Direct Democracy Is Our Destiny: via Tilting At Quixote
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Many people are against direct democracy because they fear mob rule and such. That fear is derived from a static idea fallacy; only what democracy was, is what democracy can be. There are no extenuating circumstances where democracy can be more direct than it is, and still be successful. Blah. Blah. Blah. While we have been a republic with democratic elements, or democracy with republican checks and balances, the belief system surrounding these ideas is an 18th century relic. Is it possible that our democratic system has not changed in the 234 years since our Constitution was written, or cannot be improved?
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Yes, human behavior has changed little since then. Yet, no matter what people and our nation were like centuries ago, our ability to run government since then with more democratic involvement has improved many lives. Specifically, our laws, and enforcement of them, have greatly curbed much of the mob violence and actions from 100 years ago, and reduced another degree more over the last 50 years. Mob actions have evolved in some ways as well, but many obvious elements of it are suppressed.
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The insurrection of January 6th, while not successful in its main political aim, overturning the election, sure looked a lot like a mob. But we have had many mobs actually thwarting laws before, like the school busing riots in Boston, mainly in the 1970s. School busing has ended, helped in some part by those mob actions. And other more prevalent racial incidentsoccurred before 1970, for example in housing, where white mobs got the result they wanted.
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Who We Really Are, At The Wrong Times.
On the other hand, we know significantly more about human nature and behavior today than we did fifty, let alone 250, years ago. Keith Payne’s 2017 book, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die, is an example of our collective knowledge in how humans actually think. Books by Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave; Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Biased; George Lakoff, Whose Freedom?; Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria, and Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain, also delve into how we process, frame, and absorb political and social ideas. While their research, data, and results may have different caveats and work from varied premises, we learn how much our brains have been programmed by evolution, and white-culture capitalism to make decisions our conscious and logical brains would disagree with. Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t really think that way, or want to.
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Since my essay is not about the research or data of human behavior, I am not going to present a lot of specific evidence. However, it is good to start with a reference point. One of the studies Payne wrote about included where by just placing in the mind of study participants that they were wealthier than the other participants, gave them as sense of superiority. This translated into how they voted. Study subjects who were tagged as wealthier were more likely to engender a conservative voting style.
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A substantial percent of these individuals were in reality voting against type, meaning participants were actually fairly wealthy or middle class. Yet they voted differently once it was suggested in the study parameters that they were to consider themselves rich or poor. The test-subject results also correlated with actual data from voting. Additionally, multiple back up studies were done using various forms of the experiment that confirmed the results, again and again. Most interesting was how this idea of wealth was determined by who you were being compared to, and it did not need to be Gates or Bezos. Rather it can simply be in comparison to the wealth stratification in your state, or medium sized community.
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What is found in those results mingles with our common theory of American politics, that democracy is messy. Or democracy doesn’t work perfectly, but it is the best system there is. The study results seem to show why this may be the case. People are not necessarily voting for their actual self interests, instead they are likely voting their perceived self interest in the moment. Clearly not everyone swings back and forth on the same weathervane. Some of us are more steady overall, but on what things and when? When 90% of statisticians are saying they are in the top half of statisticians, we can be sure that our views can be easily swayed by our subconscious mind, or introspective weathervane (Note: my use of statistician is made up, but there is a very similar study about professors).
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Our History Replete With The Elite, Noses Up Erring.
You can see in our history what the founding elite thought about democracy.
“He shuddered, in Democracy, at the Caprices of a Multitude, always blind, always extreme in their desires, and who condemn tomorrow with fury, that which they approve to day with Enthusiasm.” — John Adams, a letter to James Madison, 1817.
You also hear about the mob rule or tyranny of the majority trope.
“Where a majority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure.” — James Madison.
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And you have heard these concerns about who should or could vote.
“The right of suffrage is a fundamental Article in Republican Constitutions. The regulation of it is, at the same time, a task of peculiar delicacy. Allow the right [to vote] exclusively to property [owners], and the rights of persons may be oppressed… . Extend it equally to all, and the rights of property [owners] …may be overruled by a majority without property….” — James Madison.
Of course, the framers allowed the states to decide:
“The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” — Our Constitution, Article I, Section 4.
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There is at least a slight juxtaposition the founders put themselves in, which you will notice after reading a good amount of their writings. They spanned the supporting the poor and rich weathervane depending on the topic, and at what point or in what situation they were in at the time. Their concerns about equality flowed in various directions. They even hid some of their concerns including slavery, only privately noting their dislike for the peculiar institution in letters to friends, or just never taking it up consistently. These people were slave owners, like Washington, and those who owned no slaves like Hamilton. While not the same as a subconscious viewpoint, or the changing of one, those actions show how we humans can easily deceive ourselves, and others about our true or contradictory values.
