The People Need Manchurian Candidates to Reclaim Democracy In America
We need to infiltrate our own governments with people who will actually listen to their constituents, and give The People a seat at the table once again. But how?
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Where is the point of failure - the corruption point - in our current system?
It’s the representatives. Over time, our arrangement with representation has become corrupted to the core. From money and dark money in politics to the revolving door of big business, blackmail, bribery, or even fraud - it is the politicians who are the weak link in our systems.
Humans are always corruptible.
Today, representatives don’t know (or care) what their constituents want, let alone how to be courageous enough to stand up for them. Once in power, politicians vote on bills they never read, written by corporations and special interest groups that don’t have the people’s best interests in mind. They also make promises to the people that are never kept, and there is no accountability for any of this. They tell YOU what issues you should care about, and they almost never care about the harm that the aftermath of their policies create. They only actually pretend to listen once every few years when it comes time for elections.
The people no longer have a say in the solutions. We are told what the solutions are in a top-down fashion. Think of a common hot-button issue, and you will find the solution being forced right behind it (that usually divides us more, and certainly makes someone a lot of profit or gives them more control over humanity). None of their solutions ever seem to involve the constituents at the actual bargaining table.
But there exists another way - a way to reclaim our system and give the voice back to the people as it was originally intended. And since the current status quo of politicians won’t sit down to listen and work with their constituents, we propose re-infiltrating our systems with a new kind of politician - a transparent one. One whose main goal is to root out the corruption and return the power back to the self-governing People as intended.
Sure, there might be some good-natured politicians who want to be on board with this - and that’s great. But most politicians will hate it, especially the corrupt ones. It will be the perfect litmus test to see which of these representatives are actually on the side of the people and which ones are only about their masters that have corrupted and now control them. In other words, if they are on our side, they should have no problem decentralizing their own leadership and proving it.
Imagine This:
Linda Steele (a fictional character for our story) is running for office. What she is about to do is going to change the paradigm of what is expected of representation moving forward. It really wouldn’t matter who Linda Steele is or what party she runs under. All that matters about her is this:
She is willing to decentralize her own leadership.
That’s it. She literally doesn’t need to know anything about politics. She won’t be doing anything on her own, as her constituents will all be there guiding her as she intentionally decentralizes her role back to the people.
Imagine she takes office, turns around, and tells her constituents, “You are in control now. I am just a figurehead. A representative. I will make suggestions, but otherwise your voice is going to be my voice. Your actions, my actions. Tell me what you want to see done, and I will work with you, and we will do it together.”
And together we all went after our biggest problem - the corruption - in full force.
In the past few years we have come across many different factions of democracy reform. A lot of them have some fascinating ideas. But with that, there is much debate on how a process like this could unfold. We believe that we don’t have to be married to any one single way of reform. In fact, there are a lot of options to try and then compare results (results matter most, and we must be willing to change course when they do not work out). As long as the new system or reformed method stops corruption and aims to enhance the People’s position at the table, we believe it will be a massive improvement over what we have now.
A few examples of systems like this that could be implemented are Citizens Assemblies (we plan on doing an article about these soon), liquid democracy, one of Balaji Srinivasan’s “Network States,” ballot initiatives (enhanced), or even limited or constitutional direct democracy systems. There are also plenty of technological advances we aren’t using, such as transparent ledgers found in blockchains, social media platforms that rate politicians in a decentralized manner (like we wrote about here), platforms that connect voters on tangible missions (like we wrote about here), or our personal favorite - Human Swarm Intelligence (if you want to learn more about this fascinating potential for democracy reform, start here). There is a LOT more to cover with these, and we will be writing about them more in detail soon.)
All of these systems are options for groups of citizens to be using to regain control of their governments once again. If the technology of today had existed 250 years ago when the American Democratic Republic was founded, do you think it would have been used to the advantage of the voters in creating a trustworthy form of government? The ways to corrupt our system have outpaced the ways to defend it. We need bold and difficult-to-counter ways to try and stop this corruption and regain control once again, the way it was designed to be. Self-governance, not top-down governance.
At The Rationalist, we simply believe in results. Again, we suspect that factions of all different kinds of democracy reform would work better than our current corrupted system. So why doesn’t each faction get their own Manchurian candidates to run for office, openly, and then turn around and rescind their positions of power back over to their constituents in one (or many) of these reformed or modernized systems? If we can find people and other leaders willing to decentralize their own positions - or, better yet - if we can find a way to unify and demand this type of leadership - this could catch on like wildfire and soon be the norm.
"I am not the leader," is what a good leader in a Democratic Republic should say, "we are."
Imagine if our candidate, Linda Steele, shunned all campaign finances. Then, she takes office. It doesn’t matter what office it is. It could be a mayoral race. It could be a Senator. It could be the local school board. It could be any position. Her constituents from that point on plug into her decentralized position with a modern system. Instead of her working for the people (or more realistically for the corporations or whatever party line she was elected under), she would now be working in a transparent manner directly with the people who elected her.
How transparent? We have covered this a bunch of times (like here), but imagine if she decided to video record every meeting she had and posted it online in real-time for feedback (minus the rare top secret ones). Further, imagine if she posted all of the bills online before she voted on them, and we could all discuss them and see our input (We wrote extensively about options for this process here). Picture it almost being like an interactive reality TV show. We would get to see how the government actually works behind closed doors - how corrupt it really is. All of the snags she hits will be snags we can experience and overcome together. We will get to see the horrible sea of red tape needed to enact policies. All contracts, all policies, and all bills will be run by the platform and constituents first.
Imagine hearing all sides of the debate - piece by piece - instead of just being told what we should be in favor of based on divided partisan lines.
If the media attacks her for her decisions, they would actually be attacking her constituents because they would be directly part of the process. When she speaks, she will always be speaking for the people directly.
In other words, a real representative democracy.
The People could also be part of introducing new bills - ones specifically used to fight corruption - or make ballot initiatives easier.. And we could help remove bad bills that protect those who are doing the corrupting. Once we have enough decentralized leaders across party lines working together, we can pass legislation that will make permanent changes to the current government system.
Can you imagine how much the people who are currently corrupting our system right now would not want this to happen? Imagine the systems that govern over our lives actually adhering to a new culture of "results matter most." Imagine a society with goals, metrics, transparency, trust, feedback, honest self-evaluation, and a growth mindset.
Decentralization works. We have seen it in business. We have seen it in finance. We have seen it in organizations. The time is ripe to see it in government.
The world needs leaders courageous enough to decentralize their own leadership. Or maybe we just need our own candidates for Democracy Reform to run on this platform. Our own Manchurian candidates for The People. Are you courageous to be one of them?
Thanks for reading!
As always the entire purpose of The Society of Problem Solvers is to connect with other solutions-minded results-driven people like yourself!
Thank you to all of the writers that make this possible. We are always accepting guest writers, so if you have an idea for a solution, please reach out. Let’s solve it all, together.
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).
#KillCorruption #UnifyAgainstCorruption #CleanSlate #ResultsMatterMost #DecentralizeEverything #DemandTransparency
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This idea would make the perfect movie. A fantasy of sorts. The only change thats going to happen is not going to be this tidy.
Two things:
I've always found it laughable how all these people get in office to implement there own agenda rather than the will of the people - or one better yet, rather than fix all that is already BROKEN!
Secondly - you should be Bobby Kennedy's campaign manager because everything you wrote in the first seven paragraphs he should be stating verbatim!!!!