$100 trillion

The current financial crisis is just the latest in a long series of mis-handling of our civilization's course by our political institutions. It is hard to imagine the true cost of these mistakes, repeated because of a stubborn attachment to unproven and poorly working political principles. Politics is the least advanced academic and professional field today, having barely advanced beyond its Antiquity roots, as it continues to damage our well-being and our prosperity. $100 trillion is a very conservative and lenient estimate of how much our leaders' mistakes have cost us in the past half-century. It is sobering to imagine what could have been done with this money.

Imagine for an instant the consequences of a very large sum of money: $100 trillion.

This number represents a very conservative estimate of how much money we could have spent on our most important socioeconomic, scientific and technological needs in the past 50 years. It is all the resources destroyed by financial bubbles, marketing-driven politics and the immaturity of our political institutions and leaders, none of whom have paid any consequences for their mistakes. It is the wealth lost in pork projects, vote-appeasing and ego-driven policies that dominate political establishments worldwide. It is the money lost in dead-end economic policies, based on no more than personal feelings, and the one-track-mind leadership mandated for success in the culture of opposition of our political systems, where ideas are supported or defeated not on their own merit but rather on who supports them.

Capitalism works, stupid capitalism never will. It is easy to say that the way we do capitalism is wrong in restrospect, seeing now that what most experts have been saying for decades is all opinion, highly subjective and mostly wrong. We knew for years that the geniuses of the financial markets, on top of creating nothing of value, rarely beat market averages, adding nothing to the world economy despite consuming a large share. Many people have said this repeadetly. But societies continue to ignore the indecent accusations of treachery and incompetence in the high places of power.

We deserve genuine blame for what has happened, for we have continued to ignore the lessons of our history. History is a long and complex tapestry of war, treason, murder, revolution, occupation and conquest. Yet many people still believe that its absurd to force genuine accountability on political leadership. The freedom of the people always goes before the freedom of the leaders, despite no evidence that restraining the freedom of those who hold no power provides any genuine security benefits. There is ample evidence that unchecked power leads to terrible consequences.

$100 trillion is therefore the price of mistakes, ours and theirs. Whoever belongs to them is ambiguous. Not all our leaders are visible and some who are perceived as powerful hold little real influence. Our leaders are even often sincere in their misguided policies. They feel as strongly for them as the true geniuses of the past two millenia held their ideas, minus actual validation by facts. Politics and governance have a rather poor history of true genius and achievement. Policies are rarely created with rational means and for rational ends.

It is the price we have paid for ignoring our civic duties. It is not really about the low numbers of voters in most democracies. It is because most of the people who do vote rarely make up their minds based on actual facts, or even anything connected to reality. It is because many who do vote spend less than one day's worth of television on researching the most important political and economic issues. Many defend themselves that they carefully research before deciding, hiding the reality that their research serves only to validate their predetermined decisions, an unconscious character flaw that most humans have. But worst, and most important of all, it is because most citizens feel that democracy has little influence over government. We look at political power and sense no connection to the actors on the stage, let alone the script writers behind the curtains. Those who try to make informed decisions work against deliberate confusion.

It is ironic that we never have enough money to solve our big problems, yet we were capable of wasting enough to solve our most important problems to greed and incompetence. Having spent these resources on our most pressing needs, we could have ended most wars, prevented most terrorism, eliminated famine and most preventable diseases and infections, come close to 100% literacy and likely would have developed many sustainable energy solutions. Instead we repeat the mistakes of the past and fear change, cowardly believing bad is better left untouched, lest it gets worse.

In every social group, from two people to a population of two billion, there is someone making decisions, holding power. When we are not making decisions ourselves about how to best use our resources, someone else is and for as long as human civilization has existed, this power has never been accountable. Today it may be wielded with all the theater of democratic power, but it is not truly accountable. It only takes a tiny hole to squeeze all the air out of a balloon. Loose accountability, which is at best what even the most transparent governments have, is only marginally better than no accountability.

It is time we reopen the social contract that binds our societies through the ideals of democracy, human rights and freedom.

It is time to rethink how we can create societies that truly work for the better good, without being at the expense of so many who have to suffer for our irresponsibility.

The process of rethinking our political systems must rely on better methods of genuine debate and responsibility. The means we choose always become the ends. We do not yet have the power to truly accomplish the ends we work for. Often, the best we can do is to come as close as possible to what we want. That can only be accomplished when the means embody the ends we seek. We must therefore work on the means we believe can achieve better ends, rather than imagining the best possible ends. No problem a fraction as complex as a human society has been resolved by researching the ends. It is an iterative process of improving the means that gets us to the better ends, often ones we never imagined even existed from the starting point.

I am convinced that it is perfectly possible to create communication and information technologies that can understand the ideas and needs of billions of people and identify the universal elements in those needs and the solutions that truly fulfill them. I am conviced that this system can power the dynamics of true organic decision-making, mimicking evolution to apply meritocratic elements to policy-making, involving all devoted citizens in an informed process.

We cannot have one discussion with a billion people, but can certainly have 100 million conversations of ten persons.

The most engaging way to use our collective intelligence would be a simple system, it can be as simple as a Web site, to help structure millions of citizens working in small groups, independently thinking and judging ideas, using the best means nature has invented: natural selection, or rather organized selection. Ideas that are debated and analyzed by millions of informed people through means that encourage the best human nature has to provide will be infinitely better than the authoritative marketing-infused methods that exist today.

On top of identifying better ideas and policies through an organized selection process, true natural leaders would be identified, creating the basis of an entrepreneurial democracy in which our leaders rise through the quality of their judgment, rather then their marketing and rhetorical skills. Only then would we have the leadership quality that would have wisely used this lost $100 trillion to improve the lives of billions. Government is the biggest expense for most citizens of modern societies. It is worth the extra effort to ensure we get our money's worth.

I will soon publish the details of this form of government and the means to achieve it.