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Power of citizens networks, my presentation
My introduction of the Sustainocratic context was not taped during our online encounter about the power of citizens networks. I hence reproduce the slides here with some underlying text for them to make sense.
Sustainocracy stands for Sustainable HUMAN progress and our realtime Democracy. Sustainable Human Progress refers to our evolutionary existence as a selfaware species within (not at the expense of) our natural living environment.
As human beings we are a living expression of our natural environment.
As human beings we are member of two ecosystems: the natural biological one, through which we evolved, and the financial/political one that we have created ourselves.
We tend to express ourselves in three ways, often in this priority: our function in society, as citizens and sometimes as human being. It is high time that we turn this around.
As a human being we are closest to nature, in fact we ARE nature. If we pollute or destroy our natural surroundings we pollute and destroy ourselves.
As a citizen we are part of a community that is ruled by community principles. These may or may not take our natural human biological complexity into account. In that community we act through functions, also called “jobs” or “our personal contribution”. These functions have objectives and also consequences. In our current societal system’s structure these functions tend to stand far from our biological living reality. Perhaps this abuse was alright when humankind was small enough to express itself well within the regenerative capabilities of our living planet Earth. It is not anymore, in many ways.
When we crossed the threshold of about 3 billion, without adjustment of our abusive system that makes use of humankind and our planet for financial benefits, we started to run into problems (plastic soup, pollution, chronical deseases, wars, climate issues, overconsumption, deforestation, refugees, huge migrations, etc).
If it were up to the abusive system the size of humankind is the problem. From a humankind perspective it is the abusive system that is the problem. In this duality only humankind itself can solve the tension. We need to address our sustainable human resilience by acknowledgement of our biological selves. As human being we stand closed to our natural selves.
If we only relate to nature without any community structuring, learning curves and adaptive creativity, we would be living chaos all the time (if we consider our global scale deployment as a species) due to the complex nature of nature. If we however manipulate and use nature abusively out of fragmented self interests then we eventually destroy ourselves.
Balance is found by finding a progressive and sustainable interaction between nature, our community and our functions. Sustainocracy positions itself at the side of our biological selfs and redefines our citizenship and system functions around a set of core natural values that are key for any lving species, including us a human beings and our sustainable resilience.
Due to our self created dependence on the political and financial systems we see that these core natural human values are being violated systematically and continuously. We abuse of our natural surroundings to sustain a highly structured, unhealthy and unsustainable lifestyle.
The only way to address and restore our core natural human values effectively is to let go of the political and financial hegemony of fragmented interests while concentrating on our shared responsibilities in the cocreation of these core values. This is where the power of citizens networks come in. We are closest to our authentic human nature and hence the only real reliable resource for effective change through awareness and purpose driven action.
Below you find yet another representation of the transformation of societies based on human values centered cocreation and shared (people and institutions) responsibilities. The fragmented institutions and citizens join the same cocreation table and together define their priorities democratically within the context of the core values and sustainable human progress.
The institutions undergo a transformation by positioning their authenticity within the context of the common good, not just blind financial goals.
Yet another way of representing this evolution is the appearance of layer 4, awareness driven regional development, purely based on the shared responsibility for sustaining the core values locally, interlocally and hence globally.
On the next slide you find examples of layer 4 Sustainocratic initiatives in the region of Eindhoven. The one on regional air quality (AiREAS) is the most consolidated and proof of concept. Its progress has been published and can be downloaded here free of charge. The healthy city focus was caused by the old political geographical bounderies. Gradually the initiatives expanded regionally, interregionally, cross border and with very broad participation.
In practice a level 4 participation table looks like this. It is being chaired by a Sustainocrat who represents the human being and the core values. The Sustainocrat unites all regional stakeholders at the same time based on equality, without hierarchy. In the case below regional air quality and health is leading. The multidisciplinary table and prioritized focus is a movement represented by a name: AiREAS (Air and Areas). Meetings are project and results driven, generally every three months or when needed. During the meetings decisions are made, resources allocated and responsibilities agreed among all. Many simultaneous projects can be defined at the same time, all in a SMART way. They are allocated funds with a 10-10-80 distribution:
10% = Sustainocrat (normally an couple of people taking care of the vision, priorities, follow ups and looking after the means)
10% = Learning process of effective and values driven cocreation among the partners
80% = project operational means according to budget agreements
Here is again the AiREAS example in the region of Eindhoven showing the incredible amount of engaged members in all disciplines of society.
