When the First American Constitution was written, it rooted itself in certain principles, which principles today are all the legal prededent we need to do the same act again - to write a Second American Constituion.

We are the source from which the power of any sitting government is derived.  This is first elaborated in the Declaration of Independence, wherein it is stated that the only just powers of a government come from the consent of the governed.  This Idea was later embodied in the First American Constitution, in between two secure bookends.  In the Preamble, it is stated that: We the People...do ordain and establish this Constitution.  Then in the last (the 10th) of the Bill of Rights (sometimes called the reserve clause) it is stated, more or less, that: rights and powers not expressly delegated are reserved to the People.

No where in the First American Constitution does it speak of the creation of a whole new Constitution, but only of the amendment of the existing one.   This being the case, then clearly the power to completely replace the original with a Second American Constitution, is among those powers and rights which were not delegated and therefore are reserved to the People.

What this means is that we possess the power (which we must seize and exercise) to change all the rules that have been used and abused by the Lords of Finance.  We could, for example, change the underlying laws that have been abused to declare that corporations are persons.  We could, for example, insist that all legislation have only one purpose and that the name of that legislation accurately reflect its purpose (no calling an act lessening the air quality standards, a clean air act, for example).  We could require that all government employees, especially all elected officials, can only have the same retirement and medical benefits as ordinary people have.  We could create a third legislative house, whose sole purpose was to undo legislation.  We could require that the public airways be devoted in prime time to keeping an eye on public officials.  We could, we could, and we could....

Is this a daunting task?  Yes it is.   We stand on almost the same ground as did those who wrote and signed the Declaration, and who ended that document with this pledge: And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Their lives were by this act made at risk.  Can we do anything less?

Our advantage is that we can see that in spite of all the seeming obstacles, they very nearly succeeded.  Now history comes around again, and says to us: Time to make the next step, having learned from the past, the errors made by those who went before.  Honor them in all things, especially by taking up their work and moving it forward - the work of once more seeking to answer the question: How does a free people govern themselves?

The Declaration of Independence of the People of the United States of America

authored and signed in cyberspace at the beginning of the Third Millennium

The unanimous Declaration of the People of the United States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political and economic bands which have connected them with one another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them (as various individuals understand Him out of their own freedom), a decent respect to the opinions of humanity requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to that separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creation with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, the pursuit of Happiness, and rights of privacy and information*. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among human beings, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shown, that human beings are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —Such has been the patient sufferance of the American People; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present rule of financial elites is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these the People of the United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

The Lords of Finance, through their corruption of the political and social processes of the Western Democracies, have imposed on the world, and on the American People, a system of banking and of monetary rules and policies entirely for their own benefit.  Any study of the true history of the creation of Central Banking proves this assertion.  Just consider that by this means of creating economic structures totally for their own benefit, the result is that 1% of the people in the world control 50% of its wealth.

They - the Lords of Finance - have, through their surrogates the Democratic and Republican Parties, impeded all efforts to reform our social and democratic processes (such as by our making serious and real changes to campaign financing), thus permitting neither reason or truth to rule our social democratic process, but rather only wealth and the raw power it is able to purchase.

They - the Lords of Finance - have first promoted a false Cold War, and now an equally false War on Terror, for the sole purpose of creating in America a permanent Military and Arms industrial base, intended not for the protection of the People of People's, but rather for the use by the Lords of Finance as a tool for their imperial (world) rule.

They - the Lords of Finance - have used the military might and covert might of American power to manipulate, ruin and destroy - where ever and when ever they felt necessary - systems of government throughout the world that did not bow to their will.

They - the Lords of Finance - have raped the world's environment, enslaved third world peoples economically, destroyed the world's agricultural riches by the introduction of dangerous chemicals and unproven new genetic forms into the eco-system of the whole world, all in the search for ever greater power and money.

This is not to say, that no benefit to humanity has arisen from some of these changes and developments, but rather that at every juncture where it was a choice between improving the lot of life of ordinary people or enriching themselves, the Lords of Finance choose that path most beneficial to themselves, well all the while, corrupting government processes everywhere possible in the vain pursuit of this immoral goal.

It becomes a question then of how do We the People, already in possession of one hard won Constitution, remove this insidious influence from our shared social and political existence, for one of the evil means by which the Lords of Finance rule is by remaining anonymous and invisible.

On this basis we reject as no longer workable this beloved and now flawed and corrupted original Constitution, declare it null and void, and assert our right to replace it with that which we believe more carefully addresses and protects us from the over-reaching of concentrated wealth.

We recognize that this task will have as its main difficulty the removing of the existing financial structures in which all the Peoples of the world have become ensnared.  The separation of the original 13 Colonies from the English aristocracy was far easier.  Here we need to rise above something far more entangled in every aspect of our daily lives.

In addition, we will have to confess our addiction to the comforts this concentration of wealth has made possible for a majority of the American People.  The truth is that we cannot move from our current conditions to those which are yet possible without owning our own responsibility and participation in the concentration of 80% of the world's wealth among only 20% of the world's people.

In this declaration then we have to assert two essential matters.

I.  The Lords of Finance need to be taken out of their anonymous and secret rule and made to face, as named individuals, the judgment of the world for their crimes against our rights as human beings, the crimes against our free choice of government and their crimes against the planet and the environment we all share.

II.  The People of America need to confess our own excesses and own up to our own responsibilities, and by this means replace the rule of elites and their surrogate political tools - the Democratic and Republican Parties, with Citizen Governance.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. These Merchant Princes, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyranny, are unfit to be the rulers of any free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our American political brethren. We have warned our elected officials from time to time of their attempts to serve themselves instead of the people by their legislative efforts to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over our civil liberties, at the same time they reward themselves with privileges and benefits (such as medical coverage) they deny to us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our privations and dissatisfactions. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have entreated them by the ties of our shared humanity to disavow these usurpations, such as their abuse of  constant re-districting as a means to keep themselves from being challenged for election, which has placed them outside our rule through the ballot. They have also become deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity, in that we ask for and need a protected ballot, safe from electronic theft with a paper trail so that all will know our real wishes. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces as essentially treasonous the behavior by which they preferred the wishes of the Lords of Finance over the real needs of the America People, and hold them, as we hold the rest of humanity, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the People of the united States of America, via cyberspace communion, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these many States, solemnly publish and declare, That these the People of the United States of America are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent of the economic tyranny of the Lords of Finance and their surrogates, the Republican and Democratic Parties; that we are Absolved from all Allegiance to the economic rules created by the Lords of Finance and any allegiance to the present standing government of America, which has usurped excessive powers, failed in its sacred trust, and acted with conscious treason against the Republic, and that all political connection between us and the present sitting government of these many States, standing as it does solely for the benefit of the Lords of Finance, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent People, we have full Power to engage in civil disobedience, refuse to honor claims on our wealth by the many banks, ignore levies for armies, refuse to pay taxes, print our own money and any other acts of freedom necessary to resist the continued rule of the Lords of Finance, or the excessive and dishonorable abuses of power by the Republican and Democratic Parties, and to do all other Acts and Things which an Independent and free People  may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

"It is the right of every citizen to sufficient information to be able to make informed decisions.

"It is the right of every citizen to a sphere of informational privacy, inviolate from the intrusions of the State or commercial and employment interests. This sphere is to be defined by the individual citizen themselves. Citizens who widely construct their private sphere of information rights must expect the normal consequences that flow from such an act (such as limitations on possible forms of employment).

"No government or private institution may withhold information needed by a free citizenry for the exercise of its duties. The Congress shall pass laws mandating appropriate and severe punishment for the violation of this right of information. Likewise, the Congress shall make laws mandating appropriate and severe punishment for violations of the right of privacy.

"When any citizen believes his or her information rights have been violated, the Courts must make inquiry, without cost to the citizen. In order to not overburden the Courts, the Office of Informational Ombudsman will be created by the Congress, which will mediate all preliminary inquires into requests, and violations, that arise from the exercise of these rights.

"Where a conflict arises between the right of privacy and the right to information, the Courts will seek the balancing principle in the Platonic ideal of the Good. For the purposes of this bill of information rights no non-living entity, such as a corporation, or other institution or organization, shall be deemed a person or a citizen."

Section Three: The Real Power of Citizenship both as an American, and as a Citizen of the World

Fundamentally, there is a war going on.  This is a war created and managed by the Lords of Finance, and being carried out against the majority of the world's Peoples.   Here is the picture we need to have...

