Category: Politics

Option 2 : Everyone is right

We need to cut our debts down to size. We need to invest in our infrastructure. Taxes reduce incentives, and need to be held to a minimum. Without education and research we cannot build a peaceful and prosperous society. The political system is unresponsive and corrupt, and needs fundamental reform. The financial industry is overweight, and needs to be regulated. Without enterprise we cannot afford our lifestyles, so we must support and encourage businesses. There are bad people in the world, and we need to defend against them. There is oppression in the world, and we need to support the rights of the oppressed. We must balance our budgets. We need alternative energy sources. We are too selfish, ignorant and introverted. We are empathic, loving creatures who all share common ancestors and a common planet.

All of that is true.

And there are the truths we dare not speak aloud because no one has their answers:

  • Capitalist economics is fundamentally dependent on a social safety net for its survival.
  • Humans have never before inhabited this planet with today’s atmospheric configuration.
  • Human-scale is not an option, for humans it is the only option.

In the face of all these seemingly conflicting truths many of us are dazed and confused. How do you lower taxes and spend on infrastructure? How do you regulate banking and enable commercial enterprise? How do you survive in a world of differences without a massive army? How do we get from the mess we’re in, to sustainable prosperity? Confused?

Confusion is only a very short term option. When you are walking in tall grass and you hear a rustle, you have a moment to decide whether you will change direction or speed; after a short time you have made your decision, even if you have not acted. Confusion is not a valid state, it does not appear anywhere in Nature except in the human mind. Confusion is the nexus of choice and contemplation, and it exists within the unyielding contexts of time and consequence. It is the curse on the flip-side of the luxury of choice. We cannot remain confused in our thinking and about our options for long.

It’s time to stop taking sides and start deciding.

Option 2

The choices we face are simple:

  • Option 0 : There’s nothing wrong and nothing needs to change (Ignorance)
  • Option 1 : Things need to change, and I don’t know what to do, but I am ready to support someone else changing them (Confusion)
  • Option 2 : Things need to change and I am changing them now (Action)

Which option are you taking?

In order to take “Option 2” you have to move past describing all the things you know to be true, and decide what to do about them. Everything in the first paragraph of this article is true, there is no sense in splitting one set of truths from another. Identifying with one set of truths might provide you with identity, but it does not move us closer to resolution.

It’s time to start talking seriously about what we’re going to do differently, about what we are actually going to implement in the next few years. We need to engage with solutions: real, practical changes we are going to make in our social, political economic structures now that will actually lead to a sustainable existence.

That’s what we are doing at Standards of LIFE – and we need you to join in. Take Option 2!

The Path to a Future: Peace

Part 4 in the serialization of the The Path to A Future. The critical link between peace and democracy.

A new section will be posted every 2 weeks during 2011. Enjoy!
If you want to get a free PDF of the book go to http://www.standardsoflife.org/thepathtoafuture.

We’re not talking about the global cessation of violence because suddenly everyone has seen the light, and forgiven their neighbors as they would be forgiven themselves. What is necessary for The Path is simply the cessation of violence sufficient to allow those afflicted to stop wasting time, resources, people and technology on destruction. This waste affects everyone around the globe, irrespective of their direct proximity to, or involvement in, the conflict itself.

The causes of conflicts are many, but they can be distilled into fractions of disenfranchisement and ignorance. They are about people having the right and the power to make choices about their own environment. Everywhere you find conflict, you will find one group fighting for their rights and another group fighting to deny them their rights. Quite often, the identity of these groups swings between them over time, as they get caught in the cycle of conflict.

So if enfranchisement and rights are at the root of all conflicts, what are people’s rights? What does someone, anyone, have an unassailable, natural right to? The answer is simple: everyone has a right to participate in the decisions that affect them in proportion to all the other people that share the constituency of those decisions. This is the basic format of democracy, and draws its strength and veracity from simple observation of the nature of being a human, living a life.

Starting at the center of each person, standing in the space they are in, it is possible to construct circles (constituencies) that radiate out, like ripples on a pond, to include wider and larger populations of others. In each one of these circles, each person has an equal say as all the others in the same circle.

The way to peace, then, is for there to be a mechanism that abides by the simple truth of every person’s rights and allows for the resolution of differences. Such a mechanism would allow individuals to assert their rights in their local environment, without threatening the integrity of a wider circle.

The mechanism to achieve this is representative democracy, except practiced in a vastly more representative manner than we have yet to implement. Our democracies in the modern world are wonderful for what they are, but we need a greatly enhanced version if we are to bring peace to the majority of the world. We need “super-democracy”. This advanced, super democratic model has features not found together in any of the versions of democracy being practiced in the world today, although some aspects can be seen in some parts of some modern systems.

The super-democracy model is a voluntarily self associating, proportionally representative, multi-layer, directly elected system.

