Human Baseline

Forward

I have a problem. I enjoy the labor I perform, but I do not enjoy the work and why I am working. This is not a unique feeling, most people don’t enjoy where they work. To add insult to injury, the only reason you’re working somewhere you hate is to just make minimum wage. The depravity doesn’t end there, the people who can find work are the lucky ones. There are many people who cannot work and live on the fringes of their community, clinging onto the charity of their family and neighbors.

But we all heard this story already, millions of times over thousands of years. It’s old, boring, an after thought. These people just turn into another statistic to advertise another problem to sell. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I work in a very privileged position of comfort; I’m a software designer working in offices and since 2020 in my own house. I have generous benefits and leave time relative to other US workers.

Despite being in a privileged position, I am not safe. I have experienced unemployment, I have been laid off multiple times. Sometimes I was lucky to have more work to go to, sometimes I was idle for over a year. Even when employed I am not safe, I have been used as a scab against people and a community I have never met. I have learned to never trust my employer, to never trust my owners, to never trust the system. I know what it is to feel worthless, isolated, used.

But all of that pales in comparison to the real problem I have, my time is being wasted. I work in a digital medium producing tools that help people use information. The beauty of working in information is that the physical barriers are negligible, so it’s easy to go from a concept to a real thing relatively fast. The biggest blockers when it comes to software production is the production process itself. How the team organizes, distributes tasks, check statuses, etc.

But we also have developed very effective and efficient solutions to software production, and have shipped software that reaches billions of people. I have worked on amazing teams with amazing people and enjoy the process when it works as intended. So what is the real problem? It’s the business, it’s always the business that makes the process worse. The business lays off people, the business changes priority at the whim of the next investor, the business cuts your healthcare, the business knocked down the neighborhood block, the business offers you minimum wage and says that’s all you’re worth.

So I asked myself, what does my work look like without the business? What would I work on? Who would I work for? How would we work together? What does my life look like without business? How do I access my needs? Before I could find the solution I needed to know what the problem actually is. “Business” is not the actual problem, it’s just the most accessible problem since they define how we work and live in our communities. If you peel back the corporate veneer what you find is an exchange of debt. A debt enforced by the community and the owners to access the land and resources. This debt is the primary reason for your work, you will always be in debt because of taxes, and to access anything else in life you need a constant income of debts. This was made easier with currency, but that’s just a middle man for debt.

So the real questions becomes: What does my life look like without debt? What does my community look like without ownership? I followed the rabbit down the hole, at the bottom I found hope, and along the way I saw opportunities. I want to share with you the hope I found, but to find that hope you need to know the path. I can’t show you the path because I can’t live your life for you, but I can share with you the compass I used. This compass points towards hope not matter what path you take.

Current Beliefs

Before we jump into the solution, we need to discuss the current beliefs we are using today and how that creates the economic systems that enslave the people into a perpetual existence of debt. Through this shared understanding, we can then make the changes to improve our lives and remove beliefs that no longer serve our needs.

It may sound like hyperbole, but no person living within the current economy can be considered a “free person”. You currently exist to perpetuate a shared debt and support the people that enforce it. This is not a purpose you desire, its a purpose put upon you from the generations of debt your ancestors perpetuated. It may seem impossible to stop this cycle, but people invented these systems and only people can remove them.

Ownership

Once people have settled into one place to maintain farms, our lives have become dependent on a specific piece of land to survive. That sense of survival told us to hold this land by any means necessary, because the alternative is to go back to spending hours and days hunting food and seeking shelter. So we drew a line in the sand and said, “everything within this line is ours.”

This ownership allowed people to become invested in something bigger than themselves and work to support their community with the faith that the community will support them back. Humans cannot be faulted for wanting to own something, to make themselves feel important and necessary. This ownership is a coping mechanism to find a stable grasp in our unforgiving environment.

Ownership has also changed our relationship with the land, before we were just animals roaming around trying to survive, now we believe that we have control and exclusive rights to the land and no one else is allowed to have it. We assumed that the land is ours, by conquest, democracy, or divine right. We now know today that our grasp on this planet is fleeting at best, just a couple decades of erosion or a well timed meteor will wipe away any evidence of humanity.

Ownership is not a bad thing, it’s just misguided. We own our lives, that is what it means to have free will. Claiming to own people or control over a continent, is just naive. But this ownership persisted, our survival depended on us protecting our land from invaders. Those invaders might be other people.

This sense of ownership started to spread throughout the community. Who ever owned the land that grows food, can control the people. But what is stopping the people from just taking the food for themselves? The owner could bribe a few people to protect the land for them. If you promise to give someone food and shelter in exchange for protection, then you have an army.

