You have hired a consultant to help you figure out what to do with the land owned by the land-holding company you inherited.  She has been telling you want NOT to do:  do NOT simply rent the farm out without selling any rights at all, do NOT sell simply miniscule rights, do NOT sell all rights, do NOT sell almost all rights. Let’s say that you are tired of hearing the things she thinks you should NOT do. 

You just want to cut to the chase. There are companies in the world that use partial ownability systems.  They have done the research.  They know what to do.  You don’t want to know about the systems they have tried and rejected.  You want to know about the systems they have tried and that have worked.  You want to know about the systems they use. 

Quartile ownership

The consultant tells you that these companies use a system that sets rents according to a formula.  Normally, an appraiser is involved and the appraiser determines the rents according to a written formula which is used in every case that rents are set.  This formula will require the appraiser to determine the amount of operating profits of the farm first.  The appraiser will then determine the fair market value of the time and effort required to operate the farm.  (If the quartile owner hires a professional to do these things, the cost of the professional; if she does them herself, the amount she would have to pay if she hired someone.)  Subtract the costs of this work to get the free cash flow.  Once the appraiser has the free cash flow, she multiplies this by 75% to get the rents.

The buyer of this ‘package of rights’ will own certain rights. 

The farm has a certain basic productive capability. 

In its condition at the time of the sale, it can produce a certain amount of ‘excess value’ or ‘surplus’ or ‘free cash flow.’  I need a term to refer to ‘the amount of wealth the land is able to produce due to its pre-existing productive capability at the time it is offered for sale.’  This book will use the term ‘basic productivity’ to refer to the excess wealth that is added to the world due to this basic (pre-existing) capacity to produce wealth.

The basic productivity of a property is not money; however, its value can be measured in money.  In the case of this farm (which is the same as the Pastland Farm), the basic productivity is 2.4 million pounds of rice a year.  The farm produces a lot more wealth than this of course:  it produces 3.15 million pounds.  But part of this wealth must be put back into production or used to pay people who gave up their time, materials, or supplies for the operation.  The net wealth added to the world is the total wealth that comes to exist minus any wealth that must be put back into production or used to compensate people who gave up something of value in production.  The net wealth added to the world is 2.4 million pounds of rice a year.

This is the basic productivity of the land. 

The quartile owner will not own the right to ¾ of the basic productivity.  She will have to operate the farm, collect its wealth and sell it for money, then turn over enough money to buy ¾ of the basic productivity of the land to your company. 

Your descendents will get this.

The people who control the property can get incredibly rich by doing things that improve the land and increase its wealth production, then selling the rights they own for more than they paid for them.  Each time the property rights are sold, the rents are reset by the same formula used to generate them in the first place (to ¾ of the basic productivity of the property).  The improvements will benefit the improvers of course:  they will get very rich making them (we will look at examples shortly).  But the greatest benefits of the improvements will go to your descendants. As the land produces more, more goes to them. 

I need a term to refer to this kind of property control so I can discuss it.  I will call it ‘quartile ownership.’  The person who buys the quartile ownership rights will be called the ‘quartile owner.’  The quartile owner will pay rents that work out to be enough money to buy ¾ of the basic productivity of the land around them.  The entity that gets these rents will essentially be getting ¾ of the bounty of the parts of the world that are controlled with quartile ownership.

In this example, you are the one who gets ¾ of the bounty of the world.  You get it because you live in a system where all rights to the world are ownable and someone who came before you formed a land holding company which was passed down to you through inheritance.  You have a large family in this example and want to take care of your people forever. This land will take care of them if it is kept healthy; the quartile ownership system gives them powerful incentives to work hard to keep this land healthy and productive.  If they (the quartile owners) act in their own interests and do their best to make money, the land will remain healthy and productive forever. 

You want your descendants to get a very large income from the land.  You could take 100% of the basic productivity of the land (all of the free cash flow) but you know that, if you do, you will have the same basic incentives as exist in natural law societies:  production will be stagnant, inefficient, and there will be great risks; production may not grow for thousands of years.  Your people’s population will grow, however.  If the same production split among a very large number of people, eventually the land won’t take care of them all because it won’t produce enough to do this. 

You want to create incentives for the people who make day to day decisions on the land to work hard, be efficient, do the best jobs they can do, prevent anything that they can prevent from going wrong and fix any problems they can’t prevent as rapidly as possible, and improve whenever it is cost effective to improve.  Over the short run, you might get a little extra money by not selling any rights.  But over the long run, your people will get infinitely greater amounts of wealth of all kinds (as we will see later) by letting them buy and own some rights. 

Later in this book, we will go back to Pastland and look at our situation as the moratorium ends.  For twenty years we have had a natural law society.  It has advantages but it also has some serious problems.  Its advantages come from our ability to share in the bounty of the land around us. Its disadvantages include risk, stagnation, lack of progress, incredible poverty (the population grows but production doesn’t), stifling of creativity and innovation, and a primitive lifestyle that will be as likely to go backward technologically than go forward. 

We are in a position to decide what to do.  It is a unique position with a window of opportunity that is rapidly closing.  (In 20 years a lot of our complex tools and technological devices are not working anymore and we don’t have any way to make parts needed to build new ones or replace the ones we have.)  But if we act fairly quickly, we can take full advantage of our position. We have all the tools and technology we need to create partial ownability system now that will have all of the advantages of a full ownability (sovereign ownability) system, but will cause the great bulk of the river of wealth that flows to us from the land to continue to flow to us, and will immediately create vast opportunities for private individuals to profit by doing things that drive the ability of the land to create wealth higher and higher each day that passes. 

