A. Our ancestors have already experimented with various systems of governance at ever increasing scale, and these have competed against each other and been refined over millennia to deliver the ones that we use to govern ourselves today. Evolution in our governance systems is ongoing, as is the evolution of our DNA. A world governance system is perfectly achievable using the tools humans have already developed and use daily.
A single governance system would have a single global law, a single global tax system, a unified economy using a single currency, provide common services to a global standard. It would provide a Mixed economics system that makes government debt impossible using a version of MMT to control money supply, and would use wealth taxes to prevent a few hoarding the assets and controlling the work. Nations would disappear along with their borders, tariffs and most geography based wars. Multi layered cultures would free float as diasporas. Environmental and working standards would be applied globally to moderate our impact on the ecosystem we depend on, and level-up living standards globally. The system would promote and sustain long term visions like the development of technologies to get us off the planet before it goes up in a puff of smoke, and set a common moral framework so that we can control the behaviours that allow us to trust each other and collaborate while still enabling the freedom of expression, thought and dissent that we need to evolve into the future.
A governance system could be constructed from an improved and scaled up mix of democratic and expert system, where people still vote for their local representatives. It would be nice if voters made an effort to understand current issues and the nature of candidates before blindly voting for some political party facade. It would be nice if the system revealed the nature of candidates before voting, to help weed out well meaning idiots, self agrandising salesmen, power crazed demagogues and other undesirable characters. It would be good if the system provided processes to help educate candidates, the elected, and voters. It would be good if all candidates had the same level of campaign funding provided by the system. A one world government should help citizens make good decisions in support of a democratic governance process.
A. It seems we need a strong force to break existing cultural bonds that separate Us from Them, so that people (usually the next generation) can aggregate together as a larger group.
Historically, we have scaled up our organisations from families, to tribes and clans, to villages, city states, nations, federations and empires through war, usually driven by an autonomous dictator. Democracies can morph out of an existing autocratic system, usually through messy revolution.
To achieve a world with only one government (judicial and executive), all nations must be aggregated into a single system, supported by global law, global taxes, global currency, and a single administration system.
Democracies tend to vote for the status quo and so are unlikely to vote to remove their culture based nations and replace them with something larger. At best they might vote for a federation, but this is not one world government.
An autocracy may attain the force required to kick us all into a higher state of aggregation.
However, we may now have developed enough tools during our evolution, to consciously form a single governance system and persuade people of all nations that it is better than a system of competing nation states. It would need a vision for the species that every citizen can subscribe to and education to counter the national and ideological forces of the status quo. A global organisation would be required to start the ball rolling in multiple nations.
So, either might be possible, but it will take generations and is likely to be messy, but the arrow of our organisational development points in that direction, so we had better start thinking about how to do it comfortably.
A. Citizens of every nation can be be grouped into Haves, Have-nots, and Have-too-much.
Have-nots (even in economically developed nations) tend towards starvation.
Yes we do grow enough food globally, winter in one hemisphere is summer in another, and we know how to store it and prevent it rotting and we can distribute it to where it is needed, but we do not.
Competing nation states and their supporting cultures prevent the global collaboration that would be required for this to happen and National economics prevent better distribution within nations.
So, yes it is perfectly possible, but we have to re-engineer the way we organise ourselves, move away from competing nation states and move towards a single system of global governance, and set up a more equal way to distribute from the Have-too-much to the Have-nots
A. See Famine
A. A one world government would provide common global law to make governance and trade efficient, and it would provide a global judicial service to apply those laws to a common standard.
A one world government would look like any national government whose judicial system has been tasked with getting its citizens to conform to its laws. There are many possible variations in implementation as can be seen from looking around the world.
Essentially, laws, ethics and morals help us control the more combative natural capabilities we have evolved with, and develop trust necessary for collaboration with others. They channel our need to compete and differentiate ourselves in less destructive ways.
It is also in our natures, at some stages of our lives, to test rules and boundaries, which is why we will always need a judiciary service.
