Mutual aid societies - The evolution to the current state of the art

King Willem-Alexander delivered a message to the Dutch people from the government in a nationally televised address: the welfare state of the 20th century is gone.

In its place a "participation society" is emerging, in which people must take responsibility for their own future and create their own social and financial safety nets, with less help from the national government.

Introduction

Originally mutual aid societies took on the responsbility of providing social services such as welfare for individuals. The social compact for inclusion in the mutual aid society was to be an honorable person, a moral person, or to agree to work toward the good of mankind. While these general requirements don't represent the requirements for all fraternities, "secret societies", benefit societies, and guilds, for the most part the majority of these groups had the intention of making a better world and working toward the greater good. In the case of Freemasonry, the membership had to be selected and only other masons can vote to select in new masons, and for this reason it has been an exclusive fraternity. At it's peak of power it is important to note that George Washington and many of the founders of the United States were freemasons which is evidence that at the time the best people of America were in it's membershp, all the way to the peak in the 1930s-1940s era.

The Masonic paradigm can be traced back to seventeenth-century France when journeymen, through the formation of compagnonnages, attempted to defend their “collective interests against their masters and provide food, lodging, and guidance for one another as they traveled the country” [1] Their use of an elaborate ritual to forge the bonds of brotherhood pre-figured what would eventually become the Masonic rite in 18th century England. Through a series of ceremonial degrees, “gentlemen and even nobles joined with merchants and craftsmen in a rite of leveling that ended in their symbolic elevation to the idealized status of Master Mason.” In its embryonic state, therefore, Masonry offered a form of mutual aid in which ritual fortified the construction of equal-opportunity welfare.

To be a member of the freemasons was to be part of a brotherhood. Within that brotherhood you have different statuses, primarily the three ranks, which are termed degrees, with the final degree being the degree of Master Mason. This is important to note when thinking about future iterations of mutual aid societies such as Steem or other inevitable forms which come after. The point being that by helping your neighbor, by constantly trying to improve as a person, by giving back and building community, you move up in rank, you gain responsibility and leadership, and you mentor others who are in the position of apprentice. It used to be that this process could only take place face to face, but now with the latest technology we are discovering that it is possible to have the digital equivalent to mutual aid societies, fraternities, benefit societies, and much more. The discovery of the blockchain has made possible an ability to use cryptographic means to help your peers.

The King of the Netherlands made a statement which says or perhaps authorizes the development of mutual aid societies. In other words, people will have to do for themselves what they are accustomed to having the government do for them. This means people will have to come up with new forms of governance, new ways of providing for each other, this includes welfare services and even basic income.

Reputation

The main currency within a community is reputation. A person who has a good reputation is a person who has the opportunity to gain entrance into fraternities, secret societies, esoteric or exoteric gruops, which select primarily on the basis of reputation. Reputation can be tracked now on a blockchain over time as transactions are public. Events are remembered in an immutable way, and it is now pretty clear using social media, big data, and other methods, to determine who cares about what and who has an appropriate reputation. In terms of reputation, we could think of a reputation as comprising of criteria that a community uses to discern and distinguish between an entity, product, or service of quality, and a lemon. In the case of a lemon it would mean that perhaps the product is sold as if it's quality when in actuality it's not.

Attribute based encryption allows for access to certain information to be exclusive only to those who meet the attributes. The attributes may require a specific track record to be granted access. In some way, it is possible to use the capabilities of cryptography to create digital societies which are very exclusive. Steem has a reputation currency called Steem Power which has to be earned by contributing to the community in the form of content or curating, or by buying Steem Power. For the most part while Steem Power is easy to acquire by producing content, the majority of people might produce content, but there could come a time where the payouts reduce to a point where content production only rewards some marginal amount of Steem Power. At that point it will be just like with mining, where the miners or in this case the bloggers will have to resort to buying Steem Power and as a result the price of Steem itself will rise.

Reputation requires quantification, and this quantification of prestige is a point system which leads to ranks of status. At this point in time on Steemit we do not really know what these ranks of status confer or what the responsbilities are because it's still very new. Over time there will be a culture which develops which will reveal what each status means. For example what the minnows do for the dolphins, what the dolphins do for the whales, and how they all interact, or how the newbies, heroes, superheroes and legends interact, will eventually become more formalized as the community gets much bigger and cultures develop.

There are many different forms which a reputation economy can take. Gift economies are also an option, and it's not necessary to do things in the traditional way. The point is that certain services are both expected and necessary to keep a community functioning. Welfare services are necessary for a functioning society, as not everyone in society can fend for themselves and even among the individuals who can, they may not be able to do so all the time. It is important that a society offers a cusion so that it's members are willing and able to take risks to improve society and the future.

The criminal justice system and risk management

I could have been you, and you could have been me. Whatever it is, all of us are thrown into this existence without our consent. There wasn't any console for us to input our preference for our birth condition. It's just an impossibility due to the nature of our existence. Sure it can be argued that everyone has personal responsibility over their own thoughts and actions. But consider this:-Slavery used to be acceptable in the United States. Those in the privileged class were born into such human conditions. It would seem normal to do so, like how a tribe of headhunters would inadvertently create more headhunters. Sure, you have the free will. But you can only be as free as your environment.

