 Thank you all for joining. My name is Michael Sabat, and today I'm going to share some reflections on the nature, purpose, and possibilities of institutions in human societies in light of Bahá'u'lláh's revelation. The term institution defies simple definition, but I'm focusing on the institutions of the state and in particular elected, legislative, and executive political institutions in democratic countries. The talk is called institutions and the problem of trust, a high perspective on the premises of multi-party adversarial democracy. The topic may sound a bit dry, but a moment's reflection shows how crucial it is. If you think about any crisis currently facing the human family, it's clear that all three of what the Universal House of Justice is called the three protagonists in the advancement of civilization, individuals, communities, and institutions have a role to play in addressing them. And if we think of very big picture problems, armed conflict between states, mass movement of people, and above all the climate crisis, it's clear that we don't just need institutions to hold the line to keep the lights on and the trains running on time. We need them to advance rapidly in their ability to deal with ever-changing, ever-complexifying problems. And we also need institutions to do this at all scales, from the local to the global. Unfortunately, our collective level of trust in institutions of all kinds is dangerously low, if not in absolute terms, then certainly relative to the enormous undertakings that are needed in the years ahead. And finally, people generally feel fairly impotent to do anything to improve their institutions. So the goal for this presentation is to contribute to our capacity to engage in discourses that deal with institutions and their relationship to individuals and communities. The hope is to help us reflect on what particular strength a Baha'i understanding of institutions brings to current problems, and how this view connects to and can be shown to resonate with other views. During our discussion after the presentation, we can also hopefully begin to think about how we might respond to well-meaning objections or concerns about a Baha'i approach to institutions. The presentation will proceed in two parts. First, I'll very briefly outline what I understand to be the dominant framework for thinking about democratic political institutions within the nation-state. I'm calling this framework multi-party adversarial democracy, or MAD for short. It's multi-party because, with certain exceptions at the margins, essentially every country that makes political decisions through means that we would recognize as democratic does so through a party system. You could call this type of democracy many things, but the reason for highlighting its adversarialism and its reliance on parties should become apparent during the presentation. Since this form of government originates in the West, broadly speaking, this first part of the talk will deal with some political theory in the Western tradition, though I try to limit the number of names and quotations to streamline the presentation. In this first part, I'm going to suggest that some problems with how these democratic institutions are working today are directly connected to the premises on which they are built. This part is going to be very brief because of time constraints, and it will leave out a lot of nuance and detail, but it should be enough to ground part two, which will look at a few possible alternative frameworks that could plausibly address some of the problems with the mainstream MAD framework. These are deliberative democratic theory, Gandhi's political thought, and a Baha'i conception of institutions, as I understand it. As always, all of the material on Baha'i conception is entirely my own understanding, which so you can take it for what it's worth. This talk is based on a much longer paper so I'm necessarily glossing over concepts very quickly and emitting references but hopefully our discussion together will be a chance to go deeper into whatever is of interest. So I'm going to suggest that multi-party adversarial democracy or MAD creates a dysfunctional relationship between institutions and individuals. Now you may not find that a very controversial idea, but if we focus on the conceptual roots of this problematic relationship, we may be able to see both where change is needed, but also why there may be well founded resistance to such change. As I mentioned, this part of the discussion has to be brief, so rather than trace the genealogy of modern democratic politics, I'll shorten the discussion by using a single quote as a lens to explore the issue. The quote is from James Madison, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, which were a series of essays intended to rally public opinion behind the proposed constitution of the United States. So in Federalist 51, Madison has a very pithy quote that captures quite a bit about the premises that mainstream ideas about modern democracy rest on. He writes, but what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. The first sentence tells us that our ideas about institutions ultimately rest on our understanding of human nature. Now this is crucial. If our understanding of human nature shifts, then institutional designs that seemed absolutely logical can suddenly seem quite odd. The second and third sentences highlight two premises underlying the mainstream conception of political democracy. They're distinct but related. Very briefly, the statement, if men were angels, no government would be necessary, conveys a belief about human nature. Humans are not angels and we cannot