Society as womb
Al Boag has sent his own reflections on society and what can emerge out of a moment of “creative suspension”. Back in 1980 Boag was half way through a doctoral program in Scotland when, while riding his bicycle to the university, he had a critical moment where everything stopped and his thinking changed in a radical way, causing him to abandon his thesis. One image that came to him was the idea of life in the womb, where biology provides everything to the developing baby. He related this to the utopian notion that the state should provide food, shelter and clothing as a citizen’s basic right. A Guaranteed Minimum Income would provide the security out of which a citizen could then find a way to contribute back to society. When Boag returned to Australia he went on unemployment benefits and retrained himself. The result was that he began to build frame houses. Today five houses have been provided for himself and others with a market value of $1.5 million. This, in Boag’s estimation, is a five-fold return on what the Australian government had invested in his unemployment benefits. Over the past twenty years Boag has been writing to politicians, social reformers, and policy theorists arguing that the provision of food, shelter, and clothing should be enshrined as basic rights.
