A liberty of one's own?
“It is remarkable… what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about… therefore not merely do effort and labour cease but also hatred and bitterness” A room of one's own, Virginia Woolf, 1928.
Woolf saw that for seeds of creativity to grow it is necessary to have the right conditions, that is a private room and an income, without these rich soils you are just throwing acorns onto dry, baked earth and hoping for an oak tree to grow. She recognised that when your time is absorbed by mere survival there is no time or opportunity for creativity to develop, when you labour to provide the basics of life, food, shelter, there is no time left for anything else, no freedom to think, plan, live, to be inspired and it clouds the mind with resentment at your condition. It was especially difficult for Woolf as a woman in 1928 it was rare to have the opportunity to change the situation, women had only just got the right to vote, have money or even earn an income in the first place, however what is amazing is that despite the amble provocation she dropped her anger when she gained an income of her own, she immediately move into a higher state of creative and her life changed, she bypassed resentment because she had a better place to be and things to do with her life.
A rich aunt fell from a horse and changed her life, an inheritance of five hundred pounds a year gave her freedom and a room of her own, these were the only conditions she need to write freely instead of chasing an income, and the world ended up enriched by her good fortune. To think if it were not for this luck we might never have know her work, now imagine how many great books, paintings, thoughts, ideas have been lost due to the lack of opportunity to do more than just survive. We were never designed to work down a coal mine for twelve hours a day just to pay the rent and to do so destroys our ability to do anything else, we become a rat in a wheel doing nothing except repeating the cycle of waking and working. Somewhere in the development of civilisation we lost our natural liberty of time, hunter gatherers spent less than half a day hunting and searching for food, the rest of the day was for resting and bonding with your tribe, as opposed to barely seeing your own family and friends, they had a stillness that we will never know.
Whilst the modern world has more resources and productive than anything a caveman could imagine it has done so at the expensive of our time, it is the one thing that it has failed to produce an abundance of, which is strange as we are so efficient at making what we need. It use to take seventy people to produce enough food for a hundred people to eat, now it takes just one person, that should have meant that almost seventy people were now liberated and yet that has not happened. We expanded our wants as technology increased what was possible, radio, television, fridges, washing machines, all of which became necessities, social connection became a service with the entertainment industry, pubs, cinemas, holidays, and there is no reason why this list should stop increasing or be shortened. There is nothing wrong with wanting things, to have a better, fuller life but not at the expensive of the most valuable asset of time.
Our wants should never replace the fundamental liberty of freedom over our time, when we trade it all for mere wants it is a deal with the devil where he gets everything of value. Time is not a waste, it is not the lost opportunity of income, it is the natural state of being human, a stillness that our society has forgotten and when we refuse it, we lose our creativity, our chance to produce and have ideas that change our world for the better, and when individual lose it so does everyone. A million salespersons do not have anything to sell if not for the one person who invents the product for them to sell in the first place, and we are moving to world where the robots are replacing their human automatons, anything that can be split into simple tasks will be done by machines in the future.
Which is not a bad thing, there is so much more for us to do than just driving trucks or dig coal, there is the large scale problem of mental health and personal development that we have not even started to address, emotional intelligence is going to become more valuable in a materially fulfilled society, and emotions are something that robots are poor at, and will be for a while. People will prosper and others will suffer, the need for everyone to work will disappear slowly and what will be left is too many people for too few job, labour will become cheap and soon no one will be able to build an income of their own.
That time is not now or soon, you do have the chance to build an income, to buys asset that pay an income and gain a change of temper that allows you to let go of your hatred and bitterness, which is an quality worth more than things, though it is built upon the things that are necessary for our happiness. How you value your own freedom is up to you, but there is something that you can only gain with time and that should weigh heavily in your valuations. It is freedom that you can only appreciate once you have it, you might imagine it but to process it is a different experience and once you do you can not imagine giving it up for all the diamonds in the world, once you have your basic need met it is the thing of most value that you can process. To have the peace of living without hatred or bitterness is quite simply wonderful, to have that peace of mind, to let go of resentment and anger at unfairness as you have liberated yourself from the bonds that tie you to the order of masters and slaves (or employees as we call them now) as you take your power away from other and give it back to yourself.
Whilst I absolutely support the idea of universal income for reasons of fairness, as a correction to unmet essential demand (i.e not starving to death or being homeless), it also allows people to move past hatred and bitterness, an income derived just from being human, that places value on people removes the injustices of the past, generations of poverty caused by social stupidity or the accumulation of capital by elites by inheritance, strangely it also reduces the need for accumulation in the first place as it even protect the trust fund children from their own wastefulness, it secures a protected legacy for everyone which is why trust fund were invented in the first place. Basic income is just a legacy that we all get to share and in a perfect world we would be building a wealth fund now (such as Alaska is doing) now as the great project of our time, where we capture the increases in productivity that we know that are coming and allow everyone to share in the benefits in the long run.
However I would not hold my breath, as the airlines say put on your own air mask first so that you can help other, even if basic income came tomorrow it would be difficult as we also have to change ourselves from getting value in our lives by being consumers to producers. Which is also the best way to save yourself, when you live in a consumer society you have an unique advantage when you become a producer, your happiness is no longer tied to what and how much you can buy. You no longer have to spend money on unnecessary things when you realise that all you need is an income and a private space in which to create, if your only outgoing is shelter and food, you only need a modest income either from part time work or assets that pay an income (shares pay a 4% dividend, so your cost of living times 25, is how much you need to be free to create).
Once you have the liberty to create you are free and as Woolf says that freedom includes letting go of your hatred and bitterness, for the simple reason that being creative and productive is the ultimate freedom, it is the human spirit at it's greatest, and a society that was in line with that spirit would be richer than any country in the world today. Productivity creates it's own momentum and it necessary for us to return to our nature state of being time rich and having stillness, the whole point of agriculture and industrialization was to liberate us from uncertainty, it is just somewhere along the line we forget that and that the greatest reward is freeing our creativity to becomes even more productive it is a circle of virtue. After all we only need a hundred Googles, Amazons or other leaps in efficiencies to pay for basic income, and I am willing to bet on people if they are given the freedom to create, that they will be able to succeed in creating a richer and happier world, as long as they have a room of their own and an income.
