Power and Its Distribution

Power and its Distribution

A society with a well-educated populace can only be harmed by concentration of power and decision-making in too few hands. People grow and mature throughout their lives by making responsible decisions and learning through the outcomes, and if the majority of people are expected to live solely within the parameters defined by a central powerful body, then vast numbers of people are deprived of the right to self-determination. Thus collective life is reduced to a very circumscribed existence and growth is thwarted. 

Of course, it is quite acceptable that some decisions should be left to a few representatives, because they know the issues best, and they may have the most experience and wisdom to make decisions for the whole, but this only works if there are many levels of decision making between the individual and the central power. On this basis those making final decisions are doing so aware of the opinions and desires of others.

 Centralized government only works if those elected to make decisions are cognizant of the need to be as inclusive as possible, and if they are not motivated by the desire to control, but rather by the desire to serve. The worst case scenario (at least before one gets to authoritarianism) is the one that is all too common in history, and in essentially all nations of the world today, where the average person feels completely cut out of the political process and feels no way to get the government to listen to his or her opinion.

Surely we should be able to prevent a small minority from taking and monopolizing power. And yet, history shows us that this is a much more complicated issue than it should be.

In many democracies, the role of the ordinary person on the street is to vote once every few years and to complain in between elections. If he or she wishes to have more input, it seems they are expected to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to mobilize numbers of fellow citizens into such activities as mass letter writing campaigns, mass emails, or eventually demonstrations on the street. Finally the ear of their representative in power is only engaged if the very position of that person is felt to be under pressure. 

In general, a political system should embody certain principles in order to maximize the input of all adults and ensure appropriate participation in the creation of a healthy collective entity.

1.    1. Power and responsibility for collective decisions should be distributed as widely as possible

2.    2. Mechanisms should exist by which all opinions are heard

3.    3. The welfare of all living beings, including the land and the planet itself, should be taken into consideration in all matters.

The best way to ensure that power does not get concentrated at the highest levels is to collect all taxes locally and keep the higher levels on a fixed budget, so they act within a clearly defined realm of responsibility. This restricts the expansion of power, and ensures that a voice emerges closer to the street. An inappropriate grab for power would simply result in the withholding of the money on the part of the local governments.

There are many ways in which power can be limited, and the fact that these have not been implemented shows that there is a problem with relinquishing power on the part of politicians. Restricting politicians to two consecutive terms would greatly reduce the necessity they feel to make decisions which enhance their likelihood of reelection. At least it would reduce the number of years when their primary focus is on the next election. Making all communications with lobbyists public would be a major game changer. Limiting the time and money spent on campaigning would liberate everybody and greatly simplify the whole process.

The people elect their representatives, and must exercise oversight on their performance. Newspapers would be the obvious channel for information to get out to the public, but information is usually corrupted by partisan thinking. Once a party controls the newspapers, they cease to be of use in disseminating information, and there is little news today that has not been influenced by partisan thinking.

The law can too easily be used to control the population, and insulate governments from having to listen to anyone. After all, government decides when and how law enforcement will act, and has the power to mobilize an army in extreme necessity.

Clearly we cannot restrict government from making decisions, but we can 

1.    1. Define our values clearly

2.    2. Keep a close watch on our representatives and publicize their actions, assessing their performance in keeping in line with the country’s values.

3.    3. Educate every citizen about the issues of concern and the decisions that are involved in creating and maintaining a healthy society.

4   4.  On this basis, hold ongoing discussion about how to govern ourselves and how to deal with current issues. 

Many states have oversight committees to keep a watch on governmental activities, such as the justice system. This is clearly an excellent idea, and represents exactly the type of measures mentioned above. However, in keeping with the centralization of power, too often these committees are made up of the same few people, usually people who are ex-lawmakers or associates of those in power, and exhibit the same unwillingness to report to the community what is really happening. For this to work, each political unit, municipality or township, would have to send people to make up these oversight committees, and expect them to report back clearly and honestly. And of course, they would have to have access to factual information.

