I think a big problem we face in humanity is how we settle our disputes and it’s a large function of a government. But, after enough time people figure out the “rules” and get their own refs or figure out loopholes.
Fight to the death? Well not my death, i have a guy to fight for me.
Courtrooms? Got my friend to be the judge.
Arbitration? I have the money and you have the issue so let me hire a guy to hear you out and ignore it.
It seems that we need to change how we solve disputes like every 120 years before it gets overwhelming and the old system stops working entirely.
A tale as old as time. You can’t have good governance if you don’t have benevolent people. Bad ingredients, bad dish. Repeat until our technology exceeds our wisdom and triggers the answer to the Fermi Paradox.
Life in the universe is probably somewhat scarce over time and space. We detect extra-solar life by radio emissions. Radio emissions require technology. Any life that evolves into technological beings suffers the same fate of exponential growth and resource degradation. (Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries or some alternate flavourings like nuclear weapons, or Militarized AI or Biological warfare gone mad.)
The biological imperatives that made life capable of continuing evolution for billions of years (maximum power principle) is likely incompatible with technological beings. Our intellect governed by our instincts is fundamentally at odds.
As we grow in sophistication in our technology, culture and governance systems, we find ourselves building higher and higher the biggest metaphorical Jenga tower while simultaneously our primitive tendencies are pulling out pillars. We know how every game of Jenga must end.
We can choose to stop building the tower. However it’s already unstable so that isn’t enough to secure it.
We could deconstruct the tower and use those pieces to shore up a stable tower. (Degrowth)
But it looks like we’re going to try to build to tower so fast and so high in the hopes of achieving escape velocity. We know how this ends.
Yes, that’s how systems perfect themselves. Once more Hegel is proven correct.
I tried to look up Hegel’s philosophy…
Would the kind of system Hegel desires be a mere idealized abstraction from, and of dubious relevance to, the actual world? No. For Hegel such abstraction is merely half-baked systematicity: it cannot justify its making one assumption, rather than others, about what is so unimportant that it should be abstracted away.
Help.
None of us are particularly talented at ruling, and when given power we tend to impose it on others.
Limit personal wealth/power, make it difficult to entrenched, and make it easy for society to strip it from those who want to hoard it.
That’s how you get “general secretaries” and “chairmen of military commission” who are totally not Supreme Leaders.
Any attempt to “limit” power by declaring that there are no rulers and everyone is “just a comrade” only leads to obfuscation of power and complete shift to backroom politics.
There are people who like being told what to do and there those who enjoy giving orders (and “apolitical” people who “just want to live their lives” are actually part of the first group). Hierarchical systems will form one way or another, whether codified or not.
That’s how you get “general secretaries” and “chairmen of military commission” who are totally not Supreme Leaders.
President, king, politburo, commission, magnets, general secretary, whatever.
Forget naming conventions, and limit the scope of power. When someone gets delusions of grandeur and tries to consolidate more power, remove them.
