Re: [Prevent-Crime] Initiation for Empowerment Solutions Dialogue

[Doug Everingham <dnevrghm(at)powerup.com.au>]

I agree, Rachel, that the change must start in each participant.
Below I copy my recent reply to a request for defining my view of what Utopia should be.
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From: Rachel Hardesty <RCunliffeHardest(at)aol.com>
Date: Sat Jun 30, 2007  12:15:00  AM Australia/Brisbane
To: meetingplace(at)imagicomm.com
Subject: [Prevent-Crime] Initiation for Empowerment Solutions Dialogue
Reply-To: meetingplace(at)imagicomm.com
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With the risk of sounding sappy: Let it begin with me.

John asked me to offer a "discussion of human conditions that SHOULD exist, 	...	 what it is going to take to change the world?
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[cut by D E ]
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Doug Everingham's 2007 thoughts on

     					    DEFINING UTOPIA 

       				A. HUMANITY & EARTH 

       1. Beasts matter. Utopia should seek justice for all sentient beings – 'earthlings' – in harmony with Earth's web of life. That should include a family of 'humanity' reconciled in 'humanism' but also something wider: a world order that could be called 'earthlinghood' supported by nearing universal agreement or 'earthlingism',

B. GROUPS & GOVERNANCE

       2. Keeping groups small.  All voluntary groups and public authorities should join in stakeholder-governed networks. The deciding and acting groups should divide into smaller groups when necessary to talk through special parts of a question and to keep the group sizes manageable, small enough to give each member a chance to take part in planning and performing, and thus to answer fairly any continuing objections of any member. 

       3. Nested networks. Each community group should  include someone to take part in each connected activity. That includes management levels above and below.  'Nested networks' should replace dictatorial tiers of control. Examples of how such networking succeeds are mentioned in www.sociocracy.biz  and  works of Dr Shann Turnbull, Principal, International Institute for Self-governance.

       4. Linking official groups. This self-steering structure should absorb political parties and lobbies, as well as keeping checks and balances between houses of parliament and other authorities. Law makers, interpreters and implementers -- parliaments, courts and police -- linked with mediators, conciliators, monitors, auditors, social services, legal privileges and penalties, guardianship and rehabilitation –  should be chosen by proportional representation of voluntary, licensed, commissioned or contracting groups and others who hold a stake in planning and acting.

5.  Transparent accountability. The groups should thus be their own watchdog groups and authorities – auditing, monitoring, inspecting, investigating, licensing, rewarding, penalizing etc. Such controllers in the past were often appointed by ruling parties, lobbied and biased by competing or monopoly-seeking power wielders, liable to secret privilege or prejudice and not fully accountable until public outrage reminds us of the need for eternal vigilance.

6. Proportional voting.  Elections should allow proportional representation of majority and minority groups of voters. This is favored by multi-member electoral constituencies as documented in Enid Lakeman's  'How Democracies Vote'. Even more fine-tuning of democratic control should be gained by having electorates based on community of interest (cultural, partisan or geographic). Voters should have a choice between electoral rolls on which they are qualified and registered to vote.  Such a choice is rare, but an example in New Zealand may be a model. There Maori citizens may choose to vote for the Maori representation in the national parliament.  Federal governments often go a step towards this division of voting rolls,  allowing voting for representatives at different levels of government from local to global or sometimes letting one person hold office at more than one level). Swiss voters I'm told may specify a religious order to which their funeral insurance is paid by the public taxing authority – another example of interlinking controls democratically.

7. Proportional representation. Each legislative and executive (including cabinet) decision-making authority should be chosen proportionally. Another good Swiss initiative,

8. Referendum by petition. Citizen-initiated referendum and recall as in Switzerland should be used to extend voter control of governments.

9. Informed voting. All voters should have access to summaries of the case for and against each alternative proposed at referendums and elections.

10. Citizens' juries. Where needed, randomly chosen short term representation ('citizens' juries') should consider a proposal and publish findings to inform the voters and/or authorities concerned.

