The Evolutionary Role of Citizen Deliberation
CategoriesProbably the evolutionary ecosystemic truth that most applies to citizen deliberative councils is that organisms co-create the environment that shapes them. They evolve it; it evolves them. Rain and wind have an impact on the presence and role of trees -- and trees have an impact on the presence and role of rain and wind. Organisms are part of each other's environments -- and as they change, their environment changes, and then they change, and then their environment changes. They co-evolve each other, round and round, for billions of years...
People co-create the communities, societies, governments and cultures that shape their behavior, their consciousness, their lives. This is always true, no matter what kind of society they live in -- a truth Gandhi used to empower his people. Democracy is supposed to be based on people doing this co-creation consciously as citizens -- creating their shared world and letting it shape them, and then creating it newly -- an iterative cycle of mutual shaping and co-creation. The fact that it is not that is no reason that it cannot become that.
Doing this co-creative work well, collaboratively, wisely, and very consciously is what citizen deliberation is all about. Citizen deliberative councils are one aspect of a visionary wisdom culture which could help us evolve together consciously -- not through anything esoteric, but just through listening and learning together and discovering what makes sense together, over and over and over..
posted by Tom Atlee on Wednesday May 11 2005
updated on Saturday September 24 2005URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/tom_atlee/2005/05/11/the_evolutionary_role_of_citizen_deliberation.htm
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