A Revolution of Decentralism

William R Collier Jr.

America needs a new revolution, a revolution that is peaceful and orderly, that will take power from the few who run our government and our economy for their own purposes and transfer it to the many, who can exercise it through their own communities of sovereign individuals who share a common set of beliefs and values and express them individually as well as through the rules of conduct within their community (rules consented to by the people who own the community.)

Our technological capabilities allow for a much greater level of self reliance in our homes and in small communities.

A cohousing community in Nashville, Tennessee called “Nashville Greenlands” consists of 10 adults sharing 3 houses with their own gardens and during the summer they grow 80% of their food, a feat made possible thanks to hydroponics and organic gardening.

This level of self reliance means that it is not necessary for people to depend on large scale organizations, be they political or economic, for very the things they need.

Can a community of 100 or so like-minded families use the resources they presently use, in terms of time, spending, and taxes that would normally go for centralized programs or large scale insurance programs, and develop their own social services, health care insurance or assurance, education programs, and the like?

The technology is there to do precisely this and if in the past the excuse for massive programs and institutions that control resources on a large scale was that this was necessary for efficiency’s sake this argument is much less logical today.

The real question is this: can a one size fits all social, economic, cultural, and political system ever operate successfully without concentrating wealth and power into a small group of people’s hands and can such a system even produce good results, such as prosperity and freedom?

There are two simple and undeniable truths that we cannot avoid or ignore without creating serious problems: people are policy and structure creates behavior.

What people believe, as evidenced by their character and behavior instead of what they say they believe, defines their true policy. If you assign someone to make decisions the decisions they make will not so much be based on the official policy that they are told to follow as they will be based on that person’s beliefs. You cannot make policy, at any level, without assigning people whose behavior over time proves that are in harmony with that policy.

The way people’s beliefs are shaped, and remember I am talking about beliefs that are proven by their behavior, is through the structure of rewards and sanctions in which they operate. If the structure of your system allows or rewards greed or lying and does not take precautions against these things, then you will produce greed and lying. Whatever is allowed and rewarded will be practiced and whatever is not allowed or is not rewarded is not going to be practiced.

These two factors of human behavior on a social level, which means that most of the time most of the people who succeed or prosper do such behavior, are able to be manipulated.

You can, for instance, change a structure by purposefully discriminating against certain people and favoring other types of people in hiring which then leads to a de facto, if not formally legal, change in structure.

On the other hands, if you alter the structure in seemingly small ways that change the way things are rewarded or punished and that change what is rewarded or punished, and then enforce it strictly then you can change the people’s beliefs, even without changing their opinion, by forcing a change in their behavior.

These two factors cause any system where decisions are made for large numbers of people by groups of a few people to tend to be influenced by manipulations of these two factors.

This small group of people tends to be inaccessible to most people most of the time: they are physically removed from them and, moreover, it is simply impossible for then to actually interact on an individual basis with too many of these people as they may be if they were representing only 100 to 200 electors.

People are inherently self serving, this is a basic human trait, and most of the time this trait is not necessarily bad. The tendency to be self serving can be expressed negatively as greed or positively as taking care of your family. It is greedy to place your needs or desires ahead of the welfare or freedom of other people, it is responsible to take care of your family before you worry about helping people outside your family, to not put their needs below the needs of people outside your home.

The natural tendency is to focus on what you need and want and what your family needs and wants and very few people, even “good” people, are totally altruistic and self-sacrificing. When you allow decisions that effect large numbers of people to be made by a very few people you will unavoidably see a system that evolves which has a basic policy, no matter what the stated ideology of its leaders, that centers mostly on serving the wants, needs, and interests of these people and their families.

The longer this system exists, the more this tendency to create a class of people who control the system in their best interests grows. Eventually you get to a point where the ideologies or stated beliefs of the various competing groups of elites are not much more than clever ways to get customers, investors, or votes by promising the majority of people whom they “serve” whatever is necessary. Most of the time such promises are unrealistic or the people making such promises have no intention of carrying them out.

Whatever your beliefs are about how society or the economy should be run, if you depend upon the creation of small groups of people to implement your ideas the end result will be a system that puts their needs above everyone else’s.

You may pretend that a massive “democratic vote” will express the will of the people, but this cannot be the case. Most people most of the time do not have the time or the energy to stay on top of issues and keep abreast of ideas in a meaningful enough way to have all the information they need to make a decision or to judge the behavior and character of the people they may be elected.

