UBI is fundamentally about trust and security...

Humans are humans. We have the same biological machinery functioning within us, regardless of where we live or the color of our skin. In fact, the machinery within humans is even shared by our animal relatives. The reason UBI works (see all the evidence) is because it's not really about money. Money is the vehicle through which UBI functions, but UBI is fundamentally about trust and security.

Look at the GiveDirectly UBI experiment in Kenya for example. What's actually going on? Are resources from elsewhere in the world being shipped to Kenya so that they have more resources? No. Money is being sent, but it's not even physical money. It's ones and zeroes. And those ones and zeroes aren't even being sent at all. They're just being rearranged on both ends.

A UBI recipient in Kenya holds a phone, and suddenly that phone enables that person to acquire goods and services in Kenya that they'd otherwise be prevented from obtaining. Why? Because suddenly a store owner trusts them enough to provide them with food, because they in turn will be trusted to acquire their own food as a result. The only reason money has any value at all, is because we all trust it does, and trust each other to accept it. By trusting money, we trust each other. When someone has money, we trust that person did something for someone else, and so we in turn do something for them. A society full of people who trust each other has social capital. Bonds are formed between people. Relationships form and grow. This is social cohesion and it's extremely important. The more humans are interconnected, the more we trust each other, the healthier we are as a society.

There is a biological mechanism underneath all of this functioning at the cellular level. Glucocorticoids are stress hormones that affect the way the neurons in our brains fire. Neurons fire when they reach a certain level of activation. Stress creates a state where neurons are more likely to fire. Humans evolved, as did our animal relatives, in stressful environments. Those who got stressed out were put in an excited state where they were more likely to survive due to adapting a fight or flight response. Those who didn't have such a response didn't pass on their genes. Short-term survival superseded long-term concerns. It's like our brains evolved multiple gears, where the ability to downshift into first gear could mean the difference between life or death. This adaptation to harsh environments has become a maladaptation as we rebuilt our environments to better suit our collective desire to not die. We don't need the ability to sense a predator and run for our lives much anymore, but the mechanism is always there.

Today, survival is all about sufficient access to money. Without sufficient access to money, we live in a state of chronic stress. This stress downshifts billions of human minds into first gear. There are ways of coping with stress that happen to include behaviors like drug use and displacement aggression, where aggressive and even violent behavior against our fellow man reduces our stress by supplying a greater sense of control. Another way of coping with stress is by leaning on each other. Someone with close friends is far less likely to suffer from stress. There is of course an interaction here, where stressed out people are in greater need of human relationships, but being stressed out makes human relationships harder to form and maintain. What humans need in order to prosper is less stress, on in other words more security.

When humans feel secure, their neurons are not in a heightened chronic hair-trigger state of firing. Their minds are operating in higher gears where long-term thinking supersedes short-term thinking. They are more able to form relationships with each other, which in turn enables greater coping against stress, forming a positive feedback loop of less stress and greater social cohesion.

The above is true anywhere, for all humans. We are a social species that requires a sense of security in order to prosper. Because we use money as a tool of trust conveyance, money enables security and social cohesion. All humans require a certain number of calories per day in order to live. We all require maintaining our body temperatures between upper and lower limits. All of us use money to meet these universal needs, and when we create environments where survival isn't of constant concern, we as individuals prosper, and we as communities prosper. That is a universal truth that doesn't care about imaginary national borders, or skin color.

Universal basic income works universally because all humans share the same need to not just survive, but to thrive, and to do it together as interdependent social animals.

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