11. Media. The 'fourth estate' mass media should network with specialized newsletters, internet blog and chat groups and 'mmaffiaccs' (military, media, administrative, financial, fundamentalist, industrial and academic complexes, cartels, creeds and cabals including political parties).

12. Democratizing enterprises. We should encourage other public and private enterprises by tax and other rules to develop  democratic control and ownership networks.

       13. International Simultaneous Policy.  World citizens should pledge to vote for national leaders who declare in favor of the word community and 'earthlinghood', and, when sufficient competing countries agree, to act accordingly. This is increasingly agreed by voters and election candidates adopting the International Simultaneous Policy -- www.simpol.org, and to a less binding extent in campaigns like that those to ban land mines and to set up the International Criminal Court.

C, LANGUAGE & CURRICULUM

       14.  Multiple language learning. Primary and high school curriculums should include studies of understanding, fluency and social acceptance of each child's spoken mother tongue and when feasible another language likely to interest and be useful to the student.

       15. Global interlanguages. Communities enjoying a mother tongue that is a UN official language should help others to preserve and supplement their first language at home, in school and in other cultural activities.

       16. Speaking handicaps.	Our curriculum should help those who lack skill in spoken communication. Reading and writing skills are more complicated, and for most of us need formal teaching.  We should make these a birthright in the mother tongue of each child, and where appropriate communication in other codes like Braille, a gesture language, or Blissymbolics: blissymbolis.org, the largely pictographic interlingual writing used by persons who understand speech but can't speak clearly or use  regular reading and writing (literacy) skills. 


D.  BASIC PRE-SCHOOL CULTURAL COMMUNICATION

	17. Early language access. A 'mother tongue' starts with prosody – the lilt, brogue, twang or accent of a language community.  Phonemes – the sound elements that can distinguish words  from other words – grow out of infant babbling, which starts to weave words and mold meanings.  Gradually we learn how to string words together, unconsciously following  'grammar' rules. All of this comes most easily and lastingly in our first three years, when some say our prefrontal brain cortex absorbs emotionally powerful habits.  It is ever harder to change as we mature – our language skills harden, with language learning concentrated later on brain centers more concerned with logical reasoning. We might compare the way a plant loses its ability to change its twists and bends as it grows and strengthens. Later language learning tends to stay colored by our early childhood accent in spite of growing understanding of the new language..

18.   Other basic (meta-meme) learning. A 'mother culture' includes more than its mother tongue.  Its other communication and social judgment skills follow similar stages. Unconsciously at first we develop bonding and bias towards those we find most able to satisfy our wants, soothe our fears and later guide our values including self-esteem, our sense of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, good and bad manners, well being and disorder, pride and guilt.  Italian psychiatrist A. Rossin has described, at http://www.flexible-learning.org, how the first learned cultural elements (memes) are hardest to change and tend to color or filter our learning of other memes. These early ingrained memes thus act as meta-memes.  An example of this may be the cultural accent of a mother tongue which shows as our 'foreign accent' when we use a later learned language. Rossin urges educational and other authorities to help parents in particular to make use of the learning window of opportunity for children in their first three ears to develop less biased, more flexible thinking, meta-memes to avoid most social tragedies from addiction and misuse of mind-bending substances to extreme fundamentalism.


19. Early parenting crucial.  One parent normally dominates the child's first vital social group.  Too often the other  parent or a secondary mentor upholds that rule, remains obedient to demands that the child not question her/his 'betters'. We should seek family harmony with the growing comprehension, confidence and compassion of children, respected and encouraged by parents who demonstrate to the child cooperative means of resolving conflict with each other.

