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| N E W C I V I L I Z A T I O N |
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Issue 23, 28 December 1997 \ /
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It is just about new year. Time to share visions of the new. So, here is
another batch of visions about a better world.
- Flemming
-------------------oOo-------------------
** Chris Sakata <chris.sakata@cheerful.com>, USA **
My vision is that we will all realiize that we don't need anything and
that we don't have to avoid anything in order to be happy. Also that
happiness is the goal behind all other goals and that we already have
this ability. If we stop putting our attention on all the things we
believe we need in order to be happy or that we have to avoid in order
to be happy and just relax in the hear and now we will be automatically
happy. Whitin this happiness we will find the feelings of Euphoria, joy
of Live, Love and feeling All powerful (coded ELLA). We will adopt this
new basic feeling instead of our feeling of need that we have had before
(i.e. a longing for freedom, security, to be loved by other, to be
accepted by others, ...). Then our world will mirror this new basic
feeling. So it will soon change into a world without limitations. We
won't need any more food, drink or sleep. Out bodies will be
indestructable, whitout illness and immortal. We will be able to change
their form in any way we like. We will use teleportation for transport,
telepathy for commuincations, manifestion for creating things we want
and whatever else you can think of.
For the first manifestations of my vision check out my homepage see URL
below.
Everlasting Love and Happiness to You
Chris
ELLA Cooperations - How to be happy 24 hours each day
http://www.geocities.com/~chris_sakata/
-------------------oOo-------------------
** Maireid Sullivan <maireidsullivan@earthlink.net>, California **
What about cleaning up our environment and living under the magnificent
hemisphere of the sky with clean air water and healthy soil. We are not
far away from being able to restore our natural environment. Many new
studies of the effects of our current environmental practices lead to the
concept of an "up stream" solution to our problems -- where we simply
remove the offending practices. There are studies which compare organic vs
pesticide farming's impact on economics and health. Organic farming,in
every way, outstrips the supposed economic and health benefits of pesticide
farming (with all its outrageous health-impacting associated practices.)
I am of the opinion that we will need a movement larger than the civil
rights, Vietnam War movements, etc. to turn the tide on this much more
serious of issues. I would never want to shut myself off from this
magnificent garden of earth in an environment which could never be much
better than living in a gigantic high-rise buliding -- no matter what shape.
We don't need a science fiction approach to survival. We need to return to
beauty, truth and love for every living being in all forms, as the guiding
principles of our social strategies. This agenda must be promoted
everywhere, in schools, the work place and in the arts. We must be strong
in our determination to act locally and think globally.
Each individual must reclaim their realization that reality starts with
them and radiates out. We need to understand the concept of "Personal
Sovereignty" as a modern principle.
With Love,
Maireid Sullivan
http://www.maireid.com
-------------------oOo-------------------
** Barry Pittard <bpittard@beachaccess.com.au>, Australia **
COMMUNITIES NEED TO BRING WORTHWHILE JOBS TO COMMUNITIES.
How can a jobless person get even halfway to being a citizen?
In Western societies, long ago, a social welfare safety net was extended.
But not, truly speaking, a psychological one. Those out-of-work feel
useless. A human being, who can be so full of life, is now idle, defeated,
prospectless.
A welfare society is an illfare society, no matter how humane it may, at
its best, attempt to be - and the children of the jobless fare illest of
all, and are, yes, our future.
Towards those on social welfare payments, pitiable and still marginalising
as these amounts are, a class antagonism is felt among many taxpayers.
Moonlighting becomes the norm, and with it exploitation by employers, some
paying less than a subsistence wage.
And what of job creation? Search the newspapers and the journals - where
may we find any real discussion of the problem along wholistic lines?
There's plenty of talk which equates economic growth with job creation.
And there's plenty which would put that the other way round - from
commentators who show no real thought about the quality of the work, of
what it does to both workers and consumers, or in fact of the welfare of
other nations, or of what consumerism does environmentally.
Whole countries succumb to sectors and lobbies, and nasty splits of
overworked and underworked; employed and underemployed; productive and
unproductive; powerful and powerless ...
