Monday, March 28, 2011

An Enlightened Society

I live in a country that's full of liars and saints.  We say that we love the cold winters yet travel to warmer climates to 'get away'.  It's called March Break.  


We also walk on water.  In fact we even play games on water.  The trick is to get the water to freeze first.


An idea has circulated on this land for many centuries: "Life is to be enjoyed no matter what".  We've learned to lie to ourselves about many things that go on here.  You probably know how our minds come up with ways to justify putting up with things we do not love, value, or find fulfilling.  We have even found ways to put up with things that no longer work, or have outgrown their usefulness.

We can lie to ourselves that society is well organized.  In some parts of the world you can hear, "We like our tyrant.  We need him and his strongmen to protect us from one another and maintain stability."  Or perhaps, "Electoral democracy is the best system we've been able to come up with to date."

But then we'd have to ignore all the other great ways of organizing in the world.  If we look at nature, for example, we'd see that after 14 billion years of experimentation it still favours self-organization of things and also of interactions amongst things.  That is something to ponder. 

If we look at the Great Law of Peace of the Six Nations people of Michigan, New York State and Southern Ontario, then we'd find a way of organizing recognized as having excelled for hundreds of years.  In fact the founding fathers of the USA explored the Great Law of Peace when looking for something that worked better than what was, and is still going on in Europe.  

We need to address the need to adapt our societies.  Capitalism now produces more beggars than millionaires.  We're producing an abundance of goods.  We need to ask whether things can still be considered goods when collectively their production and disposal destroys our planet. 

Is electoral democracy about spending billions of dollars to hire and fire the people we choose to represent us?

Perhaps we can take some of that energy we put into improving our own circumstances, and ourselves as individuals and families, and apply this to improving how we chose to organize as societies.

We can aim for an enlightened society.  A good place to start is to put energy into researching those methods from around the world, that already work well, but that we have not thought of using in our own society.  

Nations are essentially legal constructs that worked well to some degree.  Legal concepts of individual nations became how we drew lines in the sand.  However, these ideas of nations are a major cause of conflict, war and therefore death and ecological destruction.  Ideas of nations have stopped the people of the world coming together into a seemless whole.  

I believe humanity is able to adapt.  We can advance beyond countries full of liars and saints.  

A society of light is an international society.  It comes from enlightened responses.  We take a close look at our shadowy fears, our thoughts of revenge, posturing and exploitation amongst nations.  


A society of light is where everything that people cherish in the world is explored, and validated.  We can consider whether those things that others cherish can be implemented so as to improve how things are done locally.  

Andrew