Alan Watts, in some of his talks, addressed what he called 'Democracy in the Kingdom of Heaven'. How traditional Abrahamic religion looks at God as a kind of monarch and Alan argues that in the age of democracy we still haven’t evolved our spiritual outlook to be truly rational. Even the contemporary manifestation of democracy, however, is authoritarian. We vote in a popularity contest for the group of people who get to rule the show for the next few years.
Before I understood the power of block-chain I was toying with ideas using technology in pursuit of true liberty. Voting through apps, or even better, deciding policy in real time through citizen apps or something of the sort. This thought experiment ran again and again into potential issues of security, fraud, corruption. Can block chain answer this challenge? I believe it can, but that is by no means to say it will. The powers that be will not give up easily just because we’ve found a better way. Does block-chain technology have the power to realize John Lennon’s vision? Imaging a world with no leaders and a completely decentralized government is one aspect, but in a deeper sense, I’m talking about a complete social and philosophical revolution.
Alan watts talked about the concept of a network being expressed in Eastern religions such as Taoism. The spiritual Matrix he argued is a superior outlook to deistic/ authoritative ideas. He was speaking before the emergence of the internet as we know it. We are now moving beyond even that. I’d like to propose an evolution of his analogical outlook: from the Web to Wikis and open source, and onto a truly decentralized independent node society and governance, reflected and paralleled by an advanced conception of cosmic order not only politically and socially but even internally: psychologically and psychically. That will be, if we can realize it in the face of the status quo, a far more accurate reflection of how consciousness and being itself has been in operation from the very beginning.
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