Gandhi, Civil Disobedience and Universal Basic Income

Because of Brazil’s current situation increasingly emerging day, I could not fail to express myself.

This writing was produced at the invitation of Dr. Shobana Nelasco, for the book yet to be published on Gandhi’s thoughts, and with his license, we hereby did so.

Our obligation as an activist is to denounce, take a stand and of course, it is free for those who receive it, to disclose in the best possible way.

Once again, we thank the teacher and everyone who can report this situation, either through this or another manifestation.

I am grateful, very grateful, for contributing a few words to this collective construction in this very serious moment of mourning and worldwide struggle. Especially when it comes to writing about Gandhi.

However, before that, I need to clarify a few things:

First, how aware I am that this is a huge honor, responsibility and beyond my capacity;

Second, how much I also know that this may seem unnecessary because it is absolutely evident;

And third, therefore, I know that if so, I shouldn’t even be wasting the reader’s time writing about it. However, due to my “national credentials” I cannot avoid doing so.

Unfortunately, not only a significant portion of my countrymen, but the governor of my country also wants to demonstrate that: he cannot distinguish or does not want to distinguish between what is evidence and science, what is fantasy and imagination. It doesn’t matter if it’s for the purpose of a show or other interests. The most serious fact is that for all purposes and consequences, judgment was abandoned and with it the discernment between reality and hallucinations and illogical ideas.

I need to say sorry, in fact, I need to apologize to everyone, for making everyone waste time, which is no longer just money, with this preamble to my considerations. Forgiveness, and a little patience. Because of such circumstances, what was previously tacit and without further explanation, now, is no longer.

So let me know that I am not among those who do not know, do not want to know, and hate those who know or remind them that they must respect not only humanity, but all life, freedom, and culture. I insist, without any doubt, that the responsibility is enormous, but also the respect and admiration for all the people of the world that have a guide in Gandhi and his teaching. And this is even clearer by himself: Gandhi. In fact, not only admiration, but passivity in particular with his teachings.

It is difficult to find an organization on this planet, as well as social activists, who work with the defense, promotion, guarantee and provision of human rights, which does not have in leaders like Gandhi, Martin L. King, Henry Thoreau, a mandatory inspiration. It is a mandatory subject of study. Practice it or not. It is universal.

If there were an University of Humanity, and the solidary social base action, if were a proffision: civil disobedience would be a basic training course. Not only history of the conquest of fundamental freedoms, but also strategies of modern popular organization, for the conquest of true human rights. Especially for each and every person or group of independent people, marginalized or discriminated against by a majority or minority, either as prisoners in their land or home, or outside them.

Because isolated if necessary, yes, but never separated by an absense of solidarity, discrimination and violence of any kind.

They say that each people has the ruler they deserves. After having traveled to almost every corner of the world, I have another opinion, there is no profession more difficult, or perhaps impossible, than ruling someone else. Even with a well-intentioned government, I have never seen or read about a government that really deserved its people, which governs above all. The people or ruler who testifies or believes otherwise, either lies or is confused. And this anti-scientific illusion and misinformation is the most dangerous of all.

And that is why minimally-honest rulers, in these darkest hours, know that.

They need to ask the atoms and fundamental forces that actually move and charge this universe, to fulfill their function with awareness and social responsibility. Because without the voluntary cooperation of solidarity and gregarious spirit, societies, and everything that is literally supported in the world by those forces, simply fall.

The world goes round and round to stop at my common places, but only apparently. For more than ten years I was already a persona non grata: inside and outside my country, but in that case for denouncing the rise of the populists.

And now after being welcomed by people from all the nations of the world -who fought and defended a true, universal and cosmopolitan basic income, and not like the portion in the hands of neo -or proto-totalitarians, — here I am fulfilling a mission, that I myself chose, to be a freak among the normal people, or, now that the world has turned upside down, to be a cry of judgment among the crazed.

At least in my country, and not completely outside, yeat.

And then, disobedience to the judgments, given the circumstances, joins the other voices in the chorus for judgment in this procession of the crazy fanatics.

