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I have no tangible knowledge of any conscious existences which I may or may not have had prior to my being born as a human being roughly half a century ago. As awareness dawned, my observable universe was limited to my grandparent's home and its local shops. However, I soon realised that the world was a much bigger place than I had thought, and that it was home to a lot more people than I knew. I thought it went on forever, but soon learned that humankind all lived together within a thin biosphere around the surface of a near-spherical planet called Earth.
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Planet Earth: Mass: 5.98 x 1021 tonnes Radius: 6,371 kilometres Area: 510 million km² Ocean: 361.3 million km² Land: 148.8 million km² Habitable Land: 130,693,000 km² Population: 6,000,000,000 Food Produced: 2,671 kcal/person/day NASA photo (reprocessed) |
As biological life-forms, we are not inherently self-existent. To survive, we need air, water, food, clothing, warmth and shelter. These the Earth freely provides. No amount of work could ever earn them. Our work is just a minor-but-necessary condition to receiving them. Transport us to a concrete planet and no amount of work could earn us our daily bread. The Earth is the family estate of man. It is our inheritance by default. Within it we are free. No landlord charges us rent for living here. No overseer forcibly constrains us to live and behave in any decreed way.
In recent times, in certain countries, thinking people have - through great tribulation - sought to establish an alternative kind of socio-economic system based on different rules of acquisition and ownership. This alternative system is generally known as Socialism. Unfortunately, the term itself has, in today's capitalist world, become severely diluted.
Socialists argue that since capital is created only by the collective effort of most - if not all - members of society, capital is a collective product. They therefore deem it to be collectively owned by those who produce it - namely the whole of society. Hence, and more fundamentally, they deem the means of transforming labour into the needs of life - namely the biosphere of Planet Earth - to be the collective inheritance of all.
But each human being is an individual of limited size, strength, mobility and intellectual capacity. The range and diversity of its physical senses also confine it to its immediate horizon. So it can occupy and influence directly only a small part of the Earth's surface at any time. Reason therefore suggests that each should employ an area of the planet not more than that which extends to his immediate physical horizon of influence. And this lends itself better to a divided rather than to a collective inheritance of the Earth.
The nature of the human life-form constrains it to live in family units. Each generation of the generic human family comprises two grandparents, two parents and three children, forming one productive family unit of 7. The combined area of land available to each family should therefore be 7 times the 21,782 m²/person which the planetary statistics provide for each human being. That works out at 152,475m² (or just over 15 hectares) for each family. Of course this is not all land on which you can grow food. It is divided up as follows:
On average over the entire planet, this land produces 2,671 kilocalories per person per day. This is equivalent to a steady 129 watts. It is almost 30% more than the minimum 2,073 kilocalories per day - or 100 watts - required by the human body. Thus, this planet currently produces 30% more food than is needed to eradicate malnourishment and starvation.
A vast amount of renewable energy is harvestable annually from the trees of the forest. Only about 8,000 m² of managed forest would be required to provide the 8,000 kg of naturally dried wood (24% moisture) to provide the 22½MWh (81,000 megajoules) a year to heat my home and the 3½ MWh (12,600 megajoules) of electricity it uses. That is a patch of forest only 90 metres square. As well as being a superb fuel, wood is also the best material there is for building a home and making furniture. With 4.7 hectares of woodland, a family would always have plenty of wood for both fuel and material.
Beneath our human family's generic 15.2 hectares of the Earth's surface lie all the materials necessary to support all the products and devices of modern technology. So if, as would seem fair, minerals were deemed to belong to the owner of the land beneath which they lay, then everybody would have an unconditional share in every technology which used them.
Every human being born on this planet arrives here with nothing. What he receives he must therefore be given. If this planet were divided with equity, then every child would be born into a family estate comprising 1.7 hectares of crops, 3.7 hectares of grass, 4.7 hectares of forest and 5.1 hectares of wilderness. You can imagine this as a circle of land just over 220 metres radius with a large family house plus outbuildings in the middle. Eventually, he and his siblings would inherit this estate as a birthright.
He would thus become equipped to be able - under his own initiative - to turn his work into the needs of life. But this inheritance would also provide him with the means of learning about nature and appreciating its beauty; thus providing him with the framework of language, thought and communication. It would inspire him to invent technologies and express himself through art. It would give him a place to entertain the traveller and play host to friends. Then there is the sea. Most of the planet is covered by sea. Much of the world's food comes from the sea. There are 6 hectares of sea for every human being on earth. That is 42 hectares for each family unit of seven.
