War is not a foregone conclusion or a national necessity. Each successive occupant of the White House only needs you to believe that in order to centralize the power of an increasingly imperial presidency, stifle dissent, and chip away at what remains of civil liberties.
– Danny Sjursen, retired US Army officer, The Pence Prophecy: VP Predicts Perpetual War at the West Point Graduation
Whenever I mention direct democracy, a certain segment of the population always comes back with a very negative knee-jerk reaction. Since this response tends to center around several concerns, today’s post will dig into them and explain how such pitfalls can be structurally addressed.
Minority Protection
The first thing that worries people is a fear there will be no protections for minority populations within such a system. Take the U.S. for example, where approximately 80% of the population lives in urban areas and only 20% in rural. If we moved to a system where direct popular vote played a meaningful role in deciding the majority of issues, rural populations would lose out every single time. It would end up being an oppressive system for people who live in less populated areas and would tear up the U.S. even faster than is happening now.
I definitely think this sort of thing is a problem, but people misunderstand what I mean when I discuss direct democracy. Fundamentally, I’m a firm believer that governance should be radically decentralized compared to what it is today. America is a great example of a good idea gone completely off the tracks.
Localism
While the founders envisioned a decentralized structure in which core politically entities known as states would decide most issues, we’re now stuck with a centralized imperial system in which virtually all major decisions are made in Washington D.C. by gangs of hopelessly corrupt and compromised politicians. But it’s even worse than that. Power hasn’t merely been concentrated in D.C., but it’s also become increasing concentrated within the capital itself in the hands of a reckless imperial presidency.
For example, the separations of powers outlined in the Constitution when it comes to war has been all but obliterated. Congress is supposed to declare war, yet the U.S. military is involved in conflicts all over the planet, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger without any such declaration.
To illustrate how insane all of this is, read the following from a Vice article published last year:
The U.S. is officially fighting wars in seven countries, including Libya and Niger, according to an unclassified White House report sent to Congress this week and obtained by the New York Times.
Known officially as the “Report on the Legal and Policy Frameworks Guiding the United States’ Military Force and Related National Security Operations,” the document is part of a new requirement outlined in the 2018 defense spending bill. The White House is already required to update Congress every six months on where the U.S. is using military force.
We’ve somehow gone from Congress must declare war, to the White House will update Congress every six months on how all the undeclared wars are going. This is madness.
The U.S. is currently drowning in an overly centralized and corrupt imperial government based in D.C. For direct democracy to truly function well, it should be based in local governance. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the places currently using these tools most successfully, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, focus on localism.
There are many reasons I believe decentralized, local governance is a superior model . First, it’s an insane level of conceit to assume a country as geographically and culturally diverse as the U.S. should be in the business of making one-size fits all decisions for 325 million humans. While the urban/rural divide I mentioned earlier is one important factor, so are other cultural distinctions.
Though city-dwellers in Seattle and Houston may have urban living in common, cultural differences mean these two populations will often want to handle similar problems very differently. Even within states, you often have serious friction from county to county, and power within the states themselves likewise can be too centralized and dismissive of local concerns.
A perfect example can be seen in the state of Colorado where I live. Fracking, and oil and gas drilling in general, is a very contentious issue, and what often happens is cities will try to ban or regulate drilling in their communities only to be overruled by politicians in the state capital. Who should decide whether drilling happens, the people actually living near wells, or politicians in the statehouse?
As reported by Westword:
Under Colorado law, communities have virtually no authority to stop these facilities from popping up wherever a company can acquire land, obtain a state permit and decide to start drilling.
The situation has sown a sense of powerlessness — and frustration suffused an October city council meeting in Republican-leaning Loveland. That community of 76,000 recently woke up to letters informing residents of — not asking permission for — a project that will drill a dozen two-mile-long horizontal wells underneath many of their homes and schools.
An overflow crowd packed into council chambers to hear a presentation on the drilling proposal and share concerns. Most were residents of the neighborhoods under which the planned drilling would take place — retirees anxious about how it would affect their health, parents worried about their young children. As city employees briefed council members on the plans, however, it became clear just how little control Loveland would be able to assert over the situation.
