imagining better
Imagine your ideal societal systems. How can you harness these imaginings to energize your fight for a better reality?
1 Samuel 8:4-5
All the Israelite elders got together and went to Samuel at Ramah.
They said to him, “Listen. You are old now, and your sons don’t follow in your footsteps. So appoint us a king to judge us like all the other nations have.”
The people who have lived with no king but God, no formal rulers but God’s prophet Samuel and the judges who rise in times of trouble want a king. Why?
Here, they explain that the current system doesn’t work anymore: Samuel’s sons are judges now, but they’re corrupt — they take bribes, care more about their own profit than justice. Sound familiar?
More and more of us are coming to realize what the most oppressed among us, particularly Black scholars and activists, have been telling us all along: our political systems aren’t just broken; they were actually never built to serve anyone but the most privileged at all.
We want something better! …but we don’t know how to achieve it. Like the Israelites, we can’t even imagine what a better system would look like. So we stick to actions within the system, like voting and calling our representatives — actions that matter, yes, but are ultimately bandaid solutions.
Without worrying about how to make it work practically, spend some time imagining what your ideal government structure, or societal systems, would look like. How can you harness these imaginings to energize your fight for a better reality?
The way to lasting peace needs voluntary equality to prevent divisive force of majority rules. Native Americans and Quakers have been using the equality of consensus for centuries by patiently listening to neighbors. Since Jesus believed king and slave are equal, why not ask our churches to use equal consensus/spiritual unity for decisions, so we would learn new ways of sharing power. Then we can credibly ask our government to replace winner-take-all (exclude everyone else but billionaires) with equally shared power, or at least supermajorities, multiple parties, proportional executive power sharing (to votes earned), as Swiss already proved works well.