Imagine if tomorrow you found out you were a part of a family that was considered one of the wealthiest in the world. That your family was one of a number of families that was partially responsible for the creation of such innovative things as the iPhone, the Personal computer, the telephone, and the Television. Imagine if you found out that, in each of those things, your family held a stock.
It would be a pretty good feeling, wouldn't it? You would feel proud of your family and also maybe yoursel. You would also be very happy because you would know that, owning a piece of stock in such a thing, means your family is doing okay for themselves.
I have good news for you. You're already a part of that family. The bad news is that your particular offshoot of that family has probably been robbed dead blind, the same as mine. You are not considered to have anything to do with the Iphone, the personal computer, the telephone, or the Tv. Nor are you considered to have anything to do with the bridges, the highways, the shopping malls, the skyscrapers, or all the other things that have been built across literally centuries upon centuries worth of time. Somehow, it is the case that, even though your family, same as mine,can trace itself back millions of years, you are still considered as having absolutely nothing to do -- as having no link at all -- with the creation of civilization itself. With literally any of it. And therefore, the billionaires explain to you, it is perfectly justifiable that you are born with absolutely nothing, and they are born with everything.
The billionaires , you see, will have you believe that it was just one billionaire in particular, one lucky day, who invented the iPhone. They will have you believe that it was just one man in particular who helped usher in the age of the personal computer.
This is, of course, absolutely ridiculous, and nothing could be further from the truth. The idea, in fact, that you ever have, for a moment, believed something as pathetically false as this, goes to show how blind you have become, thanks to centuries of being brought under the yoke and robbed. For the truth is that every single creation that has ever, in the history of man, happened, is a collective creation. A communal creation.
Yes, that's right. Every single thing that has ever been created was not merely thanks to "one lone genius", but rather thanks to him and to the community. For those who find this impossible to fathom, my advice would be to jump backwards in time, all the way to the 1100s or some far off year like that, and start trying to see how many "lone geniuses" were randomly tinkering with prototypes to the beloved iPhone. The truth is that nobody was --- not even the smartest people on Earth at the time. And why weren't they? The answer, though hidden from us by the murderous billionaires & millionaires of our age now, is very simple: No matter how smart someone in the 1100s was, they simply weren't a part of the right community. They were living in the 1100s. It was literally the Dark Ages. Imagine the worst ghetto you've ever seen in the glorious United States and now magnify it by 10 trillion. No lone genius boy is going to randomly invent an iPhone there. What he will instead do is make a discovery or an invention that fits in for the community of his time.
Why is this important to say? It should be obvious yet somehow it is not: All those really rich people that the capitalist system has created in recent centuries, many of whom have, indeed, created magnificent things for the human race, are still con artists, thieves, and poisonous killers, due directly to the fact that they are taking all the credit for something that, even if they added the finishing touches, a community still helped them to ultimately create. Again, it must be stressed: In the entire history of mankind now, there has never, not a single time, been a lone genius who has done it all by himself. Every genius you have ever heard of is always a part of what the great musician Brian Eno, an advocate of Universal Basic Income, rightfully calls a "scenius". A scenius is that beautiful thing we never hear about, because the murderers called billionaires always make sure everyone obsesses over the genius. What is the scenius? Again, its simple: It's the incredibly vibrant scene or community to which every single creator of anything colossal has ever belonged.
One older example of a genius operating within a scenius would be someone like Leonardo DaVinci.
Notice how Leonardo was not born in the middle of, for example, the Siberian wilderness, in the year 1452, but was instead born right on the immediate outskirts of what was, at that time in world history, one of the most accomplished cities on the planet. If the theory of the lone genius who deserves all the wealth was true, as the billionaires want us to believe, then that means DaVinci could have been born in the furthest corner of the earth at that time, and raised by literal gorillas as was Tarzan, and still ultimately become Leonardo DaVinci. Anyone with half a brain in their head knows this is not true of course. DaVinci was a part of a collective, of a community. It is no coincidence that DaVinci has tons of interesting peers from exactly the same time and place as he's from, who also lived in the same city as him, and shared ideas with him. This is because all of these people were operating within a scenius, and the scenius was operating within a country. Without the cooperative effort of that entire country behind him, the Mona Lisa would have never existed. And of course the same exact thing can be said for people like Galileo Galilei and other such names. The exact same thing. They lived and worked within a scenius.,
The real truth about our time period, when so many are still refusing to see that such a thing as a scenius exists, is a very sad truth. In fact, the fact that a word doesn't even really yet exist to define the idea of a community that is very intelligent speaks volumes about the dead blindness of our current age. It's almost as though we've not yet evolved to see the complete “top down” picture of our times and, as a result of being unable to glimpse the bigger picture, we are unable to see that geniuses are always born in or, in the modern age, one airplane flight away, from very intelligent and vibrant communities.