To make best use of the land (and indeed the sea) from a holistic point of view it would be expedient for each individual not to insist on occupying his 15.2 hectares of the planet's surface as a contiguous plot. It would be better for him to put at least some of it to integrated productive use. Nevertheless, the individual must still own it. So as its owner he must have a right to a portion of any economic yield gained from it.
It is my belief that for a society to be fair, it must be based on a fair division of the only and ultimate means of turning one's labour into one's needs of life. And that 'means' is land. But how can land be divided fairly? The straight geometric division into individual domains of 15.2 hectares each is not necessarily a fair way to divide land. Some land is located in nice places, other land is located in horrible places. Some land is fertile, other land is barren. To make the division of land as fair as possible, a variable unit of measure must be used.
This variable unit for measuring land is called the hythe. It hails from ancient times and is the amount of land deemed necessary for a family to support itself. Its area therefore varies according to the fertility and topography of the land and the climate in which it lies. I therefore believe the hythe to be the ideal basis for an economy. However, the hythe would provide its occupiers with bonuses other than economic ones. It would also provide a healthy natural environment, rich in what would facilitate good physical and intellectual development as well as rest and recreation.
Every human being arrives on this planet with nothing. He therefore has no hythe of land. A hythe of land is a substantial property. In today's world, the vast majority of mankind would have no hope of earning enough in a lifetime to be able to buy one - even on the most benevolent of mortgage contracts. If everybody is going to be able to own and use a hythe of land, it will have to be given to him. He will have to receive it as a free and undeserved gift. He will have to inherit it. It will have to be given to him as his unconditional birthright.
I therefore hold it to be a self-evident truth that, by right of birth as one of 6 billion like beings on this planet, I should be granted the exclusive right of occupancy and economic exploitation of one six- billionth of the productive and mineral resources of its biosphere.
Of course, the portions belonging to each member of a generic family would have to be concatenated into a single productive unit - or hythe.
If there were a global revolution today, in which every individual on Earth received his rightful 1/6,000,000,000th of the Earth's productive resources, then the division would be fair now. But would it still be fair three or four generations hence? Different couples have different numbers of children. Some have no children. Some hythes would end up supporting too many. Others would lie fallow. What is needed is a workable way of re-dividing the land fairly for each new generation. This, in turn, requires a redefinition of ownership - or at least, a clarification of what it always ought to have been.
But what kind of society would result? Placing each family in their rightful hythe would give rise to a planet on which the population were spread out evenly over its habitable land. A billion self-sufficient but disconnected families. With the old forces of religious fear, political subjugation and commercial greed finally eradicated from the the face of this planet, what force remains that can drive humanity to self-connect into an integrated society? And without a communications infrastructure, how can such connections take place geographically?
As well as our strong desire for self-sufficiency and solitude, there is, deep within us, also an overwhelming need to mix and interact with others. Humans are not natural hermits. They are gregarious, the natural social group comprising about 150 individuals. But these groups overlap. Each person's coterie comprises not quite the same set of individuals as that of his neighbour. This gives human society more the nature of a fluid rather than that of a structured machine or a hierarchy.
By nature, hythes are economically self-sufficient in the basic needs of life. However, the diverse talents of human kind can provide much more than the basics. They can produce specialised things. But specialised talents are distributed. For all to be able to benefit from the specialised talents of each, people need to be able to exchange what they have for what they want. Thus in order to prosper, a hythe-based economy, like any other, requires a fair and effective means of exchange - a truly free market.
As today, not everybody likes to live in the countryside, so too not everybody would want to live in a hythe. They want to be near lots of other people. They want to mix. But the social division of those who would like the quietness of hythe life and those who would like city life is complex. It is not just people of different temperaments. It is usually different members of the same family who desire different social environments. Even the same individual may have a different need and preference at different times in his life. The hythe system must therefore be flexible in this regard. There are ways this could be achieved which would satisfy the diverse needs and preferences of all.
To be able to function within a hythe-based socio-economy, people would have to be well educated. On the other hand, many would, for a sizeable part of their lives, be members of a highly distributed population. The problems of getting education to a distributed population could be solved in four main ways:
Reducing attendance time does not mean that the quality of education received will diminish. Most knowledge imparted by today's education systems is unnecessary. Its purpose is simply to turn out the kind of human cogs which are currently in demand for capitalist economic machines. Most of it is obsolete within a few years and a new lot has to be learned - all to maintain the constant change which keeps the profits rolling in. In a hythe-based society, an entirely new kind of education system is required.
