Posts
by Diane Peel
Oppression. Sickness. Death. Hatred. Loss of quality of life. Crime. When things get this bad people notice. And they start complaining. And blaming. And targeting the issue that affects them most. But none of these things is the problem. These are all symptoms of one problem, social systemic dysfunction.
A social system both shapes and is shaped by the behavior of the human who make it up. Like a recursive computer program, the output of the behavior of one generation becomes the input for the next. Unless the program is set up to correct it, extremes will be magnified over time until conditions become incompatible with life for some or all of the participants. This may be good or bad, depending on your point of view. If you believe that the survivors are inherently more meritorious than the losers, your reaction will be "Good riddance". But if you understand that whether you survive or lose is mostly the result of how you happened to enter the system and were processed by it, you will be much more humble. You will understand that the losers may have come into the system with valuable human potential which was muted, blocked destroyed, or worse seriously damaged by it, producing human actors who are a danger to others.
But don't we have willpower? Can't we make a conscious decision to do the right thing? Of course! The only problem is that your ability to have will power is itself a product of who you are--your genetic make up, your life experiences, your role models and your environment! To understand this, everyone should think about something it's really hard for them to do or NOT do and how well they have managed to overcome it. Are you thinking about it? I'm sure you are making excuses for yourself. So are we all.
For those of us who are adults, the best we can hope for is to mitigate damage and help each other cope. But now being conceived are humans who have been minimally impacted (but impacted none the less, even before birth). Here is where we can really make change. Like plants in a garden, we can create a system that gives them the best possible chance of living up to their inherent human potential. Here are potential good neighbors, artists, poets and writers of songs, makers of wonderful things, thoughtful souls, solvers of problems, caregivers , who will be muted, blocked or destroyed by conditions over which they have no control. As if you systematically chose to neglect the dahlias or carrots in your garden, depriving them of important nutrients, sunlight and water, so they grew up stunted, unproductive, or just plain died. Or if you chose one puppy in the litter to beat, lock in a closet and not feed and then blamed him for being smaller and weaker than the rest.
People of all kinds can be deprived of conditions that give them a chance to reach their potential. Even the wealthy can grow up damaged and inflicting harm on others, but mostly harmful conditions fall on those those who are poor.
A CASE
Consider how a new human having the misfortune to be born into poor circumstances yet inherently possessing some potential good qualities both mental and physical, can end up damaged. The baby's mother (nobody asked the child who she'd like to be born to) is poor and divorced, working two part-time jobs but not quite making ends meet. She doesn't have a car and therefore buys much of her food at the mini-mart or gets it from the food shelf. There is a natural food store in town, but everything is more expensive, and besides she herself was raised in a poor family and has become accustomed to a certain way of eating that comforts her after long hours at near minimum wage. She is overweight and diabetic (but doesn't know it because she doesn't see a doctor except in the emergency room, just doesn't think of it unless it's an emergency) and the baby she carries is getting a constant big dose of sugar via mom's blood stream. She also smokes, She started when she was young. (Her mom also smoked, so it seemed like the adult thing to do.) Now she is hooked.She's under constant stress from her job, fights with her baby's father and inter-family strife between her and her sister who considers her a "slut" and has been posting derogatory things about her on Facebook. She is behind on all her bills because let's face it, even with two jobs and help, the numbers just don't balance. And cigarettes are expensive. In utero, baby is being set up for obesity at birth and is subjected to the toxic effects of cigarettes and cancer causing chemicals in the food her mom eats. The effects of her mom's constant state of stress, which is pouring the steroid cortisol into her bloodstream, are only just beginning to be studied by researchers.