We don’t have to choose between 0% ownability and 100% ownability, natural law societies or territorial sovereignty societies, destruction or primitiveness.  If we understand that ownership is not a concept, handed down by God, but is a process that works like a machine and a tool that we can use, we can make our world work to our advantage. 

Incentives are behavioral motivations; they are pressures that push us to act certain ways.  Each incentive can be thought of as a kind of invisible hand, pushing people to act certain ways.  If you can make money doing something, you will feel some sort of emotional pressure to do that thing, because you can use the money to buy things that make your life better.  The more money you can make, the stronger the incentives.

Part Five of this book goes into great detail about the different incentives that can be parts of human societies.  This issue is easier to explain if you understand a large number of societies and can compare them.  You can see that some societies have powerful incentives that push people to build, innovate, invent, create, invest, manage risk, and do things that lead to the creation of value.  Other societies weaker incentives to do these same things.  Some societies do not have these incentives at all:  there are no natural rewards for activates that lead to progress and growth.  Some societies actually punish people who do these things: they work in ways that make the costs of improving greater than any potential benefits to the decision makers.  People who try to improve the way the world works, or advance the state of human knowledge, will find that they have to give up wealth and agree to accept a lower quality of life and standard of living than they would have if they didn’t do this. 

This book uses the term ‘constructive incentives’ to refer to incentives that push people to things that make the world a better place in terms of the wealth or ‘things of value’ it contains.  Some societies have constructive incentives.  Some societies do not have constructive incentives.

The Importance of Understanding the Difference between incentives that push people to do things that harm the world and incentives that push them to make the world better

If you take something with little or no value to humans and turn it into something with enormous value, you have added value to he world and made the world a better place.

If you take something with a lot of value and turn it into something with little or no value, you have made the world a worse place. 

Say that you start with clean, fresh air and run it through the engine of a car.  The air gets mixed with fossil fuels that have been buried under the ground for billions of years and are contaminated with dangerous heavy metals that were removed from the air by the ‘fossil’ plants that degraded to make the fossil fuels.  The oxygen and gasoline mixture is ignited creating an explosion that alters the composition of the air many ways.  The explosion pushes down a piston generating energy; the piston then goes back up pushing the gaseous mixture that is left out of the engine into the air.

The air coming out of the engine has many harmful products that were not in the air when it went into the engine. It has large amounts of carbon dioxide, a gas that insulates the atmosphere holding in heat that warms the entire earth.  It has carbon monoxide that is highly toxic to humans and unburned bits of carbon that are corrosive and foul the air.  The gasoline contains large amounts of sulfur which burns with oxygen to create sulfur dioxide; this is a gas that gets into the air where it gets sucked up into he clouds; the ultraviolet light that hits the clouds turns this into sulfuric acid.  When it rains, this acid gets everywhere.  The acid concentration is low so it won’t burn you immediately, but its effects are cumulative; you age and everything that is susceptible to acid degrade faster. The nitrogen that makes up 69% of the air has also been changed.  Normally, nitrogen is safe, stable, and inert.  But the incredible pressures that take place in the engine cause the nitrogen molecules to bond with oxygen creating ‘oxides of nitrogen.’  These pollutants are extremely powerful greenhouse gasses (more than 200 times as dangerous as carbon dioxide) and stay in the atmosphere for years.  Even when they degrade, they cause problems because the degrade into nitric acid which is even more dangerous than sulfuric acid. 

Many scientists claim that the most dangerous toxins of all are the heavy metals.  All mammals are incredibly sensitive to the many metals that are released when fossil fuels burn.  Mercury in the air make us all stupider, literally:  It interferes with the way the brain processes information. If you breathe air that contains mercury while pregnant, your child will be stupider than if the mercury had not been there.  There is a long list of heavy metals in all fossil fuels, including lead, chromium cadmium, copper, and zinc.  All are toxic to humans if ingested. 

If people do things that start with clean, pure, healthy air, and turn it into contemplated air, they take something with value and turn it into something with less value. They reduce the amount of value in the world.  

Humans can do a lot of things that harm the world and people in it.  In some cases, people can make money (or get other things of value) doing things that ‘turn things with a lot of value into things with less value.’ All societies where this happens have incentives this book calls ‘destructive incentives.’  We have tools we can use to measure value.  In the societies we inherited, people use money for this.  A great many people do research to determine the money value of damage people do from various activities, including war, resource extraction, and pollution; since we also know how much money people make when they do these things, we can use mathematical tools to determine whether or not destructive incentives exist in different societies (some do not have them) and, if they exist, their relative strength on different societies we can study. 

Note:  This part of the book doesn’t go over any of this math, I just want to understand that it is possible to use objective tools to determine the strength of destructive incentives.  Part Five goes over these tools and shows how to do the math, for those who are interested.  Here, we will simply go over pretty obvious relationships that exist between ‘making money’ and ‘harming the world’ in one particular type of society, one built on the principle of territorial sovereignty.  I want to show you that these societies clearly have destructive incentives and we don’t have to know any math to understand that they are extremely strong:  people can make fantastic amounts of money doing things that destroy immense amounts of value.

