The Initial Agreement

The Initial Agreement

            The following ‘maxims’ represent the rough draft of an ‘oath’ or initial agreement made between consenting adults. It can also be made by children and teenagers who also wish to do their best to enter into Agreement with other people who make this Initial Agreement. This initial agreement is part of a larger corpus of political and philosophical concepts that make up a unified vision of a future society. I am calling this imagined society that I hope we can become the Agreement Society or the Maxim Society. I am working to write out a series of essays that will spell out this vision and the steps we can take to achieve this society. These efforts will include a rigorous defense of the loosening of senseless anti-drug laws, particularly against Marijuana. I am also working to write a tentative and improvable constitution that could theoretically guide this society.

            I envision this Initial Agreement being taught to children from a very early age, as young perhaps as 4 or 5. Consequently I have tried to design the whole sequence of sayings to appeal to a diverse type of mindsets and learning styles, from the sophisticated and nimble to the slow and goofy, from early childhood to the elderly. I also envision the Initial Agreement being occasionally changed and always improved by popular and fairly determined consent. This Agreement would be the Agreement Society’s way of expressing its core values to one another and also of making a mutual pact of communal and widespread understanding of what constitutes achievable and meaningful wellbeing. These concepts would ideally guide the entire society’s conduct. In another essay I will discuss in much more detail what exactly I hope to accomplish by creating such a set of statements and building a society around these statements.  

            Each statement would initially be taught one at a time to children, in the order of their composition. Each statement would be accompanied by a thorough series of discussion and explanations by a trained adult. Children (and adults and everyone in between) would be thoroughly encouraged to debate, discuss and enlarge upon the adequacy and inadequacy of these statements (including the last). The sayings are meant to have an air of both goofiness and fun to them, and also an air of profound seriousness.

There would ideally be a coming-of-age ceremony among classes of students, perhaps around puberty, when all the students, their teacher(s) and their family would come together at a ritual time and publicly profess the agreement to one another. Each student would have an opportunity to say one or more of the sayings for the rest of the people to hear in sequence and at the end of the ceremony everyone would repeat the agreement. 

     My idea here is that these statements approximate the Kantian notion of a categorical imperative - that is, a statement or plan one says to oneself that one would also wish for other people to have or make. It also incorporates the Kantian notion of a Kingdom of Ends, in which each person conceives of every other person as an end and purpose unto themself, and not simply as a means to an end. So the aforementioned ceremony, and the sayings themselves, would represent a promise and a standard for conduct and goals for  and to oneself and to the larger community of the human world you belong to.  

Please provide feedback on what you think of my idea and these sayings, their order, their adequacy, etc. Also please feel free to propose additional and alternate sayings, and to propose the removal or change of certain sayings. I would like this to be a group project between real people who want to see real and meaningful change in this world.

Without further ado:

The Maxims or 

The Initial Agreement

by uh…we forget who…? Manbeard? Manfart?

Mancheeseyogurtjellyfishaspecialhappycoloreddancetime!YES!

We have it!

2    1. Don’t limit yourself.

2. Don’t limit anyone, anything, any place, any idea, any dream, any feeling, any misgiving, any perception, anyone, anything, any culture, any time, any cloud, any tiny drop of water, etc. and on to infinity…

3. Keep on going.

4. Then keep on going.

5. Limit definitions.

6. Stay balanced.

7. Re-examine balance every day.

8. Stay true to your family.

9. Everyone is family.

10. Give your family breathing room and space to live, to breath, to love, to die, to be happy and as peaceful and as considerate as they can be or will be able to.

11. Respect your elders.

12. Think for yourself.

13. Don’t tolerate injustice.

14. From time to time, argue with your elders in as kind and truthful a way as possible.

15. Don’t limit your family.

16. Don’t hurt yourself.

17. Don’t hurt anyone if you can help it.

18. Take good care of your body.

19. Feed yourself.

20. Cook good healthy delicious food if you can help it. Try if you can’t.

21. Cherish the world around you.

22. Be involved with nature, gardening, and the seasons. Get as close to them as you can.

23. Feed others.

24. Look for the truth.

25. Appreciate the truth.

26. Need the truth till it burns and you feel its sweet majestic caramelized fresh peach pulp burning your tongue. Ouch.

27. Be funny. Or try.

28. Appreciate funny. It appeaches you – get it!? I meant ‘appreciates you’ – ah, funny, right? Wink? Funny? Meh.

29. Dance every day or try if you can’t.

30. Make amazing art or try.

31. Read great books or at least listen to them.

32. Listen to amazing music and share it with your friends if they will listen.

33. Be wildly inventive.

34. BE modest ly ironic.

35. Enjoy yourself till you are dead.

36. STAY BALANCED!

37. s t a y   c a l m.

38. Dig it. Know incontrovertibly that you can dig it.

39. Hope for a time of healing.

40. Be there.

41. Be everywhere.

42. Love your fellow man.

43. Respect all life.

44. Take your time.

45. Get it right.

46. Be patient.

47. Cherish your time here together with all of us who deep down love one another every day every minute every hour no matter how big or small the love we know or see.

49. And let it end in most melodious Laughter and her older brother Hope and their intimately close distant cousins, Righteous Anger and Love.

50. Ah hahaha haha hee hee ah hahaha haha ohohoho hehee haha uhaahaha uh….um….yeah. YEAH! (Feel free to improvise here).