That big governments are conductive both to innovations and to the ‘social progress’ had long been considered as the axiome by politicians, mass-medias and, of course, by govs sponsored academics. This fallacy has been actively spread by politicized TV and radio channels.
The ‘pro-big-governments’ propaganda campaign was launched by ‘civil servants’ in 1920th, when bureaucrats blamed the ‘great depression’ on entrepreneurs, totally avoiding their own responsibility for it. After the end of WW2 this campaign was made the global one under the pretext of ‘promoting national interests’ and ‘fighting against aggressive foreign powers’, which, basically, means blowing military budgets out of all imaginable proportions.
Nukes, submarines, radars and other war outlets as well as cosmic endeavors most often were brought forward as the irrefutable arguments for govs being ‘The Guardian of Progress’. The fact that almost all of those taxpayers’ money paid technologies were researched and build by commercial subcontractors was, of course, disregarded.
In 1990th, following the collapse of USSR, world govs’ greedy grasp on all aspects of our lives started to ease. However, 911 had abruptly ended this short period of the bureaucratic leniency and all administrators across the world reverted back to what they do the best — institutionally suppressing their opposition under the name of fighting against various ‘threats to the national security’ and, on the way, promoting incumbent, corrupt interests of privileged caucuses by slowly but surely squashing innovations.
BTW, “slowly’ is the key word here, because it is one of the most potent institutional protections against the enterprising humanity. Proverbial ‘boiling frog in the pot’ — that is how ‘office-holders’ always get us out of their way in order to hold to governance powers indefinitely. All types of ‘national interests and citizens safety’ protective regulations, they have ever been able to get through a very thin layer of peoples’ control over the legislative bodies, still stay there, never abolished, getting more and more rigorous despite the fact that all ‘threats’ those regulations were brought against have long been gone.
You think I am exaggerating, right? Okey, let us see what else our heavily centralized, incredible expensive, increasingly militarized, openly demagogic, corrupt by special interests and exceedingly oppressing towards personal freedoms central governments had brought to us during the twenty and the beginning of twenty first centuries.
They claim that they lead to us to establish the Peace on Earth. ‘Compare the present peaceful coexistence in Europe with the Anglo-French war, which lasted more than 700 years’ they say.
First, of course, only during the past century they killed about 100 millions of us in a period of less than 30 years in two World Wars, which is way more than the proverbial Anglo-French War (and many others) had been ever capable to achieve in a ten generations.
Then, during the same century, they managed to start several thousands (averaging about 50 military conflicts a year) regional conflicts, ranging from the full-scale disasters like those in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan to countless ever-lasting Middle-Eastern wars.
Not to mention, of course, that, more than 30 years after the end of the cold war, when they solemnly promised to us that ‘all major threats to the peaceful existence on Earth were eliminated once and for all’, we, today, have such a ‘peaceful’ geopolitical situation that literally every 2–3 years we linger on a brink of the open nuclear conflict between major world’s countries. At the same time, they still have an audacity to call it ‘the political stability’ and to blame everything else on ‘terrorists’.
Speaking of which we have seen so far only the ever increasing special institutions budgets and never ending counts of lost lives most of which are peoples from socially handicapped families, which are obliged to soldier all around the world without seeing no end to those arm conflicts. BTW, what about dozens of other endless ‘wars’ (such f.e as ‘on drugs’ or ‘on crimes’) which had resulted only in so many astonishingly successful political careers and in accumulating trillions of non-productive expenses for all of us to cover from our pockets?
Then they, of course, claim that they had assured the after-war prosperity with their ingenious ‘Marshall plans’, ‘Reaganomics’, ‘Thatcherism’, ‘Perestroika’, ‘Abenomics’ and so on. In fact, one thing they only did with all those ‘Programs’, is to allow us — entrepreneurs, artisans, artists, workers, farmers etc — to stay a bit longer out of their racket brigades’ grasps, which they call ‘tax authorities’, and to spent a bit less money on cataloguing a mostly useless and expensive paper trash, which they call ‘regulations’.
Also one of their main claims is that they, through their ‘world monetary bodies’ (like IMF, WB and so on) had dramatically increased the level of living in the so-called third-world countries. Again, the only thing they really did is to allow their corporations, mostly headed by their own kinds, to receive unpaid back subsidies and to act almost without any restraint on territories where other peoples live, which resulted there in an unprecedented level of corruption and an economically (as well as politically) motivated violence.
