A society needs a government.
Hope it's a good one.
There is no way around it.
This seems to me to be driven by evolution.
People are variable. Some are better at some things than others. In this context, some people are more dominant than others.
Just as with markets that inevitably produce billionaires due to random variations in the success of transactions even if everyone starts off with the same wealth.
This random variation leads to strongmen who decide what to do.
That is, each isolated group of people would have one who would make decisions for the whole group.
For large groups that one would need companions for advice and information and support.
For a very large group those companions would evolve into what we might call a State with a government.
States would apply evolutionary pressure on each other.
Some would have good governance and good luck and expand in territory and population.
Others would be warlike and have good luck and expand in territory and population.
There would be a tension between those two tendencies and in fact there would be a similar tension among subgroups in society and then sub-subgroups within the subgroups.
I see this as a sort of fractal pattern that can continue through many levels.
In an abstract way this framework seems to me to contain what I know about society and history.
But the devil is in the details.
Last time I looked the 7 billion people on Earth are distributed among over 190 countries. Canada is relatively small in size in that context but even we have dozens of subgroups and each of those has many sub-sub groups in the familiar fractal pattern.
Each country is a State and there is a huge variety in the character of various States and a lot of competition.
Let's return to the strongman concept here. I don't think a stupid or mindless strongman would create a prosperous society.
But now States are mindless and can be stupid.
On the one hand, even States now directly ruled by a strongman have that problem because their sources of information are flawed and so they are sort of flying blind.
But even States that have evolved past the strongman stage often get into divisive partisan struggles that prevent any sort of rational decisions about issues or problems.
I ran into an interesting governance problem the other day in terms of oil refineries. Seems they are being shut down due to old age. The last refinery built in America was in 1977.
Capitalist investors don't think it's viable to invest in new refineries or upgrades.
They can see the obvious - people have been talking about getting off fossil fuels for a long time now and electric vehicles are booming.
They don't want to invest billions in facilities that may only have a market for a short time.
They are like: If we're to build a new refinery then society will have to buy it's output for it's lifetime, thus locking us into fossil fuels.
The problem here is that during the switch away from fossil fuels we may go through a period where we are still dependent on fossil fuels but not enough is refined making shortages.
And with an economy like ours with such long supply chains this could be a disaster.
One way out of this problem would be for the State to own it's own refineries. There's one for sale now that could be bought at a bargain price and the State wouldn't have to turn a profit.
Easy to say :-)
I do see the problems - doing that would go directly against the capitalist ethic of America but that ethic already has lots of problems too that need to be pointed to.
And truth be told - democracy has to work a lot better than it does now.
When a third of America believes Trump's lies (the many) democracy is in trouble.
And this is a global phenomenon.
But also I see the mainstream media promoting the lie that inflation and the gas shortage are all Biden's fault.
If Biden had direct control of the means of production then that might be a reasonable charge - but he doesn't.
Maybe we would do better to depend on the global AI called google. Use it as a seach term. What do we do about the oil shortage?
What could possibly go wrong with that ?
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.