Let’s break that down so that we can better understand how it works, starting at the end:

  • Directly elected: all the citizens vote directly for the same candidates. No electoral colleges and no subdivisions of each circle or constituency.
  • Multi-layer: every citizen has a direct vote in each constituency of which he or she is a member. Constituencies are geographically defined areas, starting with local communities and stretching all the way up to a global constituency encompassing all the people of the world. A rational model for these layers gives every person a vote in five constituencies: community, region, state, transterritory and world.
  • Proportionally representative: a vote counting system that provides equal weight to every voter’s vote, in proportion to the other voters in that constituency.
  • Voluntarily self associating: each constituency is empowered to choose its association with the constituency that contains it. For example, a Community can choose to belong to any Region with which it is geographically contiguous. The same goes for Regions and States.

The combination of these attributes into a coherent political model empowers people to take responsibility for themselves, and then build on that to resolve their differences with their neighbours. This form of super-democracy has the power to mutate conflict into disagreement, and from there to allow the motivation of self interest to drive future cooperation and progress.

This model is not just for people in conflict areas, everyone needs to be availed of the benefits of super-democracy. You will see as we travel The Path that it is vitally important that we have a properly representative system to support our decision making. Its exemplary adoption by those of us already living in relative peace is vitally important to the movement of the world’s conflicts from violent destruction to negotiated disputes within the short time available to us.

By establishing a mechanism that allows people to have control over their immediate environment, and yet be part of larger and larger entities, super-democracy removes the need for the larger constituencies to impose their identity on their members. At the same time, it provides the smallest communities the right to self-determination without threatening their neighbours. The simple process of allowing self-determination to coexist within structures that also provide for harmonization, is the key to peace and is the power of super-democracy. Its structure allows those in conflict to work their own way out, at their own pace, and based on their own self interests.

Conflict comes from inside those involved in it, and the peace has to come from them too. However, conflict also tends to deprive people and their communities of the resources and infrastructure necessary to support the administration of democracy, which makes moving out of a cycle of conflict all the more difficult. Those external to the conflict can help by providing guidance, process, structure, facilitation and support to the afflicted as they replace conflict with democracy. Because the administrative infrastructure for super-democracy is not geographically or culturally dependent, generic training systems, voting systems, technology and legislative bureaucracy packages can be developed for rapid deployment anywhere in the world.

So the first building block on our Path is super-democracy. A building material sufficiently robust to be used in the roughest parts of our landscape, and yet flexible enough to accommodate the particular topology of different situations. A simple, yet malleable, foundation for peace on our Path.

Vegetarian lions?

What kind of insanity have we fallen so easily into? When did we become so abstracted from what we know about ourselves that we started to swallow whole such counter-intuitive nonsense? Corporations with social “responsibility”, and public services that make a “profit”? How about vegetarian lions and wooden clothing? Or perhaps we should put sails on cars and wheels on boats?

Corporations that have awareness of the society that holds them, and public services that are accountable for their efficiency are both wonderful things; but let’s not let confusion permeate the proper roles for these different entities in our human sociosystem. Commercial enterprises competing in the market for the right to use limited resources, and public services striving to deliver the highest quality services on limited budgets, are both valid and vital components of a sustainable society and economy. It is important that both attend to their primary roles with due diligence, in order for them to contribute their unique qualities to the greater good.

The reason why the word “socialist” is such an ill fitting description of the modern sustainability movement is because it does not convey the fundamental adherence to the “natural order” of things that is at the heart of new political thinking. We are looking out on the world, and inside ourselves, to determine the natural flows that we can harness to fashion sustainable structures for societies and economies. Objective retrospection of the last 2000 years, and especially the last century, has to lead to a recognition of the natural human capacity for competitive enterprise and the benefits that commercial innovation can deliver. Competitive commercial enterprises are a great thing, we can and must acknowledge that. Bludgeoning those enterprises with responsibility for things that are not their natural role, is a rude fig leaf for lacking the moral courage to take responsibility for what is ours to own.

When we paint commercial enterprise with responsibility for our crumbling social fabric, for the desolation of natural resources or for the poverty of the many, we are absolving ourselves of our own responsibility for those undesirable facets of our modern world. The facts of life are that commercial enterprises are clients of our societies, and it is we, the public citizens of those societies, that must take personal responsibility for describing the environment within which commerce is transacted. We must expect that businesses are driven by their profits, and create a framework within which they can operate in that manner without destroying our social fabric, our natural world or our political supremacy.

Similarly with public services, funded by tax payers to deliver efficient services to the citizenry – these are not (typically) operating in environments where competition is desirable, possible or necessary. The profit motive is a reward system that induces risk taking in a competition to reach the most effective result, a competition that is necessary destructive of the less successful alternatives, and in so being it is inefficient. To the extent that the efficiency and quality of public services benefit from innovation and development, these can be achieved most naturally by opening up their management and direction to wider input from the public, non-profits and academia. Rewarding excellence in the performance of public services, by allowing incentive pay for those that work in their delivery, should not be confused with the services themselves having to adhere to a profit motive – they are separate and independent processes (as corporate experience has proved).

Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to your neighbour what is ours. This is the natural order of things: don’t expect businesses not to be profit driven, and don’t force altruistic services to be profit driven. When we accept what we know is the natural order, we are left holding our own responsibility for defining the intended outcomes, and the frameworks within which we wish those natural forces to operate. And when we assume our responsibility we will find it much easier to have clarity and to be effective in reaching the goals we intend. What happens in the world happens with your permission, unless you are actively doing something to change it; when we all own that fact, we can come into the power that has always been ours.

Money Flows

Hot money flows will not save the bankrupt status quo.

This week two news stories pointed to an issue that, wish it were otherwise, demonstrate the need for fundamental system change. The first story regards the fortune amassed by the Mubarak family during their rule of Egypt and the second concerns the massive scale of the corruption afflicting Indian society. Read the comments after the Indian article to get a real grasp of how this kind of corruption affects the core of a society down to the smallest neighbourhood, and this story that reveals the extent of the theft of public property in Egypt.

Where do these trillions of ‘hot’ currency go? They go into banks in the Western industrialized nations and their lackey tax havens – these three components form a coherent whole, interdependent on each other. This is colonialism by corruption, and the citizens of the beneficiary societies are as guilty of complicity today as they were 100 years ago. If you live in the West, don’t feel bad about it: you’re as much a victim as the citizens of the new ‘colonies’, because the same institutionalized theft is robbing your neighbourhood of resources just as much, through tax avoidance.

Why is this tolerated? Well it’s not tolerated by those who can’t do anything about it, in Egypt and India; they are just in a state of powerless despair. It is tolerated by those of us who can do something about it, because we have been unwitting clients of the system. The availability and use of debt to finance our distracted acquiescence has been the magician’s move that has drawn our attention away from the true play that is being made. In this trick there is a fine balance that the magician must strike, wherein the audience feels like it is getting more than it deserves, without actually getting real benefits. Like any sidewalk hussler, when the opportunity comes along to really cream a willing punter, the escape requires all parties to feel sufficiently guilty that no one feels entitled to recompense. This where the citizenry of the West is: asleep at the table, engorged on the fake food served up by the chefs in the kitchen while they resell the real food out of the back door of the restaurant to their buddies on the black market.

What can be done about it? The complete reorganization of the banking system. Preferably a coordinated reorganization encompassing the US, the EU, the UK and Japan; but even a principled stand by one of those financial centers would put the cat amongst the pigeons enough to disrupt the system and lead to change over the medium term.

What are the consequences? Without the hot, secret money Western banks will not be able to generate the profits they do today, nor would they be able to support the same level of employment. The fall off in tax revenues and employment in the client states would have to be offset, requiring a fundamental reorganization of commercial and social infrastructure. The net effect on tax revenues to Western states might even be positive, as banks pay a smaller percentage of their profits in taxes than the individuals and corporations who use the banks to avoid tax would have to pay on their incomes if they were properly declared. Potential benefits to non-haven states would be massive improvements in social wellfair, but would only accrue if accompanied by a significant democratization of their political systems – that democratization would be much easier to achieve without banking system support for corruption.

When will this happen? When the balance of benefits to the citizens of the haven states falls below even. The citizens of those haven states have already assumed the burden of the 2008 bank bailouts, but they have accounted for that with debt, so the full reality of those costs have not yet been bourn. The “plan” is to meet those debts over the coming decade by leveraging the same financial colonialism and conjuring (the failures of which created the debts in the first place) so that the massive increase in the money supply (aka ‘printing money’) that was used to account for the debts can be matched to grown wealth. This plan relies on the perpetuation of the existing banking system, complete with inflows of hot, corrupt money from all over the world. This is why today’s Western leaders will connive, lie and obstruct as much as they think they need to to protect the status quo, because they do not know how to plan for or adjust to a fundamentally reorganized society – they are not evil, they are just clueless.

The troubles with the “plan” are already becoming obvious. First is that the wealth that is being created is being confined to very small slither of the populations of the haven states, and, in a superb irony, they are using the same financial corruption to avoid adding to the wealth of states they inhabit. Second is that the debts cannot be satisfied with the growth that is available, and must be supplemented by sucking more wealth out of compliant tax payers through ‘austerity measures’. Third, none of the first two plans is happening fast enough to stop the excess money causing inflation, further exacerbated by real increases in the costs of raw materials. These problems mean that the haven states will start, this year, to raise interest rates to combat inflation, and in so doing push the balance of benefits for their average citizen firmly into negative territory. 20% youth unemployment, rising basic living costs and a kleptocratic ruling elite are the perfect ingredients for a revolution – witness North Africa, January 2011.

