An Experiment in Global Democracy (The Interdependence Papers Volume 1)

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface to the Early Edition

The Interdependence Papers Volume 1

Paper No. 1 —Journey to a New Country

The State of Our Interdependence

The Power of We the People

On Behalf of All Life

Beginning Our Journey

Paper No. 2—The Evolution of Democracy

The Country of Earth is a Choice

Gaia

. . . Institutions Must Advance . . .

Democracy's Evolution

A Fight for the Will of the People

Common Sense in the Age of Enlightenment

Common Sense in the Digital Age

Paper No. 3—The Six Freedoms

Freedom's Evolution

A Foundational Freedom

The State of Freedom's Foundation

Not Enough

Sustainability

Equality

Social

Economic

Political

Peace

Granted by . . .Whom?

Declaring Our Interdependence

Appendix

A—Declaration of Interdependence (proposed)

B—Key Definitions

Megoism

Wegoism

Illustration: Wegoism and Megoism

C—About The Interdependence Papers and LEAP

Two Books, One Mission

The Interdependence Awards

D—Introduction to LEAP

The Country of Earth is a Choice

The Country of Earth is Real

What's Missing

An Addition (Not a Replacement)

Democracy Must Evolve

Why the Country of Earth?

Choose the Future

E—Bibliography

About the LEAP Free Review Copy Program

About the Author

Endnotes

Published by

Distributed by

ISBN 978-1-7335603-3-7

Copyright 2019 Markus Thorndike

and Revolutionary Wisdom Media

Editor: Geralyn Gendreau

This book is available in print at most online retailers. There is also an audiobook version.

One-third of the profits generated from sales of this book will be donated to the Country of Earth Project, a social benefit organization committed to the establishment and long-term success of the Country of Earth. An additional third of the profits will be directed toward the publishing of subsequent volumes of the Interdependence Papers, including funding the staffing and resources to manage the Interdependence Awards competition.

A small portion of the profits will also be used to offset this book’s e-carbon footprint.

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. If you wish to quote from this book, visit our permissions page.

Thank you for your support.

Dedication

To the authors of the Interdependence Papers to come

with our collective thanks and gratitude

to all the founding parents of

the freedom-loving nations of Earth.

These Papers are for all of us.

Preface to the

Early Edition

‘

Photo of the title page of a First Edition of The Federalist (Papers): A Collection of Essays, Written in Favour of the New Constitution, Vol. 1, printed in 1788. This particular copy was first owned by Thomas Jefferson.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

—James Madison

Author of the original drafts of the US Constitution

in a letter to W. T. Barry [August 4, 1822]

AN E XPERIMENT IN G LOBAL D EMOCRACY (The Interdependence Papers Volume 1) is the companion book to LEAP: The Case for the Country of Earth . LEAP will be available as a pre-release review copy in the summer of 2019, until April 1, 2020.

The two books share the same mission, yet serve different purposes:

LEAP is the more foundational book. LEAP engages us in the possibility, necessity, and opportunity to acknowledge and empower an already existing, though presently politically unrecognized, country: The Country of Earth. LEAP both introduces us to and makes the case for the Country of Earth.

This book, An Experiment in Global Democracy, is the first volume of a series titled The Interdependence Papers. This series is meant to serve as a forum for us—the sovereign citizens of a global direct democracy—to discuss and fashion a constitution and initial laws for the Country of Earth.

As you engage with this book, you may have questions about the relationship between LEAP and the Interdependence Papers. More information about this relationship is available in Appendix C. This appendix also describes the purpose of the Interdependence Papers in greater detail, including how we, as citizens, can contribute to and participate in the creation of future papers.

A LEAP pre-release review copy program is available through April 1, 2020. Through this program you will obtain a free review copy of LEAP, prior to its formal publication, in exchange for purchasing a copy of the book on Amazon and providing a candid review of it on the day the book comes out ( on Earth Day, April 22, 2020). Initial review copies will be available beginning in Summer 2019. More information about this program can be found at the very back of the book ("About the LEAP Free Review Copy Program").

About the Spring 2019 Early Edition

DUE TO SIGNIFICANT READER INTEREST in the subject at the core of this book, the political recognition of the Country of Earth, this beta version of An Experiment in Global Democracy was released nine months prior to the planned publication date of the official first edition. The book you are reading or listening to now is not quite yet a First Edition. That version will be published, as planned, on January 22, 2020.

You are invited to help us make this book better. Please help Markus improve and clarify the evidence and information he cites, critique the arguments he makes, and fix typographical or formatting errors. You are invited to give feedback on your experience with this edition until October 22, 2019. You can submit your feedback at https://rw.media/An-Experiment-Early-Ediiton/

or by sending an email to feedback-aeigd-early@rw.media. Thank you for your partnership.

IT IS A PRIVILEGE TO PARTNER with all the change agents of our world now working toward bringing our world together. Along with LEAP, the first three papers presented herein represent an initial contribution toward us make that possibility into our reality.

In Partnership,

April 2019

Paper No. 1—Journey to a New Country

Paper No. 2—The Evolution of Democracy

Paper No. 3—The Six Freedoms

Interdependence Paper No. 1

Journey to a New Country

We have it in our power

to begin the world over again.

—Thomas Paine

Common Sense [1776]

AT THIS DEFINING MOMENT in human history, what is most important is not the many ways you and I are different. What is most important is this one way all of us are absolutely the same:

We are all citizens of this small pale blue planet known as Earth.

