Government 2.0

In an open source society, anyone can do anything they like. They can learn how to do anything humans know how to do.

Say a person wants to turn off a power station. For the fun of it. So he gets the service manual, does a bit of studying and heads to the power station. He waits until no one is around and turns the station off.

What should this man's punishment be? In an open source society, where all information flows freely, everyone that was influenced by his actions would know that he did it. Or even that it was about to happen.

Regardless, in a society where no single person or group can legally exercise control over another individual, what can you do? Well, you can certainly tell the person about it. Shouting at someone or leaving them angry notes is legal. That's not really controlling someone. Call it, expressing your morals to them, why what they did is a bad thing. You may not however, cause the person harm.

After all, while your electric going out is inconvenient, it's not the end of the world. You may have lost several hours of work on the computer, but at least it gives you a chance to make it better the second time around. This man's action still don't give you a right to exercise control over this man.

Arresting a person, or physically detaining them is controlling them. They are no longer free to choose their actions. You see, humans are free to do anything by default. We can literally do anything we imagine so long as it is physically possible, which is literally anything. This includes both good and bad.

However, the universe is completely indifferent to good and bad. What happens, happens, it happens for a reason and it has consequences. The consequences of this man's action is that a lot of people are upset with him. The reason this happened is known only to the man himself, since we cannot read minds yet. I bet if you asked him, he would tell you.

Perhaps he was simply curious, but in that case, in his studies of disabling the station, he would have found that there is a proper, regular time for doing that, and he simply need to sign up on the wait-list to do so. Perhaps he was expressing anger at something. Be glad he didn't choose to harm anyone in the process. This act was a cry for attention, so you should talk to them and find out what they would like to say.

But let's get right to it, shall we? One man (a different one) is very angry. He has been insulted by another in the worst way. The angry man, out of rage, murders the other man. In current society, he is hunted down by police, given a trial, found guilty, and kept in a cage for a sizable percentage of this man's life. This action ensures that he has enough time to build up rage and hostility towards society, all but ensuring that he does it again if he every gets out alive.

In a Utopian society, the consequences of the murderer's actions are their own punishment. What could these consequences be? Well, someone kills the man out of revenge. A relative, or whomever. Perhaps most do not feel it necessary to to punish someone by death for killing the original murderer. We still have one murderer around, but at least he seems to have some sort of standards about who dies. Though his actions were illegal, as he exercised ultimate force and control over a person, the law itself does not permit punishment of him or the original murderer.

In present day, our "laws" are do no more, or very little to prevent crime from happening. You see, the only thing everyone wants is to live and increase their comfort level. That's all. The current winning strategy for individuals and groups to achieve this is at the cost of others.

You see, for as long as we can remember, "stuff", "resources", and other "junk" have been scarce. But now we have landfills full of it. We're not "out” of resources by any means. There's PLENTY for everyone. And if there's not, we have the technology to make more.

In Utopia, society is strong enough to grant everyone what they want, because that is the goal. Its rules are designed to achieve the highest average individual happiness. No longer should government cater only to those that are best at manipulating current systems of control to their advantage.

The real crooks make the rules so they can prevent others from breaking them, then break them themselves. This is the most effective survival tactic in civilized human history, it is a monopoly on crime.

However, it does not make everyone happy. In fact, it creates a very small number of happy people at the cost of the happiness of many times more. Laws are not designed to prevent crime. They are there to make punishment and evil behavior by the state socially acceptable. By saying they are doing it "for the greater good" and to "protect the people", all while gathering more and more power, the populous quietly accepts and ignores this State-sponsored hypocrisy.

The entire problem stems from creating a "government" or State that is an entity separate from the public. The government is a special segment of the population that are indeed allow to break the rules they are enforcing to enforce the rules.

Imagine, you go up to a person you deem doing something "wrong". You wrestle them to the ground, handcuff them, and lock them in an inescapable room in your home. The current state would charge you with kidnapping, assault, and depending on how well you took care of your prisoner, maybe even torture. Talk about hypocritical.

So this group of entitled individuals gets the idea that they can use the rules to their advantage, and maybe even help some of their friends out, especially if it gets more money for the State, their campaign funds or votes. Once the State is separate from the people, it automatically begins acting in its own interest due to the fact that people in power are absolutely incapable of resisting corruption. It is a disease of our mind. And because of this, if we are really serious about designing a stable governing system, we will have to understand that no human can be trusted with power anymore than another human.

Of course, we need to create the open society first. We need to capture the information we need. No longer would we need a trial if we have direct, impartial evidence of the event in question. There would be much work required, building a vast monitoring system. However, the reason this monitoring system is the opposite of "Big Brother"-esque monitoring is that its feeds are available to everyone. All information flows freely in utopia.

Structurally speaking, our current society is unstable by design. its economies are built on a fundamentally manipulable currency system and its government rests on a very small number of decision-makers called "representatives". We create these representatives because we can't be bothered to have a say in what goes on in our towns. It's our fault just as much as theirs.

Our federal governmental, capable of tossing around TRILLIONS of dollars worth of influence, is run by less than one thousand people. Less than one thousand people decide if we go to war, how our currency works, how our economies function and who lives, who dies and who they allow to struggle for survival.

Our society is much too large to be resting on the minds of a thousand men. Even if it's ten thousand or a hundred thousand people making decisions for the rest of us, it's far too few. I am a single person, and I refuse to be marginalized.

Every single opinion from every person matters. If anything, we are defined by how we think the world should be. And every human has a right to voice that opinion. However, it may not always be right to act on the opinion. Some people's opinions, even the ones of our Representatives, have unintended consequences resulting in a disadvantage for many people, for the benefit of the few.

Structurally speaking, the most stable government is one whose responsibilities are evenly distributed throughout the population. In these modern times, the Internet easily allows all of us to make the same decisions that our Representatives make in relatively little time each day.

Now, since people's opinions are subject to error, we have to make sure they are the right decisions. So a person, any person, proposes an "action" this Action is designed to benefit the whole of society. Any other person may object to the Action based on the grounds:

This action violates the rule that no human can exercise control over any other human.
This Action should not be pursued due to largely harmful consequences that outweigh the benefits. (requires verifiable evidence).
There is not enough scientific data available to determine the effects of this action. (gather more)

In this sort of stable society, everyone's opinion would be accounted for and we can make our decisions based on verifiable facts, the same facts used in the courtroom.

We have the ability, and therefore the obligation, to create a system in which everyone is free to do the same things as everyone else.

The transition between our current system and this stable system could be easy or difficult. It is hard to say. It would take considerable thought. Or maybe we could just do it practically overnight. It's not like people wouldn't adjust over time. But the real thing we're trying to avoid is chaos. When taking the wheels off a car, you have to put it on a jack first, right?

So anyway, the current goal is to create a system that prevents crime by making crime no longer necessary. The system treats all individuals the same. All individuals are government representatives. The system requires the free flow of information to be viable.

01.09.2011. 10:50

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