book stewardship and free culture This book is a freely-given cultural object. If you’re holding a hardcopy of the book, the price covers only the mininum printer’s fee and whatever the distributor needed—nothing more. The author—you might think this is folly—receives no money from the book. And the e-book is freely available for download and printing here: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/the-books. Furthermore, the entire text is released to the international public domain*, to be freely reproduced and improved. *(The rights to certain photos, illustrations, and quotes which were made by others remain with those photographers, artists, and authors. Though if you’re going to copy the book, you might as well include them too.) And so I ask that the holder of this book practice thinking of your role as something different than an owner. The bookholder is invited to take on the mantle of stewardship—as the steward of this book. Instead of the usual economic role of consumer/customer, this role of Book Steward is a freely-received and freely-offered cultural role, like a deacon, or sponsor, or arts patron.
the role of stewardship A Book Steward has two tasks: 1) The steward agrees to refrain from throwing the book away. If the steward is done with the book, they pass the book to another person who is interested...or donates the book to a library...or leaves the book to be picked up by a passerby—it’s okay to leave the book in the hands of destiny. They’re also welcome to return the book to the author. If, for some reason, the steward ends up discarding the book (missions sometimes fail in everyday life), the steward is forgiven ahead of time. C’est la vie. Compost in the earth is a worthy end too. 2) The steward agrees to refrain from selling the book. It’s not the end of the world if the book ends up in a resale store, or yardsale, or marketplace, yet that is not within the spirit of the book, or within the role of free cultural stewardship, for the book to be bought and sold. Commoditities (food, clothing, shelter) are good, yet not everything in life is supposed to be a commodity. If the bookholder agrees to this role, they are invited to take some scissors and ceremonially cut off the bar code from the back cover—thereby permanently de-commoditizing the book. Subsequent stewards are welcome to write their name or nickname, and the date, in the line of stewards below. The stewardship mantle is offered to anyone who finds this book, in any place, at any time. If the steward is a library, the agreement is that each borrower is welcome to serve as temporary steward and sign their name. This is one library book which is meant to be written in. If the bookholder doesn’t agree to this role, then no one will wrangle with the fact that they own the physical book outright—of course they did pay for its material existence—to be disposed of as they wish.
freely given + freely supported = free culture As an entirely separate matter, the reader is welcome, but not obliged, to donate to the work of Threefold Now: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/donate Henry T. 30 Old Wagon Road Ghent, NY 12075 Even one or three dollars, or one cent, or a good thought sent our way, is something. Wishing our obstacles well is a valuable gift. Or even donating to another free initiative or charity of the reader’s choice. And there are no strings of soul-guilt attached if you don’t get around to it. But that’s all separate from whether you are welcome to this book and to the stewardship role. The author’s economic needs are met—I receive my daily bread. I’m just glad to share the idea with you.
the line of stewards
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May 25, 2014 (1 printing) th Author ________________Henry T.________________________ Date: December 20, 2014 (4 Edition) Place: __ Ghent, New York, United States__ (If you’d like me to sign this by hand, I’m willing to sign it when we meet in person, as long as the place and moment is fitting for signing a book. Or you’re welcome to send a S.A.S.E. and, as long as I’m not whelmed with other tasks, I’ll send a signed slip of paper you could glue or tape here.)
Steward ______________________________________________ Date: ____________________ Place: ____________________________________ (Where the stewarty role was taken up.)
Steward ______________________________________________ Date: ____________________ Place: ____________________________________ Steward ______________________________________________ Date: ____________________ Place: ____________________________________ (If we run out of room, there’s space to continue on the front and back covers.)
Georgia O’Keefe’s ‘Morning Glories’, New Mexico, 1935
preface This book is half of a two-volume pair. This first book explains The Idea—including the difficult but necessary separation of nation and state—and shows what America might look like if she were to take up the idea and make it her own. The second book, entitled World Wide Trisecting, depicts what the rest of humanity’s world could look like as a true and worthy social organism. There are also the rudiments of a strategy. Lastly, there is a portrayal of subtle considerations which are enfolded within outer structures and events. The credits and back-matter for both books are at the end of the second volume.
an invitation to dialogue These books are not about the problem. The problem has been enunciated by others. If you would like to know more about the problem, read 1 Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States or any number of writings by Medea Benjamin, Noam Chomsky, Henry Giroux, Chris Hedges, 2 Chalmers Johnson, Naomi Klein, or Naomi Wolf. These voices awaken us from denial, so that we might recognize the depths of descent and deflate the false, nightmarish dreams which are luring American Humanity toward shipwreck and ruin. Others have done such a good job at characterizing the problem, that my book only needs to touch on those wounds as a stepping stone to a solution. The solution which is offered here is called societal trisecting—a social movement for the renewal of the art of political science and statecraft. 3 These books are about what civil society advocate Nicanor Perlas refers to as ‘advanced trisecting’, the third stage of trisecting—beyond the semiconscious ‘de facto trisecting’, as witnessed in the recent Occupy and Tea Party resistance against the fusion of Big Business and Big Government, and beyond ‘conscious trisecting’ as seen in efforts to form various cultural and economic enterprises which reflect some facet of trisecting, and in the slow movement toward trisector partnerships between the private sector, the public sector, and the third sector of non-profit/nongovernmental organizations. I have been thinking about the nature of trisecting for years. Fortunately, I have not been thinking alone. I’ve had the chance to test the concepts with friends who are leaders in global civil society. I have also benefited from an extensive exposure to nearly a century’s worth of literature on trisecting. Practical limitations, however, prevent me from fully expressing the entire array of imaginations on the subject within the confines of a single book. So the book is not meant to be an exhaustive treatment of the subject matter. Nor is it a scholarly work where all the movements of thought are 4 meticulously documented to their appropriate sources. Rather the book is an essay, an image, and a toolbox to advance a certain perspective on trisecting and global developments, in order to stimulate further reflection, discussion, and possibilities for implementation. I would deeply appreciate comments of any kind, positive or negative. This is intended to be a living text which can be revised and improved. In the back of the book are some resources for those who want to pursue the subject matter in greater depth. And I’d be glad to see your own image of humanity’s world in ten or a hundred years.
1
This and other books in the People’s History series edited by Zinn portray history through the often refreshingly revealing—though sometimes flattened and resentment-fueling—lense of economic class. 2
Here’s some reading if you still want or need to perceive that there might be a problem: Benjamin’s Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (2012). Chomsky’s On Western Terrorism—From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare (2013) with Andre Vltchek. Giroux’s Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (2010). Hedge’s Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt with cartoonist Joe Sacco (2012). This book includes a chapter, with cartoon illustrations to boot, on McDowell County, West Virginia, near where I grew up. Johnson’s Blowback Trilogy (published from 2004 to 2007) and Dismantling the Empire—America’s Last Best Hope (2010). These books portray the nationsized resentments which are evoked by America’s continued harm-doing. Klein’s Shock Doctrine—The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007). Wolf’s The End of America—Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (2007).
Okay, I admit I haven’t read all of these from cover to cover. I’m not that well read. I have read some of the books I recommend, and I’ve at least flipped through all of them. 3
“Social Threefolding”: www.globenet3.org/threefold.shtml
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The footnotes are almost a second book unto themselves. Don’t worry about stopping for each one. I ask that the reader forgive the ugliness of showing website addresses for the source articles. They’re not just there to prove the idea didn’t appear out of thin air. (So what if it did?) The references are there for those who desire to explore further into the basis for the ideas, and to connect with those related authors and impulses in various fields of civilizational renewal. i
reading suggestions for busy people I have some suggestions for those who do not have the time to read both books: Flip through the books and see what catches your eye. Read those parts. If you’re American, read the chapters in this book where the American Dream is reimagined. If you’re French, Irish, British, or Canadian have a look in the second book, wherein a further unfolding of those national states is depicted. In the second book, flip through the trisected flags for the countries you’re familiar with. If you get bogged down, skip that part, and move on. Some the chewiest sections are for the political scientists among us. The rest can be explored when time permits.
gathering the shards Some might bristle that I haven’t couched the Trisector Idea in more subtle or artful language. I admit that I favor concreteness and sharpness over vagueness. My perspective is that there have been nearly a century’s worth of study groups on this matter, which have together only partially penetrated and grasped the basic texts, in a piecemeal way. Isn’t it time for someone to simply lay it out in plain speech? The concept has been on the periphery of humanity’s consciousness for long enough. Or was the idea supposed to remain a dusty, broken heirloom? Were we supposed to wait till kingdom come? One of the pioneers of societal trisecting suggests that the idea, as it stands, is ready to be taken in hand: "Just take this concrete fact, that our weekly paper, ‘Trisecting the Social Organism’, has already brought out 49 issues—49 issues. Take these 49 issues, read them through in succession, and you will see what an amount we have collected in them of practically all the things which it is more immediately necessary for humanity to know about the Trisecting question. We have already issued 49 numbers; and really there is to be found in them all that is more immediately necessary to know. ...As a matter of fact we have written these 49 issues of ‘The Trisected Organism’, and the whole of the material is for the time being flung away. Doesn't it look as though we should be almost obliged to begin over again from the beginning; to give out No. 1 again just as before, and then all the following numbers, just as they appeared before? Having said really a great deal here, which was thrown to the winds, which never made its way into people's heads at all... What is wanted now, would be to set to work and actually propagate the Trisector Idea, as it is. Of course there are any number of things in the way of this; but they all reside entirely in the human will.” —Rudolf Steiner, “On Propagating the Trisector Social Organism” So I ask that you bear with my admittedly rather densified handling of the idea. This work is offered as an anvil for re-forging the shards of a broken sword...the spiritual sword of an idea whose time has come...the harm-free sword of civilizational renewal. ***
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imagine Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people living for today Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people living life in peace Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people sharing all the world You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will live as one *** “If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion—not without religion, but without this my God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing—then it can be true.” —John Lennon, 1981 iii
imagine one day "Imagine one day, the hateful world around you collapses. And it is your attitude, words and actions that put an end to it." —Ai Weiwei, artist ***
our objectives “Buckminster Fuller outlines what ought be our collective objectives succinctly: ‘to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.’ This maxim is the very essence of ‘easier said than done’ as it implies the dismantling of our entire socio-economic machinery. By teatime.” —Russell Brand, British comedian and incipient utopian revolutionary, from a 4,500-word editorial in New Statesman magazine, October, 2013 ***
waking to re-imagine the world “Above the greyness and crumbling and shadows, morning rays are piercing through like golden swords. Human beings are waking to this morning as if it were a call. And they are standing up. They are joining together to re-imagine the world.” —The young people of Towards Societal Wholeness, “A Cultural Manifesto for Our Time”, 2012 ***
what will this new world look like? “A vision points to the ‘what,’ not the ‘how.’ It is the destination, not the path. In this movement—like many others through history—we often declare: ‘another world is possible.’ In the document below, we begin to provide our answers to the obvious follow-up question, "but what will this new world look like?" th —“A Vision For A Democratic Future”, Occupy National Gathering, Philadelphia, July 4 , 2012 ***
an alternative model of civilization “As a historian, I see this current crisis and the events of the last two decades in the long-term perspective. What we’re going through, I think, is the consolidation of a particular economic model, a model that’s grounded in the financial sector, in a sort of ‘casino capitalism.’ I think one of the questions that this type of demonstration raises is whether we need to start thinking of a new alternative to the economic crisis...and I would say an alternative model of civilization.” —Gerardo Renique, Occupier and professor of history at City University of New York th Democracy Now interview, September 30 , 2011 ***
the total art work “Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build a social organism as a work of art. Every human being is an artist who—from his state of freedom—the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand—learns to determine the other positions of the total art work of the future social order.” —Joseph Beuys, social artist and shaman, 1973 ***
the rise of images “The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures.” ―Fred Polak, Dutch sociologist, The Image of the Future, 1973 ***
a new model...a new world “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ―R. Buckminster Fuller, social architect “A new world came into view.” ―Bill Wilson, ‘the greatest social architect of our century’, 1939 ***
blessing and vision “Everything which has become a blessing in human civilization has at first been regarded as pure fantasy.” ―Rudolf Steiner, 1907 “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” ―The Proverbs of Solomon
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do you want to play a game? These books unfolded as a response to a question: “What do you imagine humanity’s world should be like in about 1935 if there is to be room in it for what you are now longing for as a young person?” This question was asked to an audience of young people in Central Europe, in the year 1924, by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian-German philosopher. I first noticed this question in an old lecture which I was reading as part of a study group in 2007, while I was working and living in a community near Philadelphia. When I read the lecture, I felt as if that question was being asked in that moment, face-to-face. Over the course of a few evenings, I wrote out my own imagination of what humanity’s world should be like in about 2020 if there is to be room in it for what I was then longing for as a youngish person. That was seven years ago, and I’m now in my late thirties...a middle-aged person. Ever since that meeting, I’ve been honing my answer to that question. These books are part of my response. *** As I was writing these books in late 2013, I came across a similar question by Michael Ende, the author of the fantasy books The Neverending Story and Momo. He posed this scenario to a gathering of business and labor leaders in Switzerland: "I'm very interested in the fact that during this century no positive utopia has been suggested. After two utopias, Jules Verne's scientistic one and Karl Marx's socialist one, have been proved to have some contradictions, all that were depicted, such as Wells' Time Machine and Orwell's 1984, are nothing but a nightmare. People of this century are worried about their own future. Nowadays we don't even have the courage to think what we really desire. “So I'd like to suggest to you the following: now we fly on a carpet to the future―100 years from now―and everyone will tell the others how he wants the world to be. Is it so impossible to think of our real desires in the same way that we’re discussing the obligatory facts, as we are doing at today’s gathering? If we allow ourselves to hope for something, the methods and means for it to come true will also be found. All we have to know is to know what we desire. “So let's play a game together. On this game you can say anything, like ‘Industrialized society is better,’ ‘Non-industrialized society is better,’ ‘I want to live with this technology,’ ‘I'd like to live without it’ and anything else...if you follow only one rule: you can't say ‘it's impossible.’ In short, everyone will tell what future is desired." After some moments of silence a man replied: "What does this talk mean? It's totally nonsense! We should stay in the area of facts. And the fact is that we will economically crash without at least 3% per year's economic growth." —from Fantasy, Politics, Culture, 1982 And so Ende had to drop his question because no one could or would offer an actual desire or imagination for the future. *** So I invite each person that reads these books to play a game. You don’t have to play, but you’re welcome to. The game is this—everyone will tell what future is desired in 10 or 100 years. As Steiner and Ende put it: “What do you imagine humanity’s world should be like in about 2024 if there is to be room in it for what you are now longing for as a human being?” “Now we fly on a carpet to the future to 2104 and everyone will tell the others how he or she wants the world to be.” ...Not so much what you guess the world will probably look like, or what you fear the world might come to, but what you yourself desire-wantwish-hope-yearn-long for the world to be in a decade and a century. Your imagined future could encompass your desires for the whole earth, or your image might be the circumstances of you, your loved ones and friends—our own life is part of humanity’s world too. Your image could be a tender secret or as universally sweet as ‘world peace.’ In this game, rigorous honesty trumps decorum. It could be written, drawn, painted, carved, danced, chanted, whispered, enacted. Your picture could be painted with broad strokes or intricately detailed. Your imagined future could be as hilarious or as serious as you wish. As you wish. If you read any of the rest of my book, you’re welcome to take what you like and leave the rest. You’re welcome to write your own version of my book. Your response could be as short as one word, a single page, or twelve times longer than this hefty tome. The only tradition in this game is this: THERE’S NO SAYING IT’S IMPOSSIBLE.
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contents
preface imagine do you want to play a game? why i made these pictures and wrote these books
i iii v vii
part one: advanced trisecting
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there is a solution a lexicon the potentiality of an idea the threefold separation of powers the first action: separation of corporation and state the second action: separation of culture and state the third action: separation of the powers of commoditization from the fields of individual human development qualities of the three republics beyond democracy more about the rights republic basic income? unity in triplicity—the trisector senate the separation of judiciary and state service areas of the three organisms states, circles, and municipalities a multisector societal organism? imagining an epoch of rest
part two: the separation of nation and state
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voices for an apparently impossible requisite perceiving the nation and the state national-cultural organizations what would an nco do? other national memes—coins, banknotes, stamps, vehicle plates, mailing addresses, cultural ‘passports’ nation-based sports 72 stateless nations are already members of international organizations a peak body in the national field of culture nation-forming streams freshly offered national flags an anational political state signage and the linguascape dependencies & autonomies—a well-meaning hindrance what about federalism? twelve aspirations for cultural independence the “twelve and twelve” first wave of cultural independence vhavenda—the first effort for freedom of nationality trisecting circassia—a framework and solution a fraternal, egalitarian, and free tibet
part three: trisecting america
2 3 9 11 12 37 42 58 59 63 75 78 80 87 94 100 102
104 108 117 120 125 136 141 144 146 149 151 151 154 161 163 165 169 170 171
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henry’s story letter on the nation’s probation an occupy declaration of interdependence the threefold declaration voices for a second america who were the patriots and traitors? counsel to an emerging president imagining a threefold america the homeland economy the homeland governance from fraternal order to a citizens' watch from black arts to a citizens' militia the homeland culture wishes for appalachia and america anticipated questions on a threefold america lilipoh—the threefold way
173 174 177 178 179 196 198 207 215 228 235 238 247 266 281 288 vi
why i made these pictures and wrote these books Nightmare awakening. I awoke from a nightmare, and am resolved to clear a way for others to wake. Unless America makes an earnest change of course and awakens from its strange mindset, we will become the next enemy of humanity. Our grandchildren would name the three great and terrible evils of our time: the Radical Socialist States, the National Socialist State…and the NationalSecurity State. One hundred years ago, near the beginning of a Century of Nightmare, there was another branch of humanity which fell to God-mouthing militarism. In the heartland of another continent, men and women of all stripes praised Christ and Goethe, but that did not prevent the transformation of their national community into an anti-human shape. In reaction to a shooting by insurgents of the person who was poised to be the next Head of State, followed by a military defeat, an economic depression, and hyperinflation, in twenty years the heart of the Central European social organism had compressed into the mythically evil shape of a blackened sun. The state-worshipping red star and the market-worshipping blue star crushed the black sun and divided humanity’s world in two. Then the red star threw the fight, so that we are seemingly left with only a cold, dark blue light as the guiding star of humanity. In recent decades, the navy blue star purposely provoked the green crescent into becoming a terrible adversary, so that It would have someone to tangle with. The integrity of the soul of American Humanity has already been frayed by the total burning of two cities on the eastern edge of our world, and by the hardened remorseless for those and other harms. Besides the blood sacrifice to national interest, there is soul sacrifice. Like an earlier North American empire, there is already human sacrifice at a gigantic scale: unwitting parents feed the souls of humanity’s children to the American Way, with its Blind Market, its National Law, and its Entertainment Circus. Instead of young hearts or stomachs being yanked out, the delicately burgeoning, nuanced freshness is trampled flat by well-meaning but subtly desolating government schools, by the advertising and media spectacle, by servitude to debt and the struggle to make rent, and by the economic draft into the guard industry. Where the flower would’ve bloomed, a great and dark impulse is inserted, evoking either despair or swagger, depending on the individual’s temperament and station. The humane future does not demand that kind of sacrifice. th
We are in the 1914 of our century. As evidenced by the reaction to the 11 of September, were there to be another catastrophic intrusion or political assassination, American Humanity would have little resistance to becoming a full-blown Military-Corporatist State and locked-down PrisonIndustry State. Then, through us, the third legendary evil would arise. There is only one Hitler, and only one Stalin. American evil is of a different flavor. It wouldn’t so much be persons of a particular confession or nationality—but our whistleblowers, our substance-afflicted humanity and the providers of their self-harming medicine, our radical and libertarian ‘nutbags’, our migrating humanity and work-shy vagabonds, and humanity’s ‘unlawful enemy combatants’—who would be concentrated into the American gulag, or dropped and swallowed in the sea, or struck like ‘bugs’ in the hellfires. God bless America. Never forget. Freedom isn’t free. United we stand. If you see something, say something. Support our troops. You are not forgotten. American pride. In God we trust. Deploy, Engage, Destroy. —These would become anti-human slogans. The strivings of American Humanity, from Valley Forge to Lincoln to King, would have been in vain. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, ‘Too late.’ —MLK And yet…humanity is so beautiful. Outwardly, and in the pain-born beauty seen the glints of the eyes. Why not side-step the wounds which the National-Security State would inflict upon humanity? What concepts and actions will steer America upwards, out of this descending path? The social structures are not as beautiful as the individual human beings I see. I desire to make a societal organism which is as beautiful as the human beings who cross my path. Is it possible, or impossible, to follow a golden star? I fell to the afflictions and I caught my second wind. I learned to tell my left from my right. I became filled with the idea of a future worthy of the beauty of humanity. We—as it stands now, ‘we’ means me and the Trisector Idea—would bring a eucatastrophe…a sudden joyous turn in the story. Won’t you join us? —Henry T. Eastertide 2014
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“Advanced threefolding is the adult phase of threefolding viewed from a developmental or evolutionary perspective. ...In advanced threefolding, the substance of the different realms represented by the three key institutions is so well understood that creative, albeit radical new initiatives start to increasingly determine the substance of the threefolding process.” “Advanced threefolding is also the means to an important social innovation of our times, that is, societal revolution, the most dangerous nemesis of the Empire Matrix.” —Nicanor Perlas, “Social Threefolding”: www.globenet3.org/threefold.shtml and “The Importance of Social Threefolding in the Age of the Empire Matrix”: www.globenet3.org/Features/Feature_Empire_Matrix.shtml
there is a solution the problem: NEARLY ALL SOCIETAL DISTRESS IN AMERICA AND THE REST OF HUMANITY'S WORLD IS CAUSED BY THE ENTANGLEMENT OF BUSINESS, POLITICS, AND CULTURE.
the solution: INSTEAD OF OUR COUNTRY HAVING A UNIFORM GOVERNMENT WHICH WIELDS ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL-EDUCATIONAL POWERS, WE WOULD FORM THREE SOVEREIGN SECTORS FOR ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, AND CULTURAL AFFAIRS. This is the Trisector Idea.
the basics: A Trisector Societal Organism, or Threefold Republic, is realized by enacting THREE AMENDMENTS TO A COUNTRY’S CONSTITUTION. Through these three changes, the POWERS OF BUSINESS, GOVERNMENT, AND CULTURE ARE UNTANGLED AND UNFUSED. As these elements are separated, they are coalesced as three independent sectoral organisms, or ‘republics’—AN ECONOMIC REPUBLIC, A POLITICAL ‘RIGHTS’ REPUBLIC, AND A CULTURAL REPUBLIC. Each of the three Sectoral Republics within a country is AS SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT AS A PRESENT-DAY NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. Each has 5 6 their own DELIBERATIVE BODY (the Economic Forum, the Rights Congress, and the Cultural Council ), their own EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP equivalent 7 in stature to a present-day National Head of State, their own CAPITAL SEAT, their own separate NETWORK OF INTERNATIONAL EMBASSIES, and their own FLAG. The economic and cultural organisms are not ‘governments.’ Each of the three organisms is founded on, and pervaded by THREE ENTIRELY DISTINCT QUALITIES, namely—LIBERTY, EQUALITY, and FRATERNITY. Or to put it another way—FREE CULTURE, HUMANOCRATIC GOVERNANCE, and an ASSOCIATIVE ECONOMY. The three republics coordinate their activities through a TRISECTOR SENATE, with one third of its membership appointed by each of the three republics. The action of perceiving and separating these powers is called SOCIAL THREEFOLDING, TRISECTING THE SOCIETAL ORGANISM, or simply TRISECTING. A person who desires and strives to enact this is a THREEFOLDER. ***
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Or Rights ‘Parliament’, ‘Diet’, or ‘Assembly’, depending on the social organism.
6
Or ‘Council for Culture and Civil Society’ or ‘Socio-Cultural Council’ or ‘Third Sector Council’, since the cultural sector would include several fields which are not conventionally thought of as ‘culture’, such as healthcare, science, and political party organizations. 7
Organically, the Head of State would be the ‘Heart of Society.’ The Head of Culture would be the ‘Metabolism’ or ‘Belly’ of Society. And the Head of the Economy would be like the ‘Head of Society.’ The Economy is like the Head of the Social Organism. Like the human head, through which we perceive the outer world, the economy is where humanity interfaces with the physical world. But it’s also the most dense and dead organ, made of mostly nerve bundles. And like the head vis-àvis the digestive system, the economy couldn’t survive without the nourishment received from the cultural-educational sector. The heart and lungs lie physically inbetween the two, and despite scientistic superstition that all inner experience is based in the brain, the chest and circulatory system are the physical basis for our feeling-emotional life. Likewise, a healthy rights life is based on a feeling for what is just and balanced. The political rights sector is the mediator between the cultural sector—which is based in trans-physical ideas, imagination, and creativity—and the economic sector—which is grounded in extracting fruits from the physical earth. If you would like to know more, see: “Why the Social Organism is the Reverse of the Human Organism” at www.thinkoutword.org/resources-4/steiner-on-sociallife/hard-to-find-lectures-and-articles-by-steiner/ 2
a lexicon Threefold Now uses some uncommon words, or common words in uncommon ways. I have purposely avoided confining myself to the customary political and sociological terminology. I know which are the passages a ‘specialist’ opinion will call amateurish. My form of expression was determined not only by my desire to address myself also to people who are not familiar with political and social scientific literature, but primarily because of my view that our century will judge most of what is specialized in this literature, including its terminology, to be one-sided and inadequate. Here are a few definitions for freshened words which appear throughout these two books: war fearmongering people humanity’s world humane wisdom statism corporatism governmentalism privatism collectivism communitarianism individualism (egotism and egoity) social anti-social organism threefold republic associative economics humanocratic governance rights spiritual freedom revolution/evolution
war is a nightmare These books sometimes call war a catastrophe or a nightmare, so as to refrain from evoking demented glory.
a global war on fearmongering? Some words are so abused by propaganda that they have ceased to have any value for reason and become a mere emotional dose for generating heat. ‘Terrorism’, whether by rebels, or by a national government, is one of those words. Nelson Mandela was on the U.S. Terrorist Watch List for most of his life. So fearmongering will do.
people are humanity In the eyes of the U.S. national law, chartered entities such as economic corporations are each a “legal person”, while the individual human being is only a “natural person”. The non-human, deathless “people” have been purchasing more and more rights, so that enfleshed humanity is legally compelled to be raised as a captive audience and “consumer being”. In a humane republic, only individual human beings would be citizens with inherent rights. All chartered group entities would have only those rights—such as the right to enter into business contracts—which are temporarily granted them by the human citizenry. Also, the words “people” and “community” in the sense of “the American People” or “the Muslim Community” verbally cut humanity into pieces. The American People are also American Humanity. The Muslim Community is also Muslim Humanity. Unlike “people”, the word “humanity” refuses to be severed into parts.
humanity’s world The slogan of the UN is “It’s your world.” How nice. As if I needed a gigantic, unelected, governmentalist agency whose state-pleasing leadership is appointed by bloody-handed, remorseless nation-states, and whose policy and structure is nearly impossible to penetrate or change by unaffiliated human individuals, to tell me that. The world was not made as the stage for governments or for corporations. This world is humanity’s world.
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humane wisdom It’s no secret that Societal Trisecting is powered by anthroposophy, ‘humane wisdom’—a philosophy of life which arose in Central Europe before the first world war-nightmare. These Threefold Now books are offered as companion volumes to the original basic text, Die Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft (“The Core Points of the Social Question in Life’s Necessities of the Present and Future”) by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher, civilizational architect, and friend of humanity, including American humanity. The idea is voiced now in the language of America. There are several practical fruits from humane wisdom, each of which stands on its own merits. Trisecting is what anthroposophy offers in the field of political science, social art, and societal shaping. What Waldorf schools are to government schools, and Biodynamic farms are to factory farms, the Threefold Republic is to the nation-state.
statism vs. corporatism, governmentalism vs. privatism statism/governmentalism: The faith that the healthiest society is found where the economy and culture are administered by the Government, the State. To achieve this, government powers and portfolios ought to expand into more and more fields of life. corporatism/privatism: The faith that the healthiest society is found where the government and culture are directed by economic bodies and their specific interests. To achieve this, public (government) assets and services ought to be divested into the private business sector, and all spheres of life, such as schools and hospitals, should view the human being as a customer and market share. Another word for corporatism is corporatocracy ‘rule by corporations.’ Threefold Now’s use of the word ‘corporatist’ is distinct from, but related to, the various academic or historic uses of the word, such as the Catholic corporatist economic impulse of the late 1890s to 1930s, or the corporatism of medieval craft guilds. The word ‘corporation’ is from the Latin word for ‘body.’
collectivism (communitarianism) vs. individualism (egotism and egoity) collectivism/communitarianism: The faith that the healthiest society is found where the group, the community, or the nation—and its common mindset—is more important than the individual. In the healthy sense, this is community spirit, teamwork, and collaborative effort. The unhealthy face of communitarianism is seen in social programming, group-think, harmful ‘national interest’ (the nice, modern word for ‘nationalism’), and people-pleasing. individualism: The faith that the healthiest society is found where the individual, including the individual’s business interests, are more important than the human community. The unhealthy aspect is egotism, “me”-ness, selfishness, licentiousness. In the healthy sense, this is egoity, “I”-ness, enlightened self-interest, enlarged egoism—empathic individualism.
social—nine completely different words In English, and perhaps in other languages, the word ‘social’ has many different, distinct meanings. The meanings are as different as a ‘trunk’ of a tree, a ‘trunk’ of an elephant, and a ‘trunk’ of a car. Much confusion results from using one meaning in one moment and then, in the middle of the same conversation, unconsciously switching to another meaning. Here are nine primary meanings: 1) social = personally outgoing, extroverted (the most common everyday use of the word ‘social’ in English) 2) social = a shortened word for ‘social justice’ (which is often tinged with the emotion of the Left; a nice modern euphemism for ‘socialist’) 3) social = societal; relating to society, the human community in its entirety (a neutral scientific word) 4) social = political 5) social = cultural 6) social = economic 7) social = receptive (at the personal scale; in polarity with ‘assertive’) 8) social = communitarian (at the institutional or societal scale; in polarity with ‘individualistic’) 9) social = healthy, the Good (a deeper polarity than the other two polarities; the counterpart of ‘harmful’, ‘destructive’, ‘the Evil’) Trisecting usually employs the word ‘social’ simply as a synonym for “societal: that which relates to human society”—as seen in the word ‘sociology’—rather than its later, resentment-tinged, statist sense. Since the one-sided definition has gained ground, these books often speak of a Trisector Societal Organism instead of the Threefold Social Order, and Societal Trisecting instead of Social Threefolding. Occasionally, threefolders will use the word as a synonym for the political-rights sector specifically—the sphere of democracy—since that is the sphere of human social agreements. And threefolders sometimes use the word to describe a healthy economy—a social economy (not a socialist economy)—in contrast to the healthy 8 cultural sector, which would be founded on the individuation of the human being—individualism in the best sense of the word.
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“Don’t think that I came to bring a trite peace on earth; I didn’t come to bring a superficial ‘peace’, but a sword. For I came to divide and individuate a man from his father, and a daughter from her mother, and a daughter-in-law from her mother-in-law.” —A fresh rendering from the Book of Matthew 4
Outside of Threefolding, the word is sometimes used to mean the cultural sector of civil society. For example, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations speaks of three communities: a ‘political-security community’, an ‘economic community’, and ‘socio-cultural community’; the constitution of Cuba speaks of ‘political, social, and economic principles’; and there is a UN ‘Economic and Social Council’ whose political mandate intrudes upon both the economic and cultural sectors. Basically, the word ‘social’ is a very flexible word which can fill in for any of the three sectors, or for the society as a whole.
anti-social—not always a bad word Humane wisdom further differentiates two of those meanings of the word ‘social’ (‘receptive’ and ‘communitarian’, both at the personal scale and at the institutional scale) through combining them with a deeper polarity of ‘healthy’ versus ‘harmful’.
harmful social forces in the individual (receptivity to harmful relationships, conformity) harmful social forces in an organization or society (uniformity, statism) healthy social forces in the individual (identifying with others’ stories, interest in others, empathy) healthy social forces in an organization or society (fellowship, unity-in-diversity, association)
The same is true for ‘anti-social’ forces. There are harmful and healthy anti-social forces:
harmful anti-social forces in the individual (addiction, criminality) harmful anti-social forces in an organization or society (oligarchy, corporatism) healthy anti-social forces in the individual (enlightened self-interest, personal renewal, peaceably standing as tall as sick societal 9 structures) This ‘anti-social’ force has also been named ‘super-social.’ healthy anti-social forces an organization or society (benign anarchy, individual-centered cultural renewal)
These ‘socials’ and ‘anti-socials’ are depicted in sculptural form in the “Conceptions of Reality” chapter near the end of the second book. Their colors here (blood red, rose red, navy blue, cornflower blue) serve as a key. Only when the harmful anti-social and social forces have softened into healthy social and anti-social impulses, can a harmonious balance emerge from the middle...a center-space which has its own distinct qualities. On that sculptural image, the middle space is colored gold. The bipolar Harm itself is colored black and the threefold Health is colored white. Stay with me—it’ll make sense later. These ten qualities (the eight listed above, plus Health and Harm), even though they are called by only two words (Social and Anti-Social), are ten 10 completely different psychological and systemic forces. That so many distinct things are homophones will cause almost everyone, including the Wise, to stumble and slip into the default assumption that ‘anti-social’ necessarily means ‘harmful’. Yet depending on which of the meanings is being spoken of, an ‘anti-social’ force is just as often the healing force, and the ‘social’ force the harmful. To confuse them is to call black ‘white’ and white ‘black’. If the two sets of meanings are mixed up, and the complex yet clear reality is blurred away into a vague platitude named ‘Social’, then communitarianism is equated with the Good, but individualism is equated with Destruction and Harm. Then communities fall into a one-sidedness which develops along lines of only partially human interest.
from mechanized system to living organism ‘Social organism’ or ‘societal organism’ are other ways of saying a ‘country’ or ‘society.’ Enlivened synonyms help lift the Trisector Idea out of the rut of conventional political science. I’d rather live in an organism—an organic system—than in ‘The System’ of a mechanized social apparatus. And 9
“The personal disposition of the individual human being is outside the sphere of democracy and can only be judged in an individual way. The framing of laws is eminently a social matter. The moment we apply to a judge it is probably because we are concerned, either in a super-social or an anti-social matter, in a matter which has fallen out of the social life. All individual interests are of this nature.” —Rudolf Steiner, The Social Future (October 1919, emphasis added) http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/SocialFuture/19191026p01.html 10
...or 18 things if harmful and healthy social and anti-social thinking, feeling, and willing in the human persona are considered separately...or 26 things if harmful and healthy social and anti-social aspect within the cultural, political, and economic sectors are considered separately (for example, production is ‘social’ and consumption is ‘anti-social’)...or 32 if the six other primary meanings of the word ‘social’, such as ‘outgoing’ are included. When reading the two key lectures on this matter, which serve as the basic foundation for the renewal of sociology and statecraft, the reader is left to discern which one of the 32 meanings (or mix of meanings) is speaking through each instance of the word ‘social’ or ‘anti-social’:
“Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being” (December 12, 1918): http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19181212p01.html “Social and Anti-Social Instincts” (December 6, 1918): http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA186/English/AP1941/19181206p01.html
Humane wisdom also names this array of 26 distinct qualities as ‘negative’ (=social) versus ‘positive’ (=anti-social):
“Positive and Negative Man” (March 10, 1910): http://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0059/19100310p01.html
As with ‘social/anti-social’ these meanings of ‘negative/positive’ are clarified beyond everyday usage. 5
‘country’ automatically evokes the tired concept of a nation-state. The word ‘country’ originally referred to the land—the territory upon which a human community sits. Then the nation-state sentiment pervaded the land, and this con-fused sentiment pervaded us, so that we came to worship these locked-down governmentalized identities.
there are many ways to say ‘three’ and ‘healthy’ In trisecting literature, there are a lot of synonyms for ‘trisector’, such as ‘threefold’, ‘triform’, ‘three-membered’, ‘tripartite’, and ‘triarticulate.’ Those words all mean the same thing. The original German-language terminology is Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus: ‘three-membering the social organism.’ The word Glied means ‘member’ and ‘limb’, as in the members or limbs of the body. So a Trisected Social Organism would be a Threefold Country...a country with three sovereign sectors instead of a National Government. While not everything which has a ‘threeness’ is necessarily healthy, at the scale of a country, we threefolders suggest that only a social organism which is structurally trisected would have a chance for authentic, deep health. What is usually called ‘social renewal’ could just as well be named ‘societal holism’ or ‘civilizational recovery.’
the republic—a commonwealth beyond democracy The terms ‘Cultural Republic’ and ‘Economic Republic’ are not meant to suggest that these two sectors would be politicized and electorate-based, any more than the term ‘Threefold Commonwealth’ which is encountered in older English-language literature is meant to suggest that the Rights and Cultural sectors would become an economicized pile of ‘common wealth.’ In fact, the word ‘commonwealth’ is itself a Puritan-era Englished adaptation of the Latinate word ‘republic.’ The word ‘republic’ is employed in these books to make it very clear that these sectors become as structurally independent and cohesive as the Political Republic is today. The word ‘republic’ in regard to cultural life is employed by a pioneer of the Trisector Idea: “We must be a republic of teachers and kindle in ourselves the strength that will enable us to do what we have to do with full responsibility.” —Rudolf Steiner, “Address to the Teachers” (emphasis added), 1920
association—beyond the market, beyond banking, beyond capital, beyond labor An Associative Economy means a self-governing economy which is made of associations of corporations, instead of being controlled by the state (in the case of socialism), and instead of controlling the state (in the case of our corporate state). Such economic associations already exist in the 7,600 trade associations of the American economy. Yet these associations are not yet working associatively. The industry trade groups still look to the political sector to purchase legal rights. And they still wastefully practice closed-book accounting, hostile, ruthless competition, and the single bottom line (maximum short-term profit above all). An associative economy is based on practical, contractual relationships between corporation and labor, and between producer, distributor, and consumer. Associative practices include open-book accounting, pragmatic coordination, and the triple bottom line...profitability, humanity, and the land.
from democratic government to humanocratic governance The word ‘democracy’, as it stands now, means that as long our government is called ‘democratic’ then we must bow and scrape to whatever it says, even if its laws were actually written and purchased by deep-pocketed economic corporations via payments to two non-governmental organizations (called ‘parties’). Humanocratic means a democracy where every individual adult human person has an equal voice in the shaping of the sphere of rights, and where non-human ‘persons’—economic bodies and cultural organizations—have no voice whatsoever in this governance. Such a humanocracy can only be sustainably manifested where the economic and cultural sectors also have their own legitimate arena. And ‘government’ is another tired word. We go from Government with a capital G, to a human-scaled governance. The original gesture of st government and governance is the ancient Greek word kybernismos ‘pilotage, steering, navigation’. In the 21 century, each human being becomes a pilot, steersman, and navigator.
‘rights’—the new ‘politics’ Threefolders often prefer the word ‘rights’ instead of ‘political’, because the word ‘political’ is so worn-out and tired. Nowadays, the word automatically conjurers the grotesque circus of party politics, instead of its neutral or positive origin in the Greek word polis, which meant simply ‘city’, or ‘city-state’ or ‘a sovereign citizenry.’ The political republic is supposed to be only about ensuring humane rights—not the purchasing of rights by economic corporations with the parties wheeling and dealing as their broker.
spiritual = cultural = conception Trisecting texts often use the word ‘spiritual’ as a synonym for ‘cultural.’ That is for two reasons: 1) German is the language of the original basic texts. The German word for ‘spirit’, Geist, has some different connotations than in English. This is evident in how, in German, the everyday word for the ‘humanities’—such as literature, philosophy, and history—is Geisteswissenschaften ‘spiritual sciences.’
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2) The word ‘spiritual’ is intentionally used in an innovative way, with a non-conventional meaning which encompasses everything whose primary purpose is the development and unfolding of the individual human being, including intellectual and scientific fields, along with many other aspects of life. Anything which is not the government and not the economy. Some might blink when coming across references to ‘spiritual workers’ managing businesses. Yet this is simply referring to persons who’ve trained in business and management schools—that is, intellectual workers. We refuse to surrender the word ‘spiritual’ to its sometimes mindless or stale connotations. Humane wisdom perceives ‘spirit’ as a hearty thoughtfulness through which the individual impresses life with our own good, unique stamp. Our concepts and imaginations, feelings and aspirations, and intentions and willingness cannot be weighed and measured. That’s spirit.
free means free Free Culture. Free. The word still has some life in it, even though it has been abused by the notion of the ‘freedom of nation-states’ (trumping the freedom of the human individual), by the bending of the word to mean licentiousness, disorderliness, and libertinism (‘anything goes’), and by the Neoliberal attempt to define ‘free’ only in the economic sense of free entrepreneurship and free flow of capital (but not of labor). A free cultural sector is about individual freedom. Except for the judicial branch, which is transferred to the Cultural Republic, no adult would have to participate in any cultural organization. Free culture is also about being free of advertisements, and, at least in the further future, about offering all cultural services and objects (such as art pieces) for no monetary cost. In that way, there would be generations who will have unfolded within a real, palpable experience of ‘freely ye have received, freely give.’
evolution―unfurling a new way of life ‘Evolution’ is a fresh synonym for ‘revolution.’ Revolution sometimes implies ‘men with guns’ or ‘doing the same thing over again’ (like a revolving door). Evolution means to ‘roll out’ (Latin: ex-volvere), like the unfurling of a fern, or the unfolding of a flower from a bud. Constructive Revolution...Threefold Evolution...that’s the way we roll. ***
A recolored koru (fiddlehead) flag designed by Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser as a flag for New Zealand. 7
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the potentiality of an idea The Trisector Idea is only an idea. It’s only a thought...a concept. There are no Threefold Republics on the map. Some might say that any idea which is not presently manifest must be an abstract, unreal thought. In the 1760s the same could be said for the idea of a Democratic Republic. Except for the few small Mercantile or Calvinist Republics in the Low Countries, northern Italy, Corsica, and Switzerland, and perhaps some indigenous governances off the edge of the imperial maps—the Republic was an unmanifest idea. And ‘democracy’ was only a word from ancient Greek texts. In the 1760s, the map of the world was covered with Autocratic Monarchies. Two decades later, where there had been only Hereditary Oligarchies, there would be a new kind of social organism on the map. If, like Rip Van Winkle, we had fallen asleep on a mountaintop for twenty years, we would’ve awoken to two new flags—both colored red, white, and blue—flying 11 over every town in America and France. Two hundred years later, most social organisms style themselves as ‘Democracies’ and ‘Republics’...even the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The words ‘democracy’ and ‘republic’ have certainly caught on, even though the truest democratic and republican spirit has not yet arrived. These books are about co-pioneering a Threefold Republic in our lifetime, or in the lifetime of the newborn babies here now. So that two hundred years from now, the entire map of humanity’s world might be covered with healthy and humane states, economies, and cultures. That’s the idea. *** Here’s a collage of voices on the power of a thought...a conception...an idea:
never alone “They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.” —Philip Sidney, Elizabethan poet, 1581 ***
he who lights his taper at mine “If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” —Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, 1813 ***
first a thought “Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series, 1841 ***
one thing stronger “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.” —Victor Hugo paraphrased, 1852 ***
the song of the great idea “How dare you place anything before a man? “Fall behind me, States! A man before all—myself, typical before all. “Give me the pay I have served for! 11
The author is aware of the self-seeking, oligarchic aspects of the American Revolution and of the terrors of the French Revolution. Speaking of the legitimate ideals and efforts which were folded within mixed motives is not meant as a blanket admiration for all that took place. Reading Howard Zinn’s People’s History together with A Sanctuary for the Rights of Mankind: The Founding Fathers and the Temple of Liberty by Rick Spaulding and Maurice York (www.wrightwoodpress.org/saforriofmaf.html) provides a complementary picture of the both the shortcomings and the potential of the American impulse. The Spiritual Revolution, by its very name, would be grounded in entirely constructive principles, including that of ahiṃsā—the responsibility of refraining from harm. 9
Give me to sing the song of the great Idea! take all the rest.” ―Walt Whitman, “As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario’s Shore”, 1856 ***
an ideal is necessary "To believe that an ideal is not necessary for action is a great error." ―Rudolf Steiner, “An Esoteric Cosmology: The Mission of Manichaeism”, Paris, 1906 ***
an idea is made true by events “Truth HAPPENS to an idea. It BECOMES true, is MADE true by events. Its verity IS in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its verifying itself, its veriFICATION. Its validity is the process of its validATION.” —William James, “The Meaning of Truth”, (emphasis in the original), 1909 ***
shall thinking reach the same zero-point? "Shall thinking about what must now come about in respect of the social question reach the same zero-point as did Central European policy in respect of its mission in 1914? Countries which were able to remain aloof from the events of that time may not do so as far as the social movement is concerned." —Rudolf Steiner, The Core Points of the Social Question, 1919 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c04.html ***
longing for new thoughts “The age longs for creative thoughts.” —Steiner, “Longing for new thoughts”, Renewal of the Social Organism, 1920 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA024/English/AP1985/GA024_c19.html ***
pluck up the courage to think "Little thoughts will get us nowhere, so we must pluck up the courage to think great thoughts." —Steiner, “Ideas for a New Europe”, 1920 ***
filled with the idea "One can do nothing with people who do not want the Trisected Social Organism, but only with those who are filled with the idea." ―Steiner, The Renewal of the Social Organism, "Wanted: Insight!", 1920 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA024/English/AP1985/GA024_c20.html ***
a significant shift in the level of thinking “A genuinely fundamental and hopeful improvement in ‘systems’ cannot happen without a significant shift in human consciousness.” “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” ―Albert Einstein paraphrased, 1946 ***
a good idea solves multiple problems at once “A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once.” —Shigeru Miyamoto, game designer ***
to action “Ideas matter—they have consequences—they move people to action.” —Jacob G. Hornberger, The Future of Freedom Foundation, 2013 ***
ideas do not perish “Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map.” —Alan Moore, graphic novelist *** (Author’s Note: These books, Threefold Now, are offered as a map of the golden, savage landscape of civilizational recovery.) *** 10
“History often provides insight into the present. Consider the American South one hundred and fifty years ago, for example. There human rights and economic servitude were compressed into a single domain for black Americans. They became a means of production that could be bought and sold as a commodity. In many parts of the South it was forbidden to teach blacks to read. Control by law of education, part of culture, was found necessary to subordinate human rights to economics. The domain of rights and economics thus also engulfed culture. “Today we recognize rights which are independent from economic power, at least in principle. Modern workers must accept the authority of their superiors but only in matters directly related to their employment. Human beings no longer can be treated as mere means of production. We have separated economic power from civil rights at least to the extent of making slavery illegal. “If we can perceive how law, economics, and culture grew independent of one another relative to their nearly complete interdependence one hundred and fifty years ago in the South, then we can imagine the possibility of their even greater separation.” ―Joseph Weizenbaum, professor emeritus at MIT (died 2008) from his foreword to The Renewal of the Social Organism http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA024/English/AP1985/GA024_forward.html
the threefold separation of powers
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This chapter gives a sketch of the three constitutional changes. The details of a Threefold Republic could look different than what I depict here, the main thing is that the three republics within a single territory are as independent from each other as are national governments today, and that they are infused with three different qualities and operating principles, so that we don’t have more government, but only governance. The detailed examples are here to help the individual reader, and the social organisms, perceive the societal sickness in their own surroundings, and to imagine their own approach to enacting a truly healthy future.
An image from Occupy Wall Street
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Those with experience in each field of work and life could give a more nuanced, detailed, and accurate picture of how those fields would interface with the new separation of powers. (And we are each the world’s leading expert in our own life story and dreams.) I welcome others to live into the idea, bring it down, wrap it around your field of experience, prototype the possibilities, and join us in your own way. There are lots of people who are smarter and more eloquent than the author, more qualified in various ways, more this, and more that, or who have made a greater effort for the true and good future. I’d be very glad for these and anyone to make the idea their own. It’s not my idea. I just filled my heart, mind, and will with it. In the words of Edward Snowden: “You have the capability, and you realize every other person sitting around the table has the same capability but they don’t do it. So somebody has to be the first.” 11
“We see that where government should be a counter-balance to business, instead it’s being swallowed up. And we hear in response all the dissident voices of Occupy raised up and harmonious in this one urgent call: the separation of corporation and state. At this point, it’s clear to everyone that if a corporation is ‘donating’ to a politician, then they expect something in return. They’re not doing it out of the goodness of their heart, they expect politicians to create laws that are favorable to them, or, more accurately, they expect politicians to approve the laws that they themselves have created. They’re buying laws. “We need to correct this. We need clean, publicly funded elections. We need to end corporate personhood. And we need to see this problem clearly—see that we’re buying and selling rights and laws, and that these are actually different than commodities.” —Seth Jordan, Occupier and societal shaper, “Why Occupy is Unstoppable”, Fall 2013 Lilipoh magazine “Unfolding a Better World”: www.lilipoh.com/past_issues/2013Issues/Fall2013/Occupy_Unstoppable.aspx *** “Today, a very large proportion of the wealth that people own, or that is included in company accounts under assets, is actually the marketable value of rights, not the accumulated monetary value of profits arising out of the manufacture and sale of the products of economic production.” —Michael Spence, After Capitalism, 2014
the first action
is the Separation of Corporation and State…of Wealth and Rights…of Monied Interests and Public
Policy…of Market and Statecraft…of Business and Government…of the Economy and Governance. This includes:
The Separation of Corporate Personhood and Human Citizenship The Separation of Stock Markets and State The Separation of Banks and State The Separation of the Energy Industry and State The Separation of Corporate Interests and Environmental Quality of Life The Separation of the Insurance Industry and State The Separation of Professional Licensing and State The Separation of Corporate Interests and Labor Rights The Separation of the House Construction Industry and State The Separation of the Prison-Building Industry and State (and the right-sizing of the police sector) The Separation of the Arms Industry and State (and the right-sizing of the military sector) The Separation of Welfare and State The Separation of Unions and State The Separation of Postal Service and State The Separation of Agriculture and State The Separation of Housing and State The Separation of Transportation and State The Separation of Infrastructure, Utilities, and the Commons, and State The Separation of Trade Agreements and State The Separation of Economic Development and State The Separation of Currency and State The Separation of Lottery and State
the separation of corporate personhood and human personhood…of economic lobbies and the individual human voice…of ‘corporate democracy’ and human citizenship Imagine if what are now called ‘campaign contributions’ would be considered bribery in the Threefold Republic.
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Imagine if campaigns for political service were to be shifted from the principle of monied ‘Liberty’ to the principle of Equality. Candidacy itself becomes a paid rights service position...a contracted part-time government job. The campaign season is shortened to thirty days for local elections, 60 days for state elections, and 90 days for federal elections. For these months, all of the candidates receive a living stipend so that their material needs can be met while they are interviewed by the public, in a similar way that the processing interviews for a military enlistee are paid work. Just as a paid enlistee can be released from service if they don’t pass the entry exams, so would all but one of the candidates be released from their ‘part-time’ government job at the end of the campaign period. All aspects of campaigning would 100% publicly funded. The public governance itself, as the potential employer, would organize daily face-to-face, unscripted, moderated interview sessions with the public. The governance would itself bring all candidates together on a tour throughout the electoral area. Since the candidates are ‘on the clock’ for the entire campaign season, the governance itself would facilitate media appearances with all news organizations. Large and small news outlets would have equal access to every candidate, in a similar way that a government spokesperson is required to be open to available to all reporters during a press conference. If there were too many requests for interviews, the schedule of interviewers would be selected by random lot, from among the pool of professional reporters (including alternative press). Not that any particular media outlet would have to interview every candidate—that’s freely left up to each media organization. Candidates, as part of their job, would have to talk with many media outlets every day—the same, pre-determined number of media outlets, in fact. The governance itself would fund the display of public messages of equal length for every candidate, to be aired on television, radio, and internet. If a candidate willfully and flagrantly (The footnote continues on the next page.) 12
“The rows and rows of gravestones in our military cemeteries do not mark lives given for the defense of special interest politics. They mark the sacrifices made for our freedoms as a self-governing people. From time to time we must chase the moneychangers out of the temples of our democracy.” —Granny D (b. 1910–d.2010), “Hogs in the Public Trough”, 2002 As an 88-year old, she walked 3200 miles, for two years, across the United States, from L.A. to D.C., for the separation of corporation and state. www.grannyd.com/speeches/sub-speeches/hogs-at-the-public-trough.htm *** “If you think about every single important issue America has to address—if you’re on the right and you care about tax reform or addressing the issues of the deficit, or on the left and you care about climate change or real health care reform—whatever the issue is, if you look at the way our system functions right now you have to see that there will be no sensible reform given the way we fund campaigns.” —Lawrence Lessig, with the New Hampshire Rebellion The NHRebellion, comprising about 150 individuals, walked the 185-mile length of New Hampshire in the middle of winter, January 2014, for the separation of corporation and state. Further crossings are planned. www.nhrebellion.org *** “We must pass an amendment saying that corporations are not people and they do not have the right to spend money to buy our politicians. Corporations have no soul. They are profit-making robots. They are not endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. They are legally created fictions that are charged with maximizing profit without any concern for morality. They can and they must be stopped before they destroy our democracy. “We are not against the existence of corporations, we are only against their ability to buy and control our government. Robots can be useful, but that doesn't mean we should let them run our democracy. We must not allow multinational corporations to infringe upon American sovereignty. This is supposed to be a democracy run by citizens, not by international, unaccountable business and financial interests.” —Cenk Uygur, with The Young Turks, “How to Regain Our Democracy” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/how-to-regain-our-democra_b_1021067.html *** "If laws are allowed to arise out of the interests of economic life itself, the laws are turned into a caricature of justice.” —Rudolf Steiner, The Social Future, 1919 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/SocialFuture/19191026p01.html
the separation of stock markets and state Imagine if the primary purpose of the Exchange would be to create capital for human business; not to make obscure, surreal games whereby a few amoral gamblers, non-human economic collectivities, and golden family lineages extract the wealth and wages from the rest of the populace. Imagine planting a new flag above Wall Street—the flag of a Human Economy which accepts what is Socially Just…an Economy crowned with Goodness and Brotherhood. Do you have another plan for occupying Wall Street? And what would you do if you did? Shut it down? Show the corporate world that the Government is Boss? Kill Goldman Sachs? Replace the Invisible Hand with an Iron Fist?
the separation of banks and state Imagine a new flag flying over 33 Liberty Street, with the Federal Reserve organism transferred in whole to the Economic Republic. And imagine, if instead of reacting to a financial crisis with the drastic action of blowing a gigantic cloud of public monies into a bank bailout, the government were to take the similarly drastic action of making a clear stand for the homeowners. Imagine the Rights Governance voicing and enacting the policy that homeowners are really home owners, like this: “From the perspective of the rights governance, if you are a homeowner, then you really do own that house. Yes, from the economic perspective, you will still owe that money to the bank or house-seller; you are still an economic debtor. Yes, technically you probably broke the terms of the economic contract. But in the eyes of the rights governance, the fact that you are a debtor will be a separate matter than
broke their service contract during the campaign season, such as by privately funding an advertisement, or by giving unfacilitated interviews, they would be fired. The onus of the practice of Equality is put on the candidate and the governance, not on the media. The media, as a cultural field, would remain based on Liberty. The phenomenon of frivolous candidates (such as the Crustacean Party) would eventually fall by the wayside when government is again worthy of our respect. Furthermore, beyond the election, Rights Servants would be constitutionally banned from privately meeting with anyone who is representing an economic or cultural lobby. If the economic or cultural bodies have something to say to the public body, they bring it to the Trisector Senate. The rights governance would no longer be formulating economic or cultural policy, and would no longer be the ‘Bottomless Purse’, so there would no longer be such an attractive feeding trough. And perhaps most importantly, the economic corporations and cultural organizations would have their own legitimate arenas in the Economic Forum and Cultural Council. The political government would no longer be a centralized nexus which attracts all those economic powers who are seeking to purchase laws. 13
whether you can continue to still live in the home you own. The rights governance will guarantee that no local police will contribute to evicting any citizen from their home for failure to meet the house payment. And the sheriff will come and guard your house if the bank sends private security forces to evict you. It is your home, after all. And we will vigorously implement anti-harassment protections in regard to calls and letters from the bank and its ‘discredit agencies’ (‘credit’ means ‘to believe’ in humanity). The bank corporations are welcome to renegotiate a face-to-face, humane, economical agreement with each individual homeowner or with associations of homeowners, whereby each family can pay back the money at a speed which reflects their actual financial circumstances now, while happily living in their home.” The bank industry would cry: “Heresy! You’re encouraging the shirking of responsibility. If you’re not going to bring the full force of contractual law and sheriff-directed evictions to bear on homeowners, then we banks won’t finance houses anymore.” At least then we’d see the banking industry’s true face. In a Threefold Republic, the political governance wouldn’t be economically bailing out anyone. Let the existing banks fall, if it comes to that. Let them fail. The banks are not too big to fail. Humane, sane, reality-based banking associations could begin to arise and take the place of surreality. The emerging future believes in individual human beings moreso than believing in whatever sum of institutions are presently incorporated. Years ago, I overheard a bank manager, speaking with the voice of the Bank, say to a bank worker: “The Bank doesn’t make mistakes. Human beings make mistakes.” As if the fabric of these economic corporations would be, and always is, perfectly pervaded with infallible perfection—truth, beauty, and goodness—if it weren’t for the stinking virus of human persons through which the Bank is impelled to do its work in this earthy matrix. All perfection is credited to the corporate ‘person’ and all imperfection is discredited to the human being. Perhaps it is very rare for a bank to make an accounting error. Is that all that perfection has come to in this time—the ability to count well? In that case, the Bank, nay, the Computer, is the epitome of the perfection of one quality—the quality of calculation. What of the infinite array of other qualities which compose humanity’s world? And outside of the simple function of depositing and withdrawing from retail banks, the investment and loan divisions of a bank better have more than just a computer-calculated Credit Rating to perceive who, and how much, and at what time, the capital will flow. The best banks, at least in olden days, were based on human perception, human relationship, and humane means and ends. In a Threefold Republic, any ‘bailouts’—which are essentially economic subsidies—would be done by the associations of the Economic Republic. As it stands now, whoever has purchased the ear of the political leadership gets the money from the ‘bottomless’ government purse. Who has more money than the banking industry to purchase the ears of the law? If, due to an economic crisis, such economic subsidies were found to be really necessary, the Economic Associations would be able to perceive where such a gigantic cloud of capital needs to flow: whether to the bank associations, or to individual homeowning consumers, or to both, or to some other field of the economy.
the separation of oil and state…of coal and state…of energy and state Regardless of whether the earth sphere is warming or cooling, the fuel companies have a grip on the direction and pace at which our social 14 organism unfolds. We’re all in a kettle of oil. One West Virginian native puts it like this: “In West Virginia, we’ve been extracting coal longer than anyone else. And after 150 years of making other people rich, West Virginia is almost dead last among the states in per capita income, education rates and life expectancy. And it’s not an anomaly. The areas with the richest fossil fuel resources, whether coal in West Virginia and Kentucky, or oil in Louisiana and Mississippi, are the areas with the lowest standards of living. In part, this is a necessity of the industry. The only way to convince someone to blow up their backyard or poison their water is to make sure they are so desperate that they have no other option.” —Tim DeChristopher, “Tim’s official statement at his sentencing hearing”, 2011 www.peacefuluprising.org/tims-official-statement-at-his-sentencing-hearing-20110726 And the nuclear energy industry is a gigantic sinkhole which wields the public governance as a shield to cover its risk and losses. After Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima, what strange hubris compels the American industrial and political leadership to keep pushing the ‘Peaceful Atom’ onto Japanese Humanity, and onto American Humanity?
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Tim DeChristopher is a fellow West Virginian who, while he was in school in Utah in 2008, went to a government land auction to voice displeasure that national lands were being sold to energy extraction corporations for 12 dollars an acre. When he arrived, the auction clerk thought he was a bidder and invited him in. So DeChristopher raised his paddle and purchased several parcels. The government overseers then became suspicious and the auction was cancelled. DeChristopher even raised enough money to pay for the parcels, but the Executive Branch wouldn’t accept the money, because DeChristopher wasn’t a ‘normal’ corporate bidder. Regardless of DeChristopher’s action, the auction itself was later declared to be illegitimate by the same Executive Branch. The Executive Branch had ‘broken’ its own National Law in holding the auction. Nevertheless, to make an example of him, the Executive Branch and Judicial Branch sent DeChristopher to a national prison for nearly two years, for a completely non-violent, polite disruption of Government Operations. This is the first interview after his release in May 2013: “Tim DeChristopher Speaks Out After 21 Months in Prison for Disrupting Oil Bid”: www.democracynow.org/2013/4/22/earth_day_exclusive_tim_dechristopher_speaks 14
Imagine if the energy industries had their own legitimate place in the Economic Republic, with energy services provided through transparent, openbook contracts with Consumer Federations which actually represent each individual consumer stakeholder. Even some of our industry friends would see that an Associative Economy is good business. It’s about building an economy of goodwill. If Big Oil, Big Gas, and King Coal would remove their crowns, step down from their thrones, and take their rightful seats, they’d be welcome to contribute to a worthwhile future. We would not spurn their friendship, but Sister Wind and Prince Sun would be better Friends of Man.
the separation of corporate interests and environmental quality of life Imagine if instead of persecuting and forcibly holding Tim DeChristopher for two years in concrete and steel, there were an American Chief with such integrity and wisdom that she or he would appoint DeChristopher to be Secretary of the Interior. Or if DeChristopher himself were to be Head of the American Nation and State. And one little thing from my life: I would be glad if in my birth state of West Virginia, besides the ‘Friends of Coal’ state license plate which displays 15 the logo of that business-funded non-profit organization, there were also ‘R.A.M.P.S.’ (Radical Action for Mountain Peoples’ Survival) and 16 ‘Peaceful Uprising’ license plates. As I put the finishing touches on these books in early 2014, there occurs a spill of a coal-treatment chemical which taints the water of 200,000 human beings in nine counties—the size of a small country. No drinking, cooking, or showers. The company is named Freedom Industries.
West Virginia to scale with Europe. The No Water Zone is nearly the size of Northern Ireland and twice the size of Luxembourg. Maybe we don’t need more ‘freedom industries.’ Maybe we need ‘brotherly and sisterly, humane industries.’ And a rights governance that is actually distinct from even the most good-hearted industry. Even when, in a few weeks, the lines are flushed and the water is materially ‘clean enough’ to drink, how long will it take for the water to feel clean? The 4-methylcyclohexane methanol might be flushed out before long, but how long does it take to flush the feeling of fear out of the waterlines? These words from a man whose family is in the No Water Zone, speak with the elemental voice of West Virginian Humanity: “Something about this confluence, the way I had to bring potable water to my family from two hours north, the strange look of the landscape wreathed in rain and mist, the stench of a chemical that was housed directly upstream from the water company—something about all of that made me absolutely buoyant in my rage. This was not the rational anger one encounters in response to a specific wrong, nor even the
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In the language of civil society advocates, these are known as BINGOS ‘Business-Initiated Non-Governmental Organizations.’
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R.A.M.P.S. is a non-violent effort for Appalachian renewal in which the author has participated. Peaceful Uprising is a circle of cohorts affiliated with Tim DeChristopher. Tim’s Story is available here: www.peacefuluprising.org/tim-dechristopher/tims-story 15
righteous anger that comes from an articulate reaction to years of systematic mistreatment. This was blind animal rage, and it filled my body to the limits of my skin. “And this is what I thought: “To hell with you. “To hell with every greedhead operator who flocked here throughout history because you wanted what we had, but wanted us to go underground and get it for you. To hell with you for offering above-average wages in a place filled with workers who’d never had a decent shot at employment or education, and then treating the people you found here like just another material resource—suitable for exploiting and using up, and discarding when they’d outlived their usefulness. ... “To hell with you all for continuing, as coal became chemical, to exploit the lax, poorly-enforced safety regulations here, so that you could do your business in the cheapest manner possible by shortcutting the health and quality of life not only of your workers, but of everybody who lives here. To hell with every operator who ever referred to West Virginians as “our neighbors.” “To hell with every single screwjob elected official and politico under whose watch it all went on, who helped write those lax regulations and then turned away when even those weren’t followed. To hell with you all, who were supposed to be stewards of the public interest, and who sold us out for money, for political power. To hell with every one of you who decided that making life convenient for business meant making life dangerous for us. To hell with you for making us the eggs you had to break in order to make breakfast. ... “There are sensible, sane ways to do things. (A mile and a half upstream from a water intake facility. Upstream.) It’s essential for state and federal governments to consult with scientists—actual, real scientists, in spite of this area’s long and fierce tradition of anti-intellectualism when it comes to public policy—and provide a regulatory apparatus for maintaining safety standards and making sure things are up to code, and that there’s a protocol in place for when systems fail. That’s what a society does to protect the people who live in it. Or the people who live in it will—should, anyway—naturally come to the conclusion that their health and safety mean zero in the calculus of industry and politics.” “Having been made to endure poisoned Air, Earth, and Water, we ought to be mindful of that history, and make sure that history goes with us, always... “Otherwise, to steal a line from the old hymn—and don’t we love our Jesus, our stories of noble suffering around here—we’ll all of us, residents and politicians and operators alike, find ourselves standing in the Fire Next Time.” —Eric Waggoner, professor at West Virginia Wesleyan College, “Elemental”, January 12th, 2014 http://wvpublic.org/post/hell-you-west-virginians-raw-response-water-crisis-goes-viral The same could be read with the word ‘America’—or even ‘humanity’s world’—substituted for ‘West Virginia.’ West Virginia is not a different land—West Virginia with its ‘unquestionable’, God-blessed, corporate-purchased, ‘business certified’ Government, is a mirror of America and a mirror of the whole wide world. The ‘Bizarro America’ face of West Virginia is an image of the American Way lingering and lingering, with humanity declining into a wild and wonderless Night. Yet some people in other areas of the country take a sort of perverse pleasure in imagining West Virginia to be one big slag heap populated by retrograde Southern cretins who get what we deserve. Maybe it makes them feel better about their own denatured landscape and subtle wounds. Don’t be too proud you Northeasterners—West Virginia is only an image of something bigger which we are all a part of. The last time I saw inside the Beltway (Mother Columbia’s district?), Philly (the city who loves brotherhood?), Jersey (garden state?), Downstate New York (what kind of empire?), Lower Connecticut (still revolutionary?), and Boston (the Spirit of America?)—and Beijing, Budapest, and Bucharest—they were more parking lot than paradise. Despite the scars, the West Virginia landscape is still more paradise than parking lot. And there is much beauty and nobility in the humanity of West Virginia, in the humanity of the Northeast, and in the humanity which is nestled in every corner of our world. Imagine what McDowell County, West Virginia (materially, one of the poorest counties in the US, with the Pine Ridge Reservation as its peer, but like Indian Country, rich in soulful mood), and the entire Tug Fork, Guyandotte, and Coal River valleys, the ‘Chemical Valley’ of the Kanawha River, and my own native Bluestone Valley would look like if—instead of feeling like a world ending in dementia and perpetual soul depression—these spaces were to become even more ecologically luxuriant, economically versatile, humanly responsive, and culturally rich than the Swiss valleys wherein live some of the bank officers who are financing the digestion of our Appalachian landscape into a moonscape of tailings. The American Way thinks It can buy Appalachia and eat her—our pale wildwood flower. Unlike the Swiss Alps, and unlike the more ‘tony’ parts of the Northern Appalachians, such as the Massachusetts Berkshires or the Green Mountains of Vermont, our country-sized Ouasioto Mountains are thought to be expendable to National Interest, and our people, and our speech 17 and culture are viewed as a joke. When life gives us a country-sized pile of compost, maybe it’s time to make a country-sized garden.
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If you would like to see a depiction of a healthy, trisected State of West Virginia, then visit my sandbox at: https://sites.google.com/site/ohappalachia/a-tri-sectorwest-virginia. There’s flags there too—the existing West Virginia flag is an aesthetic monstrosity which only a mother could love. 16
Oh Appalachia! They're tearin' you apart. Your strong and steady heart Can't take the strain. Oh Appalachia! They mined you for the coal, But now they want your soul To leave you dyin'. You gave to us your song And the birds sang along And the wind answered back when you called. There won't be no trees left at all— no birds a-flyin'. Oh Appalachia! Your rivers and your streams Like memories and dreams Will run through our veins. You cradled us deep Where our loved ones now sleep In the valleys and welcomed us home Oh how can we leave you alone? Appalachia —Diana Jones, “Appalachia”, from Coal Country Music, by Heartwood, 2009
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the separation of the insurance industry and state The revolution will not be insured. In a purified Rights Republic, the First Amendment would be interpreted in a commonsense way to mean that no government, whether it be federal, state, or local, may pass a law that requires individuals or groups to purchase commercial insurance before peaceably assembling. “Congress shall make no law respecting...the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” I’m not a legal genius, and I’m sure that the professional constitutional scholars have an amply documented series of precedents stretching back for decades or centuries which explain exactly why it’s supposedly constitutional for municipal governments to require citizens to buy insurance before meeting in the park. But I’m here now, and here is the Living Constitution before my eyes, and it says those words. And I witnessed with my own eyes how the City of Hudson where I live now in upstate New York says that Occupy must buy insurance before meeting in the park. Is the 18 municipality of Hudson somehow higher or outside of Congress or the Constitution? What strange legalistic mindset has blinded America?
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But the sharpest experience I have myself witnessed as to how the Constitution is a dead letter, and that all the thousands of oaths which amply-salaried government employees swear to uphold and defend the Constitution are a grim jest, was around Independence Day in 2012 in Philadelphia. There I witnessed how the US national police (park rangers) donned riot gear and stood in a battle line next to a small peaceable gathering of Veterans for Peace who had quietly set up an information table and tent right next to a black stone upon which was carved the text of the Fourth Amendment:“Congress shall make no law respecting...the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” I went up and talked with the riot police, and I asked who’s in charge here, and the captain affirmed he was, and I asked him exactly why these men are going to be forcibly cleared away. He said: “They don’t have a permit to assemble here. Someone else might want to use the park.” I looked around at the vast expanse of the lawn of Independence National Park which had been preemptively barricaded and closed off on all four sides by the national government prior to the Occupy National Gathering, so that human ingress and egress could only be through a couple narrow spots. The vista of green grass was almost entirely deserted. There were shiny new fleets of Department of Homeland Security SUVs parked all along the downtown government district, watching...watching...watching. There were city police filming with police cameras. There were probably more national police there than participants. In the face of such absurdity, all I could say was: “You know, it looks like there might be enough room for some others to assemble.” It was notable that no elected councilman was there speaking with the veterans—it was left to men with guns. The elected ‘civilian’ governance had nothing to say, leaving the police to do what they are trained to do. In the end, a police negotiator came and a temporary permit was ‘granted’ by the city government over the phone...but only after the threat of state force was fully displayed. The national police had physically removed and incarcerated a similar gathering a few days before, with the arrestees intentionally left in un-air-conditioned police wagons where some got to experience state-induced heat distress and nausea; while the engines of the Homeland Security officers are left running all day, to keep cool as they sit and watch the citizenry. What am I missing? Congress (the law makers, and the executors of that law, and the chartered local governments of that law) shall make no law hindering the right of the people to peaceably assemble. Imagine if the entire layer of federal, state, and local statutory law and permit law which has encrusted the Living Constitution, were to be reperceived so that every statute had to be within a fresh, concrete interpretation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights...a clear and lively reconception with which every citizen could engage with, in the heat of the moment, without having to keep their own personal lawyer in pay—a commonsense re-rendering of all laws to be not only within the technical letter of the barnacle-like legal precedents, but within the humane spirit of the constituted fabric of agreements which are supposed to pervade our entire social organism.
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And imagine if humanity were no longer compelled by the political state to purchase insurance services to enter the Transportation Commons. New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and California do not require auto insurance as such; instead these regions require proof of the ability to cover a reasonable amount of compensation should an accident occur, with commercial insurance being only one of several ways of meeting that proof. Perhaps an even more fraternal way could be imagined. How much State-compelled money is funneled every month into the profits of insurance corporations, compared to how much is paid out? Where I lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Jefferson Insurance Building towered over all. Somebody paid for that thing. Mutual insurance agencies were originally benevolent associations of individuals who banded together and put money in a shared pot to cover each other if there were a loss. Since it was unlikely they would all suffer a loss at the same time, it simply made practical, brotherly sense. Over the past hundred years, those fraternal associations have prospered and become immortal, publicly-traded corporate entities who are compelled by the absentee shareholder culture to be steered only by numerical profit. And these entities then discovered that if they paid political servants to enact laws which compelled all citizens to buy their commercial services, they would have captive customers. Didn’t you know that the insurance companies themselves wrote and purchased the laws which require insurance before doing this or that? Likewise, imagine if human beings were not compelled to purchase commercial insurance to receive medical, healing treatment. What would a non-corporatist and non-governmentalist—yet still universalized—purification of ObamaCare look like? American Humanity was holding out for a Sacramental Medical Sector, but the idea didn’t arrive in time.
the separation of professional licensing and state I’m not suggesting that professional traditions and standards be chaotically thrown to the wind, or even that they should be lessened or 20 loosened...yet imagine if the economic and cultural professions, like the guilds of old, themselves established their own best practices. As it stands now, the various professions pay, through their lobbies, to have the State carve out a mandate for their industry. The industry itself writes the law, which thereby ensures a perpetual flow of tuition-paying trainees to the licensed schools for each industry. The consumer’s options are also steered by this State compulsion. “...The same with the State-architects: it really cannot matter, what their relations are with the legal profession; for, the moment one enters upon the Threefold Republic, it is not possible to talk of Government-architects, since one is talking here on the basis of a political State, which is strictly democratic ground, and comprises in its sphere those things in which every full-grown human being meets every other full-grown human being as an equal; and it really cannot be a question of the line this democratic State would take as regards a person on whom some title is to be conferred, and things of that kind.” —Rudolf Steiner, “On Propagating the Trisector Social Organism” http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/TOBS-II/19200609p01.html Perhaps the most blatant example is the licensed massage therapist industry. While I recognize the legitimacy of this healing art, what political Right is being expressed by the various Government dictates on this field of culture? The State of New York requires 1000 hours of schooling, 150 hours of student training, and a $108 fee paid to the government before a human being can accept money for rubbing someone’s back. There are paragraphs and paragraphs of rules dictating how to transfer their practice from another state to this one, and how one has to be retrained with even more schooling before one can practice in New York. Can’t it be left to the consumers of this cultural service to tell whether their back feels better or not? If it’s such a dangerous art, maybe the industry lobbyists should purchase another law which requires spouses to be licensed before 21 rubbing each other’s shoulders. From a soul perspective, Government-directed professionalization presses the demeanor of our intellectual professions into a certain shape. This is witnessed in how many medical doctors and lawyers bill their time at hundreds of dollars per hour. Is their hour of service really worth that much more than the hour spent ringing up customers in a frantic convenience store? Maybe it is worth somewhat more...but many times more? Imagine if patients could charge doctors the same hourly rate for every minute a patient had to wait in the waiting room beyond the scheduled appointment time. Our professional people went through a sort of government-approved, systemic hazing to get their licensing, and are burdened by hundreds of thousands of dollars in educational debt, and so now many feel they deserve whatever financial and obsequious benefits come with their State22 crafted professional status. Through this thick initiation, our time (the substance of life) and our souls—our outlook on life and our place within it—are vulnerable to becoming commoditized and hardened. 19
If entry into the roadway commons isn’t a right, then why are those commons owned, constructed, and maintained by the State, which ought to be concerned with rights alone? And if entry by foot is the basic citizen’s right, but car travel is a privilege, then why are our highways and byways not engineered to provide safe access (much less, pleasant access) by foot to every residence and business in the country? 20 For a perspective from Associative Economics, see “Spiritual Remuneration: Has Professionalism been captured by Statism and Privatism?” by British economist Arthur Edwards at http://talkingeconomics.blogspot.com/2012/05/spiritual-remuneration.html 21
The massage example may sound absurd, but this is actually the tendency of Professionalist Statism. A nearly parallel situation is how the professional teacher lobbies (most of whom are government employees) try to ban home-schooling and private tutorial-based teaching, or make the field so bogged down with legal hurdles that only large private educational corporations can afford to navigate the sea of red tape. 22
You may say: “Well, the store clerk should’ve studied harder and gotten a degree.” That’s a naughty, dishonest thought. That wide-spread thought is blind to the fact that our social organism really, truly needs people to man the cash register at gas stations, to prepare the food at restaurants, and pick the apple off the tree. (The footnote continues on the next page.) 19
the separation of corporate interests and labor rights The right to rest Given the labor-saving technology which humanity developed this past century, all Americans, and perhaps all of industrialized humanity, could be 23 working 30-hour-a-week jobs, with 12 paid holidays and a month of vacation per year (not only government school teachers), and a sabbatical 24 every seven years (not only tenured professors), with the same material quality of life which the middle-class lived in the 1950s.
Even if we all had master’s degrees and doctorates, some of us would still need to humble ourselves and show up at the service counter and the farm field...unless migrant non-citizens are supposed to do all handwork. But that’s just postponing the day when all of Mexican Humanity and Chinese Humanity and African Humanity will have a college degree too. Then what? Then who will be shaped into an underclass to do the manual labor? Imagine skipping over this national darwinism and just making a social organism where every work is really worthy of a full livelihood. That’s one good thing about the military—the cook is paid the same as all the other workers, because they’re all needed. That is almost an expression of love. 23
Why is it that pretty much only government employees and bank employees get to rest on holidays? Does that reveal who the Boss is? The bank where I live displays a sign saying that it’s closed for a ‘legal holiday.’ True, it is a holiday in the eyes of the National Law, but what does that have to do with banks as private corporations? And are fast food and convenience store workers outside of the National Law? In most places I’ve worked, I’ve never seen a ‘closed for legal holiday’ sign. I wouldn’t take those days of rest away from our state servants and financial servants, yet I would bring that ‘Right to Rest’ to all citizens in the American economy. So that the economy didn’t grind to a complete halt on certain days (though what’s wrong with ‘dousing the forge’ and having a truly silent night?), and so that the American national culture would no longer have a monopoly on discerning what is a holy day, imagine if each individual citizen would choose twelve days for their right to leisure and rest. The days could be any combination of days of national, religious, ethnic, solstitial, philosophical, familial, or personal significance. The citizen wouldn’t have to explain or justify why those days were chosen when they submitted their choice to the Department of Labor at the beginning of each year. The economic sector would have to accept those justly-protected boundaries, just as economic enterprises must accept that the land upon which they are based has physically finite boundaries. Same for the governance and cultural sectors, in regard to “employees” or contracted rights and cultural workers. The twelve days would be different than sick days, and the selection could not be changed until next New Year’s Day. Regardless of what job the person works, or how long they have been employed by that particular economic corporation or governance agency or cultural organization, each citizen would get those twelve days with full pay. The unspoken social contract of the 1950s, where American companies would take care of their employees throughout a life-long career is gone. It is now a fanciful myth. Yet the myth quietly lingers in the structural ‘given’ whereby Americans don’t get to have vacations and basic ‘benefits’ unless we’ve been loyal to a particular corporation for a certain number of years. Thus it is a harmful myth, because even American Humanity needs rest. We are not homunculi, Winkies of the Wicked Witch, or Fighting Uruk-hai of the White Hand. I realize this is not as immediately relevant to the owner-operators among us, but most persons in the American economy are presently employees, and if that wide swath of society were imbued with the right to holiday rest, this would likely also become an accepted part of the culture for those who serve as initiators of those enterprises. This would be the ‘separation of economy and holidays.’ When I was a kid, there were ‘Blue Laws’ in my county which mandated a human right to leisure on Sundays, so that businesses were closed. That was struck down in the 1980s by the Americanist corporatist, narrow secularist-materialist, consumerist anti-culture which seeped through the seams of those Appalachian hills. Some social organism might choose to enact a Right to a Sabbatical Day. Each citizen would, before the New Year, choose which day of the week is to be their sabbatical day for that year. It would be no humanocracy which dictated a particular day; it would entirely within the whim of the individual citizen. Many (but not necessarily all) practicing Christians might choose Sunday or Saturday; practicing Muslims and Jews might choose Friday; secular citizens might choose any day. Every human being needs a day of rest. In the spirit of the Blue Laws, some rights organism might even legislate that, in order to ensure the Right of Rest of owner-operators, every business, governance agency, and cultural organization must be completely closed one full day per week, of the charter-holder’s choosing. That may sound anti-business, but what it is, is a concrete acknowledgement that the rights sector has the final say on the right to rest, not the economy. It’s also a protection of the human owners’ and managers’ need of rest. In the Threefold Republic, the customer isn’t always right. And even from the economic perspective, closing shop for one day reduces overhead. The ‘Saints Monday’ of barber shops is about all that remains in the U.S. of the idea of setting the work down for a day. The saying ‘idle hands make devil’s work’, needs to be balanced by another saying: ‘mindless toil makes satan’s work.’ And in response to those who would say that guarding the right of all citizens to a generous rest time, would just mean that people would have more time to party, drink, and drug: “Those persons who imagine themselves to be ‘practical’ may object that people would pass their leisure time drinking and that illiteracy [or drugging and television] would result if the state occupied itself with the right to leisure...Let these pessimists wait and see what will happen when the world is no longer under their influence all too often determined by a certain feeling which, whispering in their ear, softly reminds them of how they use their leisure time, and what they needed to acquire a ‘little learning.’ They cannot imagine the power of enthusiasm which a really self-contained spiritual [cultural] life can have in the social organism, because the fettered one they know cannot exert such an enthusiastic influence over them.” —Rudolf Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c02.html In my experience, I needed time and space to heal from the Americanist Way—to become mindful, to go to lot of fellowship meetings, to screw my head back on, to clear the wreckage of my past, and to feel my heart in my chest. One reason people eat so much and watch so much television is to numb the wound of forced workaholism. There is a folktale from New York called The Ramapo Salamander which tells of what happens when the forge is never doused—we ourselves and nature become burnt out, and destructive forces are unleashed. If you want to know more about the ‘demon’, or wound, of workaholism, see my sandbox: https://sites.google.com/site/teratosophy/workaholism. Several friends of mine are embedded within institutionally workaholic cultural businesses, with 80- or 90-hour workweeks. My dear friends won’t be relieved of this wound until the (The footnote continues on the next page.) 20
We are becoming a two-class society—of overworked 401K-worshipping ‘makers’ and underemployed ‘takers’ (to use a snide word) who—for inner, soul reasons…such as being sick of the anti-human workaholic culture of minimum wagery…and for outer, societal reasons…such as the antihuman, bureaucratic hoops we are legally compelled to jump though (such as government identification cards and income tax forms) just to ‘get a job’—are effectively blocked from connecting with the meaningful, human work which surrounds us, asking to be taken in hand. “This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once.” —Henry David Thoreau, Life without Principle, 1854 “Teachers, artists and [other cultural practitioners], will be able, through their actions, to inspire the development of a receptivity for their efforts and achievements amongst individuals who are protected by a self-reliant, independent political state from being forced to exist only for work, and which guarantees their right to a leisure...” —Rudolf Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question: http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c02.html From wage slaves to fraternal associates I feel sorry to patronize most businesses, because the look in the eyes signifies that nearly all workers are only there for 8 or more hours a day because they ‘have’ to be there—unless they are going to become a hungry and homeless scavenger and have their children confiscated by the government. How can I enjoy a meal knowing that the waiter or cashier is a slave...a slave to a corporatist economy? I’d love to patronize businesses and spend money if I knew that everyone there, and all those who made the products on their shelves, had plenty of rest and a full livelihood, and the other requisites for a dignified, vibrant life. “It almost sounds paradoxical to say today that no clear conception of the so-called difficult ideas of economics can be gained if the interest of one for another does not increase, if people do not begin to compare the illusions which have sway in social life with present realities. One who really thinks about it recognizes the fact that simply by being a member of society one is in a complicated relation to others. Imagine that you have a $5 note in your pocket, and you make use of this $5 note by going shopping one morning, and you spend the full $5. What does it mean that you go out with a $5 note in your pocket? The $5 note is really an illusion—it is worth nothing in reality. ...Money is namely only a ‘gobetween’. And only because in our day a certain social order exists, an order belonging purely to the State, therefore this $5 note which you have spent in the morning for different items is nothing else than an equivalent for so many days of labor of so many men. A number of men must have completed so many days of work, so much human labor must have flowed into the social order—must have crystallized itself into merchandise—in order for the apparent worth of the banknote to have any real value, but only at the command of the social order. The banknote only gives you the power to call into your service so much labor, or to put it another way, to command its worth in work. You can picture it in your mind: There I have a banknote, which assigns to me, according to my social position, the power over so many human beings. If you now see these workmen selling their labor hour by hour, as the equivalent value of that which you have in your purse as the $5 note, then you begin to get a picture of the real facts. “Our relationships have become so complicated that we no longer pay attention to these things, especially if they do not concern us closely. ...But we can at least ask with respect to national education and other such matters: What must be done so that social life and forms are consciously established in opposition to anti-social forces? What is really required? I said that it would be difficult in our time for people to develop sufficient interest in each other. You do not have sufficient interest if you think that you can buy yourself something with a $5 note and do not remember the fact that this brings about a social relationship with certain other human beings and their labor-power. You only have an adequate interest when in your picture you are able to substitute for each apparent transaction (such as the exchange of goods for a $5 note) the real transaction which is linked with it. “Now, I would say that the mere egotistical, soul-stirring talk of loving our fellowmen and acting upon this love at the first opportunity, that this does not constitute social life. This sort of love is, for the most part, terribly egotistical. Many a man is supported by what he has first rest of humanity is relieved. It’s hard enough being perceived as devil-worshippers by conservatives, and as eco-fascists by liberals, and as Germanophiles by both, without being perceived as work-shy on top of that. 24
“An average worker needs to work a mere 11 hours per week to produce as much as one working 40 hours per week in 1950. (The data here is from the US, but productivity increases in Europe and Japan have been of the same magnitude.) The conclusion is inescapable: if productivity means anything at all, a worker should be able to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker in only 11 hours per week.” —Erik Rauch, “Productivity and the Work Week” at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime “We could work and spend a lot less and still live quite comfortably. By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen anouther 30 percent. In other words, if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day—or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level. We were already the richest country on the planet in 1948 and most of the world has not yet caught up to where we were then.” —“The Gospel of Consumption: And the better future we left behind” by Jeffery Kaplan, Orion magazine May/June 2008
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gained through robbing his fellowmen in a truly patriarchal fashion, in order to create for himself an object for his self-love, so that he can then feel nice and warm with the thought, ‘You are doing this, you are doing that.’” —Rudolf Steiner, “Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being” http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19181212p01.html From hard-working to steadily working A common greeting in West Virginia is: ‘You hard at it?’ (Are you working hard?) Most of us don’t need to work harder. We don’t even need to work so much smarter. The ideal is to work steadily and diligently...even lovingly...at various big or small pieces of work—and to receive a decent portion of the fruits of that labor. If smarter work is the ideal, then that ought to mean finishing a piece of work and going home, with labor-saving technology actually saving labor and shortening the workday, instead of machines throwing most human workers out, with the remaining human hands still squeezed with long hours, and thereby astronomically increasing the mushroom cloud of profit for those few persons and other entities who manage and capitalize the undertaking. So over the years, my response became ‘I’m steady at it.’ That doesn’t mean becoming a ‘sorry’ lazybones, or doing shoddy work, but the humane future really doesn’t want us to work frantically, running around like a headless chicken, or to be doing work that would be better left undone, or to be needlessly ‘doing time’ in some Dilbert-like office space where there is constant pressure to just ‘look busy’, which is a falsity. The idea is to work diligently at whatever is at hand, and then go home to our family, or to whatever is our life’s bliss. “Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.” —Thoreau, Life without Principle, 1863 Is all work really honorable? It’s said that all work is honorable. Perhaps that’s true in a sense—that the material of the earth is blessed by the very act of human beings taking it in hand. And little jobs and unglamorous jobs (store clerk, grillworker, garbageman) are certainly honorable and good. But if you’ve ever shown up on the first day of training for a piece of telemarketing work and witnessed the manager saying that it’s best if you can get the child on the line...so that you can speak with them a long time about Viacom Inc.’s children television offerings, with the length and depth of the ‘survey’ serving a double-headed purpose of instilling as much of that entity’s corporate consciousness into the mind of that child as it can get away with, then you might agree that some ‘honorable’ work would be better left undone. There is such a thing as eating with the swine—the swine of these times are non-human, corporate vehicles of corruption. Many hands, light work Americans have forgotten that many hands make light work. I experienced that when I worked on a day-labor crew with mostly Lakota Indian 25 fellows in South Dakota. Carrying terracotta tiles across a roof was not such a drag when they’re being passed along by a mob of friendly workers. So what if we were getting paid less because there were so many of us? It made the work actually fun. Little, worthwhile jobs Imagine way stewards and river stewards—crews of young folk and any other underemployed people picking up litter for four hours a day, six days a week, along every street, road, parking lot, trail, river, and creek in the country. This would be a further evolution of the “Adopt a Highway” 26 program which began in the 1980s. Instead of, or in addition to, an organization or family sponsoring the highway, there would be constant, paid, country-wide part-time work as Way Stewards. Imagine if they received a fair and generous livelihood for that part-time work. Some might be devoted to looking over a particular stretch, giving it four hours of attention each day, picking up trash, doing a little landscaping, lending a hand with simple bike repairs and battery problems, shoveling off any horse patties, having a mobile phone handy to aid travellers when necessary, and being a trustworthy human, professional presence in our landscape. An association of way stewards would cultivate the best practices in that field of service. Or other little jobs which enliven dead public spaces, such as parking lot attendants. Though since the 1970s, most full service gas stations have disappeared in the U.S. (except for New Jersey and Oregon, where self-service is illegal, and in a few wealthy communities), the gas jockey might return—as long as everyone’s receiving a livable income and the service is truly-and-fairly priced, it’s not so bad to have someone pump the gas, 25
The liberal Americanist moniker ‘Native American’ is structurally equivalent to liberal Turks calling Kurds ‘Mountain Turks’, liberal Britons calling Scots and Irish ‘North Britons and West Britons’, and liberal Chinese calling Tibetans and Uyghurs ‘Southwestern Chinese’ and ‘Northwestern Chinese.’ Those names are technically true in the context of the ‘given’ statal-national system, yet considering the possibility for freedom of nationality, they are deadened, flat, statist words. “I hate the word Native American. It’s a government term, which was created in the year 1970 in the Department of the Interior, a generic term that describes all the prisoners of the United States of America. Those of us who are forced to live on trust territories, the Micronesians, the original Hawaiians, the Aleuts, the Inupiats, the Yupiks, who are erroneously called Eskimos, and all of the 500 nations of the American Indians are so-called ‘Native Americans.’ I refuse to be defined by a government, any government; so I am an Indian. Because I know where that came from, a bastardization of two Spanish words: In Dios, ‘in with god.’ And Columbus wrote la gente indio, ‘a people in with God;’ so I much prefer to be called Indian rather than Native American.” —Russell Means, “The Existential Indian” www.dickshovel.com/intermeans.html 26
The Adopt-a-Highway program has been a controversial avenue for hateful cultural groups to sponsor the highway and have a State-crafted sign displayed with their name and logo for all passerbys to see. The Federal Courts have upheld that the State cannot decline such sponsors. The problem is that, though the idea is wellintentioned, the State ought not be making and displaying State signage for any corporation or organization. 22
wash the windshield, check the oil and tire pressure, and grab a snack and drink for you. I’d be willing to do that for four hours a day. And I wouldn’t be ashamed for others to do that for me, as long as they were receiving a generous livelihood, with plenty of protected free time. And the ancient office of Ostiary might be returned to our churches, so that there is a human presence in those spaces 24 hours a day, whereby our churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples would really be available as reflective spaces whenever someone needs it—even if that’s only a few times a year. Then the United Methodist threefold platitudinous ideal of “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors” would become true. Imagine if we expanded on the Venezuelan El Sistema youth orchestra concept and used our mushroom clouds of capital to provide for a very large portion of the young populace to become trained as professional-quality classical musicians, and that we freely supported hundreds of full-time and part-time paid orchestras throughout the country, with at least one, and perhaps several, full orchestras per county. The same could be done for all the arts, so that the ‘art system’ would become as pervasive and well-funded as the ‘school system.’ In West Virginia, the government school system is the main employer. Imagine if the ‘art system’, as a free cultural organism (not as a government agency) were just as pervasive and wellfunded? The worlds of art are so deep and humanizing, that it’d be a good thing for many individuals to be exploring that field full-time. That’s why in Waldorf teacher training, everyone—math and science teachers included—learns the rudiments of at least one musical instrument. Enculturated guild associations Imagine if the various pre-industrial tradesman fellowships were to be revived and renewed. These have barely survived the Industrial Age and the Century of Nightmare, having been overwhelmed or co-opted by the might of corporatism, by generic over-arching politicized labor unions who focus on remuneration over artisanry, or by drab, government-directed ‘job-training programs’—and by the guilds’ own sclerotic failure to change to meet the legitimate needs of modern humanity. There are reportedly only a few hundred journeymen each year in Central Europe and France— mostly carpenters—who follow the old ways. The tradition is this: after the aspirant has completed an apprenticeship, he or she become a journeyman and embarks on their Walz (‘rolling’). The Walz is a quest for two or three years and a day. During that time, the journeyman refrains from coming within 50 kilometers of their home town, unless there is an emergency, such as a death in the family. The journeymen from a specific guild wear a distinct pre-modern uniform as they travel from village to village, city to city, and walk with a peculiar wooden staff. The journeyman keeps a passport-style travelling book in which they record their journey. When they enter a town, the mayor’s office stamps their book. Because the guilds are respected, the journeymen often find work wherever they go. The journeyman begins with five euros in their pocket, and is to return at the end of the quest with no less and no more than five euros in their pocket. The deepening of experience and human connection is what matters, with no material loss or gain.
Two journeymen from Central Europe. Soulful outfits, huh? Imagine if nearly all crafts and trades had a distinct raiment for the wandering years. Imagine if there were independent guilds for each craft and trade, not tied to the employer corporations, so that the worker would be loyal to the humane artisanry of their own fellowship moreso than to a particular employing corporation. Imagine if there were guild-like associations for even for the humble ‘unskilled’ professions—so that convenience store and grocery clerks and quick service cooks could cross-train for various companies throughout the world, limited only by their language proficiency. Beyond the practical economic trades, imagine similar initiatory journeys for cultural fields, such as for artists and musicians, athletes, counselors, pastors, and teachers. Instead of being tied as a customer to a particular institution for four years, imagine if after having completed a short apprenticeship (equivalent to a one-year Certificate or two-year Associate degree), most budding scholars and artists were hosted by a series of collegiums (colleges) throughout the world, where they studied and practiced for some years and a day. Nearly all American tradesmen, artists, and scholars would practice or study in a couple other English-speaking countries during their twenties—and other countries too, if they would take up another language. Along the way, they’d be sponsored by global fellowships which are freely and enthusiastically devoted to their particular field of practical, scientific, or artistic enquiry. The fellowships would bestow a symbol that the traveller is under their wing—it could be a cape, a pin, a 23
hat, a scarf, a staff, or even full regalia. The apprentice scholar’s graduation gown, with a colored sash signifying the field of interest, would be put to good use as a traveling cloak—and so best be made of real cloth instead of the polyester sheer of today’s souvenir robes. The prestigious University of the South in Tennessee is one school in the world which still wears the ancient robes to class, and passes them on from generation to the next. The more worn-out and threadbare, the better. There is a glimpse of a new journeyman school in my friends’ Classroom Alive initiative. Each day for six months, these scholars studied for four 27 hours and walked for four hours on a walking quest from Sweden to Greece. As I write this, the journey continues across Ireland. An education like that, spent working with professional and amateur scientists and artists and ordinary people in each locality, with adventurous jaunts inbetween, would be an education worth remembering. The path of initiation might be re-imagined to meet the needs of modern humanity. For example, in olden days the guilds immersed the novice in a trade which was supposed to become their entire life. But for modern humanity, it is legitimate to resist being defined solely by our work. It’s a good thing that nowadays, many of us need to test out several different trades and arts. That’s what our twenties would be for. To become a jackof-all-trades and a master of one. How can an enculturated, ensouled work-life return to humanity when we are supposed to be worshipping a 401K retirement plan and living off credit cards and student indebtedness to soulless banks from the time we’re 18 years old? “There is no need to fear that individual mobility would be inhibited due to the existence of associations. He who requires mobility would experience flexibility in passing from one association to another, as long as economic interest and not political organization determines the move.” —Rudolf Steiner, 1920 preface to Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_pref4.html Part of the reason the medieval guilds petered out the 1700s was because what had originally been a practical, warm-hearted association of artisans, eventually degenerated into a state-sponsored monopoly which suppressed free initiative. And so what was a blessing in the Middle Ages—resulting in the cultural bloom visible in the Gothic cathedral—fell into the curse of a mercantile-statist, totalistic economy. The vigorous new economic impulses—industrial capitalists and labor unions—simply outgrew the guilds and they faded away. The essence of some guilds flowed into cultural impulses which no longer really engaged in an actual craft or trade, for example the Masons (who were, in olden days, actually stonemasons), the Oddfellows (some suggest their origin in ‘odd’ minor professional guilds), and the one-hundred and ten Livery Companies of the City of London, which became dues-collecting social clubs and crusty insurance agencies. Such fraternities still do some good works, but are no longer vehicles for authentic social renewal. “The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow—one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance; whose first and chief concern, on coming into the world, is to see that the almshouses are in good repair; and, before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to collect a fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be; who, in short ventures to live only by the aid of the Mutual Insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently.” —Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government”, 1849 It would be wonderful if the old guilds and friendly societies were to shake off their stale chalkiness and become relevant, warm-hearted, enculturated economic impulses which were really devoted to renewing their namesake trade. If only the Central European guilds still have life left in them, then they might as well expand into the English-speaking world. In the farm sector, which I’m most familiar with from having farmer 28 friends, there are new guild-like associations, such as the Greenhorns and the North American Biodynamic Apprenticeship Program , alongside older associations such as the National Grange of the Orders of Patrons of Husbandry (‘The Grange’), which survives mostly in the Pacific Northwest. A movement for the renewal of guild life would be poised to pervade humanity’s economic sector with freely-given soul-warmth which could outgrow cold corporatism. In the context of a Threefold Republic, the freedom of association and the ‘separation of professional licensing and state’ would guarantee that no guild or professional association could retain a harmful monopoly in their field of economic or cultural life. “I have taken the free city guilds of the Middle Ages as an example in order to show you that the practical life became strong under the principle of mutual personal individual help. Where did they get their strength?—because they lived with their fellows in a spirit of mutual help. It is right to make oneself as strong as possible, but the question is can we really become strong without love? He who really develops to a true soul recognition must answer this question with a decisive, ‘No!’” —Rudolf Steiner, “Brotherhood and the Fight for Survival”, 1905 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19051123p01.html From armed forces to farmed forces Imagine if most of the men and women who enter the American Empire’s military service because it pays relatively well (compared to fast food) and because it has benefits (unlike most retail jobs in the American economy), were instead sent to be trained as professional farmer, gardener, and landscaper apprentices, journeymen, and masters. Imagine if many were sent to England, France, Italy, and Japan to learn traditional, non-motorized gardening techniques. Upon returning to our country, they’d be employed in the lifelong work of turning the entire country into a garden of vistas. The entire Hudson Valley here in New York 27 28
www.classroomalive.com and http://classroomaliveireland.weebly.com www.biodynamics.com/nabdap 24
could once again look like a painting from the Hudson River School. Imagine if instead of having a vast network of military colonies like the Roman legionnaires—where a vast body of the American populace is kept busy and paid (relatively) good money by doing work which would be better left undone—we recommissioned most of our professional soldiers, 29 sailors, marines, and airmen to be trained as organic and biodynamic farmers. “Questioning the conventional worldview is a risky business, believe you me. The only reason I have done so is for the sake of your generation and the integrity of nature itself.” —Charles, Prince of Wales, “Save the World with Organic Farming” speech in Washington, D.C., 2011 30
Imagine if these men and women, young and old—any of us—received a Fraternal Livelihood for a 40 hours of work per week, at any combination 31 32 of part-time jobs, so that we could afford to own or build a beautiful, small house and to have children. The future economy isn’t only about ‘big, good jobs.’ The future is interested in little, worthwhile jobs and a dignified livelihood for all of humanity.
the separation of home-building industry and state Zoning laws and building permits usually don’t allow for the possibility to build old English style cob and thatch houses, Earthships, hand-crafted tiny houses, replicas of Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond, and hobbit holes. In the 12 years of 8-hour-a-day compulsory government schooling, why did we not learn how to build our own beautiful house? My friend Aldo built his own tiny house (which I helped a little bit in building): 29
Biodynamic is to Organic as Organic is to Conventional (chemical fertilizer and pesticide). BD is ‘Organic Plus.’ BD produce is exquisite. This has been affirmed in the West and in the East. In a blind tasting of ten pairs of biodynamic and conventionally made wines, conducted by Fortune magazine and judged by seven wine experts including a Master of Wine and head sommeliers, nine of the biodynamic wines were judged superior to their conventional counterpart. The biodynamic wines "were found to have better expressions of terroir, the way in which a wine can represent its specific place of origin in its aroma, flavor, and texture." And Ibrahim Abouleish, an Islamic community leader, Right Livelihood laureate, and member of the World Future Council, speaks of biodynamic foods in this way: “The Koran differentiates between two food qualities—food which people are allowed to eat, halal, and exquisite foods, tayyib. This is explained in the Koran in Sura 16.114 ‘The Bee.’”* —Sekem: A Sustainable Community in the Egyptian Desert (2005) *“So eat of the lawful and exquisite foods which Allāh has provided for you.” 30
And that over the course of two or three generations, we lower the workweek from 40 to 30, or even 24 hours, as far as receiving the Fraternal Livelihood. The duty-and-solidarity-based work would be reduced and the space for passion-based work would be increased. Persons would be free to work on their own selfinitiated economic, cultural, and personal initiatives beyond those hours. But employee-style economic work and governance work would bounded by the 30 hour week. If a piece of work really needs more coverage, more persons would be hired and trained. This would make for a 5-day 6-hour workweek or 6-day 5-hour workweek. Where I grew up in West Virginia, I’d hear workers at our minimum wage jobs saying: ‘I need more hours.’ My feeling is that we don’t need ‘more hours’, we need a full economic livelihood and a vibrant, beautiful way of life. 31
What is presently called ‘home ownership’ is a misnomer. Many home ‘owners’ are really renters. It’s false to say I ‘own’ something which has to be returned if I stop paying money for it. It is an elaborate form of rental, with the transnational bank industry as landlord, but without the benefit of the landlord helping with site maintenance. The languaging and rituals of ‘home ownership’ are soul tricks for locking the populace into the Americanist Dream. Yet the economic system could just as well be recalibrated so that nearly everyone can afford to really own their home by the midpoint of human life. 32
It’s strange how both the right and the left are against inviting more than one child into humanity’s world. The right veilingly implies that there’s too much brown humanity already. The left views humanity as scum which disturbs the natural, wild state of the earth. Both are for a Malthusian control of the populace. My parents had five and six siblings each. One family was a farm family and the other a middle-class city family, yet somehow all the siblings could afford to go college. Having six or seven children is ‘unthinkable’ now. After the Baby Boom of the 1950s, which served as relief valve for returning to everday life after experiencing the terrors of mechanized warfare, the Western system has been crafted so that only the very wealthiest (and the very poorest who have fallen into the grip of the governmentalized, dispiriting welfare system) could even conceive of having more than one or two children. I’ve heard, though haven’t verified, that Walmart* intentionally calculates its pay scale so that a full-time worker, with the other parent also working full time, could (just barely) support a single child, as long as the child went to a government school. If the worker wanted to have a second child without severe economic distress, they’d have to find their way into one of the few upper level management positions, or take a second job. And while the highest executives could afford to have as many children as they would, with the mothers staying at home to ensoul the household. And so an economic corporation which maximizes monetary profit above all other concerns, is engineering the family life of a vast portion of the citizenry. The government won’t really stand up to this corporatist social engineering, because the laws themselves are written and purchased by the gigantic ‘Retail Leaders Industry Association’ lobby. *(I’m not here to demonize or single out Wally World. There are even seeds of brotherhood in that entity, though they lie mostly unsprouted in the cool fluorescence. I like all the individuals I worked with there, management included.) I’m aware of the need for space, yet perhaps the problem isn’t so much of restricting the quantity, but of providing cultural conditions for a quality-evoking way of life. I know several families which have many children, and raise them in beauty, strength, and wisdom. If all children, even in Somalia, were enculturated within a free pedagogical organism, then each human spirit who was called into our world would be received as a blessing instead of a curse. 25
“When I first decided to build a tiny house I told myself, whether I liked living in 100 square feet or not, I would at least try it out for a full year before deciding if it was for me or not. Fast forward a year, I only feel excited to continue. Quite literally, I enjoy living here! Whether away from home for one afternoon or one week, coming home is accompanied by a palpable feeling of well-being and ease. This might be due to a variety of things. For one, its nice to own my home free and clear, something that is not too easy to do in today's world. I do take pride knowing that I built it with my own hands, and though not perfect by any stretch, think is certainly good enough. Sometimes, pulling into my driveway at night, I wonder if it is actually real or just all a romantic dream.” —Aldo Lavaggi, “Life and thoughts, one year in”, Gold Thread Tiny House blog, (emphasis added) November 2013 http://goldthreadtinyhouse.blogspot.com
I’m not suggesting we all need to become expert builders, or throw zoning agreements entirely out the window and build every-man-for-himselfstyle shantytowns, but architecturally this age has fallen into a ticky-tacky, cookie-cutter rut. The vast grid of New Jersey and Los Angeles came about through a particular worldview, a particular aesthetic, a particular set of motivations which were, and are, enforced by a certain financial and legal structure. “No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.” —Michael Ende Smaller houses can be built with higher quality materials than generic larger houses. Why don’t we build every house with heirloom quality materials and artistry? Most builders would probably be glad for the opportunity to show their skill. Are there some other human beings who, in some distant time, deserve to live in beautiful, solid, artisanal houses? “Doug Immel recently completed his custom-built dream home, sparing no expense on details like cherry-wood floors, cathedral ceilings and stained-glass windows—in just 164 square feet of living space including a loft.” —“Tiny Houses Are Big With U.S. Owners Seeking Economic Freedom”, Bloomberg, July 2014 www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-09/tiny-houses-big-with-u-s-owners-seeking-economic-freedom.html (My friend Aldo’s house is also featured in this article.) Imagine if the dreary, shoddy, commercial-style apartment buildings were to be refurbished, inside and out, or, if there are not enough qualities in the structure worth saving, simply replace the thing with some lovingly-built, artisanal architecture. There’ll be a time when much of the modern American architecture will be looked upon as having been as drab and anti-human as Stalinist architecture. I’m reminded of Albuquerque, New Mexico which is poised in front of the enchanting Watermelon Mountains—but whose downtown is a cold stand of black and gray boxes, many of them bank buildings, such as the Wells Fargo building which stands like a sickly green-lit Tower of Sorcery. Or Winston-Salem’s gigantic gray shaft—the 100 North Main Street skyscraper—built by Wachovia Bank. What an extravagantly gray facility. Does a bank really need such an edifice? Why would I support and fund such an entity? Why aren’t Waldorf schools and other cultural initiatives as well funded as the bank? New York City prides itself on its cultural offerings. Yet when I stand on the Empire State Building and look across the vast gray honeycombs of the City, I wonder: what is the ratio of commercial activity to free cultural activity? Is it a healthy ratio? Imagine if the most sublime and ensouled styles and features of each neighborhood and city were used as models to architecturally evolve those areas. For example, imagine if all of Washington, D.C.—I’m speaking of the most run-down neighborhoods too—were renovated with building 26
materials and styles which are seen in the National Mall or in Georgetown. Why not revive the masonic fraternities with a task which would be worthy of their name? Or if all of Winston-Salem—the humble half of town and also the bland middle class suburbs—were gradually rebuilt in the style and substantiality of the hand-made brick buildings in Moravian Old Salem. Imagine if even the most utilitarian buildings in America— convenience stores, auto garages, warehouses, big-box department stores—were to be built in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian style or other styles which actually evoke a lofty feeling—with stone and wood that were intended to, with care, last for centuries, and to be beautiful and soulful from 33 the start. Imagine if there were teams of interior decorators in the free cultural realm, whose livelihood was freely supported so that they offer their services freely, so that nearly everyone’s home might be individualized and refreshed on a modest budget? A few examples of soulful architecture, even for the most utilitarian buildings:
The original Goetheanum, which I call ‘The First Homely House.’ The furnace house of the Goetheanum. A place which was historically a center for the Trisecting Impulse. Utility+Sublimity=Soulfulness
Frank Lloyd Wright’s gas station in Minnesota.
the separation of the prison construction industry from the state Prison-building would no longer be just another ‘growth industry.’ In the region where I grew up, the social conditions are such that people were begging for a federal prison to be built there so that we can have ‘jobs.’ Isn’t this sad? (We got it: the $223 million McDowell Federal Correctional Institution, holding 1,660 prisoners of the national government...and with 17 of 87 first hires being from the local populace.) The prison building lobbies have an interest in there being as many prisoners as possible. To the extent that a prison is necessary, its construction and operation is worthy work. Yet these entities should not be purchasing laws (through ‘campaign contributions’) which shape our society. Recently it has come to light that two US judges received money in exchange for sending juvenile defendants to for-profit youth jails over the span of years. Two economic corporations, PA Child Care and Western Pennsylvania Child Care, are said to have spent $2 million in purchasing young people from the judges to fill their facilities. While it’s easy to say those judges are just bad apples, in a way, these two men have done a service by so clearly manifesting a systemic illness. The whole Judicial Branch is afflicted with rot from the confusion of profit and justice—not just those two judges who were the first to fall and be spotted. Nearly all judges acquire their positions from their allegiance to two non-governmental organizations which are stuffed full of economic corporate motives. 34
Understandably, these lobbies also purchase the intensification of the War on the Drug-Afflicted and the War on Migrating Humanity. These economic entities are purchasing the rights to imprison even more of the American and Mexican citizenry. The corporatist and statist addiction to 35 prisons is nearly as harmful as the addiction to ingesting harmful substances. Here’s what happened, in the words of the Federal Bureau of Prisons: “As a result of Federal law enforcement efforts and new legislation that dramatically altered sentencing in the Federal criminal justice system, the 1980s brought a significant increase in the number of Federal inmates. The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 established determinate sentencing, abolished parole, and reduced good time; additionally, several mandatory minimum sentencing provisions were enacted in 1986, 1988, and 1990. From 1980 to 1989, the inmate population more than doubled, from just over 24,000 to almost 58,000. During the 1990s, the population more than doubled again, reaching approximately 136,000 at the end of 1999 as efforts to combat illegal drugs and illegal
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Steiner’s ‘Goethean Organic’ style is mentioned in regard to Frank Lloyd Wright in a New York Times magazine article, “Soul Man”, from 2010: www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/t-magazine/11talk-steiner-t.html?_r=0 34
The Justice Policy Institute reports that: “For-profit companies exercise their political influence to protect their market share, which in the case of corporations like GEO Group and CCA [the two largest private prison companies, with combined revenues of $2.9 billion+ primarily means the number of people locked up behind bars.” 35
If you want to know more, see “Curing America’s Addiction to Prisons” by David C. Leven from the Fordham Urban Law Journal, at http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/vol20/iss3/18 27
immigration contributed to significantly increased conviction rates. From 2000 to the present, the population continued to increase reaching our current population of 215,566.” —“A Storied Past”, BOP (the threefold motto: Correctional Excellence. Respect. Integrity.): www.bop.gov/about/history/ The nation-states are the ‘illegal immigrants’ of our time. In a healthy republic, the roles of prison guard, prison warden, and prison counselor would be re-perceived and felt to not only be a practice in Equality (treating each prisoner equally)...but even of Healing (penitentiary = penitence)—not as just another ‘good job.’ This would be clearer if those who were responsible for carrying out the sentences of the Judicial Branch were all working within the sphere of the rights governance or the culture sector...not the economic sector. And the bar coded bands on prisoner’s wrists—despite its efficiency—would be done away with. The human being—even a human being who is recovering from criminal distortions of the soul—is not a numbered thing to be scanned by a government agency or corporation. That does nothing to heal.
the separation of the arms industry and the state The weapons industry is a cancerous economic growth.
