Quote from the book "I, You, and All of Us" (p. 237)
As is well known, the world never stands still. We are a part of Nature. And the natural evolution of the Solar System, the Earth, and life on it is not yet complete. It continues, with the same steps of the Cosmic Hierarchy of the Solar System, as in the last 7.1 billion years. Our first species of the genus Homo sapiens Sapiens has so far lived through six periods of the so-called "Great Civilisations of Mankind" and gained some experience in the coexistence of peoples and nations. One of the best of these experiences, and, we hope, one with the best prospects for the next millennium, is the invention of democracy. Let us now consider where this idea still weakens, and how it can be made even more sustainable (i.e. capable of evolution). To this end, I present my vision of a practical modification of the idea of democracy that I would like to see for us and for future generations.
In March 2020, Prof. Rainer Mausfeld gave a lecture at the German-American Institute in Heidelberg on the topic of "Renewing Democracy". I quote some of his thoughts here because they make a constructive contribution to our present topic. He emphasised that power is a basic category of social coexistence among human beings. (P. J.: I remind you here, however, that this has only been true in the last 10000 years or so; earlier, power, in the sense of the exercise of violence, was not yet an issue for the people of that time because they lived as if in paradise). Then Rainer Mausfeld describes the basic idea of democracy: "... because democracy arose precisely from the effort to get excesses of power under control." He then goes on to consider: "What structural beams have been developed in society to contain power, to get a grip on power? What man wants desperately is not some grand, let's say philosophical, conception of freedom, but - negatively - we don't like coercion. There is nothing worse for us than coercion imposed on us. So what do we want? We want to avoid the bloodstains of history. We want to prevent it from becoming like it was back then, in the Thirty Years' War, in the Second World War. This is called the development of civilisation. We want to learn lessons from history and say: we don't want these things any more. So people began, especially at the time of the Enlightenment, to analyse these things from this point of view and asked themselves what were the deep causes of the bloodstains of history. It was then discovered that they were always power excesses. They arose because one group of people declared themselves privileged (as in slavery, or colonialism) by some criteria over others. So what is called chauvinism, nationalism, racism, exceptionalism and so on. There is always a group of people who claim to have a greater right to exercise power and the right to oppress everyone else."
I find these thoughts actually form the core of our matter of restructuring the world community. This is how we know what we must avoid at all costs.