As Voyager 1 was preparing to leave our planetary neighborhood on Valentine’s Day three decades ago—February 14, 1990—NASA engineers took astronomer and philosopher Carl Sagan’s suggestion and turned the spacecraft around to take one last look at Earth. Six and a half billion kilometers (4 billion miles) from home, Voyager 1 had already traveled the farthest a spacecraft had ever ventured into space. Yet, it was only just beginning its adventure out among the 100 billion other stars of our galaxy.

 In one of the photos taken by Voyager I that day, the Earth appears as a tiny pale blue dot in the center of a scattered ray of light. That ray appears in the image as a result of the spacecraft’s camera focusing close to Sol, our sun.

Photo of Earth, taken by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990 when the spacecraft was 4 billion miles (6.5 billion kilometers) away. Image courtesy of NASA (enhanced to remove pixilation).

Referring to this tiny image of the Earth, Carl Sagan said this:

Carl Sagan: Pale Blue Dot (video)

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization. Every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there, on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

. . . There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.¹

In relation to the incomprehensible immensity of the Universe, Earth is but a pale blue dot, a tiny mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. Contemplating our physical place in the Universe can, and should, be deeply humbling.

There is another perspective, however, one that stretches out beyond the physical. Earth is the only mote of dust we know of on which life exists. Viewed from the perspective of life, Earth is special. Even when compared with the hundred billion other stars and the hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy alone, Earth is more than just another mote of dust among the billions.

Even if we acknowledge the likelihood that life exists elsewhere in the Universe, our searches of other star systems tell us that life as we know it must be rare. Indeed, extremely rare. From the perspective of life, Earth is very, very special. Not because of our posturings, our imagined self-importance, but because of Earth’s fundamental nature as a home to abundant life. And We—you, me, and every other citizen of the Country of Earth—are all a part of this one great Life.

Whether we value this perspective and choose to value life is what this book is all about. From our relationships with each other to our relationship with the entire ecosystem of the Earth, we are in need of a giant LEAP forward.

A LEAP we can only make together.

The fate of the Earth is now in our hands: yours, mine, and all the generations alive today on this beautiful world of ours. We are all in this together, on this small pale blue dot we call home.

We are the citizens of the small pale blue planet known as Earth.

The State of Our Interdependence

WE, THE CITIZENS OF EARTH, live in a state of barely acknowledged, unempowered interdependence. Yet, as the inhabitants of this pale blue planet, we rely on each other, and on our ecosystems, to function as a global civilization.² While it is obvious to most that our economies rely upon each other to function and thrive, we are interdependent in many other ways as well:

Our intertwined food and agricultural systems provide us with food, without which most of us would starve;

Our global energy systems provide us with electricity and power our vehicles and transportation systems. Without these interwoven energy systems, our entire global civilization would grind to a halt, turning computers and mobile devices into useless plastic and metal bricks;

Our communications systems connect us to the internet and to each other, powering the information superhighway that businesses, schools, and governments depend on. They give us the ability to connect via text, phone or even video call—instantly, from or to practically anywhere around the world, using our mobile devices;

Our manufacturing and production systems provide physical goods, from the clothes you wear to the device you may be using to listen to or read this book—or that may have printed it immediately, on-demand, when you ordered a physical copy of it; and

Our monetary systems allow us to assign value to the products and services we buy and sell.

Similarly, our security and military systems, educational systems, and health care systems are all globally interdependent, as well as human dependent (at least so far).

Humans have created all these systems. Humans upgrade and improve them, repair them, and run them, twenty-four seven. Not one of us does anything by ourselves. We rely on our parents and caregivers, our teachers and mentors, our friends and co-workers, our children and communities, doctors, first responders, and innumerable individuals across the planet whom we do not know. In short, we depend on each other to live the lives we lead—so much so that we would be hard pressed to identify aspects of our lives that are not a result of our interdependence.

Above and beyond these intertwined human systems, we rely entirely on the Earth and her ecosystems. These natural systems are largely ignored by the standard economic measures we use to evaluate the health of our civilization, and yet we are 100% reliant on them for our continued existence. We cannot survive without Mother Earth’s complex, delicate web of life, which provides water, air, food, natural beauty, and all the vital elements and resources our global civilization needs for long-term health and well-being. When some of us damage the environment or disrupt its natural balance (for instance, by radically changing the composition of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere), all of us are affected. In this sense, we are interdependent with respect to the care and long-term sustainability of Gaia’s ecosystems.

It stands to reason that we would want to act, together, in a manner that recognizes our interdependence. For our world to flourish and our civilization to thrive, We, the People of Earth, must do more to honor, support, and empower the whole. Much, much more.

Yet, as the interdependent citizens of Earth, we have almost no political power. Unless we are one of the two-hundred plus delegates appointed to the United Nations, we have no common place to go to discuss or debate the global issues we face, as a species. Today, no ordinary citizen of any nation can vote in a meaningful way on the future of our world as a whole.³ We have no means, either direct or indirect, to propose or pass new legislation on the global level.

The beggared state of our global citizenship is the main political obstacle to our ability to act in a politically interdependent manner as one people, solving our civilization’s problems and establishing a new era of sustainability, equality, and peace.⁴

This is because our mutual country,

the Country of Earth,

is politically impoverished—