A Theoretical Way of Doing Things Better in Government.

• The first thing I should address is the title of this essay. Whilst this is a proposal based on 'theory', I understand that many will dismiss this on the basis that it has no record of empirical success before they even get to this sentence. The status quo has been the status quo for many millennia, by virtue of the fact that, altruism eventually gets either crushed or corrupted. The status quo going back to ancient history has facilitated hierarchical structures and administrations. Communism is an example of trying to address pyramid societies and is also an example of where something dreamt up in altruism and equality, ultimately gets corrupted into becoming a pyramid society.

Money

• It is necessary to set out certain actualities in the modern world, in order to start addressing where the root of societal problems lie. Money is one such discussion. In Rutger Bregman's book 'Utopia for Realists', he lays a fundamental faith that a modern Utopia could exist if Universal Basic Income (UBI) was a component of modern economies. Whilst being attacked on social media in debating such, it is clear that, a common misconception (almost on purpose, you might think) is that UBI is merely a slightly elevated minimum wage. It isn't though in theory. Again, I say theory as there is limited implementation of UBI globally, even though experiments have shown great success. UBI is a guaranteed income without any conditions or prerequisites for everybody. That is to say, everyone should be allowed to live comfortably and to be able to choose the occupations they want to.
• With this proposition comes the usual arguments. 'Whose tax will pay for this?', 'Who will pick the rubbish on the street?'. Bregman has addressed this as have many others, but like in politics and debate, the kindergarten is much noisier than the university library. In an addendum to the UBI philosophy that the bin collectors should be rewarded handsomely, not the people who buy shares in arms companies, I would direct you to the following Analysis:

  Number of people in the world:	8 Billion
  Number of children dependants in the world:	2 Billion
  Number of people who should receive UBI:	6 Billion
  Wage for someone to live comfortably in EU:	70 K EUR (*)
  Cost for everyone in the world to live comfortably:	420 Trillion EUR / Year
  Amount of money in the world:	77.5 Trillion EUR (**)

  
  (*) Based on the cost of living estimates in EU
  (**) Source: Google
• What this table tells us is that there isn't enough money in the world to share (420 Trillion needed, 77.5 Trillion available). Before you might argue that money flows and that this is not reflective, I will put it to you that if we had enough money to go around, we wouldn't have poverty, yet in Ireland (a theoretically wealthy country, in 2022, 13% of the population were below the poverty line which is close to seven hundred thousand people in a small country). There is also the polemic that 70 K EU is a very wealthy footing in places like Nepal, however if UBI were to exist globally, the cost of living would normalise in the same way that water finds its own level.
• As a final clarification on UBI, it should be the responsibility of government to reward the bin collector financially on top of his or her UBI such that the important society structures remain in place. UBI is not communism, you should be allowed to supplement with added income. It should be noted also, that money as we know it now is merely a combination of electrical and magnetic charges on computer disk, and as we see, can be fabricated out of thin air in order to finance military conflicts. Furthermore, a majority of military conflicts are born out of forcing populations to live in poverty. The whole thing is held together tenuously.