This model for human society would have to be based on a formal constitution to which all in good conscience could willingly subscribe. I here submit a link to my own attempt at a political Draft Manifesto upon which this new model for human society could possibly be based.
This chapter has painted a somewhat fuzzy picture of a socio-economy which is totally different from, and wholly incompatible with, the capitalist world of today. So, what first step can be taken to inject the intrinsic fairness of Hythe World in today's society? The best one I can suggest is to create an economic entity called an Inheritance Bond.
Each nation-state should list and quantify all the productive economic assets within its territory. That is, economic assets like land, minerals, industrial buildings, plant and infrastructure. It excludes dissipative (or non-productive) private property like houses and furniture. Divide the quantity of each asset by the national population giving a quantified list of productive assets per person. Confiscate all such assets from their current owners and deem each individual in the country to own a share of them as quantified on the above-mentioned list. Each citizen of the country (as a result of this they will become true citizens) must then be credited each year with the effective fair rent of the productive assets he owns.
An Inheritance Bond is the document listing the types and quantities of this parcel of productive assets which belong to each individual citizen. The quantities and types of assets which make up the Inheritance Bond will naturally change annually. As a document, therefore, each person's Inheritance Bond must be dynamic. Under today's technology, it lends itself to being kept as a hypertext document containing a link to a single source in which the quantities are held and updated.
Each citizen will thus have an income which, in the absence of being allowed direct use of the assets so listed, is deemed to be a partial compensation or recompense for that disallowment. This income of dignity is his by right of birth. It is not a benefit. It is not an act of benevolence which is bestowed upon him by a condescending patronising capitalist state.
All large agricultural, mining, industrial and commercial enterprises must rent all the productive resources they use from the citizens of the country. This includes minerals. An enterprise may own the value which it adds to the materials it mines or forms into products: but it does not own the materials themselves. It must still pay its labourers a level of wage on which they can afford to live without having to spend all their prime time locked in productive toil. They have a right to time for themselves.
This gives everybody a share in the productive resources of the planet which lie within the boundaries of their nation. Although each cannot as yet apply his own labour to his share of them directly to gain his needs of life, he does have an inalienable source of income from them. This guarantees his subsistence at a level determined directly by the yields of nature and of the economy as a whole. It cannot be relentlessly squeezed into all but non-existence by capitalist politicians eager to torture an unemployed minority to win votes from a greedy arrogant self-seeking deluded employed majority.
Those who currently control society, deny everybody else the direct use of his rightful share of the planetary resources for turning his labour into his needs of life. Those who currently control society, are therefore, through the government they support, morally obliged to provide each individual with an opportunity to work, in return for a just wage, in a job which best suites his skills and aptitudes. In other words, since they have stolen from him his portion of the planetary inheritance, they are, at the very least, morally obliged to recompense him with guaranteed appropriate life-long employment.
Of course, it is unlikely that those in control will recognise this moral obligation - at least, not in the beginning. Employment will therefore, for a long time, be a matter of good fortune. However, the wages of one who has the good fortune to be employed must be in addition to the basic income-by-right he receives from the rent on his share of the nation's terrestrial resources. On this rich planet, there is no excuse for a nation to subject any of its members to destitution or to ensnare them in the grid-lock of poverty. The Inheritance Bond guarantees that nobody can ever be subjected to such indignity by those who in ignorance of their circumstances would presume to judge them by repeatedly voting into power governments which despise and oppress them.
In a world controlled by greed-driven capitalists, the only way a universal opportunity for employment can be guaranteed is by militant labour unionisation. Unfortunately, the only kind of pressure which labour unions can bring to bear is indirect. By withholding labour and halting production, unions end up hurting the individual consumer and ruining the innocent small artisan long before their actions have any effect at all on their invincible corporate employers. A possible remedy is for consumers and artisans to protect themselves by forming themselves into tightly-bound communities which are large enough to stand against the might of the capitalist corporations.
Without the Inheritance Bond, the capitalists would inevitably win any economic war of attrition. This is because it would be the capitalists - and they alone - who would own and control all the wealth-generating resources of the planet. The labourer, the artisan and the consumer would own and control none of them. The capitalists would therefore have the means of continually regenerating their needs of life while the labourer, the artisan and the consumer were 'running on batteries' and so would not be able to provide their needs of life once they had run out of what they had stored up before hand.
