Failures of “Democracy” – Avoiding Fascism through an Earth Constitution

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 28 Jul 2025

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

Democratic theory from the 17^th century on asserts that the people are sovereign, meaning that the legitimate authority of government arises from the people.  Nevertheless, the enduring human attempt to discover the best way of living—a way of living that supports personal freedom and satisfaction within the context of social and political arrangements that protect the equality of all before the law and the common good of the whole—goes back in the West to the Greeks and culminated there in the thinking of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Plato argued that society must be designed so has to produce wise people and empower them to rule.

In the Apology, Socrates is on trial for “corrupting the youth and teaching false gods.” He was famously condemned to death by a mass-jury of 500 of his peers. His crime was to spend his life going around to his fellow citizens questioning why they spent all their time seeking money, power, social status, personal pleasures, and other such incidental things while refusing the greatest good that had been gifted to human beings—the ability to care for wisdom, virtue, and the well-being of the “soul.”   Plato, a young man of 27 years at the time, understood very well the stupidities and failures of “democracy.”

Today, Plato’s critique of direct rule of the people in Book VIII of the Republic rings all too true.  The chaos that results from putting the unwise masses of people into power necessarily results in the tyranny of a single person or group.  One thinks of the Nazi plebiscites in the early 1930s “democratically” granting more and more absolute and unaccountable power to Hitler. One thinks of the Italian elections placing Mussolini in power, or the recent French elections nearly putting far-right ideologue Marie la Penne into power, or the US elections placing the tyrannical and narcissistic Donald Trump into power.

There are those who critique the Constitution for the Federation of Earth as it was developed through four Constituent Assemblies from 1968-1977 because it gives us “representative democracy” rather than “direct democracy.”  However, the concept of democracy, hotly debated over the centuries by anarchists, libertarians, Marxists, syndicalists, etc., is far from a settled matter.  One thing is clear, it does not necessarily mean that the people must literally rule by mass decision-making about things they know little or nothing about.

For the government to be responsible to the people is not the same as the ignorant masses dictating to the government whatever bizarre whims about world affairs they might have at any particular moment. The “sovereignty” of the people can be expressed in any number of ways, not necessarily by putting the ignorant masses in charge. Fascism requires masses of people fanatically attempting to “Make America Great Again” or shouting “Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles.” It requires that they blindly follow some “Führer.” At the level on which most persons live today, these phenomena constitute “direct democracy” in action.

The advocates of direct democracy claim that an “unalienated” and wise person resides in most persons if their thinking is not distorted by the privately owned mass media, capitalist economic relations, or other systemic influences that make people into the fools that we see everywhere about us in the world today. Nevertheless, many conflicting theories about how to overcome alienation are also rampant today, and even what a human being is remains far from clear.   Which thinker gives us a “correct” picture of an unalienated human being— Spinoza?   Hegel?  Marx?   Whitehead?   Dewey?   Heidegger?  Foucault?   Derrida?  Jürgen Moltmann?  Paul Ricoeur?   Jürgen Habermas?  They all differ from one another, some radically so.   But this does not stop the proponents of direct democracy who seem to know by some mysterious intuition what an unalienated human being might look like.

Today, the world has become one world in many ways, and our problems have become global problems. The question of what a human being is and can be has become critical, since the growing consensus is that we are in the process of engineering human extinction through destroying our planetary biosphere, preparing for World War Three (nuclear holocaust), producing omnicidal bioweapons, and the rest.   Millions today declare themselves “world citizens” and many groups work for some form of genuine global governance (beyond the militarized sovereign nation-state system). My own work, as in Human Dignity and World Order (2024), attempts to explicate our common humanity in terms of the concept of “dignity.”

Yet the average citizen today—anywhere in the world—is completely oblivious concerning our human condition, let alone any possible solutions to our suicidal trajectories. Even understanding world problems—the complexities of climate science, of weapons systems and disarmament, of satellite uses and technology, of the complex economic and social conditions necessary for social justice—are far beyond what most people worldwide are capable of today. Only a few of these millions of global citizens have the intellectual capacity to grasp the problems, their complexity and interrelationships, and work with others to address the problems before it is too late.  We need to find ways to seek such people out and give them a role in democratic governance. To try to give the planet direct democracy at this stage is suicidal in my view, an invitation to fascism.

