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On February 13th 2021, a pathetic minority of United States Senators landed decisively somewhere between wishy and washy on the question of autocracy versus democracy. As they were feigning reverence for the Constitution of the United States, they inadvertently highlighted the most fundamental problem facing the USA. It is a problem that has plagued civilization from the time of its inception and, from the looks of things, it’s not going away anytime soon.

When a democratic republic tolerates a reckless indifference to the truth by people occupying positions of honor and trust, it is hardly authentic. When we value government of, by, and for the people does it make sense to retain elected representatives who routinely engage in barratry, deceptive practices? Would an honest person take an oath as a juror and, while the trial proceeds, act as co-counsel for one side in the controversy? Would a judiciary willfully convert a whirlpool of information into a cesspool of disinformation through its lack of forethought and intellectual rigor? Would a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court shrink from his constitutional obligation to preside over an impeachment trial?

In the United States elected and appointed officials often get a pass for integrity deficits. Then, when these same officials are called upon to pass judgement upon the behavior of others, and when in so doing they would be effectively implicating themselves by rendering an honest verdict, such a judgement is rendered meaningless. Why should we be surprised when such a long history of Supreme Court case law has effectively immunized the most dishonest political operatives from any consequence for deceiving and vexing the electorate.

To admit personal complicity, to admit hostility towards authentic democracy, and to admit just how unprincipled one is while simultaneously working to deceive one’s own constituency is more than can be expected from a prevaricating politician. Not serving the highest and best interests of an elected representative’s constituency should be enough to disqualify one from high office and yet, such unrepresentative politicians enjoy squatter’s rights to their form fitting seats.

While campaign finance, through dark money, has long been seen as having a distorting influence upon representative democracy, it persists. While corporations wield outsized influence that renders the “one man, one vote” principle meaningless, recent decisions by some corporations have highlighted the ability of such companies to disrupt the system of political patronage.

If a corporation can, by withholding campaign contributions from those politicians who actively deceive the public concerning election results, that corporation’s clients can also stop doing business with any company that contributes to the campaigns of politicians that lie about other things.

One popular meme on social media reads: “Universal healthcare is such a complex beast that only 32 of the world’s 33 developed nations have been able to make it work.” Why is our developed nation unable to make universal healthcare available to its citizens? Could it be the BS artistry and all the dark money? Could it be due to the House or Senate decorum that prohibits the questioning of a colleague’s motives and why one may be entirely subservient not to their constituency, but to the money brokers?

The U.S. electorate is not bound by such “decorum,” and one thing that became abundantly clear during the 2020 election cycle was the extent to which this country’s various forms of voter suppression had just one purpose. It was to make sure the Constitutional Convention formula, that would insure a black man or woman could never count as more that three-fifths of a person, would remain in force.

The racist riot of January 6th, 2021 happened because the gamesmanship that involved gerrymandering, the purging of voter rolls, the closing of polling places in marginalized neighborhoods, the voter intimidation, the vandalizing of the Post Office, the unmeritorious legal challenges to a great number of ballots, and the highly selective pandemic response didn’t work for the gaggle of bigots that assembled on the national mall that day.

The forty three Senators that voted against disqualifying an anti-democracy demagogue, from ever holding office again, have no plausible deniability with respect to their racism. They are unfit to hold any position of honor and trust. Any business that contributes to their campaigns for re-election, should be subjected to the most robust technologically advanced boycott in the history of boycotts.

It is not enough for elected representatives to pay lip service to constitutional imperatives. It is not enough for Supreme Court Justices to masquerade as originalists and textualists while ignoring the Declaration of Intent, the Mission Statement, the Value Proposition; the Cardinal Precepts as they were so carefully articulated in the Preamble to the United States Constitution. It is not enough to display the words “Equal Justice Under Law” above the doors to the Supreme Court building. Either make it real or take it down, because right now its only effect is to perpetrate a fraud upon the citizens of the United States and the rest of the world.