A. A world Government should be concerned with providing common services to its population, leveling up globally and preventing a few from controlling everything, managing the way we exploit the planet, promoting technologies to get us off the planet before it goes up in a puff of smoke, and setting a common moral framework so that we can manage the behaviours that help us to trust each other and collaborate.
Independently of all that, humans have and always will believe in all sorts of superstitions that leads to the formation of religions. Humans have, and always will, look for ways to differentiate themselves using fabricated languages, clothes, foods, and all manner of behaviours that makes a subculture to differentiate Us from Them.
A one world government would free multi layered cultures from geographical boundaries and allow them to free float within a single governance framework.
A. If One world government was based on a common culture using common morals, law and taxes, provided common services and is controlled by a common democratic process, then nation states disappear along with their borders, trade barriers, financial systems and differences in service provision to citizens. The species can then 'level up' around the world and work collaboratively to resolve global issues like climate change and the need to get off the planet before it succumbs to cosmic forces.
To achieve this we would need to re-engineer the ways in which we organise ourselves. If people stopped instilling their nationalism and ideologies into their children and instilled instead a sense of we-are-all-one-species culture, then this might be possible for a future generation.
Then most of the tensions that develop into wars today disappear.
No borders - geography based ownership wars disappear. The global system can better deal with global problems such as famine, floods, drought, pandemics.
Species governance culture would become most important - Sub cultures based on religion, language, skin colour, cricket team, sexual orientation, etc would become diasporas no longer tied to geography, free to float and co-exist within a common species-culture governance framework. Cultural wars disappear unless cultures think they are more important than species culture, or they wind themselves into an emotional frenzy, which unfortunately is part of being human.
Common services based on common taxation - reinforces common culture and if implemented as part of levelling up should remove equality based disagreements and riots.
Common economy and financial system - Trade wars disappear, national debts resolve themselves (see our proposal).
Common judicial system - corruption, fraud, drugs trade, slavery and all the other behaviours we have that make it difficult to trust each other, can be addressed better at a global scale with one world government.
Common democratic process - should remove the need for revolutions as long as people feel they can make the laws better for themselves through voting, but this will always be a finely balanced part of the system.
But then, we are human, and group conflict is a capability that has evolved with us.
So a world government would reduce the causes for war, but humans would have to evolve to be able to control our emotions and obey the moral rules to remove war entirely.
A. See War
A. Perhaps because the impressions people first receive about a one world government come from sci-fi movies and books whose fantasies require big fears to get your emotional juices flowing.
Perhaps because all of our nations have been forged through large forces required to break down the barriers of diverse identities and form a new social entity, and it is difficult to see how we could voluntarily agree to a global governance aggregation.
For a more rational view on the benefits/issues of a one world government system read "on the organisation of the species"
A. This is probably not what the academics say, but....
This all adds up to: 'Skew the environment we live in to benefit individual and collaborative evolution', which would be a lot easier to achieve if we did it at a global species level rather than as competing nation states.
A. Nations are geographically contained, and can comprise many regional states. The United States. The Russian federation. The United Kingdom etc.
Federations and other composites vary in the power they delegate to individual regions. Some allow regions to make a proportion of their own laws (legislative function). Most allow the region to implement their own services (executive function). Allowing regions to diverge in law and taxation often leads to internal competition and conflict. Allowing regions to develop a distinct culture can also lead to conflict if it becomes stronger than the national culture.
The key to greater collaboration is to create a strong top level governance culture that all regional cultures can belong to.
The key to providing efficient infrastructure and government services to a common standard is to provide common law and economy. These enable free movement of people, goods and services.
A. Polarised division has always been the norm. We have gradually worked out how to come together as polarised national cultures from smaller states, cities, villages, tribes and family units. The next step in our evolution is to work out how to come together on an ever larger scale till we become we-the-species. Yet within our comings-together we will still have polarised sub cultures based on age, gender, musical taste, ideological belief, costume. The trick is to maintain enough things that are common to us all, and let the other stuff free float. What things should be common to maintain a we-the-species culture?