Geography And Democracy

• It would be disingenuous to propose a new form of governance without discussion the notion of 'Democracy'. Modern democracy was pioneered in the French revolution whereby a pyramid monarchy society was replaced with equality, a parliament of elected representatives and a constitution. As Thomas Paine points out in his famous 'Rights of Man', monarchies are merely mechanisms to enforce hereditary dictatorships, where the laws are defined ad-hoc and only to serve the monarch and his or her circle of courtiers. The French revolution was over two hundred years ago, and at the time it effected a lot of positive change in the world, however as both Paine and Bregman point out, things grow stale and corrupted and whilst the monarchies of the 1700s are now largely gone, they have come to be replaced with cabals under the guise of political parties. Both those authors advocate for change. Not change for change's sake, as they point out, a revolution without a proposed coherent alternative is merely a vassal for the status quo when the military come in to quash dissent and provide the existing regime with propaganda.
• These cabals work in hand with the media moguls, neither of which existed prior to the conception of French democracy and so, it is now an untruth in assertion. On social media, 'Democracy' now is defined singularly as an administration of capitalist economics by institutional politics, and as the right to be xenophobic by those not frequenting the university libraries. 'Democracy' is now a dangerous term as it in no way reflects the right of a society to decide pragmatically who should manage their society to the benefit of everyone. I have always asserted that society is like a chain, it is only as strong as its weakest links. I have borrowed this analogy from sporting polemic where a games team is only as strong as those said links, and as the French revolution inspired society to come together as a unity movement, but now, most quote it (democracy) as solely a right to object. Not object to anything specifically, just to object. A culture of objection can only produce a fragmented society which cannot claim the honour of 'representing the will of the people'.
• Certainly, in the parliaments that I have visibility on, (Ireland, EU, UK, USA) the houses of parliament are nothing more than a mechanism for contrarianism and barb exchanges, and policies are not formulated on the asks of society, instead, the direction of the state is directed by the most powerful lobby groups. This can by no means be considered, 'by the people, for the people, of the people'. Yet, such is our world, that any such words in public, will draw little more than ire in snippets of 280 characters or less from both sides of the aforementioned 'Democratic' advocacy.
• A point that should also be made, which Paine highlighted, was that the notional concept of Democracy from ancient Greek, reflected a very small population and geography, and any such harking back to the glory days of Greece is a fallacy when considering sprawling dense populations of millions.

Education and Ethnicity

• In my teenage years, I lived in Northern Ireland. At the time a state sponsored civil war raged bitterly. In just the same way when Britian left India, it manufactured a civil war in its departure creating Pakistan. Ireland was subjected to the same rule book in order to protect the structure of the monarchy and subjugation. To this day, Britian still does not have a constitution, without which, it is a misnomer to claim the status of a democracy. The Northern Irish education system at the time was centred around an examination at the age of 11 whereby if you passed a very subjective aptitude and judgement exam you were entitled to enrol in a school of what can be loosely defined as a first-class institution. If you failed this primary school exam, you could only proceed to a second-class education. Thus between the gender and religious divide there were four grammar schools (first-class) in the county. One girl's school, one boy's school for Catholics and the same for Protestants (+). Due to the fact that less than 20% of the population was the bar for passing this exam, there were many more separate catholic and protestant secondary schools. The one salient elephant in the room at the time is that during the courtships between teenagers after school, there were always many instances of relationships that crossed the dividing lines in grammar school society. This was corroborated by school uniforms and hand holding, however, very little if any corroboration was evident in the secondary school's communities. This one fact alone testifies that education is the key to a harmonious society. This is the case on many levels, culture, engineering, health, communication, cohesion, administration, equity, pragmatism. The list can be endless. And don't be veering towards the dictate that a university degree is representative of an education. While it is indicative, I am aware of an individual who has a PhD in research and didn't know what a cross tab was even though they had asked for it. Education should happen every cognitive day of our lives and it should be a right as opposed to a budgetary consideration. It is the curtailing of education that allows monarchies, dictatorships and democracies to thrive in their inequality.
• It needs to be reiterated that a true education, teaches the individual to be considered and inquisitive and approachable. There are a third of a billion users on twitter every month which is a measure of the acceptance of the global standard of education. This cohort would represent the richer segment of the world's population, yet it is a cesspit of violence, insult, porn and polemic. The reality nowadays is that education is a commodity in all democracies, and a vehicle for subjugation in monarchies and dictatorships. The world ingests more insight from social media than they do from books or schools.
  (+) On the subject of Catholics and Protestants, it should be noted by non-familiar readers that they are both strains of Christianity and I can testify that their aesthetic differences are largely irrelevant in this day and age, having studied both.

