Today I am excited to announce that my book, “More Equal Animals - The Subtle Art of True Democracy” available for download by all. In the near future it will also be available in print.
This book represents the culmination of years of research and soul searching. Its contents give a roadmap for humanity to rediscover how to live in peace without creating institutions that eventually fall to corruption and tyranny.
Introduction
In this book we will explore new democratic processes designed to encourage consensus building rather than division into political factions. Imagine for a moment a democratic society governed without party politics, politicians campaigning, mudslinging, identity politics, ballot stuffing, gerrymandering, incumbent advantage, special interests, or debates with the authenticity of a WWE wrestling match. Imagine for a moment that there was a way to change the system without a violent revolution and without needing the cooperation of the prevailing political parties. All of these things can be addressed with a system that empowers the people to hold their government accountable.
Political consensus is the process by which people reach agreement about the nature and structure of government. The intent of this book is to provide practical approaches for improving your life and that of your local community for generations to come. The ills of society are an emergent property of the philosophy of the people, so in this book I lay the framework for a new approach to, and philosophy of a true democracy. Once the principles are understood, I will present a strategy to realize many benefits of applying the philosophy to your life today, without having to get everyone else in the world on board first.
Is government necessary? If so, how should one judge the legitimacy of a government? Where do governments gain their power? How do we even agree upon the purpose and powers of government? Assuming we agree on a purpose, who is the judge of the effectiveness of a government in pursuing that purpose and how do we fix a government which is failing to perform the job it was created to perform? These are the questions I seek answers to and I invite you to join me.
As I write this book in the summer of 2020 the world is on fire. People are divided like never before and I fear the civil unrest will only get worse unless everyone can come to their senses and realize our common humanity. If we cannot agree on and respect a societal dispute resolution process then what alternative outcome can we expect?
I can’t help but recall a scene from the ABC TV show “Lost”. Survivors of a plane crash are stranded on an island with mysterious monsters and natives that are attacking them while they wait for rescue. Tensions mount and the survivors start fighting amongst themselves when a character named Jack steps in and makes an impassioned speech calling people to work together, saying, “If we can’t live together ... then we are going to die alone”.
This book is my call to stop the fighting and find a way to live together. It is time to realize that we all have a common interest in peace, prosperity, and a future for our families. I am asking you to take a moment and let go of your ideologies and triggers and approach this book with a humble spirit and open mind.
Consider for a moment that everything you think you know just might be wrong or incomplete. I can assure you that your ideological enemies have some legitimate concerns that you would be a fool to ignore. How exactly do you plan to deal with those whom you disagree with if and when your faction/party gains power? How exactly will you respond if they resist? Will you resist if your faction loses power? If we don’t open the lines of communication and establish a new way of working together then the fighting will eventually escalate to slavery and genocide. Hopefully we have enough shared humanity left to agree that slavery and genocide are undesirable outcomes.
Over the past 15 years I have pursued non-violent means of organizing society and have adopted and discarded many different ideologies and philosophies. In the process I have discovered first principles that have allowed me to integrate the truths buried within capitalism, libertarianism, socialism, Marxism, Christianity, and atheism. As a consequence I can guarantee that something I write may trigger you or challenge your pre-existing notions. With any luck this book will bring everyone together.
I ask you to consider that our language is under attack and the very words we use to communicate are being subtly redefined or even multiply defined with contradictory meanings. There is no longer any agreement on fundamental things such as God, natural rights, or morality. We can’t even agree on how many genders there are. The very words “capitalist”, “socialist”, and “communist” mean vastly different things to different people. Everything has become subjective and in the process our ability to communicate and compromise is rapidly declining.
It is for this reason that I attempt to make the minimum possible assumptions in the hope that there is still some foundation we can build upon to achieve peace. When two people have a disagreement they can either fight to the death, live and let live, or agree to a process of dispute resolution. If we can’t live and let live, then agreeing to a dispute resolution process is preferable to a bloody conflict in which we kill and are killed.
The crisis we face today is a crisis in our existing dispute resolution process, our “democratic” process. We no longer trust our political processes to reach consensus in an agreeable way. Our elections have become a choice between bad and worse or dumb and dumber. Half the population doesn’t trust that the votes are accurately counted. A poll I posted on Twitter revealed that over 14% of the 533 respondents will publicly admit to be willing to facilitate election rigging, and over 20% would support rigging an election at least some of the time. The major media and social media companies actively censor the sitting president and any politically inconvenient stories. We, the people, have lost control of our government which has been captured by an elite few pulling the strings behind the scenes. These elite can only remain in control by fostering division and preventing consensus building. We the people must work together to reclaim our power from those who subvert democracy.
