A different kind of political party?

The natural political situation:

I've come to the conclusion that the people who really run New Zealand are the media, schools, tertiary institutes, and Hollywood, etc - that is, the opinion makers and culture movers. Our politicians are really just political appointees that the media effectively installs for us. 

The media can, and does, make and break whatever politician they want via their power to give exposure, or not, and their power to frame politicians (via the all-powerful post-edit) in whichever way they want. Let's face it - they run the show. As long as most people receive their information passively, as they do, the media will basically own their assumptions.

As I like to say, if the world of politics is a supermarket then the people we recognise as politicians are just the checkout girls, taking the public's [media manufactured] orders.

An excellent example of how our politicians are, and must be, puppets of public opinion can be seen with the ACT party. It went from 1% to 10% in just a couple of years. But how? In part the rise was driven by disillusioned National party voters who had nowhere else to go, but also I believe it was because the leader of the ACT party, David Seymour, became a clear 'sell out'... 

Seymour never touches anything that might upset the media, and he never goes to controversial realities that his select voter-base does not want to hear. An example is in the way his party talks about treating mental sickness yet never, ever, talks about what causes it in the first place, which is overwhelmingly child abuse and infantile damage (which has been well understood for decades). He keeps his mouth shut because he knows no one wants to hear it. He sells out, basically... 

But this doesn't mean that Seymour is a bad guy. He simply accepts that his job is to represent public opinion - not drive it. That's honourable enough, though it does mean our politicians are an empty force for change in themselves.

Really, politicians are just representatives that we insist on humiliating, because unlike a union rep' who can openly say "well guys, I don't agree with this position myself but it's your call and my job is to do your bidding - as I will"...we instead insist that our politicians pretend to agree with us, even when they don't...

That's a painful job, and it explains why our representatives tend to be shallow people. They have to play a game with themselves to compete. They have to pretend to themselves to agree with what they don't, to pull off "authenticity". That's our fault, not theirs, as we make such ridiculous demands on them.

So what should a political force look like, if it wants to have a real impact on public opinion?

I say forget parliamentary politics and go straight for public opinion. Compete with the self-appointed media for their throne. Change the minds that change the politicians.

What I'm thinking of is a political "party" that focuses directly on influencing public awareness: An intermediate organisation that stands between a good think-tank and an advertising body for public education.  

To the end of achieving mass-public education, think-tanks are typically impotent. Their vanilla and over-academic communication style renders them meaningless except for a small few, which is heart-breaking when they so often do such good work. There needs to be a mid-ground. A political retailer for good policy.

The organisation I'm thinking of should recommend policy positions based on research and reason, and then crowdsource marketing campaigns to promote their arguments. People will be much happier to donate when they can see exactly what their money is going to. 

-Muriel Newman had excellent success with this approach a few years back with Maori privilege issues, and we should learn from her example.

The organisation should maturely yet bluntly criticise political parties, and make public recommendations on who to vote for and what to vote for, based on good policy. It should not be inauthentically polite. People and organisations should win the reputations they deserve.

It should work on developing soundbites to get people alerted to the basic messages, because no-one's listening until they are first provoked. It needs to be clever more than 'intellectual'.

Note, the cellphone is a powerful tool today. People are getting used to using QR-codes which can work as an excellent extension for any public flyer, or billboard. Video material should be prioritised when appropriate. The QR-code allows people to look further immediately at the point where interest has been provoked (and not yet lost).

Flyers, flags, posters, billboards, Facebook backgrounds, online media shows, etc, can all serve to continuously thrust public awareness of the organisation out there, which allows the organisation to become a 'somebody' and in spite of mainstream media discretion.

An old saying is, if you're not copping flack then you're not on the target. An organisation like what I'm describing would get massive flack and exactly because it would be on target. If you're a threat then be ready to be abused. Don't be afraid of the media attacking you. If you're doing your job right then they certainly will. 

So for those who want to see change for the better, and wish to do something real about gross public ignorance, and can see the impotence of parliamentary politics, then I suggest moving in this direction. 

You could become more powerful than any other third party, by targeting the public mind directly.

And yes, it would have to be a voluntary organisation - with crowdsourcing campaigns. If you want money and an official political career then that's fair enough, but it's best that you join an establishment party to that end. That's not what I'm talking about with this idea.

Any thoughts?

-Andrew Atkin

The Hand of God?

Newton's cradle, as shown in the included image, could give us the most simple yet critically accurate expression of the fibre of the universe. Imagine a 'field' composed of trillions upon trillions of physical units, and a force within them driving the manifestation of what appears to us as matter - all subatomic particles.

The force within newtons cradle gives birth to the moving "particle" at the end of the line of balls. 

Think with this analogy: Matter is forced into existence, as a wave action (observable matter is a wave action), driven by the force within the field. Like Newton's cradle, it resonates in and out of existence, as it moves from a kinetic action (making it transparent) then back into a pure force within the field, in a cyclic manner. Exactly like newtons cradle.

Indeed, if matter works this way (and it looks as though it does) it would explain the 'bizarre' phenomena of elections instantly disappearing and reappearing hap-hazardly, from point-location to point-location. Are electrons just excitations bouncing in and out of the field, with the field being the true substance of all matter? Probably.

Also, the static force within the field may conduct over distance exceedingly quickly. It could be incomparably faster than the speed of light - or even instantaneous. 

Electric Universe theorists call the force within the field the electric force, and claim it must be at least 20 billion times faster than the speed of light, as required for the universe as we know it to even 'work'. Maybe they are right. If manifest matter is ultimately just a wave action, then the field is the true universe in terms of substance. 

The field may also be the foundation of other 'emergent' universes, of which are derived from the same field that generates other wave-actions (particles), though at different frequency groups to the wave-actions that make up our own known universe, which may make them completely invisible (to us) because we simply don't react with them, in everyday life. 

-It's the same thing as your radio only playing back the frequency it's tuned to. Your body and all matter is a 'radio' within the field, which in turn ignores all other wave-actions that it's not tuned to.

Within the field could be organised intelligence. Why not? If a comparatively crude brain can think, using chunky atoms and molecules, then a field could well support a 'thinker' and to an unimaginably superior extreme in terms of information processing potential. 

If the intelligence of the field (if it exists) can strategically direct forces within the field, then that intelligence could create life, worlds and galaxies, and possibly in the instant. It could contain the developed template of all kinds of structures, including living structures. It could support one massive hard-drive, ready to download the next Cambrian explosion when a given planet is ready to receive it.

And what about consciousness? That could be based in the field, as well. In fact analysis of the non-locality of consciousness already suggests this. This would mean that when, and if, our manifest bodies decompose, then that would not mean our consciousness ends because of it, as our consciousness would have nothing specifically to do with our bodies, in the same way that the internet has nothing specifically to do with your PC. 

However, we can think no further than the question of consciousness, because consciousness is as good as magic because it's absolutely impossible to conceptually understand. Though the field, as a force linking everything together, including all matter and knowable existence, can be described as the hand of God: All powerful, all intelligent, everywhere in immediate time and everything.

--and hey guess what? I managed to say all of that without any refence to anything non-structural, or fancifully esoteric. It was a fair speculation that respects the status of both our knowledge and our ignorance.

I wrote further on this topic, here.