It is possible to take things with great value and turn them into things of little or no value. This book uses the term ‘destructive incentives’ to refer to incentives that reward destruction of value.  

It is possible to do the opposite.

We can turn things with little or no value to humans into things that are extremely valuable and very useful.

A good example involves smart phones. Smart phones are built on technology that takes advantage of the chemical properties of the element ‘silicon.’ The manufactures get the silicon to make these phones from ordinary dirt and sand:  the most abundant material on the part of the earth we can get to (the crust) is silicon dioxide.  This is what mountains are made of and what the first 50 miles of the earth’s surface is made of.  It is also called ‘sand’ and ‘rocks.’  It is possible to process ordinary sand in ways that remove the silicon and process it into crystals which can be cut into very thin sheets.  By stacking these sheets a special way, and printing the sheets with aluminum ink that will act as wires, the silicon can be turned into electronic circuits that can do many things.  They can process data, emit light (with light emitting diodes), control whether light passes through a surface (with liquid crystal displays), detect light (the CCD that is used as a camera on your phone is a very versatile light detector) sense motion, determine which way is up, and do thousands of other things, all of which your smart phone can do. 

All of the parts of the smart phone are made out of extremely common materials that existed from the time the earth existed.  Over the course of the last few generations, extremely intelligent people have worked hard to figure out how to remove these materials and turn them into the things that we now take for granted, smart phones.  The most important components of the phone are made, literally, from sand. If you have a 4 ounce smart phone, you are literally holding 4 ounces of sand that has been modified into a different form. 

The phone is a lot more useful than the sand it was made out of.  By turning the sand into the phone, the manufacturers have added value to the world. They didn’t add any mass or elements:  all of the elements in the phone existed millions of years before the first humans arrived on the world. They changed these elements to put them into a from that had more value.  The phone can be used to talk to people around the world, to take movies and record data, to play games, to watch the news, to determine your location if you are lost, to map a route to wherever you want to go, and to light your way through a dark room.  It is a very useful product. 

Since we have tools to measure the relative values, we can determine how much value is added.  (If the raw materials that went into the phone can be purchased for 3 cents, and the finished phone can be sold for $1,000, the manufacturer added value of $999.97 to the world.)   If people can make money with this process, they have incentives to do these things.

Different societies have different ‘incentives profiles.’  They have different mixtures and patterns of incentives.  We have seen that natural law societies do not have the incentives that push toward progress and growth; in fact, their natural forces tend to push against it, preventing progress and causing loss of advances that have been made in the future.  If we understand the details, we can determine which societies have constructive incentives.  We can determine the strength of incentives, when they exist, and compare societies based on the strength of the incentives.

Again, this part of the book will not go over any more than the most basic of mathematical analysis.  I only want you to know that it is possible to do this analysis.  If we do, we will have tools that we can use to compare human societies objectively and scientifically. We can determine which societies will have progress and which wont.  We can determine which of two societies that do have progress and growth will grow faster. We can determine which changes could be made in societies that would alter the rate of progress and growth. 

If a group of people are in a position to form any kind of society they want (as is our group in Pastland), they can decide exactly how they want their finished societies to work.  They can then look through the possibilities of societies that are organized in some logical way (that is what Part Five does) to see which has the incentive profile that is most consistent with their requirements. Then they can build that society.

This part of the book is only designed to lay out the relationships so you can understand them within the context of one specific type of society, a society built on the principle of territorial sovereignty.   I want you to be able to understand why these societies (which are the societies we inherited) work the way they do.  These societies have both constructive incentives and destructive incentives.  They have ‘invisible hands’ pushing us to do things that add value and destroy value.  You could say there s a tug of war going on all the time in these societies, with some forces pushing us toward destruction and others pushing us toward progress.  We need to understand what is happening here in order to understand the societies described in Part For, which only have the constructive incentives and do not have the destructive incentives. 

If we understand the strength of constructive incentives in different societies, and understand the way people react to incentives, we understand some important realities of existence for the human race, and for other beings that are in the same category that are in a position to determine what kinds of societies to build.

Societies without constructive incentives will tend to be stagnant and not grow at all.  Societies with weak constructive incentives will advance slowly.  Societies with stronger constructive incentives will advance more rapidly.  Some societies have constructive incentives that are so strong that they actually negatively affect the quality of life:  people will feel such pressure to find new and better ways to create value, and work so hard to do this, that they will ignore their family, ignore their health, and literally work themselves to death in an attempt to create value. 

The same is true for destructive incentives.  Some societies have very powerful incentives that push toward destruction of value of all kinds.  They provide enormous rewards for war, the most destructive act within the capability of thinking beings with physical needs wherever they are.   They work in ways that allow people to get very rich if the do things that harm the world, even if this harm is totally unnecessary. 

We can make electricity by paying people to dig up fossil fuels and then burning these fuels in massively expensive power plants. We can also make electricity by setting silicon based solar panels into the sun and letting them turn the energy of the light into electricity. The destruction is not necessary: the electricity can be made without it. (I make all of my own electricity with solar, including the electricity used to power my car.) 

