The Chocolate Party Manifesto is part constitution, part bill of rights and part party platform. It contains recipes for a personal, social, economic and political renaissance—a rebirth of Western society, no less. The Manifesto is a reorganization of concepts that have been around a long time but with a touch of the contrarian. What you call blue, we may call red. It presents alternatives to most of the major policies of the Western governments that would make them more representative of all our citizens, or the same policies but with different penalties and incentives attached. Penalties and incentives—measured in terms of opportunity cost—they are the key to stability, without which humans cannot build or change, without which new generations cannot rebuild or improve.
The Manifesto was born out of Buddha’s Cross—a political fantasy novel about a village cut off from the world that incites a revolution in order to join the modern world, where food is plentiful, and people are free. As expected, things don’t turn out as expected. The new world they find is run by insurance tricksters, good intentions terrorists and the deep state. The title Buddha’s Cross refers to human appetites and their tendency to get in the way of our visions of utopia. It warns of the damage we do to ourselves and to human relations in trying to overcome the demands of the flesh and make our private and public worlds a perfect place (in our own image, unfortunately). The algorithm would be written something like this: As the flesh gets in the way of our ideals, we regulate ourselves unto enslavement and inhumanity. The human spirit then dies and the animal in us returns.
The politics in Buddha’s Cross lean toward the libertarian—since I am a great believer in social, economic and other freedoms—but it is not a political philosophy that would work for all humans, most of whom give more credence to respect over freedom (a formula that needs to be brought back into balance), so we tried to represent both wings of the bird here with a modified libertarianism that has more public appeal and offers fairer and more efficient use of resources. We surrendered to the idea that we are all different and need different solutions to the organization of society. The Manifesto was offered up as an olive branch to the left wing to encourage them to climb back onto the seesaw (to be explained later). It started out as the ten-page final chapter of the novel but took on a life of its own, swelled to a hundred pages in two weeks and was sent out into the world before the ink was even dry simply to lay claim to the words and ideas.
Why was it called the Chocolate Party, you ask? Because everyone loves chocolate, and this treatise was meant to please both the left and the right wings, individuals as well as groups. However, it has become clear that it will continue to displease people driven by an agenda to gain more power than they have a natural right to, but we do not need to please those people. There’s no chocolate sweet enough for them. And being just a flashy dime-store production, it needed a future edition or a complete rewriting to withdraw the olive branch before the entire arm got chewed off, and so was born the non-fiction sequel to the Manifesto, the Human Charter—a more polished attempt to address imbalances in freedom and respect without handing the keys to the entire store over to a single power group.
