"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed... whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
- U.S. Declaration of Independence, 1776

Our elite rulers did not lead us into tyranny and environmental collapse because they are evil people, but because they were forced to by the nature of capitalism. Capitalist economies must continually grow in order to survive. If investors have nowhere to increase their funds then they stop investing and the whole system collapses like a house of cards. Each phase in the development of capitalism - including imperialism and later globalization - has been required to enable successive cycles of capital growth.

Humanity can do better than this - much better - and there is reason to hope that the time is ripe for us to bring about fundamental changes. For the past two hundred years capitalism has employed an unbeatable formula to maintain its stranglehold over the world. That formula has been based on the relative contentment of Western populations, particularly the middle classes. Popular support maintained Western regimes and those regimes had the military might to dominate the rest of the world. That formula reached its culmination in the postwar years when Western prosperity reached unprecedented heights. With neoliberalism and globalization, this successful formula is being abandoned. Western populations are being sacrificed to market forces and WTO tyranny - and our elite leaders have bet their future on the success of their centralized WTO new-world-order regime. The political support base for capitalism has been fatally weakened, and that creates the conditions from which a mass movement for fundamental change is likely to emerge.

Maintaining the status quo is no longer an option for us - the nature of capitalism is forcing revolutionary changes. In a few years the global regime may be so thoroughly established that it will be invincible. The people of the world have a choice. On the one hand we can surrender to global tyranny so that capitalism can continue its insane and destructive growth. On the other hand, we can assert our rights as free peoples - we can oust the elites from power and reorganize our societies so that they serve the needs and wishes of people instead of facilitating the endless accumulation of wealth by a few.

This is our Revolutionary Imperative. Not an imperative to violent revolution, but an imperative to do something even more revolutionary - to set humanity on a sane course using peaceful means. The current regime is serving the interests of only a tiny elite, the rest of us have nothing to lose but our chains - and we have a livable world to gain.

Decentralization - a paradigm for self-rule

"The original Buddha-nature of all living beings is like the bright moon in the sky - it is only because it is covered by floating clouds that it cannot appear."
- Zen Master Fenyang

Humanity has been dominated by hierarchies for so long that we might assume hierarchy is inherent in human societies, perhaps part of human nature itself. But ten thousand years, though it seems like a long time, is less than one percent of the time homo sapiens has been living in societies. By evolutionary standards, civilization has been but the blink of an eye. For essentially all of our history as a species, we have lived in small hunter-gatherer societies. If we want to understand something about human nature, and about stable societal structures, we learn more by looking at hunter-gatherer societies than we do by investigating our behavior during our recent confinement in hierarchical cages. Today we may pace back and forth in our commuter routes, or run a treadmill all day at work, but that is not our nature, that is the nature of our cage.

We have an immense amount of information about hunter-gatherer societies, and some of the most useful is about the Native American societies, because they were studied extensively and documented while they were still functioning intact on a large scale. The Aztec and Inca empires are of no interest to us here, nor are any other societies based on agriculture. What we're interested in are the examples that match 99% of our hunter-gatherer history. Our interest is not in hunter-gatherer economies - there are far too many of us today to return to that. Rather we are interested in how these societies functioned politically, particularly those which were organized in a decentralized way.

There was a striking degree of diversity among these pre-agricultural societies, even among ones which interacted with one another regularly. There were warrior tribes, peaceful nomadic tribes, and even settled communities, when fish were plentiful enough. A considerable number of these tribes had egalitarian, non-hierarchical structures of non-trivial complexity. The one I've looked at most closely was the Oglala Sioux.

There were elders, and there were chiefs, but they had no authority to command. They were looked to for guidance, but they were only followed when their suggestions met with general approval. When a tribal decision was to be made, it was made by consensus, and the chief didn't have more weight than others, unless through persuasion or wisdom.

Perhaps more interesting - since we must deal today with the problem of scale and large populations - is the manner in which the Sioux Nation of tribes reached decisions for collective action. The invasion of the European colonists forced the Sioux to make frequent use of this collective mechanism, but it was already in place - the result of millennia of societal evolution.

