On the Conditions a Person Needs to Grow Up Human

Imagining a society that embraces people from the ground up

– So that education and welfare can treat a 'person' with genuine care

1. Basic income is not about survival — it's the 'right to explore'

I don't think of basic income as merely a system for handing out money.

It is the freedom to make mistakes,

and a social mechanism that guarantees the time to change direction.

For some, that money is rest;

for others, that money is the beginning of a life.

Basic income is a system that grants **"the chance to not give up."**

Before self-reliance, it guarantees dignity.

2. Basic public education should teach us how to live as human beings

Children don't learn only in the classroom.

Children learn by walking, learn by speaking, and grow by making mistakes.

I believe education should not be 'the act of injecting knowledge,'

but a process that lets you live it through your body and forge a path through your own thinking.

Before exams, public education

should be the work of teaching a sense for living.

How to speak, how to wait, how to cooperate.

How to put your own thoughts into writing, how to sense another person's feelings.

All of this should be education,

and all of this should be given as a basic right.

3. Gifted children often grow up carrying deprivation, too

There are exceptional children.

But let's not look only at how brilliant they are.

A great many of those children

are growing up alongside emotional voids, emotional isolation, and self-loathing.

Adults see only their potential,

saddle them with responsibility, and drive them into competition.

I want to see them differently.

So that those children can be healed,

so that they can be held without a word,

there must be a system that understands even their deprivation.

So that they become not 'someone who does well,'

but 'someone who was well cared for.'

4. And so I imagine a 'society that embraces people from the ground up'

If there is basic income,

if there is basic education,

if there is basic care—

then we can make mistakes,

we can grow slowly,

and we can build a society where no one is thrown away.

A society that, for its children,

teaches them how to love themselves before it teaches them to compete.

That is what I consider

a truly people-centered nation,

the default of a truly future-oriented society.

Written by

Lee DongHun

Ma-eum Company – Architect of resonance-based AI systems