(...and the right-sizing of the police and military services) A fruit of the separation of the arms and prison industry lobbies from the state would be the right sizing of the police and military services. While many individuals strive to serve humanity honorably through the armed forces and other guardian services, overall, the police and military sectors are stunting our real economy and dementing and retarding our American culture. Even from a pragmatic economic standpoint, this work is not really fruitful. These rights workers do not actually grow or make anything. And there are whole generations of Americans now which have been shaped by the military initiation. If there’s no enemy, America’s shadow will conjure one. The Rights Republic would clarify and hold the legitimate role of a Citizens’ Militia and Citizens’ Watch in service of humane rights. *** The above-listed separations are a true fulfillment of the Progressive-Liberal impulse. The following, further separations of the Economic Sector and the Political/Rights Sector are a fulfillment of the authentic root-purpose of the Libertarian-Conservative impulse:
the separation of welfare and state Imagine evolving from governmentalized ‘Social Security’ to Social Fraternity, with the legitimate role of fraternal weal—of economic wellbeing— transferred to the Economic Republic. The only purpose of Social Fraternity would be this—to provide the necessities of life to any member of the human family who, for a temporary or indefinite time, can no longer be an economic producer because they are (partially or fully) disabled or elderly. The social security fund is a fiction The current system adheres to the false concept that Social Security is a savings fund which individuals ‘pay into’ and then withdraw that same money when they retire...that it’s simply a government-mandated ‘retirement savings account’, and that, therefore, those who ‘paid in’ more money over the years deserve to have a higher ‘pay out’ when they are older. This concept is psychologically ingrained by tying the Social Security Tax to payroll. Unlike most taxes, such as sales tax and business tax, the Social Security Tax is printed out on each worker’s pay stub, and periodically a Social Security statement is even sent to each citizen which purports to show in black and white, how much that citizen has ‘paid into’ Social Security. These measures definitely imply that we are ‘paying into’ a fund. This false concept has led many privatists to suggest the Social Security Trust Fund should be used to capitalize the stock market. The truth is that the numerical mushroom cloud called the Social Security Trust Fund is a digital fiction. The reality is that the fruitfulness which is gathered by that month’s social security tax is what the currently retired and disabled are actually living on during that month. The tax is a procurement of the economic fruits (food, clothing, shelter) necessary for the non-economic portion of the human family to live. Those hard commodities are represented as money which is, by right, transferred from the human worker to the human non-worker, because we, as a human community have decided that we are not Social Darwinists who would kill off the disabled and elderly in our human community. It’s simply a fact that, at a certain time of life, the human being withdraws from bread-winning. And there have always been those among us who are lamed or deranged. We love them. Retirement is no longer the great ideal of life Nowadays, twenty-somethings are supposed to be planning for retirement. In a healthy republic, saving up money for retirement, or conforming to a job which comes with a retirement pension, would no longer be a primary purpose of life.
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“To many people a position entailing the right of a pension is a great ‘ideal’! And the religions speak of a kind of pension for the time after death. The soul obtains a pension; without any effort on its own part it obtains eternal life through the church itself. The church sees to this! It 36 is uncomfortable to hear that salvation can only be attained by a free spiritual striving, independently of the state, and that the state should limit itself to the rights sphere. The right of having a pension will not exist in a rights-state. This alone is for many people one reason for rejecting it.” —Rudolf Steiner, “The Inexpressible Name, Spirits of Space and Time” http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19190817p01.html A decent livelihood for the elderly and infirm An authentic Rights-State would no longer be a bottomless moneybag, and so would not be issuing pensions to the elderly or anyone else. However, a clear ‘Right to a Decent Livelihood for the Elderly and the Infirm’ would still be articulated as an Economic Right, in co-ordination with the Economic Republic. The existing Social Security laws would be recast and clarified. “Just as children have the right to an education, the elderly, the infirm and widows have the right to a decent maintenance. The necessary capital must be provided for in the same way that it is for the education of those who are not yet productive. The essential point of all this is that the income of the non-earners is not determined by the economic sector; on the contrary, the economic sector becomes dependent upon the results of rights-awareness. Those who work in an economic organism will receive that much less from the results of their work as more flows to the non-earners. However, this ‘less’ will be borne equally by all participants in the social organism if the social impulse described here is realized. The education and support of those who are incapable of working is something which concerns all humanity, and, through a rightsstate detached from the economy, it will be so, for every individual who is of age will have a voice in the rights-organization.” —Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c03.html The Rights Republic—being the entire body of adult citizenry—would continue to legislate the general conditions, such as age, at which a human being could receive full or partial Social Fraternity. However, as an economic organ, the Social Fraternity Association (SFA) itself would no longer be a government agency. Once a human being reaches the legal age of economic retirement, they would be free to continue working full-time or part-time, or to withdraw from earthly productivity. In any case, to the extent that their economic needs are not being met from their own resources, these needs would be transparently met by the Social Fraternity Association of the Economic Republic. The actual monetary livelihood for the disabled and elderly would be coming straight from the Economic Forum...straight from that year’s productivity, instead of from a government pension. “There is so much that does not stand the test of the years. In youth, ideals are plentiful; in old age few remain. Older people rely more upon the State and upon their pensions than upon the sustaining power of life itself...” —Steiner, “Karmic Relationships” http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA236/English/RSP1974/19240518p01.html A spectrum of economic ability In a healthy economy, there would not be such a sharp line between ‘disabled’ and ‘not disabled’. Disability in regard to Social Fraternity, is only in regard to economic productivity. Almost all human beings are at least a little disabled, otherwise we’d hardly be human beings. The ones who aren’t disabled moved on, and lend a hand in other ways. In a good, orderly associative economy, there’d be little pieces of work that even partially disabled people and elderly (those who choose to) could do for a couple-few hours a week. I’ve known special needs folk who put in a full day’s work. Many who are now classified as fully or partially economically disabled would take up their beds and walk again if little jobs were worthy of livelihood. It’s understandable that there are economic ‘draft dodgers’ with psycho-somatic ‘blighty wounds’ when the economy is a minimum-wage-slave galley, a gladiator pit, and a hunger game. The medical aspect of Social Fraternity The SFA would not retain on-staff doctors and psychologists. In the Threefold Republic, the healing professionals who examine the potentially disabled would be outside experts—freely supported cultural practitioners who don’t rely on payments from the Government, or from that particular patient, for their bread. Otherwise, their praxis and perceptions become subtly bent to please either the consumerized patient or the government. Furthermore, the Medicare and Medicaid aspect of the Social Security Administration would fall away in a social organism where medical treatment is a cultural right, and where most hospitals are no longer government agencies or businesses, but sacramental offerings.
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The first hump of what in olden days was called ‘salvation’ is really what is nowadays experienced as ‘recovery.’ The word is less dramatic, but it’s the authentic Lazarus experience for us, as modern humanity. 29
Pilgrim Fare—life continues after dropping off the face of the earth In a healthy economy, those who aren’t disabled, but who still won’t take on economically fruitful work, would eventually become Pilgrims. Some people just need to take a break from everyday life. The Pilgrim Association would be for America’s vagabond, footloose types. Pilgrims would 37 receive little more than Pilgrim Fare. I myself have benefitted from Social Fraternity following a burn out. I’m grateful to American Humanity for the fraternal gesture, which has contributed to my coming back to life.
The logo of St. Martin’s Hospitality Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 37
Pilgrim Fare—clean water and good bread (and what other victuals come by way of charity), a small tent and pack if they don’t have one, a hygeine kit, and a Warm Space in the winter. Pilgrim Fare would be a right to all who claim, in that moment, to be a Pilgrim. Like any Citizen, Pilgrims would have the right to personal safety and medical treatment. Pilgrim Sites—in conjunction with hostels and campgrounds—would be established throughout the land, within a day’s walk. Each site would have a clear tradition on how long a pilgrim can stay there before moving on—whether it be one night, three days, or some other length of time. Anyone could become a Pilgrim for awhile. An elderly or infirm person would not become a Pilgrim, unless they really, really wanted to. Society wouldn’t expect anything from Pilgrims except that they refrain from harm. The Rainbow Gatherings, for all their one-sidedness, are a glimpse into the notentirely negative aspect of the pilgrim world. The children of Pilgrims would not be taken away simply because of their economic lifestyle. Children of pilgrims, like the children of migrant workers, would be welcome at schools, one day at a time. Gypsy humanity has raised children for millennia. Here are three fresh perspectives on Home-Free Humanity: “We know what ‘combating’ homelessness looks like. We attack on two fronts. On one front, for example, we open shelters for the homeless but (since we don't want them to stay in the shelters) we make them as unwelcoming as possible. On the other front, we pass anticamping legislation that criminalizes those who won't stay in the shelters. This legislation allows (or compels) the police to harass the homeless, who are ‘out of place,’ who turn up where we don't want them to be. Until the homeless straighten out, get jobs, and somehow magically lift themselves into the mainstream of middle-class America, the game is going to be ‘Heads we win, tails you lose.’ Acceding to homelessness would look like helping the homeless succeed WHILE being homeless. What an idea! I can almost hear the howls of outrage from both liberals and conservatives that must greet such a concept. Help people succeed at being homeless? We want them to fail at being homeless! (So they'll return to the mainstream.)” —Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, 1992 “On the porch of St Gregory's on Sunday 5th of November I saw the most touching sight there. Leaning against the wall as we came out of church was an old tramp in rags, something like sandals tied on his feet with string, an old tin can on one wrist, and in his other hand a rough staff. He had a brown beard, and a curiously 'clean' face, with blue eyes, and he was gazing into the distance in some rapt thought not heeding any of the people, certainly not begging. I could not resist the impulse of offering him a small alms, and he took it with grave kindliness, and thanked me courteously, and then went back to his contemplation. Just for once I rather took Father C. aback by saying to him that I thought the old man looked a great deal more like Saint Joseph than the statue in the church –at any rate St. Joseph on the way to Egypt. He seems to be (and what a happy thought in these shabby days, where poverty seems only to bring sin and misery) a holy tramp!” —J.R.R. Tolkien, letter to his son Christopher, 1944 “Foxes have dens and birds of heaven have nests, but the Representative of Humanity has nowhere to lay down his head.” —The Book of Matthew
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the separation of unions and state…of big labor and big government Labor unions would become full members of the Economic Forum, as peers of the business corporations. Like all economic activity, their relationships would be expressed through contracts. The goal would be for every single worker in the American economy, including fast food and convenience store work, to be working with a contract. To those of us who work in the ordinary “employee” sector: have you noticed how job applications nearly always say in fine print: “THIS IS NOT A CONTRACT.” 38
In the further future, once a contract-based economy has replaced the employee-based economy, nearly every adult would become an entrepreneur, with their own incorporated business and with their own logo and business card through which they offer their skills and services— even if it be humble but worthy cashier skills or grillworker skills. Each individual’s work would be represented through their own self-employed micro-business. Children would be raised in financial literacy so that nearly every adult participant in the economy is able to write a professional39 quality business plan and maintain double-entry bookkeeping. Yet the shift from corporatist employment to individuated enterprise doesn’t mean abandonment to economic forces. The Rights Republic would still guarantee that economic contracts must meet the Fraternal Livelihood (the ‘Minimum Wage’ of a healthy society) and respect the right to rest and vacation. “Through the kind of social arrangements described here, the ground can be prepared for a truly free contractual relation between manager and worker. This does not mean an exchange of commodities, that is, money, for labor power, but an agreement as to the share each of the persons who jointly produced the product is to receive.” —Rudolf Steiner, “Capitalism and Social Ideas”, Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c03.html
the separation of postal service and state Though the US Postal Service is mentioned in the Constitution, it is no longer necessary for it to have a monopoly on delivery service and delivery 40 responsibilities. A Living Constitution can be amended, changed. The admirable Universality of postal service can be maintained through Associative contracts with the entire body of consumers. "The endeavors which have already begun to be realized by those in authority to turn certain economic functions (post office, railroads, etc.) over to the state must be reversed; the state must be relieved of all economic functions." —Rudolf Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c02.html
the separation of agricultural subsidies and state Sustainable-and-regenerative, intentional, human-scaled, encultured farming is crucial, and deserves to be capitalized. Yet since the State has an 41 official scientistic religion of reductionist materialism, and is owned by large economic lobbies, such as the pesticide and seed-patent industries, what public funding there is for farming, hardly goes to family-run conventional farms...much less to Organic Farms…much less to future-oriented 42 Permaculture Farms, or to exquisite, organismic Biodynamic Farms. Farming would be the basis of the Living Economy in America, but it would be capitalized through the Economic Associations, not through the Rights Governance. The goal is for there to be a whole new generation of smallscale Organic and Biodynamic farmers, of both genders and all races, in every county and landscape in the country. “Our civilization rests at bottom on the wholesomeness, the attractiveness and the completeness, as well as the prosperity of life in the country… The great rural interests are human interests and good crops or livestock are of little value to the farmer unless they open the door to a good kind of life on the farm.” 43 —Theodore Roosevelt, quoted in “The Farm as a Social Organism” by Farmer John Peterson of Angelic Organics Imagine if anyone could walk the entire length of the country and work as field-hand all along the way, because there were many organic, biodynamic, and permaculture farms within a day’s walk. Imagine if the Garden State of New Jersey were to become a garden again. 38
The word ‘employee’ is French for ‘one who is used.’ The ‘employer’ is the ‘one who uses.’ It’s better to be stakeholders, associates, co-workers, entrepreneurs, initiators, owner-operators, and charterholders, than to be employees and employers. 39
One proposed engine for youth financial literacy is C.H. Budd’s youth bonds initiative which would redirect much of the money which is being funneled into the juvenile detention industry and channel it into loans, whereby each young person, including juvenile delinquents, would be capitalized to become the charterholder of a small business, with a business plan and mentorship in the best practices of accounting: www.christopherhoughtonbudd.com/youth-bonds 40
In a healthy Republic, the Constitution would expire every generation…every 18 years…as Thomas Jefferson suggested, so that it must be freshly perceived, revised, and affirmed. Humanity ought not be born as slaves to any National Law...not even to the US Constitution. 41
‘Reductionist’ means that all the qualities of life are reduced to quantities—to gray numerical calculations. ‘Materialism’ is the view that thoughts, ideas, and conceptions; feelings, aesthetics, and longings; and ethical character, values, and strivings are only electro-chemical processes which randomly happen in the brains of walking assemblages of protein (‘human animals’), and that the earth is a speck of dust in a black void. The widespread thought that humanity (ideational beings), animals (feeling beings), plants (growing beings), and minerals (‘being beings’) are just things can have an grim effect on the way that society is structured. 42
The wider biodynamic (agri)cultural ethos is succinctly expressed in the motto “Social, economic, and cultural renewal through the integration of education, agriculture and the arts.” of Angelic Organics Farm Association in Illinois: http://angelicorganicsassociation.org 43
www.angelicorganics.com/Angelic_Organics___Chicago_CSA/Angelic_Organics___History_of_a_Chicago_CSA_Farm_files/Stir_ANGE_ORG.pdf 31
“Our future depends upon our choice between death forces and life forces; upon whether or not we will return in humility to the soil. The great questions are: Will we return to a philosophy of life which lays stress upon growth? Will our youth be educated in the spirit of growing things, and of services to life? Will they learn that it means more than money to plant our seeds and harvest our crops? If the right inner attitude towards the soil penetrates the human race again, a renaissance of rural life will begin, and not only will new resources be created for our population, but spiritually we will be ‘safe.’” —Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, Bio-Dynamic Gardening and Farming, Vol. I (Mercury Press, 1983) quoted from the Biodynamics Association: www.biodynamics.com “We are not only called upon by Allah to care for the earth, but to heal what has been destroyed.” —Ibrahim Abouleish, Egyptian biodynamic farmer "In farming, as in gardening, I happen to believe that if you treat the land with love and respect (in particular, respect for the idea that it has an almost living soul, bound up in the mysterious, everlasting cycles of nature) then it will repay you in kind.” —Charles, Prince of Wales and biodynamic farmer
the separation of housing and state All government housing programs and monies would be transferred to the Economic Republic. ‘Housing projects’ would become a thing of the past. We move from well-meaning but desolate Government Housing to ensouled, contract-based, fair-and-true priced Associative Housing. There is someplace for everyone. Imagine a further evolution of the housing market. Though I’ve had some good and kind landlords, who really wants to grow up to be a renter or landlord? Unless someone is a young person who’s in their wandering years of pilgrimage, or is on an intentional, temporary sojourn to do a piece of work in a particular locality, why rent at all? Why live like a modern-day sharecropper, Highland crofter, or medieval serf, whose very home is a rented tenancy under a landed lord? How can we feel confident to express our real views as freemen and citizens when we live like that? Is there a way to re-configure the values and structure of the housing sector so that nearly all rentals become rent-to-own, with one’s home typically paid off by the middle of life? Then, most everyone in the next generation would inherit a freehold house or condominium (a freehold apartment) instead of being shunted into a lifetime of renting, or locked into the ‘home owning’ scheme (=renting the house from the bank) whereby most houses take decades to pay off. When everyone really owns a home, free and clear, then when someone is moving to a different locale, there could be simple, transparent associative methods for swapping or transmitting homes to whoever needs it, instead of the deeply legalistic, ritualistic, fee-laden brokering by the real-estate and banker industries. My friend Aldo, who built the tiny house, articulates a Right to a Freehold Home. Possible or impossible?: “In retrospect, each of the past few rental apartments I've lived in prior to the tiny house, though wonderful in their own way, have been accompanied by a disquieting feeling due to their transient nature. I knew each personal touch i put into those places soon would be left behind when I moved. I am reminded of the words of architect, Christopher Alexander, who writes in his book A Pattern Language, “People cannot be genuinely healthy in a house which is not theirs. All forms of rental—whether from private landlords or public housing agencies—works against the natural process which allow people to form stable self healing communities.” In the same way that it is each person’s right to have their body (and mind and spirit), I believe its everyone's right to own a modest, safe abode. I have heard this notion echoed in many conversations with my friends, young and old.” —Aldo Lavaggi, Golden Thread Tiny House blog, November 2013 http://goldthreadtinyhouse.blogspot.com
the separation of transportation and state An associative transportation organism Instead of the highways being a police-zone, with their entry controlled through government identification cards and the state-compelled purchase of mutual insurance services, the transportation commons would be stewarded by contracts between stakeholders, including: a ‘consumer association’ composed of all drivers in the country (something like AAA), the commercial transport associations (truckers and trucking companies), the road construction and maintenance associations, and the traffic science and planning institutes—with the negotiations facilitated by the Transportation Association of the Economic Republic. I would know that I, through direct comment and through my consumer representative, 44 consciously agreed to—and had a real voice in shaping—the speed limits, any inspection stickers, whether and how much the tolls, and so forth, instead of inheriting them from the inertia-based Corporate State I birthed into, whose traffic laws were shaped by deep-pocketed lobbyists from 45 the insurance and auto repair industries, and by the wounded spirits of the police fraternities. 44
There are 10 US states which require no inspection sticker. And several others which require an inspection only when the car is sold. And the world doesn’t fall apart. Yet my home state of New York and my birth state of West Virginia require a full inspection every year, no matter how new the car is. It is likely that the auto repair industry played a role in writing those laws. There is a legitimate argument for some kind of emissions and safety qualifications for vehicles. Yet such matters would be dealt with by associative contracts in the Economic Republic, and by rights laws which are not influenced by any industry lobby. 45
If you would like to know more, see “Roads and Traffic Enforcement in the Threefold Republic” at https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/roads-and-trafficenforcement.
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The right to walk and bike Imagine a future in which it is a political Right to safely walk to any address, with sidewalks and footpaths built along the edges of all roads, or even through back-lots. Where I live in upstate New York, I wish there were a trail from Harlemville to Philmont which was away from the road and cars. Where I grew up Appalachia, this Right might require overhanging walkways to be built throughout her ‘unwalkable’ curvey, cliff-hugging highway system, where in the words of West Virginian storyteller Breece D’J Pancake: “road maps resembled a barrel of worms with St. Vitus’ Dance.” I’ve recently heard that the governor announced a new policy to pave all the way to the edge of the right-of-way, which will make at least a little more room to bike or walk. Imagine if, besides along the roadways, good quality walking paths were built along nearly every river and stream in the country, and along the ridges of the watershed crests, so that we could feel the lay of the land and waters again.
a car-free land surface Imagine if, in the further future, we placed all motorized road-traffic under the earth. The sound of a growling motor is really at home underground. Isn’t it strange that in this century, we sealed up much of the land-surface with tar and man-made limestone, and built roaring metal chariots which zoom around on rubbery wheels right next to where soft human forms are walking, playing, and sleeping? All roadways, whether in the city or in the country, would either be re-dug as tunnels, or where there is room, humped over to become a silent grassy berm. Walkways and bikeways would be built on top of the tunnel or berm. Trees would be planted so that, when they matured, they would 46 overarch the way, making for a walkable, shaded ‘green cathedral’ throughout the continent. Except for on-site construction vehicles, farm-site trucks and tractors, the occasional off-road utility vehicle or emergency rescue vehicle, and racecars on racetracks, the land would only be touched by the likes of human feet, bicycles, horses, and electric, quiet, odorless motorized golf carts or Neighborhood Electric Vehicles, which are essentially golf carts with windows, doors, lights, and a 25 mph maximum speed—an increasingly common means of transportation in the resort towns and retirement communities of the Sun Belt. Human children, farm animals, and wild animals could walk and wander anywhere without being run over. (Yes, there’d still be an occasional injury and death, though of a whole magnitude lower than what we have now.) The continual refining of the automobile and tractor trailer to become quieter and cleaner doesn’t change the fact that these are flying pieces of metal. Putting this metal in its place would be an amends for all those who have died trying to cross or walk along the road during this century. We might place a memorial stone at each place where a human being perished during the century of the automobile.
The Hundertwasser Tunnel. Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser (b.1928-d.2000) designed such a way. Unlike Hundertwasser, I suggest that the tunnels be entirely sealed over like a subway, and soundproofed. The under-earth is the fitting place for engine noise. There’d be underground parking lots for each neighborhood and business district, with stairways and elevators reaching the surface. In rural areas, where the residences are widely spread, there’d be an underground garage for each house, with plenty of parking for guests. Even in rural areas, there’d be overflow parking areas for each village and hamlet, so that if there were some gigantic family reunion or event, the overflow could park and carpool from there. Commercial trucking and deliveries would be done through these corridors. Stores would have their own underground loading ramps for trucks to back into. Places where large amount of on-loading occurs, such as quarries, concrete plants, and cargo ship- and train-offloading depots, would 46
As witnessed on Queens Road in Charlotte, North Carolina. 33
have their own above-ground access ramp leading down into the roadway. There’d also be limited-access outlets spaced periodically for off-loading the occasional large load onto the surface, such as a pre-fabricated home or construction site materials. From there, these items would be delivered via a very low-speed crawl across the pedestrian surface with a flagman walking in front. That may sound too expensive to do, but in 1914 our 2014 highway system, with overpasses spiraling and looping into the sky, would’ve sounded too expensive. Anyone can throw out numbers which make something sound impossible. The possibility or impossibility lies not so much in its projected cost, but in whether the idea is a self-evident ‘next right thing’ in the eyes of humanity or not. We definitely have the engineering ability. This Hundertwasser Corridor System would not be the highest social priority, and even in the realm of engineering, burying the roadways might be of secondary importance compared to renewing the livability and aesthetics of our surface buildings, but once those aspects of renewal are underway, the sinking of the motorized transportation organism into the earth would be a worthy task. The thing is, we are going to be here a long time, and will continue to need a transportation and delivery system for centuries and centuries. These tunnels would continue to serve as conduits regardless of what kind of vehicles are innovated, whether it be the conversion of cars to be magnetically self-steered, or the installation of electric tram lines throughout the country for a fleet of driverless streetcars which can be summoned at any time, by any residence, and which share the road with self-steering automobiles. The wider tunnels, such as those which seal over the interstates, could hold both car-traffic and a new extension of passenger and freight train lines, including high-speed trains, which would greatly reduce domestic air traffic. Road kill, snowplows, salt trucks, and worry about driving in rainstorms or icy roads would become a thing of the past. With magnetically steered cars and electric trams, the vexation of speeding tickets and the tragedies of car wrecks and drunk driving would be no more. And these corridors would also be used to lay utility lines and pipes. All electric, telephone, and cable poles would be removed from the surface, further clearing 47 humanity’s viewshed and play-space. There’d be no more power outages from ice storms, tree falls, and bird collisions. Some might mourn the loss of ‘scenic drives.’ In my experience, scenery experienced through a windshield is little more than a slightly pleasant movie. Only by getting out in the elements, on my own two feet, do I really feel inwardly moved by nature. In this future, the whole wide world would be open to the human foot. The right to roam One of the reasons strip-mining is so pervasive in Appalachia, is that the minescape often only goes up the back side of the mountains which are visible from public roads. There are country-sized areas which are not visible from public travelways, and the mining corporations strip those lands right up the edge of the viewshed of the public. While private stewardship of the fruitfulness of the land is important, the privatist/corporatist blocking off of vast areas of the country allows for dark things to happen to the land. And when that happens, the elements are there for bad things to happen to humanity, such as flooding, which has destroyed much of the soulful town of Welch, West Virginia. If the eyes of respectful roamers, saunterers, and playing children had been on these hills throughout the past century, and if every hill and wooded copse had a name, then there would be more human beings who loved these places, and the places would not be so easily destroyed and wasted. The same could be said for the rest of the country, including the nearly endless gridded, boxed-in, suburban and industrial bonescape which was once the Garden State of New Jersey, and the paradisical oases of Southern California which are now covered by Dantean layers of highway overpasses. The ancient Right to Roam, which has survived in the Scandinavian countries, could open up the entire earth. It is humanity’s world, after all. The Right to Roam has very specific traditions for respectfully exercising this right, such as staying a certain distance from private buildings and croplands, and leaving no trace. Americans aren’t barbarians—we can become respectful roamers too. We practice some of that in Scouting. We too are able to take up the traditions of allemannsrett—the ‘all human right’ to wander and range where the wild things are. Did American Humanity settle this vast continent only to be boxed into a world of strip malls and interstates? The Shawnee Indian leader Tecumseh also voiced the Right to Roam and its respect for the Right of Occupancy: “The right of occupancy is as good in one place as in another. There cannot be two occupations in the same place. The first excludes all others. It is not so in hunting or traveling; for there the same ground will serve many, as they may follow each other all day; but the camp is stationary, and that is occupancy. It belongs to the first who sits down on his blanket or skins which he has thrown upon the ground; and till he leaves it no other has a right.” —Tecumseh’s address to the U.S. Governor of Indiana Territory at Vincennes, Ohio, 1810 Our grandparents—even as children—were free to roam the paths and woods for miles around; but humanity’s children have become more and 48 more circumscribed by surface infrastructure, and by fear. The Threefold Republic is not only about making the structural changes, but also making the personal changes and recoveries which will heal much of causes and effects of fear.
the separation of infrastructure, utilities, and the commons from the state Similarly, the physical infrastructure and utilities which are presently maintained or subsidized by the Government, would be maintained by 49 associative contracts within the Economic Republic, with all users/consumers having a real stake in the contracts. Same for the natural commons, 47
The high voltage transmission lines would be buried too, in their own routeway. There is a fact sheet on the benefits of burying electric lines: http://retasite.wordpress.com/burying-high-voltage-lines 48
“How children lost the right to roam in four generations”: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html 34
such as the waters, the hunting grounds, and the radio frequency spectrum. Liberals/progressives have a very difficult time imagining how anything could be a Commons without being owned by the State. Yet that is exactly what the Threefold Republic is aiming for—a Commons stewarded by cultural organizations, instead of by the Government. The rights governance would only lay out the legal framework for such a Third Sectorstewarded Commons.
the separation of trade agreements and state World trade would flourish as never before, but global economic bodies would no longer be able to wield the political states as tools to box-in, strong-arm, and cow the citizenry.
the separation of economic development and state It is an illegitimate conflict of interest for the Head of State to also be the Head of the Economy. The primary purpose of our Rights Servants would no longer be to ‘keep businesses happy.’ The inane and meaningless Certified Business Location signs which appeared on the county borders of 50 West Virginia when I was a teen would be removed.
the separation of currency and state The Economic Republic and its associations would issue the currency or currencies—not the Government. Instead of our current system of obscure, politically-decreed fiat currencies, there would be no ‘legal tender’—only ‘associative tender’, ‘commodity tender’...money as a transparent standin for real commodities, real goods, real produce. Associative Economics is more Libertarian than even the most austere Chicago School economics. 51 Beyond, on the other side of anti-human Neoliberalism, lies humane New Liberalism…New Libertarianism. Trisecting is both ultra-libertarian and infra-socialist. The Threefold Republic is the true center where benevolent self-reliance and social justice wrap around and meet on the other side. “The legitimacy of money as a means of payment...would no longer be the responsibility of the government, but would depend upon measures taken by the administrative bodies of the economic organism. ...No political state will ever solve the currency question in a satisfactory manner by making laws. Contemporary states will only solve it by renouncing their efforts at reaching a solution and leaving the necessary measures to a self-governing economic organism. ...Legal facilities will not have a direct influence on monetary affairs, for these are the province of the economic administration.” —Rudolf Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c03.html
A local currency issued by a town association in southeastern England, featuring a portrait and words from Thomas Paine, who resided there for a time: “We have it in our power to build the world anew.”
the separation of lottery and state From my years serving as a convenience store clerk in West Virginia and California, I’ve sold a number of lottery tickets. I’ve heard all the tired words: “You can’t win if you don’t play!!!” (there’s only one player who’s sure to win—the house)...“If I win, I’ll come back and give you some of the money!!!” (if the clerk also prays for them to win, maybe the god of lotteries will give them a break?)...“If I win, I’ll feed the African children!!!” (it’s a sorry world order if we’re supposed to rely on lottery winners to feed a continent full of humanity.) These government lottery monies go to fund government prisons, government juvenile detention centers, government senior programs, government veterans programs, government parks, and government schools. I wouldn’t be surprised if the regular funding levels of these
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It would be a real sign of civilizational progress if, through my telephone consumer association, we negotiated the end of the robotic voicemail announcements which waste, in total, probably thousands of hours of humanity’s time per year, and which evoke frustration and annoyance in the caller right as we’re trying to compose ourselves to leave a coherent message...and which extract another 15 seconds of revenue for the corporation: "At the tone please record your message, after you have finished recording hang up or press one for more options, to leave a call back number press five." By now, most people know how to use a phone. I feel relieved to know I’m not the only one who has voiced this, as evidenced by the New York Times article “Take Back the Beep” at www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/technology/personaltech/30pogue-email.html?8cir&emc=cira1&_r=0. The article was written in 2009, to no avail...yet. The Threefold Republic isn’t only about big things. It’s also about the little things. 50
“Certified Business Location”, Chris Allen’s Spectacularly Mediocre Blog: http://actionallen.blogspot.com/2010/01/certified-business-location.html
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The recent phenomenon of self-proclaimed ‘bleeding-heart libertarians’ who are not only concerned with commercial liberty, is an expression of New Libertarianism. 35
government programs are decreased as the lottery funding is increased. In any case, I don’t need any more governmental culture, funded by the dementing extraction of tired wishes. While it’s none of my business whether individuals enjoy playing the lottery and other money games, a healthy Rights-State would not be organizing and sponsoring lotteries. In a healthy republic, economic corporations could offer lotteries, casinos, and other games of chance, subject only to whatever industry ‘best practices’ and rights-laws are deemed to be necessary to guarantee fair and transparent commerce in this sector. The transactions wouldn’t necessarily even be taxed any more than regular commerce, as taxation would no longer be a tool for enforcing morality. Besides the existing American Gaming Association—the casino industry group in the US—there’d be a Gaming Consumers Association which would serve as an organized voice for the gaming customer in the Economic Republic. But these enterprises and associations would have no affiliation with the Rights Governance. The government lotteries on this continent are organized as the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries (NASPL). This whole field of state lotteries would be divested and severed from the governance to become an associative economic field. As with any commercial association, they’d be free to donate to the cultural sector—but not to the governance sector. I feel it’s sad that much of humanity, from all walks of life, feels so pressed down by the Americanist Way that we form a cloud of wishes about what we’d do if we had millions of dollars in economic power, and how we’d heroically extract our family and friends from mindless economic toil. The cloud of wishes is so thick, it could almost become a world and lift off the face of the earth, leaving our bodies to linger in a half-life of shuffling days, in the same stale old shoes, in a broken casino. The Methodists voice this possibility in everyday words: The Social Principles state that, "Gambling is a menace to society, deadly to the best interests of moral, social, economic, and spiritual life, and destructive of good government. ...The church should promote standards and personal lifestyles that would make unnecessary and undesirable the resort to commercial gambling—including public lotteries—as a recreation, as an escape, or as a means of producing public revenue or funds for support of charities or government.” Gambling feeds on human greed and invites persons to place their trust in possessions rather than in God. Gambling, as a means of acquiring material gain by chance and at the neighbor's expense, is a menace to personal character and social morality. Gambling fosters greed and stimulates the fatalistic faith in chance. Organized and commercial gambling is a threat to business, breeds crime and poverty, and is destructive to the interests of good government. It encourages the belief that work is unimportant, that money can solve all our problems, and that greed is the norm for achievement. It serves as a "regressive tax" on those with lower income. In summary, gambling is bad economics; gambling is bad public policy; and gambling does not improve the quality of life. Dependence on gambling revenue has led many governments to exploit the weakness of their own citizens, neglect the development of more equitable forms of taxation, and thereby further erode citizen confidence in government. The church has a key role in fostering responsible government and in developing health and moral maturity that free persons from dependence on damaging social customs. Furthermore, it is incumbent upon local churches to reach out with love to individuals who are addicted, compulsive, or problem gamblers and support efforts at recovery and rehabilitation. —“What we believe”, The United Methodist Church: www.umc.org/what-we-believe/gambling (Author’s Note: Well said, UMC. Now if you’d say the same about the addiction to Partiocracy, Corporatism, and the Nation-State, and do it, then we’d be rolling.) *** Through the Threefold Republic, conditions would arise where all of humanity would have the means to become richly immersed in a sea of golden treasure...a treasure whose eyes would not be darkened, nor breath shallowed, nor belly twisted by governmentalization and commoditization: “It’s probably best I’m not rich; I guess I don’t understand how to pull it off. Despite my lottery math, I’m not even completely sure what ‘rich’ is. I suppose rich is having just a little bit more money than anyone you know. Although, there is another possible definition. “Last weekend, three of our four grandchildren came to visit. ...To calm them down for bedtime, our daughter proposed that the first one ready for bed would get to pick the book to be read to them by their grandmother. Nothing like a little competition to channel an excess of enthusiasm. One at a time they came clamoring down the stairs, teeth brushed and jammied up. When the last one found a place to perch on the arm of the chair, my wife was almost submerged in a sea of grandchildren. I caught a glimpse of her smiling blue eyes as she opened the first page. She caught me looking at her and said, ‘What?’ “I said, ‘You look . . . rich.’” —“I won the lottery” by Brent Olsen, with the Minnesota Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, 2010 https://minnesotaumc.org/news/winning-the-lottery/
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the second action
is the constitutional Separation of Human Development and State…of Culture and
Governance. Some changes will interest the Left, and some will interest the Right. All are needed.
The Separation of Religion and State The Separation of Schools and State The Separation of Universities and State The Separation of Healthcare and State The Separation of Media and State The Separation of Scientific Research and State The Separation of Arts and State The Separation of Marriage and State The Separation of Nationality and Citizenship The Separation of Judiciary and State The Separation of Political Parties and State
“I think in any society, culture should have its own rights: not to be touched by the government, not to be promoted by the government, also not to be destroyed by the government." —Ai Weiwei, Chinese artist
the separation of religion and state The one healthy separation of powers which American Humanity has initiated. That is a jewel in our crown. May we be mindful that we don’t pry it out and cast away the true potential of a free spiritual-cultural sector, which has never yet been realized. And we need some more gems. A crown with one jewel is less than worthless if it becomes merely decoration on a slow-thighed beast, slouching towards Bethlehem. Though the separation of religion and state is necessary and healthy, one of the reasons the agnostic Left advocated for freedom of religion was in hopes that the spiritual traditions would become irrelevant or die off without support from the political state, and that the other branches of cultural life, such as education, would be completely shaped by the government. “The social democrats *liberals/progressives+...were correct, although one-sided, in their demand that religion be a private affair. In a healthy social organism all spiritual life must be, in respect to the state and the economy, a ‘private affair.’ But the social democrats' motive in wanting to transfer religion to the private sector is not a desire to create a position within the social organism where a spiritual institution would develop in a more desirable, worthier manner than it can under state influence. They are of the opinion that the social organism should only cultivate with its own means its own necessities of life. And religious values do not belong to this category. “A branch of spiritual *cultural+ life cannot flourish when it is unilaterally removed from the public sector in this way, if the other spiritual branches remain fettered. Modern humanity's religious life will only develop its soul-sustaining strength together with all the other liberated branches of spiritual life.” —Rudolf Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c02.html The liberal European countries such as Belgium, Denmark, and England, which have one or more state-funded churches, have turned the meaningshaping field of human spirituality into a well-funded but irrelevant branch of the government…a sort of bureau for historical preservation, filled with very nice people. Imagine if all the leaves in humanity’s orchard of religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions were to bloom again, as one of many fields within a state-free, commercial-free cultural sector. I’m reminded of how an association of churches rented an old building in downtown Winston-Salem, and turned it into a free and beautiful public fair and cultural festival which anyone could attend. No one bombarded us with religiose messages. Yet the ‘message-less’ human warmth shone through like a burst of summer in the bleak midwinter. It was an open cultural space of respite. Our individual values would be shaped by our religious and spiritual experiences, but in the political-rights sector, these values would always be expressed in universal, secular language.
the separation of pedagogy and bureaucracy…of education and government...of schools and state Our teachers would no longer be pressed into the shape of jailers, and humanity’s children would no longer be pressed into the shape of a tool. “In the government schools, which are referred to as public schools, Indian policy has been instituted there, and it’s a policy where they do not encourage, in fact, discourage, critical thinking and the creation of ideas in public education. After finishing twelve or sixteen years in public school, your ability to creatively think is very limited because that's the way it's been designed and that has been perfected in Indian education. ‘Indian policy’ is to turn out non-thinkers and non-doers and make people a lot easier to control.” —Russell Means, Lakota leader (d. 2012) *** 37
“The souls of this generation would wither away after being sown on the rocky ground of a worldview that can give them no inner source of strength. Human beings would grow up soulless beings within a social order arising out of industrialism. In order that this may not take place, the movement for the trisected social organism strives for the complete disassociation of the educational system from government and industry.” —Rudolf Steiner, “The Trisected Social Organism and Educational Freedom”, The Renewal of the Social Organism http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA024/English/AP1985/GA024_c04.html *** “This ongoing evolution of human consciousness poses ever new challenges: If the inner potential of each human being is to develop out of its own impulses, education needs to be liberated from governmental control and from the influence of commercial interests and placed in the hands of parents and teachers—of those who know and understand children best. When all children, regardless of their family’s socioeconomic status, have the right to the education of their parents’ choice and teachers are free to exercise their creative initiative, fresh forces of renewal springing from the awakened potential of each child will be released into all aspects of society.” th
—John Barnes, publisher and teacher, “Thoughts on the 4 of July: A Growing Independence”, July 2014 www.socialself.org/article/growing-independence *** “Either a rebel or a robot will be created if one prevents a human being with the elemental need for self development from unfolding their soul forces.” —Dieter Brüll, The Mysteries of Social Encounters: The Anthroposophical Social Impulse, 2002 In a Threefold Republic, all government (public) school would be evolved into non-commercial, secular Community Schools. The government schools and other state cultural assets wouldn’t be divested to become commercial enterprises, they’d be divested as free, non-commercial cultural initiatives. This is not about neoliberal austerity, but ‘new liberal’ culture...new Free Culture. Children aren’t supposed to be raised inside a government agency, or inside a business. All children in the country would go to ‘private’ schools. A better word would be ‘independent’, or ‘free cultural schools’ since there would no longer be a public/private dichotomy, but a trichotomy of economic/rights/cultural, with education lying entirely within the cultural realm...the other private sector. MIT professor J. Weizenbaum (b.1923-d. 2008) articulates this separation of powers in this way: “Religion is one part of cultural life; another part is education. The separation of the three activities of society implies that education should be as independent of the state as is religion. In ‘The Separation of School and State’ [an article in the Harvard Educational Review] Stephen Arons presents a legal argument for this separation in the context of US Constitutional law. He states that the case would have ‘for its central principle the preservation of individual conscience from government coercion. The specific application of this principle to education is that any state-constructed school system must maintain a neutral position toward parents' educational choices whenever values or beliefs are at stake. If schools generally are value-inculcating agencies, that fact raises serious constitutional questions about how a state can maintain a sufficiently neutral posture toward values while supporting a system of public education?’ In other words public schools as a matter of course tend to transmit those values deemed appropriate by the majority of the public. This implies choices among such conflicting values as competitiveness and cooperation, intellect and wisdom, and the status of manual work vis-à-vis intellectual work. Parents not accepting the majority view have the right to alternatives. “Current rulings protect the existence of private schools and their right to determine their own curricula with minimal state interference. These rulings exclude ‘any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.’ Arons feels that their implications go further than is generally accepted. First, they can be interpreted as prohibiting state financing systems from favoring those who are in agreement with public school values. In effect every child has the right to the same educational support at the school of his or her parents' choice, whether public or private. Otherwise constitutional rights are reserved for the rich. Second, state regulation of private schools cannot effect value transmission unless there is legally compelling justification given by the state. Putting these implications into effect would increase the separation of school and state.” —Foreword to The Renewal of the Social Organism, 1984 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA024/English/AP1985/GA024_forward.html Yet the children’s’ right to education would be maintained. Presently, this universal right is implemented as a universal compulsion to attend a nationalized anti-spiritual school which flies the American National Flag, with the child locked into that Government School based on their residential address, unless the family lineage happens to be privately wealthy. This “Universal Right to Governmental Education” would be replaced with a Universal Right to School Choice. And prisons and schools would no longer have the same style of architecture. Though the Trisector Idea has much in common with Liberals/Progressives, we part ways when it comes to teacher unions. In this regard the Trisector Idea is firmly with the best efforts of the Libertarians and Conservatives. “People don't recognize how powerful politically the teachers' unions are. Something like a quarter of all the delegates at the Democratic National Convention are from the teachers' union. They are probably the most powerful pressure group in the U.S., very large funds, very large number of people and very active politically. 38
“The elementary and secondary school system is the single most socialist industry in the U.S. leaving aside the military, but aside from the military it's a major socialist industry; it is centralized and the control comes from the center and the difficulty of having a monopoly in which people cannot choose has been exacerbated by the fact that it has been largely taken over by teachers' unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers and the unions. Understandably, I do not blame them, but they are interested in the welfare of their members, not the welfare of the children, and the result is they have introduced a degree of rigidity, which makes it impossible to reform the public school system from within. Reform has to come through competition from the outside and the only way you can get competition is by making it possible for parents to have the ability to choose. “Right now those of us that are in the upper-income classes have freedom of choice for our children in various ways. We can decide where to live and we can choose places to live that have good schools or we can afford to pay twice for schooling once by taxes and once by paying tuition at a private school. It seems to me utterly unfair that those opportunities should not be open to everybody at all levels of income. If you had a system, the kind I would like to see, the government would say we require every child to get a certain number of years of schooling and in order to make that possible we are going to provide for every parent a voucher equal to a certain number of dollars, which they can use only for schooling, can't use it for anything else. They can add to it, but they cannot subtract from it. Those will be, those can be used in government schools. Let the government run the school, but force them to be in competition so that all government schools charge tuition, but can be paid for by that voucher. But that same voucher can also be used in private schools of all kinds and then you would have an open; the teachers' union complained and they insist they are doing a good job. If they are doing a good job then why are they so afraid of some competition?” 52
—“Milton Friedman on Vouchers”, 2003 www.edchoice.org/The-Friedmans/The-Friedmans-on-School-Choice/Milton-Friedman-on-Vouchers.aspx Unlike many conservatives and libertarians, Friedman perceives that the material means to attend nearly any private school—and all schools would be private and independent in a healthy society—would best be articulated as a clear right, rather than a privilege predicated only on the material wealth of the family lineage. There is no better use for what legitimate ‘rights tax’ would exist in a free society. Otherwise, if the teachers unions were simply busted and the government schools disbanded, without simultaneously ensuring the means to attend nearly any private school, then humanity’s future would be rescued from the iron pan of governmentalization and mediocracy, only to fall into the fire of economic desperation and commoditization. The Threefold Republic would go even further than Friedman, and would divest all government schools to become non-commercial, gift-funded schools, rather than commercial businesses. What libertarians don’t yet conceive is the need for two separate private sectors which are qualitatively and structurally distinct.
the separation of universities, colleges, and state Professors aren’t supposed to be government pension-and-tenure-seeking bureaucrats. How many academics really make use of their tenured economic position to courageously stand for a dignified future? Our scholars become lost in their minute, fragmentary specialization, and in their search for funding—‘publish or perish’—and are never seen again. ‘Publish’ has come to mean writing about a teeny tiny broken fragment of life, with no one really having the time or vision to synthesize the minutiae in a living way. “We see that the spiritual *cultural+ life in Europe was entirely independent and free until the 13th or 14th centuries, when, what was the free, independent spiritual life was first pushed into the universities. In this time you find the founding of the universities, and the universities then in turn slip by and by into the life of the state. So that one can say: From about the 13th to the 16th or 17th century, the universities slip into the states-life, and with the universities, also the remaining educational institutions, without people really noticing it. These other institutions simply followed. “...We have reached that point in historical development where things can go no further like this, where a sense and a feeling for free spiritual [cultural] life must once again be developed. When in a strait jacket, the spirit simply does not advance; because it only apparently advances, but in truth still remains behind—can never celebrate real births, but at most renaissances. “Today we simply stand in the age in which we must absolutely reverse the movement which has developed in the cultural world of Europe with its American annex, the age in which the opposite direction must set in. For what has gone on developing for a time must reach a point at which something new must set in. Otherwise one runs into the danger of doing as one would when, with a growing plant, one were to say it should not be allowed to come to fruition, it should grow further, it should keep blooming on and on. —Then it would grow thus: bring forth a flower; then no seed, but again a flower, again a flower, and so on.” —Rudolf Steiner, “The Art of Lecturing”, 1921 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA339/English/MP1984/19211012p02.html "People choose to believe that things will continue in the same way. No, they will not. If life continues without the stimuli that come from the spiritual [free cultural] world, industry can go on, banks can be in existence and universities where all the sciences are taught, other professions
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For other voices for this separation of powers, see the quotations from the Alliance for the Separation of Schools and State: www.schoolandstate.org/quotes.htm and “The Friedmans on School Choice”at the Friedman Foundation of Educational Choice: www.edchoice.org/The-Friedmans/The-Friedmans-on-School-Choice. 39
can be developed—but everything will lead to decadence, to barbarism, to the fall of civilization. ...And the majority of people today want decline and simply delude themselves into the belief that an ascent can still come out of it." —Steiner, “The Search for the New Isis”, 1920 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA202/English/MP1983/19201226p01.html
the separation of healthcare and state All the important work of the Veterans Hospitals and Military Hospitals would be transferred to the Charity Hospital model, with their budgets being partially met through direct transfers from the Economic Republic (without the Government as middle-man), and partially through freelygiven, individual gift monies. Likewise, the role and monies of Medicare (for elderly and disabled) and Medicaid (for low-income persons) would be clarified and rechanneled. The healthcare needs of the economically non-productive elderly and disabled, and of the economically impoverished, would continue to be met, though in a more transparently perceivable way. Scandinavia, Canada, and Britain have governmentalist/statist medical sectors. Prior to 2010, the U.S. had an almost entirely privatist/corporatist medical sector (except for government Medicare, Medicaid, veterans hospitals, and military hospitals). Health was bought and sold as a commodity. The sick were consumers. Hospitals fought for market shares. Now we are experiencing a full-blown fusion of Corporation and State in the medical field of life. The health insurance industry has purchased the right to compel every citizen to buy their commercial services. Now, as captive consumers, we are legally compelled to purchase health in ‘The Healthcare Marketplace’ (www.healthcare.gov)...a ‘government market.’ An oxymoron. Despite the fact that the government-approved insurance agencies don’t even cover much of the kind of treatment that, in my experience, really brings people back to life, or prevents illness in the first place—such as eating nearly 100% organic and biodynamic food, and taking steps to rinse out the black goo which has encrusted the hole in the emotional body, and filling the hole with gold gathered from making amends for all the harm we have ever done, and then sewing it up. In a healthy future, the healing arts would be offered as a sacrament by doctors and nurses who receive a decent livelihood to devote their workday to healing people. These healers wouldn’t be government functionaries, nor would they, in conscience, buy and sell health. They would simply be trained as doctors and nurses...and in association with charitable medical clinics and hospitals, would freely offer the healing arts. Individuals would be free to patronize any combination of streams of medical practice...conventional allopathic, osteopathic, naturopathic, homeopathic, Oriental medicine, Ayurvedic, anthroposophically-enhanced.
the separation of media and state We end the Voice of America government propaganda, unless it is to continue as a cultural service of the American national-cultural organization. And although those are nice programs, we end the remaining government funding of Public Radio and Public Television. Their offerings can and would be funded entirely by freely-given monies. More subtle than government broadcasting, yet much more pervasive, is the people-pleasing statist bent in the reporters themselves. “Whatever one wants to call this, ‘journalism’ is the wrong label. ...Presidents have actual press secretaries and Party spokespeople for that.” —Glen Greenwald, “MSNBC Boldly Moves to Plug Its One Remaining Hole”, 2013 http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/19-12
the separation of science and state…of research and state We would divest the National Science Foundation, the US Geological Survey, and the National Institutes of Health and other governmentalized research agencies, to become Free Scientific Institutes. We end the militarization of NASA.
the separation of the arts and state The National Endowment for the Arts = nice, governmentalized, nationalized art. “In the great State arrangements as in the narrower, provincial bodies, dilettantes have the authority and also, according to the strength of the parties, politicians to whom art is only a secondary interest and who, though they often have goodwill, usually lack the necessary expert knowledge and freedom from bias. And so it has come about that the State has almost completely failed to meet the justified demands of music. This does not concern music alone; it is typical in all cultural affairs. ...Where then are the cultural interests of the people to be considered? Parliamentary debates are out of the question. There is not a single expert of our profession in the Reichstag and even if there were ten or twenty, they could do nothing at all in a place where people speak and vote according to party points of view. “There is only one way that is logical and clear and it will therefore be adopted one day for the well-being of our people. Beside the Political Parliament administering the equitable position of the individual vis-à-vis the whole, and of the people vis-à-vis the international world, and beside the Economic Council to deal with the material foundations of the people's life, we need a Cultural Council for the promotion of spiritual affairs.” —Rudolf Steiner quoting a musician and editor of the Rhenish Music and Theater Newspaper “Search for the New Isis”: http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA202/English/MP1983/19201226p01.html (Author’s Note: the American words for ‘parliamentary’ and ‘Reichstag’ are ‘congressional’ and ‘Congress’.)
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the separation of nation and state…of nationality and citizenship…of cultural identity and statal identity…of the american national culture and the american civic governance Not everything in life is supposed to be packed into the National Flag. There’s a whole chapter about this later in the book.
the separation of marriage and state Marriage itself is a cultural, spiritual action of private or communal significance, like baptism, bar/bat mitzvah, pastoral or monastic ordination, solstice celebration, the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, or recovery sponsorship. In a Threefold Republic, the rights-state would have nothing whatever to do with marriage as such. The word ‘marriage’ would be stricken from legal codes. Whatever legal aspects are really necessary, and are not simply cultural matters, would be called something else, such as a ‘Civil Union.’ Though these terms have recently come to connote a same-gender ‘marriage by another name’, the 53 two words, or something like them, are really fitting as a general legal term for all couplings in the legal sphere. As a cultural action, adult human beings would be free to initiate and close relationships in any way they so choose, whether it be through an existing cultural tradition or not. The thosands of religious, spiritual, philosophical, and ethno-national traditions would be free to define and enact marriage, by whatever name, however they wish. The cultural bodies would be free to recognize, or not recognize, each other’s traditions. From Catholic Humanity’s perspective, no one else in humanity’s world is really married except for Catholics. In the cultural sector, our Catholics would be free to hold to that position forever. As a legal action, all the statutory nuances and barnacles of the vast corpus of marital and divorce law, which are invisibly pressed into what is called ‘marriage’, would be distilled and re-cast as a clear legal shape whose long-term contours and consequences can be grasped in a commonsense way by the citizenry, without having to have a lawyer on hand. People would be free to be culturally Married (or ‘bonded’, ‘partnered’, ‘espoused’, or whatever cultural name one wishes), but choose to not enter into the bundle of legal rights which is called a Civil Union. 54 And vice versa. The Civil Union itself would consist only of the rights aspect, such as the partners’ right to hospital visitation. There would be no more ‘marriage licenses’ issued by national governments. Though of course, each couple has imbued the existing forms with their own sacred and beautiful significance, why would I want my marriage to be licensed by a bloody nation-state...a national government? There could be a Civil Union certificate as a legal-rights document, but not a ‘license.’ The cultural traditions would be free to craft their own meaningful symbols of marriage. As an economic action, whatever income-sharing agreements or financial contracts two or more adults arranged between themselves, would be their own business. The ‘prenuptial agreement’ in the U.S.—which provides for division of property and spousal monetary support in the event of divorce—is clearly an economic aspect. ‘Prenups’ would be an economic contract, which could be undertaken separately from, but in relation to, the legal Civil Union and the cultural Marriage. The cultural traditions might have their own view on the economic responsibilities of marriage, which would inform those who celebrate marriage in that tradition. To the extent that there are general economic rights and obligations (rather than freely negotiated prenup contracts), these would be included in the Civil Union—though now with a perspective clarified through the structural separation of the economy (and economic contracts) from the governance (and rights agreements). From a systems perspective, what are now called ‘civil marriages’ and ‘civil registrar ceremonies’, are basically a secular, national form of marriage. This form of marriage—as opposed to religious, canonical marriage—became prevalent in the late 1700s through the British national government’s wish to conform the populace to the state-pleasing Anglican Church, and through the secularizing, nationalizing, governmentalizing impulse of the French Revolution. In the U.S., such ceremonies are performed by chartered local officials of the American government. Following the separation of marriage and state, and the separation of nation and state, the 193 civic national cultures of humanity’s world would be free to continue to offer their own national forms of marriage in the cultural sector, but the rights governance itself would no longer be presiding over cultural ceremonies. And the 10,000 indigenous and aspirant nationalities of humanity’s world would be free to offer their marriage traditions again. There would be many forms of marriage.
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The words ‘civil union’ presently refer to a government-approved relationship between same-gendered adults, which is similar or identical to governmentapproved ‘marriage’ between opposite-gendered adults. Such unions are called by different names in different jurisdictions throughout the world: civil partnerships (UK), registered partnerships (Czech Republic), domestic partnerships (Portugal, Hungary, Croatia, and various US states), significant relationships (Tasmania), reciprocal beneficiary relationships (Hawaii), adult interdependent relationships (Alberta), life partnerships (Germany), stable unions (Andorra), or civil solidarity pacts (France). In some jurisdictions, such as Colorado, opposite genders have the option of calling their legally-approved relationship a ‘civil union’ instead of a ‘marriage.’ In an egalitarian Rights Republic, the term ‘Civil Union’ would cover the rights-aspect of all of those agreements which are trying to be some form of ‘state marriage’, regardless of the citizens’ gender. If you wish to know more about the separation of marriage and state see Sarah Hearn’s “Marriage Equality in New York State” at www.thinkoutword.org/marriageequality-in-new-york-state. The other inherently polarized questions would begin to be untangled as well. For one threefolder’s perspective on abortion, see Abraham Entin’s “Manifesto for the Future”: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/manifestofuture 54
There’s a list of marital rights and legal obligations here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_and_responsibilities_of_marriages_in_the_United_States 41
the separation of the judiciary and state We would transfer the entire Judicial Branch to the Cultural Republic. The Judicial Branch would be funded with its own Judicial Services Subsidy, separate from the Rights Services Subsidy. This would mean a change from the lawyer-monopolized, mechanistic black hole of the Judicial Complex, to an authentic, nuanced, Humane Justice. And there is a necessary change which will please neither the Left nor the Right. Yet it is needed for our true humanity to unfold:
the separation of political parties and state We would end the ‘partiocratic’ state. The monied interests flow through these two Political Science-and-Action Clubs. As non-governmental, charitable organizations, Political Clubs (‘Parties’) would have no actual or implicit relationship with the Rights Governance. There would be no government facilitation of ‘primary elections’, which are simply private, internal processes, in the same way that the Methodist Church or the Moose Club select their own leadership however they wish. Local government facilities would be constitutionally barred from hosting such events. The Club of the Left and of the Right would be welcome to rent space in private facilities. In the eyes of the Actual Governance, the only election is the General Election. No party membership (or other club membership) would be listed on Governance ballots. And our elected Rights Servants would be seated in legislative chambers by their last name, instead of by their allegiance to the Organization of the Right, or the Organization of the Left. Individuals as individuals, not as party functionaries, would offer themselves for trusted service. The fear-based spectrum of Red State versus Blue State gives way to a human spectrum of purple. ***
the third action
is a constitutional Separation of the Powers of Commoditization from the fields of Individual,
Human Development…in other words, the Separation of the Economy and Culture. The human being is not a commodity. This change includes:
The Separation of Economic Corporation and Cultural Organization The Separation of Art Market and Art The Separation of Music Industry and Music The Separation of Economic Utilitarianism and Education The Separation of the Health Insurance Industry and the Art of Healing The Separation of the Pharmaceutical Industry and the Substance of Healing The Separation of Advertising Industry and the Human Consciousness The Separation of Media Companies and the Art of Journalism The Separation of the Biotech Industry and the Human Kernel The Separation of the Biotech Industry and Humanity’s Nutriment The Separation of the Intellectual Property Industry and an Open Source Culture The Separation of the Sports Industry and the Love of the Game The Separation of Monied Power and the Stewardship of Surplus Capital and Large Inheritances The Separation of Monied Power and the Stewardship of Factories, Business Charters, and other Means of Production The Separation of Monied Power and Land Stewardship
the separation of economic corporation and cultural organization These two kinds of endeavors would be made legally distinct from each other, and distinct from Governance Agencies:
Economic Bodies (‘Corporations’) would be those enterprises which produce a physical commodity (food, clothing, shelter, transportation, goods and wares), which distribute those commodities (shipping, warehousing, and retailing), or which provide a service 55 which maintains or repairs a commodity. Also, industry associations and chambers of commerce, banks, credit unions, and stock markets; along with labor unions and consumer federations, such as buyer’s clubs, would be considered as economic associations.
Cultural Organizations would be those initiatives whose primary purpose is developing the intellectual-noetic-spiritual, psycho-emotiveaesthetic, and physical-athletic capacities of the individual human being. Cultural fields include: the arts (music, dance, theater, the literary arts, and the visual arts, including architecture), science and research, religion and spirituality, philosophy, the humanities, education, primary and secondary schools, colleges, universities, trade schools, childcare, eldercare, hospitals and clinics, medical 56 practices, mental health and counseling, alternative wellness (homeopathy, herbalists, yoga), gyms, sports, parks and historical sites,
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A new, enculturated evolution of the bank or credit union, which would serve as a ‘capital stewardship organization’ within the cultural sector, would be possible in the further future. 56
How much ‘depression’, ‘anxiety’, and other soul distress is really a human response to ‘unquestionable’ societal structures within which the psychological profession is itself embedded? Soviet psychologists hardly questioned—or even perceived—that statism was simply a ‘given’ in which healthy, well-adjusted individuals were supposed to thrive and prosper. 42
libraries and museums, publishers, news media, fraternities and clubs, civil rights groups, grass-roots and social movement organizations, ethnic organizations, philanthropy and charities, grant-making foundations, mediation services, and land trusts.
the separation of the art market and art…and of the music industry and music Imagine if in every locality there were artist and musicians who received a modest but generous livelihood to simply make art and music to be given away freely. The economic, survival needs of artists would begin to be met abundantly, so that the work can be done without having to sell the sublimity. Imagine if there were Free Culture distribution platforms whereby artists could designate some or all of their art objects and musical creations to 57 be eternally ‘uncommodifyable’, and remove these pieces from the Art Market and Music Business. Instead of Art Owners and Music Consumers, there would be Art Stewards and Music Patrons, as conscious cultural roles. ‘Art First!’, ‘Music First!’, and ‘Freely Given, Freely Supported’ would be slogans of the Cultural Republic. We need a pervasive, free sector of gifted musicians and artists in all localities, offering shows, murals, and sculptures in every hamlet and neighborhood…in homes, fields, and workplaces…from morning to evening. We wouldn’t ban television, but we would provide the conditions for our culture to evolve to the ‘post58 television cultural organism.’ “Anxious artists and other spiritual [cultural] workers will question whether talent would be better off in a free culture than in one which is provided for by the state and economic interests, as is the case today. ...If we consider life from experience instead of theoretical preconceptions, we will agree that creative individuals would have better prospects of seeing their work fairly judged if a free cultural community existed which could act according to its own values.” —Rudolf Steiner, preface to Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_pref4.html;mark=311,9,16#WN_mark It’d be swell if one day the art world and the music scene were no longer floating islands of cold comfort.
the separation of economic utilitarianism and education Imagine a free pedagogical sector which put an end to industry-driven, government-dictated high-stakes testing which turns the child into a Tool which is pleasing to business and state. Instead, through an Individual Pedagogical Subsidy gifted to each child-citizen, we would provide conditions for the free unfolding of the child’s unique personality and spiritual purpose.
the separation of the health insurance industry and the art of healing The Threefold Republic would give birth to a charity-based medical sector composed of doctors, nurses, and counselors who are provided a modest but dignified livelihood so that they may provide their services freely to whoever needs healing. The corporatist-statist order itself is literally sickening, not only in regard to mental distress, but also physical unhealth: “Income inequality appears to be corrosive, undermining society at multiple levels, through ‘Rankism’ (where there are Somebodies and Nobodies), through the stress and anxiety of not having enough money to pay the rent, the mortgage or the medical bills. The loss of self worth erodes families, communities and ultimately the immune system of individuals.” —Christopher Schaefer PhD, “The Unfinished Business of Health Care”, Hawthorne Valley Center for Social Research, 2010 http://thecenterforsocialresearch.org/resources The dark, materializing, commodifying, mummifying initiation of the medical school industry would be lifted by the arrival of charitable medical schools, by Individual Subsidies for Medical School (so that young doctors aren’t indentured for the rest of their life), by putting the malpractice litigation and insurance industries in their rightful place, and by the release of the stranglehold which the government-sanctioned allopathic view of medicine has on humanity.
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The Art Dispersal in Philmont, New York and Portland, Oregon is one small model for how this could be done: www.freecolumbia.org/art-dispersal http://thearthall.wordpress.com/2014/01/31/laura-summer-art-dispersed 58
Though I haven’t had a television in years, I have enjoyed some of those cultural offerings. Imagine if the corpus of stories from the Age of Television—from situation comedies to sci-fi to soap operas to detective dramas—were to be transformed into plays which travelled throughout the country, reaching even the small hamlets. National and local actors would enact episodes from these series. For the most popular series, there might be several casts touring simultaneously, with local actors filling the supporting roles. New episodes might be written. Likewise for the Age of Film. ‘Movies’ (moving pictures) would be organically transformed into ‘livies’ (living pictures). The more fantastic stories might be done with giant puppets, like Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont. Epic stories might be turned into ‘civic masques’, where the entire populace is invited to play a role in the story, like Percy Mackaye’s Saint Louis from 1914, with its cast of 7,500. I’m reminded of Middle-earth Story-telling Theatre which came to our state fair when I was a kid, and which outfitted hordes of children to play the role of goblin, dwarven, and elven armies. Each day would become impressed with living memories. 43
Many of our hospitals were originally sacramental offerings from the various spiritual confessions. Only in the last century has their spiritual mission and outlook wholly bent to the corporatist way. “If the mere profit motive prevails in our economic sphere, it always has the tendency to become increasingly incorporated into the political state, and the generally accepted opinion is that one must produce what yields the most profit. If this idea continues to prevail, then the independent impulses of a free spiritual [cultural] life cannot manifest in the domain of the healing arts and healthcare, and spiritual [cultural] life will then become dependent on political or economic forces; then the economic will govern the spiritual, but the economic must not prevail over the spiritual. This fact is most evident to one who wants to arrive at what the spirit demands in the economic life, to one who wants to serve a genuine and true art of medicine. “The forces of the free economic life in the trisected social organism arrive at the insight which becomes a matter of public concern; an understanding of the human being becomes a public concern in the trisected social organism. The human being must stand within a free spiritual [cultural] life in order that a firmly grounded art of medicine can be nurtured. On the other hand people must develop the idealism through which the products of the economic life are met with an understanding that results not merely from a sense for profit but out of insights emerging from the free spiritual [cultural] management of healthcare. Once this insightful, social human understanding has arisen, this human idealism, there will emerge a willingness to work economically simply because the social situation of humanity requires healthcare service. If these requirements are met, people will be able to meet democratically in parliaments or other such gatherings. For then, out of a free spiritual [cultural] life, the recognition emerges of the necessity for healthcare as a social phenomenon; attention to what is necessary for healthcare as a social issue emerges from an impartial and professionally managed economic life through the high intentions that would be developed within it. Then mature human beings will deliberate on the ground of the economic life out of their insight and understanding of the human being as well as out of their relations to an economic life at the service of the medical arts. Then people will be able to meet as equals within the legislative, rights, or political life concerning the measures that are necessary regarding the healing arts and the care of public health.” —Rudolf Steiner, “The Art of Healthcare: A Societal Concern”, 1920) http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19200407p01.html (Author’s Note: This quote is a refreshed rendering by Threefold Now, because the word ‘hygiene’ was meant as a synonym for healthcare and the arts of healing and medicine.)
the separation of the pharmaceutical industry from the substance of healing Imagine reducing the length of patent on medicines to eighteen years, or even seven years, and clarifying the ethos of the pharmaceutical industry associations. Medicines are only supposed to cost as much as it takes to fund a dignified livelihood for the pharmaceutical workers while they produce the next product. Much of the science of pharmaceutical invention would best be undertaken within a free cultural sector, with scientists 59 who really understand and feel their work to be a sacrament.
the separation of the advertising industry and human consciousness The whole World of Advertising is designed to tempt and intrude into minds. That world was largely initiated by one individual: Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, known the “Father of Public Relations, Propaganda, and Advertising” and the “Architect of the Consumer Mind.” That world intentionally aims to capture and shape the inner worlds of our delicately burgeoning young people. It uses the most crass means to sell stuff—especially playing on the feminine desire to identify with an ideal beauty, and the male desire to possess that beauty. We would begin to place boundaries around this invasive anti-culture. Religious humanity might cringe at the possibility for commercial advertisements to be displayed on the main wall or lectern at a church, mosque, or synagogue. Yet there seems to be very little resistance to similar intrusions in other fields of culture. For example, I remember awhile back a television industry association posted a public relations message that said something like: “Decades of free television for you, thanks to advertisers.” And the front page to the Facebook says: “It’s free and always will be.” The Facebook’s corporate website goes on to explain what ‘free’ means in this context: “From the beginning, the people who founded Facebook wanted it to be free for everyone. Showing ads is how Facebook continues to support its growth and development.” As I type this today, along with updates from my actual friends, there appeared in my Facebook newsfeed a large ‘sponsored advertisement’ for some kind of nightclub party, with a photo of strange buxom women. Then there appears a credit card advertisement. Then a phone company
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If you want to know more, watch the film Fire in the Blood: Medicine, Monopoly, Malice at http://fireintheblood.com 44
advertisement—an entity I see enough already in the bills it sends, without having its logo flashed in front of my eyes while I’m corresponding with people who are dear to me. And everything I share with my friends is then poised alongside such images in their eyes and mind. Those are tricky uses of the word ‘free’—with only the narrowest meaning of ‘no monetary cost.’ What’s being bought and sold is the mind and consciousness. In that sense, it’s not free. There’s only so much space in a mind—only one or two things can be thought at a time. And images are crafted to stick in the mind. When a large portion of the day is filled with commercial advertisements, the mind becomes, to some degree, a part of that corporation’s spirit. Imagine if most of humanity began to realize that even if something doesn’t cost the consumer any money, if there are advertisements embedded in it, it’s only a half-truth to say it’s ‘free.’ It looks like the business model is to gradually sneak more and more advertisements in the FB so that short-term shareholder payouts are maximized, while hoping that the vexation-to-usefulness ratio will be just low enough for most participants to keep using it. Until the desire to cash out trumps whatever wisdom is left in the FB corporate leadership, and FB becomes clogged up like MySpace, and most clear-minded consumers withdraw from that yuckiness. The upper executives and canny shareholders get to take their money and live the golden life, and FB becomes a junky shell. Then perhaps some other corporation will make a similar product from scratch and begin the boom-bust cycle, so that the social media infrastructure is continually strip-mined and clear-cut by the shareholder mentality. Why not skip such wastefulness? There are other ways to enterprise a cultural service and to make it freely available without selling its participants’ consciousness to advertisers, and without being a government-controlled, state-funded thing. Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and the Wayback Internet Archive are examples of advertising-free, no-fee cultural organizations. Do you think these would be doing a better job if they charged for their services? Wikipedia, written by humanity as a whole, is in some respects, the best encyclopedia which has ever manifested in history. Wikipedia is consciously aware of how commerce is distinct from a cultural-spiritual space. “Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn't belong here. Not in Wikipedia. “Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind.” —Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder I wonder: what would a free cultural counterpart to—or transformation of—the Facebook commercial product look like? Yet freely-given, freely-supported cultural infrastructure won’t fly if human beings don’t value the practice of extracting their own consciousness from the world of advertising. And there needs to be new avenues for steady funding, new legal forms, and new professional traditions for maintaining cultural services as if they were a sacrament. What would a post-advertising culture look like? For one thing, there would be free cultural—not ‘public’ governmental—broadcasting in competition with commercial broadcasting. And while I don’t advocate going out this moment and tearing down commercial images and messages (yet), we take the words of Aldous Huxley, Banksy, and Rudolf Steiner to heart: “There will never be enduring peace unless and until human beings come to accept a philosophy of life more adequate to the cosmic and psychological facts than the insane idolatries of nationalism and the advertising man’s apocalyptic faith in Progress towards a mechanized New Jerusalem.” —Aldous Huxley, British author, Introduction to the Bhagavad Gita, 1944 “People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.” “You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. “**** that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. “You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” —Banksy, British street artist, 1999 "What the eye sees is of far greater importance, for it has an influence on soul processes that more or less run their course in the unconscious. This is of eminently practical importance, and when spiritual science will one day really take hold of the soul, then will the practical effect become noticeable in public life. I have often called attention to the fact that it was something different from what it is today when one in the Middle Ages walked through the streets. Right and left there were house façades that were built up out of what the soul felt and thought. Every key, every lock, carried the imprint of him who had made it. Try to realize how the individual craftsman felt joy in each piece, how he worked his own soul into it. In every object there was a piece of soul, and when a person moved among such things, soul forces streamed over 45
to him. Now compare this with a city today. Here is a shoe store, a hardware store, a butcher shop, then a tavern, etc. All this is alien to the inner soul processes; it is related only to the outer man. Thus, it generates those soul forces that tend towards materialism. These influences work much more strongly than do the dogmas of materialism. Add to these our horrible art of advertising. Old and young wander through a sea of such abominable products that wake the most evil forces of the soul. ...This is not meant to be a fanatical agitation against these things, but only indications about facts. All this pours a stream of forces into the human soul, determining the epoch that leads the person in a certain direction. The spiritual scientist knows how much depends upon the world of forms in which a human being lives." —Rudolf Steiner, “Occult Signs and Symbols”, 1907 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/OccSigns/19070914p01.html Though ending the circus of advertising culture is hardly conceivable since a distinction between free speech and commercial speech has not yet been clearly perceived or legally distinguished, there could be a social organism which perceives and enacts a right to an advertising-free common space. Some or all of these measures could be implemented:
No advertising at all in child-focused television, radio, websites, magazines, or books. No advertising in schools. Even for ‘good’ things such as organic vegetables. Norway, Quebec, and Sweden have the most vigorous boundaries in this area of consciousness. It’s good that these social organisms are defending the human flower from corporatism—now if they’d as vigorously defend our flowers from statism and its government schools. The insurance advertisements which are displayed on the state toll booths and toll bridges in the Empire State where I live, would be removed. That is also about the separation of Advertising and State. I’m willing to pay a few more cents if it would clear the view on the public commons. But the option of advertising-free public commons isn’t on the ballot. No billboards, even along interstates. Only keep ‘antiques’ such as Mail Pouch Tobacco as historic features, and perhaps some of the billboard poles might be kept to display art. Remove the restaurant, gas, and hotel logos which are displayed on government-produced interstate exit signs. Economic associations which are located along the highways would print business guides which describe the gas stations, restaurants, hotels, and other traveleroriented businesses. The guide could be picked up along the way, or from one’s local automobile travelers’ association. No advertisements in exterior public spaces, or within any governance facility or publication. The cultural sector might enact a similar in regard to business advertisements in cultural spaces, while still allowing for the promotion of free cultural events. Commercial signage would be enclosed within small, handsome frames which are aesthetically distinct for each municipality or neighborhood, with their own color scheme and selection of fonts. An example is the tony golf resort village of Pinehurst, North Carolina which has legislated that “Signage color should be in the Village of Pinehurst Color Palette and be muted in color.” and that the “Font should be characteristic to the Local Historic District. A list of approved font examples may be provided by the Historic Commission staff.” Commercial businesses might have one color, while governance agencies and cultural organizations might have different frame colors. The only places in the country which would still display flagrant signage are places where that is an intentional part of the local spirit, such as the Vegas Strip. No advertisements embedded within cultural offerings, which could eventually include television shows, magazines, and newspapers. Instead, there’d be dedicated printed advertising directories like the Yellow Pages; and dedicated television and radio advertising channels—one or more channels which are all advertisements. No advertisements before films at movie theaters. That would be a great advance in civilization. Don’t most people feel like a dupe for paying to see and hear advertisements? If so, then it shows how weak and scattered consumer power is without a film-goers’ consumer association. No commercials at the gas pump. As I write this book, the local village gas station was closed for a time to refurbish. When it reopened, I admit I was impressed with the fresh and spiffy look. This quickly fell to a sick impression when I went to pump gas. As the gas started flowing, a young woman’s voice called out “May I help you?”—I thought the cashier was paging me through an intercom on the pump, but after a pause, the voice continued: it was the opening line of a recorded advertisement to buy some junk food. There was now a video screen embedded in the gas pump blaring inane commercials, the first line of which was crafted to startle the consumer, as if we were animals. In New York, there are no clips on the pump handles enabling the pumper to step away while it fuels, so the consumer is a captive audience if they need gas. Now I avoid that station and get fuel somewhere else, whenever possible. All disposable product packaging in the country would use only a black dye, unbleached paper, and the same font. This would subdue the visual glamour of economic products. An example is how, since 2012, Australia requires all cigarettes to be packaged in the same plain 60 brown packaging. This could be extended to all commercial products. All product logos would be contained within a small square that is the same size regardless of the brand. Outside of that frame, the packaging would be generic, like the ‘black lettering on white’ generic products which were common sight in US grocery stores up into the 1980s. All product packaging standards would be crafted to refrain from astrality (psychological confusion and desire). There’d be no photographic imagery on packages or advertisements beyond a clear illustration of what the product is—only black and white photo of the product or a line drawing. The various actual qualities of the product would be described or displayed as a seal, such as whether it is Organic-certified and Fair Trade, and other certifications of the company or person who made the product, and the name and story of the farmer who grew the produce.
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Though the Australian government’s display of lurid photos of physical illness which has come from tobacco, while understandable and bold, is going too far, I feel. This is why it doesn’t sit well: the Australlian government which is stridently and self-righteously displaying those images is itself a vehicle of gruesome, ‘unquestionable’ malaise and death. Such images might be congruous if that same government displayed on the front doors of all its armed forces recruiting centers, images of the worst case scenarios of initiation into the Australian national-state military. And if on the doors of government (public) schools, there were photos of the inner life of humanity being trampled on and toolified, with the resulting soul-depression and destructive escapism. 46
We could opt out of junk mail from the US post office, without having to write a request to every junk mail corporation in the country. We’re told we’re supposed to be glad for having our post office box mandatorily crammed full of unasked for, random economic literature, because such advertising revenue is said to reduce the price of a stamp. I’m willing to pay more for a stamp. No ‘command’ statements in advertisements: ‘Come to Our Store’ or ‘Buy Now!’. No ‘you’ statements. Only invitations and questions: ‘Welcome to our store.’ ‘Hungry? We offer such-and-such.’ Contractual, economy-wide definition of advertising terms; for example, ‘free’ would mean that a consumer could take the thing (up to the stated limit per consumer) without any strings attached—without having to give any contact information or jump through any hoops at all. There would no longer be ‘Buy One Get One Free’, but ‘Two for the Usual Price of One.’ The difference between ‘shipping’ (actual USPS, UPS, or FedEx postage) and ‘handling’ (the shipping box or envelope and extra labor cost) for mail-order or internet goods would need to be separately displayed. If a mail-order or internet seller is not really willing for the item to be picked up by the purchaser (for example, if the purchaser happened to live close by, or if the purchaser could arrange to have someone local pick it up for them, then the ‘handling’ would be required to be included in the price of the item. Besides the Yellow Pages for businesses and other economic bodies, and Blue Pages for governance bodies, there’d be Red Pages (rose, magenta) for third sector organizations.
Art is supposed to be for art, culture, spirituality, and personal transformation, rather than to sell stuff. Stuff would sell by virtue of its actual artisanship and qualities, rather than its glamour. The actual product could be beautifully made, yet the packaging would be intentionally bland. Many of the graphic artists who’d be put out of work would find work as fine artists in the free cultural sector. “The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.” —Banksy, artist Advertising agencies might mostly go out of business. The economic life must accept what is deemed to be socially just by the rights life. Other professions, such as telegraph operator, street lamplighter, and bowling-pinsetter, have become obsolete. There’d be other good work to do. “Steiner was envisaging a world free of advertising, marketing, and speculation. What needs to be crafted will be communicated to the producers’ cooperative associations by their counterparts in the consumer circles via the counsel of the traders’ agencies—all steeped in the teachings of the arts and sciences—and the sphere of rights and laws will ensure that the expressed desire is ministered to in a righteous manner.” —Guido Giacomo Preparata, “Perishable Money in a Threefold Commonwealth—Rudolf Steiner and the Social Economics of an Anarchist Utopia” in the Review of Radical Political Economics (2006): www.threefolding.org/essays/2006-11-001.html
the separation of media corporations and journalism When nearly all the shapers of public opinion are themselves only semi-conscious of the corporatist-statist worldview which has shaped their perceptions (their ‘soul’), how can we have anything but a corporatist-statist social order? It’s striking how smiling goofs with million-dollar salaries have called Snowden a ‘weasel.’ Two phenomena which result from this situation are what NYU journalism scholar Joe Rosen calls ‘regression to a phony mean’ (a false middle) and ‘the sphere of deviance’ (the ideology of the status quo.) “Regression to a Phony Mean: an especially dubious practice that is principally about self-protection. “Journalists associate the middle with truth, when there may be no reason to… Writing the news so that it lands somewhere near the ‘halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone’ is not a truthtelling impulse at all, but a refuge-seeking one, and it’s possible that this ritual will distort a given story. “No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story. The means for assessment do exist, so it’s possible to exert a factual check on some of the claims, but for whatever reason the report declines to make use of them. The symmetry of two sides making opposite claims puts the reporter in the middle between polarized extremes.” “The sphere of deviance: The power to place certain people, causes and ideas within the deviant sphere is one of the most ideological things journalists ever do. “In the sphere of deviance we find ‘political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.’ As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible… “Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the ‘lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel’ (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.” 47
—Joe Rosen, “Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: On the Actual Ideology of the American Press”, 2010 http://archive.pressthink.org/2010/06/14/ideology_press.html (Author’s Note: ‘Deviance’ is Latin for ‘off the way’. The unspoken, un-perceived ideology of journalists from the left, right, and phony middle, is the Americanist Way.) I’m not aware of any journalist who would not think I was crazy for signing and voicing a Threefold Separation of Powers at John Hancock’s desk.
the separation of the biotech industry and the human genome, the physical kernel of humanity It is wicked sacrilege to patent any portion of the human body.
the separation of the biotech industry and the nutriment of humanity “The Machine is...more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised.” —J.R.R. Tolkien, a personal letter, circa 1951 Did you know that economic bodies are in the midst of replacing humanity’s bread with a stone? There is a wounded entity which, from one perspective, has served humanity by its contribution to uprooting socialism in the Indochinese Peninsula, by its ongoing contribution to the civil war against drugs in Colombia, and by its feeding of humanity massive quantities of a certain quality of food. This entity was one of the chief suppliers of the plant-killer which was sprayed to de-leaf 20% of the woodlands in one of humanity’s social organisms during the 1960s and early 70s, so that that branch of humanity could be killed off if they were hostile, or rounded up into concentrated villages if they were friendly. This entity makes much of the stuff which is sprayed from U.S.-funded airplanes in Colombia. This entity has devised a magic bean which can be sprayed with defoliant and still grow. That way, the whole field can be soaked in defoliant and only the magic bean will grow. No weeds! In regard to the defoliant substance, when I worked as a site assessor, I heard farmers tell me: “It’s nontoxic! You could drink it!” The same entity manufactures the defoliant and the magic bean. In the eyes of the National Law, that bean is patented and owned by that entity. In that entity’s language, the bean is not so much named as a plant—it’s named ‘technology.’ The unspoken goal of this entity is to wield its monetary resources to purchase laws and governments, and to shape the hearts and minds of humanity through advertising and subtler means, so that nearly all of humanity may be impelled to switch to growing and eating patented plants 61 and animals which are owned by this entity and its incorporated colleagues. The complementary wish of this entity, also unspoken, is for the freely-given heirloom varieties of food plants which were lovingly selected and cultivated by our ancestors, to either die off, or become hopelessly mixed with the patented variety, so that they are owned too—or, better yet, for human beings to be educationally pressed into shapes which love eating engineered orc-swill. Anyone who has a different perspective of the future is accused of advocating for starvation. This non-human person itself voices a solution: “Farmers have the option not to purchase biotech seed and also have the option not to purchase seed from [us]. “One choice is to purchase organic seeds. Advocates for organic farming claim consumer demand for organics is on the rise, and there is some reliable data to support that claim. ...This apparent increase in demand could lead to even more growth in the organic seed market, and thereby even more choice for organic farmers.” —Monsanto Company, “Monsanto, the Government, Monopoly Claims”, 2014 www.monsanto.com/food-inc/pages/monsanto-revolving-door.aspx It would be interesting to see what choices would be made by a citizen’s governance in which the material wealth of non-human economic bodies has no voice whatsoever. If we chose, as an articulation of the citizen’s right to clean, exquisite environs and food, we could make the USDA Organic or Demeter Biodynamic standards the baseline for commercial agriculture, and legally end the manufacturing or use of industrial-synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Yes, pests and weeds have to be dealt with—yet the Organic and Biodynamic methods have their own natural ways, most of which a human being really could happily drink, such as water which has been stirred in a certain way, with a dash of quartz powder which has been buried in a cow’s horn over the winter. Two Threefolders and Right Livelihood (‘Alternative Nobel Prize’) laureates—Nicanor Perlas in Asia and Ibrahim Abouleish in Africa—have spearheaded the roll-back of industrial pesticide use in their social organisms. Perlas served on the Pesticides Technical Advisory Committee of the 61
John Stubley’s prose “The Wind Has Shifted” tells of the affect of this entity in Australia, along with a similar tale of Big Dairy’s purchasing of laws which ban consumers from choosing to drink fresh raw milk. The Revolution will not be pasteurized. The Wholesome Revolution is fueled by raw biodynamic milk. http://socialpoetry.net/2014/02/13/the-wind-has-shifted 48
Philippines national government, which eventually banned 32 of the most damaging pesticides. And Abouleish, to spread the sustainable agricultural method and secure raw material for his SEKEM companies, established the Egyptian Biodynamic Association (EBDA)—a nongovernmental organization which has facilitated the conversion of 200 farms with 7,000 acres to biodynamic farming, extending from Aswan to Alexandria. One result of this was a reduction in the use of airplane-sprayed synthetic pesticides by 90 percent, from over 35,000 tons per year to the stoppage of crop dusting by airplane. Another choice is to repeal the U.S. Plant Patent Act of 1930. Sure, there are plusses and minuses to ending the technologizing and patenting of plants and animals. Yet that is one choice a rights governance composed of free-breathing human persons could consider. I wonder: which social organism would be the first 100% organic agricultural sector in humanity’s world? The Himalayan country of Bhutan has 62 embarked for that title—though since it will be a gradual phase out, maybe someone could still beat them to it. Furthermore, when will there be a region which is 100% Biodynamic?
the separation of university research and economic interests One lively portrayal of this fusion is the story “Game Changer” from the radio show This American Life: A professor in Pennsylvania makes a calculation, to discover that his state is sitting atop a massive reserve of natural gas—enough to revolutionize how America gets its energy. But another professor in Pennsylvania does a different calculation and reaches a troubling conclusion: that getting that deep slurry of gas out of the ground and cleaning it would be equivalent of dumping 16 dump-truck loads of poisonous barium into the Monongahela River—each day. Two men, two calculations, and two very different consequences. One is celebrated by the state university as a ‘rock star’, the other is told to be quiet. It shows how economic and government interests overtly or subtly shape the administration of what are supposed to be free scientific collegiums. That story and transcript are available here: www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/440/game-changer In a Threefold Republic, there would definitely still be research in the field of energy production and other economic fields. Yet the whole tenor and direction of research would be placed on a different footing, as a sovereign peer of economic industry. Instead of begging industry for grants, and so becoming an appendage of the corporate sector, the free scientific life would be a distinct sector, with its own primary purpose, and with its own traditions and avenues for funding, distinct from both business and government. Scientists and collegiate administrators would begin to 63 personally perceive, and to have a feeling for, the phenomenon that “he who pays the piper is apt to call the tune.”
the separation of the intellectual property industry and a free culture of open source inventiveness Imagine replacing the recent corporate-sponsored 120-year copyright extension with an 18-year copyright, so that no invention or research or creative offering was held for longer than a generation. The original copyright in the American Republic was for 14 years, with an option of renewing for another 14 years. Copyright is supposed to provide an artist or creator with a livelihood just long enough for them to create a new offering. Then our earlier efforts are opened up to all of humanity, so that they can be freely shared, tinkered with, and improved. Copyright law is not supposed to be a tool for immortal entertainment corporations to enforce a multi-generational lock-down on our shared mythologies—the Wonderful Worlds of Disney, the Star Wars Universe, the Marvel and DC Universes, the Middle-earth Legendarium, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Human imaginations weren’t meant to be nursed on, and locked into, corporate-owned legendries. Yet if these were opened to humanity’s common domain every 18 years, then the stories would be free to flow through other minds and hands. "Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-storystory...which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. ... I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama." —J.R.R. Tolkien, (emphasis added) from a letter written c.1951 62
“Bhutan set to plough lone furrow as world's first wholly organic country”: www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/feb/11/bhutan-firstwholly-organic-country 63
I myself have experienced this in a little way when, a few years ago, I wrote to some universities with a proposal to make an atlas which simply shows how each indigenous nation of North America itself perceives the shape of its ancestral territory. Most ignored me, but one catographic department responded with something like: “How do you suppose this would be funded? Most of our work consists of making making traffic maps which are funded by the government departments of transporation or by the road construction industry.” And so I worked on the atlas myself. Last year I went to an unconventional, local cultural initiative and showed them my work so far, and they believed in me enough to fund a $200 micro-grant. A few of the first fruits—maps I gathered or made myself—can be viewed in this Threefold Now book: the Aniyvwiya (Cherokee), Apsáalooke (Crow), Diné (Navajo), Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Hopi, and Oceti Sakowin (Sioux) homelands. My project overview is viewable here: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/ancestral-territories-map and some of my gathered or drafted maps are viewable here: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/ancestral-territories, along with a Wikipedia entry (more of a sandbox) on the Ancestral Territories which I have primarily authored: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_traditional_territories_of_the_indigenous_peoples_of_North_America 49
Presently, the lawyer industry has shaped copyright law so that copyright holders are legally required to combatively pursue all conceivably unauthorized use of their creations—otherwise their copyright can be completely voided and lost. We’d simply repeal those laws, and let each creator be free to selectively ignore others’ uses of their creations, according to their own wish and whim. Some might opt for a live-and-let-live approach, as long as the user is not crassly misusing or misrepresenting the creator’s work. Nor is copyright supposed to be a way for a family lineage to become ‘golden’ so that the grandchildren of some inventor can sit on their duff and play polo, living off of grandpa’s goldmine. Presently, the remuneratory interests of the patent lawyers steer the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, so that frivolous patents clog up the stream of inventiveness with a trollish culture of legalist opportunism. What do the patent judges (=lawyers) care?—it just means more business 64 for their buddies; for example, a patent on filming yoga classes, and a patent on photographing on a white background. “Even if your invention never makes a penny, accusing someone of stealing it can. Because in 2011 alone, unused patents alone generated $29 billion in lawsuits, legal fees, and settlements worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So if you have an idea, and you work hard, someday you can get sued by someone who had a similar idea.” —Stephen Colbert, “Amazon’s Audacious Photography Patent”, Colbert Nation, May 2014 http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/4a4ahs/amazon-s-audacious-photography-patent Seriously, we’d fulfill the strivings of Aaron Swartz—a Free Culture advocate who was hounded to death by the national police (the FBI). Swartz went to university libraries and downloaded all the scientific journals, dating back to the beginning of the Scientific Enlightenment, with the 65 intention of making them available to all of humanity, instead of just to companies and institutions which can afford to pay the access fees.
the separation of corporate logos and sportsmanship…of the sports industry and the love of the game At least our NASCAR sportsmen unashamedly reveal who they serve. If our political servants had to wear the logos of their sponsors on their suits, their faces would look honest again. The encroachment of the economic sector into the cultural sector is perceivable in the switch from the Peach Bowl to the Chick-fil-A® Bowl. In a Threefold Republic there would begin to be a distinction between Professional Sports Leagues which continue to operate as taxable Businesses, and new Free Sportsmanship Leagues which would be freely supported by sports patrons and enthusiasts, as part of the Free Cultural Republic.
the separation of monied power and the stewardship of surplus capital (superprofit, excess liquidity, large inheritances) American Humanity overcame the concept of inherited political power, at least in its most blatant form. The presidency is not handed from father to son through a blood lineage. Nor is the leadership of most cultural organizations, such as religious denominations, necessarily kept in the hands of certain bloodline groups. Yet we are totally stumped by the idea that it’s natural and good for economic power to be inherited. “The book will show how the effectiveness of capital, means of production and land use can be determined through the cooperation of the three members.” —Rudolf Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_pref4.html I’m sorry to say that the post-World War Generations squandered the biggest financial surplus in the history of humanity, and sank it into a few clever family lineages, non-human pension funds, high-stakes gamblers, soulless banking corporations, and arms manufacturers. All of American Humanity—black, white, and brown—could’ve been living a materially dignified life, with each of us owning our own beautifully-crafted home and th holding the rights to a patch of land—all paid off by our 35 birthday. All our people—including Walmart buggy-collectors—could’ve had the means to go on pilgrimages throughout humanity’s world to connect with our cultural heirlooms and natural wonders, in places such as the Amazon Forest, China, Egypt, Florence, India, Ireland, Mecca, and Jerusalem. And we could’ve afforded a spiritually-intellectually vibrant life, with all children of the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and 2000s having soulfully unfolded within an independent school of the family’s conscience, and with all the young adults of those generations having blossomed through a free college or apprenticed into a fruitful trade or craft th which actually makes something, so that by their 28 birthday, they would be ready to fill or build a beautiful home and have several children. Instead, we are raised to be cowering, indentured debt slaves and expendable retail pawns, in a fear-based National-Security State. Will we squander several more generations and run American Humanity into the ground?
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www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/stephen-colbert-takes-amazons-ridiculous-photography-patent www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/13/a-yoga-patent-heres-why-the-uspto-approves-so-many-dubious-applications 65
An example in this direction is eLife, an Open Access scientific journal recently initiated by Randy Schekman, a Nobel laureate in biology. Articles submitted to the journal are discussed by reviewers who are active scientists, and accepted if all agree. The papers then are made freely available for anyone to read. 50
Employment versus productivity in West Virginia’s coal industry over the past 130 years.
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Over the course of this century, through the labor-saving intelligence embodied in machines, fewer and fewer human beings were needed to produce more and more goods. This meant a mushrooming of profit for whoever ‘owned’ the shares of those business charters—while the ‘employees’ were discarded when they were no longer useful. Through a conscious Associative Economy, these trends would be perceived as they happen. In a healthy economic organism, labor-saving intelligence (which is spirit) would be a real blessing, instead of a half-blessing/half-curse. Through the Rights-State’s fresh framework of business law, the superprofit would be equitably shared among the stakeholders (notably, but not exclusively, the laborers; and also with the consumer, in the form of a fair-and-true price), and the workday actually decreased (while still receiving the same livelihood!)...or moving costs covered for the worker and family to move to similar work somewhere else (a ‘perk’ which management and professionals often receive today)...or the workers sponsored for a sabbatical year to train in an entirely new industry or craft...or the profit lent via a local or regional “Chamber of Association” to invest in a start-up enterprise which is poised to make something else in the same locality. Those are all healthy options which would take the place of sumptuously gilding the embedded family lineages and upper management who ‘own’ that business charter. Instead of blowing the money on personal luxury for a few corporatist and hereditary elites, in a Threefold Republic, excess liquidity would be put to good use in these ways:
1) Through re-investment into the real economy. The Associations of the Economic Republic would be devoted to actually making things. “From the moment such a person ceases to manage production, this capital accumulation should pass to another person, or group of persons, to be utilized for the same or some other type of production which serves the social organism. Capital gains which are not used for expansion should be similarly treated.” —Rudolf Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question (emphasis added) http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c03.html
2) To retrain workers from a declining or overstaffed industry into an entirely new line of work. “We must see to it that the worker is not restricted to one solitary manipulation throughout his life, but is able to turn his hand to other things. ...You can use up the surplus capital, which would be excessive at this point, to instruct and educate the workers in one thing or another, so as to be able to transplant them into other callings.” —Steiner, World Economy, Lecture 5 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA340/English/RSP1972/19220728p01.html
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The chart is from Junior Walk’s article: “Five Things People With Power Don’t Want You to Know About West Virginia”: www.huffingtonpost.com/junior-walk/westvirginia_b_5320263.html 51
3) Through gifting it to organs of the Cultural Republic, such as the free, non-governmental school organisms. “The Associations will find that when free spiritual [cultural] life declines, too little is being given freely; they will grasp the connection. They will see the connection between too little giving and too little free spiritual work. When there is not enough free spiritual [cultural] work, they will realize that too little is being given. When too little is being given, they will notice a decline in free spiritual [cultural] work.” —Steiner, World Economy, Lecture 6 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA/GA0340/19220729p01.html
4) Through mandated Cultural Rights and Economic Rights legislated by the Rights Republic, and palpably expressed as earmarked individual subsidies issued by the Economic Republic to each and every Citizen. For example, the right to a private school education for all children.
5) Through a new kind of cultural organization: Capital Stewardship Organizations. Imagine a sort of enculturated, sacred bank or investment firm which was really pervaded with wisdom and goodwill. Locally, there’s a glimpse of that future in our Berkshire Taconic 67 Community Foundation. “In my book, Core Points of the Social Question, the administration of capital was made, on the whole, dependent on the spiritual [cultural] organism in cooperation with the independent political and legal organism. ...There will even be corporations within the cultural organism, united with all other departments of the cultural life, on which the administration of capital will devolve.” —Steiner, “The Cooperation of the Spiritual, Political and Economic Departments of Life”, The Social Future (emphasis added) http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/SocialFuture/19191029p01.html
6) Like copyrights, large inheritances would eventually expire and be transferred to the Capital Stewardship Organizations. “The possibility of free disposition over the capital base through individual abilities must exist; it must be possible to change the related property rights as soon as they become a means for the unjustified acquisition of power. We do have a facility in our times which partially fulfils this requirement in respect of so-called intellectual property. At a certain time after its creator's death it becomes community property. This corresponds to a truly social way of thinking. Closely as the creation of a purely intellectual property is bound to an individual's talents, it is at the same time a product of human society and must, at the right moment, be handed over to this society. It is in no way different with respect to other property. That which the individual produces in the service of the community is only possible in cooperation with this community.” ... “After the death of the earner, or at a certain time thereafter, assets acquired through savings, along with the corresponding interest, also go to a spiritually or materially productive person or group to be chosen by the earner and specified in their will—but only to such a person or group, and not to an unproductive person in whose hands it would constitute a private pension. Here again, if a person or group cannot be chosen directly, the transfer of disposition rights to an establishment of the spiritual [cultural] organism will come into consideration. Only if someone does not himself effect a disposition will the rights-state step in and, through the spiritual [cultural] organism, make the disposition for him.” “Legitimate personal or family interests will be brought into concordance with the requirements of the human community through such arrangements. It is of course possible to point out that there will be a strong temptation to pass on property to one or more descendants during the original owner's lifetime. Also, that although descendants could be made to look like producers, they would nevertheless be inefficient compared to others who should replace them. This temptation could be reduced to a minimum in an organism governed by the arrangements described above. The rights-state has only to require that under all circumstances property transferred from one family member to another must, upon the lapse of a certain period of time after the death of the former, devolve upon an establishment of the spiritual [cultural] organism. Or evasion of the rule can be prevented in some other way through the law. The rights-state will only insure that the transfer takes place; a facility of the spiritual [cultural] organism should determine who is to receive the inheritance. Through the fulfillment of these principles an awareness will develop of the necessity for offspring being made qualified for the social organism through education and training, and of the socially harmful results of transferring capital to unproductive persons. Someone who is really imbued with social understanding will have no interest in his relation to a capital base passing to a person or group whose individual abilities do not justify it.” —Rudolf Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question (emphasis added) http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c03.html In regard to the ‘inheritance copyright’, Stephen E. Usher, PhD (http://stephenusher.com), former staff economist at the Federal Reserve Bank suggests: “Probably the best way to implement the inheritance copyright idea would be a sinking fund. In other words, the heirs would be allowed to
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keep some maximum amount, e.g. 10 million dollars, in perpetuity. The amount over that figure would be turned over to the cultural and economic spheres on a straight-line basis over the quarter century following the entrepreneur’s demise.” —from “The Threefold Social Organism: An Introduction” at www.rudolfsteinerweb.com/Threefold_Social_Order.php That’s what the Trisector Idea has to say about inherited wealth versus authentic meritocracy. What is called ‘meritocracy’ today is a bent shadow of its potential. ‘Meritocracy’, as voiced by naughty Neoconservatives and establishment liberals, often means (though this isn’t clearly spoken) the financial ‘merits’ of a family lineage—not the actual merits of an individual human being (much less the raw or potential merits within each individual). Our ‘meritocratic’ social order is ruled by those lineal bloodlines which maintain a several-million-dollar family trust fund and which have purchased ‘legacy preferences’ at the private schools and universities which fill America’s corporate, political, and cultural establishment.
the separation of monied power and the stewardship of factories, business charters, and other means of production In regard to means of production—factories and in-place machinery—there would be new kind of cultural organization: the Community Factory Trust. If the hundreds or thousands of now-abandoned manufactories in America had been held by non-governmental, enculturated organizations whose sole purpose was to keep that facility, its affiliated local community, producing something worthwhile, then there would have been no Detroit-style desolation...there would be no Rust Belt. There’d be a shiny Artisan Belt. There’d still be a working mill in the village of Philmont, near where Threefold Now calls home. “The disposal of land, systematized in the laws relating to its ownership, and the disposal of the finished means of production (for example, a factory with its machinery and equipment), should be no matter for the economic organism; they must belong partly to the spiritual [cultural] and partly to the legal. That is to say, the transference of land from one person or group of persons to another must not be carried out by purchase or through inheritance, but by transference through the legal means, on the principles of the spiritual [cultural] organism. The means of production through which something is manufactured—a process which lies at the basis of the creation of capital—can only be looked at from the viewpoint of its commodity-cost while it is being built up. Once it is ready for operation, the creator of it takes over the management because he understands it best. He has charge of it as long as he can personally use his capacities. But the finished means of production is no longer a commodity to be bought and sold; it can only be transferred by one person or group of persons to another person or group of persons by law, or rather, by spiritual [cultural] decisions confirmed by law. Thus, what at present forms part of the economic life, such as the laws relating to the disposal of property, to the sale of land, and to the right of disposal of the means of production, will he placed on the basis of the independent legal organism working in conjunction with the independent spiritual [cultural] organism." —Steiner, The Social Future (emphasis added) http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/SocialFuture/19191029p01.html *** “Unlike the early Marxian socialists, Steiner did not propose the formation of giant people’s cooperatives designed to take over the management of the community’s heavy means of production. As conceded by all anarchist thinkers, this would amount to replacing corporate oppression with bureaucratic slavery, admittedly a defeat of the rebellion’s noble purpose. What Steiner recommended, instead, is communal ownership tempered by private stewardship. Plants, machinery, and capital equipment broadly defined belong to the community; they are built with its savings. The state’s duty is to guarantee that the use of such sophisticated implements passes into the hands of individuals, or groups thereof, most suited to using such tools to the greatest benefit of the collectivity. The recommendation and identification of such capable subjects should not, however, be forthcoming from governmental quarters but should originate, instead, within the confines of the free associations of the arts and sciences.” —Guido Giacomo Preparata, “Perishable Money in a Threefold Commonwealth—Rudolf Steiner and the Social Economics of an Anarchist Utopia” 2006 (emphasis added): www.threefolding.org/essays/2006-11-001.html The same could be done with any kind of business: a Community Business Trust which passes along existing business charters to fitting operatorstewards who are willing to keep making something. These trusts would not be government agencies or corporate sharks who practice hostiletakeovers, but benefit-corporations of the cultural sector, with a mandate clearly laid out by the rights-state. Instead of ‘business owners’ (and ‘shareholders’) there would be only ‘charterholders’ and ‘stakeholders.’ “When the capitalist can no longer put his own capacities into the administration of the capital, he must see—or if he should feel himself incapable of such a task, a corporation of the spiritual [cultural] organism must assume the responsibility of seeing—that the management of the business shall pass to a highly capable successor, able to carry it on for the benefit of the community. That is to say: The transference of a business concern to any person or group of persons is not dependent on purchase or any other displacement of capital, but is determined by the capacity of individuals themselves; it is a matter of transfer from the capable to the capable, from those who can work in the service of the community to those who can also work in the best way for the common good. On this kind of transference the social safety of the future depends.” —Steiner, The Social Future (emphasis added) http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/SocialFuture/19191029p01.html *** “The socialistically-minded strive for the administration of the means of production by society. What is justified in their efforts can only be attained when this administration becomes the responsibility of the spiritual [cultural] sector. The economic coercion which the capitalist 53
exercises when he develops his activities from the forces of economic life will thereby become impossible. And the paralyzing of individual human abilities, as is the case when these abilities are administered by the political state, cannot occur.” —Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question (emphasis added) http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c03.html
the separation of monied power and land stewardship—and the separation of government and land “Through the realization of such social ideas as are presented here, the institutions which exist today will acquire a completely new significance. The ownership of property* ceases to be what it has been until now. Nor is an obsolete form reinstated, as would be the case with common ownership, but an advance to something completely new is made. The objects of ownership are introduced into the flux of social life. They cannot be administered by a private individual for his private interests to the detriment of the community; but neither will the community be able to administer them bureaucratically to the detriment of the individual; rather will the suitable individual have access to them in order therewith to serve the community.” —Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question (emphasis added) http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c03.html *When reading the word ‘property’, it’s helpful to distinguish different kinds of ‘property’:
personal property: tangible items owned by a private citizen or family. Except for large inheritances, personal property in a Threefold Republic would continue unchanged. business property: tangible property owned by a chartered entity, such as factories and equipment, and the business charter itself. Chartered businesses, and their specific productive purpose, exist only for the well-being of the human community. ‘property’ as land. In modern English language, ‘property’ and ‘land’ have become synonyms.
