The Transformation of Decision-Making Power Toward Democratic Sustainability

LoD

THE TRANSFORMATION OF
DECISION-MAKING POWER
TOWARD DEMOCRATIC SUSTAINABILITY

By Vigdor Schreibman

The pairs of opposites (being and not being, life and death, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, and all the other polarities that bind the faculties to hope and fear, and link the organs of action to deeds of defense and acquisition) are the clashing rocks (Symplegades) that crush the traveller, but between which the heroes always pass. In the clash between the Chaos Monster and the Sun God, the thunderbolt signifying spiritual power (indestructible enlightenment), shatters the illusory realities of the world. In the modern world only the democratic will of the whole people can most likely offer effective resistance to the barbaric tyranny of official powers. Compare J.Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces 87-89, n.57, Plate XXI (1973 ed.) (discussing the mythology of heroism), with M.P.Follett, The New State ch. XVI1 (Penn State University Press ed. 1998), and A.N. Christakis with K.C. Bausch, How People Harness their Collective Wisdom and Power (Info-Age Publishing 2006), and with V. Schreibman, A Technique of Democracy (2006) (discussing "meaningful dialogue" to resist corrosive social forces and to advance group transcendence).

The Paradigm of Big Money

Big Money organizes the global social system by (among other means) imposing a policy to charge exorbitant prices for all vital services and networks that convey real power so that only the rich can gain access.

For example, accreditation of law schools is granted only to those that pay their teachers exorbitant salaries so only the rich educators can teach, only rich students can learn, and only rich clients can obtain professional legal services. The consequences of these systemic conditions is that most of a lawyer's time, as much as 90%, is devoted to serving the most wealthy 10% of the people, while most of the civil legal problems of low or moderate-income households are not addressed by the legal system. Indeed, when a person does obtain the services of a lawyer, the mode of relations dictated by the legal culture will be based on the barbaric doctrine of master and slave.

For example, state and federal judges have instituted a system of robbery against property of indigent corporate litigants when they cannot afford to pay the exorbitant cost of the services of a lawyer by disregarding the corporation's fundamental constitutional right of access to court, which is routinely recognized for affluent corporations, and by denying the indigent corporation's freedom of choice to engage in self-representation under such circumstances, which has been recognized during the last 1500 years since the time of the Romans. This is an oppressive system that defies "equal justice" and defies the rule of law. These conditions define the paramount realities of an American judiciary driven by despots. This generation of Americans have thus come to realize in our time the most dreadful concerns of America's two greatest statesmen: The First Democrat Thomas Jefferson and The First Republican Abraham Lincoln.

We have, in addition, the policy of granting monopoly broadcast licensing without guarantee of serving the public interest, authorizing exorbitant rates for access to broadcast advertising, which is essential for viable political campaigning. These conditions allow Big Money to exercise pernicious control over American political systems.

We review elsewhere more extensively the Doctrines of Injustice.

Transformative Leadership

Leaders are driven by ideas, not by the expectations of others. They are skillful at finding ways to beat a system, not surrendering to it.

Beating a system is a creative act, an ability that is not sufficient for leadership but is necessary for it. It requires identifying, denying, and exploring the consequences of denying self-defeating assumptions made by most managers. As Jose Ortega y Gasset pointed out, it is a way of arriving at the incredible. Almost every revolution appeared improbable at its outset, but those who led them found a way to beat the incumbent system-and usually with fewer resources than those available to the system they beat. The American Revolution was a good example. Russell L. Ackoff, Re-Creating The Corporation: A Design of Organizations for the 21st Century 285 (1999).

The way to beat the systems responsible for the deplorable existing situation is to deny them decision-making power. Shifting from a decision making structure that supports decadent capitalism to one that supports democratic sustainability, can achieve this desired outcome.

In bringing about the desired paradigm shift, Thomas Kuhn observed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the old paradigm must be destroyed to make way for the new because the values of each are incommensurable. A mirror image of this axiom of change is reflected in this quote from R. Buckminister Fuller (1981), one of the key innovators in the 20th century known as a philosopher, thinker, visionary, inventor, architect, engineer, mathematician, poet, and cosmologist: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change things, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." A matrix of the incommensurable values governing the old paradigm of decadent capitalism, as compared to a new paradigm of democratic sustainability that can make the existing model obsolete, is described in The setting for decisions in the Information-age.

The wisdom of Russell Ackoff also confirms that decision-making power should be denied to those engaged in criminal or immoral conduct. Id., at 280-81. The theories of action that support decadent capitalism are, indeed, immoral. They must be denied decision-making power.

Paradoxically, in the contemporary global problématique, economic and religious fundamentalism are leading the way toward the breakdown of the old paradigm, opening an immediate opportunity for development of the LoD Values Transformation Matrix toward democratic sustainability.

Lovers of Democracy ("LoD") can establish itself as a transformative leader to rescue democracy and the enlightenment from their failures. LoD can support the new paradigm by adopting norms, networks, and theories of action that support democratic sustainability leading to the destruction of the old paradigm of capitalism decadence. This new paradigm should include an authorized use policy ("AUP") that encourage broadly affordable access to the Structured Design Process ("SDP") services, including Distance Learning and WebScope E-Mail Dialogue that support democratic sustainability.

The three critical stages of this new paradigm are:

To meet the evolutionary challenge of economic and religious fundamentalism;

To transform the failed setting for decisions of the Information-age; and

To secure the new paradigm of democratic sustainability by reinventing democracy guided by SDP.