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As proposed in a previous chapter the internet is hypothetically a useful tool that could be advantageously employed to facilitate a ‘reinvented democracy’. It could be remodeled into a role that has been missing in any ideologically pure method of implementing a democracy. It has the connectivity never before available to practically request individual citizens participation and to securely count that response; a basic necessity for any democratic system to have.
However it is not ‘in pursuit of an ideal democracy’, that will drive the reshaping of the web, it will be the result of a political imperative to secure the intellectual boarders of a countries entrenched establishment. The inevitable reshaping of the net is an unknowable scenario that could take it away from the public, probably on the grounds of ‘security liability’. As it now is used by the ‘social media’ business’s, it is such a liability, but its loss as a potentially commercial product, if it is subject licensing, may save it in some form. Irregardless, one or other force will demand that it change. These are forces that are pretty much those influences that have historically shaped the world in a business orientated democracy, for nearly two centuries.
As the motivation of this project is to propose a different form of democracy, and to achieve it with the advantage of an appropriately functional internet to connect citizens and facilitate debate, it is highly advantage for the net to exist, in a form that is accessible and free of undue censorship. Because this is a ‘meek’ ambition, it is likely to constitute a futile effort in its own right; however it may generate enough interest to start an effort to imagine a medium for an ‘open’ ( conditionally free ) platform for the communication of information and ideas. As a realist, I should not subject my self to such a pointless ambition, but the ‘romantic creator’ in me, cannot let go of the idea that it could be done, and not to advocate for it, is negligent. Advocacy however must clearly understand that ‘meek’ does not mean ‘weak’; and the meek will only inherit the earth if they take it. It is there for the taking, by the numerical superiority of the meek citizenry, the otherwise silent majority. The winners and non-winners, may need to be physically removed and no doubt will not go without a fight. If their intimidation works will be dependant on the cohesion of the silent majority. The ‘meek’ are capable of being a coordinated force if the establishment seeks to subjugate them, deny them sufficient freedoms or prevents the middle class from aspiring to have a family and watch their offspring thrive. Such a set of influences have proven sufficient in past history, to cause the meek to rise up in protest and resistance. It has nearly always involved spilt blood and severe hardship but as inevitable as this is, it might be handled so that this unfortunate scenario is limited.
Firstly however the conditions for revolution need to be promoted and to become truly a popular movement. This is the role of the internet; it is why it must be kept open for use in spreading the messages, organising and enacting. The security interested establishment will want to close this facility because it serves their enemies as well as it serves its citizens. There is much to work out before a compromise is available in this sphere. More significantly I believe that the necessary revolution will not only be inevitable it will be welcomed even facilitated by the establishment. All systems need leadership and the establishment are natural personalities to do the job. However in a democratic system the power is subject to the will and ambitions of the whole community, exercised by compromising their freedom, so all are included. The meek need to be led, but to where they desire to go, not to where some winner wants to exploit them.
How then can we describe the revolution; not just as a label but as a coherent set of policy ambitions and committed procedures to that end.
The initial obstacle to clear is the imprecision of ‘words’ [ rhetoric, jargon, slogans, hyperbole ]; the usual euphuism of academics and politicians ( they actually have nothing else in common). Next we must avoid the fatal flaws that ‘business’ bequeathed to the methodology of governance, which arose out of the close association the uncontrolled money market has to the resources available to government; a nexus that has put us in the quandary we find today’s parliamentary governments in.
On the matter of words. The most difficult topic to address in any language; is an ‘idea’. Earlier chapters canvas the nature of ideas and explain how they are a structure of fundamental beliefs, and learned forms. To discuss ‘governance’ is to debate ideas at a high, mature level, but not totally independent of the original and basic foundations. Values in this area are almost metaphysical and nearly always subjective. Wittgenstein in his attempt to make a new logic, declared that the old philosophers, “were trying to say things that cannot be said.” But just because they cannot be said does not mean they will not be communicated in some other way. In earlier chapters, I suggested that the ‘visual codex’ is an under utilised resource. In a new internet if it is compatible with democratic ideas being expressed, the communication will be multi media; perhaps even crossing the divide that language imposes. Images speak in a purer form than words, written or spoken. I trust that they are used for the power they have to show others what an idea’s contents are. Inevitably words will have some role, but as support or explanation.
