Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

Lets look at pairwise relationships a little more deeply. More specifically, let’s look at sexual relationships.

There are two commonly occurring patterns in sexual relationships that occur in nature. There may be more, but only these two seem to apply to humans. The first is called the Lion model. The Lion model is that in any collective of creatures where their access to fundamental resources such as food is relatively scarce or there exist natural enemies, individuals of opposite sexes pair together in monogamous relationships.

For example, lions pair for life and each individual has a separate role in the household. The lioness is the provider. She hunts food (the relevant resource) while the male, the protector, stays at home and safeguards their young.

They rely on each other to a significant extent. The protector must trust the provider to bring back food for himself and their young, and the provider must trust the protector to keep their offspring safe from predators and their home in a state of peace. If either fails, they both fail, and their collective efforts are thwarted.

The second model is called the Baboon model. Baboons live in groups. They have no natural enemies to speak of and their food is easily picked from trees. Their primary concern is easy access to these resources which they have access to in relative abundance. If any given area runs short on resources the entire society picks itself up and relocates to greener pastures, so to speak.

These creatures need not rely as heavily on any one individual within the tribe, but must rather lay his trust on the tribe as a whole, trusting in the collective consciousness to make the right decisions regarding food sources. As a result, creatures living under these conditions tend towards collective polygamy, choosing sexual partners virtually at random from the population, frequently irrespective of sex, and practicing sexual activities less as a method of preserving their species as a form of entertainment.

In this kind of society, the offspring are not the responsibility of their parents although parents tend to be primary caregivers. Rather, the responsibility falls on society as a whole.

If we look upon human history we will notice that historically we tend towards the Lion model – primarily monogamous, living by a rule of trust, frequently enforced by an institution such as marriage.

With urbanization and more specifically industrialization there was a shift towards Baboonism. As our technology slowly but surely won over each of our hindrances, be they enemies (such as savage creatures or opposing tribes) or scarcity, the feeling of safety which ensued gave people more leeway to explore more liberal relationships and found that strict heterosexual monogamy was unneeded.

The industrial revolution didn’t cause this. Urbanization laid the necessary groundwork for the shift. To wit, monarchs and noblemen had been living partially within the baboon model for hundreds of years although they still overtly stuck to the traditional Lion model.

But the industrial revolution ensured a far more fleeting exchange in behavior, and heightened by changes in musical trends in the early 20^th century, as early as the 1920’s the Baboon model was becoming extremely prominent in the western world.

In the 1960’s the schools of free thought encompassed within the Hippie movement marked the tipping point of these sexual models, and for the first time in human history (to our knowledge) the institution of marriage was being openly questioned. Having had several sexual partners and open relationships became something of a norm – more so than before.

At the same time prostitution became less common. In 1857 there were 5,178 prostitutes taken into custody by the London police, and during the decade 1850-1860 they numbered 41,954, or an average of 3,814 per year. In 1851 there were 2,363,000 people in London. Making the very unlikely assumption that all the prostitutes working that year were arrested (and each one only once), then 2,573 prostitutes were working in London that year. That’s roughly one prostitute for every thousand people in the city. To compare, in 2006 there were 7,657,300 people in the greater London area and an estimated 60,587,300 in the whole United Kingdom, making London account for rougly 12% of the population. The British government estimates that 80,000 people are involved in prostitution in Great Britain, and even assigning 20% of them to London gives us one prostitute for every 4000 residents. Of course, a lot of social change has occurred in those 150 years, but it does make you wonder.

More interestingly divorces became more frequent. In 1981 there were 5.1 divorces per 1000 marriages in the United States, while there were only 7.5 new marriages per 1000 marriages in 2005. If we were to follow this trend one hundred years into the future, an average of one out of every six marriages is likely to be upheld for a significant amount of time (of course, this isn’t exactly the correct way to look at it).

To simplify: Our sexual habits are changing. Not because of our increased desire for sexual relations, but much rather because our technology has given us far more leeway than we have hitherto had. Cities are diversifying the pool of potential mates, and our level of affluence allows us to chose more than one.

But we still hold on to the Lion model quite rigidly. Why? Because our moral and legal systems take monogamy as a fundamental assumption. Our society is entirely structured around the family unit, and because it is such a inflexible system, concepts such as homosexuality, single parents and open relationships don’t go down well.

However, there is one core system in our society that is based on the baboon model. Education systems.

Education systems came out of the industrial revolution as a way to educate a lot of people in a relatively short period of time in all that was needed for them to function as laborers in the urbanized, industrialized environment.

With the introduction of preschools and kindergartens, the raising of children has been progressively offloaded from the parents onto the society, leaving parents as primary caregivers but not much else.

