Governance and Power
What's the purpose?
Any human society needs governance.
Social insects don't need governance. Deborah Gordon showed how ants communicate chemically. The way the ants taste to each other regulates their common behavior to a remarkable extent. To the extent that the colony itself seems to be aware in a way that ants are not.
People aren't like that.
People do have signaling mechanisms like clothing and language and even smell that does influence our behavior.
But individual people have self interests. Individual ants don't. So people can be in conflict. Which means a human society can't have a group mind like an ant hill does.
Human societies rely on institutions that, taken together, provide governance for the society and that we might think of as a social mind. That mind is concerned with things like providing roads and hospitals and factories and courts; lots of things. There are lots of ways that governance evolves in a society. Even in Canada there are distinct styles of governance in the french and anglo parts of the country. Around the world, each country has evolved it's own system of governance.
Governance necessarily involves power relations. Governance decisions are carried by individuals who then are in positions of power. The constant danger is that those in the positons of power will start to think of themselves as the governors. This could, conceptually, be a good thing; thinking of philosopher kings here. But I don't think I've ever seen it.
Governance requires that the issues facing society be accurately perceived. This is not impossible. Democracy, for instance, opens the possibility of decisions being made by legislatures where debate brings all the issues forward for consideration. In fact that's almost as rare as philosopher kings.
As a young man I read Ayn Rand a lot. Paradoxically, I was also learning about Marxism at the same time. Marx was talking about a historical development where the state would wither away and disappear because it wasn't needed.
Rand was painting a picture of a society of equals among whom all transactions were friendly and voluntary without a state being involved.
I went to live in the woods and then emerged to work as a tradesman in printshops. By the time I starte thinking about this again, Rands ideas had morphed into libertarianism. This was the idea that we don't need government at all. We can let the 'free market' decide how society will evolve.
I've read theoretical studies that show that a free market is impossible. It is true that markets are a good way of allocating many resources. But markets are also unstable and tend to gather wealth and power into a few hands.
It works like this: assume that you start with all the players being equal and just doing free transactions with each other. By chance some people get the better side of the deal. Those people have an advantage thereafter. That mechanism, if left unchecked, works like a ratchet and concentrates wealth and power into a few hands.
One of the tasks that governance faces is limiting that concentration. The very rich don't like that. More than 20 years ago Grover Norquist was talking about "starving the beast" (ie government) so that it was small enough that you could "drown it in a bathtub". What that implies is handing the task of governing over to oligarchs.
Flash forward 25 years or so and we see where that sort of thinking gets us. The Republicans in the USA don't seem to have any sort of governance plan. And a tiny minority is actively working to shut the government down. Who gets the power then?
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.