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Madison was worried about both pure democracy, and republican democracy. Pure democracy would give every adult the right to vote, and it could involve having national referendums on every issue. And republican democracy is checks and balances including representation via House and Senate, and state and local elections. However, Madison chose the one where the most worthy, that is (human) property owners like himself, would benefit the most, giving too much power to the states, described above and in our Constitution. One big reason was likely that the states had a lot of power, and his personal fortune was based on slavery, which was claimed as a right by Southerners, so the states were more conditioned to protect it.
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My argument is not about changing the Constitution. However, a purer democracy is possible in another way. Before I get to that project, I want to explain how the founders are now more wrong, than they were for more than a century and a half, and why that makes even purer democracy also a good idea.
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The Ignorant Masses, Educational Morasses.
The founders had very little faith in the average citizen. In one way they were accurate, the masses were ignorant. The entire public being educated was not a common goal throughout the nation until over 100 years later in 1918, or nearly 200 years in 1965. I chose both dates to show how long we put off education, and how long we aggressively looked the other way as to racial segregation.
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Today, education is segregated from a different direction, yet as badly, due to persistent white privilege, our passive-aggressive looking away, basically pretending we have done enough. We say integration is great, then object to low cost housing because of potential property devaluations, or clutch our children when busing is suggested. No wonder direct or pure democracy is still considered verboten; our shameful and distrustful reluctance to universally and equally educate the populace lingers.
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Not The Mob But The Robbery.
As much as the founders talked negatively about aristocracy, they were selling it as well. Their true fear of the mob had to do with their need for short term financial rape. If (the mob) We The People were able to react, may be the nation would not have been as well known for its rape of the land, of native peoples, of Africans brought over in slavery, and of the masses’ wallets. Creating the best government ever was not their main reasoning. If they had looked closer at the ancients, Greeks and Romans, they may have seen that inequality was their downfall, not lack of enough governmental checks and balances. We The People are the only checks and balance that work long term.
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The American founders were not thinking long term, which the first four presidents made evident in their supposed anti-slavery stances. Each one, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, allowed the stain on our Constitution to be mostly whitewashed for two generations. That stain made possible the Civil War, and every race riot since. The January 6th insurrection is just the most recent case of inequality and white supremacy blowing things up. Building a nation on that premise was the greatest folly of the founders, or should it be the flounderers?
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That said, everything now is on us for not correcting their mistakes once and for all. Living with their legacy of soul stealing inequality, and dying from their American culture killing, white-supremacy virus, must end. Of course, conservatives will get inequality wrong. They will consider the concept from their narrow socialism, fear-mongering lens. Looking at the evidence of its destruction escapes them. It is folly to place together nearly a half billion people, and expect them to accept the lie that meritocracy, and deservedness constitute all the reasons for individual financial success.
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There is no individual success on anything but the smallest scale in such an interconnected space. No matter our privacy fences, or gated communities, we all influence each other in some way. The reason wealthy elites believe the did-it-all-on their-own bullshit is they successfully dug a trench around the We The People gauntlet. Maybe three, or thirty-two to one, but a 320 to one pay differential will not cut it anymore. Extreme income inequality kills democracies, republics, socialist, or communist states. That level of inequality kills people prematurely; it kills big and small towns, urban youths, and rural farmers. It destroys educational trajectories, mental capabilities, and more. The evidence is there, simply look around.
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Democracy Initially Arrogant Aristocracy Arranged.
As to the founders and a purer democracy, the United States has stubbornly, but gradually allowed more and more Americans to vote. That dynamic was beyond the comprehension of the collective participants at our constitutional convention in 1787. Such changes would have been considered too much democracy. All their prejudices would have arisen in stark detail if someone had imposed our current system of greater equality on them at the time; they would have been seen by us today as pathetic, racist, sexist oafs.
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Instead the founders were encrusted with greatness for mere half measures, and denigrating nearly everyone. Their indiscretions shrouded by two centuries of gaudy patriotism, and white supremacist, greed-influenced propaganda. Therefore, relying merely on their perceptions as we proceed today is ridiculous, and thus anti-American. A democracy that is static fails.
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A more direct and purer democracy is our only way forward. Will there need to be checks and balances? Sure. A lot of human behavior is subconscious. That means we must not simply trust ourselves in a free association manner. Knowing our proclivities to fall back on tropes, myths, fallacies, inferences, prejudices, etc. provides us with a different level of freedom. Systematically eliminating these biases artificially is possible. New freedoms are provided by a democracy where we determine the obstructions to our truth we want removed. We have complete control, and at the same time we can be kept under control by our own guiding lights, or purposeful restrictions.
