ABCDEFGH and What it Means to Be Human
By Lene Rachel Andersen, Denmark, and Folarin Gbadebo-Smith, Nigeria.
This article is a list of topics and considerations for the discussions at the online Global Meeting on Equinox on September 21, 2024, in the Global Bildung Network. Our overall theme in 2024 is What it means to be human: how we cooperate, how we can rethink the human experience, what it means now, and what it will mean in a society that allows everybody to thrive. We hope you find the topics important and intriguing, and that you will join our global online discussion about them. You can sign up for free here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcpcu2rrzosGN0iCZ0rlYiodMXMHr1wiLVi#/registration.
As we face seismic changes to life on the planet and therefore radical changes to what it means to be human, we need a global conversation about this subject that is open to everybody and open-ended. Among the radical changes are artificial intelligence, immense power concentration and power control due to new technologies, and global changes to the climate, flora, and fauna. There is also still immense inequality, racism, and oppression. Therefore, we need to rethink how we organize societies, structure local and global economies, and educate. Very importantly, we need to create a regenerative model for production and consumption that allows all humans and the planet to survive and thrive. We need a new collective ethos. Capitalism has solved one set of problems, but it has created other kinds of problems, and it has dissolved the social fabric that used to hold us.
Among the things we need to consider and rethink in the next model are the ABCDEFGH: the fundamental alphabet, the building blocks that can turn what it means to be human upside down, for better or for worse:
· Artificial intelligence: Never before have we faced artificial interpretation and potential for decision making that is beyond human comprehension and based on more data than humans can even grasp. Some of the data is from surveillance with facial recognition, and never before has there been private or government ownership over such data and technology.
· Biotech: With the ability to not only redesign existing life forms but also to create artificial life and implement artificial intelligence into living, neural networks, what it means to be human changes fundamentally. So does our relationship to the rest of nature, our abilities to completely mess up nature’s self-organizing complex systems, and our already unique place in the evolution of all life. With the tools for manipulation of the genome and greater control over life as we know it, whether by governments or commercial interests, humanity enters an entirely different realm of capability and responsibility.
· Circularity: Contrary to the development of artificial intelligence and biotech, which pursue a development towards constant, exponentially increasing complexity, nature and human life are, at their very foundation, circular. The evolution of life itself, of the human species, of our cultures, and of our meaning-making happens in iterations upon iterations with slight variations from time to time. New phenomena in nature and culture are co-evolutionary: they emerge in context and are themselves context. This is an aspect of evolution that exponential technological development does not possess, and therefore new technologies often disrupt circular systems.
· Demographics: The population explosion happens in the poorest parts of the world with the least access to education, and where the consequences of climate change and global inequality are already felt the most. This naturally leads to migration and is a cocktail bound for human suffering and portends a global disaster.
· Education: We are facing a number of educational problems: According to the UN, by 2030, the world will be 44 million schoolteachers short, and in many places, teachers’ education is already not sufficient, most education is focused on knowledge transfer and teaching to tests rather than comprehension and educating for life. Worst of all: education is mostly seen as an expense, not as an investment. To the small extent that education is seen as an investment, it is as a personal investment in individual happiness and opportunity, not as a societal investment in an informed populace who can contribute to the thriving of a society or a country.
· Finance, Never have so many resources been held by so few. The more global trade becomes, the more the money will trickle up towards the highest existing concentration of capital. Inequality of people , inequality of countries, and unregulated inequality of technology make for a combustible social mix.
· Global dispersion of knowledge: Along with extreme economic inequality, inequality in education and knowledge is just as severe. Thirteen percent of the world’s population is illiterate (the lowest rate ever, though), and about one third is not using the internet. In the richest countries, primary, secondary, and tertiary education is of high quality and free of charge, up to 3% of 64-year-olds hold a Ph.D., up to 100% of people use the internet, and there is state-subsidized access to life-long learning. We need a world where knowledge is treated as a global public good and is freely distributed, and we need to lift from the bottom. We have a world where people can communicate and learn around the globe, which is an opportunity that we have never had before.
· Humanism and Human Rights: Humanism and Human Rights insist that individuals are equal: they have equal value and require equal protection and equal rights. This is a fundamental principle behind rejecting and fighting racism, colonialism, slavery, oppression, and chauvinism of any kind. We cannot cooperate globally unless we recognize that all individuals are humans on the same terms.