The Aristocracy of Concentrated Wealth (the Lords of Finance), having become the hidden inheritors of the powers previously held by the Aristocracies of Blood, are engaged in feudal wars with each other.   These wars seem, in the present, to be like wars among Nation States, but in each case the Nation State is just a surrogate for the behind the scenes power of Financial Elites.

Even in the case of what is being called the Clash of Civilizations, the real battle is over power and wealth, with some power hungry arrogant rulers disguising themselves as religious leaders.   This is really a matter of human psychology, and the theistic element merely an excuse.  Human beings are drawn, out of their shadow side, toward power.  Power is the ultimate drug.  The ego becomes thereby inflated - what sometimes is called meglomania - as a result of this addiction to power, eventually and irrationally believing itself to be a justified arbritary power in the world.

Any religious leader, of whatever faith, who uses his (or her) assumed spiritual authority as a power in the realm of politics reveals his (or her) inflated sense of self and addiction to power.  Certainly, such individuals will abuse the doctrines of their religion to create after the fact justifications (reasoning to a foregone conclusion), but anyone conversant with the moral depth of the world's great religions knows that the core of these religions is service, love, generosity and similar qualities of being.  It is always a mal-interpretation of the teachings to assert they promote war, hate, terror - which leads us back again and again to understanding that the real root of the political behavior of far too many religious leaders is their personal and irrational addiction to power.

As a consequence the world is filled with far too many leaders of Nation States, whose hungers and appetites are frequently the real driving motive.  Behind them, the banking and financial powers support, or not, such leaders with loans and other kinds of help as long as the political leader follows the lead of the Lords of Finance with regard to how economic rules are structured.

For example, the main offense of Saddam Hussein was not his abuse of his People, his flirting with weapons of mass destruction or even his control of vast amounts of oil production and reserves.  His principle error was to be seeking to take his economy, particularly his oil wealth, and disconnect it from the dollar and unite it with the Euro.  No other act was more threatening to the principle group of the Lords of Finance, the axis of English and American banking and corporate families.   A great portion of their wealth (and power) is tied to the dollar, and no act of Iraq's dictator was more dangerous to their continued dominance (within the feudal wars the Lords make among themselves, and for which ordinary people all suffer disasterous consequences).

This is the same financial sin now being committed by Iran - a threat to take their oil resources away from any connection to the dollar and put it with the Euro.  This is why it was crucial to the Lords to dominate the American Presidency and by this means have access to American military might.  A Nation State which does not play the game according to their rules was to find itself at war.

All during the 20th Century the Lords of Finance have had unlimited access to political power to promote and develop their control and their status.  The very very rich have come to rule the world from behind the scenes.  In the Western Democracies this has been more directly accomplished by institutionalizing intermediate structures, which were then used to identify and develop political and intellectual talent, at the same time seducing them with access to power and wealth.  The main institutions in England and America were and are the Rhodes Scholarships (identifying American talent and taking it to England for its "economic" education), the Trilateral Commission (the main American think tank for the Lords of Finance) and the Council on Foreign Relations (the main English think tank for the Lords).

Any careful reading of the biographies, of literally hundreds of English and American leading politicians, and dominant government officials (Secretaries of State, Home Secretaries and so forth), will reveal their participation in one or more of these institutions, where they have been drawn into the inner circles of power and wealth [See in this regard, Confessisons of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins].  Generally they will never become billionaires, but certainly they will be millionaires and move easily in these spheres of privilege.  Imagine being a young Rhodes Scholar, for example, taken one afternoon to the huge estate of an English Lord, who has impeccable connections within world-wide banking and finance circles and told that you are to be part of those circles of elite power which will (and must) run the world, for the lower classes simply lack the intelligence and the practical financial savvy to be allowed, through democratic means, to make the required macro decisions by which international relations and economic markets are made stable and healthy.

What a rush it must feel in the soul to be anointed as one of the lonely few, possibly destined for the top, where such responsibility will rest on your shoulders; yet to know that behind you will stand such a power as is having tea with you that day.  With a nod and a wink you are welcomed into a fraternity only a few know exists.  Your future is now assured.

As to those strange places in the world, where there exists the few who might resist the rule of the American and English establishment, well that is part of the game you are going to be able to play.  As regards the petty dictatorships, such as in South America or Africa, for the taming of these there exists the CIA and its English cousin MI6 - these will do the wet and dirty work when needed, at those times when the pressure brought to bear by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on those nations' central banks does not work. 

And such as China and India, well they too will most often be led by individuals who also want wealth and power, and where wealth and power are desired, agreements can be made, for after all we are all reasonable men, are we not.

So the 20th Century progressed and the 21st begins.  The elites of finance and power play their feudal games, using their serfs and peasants to make the wealth and to fill the ranks of the armies, when and if necessary.  Meanwhile, if one has become a member of the privileged classes, then more and more there comes to be two worlds.

One world will be above, with private jets or at worst first class flights to safe and secure airports and hotels, with all the amenities (wine and companionship) any man or woman could desire.  Here will be the meetings in which the deals are made, by the underlings of the feudal lords, through which they divide and organize the world among themselves.  Meanwhile the Lords will rest content on their vast private estates, protected by private armies, eating the best foods, having the best health care and the most secure lives.

Oh, once and a while a terrorist (someone tired of being poor and ignored) will get through the defenses of a few of these elite classes, but in the main and as a group, the Lords of Finance and their families will survive and endlessly perpetuate themselves.  At least that is their dream, and the dream with which they seduce others.

And, in the other world - the world below the Lords of Finance and their servants - the middle class will disappear.   A certain degree of anarchy and disease will be promoted, since the engine of the world only needs so many workers and soldiers as long as the Lords can remain somewhat civil with each other.  Electronic IDs will be the norm, even if one wants to work for a pittance, since any wage will then be a considered a privilege to have.   The rest, the undocumented and unnumbered, will exist solely on the refuse heaps of an economically feudal civilization, and, with luck, survive mainly by their own wits.

Maybe...

This scenario, while quite visible in the current tendencies and trends, need not arise.  But for it not to arise, ordinary People have to discover their power, for in spite of the contrary views of the elite Lords of Finance, we do have our own power - a power equal to that of the Lords.

It is a moral power, and it is as free moral human beings (freely choosing our own intuitions as to what the good is in any instance), that we can learn how to restore balance to the world.  Balance and harmony are the crucial goals.  Although the Lords make war on the poor, it by no means is required of us that we make war on them.

Let me digress a moment, to share something I heard some months ago that is rooted in the spiritual wisdom of Africa, not well known at all in the West.  We, in the West, know a great deal about Christianity, Buddhism, and if we have been paying attention even the wisdom of Islam, but about the deeper African wisdoms, little is known outside of small circles.  Since I am not practiced in this wisdom, I can only share my incomplete understanding.

In a conflict, so it is taught, one Way to approach resolution, is for one side to so understand the needs, hungers and desires of the other, that they seek a Way to support those who make war on them.  Instead of standing in opposition, they seek a means to satisfy what is wished for by the other - to take on the burden of meeting these needs which have driven them to conflict.

This is very profound if one thinks about it carefully, and may exactly be what is needed so that the coming years can be traversed with the moral impulses of many different kinds of people finding harmony and balance, in a situation where someone else makes war upon us.   The seeking after dominance, by an elite, over the great mass of others (who do not seek dominance), whether it be through financial, political or even religious powers, can be resisted in ways that do not have to end in bloodshed. (blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth)

At the very least such must be tried, until no other choices remain.

Consider for a moment how one becomes a member of the Lords, or of their immediate circles of servants.  Mostly wealth is inherited, although occassionally it is won anew such as those who have risen to the top of the revolution in electronics.  But if we examine the biography of many of these elites of wealth (by whatever path it came to them) we find the riddle exposed by Christ when he said: "it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven".

The central crisis of the world is moral in nature, and those with the least difficulty in ignoring conscience seem to more easily rise into and live with great wealth.   The moral problem is fairly simple.  When you have more than you need, how do you live with yourself, and keep to yourself this excess beyond real need.  In a world full of hunger and deprivation, certainly conscience will advise modesty and humility as regards living beyond one's real needs.  Yet, as we know, many cannot do this; and, this is a problem not only among the wealthy elites, but everywhere that human excess of appetite finds no restraint.

The elites could have run the world with greater wisdom.  There once was the ideal of noblesse oblige - the obligations of the nobles, such that those with power and wealth were paternal and caring towards those of lesser station.  But the current crop of Lords have lost this ability to know how to father and mother a world, and, in this failure to attend to their potential moral stewardship, they have fallen into a state that can only be called: moral childhood.

