This is an introduction to Programmatic Civicism, which is my highest political ideology. It doesn't come up in my daily posts here when I'm in "Those dagnab liberals suck for X or Y reason" mode, but it's the highest political ideal that I would like to see pursued. It is both an ideal and a feasible possibility, because Programmatic Civicism describes a tangible method of arriving at that ideal.
At the foundation of Programmatic Civicism is the following principle: that in order to build a better society, one should make better people who together comprise that society. Depending on the role you see for government in making a better society, you might disagree that this is the exclusive means of doing so. But I think everyone, left or right, can agree that it would be a huge step in the right direction if realized. Thus, Programmatic Civicism is not inherently a left or right wing ideology. It could either belong to whatever camp a given adherent happens to fall into, or it could lie outside the left-right spectrum altogether.
But there lies the problem which it aims to solve: how do you realize the ideal you have in your head? Isn't that ideal most likely to remain a product of one's imagination and never become anything more?
In short, how do you bridge the gaping divide between theory and practice?
To answer this question, Programmatic Civicism has the following prescriptions:
1. Setting aside lofty questions of free will and individual responsibility, it accomplishes nothing to tell a man who's lapsed into poor behavioral and decision-making patterns "Shame on you, you b*stard!" and not offer him the means of getting better. Rehab isn't exclusively the domain of drug addicts but of criminals, underachievers, the undereducated, overeaters, the sedentary, people who harm their relationships with family, those with other negative personality traits, etc.
2. In a subversion of conventional wisdom, the hypocrite is a myth rather than a true villain.
It is always easier to give advice than to follow it yourself, and it's easier to be motivated to take hard action by someone else's compulsion than it is to motivate yourself. Rather than obstinately braying "HYPOCRITE! HYPOCRITE!" when someone tries to help you accomplish something that they haven't, the smart person would see this as a psychology hack which can be exploited. Instead of the masses listening passively to the instruction of a guru who has to pretend he's perfect (until some investigative journalists prove he isn't and the entire thing crumbles like a house of cards), two unmotivated people can "teach" one another to rise to the level of competency that they themselves would like to attain. The accountability group structure is where the most potential for improvement lies, and everyone in society ought to be plugged into such.
3. The accountability group structure needs to be designed well to produce good results. Were this not the case, anyone who attended regular AA meetings would be a well-adjusted, highly productive member of society (and we know they often aren't), since Alcoholics Anonymous has a sort of accountability group structure. A design, which I call a "program", should have many rules and protocols tailored to yield results. Below, I will list some design principles of a program that's in line with Programmatic Civicism:
3.1. Hard rehab
Metaphorically speaking, when neurons in your brain fire according to a certain habit, you "tread that path with a wheelbarrow" and "wear a groove" in the road, making it hard to turn left or right the next time. Which is to say that behavior, when repeated, reinforces itself as a habit. It took a great deal of time and repetition to arrive at the lifestyle a person is living now, so it will take a great deal of time and repetition to replace it with something healthier.
In drug rehab, the "gold standard" is 90 days, because this loosely corresponds to the amount of time needed to make or break a habit. With that much time, one can arrive at the ability to live every day without that to which they were accustomed.
3.2. Mythopoeia
What hard rehab does is establish a new "baseline" for one's behavior. But it doesn't shield one from temptations to relapse upon returning to society. For this, they need a reason to avoid doing so.
Self-improvement movements are known to utilize mythopoeia, which is a fancy word for myth-making. There's an entire Wikipedia article on the Mythopoetic Men's Movement, which thrived around the 1980s and 1990s. If you've watched enough Vice documentaries on YouTube, you may be familiar with the type: men are in a wilderness retreat with pseudo-Indian vibes, somebody beats on a drum, misquotes Carl Jung, and says something like "You've completed your hero's journey. Peter Pan has grown up from a boy into a proper man. Congratulations."
Basically, these programs used the power of suggestion to convince attendees "My life has been changed by the 48 hours I spent here", in the hopes that that belief would help the personal benefits the program aimed to impart stick. It wasn't different in principle from the proverbial 30 year old alcoholic felon who found Christ, turned his entire life around, and broke into the middle class with a wife and kids by age 45.
Of course, the self-improvement industry is rife with charlatans and perverse incentives, such as making fortunes by selling the temporary feeling of transformation and personal growth in lieu of its actual substance. Additionally 48 hours of indoctrination isn't enough time to make someone truly believe that the idea being suggested is true. But the point here is that a "rehab program" combined with believable and inspiring "myths" can give a graduate reason to stick with it afterwards.
The third and final step is the day-to-day accountability group. When done intensively, and when underpinned by the aforementioned two steps, the result can be an upward spiral for most people enrolled in said program. This would, just to be clear, be a program one is part of for life, though certain steps like rehab would be one-time only. It would occupy a great deal of one's time and energy and would rise to the level of a religious cult, though without a charismatic leader who can abuse and exploit the flock.
To tie it altogether, here is a specific example of how such a program would be organized:
You are invited to a 90-day wilderness retreat where you eat right, sleep right, live according to a schedule, exercise your body, exercise your mind, and have nothing to entertain you besides a larger-than-life message that seems to have reached you from a supernatural place of origin. Then you go home and are part of the group for life. It is leaderless and its members are governed by a pre-established set of rules. Everyone has an accountability partner, with whom they discuss things over the phone and in person, set plausible weekly, monthly, and yearly goals for life improvement, and are disciplined by (to the level of severity that one consents to) if they fail to meet those goals. Ideally, one would live with his accountability partner so that the two of them are constantly in touch. There's no need for a big commune; a group of two or three living together in an apartment is enough.
For most people, the first priority would be career. They'd aim to break into more economically productive jobs and make more money. Next would be things like being healthy, and then one's relationships with friends and family, then broader philanthropy, and finally miscellaneous personal issues or goals. The group would constitute a web of interpersonal connections through which people can get to know each other and find likeminded business partners. Motivated by an outpouring of friendship and generosity between men, there would be a sharing of advanced technical knowledge needed to build a 21st century economy, keep the US competitive with foreign powers like China, and grow GDP large enough to keep the national debt from swallowing us whole.
In short, a well-designed program that takes off and reaches this country's 300,000,000 citizens could basically solve our problems and save us from pending national collapse.
As for what precisely this "well-designed program" would be, it depends on who's founding such a group. The best way forward is for many different groups to be founded with many different approaches, in the hope that one of them actually takes off and transforms America. These groups should be volunteer-run and not money-making enterprises. Members should pay no dues to an organization, much less to a singular person. Greed is a cancer which has infested, tainted, and destroyed the whole reputation of the self-help industry, and it is a pitfall the Programmatic Civicist would do best to avoid if he wishes to succeed where all others before him have failed.
Anyway, this is it.
I'm not delusional enough to think that my average post here on DART, or previously on DDO, has been of any real value to the world. But in this forum thread, I think, has been put forward a truly novel idea that's never been strung together by anyone else in exactly this form. All I can ask you to do is read this and judge for yourself whether or not Programmatic Civicism has serious merit to it.
