The starting point is self-interest. The recognition that we are all basically out for ourselves must be the principle by which a social organism is formed and operated. Some might think that this would be a formula for total chaos with everyone jockeying around looking for their own advantage without any regard for anyone else. But how would one's self-interest be served in such a state of chaos? The answer is it would be served very poorly if at all and therefore chaotic states are not naturally ordained. We do not need cultural authority to impose order on us but to validate our innate attraction to and appreciation for an orderly society. Social authority is an artifact of our natural attraction for order.

Our species formed orderly cohesive tribes with only the natural order of things to guide us. There were no centralized cultural or governmental bodies imposing law and order on us during our more primitive existence. It all came from our natural inclinations, our innate programming. And now, what if we could instantly dissolve all our morals, laws and codes of behavior and all of the institutions that promote them? Suddenly there are no laws, no mores, no customs, no legislators, no police, no courts, no jails, no religions, no legal or moral authority whatsoever. And what if after they were all dissolved there was no memory of them at all in any one of us? What would happen? We would begin the whole process anew and establish morality and laws much like we had before because that is how we are programmed and each of us would see that it was in our own self-interest to do so. Individual self-interest is not a bad thing in and of itself but it can become a bad thing for being manipulated by gargantuan institutions whose own self-interest rules the day.

For instance:

Government is comprised of self-interested parties that compete to define what we the people should be self-interested in so the parties themselves can manipulate us for their own benefit.

Religious organizations are comprised of self-interested parties that condemn self-interest in individuals and reward self-sacrifice, which in turn, benefits the self-interest of the religious organizations themselves.

Corporations are comprised of self-interested parties that compete or collude with one another in order to benefit their own self-interests by exploiting the self-interest of everyone else.

What all three have in common is what all living organisms have in common - that is, an interest in their own survival and growth. Any given society and all of its institutions are nothing more nor less than living breathing organisms seeking their own advantage in their cultural and natural environments. In viewing societies and their institutions thusly we must reevaluate our notions of self-interest and redesign societies based on that reevaluation with respect to the living organisms that social institutions actually are.

As infants self-interest is a simple affair. A comfortable crib, warm blanket and suckling at your mother's breast pretty much takes care of it. Then at a certain age things begin to get more complicated. We begin to realize that we are not the center of all things and the instant gratification of all our desires is not the sole purpose of the universe. We have to learn to take other things into account. Our mother now attends more than she had been to her other older child whose status as only child has been taken away and who might have been feeling somewhat neglected what with all the attention lavished on the newest arrival. We can no longer expect mommy to be at our beck and call. We also discover other desires and find out that we can't have them all fulfilled. We can't have every toy we see on TV. We can't have all the candy we see in the store. And we can no longer get what we want by throwing a tantrum.

So we have to learn social skills. We have to learn to get along, to make choices, to suspend our needs and desires until some other time and even to do without certain things indefinitely or even totally. Along with this new and somewhat disquieting awareness of our selves in relation to our expanding universe there is a great desire to learn about the world around us. Our minds are like dry sponges in the rain absorbing every drop they come in contact with and expanding their content. This great ability and desire to learn provides the ways and means with which to deal with our growing pains. We can learn how to remain an object of our mother's love while pursuing a growing array of self-interests at the same time.

We learn to negotiate through the larger environment that we are becoming conscious of. We see that our mother is someone separate from us and in that separation our own self begins to emerge and become defined according to our innate personality, intelligence and disposition. Our self-interest now becomes something within ourselves that is not always met with an immediate and favorable response. We learn that some things we desire, or desire to do, may not be in our self-interest. We learn that our mother and father have control over our self-interest. We learn that we might have to control our expression for something we want in order to have a chance of getting it. We see that our mother is not an extension of ourselves. She sometimes seems inattentive, or downright opposed to what we want. Other times it is just like it used to be. She is totally attentive and giving and we once again feel immanently connected to her. So, we try to figure out how to regain or preserve the feeling of closeness we had with her as an infant while at the same time establishing our own separate identity. Things are getting complicated but we seem to have all the time in the world to sort them out.

And so it goes over the next few years as we discover how to negotiate our self-interest in a world that is not always sympathetic to it. If we're lucky our parents will not convey the idea that self-interest is bad in and of itself. Rather they will guide our self-interest through a sometimes perplexing world and teach us how to decide what truly is in our self-interest and what is not and allow us to fully pursue the interests of our better natures with their enthusiasm and approval.