These eight building blocks contain challenges that we need to face if we are going to create a thriving planet for ourselves and everything on it. If we want thriving societies and a thriving global economy, they are necessities. The good news is that ABCDEFGH all are within human control. We can take responsibility for them.
This is what we are going to discuss on September 21, 2024, at the Global Meeting on Equinox: What it means to be human when we are facing these challenges and how we can deal with them. As previously mentioned, you can sign up for free here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcpcu2rrzosGN0iCZ0rlYiodMXMHr1wiLVi#/registration
What it Means to Be Human
To deal with the ABCDEFGH, the eight major building blocks and challenges, we need to look at the ways we cooperate as humans. Therefore, 11 concrete ideas that can change our structures for cooperation have been brought together below. Some are new, some are old, some of them anybody can start locally with only a bit of drive and initiative. Some of them require major investments up front, and some need new legislation. The 11 ideas are:
1. Neighborocracy.
2. Reclaiming cooperation; challenging the current money system as an instrument of cooperation and introducing the concept of female money.
3. Looking at the economy as a game and designing it based on gamification and game theory
4. Global taxation at the global top and on data.
5. PACT: Production, Accomplishments, Cooperatives, Trade.
6. Polymodern economics.
7. Harmonizing economy with nature.
8. Bildung-/ubuntu-education.
9. Neighborocracy & bildung housing.
10. Bildung for peace.
11. Copyright to your biometrics and the PODs to store it.
Together, the ideas present ways to rethink governance, money, economic development, education, and armed conflict. Combined, they could lead to a redesign of societal structures that will reinforce what already works well but challenge what doesn’t work and causes harm to humans and nature.
When we meet on September 21, 2024, we are not just going to focus on the challenges, we will also discuss how you can take these ideas with you and turn them into action. Through short presentations, we will ensure they are properly introduced, so read on if you feel like it, or show up for the Global Meeting at Equinox with curiosity. Some of the topics include suggested further reading so you can dive deeper into them. Feel free to comment as much as you want, and don’t forget to sign up here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcpcu2rrzosGN0iCZ0rlYiodMXMHr1wiLVi#/registration
1: Neighborocracy
Neighborocracy is a system of self-organized neighborhood parliaments, each consisting of up to 30 households, each of which becomes responsible for one thing that is important to the whole neighborhood and for everybody in it to thrive. The meeting formats guarantee that everybody gets heard and that decisions are collective. Each neighborhood and its parliament may join a larger parliament of 30 neighborhood parliaments, which then represents up to 900 households, and which may join other parliaments representing 30 x 900 households. The structure of Neighborocracy thus allows a fractal structure for thousands of neighborhoods to solve collective problems. The local neighborhood parliaments are self-organized, and decision making among parliaments is a constant process of collective issues being addressed and solved in the smallest parliament possible.
At the Global Meeting on Equinox, you will meet Joseph Rathinam who is one of the Neighborocracy leaders in India:
Suggested reading: https://medium.com/bildung/reclaiming-the-commonity-61614f6a3b62
2: Reclaiming Cooperation: Female Money
Humans are social animals. This means organizing to live together, not in the metaverse or other parts of cyberspace, but in real life. Who or what controls and regulates the means of cooperation? Today, it is largely fiat money, bankers, financiers, and governments, and the current dynamic of money is a zero-sum game. It is a binary system of winners and losers: spend your money and it is gone; with your money gone, you are out. But you still have to live. To make money, you need to have skills, which in many places requires money to get, i.e. borrowing and creating debt. Alternatively, one can just borrow money, work in insecure, poorly paid jobs, or end up in slavery. Or your children do. Or maybe you sell your daughter for marriage. As you make and spend money in the system you benefit the system long-term, but you only benefit yourself long-term if you can save up money. If you cannot save up money, you must keep earning and spending or you ‘fall out’ of the system: a death or debt spiral. The way more money is created is through creating debt that needs to be paid back with interest, and due to the way the system is designed, money automatically trickles up towards what has already shown a track record of generating more money. On its own and without restraints, capitalism increases the economic distance between top and bottom, i.e. inequality.
Inspired by the work of Belgian economist Bernard Lietaer, tech innovator Pindar Wong calls the current money ‘male money’ and wants to create community money or ‘female money,’ a kind of money that reproduces depending on how it is used and how value is created. The two kinds of money thus represent Yang and Yin, and the combination of the two could generate money where it is most needed: at the bottom.