A tribal council would be called by one of the tribes. Each tribe would then hold its own consensus session to decide its position regarding the issue at hand. A contingent from each tribe, led by the chief, would then go to the tribal council - where another consensus session would be held. A chief had no authority to agree to anything contrary to what had been established locally. If he exceeded that authority, his tribe would simply not back him up. On the other hand, if the tribe had agreed to pursue some venture, then the chief knew he could promise the tribe's cooperation and that they would follow through. Trustworthiness was a cardinal virtue in most Native American societies, and mutual trust is what permitted their decentralized systems to function reliably.

In this way, collective action could be effectively planned and coordinated, without there being any centralized authority. What was delegated to the chief was not decision-making power, but rather the authorization to say on our behalf that which we have agreed. This is an all-important distinction: it makes the difference between hierarchy and local control, between centralized and decentralized power - between tyranny and self rule.

The Sioux were not an isolated example, by the way. The pattern was a common one, and the interaction between unrelated tribes also exhibited the success of various kinds of consensual relationships. The Iroquois Nation was studied by the American 'Founding Fathers', and some historians believe this influenced the design of the U.S. Constitution.

These kinds of non-hierarchical, non-federated tribal nations persisted stably for long periods of time. They were able to function collectively as nations with considerable effectiveness and coherence when the need arose, without the need for hierarchical government of any kind. Rather than being contrary to human nature, I submit that self-rule may be at the very heart of human nature, and that it appears prominently on every page of human history, except for that most recent page which began only an evolutionary instant ago, and which is called civilization (and which might be better called domestication of the species).

Once stored surpluses came into existence, with agriculture and herding, then it became possible to maintain professional soldiers, and so the tools of conquest and empire building became available. It required only one society to pursue this path, and then all the rest were doomed - sooner or later - to either emulate or be dominated by their more aggressive neighbors. Once the infection of hierarchical domination begins, the dynamics of its spread are all too apparent and inevitable.

But people have not forgotten how to cooperate, despite every attempt of our culture to inculcate competitiveness and selfishness, both in education and in the societal reward system. There are all sorts of organizations and associations that are entirely voluntary and for mutual benefit. Some are hierarchical, and others are not. The recent (10,000 years) conditioning has not unlearned the lessons ingrained by millions of years of evolution. We may have forgotten the social structures we invented formerly, because those can only be passed on culturally, but our ability to function in freedom within decentralized structures remains intact.

What kind of world do we want to build?

"Moderation in all things."
- classical Greek wisdom

"The future arrives of its own accord; progress does not."
- Poul Henningsen, Danish designer and social critic

Permit me to offer my humble proposal for such a unifying vision. It is based on seven fundamental principles, and it has been developed through dialog with hundreds of people and groups, in person and on various email lists. The seven principles are:

• Personal liberty
• A voice for everyone in society's governance
• Decentralization
• Harmonization instead of factionalism
• Economic vitality
• Sustainability
• World peace

Personal liberty
Within the limits of respecting the liberty and well-being of others, every individual should be free to pursue their lives more or less as they see fit. If they choose to submit themselves to the dictates of a religion, to cultural traditions, or whatever, then so be it - but such choices should be voluntary.

No single principle, however, can be interpreted in isolation - each must be kept in balance with the others. 'Personal liberty' does not mean that a community has no right to prohibit anti-social behavior, according to local customs. Nor does it mean that a healthy individual can choose to do sit around all day and then demand that society support them. Personal liberty must be balanced against personal responsibility, and it must be kept in reasonable harmony with the welfare of society.

At the same time, the principle of personal liberty serves to counter-balance an excessive application of other principles. In China for example, large numbers of people have been forced against their will to work on agricultural labor crews, so as to fulfill the central government's economic objectives. And in the United States, men have frequently been forced against their will to fight in imperialist wars, on the pretext of 'defending national interests'. The principle of personal freedom aims to protect the individual against such excessive intrusions by society-at-large, and from any tyranny of the majority. In a livable world, society may protect itself from anti-social individuals, but it does not seek to accomplish its objectives through coercion. A livable society is for the people, not over the people.