This is the science that no show, and no theater or performance can now stop, because speeches and decrees cannot positively kill beings or events that are governed by natural laws. It is the logic of consciousness that forms not only the reason for science, but the kind of faith that true masters dominate. Science of Ethos. And Gandhi is one of those masters.

Because I sincerely wonder where I would be today if I had not known his work and teachings, as well as others that have helped so much to correct not only my mistakes in work and studies, but in life. And I’m not trying to be diplomatic. I don’t want to be a hypocrite, especially at the moment the lack of self-criticism is toxic and deadly. So I won’t be.

After a lot of internal and cultural fighting, with Gandhi and other teachers, I unfortunately never managed to follow or fully apply the teachings, either at work, studies or in life. But luckily, I managed to understand at least something, through a lot of training and effort. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even have been able to do my little workman tasks.

It is impossible to measure in hours the time I spent talking to myself while praying and calming myself while reflecting on his teachings with a small book bought at a newsstand in Brazil, about the life and work of Gandhi. First with the messages in the hands and then in the head, or better, in the heart.

But that does not give a dimension as big as my personal gratitude. Because it goes further. Because I only found my personal fulfillment in solidarity action or basic social activism. And two writers were essential to find that way.

The first, Thoreau and his words about civil disobedience. Reading it, I abandoned graduation without ever completing the courses that would make me a professor and researcher, both in Philosophy and Molecular Sciences at the University of São Paulo. The last, included for the first payment we’ve made of Basic Income, was Gandhi, who returned to my memory in one of the most difficult moments, when we found ourselves at a dead end.

This simple story by Gandhi, which I have already included in other writings and speeches given at congresses and lectures and even published books, which influenced the non-governmental model by ReCivitas Institute- completely independent of governments and companies — that we chose as an inspiration to start the basic income in the small community of Quatinga Velho, 12 years ago, with our own resources. And then form the solidarity network that would form the Solidarity-Mutual Pension Savings that still supports this Social Action. Whose greatest merit is that despite everything it still lives and survives to leave a seed.

Here is the story as I remember and as I have published it, (I apologize if it is incorrect):

A mother took her son to Mahatma Gandhi and begged: “please, Mahatma, ask my son not to eat sugar”. Gandhi, after a pause, asked: “Bring me your son in two weeks.”

Two weeks later, she returned with her son. Gandhi looked deeply into the boy’s eyes and said: “don’t eat sugar”.

Grateful — but perplexed — the woman asked: “why did you ask me for two weeks? I could have said the same thing before!”

And Gandhi replied: “two weeks ago, I was eating sugar”. (Quatinga Velho e o Bolsa-Familia hoje. 2015)

Even though I understood that the universal basic income was not government assistance, and as a guarantee of the vital minimum it was therefore not a benefit, but a universal right. I continued to get it all wrong. I was still a child. And not an adult. I did not understand what freedom was.

I did not understand what Amartya Sen, by the way, also understood, and Thomas Paine himself explained. The correlation between rights and duties, freedom and responsibilities.

I did not understand that delegating powers is not delegating fundamental freedoms, nor a form of social or humanitarian responsibility; I had not understood that if I wanted to make a universal basic income happen, I would need to leave the childhood of my humanity, stop crying like a child, and be an adult, give, do and work, instead of proclaiming or complaining.

I had never understood non-violence, because I had only seen imitators, a person trying to mimic the marches and the acts of civil disobedience of crying children asking for help to the country. People empty of meaning and of strategic strength.

I had never understood the nuclear force of this catharsis: Gandhi asked for nothing, and he did not use violence to take anything. With a simple gesture, he simply did. He was breaking the monopoly on the production of the common good.

Civil disobedience is taking the sea salt; it is the wheel of life, building life, destiny, and social tissues, re-mutualizing, re-socializing; it is becoming the wave.

It is governing to avoid losing control and not being governed. It is not the disobedience of rebellion without cause, but a mission of reason and order of freedom and social and humanitarian liberation. It is the rupture of the social bond and the communion of peace. It is to govern and not to be governed. It is freedom as conscience and social responsibility.