This would require a complete rethinking of what money is and how the economy works. This has happened before: Fiat paper money was invented in China; the European Renaissance used it to create capitalism as part of colonialism, and among the technological drivers was Gutenberg’s printing press. Before fiat money and capitalism, both concepts seemed otherworldly, if people could even conceptualize them; now we all use them as if they are the most natural things. In fact, we treat current money, the market, and the economy as natural givens or forces of nature over which we have no control. This is simply wrong: money, the market, and the economy are all human made, and we can do with them whatever we want. We either change them deliberately as new technologies are created, or the new technologies will lead to new economic models that do not serve either humans or the planet. Male and female money, used together, may be regenerative if we design them well and use new technologies to help run them.
Fiat money is failing us. The current situation in which money is created out of thin air, debt is, in principle, infinite, unsustainable, and mainly in the hands of a few countries must be reexamined at its root. Humanity stands on the edge of a financial precipice and though it may look robust from certain corners of the OECD, it is obvious from the perspective of the bottom of the global economy that the current regulatory and management mechanisms simply cannot cope. How can the political economy of fiat money be managed? There are winners and losers in the current game, how can the winners, the uberwealthy, the tech giants, and the multinational corporations who thrive on the concept of “interest”–interests be managed?
The fundamental question is not the money, but how we cooperate, how we create value, and how value creation is rewarded and/or creates value for the worker-and-creator. Can we create a currency that rewards cooperation and actual value creation?
Suggested podcast with Pindar Wong: https://www.jsbarefoot.com/podcasts/2021/3/14/embrace-the-heretic-hong-kongs-pindar-wong and some very interesting articles too.
3: What if the economy were a game?
The economy is a game, but it is poorly designed, nobody can escape it or decide not to play, and it currently produces millions of winners and billions of losers. Most people only play the game out of necessity. We typically consider games something that people play for fun. Why? What is it that makes games fun and the economy a hellscape to at least a quarter of the people on the planet? By looking at the features that make games fun and meaningful, could we learn something that would allow us to design an economy with similar features: a set of principles and rules that would allow everybody to ‘play the game’ and continue playing with a sense of meaning and purpose?
These are some of the features of fun games:
· Easy onboarding and you get starting points or other rewards the moment you join so you can start playing with a sense of accomplishment.
· There are the same rules for everybody.
· The top players cannot rewrite the game;
· The rewards are predictable, there are no random changes to points and badges after you join.
· There are game rewards for new levels of achievement, and they are the same for everybody;
· You can win the game and reach the end point after which you can enjoy your victory — or you start over again. In board games, everybody may decide that you want to play again.
· If you ‘die’ or lose in online games, you can always start over again: there is easy onboarding. and you don’t re-enter and start with a deficit on points!
The economy will never be a pre-designed game that can remain the same forever without changes, of course. It will have to be a system that is under constant modification. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from good game design, i.e. gamification, and from how people perceive justice and appreciate cooperation in systems of exchange, i.e. game theory.
4: Global taxation at the global top and on data
Before the invention of the steam engine, the job market that followed it, and the modern nation state, there was no income tax. There was land tax and other taxes that were mainly taxation on property. There were some taxes imposed on farmers and indentured labor by the kings and religious establishment, but income tax as we know it today is based on the workforce of the industrialized nation state. In industrialized countries, national income tax is typically the main source of national tax revenue. People are taxed in the country where they work, which means that nation states mainly tax their own citizens, as income taxation for migrants is generally complicated.
With digital products and artificial intelligence replacing industry production of tangible goods as the main generators of profit, taxation needs to change accordingly. In a world of global, (almost) borderless, digital products, global companies, global markets, and global profits, and where the richest people are the owners of algorithms who also acquire global power, nation states need to regulate and tax that which generates the most global profit, and which takes away political power from legitimate political and democratic powers and institutions. Taxation in a digitized world needs to relate to data where the biggest profits are made.
How to do this is the big question, and nations need to collaborate on this. They also need to collaborate with tech industries to figure out the best ways to do it. The revenue from this taxation should be considered a global revenue that can be distributed to the poorest parts of the global economy as investment in education and infrastructure. Either the states start taxing global tech, or global tech will start the equivalent of taxation and charge countries for access to their digital services, which will basically mean that states have handed over their sovereignty and autonomy to algorithm-owning billionaires.