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Intentional Consumerism is, first and foremost, about expressing consumer preferences that are informed by the behaviors of those with whom we do business. It is how we vote every day with every dollar we spend. It is how we move towards a promising future, with each and every transaction. It emphasizes free trade together with fair trade. It demonstrates the power of a more proactive variation with respect to the doctrine Buyer Beware.

There is real potential in such an exercise of ethical consumerism, sometimes called consumer sovereignty; from the super- charged data driven boycott, to the casual expression of preferences. Intentional Consumerism is, to some extent, rooted in the indignation of thinking men and women.

How long have you been on hold? Does the company that wants your business pay its CEO what a thousand customer service workers make? Is the company providing your mobile phone service an enemy of net-neutrality and thereby the First Amendment? Is the nearby store limiting employee compensation to poverty wages? Does a politician, taking campaign contributions from big finance, have your best interests at heart? Should the person behind a corporate policy, that could be foreseen as having the effect of sickening, injuring or killing people, somehow be immune from criminal liability?

When an integrity challenged official doesn’t enforce anti-trust regulations, it may mean consumers should exercise their right to avoid patronizing those businesses that also cheat by ignoring such guidelines, by skirting the regulations, or by flaunting their lawlessness disregard. To what extent does a business, vying for your patronage, offload expenses and potential liabilities to the taxpayer and future generations? Rather than letting bad actors calibrate our thinking through relentless messaging, you and I, as educated consumers, are certainly under no obligation to support such unconscionable practices. In fact, we shouldn’t.

Ultimately, the only way to serve the national security interests of the United States in the long run is through the proliferation of authentic democracies worldwide. This authenticity must begin at home by bringing intentional consumerism to bear in curbing the wildly disproportionate corporate influence. If the business community is serious about balancing the interests of all stakeholders, it will keep pace with evolution and transition to a new corporate model whereby the influence of self-centered speculators is diminished and true augmentation is achieved through increased employee ownership and a benevolent corporate culture.

What if the consent of the governed were expressed through our preferences within the open arenas of commerce? What if the authoritarian powerhouses had no place to peddle their wares thus breaking the stranglehold the oligarchy has on our country? There are numerous obstacles to building a benevolent corporate culture. There are also ways to power past the often detrimental influence of the shareholder rights movement. For now, suffice it to say, if you are an entrepreneur that is service as well as profit motivated, there are options for building a company culture that fulfills both requirements. If your state does not proactively provide for the formation of benefit corporations, then seriously consider incorporating elsewhere.

Consumers also have tremendous power to effect this type of change. We may engage in traditional boycotts or simply act in accordance with a preference. How we direct our spending is at the heart of intentional consumerism. All leverage depends largely on where we decide to place the fulcrum. Is the frictionless buying experience most important to us? For example, do we value the one-click path of least resistance over the support of a local business? What about the human interaction?

We can effect lasting change simply by asking: “Is this business employee owned?” We need to understand that deep discounts and high dividends are not brought about through the generosity of a company. They are most often provided at the expense of over-tasked employees that are trying to make ends meet on poverty wages. We should always be mindful of this dynamic. Always ask yourself: “Does the company culture placate the few or benefit a larger humanity?”

An Employee Owned Benefit Corporation (EOBC) is one in which the employees and retirees hold a supermajority interest of at least two-thirds, thus limiting the holdings and influence of outside investors to a maximum of one third. The employees and retirees have the exclusive right to express their collective preference, with respect to local, national, and global priorities, by committing at least ten percent of their company’s profits for a clearly articulated public benefit.

They function corporately to support, rather than exploit the commonwealth. They pay their fair share into the public treasury. They build authentic community through their dedication to enhancing a quality of mind that reflects a science (the domain of facts), a philosophy (the domain of meanings), and a religion (the domain of values) that is truly commensurate with the spiritual, intellectual, and societal development of a greater humanity.

