Zoroastrian distributists

I just happened upon the most remarkable website!

Holos means the Whole. Chrestian comes from a Greek word meaning ‘useful to’. Holochrestianism is about ‘being useful to the whole’ or ‘serving the common good’.

By Democracy we mean that political influence is widely distributed. We believe power should be shared among a large number of people. Nevertheless we also believe that power should be wielded by those most able and inclined to wield it to good effect. This implies both that people need to work at developing the ability to be good political actors and that not everybody will have the same abilities or should wield the same amount of power.

All of which I am in favour of, naturally, from a political point of view. But wait, there appears to be more...

Holochrestian Democracy is not just a way of running a society but also a project to create the conditions that a Good Order of Society be achieved – in other words primarily the creation of the Holochrestian Demos. This process is one that could happen from the grassroots upwards with many individuals working to build little ‘droplets’ of the Holochrestian Demos. Each droplet being a small cluster of people orientating themselves to the task at hand, growing the strength of their association, strengthening their mutual bond of trust, discovering and developing the group culture and modes of action and greater resilience in adversity. Then educating and developing themselves to serve the wider common good with greater commitment to the goal of a well-ordered society, greater enlightenment to reality and greater capability of useful action.

Such a process is one that will be or will at least look similar to the growth of a religious movement. In the first instance it is up to each leader of each droplet to decide on his own religion. Nevertheless the chances are that they will find assistance within the long-standing religious traditions such as Jesuchristianity and Mithraism.

This blog promotes Mithraism (or Zoroastrianism) as our preferred religious tradition while recognising the huge contribution that Christians have made and continue to make. In particular we recognise the value of the Christian Social Teachings also known as the Catholic Social Teachings which are largely based on a natural law approach and are relatively accessible to non-Christians. We also see a lot of common ground between our Holochrestian Democracy movement and the older Christian Democracy movement.

Modern Zoroastrians, finding common ground with localism, Christian democracy and distributism? Sounds like a particularly awesome idea! The website features several articles authored by Chesterton expert Dale Ahlquist. And this view in the Zoroastrian community is apparently one with no small amount of backing elsewhere. Ervad Marzban J Hathiram of the Parsi website Frashogard has posted a touching obituary to one of India’s great advocates of local organic farming, the lately-departed Bhaskar Save, celebrating his fight ‘against corporate cronyism and the machinations of pharma and agro multinationals’. Sounds like as good a fight as any!