The promise of “majority democracy” is a myth: the plain fact is that most people do not have access to or the time to study everything they need to know about in order to make what we might call and informed decision. The larger the scale of people that are effected by a decision, and the more technical or complicated the issue in question might be, the less likely it is that most people most of the time will have a realistic opportunity to actually become well enough informed to choose what policy should be implemented or which candidate is the best choice.

Let us assume you want to live in a society that is based less on competition and more on cooperation, that the people who have much give to those who have little, and that profits are not put ahead of people or the environment. Now, go further, and say that some of you want a society that might be described as more traditional or conservative while others may agree that society should, as much as possible, be neutral, leaving such ways of living and moral choices only to the individual as long as the individual is not intolerant.

These are different points of view and even within the basic shared beliefs of cooperation rather than competition the structure of your society will be very different between the two different ideas.

A structure of society that says one social value or moral value system will prevail would prevent the second view from being implemented.

The structure of the second system would create a system where the tendency would be to promote an anything goes attitude and where people who want to associate only with people who share their values, or who want to argue against certain behaviors, will be suppressed and their children will be indoctrinated, against their parent’s wishes, to embrace behaviors that the parents sincerely believe are harmful.

The argument of the resent day ideologies seems to be, in effect if not in what is said, that we can either have one moral value system that everyone must follow or that we can only have a morality-free society in which pretty much anything goes except for anyone who might argue against or condemn certain behaviors which they disagree with on moral grounds.

The individual has only two choices: either impose your beliefs on the whole society or live in a society where anything goes but where you cannot speak against certain behaviors or choose to associate only with people who share your beliefs.

These are the evils of centralization of power and wealth: that it produces a class of elites who use their positions in their own best interests and that it creates a constant crisis in which the individual’s beliefs are either imposed on the whole society or where they cannot realistically practice them on anything other than a personal level.

Moral values cannot be practiced only on an individual scale or only in certain areas. Moral values should apply to everything in our lives. In concrete terms the individual who cannot choose the value system that his children will be taught, who cannot choose the rules of their economic relationships, who cannot choose the people they will associate with in terms of fellowship, buying, selling, and the like is not a free person.

The beliefs and values of the individual mean nothing and their only consolation is the myth that they can vote for issues they have no time or energy to understand and for candidates they know they cannot trust on one hand and that within their own four walls they can make moral choices.

Elections are a joke, basically you choose issues or candidates without having all the straight facts and, moreover, you cannot even be assured that your vote will be counted or that the election will be truly fair.

Your so called freedom of conscious does not extend to who you associate with or what you say in public despite the fact that the survival of your way of life and beliefs into future generations depends on having a cultural group (community, society) that promotes those beliefs and forms social, political, cultural, and economic associations which favor people who share such beliefs.

In the Muslim world the technique for destroying the beliefs or at least limiting the spread of the beliefs of other people is fairly simple: as long as non Muslims pay a tributary tax and do not seek to publicly broadcast those belief they are supposed to be left alone within their communities or churches.

The technique of the centralists is even worse, it goes beyond doing this: communities of people who do not embrace a values-free culture where the desires of the individual matter and nothing else, have no option for expressing their beliefs in public without some sort of negative social sanction and they have no right to decide to not associate with people who practice behaviors that they find to be immoral even as they must silently submit to the forceful indoctrination of their children by the schools.

It is said that having the vote, being able to live by any moral, or amoral, value system you choose so long as you do not publicly condemn or criticize other moral beliefs and behaviors, and being able to express yourself creatively any way you choose, again as long as you do not “judge” other people, is the true meaning of freedom.

The sovereignty of the individual cannot be practiced if the individual cannot choose what they will say in public, how they will live, what beliefs their children will be taught, what values will govern their relationships, and who to live with or near, who to buy from or sell to, and who to associate with in any capacity based on their moral beliefs and lifestyle choices.

The myth of the centralists is that “freedom ends at the end of your nose.” One has to ask, if all the people out there only have freedom within their own body or, at best, their own house, then what or who has authority or freedom beyond the end of your nose?

If your individual freedom is limited in this way then how can you interact with other human beings? Your freedom must extend to those relationships but how can you exercise this freedom over relationships that include people who do not hold your beliefs? Beyond this, how can you exercise freedom over a relationship that includes millions of people and that has rules that are established by people who live far away from you and who receive little more input from you beyond an ill-informed vote?

Here is a simple concept that may help us to address these myths.

The ability to control a relationship in a meaningful way that enables that relationship to accomplish the goals you set for it depends on three factors: size, agreement, and effectiveness.

The size of a relationship is defined as the ability of its participants to interact in a meaningful way and is influenced by the distance individuals must travel to interact, the number of people involved, and the communications and decision-making process itself.

