On Government

I’m about a third of the way through Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse. Amazing! Terrifying! It should be required reading for, well, everyone. Unfortunately, it is convincing me that world government is urgently needed. If you don’t have time to read the book, try the short A Short History of Progress. Either of those goes in great depth into many ideas that I merely mention in passing here.

We are social animals, but we are greedy. Even intelligent, educated people often strive for their own short-term gain at the expense of their neighbours. They prefer the possibility of their own greatness over the guarantee that their neighbours won’t starve. They think they’re better than everyone else. Maybe they’re right. That’s depressing.

Americans love to talk about equality. Interestingly, they mean not that everyone should have equal access to shared resources, but rather that each American should have an equal opportunity to screw other folks out of those resources. Remember the tragedy of the commons? Obviously, if you get away with it, taking more than your share will make you wealthy and therefore powerful. Is it any surprise then that there is such a strong correlation between greed and power? Power doesn’t corrupt; power attracts assholes.

It really ought to be obvious that spending more than you make is a stupid idea. But there is not the slightest shadow of a doubt that humans are spending the Earth’s resources faster than the resources are recovering—if you doubt this, please do some homework and convince yourself of it. Credible estimates indicate that we have less than 50 years to solve our problems before they solve themselves. There doesn’t seem to be a plan to stop this. Individuals cannot stop it—the more vegetarians and bicycle commuters there are, the more people the world can support, and we will expand until the Malthusian checks go to work on us. But because there is little incentive to live within shared means, people who use fewer resources merely make it possible for others to use more, whether it be driving an SUV or having 3 children. We need a system that will limit shared resource use, we need it to be powerful, and we need it yesterday.

Therefore the really essential purpose of government is this: to guarantee sustainable use of resources so that a few greedy people do not destroy them for the rest of us. If a government cannot do this, it has failed utterly. Only once it has succeded can it start to worry about providing secondary resources—transportation facilities, health care, buffering against food shortages… these are nice, but not worth much if civilisation will eat itself anyway.

Any country in the world can demonstrate the effects of laws created without understanding. It should be obvious that a government’s first duty requires funding for unbiased science in all fields related to the resources that a country wishes to exploit (funding for other science, like funding for the arts, is merely the measure of a civilisation’s success). With good science informing government policy a country could make its resources last indefinitely. It would have a more or less constant population, a slowly rising standards of living, and a gradually climbing economy fueled by living off the interest of natural resources, rather than by living off the land’s capital and pyramid schemes based on population growth.

The alternative, seen at almost every point in mankind’s history, is an economy that soars to the sky as resource use peaks, and then increasing interest in defensive war as neighbours wish for the apparent wealth of the “successful” country. Eventually the economy, demanding resources that are simply no longer available locally, begins to falter.

The exhaustion of natural resources demands aggressive war. If you have destroyed your forefathers’ patch of earth and you still haven’t figured out how to thrive without those resources, you exploit someone else’s patch of earth or you die. And you’d better do it when you’re stronger than they are.

If everyone in the world lives sustainably, then there is no need for war. But if anyone does not, the most ancient problem applies on the largest scale: due to greed the unsustainable society will briefly be stronger than its neighbours and able to make war on them. It will regard the land inhabited by responsible civilisations as an “underutilised” resource. And a sustainable society with slowly increasing strength will not be able to resist the might of reckless exploiters at the brief peak of their power. In order to defend itself, a country must be strong, energetic, and populous enough to fend off invasions, but that very strength demands converting resources into weapons faster than your neighbour is converting his resources into weapons. A sustainable society is the perfect target for invasion by an unsustainable one not only because the former has unexhausted resources, but because it has fewer weapons.

If enough countries in the world achieve sustainability and understand what is at stake, they may collectively be able to destroy unsustainable countries before those become a threat. This will be a humanitarian nightmare: the countries that must be destroyed are those that have high populations, rapid expansion, and the beginnings of the downward spiral into poverty, hunger, internal conflicts, and all the other self-destruction that goes along with living beyond one’s means. The poor citizens of an unsustainable country will be downtrodden as pyramid schemes take the place of exploiting exhausted natural resources, and will quite rightly appeal to our pity. And yet the country must essentially be destroyed—its use of natural resources must be less than its production, which can only be accomplished by reducing the product of population and average quality of life. Otherwise, such a country must choose between destroying itself in a variety of horrible ways and exporting its policies and ideals to its neighbours.

(Incidentally, as armies become stronger and more unassailable, terrorism must rise. Why would someone throw himself at an army with capabilities decades and trillions of dollars more advanced than his own? Attacking strength is pointless, whereas attacking weakness is sensible. It is inevitable that the greater the difference between the strengths of countries, the more surely the weaker will be forced to choose to terrorism. Why the USA is completely ignoring the solution to this apparent dilemma is left as an exercise to the reader.)

The old evil is again necessary. The world must be protected from its greedier elements lest they destroy crucial shared resources. World government is unavoidable if we are to survive the next half century. It needs to strike swiftly at any country that lives beyond its means. That should be its only duty. Ideally the world government would exist only long enough to force a critical mass of countries to learn to live within their means, so that the balance of power and enlightened self-interest would suffice from then on.

Of course, rather than striving for its own superfluity, any world government will quickly expand and think it owns the world, exploiters will gain control, the government’s functions will expand, and everything will be destroyed. Actually, I guess we’re fucked. Never mind.