Building the Sixth Republic
Creating the sixth republic out of some of the fragments of the fourth and the fifth is a generational project. Like the first republic, we tried to avoid the characteristics of society that resulted in the former problems. For us, that meant the many problems that were present even at the start of the first republic, but grew in importance slowly until the fourth was finally overwhelmed and destroyed from within. It was all the more important because the fourth republic itself was an attempt to correct the errors and problems of the third. The fourth was perhaps even more ambitious than the sixth, because it was an attempt to reform and reshape without destruction. In our case the destruction is a given, and we are building from cleared ground, in a way. What went before, the fourth republic and the fifth, are gone along with their constituents. That gives us freedom from a “fifth column” within our own newborn society; something the fourth republic never overcame.
We begin with the flaws of the past, which must be faced clearly and understood. In the first republic, it was Adams who said that “no expense would be too extravagant” to ensure the education of “every rank and class of people, down to the lowest and the poorest.” Those expenses should be, he said, “maintained at the public expense.“
Another flaw, particularly evindent in the fourth republic, is overreliance on litigation and legislation. These were intended, originally, as the last resorts when all other attempts at compromise and understanding had failed. In the fourth republic they instead became methods of first resort. Our sixth republic should rely instead on the establishment of a culture discouraging litigation as a reflexive action. It is an obscure and difficult task to attempt to find the systems, intentional or not, used by past cultures to establish and nurture the values they attempted to live by. This is the case regardless of how we, today, might judge those values. the question is how to cultivate values at all.
We found the answer in an unexpected place: corporations, which represented a major force in the destruction of the fourth republic, nevertheless left behind an extensive literature about exactly the same issue: how to establish and nurture a culture direct the activities of the lower ranking employees. Managers occupied a liminal space bounded below by the pure employees, and bounded above by another class they often called “senior managers.” This is a use of the word “senior” that may not make immediate sense. What they meant was unrelated to chronological age. A “senior manager” was thought to be more autonomous and possibly less subject to the “culture” that was thought to be characteristic of the commercial organization.
The problem the corporations’ senior managers faced was needing to enlist the support of the employees beyond simply performing their jobs at the lowest acceptable levels. Thus “corporate culture” was born, and with it a minor field of academic study. Corporate culture experts worked out ways for a set of values to be deliberately developed and accepted by a group — and often, because corporations had become gargantuan during the fourth repulic (one of the factors in its destruction), a group large enough to be a “population.”
Corporate culture studies were originally driven by cynical interests, but it turned out that the studies were nevertheless rigorous and valuable. Thus some of the principles and practices developed in the process of destroying the fourth republic have become tools we use in the construction of the sixth.
At the beginning of the first republic, the mechanisms of governance were purposefully separated from the workings of belief. That became the principle of separation of church and state, a basic value until near the end of the fourth republic. But although there is a third force, the relentless pursuit of profit by corporate entities, the efforts to also keep that insulated from the other two were abandoned before the founding.
That initial mistake echoed throughout the first, second, and third republics, causing immense problems, until overwhelming and destroying the fourth republic. The real turning point occurred in 1886, and may even have been nothing more than an error by an unnamed court reporter. But there was no stated value analogous to the separation of church and state, so it went unremarked, became precedent, and immediately began to eat away at the foundation of society, like dryrot or termites. Corporations, in short, acquired “personhood” and were even accorded “rights” independent of their members and even their ostensible owners. The sixth republic is doubtless making errors as well, and perhaps some will similarly fester in the dark until wreaking more destruction. But we have corrected that particular error, and nothing similar to a fourth republic corporation can be created.
Nor will many people seek to create such a monstrosity, thanks to both education and cultural understanding. Not through indoctrination, but by facing the data and understanding cause and effect, even when the chain of causality becomes complex. That takes a certain amount of intellectual capability, which is both the right and the responsibility of sixth republic citizens.
At the end of the fourth republic, a majority of the population could read (and reason) at only what was called a “sixth grade level.” That is, they were intellectually functioning as preteen children. The educational system was perpetually under assault, often leveled at both the institutions and the professions. The decades-long assaults were led by citizens who were, themselves, functioning at an intellectually deficient level, perhaps spurred on by some degree of animus, and justified by ideas around “profit,” which should have been separated from the mix.
During the fifth republic, it was found that while some were able and willing to improve their own capabilities in this regard, there were some (many, in fact) who refused, rejected, or were unable to do so. That realization was one of the factors prompting the great migration that led to the sixth republic separating from whatever it is the scum have established to the south. It is my understanding that they have rejected the ideas of separating belief, profit, and governance, and also support education only in a limited way. It is very unusual and difficult to progress beyond a childish level of reasoning in their realm (the sixth republic quietly sponsors centers that welcome and assist what the scum often call “deviants” to further their education and even emigrate to join us).
There are more techniques and values we are embracing in building the sixth republic, including robust support of locality as well as establishing reilably distributed systems in virtually every area, but those I will save for the next report. The window for transmitting these missives is limited and temporary.
