The Economist ~ The battle of ideas

Day 2,209, 05:57 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Spite313



Dear friends,


This is an article which uses references to UK politics, but is equally applicable and I hope interesting to all of you, regardless of country. A few days ago we had an election in the eUK between Invalidation and ChewChewShoe. Invalidation himself said at the time it was the first election in a long time that was a battle of ideas rather than of personalities. On the one side you had Chewie, who to be fair came out with a decent series of sensible manifestos which could have been posted any time in the last three years and made a good splash with voters. Alice on the other hand came out with a radical manifesto which elicited a huge response- both positive and negative. The final vote with only a half dozen votes in it was victory for Chewie, but the closeness of the election speaks to me about the changing culture of the eUK and the world.



Let’s talk about Freedom


It’s a word which is probably overused, but freedom is at it’s most base level the ability to decide your own future. You are eBorn with it, but most of us give it up or sell it off in small parts in exchange for other things- security, community, electoral success and so on. When you join a MU you might, for example, give up your freedom to choose where to fight in exchange for being given weapons to fight with. Or if you join a political party you agree to vote who they support, in exchange for hoping that when it’s your turn to run your fellow party members will support you as well.

But I think giving up freedom to others has become a reflex action in many cases, to the point where people happily surrender their own ability to make decisions, make changes and influence the situation and try and foist the responsibility for those things onto others. The government is the most likely candidate, with every small failure being blamed on faceless bureaucrats who, on closer inspection, are just players like yourself struggling under the burden of doing everyone’s job for them.

Alice’s radical manifesto for the UK and for the world said that if you want something done, you should think about how to do it yourself. He doesn’t word things in quite the same way as me, but his “politics of confrontation and competition” weren’t about everyone hating each other, they were about just that- competition. Instead of one monolithic MU, many. Instead of one monolithic party- many. The idea is that if you have twenty different ideas, you’re more likely to hit on a winner than if you just rely on the same old people trying their best to cope with overstretched demand on their talent.





Let’s talk about social darwinism

One of the biggest fallacies to emerge in the election was that we are advocating a social darwinism, where everyone is suddenly dumped alone on a desert island of poverty and has to curl up and die beneath the proverbial palm tree for lack of food or education. Firstly this is a very cynical viewpoint which kind of props up our position that people are being trained to be incapable of looking after themselves, and secondly it’s just not true. Look at all the times when government influence was removed from an area of the eUK- and how it flourished.

Removing monolithic organisations and top-down control doesn’t encourage players to give up, it encourages them to step up. With the decks cleared, they can make the game anything they want. But they don’t stand alone, they stand amongst a crowd of hundreds or even thousands of citizens in bigger countries. They stand with their friends, the people they’ve met in parties or MUs. Even people who they just know from fighting together or the odd PM. I myself am very aware that I stand in the centre of a web of thousands of people who read what I write or say or hear of it from someone else, but have never actually spoken to me in person. That network is far more important to me as a person than any title or position.

These people- yourself included, reader- are well capable of achieving their goals if they work together and set their minds to it. A single person with a good idea can become three or four bouncing plans off each other can become a massive MU with hundreds of members. And it has- Legion MU was a little sapling once, but when the great tree of the UK national army was felled, it rose to be a powerful oak, reaching the top 50-60 MUs in the world. No small achievement for an MU that sprang out of the hard work of half a dozen players who just decided to make change without government intervention. And now Legion lies felled, another three or four MUs are springing up in it’s place.



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Let’s talk about education

Everyone is born with the same assets, and everyone plays the same game with the same rules. Yet within a year of beginning, a fundamental inequality has asserted itself between the ideas people and the people who are willing to follow. It’s not just a financial imbalance, though the richest people in the world are all ideas people. It is a political and cultural imbalance. The people who hold power - even the likes of BigAnt or DonDapper - are all people who embrace ideas, stood on their own two feet, and made the changes they believed in.

You as an individual don’t just have power over your own self, you have a mind and a mind is a tool for change. Take responsibility for yourself and you get your freedom, but take responsibility for others and you gain the power to change the world. The key to all of this is education. Education about how to make your citizen the best it can be, education about how to spend money to make money, education to learn the history of the world, what has tried and failed before, so you can avoid their mistakes when you build the future.

But this education doesn’t have to come from the government. We had over four hundred voters in the UK in the last election, and probably twice that many people living here. That’s a huge knowledge-base of experience which we as a country can draw on, and we’d be mad not to. Each of you is responsible for helping and educating others, and you take on that responsibility after your first week in the game. I can help new players using broad strokes like money and food- but someone who has just lived through the first few weeks of gameplay is much better placed to educate and advise than someone who is five years old this month.



Conclusions


The UK had an election about ideas, but the great thing about this philosophy is its success or failure isn’t decided by elections. That is simply another platform for the idea of a citizen-led bottom up country, another way for the UK to reduce it’s government down to an MPP signing, foreign affairs focused body.

Each of you, wherever you are in the world, has the power to make changes in the game. Changes to your personal circumstances and those around you. Use the social networks you have, bring people together, pool money and ideas and make the game you want to play. The only thing stopping you is an unwillingness to step outside your comfort zone.

You all have talents and experiences you could share with others. Don’t be frightened to volunteer yourself, but if none of the existing education programmes appeal, make your own. All you need is a newspaper, a keyboard, and time. You can PM people right now, and there are plenty out there looking for help - they message me every day.


I hope that if nothing else, I’ve made you think about it


Iain