Conscious politics - Part I (detailed, some places almost transcript, small parts left out) prerequisites: (conceptual) understanding of non-duality, Spiral dynamics, self-deception, survival, collective ego, devilry (What is the devil, The mechanics of evil), how ideology works, relativity & relativism, systems thinking, Love.  Politics & government is thoroughly self-deceptive, both politicians and voters.  He'll be talking about republicans&democrats, but conservativism vs. liberalism is a global topic.  Why deal with politics, and not just one's own spirituality? The world's problems can't be solved by turning inwards. There are individual problems, but also collective problems. One way to contribute to collective problems is denying them or trying to reduce them to individual problems (as many spiritual schools do). There are lessons to be taken from the Absolute to the relative, but not in a simplistic way. Don't create a duality between spirituality and politics. A well-structured society helps in raising consciousness. If you want to be a bodhisattva and help enlighten the whole world, you'll not be able to do it one person at a time. If most people put their hands away from politics, the least conscious end up leading us.  By doing nothing, the status quo (unconscious politics) prevails. Selfishness, fear, exploitation.  Spiritual schools (Buddhism, Christianity, Advaita, ...) which emerged thousands of years ago are not good enough to solve today's problems. The don't understand ecology, system's thinking, modern psychology.  The problems with today's politics We are returning back to the Athens, where citizenship, philosophy, psychology, morals and ethics, politics were all integrated, and from great thinking, political advances emerged. Theory informs your practice. Today, the theory is insufficient, so practice is all wrong.  First problem: Selfishness, bias, ideology, immediately corrupts this discussion. We get into culture wars. Distraction. We need to create enough elevation to open ourselves up to something new, above both sides. Beyond left and right. But the problem is, the sides are not equally evolved,  the right is usually less conscious - so for the person on the right, Leo might seem leftist, but he's trying to get above. Any view you have is limited and highly partial. Politics and government are a matter of life and death, so devilry takes over. Second problem: Government is taken for granted. We do not appreciate, how far society has evolved, precisely because politics works so well. You can go about your life and be safe, use roads, subway, electricity, the internet... and not think of politics. This is not seeing what the government does for us. The government is a technology. A thousand years ago democracy seemed insane. Free speach, fair judical system, separation of church and state, religoust freedom, minority rights, the right to protest, a social safety net, diplomacy, environmental protection, police and accountable representatives, ... is all advanced social technology, radical in their time, someone had to think of them and then fight for them. The government has to govern on a completely different scale than a company. Hundreds of millions of people sometimes. Somehow, life in the 21st century is amazing compared to previous.  What has the government done for you? Protects from opression, enslavement and genocide !!! Also prevents internal oppression (exploitation, scam, cults, mafia, corporate oppression etc.) Ensures property rights. There are no property rights unless they are invented and protected.  Court systems. Peaceful means to resolve conflict - otherwise people go for each other's throats. Prevents torture and cruel punishment.  Police, firefighters, riot control, investigating all kinds of crimes, prison, natural disaster relief, emergency health care, ... Infrastructure: Water, transport, sewage systems, post office, ... Public education and universities. People used to be illiterate.  Grants, loans, subsidies. Poverty help. Insurance. Pollution regulation. Standards of living. National parks, protected natural areas. Minority rights Vaccines and disease prevention.  Research and development, space exploration, preservation of historical artefacts (imagine a pyramid owned by a shady corporation) Statistical data Food regulation and meat inspections. Meat used to be terribly dirty.  Banking regulation, currency enforcement, market protection, accountability for business Satellites, allocation of radio bandwidth Peace&arms treaties, diplomacy Foster homes, adoption services. Prevention of proliferation of nuclear weapons. Imagine corporations having them.  Certification and accreditation. Critique of stage orange (and libertarianism): Some of this the private sector can do (like space exploration), some of this it can't (protection about enslavement, uncorrupt police, ...). If given the chance to do so, the private sector will enslave you, you are going to be part of one emerging largest corporation, and you'll not have a vote in it. Human nature. Corporation today only have a selfish motivation, and are not accountable to anyone. Too powerful corporations are anti-democratic, because they can have more power than a government, but the employees have no say.  For SD stage orange, freedom is taken as an ideology. Libertarianism is a fantasy. The "free market" leads to enslavement. There was never a truly free market anyway, they are always manipulated by someone and propped up by power-play and aggression. There is no "non-violence principle" - it has to be ensured with aggression. That's what government is. Individualism is also a fantasy, even apes don't survive as individuals. Being able to talk about how we're all individuals today is a result of collective development. You're part of the entire colony.  