A.L.F.

Comment:

why bother creating or inventing if you get money for doing nothing? this was one of the fundamental problems of socialist russia. without stimulus, economic or otherwise, people turn into lazy, apathetic fucks.

Anonymous

Excellent question, Anonymous! Curious why you put out the energy to write it, to type in the code letters etc, and post it, without any pay! In fact, who paid you to read my blog? I’d like to meet them.

I’m so sorry you feel you are a lazy, apathetic fuck without “stimulus.” You are certainly not alone, many agree with you that without a carrot or a stick they—or perhaps not they but others, are lazy apathetic fucks.

Now of course without the stimulus of healthy food, water, shelter, clothes, and on top of that a decent environment in which to live, people indeed may become apathetic.

But you see, carrots and sticks are for donkeys. I can’t help but think either you are in an asylum full of drugged people (which the USA itself seems to be becoming), or you are an academic who doesn’t look around at real people.

I have never met an apathetic lazy fuck, either among the homeless, those on the dole, or the poor slaves in the job system. Unfortunately the latter are in many cases too damned exhausted to use their energy to do what they want. And clinical depression can be very debilitating. But anyone I’ve ever met with a little, or, better, a lot of free time, plus some cash, dive into projects, or energetic play, gardening, or bicycling, or kayaking, etc, or if they are artists or thinkers, into reading projects, writing, art, music, poetry, social activism, volunteering, working with kids or old folks, improving the planet. Human beings are the most creative, energetic animals on the planet—beavers and bees spend most of their time apparently “doing nothing.” As do almost all animals once fed. Lions are extremely lazy fucks.

How sad that you have lost this inborn incentive, my guess is long ago when you started school, when all your energy went into doing what the teacher wanted, so you could get some kind of reward. It’s well known after psychological studies that if you pay kids to do what they love, soon they won’t do it at all unless they are paid. That is how lazy fucks are born, and artists and inventors die.

Finally: A GLI (Guaranteed Livable Income) isn’t “pay for doing nothing.” It’s a basic income for being a human being on a planet heaped with too much wealth for the few who stagger around under it, and on which the job system is being eaten away by technology. It’s like your mother’s breast, which in my guess you never got: it’s like watering a plant, or a planet. The plant “does nothing” until it is fed and watered in decent soil—then stand back. Set people free of the yoke of selling themselves, and watch the renaissance.

Your unpaid friend,

Jack