In the next few years, as real social disruption develops in Western states, a serious debate will emerge around whether completely reorganizing our economic and social frameworks is actually any less disruptive that attempting to maintain the old status quo. If we desire a constructive process of change we need to start thinking now about how that reorganization can manifest positively – that’s the reason to read and contribute to alternative thinking like the Standards of LIFE.

The Path to a Future: The Three Premises

Part 3 in the serialization of the The Path to A Future. The Path of orderly change.

A new section will be posted every 2 weeks during 2011. Enjoy!
If you want to get a free PDF of the book go to http://www.standardsoflife.org/thepathtoafuture.

Peace, security and prosperity.

The interrelated, mutual dependence of these three factors is the essence of The Path, and we must understand those relationships in some depth if we are to avoid the navigation problems of our past. Tackled independently from each other none of them is attainable, but pursued with a fundamentally integrated vision all of them are achievable.

  • Peace allows us to focus our efforts and resources on the real problems.
  • Mutual, universal security allows everyone to move beyond survival to become active and voluntary participants in building the Path.
  • Prosperity is the incentive that draws people to the Path, and it is the reward returned to everyone for building it.

These three premises are inextricably linked, and vital to each other’s success.

A context that helps to frame the situation we find ourselves in today arose in the last century with the dawn of the nuclear age, when we ushered in that most human of innovations: Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD for short. In so doing, we helped to set the groundwork for where we are today: MADDER (Mutually Assured Displacement and Destruction by Environmental Reduction).

Whereas MAD left our fate resting on the decisions and actions of a very few military and political leaders, not going MADDER depends on the decisions and actions of the vast majority of our planet’s inhabitants. This necessity for hundreds of billions of decisions drives the course of the Path at every turn. If the Path does not provide for every citizen, every community, every nation, and every continent to join in and travel the same route, it will not lead us to our desired destination. It will only leave us madder.

To get everyone involved, the Path must offer everyone the opportunity to participate in the journey and the destination. The peace, security and prosperity that are the features of the Path must be available to, and attainable by, everyone. I’m sure that peace, security and prosperity are already most people’s goals in life, so it is not their desirability but their attainability that is the issue.

This is a very important element that is worth sitting with a while. Any solution, strategy or plan that does not account for the need to motivate and incorporate the vast majority of the world’s population into the processes cannot succeed. Good ideas that serve a minority will not result in the level of change necessary to mitigate our planetary impact. The need for universal participation requires that we adhere to serving the greater good of all, if we are to succeed for any of us individually. It’s almost as if the universe set up this situation specifically to make us face our most profound choices.

We have spent the last thousand years promoting and establishing mechanisms and behaviours that have led directly to where we are today. We have been so successful in that endeavour that we are now faced with the equal task of disestablishing or diverting those patterns without destabilizing our entire structure. The only way to do this is to make sure that we are following naturally sound principles that serve all the participants, as well as each of us individually.

Peace, security and prosperity are big words, often used by many, and meaning very different things in different contexts. They have quite specific meanings for the Path, so before we go on to explore the relationships between these three premises and their application in our lives, let’s get clear about what we mean by each one, individually.

Insight : Desire : Resistance : Momentum : Pressure : Change : Effort

The incredible events of January 2011 in North Africa and the Middle East show us the natural passage of real change. Change is not easy, it is not painless, and we all have a certain resistance to it. Whether it is in our personal lives or on the political and social sphere, we recognize the need for change long before we act to actually bring about that change.

The result of our natural resistance to change is that, when it does happen, it appears to happen quickly. It looks like there is a sudden turn around, a dramatic change of character that seems to precipitate out of nowhere. It does not come out of “no where”, it is just “now here”. Real change is preceded by many steps before the step we call the “change”. First there is insight into the condition that transforms unconscious acceptance into a conscious desire for something different. Then there is resistance as the conscious mind evaluates the consequences to everything else that will result from this change. There is natural caution and wariness that mitigates against disruption that might not justify the benefits of the change. If the value of the change is sufficient, the desire for it builds momentum internally against the bulwark of resistance and starts to build up pressure. Finally when the pressure is high enough, some random event appears to trigger a rapid progression of actions and awakenings. This is the moment we call “change”; in fact, this moment is the culmination of a process.

There are two important facets to this process that are best consciously recognized in advance for the change to be both lasting and as free of collateral damage as possible. First, that there is time to prepare; second, that after the change event there is still lot of work to do.

The change event is often so seemingly spontaneous and rapid that developments occur in quick succession, and there little, or no, time to develop processes or plans in the moment. This is the reason why it is “the ideas lying around at the time” that become the modus operandi immediately after the event. In our personal lives the change event often comes to us without an opportunity to consciously perceive its imminent arrival, and so we are necessarily at the mercy of the tools that we have immediately to hand at the time. But in political and social change there is usually a developing consciousness that affords some the opportunity of foresight, and they can prepare the ground in advance of the event by evaluating and developing the options and alternatives. This preparation, by those who can, is valuable and important work, performing a significant service to others and the greater good.