It now leads to that their fourth and, yet, another most celebrated ‘achievement’ — which is ‘helping to establish more fair governments across the world’- results in many countries’ regimes fluctuating towards a single-person dictatorship.
Shall I even mention their latest apocalyptic ‘decision-making’ to start yet another ‘war’ against the stem of the billion-years-old virus by shutting down the economic activity of the whole planet?
To say dramatically, the most potent power we had ever wielded is not Nuclear but the Ministerial one and it now presents the imminent threat to our species existence.
Moreover, we come to the threshold when innumerable ‘institutions’, which had been used by functionaries’ elites as vehicles of our subjugation and suppression for thousands of years, has become autonomous during the past century. Institutions have developed the planet-size ‘procedural intellect’, which goal is to create the Earth-size Ant House. This ‘intellect’ sets now its own objectives, expressing the subconscious desire of million of bureaucrats around the world. That desire is to severely restrict all possibilities for humans to act spontaneously, by our own free-will.
Now, let me guess what is on most of my readers’ minds. You think that this theory is laughably extreme and that despite all those minor side-effects I’ve just mentioned we do absolutely need those inhumane institutions and non-elected appointees to exist in order to keep our Civilization running and being protected from ‘the forces of darkness and destruction’ (whatever that means) because we do not have any other practical alternatives to the existing crazily inefficient world-system.
Basically, there are four most popular arguments endorsing gigantic central governments: to fight against other gigantic governments; to build and to maintain public infrastructures; to support poor, young, old and handicapped peoples; to address ‘Global Threats’.
Forcing a street shop owner to pay a thug to defend against other thugs is the classical bullying tactic of a Hollywood mafioso. It is now used on us by our ‘public administrators’, which, obviously, think about themselves as The Great Leaders, playing peoples as pawns on the World’s Chessboard. The incredible fact that we still allow those megalomaniacs to ruin our lives for their own pleasure can be explained by the historical inertia, which is sooner or later has to be overcome if we all want to survive.
For a starter, if we decrease the size of the states fivefold, getting 1000 instead of the current ~200 countries on the world map, only that will drastically increase competition among them for human resources and, as a consequence, will significantly rise the market price of our lives, preventing ‘civil overlords’ from periodically converting us into the ‘gun meat’.
Moreover, our govs functionaries can hardly run an ice cream kiosk without converting it into the-Hoover-dam-like epic, in a process corrupting everyone in 100 miles radius around the spot. Monumental centralized organizations are business-inept by their definition. That dictum has been well established by economic historians based on a very prolong time-sample — since when pharaohs started to waste all Egyptian public resources on their useless pyramids until the Soviet Union’s glorious low-oil-prices instigated collapse.
The fact that lean private enterprises are up to the public goods delivery job much better than gigantic govs / corporations had been questioned (again) after the present generation of world’s sovereigns came to power in the 1990th and started to propagandize the importance of ‘institutions’ (a.k.a. their own political and economic clans) for ‘spreading the freedom around the world’ (a.k.a. indefinitely prolonging their stay in public offices).
In reality, we have only to dispose of all govs forcefully installed incentives for the over-centralization to get the ‘infrastructures’ back on a right track.
Now to the ‘rish y pobre’ issue. The astronomic gap existing today between few millions of ‘haves’ and billions of ‘have not’ is the direct result of Earth’s economic resources over-centralization under the control of the several gigantic states as well as ‘super-national’ corporations, which would not exist without a corrupt political support.
As to the planetary issues ‘management’, which is today claimed as their ‘first-born-right’ by the global, megalomaniacal bureaucracy, that not the issue at all. When local communities, dependent on local natural resources for survival, are allowed to directly exercise the governance over those resources, the last thing on their mind wold be to contaminate the land they live on or to pollute the air they and their children breath.
Only the total and drastic decentralization of all gigantic governance systems on this planet can take us off this road-to-hell, which is now leading us directly to the combined global social and ecological disasters.
So, what is the practical solution to this over-centralization theorem?
There has been more than 200 years passed since the technological revolution of the colonial period brought us ‘en masse’ govs offices and peoples which inhabit them. Moreover, those bureaucrats or ‘officials’, ‘administrators’, ‘office-holders’, ‘civil servants’, ‘ministers’, ‘functionaries’, ‘appointees’, ‘apparatchiks’, ‘mandarins’ were initially looked at as the guarantors of our freedoms shielding us against monarchical tyranny.