But what more superficial myth can there be than the one, certainly common
here in Australia, which, in response to the problem, would focus virtually
alone on the growth potential of south-east Asian markets. A new version of
the old myth of putting all one's eggs in the one basket. And consider one
of the gravest dangers of this focus - in order to keep one's own country
employed, it would have to - even desperately - keep up trade levels
with, say, South-East Asia no matter what the wider harms may be; forever
tossing increasingly soggy logs at those markets to keep them hot and the
home fires at least a little warm.
And where the private sector is relied upon to create jobs, the public and
community sectors are left to languish. And on whose shoulders is the
burden greatest? Of course - the employees, who are forced to work
increasingly longer and harder working hours and who have very high stress
and burn-out levels. Inequality, then - both material AND psychological
- becomes a feature in the lives of BOTH those with and without jobs.
We need real creative thinking about the second, the Public, sector, as a
potenial area for job creation. Of that, some other time. But - most of
all - I suggest, we need to look at the potential in our own individual
communities. The little known Third Sector. Some promising examples of
this focus are happening in France, and in the suburb of Kensington in
Melbourne. One great virtue of job creation in community-oriented projects
would be that they embody values approved by society at large. Therefore,
those employed in any of the three sectors can be well-satisfied at how
their tax dollar is spent.
Nicer, isn't it? than all the rorting, the moonlighting, the odd-jobbing,
much less the appalling joblessness itself. Alright, let's suppose a more
or less wholistic still required some tax impost. But people abhor taxes
for which they see tangibly few benefits. And tangible is the word.
Especially in their own local communities, people need to see security,
both physical and psychological, and good things occuring in their own
neighborhoods. Dare we even drop the old concept: "civic pride." If we
do, we're done for.
In this third, the Community, sector, let's create jobs in areas like
domestic services. We could, for example, take considerable burden off
vast numbers of unpaid, untrained carers - usually spouses, often women,
often themselves in need of care. Let communtiies themselves shape ideas
of social usefulness, and the accountability of workers. Rather than
allowing the vital decisions to be made from far above, and from far away.
Much of the money now being spent on unemployment benefits can be funded to
communities involved in substantial job creation and training schemes. In
this way, at last, citizens come to participate - physically and
psychologically. Now, participate. There's the other word.
-------------------oOo-------------------
** Walter Fritz <walt@anice.net.ar> Argentina, South America **
GOVERNMENT IN THE FAR FUTURE
To make some concepts more evident, lets take a look at vast amounts of
space and time. Human beings already have lived some 1.8 million years on
this planet. At the speed of present space vehicles, we will have visited
and populated 1000 planetary systems in another 1.8 million years. We take
the present speed at 1 to 2 years to reach Mars from Earth, a distance of
16 light minutes. Also we take the average distance between stars at 5
light years. Since future space vehicles will be faster, humans will reach
the described situation sooner. Exactly how this will be done, is an
interesting question, but has nothing to do with our proposal.
With a thousand diverse planets occupied, what kind of government will
exist? Lets suppose that we have a central government that tries to keep
its people at peace. Further, to facilitate commerce, it maintains a
unified currency, unifies the main measures, such as weight, distance and
time (or mass, distance and velocity). Finally it creates laws that permit
a maximum of liberty to all members and a minimum of interference of the
actions of one member by the actions of other IS's.
The basic law within this society could be:
Every member has the right to do as it pleases,
as long as its deeds do not interfere
with the right of other members
to do as they please.
Such an objective for a government seems reasonable for any space extension
and any future age. Today countries are subdivided. Lets suppose that our
galactic society, of a 1000 planets, is also subdivided. There could be 10
galactic sectors, each with 10 zones and each zone with 10 planetary s
systems. Our planetary system, called "Sol", could consist of Earth, Mars,
Venus and some minor settlements. Earth would have a planetary government,
composed of 5 continental governments, one of which is America. America
would have a number of states, one of which is Argentina. This state would
have a number of provinces, divided into departments and those into
municipalities. One of these municipalities is called "La Quiaca".
Government (as we know it) presupposes that it receives information from
all members at a center and that decisions go from that center to all
members. The time required for a radio or light message to travel from the
border to the center would be about 20 years. It seems obvious that the
information about the laws and decrees of the municipality of La Quiaca and
of all other municipalities cannot reach the department, the province, the
state, the continent, the earth government, the planetary system, the zone,
the galactic sector and finally the galactic government. The mass of
information is too much. But information from all members has to reach the
center, and vice versa for a government to function. One possibility is
that a summary of information is made at every level and the final summary
reaches the galactic center.