As this past weekend’s EU elections demonstrated, humans everywhere are increasingly frustrated with the political status quo and feel utterly helpless in the face of corrupt and centralized bureaucracies. Similar to how many people in Loveland, Colorado feel alienated and disempowered when confronted with oil and gas interests and a state government that doesn’t care, billions of people across the planet are experiencing a similar level of disenfranchisement and revulsion with the political establishment. Increased local decision making combined with more citizen power via tools of direct democracy, as opposed to professional politicians, could be a key to improving outcomes, quality of life and a sense of self-government so sorely lacking in today’s world.
Civil Liberties
Another key thing to keep in mind when thinking about future political systems is civil liberties. One of the great gifts provided to the American people by the founding fathers is the Bill of the Rights of the Constitution. These civil liberties protections, which include freedom of speech and the press, are the highest law of the land. While they’re subject to interpretation by the courts, they cannot be legislated away by Congress or suspended by the president (at least in theory). In a future system more defined by direct democracy, similar protections should be institutionalized. A conscious and healthy political system should define up front certain basic civil liberties considered untouchable, while empowering the community to experiment widely beyond that.
17/ So the key points to my idea of utilizing direct democracy would be.
– More direct powers to citizens, neuter representatives, make them tools to carry out the will of the people.
– Maintain Bill of Rights.
– Localism.— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) May 24, 2019
Propaganda and Manipulation
The other pushback I get when mentioning the merits of direct democracy is how easy it is to fool and manipulate people. This is used as an argument against putting more power in the hands of average citizens, which is considered by some to be dangerous and irresponsible.
It’s undoubtably true that while the social media era has made it easier for humans across the world to directly communicate and collaborate, it has also made mass propaganda and psyops easier to perpetrate amongst a population. Nevertheless, this isn’t a good argument against the need for more direct democracy. Remember, the primary purpose of injecting more direct democracy into political systems isn’t to get rid of a separation of powers, but to disrupt the archaic and broken practice of representative democracy, i.e., the goal is to disempower professional politicians by giving more direct say to the public in matters that are currently handled by elected representatives.
In a representative democracy, propaganda and manipulation is probably an even more effective tool than it would be in a direct democracy. All you have to do is manipulate people every couple of years to vote for some sleazy, self-interested politician, and once the vote is over, special interests simply need to target that person and compromise them. In most cases, this is easily accomplished. In contrast, manipulation must be more regularly engaged under a direct democracy where citizens are more actively involved beyond just voting for some puppet every few years.
This also demonstrates another reason localism and direct democracy go hand in hand. When you centralize decision making for hundreds of millions of people in a nation-state capital, you make the job of special interests that much easier. Compromising a few hundred representatives is trivial compared to manipulating and compromising millions. Moreover, it becomes even harder to control when hundreds or even thousands of cities/regions/communities are making most decisions for themselves via direct democracy. In that sort of world, an oligarch or lobbyist who wishes to rig things in their favor must deal not just with myriad distinct largely autonomous political entities, but also with the empowered citizens residing in those areas. The more political entities an oligarch or corporation has to interact with, the harder and costlier it becomes to capture and control large swaths of society.
People will dismiss this idea and claim your average person is lazy and won’t really be involved in local politics, but I think we’d see far more involvement than we do currently since local decision-making is far easier to get a handle on and influence than the infinite levels of Orwellian bills constantly being passed by a national legislatures
In order to clearly demonstrate just how broken our political system in the U.S. is, here’s something Hunter S. Thompson wrote all the way back in 1972.
That’s the real issue this time,” he said. “Beating Nixon. It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.”
The argument was familiar, I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame, but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?
Now with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer. I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing this year is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 – and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.
—Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
Sound familiar? It’s the exact same argument shoved down our throats during the 2016 campaign in order to guilt people into voting for Hillary Clinton. Likewise, it’ll be the exact same argument used in 2020 to guilt people into voting for Joe Biden if Democratic Party donors somehow succeed in getting that clown nominated.
Fifty years and nothing’s changed when it comes to politics in this country. It’s no wonder things keep breaking down and getting worse for more and more people. Citizens have virtually no power or influence on public policy by design, and have been reduced to food on the table for oligarchs and other assorted special interests. This is a global problem, and it’s why the time has come to alter governance in order to provide the people with more direct power.