This raises several questions which I shall try to answer swiftly: Promiscuity is commonly frowned upon because the old ethic said it to be bad. And it was. It was destructive to the important trust in a binary relationship, and it increases the chances of contracting and distributing venereal diseases (something for the most part solved by condoms and medical science).

Public nudity is commonly frowned upon because the old ethic included a assumption of monopoly on the other person’s sexual activity, and nudity has since slightly before the Victorian era been equated with promiscuity.

Trust is also essential in the Baboon model. However its nature is changed: Instead of placing unlimited trust on one individual, people are forced to trust the society as a whole even if some distrust falls on certain of its members. And by society we can mean on a tribal scale, city-wide scale or national scale, depending on the person but also keeping in mind Dunbar’s number.

The Baboon model is the most common model in the western world today. However it is being held back by the Lion model, which is kept in place by the structure of our legal and moral systems. Religions also help to keep the Lion model in place. However, the Lion model has outlasted its worth.

That said, the Baboon model is in no way superior or inferior to the Lion model. They are equivalent. Not agreeing with either model is okay. I for one was raised in such a way that I live by the Lion model. But accepting both as a reality is important.

In order to understand how a social network works, one needs to have a bit of math handy. I’m so sorry, I’ve tried to keep mathematics out of this until now, but there comes a time in any abstract discussion where math is unavoidable.

You see, within any group of people it isn’t so much the people in the group that matters as the set of pairwise connections between any two people in the group. That is to say, if you have a group of one person, there are no connections, which means no social discourse. Two people can have at maximum one connection, the smallest communicating group of humans. Three people have at maximum three connections — this is where everything flips over: four people can have six connections, five people can have ten connections, and so on. The way we count the number of connections is using the mathematical ‘choose’ function — the question of how many pairs of people there are in a group is the same as the question “in how many different ways can we choose two different people from a group?” The answer is remarkably simple. For n people, the number of pairs is n!/(2 * (n-2)!).

n! is the factorial of n. That means you take every integer from 1 until n and multiply them together, so 5! is the same as 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 = 120. Let’s run through that again, because I’d rather you understand the implications of this.

If you want to count the number of ways in which to select two items from a group of items, then suppose for a moment you have n items in total. Then you multiply all the numbers from 1 up to n together, and divide that number by twice the product of the numbers from 1 to n-2.

Essentially we’ve got a method of predicting how complicated interpersonal relationships within groups will become as the number of people in the group grows bigger. As you can see in the picture below, it grows really fast. By the time you’ve got 150 people in a group there are 22052 different pairs of people.

Think for a moment about all your friends. If you have a pen and some paper handy try writing down the names of as many of your friends as you can — let’s assume a friend is somebody you would call up and invite over for dinner or a beer or whatever it is you do without thinking twice. For most people that is easily twenty people in your innermost circle of friends. You might have, say, thirty or forty friends and then three or four of them would be really close friends that you’d trust with your life, or you might have a very tight group of maybe ten friends and you’d consider yourself able to trust any of them. I’m going to venture a guess at twenty or so friends on average. That’s 342 different connections if everybody knows everybody.

But how many of these twenty or so friends actually know each other? This is a more complicated question. As for myself, I have recently just realized that two of my very closest friends have never met. One of them had been completely unknown to the rest of my friends until recently. Slowly but surely the group huddles closer together, people get to know each other.

So out of those 342 potential connections in a 20 person group, perhaps only half are utilized. For smaller groups, more connections may be used. For bigger groups less connections. We can call the percentage of utilized possible connections in any group the connection quotient. The higher this percentile is, the more connected the group is.

Now notice the fact that if any of the people on your list were to make their own list and compare them, you’d see a few people on your list that aren’t on theirs, and a few people on their list that aren’t on yours. If you were to do this with everybody on your list and they would do it with everybody on their lists and so on and so forth, the number of people on the total list by the time you give up trying to follow all the leads will be just about 150. And chances are you will know most of those 150 people, at least in passing. This is your tribe.

This is the point in this primer where we stop saying what’s wrong with things and start look at how to make them right. There is still a lot of analysis to be done, but we’re going to move beyond petty criticism and on to more pleasant things. Our first topic here is scalability: since the republic is the most common type of government and it’s flaw appears to be that of scalability, I think it is a good idea to devote quite a bit of time to exploring the limits of scalability inherent in humans, the different patterns for scalable systems and, as a case study, we’ll take a look at the largest and most scalable system ever made by humans.

10.1 Interpersonal Relationships

Scalability isn’t a typical topic for social discourse, but sometimes looked at within the realm of social anthropology and more recently amongst the substrate geeks that try to understand and manipulate their standing on social networking sites. In the same way both Tom and Orkut have become extremely popular without most people actually knowing who they are, many people are learning the clever tricks needed to alter their location within the networks they adorn.

