“Personalized Democracy” is proposed to usher in a new paradigm for social coordination. This document reviews the benefits that could emerge from applying this new social coordination form.

Prologue

The new Personalized Democracy structure can resolve many of the major problems destroying current society:
• inherently eliminating corruption
• producing an improved quality of life for all on an egalitarian basis
• elimination of poverty, homeless¬ness and crime
• elimination of social discrimination

While these achievements may seem impossible to many readers, it is only because human society has never seen or discussed any approaches like Personalized Democracy. People in current society, for example, can’t even envision a “democracy” without congresses, or voting, or compromise.

Benefits of Personalized Democracy


Here are some explanations for how Personalized Democracy can achieve these truly astounding results.

Social Coordination
• It would capture, on an ongoing basis, the individual voice of every citizen and carry that voice, individually, right through the process of creating and monitoring public programs.
• The process can be done with full individual privacy, yet provide full transparency for every public action.
• In a current democracy, “majority rules” voting always produces a group of “winners”. Unfortunately, it also produces a large “minority” of losers. In current society, this minority can easily approach 50% of the people. With Personalized Democracy, for the first time, every single individual’s particular need can be addressed with an equitable best possible result!
• Because every individual’s opinion and requests are addressed directly, for the first time, the process is inherently immune to political bias. This is so because each person’s wishes are directly addressed without the need for support by a large group, like a party.
• Political “conflicts” are entirely eliminated because direct citizen involvement eliminates political parties. Group activism will still exist and be supported. Rather than promoting candidates, who will no longer exist, the focus will turn toward education related to newly emerging problems that are not addressed by existing system models.
• Profoundly, this same process creates a social cultural structure that is also inherently resistant to racism, corruption, and commercial influence. The reason racism is blocked is because each person, independent of race, communicates their views and wishes in the same way. The process would be designed to ignore race as a factor unless there are special considerations. Medical conditions related to race would be an example. Since the opinion and wishes interaction process is a private matter, any factor related racism becomes invisible.
• With the ability to discretely handle input from each individual, as programs are implemented, each person also has a direct link to report how well or poorly programs are implemented. Because of the direct tie between each individual and the process, there are no longer “leadership positions” with power positions that can be influenced by corruption.
• Because program creation is “constructive” of every opinion directly, good ideas, that in current legislation, might be included in bills that are voted “no”, are no longer lost. Bad ideas, that might have ridden in on bills voted “yes”, are no longer included. The concept of “amendments” would no longer have any meaning. Every individual is essentially requesting special treatment, and in fact, getting it as much as possible.

Quality of Life
• Because Personalized Democracy has been specifically designed around equity and Quality of Life, it will immediately eliminate poverty, starvation, homelessness, and discrimination. No civilization in human history has yet been able to do this.
• With the requirement and ability to address each person as an individual, it opens doors to much wider diversity in all parts of life. Because the mechanisms of social structure would no longer discriminate individuals by where they live, their heritage, their race or skin color, their sex, etc., people would have much more freedom to be “different” from the “crowd”.
• To deal with the mind-numbing complexity of modern technology, Personalized Democracy would provide extensive personal development and career support tools as part of both basic education and general support. It would also provide “expert level” personal decision support tools to all individuals equally.

Public safety
• Personalized Democracy and another new principle referred to as “Cooperative Competition”, would be almost entirely based on motivation through “Positive Incentive” methods.
• With poverty and discrimination gone, and extensive career support built into every social structure, the underlying causes of crime would be drastically eliminated. Crime would essentially be eliminated. The idea of “punitive” approaches like fines and prisons will no longer make sense. Problems like “drug addiction”, for example, would be handled strictly as medical and systemic issues.

Trade and commerce
• The “Positive Incentive” model would be carried over directly into the entire commercial system. Western society’s current system is actually based on a “Predatory Bacterial” model. Consumers are told, “Buyer Beware”. This model is a carry-over from barbaric Stone Age thinking. Personalized Democracy and Cooperative Competition completely change the commercial landscape to one where all businesses and all organizations must act for the benefit of society, not the other way around.
• The new commercial motto would be “The Individual comes first”. Every commercial interaction with individuals or other businesses would be redesigned for high simplicity and efficiency.
• Because sustainability requires world society to achieve a 1.0 human footprint or lower, it also means world population must be much smaller. It also means, whatever population is determined to be stable given the existing technologies, population will no longer be allowed to grow beyond those limits.
• From a business standpoint, that means a future with zero growth. The impact of this type of thinking is profound! It means that essentially, there will be no new factories, stores, houses, roads, schools, cities etc. The only changes will be maintenance, improvements and creative replacement.
• Economically, it means no inflation or deflation!

Employment
• Relative to employment, the “Cooperative Competition” model will also apply. A simple example where this is currently applied is the Olympic Games where events have scientifically measurable goals: time, distance, accuracy, etc. In such events, strong competition is welcome because it produces a better performance for all. It would also imply that, for such an event, there could be many winners at the same time – all who break records, for example.
• With such a structure, the whole concept of unemployment would disappear. Cooperation among all businesses would insure that every “job need” was shared throughout the society. Business planning would be optimized to balance worker availability. Each person would be viewed as a social asset. If an unexpected situation occurred that eliminated jobs, a hurricane destroying a factory for example, those affected would simply return to educational settings to prepare them for other opportunities.
• The flood of defective products (like computers that can be infected by viruses) will disappear. The inundation of unwanted and misleading advertising will disappear. The reason for both of these cases is that primary requirements for all products would be public safety, ease of use, and ease of making an optimum product choice.
• The justifications for institutions like Law, Accounting, Medicine and Education to be “competitive businesses”, in the former sense of “competition” will be gone. These professions will be classified as vital public services and only be required at a small fraction of today’s levels. The products, services, and institutions we use will incorporate provisions to minimize the need for these services.

Education
• Employment and education would be merged. The corruption of education as a feeder for the “Predatory Bacterial” business model we now suffer from would be eliminated.
• As an example, the entire model for medical care would be revised to be a “health supporting” model, not a disease curing model. Every citizen would be trained during secondary schooling to at least the levels we now refer to as EMT or nursing skills. Every home would have automated telemedicine equipment and computer diagnosis support. Healthcare would be greatly improved to provide excellent care at 10% of its current cost.
• One additional observation raises a very sad indictment of world society. Not a single “leap forward” listed above requires any new scientific “discoveries”! For example, take the medicine benefit described above. Full emergency room level telemedicine equipped ambulances were demonstrated in Boston in 1992. Remote telemedicine surgery consultation between Boston, Moscow, and Paris was demonstrated in 1994. The ability of military surgeons at Walter Reed hospital to remotely operate on a soldier anywhere in the world using a robotic manipulator, was demonstrated in 1988. It is time to leave behind the corruption and Stone Age thinking that is holding society back.

Social Justice
• All laws would be rewritten to minimize the need for legal proceedings.
• With this approach, along with “The Individual comes first” requirement for businesses, all of those contracts consumers are supposed to read and sign will be gone! Most legal issues will be managed as greatly simplified “Uniform Commercial Codes”. They will be taught to everyone at the high school level.
• The changes in commerce, along with those that eliminate crime, will almost completely eliminate the need for a judicial system.