California has started an online forum for issue response. Far from socialism, this solicitation for online dialog to solve problems is both creative and revolutionary. Amplified by AI, it could potentially remove power from politicians while solving real world problems at the local and personal level.
Politicians love the adulation they get with tough ideologies and demagoguery. It gets people riled, like a football game, but ideologies all fail over time, overwhelmed by the tides of reality. Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Ideology is killing us. We need practical solutions to human problems, responses to global problems like climate, migration, and wealth disparity. At the end of the day, it’s our tax money. Instead of financing political fascism, imagine funding a government that proactively collaborates to solve human problems!
We have been trained to label such strategies as “socialist” evil. And as the US mythology has it, means taking money from hard working people and giving it to sluggards. False: socialism is “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole” (Google dictionary). Socialism conflicts with capitalism ideologically. So no, we don’t want socialism.
However, collaboration and cooperation between Government business is a requirement and critical component of our current system. THe gov’t contracts private enterprises for everything! It’s not socialism to pay a cleaning firm to keep the state house looking good.
Nor is it socialism for government policy to help business. Unfortuntaly we are in a position today where we help those who already have a lot. Oligarchy is worse than socialism.
To counter this trend, before too much more damage is done, we advocate for a new understanding of the relationship between government and its stakeholders. Approaching from an adaptation and survival perspective, we get far more useful ideas than from American individualism. What do we need to maximize the quality of life? How do we make it last? What can we do to limit strife, conflict, and violence? What new social contract could replace the “me first” philosophy in which emptiness we now find ourselves. How do we work together, like tribes did, for the survival of all?
What new social contract would help people to replace competition with collaboration?
Words are often misleading and an example is society’s lumping people’s understand of socialism into people picturing Russian society with no rights and a share all system that gets run by oligarchs. If we can come from a mindset of abundance where people share knowledge and commodities for the good of all, we will be a long way towards understanding the importance of climate protection, education of society with an open minded inclusive attitude. All people have something to add to the mix and in my opinion divisiveness is a cancer on our progress. We are beginning to see blogs about understanding consciousness. This is where we need to start as once we as a society change the conversation to potential and interconnection, we can proceed with raising our collective consciousness which in turn changes the conversation.
Right on, Marsha–
You wrote, “mindset of abundance where people share knowledge and commodities for the good of all” — I couldn’t agree more!