In Chapter 1..... A Global View of Democracy Introduction Anarchists of the World: Unite? The Approaching Crises Overshoot and Collapse The Democratic Response The Arguments for Democracy The Problems of Democracy Modern "Democracy" Customary Means of Winning Democracy As "a comforting fiction" A New Approach to Democracy In Summary

A Global View of Democracy I have seen a lot of evidence of destruction on the Earth, but basically, the view you get from outer space is that Earth is one big, happy planet on which all of humankind lives, and as far as we know, it's the only place in our Universe where there is life--as far as we know. The perspective from space is that it is happy and that it is One, and there are no dividing lines between people or between nations...and then you wonder: Why can't it be that way? It really ought to be able to be that way--except for mankind's selfishness and greed. Now that's idealistic thought, you know, that's dreaming of the utopia, but people have got to dream and think that way...or we're never going to get there. Charlie Boldon African-American Astronaut Introduction Pictures taken from spaceships reveal the Earth to be a beautiful blue and white planet, floating majestically and alone through a cold, black void--with distant points of light in the background. After years of boring flight through the vast emptiness that surrounds us, a space traveler from another part of the galaxy might well have a sense of awe while approaching the Earth. The color and complexity of the planet's surface would seem to offer the weary traveler a unique and restful experience--perhaps an adventure in paradise. If such a visitor were to set up an observation post in orbit around the Earth, however, he or she would soon begin to notice subtle changes taking place on the Earth's surface--a disappearance of vast areas of forest, changes in the composition of the air, erosion of topsoils, and a gradual desertification of large plains formerly teeming with evidence of plant and animal life. The space visitor might conclude, perhaps on the basis of past experience, that this planetary biosphere and its life forms are in an early stage of crisis. And if that visitor were to send an emissary to walk among us for a closer inspection, he or she--or it--might soon begin to understand the causes of the incipient global crisis. It would become obvious that the observed changes are taking place because of an overgrowth of the human population, poor management of natural resources, and conflicts among different groups of humans. Our observer from another world might conclude that human civilization had reached its peak, had overshot its environmental support system, and is in an early stage of collapse. The extraterrestrial may even agree, after closer inspection, with those Earth scientists who argue that we now have three times more humans than the Earth's ecosystem can sustain. Even without the benefit of science or an outsider's perspective, however, an ordinary Earthling can detect evidence that the people of this planet are in trouble. The proliferation of modern weapons, environmental disasters, devastating local wars, corrupt and ineffective political systems, more and more people without jobs or homes or enough food, episodic waves of uncontrolled migration, increasing drug and alcohol abuse, the rise in vicious crimes, rapidly growing numbers of people dying from AIDS, inadequate health care, information overload, a deteriorating patchwork of welfare supports, clashing religious beliefs and cultural values, the resurgence of ethnic conflicts and of authoritarian political parties--all raise serious questions about our values, the principles of organization that underlie our societies, and about the ability of humans to survive for another century. After several million years of development, we have, in the past two hundred years, significantly refined two dialectically opposed trends in our evolution. On the one hand we have achieved a high degree of mastery over nature; we have created improved forms of self-government; and we have begun the exploration of space. On the other, we have outgrown our own planet; we have developed weapons that threaten to destroy our whole species; and we seem to have lost our ability to find meaning or purpose in our own existence. As an example of our " progress, " let us briefly compare two sets of figures. About two hundred years ago, on Nov. 11, 1786, the Providence Gazette & Country Journal reprinted this item from a London newspaper: " There are 775,300,000 people in the World. Of these, arbitrary governments command 741,800,000, and the free ones (including 10 million Indians) only 33 1/2 million. Of these few, 12 1/2 million are subjects or descendants of the British Empire--1/3 of the freemen of the world. On the whole, slaves are three and twenty times more numerous than men enjoying, in any tolerable degree, the rights of human nature. " [McDonald, 1985] We can question the accuracy of several of those assertions, but this newspaper item points to some of the striking differences between the state of the world which existed on the eve of the U.S. Constitutional Convention and that which exists now. The most obvious difference is that the population of the world now, roughly 5.5 billion, is seven times more than it was then and is now doubling about every generation. At present there are around one hundred " free " or " partly free " nations in the world--well over fifty per cent of the 186 nations surveyed early in 1993. Some 3.75 billion people, or about 69% of humanity, enjoy to a " tolerable degree, the rights of human nature. " [McColm, 1993] As a species we have grown in quantity and in the quality of self-government, but our growth has been extremely uneven. Indeed, over the past century, some parts of the human world haven't changed at all. These few numerical descriptions of the world, even if accurate, do not reveal much about some of the grave problems endemic in parts of our present world system, nor do they tell us about the global crises that are projected to occur in the future. These figures barely hint at other dynamic forces unfolding around the globe. They do not show us the tragedies that have been part of the whole human drama that has unfolded over these last two centuries. Native Americans, whose numbers were underestimated by a factor of ten in the above quoted paragraph, will not likely participate in any unadulterated feeling of joy for the alleged human progress--nor will many other indigenous, minority, or oppressed peoples around the world. Anarchists of the World: Unite? What, then, do these confusing trends and changes mean? As we shall see, they tell us one thing loudly and clearly: the model of sovereign, democratic nationalism established two hundred years ago was at first a dramatic advance for humankind, continued to be appropriate until about the 1960s, but is no longer adaptive in the present world context. To understand this answer, however, we need to know more about the forces that organize or disorganize our late twentieth century societies. Prior to World Wars I and II, national sovereignty had been the almost unquestionable vehicle for progress. With two global wars and the atomic destruction of two major cities behind us, it began to dawn on the leaders of several nations that security could no longer be guaranteed by a strong national defense alone. The United Nations was formed, but it remained a compromise between the political forces of nationalism and those of supranationalism. The idea was that separate nations would work out their conflicting self-interests in a world parliament, but those nations which had risen to prominence as a result of their wartime victories would still keep their sovereign pre-eminence in world politics. Meanwhile, ideological forces had begun to divide the world along very different lines, and not one but two nuclear superpowers arose--each with the power to destroy the world. When the central organizing principle in the human universe became an ideological conflict between the two global superpowers, the self-interests of diverse human groupings were suppressed by the nuclear arms race between those two powers. The result was a forty year pattern of proxy wars and hegemonic alliances that left a legacy of social injustice and neglected social problems. Every political formation was stilted by an overlay of ideological falsity that placed them in line with one oversimplified political ideology or the other. After the exhilerating relief at the end of the Cold War, with the ink still drying on nuclear peace treaties, social problems and smoldering national or ethnic hatreds began to explode into anarchic violence. While a ``third wave'' of ``democratization'' swept through some countries where authoritarian governments had formerly been propped up by a superpower, and one author waxed brilliantly about history coming to an end with capitalist democracy being the peak experience, other nations found themselves overwhelmed by tribal wars, natural disasters, shortages of food and water, exploding populations, and a virtually complete breakdown of social order. Former communists, career politicians now mouthing democratic slogans and proclaiming faith in the miracle of their new, socially correct versions of the market economy, soon began to get re-elected. New alliances and regional trade communities were formed to compete with other markets, each leap-frogging the other's announcements of a new, ``world's largest free-trade zone,'' and suddenly ``history'' was reborn. In the midst of all this post-modern turmoil, a provocative article entitled The Coming Anarchy, was written for The Atlantic Monthly by Robert D. Kaplan. He wrote cogently and convincingly about a wide range of social situations in which he had personally observed ``the future.'' For example, he described his experience in West Africa where he ``got a general sense of the future while driving from the airport to downtown Conakry, the capital of Guinea.'' He saw the poverty and pollution that has for decades been typical of the shantytowns surrounding Third World ex-colonial capitals, recently made much worse by uncontrolled population growth combined with severe degradation of the environment, and he concluded that: ``...here, as elsewhere in Africa and the Third World, man is challenging nature far beyond its limits, and nature is now beginning to take its revenge. Africa may be as relevant to the future character of world politics as the Balkans were a hundred years ago, prior to the two Balkan wars and the First World War...