Contracts

                Since the Enlightenment, at least, we have looked at societies as being based on a social contract.  The idea is that the sovereign rights of the individual are voluntarily limited by the social agreements, such as laws and institutions, and that those limitations are based on an enlightened self-interest.  The soaring rhetoric of the opening of the Declaration of Independence is probably the most well known and repeated expression of that idea.  Given that grounding, it is completely understandable that we have a democracy based on the adjudication of individual rights.  Scratch the surface of any American’s understanding of democracy, and they are bound to start talking about their rights.  In English law, rights are mostly related to money and property, so our democracy has also created an unequal and unsustainable economy of individuals making money at the expense of the political franchise.

                Now that the presidency of Trump has made the limitations of that approach obvious, it might be time to go back and rethink our obsession with a social contract.  On the one hand, the contract is supposed to protect us from tyranny, but what is the crushing poverty caused by individuals bending the rules to create obscene wealth at the expense of others if it’s not tyranny.  Of course, we don’t want a King, but a capitalist feudalism doesn’t really seem like such a cheery alternative.  Contracts for the oligarchy that founded our nation were only ever meant to apply to a limited class of individuals.  That is still true.  The market produces wealth, but only for those who can afford to play in and manipulate the system.  Most of us are just spectators.  The legal system protects our rights, but only if you can afford representation that is better than the other side.  The worst part of contracts can be seen in Trump.  He never signed one he intended to honor, and his oath of office was just another convenient lie.

                Social contracts cannot create nor protect a democracy.  A democracy has to have at its core a commitment to something greater than individual sovereignty.  Maturana says that we ‘bring forth’ a world, and democracy is a specific example of that.  Creating a democracy is a move to realize that it is what we are collectively and not individually that defines our existence.  We have been sold the story that it is strong individuals that make a society great.  That’s a lie.  What makes a democracy great is collective achievements of its people.  That means that democracy is the environment and relationships of its people, not in the archives in Washington D.C.  The constitution is still there, but the commitment to a social destiny is not.  We were never meant to be a diverse nation.  The compact of the founders only covered a small group of people.  Once their shared hatred of King George delivered a surprise victory, even that initial solidarity started to unravel.  They found out their interests were not so mutual and that their willingness to sign on to a new nation was compromised.  The narrative we spin out in public school American history is edited to leave out the conflicts and the exclusions, so now that we are faced with the end of that compact, we have no living example of how to proceed.

                If there is to be a next act in the American democracy, it won’t be created around contracts and individual rights.  If there is to be a next act, it will be based on a narrative grand enough to unite us and loose enough to let us be the diverse and complex society we’ve become.  Instead of the institutions of democracy, we should concentrate on the environment of democracy, the felt experience of seeing something beyond ourselves and our immediate interests.  As far as I can tell, there is a whole political party in America that thinks democracy is the right to make money, regardless of what or who is hurt in the process.  Their model of the contract is the same as Trump’s.  They cannot see and do not help create a living and relational environment of democratic value.  To them, their success is all that matters.  That approach has hit the wall.  The life world is in peril.  We are setting our children up to fight over the last scraps of food in an environmental diaspora.  We are wasting the time we have producing garbage instead of building a future.  The limited vision of the Enlightenment created such a strong sense of self that we are now incapable of understanding how illusory the self is.  Nothing we have thought or told ourselves about how we got here will help us get to a real democracy.