Читать книгу The State Franchise. Competitive Democracy - - Страница 4

The main elements over which competitive struggle takes place are: ideological influence over other countries, economic influence, scientific and technological dominance, control over financial flows, control over all types of resources – from food to energy, competition for human capital, competition for markets, and competition for control over global logistics of goods. As you can see, this is quite a list, and I haven’t even named all of them. Yet, if you noticed, I placed ideological influence at the very top.

I do not mean ideological struggle in the traditional sense – ideology as such is a thing of the past in today’s world of universal capitalism. What we are witnessing today is a battle of managerial franchises for the minds of citizens – not just within their own countries, but especially for the minds of people in other nations. It is a battle of lifestyles, aiming to make people in other countries want to live under a competing franchise.

If your management model requires little propaganda effort, and citizens of rival countries dream of relocating to your country permanently, then you are inevitably winning the ideological competition. In this case, opposition politicians in rival nations, often without even realizing it, become agents of your franchise. And considering that the world has moved into social networks, millions of ordinary citizens in those countries also become agents of your franchise.

As we can see, the struggle between nations is carried out through the creation of economic and military alliances, followed by their expansion. The main tool in this struggle is the attractiveness of managerial franchises for the citizens of the contested nations. In this ideological battle – which is in reality a battle of franchises for minds – the losing side’s final argument often becomes the use of military force.

Countries unprepared for such competition between managerial franchises, yet unwilling to be absorbed, are forced to close themselves off from the outside world, creating isolated systems. However, this is no guarantee of survival, as more successful alliances often employ a slow strangulation tactic, achieving their goals without even resorting to military power.

In short, this is more or less how we can describe what is happening in the world today, and why the role of a managerial franchise is always of critical importance.

In a time when the intensity of this struggle has sharply increased, I became interested in conducting a critical review of existing franchises. Using the method of chess analysis, I aimed to break down the position into elements, identify the key components, discard or improve upon the rest, and propose my own refined franchise – one that is modular and universally applicable in most respects to nearly any country on the planet. Once again, I emphasize that this system is modular, and I now present these modules to your attention. I will begin with the most important part – or rather, the key people.