Choosing a different world

Choosing a different world

What if things could be very different?

If the choice was up to you…

How many people would thirst for clean water?
How many people would hunger for basic food?
How many children would go uneducated?

I hope and imagine your answer to all of these is zero.

I believe that nearly everyone on earth would come to the same conclusions if the decision was actually up to them. But somehow collective humanity is making far worse choices. We are playing the game of life by rules that few of us would agree to if given a choice.

Making choices behind The Veil of Ignorance

I have always been fascinated by John Rawls’ thought experiment about the Veil of Ignorance. (If this concept is new to you, please check out the quick video below.) What sort of society would we choose if we were designing it behind a Veil of Ignorance and we did not know what role we would play in that society?

I am pretty sure everyone in that new society would have access to food, water, education, and opportunity. No one who did not know their place in the new world would choose a system that did not ensure a reasonable baseline for all people.

Great short video summary of the Veil of Ignorance by the BBC

What would this new world look like?

The full scope of this question is immensely complicated and up for endless debate and differences of opinion. That said, I suspect most of us could agree on a bunch of foundational principles of this better new world.

One pillar I like to focus on is that everyone should have ‘enough’. We can argue about the definition of ‘enough’, but I am confident that we can all come to agreement on some examples of ‘not enough’.

Let’s start by fixing the blatant examples of ‘not enough’. If a man is starving for lack of food, if a child could be dewormed for ten cents, if a woman walks many dangerous miles everyday to collect water; they do not have enough. We as a society have a moral obligation to try to change this.

Our primary problem is not one of scarcity but of distribution. For example: humanity already produces more food in the world than we need to feed everyone, despite the fact that we are not actually trying to solve that problem. Imagine what could happen if we did collectively try to solve it.

What if we could change the rules?

Too many of us feel powerless to effect meaningful change in the world. “What can I do?” we ask. Since I believe the vast majority of us would choose a much fairer and equitable world, we collectively should make choices to change it.

Our capitalist system does a great job of meeting the needs and desires of people with money, but does a miserable job of broadly distributing money.

As I outlined in my first article It is time to reimagine money, I believe a solution to this glaring distribution problem could be the mass adoption of cryptocurrency universal basic income. I encourage you to read that article if this is a new concept to you. It outlines the basics of how new forms of digital money distributed in a truly equitable manner could become important currencies in the world. If they did, then everyone could have enough money to afford the basic necessities of life. Hopefully solving these base level needs would end much of the world’s suffering and unlock massive amounts of human potential to improve endless aspects of our world.

Will cryptocurrency universal basic income (UBI) succeed and help create a more equitable world for everyone? If a growing number of us embrace this UBI concept, grow the networks, and believe that these types of more equitable money should have value in the world…they will.

Maybe the choice really is up to you…

Here is how you can start getting involved today.

CrytoUBI.org is working to track the related projects in this growing movement. I am actively following and researching many of them.

Two of the most established and active ones you can sign up for today are SwiftDemand and Manna. I encourage you to join this growing movement and sign up for these and other promising UBI projects. It costs you nothing but a few minutes of time, but shows the world that there is a growing number of us who want to see this change in the world.

This piece was originally published on Medium.