Lord Tytler suggested the average age of what he called a “democracy” is 200 years. He said that the eight stages of a democracy, from beginning to end, are bondage, spiritual faith, courage, liberty, abundance, complacency, apathy, dependence. And then we find ourselves again in bondage, which many of us are feeling right now. Personally, I don’t think we have ever truly had a democracy. Our society has been moving closer to it as years have moved along, and it is safe to say that these cycles run in about 200 year increments. For instance, the representative Republic we started with has run its course from aristocracy to oligarchy, but we are still moving toward the democracy we envision.True, we’ve been able to have democratic activities where we were allowed to choose from one of two private parties to make decisions on our behalf, but those weren’t really our decisions. Initially, the only people with voting rights were roughly 6% of the population, the white men who owned land, and now the government is guided by the 1% of the population who own all the money. It’s sweet to say that we’ve had a democracy and may serve our patriotic fervor, but truthfully, we’ve never had the technology to truly have a democracy… until now. In Chinese, the same character represents both crisis and opportunity. Although the media America has largely cultivated has been very well attuned to focus mostly on crisis, and we would do well to spend more of the 1,440 minutes we are given every day not giving our attention to the various crises, but look more closely at the opportunities that are available in the world we actually inhabit. That is essentially the goal behind what I call ABC Squared Economics. Imagine if we could use this new networked economy to channel the economic energy we create toward the initiatives we truly want to support? What if the economic energy created through our mp3s, ebooks, nfts, and other digital downloads were not only expressions of our Artistry, but the service of our Business was to also use it for the engagement of our Citizenry and development of our Community? What if we take our power back, end the oligarchical trickle down economics, and use the power of ABC Squared to implement a more bottoms up approach?I certainly recognize the reality of the changes happening in the world around us, but I also recognize that change is the only constant life provides. I also recognize that many of the practices we have been manipulated into using over the last century, as Americans have been coerced to change our roles from citizens to consumers, are not healthy and need to come to an end. We have become all too happy to celebrate mental illness and social diseases from our veneration of violence to our adoration of greed, and we are now offered the opportunity to rethink who we really want to be as a people and a country.As certainly as feudalism rose and fell in the annals of history, so will capitalism one day decline into the fine print of our folklore. What we must ask ourselves is where we want to go from here? Can we imagine an economic infrastructure that could allow for a more balanced flow of our currency? Can we open our eyes to natural rhythms and patterns so that the lifeblood of our economy may flow as effortlessly and effectively as plasma through our veins, bringing health to the entirety of the body as our economy should support the entirety of our nation?Yes, the crisis we are faced with is that since we were in bondage to the crown, our faith gave us courage which led to our liberty, and the abundance we developed turned into complacency and apathy so that we have again found ourselves dependent upon an oligarchy rather than be monarchy we faced at the beginning of our cycle. But for those who are able to recognize the bondage we’ve again been placed under, we may open ourselves to faith in life again in the hopes that on this go around, we may create a more greatly developed democracy than the last time.