That’s how fast ownership creates this inequitable division within the community. Our sense of cooperation from our tribal era is completely replaced with competition within the community. Now that the new “owner” of the community has an army, they can start to expand and take land from other tribes.

Debt

This isn’t a history lesson, I’m not gonna waste time trying to sum up ten thousand years of ownership and conquest. There are plenty of smarter people documenting way more detail than I could ever hope. We’re going to stay focused on the beliefs. We saw how relatively quickly having ownership over land divides the community. That ownership is the root of all our problems today, now we’re going to understand the next big software update to make it nearly impossible to ever change that: Debt.

For a long time, debts were just honorable agreements. I help you out, you help me out. When we were nomads there wasn’t much an individual could do for someone else that wasn’t already beneficial for the tribe. We were already saving each others lives on a daily basis. Early signs of calculated debt was done with sticks and markings, keeping track of favors and who owes what.

Rulers took this concept of debt and used it to control the community, declaring everyone in debt to the ruler, by conquest, democracy, or divine right. Defiance of this debt is in defiance of the ruler. At some point the debts we’re consolidated from stick markings to coinage, based on scarce precious stones and metals. Money became the standardization of debt, broken up into discrete currency that can be exchanged for someone’s debt.

The biggest problem with money, as a belief, is that it’s lazy. Why think about your problems when you can literally pay someone else to fix your problems for you? This monetary barrier forces people to focus on money instead of their own needs and wants. While you should be focused on growing crops, baking bread, raising cattle, building houses and raising children, now you’re focused on earning enough money to appease your rulers and their taxes.

Taxes? What are taxes? Well that’s your debt to your community. This is different from your debt to the ruler, that debt is what creates the money so you can pay your debt to the community, which goes to the ruler. Not only does your ruler have military control over your community, they now have legal control over your future. As long as you live in the ruler’s community, your life is indebted to your ruler. You are in debt for the rest of your life, and for all generations you reproduce.

While rulers use ownership to control your community, debt ensures that you are always under control for the rest of your life. Benjamin Franklin famously wrote about the founding of the United States, “Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” While Benny may have been a smart cookie back in the day, he still only saw debt as a universal constant.

Competition

Even with the rulers using their armies to secure the community, and debt forcing people to use the community currency to exchange goods and services, the people could still rise up against the ruling party when conditions got bad enough. Most communities throughout history go through some internal revolution. So rulers needed a new way to secure their control, they just had to create a new enemy for the people to focus on: each other.

While food, water, and shelter can be shared among the people. You don’t want to share your money. That is your money, your debt, you earned it. No one else needs it more than you do so there’s no reason to ever give it away. That money is your only ticket to a better life, you will kill anyone to get it. Debt and ownership within the community breeds competition, and our owners want that to continue so you don’t focus on the root of the problem: the owners.

Today you can have every color of economic system, as long as they’re all debt. Capitalism, communism, socialism, etc. they’re all the same. They all assume someone is the owner, and that everyone else is indebted to the owners. Even if ownership is equitable, you’re still owners, and non-owners are indebted to you. While the United States may be more democratically governed than other countries, we still suffer from the same economic problem of ownership and debt.

We understand what happens when we resign our community to private owners. They lie to us about caring about the community and how they want to provide good jobs to hard working citizens, while always putting themselves above the community and hard working citizens. When the business succeed, the owners reap the profits for themselves. When the business fails, the hard working citizens suffer, not the owners. They just sell the company to someone else and wipe their hands clean from our community.

This isn’t a conspiracy, this is just “the economy”. Ownership, conquest, debt, security, competition, money, taxes. That’s the game. We’re all playing a literal game of Monopoly ten thousand years in progress and all of the spaces have been bought and sold so many times that it’s impossible to know when it all began or why we’re still playing.

Retrospective

Do we even want to change? Why should we change? Is there better belief than ownership and debt? And how do we even find it?

First of all, I want to change. I want to stop being used to hurt my neighbors. I want to stop worrying about the little men in their private planes telling me to squeeze every penny out of my dollar. I want to stop going on LinkedIn everyday to find a scrap of hope that I can be useful to some shareholder wanting to automate another hundred thousand people from earning money. I want to stop caring about money.

Just count how much of your day is spent thinking about or worrying about money and debt. Anything you want to do you have to worry about cost, thinking about your future is gonna cost more hours at work, just existing with a medical condition is going to cost you a literal fortune. You can’t even exist in your community without paying for a car, car insurance, fuel, car maintenance, road taxes, tolls, parking, plus all the time wasted being traffic, and the increased risk of being killed in an vehicular accident by everyone needing to drive to the bars. We are constantly fighting just to live, helpless to change our future.

