I'd like to share with you an essay I wrote last spring. The idea I communicate in it is about a DDU or Direct Democratic Unit. This is the idea I've developed to counter act the habit of small communities to collapse towards the most powerful personality. I've been talking about wanting to join an intentional community for years, but my husband's experience is that they become sex cults.
Direct Democracy:
A Path Towards Type 1 Civilization
When I first learned of the Kardashev scale of civilizations, I realized I couldn’t imagine a story which would bring us from our current multinational discorde into a global civilization, without great strife. Artists depict this subject matter by imagining faciest or socialist totalitarian bureaucracies or a world rebuilding after a society collapsing disaster. This cultural theme obfuscates the idea that we already live as citizens of a global oligarchy.
As someone who has made seeking wisdom through stories the focus of my intellectual life, I’m seeking to tell the story of becoming a global civilization through new growth. For too long Gold, and the understanding of individual worth that philosophy espouses, has steered our global course. Capitalism, the love of Gold, has been like a fungal bloom smothering, breaking up and consuming the remains of other economic organisms. This Golden bloom has run its course and must soon die back. In its wake we must seek out and nurture the seeds of older economic systems which have lain dormant.
The danger of this situation is that the newly sprouting economic systems will treat each other as competitors for the role of the new economic monoculture. The much healthier option is to nurture an integrated ecology of specialized economic systems. The value of objects, actions and information can and should be determined through different processes. There are Resource Based Economy (RBE) advocates who have developed plans for valuing and sharing material objects. The development of an effective, honest information economy requires cooperative global efforts which we are not yet ready. Individual actions, can however, undergo a revaluation if we can start building social units able to engage in direct democracy.
I propose we do this by reviving an economic/political unit at the level of a village or band. There is some research by evolutionary anthropologists and sociologists, often referred to as Dunbar’s Number, which indicates that 150 people is the maximum comfortable size for a group of people self organizing without the help of advanced technology. Since this is the group size which allows all members a chance to maintain a meaningful relationship with all other group members, I consider 150 people or less to be the ideal size for direct democratic communities. If we have people organize into groups of this size, and make each village responsible to each other for food security in times of hardship and disaster, then we’ll have a basic social unit with good potential for cohesion and solidarity. These Direct Democratic Units (DDUs) would then select members to represent them at the next level of economic/political units, which would also be held to 150 maximum members, thereby creating a representative government with a direct democratic base.
With our direct democratic seedbeds prepared, we can start to determine the real value of work in an equitable community. The requirements which all the DDUs would share would be the size restriction and the need to provide food security for all members. Some will be tempted to organize like small towns in an earlier era of capitalism, having outside jobs and contributing cash. The ones who organize as collectives not exchanging cash within the DDU will have the opportunity to show the practical value of other economic systems. I expect a time banking model to be one of the early successes. If the DDU runs its own internal time bank it will be easy to determine how many labor hours it takes to care for the whole community. Highly automated communities may be able to provide a high quality of life for all their members without taking up much time and showcase the quality of art and science which can be produced by a society which has given up the labor for income model.
As people get sorted out into DDUs many different community types should develop. Depending on the world view of the members some groups will opt for low tech high manual labor other groups will opt for high tech and low manual labor. DDUs would also be encouraged to decide on some type of possible disaster scenario, pandemic, earthquake, civil unrest, etc., which their community would be positioned to survive. One of the main sorting functions will be around diet, since the members will be mutually responsible for food security. Very compact DDUs could be made by vegetarians with automated vertical farms. Those preserving warrior cultures for their survival potential will want to live in DDUs positioned to accommodate hunting of lands cared for by the group and/or small scale animal agriculture.
Some of the most difficult worldviews to accommodate will likely be Nihilists and Religious Evangelists. Let me describe a DDU which would accommodate both worldviews. Nihilists are difficult to enculturate because they start from a place of not believing in anything except seeking pleasure as the purpose of existence. And Evangelists would be likely to use religious adherence to subvert the democratic process, if boundaries are not drawn to establish a maximum percentage of people adhering to the same worldview which could reside in the same community. A DDU could be formed with up to one third of residential spaces reserved for Nihilists. They would get access to basic needs and whatever intoxicants the population desires. In return the Nihilists would give up their reproductive rights and parental rights to any minor children. The Evangelists would be permitted to proselytize to the Nihilists in return for doing the work of maintaining food security and cleanliness for the DDU. Another third of this DDU would have to be made up of people from other worldviews like Humanism or a non-evangelical religious belief.
In these kinds of direct democratic experimental environments, we will have the opportunity to really work out the value of an individual’s time, efforts, and actions. I feel the action of giving up the chance for reproduction is quite valuable, but it will be up to individual DDUs to see what they can manage to offer in exchange for that action. If they live in the same community and are directly responsible to each other, people will have to reevaluate stigmas surrounding labor and the value of an individual's time. Any DDU organized around surviving a pandemic, will need to be able to seal its gates for months at a time and meet all the needs of its people internally. People with professions requiring extensive education, may find their contributions less valuable than those whose talents lie in traditionally undervalued areas like cleaning, cooking and childcare. In a class segregated society people paying for these services can easily ignore the effort of people providing these services, but if these people are engaging in direct democracy that ignorance will be challenged whenever political decisions are made.