All those 200 years those non-elected, obscure and mostly hard-working peoples had been acting all over the world almost in unison filling papers with instructions directing our lives to what they think must be our civilizational ideal — the clock mechanism.
Today, those well-intended peoples in suits are still lead all across the world by their group genes’ code emanated from their seventeen century ancestors, which believed that the Universe is rued by the Newton’s ‘Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’. We all have to follow our lives orbits governed by them as regularly as planets going around the sun under the law of gravity.
Well, today we all know that Newton is wrong and our Universe, far from being a regular machine, is, instead, the chaotic, dangerous, unpredictable place born from the quantum foam. So, our beloved and semi-educated ‘officials’ self-reappointed themselves as our Saviour.
‘Now’, they say, ‘we will forever protect you from the Universe in exchange for your Freedom, which you do not have anyway.’ That what they say and we all have to believe them or go to prison. The only issue is that ‘government servants’, with their seventeen century governing mentality and technologies can barely build a bridge or a road, or govern a school or a hospital without going from a disaster to the catastrophe, blaming, of course, everything on us — not on themselves.
As the next wave of technological progress leads us from the industrial to information based society, jacks-in-office of all countries united attempt to preserve the old, inefficient governing structures, which, however, provides them and their siblings — not us — with better chances for personal survival. It is so Human after all.
The question is not, of course, can we govern themselves, because today we already know — yes, new computing and communication technologies allow us to efficiently co-work and to self-organize taking all types of collective decisions much faster and way smarter than all world’s ‘institutions’ brought together ever were able to do. The only real question is how can we take the governance machine wheels from the trembling hands of aging institutionalized bureaucrats without them crashing the Vehicle of Humanity into the precipice?
Today, that objective looks almost unachievable given governments’ size, their universal reach and their unrestricted power those institutionalized elders are uncontrollably wielding over each of ours lives. Furthermore, any of ours attempts to self-organize are either directly suppressed or sabotaged by them supported, paradoxically, by us, which are propagandizing ourselves into the daily self-sacrificing to the abstract State Moloch.
Therefore, the first objective is clear. It is to launch the several-decades long (those changes must be generationally evolutionary — not bloody revolutionary) counter-propaganda campaign, which has to dramatically change our own perception of reality, shifting our values and priorities from currently being ‘planetary’ or ‘national’, to individual and personal ones.
The second, and the short term goal is to launch the experimental decentralized city-state, with a certain geographical locality (not virtual) permitting to built and to maintain the functioning, self-reproducing human society of no less than several million individuals.
Obviously, even to agree among ourselves whether we need to have an independent state presents itself the challenge as so many of us still believe that we either can change mandarins’ minds to simply invite us to power or live virtually forever avoiding apparatchik interference. That, of course, is the dangerous illusion of people, most of which are too young and too unfamiliar with harsh realities of the power struggle, where the opposing force intends to take no prisoners in order to preserve all to the smallest of its privileges for centuries to come.
However, as the present generation of 30–40 years olds becomes even older without getting closer to real governance, they will become both more life-smarter / wealthier and more desperate. That might change the equation to the point when (given the ever growing geopolitical gap between two main parts of the world) there are going to be possible to negotiate / to buy some piece of the land or of the ocean to harbor the most impatient among us.
All we need is about 20–30 years of the peaceful economic growth based on the economy of knowledge — not on Earth resources destruction — achieved under the guidance of the decentralized consensuses — without supervision of omnipotent ministers. Those ~30 years is all we need to prove to the rest of us that what we are talking about now is not theoretical — but real.
As to the nuclear gun, which world’s administrators will be holding to our heads all that future time, there is a good argument for them to not to press its button — our city-land will serve them as an open sky prison where all politically unreliable but economically potent individuals might serve their life-time sentences. Of course, brief conjugation visits and short vacations on the main-land must be tolerated by planetary elders to accommodate the least violent among us.
There will be, of course, stages three and four etc. in this plan to be completed after we make the first two steps but it is a bit premature to talk about that now, when we have, still, to prove to them (and to ourselves) that it is our Generation which will be the first in the History to start winning the war where our unprotected Brains fight against their armed Muscles by the sheer force of the unstoppable innovations.