Keeping the Credit

Earlier today a Thinker's Party member received this question from somebody who'd just discovered the party: If people expect the government to administer social programs and solve social problems and our plan to push them out of that role is to do it ourself, won't people just think that the government is still doing it? How will we make sure those perceptions change.

This is a good question that goes straight to one of the Thinker's Party's long term goals, which is to have the social sphere completely divorced from the political sphere. In order for that divorcing to happen successfully, we argue, we must create independent programs capable of supporting and nurturing the social sphere. Once we've done that, the government will be free to withdraw back into the political sphere - but only if the people allow it. If they think the government is still controlling the social sphere, they won't let that happen, and we will fail to reach this particular long term goal.

To be frank, at this point we consider the likelihood that we will successfully take over and support all aspects of the social sphere minimal enough that ensuring we get credit for it when that happens is not a great priority. We consider it much more likely that we'll make a significant impact in one area or another, and the methods involved in doing that will be enough for communities to understand where the resources and efforts are coming from. To go back to yesterday's marching band analogy, the greater community surrounding school A might not realize that all of the band's governmental funding has been cut, but everyone intimately involved with the band will. Since they're the ones invested enough to fight for band funding in the first place, they are the audience where assignation of credit is important, and by virtue of the network and process in place they will already know. In other words, our PR will take care of itself where it matters through the very processes that create the need for it.

Of course we dream of wild success and major societal changes within a generation, and if we find that widespread ignorance of how those changes came to be is an obstacle, we will deal with it in the best way possible at the time.