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CAUTIONYou are now leaving the calm and responsible Isthatlegal.ca world of Simon Shields, lawyer - and entering the overtly political Something Big world of Simon Shields, citizen. Don't get excited, they're both boringly law abiding (and when they're not I just shift to talk of law reform ;-).
Something Big ...?'Something Big' is a quixotic blue sky socio-political project. It is an ever-growing accumulation of brief essays - years in the mulling - on ethics, sensible living, law reform and more - with a focus on radical democracy and individual empowerment. At heart I'm a fundamentalist green-anarchist.
The perspective of the individual person is central to this analysis, since they are the most basic unit of political choice and action. But it's not the limited self-interested analytic individualism of libertarianism, nor is it the mass economic class analysis of Marxism. In an age of economic scarcity writers like Marx and Adam Smith were quite right to take the perspectives that they did in their times, but that time is gone.
My views are much more ones of post-scarcity economics - which degrades the role of economics in political analysis, as the late stages of modern capitalism struggle mightily to pretend that it is still important in anything but a pathological sense. If my views are consistent with any modern writer it is that of the anarchist Murray Bookchin (Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 1971), recognizing that conventional economics is largely obsolete as we are now in a new world with untold potential freedom - at least insofar as we can recognize and realize it. The term 'utopian' is appropriate.
This analysis tries to be instantly politically useful to the individual, not requiring any further 'work' - that is, immediately applicable to one's life. In that sense it is inherently populist, ironically in this new Trumpian world of populist abuse.
Populism (this is where Don Quixote comes in) operates on the likely-necessary suspicion that the problems we face aren't all that difficult, they just seem that way because of the many traps that lay to ensnare us into complicity with perverse social and faux economic dynamics. In short, the main political solution is usually: "STOP IT!" - the tough part is what/where/how/when to stop.
More seriously though, in this analysis the solutions to our problems should be obvious: ie. freeing ourselves from these dynamics and replacing the present role of dysfunctional institutions with alternate sustainable processes.
In other words, 'saving the world' is likely possible. Most of our problems are dumb things we're doing to ourselves out of habit or immediate dependence - many of which can be alleviated by just realizing that we're doing them, and developing necessary solutions with some novel thinking and experimentation.
If we can do all the remarkable things that as humans we do now, surely we can run an advanced human culture peacefully, fairly and sustainably. It's just another complex problem, and humans are past-masters at difficult problem-solving.
Brief Essays
Shifting Our Political Focus
Realize Where We Are in History
The Next Successful Revolution Will be Gradual
Forgotten Forgiveness
Progressivism, Identity Politics, Law and the End of the World
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