On Government

WARNING: This is not an authoritative thesis. This is just my own musings and almost certainly refutable by any college student actually taking a class on governmental philosophy.

I touched on this topic a bit yesterday, so I'll go a bit more in depth here.

The essence of government is the giving up of individual liberty for safety. By giving up the right to decide everything for ourselves, we also gain the security of knowing that certain things will be provided for us. Things like welfare spring to mind, though there are other examples, such as civil liberties.

The first government, most likely, was some kind of oligarchy. Some leader of a band received the allegiance of his followers in exchange for the increased availability of food. A coordinated, decisive band of hunters were much more likely to bring down prey than a lone tracker.

The need for a leader in this band is not immediately self-evident. If they all know what they're doing, then shouldn't they share the food equally?

That's only until you consider how much man instinctively likes to argue. We love to do it. We are also selfish bastards. Both of those are the driving forces behind why Socialism really doesn't work that well. We like having stuff, especially food. And if we work slightly harder than anyone else, we feel like we should get the lion's share. And if two people feel like that they did more work than the other, fighting ensues and probably ends up with injury for one or the other.

Humanity needs an alpha male, an Ubermensch, someone who can tell everyone else to shut up and eat what's in front of them. We need some one person in charge, at least when we roamed the land in small groups. The autocratic system works pretty well in small groups, with the autocrat always taking the lion's share, but assuring food for all. Even with the death of the roaming lifestyle, autocrats of small towns of farmers works well. The autocrat can spend all his time exclusively working out how to coordinate the town in defense, or simply how to run it daily because he doesn't need to farm food for himself. With more consistent farming practices, as farms became more and more self-sufficient, the need for a coordinator of people fades, and people become largely self-sufficient governmentally as well, though the need for a community persists, in case of hard times. Thus the autocrat is reduced to a nominal position, or removed together as farms depend once in a long while on each others' goodwill.

However, as humanity clumped in bigger and bigger groups, neither simple self-sufficiency nor autocracy would work. Self-sufficiency no longer worked because there were no people who could specialize in making better products than the farms could create themselves. People like cobblers, blacksmiths, specialized trades that required food but did not make it themselves. Farmers needed to trade with the tradesmen, and the tradesmen needed food from farmers. Again, coordination was needed.

However, you couldn't simply have a true autocracy (here, I mean not just a government where only one person has all power, but a government made entirely of one person) with larger amounts of people. True autocracy requires each individual to personally give up some of what they have to the autocrat. However, bigger is merely smaller on a bigger scale. Bigger is different.

Here's an example I've heard. Say you're an actor or an actress and you say to yourself that you will answer every single piece of fan mail you ever receive personally. At first, this isn't too hard. Just an hour a day as the letters trickle in. You get to have personal conversations with your fans. But then you star in a movie and the amount of mail triples. No problem. You just spend three hours a day. That's not too different. Suddenly, your movie becomes a cult classic and you get twelve times the mail. No problem, you'll just spend.... wait. You now receive so much fan mail that it would take thirty six hours a day to reply. Even if you just take the time to write thank you notes, you have to spend twenty hours a day replying, and you still have to do things like sleep and act, so that's out of the question. Even if you have form letters and all you do is sign, it still takes you ten hours. Which is doable, but only barely. And you're not really doing what you promised to do, are you?

The way in which governing becomes different with the first stage of bigger is simple. First of all, you can no longer know approximately what everyone is doing, because there's so many of them. You can't organize people any more. Secondly, there are now a shitload of them and only one of you. How do you enforce your law now? As long as you could physically cow the majority of your tribe or village one on one that was all right. But with enough people unhappy with you, there's nothing you can do.

Thus gives way to the second form of government. "Democracy" (or really, oligarchy.) We see this happening in Ancient Greece, with the rise of Athens. Democracy, the rule of the people, is the most selfish of the governments. Democracy requires every single person to want to participate in the ruling of everything.

And lemme tell you, Democracy is a stupid system.

(More on that topic tomorrow. That is one I know MUCH more about.)