Other problems with SD stage orange:  Doesn't see collective problems. It assumes anyone can take more responsibility for their lives. There's a sense of entitlement, that both winners and losers deserve what they have. This ignores systemic problems at work. They are about maximizing profit and economic growth. Never-ending economic growth won't happen and won't solve our problems, in fact economic growth makes them worth. Materialism and anti-spirituality Toxic masculinity and minimizing femininity and feminine values Me, me, me, my own survival at all costs. Survival of the fittest.  What is government? Why does it exist? Simplistic version: Government is a human invention. In the animal kingdom there are no rules. Anything that you can do to ensure survival is fair play. It's brutal. The government is here to protect us from that. More detailed: A lion has to hunt every day. Humans accumulate resources. (Meat, houses, tools, weapons, corn!) Humans live in tribes. Short term, conquering a neighbouring tribe and stealing their resources is the best strategy for a human tribe. But a few years later, a stronger tribe conquers us. And then an even stronger tribe ... Think of a greek city-state. In ancient times killing all the men, raping women and enslaving them and their children was the standard. Understand that that is freedom! It's gang warfare. The most powerful ends up conquering everybody else. People don't like it. That's why people unified under (quite brutal) governments at first. To protect them against even greater brutality of enslavement, murder and genocide. If you don't unify, you'll be enslaved. Morals were not evolved yet at the time. It was the brutality of the animal kingdom. That is what freedom means.  Freedom is not an absolute good from the human perspective. True freedom is: I am allowed to do whatever I want, you are allowed to do whatever you want, and there are no rules. Freedom is something we need protection against. Therefore we accept limitation for the sake of fairness and peace. We need some set of basic rules.  But how do you get a diverse set of people with different languages, and values and ethnicity to agree on the same rules? People by default don't know that it's wrong to murder and scam and rape, because that's survival. It's a very serious problem. Appreciate the depth of the problem that government solves - this is our most remarkable technology.  Freedom is counterintuitive: 1) It seems like a great thing, but we have to limit it, 2) This seems negative, but united people can do much more than individuals or small groups, so counterintuitively by giving up some freedom we get new freedoms. (Like building airplanes and flying freely all around the world!, or watching youtube ) Community vs. individualism We need community for practical reasons. But also, we are built for it. It feels good, gives us a sense of purpose. There are tradeoffs between individualism and collectivism, these need to be dynamically balanced.  Society is a "holon". It's being a part and a whole simultaneously. My hand is a part of my body, my cells are parts of my hand, they are autonomous, but can't function without all the other parts. My hand needs my teeth and my heart and my brain. Human beings are also "holons", parts of society.  It's not all about individuals. At each level of reality, many units together are more than the sum of its parts. Groups of people have emergent properties. You can't reduce society. Governments are not only responsible for managing people, but also groups of people, and collective ego's. And of course, society itself is a giant collective ego. You can see this is getting complicated, and none of this is reflected by usual political analysis.  Fundamentally reality is dividing itself and finding ways to reunite with itself, on all levels. Mankind has started off as a united group of people somewhere in Africa, until it wondered of and divided into tribes and nations, and these clashed with each other, and eventually started to bleed into each other to a point where it's untenable to stick to one tribe. We are recognizing that we are a global species. If you deny and resist that, it leads to war etc. ... the proper way is to unite. Until mankind starts colonizing other planets, and divides again, then reunites again ... An arc to human history: More equality and consciousness, less brutality and enslavement, greater complexity, greater freedom, greater unity (in the very long run).  What is politics and government really about? First of all, individual and collective survival. Survival is relative to an identity. Whatever you identify as is what needs to be survived. Identity is central to politics! It's not just right vs. left, everybody is playing identity politics, all the time. Collective identity being just as important as the individual on.  Low consciousness = you are not conscious of your own selfishness. (America isn't conscious of how it's selfish as a nation.) Selfishness is karma. It becomes it's own worst enemy. In practice, selfishness has repercussions, it's quit tit for tat. Relationships need to be quite even.  Politics is about Distribution of power and resources. Not just Marxists, everyone is redistributing power and resources! Every corporation lobbies their government. That's business, that's life, that's survival. But there are better and worse  Reduction of brutality and oppression. Creating a fair playing field. At least it should be about - and is in the long term.  Creating infrastructure and systems. That allow for greater complexity, greater freedom.  Community. Not just pragmatism. You can participate with others (in a festival, singing the national anthem, football, a religious gathering...) Evolution, and the emergence of higher holons.  