As a long-in-the-tooth, organizational psychologist, I have noticed that my field generally knows little about the organization of government or the art of governing, concentrating as it does on the other part of the corpocracy, corporate America. In this short essay I define governing, list its various forms throughout the ages and in America, and then close by proposing a model for governing in America that is definitely different from the way she has always been governed.
What Does Governing a Nation Mean?
Governing a nation means whatever "relevant" people define it to be and however it is practiced. Relevant people, I suppose, would include political scientists, an oxymoron, because both politics and governing are forms of art, not science. To me the most relevant definition of governing is not a single one but the many as seen in how it is practiced in its myriad forms, but that is begging the question. So here is my simple definition; governing is the act of managing publicly funded organizations that may or may not help the common good of the public being governed.
It is about as dry a definition as one can get but it does cover the waterfront. What animate it are the diverse forms of governing actually practiced down through the ages. I will list only the earliest and the more prominent ones. Two common denominators of most if not all forms are their creation by the power elite and their warfare, two features that are very detrimental to the common good.
Governing Down Through the Ages
Kinship. Families may have been the earliest form by which people governed themselves collectively. Extended families converged into tribes with tribal lords and councils.
Absolute and Constitutional Monarchies. In the former a monarch's rule is ironclad. In the latter the monarch's power is constrained by law and a political body.
Empires. The people of a land are conquered by a superpower and thereafter ruled by an Emperor. There have been nearly 200 empires throughout history. Egypt's empire lasted the longest, 3,000 years. No new ones have arisen for quite some time.
Early City/Nation States. Ancient Greeks, who were fixated on how to govern and by whom, were governed and taxed by city/state governments. Perhaps the earliest precursor to America's tallest hierarchically structured government was China at least two millennia ago when Ch'in, the "First Exalted Emperor" established a hierarchical bureaucracy to control the newly unified China.
Pre-America Land. Many thousands of years before the land later called "America" was stolen by rapacious, fanatical, and savage European settlers, that land was inhabited by successive waves of what became known generically as "Indians." Over time they developed more sophisticated forms of governing themselves. Perhaps the most often cited is the Iroquois League of Nations, a confederacy model copied from the mid-15 th century. Chiefs were chosen by the senior women of their tribe. Tribal decisions were made by consensus, not by voting.
Corpocracies. An outgrowth of the industrial revolution was the corporation. Benito Mussolini, the founder of Italian Fascism, reportedly said at the height of his dictatorship that "fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." Hitler honed corporatism into the Third Reich, then the pinnacle of fascism. My name for "corporatism" is "corpocracy," and in America it is the unequal merger of state and subservient government. Ipso facto, America is a fascist state and has been from its beginning.
That concludes the list, but before moving on to the proposed model I want to ask readers this question, "Do you notice what is missing from the list?"
Democracy is what is missing because it is pure myth, a hoax perpetrated and sustained by the power elite. America's "democracy" is said to have been inspired by the putative "crucible of democracy," Greece. Bunkum! Not even during the so-called "halcyon era of democracy" when Pericles ruled Greece did she have a democracy. Only about one-tenth of Athens' populace was officially designated citizens. Slaves, women, and men who had not served in the military were all non-citizens. Military service was an absolute necessity since Pericles presided over the remaining years of the war with Persia and the first few years of the 30 year war between Athens and Sparta. What ancient Greece inspired, it seems, is the habit of getting things through war.
America's power elite and its lackeys proclaim democracy while practicing corpocracy. They know it is not a democracy. Only three groups of Americans, the deceived, the deluded and the deniers believe it to be so. Americans who know and detest the corpocracy for what it is and does are outnumbered but also subjugated as are those three groups. That being so, is not any proposed alternative for governing useless and having only a short shelf life? My answer has to be "probably yes," but we live in desperate times and desperately need to start building a livable future if there are to be any future generations much longer other than for microorganisms.
Governing Smaller Americas: The Model's Four Principles
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