Ownership, debt, and competition over our needs and our lives is a personal choice we all make every day. It feels like a choice that has been put upon us. And if we don’t make those choices then we don’t get to eat, we don’t get to drink, we don’t get to sleep in a bed, we don’t feel like we’re part of our community.

But we still made those decisions. We made the decision to allow private ownership to control our lives, to own our hospitals and doctors, to block access unless you pay what they demand, to consider you a burden to the community by giving you debts, to prioritize the ability to profit over the ability to help. To own our schools and bribe our administrators to block access unless you pay what they demand, to nickel and dime you every chance possible, to force teachers to supply their own classrooms, to undermine the duty of our educators with financial bias from sponsors, to under fund communities that do not align with your racial bias, to allow our children to be slaughtered in the one place that is designed to give them hope and a chance in this world, all because some gun executive wanted a second yacht.

The quality of our lives is determined by our ability to put ourselves above our neighbors. That is what earning money is, it’s inequity. Earning money to access your needs must come at the cost of someone else’s ability to access their needs. When you are paid for a job you are literally a “sell out” to the owners to maintain your own life. This has all been a distraction from our true purpose.

We formed communities in the first place for one reason only, to keep ourselves, our family, and our people alive. We wanted to feed our family and tribe, we wanted to live close together, to share stories, music, our dreams. We built communities to give us a better life for our children, and a purpose for ourselves. Our lives is what ownership has taken from us, focus grouped it, packaged it, advertised it, and sold it back to us.

I would like to share some beliefs that I think would be more beneficial to us and our communities than ownership and debt.

New Beliefs

Before we replace all of our current beliefs, we need to add some new beliefs, first is Human Life. This is not an economic belief, or even a governing belief, this is a fundamental belief that defines who we are as a species. This belief is so obvious it’s almost insulting having to mention. But I am compelled to define because there are many people today that embarrassingly believe the contrary, or are so flexible with their definition that it loses all meaning.

This definition of humanity is based on physical truths that we inherited from the evolution of life on this planet. It’s based on our historical truths as we navigated and intentionally changed the planet for the benefit of the species. It’s based on our lives today and allows humanity to exist without owners. It prepares us for our future, as we reach the limits of sustainability and economic collapse.

Human Life

This belief contains the following axioms:

• You exist
• Your existence has needs:
  • Food
  • Water
  • Shelter
  • Community
• Your needs are as valuable to you as they are for all people
  • No person’s needs are above or below another person’s needs

Human Interactions

The axiom that defines the value of needs being equal between all people, implies that interactions with those needs must be equitable. We interact with our needs in three ways:

• Information
• Energy/Labor
• Access

Information is how we understand the world and communicate with other people. All forms of information and the tools to use information must be equitable.

Energy, or labor, is how we perform the actions to maintain those needs. All forms of labor and the tools to use energy must be equitable.

Access is how the people interact with their need, from acquiring, preparing, consuming, using, disposing, recycling, etc. All forms of access and the tools to allow people to access their needs must be equitable.

Food, Water, and Shelter are energy needs that we have inherited from our evolution. Community is an informational and access need that was constructed by humans when we invented agriculture and became dependent on a specific area of land. As we spread across the globe we established communities wherever the lands would allow us to live. As families and tribes came together to be a part of the land, our communities became alive and require additional needs.

Community

This belief contains the following axioms:

• A community contains two objects:
  • Place
  • People
• A community has needs:
  • Governance
  • Logistics
  • Infrastructure
  • Healthcare
  • Education
• A community’s needs are as valuable to them as they are for all communities.
  • No community’s needs are above or below another community’s needs.

The location of the community does not have to be physical. A community can be made from a niche interest on an online forum. As long as it is a place the people can gather, it is a community. For practical reasons we’re focusing on physical communities based around human needs. But this definition of community should not exclude communities of common beliefs and interests from existing.

We can think of the “community” as a living entity similar to ourselves. We are just a “community of cells” all organized together to perform specific functions that keeps this community we call individuality alive. This is a poetic way to say that communities have needs too. Governance is how the community shares information. Logistics is how the community shares energy, aka labor. Infrastructure is how the community share access. Healthcare is how we maintain people’s bodies and minds. Education is how we maintain the legacy of community information.

Community Interactions

The axioms that define the equal value of needs, implies that interactions with those needs must be equitable. We interact with our community needs in three ways:

• Committees
• Cooperatives
• Services

Committees are groups of people with equitable responsibility to interact with information on behalf of the community. Committees should be occupied by equitable representatives of cooperatives.

