Aus Anlass der Online-Veranstaltung beim Hamburger Netzwerk Grundeinkommen am 2.11.2026
Ist das Bedingungslose Grundeinkommen ein Mittel gegen den Rechtsruck hier eine Sammlung verschiedener relevanter Texte.
Rassismus und jede gruppenbezogene Menschenfeindlichkeit bedrohen – aktuell wieder zunehmend – betroffene Menschen, den sozialen Frieden und in ihrer organisierten Form auch die Demokratie. Die Frage ist, warum Menschen rassistische Haltungen oder Weltbilder entwickeln und wie wir gegensteuern und gesellschaftliche Rahmenbedingungen so verändern können, dass diesen der Nährboden entzogen wird.
Bertold Brecht: „Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.“
Quelle: https://beruhmte-zitate.de/zitate/62061-bertolt-brecht-erst-kommt-das-fressen-dann-kommt-die-moral/
„Der Mensch ist noch sehr wenig, wenn er warm wohnt und sich satt gegessen hat, aber er muß warm wohnen und satt zu essen haben, wenn sich die bessere Natur in ihm regen soll.“
Schiller an den Herzog v. Augustenburg, 11. November 1793
„Zutrauen veredelt den Menschen, ewige Vormundschaft hemmt sein Reifen.“
Johann Gottfried Frey
Quelle: https://www.aphorismen.de/zitat/179293
„Es wächst hienieden Brot genug
Für alle Menschenkinder,
Auch Rosen und Myrten, Schönheit und Lust,
Und Zuckererbsen nicht minder.
Ja, Zuckererbsen für jedermann,
Sobald die Schoten platzen!
Den Himmel überlassen wir
Den Engeln und den Spatzen.“
Aus: Heinrich Heine
Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen
Drei Texte bzw. Text-Auszüge von dem US-Psychologen und BGE-Aktivisten Scott Santens:
1. Finnland zahlte zwei Gruppen das gleiche Geld. Eine davon verzeichnete eine um 33 % bessere psychische Gesundheit.
Auszüge:
„Vielleicht war der faszinierendste Befund aus Finnland gar keiner zur psychischen Gesundheit, sondern zum Vertrauen. Die Empfänger des Grundeinkommens vertrauten anderen Menschen und gesellschaftlichen Institutionen mehr als die Kontrollgruppe. Sie waren zuversichtlicher in Bezug auf ihre eigene Zukunft und ihre Fähigkeit, Dinge zu beeinflussen.
…
Soziologen der University of Washington (meiner Alma Mater) zeigen darüber hinaus: Gesellschaftliches Engagement – wenn Menschen sich für ihre Gemeinschaft einsetzen – ist der stärkste Einflussfaktor für sinkende Gewalt auf Nachbarschafts-, nationaler und individueller Ebene. Ein bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen gibt allen Zeit und Sicherheit, um sich genau auf diese Weise einzubringen. Es fördert nicht nur die psychische Gesundheit. Es wirkt auch präventiv gegen Waffengewalt.
…
Die Bedingungslosigkeit zählt. Vertrauen zählt. Menschen wie Erwachsene zu behandeln, die selbst über ihr Leben entscheiden können – das macht den Unterschied.
…
Jeder Tag, an dem wir die Einführung eines bedingungslosen Grundeinkommens hinauszögern, verursacht vermeidbares Leid. Menschen erleben Angst und Depressionen, die sich verhindern ließen.“
2. The Universality Argument for Basic Income
Why including everyone — yes, even billionaires like Elon Musk — works better than means-testing ever possibly can
https://scottsantens.substack.com/p/the-universality-argument-for-basic-income-ubi
Auszug:
„The Trust Problem
There’s another cost to exclusion that doesn’t show up on any budget spreadsheet: the erosion of social trust.
Research published in the American Journal of Political Science examined Pakistan’s national unconditional cash transfer program and found that being excluded from a benefit program — especially when you feel economically deprived — actively erodes trust in government. International comparative research by Naoki Akaeda confirmed this at a global scale: low-income targeting crowds out social trust, while universalism grows social trust.
We live in an era of collapsing institutional trust. One of the contributing factors is that millions of people interact with government systems designed to determine whether they deserve help, and those systems regularly tell them they don’t — even when they do. Universality eliminates this. Everyone is included. No one has to prove they deserve it. And UBI pilot after UBI pilot has shown that when you give people unconditional cash, trust goes up. This is the predictable consequence of treating people as humans with rights rather than applicants under suspicion.“
3. Our Data. Our Resources. Our Terms and Conditions.
The neuroscience of learned control, the AI safety crisis no one should ignore, and why the fight over data centers is really about who holds the power.
Auszug:
„What We Do With the Pain
However, when human beings experience stress they feel powerless to address, they don’t just sit there quietly. The stress has to go somewhere. It gets processed through whatever channels are available, and most of those channels are pretty unhealthy.
