We the People?

"We the people" comes from the preamble of the Constitution. That phrase becomes the foundation of not only this nation but also of the democracy that is central to its existence. The Constitution provides the structure for a system of governance, but the real heart of the nation is the belief that the individual citizen matters, the ordinary person who inhabits this nation and whose voice must be heard. Those individuals are not subservient to a monarch or an aristocracy, or an economic system or some religion or ideology, but are free and uniquely valuable simply for being human beings.

And it is that very humanness that is central and essential.

Yet increasingly, many people sense that something fundamental has shifted. Systems that were supposedly created to serve humanity now often seem to demand that humanity serve them instead. Economic systems shape governments. Technology is used to try to shape human behavior. Efficiency becomes more important than wisdom. Profit becomes more important than people.

Human beings risk becoming drones, little more than functional units inside systems constructed to be so large, complex, and powerful that they seem beyond questioning.

The great struggle of our time may not simply be between political parties or competing ideologies. It may be something far deeper: a struggle between humanity itself and systems of power, control, manipulation, and economic dominance that increasingly reduce people, to manageable objects.

George Orwell warned of a future built on surveillance, fear, and coercion. Aldous Huxley warned of a future where distraction, comfort, entertainment, and consumption would quietly rob people of their humanity and their value in the web of life that sustains this planet. Today, elements of both visions increasingly surround us.

Technology now has the capacity not merely to assist human life, but to direct it-- to shape attention, emotion, behavior, relationships, even reality itself. Human beings risk becoming drones within systems driven more by economics, efficiency, and control, than by human flourishing.

And underlying all of it is a dangerous assumption: that human value can ultimately be measured by productivity, wealth, security, or usefulness to the system.

But democracy was never supposed to be built upon such ideas.

Democracy depends upon the belief that human beings possess inherent worth beyond economics. It depends upon community, participation, shared responsibility, and the capacity of ordinary people to work together in shaping their collective future.

That may be precisely why authentic community is so threatening to systems built primarily on power and control. Within human community resides the real power of the citizenry-- the people who actually inhabit this nation. That power is the connective energy created when human beings work together. It grows exponentially with every additional person, every additional voice, until it becomes powerful enough to overcome even the largest obstacles. We saw an example of this in Minneapolis this last winter.

This is the time to do what Americans have done in difficult moments throughout our history: roll up our sleeves, come together, and face the challenge before us, as a united people.

We the people still applies.

And it still works wonders.