The Lords of Finance are moral children, and it is in Civil Society (see Appendix D) where those are found who are willing to shoulder the tasks of true stewardship of the world - to be the real sacrificing fathers and mothers of the future.  What then is their/our power?

Our true power lies in speech and in naming.   We tell the stories to the children of the meaning of the world.  We give the names of things, and so far in the last stages of life of Western Civilization, this power has fallen into disuse - in fact often usurped by the Lords and their various surrogates, who have woven over and around our civilization a set of lies about the nature of finance, and about the true nature of the human being.

Our one great weapon in this war is the truth, and it has been my privilege, in the company of many others, to begin to articulate that truth out of which we need to build the future.  Everywhere Civil Society (in whatever form of individual or community expression) speaks out, ideas are used and ideas have power.  Just consider the usage in this little booklet of such terms as: the Lords of Finance, the People of Peoples  and moral children.

Where ever we discover ourselves to have surrendered to illusion, we have the power to cut through it with the truth.  This truth, authored individually out of our own spiritual freedom, to think our own thoughts and make our own moral judgments, casts both fire and light on the present crisis of civilization.  The Lords have hidden in the dark of anonymity, and once we begin to shine the light on them, all their power begins to weaken.

So we name them and we name their misdeeds and we name our real needs.  Thus begins the battle, a battle over the meaning of the world.

Once the light of truth burns more and more brightly, the Lords will be tempted to increase their restraint on speech and public gatherings.  Yet, our Founders, and the other creators of the Western Democracies, have left us a blessing.  They claimed and acted upon not only rights of speech and assembly, but also the right to author the fundamental laws.   The People are now the true source of governmental powers, and the threads of this power and authority we have to once again gather to ourselves.

This we do when we make our Delaration and then begin to gather in Renewal Groups and assert the Right of Citizen Governance to author a Second American Constitution.  We the People again take up once more the fundamental discussion of the nature of government and the rights of a truly free people, now informed by the results of the first iteration of that grand experiment that is the Republic.

We have seen how wealth acquired unjustified power and corrupted our institutions, and now we can seek to remove from our lives this treason against the Republic.   We have the power to speak and think and raise such a collective noise, from so many sources at once, that the Lords will have no choice but to rethink their posture.   Do they want to plunge civilization into internal wars which will tear down all that they have built, or will they confess and admit their errors of stewardship and recognize that liberty, equality and brotherhood will be asserted in the world, whether they oppose it or not.

For the truth is that as we seek to write a Second American Constitution, an act of power that will be a second shot heard 'round world, this will draw into question the value of private property itself.  It was by inserting the rights of private property into our original constitution, as equal to or higher than our individual rights as human beings, that then brought us to this place and time.  But now we awake and wonder: Do we want to go that far, and leave behind the childish notion of private property and substitute instead laws of stewardship, which recognize that all human beings are brothers and sisters, dependents upon our mutual stewardship of this home - this planet; and, that the claim of the rich to own it all through hidden rites of power and intimidation must now be put down and ended?

This is our dilemma, and this is also our power.  We take our moral authority in authoring truth and meaning, and by this means lead the world toward true sister and brotherhood (And crown thy Good (individual moral impulses) with Brotherhood (the recognition that the Earth must belong to all).

Yet, let us take the next moment to return to the wisdom out of heart of Africa, the wisdom that suggests that the best road to creatively resolve conflict is for one side to ask of the other: What do you need and how can we serve?

What would the Lords say in the face of such a question.

They might say a truth, which is that their judgment was correct that the common man was not qualified to organize that aspect of society which consists of finance and markets.  Civil Society is not really in a position of deciding this was a false judgment.  They also might say another truth, which is that history shows that political leaders, whether Kings or Presidents, often have an excess of egotism, that disables them from properly managing the same economic questions.

We could then reply, yes this is true, but how did you handle this riddle?  Did you approach it honestly and openly and with the interest of all in mind, or did you hide your manipulations and place your own privileges, wealth and power above the rest of us?

This they should confess as wrong.  They may not, of course, but at least we need to make the offer as we move in the direction of the Second American Constitution.  Truth to tell, we need expertise in banking and finance, just as we need expertise in medicine and science.  What we don't need is lies and we don't need to be treated as mere workers and consumers.  Such treatment is in vicious denial of what it means to be a sovereign human being and citizen of the Republic and of the World, where rights are to be equal for all.  The very very rich do not have the right to run our lives, ruin our world, deprive our children and save themselves at the expense of everyone else.

That much is clear, and as we require of them that they reveal themselves and come out of hiding into a public dialog with us, we have a right to expect truth and justice.  If they cannot meet us as human beings possessed of equal rights, then battle lines will surely be drawn and these harsh but true words may well be rendered into equally harsh but true deeds.

At the same time, we need to anticipate that in the beginning they will try to control with raw political power our efforts to rid the world of their tyranny.  They will bring back laws of sedition, and will arrest people for speaking out.  What then do we do when this battle escalates in such ways?

There is a new power in the world, or perhaps better stated: a renewed version of a very old power.  The now clearly useless and morally bankrupt paternalism of Western Civilization is on the wane, and arising to supplant it is a new maternalism - new powers of the Feminine Mysteries.  The moral power of women can be seen clearly at the heart of much of Civil Society.

So, let's imagine what happens when a few voices are stilled under sedition laws...

Imagine 100,000 grandmothers confronting the authorities with the same acts.  If you are going to arrest one of us, you must arrest all of us.  How long will the authorities be able to resist such power of moral shaming, as when young mothers with babies, and old women in wheel chairs, accompanied by all their male helpers and friends take to the streets and say, if you arrest one of us for such words, you must arrest all of us (as in the movie Sparticus, we all step forward and say: I am Sparticus).

This battle need never be fought with any other weapons than the willing sacrifice of one's own freedoms or life, and by the confrontation of the moral children of the world (the Lords of Finance), by their loving and understanding moral fathers and mothers (Civil Society).  Instead of hungering for one Gandhi, we all become Gandhi's.

Yes, such courage is hard to find in individuals, but it is not so hard when we act as a community.  Many hands make light work, and many hearts make the yoke of such love very easy to bear.

And so I ask, as did those who signed the original Declaration of Independence, that from this point forward we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

So be it.

Here is something in the same mood, written by J. Michael Straczynski, which I have adapted by changing some language.  [The original can be found in Appendix G]

The Earth speaks in many languages, but only one voice.  The language is not English, or French, or Dinka, or Inuit or Mandarin.  It speaks in the language of hope.  It speaks in the language of trust.  It speaks in the language of strength and the language of compassion, which is the language of the heart, and the language of the soul.  But always it is the same voice.  It is the voice of our ancestors speaking through us, and the voice of our inheritors waiting to be born.   It is the small still voice that says: We are one, no matter the blood, no matter the skin, no matter the language, no matter the land.   We are one, no matter the pain, no matter the darkness, no matter the loss, no matter the fear.  We are one.  Here, gathered together in common cause we agree to recognize this singular truth and this singular rule: That we must be kind to one another.  Because each voice enriches us and ennobles us.  And each voice lost diminishes us. We are the voice of the Earth, the soul of Creation, the fire that will light the way to a better future.  We are one.


{see also, Celebration and Theater: a People's Art of Statecraft}

Appendix A:

Money and Debt

- the Company Store and the beginning of the 21st Century -

You are not going to like this one bit, but below, in as simple words as possible, I am going to try to explain my certainly imperfect  understanding of the reality of money in our time.

The short version goes like this...

The Central Banks - which are private institutions, not governmental institutions - get to print money and control interest rates.  These powers should belong to Nation States, but as Central Banking came to be the norm all over the world, the control of these two of the four main powers (taxing, spending, printing money and rate of interest control) of an economy has been stolen (via political manipulation) from Nation States and placed in the hands of private banking institutions.  In the United States this happened in the era in between 1910 and 1920, when the Federal Reserve Act was passed.

Other rules had to follow, but in the main this one was the principle tool by which the Lords of Finance began their liberation from the rule of Nation States.  This liberation is now nearly complete, with the final pieces being put in place using the power of goverment, via international trade agreements - treaties, to bind the Nation States to rules of trade consistent with Central Banking and primarly for the benefit of already existing concentrated wealth.

What do banks get to do, and what does a Central Bank get to do, that violates our right and need to exist as autonomous human beings?

