“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
~Lord Acton
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
~Emerson
We’re going to build a better world, and we’re going to do it over a beer or two.
The idea of Beersurfing evolved out of a love of beer, travel, and the exploration of the human experience. We want to make it easy to find a place where you will feel comfortable and welcome, even if you are exploring a foreign place. Hopefully, with that comfort will come the ability to make connections with new and different people. The exchange of ideas, face to face and in earnest, is not only one of the most personally rewarding activities you can engage in, but a critical component of a peaceful world.
In recent weeks, much has been made of the tensions and hope in international relations. Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for improving the tone of diplomacy, while the climate summit in Copenhagen has underscored the unresolved differences between nations. Rather than placing all of our hope in officials and high-level negotiations, we believe that everyone has the ability to create understanding and encourage peace. For all the good that rhetoric and policy does, it cannot touch the power of a human connection. You don’t bomb a city if you have a friend who lives there.
People disagree for many reasons, some innocent and some self-serving. On a planet with over 6.8 billion human inhabitants, someone somewhere disagrees with you about everything you hold dear, and everything else besides. Such a person may be curious to ponder but remains largely harmless to you. Unfortunately, things get a lot more dicey once groups of people start disagreeing. As a species, we both congregate with others who agree with us and are influenced by those around us. These tendencies are harmless at first, but rapidly lead to homogenous groups that view outsiders as strangely different.
The great leaders of history have been those that could bridge the divides that separated groups. They could rally disparate others to their cause, whether through persuasion or compulsion. However, such aggregation and unification is essentially the creation of another, yet larger, homogenous group. The larger the groups that disagree, the larger the resources behind the ensuing conflagration. Even if we could trust our leaders to stay true to peaceful goals, we would still end up with larger and larger groups, capable of building larger and larger machines of war. And history shows that the vast majority of leaders who were handed unmitigated power should never have been trusted.
The genius of modern democracy is that it slices power up into the smallest possible pieces, and distributes them evenly to everyone in a society. Without a concentration of power no voter is corrupted by power, and an entire society bears the burden of making the correct decisions. A big part of Beersurfing is contributing to the democratization of international relations, with billions of ambassadors rather than a chosen few. Like secret, boozy agents we will infiltrate borders. Our espionage will be a willing ear, our propaganda the experiences of our lives, and our handlers the innate human desire to understand others.
In our new blog series, we will (quite literally) be celebrating openness and communication by doing blind beer tastings of your suggestion. For the first in the series, we’ve chosen a group of stouts. We will be tasting two Chocolate, an Imperial, and a “Chicory” stout to give a comparison between more and less traditional versions of this winter favorite. In the future we will be relying on you, the Beersurfing community, to suggest new and fun groupings. If you’ve always had an abiding interest in beers made with fugle hops, let us know. If you want to see a beerified version of world cup favorites compete, just say so. Any coherent grouping is game, as long as we can get our hands on the beer!
We’re building something big, but let’s start with a few beers…
