, everyone has meaningful work to do. If you do the math and divide up the work that needs to be done, we could radically shift the proportion of our lives spent working for others and the proportion of our siblings who get to experience meaningful work.
- Open Borders. This one was a big eye-opener for me. It is so obvious, but I had never thought of it in this way before the book. Look, when things at home get too bad — you leave, you ‘run away’. When things get too bad at work, you quit and damn the consequences. When things get too bad in your country, and they do, and the entire surface of the world is covered in countries, and none of those countries has truly helpful and scalable immigration policies, then you are just screwed. I mean, you can become a refugee… which is exactly as bad as it sounds. In order for the human experiment in self-governance to continue AS AN EXPERIMENT from which we CAN LEARN, we must allow people to opt-out of forms of government BY WALKING AWAY and PICKING ANOTHER SYSTEM. Can you imagine, for instance, what a fully open US-Canada border would have looked like in December 2016? Just take a minute to ponder the downstream effects of that talent drain.
- Universal Basic Income. This is the one that really gets people’s blood boiling. We have the research, but we just don’t believe it… it runs so contrary to the mythologies we’ve developed about ‘how people are’ — never mind that they aren’t true. It runs so counter to the cultural beliefs that undergird capitalism that it must be a lie, or else we’ve been living a lie (always an uncomfortable realization). Here’s the reality — when we create systems of ‘financial assistance’ that are targeted at specific people or groups of people we inevitably create a separation and a judgement and a stigma BY THE VERY ACT OF TARGETING. We don’t want that outcome, it doesn’t seem like it should be that way, but by every light of every experiment we’ve ever run, it is that way nonetheless. This is one aspect of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, scaled out to the size of human societies — the truth of it, discovered in small particle physics, is that there is no way of looking that doesn’t impact the thing being looked at. Check for yourself, we love our idea of objectivity, and every time we’ve tried, in all seriousness, to test it, to test our objectivity, we find a mirror showing us our own way of looking. It’s a lesson even the electrons are trying to teach us. Here’s a story from my own days at The University (capitalized at the insistence of their own style guide). We were working on a campus-wide student printing solution. Now, we had, for years, been providing free printing. At just a couple of cents a page (if I recall accurately, is was around 1.2 cents for single sided black and white, about 10 times that for color), it was cheaper for the institution to provide a minimalist system with no accounting and simply pay the costs for the paper and toner and minimal support. But, as things went along, every year there was an inventory of ‘wasted printing’ that seemed egregious (and it was) and there were always a few ‘bad actors’ who would print out their textbooks from hacked PDF’s instead of buying them (this form of opting out of the textbook racket might be more a valid form of protest than bad acting, but we’ll leave that aside for now). So, it was decided that the answer to the questions of abuse and waste — which were problems — was to implement a system where students had to pay for their printing. To cut to the chase, after all was said and done, the cost per page for a student for a single sided black and white was 11 cents, almost 10 times the cost of the ‘print’. In other words, the cost of printing was 1.2 cents, the cost of accounting (of watching and tracking and charging for) those prints was 9.8 cents per page. Now, this is an egregious example and I am using it for hyperbolic effect. Of course, there were ways that system could have been more efficient — and over time many of those improvements were made, and the cost reduced accordingly. But, friends, don’t get distracted from the point. There is NO system that adds the ‘accounting functions’ of watching and tracking that is free, or that gives extra energy to the system. In almost all cases ever studied, the accounting systems don’t even cover the average (non-outlier) cases of waste and abuse… and the outlier cases are usually issues of corruption that are detectable in other ways. The cost of looking is non-trivial and it is the near enemy of trust. Trust is the thing that is broken. It is broken by micromanagement, it is broken by anything that singles you or your group out for measurement or monitoring or evaluation… it seems, once again, like it shouldn’t be this way, but it is, my friends, it is. What Universal Basic Income does, and Rutger shows study after study where this is so, is to set a baseline for non-poverty-based human existence (as opposed to subsistence) where people, at the most local of levels — themselves and their families — are trusted to know what they need. They are given ‘value’ (in terms of monthly payments) because the are of value (as human beings sharing this world). No other reason is necessary and no excuse is sufficient. If we desire to keep the benefits that the abstraction of a monetary-and-financialized-economy provide, then a Universal Basic Income IS human-rights translated into that paradigm. I know most of you want to argue with me RIGHT NOW… you can, but I ask you to read the book first, so that we can have the argument that we need to have. So that we can be in struggle together to figure our what is true and what works and what doesn’t and we can, together, help grow a world that is worthy of our progeny.
To bring these threads back together and wind them into our theme of Hope and Faith and Near Enemies:
- Bregman’s research helps us develop a more clear understanding of ‘how things are’. Seeing and accepting how things are, how they are in and as themselves, as realities, this is requisite for rebuilding our capacity for Faith. Every form of faith based on illusion or wish or hope, those are near enemies.
- Bregman’s vision doesn’t articulate a near-enemy version of Hope — it is not about a future that will be perfect after this and that have happened. It is the version of Hope that sees or dreams a more beautiful world and says, this is how we must live NOW to walk the path toward that dream. It is a subtle but powerful distinction.
- Our obsessions with measurement (whether scientific or policy-driven) are understandable, but they are not free and they are not without foreseeable consequence. The belief that ‘measurement must be ubiquitous and omnipresent’ is a near enemy of ‘measurement as a tool of inquiry’. Tools can be deployed or not deployed, the cost and the impact of their use is known, their tendency to turn into handy-hammers is known, their utility is immense and useful and wonderful and finite and limited and narrow.
- Trust is a virtue. As such, it has near enemies of which we ought to be wary. Trust is THE factor that differentiates high-performing teams and organizations from the rest, the data is clear, the research good. What is less good is our understanding of all the kinds of things that erode, diminish, and subvert trust… Although Brené Brown and others are doing good work to help us dig deeper in this area… and the guidance from our wisdom traditions is substantial.
I concede to Elder Tolle:
“At the core of all utopian visions lies one of the main structural dysfunctions of the old consciousness: looking to the future for salvation. The only existence the future actually has is as a thought form in your mind, so when you look to the future for salvation, you are unconsciously looking to your own mind for salvation. You are trapped in form, and that is ego.”
This is true of both the near enemy versions of hope and of utopia as we have defined them. We cannot look to the future for salvation. True forms, virtuous forms of these must be identified — if they exist — in order for us to follow the wisdom of ‘walking the path’ or ‘dancing the dance’, without mistaking ourselves for guide or choreographer. By grounding our contemplation in a Faith disambiguated from near enemies, I have sought, in these articles, to articulate a version of Hope — and of Utopia — that is present-tense, not future-tense, that is not its most common near enemy. Without Faith as anchor, these versions cannot and will not withstand the shifting currents and tides and winds that buffet us at this moment, but with our Faith intact we can walk the path, unexpectedly finding ourselves manifesting more and more of the shared dream of Hope into a reality of Utopia.
(This is the third of a three article series on hope, faith, and utopia. The first article is Hope Is the Near Enemy of Faith & the second article is The Paradox of Hope & Faith)