expect them to become angels. It also tells us what we think the role of institutions is. It's to manage the fallout from us not being angels. Without going into detail, it's important to note that this view is quite a departure from more traditional conceptions of the human being, not only in Western philosophy but globally. So you can consider that in their own ways Plato and Confucius as just two examples, both put the idea of the moral improvement of the human being at the very center of the political project. But starting at least with Machiavelli in the West, the view that moral or character improvement has no place in the political project began to grow much more influential. So even Immanuel Kant, for instance, a philosopher who is very much concerned with questions of morality, writes that the constitution of a republic should be designed to create order even for a nation of devils. So this gives us the first premise of institutional design in mad that we want to highlight. In designing institutions, human beings are assumed to be non perfectable. In a sentence, if angels were to govern men, neither external or internal controls on government would be necessary speaks to the premise that power corrupts. The Americans saw their task as designing a political system in which those who wielded institutional power would be held in check from abusing it. Madison's internal controls can be mapped onto the particular separation of powers in the American system. These aren't found in exactly the same form in all modern democratic systems. But internal controls also include the bill of rights enforced by an independent judiciary. And this is a feature of pretty much every liberal democracy today. But the external controls are going to be what I focus on here. This is the role of the democratic process itself. The people have an institutionalized right to vote every few years, and this gives them a chance to kick out rulers who have been abusing their power. The second premise holds that in a democracy because our leaders will not be angels, we can't really trust them. We have to control them. Since distrust is normal and expected, we incorporate distrust into political institutions themselves. We set up rules to channel and express distrust without destabilizing the system. Because the people's role in democracy is simply to periodically choose their leaders, their main political action, voting, is precisely a chance to express trust or distrust. Political scientists have highlighted the role of parties here in particular. An opposition party by opposing the ruling party at every turn can both foment distrust and provide a means to channel it. The opposition's message, in effect, is just vote for us and we'll fix the problems. So one party tells us to direct our distrust towards the other party and vote them out of office. Now I'm not arguing that voting is a problem per se. Representative democracy has great advantages over direct democracy when you get beyond a certain scale. And of course, behind democracy also involves voting. Instead is that mainstream democracy ends up assuming that all the people can be expected or asked to do is vote. Now there is a countercurrent in democratic theory that stresses the importance of deliberation, which I'll come back to shortly. But it's the mad model whose core is voting rather than discussion or deliberation, which defines the term democracy today. So this connects back to the first premise that informs mad, which is that people don't change. They're both non perfectible as we discussed they can't be expected to improve their characters. But their views are also fixed. They can't be expected to change their minds. Now this is a concept of the human being that starts to dominate in our way of thinking about democracy, even though it's not necessarily what liberal theorists for instance had in mind. It's a model of the human being as a rational self interested creature whose reason accurately tells them what their interests are. This is a view that we often associate with economics, even though it's a caricature of how many economists themselves think of human beings. But it's arguably powerful, not because it's inherently true, but because it can be made to be true through feedback loops in our socio political and economic systems, which is something I'll touch on in a little while. Ironically, the conception of the individual in mad as an autonomous creature whose reason points them to their self interest places a hard limit on how much power the people can actually hold. They have only the meta power of choosing those who will rule as atomized individuals they cannot be empowered, because they cannot come together to advance their understanding and take collective ownership of decisions. In short, the demos in a modern democracy is not conceived of as capable or even motivated to discern the public good. This can be deduced from the theory set out above, which was covered very briefly, but it's also confirmed in practice by the lack of spaces mechanisms and resources provided for the people to deliberate in most democratic systems. So in between periodic elections citizens are reduced to the role of spectators cheering on their team, and what results is a vicious cycle, citizens of whom little is asked do little, further confirming in the eyes of political actors that little can be asked of them. This dynamic only gets worse once the impact of political parties is factored in. Parties are ubiquitous in democratic political systems, to the point that, while they're absent from most of foundational democratic theory, and they aren't enshrined in most democratic