About
Overview:
The Open Empire Foundation ( OEF ) is a vision for a unique Trust, with a Non-For-Profit ( NFP ) acting as caretaker Trustee, and an Ethical Investment Hedge Fund acting as Settlor to the Trust on behalf of the Beneficiaries - which are defined to be:
“ ... the living and non-living elements, and ecosystems of planet Earth ... ”
OEF aims to benefit its beneficiaries via a framework of non-species-biased justice, non-property/trade/currency-based economics, and anarchic politics.
( Please refer to blog.open-empire.org for more details )
Mission:
To replace the existing global systems of economics, law, and politics, with a new framework of strategies, structures, and systems, that respects:
- the sovereignty of individuals;
- the physiological needs of all species;
- the psychological needs of all sentient species;
- the ecological and symbiotic interdependencies of species in ecosystems;
Authority & Sovereignty:
OEF claims its own sovereignty and independence from the corrupt and flawed economies, interests, and legal jurisdictions of nation states and other “authorities”.
In other words:
OEF respects your right to self-governance, so long as you understand that - like it or not - you will be held accountable for the consequences of your actions, by the proportional reflection of those consequences upon yourself.OEF claims no authority over anyone, but it provides the information and motivational framework for people to hold themselves and each other accountable.OEF recognises neither claims of authority by external entities over itself, nor over its beneficiaries - nor indeed the very notion of authority by one entity over another (which is typically based on indoctrination and violent domination).
History:
Open Empire is a concept that has its origins back in the 1980s in questions I began asking of myself and the world around me.
It took the first 10 years for these initial questions to crystallise and evolve into something more consise and concrete, summarised by a single new question:
What would it take for a civilisation to be truly ecologically and socially friendly and sustainable, such that at no scale - from the individual to an interplanetary society - would it ever break?
Over the following 2 decades I studied, researched, contemplated, and discussed a great many topics in seach of the answers - along which journey I invented many things, but never pursued the development of these inventions, because none of them individually provided the answers I was seeking. There was a central set of problems I couldn't resolve, and about 15 years after the journey began, I ran into someone who provided me with the key to solving these sticking points.
What had me stuck, was that as I went thought the process of extrapolating countless scenarios in my mind, in order to see whether one idea or another was capable of achieving the benchmark objectives I'd set ... I found that no matter how efficient any particular engineered object or process becomes at fulfilling its purpose - and even if (hypothetically) every single human made object/process on the planet was designed at its theoretical maximum efficiency - the same problem persists:
if you have a growing population motivated by ownership and exploitation of property, whom are not responsible for the ecological and social consequences of their actions, you will eventually exceed the capacity of your planet, and there's no guarantee any solution will arise before it leads to conflict, suffering, death, species extinction, and ecosystem collapse.Particularly if you're poor or another species, you are considered by the status quo as merely resource inventory waiting to be exploited, with complete disregard to your own interests.
So this is where my friend ( nearly 20 years ago? ) introduced me to the work of the late ecologist Howard Odum, and the principles of Ecological Systems Modelling and Thermodynamics ... which I have to admit took me a while to wrap my head around, as it stood in stark contradiction to some firmly held beliefs at the time, and which I had to let go of in order to come to grips with it.
I must note at this point, that the same friend is directly and significantly responsible for a number of general concepts and systems I am looking at designing. However he chooses to remain anonymous at this time, due to the conservative nature of his professional life.
Where the project stands today, is that I am working on building a skeletal prototype of the systems required to get it all off the ground, and looking at ways of getting funding to accelerate that process, but on terms which will not sabotage the very objectives I am trying to achieve.
( Check the blog updates for more information. )
