Multiverse Minutiae

I am seeking to develop a pluralist society. A beacon to the universities around the country and around the world, Profoundria  sparks the flame to beam across the guiding light of universities. To carry the torch of this beacon to an ever-growing network is my task. A network of free thinkers who strive for the ultimate human values of truth, wellbeing and freedom. But how do we integrate the individual and a pluralist society? We do so by the principle of uncertainty or the principle of possibility. What Foucault would refer to as the “entrepreneur of the self” - the generation of a multiplicity of modes for entrepreneurs to relate to oneself and the market. This multiplication of individual entrepreneurs should be structured institutionally by Nozick’s “meta utopia.” This is when the blueprints for societies means a pluralism with a centripetal force.  We are to envision a radical pluralist democracy. But what holds together the pluralism? The essence of democracy...

Most social workers and Americans, generally, are hard-pressed to remember Mary Parker Follett either as a social worker or as one of the nation’s most astute commentators on democracy. Follett saw democracy in holistic terms, terms that moved beyond the indirect measures and practices of representative government to the direct practice of democracy. Direct democracy for Follett involved a citizen’s willingness, responsibility, and capacity to self-organize, act, and creatively solve complex problems. Direct democracy expands the power and capacity of citizens and society as a whole for self-regulation through individual and collective acts that regenerate society itself. What Mary Parker Follett puts forward is that democracy is a method, a scientific technique of evolving the will of the people. But with the fact in mind that the individual is the basis of self-governance, although the individual exists within infinite social relations. The pluralists have proposed diversity but have...

How can we envision the merger of energy democracy, direct technocracy, cybernetics, and crypto?   We start with an analysis of Allende’s Chile and Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn. Stafford Beer’s perspective of cybernetics was instead of the abstract dichotomy of centralization versus decentralization, he asked: What is the maximum degree of decentralization that still permits the system to flourish?  Paul Cockshott who has written extensively on the possibility of post-capitalist planning aided by contemporary processing power, is a big admirer of Cybersyn: “The big advance with Stafford Beer’s experiments with Cybersyn was that it was designed to be a real-time system.” Allende pushed Beer further to expand Cybersyn’s “decentralizing, worker-participative, and anti-bureaucratic” possibilities.  Public sector operations that were near to each other work together are “cordónes industriales” - literally “industrial belts” - in order to coordinate the flow of raw material...

It is time for a new myth. Not a myth based in mysticism. But myth as story or fable. For the purpose of telling a story myth is neutral. There can be good ideas or bad ideas taught by myth. What is important here is the evolution of ideas and their correspondence with fundamental truth. For this purpose, we should use myth to teach lessons and express our values. What is the new myth to be told? It is called New Humanism.  New Humanism reflects a new radical center. As philosophy is carried away by trajectories and regressions which result in strange mysticisms and anti-humanism, we must look for a revival of humanism in a radical sense. What is meant here by radical humanism is a fully empowered agency, creativity, and freedom of the individual. Yet not an unguided will of the individual committed to transgression for the sake of freedom of choice alone. It is to be based in an ethical egoism - an acknowledgement that the will of the individual is in social solidarity with other ...

The Cosmic Christ  Studying the chaos to cosmos theme from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 is a fascinating journey. It deepens our understanding of the original creation and the coming new creation. But it also makes us aware of God’s sovereignty over chaos: his turning chaos into cosmos (or micro-cosmos). His intent is to restore his creation to the cosmos he intended it to be in the beginning. Instead of fall and redemption, creation centered spirituality focuses on New Humanity as co-creators.    For Paul Tillich, “God” is the symbol of the infinite ground and power of being and meaning. God is the source of our courage to be as the power that transcends the threat of nonbeing. This courage to be is “rooted in the personal, total, and immediate certainty of divine forgiveness.”  God is the source of courage precisely because God also embraces nonbeing in Godself and thus eternally conquers it. In the dynamics of the triune life, the ‘Father’ is understood as the abyss...

Democratic Socialism   Nicos Poulantzas tried to envision how the left could simultaneously champion rank-and-file democracy at a distance from the state and push for radical transformation from within it. Working within the state would aim to produce “breaks” that would polarize the highly conflictual state apparatuses toward the working class, assisted by external pressure from rank-and-file organizations. “It is not simply a matter of entering state institutions in order to use their characteristic levers for a good purpose,” Poulantzas wrote. “In addition struggle must always express itself in the development of popular movements, the mushrooming of democratic organs at the base, and the rise of centers of self-management.” Anarcho-Communism  Ricardo Flores Magón’s concept of revolution was based on the idea that Mexican workers on both sides of the border had the potential to be the instruments of transformation through their own self-activity. By the outbreak of the Mexi...

Laboratories of Municipal Law: Case Studies in Technological Innovation and Environmental Protection     Cities are the new laboratories of democracy and it is important to utilize municipal law to empower municipalities as hubs of technological innovation and environmental protection. As sites of political innovation, cities have been locations of experiments in policy as well as invigorators of civic life. From an international law perspective, cities have become part of the cast of non-state actors. Yet they remain governmental actors that are forming cross-networks for greater collaboration and new exercises of power relationships. These cities are thus the locus of a new cosmopolitan citizenship divergent from the Westphalian nation-state. This is what is meant by the political innovation of the “right to the city.”  In the context of the United States, municipal home rule is the doctrine by which cities are granted local autonomy and some degree of independence from...