A voice for everyone in society's governance
A livable society is not only for the people, but also of the people. Our current societies have a pretense of representation, but that does not in practice provide a voice for the people. We get candidates who sell themselves on television, debating 'issues' which have little relevance to essential matters - and then when they're in office they generally ignore their constituencies and devote their energies to promoting the corporate neoliberal agenda. This may be less true in local elections, but it is very true at the top levels of the major Western governments, where the big decisions are made.

Our supposedly 'opposing' political parties go to great lengths to convince us that they differ in their philosophies, but in practice the 'bipartisan' corporate program is what gets implemented, regardless of who gets elected. When it comes down to it, what could we expect from a system where the only input from the people is an 'X' every four years, next to the name of one personality or the other? How could that possibly convey the will of the people?

The word 'democracy' comes from the Greeks, who were the first to study governmental structures in a systematic way. Their basic categories of governance were 'aristocracy', 'tyranny', and 'democracy'. In fact, these three are all forms of tyranny, as far as the the man in the street is concerned. The only difference between them is who administers the regime. With 'tyranny' it is a self-appointed dictator; with 'aristocracy' it is a property-owning class; with 'democracy' it is some party, or candidate, which has convinced voters that it is less-objectionable than the alternatives.

The literal translation of the Greek 'dêmokratia', rule by the people, is basically a good idea. But the implementations of 'democracy', starting with the Greeks, have emphasized the 'rule' and left out the 'people'. In fact, electoral politics always becomes a game of power-brokers and demagogues, leading to a tyranny of the majority - which really means tyranny by the party that best succeeds in fooling the people.

For 10,000 years our lives have been increasingly dominated by hierarchies. After such long-term subjugation it may be scary to think of running society ourselves. But who else should we trust instead? Even if your answer is "God", then it is up to you to represent that wisdom in the body politic. With the dawning of the 21st Century, it is time for humanity to grow up and take responsibility for itself. We are now 21.

There are many precedents, both historical and current, which provide effective models for involving people in the decisions that affect their lives - for putting responsibility where it belongs. These models are based on the harmonization of interests, rather than on competition among political parties and societal factions. And they are models which begin the problem-solving process at the local level - not in the halls of some remote central government.

Decentralization
In a livable society, local communities should be free to make the decisions that affect them directly. Why should someone else tell them how to live their lives, how late they can keep their pubs open, or what kind of schools they can run for their children? Why should that be the business of anyone outside the community? There have been cases, to be sure, where local minorities have been suppressed, and central governments have come to their rescue. But in a livable society, where everyone has an effective voice in their communities, and the liberty to express it, there should be little need for that kind of central interventionism.

And again, this principle needs to be balanced against others. A community cannot pollute the water source of other communities, nor can it be allowed to squander its resources recklessly - forcing its people eventually to make demands on the resources of others. And the community cannot be allowed to violate the liberty of its citizens, to ignore their political voice, nor to use its children as free labor instead of giving them an education.

There are clearly problems that need to be dealt with on a larger scale than a single community, and there are problems that can only be dealt with on a global basis. But in a livable society, decisions are made locally whenever possible, and larger-scale decisions are made in participation with those affected. In our societies today, decisions by unaccountable centralized bureaucracies have become the primary means by which society is run. In a livable society the power-and-responsibility pyramid is turned the other way around.

Consider how the international postal system operates. Each nation has full sovereignty over how it delivers mail, and what kind of post-office system it wants to set up. There is no centralized global postal authority which has jurisdiction over the internal operations of national postal systems. All nations (except in time of conflict) have always agreed to deliver the mail passed on to them by other nations - based on mutual benefit and trust. The Internet works the same way. Each Internet provider is like a local post office, and the providers voluntarily collaborate in the exchange of mail - based on mutual benefit and trust. The international rail system is yet another familiar example.

