Moderns are confused enough that they seem to think the bloated, sagging, overwrought infrastructures that we call our governments are actually capable of the intelligence and services they hope for. This is like thinking a shovel is capable of being a cruise ship.

We now live in a future fraught with threats and opportunities we ourselves do not even vaguely understand. We must find ways first to educate ourselves as to the real nature of our situation and predicaments, and we must then develop entirely new modes of government that are developmentally and intelligently flexible enough to meet the needs we have and continue to reveal.

We must develop collectives whose intelligence is deployed in the service of our natural and social ecologies, rather than in service of its own aggressive self-interests and survival. The governments of commercial nations tend toward the kind of gross, almost cancerous expressions that we see today in the United States and Canada, which represent the finest expressions of many of our hopes for government, while displaying many of the least desirable developmental histories.

We must become more interested in developing our personal, social, and collective intelligence than we are our commerce, armies and physical technologies; and it has never been more crucial to our survival than it is now.