Collective effort itself, not a found solution, creates self-governance.

Evidence

This proposition riffs on an image from the great twelfth-century Persian poem The Conference of the Birds, in which a gaggle of birds decides they need to find a ruler and sets out on a quest to seek out the mythic “king of the birds.” It is an arduous and picaresque journey, and they struggle together to make their way to his legendary palace. They don’t “find” him—not exactly. What they discover, on reaching his precincts, is that they have been, along the way, annealed into solidarity by their collective efforts. They have become the rulers of themselves. Which is a way of saying, “The work of democracy is democracy.” Like the work of Attention Activism. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 361

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the manifesto’s theory of who acts: the coalition itself, annealed by its own struggle, is the agent of change.
• XREF: Resonates with the ‘trust is built by the act of trusting’ theme in The Social Control of Impersonal Trust readings. — connects to: Rational collectivities form through imperfect local commitment, not achieved perfection. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2369
• FICTION: The Conference of the Birds quest structure is a portable narrative frame for a story about a group that becomes what it sought.