General
This page expands the objectives and status of initiatives proposed for the Scholars Warning Initiative. This program is part of the Deep Adaptation effort being coordinated by Professor Jem Bendell.
Submitted under Research Initiatives Related to Collapse Readiness – 3/12/21
Global Knowledge Forum and Universal Encyclopedia
Neither academia nor the public have resources that provide a single efficient entry point that comprehensively references and annotates all relevant knowledge for a topic. This initiative seeks to address that chaos in world knowledge.
If anyone, from a member of the general public, to an academic researcher, wants to find out the “state of world knowledge” for any given topic, their quest is practically impossible. For example, take the term “climate change”. How would such a search be done?
In current society, in an advanced country, a searcher would immediately turn to the internet and enter the term into a web search program like Google. When this was done recently, a page immediately popped up. It started with the statement, “About 792,000,000 results, 1.41 seconds”. With the settings on my computer, the first page listed 30 citations. 5 were paid ads: Environmental Defense Fund; Competitive Enterprise Institute; Earth Rights International; Union of Concerned Scientists; and Natural Resources Defense Council.
The first entry, the Environmental Defense Fund, didn’t even present climate data. It was all about activism. The second, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, presented a lot of graphs. But they have been “cherry picked” for very narrow situations that appear to show that global warming is actually producing strong human benefits.
Searching the page eventually led to an entry in Wikipedia. This is one of Wikipedia’s outstanding articles. In only the last year, the article finally acknowledges the high likelihood of climate runaway. That view only arose because of strong shifts in attitude of the IPCCC to acknowledge that current “business as usual” practices are likely to lead to severe climate disruption.
Another major improvement in the article is its reference to a related article on “Climate change denial”. This is a new and important element because it provides a good summary of the “alternative” claims.
These two articles, however, are unusual. Because of its open source nature, many Wikipedia articles are compromised by trolls and science deniers. In addressing a collapse of society, the causes extend far from climate collapse. They extend into subjects that are still taboo to discuss – like population, religion, and governing structure.
In summary, Wikipedia is not even close to providing a window into the knowledge trails that Deep Adaptation supporter really need at their finger tips. (In fact, as an aside, I actually got the founder of Wikipedia to discuss this problem. My request for Wikipedia to participate in an offshoot of the current structure was rejected.)
The Universal Encyclopedia
What this project is intended to do is create a Wikipedia- like offshoot. Too keep it manageable, it would initially focus on only issues that are VITAL to producing a sustainable and equitable human society. I refer to this result as the “Universal Encyclopedia”. What makes it “merit” such a lofty title is that it would NOT claim to only include descriptions of truth, but it would also chronicle a comprehensive range of all related social views. With each would be the best scholarship available to ascertain what elements of the views conform to “supportable natural truth”, and what elements clearly contradict or fail to support such truth.
These articles would form the foundation upon which the Scholars Warning effort is based.
Global Knowledge Forum
The Global Knowledge Forum is a new, structured discussion format, that eliminates the major flaws that exist in almost all current internet discussion processes when they have to address complex problems. Another page in this section, Justification for Structured Discussion, provides support for this statement.
A prototype Structured Knowledge Forum website has been developed that will be made available to the Scholars Warning effort. This Forum, which uses the general style of a conventional online forum, eliminates the wandering and chaos most forums have in relation to complex issues. Two separate pages in this section describe the unique elements of the Structured Discussion Forum.
Submitted under Research Initiatives Related to Collapse Risk Response – 3/13/21
System Based Collapse Risk Response
World governments can not respond to existential crises because they legislate using topic focused planning methods. This initiative will challenge every government to produce a 50 year plan that achieves social sustainability based on COMPREHENSIVE SYSTEM models.
Because of limitations in the thinking ability of human brains, and specifically, limitations in how our brains process highly complex information, the organizational approaches used by people in power to run society have not changed since the dawn of agricultural societies.
For example, empires as early as Babylon already approached the organization of society by dividing decision making by functional topics: central governance, law, agriculture, public utilities, housing, religion, family structures, military, etc. Each of these was addressed largely in isolation, only to be interrelated by the constraints of overall empire wealth and distribution of labor. Four thousand years later, in 1787, the structure of U.S. government was not designed much differently. Government planning is still done in a similar way.
This initiative is based on recognizing the following newly occurring factors that threaten the sustainability of life on earth as well as the sustainability of societies that form modern civilization:
1. Modern human society has now become a very complex web of interacting elements that exceed the ability of any single human, or even groups of humans to understand using function isolated analysis.
