Super-Competent Democracies

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Description

"Super-Competent Democracies will emerge when the people, their leaders and the technical professionals learn how to use ensembles of participative, management cybernetic and soft-systems processes (i.e. ‘Super-Competencies) to co-create increasingly just, sustainable and super-competent communities, organisations, enterprises, services, cities and states.

The core purpose of the obsolete pseudo-democratic models inherited from the 18th – 20th Centuries, is to constantly increase economic growth to preserve the privileges of ‘the opulent’, as Andrew Hamilton explained to readers of ‘The Federalist’ in 1789.

The core purpose of the Super-Competent model of democracy is to enable citizens and societies to learn how to become increasingly just, sustainable and super-competent.

The special skills, tools and approaches enshrined in the Super-Competent Democracy model have been rigorously tested, evaluated and refined by many thousands of innovative systems-leaders, citizens, employees, technical professionals in every kind of society and organisation, since the 1930s. Their collective knowledge and experience would provide opponents of Neoliberalism with the guidance and support they will need to learn how to apply ensembles of Super-Competencies in their own communities, organisations, enterprises, municipalities, services and states.

In other words, consigning Neoliberalism to the trash-can of history will start when its opponents combine to form a global Super-Competencies Community and learn how to co-create increasingly just, sustainable and super-competent democracies wherever they happen to live and work." (http://www.rescuingdemocracy.com/the-supercompetent-alternative-to-neoliberalism/)

Discussion

"if we look at societies where the state has failed, Somalia,Eritrea, Syria, Iraq, or is failing, eg Russia, Mexico, and contrast them with relatively robust societies where the states are pretty healthy, eg Scandinavia, most of Western Europe, much of Latin America at this moment , the need for a viable state is crystal clear.

Where states are totalitarian or autocratic or religious, the need for root and branch change is also clear, but that does not mean that the elimination of the state would benefit those societies.

These are fairly obvious truisms, But beyond them, there is the necessity of addressing the obsolete theory of the state dating from the Westphalian Treaty of 1665 or so and offer an alternative paradigm that will redefine its roles and functions so as to enable our human societies to be viable in a finite world.

As Erhard Eppler says

“The state – and not just the nation-state as preserved within the European Union – has a future, provided we really want it and plan for it. And we want it if we do not view the democratic constitutional and welfare state as something to be taken for granted, something that can stand any amount of stress and strain, or indeed as something tiresome or restrictive. It is one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind. We want this future if we do not deceive ourselves about the alternative. For that would be a future without security, without law, without basic rights, without the practice of freedom.”

“It will always be necessary to adapt the democratic constitutional and welfare state to new circumstances – or in other words, to reform it. But it cannot YET !! be replaced by something better. Because a better way of doing things has yet to be devised.”

The Super-Competent Democracy model is perfectly placed to fill that gap. But to do so will not only mean defeating neoliberalism it will also require that many of neoliberalism’s current opponents shift their attention from a concentration on the grass-roots, to a consideration of the kind of 21st Century state that would both nurture local grass-roots involvement and be capable of tackling the huge agenda of transnational threats to the future of the human family." (http://www.rescuingdemocracy.com/the-supercompetent-alternative-to-neoliberalism/reinventing-the-state/)