A Newer World Order
The peaceful solution to rampant governmental corruption is to build new decentralized systems that dissolve corrupt power structures. Decentralize Everything!
Are you new to the concept of decentralization? No problem!
Decentralization 101 anaolgy:
An easy way to understand how decentralization works in corrupting systems is imagine that you were going into the desert. You have a 55 gallon drum for water. Imagine something happened to that drum - it got a hole poked in it or somebody poisoned it or something else bad happened to the water. All of your water would be corrupted, and you would be in big trouble.
However, if you had 55 separate 1 gallon containers of water, it would be a lot harder to corrupt all those containers, and if you had thousands of even smaller containers of water, spread out all over the place, it would be even harder.
This is the power of decentralization. We must do this to all systems because they have all become corrupted.
Centralized Government is Easier to Corrupt:
For most of time, humans lived in a world where the power was consolidated into the hands of a few kings or queens. Then a few hundred years ago, with America leading the way, that shifted into more decentralized/democratic systems, and the power was spread out over the people. As a result, overall quality of life started to improve immensely.
For a while, America was one of the most decentralized governance system on Earth, and with that came lots of opportunity. People lined up from countries all over the world to move to America. They were not moving to America for the land, or for the people. No, they were moving for The American Dream: a chance to live inside a system that nurtured creativity, individualism, knowledge creation, and freedom to choose one’s own path.
America’s system also had one of the most important factors working for it: the ability to error-correct. Critics like to argue that America wasn’t born perfect. That’s right, it wasn’t. No country ever was. But over time America corrected the mistakes it made such as slavery, the oppression of women, child labor, promoting cigarette smoking, toxic waste, and more.
But in the last 50 - and especially the last 20 years - all the power has begun to consolidate again. With that centralization has come more corruption. We are losing our ability to error correct. We need to re-decentralized America to protect it. We have all the tools - especially with the internet now - to do so and make America - and all countries - more impervious to corruption and the enemies of civilization.
What are the results of living under this re-centralization of power?
The results right now are this: People with powerful agendas have us on the brink of war. No institution seems trustworthy. Our government is fully corrupted where both “sides” pretend the other is the problem, when in reality they are all in on it. People don’t trust the media, voting systems, medicine, food, academia or even science. Right now we live in a world where people sit in laboratories making viruses more dangerous even though most of us agree that is a horrible idea. We exist in a reality that despite technology evolving at such an amazing pace this century, all the people of Earth are getting sicker and sicker. That shouldn’t be happening in an aware society living under a good system. Technology should be helping us understand more, and live longer, happier lives. Something isn’t right. Something is obviously very corrupted.
The answer to all of it lies in the systems we allow to govern over our lives. The number one most important factor for determining quality of life on Earth is this: What kind of systems do you live under?
Think about it. If you tell us what kind of systems you live under, we can accurately predict what kind of life you have with amazing precision - especially if you live under a corrupted system.
The ways to corrupt our systems have outpaced the ways to protect them, so now whoever is doing the corruption has control. We need to find a peaceful way to get that control back. We must decentralize, but organize, in a radically transaprent fashion.
We should all have a healthy fear of the corruption that centralized power lures to itself, and the danger that poses to the members of any system (we the citizens). The time to resist this is right now, before it gets worse. There are only two kinds of systems: effective and ineffective. By nearly any metric, our current system seems to be losing efficacy at an alarming rate. So we need to have a sense of urgency, and do something about it.
Centralized power is always alluring to those who want to wield it. Like the ring in Lord of The Rings, profiteers and tyrants alike salivate over controlling centralized power. One ring to rule them all. The most effective way to curb this problem is with decentralization.
Think about it from the perspective of someone who is trying to hack, game or corrupt a system. In a decentralized one the hacker will only get the information of one person - one node of the system - if they are successful. In this scenario they will work extremely hard to get very little reward - aka one bottle of water. But in a centralized system they will often get a massive cache of thousands of different people’s data, money, goods - or a whole 55 gallon drum of water. The risk is often the same but the reward for attacking the centralized system is greater. Thus, much more tempting.
We should be actively stopping corruption by continuously making our systems better. When was the last time this happened in America? Or in any government? We should be constantly asking ourselves: do these systems still hold accountable those who attempt to corrupt them?
As people, we need to harness, amplify, and keep the power spread out over all of society with well-crafted new systems and tools to help us (like collective “swarm” intelligence systems). We need to make sure all systems that govern over us are not corrupted or corruptible at mass scaling. To do that we need to use transparency to expose where the corruption points occur, and then fix them.