It may seem strange that it would be more profitable to produce electricity using the obviously expensive system (pay people to dig up fossil fuels and burn them in a massively-expensive power plant) than it would be to use the cheapest a and most abundant material on the planet (silicon dioxide, the main component of solar panels) which will then produce electricity at no cost whenever the sun is shining.   We will see that in most societies, the solar system will always be preferred and always be far more profitable.  But there are some societies that have strange features that reverse the natural relationships to make destructive systems more profitable than non-destructive alternatives.  We happen to have been born into societies with these strange features.  If we want to understand why these societies work as they do, we really need to understand the flows of value that create these incentives. 

The actual details are so complex that I have decided to devote an entire book to them. Anatomy of Destruction explains the realities of destruction in a specific type of society (one built on the principle of territorial sovereignty) in great detail, using examples from the world around us.  This book, Possible Societies, deals with a different topic, the comparison of different societies and Part Three is only designed to help you understand the basic realities of societies built on territorial sovereignty.

We live in societies that have both destructive incentives and constructive incentives.  You could think of an incentive as an invisible hand that is trying to pull the system in a certain direction.  You could think of the interplay between destructive incentives and constructive incentives in territorial sovereignty societies as like the game of tug of war.  The destructive incentives are trying to pull us over a cliff into our own extinction.  The constructive incentives are trying to pull us toward a better future. 

If we can understand that this tug of war is happening, we can understand a lot of things about the societies around us that can’t really be understood otherwise.  For example, these societies are highly unstable, with things called booms and busts, expansions and contractions, depressions and recessions, inflations and hyperinflations, ages of wisdom and ‘dark ages’ that can last many centuries.  Why do these things happen?  If we understand the interplay between incentives, we can get some idea. 

Destructive Incentives

If the foundational structures of a society work in ways that allow pep to get wealth (to get rich) doing things that destroy value, those societies have destructive incentives. 

Territorial sovereignty societies reward destructive acts several ways.  Perhaps the most destructive activity within the capability of thinking beings is the one that we casually call ‘war.’  In Territorial sovereignty societies, the world is divided into independent entities that own everything inside their borders.  They own the wealth the land creates now, the wealth it will add in the future,

This section under construction.

Constructive Incentives

Some societies work in ways that naturally reward activities that can lead to progress in technology and understanding of the universe.  Some tie the right to get money or other forms of wealth to behaviors that cause the world to create more value over time (where ‘value’ is anything that humans may want or need or that can make life better for humans.)  Some tie the right to get money or other forms of wealth to invention, discovery, and investment in facilities that turn items of little or no real value to humans (sand, for example) into items of great value to humankind (smart phones, for example). 

This book uses the term ‘constructive incentives’ to refer to incentives that encourage the ‘creation of value’ and that encourage people to do things to make the world a better place for the human race. 

We have seen that natural law societies don’t have any inherent structures that naturally reward constructive behaviors with money or other things of real material value.  This doesn’t mean that no one will ever do anything constructive in a natural law society:  people often do things for reasons that are unrelated to the right to get money or things of material value for themselves.  However, it means there are no organized, directed forces that push toward progress and growth in a consistent and predictable way. people in natural law societies may make progress, from time to time, in some areas.  But the basic structures of natural law societies don’t cause the progress to become institutionalized and form a new base which can support further progress.  (In fact, as we saw in the last chapter, natural law societies work in ways that often cause a ‘reversion to primitiveness,’ where even great achievements can simply fade into history and become lost forever, due to a lack of investment.) 

Without consistent incentives pushing for progress and growth, we would expect natural law societies to be stagnant. They may remain extremely primitive for incredibly long periods of time.

Societies built on sovereign ownability, however, clearly do have incentives that encourage advancement of technology, growth in production, invention, discovery, investment, risk management, and other behaviors that can lead to more value existing on the planet that has these societies. 

Territorial sovereignty societies have both destructive incentives and constructive incentives.  People can get rich by destroying the world.  We know this:   many of the world’s rich got their wealth through conquest, rape of the environment, construction of tools of murder an death.  But we also see a class of rich that got their wealth inventing, discovering, investing, and building facilities that lead to devices that make the world better for the people who have access to these devices. 

We live in an amazing world.

You may be reading this on a smart phone, a tiny device that can download entire books in a fraction of a second and display them on a screen that you can tailor to your vision; it provides its own light so you don’t need to go into the sun or to find a candle and flame to read it; in fact, you can still read if you are blind because you can push a button and it will speak the words aloud.  You may be reading this in a car that goes faster than any animal on earth can travel, or a jet that travels into the upper atmosphere so it can go even faster; you may even be on an orbiting platform that travels more than 28 times the speed of sound.  If you don’t like reading books, you can watch movies, either on the tiny screen of a phone or on a massive screen that is wider than your field of view, with a resolution that is higher than your eyes can detect, with the ability to push a button to stop time so you can study a scene, and sound that shakes you and creates a feeling that is more real than reality. 

If you get sick, you can go to a doctor, get treated, and walk away from problems that would have killed you just a few generations ago.  If you are foolish and do something that tears your body to pieces, surgeons can put you back together, with medications that prevent suffering while your body heals. If you are hungry, you don’t have to worry about what the part of the world around you can produce:  you can go on Amazon and have items from anywhere on earth delivered to your door within a few hours; you can eat ice cream on the hottest days and have baked Alaska in a comfy kitchen in the middle of a blizzard. 

