The Party System is broken.

The first step in healing the political divide is realizing the party system is a failure.

It should be apparent to any careful observer, that the current duopoly party system of Blue Team/Red Team is a failure. Or at the very least, it is a dinosaur of the past, doomed to future extinction. The complexities and complications of our interconnected, global village have revealed the serious defects of the party system. It greatly aggravates social division—the world is polarized like never before in history. Social media has compounded this by providing an arena for the two sides to engage in an around-the-clock war of attrition, without restraint.

Western society is disintegrating.

The Global South, the Middle East and Asia will follow the Western lemmings over the cliff, if they continue in the same myopic, double-minded path of partisan politics.

The origins of the party system are found in the French Revolutionary times, when the legislature split up into class-based groups—one sat on the left and the other sat on the right of the speaker. This artificial construction of opposing camps forced political divorce on a grand scale. In fact, the left and the right were never married, but have existed in a state of permanent divorce, maintaining their irreconcilable differences as the status quo from the outset.

I would be a fool to think that any attempt at creating something better would not be met with considerable opposition and challenges, due to cultural, religious, economic, and historical differences of people around the world. Also, the alternative community, bless their hearts, are hyper critical and skeptical (with legitimate cause). Get three freedom people in the room and you have five different opinions. I expect some flak—it’s par for the course.

Onward.

We need to start with some commonality, to help tear down the barricades and soften the harsh inflammatory political division that is tearing our world apart. It should be noted that conniving power brokers are more than happy to exploit the divide—it is in their interest to keep fanning the flames and pouring gas on the dumpster fire, but why should the vocal minority keep feeding trash into the fire?

We need a universal philosophy that has populist support from all sides of the political spectrum. It would need to be focused on fundamental human needs such as food, water, shelter, healthcare and a living wage, along with shared moral intuitions and common ethics. There would need to be some practical governance while avoiding divisive issues that only serve to aggravate the irritable bowel syndrome of the public.

In other words, we need to focus on the things we have in common.

The French Revolution was a shitshow, but …

We should be aware that the French Revolution was a shitshow, but the positive legacy of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment are the basic human rights that virtually the entire world agrees upon. Rousseau’s idea of a Social Contract is thoroughly entrenched in the collective consciousness.

The Will of the People is the only mandate that gives the state the authority to govern. The phrase “general will” as Rousseau used it, occurs in Article Six of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, composed in 1789, during the aforementioned shitshow, (proving that even a shitshow produces some good.)

“The law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to contribute personally, or through their representatives, to its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in its eyes, are equally admissible to all public dignities, positions, and employments, according to their capacities, and without any other distinction than that of their virtues and their talents.”

For more on this, see my article:

The Mother of All Revolutions: The French Revolution is the Origin of the Great Reset

Almost all countries now have civil rights and freedoms embedded in their constitutions, despite the fact that these same countries have violated these constitutions in the name of “national security,” “healthcare emergencies” and “hate speech.” Two steps forward, one step back? There are still about 20 countries with lèse-majesté laws that forbid criticism of the head of state, with various fines or prison sentences imposed on those who do.

Freedom to trash the government is the cornerstone of all human rights. We witnessed the severe violation of freedom of speech on social media during COVID, when Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok all censored any narrative that contradicted the state propaganda. Currently, the Trump administration is pushing a new bill in Congress—H.R. 867, the IGO Anti-Boycott Act—that is a direct attack on free speech.

The Canadian Trudeau government attempted to pass the Online Harms Act, another nasty bill, disguised to protect children, but aimed at shutting down public dissent and legitimate protest.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of money

The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness became an international slogan after the American Revolution, even the basis of modern governments. John Locke declared in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.”

Interesting to note, that Jefferson’s original draft did not mention a Creator.

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; ...

The Committee of Five edited Jefferson’s draft. His editors felt that acknowledgement of a higher power was crucial to a new national charter:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

One of Jefferson’s hobbies, incidentally, was taking a razor and chopping up the Bible, removing the parts he didn’t like, and making a new and improved Jefferson Bible. The good news is that, because of the American freedom of speech laws, he got away with it, without getting burned at the stake.

We all want safety and freedom from political oppression. Nobody wants to get burned at the stake for political or religious heresy. The true government should be based on life, liberty and the pursuit of freedom, however. Jefferson and Locke got off-step by a hair, in this author’s humble opinion, which led to the pursuit of money becoming the national sport.

True freedom sets everyone free. The goal of all human society is greater freedom on all levels: economic, political, social, cultural and spiritual.

As a side-note, in this series of side-notes: the UN Declaration of Human Rights was the first step towards an international treaty—all national governments agreed not to be assholes. What happened in real time, however, is that they all agreed not to be assholes, but carried on being assholes anyway.

