There has been a good deal of progress on the government since I last mentioned it. Of course, implementing, refining, seeing the pitfalls and refining again will be the work of the year.

We used the book Who’s in Charge  to help us with terminology, and referred to them for information. Many forms of government were proposed, and several were shortly taken off the list. Since no one has an army, Military Dictatorship won’t be an option.

But several suggestions that I would have assumed to be frivolous were serious and proposed for different reasons than the traditional ones. Mallory was very interested in a Timocracy, where property owners make the rules. But what she was thinking was that they would have the most vested interest in preserving the environment, since it was their environment. She also knew that in our society, we would all be land owners, so no one would be shut out.

Dylan advocated clearly for an anarchy. Usually this is proposed by the smart alecky students, but she was very serious and argued well that in our group, we really shouldn’t need rules. We should all know by now how to treat people and materials respectfully and kindly, and we should just do it with no outside pressure. Also, in an anarchy, no one is above or below another. She introduced the word “hierarchy” to us.

In the book we found the government types of “lottocracy”- choosing leaders by lot, and theocracy- your God is your leader.  As many of you know, Chompy the staple puller is the classroom god, although everyone is clear that that is a joke. Several people wanted a theocracy element to be officially included in our government- we would call the  random choices that we make by choosing popsicle sticks with names on them: “the voice of Chompy”.  Grace was not comfortable with having this an official part of the government. She said,  “The government should not be run by an inanimate object.” There was some discussion of how this could offend people’s sincere beliefs.

I was happily surprised to see that with no prompting or questioning from me, they constructed the idea that someone has to speak for  Chompy, and that person would really hold the power. This was a concern of Grace’s.  You could be inadvertently putting a dictator in place.  So officially, these things are chosen at random, although Chompy is still joked about.

Every goverment had some strengths and some weaknesses, and that was becoming clear to everyone. Dylan had a suggestion. “Can we “squish” different types of governments together? I would like to combine direct democracy, polity, and lottocracy?” Everyone liked this idea and it was swiftly passed.

So now we had a form of government, but the question remained- who is the leader?

The post We have a Government… Sort of appeared first on Sabot at Stony Point.