Cooperative Democracy
an Essay by
The Divine World-Teacher,
Avatar Adi Da Samraj
Freedom is a matter of consciousness (or real intelligence) and responsibility. It is the duty and fundamental political motive, or social urge, of free men and women to create an intimate cooperative union with other men and women. Therefore, the basic idea of democracy (or of the “free society”, in general) is not mere personal independence (nor impersonally organized collectivism), but it is cooperative human community, or the culture of responsible human intimacy.
The principal obligations (or practical responsibilities) of any truly free (or cooperatively democratic) community are:
1. The practical establishment of truly humanizing and developmental cultural and Spiritual Wisdom as the basis of the daily education, moral and personal testing, and literal practice of all members of the cooperative community.
2. The practical establishment of rights of privacy and personal mobility within the cooperative community, and the full consideration and clear enunciation of just social laws (or behavioral agreements) as well as right and just means of enforcing and adjudicating the social laws (or behavioral agreements) within and without the cooperative community. (If social law ceases to be a matter of abstract and arbitrary rules, and is simply a matter of behavioral agreements made on the basis of Wisdom, universal love, and genuine compassion, then “law enforcement” and “justice” will also tend to become natural and intimate functions of the cooperative human community itself, rather than the duty of abstracted powers that manipulate “criminals”. Only if the matter of social law remains within the province of the intimate cooperative community will citizens adapt to the truly moral—or love-based, and truly ego-transcending—point of view, and it is also only within the intimate cooperative community that the “letter” of the social law can remain secondary to the compassionate and humanizing judgement of Wise representatives of the right and true “community mind”. Only one for whom the loss of intimate community would be the greatest loss of all will accept the rules and tests and judgements of the cooperative human community. And such a one generally need not be “punished” if he or she commits any wrong, but such a one can be healed by the obligation to serve the people he or she has wronged, as a condition for his or her reacceptance into full participation in the intimate cooperative community. But “outsiders”—or individuals who have never lived within, and become rightly dependent upon, the intimate cooperative community “bond” of a living culture—in fact have no peers and no truly moral foundation for their human existence. Therefore, great authoritarian, or parentlike, States breed “outlaws”—because they destroy the political principle of autonomous and intimate cooperative community as the basic unit of citizen participation.)
3. The comprehensive practical planning and orderly development (or “pre-solving”) of the total natural and human environment of the cooperative community (both in itself and in its cooperative relations with all other cooperative communities).
4. The practical management of the universal availability of fundamental and necessary goods and services within the democratically responsible cooperative community—and, thus, the guarantee of access to those goods and services on the part of all members of the cooperative human community who participate truly cooperatively and responsibly in the cooperative community, and who can, thus, offer one or another kind of fair exchange for goods and services. (And the cooperative community should, in its cooperative relations with all other cooperative communities, always help to establish and maintain the universal availability of necessary goods and services within all other cooperative communities.)