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

The Story so Far - or Why Bother?(Ref: s1001)

A message from the CREATOR (of this web site, silly!) or : "A brief history of me."

Youthful idealism never really got abandoned, just suppressed. The exuberance of youth was overrun by skepticism, lack of time and well, you know, life. With more life, and more miles on the clock, came cynicism. There was no point trying to do what is right or best for anyone but myself, with a few honourable exceptions of course for those close to me. Changing the world is impossible and I learnt that like everyone else. So I did my tiny little bit, for charity and things like that. It didn't really achieve much but it made me feel better for a while. A bit like retail therapy really.

Enthusiasm for the important things in life bubbled up every now and then, but quickly sank from sight again under the weight of cynicism and despair for the task of fixing the world. And, hey, I had a life, I wasn't a loser who spent their time alone thinking - I got out there and did to them before they did to me.

And so nothing got changed. By me anyway.

By who then?

Then, at exactly the right moment, I came across one writer whose work finally broke the cynicism trap. And the rest is history.

The introduction below is meant to speak to the deeper instincts of most people and move them to sit up and take notice that they, that is, YOU, are not alone.

NOT "More of the same but different"

WHY think about the future? (Ref: s1002)

It is my experience that the majority of people see many aspects of political, economic, environmental and spiritual life which they do not believe serve people as a whole as well as they could, or should. Furthermore, the majority of people are deeply cynical about whether things will improve, in their view, and whether it is possible for ordinary people to achieve anything worthwhile to improve things.
While the leading economies of the world have produced wealth beyond the dreams of those born a century ago they are perceived as not having improved the balance between those who have material wealth and those who suffer material poverty. The relatively wealthy also seem beset by lack of contentment with life despite material wealth.
While there is great worldwide interest in the 'environment', and local success stories are numerous, it is perceived that on the whole the desire for environmental 'improvement' is losing out to the pressures of population and development and current practices in politics and economics.
While representative democracy has undoubtedly achieved a great deal in its recent forms, it is seen by many that politics and politicians are now either out of touch with real needs, too self-interested, too narrow and short-sighted, or too powerless to govern justly and wisely for the majority of the people they are supposed to represent. It is thought that politics has become irrelevant to the majority and especially to the young who are not only effectively disenfranchised but have largely given up any hope of participation or effectiveness in their future.
While our leaders in all fields achieve little things, continually and often, it is perceived that even those most genuinely interested in 'making the world a better place' seem to be increasingly hopelessly inefficient. More and more effort, time and money seem to be needed to make smaller and smaller improvements to the 'system' which too often seems to fail for either obscure and strange reasons or because of lack of political will at all levels.
While good people the world over make great efforts, with some successes, to improve the lot of whatever constituency it is they represent or choose to help, it still seems that the big issues of poverty, corruption, religion, economics, politics and the environment are intractable.
These perceptions of how the world is and how it seems will inevitably decline have lead, and are leading ever more quickly, to despair about the future, lack of care for the future, and the sense that everyone not only should, but has to, resort to selfishness in the race for brute survival.

Despite all the foregoing I now believe it is possible for ordinary people to make a real difference. The restoration of hope, the change from cynicism to skepticism, and then optimism, leads to a renewal of the drive to try to make a difference despite the difficulties, whilst simultaneously driving back despair. This in turn opens the door to productive thinking about the future and how bright it could be.

WHAT needs to be done?(Ref: s1001)

The restoration of hope has involved the overturning of some major preconceptions. The preconceptions and the reasons for abandoning them can now both be understood. This understanding opens the door to originality in thinking and thus the defeat of problems formerly seen as intractable or simply too overwhelming to be defeated before they beat us.

Among the new bases for thinking are :

That despite the enormity of the problems somebody must tackle the biggest questions of all. The 'return on investment' of energy, time and ingenuity on solving big problems, rather than small ones, is the pay-off and the rationale behind this approach.
That problems that seem intractable are a special sort of problem, whose characteristics can be understood, and as such they are the ones which need the most radical new thinking. A fix, and a fix for that fix, ad infinitum, will not and cannot result in success. A new approach is not just desirable but essential and, without it, failure is guaranteed.
That human systems age and mature and eventually get old. All of them become senile and immune to fixes. The task of treating the symptoms has then become futile and it is the disease which has to be tackled head-on. This aging process may be exacerbated by the people involved but is inevitable regardless of who is in charge.
That the foundation of both the causes of the problems and their cures is, regardless of how many layers of overlying structure there are, something we can loosely describe as 'politics', the exercise of power by some people over other people for some motive, whether 'good' or 'sinister'. Thus it is that fixes to politics will contribute to making all the other problems more amenable to tackling, as a free side-effect. The reverse is not so.
That the world is now changing faster and faster every day and the changes and the rate of changes is not only unprecedented but also resulting, for reasons which can be understood in a rigorous manner, in wholesale failure of our systems to perform to our expectations and needs, whether those systems be in politics, economics, the environment or creeds. This is not due to the systems being 'bad' just that they have aged, and are aging, at an ever-increasing pace.
That freedom from having to fix the world by fixing the systems we use to make it work gives us the freedom to dream about the really biggest fixes of all, without regard to what is 'achievable'. Dream first, dream big, and then design the future.
All the necessary thinking, tools, methods and structures have already been thought up and written about in books. All we need is to bring them together properly and use them to our greatest advantage.

HOW is this to become reality?(Ref: s1001)

A start has been made on this project which has the following characteristics :

It is undoubtedly and unashamedly a big project, a very, very, very big project. But this is being done in full knowledge of why this is an approach with a likelihood of success on a significant scale.
That the next big thing in politics must be deliberately and carefully designed, not something organically growing from what we have now; 'more of the same but different' is guaranteed to fail.
That the resulting system must, if at all possible, be :
1. Fail-safe in operation by design, not by accident or evolution by fixing things in response to the refrain 'this must not be allowed to happen again'.
2. Based on very, very long time scales; a century not five year election cycles or financial quarters.
3. Free of many of the present causes of intractability such as the 'right/left' dichotomy, antagonistic structures which allow or encourage only two sides to an issue, the too-powerful influence on issues of who is involved.
4. Dedicated to directing power to where it belongs, by design, regardless of who wishes it were otherwise.
5. Free of personalities. The only wishes which matter must be those of the People not any individual people.
It positively, but with sound reasoning, rejects political parties, top-down government, government of any kind which is not essential, and it rejects interference in any aspects of Human affairs without great and unarguable need.
It insists, again with sound reasoning, that all government must be as open as it is possible to make it, with only the strictest of provisos.
New structures and changes to existing ones must be testable in advance, have back-out plans, be themselves amendable, and be reversible if they do not prove to be worthwhile.
A new function of government, which is fundamental to justice in the future, has been identified which can be used to test the new way of doing business, is needed immediately and can be created and put into effect right now.
The whole project's output will be made free to the whole world to use at will without restraint, control, acknowledgement or any form of ownership or proprietorship.

QUESTIONS (Ref: s1099) (Contact us)