A Brief History of The Delegate Network and Its Prospects

General Discussion
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I added a video that introduces people to the difference between “direct” and transitive proxy voting democracy. It addresses your concerns.

That said, holding 90% of the voting public in contempt for decade after decade on the policy of increasing immigration rates has done so much damage that any discussions of reforming the political system must be deferred. It isn’t that “direct” democracy would not have permitted this damage to proceed, nor even that transitive proxy voting would not have permitted this damage to proceed – although both of those are true. The problem now is defusing the stoichiometric mixture (“diversity is our greatest strength”) before it detonates destroying the West.

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Interestingly enough, Bruce Schneier also talks about liquid democracy in his essay:

The second idea is liquid democracy. This is a system where everybody has a proxy that they can transfer to someone else to vote on their behalf. Representatives hold those proxies, and their vote strength is proportional to the number of proxies they have. We have something like this in corporate proxy governance.

Both of these are algorithms for converting individual beliefs and preferences into policy decisions. Both of these are made easier through 21st century technologies. They are both democracies, but in new and different ways. And while they’re not immune to hacking, we can design them from the beginning with security in mind.

This points to technology as a key component of any solution. We know how to use technology to build systems of trust. Both the informal biological kind and the formal compliance kind. We know how to use technology to help align incentives, and to defend against hacking.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2023/05/rethinking-democracy-for-the-age-of-ai.html

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This is how the Continental Congress works in L. Neil Smith’s North American Confederacy novels, described in the first, The Probability Broach in chapter 28, “Congress Shall Make No Law”. The Congress is in session only when delegates representing 90% or more of the population gather in the capital of Gallatinopolis. They cannot vote by Telecom, as Lucy Kropotkin explains,

“Hives and heatrash, no! This place is supposed to be inconvenient! You wanna encourage more government? What a thought!”

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Schneier is, like Gavin, thinking about how to reform the political system. Since I’ve gone through a lot of this stuff over and over, ever since my 1982 essay on computer networking, all I can say is:

militia.money

That’s the political reform needed since it not only provides transitive proxy voting via conventional stock holder proxy voting, for those that want that kind of “governance”, but it is the only solution to the TFR collapse of economic value (due to the so-called “demographic transition” wherein the economy outbids young men for the fertile years of the most economically valuable young women) that I’ve seen anywhere. I’d really like to see some competition here but there is none.

That said, I brought up delegate.network because it is increasingly obvious to me from my forays into rural America to see what interest there is in militia.money, that Putnam’s documented destruction of social capital by immigration has gone far beyond people “Bowling Alone” to people being so terrified of each other that they’re just withdrawing from life if not killing themselves with opioids. This is the original reason I started considering running for office on the delegate.network platform:

Not because I thought I was going to reform the political system, but because I thought people needed to assort themselves into command hierarchies that may have, perhaps, at one time been provided by churches, politics and/or civic organizations but all of which have been essentially “bought off” by the way Federal Reserve dollars “trickle down”.

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Not the best writing, but I love those novels. Heinlein started me down the path but the NAC pushed me over the edge into libertarianism/ancap.

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Bruce Schneier seems to think that technology makes collaborative “big” systems much more feasible, and that we don’t need the conflict-based market systems of the heyday. Thus, he’s biasing towards the vision of Cybersyn.

I personally think that there’s abundant evidence of big systems going wrong, and that there’s need for ongoing evolution of governance - as well as of the governing. This is such a fundamental thing, which is shared by thinkers in a number of disciplines, and by most of us on this forum.

But we need to bring multiple proposals together, instead of just promoting one of them. It’s too hard to promote just one. One needs to assemble.

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Sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them sounds a lot like what you’re talking about doesn’t it? My original motivation for proposing assortative migration under per capita land value market bidding, aka “Sortocracy”, was that I knew that the first and foremost problem we face is the centralization of social policy that is making everyone become “supremacist” as a matter of self-defense, while we’re all being relentlessly tormented with those who call for “tolerance” of this situation. It makes people crazy and will not end well unless some way of reinstituting some semblance of consent of the governed – including those dispossessed of even land value – is discovered. The Great and The Good have made technological civilization far more fragile than all their rhetoric about “resilience” admits – and if you have 100k people offing themselves with Fentanyl every year to escape The Great and The Good, you can bet that a few are going to off themselves in a manner that is more, shall we say, “productive”.

