itch.io

Thanks very much for the feedback! I can totally see why "is this thing political or religious" is a tension. It's sort of intentional - one of my foundational observations of the degree to which religious folk and secular political religionists aren't actually aware of how they rank order their loyalties (or catastrophic fears that actually drive their behavior). We've got a whole lot of people unaware they're carrying quite a bit of Politics in their Religion Bucket and vice versa. My aim is to attract the weary unchurched and politically homeless folk who have been or wish to be unaffiliated with the "Bucket Mix-up Cohort."

> There are many bibles, "standards", and competing political visions for the future of the country.
 - There is no body of work that is more persistently debated in the public domain (across centuries) than mainstream Christian scripture and theology. It will get very hard for a 'bad actor' or 'charismatic charlatans' to maintain a monopoly extreme scriptural interpretations and cult-like practices, for very long. All of the denominational and motivated forks in this "civilizational blockchain" have been exposed. The harmful forks will die without physical or status coercion, and the neutral ones will compete in a marketplace of as-frictionless-as-possible nodes to the point of resembling Ford vs. Chevy rivalry. (Not even as dangerous as Catholics and Protestants!)

I don't really intend this model to change the culture of the country, in many ways it is designed contra to that goal. It's an extension of the principles of the founding, applying federalism to what I think *would* make a healthier structure for a sense-making institution. American culture is extraordinarily robust, I think in part to some of the decentralized mediating structures that allow us to absorb and assimilate and grow more and more mature as a nation. I expect this to continue; the pace will accelerate as it has with every technology, and our current "sense-making containers" are just not structured to handle the pace without potential co-opting or infiltration (exactly the failure mode we see rampant in all of our current institutions). My model? Not perfect. Neither was the founding. But better than what had been tried up until then. 

To the Capital point: very fair, under the current paradigm, perhaps no, but I am not setting out to create a new religion or cult. If I were, I would have a far more prescriptive opinion on what I want to see happen. Instead, I envision emergent solutions from a field of iteration and experimentation. Yes, I lean heavily on this, but arrived here through a process of deleting anything I could "red team" in my head, with the full suite of evidence from my own experiences with churches and other institutions. With luck, the people who are power hungry won't notice it until it's too late, kind of like they failed to kill Bitcoin: "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard; it can't possibly be a real threat, it's not "shaped" like threatening stuff." (I have more to say about this too but it's nebulous)

I see a potential future of societal instability where our current sense-making institutions actually serve to further destabilize society that harms the economy. We may reach an inflection point of sensible religious and secular folks alike choosing to participate in my framework out of pure self-interest, and the structural features make it a far more accountable place to put capital than any of the available explicitly non-profit frameworks we have. A slow sorting of people in unhealthy structures into healthy ones is ideal... the old models burn through their credibility at the rate at which my model stabilizes at a local level. People already ditch structures that centralize power in a harmful, non-emergent, fragile way, such as a megachurch that unwittingly grows to the size of inevitable scandal or parishioner anonymity - but the healthier options are hard to find, and don't stand out as examples of our notion of "success." They're all thoughtless mirrors of very outdated structures. 

>I completely agree that people need the freedom to organize amongst themselves and develop safe cultures, to be protected within their own spaces and act as cells of a larger organism
 - The distributed, weak nature of the structure also serves to limit the spread of noxious ideologies, and YES they will show up, but here's the kicker: In our system, you don't have start as a Congressperson to get a job in the administrative state or another unaccountable agency, even the judiciary - you can leverage your financial, cognitive, or status resources to bypass that messy ground level entrance. In my system, there is no way to reach higher levels of representative leadership other than starting and remaining part of a cell at the bottom. I had this vague shape in my head before I knew what a fractal was, and even had trouble modeling it in my head before I had my intuition confirmed by Brain of the Firm (thanks @thrialectics) that this is indeed a viable model for a non-territory bound structure, unlike the traditional nation state. 

I think part of the pushback in this aspect is precisely because we have almost zero examples of completely uncorrupted hierarchies in our world, to the point we have resigned ourselves to the idea that nothing else exists. Thankfully Nature and biology can still teach us to hope, and work hard.

K so that's what my actual writing is like :P
a little scattered