[Kaplan, 1994] While one could hardly argue with the accuracy of Mr. Kaplan's description--except to take issue with an analogy he made between children and ants--I would suggest that this scene depicts not the future but the telescopic folding of past, present, and future. And in addition to the obvious rape of the local, natural environment, a principle cause of problems in the Third World has been the exploitive sequestering of wealth in Northern areas of the globe. Mr. Kaplan's ``coming anarchy'' has, in fact, already existed for a long time in several areas of world, and its progression says as much about those of us who ignore it--while living privileged lives in societies filled with abundance--as it does about those who are doomed to live their entire, short lives in brutal squalor and despair. The strength of Kaplan's argument comes rather from a very real possibility--which he describes as an probability--that democratic nations are mere epiphenomena which will be swept away by the sheer power of a catastrophic overshoot of human population. This overshoot, he believes, will overwhelm the more fragile elements of human social structure, democracies for example, and will leave the whole world to a ``revenge of the environment'' that will end with many of us living either in ``totalitarian [societies] (as in Iraq), fascist-tending mini-states (as in Serb-held Bosnia), [or] road-warrior cultures (as in Somalia).'' Another way of putting it is this: if those violence-ridden, dictatorial mini-systems are good enough for poor people in crisis now, why shouldn't the same systems be good enough for the rest of us in the future? Just a few months after Kaplan's article appeared, almost as if to prove his thesis valid while at the same time proving the United Nations ineffectual, the people of Burundi and Rwanda sacrificed over two hundred thousand of their own in an orgy of bloodletting that owed its origins as much to environmental scarcity as to tribal hatred. Nevertheless, the point remains that the world has the necessary resources to bring an end to such humanly created catastrophes: we lack only the organization to do so. The actual probability that overshoot and collapse with a complete breakdown of social restraints against bestiality, having already occurred in several regions of the world, will in the future occur in vast areas of the world, including some of its wealthier parts, may be rather high. This appears true whether calculated on the basis of observable past and present experience or on complex, computerized models of world system dynamics. But it is also possible, and perhaps equally probable, that many democratic societies will not only be strong enough to survive the future onslaught, but that they will actually fluorish, multiply, and unite to prevent the authoritarian and anarchic alternatives. The Approaching Crises In 1992, over 1,500 scientists from various parts of the world, including 104 Nobel prize winners, published The World Scientists' Warning to Humanity. In it they asserted that global trends toward desertification, deforestation, topsoil loss, ocean pollution, ozone depletion, the accelerating loss of living species, and human population growth were threatening the biosphere. They stated that if these trends continue, we would find ourselves with ``conflicts over scarce resources...mass migrations within incalculable consequences for developed and undeveloped nations alike...and spirals of...social, economic, and environmental collapse.'' ``No more than one or a few decades remain,'' the scientists said, ``before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost, and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished.'' This was not the first such warning that humanity has received--nor will it be the last to fall largely on deaf ears. In 1987, almost exactly two hundred years after the first modern, democratic constitution was written, the World Commission on Environment and Development concluded: ``...the relationship between the human world and the planet that sustains it has undergone a profound change. When [this] century began, neither human numbers nor technology had the power to radically alter planetary systems. As the century closes, not only do vastly increased human numbers and their activities have that power, but major, unintended changes are occurring in the atmosphere, in soils, in waters, among plants and animals, and in the relationships among all of these. The rate of change is outstripping the ability of scientific disciplines and our current capabilities to assess and advise. It is frustrating the attempts of political and economic institutions, which evolved in a different, more fragmented world, to adapt and cope. It deeply worries many people who are seeking ways to place those concerns on the political agendas.'' [Development, 1987] The first modern, democratic constitution was written over two centuries ago--largely in reaction to an arbitrary feudal power and in the context of a human world that consisted of loosely connected centers of political organization. It was two days ride from Boston to New York, and it took weeks or months for communications between the American colonies and the European countries. Nature seemed bountiful then, even inexhaustible. Today democracies confront a very different set of forces. Information and materials flow almost instantaneously from every part of the Earth to every other part. Many social and economic institutions are rapidly approaching crises of information overload. A number of systems have already, episodically, ceased to function because of overload. Within fifty to sixty years from the time of this writing we may face a collapse of the socioeconomic world order and its corresponding nation-state system. Carefully constructed and tested models of the world system have consistently and repeatedly confirmed the probability of a collapse of industrial civilization before the middle of the 21st century. The authors of the Limits to Growth (1972) report to the Club of Rome explain the projected crises this way: ``Every day of continued exponential growth brings the world system closer to the ultimate limits to...growth. A decision to do nothing is a decision to increase the risk of collapse. We cannot say with certainty how much longer mankind can postpone initiating deliberate control of his growth before he will have lost the chance for control. We suspect on the basis of present knowledge of the physical constraints of the planet that the growth phase cannot continue for another one hundred years. Again, because of the delays in the system, if the global society waits until those constraints are unmistakably apparent, it will have waited too long.'' [Meadows, 1972] In 1974 the Club of Rome commissioned a second report which attempted to address criticisms leveled against the first [1972]. This more cautious approach, which addressed important regional differences and the need for a better balance between rich and poor nations, led to overall conclusions which confirmed earlier warnings and included the following summary statements: ``No fundamental redressment of the world conditions and human prospects is possible except by worldwide cooperation in a global context and with long views.'' ``The cost, not only in economic and political terms, but in human suffering as well, which will result from delay in taking early decisions, are simply monstrous.'' [Mesarovic, 1974] In their epilogue to the Second Report to the Club of Rome the authors make the following additional points: (1) The current crises are not temporary, but rather reflect a persistent trend inherent in the historical pattern of development. (2) The solution of these crises can be developed only in a global context with full and explicit recognition of the emerging world system and on a long-term basis. This would necessitate, among other changes, a new world economic order and a global resources allocation system. (3) The solutions cannot be achieved by traditional means confined to an isolated aspect of the world system, such as economics. What is really needed is nothing short of a complete integration of all strata in our hierarchical view of world development--that is, a simultaneous consideration of all aspects of mankind's evolution from individual values and attitudes to ecological and environmental conditions. (4) It is possible to resolve these crises through cooperation rather than confrontation; indeed, in most instances cooperation is equally beneficial to all participants. The greatest obstacles to cooperation are the short-term gains that might be obtained through confrontation. Even if these gains are short-lived and demonstrably lead to long-term losses, there is always a pressure to go after these gains. Overshoot and Collapse And finally, in a 1992 followup [Meadows, 1992] by three of the authors of the original 1972 Limits to Growth report [Meadows, 1972], the following scenario was among the several that were described: ``The world society proceeds along its historical path as long as possible without major policy change. Population and industry output grow until a combination of environmental and natural resource constraints eliminate the capacity of the capital sector to sustain investment. Industrial capital begins to depreciate faster than the new investment can rebuild it. As it falls, food and health services also fall, decreasing life expectancy and raising the death rate. Finally investment cannot keep up with depreciation (this is physical investment and depreciation, not monetary). The economy cannot stop putting its capital into the agriculture and resource sectors; if it did the scarcity of food, materials, and fuels would restrict production still more. So the industrial capital plant begins to decline, taking with it the service and agricultural sectors, which have become dependent upon industrial inputs. For a short time the situation is especially serious, because the population keeps rising, due to the lags inherent in the age structure and in the process of social adjustment. Finally population too begins to decrease, as the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services.'' In this scenario, we see the crisis pattern of ``overshoot and collapse'' which the authors explain as a process of ``drawing resources or emitting pollutants at an unsustainable rate'' due to ``delays in feedback--from the fact that decision makers in the system do not get, or believe, or act upon information that limits have been exceeded until long after they have been exceeded.'' [italics mine] This pattern is explained in more general terms by Soros.[Soros, 1991, 1994] This problem of getting accurate and timely feedback to decision-makers who can perceive it correctly and act effectively--without delays caused by special interests--is at the very core of the problems of modern democracy, and we shall return to this issue again and again as we proceed through the pages of this book. The authors of Beyond the Limits emphasize that Scenario 1 ``is not a prediction...it portrays the most likely general behavior mode of the system, if...'' They then include 12 more, different scenarios based on variations that could occur if... a number of assumptions are changed, the world adapts wiser policies at various times, etc. Most of those scenarios reveal a similar pattern of crisis, that is, of overshoot and collapse occurring in the middle third of the next century--even if twice the amount of actually predicted natural resources is assumed, even if world population control by 1995 is assumed, and so on. The scenarios which do show a pattern of sustained and healthy development are based on what presently would seem to be improbable progress in popular understanding, and improbable improvements in governmental decision-making, such as might occur if the distortion by special interests of information about the environment were stopped, or if other improvements were made in the democratic information feedback process. The more healthy scenarios of the future depend on quick success in reducing population growth and in achieving sustainable economic systems--globally implemented within the next twenty-five years. In a 1977 study entitled Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, William Ophuls described both the crises that will confront humanity and the possible political responses. ``...the disappearance of ecological abundance,'' he wrote, ``seems bound to make international politics even more tension ridden and potentially violent than it already is. Indeed, the pressures of ecological scarcity may embroil the world in hopeless strife, so that long before ecological collapse occurs by virture of the physical limitations of the earth, the current world order will have been destroyed by turmoil and war--a truly horrible prospect, given the profoundly anti-ecological character of modern warfare. ``Some, on the other hand, hope or believe that ecological scarcity will have just the opposite effect--because the problems will become so overwhelming and so evidently insoluble without total international cooperation, nation states will discard their outmoded national sovereignty and place themselves under some form of planetary government that will regulate the global commons for the benefit of all humankind and begin the essential process of gradual economic redistribution. In effect, states will be driven by their own vital national interests--seen to include ecological as well as traditional economic, political, and military factors--to embrace the ultimate interdependence needed to solve ecological problems (Shields and Ott 1974). According to this hypothesis, the very direness of the outcome if cooperation does not prevail may ensure that it will. ``Unfortunately, the accumulating evidence tends to support the conflictual rather than the cooperative hypothesis.'' [(p. 215) Ophuls, 1977] Dr. Ophuls concludes, however, that ``feelings of despair and impotence are not appropriate responses to the crisis of ecological scarcity.'' (p. 243) He adds further that: ``political and spiritual wisdom alike urge the adoption of the minimal, frugal steady state as the form of a post-industrial society.'' (p. 241) "Politically, a minimal steady state would, as its name implies, follow the favorite prudential maxim of our founding fathers: 'That government is best that governs least.' Where this seems to lead is toward a decentralized Jeffersonian polity of relatively small, intimate, locally autonomous, and self-governing communities rooted in the land (or other local ecological resources) and affiliated at the federal level only for a few clearly defined purposes. It leads, in other words, back to the original American vision of politics...