You May Find Yourself
Since publishing Part I of this series, the response has been incredible. Simultaneously, the world has continued to change shape at an alarming rate.
Locked away for months, we were forced to pause and look in the mirror. As we confronted ourselves, we also confronted our shared history. Out of this confrontation, for many of us, something quite profound started to emerge:
Out of guilt — responsibility.
Out of complicity and culpability — conviction.
Out of shame and blame — curiosity and compassion.
Out of self-doubt and dizziness— humility, courage, and clarity.
This follow-up to my exploration of 2020 crystallizes that newfound wisdom into something concrete, actionable, and hopefully, self-fulfilling.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
What we have witnessed has been the shattering of collective cognitive dissonance. While some people remained locked in their homes, others crowded into the streets, and countless cities mourned, erupted, and burned. And yet, as some of us have experienced individually — collective clarity emerges as the smoke dissipates. This should give us more than hope — it should leave us with gratitude. We are on the verge of transformation on a global scale.
Every breakdown is an opportunity to break through.
We left off last time exploring how our value systems have changed over time. But in order to move forward, we need to understand why value systems change in the first place. The obvious answer is that they change out of necessity — in response to the needs of the moment. But rather counterintuitively, it is a newfound capacity for change that gives rise to that necessity.
This capacity for change arises out of transformations in the technology that makes us most human — language. These transformative revolutions burst forth and create human crises that can only be tamed by embracing and harnessing the same technological advance that created them.
Every new worldview emerges out of seemingly innocuous shifts in the way we communicate. And yet, the birth pangs of these innocent revolutions can be painfully seismic.
It is no coincidence that the upheaval we find ourselves in (along with foreshocks like the Arab Spring) grips the entire world so soon after global interconnectivity crystallized into social networks. The Internet has established the neural pathways of a global mind. However, like the mind of a newborn baby, this global identity remains un-self-aware, exceedingly overwhelmed, and paralyzed by the frustrating inability to express itself.
It is manipulated by influential individuals and algorithms — for better and worse.
It is besieged by the noise of an unfiltered multitude — billions of estranged (and often uninformed) screaming voices.
It is irrational and expresses itself through bizarre dissonant behaviors:
What better proof of the emergence of a global newborn mind than such counterintuitive behavior on a collective scale? And why are we so surprised that this global mind would take on a life of its own?
Nathaniel Hawthorne foresaw this outcome as soon as Samuel Morse received his first coded telegraph 175 years ago — “What hath God wrought?”!
“Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!”
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851 (emphasis added)
Over a century ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson foresaw how this would impact us as individuals:
“— a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1909 (emphasis added)
So… the question of the first telegraph message remains: “What hath God wrought?”
As Jeremy Rifkin explained in his 2009 book The Empathic Civilization:
“By extending the central nervous system of each individual and the society as a whole, communications revolutions provide an ever more inclusive playing field for empathy to mature and consciousness to expand.”
— Jeremy Rifkin
A quick exploration of previous communications revolutions exposes this historical pattern — again, for better and worse.
The birth of oral language accompanied the establishment of small hunter-gatherer settlements and led to the emergence of proto-traditional value systems. The written word emerged alongside the expansion of large empires and established proto-modern value systems. The printing press nurtured widespread literacy, mass reproduced revolutionary ideas, and consequently —sparked democratic revolutions that eventually enabled proto-postmodern value systems. Each of these revolutions developed at a quickening pace — from elongated anthropological eras to millennia, to centuries, and now to mere decades.
Our present communications revolution is unique in its pace and scale — we have reached a crescendo of revolutions occurring seemingly overnight. We have moved beyond the mass reproduction of ideas and into the realm of the mass exchange of ideas. Communication has become instantaneous and global. This can be terrifying because of the quite startling and unpredictable outcomes already explored above. However, we cannot allow fear to hold us back — new paradigms will be born with or without us… or more hopefully, within us.
Come Gather ‘Round, People
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world. Indeed its the only thing that ever has.
— Margaret Meade
In my previous piece, I promised to “provide one possible concrete vision of a way forward.” I also promised it would result in a shared vision. That kind of promise implicitly recognizes that such a vision cannot be developed alone.