Altruism and the Public Servant

• The public servant is another misnomer that we need to debunk. I have worked in the public sector and seen first-hand how enthusiasm and initiative are regarded as a blight to be suppressed at all costs. It is in equal parts incompetent, corrupt and crony careerism. The people at the top are placed there by their associates already at the top. You also need to be in the system for many years, elevating through the ranks in part, by virtue of the time served. You invariably have no real-world skills developed in your tenure other than blame avoidance administration and all the decisions at the top are of a political nature. Furthermore, below the top, you are not empowered to make any decisions or pursue any initiatives. This is both true for elected officials and the unelected administrative and service public workforce. We have had a housing and homeless crisis in Ireland for a decade and a half because politically the capitalist lobbying sector has stifled most petitions for local government to build public housing. This decision has come from the top.
• At the same time there are many people who enter into the 'public servant' role full of idealism that they can be a force for good and make a positive change to society, however in order to protect the pyramid scheme, this idealism is withered away in them until they either 'play ball' and become part of the pyramid ideology or they leave. And when they 'play ball' and there is very little progress in most operations on an ongoing basis, they find themselves going through the motions in terms of work, so as to pretend they are a hive of activity and not highlight to their superiors that there is nothing to do. I have seen many individuals in the public sector sitting at their screens all day long, pretending they are engaged, and I have heard anecdotally many times that one quarter of the public sector do their work as well as the work of the other three quarters. Surely then, if there is no work, why not allow those people to exist under UBI? Are we not grown-ups, able to assess reality pragmatically?

Addiction and Bad Operators

• Getting back to the assertion that society is only as strong as its weakest links, we must discuss the phenomenon that is addiction. There are many addictions, drugs, gambling, theft, sex crimes, work, phones, TV, social media. The old adage, 'too much of a thing is a bad thing' can never be disputed in a reasoned discussion. In terms of the government responses to this (any type of government), if the addiction is regarded in a snobby light, then the response is punitive. If the cause of the addiction is represented by lobby groups in the political arena, then the response is to promote them. They all, however, represent a barometer of disfunction and disfunction is a metric of bad governance, which, as set out here, is a product of pyramid societies. I do not need to start itemising reasons as to why addictions of any nature are negative, but if you are looking for examples, I implore you to visit any news broadcast, anywhere in the world and you will immediately find correlations.
• Whilst there are many individual reasons for addiction, on a macro level, there are two major contributors, poverty (money) and education. And it must be stressed that these have been allowed to be as they are since ancient times so, in order to resolve the issue, we need to look at a fundamental overhaul of the governance of society. It cannot be countered by any honest broker that modern systems of governance are equipped to correct this, nor are many inclined to address it other than in the manner they already do.
• What can be said about addictions also, whether illegal or legal, is that there is always profit to be gained from their commerce, and here we find that there are many who willingly promote these afflictions, fully cognisant of the implications. And while yes, the simple answer to a drug dealer is seemingly to lock them up, there is no simple answer to the global addiction to social media which is fuelling hate and many other ills, and so the answer is to not address it.
• Bad actors permeate throughout all strata of life and society and in pyramid structures, they generally find themselves at the top. They might not all be murderers, but many are. They might not all be greedy, but most are. Self-serving bad actors also make their way to the top in government as that pyramid structure is no different in fabric.

The True Sportsman and Sportswoman

• In my life, I have worn many hats, and one of those hats is as an athlete. I don't spectate sports because it doesn't interest me that somebody else has beaten some other body. As a sport person, I want to get to the top. But in a sport where there is no money to be won, what are you the top of? Well, if you break a world record, you are a pioneer. You have achieved something that no other person in history before you have achieved. And the ultimate reward for you is that you know, you did everything that was needed to be done yourself. Nobody else got up at 5 a.m. as a 13-year-old, and cycled across town on your own to practice. And when you finally get to realise that dream you had, that is what makes you feel good. Sycophants will just annoy you, and no true sports person will ever say, they dedicated themselves to their sport because they wanted to be famous or powerful. You might argue that this was the very dream of many team sport players, where teams have a following, and yes that is the allure of commercial sport, but I do not regard them as true sportsmen and women. There is no metric by which they can be judged as the best as individuals.
• In essence, the true sportsman or sportswoman, does what they do in order to tell themselves they did a good job. Self-esteem is not something you can buy or bully others into giving you. But what has this to do with government?