In the year 1500, when DaVinci operated, you could perhaps justify why the people were unable to see the bigger picture of the vibrant scene. They didn't have the Internet and they didn't have airplanes. For all they knew, cities as mighty as Florence were literally everywhere. Therefore, they fell for the trick that DaVinci was operating completely alone, deserving of all credit -- absolutrly all --- for his discoveries.
But in a year like 2018, where we have the Internet -- the most obvious example of a collective enterprise there could be -- there's no longer any excuse for this blindness. In this age, it's incredibly obvious when someone is operating within a scenius -- and yet we still refuse to see it. Why? Well, mostly it would seem that it is a direct cause of the very modern and very capitalistic obsession, with the idea that "everyone must pull their own weight here". Instead of looking at the innovation we experience as the result of the collective, the capitalists insist that we see it as the result of a few very industrious and "private" individuals who, we are told, simply must sit on top of the pyramid, and take 99% -- literally 99% -- of all profits, leaving the rest of us to fight over scraps and crumbs. The capitalists go so far as to tell us that, if these few individuals did not get the chance to sit on top of the pyramid and keep 99% of all profit, all innovation and invention would immediately, overnight, grind to a halt. No one would create anything at all, we are sternly told, if they could not hope to be rewarded, as the Wal-Mart family has been (for "creating" a grocery store) with a combined wealth of $151.1 billion. All interest in the stars, in flight, in computing, in medicine, in art, in math, in literally everything, would come to a grinding halt tomorrow, if one could not hope to steal 99% of all profits from the rest of their own human family.
The ironic truth about this absurd idea, of course, is that it's all actually the exact opposite: Far from being an impetus to create new and beautiful things for people to share, the hording of almost all of mankinds wealth, which is what billionaires do, has done nothing but stifle invention and creation. In fact, it's almost a miracle that anything has managed to get created at all under this system of thieves and robber barons. Anyone who seriously believes that humans will cease creating just because they don't think they'll be able to one day amass a net worth of $100 billion dollars, obviously does not know too many real humans. The strange and bizarre fact about most of mankinds greatest innovations is that they have happened thanks to people who were struggling mightly in the face of a poverty and a lack that no one should ever have to live in such a time as this. We are talking about people who have been forced to work 12 hours a day at a completely useless "bullshit job" (as the anthropologist David Graeber, also a supporter of Universal Basic Income, refers to nearly all managerial jobs) and who then come home, and with a spare 2 hours of very tired time, gradually, over the course of 30 years, manage to invent something thats actually useful. We are talking about people who, oftentimes, never get any reward for their invention whatsoever. Now imagine if that person was able to collect some of their rightful inheritance. How much faster would they be able to invent and innovate? Imagine if everyone was born with the tools and resources, that the collective has created in the first place, and was thus able to contribute, when they wanted, to further invention?
The truth about a time like this is not that people are motivated by outlandish billion dollar rewards that happen to only 1% of people. The truth is that the vast majority of people are not even able to access the resources needed to further innovate and invent. Huge sections of our society are just withering away in dark emptiness, totally robbed dead and blind. Imagine a beautiful blanket, and half of it has been eaten away by moths and cockroaches. That is poverty.
If, for example ,you have ever asked yourself "where are the flying cars we were promised in the 60s?" or "why are we not yet on Mars?" and "where is the virtual reality?", look no further than to the literally gigantic areas of this civilization that are completely collapsed and forced to live in dark shadows, beneath the weight of crushing, miserable poverty. The idea that conservatives & Republican thieves are now trying to frantically spread, in the face of conversations about things like Universal Basic Income, that all humans will "cease functioning" overnight, only because they'll be automatically given enough money to eat and live on, is absolutely preposterous. No one is going to stop functioning thanks to a $1,000 a month Universal Basic Income that helps them eat 3 meals a day and have a guaranteed room to sleep in. The truth is that they'll actually start functioning then! They aren't functioning now because ... how the hell could you function, when you have nothing to eat and no where to sleep? Impoverished sections of this civilization and, more importantly, this very rich country, need to be seen for what they are: Areas of society where there is no where to 'plug in' the battery to charge.
How can a phone ever turn on if it is not charged? The phone must be charged, at least a bit, and then it can function much more efficiently. In our own time, there is the diseased idea that the fear of poverty "puts people in line" and "helps motivate them" to do things for society. This is a massive falsehood. The fear of poverty does not put people in line, nor does it motivate them to do anything for society. What it really does, especially if the poverty is severe enough, is create a very ruthless and dangerous criminal class, who is far more likely to kill you, than to be interested in finding a way to help you. And of course, the craziest part about the criminal class which poverty has created, is that they actually cost more to maintain than the Universal Basic Income would cost to implement, and they never even get a chance to help us with anything.
Does that make any sense at all?
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