We discover that the world we live in can play with our natural inclinations in tormenting ways. We are, for example, naturally inclined to seek out sweet smelling and sweet tasting foods. Fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, meats and fish all have a sweetness about them when they are most edible. One rubric for the ingesting of food might be - the sweeter the better. Primitive tribesmen suffer stinging swarms of bees in order to procure a supply of honey for their tribe. Our appetite for sweet foods, especially as youngsters, can be insatiable. But the candy that children are constantly tempted by perverts a healthful natural inclination into an unhealthy habit. We have, for example, candy posing as cereal.

It is very difficult to come to understand that something that makes so much sense to us, that seems so right, like eating sweet foods, can be so wrong. It needs to be made perfectly clear to us that our inclination toward eating sweet foods is not wrong at all. The problem is not inside us with what we want to eat but outside us with the products offered. We are not wrong but they, the products, can be wrong. We can't blame ourselves for wanting to eat sweet foods, it's only natural. So, while it is in our self-interest to eat foods that are sweet we need to learn to direct that self-interest toward healthful foods.

That seems needless to say, and to be redundant, obvious. But we often do tend to blame ourselves because, perhaps, we were told, or somehow got the idea, that our appetite for sweets was to blame. When we are taught to blame ourselves, we think that we are wrong. And it becomes much more difficult to redirect our habits because we're trying to change ourselves, our inborn inclinations, instead of our habits. It is impossible to overcome our desire for sweets and when we try and find that we can't do it we feel like a failure and tend to indulge ourselves even more. "What's the use," we say, "I'm hopeless. I might as well just gorge "

So, it's very important that a child be made to understand as soon as possible that a desire for sweets is not a bad thing, but there are things that appeal to that desire that are not good for us. The fault is not in our appetites but in those products that exploit and pervert those appetites.

Our innate inclination for sweet tasting food and the civilized-created-temptations that pander to it is a good, basic example of the convoluted situation our natures generally find themselves in with regard to the refinements of civilization. Instinct-targeted-cultural-refinements can turn our natural appetites into unruly torments. In this convolution we tend to find fault with our natures. We get the idea that we don't know what's good for us.

Money exacerbates the situation. Money explodes holistic tribal communities into a compendium of individuals competing in a zero sum game where self-interest can manifest itself as greed. Money becomes the focus of all our appetites. With money we can have whatever we want. Without it we have nothing. We devise ways of getting as much money as possible. Everything that was once useful in creating a holistic community becomes a particular commodity. Sex, aggression, beauty, cooperation, craftsmanship, knowledge, information, all have a price. They were all, at one time, interlocking parts of a whole working tribe. With money they become disassociated objects that one seeks to sell to the highest bidder.

Being greedy for money is a result of one's natural self-interest becoming individualized, isolated and distended by the matrix of civilization. It is not wrong to be greedy in an environment where one's survival is solely dependent on getting money. Instinctively driven to provide shelters that protect us as much as possible from the exigencies of the natural world we have invented civilizations where our instincts, appetites and drives, unloosed from the regimen of basic survival, can be driven to distraction. A proper catalyst to bring about the synergistic confluence of individual self-interest for holistic purposes is not provided for in our civilizations as it once was in the natural world where individual self-interest in one's survival could only be realized by forming and maintaing cohesive collective organizations, namely, tribes.

The individual/collective dynamic worked well in our primitive tribal existence. In a civilized setting self-interest often takes precedence over collective interest and various collectives within a social setting often put their interests over and above the interests of the society as a whole.

Religion attempts to act as that catalyst for bringing self-interest and collective-interest in line by declaring war on our instincts. We are taught that our instincts, appetites and drives are bad. Greed is bad. Self-interest is bad. Sexual desire is bad. Our appetite for food is bad. While vows of poverty, self-sacrifice, celibacy, and fasting are good. The world belongs to demons who want to destroy our souls by tempting our evil instincts. Only by denying ourselves the pleasures of the flesh can we survive for eternity. Just as we had to abide by rules and rituals for physical survival in the jungle we have to abide by the rules and rituals of religion for the eternal survival of our souls.

Religion's great appeal is that it engages us in a game of survival. In the jungle it is good to physically survive and all our instincts are employed for that purpose. In civilization basic physical survival is not an overriding concern and our instincts become separate venues for self-gratification. Religion creates another world which it declares to be the real world where spiritual survival is good and we must deny the physical world along with our instincts as much as possible in order to achieve that survival. Of course, religious institutions don't always practice what they preach as they cozy up to the rich and powerful, for instance, for their own physical benefit.