20.  Cultural tolerance. We learn basic memes largely from parents and adults we see as helpful or loving in parent-like functions – often teachers, clerics, gurus, legal authorities and role models. As our experience and influence widens to the national and global culture, these actors include 'mmaffiaccs: media, military, administrative, financial, fundamentalist, industrial and academic complexes, cartels, cabals, coalitions, clans, creeds, cults and clubs including political parties and factions. Parents, mentors and mmaffiaccs may guide or nurture each child's early growing capacity to question, deliberate, judge and debate.  We should help parents and children to understand this. When, in a child's view, an authority fails to understand or respond reasonably, that child may tend to adopt other role models less acceptable to her/his family and community.
The strongest cultural training is the example of mentors. A child should be helped to question with reason, compassion and global good will, others' claims to unique knowledge or virtue.  Common belief systems should be compared in schools and families with reason, respect and and compassion.  Attempts of cultural leaders or their uncritical followers  to claim unique enlightenment and virtue for their section of humanity is child abuse if it devalues or unfairly discriminates against critical thinking. No-one should demand that a child should expect to be punished or rejected for questioning particular writings, rites or belief systems. We should encourage independent judgment and confident reasoning of children as the safest way to steer them away from destructive guilt, anxiety, depression, suicide, drug misuse, rebellion, violence, bigotry, racism, war and genocide. Dr Rossin has joined with a small community in an experiment or pilot study attempting to show how parents may prevent – or, with help in the newly articulated field of early infancy education, repair – the cultural damage done by the dominant global culture which encourages uncritical obedience to authorities. We not need not wait for this local study to realize that tolerance, reasoning, mutual respect and flexibility is essential to tip the balance of global culture towards social harmony and away from social rebellion, mind-altering substance abuse, indiscriminate violence against 'out' groups, and so on. We can follow Rossin's 'dialectical decision making': encouraging each parent to consider cooperatively any disagreement with the other parent:  one authority's proposal or thesis interacting with a dissenting view or anti-thesis to produce an agreeable synthesis. The less mature group decision-making pattern dominating world cultures takes or pushes the view that one authority knows best and need not heed or agree or compromise with the other. Rossin sees each parent rather showing the child the more flexible thinking alternative: not only shown wen parents' cooperate but by also when both encourage the child to start proposals.  Parents should wait for the child to propose attitudes and actions first if possible. The growth of insurgency and social breakdown damages communities where this principle is ignored, as in military occupation or paternalistic regime change in response to breakdown of indigenous or conquered communities.

21. Magic, myths, mandatory faiths.  Unreasoned belief in magic spirits, superstitions and myths like making a wish while blowing out birthday candles,  should not be unfeelingly ridiculed.    Children and others should not be ordered to throw away any fanciful or supernatural belief if  that belief is compassionate. We should value and promote with reason and compassion the growth of Universal Declarations of rights and responsibilities, not to be brushed aside by religious or ethical rules, legal obligations or sectarian ethical dictates.  It is abuse of children and others to demand obedience to teachings which discriminate unfairly between believers and doubters. We should not exempt particular sects from rules forbidding ritual or penal mutilation, torture, execution or other deprivation of rights. 

E.  MATERIAL AND PERSONAL RESOURCES.


	22. Money.  We should study alternative money systems including local and specialized tokens and demurrage (reverse interest) money which encourages prompt investment of earnings in sustainable and fair uses and prudent developments, the lenders sharing the investment risks of those they lend to rather than charging and dictating interest rates. Such a cooperative approach seems to be favored  by some Islamic and other writers.

	23. Territories and resources.  Earth's marketable resources are the birthright of all earthlings. Land and water regions should be leased for fair and sustainable uses.

24. Dependent or disabled persons.  Minors and immature persons should be protected from sexual, commercial or other exploitation and encouraged to develop their natural skills and interests, with special help to overcome particular disabilities.

25. Sexual commitments. Consenting adults should be entitled to sexual contact and commitment with due regard to their responsibilities for population control and prevention of damage to others including emotional fraud.       .

26. Reproduction. Every person approaching adolescence should have access to  contraceptive understanding and responsible grounds for duly skilled terminaton and alternative management of unwanted pregnancy with full regard for avoiding suffering of a potential offspring and all concerned.

27. Euthanasia. Powerfully disabling treatment may be the only way to relieve suffering that is too intense to allow a tolerable quality of life. Voluntary euthanasia (a peaceful death sought by the sufferer) may result from such treatment. Helping suicide in such a case should be done and approved by persons duly qualified and satisfied that the person seeking to die peacefully is aware of all alternative possibilities, and that the objective is to end unavoidable suffering not to end life. Competent health professionals should be trained to prolong life but not by prolonging dying n agony.