Psychologists have a name for one of the most pervasive of these channels. It’s called System Justification Theory. Developed in 1994, SJT describes a motivated psychological tendency to defend, justify, and rationalize the existing social, economic, and political order, even when that order is actively harmful to you. The theory’s most counterintuitive finding is how under conditions of threat and stress, people at the bottom of a hierarchy often defend the hierarchy more vigorously than people at the top.
Why would anyone defend a system that hurts them? Because defending it reduces stress. This is referred to as the “palliative function” of system justification. Believing the system is fair, that people generally get what they deserve, that the way things are is the way things should be, provides what amounts to psychological relief. It reduces the painful cognitive dissonance of knowing you’re being harmed by something you feel powerless to change. If you can’t change it, the next best thing your brain can do is decide it doesn’t need changing, because actually it’s a good thing.
This is the Just World hypothesis at work. It’s the belief that the world is basically fair. That good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. That poverty is earned and wealth is deserved. And it is, as I’ve written about before, a massive fallacy. But it persists because it’s psychologically useful. It turns the pain of injustice into the comfort of acceptance.
System justification isn’t the only way people cope with uncontrollable stress. Conspiracy theories are another. When people feel a loss of control over their environment, they are significantly more likely to endorse conspiracy theories, which offer the compensatory illusion of understanding hidden forces. A 2022 study in PNAS by Marten Scheffer and colleagues found that stress increases the rigidity of the beliefs underlying psychiatric disorders, prejudices, and conspiracy theories, and that this creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Rigid beliefs lead to worse decisions, which create more stress, which further strengthens beliefs. The authors suggested that “measures reducing social stress, including economic policies such as universal base income, may be the most effective ways to counteract this vicious cycle.”
There’s also displaced aggression. When people are stressed by forces above them in a hierarchy and feel unable to push back upward, they push downward. They bully those with even less power. They scapegoat immigrants. They lash out at their spouses and kids. They punch down.
[…]
Every one of these coping mechanisms, from system justification to conspiracy theories to displaced aggression to organized religion to drug abuse, is a response to the same underlying problem: people don’t feel they have real control over their lives and their world. And as Seligman’s updated research tells us, without the experience of genuine control, the brain’s default is to accept the helplessness.“
Dr. Ina Praetorius: Die feministische Care-Ökonomie, das bedingungslose Grundeinkommen und postpatriarchale Religion: eine noch nicht verwirklichte Allianz für das gute Leben aller, 2015
Dr. Ina Praetorius: Die Ökonomie der Geburtlichkeit – Eine postpatriarchalische Perspektive, 2011
https://www.genderopen.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/d2165130-f287-4958-a49c-48b422ab8d6c/content
Ein sehr kurzer Text des thüringischen Demokratie-Aktivisten Ralf-Uwe Beck (u.a. Bundesvorstandssprecher von Mehr Demokratie e.V.) vom 16.01.2026
https://www.ekmd.de/glaube/radio-andachten/augenblick-mal-mdr-thueringen/grundeinkommen.html
Der US-Bürgerrechtler Dr. Martin Luther King 1967 in „Wohin führt unser Weg: Chaos oder Gemeinschaft?“ („Where do we go from here – Chaos or Community?“)
https://www.livableincome.org/aMLK-deutsch.htm
Bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen weltweit – Eine Antwort auf internationale Migrationen
https://bge-rheinmain.org/eine-antwort-auf-internationale-migrationen
Vibhor Mathur: ‘Seen’, ‘Respected’ and ‘Empowered’: Exploring the Dignity Dividend of a Universal Basic Income
Dániel Féher: Dependency Is the System: What Hungary Teaches Us About Basic Income and Democracy
Chi Kwok: Universal Basic Income in Illiberal Regimes
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/doi/10.1515/bis-2025-0023/html
Ronald Blaschke 2007 „Ökonomistischer Sozialdarwinismus und die Antworten des Konzepts Bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen“
https://www.grundeinkommen.de/20/02/2008/deutsche-zustaende-2007.html
Dr. Manuel Franzmann (Uni Kiel): Demokratisierung der Muße? Das bedingungslose Grundeinkommen aus bildungstheoretischer Sicht
(zum Anschauen) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1B3cfgQWGY
(zum Lesen) https://macau.uni-kiel.de/receive/macau_mods_00000319
Schließlich ein Auszug aus dem (lesenswerten) Buch über Zeitpolitik des britischen Ökonomen Prof. Guy Standing (ein Gründungsmitglied des weltweiten Grundeinkommen-Netzwerks BIEN). Standing kritisiert – wie wir – die Fetischisierung der Erwerbsarbeit (Labour) und die Abwertung und Verdrängung aller anderen (notwendigen) Tätigkeiten wie Care-Arbeit oder Commoning/Gemeinschaffen (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commoning), dazu gehören auch bürgerschaftliches Engagement oder Demokratiearbeit – wie auch die Geringschätzung der Muße.