In civilized societies there is a need for a catalyst to mold our instincts into a positive creative force. But declaring those instincts evil is perhaps no longer the way to accomplish that - if it ever was. But traditional religions were born in ignorance. They didn't know any better. Basically, our instincts are good but they need to have a vigorous conditioning process through which they are channeled into enriching endeavors. We don't need to change ourselves we need to change how our civilizations are configured. We need to change the way in which our instincts are channeled through the social matrix. We need to change things with respect to present knowledge rather than endeavor to go on with respect to the ignorance of the past.

To begin with we all need to develop a very strong sense that each and every one of us is the source of social order. That law, order and morality are concepts that have arisen and continue to arise from within our very selves. We need to know that the social order we are subject to is of our own making and not something that needs to be imposed on us authoritatively. Authority is a necessary presence assigned to deal with conflicts that become unmanageable by the people involved. Authority is not a necessary presence for imposing social order on human beings who are believed to be naturally inclined toward disorder. Authorities sometimes delude themselves into thinking, a la Big Brother, that they alone are responsible for law and order. There have also been several books written about our innate moral capabilities. Marc Hauser, Professor of Psychology, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, has a book called “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.

It is in school or preschool that we are introduced to official impersonal authority in the person of a teacher or caretaker. Up until then, at home, our parents were the authority. But they, of course, do not have the impact that the imposing figure of an unfamiliar adult has in the strange new environment of the classroom or kindergarten.

At home we were learning about the give and take between our parents and our siblings. We had familiar surroundings in which to grow and to discover and rediscover a place for ourselves in a personal way within our family's environment.

Then we come to school and find out that there is such a thing as impersonal official authority. The teacher instructs us as to what the rules of conduct in the classroom are, informs us that we are to obey those rules and tells us that she is the sole authority with respect to enforcing those rules. We find that we are less participants in this new environment and more subjects of officialdom. This fosters a disconnect in our own selves and the world around us. The message is that we have no sense whatsoever about how to behave and must be totally reliant on an authority figure to provide us with rules and regulations. This creates a distorted view of things. It's an Alice in Wonderland hallucination where the authority figure takes on immense proportions and we shrink in comparison. In order to feel bigger we either have to become a sycophant to authority, challenge it or phase out and daydream that we are somewhere else doing other things on our own.

A teacher as central authority figure dictating rules and regulations onto students who, it is assumed, have absolutely no concept of how to behave is no way to prepare them for a participatory democracy. Students should participate directly in creating the decorum of the classroom from day one. They should be allowed to be instrumental in making the rules and in settling conflicts and disputes that may arise between them. In this way the law and order in the classroom will be seen by the students as an extension of their own sense of things rather than a necessary imposition on, what is perceived to be, their lack of sense.

So, the first day of school might go something like this; The teacher introduces herself to the class and asks each child to do the same. I would suggest they all sit at a round table or in a circle with the teacher as part of the circle. Then the teacher might say, "So here we are, all of us here together. I wonder why. I wonder why we're here. I mean I do have an idea of my own about why we're here but I'd like some of you to tell me why you think we are here. Let's think about that a moment. Hmmm, why are we here in this kindergarten classroom? That's a good question. Do any of you have an answer to that question?" Here the teacher might spy out a child who seems to be the most outgoing of the children and asks, "Linda, why do you think are we here?"

To learn new things," Linda might say.

"Uh huh, very good. Anyone else? Yes Pedro? Why do you think we are here?"

"To play games."

"Okay. And, yes, Sudra?"

"To make new friends."

"Mohammed? Why do you think we are here?"

"To be like mommy and daddy."

"What do you mean, Mohammed?"

"Like...like...um...when they go to work."

"Mmm hmm, okay, yes Billy?"

"We're here to have fun."

"Okay then, very good answers. And you know what? You were all right. We are here for all those reasons. To play games, have fun, to learn new things, and work and make new friends. I'm here for all those things too. And I'm also here to teach. But I can learn things from you too. That's right, although I am older and have lots of stuff to teach you, you can teach me about stuff too. Like you might draw a picture or have an idea or find a new way to solve a problem that would teach me to see things in a new way. And now I need your help with something else. We are all meeting here for the first time and we will be sharing a lot of time together and doing a lot of activities together. But how do you think we should go about doing all that? Do you think we should have some rules about how we should behave and treat each other?"

The children express a consensus in favor of having rules. "All right then, now the question is, what should those rules be? I have some ideas about that but I would like to hear from all of you and what you think the rules should be about how we all should behave here. Yes, Bobby?"

