The Great Pilgrimage, a Proof of Personhood
Direct democracy, cultural beauty, coming of citizenship
POSTED ON: 10.11.2022
Errol Drummond
Exlusive content by Zero Knowledge Natives
The Great Pilgrimage, a Proof of Personhood
In the political reform idea Dynamic Democracy there is the need for a blockchain based national voting system, and therefore for a list of eligible voters. This article sketches out a proof of personhood idea for this sake, and turns some of the negatives into positives via the beauty of the University Erasmus programme. It would be better to refer here to proof of citizenship since the benefits of signing up are only relevant to citizens. Proof of Work
The security basis for this proposal is a form of proof of work.
The work involved in getting yourself on the list takes several days and probably on average would require a week. Moreover there are many security checks, and failing them would put you at serious risk. The resulting mathematical game would seriously disincentivise any attempts to cheat to such a level that safety would be achieved.
The Great Pilgrimage
We will use the quixotic United Kingdom as the example country through which to explain this process.
The UK currently consists of 4 ‘united’ nations. In the capital of each of these nations, we can organise a room that has been specifically designed with every security measure possible. This room will have 24/7 security covering every inch, and all this footage will be live-streamed for all to see and confirm security for posterity. There will also be security or volunteers manning the rooms every second of every day.
When a citizen wishes to join the list of eligible voters to take part in dynamic democracy, they will go to one of these rooms and present evidence of their citizenship such as their passport. This evidence will be checked for validity, and for consistency with the presenting person. A more thorough investigation will then be undertaken to look at the history of this individual and check whether they are who they say they are.
Any serious suspicion of fraud will be met with the most severe consequences.
And this process has to occur in all 4 of the rooms, going to any fewer is not sufficient.
You may be beginning to recognise the sacrifices involved in this pilgrimage. This process would most likely take a week to be comfortable, and the process would involve hands and eyes prying into your past, potentially asking you difficult questions. Moreover you would have to leave your other duties and find ways to afford this journey. We are signing up for participation in national governance, it shouldn’t be cheap; but the benefits should far outweigh the costs.
Cultural Beauty from Individual Sacrifices
Aside from the core benefit of this process, to be able to partake in national governance via dynamic democracy, there is the chance for a beautiful cultural tradition that helps bind everybody together. And this cultural tradition will help connect us in far better ways than being forced to sing the national anthem in school growing up.
There are two main identity-growth perspectives to consider.
Cultural Adventure
The first is the exploration of some of the varied cultures that make up our diverse country. Many citizens often never explore the majority of the varied culture that occupies their lands; not only are they missing the chance to incorporate some of the beauty in that variety into themselves, they also miss the chance to form emotional connections with their personality-aligned peers in those realms.
Imagine a stream of random fellow citizens passing in chaotic routes across the four capitals of the UK, and that you undertake your own similarly chaotic journey. How many chance encounters will you have along the way? How many potential friends will you find across your country? How many fascinating stories will you hear?
People living along commonly trodden routes between these capitals could open their homes and sofas in the sharing tradition that so many of us love, and host cultural fairs to show off the history of the place they settled in. Local foods, obscure poets, beautiful nature, and so much more.
The Erasmus programme across Europe has been a cultural wonder for the people who went through it. We made mesmerising memories with people we otherwise would never have met, developed our survival abilities by leaping to foreign lands, and finished with friends we could visit and stay with across the European plain.
If you’re reading this you’re probably a crypto native too - how much cultural and social beauty have you partaken in thanks to traveling around for conferences?
Coming of Citizenship
The second identity-growth perspective is a reincarnation of Becoming a Man. In many societies, past and present, there was conscription. Boys would be sent off to join the military, and they would come back as men.
Now the treatment of those boys also left many mental scars, but they were also given a common national strand to hold together. Every adult male in these populations has a joint experience that binds them. The cultural power of these joint experiences and national strands cannot be overstated.
Today we see a lot of internal national struggle and strife, with constant messaging about the things that divide us or make us different - would an experience to bind us not be a valuable tool to help our stability and prosperity?
There are very few societies where conscription would be a good argument, but that doesn’t mean that the loss of the shared experience isn’t something to mourn. Yet there are other opportunities to partake in join experiences, and we can build them such that they don’t come with the mental scarring that conscription left. The great pilgrimage is a great candidate.
Conclusion
This idea is proposed for serious reasons, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t fun and beauty to be had along the way of its exploration. The philosophy used here is to imagine the beauty that our commonly built behavioural patterns can produce, and then if there is potential value there to assess the costs and dangers.
The costs and dangers of this idea will be explored in future articles, so please follow me on twitter to see new articles. Some of the dangers to explore are, who creates national documents, how are they organised, should we take more identifying pieces of information from people such as fingerprints or DNA, and how do we prune the list of voters when people die or lose their rights to vote?
If you enjoyed this idea, why not read the summary of the idea it is imagined for, Dynamic Democracy Errol Drummond
Exlusive content by Zero Knowledge Natives