Preamble to a Constitution
The Preamble to the Constitution is a statement of purpose and vision. It describes the common goals, assumptions, and principles that inform the Constitution’s making. In the United States, the Declaration of Independence serves this purpose in greater detail than the first paragraph of the Constitution.
Every social organization benefits from a vision statement and by-laws. In a modern, complex, integral society, these purposes should be focused and limited so as not to wander outside their social sphere or harm or dominate other institutions or sovereign individuals. Further, the government has a role in serving as a referee of social institutions and individuals.
The United States Constitution was drafted at a stage of social evolution before the rise of the complex social institutions we have today. Modern banks and corporations were in their infancy. Religion and the press were guaranteed freedoms, but their power constrained. The U.S. Founders did an excellent job creating “a more perfect” government than previous governments, but they compromised on slavery and did not enfranchise women. Those were two problems rectified later, after social protest and war.
Other problems exist today. The period 1776 to 2022 saw social evolution go from early nations to the entry of integral commons.
A Preamble to a post-modern Constitution has to address new concentrations of power and wealth and conflicts of interest. As the founders thought integrally in their day, most of their work should stand with corrections and additions to account for social changes.
The proposed declaration of an integral society can serve as a preamble for a Constitution of an Integral Society.
Declaration of an Integral Society
From time to time, the evolution of society requires a social compact appropriate to its people and social institutions. Human society has evolved from clans to tribes, to feudal empires, nation-states, corporate states, and value communities. It now stands at the forefront of an integral commons.
States, corporations, and value communities have created social institutions that serve sovereign human beings. These institutions have been insufficiently governed and have often been turned into vehicles for wealth, power, and control, destroying individual sovereignty. The abuse and misuse of social institutions must be restrained.
We hold that each human being is a sovereign individual with a consciousness capable of transcendence in search of Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
We hold that to facilitate this pursuit, each human being has a right to love, to family, to association with others, to own property, to acquire knowledge, to make and sell products and services. These rights are not ultimate ends in themselves, but they are intermediate ends and fundamental means to enable individuals to pursue happiness.
We hold each right bears a corresponding responsibility. In interacting with society and nature to promote one’s perfection, every person must respect other human beings and the rest of creation. Each person is responsible for pursuing truth and values, and promoting economic and social justice.
We hold that each human being, a steward of nature, remains responsible for living in harmony with nature, which is interdependent and the foundation of the existence of human beings.
We hold that, to secure these rights and responsibilities, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any government or other social institution becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, laying its foundation on the principles and form of organization most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Prudence dictates that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. Experience has shown that people are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing the same object evinces a design to force them under absolute despotism, it is their right and duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the people under institutional abuse. Now necessity constrains them to alter their former systems of government.
We hold that an integral society consists of a complex interaction of social institutions in the spheres of culture, economy, and governance. These institutions have purposes and limits in their service to sovereign individuals. People create and maintain social institutions as highly specialized tools designed to serve social functions within a just social order. Institutions, as organized expressions of society’s values and goals, affect the quality of each person’s individual and social life. As historical creations of humanity carry within themselves the wounds of history, institutions are continually in need of healing and perfecting.
People create tools shaped from the resources and energies of nature to support the economic and social sovereignty of the person. Through private property ownership, everyone can become a master of the technology needed to realize their fullest human potential and dignity.
Today people have been deprived of the right to pass laws in the interest of sovereign citizens through corrupted processes of legislation controlled by political parties, moneyed interests, and the bureaucratic state.
They have failed to protect rights and secure borders.
They have violated the principle of subsidiarity and states rights.
They have entered into banking cabals that have provided independent financing for the government causing inflation as a hidden tax on the people.
They have appropriated resources from the integral commons rather than refereeing their use by the people.
They have created quasi-standing armies through agencies that do not represent the consent of the governed.
They have allowed mergers, acquisitions, and interlocking boards of corporations and institutions that overreach the limits and change the purposes of institutions, so they fail to help the citizens they were created to serve.
They have created intelligence agencies that lack accountability and engage in spying, entrapment, misuse of funds, black operations that violate the rights of people, and cover-up misdeeds through the classification of documents the citizens have a right to see.
They have created independent sources of funding to escape accountability to legislatures.
They have passed laws encouraging the concentration of capital rather than wide distribution among sovereign citizens.
They have censored the speech of those pursuing truth.
They have erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
They have combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws.
They have improperly confined citizens and failed to provide them with speedy and fair trials.
They have cut off the trade of citizens with many parts of the world.
They have imposed taxes that violate the principle of subsidiarity.
They have deprived us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.
They have taken away charters, abolished the most valuable laws, and fundamentally altered the forms of our governments.
They have suspended citizens from conducting business or legal processes in the name of emergencies.
They have excited domestic violence and theft and advocated policies that harm life and liberty.
We have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Officials whose character is marked by every act that may define a tyrant are unfit to rule a free people or their social institutions.
We have appealed to the native justice and magnanimity of ruling elites, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity.
We, therefore, declare our intent to end the unjust practices of governments, agencies, banks, and other social institutions that deny or impede the fundamental rights and responsibilities of sovereign individuals in their pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.
With the goal of social evolution, not revolution, we put forward a proposed Constitution of an Integral Society. With the recognition that human society has evolved from early nations states to societies of complex social institutions, we believe that adjustments to the Constitution of the United States can serve as the foundation, as that Constitution evolved from governance systems that preceded it.
With the goal of social evolution, not revolution, we put forward the proposed Constitution for a Federation of States. It is not a system of law to be imposed by force or military imposition, but by the voluntary consensus of peoples and leaders who will to serve the sovereignty of others. We desire to create a more perfect government standing on the successes of the past and guarding against future harm to individuals.