The agreement level of a relationship is, quite simply, the agree to which participants in the relationship agree about their beliefs, values, morals, way of life, or priorities as well as the degree to which they agree that such shared beliefs and etc. should be used to guide the rules and standards of conduct as well as the structure, activities, and goals of their relationship.

Effectiveness simply speaks to the issue of the realistic chances that the relationship in question has to achieve its goals in terms of how many resources it can bring to bear and how effective the shared beliefs which govern that relationship are in terms of their goals.

We can speak of goals in terms of height, breadth, and depth.

The height of a goal relates to how big the goal is, whether the goal may be 20% self reliance for food versus 80% or creating a small community center versus launching a rocket into space.

The breadth of a goal relates to how many spheres of human action and interaction are to be addressed: is the goal to create a trading system or to both create a trading system and regulate product safety.

The depth of a goal relates to its details (does it seek general regulation of banking or to create detailed rules for individual banks) and the degree to which it effects the individual (a small tax versus a large tax, a regulation that allows civil unions of one that forces people to rent to people regardless of their lifestyle).

Every rule or policy is designed to achieve a goal. These goals can be purely material (make sure nobody is poor), they can be designed to encourage new behaviors (tax breaks for using solar power), or to discourage other behaviors (high taxes in cigarettes).

Whatever the intention, all rules and policies, one way or another, create a structure that tends to have material effects, that promotes certain choices and behaviors, and that discourages other choices and behaviors.

The laws or policies on paper are only to be looked at from the perspective of the types of people who carry them out and enforce them: to understand this you would weigh the proven effects along with the written law, the way it is enforced or carried out, and the type of people who are enforcing it or carrying it out.

Here is another simple principle: your personal freedom is directly related to the degree to with the laws and policies that govern your life reflect your beliefs and values.

It is not enough to say you can choose as you please in your life or cast a vote when the laws or policies you have little to no control over make it more difficult and less rewarding to follow your beliefs or, worse, if they block you from practicing those beliefs in an effective and practical manner in your personal actions, in your choice of associates in ALL areas of your life, and in your right to stand up publicly to say what you believe, including condemning other beliefs or behaviors.

Let’s ties this all in together with a statement of fact: the goals of relationships must be limited in their height (how large the goal is), breadth (the breadth of areas they address), and depth (the degree to which they effect the individual) in direct proportion to size, agreement, and effectiveness.

A relationship should have more limited goals if it is larger (because bigness promotes centralization of power and wealth) or if the level of agreement is lower (because its rules will always favor one set of beliefs over others and limit the individual’s sphere of freedom). This needs to be balanced with the effectiveness of the relationship so that the beliefs which govern it must be questioned and revised if they produce bad results and so that it has a sufficient enough scale to pull together the resources it needs to achieve its goals.

A general rule of thumb is this: relationships should involve people who have a large degree of agreement on as small a scale as is possible in order for the relationship to be able to have enough resources to get the job done.

The objective of society, according to the orthodox view, is to afford the individual the greatest possible freedom of action. Some argue that guaranteeing opportunity in a free market will suffice, others argue that this is not possible unless the individual is guaranteed, as much as possible, a living wage, housing, education, and health care.

The notion that the individual is the primary unit of society and that their freedom or welfare, op both, is the primary objective of society’s activities, laws, and policies and how it uses its resources is illogical. The individual cannot be said to be free to make choices if their choices are limited only to their personal actions and do not include how they define and govern their relationships and with whom they choose to have such relationships.

If you are speaking of a society of, say, 500 or so families who have very similar beliefs and who have created a system for making decisions through a process of consensus which balances both the individual’s interests and needs with the overall needs and shared beliefs and goals of the group, then you can say that the primary unit of society is the individual and that giving the individual freedom and assuring them that their needs will be met is the objective of that society.

Perhaps larger groups of such communities may pool resources for more limited shared goals: the larger the group and the less amount of agreements that exists the less decision-making power that group should have to impact the lives of individuals or small societies of like-minded individuals.

Consider the “American society.” It is large in size and the level of shared agreement is getting lower year after year.

What should the basic unit of such a large society be?

Clearly, the basic unit cannot be the individual, for then the individual becomes completely submerged. The individual can effectively express and practice their freedom within a small society, but it is a fiction to say that it is even possible for this to occur on the scale of a 300 million strong nation.

Indirectly, and ultimately, the individual is the primary unit of society, but in practical terms a super large society cannot be seriously effected by the individual and if the individual has no intermediary between themselves and the central political and economic powers of that society then the individual is a pawn, not an agent of influence.

