Idea: We don't need a Revolution anymore.

[Cramulus]

I read the last paragraph (which introduces the new game as a possible solution to this elaborate problem Vex has described) as a call to drop out and change your priorities, rather than to set up your own independent nested society.

It's like - the gov't has you fooled into thinking you're poor. Vex suggests (I think) that things are fucked because there's this yardstick that the government The Machine^TM holds, and on one end it says Rich and the other end says Poor, and you're somewhere along that continuum, but you wish you were somewhere else.

So rather than trying to beat the system by getting rich, abandon the rich/poor continuum. Change your life so that money doesn't matter to you anymore. And if your method / mindset works, it'll spread virally.

am I reading you right, vex?

[Friar Puck]

I love the thoughts vex, preach it brother. If am am wrong please pardon the analogy, but it seems that your line of thought was expressed analogously by the baby boomer's commune ideal, although it seems you wish for a more splinter cell type approach. If this is a correct summation, what made those fail and how can we avoid those issues?

[LMNO]

Wait a minute... Communal Tribalism?

[Triple Zero]

EXREME ANARCHO CUMMUNAL TRIBALISM

(is a lizard conspiracy)

[LMNO]

...and then we set all the cows loose so they migrate towards the poor people.

[Cramulus]

Is Communal Tribalism different from Tribal Communism?

[tyrannosaurus vex]

CRAM: yes, you're right for the most part, except I was thinking a coherent system that snowballs into something larger, but does so quietly and quickly so that the State is caught off-guard (until this post is read by some NSA robot).

Fr. Puck: The Hippies failed because they were living in a dream world and based their philosophy on bullshit, but mainly they failed because the only Enemy they ever had was some vague notion of The Man, Man. We, on the other hand, have the benefit of another 40 years of evolution, plus the ability to laugh at ourselves. Plus, we have more Enemies than we can count. Also, Discordians tend to be less addicted to Free Love for its own sake.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I like the OP, but I'm not sure I agree with the optimistic conclusion (Didn't we try Dropping Out once?).

But a small point, the nation we live in today, is not the idea conceived by the colonists, their idea has been dead for more than a century. It was dying before the Civil war, but Lincoln put the final bullet in its head. Once the states were no longer freely associated, then they were all under the rule (rather than the guidance) of the Federal system. Since the that system has continued to grow in scope. Things like social security, universal healthcare, FEMA, FDA, ATF etc etc etc were exactly the opposite of that initial government design.

I'm not saying that I'm against those concepts or anything, just that the 1776 gang didn't plan for a society such as ours. And that just as their idea was quickly corrupted, so too would anything that replaced it. Anarchy may be for fools, but organized political systems appear no less full of fools. 

[AFK]

Any movement or organisation of humans is going to contain fools.  The best laid plans will be those structured with that in mind and with the best system of checks and balances for those.  Of course then you get into the matter of who defines "best system", and it seems a very lofty challenge to ever to get anything within spitting distance of that ideal. 

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Any movement or organisation of humans is going to contain fools.  The best laid plans will be those structured with that in mind and with the best system of checks and balances for those.  Of course then you get into the matter of who defines "best system", and it seems a very lofty challenge to ever to get anything within spitting distance of that ideal. 

This is an interesting thread and one that reminds me of a class I took a few years back called "Non-Euclidian Politics: A view from neither left or right" in it RAW basically spent 8 weeks showing off all the other models of government that have been discussed/debated/shitcanned in the past 200 years. Dozens of forms of Anarchy, versions of Libertarian that mix and mash in everything from anarchism or communism... but in all of these different systems, there are horrific flaws that don't account for the fools, the idiots and basic human nature. In systems that have a State strong enough to take care of its citizens in emergencies etc, the State is also strong enough that it can quickly become a tyrant in the hands of fools or humans. In systems with a weak or non-existent State, the State is powerless to assist in a time of need because of fools or humans.

[Friar Puck]

Fr. Puck: The Hippies failed because they were living in a dream world and based their philosophy on bullshit, but mainly they failed because the only Enemy they ever had was some vague notion of The Man, Man. We, on the other hand, have the benefit of another 40 years of evolution, plus the ability to laugh at ourselves. Plus, we have more Enemies than we can count. Also, Discordians tend to be less addicted to Free Love for its own sake.

Of course the hippies philosophy was deluded, however, my concern is how does your proposal differ? What have we learned in the last 40 years that will make the cut? I feel if we can lay this layer this may just present a serious option for the disenchanted.