Whether you are an anarchist, voluntarist, capitalist, socialist, communist, Christian, Marxist, atheist, or racist, I am asking you to put aside your utopian policy agendas and fear of other ideologies just long enough to consider a new way to reach consensus that we can all live with. I ask you to consider that the truth eludes us all and putting any ideology (whatever it may be) in power to the fullest is likely to backfire in ways we could never imagine. Even more important than our ideologies and philosophies is our consensus building and measuring process. If we cannot reach consensus and maintain it, then any utopia is unstable because a person convinced against their will is of the same opinion still.
Legitimate government is supposed to be derived from the consent of the governed. Democracy is supposed to be the process by which that consent is derived. In order to grant consent one must have the ability to negotiate to reach consensus. In order to negotiate you must have the ability to say “no”. Once you have reached consensus every individual must have the ability to enforce the consensus, and lastly, if you are unable to enforce the consensus (or if you disagree with it) then you must retain the ability to leave. It is not enough to declare a “consensus”, like our media and “scientists” are fond of doing; people must believe that consensus is a true meeting of the minds and not a covert opinion of a minority being presented as a false consensus of the super majority.
Society breaks down when any aspect of consent breaks down or is corrupted. This is what is happening today and today’s outcome is predictably derived from fundamental, mathematical, algorithmic, game-theoretic flaws in our implementation of democratic principles. It is not enough to “drain the swamp” and “vote them out”. The rules of the game ensure that the government will evolve toward corruption and away from democratic principles.
Download Now!
Thankyou for releasing this, and for free :)
I read the first few chapters last night in bed and used a free tool to convert it into an audiobook so I can listen to the rest today.
I have no copyright on anything I've created, I hope this is ok, if not the link will expire in <24hrs
More Equal Animals by Daniel Larimer - as read by a robot (93mb/7 hour mp3)
I'm enjoying the book. I'm happy to see your as free as ever and working on freedom! Great choice to come to Hive too.
I agree, I would like to expand on this:
The agreements are words on paper. And yea, this is a good time to upgrade. Lets try to keep an important view point when learning from the past: constitutions are just words on paper, the responsibility lies on the people to keep any agreement like this healthy. Evidence of this are amendments that we don't agree with or were not even ratified properly but still enforced. So, anytime I don't yet have specific details on precisely where the constitution failed, I tend to look at how the people may have failed and contributed to this.
I really like Anna Von Reitz's work. She does a good job making the case that the people have not been running the Republic claiming that this is the missing 3rd branch branch of the government. We learned that their are three branches of government, however, we were not taught that only two were in operation and "We the People" are the third branch. Her case is that we have had no Republic at all for nearly 100 years. The people were not showing up. Basically it sounds like we have been running on only 2 branches and "left to their own devices" the children (the corporate side) have gotten into all kinds of trouble. It is a very different view that both explains a lot and empowers people to do something. However, Anna is probably not the one to re-architect or decentralize version 2.0 (if there is to be a version 2.0). So, I'm not advocating we all do it Anna's way and call it a day. I do see her work as a very valuable piece of the puzzle if we are to stand on the shoulder's of the giants that came before us.
The people need to be responsible for such a creature or it can and will get out of control. And clearly, we should never have outsourced our education to any such creature of fiction (a commercial agreement among union states).
In the end, it makes since to me that we would want to form unions to protect ourselves from foreign jurisdictions. It is kind of like documenting our right to bear arms but trying to scale it up. And it makes even more since to use our technology to further decentralize these agreements so fictions like counties (in addition to States) have documented decentralized agreements with checks and balances.
Also, we should know that a Constitution is a contract used to create Constitutors.
Gives new meaning to the saying: All roads lead to Rome.
Under International law the debt created by "The Constitution of the United States of America" would have been forgiven in 2019 in a something known as a Great Debt Forgiveness Jubilee. Given that golden nugget of knowledge, I'm thinking Constitution is not the right word for version 2.0. KL documents this in Crrow777radio.com show #256 "A Path to Freedom for those Fictitiously Lost at Sea" (pdf show notes, audio).
Congratulations. Glad to see you made it free and available to everyone to download.
Cool, will try giving it a read next to curating. Any plans on audiobooking it? My eyes have not liked the excessive screen time due to covid lately. Maybe someone on Hive would be up for it. 😃
Oh and btw, instead of declining rewards you can also just set @hive.fund as beneficiary or @null if you prefer burning the post rewards but still not penalize curators if they want to vote up a post.
