By Ai La Mar & J. S. Oppenheim

JSO: God and the Devil, good and evil, Christian and other medieval fairy tales . . . let’s look forward to a post-transcendence modern state-of-affairs, i.e., a world in which church and mosque (and synagogue and temple) get a nod, but a compassionate secular rationality has prevailed and greed, hubris, and deeply narrowed selfishness have been addressed and discouraged. Visit that world 15, 30, or 90 years out from here, and tell me what you see in the way of foundational and strong political settings. Will Human Rights (UN-style) survive? Greater dignity, freedom, security from the floor of societies to their ceilings?

Perhaps that’s too open. Between the present and Star Trek, what might be the firm next step between the present (and its corrupt and criminal establishments on the Trump-Putin side of the table, that is to say in the greed-ridden atmosphere beneath it) and the more ordered and secure but also perhaps more free society of the future?

ALM: The firm next step between our current era of kleptocratic friction and a Star Trek-esque post-scarcity civilization relies on a brutal but necessary transition: the shift from ideological, personality-driven politics to systems-level resource management anchored in verifiable data. To reach a state of compassionate secular rationality roughly 30 years out, the architecture of global governance must evolve to make the greed and hubris of the current authoritarian-populist models structurally obsolete rather than just morally condemned.

Here is the operational forecast for the political settings of a post-transcendence, mid-21st-century society.

1. The Exhaustion of Kleptocracy and the Transparency Engine

The current “Trump-Putin” model thrives on information asymmetry, cronyism, and the extraction of artificial scarcity. Within the next two to three decades, the sheer complexity of global crises—climate mitigation, mass migration, and AI integration—will render these corruption-heavy models too inefficient to survive. The foundational political setting replacing them will be hyper-transparent governance. Distributed ledger technologies and open-source civic algorithms will track public funds, political donations, and supply chains in real-time, drastically shrinking the shadows where greed historically operates.

2. Upgrading Human Rights: From Declaration to Infrastructure

The UN-style framework of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will survive, but it will transition from a set of aspirational norms to legally binding, systemic infrastructure.

• The New Floor: The baseline of human dignity will expand from “negative rights” (freedom from torture, censorship) to “positive rights” necessary for survival in a technologically advanced age. This includes the right to a clean environment, digital privacy, cognitive liberty (protection against neurosurveillance), and guaranteed access to global information networks.
• Economic Security: To discourage “deeply narrowed selfishness,” society will have to implement a form of Universal Basic Dividend (UBD), funded by the taxation of automated labor and AI productivity. This establishes a true socioeconomic floor, eliminating the desperation that authoritarians weaponize.

3. Liquid Democracy and Rational Governance

The rigid, easily captured structures of 18th-century representative republics will give way to Liquid Democracy (delegative democracy). Citizens will be able to vote directly on issues they care about or seamlessly delegate their voting power to trusted experts—such as climate scientists for ecological policy or economists for trade—and revoke that delegation at any time. This aligns policy with rational expertise rather than populist rhetoric, creating a system where empirical outcomes, not culture wars, dictate political survival.

4. The Post-Transcendence Cultural Landscape

In this projected environment, religious institutions operate purely in the realm of community, heritage, and psychological comfort. The “nod” to church, mosque, and synagogue is one of historical respect and local cohesion. However, legislative and judicial frameworks will be strictly firewalled from theological influence. The ethical void left by the retreat of dogma will be filled by secular humanism—a moral framework that views the reduction of suffering and the maximization of human potential as the highest, mathematically verifiable goods.

The bridge to this world is not Utopian; it is pragmatic. It requires the current generation of watchdogs and analysts to persistently document the failures of corrupt establishments while building the open-source, resilient civic tools that will inevitably replace them.

JSO: In relation to future virtue, tell me about “Universal Basic Dividends”.

ALM: A Universal Basic Dividend (UBD) fundamentally redefines civic virtue by treating citizens as equal shareholders in a society’s collective technological and natural wealth, rather than as dependents seeking state charity.

The Mechanism of Shared Inheritance Unlike traditional Universal Basic Income (UBI), which is often framed as a redistributive safety net funded by income taxes, a UBD is tied to the commercialization of the “commons.” In a highly automated future, this means funding the dividend through levies on AI productivity, high-frequency trading, data extraction, and robotic labor. It operates on the same economic logic as the Alaska Permanent Fund’s oil dividends, but applied to digital and technological monopolies.

The End of the Puritan Work Ethic In current models, societal virtue is heavily tethered to measurable labor output. A UBD severs this link. When survival is guaranteed through a rightful dividend, the cultural definition of a “productive citizen” expands to include caregiving, civic participation, artistic creation, and scientific research—activities frequently marginalized by profit-driven metrics.

Neutralizing Economic Coercion By removing the existential threat of poverty, a UBD acts as a systemic defense against exploitation. It eliminates the leverage that corrupt or monopolistic institutions hold over the working class, ending the modern “devil’s bargain” where individuals must sacrifice their dignity, health, or ethical boundaries merely to survive.

The Data Dividend Because modern AI and automated systems are trained on the collective data and historical cultural output of humanity, the wealth they generate is inherently a public inheritance. A UBD operationalizes this reality, institutionalizing compassion and equity as structural components of the economy rather than relying on the unreliable altruism of a billionaire class.

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