Sure enough, baby weighs ten pounds at birth. Though her doctor cautions her about her baby's diet and mom understands what the doctor is telling her, she can't seem to figure out how to implement this in her stressed out life. Besides, the baby is a beautiful cherub, everybody in her family thinks she's fine and her high school friend just had a 10 pound baby too. Mom gets subsidized childcare, one of her jobs is second shift, she doesn't get home until midnight and she has to work many weekends. She can't find a reliable care provider for this shift, so she decides to drop it in hopes of getting more hours at her day job. No luck with that! Her employer never employs anybody full time and on top of that put her on an irregular schedule that doesn't find out a week in advance. So she can't even get another job because she never knows when she will be free. The money situation gets even worse, she gets behind in the rent and after several months she is evicted. She finds a cheaper apartment, but discovers to her horror (when her little girl is found putting one in her mouth) that the place is infested with roaches. After repeated complaints, the landlord sprays, and cautions her to put away all food, stay out for the place for several hours and clean thoroughly after. She tries to comply but eradicating all the poison would be impossible. This scenario is repeated three times during baby's young life.
Fast forward to kindergarten. Baby is now considerably overweight and has trouble keeping up with other kids in activities. She is sometimes picked on for her weight by other kids. In addition, she is restless, doesn't pay attention, throws things and knocks over other kids' t stuff. Her teacher suspects she has ADD or is hyperactive, or both. She is referred to a psychologist, then a doctor for evaluation and mom is subjected to a lot of pressure to start her on Ritalin, which she does. Her behavior improves, though she continues to gain weight and becomes shy and withdrawn. In elementary school she begins to exhibit some peculiar behaviors, pulling out her hair and scratching herself. The doctor recommends a trial of an antidepressant.
Now in high school, baby is on three meds and often skips school. She fights with her mom and is suspected of using prescription drugs given her by a "boyfriend" who she once thought loved her but who now has become verbally and sometimes physically abusive. She is doing poorly in school, despite a talent for writing and art that one of her teachers is trying to encourage. She believes she is worthless and drops out of school. At 18, hoping to keep her boyfriend's affection, she gets pregnant. She applies for assistance, and now has a caseworker but due to her weight, lack of education and poor work history from missed work days due to depression, she is unhirable in a town where there a virtually no jobs anyway and even the high school valedictorian will have to leave town to find a job.
One summer night she got into a shouting match with another woman she suspected of seeing her boyfriend and the police were called. She was charged with disorderly conduct, and, when the officer placed his hand on her shoulder, she jerked away and used an expletive, at which point she was also charged with resisting arrest. She had a public defender but the case dragged on for months with many court appearances and a lot of paperwork she didn't understand. She was eventually found guilty and is awaiting sentencing.
One summer night she got into a shouting match with another woman she suspected of seeing her boyfriend and the police were called. She was charged with disorderly conduct, and, when the officer placed his hand on her shoulder, she jerked away and used an expletive, at which point she was also charged with resisting arrest. She had a public defender but the case dragged on for months with many court appearances and a lot of paperwork she didn't understand. She was eventually found guilty and is awaiting sentencing.
This composite story is so easy to write because it is so common, repeated over millions of times, with variations. These are lives destroyed. Kept alive through a well-meaning social welfare system which nevertheless treats them like dependents and keeps them tied up in a perpetual bureaucratic run-around, they have no hope for improvement, only survival and maybe finding a way to forget.
The town's rep in the state legislature says he thinks people like her should get a job and take responsibility for their poor choices.
IDENTIFYING CAUSES
Not the cause: "Poor people are lazy". This is not 1950. You can't make a living working on the family farm or in a factory with an eighth grade education. Millions of Americans are not being sent to college on a robust GI Bill. "We need to contribute more to food shelves". Food shelves are for crises, not chronic conditions. We can't run a society on charity. Charity is demeaning and paternalistic and destroys people's sense of self worth, as well as being cumbersome and time consuming for the recipients. Anyway, with increasing number of poor, it won't work for ever. "People take drugs to have fun and get high and shouldn't blame for their irresponsibility." The pharmaceutical industry has been pushing taking drugs for everything for decades and making billions off it. Doctors push pills at every turn. Young people often have lives with emotional turmoil. Some end of killing themselves and some end up taking a pill and self-medicating, because that's what they've learned. Opiates are extraordinarily addictive. It doesn't take much to get hooked.
Having dealt with these, what is behind this system that is so devastating for peoples' lives? Here are a few. (Absent is health insurance, the lack of which propels people into poverty. But altering the system to stop the processes that create ill health would make providing health care for all at a reasonable cost very doable and make health insurance through private corporations unnecessary, a thought which undoubtedly strikes terror in the hearts of both insurance and pharmaceutical companies.)