In other words, it is not the basic income that is needed so much for each one and his community, it is the basic income that is obtained and given to another that needs it even more.

It is an order of factors, an inversion of values from selfishness to solidarity. After the inversion, it causes a wave that can no longer be contained.

And where is the wave? And where is a new Gandhi? Not even Thoreau the activist, to be clear, managed to be one in life. My abolitionist networks against wage slavery have never gone beyond some people around the world, and notably, no Brazilians.

But Transcendentalist? Yes. And I am proud of never being a samurai corrupted by the late feudalism of the eternal Latin-African-American slave colony, Brazil.

But I was never more than a wave man, a Ronin. Yes, at the service of the cosmopolitan liberation of de-culturalized peace communities and acculturated by the monopoly of violence and the destruction of their common goods.

No, there are no Emersons — not alive — nor has there ever been New or Old Concordias in Brazil, nor common senses, or agrarian justice. But in one thing we Pan-Americans are all the same: we are all racist, veiled or not, the rest is standard deviation, or the object of the relationship. In Brazil, we are not one, but at least two.

A certain economist once wrote about this paradox that reveals both our structural and cultural racism, and our own acculturation chain: we are a Belindia. What did he mean with this? Belgium within India. Yes, a rich country with pockets or condos swept away in wealth surrounded by poverty and human underdevelopment in India. The art of offending everyone and everything, starting with your own people, even with the best intentions without even being aware of what you do. The most perfect idiocracy. It is no longer necessary to imagine what capable are those that, besides being worse, have no notion, what sense, good or common.

Poor of those who have pierced eyes, and blindly obeys those who guide them to the precipices. And what to do with them, or better of our life, if both those who command and obey are our brothers? Especially if we are considering that humanity is synonymous not with fraternity, but by definition it is a brotherhood: the communion of peace and harmony and understanding that among those who recognize and respect each other as close or distant regardless of the circumstances.

Civil disobedience.

Without this art that is not martial art, but seminal, without understanding Gandhi’s teachings, even when applied to the smallest actions and activities, is not governing oneself. It is to make yourself a useful idiot, just like one who attacks a more powerful opponent. Usually motivated by the most primitive bans on crushing and exterminating, decimating, taxing, repressing, or simply shooting at a population that attacks, protests armed or unarmed, making noise or silently, on strikes, or even working.

It does not matter, fall into the trap of believing in the paternalism, patrimonialism and assistance of an imperial power, asking, claiming bread for those who only beat up the people. Or even going after those who are just waiting for a false move, to put an end to a portion of the population that has already become obsolete or has always been considered expendable. It is no use being an elephant, who does not know that without any job to reproduce the heritage of the gene and the meme, a trophy will come in the butterfly hunter and collector’s room: and they will still say that this is natural selection.

As an activist I only know two worlds, no matter what nations and borders, time, space or forms of government. One is from the people outside the “only work frees and saves” gate and the other is inside. And the bridge, of course.

One side of those who will inherit the world, because they are children and heirs of the land and heritage of humanity because they have the supposedly correct keys to genes and memes. And another of those that will inherit nothing but a place in their museum.

Mainly from authoritarian and totalitarian visions that feed the disagreements between families, tribes, nations, to plant dominance by the division and obtain their gains from the dead in the devastated lands. Be it occupationalist invaders or surrenderers and collaborationists. Whether new or old, micro or macro-organism, natural opportunistic parasites or not, exotic or not, taking advantage of the vulnerability of the host’s lack of defense.

In fact bodies and viruses, or just corporations and artificial or natural intelligences, emulating behavior in the hybrid and cold wars of meta-disinformation, are behaving not as Covid-19 denialist, but as true anti-social statesmen, against the humanity or more precisely Pro-New Coronavirus. It does not matter that the virus is not a weapon, having characteristics to be used as such so it will be taken and used according to your interests, those who have eyes only for themselves. And that they answer, because I don’t accuse without evidence. Evidence is what they produce against themselves, whether guilty or intentional, or even collective insanity.