Banks take in deposits, in terms of savings and cash accounts, for which they charge us fees.  They get to play with our money (which we have earned and they have not) and make money for themselves.  They do return a small amount as interest, but in comparison with what they earn through fees and other financial transactions using our money, this interest is a trifle.

Not only that, but they loan us back our own money and charge us for the loan.  Now money does need to move around a bit, it is a kind of spiritual blood for an economy.  But a bank is not just a fee for services business, but is rather a kind of dam, behind which money piles up, because of the mass of depositors and other clients.  This piled up money is like the water behind a dam - it can be converted to additional wealth and power.

Now there was a time when money had to stand for something else - usually precious metals, but that day is long past.  Now money is just air (or paper).  It has no intrinsic value.

Central Banks are different from other banks, for they get to issue money.  In the United States, the Treasury does print the money, but the Central Bank gets to "distribute" it.  It appears to be the People's money, being supposedly issued by our government, but in point of fact it belongs to the Central Banks and is for them completely free.

Whereas an ordinary bank has to receive deposits from the people who are forced to exchanged their labor for money, a Central Bank gets to make it's "deposits" up out of nothing.   This free money is then first distributed, in the United States for example, to the Seven regional Federal Reserve Banks which then "loan" it to more ordinary banks.  Sometimes during this process the amount of money in play increases, in that there are rules that let such "loans" be for more than the "value" of the "deposits".  I put all these words in quotation marks because they are a kind of lie - small lies among very big lies about how money really works.

Now in terms of geo-politics, the Nation States of Europe and of England and America, had achieved a kind of dominance as we entered the 20th Century, with the Nation States of Russian, India, Japan and China lagging a bit behind.  We can't leave out geo-politics, because it is in the political realm where the big lies are told about banking and finance in order for the rules, that principally benefit the Lords of Finance, to come into being.  That some of these Nations were encouraged to experiment with communism and some with socialism is another factor, but in the end it comes down to political power being used to engender Central Banking everywhere.

As a consequence of the geo-political struggles, wealth mostly concentrated during the first part of the 20th Century in England and America, and somewhat to a lesser degree in what are called the western democracies.   After World War II, other Nation States began to be players in this game.  This then came to bring it about that about 20% of the World's total population enjoyed about 80% of the wealth.

This can get to be a bit confusing, for those Nation States with wealth in the ground (oil, minerals, diamonds etc.) ought to have been more powerful, but the grip of the Lords of Finance on the economic rules of the game (so to speak) was such that those Peoples with wealth in the ground, couldn't get it out of the ground and into circulation without being compromised (corrupted).  So even though great portions of oil, for example, was in the middle East, the only way to market it was through the Seven Sisters (the big oil companies).  Eventually this lead to currencies themselves being treated as commodities (money as goods), and again the ones, who created the rules of the markets in which money as goods was bought and sold, made out like bandits (literally).

What the Lords did next with this concentration of wealth is very interesting.

Credit Cards...

Fake money is created by the Central Banks, "multiplied" and then passed on to ordinary banks, where it then is loaned via credit cards to consumers.  Consumers (us) spend the money, while often leaving it to temporarily lay around in the ordinary banks where it makes them even more money, and in the process of accepting this credit, which is "sold" to us, we acquire debt.

To help this explosion of credit work to make even more money, all manner of regulations and statutes on interest rates (usury) were set aside in various places, so that recently in England a credit card was being offered to the poor with a 78% interest rate.  This makes legal what otherwise was called loan sharking.

Our government does the same thing.  It borrows money to pay for its own excesses (just as we borrow to pay for our excesses).  And, since the way government works, the treasury debt is also our debt (for which payment we will later be taxed - each of us singly (including our children) now owes over $30,000.00 - that is every man, woman and child in America owes this portion of our so-called national debt).   So not only are we acquiring huge amounts of debt to pay for our own spending habits, but also for the spending habits of rich politicians, who use our tax money and national debt to get re-elected (pork barrel legislation, give aways to businesses etc.)

So we have personal credit cards and our government has a huge credit card (deficit spending covered by Treasury Bills), with the result that everywhere debt grows.  But where does the money come from that everyone is borrowing?  Its being printed by Central Banks and is not at all real!  This process is, of course, highly inflationary.   This huge inflationary tendency is why it is necessary for Central Banks to control interest rates at the same time they create fake wealth through printing money.   So the Fed (in the USA) is always tinkering with the interest rates, not so much because rising labor and raw materials costs cause inflation, but because constantly printing new money causes inflation.  The result is that the fake money in play is always increasing, and the Fed has to constantly trick the interest rates in order to keep the naturally occuring inflation in check.

And where does the fake money we spend go?  It goes to huge multinational businesses (arms merchants, chemical companies, energy companies, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, banks and so on), where it then concentrates in just a few - what the comedian George Calin calls: the owners.

In a sense, ordinary people living in the big lies of finance and money are just a tube through which money is passed as it circulates from its creation in Central Banks, to were it ends up in the hands of the Lords of Finance, from where it is next used to corrupt our politicians.  As it passes through the tube - that is us consumers and workers - it leaves behind debt.

Not too long ago, some people lived in areas where they worked for a company, lived in company housing, and bought everything they needed in terms of necessities from the company store.  They were the slaves, peasants and serfs, and the company owners (who owned the land, the housing and the goods on sale in the store) were the aristocrats of wealth.  We now live in that same system which in the 20th Century has come exist on a scale that encompasses the whole earth (You think you own your home?  You're kidding yourself - the bank owns it, you just have the illusion - the financial lie - of ownership).

Think about it.  The scale of this store is so huge it is near invisible.  Just because General Motors and General Electric seem to be different companies, owned by different shareholders, doesn't mean that, as the money rises through the system to the places in which it concentrates far above what we visibly know, the hand that rules the system of banking don't well understand how their knowledge of the real way finance works gives them an advantage we can hardly imagine.   The super rich are not rich by accident.

The debt left behind, by the movement of air-money as credit, is then used coercively to make us compliant socially.  The advertising business makes us want things (the carrot) and the debt we acquire to get these things drives us to keep working (the stick).  The companies we work for more and more abuse their workers (the labor movement failed completely in the 20th Century), and as everyone who is paying any attention at all knows, our civil liberties, already under attack by our own government, stop at the door of the company for which we work.

Meanwhile, the true owners - the Lords of Finance - are free to corrupt our goverments in order to make the rules of finance serve their own needs at our expense.

We are given education that is more like training to be good consumers and workers, than a real education which would enable us to unfold all our latent potential.  Instead of health care we get to take care of the financial health of insurance and pharmaceutical companies.  Instead of government protecting us, the Lords of Finance use government to be protected from us (can't sue businesses for their negligent failures, much less their intentional ones).  Instead of our receiving the news and information needed to help us be good citizens, we get infotainment and distraction - TV is a drug among a whole cornucopia of drugs (going shopping is another good one), which keep us subdued and asleep.   What's going to happen when we wake up?

Want to know just how good the Lords of Finance are at this stuff?   Here's an article about the recent drop in gas prices coming just before the 2006 American by-election:

"TREASURY SECRETARY'S FIRM MAY HAVE PLAYED MAJOR ROLE IN GAS PRICE DROP

"LE METROPOLE CAFÉ - In yesterday's WSJ in Section C there is a very, very interesting item in the article, Some Investors Lose Their Zest  For Commodities. The article notes that over that past few months, commodity funds have been liquidating commodity holdings. But here's the stunner: "Consider the Goldman Sachs commodity index, one of the most popular vehicles for betting on raw materials. In July, Goldman Sachs tweaked the index's content by cutting its exposure to gasoline. Investors tracking the index had to adjust their portfolios accordingly – which sent gasoline futures prices tumbling.

"Prior to Goldman's July GSCI revision, unleaded gas accounted for 8.45% of the GSCI. Now unleaded gas is only 2.30%. This means commodity funds had to sell 73% of its gasoline futures to conform to the reformulated GSCI. . .