We, as consumers, can make it happen. We can use our purchasing power to put our enterprises on the right path. It will take concerted effort, alternative networks, and skillful coordination. It will take Intentional Consumerism.

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Andrew Jackson, with his forced march of the Cherokee along the Trail of Tears is no darling of humanitarians. He did, however, get one thing right. Upon closing the Second Bank of the United States, he correctly accused the bankers of having privatized gains while socializing losses. He recognized, two hundred years ago, what many of our most revered economists fail to acknowledge today. Many of our nation’s largest enterprises are leveraging the worst aspects of both capitalism and socialism.

There is a big, big difference between the entrepreneurial business person that can create something of value from almost nothing, and the custodial CEO, who’s chief talent is sticking it to taxpayers in parasitic fashion. There is a stark contrast, between the custodial management that persuades constituents and investors to expect every indulgence, as opposed to those highly disciplined entrepreneurial leaders who exude a spiritual idealism, one that has the awesome power to take an enterprise and even a nation from one level of attainment to the next.

True leaders steadfastly refuse to discount the value of motivational factors. No one of quality wants to work for a company that fails to exemplify a higher calling. Those companies that make gobs of money without making meaningful contributions to the public treasury, while using the infrastructure that is mostly financed by individual taxpayers, are properly defined as freeloaders. The companies that pay wages so low they make public charges of their employees, forcing them to seek heating, rent and nutrition assistance, are operating in a parasitic fashion, while embarrassing their the employees and making them take the rap.

Those companies that have advanced the fiction of corporate personhood have clearly distorted what was, at one time, a constitutionally grounded democratic republic. While such companies masquerade as good neighbors and “good corporate citizens” they are, in actuality, no such thing.

The static cliche in the suburbs is promoted by the evangels of mammon, the penny-wise, pound-foolish that are currently at the commanding heights of the world’s economy. Even so, we must know, that we are not going to put a ten to twenty trillion dollar national debt to rest by sustaining the last gasp of an outmoded economy or the fossilized thinking of those deeply vested in it.

We are faced with the reality that we must rebuild our nation’s economy. We should be asking ourselves: “What kind of economy do we want?” Faux corporations, those controlled by outside investors, act in parasitic fashion. They engage in tax avoidance to maximize returns primarily for those outside investors. This is most recently evidenced by the fact that 91 of the Fortune 500 companies paid no federal income taxes in 2018. It is common practice for a business, consistently offering high dividends and low prices, to deliver these competitive advantages to investors and customers by the systematic tamping down of employee compensation, through a combination of poverty wages and hollowed out benefit packages.

A new type of Employee Owned Benefit Corporation or EOBC is less likely to exert a distorting and malevolent influence upon our democracy. It is far more likely to act in the greater interest of the community. Within the body politic, healthy enterprises are the foundation for affluent countries and a thriving global economy.

If we are to expose the blithering incoherence of those who believe increasing the minimum wage is a job killer, it will be by questioning how paying a CEO over one thousand times an entry level employee’s wage is not a job killer. Pseudo-conservatives have demonstrated their calloused disregard for the health and welfare of marginalized people throughout human history. They have claimed that financial assistance for those in need would run up deficits, negatively impacting future generations. In their self-serving world view, only the most privileged are likely to become a part of any future generation.

The US economy and that of the world is not sustainable to the extent it is overly burdened with an increase in the cost of disease care, perpetual warfare, migration patterns driven by genocide, pollution, and climate change; plus a seriously demotivated workforce. When the will of the electorate is continually subjugated to that of the moneyed interests and the whims of authoritarian leaders, democracy declines as would-be participants adopt a “Why the hell should I bother?” attitude.

We can break this cycle of corporate socialism and parasitism for ours is an entrepreneurial country. To fix it, we must first realize that a corporation, controlled by outside investors, is not a store of value nor is it typically a center for creativity. It is not a job creator and instead devotes significant resources to getting the people out of the loop. It is far more likely the means to siphon the life plasm out of any organization, composed of diverse personalities, working together for a better life.

