I won't read Chomsky--or any other political 'warrior', really--because every writer of any political ilk is committed to some ideology (or theology). Ideology was invented to replace theology for providing some meta-narrative for governing the governance of society. Other than giving the world political democracy--which has in turn been all but destroyed functionally by ideologies--ideology has done no better than theology did at solving structurally the biggest problems that have beset civilization from day one (much less ridding the world of belief-based conflict). Meanwhile, during the Age of Ideology environmental problems have grown to a global scale that threatens civilization itself.

Would Volek's approach to politics deliver the political process from ideology/theology? That, to me, is the question. The idea, as I understand it, is that its structure (a communal communicative process that would operate at successively larger geopolitical scales, starting at the neighborhood level) would produce a pragmatic approach to governance. Politics would be concerned with solving problems in a performative way, not ideological/theological 'culture wars'.

I think he is right.

For me, the problem is that those global environmental problems will destroy the rule of law and therefore any form of a democratic political process before this new approach to politics could be implemented then implement solutions to those problems. Volek himself says his system would presumably be initiated as a kind of 'shadow government' that would eventually replace the extant political system once it had sufficiently matured. Understandably, he can provide no timeline.

To me, focusing on solving those environmental problems has to be our first priority. As I see it, we have no choice but to seek to accomplish that with the existing system in place, rather than changing the political system first--even though I don't doubt that if Volek's tiered democracy were already in place achieving that goal would be easier to do. The problem is that time constraint.