"Here we have Goldman, qua keeper of the commodities index, manipulating markets simply by adjusting index components. It is noteworthy in several respects. First, we are used to the notion of them front running market sensitive information announced by third parties, but here a glorified hedge fund - albeit one dominating central banks and finance ministries worldwide - maintains market-moving indices itself. . . .  Second, it lends credence to the theory that the current well-publicized commodities decline is just a well-timed, well-orchestrated head fake to benefit the incumbents in the run up to the midterm elections - someone noted recently that Bush's ratings vary inversely with gas prices. . . www.lemetropolecafe.com "

Citizen Governance

- the future of the Republic form of government -

[originally part of the website "some thoughts on the nature of public life -
and an offer of service", at: http://ipwebdev.com/campaign/cg1.html]

The United States of America is the first Nation where a certain fundamentally human impulse toward true freedom emerged on the Stage of History.  Long in preparation, this impulse was/is connected to the gradual appreciation of the individual of his/her fundamental personal sovereignty - our individual free power of choice.  It is only out of the choices of the I am , or the spirit , of the individual human being, that governments obtain their just powers.  From the authoring of the U.S. Constitution forward, governments were to be seen as only having those powers granted to them by the community of sovereign individual human spirits, which constituted a particular Nation or People.

If we can appreciate how long it took for this principle to emerge onto the Stage of History, then it is possible to also appreciate how it is that this principle will require considerable time to grow into maturity.  The appearance of this principle, in its present restatement, is simply one among many other iterations of the reappearance of this impulse in modern times.   It is not new, nor is my articulation of it the only possible one.

The Declaration of Independence, states among its very first principles: " .., Governments are instituted among Men, deriving the just powers from the consent of the governed ,.. "

and the U.S. Constitution begins: " We the People ... ".

The central act is the uniting of the individual sovereign power of free choice into a community, a Nation and a People, from which then the siting government receives its powers.

However, against this striving out of the hearts and minds of individual sovereign spirits was arrayed the vast weight of the Past.  Having its own momentum, the Past did not easily step aside for the birth of this just power with its fundamental right of Consent.  Men and women were too used to the old ways, where power lived in the aristocracies of blood and inheritance.  Thus, even though a fundamental shift had occurred at the level of our understanding, the outer forms of social relations were slow to evolve.  The aristocracies of blood became replaced with aristocracies of wealth.

Such is the condition of the world today.  Oligarchies of wealth constitute the most typical form of rule over various peoples all over the world.  It some cases it is fairly obvious, and in others, such as apparent democracies, the ruling elites have worked at keeping their activity hidden.

One of the most interesting aspects of this situation is that a core element of the reasoning of concentrated wealth, in support of its point of view, has considerable validity.  This is the view that the average citizen lacks the understanding and capacity to participate in macro decisions - the kind of decisions that determine the stability of markets, and the free flow of trade upon which the modern world has become dependent.  According to this reasoning, only the financially astute know what is needed to know in order to maintain an economic environment in which wealth can continue to be generated.  This apparent truth then justifies all manner of manipulations of the inner workings of various governments.

On the surface then, it appears that the world is locked into a what is essentially a class struggle, between the rich and the poor, over the determination of the social rules of modern and future societies.  In fact, is there any reason to expect the aristocracies of concentrated wealth to abandon their positions of power and privilege without a very great battle?

Here then is the moral riddle at the heart of the modern age.  If citizen governance is to emerge into the light of world affairs in a responsible manner, will it take a course that violently destroys  the Past, or will it find some other path through this Rite of Passage that the Hopi Prophecies call: The Day of Purification.  And, in parallel, will the existing powers hold so strongly to their position and privilege such that all their considerable forces are spent trying to hold down the emergence of this sovereign individual community impulse.

If such a War ensues, then the Republic that the founders of the United States of America created will dissolve into chaos, to be replaced by either anarchy on the one hand, or some form of dictatorship (fascist or otherwise) on the other.

If we wish to avoid Battle, then the issues come down to this: By what means will we proceed ?

If the nature of our choices involves the assumption of a proper end goal - a certain right way the future needs to turn out - then we will automatically pursue a course of conflict, for the very fact of our individual sovereign natures assumes that we each will have a different end in mind.  On the other hand, if we choose to place the emphasis on how we go about stepping into the future, the basic form of the Republic that was bequeathed to us remains the most viable, healthy and just way .

To help understand this, we should notice that citizen governance is young.  It has so far rested mostly in an ideal form, as the main principle of the form of government of the United States.   Our present time offers us the opportunity to take this ideal further into reality - further into incarnation.

There are two ways that I recommend.  Both are essential, and one can participate in either or both as one wishes.

One is for ordinary citizens to run for office.  Such activity was certainly in the minds of our founders, and it is much needed in the present, for the class of professional politicians has, in the main, lost its way.  Were I younger I would choose this way myself.

The second means is the formation of conversation groups, or what I have elsewhere called: renewal groups (see Appendix B).  I have used the term renewal to emphasize the fact that this idea is not new, and was central from the very beginning of our Republic.  But it has fallen into a condition of sleep and disuse, so that if we are to return it to its pivotal place within our form of government, then we must - out of ourselves - call it forth in conversation with each other.

Conversation is the crucial aspect - the essence.  We have tended to think, having lost a true understanding of the nature of the Republic form of government, that the power of the people resided in the vote - that is that we were some form of democracy (which we are not).  More essential than the vote is our mutual spiritual work at expressing, out of our own insight, what we consider to be the nature of the good as that applies to the form and order of society.  It is our individual sovereign moral will, conveyed in the form of ideals from one to the other, that is the essential act of citizen governance.  Out of these heart-felt conversations then emerges that vision of the future toward which we then direct our elected representatives to strive to achieve.

Those, who also take the other path - that of seeking to represent us, very much need our guidance.  They work for us.   But the eternal truths to which we form allegiance, these are to be discovered in the renewal groups.  At present, the situation is almost the opposite.  The powers of concentrated wealth, and their political allies, work very hard at forming public opinion.  What we think is not so important as what we can be made to think.  Knowledge of true facts is routinely withheld.  What is provided is warped into that meaning most convenient to the speakers.  A representative form of government (our Republic) cannot thrive when all that the People are provided is a sea of lies and half-truths.

At the same time, this apparent abuse of power, by the wealthy elites and their servants, cannot (yet) imprison our hearts and minds.  Having free speech, and the gift of the word , we have the capacity to meet with each other and consider the fundamental and essential questions facing our society.  In this process of asking ourselves questions, and listening to each other offer responses, we begin that work - that means -  whose pathway offers us the most sane passage through the historic crises of the moment.

For the truth is this.   Our fundamental sovereignty as individuals is a reflection of our divine nature.   In this age of materialism, where we have unnaturally separated matter and spirit, we have also lost confidence in the moral.  Today people are content to limit their acts to what is legal, which my law professors described as the lower limit of the expectations that can be placed on human behavior.  To do only what is legal is to do the least socially acceptable act.

No society has life and vitality if its members not only expect of themselves the least, but even worse, intentionally pass downward through that boundary for reasons of personal greed (witness the massive failures now apparent in our business communities).   The renewal of the Republic can only come out of moral deeds, deeds of conscience - deeds first born in acts of individual conscience, which are then merged through conversation in to a community of ideals.

At the same time such deeds need to proceed in moderation.  Individuals, meeting in renewal groups and learning to express their hearts to each other in mutual tolerance, while considering the fundamental goals and purposes of human society, perform a sacred art.  This art of conversation then spreads from one to the other, eventually merging with other conversations  in a vast cooperative act of public ideal self examination.  Where we have been asleep, now we are awake, and our considerations become the light by which our public servants can then do those appointed tasks that we so much need for them to do.

It will not be easy.  To rise from a public expectation of behavior directed toward the merely legal to an understanding of individual moral insight will be no simply matter.  This is hard work, for not only do we have a political Past, but we also have a religious Past, and a scientific Past.  The vast weight of these ideas can be a terrible prison for the future.  Yet, if we take the time to live with trust in each other's hearts, then the mutual work of the sacred art of conversation will lead us to just that community of ideals we need to light the way.

We need have no end in mind at all.  The means - the conversation arising out of our understanding of the principle of citizen governance - will ensure that we travel the roads of life in all the mutual faith and company that we need.

Appendix C:

Appendix D:

Civil Society:

While the social body itself is  life-filled in its nature (organic), it is moved, just as our human bodies are moved, by the higher (and lower) principles of soul and spirit active within it.    Thus, the emergence, out of the general conditions of modern civilization of Civil Society, is the result of moral/spiritual impulses arising in human hearts.

These have reached a critical mass, in part as a response to the excesses and extremes of our lower nature that have to date seemed to dominate the formation of the global economy.   Even so, there is much more here than meets the eye.

It might help to look at the social world without coloring it with our values, with our likes and dislikes.  We do have this habit of mind that evaluates people, events, history - everything we might call the social world, the world of human beings and their associations and activities.  Now even though we evaluate this shared social existence, we don't evaluate Nature in this way.  Nature we accept as a given, transformable yes, but not evil.  A great storm that floods and kills millions in Bangladesh is thought to be an act of chance (or god), and the poor who live on these flood plains often considered fools.