A single leader, or even a group of leaders, dictating the conditions of the future we all live by would ruin the legitimacy of those conditions — merely another attempt in a long line of illegitimate impositions of power and oppression. True legitimacy will require complete representation, willing participation, informed deliberation, and mutual assent.
What I can do on my own is put forth some proposals, and suggest a process by which those proposals can be discussed, debated, revised, and eventually, agreed to. I can establish a point of origin — a seed — for a transformation to be born from.
Unlike other historical revolutions, this transformation will need to represent the demands of peoples of all backgrounds, circumstances, and outlooks. Fortunately, as discussed above, we are not constrained by the same limitations imposed on historical founders.
We are now able to engage with each other from within virtual salons and digital town squares. We can have voice-to-voice debates on our smartphones. We can have face-to-face dialogues on Zoom. Through billions upon billions of simultaneous conversations, what unseen collective identity can emerge?
We must have no fear of the unknown. The unknown is where new possibilities can emerge.
Above all, we forget that we ourselves are a part of history, that we are the product of growth, and are condemned to perish if we lose the capacity for further growth and change.
— Herman Hesse
The normalized structures we already live within (and often take for granted) were once invented in the minds of human beings. Checks and balances, the separation of powers, the free market, even the rule of law itself. These ideas were not preordained. These are the social constructs through which humankind transforms itself into humanity.
We must release our fear of imperfection. Imperfection already pervades everything we know, and everything we are. We cannot let this fact stop us from striving to become more perfect.
I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man.
— Alexander Hamilton
We must have faith in the evolutionary process. We must surrender to the next leap. If we resist, we will not survive much longer. We all know of the converging cataclysms we all avoid thinking about on a daily basis. We all feel relatively hopeless and helpless to prevent them.
Deep down though, we all know — without global transformation, the world will move on, and it will evolve without us.
Come, Writers and Critics
The framers of this transformation must have a unique confluence of roles. I use the word “framers” intentionally here. Just as the founding fathers of the United States Constitution are often referred to as “framers”, the role of a framer is not necessarily to lead but to frame.
Born out of a world of such rigid partisanship, deep division, and widespread polarization, we can’t simply expect leaders to solve our problems for us. One person’s beloved leader is another person’s despised tyrant. Framers, on the other hand, frame the space in which a conversation can happen between peoples of bitterly entrenched resentments and grievances.
The role of framer is three-fold:
- Seeker —liberated through incurable curiosity. The embodiment of an open mind. Not only thinking outside the box but also demonstrating how widely the box can be broken open (or destroyed altogether).
- Spacemaker — expanded by a moral compass of compassion. The embodiment of an open heart. Careful to not only empathize with the most popular voices but also to find understanding for those voices most commonly misunderstood (or even despised).
- Facilitator —dedicated to the encouragement of courage. The embodiment of an open will. Willing to not only confront themselves but also to transform others toward doing the same (ad infinitum).
Seekers: Who Prophecize With Your Pen
Many of our brightest and most creative minds spend much of their life doing research. The project of our era is to move beyond (and yet include) that research as part of a more liberated search. This is the difference between a scholar and a thinker. The former has become quite common, the latter has become nearly nonexistent.
The time for mere recapitulation, reformulation, and recreation has passed. We must now co-capitulate to the moment, co-formulate agreements, and co-create a shared vision.
We must become seekers.
As for me — my very first task is to seek out other seekers. And if you’re reading this — you may just be one of them.
Spacemakers: Don’t Criticize What You Don’t Understand
Spaces for these conversations don’t currently exist in a form that promotes free expression, exposure to counterviews, or nuanced dialogue.
Trolls, bots, and fanatical mobs drown out thought experiments, devils’ advocacy, and the unfiltered creativity required for new ideas to arise.
Targeted curation, popularity algorithms, and self-selected bubbles and echo chambers deny the possibility of personal growth, idea refinement, and self-reflection.
280-character limits, disorganized threads, and clickbait rabbit holes distract us with gotcha-hashtags, irrelevant noise, and endless whataboutisms.
We must create spaces that promote intellectual vigor, thoughtful receptivity, and sometimes confrontational dialogue.
We must promote forms of humility that encourage changes-of-mind.
We must promote forms of respect that embrace changes-of-heart.
We must create uncomfortable yet safe intersubjective spaces where new ideas can be sought.
We must become spacemakers.