What motivated me to get involved? That question causes me some restless nights and troubles my wife who believes the consequent absent mindedness, is early onset Alzheimer disease. I think it is due to the very tangible contempt I see, from the entertainment world media and retail politicians, who flagrantly disrespect sincerity. As a graphic technician I take offence to the derogatory uses ingenuous propagandists put the knowledge of the ‘visual codex’ toward.
It has become for me, an accidental obsession that I am growing more compelled to expound upon, every day, as its potential significance also grows in the community I am a part of.
In an age where the electronic media has removed the sense of touch from our ‘sense resources’ to judge reality; where we experience the world as an annotated stream of digitally reproduced images, that we can only choose to believe or not. We have very few infallible tools to know fact from fiction, and perhaps that satisfies some, even placates a large portion, but does it console the cynical. And we should all be ‘doubters’ of what we are given, but seekers of a reality we can trust.
I will avoid as I mostly try to do, using the word ‘truth’ because it has never been so unreliable as it is today. What is the ‘truth’? Only your god knows, or if not your god what ever else you substitute for it, because we must ‘believe’. If we cannot believe, we cannot ‘care’; and not caring is the ‘nihilistic’ plunge into inevitable extinction.
Please excuse my little diversion into the ‘ontological’. It is my religious upbringing; from which I cannot fully hide. By blaming my parents, that exonerates me from feeling to self conscious from these flights of fantasy. They are however recurring and necessary, else I would not have the courage to keep writing this way.
In explaining what is a straight forward opinion, as expressed in these chapters, I know from my own reading that a convincing argument must be supported by an explanation that relates to the contemporary situation. Therefore I need to describe one last example that an ideal governance may be achievable, in a hypothetical but credible world circumstance.
It may be a convoluted argument, to spend so much detail on how a government must be run, to achieve a functional democracy. I started out talking about the importance of the internet as a tool for the realisation of a democratic system; but it will be thwarted if business and government remain so intimately interdependent. It would take a reasonably long time for a government to ween itself off the bond market as it now exists and can convert that form of finance into a benign tool rather than the ultimate weapon of self destruction, only surpassed by options on the futures market. It will take even longer to work out a mechanism where by the ‘Reserve Bank’ ( Federal Bank ), can operate without getting embroiled in the machinations of the money manipulators. The end game would be a system that eliminated the manipulators but that would be a step equivalent to beheading a king, or nationalising the whole banking enterprise; something requiring either ‘blood in the streets’ or a long process of attrition, just as painful for the system.
In its role of a money manager, a government by its use of bylaws has the imperative that business does not create a fragile structure that is a threat to the state simply because of its vulnerability to change. In its constitutional laws, the state will mandate the acceptable forms of business structures, and a government in its bylaws will administer the compliance. There should be no need for banking and financing in a democratic system, to involve any degree of speculation other than what individuals behind a business are prepared to guarantee, and have the proven resources to cover in the event of failures. Some societies are built almost exclusively on credit from the bottom rungs to the top. The proven regularity of how these systems implode is indelible evidence in the vulnerability of systems built on financial instruments that depend on this economy wide indebtedness.
Dubious practices such as, ‘limited liability, common stock’ as a financial instrument, ‘securitization’, or the equally suicidal ‘collateral debt obligation’ which ensured the fatal crash, seeded by the fraudulent trading of Enron Corporation ( the attempted energy cartel ), should be illegal. No business should be able to present for public consumption, fraudulent books of account. The only ledgers that are private property do not involve money from outside an owners private equity. In this world ‘investors’ are owners and equally liable for the ethical practice of a business they are associated with. Limited liability is a fraudsters entree into misappropriation.
It is in this world, where credit is limited to the borrowers ability to cover the debt obligations, that a democratic financial system is so very different to the one that operates today.
I can already hear the out cry from the conservatives amongst the readers of this sentence!
But it really is not so different to what a lender expects in today’s market place, but relies on a legal system to act as enforcer of a debt obligation; the institutional equivalent to the loan sharks of inner suburbia, unmistakable henchmen in both cases. In a democratic system it is ‘lender beware’, and the constitutional law does not grant the lender any right to pursue the borrower for recompense. There may be bylaws that help prevent serial defaulters from entering further agreements but not to be either incarcerated or punished for the default. A sensible citizen would not risk being prohibited from borrowing if they could avoid it; but there are plenty not so disposed.
