Fundamentalists, Corporate Nation-States and Weblogging: How the World Should be Run
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I hate fundamentalist regimes as they currently exist in the middle east. The Taliban (as it existed before), the Baath party (as it existed before), and all of the others. I hate them.
Why do I hate them?
They're just attempting to combat the commercialism that permeates western society. They simply hold beliefs that things like TV, radio and self-expression aren't good for society. Is there anything wrong with those views?
No, there's absolutely nothing wrong with those views. In fact, I think there's a lot of validity to them. TV and commercialism are having massive nagative effects on our society and our children.
So, again, why do I hate fundamentalist regimes?
It comes down to freedom.
I'd be completely comfortable with a nation dedicated to no television, no shaving, no self-expression and no commercialism... as long as people could choose to come and go as they please.
In fact, I'm sure that millions of people would move there as long as they could stay or leave at any time. Hell, as I start to watch this assinine society I live in through the eyes of a parent I may even give it a shot. It's kind of like those tree-hugging communes from the sixties. Peace, love and body hair.
The beliefs are valid. The implementation and enforcement is what sucks.
Without a foundation of personal freedoms, the belief system becomes a jail. And people don't like to be in jail so they rebel. The grass is always greener. Take away TV and people will want to watch it.
If you give people the freedom to live in your nation under your laws and have reasonable enforcement, they are making the choice and suddenly the lack of TV becomes a badge... something that the people realize is good. And society actually gets better.
But when you don't allow people to choose to live in your system and then you decide to enforce your rules with things like multi-limb removal... well, that just sucks. It creates a locked-down society based on fear. Your society creates demand for something (the grass is always greener) but then limits access to it and harshly punishes people who try to get it.
Cruel. I always think of one person living in those regimes. I think of me. I imagine the fear of not knowing whether I'll live out the day. I think of all of the thoughts I'd want to share but couldn't. Then I multiply that by millions. Ugly picture.
So nations need to start with a baseline of freedom. That's why I support going to war to free nations and give them back to the people. Once freed, as long as they maintain that citizen freedom, the ability for the citizen to choose to play or not, I don't care what laws they impose. Of course, the enforcement has to be humans.
Here's how I think the world should work:
Every nation has to offer a single baseline freedom to its people: the ability to leave the nation at will. And maybe some of the standard U.N. human rights stuff.
Every nation then defines a doctorine, philosophy, legal system, what have you. They decide what they stand for. Some will stand for capitalism. Some for socialism. Some for communism. Some for muslim fundamentalism.
People then choose where they want to live. Maybe you have international funds to subsidize moving.
Look what happens:
The world situation is reversed. Instead of power being in the hands of the nations, the power is in the hands of the people... where it belongs. Because of border porosity, nations suddenly have to hire Donny Deutsch and pay him mega-millions to create slick SuperBowl ads and viral marketing programs to recruit citizens.
These national marketing programs will espouse the strengths of their society.
The fundamentalists: without TV children will grow up less violent which will make for a safer society.
The United States: Baywatch... end of story.
Amsterdam: legal pot smoking and cheap hookers.
Germany and Japan: join the engineering revolution.
India: education will lead to strength and prosperity.
Nations suddenly have to create rules and visions that people want. If they don't they risk extinction.
You'll have niche visions, like the Marathon Nation, dedicated to running 26.2 miles per day (great place to move if you're a knee doctor). You could have a nation dedicated to a TV show... The United Stated of Scooby Doo. You could have a nation based on sexual interest... The Southern Republic of Ass Rangers... the Northern Republic of Lesbos (please add laws to webcam your society). Nations based on diets... Atkins Nation. Nations based on religion.
You name it... somebody's gonna create a nation for it.
Now, you'll tell me that this vision is completely unrealistic. That the leaders of a nation, when they see it failing will lock down their people to prevent citizen-loss instead of becoming obsolete. You'll argue that essentially that's the problem in the middle east... that tyrannical leaders know their citizens will all leave if they give them the choice so they lock them down.
I'll agree with you regarding today. But that doesn't mean my vision won't work in the future.
All it takes is a subtle mental shift in how we see nations. Instead of mentally tying them to religion and self. We need to grow the sense of self in the citizen and allow them to be less nation-based.
Technology is enabling travel across the globe. In a few years you'll be able to hop a sub-orbital and be 12 timezones away in less than an hour. Space elevators will eventually allow mass movement of people into orbit, around the world and back down to terra firma.
All it takes is for people to see their nation more like they see their company. Think about it. Strong companies with good morale have a healthy sense of self... of pride. But people still leave the company from time to time. And they're not blown up for doing so (unless we're talking the US Postal Service). People come into the company and they're not ridiculed for being different. It doesn't take generations to become part of the fabric of a company and accepted as such. It takes months to years.
Employees can debate, without blood-curdling screams and machine guns, the advantages and disadvantages of their company culture, beliefs, leadership and direction. They can choose to stay or leave.
The leaders of corporations certainly have personal pride vested in their companies. They want to keep them going. But they don't kill their rivals. Sometimes they just go bankrupt. It sucks but it's not the end of the world for them. They find another company.