No longer treated as a marketable commodity The Trisector Idea offers entirely new methods for transferring ‘land property’ and ‘business property’ via cultural trusts administered by practical experts and community elders and wise-folk who are professionally and ethically, and even spiritually, devoted to getting the land, factories, and businesses into the stewardship of whichever individual or group is perceived to be most capable of benefitting the community—a method which is neither corporatist nor governmentalist. In a full-blown Threefold Republic, business charters, factories, and land would no longer be commodities. These could no longer be bought or sold. There would be no ‘landowners’ or ‘government/public land’—only titleholders. “Through the independence of the spiritual [cultural] life and the life of rights, constructed means of production, land, and also human laborpower, will be divested of their present character of commodities. (The reader will find a more exact description of the way in which this will come about in my book, Core Points of the Social Question). The motives and impulses which will determine the transference of land and of means of production, when these are no longer treated as marketable commodities, will have their root in the independent spheres of equity or politics, and of spiritual life.” —Steiner, “Capital and Credit” (emphasis added) http://wn.rsarchive.org/Articles/CapCr2_index.html The Threefold Republic would clarify and respect the right to steward and cultivate land. Besides eliminating property tax—which bloats government and justifies unfair rent prices by evoking the feeling and thought in landlords that ‘since I am being squeezed by the government, I need to squeeze the renters’—the government would no longer own or hold the title to any land at all, except those few parcels upon which sit the actual rights-governance buildings. The title of government lands which are primarily cultural in purpose, such as National Parks, would be transferred to the national-cultural organization—namely, ‘The American People.’ The title of government lands which are primarily economic in purpose, such as BLM rangeland and resource extraction areas, would be transferred to a Land Trust in which every consumer in the country has a share, regardless of their cultural nationality. The monies which are received from usage leases, such as legitimate, sustainable grazing and resource gathering, (what Thomas Paine calls ‘ground-rent’) would be paid out as a direct dividend to each individual in the country, like how all residents of Alaska presently receive a $900 dividend each year. From farmscape to Jerseyscape In our system it’s predictably inevitable that farm families will be worn out by trying to compete with factory farms, and so almost all eventually ‘cash out’ by selling their homestead to developers. Besides the economic factor, few of our farmers really cherish a way or philosophy of life which will stand up to the downward mainstream trend. The values offered by government schools and conventional churches offer little to no resistance to the Corporatist Way. Then, out of all the myriad of possible ways and styles for building a human community, the ‘New Jersey Suburb & Strip Mall Model’ is, for some strange reason, nearly always the result. (I’ve heard there are beautiful landscapes remaining New Jersey, but you know what I mean.) “Persons whose task it is to be farmers and who have experience in agriculture, very rightly declare that those administering land must not regard it as an ordinary commodity... Yet it is impossible for such insight to come into practical effect in the modern economy until the individual is backed up by the Associations. Guided by the real connections between the several spheres of economic life, the Associations will set a different stamp on agricultural economy and on the other branches of production.” —Steiner, “Capital and Credit”, Renewal of the Social Organism http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA024/English/AP1985/GA024_a04.html 54
Who owns North America? Except for those who are deeply initiated into the world of real estate, American Humanity is cultivated to have only a vague, cartoonish awareness of who is actually stewarding the woods and mountains one drives by every day, or the tired, building-stuffed suburban and urban plots which underly the cityscape. Yet, even in this deep Western continent, each place is a holy place, with a story. The condition of land awareness and stewardship in West Virginia serves as an image of the rest humanity’s world: “For the past hundred years the majority of the land in southern West Virginia has been owned by large corporate interests. Literally 98 percent of the land in Boone county is owned by land holding companies. (Which happen to have very lucrative leases with coal companies.) This has the added effect of keeping people from hunting, digging roots and finding delicious morel mushrooms to eat.” —Junior Walk (an acquaintance from the Coal River valley, who embodies the resistance of West Virginian Humanity to full-blown corporatization) “Five Things People With Power Don't Want You to Know About West Virginia”, May 2014 www.huffingtonpost.com/junior-walk/west-virginia_b_5320263.html
As it stands, most land trusts in West Virginia are afflicted with highfalutin’ hoity-toity-ism and only like to deal with large, wealthy corporate landholders. Yet there is a new land trust organization called Keeper of the Mountains (www.mountainkeeper.org) which welcomes small landholders to place land in trust. There’s a write-up here: http://ilovemountains.org/news/4832 The commoditizing of land does harm Imagine if money was no longer sunk into land. That ties up the financial capital, and ties up the land. “In all countries where the law of mortgage makes it possible for Capital to unite with Nature, we shall find a congestion of Capital in Nature, that is, in the land. ...It is one of the worst possible congestions in the economic process when Capital is simply united with Nature, that is to say, when...the Capital is enabled to take hold of Nature...The above-described capitalizing of land does harm to those who are involved in the economic process.” —Steiner, World Economy, Lecture 5 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA340/English/RSP1972/19220728p01.html “Sometime in the future, when another generation comes to recognize that land use is a matter of rights and should be decided purely on that basis, they will have a huge debt to clear. They will have to somehow absolve this debt before the land can be freed from the clutches of the market.” —Michael Spence, “The Market in Land”, After Capitalism, 2014
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What one does with that open space We would unlock the grip of the Real Estate Industry by greatly expanding the role of non-commercial Land Trusts and Farmland Conservancies in a free cultural sector. Locally, we have the Columbia Land Conservancy and its Public Conservation Areas—which are essentially an enculturated evolution beyond Government Parks—and its farmscape conservation initiative. “The Columbia Land Conservancy knows it’s not just about open space, but what one does with that open space. In this beautiful county of ours, they have been really wonderful supporters of the agricultural community.” —Martin Ping, Hawthorne Valley Association http://clctrust.org/working-farms Through this kind of cultural body, our country, and the rest of humanity’s world, might be artistically transmuted into a Garden…a City in a Garden. *** West Virginians are the first and only branch of humanity to form a state whose purpose is to end slavery. O were there to arise a human community whose primary purpose is to end humanity’s enslavement to corporatism and governmentalism. My Lord, he said unto me Do you like my garden so fair? You may live in this garden if you keep the grasses green And I'll return in the cool of the day Then my Lord, he said unto me Do you like my pastures of green? You may live in this garden if you will feed my lambs And I'll return in the cool of the day Then my Lord, he said unto Do you like my garden so free? You may live in this garden if you'll keep the people free And I'll return in the cool of the day Now is the cool of the day Now is the cool of the day Oh this earth is a garden, the garden of my Lord And He walks in His garden in the cool of the day —Jean Ritchie, 1971 Geordie Music Publishing
The City in a Garden motif from the Republic of Singapore’s national parks website. 56
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qualities of the three republics The present-day Big Government is not replaced by an even bigger Three Governments. We do not need two more Bosses telling us what to do. “In contrast to technocratic thinking, Steiner believed that creative autonomy and the experience of direct interaction with other human beings must have a prominent place in any society worth living in. Therefore, the social world must always be accessible to the experience and influence of individuals. Moreover, Steiner was convinced that societies don’t need to be managed at all. They would be naturally stable, he thought, if groups and individuals respected their ‘inherent laws’—or what Steiner called the ‘threefold social order:’ democracy in political life, freedom in cultural life (including education), and cooperation in economic life (or ‘associative economies’), with each sphere having enough strength and independence to correct any problems in the others.” —Bijan Kafi, “Making everything our business: the social legacy of Rudolf Steiner”, openDemocracy, February 2014 www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/bijan-kafi/making-everything-our-business-social-legacy-of-rudolf-steiner Only the Rights Organism is a Government, and it is drastically streamlined and humanized. We go from Government to Governance. The Economic Republic is a free association of associations. And the Cultural Republic is a free initiative of initiatives. Just because they are freely organized doesn’t mean they’re weak or scattered compared to the Rights Governance. The Government is not the only thing in life which can be pervasive and effective. Yet the Economic Organism and the Cultural Organism are formed on, and act out from, entirely different principles or qualities. That’s not to say that there is no liberty in the Governance, or no solidarity in the Cultural sector, or no egalitarianism in the Economy, but the sectors do have three distinct guiding stars. And yet one quality which is shared by all three sectors is that all three are Participatory.
qualities of the cultural republic Liberty Individual Freedom of Thought, Speech, Expression, and Conscience Personal and Cultural Independence Self-Sovereignty Radical Diversity Living Thinking Vibrance Sublimity Uniqueness (not ‘terminal uniqueness’, but living uniqueness) Humane Wisdom
Beuysian ‘Revolution of Concepts’ Russell Brandian ‘Total Revolution of Consciousness’ Dorothy Dayian ‘Revolution of the Heart’ Emersonian ‘Self-Reliance’ and ‘Whim’ Gandhian ‘Self-Rule’ (Swaraj) and ‘Practical Idealism’ William Jamesian ‘Experiential Truth’ and ‘Realized Idealism’ Kingian ‘Revolution of Values’ Thoreauvian ‘Individual Self-Government’
Bill Wilsonian ‘Personal Recovery’, ‘Enlightened Self-Interest’, ‘Benign Anarchy’, and Personal, Organizational, and National Amends Steinerian ‘Personal and Cultural Renewal’, ‘Moral Perception, Moral Imagination, and Moral Enactment’, ‘Empathic Individualism’, ‘Individualist Anarchy’, and ‘Achieved Idealism’
Agreements Democracy: Representative + Direct + Sortitional Responsive and Supple Governance Peace through Authentic Justice The True Center
Ultra-Transpartisanship Public Wisdom (Demosophy) General Assemblies Citizen Deliberative Councils The Beauty and Fragility of Humanity Humanocracy
The World House (from MLK) The Sacred Economy The New and Next Economy A Local, Global, Living Economy The Common Good Commonweal Natural Capitalism Human Needs Fair-and-True Price Abundance Prosperity
The Cornucopia + Horn of Plenty We Are All Related (from the Lakota Sioux) The Dish with One Spoon (from the Haudenosaunee Iroquois) Ubuntu (from southern Africa; in its aspect of economic generosity) Association (state-free, entrepreneurial, contract-based, transparent, open-book, stakeholder-managed, family-like Humane Corporate Socialism)
qualities of the rights republic Equality before the Law Equal Voice Egalitarianism Freedom from Fear Citizenship = Human Personhood Fairness
qualities of the economic republic Fraternity Crowned with Brotherhood + Sisterhood + Siblinghood + Familyhood Freedom from Want Solidarity Mutuality Cooperation Interdependence Co-working Goodwill Altruism
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beyond democracy “The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if everyone is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank or an inherited social order—if my notion of faith is no better or worse than yours, and my notions of truth and goodness and beauty are as true and good and beautiful as yours—then how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres? Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke suggested that free men would form governments as a bargain to ensure that one man’s freedom did not become another man’s tyranny; that they would sacrifice individual license to better preserve their liberty. And building on this concept, political theorists writing before the American Revolution concluded that only a democracy could fulfill the need for both freedom and order—a form of government in which those who are governed grant their consent, and the laws constraining liberty are uniform, predictable, and transparent, applying equally to the rulers and the ruled.” —(Ruler) Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, 2006 It’s simply not true that the law in a Corporatist Security State applies equally to the ‘rulers’ and the ‘ruled.’ It’s not true. I’m confident that the reader can think of examples of where those who are embedded in the echelons of governmental and economic bodies— executive bigshots, golden family lineages, functionaries in the security and intelligence sector—get a promotion for gross harmdoing, while the whistleblower and ordinary citizen are vigorously and automatically prosecuted to the fullest extent of the National Law. If the uniform National State is assumed as a ‘given’, then perhaps party-based, corporate-purchased democracy is the most compromised way of approximating the need for both liberty and equality...for both freedom and order...for the constraining of ‘anarchic’, ‘licentious’ Liberty by the laws of a bargained Governmental Order which theoretically and platitudinously, but not really, applies equally to the rulers and the ruled. Yet if a sovereign Third Sector—a Cultural Republic—were to be enacted, which included all schools, then everyone would authentically be free in that field of life to unfold beyond the constraints of birth, and beyond the constraints of government, so that we as individuals, with all our distinct notions of truth, beauty, and goodness, might each approach our own conception of true freedom. In an egalitarian Democratic Governance—a Rights Republic—there would be no constraints of rank or inherited social order. Even inherited money or a leading position in the economic life would be no boon in this sector, since all citizens and corporate persons would be constrained from purchasing rights. The liberty, or licentiousness, of political action committees and political party organizations would be totally sacrificed. Individuals would still be free to associate together as ‘political clubs’ which cultivate and propagate a view of political science and statecraft, but these entities, as third sector organizations, would have no actual or implicit voice in the actual governance. These two republics, along with an associated business sector—an Economic Republic—would form a society that coheres...a Coherent Social Organism.
will the real democracy stand up? The word ‘democracy’ has been employed in so many ways.
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The recently initiated Community of Democracies (CD)—which is a sort of US-sponsored corporatist competitor of the statist-leaning United Nations Organization—proudly voices the merits of what it unblushingly calls ‘corporate democracy.’
I heard a British speaker give a TED Talk about how if China becomes as powerful as America, that would mean more ‘democracy’, because then the Chinese Nation and the American Nation would be equals, and equality means ‘democracy.’ He wasn’t talking about 68 democratic agreements between individual human beings, but a balance of might between gigantic national groupings.
In regard to some questionable practices of the US military in Korea, one US rights worker (a soldier) responded: ‘my job is to defend democracy, not practice it.’
Liberals/progressives advocate for democratic schools and democratic workplaces.
There’s a link to the video and my response, at “China Rising” https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/blog 59
The word has been used and misused so much, that it has ceased to have much concrete meaning, and has become a vaguely magical word which can hardly be dispelled. What can one say to Democracy? The word is thrown around as if ‘democracy tastes like everything good.’ America is one of the younger nations, but nearly the oldest democracy of modern times. Our democratic impulse is tired. Yet even if the government were the most democratic imaginable, and the spirit of the New England Town Meeting were revived through New Humanocratic Forms, such as the General Assembly of Occupy, and implemented throughout every locality in the country, so that every US citizen was sortitionally joined with a standing GA as a fourth branch of governance, and the GA traditions (handsignals, facilitation) were refined, mastered, and worked smoothly, and the GAs were widely respected and genuinely regarded as a blessing by both the Left and the Right, and the letter of all federal, state, and local laws was crafted to match the spirit of what was expressed through the wise voice of this country-wide network of New Humanocratic Forms, I still ask: would there be any legitimate limit to the portfolio of these democratic bodies? Is there any limit to the legitimate powers of even the most pure and clean humanocratic governance? Or is the Democratic Community the king of everything in life? There are many voices calling for a refreshening of democracy. The General Assembly is a powerful, elemental glimpse. Yet there are very few voices which affirm that, even in such an imagined ‘ultra-democratic’ humanocracy, there are legitimate limits to its task. Should the Democratic Governance select the conductor for orchestras? select the leadership of religious organizations and spiritual fellowships? select the CEOs for all three million business corporations in the US? select the school a family must send the child? Here is a ‘voice collage’ speaking to the legitimate task of democracy, and to what lies beyond and outside of democracy:
inauthentic promises "Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either fantasizers or charlatans." —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, 1795 ***
the only legitimate object “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” —Thomas Jefferson, Letter "to the Republican Citizens of Washington County, Maryland", 1809 ***
not yet anywhere seen “The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly... “A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.” —Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government, 1849 (Author’s Note: In the last sentence, the word ‘State’ would be better read as ‘Society’ or ‘Social Organism.’) ***
augmenting the happiness and value of life “Allow me while upon this subject briefly to present one other extract from a speech of mine, more than a year ago, at Springfield, in discussing this very same question, soon after Judge Douglas took his ground that negroes were not included in the Declaration of Independence: I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal—equal in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.” —Abraham Lincoln, Seventh and Last Joint Debate with Steven Douglas, 1858 ***
removal of obstacles “The state may only intervene in the realm of the human individual to the extent that such intervention leads to the removal of obstacles standing in the way of the personality's free unfolding." —Rudolf Steiner, The Karma of Untruthfulness (1917), in reference to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s On the Limits of State Action http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA174/English/RSP1992/19170113p01.html *** 60
exists for the sake of human beings "The exhaustion of the impulses that kept together the nexus of the State is shown in that many people have come to regard the State as an end in itself, and to forget that the State exists for the sake of human beings. Regarding the State as an end in itself is possible only when one has so much lost the ability to assert one's inner human individuality that one no longer expects from the State the kind of institutions this self-assertion would demand.” —Steiner, "What is Needed", from The Renewal of the Social Organism http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA024/English/AP1985/GA024_c05.html ***
a genuine political organism "There must be no vague dreams of justice growing out of the economic system; we must cultivate right thought in accordance with realities, and we must do so because justice and the consciousness of justice have retreated in later times before the advancing economic flood. For a social construction of society, we need the creation of a genuine political organism with the social impetus necessary for it." —Steiner, The Social Future, “Legal Questions” http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/SocialFuture/19191026p01.html ***
the task and limitations of democracy “Since the middle of the fifteenth century the longing for democracy, more or less fulfilled in the various regions of the earth, has been growing out of the depths of human nature. This longing is expressed in the demand that in social life the human being can recognize as valid for others only what he feels to be right and best for oneself. In modern times the democratic principle has become the sign and seal of human social endeavor and has grown out of the depths of human nature. The demand of modern humanity for this principle of democracy is an elemental force. He who has an insight into these matters must treat them with the greatest seriousness. We must ask ourselves: What is the significance and what are the limitations of the democratic principle? I have just defined this principle. It consists in the fact that the persons forming a definite social organism adopt resolutions approved by every individual within the community. These resolutions, of course, can only be binding if they are adopted by a majority. The content of such majority resolutions is democratic only if every single individual is on an equal basis with every other single individual. And these resolutions can only be adopted on any matter when every single individual is in reality the equal of every other. That is, democratic resolutions can only be passed when every adult is entitled to vote because he is an adult and therefore capable of judging. “Herewith we have defined the limitations of democracy as clearly as possible. On the basis of democracy only such things can be determined as are capable of determination through the fact that a person has reached the years of discretion. All such things as are related to the development of human capacity in public life are excluded from democratic measures. Everything in the nature of education and instruction, of cultural life in general, requires the devotion of the individual human being...it demands, above all things, real individual understanding of the human being, special individual capacities in the teacher, in the educator, which by no means belong to a person merely because he is an adult. We must either not take democracy seriously, in which case we submit to its decisions regarding human capacities, or we do take democracy seriously, and then we must exclude from it the administration of the cultural life and the economic life. Everything...in regard to the economic sphere is based on the assumption that individuals actively engaged in one or another special branch are possessed of expert knowledge and efficiency. For instance, mere maturity in age, the mere capacity of judgment possessed by every adult, can never be sufficient qualification for a good farmer or a good industrial worker. Hence, majority resolutions must be kept out of the realm of economic life. And the same applies to the cultural life. Thus there arises between these two realms the actual democratic state-life in which every individual confronts every other as competent to form a judgment, because he is of full age and all are equal as human beings; but in which majority resolutions can be carried only on matters dependent on the same capacity of judgment in all adult persons. If we take the trouble to test the truth of these things by the facts of life and not regard them as mere abstractions, we shall see that people deceive themselves, because these are difficult thoughts and because they have not the courage actually to follow up these ideas to their logical conclusion. But the unwillingness to do so and the substitution of very different things for the universal demand of democracy have had, in the evolution of modern humanity, a very concrete significance.” —Steiner, “The Task and Limitations of Democracy” (emphasis added), The Social Future, 1920 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/SocialFuture/19191026p01.html ***
freedom and equality are mutually exclusive “It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.” —Thomas Mann, German novelist and Nobel laureate, “The War and the Future” speech, 1940 (Author’s Note: Occupy is mostly devoted to Equalizing everything through governmentalization, while the Libertarians are mostly devoted to Liberalizing everything through privatization.) ***
the individual citizen deteriorates “Modern society is too complex to be centrally managed and regulated and the individual citizen deteriorates to the extent that his social order is centralized. It is for the well-being of each individual that Threefold extends its prospects.” —Ralph Courtney, pioneer of the Threefold Community “Ralph Courtney Lectures for Political Association About Threefold Republic”, The Vassar Chronicle (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.), 1950 61
https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/vassar ***
it is only a step “Representative government is closer to democracy than monarchy, and for this reason it has been hailed as one of the great political advances of modern times; yet, it is only a step in the direction of democracy, at its best.” —Howard Zinn ***
these ideas are not enough “I am referring to respect for the unique human being and his or her liberties and inalienable rights and to the principle that all power derives from the people. I am, in short, referring to the fundamental ideas of modern democracy. “What I am about to say may sound provocative, but I feel more and more strongly that even these ideas are not enough, that we must go farther and deeper.” —Václav Havel, “The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World”, Independence Hall, Philadelphia, 1994 ***
from government alone to governance by all The emergence of a new politics and the next balance of powers “Our current system of government relies on a political innovation that was first introduced by the founders of the American Republic in 1776. They separated what was once a unity—the power of governance held solely by the King—into three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. In order to curb the power of any one branch of government, they created a system of checks and balances to regulate their operations and leave them relatively autonomous. In this way, one branch of government (the Office of the President, for example) cannot simply demand that another (either Congress or the Supreme Court) do its bidding. A certain kind of political objectivity is maintained. Since then, this innovation has spread over the whole globe. “What the American forefathers wanted to avoid was the absolutist state models of Europe where the King was the Government (best exemplified by King Louis XIV’s declaration ‘The State is me.’) As king, he was law-maker, executor, and judge all rolled into one. There were no structural checks and balances. Hence, monarchies were most often totalitarian and dictatorial. More than two centuries later, this invention, standing by itself, has outlived its usefulness. In the end, governments do not simply run themselves. Human beings, with their beliefs, habits, skills, passions and imperfections, run governments. And they invent all kinds of ways to circumvent the rules. Real change or simply business as usual? “Clearly a new concept of governance is needed to supplement the traditional balance of power. One can begin to discern the contours of this new approach by focusing on the problems alternative candidates face when they assume office. They have great difficulty in governing. Instead of the three branches achieving a higher unity, functioning as one healthy organism, they’ve become merely the staging centers for traditional politicians—politicians who derive all their wealth and power from the current system—to attack any initiative by a new, non-traditional politician. In reality, corruption is rampant. ... A Higher Balancing of Powers “In order to harmonize the diverse perspectives of everyone who genuinely wants something different, the new politics needs to understand the different forms of power in society. Each of the three key actors in society brings a different kind of power to the table. Government, of course, harnesses political power. Business mobilizes economic power. And civil society wields cultural power.” —Nicanor Perlas, 2010: www.thinkoutword.org/resources ***
the conversation just kinda moved on “I brought up the point that maybe culture could be free from both business and government, and gave the examples of what free education and healthcare systems might look like: the government could insure that every citizen has the right to education and healthcare, but not determine the kind. Citizens would then receive vouchers (basically coupons) to attend the school of their choosing (mainstream public, Montessori, Catholic, Buddhist, Waldorf, trade schools, outdoor education programs, etc) as well as the medical care of their choosing (allopathic, homeopathic, traditional Chinese practices, etc). This way we would extend the principle of freedom throughout the whole cultural realm—not only to freedom of belief (which we already have through the Separation of Church and State) but to all fields of self-development (through the Separation of Culture and State). “Unfortunately, it didn’t stick. Some guy spoke up and said he disagreed, that he thought people couldn’t be trusted to decide if their kid should learn math or not. The Government, representing the will of the people, needs to decide what’s important for children to learn up until they’re adults and can make their own decisions. After this guy spoke, the conversation just kinda moved on…” —An experience at Occupy, related by Seth Jordan, October 2011 from “The New Center—How Occupy Wall Street could harmonize the best of the left and the right” http://instituteforsocietalholism.tumblr.com ***
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free to develop their faculties “We think you would agree that the final end of the state is to make men and women free to develop their faculties, not to seek planetary domination through force, violence or spying.” —Lon Snowden and Bruce Fein, “Open Letter to Edward Snowden”, July 2, 2013 www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/02/edward-snowden-father-open-letter ***
the word ‘government’ would no longer be appropriate “It is not easy to put aside the present almost universally held concept of government as it exists and imagine three quite separate and distinct spheres of activity, one of which carries responsibility for all that which I have pointed to as coming properly under the term of ‘rights life,’ and for that alone. Government as we know it would cease to exist. “If the cultural and economic sectors, with all that they include, are to be fully separated off and government is to have no involvement in them except in providing the boundaries and safeguards...then a very large part of what government deals with at present will have to be removed from its control. ...In fact, the word ‘government’ would no longer be appropriate. “For many people this may seem far too radical and therefore impossible to accept. But it is the nature of social life itself and the needs of present day humanity that call for this separation of the three sectors.” —Michael Spence, "The Separated Rights Sector", After Capitalism, 2014 ***
more about the rights republic With all economic and culture-forming powers burned away from the State, and the Judicial Branch transferred to the Cultural Republic, what is left? A purified, genuine human rights-state...a rule-of-law state...which retains the Legislative Branch and the trimmed-down Executive Branch.
a rule-of-law state The Rights Republic would not own, operate, fund, or dictate the professional practices of any enterprise in the economic or cultural fields. The Rights Governance becomes a streamlined ‘rule of law state.’ The words ‘Rule of Law’ have come to connote that the individual citizenry is supposed to sheepishly bow and scrape to whatever the National Law and its amply-salaried bureaucrats, technocrats, and securocrats, and their private contractors and subcontractors, say. But ‘rule of law’ was originally an English translation of the Central European concept of the ‘rightsstate’, which means a government which is only devoted to human rights, not to economic growth or cultural development as such.
fields in the sphere of rights A streamlined Rights Republic would retain only a few of the existing government departments or ministries. Whereas the constitutional amendments would separate the economic and cultural powers from the state, what remains with the state would be closely and carefully held and ‘insourced’ instead of outsourced to private contractors:
The Military. The close holding and insourcing of the Military Services by the Rights Governance. Intelligence Agencies. The close holding and insourcing by the Rights Governance of what legitimate Intelligence Services are truly necessary. Presently, there is a whole underworld of private intelligence firms whose budget comes almost entirely from government contracts. This is the epitome of the Corporate State and the Deep State. Policing. The close holding and insourcing of the Police Services by the Rights Governance.
"The object of a democratic representation of the people can only be purely political, military, and police matters." 69
—Rudolf Steiner, Memorandum of 1917 The Threefold Republic would enact domestic and global conditions which would reduce the need for such a vast military, police, and intelligence apparatus. There are three other fields which are firmly in the sphere of rights:
Labor. The close holding and insourcing of Labor Rights by the Rights Governance. In the US, that would be the Department of Labor, including OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
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Social and Political Science: An Introductory Reader: http://books.google.com/books?id=g3TKkw2LxPUC&lpg=PA79&ots=OqiOdvpBzl&dq=%22rudolf%20steiner%22%20economic%20parliament&pg=PA66#v=onepage& q&f=false 63
Environment. The close holding and insourcing of Environmental Quality of Life by the Rights Governance. In the US, this would be the Environmental Protection Agency. For better or worse, the EPA is a tired name. Sixteen states or territories call their equivalent the ‘Environmental Quality Agency.’ So EQA is suggested as a refreshed name. All EPA science labs would be divested as free scientific institutes within the Cultural Republic. The science would be outsourced to the cultural sector, yet the implementation and assurance (‘enforcement’) of the laws which ensure a clean habitation for humanity would be through the EQA. The details and minutia of the environmental laws would be reframed from the human perspective—clarified as a citizen’s right to a wholesome, beautiful, and vibrant human environs: land, water, and air. Political Diplomacy. The close holding and insourcing of Interpolitical Relations by the State. In the US, the State Department remains with the Rights Governance. The commercial trade services of the embassies would be transferred to the Economic Republic. And the cultural services which are currently offered through the embassies, such as the British Council’s English-language classes, would be transferred to the Cultural Republic, or to the National-Cultural Organization. There would be no explicit or implicit use of military force or threat to further national economic interests.
Also, any legitimate rights powers of other departments—departments which would otherwise be transferred to the Economic Republic or Cultural Republic—would remain with the Rights Republic. All of these rights departments would be divested of any cultural powers, such as their various scholarship programs, and would be divested of all economic aspects: for example, the fee for having a passport, or the Drug Enforcement Agency’s making money off of seizing cash and property from its enemy.
a wise public voice speaking through new humanocratic forms “When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town-meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.” —Henry David Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts”, 1854 In a humanocratic governance every single adult citizen really has an equal voice, and economic and cultural lobbies have no voice whatsoever. The General Assembly of the Occupy Wall Street movement is a model for such a humanocratic voice. Another is the Citizen Deliberative Council 70 (CDC). This form is described in the 2012 book Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics by Tom Atlee. 71
Atlee suggests that Citizen Deliberative Councils composed of randomly selected citizenry be initiated as a fourth branch of government. This need and possibility has also been voiced by Ethan Leib in his book Deliberative Democracy in America. Even now, ‘We the People’ is sometimes said to be the ‘fourth branch of government’ (though others say the media is the fourth); but that thought remains entirely abstract and sentimental if there’s no concrete embodiment and voice of We the People outside of the party representatives and economic interests of the Legislative Branch and the professional hierarchy of the Executive Branch. Calling those two entities ‘The People’ is meaningless or worse. All totalistic regimes since Napoleon have called themselves ‘The People.’ For the time being, the voices of this We the People, or Citizens’ Reflective Branch, or Public Wisdom Branch would be entirely advisory. In regard to the Legislative and Executive Branches, would, at most, scrutinize policies and generate proposals. The singular purpose of the We the People branch would be to cultivate a space and quality of voice. All the various Public Deliberation techniques would be honed towards one singleminded goal: of finding ways—beyond marking an X in a box—to speak and hear the elemental voice of what the ancient Greeks called the Demos. Public Wisdom is demo-sophia, demosophy. A Demosophic Branch would not be bureaucratized, and would not have any power of compulsion. There are already nascent examples of this, such as the randomly selected Australian Citizens’ Parliament of 2009, which was a facilitated, non-governmental advisory initiative. The We the People Branch would be the most ‘non-material’, fluid governance branch, and would be essentially a free cultural initiative, but which is funded entirely through the Governance budget, or by its own Subsidy. It would not need a gigantic budget, as its only expenses would be to facilitate General Assemblies, CDCs, and other humanocratic experiences on a shoe-string budget. The existing pool of professional CDC facilitators would be greatly expanded. And perhaps nearly every citizen would learn how to facilitate GAs. Such a branch would be horizontal. There wouldn’t be a rigidly hierarchical ‘federal level’ with fifty ‘state-levels.’ We the People would be a ‘lowarchy.’ Even the smallest General Assembly or Citizen Deliberative Council would voice any matter which affects the rights-life of the citizenry, whether the matter be local, society-wide, or global. In a Public Reflective Branch, all politics would really be local. As a wise public voice, GAs and CDCs would be a real, healthy, perceivable distinction between the Governance and the Actual People.
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The crux of the book is freely available: “The Manifesto: A call to establish a legitimate, wise, powerful, collective voice of the people”: http://empoweringpublicwisdom.us/the-manifesto/ 71
In a Threefold Republic, it’d be the third branch of the rights governance, since the Judicial Branch would be transferred in whole to the cultural republic. 64
Besides the GAs and the CDCs, this branch would be devoted to cultivating and testing the best practices of the emerging Humanocratic 72 Conversational Arts. For me, the most satisfying and relieving thing about the collective visioning process of the 2012 Occupy National Gathering 73 in Philadelphia, was that, in the end, every single vision, from every human voice, was included in the final document. We suggest that at least one generation become fluent in the participatory arts of humanocracy before We the People take on the legislative and executive powers. “Fichte said that the State should be an institution which gives over the reins and gradually becomes entirely superfluous. It would hardly be possible to demand this of our contemporaries nor would they take it seriously. Today it would make a similar impression as the following incident on a troupe of actors. —A play had been performed for the fiftieth time by a traveling company when the director said: ‘Now that we have performed this for the fiftieth time, the prompter's box can be dispensed with.’ But the actors were quite terrified at the idea. Finally one of them pulled himself together and said: ‘But, sir, then one will see the prompter!’ This is about what would happen with our men of the present day. They do not see that the prompter, too, can be dispensed with. Thus it is today. The State will have found its best constitution when it makes itself superfluous, but the government officials and the Chancellors and the Privy Councilors—what would they all say to such a thing?” —Steiner, “The Younger Generation” (emphasis added), 1922 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/YounGener/19221014p01.html (Author’s Note: The Chancellor and Privy Councilors of today are the President and the Cabinet Secretaries.)
a house of citizens and a house of states Besides the Fourth Branch of Governance, the lower house of the Legislative Branch in each social organism would be transformed into a sortitional house, meaning that its members would be elected by random lot, like jurors, from among the entire adult citizenry. Though gender is a physicosoul trait, and so is properly a cultural feature, a side benefit of sortition is that about half of the body would be female. These sortitionally selected representatives, perhaps named ‘selectmen’, would be paid the same ample government salary which our party-loyal representatives presently receive. A sortitional election, along with a rotating, randomized set of professional congressional staffers, would be one very clear, sharp tool for structurally removing monied interests from the legal-rights sphere. Do you really think that the sitting House of Representatives is doing that much better than would 435 randomly selected US citizens? The upper house—the Senate in the United States—would continue to be composed of elected representatives from each constituent Rights-State. These representatives might be called ‘statesmen’, with the word ‘senator’ shifted to the Trisector Senate. This would be a continuation and purification of Federalism as a political impulse. Even though the voices of the federal Rights-States would be Collective voices, and the size of their voices in this chamber would not be based on population, they would still be humanocratic voices, because the States, too, would be purified of all economic, cultural, and party entanglements. There would no longer be any reference to an ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ house. The two houses of the Rights Congress would be re-perceived as equals, though informally they’d be referred to as the ‘first house’ (the House of Citizens) and the ‘second house’ (the House of States).
unicameral legislatures? About half of the sovereign states in humanity’s world have unicameral (‘one chamber’) legislatures. In the U.S., the state of Nebraska has a single chamber. If, for a unicameral legislature, sortitional selection is felt to be too big a leap without having a conventionally elected second chamber, then a legislature could be half-sortitional and half-elected. While sortition is the leading edge of authentic democracy, conventional representative voting is still healthy, as long as it is structurally cleared of monied and sectarian interests.
funding the rights sector There would be no tax, as we know it. There would be no income tax and no land tax. Income tax is an intrusive act of forced tribute. Fundamentally, income is not even an economic transaction. "Among all those who at the present day profess to be experts in practical life, there is not a single individual who doubts that an improvement has been made by the transition from all kinds of indirect taxation and other sources of national income to what we call the income tax, especially the graduated income tax. Everyone thinks it is unquestionably right to pay income tax and yet, however paradoxical this may sound to the modern mind, the belief that the imposition of a tax on income is a just measure is only an illusion resulting from the modern financial system of economy." "Precisely by this example of taxation, we see how very necessary is a change in our method of thinking, and how the belief that a tax on income is first in importance is an accompaniment of that financial system which has appeared in modern civilization since the Renaissance and Reformation. 72
Also known as ‘Public Deliberation’, ‘Social Technologies’, or ‘Social Arts.’ Such arts include Consensus Decision-Making, Dynamic Governance, Non-Violent Communication, Open Space, World Café, Lemniscate Process, Theory U, and others. The Public Reflection Branch would be a space for finding which of these are the most dynamic and clear conduits for the voice of public wisdom. Robert’s Rules of Order are not the end of the conversation. 73
“Our process is our message”: www.occupylv.org/sites/default/files/FINAL-A-Vision-For-A-Democratic-Future_0.pdf . My voice wasn’t included, as I was in the Federal Detention Center during the final visioning on July 4th. This book is my vision for a humanocratic future. 65
When the economic system is once placed upon its own basis, the only matter to be considered is that capital actually involved in the production of commodities shall supply the means for the manufacture of the products necessary to the community. It will then be a case of a tax on expenditure, but never one on income." —Rudolf Steiner, “The Organization of a Practical Economic Life on an Associative Basis”, The Social Future http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/SocialFuture/19191025p01.html And the right to steward a patch of land would no longer be based on whether the individual keeps paying the Government. Instead, the Rights Governance itself would be funded entirely by a single voucher—the Rights Services Subsidy. Each individual citizen would pay the same amount of taxes. No individual would even be allowed to donate more money than their equal share. Businesses and cultural organizations would be completely barred from ‘giving’ any money to the government or to political candidates. To raise and maintain awareness of how much Rights Services cost, the budgeted amount would be divided equally among all adult citizens (presently about $17,000 per adult citizen per year for the US national government budget) and issued to each citizen as an Individual Subsidy for Rights Services, which could only be given to the Rights Governance. Unlike the Cultural Subsidies, the recipient of this ‘mandatory gift’ is the same for all citizens. The Rights Sector is founded on Equality, not Liberty. “Is not tax a kind of gift? An odd example of a gift, to be sure, as it is compulsory and determined by the receiver than the giver, but a gift nonetheless. Though a tax might be experienced as a taking of money, it can also be described as giving without expecting to receive anything ‘in exchange.’ Politicians, teachers, police, and social workers, funded by taxes, do not provide anything ‘in exchange.’ They all provide a service which is not directly paid for, just as taxes are not paid in direct exchange for their public service.” —Michael Spence, “Gift Capital”, After Capitalism, 2014 The tax would be collected from all economic and cultural enterprises which charge any money for their products or services. The yearly Rights budget is known ahead of time, and so the necessary amount would be gathered each year from all for-fee enterprises, with each enterprise’s tax amount decided in a fair, simple, and transparent way. The government would no longer automatically swell when there are more economic transactions. The Governance only needs so much money to provide rights services. Instead of our byzantine tax code—which can only be effectively navigated by purchasing the services of a professional tax consultant, which large corporations can easily afford, but which is a real burden to small businesspeople and the ordinary citizen—the Rights Republic would be funded by a lump sum. Each year, the Rights Governance would draw up a budget, and that amount would be paid directly by the Economic Republic. (The Economic Republic would be the entire National Economy, but with a transparent, responsible human face and consciousness). Through the Trisector Senate, the Economic Republic would present its own view as to the effect a larger or smaller rights budget would have on economic fruitfulness. “Tax laws will provide this political state with what it needs to maintain itself. These will be devised through a harmonization of ‘rights awareness’ and economic requirements." —Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c02.html
tax-free enterprise There would be a tax-free status in both the economic and cultural sector:
In the economic sector, ‘Gifted Economic Corporations’ would be entirely tax-exempt. Such ‘G-Corporations’ would be those businesses which give all their products away, without requiring even a penny from the recipient; for example: food banks, give-away shops (free stores), and pay-as-you-can community cafes—the SAME Café in Denver, the ‘One World Everybody Eats’ Foundation in Salt Lake City, and the recently ended experiment of Panera Bread. There can still be orderly disbursal of the goods, such as a limit per customer. Existing charities whose primary purpose is to provide economic respite, and who charge no monies for their services, would be considered to be G-Corporations.
Likewise, in the cultural sector, ‘Gifted Cultural Organizations’ would be tax-free. Such ‘GCOs’ would give all their cultural services away without demanding money, as if their offerings were a sacrament; for example, Concord Free Press, the Twelve Step Fellowships, Cooper Union art school (though it’s planning to charge tuition in 2014), the Free Columbia Art Course in upstate New York, or the Gifted/Free Music 74 platforms of artists such as Amanda Palmer and MC Matre. There could still be non-monetary qualifications for receiving a tax-free cultural service, such as prerequisites for taking an advanced class, or auditions to find the most qualified recipient.
In both cases, such ‘gifted’ enterprises still need to be economically supported through tossing money in the hat, or through other forms of giftmoney…it’s just that the offering of their goods and services would not be tied to whether the individual recipient was the one who gave the economic support. Yet if a Corporation or Organization charges money for any of their goods or services, then a portion of that money goes to fund the various Individual Cultural Subsidies, the Rights Services Subsidy (the Governance Budget), and any legislated Individual Economic Subsidies. The two 74
The philosophies behind their Free Culture stances are articulated at http://amandapalmer.net/producttypes/featured and http://mcmatre.com/gift 66
constitutional categories of Cultural Organization and Economic Corporation would be defined by what they do. But the tax categories of Gifted or Commercial would be defined by whether each service, good, or object is offered with or without a monetary tie. And without a bartered tie. Bartering is commerce too. In a truly free service, no one has to pay or barter to receive the offering. In a Threefold Republic, no economic or cultural initiatives receive government money. The non-profit sector’s reliance on government grants gradually turns them into what civil society advocates call ‘GONGOs’…Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organizations. Cultural organizations and businesses which are based in other countries, and which receive money from their national government—such as Chinese state corporations—would be able to remain incorporated within a Threefold Republic, but there would need to be disclosure as to which Government is funding them, and how much, so that when these entities speak in the Economic Forum or Cultural Council, it is well-known that their voice is partly that of a National Government.
morality by taxation? “The esteemed thinker whom I have in mind thinks it necessary for the state (of course, everybody is now under the obsession of the state) to impose high taxes on luxuries; so high, indeed, that people would cease buying them. He does not admit the validity of the argument that if luxuries were taxed in this way, they would decrease, and the state then would lose the benefit of the taxation. He argues that this is just what should happen, and that the taxation has a moral aim. Taxation would then have the effect of promoting morality! “Such is the way of thinking today. So small is the belief in the power of the human spirit, that it is proposed to establish the morality which should spring from the human soul and spirit, by means of taxation, namely, by law! No wonder that here, at any rate, no unity of life can be reached. ... “For public life is now molded under the influence of this mode of thought. And no one sees that all these things must lead in the end to the recognition of the fact that the basis for a really new construction of social life is the activity of the spiritual [cultural] life in complete independence; likewise, the independence of the legal organization and its detachment from the economic system; and, finally, the untrammeled development of the economic organism. “Such things strike us very forcibly today when we see how people, who are more than commonly well-intentioned, whose ethical sense for the need of a reconstruction of social life is beyond doubt, show at least a faint indication in their works of the absolute necessity for a spiritual [cultural] foundation to the social edifice, and yet give evidence everywhere of a lack of understanding of the means by which that spiritual [cultural] foundation can be attained.” —Rudolf Steiner, “The Cooperation of the Spiritual, Political and Economic Departments of Life”, The Social Future Taxes are supposed to fund the yearly budget of the rights governance, along with whatever individual cultural and economic subsidies are deemed necessary for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s all they are supposed to do. Instead, there is a labyrinth of tax law which purports to steer our morality by giving us various tax breaks for doing ‘good, charitable’ things. There is an implication that certain things, such as profitability and the production and retailing of commodities are bad or less noble, but certain things, especially nice-sounding, liberal non-profit things, or religious things, are good and noble. The business corporations pay taxes and the non-profit corporations don’t. Yet most non-profits don’t even offer their services freely. And many receive government money, which is compulsory gathered, and thus ‘tainted’ money. Some non-profit executives take home a hefty salary and benefits. Why should a grocery store or a bookstore which is operated by a nonprofit, be exempt from dealing with taxes, while a regular grocery store and bookstore has the vexation of funding the government sector? Don’t many for-profit corporations do as much or more social good than many non-profits? For example, businesses offer gainful employment to many people, and get commodities to where they are needed. They feed the people. Though for-profit businesses have been corrupted by the idea of ‘share-holder value above all’, these bodies have the potential to be thoroughly benevolent and selfless. It its early days, the Hershey Chocolate Company poured much of its profits into the Hershey Industrial School, an independent boarding school for materially poor youth. The Hershey community in Pennsylvania was something like a nascent Twofold Community 75 Organism in America. And there are modern examples of beneficial corporations, such as the “8 Revolutionary Socially Responsible Companies” whose logos are displayed at the top of the ‘red diamond’ illustration in the Homeland Economy section of this book. So if the non-profit corporation is charging for their services—and most do charge—why are they so special? I’ve witnessed ‘nice’ non-profit groups call the fee they charge a ‘donation.’ Just because something is called by a nice name doesn’t change what it is. It’s only a donation if the person really could participate in the activity or have the thing even if they didn’t hand over any money. If charging money isn’t commerce, then what is? And if ‘non-profit corporations’ are really commercial enterprises which aren’t paying taxes, then who’s not paying their fair share? The non-profits or the businesses? Which are the ‘Benedict Arnold Corporations?’ Yet in the current Corporate-Prison-State system, I’m glad that non-profits don’t pay taxes. Some of them, such as Hawthorne Valley Farm and its associated school, really do fold all of their commercial fruitage back into human and ecological development.
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“Motto of the Threefold Hershey Community: ‘Made on the Farm’” by the Anthroposophical Society in Hershey, at www.corpsdemichael.org/festivals/Templars_threefolding_Branch_Life.pdf . With its $6 billion dollar endowment, I suggest that the Milton Hershey School branch out into a country-wide independent Hershey School System. Hershey Schools could become an American-birthed cohort of the Waldorf School impulse. 67
And though this will sound like heresy to some liberals, in the present-day system, I’m even glad that many of the largest business corporations 76 have purchased the right to pay no taxes. The corporations’ motivations for tax dodging are not necessarily altruistic, but the National-Security Government doesn’t need any more money. Neither does its fifty state arms and their governmental schools. Even local municipalities are sick with statism, such as over-zealous zoning officers and traffic policing-based revenue collection. Frankly, until the municipalities become authentic rightscollectivities, I’d prefer they barely have enough money to exist. It’s not a tragedy for a con-fused municipality, or any other sick government, to become disincorporated.
commercial or gifted Why not discard the red sea of tax law? The most commonsense clarification is this: if money is changing hands in exchange for a good or a service, then it is a commercial transaction, regardless of whether the entity is a ‘non-profit’ or not, and regardless of whether the entity is in the economic or cultural sector. From the tax perspective, there would be no implication that cultural is ‘good’ and economic is ‘bad.’ There might be cultural organizations and economic corporations who do not charge for any of their services and goods (or ‘art objects’ as a noncommodity). These would be 100% ‘Gifted’ cultural and economic enterprises. Those corporations and organizations would be entirely tax free. Other organizations and corporations might charge for some services or goods, but not for others. The free gifts would not be taxed. The commercial transactions would. Unlike the maze of tax breaks and non-profit law, which can only be sorted out through courts and lawyers, such a clear tax-free status could easily be tested. Still other cultural and economic enterprises would charge for all of their services and wares. These transactions would be taxed. These cultural enterprises would be ‘cultural businesses.’ The tax on commercial transactions would pretty much be the only source of funding for the rightsstate, since there would be no income tax, nor would it be charging fees for rights services, and would no longer be expecting to make money off 77 crime. The tax would also fund the legislated, individuated Cultural Rights Subsidies and Economic Rights Subsidies. Taxation would be clear and straightforward. As far as how this tax would be gathered, there are various ways it could be done. One way to meet that year’s rights budget would for each commercial business corporation and each commercial cultural organization which is incorporated within a political service area (a rights-state) to be required to pay a certain percentage of the rights budget, by paying a sort of lump-sum ‘membership fee’ based on how big their company is—with the tax sum based on the previous year’s commercial transactions. Or, instead of a lump sum, the rights budget could be met by taxing at the point-of-sale, as it is currently, with a portion of each commercial transaction going toward funding that year’s rights budget. If the economic productivity is unexpectedly high, then the rights governance would meet its budget sooner than expected. 78 And then....there’d be no more tax collecting for the rest of the year. The rights service sector would only need so much money. Genuine political governance wouldn’t keep hoarding money and growing larger and larger for no reason. So what if the entire tax-preparation industry goes out of business? There’d be other good work to do.
rights cannot be paid for No rights services would charge a fee to individual citizens. Rights are not a commodity to be bought and sold. The cost of anything that is a right would be included in the Individual Rights Subsidy which every citizen transmits to the governance. For example, every citizen would be issued a passport, unless the citizen declines to receive it. Beyond the Egalitarian Rights Subsidy which each citizen would pay the Rights Republic, no citizen, corporation, or organization would be permitted to ‘give’ any money to the Rights Governance. He who pays the piper is apt to call the tune. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” —Upton Sinclair
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For example: “America Has a Brand New Benedict Arnold” by Scott Klinger for Common Dreams, at www.commondreams.org/views05/0614-25.htm “Over Two-Thirds of Corporations Pay No Federal Corporate Income Tax” by Huffington Post, at www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/10/corporations-payno-tax_n_1196875.html “26 Major Corporations Paid No Taxes For the Last Four Years” by Pat Garofalo, at Think Progress: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/04/09/460519/major-corporations-no-taxes-four-year
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As suggested earlier, various earmarked Cultural and Economic Subsidies, would be issued directly to each adult citizen, without the political governance touching the money. These could be spent on whichever service provider(s) the individual citizen chooses. They’d be cleared through the individual’s will. 78
As described earlier in the book, the year’s Governance Budget, would be divided equally among all the adult citizens and issued by the economic republic as an earmarked Rights Services voucher which would be ‘mandatorily given’ by each citizen to the political governance. In that way, all tax money would be cleared through the citizenry, since the Rights Governance is only for the citizenry. And that way, every citizen would know how much rights services really cost. No businesses or cultural organizations would be permitted to ‘give’ or ‘pay’ the Rights Governance anything. 68
crime doesn’t pay Presently, when local and state police seize money and goods which is tied to illegal activity, it’s usually sent to the US national government’s federal asset seizure program. The national government keeps a portion ‘for administrative costs’ (though since those government agencies are funded by compulsorily gathered tax money, wouldn’t they exist regardless of whether they supplemented their income through seizures and fees?), and then sends the rest back to the police department. The money goes to purchase equipment, or to send our police-citizens to schools to learn more about enforcing drug laws. In other words, the money goes to ensure a perpetual war between our supposedly good fellowmen in the guard industry and our supposedly evil fellowmen who supply or ingest the physical substances which temporarily (but only temporarily) soothe the pain of life. Reportedly, a little bit of the money is sometimes sent to citizens who were harmed by the crime, yet in my personal experience, the police are sometimes as much a hindrance as the supposed criminal. In a village where I lived recently, a desperate young man went into the parking area of 79 the house where I lived and rifled through the unlocked cars. He took a little jar of money that we had left in there. The guy was snagged by the police. We would’ve been glad to have made an agreement with the fellow whereby he’d pay us back the money. Then he would’ve been restored to the circle of human community. Yet for all we know, he was swallowed by the black hole of the ‘justice system.’ And even though our policecitizens said they recovered the money, they never responded to our enquiry about returning the 20 dollars. So who’s the thief? In a refreshed state of justice, any legitimate seizures of assets would go to only two entities: 1) as concrete amends to those individuals who were actually harmed by another’s wrongdoing, and 2) as gift monies to organizations of the free cultural sector, such as state-free schools, instead of flowing back into the government. The government would no longer be making money off of crime. Local governments would no longer meet their budgets by anticipating infractions.
articulating political, cultural, and economic rights Besides the political rights, such as the right to security from physical violence and the right to an equal voice in the shaping of laws, the Rights Republic does retain a very clear and vigorous role in relation to the economic and cultural sectors. The Rights Governance ensures (but does not collect or distribute) the funding of certain key Cultural Rights and Economic Rights. The Rights Organism legislates what funds must be issued by the Economic Sector to all citizens for whichever Cultural and Economic Rights are deemed to be necessary for ‘LiLiPoH’...Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. All the tax monies which are presently being funneled into ‘social programming’ such as the well-meaning but subtly desolating No Child Left Behind program of the US Department of Education and the Head Start program of the US Department of Health—and which are building up gigantic bureaus filled with the spirit of institutional inertia—would instead be cleared through each individual citizen’s will. That same amount of money would be divvied equally between the individual citizenry, and issued as earmarked individual Citizen’s Subsidies which are slated for particular Cultural Rights and Economic Rights, regardless of their personal wealth or poverty. These Individual Subsidies would be issued directly by the Economic Republic to every adult citizen, without the Government interfering as the middle-man. The Government would no longer be the Bottomless Purse.
cultural rights The prime example of a Cultural Right is the right to a full spectrum of educational options for our nation’s children, regardless of the family 80 lineage’s economic condition. Though not everything is life is a Right, an exquisite, soulful, nuanced education is not a Privilege.
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The citizens who were serving as police chastised us for leaving the car doors unlocked, and implied that we deserved to be robbed. That gesture suggests that some of our police secretly enjoy spreading the message of a fear-based social organism. I witnessed a similar gesture when I was walking by a roadside produce store in Kernersville, North Carolina, where the family would sometimes leave the register unattended. A policemen happened by, and when he saw there was no one at the register, he flipped out. When the farmwife came back, he scolded her as if she were a child. She deflected his gesture, saying: ‘What you are trying to do, put fear into us?’ Where one of my friends lives in Alaska, people leave their house and car doors unlocked. Imagine what it would take for that to be the case throughout America and the rest of humanity’s world...and to achieve that imagined state not only through increased ‘law and order’, but through a change in culture. Even in a Threefold Republic, there would still be the ancient wound of thievery. It’s part of the human story that not everyone has gotten honest yet. Yet, it’s not far fetched to suggest that when society has found a philosophy and way of life, when the inner world of young people is no longer being trampled on by government schools, when the legitimate economic needs of humanity are being ungrudgingly met by our associative co-working, and when there is no ‘they ‘ in the rights republic, but only ‘we’, there would be less criminality. 80
Using the well-being of children as a motivator for corporatism and secular darwinism is a primitive custom. In West Virginia, I witnessed how the coal companies— now that the union culture is lost—would expect their workers to be a devoted Friend of Coal, whether on or off the clock. If the men don’t jump and smile at every corporate directive or insinuation, they will be looked on as undesirables, and let go. Then how to bring bread to the table of the children? Yes, it is vital that each generation of adults sacrifice for the next generation. Yet, unwarranted sacrifice is not something that is asked for by good entities. Here’s some questions:
Is there anything which I would not deny to any child which was not my own, but who was of my nation—regardless of the untrustworthiness or laziness of the person who the child chose to serve as their parent? Is there anything I would not deny to any child elsewhere humanity’s world, outside of the territorial jurisdiction of my national state? Is there anything I would not deny to any adult in humanity’s world? Is there anything I would not deny to even a criminal—a thief, killer, or abuser? Or to our worst enemies, such as leftists or rightists, or fearmongering Islamicists?
(The footnote continues on the next page.) 69
“The right to education could be arranged in that the economic organism's administration, in accordance with the general economic situation, calculates the amount of educational income possible, while the rights-state, in consultation with the spiritual [cultural] organism, determines the rights of the individual in this respect." —Rudolf Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c03.html This “Universal Right to School Choice” would be achieved through an Individual Subsidy (whether it’s called a ‘voucher’, ‘scholarship’, ‘coupon’, or ‘grant’). All the federal, state, and local school tax monies ($5,000 to $18,000 per child per year, depending on the locality) would be equally divided among the school age child-citizens of that locality, in trust of their parental guardians, and issued as a Pedagogical Subsidy which could be used towards the child’s tuition at any school, whether it be:
a secular Community School (the formerly Public/Government Schools), an academia-oriented College Preparatory School, a Democracy School (such as Albany Free School in New York, Highland School in West Virginia, Sudbury Schools, or Summerhill School in Britain), a Religious School (Catholic, Evangelical, Quaker, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist), a Philosophical School (Montessori, Paideia, Reggio Emilia Approach, Soka Education, Waldorf), 81 a Nature- or Farm-based School (such as the E.A.R.T.H. School in Harlemville, N.Y., Mother Earth School in Portland, Oregon, Mulberry Farm in Santa Rosa, California, Otto Specht School in Spring Valley, N.Y., and Ruskin Mill in Britain), an Arts or Crafts School, 82 a Historically Black School or other ethno-cultural immersion school (such as the non-governmental Akwesasne Freedom School of the 83 Mohawk Nation or the Lakota Waldorf School ), a Language School (Francophone Lycée or Gaelic school), or Homeschool Co-operative.
Michelle D. Bernard with the Bernard Center for Women, Politics & Public Policy calls the Right to School Choice “the most important civil rights 84 issue of our time.” The Separation of Religion and State is maintained because a parent choosing to use the scholarship for a Religious School is not so different than a Senator using their hefty government salary (public monies) to send their own children to an elite Catholic or Quaker
The conventional Americanist answer is: “I would deny everything to all of those. Survival of the fittest. And in the latter cases, I would take their life. There are no rights, only privileges. ...Except that there is no good thing which I would deny my own children.” Regardless of what words are being mouthed, or what philosophical framework it is being couched in, what is speaking is the bloodline. Yes, there is a legitimate concern that if anything is evinced to be a right, then bleeding-heart liberals will take it and governmentalize it. But if the human social organism could be cured of governmentalism, then a new culture of shared, benign sacrifice could unfold—not only the parental sacrifice within a family lineage. This can result in a deeper encasement within a familial group spirit longer than is healthy. The Sons and Daughters of Humanity would be re-perceived and felt again to be a healthy, functional familial lineage. 81
A school some of my friends have initiated: www.earthhva.org.
When I was at the Occupy National Gathering in Philadelphia, there was a fellow there who shared his vision for earth-based government schooling. He was a government school teacher. He could see that the Prussian factory-style government school is no longer a healthy model, and his solution was to make an environmentally-flavored, earth-ish curriculum for government schools. He hadn’t yet made the leap to a state-free, radically diverse educational organism which is entirely in the third sector. He was hoping the public school leadership would notice his idea. I said to him: “Look, my friends are doing something along those lines, but outside of the government—why don’t you visit up here and have a look? Why not consider starting your own earth-based school outside of the public school system, instead of waiting for the gears of bureaucracy to turn?” He responded with something like: “I am too devoted to public schooling to initiate it myself.” I liked the fellow, but it was apparent how statism shapes the soul. 82
Here’s a statement from the school: “The Akwesasne Freedom School (AFS) was founded in 1979 by Mohawk parents concerned with the lack of cultural and linguistic services available in local public schools. As an independent elementary school, AFS has existed on a shoestring budget for over 25 years. In 1985, the parents who administer the school made a historic decision to adopt a total Mohawk immersion curriculum. It was a historic decision. AFS was the first to implement this curriculum and did so without approval or funding from state, federal or provincial governments. By focusing on our young people, we reverse the assimilation process and ensure that the Mohawk people do not lose their language, culture and identity. The school continues to immerse its students in levels Pre-K to 8 in the Kanienkéha (Mohawk) language and culture. All instruction, as well as recess periods, outdoor activities, field trips, meals and extracurricular activities are conducted in the Mohawk language.” and “For history, our students learn the Onkwehonwe leaders of our nation, instead of the presidents and senators of the United States.” 83
“As of 2012/2013, our Board members, Faculty and Staff have all decided our school will be all immersion. For the entire day will be all spoken in Lakota.” www.lakotawaldorfschool.org 84
http://bernardcenter.org/2012/02/editorial-school-choice
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boarding school. The Individual is entrusted and empowered. If the constitutional scholars among us need some legalistic justification, then all parents of school-age children could be considered as ‘contract workers’ for the local School Board, and the Pedagogical Subsidy could be paid as ‘wages’ in exchange for one-hour of work for the School Board per year. A similar Individual Subsidy might be legislated in regard to guaranteeing the most exquisite Healthcare and Preventative Wellness for every childaged citizen in our country, with the parents free to choose among the array of conventional allopathic and holistically enhanced medical options. The right could just as well be extended to adults, whereby the money which is being funneled into corporatist-statist ObamaCare would be transmuted into an individual Subsidy for Wellness and Medical Care, to be used toward any preventative or acute health service, whether it be gym membership, yoga and aerobics classes, counseling, a doctor’s visit, medicine, holistic remedies which are endorsed by widely-recognized alternative health associations of the Cultural Republic, an emergency room visit, surgery, or a hospital stay. With business, state, and medicine clearly separated, the various complexities of the care of health would become untangled and transparent to perception, so that the specifics could be worked out. In the further future, the Rights Republic could legislate that other cultural fields be similarly funded; for example, a “Citizen’s Subsidy for News Media”, so that independent media outlets can be feasibly supported by micro-donations which bear the spirit of humanocracy, instead being 86 funded by Big Business. And a “Citizen’s Subsidy for College and University Studies” would replace the student debt industry. In all cases, the Cultural Subsidy is: 1) 2)
3)
Issued directly from the Economic Republic, without the Government getting its hands on it. Issued directly to each individual adult citizen, or to the legal guardian of child-citizens. There is no Government middle-man. We don’t need to build up any more Kafkaesque bureaus. The only role of the Rights Governance is to voice and legislate which cultural fields are to be funded as Rights, and how much the Individual Subsidy will be. Issued without regard for economic status. Except for certain obvious criteria, such as the criterion of being a school-aged child, needsbased criteria are not fitting for the Rights Republic. Such criteria, such as income-verification, results in government intrusion into our personal lives. And such criteria are inherently divisive, because it splits the citizenry into a resentful upper class and upper middle class and a subtly shamed or dependent lower class and lower middle class. If it’s a Right, then it’s a right of all citizens. Economic status— including the status of being materially wealthy—ought not play any role in the Rights Republic.
To our wealthiest 1%, these two Educational and Healthcare coupons would be no more than a tax rebate. To our 99%, they’d be a pedagogical and wellness revolution, which would provide soil and sunlight for the babies of today to blossom into the most ethical, nuanced, and vibrant generation in the history of America.
economic rights “There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer.” —MLK As far as Economic Rights, the main one is the Right to a Dignified Livelihood. All 40-hour workers in the American economy, including fast food and convenience store clerks, would receive at least the same pay and ‘benefits’ that entry-level national (‘federal’) employees receive. And all parttime jobs (except for informal piece-work) would pay a proportionate pay and benefits, so that if an individual worked two 20-hour jobs, they’d receive the full Fraternal Livelihood. (Otherwise, businesses would cut nearly everyone to 39 hours.) Since our national government—which is the
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Here in Empire State, we recently got to witness the New York State Education Commissioner telling parents why they must to submit their children to government schools—while he himself uses his ample government salary (tax monies) to send his own children to a private school. (“NYS Ed Commissioner Reveals His Belief in the Parental Right to School Choice” by CAUSE NYS: www.causenys.org/2013/10/28/nys-ed-commissioner-reveals-his-belief-in-the-parental-right-to-school-choice) “I blame only those well-meaning persons who, while sending their own children to private schools, self-righteously lecture the ‘lower classes’ about their responsibility to put up with government-supplied pabulum in the ‘public interest.’” —Milton Friedman, The New York Times Magazine 86
In the meantime, imagine a National Debt Jubilee, in which all debts which are owed to the National Government—or to its quasi-governmental Student Loan Industry—either by individuals, by organizations, or by other National Governments are simply erased. The person or entity is welcome to continue giving freely, but they will no longer be hounded. How will America ever really get out from under our 11 trillion dollar national debt—$36,000 per American man, woman, and child— unless we forgive other nations’ debts? We have become a Creditocracy wherein the computer-calculated Credit Rating overrules other human qualities of life. And why is every human being who is born into this patch of land automatically saddled with the outstanding debt of previous generations? Imagine if, as Thomas Jefferson suggested, no government entity could take on a debt which is not paid off within a single generation? Unlike the economic corporations and cultural organizations, the rights governance is an entity which all human beings who are born into the political service area have to be a member of. When one generation of adult citizens makes a government debt which they themselves are not going to pay off anytime soon, then they are unwittingly enslaving the next generation who had no voice in that, but who will have to really toil and pay for that debt through the compulsory taxation of the fruit of their labor. Imagine a constitutional amendment saying that no federal, state, or local government may take on a debt for longer than 18 years. 71
largest employer in this social organism—is supposed to have the clearest perception of what is just and right, then whatever our national rights 87 servants are receiving must be a fair livelihood for anyone in our national economy. It’s obvious that the Statist way of life—which humanity fully experienced eastward of the midline of Germany—bent and corrupted human relationships. The fear and pervasiveness of the State was such that one could not even trust one’s spouse. The polar counterpart of Statism—the Corporatist way of life—also has harmful effects, though subtler. The absence of clear economic rights has real effects in regard to personal independence, and in regard to relationships. While the economic corporations of an Associative Economy would be more consciously and transparently interdependent and co-operative, the human individual would become more financially independent and sovereign. The 1950’s myth of the breadwinner is a half-truth. In a healthy Economic Republic, our male humanity would no longer be expected to singlehandedly stand up to—or embed themselves within—anti-human corporatist economic powers. And materially poor single mothers would no 88 longer be wedded to government agencies. Some of the pathos of irresponsible ‘deadbeat dads’—and hyper-responsible, super-martyr single moms—would be resolved by other features of the Threefold Republic, since all children could afford to patronize private schools and healthcare practitioners, instead of solely relying on parental sacrifice within a familial bloodline. Economic dependency would no longer be such an excuse for staying in martyric or abusive relationships. And the old practice of marrying for economic status—the polar counterpart of marrying for looks—would be further dissolved. Fear of economic insecurity is a dampener of authentic romance. Our twenty-somethings, who are entering into the phase of life where the self-hood is really beginning to unfold, would nearly all be engaged in various apprenticeships and journeymanships—practical, artistic, and scholarly. Typically, only in the late twenties would there be a shift to capitalizing the individual to build or buy one’s own freehold homestead. In any case, there would be society-wide conditions for young adults to unfold into a way of life which is lovingly detached from blood family. Once we are 21, and our own “I”-hood has penetrated into the body, why do adults call other adults ‘dad’ and ‘mom’? We were peers—brothers-and-sisters—before we came here, and only needed a hand to get oriented in the new world into which we stepped. Through a Fraternal Livelihood, we all become free-standing breadwinners in a healthy, humane economy.
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Some might say: ‘That may be nice for the workers, but what about us owner-operators? We small businessmen and businesswomen don’t get to rest. We have to pour our sweat and blood into an enterprise, day and night, for years before it turns a profit. No one’s watching our back. Would employee-style workers get all these rights or benefits, while we entrepreneurs—who work hard to initiate these places of employment—have to fend for ourselves?’ That is a good question. The initiation into the current mode of entrepreneurialism is a sort of systemic hazing. It’s not supposed to be quite so hard to start a business. Presently, in countries which are economically poorer than the US, such as Brazil or India, it’s an unspoken ‘given’ that any start-up capital which is provided as a loan to local entrepreneurs is only enough to support the relatively humble lifestyle of the merchant class in those countries. In countries with a richer standard of living than the US, such as Switzerland and Sweden, when an entrepreneur submits a business plan to a local bank or other financier, it’s an unspoken ‘given’ that the venture capital will provide the requisite Swiss or Swedish lifestyle for the initiator and the first workers while the business is getting on its feet. It’s a ‘given’ that a Swiss entrpreneur won’t have to live in a tin-roofed shack while they start the business. A Threefold Republic is a whole step higher than even those. When everyone—brown, black, and white—in the whole country is living a life at least as prosperous as Swiss and Scandinavian Humanity, and it’s simply a part of the culture that people take twelve holidays and a whole month of vacation each year, then it would simply be a given—a good, humane ‘given’—that enterprise is capitalized, whether by a bank or by ‘Chambers of Association’, to a degree necessary to sustain this universal ‘right to rest’ even while a person is initiating a business. Also, every citizen—regardless of their role in the business/economic sector—would be receiving the Individuated Subsidies for various Cultural Rights and Economic Rights, which would soften the edge of fear which is the back of the mind of our entrepreneurs: ‘This better work out, otherwise my child will have to go to the soulless, gang-ridden governmental school and I won’t be able to pay for their college and so my child will be relegated to the American underclass and live a life of retail toil where they are worn to a nub by the struggle to make rent on $7.25 an hour.’ Furthermore, associative economics overcomes some of the lonely, hard aspects of enterprise. Dog-eat-dog competition is replaced with transparent striving for profitable integrity and excellence. Through open-book accounting and through the cross-training of workers and managers at hither-to ‘rival’ companies, the Economic Associations would facilitate the possibility of holidays for owner-operators. 88
I have witnessed a similar gesture in intentional communities—even those whose ideal is cultural and economic renewal—where the administrative entity and its ‘unquestionable’ social structure with its ‘unchangeable’ traditions, makes demands so high that the human marriages break, and many of the males are driven off by the suffocating paternalism (or sick maternalism), while the females remain as single moms deeply embedded in a communitarian spirit—because they cannot otherwise afford to send their child to a Waldorf School. I think such communities cannot help but be pervaded with a one-sidedness and an underdeveloped middle sphere of rights awareness. Besides such communitarian one-sidedness, a similar perception is voiced by J.R.R. Tolkien in regard to corporatist ‘persons’: “*Economic independence] usually really means economic subservience to male commercial employers instead of to a father or a family.” —Letters of JRR Tolkien, 1941 Such communitarian or corporatist conditions are reminiscent of a non-human giant marrying a daughter of humanity. Perhaps an equivalent experience for the other gender is how many males are pressured by the social conditions to be wedded to their job and become workaholics just to keep the family economically afloat—while at the same time, the overtime hours slowly destroy the human marriage. The humane goal is for every adult in the American economy to be working a combination of jobs which together bring a full fraternal livelihood, for only 40 hours a week (or less), so that we have an independent, dignified life regardless of whether we are female or male, married or single—along with the time to tend to our marriage and our creative passions, and to be present for the kids. 72
the right to water “Begin to ask the question, ‘Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?’ These are words that must be said.” —MLK Doesn’t nearly everyone hate to pay utility bills? One way to approach the possibility of relieving this vexation is to begin with making water an Economic Right within the context of an associative economy. The actual water treatment plants and pipelines would be divested from the governments and transferred to the associative corporations of the economic republic. The water company’s customer base would be organized as a consumer federation which has a seat in the local Economic Forum. In that way, the consumer’s perspective will play a role in perceiving a fairand-true price for water service. The rights governance would legislate that each citizen (but not businesses and organizations) would receive a generous Individual Water Subsidy each month, as a coupon straight from the economic republic. The subsidy coupon could be spent for piped, chlorinated water from a treatment plant, for the home delivery of purified drinking water, or for store-bought drinking water of whatever kind (for example distilled water or spring water). The water consumer could arrange for some or all of their Individual Subsidy to be automatically sent to the water company, and thereby remove the hassle of the bill. Household water consumption would still be metered, because the subsidy amount would only cover the usual (though abundant) per-person water consumption for that locality; if a person needed or wanted to wash their car every day or water a large lawn, they would pay the rest out of pocket. The Water Subsidy might also be saved up to be spent on an in-house water purification system or for digging a well in localities which still have clean groundwater. That’s one example of how the separate but coordinative power of rights articulation and state-free social entrepreneurialism would remove the seemingly ‘unquestionable’ vexation of paying utility bills, while at the same time, empowering the individual. “Clean drinking water is a basic human right and no one should go without water nor have to worry that their children are being poisoned by the water in their own homes.” —Wendy Johnston, with the Princeton Candlelight Vigil for Water Relief (and fellow Matoaka High School alumnus) Princeton, West Virginia, January 2014
the right to parental leave Another economic right might be the right to parental leave to care for a newborn, and perhaps on into early childhood. Why is it that it’s mostly only the wives of executives who have the means to be at home during the tender first months and years? Why are we not willing to provide conditions for the first months of all our delicately burgeoning human flowers to unfold within an ensouled household, with a mother or father at home? The right to paid maternal and/or paternal leave is an economic right that might be enshrined for all citizens, including fast food and convenience store workers. For this and other rights, we might as well sit down and look at the details of exactly how every other social organism in humanity’s world does it. 89 Then pick the best features and enact those. It would not be a bad thing to aim for at least as high as Sweden and Switzerland in all matters—but then top it off by implementing these rights through the threefold separation of powers, instead of through governmentalism. The Scandinavian and Swiss models miss the mark not because of their high aims, but because those social aims are implemented through statism.
the right to mail service As I write this, there’s concern that Conservative-authored austerity measures might end Saturday mail delivery in the United States. In a Threefold Republic, if the Right to Six-Day-a-Week Mail Delivery is perceived to be essential to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, then each citizen would be issued a Mail Service Subsidy which covers the true price of postal delivery to all residential addresses in the country. The subsidy could be spent on any combination of mail service providers. All mail consumers would be represented by one or more consumer federations which would enter into collective service contracts with the association of mail-delivery corporations, including the USPS, UPS, FedEx, and so forth.
in the further future—the right to transportation I asked a Colville Indian friend of mine what he’d wish the world to be like. One thing he said is that he wished there were cars available for people to use whenever a car was needed. So I imagine a Right to Transportation, whereby it would really no longer be necessary to own a car (or two) in America. What would a post-automobile culture and landscape look like? How pervasive would the Associative Transportation Organism (instead of a Public/Governmentalized Transportation Grid) have to be for every person in the country—even in rural West Virginia and Montana—to get to work on time, every day, and on weekends, without a car, and without having to make so many transfers that it’d be quicker to just drive ourself? Some might laugh at the idea of a Car-Free America. And perhaps there are landscapes where it really is most efficient for every family to have one or two runabouts. But even in rural southern West Virginia there is the Bluefield Area Transit which goes on the back roads of the county. And we 89
For example, an EU report “Parental Leave in European Countries” lays it all out in a table:
“The Swedish parental leave scheme offers the most generous combination of time and financial support to parents. It provides 480 days of leave per child up to the age of eight years or until they complete their first year of school, supported by a high earnings-related payment for most of the leave period, and offers parents a great deal of flexibility to use the leave in more than one block period and on a part-time or full-time basis. Sixty days of the paid leave are reserved for each parent and the remaining joint allowance can be divided between the mother and father as they choose. Parents are also entitled to reduce their hours to part time until the child has completed the first year of school.” I’m not sure what that all means, but it sounds like a better world, as long as it didn’t mean Big Government. 73
used to have a more pervasive Greyhound and passenger train service, but most of the stations have closed. This nationwide phenomenon is partly our cultural destiny—to descend deeply into the experience of individuation. We are used to having our own chariot—it’s almost the ‘fourth bodily sheath’ of American Humanity: spirit, soul, body, and car. But the phenomenon is partly corporate-manipulated. It is well known that the automobile and tire industries played a role in destroying the public transportation systems in the 1930s to 1950s. General Motors, behind the façade of front-corporations, bought a hundred streetcar companies in 45 cities, and either replaced them with GM-made buses, or simply shut them down, so that people would have to buy cars. This is one of the most glaring examples of an industry using its economic power to shape the culture of an entire nation. It is likely that the automobile industry also used its lobbying monies to purchase laws from the government which would subtly fetter the reach and quality of public transportation. Had America been a Threefold Republic, this intrusion of self-seeking economic interests would have been perceived, and then conscious countervailing actions could’ve been taken by the Streetcar Associations and Consumer Associations. A more recent example of how the entanglement of business and state has shaped our transportation services: as I write this in early 2014, the auto dealership industry purchased a law from the Government of New Jersey which bans the selling of cars directly to consumers. The auto dealership industry purchased the right to force consumers to purchase cars, in particular a new electric car, only through the existing network of 90 dealerships. 91
Yet the bus and train networks could be expanded again and made better than they ever were. Amtrak would be transferred to the Economic Republic and would be expanded as an associative enterprise. Local train and bus depots could be reopened. I’ve ridden on a Mexican busline, where the bus culture hasn’t yet been relegated to the ‘underclass’ (like me). The seats were more spacious and plush than American bus service. The service was of a better quality. Since Americans have pioneered the individuating process which comes with owning a car, why not work with that, instead of against it, and make our buses and trains so spacious that even what is now ‘economy class’ seating is amenable to the American sense of space and privacy? Why not refit the interiors of nearly all buses and trains so that they are as spacious as what is now called ‘business class’, and add more buses and trains? In the Economic Republic, we’d all be ‘businessmen.’ Each seat on the bus and train would be like a private chariot. If buses and trains were to become so pleasant, pervasive, and fairly-and-truly priced that most Americans ditched their cars, and the byways of America became clearer, and we could travel from Alaska to San Diego to Florida to Maine and Nunavut and Panama in quietude and style, it would be worth it. Besides trains and buses, Bicycle Sharing Systems are spreading throughout the world, with the 100-station Hubway in Boston the most pervasive example in America. Carsharing has begun to enter our consciousness. Imagine if corporations and associations of the Economic Republic were to provide bicycle stations and fair-and-true-priced car rentals which were at least as pervasive as in any of the European countries. Associated taxi corporations could fill in the gaps. No transportation service would be government owned; but as an Economic Right, this field of the economy could be funded through earmarked Transportation Subsidies issued to each individual Citizen—until a more contractual-based, full-blown, fair-and-true priced North American associative transportation organism is on its feet.
why aren’t the subsidies just issued as cash? The reason why the individual subsidies aren’t issued as cash is because they are not an expression of a general right to a certain income. The subsidies are the concrete, clear expression of legislated rights to very specific things, in specific fields of life, which are deemed by the humanocratic rights governance to be necessary for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for every individual citizen. Well-meaning libertarians, in their legitimate quest to end bureaucracy, would erringly swing to the other pole by converting all legislated benefits into a lump sum of cash. 90
“The Pointless War on Tesla”: www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/pat-garofalo/2014/03/13/chris-christie-and-new-jerseys-pointless-war-against-tesla
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In his foreword to The Renewal of the Social Organism, Joseph Weizenbaum, professor emeritus at MIT (d. 2008), voices a similar tale of the destruction of America’s railway organism, though in this case, with non-needs-specific, genericizing, shareholder-driven, corporate ‘diversification’ as the illness: “Unhealthy connections and influences among the several activities of society have caused catastrophies in economic life as well. Two cases which illustrate this are developments in the American rail and steel industries since the second world war. At the beginning of the war the US railroad system was quite superb. It covered the entire country and was fast and comfortable. But then companies like New York Central started examining themselves and decided the business they were really in was making money and providing dividends for their shareholders. On this basis they took their surplus funds and bought companies which were unrelated to railroading but which were judged more profitable than rail. Today we call this diversification. The deterioration of the railroads' infrastructure was the consequence. Within a decade the system was in disarray. Similar events took place in the U. S. steel industry. American steel became uncompetitive. Those foreign steel manufacturers who had decided that making steel was their business, and who consequently invested in renewal and improvement of their plant, became even more efficient while the American steel-making plant deteriorated. “The decline of American rail and steel can be traced to neglecting the essential nature of economic life: meeting human needs. They turned, instead, to the rights of owners, myopically pursuing shareholder profit and probably management compensation. This is the ‘pig principle.’ The net impact on society can be found by adding the shareholder's gain to the external effects, such as the cost of finding and using alternatives to rail transportation, which are costs to society. The net, a big negative, is the logical outcome of economic activity losing its primary focus of meeting needs.” “To be healthy economics must start from and keep this primary focus. Those at work in economic life concern themselves primarily with the production and circulation of commodities. What is produced is usually not consumed by those who produce it. The product serves the needs of others.” —http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA024/English/AP1985/GA024_forward.html 74
basic income? what about a basic, guaranteed, citizen’s income? The Basic Income concept is not inherent to the Threefold Republic. Instead, the Trisector Idea suggests replacing the wage system with a contractual income system, with every worker and manager receiving a fair-and-true portion of the fruitfulness which came about through their coenterprise. The economically non-productive (children, most or all elderly, and fully or partially disabled adults) would receive a full (or partial) Social Fraternity income. A Contractual Work-Based Livelihood (and Social Fraternity for the non-producers) is different than a Basic Income. “The self-sustaining economic organism, in cooperation with the rights organism, will completely separate the monetary element from rights-oriented labor relations. ...The legal relationship between management and labor will not express itself in monetary values which, after the abolition of wages...will only measure commodity (and service) values. Through these arrangements, what is currently referred to as class struggle can be eliminated. This struggle results from wages being an integral part of the economic process. This book presents a social form in which the concept of wages undergoes a transformation... Through this transformation a more viable social cooperation is made possible. “It would be superficial to think that the realization of the ideas presented here would result in time-wages being converted into piecewages. A one-sided view could lead to this opinion. However, what is advocated here is not piece-wages, but the abolishment of the wage system in favor of a contractual sharing system in respect of the common achievements of management and labor—in conjunction, of course, with the overall structure of the social organism. To hold that the workers' share of the proceeds should consist of piece-wages is to fail to see that a contractual sharing system—in no sense a wage system—expresses the value of what has been produced in a way which changes the workers' social position in relation to the other members of society.” —Rudolf Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question, Chapter 3: “Capitalism and Social Ideas” http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c03.html “The goal toward which we must work—of course, in a rational and not a bolshevistic way—must be that of separating work from the provision of the means of existence. I have recently explained this. When no one is any longer recompensed for his work, then money will lose its value as a means for acquiring power over work. There is no other means for overcoming the misuse that has been perpetuated with mere money than by forming the social structure in such a way that no one be recompensed for his work, and that the provision of the means of existence shall be achieved from an entirely different source. It will then naturally be impossible to use money for the purpose of compelling anyone to work. “Most of the questions that now arise appear in such a form that they are confusedly understood. If they are to be lifted into a clear light, this can happen only by means of spiritual science. Money must never in future be the equivalent for human labor, but only for inanimate commodities. Only inanimate commodities will be acquired in future by means of money, not human labor.” —Steiner, “The Challenge of the Times” http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA186/English/AP1941/19181130p01.html While a right to a guaranteed income need not be a part of a Threefold Republic, such a right could be articulated by some country as part of the separation of human rights and economic power. There could be a rights organism somewhere on humanity’s globe which decided to make human material existence an Economic Right through a guaranteed income. In this case, the Rights Republic would legislate that the Economic Republic must directly transmit a certain income to every citizen, regardless of their personal poverty or wealth. Since this income would not be tied to work or employment, it would be a structural separation of labor and income. Every citizen would have enough cash and earmarked Economic Rights Subsidies that would cover a modest rent, transportation, utilities, and groceries. If a person wanted a more abundant or luxurious lifestyle, they would take on paid work, or use their pool of money to initiate their own business enterprise or cultural initiative.
my own commonwealth experience Twelve years prior to articulating the idea of the Threefold Republic, Rudolf Steiner did depict the separation of income and work with a gesture similar to that of Basic Income: “Labor in the past was tribute, in the future it will be sacrifice. It has nothing to do with self-interest, nothing to do with compensation. If I base my labor on consumer demand with regard to what humanity needs, I stand in a free relation to labor and my work is a sacrifice for humanity. Then I will work with all my powers, because I love humanity and want to place my capacities at its disposal. “That has to be possible, and is possible only when one's livelihood is separate from one's labor. And that is going to happen in the future. No one will be the owner of the products of labor. People must be educated for voluntary work, one for all and all for one. Everyone has to act accordingly. If you were to found a small community today in which everyone throws all their income into a common bank account and everyone works at whatever they can, then one's livelihood is not dependent on what work one can do, but rather this livelihood is effected out of the common consumption. This brings out a greater freedom than the coordination of pay with production does. If that happens, we will gain a direction which corresponds with needs.” —"The Social Question and Theosophy", 1905 75
Inspired by that concept, some friends and I have been experimenting with the separation of income and work. For two years now, we have been putting all the income that comes our way into a pot. We call it the CommonWealth (CW) or the World House (in homage to MLK). It’s not socialism, because it has nothing to do with the state, and everything to do with actually liking each other and caring for each other as if we were a 92 family, even if only in the most practical sense of being our own home-grown mutual insurance agency in uncertain times.
america and basic income
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America has only touched on the idea. Thomas Paine, MLK, 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, and Republican president Nixon voiced such a possibility. With the sea-change in the late 1970s and early 1980s, America firmly committed to a path which has a natural aversion to the governmentalization of anything but national security. The closest thing we have to a Basic Income in the US is the Permanent Fund Dividend, whereby every citizen of Alaska receives $900-some dollars in yearly guaranteed income. 97
The idea of the separation of income and labor has resurfaced again in a recent New York Times editorial. One of the most approachable 98 summaries of the history and possibilities of the idea is the January 2014 article “Why we should give free money to everyone” by Tom Atlee. While it is not directly about basic income, Dan H. Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us offers an articulate glimpse into 99 the possibility for America to make a large-scale shift from a carrot-and-stick-based work-rut to an intrinsically-motivated worklife. Though it sounds incredible to our American way, the Swiss People and Government are considering implementing just such a thing. Switzerland is not exactly known as a bureaucratic-statist welfare state with a poor grasp of democracy and a sub-par standard of living. Five Nobel laureates in economics are in support of it. Yet from my perspective, if a Basic Income were to be implemented within the context of the present-day fusion of Big Government+Big Business, even a well-meaning, entrepreneurial country like Switzerland would be vulnerable to further governmentalizing humanity. This risk would be deflected by there being two separate, visible organisms for the economy and for legal rights. If Switzerland were to become a Tripartite Confederacy, she would be in a healthy position to become the first social organism to initiate a Basic Income as Right. Given our inherently busy, opportunistic nature, I suggest that we Americans not implement a Basic Income, but that we instead enact a Fraternal Livelihood which is still tied to gainful work; whereby, for all workers in the American Economy, the 40-hour work-week would bring at least the 92
As I write this in Spring 2014, I hear that some Duke graduate students are doing something similar—“The Great Grad-School Experiment in Utopian Socialism”: www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/04/08/_duke_collective_grad_students_collectivize_their_wages_the_great_graduate.html 93
“I shall now proceed to the plan I have to propose, which is, to create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property: And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.” —Agrarian Justice, 1797 (This text is displayed by the US national government here: www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html ) According to MeasuringWorth (http://measuringworth.com), 15 British pounds in 1797 measured in equivalent retail goods would be about $2100 US dollars in 2014, but compared to the wages of the time would be about $27,000. Ten British pounds per year would be about $1400 in retail goods or $18,000 in income. 94
MLK mentions the idea briefly in his 1967 book, The World House:
“There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum-and livable-income for every American family.” The text is available at www.thinkoutword.org/resources-4/think-outword-studies He speaks of it at length, and in detail, in his book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?: “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” http://seattletimes.com/special/mlk/king/words/poverty.html 95
Senator McGovern of South Dakota proposed a ‘National Income Insurance’ whereby “every man, woman, and child receive from the federal government an annual payment.” And that the payment “not vary in accordance with the wealth of the recipient”, along with “jobs for those who are able to work [through government-arranged employment], a reasonable income for those who cannot work [$4,000 per year for a family of four, about $22,000 in 2013 dollars], and truly adequate Social Security.” 96
In 1969, the first year of his presidency, Nixon proposed a Family Assistance Plan whereby any household with children, whose income was beneath a certain amount, would receive $1,600 per year ($10,000 in 2013) and a $800 food subsidy ($5000 now). Single persons and childless couples would not. As usual in the partyand-lobby based system, the devil entered the details. And even the think tanks could not clearly perceive and separate the various economic and rights aspects of the question. As a muddled half-measure with mixed motives, it was squelched by both the right and the left. 97
“The Busy Trap” by Tim Kreider, June 30, 2012: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com. Kreider in turn refers to the article “The Case for Shiftlessness” by Ted Rall: http://rall.com/tag/basic-income-guarantee. 98
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equivalent livelihood and benefits of the entry-level federal worker, regardless of whether those forty hours were with one workplace or a 100 combination of part-time jobs. And that above and beyond that Fraternal basis, each worker—including convenience store and fast food workers—receive a transparently fair-and-true, contract-affirmed portion of the profit which their work made possible through co-operation with the management and capitalizers. We could wait and see how Basic Income turns out in Switzerland. If it’s done in the usual European governmentalist way, it would not be suitable for North America. I feel that—at least in America—a country-sized separation of income and work would only be feasible, meaningful, and happy if:
there had been at least one generation which had already passed through the healing experience of receiving a Fraternal Livelihood for 40-hour work as described in this chapter, which had unfolded within a free, vibrant pedagogical organism which hadn’t trodden on their inner life, and if the systemic separation of economy and labor rights was visibly realized through having a separate Economic Republic and a Rights Republic.
Otherwise, a government income system would probably turn out to be an ugly curse, like the well-meaning but accursèd government school system. Without those changes in societal structure and soul health, our corporatist forced labor system (options: minimum wage, student debt indenturedness, military enlistment, or scavengery) would probably turn into either a selfish culture of entitlement where we all become indolent lazybones, or a statist carrot-and-stick forced-labor ‘workfare’ system. But in a healthy society, where everyone’s physical, soul, and aspirational needs were generously met, including the right to rest, and where the natural, healthy will to work hadn’t been damaged by government schools and minimum wage toil, it just might work...even in America. I’d be willing to lend my hand to nearly any enterprise—even an assembly line or quick service restaurant or fuel station— as long as the work wasn’t harmful to humanity and the land. ***
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Many who are now classified as fully or partially economically disabled would take up their beds and walk again if little jobs were worthy of livelihood. Those who aren’t disabled, but who still won’t take on paid work, would eventually become Pilgrims.
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unity in triplicity—the trisector senate Some might ask: if the three republics are each free, sovereign, and independent, then where is the unity? The answer lies in that a trisected society is united in each individual human being, and in the Trisector Senate.
the individual Each individual human being is separately a member of all three republics: as a citizen in the Rights Organism, as an entrepreneur, worker, and consumer in the Economic Organism, and as a free practitioner, participant, and patron in the Cultural Organism. “When we know how to establish spiritual *cultural+ life, political and legal life, and economic life on the terms that are native to each, and how to let them run off their native sources of power, then the unity of the social organism will also follow. And then you will find that certain forces of decline are released within each of these fields, but that they are countered through collaboration with other fields. This suggests, not a tripartite division of the social organism...but a trisected articulation of it, which yet comes together in the unity of the social organism as a whole, by virtue of the fact that, after all, every individual belongs to all three regions. The human personality—and that is what is all-important—inhabits this triform social organism in such a way as to unite the three parts.” —Rudolf Steiner, “From Monolithic to Trisected Unity”, 1922 http://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0083/19220611a01.html
the trisector senate Besides the three deliberative and executive bodies, there is a standing body called the Trisector Senate, with one-third of its membership selected by each Republic. It is not administratively above the three sovereign Republics. Its role is not administrative, but coordinative, in a similar way that presently, international organizations are not over-top of the national states, but are—or are supposedly—merely coordinative bodies. "A kind of Senate—elected from the three bodies that have the task of ordering the political-military, the economic, the juridical-education affairs—looks after the common interests, including, for example, the joint finances." —Steiner, Memorandum of 1917 "The greatest possible guarantee that one sphere of the trisector organism cannot be violated by another lies in their union, effected by the total corporate body consisting of the delegates of the three central administrations and agencies.” —Steiner, The Renewal of the Social Organism http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA024/English/AP1985/GA024_a01.html (Author’s Note: a fresher wording for ‘three central administrations’ would be ‘three coherent sectors’.) The economic associations and forums which are incorporated within the service area of a political state would fill one-third of the seats in the Trisector Senate which is affiliated with that rights-state. And the cultural organizations and councils which offer cultural services within that political service area would be invited, but not required, to fill the other third. ***
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the separation of judiciary and state authentically detaching the judicial branch from the executive branch If the judges are just there to mechanically do what the Executive Branch likes, then we might as well not have a Judicial Branch, and save ourselves their salaries. We’d just have the local, state, and federal police (the Department of Justice of the Executive Branch) administer the sentence. In fact, near where I live, the local court calls itself Police Justice. The Judicial Branch, from an organic, soul perspective—though of course not from the technical perspective, as the legalists and statists will always dot their I’s and cross their T’s—has become functionally a department of the Executive Branch. Many judges are amply-schooled and amply-paid toll collectors. The judges are paid and shaped by the same entity—the Government of the United States of America, or its state and local arms—which is prosecuting the individual citizenry. Did you not know that he who pays the piper is apt to call the tune? “One of the effects through which the trisecting of the social organism will prove itself to be based on the essential nature of human society is the severance of judicial activities from state institutions. It will be incumbent on the latter to establish the rights between persons or groups of persons. Judicial decisions however, will depend upon facilities formed by the spiritual [cultural] organization. This judicial decision making is, to a large extent, dependent on the judge's ability to perceive and understand the defendant's situation. Such perception and understanding will be present if the confidence which men feel towards the facilities of the spiritual [cultural] organization is extended to include the courts. —Rudolf Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c03.html;mark=1840,34,42#WN_mark
some judges are wounded by statism “The community’s conscience, whether it be the jury or the judge, must remain neutral—meaning their livelihood must not depend on making government or business interests happy.” —Seth Jordan, “Are we a community without a conscience? The challenge of Tim DeChristopher” http://instituteforsocietalholism.tumblr.com/post/50927267639/are-we-a-community-without-conscience-the-challenge-of I have seen that some judges are affable, bantering buddies with their fellow government employees in the executive branch—the prosecuting attorneys and the police officials. I’ve witnessed in my local Village Court, that the police officers often wear two ‘hats’ as law enforcer in the Executive Branch and court bailiff in the Judicial Branch. The court bailiff is the same police officer who is testifying against us. Since they see each other at nearly every court appearance (unlike the hapless ordinary citizenry who just passes through), the judges—often afflicted with peoplepleasing statism—don’t want to hurt the police officers’ feelings, or the government attorney’s feelings, and rock the boat by vigorously questioning their testimony or integrity. In the back of the judges’ mind, they know that it’s seemingly more damaging to a police if his or her inaccuracies or exaggerations are exposed, because it might affect their job and their family’s livelihood, whereas the citizen is just passing through. 101 I actually heard a federal judge ask a citizen: “Why would police have any incentive to exaggerate?” This man is supposed to be the height of
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The most basic reason for questionable policing and testimony is that police are overworked, and are under inhumane pressure to ‘look busy.’ Like in the army, the wound of workaholism is systemically inflicted, which understandably evokes a feeling that because our peace officers must sacrifice so much of their inner life and family life to rights service, then these deserve to be a special, entitled class of citizenry. Another reason is that in police work, there is military-style regimentation and soul confinement, but without the avenues for grievance which are sometimes available to a federal government worker. Also, our police have been occasionally disrespected, and so are hyper-sensitive to the need for respect. Yet the legitimate need for respect (who wants to be disrespected?) ought to be paired with a similar respect for the individual citizenry. The fraternal police culture is becoming a tight thing unto itself…which wants to show the ordinary citizen who’s the Boss. A deeper soul reason for exaggerated police testimony is that, like much of our populace, many of our police workers were raised in chaotic or domineering households, and so are vulnerable to flipping over and become controloholics. Citizen Arnold Schwarzegger has courageously shared the path of rebellion against contoloholism, only to flip to the very thing we rebelled against. That is a story of humanity. "My father was a police chief [...] We had a very strict upbringing because of him being with the police force. We had to be the perfect example. We couldn't do anything bad. And it was kind of an uptight feeling at home because of it." —Arnold Schwarzenegger, 1977 "My hair was pulled. I was hit with belts. [...] It was just the way it was. Many of the children I've seen were broken by their parents [...] They didn't want to create an individual. It was all about conforming. I was one who did not conform, and whose will could not be broken. Therefore, I became a rebel." —Schwarzenegger Thirteen years later: (The footnote continues on the next page.) 80
discernment? Are our wise-men this naïve? Our court organism—from local traffic court on up to the Supreme Court—is a Jericho Road where the ordinary citizenry is robbed by three government-employed friends. In my experience of watching others’ cases in court, if one makes a bowing and scraping display to Your Honor and Your Honor’s Employer, then Your Honor plays the ‘nice guy’ and reduces the maximum jail time and fine to half (of an already enormous penalty). But if one says one word of defiance, Your Honor is outraged that a mere mortal citizen would stand up to the State God, and the book is thrown to ‘make an example.’ Despite the seemingly complex externals, from a soul perspective, the justice system is sometimes little more than indulgent display of the judges’ childish likes and dislikes. “Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions.” —Simone Weil, “Human Personality”, written around 1933
detaching the judicial branch from the legislative branch I myself have experienced the fusion of legislature and judiciary. At my national trial, the judge said something like: “I agree that the national government doesn’t need another $375, but tell it to your legislative representative. They wrote the law.” Judges nowadays are paid a hefty salary to push one of two buttons: “THE LAW WASN’T BROKEN” or “THE LAW WAS BROKEN”…or, to stridently corral the jury into pushing one of two buttons. Most wisdom and moral perception are blocked at the door to the courtroom, leaving humanity in the gears of a legalistic machine. Yet the National Law which is handed from the Legislative Branch to the Judicial Branch is not legitimate in itself. Disregarding the fact that the National Law is largely written and purchased by economic lobbies, including the police fraternities, the National Law, even at its best, is no more or less than a tool to help perceive the truth of what happened, and a tool for enacting humane justice and reconciliatory healing. If the National Law gets in the way of truth, justice, and healing, it must be creatively massaged…or even nullified by that very court. Yet our judges have become amply-paid button-pushers. The National Law itself is supposed to be on trial whenever a citizen non-violently resists the State. “Nowadays our jurisprudence is such that the judge and the prosecutor are only interested in the books of law; both see only a case in front of them to which they must apply the law. Just imagine how this separates morality from the practice of law. This condition progressed even more in the last century.” —Steiner, “Brotherhood and the Struggle for Existence”, 1905 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19051123p01.html ***
"My relationship to power and authority is that I'm all for it. People need somebody to watch over them. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave." —Schwarzenegger, 1990 Statism is not just an external thing to be remedied solely by better laws—it’s a soul wound and personal affliction which affects and bends concepts and perceptions. The formative experience of a ‘dysfunctional’ parent (who hasn’t suffered from this to some degree?) is transferred to an even bigger, non-human ‘person’...the dysfunctional, sick parental State, towards which any “good national” crindges in fear, as if the nation-state were a god. And regardless of the healthy goodwill of individual peace officers, the professional roles themselves have gradually become aggressive shadows of their original, unfallen ideal. “The Christian in me says it’s wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, ‘I love to make a grown man piss himself.’” —US military policeman Charles A. Graner, Jr. If you want to know more about controloholism see my sandbox about co-affliction here: https://sites.google.com/site/teratosophy/co-affliction Besides the co-afflictive emotional wound of controloholic ‘dry drunkenness’, some of our policing citizens are (surprise!) themselves afflicted with the drink and other substances. There’s a saying that ‘those who fights demons, best be mindful that they don’t become demons themselves.’ There was a government prosecutor in my state who was nicknamed ‘mad dog’ for his vehement pursuit of substance users and suppliers. He would even don camouflage and join the police in drug raids. He was so popular that he was elected as mayor of the capital city. Then it came to light that he himself was using and dealing. His biography serves as an image of what’s wrong with that war. Yet another deep reason for wounded policing is that, because of the gigantic economic draft into the combat industry, many police servants have been through America’s military initiation, which voices the words ‘honor’ and ‘respect’, yet has an inherently dishonest and dark tinge. These are some of the soul constraints which afflict our citizens who serve as guardians of the peace, and which can evoke, if not outright lying, a tendency to want to ‘stick it’ to the ordinary citizen. Mix these constraints with the actual dangers and stresses of police service, and there is potential for questionable, and even antihuman, speech and actions. I respectful ask of our peace officers: unless human beings are in real danger of harm, would you get out of the way of the approaching Threefold Republic? Mullroy and Murtogg could be role models—there’s room for police-citizens to join humanity’s pirate ship. 81
The tyranny of the generic application of National Law goes on every day, but one famous example is the British court’s response to Gandhi’s harm102 free effort to outwardly change the British Empire in India into the Republic of India. There the schism is clearly expressed: between, on one hand, what even the judge as a human being feels to be true and right, and on the other hand, what the mechanistic god of the National Law decrees—a law which is itself founded on deceit and harm. Here’s an account from Rudolf Steiner: "I will give you an example of what is needed in order to adopt the right attitude in our civilization today. You have all heard of Mahatma Gandhi who, since the war, or really since 1914, has set a movement going for the liberation of India from English rule. Gandhi's activities began first in South Africa with the aim of helping the Indians who were living there under appalling conditions and for whose emancipation he did a great deal before 1914. Then he went to India itself and instituted a movement for liberation in the life there. I shall speak today only of what took place when the final verdict was passed on Mahatma Gandhi and omit the court proceedings leading up to it. I would like to speak only of the last act in the drama, as it were, between him and his judge. Gandhi had been accused of stirring up the Indian people against British rule in order to make India independent. Being a lawyer, he conducted his own defense and had not the slightest doubt that he would have to be condemned. In his speech—I cannot quote the exact words—he spoke more or less to the following effect: ‘My Lords, I beg of you to condemn me in accordance with the full strength of the law. I am perfectly aware that in the eyes of British law in India my crime is the gravest one imaginable. I do not plead any mitigating circumstances; I beg of you to condemn me with the full strength of the law. I affirm, moreover, that my condemnation is required not only in obedience to the principles of outer justice but to the principles of expediency of the British Government. For if I were to be acquitted I should feel it incumbent upon me to continue to propagate the movement, and millions of Indians would join it. My acquittal would lead to results that I regard as my duty.’ "The contents of this speech are very characteristic of that which lives and weaves in our time. Gandhi says that he must of necessity be condemned and declares that it is his duty to continue the activity for which he is to be condemned. The judge replied, ‘Mahatma Gandhi, you have rendered my task of sentencing you immeasurably easier, because you have made it clear that I must of necessity condemn you. It is obvious that you have transgressed against British law, but you and all those present here will realize how hard it will be for me to sentence you. It is clear that a large portion of the Indian people looks upon you as a saint, as one who has taken up his task in obedience to the highest duties devolving upon humanity. The judgment I shall pass on you will be looked upon by the majority of the Indian people as the condemnation of a human being who has devoted himself to the highest service of humanity. Clearly, however, British law must in all severity be put into effect against you. You would regard it as your duty, if you were acquitted, to continue tomorrow what you were doing yesterday. We on our side have to regard it as our most solemn duty to make that impossible. I condemn you in the full consciousness that my sentence will in turn be condemned by millions. I condemn you while admiring your actions, but condemn you I must.’ Gandhi's sentence was six years of hard labor. "You could hardly find a more striking example of what is characteristic of our times. We have two levels of actuality before us. Below is the level of truth, the level where the accused declares that if he is acquitted, it will be his solemn duty to continue what he must define as criminal in face of outer law. On the level of truth, also, we have the judge's statement that he admires the one whom, out of duty to his Government, he sentences to six years' hard labor. Above, at the level of facts, you have what the accused in this case, because he is a great soul, defined as a crime: the crime that is his duty and that he would at once continue were he to be acquitted. Whereas on the one level you have the admiration of the judge for a great human being, on the other you have the passing of judgment and its outer justification. You have truths below, facts above, which have nothing to do with one another. They touch on one another at only one point, at the point where they confront each other in statement and counter-statement." —Rudolf Steiner, "A Comprehensive Knowledge of Humanity as the Source of Imagination in the Teacher", 1923
shaping the inner worlds of prosecutors and judges Have you ever wondered why it’s almost unheard of for a judge or prosecutor to break out of the concrete in which they are encased? Is it impossible for a human being who has climbed their way into such a well-salaried position to simply say... ”I know what the National Law says, and I know you consciously ‘broke’ it. The National Law, as legislated by the British Parliament (or U.S. Congress), is wrong in this specific case. The National Law does more harm than good when applied to this individual situation. I’m just going to let you go. Good luck!” Some government prosecutor in the Executive Branch was paid a hefty salary to think, day and night, about how to put Tim DeChristopher and Manning in jail for as long as possible. DeChristopher was portrayed by those Government Servants as a sly, dishonest opportunist. Yet which men and women in the courtroom are getting paid tens or a hundred thousand dollars every year to be in that courtroom, while the other is being forcibly held away from gainful work for months and years, leaving their family to fend for themselves? Who’s the economic opportunist in this picture? Why would any free-breathing human being not hold contempt for such courts? Like other government workers, many of our judges and prosecutors act as functionaries of the sick status quo because if they actually make a human stand, they are fired and their government careers are over, and they no longer receive the money to pay their house payment or send
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Gandhi himself designed the flag which evolved into the national flag of India: 82
their children through college. (In that way, the college industry, and other commoditized ‘givens’ in our social organism, serve as Engines of Empire.) And even the lifetime-appointed judges, who are supposed to thereby be assured of an individual perspective unbent by political and economic influence—many of them couldn’t have gotten to those echelons without having spent much of their life shaping their soul’s perspective along certain predictable lines, beginning with the first day of law school. "Even the schools which directly serve the state and the economy should be administered by the educators: law schools, trade schools, agriculture and industrial colleges, all should be administered by the representatives of a free spiritual [cultural] life. ...The State appoints schools for the study of law, and requires that what is taught in these law-schools should be that code of jurisprudence which the State itself has laid down from its own standpoints, in accordance with its own constitutions and rules. Law schools, that originate solely in a free spiritual [cultural] life, will draw their teachings of law and equity from the sources of the spiritual life itself. The State will have to wait for what this free spiritual life shall encharge on it, and will receive new seeds of life from those living ideas which can proceed only from a spiritual life that is free.” —Steiner, from the introduction to Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/TOBS-I/TOBS-1_intro23.html Because of the way their inner world was shaped, and because of their fear of economic insecurity, these citizens hardly think twice about working full-time to misportray and mischaracterize the best Americans, and to just go along with the downward roll of Americanist governmentalism. “In regard to political life, the state requires functionaries and even learned men to fill its appointments, and these have been educated according to the stereotyped pattern prescribed for them by the state. The state, in its appointments, wishes and expects that qualities should be cultivated in individuals which can be used to its own advantage. But that brings about intellectual and spiritual enslavement, even if a man imagines himself to be free. He is not aware of his dependence, does not see that he is confined within the limits of the stereotyped model held up to him.” —Steiner, The Social Future: http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/SocialFuture/19191029p01.html
choosing our own judges Imagine if each individual citizen chose his or her own slate of local, state, and federal judges from a pool of pre-qualified persons. The slate would be reaffirmed periodically, say, every five or ten years. One of those judges would preside should the citizen be brought to trial during that period. ‘Judge’ becomes a cultural service position. Besides the existing pool of professional judges, the Cultural Republic would select an array of other wise persons with integrity and discernment, from all fields of life, to be included in the pool. If he wished, a black man would be free to choose only black judges for his slate, since they’d all be pre-qualified as impartial, balanced, humane judges. Judges would no longer have to be lawyers. The lawyers in the judge’s chair, the lawyers in the prosecutor’s chair, and the lawyers in the public defender’s office scratch each others’ backs as a professional courtesy. We don’t need only law-school matriculation. We need full-breathing, wise human beings with a wide range of life experience. “The spiritual [cultural] organization might nominate judges from the various cultural professions. After a certain length of time they would return to their own professions. Within certain limits, every person would then be able to select the nominee, for a period of five or ten years, in whom he has sufficient confidence to accept his verdict in a civil or criminal case, should one arise. To make such a selection meaningful, there would have to be enough judges available in the vicinity of each person's place of residence. A plaintiff would always be obliged to direct himself to a competent judge in the respondent's vicinity. ...An essential characteristic of such an arrangement is that a judge, because of their life outside their judgeship—which they can only hold for a limited period—can be familiar with the sensibilities and environment of the defendant. The healthy social organism will everywhere attract social understanding to its institutions, and judicial activities will be no exception.” —Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question: http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c03.html;mark=1840,34,42#WN_mark
lawyers, prosecutors, and the bar as cultural services Lawyers, as officers of the court, would become independent cultural workers in service of this enculturated Judicial Organism. No judge or magistrate or attorney general would be elected or appointed by a political government. The system of full-time salaried government prosecutors (lawyers), referred to in the US as the ‘Department of Justice’, headed by the Attorney General, would be transferred in whole to the Judicial Branch, along with the Bar Associations. The Attorney General and prosecutors would no longer be government employees. "Officials selected by the spiritual [cultural] organization's administration will assist the judges and courts with technical points of law, but will themselves not hold decision-making authority.” —Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question: http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c03.html
the nation-state versus the human being There’s strangely pervasive view that the ‘all-encompassing, all-pervading’ State is supposedly hurt because its law was ‘broken.’ We would clarify that the only difference between a ‘civil case’—where an individual citizen or incorporated entity (a business or cultural organization) is bringing a claim to court—and a ‘criminal case’, is that in a criminal case, the claimant is the entire Human Community in that locality...the entire Citizenry. 83
The fancy names, such as ‘The United States of America versus so-and-so’ or ‘The State of New York versus so-and-so’ obscures that this is simply the Rights Community which is making a claim of harm-doing. If the Community has a conscience, and is not just a robotic revenue-collecting machine, then the only ‘punishment’ for ‘breaking’ the law, is to make direct and symbolic amends to those individuals who were actually harmed, and to undergo a soul process whereby the individual is likely to fully recover from criminality, and thereby be fully restored to the Community. Fines and punishment for punishment’s sake, would largely be done away with. If, beyond making financial amends to those who were directly harmed, the Community’s conscience decides that amendatory labor would play a part in the individual recovery of the respondent, then such amends monies would go entirely to non-governmental free cultural organizations—not to the Government or the Court System.
from adversarial to inquisitive There would be a shift from the adversarial system, which is centered on Big Government Lawyers versus Big Money Lawyers—if you or your family lineage are wealthy enough to be able to purchase their technicality-based ‘get-out-of-jail free’ services—to a ‘non-adversarial’, judge-and-jury centered, question-based, enquiring system. Most questions would be asked by the judge, and by the jury members. Healthy questions include: What happened? If harm was done, how can it best be amended?
trisected, guild-style juries Imagine if instead of a sortitional (random) selection of citizens, whose only relational perspective is that they are citizens and nationals of the American statal nation, a twelve-person jury were to be composed of:
four sortitionally selected citizens, representing the shared, generically human, political-rights relationship, plus four persons selected from economic associations of which the respondent (the ‘defendant’) is a member, and four persons selected from cultural organizations in which the respondent is a participant.
Once the jury is selected, the jurors would no longer be representing their relational background per se. Such a trisector jury would have a more well-rounded perspective as to if and why our fellowman fell into harm-doing, and what actions would make amends for the harm that was done. “Many say, ‘We know what is good and right, but it is not practical.’ It comes about that thoughts concerning the highest principle are separated from life. Only in the sixteenth century we see spiritual life developing under the principle of the intellect. In the Middle Ages a member of a guild, sitting with a jury of twelve to judge some offense which another member of the guild had committed, was a brother or sister of the one who had to be tried, life bound with life. Everyone understood the other's work and everyone tried to understand how he or she could have left the ‘straight and narrow.’ One, so to speak, looked into one's brother or sister and one wanted to look into him or her.” —Steiner, “Brotherhood and the Struggle for Existence” http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19051123p01.html
a commonsense right to a speedy trial The Sixth Amendment’s right to a speedy trial would be cleared of its legalistic barnacles. Chelsea Manning was held for three years without trial, through various technical extensions by the prosecutor (the Executive Branch). What people-pleasing, statist Judicial Branch would go along with such a farce? A commonsense renewal of the right to speedy trial would be:
for major crimes, a trial within ninety days; for medium crimes, a trial within a month; for minor crimes, such as petty traffic matters, a trial within a week.