Intentional consumerism is how we vote every day with every dollar. It is how the citizenry can express its preferences for a promising future with each and every transaction. It’s how we can direct our purchasing power towards employee owned corporations and better yet, Employee Owned Benefit Corporations (EOBC’s).

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When most people think about the Roaring Twenties, the highlights quickly come to mind. Women in the U.S. gained the right to vote in 1920. People of that era also witnessed the advent of broadcasting, a steady climb-out from the post Word War One recession, and a shift in emphasis, from wartime production, to a new mass production that yielded an abundance of consumer goods. In our reprise one century later, we hope to tap the enthusiasm that characterized the twenties of a century ago as we also consider ways to avoid the pitfalls.

The 1920s were capped off with a global depression, caused by recklessness, the counterfeit wisdom of many who occupied the commanding heights of the U.S. economy. The 2020s began with a similar, all too familiar recklessness. It started with a depression that is, in no small part, also attributable to such run-of-the-mill selfishness on the part of the inheritors, skimmers and hoarders of wealth.

The fiscal policies of the years preceding 1920 and those preceding 2020 have certain common elements that suggest our leaders have failed to learn from history while dooming the rest of us to repeat it. A pair of once in a century global pandemics revealed that the so-called “smartest guys in the room” ran their businesses in such a way that they failed to maintain a rainy day fund, they paid their employees poverty wages that made it almost impossible to build any kind of savings on a personal level.

Where the 1920s ushered in a frenzied era of mass consumerism. Today we must place a new emphasis on a form of consumerism that is far more intentional. We will borrow the best from the earlier era’s artistic, social, and cultural dynamism. And we will, at the same time, give preference to those businesses that exhibit a genuine culture of benevolence.

John Wycliffe, in the preface to his fourteenth century middle English translation of the Bible wrote: The bible is about government of, by, and for the people. This principle is reflected in the cardinal precepts of the United States Constitution through the first three words: “We the People.” The thread was later highlighted when Abraham Lincoln said: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The Horse and Sparrow Theory of Economics holds that, if you feed the horse all the oats it wants, the sparrows can subsist on the undigested oats that are to be found in the dung piles along the road. Since this theory was advanced in the 1890s, a number of efforts have been made to disguise a clear condescension and disgust, the most privileged among us hold, for We the People.

Today, the same theory has undergone some name changes to make it a bit more, if you’ll excuse the expression, palatable. Leaky, trickle-down, and supply-side are among the names floated to make such unmitigated selfishness less discernible and thereby less offensive to the masses. All of the inequities on our planet are directly traceable to such depraved heart indifference and unconscionable attitudes.

The United States was formed when the founders sought to throw off the yoke of those they described as “foreign potentates.” Then over time, the ownership of certain companies and corporations transitioned from control by the enthusiastic entrepreneurial cohorts that formed them, to the domestic robber barons, and then to a new generation of outside investors, foreign potentates.

These inauthentic companies and corporations are no longer characterized by people associating for a common purpose or acting corporately. Their fate is rather in the hands of outside investors that have no deep-set stakes in the companies or the countries in which they operate. The Supreme Court of the United States has effectively promoted a strangely sociopathic form of corporate personhood through a clear lack of intellectual rigor, together with its failure to differentiate between the persons within, against a fictitious oftentimes heartless overlay.

What if we could strike, perhaps even force a better balance? What if outside investors could participate without siphoning the life plasm out of our enterprises, without exerting the kind of control that has resulted in hollowed-out benefit packagers and subsistence wages? After all, the compensatory costs, such as housing, heating and nutrition assistance are borne by the taxpayer. Think about how vibrantly alive and competitive our companies and our communities could be if everyone within them was truly enriched by them.