1. Toxins: While all of us are exposed to toxins from many many sources and undoubtedly individually or in combination these form the environmental component for cancers, the poor are disproportionately affected and these effects may occur very early in life. Public interest groups have done a good job of publicizing the negative effects of these chemicals. People with more money champion and purchase food and other products lower in toxins. Poor people would too if they could afford it. Potential loss in physical and mental functioning from this is only just beginning to be studied. Ultimate cause of this problem: Corporations like Monsanto that develop and sell toxins without regard for long-term effects. Motive? Profit.
2. High Sugar, low nutrient, genetically modified food: Same here. Those with money are transitioning to better diets and have the means to get to the food and afford it. Not so poor people. Companies like MacDonald's and Walmart are making tons of money off of advertising to poor people. They style themselves the "poor person's friend". Who else has stuff cheap enough? (And meanwhile their low wages guarantee a steady supply of poor people). They have us coming and going. Ultimate cause of this problem: Corporations promote addicting high-sugar foods and prey on the poor---- for profit.
3. Pills, pills, pills. The pharmaceutical industry pushes drugs for everything, including things that aren't even illnesses and for treating children's problems for which they haven't been approved, and falsifies research results to mask negative effects. They were behind the over-prescription of opiates, minimizing the potential for addiction. Motive: Billions in profit.
4. Culture: It's hard for someone who wants to make positive changes to do so when everyone around her lives the same lifestyle. It may even seem disloyal to try to do so. Social service agencies do nothing to help this problem. Services they offer are fragmented rather than holistic, workers usually don't live in the neighborhoods of the people they serve and don't interact with them in a non-official capacity, a few are judgmental and all are understaffed and over-worked. Rare individuals make themselves available for support or offer positive role models, because, frankly dealing with people who are not only poor but also have a myriad of other problems can be quite stressful. Most do a heroic job of keeping the worst from befalling their clients (like death) but the system is not set up to actually help anyone out of poverty. This would require a small army of neighborhood paid staff and volunteers to provide positive support and role models for children and young mothers and fathers, where significant changes could be made. Cause of this problem: A compassionate nation does not want to see hordes of beggars and people dying in the gutter, but ... a nation strapped for cash, because a lot of it is going for corporate subsidies and trillion dollar wars, isn't able to pay for actual help for poor people. Elected officials are are beholden to wealthy interests who lobby for laws to make more money for wealthy people. Motive: Profit.
5. Work that doesn't pay enough to live on: Hardly anything more needs to be said about this. When unions successfully won higher wages for workers, corporations feared less profit for executives and shareholders. So they took their factories to places filled with even more desperate poor people and no unions. If they can't do this (say, jobs that have to be done here) they will hire robots. In addition, they flout labor laws aimed at helping workers by employing people less than full time and on irregular, last minute schedules. Motive: Maximize profit.
6. The legal System: There's a lot of money to be made from crime. Not doing crime--- creating more criminals. Everything from fees and fines, to prisons for profit, to benefiting from free prison labor. Incorporating people back in society generates no revenue for private businesses. The punitive legal system ties up the lives of the poor who are its main victims, with endless court appearances, fines for fines they can't pay in the first place, harassment, and jail time for victimless offenses. Cause: Prejudice against the poor leads some people to think that punishment will solve the problem. This is capitalized upon (literally) by people wanting to make money off the system.
7: Lack of transportation: This is a problem in rural areas. Cars are not only expensive but the poor can't afford gas, or insurance. Also, car companies have made cars laden with computer controlled gadgets impossible for average people to repair, and well-meaning but incompletely thought out government regulations make driving a car in disrepair illegal. Cause: Fossil fuels, insurance and the automobile industry are hugely profitable with substantial lobbies, providing little impetus for change. Why? Profit.
Pressures on the poor involve ill health, tremendous stress, insecurity, lack of control, insufficient support and no hope that hard work will ever result in improvement. Frustration results from a consumer culture that offers things for sale they can't afford to buy. Anger, desperation and addiction lead to crime. The system is a feed back loop guaranteed to produce a dangerous downward spiral for ever increasing numbers of people.