The Judicial Organism would be funded to the level that it would be able to do this, even if more court buildings had to be built, and if many more judges and officers of the court had to be initiated by the Cultural Republic. The trial would either proceed speedily, or the citizen would be released. “After 81 days in arbitrary detention you clearly realize that they don’t have to obey their own laws." —Ai Weiwei
the end of bail bonds The judge would discern the citizen is either likely, or not likely, to return for trial. The citizen is either held till trial, or they are released till trial. The bail tradition brings a monetary-economic element into the justice proceedings, which does not fit with an egalitarian state.
the end of plea bargains It ought to be a good thing to go to trial. Every arrest would go to trial. If you’re going to pull a citizen out of their life, then they will have their day in court...and soon. The rights budget and judiciary budget would include the means to bring every arrest to trial. There ought to be no implication that a respondent (the ‘defendant’) would be ‘punished’ more for going to trial than if they ‘cut a deal’ with the Executive Branch. The Executive Branch (the prosecutor) uses the plea bargain tradition to squeeze presumably innocent citizens, using the justification of ‘saving tax-payers money’ by skipping court proceedings. ...Yet there has been no trial. Why is there wheeling and dealing between the accuser—the Government,
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who has professional, amply-salaried, full-time accusers, and the entire black hole of the police and prison complex standing behind it—and the 103 accused?
pre-trial remandment—a spiritual crux The individual has been arrested—we have been stopped by the community, and forcibly taken out of our everyday work and life. This is a serious crux in a human being's biography. For pre-trial detainees, the remand center—presumably innocent citizens would have no contact with actually convicted inmates—would be a place which provides conditions for the truth to pour forth, whatever it may be. There can be no healing without the truth, no matter how horrible and shameful the harm. It ought to be a commonly held view, from across the spectrum of humanity, that the best course is to just tell the truth, and to become more and more honest and frank. Religious, spiritual, and philosophical counselors and recovery fellows ought to be a key in preparing pre-trial arrestees to open up to the truth in court. Besides daily visits with these counselors and fellowmen, each pre-trial arrestee ought to be mostly in quiet solitude, with their own cell and access to fitting literature for recovery from harm-doing. There would be a withdrawal from noisy everyday distractions such as television. If the right to speedy trial were really implemented, visits from family and friends need not be a priority during this period of seclusion. It would help if there were fellowships made of clean and sober fellows who had admitted and made amends for theft, killing, and other specific harms, who would tell their stories to those accused of those crimes. “This is especially important for the criminal himself as a decisive break in the realization of malevolent will, as an opportunity to come to one's senses, to change one's mind, and to change one's disposition. For this it is necessary that the brief confinement before trial be solitary. Even if the prisoner turns out to be innocent, then this is not a great calamity because solitude and a change of environment are beneficial to every man.” —Vladimir Solovyov (d. 1900), “Model for Criminal Justice” Yet the complementary gesture is that the court organism ought to be worthy of witnessing that truth. In my experience, prisoners mostly talk about the technicalities of their case—because that’s pretty much all the judges and lawyers talk about too. There is little knowledge and practice of getting honest and making amends for what was done. Why be truthful with an entity which is itself pervaded with ill-will, which is stuffed with party-appointed politicos, and which is in the business of maximizing the number of citizens in prison?
the social architecture of the courtroom Court proceedings ought to be scheduled so that each citizen can say what happened without being rushed. In most of the court cases I’ve been in, the judges and lawyers are in hurry to get on to the next case. And the courtroom is usually stuffed full of citizens sitting in the benches, forcibly pulled out of their everyday life, waiting to get out of there. (That’s understandable—being in a courtroom is a sordid drag.) While courts would not be secret, waiting rooms would be outside. And while there ought to be no lollygagging or filibustering in court, there would be time and listening space to simply tell what happened like a human being, instead of dictating to a room full of distracted, irritated legalists with poor listening skills, backed by a crowd of frustrated, sighing citizens waiting in line for their turn to be compelled to pay hundreds of dollars to the government. Also the physical architecture is unhealthy. The courtroom in the only place in America I recall, except for Santa Claus at the shopping mall, where a man or woman sits on an elevated throne. While the court ought to be a place for lofty, serious questioning and revealing, and the judge ought to be situated in a way that reflects their responsibility to evoke an atmosphere of authenticity, truth-revealing, and truth-witnessing, the prevalent courtroom set-up does not really support this. “These are people who have no experience who have, you know, probably never been on jury duty before because it's a rare thing. Even though we're locking up unprecedented numbers of people, we have very few jury trials. So they don't have that kind of experience. “And they come into this huge courthouse, go through two different metal detectors and security screenings, come into this, you know, majestic courtroom, with the judge sitting up above them, speaking to them in this very patriarchal kind of way. And with all this authority behind them and saying, ‘It's not your job to do what's right or wrong.’ And people believed that. And, you know, watching that happen, it, I'd say it was the first time I really understood how some of the great atrocities in history could happen, where you'd have an entire population that, you know, plays out the plans of a tyrannical dictator, how things like genocide could happen when people are willing to let go of their own moral agency and say, ‘Well, it's not my job to decide what's right or wrong.’” —Tim DeChristopher, interview with Bill Moyers: “Why Tim DeChristopher Went to Prison for His Protest”, 2013 http://truth-out.org/news/item/16586-why-tim-dechristopher-went-to-prison-for-his-protest
from mechanized legalistic functionaries to individuated moral perception Predetermined punitive sentences dictated by the democratic Legislative Branch would be done away with. Each case and its healing remedies are individual. “The personal disposition of the individual human being is outside the sphere of democracy and can only be judged in an individual way. The framing of laws is eminently a social matter. The moment we apply to a judge it is probably because we are concerned, either in a
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For a full report see “An Offer You Can’t Refuse: How US Federal Prosecutors Force Drug Defendants to Plead Guilty”: www.hrw.org/reports/2013/12/05/offeryou-can-t-refuse-0 85
super-social or an anti-social matter, in a matter which has fallen out of the social life. All individual interests are of this nature. Such cases fall under the administrative branches of the cultural body. The decisions of justice grow beyond and above the limits of democracy.” —Rudolf Steiner, The Social Future http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/SocialFuture/19191026p01.html “If we digress from the heart of the matter and rest here on [...] the identical illegality each crime, it would be necessary to require an identical punishment for all crimes. Although such absurdity has not frightened some devotees of abstract thought, neither juridical practice nor science has adopted this logic by which one ought to heal all diseases with one medication on the grounds that all illnesses alike are disease and not health.” —Vladimir Solovyov, “On Law” “Taking away from the court the right of predetermined punitive sentences...here is a view which only recently would have seemed to be an unheard of heresy possible only from a pathetic ignoramus who is completely alien to both juridical science and practice.” —Solovyov, “Model for Criminal Justice” Punishment would never be calculated for the purpose of deterring others. No individual would be ‘made an example of’ for the purpose of instilling fear into the minds of other citizens, which the Government justifies as supposedly protecting us from future crimes which haven’t actually happened. “Moral principle *...+ affirms that human dignity must be respected in each person, and that, therefore, it is not possible to make anyone whomsoever only a means or an instrument for anyone's use. But in the theory of deterrence, the punished criminal is ultimately considered to all intents and purposes as only a means of instilling fear in others for the sake of the preservation of public security. [...] And from this point of view, the criminal who is punished is left only as a means for the deterrence of others, that is, for purpose extraneous to himself, which now directly contradicts an absolute moral requirement.” —Solovyov, “On Law” Each individual would only be sentenced to amend the harm he or she did, and to go through a morally rehabilitory/correctional/penitentiary/ reconciliatory/restitutional/amendational process which is actually likely to completely heal their harmful disposition so that they will again be our brother and sister in human community. Yet how can a sick community whose national conscience is warped provide authentic conditions for a sick individual to heal? or even perceive what is really sick or healthy? Any prosecutor or judge or jury member who personally perceives the respondent didn’t actually do the alleged crime, ought to be impelled to say so and, if they are the judge, dismiss the case. Likewise, if a defending lawyer knows that the respondent actually did the crime, it would be unethical to not say so. In any case, the primary purpose of both lawyers, the judge, and the jury, as trusted servants of the court organism, would be to provide conditions for health-bringing truth and amends for whatever harm was done. As it stands now, the defense lawyer is legally compelled to legalistically wrangle to keep the citizen out of the black hole of our prison system— which proves that the government itself knows that prisons are intentionally made to be bad places, where many human beings get worse instead of better. But in a healthy republic, prisons, like hospitals, would be good places to go. Likewise, any judge who perceives that the law which has been handed to them by the Legislative Branch is unjust or harmful in this particular case, ought to be impelled to issue a fresh judicial precedent in that very moment. The ruling, and its reasoning, would be immediately transmitted to whatever Legislative Branch authored the law, so that the Law might be honed with humane nuance.
a sovereign jury—the conscience of the humane community “Ultimately, there is no higher judge than our own conscience—‘To thine own self be true.’ This living conscience (which must decide in each moment what is right) can come up against unjust or dead laws—laws born of prejudice or simply formed by generations long past, laws which are no longer right for those now living. So we must break these laws. And then our conscience must stand trial before the conscience of the community. But what if the community no longer has a conscience?” —Seth Jordan, “Are we a community without a conscience?” http://instituteforsocietalholism.tumblr.com/post/50927267639/are-we-a-community-without-conscience-the-challenge-of Jury sovereignty is something which has largely disappeared. Theoretically, U.S. juries are free and sovereign, and rather than the judge and lawyers, are actually in full charge of finding the facts and the verdict. Despite a gradual erosion of this awareness, the verdict need not even follow the Law—the Legislative Branch’s code which was decided by majority votes...which were purchased by economic interest groups. The jury’s sovereignty to ‘nullify’ the National Law as it applies to any particular case, is called the power of ‘jury nullification.’ The Legislative Branch and Executive Branch brought the individual to be placed before the conscience of the human community. The jury, as the true sovereign of the Judicial Branch, is really there to decide what is good and right for this individual, regardless of the Law: “If the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by a judge, and contrary to the evidence...If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused is unjust, or that exigent 86
circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic or passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision.” —4th Circuit Court of Appeals, United States v. Moylan, 1969 That same judge, despite the courageous words, then reveals a statist, controloholic wound: “...by clearly stating to the jury that they may disregard the law, telling them that they may decide according to their prejudices or consciences (for there is no check to insure that the judgment is based upon conscience rather than prejudice), we would indeed be negating the rule of law in favor of the rule of lawlessness. This should not be allowed.” In other words, the Court is saying: “juries are sovereign, and have the ‘theoretical’ power, but not an obligation, to decide according to conscience, rather than the machinery of the National Law...but that power should be kept a secret from the citizenry at large, and from the juries themselves, so that juries remain in fear and awe of the ‘rule of law’, that is, whatever we, as amply-salaried government judges, steer them to do.” The trickiness the judge’s words (perhaps unnoticed by the speaker themself) is this: where is the ‘check’ that the judge’s judgment, as a government-salaried employee, and the democratically legislated national law itself, are based on conscience? That is what the heightened atmosphere of the courtroom is for, to find the best, most conscientious verdict—‘true word’—and amendatory sentence, in that very time and place, for that particular, individual situation. “By its nature, the law cannot be flexible. To make exceptions and to judge who should be excepted would require an authority from outside the rights sector. Such an authority would need to utilize capacities of discernment that have no place in rights life, where one must deal solely with what is equal in all people. “Nevertheless, there is sometimes a feeling in the community that a person is right to stand up for what he or she believes, to oppose the will of the majority, that one must not always give way to the judgment of equals. There must be occasions when it is right for people to act on the basis of their conscience when this speaks strongly within them. Many people do sense that the moral and social development of the community is strengthened when there are people who, out of the courage of their convictions, stand up against authority. A community in which everyone conformed to the law without question, where there were no rebels, would be one without life and without development.” —Michael Spence, “Conscience and Law”, After Capitalism, 2014 Some might say: “What about juries in the Old South, who would make a mockery of these practices by acquitting a guilty white man and convicting an innocent black man?” My response is: if this discretion were just one little piecemeal reform implemented in the 1850s South with its locked-down, super-dense, twisted Anglo-American mercantile culture, which was packed into the American (or Southron) National-State—or even in a 1950s context—I would not be for it. Yet within the context of the other societal changes described in this book, judicial discretion and jury nullification would be a healthy change. If you want to know more about this, see the essays by Seth Jordan, a threefolder:
“Are we a community without a conscience? The challenge of Tim DeChristopher” (2011): www.facebook.com/notes/think-outword/arewe-a-community-without-conscience-the-challenge-of-tim-dechristopher/181904528522172
“Following your heart in the face of the law” (2013): www.facebook.com/#!/notes/think-outword/following-your-heart-in-the-face-ofthe-law/570861316293156
Seed thoughts for the separation of judiciary and state are gathered in a study booklet, “The Justice System” at www.thinkoutword.org/resources4/think-outword-studies. ***
service areas of the three organisms At first, the service areas of the economy, the polity, and the cultural council would have the same boundaries—they’d be coterminous. Territorially, they would completely overlap with each other. In the further future, the Economic Forums of two economies would be free to merge, while their political states remain independent. Likewise, there could be more than one Economic Forum in a single country. Freedom of association is maintained in the economic sector—even to the extent that various businesses within a country could form their own competing Economic Forum, in a similar way that in the US, the Business Alliance of Local Living Economies (BALLE) is in friendly competition with the US Chamber of Commerce. The service areas of BALLE and of the Chamber completely overlap with each other. Similarly the service areas of two competing Economic Forums would be free to overlap within a single country. In the eyes of the Rights Republic, each of the two Economic Forums would be legally incorporated as just another economic association.
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In the cultural sector, being the most free-spirited, the service areas of the Cultural Councils of two or more countries would certainly be free to territorially overlap. In the eyes of the Political Governance, each of the various Cultural Councils would be legally incorporated into its rights service area as just another cultural organization, in a similar way that the British Council and Alliance française—the British and French nationalcultural institutes—are presently free to incorporate within other political states and to offer cultural services there. The Rights Sector would have no affiliation with, or preference for, any of the various cultural councils—including the one whose symbology sprang from its own National State predecessor. If the rights governance favored a particular cultural council, this would be an unhealthy continuation of the fusion of culture and state. The cultural sector is so free, that no cultural organization would even have to participate in the Cultural Council. For whatever reason, a cultural, national, or religious organization might choose to keep to itself. That doesn’t mean they’re a business or governance agency. They still have the same legal status as a cultural organization. It just means that they are free to ignore the activities of the Cultural Council, or to form their own. For example, some of the evangelical or orthodox religious organizations in a single country, or across the world, might choose to form their own Cultural Councils. No problem. Notably, the Holy See would surely fly her cultural flag throughout humanity’s world. She already does. A picture of a truly trinitarian future for the 104 Catholic Church is shown in Book Two simply because that is the only international religion which administers a sovereign political state. However, any religion, denomination, church, or other cultural body would be free to consider itself totally sovereign in the cultural sector, and from its own perspective, to stand singularly equivalent to even the largest spiritual-cultural organizations, such as the Catholic Church, the Lutheran World Federation, the Anglican Communion, the World Methodist Council, the International Humanist and Ethical Union, or the World Buddhist Sangha Council. Notably, a global free cultural sector would be the place for the renewal—by one or more of humanity’s manifold Islamic and Jewish branches—of the Caliphate and the Sanhedrin.
consular districts as worldwide extensions of each trisector society
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What about the rights-states? Would they overlap? The political governances would be free to overlap in a certain sense. What are now known as Consular Districts would be shown on political maps. Consulates are local branches of a national embassy. Consulates provide various legalpolitical services to citizens who are traveling or living abroad. To provide these services, the foreign affairs ministry of each country delineates every other country (in which they have some official presence) into various Consular Districts. That’s the way it is right now. It’s just that these districts aren’t yet shown on the map. By depicting the Consular Districts as a further geographic extension of the political state, all 206 rights organisms would be re-conceived as extending throughout the entire world. The existing political borders would be re-perceived as the border of a certain bundle of political-rights services, the most obvious of which are police and military services. Yet each rights-state would offer other political services throughout the world—such as facilitating voting by absentee ballot—via its consular Rights Districts which would territorially overlap with all other political states. There is already a living example: for its lower house of Parliament, the French Republic delineates the entire 106 world into constituencies which serve the French citizens who reside in other social organisms. These Consular Districts would also be ‘unfolded’ to serve as the boundaries for three other entities—economic, cultural, and national. “Should a social organism form itself according to the three natural sectors, the representatives of each sector could enter into international relations with others, even if these others have not yet adopted the same forms." —Rudolf Steiner, “International relations between social organisms”, Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c04.html 104
If you want to see a map of where the ancient Roman national culture exists on the surface of the earth today, the worldwide provinces of the Catholic Church are the direct continuation of that. The church provinces in the nominally christianized Roman Empire were based on the Roman legal-political provinces, and even when the Roman polity dissolved, that cultural identity remained. Over two millenia, that formative force has continued to delineate provinces on each continent.
The provinces of the Roman identity in America. 105
There is at least one place in the world where two polities functionally overlap. Though it no longer claims Northern Ireland, the republic of Ireland offers citizenship to all residents in that area of the British nation-state. In that sense, the ‘citizenship area’ of the Irish political state—but not the police and military service area—territorially overlaps with the British political service area. 106
“Constituencies for French residents overseas”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituencies_for_French_residents_overseas 88
Besides continuing their role as Consular Districts of the Rights Governance, through the separation of business, state, and culture, these Consular Districts would serve, at least initially, as the boundaries of the foreign delegation of the Economic Forum with its trade and investment embassies (the US Commercial Service), and of the delegation of the Cultural Council and its cultural embassies. The trade aspect and the cultural aspect of each country’s embassy network would be structurally severed from the political-rights aspect. These two services would even be physically moved into other office locations. In the further future, the district boundaries of the Economic, Political, and Cultural administrations would be free to shift, and would not necessarily line up with each other. Since the separation of religion and state, a person is always standing in the invisibly overlapping provinces of hundreds or thousands of religious 107 denominations. Where I sit writing these words, I am simultaneously in the Catholic Ecclesiastical Province of New York, the Baptist Convention 108 109 of New York of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Northeastern Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church, the East District of the Union 110 111 for Reform Judaism, the East Zone of the Islamic Society of North America, the US-incorporated Unified Buddhist Church of the worldwide 112 113 Plum Village Sangha, and the North American Region of the Movement for Religious Renewal. I am also sitting in the overlapping sales and marketing regions of thousands of business corporations. In the trisector future, every spot on earth would be within the overlapping economic, political, cultural service area of every Economic Forum, every Rights Governance, and every Cultural Council.
the consular districts as districts of national culture Besides the plurinational Cultural Council of each society, there is also the civic national identity itself. This is described in a following chapter on National-Cultural Organizations (NCOs). That would be a fourth entity which would use the existing Consular Districts as a basis for drawing its own world map. The following pages show consular district maps which I cut-and-pasted from embassy websites. There are two pages of maps showing how other nations already territorially overlap with the United States. There’s one page of other nations overlapping with each other. And another page of the US overlapping other nations. The subtleties of the Consular Districts are an expression of the national genius. Each national identity shapes their consular map differently. Note how France went to the trouble of delineating and manning a consulate just for Louisiana. Or how Kazakhstan divides the US into two big long slices…reminiscent of big long Kazakhstan itself! Belgium draws the US into three pieces...aesthetically reminiscent of how Belgium itself is made of three communities. Japan and the Philippines have established distinct Consular Districts for the US islands in the Pacific—which shows how the Filipino and Japanese People have a special awareness of those locales, because many of their nationals or ethnic descendants live there. One of the Russian districts is centered on San Francisco, near where the colony of Russian California was located. Through the separation of nation and state, every inch of land would be within every nation—either within its Homeland, or within its worldwide Diaspora districts. Every nationality would hold the entire earth in their consciousness. The earth would become every nation’s homeland. ***
The vesica piscis ‘fish bladder’ or mandorla ‘almond’ shape formed from the overlap of two circles. I don’t know what a fish bladder looks like in real life, but I do know that if in the mind of humanity, national homelands were free to overlap, it would be golden.
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The largest denominational stream of the Christian Community in the American national state.
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The second-largest denominational stream of the Christian Community in the US nation-state.
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The third-largest denominational stream of the Christian Community in the US nation-state. From a phenomenological perspective, if the United States had a national church, it would be the United Methodist Church. Its members have been on the forefront of the Americanist economic-political-cultural impulse. 110
The largest denominational stream of the Jewish Community in the US nation-state.
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The largest denominational stream of the Islamic Community in the US nation-state.
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A Buddhist denomination initiated by Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. One of many Buddhist streams in America.
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Presently synonymous with the Christian stream initiated by Rudolf Steiner, the propagator of the Trisector Idea. Though currently the only member religion of the movement is the Christian Church, the movement is potentially open to the renewal of every branch, twig, leaf, and flower on humanity’s religious organism. If you want to know about possibilities for renewing the varieties of religious experience, see: https://sites.google.com/site/4religiousrenewal 89
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states, circles, and municipalities Humanity’s rights sector would be about Equality, not about Liberty as such. One way of equalizing the political sector would be to re-language and equalize humanity’s political territorial units, so that what is now known as Government (with a capital G), with its anti-human bureaucracy and controloholism, re-appears in a fresh light, so that it becomes the one sector in life which is most generally human throughout our world. In a healthy world, a human being would be free to move to any state and municipality, in any continent, and take up the rights and obligations of citizenship with little delay. To that end, we suggest that Rights Republics throughout humanity’s world employ three names for political collectivities: the constituent state, the circle, and the municipality. Humanity’s first-level political divisions would be called ‘states’, our second-level political divisions be called ‘circles’, and our third-level political divisions be called ‘municipalities.’
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Nearly all first-level divisions in humanity's world would become ‘constituent states’, regardless of whether they are presently called ‘provinces’, ‘autonomous regions’, ‘capital districts’, and so forth. This includes, for example:
States (US, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Malaysia, Germany, Austria) Commonwealths (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and Northern Mariana Islands in the US) Capital Districts (District of Columbia in the US; and the Capital Districts of Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela) Regions (France, Italy, Chile; and the former Government Regions of the UK, if they were to be restored as a further granulation of the polity in England) Devolved Governments (UK) Provinces (Canada, Iraq, Afghanistan, Argentina, China, South Africa, Zimbabwe) Autonomous Communities (Spain) Autonomous Regions (China, Italy) Cantons (Switzerland) Centrally-Administered Municipalities (China) Federal Subjects (Russia; including its ‘Regions’, ‘Territories’, Ethnic ‘Republics’, ‘Autonomous Region’, ‘Autonomous Districts’, and ‘Federal Cities’) Governorates (Egypt)
These would all become constituent rights-states, purified of all economic and cultural-educational powers. Everyone in humanity's world would be able to answer the common American question: "what state do you live in?" “Your idea is very interesting, but would require a complete re-write of the Montana Constitution.” —The Office of Governor of Montana, in response to the Trisector Idea, December 2011 (Author’s Note: There are only three amendments required.)
rights circles In a Threefold Country, the second-level political divisions would be called a ‘circle.’ This name has been used as a political division in Algeria, in Germany, and its predecessor, the Holy Roman Empire, in Mali, and in Thailand. The name is fitting since the political sector is a circle of equals. This includes what are presently called:
Counties (US, Ireland, China) Parishes (Louisiana) Boroughs (Alaska, and the five Boroughs/Counties of New York City) Independent Cities (Baltimore, Maryland; Carson City, Nevada; St. Louis, Missouri; and 39 Independent Cities in Virginia) Departments (France and Argentina) Local Government Areas (UK: Districts of Northern Ireland, Council Areas of Scotland, Non-Metropolitan Counties and Metropolitan Counties of England) Districts (Russian raiony)
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Exceptions include those first-level divisions which are sparsely populated or unpopulated. These would become Collectivities and Territories, respectively. Another exception are those rights organisms which are so territorially small that they consider their subdivisions to be equivalent to circles or municipalities. Examples include Ireland, which consists only of counties, and Singapore which has five districts which are each headed by a mayor, and so would be considered to be municipalities. However, the decision to designate the first-level subdivision a ‘state’ or ‘circle’ or ‘municipality’ would be primarily aesthetic. For example, even though they are territorially small, and are essentially the size of a US, Mexican, or South American constituent state, the Central American social organisms might designate their first-level divsions to be ‘states.’ 94
Municipios (Puerto Rico and Mexico) Provinces (Spain and Italy) Shires (Australia)
Not every country has a second-level political division. For example, the Netherlands has only Provinces (which would become Constituent States) and Municipalities. In this case, either the State or the Municipalities could be considered to be nominal, coterminous Circles for rights statistical purposes. The political powers of the ten State-recognized (as opposed to federally recognized) Indian Reservations in the US would be invested in non-ethnic Rights Circles, which would also be Rights Municipalities. Like the Independent Cities of Virginia, they would be each be their own tiny county and city.
Golden Hill Paugussett Reservation, Connecticut Hassanamisco Reservation, Massachusetts Mattaponi Reservation, Virginia MOWA Choctaw Reservation, Alabama Pamunkey Reservation, Virginia Paucatuck Eastern Pequot Reservation, Connecticut Poospatuck Reservation, New York Schaghticoke Reservation, Connecticut Shinnecock Reservation, New York Tama Reservation, Georgia
These too, would take on new humanocratic names for political-rights purposes.
rights municipalities The third-level political divisions would be called a ‘municipality’ in the English-speaking countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Jamaica, to name a few). The equivalent in a few languages:
French commune Irish baile (The municipal districts of the Local Government Reform Act 2014 would each become a Rights Municipality.) Dutch gemeente German Gemeinde Italian comune
Each organized Civil Township or Chartered Township in the United States (also known as ‘Towns’ in New England and New York), and each incorporated City and Village would become a Rights Municipality. Cities and townships, as Rights Municipalities, would no longer overlap with each other. For political-rights purposes the incorporated Cities and Villages would be formally severed from the Townships. Other services such as garbage collection, fire protection and road maintenance, would become non-governmental economic services provided in conjunction with local associations of consumers, and so could have different service boundaries than the Rights Municipalities. Though Municipalities would have different political powers in different parts of the world, every human being would be a Citizen of a Rights Municipality...a City-State.
state-level rights collectivities Besides being a general word for any political division or group of human beings, the word ‘collectivity’ would be used in a special sense to refer to rights divisions which are at the level of the states, but which don't have enough population to justify the same representation in the legislature. In this context, the name ‘Collectivity’ means that these political divisions would either collectively share a single representative in the Rights Congress or Parliament, or would have a significantly smaller number of representatives than full-sized states. The ‘cut off’ number to be a constituent ‘state’ would differ in different social organisms. The minimum population for statehood in the US is 60,000. In Britain and France perhaps 100,000 (based on the apparently minimum size for becoming a Commonwealth Realm or a French Overseas Department). In the Netherlands, 30,000 (based on the distinction between a ‘Constituent Country’ and a ‘Special Municipality’ in the various islands of the Dutch Caribbean). In India and China, perhaps 1,000,000. Examples of ‘State-level Rights Collectivities’:
The 387 US Indian Reservations with a population less than 60,000 (all but the Navajo Reservation, which would become a Rights-State), but more than zero. Until the plebiscite tool for delineating new political divisions is implemented, only existing Reservations would become state-level collectivities. For example, the non-reservation Off-Reservation Trust Lands or the Tribal Jurisdictions of the Oklahoma Indian Nations would not immediately be the basis for a polity. Those French Overseas Collectivities with less than 100,000 citizens.
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In Canada: Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. In the further future, a plebiscite might be held on the Canadian First Nations Reserves as to whether to form a Rights Collectivity. The largest population is reportedly the Six Nations reserve Number 40, with about 20,000 citizens. The British Crown Dependencies: Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man, and the inhabited British Overseas Territories. In Australia: Jervis Bay Territory, Norfolk Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and Christmas Island. Though they are presently called ‘territories’, Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, having over 100,000 citizens, would become full-blown Federal States. (Their names would remain the same in regards to the Australian NCO.) In the further future, the Torres Strait Regional Authority and the Aboriginal Freehold Lands (though not necessarily the many other kinds of native lands) might form the basis for one or more rights collectivities. As with all ethno-political entities, their political powers become entirely non-ethnic and humanocratic once they are transmitted into the rights sector. In China: Macau, with only 500,000 citizens. In India: Sikkim, which is presently a State with 600,000 citizens, would become a State-Level Rights Collectivity. Of the Union Territories, Lakshadweep, Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and the Andaman Islands would become Collectivities, while Chandigarh, Puducherry, and the National Capital Territory of Delhi would become full-blown constituent Rights-States, since they have more than 1 million citizens. In the Netherlands: the Caribbean islands with less than 30,000 citizens (Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba would become State-Level Rights Collectivities), while Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten would become full-blown Rights-States. Each would be free to choose whether to fully converge, or to become independent Three-membered Republics. In New Zealand: the Cook Islands, Niue, and Tokelau. Though the former two might choose to become completely separate threefold social organisms, as they are almost independent already.
circle- and municipal-level collectivities There could also be Circle-Level Collectivities and Municipal-Level Collectivities for areas equivalent in size to a county or municipality (township or other minor civil division), but which are not yet actually organized and incorporated as a distinct governance. The ‘Unorganized Borough’ of Alaska would be a Circle-Level Rights Collectivity until it is organized. Unlike France, where every place is located in some Municipality (commune) or another, or unlike most of New England and the Upper Midwest, where all or most of the territory of those states is delineated into towns/township local governments, there are some places in the world which don't have third-level political division. In the US, most southern and western states don't have organized townships which actually do something. The citizen in rural areas only interacts with the county government. Some of these states have ‘survey townships’ which exist only on paper, or unorganized Magisterial Districts. In these cases, until the localities develop a distinct rights consciousness and body, those unorganized areas 115 would be considered to be nominal, unorganized ‘Municipal-level Collectivities.’ Even in New England though, there would be Municipal-Level Collectivities, such as in sparsely-populated northern Maine and the ‘gores’ of Vermont—small parcels which were overlooked during the delineation of Vermont into municipal towns, and which would become Municipal-Level Rights Collectivities if at least one citizen resides there: namely Buel’s Gore (11 citizens) and Hibbet’s Gore (1 citizen). This sense of the word ‘collectivity’ is different in that a State-level Collectivity, because at the Circle and Municipal levels of governance, 116 ‘collectivity’ would not usually signify that those collectivities share a combined representative in a federalist ‘second house.’ Rather, 115
For an overview of the various kinds of Minor Civil Divisions in each state, see “County Subdivisions” at www.census.gov/geo/reference/pdfs/GARM/Ch8GARM.pdf
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There used to be county-based representation in the upper house of several US states. Since 1962, due to the principle of ‘One Person, One Vote’, the US Supreme Court has banned such federation-style representation within state legislatures. And there used to be bicamerial legislatures at the municipal level, with a Common Council as the ‘lower house’ and a Board of Aldermen as the ‘upper house.’ The City of Everett, Massachusetts was the last bicameral municipality, having merged its two houses this year, in 2014. I’m not aware of any bicameral county legislatures. Unlike the US Senate (whose federalist structure is embedded in the Constitution), and unlike county and municipal councils (which are often a confused mix of legislative and executive powers which the 1962 ruling hasn’t touched), in the fifty state legislatures, each individual citizen’s vote must be weighed the same, instead of the votes being pooled by county. Before 1962 many states had federalist-style upper houses modeled on the US Senate, with, say, two senators per county, in the same way that the US Senate has two senators per state, regardless of the state’s population. This meant that the vote (the rights voice) of a citizen who lived in a densely populated urban county ‘weighed’ less than the vote of a citizen who lived in a sparsely populated county, since both counties simply had two senators. Since city-dwellers tend toward liberal/labor values and rural-folk tend toward conservative/landowner values, this evoked resentment. Since 1962, constituency boundaries at the state level are required to be based on equal population, and redrawn after each census. Chief Justice Earl Warren stated: "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres.” This principle of One Person, One Vote is the legitimate baseline for humanocracy. In a fused cultural-politicaleconomic State, federalist representation is a backwards, anti-democratic tendency. Threefold Now is neutral on the specific matter of county-based representation in state legislatures, since our primary purpose is the purified humanocratic voice, regardless of whether the voice is entirely population based or federal-based. From a historical perspective, the thirteen states consciously pooled their rights powers to form a federation, and the later 37 states were incorporated on that principle of federalism. Whereas, despite the initiative of settlers in forming the counties, the county lines and powers in the US were shaped more by top-down legislative fiat. So it’s not a tragedy that the federal model is deemed by the court to not be inherent to their rights identity. However, what the Supreme Court doesn’t perceive is the unspoken fact that rights organisms don’t float in mid-air, but exist on a particular patch of earth—and that it’s healthy thing for the ‘rights voice’ of the citizenry to come to expression differently in different areas of the earth’s surface, based on their experience of life there—the living conditions. That’s why municipalities are incorporated. Taking the One Person, One Vote concept to it purest apex, there might as well either be: (The footnote continues on the next page.) 96
‘collectivity’ at the circle level and municipal level would signify ‘unincorporatedness.’ Generally, the healthy tendency in a purified rights organism would be for most localities to become incorporated, so that the ‘rights voice’ becomes more articulated.
rights territories Besides ‘state’, ‘circle’, and ‘municipality’, there would also be ‘rights territories.’ The word ‘territory’, as a subnational-political division, has been used differently by the US, Canada, Russia, and other countries. Within the context of a humanocratic rights organism, we recommend that ‘territory’ be employed only for those land areas which have no human inhabitants, or whose only population are temporary or non-resident military personnel, scientists, and caretakers. Examples of ‘State-level Rights Territories’:
The 23 federal Indian Reservations which have no residents:
Auburn Rancheria, California. Alturas Indian Rancheria, California Augustine Reservation, California Capitan Grande Reservation, California Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Reservation, Oregon Dry Creek Rancheria, California Grand Traverse Reservation, Michigan Jamestown S’Klallam Reservation, Washington Jamul Indian Village, California Jena Band of Choctaw Reservation, Louisiana Lytton Rancheria, California Match-e-be-nash-she-wish Band of Pottawatomi Reservation, Minnesota Miccosukee Reservation, Florida Mohegan Reservation, Connecticut Nooksack Reservation, Washington Northwestern Shoshone Reservation, Utah Otonagon Reservation, Minnesota Paskenta Rancheria, California
A) No territorial basis for rights boundaries at all, with all political offices elected at-large, B) Or, the entire populace in a state—or in the entire country—assigned by random lot to non-territorial legislative constituencies of equal populace. Such constituencies would be like a non-hereditary version of the ancient Athenian ‘demes’, which by Classical times, were no longer territorial. This would mean that after each census, a citzen would be paired with a random swath of citizenry stretching across the four corners of the social organism. C) Or, state, county, and municipal borders redrawn as a square grid, like survey townships in the western US. In the spirit of unalloyed egalitarianism, square political divsions were actually suggested at the beginning of the French Revolution:
D) Or, as random shapes delineated by a computer program. Actually, this would be preferable to the party-based gerrymandering which has a grip on the redistricting process in the US, whereby our governance electoral districts are shaped according to power plays by the Organization of the Left and the Organization of the Right. But imagine drawing even state, county, and municipal boundaries at random! Through these four far out examples, you might see the downside to the One Person, One Vote principle: the rights service is abstracted and either loses touch with the surface of the earth upon which the rights organism rests, or ruptures the life of the existing ‘rights organism’ with the scalpel of uniformity or randomness. In the case of A and B, the rights awareness of the citizenry has no relation to any particular land at all, except for the border of the entire country. In the case of C and D, the existing rights identities, which have a certain organic life, are dissected, dispersed, and replaced with abstract squares or blobs. In regard to D, except for the elected representative themself, hardly anyone knows, or has a feel for, the actual boundaries of the rights body in which they find themselves (which is the way it is now in regard to U.S. legislative districts). And then the district is redrawn in the next census. Instead of forming a shared experience of a specific rights identity, with specific boundaries as a membrane, the rights perception is only able to focus on the person who happens to be serving as the elected representative. These examples illustrate the outer limits of the One Person, One Vote principle, despite it being the legitimate, default form of authentic humanocracy. Though the Supreme Court ruling suggests that federalism is anti-democratic, Threefold Now suggests that federalism could still be a legitimate feature in the ‘second house’— the House of States—of a bicameral rights organism. 97
The 11 uninhabited US island territories:
Pokagon Reservation, Minnesota Snoqualmie Reservation, Washington Stillaguamish Reservation, Washington Tampa Reservation, Florida Timbi-Sha Shoshone Reservation, California-Nevada
Baja Nuevo Bank (This would become a Symbolic Political Condominium with Colombia, Jamaica, and Nicaragua.) Baker Island Howland Island Jarvis Island Johnston Atoll Kingman Reef Midway Atoll Navassa Island (A Symbolic Political Condominium with Haiti) Palmyra Atoll Serranilla Bank (A Symbolic Political Condominium with Colombia, Jamaica, and Nicaragua) Wake Island (A Symbolic Political Condominium with Marshall Islands)
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Within the Green Mountain Constitutional State (Vermont), there’d be two Municipal-Level Rights Territories for Avery’s Gore and Warner’s Grant—small areas which, due to surveying quirks, ended up not being a part of any municipality, and which have no residents. If they did have even one resident citizen, they’d become Municipal-Level Rights Collectivities instead of Territories. The French Southern and Antarctic Lands, and Clipperton Island. In the UK: the British Indian Ocean Territory (until the Chagos Islanders are repatriated), South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, and the British Antarctic Territory. In Australia: Ashmore & Cartier Islands, Coral Sea Islands, Heard & McDonald Islands, and the Australian Antarctic Territory. New Zealand’s Ross Dependency in Antarctica.
ethnicity/nationality and ruralness/urbanity are not part of the sphere of equality The aim is to equalize humanity's political organism, removing differences—even terminological differences—between rural and urban, and between ethnic autonomies and ‘non-ethnic’ administrative areas. The Political Sector is not the place for economic-, landscape-, and culturebased distinctions. It's about individual human citizens as equals. As described in a following section about autonomies and dependencies, fused cultural-political entities are illegitimate and unhealthy. However, these entities—such as Indian Reservations and Ethnic Autonomous Regions—would not simply be dissolved, rather, their purely political powers and boundaries would be retained by a coterminous, ‘humanocratized’ rights identity, while the cultural powers of those entities would be divested to culturally independent National Cultural Organizations. Their ‘cultural spirit’ is loosed and the non-ethnic ‘human rights spirit’ remains. Likewise, special designations and titles of city-based political divisions would be done away with. British and Irish municipalties retain a range of ceremonial titles, bestowed in the Middle Ages, for various kinds of cities. Which is fine for national culture, but a hindrance to humanocratic municipalism. Some countries call their constituent city-states by a special name, such as the ‘Beijing Centrally-Administered Municipality’ and the ‘Independent Cities’ of Virginia. And each U.S. state has its own terminology for various sizes of municipality (village, township, town, city), with various real and symbolic differences. But in a purified Rights Republic, metropolitan cities would not be distinguished from rural municipalities (i.e. townships and villages) and would not have special titles. They’d all be municipalities. Nevertheless, since the population of the adult citizenry is the key factor in political-rights articulation, it would be healthy if larger cities were to form their own constituent state or rights-circle; for example, if New York City were to politically separate from the rest of New York and form a Gotham Constitutional State. And the traditional ceremonial titles of municipalities could be retained by the national cultures (the NCOs, described in a following chapter), such as the English Nation, the Scottish Nation, and the American People. NCOs would be free to ‘charter’ their own ‘national-cultural municipalities’, with their own nomenclature, and which territorially overlap with each other. These would not be legal-political entities, but would be like the overlapping parishes of various religious denominations. Each nationality would freely shape their own overlapping cultural landscape, even at the city, village, and neighborhood level. However, the Rights Municipalities would be affiliated with no nationality whatsoever. The governance could be addressed in any language of humanity.
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The Symbolic Political Condominium concept is described in Book Two. The U.S. rights governance would remain the Primary Political Administrator of those islands which are already effectively administered by the U.S. 98
For example, Istanbul would remain a cultural province of the Turkish NCO, but would be known as Konstantinoúpolis (‘Constantinople’) by the Greek NCO, which would offer Greek cultural-pedagogical services there, organized as a non-governmental Greek ‘cultural municipality’ covering the entire city. Besides the two national-cultural entities (and other NCOs, such as for the Kurds, Armenians, Jews, and Levantines) in the cultural sector, there’d be a ‘City of Two Continents Democratic State’ in the rights sector—the anational successor of the Turkish national government in Istanbul Province. The separation of the national-cultural identity from the civic identity of the polis, would allow both to flourish.
federalism between humanocratic rights entities Though the primary distinction which is appropriate in the Equity Sector is population, it is still humanocratic for a particular collectivity of voices to form a membrane and body, and to enter into agreements as a peer of other rights collectivities, regardless of their population. That’s true federalism. Federalism between unequally-sized bodies of citizens is healthy as long as the federating polities are themselves humanocratically purified of economic and cultural entanglements.
the essential word of each political organism By considering each country's constitution and political symbols, we at Threefold Now perceive an essential adjective (or adjectival phrase) which distills the political idea of each country. For example, constitutional for the US, parliamentary for the UK, and equality/equity/egalitarian for France. We suggest that the formal name of the purified political divisions be prefaced by the essential adjective, as that social organism’s equivalent to the universal term ‘rights’ or ‘political.’ For example:
US: Constitutional States, Constitutional Circles, and Constitutional Municipalities France: Equity States (états de l'égalité), Equity Circles (cercles de l'égalité), and Equity Municipalities (communes de l'égalité) Ireland, Portugal, and South Africa: Justice States, Justice Circles, and Justice Municipalities UK: Parliamentary States, Parliamentary Circles, and Parliamentary Municipalities Canada: Strong and Free States, Strong and Free Circles, Strong and Free Municipalities Australia: Egalitarian States, Egalitarian Circles, and Egalitarian Municipalities China: People's States, People's Circles, People's Municipalities Germany: Rights-States (Rechtsstaaten), Rights Circles (Rechte Kreise), and Rights Municipalities (Rechte Gemeinden) Japan: Peace States, Peace Circles, Peace Municipalities Mexico: United States, United Circles, United Municipalities New Zealand: Pure States, Pure Circles, and Pure Municipalities Russia: Hope States, Hope Circles, and Hope Municipalities Switzerland: Direct Democratic States, Direct Democratic Circles, Direct Democratic Municipalities Turkey: Democracy-Loving States, Democracy-Loving Circles, and Democracy-Loving Municipalities Ukraine: Sincerity States, Sincerity Circles, and Sincerity Municipalities
These political organisms, and others, are displayed in Book Two.
anational nicknames for rights-states As part of the Separation of Nation and State, we suggest that each State-level political division adopt a nickname as its official name, to distinguish it from the national culture from which it sprang. For example, as a purified rule-of-law state, the State of New York would become the Excelsior Constitutional State. However, the cultural assets (such as the NY state schools, universities, and park system) would be transferred to a non-governmental cultural organization called ‘The State of New York’ (a.k.a. ‘The People of New York’) which would be one of fifty branches of ‘The American People’ NCO (a.k.a. ‘The United States of America’). If there is no nickname, such as perhaps in the Russian federal subjects, the name of the capital city would suffice. For example, the Grozny Hope State instead of the Chechen Republic.
the full name for rights localities For formal rights identification, a polity consists of four levels of names. Here’s a few examples of rights localities:
Where the initiator of the Trisector Idea grew up: The Donji Kraljevec Democratic Municipality, in the Međimurje Democratic Circle, in (a proposed) Central Illyrian Democratic State, in the Democratic Governance of Illyria. Where Threefold Now is presently based: The Austerlitz Constitutional Municipality, in the Columbia Constitutional Circle, in the Excelsior Constitutional State, in the Constitutional Governance in the Homeland Where all Men are Created Equal. Where the author grew up: The Rock Municipal-Level Constitutional Collectivity (from Rock Magisterial District), in the Mercer Constitutional Circle, in the Mountain Constitutional State, in the Constitutional Governance in the Homeland Where all Men are Created Equal. Where the Chief lives: The Washington Constitutional Municipality, in the Washington Constitutional Circle, in the New Columbia Constitutional State, in the Constitutional Governance in the Homeland Where all Men are Created Equal. Where Chelsea Manning is held: The Leavenworth Constitutional Municipality, in the Leavenworth Constitutional Circle, in the Sunflower Constitutional State, in the Constitutional Governance in the Homeland Where all Men are Created Equal. Where Edward Snowden was made effectively stateless: The Khimki Hope Municipality, in the Khimki Hope Circle, in the Moscow Hope State, in the Scythian Hopeful Governance. 99
What would your Rights Governance, constituent Rights-State, Rights Circle, and Rights Municipality be called?
merging political organisms If or when two political organisms (countries) converge, their political divisions would be regularized. For example, their ‘cut off’ points for being a Collectivity or a State would be adjusted—probably to the lower number. The size of different countries' States, Circles, and Municipalities would vary greatly. The priority would be to get all the first-, second-, and thirdlevel political powers transferred smoothly into purified Rights bodies. However, if two or more Political Organisms chose to merge (such as the European countries), and the size and population of their political divisions differed widely, it would eventually become clearer as to what the most humane and responsive size for States and Circles. Changing political administrative boundaries would not be such an excruciating task once those boundaries are no longer fused with ethno-national sentiment. In the further future, the State, Circle, and Municipal boundaries could change, becoming more or less granular, in response to the living needs of the Human Rights Organism. ***
a multisector societal organism? Some might ask: What about a twofold republic, or a fourfold, fivefold, or manifold republic?
the onefold social organism In trisecting literature, the Collectivist State, such as a Radical Socialist State or a Radical Islamicist State, is sometimes called the ’Onefold Social Organism’, because culture and economy are completely absorbed by the Uniform State, so that there is only one sector: the State, dominated by a single ideology. All schools become Government Schools and businesses are appropriated or domineered by the State.
the twofold social organism The Corporate State, with its Public Sector and Private Sector, is sometimes called the ‘Twofold Social Organism.’ Both the Collectivist State and the Corporate/Privatist State are unconscious of their con-fusion. Yet there could be such a thing as a conscious Twofold Social Organism, either as a transitional condition, or as a supersessionist condition. In the process of enacting the threefold separation of powers, one sectoral organism might be formed first, so that there is, say, a ‘Free French Culture’ as a conscious, self-governing cultural sector, as a peer of the French Government, but with the economy not yet separately articulated. Or the associated Economic Forum might be formed first, before the cultural body. During that time of transition, we would be in a ‘Bisector Republic.’ Such a transition could be done systematically through existing societal structures, or it could be formed as a parallel sector in defiance of the fused National Government/Economy.
fourfold and manifold social organisms As far as further articulations beyond three, this volume of Threefold Now displays two Fourfold Republics. These social organisms are conceived as Quadrisector Societies because their national symbologies are inherently fourfold instead of threefold.
Iceland—with its four guardian spirits facing the four directions. Nigeria—with its uniquely fourfold national motto: Unity and Faith, Peace and Progress.
There are other Fourfold Countries which would be included in a future volume of Threefold Now—the Indian Ocean islands of Comoros, Mauritius, and Seychelles, who for seemingly different reasons, prominently display fourfold symbology, and the Pacific island country of Palau, whose legendry depicts the nation being founded by four children of the creator in the mists of time. 118
The Fourfold Social System has been described by philosopher Johannes Heinrichs. The difference from a Threefold Republic is that the religious and philosophical organizations are separated from the other cultural organizations to form a ‘Worldview Republic’ with its own ‘Worldview Council’ where the shared structural needs of the world conceptions vis-à-vis the economy and polity would be especially co-ordinated. This sector is what in ancient times would be called ‘the Mysteries.’ However, the cultural sector could be articulated entirely differently. For example, it’s conceivable for some country to make a sovereign Environmental Sector separate from the other cultural-scientific organizations. An Ecological Republic might be composed of state-free, noncommercial environmental science institutes, environmental grassroots organizations, and bioregional cultural identities. Also, though it is beyond the scope of this book, some social organism might choose to even more clearly separate the legislative and executive branches of their rights governance, so that the two branches would be considered to be two sovereign sectors, with the Head of the Rights 118
www.netzkraft.net/mitglied.php?teilnehmer=256&lang=englisch 100
Legislature having a stature equivalent to the Head of the Rights Executive. In that case, these two republics would be funded separately. A Legislative Republic could be the basis for clearly distinguishing the legislative branch at the county and municipal level, with the local legislative organs being chartered separately from, but in relationship with, the local executive organs. In the trisector conception, the Judicial Branch is transferred to the Cultural Republic. However, some social organism might choose to form the Judiciary into a distinct organism, with the Chief Justice having a stature equivalent to the Rights President and Cultural Leader. The Judicial Republic would fly its own flag whether at the Supreme Court or the Village Court. And Myanmar and Eritrea have descended so deeply into militarism, that, as a transitional step, a separate Military Sector distinct from the actual Governance might be called for. (Though if there’s willingness to make that change, why not go all the way and make a full-blown Threefold Republic with a citizen’s militia replacing the military?) Some Threefolders have spoken of a Ninefold Social Lense. What they’re talking about is that each of the three sectors of social life does have some element of liberty, equality, and fraternity within it. For example, the act of consuming has a quality of liberty in the Economic realm, while the action of production has more of the archetypal quality of fraternity. Yet those who speak of Ninefoldness aren’t really suggesting that there be an actual, concrete Ninefold Republic with nine sovereign organisms. So, while a multiplex societal organism is possible, these aren’t just abstract, academic ideas to spin…the idea is to be enacted and embodied in sovereign organic systems, each with their own deliberative forum, leadership, headquarters, embassies, flag, and most importantly, their own distinct quality or primary purpose.
Solomon’s knot. ***
imagining an epoch of rest Imagine another Quiet of the World. Imagine if the Whole Wide World were cultivated to be mostly quiet—not oppressively silent, but with less 119 noise and more green, and walkable. Imagine if everywhere was clean and fresh like our best gardens and parks, and that every view—except for 120 wild lands and a few places which intentionally cultivate an eccentric style —looked like a botanical garden or renaissance landscape. Imagine if— unless someone invents a silent motor that runs on sunshine or love and emits only clean air and water—our leafblowers and lawnmowers were to be mostly replaced by their quiet and elegant predecessors—the sickle, the scythe, the push-reel mower, and grazing animals. Imagine if most young people in the world spent their years from 18 to 28 in a variety of scholarly, artistic, and practical apprenticeships and then travelled the whole wide world as journeymen...and were not indebted afterward. Imagine if 28 year-olds throughout our world had the means to purchase outright, or build, their own beautiful hand-crafted house on a freehold plot of land—or in the City, their own freehold condominium or th townhouse—with it all paid off by their 35 birthday, the middle of life. Imagine if there were walkways and bikeways along all routes and waterways, and that fruit trees, berry bushes, and food gardens were maintained on the road shoulders by an ‘army’ of biodynamic gardeners, with the tradition that anyone could pick enough food from these common gardens to feed themselves, their family, and their houseguests for the coming day. Imagine if anyone, female or male, old or young, of any physical race or cultural nationality, could walk anywhere in the continent, and throughout humanity’s world, by day or night, with only a modicum of caution. That would be a truly great country. Imagine if there were no cars within the cities—because the clean, pervasive, pleasant associative transportation services made car ownership no longer necessary. Is there a future where there would be hardly any private automobiles in the five boroughs of New York? If human beings aren’t encased in cars, emergency sirens don’t have to be so piercing. A brass bell will suffice. Or 119
Some vibrantly cultivated vistas I’ve experienced: Pipestem Park and the path behind Sunrise Museum (now closed) in West Virginia, the Biltmore Gardens, Reynolda Gardens, and Greensboro Arboretum in North Carolina, Longwood Gardens near Philadelphia, and the Herb Garden at Camphill Copake in upstate New York. 120
Such as the Wildwoods Shore Resort Historic District in New Jersey which maintains the space-age Jetson-style Doo Wap ‘Googie’ Architecture of the 1950s and 1960s.
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a future where the streets surrounding the green grass of the National Mall in Washington could be closed vehicular traffic, so that our nation’s center is quiet again? Imagine if, in the further future, all motorized traffic, except for silent run-abouts, were buried under the earth. from now on cities, will be built on one side of the street so that soothsayers will have wilderness to wander and lovers space enough to contemplate a kiss —Saul Williams, poet, 2006 Imagine if there were unamplified live music playing within earshot of nearly wherever one stood—especially in the workplace. If the music is ‘unplugged’, then another musician can be playing on the next block without discord. Imagine if instead of billboards and advertisements, original, hand-made paintings in all styles were continually rotating throughout the public eyescape, and also inside nearly every business and factory, in each room. Imagine sublime sculpture gardens crafted by thousands of gifted sculptors, reaching throughout the countryside from sea to sea, with 121 new sculptures being placed and moved each month. Imagine if not only the crème de la crème of the beau monde wore hand-tailored clothing of natural, organic fiber, and shoes made and fitted by a cobbler. Imagine if artisanal craftsmanship were to return in all fields of industry, with a twelve-year or lifetime warranty for most goods and wares, and with interchangeable parts between manufacturers. Imagine if nearly everyone in the country and the world was either a self-employed owner-operator at something that they were good at, or were serving humanity through a 30-hour week as a laborer or clerk in ordinary but satisfying work. “If I was mourning anything, it wasn’t the chaos and fear of my childhood; it wasn’t my parents’ mistakes. It was the death of a certainty that’s associated with childhood but that persisted long afterward: the certainty that I would grow only stronger, wiser and kinder; that I would join the world and that the world would make sense. That reality would become less rapacious and terrifying. That getting out of bed in the morning wouldn’t entail underwriting clearcuts in the Amazon and oil spills in the Gulf, the three million Americans who live in prisons and the two billion people who live in destitution. “To mourn, I guess, is to forgive. We mourn because we have to forgive the dead for their human weakness, and forgive the world for the humiliation and injustice of mortality.” —Piper Wheeler, “If I Told You I Went to Church Because I Hated Capitalism, Would You Believe Me?” http://hypocritereader.com/18/if-i-told-you-i-went-to-church Imagine if nearly everyone had the means to invite one or several children into our world, knowing these would unfold within a private, lively school which reflected the family’s conscience and the individual destiny of the delicately burgeoning human being. Imagine nearly all of humanity being happy, or at least serene, to wake up in the morning, descending from our dreams without returning to a twist of dread in the stomach. That’s my game. Anybody want to play? Or does someone have a better game?
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Something like our local OMI Fields Sculpture Park here in Columbia County, but continent-sized: www.artomi.org 102
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Nationality is just one of many fields of culture. The goal for the national field of culture is to achieve cultural independence for all 10,000 aspirant nations, while maintaining political and economic unity. Here’s a practical conception for healing a structural wound which has cursed humanity since the Napoleonic Wars.
voices for an apparently impossible requisite nations and kingdoms “See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms” —The Book of Jeremiah (Author’s Note: One of many possible examples of how ancient humanity perceived the difference between a nation and a state) ***
should not be confounded "The state constitution and the national community, however closely they may be interwoven with each other, should not be confounded together." —Wilhelm von Humboldt, Prussian educational reformer and linguist, On the Limits of State Action, 1792 ***
a bass-ackwards step "The creation of all kinds of national states and petty national states at the present time, is a retrograde step that inhibits the evolution of humanity.” —Rudolf Steiner, “From Symptom to Reality in Modern History”, 1918 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA185/English/RSP1976/19181103p01.html ***
a field of cultural life “The common language of a nation, and all that goes along with this, constitutes such a field of spiritual [cultural] life. The national consciousness itself belongs in this field.” —Rudolf Steiner, The Core Points of the Social Question, 1919 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c04.html (the following three quotes are from the same chapter) ***
trying to make their national culture predominant “The people of one language-area do not come into [war, unnatural conflict] with those of another, so long as they do not try to make their national culture predominant by the use of their state-organization or their economic power.” —Steiner, The Core Points of the Social Question ***
cultural affinities are the historic cause of political and economic communities “Ethno-national affinities, together with other natural impulses, are the historic cause of the formation of political and economic communities. However, the forces by means of which these various peoples grow must develop with a reciprocity which is not hampered by relations between political states and economic cooperatives. This will be achieved when the ethno-national communities have implemented their social triformation to the extent that each of the sectors can cultivate independent relations with other social organisms.” —Steiner, The Core Points of the Social Question ***
national cultural organizations cutting across state frontiers "If the independent spiritual [cultural] life could have evolved beyond the frontiers of Austria and Serbia in a fashion that harmonized with the goals of these peoples, then this conflict (rooted in the spiritual [cultural] life) need not have burst into a political catastrophe. Yet the habits of thought of the ‘statesman-like’ thinkers in Austria-Hungary could not conceive of state boundaries not coinciding with national cultural communities. Their habit of thought admitted of no other conception than that the boundaries of state must also be the bounds of national community. They could not understand, how cultural organizations could be formed, cutting across state frontiers, comprising the school system and other branches of cultural life. It was against all their habitual conceptions. And yet this ‘inconceivable’ thing is what international life demands in the new age. A really practical thinker ought not to be held up by apparent impossibilities, and assume that the obstacles in the way of doing what is requisite are insurmountable. He must simply concentrate on surmounting them." —Steiner, The Core Points of the Social Question ***
squeezing nations into the political state “There are nationalists, chauvinists and so forth; everything we call nation, national, chauvinism, it's all incorporated into the framework of the state. Nationalism is added and the concept of the ‘nation-state’ is construed. ...In some Protestant circles the idea has arisen that the Church is only the visible institution, that the essence of religion must take root in people's hearts. But this degree of human development has not yet arrived in respect to the political state, otherwise we wouldn't be trying to squeeze all kinds of nationalisms into the political boundaries.” —Steiner, “The History and Actuality of Imperialism”, 1920 104
http://southerncrossreview.org/75/imperialism3.html (Author’s Note: In a modern Democratic Republic, the religious identities are embodied only in state-free cultural organizations, and in the heart of the individual human being. Likewise, in a Threefold Republic, the national identities would be embodied only in state-free 122 cultural organizations, and in the individual human psyche.) ***
pharaonic impulses arising from the blood “Napoleon appeared on the scenes and with him a stream of ancient Egyptian ‘Pharaoh-dom’ poured into European humanity. Impulses arising from the blood began to determine the destinies of nations. Through Napoleon's Egyptian campaign Europe learned to know the mummies and the Egyptian treasures of art, and soon afterwards—following the discoveries of Champollion—to read Egyptian hieroglyphics. A purely external culture, devoid of soul, tyrannized Europe.” —Ita Wegman, medical doctor and co-founder of anthroposophically-enhanced medicine, “On the Work of Michaël”, 1930 www.rsarchive.org/RelAuthors/WegmanIta/On_work_of_Michael.php ***
a humanizing cultural concept "Nationalism is not a political, but a cultural concept. Its fundamental purpose is to humanize..." —Mordecai M. Kaplan, rabbi, essayist, and educator, Judaism as a Civilization, 1934, quoted in Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn by Noam Pianko ***
the full use of individual liberty "The Thirty Years War was fought to make it clear to modern humanity that religion is a matter of free individual confession, and that I cannot depend on the entry of a cavalry patrol into my village whether or no I shall remain thereafter for my whole life long a Protestant or be obliged suddenly to become a Catholic, while the next day perhaps other riders will appear on the scene, and I shall have to change again and declare something else to be the one and only truth. In religious matters, mankind today understands this; in political [national], we are not yet so far advanced. Yet by the end of the present century we shall at long last be making this discovery; we shall awaken to the full use of individual liberty in these matters. Membership of one or another nationality will then be a matter of free choice and confession on the part of every individual. Dr. Steiner was a hundred years or more ahead of his time; in his memorandum all these and other things were contained." —Walter Johannes Stein, one of the teachers at the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart, Germany, Reminiscences of Life as an Aid to the Understanding of Our Time, 1936 ***
those who domineer over you "I did not start home till midnight, and walked with Charles Williams part of the way, when our converse turned on the difficulties of discovering what common factors if any existed in the notions associated with freedom, as used at present. I don't believe there are any, for the word has been so abused by propaganda that it has ceased to have any value for reason and become a mere emotional dose for generating heat. At most, it would seem to imply that those who domineer over you should speak (natively) the same language—which in the last resort is all that the confused ideas of race or nation boil down to." —J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters of JRRT, #84 (emphasis added), 1944 ***
phillip the fair “Where can we find the origin of the national states? Just as the centralized state* has its origin in the Anglo-Saxon countries, so also has the th national state its origin in one single place in Europe—and that is France. Nowhere else. Already in the 14 century under Phillip the Fair who enticed the pope to come to France, to Avignon and kept him there as a prisoner, who stamped out the great international organization of the Templar Knights, already at that time arose the idea of nationalism. This idea then developed under the various rulers of France…this is nothing but a national state coming into being which came to a remarkably great bloom under Louis the Fourteenth and which attempted under Napoleon the First to transform the whole of Europe into national states.” —Karl König, co-founder of Camphill Communities for persons with special needs, from an unpublished translation of “The Failure of New Social Endeavors: Meditative Images for a Deeper Understanding of Threefolding”, 1964 otherwise published in Becoming Human: A Social Task *(Author’s Note: ‘centralized state’ in this context means ‘mercantile state’— a government which is largely directed by commercial interests.) ***
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For humane wisdom’s perception of the deeper, hidden aspect of the National State entities, see my sandbox about “The National Jehovahs” at https://sites.google.com/site/teratosophy/national-jehovahs 105
the napoleonic idea “What were Woodrow Wilson’s intentions? He wanted one thing: somehow he had realized that the centralized state was finished and something else would have to take its place. And—without either realizing or intending it—he took up the Napoleonic idea of the national state. This was the worst thing imaginable, that nationalities should form states!” — Karl König, an unpublished translation of “The Historical Context of the Threefold Social Order”, 1964 from Becoming Human: A Social Task ***
conceiving a solution "As long as national independence and the sovereignty of the state...are equated, not even a theoretical solution of the problem of war is conceivable." —Hannah Arendt, American political theorist, Crises of the Republic, 1972 ***
a cultural nation “I suppose I'm a ‘cultural nationalist.’ I work first with my people, the traditional Lakota people, because we hold a common worldview and share an immediate struggle.” —Russell Means, American Indian leader, artist, and initiator of the Republic of Lakotah supersessionist impulse, 123 “For America to Live, Europe must Die”, 1980 www.dickshovel.com/Banks.html ***
imagining a worldview "A world view which in which there is a separation of nation and state can easily be imagined; but the twentieth century has been supportive of the position that national ideals should have outlets in the organizations of governments and states." —Monroe E. Price, American social theorist, Television, the Public Sphere, and National Identity, 1995 ***
separation of culture and politics "The most significant consequence of globalization is, for me at least, the possible separation of nation and state. Or it is perhaps the separation of nation and state which makes globalization possible. …This separation of nation and state is thus in part the separation of culture and politics. …So with the separation of nation and state, we see (around us, everywhere) the emancipation of cultural identity and the spread of transnational cultural communities (nations)." —Darren J. O'Byrne, British sociologist and human rights specialist, The Dimensions of Global Citizenship: Political Identity beyond the Nation-State, 2003 ***
nation but not a state “It is traditional…to distinguish nations from states—whereas a nation often consists of an ethnic or cultural community, a state is a political entity with a high degree of sovereignty. While many states are nations in some sense, there are many nations which are not fully sovereign states. As an example, the Native American Iroquois constitutes a nation but not a state, since they do not possess the requisite political authority over their internal or external affairs. If the members of the Iroquois nation were to strive to form a sovereign state in the effort to preserve their identity as a people, they would be exhibiting a state-focused nationalism." —Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2010 quoted by the Brown Berets for Chicano nationalism: www.nationalbrownberets.com/political_stance.html (Author’s Note: A clearer articulation of this would be: “It is traditional in political science—if not in everyday speech or in citizenship law—to distinguish the nation from the state (or government), and to distinguish nationality from citizenship. Whereas a nation (Greek ethnos) is a cultural community, a state or government (Greek politeia or kratos) is a political entity. While, in the modern nation-state system, all fully sovereign states are also nations (since all states now employ cultureshaping powers such as schools and national anthems), there are many nations (often called ‘ethnic groups’, ‘minorities’, or ‘indigenous peoples’) which are not states, or which are structurally melded into a subordinate political division of the national state, such as an Ethnic Autonomous Region, Devolved Government, or Indian Reservation. As an example, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) People constitute a national identity, but not a realized political state, since they do not possess the requisite exclusive police and military authority over a certain territory. If the members of the Iroquois cultural identity were to form a sovereign state in the effort to shield against the assimilatory effect of the American and Canadian nationstates, they, like the American and Canadian nations, would be exhibiting a state-focused nationalism.”) ***
americans confuse the terms “Americans—because of [their] peculiar historical circumstance—often confuse the terms state and nation…a state is a sovereign political entity…a nation is a group of people who share—or believe they share—a common culture, ethnic origin, language, historical experience, artifacts, and symbols.” 123
In the context of his speech, what Means names as ‘Europe’ is what humane wisdom calls ‘Mephistopheles’—not the authentic potential of European culture. 106
—Colin Woodard, American journalist, American Nations, 2011 ***
the raw people in cultural terms “By ‘people’ is meant something close to a nation in cultural rather than political terms: for example the Welsh or the Basques. That is to say, an identifiable group that enjoys or expresses or seeks a degree of autonomy from the nation-state it is otherwise supposed to be part of. The point is that, since the Treaty of Versailles nations can have an arbitrary status. Red lines in the desert delineate sheikdoms, for example. Many boundaries have been created or moved, as have whole peoples. If there is to be a choir of cultures, the point at which a people feels itself to be one needs to be identified, but not in strident, political terms. Deeper yet, recent history has seen peoples lost beneath all manner of ideological overlays or, on first release from oppression, referring to some ancient image of themselves. What is meant here, however, is the raw people, especially as defined by the future they see for themselves.” —Christopher Houghton Budd, English economic historian, Finance at the Threshold: Rethinking the Real and Financial Economies, 2011 ***
the community is the ideal, rather than the political entity 124
“On the national social-political level, Sophia’s inspiration is working to transform the state into a community. The community of Italy, the community of France, etc., is the ideal for the future, rather than the political entity of the state representing (or misrepresenting) the people.” —Robert Powell, American astrosopher, “The Present World Situation and the Rose of the World” http://sophiafoundation.org/articles/ ***
we do constitute a nation “We Eskimo are an international community sharing common language, culture, and a common land along the Arctic coast of Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Although not a nation-state, as a people, we do constitute a nation.” —“ICC’s Beginning”, from the Inuit Circumpolar Council in Alaska www.iccalaska.org/servlet/content/the_beginning.html ***
in the place of the divine “Particularly notions like the unity of state and nation serve to transcend the material political structures and are, as such, reminiscent of the prestate unity with God. They have been put in the place of the divine. …The nation-state is a centralized state with quasi-divine attributes that has completely disarmed society and monopolized the use of force.” —Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the Kurdish Worker’s Party, “The Nation-State Can Never be a Solution”, 2013 www.pkkonline.com/en/index.php?sys=article&artID=204 ***
not dissimilar to the separation of church and state "The separation of nation and state, conceived of along lines not dissimilar to the separation of church and state will allow the flourishing and coexistence of multiple nationalities." —Ariella Azoulay, Israeli cultural theorist, & Adi Ophir, Israeli philosopher, The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine, 2013 *** So speaks a collage of voices for a separation of powers which has hardly been conceived by any political scientist or statesman, but which is crucial to repairing humanity’s world. This chapter describes how to enact the separation of nation and state. ***
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Sophia is wisdom as a persona. 107
perceiving the nation and the state unpacking the national flags When viewing the Threefold America flag-page later in this book, or flipping through Book Two, see those little flags in the lower right-hand corner of the trisected flag sheets? Those are the National Flags. Presently, everything is packed into those flags: the gas stations and car dealerships fly 125 the same flag (though bigger!) as government agencies. The public kindergartens pledge allegiance to the same spiritual symbol which flies over the military base in Guantanamo. This whole book is about ‘unpacking’ the national flags and all that’s stuffed within them…so that not everything in life is packed into the National State and its National Economy. We will no longer worship the National State Gods.
defining ‘nation’ and ‘state’ In the trisector sociology, ‘national’ always means ‘national-cultural’—an entirely non-governmental, non-commercial cultural identity. Although in English we often use the words ‘nation’ and ‘government’ as synonyms, in political science, the word ‘nation’ refers to the cultural identity of a 126 country, while ‘government’ or ‘state’ refers to the political identity of a country. ‘Nationality’ is distinguished from ‘citizenship.’ Since the American nation was birthed at the same time as the American government, we Americans have an especially hard time perceiving the difference between the two words. Also, since we in America call our political subdivisions ‘states’, we’re not used to the original political scientific 127 meaning of the word ‘State’ to mean ‘the government, the polity.’ What we call the ‘Federal Government’ is also a National State. And the word ‘people’ is sometimes a stylistic synonym for the word ‘nation.’ ‘People’ is often preferred by those nationalities which are republican 128 (anti-monarchist) in form, such as France and America, and also by indigenous nationalities such as the Saami People or Lakota People.
bolivia—the bearer of the word plurinational The word ‘plurinational’ means “many-cultured.” In a Threefold Republic, the cultural sector becomes plurinational. The word has entered the world stage through the “Plurinational State of Bolivia,” which formally changed its name from the “Republic of Bolivia” in 2009. From a structural perspective, Bolivia is still just a multi-ethnic nation-state. There can be no true plurinational space without the separation of nation and state. This brings cultural independence for all indigenous and aspirant peoples, yet retains the civic nation as a voluntary cultural identity.
outgrowing the nation-state Accreting to the power of an existing state, or wresting one’s own state out of the teeth of the nation-state system, is just about the only way humanity knows to (seemingly) protect our cultures. Yet bowing to, or forming, a nation-state rigidifies, politicizes, and sickens the authentic wellsprings of each culture, and brings harm to humanity. The desire for a national culture to become a nation-state is R.U.S.T.—residual, unresolved, statist tendencies. Humanity’s world doesn’t need another nation-state or ethno-political region. To be in tune with reality-grounded sociological principles, a national culture would explicitly set aside the right to form a Nation-State or National Economy. Likewise, such a culture would shelve the right to form a culture-based Political Administrative Division, such as an Autonomous Region, Devolved Government, or Governmentalized Indigenous Reservation. And those national cultures who are presently fused with a governmental body would aspire to take steps to disentangle their cultural identity from any political state. The shelving of the dubious ‘national right of political self-determination’ would open the door for the possibility of the ‘national right of cultural independence.’ If the mainstream will not change, then individual human beings of those nationalities would be welcome to form fresh 129 embodiments of our national cultures, in free competition with the governmentalized, nation-statist faction. 125
This is the conservative version of flag desecration, since the national flag is not supposed to be used to sell stuff. Instead of prematurely spiritualizing the flag through fire, our conservatives commoditize the flag, dragging it into the earth. I’m usually not one to quote the National Law, yet the US Flag Code passed by Congress in 1942 states: “The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. ...The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing.” 126
This is not referring to how US law arbitrarily employs the word ‘nationality’ to refer to the quasi-citizen status of the inhabitants of the US Territory of American Samoa, who are said to be ‘US nationals’ but not ‘US citizens’, which is an eccentric use of the word. Otherwise, in regard to international citizenship law, the words ‘nationality’ and ‘citizenship’ are legally synonymous. This shows how thoroughly fused the national-state idea is in the mind of humanity. 127
A note to British readers, and others from parliamentary social organisms: this book uses the word ‘Government’ in the American sense of the word, as a synonym for ‘the State, the Polity’; not in the British sense of ‘government’ being a temporary formation of an Executive Branch by a partisan faction of Parliament. 128
The word ‘people’ serves as double duty in trisector social science. Besides being a republican or indigenous synonym for ‘cultural nation’, it is also the word for the Demos...the entire body of citizenry...the constituency of the political-rights sector. Presently, those two ‘peoples’ are conceptually and structurally fused. “The British Nation...the German People...the inhabitant of the Russian Earth (I purposely distinguish them just in this way)...” —Rudolf Steiner, “The Fundamental Social Demands of Our Times” http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA186/English/C52/19181215p01.html
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isn’t this nationalism? When first exposed to the idea of the separation of nation and state, some feel that any talk of re-enlivening the national cultures is ‘nationalism.’ Yet state-free plurinational culture is really the exact opposite of statist nationalism. The ones, often liberals, who cry ‘Nationalism!’ don’t see that their own rootless, postmodern cosmopolitanism is really a predictable, semi-conscious reaction to their own upbringing in the Americanist governmentalized, socialized, consumerized, nationalized environment. Their own ‘post-national’, ‘multicultural-flavored’ identity is simply the liberal version of Americanist nationalism. The separation of nation and state would provide conditions for human beings to unfold as culturally rooted, transmodern cosmopolitans. “Even when you say you are `nothing but a human being,' even the fact that you have become such a personality you owe to the spirits of your communities.” —Rudolf Steiner, “The Guardian of the Doorway” The Way of Initiation: How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA010/English/RSPC1947/GA010_c09.html
wisdom traditions versus the nation-state idea—a knock-out fight? As an indication of the strength with which the National State Idea grips the mind of humanity, compared to other culture-shaping forces, consider: how many individuals during the world war-nightmares really enacted a familial love for their fellow religionists who lived in a different national state? Humanity in those districts, on both side of the Atlantic, had been nominally Christian for a long time. Germany and England were the heartland of the Protestant Reformation. Yet our grandparents’ experience proved that beneath the flowery words, the Brotherhood of Man was mostly a grim jest...a sick joke. Which force steered humanity’s actions more—the power of the supposed spiritual fellowship, or the force of the National Government and its attached sentiment? What difference did these cultural identities make when the war came? There are several social organisms which still have a state Protestant church—either Lutheran or Anglican. And there are many country-sized human communities which have been almost entirely Catholic for over a thousand years. Yet what difference does it make in the hard matters of national security and national economy? (Liberals might be glad for the Western religious examples, but the same questions could be asked of Buddhism, or of Secular Humanism.) Emerson says “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” Organizations and their institutional mindset continue, to some greater or lesser degree, to be shaped by the founding thoughts. How are the brutally Orthodox Tsarist and Chetnik episodes, the super-Catholic Ustashe and Franco Carlist episodes, and the shark-like Junker and Neocon episodes of the Century of Nightmare not indications of the limits of the tired souls 130 of Andrew, Peter, and Luther when faced with the National State beast and the ‘given’, ‘unquestionable’ concepts out of which it is formed? If our Orthodox Humanity, Catholic Humanity, or Protestant Humanity...or Masonic Humanity...or Buddhist Humanity already had the concepts and will for civilizational renewal, half the world would’ve been a eutopia already—a Kingdom of Heaven in Earth, a Pure Land, or a Brotherhood of 131 Man. Or were we waiting for someone to do it for us? Even the recovery movement, which is one of the most healthy expressions of state-free, commercial-free culture, has been stumbled by the nation-state matrix. Recently, one of these global fellowships punished and sued one of its local “zones” for distributing recovery literature. Even though one of the foundational concepts is that the fellowship “shall never perform any acts of government.” The reason: there was only supposed to be one fellowship “zone” for each nation-state—yet there are two competing, territorially overlapping “zones” in the Mexican nation-state. So the global fellowship decided to squelch one of the two “zonal” service bodies, and put them out of the business of “illegally” distributing literature. Yet this same worldwide fellowship itself violates its own “one zone per nation-state”—a single zone covers both the U.S. and Canada! So “lumping” is okay, but not “splitting”? If there can be two political jurisdictions within one recovery zone, then it ought to be okay for there to be two (overlapping) recovery zones within one political jurisdiction.
the grip of governmentalized national culture I invite the reader to bring to mind what cultural identities or organizations of which you are a member or participant, or which have shaped your life growing up. This includes religious denominations, sports fandom, political parties, civic fraternities, school clubs, youth groups, hobbies, and subcultures. Now consider their equivalent in other countries. Whatever I feel an affinity for, there are probably at least a few human beings
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Some friends and I in Columbia County have initiated such an effort on a small scale—the Movement for the Renewal of National Culture: https://sites.google.com/site/4nationalculturalrenewal 130
...and Henry VIII (the man who cast the shape of the Anglican/Episcopal worldview), and John Calvin (who cast the Reformed and Puritan/Congregationalist worldview), John Knox (the caster of the Presbyterian worldview), John Wesley (caster of the Methodist worldview), and John Smyth (a caster of the Baptist worldview). Much of the American leadership during the Century of Nightmare was shaped by one of these cultural impulses. 131
The ongoing Sri Lankan ‘nightmare state’ (the world’s only officially Buddhist civic nation, which has wielded the state apparatus toward exterminating the nonBuddhist Tamil community) and Myanmar (a deeply militarized, automatonized society which is a great supporter of State Buddhism, and which has stripped the citizenship of the Rohingya ethno-national community because they are Muslim) are indications of the limitations of the Buddha Dharma as it exists. It will require thought and individuation to realize the Pure Land. The sheepish, consumerized condition of British and American Humanity is an indication of the limitiation of the Anglo-American fraternal tradition, as it exists. The Western brotherhoods, whether they be American Legion, Jaycees, Kiwanis, Lions, Moose, Odd Fellows, Rotary, Ruritan, Shriners, or Woodmen of the World, though they do some notable good, are not going to, alone, bring the necessary tenor of fellowship. 109
interested in that within most every national state on every continent. There are Scouting organizations in Iran and China. There are Rotarians and YMCAs throughout the world. There are at least a few Christians, Wikipedia editors, and NBA enthusiasts in nearly every country. Then I asked myself: do I really enact loving interest in individuals who are born into other national branches of humanity—even with those individuals with whom I would potentially have some shared personal affinities? How strong is this interest compared to the force with which I am shaped by the national government, with its schools and its national border patrol? Even if I feel some affinity for individuals who come from another national state, how does this translate into action? How many American nationals value the life of one Iranian or Mexican—even one who shares some similar cultural experiences, hobbies, and interests—more than we value doing whatever the National Government tells us to do, or passively paying that entity to do what it does? I mean value as a peer or potential peer—not as a charity case. I remember how I felt when the U.S. migration police entered the bus I was on, as I was travelling through the Southwest. These national police went seat by seat looking for Mexicans. One man behind me was quietly taken away. I didn’t say anything. Even as a U.S. citizen, I was afraid that if I said even one word, I’d be taken by the black hole too, and wouldn’t get to where I thought I needed to be. Though I haven’t done much yet to help human beings who are stuck in other nation-state boxes, and I, like each individual, choose which wounded neighbors to stop for on this bandit-infested Jericho Road, I’m grateful I have gotten to traverse such steps in life where I can honestly say that I hold an affinity for certain fellows and dear friends from other nationalities—admittedly, beginning with those who at least partially share my way and perspective of life—which trumps my interest in, and obedience to, the National Law. “I believe in the principle declared at Nuremberg in 1945: ‘Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.’” —Edward Snowden
government school boards—the arms of the national-state god In 1995, the cultural head of the Tibetan nation-in-exile designated a six year old boy to be the Panchen Lama, the penultimate cultural role in that nation. Three days later, the boy disappeared. In his place, the Chinese National Government appointed its own Panchen Lama. Nyima is presumably in the fold of the Chinese State. Human rights bodies have repeatedly asked for independent verification of the well-being of Nyima, who would now be a young man of 25 years. While the Chinese Government and People are to be commended if Nyima has not been permanently ‘disappeared’, we can be sure that Nyima, if he is alive, received a very thorough Chinese public education. "Gedhun Choekyi Nyima is a perfectly ordinary Tibetan boy, in an excellent state of health, leading a normal, happy life and receiving a good education and cultural upbringing. He is currently in upper secondary school, he measures 165 cm in height and is easy-going by nature. He studies hard and his school results are very good. He likes Chinese traditional culture and has recently taken up calligraphy. His parents are both State employees, and his brothers and sisters are either already working or at university. The allegation that he disappeared together with his parents and that his whereabouts remain unknown is simply not true." —A statement issued by the Chinese national government (emphasis added), 2007 132 Nyima would’ve been an 18 year old at the time.
A picture of humanity before being shaped by governmentalized pedagogy. We are all Nyima. We are each a sage and prince or princess, who, at a certain point in our life, were taken and shaped by national governmental powers. Even if we entered a family lineage which could afford a private school, we still grow up in a national state culture. We are all political prisoners in the unlawful custody of the nation-state system. Our true selves stepped down into this world with the vow to transmute the prison into an earthly paradise and home city—not to be trained as model prisoners and jailers ourselves. If you’re an American and you doubt the pervasiveness of governmentalized culture (statist nationalism), look no further than the Local School Board. Local School Boards are the most pervasive manifestation of the National-Statist Force. Local School Boards are distinct governments which 132
For a recent statement (April 2014) about Nyima from the Tibetan administration-in-exile, see: http://tibet.net/2014/04/25/the-statement-of-sikyong-dr-lobsangsangay-on-the-twenty-fifth-birthday-of-the-11th-kunzik-panchen-gedun-choekyi-nyima 110
are chartered by the fifty State Governments (which are themselves organizational branches of the National Government; evinced by the fact that the national flag flies over government/public schools and there is a pledge of allegiance to that symbol). Though of course the administrators are usually well-meaning as individuals, the Local School Boards are not really devoted to ensuring that all the families in their cultural service area have the choice to receive the vast array of possible pedagogical options, including non-secular, non-Americanist options. Rather, Local School Boards are structurally monopolized by the American Governmental High Schools and their feeder schools. The Boards and the Governmental/Nationalized Schools are the same thing. Now, as an experiment, I wonder what would happen if you or I went to our Local School Board meeting and proposed to make a cultural immersion school—a kindergarten or elementary school which was entirely in a non-English language...not even a language which raises alarm flags or pre-judgment in the Anglo-American mind, but an innocuous language like Scottish Gaelic. Sure, that might fly—there are already 133 Cherokee, Chinese, French, Greek, Hebrew, O’odham (Pima), Shoshone, and Spanish-language charter government schools in the US. But furthermore, we proposed that this primary school would fly a different cultural flag—say, the Scottish flag or the Cherokee, Chinese, Greek, Israeli, Mexican, Spanish, or French flag—instead of the American national flag...and that the school’s curriculum follow the curriculum of another nation’s school system...with portraits of their cultural leaders displayed in the classroom instead of George Washington...so that the children would really be immersed in that national identity instead of the American national identity...and, most importantly from a practical standpoint, that we and other guardians of school-age citizens ought to be free to spend their child’s portion of the School Board tax monies at our school. What would happen? I haven’t tried it yet, but I suspect that people would, at best, ignore us or think we’re crazy. Conservative Americanists might say: “this is an English-speaking country, one nation under God” or “English is the most economically advantageous language...we cannot allow you to economically handicap any children, including your own, by not immersing them in American English”, while liberal/progressive Americanists might say “government funds should only go to government-owned schools” or “cultural diversity is nice, and you’re welcome to have a little bit of nice ‘multicultural’ ethnic flavor sprinkled into your child’s school-day, but culture and language have been the source of so much conflict. They’re 134 divisive. We prefer that everyone was assimilated into the secular, liberal American civic culture.” The most open-minded ones might say: “if you 133
To name only a few of many: Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion School (Massachussetts), New York French-American Charter School, Hellenic Classical Charter School (NYC; a US government school in which five of the teachers’ salaries are paid by the Greek national government!), Ben Gamla Charter School (Hebrewlanguage, in Florida), and International Spanish Language Academy (Minnesota). The Shoshone-language government school voices one of the bureaucratic difficulties: “Being a public school brings challenges. One of which is finding teachers. Certified as teachers, as well as fluent in the language, this has been one of the challenges of many of these school based programs...Chief Tahgee must have state-licensed teachers just like any other public school. They have four teachers now but only one, Rose Ann Abrahamson, speaks Shoshone. She’s teaching the only immersion class this year. The other three classes, combination first and second grade, third and fourth grade, and fifth and sixth grade do most of their work in English with daily Shoshone lessons.” —“Idaho’s First Public Native American Language School Works To Preserve Shoshone Culture” http://boisestatepublicradio.org/post/idaho-s-first-public-native-american-language-school-works-preserve-shoshone-culture If language transmission is really the priority, then might as well have three Shoshone speakers and one professional teacher. I mean, come on, there are only a few thousand Shoshones in the whole world. What bureaucratic mind would delay language transmission because there aren’t yet enough Shoshones with four-year education degrees? And the O’odham (Pima) Nation experiences that much of the budget and time of their government charter school is spent navigating red tape: “Bureau of Indian Affairs Line Officer Jim Hastings, whose school oversight area covers the southern part of Arizona where the reservation lies, said the administrative responsibilities for the school are complex. For example, accounting for the BIE-funded K–2 grades must be kept separate from the state-funded Grades 3–5. "They don't include any other grades or any other activities other than the ones funded by the BIE.” Regarding standardized tests, the BIE requires a Northwest Evaluation Association testing regimen that is not required for the grades under the state charter. Managing the school takes advanced skills and the ability to handle "an enormous amount of work," Hastings said.” —“Charter School Blooms for Indian Students in Arizona Desert” www.charterschoolcenter.org/newsletter/january-2013-charter-school-blooms-indian-students-arizona-desert For those governmentalist reasons, most indigenous American Indian language-immersion schools are private schools, funded directly by parents. 134
In a recent visit, the American head of nation scolded the British People, saying that towns in Northern Ireland will remain divided “if Catholics have their schools...and Protestants have theirs” and that this “encourages division and discourages cooperation." A Catholic newspaper reported this speech is “an alarming call for an end to Catholic education in Northern Ireland.” I wrote to the Department of Education of Northern Ireland (DE) and to the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools (CCMS) and asked how the Catholic schools are funded. The Chief Executive of the CCMS responded: ‘CCMS is a Non-Public Departmental Body (NPDB) funded by the Department of Education.’ The DE affirmed that: “Yes, both controlled and maintained schools receive government funding...All such schools receive a fully delegated recurrent budget.” I also asked whether parents who send a child to a Catholic school pay the same taxes as parents who send child to a Controlled School. To which the executive responded: “Personal tax is not related to any particularly public service so all taxes are treated on a similar basis.” The indicative thing is that Catholic schools are called ‘non-public’ and ‘public’ in the same breath. Basically, for symbolism’s sake, they’re not called ‘public’, but are funded and therefore directed by the government as if they were public schools. This obscure languaging is evidence of the fusion of government and culture. From a systems perspective they’re both Government Schools, and are both functionally organs of the British Department for Education. The difference in terminlogy is merely symbolic. (The footnote continues on the next page.) 111
can endure slogging through years of lobbying and red tape, you might succeed in making a charter school, otherwise go start your own private 135 school, with your own money.” I ask: instead of forever continuing to build up the government’s monopoly on the art of education, why can’t a few like-minded families in my area of New York find a vibrant person who is a professional elementary school teacher, and who is willing to teach in a home-based schoolhouse, and give them the $18,000 in tuition which the government is spending per child per year? Statists might say: ‘Well, if the government’s money is going to that, then we’ll need to have constant government testing to make sure the teacher is doing it right. We don’t want to spend money on any school which won’t socialize the children.’ My response is: Why not leave the perception of the quality of education to the parents? If the teacher and school aren’t satisfactory, the parents would be free to hire a different teacher, or to send their child (along with their tuition subsidy) to any of the dozens or hundreds of schools of all shapes, sizes, and philosophies which would bloom in every locality which had a Free Pedagogical Organism instead of a State School System.
The situation in Northern Ireland is this: in the 1920s, the Protestant church schools (Presbyterian, Anglican, and Methodist) willingly transferred themselves to the Government, with the agreement that the Protestant churches would continue to appoint 4 of 9 board members for these now government schools. On the other hand, there is a Catholic school system...which likewise receives its entire budget from the Government. It will be a surprise to Americans to hear that the Catholic schools are not privately funded through tuition like the Catholic schools in the US. The historically Protestant schools are called ‘Controlled Schools’ (because they’re completely controlled by the government) and the Catholic schools are called ‘Maintained Schools.’ Students arereportedly free to attend either, regardless of their religion or non-religion. The ‘NPDB’ which the Catholic Schools Executive referred to is what civil society advocates call a GONGO—a “Government-Operated Non-Governmental Organization.” Even if an NGO isn’t formally a part of the State, and is called ‘non-public’, if its funding is entirely, or mostly, from the State, then it has accreted to the governmental culture or spirit. Governmentalized culture is inherently unhealthy. In this age, no state school is really Christian in spirit...it’s a Caesarian school with Christianish words and flavoring. It’s “Catholic education” in name and flavor only—unless Primer Minister David Cameron is the pope. But many religions love state support, because it gives them the illusion of importance and security by being tied to Caesar’s spectacle and might, instead of standing on their own feet in a free spiritual-cultural sector. The situation in Northern Ireland is not only a fusion of education and state (as in the US), but also a fusion of religion and state. Americans—especially our liberals/progressives—can easily perceive the sickness in the latter fusion, while few—mostly among the libertarian wing of our conservatives—are yet able to perceive the sickness in the former fusion. From the perspective of Social Trisecting, the unhealthiness is not that there are Catholic schools and quasi-Protestant schools, but that these cultural identities are structurally fused with, and locked into, the Government. And other educational philosophies, except for the most secular, conventional, gray, dreary, pre-chewed philosophies, are not allowed to penetrate. So now there are some liberal ‘integrated’ schools in Northern Ireland too. That’s the most that the American Chief is asking for: that a semi-apartheid, semi-religious government school system become like the American civic nationalist, corporatist government school system. ...And hardly anyone perceives the fusion of nation and state. The Northern Ireland Executive, with its Department of Education, is an organ of the British national government, and so the atmosphere in all government schools in Northern Ireland is overtly or subtly shaped by that fact, even if there are Irish language classes in a (British national-state) Catholic school. With the separation of nation and state, the republican Irish national-cultural organization would be free to actually offer Irish national schools throughout the island, perhaps beginning with nurseries and kindergartens. These cultural initiatives would fly the Irish tricolor flag. And vice versa: the British NCO—and a newly independent Royal Irish NCO and Ulster-Scots NCO—would be free to offer British, Royal Irish, and Ulster-Scots national schools throughout the island, to serve any family who was interested. And the Individual Pedagogical Subsidy could be spent at entirely non-national schools, such as the Steiner school in the County Down, or the many Independent Christian Schools in the island. I asked the Board of Education about those schools, and the response is: “The Rudolph Steiner school in Holywood is an Independent school and as such does not receive public funding. Further information on the list of Independent schools and guidance notes for their establishment, are detailed on the DE website.” I looked at the ‘guidance notes’ and they are a pile of red tape which the Independent Schools are compelled to submit to the National Government. Can you honestly say that the Government Schools in Northern Ireland are so much better than the Steiner School that they deserve to be fully-funded, but the Steiner School has to scrounge for money from the parents (and thus, by necessity, becomes an economically exclusive, hoity-toity environment), just because the Waldorf Schools, unlike the Catholic and historically Protestant schools, practice refusing to completely bow to governmentalized pedagogy? It feels to me like it’s not about quality, but about control. At least the Northern Ireland Executive calls the government schools by their true name: ‘Controlled Schools.’ 135
The charter school movement could be a step in the direction of a free pedagogical organism. Yet the charter school impulse is still trapped in governmentalization and commodification. Every charter school still has to be officially atheistic. And children are referred to as ‘market shares.’ Nor are parents fully empowered to send their child to whichever school meets their family’s conscience. Rather, there are often lotteries to see which random child will, by chance, get to escape to the quasigovernmentalized/quasi-privatized charter schools instead of lingering in the fully governmentalized school prisons to which they are compelled by law to go. According to the NY City Charter School Center, for the 2013-14 school year an estimated 69,000 students applied for about 18,600 open seats in NYC charter schools. In a truly free educational organism, all ‘educational rights monies’ would be divided equally among every school age citizen in the school district, and issued as an earmarked tuition coupon which could be redeemed at any school, including spiritual-based schools. Whichever schools satisfy the children and their guardians, would have the direct and immediate means to build new classroom space. Sick schools would close, because parents wouldn’t send their children there. Yet other schools would quickly open or expand, because the child and their pedagogical subsidy would be going to some school. Teachers at a closing school could find work in their profession at another school, or as a private home school teacher—where they’d receive the earmarked coupon directly from the parents. There’d be a lot more job opportunities for teachers. 112
The independent, global Quaker school system, Montessori school system, and Waldorf School system have raised several generations of satisfied, happy, grateful people—without government direction or micromanagement, and often at less cost than a government school. Well-meaning, hard-working government teachers would say: ‘Oh, but our government schools take in the worst students. You just have the elite.’ My response is: you don’t get a medal for serving a captive audience. The national law compels children to go to the government school to which their residential address is tied. Your government schools prosecute parents for trying to send their child to a slightly better government school which is not in their assigned governmental school district. Government schools were a good thing in the 1800s. The American public school system, which was modeled on the Prussian German school system, released the grip which the religious schools had on society, and also pushed away the thenprevalent practice of child labor, since the child had to be in school instead of in the factory. Yet a good which outlives its time becomes an evil. As independent schools which receive no state funding (and who don’t want state funding if it means having to bow to the pervasive bureaucratic 136 137 philosophy of education), our Waldorf schools have to have some way to economically survive, and yes, that does mean that our schools need tuition, which does currently limit the universality of our educational offerings, because many families live from paycheck to paycheck. The necessary $10,000 to $20,000 in yearly tuition is simply not going to be workable. Yet if we could find a feasible way—such as through the Individual Tuition Subsidy described in this book—most independent schools would be glad 138 to accept the full range of humanity. Waldorf schools, at least, are not really meant to be exclusive, upper class prep schools. The first Waldorf school was initiated by factory workers for their children. Many of our Waldorf teachers have much experience and training in serving children in need of special care of the soul. We’d be glad to offer a Waldorf School in every city and county in the country, and in every village and 139 neighborhood throughout humanity’s world. Statists might say: “But Waldorf Schools have an element of spirituality. No government money should go to spirituality.” My response is: the rights governance itself ought to be secular and universally human; that is a gift that Thomas Jefferson and America brought into the world—but that doesn’t mean that everything in life is supposed to be forcibly agnosticized. Since the government owns most of the schools in America, and since children are legally compelled to attend them, and since most parents in this society cannot economically afford to send the child to a nongovernmental school, it means that the liberal statists are using the economic desperation of the American populace to forcibly shape most of the populace into the Americanist shape...the shape of agnostic, socialized consumers. Statists might also say: “Well, if the child is going to a private school, then you must be rich, so you deserve to pay twice.” My response is: Besides the fact that many private school families are simply middle-income or blue collar people who work two or three jobs just so that the inner world
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There are several US state Waldorf Method chartered government schools—especially in a nexus in Sonoma, Marin, and Mendocino counties in central California, where there are eight schools centered on the new Credo High School. There is a rift in the Waldorf movement between the Egalitarian/Statist Waldorf-Inspired schools and the Privatist/Oligarchic Waldorf Schools. Those two gestures are embodied in two organizations: The Alliance for Public Waldorf Education and the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America. In the Corporate State, the rift between the two approaches is hardly avoidable. The statist Waldorf-Inspired schools sacrifice the deeper spirituality and philosophy which actually formed the Waldorf Method in exchange for a much wider reach— a reach which does provide a meaningful education to many children. The privatist Waldorf Schools do protect the Waldorf Impulse from creeping Statism and Bureaucracy. Private Waldorf teachers and administrators are aware of the desolating intrusion of the state apparatus into the nestling atmosphere of the classroom, such as through government testing. Yet there is not as yet a similar awareness of how the quality and potential of the classroom is affected by unspoken ‘given’ that only those children of family lineages which have a position in the industrial society which affords them the economic possibility of attending are actually there in the classroom. Yet some private Waldorf Schools have been experimenting with ways to make the school economically open to all; for example, the Accessible-to-All (ATA) Tuition Approach voiced by the Institute for Social Renewal in California: http://socialrenewal.com/what-we-do One way of uprooting economic, blood-based aristocratism at the organizational level, would be for a school to refuse to accept any tuition monies which pay for the education of one’s own child. Instead, the school would only accept monies which are earmarked for sponsoring the child of another family lineage. Instead of ‘parent-customers’ there would be pedagogical godparents or sponsors. And every child’s suitability for enrollment would be decided before money enters into it. The only considerations would be whether the faculty feel qualified to adequately teach that particular student (with their individual needs), and whether there is enough physical space in the school building to seat another student. Even if the parents only gave 3 cents, the child would be admitted. Couple this with outreach in ‘unexpected’ venues, such as among materially poor neighborhoods, among conservative or evangelical Christians, and among non-Christian communities, and a Waldorf School would become a sacramental impulse. Of course there are any number of hindrances to enacting that, such as how it is often the parents themselves who initiate the school (which is a good thing, but which is of course tied into service of their own child)...and how many parents are more comfortable with the prevalent fee-based privatist culture...and the expectations for any ‘private’ school to be a tony Ivy League prep school...plus the seeming scarcity of income and capital. Yet the Waldorf impulse was originally meant to be a secular Christian and spiritual Humanist impulse in the most radical sense of those words. Instead of, or alongside, the governmentalist stream and privatist stream, there would be a stream where teaching is a literally a sacrament which cannot be bought or sold. 137
I don’t speak for any Waldorf School—the closest I’ve come to serving a Waldorf School is in the role of janitor. And I told a story once at a Waldorf homeschool.
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The Waldorf Movement has been wounded by the fact that in many places, the Waldorf school is the only, or best, or most affordable private school alternative in the area. And so even our most hard-nosed rationalists want to send their kids there, but then discover that—even though the schools are not there to promote a particular worldview or philosophy—there is actually a spiritual way of life out of which the beautiful Waldorf art of education arises...and then the rationalist parents freak out, and hate Waldorf. For Waldorf’s sake, it would be better if there were other kinds of secular private schools available to serve that segment, such as Democracy Schools. 139
If you would like to know more possibilities, see Gary Lamb’s books: The Social Mission of Waldorf Education: Independent, Privately Funded, Accessible to All and Wellsprings of the Spirit: Free Human Beings as the Source of Social Renewal. 113
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of their children won’t have to be tread on by a government school, such a statist view also assumes that ‘poor people’ somehow secretly like sending their children to nationalized-governmentalized schools. Do you think that these family lineages have survived and endured long ages without holding the potential for wisdom? I’d gladly pay taxes if the funds were going to Individual Pedagogical Subsidies for every child-citizen, regardless of the worldview of the family. I’d be happy for children to be going to schools of the family’s own free conscience, even if it be a spiritual view or philosophy very different from my own—especially within the context of the other societal features which the Threefold Republic 141 would bring. I’m all for an independent Southern Baptist school organism in America, an Islamic madrasa school organism, a Mormon school organism, a Sierra Club-sponsored ecological school organism, a Dalai Lama-sponsored Buddhist school organism...and a non-governmental atheist (‘secular’) American national(ist) school system which pledges allegiance to One Nation Under God—where the word ‘God’ can pretty much only be spoken in the context of pledging loyalty to the National Flag. As it stands now, the latter philosophy has a government-mandated, monopolized grip on how human souls unfold in this nation-state box. Citizens who are not willing for their child to be immersed for eight hours a day in a government agency which flies the national flag, which assumes American English as the government-mandated cultural matrix, and which requires secularist materialism as the unspoken worldview of the teaching staff, are double taxed. These families pay taxes (tuition) for the government school which their family doesn’t even go to, and also pay tuition for the private school or for homeschool materials. The government school system is similar to how the medieval Islamic religious states (though they were relatively pluralistic compared to most medieval Christian states) charged non-Muslims an extra tax. This economic pressure was a big lever whereby the populace was gradually assimilated to the State’s regimented culture. That’s another thing that Americanism and statist Islamicism have in common—the ‘unquestionable’ use of the governmental power of taxation to shape the culture of the individual. This is the Traditional Hopi view of government (public) schools: “Just as predicted, the Bahanna (whiteman) Government came to Hopi land with good intentions. Armed with a proposal of education for the children, with promises of many good things for the Hopi and for their children's future. After meeting over it, leaders from all the villages rejected the education, saying: Bahanna school is not good. It will not fit into their needs or blend with their religious ceremonials. That they will teach their children their own ways, as in the past. “The religious leaders foresaw it as trickery devised to destroy the minds of children. They foresaw the danger that the children would lose their traditional culture and identity. Lose even their language and become the tool of the Government. They foresaw that they would destroy themselves and lose the Hopi way of life. “The government wanted all of the Hopi children to be put into schools. They said it would do us good, but we knew that this ‘good’ would only be on the surface, and that what was under it would destroy the Hopi cultural life. “Maybe they thought that with an education the children might be able to help the old people, but we knew this would not be so, because they would learn to think as white men, so they would never help the old people. Instead they would be indoctrinated and encouraged to turn against us, as they are actually doing today. So in order to be good according to the Great Spirit’s instructions we refused to put our children into the schools. “So almost every week they would send policemen, many of them. They would surround the village and hunt for the children of school age. We could not be happy because we were expecting trouble every day. Fathers who refused to cooperate were arrested and imprisoned. Inhuman acts were imposed upon us, starvation, insults and humiliation, to force us into submission. “Still, over half of the clan leaders and religious society leaders refused to accept anything from the government. Because of this we were mocked and treated as outcasts by those who had already submitted. “The Bahanna system is destroying what was once beautiful and good. Our children are induced into bahanna activities through the efforts of the United States Government, its school system and its so-called ‘Hopi Tribal Council.’ Children are forced to spend much of their time in schools where their only chance for fun is in such activities. Before long they seem to know nothing else. Then they are easily encouraged to join night ballgames, which have taken a great toll, as well as Bahanna dances and other programs. As a result, most of our children who are old enough to participate in ceremonies have lost interest. They have been taken from our hands by this foreign system and deprived of their chance to grow in their understanding of the sacred ways which have brought us prosperity and peace for countless centuries.” —from Techqua Ikachi issues #36 and #4, and Dan Katchongva’s Hopi Prophecies: http://www.jnanadana.org/hopi/techqua_ikachi_i.html 140
Compelling humanity to be raised in a government agency plays a role in outbreaks of radical evil. That’s only one factor, but it is a factor. If you want to know more, see my sandbox entitled “Snapped” at https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/snapped 141
There was an Arabic-language charter government school in Maryland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarek_ibn_Ziyad_Academy), which was sponsored by a religious organization. Predictably, the liberal ACLU pounced on that. Since it is the ACLU’s legitimate mission to defend against the State using its powers of compulsion to overtly or subtly impart a religious worldview into any citizen, and since, presently, it is a ‘given’ that the government has a near-monoply on education, so that most children are raised inside government agencies, it is logical that the ACLU had the school shut down. Yet I wonder when the ACLU will as righteously and vigorously stand for the civil liberty of universal school choice. Or is the goal of the ACLU to make sure that all children, except for the children of materially wealthy lineages, are raised in agnostic State agencies? 114
The 19 Hopi men who were arrested in Hopiland in 1894 and transported to California, where they were imprisoned on Alcatraz Island for nearly a year for refusing to send Hopi children to American government schools. The U.S. agent who arrested these men reported: "They said for themselves that they do not want to follow the Washington path; that they do not want their children to go to school; that they do not want to wear the white man's clothes; that they do not want to eat the white man's food; that they do want the white man to let them alone and to allow them to follow the Oraibi path.”
a domination to which they should not have been subjected “After all, only people who lack this joy and zeal can come out of schools ruled by the state and the economic system; these people feel as deadly blight the after-effects of a domination to which they should not have been subjected before they had become fully conscious citizens and coworkers in the state and the ecnonomic system.” —Rudolf Steiner, “The Trisected Social Organism and Educational Freedom”, Renewal of the Social Organism http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA024/English/AP1985/GA024_c04.html ***
imagine what would be possible “At the center of the whole intention of a school stand the children entrusted to our care; and the children, with their healing intentions for this world and their need for individual growth and development, understand nothing of these contextual realities that affect their whole future. Just imagine for a moment what would be possible if we were able to remove these outer obstacles. Imagine what kind of a future might be able to unfold as a result.” —Kristin Buckbee, Waldorf teacher, Deepening Anthroposophy issue 3.2, May 2014
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A Gadsden Flag depicting the authentic Spirit of America putting an end to government schools: the NSBA (National School Boards Association), the NASBE (National Association of State Boards of Education), and the U.S. DOE (Department of Education). 116
national-cultural organizations freedom of ethno-national association In a Threefold Republic, individual human beings would be free to form non-political, non-commercial associations which embody a National Identity—perhaps called “national-cultural organizations” (NCOs). These NCOs—like religious organizations—would freely determine their membership criteria. NCOs would strive to manifest as a purely cultural identities within every rights service area (political state) in which they have nationals. Like the Catholic Church or Doctors Without Borders, each NCO would be free to unfold as a global cultural organization which operates across political borders. Though, for legal purposes, the NCOs would be separately incorporated within each political jurisdiction, their real cultural authority would rest with their single National Council and Head of Nation.
other kinds of cultural organizations NCOs would be only one of many kinds of free cultural organizations. If there were a big enough page, on the threefold flag sheets I would show thousands of other logos beneath each Cultural Council flag, including the myriad of religious, charitable, and non-commercial organizations. The cultural organization logos would just as well be portrayed above the Cultural Council flag, since they would not be subordinate. Every cultural organization would be sovereign in the cultural sector. This chapter focuses on only one kind of cultural organization—the NCOs. Most or many cultural organizations would be unaffiliated with any NCO at all. The civic NCO would only consist of those cultural assets which are presently owned by the national government and its political divisions. And aspirant NCOs (such as the Catalan Nation) would consist only of the cultural assets which they own and develop themselves. All other cultural organizations would be independent participants in the society-wide Cultural Council. All kinds of cultural organizations would be peers. At least initially, in many social organisms, the civic NCO would be the largest cultural organization, with the most membership; though in Catholicmajority countries, the Catholic Church would be the other big cultural organization.
individual freedom of nationality for the human being Each individual human being would be free to choose to participate in one or more national cultures, limited only by the membership requirements of those NCOs. Some NCOs might require their human members to be a member of no other NCO. Others would welcome human beings to participate in multiple NCOs. Individuals would also be free to formally participate in no Nationality at all. Free means free. No organization, or erudite scholar, or government census-taker, could assign a nationality or religious identity to an individual human being. Only an individual could say what their nationality or nationalities are, if any. Unlike in the U.S., there are some retrograde social organisms wherein the religious confession of the individual is still assigned by the government. In Israel, and in several Arab countries, the individual is assigned an ethnoreligious courts according to , regardless of what cultural identity the individual chooses to In a free cultural sector, not only religion, but also nationality would be freed up. The U.S. government would no longer assign American nationality to citizens. We’d all be citizens, but of any number of nationalities. Nationality is self-identifying, self-defining, self-forming, self-validating, and self-recognizing.
transferring the government-owned cultural assets In this age, schools are the main vehicle of cultural identity, and even the most well-meaning government school subtly shapes the individual child into a particular nationality—the statal nation. Neither the statal nation, nor any other cultural identity, would have a monopoly on the cultureshaping powers. The ownership of the government schools would be transferred to the civic national-cultural organization or its local branches. In the U.S., the school districts are organs of the fifty state governments, and so would remain as organs of the fifty ‘state’ CNCOs (constituent national-cultural organizations) of the USA NCO. The same monies that are being funneled into compulsory governmental-national schools would be issued as a Pedagogical Subsidy to each human family which they could redeem at any private school of their choice, including, but not limited to, the national-cultural schools. This differentiation between the civic nation and its recognized component nationalities would ideally be an orderly process, with the civic nation facilitating the cultural independence of those constituent nationalities which it already recognizes, and the transfer of some cultural assets. For example, the British NCO might divest the English Heritage, Historic Scotland, and Welsh Cadw sites to those three NCOs, but might keep the UK National Parks as its own. Or some cultural assets might be jointly-stewarded by the British NCO and the Home Nation NCOs. And the US NCO might facilitate a smooth process whereby the 566 US-recognized Indian Nations would achieve cultural independence as NCOs. However, no one would have to wait on the civic NCOs to initiate a cultural identity. In the case of an NCO which is not recognized by the civic NCO—for example a ‘British Republic NCO’ which flew the red, white, and green tricolor of the Chartist Movement as its national flag—it would have to ‘start from scratch’ as far as building its cultural infrastructure, such as schools and land trusts. Yet that is surmountable.
the ncos keep the nation-state name and flag The National-Cultural Organization would keep the present-day formal name and title of the Nation-State. Even if their title sounds ‘political’, like “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” or “United States of America”, these titles ‘kingdom’ and ‘state’ would be reinterpreted in this context to be cultural titles. And the NCO would keep the national flag as its organizational symbol. The national flag would continue to fly over the national monuments and national cemeteries. 117
On the trisected flag pages (of which only Threefold America is included in this first book), the flag of the ‘civic’ (formerly ‘statal’) NCO is shown directly beneath the Cultural Council flag. These civic NCO flags are displayed there for two reasons: 1) so that people see how the trisector flag designs come out the nation-state flag, and 2) to show how the national identities would become non-governmental organizations within a plurinational cultural sector. If there weren’t space limitations, the national flags would’ve been displayed above the Cultural Council flag, because in a free cultural sector, every cultural organization and every individual human being is sovereign.
aspirant nations The struggle for cultural self-governance, which is presently locked into the political-military sphere, is ejected into its rightful place in the free cultural sector. For almost every social organism, I also show the flags of other aspirant national identities and diasporas which would likely incorporate as NCOs in that cultural sector. Eventually, every NCO in humanity’s world might incorporate within every cultural sector. The depicted examples (which, except for America, are in Book Two) are only a few of many which could be shown.
civic and ethnic nations Of special note is that where a dominant nationality (such as England and Castile) historically served as the core of a state-formed multi-ethnic nation (such as Britain and Spain), the core nationality would itself again achieve cultural independence. The Russian ethnologist Valery Tishkov refers to this distinction as ‘civic nation’ (the state-formed nation) and ‘ethnic nation’ (what Threefold Now also calls a ‘traditional nation’ or 142 ‘aspirant nation’). If a nation-state breaks up into two or more nation-states, the previous national identity must be dissolved, or perhaps claimed by one of the remnants (such as how Serbia and Montenegro claimed to be ‘Yugoslavia’ from 1992 to 2000, even after the rest of Yugoslavia had broken away). But through the separation of nation and state, civic identities aren’t simply dissolved when a constituent nation achieves cultural independence— the civic nation continues to exist as a territorially overlapping peer of the traditional nation. Freedom of nationality isn’t only about splitting. The eternal unity of the national identity is maintained through the civic NCO. In this regard, the Trisector Idea is for ‘one nation, under God, indivisible.’
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Tishkov’s short, sweet, and clear article “The Russian People and National Identity” (2008) http://kms1.isn.ethz.ch/serviceengine/Files/ISN/96343/ichaptersection_singledocument/77a9b90f-1a9a-4dc4-9b5f-d0750b49eada/en/16.pdf 118
An equivalent evolution in America, would be for the regional folk cultures—New Englander, Southern, Appalachian, and others—to achieve cultural independence as peers of the general American NCO. Though it’s conceived within the confines of the Nation-State Idea, Colin Woodard’s 143 book American Nations is a perception of some of the possibilities for regional culture in North America. It’s important to remember that, like religious adherence, it would a private matter of the individual as to which, if any, NCOs they chose to patronize and participate in. Many people might patronize both the civic culture and one or more traditional, ancestral, or ethnic cultures.
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www.colinwoodard.com/americannations. Even though that perception is distorted by the conceptual fusion of state and nation—as evidenced by how none of Woodard’s national homelands overlap—I appreciate Woodard’s effort in the national field of culture, and so offer images of flags for the eleven “Woodardian Nations” here: https://sites.google.com/site/ethnosophy/woodardiannations. But some of these posited identities would be artificial “Czecho-slovakias” and “Yugoslavias”, for example a “First Nations” nation-state (various Indian nationalities + Inuit + Métis ) or “Deep South” nation-state (the Black Belt + Southern heritage) or “New France” nation-state (Québécois + Acadian + Louisiana Creole). Such a Woodardian future would be a further lingering of the nation-state idea, even to the extent of breaking up the United States in a similar manner as the Austrian Empire. Yet, as you can see in Southeast Europe, national state Balkanization, beyond the initial excitement of breaking things up, and putting even more governmentalized cultural identities on the map, is no lasting remedy. My own perception of the national streams in North America is offered in this book. 119
what would ncos do? “Zunis want to retain their identity—not the moccasin and feather image—but the cultural and historical identification any man uses to reflect pride of his forefathers and their accomplishments and contributions to society.” —Zuni Governor Robert E. Lewis, 1969 The NCOs would embody and propagate a national identity. The NCOs would administer the cultural assets and offerings which the NCO owns, such as its worldwide national school organism and national land trust. The NCOs would develop national-cultural territories to serve their diaspora and national-cultural embassies and delegations to interface with other cultural communities throughout the world. Every cultural freedom which has been obtained by any aspirant nation anywhere on the globe, to serve as a precedent for all the other stateless nations. These are some of the features and activities of an NCO:
National Council Head of Nation National Capital National Homeland National Administrative Divisions National Diaspora Districts National Immersion School Organism National Language Council National Holidays National Cultural Gatherings National Land Trust National Trails National and Linguistic Internet Domains National Legendarium Translating Humanity’s Literary Organism and Filmic Organism National Cultural Embassies Other National Symbols—Coins, Banknotes, Stamps, License Plates, Mailing Addresses, and Cultural “Passports”
national councils and heads of nation Each NCO would be administered by its own cultural leadership, usually composed of some sort of National Council and Head of Nation. Whether a National Council is called a ‘Congress’, ‘Parliament’, ‘Council of Elders’ or other name, it would be a purely cultural body, like how religious denominations have their own internal ‘legislature-like’ governing bodies. Those nations who have been fragmented by political events, such as the ‘reservation nations’ of indigenous North America, but who still aspire to a single historic identity, would be free to reassemble a single National Council in the cultural realm, with economic and political matters remaining separate. “First Nations must work towards the restoration of our own model of nationhood made up of our true nations. In essence, moving away from 633 First Nations—from Aamjiwnaang to Zhiibhaasing—to governance based on the nearly 60 indigenous nations, from the Abenaki Nation to the Wendat Nation and all those in between.” —John Beaucage, “A Vision of a New Assembly of First Nations”, 2009 Beaucage is a national of Wasauksing First Nation in central Ontario. He has served as chief of his nation, and as Grand Council Chief of the 42 member First Nations of the Anishinabek Nation (Union of Ontario Indians) www.straight.com/news/john-beaucage-vision-new-assembly-first-nations Each NCO would freely designate its own cultural Head of Nation. Whether they are called a ‘President’, ‘King/Queen’, ‘Chief’, or other title, these would be purely cultural figures, like the chief executive officer of a religious denomination or other non-governmental organization. Some NCOs might have more than one human person who serves as the head (or heart) of the national body at the same time.
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Four heads of nation: the Chief of the American People, the Tadodaho of the Haudenosaunee People (Sidney Hill), the Chief of the Brazilian People (Dilma Rousseff), and the leading Chief of the Kayapo People (Raoni Metuktire). Why should the ancient cultures bow to the civic nationalities just because the civic nationalities mustered the military and economic might to form a modern political state, a national economy, and compulsory government school system?
national seat Each NCO would designate a national capital or seat. Some nations might have more than one national seat, for example, the Māori Nation NCO might designate all the sites of the itinerant Māori Parliament (1892-1920) to be national seats. The NCO would typically purchase a building in that city to serve in this role. For some of the NCOs, this might be a very humble, but significant foothold, such as a rented office, or an office in someone’s house. When a nation-state evolves into a Threefold Republic, the residence of the Head of State would generally remain the residence of the ceremonial Head of Nation, as a cultural figure. The Rights Capital would generally be seated in a different city than the National Capital.
the national homeland as a cultural service area Each NCO would delineate their homeland or ancestral territory however they wish, completely regardless of outsiders' opinions. This is the same as how the ecclesiastical provinces of the various religious denominations have been free to overlap since the separation of religion and state. In modern countries, religious organizations delineate their own ecclesiastical provinces without governmental interference, and without bothering about other denominations' boundaries, since their cultural service areas freely overlap. Cultural homelands would not have to follow the boundaries of political states. Generally, NCOs would draw their homeland according to the widest historic extents of their national territory, since the cultural sector isn’t about agreements and compromises which were forced upon each nation through the necessities of the political-military sphere. In cultural sector, individuals and cultures spread their wings. NCOs might make beautiful maps which depict their undivided, restored National Homeland, and display them in each classroom of their national school organism. Nations which suffered a historic whittling away of their original homeland might ceremonially restore their homeland over the course of a few years, which each whittled piece consciously restored through a celebration.
national-cultural administration divisions NCOs would also delineate administrative units within the Homeland to administer their cultural assets and offerings. These would be nationalcultural ‘Provinces’ or ‘States’ or whatever each nation calls its territorial subdivisions. Regardless of what they’re called, they would be simply nongovernmental cultural service areas, like the provinces and dioceses of a religious organization. To the extent that these divisions aren’t completely centralized arms of the NCO, but are incorporated as a distinct organs of a federal or confederal NCO—such as the fifty states of the U.S. NCO or 144 the six nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) NCO—these organs could be called ‘constituent NCOs’ (CNCOs). For example, the “State of West Virginia CNCO” or the “The Mohawk (Kahniakenhaka) Nation CNCO.” The divisions of a civic NCO would initially have the same boundaries as the constituent rights-states of the Rights Governance, though since nation and state would no longer be tied together, their boundaries would eventually diverge, with the rights divisions becoming more or less (usually more) granular through time.
