Sergej van Middendorp first raised the polycrisis challenge facing us in an earlier CMMI post https://cmminstitute.org/meeting-of-the-waters-at-the-relating-systems-thinking-and-design-conference/. In his recent essay on Democracy for the Future, written with Walter Wittkamp, he shows how the current conventional political order is simply unable to solve the many life-threatening problems facing us.

As Sergej and Walter observe there is a paradox here: while the power of the conventional order is getting stronger, at the same time it is less and less able to solve our problems. “Therefore, countervailing powers are needed. For those to emerge it is necessary to grow a culture of democratic citizenship and civic responsibility in which people collaborate to bring about a peaceful revolution of the democratic system. Our future depends on it.”

The idea of citizens’ assemblies is the key to a number of emerging proposals about how to respond to the current crisis at the level of the ordinary citizen. In this essay, the arguments of those movements, including Extinction Rebellion, for the critical role of citizens’ assemblies are laid out.

Sergej invites you to read the arguments here https://open.substack.com/pub/ingroove/p/democracy-for-the-future?

He sees this as just the start, and invites all of you to comment. He especially invites practical ways and ideas from a communication perspective and asks us all How we can bring CMM’s rich history with public deliberation and participative democracy to this task of building a future?

For an introduction to CMM’s rich history in this area see our vision at https://cosmopolis2045.com/collaborative-governance/