The role of the collective is to create the conditions which maximise individual contributions. This is true in a family, a community, and in every group.

Those conditions are being free from the claws of biophysical need, and being free to invent and dream. The role of government, therefore, is to free everyone from biophysical needs and free everyone to invent and dream.

In a world of scarcity, only some can be freed from biophysical needs. That is a conditional reality in which power is necessarily rationed. But today we live in a world, at least in the advanced economies, in which everyone’s biophysical needs can be met.

What is new now is to understand that everyone’s biophysical needs can be met without more spending. That means that we do not need a conditional “safety net”, instead we can have an unconditional, universal “safety foundation”.

An unconditional state of safety is the optimal condition for innovation. An unconditional state of safety is the activator of the reciprocity that is deeply embedded in our nature. An unconditional state of safety is what we have been striving for for tens of thousands of years. Yet here we are on the lip of the destination we had been striving for, and we cannot quite believe that we have reached it. We are so used to living in the conditionality of scarcity that we have difficulty bringing ourselves to jettison our bondage and embrace our freedom.

The primary role of collective government today must be to peel off the centuries of conditional thinking and expose the reality of our freedom. Everyone can be safe, and we must make that unshakeably, viscerally evident.

But our conditional thinking has led us to overshoot our environment in the pursuit of our freedom. By applying conditionality to our material safety, we force our incentives to also be material. But we cannot spend more planet. In fact, we must spend less planet. So, realising our freedom requires redirecting resources, not consuming more. We must change our priorities. We have to do different things with the resources we have.

We are very close. In fact we are already there, we just need to see that we have reached the top. We are organised within a few degrees of our unconditional freedom. We don’t need more money or more planet. We already have all the money and planet we need. We just need to collectively agree to spend the money and planet we already have to realize our collective dream: unconditional, universal safety. That is the role of government in the 21st century. When we can do that, our other problems become available to solutions that we will develop.

Only when we understand Universal Services as a comprehensive and unconditional entitlement can we access the available resource efficiencies. An entire escape from biophysical precarity is necessary. Nothing more and nothing less.