We put forward agoraXchange to elicit collaboration
for challenging a world in which myths about birthright result
in violence and suffering within and among nations and families.
We urge eliminating the laws responsible for nation and marriage
because we believe that these institutions misshape our material
and psychic lives and constrain the imagination in ways that stunt
us all.
We are disturbed by the familiarity and even acceptance of war
among much of the world's population, where each day on average
hundreds will die from bombs, guns, machetes: over six million
dead in wars since 1989, tens of millions friends and relatives
in grief. We see but cannot fathom a world in which a family will
live for a year in southern Africa on less than what a few businessmen
pay for a quick lunch in London. And we are mystified as to why
each year tens of thousands of people should die from drowning,
suffocation, dehydration, and being shot and stabbed simply because
they lack a piece of paper and attempt to move between borders,
to whose location they never agreed. We also believe human beings
deserve an earth that has air that is not toxic, water that is
uncontaminated, and an infrastructure that affords everyone basic
education and health care.
Finally, we see the travails of war, hunger, restrictions of movement,
environmental degradation, the lack of compassion in our political
institutions and in our families, as largely rooted in laws that
use birth for assigning us our place in life. It is the law of
nationality that makes one's place of birth determine where one
may move and live, and not competencies of language, knowledge
of a Constitution, or even education. It is the laws giving us
inheritance and kinship that determine whether one will have access
to the hundreds of trillions of dollars in wealth from estates
or whether one will grow up in poverty. It is marriage law that
produces the family tree, whose roots are always national.
Our present political institutions are not natural or inevitable,
but an experiment gone awry, a utopia for the paranoid. We seek
collaborators for bringing an end to the system of nation-states,
the demise of rules rendering us passive objects tied to identities
and locations given at birth. We call on all communities of and
for the imagination, for creative thinkers and visionaries, including
citizens, activists, artists, scholars, political leaders, and
the stateless, to eliminate those laws requiring us to live and
be seen largely as vessels for ancestral identities. We seek to
develop in agoraXchange and elsewhere laws that will privilege
creativity, empathy, and freedom.
Throughout history, including the present, decisions have been
made that form the body politic, creating slave and owner, lord
and serf, husband and wife, citizen and alien, heir or squatter,
largely without consultation with global or even domestic publics.
No one ever voted on whether to live in a system of nation-states.
We are using the medium of an online collaborative community not
only to facilitate construction of political communities free
of ancestral ghosts, but to perform the contingency of all laws,
including those regulating citizenship and familial relations.
We hope the medium of an online repository drawing on open source
technologies and methods for the collaborative development of
an online game will highlight how our present political institutions
have been designed, albeit haphazardly, by previous generations,
and so that we may facilitate people taking the inititative to
imagine and share new ideas for governance.
We believe that:
1. Human nature varies over time and among and within political
communities, and is largely a result of whatever the laws at a
particular point in time dictate.
2. Our current laws, especially those regulating citizenship and
kinship, encourage behaviors that are xenophobic and selfish,
though many resist this.
3. Xenophobia and materialist values should be changed not only
for reasons of justice, but so that we may design a body politic
that rewards acts of creativity as well.
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İzinsiz Gösteri'de yayımlanan yazılar ve görselller izin alınmadan ya da kaynak gösterilmeden kullanılamaz