constitutions. It's impossible to explain modern democratic politics without them. I won't go into any detail here about all the problems that partisanship gets rise to. I'll refer you to Michael Karlberg's essay in the behide world, which has a great high level overview of the pathologies of political parties, and also Simone wheels essay on the abolition of all political parties. The only two points that I want to mention for our purposes are relate to how, on the one hand, parties seem to be necessary, given the two premises of mad that we've looked at. But on the other hand, they don't end up acting in quite the way that the mad model suggests that they ideally should. So let's look at the first premise. Since the people can't be expected to deliberate and change their minds and agree on things. We need parties to aggregate and champion similar views and turn them into policy. This is a practical problem coordination problem. And it's part of the reason why parties emerge even when constitutions don't seem to have a place for them, as in the example of the United States. But there's strong empirical evidence to show that what parties often end up doing is not aggregating existing views, but instead driving those views, directing and even creating them. So a handful of parties carve out positions based at least as much on strategic considerations as on ideological conviction or commitment to good policy. And then people's party identification shapes their views on the issues to conform to those of the party. So the party reinforces the dynamic by which ordinary people do not deliberate. They just vote to choose from a menu of options that they don't really contribute to creating. The recent book democracy for realists which I highlighted on the last slide has an excellent discussion of this phenomenon. Now as for the second premise, which is that those in power should not be trusted with it. In theory, the party helps turn the distrust of many individuals into a force that can be used against those in power to hold them in check. I mentioned earlier that democracy can be conceived of as a healthy way to channel people's distrust of those in power. And granting evidence, however, as to how easily multi-party adversarial democracy can end up fomenting radical distrust of the very structure of the state. Populism is one way in which this occurs. The populist leader tries to convince voters that only they can save them. And they do this by arguing that the system itself is corrupt and flawed. So instead of this, which we saw before, where one party directs the people's distrust against another party. And yet this radical distrust where a political actor directs the people's distrust against the system itself. And that can result in weakening the constitutional order. And I'm sure you can think of recent examples from around the world where individuals or parties have found it strategically effective to whip up distrust and things like the election process itself, rather than just directing their antagonism towards other parties. And that can be MAD's potential to undermine the very constitutional system on which it rests. If I had more time, I'd discuss another kind of trust which MAD can tend to erode, which is social trust or people's trust in strangers. By accentuating division, MAD can contribute to eroding social trust in effect tearing the social fabric that institutions rely on to be effective. But unfortunately, we don't have time to discuss that in detail. Apart from being a problem for institutional credibility, all of the issues we've discussed are harmful to our species. At a time when we need our institutions to be raising their capacity to act wisely decisively and quickly, many of them are increasingly undermined by the people's distrust of them. So where can we look for alternatives? Let's start with deliberative democracy. So deliberative democratic theory offers a talk-centric model of democracy as an alternative or a supplement to the vote-centric model that's prevalent in liberal democracies. Where vote-centric democracy treats citizen preferences as essentially fixed, deliberative democracy considers preferences to be malleable and responsive to a process of reasoning with other people. While a reaching consensus is held up as an ideal by some deliberativists, others recognize that deliberation has value even if it only results in narrowing and specifying the causes of disagreement. A deliberative participant, it is argued, will feel heard and thus retain trust in the democratic system, even if their views don't end up swaying the group. Despite of a sophisticated literature at a wealth of experiments and experiences with deliberation around the globe in a variety of spaces, deliberative democracy lives very much in the shadow of mainstream vote-centric mad, which the deliberative literature refers to as aggregate of democracy. Indeed, adversarialism and the conception of the self-interested competitive human being that underpins it has a hegemonic hold in much of the world. To explain this, we can use the concept of life world and system, as employed by the philosopher Jurgen Habermas. So, the life world for Habermas is our non-institutionalized sphere of being in society, amongst friends, family, voluntary associations, and so on. This is where we learn how to be with other people, finding common ground and negotiating difference. A society's political and economic possibilities, its institutions, spring from the soil of the life world out of the collective resources generated by the many ways that people learn to be together in society. This more formal institutional dimension of human