I want to conclude by making it clear that I don’t think I have “the answer” to anything. The only thing I am 100% certain of is human beings across the globe, whether they live in an in your face dictatorship or a representative democracy, have very little agency when it comes to the public policy that intimately affects their lives on a daily basis. All governments are more or less controlled by a very small group of powerful interests who use carefully selected politicians to do their bidding. In the more ostensibly free societies, we’ve centralized legislative power in a few hundred easily corruptible people, but it’s become clear this no longer works. Such a system merely serves to separate the voter from the professional politician as soon as an election is over.
I’m fairly certain representative democracy as we know it is on the way out, and the purpose of this series is to think out loud about what might come next, and how we can improve upon the better parts of the systems we already have. As things continue to fracture and break down more dramatically in the years ahead, I believe the idea of direct democracy will catch on like wildfire, and it’d benefit all of us to start thinking about what this means and how best to go about it.
Read Part 1: Direct Democracy Is the Future of Human Governance
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The idea of direct democracy is intriguing. Are the people in aggregate anywhere near being able to handle the responsibility of self rule when they are so morally immature-bankrupt in the aggregate, no matter how this state has come about? This let alone the present situation aimed at greater centralization on a global scale by global spanning interlocking powers. Are these powers to be unseated by this same morally immature people? It is hard to know the best area to focus one’s efforts on in combating the controller’s big push on sustainable development…aka a scientific and engineering dictatorship to be run under the auspices of the current owners of financial capitalism.
My guess is that the education of the populace comes before any real improvements in the power differential can take place. Best of luck to all of you as my expiry date is due about the time their big push becomes reality, in the next 15 or so years. While I regret what will likely take place as it affects my clan it will be the same for everyone else. Without the ability to reason and learn I fear the worst.
Michael, Thankful for your articles, for making people think. I am still going to try to pull you off the democracy wagon though. If only I could get you in my corner. Please if you can visit my Medium site, (CMW, 5th one down, member since Jan 18) and read what you can. That said here are my thoughts. 1 What is it we want our Representatives to do? We want them to make intelligent decisions. What is an intelligent decision. Is a logical decision the best and how does religion play a part? 2. If a “Collective intelligence” can outperform an “Individual” in a contest of applied logic and reasoning why do we prefer “Individual Intelligence”. 3. Power is the name of the game in this game of thrones, how does power distort human logic and reasoning. What is the “power” of a sound conclusion? 4. When you say, “this is madness” can all the blame be laid on the representatives, what part does sociology play? To sum it all up the only real way we can fix this is to approach it from the core and that is the logic behind the conclusions we form. These conclusion are central to the directions we take. How they are formed is everything. I have read the link to the eDemocracy page from the previous article and They have 5 obstacles. A Collective Intelligence would solve 2,3,4 and 5. Concerning no. 1, this is only a technical barrier and one must ask how many participants are needed to formulate a strong conclusion? Where is the point of diminishing returns in terms of numbers of participants. Think about this. This is a bold assumption that a Collective Intelligence would solve all these issues. I believe if you understood the dynamics you would see that it does. Please read “Viable” on my page. Thank you again for your efforts.
Five obstacles, or challenges as they were mentioned from the article linked from part 1 concerning eDemocracy.
1. As stated in previous post above; This is only a technical barrier and one must ask how many participants are needed to formulate a strong conclusion? Where is the point of diminishing returns in terms of numbers of participants.
2. Validation – Concerns, “how much our democracy relies on the technology of vote counting. And these concerns will not go away.” Answer; These concerns will go away. See no. 1 above. Voting is based on tallies related to individual conclusions. These are conclusions formulated by the individual with no transparency or proof of work. Where thousands of individuals work as individuals or groups of individuals to form conclusion which must then be tallied. With a Collective Intelligence, what I refer to as a form of human powered artificial intelligence as best I can explain it. The formulation of the “conclusion” is a work of the collective. The moderator is the application of human logic. It is transparent and a work of constructive logic. Everyone can participate. They do not need to be counted though.
4. Deliberation – Concerns; 1. practical concerns; “Traditional processes are single channel—one person can speak at a time. This is workable for small group communication, but the number of potential conversations grows exponentially with the number of participants. If there is only one microphone—a traditional town hall or assembly meeting, for example—things quickly become unmanageable due to the bottleneck in communication. This is one of the greatest challenges to group decision making.” 2. concerns in today’s environment; a. “ We are now grappling with the impacts of “siloization” and the spread of fake news through social media” b. “We need deliberation. There must be exposure to and exchange of different ideas—reasoned debate and argument. ‘ Answer : These are issues related to an environment dominated by Individual intelligence and individual power or power held by groups of individuals. Fake news only lives for the time duration it does because society has no logical yardstick to measure it by. A Collective intelligence would solve this. Part b. Is answered by the same answer as no. 3 Delegation. There would be a framework, a direction of forward progress and creations and guide and moderator to accomplish our goal. The moderator and guide is human logic. The goal is a tested and well formulated conclusion that no one can find any issues with. We want people to find issues with our collective conclusions that is what makes this great.
