Speaking of Kings, Lords, and Peasants:

A Return of Medieval Problems and a Call for (Peaceful) Revolution

Preamble:

The statement, “everything is local,” rings true in most cases, but today, while the difficulties that individuals face on a daily basis are truly local, the causes for most of those local problems are increasingly rooted in global policies that are arguably even beyond the scope of national governments. No longer can a protest movement be satisfied with a march on city hall or the school board because so many of today’s problems at the community level are merely the result of global agendas that have been pushed downward, through national and regional governments, by a powerful cadre of corporate organizational elites who have had, as their single driving motive, the extraction of wealth from the pockets of the masses into their own. In 2008, in true medieval fashion, the peasants had nothing left to give to their lords and kings. It is, once again, time for a new renaissance period, and we, the peasants, will have to go through our second age of enlightenment before anything will change.

Organizational Statement:

This book is intended to be revolutionary. It presents an incredibly complicated new view of governing, and even humanity. Because of how complicated this material is, and because of how unfamiliar some of these concepts will be to some people, each chapter will be highly structured in a lesson-plan format. After opening with a brief and concise thesis, which will typically introduce a new view of the world or an analysis of the organizations that define this world, each chapter will then outline a brief organizational statement for that chapter (just like this one). The report will then delve into an argument or provide an in-depth examination of the concept or theory presented in the thesis. The argument will then be summed up in a brief conclusion. At that point reflexive questions will be asked in order to challenge the reader to objectively examine whether he or she grew accustomed to certain social norms in thinking about the topics that were addressed. The final section, as a sort of appendix to each chapter, will touch on four supportive sub-organizations that are being developed simultaneously. These will be described below under each of their respective headings.

This chapter template that is being used in writing this book is important because, as part of this new renaissance and second age of enlightenment, it will be essential that we, the peasants, find our common ground as a global community. In order to succeed in our global revolution we will need to eliminate the boundaries that the elites themselves have injected into the governing process and into our hard-won democratic process so that they might divide, conquer, and dominate us. If we ever hope to achieve our goals for equality and freedom we cannot continue to sort global citizens by class, religion, race, gender, tribe, language, age, or political party. But in the 21^st century we are now a global body of peasants, and before anything will change, we need to find our solidarity and rise up against the global “lords” and “kings.” In times like these a regional strategy has little or no chance of success against the oppressors who are currently at the levers of power.

Argument and Examination:

First and foremost, this book is a text book. It is designed to be a how-to manual for creating a new global institution for governing. But it will fail if it does not first succeed in its attempt to reorient the minds of global citizens everywhere so that they will follow the guidance of the 20^th century philosopher John Rawls. In his seminal work, A Theory of Justice, he defined what he called the “original position” (Rawls, 1976?).

In this new renaissance, just as in the French revolution and so many other nation-building conflicts of the original renaissance period, we, the peasants have no allies. We only have each other. As many nations in the world hold new national elections we hear the candidates court the global elites for political donations, and in the process, as they pander to them, we continue to hear the modern-day equivalent of the refrain, “let them eat cake” when it comes to the pressing needs of everyday citizens. Acknowledging the truthfulness of this sobering fact is the first step toward our second age of enlightenment because it forces us to acknowledge that we have been lied to. We have been told that we live in democracies, but in 2008 we realized that our nations…all of them…are, in fact, corporatocracies (cite). We have a situation where global giants are manipulating shadow governments that, over a period of thirty years, passed policy after policy that served little more than to facilitate the transfer of wealth from the most vulnerable to the most powerful. The lies that we have been told were cleverly masked as truth by a global media network that is primarily controlled by six corporations that, in turn, are governed by just a handful of very wealthy and powerful men.

We have been lied to about who we can trust. We need to realize that in the instant that we elevate anybody to a position of power they become a target for “conversion” by the organizational elite (cite). In spite of how tempting it is to listen to their siren song of how we might some day “earn” the right to become one of them, it is in truth part of their modus operandi. Once “converted”, the leaders that we should have been able to trust will have become little more than the modern equivalent of the whip-crackers of the slave era, doing the plantation owner’s dirty work for them. Part of the new age of enlightenment will be our willingness to admit that the power that we give to our elected officials and other leaders will, in all likelihood, corrupt them.

