“Any new idea or concept, in order to be accepted and make a contribution to the betterment of society, must be seen and accepted as a natural and necessary development of existing concepts, and social structures.”

To successfully build a Stage 3 Democracy, we will need to retain those aspects of our traditional 2nd Stage Democracy that are working and lend themselves to its improvement and effectiveness. These include,

1. The direct connection between the values stated in the Declaration of Independence and the seven core values of social sustainability.

2. There already exist long term democratic processes in place that have produced a social, political, and economic culture of democracy that will lend itself to the public’s acceptance of a Stage 3 Democracy; and the qualitative interpretation of the world “equal.”

3. The First Amendment provides the context for the development of the 3rd Stage of Democracy, and the qualitative interpretation of the word “equal.”

4. The Internet is already in place that connects all democratic nations for similar democratic developments.

5. The first and second intention of the founders of the United States democracy are fulfilled: a) The Revolutionary Colonists successfully pushed the authority of the British monarch back to his homeland; b) to create a sovereign democratic nation.

6. There is a history and culture of local citizens meeting together to discuss and promote legislation…

7. … and share their views, perspectives, opinions, and preferences with their elected and appointed public executives.

“What is right? What Works?” One book that has been very influential for examining 2nd Stage Democracies is “Breaking the Rules” ³⁵ by Kurt Wright. Wright’s book is eminently practical because he asks several questions that lead the reader to intuitively pragmatic answers.

1) “What’s right?” [The word “right” is interchangeable with the word “works” to become, “What works?”]
2) “What makes it right/work?”
3) “What would be ideally right/workable?”
4) “What’s not yet quite right/workable?” And,
5) “What resources can we find to make it right/work?” This process moves our inquiry from “fixing problems” to creating solutions.

Question #1 begins by asking what is working, rather than focusing on what is wrong, which is the usual point of inquiry. It also asks us to get to the intentions and purposes of the function of our inquiry, and acts much like a review of the basics, which often get lost in the shuffle of fixing problems. Question #2 forces us to inspect what motivates the “right working” of the situation. Again, it forces us to retain what works and isolate what is not working. Questions #3 asks us to reach to our vision for something that makes us stretch to fulfill the greater good. Only then, in question #4 are we guided to discover/reveal the factors that are not working well; and, in #5 we are guided toward the resources that become the change-agents for creating the solutions we are seeking.

Whatever We Re-Design Must —

1. Be compatible with the Constitutional framework of our nation, and offer an inventive means of linking the values of the Constitution with the innate, sustaining values of our species;

2. Recover the quality-value relationship that citizens had with their congressional public executives before it vanished after the Apportionment Act of 1911;

3. Become a democratic evolutionary development to bridge the democratic tragedy that the Apportionment Act created; and,

4. Offer an inventive way to engage contemporary technologies to give citizens an ongoing and continuous means of offering their collective intelligence (think in terms of “knowledge workers” in high tech industries) to create a “trend” of intelligent consensus to share with public executives.

5. Offer a means for public executives to receive ongoing feedback from constituents; and keep pace with social change and the ever-changing hierarchies of needs of citizens whose interpretations of our seven innate values are constantly evolving. Doing so will empower Stage 3 Democracies to adapt to social change.

♦ ♦​ ♦​

“In a 2 nd  Stage Democratic Society — 
  Responsibility to society is indoctrinated  
  by authority, obedience, and discipline.   
 
In a 3 rd  Stage Democratic Society — 
  Responsibility to society is enculturated  
  by teaching personal power,   
 self-discipline, and personal responsibility.”

♦ ♦​ ♦​

To move this nation and the  
democratic global culture into a Stage 3 
Democracy, leaders in 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. 

14. What Does All of this Mean?

Succinctly, all of this means that the values of social sustainability are finally available to balance “social equity,” “social justice,” “the common good,” and “what is fair.” Use of the social sustainability perspective will take the “ball” out of the game between conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, and put it squarely in the hands of Progressives. Who else can handle this ball politically? Who else will be able to identify with these values to proactively fulfill “what works” to bend public social policy toward social stability, peace, and eventually social sustainability?

George Lakoff’s last four books thoroughly explained how and why conservatives have taken control the democratic process of the United States. He did point to the “nurturing” parental model as a place to begin that could bring about progressive social evolution, rather than the social and democratic devolution that is occurring now under the control of conservatives. What will make Progressive efforts powerful and effective is to adopt the seven organic values into their political rhetoric and political agendas. i.e., to reframe democratic values using the values of social sustainability. Politics then moves from Republican and Democratic, conservative and liberal, to “Progressive and Sustainable.”

Though the nurturing parental model provides the foundation for a generative learning process, the model does not project a family model onto society. The family as a democratic societal metaphor is vastly inadequate to describe a democratic society. There are no “fathers” or “mothers” or “children” of a national democratic society. If we need a metaphor to describe a democratic society, then we need to look at a business model with socialized and enculturated knowledge and wisdom teams in every community. This means that citizens become co-participants of the responsibilities in the larger business of a democratic society, including its government and politics, finance and economics. ³⁶

It means that when a society pursues social stability, peace, and eventually social sustainability, its citizens will have set themselves on a course to fulfill “what works” sustainably. “What works” only becomes pragmatically political when politics takes on the values of social sustainability. The morality of politics then takes on a purposefulness that contributes to practices of sustainable governance.

It means that “how” the Progressive agenda is fulfilled begins by formalizing a socially sustainable vision for all democratic nations; with clear, socially sustainable intentions for that vision, followed by clearly transparent mission statements in a business-like format using the seven core values of social sustainability as their criteria. The philosophy of democracies need not be revised — freedom, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness are the self-evident values described in our Declaration of Independence that will continue to provide the timeless and consistent philosophical guidance democratic societies have always sought.

What all of this means is that in order to overcome the immense social, political, and economic hurdles that every democratic nation will experience in the near future, candidate selection and the business of governance must change from who can gain control, to who can develop sustaining answers. The last several decades have thoroughly proven that political hierarchies are unable to create solutions for local, state, or national social problems. With no one in control having the answers, millions of citizens themselves must begin training themselves how to use their immense intellectual and wisdom resources to create those answers. If no one in governmental and political hierarchies has the answers, then we must fall back, again, on the values that are innate to every citizen to exploit a proven methodology to give millions of local citizens the opportunity to create meaningful solutions for their community and their nation.

What this all means is that pragmatically applying the values of social sustainability to solution-creation of old and emerging social problems will take the “game” out of politics. “Politics as usual” is like playing American football without any rules: Just take control of the ball and run like hell until you fumble or someone takes the ball away from you. The “rules” of social sustainability provide the structure, logic, and rationality, much like the rules of Euclidean geometry, to democratic governance. All steps and procedures are checked against proven values of social sustainability of what works to create just and humane sustainable solutions and policies.