I feel Ratatosk brings up a good point; if the nexus of governance was local instead of national we would have a greater variety of living options, which seems to be the point of the damn thing, at least for a few generations. Early Grecian [and to some extent early Roman] rule is a relatively good analogy; central governance, local power.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

No system can be perfect, and every system will eventually be subject to corruption and eventually to collapse. It should not be the aim of any generation to define a Utopia for all future generations, but to do their best to get as close to Utopia as they reasonably can, and leave it up to future generations to take on the same challenge.

That said, the theory behind governments is one of the points I'm trying to work out here. A government is a system of social control (obviously). In developed nations this system replaces or controls (to a large degree) natural systems of social control such as disease, tribal warfare, and the elements. People however are genetically programmed to adapt to and overcome systems of social control, and their governments are no exception to this innate law.

The corruption of a government is in part due to the fact that there is always somebody driving the thing, and beyond things like greed and power lust these people are designed to use any system at their disposal as a tool to increase their social standing. We are monkeys after all and just because we have legislatures and armies instead of sticks and rocks doesn't mean we don't wield them like weapons all the same.

The idea then behind designing a system less susceptible to corruption was, to the American Colonists, to design a system where no one had absolute power. They did this by using checks and balances, which worked for a while and then broke down, because somebody was in control of the checks and balances. They did not occur automatically. For example if the Congress wanted to pass a draconian law, the President had to choose to veto it.

The next step, in my opinion, is to create a system where no one is in control. How can it be done? I have some ideas but this post is already too long.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

No system can be perfect, and every system will eventually be subject to corruption and eventually to collapse. It should not be the aim of any generation to define a Utopia for all future generations, but to do their best to get as close to Utopia as they reasonably can, and leave it up to future generations to take on the same challenge.

That said, the theory behind governments is one of the points I'm trying to work out here. A government is a system of social control (obviously). In developed nations this system replaces or controls (to a large degree) natural systems of social control such as disease, tribal warfare, and the elements. People however are genetically programmed to adapt to and overcome systems of social control, and their governments are no exception to this innate law.

I agree with this notion a lot. Though for it to work, we would either need to live a life similar to that described as "rational anarchy" in 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (where the rules/State exist for people that need them and we as individuals follow the rules until they inconvenience us, then we selectivly ignore them), or some sort of system that would be a Utopia for the insane diversity we have here in the US.

In tribal systems, there is a political system, there are political rules/beliefs/traditions etc. It seems to work because everyone in the tribe shares the same view of reality. Here in the US we have thousands of "tribes", scattered across a continent. I have yet to determine what a Utopia would look like if it were to please a Fundie from Alabama, a liberal atheist from New York and the 998 other tribal groups that make up the US. Indeed, this point is really the only argument I can see against "diversity". The more our lives are different, the less likely we seem to be to agree... different cultures, languages, belief systems etc seem a guarantee that a nation will be fragmented.

JW's translated the Nebuchadnezzer's dream of a great statue as the march of World Powers that affected God's People (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome and "Anglo-America". They assign Anglo-America to the feet made "partly of stone and partly of molded clay" as a reference to the structural instability of our society vs. that of historical world powers... an interesting analogy maybe.

The corruption of a government is in part due to the fact that there is always somebody driving the thing, and beyond things like greed and power lust these people are designed to use any system at their disposal as a tool to increase their social standing. We are monkeys after all and just because we have legislatures and armies instead of sticks and rocks doesn't mean we don't wield them like weapons all the same.

The idea then behind designing a system less susceptible to corruption was, to the American Colonists, to design a system where no one had absolute power. They did this by using checks and balances, which worked for a while and then broke down, because somebody was in control of the checks and balances. They did not occur automatically. For example if the Congress wanted to pass a draconian law, the President had to choose to veto it.

The next step, in my opinion, is to create a system where no one is in control. How can it be done? I have some ideas but this post is already too long.

our
Good points, its one of the reasons I see Universal Healthcare as currently a dangerous plan, since it will (as with all things) be mutable based on the will of the party in power. So the next question is, HOW do we develop a system that has built in checks and balances that don't depend on humans.

My first guess might be a system were any and all laws automatically sunset after a period of X years and must be reviewed etc before they can be renewed.

[Diseris]

Blow voting out of the system as well, set it up by randomly choosing the tribal representatives from among the literate populace.  Have draconian laws against corruption in the state added to it and you could get a whole different brand of people running things, and their main interest had better be the betterment of their communities.

This would eliminate the need for campaigning and that associated corruption.

Can't remember whose idea it was originally, but school was quite a while ago.

[Iron Sulfide]

So, if you're interested, I'd like to invite you to a New Game... Just turn around.

...? this is more along the lines of something i was thinking. i'll have to chew on this and read the OP a few more times.