Dialogue
Sue (CDO Supporter): “What’s your first priority in life?”
Kim: “Saving the environment.”
Sue: “Okay, but what is your first day-to-day priority – you know, not what you want it to be or think it should be but what it actually is?”
Kim: “My job.”
Sue: “So, why is your job more important than the environment?”
Kim: “Well, I’m not saying it’s more important – actually, just driving to and from work and all the resources I use once I get there damages the environment and, working at Centrelink, rather than producing ‘goods’ or ‘services’, we produce ‘bads’ like Harassment and, by extension, Mental-Illness, which creates lots of other excess ‘bads’-managing jobs in health, charity, law-enforcement and other bureaucracies, which, in turn, superfluously damage the environment – but, obviously, I need money to live on.”
Sue: “So, you need a Survival-Income?”
Kim: “Of course. At least. If you don’t survive, you can’t do anything and there’s no browny points for being a ‘dole-bludger’.”
Sue: “Hence, you could say, having to obtain your Survival-Income prevents you from maximising your ‘Coopetition-contributive self-actualisation’?”
Kim: “What?”
Sue: “It prevents you from behaving in a ‘Cooperation first & foremost and, within that context, Competition as the treasured second’ manner?”
Kim: “Excuse me but who understands what you just said? You’re speaking ‘nerd’.”
Sue: “Your job prevents you maximising helping society in the ways you’re most enthusiastic about?”
Kim: “Definitely.”
CDO ‘Simple Pre-emptive Solutions’ Noticeboard
‘Choice: We can blame individual-citizens (and punish them) or we can blame our societal-systems (and optimise them).’
The solution to:
- The U.S. gun lobby (and all lobbyism’s corruption of democracy) is 2020 Democrat Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang’s ‘Democracy Dollars’ – i.e. a $100 [or, $20] use-it-or-lose-it voucher to every voter, which is given to the party/candidate of their choice thereby diluting the gun-lobby’s bribery to the point it has no effect. [Aside: apparently, the gun lobby’s influence is particularly relevant in pre-selections.]
- The illegal hard-drug scourge is, instead of only attacking Supply – i.e. via law-enforcement – also attacking Demand – i.e. any addict (as determined by, say, 2 doctors) can go to a clinic where they get their drug of addiction administered for free, which means illegal drug traffickers’ business would dry-up with no incentive to create new addicts. [Note: This method of attacking Demand (as well as Supply) was successful against people-smugglers in which, via insisting no boat-person (the Demanders) would ever become an Australian, it broke their business-model.]
- Mental-illness is to unleash ‘Coopetition-contributive self-actualisation’ via ‘The USI-Reform’ of trading-in Universal Minimum Hourly Wages (UMHoW) for The Universal Survival Income (USI), which, among other things, eradicates Poverty and Unemployment.
- Budget deficits is The USI-Reform, which will result in perpetual surpluses such that non-GST tax will need to be reduced because:
- Tax revenue will skyrocket via a far more efficient and productive economy
- Government expenditure will plummet via savings in law-enforcement, health, charity, business-welfare and bureaucracy per se.
- Both Aged Care & Disability neglect (including its staffing crisis) is The USI-Reform because:
- With family members receiving The USI, if they so choose, they will be better able to directly care for loved-ones
- [Counterintuitive] unhappy staff (who only do it because ‘it is a job’) will leave since, with no Unemployment, they have lots of options, which will ‘market-signal’ that pay, training and conditions (including the need for more staff) must be improved, which will draw increased resources (financeable by the Budget Surpluses), which will draw the right staff in the right numbers such that morale will be high.
- Assisting ‘family’ business (as per Robert Gottliebsen’s broadening of ‘small’ business) is The USI-Reform because:
- Business-owners also receive it
- The aggregated-Demand they face will increase
- Non-GST taxes will plummet
- It delivers significant labour market deregulation
- Morale will skyrocket because all their employees will be there because they want to be there rather than because they need a Survival-Income.
- The Xi’s China-Pacific problem is The USI-Reform because:
- With zero Unemployment, we can offer Pacific citizens paid-work because, for us, it will be positive (i.e. more production) without any concern they are taking Australians’ jobs
- With a booming budget-surplus-economy, we will have far more income to, amongst other things, invest in the Pacific.
