At the heart of fostering better decision-making is creating a culture of responsibility. By delegating power equally among all citizens, the constitution also distributes the responsibilities that go along with it. The existential challenges we face are of such magnitude that they cannot be borne by only a few shoulders. We need all hands on deck.

By concentrating power and responsibility in the hands of only a few individuals, representative democracy effectively strips regular citizens of both their power and their responsibilities. The consequence, intended or not, is that citizens are infantilized. Between elections we lack all practical means with which to steer the direction of our ship. With no real power to shape our own circumstances or the world we live in, all we can do is complain, make demands and point fingers.

To gain back the power that rightfully belongs to everybody, we must start by taking responsibility of everything, good and bad, happening around us. Instead of complaining or accusing others, responsible behavior means taking full ownership of our own lives, the communities we live in and the planet we depend on. This means that we own all the things, large and small, that are broken–even if it wasn’t us who broke them in the first place.

When we walk past litter and choose not to pick it up, we become responsible for our dirty neighborhood. No matter who originally threw out the litter, it’s now up to us, too, that the litter ends up where it belongs–the trash can. This is what taking ownership means.

You’d be surprised by how many cities and cultures manage to live completely trash-free when the citizens feel responsible for their immediate surroundings. The day we realize that it’s not somebody else’s job, but ours, to improve our environment we are a giant step closer to taking back our full power. While we can’t personally fix every problem, we can help make sure they do get fixed.

Nobody can be forced to take responsibility, of course, but you can’t have it both ways. By avoiding responsibility, you effectively forfeit the power that you have. Demanding more power while avoiding responsibility doesn’t work because it is exactly by taking responsibility that we gain our power.

To educe this behavior change, we have to spread our responsibilities evenly, and this in turn requires that we also spread power evenly. This is exactly what issuing the UBI does. By endowing each other with a UBI, the citizens of the world can dramatically change the existing dynamic. By linking legislative and judicial power to the executive power contained in basic income, we create universal basic power. This will help delegate power and responsibility to each citizen unlike anything else that has come before.

By allowing us to direct our power to fund and shape the decision-making of all the projects we deem important and necessary, we as citizens gain much more control over how our public resources are spent. Not only do we get to pick and choose which public projects should be funded, once we make our choice we can continue to shape the policies of those public projects with the votes our UBI contains. And our influence doesn’t end there. We also get to judge the effectiveness of the cells by providing them with the evaluations that help form their public reputations.

Since public services will from now on be funded via a grassroots crowd-funding effort, citizens have much more control over the direction of their community than ever before. Each and every citizen can direct their funds wherever they deem them to be most necessary. A culture of responsibility is predicated on the idea that being responsible for something changes our behavior profoundly. This change in behavior alone goes a long way in solving our problems.

As citizens make their choices, they are all aware that they can only take part in decisions in the cells and forums they subscribe to or work for. This important limit on their power should further influence how they spend every precious monetary unit. To have a say in most things that affect their lives, they have to fund most projects that a functioning society depends on. To simply pour all resources into a single project can be necessary in an emergency but is unwise in normal circumstances.

For the first time everybody is equally responsible for the common good and everybody has at least some means to fix the problems they encounter every day. The fact that behind every 100 units of public expenditure is an individual citizen, who makes the decisions based on their values and reading of the community’s needs, ensures that public funds are much better allocated than they are today.

Citizens can’t blame anybody else but themselves if the results disappoint them. Having so much skin in the game will in and of itself make people behave more responsibly. A culture of responsibility means that everybody is engaged in solving the problems we face. When something falls off a cart, there is always somebody to pick it up. As more people are engaged in this effort, the stress placed on a single individual becomes much lighter.

By giving every member of the community the tools with which to take on problems, the problems don’t become an undue burden on anybody. The ample public funding creates full-time jobs and provides the necessary boots on the ground to take on the problems as they arise.

When you’re not expected to do everything, doing your own bit becomes much easier. When you see other people doing their bit, you are even more likely to do your own. In an environment like this getting caught for not doing your part would, in fact, be a source of embarrassment. Suddenly, doing the right thing becomes the social norm. When that happens, we don’t need overt rules, regulations or punishments any more. Taking responsibility becomes ingrained. It becomes our culture.

When people understand that they will live with the direct consequences of their actions and choices, they have to search for the best possible solutions not only with regards to their immediate circumstances, but also considering unforeseen events in the future. In preparing for the possibility of accidents and other unlikely occurrences, citizens have an incentive to hedge their bets and act more judiciously.

Taking responsibility will, in turn, lead to better decisions and better allocated resources. This change in behavior, when added up on a large scale, will lead to much better outcomes globally. As our well-being hinges on our ability to do more with less, empowering every citizen to help make those difficult choices is essential. Ideally this practice and the decisions that it creates will result in superior outcomes that only a higher collective intelligence can produce.

Now, solving problems here and there, one by one, even with great tools and everyone engaged, is still not the optimum solution. The best option is to prevent the problems from arising in the first place. To get to such a place, we have to solve the problems on a systemic level. We have to design a system that explicitly precludes the problems from even materializing.

By designing the right incentives and creating a genuinely free and fair market, we reinvent the rules of the game in a way that the world can be as problem-free from the outset as possible. When the problems have been solved from the get go, humanity can direct its energies to achieving new heights.

This is the next stage of collective intelligence, where instead of reacting to problems of our own creation, we can focus on pushing the boundaries that natural laws have imposed on our collective well-being. To achieve these systemic solutions, however, we have to take full ownership of our system. As our first act of collective responsibility, we have to take the bull by the horns and the change the system we currently inhabit.