Under the overlay of oligarchies, plutocracies, monarchies (OPM) and anarchies which obsess historians, there was, at the level of the vast and populated countryside of the world’s old cultures, Consensual Governance with many localized diversities and variations. There was little paper-shuffling. No computer-assisted bureaucracies wielded remote but powerful Command-&-Control Centers (CCCs). Consensual Governance was human scale. It focused on equilibriums, not equalities.
The change first occurred in the geographical harshness of tribally attenuated, pagan Europe. To neutralize the marauding local aggressions, the tyrannical alliance of the fiefs and the Church scaled up Governance so that the affairs of the populace began to be affected by Power seized and vested in remote CCCs. It took a while for the consequent ferment and upheaval to culminate in beheadings, revolution and the general acceptance of Majority Governance, a.k.a., ‘Lesser Evil’.
After this, however, colonial greed plus industrial enterprise, plus the zeal to protect from those CCCs, the intellectualized notions of ‘Rights & Freedoms’ over-individualized the people. This tempted community-members away from the responsibilities and self-disciplines inherent under local Consensual Governance. Bureaucracies, politics and (for profit) enterprise gave larger-than-human-scale ‘Lesser Evils’ in Europe a spin, which, in imitation of previous bully-oppressors, in effect, progressively internationalized regional plunder-&-protection rackets. Families, communities and academia - instead of producing skilled, socially disciplined citizens - began churning out rainbow-chasing taxpayers, hedonist jobbers, entitlement jockeys and over-consuming escape artists.
Meanwhile, nominal ‘governors’ of these regional rackets, whether ‘representative’ or otherwise, had only the hero/martyr OPM paradigm-guidelines to establish - in opposition to the corpus of conventions, traditions and folk wisdom - man-made Rule of Law at these large, inhuman scales. The audacious – and now scientifically proven as fallacious – presumptions were:
(a) Nature was ‘wild’ and needed to conquered and tamed.
(b) Natural man was a ‘savage’ who must be schooled and civilized.
(c) God and his/her/its creation was inherently chaotic and lawless; it needed to be ordered and organized.
Under this hallucinatory paranoia of ‘Progress & Development’, predation and destruction were prosecuted with arrogant expedition: Strip mines wounded the land; its forests cleared into oblivion. Dams squeeze-damned rivers. Mountains were blown apart; the oceans were emptied of life and converted into grounds for dumping waste. Even the air was injected with toxic pollutants. All that had been held in reverence by the heritage of humankind was trashed and trivialized. More fat to the fire, these regional Euro-USian micro-macro management examples became desirable ‘management’ models for the new nations emerging in those old, old consensual cultures.
Recent histories are packed by leaders who successfully committed their hero/martyr follies and by those who tried and failed in correcting them. It’s doubtful if Majority Governance and its Rule of Law, under any preferred politically correct nomenclature, can really be scaled up any further to create amity, stability, and prosperity worldwide.
Diversities-&-variations-respecting Consensual Governance, aided by non-governing global communication, appears to be a more realistic alternative for the next Christian Millennium. For this, notions of prosperity based upon excessive, inefficient and unnecessary production-&-consumption, purveying of techno-fantasies inimical to our species and gun-running must be jettisoned with extreme urgency.
‘Prosperity’ isn’t derived from a Shakespearean character and ‘Government’ doesn’t have Greek ‘helmsmanship’ roots. The Sanskrit ‘paraspar’ is approximated by ‘mutual’ while ‘Gûrû+mantra’ suggests an advisory function. For advice to catalytically function sustainably in the desired direction, carrot & stick games, latently threatening ‘messages’, and exhibitions of technological prowess are counterproductive; one needs only, say the ancients, the moral force of loving care which is transparently motivated by an equation that keeps ‘self’ at the bottom of the heap. In fact that is what ‘Sarva’ (everyone) + ‘Sva’ (self) – from which ‘Service’ is derived – means.
—This is an edited version of the document that was snail-mailed, August 30, 1997, to President Bill Clinton