A. Attempts at collaboration on a global scale make our differences more prominent. Difference in economy, taxation and services, law, currency, language, ideology and culture. Our natural desire for the free flow of labour, goods, ideas and capital has been impeded by our creation of competing geography based nation states, resulting in borders, tariffs, differences in working standards and environmental controls, war, mass migration, cross border crime and an inability to tackle global problems as a global species.
Globalisation is the name for a force nudging us to return to our natural global freedoms by reducing social and economic barriers, and now that we have the means for global communications we should look to collaborate more, and compete less destructively, to move onto the next step of our evolution by organising ourselves at a larger scale.
A. No, but it should.
Internationalisation does not affect a nation's ability to make law, enforce law or provide services.
Internationalisation defines how nations interact with those outside their national system, and interactions and their enforcement methods are codified in international agreements. Essentially internationalisation is asking a nation to trade some national freedom to act in any way it damn well pleases, for an agreement on common behaviour whether that be commercial, ethical, environmental behaviour or seek to constrain defensive, offensive and migration interactions.
These legal interfaces to external nations have to mesh with the internal gearing of national law and behaviour so that national endeavours do not conflict with international endeavours. This will inevitably lead to greater harmonisation of ethics, standards and law which may scare national separatists, control freaks and peacocks into believing their sovereignty is being eroded.
On a larger scale, the effort required to negotiate and manage these complex agreements is huge, and in a world of limited labour available to our species and given the global challenges our species has yet to deal with, seems an utter waste of resources.
We really need more joined up behaviours to evolve out of our man made system of perpetual national competition and conflict and stop wasting our efforts propping up a stupid system. Ultimately this can only be delivered by a governance system which delivers common law and a common economy, but that would take a seismic shift in the minds of global citizens.
A. Being able to collaborate is useful, as a body of people can have a greater impact than an individual.
Humans compete individually and collaboratively and that can include killing each other.
Individuals use the tools of Ethics and Morals to curb our coarser methods of competition and restrict them to things like business and sport competition. Essentially we do have the ability to agree to trust each other and work collaboratively with our neighbours.
Groups of humans use the same tools and have developed them into agreement methods like laws and treaties and federations.
So we do have the ability to agree to collaborate at scale and we have evolved tools to formalise those agreements.
The way we organise ourselves today has become stuck in the concept of separate nation states tied to geographies, which require the definition of cultures to differentiate Us from Them.
Nation states, and the cultures that define them, are responsible for wars, land disputes, tariffs, barriers, borders, tax havens, trade wars, currency disputes, economic migration and actively promote cultural differences that prevent us working together as a global society. They are responsible for preventing global responses to natural disasters and man-made problems.
In theory it is perfectly possible to organise ourselves so that we compete without killing each other, but to do so we must evolve the ways in which we organise ourselves.
Common ethics and morals, means common law, means common system of governance, means no nations. Impossible? Just remember that at birth, there is no notion of nationhood or cultural identity. These are taught to us by those who have them already. It would be perfectly possible to instill a single global governance culture if the next generation were taught to do so from birth.
A. Assuming you are repulsed by capitalism and attracted to communism because you are uncomfortable with inequality.....
All implementations of a communist governance system are likely to end up looking like a capitalist system because we live within the constraints of a competitive evolutionary supersystem where inequality is inevitable.
People will differentiate themselves whatever governance system we concoct.
We should however learn to manage inequality to enable people to better themselves and their surroundings through their own individual efforts, or through collaborative efforts, and restrict the ability of the successful (or their idiot offspring) to hoard all the biscuits. In particular, Wealth taxes in any governance system would help reconcile communal and capitalistic behaviours, as would spending those taxes on common services rather allowing the super-wealthy to build gold palaces, nukes and bombastic statues.
