To make a comparison, the 2nd Paradigm of Democracy is to the 1st Paradigm as democracy was to the monarchy. Seen another way, smart phones are to DOS as the 2nd Paradigm is the 1st Paradigm.
We know what the 1 Democratic Paradigm is like – we are living in it. The motivations and intentions of the founders of the United States democracy have been fulfilled. Yet, the hunger for self-determination by democratic citizens is still burning within them. Something seems to be amiss: Many citizens in most democracies are dissatisfied with the performance of their governments. There seem to be very few options, as viewed by most citizens. They can either,
a) strive to revise the entrenched bureaucracy from within it;
b) use the recall and/or referenda to motivate change from a public citizen base;
c) use some form of public demonstrations or protest; or
d) resort to riot, rebellion or revolution — none of which are effective.
The last option retards social progress, and often entrenches the existent powers.
What the 2nd Paradigm of Democracy proposes is to create change rather than being a victim of change. We know that the three values that have sustained our species for tens of thousands of years are a reliable and timeless guide for the development of humane social, political and economic policies. We know, too, that democratic processes are no longer experimental but have been firmly proven and validated by over two centuries of experience. It is time now to consciously use those three values to design an evolved form of democratic process using contemporary technologies, without violence or demonstrations. To move this nation and the democratic global community of nations into the 2 paradigm of democracy, leaders of all organizations must be taught and trained how to reframe their thinking from political processes that support democracy to social systems that support sustainable democracies.
Accomplishing such a task will require a totally new method of option-development, problem solving and decision-making — one that reliably supports the existent society and culture while introducing a way to engage the holism of society, solving problems that take most social parameters into context. In other words, we will intentionally create social change using the sustaining values of our species to design social programs with far greater assurance of the quality of what they produce. “The best way to predict the future is to create it,” according to Alan Curtis Kay, 1971, at an early Palo Alto Research Center meeting. (Also attributed to Peter Drucker and Dandridge M. Cole.)
