The fracturing of society and the rise of a misused term sovereignty

When the governing body of a nation-state abuses its people, be that through exploitation, lying, corruption, neglect, or deliberately manufactured ignorance, that nation-state creates the grounds for a precessional effect that will end in its demise.

In these last gasps of governing leaders of nation-states, corruption, accumulation and the use of any means to spell-cast people will be deployed.

Any unhealthy ecology has early warning signs. Failure to heed the early warning signs will escalate to a collapse.

To understand the field for this to occur, we must understand some of the key features.

Power

Power is an overused word that needs context to be held in integrity.

Individual power to act, make decisions, speak up and respond is right use of power. We misuse power when we use power to dominate, exploit, extract, and reduce others to non-human facsimiles. This is the wrong use of power. It is this form of power that dominates the world currently.

Our Individual power becomes more potent when we have something others want. Money, decision-making ability, access, weapons, warriors, cruelty – OR health, community, vibrancy, wisdom and skills.

How did we access our power? Did we get it by extraction, exploitation, violence, inheritance or stealth? Did we trick or spell-cast others to take it from them? Did we convince those we took from that it is their fault? OR did we make a commitment and apply ourselves towards our health, vitality, education and wisdom?

When people want your time, knowledge, connections, influence, labour, and courage – your power – do they take it without an exchange honouring both parties? Do you allow them to take it via an exchange that rewards them and, in the process, exploits yourself? Do you undercharge for it, or overcharge and, in the process, exploit the integrity of the offering and you as the offerer?

All of these questions surface one part of the landscape of power.

On another level is institutional power which lives in law. Law is designed in its right expression to protect against abuse of power. Driving too fast or under the influence of alcohol is a risk to the lives of others. Protecting the rights of consumers is another right use of institutional power.

Law has been conscripted by the powerful to protect their rights and assets to create a set of rules that is unique to them while hollowing out the rights and access of those with less power. (See ​The Code of Capital​) These legal codes for the powerful are contributing exponentially to the demise of humanity.

A society absent law will disintegrate into a messy heap. Out of this heap will rise someone who seizes power and creates their law over others, an autocrat or oligarch.

To prevent autocracy and law for one person’s betterment while extracting from and exploiting others is why we have codes of law and institutions to protect these codes. Yet, when these institutions are corrupted to protect a particular class of people above the others, we set the stage for the whole system to collapse.

Sovereignty and the co-opting of the term through white supremacy and others in the conspiracy space

In this milieu of power-seeking, we see the word sovereignty spoken with rising frequency.

Sovereign – having supreme power; – from Old French soverain “highest, supreme, chief,” from Vulgar Latin *superanus“chief, principal” (I love this superanus reference – it knocks some of the edge of the word.)

When people’s access to trusted institutions and citizen-focused government representatives of nation-states is eroded over time by corruption and winner-takes-all attitudes, when the mythology of our origin stories in colonised countries is challenged – as it should be – when the coloniser’s rights feel threatened by the colonised – for any reason – when our nation-state is overcome with migrants fleeing poverty, climate, war and hunger and it feels like our access, limited as it is, will be reduced, when we feel disempowered and without choice, when the ‘other’ – be that other race, other religion, other castes – is seen as a threat, our desire for our rights over the other is likely to surface as a ​precessional effect​.

The rise of the sovereign citizen movement is the result. Its Pattern Integrity is fear, a belief in nativist settler rights to land, a ‘no-one-tells-me-what-to-do’ stage of ego development, seeded, with good reason, in a deep distrust of the Nation-State, and the pot stirred with targeted delight by conspiracy gurus, who profit from an adoring crowd of believers seeking to place their power in someone, or something, they feel is serving them, even though it rarely is.

From this perspective, can we judge, with scathing harshness, the sovereign citizen movement? Decades of distrust and disregard, stirred by fear from those who spell cast and profit from retail fear. At the least, we can understand this movement and be compassionate. We can also know the ecology from which it grew. Systems, structures and governance that do not serve the people, institutions that get away with the murder of humans, animals, nature and our future. Law that protects the privileged and throws everyone else under the bus. Tax codes that break the backs of those with the least while enabling those with the most to pay the least.

In Syntropic World, I have used the term sovereign many times, but with a very different context.

In Australia, we have the half-century existence of a First Nations peoples ‘tent embassy’ on the grounds of the old Parliament House in Canberra. It was set up as a statement by our First Nations people that they never ceded sovereignty of the land of Australia to the colonisers. Terra Nullius – nobody’s land – was how the land was described to those who had a 65,000-year history of habitation. I can imagine the look on the face of one of our politicians who has 17 investment properties if tomorrow someone said to him that all of his investment properties are declared Terra Nullius. Yet the fear of this exact thing happening is cultivated to keep the conquered divided, cultivated by politicians backed by their corporate landlords – those with power.

This statement by tent embassy caretaker Murriguel Coe, says sovereignty is pretty simple.

As does everyone. Yet, this type of sovereignty comes, as always, with conditions.

This is the way Syntropic World and I see sovereignty: Self-determination. Sovereign to self. Always and only in the context of the understanding that everything is a whole and a part.

Rights and responsibilities. Whole parts. Holons

I am a whole, with sovereign whole choice, as part of a larger whole that includes you, who also has equal rights to sovereign choice. If my actions deny your sovereign choice, then we have an issue. Or, to say it differently, my rights ALWAYS come with responsibilities to the other, of which I am a whole part.

If I want to walk the streets freely, infected by a terrible contagious disease that will kill others, this is not sovereignty. It is sickness. If I want to drive drunk and kill or maim innocent, this is not an expression of sovereignty. It is an expression of selfishness.

It is for this very reason we have laws. To stop those who are careless, selfish and irresponsible towards the same rights as others.

We are all whole, yet we are also always a part of a larger whole. To deny this is to deny our existence. You will not exist without the other caring for you as a child, farming the food you eat, refining the petrol that fuels your car, and creating the technology that gives you access to the internet.

You will not exist without well-maintained access to roads, without the hospital and the medicine and the carers who will care for you, even if they think you are evil.

The relationship between power, sovereignty, rights, responsibilities, law, citizenship and community, governance, the structures and people that steward them and the developmental capacity of the steward leaders who intend to enable increased well-being for Earth and all her creatures or not, requires comprehensive consideration. They are integrally linked. They are whole.

To attempt to have power without responsibility, to seek community and enterprise without law, to claim sovereignty without giving the same claim to all humans, our earth and creatures, is to deny the complementarity of existence.

We are all citizens of Spaceship Earth, as Bucky Fuller called it. Our home planet is the only one we have. We might begin to act like this is true.