After the change event(s), the translation of insight and desire into a lasting and credibly different path forward requires real effort and focus. To a certain extent, the drivers that lead to change happen unconsciously and spontaneously, but a new reality must be forged consciously out of the present conditions. Prior preparation can help just by recognizing the amount of work that will need to be done after the event, and how long it will take. Change is for the best when it is backed by determination and effort – history is littered with the stories of post-revolutionary reversion.

All this is the reason for developing The Standards of LIFE. A recognition that significant pressure is building in societies across the world and that the coming decade will see resistance overcome in many places, in many hearts and in different conditions. We are working to develop alternative models for our societies, our freedom and our prosperity that will serve us well when we decide that the time is right for us to change our status quo. Join us! Start preparing for your change!

The Path to a Future: The Path

Part 2 in the serialization of the The Path to A Future. The Path of orderly change.

A new section will be posted every 2 weeks during 2011. Enjoy!
If you want to get a free PDF of the book go to http://www.standardsoflife.org/thepathtoafuture.

What makes now such an important time is that we have reached a crossroads. We are at a point where the only constraint on our destination is our choice of direction, our decision to limit our impact on our environment, this planet.

We have scaled the heights of growth and technology so effectively that, without a singular focus on living sustainably, we will change our planet’s environment very significantly, probably catastrophically. No matter where you live, or how rich you are, or how clever you are, you cannot be sure that you or your offspring will be amongst the survivors of climate change. Your best bet, by a long shot, is to choose orderly change over chaos. The Path is that orderly change.

The Path follows a simple logic that goes like this:

  • In order to bring about the global changes necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change we need peace. Without peace we will not be able to assemble or coordinate the resources and processes required to build The Path to a Future.
  • Even with peace, we still need everyone’s voluntary, personal and active participation in order to make the right choices, select the best leaders, develop the technologies, work together and implement the changes.
  • We’re not going to get global peace and cooperation unless there’s something in it for everyone. The Path to a Future cannot just be in people’s eventual interest; it must be the best thing for each and every one of us to do now.
  • Finally, The Path has to lead to a future that we want to live in. The future we aim for must be much better if we are collectively going to make the effort required to get there. This future must not only be sustainable, it must be much more fun, with more freedom and ample opportunities for joy for all.

The Path is made from three simple, reinforcing elements:

  • Peace is necessary to focus our resources on providing for our security.
  • Security allows prosperity to flourish.
  • Prosperity allows us to build greater security that sustains the peace, which makes broader prosperity possible.

These three things are inter-dependant. Not new and not rocket science, but with one big and important difference today: realistic achievability.

The link between peace and prosperity was expressed eloquently by Martin Luther King a generation ago (Beyond Vietnam, April 4 1967, New York), and the generation before that by Gandhi, and so forth back through the generations of time. What is different now is the global impact of our choices, and the possibility for global change. Before now to imagine globally coordinated or synchronized change was the stuff of dreams, but today the imagined differences and barriers between peoples have been brought low by the advent of global telecommunications.

The fear that others do not want the same results or that different cultures have irreconcilable differences has kept our sights low and our vision narrow. Now we can see on TV, with our own eyes, people in every corner of the world speak of the same desires, the same intentions and the same simple hopes for themselves, their communities and their planet. Mothers in Maharashtra, Manchester and Malawi all want exactly the same things for themselves and their families.

Keep this in mind as you wind your way down The Path with me. It really is possible for people everywhere to adopt the simple changes proposed in this book, and implement them where they live. In our time, in this age, these ideas can be discovered, disseminated and the process of change started. Within a decade change can be happening across the surface of the globe.

In this book I will attempt to show you that you can build this Path, that there are changes that you can make in the community, region and state that you live in today. I will try to be explicit about what the changes are, without ignoring the fact that exactly how they are achieved is going to be dependent on your specific situation.

After reading this book I hope that you will share with me:

  • A joy about the possibilities in front of us
  • An understanding of how the changes work together to create The Path
  • An enthusiasm for sharing The Path with others, based on your own intuitions and understanding of its value
  • A desire to start the changes where you live See you on The Path to our Future.

Continue reading “The Path to a Future: The Path”

The Path to a Future: Setting Out

The first part in the serialization of the The Path to A Future. A new section will be posted every 2 weeks during 2011. Enjoy!
If you want to get a free PDF of the book go to http://www.standardsoflife.org/thepathtoafuture.

