‘The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling… This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how I hate them! War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business’ Albert Einstein, from Mein Weltbild (My World-view) (1931).
Citizen Revolution
Finally, it’s time to throw off the yoke of violence from human behaviour.
There is no need for violent revolution and there is no success for such a programme.
Violence begets violence, hate begets hate.
Nuclear weapons beget nuclear attack and accidents.
So a non-violent revolution, or ‘fast evolution by citizens’ directing their own governance and learning, appears more than timely, it appears urgent.
A non-violent revolution against the tyranny of combined political, economic, corporate and media systems that deny life and destroy everything not prized by a psychopathic political economy (2020 CE).
A revolution grounded in citizen learning and communication, two essential sides of the same coin.
Without this dual capacity – to learn and to communicate — every citizen is left vulnerable to manipulation and today, even to digital slavery.
Firstly, let’s define citizenship.
A citizen is a sovereign biological homo sapien, or ‘species individual.’
We are each citizens with sovereign rights framed by agreement within nation states.
Without individual rights, the states we establish to protect us, are themselves liable to run amok, as they do today.
Wars, assassinations, exploitation of people and resources, enslavement of populations and increasingly, states run by minorities of 1%.
Historically, a lax assignment of democratic participation and a convenient reduction of human rights, has served the purpose of power and wealth accumulation still infecting human progress like a terrible disease.
Against this model of manipulation and aggressive enslavement by minorities, is a model of new digital democracy.
A digital democracy based on absolute rights held by each and every citizen and not liable to retraction or diminishment by governments, or elite self-interest.
There is no poverty, homelessness, hunger or war, under a system of guaranteed citizen rights, where individual sovereignty is protected as the fundamental law of human society and within every community.
No state has lawful right to usurp or deny the sovereign citizen rights that define the democratic state. Individual rights create and determine the rights of each state, and not vice versa.
Citizens create public agreements to form and control states, yet these states, historically managed by minorities, are compromised by special interests, reducing citizen sovereignty via self-interest, to benefit of the few.
States are actually legal constructs employed to protect sovereign citizen rights to life, peace, security, food, housing and flourishing, defined via public participation in protected democratic fora.
Human flourishing is decided by public agreement between individual-citizens, only then by states.
States are simply legal entities that undertake collective bidding of citizens.
Usurpation by special interests and the ‘capture of states’ cannot and does not supersede the rights of individual citizens.
Today, legal systems, political, financial, technological, military and governance systems, are routinely ‘usurped’ by money and power or special interest.
While sovereignty is only reduced by special interests when citizens neglect their sovereign rights, which in present ‘undemocratic’ political economy is common.
In the digital age, these ‘acts of state usurpation of individual and collective sovereign rights’ are the line of struggle between citizens and their states.
Fundamental Life Rights include:
1) The Right to Life
We each have the right to protect our own life against others and our community life against usurpation by other communities. This implies no aggression: no instance of aggression is allowed once human or civil rights are fully applied. The ‘multipolar world community’ must protect the principle of self-defence for every community and individual, especially against the violent desires of some, to misappropriate the lives and resources of others, using violence.
2) Right to Sustenance
If you are a human being, of whatever gender, ethnic, or minority group, you are a world citizen with the right to sustenance. This right includes the right to clean water, non-toxic food, sunshine and clean air.
3) Right to Housing
The need for protection from the elements at an acceptable level of warmth is a sovereign right for all citizens.
4) Right To Energy
Access to energy systems that provide warmth, cooling, light and transport is a sovereign right for all citizens.
5) The Right to Self-Govern
The ability for each citizen to work within their communities to make decisions that influence and protect their joint and several rights to life, is a sovereign right itself. This right increases transparency and reduces manipulation by those seeking to gain from corruption and greed.
6) Right To Self-Learning
The power to learn and work with others, to learn at all scales of information and data is the basis of a new digital economy and a fundamental civic, human or natural right.
7) The Ecological Protection Right
To protect our common life, citizen control over the political, economic and other mechanisms of mass society extend to protect all life, as a sovereign individual right.
8) The Right To Culture
The Right to share and enjoy the ever renewing arts, sciences crafts and social events that make up culture, is a sovereign right.
9) The Right To Democratic Inclusion
The Right to democratic inclusion requires that every citizen is paid or remunerated to participate in the governance of their state, as a sovereign right. This the basis of a new data economy built on trust not manipulation.
10) The Right To Private Data
This Right provides that every citizen is the sole owner of their private and public data and the intellectual property they produce throughout their lives.
Summary
Individual sovereign rights are absolute, and may not be qualified by any institution, either public or private.
Democratic assembles may not reduce these rights either, because they protect the minimum requirements for life for each citizen.
This sharing of the rights-to-life implies that wealth is distributed as a social good, so that excessive wealth is simply taxed away, or potentially create distortions in the global system, as per today.
Each citizen is both the source of their own life-rights and a source of renewal and life for their entire community, and today, the world-digital community.
With this in mind, the purpose of learning as a formal practice of citizenship, free from usurpation by private interests, becomes central.
As is the practice of citizen communication within formally recognised public assemblies, that actively and continuously protect these rights.
The future is here, it just demands that outdated models of existing authority admit and cede their illegitimate and inhumane power to the citizens, whose rights have been usurped, up until now.
New digital technologies protect and connect public assemblies of citizens defined as part of sovereign rights to collectively protect all other lives.
Citizen Rights today, demand the deep economic power of Citizen Participation, enabled via digital technologies, to protect all life.
Or climate change and technocrats will combine, to sink our ‘new digital age’ in the murderous anxieties of ages past.