Federal Charter of 1291

"The Federal Charter from early August 1291 is Switzerland's oldest constitutional document. In this ancient pact, the valley communities of Central Switzerland, Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden pledged to help each other resist any threat of violence or injustice. Foreign judges were not to be tolerated, while the existing power balance remained intact.

Procedures for criminal and civil cases and for disputes among the signatories were also laid down."

Source: Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft

"The Charter was probably intended to ensure legal certainty after the death of Rudolf I of Habsburg on 15 July 1291. The first two paragraphs commit all three communities to the joint defence of the three valleys. The remainder of the Charter concerns judicial matters: It calls for arbitration in the case of conflicts, rejects foreign judges, establishes the death penalty for murderers and exile for arsonists, and commands obedience to judges and judicial verdicts."

Source: Wikipedia

Probably that the only expert they needed in those days was a judge (or a scribe) to write it down (in Latin). Now, if a similar document had to be put together in 2020, what resources would it require, and what could it achieve? Please take the following comments with a pinch of salt!

First, you will need various committees, with legions of experts for compliance, legal, inclusion, communication, diversity, sustainability (to only list a few).

You will certainly end up with a work made up of multiple volumes of hundreds of pages each, with footnotes on each page, together with another blanket of various policies, just in case.

On an organizational level, it will of course demand additional layers of experts to interpret it, and essentially trying to understand what the former experts meant by writing it down.

And then, the familiar pattern finally emerges, where "Means become ends and ends become means. Consequently, the original goals of such organizations are now considered to be nothing more than obstacles on the way to realizing new aims (...) the collective perpetuates its existence, regardless of whether it has any role left and how well it functions." Source: Sam Vaknin, Lidija Rangelovska, Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited, 10th edition, 2015

Wish you all a happy first of August :-))