Advanced thinkers such as Ken Wilber and proponents of “Integral Theory” have embraced what has been called the key insight of the 20^th century: the evolution of the cosmos and human beings within it. Putting some of this vast literature together, Wilber has outlined steps in the evolutionary process across four quadrants: science, personal subjectivity, culture, and institutional arrangements.  Human personalities, cultures, and institutions (of governance) can therefore be assessed according to how advanced they appear within these evolutionary scales.

How we fashion our governing systems might well correspond to the psychological level of development that predominates on planet Earth.  In Integral Psychology (2000), Wilber defines eight levels of human development and assigns them colors: (1) Beige: Archaic Instinctual, (2) Purple: Magical Animistic, (3) Red: Power Gods: “powerful, impulsive, egocentric, heroic,” (4) Blue: Conformist Rule. “This righteous Order enforces a code of conduct based on absolutist and unvarying principles of “right” and “wrong,” (5) Orange: Scientific Achievement. “Achievement oriented toward materialistic gains.” (6) Green: the Sensitive Self. “Communitarian, human bonding, ecological sensitivity, networking…. Collective communities.”  (7) Yellow: Integrative. “Egalitarianism is complemented with natural degrees of excellence where appropriate. Knowledge and competency should supersede rank, power, status or group.”   (8) Turquoise: Holistic. “Uses the entire spiral; sees multiple levels of interaction; detects harmonics, the mystical forces, and the pervasive flow-states that permeate any organization.”

Here we have “natural” hierarchies of psychological and institutional growth.  Given that most people the world over today are red, blue, orange, or green (or some combination of these levels), how do we need to govern ourselves on this planet?  People at the red level are drawn to fascism. People at the blue level want society to mirror the authoritarian structures given in the Bible, Koran, or Torah.  People at the Orange level want unrestrained capitalism despite its horrific consequences for the environment and human inequality and misery.  People at the green level often reject all hierarchies in their communal spirit, thereby discounting the natural hierarchies that are everywhere in nature and human life.

For example, they may want people chosen for office to be selected randomly by lot.  (Why not? Since all are equal and no one is more competent than anyone else.)   As Plato discerned some 2500 years ago, Socrates was wiser in his quest for virtue and integrity than the people who condemned him to death who were concerned with money, status, power, and pleasure.  The fundamental evolutionary thought of the 20^th and 21^st centuries fairly shouts at us that we human beings must engage in what Barbara Marx Hubbard and others called “conscious evolution.”

The concept of Noosphere has also entered popular discourse.  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist, developed the idea of a cosmic evolutionary process that evolves the Earth from its geosphere phase to its biosphere, and then to the development of the mind-sphere in the form of human thought encompassing the Earth. The Noosphere is now to take the lead in the evolutionary process.  However, as I argue in The Earth Constitution Solution: Design for a Living Planet (2021), the Noosphere on planet Earth remains a chaos of inchoate ideas, ideologies, hates, fears, and conflicts.  The Earth requires a brain, and the Earth Constitution provides the structure making that planetary brain possible. Any properly working brain will engage in conscious evolution. That is exactly the point of the human gifts of freedom and foresight. A mature brain recognizes natural hierarchies: those with proven competence and wisdom should be doing the work suitable for them and us.

We must engage in conscious evolution not only personally but also institutionalize this process so that human beings move beyond their present red, blue, orange, and green stages of growth to a yellow integral stage in which we govern ourselves through finding ways to put those who are more competent into positions of influence and authority. At the same time, we should institutionalize the process of evolutionary growth itself so that governing itself evolves toward higher forms that we can hardly imagine today, perhaps toward forms of “direct democracy” in the distant future.

I argue that the Constitution for the Federation of Earth is the best document (that we have at present) for getting wise people into positions of authority and influence while institutionalizing the process of conscious evolution for humanity. Governing requires advanced conceptual understanding and integration, and the world as a whole is an extremely complex and dynamic reality requiring highly competent and dedicated people in economics, development theory, systems theory, climate science, energy science, engineering, human rights and dignity specialists, legal minds, etc., all working together to form an integral evolving unity in diversity of the whole.

