I’m delighted to see the emergence of the “religious left” to counterbalance the religious right. I’m also excited about the Faith in Public Life group. No single group is perfect and all we each have to do it take one bite of the cookie. No matter how big the cookie is, if we have enough people who just take ONE bite each, then the cookie is finished in moments.
Am I a lefty or a righty? Neither and both. I just want people to get active. We all have an activist in us. Let’s all get involved and live according to our inner moral code. Let’s all pray to Jesus Christ and walk as our conscience dictates.
Left, right, center? Who can even tell where and what these things are? They keep shifting anyway!
The most important thing to me is to preserve diversity. It is only because of diversity that God had some people to work through to rescue the world from a second great depression. It is because of diversity that God could work through other people to counter the darkness that the world endured sporadically over it’s history. In some countries like Iran recently, diversity was suppressed and there is no balancing option to redirect the country away from the calamity that any sane person can see is coming.
Giving permission to bad behaviour
Diversity is alarming to countries that believe they alone, the ruling elites, have the capacity to govern. No one else can be trusted to have “their” power. But diversity has been shown to be a corrective balancing power, because when too much power is vested in one leader, or a group of people, with no diversity to permit corrective changes, then we have a serious situation when a leader goes off the rails due to a traumatic incident.
It’s understandable that a trauma can spark radical behaviour, but diversity enables other people to rise up and maintain balanced behaviour. We can see this in fauna and flora where an infection starts in a section of moss, and by the time the infection has spread to other parts of the moss, that part already has the moss equivalent of anti-bodies to resist the infection. If that ability to correct imbalanced behaviour doesn’t occur, then the whole body gets sick.
To make matters worse, if the traumatised leader runs amock, traumatising others… and then gets away with it, it sends a message which encouraging future leaders to “have a go” in the sure knowledge that they too will not be reprimanded.
This is why I so deeply admire the constitution of America, the diversity and balancing measures that the founding fathers tried to build into it. It’s why I admire nations who uphold a bill of human rights. It’s why I admire independent judiciaries that protect people and their rights.
But after 911 we saw that it was possible to shred the US constitution and for one powerful country to terrorize almost the whole world. Fortunately, due to diversity in the political makeup of the US, a counterbalancing personality could rise up and redirect things away from calamity. But the secret is out now. It is possible to ignore the US constitution and to use the immense power of the USA with impunity across the globe.
And that lesson – that protecting the public gives permission for governments to override constitutions and destroy lives – has been learned by others and put into effect elsewhere.
Beyond democracy, beyond public limits
More and more power seems to be shifting beyond the reach of democracy. The African Union is not elected and they are acquiring more and more power. The European Union is not directly elected, only indirectly, and they are acquiring more and more power. I keep hearing of elite groups forming high in the atmosphere above the common rabble with the vote.
The United Nations is beyond the influence of democracy, but it does have diversity. One out of 2 isn’t bad. But yet people are looking to reform the UN. Enlarging the diversity would be good, but I look at Responsibility To Protect (see Huffington Post) and I’m excited by the capacity to do good, and then I think about post-911 and centralization of power beyond any democratic influence with no oversight or balance of power, and then I am worried about what we will if another traumatic event occurred?
What reforms do they have in mind? Are they thinking about how to counter-balance that power? Are they thinking about how to hamstring a power-hungry personality or group of people who suffers a traumatic incident? Will they realise the danger of centralizing even more power beyond the reach of democracy?
Did we not learn from what happened after 911? We run the risk of putting place across the world an elite who have immense power, with this power held beyond the influence of “mere” democracy, with no diversity to create balance. This worries me. A lot.
And diversity also creates it’s amusement too: Australian Sex Party approved by AEC.
Faith + Hope + Love 