Descriptions:
Video Description
This short essay from the Conscious Radical channel reclaims an awkward claim: people have represented themselves more honestly than they do in the systems most of us inherit. It points to five buried experiments in real self-rule and argues they were not failures of the idea so much as threats to the few.
The story is not a call to romanticise the past. It is a reminder that alternatives existed, and that their memory was set aside by the same architecture that set aside the wisdom traditions. Remembering them is its own quiet act of recovery.
Full Video Transcript
Athens picked its government by lottery for two centuries.
Iceland used the same method to redraft its constitution
after the 2008 collapse.
And there’s possibly a reason
you haven’t been told about that.
But this question keeps coming back to me.
When I watch the news and I see the same dramas
and the same noise and the same protection of the 1%,
I catch myself wondering
what would actually represent the rest of us.
So of course, I went looking.
And the alternatives do exist,
but they’ve been buried for a reason.
There are five systems that I’ve come across
that have already been proven to work.
They’ve been tested, they’ve been documented,
and they have largely been forgotten.
The first is sortition.
That’s a random selection of representatives by lot.
So Athens did it for most of its democracy.
The only elected were generals and treasurers
because those positions needed expertise,
but everything else was a lottery.
The modern versions include Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly,
which broke the abortion deadlock in 2008.
France ran a Citizens’ Convention on Climate,
and Iceland used Citizens’ Assemblies
to redraft its constitution after the 2008 collapse.
Sortition works for a structural reason.
You can’t bribe a system you can’t predict.
You can’t capture a body
whose membership you don’t know in advance.
And it cuts the entire campaign finance pathway
out of the loop,
which is why it isn’t in mainstream conversation,
because it makes the political class redundant.
Those career politicians who’ve never run a business,
who’ve never managed a payroll,
who’ve never lived an ordinary life,
well, they are the ones currently deciding
for the rest of us.
The second is participatory budgeting.
In Porto Alegre in Brazil,
They started this in 1989.
Citizens directly allocated chunks
of the municipal budgets themselves.
And as a result, corruption fell,
public services improved, health outcomes got better,
and the model spread to roughly 1,500 cities worldwide.
But you’ve probably barely heard of it.
The third is worker ownership at scale.
In Mondragon in the Basque country,
It employs 80,000 worker owners.
The profits stay local and the decisions get made
by the people who are actually doing the work.
It’s existed since the 1950s and it functions.
The salary ratio between top and bottom
is capped at around six to one.
The US S&P 500 ratio runs at about 350 to one.
The fourth is commons governance,
which is the self-organized management
shared resources by the communities that depend on them. Eleanor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in 2009
for demonstrating with decades of field work that commons could be successfully governed by
communities without state or market intervention. The tragedy of the commons theory was a 1968
ideological move designed to justify privatisation but the actual evidence said the opposite.
the noble committee eventually had to acknowledge it the fifth is the Haudenosaunee confederacy
which is made up of six indigenous nations a constitutional democracy with female veto on war
where power is distributed across the nations and a seventh generation rule requires decisions to be
assessed for their impact 140 years out the american founders studied it and borrowed the
structural elements they liked but they dropped the ones that would have constrained elite power
particularly the female authority and particularly the long time horizon why so the alternatives
exist they have been tested they work but let’s have a look at who’s been telling us they don’t
everyone whose position depends on it never working mainstream media funded by and culturally
dependent on the same economic order any real alternative would have to indict mainstream
academia structured around grants and tenure pathways that align with not asking the wrong
questions what about schools designed in the 19th century to produce factory workers with curriculums
that still reflect that purpose the there is no alternative line was thatcher’s deliberate slogan
from 1980. mark fisher called the cultural condition that grew out of it capitalist realism
which is the inability to imagine the end of capitalism even as it becomes easier to imagine
the end of the world buried every civilization has produced people who saw the architecture clearly
the gnostics the cathars the witches of europe the mystics inside every major tradition who were
declared heretics indigenous knowledge holders across the americas africa and australia across
two millennia and across continents the same response bury it burn it kill the carriers of
the knowledge write them out of the record so let’s look at the timing athanasius issued his
easter letter in 367 ce declaring the official christian canon and the nakamaditex were hidden
in a jar in the egyptian desert in the same generation the european witch burnings peaked
between 1450 and 1750 running in lockstep with the enclosure of the commons and the early
consolidation of capital diego de landa burned the main codices in 1562 exactly when spanish
colonial extraction was being built out the dead sea scrolls were recovered in 1947 and then sat on
by a tiny group of scholars for 40 years before their full release so whatever anyone thinks of
any individual case the pattern is too consistent to be an accident knowledge gets buried exactly
when power is being consolidated and what gets buried is the same thing across all of these cases
anything that places authority inside the person rather than inside an institution anything that
says you can know directly anything that names the architecture and gives the carrier of knowledge a
way out so they don’t need a priest they don’t need a king they don’t need the company they
don’t need the platform they don’t need the state all of these systems got buried the text got burned
and the knowing was forbidden the witch hunts targeted women who held knowledge of bodies
of herbs of birth of death and of the land but the new order needed that knowledge to not be available
and that’s the same logic that runs today big pharma sits on cures that can’t be patented
treatments that aren’t profitable don’t get developed the council of nicaea decided which
gospels christians would read and the new order needed certain teachings not to be available but
But a free society doesn’t need a council
and it doesn’t need an inquisition.
The amount of institutional energy spent over the centuries
to bury, ban, burn, discredit and ridicule
particular kinds of knowing
tells you precisely how dangerous that knowing was considered
because they wouldn’t have buried it if it didn’t work.
I think the work runs on two tracks, the future work,
the structural one where we learn what’s been hidden,
we build small, we work in local councils and cooperatives
mutual aid networks and food systems. Basically the structures that already exist below the level
of capture. And the second one is the recovery one. Going back into what was buried and asking
the questions by whom, when and why. The answer to by whom is always the same set of interests.
The answer to why is always the same too. This was knowledge that restored authority to the people
who held it and the project required them not to have it. You don’t have to fix it tonight and you
don’t have to know what comes next but you do just have to stop believing the people who buried the
alternatives are the only ones with the answers. Start there because then the rest comes.
Source: The Conscious Radical