As for me — my second task (along with other spacemakers) is to co-determine (or co-create) the technologies that can be leveraged for this kind of spacemaking.
Facilitators: The Line, It Is Drawn
Creating something from nothing is perhaps the most difficult of tasks.
Choosing something from everything is perhaps of equal difficulty.
Both are of the utmost importance for the project before us — as is nurturing the growth of those things along the way. What are those things? Transformative ideas.
We must initiate this process by planting the seeds from which lively debates can miraculously be born — sowing.
We must moderate instances of unwieldy dissonance by defining, refining, and shaping the dialogues that spontaneously arise — nurturing.
We must collect moments of momentous resonance by deciding when a collective conversation feels generatively complete — harvesting.
We must cultivate ideas in ways that allow them to unfold, flourish, and bear fruit.
We must become facilitators.
As for me — my third task (along with other facilitators) is to determine the principles by which these conversations are conducted, the guidelines by which they proceed, and the conditions by which they are concluded and later revised.
The Order Is Rapidly Fadin’
The anger we see in the streets, the laughter we see in the spiritually sickened, the sorrow we see in the grieving… they all stem from the same conditions. Shaming and blaming will not help. Transcending and including — this is what we must strive for.
Resistance will lead to the persistence of the conditions we are trying to change. Transformation, on the other hand, involves the much more challenging act of forming a wider embrace around the realities we despise.
Donald Trump is not to blame. I no longer feel anger nor hatred toward him. I have no idea what happened to him in the womb, in his dysfunctional childhood, or elsewhere along the way. He is very simply — a traumatized and scared mentally ill child. And he must be removed from power for that very reason.
He is certainly not the type of seeker, spacemaker, or facilitator that will give rise to the transformation we need. Quite the contrary.
However, we need to acknowledge the conditions that allowed him to become who he is, and the conditions that allowed him to ascend to power. And perhaps we can find some remote shred of gratitude that he has allowed us to see how urgent the moment is for new framers to come forth.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Many people no longer believe in the power of holy scriptures. Most people no longer believe in the adequacy of the Constitution. People need something new (which also includes the old) to put their faith in — something that inspires them and empowers them to believe they have some control over their own destiny — and over the collective destiny of our species and the world. The current system doesn’t do that anymore.
The development of our law has gone on for nearly a thousand years, like the development of a plant, each generation taking the inevitable next step, mind, like matter, simply obeying a law of spontaneous growth. It is perfectly natural and right that it should have been so.
— Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Path of the Law, 1897
And so this is where our journey together begins. We must:
- Assemble a group of nondual-, paralogical-, and integral-oriented framers ready to seek a shared vision forward.
- Equip those framers with digital technologies that empower them to shape value-seeking discussions.
- Welcome the entirety of The People into spaces to participate in those facilitated conversations.
Together, we will propose, establish, and continuously revise a platform of values that we want to aspire to as a society, and, reflexively modify the process by which we deliberate those values simultaneously. We will root out false dilemmas and present integrations in their place.
We will start this movement not with a set of commandments, but with 10 initial questions in order to generate a substantial and meaningful set of proposed amendments to the United States Constitution:
1 — How do we remove the corrupting influence of entrenched power from the field of politics?
- How do we transform a realpolitik into a clearpolitik?
- How can politics refocus its aim toward illuminating the best path forward for everyone rather than perpetuating the status quo for the powerful few?
- How do we make decisions from an original position rather than our personal biases?
This discussion will include, but not be limited to:
- the role of money in politics (campaign finance and public officials’ pay);
- term limits (elected, appointed, and confirmed); and
- transparency in government.
2 — Why is political representation rarely reflective of the values and preferences of The People that are being represented?
- How do we transform a system of representative democracy into a system of generative democracy?
- How can we ensure that people are heard amidst hundreds of millions of voices within a democratic system that claims to represent them?
- Why do our electoral processes result in inefficient, ineffective, and unrepresentative outcomes?
This discussion will include, but not be limited to:
- efficiency gaps (gerrymandering and ranked voting);
- the structure of government (horizontally — the tripartite system, separation of powers, and bicameralism; and vertically — federalism and local/states’ rights’); and
- forms of representation (individual, communal, and intersectional — rural, urban, and suburban).
3 — What is the role of the corporation with respect to the rights of human beings and the natural world?
