By Lowell F. Christy, Jr, Ph.D.

Please read this article first and then my commentary.

Individual stories artfully curated from a people's own heritage and direct experience will form a core section of our participatory MEDIUM of exchange. 

But the overarching voice of the voiceless is allowing democracy to speak for itself. The FORUM will become the crucible of experimentation of giving voice to democracy.

Democracy has become almost a curse word around the world with the concerted voice of Communism 2.0 and authoritarianism in the mouths of multiplying dictators. 

But the core of those who have the monied microphones of the media and legions of puppet-like leaders reading scripted bullet points of those greedily seeking absolute power, are acting in concert to tear down democracy's checks and balances. 

Processes designed into the American Experiment sought to reclaim individual's agency and revitalize Democratic citizenship as THE antidote to debilitating anxiety, overwhelming complexity and lose of our social sense making. 

The Founding Thinkers read history differently then the stories of the Game of Thrones. The Great Game of power, pomp and circumstance made the Serfs and Subjects into the armies of the down trodden. 

The Founders saw in the blood drenched stories of Power the linked stories of powerlessness. They peered through the Shakespearean keyhole into the reality and madness of power. The Founders saw that as power consolidated in the hands of the few inequality grew expodently in the many. 

Power may move boulders and a State to wars but it was in living systems connected to realities beyond the limits of individual consciousness that the whole system thrives. To state it simply, The Founders, drawing from the lessons of history, were the first whole systems thinkers, the first ecologists of Mind. 

The American Revolution, depicted by Hollywood and academic historians, have become the material world of physical battles and purient psychological thrillers. 

EMPOWERMENT IS THE POWER TO, THE POWER BY AND THE POWER FOR NOT SIMPLE POWER OVER

It was these unusual Minds suspended between colonization by outside forces and seeking a different future that thinking about the ecology of information, communication & how to draw out the agency of the every person, that they designed antidotes to power. The antidotes to power in their Democratic Experiment was empowerment of the citizen.

 Why? Because the ability to see the limits of power resides in voices far from the corrupting Halls of the Powerful. What is the American Experiment and Revolution of Mind about - the political alchemy of enabling the common to become uncommon the ordinary to become extraordinary. These are not end points or mere words but processes that in Democratic societies must be held as sacred and inviolable.

QUALITY PROCESSES IN CREATING A FUNCTIONING DEMOCRACY

As the leader of the Quality Control movement, Edwards Deming's ideas are embodied not in detached words, not in abstract endpoints sold by politicians but by understanding the processes of the system. His quote is, "If you cannot describe what you are doing as a process, you do not know what you are doing." The Art of those committed to democracy's downfall is to destroy the processes advancing the health of the whole by turning ideas into one dimensional slogans like "Freedom", wrapping the minds of the public around their axles.

This transformative political logic catalyzes simple Freedom into Liberty, of isolated alienated individuals into a Union that blazed in Lincoln's mind, of diversity of world views in a conversation of change allowing collective intelligence to trump the hubris of those who self classify as elite. 

It is the creative destruction of the past walled cities of the powerful that a Nation may see beyond the blinders of self interest to the health of the system. It is a battle between the "smarts" of the powerful using both the visible and invisible tools of power and the necessary variety of citizens working, assembling and conversing creating the "collective intelligence" necessary for the body politic to live and not be zombified. 

THE MOST POWERFUL SYMBOL IN THE UNIVERSE -

The design of our political home rests on the most important symbol of an equal sign. What happens on oneside of the powerful equation of political life ultimately festers on the other side of the powerless.

IDIOTS, SMARTS & INTELLIGENCE 

Cycles of the powerful being overthrown by the powerless until they install themselves a the "new, improved" powerful is a "story told by an idiot, full of sound and fury." It was ancient Greece in their experiments in democracy that defined an "idiot" as an individual who lived apart and does not contribute to the health of society. 

"The Greek word for "idiot" literally translated means one who does not participate in politics. That is the sum of my comments on the subject." Gladys Pyle, first Female Senator from South Dakota, Republican.

What the Founder's understood was that these cycles of power and powerlessness could be better regulated  by a simple statement that all people are created equal. Inequality, voices of the voiceless was and is a reality but given processes in Democratic society, given the primacy of the citizen not the elect and  elite, that those in power freeze the system to their advantage. This advantage compounds  thereby stopping learning, connection to real states in the environment. 

This ecological alienation pushes that civilization to ultimately crash after believing in its own old story of answers that no longer sync with the Zone of Survival. 

Equality is not a state but a process understood as  equation that links living systems to the ever changing environment requiring eternal vigilance and creativity in finding antidotes to the corrupting power of the physics of power. Technology and resource extraction billionaires club is able to shout down the processes that make democracy work.

Creating the upstream tributaries of how the voice of the voiceless of Native Americans contribution with their Constitution influencing ours, the processes tapped into our system to for women to get the vote, of the stories of immigrants making their way to our shores and how they made a different life will draw people not only the hear our history and the strengths and weaknesses of our Democratic System. 

We need to raise these voices and many more to give democracy itself it's voice to defend itself on the world stage and create the citizen immune system countering of ideas, ideals and ideologies that are signing it's death sentence.

May the System be with you and not again' you, 
Lowell Christy