5 Aggregation – Concerns; 1.“making a choice; our systems generally reduce this to measuring the support participants have for different alternatives. Problematically, the traditional process of reducing decisions to either-or choices loses the texture, interconnections of multiple variables, and range of potential outcomes associated with deeply rooted and complex problems.” 2. “Our current parliamentary procedures are not conducive to complex decision making. They allow us to evaluate only a small number of proposed outcomes at a time,” 3. This process results in outcomes that have majority support, but that substantial minorities may nevertheless oppose—sometimes quite adamantly. This gap in satisfaction levels across groups is the tyranny of the majority Answer : 1. With a Collective Intelligence you will have all the “texture”, “interconnections” and “multiple variable”. The more the better. Human logic is represented in it’s virtual entirety. We humanity do our honest best for “humanity” 2. When you get to the issue it may already be 70 % finished. See challenge No. 1 participation. Expand the “legislature” to 40 million and see what can happen. 3. Outcomes are thoroughly vetted, transparent and permanently available for revision. Being anonymous one can only argue with “human logic”. There is no majority or minority. To end it here is the kicker. These are their words Not Mine; “Presenting such frameworks with Internet technology, it is possible for large groups of people to focus their collective intelligence and collaboratively evaluate vast numbers of potential outcomes.”
Sorry for all the post. Thanks Michael for having this site to work on our common issues. This is exciting. Here is a para. From the bottom of the eDemocracy story link from part 1. This is the future. We just need to get it into the public domain. Business applications are great but we’re dying out here. When this all does take hold The world “Democracy” may fade. Let’s think in terms of “Humanity” The Paragraph: “One the greatest contributions of information technology will be new ways of aggregating opinion data to liberate eDemocracy from the tyranny of the majority.
Ethelo is an online collaboration platform that enables groups to solve complex, multifactor problems and identify decisions with broad support. Ethelo earns revenue by providing licenses to consulting firms and large organizations doing stakeholder engagements. Ethelo is funded through equity investments.
1000minds provides an online suite of tools and processes to help individuals, groups, and organizations make decisions based on multiple objectives or criteria. Established in New Zealand in 2003, they earn revenue by providing licensing and consulting services to organizations.
Other notable efforts include Loomio and Democracy.os (which support alternative voting with blocks and abstentions); Decisiontree and D-Sight (which use multi criteria decisionmaking); and Opavote, Modern Ballots, and Condorcet.vote (which use ranked choice voting). “
Excellent article Michael, thank you and all is in accordance with our own thinking here in UK. Our small group promote six demands: http://harrogateagenda.org.uk/ and a short 15 min video presentation quickly covers the main points:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvJAmkSOuck&feature=youtu.be
I have written a book about all this and a free pdf is available by request to: [email protected]
“Direct Democracy Is the Future of Human Governance”
Dumb idea. Democracy doesn’t work because stupid people are allowed to vote.
If democracy is a dumb idea because stupid people are allowed to vote then the market is a dumb idea because stupid people are allowed to spend money. You might say this is limited because stupid people won’t be rich enough to have an effect, but what about the effect in aggregate, if you truly believe that a democratically significant number of people are stupid? Are we to be saved by the extreme wealth of intelligent oligarchs? And are these super rich people universally intelligent? Or is it more likely that playing a system for pure profit at the expense of anything else is going to lead to psychopathy at scale? Where war is a good investment because coupled with political power you can make the market? And what about the idiots with inherited wealth, who didn’t earn it? What about the idiots who are just sitting on top of a pile of money out of dumb luck, sitting on a massive pile of capital that they will frivolously misallocate? Your argument against democracy can also be directed at the market, which I suspect may be your favoured form of human organisation, in which you vote with your wallet.
Just maybe Micheal should have a conversation with Socrates…
Here’s what he had to say about it a couple thousand years ago…
“”Why Socrates hated Democracies”
On any level large or small, “democracy” is a majority of people voting to screw the minority. What society needs is not democracy but individual rights.