Cooperatives are groups of people with equitable responsibility to interact with the energy, aka labor, on behalf of the community. Cooperatives should be occupied by all people within the community.

Services are places to access human and community needs. Committees and Cooperatives define the equity of these Services. All people within a community must have equitable access to necessary services.

Value

The one clarification I need to mention is “value”. Value is the level of impact, or importance, something is to your life. This belief does not prescribe any value to people, because I have no authority to do so and to give people a “value” means that someone else can take that value away. Which is the point of ownership and debt, to give people a value and dictate how they can live their lives based on that perceived value.

What actually has value, is our needs. Because needs are the one thing that keep our existence alive, they have the highest value above everything else. But that is not enough, while everyone needs “food”, there isn’t just one “food” everyone can eat. “Food” as a need is a collection of various plant, animal, fungal, and chemical materials.

Each permutation of food changes value from person to person and over time. Regardless of the specific object, you still need to access it. Without access that object has zero value. Therefore we can use access as our constant value. As long as everyone needs access to something the value of that something becomes the same for everyone accessing it.

Updated Beliefs

This belief package also re-prioritizes ownership beliefs with equitable alternatives. This process can take a long time to transition, the old beliefs are thousands of years old and may require generations to pass before fully transitioning. Inability to individually transition beliefs will increase the time of transition for the entire community. The following beliefs must be replaced with the prescribed equitable alternatives:

• Ownership
  • Responsibility
• Conquest
  • Equity
• Debt
  • Obligation
• Competition
  • Cooperation
• Security
  • Maintenance
• Taxes
  • Contracts
• Currency
  • No Alternative Necessary

Ownership

This is the root belief that has corrupted all others since. Ownership itself is required to have individual autonomy. This sense of self is our ownership of our body and our mind. When we invented agriculture, we became dependent on a specific piece of land to supply our water and food. We built permanent shelters and extended our ownership to the land. This snowballed into empires claiming ownership over continents and people across the globe.

This belief became corrupted with fear, fear that losing ownership of your land will mean losing access to your needs. Evolution has been, up until this point, a game of survival. You fending off against predators, and hunting against prey. Keeping yourself alive is your main priority. But we let this fear of survival corrupt our judgment when sharing our survival with our community. We didn’t just build walls from the chaotic wild, we built walls between each other. This snowballed into the isolation everyone feels as we hide in our physical and digital shelters; from pandemics, genocides, and all the scary people in our communities we are taught to fear.

The purpose of this belief is to define the self, ownership doesn’t need to extend beyond the self. Everything beyond the self is the community. Because you are alive, you are required to fulfill your needs, otherwise you die. You access your needs through your community. Therefore it is your responsibility to equitably interact with your community to fulfill your needs and by extension, the needs of the community.

Conquest

Once we had a taste of owning land, we logically wanted to expand our ownership. This expansion is the cause of those empires that spread their ownership throughout the world and through every weaker community they met. As the population of humanity exploded over the last couple hundreds of years, physical space to support the population has been a concern. Today, countries are exploring the eventual conquest of other planetary bodies.

Thankfully I don’t believe we’ll run out of physical room on Earth for hundreds of years to come. Until that time, we need to replace our goal of expansion with a goal of equity. We are at a special time in humanity where we have finished conquering the Earth for our species. We can focus our energy towards improving ourselves and our communities until our technology has advanced enough to start exploring beyond our world. Our dreams of Moon and Mars colonies will be impossible as long as we allow private ownership to dictate the lives of people in those desolate wastelands.

Debt

Debt is a belief imposed by owners to force the owned people to dedicate their lives to fulfilling their debt to the owner. Failure to fulfill that debt threatens your access to your needs, which is just a threat of death. By using your life against you, you feel obligated to fulfill that debt or risk dying.

The Human Life belief guarantees your right to exist, you no longer have any debts to fulfill. This removal of debt introduces an unknown for your existence; if you no longer exist to fulfill your debts to your community, why do you exist in a community in the first place? Obligation is that reason, you have a responsibility to fulfill your needs, and you access your needs through your community. Therefore You have an obligation to fulfill the needs of your community. With debt, your labor fulfills the existence of the owner. With obligation, your labor fulfills the existence of the community and by extension yourself.

Competition

Competition in the classical evolutionary sense, is just two distinct entities not collaborating on a common resource. There is no goal in competition, it’s just the result of scarce resources between two entities that do not value the existence of the other entity. In sport this creates winners and losers, in life this means something has to die in order for the other to live.