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The Reality of It All.
Professor Payne posits in his research that many, maybe most every white person would make the same call in a shooting death like that of an unarmed Amadou Diallo in 1999, no matter their political affiliation, etc. Whether it is 99 out of 100, or less of a propensity, for a white cop, or white civilian to shoot a Black American in the same situation as Diallo, compared to 1 out of 100 for shooting a White American, the real problem is that police do shoot three times as many unarmed Black Americans than White Americans. Rather than deciding if Dr. Payne is correct, what I am asking is, would it not be great if we were restricted from making dissimilar decisions in similar situations, especially traumatically dissimilar?
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While educating everyone about their decision making process in racially confusing situations, and other problematic areas is a laudable goal, it may not be realistic, and just not possible. Professor Payne noted how he kept falling for a similar prejudicial decision in an experiment that was similar to having a split-second to decide whether or not to shoot someone. Educative strategies can help eliminate damaging white culture biases, and develop positive diverse culture perspectives early on, but once ensconced in late preadolescence, it may only help at the margins. Some preparatory instruction can even reinforce the bad behavior:
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For example, after I tell you about a dancing elephant, I want you to forget about a dancing elephant. Remember don’t think about a dancing elephant! Now go ahead, and think for yourself.
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How do we subvert such a deeply embedded paradoxical problem, and other biases that subconsciously disturb our peace, and harmony as a society? What I believe should be done is combine the two, teach to, or around the problem, AND do as much as possible to head off our most negative inconsistencies.
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Developing a more direct democracy can be a big part of the solution. What if the founders were restricted to taking into account their reservations about slavery in all their decisions, and their contradictory equality and aristocratic statements and beliefs, and could not rationalize their way out of those inconsistencies? Dr. Payne noted a study that showed how many Americans can believe two conspiracies that contradict each other:
- Osama Bin Laden was already dead, and the killing of him by Seal Team 6 was faked to make Obama look good.
- Osama is not dead, and is still running Al-Qaeda.
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Egregious contradictions like that, and mundane ones are something I want caught, and removed from my mind. That’s because falling in any such trapdoor can easily create more trapdoors. Think of all the powerful people who harbor many of these contradictions, and how they could be harming us.
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Anyone who thinks they are immune to the influences of our deep down, evolutionary thinking-processes is more dangerous than those who are ignorant of such things. While white cops may be in the worst jobs to employ evolutionary thinking in their split second decisions, who knows how much damage we do in our everyday actions. Of course, the power of evolutionary thinking plays a part in slo-motion decisions as in the murder of George Floyd, and the founders covering up their slavery stain. Our prehistoric brains are prepped to justify whatever we are doing or have done, even if we realize it is wrong. Only specific actions can be taken, and filtering strategies must be in place, to avoid these mental trapdoors.
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Disabling the tripwires and shutting those trapdoors is a paramount objective in building a viable, thriving, and long term democracy. If we are lying to ourselves in too many cases, fault lines will lengthen, widen, and deepen. We collectively do this in small ways every day, and have done it in major ways throughout our history. Unfortunately, to some greater or lesser extent, we cannot help ourselves.
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Working Reality Into Democracy.
The new democratic process will allow ideas to leave our brain, but before implementation those thoughts are filtered through our more perfect thoughtfulness. We determine as a society what those are, and we will be able to do individually as well. For example, saying I believe school integration is more important than my desire for another personal or societal benefit, means my vote, question, or suggestion will reflect the higher ideal. Though the other benefits can have a sliding scale status in the overall decision process. Matching our personal ideals with national ideals, the democratic system would be refined in ways it would not be, and could not be today.
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The ideals are basically filtering out our selfish or harmful evolutionary bugaboos. Though evolution is not fully unprepared for the 21st century, the system would work from the widest common denominator first, then graduate to more speciic functions if need be. Think of it as keeping us from overcorrecting in a vehicle skid, and making sure we turn into a slide, the same direction the back end of the vehicle is fishtailing, on an icy road. Since democracies are not panaceas, the new system would also correct for when others attempt, consciously or subconsciously, to use our ideals against us, and others.
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The system will curb our worst quick-thought tendencies, and unravel our anti-ideal, slo-mo rationalizations, so we do things more consistently, and see everything more clearly. These controls are not necessarily viable in real-time, as-you-live-out real life with family, in your community, or on the job. What this system should do is reduce our likelihood of implementing rules and laws that contribute to the negative occurrences and traumas in real life.