(p. 241) "...if we act wisely and soon, the transition need not involve unbearable sacrifices or frightful turmoil. Indeed, we are confronted not with the end of the world, although it will surely be the end of the world as we have known it, but with a grand opportunity to share in the creations of a new and potentially higher, more humane form of post-industrial civilization. But we must not delay, for unless we begin soon, an ugly and desperate transition to a degraded and tyrannical version of the steady state may become almost inevitable." (p. 243) Thus far we have briefly addressed the present world system and some of its most serious problems. We outlined the dangers that lie ahead, and we have seen the warnings. Let us now turn to the question of how best to respond to these and other challenges that are emerging. The Democratic Response Meadows et al [Meadows, 1992] describe one possibly successful model of decision-making that has already occurred in response to a global crisis. Democracies, along with the United Nations, led in the process of scientifically detecting, confirming, and finally moving politically to curb ozone production, but the story brings to light some of the forces and difficulties involved when large scale, poorly coordinated systems have to respond to a supranational crisis: "Scientists sounded the first warnings about the disappearing ozone layer and then transcended political boundaries to form an impressive knowledge-gathering force. But they could do that only after they managed to get beyond their own perceptual blinders. Governments and corporations at first acted as doubters and foot-draggers, but then some of them emerged as true leaders. Environmentalists were labeled as wild-eyed alarmists, but in this case they turned out to have underestimated the problem. "The United Nations in this story showed its potential for passing crucial information around the world and for providing neutral ground and sophisticated facilitation as governments worked through an undeniably international problem. Third World nations found in the ozone crisis a new power to act on their own behalf, by refusing to cooperate until they were guaranteed technical and financial support for that cooperation. "In the end, the world's nations acknowledged that they had overrun a serious limit. Soberly, reluctantly, they agreed to give up a profitable and useful industrial product. They did it before there was any measurable economic, ecological, or human damage and before there was complete scientific certainty. They may have done it in time." (italics added) ..."we can see in the ozone story all the ingredients of the structure of an overshoot and collapse system--exponential growth, an erodable environmental limit, and long response delays both physical and political. It took thirteen years from the first scientific papers[1974] to the signing of the Montreal Protocol.[1987] It will take thirteen more years until the Montreal Protocol, strengthened in London[1990], is fully implemented.[2000] It will take more than a century for the chlorine to be cleansed from the stratosphere." [Meadows, 1992] Since the ozone crisis numerous groups have continued to wage a struggle for more public action to achieve sustainable societies. Within democratic countries mostly nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as the Global Action Plan for the Earth (GAP), have been leading the way. It is commendable that ``democracies'' allow such organizations to develop. It would be much more encouraging if democratic governments actually took the initiative in responding to the obvious dangers. This, indeed, is what will have to happen in the future if we are to act quickly enough to avert ecological and related political crises on a global scale. The Arguments for Democracy Coping effectively with the global crises of the 21st century will require cooperative organization on a scale never before seen on this planet. Conditions will stress even the best of democratic systems, but any other form of organized decision-making is unlikely to do as well as democracy. The critics and opponents of democracy, and there are many, will strongly disagree. If we are to advocate democratic reform at home and the creation of democracy abroad, we must be able to thoroughly convince, first the citizens of modern ``democracies'' and then others, that democracy really is the preferred way to organize human society and to prepare for, or prevent, the projected crises. For some it will not be enough to reason on the basis of arguments about human rights, values, or a freeing of the human spirit. Nor will generalizations about adaptive and competitive social intelligence be sufficient. Arguments based on broad moral principles as, for example, Kant's Categorical Imperative that we should act always in such a way that the principles which guide us could become universal law, or always in accordance with the "Golden Rule" that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us, will not be sufficiently relevant to many. There will be individuals who " know " that " the market will make the best decisions." There are individuals and groups who will claim divine guidance, who defend the necessity of redressing historical injustices, who adhere to an ideologically defined destiny, or who simply demand the right of power as justification for killing those they perceive to be obstructing their path toward their own unshared "higher values. " In short, there will always be people who place their own interests and values ahead of all common sense and scientific knowledge regarding the health and well-being of the whole human community. If, therefore, we are to advocate the democratization of human life we must reform and improve existing models of democracy, create new ones that are even better, and defend them from attack. We will have to show that authentic democracy--which takes into account the full spectrum of human opinion while preventing control by narrow or special interests--works better, while at the same time appealing as human beings to the hearts and minds of those who have not yet learned, or who have been misinformed, about the basic ideas and practices of democracy. While ensuring the security and safety of all human societies, and the preservation of their cultural, ideological, and religious values, we must demonstrate how those values can be integrated into democratic processes. We must create systems wherein we can prove to others beyond a shadow of doubt that genuine democracy is not a cover for economic exploitation or cultural hegemony, and we must rein in those who would abuse democracy to serve their private causes thusly. The actions of democratic societies, in short, must be consistent with their professed values and arguments. Above all, corruption and dishonesty in democratic processes, along with gross inequalities of wealth, must be substantially eliminated. The basic needs of food, shelter, and health care in return for work must be guaranteed to all citizens. Only by demonstrating its basic humanity and decency can democratic government stand before the world as a model for human systems and as a beacon of hope to the poor and the oppressed who together still make up the largest percentage of the world's people. That accomplished, or at least stated clearly as a set of goals, the adherents and defenders of the democratic idea can then convincingly present to the rest of the world the following arguments for the creation of a new democratic, multicultural world system. 1. Balancing Self-Interest and Common Interests The ozone story described above clearly and dramatically demonstrates the issues of self-interest and common interest. Chlorofluorocarbons are useful chemicals that are profitable to make and use. Unfortunately, someone discovered that their release into the atmosphere destroys the ozone layer which absorbs ultraviolet-B wavelengths and thereby protects us from cancer and other forms of damage. It was perceived by the producers and users of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) to be in their self-interest to continue the production and use of CFCs. The common interest, of course, was to protect ourselves against skin cancer. Somehow the conflict between self-interests and the common interest had to end in a merger of the two sets of interests. A democratic process, imperfect as it was, applied scientific rationale on a global scale in order to protect life on Earth. Democratically elected leadership demonstrated to the special interests that it was actually in their own self-interest to give priority to the common interest on this issue. The raison d'etre of democracy is its intrinsic ability to nonviolently and cooperatively resolve issues of self-interest vs. common interest under conditions of competing power structures. Democracy is a political system that is indicated if for no other reason than the self-interest of its citizens, yet if self-interest becomes the primary objective of each of the individual and group components of democracy then democracy is dead. We are constantly reminded by both commercial advertising and the pundits of capitalism that self-interest is a permanent part of human nature. What they invariably fail to add is that "other-interests," too, and the common interests are also inevitable and permanent aspects of human nature. Each of us is born into a situation in which we unavoidably and constantly strive for the appropriate balance between Self-interests, Others' interests, and the Common interest. Democratic processe are the equitable, just, respectful, and efficient means of achieving that balance. There is a considerable history of the issue of self-interest vs. the common interest in relation to democracy. Democracy was, from its earliest recorded beginnings, an attempt to resolve the issues relating to self-and-other interests. Aristotle, who was himself not a democrat, described this beginning in his notes on the Athenian constitution: "...the many were enslaved to the few, [and] the people rose against the notables. The strife was fierce, and they held out against one another for a long time. Eventually the two sides agreed to appoint Solon as reconciler... " Solon disputed with both sides on behalf of the other. To the rich, Aristotle reported, Solon wrote the following: But quiet the strong spirit in your hearts, You who have pushed through