Owners use competition to distract the owned people from collaborating to fulfill their needs. Threatening your ability to fulfill your needs by forcing people to put their life above another. Cooperation is the act of sharing a common resource. Even in economic competition, each company is a collaboration of laborers to fulfill a goal. Collaboration creates innovation, competition creates losers. No one wants to fight with their family, neighbors, and coworkers. No one wants to be a loser.

Security

In order for owners to keep control over what they own, they needed to enforce their ownership on the people. With debt and competition it became easy to incentivize a few people to act as a force to legitimize and support the owner. Those people became the armies and police that we see and aspire towards today.

Without ownership, there is no delusion to enforce. But we still need to ensure the longevity and support of our necessary systems. Maintenance is the act of supporting our needs without segregating people from accessing their needs. This also defines the scope of our obligation and cooperation. We can’t exceed our needs; drinking more water, eating more food, living in a bigger house does not help the individual or the community. We only need to maintain our needs and ensure the longevity of our needs.

Taxes

Taxes are your specific debt to your community to “maintain” the community, though we have seen how easily owners literally buy/bribe/lobby elected officials to change the tax law in their favor. Because of taxes, it becomes impossible to ever break your debt. Even after you paid off your mortgage to the bank, you are forever in debt to your community for that house to exist. Ownership of your own house is a fantasy while taxes exist.

Without taxes to legally bind you to your community, we need an alternative but equitable. Contracts are mutual agreements between two or more people. If all people in a community agree and sign the same contract that ensures equitable access and labor towards the necessary systems within the community, then you have the legal justification for your community to exist and your equitable membership of that community.

Currency

Money, credit, securities, crypto, etc. is a quantized division of debt that allows people to access their needs and wants by performing services to acquire money. Which in turn will be given to owners in exchange for access to their needs and wants. Without a system of ownership, debt, or taxes, there is no need for a medium to regulate the inequitable interactions between people. Money is debt. Currency is by definition inequitable, and no equitable alternative is necessary. Currency will be deprecated.

Belief Omissions

These beliefs are not designed to solve all of humanity’s problems. It is designed to create a foundation that values individual needs and community needs equitably. With this equitable foundation, we remove a large portion of blockers people face today because of our corrupt sense of ownership. With these blockers removed, it is the hope of this author that humanity can keep moving forward to face the real problems in our lives.

Sustainability

This is purely a math problem. We have a finite amount of land and resources, with an unlimited capacity to use those resources. If we value all individual and community needs equitably, then we must prioritize sustainability to ensure the longevity of those needs. This is a current problem regardless of the adoption of the Human Baseline.

Wants

The Human Baseline only focuses on our needs because those are the aspects of our ourselves and communities that are consistent. The implication is that anything defined as a “need” must follow the equitable interactions for the entire community. Wants are an individual pursuit that do not have the same value between any two people, nor does that value stay the same over time. Because that value cannot be consistent or made equitable, interaction with those wants cannot be equitable.

The Human Baseline defines one axiom regarding wants:
• Needs are a higher priority than wants.

One of the failings of the economy is valuing our wants and needs as the same. When money can be used to access your wants and needs the same way, you value your wants as the same as your needs. Because of the inequitable nature of wants, the economy forces that inequity onto your needs. Allowing people to neglect our needs to work on their wants. Putting the burden of supporting the community on vulnerable people desperate for any job.

There are some wants that are so ingrained in our community and culture that they feel like needs: art, sport, apparel, etc. Because Community is a need in of itself, the Human Baseline allows communities to define for themselves what is considered part of the “community”, beyond the place and people. If a community can agree on adopting a want as a Community need, they can then equitably interact with that want.

How To Use This Belief

Each individual will need to adopt these beliefs. Once all people within a community have made that change, then the community can transition their necessary systems to operate without ownership and its subsequent systems.

This belief should be used as an inspiration for humanity to allow ourselves the right to exist and the right to access our needs equitably. Through this inspiration we can remove all ownership and economic distractions from killing ourselves and our communities. Without these distractions we can exist with the purpose of improving ourselves and our communities, not to kill and exploit them.

This belief is very low level and will require additional exploration to become useful to our reality today. We still need to develop the tools and strategies that will allow us to transition our necessary systems and our interactions to become equitable. This is just a start, a better start for all people and all communities.

The Economic Transition Cooperative was founded to take this belief and bring it into reality. The coop’s purpose is to explore what this belief can look like when you apply it to our existing communities, and see what the results of that transition. Regardless of the ETC’s explorations and efforts, the Human Baseline will remain the same. You can take these beliefs and explore what equity means to you and your community, in your own way.