The cause is control of the system by a few bent on maximizing their wealth. And they are doing it, because the mirror image side of the processes that shift more people into poverty and then down the spiral, concentrates increasing wealth in the hands of a few. Just reverse all the above problems. Better safer food, cleaner more aesthetic, safer environments full of consumer goods, access to a whole host of mitigating things that money can buy, like savings, health clubs, lawyers, private psychiatrists, private schools for kids, tutors, and vacations. But most of all, the belief that if they work hard, they will succeed. So even if they screw up, make those bad decisions, there's a safety net, and hope.
You might think that just getting rid of these people would solve the problem, but remember this isn't a "bad people" problem, it's a system problem. With going on nine billion people in the world, and most of the wealth controlled by the one percent of one percent who are pathological wealth accumulators, odds are there are plenty of this personality type waiting in the wings to step up and fill the vacuum. Which is exactly what happens. They have different names and different titles, but in the midst of social disorder they gravitate to power and wealth and hold on tight. And nothing really changes. The system just keeps churning on, increasing their wealth and decreasing everybody else's.
You also might think that we can pass laws that make things fairer. We have a lot of laws, and things are not getting any fairer. In fact more laws usually make things harder for middle class and poor people while the wealthy buy their way around them. Sometimes it takes awhile but in the end, things don't change. But there is a valuable role for those that work hard to pressure leaders to make changes, it's just that this only slows down the process. It doesn't stop it. If it is the only action we are taking, we will fail.
So is it hopeless?
Having dealt with these, what is behind this system that is so devastating for peoples' lives? Here are a few. (Absent is health insurance, the lack of which propels people into poverty. But altering the system to stop the processes that create ill health would make providing health care for all at a reasonable cost very doable and make health insurance through private corporations unnecessary, a thought which undoubtedly strikes terror in the hearts of both insurance and pharmaceutical companies.)
1. Toxins: While all of us are exposed to toxins from many many sources and undoubtedly individually or in combination these form the environmental component for cancers, the poor are disproportionately affected and these effects may occur very early in life. Public interest groups have done a good job of publicizing the negative effects of these chemicals. People with more money champion and purchase food and other products lower in toxins. Poor people would too if they could afford it. Potential loss in physical and mental functioning from this is only just beginning to be studied. Ultimate cause of this problem: Corporations like Monsanto that develop and sell toxins without regard for long-term effects. Motive? Profit.
2. High Sugar, low nutrient, genetically modified food: Same here. Those with money are transitioning to better diets and have the means to get to the food and afford it. Not so poor people. Companies like MacDonald's and Walmart are making tons of money off of advertising to poor people. They style themselves the "poor person's friend". Who else has stuff cheap enough? (And meanwhile their low wages guarantee a steady supply of poor people). They have us coming and going. Ultimate cause of this problem: Corporations promote addicting high-sugar foods and prey on the poor---- for profit.
3. Pills, pills, pills. The pharmaceutical industry pushes drugs for everything, including things that aren't even illnesses and for treating children's problems for which they haven't been approved, and falsifies research results to mask negative effects. They were behind the over-prescription of opiates, minimizing the potential for addiction. Motive: Billions in profit.
4. Culture: It's hard for someone who wants to make positive changes to do so when everyone around her lives the same lifestyle. It may even seem disloyal to try to do so. Social service agencies do nothing to help this problem. Services they offer are fragmented rather than holistic, workers usually don't live in the neighborhoods of the people they serve and don't interact with them in a non-official capacity, a few are judgmental and all are understaffed and over-worked. Rare individuals make themselves available for support or offer positive role models, because, frankly dealing with people who are not only poor but also have a myriad of other problems can be quite stressful. Most do a heroic job of keeping the worst from befalling their clients (like death) but the system is not set up to actually help anyone out of poverty. This would require a small army of neighborhood paid staff and volunteers to provide positive support and role models for children and young mothers and fathers, where significant changes could be made. Cause of this problem: A compassionate nation does not want to see hordes of beggars and people dying in the gutter, but ... a nation strapped for cash, because a lot of it is going for corporate subsidies and trillion dollar wars, isn't able to pay for actual help for poor people. Elected officials are are beholden to wealthy interests who lobby for laws to make more money for wealthy people. Motive: Profit.