Everyone hates corrupt politicians

Everyone hates crooked leaders. Better methods of rooting out corrupt politicians, with harsher punishments imposed on evil-doers, needs to be established all over the world. This may happen very soon in America—national disgust over Epstein’s pre-teen brothel in the Caribbean may trigger a public holocaust of his client list.

Public office should be seen as a high calling, and those who betray the public trust should expect harsh punishment. Public office ought to be a meritocracy, and not a cabal of agents who work for inbred billionaires and bankers. It is interesting that nobody would go see a doctor or lawyer who did not have a license to practice medicine or law, but we elect untrained and uneducated politicians every day. What if a civil service diploma was a requirement for all of those considering public office?

China was the first country to invent a civil service examination system, known as the Keju. During China’s late imperial period (roughly 1400-1900 CE), aspiring men would line up by the millions every two or three years, and compete for pubic positions at official examination centers across China. Only one percent of candidates would complete the academic regimen that would earn them a post in the administrative bureaucracy.

Why do we keep rewarding incompetence?

We need to go back to the Stone Age

The Neolithic Revolution, that began roughly 12,000 years ago, allowed humans to settle down, ending the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. This created food surplus that freed people to specialize in non-farming roles (artisans, leaders, scholars, priests). The central feature of the Neolithic Revolution was family farms, banded together in a community that enabled trade and technology to flourish.

Everybody has a family of some kind, even if people create their own families. It does not change the biological fact that we are all born of a woman, no exceptions. The support for strong families and respect for traditions without forced conformity should be endorsed by everyone, including government officials.

What happened to family values?

There could be a family legislature, led by husband and wife co-leaders, that pass laws central to family, marriage, children and all things related. We cannot progress beyond our biological status quo—there isn’t any way to bypass the foundation of human existence—the transhumanists who fantasize about creating a new species are pushing ideas that are dangerous.

The beginning of a New Stone Age, or more accurately, a New Farm Age, would create a bulwark against totalitarian control. Local decision-making is sometimes called subsidiarity or localism. Libertarians take note. Letting communities handle what they can, rather than top-down control, and granting greater powers to municipalities would ensure that power brokers are not able to usurp control of nations and create dictatorships by consolidating power. Making local communities as self-reliant as possible is also an aspect, especially with regards to agriculture. People should be able to feed themselves locally, as this is the basis of civilization. Local manufacturing and industry is also preferable to act as a safeguard to massive global corporations who destroy local economies.

It should be the job of national or international governing bodies to facilitate the local governments, not micro-manage them. The decentralization of power does not mean, however, that we have no central government. It just means the function of the central government is focused less on intervention and regulation, and more on bringing the various groups together and then facilitating, coordinating and mediating between them to come to a consensus and pass legislation that offers the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people.

The rich are getting insanely richer

The wealth inequality gap is becoming so extreme, soon the billionaire class will own the entire planet, all its resources, every nation and every industry—and ultimately every person.

Eight billionaires own as much as 3.6 billion people.

Here is a stunning visual proof of global inequality. Both halves of this graph represent an equal amount of global wealth. The top half consists of the world’s eight richest billionaires. The bottom half represents the poorest half of humanity. It is greed on steroids, unprecedented in human history.

Some people believe that redistribution of wealth is communism, yet how can capitalism be fair if it permits greedy men to accumulate so much wealth, especially when they do not put some of the money back into society? Some conservatives serve as apologists for the billionaire class, with arguments about “true capitalism” and “crony capitalism.” The so-called true capitalists are slow to condemn the crony capitalists, and instead blame wealth equality on communism.

The wealth hoarders could eradicate poverty overnight by creating industry, infrastructure in third world countries, especially Africa. They have no government or bureaucratic oversight to block their efforts because they are independent, and they can move much faster than NGO’s, corporations or national governments.

The nations of the world need to create opportunity, instead of attempting to guarantee equality. We cannot force the world to be fair, but we can open doors for people to improve their lot in life. Most people agree that hard work should be rewarded, and conversely, extreme poverty should be alleviated. The solution is not to give out free money or create endless social programs, but to support the growth of small businesses, fair wages, and consumer protections without full socialism, communism or unchecked corporatism.

Global poverty reduction could be achieved through international programs helping the truly needy, such as children, disabled and the elderly. There is nothing utopian or far-fetched about these ideas—it is just the collective will that needs to be engaged, and the participation of the billionaire class needs to be enforced or managed—they need to be corralled into the service of humanity.

Billionaires won’t help voluntarily—it takes laws, protests, and systemic disruption to force change. The playbook exists—it just needs massive pressure. Compelling the billionaire class to contribute more equitably to society—rather than hoarding wealth and power—requires a mix of policy reforms, public pressure, and systemic changes.