The strongest kind of relationship in any group is the relationship between two people. In fact, it is the only kind of relationship in any group. You never find a group of three people in which no pair of people knows each other without the third person being present. Such a group does not occur in nature¹, simply because life on Earth did not evolve for that level of symbiosis.

If you are sitting outside with two good friends, you are a group of three people, but more importantly you are three pairs of people.

1Although I suppose this kind of group is conceivable and several pages of good science fiction could be written on the subject

I used to be a bureaucrat. It used to be my job to move pieces of paper around. There are certain aspects of that kind of job that I like but the fact that it forces me to be bureaucratic is not one of them. My job was to make a system function. The system was a small town with roughly four thousand inhabitants. I was not an important part of the system, it would not break were I not there. It has gone on just fine for over a millennium without me. But I did contribute to it’s function in my own way.

Within any governmental system there are processes. Long ones, short ones. Institutionalized rivers that matters must float down and be deposited in the sea of solutions like so much jetsam. A paper trail follows.

Most of these processes have evolved over time to suit the demands of each passing moment in a very logical way, but for some reason these processes have a tendency not to shake off any ancient baggage. Instead of staying well optimized and clever as they were intended they drag through the riverbed accumulating gunk, artificial baggage that sticks to the hull of an otherwise elegant solution and stays there.

Actually, it’s not always that good. Sometimes when people have been practicing bureaucrats for a long enough time, they start to think that this is the way things should be done and actually start to design things in an awkward fashion. New processes are laden with superfluous nonsense designed to keep any naysayers at bay, and the people who designed the processes truly believe that this is the only way to do things.

If you ever thought politics was a complicated affair, think for a moment about the people who work for politicians. It’s actually rather funny how the model works — nobody ever really acknowledges the fact that it works the way it works any more, but in some governments there are still remnants of the time when this was the case:

The democratically elected representatives have a duty to get things done, but they are unable (or unwilling) to do it themselves. So they impose a tax of some kind to levy the financial prerequisites for getting things done from the people. Then they use that money to hire other people to get things done. In my town the representatives are a town council presided over by a mayor. Until a couple of years ago all public employees worked for a entity known as the town fund, which described very well how power was delegated. This has since been changed to obscure the purpose of the public workers.

Why is this? It is simple. Politicians come and go, but they need to be able to trust that when they are elected there is somebody in their employ who knows something about how the town should be run. Most political candidates know nothing of the function of the system. They have been citizens sitting on the fringe for so long that they don’t know who does what or what lies where. For example, the politician presiding over town planning, zoning and public ordinances is elected for, say, a four year term. Upon entering that term how is he supposed to know the position of every single building in the town, every vacant lot, every piece of unused land? How is he supposed to know how far school zones extend, what regulations apply to building new houses, managing property rights?

There would be two ways of doing this: one would be to restrict the list of potential electoral candidates to people who knew this kind of thing. This would not only be anti-democratic, it would also be very prone to misuse as the definition of “knowing this kind of thing” could be changed to get rid of unwanted candidates.

The other way is to employ a bureaucrat. The saying goes: politicians come and go, but bureaucrats live forever.

A bureaucrat is somebody who has been employed over several terms and knows the function of a certain part of the system inside and out. Somebody who knows the regulations, perhaps even came up with a few, and understands how the town or state or nation functions at a very fundamental level. This is a pretty handy kind of person to keep around, right?

On the flip side we get some weird results: if a politician wants to make something happen he has to ask the bureaucrat if it can be done. If the bureaucrat doesn’t like the idea he can pull several regulations out of his butt to say it isn’t. Further, if a bureaucrat wants something done he need only petition the politician and state numerous (possibly vacuous) reasons for this being a good course of action.

Where does the power end up? With the bureaucrats. Politicians effectively become their sock puppets. Democracy is doomed.

This is not to say that bureaucrats are malignant and not to be trusted. Most bureaucrats are hard working decent people. But they are people who have over possibly hundreds of years created around them a complex system to protect themselves against any harm — not just against the politicians but also against disgruntled citizens who want to build that patio or don’t understand why a bypass has got to be built.

Bureaucracy is not dangerous because of the bureaucrats, it is dangerous because most bureaucrats are not revisionists, and the ones that are slightly revisionist are in danger of biting the hand that feeds them. They are victims of their own narrow-mindedness, and have become locked into the biggest collective scam of all time.

There is some light here though. Computers and technology are giving a lot of bureaucrats a couple of outs, remarkably clever ways of making the systems more efficient. That’s part of what I do for a living. I look at processes that are stupid, processes that are overly complicated and clogged up with years and years of bureaucracy, and I say, “how can we do this a little bit differently?” It all boils down to asking the right questions.