There is certainly something to be said for a democracy that makes rulings and laws ONLY on unanimous decisions.
– I am referring again to EVOLUTION as a model.
PS. I am a little dismayed and annoyed by people using this site of Michaels to promote and direct interest to their own agendas.
I guess I would be on your annoying list. I am not trying to promote my own agenda. I went to the eDemocracy link from part 1 and there it was at the end, a reference to “collective Intelligence”.Encouraging to me. I have been practically begging people to listen since somewhere around 2006. There are so many authors such as Michael; Caitlin Johnstone, Charles Hugh Smith just to name a few, who are so very close, They all dance around the subject, frame it well and have some good insight. Problem is they just don’t seem to get it. They are missing that one last piece. They never even reply. I would love for someone to point out where I am wrong. I can’t even get that. So please go ahead and put down your thoughts below Michael’s. In 3-5 weeks time it will be all yesterdays news.Nothing was created, nothing was determined. Just a myriad of opinions, questions, thoughts, and insights,some very good informantion. In the meantime our country is as divided as ever. We inch towards large scale war and people are annoyed that someone has an “agenda”. My only agenda is not seeing everything beautiful, wonderful, and good in the world, that included my family being swept up in a conflagration hte likes we have never seen. Facilitated not by Democracy or the lack of democracy or a republic. Facilitated by the fact that human logic is fractured, broken and barely surviving. Most people though are more interested in taking selfies, eating out, movies and the Avengers, sports and basically just getting whatever they want, be it politics, material things, etc. I thank Michael for having this site, without people like him it would be completely hopeless.
I share your frustration, Clint, and thank you for your share. In my world of finance and economics there can only be one conclusion: we are indeed headed for disaster and only the depth is in contention.
I have written a book about all this and more and you are welcome to a free pdf of my 2nd edition prior to publishing this automn: email to [email protected]
Thanks Peter, Great analogy and great point. Why can’t human perceptions, thoughts, ideas, viewpoint, etc, etc, be worked out like a math problem? There are 130+ know fallacies to guide us. Instead everyone just gives thier “opinion”. So if I say 3 X 3 + 12 = 32 then that’s alright because everyone should respect my opinion and if they don’t then they can just get in my face and scream with lots of spittle and anger “no it doesn’t” That really just sums up where we are. Good thing math doesn’t work that way. Ridiculous, human sociology. Another question would be the chicken and the egg. What came first? humans and the use of logic or means of governance? We need to get back to basics.
We can get back to basics Clint: our small group are nudging our masters continually – it’s just 90% perspiration:
This 15 min video of our leader at work explains it all:
We agree with much of your comment. But how much is possible without dealing directly with the power and wealth differentials at some point? Look at the Spanish Civil War. Spain was becoming very progressive. You can only take it so far before power becomes naked violence as a last resort. Your big business rulers will not just give up their advantageous and luxurious life because of a referendum. That’s when the thugs come out to play.
Great article but I also agree with a lot of the comments here. Sad to say, for such a redirection and re-enchantment of PERCEPTION I think such a move toward direct democracy doesn’t have a chance in hell. The Power structures are just too pathologised to wrest back any kind of normality.
I’m afraid it’ll have to reach its natural entropic end before a suitable amount of shock has re-wired human consciousness and cut back the many psychopaths in positions of power. And I don’t say that as a glib, throwaway comment. It’ll be horrednous. I think that is going to come from three directions: the environment/nature; societal conflict and a global economic meltdown – the signs of which are very clear to see. We’ve past the point of reigning in those forces. They’ll have to play out. I’d loved to be wrong but there it is…
Once they have, maybe then we can begin to decentralise, localise and build again with only a skeleton state.
Yes, M.K. I think most of us agree that some very rough stuff has to happen and WILL happen to create the conditions for a huge change in direction.
I live in a remote part of Australia, and it seems to me that the “environment/nature disaster” is mostly a delusion created by the fact that the vast majority of humanity lives in huge cities where it DOES seem that everything is man made, including the weather. – Out here where I am, as indeed in 90% of the Earth’s land surface, up to 90% of what I can see has never even been touched by human hand or foot !
I have done simple maths – the entire population of the world would fit on the tiny sand island south of here called Frazer Island, with enough room for each one to lie down, exercise, and walk 3 steps!
