3 – The development of the individual
Picture the first government. Not a parliament, not a flag. A handful of people around a fire, working out together where to cross the river, who keeps watch tonight, how to share what the hunt brought in.
That is all a government has ever been: people with a shared problem, coordinating. The need came first. The government answered it.
Now stretch that circle around the fire until it holds almost eight billion people across 195 countries. The circle is unrecognizable. The reason for it has not changed at all. People still need to coordinate. That need still defines what a government is for. A government that forgets this has lost its reason to exist — and tends to find that out the hard way.
Something has changed, though. Our coordination needs are now global. Yet our governments have remained national, often local. Your money knows nothing of borders: a single purchase at the checkout can touch a factory three continents away before the receipt finishes printing. The government standing behind you stops at the line on the map.
So what is a national government for, in a global economy? Who does it serve, and how?
Start with the heat. In a thermodynamic system, heat drives change. In a socio-economic system, choice does. The Dollar-Vote has been running quietly through all of human history, shaping every tomorrow. What is new is that we can finally use it purposefully, together.
For most of history that heat pooled at the top: in throne rooms, capitals, head offices. It is moving now. It is moving into the checkout line, into eight billion pairs of hands. As the heat moves to the individual, government’s focus has to move with it. Away from running a nation. Toward developing the people in it.
That is the yardstick for government:
the development of the individual.
Not half a person. The whole one: body, mind, feeling, and place among others. And this is not charity. It is mechanics. Think about what a conscious Dollar-Vote actually requires. You have to be able to read the label, and understand what it tells you. You have to be well enough that your own survival is not the only thing on your mind. And you have to have a little money to spare — because a person down to their last few dollars does not get to weigh how a thing was made. They buy the cheapest one, because they have to. Develop that person and you get a citizen who can look past the price tag and ask what they are subsidizing with that purchase. Leave them undeveloped and the system stalls: they vote, every day, with the only dollar they have, for the cheapest thing in front of them.
Every job a government already does fits under this one measure. Foreign policy, economic policy, health care, social security, rule of law, education, infrastructure, the courts. All of it, in the end, serving one thing: a person’s capacity to grow, to choose, and to take part.
And for the first time, the tools are in the hands of the individual. In 1820, twelve people in every hundred on earth could read. Today it is eighty-four. Add the internet, and the means to choose consciously are no longer held by a few. The power always belonged to the people. Only now can they exercise it with informed purpose.
Which gives us something to hold our representatives to. One question, asked of every law and every policy that reaches the floor: does this develop the individual?
If it does, it serves the purpose of government. If it does not, it does not serve the common good. It does not tend the Health of the Organism, this global village of ours. It is not the butterfly’s wings of a sustainable and equitable tomorrow.
The heat for change is in our hands, in our choices. Every day.
