Someone on Quora asked me, “Can orthodox thinking change the world?”

Yes and no. No: We’re probably not going to change the world with the thoughts we’ve already had. But yes, it will include orthodox thinking that will change the world.

But there’s more to thinking than just thoughts. Before 2017, PeopleCount.org will begin changing the world. It’ll start by making the US Congress accountable to the people. It has no new new technology in it. In fact, one might say there’s no new thinking in it at all. It contains a bunch of old thoughts, applied to the domain of politics.

But it’s a new context for politics. It’s a context of empowerment of voters, and responsibility for governing ourselves. It’s a context of politicians serving people and representing them in the problem-solving process of governing a country.

You could say none of this is new, as well. We’ve long had the notion of “public servants” and “representation”. The problem has been that they had conflicts of interest, so they were servants of wealthy interests, while trying to be public servants. They had the intention of representing us even though we couldn’t say what we wanted and they couldn’t hear it. So we had a fictional world of intention that didn’t match their real world, and it didn’t work. But occasionally it was close enough that we could maintain our mythology about it.

On the one hand, there has never been the possibility of a democracy that was truly representative. On the other hand, you could say that we’ve had these ideas all along. And though there’s nothing in the Bible about democracy, this new way of governing will make possible peace and prosperity, kindness to neighbors and the poor, treating others as we want to be treated.

While there is plenty of thinking about these virtues outside of orthodox Christianity and Judaism, yes, this kind of thinking will change the world. And, we’ve had this kind of virtuous thinking for years. It’s been changing the world for millennia.