The way he did it was to preach their cult's doctrine to them. "OK, according to your church's teaching, here's the requirements for you to be saved. How are you doing? Are you going to make it? How much harder are you going to have to work in order to make it? Will even working harder be enough to get you there?" When the weight of what their belief system actually demanded of them sunk in, some of them didn't want to be in the cult anymore.

Some of them. A few. Not many. But some.

It's not only recent, according to this quote from 300 years ago.

Jonathan Swift — 'It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.'

edit: oh and without sounding too conspiratorial hopefully... how are you going to control a populace that isnt desperate, downtrodden and uneducated... /end conspiracy

One can be dispassionate and distant from one’s beliefs and still difficult to convince, because we all harbor some forms of _private reasoning_ about how the world works. If I have strong personal beliefs, they may be gathered from experience of decades. Not going to easily change my world view.

Add maybe a few _false beliefs_ for the xtra complication? (Not even considering the paradox of lying).

Finally, the emotional spin appears as _cynical reasoning_, that toxic mix of anger and resentment. The logic-warrior who ventures here is brave indeed.

Stuff like "why should I pay for this", or "why should they get to be lazy while I work" or "I don't feel like I should work as hard"

So they find other arguments, in a doth-protest-too-much-other-logic-arguments way.

And everything you earn isn't rightfully yours. It's supported by an infrastructure of national defense, courts, police, building regulations, and so forth. You get many years of public school for free. Etc. etc. You didn't do this solo.

So the cost of all the benefits you get as a citizen is to contribute your rightful share, that share being decided democratically in which you have a vote.

If every American was forced by some kind of mandatory conscription to spend a percentage of their life living in the poorest neighborhoods in America they’d probably become pro-social safety net pretty quick.

The same way any animal in the jungle keeps the food they earned.

Society is a team effort. That’s what the elections are about.

Fascism tends to reward work rate, contribution, cooperation, etc., and is typically nationalistic - there is no (Western) nation right now without an enormous proportion of ethnic foreigners whereby a UBI would effectively constitute a massive wealth transfer from the domestic population to immigrants (which is, needless to say, contrary to fascist objectives).

This is basically what we are seeing already, democratically, however. I know here in Australia it seems like there are neverending announcements of unfunded public programs to give out money and other resources to whichever group tugs at the voters' heartstrings most effectively. The coffers are dry, national debt is soaring, fraud is rampant, and yet I'm still positive I'll see a feel-good headline next week about the latest government initiative to "pay off" their electorate.

That isn’t behavior that occurred in the pilot problems they talk about it.

Barring AGI and a swarm of drones/nanobots, you still need people to work. Money is just a unit of exchange. If everyone on earth has a billion dollars, but nobody wants to work, nobody is going to be driving around in lambos.

You think people don't pay their rent with SNAP/EBT?

I've got news for you - they do, by selling their benefits to someone with cash at a horrible rate. To pay rent, put gas in their cars, buy alcohol... all the things money is necessary for.

Giving all 258 million adult US citizens $1000 a month totals to $3.096 trillion per year.

Giving them all $2000 a month totals to $6.192 trillion per year - more than all US tax revenue from all sources combined.

Of course, we already have a $1.7 trillion deficit, with $38 trillion and counting in debt without the UBI, and I assume you're not planning on defaulting on our $1 trillion+ in annual interest payments on the debt either, right?

How about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which by themselves take up over half of the entire federal budget, are we keeping those too?

If you'd like, we could confiscate 100% of the assets of every billionaire that's a US citizen and hope to sell all of the non-liquid asssets at market prices, that'll get us 9 months worth of current federal spending levels - less if we're adding UBI on top and not getting rid of any other programs.

Now if you want to get creative, we could keep funding the military and use it to go after all of the other global billionaires, that'll get us almost through a full 4-year presidential cycle, at the low, low cost of invading just about every other sovereign nation on earth to rob their citizens, too.

We could also have the treasury start minting trillion dollar coins to both pay off the debt and fund the UBI, but I don't think you're going to like your $2000 monthly UBI check as much when market rent on a studio is $200,000 a month.

If you have better ideas on how to pay for this, I'm all ears.