5. Work that doesn't pay enough to live on: Hardly anything more needs to be said about this. When unions successfully won higher wages for workers, corporations feared less profit for executives and shareholders. So they took their factories to places filled with even more desperate poor people and no unions. If they can't do this (say, jobs that have to be done here) they will hire robots. In addition, they flout labor laws aimed at helping workers by employing people less than full time and on irregular, last minute schedules. Motive: Maximize profit.
6. The legal System: There's a lot of money to be made from crime. Not doing crime--- creating more criminals. Everything from fees and fines, to prisons for profit, to benefiting from free prison labor. Incorporating people back in society generates no revenue for private businesses. The punitive legal system ties up the lives of the poor who are its main victims, with endless court appearances, fines for fines they can't pay in the first place, harassment, and jail time for victimless offenses. Cause: Prejudice against the poor leads some people to think that punishment will solve the problem. This is capitalized upon (literally) by people wanting to make money off the system.
7: Lack of transportation: This is a problem in rural areas. Cars are not only expensive but the poor can't afford gas, or insurance. Also, car companies have made cars laden with computer controlled gadgets impossible for average people to repair, and well-meaning but incompletely thought out government regulations make driving a car in disrepair illegal. Cause: Fossil fuels, insurance and the automobile industry are hugely profitable with substantial lobbies, providing little impetus for change. Why? Profit.
Pressures on the poor involve ill health, tremendous stress, insecurity, lack of control, insufficient support and no hope that hard work will ever result in improvement. Frustration results from a consumer culture that offers things for sale they can't afford to buy. Anger, desperation and addiction lead to crime. The system is a feed back loop guaranteed to produce a dangerous downward spiral for ever increasing numbers of people.
The cause is control of the system by a few bent on maximizing their wealth. And they are doing it, because the mirror image side of the processes that shift more people into poverty and then down the spiral, concentrates increasing wealth in the hands of a few. Just reverse all the above problems. Better safer food, cleaner more aesthetic, safer environments full of consumer goods, access to a whole host of mitigating things that money can buy, like savings, health clubs, lawyers, private psychiatrists, private schools for kids, tutors, and vacations. But most of all, the belief that if they work hard, they will succeed. So even if they screw up, make those bad decisions, there's a safety net, and hope.
You might think that just getting rid of these people would solve the problem, but remember this isn't a "bad people" problem, it's a system problem. With going on nine billion people in the world, and most of the wealth controlled by the one percent of one percent who are pathological wealth accumulators, odds are there are plenty of this personality type waiting in the wings to step up and fill the vacuum. Which is exactly what happens. They have different names and different titles, but in the midst of social disorder they gravitate to power and wealth and hold on tight. And nothing really changes. The system just keeps churning on, increasing their wealth and decreasing everybody else's.
You also might think that we can pass laws that make things fairer. We have a lot of laws, and things are not getting any fairer. In fact more laws usually make things harder for middle class and poor people while the wealthy buy their way around them. Sometimes it takes awhile but in the end, things don't change. But there is a valuable role for those that work hard to pressure leaders to make changes, it's just that this only slows down the process. It doesn't stop it. If it is the only action we are taking, we will fail.
So is it hopeless?
HOW WE USED TO KEEP THE SYSTEM STABLE
Back in the old days when human population was small, there was probably (from ethnographic analogy and archaeology) not much difference in status. If somebody wasn't sharing, it was pretty obvious and group pressure would be exerted to prevent hoarding.
Experiments by behavioral economists suggest that most people still retain this value of share and share alike. They have also found that some people will punish others who try to game the system to their own advantage, which puts a check on accumulators.( But over time, if people see that accumulators are acting unchecked, they abandon the value of doing what's best for the group and play to their own advantage).
One researcher has observed (and filmed for our edification and amusement) that monkeys have a sense of fairness and get upset when a researcher treats another monkey preferentially.
If the teacher brings out six cupcakes for the class of six, and Johnny takes two cupcakes leaving four to be split among the other five, the teacher is sure to reprimand him. Even little Sally may exclaim, "You can't have two!".