That passes for conservatism today is, for the most part, penny wise and pound foolish. It is, at times, even parasitic. How much healthier would our democratic republic be if the outside investors were unable to exert a distorting influence in the name of those by whom the company actually operates?

To effectively convert or sunset such pretentious companies, while raising a new 21st Century enterprise architecture, can help to cure the ills of our otherwise abundant world.

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In the first week of this year, we saw just how fragile even a mature, constitutionally grounded democratic republic can be. As we reached out to family, friends, and colleagues, we got the sense that we, as individuals, are just as siloed as our media. We finally came to realize how about six hundred billionaires control the information flow for a country of three-hundred and thirty-one million citizens within the United States. And to our dismay, it was revealed, that the most privileged among us have become even more enriched, while the marginalized and powerless are dead, dying, or stewing in hormones of stress.

For years we’ve watched helplessly as a sociopathic few presume to speak for a world population that is fast approaching eight billion human beings. And now we are witnessing an abrupt shift as the most inauthentic, shell like corporations have found that, despite all the deceptive practices, the public’s perception of their corrupt political influence is now more acute than ever. The dark money is now front and center and so, supporting the most integrity challenged politicians is therefore, no longer convenient. 

We have long been told that the natural world’s response to overpopulation is through war, famine, and pestilence. And when we’ve witnessed behaviors of elected representatives willing to write off entire swaths of humanity in the name of “culling the herd” and “herd immunity, we are somehow expected to adopt the same kind of calloused world view, together with the depraved heart indifference they have shown towards the people we care about. 

The thin vernier of religiosity, that is now on full display in the realm of religion and politics, has failed to conceal the moral cowardice of those prostituting themselves for forces intent on undermining our constitutional republic. Their corrosive influence, on the democracy underpinnings of our nation, is a clear betrayal of the oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Standing in stark contrast to those who have disgraced themselves are the heroes, the steadfast healthcare workers that have held the line while those sworn to provide for the common defense were AWOL. The coronavirus pandemic infected more than 80 million people and killed more than 1.8 million globally over the course of just it’s first year. While microscopic foes have proven to be just as deadly as political adversaries, our conventional definitions of what it means to “provide for the common defense” are clearly inadequate.

We’ve seen some supremely heroic and some truly pathetic responses to the global pandemic and, while we have also listened as some claimed the economy will come “roaring back,” others don’t want to rebuild the economy in the same old way. These opposing forces have very different ways of experiencing the economy. While one group holds that the stock market is the leading indicator of economic health, others have noticed that this particular market tends to rise in tandem with the human misery index.

The question before 331 million of us affecting the eight billion of us is this: If we are to “build back better,” just how will that be achieved? Some would undoubtedly like to see us rebuild on the same old rotting foundation of baser instincts and moral bankruptcy. People of true integrity would prefer to build upon a culture of benevolence.

The United States fought a revolutionary war to throw off the yoke of what the founders called “foreign potentates.” Then, in less than 250 years, the arch-typical democracy devolved into a feudalistic corporatocracy. One that is controlled by other, more brutal, foreign potentates.

There are those among us that are entirely ok within a world where the rich get richer and the poor die. That form of fascism that is often seen wrapped in the flag, while carrying a cross, is fooling a group that is getting smaller and smaller every day. The year 2020 was a defining moment for them. Those elected officials that were once engaged in a masquerade as constitutional conservatives, have been exposed as anything but.

Likewise, Justices on The Supreme Court of the United States that have long been masquerading as originalists and textualists while ignoring the entire Preamble to the Constitution, have demonstrated a lack of intellectual rigor. They have clearly dishonored themselves and the institution as they capped off a long series of cases advancing a counterfeit corporate personhood, with the case Citizens United.

They have failed to differentiate between those inauthentic corporations that are controlled by foreign potentates, shells with no affinity for company or the people they claim to represent; as opposed to those authentic corporations composed of people in good company, choosing, associating, and operating for a common purpose, real people who are acting corporately.