to glut yourselves with many good things, And in moderation lay aside your ambitious thoughts. We shall not allow you to proceed like this, Nor will these things be wholesome for you. [Aristotle, 1984] Although he cancelled all their debts and freed many slaves in a great " shaking off of burdens, " Solon was equally strict with the poor: " The people had thought that he would carry out a complete redistribution of property, while the notables had thought that he would restore them to the same position as before, or make only small changes. But Solon was opposed to both; and, while he could have combined with whichever party he chose and become tyrant, he preferred to incur the hatred of both by saving his country and legislating for the best. " Of the poor, Solon himself wrote: They came for plunder, full of rich hopes, Each of them expecting to find great prosperity... I did nothing in vain, nor was it my pleasure To act through the violence of tyranny, or that the bad Should have equal shares with the good in our country's rich land. [Aristotle, 1984] Modern studies have clearly demonstrated that where wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands democracy either does not emerge or is too weak to serve its citizens. [Vanhanen, 1992] When Solon was asked by both sides to stop the long conflict between the rich and poor of Athens his response was to formulate a set of laws which provided a stronger framework for resolving such conflicts in the first democracy. Democracy continues to be based on a set of laws for resolving the apparent conflicts among self-, other-, and the common interests. The resolution of these conflicts will ultimately include, I believe, the wisdom of Solon in eliminating debts and in maintaining a more equitable distribution of wealth. This will eventually be perceived to be in the self-interests of all, but it will have to be accomplished by democratic means and with more artfulness than was shown by Solon. The Athenian struggle against excessive self-interest, of course, did not end with Solon's authoritarian reforms. Plutarch adds the following anecdote to this story: " Anacharsis came to Athens...at a time when Solon was already involved in politics and was drawing up his laws. When Anacharsis discovered this, he laughed at Solon for supposing that his countrymen's injustice and greed could be kept within bounds by means of written laws, which were more like spiders' webs than anything else; he said that they would hold the weak and the small fry who might get entangled, but would be torn to pieces by the rich and the powerful. To this Solon replied, we are told, that men abide by their agreements when neither side has anything to gain by violating them, and that he was framing his laws for the Athenians in such a way as to make it clear that it would be to everybody's advantage to keep rather than break them. However, the results turned out much more in accordance with Anacharsis's forecast than with Solon's hopes... "[Plutarch, 1960] As if to confirm Plutarch's story and presage the corrupt politics of modern democracies, Aristotle reports: " When Solon was about to bring in the Shaking-off of Burdens, he mentioned it in advance to some of the notables; then, according to the democrats, he was outmanoeuvered by his friends, or, according to hostile sources, he joined in the scheme himself. The men he had spoken to raised loans and bought up large tracts of land, and not long afterwards the cancellation of debts took place and made them rich. This is said to be how men who were later reputed to be of ancient wealth had come by their riches. " [Aristotle, 1984] Such maneuvers naturally led to strong resentment, and Solon's laws were observed for only about five years before dramatic setbacks and violent conflicts reoccurred as part of the long evolution of Athenian democracy. Solon's belief that " men abide by their agreements when neither side has anything to gain by violating them " can only be valid when a government of laws is strong enough to make it valid. Nothing characterizes human government more than the ongoing contest between the interests of the few and those of the many. Now, as at the origins of democracy in recorded history, we are in the midst of an almost constant struggle between special interests and the common interest. It would not come as a surprise to most Americans to hear that the power wielded by special interests is pervasive in U.S. politics. Nevertheless, I think that the average citizen of the United States and of other Western democracies would be truly disheartened to discover the full extent to which the money of large private interests subverts the political process in our " democracies. " The details of many of their corrupt and cleverly hidden practices are well documented by several authors and will not be extensively repeated here. We must not embrace an unrealistically pessimistic view of human beings, however. Founding a democracy on either an overly pessimistic or an excessively idealistic view of human nature would be an invitation to serious trouble. The time it takes for such trouble to develop could, of course, be decades or even centuries. Reacting as they were to arbitrary authority when they established democracy, people in democracies have always had a sensitivity, and a sharply divided consciousness, regarding the public control of self-interest. Perhaps that partially accounts for the fact that few effective measures, and few of the raw powers of police forces, have been implemented to prevent the corruption of democratic process by special interests. Many scholars still write today about issues of constitutional democracy in naive and idealistic terms that suggest little or no awareness of the way money is commonly used to distort the flow of information and decision-making in a modern democracy. A few authors, in contrast, seem to have given up hope that anything can be done to control the " inevitable " flow of money into and around all attempts to distance the power of special interests from democratic decision-making. It is rapidly becoming clear to more people, however, that an effective resolution of the issues relating large special interests, individual self-interests, other-interests, and the common or public interests is of fundamental importance to the health and survival of democratic government--and especially to the health of the environment, i.e., the " Commons. " Democracy, we feel intuitively and we know from history as well as from political science, is not likely to survive a continued concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands. The ultimate expression of self-interest, of course, is the domination of a whole people by one personality. Why, we might ask, has the democratic response been so tepid in relation to major crises in the quality of life and so resolute in reaction to the authoritarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein? If it were simply that democracies are opposed to authoritarian regimes, then would not democracies have responded with aggressive limits to Franco of Spain, Pinochet of Chile, or the dictatorships of South Africa, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador? The answer to these questions is implied by three sets of facts about U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century. Firstly, Hitler, Stalin, and Hussein commited acts of aggression that ultimately threatened all democratic governments. The fact of aggressive expansion that threatened U.S. interests sets them apart from the other dictatorships. Secondly, many authoritarian regimes have allied themselves with existing economic and political interests in powerful democracies, including those in the United States. Thirdly, despite their present lack of support by an enemy superpower, the relatively minor threats to the U.S. posed by Cuba and Viet Nam are still targets of aggressive reaction by the U.S. There are numerous other foreign policy examples which could be cited to support the simple conclusion that ``democratic governments'' act out of perceived ``national (self) interests'' which are often identical to those corporate interests which exercise a strong influence on the internal political processes of the capitalist democracies. " Democracies " strive to balance both their people's self-interest in the sphere of international relations and the self-interests of individuals and factions within their own nations. When the inner balance is not achieved the outer, or foreign, policies may end up being similar to those of authoritarian states. Democracies, while advocating democracy in their foreign policy, must also advocate the regulation of both the accumulation of wealth through self-interest in the marketplace and the contributions of private funds to the " democratic " political process. This can only be accomplished, however, by all democratic nations working in concert. If one or a few democracies put forth a policy of regulating wealth and self-interest, then money would simply be moved by the financial elite into less regulated territory. The more democratic and progressive nations would then be punished by the money market. The relationship of democratic government to market forces is complex and requires careful, and above all, globally cooperative policymaking. Unlike those who would argue that democracy and free markets are co-dependent, I would argue that, since both will exist, democracy has a relationship to the marketplace that it simply cannot avoid. Some percentage of economic activity will inevitably be market activity. The connection is faintly reminiscent of the relationship that an intellect has to the emotions: the leading principle cannot free itself from its more primitive foundations. Nor for that matter, should it want to, but democracy must find a way to transform the primitive forces of the market into an intelligently regulated system that has the final effect of supporting Life and its evolution. The task, perhaps, is to relate the market to democracy as William Blake related energy to reason when he wrote, in a poem entitled The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that: " Energy is eternal delight, and reason is its outward circumference. " A clearer way to look at the issue of conflict among interests may develop through an understanding of the relationship of self-interest to use of " the Commons, " that is, of community owned land, and other resources--such as air and water--that are " held " by people in common, or through such simplified models of human interaction as " the Prisoner's Dilemma " game. These topics will be developed in chapter three, but we can anticipate here the conclusions of that discussion: self-interest most clearly lies in cooperation for mutual benefit when information about our interactions is available to all. 2. Enhancing the Quality of Life Democracy is generally associated with a higher quality of life and a higher level of material wealth than we associate with nondemocracies. Why is that so? To answer this question let us begin by reminding ourselves that the three principle values of democracy are freedom, equality, and love for human life. We could argue, in fact, that these values are inherent in human nature and that any system which violates them will eventually be reformed or replaced. Out of these three values the whole complex of rules and decision-making processes for conflict resolution in a democracy are developed. The quality of life in human society depends on how well we balance and implement these values and their corollaries. In a rationally governed corporate culture driven by the goal of profits, where information about each of us is made available in the form of personnel files and résumés, wealth can be created and accu mulated while most of the costs of such " externals " as law enforcement and other infrastructures are borne by the whole population. Within