So here we sit on the third rock from the Sun, in an otherwise basically lifeless solar system, living in a gloriously beautiful, paper-thin atmosphere that has the capacity to support and nourish us all. We have copious quantities of energy streaming into and around our planet and the technology to harness it. We have oodles of delicious food and the capacity to grow and distribute it. There is nothing standing between us and global peace.

And yet, as we enter our 41st Millennium, our economies are degrading our atmosphere and pillaging the planet, leaving vast swathes of desolation in our physical and social environments. We are diminishing our capacity to sustain life and are in danger of placing the solutions beyond our reach. Our democracies are perilously dysfunctional, and our grasp of the consequences almost suicidally absent. Only by harnessing our collective wisdom to our course of actions can we make the fundamental changes to our economies and societies necessary to achieve sustainable prosperity.

So, are we really just going to let it all go to ….?

For want of a plan, and the courage to follow it? Because it requires hard choices and hard work? Those are not good enough reasons for inaction.

Now is the time to act. Now is the only time we have. Today we can have evolution before revolution, tomorrow maybe not. Change is inevitable, but what changes is up to you and me.

The truth is that there is a path we can take, a path that leads to sustainable prosperity, but we will not choose what we cannot see. We do have the choice. There is a realistic, practical option for coexistence and prosperity. We have only to grasp the opportunity, to understand that this is the right time. This is a time pregnant with potential, and we are the ones alive in this time! All that is required is for us to see a path that will lead us to where we want to go. A clear, simple and achievable path.

Such a path of change must be so rooted in common sense that it is self evident on receipt, and so simple in application that it is realistically achievable by all. It will have to be hewn from the universal nature of humanity, and flexible enough to be shaped by the diaspora that adopts it.

This book shows you that such a path is available.

In the chaos and confusion of these times it seems that we are a little lost as to what to do differently, what to change or how to change it. I am convinced that by starting with simple observation of ourselves we can arrive at a clear understanding of what we need to change, and what it should look like after we’ve changed it. In these pages I explore natural principles which can guide us in reformulating the structures of our societies. If we start simply and are honest in observing ourselves, we can see these principles at work in our own lives.

Using these principles to formulate a path, we will have a rallying point, a banner around which all who are interested in change can gather together to promote the issues they feel are most important, in concert with everyone else and their individual motivations for seeking change.

This is about getting our act together, about focusing on the strategy and channeling our energy and enthusiasm for a better future into a common purpose. Whatever your specific concerns, there is little chance of any of our issues being resolved without a strategic, over-arching framework. We need a construct that serves those that are seeking change, as well as others who don’t know what to change, and even those who haven’t decided to change anything.

While many futures are available to us, individually and collectively, this is a story about one path that leads to a future in which we live in sustainable prosperity. There are other futures available to us. There are futures full of the same struggles, violence and waste that have characterized much of human history to date. Those futures are indisputably possible, and if we don’t choose differently they are our default destination.

The choices we face between peace and war, respect and hubris, love and hate are not new; we have faced them since the dawn of our times. The difference today is that our choices will affect everyone, everywhere, because they will affect the nature of the planet we all live on. Whatever we do, we are headed for massive changes to our cultures and our climate. The difference is whether we choose our own path through those challenges, or wait for chaos to be thrust upon us.

Indeed, the evidence of human history does not support the notion that we will make the choices that will lead us down the path proposed in this book. These choices have been heralded and recommended by our wisest sages over and over again, but rarely adopted and never fulfilled. But they were never as possible as they are now, because for the first time in human history we can truly act globally in unison. As seems uncannily often the case, we are presented with opportunity, at exactly the moment of necessity.

Our religions and our literature have long extolled the value of seeking our higher natures, of reaching for our destiny rather than settling for our fate. We have been told by the wise since the dawn of our ages that love is the manifestation of good in us and that we have the capacity to be the lights in our own creation. However, as a species, we have yet to fashion a working model for this practice. We see the lofty ideals espoused by our sages and prophets as just that: ideals, but not practical solutions. We look around us and see a world full of others who we think will not honour a mutual contract, let alone reach inside themselves for love and peace.

Realizing that appeals to our better natures or our faith in humanity have not proved successful to date, this book lays out a path of action that is intensely practical, realistically achievable and in our self-interest. Rather than asking you to have faith in the primacy of good intentions, this book describes changes that make sense, even if you don’t trust your fellow humans to reach for their better natures.

The purpose of writing now about this path is not to promote it as the only option. I, and no doubt you, are only too plainfully aware that we have many options and that we can quite easily follow our fate to our grave, without the courage to reach for our destiny. The reason to write this book, and for you to read it, is to envision a clear path that gives us the chance to choose our destiny.

It is a choice. We have to actively make the choice, if we are to reach a different destination. That means that we have to be able to see the path, to feel it in a very personal way. After you have read this book, I hope that you too will see and feel The Path.

Continue reading “The Path to a Future: Setting Out”

We Know Better

Bottom up or top down, which way is best?