It happens here. Here it happens. Rap-tap-tap, the future is near. Please hold.

Communication lines are stifled again. We’ve been on hold for an hour, trying to call anybody who will listen. The Pope is out of town for the weekend, the American president is busy waging a war. Nobody wants to hear our song.

If there’s anything that really characterizes modern life, it’s our incessant waiting. We keep waiting. Waiting for her to show interest, waiting for him to call back. Waiting for somebody to solve the problems, waiting for the prices to drop or for the weather to get a little bit better. Our technology is based on this. The human need to wait a little bit is so strong that we’ve come up with several branches of mathematics to describe it: queue theory looks at the way we wait and how we eventually get served. Retarded differential equations are equations that describe effects that take a while to manifest, like how the suicide goes up just before Christmas or how, in February when the credit card companies send out the results of the Christmas shopping sprees, consumerism slows down just a tad.

We wait for everything. Airports are perfect examples of this: you are required to check in up to four hours before the flight and wait. Why? Just because. The airline would rather you wait for them beforehand than they wait for you afterwards. Then you get on your plane and wait. Why? Because it takes time to travel. Nothing is instantaneous. Just wait.

Is all this waiting strictly necessary? Or, to ask a better question: are we always waiting for the right things?

Most of the time we’re waiting for other people to act. And they in turn are waiting for other people to act. Every action is a reaction. The world ticks on like clockwork. Consider, if you will, that there were only a single person who had the freedom not to wait. Around him things would happen fairly rapidly, he would act and his suitors would react. Events would ripple out from this point.

Now think, for a moment who you spend most of your time waiting for. Is it a single person, is it a group? If a group, how can it be described? Are they bureaucrats?

At the same time as communism was growing in popularity throughout the world, so was the alternative. No matter what Adam Smith will tell you, capitalism came into existence in the 17th century as the result of a really cool change in the way money worked and the effect it had on the globalization movement that was starting to work.

Until the 1600’s money was static. Gold was gold was gold was gold, to take an objectivist view on things. A coin of any denomination had that denomination because it contained a specific amount of certain materials that were considered by all who mattered to be of some worth. But with increasing trade with western Africa, where the primary currency was a relatively rare type of sea shell, and Asia, where the primary currency was silver, there began to be quite some variation on exactly how much silver people were willing to pay for so and so much gold and so on: instead of being fixed, the value of entities started to flow much like a river. The financial system got it’s own current. The specie system died. Currency was born.

With currency came lots of interesting new games that people could play, a virtually endless supply of possible ways to manipulate the economy. Selling short had been a long time favorite, the act of borrowing stocks, selling them, forcing a collapse in stock value, buying them back and returning them to the owner. With a fluctuating system bound by no discernible laws this was a hit and was eventually made illegal in most countries. Other games were played, the stock markets were awash in trade.

But it took many centuries for the transformation from specie to currency to complete. For a very long time, even if the inherent value of gold fluctuated, the currencies of the world, such as US dollars or British pounds, were bound to gold, the price pegged. Eventually in the 1930’s the world’s stock markets crashed one after another bringing on the greatest recession in the history of the world — the great depression. Men like Hitler and Roosevelt brought their own ideas for rebuilding the system, and World War II was the natural result of Hitler’s expansionist-nationalist method of rebuilding the ruined economy. It’s difficult for a lot of people to admit it, but Hitler rebuilt the economy of Europe.

Prior to the World War the so called gold standard was abolished in America, essentially unpegging the price of gold from the price of dollars. During World War II most countries either misplaced their gold or had it stolen from them, resulting in the other countries following suit. The New Deal was an effective reset of the western economies, and the Bretton Woods system provided a stable basis on which to build the postwar financial system.

Eventually the Bretton Woods system was found to be flawed and it tossed aside, and one ideological system followed another for the control of the capitalist economy as each one is discovered to be flawed.

In the 1990’s venture capitalism put a lot of it’s eggs in the Internet basket, hoping for an endless amount of return after increasingly grandiose IPO’s¹. Most of these were betting their money on vaporware — computer software that didn’t even exist. People were capitalizing on ideas, buying rights to concepts that existed solely as the figments of some geek’s imaginations. Eventually the bubble burst.

Since then the focus has turned largely away from one hit wonders and large scale capitalism. The most recent buzzword is micro-VC, small scale venture capitalism in which banks and the owners of large quantities of money distribute their money between lots of small projects, slowly pushing up their profit margins, playing it relatively safe.

Safety has always been lacking from the Capitalist’s vocabulary. Insurance, yes. Risk analysis, sure. But the system of currency wasn’t designed for safety, there are no built in harnesses. And as the system continues to fluctuate out of control as economists and mathematicians struggle to figure out ways to describe and explain the first ever man-made organism.