Dark no longer bothers us:  a switch turns on light that is better than natural light for seeing the things around us.  Cold is banished by furnaces and heat pumps.  If the air gets stuffy, push a button and the air conditioner comes on.  If you want ice, push a different button and it comes out of the machine into your cup.  You don’t have to wash dishes by rubbing sand onto them or wash clothes by beating them against rocks: machines do it all for us. 

Smart Phones

I like to use smart phones as an example of ‘creation of value’ because it illustrates the process of value creation very well:  smart phones obviously have a great deal more value than the raw materials they are made out of. 

The main components of the phone are made of silicon dioxide and aluminum.  These are, coincidently, the most common and abundant materials on the part of the earth we can get to, call the ‘crust.’  The crust is 87% silicon dioxide and 8.3% aluminum.  If you want to find small particles of the ‘crust’ of the earth, go to a beach:  the action of the waves beats rocks against other rocks, chipping off pieces and rubbing them against other pieces, essentially ‘sandblasting’ them, making them smaller and smaller.  This has been happening for billions of years.  They end up a sand.  This is the starting material for a smart phone.

The glass is made directly out of sand.  You can make glass yourself out of sand, by heating it to a very high temperature.  It turns into liquid and this liquid hardens into glass.  Of course, modern glass makers have refined this process a great deal and the glass they make is of much higher quality than the glass you can make yourself, but the basic idea is the same. 

The electronic parts are made of silicon, which comes from silicon dioxide.  Sand is 87% silicon dioxide.  The processor, touch censors, the CCD camera and other light sensors, and the LED lighting system that illuminates the phone are made of silicon. The glass is made of silicon dioxide. The other parts, including the case and wiring, are mostly aluminum.  Sand is 8.3% aluminum.  This means that if  you are holding a smart phone in your hand, you are basically holding a handful of sand that has been processed. 

Various people figured out how to take sand and turn it into extra-hard glass, processors, CCD sensors, touch sensors and casing materials, aluminum ‘ink’ to print onto a board that acts as a wiring harness to hook it all together.  These parts went to assembly lines and were put together.  At the end of this process, the hardware of the phones is complete but it is not yet ‘smart.’  To make it smart, it has to be hooked up to a computer that will install the software and run diagnostic tests.  It is now a ‘smart’ phone.  You can then put in a ‘sim card’ and start using it anywhere in the world.  You can take or watch a video, check the weather, check your email, buy things and have them delivered to you, book a flight to China, use its GPS and compass to determine exactly where you are, play games, find instruction manuals for just about anything you own, and even make a phone calls.

My phone was made by Apple, a company formed by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne.  The company didn’t create the matter that the phone is made of.  The matter (the silicon, aluminum, and other elements) existed long before Apple corporation was formed.  Apple basically organized and built systems that took things that already existed but were in a form without any significant value to humans (mostly sand), then processed these raw materials, turned them into parts, assembled the parts into usable devices, and employed thousands of programmers around the world creating software to make the phones more useful.

Although a ‘company’ made the phone, real flesh and blood humans were behind everything the company did. 

The three men listed above went to government agencies in countries all around the world and filed documents to create the corporation.  The corporation was then a kind of artificial person, an entity that could make deals, sign contracts, buy and own land, and enter into business arrangements as if it were a real human being.  The creators then arranged to get financing to cover the cost of doing research about how to actually build the devices they wanted to build.  They hired thousands of people to design and engineer factories that would take ordinary raw materials that are all around us and turn them into parts that could then be put together to make computing devices, including smart phones.  They bought land in hundreds of locations all around the world for the facilities they would need to build the parts, assemble them, design and install the software, test the products, package them, and get them to consumers.  They hired attorneys to help them get the permissions from local authorities to build these facilities. They began construction on many different kinds of facilities, each of which had a different function, with plans for it all to come together to create the finished products and make them available to consumers all around the world. 

This was a mammoth undertaking. Some of the factories required hundreds of millions of dollars in materials and required millions of man-hours to build.  They had experts coordinating everything.  Many of these people worked so hard on the project that they didn’t have time for their families, for enjoyment of nature, or for anything other than their work. 

The first facilities they built worked well, but not as well as they wanted them to work.  They hired experts to go over every single detail so they could find improvements; they then made these improvements, often being forced to abandon facilities that didn’t work well enough to suit them.  In the end, they wound up with a network of buildings that basically worked like this:  at one end, loaders poured sand, rocks, and other basic items of the earth that contained the required raw materials into hoppers. 

The materials through networks of machines, factories, and other facilities until, at the other end of the process, finished, programmed, ready-to-use smart phones in attractive packages came off the line, complete with everything needed to make them work. Most of the work was done by machines and the people involved in the process are trying hard to eliminate any need for human hardship or toil on the way.  If they had their way, they would have a single switch that they could flip that would cause automated machines to start gathering sand and other materials in places where these materials were fantastically abundant; the machines would then process them into packaged and programmed smart phones which would come out of the network of machines with no human effort needed for anything that happened. 

A great many people worked very, very hard for many years to make all this work.  They took great risks:  no one even knew if the first devices Apple made (computers) were going to work at all: It had never been tried.  Still, the founders used their own money and worked tirelessly, month after month, to go through every detail.  Early investors poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the company, all without knowing for certain that the devices would work or that, if they did, people would be interested in using them enough to pay for them.  They poured wealth, time, skill, talent, effort into the project.