particular cultures, although not universally, personal accumulations of wealth can convey honor and status. In the New China, for example, Deng is often quoted as saying, " To be rich is glorious. " Ultimately, however, the most important information about each of our interactions relates to how truthfully and how deeply each of us upholds the three basic values of freedom, equality, and love of human life. All measures of the quality of life, including knowledge and the arts, can be related back to the necessity of giving expression to these three universal values, each of which conditions the others, in human society. Authentic democracy, our argument goes, upholds them in the best balance, and by definition, more evolved democracies do so better than less evolved democracies. Information about each of us is most freely available to all in small, democratic communities where the ease of information distribution is great, and the cost of information is small. For this reason well-democratized smaller groups and communities generate more intelligent, stable, and efficient economic environments--including a higher overall standard of living with higher productivity rates, better health, higher levels of education, cleaner environments, less crime, less cost of law enforcement, and more leisure time--all other factors (such as capitalization) being equal--than larger or less democratic systems. Evidence to support these assertions is not hard to find. The Jeffersonian assemblies, organized by the U.S. Conference for the Southern Poor, brought direct face-to-face democracy into approximately forty poor communities of the southern U.S., and along with the increase in democracy came significant economic benefits. Democratic self-management in the Mondragón cooperatives of northern Spain enabled those cooperatives to sustain profits and grow at a higher rate than the majority of businesses in the U.S. This has remained true even during economic recessions in Spain. Growing from 23 workers in one cooperative in 1956 to over one hundred cooperatives with 23,500 workers in 1991, their record of survival has been impressive. "...of the 103 worker cooperatives that were created from 1956 to 1986, only 3 have been shut down. Compared to the frequently noted finding that only 20 percent of all firms founded in the United States survive for five years, Mondragón's survival rate of more than 97 percent across three decades commands attention. " [Whyte, 1991] Higher levels of democratically organized cooperation for mutual benefit in quite a few nations have ennabled them to surpass the standard of living in the U.S. In the U.S. itself, research shows, those businesses which are more democratically organized show higher rates of productivity. Studies done at M.I.T. in the 1960s, discussed in the section below, demonstrate why democratic process produces for its participants, among other things, economic advantage. Democracy, by ensuring freedom of speech, also enables the detection and social development of concern for the environment and action to protect it. Joining the Global Action Plan and following their recommendations for conservation and environmental health in the family household can not only improve the quality of life but will also save a substantial amount of money (for family of four around US$1200 per year in North America). [Gershon, 1992] Democratized and decentralized community banking and cooperative credit unions, based on the Grameen Bank model, have led to undisputed economic gains in a variety of neighborhoods and communities around the world. These small community banking and lending cooperatives have continued to grow in popularity and have even attracted the attention and support of the current President of the U.S. The successful Gandhian/Sarvodaya model of self-reliance based on cooperative, local production and local self-help services has continued to inspire emulation in several parts of the world. The positive relationship between democracy and the quality of life, including material standards of wealth and of human health, is tempered by the fact that many of the so-called democracies are incompletely democratic and are coupled with economic policies that range from centralized planning to laissez-faire. There are always exceptions, such as Singapore in this case, to general rules. The effects of cultural values and of polarized political forces on the quality of life, and on economic efficiency, further complicates this issue. Nevertheless, a general rule, the " wealth theory of democracy, " has been developed and empirically evaluated. [Pourgerami, 1991] The theory is often stated as an hypothesis: socio-economic development facilitates political freedom which, in turn, enhances economic growth. This hypothesis was examined in an empirical evaluation of 106 developing countries. Abbas Pourgerami writes in his conclusion to the study: "...countries achieving high levels of development are more likely to establish and sustain democracy, and nations with democratic political institutions are more likely to accelerate economic growth. " " Violations of the basic human rights may prevail in developing countries which follow a 'cyclical' autocracy-democracy pattern or establish 'shadow' parliamentary institutions capable of manipulating authority in favor of an elite group. In general, however, political institutions that incorporate mass participation in the decision-making process provide political and civil liberty and respect human rights experience improved economic performance. " The coexistence of poverty and lack of freedom in most developing countries should not be construed as a 'cruel choice' between the provision of basic human needs and political liberty or incentives for socio-economic advancement. Failure to understand the complementarity between economic, social and political freedom will stunt national development and lead to situations in which some elite units enjoy progress and modernity, while the majority remain impoverished and repressed. " 3. Coping with the Problems of Rapid Change Despite the present reluctance of most " democratic " governments to take action in response to the development of some authoritarian systems or to the above mentioned projections of a global crisis, there are good reasons for believing that democracy is the best form of government for coping with complex and rapid change as well as for implementing human rights and values. In a 1964 article entitled Democracy Is Inevitable, Slater and Bennis stated this thesis as follows: o " For simple tasks under static conditions, an autocratic centralized structure, such as has characterized most industrial organizations in the past, is quicker, neater, and more efficient. o " But for adaptability to changing conditions, for rapid acceptance of a new idea, for 'flexibility in dealing with novel problems, generally high morale and loyalty...the more egalitarian or decentralized type seems to work better.' One of the reasons for this is that the centralized decision-maker is 'apt to discard an idea on the grounds that he is too busy or the idea too impractical.' " [Slater, 1964] Basing their argument on organization and communication research done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as on their observation of political systems, Slater and Bennis criticized the popular overestimation of autocracy, predicted the " inevitable Soviet drift toward a more democratic structure " and the " ultimate democratization of the entire globe... " They concluded their article, incidentally, with a remark relevant to the position of advocacy taken in this book: "...our thesis that democracy represents the social system of the electronic era should not bar...persons from giving a little push here and there to the inevitable. " Change, generically speaking, is inevitable; democracy is not. Change toward democracy, however, is highly likely, because democracy--being both more efficient and more desirable than nondemocratic systems--is more likely to be " naturally selected " as well as consciously and socially selected. 4. Coping with Authoritarianism The dramatic collapse of a whole bloc of totalitarian states in 1989, and their as yet uneven replacement with democratic processes, offers perhaps the most convincing evidence that democracy is superior to other governing systems in adapting to the changes characteristic of the modern world. Whether we verge on a collapse of world order in the second quarter of the 21st cen-tury, as suggested by some of the computer models inspired by Forrester et al [Meadows, 1972 ], or in the last quarter of that century it would be reasonable to put in place--as soon as possible--improved, democratic structures. The more democratic a society is, all other things being equal, the better it is able to cope with today's problems and to prevent the crises in industrial output, natural resource depletion, pollution, population growth, food supply, and international conflict that are likely to threaten world order in the 21st century. The alternatives to democracy, now and in the future, are those authoritarian structures that will always be waiting in the wings with arms, money, and religious backing--ready to move to the center of the stage as soon as chaos permits. Whether the crises of the 21st century are predicted precisely enough or not, unresponsive and ineffective government must be recognized as one of the central problems of humanity. In the Modern Age, every government ought to be able to ensure that the basic needs of every person are met. ``Market-Leninism,'' another new name for fascism, has in China succeeded in raising the material standard of living and literacy rates while lowering infant mortality and controlling population growth. By these criteria China outperforms its neighbor, India, the " world's largest democracy. " China's model is sometimes cited, therefore, as a better model for government than democracy. (Never mind that such single pair comparisons make little sense in a complex, multicultural world.) The Peoples Republic of China, of course, is also losing legitimacy both at home and abroad by fostering wide-spread crime, corruption, and female infanticide; by killing or torturing, imprisoning dissidents, conquering and oppressing Tibetans, supporting other dictatorships, illegally spreading nuclear and missile technologies, and in general, setting the stage for its own collapse. We might add that virtually all dictatorships, both secular and religious, are headed by self-serving elites that significantly obscure important realities facing humanity--but then so are many of our modern " democracies! " Why, if genuine democracy is more egalitarian and decentralized than dictatorship, does the above statement seem so obviously true? The answer is that though theoretically, in empirical studies, and by broad historical experience democratic processes are more desirable and more effective social forms than dictatorship, our " real democracies " are still riddled with antiquated, authoritarian, and corrupt processes. Under conditions of complex and rapid change, such as we can expect in the future, even these limited ``democracies'' dramatically outperform dictatorship. And especially under those conditions in the future, more ideal democracies will outperform today's models of actually existing " democracy. " To help understand the distinction between a partially democratized society, aptly characterized as a " polyarchy " by Dahl [Dahl, 1971, and a more fully democratized society, let us compare the main principles of autocracy and democracy. If the ideal democracy is a political system of, by, and for its people, then autocracy (or authoritarian government) is its antithesis, and governments secretly controlled by elite " special interests " are halfway between. Authoritarian governments, in order to stay in power, employ violence to some degree, impose closure, require