Pedro Victor via Facebook: Denis, I just finished reading an inside take on the Israeli Air Force entitled "Zanek!" It seems that your idea is very much the philosophy which the Jewish kibbutzniks brought to Israel. Devolution is good. Yes it may take a while to implement the idea but it is actually very close to the concept of true democracy as practised by the ancient Greeks. One possible issue I foresee is Macro/ National Policy concerns. The local community knows what it needs, but how are decisions made on a National level?
Aviation didn't end with Orville Wright
Pedro, ek is bliksems jammer om weer te moet kvetch, but so it goes. Devolution is not good. It is one half of what could be good. On its own it is verbrokkeling, fragmentation. Devolution is eternally upheld by professors as the right thing to do, and eternally ignored by governments as a surrender to the irritators. Not for nothing does the famous Swiss devolution, cantons, remain a much-admired bright idea that nobody has followed in 720 years.
If you want actual peace and actual progress in a country like South Africa (which in this respect represents some 120 of the 200 nations of the world) you have to find a way to enhance the power of the majority and the power of the minorities simultaneously. That is what D2 does and that is why it is a little difficult to define D2 in one easy step. It involves new thinking, and new thinking has to cross hurdles.
The good news is that when you cross the hurdles D2 is ludicrously simple. It's like an illusion, that when you see it resolved you can't believe you ever doubted its resolution.
D2 does, yes, overlap with the kibbutzes, but it firmly installs those kibbutzes not as offshore islands but as portions of a nation.
Secondly, may I please record that this thing about true democracy in ancient Greece is a big bleddy myth. The "say" in those days was held by no bigger a proportion of the population than in unmentionable apartheid. That does not mean it was meaningless or a sham. It was a big step forward from the idea that whoever was born to be king was anointed by God to rule everyone else. But the idea that this was a golden democracy that has been tragically lost to the world is out of court. There is no evidence whatever that anywhere ever in the history of the world did today's understanding of democracy apply any time more than a century ago. And of course –the essence of D2 – today's idea of democracy is not the last word, any more than was Orville Wright's understanding of aviation.
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