We should learn from all our experiments in governance and engineer a new approach based on a better understanding of ourselves and our cosmic environment. Of course we would have to overcome nationalism, religion and all manner of other ideological systems that we make up and treat as if they are real, but hey, that is the challenge of being human....and we are still evolving both genetically and in the way in which we organise ourselves.
A. Revolutions often rebel against something, and only later try to work out what to replace it with, which leads to competitive visions, which requires an autocrat to enforce a dominant way forward.
By their very nature, revolutions are coercive. Revolutionaries have to force their view on those reluctant to change and who have not agreed to the revolutionary proposals. It then take several generations of (often chaotic) authoritarian adjustment from idealism to reality before society can reach some sort of cultural unity. By which time a new authoritarian elite have become embedded in society and people seem unwilling to give up their positions of power.
It is alway better to to be an activist for something rather than against something.
A. Big question....
On an immediate note, some of the following:
Economy: Implement a super wealth tax, and minimum living wage. Only borrow money in my own national currency. Only generate money (in my own currency) if national workers can use it to add value to national assets or services.
Governance: Remove any relics of monarchy and hierarchical family based structures. Ensure experts (including autocrats, dictators etc) can be removed from office. Empower the judiciary to identify and reduce corruption and graft from the top down (especially in its self). Set up a debate system open to all citizens and their representatives to help educate citizens around proposals for legislative change. Remove divisive political party politics. Implement common state funding of all individual political campaigns. Give an acceptable voice to businesses so they can visibly propose legislative changes where they can be challenged and modified by citizen representatives.
Education: Teach the truth about competition (individual and group), collaboration and trust, and how cultural tools can be used to form multiple layers of Us and Them. Promote a top culture that includes all of Us, and gives freedom for sub cultures to peacefully co-exist.
And longer term: Align it to a one world government system that would enable the species to tackle global problems, removing the causes of wars, resolving famine and immigration, resolving financial blocks to regional development, and work collaboratively towards a common vision for our species. This would require many generations of change, including all of the above and more, and is described in more detail in the paper ‘On the organisation of the species’.
A.
A. Add value.
Seek out the root cause of problems. If there is hunger, improve food production, local processing, storage and distribution. If there is thirst, look at capturing rainfall and generating water from the ocean. If there is a lack of housing, persuade those who think they own land to release it for construction and look at financial models that allow those in need to buy or rent decent accommodation.
Improve the infrastructure of your region (electricity, communications, transport, waste disposal).
Improve the cohesion of society. If there are criminals and corruption, improve the morals laws and judiciary. If there are quarrelsome divisions in culture and religion, reinforce what is common to all to reduce polarisation and conflict. If there is vast inequality, add pressure for wealth taxes to pay for value adding projects.
Improve the value that can be added by your fellow citizens. Gain education and help others to educate themselves in useful skills. Learn how to debate to improve knowledge, not just to win an argument.
Be aware what you are adding value to. Many seek labour that adds value to their personal wealth while claiming a higher purpose, although sometimes both are possible.
A. All living beings have evolved the ability to decide how to act (within the constraints of their genetic capabilities). Some have evolved the ability to decide to collaborate with others which, in humans, forms the basis of our societies, families, tribes and nations. The limited resources of the planet and the fact that we need to exploit other beings (carrots, oysters etc) for our survival mean that competition and differentiation are fundamentals of the system. Fairness is only a consideration when we use it as a tool to help us collaborate with others (human or otherwise).
Rules and laws are based on morals and ethics, and humanity has invented these to aid collaboration. It is entirely in our natural gift to exercise free will and choose whether to obey social rules and collaborate, or whether to go our own individual ways.
Achieving this balance between conforming to a rules based society and allowing freedom of expression and action are what every system of government is struggling with.
We need a system that encapsulates both, and we should educate ourselves better in how and why this works.
A. To 'be good' means obeying some human rules that we have made up and agreed to uphold. We need rules to curb our individual competitive evolutionary natures, and these rules allow us to work collaboratively as they form the basis of trust. Working as a group has more power to influence our environments and our evolutionary success rates than working individually. Of course we also require group moral behaviour otherwise we just move our tendency to kill each other as individuals to killing each other in groups.
