Beyond Representative Democracy

Our current struggles to preserve our freedom from the encroachment of an ever-increasing and more powerful, federal government are, indeed, nothing more than follies.  Mired as we are in divisive, partisan thinking, we have ceased to be accelerators of human, social evolution and have become, instead, millstones around the ankles of humankind's march upward out of the prehistoric slime.  Elsewhere, I have written rather extensively about conceptual efforts to reconstrue the nature of governance in society to form a "synocracy" that transcends the representative democracy bequeathed to us by the Founders of the Republic.  Further discussion can be found here and here.

As the late novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, pointed out, the American Constitution, as revolutionary as it may have been at the time of its creation, provides "no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong."  In other words, "We the People" have become little more than the subject of "lip service" to a worthy ideal, and the Constitution sits languishing like a titular monarch who has lost all power to influence or control the populace.

Jim Gough has echoed this criticism in saying that "there is no ‘We the People’ to take charge to make the changes that are needed.”  John Buck, a proponent of sociocracy, which represents an egalitarian approach to business organization and governance that has been extended into the realm of public governance, has countered that

...right now it’s not easy for people to have your voices heard. In the physical neighborhood, you may not talk to your neighbor more than once or twice a year. You may have a neighborhood of people that you are emotionally connected to, but you don’t do any governing that way, exactly. And, so what if we started to organize at the neighborhood level so that…there was like economic activity based in the neighborhood going on and cultural activity, and this was coordinated on a citywide basis, so that if people had needs for daycare or they had needs for a nearby doctor or whatever and they weren’t there, [then] that could be coordinated.

As I have pointed out previously in another blog, Buck's suggestion sounds a lot like the idea of artificial extended families suggested by Kurt Vonnegut in 1976.  And, his ideas harken back to a conceptual framework that I developed in the early eighties which I called "The Novalian Society."  This was before the advent of home computers, and thus I never published anything regarding my thoughts at the time.  I was principally involved in trying entrepreneurially to develop a new source of income and had started out organizing a singles network to counter the loneliness and isolation inherent in the walled-off society that was Southern California at the time.  Exemplary of this fortress mentality was the desire of my neighbor in a recently constructed community of Tudor homes near the beach, to construct a cinder block wall, seven feet tall to separate our properties that were built in quite close proximity of each other, and which would extend all the way to the street.  Fortunately, I was able to prevail upon him to settle for a wall six feet in height and which would gradually diminish to two feet by the time it reached the front sidewalk.  This effort eventually did not produce the grandiose results which I had idealistically envisioned, but it did eventuate in the development of the conceptual framework for "The Novalian Society" or "Novalia," which is a word deriving from the Latin meaning "new land."

Recently, I have excavated "The Novalian Society" and have begun its restoration, like the social structures from antiquity which I saw being restored during recent trips to Turkey and Israel.  I commend it to your attention and solicit your comments, criticisms, and suggestions that will contribute to the development of a synocracy that will give force to the will of "We the People."  The posts referenced here are the first two in a multipart essay in progress.