In contrast to counterfeit corporations that enrich only the few, Employee Owned Benefit Corporations are of, by, and for We the People.

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A deeply resonant CSN song began with the lyric “You, who are on the road, must have a code that you can live by.” While this is likely true, one would hope the rest of us don’t need an Ovaltine Decoder Ring to figure out what it is. Many singers, composers, authors, parents, pastors, and elected representatives each have some power to sway in a way that can help insure our ultimate survival or destruction as a species. And yet, trying to decipher the values proposition such people put forth is often a matter of guesswork.

Throughout the history of our planet, there have been people, at the commanding heights, who are unable to differentiate between true and false liberty. The bully pulpit is, as often as not, occupied by people that can’t seem to balance freedom with self-control. Many of us, as parents, have had to contend with one or more children that don’t think the rules apply to them. Our responses range from an off the shelf “cause I said so,” to a dissertation on the golden rule that can be procured from any major religious tradition on earth.

Today we find ourselves and our fellow human beings situated somewhere between a Luciferian license and a Jesusonian form of self mastery. Politicians can spend lots of their constituent’s money on media to rile us. When we are on an even keel, it doesn’t serve the interests of political operatives intent on leveraging FIBS, the Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear that are in every dirty trickster’s toolkit.

They want us to hate the Chinese, Iranians, Russians, Hebrews, Palestinians , and Arabs when the real, most objectionable conduct is usually traceable to the egomaniacal leaders of those nations. They have encouraged us to view anyone that doesn’t exhibit a complexion exactly like ours, as somehow less than human to perpetually justify man’s inhumanity to man through international or internecine, hot or cold warfare. And, as they do, they often characterize themselves as liberty loving freedom fighters.

Just what is this thing that we call liberty? Is it permissible, in the name of free speech, to yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire? And what about truthfulness? Is it ok to mislead someone who may rely upon your word to their detriment?

Liberty that is unintelligent, unconditioned, and uncontrolled is a cruel deception that invariably leads to abject bondage for someone. It may be you; if you should decide to go wilding with the hordes through the hallowed halls of representative government. You could lose your freedom, for life, in accordance with the felony murder rule. You could lose your cherished 2nd Amendment right to own a gun. You could find yourself on a list that forever bars you from boarding a commercial flight.

If your idea of liberty gives you license to rape, pillage, and plunder or engage in human trafficking, you are imposing bondage on someone else. There is a delicate balance between true freedom and self-control. And, while good parents teach it, bad-faith pastors do not. The counterfeit wisdom that flows from many in authority, who are often enjoying excessive prominence, is leading us into an orgy of darkness and death. They often fail to teach that diminishing external restraints are always contingent upon augmenting internal restraints.

If we are to survive as a species, we must turn our attention to those purpose driven leaders that are advancing us towards an era of light and life. They are easy to recognize because their values proposition is crystal clear. They focus us not upon themselves but on our own highest and best understanding of truth, beauty, and goodness as they give creative expression to those qualities. They encourage us to consider just how we can contribute, in an active and spiritually pragmatic way, toward the healing and elevation of life on our planet.

Democracy, throughout the world, is under attack. And, at its most basic level, it is problematic. It can be three wolves and a sheep deciding on dinner. It can lead to the domination of mediocrity. And, every time it stumbles, authoritarian wannabes will say: “You see, it’s messy. It doesn’t work. That’s why to need me.” But in the final analysis, government of, by, and for the people is the only design that is truly sustainable. It is the only one that is spiritually serviceable; as it alone has the power to elicit the enthusiastic consent of the governed.

The choice now before us is autocracy versus democracy. We must learn to recognize any sophistry that has the effect of corroding the democracy underpinnings of our constitutional republic. Long ago, Edmund Burke, in referring to the American colonists, described our ancestors as “able to snuff the approach of tyranny with every tainted breeze.” Today the tainted breezes are delivered by means of powerful airwaves that Burke probably never imagined. And, right now, the most deceptive practices, ones that push fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear are generating howling winds in contrast to the gentle breezes of true benevolence. The most refreshing breezes are the ones that are spiritually fragrant, the ones where truth, beauty, and goodness are clearly in evidence.