These systems are not fully decentralized. Each national post office is itself an hierarchical bureaucracy, and international postal standards are set by a centralized agency. Nonetheless, the overall system structure is a decentralized one - national post offices are run autonomously. They cooperate according to agreed procedures, but they are not under any central management. As these examples prove, a decentralized structure can be very reliable, and it can evolve over time as new circumstances arise. The administrative burden is spread out, where it can be more efficiently optimized for local conditions. The overall administration overhead is less than in a centralized system; administration is closer to its users; and different societies can choose to have different qualities of local service, depending on what they can afford and what their needs are. In a decentralized system, unresponsive and inflexible bureaucracies are minimized.

In addition to these many advantages, decentralized systems provide something even more important - they facilitate innovative evolution. Let's suppose that the Swedish Post Office develops a mail sorter that is more efficient than those used anywhere else. Very soon, other nations will emulate Sweden, perhaps modifying or refining the design in the process. In a centralized system, the research & development function is also centralized, and innovation is constrained through a narrow pipeline. In a decentralized system, each party can take risks on their own with new ideas, and if they fail, no one else need emulate them.

In a livable world, decentralized systems are to be preferred, wherever they can be successfully employed. Besides their advantages in terms of system performance and evolution, such systems provide a political benefit: they transfer responsibility and control to the lowest possible level, in many cases to the local community itself. To the extent that liberty and responsibility can be successfully combined and concentrated at the community level, we can hope to achieve a livable, humane, world - where everyone's voice is expressed and listened to. Such a society would be very well ordered, but that order would be a harmony of individual voices, not the regimented order imposed by a central government. There is every reason to believe that individuals and societies would thrive under decentralization - for that is how all humans have lived during nearly all of our time on Earth.

Harmonization instead of factionalism
Our current political systems are based on competition among societal factions. Different factions (workers, gun owners, gays, ethnic minorities, etc.) each identify their own interests, and then they compete in various ways to promote their interests in preference to those of other groups. Political parties seek to enlist the support of these factions, and then the parties go on to repeat the factional competition in our legislative bodies. In practice, the societal factions are betrayed - the parties follow the agenda of a tiny super-rich minority instead of listening to their electoral constituencies. Politics in the Roman Republic degenerated into 'bread and circuses', and that has been the story of 'democracy' ever since. But even if the competitive system worked as it is ideally supposed to work, it would still be a very dysfunctional system.

Consider the decision-making process that is followed in our legislatures - some call it Parliamentary Process and other call it Robert's Rules of Order. Under this system, discussion continues until some faction feels that it has assembled a majority for its proposal. A vote is then called, and if a majority assents, the matter is settled and debate is ended. The focus is not on discussing problems, listening to alternatives, and working out solutions. Instead, the parliamentary process provides a forum where deal-makers try to assemble support for prepackaged partisan proposals.

It is no surprise that such a system does a poor job at solving societal problems. The problems of our society are complex, and coming up with solutions requires that all viewpoints be taken into account. Instead, each party proposes narrowly conceived solutions, based on its own partisan perspective, and designed to provide relative advantage to its own constituency. This process is not conducive to generating effective solutions. The relevant information is simply not being taken into account.

Consider the story of the blind men and the elephant. None could see the whole elephant, and each got a different impression depending on which part of the elephant they could touch. Our societal problems are like that elephant, and our politicians are like those blind men. What the blind men need to do, in the case of the elephant, is to talk to one another, compare their observations, and figure out that the Big Picture is about an elephant. What our politicians need to do is to listen to one another, and come up with solutions that work for society generally. But our system is not set up that way - the politicians (with some notable exceptions) perceive their role as promoting one set of interests over another. Thus our societal problems, like the elephant, are only partially understood and partially addressed - even when the system works ideally and without corruption.

A livable society cannot afford to entrust its governance to such a dysfunctional system. When people come together to make decisions, whether locally or on a larger-scale, society needs its problems to be addressed collaboratively, with all relevant information taken into account, leading to solutions which harmonize the interests and desires of the various constituencies.

