Beyond Democracy

by Mike Meyer

So how do we get out of this mess? We all know the mess we are in. It is planet wide although it is much worse in some places than others but that is probably only due to timing and stage of development. We will need to see how that works out but one major factor is planet wide integration and communication. Except for remote areas of the Amazon and isolated communities we are working with a planetary civilization. So the old ideas and attitudes of dealing with first, second, or third worlds is just not valid. Globalization has eliminated that already and whatever the fever dreams of neo-nationalists the world is not going to shrink back into good, old fashioned warring states. Not that it could not happen in the worst case and war is definitely a threat but, as with everything else, it is not at all what it use to be. And that is a whole other set of issues.

But how to get out of this mess and deflate the wild eyed ranters, rabid racists, mindless misogynists, vicious religionists, and generally bigoted idiots that have suddenly, it seems, erupted from cracks in the wall and nasty rodent holes. We thought, a big percentage of us at least, that our planet was on the way to sanity after leaving two centuries of progress, industrialization, massive pollution, explosive population growth, and the bloodiest wars in human history behind. And for much of the planet this has been the case. Unfortunately the leading nation states began to stumble and the two lead states of those hit some serious problems with their tried and true governmental systems. Then the biggest of the leads lost control and drug part of Europe and all of the middle east into a sequence of disasters that triggered nation state senility that couldn’t be corrected. This is really important as, despite the fact that we are well along in becoming a planetary civilization, having the de facto lead nation begin to tear itself apart in terminal dementia is really bad timing on a world scale. But, wait, maybe not.

The bigger picture

We are clearly in advanced metamorphosis of human social structure and evolutionary transformation for the human species. And as I and many other people have been saying in more and more ways this is big and not going to be easy. In fact, in the really big picture, there are clear indications that surviving this type of change is the complete opposite of a slam dunk. That big picture is the lack of other, verifiable, beings who have gotten off their planet and made it around to ours for a look. Knowing our situation, this may be the challenge. In order to get to the level to move into our immediate galactic neighborhood we have to be able to make significant changes to our planet. This is based on the need to manage energy and forces that are fully capable of destroying us and our planet. We use to think that we would go out in a bang of mutually assured destruction. But, despite the frantic efforts by Kim Jong Un and stupidity of Donald Trump, we are more likely to achieve that end by heating big parts of the planet to levels at which we can no longer survive. But Stephen Hawking, among others, is saying we need to concentrate on getting off this planet in case we can’t fix the mess we have made. Hawking is being nice and not going into detail about levels of stupidity but it doesn’t take much to read between the lines. So, as I said, this is not going to be easy.

Human level

That’s the bigger picture of what is happening. On the human level we have evolution and diversity. The most important of our achievements in the first four hundred years of getting around on our planet is discovering that there are a good range of people in different places and they have very similar but also interesting and unique skills and attitudes. Much of the confusion and disgust with the sudden lurch into the ugly past that we are experiencing now is the aggressive reappearance of racists and supremacists of various forms. Nationalist, i.e. fascist, political movements gaining support seems absurd. But, again, maybe not. We need to understand what is causing this.

We know that the movement to globalization through neoliberal, radical capitalism, appeared to remove jobs and to suppress wages in nation states, the US extensively, that could easily be explained by someone else getting the money. Xenophobia is an old survival characteristic of our species. The rise of a planetary economy dedicated to efficient utilization of resources has produced much of the planetary gains in the last fifty years. The distortions brought by hypercapitalism are the primary cause of wealth imbalance created by allowing a small billionaire class to gain control of the planetary economy. The inevitable monopolization of production and resources by that class created vast, unused accumulations of wealth to which equally vast majority of people were denied access. Allowing the super wealthy to own and control the political systems set up the irony of their support for nationalistic xenophobes as a protection for their vast wealth. It wasn’t us but those nasty refugees who had, incidentally, resulted from regional destabilization to gain petrochemical wealth by the same billionaires. But the fascists and neo-nationalists have only the old tricks and those have limited appeal where the imbalances are not too extreme. The US, in its terminal dementia, had gone over the line.