A key principle is that the Constitution applies to the whole of humanity.  Nothing can be accomplished through the sovereign nation-state system, which, since Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant, has been widely recognized as a war-system. The Earth Constitution gives us a brilliant tricameral structure that includes a House of Peoples, a House of Counselors, and a House of Nations. The largest house, that of Peoples, has 1000 representatives from 1000 World Electoral Districts, each elected by voting within his or her district.  The broad functions of the Constitution include ending war and disarming the nations, protecting universal human rights, and protecting and restoring our planetary ecosystem.

The Constitution sets up its “Integrative Complex” in Article 8 to help function as our global brain by researching global problems and their possibilities and educating the members of the Parliament in these problems, including all those in the House of Peoples. The Earth Constitution institutionalizes a growth process for 1000 delegates, not immediately for all humanity.  It trains them in understanding the complexities and dynamics of global problems, of complex issues of personal and group freedom in relation to the needs of the biosphere, present circumstances, and future generations.  It is essential that we get the 1500 or so members of the World Parliament (in all three houses) as educated as possible as fast as possible. There is not much time left before the Earth will become uninhabitable or commit omnicide through weapons of mass destruction.

The Earth Constitution also sets up criteria for advanced education and experience for the Judiciary, the Ombudsmus, the thirty or so Departments of the Earth Federation: transportation, education, housing, climate restoration, agriculture, water, democratic processes, etc. These criteria are specified in Articles 5-11.  The Constitution places experts in all areas of government through the global civil service administration. The Constitution includes a planetary World University System and global educational system that lends itself readily to conscious evolution.

Here is where the people of Earth can be addressed in their need for evolutionary growth.  The Provisional World Parliament at its 8^th session in Lucknow, India, June 2004, passed World Legislative Act 26, entitled “The Education Act.”  It defines curricular goals, applied, using appropriate formats at each level of education from childhood to adulthood, that help bring people to self-aware levels concerning democracy, human well-being, global issues, the principle of unity in diversity, etc.  Article 18.4 of the Constitution mandates a complete review of the Constitution within the first 10 years after the First Operative Stage is reached (see Article 17.3) and every 20 years after that.

Clearly as the people of Earth grow toward what I called in Millennium Dawn (2005) “planetary maturity,” the Earth Constitution can and should be amended to allow for their increasing levels of mutual understanding, cooperation, and maturity.  If “direct democracy” is to be found in the constitution, therefore, it needs to be in Article 13 where future goals for human rights actualization are specified. At present, the Constitution can and must serve as the blueprint for an effective democratic human totality devoted to saving us from extinction and laying the groundwork for human flourishing in peace, justice, and freedom.

In addition, perhaps the most compelling arrangements moving people toward an integral consciousness is the structure of the Earth Constitution itself. Just as the present world system of multiple sovereign nation-states and self-centered capitalist greed influences people in the direction of fragmentation, violence, and war so the holistic structure of the Constitution embracing all as world citizens with the same rights, duties, goals, and aspirations will play a major role in human evolutionary growth. The Constitution embodies the “General Will” of humanity for peace, security, prosperity, freedom, self-realization, and fulfillment.  Once ratified as binding law, the Constitution, with checks and balances, preserves and protects that General Will.

For Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the 18^th century democratic theorist who was decisive for the work of Immanuel Kant and others) this General Will is the very heart of the social contract. By contrast, direct democracy attempts to institutionalize “the will of all.” But the “will of all” can be anything, Rousseau pointed out; it can be wrong. A proper constitution will institutionalize protections for the General Will, for universal human rights and dignity, with checks and balances. It will overcome, inhibit, and neutralize all tendencies toward fascism.

This Earth Constitution is unique because it premises government on human dignity (not on historical accidents, tradition, or naked power). Human Dignity (the General Will) is manifested in the very structure and dynamics, in the checks and balances, and in the oaths required by the Constitution. This dignity is protected by its representational and educational structures, among other things. It is not likely to be enhanced by placing upon ordinary citizens the immense burden of governing themselves in a complex world beyond their understanding. The Constitution embodies this General Will. While taking account of the “will of all” in multiple ways, it carefully protects the dignity of humanity from possible fascist violations of its moral and practical foundations.