The capitalist crisis is not one of imminent poverty. It is a question of control. They had control, they got greedy, and now they’ve lost control. Now all they can do is surf the surf and beware of the sharks.

1Initial Public Offerings — when a company’s shares are sold to the public for the first time

People like to own things. Right? Well. Ownership is a tricky concept (that, incidentally, I’ll get into later), but I’ll agree that people like to possess things. The stereotyped image of communism is that of poor farmers, a collapsed economy and people standing in lines awaiting food rations. This could not be further from the truth.

The idea of communism is one that has been raped more severely than the idea of democracy. It started out in the 19th century when several thinkers, most in some way related to the Paris Commune, started thinking about the same problems as we have up until now. But more explicitly, they wanted to figure out a way in which a government could function without a feudal hierarchy or a monarch. Thy wanted to figure out a way in which a civilization could function giving power to the people.

At the time this was a fairly novel idea. Political thinkers, philosophers and even poets applied themselves to this problem and from it came many of the ideas that are only now, two hundred years later, becoming popular.

One of the early thinkers on the subject was William Godwin. Today his daughter Mary is far better known, for Mary Shelley, neé Godwin, was the author of the famous story Frankenstein’s monster – embedded within the story are subtle references to both her father’s, her mother’s and her husband’s political views.

Mary Shelley’s mother was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. This name is fairly unknown too in modern times outside small circles of the enlightened. Mary Wollstonecraft was the first feminist. And whether you agree with feminism or not it is hard not to agree with Mary’s idea. In fact probably the only reason her name is not set in gold and adorned in every corner of the world is that William Godwin wrote a posthumous biography of her that was considered way too honest, and it is, even by today’s standards.

Mary Shelley was married to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who at age 21 wrote the controversial essay “The Necessity of Atheism.” Percy Shelley was a devout atheist and a strong admirer of William Godwin’s views. It was because of his admiration of Godwin that he met his future wife, and his career was complete with references to Godwin’s ideals, especially visible in such poems as Ozymandias and The Masque of Anarchy.

Yes. William Godwin is the father of the political concept known as Anarchism. Although the name was not applied to his views commonly until far later, William Godwin laid the foundations for a system of thinking that was fascinating to many but similarly rubbed quite a number of people the wrong way. Godwin, and his contemporaries Bakunin and Proudhon, were all about removing all restraints from people, not just by minimizing the government but effectively abolishing it.

Two of Bakunin’s deciles were Karl Marx and Frederich Engels. They agreed fundamentally with Bakunin’s view of the necessity of abolishing private ownership, but they disagreed with the total abolishment of government. Rather than abolishing it they wanted it to function as a sort of communications outpost for the proletariat, coordinating the efforts of the working class and protecting them from the scourge of capitalism. They published their magnum opus in 1848, The Communist Manifesto.

Much later Lenin and Trotsky took that manifesto and established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which functioned well under Lenin’s rule until his death. Lenin styled himself the head of government, the premier, but left it as that. It was after Lenin that things started to go wrong.

Stalin was the first in a long line of hard-handed dictators. His first order of business, for example, was to remove more than half of the Crimean Tatars from their home and send them to Uzbekistan. The Tatars are a small tribal nation that at the time lived on the Crimean peninsula of what is now Ukraine, and owing to the diaspora have become a sundered nation like so many of the tribes that made up the USSR.

The Soviet ideal failed. Why? The implementation was wrong. Stalin’s fault? No. Nikita? No. Gorbachev? No. Not even Lenin is to blame. The fault lies with a fundamental misunderstanding of Marx and Engels. The fault lies with the anarchists that didn’t understand anarchy and created something else, an uncontrollable beast from the noble ideas that they had been impregnated with.

The Communists were revisionists according to Mao. A good question is, what were they revising?

They were revising an ancient way of thinking, they were playing with provocative terms, doing a different kind of math, and watching the results play out. They wanted to know if it would work, and if there was any alternative to the alternative.

“Dig up, stupid.”

– Chief Wiggum, The Simpsons

Let’s focus the western world for a while. The modern world is full of flaws. We all know this, and we’ve pointed out the gaping wounds in the big picture but it would be interesting to see if there is anything specifically wrong with the way things are run, how things are done. Let’s jab a few spears in the direction of some common notions in politics and see if they hold their water.

The question here is what holes have we dug for ourselves? In computer science people frequently deal with so called design patterns: predefined abstract notions of how problems are solved, defined by the process of resource manipulation and internal structure. In political science design patterns exist, but most political scientists are careful not to delve into a scientific classification of the pros and cons of the various systems and indeed none I can think of would ever dare to treat political theories as design patterns.