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Really nine or more nations, if the adopted nations are counted: besides the Tuscarora Nation, there is the Wyendot Nation (or the faction of that nation that live among the Iroquois in Canada), the Delaware Nation (or a faction of that nation), and the remnant of the Tutela Nation (a Wichashaic/Siouan nation whose ancestral territory was the Big Sandy river valley of West Virginia and Kentucky, known in early days as the Tatteroa River. Tutela nationals still live among the Cayuga Nation at the Grand River Territory in Canada). These nine nations are still considered to be members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy by at least the Canadian faction of the Iroquois: www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/leagueofnations.html 121
The civic NCO and traditional NCOs would have different geographic conceptions. For example, the British civic culture would consider all of Great Britain and Ireland as it national homeland, and would adopt the existing ceremonial lieutenancy areas as its cultural service divisions, while the English national culture would restore the 39 traditional counties of England as its cultural service divisions. Likewise, the Irish civic NCO would be free to restore cultural counties throughout the island.
diaspora districts Outside of the homeland, the NCOs would organize and delineate national Diasporal Districts to serve its nationals who live in other areas of humanity’s world. The boundary between the Homeland and the Diasporic Districts would be aesthetic and emotive, rather than statutory or political. For civic nations, the Diaspora Districts would usually be based, at least initially, on the existing Consular Districts. Every nation would be free to cover the whole earth with their Diaspora Districts. For example, the Irish NCO would be free to delineate Irish cultural districts throughout humanity’s world, in service of the Irish diaspora. Unlike the Latvians or Basques or Irish, it’s hard for Americans to feel much enthusiasm for the idea of offering our national culture throughout humanity’s world, because our culture has become thin fare relative to our thick consumerist and security sectors, having been boiled down to emotional catch-phrases such as “Free Markets” and “Democracy” and the “American Way of Life.” Yet it would be possible for the American culture to become ensouled again, or for the first time.
immersion school organisms Through immersion schools initiated by each NCO, we would have the means to immerse our children with our chosen language and cultural values throughout the schoolday. Like all schools in a Threefold Republic, NCO schools would be entirely non-governmental, and would be free to receive each family’s Individuated Educational Subsidy to cover all or most of tuition. NCOs would teach their own national history and learn about own heads of nation, instead of, or in addition to the heads of the state. NCO-owned schools would be free to draw upon the entire array of educational philosophies and methods. One of the most basic diasporic cultural service would be for each NCO to offer a worldwide, non-governmental system of language-immersion kindergartens. Not that every national would choose to send their child to a national-cultural kindergarten. NCOs which don’t already have a national school system might start small, with a single kindergarten.
language councils "A people's own language and everything related to it also constitute a spiritual [cultural] area." —Rudolf Steiner, Basic Issues of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c04.html Americans and other English-speakers aren’t so aware of language councils, since the English language standards (British English and American English as the two main sources of Global English) arise ‘behind the scenes’, through the various house standards of publishers, universities, newspapers, and other media corporations, rather than through a government language planning council or academy. Yet most languages have some sort of stewardship council for affirming spelling and grammatical conventions and style manuals, such as the Académie française and the 145 Foras na Gaeilge (for the Irish language). In a Threefold Republic, such language councils would be divested from the State and government monies, and would become an organ of the civic NCO. Though language is one of the main seeds of nation-formation, language does not always correlate with nationality. Some nations have more than one national language. To name only a few:
The Canadian, Singaporean, South African, and Swiss civic nations The Scottish nation (whose national identity was formed by the convergence of the Celtic Gaelic-speaking Highlands and the Germanic Scots-speaking Lowlands, and then overlain with the all-pervading English-speaking culture) The Ka'igwu (Kiowa) nation of the South Plains of North America (one band of that nation speaks a Plains Apache language, which is from an entirely different language family) The Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy (five main languages, plus several languages of adopted nations) The Niitsítapi (Blackfoot) Confederacy, the Lords of the Plains (three varieties of Blackfoot speech, plus two other languages, one of which is from a completely different language family)
And some national identities share a single language, such as the various French-speaking nations (France, Belgium, Canada, Luxembourg, Francophone Africa), German-speaking nations (Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein), and many Spanish- and English-speaking nations. Except for English-speaking nations, these language communities have already initiated a trans-national language council, for example, the Council for German Orthography, seated in Mannheim, Germany, and the Association of Spanish Language Academies, seated in Madrid, Spain.
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Here’s a full list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators 122
Other nationalities, such as the Saami indigenous people of the northern fridge of Scandinavia, have several mutually-incomprehensible, lineally 146 related regional languages which are all considered to be legitimate variants of the national tongue. That is actually a healthy trend. All traditional varieties of a language ought to have a place in the further unfolding of freedom of nationality. The era of the politically centralized and economically homogenized language is no longer relevant to most of the 10,000 languages of humanity. It’s also possible for the same national language to have multiple written standards, such as Bokmål and Nynorsk of the Norwegian language. The Norwegian national government has a detailed policy for making sure both varieties are used in a certain percentage of government publications and services. NCOs which have multiple written forms of the same language—for example the Ojibwe language, whose wide-spread communities use two different scripts (Roman alphabet and Aboriginal Syllabics) and multiple spelling standards—might adopt a policy similar to the Norwegians. For some incipient nations, such as the Vermonter Nation (vis-à-vis the federal American civic nation), and Somaliland People (vis-à-vis the federal Somali civic nation), language is not the main source of identity; rather it’s a set of different values which shapes the national culture. However, it’s possible that such NCOs might cultivate a slightly different national standard; for example, in the same way that the Canadian and American English, or Australian and New Zealand English spelling and vocabulary are slightly different.
national holidays
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Each statal nation already has its own set of national holidays. These would remain as national-cultural holidays of the civic NCOs. The U.S. NCO would retain the twelve holidays of the U.S. Government. There are also many other secondary days, weeks, and months of national observance which have been proclaimed by the U.S. head of nation, most of which are unquestionably sincere expressions of the national spirit, others of which appear to have been purchased by economic or cultural lobbies, such as National Dairy Goat Awareness Week. The myriad of other NCOs, such as the Cherokee Nation, Kurdish People, and Tibetan People, would designate their own set of national holidays, honoring their own founders and significant events. Each religious denomination would maintain its own array of religious holidays too. During the transition from nation-state to humanocratic governance, the Rights Governance would at first retain the Nation-State holidays as rights holidays for governance workers, though in that context, the days would formally be named by the date, rather than the cultural name—for ” example, “December Twenty-Fifth . Once the right of each individual citizen to choose their own slate of holidays is enacted, governance offices and businesses would have to work around that.
national cultural gatherings Each NCO might initiate a yearly national-cultural gathering and festival, with the National Eisteddfod of Wales and the Royal National Mòd of Scottish Gaeldom as models.
national land trusts The national parks and most other national/federal lands of statal nations would become Trust Land which is held by the civic NCO. The NCOs of ‘stateless nations’ would begin to designate and acquire (such as purchase) the land rights for their various National Heritage Sites, National Parks, National Memorials, National Cemeteries, National Recreation Areas, Community Gardens, Community Hunting Grounds, and other nationally significant places. Such national-cultural sites could be located in multiple political states.
national trails To help individuals get a feel for their national homeland, each NCO might designate a ‘national round’—a road route or walking trail which roughly follows the boundaries of their homeland, and a ‘national crossway’—a route which crosses the national homeland from north to south and from east to west. Some NCOs might fundraise (or seek access from the Land Stewardship Organizations, once land is completely de-commoditized) to acquire the deed to those lands, or trail easements, and build a trail where none exists.
national-cultural internet domain Each NCO and language council would be free to sponsor their own internet domain, like the recent .cat domain for Catalan culture. The Spanish National Government goes to great lengths to squelch any suggestion that the Catalan identity could be more than a regional subdivision of the Spanish identity. The article “Cultural Diversity in Cyberspace: The Catalan campaign to win the new .cat top level domain” by Peter Gerrand tells the story of the political hurdles (the Spanish Government calling the US State Department seeking to squelch the attempt), economic hurdles (a $1 million deposit required by the ‘non-profit’ corporation which administers the global internet domain infrastructure), and cultural hurdles (the myopia and ignorance of the techies who decide such matters) which the Catalan cultural organizations had to surmount: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1305/1225. There ought to be an internet domain for nearly every language community and national community in humanity’s world. 146
Six written Saami languages, two of which have two different spelling standards, plus three more languages which are only spoken by a few people, plus two recently extinct languages which have been partially recorded and so could be renewed, for a total of thirteen varieties of Saami. 147
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_holidays_by_country 123
a national legendarium For each of the thousands of traditional and indigenous national cultures, someone ought to compile, absorb, synthesize, and publish a book-sized National Legendarium, or a series of books, with the Kalevala of Finland, the Iliad and Odyssey of Greece, or the gigantic Mahabharata of India as 148 models. This would be complementary to efforts to bring the global religions to each nationality through Bible, Koran, Veda, and Sutra translation. Losing the indigenous stories is the loss of the story of humanity and its representative. What’s lost can eventually be restored, but it’s still destructive and wasteful to lose things.
translating humanity’s literary organism and filmic organism
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The biblical translators are still leading the way in the development of a literary language for each of the thousands of languages of humanity. And on the internet, Wikipedia is a lively force for smaller languages, with user-created Free Encyclopedias in 287 languages—including such gems 150 as Nahuatl (the modern descendant languages of the Classical Aztec language), Crimean Tatar, Venetian, and Zulu. Yet there’s no good reason why all sorts of literature and films couldn’t be translated into even the smaller languages. Even if they are not economically viable, that’s a perfect use for gift moneys and cultural grants. Of the stateless languages, Harry Potter has been translated and published in Asturian, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Faroese, West Frisian, Galician, Low German, Ancient Greek (in addition to Modern Greek), Greenlandic Inuit (the only Harry Potter translation into a North American indigenous language...so far), Gujarati, Classical Latin, Marathi, Malayalam, Occitan, Tibetan, and Welsh. Not to mention the many statal languages such as Icelandic, Persian, and Ukrainian. Of the smaller state languages, there are Irish Gaelic, Luxembourgish, and Mongolian translations. The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings books are available in Basque, Breton, Catalan, Esperanto, Faroese, West Frisian, Galician, Irish Gaelic, Latin, Luxembourgish, Marathi, and Sorbian (a Slavic language of southeastern Germany). There are translations of the Chronicles of Narnia into stateless languages: Catalan, Faroese, Swiss German (audiobook), Tibetan, and Welsh. The Star Wars film has recently been dubbed in the Navajo language, joining 50 other languages.
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Through the evolution to a post-television, post-spectator culture, these stories could be presented as travelling plays, giant puppet theaters, live action participatory games, and civic masques. With the right to rest and leisure protected worldwide, human beings would have the powers of attention, the interest, and the time to produce and enjoy such works. The literature of personal recovery, humane wisdom, and civilizational renewal would be another priority.
national-cultural embassies Each NCO would be free to initiate its own cultural ‘embassy’ institutes throughout the world. Existing examples include the British Council, Confucius Institute, Alliance française, Goethe-Institut, and Instituto Cervantes—the British, Chinese, French, German, and Spanish international cultural institutes. But even emerging NCOs such as the Welsh and Cherokee and Basques would form their own independent cultural embassies. These would be distinct from the cultural embassies of a plurinational Cultural Council. The embassies of an overarching Cultural Council would represent the worldwide interests of an entire cultural sector and all its fields, rather than of a single national cultural organization. ***
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There’s a big list of national legendries, or ‘national epics’ here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_epic
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According to the 2013 tally by Wycliffe Global Alliance of Bible translators, of the 6918 actively-spoken languages of humanity’s world (not counting a couple hundred languages which are moribund), there are 513 languages which have the entire Bible, 1294 languages with the entire New Testament, and 1010 languages with at least one book of the Bible, for a total of 2817 languages with some Biblical scripture...and 4101 languages with no Biblical scripture. There’s a list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations_by_language. Now if only if the Good Book would be rendered in a fresh way, as seen in Jon Madsen’s renewed rendering and Kalmia Bittleston’s deeply poetic verse rendering. 150
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
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http://navajonationparks.org/pr/42613_NavajoStarWars.htm 124
other national memes—currency, stamps, vehicle plates, mailing addresses, passports Most venues for national symbology, such as currency, stamps, and license plates, are presently monopolized by the national governments (or its constituent branches, such as vehicle plates issued by the fifty U.S. states). Yet these are properly economic matters, which are illegitimate to be tied to a national-cultural identity. As it stands now, these objects serve as an all-pervasive ‘advertisement’ and ‘meme’ for the statal national culture.
coins, banknotes, and stamps Associatively-issued currency and stamps which were minted or printed by bodies of the Economic Republic, would display anational economic symbols as the default symbology. This would be the separation of economy and national culture. However, the cultural symbols of the various national-cultural organizations would be fitting as cosmetic variants and ‘special editions’ of currency and stamps. Widely-recognized NCOs would be free to sponsor their own coins and stamps as cosmetic variants. This would be similar to how some British Overseas Territories, the Danish Faroe Islands, and the Caribbean Netherlands issue their own symbolic variants of the British pound, Danish krone, and the Netherlands guilder (though, with the guilder’s replacement by the euro, and the closeness of the economic-national force of North America, the Caribbean guilders are now pegged to the U.S. dollar). Or how Scottish and Northern Irish banks have the right to make cosmetic variants of the UK paper currency. Or how the Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City have an agreement whereby they produce cosmetic variants of the euro coins, even though they’re not members of the European Union. There are three options for actually using such national-cultural currency designs in an associative economy:
1) As privately-issued, entirely symbolic, commemorative currency. Even now, there’s nothing stopping any cultural identity from hiring a private mint to make a series of symbolic coin-like tokens for sale to their own nationals, and to coin enthusiasts, as a consciousness raiser.
2) As a complementary currency. Like the BerkShares regional currency in western Massachusetts, this option would consist of a currency which is exchangeable with the mainstream currency, and spendable within an association of like-minded businesses. A national-cultural complementary currency would require an economic or cultural organization to serve as the administrator and propagator. The organization would develop a regional network of businesses which accept the currency, as a method for cultivating mutual loyalty with local consumers who share that cultural aspiration. Any sufficiently organized aspirant identity could do this even now. The BerkShares model has already gained the attention of an aspirant national culture, as reported in the national news:
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“The Berkshares program caught the eye of Sam Anderson, a community activist and black history professor in Brooklyn, N.Y. He thinks an alternative currency could be a tool for reviving black and Hispanic businesses, which he said have been "locked out of capitalistic development." Anderson suggested that a "Blackshares" experiment could start in a community such as Harlem or East Los Angeles, and eventually have a wider inter-state reach. "In the slavery period, you had this economic relationship developing," Anderson said. "It was more bartering between enslaved Africans, between plantations. … That tradition was carried on in the Reconstruction period, and during that period you had the most powerful economic development in the black community coordinated in the South." Anderson said the introduction of Jim Crow laws set black businesses back so far, they've never adequately recovered to compete with mainstream white businesses. "By the time [of the Civil Rights movement], the economic development between white development and black development was so disparate … that by the 1960s, when black business folk were trying to do something, there was already a monopolistic structure in place," he said. Anderson explained that while a racially-based currency might appear to discriminate or isolate, "if you want to support black economic development, no matter what race you're from, you'd get Blackshares."
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“New England Town Prints Up Its Own Currency”, ABC News, 2007: www.berkshares.org/press/07feb26abc.htm 125
Like Berkshares, the idea behind the still-theoretical Blackshares is to challenge the current tide of globalization. It is, at its heart, a way for the disenfranchised communities who have missed out on the fruits of global capitalism to have their piece of the pie.” Sam Anderson is a founding member of the Harlem Black Panthers. Anderson suggests that “BlackShares could be introduced in the black 153 community on a national basis.”
3) As a cosmetic variant of the mainstream tender. In a full-blown associative economy, national designs could be issued in limited numbers as a ‘special edition’ of the main, anational currency. These coins and bills would be produced according to the same production standards, and issued as part of the entire circulation. For example, though the euro coin in an associative European Economy would display no national symbols, special mintings could be offered with designs from the hundreds of European NCOs—not only the civic nations like France and Germany, but all widely recognized national cultures—such as the members of the EU’s Federal Union of European Nationalities—Frisia, Brittany, and the Romani ‘gypsies’—would be free to sponsor their own set of euro coin designs. Same for an associative economy in China—there could be cosmetic variants of the shèhuìbì (the ‘social currency’) sponsored by the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan NCO or the Republic of East Turkestan NCO. Or in America, an anational, associative dollar could be issued with designs from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy NCO or the Republic of Texas NCO.
The same options would apply to stamps. There could be 1) symbolic national-cultural stamps for decorative use, 2) national-cultural stamps for use by some kind of complementary delivery service, and 3) national-cultural cosmetic variants offered in cooperation with the mainstream postal service. Here follows a gallery of coins and banknotes from aspirant nations, whether they be dependent nations (such as Bermuda), limited-recognition nations (such as Kosovo), or unrecognized nations (such as Cascadia). Most were issued by an actual aspirant state or organization, though a few were issued by ‘fantasy coin’ manufacturers without any formal tie to that national impulse (I try to note that in the caption). Nevertheless, even privately minted tokens indicate some awareness of an identity. Through the separation of nation and state, and the separation of currency and state, there could be many thousands of national-cultural cosmetic or complementary variants of the associatively tendered currency. ***
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“Town Bucks a Trend”, The Hartford Courant (2006): www.berkshares.org/press/15dec2006.htm?coll=hc-headlines-home 126
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license plates In a Threefold Republic, most or all of the vehicle licensing would be done through the non-governmental transportation associations. Though this is an economic field, the transportation associations might continue to expand upon the American tradition of specialty plates which feature the design of non-profit/cultural organizations. The courts have ruled that if a state offers specialty plates sponsored by non-profits, then any nonprofit organization which meets that same criteria must be afforded the same opportunity. This would be a legitimate place for NCOs to display their symbology. Besides those specialty plates, American Indian tribal governments have issued plates, sometimes in conjunction with the state motor vehicles 154 agency. A few examples of the many American Indian national license plates:
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There’s a gallery of American Indian license plates here: www.worldlicenceplates.com/usa/AI2.html 130
The Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma), the Oglala Sioux Tribe (Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota), the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe (remembered where I grew up in West Virginia as the ‘Mingo Indians’—the Iroquois who lived in the Ohio Valley. We wondered where they went. They now live in Oklahoma.), and Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (one of the few Indian Nations remaining in Texas.)
Since the nation-state has a monopoly on the transportation administration, the other aspirant identities in America have hardly entered this area of symbology. I found a few: a Kingdom of Hawaii plate for the aspirant indigenous Hawaiian identity (the plate is not recognized by the State of Hawaii); a Republic of Texas plate frame; and a Vermont Republic decorative license plate (for the front plate, since in most U.S. states, only a rear plate is necessary by law). Curiously, there’s also a license-plate offered by the Virginia DMV which is sponsored by a Tibetan national charity and which features symbology from the Tibetan national flag. That’d be like the Chinese Province of Zhejiang offering a license plate with the Haudenosaunee national flag saying “Friends of Iroquoia.”
Even prior to a full-blown Threefold Republic, plate frames, decorative front plates, and the sponsoring of specialty plates by a non-profit organization would be three ways of propagating the concept of cultural independence. Outside of the U.S. there are further examples of vehicle plates serving as symbology for aspirant identities. The limited-recognition nations which are functioning political states issue their own plates, even though their national territory is claimed by a widely-recognized nation-state; for example, the Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia, which are claimed by Georgia, and Pridnestrovie (Transnistria), which is claimed by Moldova:
The UK has a unique and healthy practice of letting each consumer, regardless of where they live in the country, choose whether their vehicle plate displays the British, English, Scottish, or Welsh national flag, the European Union supra-national flag, or no flag at all. For the Welsh plate, the consumer also chooses whether the writing is in the English language or Welsh language. The British Overseas Territories, such as Gibraltar and Bermuda, have their own license plate agencies and styles. In a Threefold Britain, the British Nation and the four Home Nations, as cultural organizations, would no longer have a special tie to the transportation services. And so if that practice of choosing a national flag is going to continue at all, then any NCO which is legally incorporated in Britain, or any other cultural organization which meets a pragmatic criterion (such as a certain number of pre-orders for the plate so as to make the printing economical) would be free to have their flag or logo offered as a choice for driving consumers. And so there could be license plates which show the Irish republican flag, the Indian flag, Pakistani flag, German flag, or U.S. flag, for example. Those are the countries of birth for the five largest sources of foreign-born residents in Britain. Anyone who’s interested in those national cultures would be free to purchase those designs for their car. And the other Home Nations and smaller NCOs which meet the pragmatic criteria would be free to sponsor plates too, such as the Royal Irish, Ulster-Scots, and Cornwall. The EU flag would no longer be the only supra-national symbol which is offered. Consumers could choose a license plate with, say, the logo of the Commonwealth, the Anglican Communion, the Catholic Church, the Muslim Council of Britain, Amnesty International, or any other cultural organization which met the criteria.
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placenames in mailing addresses The various NCOs and language-based consumer groups would be free to engage with the associative postal corporation(s) about having their placenames recognized as acceptable variants for addressing mail. In this day and age, there’s no good reason why a place which has a name in several different languages couldn’t have all those variants entered into the mail-sorting software. There are already many post offices in the U.S. which have multiple acceptable placenames, such as “Spring Valley” or “Chestnut Ridge” in Rockland County, New York. Māori placenames have recently been recognized by New Zealand Post. For example, the same address in English and Māori: Māori Language Commission PO Box 411 WELLINGTON NEW ZEALAND Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori Poutāpeta 411 TE WHANGANUI A TARA AOTEAROA Note that even the words “post office box” are translated. Each NCO could have the name of its homeland recognized by the International Postal Union for addressing international mail, in a similar way that there are several acceptable ways of addressing mail to Britain. Post offices worldwide recognize all these variant names for the same postal service corporation (the Royal Mail), within the same nation-state: UNITED KINGDOM, GREAT BRITAIN, ENGLAND, WALES, SCOTLAND, or NORTHERN IRELAND (not to mention the British political outliers, such as BERMUDA). Likewise, the associative successor of the US Postal Service might agree to recognize, for example: 132
CHEROKEE COUNTRY or ANITSALAGI GADOHI (written in either the Roman alphabet or Cherokee syllabary) IROQUOIA or HAUDENOSAUNEEGA (or the actual spelling in the six Ongweic/Iroquoian languages, with diacritic marks and all) SIOUX COUNTRY or OCETI SAKOWIN MAKOCHE (or the actual spelling in the Wichashaic/Siouan languages, with diacritic marks, and with also the option of addressing mail to one of the seven constituent national homelands, such as YANKTON COUNTRY or IHANKTONWAN 155 MAKOCHE. The mail could also be addressed in Lakota moon letters. )
Two examples of scripts which could appear on mailing addresses in an associative economy where each language community sponsored a consumer advocacy association which was in a stakeholding relationship with an anational postal service association. Updating the optical character recognition software, and the continued use of delivery codes (such as the ZIP code of the USPS), would make possible this localization and customization of the mail consumer’s experience. In the meantime, there’s nothing stopping anyone from writing the address once in the “common language” of the postal service (English in the U.S.), and writing the address again in their indigenous or national language next to it.
passports—a rights document Many aspirant national cultures issue passports to show that they are as sovereign as the statal nation. Several are pictured on following pages. The practicalities of such passports range from actual use as a passport (Taiwan, Transnistria) to the symbolic (Eastern Cherokee, Vermont). Some cultures (Catalonia, Scotland) have privately produced symbolic passport sleeves which display their national emblem, within which the recognized nation-state passport (Spain, Britain) can be tucked. Though passports are presently a powerful symbol of national identity, they are really a political-rights document, and so national identity has no place on them. However, there are some changes and legitimate possibilities that are relevant to the national field of culture. From national emblem to rights emblem Presently, passports display the national/state emblem, and are written in the dominant national language. They are symbols of the nation-state and statal nation. In an authentic Rights Republic, passports would display the emblem of the anational humanocratic governance, not of a nation. Instead of “United States of America” the cover would say “Constitutional Governance in the Homeland Where all Men are Created Equal.” The citizen’s preferred language And, because of the omni-lingual basis of the rights sector, each passport would be bilingual or multilingual, with the preferred language of each individual citizen as the most prominently displayed text, followed by the common language(s) which are used in international passport contexts, such as English or French. For example, a Cherokee individual (or anyone who chooses that as their civic rights language) would be free to select their passport to be written in the Cherokee language, with English text beneath it.
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An explanation by the inventor of the script, Wicahpi Wanjila - Leroy C. Curley: http://oneworldinconcert.blogspot.com/2010/03/orderly-letters-of-lakota-andenglish.html 133
There is already one nation-state that is approaching that policy. Belgian passports come in three varieties, with Flemish, French, or German text on top, depending on which of the three linguistic-political communities the individual is assigned to. But an authentic humanocratic passport would be different than the Belgian example, in that the individual citizen would decide their own preferred language, instead of being assigned by the government to a language community. It’s no government’s business to say what culture I identify with. National-cultural ‘passports’ Any NCO (or other cultural organization) would be free to make cultural membership booklets that look cosmetically similar to passports. Such ‘national-cultural passports’ would be similar in concept to the existing US national park passports. The myriad of NCOs might offer to stamp visitors’ ‘passports’ to mark their visit to the NCO’s national homeland or to a particular cultural site. About tribal I.D. cards Most American Indian national governments issue a tribal identification card to their members. In a Threefold Republic, these would become nongovernmental cultural documents issued by the culturally independent indigenous NCOs, in the same way that a church or non-profit organization is free to issue cultural membership cards. Those Indian Reservations which become distinct state-level political collectivities would be free to issue citizenship cards to all who are citizens of that collectivity, regardless of ethnicity/nationality. No cultural aspect—ethnicity/nationality, religion, or race—would be listed on political-rights identification. Cosmetic passport sleeves It would not be a crime for any citizen to put a removable cosmetic sleeve over their passport which symbolically displays the emblem of an NCO or supersessionist political-rights identity. In the meantime—making way for the Traditional Hopi and Haudenosaunee passports In the further future, there would be a constitutional system in place whereby the political service areas could be periodically redrawn through plebiscite, and thereby allowing for new sovereign rights-states to freely arise out of what is now a locked-down nation-state matrix. In the meantime, I suggest that a pragmatic, respectful approach be taken in regard to those identities which refuse to travel on existing nation-state passports—namely, the Traditional Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Traditional Hopi. In past decades, a very few Traditional Hopi elders have traveled on a Hopi passport, consisting of an eagle feather tucked in a buckskin sheath. The National-Security State would almost certainly hinder that now. And the Iroquois have, on ceremonial occasions, insisted on travelling internationally on their own passport since 1921, when Iroquois leader Deskaheh travelled to England to address the British government which at that time still administered Canada, and 1923 when he traveled to 156 Geneva, Switzerland where the Iroquois formally requested membership in League of Nations. The modern incarnation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy passport has been in continuous use since 1977. In 2010, after 33 years of international travel on the Haudenosaunee passport, Chief Barack’s and Boss Cameron’s executive branches dickered with the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team for refusing to submit to the American national passport. The new National-Security State wanted to show them who’s the Boss, and so grounded the entire team at the airport on their way to the World Championships in Britain. Only a legalistic, state-worshipping Americanist mind would imply that the Iroquois lacrosse team are dangerous fearmongers. As the nice, liberal face of the Americanist Way, the Chief offered to let them go if they would bow to the U.S. national-state god, and travel under an American passport. The
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The story is told in “The Six Nations of Grand River Territory’s Attempts at Renewing International Political Relationships, 1921-1924”: www.academia.edu/1097961/_The_Six_Nations_of_Grand_River_Territorys_Attempts_at_Renewing_International_Political_Relationships_1921-_1924._ and http://blog.wikilaws.ca/2011/08/02/chief-deskaheh----a-tribute.aspx In September 1923, Estonia, Ireland, Panama, and Persia signed a letter requesting the Iroquois be allowed to address the League of Nations as a whole. Britain and the U.S. voiced shadowy consequences to any who further supported the Iroquois, and the matter was dropped. These are the same nations who had, a few years prior, destroyed the Central European empires, supposedly in service of the principle of a ‘state for every nation, even the smallest.’ While Deskaheh was away, the British-Canadian government sent the national police to occupy the Council House, then changed the lock on the door, and declared the Iroquois Confederacy to be dissolved. The police went into the houses of the chiefs and took the ancient, sacred wampum belts. These operations were enacted by men who had recently returned from the formative experience of the first world war-nightmare. The chiefs, who considered the Iroquois to be an independent identity, were then replaced by (Canadian) civil servants who are elected in the (Canadian) ‘democratic’ mode (as exemplified in Robert’s Rules of Order, presided over by a wealthy, dazzling hereditary monarch) and who are paid to be salaried functionaries of the (Canadian) National Government. There are still two distinct governances there today—the traditional council and the Canadian-funded ‘elected council.’ Of course there are well-meaning elected chiefs. Yet, systemically, without the Threefold Idea, their role will continue to be a conduit for Canadianism and culture-unraveling democratization. In a Threefold Realm, the traditional chiefs would remain as the sole leadership of a culturally independent Haudenosaunee Confederacy NCO in the Grand River Territory. And the Elected Council would become the non-ethnic, humanocratic leadership of a new rights-collectivity which would be removed from the Province of Ontario, and which would provide rights-services to all resident citizens, regardless of whether they are indigenous or immigrants. In the further future, that collectivity could achieve full-blown political independence through a plebiscite. 134
Haudenosaunee refused. They stood their ground for days, praying for a way out of the nation-state box. The Iroquois missed the world championships. I myself wrote to Citizen Hilary’s State Department and expressed that the Haudenosaunee passport ought to be recognized as a cosmetic equivalent of the U.S. passport, with the Haudenosaunee passport (and, notionally, the U.S. passport as well) being ceremonially administered by the bi-national Silver Covenant Chain—which is a four-hundred-year-old inter-national organization of which the Haudenosaunee People and the American People are both equal members, but which has been largely forgotten. All practical security concerns of the U.S. authorities would be addressed by having the Haudenosaunee passport made by the same company which prints U.S. passports, and with the same security features. For this special purpose, the U.S. post office in Nedrow, New York, adjacent to the traditional capital of the Haudenosaunee, would serve as the face-to-face vendor of this Silver Covenant Chain passport service. With that long-term solution in sight, a short-term special allowance could have been made. Predictably, the letter and its offerings were swallowed in the sea.
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nation-based sports Some sports leagues are based on criteria other than nationhood, for example:
The major league sports leagues in the U.S. and the professional soccer leagues in Europe, are city-based, corporate teams. Some sports organizations, such as professional golf and tennis singles, are based on the ranking of the single individual athlete. Motorsports are often organized by non-geographic, corporate-organized teams. The North American Indigenous Games are based on teams made up of indigenous individuals, but organized as teams by Canadian 157 province, territory, or U.S. state, rather than by tribal national affiliation. Membership in the International Island Games Association is based on islandhood, rather than nationhood (though several of those 158 islands do aspire to a national identity).
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Except that Quebec and the Maritime Provinces field a single team called “The Eastern Door and The North”: http://naigcouncil.com/news_details.php?news_id=32 158
www.iiga.org/members.html 136
Yet many international sports leagues are fundamentally based on national identity, with athletes competing as members of a national team, under a national flag; or in the case of singles sports, competing as a single representative of a nation. Nation-based sports organizations include the 159 Olympics, World Cup FIFA soccer, and hundreds of other international sports federations—everything from aikido to wheelchair fencing. If the separation of nation and state were to unfold at a global scale, those sports federations which are now nation-state-based would then be based on NCOs. All the widely-recognized NCOs would be welcomed as a member of the nation-based sports federations. Instead of 200-some national teams, there’d be several thousand. Athletes who are nationals of more than one NCO would be free to choose which national team to compete for in each event. Given the enormous difference in size between large nations such as China, Russia, and the U.S. and the smaller traditional and indigenous nations, the NCOs might be grouped by the sports federations into brackets and regional confederations composed of national communities of a similar size and skill. Some smaller nations might excel in a certain sport, such as the Iroquois in lacrosse, and so participate in a higher bracket than would be expected based on their population. Thousands of national contingents would be too much to fit in a single event, such as a World Championship series, so they’d be weeded out by regional competitions. Even the smallest nations, such as the indigenous nations of California and Siberia, might field a team in a single sport, such as archery, tug-of-war, or curling.
folk sports Besides the international aspect, there are also sports which are expressions of a specific folk cultures, such as Gaelic football (similar to, and possibly an origin of, Australian-rules football) and hurling (similar to lacrosse), Scottish Highland games such as the caber (pole) toss, xikunahity 160 (an Amazonian game similar to soccer, but played while crawling, and using the head to push the ball), or the many Basque folk sports such as 161 ingude altxatzea (anvil lifting). In a free cultural sector where leisure is protected by an authentic rights-state, there’d be room for sport to flourish as never before, whether it be organized on national lines, professional clubs, or recreational leagues. Like other fields of life, sports would continue to evolve from spectating to participating.
sports for the cultural world, not the political world “The different Catalan sports federations cofounded many international federations, but in 1938 the Spanish dictator Franco forbid any Catalan national team in his effort to exterminate any sign of the Catalan culture and national identity. Despite the massive support of Catalans for the Catalan sports federations to compete in all official international championships, the Spanish government keeps trying to ban them in all international federations—even those cofounded by Catalonia–using all kind of methods including diplomatic menace and coercion, as some national managers from South America publicly denounced and was obvious after the expulsion of the Catalans from the International Roller Sports Federation after they competed for first time in the World Cup B—and won.” —“Sports and Catalan Teams”, 2011 www.helpcatalonia.cat/2011/05/sports-and-catalan-teams.html World Cup soccer (a.k.a. ‘association football’) serves an example of the confusion of state and nation in sport. The International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) statutes explicitly tie the cultural field of soccer to the political state: “Any association which is responsible for organizing and supervising football in its country may become a member of FIFA. In this context, the expression 'country' shall refer to an independent state recognized by the international community.” —FIFA Statutes (emphasis added), 2008 Nevertheless, twenty stateless cultures already field a national team in FIFA World Cup: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (the Home Nations of the British nation-state), Anguilla (UK), Aruba (Netherlands), British Virgin Islands (UK), Cayman Islands (UK), Chinese Taipei, Cook Islands (New Zealand), Curaçao (Netherlands), Montserrat (UK), Faroe Islands (Denmark), “Tahiti”/French Polynesia (France), New Caledonia (France), Palestine, Puerto Rico (US), American Samoa (US), Turks & Caicos Islands (UK), and the US Virgin Islands. Seven other cultures are members of the regional soccer federations which feed into the FIFA brackets, but are not members of the FIFA itself: Bonaire (Netherlands), French Guiana, Gibraltar (UK), Guadeloupe (France), Martinique (France), St. Martin (France), and Sint Maarten (Netherlands) Recently, the FIFA has hamhandedly ruled that "an independent state recognized by the international community" means only UN member nations, 162 despite the fact that 20 non-UN nations are already FIFA members. The Kosovar national team has been banned from the FIFA because Kosovo is 159
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_sport_federations
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“Indigenous Games Begin in Brazil”, Huffington Post, 2013: www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/15/indigenous-games-brazil_n_4281418.html#slide=3121260
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_rural_sports
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“FIFA working group to help small unrecognized nations and territories” (2010): www.playthegame.org/news/detailed/fifa-working-group-to-help-smallunrecognized-nations-and-territories-4733.html 137
recognized by only 108 UN members, but not by the UN as a whole. ...But that’s 108 more nuggets of ‘international recognition’ than England or Puerto Rico have. Does the FIFA really expect the Kosovar soccer players to play for the Serbian national team? This shows that the FIFA puts abstract politics and glorification of the national state above a commonsense love for the game. It’s hypocritical for Scotland and the US Virgin Islands to be FIFA members, but not Kosovo. Same for Kosovo’s ‘twin’ Abkhazia and similarly frozen states with limited recognition. Because of that narrowed policy, the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar and the British Crown Dependency of Jersey have been barred from joining the FIFA even though other British dependencies are already FIFA members. Even within the context of the inherently confused nation-state system, this is a lame, spineless policy. Either expel the non-UN members, such as England and American Samoa, from FIFA (which I’m not really suggesting), or re-interpret the statute in a way which seamlessly mimics the actual makeup of the existing body of FIFA members. A more congruent statute would be: “The expression ’country’ shall refer to either:” A) a UN member state, OR B) a non-UN state which is recognized by at least one UN state—for FIFA purposes, this is interpreted to be recognition from ‘the international community’—with these caveats: 1) The name of the country for FIFA purposes shall be distinct from the claimed official name for that limited-recognition state, with the default name being “The such-and-such Community.” 2) The team flag for FIFA purposes will either be the association team logo on a single color field, or another design which is distinct from the claimed national state flag. The flag of Chinese Taipei Football Association is a guide.* Representatives of the team itself will not fly the claimed national state flag. Fans are free to fly whatever flag they wish. 3) The team anthem for FIFA purposes can be any song which is significant to that community—other than the primary anthem of the claimed national state. The Chinese Taipei flag anthem is an example.* 4) From the perspective of FIFA, an athlete who is from the non-UN country is free to choose to compete for either that team, or for the country which claims the disputed area, subject only to nationality requirements of those two administrations and their affiliated football associations. OR C) With the approval of an existing FIFA national association, the expression ‘country’ shall refer to any dependency, autonomy, devolved government, constituent country, or similar ethno-national-based political division within that FIFA association’s national state. In the absence of such approval, a majority vote from all FIFA members may override and admit such a dependent country. From the perspective of FIFA, an athlete who is from such a dependency or autonomy is free to choose whether to compete for that association, or for the association which is affiliated with the administering national state. *Note: Since Taiwan is barred from flying its national flag, Taiwan has made a special ‘sports flag’ template which can be used to make flags for its various national sports teams: a red and blue plum blossom shape, with room for the various logos to be plugged in—the Olympic rings, the Paralympic logo, and so forth. Chinese Taipei uses a ‘national flag anthem’ for its awards ceremonies, distinct from the usual national anthem of the Republic of China. This kind of ‘sports flag’ and ‘sports anthem’ would serve as a model for other limited-recognition nations to participate in FIFA and other politicized sports organizations, even prior to the full-blown separation of nation and state.
Olympics
Paralympics
Deaflympics
University Games
Soccer
Volleyball
High School Sports
Under clause B, the following football associations would be admitted:
The Abkhaz Community. The Abkhaz national team is a member of the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (ConIFA). The Kosovar Community The Sahrawi Community. The Sahrawi Football Federation is a member of the New Federation Board. The South Ossetian Community. The South Ossetian national team is a member of ConIFA. The Turkish Cypriot Community. Kıbrıs Türk Futbol Federasyonu is a member of the N.F.-Board and ConIFA.
Clause C is the way it was prior to FIFA re-interpreting its own statutes to mean “only UN member states.” Through this clause, the many dependencies which have recently been blocked from joining the FIFA would be admitted, such as Gibraltar, Jersey, Guernsey, Sint Maarten (Curaçao, another Dutch constituent country, is already an FIFA member), and Greenland (Faroe Islands, the other Danish dependency, is already an FIFA member). And the provision which would allow a player to choose which association to play for means that the nation-state teams, such as Spain, would not necessarily be deprived of all their Catalan, Basque, and Galician players if Spain would get out of the way of their joining FIFA as autonomous regions. Some individuals might still choose to compete for the Spanish team. 138
That’s what a clear and coherent policy would look like, even within the confining context of the nation-state system. But in the further future, the FIFA and other international cultural organizations who base their membership on nationality, would go by whichever nations are members of widely-recognized peak bodies in the field of national culture. Another example is the sport of ‘futsal’ (similar to indoor soccer). The World Futsal Association is one of two global organizing bodies for futsal. The other is organized by the FIFA, the International Futsal Federation. The World Futsal Association (or its regional affiliate, the European Futsal Association) welcomes Catalonia and other non UN nations (Abkhazia, Basque Country, Galicia, Kosovo, South Ossetia) to field a team alongside the usual nations. So Spain boycotts all matches organized by this body, and only participates in the FIFA-organized matches, because Spain doesn’t want to lend any credence to the possibility of cultural (or political or economic) independence for those identities. Even in the healthy future, Spain would be free to boycott. Free means free. But it’d be better for the game if clarity could be reached as to the legitimate place for state-free national culture in the field of sports.
olympism glorifies governmentalized culture The Olympics are another example of how the fusion of nation and state has real effects. The official website of the Olympics Movement says: “Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education.” It would be more authentic to say “Blending sport with national statism.” It’s not inherently sick for two cultural fields to be intertwined—but since nationality and sport are also fused with state, sport serves as a spectacular showcase for governmentalism. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) recognizes twelve National Olympic Committees (NOCs) which do not correspond to a fully-recognized political state: Aruba (Netherlands), Bermuda (UK), British Virgin Islands (UK), Cayman Islands (UK), Chinese Taipei (‘Taiwan’/’Republic of China’), Cook Islands (New Zealand), Guam (US), Hong Kong (China), Palestine, Puerto Rico (US), American Samoa (US), and the US Virgin Islands. The IOC has haphazardly recognized the NOCs of these twelve non-nation-states, but bars others from doing the same, with no good reason. Reportedly the IOC revised its statutes in 1996 to say that only UN member nations may participate in the Olympics...even though twelve are already members. In earlier decades, the IOC allowed dependencies to form their own national teams, as long as the political sovereign agreed. But since the Yugoslav wars and post-Soviet wars of the 1990s, the nation-state system has become even more frozen. If a partially-recognized nation, such as Kosovo or Abkhazia, is admitted to the Olympics, then whatever nation-state claims that territory, such as Serbia and Georgia, will complain to the IOC. There are reportedly several national identities with nascent Olympic organizations, who got locked out by the policy change: Abkhazia, Anguilla, Catalonia, Faroe Islands, French Polynesia, Gibraltar, Kosovo, Kurdistan, Macau, Montserrat, New Caledonia, Niue, North American Indigenous Team, Northern Cyprus, Northern Mariana Islands, Somaliland, and Turks & Caicos Islands. The Macau NOC was founded in 1987 and has attempted to enroll in the IOC since its foundation. Its sister region, Hong Kong, is already an IOC member. Hong Kong was the British colony (returned to China in 1997), and Macau the nearby Portuguese colony (returned to China in 1999). Macau’s IOC membership is even supported by the political sovereign, the People’s Republic of China, but is still not recognized by the IOC. Macau has, however, participated in the Paralympic Games, which are affiliated with the IOC. Likewise, the Faroe Islands (a constituent country of Denmark) have a recognized National Paralympic Committee, but are arbitrarily barred from a National Olympic Committee. It’s as if the sheepish administrators of the Olympic movement hope that people won’t notice that Macau and the Faroes participate in the Paralympics.
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China, Serbia, and Spain aren’t the only ones who use their nation-state status to hinder the unfolding of national cultures. There is presently an effort to form a North American Indigenous NOC which would compete separately from the US and Canadian Olympic teams. One journalist puts it this way: “The creation of such a team composed of athletes from tribes across the continent faces daunting challenges, including established ideas 164 of what constitutes a nation.” In response to the North American Indigenous effort, the spokesman for the US Olympic Committee says: "The US Olympic Committee is recognized by the IOC as the steward for the Olympic movement in the United States, and only one entity within a nation can have that distinction." This shows how the structural fusion of state and nation is used to squelch smaller, stateless national cultures. And the words aren’t even true, since four other stateless cultures already have the distinction of “stewarding the Olympic movement in the US” through their own National Olympic Committee—American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. The USOC spokesman goes on to say: “Native Americans shouldn't expect anything more than the same chance other amateur athletes have to make their national teams.” The snide insinuation is that these Indigenous Nations’ efforts to be recognized as peers in this field of culture is just a scheme by some local athletes trying to up their chances. Would the spokesman make that insinuation about the athletes of the small, ritzy nations of Liechtenstein and Monaco? Also, the phrase ‘their national teams’ shows that the USOC organization has already assigned us a national-cultural identity. In the US Olympic Committee’s mind, we are simply citizens of the US Government, and only one national culture is allowed within that Governmental System. We have freedom of confession, but there is no freedom of nationality. In regard to national culture, we’re still in the age equivalent of when, during the early Reformation, the princes of each state would declare that all persons within the state borders simply must be the same confession as the prince himself and the princely state church. For a parallel, consider the World Council of Churches, which is a global peak body in the cultural field of Christian religion. The World Council of Churches is composed of 345 member churches, most of which have themselves delineated ecclesiastical provinces which cover the entire world. Their cultural service areas completely overlap. Now imagine if the World Council of Churches only allowed one representative per nation-state! There’d be a mandatory ‘National Council of Churches’ for each of the 193 nation states, made of all the denominations which are incorporated within the political service area of that national government. And only these 193 National Councils would be permitted to have a voice in the WCC. All denominational streams would be required to speak through the assigned National Council. The Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Orthodox, and Quakers in America would all have to speak through the US National Council of Churches instead of speaking through their own world-wide denominational leadership, such as the Catholic Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. That would be the parallel to the present situation in regard to the cultural field of national sports. On the same question of an Indigenous North American team, the president of the International Society of Olympic Historians says: “The International Olympic Committee doesn't recognize ethnic groups.” This reveals how the word ‘ethnic’ (which was originally simply a synonym for ‘national’) has become a loaded word which is wielded to hinder the legitimate cultural aspirations of stateless nationalities. The IOC isn’t speaking truly. The IOC does already recognize ‘ethnic groups’…they’re called national states. The modern Greek word for ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ is still ethnos; ‘nation-state’ is ethnous-kratous. The American ‘ethnic group’ and the 192 other statal ‘ethnic groups’ have their own teams, as do ten haphazardly recognized stateless ‘ethnic groups’ such as Puerto Rico and 165 Hong Kong. The Olympic historian’s use of the dismissive term ‘ethnic group’ instead of its dignified synonyms—‘nation’ or ‘national culture’—is 163
The Chinese nation-state threatened an economic boycott of Danish shrimp because the Danish government allowed a group calling themselves the Tibetan National Team to compete in a soccer tournament in Denmark. A fusion of economy, government, and culture. www.colorsmagazine.com/stories/magazine/90/story/tibet-forbiddens 164
“Native Americans Seek Recognition” by Kara Briggs, with The Oregonian newspaper: www.nativevoices.org/articles/native_plympic_team.htm
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Another loaded word is ‘minority’, as in ‘ethnic or national minorities.’ The word ‘minority’ assumes the national state as a given. Various stateless nationalities are only ‘minorities’ relative to the population of the political state in which they are encased. And every human being is really a 100% majority in the 3 x 3 foot square in which we stand. Plus, since nationality is a cultural phenomenon of the psyche and conceptual sphere—not a physical trait—individual human beings can and do identify with multiple nationalities at the same time. There is more than one national culture in my square; the American nationality is only the most apparent. “...Some erudite scholar points out, for example, that conditions in the Balkans are due to the fact that the population of Macedonia consists of so many Greeks, so many Serbs, so many Bulgarians. Nothing can stand up against figures because of the faith that is reposed in them...But later on one begins to see just how ‘reliable’ such figures are. Admittedly, figures are sometimes a means of proof, but if one goes beyond them and investigates more closely, one often notices things like the following. In the statistics of Macedonia, for example, a father may be put down as a Greek, one son as a Serb, another son as a Bulgarian; so the father is counted in with the Greeks, one son with the Serbs, and the other with the Bulgarians. What would really help one to get at the truth, however, would be to discover how it has happened that in the same family one is said to be Greek, one Serbian, and one Bulgarian, and how this affects the figures—rather than simply accepting the figures that people find so satisfactory today...” (The footnote continues on the next page.) 140
th
similar to how in the 19 century, conventional academicians often snidely used the word ‘dialect’ instead of ‘language’ when referring to indigenous languages, as if Lakota and Mohawk weren’t real languages because they didn’t have their own army and navy. It’s a subtle and tricky denigration, and shows how the Statal-Nation Idea has warped and nationalized the perception of our scholars. If leading international scholars can’t yet see through the Nation-State Matrix, how will the general populace, unless someone explains it? 166
Even the US and Canadian governments often refer to the indigenous cultures as ‘Indian Nations’ and ‘First Nations.’ If they have ‘nation’ in their name, how are they not nations? And if it’s a matter of having a political territory (but why should politics be mixed with culture?), then what about the Indian Reservations and First Nations Reserves…is their status that different from a US ‘Insular Territory’ (Puerto Rico), or a Chinese ‘Special Administrative Region’ (Hong Kong), or a British ‘Overseas Territory’ (Bermuda)—all of which field their own Olympic team? Let’s at least be honest and say that despite the well-meaning efforts of individual athletes and organizers, the overarching gesture of the Olympic Movement is to showcase and glorify the National Governments. Such seemingly nice international bodies such as the Olympics and UNESCO are actually conduits for the governmentalization of culture, whereby humanity is to be eternally chained into national-statist boxes. "Anyone who cares about truth should avoid not politics, but Olympic lies." —Ai Weiwei, “Happiness Can’t Be Faked.” Guardian, 2008 “A revival of the ‘Olympic Games’ has become a catch phrase, though this ‘revival’ is of a purely external nature. ...It would be far better today if, instead of trying to find out from books how to revive the Olympic Games, people made some attempt to understand the inner nature of humanity.” —Rudolf Steiner, “Education”, 1923 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Education/19230811p01.html Some may say I’ve beaten a dead horse by delving into the structural sicknesses of two international sports organizations. Yet these are two visible, approachable examples of how the lords of the nation-state idea expect humanity to ‘accept’ that’s “just the way it is”—that the international social organism is to be locked into precedents which were shaped by economic ‘horse trading’, political ‘power plays’, backroom arm-twisting, unconscious glacial creep, and other incongruous ‘givens’...and thereby surrender our own human ability to re-perceive, re-imagine, and re-enact a congruous world. Authentic acceptance is not the same as submission, unless the submission is to one’s own conception and ideal of healthy and just world. ***
72 stateless nations are already members of international organizations The international community is already beginning to manifest a distinction between national identities and political states, though only semiconsciously and arbitrarily. The UNESCO ‘associate members’, and the Olympic and World Cup non-UN nations are examples of the national sphere of culture beginning to bulge out from the seams of the political state order. There are other sports federations and regional or global organizations which have admitted non-nation states. For example, the Turkish Cypriot State and the Moro National Liberation Front (within the Philippines 167 nation-state) are admitted as Observers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, alongside the recognized Muslim nation-states. These nonUN entities are often referred to as ‘nations’ and ‘countries’ in the context of those international bodies. Here is a compiled list of at least 72 cultural-political identities which are not widely-recognized nation-states, but which are members of 168 169 international cultural and political organizations —organizations which are otherwise composed of nation-states. —Rudolf Steiner, “The Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman”, 1919 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA/GA0191/19191101p01.html 166
"Indian Nations have always been considered as distinct, independent political communities, retaining their original rights, as the undisputed possessors of the soil…The very term ‘nation’ so generally applied to them, means ‘a people distinct from others.’” —Chief Justice John Marshall, US Supreme Court, 1832 167
How can a state or nation, which is not a human person, have a religion? What does a true re-ligion (re-connecting with truth, beauty, and goodness) look like for a national spirit or a collective rights spirit? 168
Though the African Union, Arab League, British-Irish Council, Caribbean Community, La Francophonie, Nordic Council, Pacific Community, Pacific Islands Forum, Melanesian Spearhead Group, and West Nordic Council are fused political-economic-cultural organizations, they do include a cultural component. In a tri-polar world order, each fused international organization would itself either be trisected into three organizations, or clearly re-purposed in one sector of life. Though NCOs would explicitly set aside the right to participate in international economic forums (such as the World Trade Organization) or political-security forums (such as NATO), if those organizations have a cultural branch, NCOs might apply to participate in this aspect, until such time as the international organization is trisected. (The footnote continues on the next page.) 141
Abkhazia (claimed by Georgia): European Futsal Association Åland (Finland): Nordic Council Altai Republic (Russian Federation): International Organization of Turkic Culture (observer state) American Samoa (US): Olympics, FIFA soccer, Special Olympics, Pacific Community, Pacific Islands Forum (observer) Anguilla (UK): UNESCO (associate member), Caribbean Community (associate member), Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (associate member) Aotearoa Māori (New Zealand): Rugby League Pacific Cup Aruba (Netherlands): UNESCO (associate member), Olympics, FIFA soccer, Special Olympics, World Futsal Association, International Korfball Federation, World Chess Federation, Dutch Language Union (cooperative agreement) Republic of Bashkortostan (Russian Federation): International Association of Turkic Culture (observer state) Basque Country (straddles Spain and France): World Futsal Association, European Pitch and Putt Association Bermuda (UK): UNESCO (associate member), Olympics, Federation of International Lacrosse, World Chess Federation, Commonwealth Games, Caribbean Community (associate member) Bonaire (Netherlands): Special Olympics, Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (associate member) British Virgin Islands: UNESCO (associate member), Olympics, FIFA soccer, Special Olympics, World Chess Federation, Commonwealth Games, Caribbean Community (associate member), Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (associate member) 170 “Canada-New Brunswick”: International Organization of La Francophonie (member government) “Canada-Quebec”: International Organization of La Francophonie (member government) Catalonia (The Catalan cultural area spans Spain, Andorra, and France): World Futsal Association, International Korfball Federation, Federation of International Pitch and Putt Associations, World Ninepin Bowling Association, European Tenpin Bowling Federation, Australian Football League Europe Cayman Islands (UK): UNESCO (associate member), Olympics, FIFA soccer, Special Olympics, Commonwealth Games, Caribbean Community (associate member) “Chinese Taipei” (a.k.a. Taiwan, the Republic of China; not a UN member state): Olympics, FIFA soccer, Special Olympics, World Futsal Association, International Korfball Federation, World Chess Federation, Tug of War International Federation. This social organism participates in several other international cultural and economic bodies, where it usually goes by politically compromised names such as “Chinese Taipei”, “Taiwan, Province of China”, or “Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu.” Cook Islands (New Zealand): UNESCO (full member, despite not being a UN member state), Olympics, FIFA soccer, Rugby League Pacific Cup, Commonwealth Games, Pacific Community, Pacific Islands Forum (full member) Curaçao (Netherlands): UNESCO (associate member), FIFA soccer, Special Olympics England (UK): FIFA soccer, Federation of International Lacrosse, European Futsal Association, , International Korfball Federation, European Tenpin Bowling Federation, Rugby League European Federation, Australian Football League Europe, World Chess Federation, Tug of War International Federation, Commonwealth Games Falkland Islands (UK): Commonwealth Games Faroe Islands (Denmark): UNESCO (associate member), FIFA soccer, Paralympics, Special Olympics, World Chess Federation, Nordic Council, West Nordic Council Flemish Community of Belgium: Dutch Language Union French Community of Belgium: International Organization of La Francophonie (member government) French Guiana: Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football French Polynesia: FIFA soccer (as “Tahiti”), Pacific Community, Pacific Islands Forum (associate member) Gagauzia (Moldova): International Organization of Turkic Culture (observer state) Galicia (Spain): World Futsal Association, European Pitch and Putt Association German-speaking Community of Belgium: Council for German Orthography Gibraltar (UK): Special Olympics, Union of European Football Associations, European Tenpin Bowling Federation, Commonwealth Games Greenland (Denmark): Nordic Council, West Nordic Council Guadeloupe (France): Special Olympics, Forum of Tourism Ministers of the Eastern Caribbean, Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football Guam (US): Olympics, Pacific Community, Pacific Islands Forum (observer) Guernsey (British Crown Dependency): European Tenpin Bowling Federation, World Chess Federation, Tug of War International Federation (combined “Channel Islands” team), Commonwealth Games, British-Irish Council Haudenosaunee Confederacy (the Iroquois Nationals’ cultural area spans the U.S. and Canada): Federation of International Lacrosse Hong Kong (China): Olympics, Special Olympics, Federation of International Lacrosse, World Futsal Association, International Korfball Federation, World Chess Federation, Tug of War International Federation
Only a few of about two hundred international organizations for sports are included in this table: Olympics, Paralympics, Special Olympics, the Commonwealth Games, Australian-rules football, bowling, futsal, korfball (similar to basketball), pitch and putt (a game related to golf), rugby, soccer, and tug-of-war. Not to mention all sorts of other international cultural organizations which use the nation as an organizing principle, from Miss World beauty pageants, to boardgame competitions. 169 Organizations which are made entirely, or almost entirely, of non-UN members are not included in this table; for example, the N.F. Board soccer organization whose membership (except for Kiribati) is composed of aspirant identities, plus regional ‘filler’ teams which don’t really claim to be a distinct nationality: www.nfboard.org/#!fa/casm. 170
The Francophone community in New Brunswick is essentially a part of the wider Acadian nationality. 142
Indigenous Dreamtime (Aboriginal Australian): Rugby League Pacific Cup Jersey (British Crown Dependency): European Tenpin Bowling Federation, World Chess Federation, Commonwealth Games, British-Irish Council Khakassia Republic (Russian Federation): International Organization of Turkic Culture (observer state) Kosovo (claimed by Serbia): Special Olympics (its member office is listed as “Kosovo Under UNSCR 1244/99”). The administration in Kosovo is a member of several economic and security organizations, whereby it is variously referred to as "Republic of Kosovo", “UNMIK”, or "Kosovo*” with an asterisked footnote: *"This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSC 1244 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo declaration of independence.”) Macau (China): UNESCO (associate member), Special Olympics, International Korfball Federation, World Chess Federation, Tug of War International Federation Isle of Man (British Crown Dependency): Special Olympics, Commonwealth Games, British-Irish Council Martinque (France): Forum of Tourism Ministers of the Eastern Caribbean, Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football Montserrat (UK): FIFA soccer, Special Olympics, Commonwealth Games, Caribbean Community (full member), Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (full member) Moro National Liberation Front (Philippines): Organization of Islamic Cooperation (observer) New Caledonia (France): FIFA soccer, Pacific Community, Pacific Islands Forum (associate member), Melanesian Spearhead Group (represented by the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front—FLNKS) Niue (New Zealand): Rugby League Pacific Cup, Commonwealth Games, Pacific Community, Pacific Islands Forum (full member) Norfolk Island (Australia): Commonwealth Games Northern Ireland (UK): FIFA soccer, Commonwealth Games, British-Irish Council, European Tenpin Bowling Federation, Tug of War International Federation Northern Mariana Islands (US): Pacific Community, Pacific Islands Forum (observer) Palestine (a UN observer state): UNESCO (full member), Olympics, FIFA soccer, Special Olympics, World Chess Federation, Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Arab League Pitcairn Islands (UK): Pacific Community Puerto Rico (US): Olympics, FIFA soccer, Special Olympics, World Futsal Association, World Chess Federation, Organization of IberoAmerican States Saba (Netherlands): Forum of Tourism Ministers of the Eastern Caribbean Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (a.k.a. Western Sahara, mostly administered by Morocco): African Union St. Barthélemy (France): Forum of Tourism Ministers of the Eastern Caribbean St. Eustatius (Netherlands): Forum of Tourism Ministers of the Eastern Caribbean St. Helena (UK): Commonwealth Games, World Futsal Association Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) (Russian Federation): International Organization of Turkic Culture (observer state) Scotland (UK): FIFA soccer, Federation of International Lacrosse, International Korfball Federation, European Tenpin Bowling Federation, Rugby League European Federation, Australian Football League Europe, World Chess Federation, Tug of War International Federation, Commonwealth Games, British-Irish Council St. Martin (France): Forum of Tourism Ministers of the Eastern Caribbean, Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football Sint Maarten (Netherlands): UNESCO (associate member), Special Olympics, Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football South Ossetia (claimed by Georgia): European Futsal Association Autonomous Province of Bolzano—South Tyrol (Italy): Council for German Orthography Republic of Tatarstan (Russian Federation): International Organization of Turkic Culture (observer state) Tokelau (New Zealand): UNESCO (associate member), Pacific Community, Pacific Islands Forum (observer), Rugby League Pacific Cup Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (recognized only by Turkey): Organization of Islamic Cooperation (observer as “Turkish Cypriot State”), International Organization of Turkic Culture (observer state) Turks & Caicos Islands (UK): Commonwealth Games, Caribbean Community (associate member) Republic of Tyva (Russian Federation): International Organization of Turkic Culture (observer state) US Virgin Islands: Olympics, FIFA soccer, Special Olympics, World Chess Federation Wales (UK): FIFA soccer, Federation of International Lacrosse, International Korfball Federation, European Tenpin Bowling Federation, Rugby League European Federation, Australian Football League Europe, World Chess Federation, Tug of War International Federation, Commonwealth Games, British-Irish Council Wallis and Futuna (France): Pacific Community, Pacific Islands Forum (observer)
All of these ‘stateless nations’ would, or could, achieve cultural independence as NCOs. As part of the path to that goal, I suggest that aspirant identities apply to join any and all INCOs, or band together to form their own mutually-recognized, state-free, de-politicized INCOs in open, countervailing defiance of the existing governmentalized INCOs. ***
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a peak body in the national field of culture With thousands of nations achieving cultural independence as NCOs, we would need some kind of peak organization in this field of culture. There are already peak global organizations in other fields of culture, such as the International Council for Science and SportAccord in the cultural fields of 171 science and sport.
what about unesco? On the path to achieving cultural independence, the NCOs might apply for associate membership in UNESCO. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is the UN cultural organization, though like all UN cultural activities, it is governmentalized, politicized, and bureaucratized. The motto of UNESCO is “Building peace in the minds of men and women.” I’m not sure that I want UNESCO, as it exists, building anything in my mind. The front-page mission statement of UNESCO includes this goal: “...building intercultural understanding through protection of heritage and support for cultural diversity.” In regard to the stateless nations: UNESCO has admitted 11 non-UN nations: Cook Islands and Niue (dependencies of the New Zealand nationstate), and Palestine (a military dependency of Israel), are full members of UNESCO even though they are not UN member states. UNESCO has also haphazardly designated eight (of thousands of) stateless cultural communities to be ‘Associate Members’: Anguilla (UK), Aruba (Netherlands), British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands (UK), Curaçao (Netherlands), Faroe Islands (Denmark), Macau (China), Sint Maarten (Netherlands), and Tokelau (New Zealand). So tell me why tiny English-speaking settler cultures such as Anguilla and the Virgin Islands which are still politically a part of the British nation-state can be admitted to UNESCO, but the ancient Welsh culture, or the beautiful Navajo culture, or the distinct Catalan culture must be relegated to being represented by their gigantic British, American, and Spanish statal-cultural overlord? Is the fact that a community is located geographically on an island, rather than on the continental mainland supposed to be such a crucial factor in regards to whether that community is recognized as culturally sovereign? How is this not an abstractization, a governmentalization, and a morbidifying of authentic cultural heritage and diversity? A healthy UNESCO would be recast as a purely non-governmental, educational-scientific organ of humanity’s cultural organism; though if it is not able to open itself up to living, state-free cultural impulses, it might be dissolved and replaced by other global cultural bodies which are especially devoted to the fields of education, science, and national culture.
a choir of cultures “Have the nations all the human traits except the heart?” —Novalis All the widely-recognized nationalities would be invited to become members of such a paramount global forum...a choir of national cultures...a Heart of Nations and Peoples (HONAP). Instead of a mixed-purpose organization, there would be a cultural organization which is entirely devoted to cultivating the field of national identities. This would be a concrete realization of international cultural recognition for the thousands of statefree cultures throughout the entire world. HONAP would be one of several organs of humanity’s cultural organism, alongside peak bodies for all the other cultural fields, such as the arts, sciences, and worldviews. All widely-recognized NCOs would be admitted to international cultural organizations (INCOs), such as UNESCO, the international sports federations, and other nation-based cultural bodies. In HONAP, the mighty American, Brazilian, Chinese, and Russian nationalities would be equal peers with the tiny, forgotten nationalities, such as 172 the Powhatan nationality (the original people of the Jamestown settlement of Virginia) and the Wampanoag nationality (the original people of the Plymouth colony in New England), both of whom still exist. This would be real, cultural self-determination of nations. 173
There are about 4,000 to 11,000 languages spoken by humanity, depending on how ‘language’ is defined. Considering there would be multiple legitimate factions for some nationalities (such as monarchist versus republican), there may well be Ten Thousand Nations conversing under one
171
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Council_for_Science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SportAccord 172
Like many from the two Virginias, according to family tradition, one of the author’s physical lineages bears a homeopathic dose of Powhatan ancestors.
173
The Linguasphere Observatory (www.linguasphere.info) counts 4,000 languages if mutual intelligibility is the definition (so that Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are counted as a single language) or 11,000 languages if such cases are all counted as separate languages. Ethnologue counts 7,105 languages: www.ethnologue.com. 144
roof. However, those NCOs which admittedly represent an aspect of the same national identity might be symbolically paired, such as being seated next to each other in the assembly hall, though they would remain as organizationally independent contingents. Notably, all the indigenous ‘tribal’ nations of native North and South America (including the contacted, and as yet uncontacted, nations of humanity in the vast Amazonian ocean of forest), of the Siberian far north, of the scheduled tribes of India, of highland Southeast Asia, of aboriginal Australia and the Pacific Islands, and of all the traditional kingdoms and peoples of Africa would achieve cultural independence. The national identities which are represented by the existing associations of aspirant identities would be a place to start.
174
The 37 member organizations of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO): www.unpo.org/members.php 175 The 90 member organizations of Federal Union of European Nationalities (FUEN): www.fuen.org/european-minorities/members/list The 633 First Nations of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) of Canada: www.afn.ca 176 The 632 Indian Nations of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in the U.S.: www.ncai.org/tribal-directory The 13 members of the Organization of Emerging African States (OEAS): http://oeas.info The 21 members of the Federation of Free States of Africa (FFSA): www.africafederation.net
I offer a draft flag for a Heart of Nations and Peoples based on the old League of Nations emblem, combined with the space between the stripes of the UN Freedom Flag which was flown by Allied Humanity during the second world war-nightmare. The cold blue star plus hot red stripes becomes a balanced magenta. The pentagon is redeemed as the shape of a humane way of life. The star within a star is the human being standing freely within the national cultures in which we choose to participate.
In regard to national culture, the HONAP would be a renewal of the LON and UN as they were supposed to be. In the Heart of Nations and Peoples, all ten thousand nations of humanity would live under one roof. It will need to be a long house. The physical locale for the longhouse would be built within sight of Onondaga Lake, in Upstate New York, the ancestral capital of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) League of Nations. From this spot, all branches of humanity would be sheltered by the great pine and the eagle.
realizing the heart of nations and peoples The picture offered here could be enacted by the mainstream UN system of nations...or it could be begun by a ‘rebel alliance’ of aspirant nations. It would be quite a sight to see the stateless identities banding together to enact cultural independence. For more, see “Method #198—A Trisector Parallel Organism” later in Book Two. ***
174
Threefold Now continues to voice the strong suggestion that the UNPO leadership jettison its hopelessly ineffectual and statist underpinnings, and adopt the separation of nation and state as the grand strategy for achieving internationally recognized cultural independence for all UNPO members. 175
The anemic conceptual basis of the FUEN is evidenced by the absence of such salient nationalities as the Basques, Catalans, Circassians, Chechens, Saami, Scots, and Welsh; by the nationalities only being represented by fragmented ‘non-profit’ organizations, instead of by integrated national-cultural councils which could evoke the imagination of the populace; and even by how the members’ list is grouped by the Nation-State in which they are encased. 176
As of early 2014, there are 566 federally recognized Indian Nations and 66 state-recognized Indian Nations. Both the federal- and state-recognized Indian Nations are members of the NCAI. 145
nation-forming streams There are limitless streams of national-cultural formation, including:
civic and traditional NCOs serving their immigrant and diasporic nationals (The Irish Nation in America, the Indian People in Britain, the Welsh Nation in Argentina) indigenous peoples (Indian Nations in the U.S., Saami ‘Laplanders’ in Scandinavia, Aboriginal Nations in Australia) 177 endemic ethnic or linguistic ‘minorities’ (‘New Afrikan’ Black nationals in North America, Chicanos, Acadians) regional folk cultures (Appalachians, Pomors ‘maritime Russians from the White Sea coast’) 178 monarchist NCOs (In a republican country, such as a renewed Bourbon Kingdom of France NCO, or of ‘pretender’ lineages, such as a Jacobite Kingdom of Scotland NCO) republican NCOs (In a monarchist country, such as a British Republic NCO or Dutch Republic NCO) cultural identities which embody past or future political ideals (A legitimist ‘Irish Republic’ NCO formed by the Republican Sinn Féin 179 faction, a ‘Republic for the united States of America’ NCO inhabited by the spirit of the uSA as it was from 1791 to 1871. ) social justice and anarchist versions of national identities (Like the FARC identity in Colombia and the Zapatistas in Mexico) religious-oriented NCOs (For example, Islamic emirate NCOs and a Christian States of America (XSA) NCO formed by the Christian Exodus 180 effort ) linguistic NCOs (For example, an NCO for each of the French, Italian, South Asian, or Chinese regional languages or patois) ancient reconstructionist NCOs (Renewed Gaulish, Gothic, and Phoenician languages and identities. The Phoenicianist renewal movement 181 is a significant cultural impulse in modern-day Lebanon.)
177
Like ‘ethnic group’, the word ‘minority’ is a loaded word. The words ‘ethnic minority’ assumes the national state as an unquestionable given. Various stateless nationalities are only ‘minorities’ relative to the political state framework in which they are encased. And every human being is really a 100% majority in the 3 x 3 foot square in which we stand. ‘Minorities’ are only conceived when the granularity of the map is expanded to the cartoonish scale of the nation-state. Plus, since nationality is a cultural phenomenon—not a physical trait—individual human beings can and do identify with multiple nationalities at the same time. There is more than one national culture in my square; the American nationality is only the most apparent. 178
Two especially noteworthy restorations in the cultural sector would be the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian Monarchy. The Austrian Monarchy would eventually bear the return of the Holy Roman Emperor. And though the two factions of the shattered House of Romanov would be free to constitute their own competing ‘Russian Empire’ NCOs, whichever Russian leader, regardless of their blood lineage, presided over the trinal evolution of the Russian Federation would be worthy of initiating a new cultural dynasty—the Third Roman Empire. These would be purely culture-bearing roles. The rights sector in those social organisms would be genuinely egalitarian, republican, and humanocratic. 179
www.republicfortheunitedstates.org
180
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Exodus
181
Though it’s sad that languages and nations have died out, don’t worry—in a free cultural sector, any lost languages and nations could be meaningfully renewed, as long as there is even one person who is interested. Even during the governmentalized, culturally confined Century of Nightmare, there were glimpses of language renewal; for example, the crafting of Modern Hebrew to serve as the national language of the Israeli People in 1948, or the renewal of the Celtic Cornish language in southwestern Britain, whose last native speaker is supposed to have died in 1777, but which is now a living language again in Cornwall (including a Cornish language preschool which opened in 2010), or the recent efforts to renew the Wampanoag and Powhatan languages—indigenous languages of Massachusetts and Virginia— with the Powhatan language being boosted by a recent film (The New World) which featured reconstructed Powhatan dialogue which was crafted by a linguist. Other successful renewals include the Nynorsk (‘New Norwegian’) variety of Norwegian, which is an effort to renew the Norwegian language in a way that reflects what Norwegian would’ve been like had the Danish language not dominated the Norwegian literary language for so many centuries, and the similarly conceived Katharevousa (‘Puristic’) variety of Greek, which is a sort of ‘Modern Ancient Greek’ which was consciously crafted as a more lofty counterpart to the everyday spoken Demotic Greek, and which has been adopted by the Greek Orthodox Church for its official communications. In regard to indigenous nationalities, some academics and journalists—often progressives/liberals—snidely and morosely imply that only full-blooded physical descendants of a nation are ‘real.’ There are still dirge-like newspaper articles which report the last ‘full-blooded’ member of some tribe has died. For example, “Marie Smith Jones, 89, last full-blooded Alaskan Eyak” at www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2008/01/25/marie_smith_jones_89_last_full_blooded_alaskan_eyak/. The article fails to mention that there are over a hundred Eyak nationals still living, with children still arriving into the Eyak identity, and that the Eyak nationality is still embodied through the Native Village of Eyak (http://nveyak.com/) and the Eyak Native Corporation (http://eyakcorporation.com). Maybe the morbid wistfulness sells more newspapers? The Irish people are physically a melange of Gaelic, Scandinavian, English, Norman French, and Scottish bloodlines, yet hardly anyone would claim that the Irish nation doesn’t exist. Just because one would be hard-pressed to find a ‘full-blooded’ descendant of Milesius, wearing léine and brat, doesn’t mean there no ‘real Irish.’ Even if the Irish Gaelic language had gone extinct in the 20th century (it almost did), the Irish identity would have continued for some time, and the language could have been picked up again from written records. The loss of the latest spoken traditions would be sad, but the language and nationality could still be renewed in a meaningful way. Even if there’s only one word known from the language—or no words—there will be philologists who will have the skill and artfulness to fill out the rest of the language in a way that embodies the aesthetic of that nationality. Unlike ‘natural languages’ such ‘artisanal languages’ will have been consciously and artistically crafted. What’s wrong with art? (The footnote continues on the next page.) 146
NCOs devoted to linguistic ultrapurism (High Icelandic, de-Sinicized Korean) bioregional and eco-communitarian identities (such as Cascadia in the US Pacific Northwest, Katuah in the southern Appalachians, a 182 Clearwater identity for the Hudson Valley, and the Kimberly bioregion in Australia).
Different streams of identity-shaping force would be free to each form a separate NCO for the same-named nation; for example, a monarchist NCO and a republican NCO.
sponsoring ‘friendly’ versions of ncos All the national cultures, including the formerly statal nationality, would be free to sponsor their own ‘versions’ of other nationalities. For example, the Chinese NCO would sponsor an NCO for each of its 56 recognized nationalities, including the Han, Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongols. Their symbology and organizational form would be pervaded with ‘People’s Republic values.’ In the case of these ‘PRC-friendly’ Tibetan, Uyghur, and Mongol NCOs, they would be in friendly competition with the culturally distinct ‘Central Tibetan Administration’ NCO headed by the Dalai Lama (or the traditional King of Tibet), the ‘Third East Turkestan Republic’ NCO, and the ‘Southern (Inner) Mongolia’ NCO (and also with the civic Mongolian NCO). The same for the Federal Russian civic identity: it would sponsor its own ‘Russian-friendly’ NCOs for each of the many nationalities which are native to that social organism. There would be a ‘Russian-sponsored’ Chechen NCO in friendly competition with the distinct ‘Chechen Republic of Ichkeria’ NCO. Monarchic nations would be in an especially favorable position to sponsor new NCOs, because a single monarch or royal house can easily serve as the head of nation for multiple NCOs, whereas a republican NCO would be internally elected. Yet a republican NCO could still sponsor NCOs through financially fostering the formation of another NCO, and by forming a ‘commonwealth of national cultures’ which is centered on its own formative values. In this book, the independent, republican American Samoan, Guamanian, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rican, and Virgin Islands NCOs would be sponsored by the U.S. NCO. The US already recognizes Olympic teams for some of those dependent identities. Also, the cultural independence of the 632 U.S.-recognized Indian Nations would be sponsored by the U.S. NCO. In Book Two, there are many images of aspirant NCOs which would be sponsored by a civic NCO:
An Austrian-sponsored Burgenland Croat NCO distinct from the civic Croatian NCO. The Flemish NCO, Walloon NCO, and German-speaking NCO of Eupen-St. Vith would all have the Belgian Monarch as head of nation. There are many images of NCOs which would be headed by the British Monarch, or by another member of the royal family or peerage: the English, Welsh, Scottish, Royal Irish, Aboriginal Australian, Acadian, Black Loyalist, Chagossian, Christmas Islander, Cocossian, Cook Islander, Cornish, Cumbrian, Falkland Islander, Guernsey, Indo-Fijian, Inuit Nunangat, iTaukei—Fijian, Jersey, Manx, Māori, Métis, Moriori, 183 Newfoundlander, Norfolk Islander, Norse-Gael, Orcadian, Québécois, Shetlandic, Tokelauan, Torres Strait Islander, Ulster-Scots, and United Empire Loyalists, plus many other ‘Arthurian’ realms. There would also be an NCO for the other inhabited British Overseas Territories. In the further future, NCOs could be initiated for all the former British colonies. 56 nationalities sponsored by the People’s Republic of China; only three of which are shown here: Han, Tibetan, and Uyghur NCOs. Czech-sponsored Bohemian, Moravian, and Silesian folk-culture NCOs. The Danish Monarch would serve as head of nation of the Faroese, Greenlandic, and Royal Icelandic NCOs. A Finnish-sponsored republican Finland-Swede NCO.
The indigenous Tasmanian language and nationality is an example. There were historically several aboriginal languages spoken on the Australian island of Tasmania. Only a few wordlists and other sparse words were recorded. Yet there is interest from both aboriginal and immigrant Tasmanians in renewing some sort of Tasmanian speech. So interested persons have taken all the known words and artistically crafted a language called Palawa kani (‘Tasmanian language’). Palawa kani is now being featured on bilingual park signs and placenames. Another example is the indigenous Taíno language of the Caribbean whose remains are being renewed in two completely different ways—as a Lokonoic (Arawakan) language or as a Uinicobic (Mayan) language—by two different heritage groups. Two other groups have artistically crafted two different Taíno scripts, one of which is being taught in a few elementary schools in Puerto Rico. (“An Inconceivable Indigeneity: The Historical, Cultural, and Interactional Dimensions of Puerto Rican Taíno Activism” by S. Feliciano-Santos: http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/84542) Some might object that artisanal languages are inherently divisive, since anyone can argue with the artistic taste of the person who crafted the language. Such bifurcations have been experienced by the Esperantist community. Yet in a free cultural sector, there’d be no ‘government-approved’ language planning, and each faction would be totally free to initiate their own competing Language Council. In the long run, the variety or varieties with the most liveliness would flourish. If the language split is deep enough, then the two philological factions might even form separate NCOs. The differences in linguistic aesthetic ultimately rest on a different perception of the national ‘aesthetics.’ And if further details of the language are discovered, or the aesthetic sense shifts, then a Language Council would be free to approve a freshly conceived version of their language, and perioditize the earlier artisanal effort as an “Early Renewed” era of the language. 182
I have a sandbox about bioregional identities here: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/bioregional-nations-1
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I suggest that without the British Monarch as King of the Québécois Nation, the Québécois would almost be French nationals. In fact, the French Republic NCO would probably be actively cultivating its national identity in Québéc too. The truly republican-spirited Québécois, might as well form their own NCO as a renewal of the Republic of (Lower) Canada, with the green, white, and red tricolor as the national flag. 147
Once France awakens from glorified statism masked as egalitarianism, she might sponsor a ‘linguistic NCO’ for each of the traditional patois in the north and south of France. These would be in friendly competition with the pan-Occitan identity. A German-sponsored Sorb NCO. The small nationalities whose fate has been bound to Germany’s travails—the Slovincians, Kursenieki, and Masurians—might be another possibility. A Greek-sponsored Arvanite NCO and Vlach (Aromanian) NCO. Other Hellenist NCOs would be possible, such as for Slavic-speaking Hellenism. A Haudenosaunee (Iroquois)-sponsored version of the American and Canadian identities, as a renewal of the Silver Covenant Chain (if the U.S. and Canada continue to refuse to separate nation and state). In the further future, the Haudenosaunee might sponsor Covenant versions of all North American nations. The Hindi and Urdu linguistic NCOs (or ‘LCOs’) are examples of the Indian NCO sponsoring a secular cultural identity for each language of South Asia. An Israeli-sponsored Negev Bedouin NCO distinct from the Palestinian NCO. Also the African Hebrew Israelites. The Ladin, Laziale (the heart of the global Latin identity), Ligurian, and Sicilian NCOs are examples of linguistic identities which would be sponsored by Italy. In that way, by the orderly birthing of Italian-sponsored linguistic NCOs, the Italian NCO would be justifying in transforming all of its ‘Autonomous Regions’ back into regular Italian regions. The Chrysanthemum Throne might serve as, or provide, the head of nation of the Ainu and Ryukyuan NCOs. The Netherlands Monarchy would serve as head of nation of the various Dutch Caribbean NCOs, a (West) Frisian NCO, Limburgish NCO, and Low Saxon NCO. The Norwegian Monarch would serve as head of nation of the Kven NCO and a Forest Finn NCO. The State of Azad Jammu & Kashmir NCO would be reconceived as the Pakistan-sponsored version of the Kashmiri linguistic identity. Jammu & Kashmir would also be a cultural province of the Pakistan NCO, symbolized by the usual plain green provincial flag with white provincial emblem. The AJK NCO and its flag would serve as a model for forming Pakistan-friendly NCOs for all the ethno-linguistic identities in South Asia, each imbued with the Islamic Ideology. Polish-sponsored Kashubian, Lemko, Karaite, and Polish Tatar NCOs. The Russian NCO would sponsor an NCO for every nationality which is recognized by Russian civic ethnology. There would be many Serbia-sponsored NCOs. Since the fall of Miloševid, Serbia has developed one of the most sophisticated organs for the shaping of national culture, through its National Minority Council system. Also, the multiethnic identity of Vojvodina would become a distinct Serbian-friendly NCO within a “Yugosphere of Cultures” CWONCO. The notional Autonomous Province of Kosovo & Metohija might be treated similarly. In that way, Serbia would have two more allied NCOs. And the Serbian NCO would be justified then in restoring the Districts as the only Serbian administrative division in those areas. The Spanish monarch would serve as the head of nation of several national cultures, such as the Galician and Valencian nationalities. Sri Lanka-sponsored NCOs: Sinhala, Tamil, and Moor. The Swedish Monarch would serve as head of nation of the Meänkansa (Tornedalian Finns), Swedish Finns, and Scanians (if the Monarchy doesn’t continue to rub them the wrong way). Turkish-sponsored Zaza and Kurmanji NCOs, openly competing with the Kurdish national identity. Also an ethnic (as distinct from civic) Great Turkish NCO.
cwoncos—commonwealths of national cultures It’s suggested that each of these ‘chains of sponsorship’ form its own ‘Commonwealth of NCOs’ (CWONCOs) as a particular kind of international cultural organization (INCO) serving as a forum for the many nations which share cultural roots, similar to how the British Nation formed the 184 Commonwealth, or how the French Nation formed La Francophonie. Unlike those two nation-state-based organizations, these would be entirely 185 cultural, non-governmental forums. For example:
The Chinese NCO and its 56 sponsored nationalities might form a Harmonious Family of Cultures The Russian NCO and its hundreds of sponsee nationalities might initiate a Union of National Cultural Organisms The US NCO might initiate a United Concert of Cultures composed of republican NCOs for each of its territories, plus the 632 newlyindependent Indian Nations, plus the other nations which have a special relationship with the American culture, such as the NCOs of the Associated States in the Pacific, of Panama, of the Philippines, and of Liberia. This would no longer be cultural imperialism, because the member NCOs could participate in multiple CWONCOs and other INCOs.
Other CWONCOs might be formed by each linguistic family of nations, for example: a Naabekic (Algonquian) CWONCO, a Daic CWONCO (for the NCOs which speak a language related to Thai, such as the Lao civic NCO and the Zhuang NCO of southern China), or a Deneic (Athapaskan) CWONCO (spanning from Navajoland and Apacheria to the Yukon and Alaska). There are already organizations like this, such as the Latin Union 186 (which reportedly suspended operations in 2012) and TÜRKSOY (the International Organization of Turkic Culture).
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Those existing fused organizations would themselves be trisected into an inter-economic association, an intergovernmental agency, and an intercultural organization (made of Cultural Councils, but with an affiliated CWONCO). 185
For more, see my online Threefold Now illustrations: Book 2, Chapter 4: “Families of Nations and Peoples” https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/3n
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In the further future, this kind of organization might be a place for testing the waters of artisanal languages which distill the essence of a language family, such as Interlingua (distilled Modern Romance) and Interslavic (http://steen.free.fr/interslavic). There’s an overview of these ‘zonal constructed langauges’ here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zonal_constructed_languages 148
Or CWONCOs might be formed to re-embody ancient ceremonial relationships, such as the Silver Covenant Chain or Pontiac’s and Tecumseh’s Western Confederacy, or the Bear Butte Council or Laramie Council of eight Plains Indian nations which would embody the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. These would be confederations of completely independent NCOs. A confederation embodied by a CWONCO is looser than a confederated NCO, such as the Haudenosaueen (Iroquois) NCO or Swiss NCO. In this way, nations, or fragments of nations, would have an option to decide whether retaining their own separate seat in global cultural bodies is the truest expression of their cultural genius (and so participate only in CWONCOs and other INCOs), or whether they feel that a reconciled, confederated NCO is the truest expression of their reason for being. Those fragmented North American ‘reservation nations’ which, for whatever reason, don’t choose to re-converge as a single NCO, might at least initiate a shared CWONCO which embodies the ancestral source culture. For example, from the perspective of Americanists, why would a ‘reservation nation’ (such as the U.S. sponsored, fragmented Sioux reservation identities) ‘surrender’ any ‘political’ power to a reconciled Council of Seven Fires? But in a healthy cultural sector, sovereignty isn’t only about splitting...sometimes sovereignty is more authentically expressed through reconciliation of the traditional identities as they live in the original imaginations. The restored Wendat (Wyandot/Huron) Confederacy, is an example of the direction towards reconstituting the traditional nations. In the encounter with the immigrant nations, the Wendat were split into two U.S. Indian Nations, one Canadian First Nation, and one self-recognized 187 heritage group. These four fragments re-lit the fire of their confederacy in 1999: “Over ten generations ago, the Wendat people were driven to many directions from our beloved homeland. Today, 350 years later, we stand with our children and grand children at our sides and come together once again to affirm the Wendat Confederacy. With gratitude to the Creator and the reverent thanksgiving of kinship, we light the council fire and invite all who come in a spirit of peace and brotherhood to enjoy its warmth. ...The Wendat Peacemaker once outlined the path toward unity. ...May we always cultivate feelings of friendship, love, and honor for each other so that the good tidings of Peace and Power of Righteousness will be our guide. May our leaders endeavor to serve each nation in a manner that will bring peace, happiness and prosperity for all the people.”
micro-nations? Just as presently, any individual could initiate a non-profit cultural organization called ‘Joe Schmoe’s Nation’, so could anyone initiate an NCO in a free cultural sector. The phenomenon of ‘micro-nations’ is an expression of this—the most well-known example being ‘The Principality of Sealand’, where, in 1967, a man, his family, and associates claimed and settled an abandoned WWII gunnery platform in international waters, off the coast of England. They’re still there, propagating the Sealand identity through various cultural and economic enterprises. Some micro-nations are fanciful ‘vanity nations’, tourist gimmicks, or ‘virtual nations’ which only exist on the internet. Yet some are, or could be, sincere attempts to provide a seed-form for a new social or cultural impulse. Regardless, the ‘micro-nations’ generally wouldn’t be admitted to the widely-recognized peak bodies in the field of national culture. It’s not about size. I’m not talking about the tiny statal nations such as Andorra, Liechtenstein, Nauru, and San Marino—the NCOs for these identities would continue to be widely recognized. Nor am I talking about those traditional nations, such as certain indigenous nations of California or Siberia, which have very few living members, but which would be widely recognized as culturally independent nationalities. Yet hardly any of the modern ‘micronations’ have the cultural substance of such nationalities. But there’d be nothing stopping the ‘micro-nations’ from incorporating as cultural organizations, or from propagating their ideas, or from mutually 188 recognizing themselves within one or more ‘leagues of micro-nations’, as their own peak bodies. ***
freshly offered national flags Most of the hundreds of aspirant national flags shown on the lower right-hand corner of the threefold flagsheets in Book Two are actual, presentday flags of stateless nations. In a relatively small number of cases, for illustrative purposes, I myself have designed or revised an offered flag for the aspirant nationality. Some flags which have been proposed by others are given a slight polishing which incorporate insights into what is expressed through the language of flags. I practice (though may not have always succeeded in) approaching the national symbologies with reverence and humility. I offer flag designs for these nationalities, which are displayed in Book Two:
Acadia of the Lands and Forests, and Acadia of Gaspesia (two regions of the Acadian nationality.) Afro-Venezuelan Appalachian (featuring the Tamarack Star of the Appalachian cultural center in southern West Virginia—the most nuanced rendition of the Appalachian Star I’ve seen, since it has both angularity and roundness, four colors (not just a predictable red-white-and-blue), and a
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www.wyandot.org/confederacy.html
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Such virtual peak bodies already exist; for example the ‘League of Secessionist States’: http://theloss.org 149
warm heart. The star design was commissioned by the People of West Virginia, which is the only state which lies entirely within Appalachia. For a fuller description see my Appalachian sandbox at: https://sites.google.com/site/ohappalachia/cloth-flag) Argentine social justice identity (I adapted the lettering on the Argentine socialist party and militia flags to reflect a shift from armed revolution to an identity-based cultural revolution.) Arthurian gold ensigns for NCOs sponsored by the British Monarchy. I also made flags for the Scandinavian nations which were in legend ruled by King Arthur, and perhaps, in some barely manifest imaginal aspect, still are, or could be. Their current civic flags are shifted from the lefty Scandinavian cross to the centered cross of St. George. Azanian (the Black Consciousness in South Africa) Black Hebrew (based on the lion and lamb logo used by the African Israelite community, plus the red, gold, and green Pan-African colors.) Burgenland Croat Cape Malay Chinese-sponsored Han, Tibetan, and Uyghur nationalities (featuring the official Han ethnic totem of two dragons, the Tibetan Chinese Potala Palace totem, and the moon and raven Uyghur Chinese totem. The totems of the other 53 Chinese nationalities are viewable at the Chinese National Tourism Office: www.cnto.org.au/about-china/the-people-1/ethnic-totem.html. The Tibetan and Uyghur NCOs would be in friendly cultural competition with the CTA Tibetan NCO and the Eastern Turkestan NCO.) Adapted the lettering on the FARC/New Columbian insurgent flag. Cumbrian (a potential renewal of the submerged Welsh-like identity of southwestern Scotland and northwestern England, which formerly extended throughout North Britain. The design is a variant of the Welsh flag, plus the mountain and water logos of the Cumbrian County Council and Tourist Board. Just as Wales was historically divided into ‘counties’, the Old North would be delineated into ‘regions’—the first two being Strathclyde (with its wide 1973-1996 boundaries) and Rheged (Cumberland and Westmoreland). Other regions would be established later, such as Bryneich (Northumberland, Durham, Berkwickshire), Deifr (East Riding) or Eborac (Yorkshire), Elmet (West Riding of Yorkshire), Gododdin (Lothian), Mureif (Moray), and Novant (Galloway and Kirkcudbright).) Finland-Swede (the dimensions of the nascent, existing flag are shifted to match the Finnish flag, since the NCO is conceived of as being sponsored by the republican Finnish NCO.) Franco-Vermontais (based on the existing Franco-American flag, but with Vermont coloration and the skewed Vermont star.) France as a British Monarchist NCO (the three gold lilies on a blue field, as seen in the British coat of arms until the claim to the French throne was set aside in 1801.) Frisian (I centered the proposed Scandinavian cross design from Groep fan Auwerk so that it’s an Ingvaeonic cross.) Galloway (the white lion on a blue field is reported as the emblem of the ancient Norse-Gael Lordship of Galloway.) Guam (as an independent US sponsored NCO.) Hindi (featuring the Central Hindi Directorate logo.) Traditional Hopi (from the logo of Techqua Ikachi traditionalist newsletter, placed on the triangular banner of the Red Symbol.) A Pirate Party-inspired Free Cultural Identity in Iceland (based on the Pirate Party Iceland purple, black, white, and lilac colors.) Indo-Fijian (features the Star of India, dating from the time when Fijian Hindustanis came to Fiji, but with the light blue Fiji color and green, white, and orangish-yellow canton. The shade of green ought to be exactly in-between Pakistani green and Indian green and the shade of yellowish-orange ought to be exactly in-between Indian saffron and the yellow-golden color seen on the flag of Pakistani Azad Kashmir.) Inuit (featuring the Inuit Circumpolar Council logo.) and Royal Inuit (with the logo of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), the national Inuit organization in Canada). Kosovan (Serbia-sponsored. Based on the Vojvodina flag.) Kemalist Kurmanji (Turkish-sponsored. The Kurdish sun symbol in the style of the Turkish flag.) Kven (the existing Kven national emblem is shifted onto a Norwegian-style flag to reflect that the Kven NCO would be sponsored by the Norwegian Monarchy.) Latin Cypriot (the red lion on white of the Latin Kingdom of Cyprus) Logres (the flipped colors of the flag of England) Low Saxon (of the Netherlands) (I centered the existing flag proposal from the Low Saxon Wikipedia so that it’s an Ingvaeonic cross instead of a Scandinavian cross.) Maronite (the Lebanese civic flag with a golden Maronite cross instead of the green and brown Lebanese cedar.) Meänkansa (the existing Tornedalian triband is shifted to a Nordic cross with the same dimensions as the Swedish flag, to indicate that the NCO would be sponsored by the Swedish Monarchy.) Negev Arab (the Arab Revolt flag with the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages logo.) Norse-Gael (the emblem of the Lord of the Isles, from Prince Charles’ personal banner for Scotland.) Northern Ireland (this flag is heraldically defunct, and so a renewed provincial flag is offered which would have a 9-pointed star representing all of Royal Ulster, instead of the 6-pointed star of the politically truncated Six Counties, and with a 3:5 ratio and St. Patrick’s saltire like the flag of the Kingdom of Ireland, of which it would be a province. The specifically Ulster-Scots national flag would retain the Ulster cross, but the Province flag would be more of an expression of Irishness. And an Ulster cross without a gold background looks like St. George’s cross, which would be fitting for flags of the English diaspora in Ireland: one English Overseas Province and its 12 English Overseas Shires. Royal Irish flags for the other three traditional provinces of Ireland are offered too.) Pictish (the emblem of the Duke of Albany, since that dukedom in northern Scotland is the faded remnant of ancient Pictavia.) Russian-sponsored Armenian, German, and Ukrainian NCOs (These would be Russian-sponsored NCOs in friendly competition with their namesake civic NCOs. The white color of the top stripe of the Russian flag is inserted as a triangle. This idea is from a Russian person’s website I saw which was about the nationalities in Russia, though I’ve lost the address. There is also white on the flag of the Union of Armenians of Russia, which is white-orange bicolor. The white triangle would be inserted to convert civic tricolor or bicolor flags for use 150
as a distinct Rossiyan nationality. If the flag already has a white stripe, then blue. If white and blue are both in the flag already, then a red triangle.) Samoa (as an independent US-sponsored NCO.) Strathclyde (The flag of the Cumbrian subkingdom of Strathclyde is described by the University of Strathclyde here: www.strath.ac.uk/media/ps/cs/gmap/academicaffairs/publications/part1201011/Significant_Dates,_Amoral_Bearings,_Mace.pdf) Swedish Finn (conceived as an NCO sponsored by the Swedish Monarchy, so the dimensions of the existing flag are shifted to match the Swedish flag.) Tidewater (based on the Virginia state tourism logo for the Tidewater region, which by chance, matched the white, lemon yellow, and aqua green colors of dress that my one Tidewater friend happened to be wearing the day after I designed the flag.) Turkish ethnic NCO (the same as the civic, multi-ethnic Turkish flag, but in turquoise.) Ulster-Scots (with a ten-pointed star for the nine counties of Ulster plus the overseas Ulster-Scots and Ulidian Gaels, including those of Galloway, Carrick, Islay, and Argyll. The Red Hand of Ulster is paired with the thistle of Scotland—an emblem which is beginning to appear on privately-made flags from the ‘Scotch-Irish’ diaspora in America. To show the symbolic connection with Scottish culture, the depicted crown is the Scottish crown, instead of the English, British, and Royal Irish crown of Saint Edward. The Ulster-Scots king would be coronated with that. The existing logo of the Ulster-Scots Agency is an amalgam of three national streams which would become three separate NCOs: Royal Irish (St. Patrick’s cross), Ulster-Scots (the name of the agency), and Cruthin (the deep purple color on the logo)) Urdu (featuring the logo of the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language.) Virgin Islands (as an independent, republican US-sponsored NCO.) Wymysiöejyn (the Flemish identity of a small town in southern Poland. The design features the Flemish lion plus the emblem of the village of Wilamowice.) ***
an anational political state an omni-lingual rights sector An authentic rights governance is there to serve the rights needs of the human populace, not to promote a particular culture or language. Because the political governance would not be affiliated with any Nationality at all, and since language is the chief vehicle of nationality, the policy of those governance (State) organs which interface with the public, would be that they may be addressed by a citizen in any language of humanity 189 and receive correspondence in that language. The primary language could be any natural language of humanity, or Esperanto. And there would be no language-requirements to be elected to any rights service position. Within the governance offices, there might be one or more practical working languages (a ‘common’ but not ‘official’ language), yet the public interface and the elected service positions would be omnilingual. There is already an example of this trend. Since the Nordic Language Convention was signed by the Nordic Council (the regional forum of Scandinavian countries) in 1987, any citizen of any Scandinavian state, when visiting or residing in another Scandinavian state, has the theoretical right to address the governance in their own language. However, this convention is reportedly little-known by the citizenry, or by local officials, and is barely actualized. And that’s only for the five civic languages, not for the stateless Scandinavian languages (such as Faroese, Greenlandic, and Saami), nor the other languages of humanity. So rather than a humanocratic policy, this is a Scandinavianist supra-nation-statist policy.
velvet plebiscites When, in 1993, the Czech culture and Slovak culture agreed to retire the Czechoslovak national-state which had been foisted on them by Americanists in 1918, it was called the Velvet Divorce, because no human being was hurt in the process. Like the preceding Velvet Revolution of 1989 which transformed the Socialist regime into an ordinary nation-state, it was a gentle, velvety-soft event. That’s the way change is supposed to be. Even nation-state-sized organizations can be drastically restructured without harming even one human person. Though the national cultures would shelve the dubious ‘right of self-determination of nations’, they would continue to hold the possibility of legitimately inspiring the formation of humanocratic, anational political divisions and rights-states—when humanity has healed to the point where the drawing of political-rights service areas by plebiscite would no longer evoke a violent stumble. ***
signage and the linguascape The matter of signage is complex. Is it a legitimate citizen’s right to be 100% visually immersed in a particular national linguistic culture wherever one walks within the landscape of a certain political jurisdiction? Is the ‘linguascape’ a right?
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Whether other constructed, international auxiliary languages besides Esperanto would be recognized by the rights governance is a matter for their cultural advocates and the rights bodies to decide. 151
This complex matter of the ‘linguascape’ can be untangled by differentiating between government signage, business signage, and ‘third sector’ signage, with a different principle and legal framework applying to signage in each of the three sectors. This complexity is exemplified in Quebec. Over centuries, the French culture in Quebec experienced the British government’s wielding of economic and political might to squelch the French language and culture, which understandably evoked resentment. It’s no secret that the Anglo-American cultural impulse has used its instinctive economic and political prowess to dominate and absorb other cultures, and then claim that it’s just ‘natural’ and ‘economical’ that the other languages die off. So, since the 1970s, the Francophone Québécois have likewise used the provincial government to enforce the French language in education, government, and business signage—which understandably evokes resentment in the English-speaking citizenry there. Laws dictate whether a child must go to a French-speaking government school or an English-speaking government school, depending on the ancestry of the family lineage. (As in other countries, wealthy families get to opt out of the governmentalized shaping of their children, by paying tuition twice.) The mutual resentment is fueled by the ancient Anglo-Saxon and Romance cultural competition, which continues to touch ground here and there. This can be untangled through the threefold separation of powers.
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governance signage Basically, the rights governance, whether at the federal level or provincial level or local level, would no longer be propagating French or English, or any other specific language. Any citizen could address any level of governance, in any natural language, and be elected to any rights office, regardless of what language they speak, and regardless of where on earth that governance is located. Instead of a bilingual English and French national government, and a ‘French Only’ provincial government, there would be an omnilingual humanocratic governance. There could still be one or more ‘common languages’ which are used as working languages within the governance organs (the civil service), but no ‘official’ government language or languages for the public interface, or for the elected service positions. Even now in the U.S., local and state governments often have some way of reaching a translator for nearly any language when necessary for police investigations and court cases. This policy would be deepened into all aspects of rights life, and expanded throughout humanity’s world. All governance organs would be mandated to be connected with a contact list of translators for every language which might be encountered in rights work—which ultimately includes all languages of humanity, since any human being would be free to move to any locality and become a citizen, without even being legally compelled to learn another language. As far as government signage and publications, the detailed policies of the multilingual nation-states or political divisions could be distilled so that a set of global humanocratic ‘best practices’ could be perceived. Some models for this distillation process include: Belgium (Flemish, French, and 190 German), California (where, despite its English ‘official language’, offers government services in 32 languages), Finland (Finnish and Swedish), India (with Hindi as the primary national language, along with 21 other constitutional languages, plus English as a subsidiary language), Canada’s Northwest Territories (which has eleven official languages: English, French, and nine indigenous languages), Norway (with its two written standards of Norwegian), the Canadian territory of Nunavut (English, French, and two Inuitic languages), Ontario (which has its own system for delineating which municipalities or counties will feature bilingual French services), South Africa (eleven national languages), Switzerland (French, German, Italian, and the rare Romansh language), and Wales (English and Welsh). For example, there could eventually be a common standard whereby any language which is a preferred language of 10% of the citizenry at any level of governance (municipal, county, state/province, federal/societal) must be featured on all governance signage which is owned by that level of governance. Rather than being passively assigned a language by census takers or academics, there would be a plebiscite where each citizen would consciously name their preferred language or languages for rights service. The chosen preferred language(s) wouldn’t even have to be their mother tongue or language of regular use. The tally would determine which languages are displayed on governance signs, and in what order. This process would be enacted every 18 years, and the signage replaced or modified, so that the public, governance signage livingly mirrors each generation of citizens. In a humanocratic evolution of Quebec, this would mean that there would be other languages besides French which would be mandatorily featured on signage which is owned by the local municipalities or by the supralocal governance units—and not only the ‘recognized minority’ languages like English, Mohawk, Cree, or Inuit, but even ‘ethnic immigrant’ languages such as Arabic, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese (the most common languages in Quebec after French and English). And since indigenous reserves would become non-ethnic, humanocratic municipalities or rights-states themselves, it is likely that the citizenry there would choose for the indigenous language to be prominently featured on governance signage and publications. For example, though the Huron language is extinct, a number of ethnic Huron citizens in the Wendake Indian Reserve in Quebec might very well choose their ancestral Wendat language as a preferred language, along with French and/or English. If Wendat passed the 10% mark in that municipality, or in any municipality, it would be displayed on municipal governance signs, and basic municipal governance publications. There are enough historical documents in Wendat to be able to renew the language. Even in business and cultural establishments, the rights sector would mandate the use of language on safety equipment, such as fire exit signs and instructions on fire extinguishers. Though located in private establishments, these would essentially be ‘governance signs’, and, as such, might even be funded by the rights budget and owned by the rights governance.
third sector signage And cultural organizations, such as churches and independent school organisms (there would be no more government schools), would be entirely free to display and propagate whichever language(s) they wish, according to their whim. The desire of the family (with a $10,000+ individual school choice subsidy to back it up)—not a national or provincial government—would decide what language of education is transmitted to the child. The Francophone cultural organizations, such as the Québécois NCO, Acadian NCO, and La Francophonie INCO would be free to promote monolingual French language and French schools throughout the whole world. These Francophone organizations would be free to advocate for more French services in various other cultural organizations, such as church services, sports clubs, or schools, but none of this would be governmentalized and legally mandated. And as cultural signage, NCOs might negotiate with private land titleholders to install beautiful signs along the roads which pass through the ‘cultural border’ of a national homeland, marking the entrances to their homeland. The Québécois National Homeland extends to the Ohio River (the area was a part of Quebec from 1774 to 1783), and so the Québécois NCO might arrange for privatelyowned signs on Ohio’s border with West Virginia and Kentucky welcoming Québécois nationals and visitors to Quebec.
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The California state driver license test publication is available in Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Cambodian, Chinese, Croatian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Persian/Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Spanish, Tagalog/Filipino, Thai, Tongan, Turkish, and Vietnamese. Voting assistance in Los Angeles County is offered in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese. 153
“Should one people's culture have a greater capability for expansion and spiritual productivity than another, then its expansion will be justified and will come about peacefully if its only means of doing so are the institutions which depend on the spiritual [cultural] organism.” —Rudolf Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c04.html
business and infrastructure signage In contrast to the governance sector, signage in the economic sector would be based on pragmatism, free association, and contractual relationships; for example Francophone businesses (but not the government) would be free to form a ‘Francophone Chamber of Commerce’ made of businesses which freely agree to display French signage and advertisements, and Francophone consumers would be free to form a ‘Francophone Consumer Association’ which supports those efforts. (Since the economic life is grounded in pragmatism, the Francophone businesses would likely choose to also participate in all sorts of other associations as well.) These Francophone economic associations might promote their own ‘seal of approval’ or quality mark for businesses and labor unions which support the French language. These economic associations could be formed on a global basis, in relationship with the La Francophonie international cultural organization, so that the Francophone economic voice would become as strong as possible. Since the transportation grid would be transferred to the Economic Republic, the highway signage would no longer be government signage, and so would be based on the pragmatic associative principle, instead of on the politically compulsory principle. However, even in an associative transportation organism, some social organisms might continue to be a rights-safety aspect in regard to the legibility of highway signs, which might be impaired by having too many languages on one sign. Some of this would be addressed through the international trend of using wordless symbols for the most crucial signs. The Francophone Consumer Association would be welcome to engage with the various transportation associations in and around Quebec, and as stakeholders, negotiate the placement of French on road signs. It would even be possible for such associations to succeed in having multilingual French language signage added to certain roads outside of Quebec, such as in other areas of Canada, and along Vermont and Michigan interstates or tourist routes which are frequented by French-speaking travelers, or in Louisiana. In any case, road signage would come about through a pragmatic conversation between stakeholders.
Stop signs in the Cherokee, Inuit, and Cree languages.
The bilingual highway sign for the national capital of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation—the town of Crow Agency, Montana. Baaxawuaashé “house of the thing that makes rustling noise” (mill-building) is the placename in the Apsáalooke language.191 In the further future, the diacritic (é) for proper Apsáalooke spelling could be added, along with the Apsáalooke words for ‘exit’ and ‘mile’, at least in a smaller font.
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“Tribes seek traditional names for highway signs”: http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/tribes-seek-traditional-names-for-highway-signs/article_f538b4afefab-53b9-91c1-7b27f2a84a88.html 154
dependencies and autonomies— a well-meaning hindrance A ‘dependency’ and an ‘autonomy’ are different words for essentially the same thing. Both are areas of the earth where national cultures did not have the military or economic might to form an independent political state, and so ended up frozen within the political state of another national culture. One person’s dependency is another’s autonomy. ‘Autonomous’ is a fuzzy word which literally means ‘self-ruling’, but which has come to mean a political division which is ‘half-independent’ or ‘partially ruled.’ It’s a watered down word for ‘independent’, in a similar way that ‘ethnic group’ or ‘minority’ are watered down words for ‘nation’ or ‘nationality’, and ‘dialect’ is a watered down word for ‘language.’ In this context, ‘autonomy’ is little more than a dignified synonym for ‘dependency.’
governmentalized cultural devolution—a false solution Why is ethno-political devolution a false solution? Because devolution simply shifts the same problem from the political state to its political administrative divisions. Examples of shifting the problem of the fusion of nation and state onto political subdivisions include:
The "United States of Greater Austria" idea floated in 1906, which would’ve redrawn the political subdivisions of Austria-Hungary to approximately match the geographic spread of nationalities. That wouldn’t have held Austria together, because there still would be no living idea as to why such a political state should continue to exist.
The Marxian nationalities policy of ‘autonomous republics’, still seen in Russia’s 22 ethnic ‘republics’ and China's system of 5 ‘autonomous regions’, 30 ‘autonomous prefectures’, 117 ‘autonomous counties’, and 1000+ ‘ethnic townships’. Like the Americanist Way did with the ‘Czechoslovaks’ and ‘Yugoslavs’ at the end of the first world nightmare, the Marxist Way abstractly invented and amalgamated national identities and used political and economic might to press ethno-national cultures into these artificial governmental boxes; for example: ‘Moldavians’ (Soviet Romanians), ‘Mordvins’ (really two ancient nationalities: Erzyas and Mokshas), ‘Adegeys’, ‘Cherkesses’, and ‘Kabardins’ (three words for ‘Circassian’, employed to divide a single nation into three Soviet nationalities). 155
During this century, Chechnya, Circassia, and Tibet have deeply experienced the governmentalist ethnology of the Left. All three are officially ‘self-governing’ within the Russian and Chinese nation-states—as the Chechen Republic, as three Circassian or semi-Circassian ethnic republics, and the Tibet Autonomous Region, along with Tibetan autonomous prefectures and Tibetan autonomous counties. Their languages appear on government signs, and are taught in government schools, and there are nice government-funded folk dances and such. Yet what actual difference does that make in regard to authentic Chechen, Circassian, and Tibetan cultural vibrance?
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The delineation of Belgium into three cultural-political entities.
Though the Belgian ‘ethno-linguistic federation’ model, along with Åland ‘autonomy’ model and the Swiss ‘canton’ model, are the darlings of UN über-bureaucrats, they are well-meaning dead-ends. They are the height of development of the Nation-State Idea into ‘nice civic nations’…but they’re still a dead-end. These may seem like the most nice and happy models, but they are harmful. They subtly turn human beings into nice but sheepish statists (“the Boss says that the nation-state box may not be questioned”). They are structures for the governmentalization and death of culture. And they’re more obviously harmful or superficial when applied elsewhere.
The Western-crafted, fused, confessional-political system of Lebanon, Cyprus, and Fiji, which was bequeathed by the best political minds of France and Britain, whereby individual human citizenship could only be expressed through certain state-recognized cultural communities which were to be eternally, constitutionally locked into the political structure.
The half-hearted post-war, forced ‘cantonization’ of the Bosnia and Herzegovina—a nation-state which half the citizenry—two out of three cultural groups—didn’t want to exist. Though the population ratio is different, and there is no ‘Bruxellan’ national culture, it’s as if NATO bombed Flanders and strong-armed Wallonia because the citizens of Brussels wanted the Belgian nation-state to exist forever. If the diplomat crowd had understood the structural separation of nationality and state, the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s would have been skipped. The statesmen don’t yet understand that each of the Swiss cantons have their own ancient identity and spirit which existed before ethno-linguistic identities fully coalesced there, and which have maintained a territorial and ideational continuity from the days of the Holy Roman Empire. The language-based delineation of the Jura canton in 1979 is only a recent phenomenon which occurred as a modification of those deeprooted cantonal identities. The diplomats think that cantons can just be drawn on a map by a hand from above, and people should simply warm up to them, and that Balkan Humanity must be barbarians for preferring the substance of their national-cultural identities over the hodge-podge of shifty political districts which were drawn by the various administrations which have come and gone in Southeastern Europe during the Century of Nightmare: Austrian crownlands, Hungarian counties, Royal SCS oblasts, Royal Yugoslav banovinas, Ustaše Croat great counties, the Socialist Yugoslav republics, autonomous provinces, and municipalities, the irredentist and secessionist Serb, Croat, and Western Bosnian autonomous regions and republics of the 1990s, and now Federal Bosnian ‘entities’ and cantons. That the word generic word ‘entity’ is the official name for the two political administrative divisions shows how thin the nation-state idea has been worn there. “...Especially *in+ Southeastern Europe, an immediate application of the principles of the ‘Threefold State’ is imperative. It will be recalled what Bismarck said about the Balkan problem: ‘There is only one man who completely understands the Balkan muddle, but he, unfortunately, is confined in an institution.’" —Henry Powell Spring, The Peace Aims of Humanity, 1943 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b184262?urlappend=%3Bseq=167 *** “The Austro-Hungarian monarchy encompasses—let me use my fingers to help me count—Germans, Czechs, Slovenians, Slovaks, ‘Serbo-Croats’, Croats, Poles, Romanians, Ruthenians, Magyars, Italians and Serbs; as you see, many more than Switzerland has. What really lives there can only be recognized by someone who has lived for quite a long time among these peoples and has come to understand the various streams that were at work within what is known as Austria-Hungary. As far as the Slavic nations are concerned there was, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, a paramount endeavor to find a way in which the various Slavic nations could live together in peace and freedom. The whole history of Austria-Hungary in recent decades, with all those bitter battles, can only be understood if it is seen as an attempt to realize the principle of the individuation of the separate peoples. This is of course exceedingly difficult, since nationalities do not live comfortably side by side but are often enmeshed in complicated ways. Among the Germans in Austria there are very many who consider that their own well-being would be served by the individuating of 157
the various Slavic nations in Austria, that is, by finding a form in which they could develop independently and freely. Obviously such things need time to come about; but such a movement certainly does exist. “Then, apart from the Slavs in Austria-Hungary, there are the Balkan Slavs who lived for a long time under Turkish dominion, which they have thrown off in recent decades in order to found individual states: Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and so on. Yesterday I mentioned the Polish Slavs as those who have most unfolded in the spiritual [cultural] life. I am mentioning only the more important subdivisions, for I too can only work these things out gradually. In all these Slavic nations and clans there lives...a consistent, primal folk element, which is something that is preparing for the future.” —Rudolf Steiner, “The Karma of Untruthfulness”, 1917 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA/GA0173/19161210p01.html
India's and Ethiopia's recent delineation of ethno-linguistic states. And the current plans in Nepal to do the same. A similar redrawing of 192 China’s provinces has been recently floated on Wikipedia. It’s an entrancing idea and tool for furthering the nation-state, and for crystalizing local cultural identities into political structures, but only prolongs the day when national culture, rights governance, and economic development are to be fully distinguished.