2. Large populations, the explosion of power tools, instantaneous communications, world mobility of individuals, replacement of human labor by robots, and the global intermixing of cultures have overrun the limits of renewable natural resources.
The world, however, does have individuals with appropriate knowledge, sufficiently powerful computers, and available computational tools, to analyze the interaction of all of these complex factors at the same time. Such analyses can determine the impact of government policies on natural resource use and the standard of living they will produce.
There is no government on earth that is now doing this. Also, there is no government on earth that can produce a credible 50 year sustainability plan, based on scientifically based empirical measures of natural resource availability and consumption.
What this initiative proposes is a challenge to all the countries in the world to develop such 50 year plans. Since no country currently knows how to do this. The initiative would also bring together the computer programs and data resources to create one or more versions of such analysis tools, and make them available to the countries.
Research Initiatives Related to Collapse Risk Transcendence – 3/13/21
Personalized Democracy
With serious analysis, Athenian and Roman forms of democracy fail, being fundamentally incompatible with modern conditions! This is not generally acknowledged. No credible alternatives are generally discussed. PERSONALIZED DEMOCRACY presents a breakthrough solution.
Both Athenian and Roman republic forms of democracy were developed to address populations with the following attributes:
• A singular, approved, city-state or empire wide religion.
• An agriculture based society with a very homogeneous view of daily life.
• A society with tools and fabrication techniques that most people understood.
• Most clothing and tools needed by a household were either self made or procured from a personally known local craftsmen.
• Communications were slow, and limited by the speed of a horse.
• A social structure that fully accepted or expected national threatening military involvement.
• Relatively small population size and lifestyle that was supportable by existing natural resources and trade.
• A social structure of castes, where a royalty was expected to rule over and exploit a peasantry.
While modern people think of Ancient Athens and Rome as models from a far distant past, this is not so clear. When Athenian Democracy was adapted for the emerging United States in 1787, the U.S. still had a very small, sparse population, slow communications, simple technology, and a population mostly of self sufficient farmers. Each person could understand “everything” in their society pretty well. They could pretty much do things their own way, and life worked. This is no longer the case! These primitive technology and homogeneous social attributes no longer exist. It also means, many unstated but vital assumptions behind the initial drive for democracy no long apply. To understand this, the primary attraction of “democracy” needs to be more precisely understood.
The first issue is that democracy begins with the concept that moving power from a ruling nobility to the “people solves some significant problems. The major issue bothering the Athenians, of course, was that the nobility always enslaved the peasants to harsh work, and then taxed them to maintain their luxurious lifestyles. The Athenian people believed that giving power to the people would allow them to reduce the harshness in their lives and expand their personal freedoms.
The second issue to resolve was, once the “people” were given “power”, how would they decide what to do? In Athens, they found a solution that worked pretty well: “voting”, using the concept of “majority rule”.
Most people in modern society believe by living under a government that “claims” to be a democracy, these two benefits still actually exist and are “obvious”. In fact, the beliefs are so strong, people can’t even imagine any other way it could be. This is where understanding the vital assumptions are so critical.
The first assumption is that the people are capable of making sound decisions; the second is, if a belief is held by “the majority”, it is the “best” choice for the community. If these assumptions are evaluated against the list of attributes shown above for Athens, and again for modern conditions, the result is blatantly not so “obvious” for modern society.
First consider technology. The human brains of Athenians, which were not much different from modern brains, could easily understand the technology of most of the objects in their environment. The same can also be said for humans alive, around the world, in 1787, when the U.S. Constitution was created. The answer for today, however, only 234 years later is a very “obvious” NO. Modern humans are not able to understand most of the technologies that drive society.
And because the technologies themselves aren’t understood, the effect they have on the cultural processes throughout society, and therefore the cultures that now exist, themselves, aren’t understood either. People deal with this fog of confusion by resorting to superstition and social conformance. These were two of the issues Athenians were very careful to weed out.
The second element of the Athenian assumption about making sound “decisions” was how “voting” was done. Athens was not a “republic”. They did not have “representatives”. The heads of households, of all Athenian families, would gather in arenas, on a monthly basis. The gatherings would bring over 8,000 together over a months time. They would each get to vote! The voting would also not be for some complex “bill”. The individuals would vote on issues separately, as if they, themselves, were crafting a law or process.
