Categories
economics environment Key Article politics society

Discover LIFE

In the never ending quest to make the principles and ideas behind LIFE accessible to a wider audience we have produced an new iBook called “Discover LIFE”.

Understanding who we are requires that we can reach beyond our personal perception of the world to see ourselves as a species.

Who are humans?

How did we get here?

What makes us tick?

These are the important questions we must be able to answer first, before we can embark on our journey to find out what works for us.

With sound and compassionate understanding of our inherited natures, we will be on the road to developing effective new models around which the peoples of the world can organise themselves.

The book is available in the animated iBook format for Apple devices and computers here. Most graphics are clickable for more detail – it’s fun, try it out. Open in iBooks when prompted.

And a PDF Hi-Res version (30Mb) is here and a Low-Res (7Mb) version is here.

Please post your comments and suggestions below, or email then to info@uklife.org, that would be greatly appreciated

Many thanks!

Donate

Donate to UK LIFE now to help make Proper Change come true - thank you

£25.00

Categories
politics

The Heart needs its Soul

The left has lost touch with its soul, and until it finds it again we are all the losers.  From Berlin to The Baltic, from Scotland to San Francisco, the confusion is manifest, and the result is the political failure we witness around us. To the extent that there is any resurgence of left leaning politics, such as in Spain and Greece, those forces hark back to 20th century models and ideals that are unmodernised, and they are doomed to fail, if not electorally, then in office.

Categories
Key Article problems society

Promises

Hominoids only emerged from the Savannah to cover the world after they adopted promises as the basis of their societies. In a material world, where money is used as a replacement, is rediscovering the importance of promises a leap too far for most of us?

There is something that humans before the “economic era” knew and understood, a truth that we find hard to grasp with our economic minds: human society is based on promises, not money. The primary social promise is of mutual safety, given to every member of the society in the form of help and care, available in the event of need, and provided as service. That promise of social safety is not conditional, but it does anticipate that in return each member will make their best personal contribution.

Certainly the humans of a few thousand years ago, and, I would wager, even our great-grandparents, would have unconsciously known that their society was bound together by mutual promises. So basic was this fact that it need not have been consciously examined. That a promise of mutual safety was exchanged for mutual contribution was inherent, instinctive, and bound into the fabric of common understanding, as it has been since the dawn of our species.

If there is one thing that will help you understand our troubled predicament today, it is this: that we are dependent on others, to whom we are bound by promises, not money. If that jars with your sense of reality, you are not alone. If you recognise its absence in the world around you, you are also not alone. Let’s try to understand why.

Categories
competition crisis Key Article society

A devastating critique

Nearly every facet of modern western civilisation is based on a simple premise: that the individual makes better decisions than a group. What if that is untrue?

The entire neoliberal construct (limited government, free enterprise, and personal freedom) is predicated on the notion of the individual as ascendant to the group. The dominant feature of this philosophy is this distain for the group as a quality. Government should be limited because groups make poorer decisions than individuals, private markets excel because they rely on the decisions of brilliant individuals, and personal freedom is phrased in the format of freeing the individual from limits imposed by the group.

Yet what we know of ourselves, what we can see around us, and what we know about evolution, all attest to this as fallacy. We need our groups, our families, our communities, our markets, for our individual sanity and happiness. We evolved as groups, that is our foundational and inescapable inheritance. We cannot think ourselves into solitary individuality, we know we are individual members of groups.

Categories
economics Key Article politics WellFair

Conditional Cash Corrupts Us All

Why cash has (almost) no place in a social security system.

Unconditional love is the ultimate expression of our humanity for a reason, because it is the basis of our successful evolution.

The purpose of social security is to provide unconditional support as the expression of solidarity, thereby maximising the output and the quality of our society. Conditionality defeats the central purpose of providing social security, corrupts all participants, and stultifies our society and its economy. Because cash distribution always includes conditionality, it has to be removed from social security.