The SoLiD manifesto

The movement:
  1. The SoLiD movement sees itself as an unfinished work, subject to critical review and  change. Criticism founded on knowledge and insight
  2. The SoLiD movement is an ideological movement and not a political party. Its goals are situated in a distant future and there is no guaranty that they will or even can be reached.
  3. The SoLiD movement tries to achieve its goals by influencing existing organizations or by forming new organizations based on SoLiD concepts.
  4. It develops a variety of cultural practices and rituals, enabling its participants to experience its values and ideas in their own way. It will do its utmost to prevent personal or leadership worship.
Individual and society:
  1. Our principal moral value is solidarity. Meaning a reciprocal obligation to work together to reach set goals and stand for each other; into which one engages oneself freely. It is not an axiomatic brotherhood, stemming from the natural goodness of mankind. It is not about reaching a state where everybody has the same possibilities and rights.
  2. Individual initiative, responsibility  and creativity are important and so is the freedom, necessary to develop them. There should be reasonable incentives for successful creation. But: new creations are always the result of previous ones. It does not begin or end with the individual. We want to put restraint on excessive appropriation of the fruits of society for merits falsely claimed as entirely ones own.
  3. The SoLiD movement accepts private ownership of businesses when the owners make a clear entrepreneurial contribution to the organization. All other forms of ownership of businesses should be socialized. Only private goods and a limited claim to unearned income should be inheritable. Market distribution is an important economic coördinating mechanism fostering freedom of choice. Making profit is a legitimate goal of organizations, in the first place to enhance its chances of survival, this way creating more certainty for their participants.
  4. We seek to improve institutions and organizations through democratization. Democracy, meaning something different from the usual one-man-one-vote idea, is seen as a mechanism to qualify for participation in decision making based on knowledge and skill as well as the mechanism for decision making itself.
Humanity and the world:
  1. The SoLiD movement considers the Enlightenment and the humanisms, capitalisms and democracy that spring from it as the superior culture and mode of existence for humanity. The present failures of this system should lead to its improvement, not to abolishment. There should be no wish to control or absorb other cultures but its dominance should be continued. It rejects the idea that all cultures are of equal worth.
  2. The value of the life of an individual specimen of the sort can vary, depending  on the circumstances. This holds for all life, vegetable and animal, including human life. The valuation of a life is a cultural, societal and historic given, subject to change and discussion.
  3. The SoLiD movement seeks improvement of the situation of mankind as a whole, while acknowledging differences between cultures and groups. It does not see differences as something unwanted, to be annihilated. It does not acknowledge nor seeks for guild for present inequalities in the more distant history
  4. The present handling of nature, i.e. the capitalist economy is a worldwide system on the verge of derailing, if that hasn’t already happened. Regional-cultural coördination and regulation, adding up to a worldwide one is urgent. For this, international cooperation and the realization of federations of states are a necessary precondition. Pressure on groups or states blocking these efforts can be inevitable.

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EN version 2.0 151026 from NL versie 5.0 dd 150614

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