Functional Politics – An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Wiki Politiki’s Mission For 2019

Functional Politics

“I know what you’re thinking. I am proposing a sane world. I must be crazy.”
— Swami Beyondananda

 

Functional politics?

No, that’s not an oxymoron. Nor is it some utopian dream. In this era of dysfunctional politics, it has become a practical necessity.

Several weeks ago, I watched a brilliant series on health and the microbiome called “Interconnected” and it reintroduced me to Functional Medicine, defined below by Dr. Mark Hyman, a pioneer in the field:

FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE is the future of conventional medicine–available now. It seeks to identify and address the root causes of disease, and views the body as one integrated system, not a collection of independent organs divided up by medical specialties. It treats the whole system, not just the symptoms.

Following this definition, Functional Politics would be “radical” indeed, radical meaning “to the root.” Only this “radical” wouldn’t come from the fringes of left and right, but from I would call “deep center” — the fundamental desire that most people have to come together to solve problems at their root rather than waste precious time and energy fighting one another or defending positions.

Functional Politics would address the systemic causes of our political malaise, and bypass the “wedge issues” that both mainstream parties use to activate their base and create more heat than light. It would expose the fundamental contradictions, misperceptions, and obsolete and “obsolethal” assumptions and practices of “politics as usual”, addressing the whole system. For as more and more of us are coming to realize, the system doesn’t need reform, it needs reformulation.

Despite the best intentions of well-meaning people, when a system is fundamentally based on extraction of the world’s resources and exploitation of the world’s people, there comes a time when it no longer works to make the intolerable slightly more tolerable.

We are at that time now.

As we face an in-your-face President who lies boldly, and a corporate press that lies by omission and intentional failure to contextualize, it’s time for we the people to gather above and beyond mainstream media, mainstream politics, and mainstream thinking.

The work I have been doing through Wiki Politiki for the past 14 months has been an attempt to bring evolutionaries and solutionaries into conversation and then bring those conversations to a receptive audience.

I’ve playfully called this yet-unnamed movement the “great up-wising” because more and more people are waking up to the realization that the dominate-or-be-dominated program we have been living by for millennia will not get humanity through our current evolutionary crisis — and are wising up to the power of love, coherence, community and collaboration.

There are many, many organizations and individuals that hold key pieces to creating and animating this new political narrative. And now, using all the serious and humorous resources that I have cultivated, I am dedicating my work to helping bring about a “movement of movements” that will put we the people and “functional politics” in the driver’s seat.

In this emerging new context, Wiki Politiki holds the possibility of being even truer to its name, as we create a place and space for open source collaboration, bringing the best ideas to the forefront. Using another platform currently in development, National Town Square, the American people will be able to vote the best ideas “up the pop chart” and in speaking coherently in large numbers, can become an advisory branch of government more powerful than the power of money and special interests currently running the show.

Right now, “Functional Politics” is the seed of an idea, but a seed I believe will “succeed” because it addresses everything that conventional politics refuses to address, and that will need to be addressed if we are to empower a truly healthy body politic and replace the fear-based homeland security with the infinitely more secure “heartland security.”

Over the next months, I will be exploring how to create an Institute of Functional Politics to explore these ideas further. Seriously.

In the course of doing my Wiki interviews, I have connected with numerous “solutionaries” who hold key pieces of this newly-emerging political view. My intention is to spark a movement and infrastructure for Functional Politics so it becomes a significant player in creating “political climate change” by 2020.

As the old saying goes, insanity is defined as doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. This is my invitation to “go sane” together.

Are you in?

If you recognize that neither of the two political parties can lead us through the crises and opportunities we face as a nation and a species, and that a vital, independent force is needed, I invite you to support this venture at its inception.

How You Can Support FUNCTIONAL POLITICS At Its Inception. Please click here.

To read more about the Center for Functional Politics, its mission,  vision, and action plan please click here.