Might Is Obsolete

Since the Bronze Age, large human societies have been organized around the provision of force. Governments, after all, are monopolies of violence.

Every rulership involves two primary operations: to deliver coercion and to keep its populace convinced that no other arrangements are possible. All other concerns are secondary, no matter what the publicists say. We are adults and we need to face such things.

This model has survived mostly on the fears of the populace. Primarily that boiled down to an assumption of insufficiency. Fears of foreign invaders have always played an intermittent role, but the persistent fear that made the model work day to day was a sense in the populace of being insufficient to deal with the world.

Humanity, from the Bronze Age onward, has believed itself insufficient and felt a need to join with a large, powerful entity. Whether stated or unstated, this is what lies beneath mass compliance, and mass compliance is the fundamental necessity of every rulership.

That belief, however, has passed its expiration date. Buckminster Fuller, who saw this coming, explained it this way in 1981:

We can now take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known. It does not have to be “you or me,” so selfishness is unnecessary and war is obsolete.

The scientific revolution has had its effects, and a sufficient number of us have risen to the occasion. We have fundamentally transcended scarcity. We grow more food than we can eat, we know quite well how to build enough structures, medical care isn’t really a problem, and we have tremendous distribution abilities.

What we lack are methods of cooperation that are up to the task.

If we consider that we know how to provide everyone with food, shelter, medicine, and transportation, and if we further consider that we have more than enough people who want to do these things and others who are glad to work for them, we run straight into the fact that poverty and privation persist.

Clearly, our means of cooperating with one another have failed. And if we are honest about it, we have to concede that mankind’s central organ of cooperation is the state. If we are able to continue in honesty, we concede two further things:

1. The state has made itself lord of cooperation, exerting its will over all commerce in the territory it dominates and enforcing that will through an array of force-backed mechanisms.
2. Means of cooperation that bypass the state are incented against. At the base level, they’re seen to be “other.” One level further they are considered dangerous. Beyond that, they are attacked, sometimes with propaganda and sometimes with force.

The bottom line is that cooperation via other than state-prescribed channels is penalized or forbidden. Science has transcended scarcity, but the state is unable to adapt. That millions or billions will suffer – do presently suffer – doesn’t matter. The operators of states have convinced the populace that they need their Bronze Age model in order to survive.

This model, however, is doomed to failure.

It’s Only a Matter of Time

One by one and two by two, people are seeing the facts… are grasping that production technologies have made privation obsolete and that centralized, hierarchical, Bronze-Aged structures are their primary obstacle.

This is not to say that a decentralized world would be the end of human troubles; our troubles won’t end until we’re sufficiently upgraded on the inside. But the status quo has been maintaining our inner troubles; in fact it would fall apart if any serious percentage of us shed our vulnerabilities. I know that concept is deeply challenging to many good people, but there it is all the same. Those who take time to consider it will know.

Almost any honest way we look at things, decentralization comes out as functionally and morally superior to the systems that have been dominating this planet since the Bronze Age. Save of course, if the goal is not health and prosperity, but rather to project power and skim from working people. In that case, the state is superior.

In order for the large nation-state to continue, its subjects must be unable to think beyond their permissions.

And so I question how long the Bronze Age model will continue. Humans may be hobbled by fear, addiction and inertia, but the persistence of facts brings them out of it over time.

The more that people see basic facts (like the fact that we already know how to feed everyone on the planet times two), the more the glory of outdated systems will fade.

It may take decades for humans to break out of archaic and misplaced devotions, but humans are not fundamentally stupid. Sooner or later, the Bronze Age model will end.

Our way forward will not be smooth, nor will our future be pristine. But we deserve to be unimpeded and new ideas deserve to be tried. We are not made better by closing our eyes and ears. The mindset imposed upon us by ruling institutions is retrograde.

Science has indeed won and might is indeed obsolete, as Buckminster Fuller wrote in Cosmography:

Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.

It’s only a matter of time, my friends. Keep planting your seeds.

**

Paul Rosenberg

freemansperspective.com