These comparisons show that, the assumption that modern “people” can make sound decisions is no longer supported; not in the least! Not only are modern people blind to how the details of society work, they do not have a say to address each detail. It’s an “all or nothing” choice.
The second assumption also implies that, if a belief is held by “the majority”, it is the “best” choice for the community. This was actually reasonable for Athens because of two factors.
The first was the homogeneous population. Most of the issues raised for voting were posed by small groups. The citizens were essentially addressing whether a small change could be tolerated. Most decisions were almost unanimous. The second was because issues were so narrow, choosing to oppose one of them had very small impact on the larger society. (One example where this wasn’t the case were votes to go to war.)
Modern society is a very different situation. Homogeneity no longer exists in modern society. Society is now awash with many overlapping cultures. For example, in Athens, a question raised about permitting a new play about the god Heracles would be understood very clearly and similarly by most Athenians. Now consider a recent religious question in modern society – the forcing of muslim woman to remove their hijab in public. While the citizens of Athens would be focused on clarifying some specific religious rule, France had a much different problem: there was the religious vs. secular question; the public security question; the concept of school uniforms; the concept of civil rights; the concept of extent of authority within a family; the feminists had a view; each political party had a view; work places like hospitals had a view; there were even multiple views within the muslim religious community itself.
Because of the lack of a homogeneous society, a modern election is not actually resolving individual questions like it was in Athens. It is no more than a popularity contest to select a representative that promises to speak in favor of some very broadly described agenda. The result, in fact, is almost as far away from “democracy” as can be achieved without turning to direct autocracy again. This is not an exaggeration.
With the current process, the result achieved, for both the election voters, as well as what those voters get when their representatives vote on bills, is what is called the “tyranny of the majority”.
For either the voter or the representative, coalitions are formed until some group achieves a 51% majority. This means, 49% do not get whatever were the key issues dividing the vote. But, the outcome is even worse than that. The representatives will be voting on bills that are conglomerations of many issues. Due to compromises that are made, most citizens will not get things in those bills that they do want, and also be forced to take things they don’t want.
THE DEMOCRATIC VISION OF THE ATHENIANS HAS ENTIRELY BEEN LOST.
In our modern world, the politicians we elect, and the way we elect them, doesn’t select people with the mental aptitude or background to understand how to restructure government to recapture the Athenian goals with the conditions of the modern world. Furthermore, due to the capitalist structure of modern higher education, there is no incentive for colleges to understand this issue either. In fact, raising concepts that would transfer direct control of society to individuals would surely be suppressed by academia, as well as industry and governments.
Facing certain collapse of the principles and structure of our current civilization, this initiative proposes to introduce a new concept that would create a sustainable civilization while actually achieving the primary Athenian goal of “power to each individual”. That is, the new approach would give a direct voice to each citizen in how society operates. Furthermore, the process that would be implemented would directly insure both environmental and social sustainability, while inherently achieving social and economic equity and the elimination of racial and social bias and corruption at the same time.
And yes, because of the indoctrinating beliefs that form the world model most people have, any process that can achieve all these goals at the same time, will appear “impossible”.
Achieving this breakthrough in democracy required making a number of additional breakthroughs in what initially appeared to be unrelated subjects: a new model for the human brain; a new model for human consciousness and psychology; a scientifically based model for morality; new philosophical explanations for many basic concepts such as: absolutes, freewill, freedom, religion, equality, truth etc.. But it was only then, after putting all those factors in place, that a “democratically consistent” process was found to implement logical combinations of the “idealistic” goals of the Athenians. These goals, of course, have also been sought by the oppressed people of the world throughout all ages.
What this initiative proposes is to initiate a very new global discussion about radically new organizational and social structures that could produce a truly sustainable civilization. It would present a radically new social model called Personalized Democracy as a “straw man”, to focus the discussion about issues that are buried in existing discussions due to deeply embedded and misleading social stereotypes.
Personalized Democracy
Here is a very brief summary of the principles of Personalized Democracy. More complete explanations can be found at A3Society.org/personalized-democracy/.
While the summary is based on a fully functional social model, many of the elements can be applied to current society to solve some of our greatest obstacles.
Each of the modules presented below is a stylized depiction that accentuates the principles of the module. Wide variations from what is described are expected as long as the basic principles are followed.
How was Personalized Democracy developed
Personalized Democracy was developed using “system analysis methods”. This approach considered, simultaneously, all the known positive goals most people have espoused throughout history, along with those conditions that most humans did not want. After extensive analysis, and some very lucky breakthroughs, a road to achieve a practical, workable solution appeared. This solution did not resemble current practices. The following highlights summarize the key provisions that compose this new paradigm.