Why did people do these things?

You don’t have to think very long to answer this question:

They did it for money.  

The people who did these things went from being ordinary people to being the world’s super rich.  Their wealth brought them great power that included the power to control the destiny of millions of people.  As of the summer 2022, the company they built is worth roughly $2,626,640,000,000,000 ($2.62 trillion).  

How much is this?

The largest country in the world, Russia, has a GDP of $1.774 trillion.  This means that if you bought everything produced in Russia, including all food, fuel; if you rented all buildings, offices, and homes; if you purchased all electricity at market prices, if you hired everyone who works to wash cars, repair washing machines, and made jewelry, cut hair, and did anything whatever, paying them the same amount they made in 2021, you would have to spend $1.774 trillion.  The people who own the Apple company could easily afford this.  In fact, after paying for everything produced in the largest country on earth in an entire year, they would have enough money left over to buy all farmland in the country often referred to as the ‘breadbasket of the world,’ the Ukraine. 

The average price for farmland in Ukraine in the summer of 2022 $1,300 per hectare; the country contains 42,000,000 hectare of farmland, so you would need $546 billion to buy it all.   If you owned the Apple company, you could sell it, use some of the money to buy these things, and have more than a trillion dollars left over.

And, even after all that, you would have enough left over to fully fund the following governments for a year:  New Zealand, Colombia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Hungary, Vietnam, and Iran, 

The people who did all of the things to make these devices were very well compensated. They got fantastic amounts of money for the things they did. 

Before they even started planning, they knew it was possible for people to incredible fortunes doing the things they wanted to do.  They could read about the vast fortunes made in the history books. Henry Ford came up with a new way of manufacturing cars and built the massive Ford Motor Company; when he died, his estate was worth $188 billion in 2022 dollars.   Ford built the first affordable cars and showed that cars weren’t just luxuries for the very rich:  even working class people could afford them.  Andrew Carnegie built massive steel plants.  People had been making steel for thousands of years, but it had been made in tiny backyard facilities that could only produce small amounts; because everything was done by hand, costs were very high.  Because of Carnegie, steel became so cheap that Ford could afford to make cars out of it and sell them profitably at a price of only $260 each (this was the price of his early model T cars).  When Carnegie sold his steel company in 1901, he got the $310 billion in 2022 dollars.  John D. Rockefeller cornered the market on oil.  He bought entire fields and then built transport facilities and refineries to turn it into useful fuels; he sold the fuels through networks of service stations all over the world.   When he died, his estate was worth more than $400 billion in 2022 dollars. George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison created our electric infrastructure.  Bell created the telephone system.  Marconi created broadcast systems all around the world. Watt created the steam engine. The Wright Brothers made the first practical aircraft.

These people put together incredible networks of facilities that make the wonderful things that make life easy and comfortable for us today.  Because of them, the world can produce enough food and get it to the right places to feed 8 billion people.  They all had incentives to do the things they did: they got rich doing them. 

The people who created the smart phone knew it was possible.  It had been done. 

The people who formed Apple created the network of facilities that invented new products and organized everything.  They got paid for this two different ways:

First, they got something called ‘dividends.’  The company pays out about $1 per share on each of its 16.86 billion shares, so it pays out about $16.86 billion a year to shareholders. 

Second, they got something called ‘capital gains.’  They paid a certain amount for the ownership interest they have in the company.  If the company can make more things of value to the human race, and sell them, the value of their ownership interest goes up.  The amount they make from this depends on the exact time they bought in.  People who ‘bought in’ at the very beginning (including those who formed the company) and held their ownership interests for long periods of time made billions.  Collectively, the owners made trillions of dollars. 

They created a network of facilities that made things that made life better for humans. They had powerful incentives to do this.  They made so much money from their venture that money became meaningless to them.  They earned their way into a kind of freedom that most people can only dream of. 

Where Does the Money Come From?

The people who created this network of facilities got paid two different ways. 

First, they got something called ‘dividends’ of their stock.  If a company is making money (selling items for more than it pays in costs) the shareholders may vote (through their elected ‘directors’) to pay out money to them to pass some of this money on to the owners.  These payments are called ‘dividends.’ 

Second, the market value of the shares they own can go up.  If a company is growing and expanding its capability to make money, people will pay more money for the stock in the company. If you had bought a billion shares of Apple when it was still a fairly small company with small revenues (say in 2015, when the split adjusted shares were selling for $20 each), and held it until January of 2022 (when shares were selling for $180 each) you would have made $160 billion. 

Of the two benefits, the greatest, by far, is the benefit people can get from buying low (or creating a company, meaning buying for nothing at all) and selling high.  In the same period, the company paid out a total of $5.60 in dividends.  If you owned 1 billion shares, you would have gotten $5.6 billion in dividends and made $160 billion, or more than 30 times more money, on the increase in the value of ownership of the company. 

Later, we will examine the amounts of money people can make by buying and owning rights to things that we may call the ‘means of production’ in different societies.  Obviously, people can’t make anything buying and owning these things in natural law societies, because at least one thing that is necessary for all production, land, is not ownable. 