5: PACT: Payments, Accomplishments, Cooperatives, Trade
PACT is an economic infrastructure that is designed to promote easy onboarding at the bottom of the economy in subsistence economies. PACT stands for Payment for production; rewards for Accomplishments by individuals and villages in a gamified credit system in which the credits can be used to get new tools, and other benefits. It sets up Co-ops, enables viable Trade, and has a built-in education program that also allows people to earn credits by studying.
The idea is very hands-on: a cooperative PACT Umbrella is set up for a country or a region, and under it Local PACT cooperatives are established with up to 200 households. Each of these Local PACTs start out with 7 trained board members who are employed by the PACT Umbrella, they also get a refrigerated truck with a driver who goes to the Local PACT villages and buys produce, which is sold at the nearest market. The individual farmer automatically becomes a member of both the Local PACT and the Umbrella PACT at his or her first sale, and for each sale he/she gets both money in-hand and credits: the money they can spend; the credits will accumulate and work as savings for very specific uses. The credits are personal and cannot be transferred to family members or others, and with the accumulation of credits come access to farming equipment, benefits, and voting rights in the Local and the Umbrella PACT cooperatives. Over the course of 7 years, a Local PACT co-op gradually goes from being run by the trained board members to being taken over by the local members of the PACT with one trained board member being replaced by a local farmer each year. The education that will get members extra credits may be better agricultural techniques or economics and democratic training. Besides selling produce, farmers and villages can earn credits collectively or individually by promoting, say, irrigation, family planning, education for their children etc. For instance, parents could be rewarded with credits for each year their daughter(s) stay in school rather than getting married.
PACT members can track their credits online, and if they do not have a smart phone, a member can use a QR-code on a piece of laminated cardboard that they can show to the truck driver who can then scan it and show them their credits. As each PACT Enclave and its co-op grows in size and strength, it can branch into setting up factories for processed foods and its own stores.
PACT products should be sold under the same brand and marketed professionally from the beginning. Besides the food production and sales, each Local PACT is also part of a recycling system where people are paid and earn credits for collecting glass, soda cans, and plastic, which can then be re-used.
PACT could double as a ‘registration of existence’ system, which would be useful to many poor people around the globe. As production and sales grow, and as more people get better education and accumulate credits, the total credit score of a village or region becomes an indicator of economic robustness and may attract further investments. These accumulated credits might also work as the value base of a crypto currency; rather than “digging out” more crypto coins through an algorithm (like Bitcoin), the value of the PACT crypto will be rooted in the real economy and real value creation.
Suggested reading: https://www.nordicbildung.org/pact/
6: Polymodern Economics
The concept of polymodern economics describes the economy in four different strata:
· Indigenous gift and households economy: no money involved.
· Traditional market and cooperative, artisan, local economy: involves money.
· Modern capitalist, industrialized, national economy: involves money.
· Postmodern digital, continental and global economy: involves new kinds of money.
By distinguishing between, measuring, and facilitating each of the four economic strata differently, local, national, continental, and global economies can be addressed with different measures and taxation.
Explanatory reading: https://lenerachelandersen.medium.com/polymodern-economics-ec4d817b3824
PACT would primarily operate in the traditional market stratum of a polymodern economy, but it will build up capacity to produce for the city markets and supermarkets in the industrialized and global part of the economy.
7: Harmonizing Economy with Nature
In his (not yet published) 2024 paper Harmonise With Nature; Only a change of mindset can reverse cultural habits which counter nature, Dr. Ulrich E. Loening lists 9 fundamental differences between nature and industrialized society / economy and suggests that if we can grasp this and change our mindset accordingly, we can harmonize the economy with nature, and then we can thrive with nature and survive:
This understanding of the economy could harmonize very well with the other approaches to rethinking economics presented above.
8: Bildung & Ubuntu Education
Education must be addressed as more than just the transfer of knowledge. It must address the full potential, meaning-making, and development of each individual person, their personality and agency in their community, culture, country, culture zone, and as a member of humanity and all life on the planet. There are traditions around the globe that promote this. Two of them are Ubuntu in parts of Africa and bildung, particularly as it has been developed in the Nordics.