The same would be true for information in the other direction, from the
center to the periphery. The galactic government cannot dictate the
specific laws and decrees for all municipalities of the galaxy, local
conditions vary too widely, moreover the time required for making a local
law would be too long. So the creation of laws has to be delegated. The
basic law making function would be at the municipality. All municipalities
of a department would have to agree to make a departmental law. The laws of
each super society would be created using parts of laws common to at least
75% of the member societies. We propose that each law becomes effective
when more than 75% of the members approve it. Again all departments would
have to agree to make a provincial law, and so on until all galactic zones
agree to make a galactic law.
Once a law of a superior level of society is approved it becomes binding to
all the lower level member societies. The member societies have to adjust
their laws accordingly. At each level of government the laws at that level
are adjusted to conform to the next higher level laws, and finally those
laws and decrees that a municipality applies are adapted laws and those
strictly local laws that it made for itself. After 25 years (one
generation) local law becomes invalid. The same law, or preferably an
updated and improved version, can be voted again (Galactic laws, which
take a longer time to be created should have a longer life span, possibly a
100 years, those of intermediate levels should have intermediate life
spans).
Due to the time involved for information from the most distant municipality
to reach the central government, and for a new law to reach this
municipality, laws of the central government can only be about the most
general matters, these laws, due to the travel time of messages require at
least 40 years to be made and received. They could only be about such basic
matters as a unified currency, fundamental units and measures and possibly
those of capital crimes and attacks of one subsociety on another.
What can we learn from the above? At present we do not have a galactic
government. But in the last 200 years bigger and bigger political groupings
appeared. We will shortly reach the point (or have we reached it?) where
these groupings become unmanageable by a central government. Layers of
government and laws, as described above, become necessary. This would also
solve the case of unsatisfied minorities. They would have their own
government and their own laws.
Who pays for the services of these governments? Who collects the taxes? The
central governments could never have a sufficiently great population to
sent representatives to all municipalities. Even hiring local help would be
unwieldy. It seems that a reasonable way out would be for the local
population to pay the expenses of the municipal government. The
municipalities would contract for the services of the next higher
government and pay for these services, the amount to be fixed by law, and
so on at each level, until finally the government of the galactic sector
pays for the services of the galactic central government. The idea here is
that a service is received and paid for. The higher government provides a
service for the lower government and finally the municipality provides a
service for the population. Also the maximum of expenses by government
should be limited to a certain percentage, maybe 8% or 10% (excepting
social dividend, see below). History shows that government expenses tend to
grow, and being unproductive they can stifle all economic activity and thus
lower the standard of living.
>From all this it seems to follow that a government that covers vast areas
should be structured in sub societies that repeat similar functions and
government structures at all levels. This system of subsocieties with
similar functions has a great advantage. It permits the practical training
of governors at each level. Only governors at the next lower level would be
eligible for the next higher position. This means that only a person with
experience as a planetary governor would be eligible for governor of a
galactic zone, and only one of those would be eligible for governor of a
galactic sector. With this system it would be impossible that John Smith, a
likable person with a good TV personality, but with no experience in
government could become the galactic governor.
Another great advantage would be that it would be easy for one government
to associate itself with another. Since each level of government is
identical in function, an area that would like to associate with others
could do this automatically once the agreement to associate exists (with
this system the USSR probably would not have dissolved itself).
The government of a society should be voted for service for a limited time.
It should concern itself with the creation of the minimum amount of laws
necessary and the protection of its members. It should not participate in
commercial ventures of any kind (including railroads, post office,
generation of electricity and water). The "armed forces" (police or
military) shall protect the members from each other and from non members.
For maximum stability and to avoid the misuse of power, we suggest that the
sum of lower level power and forces should be greater then the next higher
level power and force. Also the higher level power and force should be
greater than that of any individual, lower level, member. Most political
power should be, as far as possible, at the lowest level, with only a
delegation to the next higher level, of those functions that locally cannot
be done efficiently. The lower level society will delegate these functions
but should always maintain control, and check that the next
higher level society executes their functions correctly.
http://www.anice.net.ar/intsyst/betgov.htm
-------------------oOo-------------------
** Margriet <taggert@netbistro.com>, Northern BC, Canada **
My vision is for a world, where everyone excepts one and other for what
they are. We will live in a world where all cultures will have equal voice.
