Resurgent.Us — Let Freedom Dividends Ring
Through Authoring Comes Authority
What a “Freedom Dividend” really means
To me, UBI is a symbolic expression of the ownership that citizens have over the society which our ancestors build and that we’ve inherited.
Our forefathers either laid down their lives fighting to defend America, or they worked without compensation as slaves to build America, or as Native Americans, they lost their land in the formation of America, or as immigrants, they pledged their loyalty to America.
Whichever is the case for any particular person, I believe all American citizens are all entitled to our fair share of the dividends as our inheritance, which rightly accrues from any of the above facts about why we are now citizens.
Our tax dollars funded the research which made everything from space travel to the internet possible. The infrastructure that private commerce uses to flourish belong to us as citizens, and so I believe a small value-added tax of 10% is a reasonable price for private enterprises to pay to secure this blessing for all Americans.
We should not tolerate that a single one of us in a country this wealthy can ever be in such a vulnerable position as to starve or go homeless. It should not exist, not here in the land of “E Pluribus Unum”, “with freedom and justice for all”. Nor should Universal Basic Income be denied to the rich, even if to them it is only a symbolic gesture of their inclusion as part of the greater “Us”. We are one American family, brothers & sisters all, and it is long overdue that we act like it.
But is this policy going to be implemented any time soon? Well, that isn’t up to me.
But since “Freedom Dividend” is a social construct and we therefore collectively negotiate it’s meaning, what is up to me is expressing my own definition of Freedom Dividend as “a passively received $1000 that comes to you each month regardless of whether you work or not”. To me, who that $1000 comes from isn’t the important thing. That you have financial freedom, is.
Indeed, even Andrew Yang, whose campaign popularized the term, has given out Freedom Dividends funded by philanthropic donation rather than government tax dollars, so again, I argue that the funding source is not the most important thing and defend the flexibility in my interpretation.
At present, only investors, authors, musicians, and others who receive royalties can reliably command this kind of arrangement to receive Freedom Dividends.
So be it.
Create your own Freedom Dividend
I argued in a recent article that those of us who support UBI should not wait for the government to provide us with income. The policy may never be written into law, and even if it is, we don’t control when or how it will be set up, at least not with the level of power most of us currently possess.
For those of us who believe in UBI to get into a position to lobby what is due to Us collectively, we must first earn our Freedom Dividend individually.
So as strongly as I feel about everything I wrote above in the first section, it should surprise no one for me to take the position of not idly waiting for the government. A generally useful (but not absolute) heuristic I live by is “what isn’t under my control isn’t worth focusing my mental energy on unless I see how it could realistically be brought under my control”.
Therefore, I argue that rather than hoping for government action, which is not under our control, we should each individually be building our own Freedom Dividend by writing on Medium. That is under our control. I outlined my plan on how to do so in a way that will generate a passive $1000 per month within no more than a year for those of us who stick to the plan.
A member of my thinktank/incubator group Resurgent.Us objected to the language used in my article:
Jobs and UBI being social constructs doesn’t make them the same except in the broadest sense. And I’m all for empowering people etc., but I prefer a more honest framing than “I got my own personal UBI by…having a second job.” Its like saying you had a threesome by including your other hand.
And I get it. I’m grateful for these criticisms because they help sharpen my thinking and my argument. So I acknowledge that I am indeed bending the meaning of a now popularized term for my own purposes. Yes.
I would have us build an army of UBI supporting authors, one which is infinitely more potent than any we ever achieve as an angry mob throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails — provided that we accept the principle that “the pen is mightier than the sword.”
See, this isn’t just any “second job” that I’m talking about.
Writing is the act of organizing thought. It is the escape hatch from your current situation, whatever that may be. Writing unlocks our capacity to reject paradigms as they have been presented to us and to instead create new options for ourselves.
Through authoring, comes authority.
Not to belabor the point, but to transform the nation, we first must transform ourselves. As Rumi put it, “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
So how does one change themself?
It isn’t a coincidence that the people with the greatest impact on history virtually all had daily writing habits, with few exceptions. The most reliable way for people to change themselves has always been through writing.
Even while waging constant war and running an empire, Marcus Aurelius still made time to write The Meditations, and he didn’t even plan to share it with anyone else. He just made it to keep his thoughts focused. From Julius Caeser to Martin Luther, from Niccolo Machiavelli to Albert Einstein, think of who it is that fills the pages of the history books, the trailblazers who were truly worth writing about. Ask yourself whether they themselves were authors in addition to whatever else they did, and the answer is almost always “yes”.
It isn’t just that brilliant people write, it is that writing wires your mind into brilliance. To paraphrase Winston Churchill:
We make our writings, and then our writings make us
What is “Truth”?
Now again, I realize some might find my call to action deceptively framed for a variety of reasons. And I admit that I’m not telling you everything. In my defense, I think for technical reasons it is impossible to do so. Even if the volumes I wrote were so filled to the brim that it took you 80 years to read them (assuming I knew enough to write such a thing) tome would still be incomplete. No matter what topic I picked, I still wouldn’t get close to revealing “The Full Truth”.
As an example of what I mean, Yuval Noah Hirari’s freely available masterpiece of A Brief History of Mankind is 62 parts (which I strongly recommend), but barely even scratches the surface. So please understand that completeness isn’t necessarily what I aim for.
I see my archetype as being more like that of The Oracle from the Matrix, with her cryptic and even misleading prophecies. Or Obi Wan, telling you my own point of view that Darth Vader killed your father. Or Gandalf, pretty much winging it as he takes a puff of the halfling weed from his pipe and leads The Fellowship wherever. Or maybe Dumbledore, leaving out the important detail that Harry needs to die.
That is to say, I don’t believe it is my job to tell you “The Whole Truth”. My job is to tell you, dear protagonist, what you need to hear to take the action you need to take. That’s all.
So yes, I do omit quite a lot, including how difficult some parts of the path ahead will be, the stinging pain of rejection and criticism that lies in store, and that I don’t even quite know the whole way there. I bend things to my own perceptions and biases. I might very well get us lost somewhere in the dangerous caves of Moria, if I can even figure out the translation to unlock the door. There are no guarantees.
But in the end, my dear patriot and UBI enthusiast (and probably fellow “nerd”, if you’ve read this far), you either trust me that your quest of becoming a skilled writer on Medium can transform you into someone formidable who can help unite our country towards harmonious prosperity, or you don’t.
So if you trust me, start building your Freedom Divided today.