A video about Ubuntu with Mamphela Ramphele from South Africa at the first global meeting on Equinox in September 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjqjLJVfGcA
A video about Ubuntu with Folarin Gbadebo-Smith from Nigeria at the global meeting on Equinox, March 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPGFGWqe1eI
Lene Rachel Andersen’s video about bildung from the same event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1Gk5kAsACc and here my article about bildung in Denmark: https://lenerachelandersen.medium.com/the-danish-secret-7e5e38750a01
All three speakers have contributed to the book What it means to be Human: https://www.nordicbildung.org/what-it-means-to-be-human/
9: Neighborocracy & Bildung Housing
The world over, there is a need for cheap, sanitary housing. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, millions of people live in slums in or around the largest cities. In the US, one million people are homeless, and in major cities in the richest countries affordable housing, particularly for young people, is a problem. We need to invent cheap, sustainable housing with adequate clean water, plumbing, electricity, and sustainable indoor temperature regulation, as well as enable self-governance among the people who live there to maintain both buildings and installations. One option could be mass-produced, stackable, livable structures (i.e. old shipping containers) with installations that either include a self-contained water management system and solar power or that can easily be plugged into local main pipes, sewers, and grids. Traditional cooling technologies from Africa and the Middle East must be incorporated in the design, so that cooling will not require much, if any, electricity.
Taking from Neighborocracy, 30 family units could make up an entity that shares main installations for water management and electricity, and each 30-unit entity could be a bildung community, which would have access to education in maintenance, urban gardening, crafts, bookkeeping, food production, civics etc.
Quality housing is already being mass-produced as stackable units in Sweden: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/headway/how-an-american-dream-of-housing-became-a-reality-in-sweden.html
10: Bildung for Peace
Autocratic leaders around the globe are more interested in serving themselves and attacking neighboring countries than in creating conditions for the wellbeing of their own people. Good education is no guarantee for a peaceful society — Germany in the 1930s is just one example — but undereducation definitely makes manipulation of the masses, fascism, and other kinds of authoritarianism and totalitarianism easier. Bildung is the currently best-known vaccine against authoritarianism, and the wealthiest countries could probably make a rather cheap long-term investment in global stability and peace if they threatened autocratic leaders with educating their people, particularly the deserters from their armies. Imagine if NATO had threatened Russia with giving any deserting Russian soldier 2 years of education including learning a craft and bildung in a camp facility with indoor plumbing, three nutritious meals per day, and evenings and weekends off for sports and hobby activities. Not only would it make deserting rather appealing, returning to Russia afterwards might inspire some independent thinking.
11: Copyright to Your Biometrics and the PODs to Store it
AI is increasingly closer to being able to create live deepfakes that are so like the original person that differentiating between the two becomes impossible. When this happens — and probably even before then — fakes will infiltrate the mediascape, trust in media will erode, and democracy will be dead. So will business negotiations and other meetings online; only live presence will guarantee that you are not talking to a deepfake avatar.
A substantial, if not by itself sufficient, means to protect us from deepfakes and misuse of digital identity will be to give every citizen copyright to their own face, voice, and all biometrics by default and to make it a basic human right. This would not solve the problem of deepfakes, but at least it could make it very costly to produce deepfakes, because it would not just be a crime, it would be a human rights violation that warrants severe repercussions.
With copyright to your biometrics being a human right, the next question becomes: who should be allowed to store biometric information and where? Tim Berners-Lee, who was one of the inventors of the internet, suggests that we all have an online POD (Personal Online Data) with our most private data: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/technology/tim-berners-lee-privacy-internet.html
ABCDEFGH
We are facing major, complex problems as a species, and none of them can be solved with just one solution; they are too complex and too big for that. Instead, we present here eight aspects or challenges that need to be taken into account as we solve those bigger problems: Artificial Intelligence, Biotech, Circularity, Demographics, Education, Finance, the Global need for access to knowledge, and Humanism and Human Rights. We also present here eleven ideas or proposals that may contribute to solving our major problems. None of the proposals are addressing climate change and other systemic threats to our eco-systems directly. Instead, they offer partial solutions that may contribute to sustainable conditions for humans and other life on Earth, including how we organize local, national, and global economies.