There will be a coming together of all cultures to solve the world's
problems. We will realize how insignificant we are as individuals and only
when we all come together can we evolve to the next level. Our new world
will provide sustanance to all. All problems that effect the whole will be
solved by the people as a whole. There will be peace and we will all know
the meaning of unconditional love. We will carry this love in our hearts
and it will keep us from harm. We will help our neighbour in distress, we
will help light the way for those lost. We will do so without judgement or
hatred. Ours will be a peaceful planet. We will respect all living things
and we will realize that we need Mother Earth to sustain us. We will show
Her respect and we will help heal Her. We will know one and other as we now
know our friends and family, even though we have never met. There will be
no need for games or lies, since we will not be judged there will be no
need to cover up our indeficiencies. Those who do not understand or can not
understand will be nurtured and forgiven. They will be shown the way, even
if they remain lost. The bible teaches us to turn the other cheek and we
will do this. We will learn the true meaning of Love and we will each
harbour this feeling deep within ourselves. When we achieve this, humanity
will be at peace and ready to evolve into beings beautiful beyond
imagination. We will be at one with ourselves and each other. We will have
no need for jealousies and hate. There will be love and respect for all
living things.
-------------------oOo-------------------
** Flemming Funch, 11 years old, 1970, Denmark **
Well, my mother is visiting for christmas and she brought some of my old
essays and stories I had written in elementary school in Denmark, and that
is kind of fun reading. Let me translate one of them here, about "The
Future", written 27 years ago. Note that this is written long before the
personal computer or the Internet was invented, and by an 11 year old. I
would obviously say a few things a little different today.
"THE FUTURE"
It is July 18th in the year 2005 in the city Europolis, which is the
biggest city in the world. All of Europe has long since been united and
there isn't such a thing as war any longer.
J.P.Jefferson is on his way home from his work, which is to control the
manufacture of superhydromolecular engines. All factories are placed deep
under the earth's surface and they don't pollute any longer. Jefferson is
being transported in a big comfortable computer controlled hovercraft
vehicle. All cars are nowadays controlled from a big computer central, and
there are never any accidents. After a few minutes he is home, where he
gets out of the car and lets it drive down into the underground parking
garage by itself. He himself steps into an M-7 elevator, which is a kind of
tube where one gets sucked up by some special magnets.
His wife is in the middle of preparing dinner, but actually only because it
is her hobby. Normally one only has to push a few buttons and you get
exactly what you want. While his wife is making dinner Jefferson tunes his
TV in on the daily newspaper. Paper is hardly used any longer, and it isn't
really necessary, as the newspaper comes up on the TV screen. You change
pages just by clicking a button. You don't need books either, as they have
all been recorded on video. If you want to read a book you just connect
with the Library and request the book. A moment later you see the first
page on the screen. If you want you can get the book read aloud by
selecting which voice you want. If, for some reason, you'd rather have the
book or the newspaper in print, you just push a button and it comes out on
a printer that is connected with the TV. There are also thousands of
regular TV programs that you can choose from, and if you don't find
anything you want, you can order something else from the program library.
You can also do shopping through your TV screen. Either you can browse
through the list of goods on the screen, or you can have a camera scan
through the shelves of the supermarket and then you can order what you
want. The purchase will then be sent by tube mail directly to your home.
Jefferson's kids are now also coming home from school. They only go to
school 4 hours per day, as they're learning much more than they did 30
years ago. They are mostly getting their education from computers. Now
they're all getting their daily exercise and then they're going to swim in
the pool. When one has that many technical conveniences one has to make
sure that one gets exercise as well.
If humanity hadn't stopped the pollution in time, maybe nobody would be
alive on earth today. In the 1970s there were already large cities where
people started to walk around with gasmasks and had to buy clean air in
cans and bottled fresh water. More and more people died from lung cancer
and the fish died in the oceans. But then the pollution was stopped by law
and a lot of money was used to clean air and water with, so now there is
almost no pollution left.
-------------------oOo-------------------
Send in your visions for a new civilization to ffunch@newciv.org
o o
/ \------------------ Flemming A. Funch -------------------/ \
/ * \ New Civilization Network / Synchronicity Networks / * \
/ * * \ ffunch@newciv.org / * * \
o-------o----------- http://www.worldtrans.org/ -----------o-------o
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