Boris Stremlin has raised in his May 10, 2003 post "PFPC" a number of
questions re PFPC, and Warren Wagar answered them all in detail,
prefacing his post, however, with the remark that these questions
"should also be put to Dr. Rojas and Dr. Prugovecki."
Let me say that I agree with many of the answers supplied by Dr.
Wagar, but that we have "agreed to disagree" some time ago with
regard to some of the theories and the practices to which we
subscribe. This, of course, does not prevent us from agreeing on
many fundamental issues. That is a necessary part of the process
which I call "coordinated group decision making," or "cogdem" for
short. (Incidentally, Dr. Wagar and I have never met, and our
"electronic acquaintance" is entirely due to e-mail and the Internet,
which, I am by now certain, will one day be totally integrated in
medium of multi-personal communication along the lines of the
"Coordinating Computer Complex" which I envisage in my futuristic
writings.)
I have explained in the article "Coordinated Group Decision Making: A
Sociological Model for Future Democracies," published about one year
ago on the Utopias Forum website
how I have arrived at the idea of cogdem, spurred by political
developments in the late 1960s. I shall, therefore, not take valuable
WSN space by repeating that story (which, I think, was submitted last
year to WSN by Dr. Wagar), except to say that I envisaged in the
early 1970s how some future developments in computer technology might
enable new forms of participatory democracy. That was, however,
before the Internet was even conceived, so that when I was ultimately
confronted with its technological reality, I had to ask myself how a
cogdem-based might be eventually achieved without bloodshed.
I have provided some answers in the context of two futuristic novels,
which I have recently published (cf. my website above), but they
invoke catastrophic events, which the present world situation does
not render at all unlikely, but which are certainly most undesirable
for humankind.
In one of his answers to Boris Stremlin's questions, Dr. Wagar
mentions "a planet-wide revolution, programmed and timed to seize the
initiative in the wake of catastrophe, [which] can create a radically
different United Nations with the resolve, the teeth, and the support
of the masses to disarm national armed forces and redeem the wealth
of the world from its corporate malefactors."
My answer to the same type of question is much less spectacular, and
it was presented in the article ON SOME FUTURE SOCIAL EFFECTS OF THE
COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION, published last year on the website
It is based on the observation that the Industrial Revolution had
proceeded without significant bloodshed (but, of course, caused a
tremendous amount of suffering among those exploited by the emerging
capitalist class), and proceeded under its own impetus due to the
availability of new technologies. Hence, I reasoned that the
invention of totally new type of communications media, which can't be
totally controlled by those in power, and which furthermore enable
two-way mass communication (as opposed to the inventions of print,
radio and TV), might eventually lead, through a long and gradual
process, to the emergence of mentally liberated masses of people, who
would not allow themselves to be manipulated the way, say, the
American public has been manipulated by the American ruling classes
since the very inception of USA.
Of course, this hypothesis is very un-Marxist, and contrary to the
ideology of revolutionary class struggle. But it is based on my
observations in five countries in which I have lived for long periods
of time, and several more, which I have visited for protracted
periods of time. These observations indicated to me that ideological
indoctrination can play as big a role in shaping the behavior of the
"masses" as the economic factors to which Marxism pays overwhelming
attention. (That's one of the reasons why I wrote my WSN posts about
supremacist ideologies based on fallacious and racist or chauvinistic
"superiority" arguments.)
For example, I now live in Mexico, and I find that Catholic
indoctrination, combined with beliefs that have survived the
encounter of the Aztecs with the Spaniards, have influenced
enormously social relationships in this country. Before that I lived
in the United States and Canada, where I found that the almost entire
population, including most of the "intellectuals," have been totally
"brainstuffed" since the moment of birth with a system of beliefs
which do not reflect social and economic realities. (I invented the
term "brainstuffing" as a counterpart to "brainwashing," since its
victims have never acquired the kind of objective and reliable
information that could be "washed out" of their brains, and are even
blissfully unaware that they've been brainstuffed.) In fact, in the
two "communist" countries in which I have lived for many years
(namely pre-Ceausescu's Romania and Tito's Yugoslavia) I found the
people least brainstuffed, since they have been exposed since
childhood to various ideologies ("communist," "capitalist," Catholic,
Eastern Orthodox, Muslim, etc.), so that as they grew up many of them
did not totally fall under spell of any single ideology.
Of course, that did not prevent Milosevic to take over power and
drive Serbia into a series of almost genocidal wars, of which many
Serbs disapproved. But to me that only demonstrated the fact that the
Serbian people are still far from the higher level of "consciousness"
necessary for cogdem or some other advanced form of participatory
democracy. However, compare that with the way Bush came to power in
US through a fraudulent election, and then proceeded to invade Iraq,
while the great majority of the Americans bought the propaganda
handed down to them by CNN and other big-time media controlled by the
US ruling classes.
Hence, I look upon PFPN as one of the many parallel efforts to resist
Bush and the neo-con tide, which now threatens in a very real way the
entire world. Those of you who have been following my recent posts
might have noticed that I first brought PNAC and its goals to the
attention of WSN in my April 1, 2003 post with the subject "A SECRET
blueprint for US global domination."
It turned out that the blueprint was not totally secret, and that a
few WSN subscribers already knew about it. Nevertheless billions of
people across the globe still do not know about it, including, I
believe, the huge majority of the American people. However, at the
beginning of the last month I myself knew very little about PNAC and
its very explicitly stated plans for US global domination. But then
Dr. Robinson Rojas reacted positively and constructively to my April
29, 2003 post on the same subject, and in a very modest illustration
of how cogdem works in practice, we now have online a PFPC website.
(Incidentally, as in the case of Dr. Wagar, my "electronic
acquaintance" with Dr. Rojas is again due exclusively to e-mail and
the Internet.)
I only wish that more WSN subscribers had participated in this little
enterprise. Of course, cogdem requires intellectually alert people
who not only like to discuss issues, but are also willing to act
after a consensus is achieved by democratic means. Although this does
not seem to be the case with WSN subscribers, I have seen it happen
in some other recent instances, and I give an actual example in my
aforementioned article ON SOME FUTURE SOCIAL EFFECTS OF THE
COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION.
In fact, I believe that the world-wide resistance to the war on Iraq
might be largely due to the existence of the Internet and e-mail.
Anybody with access to Internet can nowadays use Google or other
search engines to trace dozens of websites which oppose the present
US imperialist policies.
Perhaps one day the people who have founded these websites will start
actively interacting and cooperating. That would be the next small
step on the very long path leading towards a cogdem-based society.