We want vibrant civic institutions and participation on all levels, from the grassroots up. One feature of the representative democracy structure within the Earth Constitution presents a mechanism for removing big money from politics by allowing each candidate so much space to make his or her case.  More needs to be done, of course, to get big money out of politics.  The Provisional World Parliament, in World Legislative Act 29, established a system of Global People’s Assemblies for each of the 1000 World Electoral Districts.  The purpose of this legislation was to enhance citizen participation in the political process everywhere on Earth.

Nevertheless, the “powers” of government under the Earth Constitution as articulated in its Article 4 should include the ability to put into place mechanisms for direct voting, referendums, etc., but should not tie the hands of the Earth Federation government by mandating these. If ever increasing direct democratic participation is a human right, then Article 13 is its proper location, for this entire article is about the direction by which humanity and the Earth Federation can and must move into the future.

As the world-chaos of climate collapse and the spread of ever more dangerous weapons increases, the danger of fascism also increases significantly.  Fascism draws on people’s need to submerge their freedom into some collective-power-identity by surrendering their thought and direction to “der Führer.” This occurs because most people are deeply bewildered about our human situation, what a human being is, and how we should both be living and governing ourselves. Proponents of direct democracy risk exacerbating this tendency. We need a world system that is pragmatic, efficient, fundamentally democratic, and powerful enough to turn our suicidal trajectory around, a constitution that is capable of overcoming the tendency to fascism among those voters who 2500 years ago condemned Socrates, last century put Hitler into power, and this year elected Donald Trump.

The Constitution as a whole, as it is currently written, constitutes a stellar template for humanity moving into the future. Indeed, it forms a template for having a future at all.  The 16^th session of the Provisional World Parliament will take place in Pondicherry, India, December 7-10, 2025.  It will be a pivotal moment for humanity and will transition to a Permanent Secretariat for the PWP to serve as a key hope for the future of humanity—for humanity even having a future.   To learn more, check out our website at the Earth Constitution Institute.

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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 28 Jul 2025.

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3 Responses to “Failures of “Democracy” – Avoiding Fascism through an Earth Constitution”

1. Suryanath Prasad says:

   28 Jul 2025 at 16:14

   In the whole world, maximum numbers of Nation-States are Non-democratic, but even in the less number of democratic Nation-States, there is no true democracy, proxy governments are there. Reality is that if people do not eat by proxy, drink by proxy and marry by proxy, why then they should be ruled by proxy? They must be masters in their own houses. And the people of Non-democratic Nation-States and their rulers will also be inspired to follow the awakened people through Peace Education. For more details, one may refer to my article cited below with its website link:

   Peace Education for Genuine Democracy, Good
   Governance and Nonviolence
   By Surya Nath Prasad, Ph. D., Transcend Media Service
   21 Apr 2014
   https://www.transcend.org/tms/2014/04/peace-education-for-genuine-democracy-good-governance-and-nonviolence/

   Reply
2. Dr. Roger Kotila says:

   28 Jul 2025 at 18:05

   Professor Martin’s analysis reflects the emerging movement to replace the UN Charter with the World Constitution & Parliament Association’s visionary, but practical Earth Constitution. World federalists have known since the founding of the UN Charter that it was not adequate for its primary task: To end the scourge of war. It has become obvious that the Charter also cannot deal adequately with justice and human rights, or climate change.

   What to do? Join the Earth Constitution movement. The EC wats in the wings, ready to go. The world community deserves a decent, peaceful world and the House of Peoples provides a meaningful voice with real voting rights. The UN General Assembly can become the House of Nations which will give 187 nations voting rights for the first time regarding global affairs. See ww.earthfederation.info for articles in support of this inspiring strategy.

   Reply
3. Alberto Portugheis says:

   29 Jul 2025 at 11:00

   Glen Martin “……functions of the Constitution include ending war and disarming the nations”
   We don’t need to ‘disarm’ nations. We need to ABOLISH Militarism, that is the war industry and its clients, the Armed Forces.

   The Universal Abolition of Militarism will automatically protect universal human rights and restore our planetary ecosystem.

   Reply