„Even in the sixteenth century, the upper classes waged a societal campaign against the enjoyment of times of idleness by low-income people. They started to chip away at the previously large number of holy days and saints‘ days linked to the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church, many of which also marked seasonal changes such as planting and harvesting times and were celebrated with singing, dancing, playing games and feasting. Failure or refusal by the lower classes to do labour was also castigated as vagabondage or idle wandering leading to the passing of the first Vagabond Act in 1531. This described ‚idleness‘ as ‚the mother of all vices‘ and dictated that those found guilty of vagabondage should be whipped and ‚put to labour‘.
Subsequent Vagabond Acts were even more vindictive. The most severe, passed in 1547, mandated that for a first ‚offence‘ a person was to be branded with a V and subject to two years of forced labour, and for a second offence punished by death. Over 100,000 people were hanged in the space of just a few years. Most of the population was forced to ‚want‘ labour. Wanting to labour was clearly not a natural human impulse.“
(S. 43)
„As commoning was squeezed and as independent work was make harder to sustain and less remunerative for many, reliance on wage labour grew. This had tragic consequences. A growing number of families were unable to support those who could not labour. Many elderly and disabled people came to feel they were a burden on their children and grandchildren.
As a result, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the indigent pushed out to depend as well as they could on parish relief, which was stretched and mean-spirited and usually resulted in the early death of those who sought it. This was also the period that saw the institutionalization of the infamous workhouse, foreshadowing the modern state, where mainly elderly rejects spent their last years labouring in abject conditions, a visible disciplinary warning to others that they must do labour or face the same fate.
Analogous to today’s ‚deaths of despair‘, many older people turned to suicide. During the eighteenth century, the over-fifties may have accounted for 40 per cent of recorded suicides, twice their proportion in the general population[20]. Suicide was interpreted as an act driven by medically rooted ‚insanity‘. But for many it was more about time. Their time was worthless, socially and demographically. In opting to shorten their lives, they took their residual time with them. Had commoning been preserved, had enclosure and privatization been reversed, had independent work been fostered, dependency on labour would not have become the sole means of survival. But industrial capitalism was being built on jobs and labour, and those unprepared, unable or unwilling to devote their time to labour were consigned to history.“
(S. 55-56)
[20] E. Sbaraini, ‚What 18th-century suicide inquests tell us about growing old in Georgian England‘, The Conversation, 26 August 2021
„The ideas of mutual aid, community production and systems of social solidarity have come through to the twenty-first century. However, these messages were submerged in the violent and bitter ideological conflicts of the early twentieth century. Labourism emerged as the dominant theme. And is wasn’t just communists who took it to extremes. Leading members of the Fabians, the dominant social democratic movement in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, most notably Beatrice Webb (1858-1943), openly advocated labour camps for unemployed youths. The so-called left embraced labourism. It was one of the great historical errors of modernity.“
(S. 74-75)
„Leisure as time off labour was a dismal replacement for the leisure eulogized by the ancient Greeks and Romans. It was permitted recreation. And when it began to expand during the twentieth century, it was intended to enable labouring families to spend more money to keep the economy growing. But if you could neither labour nor consume, you were increasingly likely to be dubbed ‚lazy‘ and ’scrounging off the state‘.
If leisure is interpreted as private recreation, entertainment and consumption, it not only loses its subversive, solidaristic, public place in the allocation of time. It means that leisure as schole is marginalized to the point where politics can be converted into a voluntary, superficial form of consumption itself. Quality time is necessary to participate as an active political citizen. One of the scarcely noticed outcomes of the transformation of leisure into recreation-and-consumption time was that political messaging gradually became ‚dumbed down‘, converted into a zone of commodification commanded by advertising minds. The average number of words on a political message shrank, and political soundbites became shorter and more platitudinous. It was to become much worse under tertiary time.“
(Seite 104)
Prof. Guy Standing:
The Politics of Time – Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-politics-of-time-9780241667163
Er stellt das Buch auch in Vorträgen vor, z.B.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFUJFAx3XN8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPO2XX7SKKg
Bundestagspetition von 2007 „Volksabstimmung und Bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen“ http://politik-werkstatt.de/petition2.htm
Antrag zur Mitgliederversammlung von Mehr Demokratie von 2012 (abgelehnt) („Diäten für Alle“) http://www.politik-werkstatt.de/MD-Antrag-BGE31082012.pdf
Antrag zur Mitgliederversammlung des Netzwerks Grundeinkommen von 2023 (abgelehnt) https://bge-rheinmain.org/antrag-bedingungsloses-grundeinkommen-und-direkte-demokratie
Veranstaltung 2023 zum 175-jährigen Jubiläum der Frankfurter Paulskirchenversammlung (u.a. mit Sarah Händel, damals im Bundesvorstand von Mehr Demokratie e.V.): https://bge-rheinmain.org/bedingungsloses-grundeinkommen-und-demokratie