The Conclusion

• Thus far, I have set out in general terms, what is wrong with the system of pyramid governments and that that includes democracies, monarchies and dictatorships (including communism) and I have laid out the fundament influences in those disfunctions. I now want to bring it all together in a proposal that is born out of rational common sense. I am fully aware that I would not be the first to have proposed this but the majority of the world's public do not engage socially on such matters because they perceive the palpable sense of futility in trying to change the status quo.
• What if, as an individual in society, you felt you could make things better on a topic, and that your conviction was a result of experience and education on the matter. And that you were allowed the opportunity to attempt to correct the negative impacts of that topic by taking up employment in the relevant public body. Under a system of UBI in the public sector, if everyone was on the same income, there would be no benefit to trying to protect your position as management decision maker because there is nothing to protect personally and financially that you wouldn't have otherwise. Further to this, if society was protected by UBI, there is no extra power personally in being an elected politician than there is in being an ambulance driver.
• It doesn't just fall into place at that, however, there are other measures needed. One such is the abolition of political parties. This eradicates cabals and cronyism and ultimately the pyramid. As an elected member of parliament, your duty and your mandate are your conscience and your learning. Without political parties, you are denied allegiances with which to base your prejudices on and you end up without barb based objectionism as a form of governance. With the freedom to act in the best interests of society, the political system is then free to ignore lobbying from the capitalist sector and do things like protect people's rights to food and shelter and to not participate in conflicts at the other side of the world that bring untold suffering to people you will never see. Suffering that countries find themselves being coerced into afflicting by association with these 'Democracies'.
• We need to educate people in our societies so that they don't dismiss on social media the concept of everyone having the right to a happy and healthy life, merely because the pyramid system blinds them into thinking the only way that can happen is if they personally pay more tax. Society needs to prioritise education, such that tolerance is allowed to breath and the bad actors are allowed to be ignored. We need governments to not pander to 'market forces' in order to set out pragmatic and advised priorities, and in order to do that, governments need to comprise of individuals who derive their self-esteem from their own vocations, like the world record holder. Or the national record holder. Or the district record holder. Or the aspiring record holder. There are a lot of these people around, but the pyramid won't allow them in. Certainly, people should be given credit for getting it right, but not financially, and society will stand by those who will get it right and allow inclusion and collaboration. You will always have bad actors but without a pyramid society to protect them, their impact becomes isolated and less impacting on others.
• In discussing these ideas with friends, one question that always arises is, 'if its not a democracy, then what is it?'. In trying to answer that question, the nearest I could get to, was the label 'Meritocracy', but I now believe that that is a disingenuous moniker, because it implies an external reward system of some nature, which will ultimately bring about a return of a pyramid society. And so, I believe now that, it is best left unlabelled. You can refer to a society by its name, e.g. Ireland, and if this form of governance was in place in Ireland, people would come to know such and not need to defer to the lazy definitions of the class of government. I understand this is a difficult step to take for the media, but should they become educated and impartial, they should find methods in eloquence.

Your position

• So now, I turn the table. Are you inspired to advocate for this system? Is a former reticence about being a public official gone if you felt that a whole society could come to the same way of thinking and bring about such a transition? There is no magic potion to make this happen, it needs to come about in the same way as 'Live Aid' in 1985 or the ice bucket challenge a number of years ago. The majority of society needs to realise that collective altruism is what is needed to manage the problems we face in this day and age. There's little point in you as an individual deciding to work in the council with a view to fixing it, but there is a point in millions of educated people making it happen. Objectionism and democracies are classic examples of going nowhere and doing nothing, but if you believe in this, I invite you to become a digital signatory and this theory may see the light of day as a successful form of governance.
• ECJD
  3rd May 2024

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