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How to get people today to adopt sound reforms?
How to get people today to adopt sound reforms?
That is the question many concerned people ask themselves as they try to develop and sell reforms that would actually work.
People today are distracted by many entertainments. Many consider politics a form of entertainment, and show this by electing entertainers to high office, usually on promises to “do something” they cannot possibly do, or that would have bad outcomes if they did. Proposals for sound reforms are drowned out by a flood of unsound proposals. Everyone tries to put forward his own, and most don't have a clue how to do it, nor does the public have a clue how to select the better ones..
In the past the main vehicles for reform were long treatises. We have many of them online in our Liberty Library. We don't see many such treatises being written today, because people don't read them. Not many people read those past treatises, except for a few students and scholars. Our website, can be considered a kind of modern treatise, a compilation of many articles on many subjects, but most visitors seem to go to particular pages based on web searches, and no further. Attention spans seem to be limited to a few hundred words at a time, or 140 characters.
But this is not a litany of alarm. I and others have done that elsewhere. This is to explain a way I have tried to solve the problem.
The way is a novel, now nearly completed, I have spent the last three years writing.
The title link takes one to the novel online. To access the chapters one needs the chapter password “wweditor”. I put it online to facilitate getting help with editing.
In planning the novel I first had to identify a single wrong turn in history that, had it been taken differently, history might have taken a much better course. There are many wrong turns in history. some are more critical than others, and and some occurred during periods where taking a different turn might have had a more lasting effect. Most situations requiring reform are the result of historical wrong turns, and most reforms are attempts to correct the historical mistake.
One wrong turn turn stood out. The Battle of Evesham on August 4, 1265, when royalist forces led by Prince Edward, later to become Edward I, slaughtered Earl Simon de Montfort and most of his reformist followers. A faction of English and Welsh barons, led by Simon, had seized control of King Henry III and established the first English parliament at Oxford, to which commons could elect representatives. Although weak parliaments continued to be held thereafter, centuries of civil war among claimants to the English throne retarded progress of England through what would otherwise have been an earlier flowering of the Renaissance and the industrial revolution in the British Isles, by involving merchants and craftsmen in the making of law. It is plausible that Evesham set back human progress by perhaps 400-500 years at a critical stage in progress in Europe, that might have accelerated if the Montfortean reforms had become established in 1265.
The late 13th and early 14th century also presented many opportunities for reform. The Roman Catholic Church was without a pope and could not agree on a successor. The Holy Roman Empire was without an emperor. Northern European lands were experimenting with various reforms. Spain and Portugal had established early parliaments, each called a cortes, to which commons could elect representatives. Venice, Florence, and Genoa experimented with republican government using random selection. The Egyptian Emir, Baibers, swept across the Holy Land, driving out Christians and Jews and consolidating Arab control of the region for the next 1000 years. The Mongols were destroying the lands in the Caucasus region, and also conquering what later came to be called China. The Persian llkhan had conquered Baghdad and killed most of its people. The peoples of the Indian subcontinent were at war in ways that presented opportunities. The Aztec and Inca empires had not yet emerged in the New World.
The situation presented an opportunity for an enlightened, gentle military leader, based in the British Isles, to put the stamp of her personality on most of the world, as had not been done since Alexander. After some deliberation, I concluded this could only be done by an extraordinary young woman who was formidable both in personal combat and as the head of military forces intensely devoted to her. She had to have superior abilities, not superhuman, just superior. Not only as a leader, but as a charmer. I have known such women, perhaps none as intelligent as our Ariel, but serene, regal, beautiful, and professional.
If we examine most examples of science fiction today, most of the leading characters, such as the crew of the Starflight Enterprise, are regularly exercising abilities far beyond the reach of someone with an IQ of less than 200. They might claim not to be genetically enhanced, but they would have to be to do what they do.
