A Syringe of Possibility (Consider the Basic Income)

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These days, the only thing that feels so certain as the need for socioeconomic change is the learned sense that nothing will, in fact, change. The powers that be will prevail. We will lead the lives society arranges for us, like schoolchildren who awaken to find their outfits already hanging on the doorknob.

We may harbor the inchoate idea that the whole of life should perhaps be arranged differently. But we’ll learn to let that be. We’ll learn to savor the small pellets of satisfaction as they come, like birds passing overhead that wrench our heads skywards, granting us a distracted moment to marvel at the great blue expanse above, only to return our gaze to the earth we’ve grown so ambivalent towards. We’ll settle back into the numbness that prevails.

The impossibility of change is, of course, an illusion. There is only change. Even what appears solid and motionless, like a great stony mountain, moves and morphs when seen along an appropriate timescale. But the past 50 years have set upon us an advanced sense of inertia. This perception that nothing is possible, that nothing will change, is a disorder of our own making.

“The critic Raymond Williams once wrote that every historical period has its own ‘structure of feeling’ ... a distinct way of organizing basic human emotions into an overarching cultural system. Each had its own way of experiencing being alive.”

— KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

This crippling atmosphere of impossibility, where change is forgotten because it exists beyond our perception, descended on us only recently. And I think it’s killing us, slowly. Just as our bodies replace all their constituent cells in 10 year cycles, the past few decades have rebuilt our experiential palette, yielding not a renewed physical body so much as a new mentality. The critic Raymond Williams describes these emergent mentalities that coevolve with culture as structures of feeling. They’re an age’s organs of perception.

Inside this most recent structure of feeling, it feels as though the disenchantment Max Weber wrote about is coming to a boil. Or rather, a flat, exhausted sputter. Strange as it sounds, it feels as though the way we experience life is dying. The organs of perception are shriveling. I know I’m projecting, but perhaps less so than we’d like to admit.

In the unfinished introduction to Acid Communism, a book cultural theorist Mark Fisher killed himself before completing, he describes our perception of the 1960’s as “a moment more vivid than now - a time when people really lived, when things really happened.”

The subtext moans with disenchantment: now, people do not really live. Things do not really happen. Is it any surprise, then, that we’ve flung ourselves into the internet like stranded, starved island survivors to the sound of a passing boat? The more unsatisfying real life grows, the more we come to depend on the empty dopamine pellets dispensed by the internet’s attention-seeking platforms. They keep alive inside of us the waning notion that life is still worth living. Consider, for example, that in 2017 there were more than twice as many suicides than homicides in the US. We’re addicted to distractions, but can you blame us?

The essayist Jia Tolentino notes how we allow the internet to fit itself into each unoccupied moment of our lives. Like water filling the holes in a sponge. We’re content to distract ourselves from the deadening atmosphere of impossibility that surrounds us:

“There is less time these days for anything other than economic survival. The internet has moved seamlessly into the interstices of this situation, redistributing our minimum of free time into unsatisfying micro-installments, spread throughout the day. In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute”

The internet is not inherently benevolent. But neither is it evil. I don’t suspect it of any inherent moral inclinations. Its tendencies towards toxic codependency and psychological exploitation derive mostly from the fact that much of what we know as “the internet” exists upon for-profit platforms. Business models of dependency are not native to the internet, but to capitalism as we know it.

This is why, when Tolentino asks how we might put an end to “the worst of the internet”, she first looks to economic and structural changes: “Social and economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases followed by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow dismantle the internet’s fundamental profit model.”

But she shies away, exposing that learned sense of impossibility that we who’ve never existed within a system other than hyper-capitalism cannot help but osmose: “At this point, it’s clear that collapse will almost definitely come first.” Fredric Jameson’s 2003 observation is aging disconcertingly well: the end of the world comes more readily to our imaginations than the end of capitalism.