Here is how the eleven proposed ideas relate to the eight aspects we need to take into account:
Artificial Intelligence is both a danger and an immense opportunity for humankind. Particularly, bildung/ubuntu education is necessary if people are going to be safe around AI and not be fooled by it or ascribe to it human capabilities and emotions etc. that AI and robots do not have. As Zak Stein writes in What it Means to Be Human, the interaction with AI cannot be allowed to emulate human interaction in such ways that we, but particularly children and the most vulnerable, least-educated adults, are deceived. Bildung and a sense of ubuntu and humanity is also a prerequisite for the developers of AI if they are not going to create unethical AIs. Taxation may be an efficient tool to curb the use of AI, particularly for non-essential uses of AI, because it is very data-intense and taxing data will make AI expensive to use. Polymodern Economics would emphasize and enable that high-tech industries must be handled at the continental and the global level, and an economy that harmonizes with nature would have built-in feedback loops that would favor sustainable tech development. Copyright to our biometrics, including our facial features, would also protect us against appearing in fake videos etc.
Biotech, like AI, is also both a danger and an immense opportunity for humankind. Again, bildung and Ubuntu education are necessary if we are going to have safe biotech. Taxation, polymodern attention to continental and global regulation and collaboration, setting up economic feedback loops that harmonize with nature, and copyright to our biometrics, are other prerequisites for safe development and use of biotech.
Circularity is an aspect of nature that we need to build into our ways of thinking about human interaction with the rest of the planet, with each other, and with culture, tech, and economy. Bildung and ubuntu education would be the obvious, primary measure to change our understandings. Neighborocracy, with its circular method or practice, would also be great practical help, as circularity is built into the neighborocracy structure’s meetings and collaboration in each group. As neighborocracies are circles of discussion and decision-making, their dynamic structure inherently allows for circular iterations to address concrete problems. A polymodern economy, which includes indigenous and traditional economic patterns, would help too. Female money might also be circular, just like a well-designed economy would be if we designed it as a game with easy (re)onboarding. By allowing people who fail in the economy to onboard again easily according to transparent rules, the economy will allow for both failure and new iterations. The macroeconomic structure needs to be designed such that re-entry is financed, but failing and reentering is not favorable to sustaining oneself long-term in the economy.
Demographics are defined by births and deaths, and with education and family planning, birthrates typically go down. Particularly education of women, not just regarding family planning but education in general, allows women to make informed and independent choices about how many children they want, and most women prefer to have fewer children when they have the choice. For women to have this choice, it is important to educate the men too. In other words, education is crucial, particularly bildung / ubuntu education, as well as community, culture, and a sense of economic security. Neighborocracy, female money, a well-designed economy, PACT, and polymodern economics could all therefore benefit demographics. The dynamic structure in neighborocracies allows them to reorganize when demographics change, and the process in the neighborocracies is itself educational. The local collaboration through the neighborocracy can often make decisions that offer the poorest financial help when the community decides to create paid jobs for them.
Education: We need to rethink it so that it contains all eleven proposals plus the necessary knowledge to live sustainably in one’s local environment. We also need to rethink the economy, so that education becomes integral to it. Part of the “game” therefore needs to be financed education so that one does not have to pay separately for being able make a living in a system one cannot live without participating in.
Finance: Money needs to be available at the bottom of the economy, but needs to be invested or available so that it contributes to lifting people out of poverty long-term and sustainably. Finance should therefore consider all eight challenges and all eleven proposals before money is invested; we cannot survive in a pyramid scheme that destroys the planet.
Global dispersion of knowledge: AI can definitely be of help here, but it needs to be done ethically and in ways that do not harvest data from the users and turn them into products. As a species, we need to protect ourselves and every one of us from our own invention so that we do not end up in a manipulative or slave-like relationship with AI. In the book What it Means to Be Human, Steve Joordens and Adam Frost as well as Zak Stein address this. Almost all of the proposed solutions: neighborocracy, female money, a well-designed economy, taxation of data, PACT with education, polymodern economics, creating the right kinds of feedback loops in an economy that mimicks nature, bildung / Ubuntu education, neighborocracy & bildung housing, and bildung for peace can contribute to global dispersion of knowledge.
