WAKE UP!

By Ira Seidman — part eight of twelve in the series decentralize

Whether you’re daydreaming your worries away or in full blown REM sleeping off your struggles, it’s time to wake up. Ask around and many people will argue that the world is going off the rails, certainly down the wrong track. Yes, by the numbers we are at a time that is arguably the best in history with all-time life expectancy, computing power, and vaccine production, but is this sustainable? Most people will say no, but where we often disagree is why — the disintegration of the American family, existential climate change, racial injustice, widespread disbelief in God, etc… Maybe we can all set aside our differences long enough to agree that something needs to be done, and fast. First things first though, we need to wake up.

How often do you bend your morals because everyone else is? “Yeah my carbon footprint is awful but there’s no way I’m gonna start a compost in my apartment.” “Sure social media is dividing us, but if I unsubscribe how am I supposed to stay connected to my friends?” To make matters more complicated, the issues we are most likely to collectively recognize as being a problem are often issues few, if any, people know how to solve; for examples, how to preserve incentives for hard work in an economy without runaway wealth inequality or how to get justice for everyone involved in a crime. Some of these issues are so big that as soon as we finish talking about them we just go back to sleep as if the problems were just an academic exercise. I promise you we can solve these problems, but first things first, we need to wake up.

Debatably the biggest problem that we sleep through is the effectiveness of government, or ineffectiveness I should say. Everyone knows politicians are in bed with their donors and yet we have long since (if we ever inquired in the first place) stopped asking questions in debates about how to mitigate corruption. Many people have given up and totally passed out on defending the idea that government can be just and public-serving, and so the best that we could ever do is simply make the state as small as possible. While reasonable on its face, this position has a lot of problems, most notably that the economy is great at making the rich richer; without effective government not only is there no check on runaway wealth inequality, but the very power we took away from government to avoid corruption in the first place is now squarely centralized in the private sector (where it is sure to be equally corrupting). This is to say nothing of how individual liberty, environmental protection, and social/religious freedoms all need a strong government with a certain amount of authority to endure. The key is to never give up and to decentralize power, but before we can do that we have to put first things first — we need to wake up.

Sometimes when I’m sleeping I’ll have the coolest dreams that get totally spoiled by my subconscious. What is she doing here? Why am I still thinking about that? It’s tough where the truth rears its ugly head sometimes. Whether I consciously ignore or subconsciously forget, it does not make the truth any less real. The best solution would be to wake up and at the very least figure out what I’m going to do in the morning, but too often I just keep sleeping. Sometimes I wish I was better at putting first things first and waking up.

Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It’s tough to create urgency when there is no consensus that a problem even exists, let alone when everyone at the meeting is asleep. The interesting part is, most people already agree that the government is corrupt so the question is simply what should be done? The way I think about waking up is committing unequivocally to mitigating, if not eradicating, corruption in government by making it structurally harder to pass laws that are not in the public’s interest. I’m running for mayor to implement online voting to crowdsource the best proposals, promote paper referendums to pass these proposals into law, and host more discussions built to build participation. Once the power is decentralized and corruption is systemically more difficult (if not too difficult to be worth the effort) we can figure out the details of exactly what laws we’ll pass and change, but the order of operations tells us to fix our tools before we use them. What does waking up look like to you when voting on June 22nd? Whatever that may be, please put first things first and do just that.