Democracy for a new millennium


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DEMOCRACY HOPE DIGNITY FREEDOM SPIRIT JUSTICE SUSTAINABILITY OPENNESS SOUL POWER PEOPLE HUMANITY

Frequently asked questions

Table of Contents (Ref: f1000)

  1. Is there a hidden agenda behind this movement and this website?
  2. What's in it for me?
  3. Large sections of this website are dull as ditch-water; they have no personality, no humour, no emotion, no passion and no spirit. Why is this?
  4. With this sort of unrestricted law-making wouldn't it be possible that murder could become legal?

Q 1. Is there a hidden agenda behind this movement and this website? (Ref: f1001)

In a sense yes. Probably every Human society has things which cannot be said or are rarely said in public or at all. The originators of this movement live in a society where almost any conceivable thing is discussed ad infinitum and often ad nauseam in the media, the street and the home. However, among subjects which are rarely mentioned in public because they cause embarrassment, shame, guilt, or other disquieting emotions are the simple words spirit, soul, virtue and dignity. We all have these in abundance but in this society it is not very polite or easy to admit it. To sprinkle these words through this website and our movement would simultaneously alienate and attract a large portion of the whole population; and alienation unfortunately usually wins that contest. It is nevertheless almost certainly an extremely common unspoken belief that it is something in the general realm of 'spirit, soul, virtue and dignity' which is lacking in our present lives and it is this lack which helps cause our discontent with life despite our not-too-bad, to astonishingly enormous, material wealth.

It is the foundation of this movement that it is these nebulous and rather undefinable characteristics, whatever you call them, which need urgently to be brought back into our lives and particularly into our public lives, into the way we govern ourselves and conduct our existences on the scale of societies not just individuals. At the same time it is desirable that we not define for others what these things mean to them, we cannot and should not, but that as far as possible we craft our systems to allow and encourage everyone to define them and pursue them for themselves.

Keeping these matters slightly under wraps on this website is a deliberate attempt not to meet the devil half-way; let's try to get the reader to at least go beyond the home page before clicking on somewhere else.Top

Q 2. What's in it for me? (Ref: f1002)

Power. The power that belongs to you in the first place, to direct your own life and your own destiny as you see fit, to ensure that your views on right and wrong and the best way to be governed are heard, and to return politicians and politics to their rightful place as your servants not your masters.Top

Q 3. Large sections of this website are dull as ditch-water; they have no personality, no humour, no emotion, no passion and no spirit. Why is this? (Ref: f1003)

Passion, soul, morality and the whole gamut of human emotions belong in the People who make the laws and need the government, and in the content of the laws they make. The methods of doing government are just the tools, they should be as dull and mechanistic as possible, leaving all the rest to the people doing the job. When you create your beautiful garden the spirit, passion and beauty come from you, what you plant and how you care for what you grow, not from the spade you use to dig with. Where these new approaches do take true human nature into account is that they are crafted with the utmost care to ensure that they permit the free expression of our Human Nature and our highest ideals in our laws and the practice of governing ourselves, without stipulating in advance anything about what those ideals may be. Too often our present methods discourage or actively prohibit the exercise of Humanity from the outset. Just look at some of the way our judicial systems operate in the pursuit of 'justice'.Top

Q 4. Won't self-interest ruin this, as it does so much else? (Ref: f1004)

Why should it? The damage done by everyone pursuing their own self-interest at the moment is caused by an incorrect understanding of what our real self-interests are. What we do today is founded on the ethos of today - make money at any cost and for g**'s sake don't mention morals in public. These attitudes are so pervasive that we pick them up at birth and by adulthood have been steeped in them for so long and so thoroughly that it is all but impossible to buck the system in any significant way. So we all play along. And our self-interest is the ultimate in selfishness. But this need not be the case and is in fact harmful to us and our real self-interests. Neither the survival of our genes, our memes nor our souls depends on making as much money as possible by exploiting as many of our fellows as possible in the shortest time possible. The short-sightedness and ultimate futility of this behaviour is fast becoming painfully apparent, and being recognised by increasing numbers of people, and it will become a desperate problem within the next thirty years as our population and demands on the world become very hard to handle.

Our true self-interests are far more noble and important. So the drive and energy put into selfishness in the cause today can be, and should be, harnessed to our new view of what our self-interests are. This way there'll be no stopping us, and progress could be very rapid indeed. It needs to be!Top

Q 5. Isn't politics too boring to bother with? (Ref: f1005)

Today it certainly is. Because it is tired, dull and pointless. This project proposes that we change all that. When politics is very far from pointless it will also be very far from dull or boring. We will want to get involved because it will matter!

Think of the number of dull and tedious things you do every day that you do only because your self-interest makes them worth doing. How we govern ourselves, and how and to whom we give the power that rightfully belongs only to us are that important and we would be that interested in them, if what we thought mattered.Top

Q 6. With this sort of unrestricted law-making wouldn't it be possible that murder could become legal? (Ref: f1006)

Yes. The purpose of the method is not to try to say what should or should not be legal or illegal, moral or immoral, that is up to the People. The purpose is to lay down how laws are made and unmade in order that they reflect the true wishes of the People as a whole not the agenda of some group or individual who wishes to impose their views on others, exercising power to which they are not entitled, whatever the virtues or otherwise of the group or individual.

So, yes, there is a risk that murder could legitimately become legal somewhere. Anything could become legal and similarly anything could become illegal.

But what is the point of having a system which allows this when we can ban murder and such like outright and we would all be immediately safer? The point is that a system which allows extremes allows both 'good' and 'bad' extremes, it allows experimentation in any direction as far as anybody would wish or could go. This is what enables and fosters growth and without growth our lives are both stagnant and pointless and futile. Without this freedom to try things and test the good, the bad and the outrageous we could not experiment with the good and the very, very best that we could dream up. To attain the best we risk the worst. The opposite approach, which is common to many if not most of today's methods of government, is to lean towards 'everything that is not allowed is prohibited'. This is not freedom, does not foster growth and is not safe because it does not allow us to explore the highest ideals to which we might aspire. Very importantly it also means that we restrict ourselves in advance in how we react to the unexpected in the future. The unexpected good is automatically prohibited. Out goes the baby, oops! The approach of this movement is 'everything that is not prohibited is permitted'. This allows the best, the worst and everything in between to become possible.

What is the risk that we end up with the worst world, that some town in the middle of our country votes quite legitimately to make it mandatory to kill all outsiders on sight? Look at yourself, look at your family, look at each of your friends, look at your neighbours, look at your work colleagues. How many of them would vote for barbarity and how many would without hesitation reject it? Even with the most pessimistic and cynical view of Human Nature and whether we are born good or bad it is hard to envision such a thing really happening when it would be in the teeth of opposition from the whole of the rest of Humanity as well as our own natures, spirits, souls and real self-interest, never mind our genes. But this method is also its own safeguard. A policy that says 'that which is not prohibited is allowed' allows too for the rest of Humanity to say that it is simply unacceptable that this or any town or group of people on earth make murder legal and we will stop them doing so by force. The People can still sanction war, for any purpose they wish. The difference from today's norm is that in this spiritual future it would be all the people sanctioning force not one person or group such as politicians who all have, by virtue of them simply being politicians, an agenda which cannot knowingly be the People's.

In short, this approach offers vastly more scope for us to realise our highest ideals and to do so safely. The most important point is that we have the choice, permission and encouragement to create the best and the choice, permission and encouragement to reject the worst. Imagine for a moment, or for the rest of this year, the wonderful things that the town in the middle of our country could choose to do if the inhabitants were just people like you and not the psychopaths we fear they could be.Top


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