- The Xi-na problem (including Taiwan) and the Put-sia problem (including Ukraine) is to optimise our ‘Western Coopetition Model’, which will self-export such that Xi-na and Put-sia will, respectively, return to being China and Russia.
- ‘Closing the Gap’ is The USI-Reform because there is no ‘dole-bludger’ Stigma (including its racist-variant) and no ‘mutual obligations’ Harassment yet, with no Unemployment, there is the ‘Agency of Choice’ such that, without racial marginalisation, anyone who ‘wants paid-work at the going rate can get paid-work’. [Question: Which will do more to ‘Close the Gap’, the ‘Voice to Parliament’ or The USI-Reform?]
- Optimising paid-work opportunities for the Disabled is ‘The USI-Reform’ because then there will be zero-unemployment.
- Domestic violence is The USI-Reform – i.e. if a woman can escape the house, she has a mobile Survival-Income and, with no unemployment, every chance to prosper.
- Our natural-environmental problems [Take 1] are:
- Survival-Income-Servitude (SIS) abolition
- An economy that isn’t to create jobs-for-jobs’-sake paid-work but for ‘exclusively efficiently producing and distributing the goods and services we need/desire.’
- Our natural-environmental problems [Take 2] is The USI-Reform because:
- No citizen needs to prioritise obtaining their Survival-Income over the environment
- It solves developing-country’s population growth as people don’t need lots of children for captive cheap labour and an old-age pension
- It makes the economy efficient – i.e. it returns the economy to ‘exclusively efficiently producing and distributing the goods and services we need/desire’. [In comparison, none of The Greens and/or Teal policies achieve a., b. or c., which is almost worst-case because it means, currently, that tremendous Greens/Teal passion is being mis-invested in promoting the counterproductive such that, paradoxically, solving our natural-Enviro- problems requires one to campaign against the Greens/Teals.]
- Addressing Menzies’ ‘forgotten people’ concerns is to optimise the societal-systems facing all citizens.
Wow – the solution to 12 out of 14 of the above is ‘The USI-Reform’ yet no party or independent has it even on the table.
…
June 5, 2022
Hi
First, congratulations to all parliamentary-seat winners (and their organisations) including the independents – from the Teals to Dai Le and David Pocock. Also, special congratulations to leaders Anthony Albanese, Adam Bandt, Barnaby Joyce and Simon Holmes a Court.
Commiserations to the Liberal Party particularly Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg.
Congrats to new Coalition leaders: Peter Dutton, Sussan Ley, David Littleproud and Perin Davey.
Second, this essay asks:
‘With the Centre of politics being eviscerated, is there an alternative for those who reject increasing Left versus Right polarisation?’
What is Nature’s Definition of a ‘Society’?
‘The Big Picture isn’t an optional extra;
without it, we are left to fudge it, which leads to the disasters of suboptimal infrastructure and Band-Aiding.’
Society is nature’s supreme manifestation of ‘Coopetition’.
Coopetition is defined as: ‘Cooperation first & foremost and, within that context, Competition as the treasured second’ – i.e. in Coopetition, Cooperation is dominant and Competition is subservient.
Thus, Coopetition’s 2 components are:
- Cooperation – in Chinese cosmology, ‘yin’ (or female) – the champions of this are ‘the Left’
- Competition – ‘yang’ (or male) – the champions of this are ‘the Right’.
In societies, Coopetition achieves both:
- Unity
- Evolutional-vitality.
Within nature, societies are ubiquitous – i.e. they exist from bacteria to sentient-animals.
A single multi-celled-organism may be described as a ‘society of cells’ – i.e. the body’s cells ‘Cooperate and, within that context, Compete’. For instance, different areas of a body Compete for nutrients. When Uncooperative cells arise – i.e. those which are cancerous or infected by a virus or dead – then the Cooperating cells Compete in attacking and/or disposing of the Uncooperative ones and, if successful, the organism survives and, if not, it dies.
Within modern human societies, Coopetition exists as sport, democracy and civil-debate and may be imagined as an efficient non-exploitative free-market economy.’
A modern society’s mission should be:
“Governance that maximises citizens’ Coopetition-contributive self-actualisation”
because it optimises the societal vision of:
‘sustainable stability-prosperity’.