But if the CEO of a company with $6 million to pay as salaries takes $2 million for himself, leaving $4 million to be split among the remaining 39 employees, nobody complains. Not the janitor who got $25,000, nor the head of accounting who got $100,000. In fact, the ratio of CEO to worker compensation may actually sometimes be as high as 300 to 1.
The CEO himself probably realizes that if the hostess at the party brings out six tarts for six guests, he shouldn't take more than one. He learned that in kindergarten. And everyone is sure to notice his boorish behavior. Yet, in the workplace he does, because nobody complains. Nobody complains because nobody notices. Nobody knows what he makes, (and it's not all in dollars anyway). Nobody knows what anybody else makes for that matter. Nobody even knows how many employees there are or how much the company makes. The system is very large and nobody is really able to wrap his head around it (except maybe the CEO). The CEO easily rationalizes his behavior. After all, where would the company be without him?
Humans retain very old values about the importance of sharing. They express these values in small scale face to face situations like those which prevailed when the values evolved. When numbers get big, humans eyes glaze over. We have trouble wrapping our heads around very large social systems, like the one in which we live today. Charities have found that telling people that a million people are suffering in a famine gets fewer contributions than telling the story of one person suffering from famine. Because we do not relate to large and complex human organization.
To recap, when systems are small and face to face, most people behave fairly and work for the good of the group rather than for self. Some individuals are accumulators who try to game the system to their own advantage. These are put down by the group, or by individuals whose sense of fairness is so strong that they will take a risk themselves to punish the accumulator. Such groups maintain a stable equitable distribution of resources over time. Some researchers think this may have evolved because humans have better survival capacity through group action than individually and because in small groups individuals are all genetically related, so survival of the group is good for survival of each individual member's genes. Cooperation within a group (as opposed to competition) has even been shown to make people feel good, through release of the hormone oxytocin.
THINGS GET BIG
We now have a lot of people. Population grew and a lot of other things happened, too. Organization got more complicated, and in the absence of electronic communication, people developed hierarchical structures to get things done. Hierarchical structures funnel resources and information "up" and "down" through the hierarchy (as it is usually drawn), that is, one person is in charge of a certain umber of other people and all those at his tier are in turn answerable to another person in the next tier up, and so on, sometimes up to just one person. Basically, it works like a phone tree, which is how people got information out to other people before the internet. Humans naturally think hierarchically nowadays. I recently attended a group forming to accomplish a community task, where the first order of business was to appoint a "Board of Directors", that is, a second tier up.
Government is hierarchical, business is hierarchical, churches are hierarchical, unions are hierarchical, the Communist Party is hierarchical, charities are hierarchical. Everything is hierarchical.
But there's a problem. If you were to act this out, with a crowd of people handing off dollar bills to a middle tier, and then the middle tier to a second tier, and then the second tier to one person, you might guess what this problem is. As the dollars (resources) pass from tier to tier they get concentrated. It could be information too, going up or down the hierarchy. If you wanted to steal $50 at the ground level, you would have to steal it from 50 people 50 times, but if you you could get in the fourth tier, you could steal it all at once. If you wanted to spread a vicious rumor at the ground level you would have to tell 50 different people, but if you situated yourself in the fourth tier, you could spread it to 50 people all at once. Those small number of people who desire to accumulate (or desire power over others) have not failed to notice this. They are drawn to upper tiers.
Where might we find these upper tiers? In the state legislature, or the Congress, in the upper levels of management in business, at the heads of charities, among union bosses, at the leadership of religious organizations, to name just a few.
The small number of people who desire to game the system for their own gain, who would be found out and put down in a small face to face system, operate with impunity in hierarchical systems due to the system's size and complexity. People just can't keep track of it.
Upper tiers of hierarchical structures attract predators like food left out at your campsite attracts bears. So just don't do it.
IF NOT HIERARCHICAL, THEN WHAT?
Well, there wasn't much hope prior to the Age of Electronics. Space was an unconquerable barrier. It is said that the Roman Empire failed because it just got too big to get information from one side of it to the other. Too bad they didn't have the internet.