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On January 6th in the year 2021, hoards of emotionally charged, intellectually stunted insurgents breached security and stormed into the United States Capitol building. Elected representatives were evacuated. The traitorous, treasonous, seditionist, insurrectionist authoritarian enablers among them tried to distance themselves from the violence they intentionally fomented. For such unrepresentative elected representatives, statesmanship is an arcane banished idea while its distant cousin, politics, is taken to illogical extremes.

Our country’s organizing principle is the spirit of the law. It is articulated in a carefully crafted Preamble that begins with the words “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union . . .”

From such a coherent value proposition, one that is often ignored by those occupying the commanding heights of government while masquerading as originalists and textualists, coherent strategies could and should evolve. But there are true enemies, advocating moral anarchy, exerting a corrosive influence on the democracy underpinnings of our constitutional republic, as well as others around the world.

Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, made it abundantly clear that “Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” Indeed, to restore the rights of a people as they work, to become the arbiters of their own destiny, appeals to the Spirit within each of us. The only societal arrangement that will ultimately satisfy, perhaps even enthuse such a Spirit activated group is government of, by, and for the people.

John Wycliffe, in the preface to his 14th Century bible translation to Middle English, made it clear that the bible advances “government of, by, and for the people.” The offended priesthood of his day, dug up and burned his bones. It is not unlike the force behind today’s dark money, the gerrymandered maps, assault weapons on full display and all the other means of voter intimidation and suppression. These faux Christian conservatives push incessantly for things antithetical to the biblical principles they claim to represent.

By means of a variety of political sophistries, a few inheritors, skimmers, and hoarders of wealth have routinely thwarted the will of the many. Through a pseudo-religious hucksterism, some have even sacrificed a witness to the kingdom within, while engaged in a masquerade that stands in stark contrast to the cardinal precepts contained in the bible they like to thump.

Marketeers and politicians place great emphasis on what they term key differentiators, or what sets us apart. Today, the divide is dangerously wide. In our supercharged political environment, we tend to view the world through polarized lenses, seeking and seeing only what is pre-packaged to fit our circumscribed world view. It is a mediated world, replete with a tribal epistemology that reduces every value proposition to a binary choice where the question is: “Are they with us or against us?”

We must each ask ourselves: “To which ‘us’ are you referring?” At this juncture we should also pause to consider just how any understanding of the term “us” is ripe for a paradigm shift – a Pareto flip. In the United States, over the past decade, about 600 billionaires have controlled the information flow to 330 million people.

Conservative columnist George Will, in his book Statecraft as Soulcraft examined how the power of the state can create conditions that either foster the growth of blessed souls or the imprisonment of seriously stunted and tortured souls. He admits that his vision may appear to share some traits with totalitarianism. However, like Edmond Burke, Will places great emphasis on the voluntary associations and values that are seen as essential to a fully informed consent of the governed and a functioning free society.

In his own historically rich book; The Soul of America, biographer John Meacham wrote: “in the battle between the impulses of good and of evil in the American soul, what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” have prevailed just often enough to keep the national enterprise alive.”

Today, win-win is often not perceived to be of value to a taint by numbers politician or any other party trying to differentiate by leveraging fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear. It is a Joe McCarthy era tactic known by the acronym FIBS. When it is seen as politically expedient, they even divide us on consensus issues. And yet, once we blow through our own politically conditioned understanding, or expand our horizons beyond the Twitter-verse, we find we have far more in common than any self-serving political operative would have us believe.