Hence, given society’s nature-given requirement for ‘unity’, any whole-of-society structural division is a contradiction, which nature always resolves via either:
- Transcending the division – for example, most of the divisions existing in Ukrainian society prior to Russia’s invasion have been transcended so as to confront the common threat; or,
- Splitting the society into two or more societies.
Thus, while, within societies, structural-divisions may arise, structural-division over the long-term is unnatural.
And yet, across the globe (including in Australia), there is the increasingly polar Left/Right divide.
The Left/Right divide is a remnant of the Industrial Revolution (c. 1760), which, after 13 generations, should already have been transcended.
The Industrial Revolution’s ‘Society-of-Strangers’
The Industrial Revolution was an economy-driven ‘all-in-this-together’ social watershed.
That is, harnessing and multiplying Human-Organisation, Science & Technology (HOST) progressions, the Industrial Revolution involved subsistence-farmers becoming factory-machinists.
Hence, the local ‘everyone-knows-everyone’ community was transcended into a ‘society-of-strangers’ national (or, even, international) phenomenon.
In this way, rather than the major societal-interface being ‘Community/Individual’ – i.e. with the Community supporting Individuals and Individuals contributing to the Community – it became ‘Government/Citizen’.
That is, in a society of the familiar, one helps and is helped by those one knows; however, in a ‘society of strangers’, this doesn’t work because, instead of being a denotable fraction of the community (say, 1 in 200), compared with their nation, a citizen is an infinitesimal.
Thus, the optimisation of this new ‘society-of-strangers’ construct required appropriate government-administered societal-wide systems – i.e. infrastructure.
Optimal Post-Industrial Revolution Citizen Empowerment Infrastructure (CEI)
Within the new post-Industrial national rather than community context, in order to maximise citizen empowerment, societies required 5 ‘universal, guaranteed and unconditional’ Citizen Empowerment Infrastructure (CEI) cornerstones – i.e.:
- Universal Rule of Coopetition-maximising Law
- Universal Liberal Democracy
- Universal Education
- Universal Healthcare
- Universal Survival Income (USI).
Optimally, these 5 needed to be provided by government as an Industrial Revolution inheritance because:
- They maximally inspire and empower citizens to pursue ‘Coopetition-contributive self-actualisation’
- Government – rather than citizens, families, extended-families or, even, communities – can most efficiently guarantee their provision.
Of the 5 CEI cornerstones, the most important was The USI because the transition from subsistence-farmer to income-earning factory-machinist resulted in a loss of direct control over one’s survival needs such that, without The USI, they were physiologically vulnerable – i.e. they were vulnerable to Poverty.
That is, without The USI, citizens were subject to Survival-Income-Servitude (SIS), which infects the psyche at its core – i.e. at the level of Survival – such that ‘Coopetition-contributive self-actualisation’ can’t be a citizen’s paramount priority, which weakens society.
Also, with the Econo- a subset of the Socio-, without The USI, the Econo- gained outsized importance – for instance, paid-work became more valued than unpaid-work, which, among other things, distorts home-life respect including:
- Marginalising child-raising
- Catalysing domestic violence.
Hence, with the Socio- superior to the Econo- yet sharing a common ‘labour-market’, unpaid-work (whether devoted to society, family or self) should be rewarded first via The USI.
However, in the 1760’s, with no aspect of this 5 CEI cornerstone narrative existing, initially, none of the cornerstones were implemented.
Meanwhile, the elite – i.e. those controlling these new integrated ‘societies of strangers’ – were Conservatives who enjoyed the status-quo of Competition-over-Cooperation because they possessed the Competitive advantage of power including wealth, connections, education and access to the best health treatments.
However, because Competition-over-Cooperation violates nature’s definition of ‘society’ as the topmost ‘Cooperation first & foremost and Competition the treasured second’ entity, nature intervened – i.e. through its blunt tool of evolution, nature acted via some citizens’ behaviour.
Left, Right & Centre Evolution
Few people want to think their behaviour is due to nature
– i.e. ‘we each have a mind and we each decide for ourselves’ –
however, next time one is hungry, one may try ‘deciding’ one isn’t hungry.
