I could use some help. So periodically I reach out to new people. Here’s a letter I wrote recently.

Dear hopefully-kindred spirit,

I’m 59, I earned math and computer science degrees from Stanford decades ago. I have a home, a wife, 2 sons and a dog. I’ve been a software engineer. It has been a decent life, good in many ways, but with many struggles. About a decade into my career I discovered that it was great for my works to make a difference in people’s lives. Since the turn of the century, I’ve been increasingly bothered about politics and the state of the world.

A few years ago, I took an interesting one-year course looking at life newly. I knew I was resigned about most of the problems in the world, but didn’t realize till then that my resignation wasn’t really by choice. And I saw that it made me unable to make a difference. It was especially obvious in politics. So I gave up my resignation and, just as an exercise, took a fresh look at politics.

We have exactly the results in politics our political system allows

After a few months of looking in new ways, doing research and trying to participate was that we have exactly the results that our political system allows. Whether it’s small government, a balanced budget, fairer taxes, an end to corruption or concerted action on climate change, our current system favors the way things currently are. And our thinking reacts to the current system and mainly strengthens it.

Of course, this is sort of obvious and makes sense. Politics has no rules in it except the many we give it. On the one hand, it’s not a natural phenomena. On the other, like ants organize, human tendencies have led us to organize as we have- mainly in hierarchies. A bit of disruption was added with the move to democracy, but mostly we drifted back to hierarchies. The president is at the head of a hierarchy. Each member of Congress is at the head of their staff, and as a representative is also the leader of their district or state.

Our ways of organizing and communicating don’t support Democracy

Similarly, each party is organized in a hierarchy. Each campaign is. Each special interest group. And for all these, the communication is mainly top-down.

Democracy isn’t top-down. It’s bottom up. Yet, except for the brief communication of voting, we have no bottom-up communication.

In politics, what do we want?

I have two questions. First, what do we want in politics? I listed a few results above, like a balanced budget or fair taxes. But what do we want in the nature of politics that will allow for that?

There are lots of ideas- democracy, representation, fairness, transparency, justice, and more. When I looked, what I saw is that we have a hierarchy of power with our representatives as leaders. Though they need voters to vote for them, there’s no other facet of accountability. So they’re our leaders much more than they are our public servants.

Since they’re not accountable to us, we can’t be responsible for what they do, for how they govern. In short, we don’t self govern.

And when I looked at this more and more, I saw that a system that supports accountability could deliver breathtaking results. Plus it could be added without changing a law.

The reason for my letter- shall we talk?

I haven’t been able to create it on my own. I simply lack the funding, the network, and probably the communication skills. Hence this letter. (And I apologize for it being so long…)

Would you be interested in helping create a new possibility for America, and humanity? If so, please contact me. You can email to me using my first name, here @PeopleCount.org. And if you just want to be notified when, someday, we finally go live, please add your email address to our announcement list.