Since the ending of worldwar II our democracies have gone through a gradual process of cooling down, up to a freezing point of public status quo, apathy, dependence and unjust confidence in (or comfort with) extreme levels of immobilized, institutionalized, self protective silos of power and hierarchy. Corona surprised us (again) and broke loose a part of society into a meltdown that brings our democracies back into a kind of flow (chaotic at first, maybe dynamic soon). The frozen institutional landscape does all it can to sustain its status quo against all odds. The meltdown however releases tremendous amounts of public energy. Energy that still is highly volatile and unorganized. But it will organize….

Our first global meltdown in 2009, the financial banking crisis, got us to loose all confidence in banking institutions and related governance support systems. From my own perspective it showed the sudden opening up of people and institutions to the voluntary choice of core human values defined in Sustainocracy. Money had lost its status of “holy grail”. The frozen democracies became unsustainable due to their enormous financial dependence. Two fields appeared, the one that tried to save the institutional positions by refreezing society with huge capital injections, power pressure over people, impulsing fear, etc. And the other as a movement of waking up of which Sustainocracy is the pacific part, representing “the positive invitation of the awake to create a harmonized cocreative, natural human values driven society”. Other parts may be more aggressive and stand up against the dominant structures that want to keep the status quo of frozen democracies through the promise of an unjust sense of comfort .

The second global meltdown is the 2020 Corona crisis. Both “awakend sides” are intensifing their positioning. In Taiwan a movement is using a new internet based democracy model to engage the public into dynamic clustering movements around consensus building. Large manifestations in European capitals against corona measures are a prelude to more aggressive stand ups to meltdown the holy grail of political economic hegemony of artificial measures to keep public control in a make belief world of risks and “services”. Meanwhile the world economies collaps, food structures break down, inflation grows, poverty builds up, etc. The awakening recognizes the signs of forthcoming nightmares at the horizon but also huge opportunities to crack back open our democracies with great new creative, progressive, self aware flows of renewal and public engagement in our huge global challenges.

Government is in fact a well described and often imposed illusion of security. Our Taiwan innovators state “Once people get the idea that you don’t need a government to do governance, then people get into the true spirit of collaborative governance.” In my own human complexities drawing we see that this move to collective governance is never a direct step, as it was not in Taiwan either. There are two fields in between letting go of control and defining harmonic clustering of society: chaos and awareness. In the case of Taiwan this was covered by open source technology and the positive invitation to participate. In the Netherlands it was covered by defining our core natural and the positive invitation to participate. In both occasions it was preceeded by chaos. In Taiwan the 2014 public uprise, in the Netherlands the 2008 credit crisis. And in both occasions the open invitation to participation is rewarded by involvement, being taken seriously as engaged citizen or institution, and eventually the measurable growth of commonly shared core values.

Maybe the Taiwan technological and Dutch Sustainocratic flows can be united one day and create a viable path for the world to grow to. A global patchwork of self sustaining communities in close, peaceful symbiotic, relationship among eachother and the natural environment, will then emerge. Probably even without borders! These are after all yet another illusion established by powers for seperatist control. We prefer the engaging views of an artist from Africa, resident in the Netherlands: “Borders are the places where our communities meet”.