politics

GET RID OF BILLIONAIRES

Create a society where you ban extreme wealth.

You allow people to gain wealth, as much as they want but you create an upper ceiling .... like say 100 million. Beyond that, any further wealth you create is just sent to the government as taxes and spent on public services and infrastructure and on other less fortunate people.

Wealth is also not inherited and when you die, a small part of your wealth is passed to your descendants but the majority is given over to the government to again be used for taxes, infrastructure and public services.

Humans will always be greedy bastards and there will always be people who will game the system in their favour for whatever psychotic or manic reason they have (similar to people with hoarding mentalities or people who collect cats or bottle caps) ... in this suggested society, people would still be allowed all the freedoms to fulfill their fantasies or manias within a controlled environment and not to the point where they are degrading all of humanity in the process.

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

And as you create an upper ceiling of wealth, you also create a lower floor of poverty ... you use all that extra money and institute Universal Basic Income and allow every able bodied human an equal opportunity to become as much of a greedy bastard as they want and start to gain their own wealth. Or they use their good start in life, generate a bit of wealth, get an education and find the cure for cancer. Imagine if we had thousands or even millions of scientists who no longer have to worry about making rent and instead spend their time trying to find cures for things or finding new solutions to the energy crisis or environmental problems like global warming.

Instead .... we have a world where we funnel all the wealth of the world to a small group of people who sit on it, defend it at all costs and send humanity to its doom while billions of people either starve, near starve or spend all their time and energy just barely getting by.

Occasionally reminding the people at the top that if they don't behave then they won't live very long.

Good education is the main bulwark against this type of decline. Any political party that starts banning books, denigrating teachers, or cutting education funding should set off major alarms. Making people stupider is step one in the long game of authoritarian takeover.

So what’s the alternative?

Constantly improving the big compromise. No one size fits all. Constant work. Not only in the government, but also in people's heads.

Keeping the checks and balances in place. Finding loopholes and fixing them - if need be with more checks and balances.

Yes, a stable and relatively just state will always require administration. Be sure it doesn't all fall into one person's hand.

But the USA lost all this decades ago. Frankly, it's a miracle that it took so long for a president to take full advantage.

If humanity survives long enough (that's a big if), I believe that the establishment of non-hierarchical systems is inevitable.

Humanity, as it matures philosophically, sociologically and psychologically, will outgrow the desire for hierarchy exactly as individuals outgrow the desire to be parented.

For the time being though, there is no alternative. Virtually every civilization that's ever existed on Earth has already died in more or less this same fashion, and the ones that haven't yet will.

As a bit of an aside though, my opinion is that the first step has to be a dedicated public health effort to diagnose antisocial personality disorder and ensure, by whatever means necessary, that society is protected from those who suffer from it.

Hopefully that's something our descendants can do when they build whatever they're going to build out of the rubble we'll leave behind.

Democratic socialism

We've only tried hierarchy with humans at the top.

I have a thought experiment on this that I am developing. It's still to complicated to properly convey but it's basically an immutable set of axioms upon which we can individually build our personal social contract.

From the axioms we declare addendums, every addendum id public and is opt in at that personal level. Everyone's adopted addendums are public so we can choose who to associate with based on shared addendums.

Create these as mathematical proofs that are essentially contracts that have predetermined but immediately executable penalties when the person fails to adhere to their addendums. The penalty is paid out directly to the damaged parties.

For example I say X is true backed by Y value, if it can be determined X is false anyone that I promised X to is owed Y. If I overextend and cannot pay, others will know I am untrustworthy and unable back up future claims.

If you took X and passed it off as true, I would also be responsible for resolving that value.

People will quickly learn not to make up bullshit and keep their word. Society will quickly learn what Y values are appropriate for given assertions.

As a good first step, the means of production must be controlled by the people, not by individuals, so that the fruits of our labor benefit everyone. As a second step, those of us aware of the problem must band together to create a strong vanguard (if you will) that can defend the people from infiltration while we all figure out how to make a non-hierarchical system.

There, we’ve just come up with Marxism-Leninism.