Creating a consensus, amongst millions of people with different survival agendas. Not everyone can be satisfied, but there are some decisions, which benefit most. Seeking a consensus. But we also have debates, culture wars, actual war... it's about changing the culture in such a way which benefits you and your tribe. There's no objective "best", no objective right and wrong. We're making it up as we go.  ... Government must be inclusive Government must be inclusive, in a manner that other organizations don't have to be, which makes it much more difficult. Government is the highest structure we have developed. If I have a hippie commune, and someone troublemaker makes it in, we can kick him out. It's fine. The whole society doesn't have that option. It has to deal with the poor, the sick, the addicts, the crazy, the insane, the psychopaths and sociopaths, criminals, religious fanatics, terrorists... you can't exclude them. No other country will take them  You need to integrate them, and develop infrastructure to deal with them. You can't just say fuck them, because then while you're sleeping in your comfy bed next to your comfy wife one of these poor mentally deranged people will break into your house and kill you. Wouldn't it be better if we found ways to solve these problems in a humane way, give them treatment, help, so they stop being harmful to themselves and the rest of society? Because hopeless people who have no nothing to loose and feel like nobody cares for them are those who will go into a school and shoot your children. Take fringe cases seriously.  Likewise for other governments and countries. The poorest, least developed countries in the world have serious pathologies - you can't ignore them. These may be people who feel so oppressed that they get on an airplane and .. 9/11. It's smarter to integrate. Because happy people don't crash into buildings or start wars.  So these kinds of isolationist policies where you build walls and jails and ignore don't work.  Government is uniquely difficult because it must work for all people. You can't take your high-IQ or billionaire elite and build your own country. Because people have so many different worldviews and survival agendas.   Most people don't understand, what's going on. They are to desperate to pay bills and survive to think about philosophy. The government must be pragmatic because these issues are life and death issues. In a lot of countries, billions of people deal with famine, poverty, slavery, drugs, abusive relationships, exploitation by their bosses, toxic pollution, genocide... (So put away your culture wars.) No human knows what the best design it for government. It's natural selection, but we are consciously participating in the evolution. This is a big responsibility.  ** Thought experiment: Imagine you can be born as whoever. You can also pick your government. But, there is a caveat. You know that after this life, you will also incarnate as everybody else. Now, what kind of government do you want? ** What keeps people from having an objective sense of fairness is their own bias. A person born rich will never think they're going to be born in Africa, or exploited by some corporation who pays a slave wage, or as a young girl sold for prostitution because he's so locked into his own persona. He blocks all the suffering of the other people in the world out of his mind. But if you know you're gonna be all the people, you want a fair government which doesn't oppress anybody. The trick with conscious politics is stepping out of our own egoic survival agenda.  The true aim of government should be to elevate consciousness and love.  This is what everybody wants. This is what life is about. Government should be creating a healthy ecosystem for raising the consciousness of all people.  This is being easily dismissed. But if you don't know your aim, you can't reach it. Because if government is not designed for high consciousness values, it's by default being designed by devilry. Selfishness and greed.  I'm not talking about creating a theocracy! (pre-trans fallacy) Can you do that? Yes! That's what we've been doing all throughout evolution, it just has a lot of degrees.  The entire reality is moving towards consciousness and love. Reality is an infinitely expanding love fractal.  We can be aligned with the force of evolution, or against it. Create beautiful societies, or go extinct. The choice is ours.  I'm talking about expanding our circle of concerns towards all beings.  We need to have infrastructure which helps all people meet their basic needs, so that they can spend the rest of their lives raising consciousness. The more conscious all of your neighbours are, the better neighbours, coworkers and citizens they will be, the better inventions they will create, the more responsible they will be... Government taxes people, a large pool of money is created, but then people (entire professions) leach off the system. But that doesn't prove government is bad. What you want is not a small government, you want a great uncorrupt effective government. You can't get rid of taxation, that's a fantasy. Solution is to end the self-dealing by becoming more engaged and holding people more responsible. Propper way to end government corruption is by getting educated and engaged as a voter. Don't undermine the government by privatising everything... there's no accountability with corporations. The government's purpose needs to be the well-being of human beings, not profit.  The biggest problem of most government is white-collar crime, lobbying, subsidies to companies who don't need them, the revolving door... 
Starting a new organization won't help. We already have a massive organization called the government. We have to keep evolving it. Our best bet is engaged citizenry.