Taxes Can Change Us

But I’m writing this because I disagree. I do not believe the hyper-capitalism is as infallible as it seems. I do not believe that meaningful change will only come after the world ends. And I do not believe the internet will always be a profit-seeking ether that numbs us to our melancholy while bringing out the worst in us.

I say this because very small changes can have very large effects, if they occur deep enough in the heart of a system. And I believe the state of the covid-scarred world is such that precisely this sort of small, incisive change is becoming politically viable. The kind that embeds itself inside the heart of the status quo, setting off a cascading series of changes that percolate upwards through each piled-on layer of the world as we know it. Like a rock placed under a mattress, forcing all that lies upon it to shift.

It’s at this point that I ask you: consider the negative income tax (NIT).

Richard Nixon almost passed a misshapen relative of NIT in 1971, but in 2020, we might consider the real deal. NIT is a type of basic income. It’s equivalent to universal basic income (UBI), without the redundancy of taxing the UBI back from high-earners who don’t need it.

With an NIT income floor of $13,000, if you quit your job, shave your head, leave your spouse, buy a used Prius, and spend the rest of your days writing obscure poetry, you can still count on receiving $13,000 per year, or $1,083 per month. The poverty line becomes a concrete floor. As you begin earning income, your NIT benefits slowly phaseout. If your income drops, the benefits phase back in.

Both NIT and UBI are economically feasible. But NIT, at present, is more politically feasible. There’s no reason we couldn’t pass it tomorrow, with a few progressive taxes that are desirable on their own, never mind as means to eradicate poverty and ignite a renewed sense of possibility throughout the populace.

I’m not saying a guaranteed trickle of income is sufficient to redesign the hyper-capitalist system, let alone redesign our mentalities. There is no single panacea. Only a dutiful placing of one foot after the other. One policy, and then another. A meager basic income detached from a broader project of reform could actually do more to entrench the status quo than transform it.

But I see NIT as a method of increasing our optionality. It expands the possible at the most atomistic layer of society: they everyday life of ordinary people. This single change strikes directly into that veil of impossibility’s shroud.

“A structure of feeling is not a free-floating thing. It’s tightly coupled with its corresponding political economy ... The neoliberal structure of feeling totters. What might a post-capitalist response to this crisis include?”

— KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

A basic income lowers the stakes for pursuing risky ideas and experimental behaviors by raising the economic floor (so, by the way, would universal healthcare, baby bonds, and social wealth funds). You won’t fall nearly as far if things don’t work out. The barriers to entry are lowered, allowing more people to experiment. Not to mention, of course, that an income floor does away with an entire socioeconomic stratum of suffering. We don’t know how much happiness money can buy, but we’re sure that poverty buys misery.

Raising the floor and lowering the stakes increases the likelihood that people will try different things. Opting out of a deadening life for an unassured alternative has no guarantees. It requires high risk tolerance. It’s scary. If you don’t find a source of revenue, you cannot survive. This constrains the spectrum of viable behaviors - you can only do that which earns. But with a basic income, this behavioral constraint is loosened. New possibilities arise.

Consider my waking up one morning and deciding to confront, rather than scroll away from, that thorn in the mind, that vague but persistent sense that I quite simply dislike my life on the whole and would rather do something else. With a sufficient basic income, why not? Why not spend a year writing a novel? Why not try and start a business? Why not hitchhike across the country while learning how to play guitar? Why not pool money with some friends, buy land, learn how to build shoddy houses, and raise some animals?

Surely someone enabled to explore how they’d most like to exist is worth more to society than another disgruntled retail worker? Or another creative marketing director who figures out how to sell yet another sports drink to the world? Disgruntled and disenchanted workers do not make a vibrant society. Society thrives when its constituents feel alive, like an electromagnetic energy that courses through the system.

The point is this expansion of possibilities. Expanding our perception of the possible is to expand our sense of life itself. I mean this literally, following the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset:

“When people talk of life they generally forget something which to me seems most essential, that our existence is at every instant and above all the consciousness of what is possible to us. If at every moment we had before us no more than one possibility, it would be meaningless to give it that name [life]. Rather, it would be pure necessity…So we could say ‘we live’ as well as ‘we find ourselves in an atmosphere of definite possibilities’.”

