Béla Hatvany – "Why are we here?"

Mustardseed Founder, Béla Hatvany, speaking to the 19th World Basic Income Congress organized by Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), August 2019.

Hyderabad, India

Why are you here? Why am I here?

I think we are all here because we care about something larger than ourselves? I care because I want a world which works for Mother Earth and all beings on it, including myself.

When I arrived in India I noticed everything that was not working the way I felt it should. After a while, Alida who is working with me suggested “let's notice what is right”. We immediately started to realize how many more things were working.

This exercise helped me to see the thousands of skills that are needed to create the world I depend on. It underlined for me again how I live in state of interdependence and inter-being with all of you and all other beings and how all of this requires a healthy Mother Earth to nurture us all.

We want basic income because we believe that it enables each of us to choose the essential care that we need to have a life of dignity and wellbeing for everybody. Each one of us have had a change of heart that has moved us from selfish preoccupations to concern for the greater whole. Like UBI. So, we are gathered here to co-create this new world that we believe is needed for our survival and prosperity.

I personally have worked with computers and information since I was 18 in 1956. I now realise I have been playing a small part in building a more sufficient nervous system for the body of humankind. This nervous system, or information system we call social media and other things based on the internet allows me to interrelate in a wholly more sufficient way with the vast array of humanity of which we are all a part. Many of us are working in the area of creating money, alternative and complimentary currencies. Money is a currency and a store of value. Currency is the blood supply of corpus humanitatis, it carries the nutrients, the goods and services, from one cell (one person) to another, in this amazing body of which we are all a cell.

Money is ultimately based on trust. Trust is based on trustworthiness. Humanity’s special strength is that it is able to elaborate upon a fantastic system of trust. I came to India in an airplane without knowing the million people that helped got it up in the air and I didn’t give it a second thought. You all do the same. That is the trust we have in humanity.

We are now elaborating the blockchain, this enables an omnipresent, intrinsically transparent, utterly trustworthy record of all that has been entered it to be maintained. If I lend you 10 dollars it is entered into a system and that information can never be erased. This will make it possible for all our institutions to have at their heart a trustworthy record of every entry into the system.

It is essential that in the future this constellation of new technologies must be in the commons owned by us all. It must be open source; it must be owned by all us. The open source movement consist of millions of programmers that give their spare time that creates something in the public domain like Wikipedia - this is much more powerful than Google or Microsoft or IBM. It created the UNIX the foundation of Apple IBM, and is a fundamental building block of all our technologies. And it is in the public domain. It is in the commons. Please, all of you, spend time to know this new blockchain world and its implications.

However, all of this depends on our caring heart, our tender heart. This must be nurtured by us, in ourselves, in our education system. It must be nurtured in the face of our current world in which every horrible event worldwide is fed to us a news immediately.

We must stop creating a terrifying world where we teach our children to be fearful and competitive. We must educate ourselves and our children to care for themselves; then secondly, to care for all beings; then to engage in creating an essential component of the complexity on which we are all interdependent.

If you don’t educate a child to be selfish, profit driven and competitive, but teach it to be caring and to contribute to the well-being of the planet and all beings on it, it will automatically be in the ‘right’ of things. This complexity will enable us to evolve a caring society, which nurtures all with a basic income, which enables each one of us to choose the essentials that give us health and wellbeing.

We must all remain conscious of the tender heart that motivates each one of us to be here together to create this caring world and in it elaborate basic income.