In exploring the political polarity of our nation, I came to realize how our system of government is based on the British colonial concept of a “commonwealth” — a political system based on sharing “valuable possessions or money” for the common good [1].
Money is an intermediary standard to enable the seamless exchange of goods and services — in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) language, goods and services are strategies for getting our needs met [2][3], as they are forms of objects and actions respectively; money is also a strategy, it is not a need.
Our nation is based on capitalism, which is a system designed to maximize money as measured by a “Gross Domestic Product” (GDP), which in NVC is a system based on the exchange of strategies.
Imagine this: ¿What if we had formed a nation based on “commonhealth” instead of “commonwealth”?
Health is directly associated with wellbeing, which is a universal human need that must be fulfilled to support life. The more we select strategies to satisfy our collective needs for health, the more chances we will have at self-actualizing individually and collectively as a culture -- on the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs [4].
In acknowledging health as a foundational principle for the strategies that we select, we will also satisfy our needs for sustainability, honoring our interdependent connection to nature.
However, in maximizing the focus of all we do on a strategy, instead of focusing on needs, creates the situation in which we are not satisfying our collective needs, creating a whole economy that lacks equity and is not sustainable. In other words, there is no compass for the direction of the collective.
In a republic, the constitution provides a kind of multi-dimensional compass for the direction of a nation.
“By definition, a republic is a representative form of government that is ruled according to a charter, or constitution.” [5]
Our current US constitution contains clauses that acknowledge our needs for freedom of expression, and some measures of social justice. “Health” is missing!
¿Assuming that we agree that health is worth satisfying for the “common good,” what would it take to shift the collective consciousness of a nation, leading to strategies that maximize the satisfaction of our needs at the lowest cost — through a needs-based economy?
End Notes and References
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