In post-Industrial Revolution Competition-over-Cooperation societies, some of society’s disenfranchised evolved into agitators who prioritised societal-systems promoting Cooperation or ‘human-rights’ such as justice, equality and non-exploitation.
As stated, these champions of Cooperation are known as ‘The Left’.
Yet, while the Left prioritised Cooperation-promoting systems, as evolutional agitators, they necessarily Competed (including, sometimes with violence) so as to achieve these aims.
Meanwhile, with the Left defining the battles, reacting to this, the Conservative elite became organised as champions of Competition, which are known as ‘The Right’.
In contrast, ‘The Centre’, rather than being an ideology, evolved more as an, in-principle, desire to douse Left versus Right conflict – i.e. they are champions of Cooperation (Leftists) who operate on a practical interpersonal level.
Citizen Empowerment Infrastructure (CEI) Evolution
For generations, thankfully, the Left have agitated one-by-one for the 5 ‘universal, guaranteed and unconditional’ CEI cornerstones with the notable exception of The USI.
In some countries, these cornerstones have, over time, gained support from the Right, which have assisted the cornerstones’ refinement.
In such cases, the Left, Right and Centre merge – i.e. become unified to the point of often being, individually, unidentifiable, which is society consistent.
And, the countries with the most complete and robust CEI cornerstone versions are synonymous with ‘First World’ nations, which is uncoincidental – i.e. nature is, at the very least, directing us away from what’s detrimental to our survival and, at best, towards what is best for our survival.
In Australia, we have robust ‘universal, guaranteed and unconditional’ versions of:
- Universal Rule of Coopetition-maximising Law
- Universal Liberal Democracy
- Universal Education
- Universal Healthcare.
Regarding The USI, the reason it hasn’t materialised in any Western country is that evolution, unlike a conscious narrative, is a trial-and-error-try-again phenomenon, which can (and, in this case, has) gone off-track.
The Evolutional USI-Proxy Journey
If ‘universal, guaranteed and unconditional’ had been a conscious narrative, the Left would have agitated for The USI.
Instead, Leftist constituents separately agitated for 2 distinct USI-proxies:
- Communism (i.e. economic-Competition eradication)
- Universal Minimum Hourly Wages (UMHoW).
The cost of mis-defining this battle has been unprecedented:
- Regarding Communism, no library can exhaustively detail the disaster and we are still suffering its remnants such as Put/Xi
- Regarding UMHoW, though not as spectacular as Communism, arguably, the net result has been even more disastrous – certainly more insidious because, collectively, we’re still yet to realise it’s damaging, let alone catalogue the damage.
Universal Minimum Hourly Wages (UMHoW)
The collective agitating of employees for increased wages within a firm is a normal Coopetition activity [and trade-unions are important Coopetition-enhancing entities]; however, the universalisation of that for all paid-workers is a harmful infrastructure.
First, UMHoW doesn’t ensure a citizen (let alone all citizens) receive a Survival-Income – i.e. at any given time, it’s only relevant for those currently with paid-work; moreover, it only provides a Survival-Income for those with enough paid-work hours and, furthermore, it doesn’t take account of a paid-worker’s dependents.
Second, it is the sole cause of the blight we know as Unemployment/Underemployment – i.e. without UMHoW, we would automatically have perpetual full-employment defined as, ‘everyone who wants paid-work at the going rate, can get paid-work’.
That is, while it’s commonly believed we must perpetually battle against Unemployment (and can never totally win), on the contrary, we have artificially (in its entirety) manufactured Unemployment via UMHoW. [Please see, The Coopetitionist 3.5 – Schizonomists.]
In any case, with Poverty & Unemployment prevalent, instead of retracing our steps, the solution is typically seen as ‘more jobs’.
Hence, UMHoW has also gifted us the pseudo-national bipartisan mission of Jobs, Jobs, Jobs (Triple-J) politics, which has, in turn, given us jobs-for-jobs’-sake paid-work, which along with Manage-the-Manufactured-Mess (Triple-M) paid-work, has made our economy massively inefficient such that:
- Our prosperity is a fraction of its potential
- Our environmental destruction is unsustainably wanton.
Of course, the prevailing wisdom is that paid-workers are all contributors – i.e. ‘lifters’ – and pretty much everyone else is a ‘leaner’; however, believers in this are more divider than lifter.