Our focus must be more about finding our center, our soul, our statesmanship than it is about politics. Because, today’s politics is mostly about opposite poles on a line. We need to be mindful of the fact that: “No bird can soar except by outstretched wings.” And that, as experience has shown; the amount of lift produced at the wingtips is clearly not sufficient to overcome the gravity of our present situation.

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As the clock struck 11 p.m. on New Year’s Eve in 2020, and as the British exit from the European Union was finalized, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, tweeted: “Scotland will be back soon, Europe. Keep the light on.” The First Minister intends to take an independent Scotland back into the EU. BREXIT is just the latest example of the ongoing struggle between those across the globe that are vested in nationalism, and others who believe the only way to stop the ritualized insanity of perpetual warfare is to somehow unite the world through an inherent desire for global peace and prosperity.

The European Union has, since its founding, been seen as a major though incrementalist milestone in moving the entire world towards an eventual federation of democracies. Many of the foundational principles for organizations such as NATO, as well as the EU, are informed by the work of Clarence K. Streit. As the New York Times correspondent at the League of Nations in Geneva, Streit understood the founding principles as they were articulated through the Treaty of Versailles.

He was impressed by this initiative for international cooperation that was formally established on January 10, 1920. He also saw how the League’s collapse was rooted in its inability to tap the power of individual conscience. Streit believed it was a mistake to identify democracy with either capitalist or socialist economics. His was a spiritual conception, one holding that “no community can live without a conscience, that we must hitch the community directly to the conscience of the individual.”

Streit understood that “whether we are establishing government between tribes, states or nations, the process is the same, the basic unit is still the individual man. The government must operate on him individually and the more directly it depends upon him, and upon his conscience, the more realistic and effective it will be.” He held that for global government to work, international institutions would have to penetrate the shell of national sovereignty and reach the core of each citizen’s loyalty. He presented his revolutionary book during a series of lectures at Swarthmore College in 1938.

Streit’s book, Union Now, is a classic work informing federalist political and constitutional thought. He is widely regarded as the founder of the modern world’s federalist movement. He ventured well beyond the sterile universalism of Geneva. He advanced the political and strategic framework, whereby a small union of democracies could develop peacefully. To this day it remains the most serviceable vision for eventual world peace. Such a nucleic union, by leveraging the dynamic-unifying elements of conscience, by making any authentic regional union the root of an ideological union, could eventually grow to encompass a world union since it would be based on the sharing of a universal value: individual freedom grown into a healthy collective freedom based upon the foundations of a healthy family.

A federation among nations, and the idea of tracing the responsibility for world peace to a group of democratic countries, informed Winston Churchill’s offer of a British union with France on June 16, 1940. Enthusiasts within the Union Movement played leading roles in developing the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO. It inspired The Anatomy of Peace by Emery Reves in 1945. Streit built upon the logic of a revolutionary concept that extended beyond short sighted nationalism. The sovereignty of the individual citizen could at last be realized through a Federal Union of the Free.

In such a world-wide union, the smallest of nations would be “a part of the world and not a world apart.” They would be just as powerful as the greatest. We have many lessons derived from the American revolutionary experience and that of the early European Union. In the first instance, even though the land mass for the state of Rhode Island is just a little over one thousand square miles, it has two senators in the United States legislature. Alaska encompasses well over five-hundred thousand square miles of land, and it also has two senators. California has a population of about forty million people while Wyoming has about six-hundred thousand. Each of these states also have two senators.

While Brexit may have temporarily retarded the progress of a continent that hosted the planet’s first democracy in Athens, many in Great Britain are now regretting their decision to withdraw from the EU. This regional union is the clearest example to date of the schema described by Streit. Consider certain carefully delineated design imperatives as proposed through Union Now:

Just as local affairs in the United States are typically handled by local governments while national affairs are handled by national governments, an evolving world, such as ours, will one-day see its international affairs administered by a global democratic government. Once we’ve broken the cycle of ritualized insanity, where the answer to every problem is more armaments, each individual will be able to exercise greater liberty under such a global union.