There are proven processes which facilitate this kind of collaborative harmonization, and they are not at all like the parliamentary process. Instead of debate, they emphasize listening. Instead of focusing on partisan solutions, they focus on understanding the problems, and identifying the kinds of outcomes different people would like to achieve. These are creative, problem-solving processes, where people learn from one another, and solutions are developed which none of the participants anticipated. Furthermore, the processes help build a sense of community, and help develop a cooperative spirit generally among those who participate.

Such processes, I suggest, are the appropriate political processes for livable societies. Whereas factionalism works effectively to manage top-down hierarchies, harmonization works effectively in support of bottom-up decentralized systems. Trust and mutual benefit are what enable harmonization, as we noted before in the case of the international postal system, the Internet, and the Sioux Nation. By contrast, partisan conflict and exploitative relationships are what enable hierarchical control.

In a decentralized world based on liberty and a voice for all, interests are harmonized first at the community level, and then delegates are selected to go on to regional councils - empowered to express that which has been agreed locally. This means that all fundamental issues must be discussed at the local level, including matters of overall societal policy. At regional councils, and on up to global councils, the same process is followed. Delegates speak with the voice of the constituency which sent them, and they work together with their fellow delegates to harmonize the interests of all. Delegates are ordinary citizens - not professional politicians. Nowhere is there a central government or bureaucracy that dictates the policies of society. As with the Sioux Nation, large-scale coordination can be effectively pursued without the creation of power hierarchies at any level.

Certainly, for efficiency, we will still need to establish agencies, and organizations, and give them responsibility for building and operating transportation systems and other infrastructures. A decentralized world does not mean every citizen must participate in every minor operational decision, nor does it mean that agencies cannot employ hierarchical methods where appropriate. Certainly, when a railroad is being built, some central engineering group will orchestrate the activities, and others will lay the rails according to the plan. What is central to a decentralized, self-governed society is that policy issues be decided in a way that all voices are listened to. When people's voices are actually listened to, and when the issues under discussion make a difference to their lives, I believe we will find that people are far less apathetic than they seem to be under our existing tyrannical 'democracies'.

In the next section, we will be talking about the movement. In that section I will suggest that a decentralized model is also appropriate for the movement itself. The means always become the ends: if we want a self-rule world, we'll need to get their by means of a self-rule movement. If we build a hierarchical movement, then we'll have a hierarchical power structure in place when victory is achieved. If instead we build a decentralized movement, based on collaboration and harmonization, then we will emerge into the new world with solid experience using decentralized structures. We won't be trying something new, we'll be continuing with a system that has proven itself by accomplishing a momentous task: overcoming the most powerful centralized regime in history.

Economic vitality
A healthy society cannot exist without a healthy economy. Under capitalism, we tend to think of 'the economy' as being employment figures, stock market levels, and interest rates. In fact, the 'economy' is everything you and I do, each day, as we make a living, and acquire the things we need. The economy is the sum total of the ways people interact, as they carry out their business in life. An economy is healthy - vital - when people's work is directed toward things that are needed by society - when supply and demand are allowed to interact naturally and directly. People, out of their own self-interest, generally seek to maximize their economic reward for the work they do. A 'vital' economy is one where economic rewards are closely linked to societal benefit. In that way, the economy naturally facilitates the welfare of everyone, with little need for central coordination. Such an economy, by the way, is precisely what Adam Smith was talking about in "Wealth of Nations".

Under capitalism, most people maximize their economic reward by taking a job in a corporation for wages. Their work then serves whatever agenda the corporation might have in mind. Instead of work being linked to societal benefit, work is linked to corporate profitability. To the extent that corporate prosperity benefits society, then the system works well enough. It worked well enough, in fact, that most Westerners were happy with the system up until neoliberalism raised its ugly head. It has now become now abundantly clear that a capitalist economy is ultimately an unhealthy economy - it directs people toward work which pollutes our environment, wastes our resources, and which fails to meet the basic needs of most of the world's people. Under capitalism, economic reward is separated from societal benefit, and the pursuit of economic gain becomes ultimately an anti-social force.