With the Inheritance Bond, each individual is self-sufficient for survival while the great capitalist corporations could be starved out by the on-going rents they have to pay on the land they use and occupy and the materials they extract.
Nevertheless, in the present world, capitalist corporations are still the only mechanisms through which almost all food, clothing, shelter and other needs of life are produced and distributed. Consequently, until these mechanisms are downsized and proliferated into hythes, the capitalist elite can still hold the rest of humankind to ransom for profit.
Thus sadly, in the world the way it is, the National Inheritance Bond is about as far as we can go. The global economy is so intertwined and interdependent that no one nation can unilaterally progress any further along the long road which leads from the jaws of capitalism towards an equitable society like Hythe World.
To progress further, all nations would have to implement the Inheritance Bond for their respective citizens. The next step would be for all the natural resources of the planet to be quantified and divided by the entire world population to create one single Universal Inheritance Bond which would be the same for every inhabitant of the planet.
The next step after this is to dispossess the favoured few of their hold on this planet and distribute real land. But then comes the big problem. For a couple of centuries or so now, human beings have been forced by the industrial division of labour to become more and more specialised economically. As a result, almost every human being on Earth has lost the essential knowledge inherited from the depths of history on how to use directly the natural resources of the planet to gain his needs of life. Placed in Hythe World now, we would all starve.
There has to be an intermediate stage between the Inheritance Bond and the Hythe. I call it, for want of a better term, the virtual hythe. This, in essence is a software model of a generic hythe. It could run on a personal computer. It enables a family - even from the confines of their suburban house or city flat - to operate as if in Hythe World. To connect into the real and present world of capitalism, the virtual hythe has peripheral adapters. These are extra software modules surrounding the central model. They act as bridges between the model and the various elements of the present socio-economic environment.
The virtual hythe would provide families with a means of regaining the 'lost knowledge' of the land, and present a constant and familiar user interface from the outside world as it transmuted from capitalism to universal egalitarianism. A prime example of this transmutation would be the change from the corporate-enforced life of the commuting employee to a free and unpressured option to work from home in a truly free market.
To my mind, the Inheritance Bond is a fundamental human right. Without the economic empowerment it affords, the generic inhabitant of this planet is essentially powerless to exercise the human rights listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Consequently, in any fair society, it must be one of the most fundamental in a new and different Bill of Rights based on a family-centric view of the global socio-economy and providing protection from physical violation, psychological oppression, poverty, forced isolation, and all possible harm resulting from the actions of incompatible laws.
The human life-form requires the unencumbered use of sufficient of the planet's natural resources to turn its labour into its needs. Every human being born, should therefore have full possession of a fair portion of the planet's natural wealth generating resources as a right of birth. The human life-form also requires access to society in order to fulfil its wider genetic, economic, social, education and spiritual needs. It must therefore be given complete freedom to interact with others of its kind through an unrestrictive communications infrastructure which allows each individual to determine his own mix of socialisation and solitude.
Human endeavour is driven by the complex dynamical forces of the planet's biosphere. This imparts a complex dynamical nature to society. Humanity is thus an ever-changing quilt of regularity and turbulence. Turbulence plants unique waymarks along the long open road of history. It writes for each a unique and inspiring melody upon the regular rhythm of life. It provides each with his own personal mix of socialisation and solitude.
Each human being is, by nature, constrained to see things only from his own point of view. He is also, by nature, driven by an unrestrained lust and compulsion to acquire without limit. These two factors combine to entrap him in a vicious cycle of blind striving for unrestricted self-gain. Different human beings are, by nature, endowed with different abilities in different proportions. This gives some individuals an advantage over others in the realm of human interaction. This, together with the lust for unlimited self-gain, results in an unacceptably disparate society.
Human interaction is governed by laws of cause and effect which, due to the individual self-interest of human nature, are not convergent. The complex dynamical nature of human society is thereby destined eventually destroy it. The laws of human interaction must be made to converge. This can be achieved only by upgrading the human mind to seek the interest of neighbour equally with that of self. This is not humanly possible. It is only possible at present to create a pseudo-equitable society by setting up a social infrastructure to teach and enforce a fair and equitable code of law. It is not difficult to see that today's society is unjust and unfair. But why strive for an idyllic society at all? What is it all for anyway? There is a reason.