"We shouldn't fight."

"A very good rule. Billy?"

"We shouldn't throw things."

"Another good rule. Yes, Linda?"

"We should be nice."

"That's also a very good rule. Sudra?"

"Share things."

"Good rule. Mohammed?"

"Pay attention"

"Mm hmm, well that is an excellent start. And that might be all the rules we need. Or we may find that we need to make more rules as we go along. So, we'll see how things go and any one of us can suggest a new rule at any time. And for those of us who didn't get a chance to say any of these rules, like myself, did we all pretty much think of these same rules ourselves even though we didn't speak them?" A general response in the affirmative is expressed. "Okay, so do we all like these rules?" "Yes." "Very good. And if any of us have arguments with one another we will all take part in settling them and maybe some new rule will come out of that."

The teacher would then make a sign listing the rules of the class and stating that they were all made by Mohammed, Billy, Linda, Sudra, Viola, Pedro, etc. and were all approved and accepted by the whole class as well as the teacher Ms./Miss/Mrs./Mr. Whoever. The sign would then be prominently posted in the classroom. Thus, the whole class sees themselves as a rule making body. They do not merely feel themselves at the affect of rules dictated by an authority figure but they feel empowered to fundamentally effect the social environment they are part of. The class might sometimes need to rely on the authority figure to enforce their rules or explain how they apply in a given situation but each and every member of the class should always have the sense that the teacher, the authority figure, is always operating within the parameters set by the members of the class themselves. Authority then is not seen as something "other" but as a direct extension of ones own inner directive. Authority can have no more power over us than we allow it to have.

It seems that in some sense this state of affairs was at one time taking root. During the spring of 2001 students at Harvard University demonstrated for and succeeded in achieving living wages for all of the university's employees, like, for instance, the janitorial staff. The action taken by the students at Harvard was not a challenge to authority, a la the sit-ins of the Sixties. Rather, it seemed more of an effort to work with authority in order to install policy the students thought to be appropriate. They, like my above scenario for a kindergarten class, were participating in the rule making of their institution as they saw fit. This was an expression of the students' sense of belonging to their whole environment and seeking to affect it from an overall perspective.

Also, unlike the student revolts of the Sixties the Harvard students weren't trying to change the whole world. They were just tending to their own little corner of it. And this is precisely the way in which to go about changing the whole world with everyone participating in their own precincts to further the interests of their entire community by forming, reforming and maintaining wholesome economic, social and physical environments. In the ecology of the global village, local is global. We need to create our social organisms out of healthy, vital cellular communities. This would, of course, translate into healthy, vital societies.

The encouragement and means to participate in all aspects of one's environment must be a constant presence in students' lives throughout their schooling. The responsibility for how a class behaves should not be seen as resting solely on the teacher's shoulders but the decorum of the classroom should be understood and felt as being a result of each and every student's individual will in association with the collective will of the entire class. In some schools in New York State student courts were initiated to judge and censure the questionable behavior of other students. The judgment of the student court was found to be much more significant to the students judged by their peers than if they had been merely reprimanded by an authority figure. This kind of student involvement serves to ameliorate the kinds of pathology that can occur in the gap between particular students and officialdom. A gap that cannot be bridged by the usual bureaucratic mechanisms and leaves students to stew in their own juices and brew their own, often misguided remedies.

Student courts should not only be conducted for the purposes of judging those accused of wrongdoing but should also be a forum where students can air their grievances. This could go a long way to ferret out the festering resentments in particular students, allow them constructive ways to find redress and prevent them from acting out a violent vendetta. At Columbine, for instance, the "elite' of the student body systematically dealt out considerably harsh treatment to those they perceived to be "other" than themselves, like the two students who shot up the school. The faculty did nothing to correct this situation and, so, in effect, condoned it. If there had been a student court at Columbine, where harassed students could have aired their grievances openly and sought remedy for them, perhaps the shooting could have been averted. There needs to be input from all quarters in any given community in order to form and maintain healthy coherent social groups.

One's school experience, from kindergarten to college, then, should include direct participation on the part of every student in creating every aspect of the school's environment. Such participation should not be an anomaly. Officials of a school would hold whatever authority that administrators, faculty and students deemed necessary for the purpose of facilitating the whole process of a participatory democracy. Upon graduation the students would go on to continue a participatory involvement in their workplaces and communities in order to create wholesome social institutions and maintain salubrious natural environments.