Good tip!
Thank you for the gift to our hive communiti of hive we apreciated ir a Lot.
Well i hate the polítician that only get their benefit, but i Will taking the Time to read your book considering that you have a fresh point of views,
Looking forward to reading the book.
Love the entire concept of this Dan! Well done!
It's something I think a lot about as I think we can all agree that a lot of the current mechanisms and systems in place just aren't working for a large portion of the population.
The copyright footnote is already off to a good start. 😃
Hahaha, I had to draw a flow chart to understand it, but it is amazing.
Send to Kindle for Google Chrome
The topic is of high interest to me and I downloaded the book and keen on reading soon. Thanks for making it available for download.
Are you hoping to have discussions on the ideas about consensus in society? And reach some agreement on how to build such consensus?
Absolutely! This book outlines the real problem is a consensus building problem. And "democracy" is supposed to be a means of building consensus. Tyranny opposes any attempt to build a new consensus.
am curious to your take on the events on the 6th?
Congratulations!
I downloaded it
Can we record interview with you for this channel?
https://www.youtube.com/cryptotexty1
Actually it might be even 2 interviews: one about blockchain topic, another about ideas expressed in this book
You are a great addition to Hive @dan
I really do hope to see you around more regularly so you can share more of your knowledge and experience with us!
You should audiobook it as @acidyo stated.
I wish you good fortune in the wars to come.
Congrats on your book and the vital subject — good to meet a fellow author on here!
https://www.the-star.co.ke/sasa/books/2020-12-04-yahia-lababidi-as-the-voice-of-our-global-uncertainties/
Thank you for making your book available for free to the masses.
Your posts have always been inspirational to me and I can't wait to read it.
I enjoyed reading the book. I was wondering why the title is" more equal animals" but I found the answer in the middle of it. I find many interesting quotes and this one sticks instantly.
Plenty intriguing information, questions, analogies and lesson. I think it's the first time I read a book that contains heavy topic but is enjoyable to read.
I have no idea how you read it that fast. I can’t even read it anywhere near that speed. I’m glad that you enjoyed it.
nice making it free and
Things need to and will change and the shape and form that comes in one can only hope that it does not look anything like the last 4 years. Both sides did bad and the fact we have an Elephant of Donkey as our mascots in the political ring is the setup for a downfall.
Hey Dan, I will be doing a chapter by chapter critique of your new book as I read it. Let's see how this goes!
https://hive.blog/moreequalanimals/@btcmillennial/ch-2-critique-of-more-equal-animals
Congrats on the release
I just read the first two chapters and looking forward to the rest. Well done!
It's an important time to focus on solutions. And in this, it is an important opportunity we live in now to reset the foundations of society and redeem/reclaim language.
These are similar words to Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum - which is ironic I repeat them here.
I suppose like @dbroze has initiated with the 'greater reset', we need to direct this opportunity for reset with conscious intention or face losing a chance to choose as result of tacit choicelessness.
We stand at the fork of a road
I just downloaded it and look forward to digging in. We sure could use some consensus building right about now!
I'm already reading... will be back for a review.
Thank you for sharing it here, @dan!
PDF? What about publishing it on-chain?
That wouldn't be as portable or consumable.
It is inspirational to see you here, and I'm very moved reading about your new book. You had me at the Animal Farm reference and I cannot wait to read it. Few people realize as they loudly cry 1984 that Animal Farm is playing out right before our eyes.
In the last couple years I have gone deeper and deeper into these beautiful things that you created. They have absorbed and changed my life, provided me a job doing what I love, the resources with which to grow and learn, and showed me a glimpse of a future of positivity and abundance.
There are no coincidences in my life. Thank you.
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STOPVery soon a decentralized democracy ! ? Let's dream. Thank you for sharing. Well, I have no choice but to read your book.
I am really excited to read this.
wanted to share the speech I gave in 2016 at a support rally for the Malheur National wildlife refuge occupation by the Bundy gang, this was at the state capitol, and a month later I hosted a BBQ with some other people at a park, and read to the the "Declaration of dissolution of government" which is part of the Plan for restoration of constitutional government. this is before i knew about DeFi and Blockchain
https://peakd.com/hive-179175/@unorgmilitia/my-first-ever-speech-age-26-i-think
Wow thanks
перевод книги "Более равные животные. Тонкое искусство истинной демократии" - https://docs.fractally-ru.com/kniga-bolee-ravnye-zhivotnye
Подписывайтесь на мой телеграм канал чтобы узнавать подробнее о Фракталли и многом другом на русском языке.