secrecy to hide the inevitable injustices, suppress political and cultural variety, spread fear, distort communications, and foster dependency between followers and leaders. Many well-documented descriptions of this process can be found. Samir al-Khalil's Republic of Fear, describing the politics of modern Iraq, details but one currently existing, flagrant example. [al-Khalil, 1989] Authoritarian leaders and their followers, whether in opposition or not, engage in a peculiar dance with one another wherein the requirements of power cause both to lose their grip on realities other than those involved in maintaining the delicate balance of fear between them. The adaptive intelligence of the authoritarian system taken as a whole suffers considerably from this inner paranoia. Further, authoritarian leadership almost invariably attempts to strengthen its grip by posing as the protector of the people against outside enemies, transfering the peoples' fear onto external enemies which are all too easy for authoritarians to find or create. Contrary to oft-asserted opinion about their alleged efficiency and decisiveness, the logic of authoritarian processes--whether religious or secular--leads progressively to closure, isolation, centralization, self-paralysis, increasing inequality and division, to increasingly violent repression internally and to violent conflicts, if not aggression, externally. This is the path that one prominent political scientist, Karl Deutsch, said should be " normatively rejected as evil. " [Deutsch, 1963] [see also Aron, 1990] Authentic democracy, on the other hand, is an open system within which each person has a right to the information necessary to participate as an equal in the voting decisions by which the broad outlines of government policy are established. An inversion of the " logic of dictatorship, " democracy's inner logic is one of self-correction, increasing openness, and an increasingly equal distribution of the powers of decision-making to all members of society. As de Toqueville wrote: "...the further that electoral rights are extended, the greater is the need of extending them; for after each concession the strength of democracy increases, and its demands increase with its strength. " [Rogers, 1990] This logic leads to more than just the extension of individual voting rights. It leads even beyond the peaceful resolution of conflicts among competing interests. It eventually encourages competing interests to begin to cooperate in mutually beneficial, " win-win, " relationships, and ultimately, leads to a search for common goals which unite larger and larger communities--even ecosystemic communities composed of " competing " species of life. Democracy's logic, as we shall explore further in the next chapter, is consistent with Deutsch's concern "...to preserve for any finite mind or group some open pathway to the infinite, that is, to preserve for it the possibility of communication with a potentially inexhaustible environment and a potentially infinite future. " Unfortunately, the progress of democratization is hindered in every " democracy " by authoritarian processes left over from earlier periods as well as the authoritarian groups that continue to spring up, it seems, whenever opportunities arise. Special-interests, propelled by their desire to siphon wealth from the public pool, are in a constant--usually secret--war with the common interests. " Shadow governments " of all kinds perennially rise and fall without being detected by most people. Reagan's Iran-Contra operation was an example as was the semi-secret National Council On Competitiveness chaired by Vice President Quayle. [Grieder, 1992] Referring to the unelected and largely unaccountable " public authorities, also known as corporate government " some 35,000 of which control over $1 trillion worth of such vital services as housing, water supply, sewage and waste disposal, urban redevelopment, and the construction of schools, hospitals, etc., in the U.S., one author writes, "...we now have two governments side by side: the visible general government and the shadow government of public authorities. " [Grieder, 1992] Everyday, from local school board elections to the state and national legislatures, from the workplace to the family home, these forces contend. To help democracy reach its fullest realization, we need a supportive culture that consistently teaches the ideals and methods of democratic process to every individual. And to achieve that more quickly, we need a political movement that focuses on the improvement and extension of democracy. " Freedom, " as they say, " is a constant struggle. " All the forces that profit from the status quo conspire to make it difficult for us to agree on an identification of the present dangers, on the crises that are looming for the next generation, and on the methods of improving human self-government. Emotional tirades by paid spokespersons for competing interests leave the situation confused and our various populations bewildered. Strident calls for change result in most of us feeling that we'd rather just be left alone, that the results of po-litical action are too unsure, too much work, or too dangerous, and maybe not necessary anyway. The general uncertainty, combined with the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of social problems, is depleting spiritual reserves in virtually every country of the world. Although we can identify governments that are ineffective because they are composed of unhealthy mixtures of authoritarian, special-interest, and democratic forces, we could also gain understanding by seeking the more distant, less apparent causes of disorder. We could learn more about why our present national governments are failing in so many ways, for example, by looking more carefully at the global context. Clearly the growing problems do not exist only in authoritarian nor only in a few ``democratic'' nations. Unemployment and crime rates are up everywhere. All governments, by nature slow to adapt when consensus is lacking, are being stressed by complex and divisive forces that are distributed throughout the planet. The student rebellions of the 1960s were a widespread, international phenomenon but not the first sign of the problems which are overtaking our abilities to self-govern as we are presently constituted. 5. Avoiding Self-Destruction In contrast to the Marxist thesis that economic expansion is the principle cause of war, a considerable amount of historical evidence suggests that authoritarian decision-making, in all its many guises, is actually the main culprit. Inversely, it has often been argued that democracies, more than any other form of government, tend to avoid war. During the past few decades of the " nuclear age, " we have lived in the shadow of a nuclear war primarily because of a classic standoff between authoritarian and democratic forms of government. Had both of the major superpowers been thoroughly authoritarian, a nuclear war may have already put an end to the human adventure. A majority of citizens in the more democratic countries have usually opposed international warfare of any kind, although public opinion has often been manipulated to serve wealthy or powerful special interests. Nevertheless, in open, democratic societies the horrors of nuclear war are perhaps even better known than those of conventional war. As a result, large mass movements in democratic countries pushed their governments to negotiate nuclear arms reductions. Public concern in open, democratic societies also stimulated scientific research into the effects of nuclear war on the planetary eco-system, leading to the discovery of the " nuclear winter " phenomena. Prior to this discovery many government defense specialists considered nuclear war to be a viable option which could be in a nation's strategic interests. As with the ozone research, the free citizens of democracies led the world in researching the aftereffects of nuclear war--possibly saving the human species from self-destruction. This is the most compelling of all the arguments in support of democracy. The Problems of Democracy For as long as democracy has existed, it has been argued that humans are not ready for democracy. Despite the recent wave of democratizations this argument still surfaces. It would be best, one version goes, to pretend that we have a democracy while letting government actually be controlled by " responsible " people who are better qualified than the rest of us. Aside from the implications of such arguments for power, wealth, and morality, there are two interpretations of the unreadiness argument that I want to separate: (1) that most humans have not yet culturally evolved enough, and (2) that we humans have not evolved enough biologically to create a true, working democracy. From either perspective, it would appear that the best we can do is to recognize the childish but popular desire for democracy and respond to it by creating a sham democracy which will, in any case, always pass back into some version of tyranny, oligarchy, or chaos as experienced by Plato and Aristotle. With regard to the first interpretation, I think it is obvious that some culturally transmitted beliefs and learned practices interfere with, or prevent, the functioning of democracy. That is an issue we will address as we explore ways to initiate or improve democracy. As for the second implication, in chapter three I will argue to the contrary that the evolution of life has reached a stage in the human species that makes even global democracy almost inevitable if we are to survive the crises of the 21st century. Paying little attention to theoretical arguments over the readiness of human beings to govern themselves democratically, the actually existing world has for centuries been evolving, albeit unevenly, toward greater democracy. If we set aside, for a moment, questions about the inhumanity that exists in various parts of the world today, we may still agree that the ratio of slaves to citizens of relatively democratic governments has been dramatically reversed during the past two hundred years. Chattel slavery--as it existed two centuries ago--has been almost completely eliminated. Even within such modern authoritarian societies as China and North Korea, most of the people experience more democracy in the mid-1990's than in the 1960's. In general people are more democratic and more civilized now, we could argue, than at any time in human history. Further, a spectacular wave of democratization crested in 1989 and is still progressing at the time of this writing. During the years 1972-93 the number of formal democracies in the world more than doubled--going from forty-four to ninety-nine plus. [McColm, 1993] Of equal importance, though much less noticed, is the recent dramatic increase in democratic reform movements around the world. These reform movements in previously established " democracies, " for example in Italy, the United States, Mexico, Israel, and Japan--together with the steps toward supranational integration that are occurring among European democracies--promise to move democracy to a new stage in the evolution of democratic process. Democracy is becoming both deeper and wider in its scope--and closer to its intrinsic goal: a worldwide democratic system. In view of the environmental, demographic, economic, and military crises widely expected to occur by the middle of the 21st century, and bearing in mind the present limitations of democracy in responding to smaller but similar crises today, this sweeping democratization assumes an added importance relative to the future prospects for human survival. Taken altogether, the advances by reforming democracies, the rapid creation of new democracies, advances in global communication and transportation, population growth, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, discovery of the danger of a " nuclear winter, " advances in space travel, the computerization