All people need rules to enable them to work together, whether the rules have been entangled with some imagined creation theory and reinforced in a church, or are informed by our developing theories based on scientific evidence and enforced by our judicial systems. So I would say that as an atheist you do want to voluntarily conform to morals, encapsulated in laws, so that you can prosper alongside your neighbours. Multiple religions may have started the drive towards moral enforcement, and many have evolved into judicial systems which free people from ancient dogma. Of course people have been told to believe all sorts of gibberish since time immemorial, and that is unlikely to stop, but the only important and consistent thread in our historical evolution is our ability to form groups based around common morals, trust and common aims.
A. Ghettos exist in every country. They normally house groups that have marginalised themselves (usually by maintaining a separate culture) or have been marginalised by the rest. If the marginalised groups cannot compete successfully within the law of the country, then they will compete in ways outside law and outside what is socially acceptable by the rest.
The solutions must come from both ends. The marginalised must make efforts to integrate, and the rest must make efforts to provide successful paths for the marginalised. In this way the walls of the ghetto can be gradually dissolved. Trying to control without dissolving the barriers of separation just leads to conflict. Trying to ignore it leads to higher walls.
Of course in any country there will remain a base layer of criminals who compete outside the law, but this is a standard problem that can only be resolved by making the risks higher and the rewards lower. A judiciary that is NOT corrupt is a good start. Properly funding them to pursue criminals from all society (rich, poor, politician, business) is a good second step.
A. As the temporary wearer of flesh that can ingest air, roast mutton, water, smells, ideas, can sense light, sound, pressure, heat, and can transform them into movement, stools, words, emotions and impressions in all of those beings we interact with, of course you can make the world better. You just need to decide what 'better' is and then do it. And remember that small things soon add up.
A. Reasons are legion, but some are stronger than others.
"Their god" is misleading, there is only one system that has given rise to everything, so I am answering "Why do religious people like to force their Religion on others".
Religion is a man made invention that is bounded by a set of beliefs and behavioural rules (BBRs). And just like any other culture it differentiates those who adhere (or at least give the impression that they adhere) to the BBRs and those who do not. Us, we go to heaven, Them do not. Us are brothers and sisters, Them are heathens and unbelievers.
Essentially, religions can be used as tools of competition, which we have developed as part of the competitive system we live in. Humans have always been susceptible to best guesses and superstition as we try to make sense of our system, and we have held many idiotic beliefs during our evolution. Yet we still manage to evolve in a system where collaboration at scale can help us prosper, and religious tools help us to collaborate whether the beliefs are idiotic or not.
The hard evolutionary step will be to form an Us-the-species so we can tackle global issues, and for this we might need beliefs that are closer to the truth, and an understanding of how these religious and ideological tools really work.
A. If only the species could harness the powers of each stage of our lives.
When I was young I truly believed I knew how things worked, and I was confident in the superiority of my views. As I grew older I realised I was naive and misinformed. My mental models of how the world really works have been developing ever since and continue to do so.
Risk identification:
Emotion control:
So, should youths.....?
A. All living beings exploit other living beings unless they can live on sunlight or by recycling decomposing bodies
Humans are currently omnivorous and we can only evolve by exploiting living beings whether or not they are capable of running (or swimming or flying) away. A Carrot is a living being, as is an oyster. Accept yourself for what you are. We can of course choose how we treat the beings we exploit during life. Self consciousness, empathy, fear of death, pain are outputs of many living beings. After all, they are only a few DNA sequences away from us, and we are all part of a single interacting evolving system.
A. There are many ways to implement democracy, just look around the world.
Multi, zero or single party systems. Proportional representation or first past the post. 2/1/3 decision making houses. Head of state elected by representatives or citizens or party members. Monarchy as head of state, or president or party head. The different level of power and responsibility assigned to a nation’s component parts which might consist of federated states, devolved governments or regional councils. The way nations separate their legislative and executive powers, and have different rules to implement executive orders.... the list is endless..