life Habermas refers to as system. Now, the global life world is not a monolith, but over time it is arguably becoming increasingly shaped everywhere by what Michael Carleberg has called a culture of contest. Enlightenment theories of human nature as rationally self-interested inform the structures and institutions of modern societies and shape our expectations of how to organize our social lives generally. Now, this is not to say that cooperation and altruism do not exist in our life world. However, Habermas points out that while the life world is the seedbed of institutions, institutions in turn shape the life world. Specifically, the political and economic systems of capitalist societies tend to colonize the life world over time. As norm-free commercial transactions and state-imposed administrative structures come to replace intersubjective relationships in people's lives, the scope for individuals to exercise their capacity to intersubjectively negotiate mutual understanding shrinks. So what does that mean? Well, let's think about an economic example for simplicity's sake, grocery shopping. In many places over time, sorry, in many places over the past few generations, we've gone from growing our own food, often communally, to buying food from the people who grow it, to buying food from a middleman, our local grocer, to buying from massive chain grocery stores, and now to using automatic checkout lanes or even ordering all our food online. The scope for us to communicate with other human beings by drawing on our cultural resources to approach this transaction around food has shrunk, and it's come to be defined by the logic of the system. As a result, our collective imagination about how things might be done becomes narrower and narrower, as we have fewer examples of other ways of being together to draw on. As another example, even though our societies are more diverse in some ways than ever before, it's possible for us to live increasingly monocultural existences, to the extent that we allow our media, for instance, to be selected based on what we already believe. It's possible to live today in such a way that we either don't interact with people who significantly disagree with us, or we only interact with such people in non-deliberative ways, for instance, through protests, online shouting matches, and so on. In other words, our competitive economic and political institutions select for and reward the competitive traits of individuals and groups. The democratic state, along with the capitalist economy, end up helping to create the very type of human being it anticipates, isolated, competitive, individualistic. So what does all this have to do with deliberative democracy? Well, the prospect for growing deliberative institutions from the ground of our life world are arguably bleak. The soil may just be too sterile. An enthusiastic political scientist or an activist organization might create a deliberative space, but creating a culture of deliberation is going to feel like swimming upstream. A self-sustaining deliberative democracy has to draw on resources from the life world. A deliberative political culture must be rooted not in people's rational self-interest, but in their subjective self-understanding as people who deliberate, and this has to be drawn from shared cultural resources. So if new kinds of democratic institutions are to be sustainably built up, they are going to have to root themselves in life worlds that operate on logics quite different from the adversarial partisanship that structures our current systems. Where might we look for such life worlds? Well, before looking at the Baha'i example, I'd like to briefly discuss Gandhi for a couple of reasons. First, Gandhi's political thought and practice had enormous impact in the 20th century and beyond, and they're considered by many to be a credible alternative to the kinds of politics that prevail today. Secondly, they share some very important features with a Baha'i framework, but they also help highlight what's distinctive about a Baha'i framework. So if we want to learn about contributing to discourses that discussed institutions, being able to connect to Gandhi might be very helpful. Now, it should be said that the political thought of Gandhi may seem like a bit of a strange place to look when thinking about institutional reform. Gandhi proposes that the way forward to a better political order doesn't lie in institutional reform or in institutions at all, but in the reformation of the human heart. But this also makes Gandhi useful because he's a credible, well-known thinker who, in the context of modernity, and not ancient thought like Confucius or Plato, radically refutes the first premise of mad, which we saw, the non-perfectibility of the human being. In his magnum opus in Swaraj, Gandhi took the central political problem of Indian self-rule, Swaraj, and turned it on its head. He argued that achieving mere political independence from Britain would simply mean substituting the people's British political masters for Indian ones. Conversely, once the Indian people themselves as individuals achieve an internal Swaraj, spiritual self-rule understood as disciplined mastery of their own selves, then political self-rule would be an established fact. A community made up of those who can rule themselves, restraining their baser impulses and serving the common good, would be one in which the state had no further role. Gandhi thus essentially agrees with Madison that political institutions are only needed insofar as the people are unredeemed. But, contrary to the liberal tradition, Gandhi does not see the idea of attaining a level of spiritual