When humans feel ignored, they become angry. When they feel powerless, they become complacent. When they feel threatened, they are capable of horrible things.
These are all very simple observations of cause and effect. I don't believe (m)any humans are horrible by nature, and even if there were a few, there should be enough decency among the rest to cancel them out and ensure that things like genocide, or widespread corruption, horrible working or living conditions are not really a thing.
Horrible things DO happen though and sometimes at a wide scale and over long periods of time. This leads people to have a rather bleak view of human nature.
What if all these horrible things could be averted by a few simple changes in our cultural narratives? What if an adjustment of a few learned assumptions could vastly improve the expression of human nature that most, if not all of us experience?
I will not be making a politically charged argument here. I want to present an idea that people from all different poltiical and economic and even religious ideologies can much more easily consider.
I don’t propose to know what system is fundamentally best, and I don’t propose to know how far any law should go or when we should get rid of laws entirely. Those are very nuanced discussions that will vary grearly depending on our experiences.
What does not depend on our experiences is our desire to feel like that someone claiming to represent us, actually represents us. We would all feel better knowing that our friends, our family, our neighbors ACTUALLY care about our well-being and our happiness. We would like enough freedom and mobility to move away from the things that feel bad and move towards things that feel good.
How to achieve any of that is where we end up back into debate but it seems increasingly obvious and less and less controversial that achieving it is much more challenging at a large scale and much much easier at a small scale.
Why then, do we care so much more about national elections than we do about local elections? Why do we care about any elections more than we care about creating a healthy environment on our street, or in our building, or in our own mind and body?
We defer our power away because we live in a society that is built from the top down. I believe some of our constitutions and the expulsion of colonizing empires as well as the intention behind most social movements are an attempt to change that, but we are still recovering from centuries of monarchies, empires, and ruthless expansionism.
It’s easy to look back and condemn these things, but from seeing what we don’t want, we can better understand the kind of world we want to build. As money and power consolidates into fewer and fewer hands and, we also see culture splintering into a million different bubbles. Governments and aristocrats can no longer maintain their monopoly on cultural narratives, and the concept of decentralization is becoming more and more important for those of us who are paying attention to these patterns.
True freedom does not require you to be like me. It doesnt require that we agree on a system. If there is anything it requires, it is merely this: mutual respect and a desire for peace. That is all.
Centralization is an attempt to force people to unite, but true unity does not come about from force. Trust is not given. It is built, and we cannot build trust when we are FORCED to trust. We are forced to trust our nations from a young age. They do not need to earn our trust. There is nothing mutual about the relationship.
Contrast this from a local community. When we look at a society that is small enough to fit into a single neighborhood, we have an opportunity to see everything with our own eyes. We have a voice. It is much easier to join or to leave. We have a chance to know everyone. We can make our discontent known. We can rally support and work to fix problems ourselves.
Is it easy? Hell no! In fact we had small societies like this in ancient times and they eventually devolved into wars for conquest that resulted in our current system.
Our current system isn’t evil…but it’s outdated. We needed some awful things to teach us how to make something better.
There is one thing we have today that people of the past did not. We have the added hindsight of the challenges and advantages of centealization. We see that it can lead to wealth and prosperity that the world has never seen, and that once we are all under the same spheres of influence, war and regional conflicts start to disappear, crime goes down as “rule of law” is enforced and the state gains a monopoly on violence.
It’s disingenuous to deny either the faults or the benefits of such a system, and so a decentralized society has all of this insight to draw from. It can pick and chose which aspects it wants to keep centralized while keeping decentralization as an ideal.
It also has THE INTERNET, a tool to communicate between communities and share information in real time.
Obviously the internet can be used for more sinister things, but over time, our growing skepticism of what is real will force us to build deeper physical connections to other communities and other societies. The internet will be a window into what may be occuring elsewhere, and then our relationships and networks will serve to verify and elaborate.
The internet is still incredibly new in the larger scope of things. Just imagine how long we had a motor engine before international travel became possible. Blockchain and AI are leading us into a new iteration of the internet now. We are about to see the next stage unfold.
Peace will need to be made between different communities, and it will have to be built through cooperation rather than coercion. It sounds impossible now, but thats because our incentive structures are still running on the old software and hardware.
Bitcoin offers the worlds hardest money, and the potential for a deflationary system, which turns everything we know on its head. Meanwhile other blockchains destroy the monopoly that government has on currency and will soon force them to improve if they want to maintain a semblence of their power.
Of course none of this will be easy. We may see more armed conflict and riots in the streets. We may see states and other powerful groups lashing out at being exposed for corruption, or having to actually prove the validity of their words. Misinformation campaigns and propaganda may get worse before they get better. International lobbying groups with more money than god may make a move to try and herd us into an even more centralized world. It won’t work.
We are experiencing a fundamental upgrade of the software and hardware that humanity runs on. It is not just about technology. It’s about our understanding of what’s possible and how we interact with each other.
Imagine a world where countries need to earn your respect and even your citizenship because you can easily choose to belong to a different system. Imagine any system that uses coercion to keep another system from flourishing can exposed by transparency and resisted by forks and bridges built by individual members from both sides of the bridge.
Imagine that anyone can declare autonomy and start their own country with its’s own monetary system and values. This may or may not be a physical country with borders, but it won’t need borders and a physical location to grow and evolve and improve with time. Imagine the majority of communities rally to support anyone who wishes for autonomy.
We are already at the forefront of this here.
We are building from the ground up, rather than from the top down. Our alliances are built through our own interactions and our communities are built by our own effort. We can join an existinting tribe, whichever one we choose, or we can start our own. Starting one is not easy, but it’s always possible.
The ability to fork means that the people with the most power always have to earn enough support to ensure that their ecosystem has the potential to flourish. Of course we are still dealing with a lot of people and a lot of structures that run on the old software and hardware, so it’s in our best interests to stick together as much as possible, but as more and more people become open to ideas like blockchain based governance and community tokens, our ability to lobby others with good ideas will grow.
This encourages the development of the individual. Rather than a system that incentivizes the cycle of selfishness and even deceit, we are slowly moving towards systems that incentivize honesty and a holistic view of the world.
This is not a revolution that people need to be convinced to join. It’s just a natural evolution of how we interact. It feels better and so it’s attractive to anyone who understands it.
We feel disempowered by majority rules because the majority is a monstrous coagulation, a zombie like combination of too many different things. We understand more and more clearly that we don’t want conflcit or coersion, and so naturally, people are moving to the better mode of existence. It’s only a matter of how long it takes for each individual to realize the transformation that is occurring. The worse the world looks on the outside, the more we will see people flock to our ranks, the ranks of the decentralized.
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