Ensure The Rights of All
See Make Help The Community Culture — Medium http://buff.ly/17SENAP
To speak of ensuring the rights of all is a fantastic sign of awakening community. How many communities do you know where this assurance is forthcoming? I am not talking about speech alone. I am talking practice. Action. Care.
In the cybercommunity of my imagination there is one good way to start ensuring the rights of all. It is to insist that people who work in the community live there. (Yes, cybercommunities are residential, occupational, educational, recreational — whole cities 10K strong, local but global as well.)
So, rights improve if all are one community. The notion of coming in from the outside and lording it over others is foreclosed. Law enforcement. Teachers. Heads of this or that. All who are employed. All kids. All old. All live there.
The labor pool is made up of all who wish to work. The community takes the shape of its residents, their interests, their skills. Basic income is assumed. The successor to the Fed maintains a floor for every person. It bails out people, not banks.
Such conditions make for at least the beginning of a rights-for-all mentality.
How to make rights for all not merely a local thing but everywhere? Start understanding that we are are born attuned to freedom. Yes, within our minds there is a conscience. And within that conscience is the science of togetherness — our conscience-ness (our withscience-ness). Our conscience contains the perfect (ontological) value: democracy. Within democracy lies all rights, including equality.
Does our equality extend to beasts? Are not beasts, animals, other living things — are not they capable of consciousness? Yes and no. Actually it is the same thing with us. To be conscious is to have knowledge of right and wrong, which is a knowledge about harm and its prevention. When we consciously or unconsciously do harm, the very worst thing that we do is take another life. When other creatures do the same thing they are doing evil, even if it can be shown that there is an advantage to having a rabbit to eat if you are a hungry eagle.
It would be better if we were all vegans, even though it can be argued that plants are not without feelings.
Well, this seems like a diversion but bear with me. We are life that wills to live, according to Schweitzer. And we live midst life that wills to live. Reverencing life is the foundation of all rights. It should be the watchword of life in cybercommunities.
We will be open to learning the least harmful ways, recognizing that there is a spectrum and that it will take centuries before we have managed to understand ways that good vegans already see as clearly as the back of their hands.
Rights are a spectrum! We evolve. We get better.
I hope this excursion makes it easy to agree that to create safe communities we will need to make conscious decisions that are foundational. Among them the right, as perfectly as possible, to be safe from violence.
Nonviolence will be a watchword. There will be law enforcement. But there will be at least some communities that abide by a salient rubric:
Gun Free.
Yes, why not?
You see I believe cybercommunities can and will vary as to basic rights.
Clearly the right to bear arms would not be operative in a community that said no guns. But the right not to get shot would be in great shape.
And there will be communities with guns, where even the stretched definition of our US Second Amendment will be scrupulously observed.
I am pushing for choice on issues that can only be resolved on a community- to-community basis.
So I shall enlarge my title. My cybercommunity will ensure the right to peaceful existence — no guns. Even if the one down the road permits firearms.
That said, yes, it is my thought that cybercommunities will take on their own characters according to their several constitutions and governances. They will delight in the variety of perfectly harmless and perfectly reasonable modes they choose. Thus will democracy be perfected, not with a tasteless soup of uniformity, but with 1000 different accents, flavors and visions.
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From Planning and Designing a Good Future: What to Strive for and What to Avoid Stephen C. Rose: Kindle Store http://buff.ly/1DGYTIP