But now we do, Maybe this is the time to rethink hierarchical structures, specifically, getting rid of them. Because if we can, we make it much harder for the predators to get at the goodies. The predators will have to come much closer in, to our face to face groups where we can see them and take them down.
I think people are on to this. I don't think most people think about the theory behind it, but intuitively they feel they have more control when things are more local. This is true of both politically left people and politically right people and a place where we can really agree. Local control is good. For the right this means no big government. For the left this means no big corporations. Both are right on.
When we create institutions which are local we get rid of tiers. We emphasize smaller, more face to face organization where the natural human values of sharing and fairness come into play. Small scale is where we evolved, small scale is where we are at our most moral. For the right this means government that is not overbearing or wasteful of our resources, for the left this means food production that doesn't poison us and work that is dignified with fair compensation. These are all admirable goals which will create a more equitable world.
THE SOLUTION: CREATING NEW INSTITUTIONS
Getting back to our baby born into unfortunate circumstances and being processed through a system that creates more poverty for many and more wealth for a few, how can we design a system that self corrects? Pathological wealth accumulators operate unopposed in large hierarchical systems where they can get control of crucial points where resources and information are concentrated. Traditional human measures for self-correction in the distribution of resources fail when systems are large.We can solve this problem by eliminating tiers, decentralizing and emphasizing local control. This decentralization (sometimes called horizontal structure) is facilitated by the Electronic Revolution. This plan addresses concerns of both the political left and the political right.
Creating new institutions is a lot of work. It's done at the local level, and it's plodding and slow. It involves working with neighbors we may not want to interact with. It involves giving up leisure time to go to meetings or do volunteer work. It is not glamorous. It may not produce results in your lifetime. It is not fun. It is the solution.
Developing local structures carries with it the potential problem of inter-group strife. Without overarching tiers (the Pax Romana), local groups may diverge or compete. Care must be taken to prevent his.
"INSTITUTION SUBSTITUTION"
This involves the gradual replacement of existing institutions with institutions which are smaller and more local. Eliminating tiers should be a goal. Although revolutionary in its aims, this can take place "under the radar". It is crucial to develop replacement institutions before removing existing institutions, in order to avoid the social upheaval which allows new pathological wealth accumulators to move in and take control.
This is a process which has already begun. Valiant people are working hard in communities and neighborhoods all over the country to promote new ways of organizing ourselves from the ground up. But we need many more workers.
What this is not about: Setting up intentional communities unless these communities actively work in their cities and towns to involve average citizens in new institutions. The impact of such communities on the larger society is close to null. Either they remain insular (like the Amish) with no impact, or they just die out (like the Shakers) or they just blend in with local culture and add a few more kids to the "liberal" mix (like the Back to the Landers" here in Vermont.)
What this is about: People who are growing vegetables in the front yards and vacant lots of cities and towns or putting solar panels on the roof of their barns, People who volunteer to sit on restorative justice committees or form "citizen grand juries" to investigate complaints against law enforcement, people organizing to set up community centers, recovery centers and "swap" centers at local landfills, forming groups to bring local hydro power back into service, or providing information to people about their rights as jurors. These are just some of the projects that a handful of people in my own community are working on but they seriously lack person power.
Please stay tuned for Part II: New institutions that are being built and some suggestions for ones not yet thought of.
What this is not about: Setting up intentional communities unless these communities actively work in their cities and towns to involve average citizens in new institutions. The impact of such communities on the larger society is close to null. Either they remain insular (like the Amish) with no impact, or they just die out (like the Shakers) or they just blend in with local culture and add a few more kids to the "liberal" mix (like the Back to the Landers" here in Vermont.)
What this is about: People who are growing vegetables in the front yards and vacant lots of cities and towns or putting solar panels on the roof of their barns, People who volunteer to sit on restorative justice committees or form "citizen grand juries" to investigate complaints against law enforcement, people organizing to set up community centers, recovery centers and "swap" centers at local landfills, forming groups to bring local hydro power back into service, or providing information to people about their rights as jurors. These are just some of the projects that a handful of people in my own community are working on but they seriously lack person power.
Please stay tuned for Part II: New institutions that are being built and some suggestions for ones not yet thought of.
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