The Mission
What is Sustainable Democracy?
That is a question I have asked myself many times. It took a long time to figure out the answer, but I would never ask for anything else.
Sustainable Democracy is the effort to achieve a stable democratic society based upon principles of sustainable/renewable energy. And energy is in italics for a very good reason. What I suggest is far beyond renewable power sources (although that is important).
Energy is everything. There is political energy, economic energy, social energy, spiritual energy, and technological energy just to name a few. These are all living breathing systems just as we as individuals are. They are alive and have energy because none of these systems are separate from us! Over time we have gradual built up hundreds of impersonal layers to remove the human element to the systems we manipulate, spend, and deplete. The abstract stock market is not just profit margins, it involves the lives and futures of every employee.
Sustainable Democracy is about reinventing system to fully visualize this nature of systems. We have spent centuries working to achieve better technology, philosophy, and social structures to make our lives better. We should begin bringing that effort to bear and create the society that renews and rejuvenates us, not perpetuate the one that sucks us dry until we are of no great use to it.
Why is it so important?
It may seem like fun to work as hard as you can for the next 40-60 years of your life while hoping for a relaxing retirement. But is that really the way the great innovators of society have hoped it would turn out?
The effort of philosophy, social science, and technology is to free us from tedium and allow mankind to achieve further levels of personal enlightenment. Sustainable Democracy is important because instead of making progress we are sliding backwards. Office technology has had the great benefit of making you a cow. You sit in a pen and produce a product for consumption. That is very likely an accurate image of your life. And that seems rather depressing.
We have created a behemoth of government, corporate interests, and social rules that serve little other purpose than to destroy hope and breed complacent workers. More and more small companies and alternative societies are attempting to escape this way of life. The reason is the system we have created is not sustainable.
Medicine has greatly improved our lives and given us the chance to live much longer. Industry has filled in the gap to make sure that your extra time in life will be indentured to moving papers from stack to another while praying that your retirement account grows and isn’t wiped out by a recession.
That is why it is important. because we should be working with every breath we have to escape that bleak gray world and be building the infrastructure and systems to enrich our lives and free us from the grind that life has become. Because you are not living in a sustainable or democratic society if your hope for retirement is to escape existential suffering.