As many developers and participants in the blockchain community know, it's very easy to get caught up in a circumstance which results in prison time. When operating in legal grey areas, it is important to have an ability to have a type of insurance so that risk taking becomes possible. Mutual aid societies provide a kind of unofficial peer to peer network which functions similar to an insurance mechanism. People who take risks for the community can have some expectation that if they fail, they can fail gracefully and fall into the collective arms of the community. In a way it is like with crowd surfing, where the lead singer of the rock band can dive into the crowd expecting to be held up by the fans. It's this similar mechanism which can allow super heroes and legends of the community to take risks, to speak up, to be willing to fail, knowing that if they need a lawyer they might be able to post on Steemit and the upvotes of their peers could afford them the best legal team available. It allows developers who can't afford to try new ideas to be able to fund development through popular support. When the criminal justice system is clearly persecuting members of the community for victimless crimes, the Steem platform would allow the community to be resilient enough to support itself in these situations.

For the most part, navigating the criminal justice system is a challenge of risk management. People must know the laws in order to know which laws not to break. People must know if they break certain laws how much risk it is, and this requires both risk litaracy and risk management. The risk of being too honest can be jail time or a fine. The risk of doing the right thing according to your own morality could be jail time or a fine. For people who understand that in many cases the navigating law isn't about right or wrong, but about avoiding certain consequences, they may reach an understanding that reputation in the community is more important personally than to blindly follow the law. The point is that they must know the community will have their back, and of course we are talking about the controversial grey area of victimless crimes where in some cases the consequences of breaking the law are going to be better for the people involved and perhaps the world, than the consequences of following the law. In these instances, if a risk taker can know that their risks are limited to something financial such as a fine, and they know the fine can be paid with the help of their community, then you have a means of protesting unfair victimless crimes.

Mutual aid societies going into the future will be able to lower the amount of risks that individuals face in certain industries. Because the blockchain industry is a grey area, and the risks in this space are much higher than elsewhere, a mutual aid society can dampen the risks by producing the sort of disaster insurance that are available to other industries. Being arrested for a crime is a disaster, and in the case of a disaster we can see for the most part people are left to fend for themselves. Mutual aid societies would allow for a pseudo-family to form to protect any member who is unfairly treated by people in positions of authority.

Mutual aid societies and basic income

While mutual aid societies may act as a type of insurance, what some people might need in tough times is an ability to receive a basic income directly from their community. We know for example that financial liberation is possible if each person has enough of an income to at least be financially secure while they try for financial independence. If a person cannot afford rent, cannot afford food, cannot afford access to basic resources, then their contributions to society are lost. Many of these contributions could be very valuable, yet many potential contributors and contributions are lost, due to market ineffiencies. Basic income will likely be necessary due to technological unemployment, and as the King of the Netherlands said, it's up to us to solve these problems because the national government is politically unable to do so.

How will we solve our own problems? By creating alternative solutions, services, forms of governance, in digital space, for the digital age, just as the United States itself was created as a decentralized form of governance with checks and balances. In the digital age, many of the services which required or which were thought to require national governments, will only require networks of computers and human beings willing to work. In essence, the services provided by national governments are just services, and there is no reason to believe there couldn't or shouldn't be competing service providers if we find that there is a possibility that the national solutions could fail. Basic income through cryptography will become available sooner or later, even if it starts out on a small scale, within mutual aid societies and digital nations. In the end, behind all of these technologies are people and communities, and the technological solutions are a means to an end.

Voluntary basic income in mutual aid societies

Many may have seen Johan's posts on basic income. The concept behind his posts is the idea of voluntary basic income using cryptographic mechanisms. His idea is based around the concept of taxemes which is a form of voluntary taxation, where a taxeme is similar to a meme, where a meme is a cultural unit of information similar to how there are genes. Whether Johan's basic income scheme will work is anyone's guess but considering that it's voluntary and based on self relience, it's an alternative to the nation state approach if there is even going to be an attempt by nation states.

Mutual aid societies can be formed by any group of people who have access to the Internet. To achieve this we must achieve a state of affairs where Internet access is perceived as a human right rather than a privilege. Mutual aid societies could be fully programmable, based around decentralized digital reputation, decentralized trust, and distributed authority.

Mutual aid societies may start out on social networking sites such as Facebook where individuals can join Facebook groups. Virtual mutual aid societies may also start out in Second Life, in gaming universes, or anywhere that a group of people can meet. The criteria for entry can act as a programmable filter and the ability to vote may also be built in.

Mutual aid societies can provide for their members by offering membership rewards, membership dividends, or if these virtual mutual aid societies are self governing then citizen’s dividends, discounts, etc. Decentralized reputation will allow people to know far more people than the limits of Dunbar’s number and due to the fact that it is programmable the logic of the mutual aid society can be continuously improved and updated. I will have more posts to offer insight on the subject of virtual mutual aid societies in the future.

References

Edwards, D. (2016, August). Retrieved August 17, 2016, from https://steemit.com/steemit/@dana-edwards/mutual-aid-societies-a-short-review-of-history

Independent. (2013, September 17). Youngest monarch in Europe says people must take responsibility for their own future and create their own social and financial safety nets. Retrieved August 17, 2016, from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/dutch-king-willem-alexander-declares-the-end-of-the-welfare-state-8822421.html

The Incorporation of Mutual Aid. (n.d.). Retrieved August, 2016, from http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma04/mccain/fraternalorders/page2b.htm

Wong, K. (2016, August). The End of Criminalization: On Free Will, Accountability, and Compassion. Retrieved August 17, 2016, from https://steemit.com/philosophy/@kevinwong/the-end-of-criminalization-on-free-will-accountability-a