We know better than you. That’s the basic message we hear nowadays – from captains of industry, diplomats, politicians and humans with a claim on the mind of god. But the truth depends on where you’re standing and who’s saying it.

Are you a Monsanto executive talking about how to feed the world? Or are you a farmer talking about what works for your land?
Are you a Western diplomat talking about Middle East peace? Or are you a Middle East citizen talking about your community?
Are you a banker talking about sovereign debt? Or are you unemployed in a capitalist democracy?
Are you an executive responsible for 10,000 employees? Or are you one of those employees?
Are you a pontiff? Or a victim of rape?

Who knows better than you?

Well, you know that no one knows better than you, about you. It is an inevitable facet of being alive that we are the experts on our own experience. This leads us to develop a certain confidence about the veracity of our perspective that we bring unconsciously to our opinions about other things, things that are not actually our own, personal experience. This false confidence is why the useful development of our selves passes inevitably through humility. Humility is a process by which we learn to distinguish between we can really know, because it is our own experience, and what we are deducing, based on the combining of facts we have access to and our experience with similarities. Without an intentional effort to develop awareness and humility, we are mired in a thoughtscape of certitude that serves our perspective but does nothing for the common cause. In other words, no one need know better than you, so long as you are not making decisions for anyone else; if you are making decisions that affect others, it is supremely important that you understand who knows better than you.

So “who knows better” is defined by both access to facts and access to humility. Those with access to facts but without humility are subject to arrogance and self-deceit that depreciates the value and quality of their opinion. Today power is centered around a “top down” approach, whether that be in the form of major multi national corporations or the political elites of industrialized societies, that is substantially lacking in humility – as is demonstrably proven by the Wikileaks revelations. This need not be a bad thing, in and of itself, because many decisions made for the good of the majority are best made at a high level; but if humility is missing from the atmosphere that those decision are made in, the quality of those decisions becomes disastrously poor. And poor decisions made at the top, for vast constituencies, are potentially catastrophic for everyone – witness the quality of current decision making about climate change.

Successful leadership in a successful society brings together facts and humility, often in the position of a ‘public servant’: an acquirer of knowledge who acts on behalf of the greater citizenry to enable high quality, effective and empathic decision making. But even a public servant cannot be a knower of all things and there is bound to be tension between the goods of overlapping constituencies, and that is why we also have politicians. Politicians are supposed to take the informed knowledge and opinions of multiple public servants and fashion policy, meaning that they make the decisions arbitrating between competing ‘goods’. The entire decision making process in advanced and complex societies is substantially dependent on the quality of the public service that feeds information into the decision making process in the first place. That leads us to another very worrying development of the last few decades in many powerful democracies: the public service has, all too often, been co-opted by the private sector. Through a combination of devaluing the work of public servants and attempting to honour the unbridled right of every individual to seek the opportunities that reward them the most, we have corroded the boundaries between public and private service so much that there is now, in many countries, a revolving door between the two.

The best decisions would be taken by those informed by the best knowledge of the issue, steeped in humility and the pursuit of the greater good. Instead we have decisions taken by the supplicants of the rich and the powerful (privately funded politicians), informed by a public service that always has half an eye on the best interests of the private sector for whom they may wish to work in the near future. Humility is not even regarded as a quality worth having, and quite possibly it is seen as a weakness.

So who knows how to fix this?

It is helpful, and important, to recognize the multi-layered truth about decision making and the source of useful knowledge. It is unlikely that any one person is the exclusive holder of the truth, it is more likely that there are a few truths dependent on perspective, and that the best decisions will come from reconciling these to fashion a ‘best possible’ solution. The better version of decision making will incorporate this multi-layered reality in its foundation and structure, such that decisions are made at appropriately different layers for different issues. A decision making process that incorporates this reality will best serve the greater good in more cases than either a single top down or bottom up diktat. While today’s power structures are undoubtedly top heavily and need of radical adjustment, we would do well to consider this nature of the problem, and the best possible solutions before simply electing to turn the hat upside down again. (I say “again” because we have had revolutions before, inspired by a desire to turn the power structure upside down, but they quickly run aground on the rocks of practical realities, and revert to upside up in pretty short order.)

Thankfully, we are already fairly well equipped to make this transition because we have already adopted two important building blocks for better decision making: defining the multiple layers and establishing voting systems. Layers are geographically concentric segmentations of our lands; where continents contain countries, countries contain regions or states, and states contain counties or communities. All this is already practically implemented and established, albeit in need of a large dose of citizen choice in the form of self selection of association. Furthermore many places around the world already have voting systems set up in each of these constituencies, and many also have distinct layers of government at each level of constituency.

So what do we need to add or change?