The ‘Devolved Governments’ of the UK Home Nations.
The well-meaning, and probably very nice, but fused, ethno-governmental Nunavut Territory of Canada. Though of course the tenor of the Aparthood Republic and the Multicultural Dominion are opposite to one another, from a systems perspective, the Ottawa Citizen newspaper was right to say that: “One-fifth of Canada will be put under a government whose purpose it is to represent one ethnic group. Canada will have its first Bantustan, an apartheid-style ethnic homeland.” Will the Ottawa Citizen support the healthy evolution?—Complete cultural independence for the Inuit Nation, with their own participation in international cultural bodies, and with the title of their settlement parcels held by a non-governmental Inuit land trust organization? Will the Ottawa Citizen support Nunavut, as a political entity, becoming an omni-lingual, non-ethnic, non-partisan, humanocratic collectivity?
The half-in/half-out status of quasi-colonies, such as the British Overseas Territories, French Overseas Collectivities, the ‘Commonwealth’ of 193 Puerto Rico and the four other US dependencies, the two Danish dependencies of the Faroe Islands and Greenland, the Caribbean ‘constituent countries’ and ‘public bodies’ of the Netherlands, the External Territories of Australia, and the Associated States of New Zealand.
The “Europe of Nationalities” model whereby the political administrative boundaries in the EU would be adjusted to approximately match the 194 distribution of national cultures and languages—a sort of ‘Belgianization’ of the continent. To the Europeans: do you really think the Basque Nation is going to be so beaten down and stuffed with government schooling that they will simply forget that, despite the fact that mostly Spanish- and French-identifying individuals live there, their traditional cultural homeland also includes the Spanish province of Navarre and three provinces in France? And even if you were to hold a plebiscite where every village in those four provinces could choose whether to belong to the “EU Federal State of Basque Country” or to some other EU Federal Region, and thereby gerrymander the political boundaries, why not skip all this governmentalist fiddling and eject the problem into the realm where it belongs?—in a free and sovereign plurinational cultural realm.
The Israel/Palestine ‘one state’ idea, whereby there would be two ethno-political divisions of a federal nation-state.
The apartheid-era Bantustan homelands in South Africa and Southwest Africa. These were, in essence, a second round of Wilsonianism—after the first round whereby the African colonies were converted into statal nations in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. In this case, the nation-state idea
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ethno-linguistic_based_administrative_division_map_of_China.png
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The word “Commonwealth” in regard to Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands is just there as a fuzzy, lukewarm word lying in-between the word ‘State’ (as in U.S. state) and the word ‘Republic’. The Philippines was likewise titled a “Commonwealth” when it was an autonomous/dependent half-in/half-out appendage of the United States from 1934-1946. 194
For example, see these maps: www.eurominority.eu/version/shop/poster-nationsnew-big.asp http://www.eurominority.eu/version/maps/map-nations2.asp Similar to the “Europe of Nationalities” is the even more prevalent concept of a “Europe of Regions”. This is likewise a half-baked political compression and fracturing of the national cultures—though into more U.S. state-like regions of a similar size: www.aer.eu/publications/tabula-regionum-europae.html. The formation of constitutent political states of a similar size would be fine if they weren’t half-way enmeshed and blurred with the cultural identities. The existing French regions are the archetype for this fusion of culture and politics. The French regions were delineated in 1982 by taking the existing Departments of France—which date from the French Revolution, and which were intentionally drawn to not reflect any existing cultural or regional identity—and grouping them into similarly sized entities. They were given names which usually hearken back to the pre-Revolutionary provinces, but their borders were completely different than the traditional provinces. For example, the new Region of Brittany is a lopped-off version of the wider traditional homeland of the Breton Nation. If the Breton national cultural is supposed to identify with this political region, then the Breton identity will be forever chained as a subordinate political-cultural unit of the French national state and culture. A “Europe of Nationalities” or a “Europe of Regions” would chain all of the nationalcultures into becoming subordinate quasi-political units of a European state and culture. 158
(and its affiliated ethno-political ‘autonomous region’ sidekick) was further applied to the indigenous African cultures within the South African nation-state. The deeply warped Aparthood impulse was able to extend this sick formative force even further, so that it lingered until 1994. The South African government studied the U.S. system of Indian Reservations which had been applied to American Indian Humanity, and applied that to Black African Humanity. During the 1970s and 80s ten bits of land were delineated within South Africa and declared to be ‘selfgoverning’ homelands. Plus ten homelands in Aparthood-occupied Southwest Africa, now Namibia. Then Aparthood took it one step further than the Americans. Four of the homelands—Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei—were declared to be fully independent nationstates! South African maps showed them to be separate countries. A homeland ‘citizenship’ was assigned to each Black person based on their ancestral culture, and they were tied to one of the homelands. It would be as if 120 of the 310 U.S. Indian Reservations were recognized by the Americanist Republic to be nation-states, so that there were little holes in the U.S. map. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate freedom? A state for every nation, even the smallest? Yet Black Humanity there got to deeply experience that these were little more than nation-state shaped prisons. Their economies were necessarily intertwined with the surrounding land and industries. Now Blacks needed a passport to travel to their jobs in South Africa. Several of the homelands were not even geographically contiguous, but were made of disconnected patches of land. Because all were corporatist, partiocratic states, their policies could be purchased by South African corporations, and by the South African government. Because they were structurally and ideationally tied to a particular ethno-national culture, “tribalist” nepotism and inter-cultural resentment flared. The Aparthood Republic simply used the “freedom of nations” concept to rid itself of its unwanted populace. No other country recognized these confined orphans of the Nation-State Idea. What a twisted experience, by Jove!
The White Caucasian race (of Dutch Afrikaner, British English and Scottish, Irish, French, German, Portuguese, and Greek ethno-national heritage) was treated as a single national group, while the Black Ethiopian race was stucturally divvied into its component nationalities. Thus the warped spirit of Caucasianist Aparthood took up Wilsonianism, with all its ham-handedness and ill-will. That round of twisted NationStatism was rolled back by the Rainbow Nation in 1994. Yet from the perspective of the emerging future, all nation-states are Bantustans. When will an Ubuntu Republic roll back the now well-meaning, but ultimately unhealthy and confining South African nation-state?
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The Indian reservations and First Nations reserves. These boxes are Wilsonian nation-statism as applied to the Original Peoples of this continent. This is North American version of applied, governmentalized ‘nation-building.’ The nationalities of North America were forcibly fragmented by the military and economic might of the American and Canadian People into several ‘reservation nations.’ Or, especially in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, many tiny nationalities were forcibly amalgamated into a uniform ‘confederated reservation nation’—the 195 Czechoslovakias and Yugoslavias of Indian Country. From a systems perspective, each of these 632 Indian Nations and 633 First Nations are 196 now structurally a subordinate branch of the American People and the Canadian People. To give only three of many examples of cultural nations which were politically amalgamated by the fiat of the American People:
‘The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Washington’ which was originally twelve distinct nations speaking several different languages (Wenatchee, Nespelem, Moses-Columbia, Methow, Colville, Okanogan, Palus, San Poil, Eniat, Chelan, Nez Perce, and Lake). ‘The Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, Montana’, an administrative merger of two nations who were traditionally enemies. (The footnote continues on the next page.) 159
Did you know that in the vast portion of the North American continent which is administered by the U.S. nation-state, the American People tried to corral all the Original Nations into a single box? That box is now the State of Oklahoma (the name means ‘red people’), wherein lie the pressed remains of 35 indigenous national flowers gathered from as far away as Georgia, New York, Michigan, Arizona, and Oregon. This is not ancient history. There are centenarian Americans still living who were children when the Indian Territory was wrapped up in 1907. Imagine the soul wounds which would come from an experience of the Aztecs colonizing Europe, and completing, only a century ago, the pressing of the French Nation, German Nation, Italian Nation, and thirty-three other European nations into a fortified rectangle in the Ukrainian steppe, named the State of White People. Then the hundreds of national cultures were forced by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 to reshape their ancient cultures into the square form of an Americanist political government, with an Executive Branch, Legislative Branch, and Judicial Branch, and Robert’s Rules of Order. That may be fine for the sphere of political rights, but it’s death to vibrant, authentic culture. It’s a way to re-make indigenous humanity into Americanists, in the worst sense of the word. Then came the Termination Era of the 1940s to 1960s, when the U.S. nation-state attempted to dispose of even these relatively Americanized husks, by disincorporating the tribal governments and divvying their assets among the individual members. It would be as if the Aztec State in Europe carved up the entire British and French national territory into checkerboard lots and handed one lot to each individual Briton and Frenchman (with extra portions going to the national leaders who would go along with the scheme), to then be bought and sold on the market (and with the Aztecs being the wealthiest, most savvy potential buyers). Then these identities began to resist termination, only to enter the über-bureaucratic process for achieving the dubious status of Federal Recognition—a process which has been described as “broken, long, expensive, burdensome, intrusive, unfair, arbitrary and capricious, less than transparent, unpredictable, and subject to undue political influence and manipulation." Out of the fire, into the freezer. Next, in the 1980s, out of all the powers and possibilities which were implied by their status as ethnic polities which are theoretically above the fifty state laws, the right to build casinos came to mind. This economic boon has infused the tangle of national-cultural identity and political-governmental status with mafia-esque big money gathered from tired American souls. The nations used to have their own cultural ways of determining nationality and adopting outsiders into the nation. Over the past two centuries, the U.S. Nation-State has replaced these traditional ways with a government list of how much Indian blood is in each individual, called ‘blood quantum.’ Imagine if some other nation subjugated the American People and kept blood quantum records of how ‘full-blooded American’ we were. The identity of the American People isn’t only blood-based, since immigrants can become naturalized Americans...but the American People, through our American Government, force our domesticated dependent nationalities to be blood-based. In this way, these identities are kept in the tight grip of the American nation-state. “Native people in the United States are the only group in the world who have to use blood quantity to identify themselves as Native. This is not the traditional way to identify a Native person. It was brought about by the state and federal government.” —Donald Soctomah Historic Preservation Officer, Passamaquody Tribal Representative “We have people in our village who may not have blood quantum but are integral members of the tribal community.” —Richard Phillips-Doyle
The (Eastern) Delaware Tribe of Indians who, from 1867 to 2009, were forced by the American People to be a dependency of their Cherokee Nation—a dependent nation of a dependent nation. When some of the US governmental and economic tightness was recently loosened, the Eastern Delaware went through the purgatorial bureaucratic process of achieving national independence from the Cherokee Nation (but not from the American Nation) in 2009.
“It is said, funnily enough: ‘The Czechoslovaks are to be liberated.’ We know the Czechs and also the Slovaks. It goes without saying that only the Entente *the Allied Powers of the First World Nightmare] has heard of Czechoslovaks. Let us presume that it is the Czechs and the Slovaks who are meant. If we go by what the Czechs themselves think, the result would be like this.” —Rudolf Steiner, “The Karma of Untruthfulness”, 1917 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA174/English/RSP1992/19170113p01.html 196 With at least five exceptions:
1) The traditional Grand Council of Chiefs of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy considers the politically elected Iroquois reservation governments to be puppet states of the US and Canada. 2) The Western Shoshone Nation, centered in the deserts of Nevada, ignores the US government’s fragmentation of their nationality into ‘reservation nation’ colonies. 3) The Traditional Hopi view the US-funded Hopi Tribal Government to be illegitimate. 4) The Republic of Lakotah, which was initiated in 2007 by Russell Means on the Pine Ridge Reservation. This is the same place as the Wounded Knee Incident of 1973, where he and other Lakota Indians re-asserted the continuing independence of the Oglala Lakota Nation from the United States. The area was then cordoned and surrounded by U.S. national police (marshalls) and a shoot-out ensued, with deaths sustained from both nations. The Republic of Lakotah group’s stated goal is to become an independent Associated State like Micronesia. This aspiration has been recognized by the Alaskan Independence Party and Second Vermont Republic group. We threefolders offer another possibility. 5) The Independent Traditional Seminole Nation, in the Florida peninsula, has never formally submitted to the United States. 160
Sakom/Chief, Passamaquoddy Indians “Identity is Learned”: www.abbemuseum.org/downloads/Identityforonline.pdf "He who gains power over a man's blood gains power over the man."
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—Rudolf Steiner, “The Occult [that is, the Hidden] Significance of Blood”, 1906 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19061025p01.html Because of their remoteness, the indigenous nations of Alaska were spared from some of this confining process. When the time came to clarify their status in the late 1960s, governmentalized reservations were perceived to be inefficient...so the Americanist leadership swung to the other pole of corporatism. In 1971, the nations on this northwestern claw of Turtle Island were embodied in thirteen ‘Alaska Native Corporations.’ Though most these have proven to be relatively efficient and profitable compared to tribal governments, I wonder if the deeper national-cultural aspirations of these ancient identities are really being met by the corporatist structure. That’s a brief history of the Original Nations of North America in their role as ‘domestic dependent nations’ of the American People.
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in or out—untangling the dependencies and autonomies In a Trisector Society, such autonomous/dependent entities would have only two options: In or Out. No fuzziness. ‘In’ means the area becomes an integral organ of the country-wide economy, and of the rights governance. Politically, the area becomes an equal right-state or rights-collectivity, alongside the other constituent states of that polity. The citizenry would have an actual vote in the sovereign legislature…not the fake, play vote of the present-day Puerto Rican representative, who can ‘vote’ in committees, but not in the actual vote on the floor of the US Congress. ‘Out’ means the area achieves full trisector independence, with its own Economic Forum, Political Governance, and plurinational Cultural Council taking a seat in global economic, political, and cultural forums. Either way, individuals in that area would be free to associate as a culturally independent nation. And either way, the trisector idea would ensure that there are no patches of earth wherein human beings are bound by some sheepish agreement or bribe which their blood ancestors entered into, which supposedly blocks individuals who are born into subsequent generations from having a full citizen’s voice (and vote) in whatever political governance they find themselves in. There would be no quasi-citizens in a healthy social organism. Here follows a depiction of four examples of the ‘in’ option—Falkland Islands, French Polynesia, Puerto Rico, and Tibet—with the economic, rights, and cultural (and national-cultural) powers structurally separated. The aspirant identities achieve cultural independence, yet political and economic 199 unity is maintained.
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For a vision of breaking out of the grip of blood quantum, see “Haudenosaunee Kanienkehaka Mohawk Nation Roots of Citizenship—A Draft Declaration for all Nine Haudenosaunee Kanienkehaka Mohawk Communities on Sovereignty Through National Identity and the Removal of the Colonial System of Blood Quantum” by Kahon:wes of the Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) Nation: http://www.kahonwes.com/blood/citizen.htm 198
If you want to know more about how the Trisector Idea would intercourse with the Original Peoples in North America, see the writings at “Tecumseh’s Vision”: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/tecumseh-s-vision 199
For over a hundred more examples of a trisector clarification of autonomies/dependences, see my picture album, “The Illustrations: The End of Autonomies and Dependencies”: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/3n 161
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what about federalism? Some might suggest that the separation of nation and state, and the other threefold separations of powers, aren’t necessary—that all we or any country needs is more ‘federalism.’ From the perspective of a healthy future, the Americanist word ‘federalism’ essentially means trying to solve cultural aspirations or regionalist economic aspirations by a relatively slight shifting of the political structure, such as allowing the constituent states the right to levy a few percentage points of taxes, and to have their own level of political bureaucracy in addition to the federal level of bureaucracy. In this sense, ‘federalism’ is the American word for what the British call ‘devolution’, and what the Marxians call ethnic or regional ‘autonomy.’ Do you really think that elevating the Indian Reservations to some kind of US federal state would resolve their ancient cultural aspirations, even if having their own Senator and Representative in U.S. Congress resulted in a bit more tax money flowing to the Reservation bureaucracy and their government schools? The traditional faction of the Mohawk Nation already refuses government monies for its immersive Mohawk-language Freedom School, because they know that he who pays the piper is apt to call the tune. ‘Federal’ has become a magical word in the American mind, which stuns the soul. The word evokes in the American soul a simultaneous swelling and cringing—a swelling with pride for the accomplishment of building a Federal Union of States, and a cringing with fear of the national state god. I despise the word ‘federal’, because it’s used to disguise the word ‘national’ or ‘centralized.’ In Alexander Hamilton’s time, the ‘Federalists’ were the advocates for a Centralized Government…exactly the opposite of what well-meaning Americanists intend to say when they suggest ‘federalism’ as a panacea. Try to feel the subtle psychological difference between these words, which are referring to the same actual thing:
‘the Federal Government’ or ‘the National State’ ‘federal law enforcement’ or ‘national police’ ‘federal detention center’ or ‘national prison’ 162
Nationalism is something which can be resisted. But who can resist Federalism? Yes, if the National State Idea were the only possible future for humanity, in the same way that Air-Breathing and Land-Walking are the only possible future for humanity, then Federalism would be a half-measure we would be obliged to accept. But if humanity will mature to the Trisector Idea, then Federalism would have its rightful place as an option in only two situations: 1) In the sense of political devolution: If tension has built up within a rights-state which has already been purified of all economic and cultureforming powers, and which has already divested its national culture to be embodied in a National-Cultural Organization, and which has already made way for the cultural independence of all aspirant nationalities within its service area, then a federal decentralization of this purified rights organism through a further localization of rights services, would be a legitimate, healthy way of channeling this tension. The ‘upper house’ of a bicameral rights legislature is especially suited for embodying the ‘federal’ principle. 2) In the sense of political unification: If there were an independent, purified rights organism (a sovereign political state) which wished to peaceably converge with another rights organism, then a federal convergence would be fitting and legitimate. Federalism within or between purified political states is fine, and is a legitimate aspiration or tool in the political-rights sector. But Americanist federalism as recently applied in Germany, Nigeria, Russia, Ethiopia, Nepal, and Iraq—is a slightly more sophisticated continuation of the national-statist wound. Americanism is more about jaguar-like, opportunistic power-plays and freezing the ‘status quo’, than it is about authentic federalism. We waited for Bosnia and Somalia to become the exemplars of chaotic destruction before floating the concept of a Federal Bosnia and a Federal Republic of Somalia. As I write this in early 2014, Russophiles in eastern Ukraine have explicitly asked for a Federal Republic of Ukraine. Yet Americanism solemnly delights in waiting until tens of thousands have been killed and an entire populace exhausted, so that we can come in at the end as the ‘hero’ and ‘responder’, thereby instilling the belief in another segment of humanity that the Corporatist-Federalist Way is the unquestionably pragmatic, God-given way. The Trisector Idea would put the Federalist Idea in its place. ‘Federalism’ would no longer be an ‘irresistible’ tool for forcibly continuing a fused, statal nationality and its national economy.
then what about confederalism? The same goes for Swiss confederalism, despite the adoration which the UN diplomat crowd holds for the ‘Swiss Canton Model.’ ‘Confederation’ as it is currently manifest in Switzerland and Canada—the two countries which formally employ that word—is just a looser-sounding synonym for a 200 Federative Nation-State. In fact, both of those social organisms now use the word ‘confederation’ and ‘federation’ interchangeably: the national level of government of the Swiss Confederacy is called Federal; in Canada, ‘Confederation’ now only serves as the word for the historic process by which those colonies became a Federal Government. Confederation as it exists, is simply a stylistic synonym for Federation. Even if some country were to invent a level of sovereignty which lay between the nation-state and the international organization (of nation-states), and call that a ‘Confederation’, do you think that would solve humanity’s troubles? Such ‘confederations’ already exist: the European Union, or the relationship of the United States with the three ‘Freely Associated States’ of Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau, or the existing ‘Union State’ of Russia and Belarus, lie structurally in-between the nation-state and the super-nation-state. The Confederate Idea is no more a solution than the Federal Idea.
a new federalism The threefold separation of powers and their recoalesence in three sovereign sectoral republics which are faithfully allied via the individual human being and via the Trisector Senate—that is the New Federalism. All countries would become federations. “The Aztec centralized social regime prefigured the social experiments of the 20th century, be they of the right or of the left. The Haudenosaunee inaugurated a far-seeing political model from which we can still draw lessons for the present. On the one hand stands the unified, centralized state, whether this is a tyranny or a nominal democracy; on the other appears a new form of federalism giving autonomy to its constituent components, but also to the different areas of social life—cultural, political, economic.” —Luigi Morelli, American author and social arts trainer, “Aztec and Iroquois: Myths, Rituals, and Political Models”, 2013 http://luigimorelli.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/five-nations-and-aztecs-prefiguring-modern-political-models/#more-1212
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Even the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy—a sovereign culture which does not currently manifest a sovereign political state—uses the word ‘confederacy’ to mean their single confederate/federal national identity which was historically formed from six national identities. The traditional Iroquois call the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario their Haudenosaunee Federal Territory. 163
twelve aspirations for cultural independence We, the myriad national cultures of humanity, aspire to the separation of nation and state. We are the nationalities, ethnic and linguistic groups, indigenous peoples, distinct folk cultures, and emerging, incipient, or alternative national identities—whether we be stateless nations who are unrepresented in international forums, or nations who, through recent centuries, acquired the military and economic might to maintain a widelyrecognized political state and national economy. In the realm of culture we are peers. We aspire to enact the structural separation of cultural power from political and economic power which will we free us to achieve cultural independence and vitality as state-free nations in a global free cultural sector, within the lifetime of the present generations. This is the path we aspire to climb: 1.
We aspire to outgrow the Nation-State Idea. We set aside the right to form a nation-state, ethno-political region, or national economy.
2.
We aspire to freedom of ethno-national association, so that our national identity is embodied in a non-governmental, state-free, National-Cultural Organization.
3.
We aspire to individual freedom of nationality for the human being.
4.
We aspire to initiate our own National Council and to designate our own cultural Head of Nation.
5.
We aspire to delineate our own National Homeland or Ancestral Territory as a cultural service area.
6.
We aspire to form our own Language Council, our own Immersion School Organism, our own National Land Trust, and other initiatives in the various fields of culture.
7.
We aspire for our national symbology to appear as a cosmetic variant in certain symbolic fields, such as coins, banknotes, stamps, and license plates.
8.
We are remorseful for, and aspire to amend, the harm that came to humanity through our role in the sick fusion of nation and state.
9.
We aspire to declare and enact cultural independence in concert with each other, to mutually recognize each other, to form a global peak body in the national field of culture, and to achieve full membership in international cultural bodies, such as UNESCO and the Olympic Movement—or to form our own countervailing bodies if the existing ones will not yield to the separation of culture and state.
10. We aspire to support those economic enterprises and associations which materially support the unfolding of our national cultures and languages. Yet our national cultures are not businesses, and our substance and symbols are not commodities to be bought and sold in the market. 11. We aspire to advocate for an omni-lingual, anational rights governance. When the political sector is no longer so sick, we reserve the possibility of inspiring a humanocratic political division or political state through a velvet plebiscite. 12. Having experienced cultural independence through the separation of nation and state, we aspire to carry this message to each national identity in humanity’s world. ***
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on national amends Our national cultures would be in a better position to realize cultural independence if they, through us, expressed remorse for, and began to amend, the harm that came to humanity through our nationality. Many nations have wielded their state apparatus to harm humanity. Others have done harm by attempting to force a rebel military solution instead of enacting a similarly vigorous, yet peaceable, culturally-inspired supersession. How would the situation of the Serbs in the Croatian Krajina or the Chechens in the Russia Caucasus have turned out differently if the Serb and Chechen leadership and much of the populace had expressed remorse for the harm that Serb Humanity and Chechen Humanity have done to Croat Humanity and Russian Humanity through the years—regardless of the terrible harm that was received by the Serbs and Chechens—and if this amends was enacted in concert with the voicing of the separation of nation and state as the end-game picture? Though the idea has been in humanity’s toolbox since Humboldt expressed it in 1792, most of our national ancestors did not know about the possibility of separating nation and state. Nevertheless, we, as living representatives of those identities, are empowered to take an inventory of the harm our nationality did. We take some responsibility even for the harm which came through i-gnorance, ‘not knowing’. Though we, as human individuals, were not alive during some of the harm-doing, as long as we have been shaped by those national governments, and continue to identify with them, then we continue to play some part in their remorselessness. Not many people have renounced or outgrown, even symbolically, their membership in the national state into which they arrived at birth. Any individual is empowered to make at least a symbolic, ceremonial, unforced amends for those harms. Even one or few letters written to an embassy or ethno-national organization, or to an individual who is known to identify with that ethno-national group...that is something. Personal remorse can be expressed for what happened. It makes a difference, regardless of whether there is any external response from the recipient. As individuals and as nations, we have only suffered and inflicted so many harms. The harms can be listed in black and white...even if it is a very long list. And some small action can be taken for each harm, whether one was the receiver or the giver. We clean our side of the street. Such actions are not tied to what the other party does or how the other responds or doesn’t respond. Otherwise we are still entangled with, and seemingly controlled by, someone or something outside of our individuality. A culmination of national amends would be to enact ceremonies which restore all the national aspirations which were brought to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and the aspirations as they were on eve of 1914. From there, all the national aspirations, from time immemorial, could unfold again in a healthy way, as an amendatory reversal and inversion. Suffering has a beginning and it can have an end.
carrying the message to every national identity in humanity’s world The idea of cultural independence through the separation of nation and state is an idea which every cultural identity in the whole wide world can benefit from. Whichever nation—whether it be a statal nation or stateless nation—is first through the gate would be in position to bring the idea to their peers. The first state-free nation would lay out the tools for others to awaken from statism. One priority would be to carry the message to humanity’s ancient national identities who are embodied within the vast “forest ocean” of the Amazon, and in other tender areas where the spirits of national vibrance have not yet been dulled. The images in their national memories extend to the first ages of humanity’s story. This is a call to save the Amazonian nations.
a second spring of nations In 1848, the year of the Spring of Nations, various nationalities in Europe—the Danes, Germans, Hungarians, Irish, Italians, Poles, Romanians, Ukrainians, and others—attempted to break out of the box of the autocratic state monarchies. “Because the nineteenth century was the age of materialism, anything of an idealistic stamp was not favored with much luck. The blame for this bad luck lay not so much with the nation as with the materialism of the nineteenth century.” —Rudolf Steiner, “The Karma of Untruthfulness, Vol. 1” http://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA/GA0173/19161218p01.html Though the First Spring was squelched, a Second Spring of Nations would break out of the whole nation-state box. A Second Spring would have lasting results if the ten thousand nationalities would refuse to be diverted by Statism and would stay on the path to Cultural Independence. The Icelandic singer Björk has written a song called “Declare Independence” which calls for a Greenlandic nation-state and a Faroese nation-state. She has sung the song in different venues, calling for recognition of the Kosovar nation-state, for a Tibetan nation-state, and for an Aboriginal Australian nation-state. And yet...the world doesn't need another nation-state—not even a nice Inuit indigenous-flavored nation-state or Tibetan Buddhist nation-state. Neither does the world need another national economy or ethno-political administrative unit. Humanity’s world sorely needs the separation of nation and state. 165
We need 206 rights-states which are filled only with the elemental spirit of humanocracy. We need the healing which will come from achieving cultural independence for the myriad of aspirant nationalities. We need our national cultures to be freed from their political prison-cells. Björk’s song would be a fitting anthem for a break-out. We need a choir of nationalities within a global free cultural sector. And we need to clear the way for the human individuality to stand taller than both the nation and the state. May the loving God and highest ideal of the nations bless humanity. ***
the twelve and twelve In this section, there’s a gallery of 24 national identities which would be fitting as the first wave of expansion for humanity’s global cultural forums. Cultural forums include UNESCO, Olympics, FIFA football, and other international organizations whose primary purpose is (supposedly) in a field of culture, rather than politics. There are twelve nations in the world which are functionally or nominally independent, but which are not generally admitted into global cultural forums (much less political and economic forums). That makes up the left-hand column. The Cook Islands and Niue are a special case because New 201 Zealand is in a ‘nice’ relationship with those dependencies and is preparing them for nation-statehood. 202
The other twelve are stateless nationalities. That makes up the right-hand column. Besides having only two from each continental region, which greatly narrowed the pool, the twelve stateless cultures were selected based on their ripeness, such as whether there is a cultural organization which would be ready to serve as the core of a sovereign National-Cultural Organization if the separation of nation and state were enacted this very year. It wouldn’t ‘have’ to be these exact twelve, but this is my informed suggestion. There are many thousands of other cultures which could and would achieve cultural independence in further waves. But here are twelve. Some would question whether all of the twelve civic nations in the left-hand column are ‘real nations’ since some are very recent offshoots of other, more traditional nations (Somaliland from Somalia), or came into being as client states (Turkish Cyprus and Turkey, or Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia)—but if they have a national school system and a national anthem, and consider themselves to be a people, then they are a national culture. The same naysaying could be said for many state-formed nations which came about through political circumstance: such as Andorra, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Singapore; but these are admitted as sovereign cultures.
mutually recognized cultural independence for the two expressions of china Cultural recognition would be formally separated from political recognition. There is no question of the People’s Republic recognizing the political independence of the ROC (Taiwan). Yet there is a functional cultural organism on that patch of earth called Taiwan, regardless of what name it calls itself. And so those cultural forums which are supposedly universally human ought to make space for such cultural organs to speak and share in the cultural realm, even if the political sphere is still an open wound. This wave of cultural recognition could only healthily be enacted if:
The twelve statal nations in the left-hand column would at least partially implement the separation of nation and state, with the national identities incorporated as non-governmental organizations, even if they at first receive funding from their namesake government, And if the leadership of the twelve stateless nations on the right-hand column were to vocally commit to setting aside the right to form a national state and national economy.
For example, if the Taiwan-based authorities were to incorporate a non-governmental organization which boldly called itself “The Republic of China National-Cultural Organization” (ROC NCO) instead of the usual “Chinese Taipei”, and if its activities were clearly and vocally limited to fields of culture (art, education, science, sport), and if the ROC NCO was only admitted to global cultural forums (but not political or economic forums), and if the ROC simultaneously allowed the equivalent PRC NCO to offer cultural services throughout Taiwan, and if this were to take place in concert with the international recognition of 23 other national cultures, then it might be possible.
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Denmark’s relationship with the Inuit of Greenland is another relatively benign example of niceness within the national state matrix. Yet don’t be too proud you Danes and Kiwis, it’s not so hard to be magnanimous when the aspirant nationality is thousands of miles away and physically bounded by islands. Whereas the overlapping territorial conceptions of the nationalities of China and the US are nearly impossible to nicely navigate without the separation of nation and state. 202
As for why Southern Asia and Oceania are considered a single continental region, see my sandbox on “The three tritospheres and the seven continents” at https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/tritospheres 166
easing the pain—ripping 24 infected band-aids off at the same time Admitting all twenty-four nations at the same time would ease the pain, since many established UN member nations would simultaneously experience the pain of letting go of the state monopoly on identity-shaping impulses: Algeria (Amazigh/Berber) Andorra (Catalan) Argentina (Mapuche) Armenia (Kurdistan) Australia (Aborigines) Azerbaijan (Nagorno-Karabakh and Kurdistan) Bhutan (Republic of China in eastern Bhutan) Brazil (Kayapo) Canada (Iroquoia and Quebec) Chile (Mapuche) China (ROC and Tibet) Cyprus (Northern Cyprus) Egypt (Amazigh/Berber) Finland (Saami) France (Catalan) Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia) India (Republic of China in northeastern India and Kashmir) Iran (Kurdistan) Iraq (Kurdistan) Israel (Palestine) Italy (Catalan, on the island of Sardinia) Japan (Ainu , Republic of China homeland overlaps Senkaku Islands)
Libya (Amazigh/Berber) Mali (Amazigh/Berber) Mauretania (Amazigh/Berber) Moldova (Pridnestrovie/Transnistria) Morocco (SADR and Amazigh/Berber) Myanmar (Republic of China in northern Myanmar) New Zealand (Cook Islands and Niue) Niger (Amazigh/Berber) Nigeria (Ogoniland) Norway (Saami) Pakistan (Republic of China in northeastern Pakistan) Russia (Ainu, Saami, Republic of China in Tyva) Serbia (Kosovo) Somalia (Somaliland) Spain (Catalan, and Amazigh/Berber in Ceuta, Melilla, and the Canary Islands) Sweden (Saami) Syria (Kurdistan) Tajikistan (Republic of China in eastern Tajikistan) Tunisia (Amazigh/Berber) Turkey (Kurdistan) United States (Iroquoia)
And that’s only the initial spread of the homelands. In the further future, some NCOs might expand the definition of their cultural homeland; for example, the Kosovar Homeland might include all of the Ottoman Vilayet of Kosovo (the Sanjak in Serbia, and much of Montenegro and Macedonia), the Palestinian Homeland might include all of Jordan, the Pridnestrovian Homeland might include the area of the Moldavian ASSR of 1924-1940 in Ukraine, the Québécois Homeland would eventually extend to the Ohio River in the U.S., and the Tibetan Homeland might include the Tibetan cultural areas in India, such as Ladakh in the west and Arunachal Pradesh in the east (since the Indian nation-state is hosting the Tibetan leadership-in-exile, it’s not surprising that the historic Tibetan claims to parts of India are discretely glossed over).
political and economic independence would still be an option for some In the case of Palestine, the Cook Islands, and other near nation-states, this cultural independence would not be a substitute for political and economic independence, if that is their goal. On the other hand, in the case of the nations of the right-hand column such as the Central Tibetan Administration NCO, cultural independence would mean a conscious letting-go of the ideal of the Nation-State and National Economy. When, in the further future, the whole world’s rights organism has melted into municipality-sized states, and the tool of the plebiscite returns in a big way, then citizens would be free to sponsor referendums on peaceably redrawing rights service areas.
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The map on the following page shows the cultural service areas—in other words, the national homelands—of these 24 identities. Some are depicted with their projected initial boundaries—they’d be free to widen their territorial conception however they wish. For example, Quebec might, in the further future, expand its territorial conception to reach the Ohio River, its widest historic extent to the south. The dark blue waters are a rough depiction of the maritime zones of the national economies. The national sea of each NCO is depicted as extending out into the ocean. It’s a good thing to have more and more people able to, and interested in, holding our waters in their consciousness. 168
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three examples I have sent out feelers to cultural leaders of several nations. Here I share the response from a representative of the VhaVenda People in southern Africa, and from a representative of the Circassian People in the northern Caucasus. A picture of how the Trisector Idea would free Tibet is also offered, since this is on the mind of many in the West. O were that same indignation and interest to be expressed by Americans in regard to freeing Iroquoia and Hopiland. ***
vhavenda—the first effort for freedom of nationality The Vhavenda national flag. The Vhavenda People are the first nationality to seek cultural independence through the separation of national culture from the political state. Beginning in 2011, I’ve corresponded with Tshifhiwa Makhale from the Dabalorivhuwa Patriotic Front, the organization which represents the Vhavenda People at the UNPO (the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization). Out of our conversations, the Vhavenda delegation sent a request for cultural independence to the South African People, along with a booklet I’d authored about how the separation of nation and state 203 might look for the Venda. Here’s the letter from the Vhavenda People to the South African Government: th November 4 , 2011 Dear Sir/Madam I wish, on behalf of the Vhavenda people and the DPF, to make a humble submission for the indigenous status of the Vhavenda-Vhangona people and their accompanying cultural independence. First and foremost we would like to request for formal acknowledgement and recognition of the Vhavenda-Vhangona people as aborigines or natives of the area known as Venda. Secondly we also hereby apply for cultural independence in terms of a Trisector model, supported by UN Declaration of Indigenous Rights, attached hereto for easy reference. We also refer you to Articles 3, 4, 5 of the Declaration. Respectfully Makhale T.S {FOR VHAVENDA PEOPLE} *** In February 2012, nearly a year later, the South African government acknowledged that the proposal was received. We’re not holding our breath waiting for a further response. National States aren’t known for their responsiveness. Nevertheless, this fledgling action taken by Vhavenda people is the first small step towards a future freedom of nationality.
A rough map of the Venda traditional lands, a cultural service area which straddles the political border of two nation-states. 203
The booklet can be downloaded as a PDF at the bottom of my Venda webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/venda 170
trisecting circassia—a framework & solution
The Circassians are the indigenous nation of the Black Sea port city of Sochi, the site of the recent 2014 Winter Olympics. Circassian Humanity suffered a grievous blow when their ancestral territory was completely overrun by the Russian Empire in 1864. The tsar’s goal was to physically uproot this beautiful nation and expel her to Turkey, which was largely accomplished. In 1994, Russian Humanity barely admitted, through the words of Yeltsin, then head of nation and state, that the Circassian resistance to the tsarist forces was legitimate. Yet many Circassians feel aggrieved that our international community is holding a nice happy event in the lost Circassian homeland without having ever been condoled by humanity at large. Threefold Now has corresponded with Amjad Jaimoukha, whom the Circassian Encyclopaedia names as “perhaps the most important writer on Circassian issues.” We shared images of a Trisected Russia and cultural independence for the Circassian People. This is Jaimoukha’s response to the Trisector Idea: May 10, 2011 I am intrigued and challenged by the concepts involved. I think this is a basic framework for negotiation between the Circassians and Russians, as the Circassian issue is becoming more prominent at the international level and the Russian Duma trying to co-opt the diaspora Circassians in the lead-up to the Sochi Olympics. I will spread the word about the scheme, for it presents interim solutions for many of the problems that are facing the Circassians nowadays. All good things, Amjad Jaimoukha
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a fraternal, egalitarian, and free tibet “The whole of Tibet known as Cholka-Sum (U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo) should become a self-governing democratic political entity founded on law...in association with the People's Republic of China. The Government of the People's Republic of China could remain responsible for Tibet's foreign policy. The Government of Tibet should, however, develop and maintain relations, through its own foreign affairs bureau, in the field of commerce, education, culture, religion, tourism, science, sports and other non-political activities. Tibet should join international organizations concerned with such activities.” —The Strasbourg Proposal by Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama of Tibetan Humanity, 1988 www.dalailama.com/messages/tibet/strasbourg-proposal-1988 The Strasbourg Proposal speaks from an awareness of how the possibility for a solution to the seemingly impossible impasse in Tibet lies in the structural severance of culture from politics. Yet in this proposal, the cultural fields, along with commercial activity, would still be fused with a democratically-elected Government of Tibet, which would be an ethno-political autonomous/associated state of the Chinese nation-state. In a trisected proposal, the Central Tibetan Administration NCO would become an internationally recognized non-governmental organization which would be free to fund its own private schools, religious bodies, science institutes, arts, sports, and other cultural activities. The CTA cultural service area (the national homeland) would extend to the widest Tibetan territorial conception, with its three traditional provinces. The leader of this nongovernmental organization would be entitled ‘Head of Nation’, but not Head of State. The national homeland, as a cultural conception, would freely overlap with the Chinese national homeland. Individuals would be free to participate in either or both the Tibetan cultural identity and the Chinese cultural identity. The Tibetan national flag, like any other non-governmental cultural symbol, would be free to fly over cultural sites which are owned by CTA, or by private individuals at their own residence. In the political sector, every human being who resides in Tibet, regardless of their chosen nationality, would be an equal citizen of an anational ‘Land of Snows’ People’s State, with an elected state governor. However, there would no longer be politicized funding for settlers to move to Tibet, or to any other region, since that is an economic matter. This state’s borders would remain the same as the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and would have its own flag distinct from the Tibetan national flag. This state would be an integral and perpetual constituent state within the Chinese polity. In the economic sector, there would be an anational, non-governmental, pragmatic commercial association which represents the economic endeavors in that natural region, in association with the adjacent economies. This Tibetan regional ‘chamber of commerce’ would select its own leadership, and would have its own flag, which would be welcome, but not required, to be flown over businesses. As a non-governmental trade association, it would be free to develop investment offices throughout the world. Such a threefold healing could only be enacted if the leadership understands the Trisector Idea, and agrees that any cultural independence must be explicitly paired with egalitarian political integration and economic interdependence. “Our basic and immediate concerns are threefold: the preservation of Tibetan culture, the identity of Tibetan nationality and the environment of the Tibetan Plateau. All these three are in great danger.” —Professor Samdhong Rinpoche, Prime Minister of the Central Tibetan Administration from 2001 to 2011 “The people of Tibet have legitimate grievances after decades of harsh rule. They have been economically marginalized in their own land, imprisoned for peacefully expressing their political views, and forced to endure ‘political education’ campaigns to denounce His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The United States, a country rooted in the values of liberty, equality, and human rights, has a special responsibility to protect and promote those values, both at home and abroad.” —Citizen-Representative Nancy Pelosi, U.S. House of Representatives, 2012
Images from the Tibetan national flag. 172
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henry’s story I’m a janitor who noticed a star. Through luck and effort, I keep following the path to that star. In these 39 years, I’ve explored our American civilization through 30-some jobs where I got to work alongside beautiful and hearty fellowmen, including four different convenience stores, two quick-service restaurants, four grocery stores (including one big-box), an engineering firm with office space, a concrete casting plant, and one national army. Military service is completed quickly when one tells the driller that the US army will see things differently when the United States is 204 overthrown. I’m not the best student, but I eventually made it through a Quaker school, and did just enough master’s work in American Indian Studies to join the wide ranks of the hopelessly in debt. I’ve been to seminary and I graduated from an artists’ training in painting and puppetry. I’ve lived in China, and crossed the length and breadth of the (admittedly, small) secessionist state of Transnistria by foot, whereby I expressed my wish for that branch of humanity to be spared what the national state system eventually has in store for those who break out of the box—as exemplified in the grave fate of the Eelavar Tamils on the island of Ceylon. I’ve been through three county jails and two national (‘federal’) prisons for non-violent resistance and insistence on a true and worthy future. I desire to remove the trap which has clamped onto humanity’s hand—the Americanist Way. My story is messy enough that I’m glad that I don’t have to do a public Fifth Step. It’d be swell if the most important part of the story spoke through the words of these books.
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Whenever I say ‘overthrow’, I mean peaceably, but vigorously outgrow, overcome, and complete. And not by some foreign regime or fearmongering cell, but by us. Regime change in America, by Americans, with no harm to human persons. 174
letter on the nation’s probation Here’s a letter I wrote. These words evoked the Judicial Branch sending a helmeted SWAT team of ten US marshals, with an assault rifle aimed at my chest, to my bedroom door…to collect $375. *** October 25, 2012 US Probation Office James T. Foley Courthouse 445 Broadway Albany, NY 12207 To the United States and to those Citizens who serve as functionaries of its Federal Probation organ, I will not pay tribute to the United States regime. In Philadelphia yesterday, the United States—or more truthfully, the Corporate-Military States— fined me $375 for signing a Declaration of Interdependence on the desk where John Hancock signed the other document. I harmed no one and damaged no thing. The British Government of North America similarly tried to punish the ‘scofflaws’ in 1776. I will help you understand. You, the United States, are the one who is on probation, you are being probed and tried by Humanity and the Times: “Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’” —Martin Luther King, Jr., The World House
an illegitimate empire Over the past century, your regime has been shaped by economic corporations via payments to two non-governmental organizations—the Party of the Left and the Party of the Right. The very substance and fabric of our laws have been determined by monied interests funneled through those two organizations. Even the citizen who ‘judged’ me yesterday was appointed partly because of his allegiance to one of the two party 205 organizations, and he was paid by the same entity which was prosecuting me: The United States of America versus Travis Henry. Instead of a living association of benevolent businesses meeting real human needs, our economy has become a financial game. Instead of a humanscaled, warm-hearted governance, we have a bureaucratic, spectacular circus handed back and forth between whichever of the two evils seems less evil at the moment. And our culture is pervaded by nationalist blindedness to the resentment which our own violent, hateful deeds have evoked in the rest of humanity. You have kept one of America's greatest men, Tim DeChristopher (who you probably haven't even heard of), in prison for 14 months to “make an example of him” for his non-violent challenge of the fusion of corporation and state. You have spent untold resources to follow and surveil Tarek Mehanna for years—when it would have been a more prudent use of our time to make amends to the Islamic Nation for the harms we have done. You have held Citizen Bradley Manning in prison for two years without trial for his act against the entrenched, secretive culture of US militarism. Besides these political prisoners, there is a whole world of economic prisoners in the US gulag—like the line of young men who filed before me in the holding cell yesterday—all black men—most of whom would not be there if all 40-hour jobs in the American Economy, including fast food and convenience store work, were required by law to provide at least the same pay and benefits that entry level Federal workers receive—like the amply-salaried Federal employees I saw arrayed against me in the courthouse yesterday. You and your courts blithely take days and years out of the lives of our men and women, but if we interfere with Government Operations for even a moment, you are ready with state-sanctioned force. You are a plutocracy and oligarchy which wields the police and military as its tool. You are an illegitimate regime which deserves to be overthrown. I want nothing to do with you. It is my duty, at least to wash my hands of you. Yet, except for a few atavistic pockets of statist-socialist or theocratic regimes, all countries in humanity's world are corporatocratic colonies of the American Empire, and there is no place on the wide earth to escape, even if I wished to. And I am an American. I am a member of the American People as a cultural identity, even though her worn-out politicaleconomic raiment is ready to be discarded. So it is my will to stay here until we have completed regime change in America.
a governance worthy of my respect “Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect and that will be one step toward obtaining it.” —Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government There are three actions which will reconcile my relationship with the United States: 1) Enactment of the constitutional Separation of Corporation and State, of Business and Governance, of Wealth and Rights. 2) Enactment of the constitutional Severance of all Political Party Organizations from the State. 3) The beginning of National Amends to all Peoples, Organizations, and Individuals we have harmed since 1776.
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The author’s anonymity is symbolic, not secretive. Henry T. is my evolutionary name. 175
Any US leader who touches these three ‘freeze zones’ will become a target of the corporate-military interests. How can I ask the American leadership to courageously enact these healing measures, if I'm not willing to put my own life on the line? Though I prefer to be free, I would rather be in jail than bow to an evil empire. The Soviet Union was replaced by the Russian Federation. And the United States will be replaced. It will have a new name.
from uniform government to twofold republic, and then threefold republic I recently saw an exhibit at the National Museum of American History in our nation's capital. It defined the seven roles of the American President, one of which is ‘Manager of the Economy.’ It is an illegitimate conflict of interest for the Head of State to have the role of Manager of the Economy. This is indicative of the structural fusion of Corporation and State. The Second American Revolution will make a distinct Chief Economic Executive, of equivalent stature to the political President. The role of the economic Manager will be to create jobs and develop the economy. This individual will serve as the transparent, human face of the American Economy. All the economic departments of the US Government will be transferred to form an economic executive branch. That will clarify the remaining role of the political President: to ensure equality of all human beings before the law. The feeding trough which attracts lobbyists will be removed. Rights will no longer be for sale. Besides the ‘Economic President’ and their executive branch, there will also be an Economic Forum—equivalent in stature to the political Congress—made of all the businesses in the country, along with their chambers of commerce and industry associations, the labor unions, and consumer federations. The stock markets and financial sector will be put in their place. Their legitimate place is to create capital for human businesses—not to make obscure games whereby a few amoral gamblers, oligarchic family lineages, and non-human economic collectivities extract the wealth and wages from the rest of the populace. The Economic Forum will be the rightful arena for the development of an entrepreneurial economy founded on good will.
the separation of party and state
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Another presidential role from that museum exhibit is that of ‘Party Leader.’ This role is also illegitimate. It is systemically unlawful for there to be any explicit or implicit relationship between a Governance worker and his or her membership in non-governmental organizations or clubs. We will entirely sever all political parties from the actual governance. No party affiliation will be listed on government ballots. Individuals as human individuals—not as party functionaries—will offer themselves for political-rights service. Governance facilities, including at the local level, will be constitutionally banned from hosting ‘primary elections’ (in-party leadership meetings). Churches and civic clubs hold their leadership elections in their own facilities, and so will the Democratic and Republican Parties...if they don't simply wither away and die once they are no longer embedded in the Governance. In the eyes of the Governance, the only election is the General Election. And presently, our representatives are physically seated by their professed allegiance to the Organization of the Left or the Organization of the Right. This collapses all the nuanced qualities of human perspective into a flat, fear-based spectrum of Liberal versus Conservative—Blue State versus Red State. The Separation of Party and State will end this practice. Governance legislatures will seat their workers by last name, not by their affiliation with a party or other civics club.
national amends We will make National Amends to all countries we have harmed since the United States began. Then there will not be so much resentment, which is why the American People feel the need for a gigantic standing army. All Indian treaties with the Original Humanity of this continent will be honored, and Black Humanity in America will receive 40 acres and a mule. It is gravely important that America soon apologize to Iranian Humanity for the wrongs we did, and clear our side of the street, in order to avert the US Establishment's plan to provoke or stage a crisis and justify a nuclear assault.
who am i? There is an Idea which is bigger than the Spirit of the United States. Through this Idea, all human beings will be able to practice standing taller than the even the most gigantic Government on earth. I strive to be filled with this Idea. I have participated in the Tea Party and in Occupy. I honor the peaceful rEVOLutionary efforts of both the left and the right. The story of how I was noticed by the US Government is published here: http://occupiedstories.com/imprisoned-for-a-declaration-of-interdependence.html I have signed, and helped craft, two recent petitions calling for the structural end of the Democratic-Republican regime. www.change.org/petitions/vote-no-confidence-in-the-federal-government www.change.org/petitions/help-remove-special-interest-groups-from-the-federal-government-sign-no-confidence-referendum Yet my primary work is with Threefold Now: The Movement for the Trisector R/Evolution. From out of this comes the Declaration which I voiced again at the Federal Court in Philadelphia yesterday: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/threefolddeclaration
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After I wrote this, a friend pointed out that the Chairmen of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee are the head of the party organizations, not the President. Nevertheless, the President is the most visible party leader. Anyway, tell it to the Smithsonian (an organ of the National Government) and their “American Presidency: A Glorious Burden” exhibit, which lists “Party Leader” as one of seven presidential roles: http://americanhistory.si.edu/presidency/4_frame.html 176
I am striving to enact the separation of powers in our fused Corporate Democracy, so that it unfolds into two distinct administrations: 1) An entrepreneurial Economic Republic founded on goodness and brotherhood. I have designed and made a cloth flag for this Economic Administration, and I was arrested while flying this inside Independence Hall. 2) And a constitutional Rights Republic where every individual human citizen has a real voice, and where corporations and organizations have no voice whatsoever. These are not human persons. The further completion of our Twofold Republic, will be the formation of a third sector: a free Cultural Republic made of all the schools, universities, and non-profit organizations in the country, wherein all Americans might unfold as sovereign, self-reliant individuals. So, I perceive our societal distress is threefold: economic, political, and cultural. Healing has to come about in all three. This is the Threefold Idea. No entity, no matter how large and violent, can imprison or kill an Idea.
my upcoming engagement with the u.s. government There's no need to break down my door, like your colleagues recently did in the Pacific Northwest at the house of Leah-Lynn Plante. Like her, I won't hurt one hair on the head of any human being, including those dear citizens who are serving as guardians of the peace. If you send me a letter saying when you'd like to meet, I will meet you here in Philmont. I have already wasted enough resources driving down to Philadelphia and missing work to address your petty court. I will go about my life and work, and you are welcome to come meet me when you 207 will. As individuals, you Federal Probation Officers in Albany are probably fine people. Yet I hold despite and contempt for the organization you work for—the United States. The United States Governance does not need another $375. It already has enough money to build robot assassin drones. It's not about the money though. Even if the fine was erased, I aim to end your Uniform States and—employing any and all non-violent, transparent, spiritual means— vigorously replace it with a Twofold, and then Threefold Republic. We will plant a new flag above Wall Street and above the Federal Reserve. Why don't you join me? The Threefold Republic is open, I believe, to all of humanity. I bow not yet before the Iron Crown, nor cast my own small golden sceptre down. In liberty, equality, and fraternity, Travis Henry
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If you want to know how that unfolded, see “The Quest for the Threefold Declaration” at https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/the-quest-for-the-threefolddeclaration 177
AN OCCUPY DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE We the people of the United States reject corporate rule and assert our economic interdependence with one another. We move to amend our constitution to firmly establish the separation of business and state. We stand for the transformation of our corporacratic, oligarchic economy into a humane, living economy whose primary purpose is to fulfill real human needs, such as food, clothing, and shelter. We support those businesses and economic associations who accept what is socially just. We value an economic system which is occupied with the human qualities of brotherhood/sisterhood, mutual aid, solidarity, co-operation, and altruism. We are dedicated to a dignified future where human rights and human individuality are not for sale. Given the pervasiveness of the Corporate State, this constitutional change could be described as regime change in America.
th
One of many Declarations of Interdependence which were voiced at the Occupy National Gathering in Philadelphia on July 4 , 2012. This one was voiced from John Hancock’s desk. 178
THE THREEFOLD DECLARATION of Cultural Self-Reliance, Political Supersession, and Economic Interdependence th
IN PHILADELPHIA, THE CITY WITH THE LOVE OF BROTHERHOOD, JULY 4 , 2012. The unanimous Declaration of the ultra-American human beings who are willing to bring the United States to completion, and to begin to embody the THREEFOLD STATES in this HOMELAND OF THE FREE. We see that our societal distress is threefold: Economic, Political, and Cultural. Healing has to come about in all three. We are each sovereign human Individuals, united in this Threefold Idea. This is why we wash our hands of the Uniform States and begin the Threefold Republic: The twin evils of economic Corporatism and political Militarism have almost entirely possessed America. The one Man who had the capacity to stand up to these Powers, Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot. It is clear from the current Presidency, that no person at the Head of the American Nation has the conceptions or willingness to stand up to the Militarized Corporatist apparatus. And so a whole generation’s hopes and striving to initiate civilizational renewal through proper electoral avenues has come to naught. The vision which has been enacted by the American Establishment over the past century is no longer worthy of humanity. America’s leadership is now entranced by a singularly anti-human vision of a plutocratic, spectacular, remorseless American Empire addicted to perpetual war. The American People have become a giant economic belly without a heart for human rights, and without a mind for free culture. America has lost the middle color, leaving only the predictable polarization of a Red-Blooded America who worships Big Business and Big Military, versus a Blue State America who worships Big Government and its Social Programming. We see no dignified future for America and humanity unless the conventional American Way of Life is vigorously transformed into an ultraAmerican Humane Way of Life: a Culture of the People, a Polity by the People, and an Economy for the People. So we begin here to enact REGIME CHANGE IN AMERICA, with the aim of laying the Goliath of the Uniform Empire to rest, using any and all nonviolent means, including superseding the US Government through a parallel Trisector Governance, so that the Spirit of a True, Beautiful, and Good America, LADY COLUMBIA, may touch ground. Will you join us? The Threefold Republican way of life, is open, we believe, to all of Humanity.
th
This was signed on John Hancock’s desk on July 4 , 2012. 179
voices for a second america A few have called for a sea-change in America—for ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of this nation to be cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives to begin to impel our national will. Here is a collage of those voices, including voices on the possibility of a Trisected America—beacons of which are already rising on islands of light.
america is an open slate “It is only natural to expect that themes that emerge in the present are connected with pre-existing yearnings and threads going back to the time of the colonies and before it. However, America is a new land and, in many ways, an open slate. Its history is recent, and further than a few centuries back, little known or appreciated. ...What is emerging at present continues a long tradition and brings it into new forms, new manifestations. There is a continuity that returns to new powerful expressions in the present, precisely because it rests on some little known or appreciated cultural threads of the past. “However, continuity does not mean homogeneity. What presents itself to our eyes rests on the strength that comes from the past, but presents itself under a new edition as it were. Understanding the past offers assurance for the future; it allows us to better grasp the present, gain assurance of a continuity of intent native to this land and continent. We are all yearning for a paradigm shift at a time when clouds gather over our land and the globe. We may sense that this paradigm shift is already on the way. But how can we form an image of the larger dimension of cultural renewal and social change of which we are a part? ...Even though the United States is in great part at the origin of many challenges worldwide, the best efforts of its people have much to offer to world evolution. In fact, the opposites present themselves like two sides of a coin. “America can again be the land of the free, it can be the land where all human beings are equal, and it can be the land of opportunity. Our culture can be strengthened to the point that we know what it is to be truly free, creative, mature individuals like Franklin, Washington, Lincoln, and King. We can enlarge our political system in such a way that all voices are heard and every citizen is truly equal. Finally, although it may take the longest of all these changes, we can take part in renewing the economy so that we are truly stewards of the earth and of each other. We stand at the threshold of either the globalization of a higher consciousness or the globalization of denial. Truly courageous choices in radical departure from the past can allow a future for a truly compassionate America, a home to freedom, equality, and social justice.” —Luigi Morelli, author of Legends and Stories for a Compassionate America, May 2014 www.luigimorelli.com ***
the deep state—a god-favored system? “The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to ‘live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.’ ‘Living upon its principal,’ in this case, means that the Deep State has been extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion.” ... “Throughout history, state systems with outsized pretensions to power have reacted to their environments in two ways. The first strategy, reflecting the ossification of its ruling elites, consists of repeating that nothing is wrong, that the status quo reflects the nation’s unique good fortune in being favored by God and that those calling for change are merely subversive troublemakers. As the French ancien régime, the Romanov dynasty and the Habsburg emperors discovered, the strategy works splendidly for a while, particularly if one has a talent for dismissing unpleasant facts. The final results, however, are likely to be thoroughly disappointing.” —Mike Lofgren, “Anatomy of the Deep State, February 2014 http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state (Author’s Note: If there were more space in this book, I would’ve included Lofgren’s essay in entirety. It’s recommended reading.) ***
we have no sense of history “I'm an intelligence officer. I profited from, I know the value of this collection mechanism. Okay? I would never say we shouldn't do it. But, you know, just like everything else—you know, the Greeks used to say meden agan or the Romans in medias res: nothing in excess. Virtue's in the middle. Just because you have all the money in the world, just because you have all the technology the world to do this kind of thing, you don't do 208 it without adult supervision, you don't to do without saying, well, alright, Angela Merkel's phone? Yeah, that would be really—well, wait a second. Now, what do we expect to get? What's she got for—what she eats with sauerbraten on Saturday night? Well, that's what they got. “Now, this is just the latest of the abuses and usurpations vis-à-vis the Europeans. I mean, we persuaded them to go along with kidnapping. We persuaded them to go along with enhanced interrogation techniques, with black prisons on European soil. We persuaded them to do all that kind of thing. There comes a time when the Europeans will say, hey, remember what happened when that happened back in the '30s? Maybe we ought to tell the Americans the dangers of incipient fascism—and I use the word advisedly. They know what it's like. And I'm appealing to them in every 208
Head of Nation and Head of State of the Federal Republic of Germany. 180
interview I get with Europeans to say, look, you know, it's your turn. My father's generation drove the fascists out of Europe. Now it's your turn to make sure that we realize what it's like, because we don't know, we have no sense of history.” 209
—Ray McGovern, retired CIA officer, employed under seven US presidents for 27 years, where he presented the morning intelligence briefings at the White House under Chief Reagan and Chief Bush the First, from “Ex-CIA Analyst on Snowden and Calling Journalists Terrorists” interview by Paul Jay, November, 2013 http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10957 ***
america or reality? “America is not real; it is an idea that someone had ages ago. Britain, Christianity, Islam, karate, Wednesdays are all just ideas that we choose to believe in and very nice ideas they are, too, when they serve a purpose. These concepts, though, cannot be served to the detriment of actual reality.” th —Russell Brand, October 24 , 2013 “Manifesto for Revolution”: www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/10/russell-brand-on-revolution ***
curing the hugely suboptimal culture “We encourage you to engage us in regular exchanges of ideas or thoughts about approaches to curing or mitigating the hugely suboptimal political culture of the United States. Nothing less is required to pay homage to Valley Forge, Cemetery Ridge, Omaha Beach, and other places of great sacrifice.” —Lon Snowden, father of Edward Snowden, with Bruce Fein, his counsel, “Open Letter to Edward Snowden”, July 2013 www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/02/edward-snowden-father-open-letter ***
a totalistic beast, slouching toward washington "If Edward Snowden is proving one thing, it’s this: in 2013, Planet Earth isn’t big enough to protect the American version of ‘dissidents.’ Instead, it looks ever more like a giant prison with a single implacable policeman, judge, jury, and jailer. "In the twenty-first century, without another major power in sight, the remaining superpower has made those ‘shadows’ its own in a big way. Just beyond the view of the rest of us, it began recreating its famed tripartite, checks-and-balances government, now more than two centuries old, in a new form. There, in those shadows, the executive, judicial, and legislative branches began to meld into a unicameral shadow government, part of a new architecture of control that has nothing to do with ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’ "It’s eerie that some aspects of the totalitarian governments that went down for the count in the twentieth century are now being recreated in those shadows. There, an increasingly ‘totalistic’ if not yet totalitarian beast, its hour come round at last, is slouching toward Washington to be born, while those who cared to shine a little light on the birth process are in jail or being hounded across this planet." —Tom Engelhardt, an editor for the Maus graphic novel, “Can Edward Snowden Be Deterred?”, July 2013 www.tomdispatch.com/post/175725/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_can_edward_snowden_be_deterred/ ***
freedom versus the national-security state
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"Secrecy, secret courts, secret surveillance schemes, MKUltra, wars of aggression, assassinations, torture, invasions, occupations, coups, support of dictatorships, state terrorism, murder, kidnapping, rendition, torture partnerships with brutal dictatorships, execution, foreign aid, perjury, interference with foreign political and economic systems, interventionism, foreign military bases, militarism, and imperialism. In the mind of the average American, all this is freedom, owing to the false mindset that has been inculcated within him since the first grade." —Jacob G. Hornberger, libertarian, “Freedom versus the National-Security State”, June 2013 http://fff.org/2013/06/25/freedom-versus-the-national-security-state/ ***
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In October 2013, McGovern presented the Sam Adams Award to Edward Snowden at a sequestered ceremony in Moscow. Chelsea Manning was awarded in 2014. The award takes the physical form of a candlestick, and the recipient is chosen by a group of retired CIA officers, and given to an intelligence professional who has taken a stand for human integrity. The award is named after Samuel A. Adams, a US agent, who during the build up to the Vietnam Nightmare in 1967, revealed a ‘monument of deceit’—that the CIA and US military command of the Executive Branch, as a sort of shadow executive, had secretly agreed to intentionally underreport the Collectivist troop numbers as half of what these ‘shadows’ knew them to be, so that the supposed leadership of American Humanity would not hesitate to fully enter those jungles. 210
Project MKUltra was an initiative of the US Executive Branch which lasted from 1953 to 1973. Through front organizations, the US Executive Branch tested behavioral engineering techniques and substances on unwitting US and Canadian citizens at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities. In response, US Supreme Court justice William Brennen voiced that ‘The medical trials at Nuremberg in 1947 deeply impressed upon the world that experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable. ...[I]n defiance of this principle, military intelligence officials...began surreptitiously testing chemical and biological materials.’ This is the same Executive Branch which is being entrusted with gathering the personal online correspondence, browsing history, and phone records of all US citizens, including legislative representatives and judges. 181
the ultimate totalitarian achievement “Václav Havel is perceptive enough to have noted at times that the complementary utopianism of the corporate capitalist West leads in a direction similar to the one he detected in the state capitalist East. The utopia of consumption does not, of course, rely heavily on concentration camps (though it seems to be moving a bit more in that direction lately) but its tactics are in many ways similar to those Havel points out. The elements that are most threatening to its utopian illusion are also concentrated—in ghettos, in reservations, in human and ecological sacrifice zones—as the unthinkable horrors on the margins of utopia. However, such dystopian dimensions of the everyday can be ideologically banished in a world in which everyone who can shop at Wal-Mart and dine at McDonald’s can self-identify as middle class, and is convinced, at any case, that ‘There Is No Alternative.’ Thus, it becomes increasingly evident that totalitarianism reaches its greatest perfection in the utopia of consumption. Its only remaining rival of any consequence is the competing totalitarianism of religious fundamentalism. And though the battle between these two totalizing systems continues to intensify, there is no doubt that the overwhelmingly more powerful one at this moment in history on a global scale remains the ‘empire of consumption.’ “Totalitarianism today is not on the deepest level a matter of sovereignty. Nor does it depend on the state’s formal abolition of all competing forms of social organization (though the evils embodied in this political totalization process and its system of oppression and terror cannot be overemphasized). The ultimate totalitarian achievement is the capture of the imagination, and the reinforcement of that conquest as the dominant order is legitimated through processes of sublimation and banalization. The consuming subject is overawed by the sublime consumptionist spectacle and automatized by the realities and rituals of everyday productionist and consumptionist life. “The economic system’s values are not yet universal, but are, however, hegemonic. This means that they are embedded in the reigning ‘common sense’ and the dominant ‘reality principle.’ ‘Reality’ is whatever is enshrined in the dominant ideology, imaginary, ethos, and institutional structure. Furthermore, these values are constantly extending their dominion, especially in their consumptionist dimension. The growing success of the totalitarian project depends heavily on the efficacy of the consumptionist utopia and its image of the good life. It is a life of happiness, health, love, sex, beauty, power, fun, and immortality. And it is perpetually available to all who buy the right commodities, and know how to perpetually refashion their very selves into the right kind of commodities. It is available, that is, in the form of the fundamental fantasy of the world of consumption. It is with good reason that a popular version of this fantasy is called ‘the American Dream.’” —John P. Clark, The Impossible Community, 2013 ***
evil crystallized in social structures “Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples are reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence. ...When a society—whether local, national or global—is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programs or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility. This is not the case simply because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root. Just as goodness tends to spread, the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence and quietly to undermine any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear. If every action has its consequences, an evil embedded in the structures of a society has a constant potential for disintegration and death. It is evil crystallized in unjust social structures, which cannot be the basis of hope for a better future. We are far from the so-called ‘end of history’, since the conditions for a sustainable and peaceful development have not yet been adequately articulated and realized.” —Francis, the Pope of Catholic Humanity, Evangelii Gaudium, 2013 ***
a second america rising from the underworld “Some of the articulations against the injustice at the heart of modern America come also from within America itself…Here we have an articulation of the America Emerson also saw—an America that is, on the one hand, extremely eloquent and timely, and, on the other hand, stuttering into form. The really powerful articulations of this, it seems, are when co-operative economic organizations are able to begin to work with one another, including working with others across industries and, ultimately, across sectors. Here, the violence of our time is not met with more violence but with higher Principles… “Here we are able to see the America that was always supposed to be—one that carries a global task not for its own ends, nor for the ends of a powerful few within its borders, but for the betterment of civilization—for the betterment of mankind as a whole. This is a kind of, what I would call, ‘Second America’—an America that stretches around the world. It uses the existing global economy in order to replace the prevailing paradigm of competition with one of co-operation, and it does so for the betterment of all. In doing so it creates an economy that is not state driven, nor market driven, but driven by human beings under the Principles of justice and brotherhood in economic affairs. “In seeing the situation in this light, it is possible to see this Second America as living just below the surface of the land within that broad country between the Pacific and the Atlantic, and, from there, spreading out on the economic web of the world to the rest of the globe. It is a Second America—the one that Emerson and others have been waiting for—one that is able to take up its global responsibilities not in a one-sided and selfish way, but in a balanced and selfless manner based upon the Principles of cultural and spiritual freedom, equality of human rights, and cooperation of economic activity. It is the America—and with it, the world—that has been waiting to be made. It has been inside the world as we know it all along, and now it is gradually rising—moment to moment, thought to thought, human being to human being, initiative to initiative— from beneath our own feet. But it will only come into full realization if human beings make it so.” —John Stubley, Australian social poet, “Boston Lessons and the Second America”, 2012 http://socialpoetry.net/2013/04/26/boston-lessons-and-the-second-america/ 182
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mythic inversions “At another moment in American metahistory, when maya-ridden mythic inversions played havoc with the human community, a rich Mesoamerican civilization called its orgies of torture and bloodletting ‘Flower Wars,’ and hundreds of thousands of citizens of Tenochtitlan turned out to enact rituals of slaughter fed by slickly seductive poetic, hieroglyphic, and pictorial images crafted by a small state elite. Today the American th state lets Hollywood do most of its propaganda work, packaged as ‘entertainment.’ As in 16 century Tenochtitlan, selflessness, compassion, and truth are in short supply in contemporary storytelling.” —Kevin Dann, historian and seeker of new ideas, “America’s Comic Book Apocalypse”, 2011 http://realitysandwich.com/100651/america_comic_book_apocalypse/ ***
the question of a threefold turn “I question whether a new morality and the principles of the threefold social organism can be built on a history of the sacrifice of countless human beings that destroys trust. I think hope lies with deeds of ordinary people joining with brothers and sisters across borders, dedicated to the common good. When I go to demonstrations I carry a sign that says,―Tell it like it is—war is human sacrifice. The other side says,―The soul of America has been sacrificed in a Faustian bargain for world domination. Humanity‘s future calls for a turn to economic brotherhood/sisterhood, political equality and spiritual/cultural freedom.” —Adeline Hope Bianchi (d.2013), co-founder of East Bay Waldorf School, 2010 “Further Thoughts on Empire and Threefold Principles” http://goetheanum.eu/fileadmin/sozialwissenschaft/2010/Michaelmas_2010__Newsletter__Soc_Sc_Section.pdf ***
the american sheeple “The dumbing-down of the population by financier-owned media have turned the population into the ‘sheeple.’ Such half-human, frightened, and heavily-medicated creatures are fit only for zombie-like obedience to the imperatives of consumerism and militarism.” —Richard C. Cook, former NASA analyst, “2010: Humanity’s Choice as Foreseen by Rudolf Steiner”, 2010 211 www.richardccook.com/2010/08/04/2010-humanitys-choice-as-foreseen-by-rudolf-steiner (Author’s Note: Despite the resemblance to authentic sheep, the sheeple is a kind of goat. Don’t worry though—sheeple-ness can be overcome and transformed, and our fierce, yet gentle, upright humanity recovered. Each human being was originally an adventurer, a hardy knight, a gracious maiden, a shining prince, a lofty queen, a wise man, and a legend.) ***
if a president emerges “The United States was born as a Republic. The individual was the center of society and rule of law was King. Neutrality and non-entanglements were the North Stars of foreign policy. Preemptive wars were feared as precursors to executive tyranny. The Republic would not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Transparency was the rule and secrecy the rare exception. And the thrill of self-government was the utmost good. Since the emergence of Manifest Destiny and the Mexican-American War, the United States has progressively degenerated into an arrogant, swaggering Empire featuring hundreds of military bases abroad with defense commitments to foreigners. The degeneration was accelerated by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and 9/11. Bush, Cheney, and Obama are a philosophical triumvirate in national security matters. The Empire is earmarked by perpetual and global warfare unilaterally initiated by the President for the sake of domination; unchecked executive power; the crucifixion of the rule of law on a national security cross; the diminishment of Congress to a constitutional ink blot; secret government; unsustainable trillion dollar budget deficits; and, a craving by the public for risk-free lives more than freedom itself. The Republic can be regained if a President emerges who renounces executive usurpations and secrecy, terminates all US military bases abroad and revokes all defense treaties or executive agreements, immediately ends the Afghan, Iraq, international terrorism wars, and makes the rule of law the nation's civic religion.” —Bruce Fein, Justice Department official under Chief Reagan, overview of American Empire: Before the Fall, 2010 Fein served as the voice of healthy conservatism in a joint speaker’s tour with progressive Glen Greenwald and libertarian Jacob Hornberger, and recently co-authored a letter with Edward Snowden’s father ***
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What Cook in that writing calls ‘Zionism’ is what Threefold Now names as ‘Israeli Americanism’, ‘Jewish Nation-Statism’, or ‘Fallen Zionism.’ In book two, we offer a picture of an unfallen Zionism. 183
the last shall be first (indictment of an old regime) by MC Matre, from Easter Sonday album, released 2009: http://mcmatre.com Verse 1: If Jesus were alive I think he’d really be trippin’ Seeing our most violent criminals calling themselves Christian Or actually maybe he wouldn’t trip on none of it After all he was familiar with similar criminal governments Just check the roots It’s one in the same noose Electric chair to crucifix Now it’s wolves in sheep’s suits Just like the ones he knew But real smooth Fighting wars while they pray to the Prince of Peace Oooh, man He’d be like, “This wolf is new and improved I know him well, I was crucified by wolf and his crew And they’ve still got me crucified in front of their pews While praising me It’s crazy one’s even named Wolfowitz too” What it do? Man I wish it wasn’t true But that’s prophecy revealed, old voices coming through The first shall be last, so the worst men rule But the last shall be first, good cats will have to duel.
C’mon Truth will be my rock Come one come all, As lies rise to the top C’mon And though it hurts so much to be down Come one come all, We’ll get this whole thing turned around. Verse 3: Keep reading and you’ll see in Revelations Chapter 20, Verse 8 It states that, The fate of Satan’s to deceive many nations And bring them all together in battle and devastation It’s too familiar, similarities are amazing Iraq, Afghanistan, kidnapping a Haitian statesman Who happened to be a former priest if I’m not mistaken And one who actually practiced being the poor people’s patron Check Proverbs 14:31 for consultation: Oppress the poor and you insult the god who made them Now let’s ask the poor in Florida about their votes that weren’t taken Or hurricane survivors how much our government aids them Then consider Leviticus says, treat immigrants with veneration And check our Christian president’s current stance on immigration Now it’s more of an observation Than it is an act of dissing But according to your scripture it appears you’re not Christian.
C’mon Truth will be my rock Come one come all, As lies rise to the top C’mon And though it hurts so much to be down Come one come all, We’ll get this whole thing turned around.
C’mon Truth will be my rock Come one come all, As lies rise to the top C’mon And though it hurts so much to be down Come one come all, We’ll get this whole thing turned around.
Verse 2: So to the leaders of this country Who call yourselves Christian Pull out your bibles, get in studying position Thou shall not kill Is there something that I’m missing When every day you’re killing Is this really your religion, Well, Jesus even took it one step further In Matthew 5, an eye for an eye will not justify murder And beyond that he said love your enemies to strive towards heaven But I didn’t see you turn the other cheek on 9/11 In fact I think you might’ve done the attack But ok, Let’s say you didn’t You still responded by killing All the while holding bibles and saying it’s Jesus’ mission That you carry out, I highly doubt Jesus said to bomb children, But he did say check for leaders like you Beware of false prophets and know them by their fruits How about lies, wars and countless dead troops The last shall be first I hope your savior spoke the truth.
Verse 4: But check it, Jesus said he was the first and the last, Damn Now that flips the hourglass Or actually it breaks it No side is taken And maybe there is no top or bottom if we are awakened (What?) So I paused for a second And put the first three verses of this song in question Question: Will the words I’m writing really lessen The violent oppression by calling out their deception Or should I Question My own involvement in the aggression Fighting fire with fire By spitting anger their direction Objection: The truth should be known that’s no question Correction: The truth may be deeper than we’re expecting, 184
‘Cause we can turn the tables But what would really change When as long as one’s below Both remain in chains, And I know it’s crazy pain So how do we not retaliate? Maybe by knowing we’re first in love and last when trapped in hate. ***
dishonesty, close-mindedness, and unwillingness “A land that rejects the truth, barricades itself against change and lacks the spirit of freedom is hopeless." —Ai Weiwei, speaking of another social organism in 2009 ***
a civilization that worships money “It is an extraordinary comment on our society that what we think of as a civilization founded on Christianity has, to a large degree, descended to become one that worships money, that sees money as something that has value in itself and the human community as founded on the survival of the most successful in accumulating money for themselves. What has happened to compassion, and to the greater human aspirations?” —Michael Spence, administrator of Emerson College, After Capitalism, 2008 www.thinkoutword.org/resources-4/steiner-on-social-life/other-authors-and-materials/ ***
what hour is this I picked up a book of Rilke’s poems His Book of hours Love poems to God
America we are at war with ourselves When will the gaze turn inward
And America about to go to war
Love poems to God
We are faced by the beasts We stand enslaved appalled Our keepers are the beasts
And America choosing to start a war
Love poems to God And America willing to kill the Children of God
Their names Fear
The love poem from God Forgotten
Hatred Doubt
Shadow of West About to war With shadow of East
They are us Can we learn to act without fear or bravado Can we learn to feel joy in the other Can we dare to think the truth Can we redeem the beasts ourselves
America remember your origin America remember you founders Where is the wisdom of Washington Franklin
When shall we know ourselves When shall we remember Our descent into matter And the world of light we inhabited before
Jefferson We do not yet know Who we are Who we are to become What was laid down for us by our founders
When will we choose To use The oil That anoints That makes holy America your task is holy When will you know yourself
Life – we have it in one way Liberty – we have it outwardly The pursuit of happiness – we are busy pursuing it but have we found it When will the gaze turn inward
—Eve Olive, eurythmist, poet, and teacher voiced at the conference “From the Ashes of 9/11: Called to a New Birth of Freedom” in Chapel Hill, North Carolina reported in The Sophia Sun, June 2008 www.anthroposophync.org/documents/2008_06_SophiaSun.pdf *** 185
think again “The West has to think again—to think, in fact, that there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims.” —Guido Giacomo Preparata, social sciences lecturer at Pontifical Gregorian University Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich, 2005 http://druckversion.studien-von-zeitfragen.net/Conjuring%20Content%20and%20Preface.pdf ***
the america the world needs “If America is to become ‘the America the world needs,’ Rudolf Steiner’s lifework can be a significant help to get us there. The time, I believe, is ripe! I am increasingly convinced that it is the practical consequences of Steiner’s threefold approach to social life—in its many aspects—that will speak to Westerners today.” —Henry Barnes (b.1912-d.2008), Waldorf teacher, from an interview by William Jens Jensen, 2005 http://steinerbooks.org/excerpts/barnes_excerpt.pdf ***
the next step in individuation “The inherent qualities and capabilities of the United States are not difficult to discover. Combined with the immense physical and natural resources of its land is a remarkable dynamism of creative and highly intelligent will power, masterfully capable of using the riches of the earth for the benefit of physical civilization. What was achieved in this regard in 250 years has no precedent in human history. ... “In fact, it made the US into the most powerful nation the world has ever known, a global power that has dominion over the whole planet. However, when hegemony is achieved, the question of power is transformed into a question of ethics and morality—that is, of America’s global responsibility. ... “The next step in individuation, which decentralizes the state into mutually supporting, differentiated-integrated autonomous social agents and sectors, has long been due. It will allow individuation to reach the next level of realization, in which each person is free to participate directly in the economic, political-democratic, and cultural-spiritual sectors according to his or her needs and abilities. Individuation becomes at this stage a fully creative and socially formative force. As in the past, it served to demolish the old, hierarchical, centralized social and cultural medieval theocratic pyramids, and brought about the great revolution of modern democracy, it is now ripe to deepen the democratic state itself, moving it to its next level of social formation.” —Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon, Israeli philosopher, “Threefolding in Historical Perspective”, America’s Global Responsibility, 2004 ***
a submissive people “We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all—by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians— be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. “How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.” —Wendell Berry, farmer and poet, “Compromise, Hell!" Orion magazine, November/December 2004 ***
they don’t care for humanity "If there's a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings." —Nelson Mandela, 2002 (eight years after the fall of Aparthood) ***
an americanist war against the cultures of humanity "All cultures forged by nations—the noble indigenous past of America, the brilliant civilization of Europe, the wise history of Asian nations, and the ancestral wealth of Africa and Oceania—are corroded by the American way of life. In this way, neoliberalism imposes the destruction of nations and groups of nations in order to reconstruct them according to a single model. This is a planetary war, of the worst and cruelest kind, waged against humanity." —Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos of the Zapatistas, “The Fourth World War has Begun”, 2001 ***
cultural death and illness "The Anglo-American world may gain world dominion; but without the Trisected Social Organism it will, through this dominion, pour out cultural death and cultural illness over the whole earth" —Rudolf Steiner, “The Mysteries of Light, of Space, and of the Earth”, 1919 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/MystLight/19191215p01.html ***
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economic subjects in a totalitarian economy “By this time, the era of cut-and-run economics ought to be finished. Such an economy cannot be rationally defended or even apologized for. The proofs of its immense folly, heartlessness, and destructiveness are everywhere. Its failure as a way of dealing with the natural world and human society can no longer be sanely denied. That this economic system persists and grows larger and stronger in spite of its evident failure has nothing to do with rationality or, for that matter, with evidence. It persists because, embodied now in multinational corporations, it has discovered a terrifying truth: If you can control a people’s economy, you don’t need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant. If you control people’s choices as to whether or not they will work, and where they will work, and what they will do, and how well they will do it, and what they will eat and wear, and the genetic makeup of their crops and animals, and what they will do for amusement, then why should you worry about freedom of speech? In a totalitarian economy, any ‘political liberties’ that the people might retain would simply cease to matter. If, as is often the case already, nobody can be elected who is not wealthy, and if nobody can be wealthy without dependence on the corporate economy, then what is your vote worth? The citizen thus becomes an economic subject.” —Wendell Berry, "Conserving Forest Communities", 1996 ***
a three-in-one society Dio- He- Ko Dio- He- Ko Corn Beans Squash Corn Beans Squash “So sang the maidens of an Iroquois agricultural society. They worshiped a three-in-one goddess who appeared in the world under the guise of corn, beans, and squash, the three crops that were planted together in Iroquois village plots. “What where the virtues of this goddess? She was herself a community. As Dio, corn, she grew tall and sustained the people with her fruit. (A native farmer could sing the song that counted every leaf, every joint, every tassel in the order that it appeared on the plant from seedtime to harvest.) As He, beans, she twined about the corn stalk, making of it a living trellis on which to support the vine and its fruits. In return, as beans, she fed the roots of the corn and the squash. And last, as Ko, squash, she put on spiny leaves and stems to defend the plot from marauders. “This triple goddess—a kind of New World Hecate—is the founder of the Thanksgiving feast, and so it might be said she is ruling deity not only of the agricultural native peoples but also of the newcomers who survived their first winter only owing to her bounty. It is not just bad policy to reject her, as we have done over the past three centuries. It is sacrilege, and it is being avenged every day in farm fields across the continent.” —William Bryant Logan, arborist (http://williambryantlogan.com), Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, 1996
The Three Sisters on the U.S. dollar coin.
america is an indian reservation “‘Indian policy’ has become institutionalized and the result has been that American people have become more dependent on government and that the American people have become more dependent on corporations.” “'Indian policy’ has now been brought down upon the American people, and the American people are the new Indians of the 21st Century.” “America has become one huge Indian reservation.” —Russell Means (died 2012), Lakota Sioux leader, 1996 from “The Existential Indian”, an interview by Linda Brookover: www.dickshovel.com/intermeans.html 187
a critical decision “America stands at a crossroads. It can continue the materialistically oriented world view with all its consequences in political, economic, and cultural life; then at the end of the century it will be forced to make very serious considerations due to the effects of dissolving and destructive forces at work in the social ordering of society. Or it can also be led to a strong inner awakening through the strongly disturbing events it has gone through in recent times, and which are not yet over. One can see rather clearly that the next few years are headed toward a critical decision. The years from now until the end of the century will be very decisive years.” “Perhaps one needs there a particularly strong Christ impulse in order to deal suitably with these forces working out of the depths of the earth.” —Carl Stegmann, priest in Oakland, California, The Other America, 1975 (Author’s Note: the end of the century is the end of the Century of Nightmare. Our Century begins when we decide that the nightmare will linger no more.) ***
the american way 1 I am a great American I am almost nationalistic about it! I love America like a madness! But I am afraid to return to America I'm even afraid to go into the American Express—
they will only allow death to make America smart Educators & communicators are the lackeys of the American Way They enslave the minds of the young and the young are willing slaves (but not for long) because who is to doubt the American Way is not the way?
2 They are frankensteining Christ in America in their Sunday campaigns They are putting the fear of Christ in America under their tents in their Sunday campaigns They are driving old ladies mad with Christ in America They are televising the gift of healing and the fear of hell in America under their tents in their Sunday campaigns They are leaving their tents and are bringing their Christ to the stadiums of America in their Sunday campaigns They are asking for a full house an all get out for their Christ in the stadiums of America They are getting them in their Sunday and Saturday campaigns They are asking them to come forward and fall on their knees because they are all guilty and they are coming forward in guilt and are falling on their knees weeping their guilt begging to be saved O Lord O Lord in their Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday campaigns
The duty of these educators is no different than the duty of a factory foreman Replica production make all the young think alike dress alike believe alike do alike Togetherness this is the American Way The few great educators in America are weak & helpless They abide and so uphold the American Way Wars have seen such men they who despised things about them but did nothing and they are the most dangerous Dangerous because their intelligence is not denied and so give faith to the young who rightfully believe in their intelligence Smoke this cigarette doctors smoke this cigarette and doctors know Educators know but they dare not speak their know The victory that is man is made sad in this fix Youth can only know the victory of being born all else is stemmed until death be the final victory and a merciful one at that If America falls it will be the blame of its educators preachers communicators alike America today is America's greatest threat We are old when we are young America is always new the world is always new The meaning of the world is birth not death Growth gone in the wrong direction The true direction grows ever young In this direction what grows grows old A strange mistake a strange and sad mistake for it has grown into an old thing while all else around it is new Rockets will not make it any younger— And what made America decide to grow? I do not know I can only hold it to the strangeness in man And America has grown into the American Way— To be young is to be ever purposeful limitless To grow is to know limit purposelessness Each age is a new age How outrageous it is that something old and sad from the pre-age incorporates each new age—
3 It is a time in which no man is extremely wondrous It is a time in which rock stupidity outsteps the 5th Column as the sole enemy in America It is a time in which ignorance is a good Ameri-cun ignorance is excused only where it is so it is not so in America Man is not guilty Christ is not to be feared I am telling you the American Way is a hideous monster eating Christ making Him into Oreos and Dr. Pepper the sacrament of its foul mouth I am telling you the devil is impersonating Christ in America America's educators & preachers are the mental-dictators of false intelligence they will not allow America to be smart 188
Do I say the Declaration of Independence is old? Yes I say what was good for 1789 is not good for 1960 It was right and new to say all men were created equal because it was a light then But today it is tragic to say it today it should be fact— Man has been on earth a long time One would think with his mania for growth he would, by now, have outgrown such things as constitutions manifestos codes commandments that he could well live in the world without them and know instinctively how to live and be —for what is being but the facility to love?
the famous night club comedian together at Valley Forge? Old old and decadent gone the dignity the American sun seems headed for the grave O that youth might raise it anew! The future depends solely on the young The future is the property of the young What the young know the future will know What they are and do the future will be and do What has been done must not be done again Will the American Way allow this? No. I see in every American Express and in every army center in Europe I see the same face the same sound of voice the same clothes the same walk I see mothers & fathers no difference among them Replicas They not only speak and walk and think alike they have the same face! What did this monstrous thing? What regiments a people so?
Was not that the true goal of growth, love? Was not that Christ? But man is strange and grows where he will and chalks it all up to Fate whatever be— America rings with such strangeness It has grown into something strange and the American is good example of this mad growth The boy man big baby meat as though the womb were turned backwards giving birth to an old man The victory that is man does not allow man to top off his empirical achievement with death The Aztecs did it by yanking out young hearts at the height of their power The Americans are doing it by feeding their young to the Way For it was not the Spaniard who killed the Aztec but the Aztec who killed the Aztec Rome is proof Greece is proof all history is proof Victory does not allow degeneracy It will not be the Communists will kill America no but America itself— The American Way that sad mad process is not run by any one man or organization It is a monster born of itself existing of its self The men who are employed by this monster are employed unknowingly They reside in the higher echelons of intelligence They are the educators the psychiatrists the ministers the writers the politicians the communicators the rich the entertainment world And some follow and sing the Way because they sincerely believe it to be good And some believe it holy and become minutemen in it Some are in it simply to be in And most are in it for gold They do not see the Way as monster They see it as the 'Good Life' What is the Way? The Way was born out of the American Dream a nightmare— The state of Americans today compared to the Americans of the 18th century proves the nightmare— Not Franklin not Jefferson who speaks for America today but strange red-necked men of industry and the goofs of show business Bizarre! Frightening! The Mickey Mouse sits on the throne and Hollywood has a vast supply— Could grammar school youth seriously look upon a picture of George Washington and 'Herman Borst'
How strange is nature's play on America Surely were Lincoln alive today he could never be voted President not with his looks— Indeed Americans are babies all in the embrace of Mama Way Did not Ike, when he visited the American Embassy in Paris a year ago, say to the staff—'Everything is fine, just drink Coca Cola, and everything will be all right.' This is true, and is on record Did not American advertising call for TOGETHERNESS? not orgiasticly like today's call nor as means to stem violence This is true, and is on record. Are not the army centers in Europe ghettos? They are, and O how sad how lost! The PX newsstands are filled with comic books The army movies are always Doris Day What makes a people huddle so? Why can't they be universal? Who has smalled them so? This is serious! I do not mock or hate this I can only sense some mad vast conspiracy! Helplessness is all it is! They are caught caught in the Way— And those who seek to get out of the Way can not The Beats are good example of this They forsake the Way's habits and acquire for themselves their own habits And they become as distinct and regimented and lost as the main flow because the Way has many outlets like a snake of many tentacles— There is no getting out of the Way The only way out is the death of the Way And what will kill the Way but a new consciousness Something great and new and wonderful must happen to free man from this beast It is a beast we can not see or even understand 189
For it be the condition of our minds God how close to science fiction it all seems! As if some power from another planet incorporated itself in the minds of us all It could well be! For as I live I swear America does not seem like America to me
that will free them from the Way and make them a glorious purposeful people once again I do not know if that event is due deserved or even possible I can only hold that man is the victory of life And I hold firm to American man
Americans are a great people I ask for some great and wondrous event
I see standing on the skin of the Way America to be as proud and victorious as St. Michael on the neck of the fallen Lucifer— —by Gregory Corso, Beat Generation poet, 1970
Dove standing on the skin of Teotl, by Henry T. 190
america the beautiful? “We still sing ‘America the Beautiful’ as though we had not created in it, by strenuous effort, at great expense, and with dauntless self-praise, an unprecedented ugliness.” —Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House, 1969 ***
restructuring the whole of american society “I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about ‘Where do we go from here?’ that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. (Yes) There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. (Yes) And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. (Yes) But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. (All right) It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" (Yes) You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" (Yes) You begin to ask the question, ‘Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?’ (All right) These are words that must be said. (All right) “Now, don't think you have me in a bind today. I'm not talking about communism. What I'm talking about is far beyond communism. (Yeah) My inspiration didn't come from Karl Marx (Speak); my inspiration didn't come from Engels; my inspiration didn't come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn't come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago (Well), and I saw that maybe Marx didn't follow Hegel enough. (All right) He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism. And he went over to a German philosopher by the name of Feuerbach, and took his materialism and made it into a system that he called ‘dialectical materialism.’ (Speak) I have to reject that. What I'm saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. (Yes) Capitalism forgets that life is social. (Yes, Go ahead) And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. (Speak) (applause) It is found in a higher synthesis (Come on) that combines the truths of both. (Yes) Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. (All right) These are the triple evils that are interrelated. “And if you will let me be a preacher just a little bit. (Speak) One day [applause], one night, a juror came to Jesus (Yes sir) and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. (Yeah) Jesus didn't get bogged down on the kind of isolated approach of what you shouldn't do. Jesus didn't say, ‘Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying.’ (Oh yeah) He didn't say, ‘Nicodemus, now you must not commit adultery.’ He didn't say, ‘Now Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that.’ He didn't say, ‘Nicodemus, you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively.’ He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic (Yes): that if a man will lie, he will steal. (Yes) And if a man will steal, he will kill. (Yes) So instead of just getting bogged down on one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, ‘Nicodemus, you must be born again.’ (applause) “In other words, ‘Your whole structure (Yes) must be changed.’ [applause] A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will ‘thingify’ them and make them things. (Speak) And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. (Yes) And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. (Yes) (applause) “What I'm saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, ‘America, you must be born again!’” —MLK, “Where Do We Go From Here?”, Atlanta, 1967
the revolutionary spirit “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. “A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. … “America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.… “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. … “Now let us begin. Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another 191
message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history. … “And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” —MLK, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”, NYC, 1967, shortly before his death ***
the threefold republic and the american constitution “Dr. Steiner once said, ‘If one wants to erect a threefold commonwealth, the American Constitution could be used as a model of a constitution of such a commonwealth. ...I remember I stood there myself during those discussions about what he called the American Constitution of Washington… He always said, ‘The Constitution of Washington could be the basis upon which we now could build the Threefold Commonwealth, if we could only find one territory on earth which is willing to accept it.’ st
—Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, lecture from May 1 , 1960 (emphasis added), at Threefold Farm in Spring Valley, New York, from Ehrenfried Pfeiffer: Notes and Lectures, Compendium II ***
justice, freedom, and love “Well, I’ve got a hammer and I’ve got a bell, and I’ve got a song to sing all over this land. It’s the hammer of justice; It’s the bell of freedom; It’s a song about love between my brothers and my sisters, all over this land.” —Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, “If I Had a Hammer” folk song, 1949 ***
free enterprise against state capitalism “Already it is deemed treasonable in certain quarters to defend free enterprise against Communism or State Capitalism, which amounts to the same thing. If the individual, in short, at this critical hour in history fails to shoulder his own responsibility, then some bloodless abstraction called the State, run by a ruthless group of individuals bent on disseminating some half-truth, will inevitably take over. “Let it again be stated with emphasis, that the principles of the Threefold State present us with the only workable solution for the very complicated post-war problems with which we must deal. The cultural and economic realms must be liberated from the pressure of rival nationalisms if we wish to avoid suicidal competition. Not free trade but self-governing trade is what we need. The Threefold State requires not merely deep study but entails an entirely new approach to problems hitherto handled without benefit of deeper insight.” —Henry Powell Spring, The Peace Aims of Humanity, 1943 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b184262?urlappend=%3Bseq=71 ***
liberty, equality, and a live-and-let live attitude “The ideals of the French Revolution have miscarried for the selfsame reason that our own ideals have miscarried. Three separate spiritual precincts in human nature have been scrambled. Mankind requires liberty, true, but liberty in the cultural sphere, in matters pertaining to the mind. Mankind requires equality, true, but it is equality in the political sphere, that is, in all matters pertaining to individual rights and prerogatives. Mankind requires brotherhood in the economic sphere, that is, in matters pertaining to a live-and-let-live attitude, in regard to the distribution of food, wealth and the like. The ideal administration of such a program calls for three centralized representative bodies, one each for the cultural, political and economic problems involved in government.” —Henry Powell Spring, “The Threefold State”, The Peace Aims of Humanity, 1943 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b184262?urlappend=%3Bseq=168 (Author’s Note: What Powell Spring calls ‘government’ would be better named ‘administration’ or ‘governance’ since the cultural council and economic forum would not be what we think of as compulsory, law-making governments. The word ‘coherent’ would be better than ‘centralized.’) ***
let america be america again Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(It never was America to me.) O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.
(America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.
(There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.") Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? 192
Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we've dreamed And all the songs we've sung And all the hopes we've held And all the flags we've hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay— Except the dream that's almost dead today.
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one's own greed!
O, let America be America again— The land that never has been yet— And yet must be—the land where every man is free. The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME— Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean— Hungry yet today despite the dream. Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose— The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America!
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That's made America the land it has become. O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home— For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore, And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa's strand I came To build a "homeland of the free."
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath— America will be! Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain— All, all the stretch of these great green states— And make America again!
The free?
—Langston Hughes, 1935
Langston Hughes.
***
a more profound observation of events is necessary “Basically, what is most effective today and what will show itself to be an even more effective imperialism in the future will be its bearer—the Anglo-American people. As far as its name is concerned, it has shown itself to be something new: economic imperialism. But most important is the fact that everything said about this economic imperialism is untrue, everything, I would say, seems to be hanging in the air, which more or less 193
consciously leads to untruthfulness. So in order to recognize how in these times realities are completely different from what is said about them, a more profound observation of the historical course of events is necessary.” —Rudolf Steiner, “The History and Actuality of Imperialism”, 1920 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA196/English/SCR2011/19200220p01.html ***
the introduction of a spiritual empire "I have spoken about something quite terrible: about the platitude. But if the world had not become so platitude oriented, there would be no room for the introduction of a spiritual empire. Precisely because everything old has now become platitudes, a space has come into being in which the spiritual empire can enter. Especially in the west, in the Anglo-American world people will continue to speak in the usual terminology, things that come from the past. It will continue to roll on like a bowling ball. It will roll on in the words. You can find innumerable expressions especially in the west which have lost all meaning, but are still used. But not only in these expressions, but in everything described by the old words the empty platitude lives, in which there is no reality, for it has been squeezed out. That is where the spiritual, which has nothing of the old in it, can find room. The old must first become empty platitude, everything that continues to roll on in speech thrown overboard, and something completely new must enter, which can only propagate as a world of the spirit. "Only then can there be a kingdom of Christ on earth.”
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—Steiner, “The History and Actuality of Imperialism” (emphasis added), 1920 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA196/English/SCR2011/19200220p01.html ***
the terrible responsibility "When we realize that we are living in the kingdom of platitudes under which only economic imperialism glimmers—then will we call for the spirit, invisible but real. We will call for a knowledge of the spirit, one which speaks of an invisible kingdom, a kingdom which is not of this world in which the Christ-impulse can actually gain a foothold. This can only happen when the social order is tripartite, threefold: The economy is autoadministered, the political state is no longer the absolute, all-inclusive entity, but is exclusively concerned with rights alone, and spiritual/cultural life is truly free, meaning that here in reality a free spiritual sector can be organized." … “It's immaterial whether a dictatorship or a republic is established, if it is not understood that everything which appears is subject to life and must be continuously transformed, must pass through death and be formed anew, pass through metamorphoses, then all that will be accomplished is that every new generation will be revolutionary. Because only what is considered good for the present will be established. A fundamental concept for the western areas which are so mired in platitudes must be to see the social organism as something living. And one sees it as living only when it is considered in its threefold nature. It is just those whose favorable economic position allows them to spread an economic imperialism over practically the whole world who have the terrible responsibility of recognizing that the cultivation of a true spiritual life must be poured into this imperialism.” —Steiner, “The History and Actuality of Imperialism” (emphasis added), 1920 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA196/English/SCR2011/19200222p01.html ***
what was intended "It's an either/or situation: Either efforts remain exclusively oriented towards the economy—in which case the fall of earthly civilization is the inevitable result—or spirit will be poured into this economic empire, in which case what was intended for earthly evolution will be achieved. I would like to say: Every morning we should bear this in mind very seriously and all activities should be organized according to this impulse." —Steiner, “The History and Actuality of Imperialism” (emphasis added), 1920
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Author’s Note: As perceived by humane wisdom, Christ is the Higher Power who was originally, and still is, at the true center of every wisdom tradition—the Great and Good Mystery of indigenous North America, the Tao of Chinese civilization, Vishnu in Hinduism, the Sun Hero in the Celtic and Northern Mysteries, Osiris in Egypt, the Elohim in Judaism (of which Yahweh is one of seven), Vishvakarman in Buddhism (the meaning of life), the Platonic ‘Form of the Good’ (the Unknown God) in Greece, Sol Invictus in ancient Rome, Allāhumma in Islam (Higher Power as conventionally perceived by our Muslim Humanity, is the cool, personal reflection of the seven Authors of humanity’s world), and Ethical Individualism in secular humanism. Our stories of those Names of God—to the extent that the stories have not become bent or mixed with the stories of other gods—are actual perceptions of this Power before he and she leaped down into humanity’s world. The ‘pagan’ or indigenous mysteries were originally founded as beautiful and humane paths for the different nationalities to approach this Higher Power, though by historic times, many of these paths had fallen into yuckiness, having been bent to the left or the right. What is known as the Christian religion is only a beginning. This sprouting shoot has herself been bent one way or the other. The Loving God is distinct from the Evil Jesus—the mindless, oily, vindictive, bearded, sandle-wearing, path-distorting, simpleton sorcerer who bows and scrapes to the market state—who our theologians and our Church Lady keep in a box as a pet. This ‘Imposter of Jesus’ is confronted by Paul in the Book of Acts. Bar-Jesus is the lieutenant and mouthpiece of Ba‛al, the false sun. Our folk religion is now heavily influenced by this distorted perception, which stands in the way. If you want to know more, see my sandbox about “The Fake Jesus”: https://sites.google.com/site/teratosophy/fake-jesus The Higher Power is also distinct from the legless Cosmic Christ conceived by some of our New Age fellows. The inflow of the Other Power into the centerpoint of humanity’s story is evident in the possibility now for human beings to recover after falling to actually hopeless, impossible affliction. That is the Spiritual Experience, regardless of what name or conception inspires the will to return to life. This one is humble enough to be called by other names. 194
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA196/English/SCR2011/19200222p01.html ***
anglo-america—the makings of a genuine world conception “In the heathen civilizations especially, we find, when we look back on them...in those days people had a Cosmogony—that is, they recognized themselves to be members of the whole world. They knew that they were not merely beings who had gone astray and were wandering over the face of the green earth like lost sheep, but that they were part and parcel of the whole wide world, and had their own purpose within this world. The men of old possessed a Cosmogony. “Our civilization possesses no instinct for the creation of a cosmogony in real life. Our mode of conception is not, in the strict sense of the term, a genuinely scientific one. We have tabulated isolated facts, and we have constructed a logical system of concepts; but we have no real science forming a practical link between us and the spiritual world.* How paltry is the part played by the science of our day in common life, compared with what humanity of old felt pulsing through us from the forces of the spiritual world! In all our actions we had a cosmogony; we knew ourself a member of the whole vast world. When we looked up at the sun and the moon and the stars, they were not to us strange worlds; for we knew ourself, in our own deepest nature, akin to the sun and moon and world of stars. Thus, the old civilizations possessed a cosmogony; but for our civilization this cosmogony is lost. Without a cosmogony in life, humanity cannot be strong. ... “The question then arises:—How are we going to surmount these signs of our civilization's decline and fall?...Is there no possibility of arriving once more at a mode of conception which is cosmogonical, which takes on the world as a whole? ...Where in the life of earth today may there perhaps exist the possibility for a cosmogony to evolve? ... “Anyone acquainted with the spiritual life of the Anglo-American world knows...it has in it the makings of a cosmogony. ...It lies in the AngloAmerican nature to seek for it...the search for a cosmogony. ...They were trying to become acquainted with the real, supersensible power.” “We cannot today arrive at the secrets of our civilization, my dear friends...unless we know that the tendency towards Cosmogony is an endowment of the Anglo-American world. ...Anglo-American civilization owes its success to a cosmogonic impulse. It owes it to the circumstance, that people are able to think in world-thoughts. “And when...from out of this consciousness of the whole world, we say to ourselves that the old civilization is bursting through its partitions, it is doomed—then to try to save it in its present form would be to work against one's age, not with it. ...We need a new civilization upon the ruins of the old. The ruins of the old civilization will gradually crumble; and that person alone understands the present times who has the will and courage for one that shall be really new. But the New must be grounded...in a sense of the World—the world-consciousness of future humanity.” —Steiner, “Cosmogony, Freedom, Altruism”, 1919 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19191010p01.html *(Author’s Note: As voiced by humane wisdom, the Spiritual World is a refreshed word for God, the Higher Power. Cosmogony is the birth of a new world.) ***
will there be a sufficient number? "Well, the actual victor is the Being of the Anglo-American Peoples, and as a result of forces that I have often described here, this Being of the Anglo-American Peoples is destined to dominate the world in the future. …It will be easy to win external domination, for this will be done with the help of forces for which the winners can claim no credit. The transfer of external dominion will take place with the relentlessness of a force of nature. …Already inscribed in the book of human destiny is the question: Will there be a sufficient number among those impelled to assume external dominion, as though by a force from outside, who feel a responsibility for inserting into this entirely external, materialistic dominion—for 213 that is what it will be, make no mistake—an impetus for spiritual life?" —Steiner, “Ideas for a New Europe” (emphasis added), 1919 ***
from americanism to america becoming “Americans think within the limits of what they are simply by reason of the fact that they belong...to America. They do not need to become something. They need only to point out how different they are from the evil human beings of the Central European countries, showing how black they are, whereas they alone are white. This is something that has spread an illusion regarding human beings over vast areas of the earth...” —Steiner, “Social and Anti-Social Instincts”, 1918 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA186/English/AP1941/19181206p01.html (Author’s Note: Americanism says to Itself: “I have arrived. I am the End of History.” When there is really quite a lot of arriving to come.) ***
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In humane wisdom, the word ‘spiritual’ includes not only religious tradition and meditative practice, but also secular culture, intellect, and creativity, free from the State and commercial motives. 195
the principle of economic dependence "The most effective principle for extending power over as many human beings as may be needed is today the principle of economic dependence...The economic principle is connected with everything which seeks to enlist a great number of human beings all over the world as a kind of army in the service of these principles...In the West we have the principle which is really rooted in the [past], but which passes unnoticed because it clothes itself in the phrases of revolution and democracy. It wears them as a mask and by this means strives to gain all possible power for itself. These endeavors are favored if as many people as possible do not exert themselves to see things as they are, and in this field allow themselves to be lulled to sleep again and again by the illusion...” —Steiner, “Wrong and Right Use of Esoteric Knowledge” (emphasis added), 1917 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA178/English/RSP1966/19171125p02.html (Author’s Note: that is to be read as: ‘phrases of the American revolution and corporatist-securocratic democracy.’) ***
fuller, lincoln, and paine “I do not deeply distrust my country. She is not dead, but in my time she sleepeth, and the spirits of our fathers flame no more, but lies hid beneath the ashes. It will not be so long; bodies cannot live when the soul gets too overgrown with gluttony and falsehood.” —Margaret Fuller, American journalist, feminist, and Transcendentalist colleague of Emerson and Thoreau, 1856 *** “Free society is not, and shall not be a failure.” —Abraham Lincoln, voiced in Chicago, 1856 and written on the southern face of a statue in Lincoln Square, Chicago *** “Let us have faith that right makes might. And in that faith dare to do our duty.” —The message behind the statue of Lincoln, on Bascom Hill, overlooking Madison, Wisconsin *** "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." —Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776 th Voiced again in Independence Hall on July 4 , 2012 ***
threefold verse for america —from Rudolf Steiner, given to Ralph Courtney for the Threefold Group in New York City which later established the Threefold Community in Spring Valley, N.Y. in 1926
May our feeling penetrate Into the centerpoint of our hearts And seek in Love to unite itself With the human beings of like goal With the spirit beings, full of grace, who, Upon our earnest, heartfelt striving, Strengthening us from regions of light And making luminous our love, Are bestowing their attention. ***
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who were the patriots and traitors? by Jacob G. Hornberger, June 12, 2013. Hornberger served as the libertarian voice and friendly cohort of the progressive voice of Glen Greenwald and the conservative voice of Bruce Fein in a recent joint-speakers’ tour. Ever since I was a kid, I have heard Americans ask, “How could the German people have allowed the Nazi regime to commit its evil acts?” Well, here’s the answer to that question: The German people had the same warped and distorted concept of patriotism that American statists have today. The overwhelming majority of German citizens believed that it was their moral duty to come to the unconditional support of their government in time of crisis, especially when the nation went to war. The good citizen didn’t question whether his government was right or wrong. The good citizen placed his trust in the judgment and decisions of his government officials, especially during crisis and war. That’s what patriotism meant to the German people during the 1930s and 1940s. The good citizen—the one who deferred to authority—was considered the patriot. What about German citizens who refused to defer to authority, those who had an independent mindset—those who would examine government policies with a critical eye—those who would question, challenge, and object to wrongful government policies? They were considered bad citizens—traitors. The best example of this phenomenon involves the story of the White Rose, an organization composed predominantly of German college students. If you haven’t seen the movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, I highly recommend it. Sophie Scholl, along with her brother Hans, were members of the White Rose. If you do see the movie, pay particular attention to the trial scene in which the presiding judge, Roland Freisler, comes down hard on the defendants Hans and Sophie Scholl. You’ll notice something apropos to today: Freisler’s mindset is the same as that of American statists today who are condemning Edward Snowden. In Freisler’s mind, the Scholl siblings were bad Germans. They were traitors. Their parents had raised them to be despicable creatures. What had the Scholl siblings done? What was their “crime”? They had taken a critical look at their own government in the midst of World War II. They had concluded that their own government was in the wrong—that it was engaged in wrongful conduct. Knowing that they were risking their lives or liberty, they violated the law by secretly publishing and distributing a set of pamphlets called “The White Rose,” in which they exhorted the German people to rise up, stop the wrongdoing, and set Germany on a correct path. They were caught, primarily owing to the Nazi regime’s extensive surveillance system over the German people. A college janitor saw them tossing White Rose pamphlets into the school courtyard and, being the good, little citizen he was, locked the doors and called the Gestapo. Hitler and his cohorts considered him a patriot. Not surprisingly, Hans and Sophie Scholl were quickly convicted and executed at the guillotine for treason. After all, the law is the law and citizens are expected to obey the law, as American statists never cease to remind us in the case of Edward Snowden. By the way, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that the Scholl trial did not take place in the regular German courts. After the terrorist attack on the Reichstag, and after some of the accused in that terrorism case had been acquitted, Hitler established a special tribunal called “The People’s Court” to try terrorism cases and treason cases. Its purpose? To ensure that no more accused terrorists and traitors got acquitted. Another interesting World War II movie is Downfall, which is about Hitler’s last days in his Berlin bunker. The movie revolves around his young secretary Traudl Junge. At the end of the movie, the real Traudl Junge is shown making a statement. She points out that when she accepted the job as Hitler’s secretary, the last thing on her mind was that she was doing anything wrong. After all, Junge embraced the same concept of patriotism that most other Germans embraced—the same type that American statists today embrace. Her job, as a good German citizen, was to come to the support of her government, especially during crises and war. But Junge pointed out in Downfall that when she learned about the Scholl siblings after the war, she realized that she should have been asking the same types of questions that Hans and Sophie Scholl had asked. When she learned about Hans and Sophie Scholl, her concept of patriotism changed. Today, American statists are condemning Edward Snowden for breaking the law and violating his oath as a government subcontractor to keep secret from the American people the massive surveillance scheme that the national-security state has secretly imposed on Americans and on much of the rest of the world. Statists are saying that Snowden is a bad citizen and a bad person. They’re calling him a traitor. They saying that he needs to be put on trial, perhaps even before the national-security state’s special tribunal system at Guantanamo Bay. 197
Where does conscience play into the American statist’s concept of patriotism and treason? For the statist, conscience must be subordinated to the needs of the national-security state. All that matters to the statist is the undying loyalty that national-security state employees, contractors, and subcontractors (and American citizens) owe to the national-security state apparatus and to their oath to protect its secrets. For the statist, the national-security state is everything. It is god. It is daddy. It is big brother. Everything else, including conscience, must be subordinated to “national security” and to the national-security state’s oaths, laws, rules, and regulations. The battle lines are forming in the case of Edward Snowden. On the one side are the statists, for whom patriotism means an unconditional pledge of allegiance to the national-security state and its deep and dark nefarious secrets involving grave infringements on liberty and privacy. On the other side are the libertarians and a few liberals and conservatives, for whom conscience and freedom reign supreme. Time will tell which side wins out. Time will tell which direction America heads in. ***
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counsel to an emerging president
To a future Steward of the American Nation, Seeing that our distress is threefold: economic, political, and cultural, I counsel you to evoke healing in all three. These are some signposts for a path to a healthy, humane America:
enact the higher balancing of powers th
First, enact the 28 Amendment: The Separation of the Economy (Business, Corporations, Unions, and Wealth) from the State. Gather the CEOs of the businesses, the chairmen of the Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the presidents of the labor unions, along with representatives of the existing consumer federations, and turn the economy over to them. Empower them to form a US Economic Forum with a stature equivalent to the US Congress. The Forum would be made of representatives from all the Businesses (large and small) and Labor Unions in the country. Task our economic leadership to choose from amongst themselves, an Economic Manager with a stature equivalent to the President, who would serve as the human face of America's economy. The Economic Forum would designate an Economic flag and Economic capital city, and fund the construction of an Economic ‘capitol’ building. The Forum would develop Trade and Investment embassies throughout the world, and would negotiate America's international trade agreements. Transfer all economic departments of the Federal Government over to this Economic Forum, including the Departments of Commerce, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Energy, along with the Post Office. The Economic Forum would issue the currency. The Reserve Bank would be a member of the Forum. This Amendment, once ratified by the States, would ensure a similar separation at the State, County, and Municipal level, throughout the country. Once the Economic Administration is in place, the Federal Government and the States would no longer be in the business of developing the economy. th
Second, enact the 29 Amendment: The Separation of Culture, Schools, and Healthcare from the State. Gather the presidents of the leading Non-Profit Organizations, the public and private secondary school associations, the national associations of state and private universities and colleges, the key medical and health care associations (both conventional and alternative), the leadership of the National Council of Churches and other religious organizations of all faiths, and representatives of the other Cultural fields, including the arts. Empower them to form a US Socio-Cultural Council with a stature equivalent to the US Congress. Task them to choose from amongst themselves, a Socio-Cultural Leader to serve as the face of the civil society sector. The Council would designate a Cultural flag and Cultural capital city. The Council would oversee the funding and construction of a Cultural ‘capitol’ building. The Council would develop Cultural embassies throughout the world. Transfer all cultural departments of the Federal Government over to this Cultural Council, including the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services. Drastically enhance the independence of the judiciary by transferring the Judicial Branch to the Cultural sector. Judges would no longer receive their salary from the same Government which is imprisoning or hounding Tim DeChristopher, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Aaron Swartz. Judges would no longer be bureaucratic tools who simply apply mechanistic formulae to determine if the ‘law was broken.’ If that is what 199
justice and rehabilitation (moral healing) have come to in this country, then we could save ourselves their hefty salaries and benefits, and replace all the judges with computers or button-pushing monkeys. The Amendment, once ratified by the States, would ensure a similar separation at the State, County, and Municipal level, throughout the country. Once the Socio-Cultural Administration is in place, the Federal, State, and Local Governments would no longer have control over pedagogy, the care of health, the art of judicial wisdom, and other cultural fields. th
Third, enact the 30 Amendment: The Separation of Culture (including Pedagogy and Wellness) and the Economy (Business and Wealth). This would provide the constitutional basis for a perpetual distinction between Cultural organizations (of all types) and Economic corporations. This Amendment would simplify, clarify, and debureaucratize what it means to be a non-commercial/non-governmental Cultural Organization. In order to qualify, the Organization must not accept any Federal, State, or Local Government monies (or Foreign Government monies), and must not embed any paid Advertisements within its offerings. Further qualities might be designated by the Cultural Council. What remains of the Government would be a purified, constitutional Rule-of-Law Governance, a ‘Rights-State.’ Completely remove the feeding trough which attracts lobbyists. The only job of the Federal, State, and Local governance would be to ensure human Rights and Obligations, including articulating what ‘benefits’ the Economic and Cultural sectors must provide each Citizen as requisites to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But this renewed political/rights Governance itself would no longer own any Economic or Cultural facilities (including Schools), nor manage their praxes. Structurally sever all political party organizations from the Governance, including whatever part you rode in on. The political parties would be clearly incorporated as non-governmental Cultural Organizations which are devoted to a particular political philosophy. As such, like membership in a church or other civic organization, party membership would no longer be listed on ballots, and seating in legislative chambers would no longer be by party membership. Individuals as individual citizens, not as party functionaries, would offer themselves for political/rights service. Next, after having enacted the Threefold Republic through the separation of Business, Governance, and Culture:
take a national inventory and make amends Empower an independent, widely respected circle of American historians to make a list of all harms the American People have done since 1776. When I say the American People, I mean the American Government—along with the American Corporations and American Institutions which have been incorporated through the laws of the American People—since we have prided ourselves as being the most democratic and representative society in the world. Whatever our Government and Economy have done, We the People have done. For this step, we completely ignore ‘who started it’, and what harm the other party did to us. This is not about lawsuits, but about unforced human condolence and healing. In many cases, this will not be an apology for wrongdoing, but an expression of remorse and sorrow for the human loss. Begin with mending the wounds which are most pressing: Make national amends to Arab Humanity, to Iranian Humanity and to humanity's Muslim Civilization. Forgive Al-Qaeda in this way: Invite each American to join you in asking each day, for two weeks, that Al-Qaeda, the dead Osama bin Laden—now lion-like and hardened—and all enemies of the American Way of Life, be given all the things that you and America desire for ourselves, our families, and our country. For fourteen days we would ask for our enemies' health, prosperity, and happiness—for goodness, guidance, and righteousness. Make national amends to the Korean Humanity who live in the North Side of the Peninsula. Though it is not entirely pure-hearted, there is an expression of the Collectivist Korean wish, carved in stone at the Military Demarcation Line: “The Americans started the war. They apologized on their knees and agreed to break off the war.” Though we don’t scrapingly bow to any man, must less to a government, a magnanimous gesture of amends can be made to one’s own Loving God.
