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Dr. Herb Ruhs & grandson
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What exactly is 'power to the people'?
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by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
February 20, 2008
If democracy is the answer, what is the question?
The question, as I see it, is how to achieve social justice.
Small groups can act democratically because the members know each
other and are immediately, experientially aware of any injustices
occurring in the group. Not that it is any guarantee. Under the
influence of religious and/or political dogma people can inflict
grave injustices on each other even in smaller groups. Patriarchy,
for instance, as a system of |
injustice toward females, thrives in
small groups. However, even then such injustices exist largely
because some group members who would exploit sexual identity are
validated and protected
by remote authority. But the small group is
where the struggle for justice stands its best, maybe its only, chance.
The small hunter-gatherer groups, within which we evolved as social
primates, achieved a level of social justice by the elaboration of a
dense set of interlocking and unconscious motivations that balanced
each other out. In considering evolutionary change it is important
to recognize that this concept of primordial justice, of necessity,
incorporated many features that have given rise to many of the
injustices that characterize the large social groups that have
developed under the influence of civilization.
Status, for instance,
allowed groups to select against those individuals who's weaknesses
it was not in the evolutionary interest of the group to propagate by
reproduction. In contrast to the fantasies of the social Darwinist,
however, it was brain over brawn that triumphed here. But a single-minded rejection of the weak, the kind of extreme rejection of
weakness we see played out in fascist and neo-conservative circles,
would not have been in the interest of the survival of the group.
Hence, the countervailing behavior of compassion, of the ability to
feel the pain of others.
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It mostly means getting over the millennia of propaganda produced by coercive organizations that served to have us believe that we are inherently weak and dependent on remote authority for our survival.
That was never true, is not now true, and will never be true.
When we decide to band together in cohesive local units and act cooperatively with other such units for mutual support and protection, nothing is more powerful. |
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Evolution apparently selected for groups of no more than about two
hundred individuals, thirty or fewer families. Hence, as Gladwell
recounted in his book The Tipping Point, this size group remains the
most efficient. Evidence for this in current society abounds. The
most effective military unit is this size. The most effective
economic units are about this size. Were it not for the ability of
larger, hierarchically organized units (which actually recapitulate
this limit in the size of the power elite that run them) we would
have continued along this line and remain organized in small villages
of related people.
The problem then can be seen in the institutionalization of coercion,
which at its apex stands the institution of war. The problem of
democratization then is ultimately the problem of doing away with war.
If we are to survive as a species, if the world itself is to have a
good chance of surviving as a home to life even, we are going to have
to make a deliberate decision to de-legitimize organizations that
exceed the two hundred person limit. If this sounds fantastic, some
kind of bar stool philosophy, then I suggest that you consider that
we, as a species, made a deliberate decision to de-legitimize
cannibalism (with the exception of some individual celebrity seekers
such as Jeffery or Idi) and a similar decision to de-legitimize
chattel slavery (a project as yet incomplete).
The how of this has
been well worked out in places like Chiapas and Venezuela and many
other places, both currently and historically. It consists of
establishing neighborhood sovereign councils, on the model of the New
England Town Meeting, that coordinate with each other to protect the
rights of their members as well as the members of allied groups.
It is really not that hard. It mostly means getting over the
millennia of propaganda produced by coercive organizations that
served to have us believe that we are inherently weak and dependent
on remote authority for our survival. That was never true, is not
now true, and will never be true. When we decide to band together in
cohesive local units and act cooperatively with other such units for
mutual support and protection, nothing is more powerful.
That is what power to the people actually means.
© by the author.
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