development that would fulfill Madison's, if men were angels, as impossible. It's not impossible for Gandhi because of his profound conviction in a metaphysics of spirit. The human being, in this telling, is at core a spiritual creature, and as such it has a purpose or goal. This is what philosophers would call a telos. To the extent that the individual recognizes their spiritual nature and sees in it nothing but a manifestation of the cosmic spirit that underlies reality itself, then that individual will be freed from the selfish, particularizing instincts and drives born of our embodiedness and psychological individuality. They will see their own well-being and the well-being of all. This is how Gandhi interprets the Vedic concept of moksha. It's a hard word to translate, but for Gandhi, moksha means not only freedom from one's own particularity, but also the concomitant recognition of oneself in all others, a recognition that's manifested in active love and service. Gandhi's politics therefore transcend the logic of trust and distrust. So let's consider the difference between trust, as we commonly understand it in the boat-centric context of mad, and the kind of altruistic regard for the other, love born of moksha, that Gandhi believes is the fully attainable foundation of a sound social organization. Trust is essentially passive. Love is involved and active. Trust can be broken when the other acts against one's interests, love perseveres even when it is injured, and it points out mistakes in order to help the other improve, not out of self-interest. Finally, where trust can be conceived of as an end point, a state reached often only after pains taking trust building, love looks to the future. It sees potential in the other and wants that potential to be realized for the other's sake. Indeed, a love born of moksha transcends the concept of self and other, whereas trust depends on it. Moksha may seem irrational from the perspective of rational self-interest, but it simply rests on a different expanded conception of the self. If you, I, and everyone are simply different expressions of something that is more fundamentally one, then this kind of altruistic love is the only irrational condition. On its face, Gandhi's approach to sociopolitical change would seem to center on a radical cultural shift, one in which the power of the human desire for truth channeled through the religious and cultural resources present in the life world, would act to reinvigorate that life world with new possibilities in the form of interrelationships based on altruistic service, rather than competitive individualism. Now, Gandhi also believes that, as noted, if the people attain Swaraj, then the state will have no further role, allowing justice to be built through the relationships between individuals expressed in communities. This is not so different from the hope of Marxists and anarchists. Is there any evidence that it can be achieved outside the cloistered environment of an ashram? Well, we may suspect that institutions will not simply disappear. We may also believe that maybe we don't want them to, given the level of coordination specialization and focused application of legitimate power that's required to address the problems facing humanity today. Can institutions instead be made co-creators of an ethos of altruism, instead of being cast in the role of either suppressing the naive altruism of the people, or exploiting it. If this isn't possible, then maybe we have to turn away from Gandhi. After all, we're probably better off with a conflict-laden politics in which our mutual distrust of each other and our institutions moves us to fight for justice, rather than a politics which legitimizes injustice in the name of a fictional harmony. So the question that arises is, what are the preconditions for authentic altruism or even love in the entire socio-political order, encompassing relationships amongst individuals, communities, and institutions? And this is where the Baha'i community may have some experience to share. Now many of you will be familiar with quotations from the Baha'i writings that speak to the exalted nature of the Baha'i administrative order. Because our interest here is in contributing to wider discourses, rather than start with those direct scriptural affirmations of the sanctity of Baha'i institutions, I'm going to suggest ways in which the Baha'i writings and practice within the community coherently build institutions that have the potential to live up to those lofty descriptions. So the goal is not so much to suggest the excellence of Baha'i institutions in their own right, but instead to glean some lessons that they could impart democratic institutional forms and wider society. I'll start by suggesting that the Baha'i faith has a vision that is particularly well suited to addressing this question, and then we'll briefly look at how the community's experience speaks to it as well. So at the level of vision, most Baha'is will be familiar with the metaphor of the human body to describe humanity as a whole. This metaphor sits at an interesting intersection between a few quite different traditions. On the one hand, it speaks in the Western tradition to the idea of the body politic, which tends to be very hierarchical use of the human body image where the monarch sits at the head of the body. But for a Persian audience, it also resonates with the poem Bani Audam by Saddi, which sounds a lot more like Gandhi, where the human body is used to emphasize the mutualistic nature of humanity and how we all are part of each other. Now, in the Baha'i usage, the metaphor is not a static image. It's been invoked by the