Transcription
I think, although great new ideas are usually articulated by individuals, they're nearly always generated by communities. And I think what I see as the waste is the waste that we make of that possibility of cooperative intelligence.
Being an artist, you hear a lot of talk about genius, which is the process of singling out certain people in art history and saying, those were the important ones, you know, Picasso, Rembrandt, Shostakovich, whatever. Whenever you look at any of those artists, you find that they lived and drew from a very, very active flourishing cultural scene. And they were only one of the elements in that scene. All these people who are called genius actually sat in the middle of something that I call scenius, S-C-E-N-I-U-S. So just as genius is the creative intelligence of an individual, scenius is the creative intelligence of a community. And what I want to see is more attention given to that possibility of creative behavior.
So what that means, of course, is two things:
The understanding that all people are born unequal. So everybody has a particular and unique set of gifts and talents, whatever they are.
That intelligence is generated by communities, by cooperation of some kind.
So I suppose the thing about the biggest obstacle to that at the moment is that people have to earn a living. I often get asked to come and talk at art schools. And I rarely get asked back because the first thing I always say is, I'm here to persuade you not to have a job. And the professors always look a bit nervous at that point since they often consider that their task is to somehow smooth you into a job. So my first message to people is, try not to get a job. That doesn't mean try not to do anything. It means try to leave yourself in a position where you do the things that you want to do with your time and where you take maximum advantage of whatever your possibilities are. And I suppose the obstacle is that, of course, most people aren't in a position to do that. So I want to do anything to work to a future where everybody is in a position to do that.
I should say that in terms of basic income, I probably know less about the subject than anybody else here. But what I do know is that the concept is the closest thing I've heard to achieving the kind of future that I would like to live in.
- Brian Eno speaking at 'Basic Income: How do we get there?' Basic Income UK meet-up at St Clements Church Kings Square, London, 3 December 2015.
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