Social Coordination – creation of policy
1. The concept of “governing” is radically changed. The term “govern” means to “direct the action of people”. Throughout history, direction was typically mandated by a human “governor”. This was frequently harsh and tyrannical. In “democracies” and “republics”, laws are established by small groups of people – congresses or parliaments – and enforced by police. These enforcements have also frequently been harsh, tyrannical, and socially biased.
Personalized Democracy, to the contrary, relies heavily on “self governance”. Confidence that such “self regulation” can be achieved is based on changes to the structure of every social institution to provide positive incentives and rewards for “good” self governance behavior. Education and social messaging will teach and reinforce this model.
2. The entire representative decision structure of “democracy” is eliminated. It is replaced by direct input from individuals.
3. Of course, “rules” will still be required to give people guidance and boundaries for conducting their lives. These rules will be developed, not by human’s debating viewpoints proposed by other humans with vested interests, but by academically and scientifically founded “system analysis decision processes”. These processes will be guided by the positive values held by both society, as a whole, but also, and more importantly, by the entire community of individual citizens. The processes, most importantly, will be bounded by the constraints of sustainability and equity, as provided by scientific research.
4. To capture individual citizen’s voices, a new information collection process is implemented. It captures opinions from every individual citizen in a region of any size, who agrees to contribute opinions or ideas. Novel features effectively eliminate all biases of intermediaries. This produces two fully, non-biased, results. One is each individual’s contributed responses that are kept private and securely stored for later use. The other is aggregated results that are fully transparent to the community.
The aggregated responses would be condensed into multiple forms for further action. NOTICE, there is no “traditional” voting in this process!
5. A fundamental change in government or services is made related to how laws are created and decisions are made. The new process becomes a “constructive – inclusive” process. Rather than voting for competing “bills”, highly trained, multiply skilled “coordinators” take on the assignment to include as many individually requested inputs as possible into a workable system, subject to world sustainability and equity limits. The result, profoundly, will produce a public program directly proportional to the full range and levels of public interest. There is no longer voting to approve a final bill. There is no “majority” who gets their way, and a “minority” that looses. Every individual’s personal interest is directly respected!
6. The roles of congresses and parliaments are replaced by Community Coordinating Groups : COMCORGs. These groups are specialized by the “type” of social processes they are coordinating: education, natural resources, transportation, etc. The people selected for the groups are essentially social research specialists. Their “job” is to continually provide updates to computer programs that make real time “coordination decisions” for society.
7. Unlike current governing structures that prepare bills and direct compliance in response to representative “voting”, all inputs to these groups are the direct, real time voice of every individual citizen, and ONLY those of individual citizens.
8. Laws that regulate social cooperation are no longer selected from 2, or just a few, polarized proposals with fixed provisions. Each law is a dynamically changing, real time system “model” that fully addresses and implements every citizen’s voice, on an individualized basis. The model, also incorporates a universal basis at the same time, to assure sustainability and equity for the local and global limits of social resources, social harmony, natural resources, and environmental conditions.
9. Using the most current assessments of the natural world and social conditions, the system attempts to simultaneously implement the goals established by the entire collection of social principles. The aim is to achieve the “highest Quality of Life” for each person individually, to the extent possible within the constraints of global and local sustainability, and equity throughout society.
10. Each citizen’s input is made in relation to what actions the citizen is planning to take in their lives, both short term and long term, and the life goals they are trying to achieve.
11. Each citizen is involved in every government action that affects them that they choose to be involved in.
Social Coordination – policy Implementation and monitoring
12. Unlike current methods, all resulting programs are implemented on a fully personalized basis. That is, each citizen would be notified of the programs options that are specific to them, and helped to individually understand and achieve the goals they requested as best the community can afford within natural limits.
13. Continuing further, once a program has been implemented, the same systems used to collect individual opinions will be used to allow each citizen to continually monitor and evaluate every program’s performance. That means, implementation problems are reported and addressed in real time as they occur.
Lifestyle and Social Arrangements
14. Personalized Democracy anticipates and supports a greatly expanded range of lifestyles. While some people might live in cities, the full range of social density we see now would be supported – with strict limits on population concentration. The primary change would be that each living arrangement would be supported by the community to try to maintain a suitable Quality of Life and value to the community, within the limits of technology. People choosing to live in traditional settings, for example, like rugged free-standing houses in remote areas, could be supported by the best medical systems and schooling through remote technology. They would only have that community support, however, if their use of energy was consistent with environmental concerns. Cutting live trees to burn for heat, for example, would not be supported, despite its local abundance in a rural setting.