of information processing, and the discovery of limits to the Earth's carrying capacity suggest that we are approaching a new era of challenge and response in the history of life's adaptation in our solar system, perhaps in the Universe. The most salient, recent challenge to human survival, a nuclear arms race between superpowers, has subsided with the self-dissolution of Stalinist governments. The new challenge is to create a sustainable world economy and a sustainable world peace. The creation, reform, and integration of all democratic systems, together with a new and unified strategy for long term human survival, offers the best hope for a successful response. As we enter this new period of human history the dominant themes will become the control of mass weaponry, adjustment to the Earth's limits; appropriate designs for crowded, multicultural societies; and the creation of a world democracy. Fortunately, we have a broad repertoire of social thought and political strategy that has been accumulated and refined over the ages. The variety of systems available to us can be simplified, however, into two basic categories: democratic and authoritarian. And democracy, with all its present limitations, has become the preferred choice of most of the world's people. To honor the wish which is held by most of humanity for authentically democratic government, and to understand why we need to reform our democracies before all those people become disillusioned, we will look in the next section at some of the problems of modern democracy. Modern " Democracy " On Nov. 15, 1992, an item reflecting the spirit of its times appeared in the San Francisco Examiner. In this case it was an editorial stating that: ... " voters may be approaching a critical mass of despair at the inability of government to respond to even the most obvious needs of the polity...the public recognizes what 'the system' cannot admit to itself: that it is slowly, painfully dying of...'demosclerosis,' a disease characterized by political ossification...and the progressive hardening of the arteries of representative government...[Some] blame democracy's enfeeblement on the decades-old accretion of special-interest groups that protect and maximize their power and profit at the expense of the broader interests of society... " The theme of the day is no longer an apposition of slaves to " free men. " Near the end of the twentieth century political conversation in post-industrial " democracies " has begun to revolve around an almost ghostly apposition of despairing citizens to the luckier citizens of a past, implicitly ideal, democracy. In fact, the historical evidence suggests that we never had an " ideal democracy " on any scale larger than a small community. Despite the global expansion of bureaucracy and the intricate webs of mutually supportive special interests, our representative democracies have actually been improving. Further, " we the people " are now closer to the point of gaining control over the special interests and of the precise means by which they subvert democracy--a seamy underside of democratic politics that has been continuously present since the origins of democracy. Our democracies are much more democratic now, and more fully conscious of their shortcomings, than they were two hundred years ago. Yet it is also clear that special interests are still preventing democratic governments from responding to some of " the most obvious needs of the polity. " One of the polity's most urgent needs is a new medium for obtaining the news. In the more tightly interconnected modern world system, problems are generally more complex than two centuries ago. Information--too much, too little, too late, inaccurate, or unconfirmed--always seems to be at the heart of the problems. The privately owned media, more artfully than authoritarian propaganda machines, are constantly obfuscating important issues with their dissociative double-speak. Large, privately owned media corporations are, in fact, foremost among the special interests that are subverting democracy. [Chomsky, 1993] The privately owned mass media, though occasionally attacking other special interests, almost always excludes the corporate paper on which it is printed and refers only to other special interest groups. The huge profit-making mass media almost always, explicitly or implicitly, portray themselves as the independent " voice of the people " or as heroic champions defending " freedom of the press. " Unfortunately, they almost invariably save their most effective distortion strategies for the purpose of undermining any candidate or any cause which threatens special interests and expresses the actual " voice of the people. " There is another sense in which the mass media distorts the flow of information in favor of particular interests. The media of most nations, aided and abetted by self-serving politicians, constantly confirm the traditional view that national interests or the interests of the people of one nation are to be placed above the interests of all other people. National interests, however, are " special interests " when viewed from a global perspective, and the global perspective is becoming increasingly essential to democratic decision-making. Further, although " special interests " were correctly identified in the above editorial as causing the enfeeblement of democracy, little was offered in the way of specific solution. Our free press is free to startle, shock, or worry us about crises, but they seem less free to propose constructive solutions. Nor was much written in this editorial about the same crises occurring in other welfare states, the accelerating global danger of overpopulation, mass starvation, fundamentalist authoritarianism, nationalistic chauvinism, weapons of mass destruction, environmental pollution, or natural resource depletion. Yet these are all problems that humans collectively face, worldwide, precisely because the special interests who control governments have prevented timely responses to these accumulating problems. In the 1992 editorial we hear only about the despair which the citizens of the U.S. feel in relation to their own government. In fact, every modern democracy around the world--whether capitalist or socialist--has been weakened by selfish interests. The public discourse on democracy and its problems, like the reality of democratic government itself, has been enfeebled and narrowed--by the media and by other special interests--from the origins of democracy to the present time. Customary Means of Winning For a glimpse into the nature of these problems in the modern world we must look a little closer at both the history of democratic processes and the changes that have taken place in the world context of democracy. To find where the first, modern democracy began to go awry we will go again to the period just before the origins of the American constitution. Thirty years before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, George Washington was busy " fathering " representative democracy by this rather peculiar method: When [Washington] ran for the Virginia House of Burgesses from Fairfax County in 1757, he provided his friends with the " customary means of winning votes ": namely 28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, 34 gallons of wine, 46 gallons of beer, and 2 gallons of cider royal. Even in those days this was considered a large campaign expenditure, because there were only 391 voters in his district, for an average outlay of more than a quart and a half per person. [Thayer, 1973] cited in [Clawson, 1992 ] Thirty years later, modern, liberal democracy was born into that moral and political context with the signing of the U.S. constitution in 1787 by 39 white males. It was an auspicious yet obviously flawed beginning. Only three or four at the convention, James Madison, Ben Franklin, James Wilson, perhaps George Mason, were strong pro-ponents of representative democracy. [Padover, 1983] In its original form far more than half the population, including women, slaves, and Native Americans, did not have the right to vote. In the first presidential election, only 6% of the adult population actually cast ballots. "'Democracy' was not to emerge as a fully legitimate cultural value in America, commanding more or less universal approval, until the 1830s, with the appearance of a national system of mass political parties. " [Elkins, 1993] The United States did not actually cross the threshold of democracy, as defined by minimal indices of free political competition and electoral participation, until the 1840s. [Vanhanen, 1984] Despite a slow but considerable widening of the franchise since then, more than two hundred years later Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel still felt compelled to disturb the pretentious sanctity in Washington by reminding the U.S. Congress that democracy is an ideal that has never been fully achieved in real political systems. Partially responsible for this slow progress is the fact that most people, though innately capable, have not had an adequate education or training in democratic processes or in democratic decision-making methods. Modern advertising techniques for slipping information past conscious defenses and into the unconscious mind make it even more difficult for busy and often economically distressed voters. Few citizens are trained to cope with the sophisticated propaganda techniques that are used today by politicians and the " free press. " Yet information is considered " the currency of Capitol Hill, " claims one professional lobbyist in the U.S., " not dollars and not friends. " [Wines, 1993] Information, however, costs dollars, and those who have money can use it to misinform " friends " and manipulate public opinion. And they will continue to do so at ever greater cost to the public unless the democratic system is carefully redesigned to prevent these modern methods of thought control by special interests. Once a candidate wins office, he or she is in an advantaged position to curry favors from those special interests. Incumbent candidates running for re-election in the U.S. have such a cash advantage in the competition to deliver biased information to voters that they win almost ninety per cent of the elections. John Bonifaz, staff attorney at the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C., has reported that just as the U.S. has in the past had election barriers which screened out candidates on the basis of property, race, and gender it now has a ``wealth primary'' that screens out those who do not have access to the wealth necessary to run a political campaign. As evidence he made the following assertions about congressional elections, specifically the 1992 elections: average winner of a seat in the House of Representatives spent $543,000 while the average runner-up spent $201,000 average winner of a Senate seat spent $3.9 million while the average runner-up spent $2 million 51 of 100 senators are millionaires while none had an income that was defined as below the poverty line the congressional candidate who raised the most money won 4 of 5 races the smallest amount spent by a winning candidate for the House was $200,000 the smallest amount spent by a winning candidate for the Senate was $875,000 77% of total campaign donations were greater than $200; less than 1% of the population contributed at or above the $200 level vested money interests buy the votes and determine the nations priorities Bonifaz concluded that the " system of privately financed elections is unconstitutional, because it violates the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution...We cannot say, " he adds, " that America today is a democracy. We cannot say that America today cherishes the principle of one person, one vote. We cannot say that America today holds free and fair elections. " [Bonifaz, 1993] Greider focused, in his book on " the betrayal of democracy " and in a PBS