[Food for thought: pre-pandemic, Australia had 5.7 million volunteers each earning $0.00 per hour – currently, it is illegal for any of these millions to earn anything between $0.01 and $20.32 (inclusive) per hour. Does that sound natural?]
Yet, unable to create enough jobs let alone eradicate Poverty, governments created the Band-Aid of targeted ‘income-Welfare’, which, in turn, has created other problems including:
- The dole-bludger narrative Stigma (including the racist and disablist variants)
- ‘Mutual obligations’ Harassment
- The wastage of Centrelink and other associated bureaucracies and companies.
Left/Right Turmoil: Universal Minimum Hourly Wages (UMHoW) & Income-Welfare
Whereas the 4 implemented Citizen Empowerment Infrastructure (CEI) cornerstones have all become Left/Right bipartisan, The USI-proxies of UMHoW and income-Welfare have fermented increasing division – i.e. perpetual arguments (and excess regulation) over:
- UMHoW rates, conditions and other regulations
- Income-Welfare rates and ‘mutual obligations’.
And, in addition to this perpetual instability, The USI-absence destabilises the 4 implemented CEI cornerstones – for example, parents’ Poverty and Unemployment disturbs children’s Education.
Regarding the Econo-, The USI-absence’s division, distortion and destabilisation means it’s inefficient – i.e. at best only ½ as efficient as it would be with The USI-Reform and up to 1/50th as efficient. [While, since 1760, there have been increased Human-Organisation, Science & Technology (HOST) of perhaps 10,000-fold, our income is only 216 times more than Burundi, which is poorer than 1760 Britain.]
In short, The USI-absence decreases all 3 elements of the societal vision – i.e. it decreases:
- Sustainability
- Stability
- Prosperity.
In this way, as mentioned, The USI-absence explains our culminating perfect storm of exponentiating Socio-Econo-Enviro[international/natural] (SEE-in) catastrophes.
Furthermore, as implied at this article’s beginning, the Centrists reason d’être of compromise is becoming increasingly unsustainable such that they’re increasingly marching towards one or other of the Left/Right poles, which indicates nature is ‘giving-up’ on ‘transcending the societal division’ and has now entered the ‘splitting the society’ phase.
The ‘Splitting the Society’ Phase
‘Fragmentation impedes resolution – the most fragmented wars are often the most prolonged ones.’
In contemporary Australia, while The USI-absence is the source of both the Left/Right split and its increasing polarisation, Competition is increasingly gaining hold over Cooperation such that there is increasing fragmentation in the form of ‘identity warfare’.
Identity warfare is degrading – i.e. reversing – all 4 of our acquired Citizen Empowerment Infrastructure (CEI) cornerstones [another essay].
Our Prime Minister-elect – a good-hearted yet disastrously naïve leader (arguably the most dangerous mix) – no matter that 10 indigenous Australians have been elected to this parliament, states the first task is insertion of racial separation within the Constitution.
However, ‘The Voice from the Heart’ is, predominantly, an understandable ‘cry for help’ to ‘Close the Gap’; yet, ‘Closing the Gap’ only requires The USI-Reform – i.e. no Poverty, no Unemployment and no racist dole-bludger narrative yet the crystallisation of empowerment and hope via an optimised ‘Agency of Choice’ (including mobility).
No matter our indigenous are descendent from first Australians or that their ancestors have been in Australia tens of thousands of years or that their cultures are unique and splendid, our humanness is identical, which means their disproportionate trauma-suffering, will be disproportionately re-harmonised via The USI-Reform.
[Note: as per The Coopetitionist 3.3 – The Coopetition Party Blueprint, The CDO also advocates a Genocide Museum to record and display the impact of the Australian continent’s colonisation.]
Conclusion
In Australia, with The USI-absence the last Left/Right battle remaining, we can transcend the Left/Right paradigm and its identity-warfare offspring via implementing The USI-Reform, which, optimising the ‘Western Coopetition Model’ will unify our country.
Thus, the CDO calls for the creation of such a Left/Right transcendent political party.
Thank you.
Best regards
Paul Ross
Founder, The Citizen’s Dividend Organisation (CDO)