The Baptism in the River Jordan, one of series of scenes by Woonbo Kim Ki-chang painted during the Korean Nightmare. In an interview, the artist says that he “thought the Korean people’s wartime tragedy was comparable to the sufferings of Jesus Christ.” 200
On the Line, build a humanity-wide memorial of the fall and endurance which we, as Privatist Humanity and Collectivist Humanity of all nationalities, experienced through the War of the Two Ideologies—Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians, Germans and other Western and Eastern Europeans, north and south Yemenis, Cubans, Angolans, Red and White Finns and Russians, to name only a few. The place would serve as one node for enacting a century of ceremonial reconciliations extending backwards in time, through the proxy wars, to the moment of Contact on the Elbe, and further onward to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Make national amends to the Indigenous Humanity of this continent. Honor every single Indian Treaty. There is a concrete or symbolic way to 214 honor each provision. Enact a series of ceremonies which re-affirm each Indian Treaty, in reverse order, from the last treaty to the first treaty. Make national amends to the Black Humanity of America. Forty acres and a mule. "Few people consider the fact that, in addition to being enslaved for two centuries, the Negro was, during all those years, robbed of the wages of his toil. No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest." —MLK, Why We Can't Wait (Author’s Note: The Trisector Idea suggests that a nation-sized, unforced amends be initiated and helmed by the organizations of the Cultural 215 Republic, instead of by the compulsory power of the government, the Rights Republic.) We have already begun. The American People have already begun to express sorrow for the harm which came to enemy humanity. There are at least a few instances of the American Nation, or salient agents of the nation, expressing human remorse:
For the death of Chinese Humanity during Hainan Island Incident where there was a mid-air collision between a U.S. spy plane and Chinese fighter plane in 2001: “I know the American people join me in expressing sorrow for the loss of life of a Chinese pilot. Our prayers are with his wife and his child.” —Chief W, 2001
(Author’s Note: Yes, I know the collision was partly due to the man’s hotshot piloting. Yet this is an apt expression of remorse for a man who was loved by someone. This is a fitting model for other condolences where, from a strictly military perspective, no wrongdoing could honestly be admitted, but where harm still came. Death and wounds are harm. Our part in that harm, no matter how small, can be courteously voiced.) *** For the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on American Humanity of African ancestry from 1932 to 1972: “It is not only in remembering that shameful past that we can make amends and repair our nation, but it is in remembering that past that we can build a better present and a better future. And without remembering it, we cannot make amends and we cannot go forward. “So today America does remember the hundreds of men used in research without their knowledge and consent. We remember them and their family members. Men who were poor and African American, without resources and with few alternatives, they believed they had found hope when they were offered free medical care by the United States Public Health Service. They were betrayed. ... “We can look at you in the eye and finally say on behalf of the American people, what the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry. “The American people are sorry—for the loss, for the years of hurt. You did nothing wrong, but you were grievously wronged. I apologize and I am sorry that this apology has been so long in coming.”
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From the perspective of the American People, the official closure of the Indian treaty era was the Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 which declared:
“That hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty.” Yet on into the 1900s, treaty-like arrangements continued to be made between the American People and the Original Peoples—these arrangements were simply called ‘Agreements’ instead of ‘Treaties.’ The beginning of the treaty era, in regards to the newly incorporated American Nation, are the revolutionary-era 1778 Treaty of Fort Pitt with the Lenape Delaware Nation and the 1776 Watertown Treaty with some of the Wabanaki nations in Maine. 215
If you want to know more, read my practical vision of national amends to our Black community: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/40-acres-and-a-mule 201
—Chief Clinton, “Remarks by the President in Apology for Study Done in Tuskegee”, 1997 www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/clintonp.htm *** For the massacre of Vietnamese Humanity in the village of My Lai in 1968: "There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry."
—former Army Lt. William Culley, 2009 http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2009/08/21/813820/william-calley-apologizes-for.html This is voiced by an individual, not the nation. *** For the covert overthrow of the democratic governance of Iranian Humanity in 1953: "The United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government." —Chief Obama, 2009
*** For the internment of the American Humanity of Japanese ancestry from 1942 to 1945: “The Congress recognizes that, as described in the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, a grave injustice was done to both citizens and permanent residents of Japanese ancestry by the evacuation, relocation, and internment of civilians during World War II. “As the Commission documents, these actions were carried out without adequate security reasons and without any acts of espionage or sabotage documented by the Commission, and were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. ...
“For these fundamental violations of the basic civil liberties and constitutional rights of these individuals of Japanese ancestry, the Congress apologizes on behalf of the Nation.” —U.S. Congress, Civil Liberties Act, signed by Chief Reagan, 1988 www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/civilact.html *** For the Exclusion Acts of 1882 to 1943 whereby ill-will towards Chinese Humanity was crystallized into National Law:
“ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. “That the House of Representatives regrets the passage of legislation that adversely affected people of Chinese origin in the United States because of their ethnicity.” —U.S. House of Representatives resolution 683, 2012 http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20120618/BILLS-112hres683ih.pdf and reported in the Chinese state news: www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2012-06/19/content_15512469.htm *** For the overthrow and annexation of the social organism of Hawaiian Humanity in 1893: “The Congress...apologizes to Native Hawaiians on behalf of the people of the United States for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii on January 17, 1893 with the participation of agents and citizens of the United States.” —U.S. Congress, Public Law 103-150, signed by Chief Clinton, 1993 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/US_Public_Law_103-150
*** The death of Mexican Humanity during the Mexican War in 1847: “Brave men don't belong to any one country. I respect bravery wherever I see it."
—Chief Truman, 1947 In regard to his placing a wreath, and pausing for a moment of silence at the memorial to the six Mexican children who fought U.S. armed forces to the death in Mexico City during the Mexican War, a hundred years earlier. *** For the harm to the Original Humanity of North America: “The United States, acting through Congress— ...apologizes on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States; expresses its regret for the ramifications of former wrongs and its commitment to build on the positive relationships of the past and present to move toward a brighter future where all the people of this land live reconciled as brothers and sisters, and harmoniously steward and protect this land together.” 202
—U.S. Congress, Public Law 111-118, signed by Chief Obama, 2009 This was tucked into a military funding bill. Section 813, page 45: http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20120618/BILLS-112hres683ih.pdf *** Though some of these are pale words, and were not voiced in a way and context which would sink into the imagination and feeling-life of the entire American populace, and do not necessarily reflect a willingness to change our national disposition and actions, they are a beginning. It would make an interesting book to gather any further words of remorse from American political, economic, and cultural figures which have been expressed since 1775, in regard to national harm-doing. His story must not be forgotten There are persons who represent the ability for humanity, even severely twisted humanity, to make amends. One of those is Elwin Wilson, a former Klansman who, in 1961, had physically beaten one of the leaders of the civil rights movement, John Lewis. 38 years later, Wilson went and made direct amends to those he had harmed. In his own words: “All I can say is that it has bothered me for years, all the bad stuff I’ve done. And I found out there is no way I could be saved and get to heaven 216 and still not like blacks.” Elwin Wilson died in 2013. His wife says: “He said he had it on his heart for a long time. He said he wished he could find the ones he mistreated and apologize to them all.” John Lewis, who had received Wilson’s hate, says these words in memory of Wilson: “He was the first private citizen...he was the very, very first to come and apologize to me … for a private citizen to come along and say, `I’m the one that attacked you; I’m the one who beat you.’ It was very meaningful.” “I am very sorry to learn of Elwin Wilson’s passing. It is my prayer that he will rest in peace since he made amends to many of those he had injured. He told me he wanted to be right when he met his Maker, and I believe Elwin Wilson accomplished what he set out to do. “We can all learn a valuable lesson from the life of this one man. He demonstrates to all of us that we fall down, but we can get up. We all make blunders, but we can get on the right road toward building a greater sense of community. “Elwin Wilson experienced what Martin Luther King Jr. told all of us that “hate is too heavy a burden to bear”. He demonstrated the power of love and the effectiveness of non-violent direct action not only to fix legislative injustice but to mend the wounded souls in our society, the soul of the victim as well as the perpetrator. Elwin Wilson shows us, that people can change, and when they put down the mechanisms of division and separation to pick up the tools of reconciliation, they can help build a greater sense of community in our society, even between the most unlikely people. Elwin Wilson proves that we are all one people, one family, the human family, and what affects one of us affect us all. “I will never forget Elwin Wilson. I speak about our meeting often. In fact, just this morning I mentioned him to 147 students from California, New York, and Ohio. And I spoke about him earlier this month on the pilgrimage to Alabama. Because this one man had the courage to seek 217 the power of forgiveness, he stepped off the sidelines and into the pages of American history forever.”
Lewis and Wilson. 216
www.politico.com/story/2013/03/elwin-wilson-death-89498.html. Author’s Note: the existence of national and racial identities only extends into the lower conditions of the soul world. If an individual’s thoughts and actions are pervaded by the nation-state gods or the racialist gods, the soul peters out, and the spirit turns back. 217
http://johnlewis.house.gov/press-release/rep-john-lewis-saddened-passing-elwin-wilson-rock-hill-man-who-apologized 203
crown america with brotherhood Enact a Federal Citizen's Livelihood. All workers in the American economy would receive from their workplace all the pay, weekends and holidays off, vacations, and benefits that entry-level Federal Government employees presently receive. This includes even fast food grillworkers, grocery store cashiers, stockers, baggers, and cart-pushers, and convenience store clerks. End federal income tax. Fund the political Governance through transparent negotiations with the Economic Forum, resulting in a yearly lump-sum Rights budget. Enact a National Jubilee, forgiving all debts owed to the Federal Government and its quasi-governmental affiliates in the student loan industry.
demilitarize the country, beat the swords into plowshares, and recover from war fever End the War on Drugs, the War against our People, our wounded Brothers and Sisters, so that the American economy is no longer based on guard labor. Actual harm to others would be the criminal offense, regardless of the whether the person is intoxicated or not. A strung-out citizen who steals something and a sober citizen who steals something, would both be charged with theft. And drug and alcohol use would still be an ‘immanent crime’ in the case of operating vehicles and heavy machinery while within the influence of substances which slow the reflexes or impair judgment. That would still be criminally irresponsible—a good opportunity to provide conditions for this fellow to recover and make specific amends for the harm that was done, or almost done, to others. In words of the British revolutionary: Russell Brand: “Well, I was busy being a drug addict at that point, because I come from the kind of social conditions that are exacerbated by an indifferent system that really just administrates for large corporations and ignores the population that it was voted in to serve.” Interviewer: “You’re blaming the political class for the fact that you had a drug problem?” Russell Brand: “No, no, no. I’m saying I was part of a social and economic class that is underserved by the current political system and drug addiction is one of the problems it creates. When you have huge underserved, impoverished populations, people get drug problems, and also don’t feel like they want to engage with the current political system because they see that it doesn’t work for them. They see that it makes no difference.” Russell Brand, “Paxman vs. Brand” interview, BBC Newsnight, October 2013 www.correntewire.com/russell_brand_vs_jeremy_paxman_the_full_transcript *** “This is an important moment in history; we know that prohibition does not work. We know that the people who devise drug laws are out of touch and have no idea how to reach a solution. Do they even have the inclination? The fact is their methods are so gallingly ineffective that it is difficult not to deduce that they are deliberately creating the worst imaginable circumstances to maximise the harm caused by substance misuse. “People are going to use drugs; no self-respecting drug addict is even remotely deterred by prohibition. What prohibition achieves is an unregulated, criminal-controlled, sprawling, global mob-economy, where drug users, their families and society at large are all exposed to the worst conceivable version of this regrettably unavoidable problem.” —Russell B., “Philip Seymour Hoffman is another victim of extremely stupid drug laws”, February 6, 2014 www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/06/russell-brand-philip-seymour-hoffman-drug-laws?CMP=fb_ot *** “I want a revolution in the way we regard addiction as a disease, the way we treat drug addicts.” —Russell B., February 15, 2014 www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/02/15/russell-brand-jon-snow_n_4793555.html?just_reloaded=1 *** Open the gulag archipelago. Pardon most non-violent Federal prisoners. Grant Commutation to most actively violent Federal prisoners, with the remainder of their sentence devoted to authentic moral renewal in secure moral hospitals which really offer the conditions for penitence through 218 moral inventory and amends. 218
It’s a sad society where the general populace is so beaten down that they feel jealous that prisoners ‘get’ to have three meals a day and watch television. Nevertheless, a more austere and quiet, almost monastic—rather than increasingly militarized and commoditized—environment would really make penitent-iaries live up to their name. The Christian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, in his “Model for Criminal Justice” offers a clear vision of a middle way for a future penitiential organism...a practical ideal from the 1800s which has never yet been realized, despite a century’s worth of dusty libraries full of academic papers on criminal justice: “Model criminal justice and a penitential system which corresponds to it—real justice and mercy to criminals without injury to the innocent—here is the most explicit and complete proof of the true connection between law and morality, or the true concept of law as the balance of two moral interests: public good and individual freedom.” In my own experience in county jails and federal prisons, the picture I got of the American ‘correctional’ system is this: controloholic, immoral humanity supposedly trying to ‘correct’ afflicted, immoral humanity to become moral humanity. By ‘immoral’, I mean more or less sick and confused. (The footnote continues on the next page.) 204
Make the last the first, and the first the last. Offer Edward Snowden the service position of Director of the National Security Agency, and offer Tim DeChristopher the role of Secretary of the Interior. Promote Private Chelsea Manning, formerly Specialist Bradley Manning, to the rank of Corporal or Sergeant. One of these men or women would be fitting to be the one to whom this counsel is offered. By executive order, bring all non-essential US military and intelligence personnel back to the Homeland. Close Guantanamo. Not just the prison block, but the entire fortress. 30 days to be entirely vacant and handed back to Cuba. Devote our energies to healing our own country first. Complete the remainder of the enlisted contracts through training in Organic-Biodynamic apprenticeship and other capacities which will be needed for civilizational renewal. Dismantle America's nuclear weaponry, in a step by step concert with the other nuclear social organisms.
stand proud and victorious on the skin of the american way Enact the Separation of Nation and State. Change the name of the three administrations to ‘The Homeland of the Dream’, or other poetic name. The Nation, as a divested Cultural Organization, would retain the name ‘America’, with ‘United States of America’ as the formal name, and the US flag as its symbol. As head of this cultural organization, request that all commercial enterprises, such as car dealerships, gas stations, and fast food chains, remove the American national flag from their flagpole, and replace it with an American economic flag. The election for the next Head of Nation would be a non-governmental cultural election by American nationals, entirely separate from the governmental election of the Head of State by the citizenry of the Homeland. Offer a cultural process by which any human being, living anywhere in humanity’s world, could become an American national. — Complete decolonization, including the Federal Indian Reservations. Offer the five inhabited US insular commonwealths and territories—Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa—and the 566 federally recognized Indian Tribes, only two options: 1) Full economic and political convergence with the Threefold Republic. Those areas with a populace of 60,000 (such as Puerto Rico and the Navajo Reservation) would become Constitutional States, and those areas with less than 60,000 (the hundreds of other Indian reservations) would become Constitutional Collectivities and would be outside the authority of the State governments. Those Reservations which have no residents would become Constitutional Territories. Tribes without a federal Reservation would achieve cultural independence, with no corresponding political collectivity. OR 2) Full economic and political independence in association with the US, including, for example, provisions for perpetual demilitarization.
Though many of the guards were courteous, and some were even helpful, Tim DeChristopher’s characterization touches on a sad truth: “You know, I think there’s many roles that our prison system serves, at this point, that further those in power. And one of those roles, I think, is an employment service for military veterans who are too psychologically damaged to work in the private sector.” —“Released from Prison, Climate Activist Tim DeChristopher on Civil Disobedience & Building Movements”, Democracy Now!, May 2013 www.democracynow.org/2013/5/17/released_from_prison_climate_activist_tim Though this clashes with the values of some Americans, who themselves enjoy staring at the television ‘seeing stone’ and eating chemically denatured orc-swill, I suggest that televisions be removed from prisons, that library options be greatly expanded, and that prison food be almost entirely organic and biodynamic, and that nearly all prisoners learn to grow their own biodynamic food, so that upon release, they could step into the role of farm apprentice or journeyman. A clarified physical body contributes to (though of course doesn’t guarantee) ethical clarity. Imagine if all manner of healing, enculturating modalities, such as recovery meetings—beyond even the drug and alcohol meetings—and religious, spiritual, and soul counseling practices, descended into the America’s prison archipelago. For convicted citizens, the spiritual-cultural sector would be there to offer paths to personal renewal. “Here is the entire substance of model punishment: the deprivation of freedom for a more or less protracted time, not determined beforehand and conforming with real changes in the condition of the criminal, and afterward mandatory work for his own benefit and for the compensation of victims. It is reduced to the conditional restriction of the criminal's individual and property rights as the natural result of crime. This is what society should take from the criminal; but in place of this it should give him active assistance in his correction and moral regeneration. It is precisely from this aspect that a radical reform of prison institutions to transform them into moral-psychiatric establishments is particularly essential.” —Solovyov The ‘penitentiary’ and ‘correctional’ institutes would become amendational organisms. Instead of blank spots in a biography, prisons would really be a place where nearly everyone becomes a New Man. But the American populace won’t go for this until they themselves are no longer prisoners of the Corporate State. "Nothing. Jail is about nothing. Completely blank.” —Ai Weiwei (Author’s Note: I thought up the Threefold Alliance while I was in jail, so my experience wasn’t completely blank.) 205
In either case, the 566 Original Peoples, the Puerto Rican national culture, and all other ethno-national identities would be free to declare cultural independence. Discard old ideas for new. 219 Discard the demented, hopelessly polarizing, self-fulfilling, anti-human US foreign policy conceptions which entrance the American leadership:
The Clash of Civilizations of Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. This is a leading worldview among the U.S. establishment. The initiator of this concept, with its entrancing black-lined map of humanity’s ‘fault lines’, was one of the architects of the U.S. practice of rounding up the populace of Vietnam and concentrating them into camps, so that collectivist humanity (namely, anyone who resisted concentration) could be perceived and killed. Huntington was an advisor to the Aparthood administration in South Africa, in which the State Security Council came to pervade nearly every aspect of life. Huntington advocated, in his own words: "duplicity, deceit, faulty assumptions and purposeful blindness.”
Endless War: Middle-Eastern Islam versus Western Civilization by Citizen-Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Ralph Peters. This conception is also known as Jihad vs. McWorld. Peters serves as a voice for this gesture: “There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing." —“Constant Conflict" from Parameters: The US Army War College Quarterly
Blood Borders: How a better Middle East would look, from the Armed Forces Journal, also by Ralph Peters. Humanity’s world doesn’t need a second round of Wilsonian national-statism in the Middle East.
The ‘Functioning Core’ versus the ‘Non-Integrating Gap’ of Tom Barnett of the Naval War College. This policy of the US Department of Defense is a gigantic parallel of the Americanist fearmongering State of Israel versus the rebel fearmongering State of Palestine. This map was displayed on the wall of the entry processing center in Raleigh, North Carolina where I entered the U.S. military organism.
Let’s roll. Remake our foreign policy along the lines pictured in these books, Threefold Now. Recognize and facilitate state-free cultural independence for every nationality in the world, beginning with their diaspora in America. Offer real support to any trisector parallel organism in the world which aims to peaceably supersede a nation-state. Host trisector governances-in-exile for any threefold movement which arises within an authoritarian regime or otherwise uniform state. Offer full membership in our Union of Threefold States to any nation-state which will trisect itself. Add those stars to the flags. America would then become worthy of Lincoln’s call for ‘the last best hope of earth.’
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For maps of these backwards conceptions, visit my sandbox entitled: “Why do only the Bad Guys get to imagine and enact the future?”: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/why 220
Annual Message to Congress, December 1st, 1862, one month before the Great Emancipation. 206
build a statue of equality and a statue of fraternity Gild the entire Statue of Liberty, like her torch. (Chief Reagan got the metal right.) None of the cost would come from compulsory-extracted tax monies. The gold would come entirely from freely-given gift monies. Put the vaults of gold in Fort Knox to some use.
Build two more colossi—one in Montgomery, Alabama, and one on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. 221
The Statue of Equality would be silver. Lady Equality, or Usawa, would be poised at the moment of taking flight, with only a toe touching the surface of the earth and her two wings outstretched. Minerva’s helmet would be couched on the crown of her head. Her eyes would be steady on the horizon, and her hands would be on her heart. The model would be Rosa Parks as a young woman. “Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery.” —John Prine, American country singer 222
The Statue of Fraternity would be in polished bronze. Lady Fraternity, or Kawatsire, would be offering a cornucopia. The place would be renamed Fraternity Island. The model would be Yvonne Oakes, a 13-year old girl of the Mohawk Nation of Iroquois. She would be wearing the traditional raiment of that nation. In 1970, during the Occupation of Alcatraz by the Indians of All Tribes, she slipped while playing, and fell from a height to her death. *** If we can get those two statues up, then we’d be truly worthy to build a fourth statue—a Statue of Humanity—in the midst of the land. That’s my counsel to an emerging president. ***
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Swahili for ‘Equality’. Though that is only one of many arterial languages in the African continent, Swahili has come to symbolize Pan-African culture.
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Mohawk language for ‘Relations, Relatives, Family.’ 207
“The conception of the Threefold Commonwealth is noble—a little aloof in its mighty grandeur. It is almost presumptuous in its scope and magnitude. It is a conception, nevertheless, worthy of man.” —The New York Times Book Review
imagining a threefold america higher than empire When the possibility for real change is voiced, our Americanist leadership will insinuate: “You better be good boys and girls and not question the way it is, or else we will fall to governmentalized authoritarianism (Gaddafi, Assad, Russian Neo-Statism) or complete destructive chaos (Somalia, Syria). There is nothing the matter with God-Blessed, Liberal (=Corporate) Democracy...it’s just a few bad apples...like you! The Partiocratic State— Love it or Leave It! If you don’t love and serve either the Democratic Party or the Republic Party, and their game, then get out!” This is a false choice. It’s true that the American Way is, in many regards, the lesser of these three evils. Yet why would we want to make the entire world into an American bonescape of concrete, fast food restaurants, and strip malls? Why would we want to spread the impulse of a dying civilization? Why build another telegraph line when we have the tools to build a fiber optic or wireless system? From the perspective of the Trisector Idea, all human social organisms, including the United States, are still ‘developing countries.’ Our Military-Corporatist-Entertainment Empire continues to crawl across the earth’s surface and into the minds of humanity. We are programmed to be nostalgic for eras which were already decadent, such as the Roaring Twenties, which was led off in 1919 with a generation of men returning from participating in the pulverization of humanity through trench warfare, directed by paternalistic, banker-run National States. In the same year, the National State, in a strangely hypocritical, controloholic, sick maternalist gesture declared a War on Alcohol, as if the National Government and its prohibitory police-citizens were themselves paragons of human morality. Or the Fifties, when men channeled their inarticulate experience of the bloody, fiery mess of the next level of mechanized sacrificial warfare into a compulsion for white, shaved, clean homogenization. Or the Sixties, when a whole generation was diverted down a dissipatory left-hand path by chemical gurus. I am not a Child of the Sixties. For us who are here st now, regardless our generation, these are the days, and the 21 century is Our Century. I’ve grown up within the Roman Empire of this age, and I live in its Empire State. And though Americanists will always point out how wretched life is beyond our borders, and that the American Way only needs a few tweaks, it has become clear to me, and to other Occupiers and Libertarians, that the Americanist Way is a dead end. If this way of death is not earnestly redirected, it will lead American Humanity to humiliation and ruin. If Empire is inherent to our nature, then we enter a metamorphosis—in our lifetime—whereby we break out of our hardened chrysalis and spread America’s wings as a freely-given Spiritual-Cultural Empire which is clearly in service of humanity. We evolve the Empire State into the Excelsior State, the Higher State. The pictures in these books are offered as the imago…the unfurled image of a mature, Humane Way of Life which not only crawls and rolls, but can fly and leap hindrances in a single bound.
more about national amends America is one social organism where there are several persons who know how to make amends for the harm we did, regardless of what the other did to us. We know how to sweep our side of the street even if the person who lives on the other side is seemingly crazy and dangerous. It takes two to tango. The Trisector Idea has been in the ideational toolbox of humanity since 1917. The concept of Personal Amends has been in our toolbox since 1935, and the concept of Group Amends since 1946. There is no good excuse for this past century of bungling. American courts don’t allow individuals to plead ignorance of the national law. Neither will world destiny allow the National Law to plead ignorance of the healthy sociological principles. The separation of economic, political, and cultural issues will provide conditions for The American People NCO to make unforced symbolic and concrete amends for every harm we have done as a group, since 1776. We don’t need leaders who speak flowery platitudes in praise of Martin Luther King or God, while bungling in the same old ways. We need wayclearers, gap-leapers, and bridge-builders for the future social impulse. “Do not go where the path may lead, Go instead where there is no path, and leave the trail.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
an anational name for the spirit of america “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” —Mahalia Jackson, who called out to MLK as he was speaking, and evoked his “I Have a Dream” extemporaneous speech. For a refreshed societal name for America, there were various possibilities, such as ‘Columbia’ (Land of the Dove)—the almost forgotten name for the true potential of America—or Frank Lloyd Wright’s artistic-architectural vision of ‘Usonia’, but after trial and experimentation, the Homeland of the Dream is offered; inspired by MLK, and with a friendly nod to Chief W. 208
The name offered by Langston Hughes, the Homeland of the Free, is fitting for the spiritual-cultural sector. The Homeland Where all Men are Created Equal is offered for the Rights Republic, and the Homeland Crowned with Brotherhood for the Economic Republic. In these names, the word “Men” with a capital “M”, represents the original gender-free meaning of “mindful beings”; and the word “Brotherhood” likewise points to the poetic, gender-free, trans-human persona of Fraternity, Solidarity, and Goodwill. Luigi Morelli’s recent book, Legends and Stories for a Compassionate America, gave the idea of the three sectors having a different name.
keywords—revolutionary, constitutional, and living Living Economy: the economic quality is inspired by the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). Like ‘The United States of America; as the formal name of the US Government, the US Economy would have its own formal name. Other fitting adjectives, such as ‘Interdependent Economy of America’, ‘Solidarity Economy of America’, or ‘Fraternal Economy of America’ mean essentially the same thing—a good, family-like economy which accepts what is socially just and humane. Constitutional Governance: In an authentic rule-of-law Governance, a fresh, humane, wise perception of the Constitution would completely pervade the political sphere, and would shake off the encumbering accretions of statutory law. Revolutionary Culture: A perpetually innovating, evolutionary cultural sector imbued with the Spirit of Liberty which guided the First American Revolution, would be able to meet the aspirations of future generations of humanity. These three are in the Homeland, not of the Homeland. The Living Economy, Constitutional Governance, and Revolutionary Culture are potentially worldwide.
new glory—trisecting the stars and stripes The word ‘glory’ is nowadays usually meaningless and inane. The deep original meaning of the word ‘glory’ is the golden ‘invisible’ atmosphere which shines through truly good and beautiful situations, such as the moment when a fellowman speaks deeply from the heart. The American national flag did shine with glory at first—as it was so much brighter than the cold star of autocratic monarchy. But now, next to the true potential of a mature humanity, the national flag gleams with the dark light of a National State God. Through the threefold separation of powers, America would shine forth again with authentic glory and splendor. To help people picture a Threefold Republic in America, I designed three flags—for the Economic Republic, for the Rights Republic, and for the Cultural Republic. Then, using a $300 223 micro-grant from a local organization who believed in me, I had them printed on cloth. Next, my artist friend Nick sewed them up, and a young Mexican American woman who works at a nearby cloth factory offered to punch the grommets. Here’s how I conceived the designs:
the stars For the Threefold America flags, the stars are configured in three universal shapes: triangle, circle, and square/diamond. These three 56-star constellations were calculated for Threefold Now by mathematician Skip Garibaldi of Emory University in Atlanta, through the facilitation of Slate magazine. Earlier US flags—even on government buildings—used to display stars in many different patterns and shapes. Only recently has the ubiquitous rectangle become the normative standard. Three examples of earlier constellations:
The 29-star Diamond Flag from 1847-1848.
A 38-star Concentric Circle Flag from 1877-1890.
The 26-star point-down Great Star Flag from 1837-45.
economic diamond The square turned on its point on the Economic Flag is not static like a flat rectangle, but is poised, ready for initiative, ready to move. The crystalline, lozenge shape is fitting for the natural field upon which the human economic sector is based, given Nature’s four directions and four states of matter. The square diamond is also evocative of Columbia, the spirit of America, in her role as Indian Princess, the Sacred Economy.
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http://thecenterforsocialresearch.org/credere-grants 209
rights circle The circle on the Rights Flag is where everyone is equal. The circle is an image of the aspect of America which has been depicted as Helmeted Minerva, Public Wisdom.
cultural triangle The point-down triangle on the Cultural Flag is an image of an idea dropping down into reality through human creativity, into the three archetypal cultural fields of art, science, and spirituality. Instead of a pyramidal hierarchy, there is a revolutionary/evolutionary ‘lowarchy’, whose primary 224 purpose is the free unfolding of the human individuality. The triangle evokes the image of America as the inspiring Greek Muse.
the stripes On the threefold flags, the vertical stripes are from the Rebellious Stripes flag of the Sons of Liberty revolutionary group which enacted original Boston Tea Party. The Sons of Liberty membership included Paul Revere, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other Founders. Vertical stripes are still seen on the present-day flag of the US customs service.
The Rebellious Stripes flag which preceded the Stars and Stripes.
The US Customs Service flag. The stripes shift from spreading a worldly economic-legionary empire horizontally across the earth’s surface, to harnessing our American willingness for action as a chariot to spiritually and ideationally uplift humanity as a whole. We have entered a century-deep crisis point, and humanity needs to be able to stand upright. The threefold flags keep thirteen stripes, because it’s important that the American People don’t lose anything good by joining the Threefold Republic. We don’t lose any stripes. The stars in each canton are poised on three pillars of light—the light of truth in the cultural flag, the light of the beauty of humanity in the rights flag, and the light of goodwill in the economic flag.
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If you want to know more about the imaginal qualities of the threefold Spirit of America, visit my sandbox about Columbia: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/columbia
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cultural glory The red stripes of the cultural flag signal Liberty.
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The Cultural Stars and Stripes. The first cloth version of the cultural flag which Nick and I made had the triangle sitting on its base. Yet a fellow at the 2012 Occupy National Gathering who volunteered to carry that flag in our parade, shared afterward that it reminded him of the pyramid on the back of the US dollar. And later, when I showed the flag at a talk at Camphill Kimberton near Philadelphia, a fellow there, Michael Babitch, suggested that the pyramid is a hierarchical symbol from olden days. So I flipped it, and also flipped all the other triangular cultural flags I’d designed for other social organisms. Now it’s a ‘lowarchy.’ Culture is about revolutionary evolution after all.
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The Homeland Cultural Flag carried by a fellow Occupier at the Occupy National Gathering in Philadelphia. 225
In one draft, I made the cultural flag All Red and the economic flag All Blue. Thanks to Kimberly O’Keefe for voicing, during a round of feedback on the flag designs, that it is important for all three flags to have red, white, and blue.
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economic glory Instead of Red Liberty in the economic realm, there are stripes of Blue Fraternity. In the economic life we become Sons and Daughters of Fraternity. "And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea." The blue Fraternity is complemented by its counterpart Solidarity, in the red canton. The reversed colors are from the US flag which flew over Fort Mercer, New Jersey in 1777:
The Fort Mercer flag.
The Economic Stars and Stripes.
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I deeply appreciate that the peace officers who arrested me in Independence Hall were to mindful to keep the flag from hitting the ground, that the flag was returned to me as promised, and that in the national trial, the guardian of the peace affirmed to the court that this is an American flag.
rights glory There are half-red, half-blue stripes of Equality on the rights flag. The color scheme is reminiscent of the US flag flown during the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1781:
The Guilford Courthouse flag.
The Rights Stars and Stripes. 226
I don’t know who took these parade photos...I found it online awhile back, but now I can’t find the site. If it’s your photo, let me know, and I’ll acknowledge that.
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A cloth version of the Living Economy flag is available at: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/cloth-flags. 212
There are 56 stars: for the five inhabited US territories of Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa— plus one star for an equalized rights-state covering what is now the District of Columbia; a place where US citizens presently have no voice in the legislative branch. Each of the five territories would be offered the choice of in or out—either leave the Union, or fully converge with us. The first cloth version of that flag I made had all the stars point up. When I showed it to the eurythmy dancer, Grace Ann Peysson, she suggested the stars all face the center. The half-red, half-blue stars represent the human being. We each have a left hand and right hand, a left brain and a right brain. If our skin was transparent, we would see that we each have red blood and blue blood. Our hearts are half red and half blue. From a distance, perhaps humanity looks purple.
The Homeland Rights Flag carried by a fellow Occupier at the 2012 Occupy National Gathering. When I shared the ideas behind the three flags, this man volunteered to bear this one, and hollered: “We have an Occupy Governance!” 213
The Threefold States in the Homeland of the Dream (The “Threefold States” or “3.S.” or “Homeland Society” or “The States” or “These States”)
An economic map:
A political map:
A ‘cultural’ map:
The service area of the Economic Republic and its regional associations
The Rights Republic and its 56 constitutional states
The service area of the Cultural Republic
The seat of the Economic Forum would be located in New York City
The seat of the Constitutional Governance would be located in Chicago
The seat of the Cultural Council would be located in Los Angeles
On the economic map, for illustrative purposes, the existing Economic Areas of the U.S. Department of Commerce are shown. The service areas of 228 the various Chambers of Commerce, and also the natural bioregions, could be other influences in shaping the regional economic territories. Furthermore, when the economy no longer influences the articulation of law and human rights, it would not be a tragedy for the economic sectors of North America to converge. The cultural map simply shows the service area of the overall plurinational Cultural Council, which is suggested to be located in Los Angeles. The place with the most cultural potential is where the suppressive and distortive concrete is laid on the thickest. Even still, the Los Angeleans are hopping with spiritual and artistic energy. Los Angeles would become the City of Angels. Of course, each business and cultural organization would have its own internal administrative boundaries (such as sales territories or ecclesiastical provinces) which could extend throughout the world. Likewise, the Economic Forum and Cultural Council would be active throughout the world, via their economic and cultural embassies. Some might suggest that the Cultural Capital could move to different cities periodically, like how the Olympics are hosted by different cities or how presently the ‘European Capital of Culture’ is moved to a different city ever year. While that would be a way of preventing the Cultural Council from becoming stuck and entrenched in one place, I suggest that the Cultural Capital move only if the Rights Capital and Economic Capitals move too. In 228
The EPA map of Ecoregions is the most prevalent conception of North American bioregions: www.epa.gov/wed/pages/ecoregions/na_eco.htm 214
that case, perhaps each administration might stay in one city for twelve years, but with a staggered rhythm, so that one of the three capitals moved every four years. Various localities in the Homeland—they wouldn’t have to only be a large metropolis—would offer to host. Through these twelveyear cycles, fresh architecture and social life would be infused into the various corners of the Homeland, and fresh landscapes and cityscapes would inspire the cultural, political, and economic deliberations.
The economic departments of the fifty state governments would become degovernmentalized associative economic bodies. These fifty economic associations would be just one of many kinds of non-governmental associations which make up the Living Economy. The fifty ‘state economy’ flags would be a sort of regional brand identity and ‘tourist logo’ which businesses in that region might fly. For further pictures of trisecting a US state see: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/u-s-states At the time of this writing, there are images of a threefold Montana, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and West Virginia posted there. The next step beyond e pluribus unum is tres ex uno ‘out of one, three.’ ***
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the homeland economy “The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. ...I exhort you to generous solidarity and to the return of economics and finance to an ethical approach which favors human beings.” —Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 2013 *** "In such an economic life as this there will be a return to a condition which has now almost ceased to exist because of the financial system in which money itself has become an object of economic business, a condition in which economic life will be re-established on its natural and worthy foundation. It will not be possible in future to carry on business by means of money and for money; for economic institutions will have to deal with the respective values of the commodities. That is to say, society will again return to goodness of quality, excellence of workmanship and the capability of the worker." —Rudolf Steiner, The Social Future http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/SocialFuture/19191025p01.html *** “If Dr. Steiner’s principle be taken merely as an ideal defining the spirit in which institutions are developed, it might almost seem that he is preaching the Anglo-Saxon ideal to the German people. The independence of press, church, and higher institutions of learning is certainly a recognized ideal with us, and sets up to some extent an independent community of the mind. And the function of the state in relation to industry is supposed to be the arbitration and protection of human rights, rather than the direct control of the production of communities—precisely the distinction that Dr. Steiner makes. However, Anglo-Saxon industrialism would not satisfy Dr. Steiner’s requirements, for our economic, intellectual and spiritual communities are not organized, and their functions are not divided as he divides them, for he demands that wages and labor conditions be not fixed by economic forces, but adjudicated as a matter of ‘right.’” —The Journal of Political Economy from the University of Chicago Press *** “When the threefold commonwealth is realized, there will be a sufficiency of commodities, greater equalization of wealth, a growing sense of social solidarity, both national and international, and a tremendous release of spiritual energy which should create a civilization greater than any which the world has seen. Dr. Steiner’s Platonic speculations may be fanciful and visionary, but they serve to stress and reiterate the important truth that in the growth of civilization the material and the spiritual must go hand in hand.” 229
—The American Economic Review from the American Economic Association *** “The principles of a [living economy] are based in five postulates and one fundamental value principle: One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy. Two, development is about people and not about objects. Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth. Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services. Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible. And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.” —Manfred Max-Neef, Chilean economist and Right Livelihood laureate, “The US is becoming an ‘Underdeveloping Nation’” interview by Democracy Now!, 2010 www.democracynow.org/2010/9/22/chilean_economist_manfred_max_neef_us (Author’s note: I would replace ‘the people’ with ‘humanity.’) AMY GOODMAN: “So how would you turn that around?” MANFRED MAX-NEEF: “Well, I don’t know how to turn it around.” ***
how to turn it around The US Economy would be intelligently stewarded by the US Economic Forum with its Economic Executive. The Economic Forum would be the higher, intelligent, humane synthesis beyond the Invisible Hand of the blind market and the Iron Fist of government interventionism. All individuals in the country would remain as Citizens in the US Governance, but would wear a different hat in the US Economy—as entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers. In the economy, everyone at least serves as a consumer. Even if no cooperative element were to be introduced into the economy, and nearly all business corporations remained driven by absentee 230 shareholders whose only ethical principle was loyalty was to the short-term liquidity of their stock share, such a myopic, opportunistic economy
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This quotation and the preceding quote are from book reviews published in two of the leading economic scholarly journals. These and other reviews are viewable at the bottom of Threefold Now’s resource page: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/basic-texts 217
would still be healthier if it had its own arena which was structurally separated from the rights governance. An Economic Forum composed of sociopathic corporations would be better than a Corporate-Military State purchased by sociopathic corporations.
an economic ‘legislature’ The Homeland Economic Forum would be the economic equivalent of the US Congress, but without being a compulsory governmental agency. The Forum would be a sovereign chamber of commerce, and would be made of potentially all the businesses, labor unions, financial institutions, stock exchanges, and consumer associations in the country. All business corporations in the country would have a voice through their industry 231 associations. Its membership would include: The US Chamber of Commerce and its social-responsibility oriented counterpart, BALLE—The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.
The 7,600 industry trade associations in the US—at least those which have a nation-wide presence. These are currently incorporated as non-profit organizations, but would be legally reclassified as economic associations. To give only three examples:
The American Beverage Association, whose members include Coca Cola Company, Pepsi-Cola North America, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, and many other beverage producers and bottlers. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, an association of 12 automobile manufacturers in North America, including BMW Group, Chrysler Group LLC, Ford Motor Company, General Motors Company, Jaguar Land Rover, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz USA, Mitsubishi Motors, Porsche, Toyota, Volkswagen Group of America and Volvo Cars North America. Retail Industry Leaders Association, a group of 18 corporations: AutoZone, Nike, Gap, Lowe’s, Target, The Home Depot, Walmart, Apple, CVS, Best Buy, Walgreens, Sears, JC Penny, L Brands, Dollar General, 7-11, and Abercrombie & Fitch.
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“Shareholder-value thinking dominates the business world today. Professors, policymakers, and business leaders routinely chant the mantras that public companies ‘belong’ to their shareholders; that the proper goal of corporate governance is to maximize shareholder wealth; and that shareholder wealth is best measured by share price (meaning share price today, not share price next year or next decade). This dogma drives directors and executives to run public firms with a relentless focus on raising stock price. In the quest to ‘unlock shareholder value’ they sell key assets, fire loyal employees, and ruthlessly squeeze the workforce that remains; cut back on product support, customer assistance, and research and development; delay replacing outworn, outmoded, and unsafe equipment; shower CEOs with stock options and expensive pay packages to ‘incentivize’ them; drain cash reserves to pay large dividends and repurchase company shares, leveraging firms until they teeter on the brink of insolvency; and lobby regulators and Congress to change the law so they can chase short-term profits speculating in high-risk financial derivatives. Yet many individual directors and executives feel uneasy about such strategies, intuiting that a single-minded focus on share price may not serve the interests of society, the company, or shareholders themselves.” —“The Shareholder Value Myth”, Lynn Stout, Distinguished Professor of Corporate and Business Law at Cornell Law School, posted at the Havard Law School Forum: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/ *** “Shareholder of public companies are generally not involved in the actual work of the companies they own; they have no interest in the people who work in them, in their products, nor in the customers. But they do have ultimate control, and their sole interests are the dividend and an increase in the value of the shares. ...Anything that may be thought to increase profits, even if this is only short-term, such as the laying off of workers, taking shortcuts on safety and environmental pollution, moving to areas of cheap labor, and producing only low standard short-lived products for the mass market, may be seen as the fulfilling, by management, of its responsibilities to its shareholders. Unlike the employees, customers, and the wider community, the shareholders’ commitment to the company can be very short term—they can sell out at any time they think the value of their shares has peaked and may be about to decline. “The increase in shareholder value, to which so much effort and so many brilliant minds are now committed, is unreal money value—counterfeit money—that has nothing real behind it.” —Michael Spence, “Shareholder Value”, After Capitalism, 2014 231
There are reportedly 4.5 million corporations in the US, though that number likely includes non-profit corporations as well. There are 3 million member corporations in the US Chamber of Commerce. 218
And the bank associations, such as the American Bankers Association, the National Bankers Association (of banks owned by individuals from various ethno-national cultures and by female individuals), and the Global Alliance for Banking on Values (GABV; which is associated with Triodos 232 Bank in the Netherlands—the world’s leading socially regenerative bank) and the two competing credit union associations: the Credit Union National Association and the National Association of Federal Credit Unions:
The stock markets, with their primary purpose clarified as ‘creating capital for business’:
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Some most extraordinary words from a banker:
“You can make a profit as a bank. No problem. I think many bankers now realize that two digit profits, up to 20 or 25 percent return on equity is not actually a real profit for a bank. They take it from the real economy and it should be lower. Because there’s not a lot of innovation and new ideas in banking that justify such high profits.” —Peter Blom, CEO of Triodos Bank and Chairman of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values, in an 2012 Radio New Zealand broadcast: www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ideas/20121021 Blom’s interview begins 24-minutes into the broadcast. I recommend listening to a living voice which stands out from among the Grey Gentlemen of the banking world. 233
In the words of libertarian American businessman Mark Cuban: “What Business is Wall Street In?” http://blogmaverick.com/2012/09/21/what-business-is-wallstreet-in-3 219
The investment firms, to give only two of many examples—one big and one small:
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It’s been said that this innocuous pale blue square “rules the world.” The cultural fabric of this entity is perceived and voiced by Greg Smith, a former executive director with the Pale Blue Square, who speaks frankly: “I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. ...I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival. ... It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. ...You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about...‘ripping eyeballs out’...doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.” —“Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs”, New York Times, 2012 www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 The Threefold Republic would enact conditions where such entities would re-discover their unfallen, original ideal and culture. If the Pale Blue Square didn’t find its place, it would be put in its place. The two remaining nation-wide labor associations (unions) in America—the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win Coalition—along with the now 235 diminished, but historically significant IWW Wobblies:
The consumer associations, of which the Consumer Federation of America is the main example. Every consumer in the country would have a conscious voice in every economic field, through various consumer associations and buyers’ clubs. The American Automobile Association is another example of a consumer association. AAA was originally a sort of cultural organization—a motorist club—but has now evolved into something like a motorist consumer association.
Those are the kind of bodies which would make up the Homeland Economic Forum.
the economic executive There would be a role similar to the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, who would serve as the responsible, human face of the entire US Economy. This role would be the economic ‘equivalent’ of the US President, but without the compulsory political aspect. The Economic Forum would select this entrepreneurial economic face. 234
In the words of a market trader who is being more honest than usual: www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15059135
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The opening words of the IWW Constitution say: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” I suspect that if the masks of the two ‘class identities’ were removed, there would be a common spirit between them. Regardless, the individual human beings through which the two economic identities work definitely have something in common. Employee Humanity and Employer Humanity both have arms and legs, a torso, and a head, and both have human wishes and aspirations. Do the Wobblies not know that we are supposed to be a single human family? The Trisected Social Organism is the realization of the Wobblie threefold goal of (Cultural) Education, (Rights) Organization, and (Economic) Emancipation. 220
The Executive Chairman would select and form an economic executive branch. All of the economic and financial powers of the US Government (and quasi-governmental entities such as the Fed) would be transferred to the Economic Executive, including: The Federal Reserve (the US central bank):
The Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation, including the Foreign Commercial Service:
Also governmental or quasi-governmental bodies which provide economic services, such as the US Postal Service (which provides delivery services similar to its peers UPS and FedEx), would be fully divested as Associative Corporations:
what would the economic governance do? The Economic Forum and its executive would serve as the transparent embodiment of the Homeland Economy. Our Economic Forum’s job would be to create jobs and develop the economy. (In contrast, the job of its cohort, the Rights Governance, would be to protect and ensure human rights, and to humanocratically decide what is socially just in regard to working conditions, environmental quality, and fair sharing of the fruits of profit, without influence from the economic perspective.) The Economic Forum would issue the currency. The Economic Sector would designate an economic capital, perhaps New York City. It would build an economic capitol complex to house the Economic Forum and Economic Executive. No government money would be used to build this. In fact, the Economic Forum would not receive or accept any government tax monies. Its operations would be funded entirely by its member associations—by the entire American economy. The Forum would negotiate international trade agreements and free trade areas. The Forum would be in charge of customs duties. 221
The Foreign Commercial Service would build its own trade and investment embassies throughout the world, separate from the Homeland Governance embassies. The economic administration would negotiate international trade agreements and free trade areas. The Forum would be in charge of customs duties. Despite having a scale and stature equivalent to the Homeland Governance, the Homeland Economic Forum would not be an ‘economic government.’ Freedom of association would be maintained by the amendment stating that businesses and other economic corporations would be free to not participate in the Homeland Economic Forum and Executive, and to instead form their own competing Economic Forum. However, regardless of which Economic Forum or Forums they participate in, they would all be considered to commercial businesses, incorporated through the law of the Rights Governance.
currency—keep it flowing The Economic Forum would issue a demurrage currency which—like the farm fresh produce upon which the Homeland Economy would be based— 236 would have to keep flowing. It couldn’t be hoarded, because it would expire. So much capital is tied up in gigantic mushroom clouds of pension funds and other hoards. Imagine if all currency had an expiration date, say of 14 or 25 years (the exact number would be different in different countries). It takes so much effort for a farmer to grow a crop of onions. She has to keep growing new ones. Onions are eaten or they rot. All commodities—even cars and houses—wear out. Since money is supposed to only represent real commodities, then money ought to rot too. That way, banks, family lineages, and other immortal corporations, can’t just sit on an earlier generation’s productivity, or an earlier decade’s productivity, by extracting numbers from a bank account. There can’t be a living economy without a dying currency—a living dollar. “In the healthy social organism money will really only be a measure of value, since commodity production, the only means through which the possessor of money will have been able to attain it, will back every coin and banknote. Due to the nature of these relations, arrangements will have to be made whereby money loses its value for its possessor once it has lost this significance. ...In order to prevent money which is not working in productive enterprises being retained through evasion of the economic organism's measures, a new printing could take place from time to time. One result of such measures is that the interest derived from capital would diminish in the course of time. Money will wear out, just as commodities wear out. Nevertheless, such a measure will be a just and appropriate one for the state to enact. There cannot be any ‘interest on interest’. Whoever has accumulated savings has surely also rendered services which entitle him to claim reciprocal services in the form of commodities, just as present day efforts give claim to reciprocal efforts; but these claims are subject to limits, for claims originating in the past can only be satisfied by performance in the present. They may not be allowed to turn into means of economic power. Through the realization of these conditions, the currency question is given a healthy foundation.” —Rudolf Steiner, Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c03.html “Let us suppose that we really make up our minds to allow money to grow old. Suppose you have a certain piece of money, no matter of what substance it is made, or what is the date inscribed on it. Say it is ‘1910.’ And now you take another piece of money with the date ‘1915.’ The money marked ‘1915’ begins to exist, as money, economically, in that year. And now suppose that by some reasoned treatment it undergoes the process which is undergone by all other exchangeable products, namely, that it loses its value after a certain time. The precise figures I mention are not important; they are merely illustrations. The actual figures required would have to be the subject of endlessly numerous—but perfectly possible—calculations, as we shall presently perceive. Suppose, therefore, for the sake of example, that the piece of money would have lost its value for economic intercourse by the year 1940. It would only have a definite value between 1915 and 1940. For that period it would have, as we shall see directly, a determinable value. If money loses its value in the economic process after twenty-five years, a piece of money bearing the date ‘1910’ will have lost its value in the year 1935. Thus I should assign a peculiar property to the money which I carry about on me; I should assign to it a kind of age. This 1910 money is older; it will die earlier than the other—earlier than the 1915 money. Now you may say: ‘That is just a scheme.’ No, it is nothing of the sort. What I have just explained to you is the actual reality. That is how the economic process actually wills it. The economic process of its own accord makes the money grow old. The fact that it does not appear to grow old—the fact that we still buy things with 1910 money in the year 1940 is only a mask. In doing so we do not really buy with this money; we buy with a fictitious money-value. “If therefore the money in my purse grows old in this way, if its date of origin has a real meaning (and by ‘growing old’ I mean getting nearer and nearer to its death), if this be so, then money, like man and every other living thing, has a certain value impressed upon it by the fact that it is growing older. The money comes to life and a value is impressed upon it. ... “Please note, ladies and gentlemen, that this is not a thing which does not exist already. It exists, but in a wild untamed way, which results in mutual disturbance and unhealthy economic conditions. On the other hand, if you tame money, if you really assign to it a certain age, letting young money...be more valuable than old, then you will be impressing the money with its real effective value, the value it possesses through its position in the economic process. ...These things will correct themselves of their own accord. “
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For a scholarly depiction of demurrage, read “Monetary Economics” (pages 12 to 23) in Guido Giacomo Preparata’s, “Perishable Money in a Threefold Commonwealth—Rudolf Steiner and the Social Economics of an Anarchist Utopia” in the Review of Radical Political Economics (2006): www.threefolding.org/essays/2006-11-001.html 222
—Steiner, World Economy, Lecture 12 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA340/English/RSP1972/19220804a01.html “There is something extremely unnatural today in the social order. This consists in the fact that money increases when a person simply possesses it. It is put in a bank and interest is paid on it. This is the most unnatural thing that could possibly exist. It is really utterly nonsensical. The person does nothing whatever. He simply banks the money, which he may not even have acquired by labor but may have inherited, and he receives interest on it. This is utter nonsense. But it will become a matter of necessity when the provision of the means of existence is separated from labor that money shall be used when it exists, when it is produced as the equivalent of commodities that exist. It must be used. It must be put into circulation and the actual effect will be that money does not increase but that it diminishes. If at the present time a person possesses a certain sum of money, he will have approximately twice that amount in fourteen years under a normal rate of interest, and he will have done nothing except merely to wait. If you think thus of the transformation of the social order, as this must occur under the influence of this one fundamental principle that I have presented to you, then money will not increase but will diminish. After a certain number of years, the banknotes I acquired before the beginning of those years will no longer have any value. They will have matured and become valueless. “In this way the trend will become natural in the social structure toward bringing about such conditions that mere money, which is nothing more than a note, an indication that a person possesses a certain power over the labor of human beings, will lose its value after a certain length of time if it has not been put into circulation. In other words, it will not increase, but will progressively diminish and, after fourteen years or perhaps a somewhat longer time, will reach the zero point. If you are millionaires today, you will not be double millionaires after fourteen years but you will be broke unless you have earned something additional in the meantime. “Of course, I am aware that people wriggle as if they had been bitten by fleas when this is mentioned at the present time—if you will permit such a comparison. I know this, and I would not have employed this comparison but for the extraordinary movements I observed in the audience! “Since, however, the situation is such that this matter causes people to feel as if fleas had bitten them, we have bolshevism. Just search for the true causes and there they are. You will never be able to free the world of what is coming to the surface unless you determine really to penetrate into the truth. “The fact that the truth is unpleasant makes no difference.” —Steiner, “The Challenge of the Times” http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA186/English/AP1941/19181130p01.html The idea of a real, living, rotting currency is called demurrage (it means ‘lingering, loitering, delaying’, because the money dies if it lingers)—and is already being done by the Chiemgauer regional currency in Bavaria, in the Chiem lake district. Any piece of Chiemgauer currency dies after three months, and can be renewed by paying a 2% fee for a fresh validation stamp—which hardly anyone does (who wants to pay a fee?), so the money is quickly spent, and then quickly spent again by the business holder who received that payment, and then again and again. A demurrage currency 237 has to keep moving, like a current...which is what ‘currency’ is supposed to be. If the piece of money totally expires, its ‘husk’ is still worth something—it can be donated to a free cultural organization. Only completely free, charitable initiatives of the Cultural Republic could cash the ‘husk’ at a bank. Presently, the central banks of the national governments (the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve in the U.S.) use intentional, perpetual inflation to keep the money flowing. By making things cost more and more each decade, we are pushed to spend the money (putting money in a bank is ‘spending’ too). With a dying currency whose ever-falling value is perceivable on the banknote itself, the healthy natural pressure to ‘keep it moving’ would be a transparent factor which could be consciously and intelligently weighed by the individual populace, instead of being pushed by the imperceptible ever-slow boil of inflation engineered in the secreted halls of political-financial centers.
complementary currencies The Living Dollar would continue to be the mainstream currency, yet local chambers of commerce, banks, and other regional associations would be free to offer various complementary currencies. It’s healthy for there to be several currencies in a single social organism, as long as none of them are issued by the government, and as long as all of them—better yet, the whole world economy—employ the same transparent accounting unit. Such local currencies serve as a marker of local economic loyalties—essentially a discount coupon issued by a local business association. Where Threefold Now is based in the Hudson Valley, there are two successful, sophisticated currencies nearby—the BerkShares in western Massachusetts,
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There’s a great English-language overview of the Chiemgauer currency written by the high school Waldorf teacher who initiated it: https://ijccr.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/ijccrvol132009pp61-75gelleri.pdf (International Journal of Community Currencies, 2009)
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whose start-up costs were partly funded by the nearby Rudolf Steiner Foundation, with a similar quality as national currencies.
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and Ithaca Hours in Ithaca, New York. Their notes are printed
Every local economy could form its own complementary currency, with banknotes which picture their own local heroes, natural landmarks, and cultural sites. Such currencies, if done right, are signposts of a local, living economy.
The BerkShares and Ithaca Hours.
redeeming money To reinstill confidence in the real, natural economy, and to break the hypnosis which money holds on humanity, perhaps the main currency would 239 be freely convertible for gold and biodynamic bread. Let’s get the condensed sunshine out of Fort Knox where it sits in rectangular shape, in lifeless fluorescent-lit vaults, and into humanity’s hands again, so that it can be made into beautiful and useful things. The bread (or it could be some other kind of commodity, such electric power credits, or a basket of economic staples) which serves as the redemption value, might be mostly symbolic, and only rarely redeemed—but it would be there in the background to affirm that this is solid money which stands for real goods.
designs for coins and bills The entire set of US coins and paper currency would be freshened with new, beautiful designs. The associative Homeland Mint would no longer be tied to the US national culture. Therefore the US nation would no longer have a monopoly on imagery. An anational economic imagery would need to be designed. Since in a healthy republic, money is only a stand-in for commodities, it would be fitting for the standard-issue Homeland currency to feature no political leaders or other human beings, nor national memorial buildings, but only economic symbols, such as Lady Fraternity, the cornucopia, the buffalo, and wheat. Instead of LIBERTY, coins would say FRATERNITY. A fitting economic motto would be FIAT PANIS, ‘let there be bread.’ On paper bills, instead of NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM ‘the new order of the ages’, there’d be the words TRIPLEX ORGANISMUS SECLORUM ‘threefold organism of the ages.’ The US NCO would be free to commission cosmetic variants of the currency, which would continue to feature the US Presidents, ‘In God We Trust’ (which is presently a dubious, wicked claim, but would approach the truth in the Threefold Republic), and the other US national symbols. Likewise, all 632 Indian Nations, and all other widely recognized NCOs in the Homeland, would be free to design their own cosmetic variants in association with the Homeland mint. This would be similar to how the euro coin is issued in various national styles. Such coins and banknotes would likely be 240 mostly ‘collectible’ and commemorative.
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The story of how BerkShares started is reported in this newspaper article: www.berkshares.org/press/15dec2006.htm?coll=hc-headlines-home (“Town Bucks a Trend”, The Hartford Courant , 2006) 239
If you want to know more, see Of Wheat and Gold by Christopher Houghton Budd at www.christopherhoughtonbudd.com/publications/books
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For Threefold Now’s sandbox on currency see: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/money 224
How often do we disregard the penny on the ground? With value next to none, it is hardly worth bending down for it. Now and then the government considers to all together discontinue minting the penny with production costs higher than what it is worth. But can we really imagine that the penny might all but disappear, for us to be deprived forever of that brief moment of delight at the sight of a shiny penny with its bright, reddish copper glow? How marvelous that the lowliest, the least of coins should be able to out-shine all the other coins. 241 —Gisela Wielki
the colors of money In the further future, all paper and metal money could be mostly done away with, except as collectibles. Two economic scholars, Christopher Houghton Budd and Guido Giacomo Preparata, suggest that nearly all monetary transactions could be met through each person having two bank 242 cards, for two kinds of accounts:
1) a “red card”: a checking/debit account for purchasing goods and services (which would quickly decline through demurrage if not spent) and 2) a “blue card”: a savings account for loaning to, and investing in, that is, ‘crediting’ to business enterprises (which would be lent by the bank to entrepreneurs so that there is a return on the money—at least enough to stave off demurrage).
The ‘Octopus’ smart cards which are widely used in Hong Kong, are going in the direction of a “red card.” However, a fully digital currency is dubious in the context of the fused corporate-security-state. For example, though the corporation which administers the Octopus card swore it wouldn’t, it later admitted to selling the personal data of users to other corporations. Yet the structural separation of the economy from the rights governance would provide conditions for such an efficient change to become a blessing instead of a curse.
trisecting and our labor unions Given the ill-will which the economic leadership has displayed toward Blue Collar Humanity since the industrial revolution, the unions were a necessary, or at least understandable, barrier to that ill-will. Having grown up in southern West Virginia, I realize that, in the absence of a countervailing imagination, the unions were just about the only defense against anti-human absentee corporations and their private police 243 forces. I grew up in household which benefitted from union salary. The trisector idea has this to say on the role of unions in an associative economic republic: “Unhappily, the feeling for liberty, which had become so strong in the eighteenth century, was carried over into the nineteenth and applied not so much to the cultural sphere, where it belongs, as to the industrial sphere, where it does not. The new industries were inserted into life under the sign of liberty, which basically meant liberty for the industrialist. The doctrine of laissez faire prevailed over the efforts of men like Robert Owen with more idealistic views.
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Seminary Newsletter, Spring 2009 at http://christiancommunitysv.org/newsletters/newsletters.html
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See page 16 of Guido Giacomo Preparata, “Perishable Money in a Threefold Commonwealth—Rudolf Steiner and the Social Economics of an Anarchist Utopia”: www.threefolding.org/essays/2006-11-001.html. There’s a fictional depiction of the two card system in C.H. Budd’s story Rare Albion: http://rarealbion.com. 243
For an evocative picture, watch the film Matewan by John Sayles. 225
“This laissez faire attitude, which regarded human labor as a commodity to be purchased as cheaply as possible in the labor market, produced intolerable labor conditions, and it was only very slowly that Parliament, which should be the custodian of human rights, was induced to intervene in the matter of hours and conditions of work—beginning with child labor. It is not surprising, therefore, that the industrial workers saw in the new right to form associations a bargaining weapon against their employers. Trade Unions became, not unions of managers and workers for developing trade and production, as Robert Owen advocated, but unions of employees alone, fighting for better conditions and higher wages. Fundamentally this is still their character. “Wages, however, represent the individual’s claim on the current production of society. What that claim should be is a matter for the Rights-state (Parliament) to decide, not for individual trade unions concerned only with their own members. The absurdity of our present succession of strikes, or threats of strikes, and of a fixed percentage of wage rises irrespective of the existing anomalous scales, is becoming increasingly evident. In a threefold State, the Rights sphere—Parliament—would make an over-all survey of wage levels and decide the appropriate amounts for all basic industries. The Trade Unions would have to give up their vested interest in the present strike-bargaining (no easy thing) and in return they would demand some amendment of the present function of capital (also no easy matter). Not a few firms today are seeking for new conceptions of the role of capital in their activities. “Recent events have shown how deeply workers resent uncontrolled dividends and capital appreciation for absentee shareholders, who know nothing of the business but exercise a final control over it. If capital is only attracted by the prospect of a large return, it is a fairly obvious answer that labor will be attracted only in the same way. It would be the task of a real trade union to bring together the three parties in every industry, the management, the labor force and the suppliers of capital, to work out a harmonious relationship. But industry exists for the consumer, and the consumers’ interests must also be represented in all industrial planning. “To bring about such changes will admittedly be a matter of enormous difficulty. For the Trade Unions, the right to free collective bargaining has become a matter of faith. They resist any attempt to restrict it and at present would not dream of giving it up. The Union leaders feel that their authority and prestige depend on their success in battling for the men’s demands. It is hard to imagine them surrendering this role to any kind of government authority. We must, however, begin to envision a system of economic production which will not be a battlefield, but which will fulfill its real function of producing and distributing commodities by methods which would be generally accepted as being rational and fair. The present system is rapidly becoming lethal.” —“Trade Unions and the Sphere of Rights” by A.C. Harwood, The Organic Society: Threefold Ideas in English Life, 1974 www.thinkoutword.org/resources-4/steiner-on-social-life/other-authors-and-materials/ and: “Steiner observed that one of the major causes of social unrest arises from the idea that human labor and initiative is a commodity to be bought and sold like any other. He recognized that human labor is a Right, and needs to be recognized and rewarded as such. Therefore, wages should be determined by the Rights (legal-political) sphere and not by the Economic realm of production and consumption. Steiner saw that if wages would be paid in this way, people could gradually overcome their sense of being exploited in their work, and in time might accept being paid in accordance with their actual needs and what a country could afford, rather than automatically demanding higher wages. A search for more money, particularly as wages, is also sometimes a compensation for the unfulfilled yearning for a life with more meaning.” —Tom Raines, “From ‘I’ to Community Vision of a Three-Fold Society”, first published in the British magazine New View, 1998 https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/basic-texts and: “Professionalism and objectivity could cause a general harmony of interests to prevail in the associations. Not laws, but men using their immediate insights and interests, would regulate the production, circulation and consumption of goods. They would acquire the necessary insights through their participation in the associations; goods could circulate at their appropriate values due to the fact that the various interests represented would be compensated by means of contracts. This type of economic cooperation is quite different from that practiced by the labor-unions which, although operational in the economic field, are established according to political instead of economic principles. Basically parliamentary [governmental] bodies, they do not function according to economic principles of reciprocal output. In these associations there would be no ‘wage earners’ using their collective strength to demand the highest possible wages from management, but artisans who, together with management and consumer representatives, determine reciprocal outputs by means of price regulation—something which cannot be accomplished by sessions of parliamentary [governmental] bodies. This is important! For who would do the work if countless man-hours were spent in negotiations about it? But with person-to-person, association-toassociation agreements, work would go on as usual. Of course it is necessary that all agreements reflect the workers' insights and the consumers' interests.” —Rudolf Steiner, in the preface to the fourth edition of Core Points of the Social Question http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_pref4.html
more about the economic flag The flag of the Homeland Economic Forum would be welcome to be flown by any and all businesses in the Living Economy. The economic flag would be just the right flag to use in advertisements and to fly on gigantic flagpoles over car dealerships and gas stations. This Associative America flag is a redeemed evolution of Adbusters’ Corporate America flag. 226
key to the economic logos The red diamond displayed below is not for a flag; it’s simply a shorthand image of how the Economic Forum would be made of all the corporations and industry associations which have a nation-wide presence. Of course only a handful of the millions of corporations and thousands of associations are displayed here. Their grouping into five numbered sections is for simply for illustrative purposes. The first group is from the Adbusters Corporate America flag. Also, though they aren’t shown on this red diamond, the divested economic departments of the fifty state governments would become members of the Economic Forum or its Executive, as de-governmentalized associative bodies.
1. conventional economic corporations: Visa Inc. Nike, Inc. The Coca-Cola Company The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Eli Lilly and Company General Motors Company, LLC Citigroup Inc. Apple Inc. Google Inc.
Monsanto Company Verizon Communications Bank of America Corporation Halliburton Company ExxonMobil Corp. Chevron Corporation Phillip Morris International McDonald’s Corporation Cable News Network Blue Cross Blue Shield Association 227
Dow Chemical Company Viacom Inc. Lockheed Martin Corporation Starbucks Corporation American Express Company General Electric Company ConAgra Foods, Inc. Fox Entertainment Group, Inc. Pfizer, Inc. Microsoft Corporation
2. chambers of commerce, industry associations, and stock exchanges: US Chamber of Commerce: An association of hundreds of trade associations and 3 million businesses Business Alliance for Local Living Economies American Bankers Association National Bankers Association: an association of 103 minority and women-owned banks New York Stock Exchange NASDAQ Stock Market 3. national government departments and quasi-governmental organizations to be transferred to the economic republic, to become anational, non-governmental economic associations: US Department of Agriculture (USDA), becomes the Homeland Agriculture Association US Department of Energy becomes the Homeland Energy Association US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) becomes the Homeland Housing and Urban Development Association US Department of Transportation becomes the Homeland Transportation Association US Commercial Service becomes the Homeland Commercial Service US Department of Commerce becomes the Homeland Commerce Association US Postal Service (USPS) becomes the Homeland Postal Service US Federal Reserve System (The Fed) becomes the Homeland Monetary Organism 4. labor unions, credit unions, cooperative businesses, and consumer federations: American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO) Change to Win Federation (CtW): The other surviving nation-wide mainstream labor union. National Association of Federal Credit Unions (NAFCU) Credit Union National Association (CUNA) Consumer Federation of America (CFA) National Cooperative Business Association CLUSA International (NCBA Cooperative League of the USA) 5. “8 Revolutionary Socially Responsible Companies” from the Huffington Post Business section: 244 Seventh Generation Inc.: natural household and personal care products Patagonia, Inc.: outdoor clothing The Body Shop International PLC: harm-free beauty products Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. Interface, Inc.: non-toxic carpets Stoneyfield Farm, Inc: organic yoghurt TOMS Shoes: has a fraternal practice of gifting shoes and sight to the underserved populace for each sale Honest Tea: organic beverages
*** “Perhaps it may even appear after some consideration that the persons themselves are the wealth; not gold and silver. The true veins of wealth are purple—and not in Rock but in Flesh. The final consummation of all wealth is in the producing as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed and happy-hearted human beings. In some far-away and yet undreamt-of hour I can even imagine that instead of adorning the turbans of her slaves with diamonds from Golkonda and thus showing off her material wealth, England, as a Christian mother, may at last attain to the virtues and the treasures of a non-Christian one and be able to lead forth her Sons, saying, "These are MY Jewels." —Mohandas Gandhi, Sarvodaya, 1908; paraphrasing John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, 1860 (Author’s Note: Try reading those sentences with some words replaced: ‘slaves’ replaced with ‘fast food and convenience store workers’, ‘diamonds from Golkonda’ with ‘plastic clothing made in China’, ‘material wealth’ with ‘material efficiency’, ‘Christian’ with ‘Christian and humane’, ‘Sons’ with ‘Sons and Daughters’, and ‘England’ with ‘America.’)
The three-cent piece, minted from 1851-1873. 244
www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/12/8-revolutionary-socially_n_679832.html 228
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the homeland governance The image on the preceding page is of We the People coming down, with 56 rights-states poised in the vessel of the Legislative and Executive Branches of a genuine American governance. In an authentic rule-of-law state, there are only a few rights departments—defense, police, environmental protection, labor rights, and foreign political affairs. The other cabinet-level departments would be transferred to the economic republic or cultural republic. The Constitutional Governance would initially be made of 51 rights-states, which inherit the political powers of the 50 fused cultural-political US states from which they sprang, plus a ‘New Columbia’ Constitutional State with the same boundaries as the US District of Columbia. Washington would remain the national capital of the American People as a national-cultural identity, but a new rights capital would be built in the Chicagoland metropolitan area in the Midwest, near the political center of the Homeland. There’d be a new legislative building, new executive buildings for the 245 remaining rights departments, and a new residence for the rights executive. Then the five inhabited US territories would be offered a referendum: in or out. If they all stayed, that would be 56 rights-states.
features of a genuine rule-of-law governance
Citizenship is an inherent human right. No adult could be disenfranchised or stripped of citizenship, no matter their crime. Stripping of citizenship, or voting rights, is saying that the person is not a human being. Even though some human beings have done inhuman things, the goal is for the community to facilitate sick human beings becoming more human, not to insert even more inhumanity.
The departments would be given fresh names to remove the spectacular glamour:
US Department of Defense > Homeland Militia Agency. If the Coast Guard is going to remain primarily a militia, then it would be transferred from the Department of Homeland Security to this agency; otherwise it would remain with the Homeland Watch Agency, and would be considered a branch of watchmen, unless called to temporary militia service by the Naval Militia. US Environmental Protection Agency > Homeland Environmental Quality Agency. US Department of Homeland Security > dissolved. Its policing powers, such as the Transportation Security Administration, would be merged with the Homeland Watch Agency. Its scientific research institutes, such as the Environmental Measurements Laboratory and Plum Island Animal Disease Center of New York, would become independent institutes in the cultural sector. US Department of Justice > Split into two, so that prosecution is separate from police. The Homeland Watch Agency would retain the national police agencies, such as the FBI. The Watch Agency would also absorb the policing powers of the Department of Homeland Security. The prosecutorial powers of the DOJ would be transferred to an organ of the Judicial Branch, as part of the Cultural Republic. US Department of Labor > Homeland Labor Rights Agency US Department of State > Homeland Diplomatic Agency
Besides the EPA, all other ‘independent federal agencies’ of the US Government, such as the CIA and US Postal Service, would either be:
a) Divested to the economic republic (for example, the USPS, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and the Small Business Administration) or cultural republic (National Science Foundation). b) Merged with one of the cabinet-level rights agencies. For example, the Selective Service System would become part of the Homeland Militia Agency. Or, c) Promoted to a cabinet-level agency. For example, the CIA would become the Homeland Spy Agency. Yes, that is what ‘intelligence gathering’ means.
In that way, the citizenry could hold the organizational picture of our governance in our consciousness, instead of being passively born into the jaws of a fog-spewing, many-headed hydra. We would more clearly see who is really responsible for each department of rights life. Whatever a rights agency does, it does in the name and conscious will of its head.
End the Electoral College. There would be a constitutional amendment ending that, and making the Citizen-President directly elected. (The Electoral College would continue to be a ceremonial feature of the US National-Cultural Organization.)
Age Equality among Adult Citizens:
For adult citizens, there would be no distinction in the Rights Governance by age. This would require a constitutional amendment ending all age-based distinctions for adult citizens, both federal and state-level. Make 18 the age when one can serve as president, senators, and representatives, or any other governance service.
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The stewardship/ownership of all the monuments and museums and other national-cultural sites in D.C. would remain with American NCO. The White House would continue to serve as the residence of the head of the American nation. The capitol building would continue to house the American national-cultural Congress. These would be ceremonial figures and bodies who administer the cultural assets of the American nationality. 230
18 becomes the age when alcohol can be purchased and consumed. It's hypocritical that the American People send 18 year olds into combat, with flying metal and blood and guts, but maternalistically make it a crime for them to drink. It's not about whether drinking is 246 moral or not. It's about equality for all adult citizens. Either the person is an adult, or not. End the tax laws that say that college students are a special class of quasi-adults who can be claimed on their parents' tax forms.
There’d be no distinction between native-born citizens and naturalized citizens. Presently, only US citizens who were born as citizens can serve as President or Vice-President. As it stands now, an individual who moves to the US and becomes a naturalized citizen cannot serve in those offices. In a pure Rights Republic, this would be changed by a constitutional amendment. Either one is a full citizen, with potential to serve in any and all rights offices, or not. There would be no ‘quasi-citizens.’
Voting:
Because the Rights Republic is the place of Equality, not of Liberty, voting would be mandatory at every level: national, state, and local. Like in Belgium and Australia. A symbolic $1 fine for non-participation. The Cultural Republic—not the Rights Republic—is where people would experience complete individual freedom of choice. People would get to experience that the rights sector has a different quality. There is no question that everyone would be let off work to vote. Beyond voting, the Rights Republic would vigorously protect the right of any worker to take a “civic leave” to attend any public hearing, at any level of governance. Civic duty and interest trumps economic productivity. Otherwise, the governance is practically shaped almost entirely by retirees and those whose private wealth affords them the opportunity to be present. Voting days would all be on the weekend. And the days would be a civic holiday. Preliminary vote counts, including media-shaped ‘exit polls’, would not be released until voting booths in the last jurisdiction in the furthest time zone are closed.
Sortition: Being the epitome of Egalitarianism, the ancient Athenian practice of Sortition—random selection of public office-holders from the entire adult citizenry, which is presently only experienced in the temporary office of jury service—ought to become a major part of the Rights Republic. Sortition ought to have no place in the Economic Republic or Cultural Republic.
The Rights Congress:
The rights sphere is no place for ethnic, national, and racial designations:
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There would no longer be any reference to an ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ house. The two houses of Congress would be re-perceived as equals. The House of Citizens: The former US House of Representatives would be sortitionally elected (selected randomly) from the entire adult Citizenry. This chamber would evolve from representative democracy to sortitional democracy. For details, see Tom Atlee’s Empowering Public Wisdom. The House of States: The former US Senate would continue to be composed of elected representatives from each Rights-State. This House would serve as a voice of the 56 collective rights identities. (The name ‘Senate’ is transferred to Threefold Senate, which serves as the coordinating body between the three sovereign administrations, with one-third of its members appointed by each of the three Republics: from the Economic Republic, the Rights Republic, and the Cultural Republic.) Do the same for the 56 rights-state legislatures. (The American National-Cultural Organization would continue to call its internal non-governmental cultural governance the ‘US Congress’ with a ceremonial Senate and House, which would still meet in the US capitol building, the Temple of Liberty. This body would administer the American national-cultural assets, such as the National Parks.)
The Rights Republic would never ask racial or cultural questions. The Rights Census would be conducted by the Rights Republic, not the Cultural Republic. The census would no longer be a corporate marketing survey in disguise. This Rights Census would be mandatory, with a symbolic $1 fine for not completing it. The Cultural Republic and Economic Republic would have their own non-mandatory censuses. If a physical description of a Citizen is required, such as a description of the suspect of a crime, there would be a mandated, genericized language for describing skin tone and other physical features, and also the suspects’ verbal accent, if necessary. The Americanist scheme of race and ethnicity which is embodied in American national law, and propagated by the U.S. government census, would be done away with. This is the “Five-Race, Two-Ethnicity” scheme, which perceives five “races” (“American Indian or Alaska Native”, “Asian”, “Black or African American”, “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander”, and “White”) and two “ethnicities” (“Hispanic/Latino” and “Not
Humane wisdom suggests that 21 is, from a developmental perspective, the general age of adulthood:
“The central theme of all the pedagogical lectures is the seven-year periods. Today, children start school at six (premature etheric [intellectual] birth), reach puberty at twelve (premature astral [emotive-desire] birth), and are granted majority at eighteen (premature I [egoity] birth): a rhythm of 666. Even the Waldorf School had to have eight years of primary school because of the law. But that was not the original suggestion.” —Daniel Hafner, “Original Intent: The Neglected Essentials of Waldorf Pedagogy”, Deepening Anthroposophy issue 3.2, May 2014
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Hispanic/Latino”). The Americanist scheme may seem to be ‘natural’, ‘objective’, ‘obvious’, and ‘unquestionable’, but it is actually as much a specific, warped perception of humanity as the detailed Spanish colonial Castas system of racial classification, with “Mulattos”, 248 “Peninsulares”, “Zambos”, and so forth. If the American nation, as a cultural entity, wishes to continue to perceive humanity through its own lense, fine. Yet this national perception ought to have no place in a humanocratic rights governance. At my whim, I often write “Hispanic” when filling out forms, since some of my ancestors come from Galicia, Spain—the Milesians who settled Ireland. As far as race, I usually mark “other” or “mixed race” since family tradition says there’s American Indian relations, and legend holds that the Scots and Irish came from Egypt, and that the Germans and English came from Asia. I’ve eaten African, Asian, and European food, so my physical body has that earth in it too. I love individuals from all those containers of humanity, so I’m proud to identify with all of them.
The rights governance would be omni-lingual. A Citizen would interface with rights organs in any language of humanity. The Trisector Idea is neutral in regard to whether the American People, as a cultural identity, wish to become an ‘English only’ nationality. As a free culture, it’s up to each nation to cultivate whichever language or languages they wish, as their national language(s). Yet the Trisector Idea is firmly opposed to the English Only movement in regard to the rights governance. Though it will always be couched in the language of economic ‘pragmatism’ and political unity, the English Only movement, when applied to the rights sector, is really the Anglo-American version of nationalism. The ancient English-speaking cultural impulse, which is hardly perceptible by those who are steeped within it, would no longer have a special place in the Homeland Governance. The authentic spirit of Constitutional Governance is greater than even the Anglo-Saxon impulse. The Homeland Constitution would be translated into every language of humanity’s world.
Egalitarian, Transparent Traffic Law:
Even such an everyday vexation such as traffic fines would be addressed. Except in places where there really are special traffic safety concerns, it ought to be wise public policy to make posted speed limits match the higher end of what speed the traffic actually flows. Traffic fines would be mostly symbolic, say $5 per mph over the speed limit, unless it’s truly a reckless speeding, or unless the speeding becomes habitual and flagrant. It’s enough ‘punishment’ (consciousness raising) to be forcibly pulled out of our life for five or ten minutes. And even these humble traffic fines would not go to the government which is enforcing it...only to free local cultural organizations not tied to the local government. In an authentic Rights Republic, crime doesn’t pay. It is unethical for governments to meet their budgets by expecting crime. Like the federal and state governances, the budget of Rights Municipalities would be met transparently by yearly lumpsum vouchers. 249 Most of the nuances of what is called ‘police discretion’ would be embedded in the actual laws. In the current system, ‘police discretion’ is both well-intentioned and harmful. It’s sometimes well-intentioned, because a policing citizen can give someone a break— the college ‘kid’ with the joint in the back seat...especially the white college kid. On the other hand, is it going too far to suggest that pretty white women are probably treated with more ‘discretion’ than black men? It’s not a joke. A two-hundred dollar fine for a minor traffic violation is three full eight-hour days of work for many citizens. Add taking off work for court (instead of just paying it to be rid of the vexation), that’s another half-day loss of pay. Given that speed limits rarely match the natural ‘safe enough’ speed of traffic flow, so that police can pretty much pull over most drivers on the road, this is almost a kind of corvée labor. If it were anyone other than the Government, it’d be called highway banditry. In an associative, contractual transportation grid, would most driving consumers still choose to fund the policing of traffic by airplane (at thousands of dollars per hour of flight) and by the lidless eye of automatic traffic cameras? Do we need to feel as if we’re entering a warzone or surveillance zone when we enter the transportation commons? Why not replace most stop signs with yield signs, so that a substantially equivalent traffic effect is achieved without our police-citizens having an excuse (or being compelled by their elected boss) to pad the government budget every time a car doesn’t come to complete standstill? Same for cutting the curve slightly in an area which is not especially known as a dangerous corner with poor visibility. It ought to be illegal for police to simply stop (arrest) citizens for touching the yellow line. In a humane legal organism, such nuances would be built into the law. A friend of mine in West Virginia, a mail carrier who was on the job, was stopped by a municipal police-citizen for cutting a 90 degree corner in a quiet, slow city street where one can see far up and down the road. When my friend questioned the sensibility of such policing, the police-citizen said: ‘You can never touch the yellow line, no matter what.’ The police-citizen was just sitting there throughout the day, writing tickets, forcibly extracting the wages from the passing citizenry—a government-employed, state-sanctioned jaguar among sheep. Do you think he’d pull over a state trooper if the trooper touched the line? What are the chances that the police-citizen himself actually stays in the yellow line throughout the day, or when he is off the clock in his civilian car? Do you think he turns himself in and volunteers to pay a fine?
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The scheme is laid out in the U.S. Department of Education document entitled “Ethnicity and Race Reporting Guidance”: www.tea.state.tx.us/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=2147493801. 248
That scheme for perceiving humanity was depicted in painted racial charts : www.latinamericanstudies.org/race.htm
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The best practices of police discretion would be incorporated into the actual laws, in regard to their execution by the Executive Branch. Whereas the Judicial Branch would go in the opposite direction, unfolding an even more discrete, individuated practice of moral perception. 232
It would be a really interesting study to somehow discover how fast peace officers drive when they are on-duty, but aren’t on traffic patrol and are just transporting or shuttling, or when they are off-duty. And of those off-duty police who happen to be pulled over for speeding in their own private vehicle, what percentage are released when the police badge in their wallet is seen by the other policing citizen? Now, I’m not suggesting that our highways be disorderly, and I’m glad for the presence of our peace officer-citizens in situations where an academy-trained watchman is of real help. But it’s the little things that are indications of bigger things.
An Egalitarian Livelihood for trusted service in the governance sector:
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In the village near where I live, the posted speed is 30 mph. Yet it seems that 35 is the ‘pull-over’ number...unless the police don’t personally like the appearance (black?) or ‘attitude’ of the driver. In the eyes of some police, any civilian who doesn’t sheepishly bend and scrape, but who courteously and unbowingly asks for the police officer’s identification, has an ‘attitude’ and deserves as many tickets 250 as can possibly be justified. I am not sure that safety is the paramount reason for ticketing, because I myself witnessed the police barreling down the hill with engine roaring, at dusk, with children playing on the sidewalk, just to ticket someone. It must not have been a major crime, because the ticketee was released after a few minutes. I wrote a note voicing my concern, and, when the wayfarer was released by the police (bandits?), I went up and courteously shared my concern with these servants of the peace. This is the kind of speed limit sign I’d like to see:
Despite our American myth of entrepreneurial vigor and rugged individualism, the national government is the largest employer in the country. The various national-governmental pay systems would be phased out and converged into a single Governance Livelihood (GL), including— The General Schedule (GS), for white collar workers. The Federal Wage System (WG), for blue collar workers. The Senior Executive Service (SES), the level of executive workers just beneath the appointed heads. The Senior Foreign Service (SFS), the equivalent of SES in the diplomatic corps. The three uniformed service pay scales: Enlisted (E), Warrant Officer (W), and Officer (O). The Executive Schedule, for the Presidentially appointed workers in the hierarchy, such as the Cabinet heads. The pay systems of US Congress, the Federal Judiciary (though that would be transferred to the Cultural Sector), and the President. These would all be merged into one pay scale. For currently employed rights workers, I personally would be open to their salary remaining on their current pay scale until their retirement, unless the combined Egalitarian pay scale is higher. That is more generous than the experience of privately employed workers. Furthermore, I suggest that over the course of a generation, this GL pay scale be collapsed to become an Egalitarian Livelihood (EL). A humanocratic governance ought not be about prestige and pension plans and enlistment bonuses, or about a business-style hierarchy with a glamorous CEO at the top, but about a real desire to offer service and leadership while receiving a generous but modest livelihood. To that end, I suggest we drastically lower the upper end of the federal pay scale and significantly raise the entry-level livelihood, so that the Rights President and Rights Senators receive a livelihood either the same as, or not much more than, what an entry level federal civil 251 servant and E1 military servant receive. If our Senators, and Generals, and Presidents feel that’s not enough to live on, then they better raise the blessèd Egalitarian Livelihood!
There’s an articulate essay on this by Charles Eisenstein: “Disorderly Conduct” http://charleseisenstein.net/disorderly-conduct.
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$17,803 for a GS-1 grade federal civil servant. Even fast food, convenience store, and migrant workers, whether full-time or part-time, would be paid a wage that would at least meet that yearly salary that if one worked 40 hours a week. Dividing that annual salary by 40 hrs x 52 weeks, comes to $8.55 an hour, even without raising the GS-1 to a higher pay. Minimum wage is presently $7.25. That may not seem like much a difference, but all workers would also be receiving the equivalent of federal benefits, 10 paid holidays (or better yet, twelve), vacation, and sick days. Plus no income tax. Plus the federal pay scale’s ‘locality adjustment’ for expensive areas such as San Francisco. Plus the multi-thousand-dollar Pedagogical Subsidy for the children, and other individuated cultural and economic Rights Subsidies which every citizen would receive. This would all become the minimum ‘Fraternal Livelihood’ of the private, associative economic sector—a great-hearted, pragmatic improvement in the life of many, many co-workers in our American economy. 233
Citizenship would no longer require humanity to sell our soul:
Presently, the process of becoming a U.S. citizen involves traversing a three or five year bureaucratic and economic gantlet. In a healthy, humanocratic society, there wouldn’t be so many hoops to jump through. We want whoever’s living and working in this jurisdiction to have a real voice in rights services, without having to promise a pound of flesh to the Nation-State God. Citizenship would be opened to anyone who has resided here for year and a day. In the further future, when humanity has more fully recovered from the nation-state idol, the residency requirement could be reduced to 30 days. Dual- and multiple-citizenship would be welcomed. In the further future, some individuals might be a citizen of many states, as long as they meet certain residency or participatory requirements.
Name, not Number:
Workers in the rights sector—including the police and military—would be protected by a 40-hour maximum workweek, except in times of emergency or special need. (And perhaps with a 30-hour workweek in the further future.) Through lowering the upper tiers of the pay scale, we could afford to hire perhaps twice as many service workers to do whatever rights work is really necessary, instead of piling it onto over-worked government functionaries. Our rights workers would have time to become more nuanced, well-rounded human beings, and to initiate their own cultural initiatives or economic enterprises on the side. As to how this would apply to the executive leadership, there would still be a few positions, such as Rights President, which call for the individual to be nearly ‘always on the job’, but that intrusive communitarian impulse would be the exception rather than the tendency. And that doesn’t mean the Head needs to get paid more money. Anyway, even the Rights President is a human being who needs to rest. That’s what the Vice President is for—to cover for the Chief and share the load. There would still be Locality Adjustments based on cost of living, as there is currently for federal employees in San Francisco and other high cost areas. There would be a Dependents Adjustment. A rights worker who is raising dependent citizens (children) ought to receive a higher salary to cover the cost of such ‘non-economical’ members of the household. If you need some justification, the raising of the children could be looked as an adjunct aspect of their job as rights workers. And the same would apply in the economic sector. The minimum Fraternal Livelihood in the private business sector, and the state- and local-level governance pay, would always be at least that. The Locality Adjustment and the Dependents Adjustment would also be included in the Fraternal Livelihood.
How many times have we been casually asked by a bank teller or government agent: ‘what’s your social?’ We’re considered to be stupent fools if we haven’t memorized our government-assigned number. When navigating that everyday question, instead of saying ‘my number is’, I say ‘the number is’ (which is short for ‘the number your agency goes by, and wants; in other words, your number, not my number, is...’). Likewise, when I visited federal prisons, the guards would growl and threaten punishment for not memorizing one’s prisoner number. I refused. Numbers are efficient. Yet the human being is something more than a number. For legal-rights purposes, each individual in the Rights Republic would have a unique Citizen's Name composed of their full legal name plus the date and rights municipality where they took on Homeland Citizenship. This Citizen’s Name would be used instead of the Social Security Number, which would be done away with. For native-born citizens, the citizenship date would be the date of legal majority, the th 18 birthday—because children are only provisional citizens, with all the protections of citizenship, but without the obligations. In that sense they are not yet fully Citizens. For citizens who live abroad when they came of age, their Citizen's Name would follow the same law as absentee ballots, as far as determining their place of residence. Besides the full long-form Citizen’s Name which would be used in place of the Social Security Number, governance forms would have a space to write the short-form name by which the citizen prefers to be called in conversation in governance contexts. Though the government is presently one of the most formal, cold, and dark-hearted entities to interact with, it is supposed to be as warm-hearted and humane as a healthy family who actually likes each other. This could be facilitated by rights servants going by their first name, such as Citizen Barack. Except for right workers who are on-duty, there would be no outside ‘hats’ or titles in the Rights Sector, even in informal conversation, except for ‘Citizen’...not even Mister (short for ‘master’), Mrs., Ms. or Reverend. All the phony, slimy titles in the legislature and judiciary which are leftover from monarchy—"The Right Honorable so-and-so", or "Your Honor"—would be completely scrapped. When a rights service worker is on-duty, their title could be hyphenated with a more distinct job description: for example, ‘Citizen-Legislator’ and ‘Citizen-President.’ No such titles would be used when the rights worker is off duty or when the citizen is speaking in the context of the demosophic ‘We the People’ Branch.
The motto “Freedom isn't Free”—reportedly crafted by the New Mexico Military Institute—would be banned from all Governance usage. It would be replaced with “Equality and Fraternity aren't Free.” The fearmongering, stupifying word ‘terrorist’ would be banned from all Governance publications.
beyond the 56 states The constitutional amendment which articulates the separation of nation and state would clarify, streamline, and free-up the process for delineating a new rights-state. The fifty US (cultural) states would be forever preserved in the American national-cultural organization. But the rights sector isn’t about preserving cherished traditions—it’s about a living, responsive, supple articulation of rights awareness.
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The next articulation would a rights-state coterminous with the Navajo Reservation: a ‘Fourth World’ Constitutional State. Like all rights-states, it would be entirely non-ethnic. The Navajo Nation would achieve cultural independence, but its political powers would flow into the right-state. The political powers of the other 387 inhabited Indian Reservations—none of which have the 60,000 populace to become a rights-state—would flow into ‘state-level rights-collectivities.’ These would be subservient to none of the 57 states, and would have all the powers of a right-state, except that they would collectively share a single seat in the House of Citizens and would share one or two ‘statesmen’ (formerly known as ‘senators’) in the House of States (the humanocratic evolution of the US Senate), with the number depending on whether their total collective adult populace is less than 30,000, or between 30,000 and 60,000. If in the future, their collective population reached 60,000, they could be split into two congressional delegations. For the purposes of law, the eleven uninhabited US Insular Areas would either each become a Constitutional Territory, or would be combined into a single Insular Constitutional Territory. It would be shown on all Homeland Governance maps, so that those areas enter into the consciousness of the citizenry. Same for the 23 uninhabited federal Indian Reservations—they would become either 23 Constitutional Territories or one Constitutional Territory. The next articulation of new rights-states would be those areas which have long swelled with the desire for distinct rights identity, such as New York City, Northern California, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the Inland Empire of eastern Washington and the Idaho Panhandle, and northern Colorado. The tool of the plebiscite would allow for localities from multiple adjacent states to converge, such as southwestern Oregon with northernmost California. The constitution says that a new state may only be formed from an existing state by the consent of that state legislature. Either a fresh clarity would need to pervade our state legislators, so that state formation is perceived to be a healthy re-scaling of the rights sector (rather than as a loss of economic-political turf and cultural prestige), or the constitution would be amended. The return of state formation as a living impulse would evoke human interest in the political-rights organism again. The smallest granular unit for rights delineation would be the election precinct (the voting district), since that is the smallest governance area which has a specific body of citizenry with a verified address. If a more granular precinct map were developed, an even finer rights-state could be articulated. Borders of new rights-states would not have to be contiguous. The ‘state-level collectivities’ formed out of the Indian Reservations would serve as a model for the citizenry of any small area—even down to the size of a municipality—which desired to take on the rights and obligations of a full-blown rights-state. Yes, that would mean that, before long, the political map would become very detailed. That’s good. Humanity’s world isn’t supposed to be a vaguely-brushed cartoon with black outlines. Like the ancient Greeks, we need a human-sized polity.
Our election day banner. Rather than supporting one of the candidates, we offered slices of apple pie to passerbys in our city of Hudson and invited them to write their own vision of a governance worthy of their unforced respect. Then we placed the visions in a giant envelope and mailed them to the Chief...where they were swallowed by the sea. 235
from fraternal order to a citizens’ watch “We're the First Eastfarthing Troop now. There's hundreds of Shirriffs all told, and they want more, with all these new rules. Most of them are in it against their will, but not all. Even in the Shire there are some as like minding other folk's business and talking big. And there's worse than that: there's a few as does spy-work for the Chief and his Men.” —“The Scouring of the Shire”, The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien *** "If a community is obliged to defend itself for a period of time, then it is surely justified to create certain professions for that purpose: police and military professions. But when the danger against which defense was necessary no longer exists, the professions continue to exist. The people involved ‘must’ remain. They want to continue to exercise their professions and therefore we have something which is no longer justified by the circumstances. Something develops which, although perhaps originating due to the necessity for defense, takes on an aggressive character." —Rudolf Steiner, “The History and Actuality of Imperialism” http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/Dates/19200222p01.html
Even our national police fraternity has a threefold motto: Jus•Fidus•Libertatum—‘Law is the Safeguard of Freedom.’ When the National Law becomes the Humane Law, purified of economic influence, those words will become true.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes? “Who watches the watchmen?” The words ‘police’ and ‘law enforcement’ are so tired. Who wants to force the National Law onto humanity? In the Threefold Republic, the word ‘police’ would be replaced with a new name: the Watchmen. ‘Watchmen’ is what police were called in America before law enforcement became a profession. Like the word ‘Guardsmen’ (members of the National Guard) and ‘fellowmen’, the word ‘watchmen’ would be interpreted as a gender252 neutral word. There would be male Watchmen and female Watchmen. In a genuine rights organism, everyone would become watchmen. Every citizen would have some responsibility for what public safety is really necessary. That doesn’t mean we become like the nosy grannies of the Red Emperor. It means there would no longer be such a glaring and growing 253 distinction between the ‘heroic, responsive’ emergency personnel and the ‘meek, passive’ civilians. Within the context of the corporate state, such a mandatory police service would be a further intrusion of the state into our lives. Who wants to interact with the black hole of the police apparatus any more than can be avoided? Not me. I suggest such a Citizens’ Watch not be implemented until one generation has grown up within the healing atmosphere of the Threefold Republic. In the context of societal healing—with the governance purified of its controlling, anti-human gesture, and the drug wars ended and the nonviolent prisoners released, and national amends begun, and other exciting healing events—civic service such as this would not be such a vexation. I’d be willing to volunteer in watchman services at least a few times a year. The citizens who are serving as professional peace officers would become Active Watchmen, including:
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The original meaning of the word ‘men’ is ‘beings with minds’, of whatever gender. This is still evident in German, where the gender-free word for ‘human being’ is Mensch, and has no genderist connotation. In ancient English, there were two kinds of ‘Men’ (mindful beings): ‘Wo-men’ and ‘Were-men’ —‘mindful beings who are wifely’ and ‘mindful beings who are virile.’ At a certain point in medieval times, the English culture and language became bent in a patriarchal direction and the word ‘were-men’ dropped out of use, so that the word ‘men’ came to serve double duty as ‘human beings’ and ‘masculine human beings.’ Yet the word ‘men’ could be rehabilitated to its original gender-free meaning of ‘mindful beings.’ It is used that way in the word ‘fellowmen’, whose subtle meaning is ‘mindful beings who lay down their fees together.’ 253
In everyday American speech, ‘civilian’ used not only is contradistinction to ‘military’, but also in distinction from ‘police’ (and from firefighters!).
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The many-headed agencies of Federal Police—from the Bureau of Indian Affairs Police, to the FBI, to the National Zoological Park Police— would be Federal Watchmen.
State Troopers would be State Watchmen. County Sheriffs and Deputies would be Circle Watchmen. City, Town, and Village Police would be Municipal Watchmen. The other citizens would become Auxiliary Watchmen. Basically, the entire populace would become low-intensity auxiliary police officers, for example, through existing volunteer watch initiatives, both governmental and non-governmental. Existing voluntary or part-time watchman roles would be greatly expanded such as:
Volunteers in Police Service (VIPS) Auxiliary Police, also known as Community Service Officers (CSOs) or Special Constables Neighborhood Watch Town Watch (In Britain there is a Pubwatch!) Shomrim (‘watchers’): amateur safety patrols in Hasidic and Haredi Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and London. Shanti Sena: the peacekeeper role at Rainbow Gatherings. Guardian Angels: since 1979, the red berets have been enlivening dead public spaces with goodwill.
These and similar initiatives would be considered auxiliaries of the Active Watch. All participants in such Auxiliary Watches would have the police rank of ‘Auxiliary’, and every citizen would, from out of the principle of Egalitarian obligation, participate at least a little bit, in one of the Watches. There would be a $1 fine for not participating in at least one Watch training or shift per year. Given that present-day Auxiliary Police Officer roles are much more involved than that, the most basic Auxiliary Watchman role would be a rank lower. We are the Watchmen. All citizens would become Police—because we are the Policy, the Polity, the Politia, the Politeia, the Polis, the State, the 254 Republic. Auxiliary Watch training would be a basic civic rights initiation which occurs when a minor becomes a full Citizen in the 18th year, or when an immigrant becomes a naturalized Citizen. All citizens would be issued a basic Auxiliary Watchman uniform, even if be only a feather. “The Shirriffs was the name that the Hobbits gave to their police, or the nearest equivalent that they possessed. They had, of course, no uniforms (such things being quite unknown), only a feather in their caps; and they were in practice rather haywards than policemen, more concerned with the strayings of beasts than of people.” —“On the Ordering of the Shire”, The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
criminal citizens as watchmen? Even those with a criminal record would serve in some capacity. Human beings aren’t either trustworthy or untrustworthy—each person has an array of situations in which he or she is trustworthy, and an array of situations in which they best not be trusted. For some human beings, their array of trustworthy situations is relatively narrow, but as long as there is awareness of the limitations and possibilities, even our ‘corrected’ and 255 ‘penitent’ citizens could serve in certain transparent voluntary support roles in the watchman organism. Even the most incorrigible criminals, including those who are still in prison, could not be completely discharged from the Watch, because the Watch would be an inherent part of Citizenship, and Citizenship is human personhood...and even Radically Criminal Humanity is still in the form and potential of human personhood. However, such persons, even though they would be notionally Watchmen, could be barred from actually participating in Watch service until they have enacted a psychic change.