- How do we transform corporations from unencumbered sociopathic beings empowered with human rights into artifacts of a human-centered economy that can achieve all of their creative competitive potentials while still serving the best interests of The People they cater to and exist for?
- What are the duties of corporations to their members and related parties— founders, shareholders, workers, and customers?
- How do we hold corporations accountable to the externalities they export to The People, the economy, and the environment of the natural world?
This discussion will include, but not be limited to:
- fiduciary duties (internalities and externalities — food, pharma, the environment, and beyond);
- corporate governance (directors, shareholders, workers, and others); and
- the future of corporate personhood.
4 — What is the purpose of advertising in a society that aspires to be free of coercion and manipulation?
- How do we transform Madison Avenue and ad tech into Consumer Reports and ed tech?
- How can advertising rechannel itself toward its own self-justifying aim of empowering consumers with the information that allows us to make informed economic decisions — a more perfect market?
- How do we ensure that the economy we contribute to is working for us rather than working on us?
This discussion will include, but not be limited to:
- the use of personal data (privacy, curation, and manipulative targeting);
- the freedom of the press (freedom to report the news and freedom from undue economic influence); and
- the ecological role of advertising in a human-centered economy.
5 — How can we create an economy in which economic value reflects our social values?
- How can we transform the blindness of the all-powerful invisible hand into a cooperative force that not only furthers the shared ideals of a global mind but also empowers each of us to achieve our own individual self-actualized potentials?
- How do we properly compensate and incentivize people who pursue careers of greater social value (e.g., the emergency room nurses that save thousands of lives), and dismantle the financial incentives that push brilliant minds toward careers of lesser social value (e.g., the day trading gamblers of Wall Street)?
- Can we acknowledge and properly compensate the unpaid caregivers and good samaritans in our society — whether a mother that turns a child into a productive member of society, a grandchild that cares for an elderly family member who provided him with shoulders to stand upon, or a teacher that educates thousands of global citizens?
This discussion will include, but not be limited to:
- the use of economic incentives (taxation and subsidization);
- public expenditure (infrastructure, services, benefits, safety nets, and sovereign wealth redistribution); and
- the role of democracy in shaping the economy (democronomics).
6 — How does monetary theory transform when abundance becomes more prevalent than scarcity?
- How can we transform the absurd perpetuation of artificial scarcity into a system of distributive justice?
- What does an economy look like when the printing of money is not dependent on the creation of debt?
- How do we handle property that will forever remain scarce (e.g., waterfront property and invaluable pieces of original art), or that require temporary scarcity in order to generate ex-ante investment incentives (e.g., intellectual property)?
This discussion will include, but not be limited to:
- the future of employment (labor, automation, and artificial intelligence);
- human birthrights (natural resources, inherited wealth, shared capital); and
- a framework for trading goods and services.
7 — What do liberty, equality, security, and justice really mean to us as a society — especially in relation to one another?
- How can we transform the tensions and contradictions inherent in liberalism into reconstituted harmonic values?
- How can we ensure that equality of opportunity exists in a world where we are born with biological differences and into disparate circumstances?
- What roles should our predispositions (genetics, race, gender, sexual orientation, ability), and our dispositions (age, socioeconomics, education, circumstance, environment) play in the outcomes we achieve?
This discussion will include, but not be limited to:
- the role of rights (negative and positive);
- the importance of mobility (socioeconomic and geographic);
- the nature of due process.
8 —What circumstances, if any, justify asymmetrical limits on rights?
- How can we transform a system of retributive justice into one of restorative justice?
- How can we simultaneously deter people from violating the rule of law while also addressing the conditions that lead to those behaviors?
- How can we protect citizens from those who represent a continued danger to society through unremorseful acts of physical and economic violence?
This discussion will include, but not be limited to:
- the role of criminal law (deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, and restitution);
- penalties and punishments (tort liability, fines, and incarceration); and
- denormalizing the current criminal (in)justice system.
9 — How will we preserve the iterative mechanisms of the Constitution and the aspirational preamble that it divinely elaborates?
- How can we transform our un-self-aware imperfect union into one that continually seeks to become more perfect?
- How do we prevent the law of the land from once again becoming stuck in the form of a fixed textual artifact that loses resonance and relevance over time?