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My hunch is that it will take a lot of centralization to win against the current establishment, and then have the foresight and wisdom of decentralizing for continued evolution and longevity of the system.

Either way, a coherent vision of the future for the common man is needed to bring about any change. Science fiction is not far from prophecy-making of the ancients: it emboldens the kids to pursue it, it emboldens the parents to encourage.

We know the story of Jesus. We don’t know the prophecies that brought Jesus about. Biblical scholars I know tell me that John the Baptist was the sage that coached Jesus.

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There’s broad agreement about big systems going wrong, and many ideas how to make big systems work better. But maybe we should spend as much time thinking about whether big systems are necessary and whether those which are failing might benefit from being chopped up into smaller pieces which can go their own ways and attract those who concur (as @jabowery has discussed as “sortocracy”).

Here are the happiest ten countries in the World Happiness Report for 2023.

image

They’re all small, homogeneous, and developed. Not a single continent-scale, railroad-era, resource-extraction empire in the bunch. Here the the rankings for some big countries.

  • United States — 15
  • Brazil — 49
  • Argentina — 52
  • China — 64
  • Russia — 70
  • India — 126

Harry D. Schultz’s 1999 book, On Remaking the World: Cut Nations Down to Size (now an absurdly expensive collector’s item), made the argument that size itself was the problem and the obvious solution was to reduce the size, not try to design some new mechanism that people haven’t already tried in forty centuries of experimentation.

People are pretty much the same today as when they evolved to live in hunter-gatherer bands of 50 to 100 individuals. Maybe we’re asking too much to try to get hundred of millions spread over a continent to agree on anything.

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I’m not sure I would describe the Finns as happy.

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The methodology of the World Happiness Report puts heavy weight on surveys of representative samples of the population of each country/territory where they rank their own lives on a scale of 0 to 10. This is then combined with “life evaluations” based upon objective factors which can be compared across countries.

The rankings of national happiness] are based on a Cantril ladder survey undertaken world-wide by the polling company Gallup, Inc. Nationally representative samples of respondents are asked to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale. The report correlates the life evaluation results with various life factors.

The life factor variables used in the reports are reflective of determinants that explain national-level differences in life evaluations across research literature. However, certain variables, such as unemployment or inequality, are not considered because comparable data is not yet available across all countries. The variables used illustrate important correlations rather than causal estimates.

So, the Finns may be dour (especially in winter), but if they believe their lives are as good as it gets, they’ll rank their country at the top.

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Which also explains Iceland. The Icelanders I’ve come into contact with have a real case of reduced horizons.

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Please elucidate.

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This is the function of a Constitutional Declaration of War, even if the essence of the Holy Spirit was obscured from the consciousness of The Founders:

Where there is no vision (of The State of Peace) the people perish (in perpetual war).

The State of War is conflict between nascent group organisms.

The State of Peace must be defined in a Declaration of War, but people are afraid to face what that means as mortal Thoughts in The Mind of The Creator. Any such mortal Thought that lacks integrity is what is meant by:

“I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

Individual Integrity consists of Being such a Thought.

This is the theme of the, thus far, only video I’ve made for The Fair Church℠

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War is one of the worst ways to win. Win what though?

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I’ve provided an operational definition of “war” contrasting with “peace” in organic terms of “nascent group organisms” contrasting with “individuals”.

I submit any lesser definition leads to confusion hence perpetual war.

Take, for instance, the document “Unrestricted Warfare”. That document, reflects the Chinese culture of war going back to at least to Sun Tzu. There is nothing in even Sun Tzu’s teachings that define The State of War as essentially applying force. Indeed, the preferred weapon is fraud*.

Don’t be confused.

*Fraud can, of course, be perpetrated by individuals. Question: What is it called when fraud is perpetrated by a nascent group organism (whether or not component members of that group organism are conscious of the fraud being perpetrated)?

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I’m not sure we disagree: you define war as potentially non-violent, which is fine. Some things can be done through wars of memes or even through re-framing and persuasion.

But my question remains: what is the desired outcome? What is the war being fought over? I’m sorry if I should know about it as you’ve probably written it up somewhere already.

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That is the question! Few others are worthy of discourse midst cries of ‘Peace! Peace!’ When There Is No Peace.