So yes, every nation is still trying to refine its system of government (democratic or otherwise), and slow evolution is usually better than dramatic and often messy revolution.
A. At least the people have a chance to choose a representative who is not stricken with ideological idiocy (If such representatives are allowed to compete). Of course the majority of people may prefer to conform to an ideology however idiotic it may be, and that is OK as long as the democratic system allows the ideology to be challenged at election time, voters can then choose to reaffirm their allegiance or choose a different path. In this way democracy enables change and adaptability as our understanding of ourselves and our situation changes, whereas autocracies tend to be stuck with the ideology of the autocrat.
A. To come to the best course of action for a group.
This requires discussion and enrichment of a topic that leads to better understanding from many viewpoints, then compromise to decide the best course of action and prioritisation against other actions.
The majority of us do not have time, and are not that good at this process, which is why we should put more attention on evaluating these skills in any representative we choose to do it for us.
A. That might be true in a direct democracy or in a referendum, which might be better described as the tyranny of the majority of those who vote.
What are the alternatives?
Zero party representative democracies would seem to minimise the risk of 'tyranny' but these are rare.
Plus, democracies have a built in override switch at the next election, whereas autocracies often deliver permanent fixtures who cannot be removed, which is the original meaning (Plato) of tyrant.
A.
A. Ruling class defn = "In sociology, the ruling class of a society is the social class who set and decide the political and economic agenda of society."
If there is a rules based society, then there will be a political and economic agenda, so there will always be some form of ruling class. What forms are possible?
However, you have to think about where society gets its influences in order to form an agenda. In todays era of mass media, whose messages are repeated strongly enough to become normalised in our collective consciousness? We are a competitive species, and all manner of groups and organisations try to influence our agendas, from religions to industries, cultural identities to geographical based entities, adventurers to the risk-averse, local political parties to state competitors. Citizens of every nation are subject to this swirling mass of influence, and it is up to those who wish to participate in the democratic process, to learn to refine our personal mental models to the point where we can properly evaluate them. Or we just choose a representative who can do it for us, which puts the onus back onto voters to pick a good representative or to be a good representative.
A. Depends on your starting point.
Each of the above point to some action that can eventually add up to a transition from basic autocratic systems that enforce behaviour to a more democratic one where citizens are able to take responsibility for their own actions.
A. Someone who joins with like minded people to set up a communally owned organisation without forcing anyone else to join. Like some: Shareholders (equal holdings)? Partnerships (equal holdings)? Charities(no holdings)? Kibbutzes (that have not been privatised)? Shipwrecked crews? Families that share all income?
They also need to be in control of their desires and drivers of evolutionary success. Someone who does not seek more for themselves than they need, and when there is less is capable of sharing what there is, and when there is more is capable of not flaunting their wealth but sharing it outside the commune. Which removes most of the aforementioned groups as shareholders and partnerships tend to trouser all the profits, shipwrecked crews tend to eat each other when there is not enough, many charities start to pay their management huge fees.
That leaves a few true communal organisations.
You can scale these thoughts to nations attempting communism.
Communism does appear to be at odds with systemic evolutionary drivers that seem to favour those who can both collaborate with others and show their individual superiority. The latter gives rise to our love of celebrity, beauty, strength, intellect, trust in influencers, 'Face', desire not to be equal, capitalist economics and football. The former to rule-of-law, government services, taxation, economic regulation, brotherhood, friendship and the agreement to all drive on the same side of the road. As different governance systems try to balance these 2 forces we have created a whole bunch of academic words that try to describe where they are on the scale, and we use them to differentiate our national systems and denigrate competitors. Fact is we are all struggling to get it right, and every nation shifts on the scale as those-who-are-alive-today are a continually roll mass of minds that are influenced by our peers, and our genetic imperatives.
A. Play a role.
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