Universal House of Justice, and it comes up in grassroots discussion as we try to understand reality through it. So there's a rich experience, which we can draw on to understand how Baha'u'llah intends us to understand this metaphor. So let's look at this quotation from the Baha'i international community in the prosperity of humankind, which shows how this image has been used to contribute to discourses. Baha'u'llah compared the world to the human body. The modes of operation that characterize man's biological nature illustrate fundamental principles of existence. Chief among these is that of unity in diversity. Paradoxically, it is precisely the wholeness and complexity of the order constituting the human body and the perfect integration into it of the body's cells that permit the full realization of the distinctive capacities inherent in each of these component elements. No cell lives apart from the body, whether in contributing to its functioning or in deriving its share from the well-being of the whole. So this suggests that the human body metaphor can help us see institutions in a very different light from how they're depicted in that. Precisely because the cells are differentiated, there's also a need for coordinating entities within the body as a whole organs, we might say to extend the metaphor. And crucially, the organ has no meaning outside of the body. It exists to serve the entire body. And if it takes any model for its operation other than service to the whole, the result is disastrous. That could look sort of like an autoimmune disease or cancer. So in the Baha'i understanding institutions do not simply fulfill the essentially negative role of making up for the imperfections of human beings themselves as Madison thinks. Because this is a role that would theoretically diminish as a community's spiritual perfection progresses, which is what Gandhi thinks. Instead, the institution has a positive role. It makes contributions to the common good that individuals and communities, however advanced cannot make. Further, it's in a relationship of reciprocal improvement with individuals and communities. None of them can progress towards the ideal without the others. And this is something of a point of departure from Gandhi. That also points to another dimension of the Baha'i paradigm, which is historical consciousness. In the Baha'i model human history has a telos purpose. It's going somewhere, namely an ever advancing civilization. The goal of humanity is thus not to reach a state of static perfection, which is a condition impossible on its face in the organic context of the human body, but a condition of progressive growth, betterment and refinement. So, recall that in Gandhi's thinking, the individuals progressive achievement of self rule is inextricably linked to an attitude of service to others acted out in their own lives. In the Baha'i context, this attitude of services combined with the metaphor of the human body and with a progressive view of history to lead to a particular kind of mutualistic relationship between individuals, their communities, and institutions. Specifically, service in this context looks like mutual capacity building. The individual and community see their institutions as nascent, organically growing, and in need of active engagement with the citizenry in order to increase their capacity. So in this vision, while the distinction between life world and system remains meaningful for some purposes, in other words, the state does not disappear as Gandhi might think, the radical tension between them disappears. The system does not pursue goals distinct from the well being of the whole and each of its parts. The Baha'i model has what we might call vertical integration. Because the community has its own unique institutional framework rooted in the socio religious life world of the community, and animated by the same spiritual norms governing human relationships. The system does not colonize the life world, but instead exists in a symbiotic relationship with it. The altruistic dynamics between individuals, which Gandhi sees as central to political reform are extended to and between individuals, communities, and institutions. The attitude that becomes possible here is one in which the individual does not love her administrative or political institutions out of naive allegiance, nor does she distrust them by default. Instead, she sees the institution as the collective project of her community. It's a thing that they are actively nurturing and helping to develop. The institution understands itself in these terms as well. Institutional actors adopt humility and a posture of learning in their official capacities, recognizing that they're only at a certain stage in their organic development. And the institution also takes responsibility for nurturing its citizens capacities. They do this through elicitation, not coercion. That was by considering how this vision operates in practice within the Baha'i community and the administrative order. Most listeners will have some familiarity with the broad features of the behind minister to border, so I'll be very brief, and I'll start with the caveat that highs recognize that this order is still maturing. The highs try to approach it in a spirit of learning, not expecting it to be perfect, but focusing on how it can grow organically towards the ideal vision for it, which the Baha'i writings present. The administrative orders design shows how on a practical level, it rejects the two premises of mad, which we saw. Let's first consider the second premise, which is this that distrust of institutions is rational. The administrative order has features of a