Diversity punctuated

Diversity is another part of this that can be seen as old but also very new. The power of planetary urban society is the incredible intellectual wealth of diversity in close proximity. This is stressful and can be violent when allowed to be manipulated by fascists and authoritarians but is the source of the new. Once exposed to this most people will be forever changed. The opportunities are the greatest they have ever been. The result is diversity of ideas and social relationships. This may be the well spring of punctuated equilibrium of a new burst of evolution for homo sapiens. At the very least we are widening our societies to include diversity in ethnicity, mating groups, and gender. These are the workings of evolution. We need to encourage this as we need all the help we can get to make up for our mess and to, maybe, get out of here if we can’t cleanup that mess in time.

But what about the poor folks shouting about all the horrible, evil things happening and all the people they are working to hate? Another aspect of globalization that was not handled well was the inevitable blending and merging of cultures. As noted above this is the most powerful agent of change for our species. We need to support metropolitan blending and urbanization to have a hope of surviving this mess. At the same time we need to preserve the range of difference and the base diversity. This, I’m convinced, is an emotional part of what people are upset about and struggling with even if they can’t quite directly articulate this. We need to solve this problem also.

The emerging reality

We have a whole lot of problems and have allowed the wrong people to gain control, not everywhere but in the US and maybe Great Britain, too. We have the old style authoritarians taking advantage of the confusion of massive change such as Putin in Russia in the collapse of the post USSR, Erdogan in a Turkey that is collateral damage of the great American middle east mistake building on decades of previous mistakes. But we have the foundation of open, global trade for resource efficiency and, potential sustainability, and emerging urban centers, the metropoles, that can be independent and unique centers for diversity replacing the old nation states. On a personal level we have new generations that are shaped by virtual reality and virtual human society that are not limited by nations or even regions. We have a growing class of people who are comfortable with full diversity, new forms of marriage, and the virtualization of gender. Everything is virtual or potentially virtual and, therefore, is both real and unreal with no limit of time or space.

The virtualization of human experience is the key to the future. That future must be here within a few years or we won’t survive because we can’t go on with the old mess. By linking everyone and everything together we make everything possible for everyone, or not. It’s up to us. But the devil is in the details.

We cannot anticipate all of the details and all of the obstacles or all of the compromises. I’m pretty sure the way to get there is not by trying to repeat the same old processes or by fighting the old wars and reinstalling the old repressions. I think we need to let go. The planetary society is not going to be some kind of united nations or a recreation of the US or USSR or China. We need to go smaller in order to go bigger. We need to allow people to be free to unite together in virtual societies built with public services and a growing range of rights. These must be distinct from what we know as politics. Administration needs to be the work of AI. Changes in the allocation of resources that effect people are the work of people but in a return to full democracy.

This is already happening around us and the old structures are just getting in the way. Cities are voting new minimum wages that work or can be changed. Soon that will be Universal Minimum Incomes with everyone understanding what is available and what is not for their resident region, their city and their community. The whole idea of voting in some centrally controlled and archaic fashion does’t make sense. Our existing AI systems are able to identify us and track where we go, what we buy, and what we post to our own communities. As we have already seen the old style of voting is easily manipulated for states and districts by Russian based automated systems because people only vote for representatives that they don’t control. But what I think about what my community should do is something that I talk about. A public AI system would constantly track changing flows of information and changing attitudes of everyone who mentions those things. The systems will know what we think and what we want. The only question then is do we have the resources to do that. Or the decision is evenly balanced on building a new museum or sports stadium. Everyone needs to talk some more until the balance changes. But it can all be watched as it happens. Nothing hidden. Authoritarianism needs secrecy and back rooms and deals. They can’t survive in real time decisions by everyone.

A new way of thinking

The real change is realizing that we all are equal and can be tracked. Oh, unless you refuse to participate. That’s an option also. But in the world we are in already you make a choice with each purchase. You state an opinion with each restaurant you visit and with each class you take or concert you attend. Making decisions about our community and what happens and what we like or don’t like is ours to say. We don’t need someone to speak for us. We can now begin to speak for ourselves.