Two worlds and the bridge.

The bridge that means the manifestation of freedom included as an objection and civil disobedience, and if necessary, in favor of faith in science and conscience of humanity.

Because the problem is not that governors do not believe or obey the commandments of science. The problem is that there are scientists who still believe in governments and in rulers who respond to laws of science or conscience. Neither they nor technocrats and bureaucrats. This is a myth. Which science, conscience, and reason of all faiths will correct if necessary, with civil disobedience.

Because there have always been two sciences in the world, the one you apply to the volunteer, and the one that applies to yourself. And the doctor, who never shoots himself in the head to resolve his Shakespearean or quantum doubts.

Here inside the box, speaking like an animal in an ongoing scientific experiment, which treats people like flock and Russian roulette. Or as popular wisdom says here as “Indian”. Two worlds, bio and ecological, necro and eschatological, and bridges, because Earth and Humanity are one.

Talking places? Not remain silent and velar. A cemetery of dreams in the land of the future that never arrives, except as a false promise.

Places that do not die of pandemics or due to lack of reaction in time, but before hypo-critical and chronic anachronism, an endemic to underdevelopment caused by the suppression of empathic intelligence, the collective neuro-immune system that protects organisms and social tissues from disintegration and causes the death of the state, peace bodies and bodies, for lack of the minimum basal consensus.

An organism without this ethos, it is a body without real resistance and jusnatural defense, it is a home and banquet to viruses, opportunistic infections and cancers that have discord, disaggregating the base of the corruption of the codes that maintain the integrity of life including the social.

Wordplay?

Philologists say that like the discovery of America itself — or decimation and taxation of all exotic power and destruction of indigenous nativity — that this is a mere coincidence, that these inhabitants were named Indians, by a derivation of Sanskrit from the ancient inhabitants of the Indus Valley civilization.

I don’t know.

Like Lavoisier, or rather Lomonosov, I do not believe in co-incidences, except those duly scientifically proven. The saying “nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed”. Even pain and suffering: because life is this capacitor of potentialities that transforms chaos and entropy into activity and nativity of love.

Even because at certain levels of chaos as well as vacuum and deprivation and famine that are not improvised, but that lack voluntary gregarious-solidarity provisions for life and freedom to evolve and sustain.

Nothing just appears or disappears not spontaneously, except for the very power of the singularities of creativity and free will that move the Universe. Or else hallucinating would be, and in sleight of hand it would fall.

Even the complexity of the chaos or of thermodynamic transmutations progress exponentially to reason — including also inversely proportional to the unreason — of doubt or ignorance and denial of its self-determined causes. A ratio or standard that, therefore, should never be confused, (or let ourselves be confused) by cryptography, since there are other graphs, that of biography that write and inscribe themselves in the ontology of the ontogenetic codes of the liberty of life network, or in book of life and death.

Sacred and harmonic senses that echo in the sounds even in the cries of the silence of lives lived and interrupted, but never lost. Because as the Brazilian song “Amor de Índio” would say: everything that moves is sacred.

But in contrast to everything that moves and is sacred, there are prison states or centaurs; necropower for some, biopower for others. But not only that, it’s more. It is a prison for madmen. It’s a panopticon. A concentration camp for the exploitation of labor, where only labor saves and frees, the only concern, occupation and post-occupation, of those who live and die in the name of a millenary cult to all powerful people, who consider themselves knights, but are nothing more than parasites killing the poor beast of burden that supports them. Because in addition to the necropower, the sentence and death sentence of the necrocapital, where the State is only the executioner.

But such systematic madness is not improvised, not overnight. It is not a watch and punish. It is not a prison state. It is an asylum. Ruled by statopaths who alternate in power. A madhouse that presides over us as if it were a government, and a government as if it were an asylum of the 19th century.

And strictly speaking, not without offense, these states or regimes cannot even be called Nazis, not when they do not even hold science, technology or industry to produce the systematic extermination of populations considered undesirable by tropical eugenicists. It is feudal eugenicism, in a pre-Fordism mass production line. Let the Indians say so. But Native Amerindians are not acculturated, or disobedient, because there are already those who unfortunately fell into the capital trap of bartering the useful and vital for the futile and fatal. And let my great grandmother keep me.