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We can develop better policies to limit police violence, and implement economic structures that reduce harmful levels of inequality. We must stop ourselves from continuing or reintroducing the calamities of welfare reform, mass incarceration, and billionaire booms when everyone else busts, that destroy American dreams by the tens of millions.
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The New, Purer Democracy Project.
We must further whittle away at the problems our Constitution will never solve on its own. There has been no significant amendment to the document since 1970. The E.R.A. came within three states of being ratified in 1982, and in 2020, three more states did ratify it. That means the 38 state minimum to become an amendment has been achieved. Yet, the law to extend the amendment vote has not occurred since 1982, failing last year as well. This level of approval, and still no amendment, shows the failure of our Constitution to overcome its white male biases. Imagine if we were still waiting on slavery to be ended merely because Mitch McConnell did not allow a vote on it in the senate.
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What if one person was blocking the right to vote for every American, except for white men who owned property?
What if one person was not allowing Catholics, Mormons, Jews, or Muslims the right to vote?
What if 12 states were blocking your right to do something that others could do?
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We cannot proceed like this. Mob rule and tyranny of the majority worries are a major reason we are still in this position:
Who got all the benefits our 1st few decades? Only white property owners.
Who got most of the benefits for almost a century? Only white males.
Who got all of the benefits for over two centuries? Mostly males, as rights dribbled in for females, and even less so for people of color, other genders and the poor.
Who still is not getting all of the benefits? Still females, other genders, people of color, and poor whites.
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Nearly two hundred years of avoiding the education of our entire populace was slowed by white privilege combined with wealth privilege. This proves the lie of the ignorant, easily-swayed rabble being the problem. By educating the nation with a lack of education, and all the biases and racist thought developed within that structure, we have degraded evolutionary behavior, modernity inconsistencies with a devastating prejudicial virus.
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Not only are whites more likely to shoot first, before asking questions, we will shoot a person with darker skin tones more readily, due to a defective genetic code; a.k.a. skin tone prejudicia predilectio. Now who has a lower genetic IQ?
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Complete direct democracy may not be possible, and will not be a cure-all, but in an advanced society, advances should be possible. Aristocracy and arrogance are harmful. Forced ignorance is harmful. Inequality is harmful. White male power and opinion left to its own devices divided us into factions. This ideology monopoly has denigrated the value of other Americans. More than half the population was made lesser, and given little chance to overcome their situation due to the founders’ original interpretation of our rights. If you add oppressive wealth and income inequality to the mix, 80% to 99% of Americans have been targeted as not worth enough to invest in and succeed.
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While there are some people who are truly lazy, and maybe do not deserve any help, these numbers are always and wholly exaggerated, and this fabricated and inflated derision only benefits the top few percent. Whatever the problems actually are, we end up dealing with it, not the mega wealthy. Most Americans often pay double their fair share, as the mega-wealthy mostly whine double their fair share. To overcome the harm done by our too inflexible Constitution, or at least how the white wealthy have controlled its output, we need a better system.
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An effective constitutional convention in our current political and social environment is impossible. Therefore change must come from another direction. A system that takes on the powerful and harmful in their own environment without the same restraints bounded up in the current political process. The system would prove the value of direct democracy, and make it possible to merge at some later date, with the current political process, or use its outside the beltway position to make changes without altering the structure of politics and elections as they are today. Of course, stripped of its extreme polarity, constant gridlock, and insurrectionist division.
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How would such a system be put together? We would combine the ideal filtering process, first noted in a previous section, with a comprehensive direct democratic voting architecture. While I believe a more complete democratic system earlier on in our nation would have turned out much better than the white male dominated, property owner republic version, we need to recognize that we got here in our tangled up state for other reasons as well. Human behavior is complicated by its inculcated prejudices, negative, positive, and bystander or neutral types, and its evolutionary prejudices, meaning how we all react to certain basic stimuli, e.g. fight or flight.
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Navigating around the evolutionary and inculcated prejudices that impinge on our growth as an advanced society is vital. We need to come to terms with how much we give over to a computer and other memory devices, versus believing we can improve all on our own brain power and functions.
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First, the reality is ever since humans began reading a papyrus document, someone else wrote on, we have given up some part of ourselves to a memory device or thought machine. The worry about A.I. taking over our lives comes from inculcation by movies and books. Being active in the development is not the same as being plugged in like Neo was to The Matrix. The system I am proposing would be constructed, and controlled by all of us.