However, societies that don’t accept any ownability of the means of production are extreme societies (just as are societies that accept all rights are ownable). It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It is possible for a group of people in a position to form any kind of society they want to decide they want certain specific rights to use the world to be buyable and ownable.  For example, a group in such a position may decided they want to find a kind of ownership that will allow the wealth that flows from the land that has nothing to do with improvements or changes made by the current owner to NOT be ownable, but will allow people to buy and sell rights to streams of value that don’t exist yet, but which could exist if improvements were made. 

The people buying Apple between 2014 and 2022 were paying mostly for things they expected to happen in the future.  If Apple had been an old and mature company with no real growth progress, its earnings would have justified a price of perhaps $2 per share.  You could say that about 1/10^th of the share price reflected the ownership of the ‘rights to the money that the company was already making.’  The majority of the price reflected the value of owning the rights to create and implement new strategies and build and sell new devices and services that rested on Apples existing platform.

What if there was some way to use markets to ‘subtract out’ the rights to benefit from future innovation, invention, and discovery?  A group of people in a position to form any kind of system they wanted may decide to make the rights to future growth ownable, but not make the rights to free cash flows that already existed when the people involved (say the buyers of stock) became involved. These people would buy and own the right to all benefits of their own innovation and invention.  But the rights to get the ‘basic’ flows of cash the world generates would not be owned or ownable. 

We will see that there are many forms of ownership.  It is possible to use a form of ownership called ‘leasehold ownership’ (which already exists and is being used in many places) to create a mix of ‘rights that are ownable’ and ‘rights that are not ownable.  We will see that we can adjust a single variable to change the ratio by infinitely tiny increments, creating a system that has the exact mix of ‘rights that are ownable’ and ‘rights that are not ownable’ to bring the incentives we want. The system discussed in Part Three is built on a very specific form of leasehold which, as we will see, is already used in many places and already extremely well understood.  This system transfers ownership of all rights due to the improvements, innovation, invention, or other creative behaviors of the people who own these rights (own something called a ‘leasehold title’ to the property or corporation) to the owners, while leaving all of the rest of the value the world creates to be unowned and unownable (in the same way all value created by nature is unowned and unownable in natural law societies.)  This will lead to an intermediate system; it is not a natural law society (because it allows ownability of rights to nature and the means of production) and it is not a sovereignty based society either (because it does not allow ownability of sovereign rights by any entity).  It is somewhere between a natural law and a sovereignty based society.

After we look at this one system, we will understand three societies; two extreme systems and one intermediate system.  We can then ‘fill in the gaps’ and come to understand the other intermediate systems.  This will allow us to compare them all by comparing the different incentives created by the different systems. 

We will see that there are only two things that can change about societies of thinking beings with physical needs:

1.  The way they interact with the physical world that provides their needs, and

2.  They way they interact with other members of their own species.

Total ownership (sovereign ownership) is a ‘way of interacting with the world:  we can divide it into territories and fight over who owns everything.  Total non-ownership is also a way to interact with the world:  People in natural law societies interacted with the world this way.  Each different partial ownership system is built on a specific way of interacting with the world. 

Since the world provides all our food and everything else we need to keep us alive, the system we choose for a ‘way to interact with the world’ determines what people have to do to meet their physical needs.  This means it determines the incentives that are part of societies. 

After we have decided how we, the members of the human race, will interact with the planet we live on, we have built the foundation for a society. We may then decide what we want to build on that foundation and work out the other variables.  Obviously, if we are building on a specific foundation (say a system that divides the world into territories that fight over sovereignty for each square inch of the world) we have different options for social variables than if we have a system that has an entirely different relationship with the world (say a system where no one owns any part of the world).

Social variables are the details of society.  The relationship with the world is the foundation that these variables will rest on.  We can’t really start building the social variables until we know what kind of foundation we want to start with.  (For example, if we decide we want the world divided into territories that fight over total rights to land, we are limited to societies that have governments capable of fighting wars; these become the foundational social variables.  Other societies, that don’t have these powerful forces pushing for well-organized, well-funded, all out battles to doom, have options for social variables that sovereignty based societies do not have.)  

If we want to understand the incentives that are inherent in different societies, we need to understand flows of value.  To make this easier, this book represents all flows of value with flows of money.  They all use money and, in each system, one unit of money will be called a ‘dollar’ and will represent the ability to buy one pound of rice. 

The people who bought Apple shares in 2014 and sold them in 2022 wound up with billions of dollars.  Imagine you had done what was suggested above, and made $160 billion from the transaction.  This money spends exactly the same as money that people made working for $1 per hour on rice farms in Indonesia, China, and India.  These farm workers made a total of $16,000 from eight years of work, eight hours a day, 50 weeks a year.  You made $160 billion, or 10 million times the amount the workers made, without lifting a hand. 

It is easy to see where their money comes from:  rice was sold for a high price and they were paid out of the proceeds. 

But where did your money come from?  If we want to understand how societies work, we have to understand these things. 

Unfortunately, the societies we inherited (territorial sovereignty societies) are the incredibly complex.  They have mind-boggling complexity and it clearly doesn’t make sense to start an explanation of a complex topic (like ‘what determines the market values of the means of production like the Pastland Farm and the Apple company?) in the context of the most complex society possible.

Starting with the next chapter, we will examine a society that is a little more complicated than a natural law society, but far, far, simpler than the societies we inherited.  This will allow you to see how this process works in a system that is simple enough to understand how it works. 