This is Brazil, a country of lieutenants in places of civilian and military supporters in the government. A place separated from the geopolitical cosmos of the world, reality, science, the nation and the people, concentrated in its intrigues worthy of pre-Napoleonic oligarchies and absolutist monarchies, always properly and strategically well aligned with the geopolitical interests of the development of others.

A country that, after the coronavirus, may be even more marked by inequality, not only in life expectancy, but in the graves of loved ones. This is because we risk being soon divided between those who were forced to work and lost their parents, and the privileged who can protect themselves or hide behind their positions or assets. Two Brazils now separated by a war in which the people who endured were useful. And whoever rides on their backs, fled or hid.

And this translates into access data for both protection and care. The international division, not of capital and labor, but of the value of human life. The heirs of the world, and those who will inherit nothing because they are not people, but capital, making space, sacrificing themselves or being sacrificed, from dust to dust. Two humanities, one with a future, as heir to the heritage of humanity. And another like the Indians, the heritage itself, if not more alive, dead, in museums, books, necrocapitalist culture, devoured by those who will now interpret, represent or wear their skins.

Is this a fact? No. Again, a stochastic bet — not mine, theirs. That’s all they know. Betting on another’s life, of course. Lottery. Russian roulette… It is the mathematics of the sacrifice of life on Earth, forming these Necropolis while the rulers hide in their castles and country mansions. An architectural design that even in its servo-functional meta-structure and urban superstructure is a disservice to the Necrocapital as counter-popular paraphernalia, anti-socializing and de-politicizing the consensuality of human interpersonal relations, whether international communities or societies of national entities.

This is not just a waste of time. It is a thermodynamic loss of life. So if I’m going to bet on something I don’t know anything about, I can’t be overbearing, I don’t bet against Life. Because Life is not a game and I don’t play with dice. Life is Freedom and Freedom is a Fact: and facts are sacred. It’s foresight. It’s providence, security, mutualism, provision, gregarious and solidary spirit. Cosmopolitan, humanistic and ecological vision. It is also universal in a pure act. It is awareness.

Because after all there is no human being, there is no living being that is not equally special. Whose way of life does not influence time and space, co-existentially, with its pain and joy.

And even in this moment when the entire planet is silent and cries in mourning, we are unable to make ourselves understood in order to understand ourselves better. Not according to the algorithm that masters of the ontology of life, like Gandhi and other teachers of liberation, who helped to free people who sacrificed their lives to give us such codes of life; without being aware of this Consciousness, we will have to capitulate into disintegrating bubbles of insanity and inhumanity — that is, if no new determining factor changes our pathways and wave fields so disturbed by lives so interrupted and not lived in all their potency, vocation and fullness as free will.

Lifes reduced to a game of forms and information, the theater of appearances and representations, where action and preaching are not in perfect harmony with the metadata of the ontology of the Book of Life.

It’s about ancient tactics and strategies of eugenic colonization and occupation. And the genocidal supremacy that Gandhi not only knew, but learned to fight the wisdom of the word integrated into action, and action integrated into word-action. The meaningful gesture, which without words are empty, and the mutatis mutandis of signs properly connected to social and humanitarian actions, missions that lose the purpose of co-existence.

With this, we have the equation of the matrix of life: complex relational function of an arbitrary chaos. And that relative observers can see as if they were separate events or manipulated, but with a creative product of self-determined connections. Things you learn by weaving your own fibers, and social fabric, in the distaff or school of Life.

Sad to know, not only that more and more people read less each day. But more people become functional illiterates, not only from reading the codes of the liberation of life contained in the books of the distant in space and time, but from the very liberation of life that is present before the horizon of events of the trajectory of its historicity, in the book of life and death that is none other than yours. They are becoming illiterate, deaf and dumb for the signs and signs and iconograms, not only of the apparent life, but of the essential that does not fall short of mere materialistic or idealistic interests but beyond, as the universal principle of all possible faith and science: respect and observance of life, which is not opposed but is the very episteme of the phenomenological manifestation of freedom [1].