So who will finance big projects and ambitious entrepreneurs?
Obviously tax payer money, will be present as it is in today’s world, but it will not be alone. Superannuation funds if they are allowed, and administered as ‘not for profit’ organisations under constitutional laws, are obvious candidates in a democratic system. Thirdly there should be allowance for individuals to contribute to a finance fund under the same conditions that apply to superannuation funds, with the provision that the finance fund is their only business, and administration costs come out of contributions not profits which will be distributed as detailed in chapter 8, for a ‘business’. The government may also offer bonds, just as they exist today but only offered to citizens, not open to international entities unless the government has a constitutional agreement of a common market with that state.
In this financial scene government has no business interfering with business, or advantaging any business by providing bylaws to influence either business conditions or specific assistance to business’s. Elected representatives offending this condition are guilty of a capital offence. In specific circumstances similar to PV cell subsidies, these will go to individuals and although an indirect advantage to the PV industry this will be acceptable but require an ombudsman’s approval of the process, to ensure the constitutional separation business and state.
Democratic governance should not involve the welfare of business but only its citizens. Business by its disciplines and practice has no need of government, does not hold the welfare of citizens as its sole prerogative and adjusts to the free market conditions as they develop and change. In this role they best serve the greater system of money management that is the governments correct responsibility. This primary focus is where business and government diverge.
None of the above precludes business practice in its uncorrupt form, from providing lessons for a ‘service’ organisation to take as an efficient model for government departments. Things that business’s do just as a matter of survival, such as balancing the ledger, factoring in risk and ‘quality assurance’, are elementary functions of any efficient operation. Every government department should be built around these basic elements and with due diligence, report their compliance. On first instinct the fact that a business has the sole objective of maximising returns to its owner/owners which may extend to those supplying credit, contrasts with a government department which does not need to make a profit and owes no obligation to its sources of money. On the contrary, government revenue demands that it be used to achieve the best value for money and it should be constantly audited to ensure this is the outcome. Every minister of the crown is subject to the approval of a corruption protection ombudsman who is nominated by a constitutional process and ministerial decisions as well as spending decisions of the ministers department are only provisional until duly ratified, a process that must be mandatory and open to public scrutiny as well as adhering solely to its constitutional responsibilities.
If most of the above is merely boring to most, as I expect it will be, I apologise; but if I merely said governments must not have anything to do with business it would be reasonable to say, ‘that is unworkable’, unless I take the additional step to hypothetically show how it could be made to happen. It will need fundamental changes and these things do not happen in an instant but they can be made to happen. In modern conservative agenda democratic systems, it is unworkable that business be excluded. It was their purpose to ensure it would be that way. I am saying that it could be worked the other way and democracy would be more readily realised if it was independent of business. If that business scene involved multinationals it is an issue of sovereignty. If not it is simply an issue of ‘conflict of interest’; which is the ‘seed’ of corruption .
If like me you find politics harder to understand than the QED, you have many friends and fellow cynics. It need not be that way, but it suits those that keep it that way. To try and enumerate the possible agenda’s and motives of those who relish the intrigue of the parliament, is too demanding to undertake and equally unrewarding. Only one certainty exists; that is if the ‘meek’ are ‘under informed’, misinformed or not included at all, in any decision, that cannot be a democratic decision.
It is a farce to assume if a politician is elected, what ever they consequently decide, is their democratic right to do. As proven, in reality they actually do things that are counter to their per-election agenda’s. Perhaps, and I agree it is difficult, an enrolled elector could require the ombudsman to decide if this is a ‘breach of integrity’ and remove that representative from the public purse.
We have, just out of our reach, the technology to facilitate a democratic form of governance that would be close to ideologically pure. The distance we have to close is in the area of ‘national security’; it is impossible to make government more interactive until the net is immune to ‘hackers’. Bit coin have appeared to have done it and probably existing security spy’s do not want the rest of the net to go there. However it appears possible. For those who are closet ‘Voltairianists’ ( Voltaire said of British democracy it can only lead to chaos. Government requires an enlightened monarch ) they see business as that ‘enlightened monarch’. Problematically business is not a single entity it is a jostling contest of many individual princes and the mere fact they are plural explains much of the pain that comes out of that scenario.