This is the wrong direction. Democracy is nothing more than the majority lording over the minority. This is the road to slavery, all you have to do is control the narrative and you can get people to vote for whatever. Mike the red and black flag that flies high over boulder is rubbing off on you.
Liechtenstein: population $166,000
100% literacy rate
It allows exactly 89 foreign nationals to live within its borders, of which 17 must be Swiss.
19,806 people voted in their last election (2013)… Biggest issue was whether or not to issue 11 more foreign residency permits, just to get to an even hundo… didn’t pass.
Switzerland: population 8.6 million, across 16,000 sq.mi.
70% Swiss ethnicity (82% Western European); 67% Christian, 24.9% unaffiliated
GDP per capita: >$80,000
99% literacy rate
I’m totally down with a direct democracy where my neighbors represent a homogeneous array of rich, educated people sharing my religion, my traditional values, my group history, not to mention appearance. I think we could do some good. I’d be willing to up my tax rate in exchange for more social services, too, under those conditions.
Absent those conditions, I think it’s total lunacy, unworthy of consideration… In fact, I’m going to assume you wrote this whole thing as a gag… HA! You got me there for a second, Michael, you sly dog you!
I really like the liquid e-democracy idea… Can’t wait to go on FaceBook and abdicate my vote to Kim Kardashian… maybe Taylor Swift, she’s so cool and nice and stuff!
Ahhh… corrupted post:
Liechtenstein population 38,000 GDP per capita >$166,000
I agree wholeheartedly that “things need to change” drastically, and that Direct Democracy may have great intrinsic value as a self governing “process”.
My concern is that the extreme partisanship in American culture is imbued with this “extreme individualism”, that in essence, does not appreciate or relate to a direct process of “reasonable public policy” as debated by a community or county group.
I live in suburban Tucson Arizona. Its nice, its quiet, well kept, and very conservative. The people in my neighborhood want nothing to do with reasonable public direct governance. Their concerns are very mundane, and tend to be “single issue” – keep hawks and owls from killing their small dogs or cats, and guns and hunting related issues.
Its as if America is the wrong country to try “Direct Democracy”.
You seem to be calling to world-global Cultural Revolution
But it comes with its own share of inherent disadvantages.
Ancient Rome overtook Ancient Greece, and one of the reason reportedly was that “professional” rulers were more informed, more thoughtful, more sly than simple-minded crowds in agoras. Which often could be manipulated.
There is a “fleeing from freedom” – and that is “fleeing form uncertainty, irresponsibility learning and realizing how little you know despite all learning”.
There were crowds in the squares of Cairo and Kiev, demanding crazy impossible things, like children with matchboxes.
There are crazy green sects, demanding increase of pollution, because they are averse to responsibility of understanding how power grid really works.
Cultural Revolution is an emergent therapy that is worth its harsh costs when everything is very bad. But not when everything grows to the better.
DIY is hobby, but when it becomes the whole life style, it is feudalism and “natural housekeeping”.
Also, Gaddafi claimed he created “new political system”, and that that cares about people and empowers those very local communities.
And it maybe really worked well until push came. When the external force invaded – the cohesion proved too little and those “decentralized” communities did not unite to repel invaders, but bargained and looked for their “local” profits over adjacent communities.
Similar happened to Syria.
And that makes decentralized dream practically moot. Not as moot as libertarian/anarchist dream, where people have not communities at all and every single person is a nation of one’s own free to engage in all sorts of international relation with every other nation-persons. But towards the same direction.
Afteral when back then we lived in cave – every cave was that very “small community” and all caves together were that “decentralized” utopia.
But mankind history pressed them to centralize and fuse and amalgamate towards where we are today.
Before any dream of decentralization can get practical – we have to determine problems that did (and will do it again!) forced us all to join each other ( = to centralize ourselves) and find practically working solutions for them. Libertarians call for for profit private armies and police forces. Like sheriffs were in Wild West days. But did it really work that good? and anyway, as trans-state mafia appeared – decentralized concept of sheriffs system ceased working and centralized FBI had to be created.
please make sure this message is being reported at ZeroHedge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYL6PEuRgJ0
Thanks!
Human nature never changes. Power corrupts and the masses blindly follow power. Those who God would destroy he makes mad. There seems to always be the interplay of good and evil.
Thanks Michael for letting us mouth off.