But a war we lay at the feet of human hearts.  Crime is the fault of criminals (or poverty if we are knee-jerk liberals).  Depending on our upbringing and many other factors, we all have our likes and dislikes, our loves and hates, and our assumptions about who is bad and who is good and who should be punished and who should be forgiven.

What is especially odd, if we bother to think about it, is that each individual has a different set of such values, and while we tend to join various communities with those who share ours, the fact is that many of the value systems consider the same social phenomena, but do not agree on their rightness or wrongness.  If we follow this out to its real logical conclusion, we will see that the social world, in itself, is not the values, but rather the values arise because of our individual relationship to the world.  Let's restate this, as it is central to the theme.

The social world, in itself, does not have the values by which we color it.   In fact, if we just think about how frequently others misjudge us, and how often we become aware of how others' interpretations of who we are is wrong, then we can see that this is true everywhere.  The valuations come from inside us, but are not implicitly on the object (person, community, race, religion) that is being judged.

Now if we remove these colors, these personal values, from how we see the world, how will it look?

Perhaps, if we can learn to do this with the right warmth of heart, we will see that the World is a great and wondrous Play, unfolding in Theme a grand Mystery.

This is not to belittle, by the way, our own vision of the Good, the truth we hold dear when we look at the world and find it wanting, or full, as the case may be.   It is possible, and this I say from experience, to hold both views without contradiction.  In the one view, the one free of our personal sympathies and antipathies, we see a thousand miracles pregnant with life and surging human passion.  This view of the social world shows something apparently unbound, seemingly unfinished, and largely unknown in its most intimate depths.  The other view, the one colored by our values, tells us more about ourselves than about the world.  Think about it, for here is one of the miracles.

Perhaps we pick up the newspaper.  We read of the acts of politicians, criminals, terrorists, businessmen, armed youth in our schools, an endless collection of matters sometimes too terrible to contemplate, served up to us by educated men and women in the name of our right to know the gory details of the darkness in human souls.  Small wonder we are appalled, and spend our days in contemplation of how screwed up the world is and how, if just this or that was done in accord with our personal understanding, then the world would be better, be more light filled, and humane.

Or we go to work, and our bosses make unreasonable demands, while co-workers gossip, and our best friend sneaks out to have an affair with our spouse.   And then we get home, and the house needs cleaning but we are tired until mom calls and says she is coming over and out of guilt we rush about, meanwhile parking the children in front of the TV to watch a video with too much violence.

For truth to tell, we can turn our value seeing eye upon ourselves, and find that we too are wanting, weak, empty of high purpose, and not at all what we planned to be in our dreamy youth.

The Plains Indians of North America called this aspect of the world, the mirror.   The world, when we start to awake to its real nature serves to reflect back to us something of our own.  We value the world, we color it according to our likes and dislikes, our hopes and dreams, our vision of the Good.   That we do so is in no way a wrongness.

What a wonderful thing that we care, for in the heart is the seat of why we value.  We yearn for justice, for wrongs to be righted, for children to be perfect, for love for ourselves and all we know.   It is the heart which feels pain at failure, especially our own.   Sure we may feel guilt, but even more we feel loss, a small kind of death at the difference between what we really are and what we wish we could be.

Let us consider this some more, for it is central to approaching the Mystery of Civil Society.

One way we can see all this is to notice that the social world has an inside and an outside.  The inside seems intimate to us as individuals.  It is a psychological milieu, quite personal in its texture.  In fact so much so that we consider it the most private realm at all, one we have trouble even sharing with our closest friends and companions.

The outside would be the behaviors we observe in others.   Like the inside, this outside is incredibly rich and complex, although in thinking about the behaviors of others we often reduce our understanding of them to the most simple terms.  We see someone act in a way we do not like, and easily it comes to our mind an idea of their motives and reasons.  Yet, this is so odd, for at the same time we know in ourselves that our own behaviors are not at all based on simple motives and reasons.   In fact, we know that often we ourselves are unsure as to why we do what we do, even though we know more about our own inner realm than any other person possibly can.

Now it is not the purpose of this essay to investigate this most intimate matter of our inner lives in great detail.  Those aspects I have placed under the section Mysteries of the Mind (see: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/contents.html).  Rather what I want us to do here is sum up these facts, to make wholes out of them for the purpose of a better understanding of the social world.

To make this more concrete, let's consider some examples, both on a micro-level (intimate and personal) and a macro-level (large movements of communities of people).

We have a co-worker.  They are overweight.  We, on the other hand, eat right and work out.  We see this person everyday and there arises in us a reaction to this person, to their shape and form and to their habits of eating (we see them in the lunch room five days a week).  This reaction is not really thought out.  It is just there in our consciousness.   We have a value of a certain kind of health discipline, and someone not demonstrating that value is judged.  Not only that, but we might think to ourselves that this person has no will power, and that if they would just exercise their will, then they too could be healthy and fit.

The fact is, of course, that we walk through the social world constantly evaluating the behaviors of others of our acquaintance, and supposing we have insight into the whys and wherefores behind those behaviors.  It is also a fact that many of us, when they face this process of judging and evaluation directly (moving it from the semi-conscious realms into the conscious realms of our inwardness), exercise a deeper inner behavior.   We notice we have been judging and we alter that view and become more charitable.

On the macro-level, consider the Middle East, the nation of Israel and the Palestinians.  These are large congregations of individuals and we will often have discussions and thoughts where we conceptualize communities of individuals in generalizations.  We might think that Israelites do this and Palestinians do that.  Like the individuals of our acquaintance, we judge and evaluate - we "see" - the world of macro-social events in the light of our likes and dislikes.

Now everyone does this.  Everyone shines the light of their values, their likes and dislikes, upon the world.  Moreover, we tend to form associations in accord with finding others of similar points of view.  We might join a church, a political party, a protest movement - the list is endless of communities of common interest that arise because of shared values and world view.

I realize that this seems all to obvious, but it is in our clear thinking about the obvious that it is possible to find our way to the deepest social truths.

Let's step back a bit from these facts and try to have a more global view.

Imagine we are seeing the world from space.  We see before us a big physical place, upon which very large numbers of human beings live.  These individual human beings are also parts of various kinds of groups - some in accord with matters of language, culture, religion, race and shared values and interests.  Many individuals act toward each other with violence, as do many groups.  We could observe from space, over long periods of time, all sorts of behaviors and movements of associations and communities.  This is the outer social world, a world of moving and changing social forms.

Now imagine we can see into the inside of these human beings.  Here lies a whole other world - one of desires, and the most complex kinds of motives, thoughts and judgments.  No one would question that there is a relationship between these two worlds, the outer world of social form and the inner world of invisible psychological dynamics.

Among the elements of this invisible inner world are a wide variety of views as to what it all means.  We have religions and sciences, mysteries and theories.  Then, among all this vast collection of points of view, there might even be some elements of truth.  But the fact that there are all these points of view, which frequently do not agree with each other, this I want us to include in our global picture.  For consider, these views themselves have changed over time, and give no evidence of coming to final rest, in spite of what ultimate truth any current view might claim for itself.  These views of what it all means are just one more aspect of the inner invisible dynamics of the social world.

I urge the reader now to read my essay The Future (see: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/future.html), if that has not yet been read.  If it has been read, then it might be well to call to mind the pictures contained therein concerning the changes over time of the outer elements (social form) of the social world, and the corresponding inner elements (evolution of consciousness).   Basically as we go forward from this point I want us to remain simply within the most obvious social facts, as we have come to know them in their dynamic movement and complexity.

Clearly what we know of as "civilization" is undergoing dramatic changes in the present.  The social world, of outer form and behavior and inner dynamic psychology, is not static, but rather full of change.  Moreover, these changes give evidence of much order.  Chance hardly seems a word to describe what is actually observed.  But the ultimate conclusion to such a question I will leave with the reader, for there is no place here for a debate on causality.  The existence of order is obvious, its source a bit more mysterious.

Let us now turn to Civil Society, the true theme of this essay.

First, we need to accept that the existence of this social phenomena (civil society) is a matter of debate for many.  To some it does not exist, or if it does it really is only something already described in the social and political sciences.  The fact is this term is just a pair of words, whose meaning we are free to determine.  So for the purposes of this essay, I will use Civil Society to mean a very particular thing, which is only partially grasped by noticing certain outer social form manifestations (for example, the loose collective activity of many NGOs - non-governmental organizations).

