How to Join
The 3rd R - Redistribute Power: as a movement we offer two options for participating, Membership and Affiliation.
After Times
The 1st R - Rebel With a Cause: With the crisis in our current social, political and economic systems accelerating, it is important to envision what comes next.
We are living at a pivotal time in human history. For the past 100 years the world has been driven by the spread of democracy and capitalism. It could be framed as the rise of the American empire, based on these two ideologies. At this time both of these systems are facing a crisis which calls their viability into question. Both ideologies have been placed on a pedestal where no one questions their viability or examines the assumptions on which they are built. Some are suggesting we are in the End Times of these ideologies, corresponding to the fall of the American empire. We’ll start by examining them at a deeper level in order to understand some inherent flaws.
In his book “End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration”, Peter Turchin paints a picture of what is really happening in our political system. It is not the battle between Liberals (blue) and Conservatives (red), instead what he calls the Elites vs the Counter-Elites. Simply put, the Elites are those in power and the Counter-Elites are those who want power. In our current system we have an overproduction of Elites, those wanting power, in a world where there are a limited number of positions.
Consider the game musical chairs, instead of removing a chair each round, more people are added. In other words, you have more and more people competing for a limited number of chairs. The focus becomes the acquisition of the chair, not the responsibility the chair represents. This is why our political system can’t get anything done. We see this in the financial system where the 1% exercises influence over everything. We see this in academia where peer review limits new ideas and thinking stagnates. We see this in governance where bureaucracies grow out of control, expanding their charter without accountability.
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Who Can Join
The 4th R - Reorganize Yourself: we use legal and financial structures which focus on meeting the needs of people and the planet.
As the number of Counter-Elites continues to grow the system gets more competitive until it reaches the point where people are willing to do anything. Rules no longer apply, compromise is no longer possible, truth gets obfuscated and power gets concentrated. This is the state of our current financial, political and academic systems. It is the financial elites who are now in control and taking action to entrench their power and disenfranchise those without.
The creation of these financial elites is the result of a capitalistic economic system which values capital over people and the planet. In his book “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century”, Walter Scheidel exposes how our social systems auto-correct when we have a large disparity of wealth. He describes the four paths of correction as revolution, mass warfare, system collapse and natural disaster.
The book offers many examples throughout history. Examples of each in the last century, during the rise of the American empire are:
- Russian Bolshevik revolution (1917)
- World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945)
- Collapse of the U.S.S.R (1991)
- Spanish Flu epidemic (1919)
The result of each of these was a dramatic reduction in population where wealth disparity was reduced. Are we in the collapse of the capitalistic/democratic ideology? Probably. Could COVID 19 have been the catalyst for the next correction? Possibly, yet it wasn’t. Was it our technology and global response that prevented the correction? One thing is different from all the past corrections, our technology allows us to respond more directly and rapidly than any time in human history. New ideas and systems can be created and deployed on a global scale.
As distrust of our financial, governance and academic institutions is increasing, it is imperative that they be replaced with something we can trust. If we let the existing systems collapse and in parallel we design a new system to replace them. Think of it as a cushion on which society can land instead of succumbing to one of the 4 paths. A system that rises up from the grassroots, built on a foundation of human needs and addresses the flaws in the current systems. Using technology that is imbued with our values, putting barriers in place that prevent the failures of the existing systems. Eliminating the overproduction of elites, preventing wealth disparity and placing people and the planet before profit.
We call this new system Contributionism…