Matchism Home

Version 0.8.5 May 28, 2020

Beta testing on the decisionmaking system for matchism (https://www.proxyfor.me/) continues. The next version will include authentication and will focus on local proposals for cities in Colorado instead of the current global set.

This is the home of matchism, a philosophy and design for political, economic, and social systems that will provide an optimal fit for human nature and our current level of technological development. This document is the Matchism Manifesto, but also includes a wide range of specific proposals: It’s not only a Declaration of Independence from these existing systems and the leaders who exploit them but also a prototype Constitution for how we’ll organize a society that works better without them.

This document is organized such that it can be published on-line or in book format. Many of the links will open up the document referenced (if anyone asks, you’re obviously a scholar or you wouldn’t be here, so this redistribution is covered under fair use). Others, including most references to books, will take you to Amazon’s web site so that you can find out more about the book and either order it or use the information to find it at your local library (although some of them are academic books which you’ll probably have better luck finding at a university library or through inter-library loan). This document itself is intended to be read sequentially, however. If you follow any of the internal links, be sure to use your browser’s back button to resume reading where you left off or you may find the later sections hard to follow because they rely on information presented in previous sections. If you’d prefer to read the whole thing off-line, you can download it as a PDF or as HTML.

Not every claim is backed up by a reference link, but are either easy to verify with an Internet search or are theoretical claims for which there are no relevant published resources. When a reference is provided, it’s not merely to bolster a claim but instead to ensure the reader has the necessary background information (i.e., you really should read them): As a “Master Class” in social engineering it presumes the reader has some familiarity with concepts in the domains of ethology, anthropology, psychology (social, personality, and evolutionary), economics, and political science. And of course some familiarity with engineering principles would be most helpful. Of these a deep appreciation of ethology (the study of animal behavior with particular emphasis on the genetic basis of that behavior) is the most crucial as it is the foundation of most the psychology and anthropology cited here. If you have not completely assimilated the concepts covered in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, for example, that’s the place to start. After that, a good next step would be reading an overview of the field of evolutionary psychology, such as Christopher Boehm’s Moral Origins or Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.

Much of matchism.org will be slow going for some readers because it is more engineering specification and instruction manual for the political “technology” than the “story” needed to sell it. This is by design. It is instructive to compare the foundational documents of three of the most important revolutions (American, Bolshevik, and Nazi) to see why. For the American Revolution, the specifications of the technology on offer are The Federalist Papers. These are also quite dry but the most complete and specific of the three founding documents. Marx’s Communist Manifesto, which Lenin and Trotsky used as the technological basis of the Bolshevik Revolution, is more of a mixture, but with enough detail that the technology can be clearly seen. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, on the other hand, is mostly story and it requires careful reading to pick out the technology parts. Hitler sold 8 million copies of his manifesto, primarily because the “story” in it was very compelling. It was only after implementation that it became clear that the technology behind it was fatally flawed. Of course we now know that all three of these technologies have fatal flaws, but it should be clear by the inverse relationship between specificity and longevity that it is better that the technology be completely and clearly specified first. The “story” part of Matchism can come later, after the details of the technology have been worked out.

As you’re reading please keep in mind that this is just an beta-test version of the Matchism Manifesto. The 1.0 release is the one that will be complete enough to actually be implemented. If you find a problem, whether it be something that is just unclear, or definitely flawed (a bug), please make a report to scott@matchism.org so that it can be improved. You are also encouraged to join the proxyfor.me Facebook Group to ask questions, debate specific proposals, and suggest additional ideas.

Matchism is at present merely a philosophy. It is not a club, political party, corporation (non-profit or otherwise), or religion. The information on this site as well as the source to The System (https://www.proxyfor.me/) are and always will be free and open source (Public Domain licensing). No one has any proprietary interest in any of the ideas unique to the philosophy or the words used to described them. There is no management, board of directors, or leadership. This is for everyone’s protection: No one can be held responsible for any of these ideas, nor can they be held against you, neither because you read them, discussed them, or even signed up and voted on The System. Until version 1.0 is put into an implementation phase, there are no “matchists” as individuals or “matchish” as a people. You may have “matchist tendencies”, be “matchist curious”, or be a “matchist sympathizer”, but because there is no membership or oath or any other requirements, everyone is just a hobbiest, a researcher, an explorer.

The pages on matchism.org will never include advertising, be used to sell any products or services (e.g., the links to books on Amazon are not associated with any sales account), or sell any of your information or contributions to others. You may at some point be given the opportunity to contribute time or money toward some particular project, but you will be free to not participate, and it will be years before those opportunities come, if in fact they ever do.

Next: Tenets of Matchism