representative democracy, but it's one which is explicitly non adversarial. There's no campaigning nominations or parties. In short, power seeking is curtailed both by formal rules and by the norms which the community tries to uphold. Further, no elected individual has any personal authority at all in the community by virtue of their election. An assembly can only make decisions as a body, and the institution has a completely distinct identity from the individuals elected to it at any time. So the assertion that distrust doesn't need to characterize our relationships with institutions is not simply naively asserted. Instead, the institutional design is deliberately calibrated to avoid giving any avenue for a person's ambition to express itself. This design arguably addresses the fear of tyranny or abuse of power preemptively, rather than relying on constitutional checks and the power of the people to vote someone out, although the latter does remain possible, of course. The global cohesiveness of the administrative order is arguably only possible because of this institutional design, a design that gets us away from distrust as a default. So for reasons of scale, the administrative order relies on a delegate system for national and global elections. Direct elections without nominations at these scales would be very challenging. But this delegation works because the conceptual premises of the system do not assume that those in positions of authority will abuse it. Also, they work because the practical rules and normative context of high elections strongly mitigate against power seeking and self advancement. Now let's consider the first premise of mad that human beings are non perfectible and inflexible. The administrative order is profoundly deliberative. The members of institutions deliberate amongst themselves, the high community, the community deliberates on a wide range of spaces, and institutions understanding is informed by community deliberations. This deliberation, which is the high concept of consultation is explicitly about truth seeking with the good of all as the goal. It's not about advocating for one's perceived self interests. And again, there's guidance about how to structure a conversation to achieve these ends. And while it's not done perfectly, it is something that my community approaches again in a spirit of learning. So the vision of the human being as both perfectible and capable of growing and understanding through communication with others is given the space that it needs to be realized in practice in all the community spaces where consultation occurs. The emphasis on consultation in all community spaces unlocks the possibility of a much richer conception of democratic participation than we see in that consultation casts individuals as well as communities as protagonists and the generation of knowledge. The spaces such as the 19 day feast and reflection gatherings allow consultively generated knowledge to be shared with local institutions. These in turn relay knowledge up to national and through them global institutions. Simultaneously, knowledge is disseminated downward through the system, having been systematized and generalized at a national or global level, learning is shared back with the community through regular communications. The community has shown what is what it has collectively learned, and this learning informs further consultation. This is an empowerment that is not realized in in mad. It seems plausible then that a political system with this design will have advantages over mad in an age of global crisis. In the interest of time I won't discuss all of them. I won't discuss any of them in any detail, but perhaps they can be summed up by the word unity. Mads premises and its partisanship mean that an enormous portion of the available energy of individuals communities and institutions is devoted to conflict within the system conflict over who should rule and what should be done. This is all energy that is not being used to address the needs and problems of humanity. In contrast, the behind model which has proven capable of traveling across cultural contexts unifies communities across the globe. Since cooperation is the premise and default arrangement, a truly global mobilization in response to issues both urgent and mundane is not only possible but it can conceivably become the norm. I'll leave it there for my presentation. This seems a lot unsaid, including possible objections that we might encounter in raising these ideas. I'm going to highlight to now, which we may choose to discuss. They're related. The first objection comes from liberalism from thinkers like Rawls, who are wary of political or institutional designs that seem to require broad agreement on fundamental questions about the good. The imperfectionistic view of human beings may not just be more realistic the way Machiavelli or Madison think it is. It might be safer because it keeps us from fighting over things like religion. This is a rational concern, given for instance the history of religious wars in Europe, and even the totalitarian experiences of the 20th century, where those in power tried to impose a monolithic understanding of the good. How might we respond to the subjection from a high perspective. Another related concern is that the highest attitudes towards their institutions are made possible because they're rooted in religious faith. Can similar attitudes of love and mutual support survive in contexts where individuals don't have that kind of religious faith in their institutions. So these are just some ideas what we could discuss. Thanks again for listening, and I look forward to the discussion.