The social mechanism
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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.
Contents
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).
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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).
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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.
The common goals: 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.