A livable society, given our finite resources, cannot afford capitalism's wastefulness. We need economic arrangements which take into account the fact that our children will need to live after us, and which don't reward farmers for poisoning our food and depleting our topsoil. We need a fair-competition marketplace, with effective measures to prevent speculation and the emergence of monopoly operators. We need to structure our monetary and financial system so that it facilitates market competition and encourages the development of healthy businesses. Instead of giant private banks, whose only objective is maximizing their returns, we need something more like the credit-union model, where funds are available locally at rates that enable businesses to develop without a punitive debt burden. We need to remove the artificial growth imperative by which capitalism has infected our economies. Societies benefit from stable, profitable businesses, rather than businesses which must grow and exploit in order to survive at all.

Under such conditions, competitive markets can be a very effective way to achieve a healthy, vital economy. There are some cases, however, where other economic models have a role to play as well. Highway systems, for example, are best managed by public agencies, as they are in most of parts of the world already. The actual work might be contracted out to efficient private operators, but the infrastructure should be managed so as to serve society generally, rather than to line the pockets of a private owner. Co-ops are another useful model, provided they are not allowed to grow into exploitive monopolies. Competitive markets, societal management, and co-ops are all available in our 'toolkit for a healthy economy'. Which to apply in each case depends on circumstances, and on the preferences of those affected.

Sustainability
Whatever definition of 'livable world' we might come up with, I think it is safe to say that all of us want to build a system that will last - a system that can be sustained over time. Why would we squander our rare opportunity by building something that will fall apart and cause a crisis for our grandchildren? I suggest that sustainability is a principle we can all agree must be observed a livable world.

This means that we need to move as rapidly as possible to harvesting methods which don't take more trees or fish than nature can replace. It means we need to adopt agricultural methods and livestock practices which do not deplete the water tables or the soil bank. Sustainable methods require more labor than industrial methods, but labor is something we have an abundance of in this over-populated and under-employed world of ours. Labor-intensive, sustainable agriculture can produce as much food as the industrial alternative, and it can do so using organic practices. In addition to providing increased employment, and using less water and energy, such methods avoid the need for expensive pesticides (which are made from non-renewable resources) and the food is healthier for those who eat it.

Achieving sustainability will be a major societal project. Under capitalism, our economies have become dependent on excessive long-distance food transport, on extensive use of automobiles, and on similar extravagances that are not sustainable - but which cannot simply be abandoned all-at-once. There needs to be a well-orchestrated transition program, in which current systems are gradually phased out, and new sustainable infrastructures are developed and established. This transition program will in fact be a major development project, and it may require the use of a considerable portion of our remaining fossil fuels. Obviously we want to keep green-house emissions to a minimum, but what better use for fossil fuel, than to establish energy-efficient systems that don't depend on fossil fuels for their operation?

In the literature today, there is already a considerable understanding of ecosystems, sustainable methods, and energy-efficient technologies. Considerable work has been done as well into sustainable economic systems, using a different basis for issuing money and credit than under the capitalist system. There is little doubt that adequate solutions can be developed once they become high-priority societal projects. After the victory of the movement, we will still have our engineers, scientists, and economists.

World peace

"To the size of states there is a limit, as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements; for none of these retain their natural power when they are too large or too small, but they either wholly lose their nature, or are spoiled."
- Aristotle

I doubt if anyone would disagree that a livable world must be a world without war. But, we must admit, humanity has been at war nearly continuously, in one part of the world or another, for thousands of years: Is it possible to achieve lasting peace? Is warfare perhaps inherent in human nature? I'd like to suggest some reasons why the achievement of a stable peace may not be nearly so difficult as it might first appear.

Let's consider the history of the major Western European powers - Germany, France, Great Britain, and Italy. For centuries, up until 1945, these powers were at war time and time again, with all sorts of shifting alliances and balance-of-power games. Competition for markets and territories continued even during intervals of peace, and the next war was always brewing on the horizon. World War I was supposed to be the "War to end all wars", but nothing had really changed, and World War II followed only twenty years later with even greater ferocity.

