"The people when rightly and fully trusted will return the trust." - Abraham Lincoln
“The Government sets out the objectives of the agencies’ activities and how much money they have available to them … but it has no powers to interfere with how an agency applies the law or decides in a specific case… In many other countries, a minister has the power to intervene directly in an agency’s day-to-day operations. This possibility does not exist in Sweden, as ‘ministerial rule’ is prohibited.” - Anders Tegnell (evidence to Covid enquiry)
“I feel anger like many of those people in the street about many issues that all go back to government. How many are there who feel that way but don’t go out onto the street? It’s so easy for the government to brand those on the street as thugs and therefore the issues they protest as equally thuggish and extreme far right beliefs. When in fact they represent the feelings of many others who are afraid to push too hard, afraid of the government and the laws they wield when they choose, fear for their jobs, or just fear ahead.” - Brett H (My bolding)
“For many, the advent of printing was nothing short of miraculous but for others it symbolised a scandalous cheapening of knowledge.” - Alexander Lee
“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” - Clement Atlee (1945) (adopted into UNESCO Constitution)
A Failing State
“Don’t try to understand ‘em, just rope an’ throw an’ brand ‘em” - Frankie Laine, Rawhide (song)
Arguments are raging in Britain at the moment about the genesis of the unrest that has recently escalated into violence in some English towns and cities.
It's clear that the powers that be, as represented by the newly minted government of Sir Keir Starmer, haven't the faintest idea what the problem is.
Instead, Britain's current Prime Minister prefers to play the law'n'order card – tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime – which sounds like it came from Angry of Tunbridge Wells, but is in fact a Blairism. (In a speech to the Labour Party Conference on 30 September 1993)
Of course, Starmer was, not that long ago, Director of Public Prosecutions, the senior lawyer in the UK administration and a post for which he seemed abundantly qualified: a natural born lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key type of guy. He was especially zealous in his pursuit of Julian Assange, whose crime was to have published truths that were uncomfortable to certain powerful people. (This crime used to be called investigative journalism.)
Starmer's strategy appears to be to dupe the British legal system into going after one section of the community. This is not new but is a dark path that the British establishment has been following for at least a generation. Had it not embarked on this foolish journey, the situation today would have been considerably better.
You may or may not agree that banging up dissenters is the right solution. It's certainly what happened in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and still does in lots of other totalitarian regimes around the world.
It seems clear however that whatever has boiled over recently in Britain has been simmering for a while and throwing a few burly blokes in the clink is not going to disappear the underlying problems.
But who in the credentialed class (Panocracy 69) listens to Hilary Clinton's deplorables? Dispossessed of their jobs and characterised by an unusually frank Barack Obama in 2008 as “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Wilfully ignoring for several generations the concerns of ordinary people about losing their livelihoods, their culture, their status and their society is like ignoring a cancer: it will with certainty eventually come back a lot worse.
The British administration has failed its own people. Many of our own 'deplorables' may not be good at articulating what has gone wrong but their lived experience tells them how bad things have become. They didn't need to be tweeted or fed with phoney statistics to become angry.
The British State has failed in its duty to protect its people. Their lives have been derailed, depleted or even destroyed by a succession of bad choices by the misinformed, the arrogant and the cynical who purport to know what they're doing.
It's little wonder the natives are restless.
What is the State for?
Panocracy is founded on the idea of protecting the people in general and the individual in particular. Given the chance, people will argue and, yes, protest for their own interests: their families, their jobs and their culture.
Panocracy allows and encourages them to do just that. Peacefully. Via open debate: debate which will be uncomfortable, heated, acrimonious, hard-hitting, offensive, defensive, ... But, as Winston Churchill nearly said: 'jaw, jaw is better than war, war'.
Widespread ressentiment about public policy cannot allowed to fester as it has been in Britain and the West. In our Panocracy such grievances are exposed in the open forums. Those who are aggrieved can see what others are thinking and why; they can check the evidence for themselves rather than relying on mass media; they can take on board innovative solutions that are incomprehensible to our current crop of pie-in-the-sky narcissists and their acolytes. Rather than 'nursing her wrath to keep it warm' the citizen of a panocracy can pile in to the debate to make her feelings count.
When new policies are enacted, the agencies which implement them are subject to public scrutiny to make sure they're behaving according to their remits and not sneaking in their own political predilections.
In our panocracy, an agency must say what it's doing to meet its objectives and provide all the data on how well or badly each objective is being met. Any citizen can of course raise an RFC to change or remove the objective but ultimately that has to be approved by referendum.
None of us knows how the current situation in Britain will turn out.
We hope it will not be 1930s Spain again but perhaps such conflicts are inevitable in the flux of human affairs.
As always, we present panocracy not to bitch about the state of the world but to offer a practical, if technically radical, alternative to the system that has led us down our current rabbit hole.
What panocracy needs now is practical demonstration so if you know anyone who has IT skills and might be interested, please ask them to PM me.