The social mechanism

This page describes a concept which is part of our glossary

No person or association of persons has consciously constructed or directed the mechanisms of society to their present state. They have evolved under the direction of the dominant forces at play within our civilisation, the most dominant force of all being in the direction best serving the economic bottom line.

The task we must undertake to ensure our ongoing survival as a species is to understand and make clearly explicit the current systems that make up the social mechanism as a whole, and to make these open (understandable and accessible to all). We must take seriously the need to align to the mutually beneficial, and essential, vision of making the environment and the well-being of all its inhabitants the common foundation of all aspects of the social mechanism. This means that every aspect must actively partake in the effort to align to this common vision, by defining clearly the necessary corrections and all taking on our portion of the work required to make the necessary changes.

Making mechanisms explicit

Before any organisation can properly direct itself, it must make its system clearly described and complete. If it's a mechanism of society that is designed to serve the people it should also be understandable and accessible to the widest possible audience. Since this audience will be diverse in terms of their cultures and areas of expertise, and we want to ensure maximum re-use of knowledge, the systems need to be describable in a common language that can act as a medium between any other contexts.

We have excellent semantic web tools available for this allowing us to define any concepts, especially systems oriented concepts in commonly available well-defined standards.

The natural order

Robertson, describes (p. 394-5) the natural order as follows (links to equivalent concepts added in brackets):

Such a conception of society follows the natural order. In it the dominating power of finance is destroyed; and since money would be free and not negative, debt would cease to exist. And with the disappearance of the debt would cease the centralisation of power which at present deprives men of their sovereignty. In it also consumption would determine production, and a united social policy would prevail without arbitrary pressure from any quarter. The confusion of ends and means would cease since the end of man (the bottom line to maximise the well being of the environment and all inhabitants) would be truly served. Leisure would become the test of efficiency in industry, the fewness of laws the test in politics, and the smaller the Administration and Sanctions the greater the excellence of government (our self governance). The criterion of all would be the security with freedom.

The seven mechanisms constitute the organism of society serving integral man by fullest and freest provision for all his needs, and thereby the prevailing pressure would be towards co-operation and unity rather than competition and disunity (fragmentation).

[...]

The expansion of the individuality through the natural order would be achieved by organic growth from within and not by planning imposed from without. It would provide the one and only basis for stability in society. And just as unity is not uniformity, neither is stability stagnation. A stable society is not static but one steadily progressing towards its objective (vision).

The purpose of society

Again from Thomas Robertson: The aim of society is to provide a field for the perfecting of individual existence, which it does by the provision of the Basic Needs through co-operative effort and differentiation of function, and by creating a suitable field for the exercise of the higher human faculties.

One of the very general requirements is for a group of affected parties to govern the mechanisms they're affected by together. There are also other systemic requirements common to all, such as governance guaranteed by its systemic structure to offer the best known way for the group to collaborate on and achieve their goals together by fully utilising their combined knowledge and expertise. These groups that form from common interest or from groups affected by a common requirement are what we call organic groups. Groups of people (or organisations or projects etc) that collectively share a certain variety of attributes.

Lets imagine for a moment that there existed a medium by which these groups could be made explicit and that they had the tools to collaborate on a vision and work on their projects and goals together; that they could govern themselves. It would soon become apparent that the larger and more diverse the members of such groups were, the more generally applicable the goals they all share in common would be. Some of these common goals are universal since they form the stable structure of society itself; without them the peoples needs could not be catered for such as their safety, health and survival.

Universal common goals: the social mechanism

After the basic needs are met, there are still further universals such as the increase of vitality and well-being for all, the collective ability to achieve goals more effectively and the reduction of wasted resource and energy. Since these are universals common to all, it follows that they be clearly defined and made accessible and understandable to all. These clearly defined common aspects form the "social mechanism".

The spreading of understanding of the mechanism and the raising of awareness of the importance of self governance and global alignment is the primary work. Packaging this knowledge and the accompanying tools into a re-usable seed form and propagating it widely is work that is common to all aligned systems. The Platform specification defines a deployment department specifically aimed at this aspect of the common work.

Defining corrections to the mechanism

The natural order and common values give us a guide for describing our ideal system (at least a good first attempt at it) in the same common medium that we described the other diverse systems in, so we would then have the ability to see what aspects differed by how much, and start to determine the importance each. These differences form our common objectives, or goals which are required to achieve our ideal vision.

Each goal will have a number of obstacles to overcome as it moves on its path toward completion, as these are discovered the system will need to undergo change, but must do so without compromising the bottom line of the environment and the well-being of all its inhabitants.

The common work

Achieving the common goals requires work which is distributed amongst all the organisations with available resource to perform the work. This is achieved by every organisation that is aligned with the common vision mergeing the platform specification into its own system of operation, as that in addition to performing its own core business, it also contributes to global alignment with the vision and values.

Unification

If it were easy to align into a global self-governing system, we would have already done it. There are many obstacles to this vision, but they ultimately all come down to different variations of a single theme, fragmentation. And the solutions all come down to variations on a similar theme too; different variations of unification. We need to unify our differences to fully benefit from our common knowledge, resources, expertise and our common needs too. The tools to do this are already available within the wide spectrum of Internet technology we have available today.

The semantic web is an emerging "universal language" that can act as a common medium through which all our diverse knowledge and systems can connect. We can use this new technology to align ourselves into one self governing planetary organism.

Notes

	We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;
	— Thomas Jefferson in 1776 from the United States Declaration of Independence

See also

• OrganicDesign vision
• Governance
• Human Ecology