As expressed in the essay The Future, our time is an age of individual moral choice.  It is as if a fundamental human power was coming awake, a power in times past more imposed by some authority upon individuals.   In ages past we had commandments, religious, moral systems and teachings, everything but a recognition of the primacy of individual conscience.  But today this is not longer true.  Out of our own striving for selfness has emerged a demand for a free and individual rendering of what it means to do the Good.

Directed by our sense of what is wrong in the world, and in response to our personal values - our likes and dislikes, we form associations to accomplish the Good.  Whether it is a Green Peace or Amnesty International or the Alliance for Democracy or church based social work in a third world country  - the names make little difference, in each case human beings join into communities to act upon the world out of impulses of the heart.   And, behind these impulses lives our individual moral authority.

Now this in itself would seem nothing new.  But in our time other events have occurred, which have made the context, in which this emerging moral freedom arose, have a special flavor.  One of these events is the globalization of the economy.  The second is the arrival of the Internet.  It is no accident that these elements have come to be at the same time in human history.

Globalization is a natural result of economic forces, which have to grow and combine until a certain limit is reached.  If we really understand "economia" [c.f. Barbara Gardiner's: Aesthetics of Economics and the Scottish Masonic Tradition (see: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/bgae1.html) ], we will realize that a true economy can only include the whole - the world.  Partial (national and regional) economies were only stages of growth, before the true natural scale was reached.  It would be more accurate to see what we have in the past seen as local or national economies to be local conditions in the Global Economy, much the same way we understand our local weather as aspects of the Nature of Climate of the whole world.

As many believe, the global economy is not dominated by moral ideals flowing from our individual sense of the Good.  Rather it is driven largely by fears, mostly fears of death.  Those individuals, who dominate the global economy through their connections to the tyranny of concentrated wealth (the successor to the older aristocracies), have other gods than the Good.  They serve themselves and as a consequence the values driving the global economy have brought it about that globalization has arrived with few truly human ideals at its center.

In earlier times, the suffering produced by the social domination of the selfish was only known locally.  But with the arrival of the Internet and modern media, our awareness of these tragic elements of human existence became more common.  The result of this non-accidental confluence of events (emerging moral individuality, economic globalization and wide spread information access) was the creation of a moral social organ within the world community - Civil Society.  This organ is young, and only somewhat self aware, but it is nevertheless a seed with remarkable potential.

But to really appreciate this we have to expand our understanding of the world social organism, so that we can see the real relationships between it and Civil Society.  To do this we have to become familiar with an Idea, in this case it is called: the threefold social organism (http://www.threefolding.freeuk.com).  First introduced by the philosopher and seer Rudolf Steiner, this idea is essential to our understanding of modern social conditions. 

In general on this website, I have been trying to point out that the social body of humanity has qualities of an organic nature.  These are not the only qualities, but this organic aspect cannot be denied, given that the social organism is made up entirely of living beings.   There is nothing theoretical or abstract about this situation.  It is a quite simple and observable fact.

This social organism can appear to our seeing-thinking if we take proper care to observe how organization appears in our social arrangements.  This organizational aspect can be seen in certain functional relationships, which are essentially polaric in nature.  This fact requires that we first understand the idea of polarity, which is something quite different from the idea of mere opposites.

In the pure mathematics of projective geometry (http://www.anth.org.uk/NCT/), the idea of polarity comes to full expression in the various relationships of point, line and plane.  In this sense, point and plane are the twin poles, while the line is the middle or mediating element.

In the human form, the head organization is one pole, while the limb organization is the other.  For those unfamiliar with this way of thinking, this will appear quite strange.  However, if you follow this out carefully enough, the true nature of what is being discussed can be apprehended.  The head is soft inwardly, while the bony part is on the outside.  The limbs, on the other hand (pole), have the bony parts on the inside, while the soft parts are on the surface.  It is this relationship between the two that unveils the polaric aspect.  In polaric systems, one pole is related to the other almost as if they were inside-out versions of each other.  In the human form, the middle (the trunk organization) is upwardly bony on the outside (rib cage and sternum), while as we descend in the form, the lower trunk is all soft, with the lowest parts of the spine being on the inside.  This polaric relationship of the human form is true in all details, and a deep and wonderful discussion of it can be found in the book Man and Mammals, by Wolfgang Schad.

Moreover, while the form is polaric, this is due to the non-physical inwardness also being polaric.  That is, the head carries out certain functions (form follows function) of a sensing and contemplative nature, for which it needs to be at rest, while the limbs propel us through space according to our spirit and soul's will and direction.  I have here, of necessity, only been able to hint at the details, the full expression of which would take us too far afield.

[In the following I am going to be referring to certain "ideals".  To understand the importance of this, there is a detailed consideration in the essay: Basic Conceptions: fundamentals of a new social view (see: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/basic.html) .]

What Rudolf Steiner pointed out, in his book Towards Social Renewal, is that human activities can basically all be described in such a way that it is clear that a certain kind of form or organization arises in the social order, from the inside out - form follows function.  For example, inwardly we have certain impulses of freedom, and these efforts to express this ideal appear most dominantly in what Steiner called the Cultural Sphere, in which he included science, art, religion and education.  Thus, in the main, the impulse to freedom is most realized in Cultural Life.

At the opposite pole, is the ideal of brotherhood.  Freedom is very much an individual expression - we do it out of ourselves.  But the ideal of brotherhood requires that we join together.  It is the Earth we share together, and thus, at the root of Economic Life is the ideal of brotherhood.   In the present, of course, we do much in our social life that deconstructs this naturally appearing order.  For example, many assert freedom in the realm of Economics, they want wealth only for themselves or their associates.  Yet, there is only one Earth, and only so much wealth, and the ideal which seeks to emerge in Economic Life remains brotherhood - the sharing of what is available among all.

In between these two poles, the individual pole of the ideal of freedom and its polaric counterpart, the sharing pole of the ideal of brotherhood, lies a middle realm.  This is the Political-legal Sphere, or the Rights Life.  Its ideal is equity, or equality.  In law we balance the apparent competition between the impulses to freedom and the necessity of brotherhood.  Through political processes we determine what rules apply to all - or, how we are equal to each other and in what circumstances.

This then is how the threefold social organism tries to appear in human societies.  Profound Ideals seek to emerge, through human activity.  This functional process then forms our social order.  We should keep in mind, however, that this process of the forming of the threefold social organism is something that is occurring over vast periods of historical time.  It develops according to rules, and depends upon our slow maturation as human beings.  As we mature, more and more the social organism will acquire this form. Globalization and Civil Society are interim phenomena appearing in the history of the development of this threefold organism - natural stages in long term processes, whose eventual full realization will require our conscious participation.

Let me give a very brief sketch.  The older social structures, such as the ancient Egyptian, were theocratic in nature.  The kings were also priests.  Even in modern times, remnants of this way have continued, for example, up until the Chinese invaded Tibet, it was a functioning theocracy.  In this sense, something out of Cultural existence dominated societies.  Yet, this form of social organization was incomplete.  It only really was valid for the particular stage of the evolution of consciousness applicable to that time.  Today, a theocracy is a dam to the real needs of any people (witness Islamic Fundamentalism).

The theocratic approach to social organization eventually gives way to some kind of idea of the political State.  With the early Greeks and Romans, we have the emergence of the first iteration of the Political-legal life in the formation of the State and the recognition of the Citizen.  So, now (or then actually) we have a Cultural Life and a Rights Life simultaneously.  The threefolding process is still immature, while yet being appropriate for humanity's inner condition.

Now we come to more modern times.  Human individuality is flowering.  The Economic Life has reached a kind of youthful climax with Globalization.  The Rights Life has matured, and in the latent ideal of citizen governance a seed planted at America's founding begins to grow into the light.  In the Cultural Life, human freedom in the realm of science, art, religion (as in choice thereof) and education (think about the real issues underlying current struggles) is exhibiting tremendous power.

More and more we are determined to think what we want to think (our society, family, education, religion, science be damned), especially about the moral, the nature of the good, and what is right to do in any circumstances of life.