Lucky I’m not a political scientist.

One of the most celebrated notions of political science with respect to human rights is that of democracy. But democracy has many flavors, many more than I could think up on the spot if quizzed. The chief doctrine of democracy is embedded in the name: democracy from Greek demos meaning “the public” and krateia meaning “ruling”. Democracy means that the people rule the people.

How does this differ from the idea of monarchy, despotism or feudalism? Simple: the concept of class is eradicated. By giving common people the power to govern themselves (or, rather, never taking it away from them in the first place) you are saying that everybody is essentially equal. We drop the assumption of an inherent hierarchy and instead assume that groups of people can be organized in a more ad-hoc way.

Of course many flavors of democracy don’t go quite that far. The Athenian democracy of half a millennium B.C. didn’t allow for complete ruling of the common people but rather limited it to free men. This limitation excluded two classes that were deemed unworthy or incapable of ruling. It seemed to make sense to them – but something tells me the women and the slaves didn’t participate in that vote.

The most common modern form of government is the republic. In fact whenever you see a functional democratic government in the world today it is a republic. This would lead many to believe that the republic is the ultimate form of democracy. But we’re all about questioning things so lets. Is there an inherent flaw in the idea of the Republic? If so, why is it flawed? How can it be fixed? Indeed, can it be fixed?

A quick overview of the functionality of the republic is in order.

The core of any republic is the constitution, a document that can be one page like the original U.S. constitution or several pages like the Icelandic constitution or several hundred pages like the proposed European constitution. Strictly speaking the EU constitution is not a constitution at all, it is a multi-partisan international cooperation agreement. But the bureaucrats in Bruxelles like to call it a constitution. I’ll explain later. Anyway, this document is normally agreed upon by all members of the state that is to be formed by general vote, a process that is typically called a referendum in republican context. The reason this is called a referendum is because the government to be is referring the power of making the decision to the general public rather than unilaterally making the decision themselves.

It is exactly here where things go all weird. The general public, having agreed on a constitution, vote in a general election on a parliament and a government. Implementations vary, but the government can either be a subset of the parliament, completely disjoint, or there may be an arbitrary level of overlap. Most republics also vote a single person to the office of president (and sometimes elect a vice president), the function of which is very differently defined between states. In the United States the president is required to ratify laws but may also suggest new laws, publish the republican equivalent of monarchic edicts, and are the supreme commander of all armed forces. In most republics the role of the president is nowhere near as grandiose. Most are in a purely honorary role, temporarily serving as the face of the country with regard to public relations and are generally also expected to ratify laws or refuse to, thereby acting as the moral conscience of the nation, weighing against the government.

In a republic the people, after a general election, essentially hand over the power to the elected representatives (hence the name of the system). They forfeit any rights they have to self-governance in the process of voting, and establish a council of what is analogous to tribal elders that set the laws, that must be in concordance with the constitution.

Because governing any state is such a complicated business there are committees, councils and subordinate government entities at various levels, for example municipal governments. These are generally selected through a similar republican process of public referendum.

Now, who here noticed the flaw?

It was so subtle most people probably didn’t notice it. It took me the better part of my life to notice it, but thankfully it appears as if all over the place a lot of people are waking up to it.

In Athenian democracy the idea was that free men had the power, and nobody else. But every free man had the power and they came together to make laws as needed. In the Icelandic parliament Alingi in the early years of the settlement there was a similar thing, except the parliament wasn’t limited to men by law but rather by means, the men generally attended bringing their young sons while the women stayed at home to keep the farm running. In both cases these simple decisions caused a masculine bias. But it did something else too: it limited the number of people that needed to be heard when the parliament convened. It would be time-prohibitive to allow everybody to have their say, and this limitation was an important one. But as populations grew this kind of limitation stopped being extreme enough.

In the republic the number of voices to be heard is lowered by making each person choose his representative — that way several people group together and select a single person to be their voice at the parliament. (Of course, most modern republics aren’t that transparent, having people select parties rather than people and thereby diffusing the obligation of any individual electee towards each voter. I’m getting ahead of myself.)

Thus limiting the number of voices at the parliament it can be conducted with a fair level of efficiency. The most efficient type of government is the dictatorship, because no arbitration and no discussion leads to rapid execution of any task. A democracy in which every man, woman and child had an equal voice on the parliament would be extremely inefficient, because anything and everything would have to be discussed and every view heard. Just as we globbed all the countries together earlier into three worlds, the purpose of electing representitives is to glob together several views, united only by vague similarity. That way everybody can potentially be at least somewhat happy.

But the resulting hierarchy is deep. You have a relatively small number of people at the top, preceded over by one individual, and then this top level of the hierarchy delegates and subordinates and grows deeper and more complex until at the bottom you have the majority of the voters.