television documentary by that title, not on the way moneyed self-interest dominates the electoral process in the U.S. but rather on the way it controls the decision-makers and regulating agencies. [Greider, 1992] [Greider, 1992] Among the many clever ways this can be accomplished under the noses of both voters and the investigative agencies two methods are particularly striking. The first begins with corporations paying money to a lobbying firm to create public support for a corporate position on a piece of legislation. The lobbying firm then targets and feeds distorted information to carefully identified groups of naive citizens who respond to the misinformation by writing, calling, or being brought to Washington to add " emotional " support to the corporate position and to influence the lawmakers. Such efforts can be massive, hugely expensive, and take months or years, but they succeed largely because there are few public interest groups who can afford--even if they wished--to compete at that level. A second method by which special interests control the governing process is to apply pressure by threatening to withdraw campaign support from lawmakers who fail to vote as the special interests require. The elected representatives are then in a difficult position when popular support demands a vote against corporate special interests. They manage to satisfy both masters by publicly voting as their constituencies wish, but wording the bill ambiguously, or watering down its regulatory enforcability, so that corporate interests are also pleased since the law is never enforced. Democracy As " a comforting fiction " James Davison Hunter, in his book Before The Shooting Begins, accurately described the peculiar style of power politics that has evolved in the United States out of the " culture war " among powerful special interests, authoritarian ideologies, and identity groups: " It is not unfair to describe the nature of political exchange under the present circumstances as a negative politics--one that is oriented first and foremost toward delegitimating and discrediting the opposition. Insofar as this is true, the culture war is not so much a conflict of cultures but a competition of anti-cultures, for rarely does one ever hear articulated an integrated, coherent, and affirming moral vision that encompasses the nation as a whole in all of its glorious and irreconcilably messy diversity. " The appeal to politics for resolution, and in particular a politics predicated upon the deprecation of the opposition, suggests once again that what we call democratic practice in America today is the expression of shallow democracy--a 'soft imperialism,' as Lyotard put it, where words are weapons and debates are occasions to intimidate if not verbally bludgeon one's opponent. What we call democracy in this light may be little more than a comforting fiction idealizing what more nearly resembles the competing 'will to power.' It is a bitter if not dangerous parody of the ideal we hold in our minds. " [Hunter, 1994] What we call " democracy " today is actually, in most cases, a very limited manifestation of the idea of democracy. If our democracies provided " equal protection by law, " an idea, which along with the idea of " freedom, " has been central to the development of democracy since its origins, we would expect the rich and poor to have equal representation in the courts and in our law-making legislatures. With equality before the law we would expect that unfair advantages in economic exchange would have been substantially reduced, and that consequently, the gap between the richest and poorest would be more narrow--with ownership of large economic enterprises more equally shared. In the U.S. we would also expect elected representation, in proportion to their numbers, of women, Native Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, European-Americans, and Hispanic Americans. We would think it natural that infant mortality rates, employment rates, educational levels, life expectancy, and access to housing, food, and health care be essentially identical for all population groups. We would not let millions of people become homeless, wandering in the streets seeking food and shelter. We would certainly require that powerful determinants of public policy-making, such as the mass media, be owned and controlled on the basis of a balance among competing public interests--and not by special interest, private profit monopolies. We would not have politicians " selling " their votes, " secret government " by self-selected groups within government, or authoritarian bureaucracies and regulatory bodies that remain indifferent to the needs of real people and of the environment. Without the special interests in modern democracies slowing our social reaction times, our democratic systems would have responded a long time ago to the increasing problems of pollution, ozone depletion, the nuclear arms race, overpopulation, mass starvation, and the grossly unequal distribution of health care and material wealth. One of the astonishing facts of modern democracy is that so little has actually been done to ensure truthfulness, fairness, sensitivity, efficient use of taxpayer funds, and accountability in government. While the costs of reform and of policing our elected officials may be regarded as part of the necessary price of democratic government, costs alone do not explain the slowness in adopting improved quality control in democratic procedures and institutions. The explanation lies in the relationship between power and wealth. Wealthy special interests support selected politicians who seek power. Having attained power the politicians must either return the favor or lose office. They generally act, when possible, to preserve or extend their power. They are not usually eager to alter the paths by which they, instead of their opponents, were able to attain power. They should not, therefore, have absolute decision-making control over the processes of democratic reform. At present, minimal reforms are only accomplished when the public demand for reforms reaches unusually high peaks. Even then the theory and practice of modern democracy assigns the task of change to elected representatives in government who are then expected to weaken their own hold on power by making that power more available to others. This is the Achilles Heel of modern " democratic " government. We will not be able to preserve and advance the gains of democracy effectively enough to meet the challenges of the 21st century until we address this and other flaws in the modern democratic process. The job of reform in late twentieth century democracy, however, will not be easy, and it is doubtful that it can be accomplished by a small " ingroup " of reformers. Modern sequelae of the early and " customary forms " of persuasion are much more subtle, and more powerful, than older methods. One doesn't crudely and obviously ply voters with liquor anymore. In some countries individuals are secretly threatened or killed by " death squads, " but in most modern industrial societies it is smarter, and in the long run more effective, to sooth or arouse people with false or misleading information. Packaged in slick, attention-getting ways and distributed into each home via radio, television, newspapers, and the federal mail services--sometimes paid for by taxpayers through franking privileges--this information usually arrives from well-financed special interests. When more accurate reports come in from public interest sources, it is difficult to separate them from the enormous volume of " junk mail " and paid advertisements that pour into our homes or beseech us night and day from the ubiquitous television screen. Since voters can't make decisions without information, and since information is expensive, the candidates and causes with the most money have the great advantage of being able to supply the information that forms both the framework and the content of popular belief. The average voter, struggling for economic security, is left with little personal opportunity to prove or disprove any of the claims that are made. Most public involvement in national decision-making occurs as support is sought by " authorities. " Statements are made as to what one proposed policy or another will do, and individual voters seldom see or hear the type of detailed information that would allow them to reason their own way to a carefully considered decision. In short, as democracies have evolved the struggle between special interests and the public interest has evolved. Generally, the well-financed special interests have kept ahead of reforms. Money continues to flow in and around all obstacles. Only radically new methods have a chance of stopping it. Several new strategies are proposed in Chapter 7 and further detailed in a companion book: The Universal Model: A Democratic Constitution for the Third Millenium. A New Approach to Democracy In this book we will build what I think will be a compelling case for a new theory and a new organizational process for democracy. Democracy will be viewed, not simply as a " political " or a " governing " system although it is both, but rather as a method of decision-making and a sharing of control--an " organizational paradigm, " if you will. I shall argue that the long march of democracy is only halfway from its earliest beginnings in family and tribal councils to the fullest realization of its universal and ideal forms. It is now in its " modern " period--still a dream to those who have felt its promise--but a nightmare to those who have experienced its worst failures. In the subsequent chapters I will specifically address the incomplete or " sclerosed " nature of modern democracies and advocate new forms and methods of change--and some goals for democracy in the 21st century. We will try to understand liberal democracy's insufficient responses to the momentous changes that have taken place in the world since 1787. We shall also consider the specific transformations of democracy that appear necessary if we wish to prevent, or respond effectively, to the world crises projected to occur in the 21st century. In Summary Modern democracy is a complex social structure that was created under conditions very different from those that exist today or will exist in the next century. The inner logic of democracy, in contrast to authoritarian logic, moves us toward more open, more inclusive, and more egalitarian political systems. Democracy is the form of government best suited to coping with the rapid and complex changes that lie ahead. Our " democracies " can, and must, rapidly improve themselves, however, if we are to cope successfully with the challenges of the mid-21st century. The best way to meet those challenges is to create a new democratic and multicultural world order. " Democracies, " however, come in a variety of forms and sizes, and they are in various stages of development. Each of the principle problems facing humanity can best be addressed by political systems which are based on democratic values and which are functioning with democratic processes more fully established throughout their socio-cultural surroundings. Fitting democratic processes to specific cultural conditions, testing them, improving them, and integrating them on a global scale will be one of the principle tasks facing humanity over the next century. In the next chapter we will look at democracy in relation to the questions of meaning in history and purpose in life. Then, after a " constructive " overview of world history, we will envision the future by looking at the 21st century in three phases and relating each phase to the idea of democracy. In chapter 3 a theory of democracy will be outlined. Chapters 4 through 8 will address several system levels in the design for a democratic system that appears to offer the best hope for the 21st century, that is, for our children, our grandchildren, and their children.