The only possible basic units of the American society can be component parts in which representatives of a few people, who can interact with small groups by talking directly and regularly with their representatives or leaders, which means in practical terms that one representative has the ability to talk to up to 500 people on a regular basis, especially with the use of technology, while those 500 or people need to interact with no more than 500 people whose views they represent.

Call these entities what you wish, call them cantons, virtual cantons, free societies, or whatever: in the end these entities or around 500 small communities of around 500 families each are the proper basic unit of a society of 300 million people- given these entities maximum freedom of action, protecting their rights, their property, and their lives, as well as promoting their general welfare or even assuring them of help in time of need on a temporary basis are the proper objectives which such a society should seek to fulfill though its government and its economic system.

Of course America as a society consists of states and of corporations- the states are supposed to be represented in the Senate and the corporations tend to be represented through lobbying and through the Federal Reserve. It is alleged that individual are represented by the House of representatives through popular votes in districts that include, roughly, 250,000 or less voters (over 550,000 people).

The size of the US House of Representatives is actually good, it could be 400 to 500 members strong and represent these basic entities which consists of sovereign individuals who more or less have shared beliefs and who are somehow organized into communities of around 500 families.

(NOTE: these numbers are not set in stone, they allow me to paint a specific picture, but the greater principle is that they should be small enough communities of like minded people so that some form of consensual decision making is possible if desired and yet large enough to be able to have enough resources to accomplish their shared goals or meet needs they wish to partially or fully meet through some form of social cooperation.)

The smallest communities with the greatest amount of shared values, but which are large enough to handle most of the material needs of that community, should have the most amount of economic and political power which they can then express by forming larger groups of communities which choose a delegate to represent the interest of all 500 communities at the national level.

These delegates would not be free agents, they would take issues to the leaders or delegates of their member communities and then express those opinions. In addition to this, the people who interact with the national delegate on behalf of their small community would also go back to their own communities where a decision-making process would occur whereby the community could instruct its delegate in terms of the least favorable result and the most desired and possible results leaving it to the talent of the delegate to negotiate a good deal.

The idea of calling these entities “virtual cantons” comes from the Swiss model of confederacy which is based on Cantons that are actually consensual democracies and from the fact that while these entities would also be capable of being consensual democracies (or whatever they wished to be, within reason) they may not be based on geographic territories.

These virtual cantons should be made up of people of shared values and beliefs, generally they are themselves some form of a federation of more or less sovereign communities (I prefer the term commonwealth) of people who share the same values and who live near each other.

The individual is free to form or join a sovereign community (commonwealth) based on their own beliefs knowing that this community will be the primary means by which they exercise influence over the social and economic rules they will follow as well as their primary means of cooperating on a larger level then their own house for shared goals or to be assured of help in time of need or lack.

The commonwealth of sovereign individuals is then free to choose a federation of other communities (virtual cantons) based on its beliefs and values which will pool the resources of these commonwealths for shared needs or goals and which will send its delegate to the House of Delegates (renamed from “House of Representatives).

This is not specific, I am trying to show and hopefully persuade you to agree with the concept of decentralization without trying to be too detailed, as if I have all the answers.

The tendency to centralize power and wealth is bad, it is hurtful to our freedom and it is also not a very efficient way to run society if individuals and their small communities are to have a reasonable opportunity to live free and obtain material prosperity not just overall, but in terms of how the vast majority of people live most of the time.

If we give power to small communities of people who share the same beliefs we give maximum freedom to the individual, we allow various ideas to compete and prove how effective they are, we avoid the inherent danger of centralization of power and wealth, and we make the individual responsible for what they believe and how they act while making it realistically possible for those individuals within their communities of choice to obtain material prosperity and be assured of help in time of need.

This concept of decentralization balances the individual right of being an agent of influence within a society of individuals who share their beliefs and values with the need to avoid simply having the beliefs and morals of the majority being imposed on everyone else who lives under the jurisdiction of the government that majority controls.

In the future we should talk about how you can start to use these ideas and how a revolution from within, a revolution of sovereign individuals and their sovereign communities, can be carried out to decentralize American society in a manner that gives REAL maximum freedom to the individual.

Here is the bottom line of this report: centralization of power and wealth is bad and the only check against this that will work is for sovereign individuals of a like mind to form their own virtual commonwealths and virtual cantons which insist on and assert their basic sovereign rights, which is the sovereignty of their individual members, in the same spirit and with the same intensity as the men who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

 

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