If you happen to like the republican system then at this point you’re thinking something along the lines of me being a damned communist. Right? So far I have done nothing to convince you that the republic is flawed, and in fact I still haven’t even said what the flaw is.

A lot of people say that democracy doesn’t work. The truth is much simpler: Democracy doesn’t scale.

And it is scale that is the flaw of the republic. Republics are simply too large to be managable, and they attempt to make up for their large scale by globbing opinions together and blindly assuming that the chosen representatives will represent the union of all these opinions rather than simply attending to their own. Furthermore, as I pointed out earlier, these representitives are usually city-dwelling urbanites that are totally out of touch with any problems or passions of people living in rural areas. The representatives are doomed to represent only themselves and the environment they live in.

In short: Republics don’t work. The republic has failed. If you live in one, you’re going to want to read on. If you don’t, sorry, but you’re probably being fucked even worse than the republicans. If you’re not sure if you live in a republic or not, check out this list:

• Afghanistan (republic since 1973)
• Albania (since 1946)
• Algeria
• Arab Republic of Egypt
• Arab Republic of Syria
• Arab Republic of Yemen
• Argentina
• Austria
• Bangladesh
• Benin
• Bolivia
• Bosnia and Herzegovina (since 1995)
• Botswana
• Brazil (since November 15th, 1889)
• Bulgaria (since 1946)
• Burkina Faso
• Burundi (since 1966)
• Cameroon (unitary republic 1960-1961 and 1972-present; federal republic 1961-1972)
• Cape Verde
• Central African Republic (1958-1976; restored 1979)
• Chad
• Chile
• Colombia (unitary republic since 1886)
• Congo (Kinshasa)
• Costa Rica
• Croatia
• Cuba
• Cyprus
• Czech Republic
• Côte d’Ivoire
• Democratic Republic of Congo
• Djibouti
• Dominica
• Dominican Republic (1801-1861, 1865-present)
• East Timor
• Ecuador
• Egypt (since 1953)
• El Salvador (1821-present)
• Equatorial Guinea
• Eritrea
• Estonia (1921-1940; 1991-present)
• Ethiopia (unitary republic 1974-1994; federal republic since 1994)
• Federal Republic of Cameroon (1961-1972)
• Fiji Islands (since 1987)
• Finland
• French Republic (1st: 1792-1804; 2nd: 1848-1852; 3rd: 1870-1940; 4th: 1945-1958 and 5th, since 1958)
• Gabon
• Gambia (since 1970)
• Georgia
• Germany (since 1918)
• Ghana (since 1960)
• Greece (since 1973)
• Guatemala
• Guinea
• Guinea-Bissau
• Guyana (since 1970)
• Haiti (1806-1849; restored 1859)
• Honduras
• Hungary (since 1946)
• Iceland (republic since 1944)
• India (since January 26, 1950)
• Indonesia (Unitary republic since August 1950)
• Iran (since 1979)
• Iraq (since 1958)
• Ireland (republic since 1949)
• Islamic Republic of Iran (since Iranian Revolution)
• Islamic Republic of Mauritania
• Islamic Republic of Pakistan (since 1970)
• Israel
• Italy (since 1946)
• Kazakhstan
• Kenya (since 1964)
• Kiribati
• Kyrgyzstan
• Laos (since 1975)
• Latvia
• Lebanon
• Liberia
• Libya (since 1969)
• Lithuania
• Macedonia
• Madagascar
• Malawi (since 1966)
• Maldives (since 1968)
• Mali (since 1960)
• Malta (since 1974)
• Marshall Islands
• Mauritania
• Mauritius (since 1992)
• Mexico (since 1917)
• Moldova
• Mongolia (since 1924)
• Montenegro (since 1944)
• Mozambique
• Namibia
• Nauru
• Nicaragua
• Niger
• Nigeria (1963-66:1st Republic, 1979-83: 2nd Republic, 1993: 3rd Republic, 1999-present: 4th Republic)
• North Korea (since 1948)
• Pakistan (since 1956)
• Palau
• Panama
• Paraguay
• People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria
• People’s Republic of China
• Peru
• Philippines
• Poland
• Portugal (since 1910)
• Republic of China (Taiwan)
• Republic of Colombia (1819-1886)
• Romania (1965-1989)
• Romania (since 1947)
• Russian Federation
• Rwanda (since 1961)
• Samoa (since 2007)
• Senegal
• Serbia (since 1944)
• Seychelles
• Sierra Leone (since 1971)
• Singapore (since 1965)
• Slovakia
• Slovenia
• Somalia
• South Africa (since 1961)
• South Korea (since 1948)
• Sri Lanka (since 1972)
• Sudan
• Suriname
• Swiss Confederation (since 1848)
• Syria
• São Tomõ and Principe
• Tajikistan
• Tanzania
• The Most Serene Republic of San Marino
• Togo
• Trinidad and Tobago (since 1976)
• Tunisia (since 1957)
• Turkey (republic since 1923)
• Turkmenistan
• Uganda (since 1963)
• Ukraine
• Union of Myanmar
• Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922-1991)
• United Provinces of Central America (1823-1840)
• United States of America (since 1789)
• United States of Indonesia (1945-1950)
• Uruguay
• Uzbekistan
• Vanuatu
• Venezuela
• Vietnam
• Yemen
• Zambia
• Zimbabwe

