Thesis of speech
1
I would define the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) as ideology and practice of an existential humanism, which means the economic help of people because of the fact of their existence. But how does it influence the personality? Does BIG free or – to the contrary, enslave people? The answer to this question lies on the hand: ripe personalities a Basic Income will free; people, who are still developing, it takes the freedom.
If we understand the personality as personality, which first of all wants to be creative and not to consume, a Basic Income gives such a personality social existential and psychological advantages.
First, the possibility to free oneself from the rush and fear by searching for oneself. A Basic Income gives each member of a society the possibility to take the demeaning rush and sorrow, which is the base of fear of possible misery. A Basic Income makes a human more free, more self-confident and contributed to the creative development of the personality.
Second, the possibility to free oneself from the conflict with one’s own conscience because of the necessity of doing foreign things just in order to feed oneself and his/her family, but which are against his/her own conscience. A Basic Income creates a possibility to solve the contradiction between the capabilities of a human and the work performed.
And, at last, third, the possibility to free oneself from the loneliness and alienation of the market society. A Basic Income can free humans from the loneliness, because he/she experiences the solidary unity of personality and society. This affects mainly personalities, who are independent entrepreneurs. A free entrepreneur because of the bare fact of his/her existence aliens from his/her competitors, and from the consumers of the result of his/her work. A Basic Income softens up the relation to the world as a set of resources and goods, as well as to another person as competitors and objects of manipulations.
Thus, these three aspects of the human emancipation give the reason to call BIG as theory and practice of a existential humanism.
2
As a result, the realization of a Basic Income can become a catalyst to better the moral relation between humans.
But a Basic Income can also destroy this relation to oneself and the world. It should be taken into account, that some existential dangers may arise with the introduction of a Basic Income, which can get to social dangers.
First danger: The loss of the willingness to work for immature people, whose only values are to survive and to reproduce themselves. For those people, who can be called physically mature, but not psychologically, the payment of a Basic Income, which is enough for living, can become an “infinite loop”. The result would be an army of people, who lose the impulse to realize themselves in the society, because such impulse must come for mentally and psychologically immature personalities always from outside.
Second danger: The loss of freedom by a Basic Income because of manipulation of the consciousness. A regular payment, which is not earned, can awake unconscious feelings of guilt for some immature people, which makes possible to manipulate them. One of this manipulations can have for example religious character. This would intensify the immaturity and dependence.
These dangers may result in the simple conclusion: The absence of creativity in a human transforms the Basic Income into poison. In other words: With all freedom to chose one’s job, there is one job not possible: a pure BIG receiver.
3
The said brings us to an inconsistency.
On the one hand, a Basic Income shouldn’t be lower than the subsistence minimum and should not depend on regional, social and economic differences between people, because otherwise it wouldn’t be unconditional. In other words: differentiation of BIG destroys the idea of BIG. A Basic Income shall connect people and not separate them. But this would inevitably happen, if we begin to differentiate.
On the other hand, a Basic Income can not be undifferentiated. If a sufficient sum is paid to mature people as scholarship for the creative development of their personality, the same sum appear at “usual people” with a “usual worldview” to the loss of fullness of life and to the revocation of stimulation to grow personally.
But how to solve this inconsistency? One answer to this question may be an intensive philosophical and ideological justification of the idea and realization of a Basic Income as financial help, but to understand “income” not in the meaning of the word, but more as certain investment to the personality and their reserve, as “economic parachute”, which is guarantied to each, but needs creativity. Only then will Basic Income, which is also , as we saw, an existential and psychological “parachute” have a freeing effect not only at a sole humans, but at the whole society. In that case it becomes the theory and practice of a real existential humanism.
Nazip Khamitov is PhD in philosophy, writer, a leading researcher and a Colleague at the Institute of Philosophy at the National Academy of Science in Ukraine, a founder of Meta-Anthropology: the study of the daily, highest and furthering of the being of humans. Author of more than 20 books, of which most well-known are: “Philosophy: Being, Human and World,” “Loneliness of Men and Women,” “Aphorism of Force,” and “Ethics: The Path to Beautiful Relations” (he last of which was co-authored by Svitlana Krylova)