Humanism and Human Rights: History is replete with examples of slavery and subjugation. Race as presently defined is a floating decimal but ends up in a binary metric: There is white and every shade of brown depending on the quantity of black infused. “Us” and “The Other.” Instead of embracing plurality, the world has trended toward the binary. Consciously or subconsciously, this is a basis on which international policy, aid, and even “global” finance is formulated. It justifies the feeling of relative deprivation in the United States, and it was the justification for major unacknowledged genocides against brown and black people. What the West gives as aid they take away in trade; they play by rules that they themselves made and that give very little room for emerging economies. This is an ongoing corrosion of the concept of what is means to be human from the point of view of a non-white person. It is also the reason why the Human Rights promoted by the UN and the West are met with suspicion outside white culture. Any discussions of what it means to be human without robust discussion of race and prejudice will ring hollow. For many white people this is a sensitive subject because it challenges their existing epistemology and sense of self and accomplishment. The case is similar regarding women and men, sexuality, and, often, ethnic minorities. “Inclusivity” cannot satisfy this node in the human complex. Humanity has to be determined on its own terms, a term that carries all the differences, accents and paradoxes as a given.
With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence and the creation of avatars and robots, seeing all humans as equally human is more crucial than ever. There are already examples of image recognition AIs that mistake black people for non-human, and there are biases and prejudice built into the data based on which AIs are trained. If we do not address racism, misogyny, and other forms of prejudice, we will be technologically enforcing injustices of the past.
There are currently initiatives for giving rights to nature and “human” rights to animals, such as great apes, because they are highly intelligent, sentient beings. Important as granting rights to nature and some animals may be, humans are different and there is a reason we cannot equate the rights humans need and the rights of nature and animals. Other humans can disagree with us and make deliberate choices in ways that offend us, and we all do something that somebody else does not like, and do it in ways that are not possible for animals and nature. The ways of animals and nature are outside human morality; we cannot judge them on human terms. Humans make choices that other humans find immoral, we judge each other all the time. Humanism and Human Rights are there to protect each one of us, particularly the people we do not like and whom we find immoral, offensive, and annoying.
Whether we are talking neighborocracy in small communities or redesigning the economy globally — and everything in between — we need to face our prejudice and learn to see every human individual as having the same value and rights as everybody else. Ubuntu, bildung, and similar philosophies of how the individual becomes their full and true self through their community and culture does not change the fact that it is as individuals we feel pain and suffer, and therefore individuals must have rights and be treated with dignity. We are both individuals and shaped by our community and interaction with others and the world, and there should be no conflict between individual rights and communal belonging. They are two sides of what it means to be human.
Concluding Remarks
All of the above raise new questions, such as:
· How to set up the systems using collaborative game set-ups instead of competitive games? The world will end up brown, not black and white. We need to embrace this fact and develop equitable systems.
· How to set up new ways of working using technologies in the wisest possible ways?
· How to build circularity into the resulting systems so they can keep running and regenerating nature and societies?
· How to take into account the current socio-economic landscapes and the inequalities regarding age and education that exist?
· How to make sure that we promote bildung, i.e. both the transfer of knowledge necessary to understand the 21st century and its technologies sufficiently, and the personal, emotional development that allows people to thrive socially?
· How to promote a gentler more Humane world overall.
The Western exploitation of developing economies must be addressed, not least in the way “aid” is often used by donor countries to benefit their own industries. Likewise, the current Chinese colonization of many areas formerly colonized by Europeans must be addressed, as must the genocides that are committed by non-Westerners. Part of being human is our ability to see “the other” as less human than ourselves and to maim and murder. We need to confront this as a universal part of what it means to be human if we are ever going to stop doing it.
There must be mechanisms in place that keep the majority of value created in one place in that area; when the West industrialized, the tycoons re-invested their profit locally, spent their money locally and hired local staff, and they thus helped grow their local economy. Today, foreign investments often extract value without creating matching local economic development. On top of that, the winner-takes-all mentality is driving a new cold war between the East and the West. This results in a value-destroying global economy where only the military industrial complex wins.
Creating a bildung and Ubuntu world seems like the open-ended enriching — and most likely also the only working — method to get rid of racism, cultural anxiety, misogyny, antisemitism, islamophobia, etc. and to managing migration through inclusive growth.
We need to look at and imagine a world in balance where every human being can develop without another losing out.
Don’t forget to sign up for free here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcpcu2rrzosGN0iCZ0rlYiodMXMHr1wiLVi#/registration.
Everybody is welcome on September 21; the program is time-zone friendly: https://www.globalbildung.net/what-it-means-to-be-human-2024-september-21/.
You can read more about us and What it Means to Be Human here: https://www.globalbildung.net/what-it-means-to-be-human/ and in the book by the same name: https://www.nordicbildung.org/what-it-means-to-be-human/