Conclusion:

This book will define what kind of global institution will be required in order to accomplish a second renaissance and global revolution. It will expand upon an organization that already exists on the Internet; one that is on an open platform that will never be monetized for the benefit of any person, but only for the support of the collective that helps to build it. It is an organic institution, capable of evolving and growing like the social media that will drive participants to it, and with which we are already familiar. This book will define this new institution as one that recognizes no political borders and costs nothing for individuals to participate, even if only by Tweeting from a $15 cell phone in the farthest reaches of an impoverished nation, or by posting to a Facebook thread at the local public library computer. This new institution will be governed without a hierarchy, and the governing narratives that it facilitates will be germane to the user-generated content of the relational database that will evolve as the global community within this new institution grows. This book will outline how a foundational base for this new institution can be easily organized at the grassroots level; a base from where as few as 18 people can formalize and then steer a community-based general assembly. Once on-line this new team of grassroots organizers will automatically be affiliated with, and begin learning from, like-minded, similarly situated peers in a virtual realm where they can “see” and “sit in council with” their counterparts from thousands of other locations as they use the virtual organization as a socio-technical system in a new world order for governing. They will also be able to attend a virtual “college” where continuing education classes will be taught on an on-going basis to ensure the effectiveness of this Second Age of Enlightenment and the global movement that will usher us through the transition that we all hope will transform this world into a more peaceful, fair, and humane place.

Self-reflexion:

1)      Is it incorrect to use the word “men” to describe the global elites?

2)      In keeping with the metaphor that we are advocating for a peasant revolution, what, in your opinion, is the modern equivalent, where you live, of the famous French Revolution phrase, “let them eat cake?”

3)      In reflecting on the phrase used above, “…we will need to eliminate the boundaries that the elites themselves have injected into the governing process and into our hard-won democratic process so that they might divide, conquer, and dominate us,” can you see events from your own life where your behavior or failure-to-act has marginalized people who you now need as your allies in your struggle for fair treatment?

Practical Applications:

MOCSIE Resources on the Web:

MOCSIE is an acronym that stands for Media Omniverse Collective for Social Initiative and Enterprise. This is the name of the new institution that has been put together for the purpose of facilitating this Second Age of Enlightenment. True to its name, it is a collective, fashioned after the farmer’s cooperatives from more than a century ago that were organized in order to take on the robber-barons of the Guilded Age. The web page for MOCSIE is at http://www.mocsie.com. Under this global domain there will be a gateway into the relational database of media genres as well as policy campaigns, each sorted into six broad areas.

Because it is recognized that not everybody will have a computer that has the robust graphics adapter that is needed to run a 3-dimensional virtual realty program, this web domain will duplicate much of the material that is generated through the training and governing process that will take place in the virtual realm, as explained in the next section below.

MOCSIE Resources on the Second Life platform (“Mandu” region):

As noted above, this new institution will have no hierarchy. Almost every element of governing in this new institution will be managed through the 18 individuals who organize face-to-face at the community level. It is they who will steer their grassroots organization via four strategic management groups, but the true global nature of this new institution happens through the kind of relationship that these 18 individual will have with their counterparts from all over the world through the virtual organization on the Second Life platform. The global information hub for the virtual MOCSIE is presently housed on the region named “Mandu,” which is located on what is known in Second Life as “the mainland.”

MOCSIE Resources for the “Occupied Squares” Project:

The MOCSIE growth strategy is two-pronged: one focusing on the global “Occupy” movement, and by extension, the “Arab Spring” movement, and the other focusing on the inner-city populations (see next sub-header). As a central tenet of the Arab Spring and Occupy movements is the idea of taking over a prominent “city square” in order to be visible to the rest of the people (through the media), and also be constantly “in the face” of and disruptive to our oppressors. As it turns out, the Second Life grid is organized into “squares,” so it only made sense to take advantage of that coincidence as we transition the Occupy and Arab Spring movements onto the “squares” of Second Life.

The Inner-City MOCSIE “Brick-and-Mortar Facilities” Project:

While the Occupy movement is already extensively on-line, such is not the case with the inner-city areas of the world. In areas of extreme poverty the digital divide is a major impediment to helping this vulnerable population escape a cycle that has trapped some families for generations. To this end, and in a way that will be unique to the inner-city, a push will be made to fund brick-and-mortar MOCSIE facilities that will not only become policy centers,  but also centers for economic development where media creativity will be converted through micro-enterprise initiatives into income streams for talented individuals who just needed “boots” before being told to “pull themselves up by the boot-straps.”