So what are the biological limits on how much intelligence the human rain can achieve? I examined the abilities demonstrated by savants on specialized problems, then extrapolated them to the brain as a whole, and to a full array of problems. I came up with a functional IQ about 5 times that of unenhanced humans. This is not the extravagant intellectual power of a Lucy, which is not plausible. However, the motivations of the character are plausible. It is considered standard plot design to give heroes flaws or weaknesses. Ariel hs no flaws. like many of the women I have known on whom she is modeled. She does have weaknesses, mainly arising from her love for others, but we see in Chapter 25 what happens to a villain who tries to exploit it. Unlike conquerors of the past, Ariel loves deeply. It is what motivates her.
She also knows how to have fun. From sex to music and other arts. She can learn a new language in a few days. She admires her Jewish tradition as a art form, not because she accepts the faith, like many of my Jewish friends. She laughs easily, and has a wicked sense of humor.
It would not have done to merely introduce supremely talented individuals before the battle. They would needed to know things they could not know. That meant finding a way to get information from the future, and the obvious solution was from a future human. But I needed to introduce a plausible way to do that. Modern physical theory provides a possibility. It posits that if a stable wormhole could be created and maintained, and one end accelerated at nearly the speed of light for long enough, the ends of the wormhole could be separated in time, with one end in the past and the other in the future. A stable wormhole would be unlikely to be wide enough to permit passage of even a single subatomic particle or photon. However, it might enable a telepathic connection between the two ends. For that I posited that what we call telepathy is a kind of quantum entanglement, and that human brain functions are themselves a kind of quantum entanglement between parts of the brain. Much of mental capacity can be explained that way.
Information is conserved, so that no information can be transferred between past and future with an equal exchange in the opposite direction. Quantum entanglement avoids the problem, because within a quantum entangled system there is no real transmission of information. Within or between minds information exists everywhere at once, without being transmitted. It is a theoretic leap to posit ennoblement of this connection through a wormhole, but not implausible based on present theory. It makes a convenient plot device for this story.
The awareness (not “information”) conveyed could not require the 13th century young people to recreate industrial civilization within a single year. They had to build on what was available in 1264. Fortunately, that foundation did exist then, mainly in Northern England, with clever action on the part of our Three recipients of future knowledge. Such a thing could not have been done sooner, or done anywhere else. With their new awareness, it was just barely barely possible to create and use the needed weapons in the time available.
The Three could have intercepted the royalists somewhere else than at Evesham, but Evesham was the perfect spot. It had a hill for artillery emplacement. The royalist forces could be expected to form themselves in the same arrays used in the other timeline, making them vulnerable to bombardment. That presented the Three with an opportunity to only defeat the royalists, but to crush them ,as they had not been following their defeat at Lewes. The royalists had to be defeated so thoroughly that they could never make a comeback. In 1265 the royalists were on the ascendant, for reasons that would survive a battlefield defeat.
When Ariel saw that not all the royalist leaders were killed, she sallied forth to finish them off. They could have surrendered, but were unlikely to do so to a single knight. That gave her the warrant to kill them all.
That still left the problem of the king. Prince Edward was mortally wounded by the barrage, but the king had to die of an accident, so the reformists could not be accused of regicide. Dragging the king by his stirrup through the battlefield accomplished that. That left the realm without a king, and since Simon did not want to assume the position, there was an opportunity to replace the monarchy with a republic. The main other plausible claimant to the throne was Simon's son Harry, who also didn't want the job.
That situation opened the way for the Three to introduce a new Constitution, Bill of Rights, Rules of Order, and other reforms, which they do at the banquet following the battle, in the form of printed booklets using their new printing presses. In accepting them Simon lent his support for adopting them, and that brought the consent of others among the reformers and the nobility (whose privileges were not divested). Once land was granted to the farmers who worked the land, there was no going back to the old feudal system most of them knew.
It would not work to make the rest of the novel a manual on the governing documents. That would lose the readers. The relevant elements at various points in the novel could be introduced and used, leaving the documents to appendices for those who might want to read further.
Source: http://constitutionalism.blogspot.com/2016/07/how-to-get-people-today-to-adopt-sound.html
