While my personal background shouldn’t be the focus here, I will share some of my journey to this moment with the hope that others will see how unique and yet so similar my life has been to so many others. Through it all I have been pondering governance, politics, and social issues; ultimately culminating in the creation of this new governmental framework.

I grew up in a loving lower-middle class family with two parents and several siblings. I went to church with my family every Sunday and worked a paper route from a young age to save for college. A strong work ethic was instilled in me early on. I pushed myself academically and socially with aspirations of public office and one day making the world a better place.

Perhaps I have an inherently incredulous nature, or it’s a natural byproduct of growing up in a religious family and receiving a Christian education, but as a teenager I began the arduous process of analyzing and deconstructing everything I believed. As a result I came to recognize that you don’t have to believe in God to be a good person and have a positive impact on your community. After graduating from high school I attended a well-known large university with the explicit intention of meeting new types of people. I pursued a degree in environmental science and political science.

I received a tremendous education and could have worked my way up the corporate or political ladder anywhere. I discovered how naive I was to think that I could impact American politics in any meaningful or positive way. My continued incredulity had me reading between the lines throughout my education. I eventually realized that for anyone to get elected necessarily requires endless compromises and unscrupulous deals. I never wanted a job in politics for power, only for the good I thought I could do. I left the university just as I was about to graduate, disenchanted and disgusted with the American political system.

At this point in my life, now a young adult, I poured all of my effort into music. Music is something I have always loved and thought was as far removed from politics as possible. I spent years playing in bands, booking shows, running sound, and touring. During this time I taught myself how to program and build music related websites. After years of living in poverty for the love of music I got a job as a programmer. This is where I started my “real adult” life with real responsibilities. I became a serial entrepreneur along the way, I purchased a home, and spent the next decade of my life living the stereotypical American dream.

I was still intentionally not engaging with politics but I couldn’t escape politics engaging with me. Seemingly endless foreign wars, destructive international policies, and a lackluster domestic agenda. I became frustrated with the ineffectual leadership and little to no progress dealing with the environmental and social issues here at home. It wasn’t until I developed severe knee issues in my late 30’s and had to endure our broken health care system that I truly became aware of just how much trouble our country was in.

It isn’t easy for me to share this next part of my life with you all, even though I know that so many of you know someone with a similar unfortunate experience. After several surgeries over 14 months in an attempt to save my knee, I was informed that I’d need a knee replacement surgery. Yet at 39 I was considered “too young” to get the surgery. Different doctors passed me off to each other without giving me any real solution. Ultimately I was told to “hang in there” until I got older.

I had bone-on-bone tearing up my knee and the pain was so bad that I could barely walk and I rarely slept well. My doctor had prescribed opiates to manage the pain during my surgeries. This was the beginning of a very dark time in my life. The opiates did help my pain, but they created so many more problems. I wasn’t able to keep my job as a programmer as I was going through all of this and therefore lost my health insurance. My day to day life was now spent in enormous pain, unable to work or walk. I began looking for ways to self-medicate, trying to hang on to everything I had worked so hard for until I was eligible for the surgery.

No one thinks they will grow up to become an addict. I was the type of person who didn’t even take Tylenol for headaches. Dealing with terrible chronic pain and being reliant on a system that doesn’t support you is a sure path down this road. I was now unemployed and addicted to opiates. My house eventually went into foreclosure and desperate to stave off the inevitability of homelessness, I began doing any odd jobs/gig work I could to manage. One of these jobs was driving someone I didn’t know very well three hours away to a party. In hindsight I knew that this person wasn’t someone I should be involved with, but I desperately needed the money. The person I was driving turned out to be the target of a sting operation so we were pulled over and both arrested for the drugs my passenger had on him. I was charged as a co-conspirator because I was driving the car, despite my lack of involvement in this investigation. I had never been in trouble with police before and only had one minor speeding ticket in my youth. I quickly learned the hard way how the law works differently for the poor and the rich. Even to this day I firmly believe that if I had been able to afford a good lawyer that I would have at least won the case but more than likely I would not have even been charged. There were so many issues with the entire process, ultimately I was convicted and spent years in prison due to the mandatory minimum sentence.

I had never really thought about the criminal justice system before, but if I had been asked I would probably have said that it’s a reasonable way for society to deal with and reform those that acted outside of the law. I could not have been more wrong. I wasn’t a bad person, I was just someone who needed help. In prison I discovered that same quality in many of my fellow inmates.

I can now definitively say that prison isn’t the place where people are reformed. It is very much the opposite. I met plenty of other inmates that were caught up in terrible circumstances, just like me. A surprising number of them simply had mental health issues, many of them were addicts, all of them were human beings that for one reason or another just needed help. Prison is the last place where you can get help, and most everyone who gets out is worse off than when they went in. In reality, prison is just a place to keep people separated from society for a certain amount of time, at the lowest possible cost, with no other considerations.

The medical services in prison were outsourced to a private company that had quotas to meet, per their contract. Yet their goal was to maximize profits. That meant that they spent most of their time requiring each of us to show up semi-regularly for quick and inconsequential tasks, like making sure our glasses weren’t broken. For someone like me, with unbearable knee pain, the only option I had was to purchase Tylenol from the commissary (which wasn’t always in stock). It took me a year to be seen by a nurse about the random paralysis that was making my limbs go numb. The nurse brushed me off as making an excuse to get a better mattress to sleep on. It wasn’t until after I got out and was able to see a real doctor that I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. By this time I had lost all feeling and use of my right arm and both hands. At least I was finally old enough for that knee replacement surgery.

It’s been years since I’ve been out of prison and luckily I had a supportive family waiting to help me. I had my knee replacement surgery, and with regular MS treatments and physical therapy, I’ve been able to recover some functionality in my limbs. This brings me to the present day, in a world where I’ve given up on politics for salvation but have never given up on the hope of making the world a better place. I finally feel like I can see this country clearly; with all its amazing opportunities and every horrific flaw. I finally have enough information and insight to do something about it.

I know I’m not alone in my frustration with the status quo and desperation for change. Through all of these experiences I have shared with you, plus many more I haven’t, I have come to some insightful realizations. Whether you are a conservative or a liberal, we’re all speaking the same language although we may not realize it. We all intuitively understand that our government is broken. We put our hopes in non-mainstream candidates to solve these problems, but there is a very simple reason that this change will never come from a candidate; any candidate.

The answer revealed itself when I asked myself, “what if a representative democracy and the current separation of co-equal branches is in fact the problem?” What if the problems are actually systemic and intentional? Instead of trying to change what can’t be fixed, I concluded that it’s time to start thinking about what comes next. There is a solution, and that solution is surprisingly simple, though the path there is herculean. It took the advances of the modern world for it to be possible, but now it awaits our future. It’s time for a new political framework, one that is intuitive and fair and would work equally well in any country, from the local to the international level.

I have been working on this concept for some time, but now I open it up for contributions and critiques from my fellow Americans and citizens of the world. This may never become our new reality, but we owe it to the future to do this work so there’s something better and ready when the time comes.

I will be releasing the framework in its entirety over the next weeks and months. My team and I will be reading all of your comments and we look forward to hearing from everyone interested. We will ultimately be releasing the framework in the wiki format so that anyone from anywhere can contribute to its final form. I will also be releasing regular videos on YouTube to address your comments and I invite anyone to reach out to discuss or debate with me.

There is a better way, and everyone’s invited on this journey.

– Mr Fox