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Second, every day we do things we should not. Sleep in an extra ten minutes. Spill coffee on our lap while driving. Dozing along a lonely highway with the cruise control on. Eat too many donuts. Stare at someone a second longer than appropriate. Once in a while those mistakes are much worse, and we do not know who is going to make them, us or a neighbor, or someone in the next town. That said, except for the Butterfly Effect, most of us will never physically harm anyone, and not know it. Oh yeah, I left out politics. Whether we vote all the time or never, what we have done, or not done at some point has harmed someone else. I voted for Clinton; he gave us the crime bill, welfare reform, and Wall Street deregulation. Obama did drone strikes, Guantanamo remained open, and gave Wall Street a pass after the 2008 crash. Still, both presidents were the best choice compared to the others.
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That said, imagine if the crime bill was half as damaging, and drone strikes were ended in the first one hundred days. Just resolving those two issues in a better way could have saved many lives, maybe millions. Yes, my improvements or yours could have backfired worse. That being said, removing at least some negative evolutionary brain activity, and inaccurate perspectives inculcated, we and our ancestors surely would have, over time, made things better. Otherwise, improving would be near impossible.
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The system would filter out those bad takes, and given us a clearer picture of what we were voting on. There would be two ways this advanced direct democratic system will help us improve our future. 1) The internal vote done with ideal filtering will determine how the We The People System lobbies Congress. 2) The knowledge we get from other participants, ideal filtering, and the system data will make our election voting more aligned with our ideals not confused by our evolutionary, inculcated and hierarchy prejudices.
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There are two acceptance stages of system functions.
- It formulates answers or recommends votes according to the overall ideals we decide are our own. Each time we make a decision, before it is inputted live, the system adjusts our answer to our ideals, if anything needs adjusting. We can choose to disable the feature, before uploading a decision or vote, but it always presents us our ideal decision. When we do disable, we must opt out each time, though no one else is ever aware of our decision making process. While opting out may seem like a perversion of the system, it is also showing us how our answers or votes are not aligned with our ideals. This provides us with a chance for growth in a way nothing else does today. Someopting out could also be completely, ethically justifiable.
- The main stage is the overall We The People System ideals. This provides the parameters for every goal, rule, solution, and lobbying effort of the entire WTP System. Any element that does not have the capacity, ethics, structures, or morals to fit within our ideals is rejected and must be reassessed, and voted on again, almost as if we are trying to beat the machine. Of course, it is a machine we made and control. So we can decide to rewire the ideals, but that requires another set of parameters to overcome. We do not want to constantly usurp our ideals to get a final vote. For example, if the founders had such a system, the concept of equality would have thwarted their efforts to enslave and disenfranchise people unless they eliminated equality from their ideals. Yes, ideals can be overridden, but the system requires a level of reality-in-your-face honesty that is very hard to avoid, and therefore, take part in.
Every system participant votes on the ideal agreement in the first conference, then all who join afterwards sign the agreement. Possibly every three, five, or eleven years, ideals are voted on again to reaffirm or refine, to avoid becoming stagnant like the Constitution has.
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Conclusion, Tilting At Quixote.
My parents constantly tilted at Quixote. They did it in South Bend when racists tried to stop a housing project getting built next to our nearly all white elementary school. Intervening with good ideas calmed the white crowd. The final the project was altered to some small multiplexes, many duplexes, and some single family homes rather than tall high rises. Then after moving to a small town in Iowa, after dad lost his job, they both fought to get better and more educational services for disabled students including my sister who has cerebral palsy. Mom and dad did also it from an early age, e.g. while in training before USN deployment in 1943, dad prevented two sailors from being harmed in a potential antisemitic assault by 20+ sailors, he was 17. The effective Don Quixote is real people doing it right.
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Tilting Don did it wrong. Humans cannot displace a problematic competitor by flailing around it. We must get off our evolutionary, high-horse brains, and reposition the gears of our machine that works against us, by getting real, and knowing how our machine actually works. Then construct a system that exploits our highest ideals. Not hide from our inconsistencies, or just poke at our problems with impotent equipment.
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Smart phones, digital connectivity, and A.I. are not any worse than heating, air conditioning, or transportation. It depends on what is powering them. If we allow others to power our politics and society, or dirty energy to power our days and nights, we often get, down the road at least, what we do not necessarily ask for. We must admit that changing our minds is not merely about positive thinking, ad campaigns, school curriculum, and seminars for a thousand more years.
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Harboring the worst prejudices so deep in our 245 year old (white) American culture, that continues today, and can be subconsciously and tragically enacted by our evolutionary brains, requires a two pronged approach. Yes, use all those educational elements noted above and others, as well as employ more and better direct democracy with an ideals protection architecture like the We The People System.
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By Richard The Chwalek
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