- How can we ensure that The Reconstitution is a living, breathing, and unfolding document that continually mirrors the human aims, wants, and needs of the moment?
This discussion will include, but not be limited to:
- the future of the reconstitutive process (balancing the tension between change and stability inherent in liberal and conservative inclinations, respectively);
- the role of the judiciary (reasoned elaboration, empathic consideration, and purposive interpretation); and
- a formulation of recursive governance.
10— When will we know that we have succeeded and that we can confidently speak from a stance of moral certitude?
- How can we transform this new paradigm from being a purely American worldview into one worthy of inspiring self-determined people throughout the world to follow in our self-determining footsteps?
- What is the role of state sovereignty, transnational, and international organizations in the world that emerges out of this momentary order of isolationist self-reflection?
- Will that global system require a new breakdown before it breaks through, or will it organically emerge all on its own?
This discussion will include, but not be limited to:
- globalization (economic interdependence, trade, and currency exchange);
- diplomacy (peacekeeping, amnesty, and humanitarian intervention); and
- the future of international law (institutions, organizations, and treaties).
E Pluribus Unum
There is an increasing demand from people across the political spectrum for a Constitutional Convention to address many of the above questions. There is already considerable agreement on both sides of the aisle that money plays “far too large a role in politics.” And this is just the tip of our shared sentiment iceberg. In order to allow the rest of our shared values to emerge, we must take this hypothetical stance of question asking rather than position taking in order to free our imagination to break free of false dilemmas, dream up entirely new paradigms, and to provide those new paradigms with intersubjective legitimacy.
[T]he preamble begins, “We the people.” It’s a notion of a people that can engage in self-determination.
— Sanford Levinson
Legitimacy depends not on everyone’s opinion to be written into law, but it does depend on everyone’s opportunity to be heard and understood. This is the core strength of what our current value system aspires (and often fails) to achieve—the equality of opportunity provided by true due process.
Once we are digitally assembled together and the fruits of our dialogue have come to bear, we will call for state legislatures across the country to invoke Article V of the United States Constitution so that we, The People, can reconstitute ourselves through a transformative Second Constitutional Convention, for which the delegation, process, and framework is also determined by us, The People.
This Convention need not necessarily be attended by any member of Congress —a deliberative body unable to break partisan gridlock or find any common ground to pass laws with widespread support, and bearing an approval rating that has dipped as low as 9% (now sitting at a still-dreadful 31%). Nothing in Article V says that the Convention must be conducted by Congress — they must merely “call” it into being.
The words of this article are peremptory. The Congress ‘shall call a convention.’ Nothing in this particular is left to the discretion of that body.
—Alexander Hamilton, Federalist №85 (Concluding Remarks)
The goal is not to discard the Constitution entirely. It is to use it, in order to transcend and include it. It is to take all that we have suffered, all that we have experienced, all that we have learned — and integrate it. We must reconstitute ourselves as a People toward achieving that more perfect union that is called for in the aspirational preamble of our Constitution. A preamble that acknowledges its own imperfection paradoxically establishes a state of relative perfection. This declaration of humility forms the basis of a society that can walk the long arc of a moral universe that bends toward justice (to paraphrase the brilliant words of Theodore Parker enmeshed into American culture by Martin Luther King, Jr.).
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
— Preamble, United States Constitution (emphasis added)
Let’s now turn the sharpest corner of that long arc toward justice.
Let’s take our largest leap of faith to date.
Let’s learn how much our human aims, wants, and needs are fundamentally shared.
I am confident that we will be touched, moved, and inspired by the resounding depth of unity that emerges from within the vast breadth of our diversity.
The Reconstitution
Our Reconstitution begins on July 4, 2020.
Stay informed by visiting TheReconstitution.com.
To get involved, you will soon be able to:
- apply to become a framer; and
- register to become a participant.
I look forward to moving onward and upward with those of you who have dedicated yourselves to reading this far. I am grateful for your curiosity, hope, and determination. I welcome your feedback and promise to take questions in the days ahead.
Until then — stay safe, stay tuned and stay grateful… for the times they are a-changin’.
Attribution
The subheadings of this article are all attributable to lyrics from:
- David Byrne’s Talking Heads — Once In A Lifetime
- Bob Dylan — The Times They Are A-Changin’
