Manifesto for a biological democracy
Representative democracy is approaching to its end. Corruption, the growing distance between the politicians and the citizens, the lack of connection between the representatives and the citizenship and the excessive influence of the lobbies have deathly hurt the representative democracy. This crisis is a good example of it. If continue on following this path, we will wither and fade away, and we will be one day a simple remembrance for next generations, as it was Roman Empire for britons, anglos and saxons who came after them to rule Britannia.
Power is corruption, we all know it. Thus said Gandalf to Frodo when he rejects the Ring. But it is not power what is sick, but only the type of power that we have been developing since ages in our little planet called Earth: the vertical power.
During centuries we have created vertical hierarchyc structures, in which the transmission of information and the responsibility fluxes flew form the enormous base of miserable slaves or underpaid workers to the summit of a pyramid where the king, the president, the chairman or the director had all the power.
It is not the same process in Nature. The ecosystems of our planet, probably the most perfect example of dynamic and permanent structure, work horizontally. In an ecosystem there are tenths, hundreds, thousands of relations among animals, plants and microorganisms living on it. Everyone carry out its function, and everyone does it as well as it can. The more diverse is an ecosystem and greater is the number of relations among the different living beings that live on it, the greater will be the capability to resist crisis and catastrophes. In an ecosystem as the African sabana, the lion does not act as a tyranno with the rest of animals: he simply often eats a zebra, usually the weakest of them, and by doing so the lion gets fed and the zebras will evolve by means of natural selection to make more difficult for the lion to eat them.
We have to apply biology to politics, but not in the way that Herbert Spencer did with his social darwinism. Now we know that there exist in Nature thousands of cases of cooperation among animals, and concepts like symbiosis, mutualism and others are not anew for we citizens of XXIth century.
To apply biology to politics, we have to enhance the relationship between the citizenship, as if we where a social ecosystem. To do it, the only way is applying new technologies to sort old problems out. The power of social networks and computers is our most important weapon. Some of these solutions have been yet implemented and tested in groups like the 15-M movement in Terrassa, the city where I live with my son Pau and my wife Sandra. Our goal has to be the construction of boundaries among citizens so strong like those who invisibly bound the bacteria in soil with the roots of the trees, the insects that invade the surface of the barks of the trees and the animals that eat these insects.
My proposal is very simple: we have to come back to the classic agora, to the classical period of our history, but with the XXIst century technology, and without slaves the carry out the tasks that free citizens did in the past. Today the basic requirements for living with dignity can be fulfilled for every citizen in my country if the political authorities do really want it. The banks are expulsing people from their homes while they keep in their property loads of flats with no one living on them. There are families that do not have anything to eat while the supermarkets throw every day tons of food which which can be eaten. If we solve this basic problems, the Greek agora will flourish again, but this time it will be a Agora 2.0, where debates and elections will be done via internet, when the citizens come back home after having worked the half of the day and televisions broadcast daily debates over the law proposals to be voted that very night. If almost every country in the world had its audience addicted to American Idol, Britain’s got Talent and other similar programs, wouldn’t be the common citizen addicted to a TV in which the major and other politicians and citizens discuss about how to build a new green park five streets away from their homes?
Jeremy Rifkin tells us in its latest book of the power of the so-called lateral power, the force of social networks and poses a question to us young people: ¿where do you want to be in the next 20 years?
I pose myself the same question, young men and women of English-speaking countries: what do you want to do with your lifes? Do you want to watch all-day long reality shows and all the football matches? Or do you dare to think, probably the most revolutionary, provocative and obscene act that has created Evolution?
As everything in my blog, this is free material. You can get in touch with me at euterpe80carballo@gmail.com, and you can do copies, translation and your own proposals of rectifications. I will translate it to Catalan in next days and with some help of an old friend of mine I will translate it also to German.
Power is corruption, we all know it. Thus said Gandalf to Frodo when he rejects the Ring. But it is not power what is sick, but only the type of power that we have been developing since ages in our little planet called Earth: the vertical power.
During centuries we have created vertical hierarchyc structures, in which the transmission of information and the responsibility fluxes flew form the enormous base of miserable slaves or underpaid workers to the summit of a pyramid where the king, the president, the chairman or the director had all the power.
It is not the same process in Nature. The ecosystems of our planet, probably the most perfect example of dynamic and permanent structure, work horizontally. In an ecosystem there are tenths, hundreds, thousands of relations among animals, plants and microorganisms living on it. Everyone carry out its function, and everyone does it as well as it can. The more diverse is an ecosystem and greater is the number of relations among the different living beings that live on it, the greater will be the capability to resist crisis and catastrophes. In an ecosystem as the African sabana, the lion does not act as a tyranno with the rest of animals: he simply often eats a zebra, usually the weakest of them, and by doing so the lion gets fed and the zebras will evolve by means of natural selection to make more difficult for the lion to eat them.
We have to apply biology to politics, but not in the way that Herbert Spencer did with his social darwinism. Now we know that there exist in Nature thousands of cases of cooperation among animals, and concepts like symbiosis, mutualism and others are not anew for we citizens of XXIth century.
To apply biology to politics, we have to enhance the relationship between the citizenship, as if we where a social ecosystem. To do it, the only way is applying new technologies to sort old problems out. The power of social networks and computers is our most important weapon. Some of these solutions have been yet implemented and tested in groups like the 15-M movement in Terrassa, the city where I live with my son Pau and my wife Sandra. Our goal has to be the construction of boundaries among citizens so strong like those who invisibly bound the bacteria in soil with the roots of the trees, the insects that invade the surface of the barks of the trees and the animals that eat these insects.
My proposal is very simple: we have to come back to the classic agora, to the classical period of our history, but with the XXIst century technology, and without slaves the carry out the tasks that free citizens did in the past. Today the basic requirements for living with dignity can be fulfilled for every citizen in my country if the political authorities do really want it. The banks are expulsing people from their homes while they keep in their property loads of flats with no one living on them. There are families that do not have anything to eat while the supermarkets throw every day tons of food which which can be eaten. If we solve this basic problems, the Greek agora will flourish again, but this time it will be a Agora 2.0, where debates and elections will be done via internet, when the citizens come back home after having worked the half of the day and televisions broadcast daily debates over the law proposals to be voted that very night. If almost every country in the world had its audience addicted to American Idol, Britain’s got Talent and other similar programs, wouldn’t be the common citizen addicted to a TV in which the major and other politicians and citizens discuss about how to build a new green park five streets away from their homes?
Jeremy Rifkin tells us in its latest book of the power of the so-called lateral power, the force of social networks and poses a question to us young people: ¿where do you want to be in the next 20 years?
I pose myself the same question, young men and women of English-speaking countries: what do you want to do with your lifes? Do you want to watch all-day long reality shows and all the football matches? Or do you dare to think, probably the most revolutionary, provocative and obscene act that has created Evolution?
As everything in my blog, this is free material. You can get in touch with me at euterpe80carballo@gmail.com, and you can do copies, translation and your own proposals of rectifications. I will translate it to Catalan in next days and with some help of an old friend of mine I will translate it also to German.
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