Finally a slide about the engagement of our young generations. I cite here a poem by Marcus Link for his son (2004):
“I have been sailing under your command since long before my own adventures to a world that once was mine and now is yours —may you make it someone else’s.”
As such Sustainocracy positions itself in the era of awareness and spreads its roots and branches across the world. Citizens initiatives are the powerful juices of the branches. Two of such initiatives: Planet4Youth and Sensor Community, have been recorded on YouTube. They were presented after this Sustainocratic contextual positioning.
Some necessary issues that create a totally new economy, save humankind and the planet but make the current power structures obsolete
Our current human world is in drastic need of a fundamental transformation. If we don´t we destroy our habitat and our sustainable expectations as a species. If we do we create numerous new opportunities for humankind but challenge all the power hierarchies in place right now. Let us take the four big lines of transformation that we see as an absolute necessity.
Energy
The sun is the main supplier of energy on Earth. All life on our planet has been made possible thanks to this continuous source. Other energetic players in the development of life have been the rotation of our planet Earth, the movement of water (influenced by gravity, evaporation and the Moon) and the windy weather patterns. Humankind however decided to build its golden age of (technological) welfare on the usage of fossil fuels. This natural source of storage of millions of years of sunlight and carbon combinations provided us with incredible amounts of energy and equal amounts of pollution. Part of our climate issues can be directly related to our addiction to burning fuels.
The end of the fossil fuel era in sight. It has had and still has devastating consequences on our surroundings and our health. After all we have been using it for a few hundred years without any ethical bounderies. Now a desperate search is going on for alternative sources that sustain the same level of energy usage. Most of the solutions found are as destructive as the original fossil fuel problem.
The real issue is not the availability of sources of energy. It is our unjustified massive need for it. Most individuals (especially in industrialized countries) and communities use energy for transportation, the production and logistics of everything we consume, for warmth in our homes or offices, and for cooking our food. Compared to any other living species, in our modern world of technology, we use up many thousand times more energy per person and society than we stricktly should and need as a natural species.
If one tree in a forest would behave as a human being than the forest would disappear, consumed by this single tree. And in the end the tree would disappear due to the lack of a forest. Thankfully the tree uses sunlight to live and develops a working relationship with the other trees and the living world around it. If human beings would behave like trees we would be bathing in abundance and wellness, not in the risk of our self elimination.
The message hence is to reduce our individual and collective energy usage by at least 75%. This is a great challenge in which we can deploy our scientific knowledge as well as a creative, innovative nature. Our main supplier is the sun for the remaining 25% and for this we need to become regionally self sufficient in a clean and neat way.
Social engagement instead of money
In our current society all relationships between people, our needs and institutions are organized through money. In essence this means that we delegate our wellbeing to a whole set of financial players. This has two important consequences. The first is that we as individuals have lost our sense of responsibility towards important issues. Secondly we expect that responsibility to be taken by those financially oriented players. We are now becoming aware that this is not taken, certainly not in a proactive manner. The institutions built within the financial cloud have a financial dependence and fragmented focus. None can be helt responsible for “the whole”. Even local territorial government is managing a territory as a profit and costs, not as a shared responsibility.
This means that we need to engage again directly with our own responsibilities, certainly when they refer to our core natural human values as a biological species that also dependents on its natural environment for our integral health, wellness and sustainable expectations. We need to learn to see society not as a profit and loss account but as a cocreative shared responsibility. Our financially based society has torn our relationships apart based on self centeredness and shared services against a price. Our social engagement brings back our care for and with each other, our environment and the abundant reciprocity we receive through this interaction.
The message here is that we connect again with real values directly, like the air we breath, the food we eat, the water we drink, the warmth we need and work together with our follow people on our health and safety together in self aware cocreation. Money, if needed at all, is just a means. Institutions are our values driven instruments that share our responsibilities with us, not against us.
