Dear Imran Ali,
It’s been a while since I last wrote, but I have some important updates about the Good Country which I’d like to share with you.
The biggest news is that the Good Country is now much more than an idea, more than a TED talk, and more than an Index: the Good Country is becoming a country, a country with hundreds of millions of citizens from all over the world.
We’re not doing this because we want to build an ideal country, but because we need a new country to build a better world.
Sounds like a big task? Well, the good news is that the Good Country already has a huge population. Four years after I launched the Good Country Index at TED, our research has shown that at least ten percent of the world’s population fully shares the values of the Good Country. That’s seven hundred million people, the world’s third largest nation. These are the people who, like me and perhaps like you, think of themselves as members of the human race first, and citizens of their own nation second; people who’d like governments to focus a lot more on collaborating and a little less on competing; people who don’t mistrust or dislike other people just because they come from a different background; people who see a great future for humanity if only humanity could learn to work as one.
We all belong to that nation: it’s where we were born. We speak its language, we share its values, and we’re longing to spend more time there, to meet our fellow citizens, and start working together.
Our task now is to activate that vast, invisible nation; to grant it its sovereign status, and so to create a powerful new player at the heart of the international community. Not a movement raising awareness of issues, not a campaign raising money and signing petitions, but a true sovereign power that designs and executes innovative new ways of solving international problems. And we’re lucky enough to be living in an age where such extraordinary things really can happen.
The Good Country will be a country without a government. Thanks to our cutting-edge technology, it will work as a self-organising system, guided and driven by its citizens. A virtual country that collaborates actively with other countries and shows them how to produce lasting results both for their own citizens and for the world as a whole. A country with the economic power to create new international systems and structures where and when they’re needed.
And it’s nearly ready to launch.
Since January last year, Madeline Hung and I have been working to turn this vision into a reality, and this year we co-founded The Good Country Inc., a non-profit organisation whose purpose is to design, build, and launch the new country. We’re working with a growing team of interns and advisors to welcome our first citizens in the last quarter of this year.
We’ll launch in two stages, enrolling up to 200,000 citizens between September and December this year, then closing again for citizenship while we work with that ‘First Nation’ to ensure that everything is running smoothly. Then, all being well, we’ll re-open for good in September 2019 and start reaching out to the rest of those 700 million people around the world.
We need your help to make this happen. If you’d like to get involved, by spreading the word to your own networks, friends and colleagues, by donating your time and skills to the Good Country, or simply by agreeing to respond to some short survey questions from time to time, please just reply to this email and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
Once it launches, the Good Country will be entirely funded by a low annual tax on its citizens (in the order of $5 each per year if you live in a rich country, less if you don’t): this is important in order to ensure that it’s funded and influenced by its citizens alone.
In return, we promise that the Good Country won’t just talk about change: it will drive the change we all want to see.
With our thanks for your continuing support, and hoping very much to hear from you soon,
Simon Anholt
Madeline Hung
P.S. As ever, if you don’t wish to hear from us again, please unsubscribe below.
Unsubscribe:
http://app.icontact.com/icp/mmail-mprofile.php?r=48277994&l=13142&s=1CUB&m=315186&c=1586452
This message was sent to
sh...@cselian.com from
in...@goodcountry.org
Simon Anholt
The Good Country
10 Orange St
London, none WC2H 7DQ, United Kingdom
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
iContact - Try it for FREE:
https://www.icontact.com/signup-trial?utm_medium=poweredby&utm_source=footerlink&utm_campaign=iC%20Footer&afid=144186