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The word ‘police’ in the sense of ‘a professional peace officer’, was first used for the Thames River Police in 1798 in London. Before that, the word ‘police’ meant simply ‘an administration.’ It was the same word as ‘policy.’ They both came from the French word police ‘political administration or organization’, which came from the Latin word politia (which survived in English as ‘polity’, another word for ‘state’), which is in turn from Greek politeia which meant ‘how a city-state is administered’, ‘the form of governance’, and ‘the rights of citizenship.’ The Greek title for Plato’s Republic is Politeia. Politeia was simply the word for ‘that which relates to the polis.’ Polis is the Greek word for ‘state’, ‘city-state.’ All this to say that what was originally a shared aspect of citizenship in a human-scaled city-state, has descended into a very tight and hardened fraternity of professional law enforcement. 255 If the community has sent a citizen into a correctional facility, or penitentiary, and they have done their time, and experience years of healing influence in the arms of our moral State, aren’t they viewed by the community as ‘corrected’ and ‘penitent’? What were those years of separation from the community for, except to prepare a reconciliation with the rest of the human community? Or is the goal to make a permanent underclass of scapegoats with a scarlet letter on their foreheads, so that America’s hypocrite Church Lady and Church Daddy can feel good about theirself? I experienced this in a small way, when I applied for a job at a big-box department chain. I had worked for that corporation before, in another state. I sat at the instore computer station filling out the application for 45 minutes, and then at the very end, the computer asked: ‘Have you ever been convicted of a crime?’ Well, I’d been convicted of misdemeanors from my adventures in vagabondry, and I practice rigorous honesty, so I clicked the ‘yes’ button. Then the computer said something like: ‘We don’t accept applications from criminals. Goodbye.’ And it turned off. That ‘game breaker’ question could’ve been asked near the beginning of the interview. Having the applicant waste time sitting there is an act of petty hatred. This is the same corporate person which has been fined for violations of labor laws. It’s true—I am a criminal. In this case, it takes one to know one. 237
from police officer to citizen-watchman When addressing an Active Watchman, instead of calling them ‘officer’, the Watch would be respectfully referred to as ‘Watchman’ or ‘Citizen.’ If their job title is known, and they are on duty, that could be a hyphenated part of the title: Citizen-Superintendant, Citizen-Sheriff, Citizen-Major, Citizen-Trooper, and so forth. Though if ‘officer’ is really their service title, then they would be a Citizen-Officer. Every citizen would at least have the police rank of ‘Citizen-Auxiliary’ through their role in Watch, yet for most citizens, that would only be a relatively small part of their life. And police rank would play no role in the Legislative Branch and the proposed We the People Branch, where all ‘hats’ would be off.
legitimate policing practices become the shared responsibility of all citizens As a little example of how police practice has diverged from what would normally be expected from human citizens, did you know that generally, peace officers won’t shake the hands of most other citizens while they are on duty, except for the offered hand of government leaders or lawyers in court? There are some legitimate reasons; for example, as a practice of always maintaining a space for the safety of their person. Yet if this is part of the watchman training, and is an unspoken but legitimate rights tradition, then every citizen ought to know about this and take joint responsibility for this safety practice. In that case, all citizens ought to refrain from offering our hand to any of us who is on duty as an active or auxiliary watchman. A friendly nod will suffice.
the demilitarization of watch services Our police training has been influenced by military tactics. Now even the local village police stay hunkered in their metal vehicle as if it were a humvee on patrol through a foreign land. Conditions have deteriorated to the point where our police-citizens feel the need to separate from the rest of the citizenry. The best spirit of the Irish police would be a healing model: “The Garda Síochána will succeed not by force of arms or numbers, but on their moral authority as servants of the people.” —Michael Staines, the first commissioner of the Guardians of the Peace of Ireland. It is not usual for the Irish police to even carry guns.
the return of the beloved neighborhood police In the Threefold Republic, foot patrols, beats (walking routes), and neighborhood-scaled policing would return. The kōban and chuzaisho police boxes of Japanese police organism would be a model. There’d be a tiny police box in each neighborhood. Police are so beloved and trusted that the citizenry stops and asks directions. The policeman’s job includes such humble tasks as maintaining the neighborhood lost-and-found registry. In rural areas, the policeman’s family even lives in a chuzaisho—a house attached to a police box! (Not so different than how in the rural US, the post office was often attached to the postmaster’s house.) In the prevalent American culture, this would not fly, because government service—like corporate service—is supposed to bring the ‘good life’ of a picket-fenced house in the suburbs. “Once pressed against the thin blue line in the white heat of a Reclaim The Streets conflict I observed that the accents formed behind the plastic shields and helmets were far more familiar to me than the ones muffled by bandanas. Today I met a Peeler who stopped me as I passed to tell me that he was called Russell and came from Grays in Essex, where I’m from. I squeezed his shoulder in acknowledgement and noted that beneath his uniform he wore body armour like a chunky thick Toblerone between us and I felt worried for the poor fella.” —Russell Brand, 2009 www.russellbrand.com/2009/04/revolution/ (Author’s Note: to translate into Americanese, ‘Peeler’ is a British word for policeman, from Sir Robert Peel, who initiated the modern police force in the 1800s, and a Toblerone is a Swiss chocolate bar that looks like an anti-tank barrier.)
an egalitarian livelihood for active watchmen Active Watchmen would receive the same, full Egalitarian Livelihood as all governance workers, along with the generous, individuated cultural and economic subsidies which all citizens would receive. Our police would no longer feel impelled to bow to corporate funding of their fraternities and professional foundations, which bends their allegiance, as seen in the ill-spirited policing of the Occupy movement (which I have experienced myself), in the policing of the nation-wide fracking resistance (where corporate security forces direct the local police), and in the policing of stripmine resistance in Appalachia (which I have witnessed). In the current structure, economic and government leaders (Citizen-General Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency, or the former Massey Coal Company in West Virginia) may ‘break the law’ 10,000 times, with some slight, polite disapproval from the government, and with no police involved. But if a single citizen ‘breaks the law’ by making a non-violent stand, the police are sent in full force, with kettling nets and pepper spray...and with heavier tools in the wings. Then their tag-team partner in the Judicial Branch piles on economically debilitating fines, to remind the citizen who’s the Boss.
the legitimate place of the security guard industry In the US there are 1 million private security guards who serve corporations as employees or contractors, compared with 700,000 police officers whose ideal is to serve and protect egalitarian human rights. Singapore is even privatizing and ‘outsourcing’ its police services through a process it unblushing calls ‘corporatisation.’ In the Threefold Republic, the role and powers of the security guard industry and the bail enforcement industry 238
would be clarified. Either this responsibility would be fully absorbed by the Rights Republic, or their powers would be more clearly severed from, and distinguished from, the actual Rights Watch. During a visit to Independence Hall, it was striking how the doorkeepers to this National Cultural Site were private contractors who wore uniforms which mimicked peace officers, with American eagle badges. In some social organisms, such as the Netherlands, there are vigorous laws which guarantee that a private security guard is not visually mistaken for a public servant. In this field of life, we would go in the opposite direction from Singapore. While the Rights Republic would divest all economic and cultural powers, it would retain, reabsorb, and insource what peace and protection services are really necessary.
healing the bribery culture The most pervasive culture of police bribery in the US—whereby persons who have donated to the national police union (the Fraternal Order of Police), or who carry a local Police Benevolent Association card in their wallet, which is given to the blood relatives of police and to political leaders who the police fraternities wish to influence, are released from traffic vexations and fines—would be stamped out. This ‘little thing’ is indicative of soul gesture which enters into bigger things. We know who are considered to be ‘brothers’ in this order, and it’s not the entire Citizenry or the Brotherhood of Humanity. The Watchmen would authentically strive for egalitarian service. ***
from black arts to a citizens’ militia “Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts—a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity...The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.” —Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government”, 1849
guardians of the meaning of life
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I recently read in the New York Times that self-death has surpassed combat deaths in the US Army. The Department of Defense reports that more US service members took their lives last year than died through combat in Afghanistan during that same period. The NYT article goes on to suggest a solution: there ought to be more nice mind-body therapies available for veterans. This characterizes the schism between the suffocating reality of combat initiation and the superficial suggestions offered by nice people. An open secret is that—despite the pervasive illusion as portrayed in Gomer Pyle, Beetle Bailey, and Forrest Gump—even the basic US military initiation is crafted to sheer off or bend the human ego, our sacred center, and to insert a valorous and dark impulse into that gap. A large segment of the populace is guided to experience the disjointed shift from twelve years in an inane ‘Saved by the Bell’-style government school, to a gravely intense training in bayoneting, machine-gunnery, and sleep deprivation by an even more inane and retrograde government military. From there, many are sent into a deeper initiation into the animalistic bloody hell of a combat zone. Our military initiates are vulnerable to bearing a life-long twist of self-hatred and a cold glint in the eye because circumstances weren’t sufficient to peaceably stand up to the real enemy—the US Military itself. And, until a healthy separation of powers is enacted, the US Military is the American Government...and the American Government is the Corporatist State...and the Corporatist State is the Americanist Way. “The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government.” —Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government” We don’t need any more sad guardians of the meaning of life. An action which would really help the swirling, roiling horror of suicidality, would be 257 for US veterans to be able to perceive and name what humane wisdom perceives and names as ‘Teotl’, the Great and Dark Spirit of America, the Americanist Way, the God of Mechanized Corporatist Militarism in which America trusts, and which blesses America with natural might regardless of what harm America does...and also to perceive and name It’s simpleton sidekick, Bar-Jesus, the Evil Jesus. When I engaged with the US Army, I noted that the drillers say the word ‘Jesus’ a lot. Evidently that is a different Jesus, because as the real Representative of Humanity comes again into the clouds of our conceptions and actions, we would vigorously transform the US Military. Does the Pentagon think there is nothing bigger than Itself? There are good things about the military:
its fraternal economy, with a livable stipend for all, regardless of the job, and with housing and other physical necessities for life available to all. The military is the most socialist organism in the US, in the best sense of the word. its honing of self-discipline, orderliness, and a certain kind of courage, and its ideal of honorable service to humanity, even to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
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A similar phenomenon is occurring in the allied national militaries. Here is an Australian response to a soldier who ended his life, in “Walking into the World”, written by John Stubley, at http://socialpoetry.net/2014/01/23/walking-into-the-world 257
If you would like to know more of the story, see “What is Teotl?” at https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/what-is-taotl 239
Currently, these ideals are strangely warped into fallen ideals. Yet they could be lifted up again. The US Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War are a breath of fresh air from such a future. The people I feel most sorrow for are our drillers, special forces, and top brass militarists. Our drill initiators, black ops, and war-profiteers have deeply embedded themselves into the Americanist Way. These fellowmen pay with an especially large chunk of their inner life, and of their family life. It would be all the better when these fellowmen stop digging and bring up the treasures they found in the deep. Even if one signed one’s Mephistophelean enlistment contract in blood, the loving god which is higher than that way still holds us ever in His and Her thought. We each made solemn oaths which trump whatever papers we sign here in this strange land. I and the Trisector Idea invite our citizens in the armed services to, during the course of Our Century, lend a hand in peaceably overthrowing and completing the United States and co-pioneering a tripartite Spiritual Empire.
the u.s. military organism A brief history of the US military: The American Revolution began with the New England Militias' encounters with the British Army at Lexington and Concord. Then George Washington was commissioned by the Continental Congress to initiate a Continental Army (which was at first, essentially a New England Army before the Mid-Atlantic and Southern States stepped in), a Continental Navy, and Continental Marines. The founders were concerned about the effects of a Standing Army, and so the military was disbanded in 1783, at the end of the Revolutionary War. In 1790, the ‘Revenue Marine’ was initiated, which became the US Coast Guard in 1915, and so is the oldest continually operating branch of the armed forces. In 1792 the land forces were reinitiated as the Legion of the United States. In 1796 the Legion was disbanded and parts of it were transformed to become the US Army. The US Navy was initiated in 1797 and the US Marines in 1798. An air army was begun in 1907, and was separated from the US Army to make a distinct US Air Force in 1947. Perhaps many readers know this already, but here’s an overview of the structure. There are five branches of the US military: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Army Navy Air Force Marines Coast Guard
There are seven reserve components of the US military. Together they are called ‘the Guard and Reserves’: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Army Reserve Navy Reserve Air Force Reserve Marine Corps Reserve Coast Guard Reserve Army National Guard of the United States Air National Guard of the United States
What is called the ‘National Guard’ is really two legally distinct entities which are functionally fused: 1. 2.
National Guard of the Several States, Territories and the District of Columbia (a.k.a. the Militia of the United States) National Guard of the United States. This entity is formed by calling up individuals and units from those 54 National Guard bodies.
And there are four auxiliary components which are civilian entities which can be called to temporarily support the military: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Civil Air Patrol, auxiliary to the Air Force Coast Guard Auxiliary, auxiliary to the Coast Guard Merchant Marine, auxiliary to the Navy Military Auxiliary Radio System
Since the state National Guards became practically absorbed by the federal government, some state governments have formed another kind of organized militia—the State Defense Forces—which are not affiliated with the federal government, such as the New York Guard and the Massachusetts State Defense Force.
the constitution, the troops, and the militia In regard to the military organism, the US Constitution voices that: “The Congress shall have Power... To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; To provide and maintain a Navy; 240
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces; To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress” ”The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States” “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace” In constitutional language, ‘Army’, ‘Navy’, ‘land and naval forces’, ‘Troops’, and ‘Ships of War’ refer to professional, national-level armed forces. ‘Militia’ refers to the 54 state-and-territory level armed forces. It may be noted that Congress, and no other entity, has the power to provide for organizing, arming, and prescribing the discipline of the Militia.
twelve priorities for tracing the way to a tree This is what I suggest we do in regard to the military field of rights life:
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Bring nearly all US military personnel—from the 150 social organisms into which they are deployed—back to the Homeland. Terminate nearly all US military bases abroad. Revoke nearly all defense treaties or executive agreements, such as NATO. Quickly end the 12-year Afghan war and the Global War on Terror. Release those POWs. Symbolically disband the Standing Army (and Air Force) and Standing Navy (and Marines), like we did at the end of the Revolutionary War. 6. Transmute the US Military into the Homeland Militia with five branches. 7. Initiate a sixth branch of service within the Department of Defense: the Nonviolent Militia. Incorporate combative nonviolence into the total defense strategy. 8. Initiate mandatory service in one of the six Militias by all adult citizens. 9. Make amends for all the military harm we did to the humanity of other nations. 10. Poise the Homeland Militia to respond to whatever destiny brings toward the Threefold Republic, as the last best hope of earth. 11. When soul conditions within American Humanity are sufficient, and external conditions in humanity’s world are sufficient, we bury the 258 hatchet, and throw all weapons of war under the Tree of Peace. 12. We transmute the armed branches, and their divisions and regiments, into biodynamic farming and gardening branches, divisions, and regiments; and their weapons into plows.
remorse for the harm done by our sword We would build memorials to the dead humanity of other nationalities who fell by our hand or weaponry. We’d do this in reverse chronological 259 order, beginning with solemn memorials to dead Islamicist Humanity in the drone strikes of Operation ‘Enduring Freedom’ and other ongoing U.S. war-nightmares. When we got to the cusp of the 1960s, we would build a wall with the names of all the Vietnamese Humanity who perished through our agency. We’d continue on through the Korean Nightmare, the World War-Nightmares, and onward to 1775. We have already built the capstone memorial—the American People maintain the graves of British soldiers James Hall, Thomas Smith and Patrick th Gray who fell at the Old North Bridge on April 19 , 1775. We are humble enough to lovingly maintain the flags of an enemy nation, planted in our own national soil.
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As each missile or weapons cache is decommissioned and melted down to be beaten into plowshares, a fragment of each is sent to be buried in a chamber beneath the Mount of Olives. Hunting and sport rifles, and museum pieces (as cultural exhibits) excepted. 259
“Enduring Freedom” is a euphemism for “Endless War.” 241
We would grant small, symbolic pensions to the widows of enemy dead. We would help look for, and forensically investigate, the MIA of enemy humanity.
abolishing the standing army “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” “The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people." —James Madison, 1787, later Chief of the American Nation “Both political and civil liberty have long since ceased to exist in almost all the countries that now employ standing troops, and that their slavery has in every instance been effected and maintained by the instrumentality and invariable obedience of these living machines to their chief.” —An essay from the Baltimore Maryland Gazette, signed ‘A Farmer’, 1788 “It is universally agreed, that a militia and a standing body of troops never yet flourished in the same soil. Tyrants have uniformly depended upon the latter, at the expense of the former.” —As essay from the Boston American Herald, signed ‘John DeWitt’, 1787 “Costa Rica is the best example of an entirely demilitarized country. ...When I visited Costa Rica earlier this year, I saw how a country can develop successfully without an army, to become a stable democracy committed to peace and the protection of the natural environment. This confirmed my belief that my vision of Tibet in the future is a realistic plan, not merely a dream.” —Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, Nobel lecture, 1989 Like Switzerland and Costa Rica, we would no longer have a Standing Army. Costa Rican Humanity is the only human community to abolish their military. That country has only has a Police Guard and a Public Force (a citizens’ militia). In a ceremony in 1948, the head of nation, President Figueres, broke a wall with a mallet symbolizing the end of Costa Rica's military spirit. A year later, the abolition of the military was introduced in the Costa Rican constitution. Día de la Abolición del Ejército (Military Abolition Day) is a national holiday. Switzerland does not have a standing army, instead relying on a citizens’ militia for defense. The 1999 constitution states that the army is ‘in principle’ organized as a Militia, though implicitly allowing a small number of professional soldiers who are integrated into the militia. Even though the US constitution mentions the words, ‘army’, ‘navy’, and ‘troops’, we do not have to keep a Standing Army and Navy. This possibility is evinced by the how the Founders disbanded the Continental forces for nine years, from 1783 to 1792, including the three years following the ratification of the constitution in 1789. Just as the Continental Army was reconceived to become the Legion of the US, and then reconceived again as the US Army, so would all five of our military service branches—along with National Guard and the State Defense Forces—be reconceived as a citizens’ militia...the Homeland Militia.
a well-regulated militia All of the armed forces would be reconceived as ‘a well-regulated militia.’ The Homeland Militia would be composed of five branches: the Land Militia, the Naval Militia, the Air Militia, the Marine Militia, and the Coast Militia. There would be two levels of militia: the Federal Militia and the State Militias. The National Guard of each state would become a State Militia, which could be called up to serve as forces of the Federal Land or Air Militia. The State Defense Forces would become State Militia Auxiliaries. The word ‘military’ is tired and darkened. It was originally the same word as ‘militia.’ But ‘military’ has come to mean a professional class of fulltime armed forces. The military professions—at least at the upper levels—have a vested, not-entirely-conscious interest in maintaining a war footing so that these citizens don’t have to scrape by through fast food and retail work like the rest of the poor saps who didn’t get a job with the national government. The Homeland Militia would be an organic continuation and re-casting of what is now the US military. The various US military divisions and regiments, with their colors and insignias, would continue in the five Armed Militias. Though the combat capacities of the US military would be retained, the transformation from Military to Militia would not be entirely symbolic. There would be a change in tenor. All military power is supposed to be in clear service of anational, universally human dignity, rights, and life.
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a post-military weapons system “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.” —MLK There would be a sixth branch of the militia: the Nonviolent Militia. It too, would be a branch of the Department of Defense. This branch would train entirely in Combative Nonviolent Discipline. Combative Nonviolence is described the works of the 2012 Right Livelihood laureate Gene Sharp, ‘the Machiavelli of nonviolence’, an American strategist whose writings have influenced the recent democratic revolutions in Serbia, Egypt, and the 260 Ukraine. His work was used by the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian governments during their supersession and secession from the Soviet Security State. Such a strategy includes on-going, pervasive training for non-violently, but vigorously, resisting a potential occupation by foreign humanity. Nonviolent Deterrence and Defense tactics would be integrated into all militia training, including the five armed branches. However, the NV branch would focus exclusively on these tactics. The NV Militia would be composed of those citizens who, for religious, philosophical, or personal reasons, for reasons of soul health—or for whatever reason—choose to serve in this branch. There’d be no government investigation as to what their reason is—these citizens wouldn’t have to be ‘government certified’ Mennonite or Quaker or Jehovah’s Witness. In the Threefold Republic, all six branches of the Militia—the armed branches and the nonviolent branch—would be a valued part of the Defense Strategy of the Republic. “I suggest that the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding the relations between nations. It is, after all, nation-states which make war, which have produced the weapons that threaten the survival of mankind and which are both genocidal and suicidal in character.” —MLK, The World House Are we, as American Humanity—or any other branch of humanity—even capable of imagining what a non-violent, Christian, humanist version of the engagements in Hiroshima, Omaha Beach, and the Somme River would have looked like? Despite some initial, poignant losses, it is likely that an embracing, familial end would have been reached. Subsequent flare-ups would not have been necessary. And our own populace would not be 261 slowly turned into Winkie troops of the Wicked Witch. What that would a humanitarian, authentically Christian embrace of Islamicist fearmongering humanity look like?—or whoever it is the NationalSecurity State says is our enemy in this endless war. Whatever the concrete objectives in northwest Pakistan which justify using robots to lob hellfire missiles into crowds of humanity—is it possible or impossible to allow ourselves to begin to conceive of achieving equivalent objectives through non-violent and harm-free, yet intense and vigorous direct action? 34 genuinely brave Americans, including U.S. veterans, recently went to that place even though the U.S. State Department was afraid, and told them they’d be killed. This is what these humanists and true Christians said to Pashtun Humanity: “We do not support the drone program, and we care about you and your lives. Your lives are as precious as our lives." This is the response they experienced: And when we were in a meeting with hundreds and hundreds of Pashtun men, one of them stood up, and he said—put his hand on his heart, and he said, "If you have come here to win our hearts and minds, you have done so." —Medea Benjamin, 2013 www.democracynow.org/2013/1/21/codepinks_medea_benjamin_brings_voices_of Imagine if, instead of 34 private citizens acting on their own resources, there where whole ‘battalions’ of men and women empowered by the American national and spiritual community, who were trained as precisely as soldiers and special forces, but in authentic, face-to-face, human penitence and amends-making. That would be a nation under God, instead of a nation-state over God. That the idea of direct non-violent 260
See Civilian-Based Defense—A Post-Military Weapons System by Gene Sharp: www.aeinstein.org/downloads
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“We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.” “The news today about 'Atomic bombs' is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol [jail] and then saying that you hope 'this will ensure peace'.” “You can't fight the Enemy with his own Ring without turning into an Enemy; but unfortunately Gandalf's wisdom seems long ago to have passed with him into the True West.” —J.R.R. Tolkien, veteran of World Nightmare One, from three letters written in 1944 and 1945, to his son who was in the British military.
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intervention is hardly even conceivable is evidence how rare the truly Christian, humane impulse is within a world-sized community which is pervaded with the nation-state concept—an idea which came to steal, kill, and destroy.
from military vs. civilian to an all-citizen militia One important goal is to end the fake distinction between Military and Civilian in the mind of the American citizenry. There would only be one kind 262 of governance role: Citizen. The words ‘citizen’ and ‘civilian’ are, in origin, essentially the same word. The Rights Republic, including legitimate civil defense, would not be the realm of ‘Freedom’—as if Freedom alone was a synonym for everything Good. The Rights life would be the sphere of Equality. We would respect international law in regard to distinctions between civilians and soldiers in 263 other countries, but within our own Governance, there would be no distinction. US ‘civilians’ are presently just the ‘nice’ side of the same coin. Liberals use this distinction between Civilian and Soldier to think they are good peaceful civilians, but conservatives are ‘bad’ hawkish military men. But everything done by the US military is really done by the American People in whole. Our military men and women are only the fingers in the fire. The rest of the body, including Liberals, pays money to the US military so that it is enabled to do what it does. And the worldview of the Americanist Way, which possesses the Liberals as well as the Conservatives, is what sends our citizen-soldiers into the fire. If our liberals don't want their sons and daughters training in the arts of war—such as how to stick a man in the belly with a bayonet—then make the societal changes necessary to end such obligations, instead of leaving the dirty work to our conservatives, the economically desperate, and the family lineages which are embedded in the military culture. The Swiss and Costa Rican militias would serve as models, yet they wouldn’t be copied wholesale; for example, the Swiss financially punish those who, for soul reasons, are barred from armed training, by compelling them to pay 3% of their income to the State. Whereas, in the Homeland Militia, there would be some militia role for every citizen—with the Nonviolent Militia and the various Auxiliary Forces serving as further options. And, unlike those countries, but like the Israeli Defense Forces, all females would serve equally. There would be male Militiamen and female Militiamen. In an egalitarian governance, every citizen would either be Active, Reserve, or Auxiliary in some branch of the Homeland Militia. Actually, though most people don’t know it, that’s already the case for US males, as by US law, all able-bodied males aged 17 to 45 are always in the Reserve Militia, also known as the Unorganized Militia. The Selective Service registration of all 18 year-old males is only the visible aspect of that fact. Though the professional services of active militiamen would be maintained as long as necessary, all adult citizens would become auxiliary militiamen, and would go through mandatory militia service in the Rights Sector. 264
Every adult citizen would have a militia rank, with the most common being ‘Auxiliary.’ All would be issued a militia uniform. Yet one’s militia role would have no bearing on other aspects of rights life—all ‘hats’ would be off in the Legislative Branch and in the proposed We the People branch— much less in the economic republic and cultural republic.
the right of the militia to keep and bear arms Except for those individuals who, for religious, philosophical, or personal conviction, have chosen to serve in the Nonviolent Militia, and except for 265 those who are ordered by the Militia to refrain from bearing arms —the entire adult Citizenry, both male and female, would be trained according to the highest standards of the Swiss armed militia, and, like the Swiss, would keep their personal militia weapon in their home. The goal would be 266 for every outer enemy to know that America could not be effectively occupied, and, perhaps more importantly, for the Citizenry to feel and experience confidence in that fact. Switzerland has one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the world. There is a pervasive culture of firearms training. In the Homeland of the Free, all gun ownership, registration, and firearms education would be within the constitutional context and domain of a well-regulated Militia.
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‘Citizen’ comes from Latin civitas ‘a community formed by an agreement between cives, between citizens’ and ‘civilian’ is from Latin civilas ‘related to citizenship.’
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Except for children. Children are the true civilians. The minimum age for US militia service would be raised from 17 to 18. 21 would be better. While the combat uniform would continue along utilitarian lines, the ceremonial uniforms of the six militias would be artistically refreshed to look as if they were uniforms of the Continental Army and Navy of the American Revolution. The uniforms would even be made of natural fiber; but they wouldn’t be entirely retro, since the distinctive colors and badges of the five armed branches, and of their various modern-day divisions and regiments, would be incorporated into the designs. 264
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The implementation of the existing gun control laws in the US would be transferred from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to an organ of the Militia itself. Since all keeping and bearing of arms would be within the domain of the well-regulated militia, and since keeping and bearing arms is a Right, those sections of people who are permanently or temporarily denied that Right—due to reasons of soul health, or because the citizen is still recovering from serious criminality—such denials of that Right would be interpreted as a direct militia order to these individuals, as militiamen, to practice only unarmed militia duties until their condition improves to the point where it would be healthy for them to contribue to armed militia service again. The right of the militia to bear arms is disciplined. 266
Some might object that occupation isn’t the goal of enemy humanity now, that the danger now is an asymmetric catastrophy. Yet the Homeland Militia concept is about humanizing and enlivening the military apparatus, not about addressing every aspect of the supposed clash of civilizations. Other features of the Trisector Idea address these other wounds.
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“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” —The Second Amendment
what about other emergency personnel or the civilian social corps? Some might suggest: ‘What about the non-military, emergency services, such as policemen, firemen, and other first responders? Wouldn’t that count as militia service?’ Emergency response services are, and still would be, important. And every citizen would have at least an auxiliary role in watchman services. Yet 267 the perception in America that police, fire-fighting, and emergency medical technician (ambulance) services are something akin to military service needs to be clarified. The feeling is there because those services wear uniforms, have ranks or EMT levels, and like military services, are usually government-employed, except for private ambulances. Yet the military power of humanity is something distinct from the police power and from other uniformed services. Others might ask: ‘And what about social service corps, such as Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and Senior Corps? Wouldn’t that count as militia service? No. This is not about finding various ways to serve the State. It’s not about building up even bigger state-organized communitarian bodies. The cultural sector is the place for volunteering—perhaps along with the economic sector in the further future. Most of those social service bodies would be transferred to the Free Cultural Republic. The humanocratizing of military service is about the entire citizenry consciously entering into, and sharing personal responsibility for, a very specific, intense aspect of life which underlies American civilization—the military world of life and death.
exemptions?
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There would be essentially no exemptions from militia service. No exemptions or deferments for college studies or pastors or Amish or former criminals or for employees of other branches of the government. All would go through one of the five armed militia trainings or the nonviolent 269 militia training. Physically or mentally handicapped citizens would go through as much of the training as they are able to do without distress—perhaps only the lightest Auxiliary training. In these cases, the initiation into the militia would mostly be symbolic, but still significant. In my experience serving as a personal aide to special needs persons, I witnessed a desire to be a part of whatever the rest of humanity is getting into. As with Watch service, seemingly incorrigible criminals who ought not be trusted with most Militia duties, would still be formally considered to be members of the Auxiliary Militia—because, along with Watch service, Militia service would be a mandatory and inherent part of Citizenship, and Citizenship is human personhood. However, such citizens could be ordered to be on ‘perpetual standby’ or relegated to the simplest services, such as help cleaning the local militia armory once a year—unless our karma is such that the Homeland, heavens forbid, faces a situation which presses us to call our ‘Dirty Dozen’ back to full service.
other features of a humanocratic militia
There would be no separate Officer and Enlisted tracks. Everyone in the Active Militia would begin as a Private. A person would become a leader only by dint of their qualities of character and leadership which surface during their service within the actual Militia.
There would be no distinction between male and female, and gender preference, in militia service, except for matters of basic human privacy, such as separate barracks. In this day and age these matters are cultural, and cultural debates have no place in the Rights Governance. If there are physical requirements for certain physically intense roles, they would apply to male and females equally. Individuals would either meet the requirements or they would be required to shift to a different role in the militia.
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Access to fire suppression service would remain a right and an obligation, though fire-fighting companies themselves are perhaps most fittingly conceived as associative economic bodies, since their primary purpose is to maintain the integrity of buildings, which are long-lasting commodities. Fire services would be an obligation because no one can ‘opt out’ of fire suppression service. When fire companies first formed in the 1600s through 1800s, each business would pay for fire protection services from a private fire brigade, and only those buildings which displayed the fire brigade’s badge would be extinguished by that company. Other buildings were simply left to burn. That is not the case now. Fire service has been pervaded with altruism. Where I live in upstate New York, the volunteer fire-fighting companies are one of the last remaining civic institutions in which nearly anyone is welcome to participate. The quality of mutual aid and civic camaraderie is a future picture of what associative corporations could look like in other fields of economic service. Fast food and convenience store service could be just as well organized and altruism-based—with service ranks, ceremonies, cross-training at different companies, profession-based benevolent associations, and unforced appreciation from the wider community. 268 In life, there are nearly always exceptions: the militia service of a female citizen in pregnancy or with an infant would of course be deferred. And the elderly at the time of the commissioning of the Homeland Militia would only be a symbolic part of the Auxiliary. But there would be no economic class, or ‘nice’ occupation, or special segment of the population which would be actually or implicitly exempted from militia service. 269
The five armed trainings would themselves be clarified and humanized, while losing none of their legitimate sharpness. The nonviolent training would be sharp too. 245
The tradition of using titles from British aristocracy—‘Sir’ and ‘Ma'am’—would be ended. The traditional response to questions would be simply ‘No.’ or ‘Yes.’ or ‘I don't know.’ Let your words be simply, Yes or No: and whatever is more than these is of the spine-bending evil.
While ranks would be maintained in the militia, ‘Citizen’ would be an acceptable title regardless of rank. Even Privates would be welcome to respectfully address Generals as ‘Citizen.’
The 40-hour workweek of rights governance workers (and in the further future, a 30-hour workweek) would be implemented in place of the 80+ hour military workweek, except for during combat, and during certain delimited combat-endurance training periods. How can individuals whose basic human right to rest has been systematically trampled on, develop a humane sense for rights? Or is the goal for everything in life to be a ‘privilege’, reluctantly granted by controloholic government-security agencies, from which one can only escape through acquiring personal wealth?
No chaplains would be employed by the Homeland Militia. All chaplain services would be divested and returned to their sponsoring religious or spiritual organization (or humanist philosophical organization) in the cultural sector. Yet there would be even more chaplains available to provide spiritual and soul-counseling services to Citizens who are in the Active Militia, and the chaplains would still have pervasive access inside Militia units, but the income of the chaplains—their bread—would be paid by those cultural organizations, instead of by the Military. He who pays the piper is apt to call the tune. In a Threefold Republic, the cultural sector would actually have the means to employ an ‘army’ of spiritual-cultural workers to serve humanity at the gigantic scale of the military apparatus. Though militia chaplains would receive special training from their religious or philosophic organization to deal with the specific needs of humanity in the militia, and though chaplains who are embedded as non-combatants in combat units would also be trained by the militia in regards to serving in a combat zone, chaplaincy itself would be subject only to the best practices of that healing profession, not to the military praxes. The Americanist Way delights in having clergy from all religions in Its actual employ. In my experience, it was interesting to note how the presence of clergy in the pay of the US army, providing religious services on the military base, symbolically legitimized whatever was happening in the dark initiation which surrounded the sacraments.
The Geneva Convention and other laws of human engagement would apply to what are referred to as ‘non-state/unlawful/illegal/unprivileged combatants/belligerents.’
Instead of lip service, citizens in the Militia would really be empowered and trained to intervene in, and to report on, suspected torment and other anti-human intrusions. Militia training would include frank descriptions of the conditions which can evoke snapping into war psychosis, and their examples in U.S military history. There would be an independent Rights agency which is dedicated to responding to whistleblowing in the context of the militia. Vietnam veteran Lawrence Colbern would be invited to be its head.
The procedure of placing bar-code stickers on the body of recruits during entry processing would be ended. The human being is not a commodity. The Americanist Way does not own humanity.
We would end military courts. It's said that only military men can understand each other. Well, given the perpetual wars during this past century, there is hardly any American who hasn't been in the military, or married to a veteran, or raised by military veterans. All courts would be organs of the cultural republic.
As independent members of the Cultural Republic, each school or school association would decide for itself whether to allow military recruiters, such as JROTC, onto its campus or not. As it stands now, since the US Military and the US Public Schools both fly the same flag, and are divisions of the same entity (the US Government and its fifty branches), there is hardly any question. While I was in the waiting room of the armed forces processing center in Raleigh, North Carolina, I noted a photograph there of the principals who had supported the JROTC. They received their reward.
I’ll be frank: in my foray into the military world, when I walked away from the initiation and wrote that ‘The US aims to do the Muslims what it did to the Indians. And so I am an enemy of the United States.’, I was sent by the military police to the psyche ward for evaluation. I’m glad I was, because I got to meet the constant stream of distress which flows out of that initiation. I was only in Fort Jackson a short while, yet I met several persons who had tried to kill themselves to escape from the initiation. A South American warrior who drank bleach. The articulate fellow from Oklahoma who had pierced his wrist with a ball-point pen. I saw strong and beautiful people pass through there. These are understandable, human responses to the widely accepted, but actually anti-human attempt to bend the ‘spine of the soul’ to make way for the Americanist Impulse. I suppose that there is a continual stream of suicidality on the initiatory training bases—and even moreso from the valorous but animalizing combat zones. Maybe the American People didn’t know this. And I also witnessed the strange institutional culture there—how military nurses threatened to send patients back to the place they tried to leave, and would shame the patients, insinuating they are weak failures. The Americanist Way delights in that. (The consciousness is lowered in that thick soul atmosphere, and much of the threats and shaming appeared to be not entirely conscious on the part of the nurses.) The Americanist Way wants to get one more jab in and insert a shard of self-hatred before letting the human being out of its jaws. Somehow, the mental health service of the military tends to hire some individuals who despise mental patients. I witnessed a few courteous and kind-hearted individual nurses (and even the sick nurses can get better), but systemically, the organizational culture of the US military wants to evoke dehumanization in as many human beings as It can get away with. 246
In the Threefold Republic, no hospitals would be owned or operated by the US military. All hospitals on US bases would be divested as free charity hospitals in service of the citizenry, both active and auxiliary. The hospitals would be part of the newly initiated Free Cultural Republic. The doctors and nurses would be rededicated to the higher ideals of the healing professions, instead of dedication to the military culture, its questionable bedside manner, and its ample paycheck.
isn't this more militarization? At first brush, it may sound like we’re suggesting an increase in militarization, and the formation of a Peter-the-Great-style totalistic military society. Yes, within the context of a corporate nation-state, compulsory national militia service would be a further intrusion into the individual life and culture of the citizenry. Yet in the context of enlivening events which would shape our time in a way humanity has never seen before—with a vigorous reconciliation with the Humanity of collectivist Korea, of Iran, of Cuba, of China, and of global Islamicism, with our soldiers being brought home and the hundreds of military bases being closed—the shift to a Citizens’ Militia would be a healthy change. And what’s really being voiced is the end of the structural and soul distinction between "bad, controlling, warmongering" (or "good, patriotic, godfearing") soldiers and cops and "nice, innocent, peace-loving" (or "lazy, cowardly, bleeding-heart") civilians. It’s about making humane rule of law the nation's civic religion. The entire citizenry—art students, hipsters, ballet dancers, Southern débutantes, and all—would take on the responsibility of what legitimate civic defense and public safety are necessary. The psychological security is enhanced when the entire populace has trained with automatic rifles like the Swiss militia and/or trained in Gene Sharp's nonviolent, yet intense, resistance tactics. Then the American People won't feel so afraid, which is why we have a gigantic standing army serving as a giant thumb for our fear-based society to suck on. And our Active Militiamen and Active Watchmen would no longer be a special class or fraternity which feels justified in whatever they do because they have been especially subjected to the dark, anti-human military-police initiation, and subjected to the special stresses of rights work in this field. The Militia and Watch would be closely held by the Rights Republic. Fundamentally, the Militia and Watch are servants of the rights of humanity. We would put a new flag patch on the sleeves of our Militiamen and Watchmen—the half-red, half-blue Stars and Stripes of a Constitutional Rule-of-Law Governance.
the endgame picture That’s a picture of what a healthy, humane military might look like, for as long as militia service remains truly necessary. But the endgame is really to enact global conditions whereby all the armed branches...and all their units...and all the individual enlistment contracts could be transmuted into biodynamic farmer divisions and regiments and farm apprentice contracts. The Trisector Idea is about turning swords into plowshares. ***
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the homeland culture what would a cultural council do? Culture is not only opera and Oprah. The Cultural Council would serve as a human face for the cultural power of the entire third sector of civil society—the non-profit, nongovernmental, non-commercial, socio-cultural, spiritual-intellectual sector—as distinct from the political governance sector and the commercial sector. The Homeland Cultural Council would have the same stature as the Homeland Rights Congress and the Homeland Economic Forum. The Council would serve as a countervailing force vis-à-vis the powers of business and government. The Council would select an Executive Director who would be as visible as the Head of State of the Rights Republic and the Executive Chairman of the Economic Forum. The Council would appoint onethird of the membership of the Threefold Senate which would coordinate the day-to-day practical relationship between the three sovereign sectors. The Council would negotiate and ensure large-scale funding for the cultural sector through various sources:
through direct (advertisement-free) funding from Economic Republic and its associations and corporations, through earmarked Individual Cultural Rights Subsidies, through making sure that all amendatory fees for criminal harmdoing to ‘society at large’ go to the cultural sphere instead of to the government, and through making the currency a demurrage currency whose renewal fees go entirely to the cultural sector.
The large-scale funding would be complementary to the gifts, donations, tithes, grants, and patronage which would be flowing to various cultural organizations through foundations and individuals. Individual, small-scale gifting—the widow’s mite—would be the basis for a healthy, participatory culture. The Cultural Council would provide a forum for the various ‘peak bodies’ in every field of culture to act in concert on matters that are vital to cultural freedom. Any cultural organization which participates in the Council would be welcome to fly its flag along with their organizational flag. The Council would serve as a visual symbol for all human beings that social life is made of three power sources, not just trade and government. The Council, being an embodiment of the plurinational idea, would provide a context for the people to understand and live our way into the healing separation of nation and state. The Council would have a role in shifting the Judicial Branch into a context distinct from politics. The Council would establish cultural embassies in other social organisms. Locally, the Council might establish or recognize affiliated free cultural centers in every locality, as pervasive as government offices are today. The cultural centers would house artistic events, educational workshops, recovery meetings, religious gatherings, scientific lectures, and other cultural events where no money is exchanged. Some cultural centers might have large areas for offices, wherein third sector organizations might share 270 office space in a lively, cross-pollinating social atmosphere. Those are some of the things which a Cultural Council would do. 271
There are already Cultural Councils in some places—the Massachusetts Cultural Council with 300 affiliated Local Cultural Councils, the Cultural Council of Greater Jacksonville, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County, and elsewhere. And there are 272 Arts Councils in many places, such as my local Columbia County Council on the Arts. There are also cultural centers, such as the Chuck Mathena Center in my birth city of Princeton, West Virginia, or the Cultural Center in the nearby village of Philmont, New York which is attached to the public (government) library. However, these bodies are presently either organs of the state or local governments, or are private non-profit corporations which have not yet consciously and structurally taken up the role of a third sector distinct from government and business, with its own distinct qualities, sources of funding, and voice. There is a tendency to form the world of arts and culture into the shape of a government-funded organ, or into the shape of the business world. The existing Cultural Councils are mostly focused on the field of art, leaving the wider fields of human development—including science, worldviews, health, and pedagogy—in the hands of the powers of compulsion and commoditization. Most notably, a full-blown Local Cultural Council would serve as the vehicle for unfolding a wide array of independent, non-governmental school organisms and professional teacher ‘firms’ (like engineering firms) serving home schools within every locality in the country.
what is a cultural organization? The existing Non-Profit Sector—the realm of the Cultural Creatives—becomes the main structural basis for the Free Cultural Republic. The frequently heard terms ‘Non-Profit Organization’ and ‘Non-Governmental Organization’ say what those organizations aren’t. They aren’t businesses and they aren’t government agencies. So what are they? They are organizations whose primary purpose is Cultural Development and 270
An example is the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto. http://socialinnovation.ca
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www.mass-culture.org/lcc_public.aspx
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Civil Society in the widest sense—they are Cultural Organizations, also known as Voluntary Organizations, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), or Third Sector Organizations (3SOs). The legal definition of ‘Cultural Organization’ might include all public charities, private foundations, religious organizations, and most kinds of 501(c) non-profit organizations. All political parties and other ‘527 organizations’ (those organizations whose primary purpose is to advocate for a political candidate, including Political Action Committees) would also be ‘cultural organizations’ to the extent that any still exist after the structural separation of party and state and the implementation of an Equality-based, 100% governance-funded campaign regimen. Those categories of 501(c) organizations which are primarily economic in purpose—namely, federal credit unions, labor unions, and ‘type 501(c)(6)’ business leagues, chambers of commerce, and industry trade associations—would be legally reclassified as a type of economic association. These would be the key figures in the economic republic. The actual legal definition of ‘cultural organization’ would be hammered out by the leadership of the peak bodies of the cultural sector, and then, on that advice, enacted into law by the rights republic. The definition could be further revised and honed in the future. Through the threefold separation of powers, it would become clearer as to what is really a Cultural Organization and what is a BINGO and GONGO. A Business-Initiated Non-Governmental Organization (BINGO) is essentially an industry lobby group disguised as a grass-roots organization, and a GovernmentOrganized Non-Governmental Organization (GONGO) is essentially a government agency in disguise. The many non-profit organizations—including faith-based organizations—whose budgets are largely met by the government, are becoming GONGOs. In a threefold republic, no cultural organization could receive any government money. That would do away with GONGOs. But the more subtle influence of corporate-sponsored and directed cultural impulses would require some deliberation. It feels unhealthy for the entertainment corporations, corporate media companies, and other commercialized cultural businesses to be participants in the Cultural Council— even though presently these bodies are the main shaper of humanity’s culture, alongside government schools. Perhaps cultural businesses would be impelled to split into a for-profit commercial corporation and a gifted non-commercial cultural organization. The newly-initiated First Look Media of journalist Glen Greenwald has taken this route. One thing the Cultural Council might do is establish a ‘best practice’ in regard to how large, and in what contexts, the names and logos of financial sponsors could be displayed by cultural organizations, if at all. Another practice would be to discern how much say an economic corporation can have, if any, in selecting the leadership of a cultural organization which it funds. At a certain point of influence, such a corporate-directed cultural organization would be reclassified as an industry association. The cultural leadership ought to be able to discern when an economic body is calling the tune, because every cultural organization would have a say in the cultural governance. The voice of business interests needs to stay in its own arena. Some of these kinds of discernment are already theoretically present in the definition of a ‘non-profit organization’, but they would be clarified and invigorated. And the status of cultural organization or economic association would be separate matter from whether a body is tax-free or not.
a freely-given future The ideal for the future of culture is for there to be no commercials visually or audibly embedded in, or attached to, a cultural offering or experience. Given the widespread commodification of life, we experience this in only a few places now—like the Sunday service, public mindfulness days at Buddhist monasteries, or other freely-given religious or spiritual offerings, or in Wikipedia and other open source culture. Noncommercial broadcasting used to be like that, though since the FCC relaxed the parameters on displaying messages from ‘underwriters’ (a nice word for advertisers) in 1984, NPR and PBS have become increasingly commercialized. Why should I donate to something which is already receiving my compulsorily-gathered government money and which is also trying to insert commercial messages into my consciousness? And yet, I acknowledge that it’s also about survival. The creative fields starve, and cultural practitioners have to eat. Yet when all workers in American economy are receiving at least the ample livelihood which national government workers presently receive, then nearly everyone would have the means to be a patron of free culture. The experience of serving as a patron connects us to the work in a different way than if we just buy it. 273
In the further future, one ideal would be for the entire cultural sector to charge no fee for any cultural service or cultural object. Freely given and 274 freely supported culture. For an eloquent statement of this, see Amanda Palmer’s “The Art of Asking.” While many cultural services, such as concerts and exhibitions, would be freely offered to all-comers, there could and would still be qualifications for participating in some offerings, such as having done the prerequisite studies before being admitted into an advanced college course. But the quality of having economic power— which is only one step down from having the physical might to take what one wants—would no longer be the main qualification for receiving a cultural service or object. The for-fee culture, as exemplified in the higher education industry, shows that many of those who offer culture don’t yet have the discernment to select their students and apprentices based on individual qualities and potentials, rather than on the wealth of the family
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This issue of entirely non-commercial free culture might even cause a rift in the Cultural Council, with one segment of the cultural sector being for the idea of completely free culture and the other portion viewing the willingness to do the hard sacrifice of earning and saving up enough money to pay for a cultural experience, as being a legitimate requisite for a culture seeker in this fallen world. I’d be glad if we were to reach the point where that is the kind of problem and level of disagreement we are faced with. 274
http://amandapalmer.net/videos/ted 250
lineage. From one perspective, charging fees for cultural services, such as collegiate studies, is akin to the Church charging fees for the sacraments. This evoked the Protestant Reformation. “NO fee is charged visitors, because care is taken not to commercialize this sacred ceremony.” —Techqua Ikachi issue #8, newsletter of the Traditional Hopi www.jnanadana.org/hopi/issue_8.html
cultural livelihood Presently, non-profit organizations, artists, and other cultural practitioners receive their daily bread by some combination of selling their services and objects, plus grants from government agencies or private foundations. Yet a full-blown free cultural sector would be funded entirely by freely gifted, unforced receptivity and appreciation. No cultural organization would receive government money. And there would be no minimum livelihood in the cultural sector. If the cultural practitioner doesn’t produce the quality of work which evokes gifting from the audience, then the practitioner would need to find some other work in the economic sector or in rights service. The fact that some artists do great work but aren’t yet widely appreciated would be addressed by grants from peer organizations and cultural foundations who could recognize the vanguard. But these organizations and foundations would be entirely non-governmental. However, the Egalitarian Livelihood in the rights sector and the basic Fraternal Livelihood in the economic sector would serve as a basis for calculating the size of the Individuated Cultural Rights Subsidies which would partially fund some cultural fields, such as primary and secondary education. But all of these Cultural Subsidies would be funneled through the free will of the individual citizen.
a culture of realness—recovering from celebrity worship A healthy cultural tradition, in my view, would be for us to recover from celebrity worship. There are still places in humanity’s world where some egalitarian dignity remains. Reportedly, the royal families, political leaders, and rock stars in the Scandinavian countries usually aren’t mobbed when they’re out in everyday life. It looks like the people there, are, in this regard, generally more self-possessed. The people aren’t so starstricken. The trisected nature of a healthy social organism would support this recovery. When crossing paths with a ‘big shot’, the question arises: what is this venue? What is the primary purpose of this place? Is this a grocery store, a park, a fellowship meeting, a sidewalk, a gas station, a government agency? If so, then we are both here to get food (economic activity), enjoy the spirit in a natural park (culture), soak up some healing (cultural), get to where we need to go (transportation = economic), get some fuel (economic), or exercise our rights as citizens (political). Are these legitimate places to approach, or even betray any sign of noticing one of our notorious fellows? Though no hard rule could be laid down, my view is that we are there to play the humane role which that place calls for. On the other hand, while much of the responsibility rests with the people, some of the responsibility rests with the ‘star.’ Isn’t it a kind of sickness for our ‘starring’ fellowmen to seek attention outside of legitimate venues, especially if it’s disruptive to the place and primary purpose? Also, in a healthier culture, many of our celebrated fellowmen might be approachable and responsive in legitimate ways. In the Scandinavian social organisms, the people usually respect the privacy of the ‘stars’, but at the same time, these ‘luminaries’ are more approachable to legitimate queries and interactions which are relevant to their work. The legitimate place for celebrating a cultural talent is during the actual performance, the question and answer session, the book-signing, the enthusiasts’ convention, through sending a letter of appreciation to their business address or their agent, and so forth. Same goes for famous businessmen and politicians, though I imagine that there wouldn’t be any ‘celebrities’ at all in a genuinely egalitarian political sector. In an authentic rights governance, we are all citizens—nothing more or less. All hats are off in the Rights Republic. In a healthy world, hardly anyone—not even Chiefs and Emperors—would really need a bodyguard or secret service battalion. Through national amends, a fraternal economy, and a culture of realness, that world would become possible.
an appeal for educational sponsors Lastly, if you’re a charity or trust fund manager who has more liquidity than you know what to do with, I invite you to simply sponsor children, from 275 all walks of life, to attend a Waldorf School or other independent school. It makes the difference between growing up as another mugglefied brick in the wall, or growing up as a vibrant, nuanced lover of life.
further pictures If you want further details of what a Free Cultural Sector might look like, see:
“(Little) Brothers: Cyber-activists and threefolders” by Seth Jordan, at www.instituteforsocietalholism.com “Imagining Cultural Freedom” by Nathaniel Williams, at www.thinkoutword.org/core-group-blog/2012-independent-projects/
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Here’s a way of being matched with an educational godchild: http://www.freunde-waldorf.de/en/donate-help/help-a-child-go-to-school.html. In particular, there is Arafa, a Tanzanian girl. Though we have met the cost of the first year of studies—$18,000, the same amount as the American government in New York spends per year per student in compulsory government education—she will continue to need sponsors to cover subsequent years. The contact persons for donating are at the bottom of this write-up: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/14-year-old-tanzanian-girl-arafa-dreams-of-going-to-high-school-in-the-us 251
“A Free Cultural Sector” by myself, at https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/free-cultural-sector
cultural logos These are only a few of the many thousands of cultural organizations which would compose the Homeland cultural sector. The grouping into numbered sections is only for illustrative purposes. 1. arts organizations National Endowment for the Arts (NEA): this would be an organ of the American NCO. Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 2. science organizations National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Science Foundation (NSF) United States Geological Survey (USGS) United States National Academies 3. worldview organizations (religious, spiritual, and philosophical fellowships) The Bahá'í Faith American Philosophical Association (APA) The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania (the Jehovah’s Witnesses) Maharishi Foundation USA Self-Realization Fellowship Unified Buddhist Church, Inc. Evangelical Lutheran Church in America: a descendant of the north German and Scandinavian national churches in America. Presbyterian Church (USA): this is the Church of Scotland in America. Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America: this is the Church of England in America. United Church of Christ: the modern-day descendant of the Puritan Church of the New England pilgrims. 252
United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ): the second-largest stream of the Jewish Community in this national state. Islamic Society of North America (ISNA): the largest stream of the Islamic Community in this national state. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (The Mormon Church): the fourth-largest stream of the Christian Community in this national state. Church of God in Christ (COGIC): the largest Pentecostal denomination and fifth-largest stream of the Christian Community in this national state. The COGIC is largely African-American in membership. National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.: the sixth-largest largest stream of the Christian Community in this national state; mostly African-American in membership. Union for Reform Judaism (URJ): the largest stream of the Jewish Community in this national state. American Humanist Association (AHA): the secular cultural worldview. The Catholic Church: the largest religious body and largest stream of the Christian Community in this national state. Southern Baptist Convention: the second-largest stream of the Christian Community in this national state. United Methodist Church (UMC): the third-largest stream of the Christian Community in this national state. Anthroposophical Society in America: a non-religious, secular philosophical organization. The Society has no logo, so the seal for the third Mystery Drama will suffice. The Twelve Step recovery movement, composed of several independent spiritual fellowships, such as for the Big Five Wounds of Humanity: 1) substances: Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Marijuana Anonymous. 2) co-affliction, people-pleasing, and controloholism: Al-Anon Family Groups, Nar-Anon Family Groups, and Co-Dependents Anonymous. 3) difficulties with food and destructive eating: Overeaters Anonymous. 4) difficulties and harm in the sphere of sex: Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous and other S-fellowships, and S-Anon International Family Groups. 5) soul wounds: Emotions Anonymous. Recovery International (www.lowselfhelpsystems.org) is another freely-given mystery center in this sphere of life, though in a different stream. RI steers a path between romanticism and intellectualism. Along with Re-evalution Counseling (www.rc.org), these fellowships offer a potent alternative or complement to the for-fee psychology industry initiated by the Austrian ‘giant’ Sigmund Freud. And other afflictions such as Gamblers Anonymous and Gam-Anon Family Groups, Debtors Anonymous, Workaholics Anonymous, and Clutterers Anonymous. Given the traditions of non-affiliation, some or all of the Fellowships might not actually participate in the Cultural Council. That’s fine. The Fellowships are still inherently a part of the cultural sector. It’s not as if these are government agencies or money-making businesses. They are, indeed, a model for freely given spiritual activity. For illustrative purposes, the recovery symbol, signifying the Fellowship of the Spirit, is shown here among the worldview organizations, though most of the fellowships themselves are initiatives in the field of health and wellness. The Movement for Religious Renewal. A religious organization inspired by humane wisdom. 4. grant-making and charity organizations Rockefeller Foundation Turner Foundation, Inc. United Way The Omidyar Group (its non-commercial initiatives) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 5. youth organizations and elder organizations 4-H Youth Development Organization (would be an organ of the divested American NCO since it is an agency of the national government’s Department of Agriculture.) Boy Scouts of America Girl Scouts of the USA Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) AARP Foundation: it’s questionable whether the main AARP, Inc. body is a commercial marketing business or a cultural organization. 6. non-commercial sports organizations National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA): an example of a nonprofit corporation which engages in many commercial transactions. US Olympic Committee (includes US Paralympics) Special Olympics 7. associations of colleges and universities American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU): 400 government colleges National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU): 1000 private colleges Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U): 1150 government and private colleges 8. primary and secondary school associations... National School Boards Association (NSBA): 90,000 government school board members, providing governmental education to 50 million burgeoning human spirits. (A similar organization is the NASBE, the National Association of State Boards of Education.) Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI): 3000 schools in the US and 20,000 schools worldwide American Montessori Society (AMS). There is another Montessori association: Association Montessori International /USA (AMI) National Catholic Education Association: 150,000 educators and 6 million students The Friends Council on Education: 82 Quaker schools and 20,000 students Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA): 250 schools Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America (WECAN) National Council for Private School Accreditation (NCPSA) US Department of Education (ED): this would be divested from the government to become the educational organ of the American People NCO. It would not be a tragedy if this entity dissolved. Though if the various free school associations perceived there was actual humane value in any of the ED’s services, they’d be free to maintain these services as part of the pedagogical peak body of the Cultural Council. ...and curative education Camphill Association of North America: curative educational communities for children and adults with special needs 9. museums and libraries The Smithsonian Institution American Alliance of Museums Library of Congress: this would remain an organ of the American People NCO. American Library Association (ALA) 10. non-commercial media organizations Democracy Now! National Public Radio (NPR): this organization would no longer receive the relatively small governmental funding (reportedly 2% of its budget) which it currently receives. 253
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS): this organization would longer receive any state monies. Wikileaks The Intercept digital magazine from First Look Media: a fresh media source recently opened up by Glen Greenwald with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. The noncommercial journalistic branch of this initiative is a free cultural organization. 11. free culture organizations (this is the future of the cultural sector; freely given, freely supported) Wikimedia Foundation Creative Commons Free Culture Foundation 12. political party organizations Green Party of the United States Democratic Party Republican Party Libertarian Party 13. fraternal organizations Kiwanis International Rotary International Lions Club International North American Interfraternity Conference American Legion Freemasonry Junior Chamber International (JCI) ‘Jaycees’ Ruritan National 14. the judicial branch US Supreme Court US Court of Appeals (and the federal District Courts) (Plus the federal subject-matter courts, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts (FISA), and all the state and local courts.) Federal Circuit Bar Association National Bar Association American Bar Association (Plus all the state bar associations) 15. non-commercial medical & wellness organizations American Psychological Association (APA) American Medical Association (AMA) US Department of Health and Human Services: this would be de-governmentalized and transferred to the cultural republic National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NCCAOM) National Autism Association (NAA) American Institute of Homeopathy The Breast Cancer Research Foundation American Osteopathic Association (AOA) Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) Shriners Hospitals for Children American Cancer Society (ACS) Physicians Association of Anthroposophic Medicine (PAAM) Doctors Without Borders USA Alzheimer’s Association 16. volunteer & relief organizations American Red Cross Volunteers of America 17. non-commercial horticultural organizations Biodynamic Association (BDA) 18. ethnic and national-cultural organizations The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy NCO The American People—The United States of America NCO Order Sons of Italy in America (OSIA) 19. land stewardship organizations US Bureau of Land Management (BLM): this would become a non-governmental land trust organization, with the proceeds of resource production going as a dividend to every consumer in the country. US National Park Service (NPS): this would remain an organ of the American NCO. The Nature Conservancy 20. ecological organizations Peaceful Uprising National Audubon Society Sierra Club World Wildlife Fund 21. civic rights organizations and social movement organizations Amnesty International American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Rifle Association (NRA) Human Rights Campaign (HRC) National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 254
American Jewish Congress (AJC) Open Society Foundations (OSF) Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Tea Party movement
nations in the homeland of the free Barbossa: “The world used to be a bigger place.” Jack Sparrow: “World's still the same. There's just less in it.” —Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End The following maps show a sampling of national identities which would achieve cultural independence, and would no longer be governmentally and economically packed into the US nation-state. The world would become a bigger place.
The American People—The United States of America NCO 276 The Aniyvwiya—The Cherokee Republic NCO The Appalachian Culture—The Strong, Beautiful, and Versatile States of Appalachia NCO 277 The Apsáalooke—The Crow Nation NCO The Black Nation—The Republic of New Afrika NCO The Cascadian Identity—The Bioregional Cooperative Commonwealth of Cascadia NCO The Chicano Nation—The Union of Free Pueblos of Aztlán NCO 278 The Diné—The Navajo Nation NCO The Gullah/Geechee Nation NCO The Hopi Traditional Identity—The United Sovereign Hopi Independent Nations NCO (separated from the Americanist “Hopi Tribe of Arizona”, which would remain a dependent part of the American NCO, and distinct from the “Sovereign Hopi Independent Nation, 279 Hotevilla Village” NCO, which reportedly hasn’t joined the wider Hopi traditional council.) The League of Nations—The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy NCO (separate from the elected Iroquois-American and Iroquois280 Canadian ethno-political governments, whose political powers would flow into non-ethnic humanocratic Rights Collectivities.) The Lenape—The Delaware Nation NCO The Mormon Nation—God’s Kingdom of Deseret NCO The Oceti Sakowin—The Great Sioux Nation NCO The Texian Nation—The Free, Sovereign, and Independent State and Third Republic of Texas NCO The Tidewater Culture NCO The Vermonter Nation—The Free, Sovereign, and Independent Freemen or Commonwealth or State and Second Republic of Vermont, or New Connecticut NCO
These are only a few of many possibilities. In particular, the Cherokee, Crow, Hopi, Lenape, Navajo, and Sioux are only six of hundreds of indigenous nationalities. For this presentation, the established designs of the Apsáalooke (Crow), Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and Diné (Navajo) flags are depicted with slight evolutions: the name ‘Apsáalooke Nation’ evolving from ‘Crow Tribe’ and the dark purple color of Haudenosaunee wampum evolving from the blue. For the state-free Diné national-cultural flag, the entire map of Navajoland is shown, extending beyond the confined bounds of the Navajo Reservation to the four sacred mountains which really define Dinétah, and to the wider historic claims expressed by the Navajos at the Indian Claims Commission in the 1970s. The emblem of the oil derrick at the center is replaced with the seal of the Navajo Nation Office of Dine Culture, Language, and Community Service, with corn and children at the center.
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The letter ‘v’ in the English spelling of Cherokee words is a nasal ‘uh’ sound like the vowel in English ‘uh-huh’ and ‘huh!’ The pronunciation is ‘ah-nee-YUH-weeyah.’ 277
The English pronunciation is something like ‘ahp-SAH-loh-geh.’
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The English pronunciation is like ‘dinn-EH.’ Though it’s not native to the English tongue to be able to pronounce ‘eh’ as in ‘get’ as a word-ending vowel, a Navajo woman chided me for saying ‘dinn-AY’—so aim for ‘eh’ if you can. 279
“At that time all the leaders from all the Traditionally established villages were present and agreed that this is a long awaited desire of the Hopi which has finally arrived. So it was agreed to organize. The name "United Sovereign Hopi Independent Nations" was adopted. However, the Traditional religious leaders and people of Hotevilla Village chose not to join. They would maintain their position as an independent nation as always since the founding of the Village of Hotevilla.” —Techqua Ikachi issue #25: www.jnanadana.org/hopi/issue_25.html 280
Despite the spelling, the English pronunciation is like ‘hoh-dee-noh-SHOH-nee’, with ‘sh’ instead of ‘s’ and ‘oh’ instead of ‘aw’. If you want to know more about how the Haudenosaunee civilization could be renewed through the Tripartite Idea, and could serve as the vehicle for renewing North America and the rest of humanity’s world, read “Haudenosaunee Future” at https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/haudenosaunee-future 255
one nation, indivisible It’s important to note that the American NCO would not be splitting up people by ethnicity or race. The American Identity would continue as a multi-ethnic cultural body, with American nationals of every race and creed. We would perpetually consider everyone who is born in the American Homeland, or born to an American parent, to be an American national. Our nation, like every nation in the cultural-spiritual locus, would forever remain one nation, under God, indivisible. Rather, these other NCOs would arise through the initiative of individuals, and through cultural organizations having nothing to do with the American NCO. A similar example would be how, since the separation of religion and state, new religious bodies sprang up around the mainline denominations, but the mainstream denominations continue to exist. A big difference though, between the national field of culture and the religious field of culture, is that there’d be nothing inherently stopping an individual from participating in, identifying with, and patronizing more than one national-cultural organization. Presently, many consider it unseemly to be a member of multiple religious denominations. But in the national field of culture, an individual could be, say, an American national, an Appalachian national, and a Scottish national at the same time, or a Chicano, Texian, and Mormon national at the same time. There’d be nothing stopping an NCO from requiring its membership to participate in no other NCO, but there’d be no legally-mandated aspect to such a tradition. It would be a purely cultural matter.
from 50 stars to 58 stars The American national flag would have a different number of stars than the threefold flags. That’s because the American NCO could delineate new 281 US (cultural) states throughout the world, but the Homeland Governance would keep the same political boundaries. st
51 star: The District of Columbia. For purposes of national culture, Washington would remain a District, but its star would be added to the flag.
52 star (51 state): The US State of Puerto Rico. This would be the cultural arm of the American People in that island. The independence-minded individuals would be free to form a culturally independent Puerto Rican Nation—“The Republic of Puerto Rico NCO”, which would retain the Puerto Rican Olympic team, FIFA World Cup soccer team, the membership in the Organization of IberoAmerican States, and other international cultural seats. Their flags would be distinguished by the shade of blue—navy blue for the American Puerto Ricans, light blue for the Puerto Rican nationals.
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The US state.
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The independent NCO.
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53 star (52 state): The US State of Guam. There’d also be a culturally independent, multi-ethnic Republic of Guam NCO which would retain the Guamanian Olympic Committee. The republic’s flag depicted below comes from the original artist’s blueprint for the flag of Guam, in the colors of the Guam Football Association logo. There would also be an ethnic Chamorro NCO, whose national homeland— Tanó I ManChamorro, ‘Land of the Chamorros’—would include Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands; not only the existing Chamorro Land Trust parcels, but the entire island chain.
The US state.
The independent NCO.
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Unless other trisected nation-states chose to join our Threefold Union. Also, the healthy direction for the political sector is a human-scaled governance, which suggests that in the further future, there would be delineation into more granular rights-states within the Homeland Governance. That would make for more stars on the Homeland political flag, but not on the American national flag. For example, even if the ‘Golden’ Constitutional State were to split into two or more rights-states, the US State of California would probably eternally remain a single (cultural) state within the US NCO. 282
The sequence of statehood for the US territories is presented here in order of greatest to least population. That’s only for illustrative purposes. 256
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54 star (53 state): The US State of the Virgin Islands. There’d also be an independent NCO: “Our Republic of the Virgin Islands” which would retain the National Olympic team and FIFA soccer team. The US state might retain the existing flag, and “Our Islands” might design a new national flag with the American eagle replaced with the national bird, the Yellow Breast; with the national flower, the Yellow Elder, instead of laurel and arrows; and with a different background color instead of white. A draft design is depicted below, featuring elements from the territorial emblem. The Kingdom of the Virgin Islands, headed by the British Monarch, would be a third NCO, along with the United Kingdom NCO itself as a fourth, which would consider the islands to be a viceregal Overseas Lieutenancy Area. There’d be nothing stopping all four NCOs from conceiving the entire Virgin Islands to be their cultural service area.
The US state.
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The republican NCO.
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th
The Free Samoan NCO.
The Independent Samoan NCO.
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56 star (55 state): The US State of Pacific Islands: From the perspective American national culture, the Northern Mariana Islands would form a US cultural state which also encompasses the other districts of the former UN Trust Territory of Pacific Islands: Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Palau. This US cultural state would be in friendly cultural competition with those three civic NCOs. The US state flag would be the former Trust Territory flag, but with US navy blue instead of UN gray blue. There’d also be a Republic of the NMI which would retain the NMI flag and NMI membership in the cultural activities of the Pacific Community. Besides the multiethnic NMI identity, the indigenous peoples there would be free to form a Chamorro NCO and a Carolinian Islander NCO.
The US State of Pacific Is.
The royalist NCO.
55 star (54 state): The US State of Samoa. If the fact that American Samoa has less than 60,000 people is viewed as a hindrance to cultural statehood, the entire Samoan Islands could be considered a single US cultural state, with American nationality offered to all. There’d also be a US sponsored Free State of Samoa NCO which would retain the American Samoa Olympic team and national soccer team. The offered flag design features the fue fly switch, to'oto'o staff, and tanoa kava bowl from the territorial seal, with lighter shades of blue and red. The Independent State of (Western) Samoa’s civic NCO would be a third NCO. Perhaps a Samoa-wide Fa'amatai organism of traditional chiefs might form a fourth, traditional Samoan NCO. These various culture-forming streams would then be out in the open, instead of packed into political-economic power structures. Individuals could participate in more than one, and financially patronize whichever they wish, if any. The vibrant cultural roots would flourish, while others would be poorly patronized and would fade.
The US state.
The British Lieutenancy Area.
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The Republic of the NMI NCO.
The Rep. of Palau NCO.
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The Federated States of Micronesia NCO.
Rep. of the Marshall Is. NCO.
57 star (56 state): The US State of the Philippines: A US cultural organ in the Philippines. American (cultural) nationality would be offered to all residents of the Philippine Islands. And vice versa: the Philippines NCO would be free to develop Filipino provinces throughout North America, based on its existing consular districts. The US state flag would be the pre-independence flag which was colored US navy blue and old glory red.
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The US state.
th
The Republic of the Philippines NCO.
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58 star (57 state): The US State of Columbia Rediviva: A new cultural organ which would encompass the area of the northern Oregon Country, now part of British Columbia, Canada. Columbia Rediviva—‘Columbia revived’—is the name of the US merchant ship which, under Captain Robert Gray, explored the coast of Oregon Country. The Columbia River was named after the ship, and British Columbia 283 was named after the river. The ship was named after Columbia, the spirit of America.
In the further future, the two areas which were claimed by the United States in the negotiations with Britain at the end of the Revolutionary War, but which were lost by the time of the final treaty of 1783, would be restored:
The coastal area extending to the St. John River east of Maine (which is in addition to the other, northeasterly extension of Maine claimed by the US until 1842); and All the lands extending to the southern boundaries of the Province of Quebec (a.k.a. ‘Canada’) as described in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. This large area, consisting of much of southern Ontario, would be admitted to the Union as the US State of Skaniadarade once there are 60,000 resident nationals. The name is the Iroquois name for that region. New York State claimed the region based on its purchase from the Iroquois of the hunting ground there. “He asked us what boundaries we claimed. We told him the river St. John to the east, and ancient Canada, as described in the proclamation, to the north.” —United States ambassador John Jay, speaking of his and Benjamin Franklin’s conversation with the French representative in 1782.
The old boundary of Canada as described in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The area south of that would become a new US cultural state.
indian country—a 59th star (and 58th state) The Lenape Nation—the indigenous nationality of New Jersey, Delaware, southeastern New York, and eastern Pennsylvania—was the sixth nation, 284 285 after the Mi'kmaq Nation, Maliseet Nation, and Passamaquoddy Nation, the French Nation, and the Moroccan Nation to recognize the fledgling American revolutionaries. In the “Treaty with the Delawares”, the first US treaty with an indigenous North American nation, in September 283
For more about Columbia in the light of humane wisdom, see my sandbox: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/columbia
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The Lenape treaty was preceded by the Treaty of Watertown of July 19, 1776, a Treaty of Alliance and Friendship between the newly declared independent State of Massachussetts Bay and the Maliseet and Passamaquoddy Nations, pluse some districts of the Mi'kmaq Nation. The treaty was initiated by Massachussetts, though nominally in the name of the entire United States. 285
The Moroccan Nation of the Arab, African, Islamic civilization was the fourth social organism to recognize the American People, after the Wabanaki, French, and Lenape. During the American Revolution in 1777, Morocco listed the United States as a nation which would be welcome at its ports. This relationship was formalized in a 1787 Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship, which is said to be the longest unbroken treaty of the United States. The American diplomatic building in Morocco is the only US National Historic Landmark located outside of the United States homeland. 258
1778—seven months after the Treaty of Alliance with the French Nation—George Washington’s administration offered the Lenape Nation to join the Union as the fourteenth state.
The treaty is remembered on the back of a U.S. dollar coin. The three clans of the Lenape—Turkey, Wolf, and Turtle—are an earlier image of threefoldness. Following the revolution, the Lenape Nation embarked on an exodus. Now the Lenape People are in Canada, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. The historic Lenape Nation is presently fragmented into three US-formed Indian Nations, three Canadian-formed First Nations, three US-statesponsored Indian Tribes, and several self-recognized heritage groups. In the following section, there is a map of the Lenape Country which aims to show all the lands which were ever part of the Lenape territorial conception, even if incarnate Lenape no longer live in those places. As a capstone to national amends, the various US branches of the Lenape Nation would be offered cultural statehood as a branch of the American People. If the Lenape accepted this offer, that would make for a 59-star flag. All federal- and state-recognized US Indian Nations would be welcome to join this non-territorial US state which George Washington offered. In regard to cultural matters, all 566 federally-recognized tribes would be offered only two options: 1) join the Union as part of the ‘Indian State’, or 2) prepare for immediate cultural independence. The state’s official long-form name would come from the preamble to the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) constitution: the “State of the Indian and Alaska Native Tribes of the United States of America”, with “State of the Indian Nations” and “State of Indian Country” serving as short forms of the name. The service area of this state would overlap with the lower 48 US cultural states and Alaska. The 13 Regions of the NCAI would serve as the ‘counties’ for this state. Its ‘state capitol’ would be the existing Indian Tribal Embassy in Washington, D.C. and the President of the NCAI would be equivalent to a state governor. This would all be within the context of the American national-cultural organization, within a free cultural sector. Here’s an offered flag for the “US State of the Indian Nations”, with the NCAI logo:
The US State of Indian Country. th
Within that 58 state, the area of the almost-State of Sequoyah which the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’—Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—attempted to form in what became eastern Oklahoma, would be named the ‘Region of Sequoyah.’ 259
The seal of the proposed State of Sequoyah and map from the 1905 Sequoyah Statehood Convention. The Region of Sequoyah would become one of thirteen Regions within the US State of the Indian Nations.
The twelve BIA regions (Alaska is the twelfth region)...which are the basis for the thirteen regions of the National Congress of American Indians (except the Eastern BIA region would be split into a Northeast Region and Southeast Region at the Virginia-North Carolina border)...which would serve as the ‘counties’ of the US State of Indian Country. The map is from: www.bia.gov/cs/groups/public/documents/text/idc013422.pdf
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The 59-star flag.
two paths of humanity, rowing home together The American People, as the successor state, took on the benefits of our colonial predecessors, such as the rights to indigenous lands which had been surrendered to Britain, France, and Spain through earlier treaties with the indigenous nations, or through ‘right of conquest.’ Now we would take on the obligations for social healing and condolence between the immigrant and indigenous streams of civilization in North America, this 286 Great Turtle Island. After renewing and affirming the Treaty of Fort Pitt and the Treaty of Watertown through this capstone amends—as the first, now last, of the hundreds of US-Indian Treaties—the American NCO would invite our colonial predecessors—Britain, Denmark (our predecessor in the Virgin Islands), France (the Louisiana Purchase), the Netherlands (New York), Russia (Alaska), Sweden (Delaware), and Spain—in partnership with Canada, Mexico, and the Central American and Caribbean civic nations, to join in the renewal and affirmation of the pre-revolutionary Indian Treaties, and even in the absence of treaties, amending the harm that was done in the course of forming the American Identity and American Homeland beginning in 1775, and going backwards in time to Plymouth Rock (1620) and Jamestown (1607), and further backwards to the actions of explorers from nations of which we served as successors, until we reached the Dutch Nation’s Two Row Treaty (1613), which in the mind of true myth, was on behalf of all European Humanity in North America.
The 1621 treaty between the English Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag Nation is remembered on a U.S. dollar coin. This is one example of how the American nationality claims cultural continuity with the English colonial predecessors, despite that treaty being 155 years before the American Nation was birthed. If we claim continuity, then we claim responsibility. When we reached the Two Row, the US NCO would sponsor the cultural independence of all 632 Indian Nations, even the ones which chose to become part of the US State of Indian Country. The reconciliatory offer of US statehood, would only be a temporary, transitional stage of healing. The nations would themselves would all achieve cultural independence, in accordance with the Two Row agreement between European Humanity and American Humanity. The US Indian State would continue as a non-territorial, non-tribal, Pan-Indian cultural body of individual Native American/American Indian US nationals. The name “US State of Indian Nations” would shift to the “US State of American Indians and Alaska Natives.” “The State of Indian Country” would be retained as a shorter name. From the American NCO’s perspective, an American Indian individual could choose to be an American national while also being a national of an independent indigenous nation. Whether the indigenous NCOs require an individual to refrain from participating in other national cultures is their
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For a small beginning, see “An Entreaty of Relationship” between twelve immigrant individuals and the Sand Hill Indians: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/lenape-amends 261
own business. There would be no legal barrier to individual human beings participating in multiple cultural streams, yet the cultural identities themselves would remain forever parallel.
A flagified image of the Teiohate Kaswenta, the Two Row Wampum. In the words of the Haudenosaunee Onondaga Nation: “The Two Row Wampum belt is the symbolic record of the first agreement between Europeans and American Indian Nations on Turtle Island/North America. 2013 marks the 400th anniversary of this first covenant, which forms the basis for the covenant chain of all subsequent treaty relationships made by the Haudenosaunee and other Native Nations with settler governments on this continent. The agreement outlines a mutual, three-part commitment to friendship, peace between peoples, and living in parallel forever (as long as the grass is green, as long as the rivers flow downhill and as long as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west).” —from “Two Row History”: http://honorthetworow.org/learn-more/history/
re-conciliation and condolence reaching all the way to columbus The Two Row ceremony and amends would be followed by the re-conciliation of the forcibly fragmented or confederated ‘reservation nations’ through the re-embodiment of internationally recognized Traditional National Councils. Then, the even earlier wounds would be condoled, extending deep into the Spanish Nation’s interactions with the indigenous nations in California (beginning with Cabrilho in 1542), New Mexico (Coronado in 1540), the Gulf Coast and Texas (Álvarez de Pineda in 1519), Florida (Ponce de León in 1513), Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands (Columbus in 1493). The Carib Indians are still here, living in an Indian Reserve on the island of Dominica, and along the Caribbean coast of Central America, where they were expelled from their island homes by the British in 1796. Now known as Garifuna, this nationality still speaks their Arawak language. As for the gentle Taíno people, who were the first nation encountered by Columbus, and who were hard pressed by both the Caribs and the Spanish, this identity is still embodied in heritage organizations in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Boriké (Puerto Rico), and Cuba. Except when they were serving as our proxies, or when we had a partial role in harm-doing by squeezing one nation into the land of another, as Americans we only make amends for the harm our nationality did, not for the harm one indigenous nation did to another. By the end of the ceremony, all the contact-era nations of the American continents would be re-embodied as competely independent cultural nations. *** “If the purpose of America is ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’ who is fuller of life, freer, and happier than Indians left to live life as they see fit? —The Blackfeet Nation, “Our Culture” http://web.archive.org/web/20120215141848/http://www.blackfeetnation.com/our-culture.html
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completing the united states The worldwide US consular districts would become US cultural territories. This map shows the United States in the future, with US territories covering the entire earth. The Territories would follow the same boundaries as the present-day US Consular Districts, so that many of the large nation-states, such as Canada, Brazil, France, Russia, India, China, and Australia, would be divvied into multiple US Territories for the purposes of American national culture. In other places, multiple countries would be a single US Territory, such as Surname and French Guiana combined as the US Territory of Paramaribo. The American People NCO would be free to offer cultural services throughout humanity’s world. For example, we might acquire houses where great American expatriates lived, such as Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and sites where wartime American sacrifices occurred, and maintain them as American national heritage sites, as part of the (non-governmental) global US National Park Organism. Such sites already exist: the American Battlefield Monuments Commission maintains 24 national cemeteries and 25 national monuments in other social organisms, and the US State Department designates twenty overseas sites on its Register of Culturally Significant Property. This map shows the US Territory of Vancouver with the same boundaries as the present-day Vancouver Consular District, prior to being redelineated and admitted to the Union as the US State of Columbia Rediviva; and the US Territories of Toronto and Ottawa prior to forming a US State of Skaniadarade. The cultural impulse of the former US Panama Canal Zone would be ceremonially included within a US Territory of Panama. Various historic buildings in the Canal Zone would be purchased and maintained as US cultural heritage sites. 264
In the Caribbean, the tiny, uninhabited US lighthouse island of Navassa, situated off the coast of Haiti, would be part of the U.S Territory of Port-auPrince. The disputed US Caribbean islets of Serranilla Bank and Baja Nuevo Bank (off the coast of Central America) would be a part of the US Territory of Bogota. Likewise, the numerous small islands throughout the world which were temporarily claimed by the US Guano Islands Act of 1856 as part of the US fertilizer production efforts, and which were later signed over to the adjacent nation-state—including Marcus Island, now part of Japan; and the Iles du Connétable, now part of French Guiana on the coast of South America, and many others—would be considered a part of the US consular district-based cultural territories. As a non-governmental cultural organization, the US NCO might seek to install historic markers which memorialize the American presence on these islands, and to purchase parcels of land as nature conservatories. These would be cultural features which would have no bearing at all on the political administration of these islands. All those national cultures would be free to do the same throughout the US political service area. The existing US consular districts in the Pacific are shown, prior to their being combined for national-cultural purposes as the US State of Pacific Islands—covering Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Northern Mariana Islands, and Palau—and prior to the US Territory of Manila becoming the US State of the Philippines. In the further future, whichever cultural territories reach 60,000 or more resident American nationals would be admitted into the Union as fullblown US cultural states. “We cannot have homeland security unless we understand the whole planet is our homeland.” —John Perkins, author/activist/economist
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If you want to know more, see my “Oh Appalachia” sandbox at https://sites.google.com/site/ohappalachia/home. 266
Here’s a letter-to-the-editor published in the Charleston Gazette newspaper.
wishes for appalachia and america August 22, 2012 Editor: CHARLESTON, W.Va. — I was born in Princeton and graduated from Matoaka High School in Mercer County. These are my wishes for the unfolding engagement between King Coal and Mother Nature, with Humanity standing in the middle: For our strip-mine resistors: May any outer or inner wounds heal quickly. May their intense courage remain gentle until the end. For our miners who would counter-resist: May these good men aim to treat the activists with kindheartedness. May the concerns they bear be met by an economy founded on goodness and brotherhood. For our industry executives: In the name of humanity, may they refrain from wielding their economic power to rouse up wild hatred. For our police: May the spirit of their oath extend to all human beings on their watch. For our judges: May they know that the law itself is on trial whenever a citizen peacefully resists the state. For our reporters: May they not bury serious events within a circus of entertainment. For our political servants: May we enact Amendment 18 to the state constitution—the Separation of Corporations and State, of Wealth and Rights. Our state government even offers an official Friends of Coal license plate with that logo. Then why not a R.A.M.P.S. (Radical Action for Mountain Peoples' Survival) license plate? For our clergy: May they consider, was humanity made to serve the law, or was the law made to serve humanity? Will the hills still burst into song if their heads are removed? Is there more than one legitimate king in Appalachia? For our people: May we awake as Appalachians and Americans. Are we so beaten down by economic and governmental powers, and so ashamed of our Appalachian culture, that we won't steward the beauty of our mountains as well as the Vermonters or Swiss? What picture of an economic future, political-rights future, and cultural future for West Virginia most beautifully represents our humanity? Henry T. Philmont, N.Y. ***
To the hills I will lift mine eyes and I am not afraid. In sun by day or the moon by night My courage will not fade. In the morning smile or in evening vale My courage will not fade. Oh guide my feet and guard my way My courage will not fade. —Wester Caputh by Brendan Taaffe
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Two Chicano national flags are shown: one is essentially the United Farm Workers flag of Cesar Chavez, but which has been adopted by the wider Chicano cultural movement, the other, with the three-faced human being, was flown from a light-pole during the take-over of Chicano Park in San Diego on April 22, 1970.
“Voters in this country have been seduced into believing that our vote counts within this system. But when realizing that we live under a dictatorship, they begin to understand that this is impossible. Of course, the ‘dictator’ of today has evolved from the typical “Hitler type” dictator to one of “Global Corporations” which embody Consumer Capitalism. This “US type” dictator has been perfected by ad agencies and “spin doctors” and political lobbyists. We have been duped into believing that there are two opposing parties that challenge each other for the political vote of those allowed to believe themselves in control. But in fact, this country has two political parties that represent the same interests, essentially a snake with two heads that represents ‘money for the rich.’” —Jenaro Ayala, National Chair of the National La Raza Unida Party, 2010 www.nationalbrownberets.com/Raza_Unida_Party.html *** “At night, I close my eyes and remember the words of my ancestors who said we will one day rise up to reclaim this land again. Let us take heed and do everything we can to make our vision a reality. It won't be perfect, nothing is. But it will be a helluva a lot better than how we are living now. When reading about our history, I am always touched by the writers who said that our people would laugh sweetly and had the most remarkable health in the world. They wrote that our ancestors had gentle souls and shared what they had with others. Chicanos still have that same spirit today.” “My Vision of Aztlan” by Nelli Temachtiani www.nationalbrownberets.com/Aztlan.html
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the governmentalization of the hopi and navajo cultures and territories If you look at the map of the Diné (Navajo) Homeland a few pages back, you will see that their traditional territory greatly overlaps with the Hopi traditional territory. Through the separation of nation and state, Hopiland and Navajoland, as cultural service areas, would freely overlap with each other. The governmentalized reservation boundaries have been the source of much political and economic dispute. That’s a bitter fruit of the Wilsonian nation-state idea—in this case applied to the indigenous North American nations. Reservation Governments are essentially quasi-Nation-States with fused political-economic-cultural powers. The inherent sickness in such entities is perceivable by the Traditional Hopi Identity—a voice distinct from the US Government-formed ‘Progressive’ Hopi Tribe, with its democratized Roberts Rules of Order. The perception of the sick Wilsonian formative force is voiced in this way: “The United States Congress has made several attempts to ‘solve’ what certain vested interests have claimed is a ‘land dispute’ between Hopi and the Navajo. They do this at a great distance from the people whom their decisions affect. Their ideas of ‘ownership’ and ‘jurisdiction’ are alien to the way we live. “Public law 93-531 is a recent attempt which proposes negotiations between the ‘Tribal Councils’ of the two nations. If the negotiations fail, which is almost certain, being based upon ideas alien to both, the Secretary of the US Department of the Interior will be given control of the matter, which involves a plan to declare a boundary, and fence the Hopi and the Navajo off from each other. “The whole problem could have been avoided if the Tribal Councils of the Hopi and Navajo had sat down together to consider what their traditional leaders want. ...Perhaps the US Government has foreseen that if the leaders of both Tribal Councils persist, their struggle will end in blood shed. “It is in the prophecies of the Hopi that in a case like this the Navajo may help our cause.” —Techqua Ikachi issue #1, written by the traditional leadership of the Sovereign Hopi Independent Nation, Hotevilla Village www.jnanadana.org/hopi/techqua_ikachi_i.html ***
traditional verus progressive There are really two distinct governances in Hopiland: “Which faction in Hopi land deserves the name ‘Hopi Nation’ or ‘Hopi Tribe’? These two important names have been crisscrossing between the Traditional Hopi and the progressive ‘Hopi Tribal Council.’ We bring this out because it has caused much head scratching and confusion among outsiders who are unfamiliar with the Hopi. This is particularly noticeable in the Navajo relocation issue. “It seems these terms portray all the united Hopi tribe within the Hopi Nation as working together in trying to throw out the Navajo by their ears. We view this as misleading for the Traditional Hopi are not involved in relocation so as not to tarnish our proud name of peaceful Hopi. As far as we know the ‘Hopi Tribal Council’ was created by the BIA. We don't know from what substance and they failed to give them a name so they adopted the name ‘Hopi Tribe.’ “The Traditional Hopi were created by the Great Creator from spiritual seed and received the name ‘Hopi’ long before the progressive Council was ever heard of. We will let you decide.” —Techqua Ikachi issue #33, “Defining Hope Nation and Hopi Tribe”
An illustration by a Hopi artist of the formative split between the culturally independent Traditionalist Identity, and the governmentalized, U.S.-funded Progressive Identity, among both the Hopi and Navajo. ***
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notes on the national homeland maps Skip over this section unless you want to know where the maps came from. The American Homeland map is adapted from a National Atlas of the United States map. The map showing the southern boundary of Quebec in 1763 is from http://faculty.marianopolis.edu/c.belanger/quebechistory/maps/1763.htm The Appalachian Homeland map was crafted by Threefold Now. The initial suggested boundaries of Appalachia encompass the widest composite extent of the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Southern Highland Craft Guild, the 1935 USDA map of Southern Appalachia, and the UNESCO “Southern Appalachian Man and Biosphere Region” (who knew?). Other territorial conceptions of Appalachia could be included. Though the Southern and Central Appalachian culture and speech are the core of our identity, in the further future, the Appalachian identity could be offered in wider areas, such as the Appalachian foothills (the Piedmont), the ‘Ozarkadia’ region of Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, and eventually in the Northern Appalachians and Canadian Appalachians. The Cascadian images: The homeland map is from the Sightline Institute, drawn by Cynthia Thomas and accessed at www.portlandwiki.org/images/9/94/Cascadia_map.jpg The ‘Cascadia Rising’, ‘Captain Cascadia’, ‘Uncle Cascadia’, and ‘Eco-Regions of Cascadia’ images are from the Cascadian Independence Project: http://cascadianow.org/photograph-gallery/ and http://recollectionbooks.com/Cascadia/ecoregion.html The Occupy Seattle Cascadia fist is from www.pinterest.com/pin/44754590020102080/ The Cherokee Homeland maps: The original Cherokee Country map is from James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee (1900) A Royce map of Indian treaty lands in Arkansas. The Texas Cherokee map is from the 1948 Claim-Indian Claims Commission, reprinted from Chief Bowles and the Texas Cherokees, by Mary Whatley-Clarke, and accessed at the Texas Band of Choctaw Indians website: www.redeaglejw.net/oldchahtaorg/maps.htm The Kansas and Oklahoma Cherokee map is adapted from Ken W. Martin (2007), which is adapted from a 1908 school book A History of Oklahoma by Thoburn & Holcomb: http://history-sites.com/itcw/Map%20of%20IT.html The Apsáalooke Homeland map is from the “Crow Natural, Socio-Economic and Cultural Resources Assessment and Conditions Report” (2002) by the Crow Nation: www.blm.gov/mt/st/en/fo/miles_city_field_office/og_eis/crow.html The Chicano Homeland: The map with the eagle is from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aztlan_flag_rb.jpg The Chicano Park logo is by Rico Bueno, posted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicano_Park The other map is from the National Brown Berets, at http://nationalbrownberets.com/Aztlan.html The Gullah/Geechee Homeland map is from the Gullah/Geechee Nation website: http://gullahgeecheenation.com. The few areas of the US Park Service’s Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor which extend beyond that county-based map might also be included in the Homeland: www.nps.gov/guge/planyourvisit/images/GUGE_ProposedBoundary.jpg The Haudenosaunee Homeland map was crafted by Threefold Now from various sources. The Hopi Homeland map is from www.naturalhistorymag.com/htmlsite/1104/images/1104feature_map.jpg The Lenape Homeland map was crafted by Threefold Now. The Mexican Homeland map is adapted from the 1835 map at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_mexico The Mormon Homeland map is from http://wchsutah.org/maps/state-of-deseret.jpg. God’s Kingdom of Deseret would be an initiative in the national field of culture, whereas the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would remain as an initiative in the religious field of culture. The Navajo Land Claims map is from “American Indian Territoriality: An Online Research Guide” by Imre Sutton, figure 6.4: http://thorpe.ou.edu/treatises/AITchptr%20pdfs/ . I have with corresponded Sutton, who recently passed away, and appreciate his encouragement. The map of the Dinétah trapezoid is from the Navajo-language wikipedia article on Dinétah. The New Afrikan Homeland graphics: “The Proposed Minimum Map: Kush, in the Subjugated National Territory—The Republic of New Afrika” is from Penn State Special Collections: www.flickr.com/photos/pennstatespecial/6950948048/ One RNA map/flag graphic is posted at: www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/09/new-radical-black-mayor-of-jackson-mslumumba-is-a-former-leader-of-republic-of-new-afrika-dedicated-to-transforming-south-into-an-independent-socialist-blacknation/#! The other is from the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika website: http://pg-rna.com The Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux) Homeland maps include: An Indian Claims Commission map. The Treaty Area map from the Republic of Lakotah: www.republicoflakotah.com/2008/the-treaty-area “South Dakota within the Border of the Great Sioux Nation” from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe at: www.sioux.org/index.php/main/inner/sioux/south_dakota_border The Texian Homeland map is from the Texas General Land Office, 1891, posted at “Tejano History” at:www.texastejano.com/history/republic-of-texas-1846 The Tidewater Homeland map is from The Story of English by McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil, from Michael Crafton’s website: www.westga.edu/~mcrafton/Images/tidewater_virginia.jpg The Vermont Homeland map with the restored East and West Unions is from Northern Cartographic, posted at “The Historical Geography of Vermont” webpage at: http://academics.smcvt.edu/vtgeographic/textbook/historical/historical_geography_of_vermont.htm 281
anticipated questions on a threefold america this is too complicated. why not just switch military spending to government schools and other government social programs? It’s true, reality is complicated. The Trisector Idea is not simple. Our progressives/liberals will rightly suggest that if the military sector wasn’t so big, this tax money could go to education, healthcare, and other social needs. The unspoken ‘given’ is that these social needs would be met by government programs. This will sound like heresy, but I have some gratitude that we have wasted billions or trillions of dollars this past century. I’m glad we used the enormous cloud of capital built from generations of American toil to build swords. Because, given the pervasive governmentalist bent of American statesmen and stateswomen, if the money hadn’t been blown in building weapons, then it would’ve probably been used to turn America into a gigantic, seemingly benevolent, but actually smothering ‘Social Programming State.’ Progressives/liberals would’ve built the Great Society. We don’t need a Great Society...we need a Great, Loving, and Wise Society.
isn’t society supposed to toughen us up? Sanding our personal shortcomings, raising children, doing little and big pieces of work, tending to a freehold homestead and patch of land, and service to cultural, economic, and political renewal is enough for humanity to deal with. God and the gods really do not wish for us to have to deal with much more than that. The Trisector Idea is about healing the sickness within our societal structures. We think the business fabric, the government fabric, and the cultural fabric are shot through with systemic afflictions which might be helped with a better understanding all around. The Threefold Republic would be a eutopia not a utopia. There would still be personal affliction, job loss (though with a softening of the desperation), broken relationships, heartache, and tragedy (though a world of meaning would begin to speak through the ups and downs of life), jails (but good, orderly, amendatory jails), taxes (of a sort), and death. Life will shape us up without a Government School/Entertainment Circus Culture and Oligarchic/Corporatist Economy and Surveillance/Police/Prison/Military State further beating us into the ground. In this age, it is not a legitimate role for government and economic structures to place hindrances in the way of humanity. It is time for the societal structures to get out of the way of the human individuality. A wise and good parent isn’t wishy-washy, but neither do they intentionally harm and thwart the unfolding of the child. Imagine if political and economic bodies were to practice treating each individual citizen and co-worker with familial, motherly love. Not the fallen love of our own chosen mothers, who often cannot help but being touched by the sickness of spaciness or controloholism, but the love of a clearly wise, beautifully warmhearted, and good-willed mother. “We must bring something which you will realize at once is hardly present today in ordinary consciousness. There is just one thing here in the physical world in the way of sensations, of feelings, that each of us must have if he does not want to investigate the social laws, the social impulses, in an unreal way but in a fundamental way. This is found only in a limited form here in the physical world, only indeed when an absolutely healthy, absolutely right, relation exists between a father, mother and child, in the interest between father, mother and child. It is not to be found in anything that can be experienced between human beings anywhere else in the whole world round, certainly not in ordinary consciousness. Now while you are getting clear in your mind about, let us say, the mother’s love—you can do it too in this fundamental way about the love developed in the mother immediately she bears a child – try to become clear about this mother love, and then ask whether this mother love is dominant in any scientific investigations ordinarily carried out by the well informed, even by those who are doing research who work in social science. This mother love must be there in the thoughts developed about the social structure if these thoughts are to have reality in them and not unreality. The only form of thought in human life that could be right socially is what is thought out socially with mother love.” —Rudolf Steiner, GA 188 (emphasis added), 1919 Through this century, we’ve been claimed by a ‘mother’ which would cut us in two. We have eaten snakes and stones. When will we taste fish and bread?
who would be the leaders of the three republics? Once the three sectors have coalesced and formed their deliberative body, who can say who we would select for our leadership? For the Head of the Economy—the Executive Chairman of the Economic Forum—how about someone like Bill Gates? Or the leader could just as well be someone like the President of the Chamber of Commerce, or of one of the Unions, or someone from the New Economy movement.
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For the Head of Culture—the Cultural Leader or Executive Director of the Cultural Council—how about someone like Sean Penn or Glen Greenwald??? There are also less dramatic possibilities such as the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches or the CEO of the United Way. It’s hard to say, because our culture is so fractured. There’s no MLK or Mandela who stands out in American culture. It’s difficult picture someone who would serve the wider cultural needs of both Evangelical Christians and Free Culture Hacktivists. But that’s what and who we need. There’s a Chinese saying (or maybe I just made it up) that ‘Even breakers-of-bones and thieves cooperate to get a job done.’ So why can’t the cultural community of American Humanity cooperate to protect our American Culture from governmentalization and commodification? Besides the usual suspects for the Head of State—the Rights President—how about Tim DeChristopher, Chelsea Manning, or Edward Snowden? Of the three sectors, the political-rights leadership would be the only ones which would be directly elected by the citizenry. The economic and cultural leadership would be selected by the businesses (in association with the unions and consumer federations) and by the cultural organizations. There’d also still be an American national President, as a cultural figure—the Head of Nation of the American NCO. For continuity’s sake, I picture a former US president (there are two living Chiefs who still could serve again without bumping up against the two-term limit), a former vice president, or a former First Lady being elected as the first American president following the separation of nation and state. The election would be a nation-wide non-governmental event, like a nation-wide non-profit club selecting their own internal leadership.
what about a leaderless america? ‘Leader’ is understandably a tired word in some respects. Yet even the leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement relies on individuals who take initiative. We’d still have leadership in the Threefold Republic, but we would provide conditions for more and more of our leaders to really become trusted servants instead of big shots.
what about the sovereign citizens movement? The Threefold Republic would make some space for the Sovereigns. There is a phenomenon in the US where citizens are declaring their individual independence from the United States and its national law, or at least independence from the statutory law which has gradually overshadowed the Constitution. There have unfortunately been shoot-outs between individual Sovereign Citizens and US police-citizens. The Sovereign Citizen movement is coming about because people unconsciously or consciously sense that the Government is stifling humanity. So the Sovereigns are trying to break out. I had barely heard of the term until the summer of 2012. A friend had mentioned the words to me in passing as something to look into. I hadn't gotten around to looking up the meaning of those words by the time I was detained by the US Governance on July 4, 2012. Near the end of a long series of questions, to which I mostly declined to respond, a national probation officer asked me: "Are you a sovereign citizen?" I liked the sound of it, so I said yes. Who wouldn't call themselves a sovereign citizen? Two such beautiful words. In retrospect, that was likely the excuse for the US Judicial Branch later sending an armed SWAT team to my bedroom. Our police organizations have their own internal law: because there had been armed incidents with a few Sovereign Citizens somewhere in our gigantic country, it has become an unannounced police policy to treat those words as a ‘fearmongering name.’ Who knew that it was against the national law to say the words ‘sovereign citizen’? Later, the second time I was in the Philadelphia federal prison, I was walking down a corridor, and a guard asked me: "Are you a sovereign citizen?" I said: "I'm a Threefolder. I'm not so into the Sovereign Citizen movement. I'm for the Threefold Republic." He asked what that was, and I said “It's about the Separation of Business, Government, and Education.” How would a Threefold Republic respond to the Sovereigns? In a Threefold Republic, the Free Cultural Sector is where the human individual would 287 be fully sovereign. Even in a healthy threefold society, the Rights Sector and the Economic Sector are inherently limiting, because Rights are about Obligations and Agreements between two or more human beings, and the Economy is limited by the practical bounds of natural resources, and that it really take work to produce food to maintain physical life. So, in the Rights Republic, we share sovereignty through human agreements (the foremost being the Living Constitution), and in the Economic Republic, our individual human sovereignty is bounded by the limitations of nature, and by what working conditions are deemed by the Rights Republic to be socially just. Yet, I suggest that in a humane, purified Constitutional Governance, that if some individuals, having been wounded by Statism, choose to refrain from participating in the Rights Governance, then I would leave them alone. I would consider them to be what Thoreau calls ‘Aloof.’ These aloof few who declare themselves to be Sovereigns, whether they be vagabonds or eccentrics, would be free of all Rights duties, beyond basic respect for human rights. They would be, at least symbolically, stateless. This would not affect their role in the Economic Republic or Cultural Republic. I even suggest that there be a "Sovereign Citizen Law" which spells out exactly how the Governance would leave them alone, while still respecting their humanity. "I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to lie aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow men." 287
For a fantastic articulation of this, see John Stubley’s “The New Pharaohs of Egypt and the World”: http://socialpoetry.net/2011/02/10/the-new-pharaohs-ofegypt-and-the-world 283
—Thoreau, On Resistance to Civil Government
what about the state sovereignty movement? Individuals would be free to come together to initiate an NCO for the identity of each of the fifty states—as free, sovereign, and independent republics—separate from the American NCO and its fifty subordinate organs. If you want to know more about this possibility, visit my sandbox entitled “Fifty Free, Sovereign, and Independent Nations”: https://sites.google.com/site/threefoldnow/sovereignstates?pli=1
what about hateful philosophies? Liberals have said to me that they are against School Choice and an independent, non-governmental pedagogical sector because it might mean there’d be Black Nationalist schools, Islamic schools, and Nazi schools. My response is: So, you’re willing to make sure that the entire child populace (except for a few wealthy lineages) is certainly compressed into the shape of U.S. government schooling...out of fear that a few families on this continent might really wish to form a Black Nationalist school or National Socialist school? Are you implying that those few children whose families would choose to send their children to such schools are saved by those 8 hours of compulsory Americanist schooling from the otherwise evil influence of the family they chose to be born into? Or do you just feel satisfied that not one penny of the community’s money went to evil schools? You think it’s your duty as a good American or progressive liberal to make sure all children (except, perhaps, your own) are raised and socialized by government schools? What a statist, controloholic, petty Americanist fear. The intense twistedness of the extreme Black supremacist and White supremacist impulses arose largely from the pressure in which they were encased by the national state, which subtly or overtly humiliates and suffocates the human individual. Having been pressed by a monolithic Market State, the individual sought some philosophy which would at least stand up to that giant, even if in a hateful, evil way. These impulses are expressions of personal and cultural woundedness. A healthy social organism would gently wash out these wounds, opening them to the sunlight. Though ordinary Americans, from both the left and right, associate Afrocentric and German-speaking culture with anti-human Reactionary Black Supremacism and National Socialism, those are only the twisted, fallen versions of potentially humane formative forces. In a free cultural sector, there really would be a healthy possibility for an ethno-national school organism sponsored by the Black Panthers and the ‘Republic of New Afrika’ cultural organizations. Such schools might display a portrait of RNA President Robert F. Williams instead of George Washington. Rosa Parks spoke at Williams’ funeral. Likewise, the Southern Heritage would be free to rise again, and offer Southern cultural 288 immersion schools. I ask liberals, especially Northeastern progressives: what does it say when you might be open to the use of the school choice voucher/subsidy for families to freely fund a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) or Lakota (Sioux) national immersion school, but not to a Black or Southern school? "A black nationalist is one who is building, perpetuating and growing a group of people who constitute a nation to gain a greater sense of self-determination. It's not necessarily about race but a common future. I don't hate anybody else. I just want the right to be free.” —Kwame Afoh, former President (1990-1998) of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika Though Hitlerism was as much ‘christian’ as it was ‘pagan’, there really could be a healthy Germanic pagan school organism sponsored by the widely respected indigenous Ásatrú religion of Iceland, in the same way that the Catholic, Jewish, Evangelical, and Quaker denominations sponsor and shape their own independent school organism. In regard to Islam, in this day and age, one shouldn’t have to defend the merits of a cultural force which shapes nearly a quarter of humanity, of all stripes. Didn’t you know that political Islamicism is only the harmful, warped version of the humane potential which is reflected in the Islamic personality? Some might then ask: But what about actually hate-rooted cultural organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan and National Socialist Movement (NSM) in America? The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that such incorporated organizations have the same legal and cultural rights as any other. To the extent that their speech or actions do not cross the legal line of threatened or actual violence, those cultural entities would continue to exist, as they do now under U.S. law. Despite their notoriety, these are usually very small groups, with only a few hundred members spread across the country. So the question remains: would these incorporated groups be free to make schools? Under U.S. law, individuals are already free to raise the children within the influence of those philosophies. Children do arrive into these wounded families. Given the shallow, threadbare nature and geographic sparseness of those cultural impulses, it is unlikely their membership would form a KKK or Nazi kindergarten. In order to qualify as a school, and thereby be able to accept and cash the Individual Pedagogical Subsidy vouchers, the school would have to be recognized by one of the various non-governmental teacher associations and school associations of the Cultural Republic. Or the voucher could be used toward home school materials or a private teacher, perhaps in the context of a Home School Association. So yes, it would be possible for racial supremacist cultural organizations which are legally incorporated to sponsor such a strange school, so that the children would unfold within the influence of those families’ conscience, such as it is. 288
For a behind-the-scenes perspective on the Southern identity, see my sandbox entitled: “Neo-Conservatism: The Shade of Dixie”: https://sites.google.com/site/teratosophy/neo-conservatism 284
Yet when, instead of a monoculture American nationalist secular school system, every locality in the country blooms with a wide and lively array of various religious schools, philosophical schools, arts schools, craft and trade schools, language immersion schools (for example, Swahili and Old 289 English), and national-cultural schools (Black, Haudenosaunee, Lakota, and Southern, to name only a few), how many KKK and NSM parents would really choose to send their child to a narrower school sponsored by an infantile worldview? Should we abandon the goal of an independent educational organism, and continue to bow to governmental schooling, out of fear of these tiny, wounded cultural forces? It is possible that the since the Cultural Council itself would be a free cultural organization which could freely determine its membership criteria, it might refuse participation from racialist or hate-rooted cultural organizations. But, being that the cultural sector is free, those organizations would likewise be free to form their own Cultural Councils. Free means free.
why not become like socially progressive canada and scandinavia? Progressives imagine Canada to be a ‘nice, liberal’ version of the United States. Or perhaps the US is felt to be the goatee-wearing ‘mirror’ version of Canada. Canada may have a nicer, cleaner façade, but at the price of a government-pleasing spirit. There are several Canadian friends who are dear to me, and I am not denying the potential of Canada, yet Canada has most of the drawbacks of US corporatism, plus an even heavier statist tendency. And Canada isn’t that much nicer anyway. It is a member of NATO after all, and has its hands in much of the global dirtywork of the Empire. So no, just shaving the goatee and becoming a nicer, all-blue ‘United States of Canada’ will not cut it. *** As far as Scandinavia, of course they are beautiful countries. But it would be a step backward for America to surrender its natural aversion to governmentalism and become a Scandinavian Welfare State. The genuinely admirable, ancient social impulse of those national communities was diverted into the deadening path of governmentalism. Those countries don’t really have something which will have the vigor to transform American corporatism and militarism. Denmark, Norway, and Iceland are all members of NATO. Sweden, like Switzerland, has a gigantic military budget. Progressives/liberals are surprised that Iceland didn’t grant Edward Snowden asylum. American progressives hear reports that Iceland resisted the Neoliberal bank bailout model and that the Pirate Party for Free Culture has won three seats in the national parliament, and imagine that that place must be worlds better than the United States. While those events are indicative of some real potential in that land, such wishful thinking reveals an ignorance as to the pervasiveness of Americanist thought in Iceland and the rest of Scandinavia—and of the unspoken fear of the American shadow. The fear to look Americanism in the eye and penetrate to what lies on the other side of the Americanist Way manifests as a certain streak of inanity which courses through the culture of postmodern Scandinavia. “We have swallowed so much of America's view of life that we can no longer see the people over there.“ —Jens Bjørneboe, “The Fear of America within Us”, 1952 http://uncletaz.com/fearofamer.html Why settle for statism? Why not enact all the benefits of the Nordic Model, but through a non-statist associative economy, a streamlined humanocratic governance, and a state-free cultural sector? The Scandinavians call everything ‘public’, as if that statist word were an unqualified good. I would ask the same question to Scandinavia which Norwegian Jens Bjørneboe asked America in 1952: Aren't there people on the other side of the ocean too who are willing to leave shop and field in order to devote themselves to the quest for the Holy Grail?
why not become like economically liberal singapore and dubai? Singapore is a gem of the Chinese and Southeast Asian civilizational streams. I would not be surprised if the Singapore model, with its entrepreneurial economy, its clean streets, and its law-and-order governance, might be the secret ideal of much of Western corporate and political leadership. Singapore is so admirable that I have a concern that the entire world will become like Singapore. The voice of Singapore can be heard in 290 Lee Kuan Yew:
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In a free cultural sector, if one was deeply devoted to the mercurial and jovial mysteries of African or Northern culture, it would even be possible to renew the Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Germanic languages. 290
Singapore Prime Minister 1959–1990, Senior Minister 1990–2004, Minister Mentor 2004-present. The tradition of rotating leadership is not a Singaporean strong point. 285
"I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn't be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn't be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters—who your neighbor is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right." Lee's frankness is truly admirable and fresh. A world order formed along Singaporean lines would certainly be more orderly and neat than our present-day American world order—and probably even more economically prosperous and pleasant. There is very much to admire in Singapore– yet the future of humanity demands a clear distinction and systemic balance between Economic progress, participatory Governance, and Private life. If a prosperous global order didn't also provide for: 1) rights-states where all adult citizens have a real voice regardless of their place or seniority in the economic and familial hierarchy, and 2) cultural sectors where individuals and civil society organizations may freely bloom, it would not be worthy of our true human dignity. The dignified future brings a three-way structural balance between the Economy, Polity, and Culture—a tri-polar world order. *** Dubai, a ‘City-Corporation’ in the Persian Gulf, is the wonderchild of the Neoliberalist Idea and the oil economy. Like Hong Kong or the adjacent Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, Dubai has shown that allowing the economic sector to do its thing within the framework of business-friendly laws, can allow for amazingly prosperous results. I’m not naysaying those developments. Both Singapore and Dubai reveal the potentials which are squelched by the concrete layer of governmentalism which covers much of the world. And they both reveal the potential for enacting ideas at the scale of a city-sized social organism. Yet the Trisector Idea would build on the admirable entrepreneurial freedom of these models and complement it with an even more transparent legal-rights governance—one which is not ‘forever’ tied to the personal fortunes of the founding family lineages and ethnicity. And even the jaded, office-working, post-modern Hong Kongers, Singaporeans, and Dubaians would be refreshed by the experience of witnessing their children unfold within a diverse array of free, independent school organisms.
why not become like switzerland, which is admired by both the right and the left, because it is both economically liberal and socially progressive? Why would America seek to become a staid country who always follows the rules? Through the grace of the topographic and political landscape, destiny allowed the Swiss People, along with the Swedes, to slip through the Century of Nightmare materially unscathed. Thank goodness. And yet our Swiss Humanity is vulnerable to a certain smugness, which we Americans would emulate only at the peril of missing our appointment with humanity’s destiny. And do liberals realize that Switzerland is the one of the world’s largest arms exporters, and that the modern impulse of militarism first touched ground in Switzerland? The Pope didn’t choose Swiss bodyguards because of their spiffy uniforms, their chocolate and cheese. In the words of Michael Ende: “Of course *Zurich+ is a neat and clean city. But it won't be so pretty if you imagine the dead human bodies produced in the whole world by the Swiss military industry. ...This can't last forever. Not only because this is against our morals, but because this system is unsustainable." —Talk with Ende, 1986 And Swiss democracy is only a beginning. Its limitations and potential are voiced here: “Because of the conditions of the recent development of humanity, public life as such, which was to express itself in the life of rights, has in the main disappeared. What expresses and lives in the configuration of the state, is really a chaotic union of the spiritual [culturaleducational] elements of human existence and the economic elements. One could say that in the modern states the spiritual [culturaleducational] elements and the economic elements have gradually become mixed together; whereas the actual political life has fallen away in between, has in fact vanished. “This is particularly noticeable within the conditions of Switzerland. We are dealing there everywhere with a seeming democratization of the spiritual [cultural-educational] life, impossible [unhealthy] in its actual formulations, and a democratization of economic life and the fact that the public believes that this apparent democratic mixture of the spiritual [cultural-educational] and the economic life is a democracy. Since people have formed their concepts of democracy out of this mixture, since they therefore have an absolutely illusory concept of democracy, it is so difficult to speak of true democracy particularly to the Swiss. Actually, the Swiss know least of all about real democracy. ... “It serves no purpose to speak of these matters in a—let me say—pussy-footing manner in order to speak politely to a mainly Swiss audience; for then we could not understand each other. ... “When one tries to make somebody in Switzerland take an interest in something that is bitterly needed for the world today, one can become quite desperate, for it doesn't really move him at all, for it bounces right back because in reality his heart is not in it. It is too distasteful to him for him to become interested, and he has too little experience concerning these matters for them to become in some way appealing to his sympathy. He wants to have his peace. ... 286
“Switzerland is something like a gravity-point of the world. ...Just as they know how to value the unchanging franc, which, as it were, has become the regulator of currency the world over, the Swiss should learn to understand their independent position, brought about by world conditions, whereby Switzerland could indeed be a kind of lever for world conditions. It is therefore necessary that one makes this comprehensible to them. “Therefore, it is a matter of especially emphasizing here that rights...need to be experienced in their self-evident quality, something that must be experienced when a person, who has become of age, becomes conscious of himself as a human being. Therefore, it would be a matter of trying to work out this human relationship of feelings and sensations in the life of rights, in the political life for Swiss conditions, to show that equality must dwell in the individual person if there is to be a life of rights. For it is Switzerland that is actually called upon— and I would like to say that the angels of the whole world look upon Switzerland to watch whether the right things take place here, to create a system of rights by letting go, freeing the cultural and the economic life.” —Rudolf Steiner, “The Art of Lecturing”, Dornach, Switzerland, 1921
my question: why not become something which has never been on the earth before? There is much to admire in all these societies. Yet to put it bluntly: we’d be betraying the potential of America if we were to adopt any of these existing models. An America which tried to become like Scandinavia would be an America which had nothing left to say for herself. Even the Canadian model would be falling short. All those models would be settling for less. The Spirit of America is holding out for...
a living, family-like, beneficial corporate and cooperative economy a human-centered, fresh, constitutional governance a culture of authentic liberty—including a third sector of state-free, charitable, radically diverse educational and healthcare organisms.
Sometimes the student who looks slow is absorbing the situation and biding her time for the right moment. We are holding out for a Philosophy of Life and Liberty. ***
over the carnage rose prophetic a voice —Walt Whitman
Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice, Be not dishearten'd, affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet, Those who love each other shall become invincible, They shall yet make Columbia victorious. Sons of the Mother of All, you shall yet be victorious, You shall yet laugh to scorn the attacks of all the remainder of the earth. No danger shall balk Columbia's lovers, If need be a thousand shall sternly immolate themselves for one. One from Massachusetts shall be a Missourian's comrade, From Maine and from hot Carolina, and another an Oregonese, shall be friends triune, More precious to each other than all the riches of the earth. 287
To Michigan, Florida perfumes shall tenderly come, Not the perfumes of flowers, but sweeter, and wafted beyond death. It shall be customary in the houses and streets to see manly affection, The most dauntless and rude shall touch face to face lightly, The dependence of Liberty shall be lovers, The continuance of Equality shall be comrades. These shall tie you and band you stronger than hoops of iron, I, ecstatic, O partners! O lands! with the love of lovers tie you. (Were you looking to be held together by lawyers? Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms? Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.) (Author’s Note: We don’t need any more physical blazes like Mohamed Bouazizi (goodness, guidance, and righteousness be upon him). In the past five years, 120 Tibetans have practiced that against the nation-state which has locked down that patch of God’s green earth...with what results? What would it look like for human beings and a collectivity to reach the point where there is soul ignition...in a harm-free yet vigorous way that is as serious and drastic and "non-returnable" as the physical fire? What does a harm-free human inferno look like? What would a fire look like that relieves, cures, and evolves—rather than chars, blackens, and disintegrates—the people and structures who touch the blaze? We need human beings who will ignite for a harm-free Thoreauvian Jihad for surmounting this national state, and all nation-states in humanity’s world. A harm-free jihad for civilizational recovery.) ***
hymn to columbia To the air now, oh, Dove. 'Tis now or never. Lest the wellsprings of freedom are tainted forever. Dark Night is descending; 'Twill envelope us all; Unless Thou ascending Free us from our thrall. 288
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