Planet A is ALIVE! A New Political System
Joe Pease, “11.22am”, from Twitter. Thx also to Deep Nostalgia + MidJourney
BECOME A CO-CREATOR AND JOIN THIS INCUBATOR- STARTS APRIL 17th 2023, THEN EVERY THIRD MONDAY
The parallel polis is like another leg of the body politic - separate, but vital to the health of the whole system
WE started The Alternative Global with the question If Politics is Broken, What's the Alternative?'. In the age of waking up, polarisation and widespread dethroning of authority, where is my - and our - agency to meet the needs of the future? Voting once every five years for competing parties is no longer cutting it.
Over the past six years we have come to see that a new political system is possible. There are methods for bringing people together and making decisions that better reflect the diversity we are, on a planet fit for the future.
But that new system is unlikely to be established by the those currently in power: turkeys do not vote for Christmas. We need a parallel polis, drawn from well designed and facilitated communities, to bring it into being.
This conversation would not focus on improving the old party political system, but on what it takes to build a genuinely new one. Questions to explore will include:
what's the distinction between citizens and people and why does it matter?
what tools and spaces help people to come together meaningfully?
how can we generate community power beyond fixing problems?
how does technology capture deliberative politics?
why Citizen Assemblies are not enough
what we can learn from Vaclav Havel's parallel polis and what not
where does Flatpack democracy fit into all this?
what attracts people to participate in future building?