We live on a rotating rock that orbits a giant gas ball

The truth is we are hurtling through space on a spinning ball, suspended by gravity in a staggeringly huge, stupendously gigantanormous universe. We are a species of mammalian bipeds, who are gregarious social animals and thus political. Herd animals form hierarchical social units. The herd follows the alphas. We will never have a leaderless society of betas. That’s the facts of biology.

We’re also super handy with tools and tech.

We are technimals (techno-animals), and we our technology that has advanced to a dangerous, wonderful, amazing level that threatens to alternately plunge us into oblivion, or launch us into a fantastic utopian epoch of unimaginable advancement. The verdict is still out on which way we will go.

Science and its offspring, technology, need to be harnessed by the technimals and controlled, without resorting to the temptation to use technology for power and control. We now have a class of billionaires, mostly in Silicone Valley, who have unimaginable wealth. Elon Musk just donated some of his spare cash, a whopping $289 million dollars, to the Trump election campaign.

Musk is a technimal with enormous political power, who is acting without restraint.

See here, for more info:

Elon Musk and the Dark MAGA Cult

Adjacent to this, we need to find a way, that is not divisive, to collectively manage our biosphere, because human intrusion on the Earthspace threatens all life, including our own. We have mountains, forests, waterways, lakes, farmland and plains that all need to be cared for.

We don’t need to be commies to share the world.

The Earth is experiencing many environmental challenges due to the intrusion of the human species on the biosphere. The media and government focus almost exclusively on climate change, but there are multiple problems, including:

• Biodiversity Loss

• Water Scarcity and Pollution

• Deforestation

• Overfishing

• Plastic Pollution

• Air Pollution

• Soil Degradation

• Waste Management

It is ironic that conservatives seem so uninterested in conservation. Shouldn’t they be the first ones to the gate, to advocate for the protection of our most important institution, the Earth we live on?

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The Great Pacific Garbage Path is a symptom of messy humans who don’t clean up after themselves. Because the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is so far from any country’s coastline, no nation will take responsibility, or provide the funding to clean it up.

Researchers from the Ocean Cleanup project claim that the patch covers 1.6 million square kilometres (620,000 square miles), an area more than twice the size of Texas,^. consisting of 45,000–129,000 metric tons of plastic as of 2018. This is the debris of millions of plastic lighters, toothbrushes, water bottles, pens, baby bottles, cell phones, and plastic bags.

Thus far, the Ocean Cleanup has removed more than one million pounds of trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which only represents about 0.5% of the total accumulated trash.

The elimination of the GPGP can be done, at today’s level of performance, in 10 years at a cost of $7.5 billion. This is chump change for the billion class. The billionaire class go to great lengths to try to convince the world that they are benevolent human beings. Let them put their money where their mouth is and solve this problem by funding it. They don’t want to pay taxes, so the alternative is for them to voluntarily help humanity.

Basic human needs such as clean air, drinkable water, and sustainable land use are universal. Nobody (sane) wants pollution, or the destruction of forests or lakes. Conservation of our environment can be balanced. We can protect the natural world without extreme anti-development policies.

The party is over

The Greek philosopher Cleisthenes is credited with inventing democracy in ancient Athens. It was originally non-partisan—eligible citizens voted on laws themselves rather than electing representatives. The pool of eligible citizens was quite small, however, only adult male Athenian citizens who completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens. The percentage of the population that actually participated in the government was 10% to 20% of the total number of inhabitants. Women, slaves and foreigners were excluded, making Athens a democracy of the elite.

There are states who do not have the party system, such as Micronesia, who elect independent representatives. Legislators do make political allegiances, however, along family and business lines, but there is no organized party with a platform.

The rise of independent politicians is a thing in politics now, so there is hope. People are getting fed up with traditional party structures, and they are looking for alternative voices. In the U.S., nearly half of voters now identify as independent, marking a shift away from traditional partisan affiliations.

This trend is not limited to the US.

Australia, for example, has an increase in independent and minor party members of parliament, particularly since the 2022 federal election. From a report on the erosion of trust for the major Australian parties:

“Protest politics is on the rise in Australia, and the main cause is collapsing trust in politicians and the major parties.

If the major parties and politicians want to rebuild trust with voters, they will need to change the way they do politics: stop misusing their entitlements, strengthen political donations laws, tighten regulation of lobbyists, and slow the revolving door between political offices and lobbying positions.”

The party system forces party members to tow the line and advocate the party platform or face excommunication. This makes politicians representatives of the party, instead of representatives of the people.