As an important caveat, often there are multiple systems working together. Some centralized, some decentralized, and some a fusion of the two systems. In any case, the system with the final say over the other ones holds all the power. Picture that hand-over-hand game you played as a kid with a baseball bat to see who bats first… the last hand on top wins. Now picture that with systems. If a centralized system controls a decentralized one - the centralized system has control of everything. If a decentralized system controls a centralized one, then it has the control.
We call this the “Last Hand on The Bat” theory of systems, which means the last system to control the others, controls the whole thing.
To understand this better let’s use government as an example. The centralized businesses in America were supposed to be kept in check by the centralized entity of government. Government was supposed to act as a referee between business and people, and people and each other, and for a while it did that safely. This was only safe because the decentralized power of the people working together en masse voting had the final say. So the controlling system - the last hand on the bat - for a long time was the decentralized voters.
But is that still the case?
If the systems of voting are corrupted in any way, then that would mean that the whole system is corrupted. Why? Because the people with the final hand on the bat here would now be the centralized ones who were corrupting the system, and no longer the decentralized voters.
The trust has eroded within our most vital systems.
If we ignore the hot button issue of “stolen elections” for a second, and just honestly and scientifically examine the current American trust in the voting system, how does it score? Trust is low. When you have elected officials in 2016 saying that the system was rigged when Trump won, then now again the opposite in 2020 and 2022 and 2024….. that says something.
Add to that the obvious fact that money in politics controls politicians and sways elections, and it is clear that trust in the entire system is failing. Most people now believe that it is no longer the decentralized voters in control. It is the centralized corporations and the people colluding to corrupt our systems who are - The Corruptors.
What we need to repair first is trust. Good decentralized systems require trust. It is an absolute. The best way to get there is to build new systems that we migrate to that use transparency and decentralization as core principles.
Imagine a new paradigm- making our own consensus and problem-solving systems that plug into the current ones that will give us better decentralized control in the end - like we have talked about so many times before such as HERE, HERE, and HERE.
Humans are fallible, and bad actors will always try to corrupt our systems. Imagine if the houses on your street kept getting burglarized. The answer would not be to hope for better people, or to hire better cops. The answer would be better systems - ones that were very hard to corrupt. Such as better locks, security systems, cameras, motion lights, dogs, weapons, neighborhood watches, and more.
America’s situation right now is our own fault for putting the trust in the wrong type of system - a centralized power system. There is absolutely no excuse not to have transparent, open sourced, and difficult to corrupt systems in place to help us run governments.
So let’s build them.
Anyone who has read the book The Starfish and The Spider (that we often recommend such as here) knows that if decentralized entities are prepared to fight back then they only get stronger when attacked. Think about what happened when the US government tried to shut down Napster back in the day. New, more-decentralized platforms popped up everywhere (Kazaa, Morpheus, etc). Or when CNN and MSNBC and FOX tried to smear podcasts and Substack and video platforms, they only became stronger and now Legacy media is all but dead.
Understanding decentralized systems might be easier with an infographic, such as this
At the Society of Problem Solvers we like to think about our situation like this:
This is exactly the kind of thinking we need. Parallel systems. Decentralized systems, Transparent systems. New systems that we build ourselves and control ourselves. We need a place to block out the noise and propaganda and have serious talks once again.
We have all the tools we need to fix our systems right now such as collective intelligence, blockchain, think tanks, and decentralized problem-solving systems like we wrote about so many times.
We just need to decide that it is time to decentralize once again, and snuff out corruption before the reverse happens.
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All problems that do not defy the laws of physics are solvable with the right knowledge - David Deutsch
Humans solve problems better in high-trust groups, and solving problems is happiness!
#CollectiveIntelligence
For over 3 billion years on this planet there were only single-celled organisms. Then one day they somehow learned to work together and make complex multi-celled creatures . Right now we are like those single-celled organisms. Our next evolution is finding how to work together, better… (like we wrote about here).
#SwarmAcademy #NetworkState #LEADERLESS #ResultsMatterMost #DecentralizeEverything #DemandTransparency
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This is how we change the world. We build genies - systems of people like this:
I was thinking as I read this that my husband and I will go to a family run restaurant 90% of the time over a chain. It follows with your theory, I think. Also, chain restaurants generally speaking aren’t very good... probably because they’re centralized and trying to appeal to everyone.
When the people apply their God-given tenants of thinking and quit participating, i.e. voting and paying taxes, it would be over in one day. Don't know about you but this one does not require policy enforcement baby sitting. Adults need to grow up and remember their Godly origin to get back to nature and do no harm.