But after World War II, something entirely new and different happened. As Europe recovered from this particular war, it began to build a cooperative framework instead of rushing to rearm and enter a new cycle of conflict. After only a few years the idea of war between these powers had become nearly unthinkable, it is still unthinkable today, and there is little reason to expect this to change in the near future. This example proves rather conclusively that a cycle of perpetual warfare can be broken, and that a successful cooperative regime can come suddenly into existence. And in this case, the reasons for the transformation are easy to understand.

What European powers had been fighting about, for the last few centuries at least, had been their empires - their spheres of influence. After each war there were minor adjustments of European borders, but the basic map of the four major powers has remained recognizable. The wars were wars of competition over empire, rather than wars of mutual conquest per se. What brought peace to Western Europe after Word War II was a shift in the nature of imperialism, brought about under firm U.S. leadership.

Whether Europe liked it or not, Uncle Sam had decided to claim and defend the exclusive right to manage global geopolitical affairs. In this endeavor, America employed both carrots and sticks. The Marshall Plan, NATO, the UN, and the Bretton Woods institutions were carrots - they gave Europe positive reasons to enter into collaborative arrangements. America's willingness to deploy fleets worldwide in support of imperialism (Pax Americana) was also a carrot, in that it relieved Europe of that burden. But in 1956, when Britain and France bombed the Suez Canal, then America made it clear that a heavy hand would be used if the carrots didn't do the job. Europe was persuaded and coerced into engaging in a cooperative system of imperialism, and to leave competitive imperialism behind.

Once imperialism had become a cooperative venture, then there was no particular reason for European powers to fight one another. Instead, the advantages of cooperation came to the fore - pooling their coal resources, reducing their mutual tariffs, and evolving toward an integrated Europe. Once the cooperative regime got a good start, it became self-stabilizing, and in every year that passed, war became less and less a possibility among these powers. And all this happened before the formal European Union was established.

In a livable world, a community is made up of free individuals collaborating in harmony for their mutual benefit. Similarly, at the international level, a livable world is a community of sovereign nations collaborating in harmony for their mutual benefit. No central authority is needed for the world, anymore than it is for a nation.

As the experience of Europe demonstrates - when people or nations are cooperating in collaborative endeavors, they tend to build bonds and community, rather than pursue conflict and competition. And if a centralized world government were established, then there would always be the danger that some organized group might seize control of the government apparatus, leading us once again back into tyranny. A system based on cooperating, autonomous nations would be better able to recover from a power-grab somewhere by some aggressive faction.

There will of course need to be a very carefully managed transition program, in which most weapon systems are destroyed, and only balanced National Guard and Coast Guard forces are retained to protect against any aberrant aggressor or pirate force that might arise. And there would need to be arrangements for collective action against aggressors, and for humanitarian interventions in extreme cases, with effective protections against misuse. Larger nations will need to be split up (voluntarily) into smaller chunks - the bigger the scale of a society, the more likely are hierarchies and tyranny to arise.

"How well we know all this! How often we have witnessed it in our part of the world! The machine that worked for years to apparent perfection, faultlessly, without a hitch, falls apart overnight. The system that seemed likely to reign unchanged, world without end, since nothing could call its power in question amid all those unanimous votes and elections, is shattered without warning. And, to our amazement, we find that everything was quite otherwise than we had thought"
- Václav Havel, 1975

The fact is that the conditions are right for a global, transformative movement. The current regime, in its power-bred arrogance, is trampling on the welfare of nearly everyone, in every nation, and every walk of life. Very few people are happy with the way things are going in the world, even those who are comparatively well off. People are generally aware that our environment is being wasted, our food poisoned, our communities destroyed, and our economies undermined - and they would like to see something done about it. I believe that if the 'right kind' of movement comes along, with the right kind of organization and vision, then it has the potential to spread like wildfire. The very success of the current regime, as it implements its globalization project, creates the conditions which give us considerable hope for movement success.