For those readers that have been so patient to read the previous chapters and come to this last, in expectation of a conclusion, I can only image one form of defence. For lack of a better label I think of it as the ‘meek’ revolution. It is the uprising of the ‘meek’ within an existing democratic system.
It could be a revolution based in the technology that belongs to the last decades. It needs governments to take it back from commercial interests or at least share it. The machinery is available even it is used at present for entertainment only. Security is the most conspicuous ‘elephant in the room’, but it only needs aggressive decisions to be made to resolve that issue. The early exploiters of the web fear ‘security’ because their trade is selling individuals habits they do not know they have revealed. Security systems will threaten that world view.
All of the chapters represent an opinion and if we were to find a road to democracy it will be something completely reinvented by those best placed to implement it.
I seek to encourage individual citizens to envisage how it could be done; or at least join a common movement to ask it to be done. I offer the whole set of chapters, it in the form of a ‘thought experiment’ inspired by the mythological icon of theoretical physics, ‘Albert’ himself.
In this sense of a thought experiment I would like to see a unique change to existing democratic systems. In essence I believe democracy is fatally wounded when one side of the political spectrum wins and the other loses; sometime by a narrow margin, creating a non representative government. This or something like it is how it could be improved. In countries where voting is a right, preferably a mandatory right, the voter will cast their choice as normally done. Ideally many imperfections could be eradicated but that can follow. Seats to distributed to the representatives as normal.
The one change is that there needs to be a constitutional change requiring a government to be formed with a core cabinet made up of a mandatory number of departments. PM, Treasury, Home affairs, ect. to cover the essential functioning of a government. These positions will go to the parties contesting the election based on their electoral numbers. Therefore the Prime minister will go to the party with the most representatives. The party that takes a position will have its tally discounted by 10% and the next post in order of seniority ( constitutionally mandated ) will be filled by the party with the next highest tally. In the case of a very popular party they may qualify again even with a 10% discount. This process will continue until all mandated ministries have an elected minister. The resulting cabinet will reflect the will of the people. Not for one side of politics or other but for a combination that truly reflects their balance of opinion.
That is absurd, my pen trembles even as I write such revolutionary nonsense.
They will never work together, it will just be one big bun fight. However they will have too or else leave the running of the countries to the incumbent public servants until a replacement parliament can be elected.
Don’t worry about, if the known role call of politicians would never agree. They will be replaced by those prepared to do as the will of the people dictates. You the ‘meek’ will vote these individuals into office and the resisters out of office.
How to make that original constitutional change is a bigger challenge. It may take several election cycles to vote in representatives that will bring on the constitutional referendum required to set up the mandated cabinet as a constitutional entity. It can be demanded by some other interventions but I will leave that speculation to another project, and to other persons who have more knowledge, more imagination and the necessary aptitude to see how it could to achieved; I would however be as supportive as I could be.
Who ever thought the ‘meek’ were week and could never threaten an establishment, should learn from the past that it has been done. Not without an undesirable, messy and painful act of violence, which I definitely do not recommend. But that same force can be better directed to overthrown of the status quo, even without guns or bombs, just armed with the irresistible energy of overwhelming numbers given by exerting their democratic right.
This is also where the internet story comes into focus. The necessary surge in popular support for this idea can best be served by an effective and open net. It is not the only way but it is the best and most inclusive so we must protect this endangered tool.
As the western civilisation pendulum retreats from its zenith, in the 19th century, and the alternate phase of its cycle is scarily ominous, we should consider if our inability to protect ourselves from the result of the assault on the environment, will be repeated in our inability to stop business bragging us into a species specific ‘black hole’. I once looked out of my study window at the local birds feuding over a small amount of crust I put out for them, and pitied there unsophisticated plight, the constant personal battle for the means to stay alive and procreate. Today it haunts me that, sooner than later, there will be no one to make the crusts or put them out.
Then again that is just sentimentality. Earth may be a better place to be rid of the plague that our species has come to be. It is inevitable no matter what we do, but it is just too nihilistic to not, at least try to hang in, just a little longer by ‘caring’ enough to change.