Ironically, the biggest flaw in today’s democracies is that we have “bottom up” ways of electing politicians to our “top” layers of government. Inherited from our tribal, non-technological heritage we send local representatives up to regional, national and international decision making bodies; where they are quickly overwhelmed by the scope and size of the issues and the large interest groups formed specifically to operate successfully at that higher layer. The exception to this is the presidential model whereby an “executive” is voted for by all the members of the total constituency. However, keenly aware of the potential for corruption in an individual, we make that executive’s decision making power dependent on the support of the elected assembly of local politicians. This has been the “state of the art” structure for politics for over 200 years, and is often lauded for its incorporation of a “balance of power”, or system of “checks and balances”. In our modern world however, this structure is failing us, and fails to deliver the quality of decision making that we could have with a modernized structure that incorporates the advances in our technological capacities over the last two centuries. Modern communications and transport mean that now we can know about and vote for candidates over vast geographies – witness our existing presidential elections as an example of this in practice already.

Instead of a bottom up electoral system to generate top down government, a “layered” electoral structure, with a direct line between every citizen in that constituency and their representative for that layer of government, will yield better decision making by politicians specifically focussed on the issues best addressed at that layer of government. The citizens not only decide who makes decisions on their behalf, but also at which level or layer those decisions are best made. In a multi-layered democracy every citizen votes for a candidate from exactly the same slate of candidates as every other citizen in that same constituency. For instance, for a national assembly: every citizen in the nation votes for a candidate standing for election by all the citizens in the nation; the candidate is not going to the national assembly to represent a local district, they are going to the national assembly to make decisions about national affairs, and only national affairs. That same citizen votes for representatives in local and regional assemblies, who decide which issues are better decided at their level or promoted for decision by a higher layer.

Neither strictly “top down” nor “bottom up”, multi-layered representative democracy generates higher quality decisions by locating the decision making in the appropriate layer of government best able to “know best” (in the opinion of the citizenry) about that particular issue. In the end we know best and we need to structure our decision making bodies to allow us to define the best place for different decisions. We still need humility and quality public servants, but those will be easier to come by when we reform our political systems to disperse our power over appropriate constituencies.

To find out more about how all of this works visit www.standardsoflife.org/mlr

We are “domestic consumption”

The overriding message coming out of the WikiLeaks leak of diplomatic cables is one of disrespect. You, me, all of us, we are the “domestic consumption” that the contents of the cables sought to avoid being consumed by. Be we American, Yemeni, German, Russian, Swedish, Korean or citizens of just about any country on the face of this planet, we are apparently untrustable with the truth. We are just too stupid, too happy and busy consuming, too ready to pay unquestioningly for government. A government which does not think so much of us that we can be trusted to hear the honest truth from those whom we entrust to lead us, and all paid for with our money.

Really?! If somebody walked up to you on the street and told you lies while picking your pocket, and then came up to you a few weeks later and asked for a character reference – what would you say? Yet you will be asked to vote for or support these same politicians/kings/leaders again soon, the very same ones who thought so little of you that their truth was too good for you to hear. What will it take to make you change your behavior? Perhaps the lying pickpocket needs to kick you in the groin before you’ve had enough?

Much of the reason that you cannot be trusted with their truth is because you would, quite rightly, disagree with them. You might even object strongly that they were either lying to you before they got to power, or they’re lying to you now that they have power, but one way or another: they are liars. The thing about lying, that we all know instinctively, is that mostly it is the liar that is damaging themselves when they lie; it is only when we are made a fool of by their lying that we feel ourselves to have been damaged by their lies. And that is the test we tend to apply to situations like these WikiLeaks: do we feel foolish in the light of the disclosures?

If you can steal yourself to take a deeply cynical view of your world and your compatriots, then you are less likely to feel foolish. Think cynically enough and you can let the duplicity of your leaders roll off your back. But you will have to dig yourself a little deeper into the mire with each spade-full of cynicism you heap on your already weary view of the world. If you allow cynicism to dominate your thinking, you lose hope, you lose sight of the better world you wish for and you lose the impetus to make your dreams come true. Cynicism is a self-engorging downward spiral to abject aspirational poverty.

Feel foolish. Be proud to expect better. Let it sting a little, and take the rise to garner up some gumption for something different. You have every right to expect others to live by the standards you hold yourself to and, if nothing else, the WikiLeaks show that our so called leaders do not hold themselves to anything like the standards we hold ourselves to. The only thing likely to be missing from a society run honestly by government that trusts and respects its citizens is quite as many rich people, not such a bad trade really.

Let us become the domestic consumers they are so frightened of. Let us consume them with a repudiation of their distrust, let us consume the disrespect they have shown us and regurgitate it as urgent change. Let us demonstrate that they were right to be scared of the impact of their lies on us. We, the domestic consumers of truth, hereby declare the end times of the privileged promoters of deceit. We fear not your positions of privilege nor your mountains of wealth, you have squandered our trust and betrayed your weakness as furtive agents of guile.