Yesterday, I asked what you would do if you were standing at the control of everything or, well, of almost everything.
Here’s my answer: Pay people to do their thing. Pay them to give. Pay them for a month.
Write your poems or bake your bread or start your business or figure out what your thing is.
Do that for a month. And get paid to do it for a month.
And get some cash to give, invest, or donate as well. Money you use to make the world “cooler.”
You can view this another way:
Let's dial up the global village and reinvent the wheel as a wheel of wages.
A wheel that pays people to do their thing and to give. For a month.
How do we make life a little more how we wish it to be, improve education, and cool down the earth? We recognize that in the last twenty years, as those questions have become more and more pressing, the control board of everything has, in essence, come into being as the internet.
So let’s dial-up a village as a place that works against corporate dominance, across national boundaries, and with a unified mission.
My unifying mission? Crank out agents of the good.
What makes you good? Well, lots of stuff we can debate about in church or school or on other parts of the internet. But one thing that makes everyone good is when they do their thing. People are more productive for the world and less expensive to it when they are doing their thing.
Can we offer you a year or a lifetime of doing your thing? Nope. Too expensive. But a month? Yeah, we can work towards that.
In our village, when it makes sense for you—whether you are twenty-one, or forty-five or sixty-three—you get a month of doing your thing.
Because in a world where we feel ground down, while a month may not undo all your stress or reinvent your career, it will help you and your life, especially because the village offers you support and mentoring and connections for this month. (Connecting you to those who can support and mentor is what the internet does best.)
Besides, with a future more and more dominated by jobs done by robots (or people asked to work like robots), your month of doing your thing will help seed the economic ground with jobs only humans can do.
And for this month you get €1000 euros or €4000 as if churned out by a wheel.
The wheel of wages.
Why these numbers? Because they establish a global middle-class norm and because whether your are Sierra Leone or Switzerland, have nothing and need your month fully covered of have some means and just need a wage to take the your month without stress, these wages make that possible.
They work everywhere within a system.
And whichever of the two wages you are paid, you are also paid an additional 1000 euros to give, invest, or donate.
You are paid to give.
Because in world that is getting hotter, someone who can add a drop of rain by global econic standards— €1000 say—to the parched ground can help cool things off.
Do your thing. Make it rain.
Sure, we could ask everyone to prove themselves. Who's most deserving? Like when you apply to college or try to get a job. But is not that the essence of the grind? Where so much of the heat and stress we all know so well come from? Which cog fits into our system best?
For this month, in this village, the pressure is not on the individual to conform but the system to turn that wheel, to spill out the €2000 or €5000 we spend to manufacture time—a month—which our citizens use as agents of the good.
More about the river of money needed to turn that wheel another time.