Well, there aren’t many solutions in national politics because there’s a fundamental flaw in expecting everyone to agree based on their geographic location and where they fell in a birth nation lottery. If you want to create a civilization, it needs to be something people choose to join and something that’s very easy to leave. (unless you have other ideas, but I think that’s pretty solid)
Really super-roughly…create a Mondragon/Valve/Google/Charter city hybrid that uses principled hiring to gather people up under the condition that they raise the bar to a basic level (respecting consent, not ruining other people’s days, that sort of thing). Then provide them housing and turn campuses into charter cities that the people themselves control.
Use an open-source forking type structure to cover a person’s entire life (governance, housing, economics, etc.). Give people options, let them vote with their feet. The ones that people like grow, the ones they don’t shrink. Instead of one person imposing their will on everyone else with a generic idea that nobody is excited by and is a very low bar, people are forming groups based on what they like because we’re all different and change over the course of our lives.
Of course it’s more complicated than that (everything is complicated with people involved), but I’ve got a team and currently we’re at ‘absurdly overengineered’. It just needs to be good enough to put refugees in Skunkworks-type projects. And I’ve already got a team working on the VC pitch and putting the rest together.
Honestly, there aren’t any original ideas there. It’s a framework and the Venn diagram of overlapping ideas has already been implemented in various ways. This is just a different assembly of existing parts and falls very nicely into my comfort zone (business consulting on complex interactions was what I did before moving to Data Analytics after 9/11 turned my job from ‘let’s enable people to be awesome!’ to ‘let’s be more efficient so we can fire people!’)
THEN we use Citizen’s united for a very good cause.
Nation-based representational democracy will always create a miquetoast solution that traps everyone at a fairly low level because ‘if they’re not trying hard then why should I?’ there’s not much incentive for progress there.
I’d give my spleen for an infintesimal fraction of the resources that go to these elections, we only need enough to set up a couple of university-type campuses (with housing) to create our critical mass.
Seeing everyone put so much heart and resources into our political process honestly kind of ticks me off. There’s no way that the good guys will win because the advantage goes to the worst in us.
Edit: The last local convo on the subject is here…but something much, much better is in the works.
