There are some interesting social initiatives now. There’s one called Basic Income. I don’t know if you have heard of that. This is the idea that everybody should get a wage. Everybody. Whether they work or not. So that we simply eliminate poverty in one step like that. There would be no more poor people. You think ‘Jesus, that sounds ridiculous.’ It isn’t ridiculous, actually – you might want to read about it.
Another thing that tells you about the future we’re moving into is the open-source movement. Where people, instead of producing ideas, carefully defending them, and keeping all the rewards from them are starting to share ideas… Altruism. Altruism has a kind of a new face. Writers like William McCaskill are starting to think let’s get rational about altruism. We have to be more altruistic…
So, all of these challenges require us to constantly be remoulding ourselves… What we tend to do is we get a sense of what everybody else is thinking about things and we sort of work out our attitudes in relation to everybody else, as we generally think quite collectively. I think it’s good that we do. I think it’s very important that we have more and more of the mechanisms for doing that. This is why I think we need to be thinking about art and culture not as a little add-on, a bit of luxury, but as the central thing that we do…
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Excerpts from Brian Eno’s BBC (John Peel) Lecture, 2015, with paragraph arrangements and emphasis added by ELLOPOS BLOG. Cf. Brian Eno @ Amazon.