15. Because of the broad complexity of cultures that would be supported, the “structure” that is called a “family” could vary widely – from 2 adults to full “Kibbutz” arrangements. All of these would be supported with a primary community focus on healthy child development.
16. One element that will become standard in all communities is the “community center”. This would physically be a large floor space unit. It’s actual land footprint can vary widely as long as it has an integrated transportation system that allows rapid environmentally protected transport – including walking – between any two locations in the center. The large “floor space” is required because every community based process “necessary” for citizens to carry out civic responsibilities must be represented there. This includes things like: education – including adult crafts and hobbies, recreation, medical care, financial and legal support, food and clothing, dining and leisure, etc. “Public” transportation from every home or business to the community center must be available.
Education
17. Education will form a core structure of community life. Every citizen should view “no cost community provided” education as available throughout their entire life. Many elements of education will be provided by businesses and organizations through “on-the-job” training as part of the business’s “social responsibility”.
Arts and crafts will be key educational components. These would include: fine arts, music, dance, theater, video production, etc. Since the creation of beauty throughout the community would be a primary requirement of the Social Contract. ( Imagining “Disney World” – without the rides – as a model for a community is not unreasonable. )
Commercial Practices
18. Sustainability requires all social programs achieve a 1.0 or lower human footprint. This means world population overall, and the control of its density will be necessary. Population size will be capped in proportion to technological limits. From a business standpoint, that means net zero growth – no new factories, no new stores, no new houses etc.
19. A zero growth model also implies a radical change in how society views competition. The approach of “growing a company’s market” at the expense of other companies is no longer be supported. Growth, as a “commercial” concept, can only be interpreted as continued improvement of benefits for a designated size group of consumers.
20. The existing “Predatory Bacterial” business model will be replaced with a “Cooperative Competition” model as the standard of business practice. With the elimination of predatory capitalism, the focus of companies will be on consumer value and efficiency. This results in multiple unexpected changes.
21. One is moving most human resource functions out of organizations into a community wide “human resource pool”. Ultimately this will be nation wide or even global. This is not a new name for labor unions. Worker safety will be held in highest regard, of course. The major benefit for centralizing human resources are worker freedoms. It allows the simple movement of workers between organizations. It also allows uniform performance appraisal, not subject to corporate corruption.
22. The second is a new social view of “compensation” for effort. This is no longer strictly viewed as “money”. A new term, “performance equivalents” implies that recognition of performance will be made in many ways. A new form of “money” is one. A share in the success of organizations that an individual supports – similar to a new form of company “stock” – is a second. In addition, however, there will be new forms like: credentials, labor credits in specific categories, “creativity” credits; special performance awards, etc.. Importantly, compensation equivalents will not be set by either the labor pool or organizations. They will be optimized on a much broader scale based on considerations of individual merit and social needs.
23. This approach to “citizen” motivation is truly a “no one left behind” model. Because of it’s complexity, each citizen would have access to “mentoring teams” as a life-long social benefit. The people on those teams would be “incentive” compensated based on how well their mentees performed in all Quality of Life categories, and how they did with occupational performance.
24. A third major change is eliminating the entire concept of income taxes. The primary need for current taxes is paying for government employees. With the focus on community sustainability, all citizens will be expected to perform community service as full or part-time employment. With the very high efficiency of computer modeling, this social requirement will be minimal. The other current government need is for material. Since all social programs will be viewed as “social needs”, material handling will all be done by “private” industry. The material costs will factored into regional compensation.
25. A major role of the new “human resource pools” will be stabilizing the “workforce” at “optimum” employment. Since a centralized labor pool would have a centralized worker “personnel file”, individuals could change organizations as easy as office moves are now made. If an organization is confronted with an unanticipated “layoff” situation (most would be anticipated in advance), the employee would be supported to move to another needed position, or, frequently, a paid training program, either in a college or on-the-job training in a new location. Employment and continuing education will essentially be merged.
26. One obvious question many readers may have is, “isn’t this simply socialism by another name?” The answer is no, for two simple reasons – the two basic principles that actually define socialism: 1. no commercial business or property is owned by the community; and 2. the basic decision making authority for society is not the government. It is each and every individual, by direct control of what society gives them through the coordinating process.