Regenerative, local, circular and clean productivity
We currently misuse our available resources in a destructive and abusive way. We are surrounded by a sense of shopping abundance that is being realized against the destruction of our habitat, often without recovery due to lack of return or circular processes. We have created black holes of blind consumption and waste pollution. Overall this era is referred to the Anthropocene. This is the only era that humankind leaves an unerasable destructive footprint on our planet Earth. In a way that we are well on our way in eliminating ourselves.
The only way to turn this around is to develop regenerative, local, circular and clean productivity that covers our needs and reuses our resources over and over again. We don’t have to own any material resources and can create patterns of usages and reusage. Local productivity in this way demands the involvement of the entire population.
The message here is that we share our responsibilities, our productivity and value creation together in a natural, circular and regenerative manner. We redesign our communities (cities, rural) to optimally fullfil this on a local for local scale. We interconnect regionally to share our abundance and help cocreate wellness and our core values on a global networked scale.
Engagement of our youngest generations
The leadership required for these points is one of wise senior adulthood, not (young) blind speculative opportunism. Our learning towards such leadership starts already at the level of early childhood. This means that our educational patterns need to be restructured. Rather than setting the scene of an indoctrinized social structure of dependence we need to help our young people themselves in awareness, empathy, sense of responsibility, open reflection and feed back loops, self leadership, cocreation of core values and togetherness. Their guidance will be done on developing their own authentic and meaningful identity, equality, safety, health, awareness, trust and cocreation of genuin values.
The message here is that we need to present an open learning space for our youngest generations where they can optimally develop themselves without indoctrination but a core natural human values attitude towards awareness building, self reflection and self leadership. They will walk through all their growing up phase with new role models in societal engagement and working together.
Sustainocracy and world peace?
Mid 2022 a Peace concert will take place in Nigeria. It is being organized by peace ambassador Ukpeme Okon and contemporary jazz musician Rick Dellaratta. The happy expectation of this unique gathering, that will be broadcast worldwide, is a wonderful occasion for us to initiate a dialogue about Peace, its significance and how to achieve it in a lasting manner.
If we look up the word Peace then we get a number of meanings, all representing relatively passive states of tranquility, the absence of agression or war. This is not enough for us. Peace needs to be a continuous process of harmonisation and conflict avoidance. Is this possible in our current human world order? We believe it is not. Our world is full of conflicts which are caused by a self centered attitude of having, taking and controls. In order to achieve world Peace humankind needs to grow up and start behaving in a different way.
“Peace is achieved when all people and institutions are capable to resolve their differences or conflicts without violence, and work together in cooperative co-creation (also with our natural environment) to improve the quality of all life“.
In our current world of political and financial hierarchies “diplomacy” is already a good step into the direction of lasting Peace. In certain regions institutions learned to work together. Often this is to strengthen their financial position by sharing costs or addressing financial needs together. The concept of Triple Helix (Government – Business – University alliances) is such an example. But is still focused on the financial wellness of a region, not integral wellness through the involvement of all. Citizens are still consumers, workforce and tax payer. Not societal partners for sustainable progress, because in a world run by institutions progress is measured in financial parameters. The financials are presented as shared global responsibility, not certain core values. Even certain social securities have been translated into financial buffers as care, creating even more financial dependences. This creates the distortion among people and our environment which leads to climate issues, pollution, increased costs of society, inequality, speculative actions for financial growth, and the appearance of points of singularity upon which all kinds of collapse can be expected.
Sustainocracy introduces a set of core human values that are a shared responsibility in a multiple helix environment. It is theoretically not that difficult to create clustered, multidisciplinary communities to develop those core human values. In practice we see that such gathering at the regional cocreation level of Sustainocracy (sustainable HUMAN development and Democracy) is effective to provide people with real securities in their basic needs. It also assures their involvement in realizing them and sharing the abundance among all equally. With our current state of scientific knowledge there is no area in the world where circular community self sufficiency can not be realized.
“If we accept that sustainable human wellness and progress is a cocreation, not a cost, then we can also develop lasting Peace together” (Jean-Paul Close, Sustainocracy).
Peace is achieved when we do not have to compete for our needs. Living nature around us is based on shared abundance. When we associate ourselves wisely with nature and trust ourselves in applying well our knowledge with a sharing attitude, then we can all benefit from the natural abundance in a peaceful manner. What reasons could there be for not taking this responsibility together?
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 