If I may make a personal note, my life spans an interesting period of time, having begun in 1940.  As a youth I was taught to do what was expected, something that was thrown over in a quite revolutionary way in the 1960's.  This insistence on freedom of moral choice has since matured (although between the generations there is a lot of misunderstanding).  Even so, out of this emerging moral freedom is forming a new social power in the form of Civil Society.    That which lives in the moral center of individuals is slowly finding various forms of community, and these communities themselves are gathering together in the secure knowledge of their common moral strength.   At the time of this writing (early March, 2003) this community opposes the efforts of the sitting government of the United States (the 2nd Bush Administration) to start a war against Iraq.  A new power awakes in the world, refusing any long to let elites of wealth or blood maintain their historical dominance and self serving rule.

If we step back a little from this situation, we can come to see the World itself threefolding, with a global economy on the one hand, an emerging cultural-spiritual force in the moral  power of Civil Society on the other, while in between, whether in the United Nations, or the International Court in the Hague, a mediating world life of Rights also surges forth from the inwardness of many human beings.

We need to look at this again.

Less than a hundred years ago, when the various European nations that brought us World War I were busy doing what nations do when they get ready to kill a lot of people, the ordinary people of the world basically had to stand by, passive guests to the machinations of powerful elites.  That is no longer the case.

Now the ordinary people of the world are beginning to know and experience their moral power as a group.  They no longer stand by passively, nor do they accept their own government's choices. Everywhere, people resist the excesses of those obsessed with power, and it is now clear that sitting governments are near the end time of that mischief they can cause the ordinary and once powerless gentle folk to whom this planet really belongs.

Where once, ages ago, hierarchical castes ruled the ordinary human being, such as the Pharaohs of Egypt or the Caesars of Rome, this time has passed.  A new ordering principle awakes in the world, rising from inside the individual human being as a heart directed moral impulse, forming from there into communities of action, determined to impose its collective will on world social order.

This will can not be expected to achieve all that it might wish to overnight.  But no one - no one - should any longer fail to see its active presence in the unfolding of the future.

Appendix E:

The Declaration of Independence of the People of the United States of America (Thirteen Colonies)
In cyberspace at the beginning of the Third Millennium (CONGRESS, July 4, 1776)

The unanimous Declaration of the People (thirteen) of the United States of America

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political and economic bands which have connected them with one another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them (as various individuals understand Him out of their own freedom), a decent respect to the opinions of humanity (mankind) requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to that (e) separation. 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings (men) are created equal, that they are endowed by the (ir) Creation (or) with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, (and) the pursuit of Happiness, and rights of privacy and information*. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among human beings (Men), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shown (hath shewn), that human beings (mankind) are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —Such has been the patient sufferance of the American People (these Colonies); and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present rule of financial elites (King of Great Britain [George III]) is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these the People of the United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

The Lords of Finance, through their corruption of the political and social processes of the Western Democracies, have imposed on the world, and on the American People, a system of banking and of monetary rules and policies entirely for their own benefit.  Any study of the true history of the creation of Central Banking proves this assertion. Just consider that by this means of creating economic structures totally for their own benefit, the result is that 1% of the people in the world control 50% of its wealth.

They - the Lords of Finance - have, through their surrogates the Democratic and Republican Parties, impeded all efforts to reform our social and  democratic processes, such as by our making serious and real changes to campaign financing, thus permitting neither reason or truth to rule our social and democratic process, but rather only wealth and the raw power it is able to purchase.

They - the Lords of Finance - have first promoted a false Cold War, and now an equally false War on Terror, for the sole purpose of creating in America a permanent Military and Arms industrial base, intended not for the protection of the People of People's, but rather for the use by the Lords of Finance as a tool for their imperial (world) rule.

They - the Lords of Finance - have used the military might and covert might of American power to manipulate, ruin and destroy - where ever and when ever they felt necessary - systems of government throughout the world that did not bow to their will.

They - the Lords of Finance - have raped the world's environment, enslaved third world peoples economically, destroyed the world's agricultural riches by the introduction of dangerous chemicals and unproven new genetic forms into the eco-system of the whole world, all in the search for ever greater power and money.

This is not to say, that no benefit to humanity has arisen from some of these changes and developments, but rather that at every juncture where it was a choice between improving the lot of life of ordinary people or enriching themselves, the Lords of Finance choose that path most beneficial to themselves, well all the while, corrupting government processes everywhere possible in the vain pursuit of this immoral.

It becomes a question then of how do We the People, already in possession of one hard won Constitution, remove this insidious influence from our shared social and political existence, for one of the evil means by which the Lords of Finance rule is by remaining anonymous and invisible.

On this basis we reject as no longer workable this beloved and now flawed and corrupted original Constitution, declare it null and void, and assert our right to replace it with that which we believe more carefully addresses and protects us from the over-reaching of concentrated wealth.

We recognize that this task will have as its main difficulty the removing of the existing financial structures in which all the Peoples of the world have become ensnared.  The separation of the original 13 Colonies from the English aristocracy was far easier.  Here we need to rise above something far more entangled in every aspect of our daily lives.

In addition, we will have to confess our addiction to the comforts this concentration of wealth has made possible for a majority of the American People.  The truth is that we cannot move from our current conditions to those which are yet possible without owning our own responsibility and participation in the concentration of 80% of the world's wealth among only 20% of the world's people.

In this declaration then we have to declare two important matters.

I.  The Lords of Finance need to be taken out of their anonymous and secret rule and made to face, as named individuals, the judgment of the world for their crimes against our rights as human beings, the crimes against our free choice of government and their crimes against the planet and the environment we all share.

II.  The People of America need to confess our own excesses and own up to our own responsibilities, and by this means replace the rule of elites and their surrogate political tools - the Democratic and Republican Parties, with Citizen Governance.

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{He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.}

____________________________________________________________________________________________________here]

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. These Merchant Princes, (A Prince) whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyranny, are (is) unfit to be the rulers of any free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our American political (British) brethren. We have warned our elected officials (them) from time to time of their attempts to serve themselves instead of the people by their legislative (ture) efforts to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over our civil liberties, at the same time they reward themselves with privileges and benefits (such as medical coverage) they deny to us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our privations and dissatisfactions (emigration and settlement here). We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have entreated (conjured) them by the ties of our shared humanity (common kindred) to disavow these usurpations such as the abuse of constant re-districting as a means to keep themselves from being challenged for election, which has placed them outside our rule through the ballot. (, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.) They (too) have also become (been) deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity, in that we ask for and need a protected ballot, safe from electronic theft with a paper trail so that all will know our real wishes. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces as essentially treasonous the behavior by which they preferred the wishes of the Lords of Finance over the real needs of the America People (our Separation), and hold them, as we hold the rest of humanity (mankind), Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the People of the united States of America, via cyberspace communion (in General Congress, Assembled), appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these many States (Colonies), solemnly publish and declare, That these the People of the United States of America (Colonies) are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent of the economic tyranny of the Lords of Finance and their surrogates, the Republican and Democratic Parties (States); that we (they) are Absolved from all Allegiance to the economic rules created by the Lords of Finance and any allegiance to the present standing government of America, which has usurped excessive powers, failed in its sacred trust, and acted with conscious treason against the Republic (British Crown), and that all political connection between us (them) and the present sitting government of these many States, standing as it does solely for the benefit of the Lords of Finance (State of Great Britain), is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent People (States), we (they) have full Power to engage in civil disobedience, refuse to honor claims on our wealth by the many banks, ignore levies for armies, refuse to pay taxes, print our own money and any other acts of freedom necessary to resist the continued rule of the Lords of Finance, or the excessive and dishonorable abuses of power by the Republican and Democratic Parties (levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce), and to do all other Acts and Things which an Independent and free People (States) may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Appendix F:  Some material about the author, Joel A. Wendt

Most of this material is going to consist of links to my various websites and writings.  For the reader's general information, I am presently 65 (and retired on social security), the father of five (through two wives), and most of my adult life I was working poor.  I began life in better straits, gaining degrees in pre-seminary (a BA at the University of Denver) and law (a JD at the University of Montana), but during my about 14 years living in and around Berkeley California (1969-1983), I became an addict (mostly marijuana), and have been in recovery since September 1987 (a little over 18 years).  Following this I mostly worked for restaurants, or in mental health, although the last three years of my work life (59-62) I worked in a light industrial factory.  If you explore the links below you will see that I have been thinking and writing for a long time, and there exists a great deal of work.

A list of all my writings can be found at: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/fullindex.html
My main website is called Shapes in the Fire and can be found at: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/
My last presidential offerings can be found at: http://ipwebdev.com/campaign/
also there is Celebration and Theater: a people's art of statecraft, at: http://ipwebdev.com/celebration/
I also have a blog, which is used only occassionally: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/blog/