We are so far from being permitted that discourse – particularly with the recent subversions of Section 230 by the social media network effect monopoly regulatory capture that is hollowing out the US as a polity – that we’re in danger of blindly killing each other.

That’s why my emphasis has been on things like the Delegate Network, Sortocracy, Militia.Money, The Fair Church℠ and within it, my own preferred way of life in The Berkana Ecclesium – which seem like a grab-bag of incoherent “ideas” but which can be viewed as stages of “Stand Down” from war toward individual moral agency so that people can negotiate their way toward the definition of “Peace” in the aforementioned organic terms.

For instance, a delegate hierarchy under the control of individuals permits group coherence to emerge at a formally declared level, which contrasts with what John Robb calls “The Swarm” that currently rules the West with virulent memes leading us quite plausibly to nuclear war with Russia if not also China. The importance of formal declaration of group allegiance is that it allows discourse to emerge between those that wield formal proxy powers, possibly negotiating what “peace” means.

Sortocracy is what I suspect would be the outcome of such a discourse between members of the delegate network – a change to the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia to dynamically reallocate territorial value on a per capita basis so as to stand-down from what are quasi-religious differences, while revitalizing the Treat of Westphalia’s spirit of self-determination over their internal affairs – including the urgent necessity of dispensing with this mendacious notion of “inclusion” as the universal value which merely evolves take-the-money-and-run virulent cultures.

The Fair Church℠is an attempt to attain present legal standing for Sortocracy.

Militia.Money is a recognition that people are unlikely to join The Fair Church℠or Sortocracy prior to the outbreak of a rhyme with The Thirty Years War, and that therefore some sort of localized contract between young men and property owners is necessary to avert a French Revolution or similar nightmare as part of that outbreak. This is because the World Reserve Currency is the de facto religion of The Swarm, and it has corrupted all established institutions down to and including the local Chambers of Commerce, schools, fraternal organizations and churches.

The Berkana Ecclesium’s fiat monetary system is the original formalization of militia.money, but geared toward my own “hunting pack” of men (mainly but including women, including older single women) that believe as I do, but who recognize we are not permitted to practice our religion under any present government – but may be seen as a halfway-house toward a State of Nature compatible with the biosphere, while the technological civilization finds its destiny in the stars. So it is also a minimal compromise.

Lest people think my emphasis on individual conflict as compatible with “peace” is misplaced:

This thing about MMA among billionaires is cute and all, but it reminds me of what one extremely wealthy individual told me in confidence – so no names:

“The US is a prison for men.”

I had shared with him that the reality is that Western individualism evolved in the crucible of conflict between Paleolithic heads of households – usually consisting of a man, a woman, children and their wolves/dogs – finding themselves starving in the depths of winter because their hunting grounds overlapped. The conflict would not take the form only of close combat but rather a mutual hunt in nature between heads of households. You don’t hunt a bear with MMA skills, nor does a smaller but better man fight a bear man like Mike Tyson primarily with MMA skills.

This kind of selection may be considered a transition from natural to artificial breeding for the attitude of “May the best man win!” that is the heart and soul of the superiority of Western culture over other cultures. The whole question of what is meant by “best” is answered only by The Holy Spirit and any shrinking from that question is shrinking from that still small voice from The Creator.

Ye are gods.

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Proto-Sorotcracy:

While reading Jim Webb’s “Born Fighting” I came across this quote from Churchill.

Within this peace man was bound to man by a most intricate network of rights and duties, which might vary almost indefinitely from shire to shire, and even from village to village. But on the whole the English doctrine was that a free man might choose his lord, following him in war, working for him in peace, and in return the lord must protect him against encroaching neighbours and back him in the courts of law. What is more, the man might go from one lord to another, and hold his land from his new lord.

If you replace “lord” with “law” and make land value, rather than land itself, follow the “free man”, you are “Within this peace…” I call “Sortocracy”.

And by the way, the arrangement Churchill describes is the proto-IndoEuropean “military marketplace” Kevin MacDonald talks about in “Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition”, except that being pastoralists, pastures are not as easily associated with the individual man as is the comitatus.

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Here in the US, we used to agree on not agreeing. That agreement has fallen apart, and too many people are excited about living in a country where hundred of millions spread across a continent agree with them.

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