All sorts of measures are put in place to restrict what information can get out to the general public, starting with “national security”, “ongoing investigations”, “privacy”, etc. On top of that, the press can feel pressured by threats of lawsuits or arrest if they write anything unacceptable to someone with power. These are real issues which greatly increase in importance in a society where trust is low.

Trust is low now because most governments are operating in a mode that is no longer appropriate for people of the education and maturity level demonstrated in today’s world. Actually the current mode of governing has been extended beyond what was appropriate by at least half a century. As a result, people have become frustrated and upcoming generations have felt disempowered by their entry into society, not excited by the prospects for a great future. Their education has been severely misdirected, with emphasis placed on keeping them in their place rather than on encouraging creativity and personal empowerment.  In fact, at this point a typical life cycle involves getting into debt by the time of graduation from college, taking essentially any job, and immediately being encouraged to save for retirement.

How does anyone ever travel, spend time looking for the purpose of life, volunteer to do good somewhere else in the world? 

America in particular maintains such a dysfunctional government by the misuse of, and overreliance on, the Rule of Law. This is not the ultimate good, it is merely a stage where we have all gotten stuck because the prevailing lack of trust encourages us to try to control everybody by what seems to be the only means available. However, accusation is not going to bring a healthy society: primarily it serves to further destroy any trust between people. Very few feel able to challenge the abuses within the system because they know that same system can easily be used against them.

There exists a powerful force for change in the world today, but it is sleeping, unaware of its power. When the women of the world decide to participate actively in local groups and local government, it will be a very major step toward the good, because women naturally care about future generations, and can collaborate and discuss and come to consensus without all the formality and need for control that exists in most of society today.

Our greatest hope is soon coming online. Young women are growing up with the very clear knowledge that change must come, and with the stronger educational backgrounds, as is evident from college campuses. And of course the women who would have been old at fifty in previous generations are now feeling quite lively and active at sixty, looking for a way to give meaning and value to their lives.

The Basis for a Constitution

The Basis for a Constitution

New times require new thought. We cannot simply offer the US Constitution as a model for constitutions because it is based on a worldview that more and more reflects the way we used to think, not the way we would like to think in the future. It defines life in terms of ownership of material resources and the overarching need to escape the oppression of authoritarian leadership. More human-rights-based thinking crept in over the years, but was relegated to a Bill of Rights that exists supplementary to the actual Constitution. I submit that the proper order for a healthy society is the reverse. The original purpose of life and identity of a human being should be the primary thrust of a constitution, while the unfortunate need for some governmental authority and control should become secondary.

It could be argued that the rights expressed in the Bill of Rights are so obvious that they don’t need verbal expression. To young people they probably are. However we see much evidence in today’s society that competing in the marketplace and living subject to the many and proliferating instruments of governmental control has produced a population that lives defensively, finding self-preservation so burdensome that there is little room to care actively for human rights on a larger scale. Those who have been successful in the financial world tend to speak of their own rights much more than of the needs of others, and tend to see poverty as a sign of failure more than anything else. 

Constitutional rights have become legal rights, and the legal world dominates modern economic life. Without a wide, encompassing basis for a constitution, it is inevitable that sooner or later restrictions will become part of everyday life via a system of laws and societal institutions. Therefore it is essential to widen the constitution to embrace growth and the freedoms commensurate with our much greater technological and scientific knowledge.

We find ourselves in a society where so much is based on laws and the legal system, yet legal help is circumscribed by access, thus typically confined to the wealthy. And how burdensome it must be to a corporation to have to keep a team of lawyers, at huge expense, to manage their existence, what a waste of productive energy and creativity that could have been applied to research into better products! In a world where we are largely beyond the need to labor constantly to produce goods and services, a corporation can be more financially successful by judicious managing of its relationship to government and the banks than by producing more and better goods. The Founding Fathers could not have foreseen such a development.

In short, our constitution, so essential for the creation of a society with basic freedoms, nonetheless now leaves us powerless to manifest the deep desire of the population to overcome the massive and widening economic inequality, poverty on an unimaginable scale in a nation that has dominated the world economically for decades, government spying on our own people as well as almost the whole world, overflowing jails full of the mentally ill as well as our disenfranchised youth …. the list goes on. The real issue is that what is only part of life has been taken too often to be the whole, even to the extent of initially allowing slavery because it fit within a worldview that overemphasized the importance of property.

