One of the things about almost all films and movies about psychic/spiritual conflict of the good vs. “evil” type is that the evil is portrayed as coming in from outside everyday life and threatening everyday life.
But ... what if it is that everyday life that is the true evil? The life that includes, say ... endemic bigotry, enabling and supporting the climate crisis, soul crushing lifestyles, etc ... Or people or groups who are living that "everyday life"?
If that were true ... it might mean we could not separate and hate one clearly discernable group as evildoers, instead having to recognise the complexity that it is us who is part of the problem, and that, even if there is someone to target efforts against, that person is still a human being and thus as deserving of consideration as we are (although the harm they are doing MUST be contained, neutralised, and undone).
It would mean "everyday" places like the work office are places of contest, places where we need to speak up for and support human decency (doing things like this, avoiding the mistakes outlined here) instead of normalising greed and prioritising the lazy, selfish desires of corporations above humanity ...
This has been triggered partly by watching the streaming series “The Railway Men”, about the chemical leak disaster at Bhopal, India in 1984, partly by beginning to rewatch “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace”, which begins with a corporation putting an entire planet under siege, but mostly a life which has included (not all directly experienced) things like the Chernobyl disaster, seeing the fight of tobacco companies against being held accountable, the so-called decade of greed (the 1980s - when the zeitgeist of even regional and outback Queensland was infested by the sense that greed was, if not good, then at least OK ... remembering that I was there, living through those times), the spread of neoliberalism - a philosophy of evil enabled by everyday people who fooled themselves that they were being economically savvy (they weren’t!!!), a still ongoing series of wars, the ultimately disappointing end to the Cold War and the associated sense of a permanent threat of nuclear extinction, the spread of christo-fascism, the long foreseen climate crisis, the corporation free alternative of the original Star Trek TV series (why is that not included in the Wikipedia article? It is a key point - corporate influence? Or incompetent and uninformed editing?), the counterculture movement, personal experience of the harm done by corporate working conditions governed by financial targets and aggressive admin departments ... and the clear promise of UBI.
So why is UBI such a promise?
Well, it gets rid of the vicious attack by bureaucrats on the mental health of citizens for starters, but, more importantly, it means people are not beholden to corporations for survival - they do not need a job to have the modern life survival staple, which, like it or not, is money. Their lifestyle may be cut back on a UBI, but they have the ability to choose to leave if working conditions or ethical ... conundrums become unacceptable to them.
This concept has been revisited for the latest in the series of existential challenges by one of my favourite writers at https://joanwestenberg.medium.com/what-if-free-money-is-the-only-answer-to-ai-8cca7e6ab96a.
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Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk.