Avoiding the hot button issues

We need a new universal philosophy that avoids hot-button issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage or ideological dead ends, such as debates about communism, socialism and capitalism, because ultimately they are becoming futile head-bashing sessions. We need to instead focus on universal human desires and basic human needs. We all need physical safety, it is part of our biological makeup. Everyone wants to be treated fairly—it’s universal.

Tolerance for others is the way forward. We need a laissez-faire universalism that allows people to live and let live—People are free to follow their own beliefs as long as they do not harm others.

Everyone wants to live in a peaceful, stable community where there is respect for law and order. Only criminals would object.

There are obstacles but we shall overcome

The one percenters have more power than the ninety-nine percent—we live with a power imbalance that needs correcting. The one percent often benefit from division, so it is in their own interest to keep the status quo intact.

Some people, especially in the alternative community, are distrustful of universal philosophies, and assume that they are secretly biased towards the global elites. The balanced hybrid model of a mixed economy with safety nets (but still capitalist) has been proven to offer the greatest amount of personal happiness, whether hardcore capitalists or conservatives care to admit it or not.

The Nordic model comprises the economic and social policies as well as typical cultural practices common in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). This includes a comprehensive welfare state and multi-level collective bargaining based on the economic foundations of social corporatism, and a commitment to private ownership within a market-based mixed economy.

According to the World Happiness Report, in an article entitled Nordic Exceptionalism:

From 2013 until today, every time the World Happiness Report (WHR) has published its annual ranking of countries, the five Nordic countries – Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland – have all been in the top ten, with Nordic countries occupying the top three spots in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Clearly, when it comes to the level of average life evaluations, the Nordic states are doing something right, but Nordic exceptionalism isn’t confined to citizen’s happiness. No matter whether we look at the state of democracy and political rights, lack of corruption, trust between citizens, felt safety, social cohesion, gender equality, equal distribution of incomes, Human Development Index, or many other global comparisons, one tends to find the Nordic countries in the global top spots.

What exactly makes Nordic citizens so exceptionally satisfied with their lives? This is the question that this chapter aims to answer. Through reviewing the existing studies, theories, and data behind the World Happiness Report, we find that the most prominent explanations include factors related to the quality of institutions, such as reliable and extensive welfare benefits, low corruption, and well-functioning democracy and state institutions. Furthermore, Nordic citizens experience a high sense of autonomy and freedom, as well as high levels of social trust towards each other, which play an important role in determining life satisfaction.

It might be a cliché, but money doesn’t buy you happiness. Poverty, however, causes a lot of suffering—people are the happiest when they are in the middle class. All of the Nordic Model nations have 75% - 80% of their population in the middle class.

Gross National Happiness

The fool is his own enemy. Seeking wealth, he destroys himself. Seek rather the other shore.

— Siddhartha Gautama

Gross National Happiness is a philosophy that guides the government of Bhutan, emphasizing the happiness and well-being of its citizens over purely economic measures like Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The concept was introduced by the 4th King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the 1970s. Bhutan's Constitution, enacted on July 18, 2008, established the Gross National Happiness Index as the country's primary goal. He declared it was, “more important than Gross Domestic Product.” The concept implies that sustainable development should take a holistic approach towards notions of progress and give equal importance to non-economic aspects of wellbeing.

The GNH Index is a comprehensive measure that evaluates progress based on 9 domains and 33 indicators. These domains include good governance, sustainable socio-economic development, cultural preservation, environmental conservation, and health, among others. The GNH Index is evaluated every 5 years to assess progress and inform policy decisions.

Several scholars have noted that “the values underlying the individual pillars of GNH are defined as distinctly Buddhist,” and “GNH constructs Buddhism as the core of the cultural values of the country (of Bhutan). They provide the foundation upon which the GNH rests.”

This humble blogger is not endorsing Buddhism, or any other religion, just to be clear. Part of our new universal philosophy is allowing cultures to find their own way, and not imposing cultural or religious ideology on others.

Some within the alt community seem highly resistant to change. Maybe it is time we become aware that there is an opposing and positive counter-force, that is swirling under the surface of the global waters, like a warm water current flooding into a cold ocean. Things are changing, for the better, beneath the surface, if you spend some time to look, instead of always focusing on the abomination.

Focusing exclusively on evil, corruption and political intrigue leads to despair, helplessness and passivity. Focusing on the positive and seeking for solutions leads to hope, enthusiasm and active efforts to win the war. One of the best weapons any soldier can bring to the battle is sincere optimism and good cheer.

The world is being stretched in two opposing directions. Only one side will win, and it isn’t the Blue Team or the Red Team.

Only Team Humanity will win.

For some reference, in a previous article, we discussed a universal spiritual ideology:

A New Universal Spiritual Philosophy