Light, Language, You, and Utopia

1. Most people spend most of their time talking to themselves in their head. Most of the time, that's what "thinking" is – talking to ourselves as we navigate our ways through our daily lives.

2. When you're talking to yourself, there's a you doing the talking, and another you that you're talking to – two yous (and more, actually).

3. The sliver of space and time between the you doing the talking and the yous you're talking to is the point where being human intersects with light, the point where what makes us human makes us human.

4. The human intersection with light (that which makes us human, that which fills the spacetime slivering our yous) is linguistic, language-based, and therefore, by definition, a group activity.

5. By living a language as part of a group, we live light, we construe reality as a spacetime using light and language. There is necessarily a language of light embedded in human ways of life, typically implicit, deep in the background of everyday life and consciousness. But if enough of us determine to accept the responsibility, we have the freedom and power to create new languages of light – new spacetimes, new realities.

6. Particular languages of light and the spacetime realities they construe depend on the group ways of life – the language of living light – of particular groups of people. Opening up benevolent-path spacetimes depends on the language-practice of people living benevolent-path ways of life. (Light, language, and way of life are inseparable, inherently inter-constitutive; their necessary link is what makes humans human.) The benevolent-path way of life that will open up benevolent, even utopian, spacetime realities, is what can be called "true democracy," a form of society based on freedom, responsibility, and good will in which any governing is done by and for the people being governed in any particular situation. It's really a simple, 5-step moral system of freedom and responsibility that opens a path to a utopian way of life:

Step 1) HUMAN DECENCY

At birth, every human being is equally deserving of respect and equally deserving of a society where she or he can live a good life.

Step 2) THE GOLDEN RULE / MORALITY

Good citizens and decent people live by the following principle of morality and freedom: do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or your children or mother or whoever you care most about in the world. The golden rule demonstrates that morality ("the way a person should act") is SOCIAL; it's about how you treat other people and the extent to which you consider how your actions will affect other people.

Step 3) DEMOCRACY

With golden rule-morality as the starting point, the ideal political form is what can be called "true democracy," which is to say that people govern themselves – any governing is by and for the people being governed in any particular situation. Wouldn't you want the opportunity to participate in any decision that affects you? The golden rule demands we extend that right to all. And that is true democracy.

Step 4) JUSTICE

Within the open-honest-thoughtful discussions that make up the political process of true democracy, good citizens and decent people will consider the good of everyone affected by the decision to be made, as called for by the golden rule. If people try to argue for a course of action based on selfish self-interest, good citizens and decent people will recognize and critique such positions as anti-democratic.

Step 5) FREEDOM

Live and let live; look kindly on people, both generally and specifically; feel free to find and create ways to be happy and enjoy life any way you can without hurting or infringing on others.

We have the freedom and the power to create true democracy. We just have to believe in it, and then start finding ways to enact it, especially in cooperation with others who are on the same path. It won't always be easy, but it's the right thing to do. And the resulting societies, as the products of the democracy enacted by free, responsibility-assuming people, will be ongoing utopias – the best societies free people can create at any given moment.