Mr. Andrew
It’s not often I get a lengthy response to my Medium posts. I appreciate your time and effort.
I do have faith in human nature. It’s not hard to find “good” people and people who need to work on themselves a little more. The trick is to have an electoral process than selects more of the good people for governance. With more people like this in positions of authority and responsibility, they can move society forward. The TDG will better deliver this kind of person than current systems.
Speaking of needing to work on themselves, a couple of years ago, we had a municipal election. I voted for a particular fellow, and he got in. This fellow is certainly a man around the town, attending many events and being quite cordial. He had been a councillor before and was head of our local theatrical group. So he had lots of civic exposure. From what I could see, he was a decent fellow.
Six months later, he resigned. It seemed he had taken to alcoholism and his wife had left him. He clearly stated that he needed to work on himself rather than be busy with civic affairs. I — and many others — had no idea. I believe that if I had been a neighbor to this fellow, I would have stood a better chance of having this knowledge to not vote for him. If my town had a two-tier system, it is doubtful this fellow could have made it past the first tier for alcoholism is difficult to hide for more than a few meetings.
Your karass and non-karass comments are interesting. When I was first postulating my TDG, I had inclinations of forming communities that were not of a geographical nature. For example, I might prefer to participate in a community of oilfield service workers OR small business people. I would choose which group to cast my vote towards and I would be part of that tier. But I just couldn’t make the TDG work on these communities that were likely to be far flung — and we were unlikely to really know much about each other.
When I attained my TDG eureka (1992), I was living in the Ritchie area of Edmonton. My next door neighbor was one of these amiable people. She had brought about eight households into one social group. Other than being Caucasian, we were a rather differentiated group: different ages, different religions, different economic status, different marriage status, etc. But we enjoyed each other’s companies and would help each other out. I think the TDG will be better at creating these kinds of neighborhoods.
And it was interesting that when Mr. Trump announced the USA’s departure from the Paris Accord, many American states and cities decided to continue on with implementing new climate change strategies. And despite a reduction of mining regulations to entice more coal production, no former mines have opened up in the USA. In some ways, the world seems to be moving in a certain direction — despite what the politicians are trying to do. My understanding of history is that the world has been moving in the direction of progressivism since 1848. It was really tough being in the worker class at that time.
Thank you for reading a few articles from my blog. Unfortunately my stand on alcohol has partially caused some strained family relationships. I have a whole bunch of new articles to put in that blog, but family finances are a little tight. With very few readers, it is hard to justify the additions.
We tried to bring western democracy to Iraq. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to work, and unfortunately I was right. It seems to me that society needs some lessons first. Canada and Australia had the benefit of direct lessons of the English parliament of 1688 to learn from. But a lot of English blood had been spilled to get that understanding of how to govern democratically. The Iraqis just didn’t have enough prior life lessons to make western democracy work. And their culture(s) and western democracy are not that compatible. But I can see how the TDG, with no political parties to entice tribalism, could be implemented and eventually work well (Chapter 7).
In some ways, the first TDG tier (the neighborhood) is a choosing by lot. As I have alluded to earlier, there will be some difficulties in knowing enough about all neighbors. And even interacting with some of them on a daily or weekly basis, we can still be fooled. If a neighborhood has, let’s say, four good people, one of them should be chosen. It really doesn’t matter which of these four is chosen. The neighborhood has found someone of good character and capacity.
In contrast, if a neighborhood has an amiable type person but more than a few neighbors can see some issues with alcohol within that person, that person is not likely to receive enough votes to win. And if the neighborhood is of state of semi-drunkeness to elect that person because of his obvious alcoholic virtues, that person is not likely to rise very rise in the TDG. In other words, the TDG self-corrects itself if local voters are fooled.
My involvement to Medium is coming to a close. After three months of at least three hours a day with very few tangible results, I need to spend my free time and energy on another TDG project.
In these days of political messiahs all over the place promising to fix things, I am quite clear that I cannot build this TDG by myself. In fact, if people don’t get off the butts and start putting together local TDGs, this movement goes nowhere very fast. The TDG is much different than to attend the local rally when the circus comes to town and write a $100 check to check off the box “I participated in democracy.”
Your support for the TDG seems to be somewhat ambivalent. And that is OK. May I suggest that you mention the TDG to your social and internet circles? Who knows where this can go?
BTW, I had an interesting TDG conversation with a fellow from Adelaide about four years ago. I went back to my FB page to see if I could find his name, but I’m not able to retrieve it.