In this sense, unconditional basic income operates as what the psychologist James Gibson calls an affordance. An affordance is an “action possibility formed by the relationship between an agent and its environment.” Basic income changes the economic environment of our lives, inviting new possibilities. It’s an affordance that enlarges our “consciousness of what is possible to us”, by increasing the concrete “action possibilities” available.

Systemizing this expansion of real possibilities for everyone is what I think we can begin now, with a NIT. And has there ever been a moment in such need of new operating procedures? We know schooling is becoming a deterrent of true education. We know the global economy must come into harmony with ecological limits. We don’t know what will happen as we continue developing artificial intelligence.  

We’re awash in meaningful, civilization-scale questions. But barriers set by risk and economic insecurity restrict the percentage of the population who can engage with these sorts of inquiries. We need to lower the barriers and let people flood into these questions.

Fisher writes: “The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”

We must tear this hole. We must revive the sense that things are possible, that we are really alive and things can really happen. But we shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the 20th century. We shouldn’t tell people what these possibilities are. We shouldn’t tell people what to imagine. The white picket fence was lame anyway.

Instead, we should afford people the means to imagine for themselves. We should reduce the bottleneck placed on human behavior by reducing the amount of money one must earn in order to survive and participate in society. Once money is assured, we can move on to more interesting, diversified obsessions.

Hasn’t this always been the point? Haven’t we spent centuries accumulating capital and innovating new technologies precisely to further our freedoms? Isn’t the point of accumulating wealth so that its lack will no longer constrain our lives? So that we’ll be afforded new possibilities?

Every comfortably middle-class citizen working a bullshit job for no purpose other than the paycheck is a loss of potential. A subdued possibility. A forsaken future. We’ve already re-written Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and it’s ugly: “I saw the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads.”

Most people working bullshit jobs know it. Or at least, they feel it, in some deep level of their psyche. As “basic” as the income an NIT affords may be, its effects reach down into exactly these depths. A recent basic income trial conducted in Finland confirms as much.

After holding extensive interviews with basic income recipients following the two-year experiment, researchers found remarkable changes in recipients’ mentalities. They found that recipients: “trusted other people and the institutions in society to a larger extent and were more confident in their own future and their ability to influence things than the control group.” They found lower rates of depression and higher life satisfaction.

What price should we put on the effects of reviving people’s confidence in their own future? Is $850 billion a good deal (we spend that much on the defense department)? What outcome could do more to pierce the veil of impossibility than reviving our decrepit belief that we can influence the future? That things are possible?

Interviewees also reported that the basic income “provided them with a larger variety of legitimate modes of participation outside of paid labor”. If we’re truly committed to innovation, this is good news. A larger variety of “legitimate modes of participation” in society yields more diverse outcomes. More outcomes increase the probability that we stumble upon a good idea.

Coaxing these broader ranges of innovation will help, I think, bring new structures of feeling into being. A new lens of seeing and feeling turned upon the world. It begins with a confident reorientation towards the future, achieved by making basic economic insecurities a thing of the past. It has, of course, already begun. “The future is already here - it’s just not very evenly distributed”, William Gibson quips.

But with a negative income tax, we can further draw this future of possibility into the present lives of ordinary people.

I think of this project as quintessentially, if not romantically, American. It’s rooted in democracy, freedom, and innovation. The project, as I see it, is to democratize the capacity to see and feel the world as alive with possibilities. Because of course it is. But for too many, economic concerns eclipse this reality like a tall metallic skyscraper blocking the sun’s light for anyone not hoisted atop the tall hills of the wealth distribution.

We can begin the work of changing that now. I hope we do. We can act upon our economic systems to rebuild our own mentalities so that it feels as though we’re all really living. That life is really happening. Because of course it’s always happening, but we’re only around for a short while. It’d be a shame to miss it.

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