Regarding copyright, see Legal Notice on the linked page:
http://www.paulstramer.net/2022/12/about-use-of-meritorious-planning.html
=====
Sunday, December 4, 2022
About the Use of Meritorious Planning Committees
By Anna Von Reitz
It has been suggested that as we go forward so-called Meritorious Planning Committees, similar to those used in traditional Japanese Government, should be used here; but, as usual, there is a fly in the ointment.
The Japanese System was indeed very beneficial for Japan, but Japan offers a very homogenous culture with few minorities -- ethnically or religiously -- to deal with. Like the old Swedish System, which worked well for Swedes because of their cultural homogeneity at the time, for the same reasons--- and didn't work in a multicultural country like ours.
The advantage of being the melting pot of the world is that we benefit from the creativity and diversity of hundreds of other countries' heritages and religions and cuisines and languages and laws and everything else.
The disadvantage of our total lack of homogeneity is that the would-be "planners" have little or no commonality of vision and values, cultural or otherwise.
Note what Winston Churchill observed early on about the Americans --- "The Americans always do the right thing --- after they have tried every other alternative."
Our natural process isn't so much a planning process as a sifting and winnowing process, testing every option like scientists searching for the best theory to explain a given set of facts. We have little or no cohesive cultural identity to provide the "Group Think" that comes quite naturally to other nations, and it would certainly be a Big Mistake to assume that what works for Japan, with an almost singular cultural identity, and thousands of years of tradition behind it, would work in America.
It won't. We have already been there, done that, analyzed that much of our problem, and we know for sure that Meritorious Planning Groups don't work here. What always happens is that the Planners turn into Analyzers. Immediately after that, a fierce free-for-all ensues, while all the Analyzers analyze everything down to a gnat's eyelash, and then come back around with all the interminable arguments that accrue from every facet of every different viewpoint.
The end result of our version of "planning" which doesn't result in a plan, by the way, but does result in a conclusion ---- is often a very sound and sober solution to whatever given concern started this process in the first place, but does not allow for the act of planning --- as in projecting a forward path for the future five, ten, twenty or a hundred years down the road.
Such a prospect is not only foreign, but due to the massive lack of coherent shared cultural values, is a virtual impossibility here.
Look at the history of this country versus the history of Japan.
Successive waves of people from vastly different cultural bases have come to America since the Stone Age --- Ancient Egyptians left their hieroglyphs and DNA, Polynesian and Chinese immigrants left their imprints among the Native Peoples on the West Coast, Mound Builders who were red-haired, white-skinned proto-Celtic people who occupied 45 degrees of Latitude on a circumpolar basis, French Armoricans followed the same path as the Egyptians and left their words and DNA and so did the Norsemen, who reached our shores and traded here in prehistory; and, as we moved forward into modern times this so-called "melting pot" phenomenon only accelerated and increased.
We now have sizable populations of people from every country and nation in the world here, all living under one roof, all counting themselves as Americans, all bringing their culture with them, all inter-marrying more or less freely, all sharing little but the American Dream and our odd version of Football.
Planning? Just in the past hundred years we have seen a collapse of the predominantly white European population and a large increase in the Hispanic and Oriental populations, regrowth of the American Indian population, and moderate expansion of the African-sourced population. Who is to say what an "American" will look like or believe a hundred years from now?
Compare this with Japan? Short of an earth-spanning extinction level event, there will still be pure blooded Japanese living on the Japanese home islands a hundred years from now, and probably a thousand years from now.
They can afford to do long term planning and they have the history and cultural identity to do so without a lot of the "other views" and arguments and uncertainties that we have in this country.
So when it comes to Meritorious Planning Committees, thanks, we understand that they worked well in the Orient, but please pay attention to the fact that we have vastly different conditions to deal with in the West and especially in North America.
----------------------------
See this article and over 3800 others on Anna's website here: www.annavonreitz.com
***********************************************************