So I present to you the world’s problems, extremely simplified. The solutions summed up here in one word each are not one-pill-cures-all explanations. They are just an outline that we will use throughout the document, and as you will see, all solutions apply equally everywhere.

Don’t jump to conclusions. These solutions are lobbed in here with very little backing and especially the last one is extremely inflammatory. Before you make up your mind, read on. See what chapters 8 and 9 have to say.

“Life in the mid-21st century is going to be about living locally.”

– James Howard Kunstler

What are the real issues in the industrialized western world? Financial and political instability don’t plague us, and we’re adopting technology faster than anybody else. So what’s the problem?

Long story short, the first world is tiring. If you ever want to experience true fatigue, go to a first world country. Everything is so fast! Everything happens at the speed of information, which is arbitrarily fast. There is so much information flowing around and the only way to stay on top of things is to become extremely clever at sifting out relevant information and, more importantly, ignoring the rest.

To make matters worse, the first world is extremely inefficient. After the second world war, around the 1950’s, people in western cities fled from them into newly founded suburbs, distributing the mass of any urban settlement over a far larger area. The key idea here was that everybody was entitled to their own little hubby-hole in the middle of nowhere, but this idea failed miserably: instead of vast country homes people ended up with curling, furling streets and an endless supply of homely architecture in which each family was sacred. A paradigm shift occurred: instead of organizing cities around people, they had to be organized around traffic, because even though all these people now lived outside of the heavily industrialized cities, they still relied on that very same industry as a source of employment and income. The 1950’s weren’t just the advent of the computing age, they were also the advent of the commuting age.

Now thousands and thousands of people lived far away from their places of work, and cars became commonplace. Since public transport could not be effecively applied to such varying needs and privately owned companies failed to see the long-term benefits of providing buses or carpools for their employees, every family needed it’s own car, it’s own plan for getting to school and work in the morning and home in the afternoon. This was also the advent of the super-market age: huge bustling shops providing everything the family might need propped up in the suburbs, disrupting the concepts of local specialty stores. There was no place for the butcher or fishmonger in the suburbs, everything had to be available, consumer packed, in the supermarket.

Every car fed off oil, burned and left a permanent imprint on the environment. Every household dumped it’s own pile of waste with an increasing amount of suburban commodity waste, and every community had to conjure up it’s own large scale waste disposal network that could facilitate all this extra garbage.

The inner-cities changed as well: as the middle- and upper classes migrated to the suburbs they left in their wake a new set of impoverished neighborhoods around the city centers. The centers themselves were kept pristine by the growing needs of the business districts that grew vertically, but around them the ‘hoods deteriorated. In northern cities of America it was around the 50’s that the Great Migration occurred when tens of thousands of African-Americans moved to these richer Yankee cities, fleeing the poverty and lasting oppression of the south. In Great Britain the proletariat class was left behind in horrible conditions as middle class towns like Skelmersdale and Carnforth expanded around older industrial cities like Wigan and Lancaster. Most of Europe followed a similar trend, with long avenues stretching out from the city centres radially like Hommelsjeweg in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and sufficiently far away from the city center new centres of mass came into existance, around which a couple of small shops provided a kernel for a European style suburb.

Eventually the sparsity of the cities caught up with them, and to connect the various parts of the urban sprawl huge highways were constructed, motorways designed to lessen the pressure of the rush hours. Before the 1950’s rush hours existed for sure, there were certain hours of the day during which there were far too many people in Oxford Street, London, or on 5th Avenue in New York, in which the stifling atmosphere kept the faintest of heart at home. But before the motorization of the population this was not a problem except on the most busy of commercial streets, before the suburbanization of urbia this was inconceivable on a grand scale. People did not sit for hours per day in traffic jams.

What is the abstract problem that the First World suffers from? It is developmental strangulation. We’ve developed ourselves into a corner. We are choking ourselves with our own short-sightedness and our inability to optimize the simplest of tasks. We have dug ourselves into a system that is almost impossible to escape from, one that is suffocating our ability to develop any further.