capital A in a circle

The whole Xin business is a major pillar in this manifesto. It is essentially formalizing personal responsibility and introducing accountability for that concept. I guess the idea is most prominently put forward by anarchists of all kinds (communists and libertarians alike, though I did not hear them proposing accountability for it). The idea was also advocated - and used - by blogs from the start. It was then called mojo or karma and such things.

The concept of personal accountability - honor - worked pretty well in ``primitive'' societies ... too well at times. However, it suffers from obvious problems in modern society where everybody is honor wise first and foremost anonymous. The Xin can bring personal accountability back. It may work even better in a networked society than in a pre-information-age society. The biggest problem with traditional honor is that it was an extremely rigid concept that was dictated by the narrow minded world view of small enclosed societies. Our impression of honor largely dates from the Victorian age. That age was the first to offer some personal recesses to significant numbers of the people involved in the honor business. Such personal recess combined with the need to comply with a very rigid concept conveyed hypocrisy.

The modern networked society allows everybody to choose his own peer group with its own ideas of what conduct is desirable. The transparency of the proposed society would probably encourage tolerance even more than current western societies while it would at the same time discourage hypocrisy. The concept should thus bring about all the good consequences of personal accountability without including the downsides usually associated with it.

This whole manifesto actually began with the Xin (or rather Kama) idea - then I did not call it Xin/Kama and I merely considered it to be a good instrument for determining who governs the rest of us, i.e. choosing the legislative. If it were restricted to that application though, I believe it would turn out to be much too costly. When it's part of everyday life it has many other desirable consequences and is much more likely to actually be used. Yet its role in government is crucial.

The top level of government is the legislative. In the proposed model there would be no leaders as those of each and every modern state. Instead the best individuals would only ever make one or - over the course of their lives - a few laws. Since laws usually impact many people, people who may give some feedback on what they think of a given law, the quality of a law can have a very significant impact on the lawmaker's Xin.

The best individuals for solving a given problem (making a requested law) are chosen through the universal rating mechanisms of the Kama and because of the impact the law may have on their Xin they are motivated to do the right thing - the right long term thing, because they'll spend their lives with their Xin. Since they only make one law in mid term, misuse can easily be corrected and could only have undesirable consequences for lawmakers who try to misuse their power.

Obviously different laws would be made by different people and there would be no classical leadership that could imprint their governance style on the nation. It is just competent people doing what is necessary. This is bit different from how things work today which is one of the reasons why I think, that my proposals would need a lot of careful testing and polishing were anything of it ever implemented.

Yet this volatility of personal power is another cornerstone of the manifesto: it allows disregarding most conventional safeguards for protecting the people from their governor's power. After all, Big Brother is only big for a very limited period of time and has a very limited scope in which to apply his power.