Once, after I had bent several nails in frustration, a Zen carpenter explained to me how to hammer a nail in straight. It was simple. Instead of focusing on the head of the nail, you think about the point of the nail, and getting that in straight. After that, the task was easy. Similarly, when a karate expert smashes through a brick, the strike is aimed below the brick, not at the brick itself. In the same way, if we want to help launch the 'right kind' of movement, I suggest our attention should be on the post victory activity of the movement, rather than the struggle against the current regime. As the movement grows, it will either evolve successful engagement strategies, or it will fail. But if it succeeds, we want to be sure it leads to a livable world, and not some new form of dysfunctional society.

In a socialist revolution, the 'worker class' supposedly gains dominance over the 'owner class'. Such a revolution, even if it stays true to its rhetoric, stays within the 'competing factions' paradigm, and usually leads to centralized authoritarianism as well. A movement for a livable world is not about one class or group dominating others. It is about everyone participating in liberty and harmony with their fellow citizens, using decentralized processes to coordinate collective activities. If that is the kind of society the movement is trying to achieve, then I suggest that the movement itself needs to be structured along identical lines. In that way, the struggle of the movement will give us the experience we will need to build the kind of societies we seek to achieve. The medium is the message; the journey is the destination; the means are the ends - these, I suggest, are wise maxims for our movement.

The 'target constituency' of the movement is everyone, everywhere. The 'issue' that draws people to the movement can be almost any issue - because all of our problems are caused or worsened by capitalism and by the policies of the global regime. It is not only the IMF protesters that are part of the the current movement. Farming cooperatives in India, Zapatistas in Mexico, environmentalists in Britain - even those on the right who have been driven to embracing narrow nationalism - each of these groups is struggling in its own way, in its own backyard, according to its own understanding, against the oppression of the global regime. What is lacking is a 'sense' of a global movement, and a suitable organizational process to bring these constituencies - and others - into communication, so they can work out their differences and achieve mutual synergy.

I suggest that what we need is not a new movement organization, but rather a new organizing paradigm. We need to find ways to get groups of people to listen to one another, and to discover that they are - on all sides - mostly sincere people trying to make life better for their families. Once people, and groups, can communicate beyond their differences, and begin to find what they have in common, then they can begin to find consensus solutions to the problems that face them in their lives, and as movement activists. One person might be a bio-ethical vegetarian, and another an avid hunter, yet they might both agree that we want our environment to be free of pollution. We need to embrace a paradigm of inclusiveness, and of systematic consensus building. The paradigm is itself decentralized - the harmonization process can begin anywhere and everywhere, by diverse methods and with varying success - and without any central organization.

The growth of the movement is simply the spread of this harmonization paradigm throughout the global society. The progress of the movement is the evolutionary process by which harmonization techniques are refined, and higher-levels of decentralized coordination become possible. The victory of the movement will occur when the entire global society has been mobilized, and when it is capable of taking decisive and coordinated action everywhere at once, without any central authority, and without allegiance being sworn to any single ideology or religion. When that day comes the old regime will stand down, and we can then welcome the last few elite hold outs to join us in building a world that we can all be proud to hand on to our descendants.

Peter Farb, Man's Rise to Civilization, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1968.
   This book investigates several of the Native American societies, with detailed accounts of political structures and decision-making processes. Especially interesting are the adaptive changes these societies went through under the influence of European traders and the pressures of colonial invaders.

Tree Bressen, Dynamic Facilitation for Group Transformation.
   This article describes 'dynamic facilitation', one of many processes which facilitate collaborative problem solving in non-homogeneous groups.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, W.W. Norten & Company, 1992.
   This masterful tour-de-force redefines our understanding of how societies and civilization developed. I am highly skeptical of reductionist historical theories, where all developments are explained in terms of some single principle. But in this case I am forced to make an exception. The scope of evidence presented is compelling, and the reasoning is detailed and irrefutable. Jared shows how environmental factors alone account for why cultures evolved at different rates in different places, and why some cultures never advanced beyond the neolithic era. The kind of book you can't put down, and which on finishing you immediately loan to a friend.