Funding an independent Futuresphere
Two reasons to fund Futuresphere
1. The selfish reason
If you are someone who can afford to offer material funding to Futuresphere, you have a vested interest in seeing the Western world remain operating as a functional and engaged liberal democracy.
There are only two ways to achieve considerable financial wealth. The first method is having the right ancestor or ancestors. Traditionally, position and the wealth that went with it was inherited.
The second was to provide something of value to enough people at a price they were willing to pay. It is this second, pro-social, productive method that Adam Smith, in the same year as the representatives of the 13 American colonies declared their intention to dissolve the political bands which had connected them with the British Crown, enunciated so imaginatively and so vividly in An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.
However, the butcher, the brewer or the baker still require a functioning market institution to sell their wares. Similarly, or perhaps analogously, you require a functioning market and the multlitude of other functioning liberal democratic institutions to support the market to sustain you wealth, whether it be currently productive or monetised through sale.
Sure, you think the world has got itself in to trouble, beset by polycrisis, and it needs to change, but the last thing you want to see is either (a) your demand conditions change irrevocably or (b) all those market-related institutions usurped for the benefit of a very few at the expense of the very many, possibly including you.
In short, you need enunciated and you need the world to hear a viable alternative path that square the circle — combine the demands for economic justice with renewed legitimacy of key liberal market and democratic institutions that will suvive under foreseeable technological and implied sociological conditions. You need Futuresphere defining and enunciating a vision of that future path.
Protect your own and what you own.
Provide for Futuresphere.
2. The altruistic reason
The publicly-perceived legitimacy of liberal market and democratic institutions has taken a thrashing of late. Access to the fruits of capitalism have become more restricted and less imaginable for many for reasons they perceived as unfair, as illegimate. The result as been the increasing relative attractiveness of the voices of discord and of questionable truth claims about otherness and means of social control — of conspiracies, and the Deep State. The unsubstantiable and simplistic explanations offered by opportunistic politicans willing to exploit those frustrations are attractive to voters who feels themselves increasingly to be alienated economically and, sometimes, challenged culturally in their own societies.
As more and more people are attracted politically to outspoken demagogues, the freedoms citizens enjoy will be sqeezed by increasingly authoritiarian politicians, increasingly persuaded that they and, eventually, only they, have the answers necessary to save citizens from themselves, Down that path is Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. But they — the voting public — don’t see that. Many simply seek an alterative from that political class or clique which they perceive not to have delivered for them. They seek outsiders willing to challenge and depose the status quo ante.
Two, sometimes even three, generations removed from the existential challenge the combined Axis powers respresented to the Western world in WWII, and from the atrocities committed where that treat had manifested, today’s European voters have not witnessed the takeover of liberal democratic government from within. For these voters, a life of non-war is all they have known; wars are fought somewhere else, where the customs are foreign and people look different. The idea of anything other than open, liberal democracy seems distant and foreign, even, now, in the countries formerly behind the ‘iron curtain’. Only in the countries that emerged or re-emerged from the break up of the former Yugoslavia from 1992 and in Ukraine following the Russian invasion in January 2022 do citizens have recent or current experience of war between nations.
Memory of the events in Germany from the election in July 1932, at the depth of a profound recession and still wracked by the humiliations and privations imposed by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles following WWI, have long faded, even if the memory of the cataclysm of WWII and the atrocities committed therein remain a ubiquitous folk-memory. But the signficance of its origins within a constitutionally-sanctioned process have not been widely retained.
After Hitler’s NSDAP had won the most seats in the Bundestag in the July 1932 election, the elderly Reichsprasident, Paul von Hindenberg, demurred from appointing Hitler as Reichskansler. Instead, urged by his advisor, (former General) Kurt von Schleicher, Hindenberg appointed Franz von Papen, who was unable to secure a paliamentary majority and was forced to rule under emergency decree. When this failed, partly at the hand of Defence Minister (former General) Kurt von Schleicher, Hindenberg appointed Scleicher as Chancellor. When, after less than two months, Scleicher’s Chancellorship failed, blocked still by the coalition around the NSDAP, Hindenberg agreed to von Papen’s plan to appoint Hitler as Chancellor and von Papen as his deputy. This was the first government in Germany with a majority in the Bundestag since 1930. It would be
scholars with a prime case study of the end of a democratic regime, the perennially tragic model of a quasi-legal, rapid, and harrowing process of internal subversion and breakdown.
Only example in the West snce the advent of Western liberal democracy of an endogenous collapse of such a democracy into extreme authoitarianism.