Sad and dangerous that this gap is opening up again between so few privileged and others. Privileged are those who know how to write and read, who even know how to compile and index the patterns of genes and data ontotologies. Who know the technology to transmit, receive and manipulate information. Then compose the formations of the private and collective organizations of life and the cosmos. And by others, I mean the rest of the world, most of the people.

So while few who dominate and advance in the sciences of nanos and microparticles applied metamaterials and metamaterialities including for macro-political and macroeconomic ends, some bring great hope for new advents, others merely content themselves with the disservice of providing intelligences other than natural, artificial increasingly powerful to bodies and corporations increasingly gigantic teratological, to propagate and mutate for arbitrary reasons — or what is the same thing — in a completely inconsequential way the ecosystemic and humanitarian preservation of life.

Meanwhile, on the other side, his, childish and idiocratized adult populations who behave more and more patently in the image and likeness of their idols, as spoiled tyrannical dictators dependent not by chance, to watch over their eternal sleep and rest. . Right now they lie apart in the lands and intermediate times of that territory and fields of obscure knowledge; fallen once more into the darkness to beg for the persona and personification of all powerful and supreme political-religious leaders who guide these blind people to pierce each other’s eyes. And behold, we ended up in a blind land, where anyone who has one eye, or none, is now a king with extraordinary powers: ave Cesar, because habemos.

And behold, here we are all in the same bioship expropriated not only from our privacy but from its intellectual property, but from its intellection as an emancipational, communicative and self-organizing organic capability, now desperately chasing loss to deal with a widespread infection to disturb all compartmentalized fields and territories including knowledge.

But no, unfortunately, I don’t have the wisdom. I would like to have it. I’m just a lumpem-activist. My work, my eyes, my ears, are for the invisible or inaudible and untouchable. But Gandhi to spin in his wheels of life’s re-civilizations has. And Ganesha. Idem.

But what about basic income?

So I come back from this huge sidereal journey that I took, to the field that I understand, the knowledge of the cause, and the thesis as a practice to end my testimony.

A genuine basic income, the libertarian, will never be and will not come from the consequence or provoked by fear due to a pandemic. But it must arrive more urgently than ever before in history (which is not repeated as a farce). It must come now that we need it most. Because basic income is not social assistance, it is really important, but it is not. It is a libertarian-gregarious principle of universal cosmopolitical solidarity; It is not just cash transfer, which is also important, but a consequence and not the generating principle or the matrix.

Basic income is the matrix, but the generating power is the assumption of social responsibility and compliance with humanitarian reason as an existential sense. I could call it a paradigm shift from mere preaching to praxis. But I prefer, to close this writing, simply remembering the principle that moved also as an inspiring word, from courage to social action, and against all forms of violence, whether aggression or deprivation: “Be it the wave. Be the social agent of transformation.”

Because we will never be as big as the masters, but even though we can do so little, if we learn to see and hear the people who need it most, we will understand that when so many need it so much, even what seems insignificant is not just a gigantic transformation, it is the wave of universal cosmic music.

And we will never be perfect either, but there is an infinite chasm between doing nothing and acting, transferring liberties, or the very act-action of getting up and walking… this is the manifesto of “Libertas Ação”.

Note:

[1] The existential function of the dynamics of the matrix of life is given by the power of freedom as well as the exponentiation of freedom by the re-evolutionary propagation of the diversity of life. It is a physical-mathematical equation where the phenomenal manifestation of existence and its power that enables freedom are tropically, symmetrically, progressively and synchronously aggregated and integrated to make up their order of possibilities in the inversely proportional ratio of entropy that constitute the ontology of physical materiality, this is, metamateriality (both physical and computer) that is not given in disorder or random mutation, complex chaos, nor much less planned and predeterminist, the anachronistic, but in constant and permanently self-determined evolution of free volition and vocations even for work is in the physical sense of the word, whether in the social, harmonic or simply at peace.