In the U.S.A. and other nations, we have a functional plutocracy in the guise of an electoral democracy. It's a political system that places the general electorate in a slave role. The information providers present a tweedledum and a tweedledee as a candidate pair to the voting public. The dispirited public generally makes one of two choices. A significant percent of the population simply rejects the process by seldom voting. The rest of the public often perceive themselves voting for the lesser of two evils.
The natural social environment of mankind consists of hunter-gatherer groups consisting of 40 to 200 individuals. It is this social environment, to which , people have physiologically adapted. Instincts formed there seem to be employed and exploited in our current political environment. Most of the population seems to require the illusion that they personally know a candidate before they will cast a vote for him or her. This may seem reasonable in a small hunter-gatherer group, but the only way in which even an illusion of this can occur in our modern society is for the candidate to receive exposure to the public almost on a daily basis.
A candidate can only receive this magnitude of exposure when the primary information providers and political fund sponsors actively endorse the candidate by either providing the exposure free of charge or providing the exposure through commercial advertising. A more respectable political and economic system is sorely needed.
What ideas have you pondered on in this realm of mental exploration?
Many emphasize the importance of revitalizing municipal democracy. The city of Athens once had a more vital democracy than we do now. Later the Peloponessian war and Macedonian militarism suppressed it and it never fully recovered. This vitalization of municipal democracy could be embodied by the equivalent of "town meetings" in urban districts, commercial work places, and centers for rural gathering.
This effectively requires some political power to be surrendered by states and by corporations. It could be easily argued that the corporation should be out-right replaced by industrial and commercial organizations that have ownership within a localized community and have a relatively democratic organizational structure within.
The corporation is probably the mostly glaringly defective social organization that exists in the world today. It's a great engine of wealth concentration and a destroyer of community. It's a totalitarian plutocracy that places much of humanity in its' iron grip during the work day and broadly effects our political culture. Any serious and honest intellectual evaluation of our social institutions would have to consider ways in which to replace or radically reform corporations in a broader reformation for public good.
Many propose monetary reform as being central to enabling a healthy society. Today we have a fractional reserve system that enables banks to create money out of thin air. This is an inflationary monetary system that constantly pumps money into the system and there's a multitude of ways in which the wealthy can create money from money. It's a form of trickle down system in which money is pumped in at the top and inflation is kept in check by anchoring down wage compensation. The so-called natural rate of employment is that which, though painful for the common man, brings down inflation to an acceptable level while new rich enjoy their $10,000 martinis.
It is essential to realize that the central government of a sovereign nation has the right, the ability, and the responsibility to introduce new credit into existence. This is totally different from having the central bank "print money" by relaxing lending policies, resulting in an infusion of cheap loans which must still be repaid. Sovereign creation of credit need not be based on debt. It can be based on direct spending of money into circulation by the government itself.
A form of monetary infusion can be in the form of a citizen dividend. A citizen dividend is a fixed amount paid to every man woman and child. This amount would be a fraction of per capita income but it's advisable for it to be a substantial fraction. Some have calculated that for an industrial economy such as the United States, this fraction could be about one third of per capita income.
Media reform could be critical for the enlightenment of society. In our natural state, older wise men would tell us stories as we sat around the fire and ate the game we hunted and the plants we gathered. This represented the continuity of culture and its' transmission from old to young. Today we have media conglomerates striving to exploit "the lowest common denominator" and even expand upon it. Our entertainment and even our information are merely the wrappings on a great mass of commercials which actually provide the revenue to media corporations.
It's true that part of the problem is the corporate nature of media companies, but there's more to it than that. The inherent need to capture the "lowest common denominator" may be an intrinsic problem with our media system. Since children spend more time in front of the TV than they do with their parents, we ought to have the equivalent of wise men to tell them stories. A solution could be to tightly control and limit commercials in media and perhaps completely eliminate them from television and radio; to enable and expand media organizations that are controlled and operated by municipal and state offices.
Today we have difficulty in maintaining a stable equilibrium for our relationship with nature. Many of our practices have no pretense of being sustainable. We drink cheap tap water for $1.50 a bottle. The water is encased in a petroleum product – a non-renewable resource. We then send it out to sit in a landfill for many thousands of years. All this because we haven't elected to pursue a policy of natural equilibrium and because we've allowed a couple bottling companies to seize monopoly control of point sources of water. This is of course just one example amongst very many.
A enlightened policy could be to have environmental committees evaluate industrial, agricultural, and commercial activities to ensure they're environmentally adequate and that they represent renewable closed cycles with nature and humanity.
Part of a healthy stewardship of the earth would be to create and maintain enough fully natural ecosystems to ensure the diversity of life. This does take some of earth's biosphere away from our greedy human hands, but this should be part of our sacred responsibility to the earth. This would in effect, require establishing wilderness areas in many varieties of ecological environments.
An essential part of an enlightened reformation would be the establishment of a reliable and sane security system. Here a form of global governance can be useful. A Terran Department of Peace can have a global reach and can actively seek to prevent conflict and armament amassment. Security forces can constantly maintain a form of solder and officer exchange with other security forces all over the globe. Any given sovereign security force could have local officers, exchange officers, and Terran officers. Both Terran authorities and local authorities would need to OK any action involving force.
It's important to represent this global organization as a department of peace and not a department of war. Having a global military dictatorship is one of the last things we need.
Here I've distilled a number of key problems and challenges that we now face as a civilization. I've also very roughly sketched out some proposed solutions. What ideas do you have that would help enable humanity to embark on a reformation of enlightenment for the twenty first century?
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