To me, the way that people treat their membership in a company is the way that they should treat their membership in their nation. Step back from the dogma. Tone down the sense of ego tied to nations.
It's going to happen. Of course, there are difficulties.
To implement it you need a centralized world order. Something like the U.N. with a set of balls. Their only task is to enforce the one freedom that nations have to give their citizens... the ability to leave at will.
You need rules for dealing with obsolete nations. Shouldn't be too hard... we have bankruptcy rules for companies. But they need to be created.
You need to somehow subsidize movement of people between countries. Maybe a credit system... you get one move per two years. It has to be equal and can't be based on personal wealth. Just a flat subsidy for all people. We have the international monetary fund. If we, as a world, see the freedom and choice of people as important it shouldn't be hard to divert funding.
The biggie problem is of geographical space. Some societies are going to be more popular. Hell, they could even just be trendy. Once the word gets out that Nation X is "the" nation to be in, you'll have billions of people exercising their freedom to move there. Imagine all the hippies in the world suddenly trying to immigrate to Amsterdam so that they can get high all day. Amsterday (and Holland as a whole) isn't big enough. There are a ton of pot-heads out there.
So what do you do? You need to have some sort of system, governed centrally, that allows for the expansion and contraction of nations based on the number of people who move there. Remember, the important thing isn't "this holy land of our nation"... it's "these beliefs that we hold." It's moving nationalism from a physical land system to a mental belief system. But, ironically, you could model the nation-expansion rules on real-estate law.
Still, it gets really tricky when you have two nations in close and geographically constrained proximity. When do you decide to take from one nation's borders and add to another's? I think that the zero sum game theory from the eighties could be applied. General notion being that you take the total area of the earth and divide by the number of people alive. That gives you a per-capita land allowance. If you, as a nation, attract more people you get more land.
How do you start a nation? What qualifies you? Do you need a minimum number of citizens who've committed to moving to your new nation? Is there a startup fee? Some thinking would need to be done.
Another issue that many people will bring up is PFE (Pure F'ing Evil)... also called PANG (People Are No Good)... in the U.S. this is a view that the Democrats generally subscribe to as they conclude that people couldn't possibly run society for themselves... that it takes a bunch of laws, rules and guidelines to protect them from themselves. That people, left to their own devices, will do the wrong thing. PANG theories claim that any person in power will abuse that power. PANG theories paint an ugly picture of humans as evolved but having age-old instincts of survival that make us evil.
There's some validity to PFE PANG theories today. People have deep-rooted psychological and societal tendencies that are anachronistic in a modern connected world.
But I don't buy into the PFE PANG theories in the long run. What we do as people, individually and societally, is defined by the way that we're raised and evolved. In today's world there is a lot of killing, but the mental assumption, even on the part of the fundameltalists, is that killing is a bad thing not to be taken too lightly.
This is a massive shift as compared to our cave men ancestors who killed at random for some berries. Killing wasn't taboo back then. It is now. It's progress towards a better world. Think on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years... not on the scale of what you learn in the history books.
I've said that I buy into PFE PANG theories today. So I have to choose to either act on them or to act for the future. I choose to act for the future and start implementing systems that move us to a world where our mental fabric isn't PFE PANG. Do you want to be supporting the wrong mental vision for humanity, or defining the right one? Come on, join the new wave.
The mental shifting will take place. People will realize that my system is a better way to run the world and over many generations will adopt the mental schemas required to make it a reality.
The thing that will make it happen: technology.
Technology enables people to see the good, the bad and the ugly. Anybody seeing how horribly locked-down fundamentalist regimes can Xxxk up millions of people will conclude that humanity has to change. Throughout most of history such information has been hard to acquire.
With the internet and technologies like weblogging you see information exchange at a much faster rate. Poople are gaining tolerance. People are understanding each other. People are seeing the ugly side of the way we run the world today.
So, to summarize:
Fundamentalist regimes suck not because of their beliefs, but because they strip their people of freedom. Under this light it's easy to see how there are really just nations that believe in freedom and nations that don't. Support the ones that believe in freedom, irrespective of their laws and notions on how to run society. It's not a debate about TV, shaving, commercialism or religion... it's a debate about the freedom of people to choose... a much higher order debate than the petty religious crap.
The world should work more like modern corporations than modern nation-states. By giving all people the freedom to move into and out of all nations you flip the power structure in favor of people and force nations, much like a capitalist corporation, to serve the people.
There are some sizable challenges but these challenges will be overcome. It will take time but they will be overcome as the collective mental biases in the world move to overcome them. If you're reading joereger.com in the year 202005, two hundred thousand years from now, you know I was right. Gimme mad props, dog.
Technology, in particular weblogging, plays a critical role in the distribution of information that will power the required mental changes to make society better. In particular, it will create a sense of understanding which will lead to tolerance and eventually cooperation. Start blogging today.
Differentiation between people is only a petty modern creation. It will dissappear with time as our collective human intelligence increases.
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