However, there is nothing wrong with the values expressed in our constitution that a little reprioritizing couldn’t put right. We want the future to be a future of trust and cooperation, but there is still a need to keep a watch on governments in case individuals with power complexes start to take over. We would like equality and general empowerment rather than a competition for survival, but we know that taking from the rich to give to the poor is a recipe for resentment and blame. 

We require a new relationship with the natural world and with each other that guides us towards stewardship and sustainability, and yet still enables personal growth, freedom and adventure in life. This cannot be found within the current constitution, due primarily to the overriding necessity of the Founding Fathers to define a realm of freedom in a world where that was almost universally denied. Now however, we cannot hope to have freedom without universal economic freedom and universal human rights.

I believe that the time is right for us to enter a process that leads us eventually to a definition of life as a basis for a new constitution. 

We need a constitution that emphasizes what it means to be a modern human being, not one that preserves the old approach of defining property relations and stating the chain of command. Mature adults should make decisions for themselves rather than looking to an outside authority. If we cannot claim our identity as mature, trustworthy adults, then we will not have that right.

Of course not everyone is mature, and we cannot simply abandon the necessity for a justice system, but we can put these things into their proper place, not simply continue on with a Rule of Law by which we should forever remain dominated and restricted.

Therefore I suggest eight points which I feel are a starting point for the primary definition of a society which manifests a world that lies in the future:

Eight fundamental areas to be addressed in a healthy society:

1.       1. All people at birth inherit the right to receive parental love and nurturing, leading to growth and development towards self-actualization. In this process, responsibility is gradually transferred from the parent to the child.

2.       2.  All people at birth inherit the right to ownership of enough of the created world to guarantee survival; all people also inherit the responsibility to guarantee this same right to all other people.

3.       3.  All people at birth inherit the right to education to the level at which they will be able to continue to pursue their own education as they choose, be able to fulfill their role as a citizen of the world and participate in all decisions pertaining to the society in which they live.

4.       4.  Society functions to support the creative endeavors of all adults, in the context of their fulfilling their basic responsibilities to the whole, facilitating, not hindering, people’s innovative ideas and entrepreneurship so they can be co-creators.

5.       5.  A justice system is focused on rehabilitation and reconciliation, not punishment for its own sake.

6.       6.  Leadership is a position of service towards the whole. A true leader is the one who creates the most leaders, and who creates the most opportunities for growth and fulfillment for all people.

7.       7.  All people are born with the right to live within a clean and healthy environment, and have an equal responsibility for preservation of the planet for future generations.

8.       8.  A happy society encourages healthy relationships, with particular emphasis on marriage practices. Heart will rule all relationships.

 

Rights cannot be claimed without responsibility for their fulfillment being assigned, but in the case of a defining constitution acceptance of such rights assumes that responsibility lies with the whole. These questions can arise in designing the constitution. There are clearly many ways in which such basic rights can be assured by community-level agreement, and the least restrictive terms should be used within a constitutional document to allow for individual creativity and insight in its implementation. Once a society has defined every part of human life by a system of rules, it is most likely time to start over on a new constitution. Such is the nature of humans.

In Delaware the death penalty now has no moral basis.

If your friend is murdered, and you find the murderer and kill him, we
consider your action to also be murder. However we accept killing a
murderer as a moral act as long as it is brought about through the
justice system, because this is a decision sanctioned by the whole.

Without community sanction then, putting to death a murderer is also murder.

Over a year ago our State Senate passed a bill to repeal the death
penalty, and yet since that time the bill has not been allowed out of
the House Judiciary Committee for a vote by the House. The moral
justification for the death penalty in Delaware now rests solely on
the shoulders of the House Judiciary Committee.

I suggest that this is not a sufficient basis for the death penalty in
Delaware, and that it should be suspended until such time as we have a
clear expression of the citizens’ decision. It is hardly right to
expect our police to put their lives on the line enforcing such an
extreme punishment without solid community support.