8:  Separation of Society into Classes

When we had our natural law society in Pastland, no one owned the land so no one owned the wealth it produced. It was bountiful and produced very large ‘free rice flows’ that led to very large ‘free cash flows.’  No one owned this free money. We shared it in some way we agreed upon in meetings and elections.

In the system built on territorial sovereignty, many parcels don’t produce any free cash flows at all, because the people who own them don’t know how to operate them well enough to make this happen.  Some parcels do produce free cash flows. 

Some farmers can make enough that they don’t have to work at all.  They can hire people to do the work and will have enough left over to support their families.  Some will be able to support themselves and their families comfortably, but will not have enough money to make investments. 

A very few will have enough to support their families and invest in additional land.

Their holdings will grow. 

As their holdings grow, their free cash flows grow.  The surpluses they have to invest, above the amount they need to take care of their families, will increase. They can invest more and more.

At some point, some of these people will have such enormous incomes they can do more than just support themselves in comfort, they can hire servants to minister to their every need. 

Societies built on the principle of territorial sovereignty naturally divide the people in them into three basic classifications, creating three ‘classes’ of people. 

The class at the top consists of the people who own large amounts of cash-flow producing land.  They get income without doing anything. 

The class at the bottom owns no land at all.  They get nothing unless they work. 

Sometimes there is a class in the middle.  These people have enough of an ownership stake in the means of production that they can support themselves, but don’t have any significant amounts to invest.

Population

In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote a book that is now considered to be the seminal work on the relationship between labor, wages, and population levels.  The book is called ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population.’ (You can find the full text of this book on the PossibleSocieties.com website.)

It discusses the basic realities of existence for one classification of humans, the ‘working class.’ 

These people have no investments to generate income for them.  Their entire income comes from wages.  They depend on wages so the factors that determine wages determine what kinds of lives they will have.  If wages are low, they will suffer.  If wages are high, they will live well. 

Malthus claims that the main factor that determines wages is the relationship between the supply of workers (the number of people who need to work to stay alive) and the demand for labor (the number of workers that the owners are willing to hire).  If the supply of workers goes up, but the demand for workers does not go up, wages must go down. 

What determines the supply of workers?

Normally, this depends on the population of the working class. 

If the working class population increases, but the demand for workers does not increase, wages will fall. 

Malthus points out that people have very strong desires to have sex.  They will give in to these desires.  Without birth control, sex leads to babies. 

People have powerful incentives to figure out ways to have sex without pregnancy and all cultures appear to have had some methods to make this happen.  Certain plants can reduce fertility a great deal and condoms can be made out of animal intestines.  Although some methods existed at the time Malthus wrote, the poor often couldn’t afford them.  (This is still true today.)

Parents have instinctual pressures to take care of their offspring.  They will take care of their children and keep them healthy if they can. If food is plentiful, conditions healthy, and there is no birth control, one woman can easily have 8 or more children that survive to breeding age themselves.  In other words, if food is plentiful and conditions healthy (for people in the working class), the population can grow fantastically fast. It can quadruple each generation.

Malthus pointed out that this can lead to something that modern scholars call a ‘population explosion.’ Population grows at what Malthus called a ‘geometric rate.’  (This is also called an ‘exponential rate’ and is the same rate of growth of the chemical and nuclear reactions we call ‘explosions’) 

Malthus pointed out that if wages were high enough to support the babies, the population would explode (grow geometrically) and the supply of workers would also explode. 

The food supply would not explode, however. 

The reasons for this are practical: There is only a certain amount of land available to grow food.  The best land is already in use.  New land can be pressed into service, but this process happens at what Malthus called a ‘linear rate.’  A linear progression will always be slower than a geometric progression.  This means that the food supply can never grow as fast as the population. 

The Maximum State of Misery Short of Death

Malthus explains the results. The population of the working class will grow rapidly if conditions allow the workers to take care of their children.  The supply of workers will grow faster than demand and wages will fall.

As wages fall, the workers living conditions will fall.  With more demand for food, people (of all classes) will buy more.  But the supply of food won’t keep up with the demand and food prices will have to rise. 

This will affect everyone, but it won’t cause starvation for the upper or middle class.  These people will not be able to live as well, but they will not be forced to allow their children to suffer.  Many members of the working class won’t be able to afford enough to give their children a healthy diet.  Their health will suffer.  If wages continue to fall, eventually they won’t be able to afford enough fuel, clothing, or even the most basic medical care.  Eventually, the working class will live in such great poverty that most of their children don’t survive to breeding age. 

At some point, the working class will be living in such miserable conditions that its population will stabilize. It won’t be able to grow because the people literally won’t be able to feed their babies enough to keep them healthy.

Malthus claimed that this is the only way that wages can stop falling. 

He claimed that wages can never be higher than the level that will support families in the ‘the maximum level of misery short of death’ for very long. 

Malthus is one of many who have looked at this issue. Another person who provided great insight into the nature of population growth is Charles Darwin.  Both of these researchers noted that population levels tended to explode (grow at an exponential rate) if resources are available.  But both noted two exceptions in this rule:

The first involved humans who were in the upper class.  These people had access to opportunities to control birth that lower class people didn’t have and appeared to take advantage of these opportunities.  Upper class women had a lot of options about ways to spend their time. They didn’t appear to want to spend their lives taking care of enormous broods and they didn’t have to.  The population of upper classes therefore tended to remain constant.  This basically means that the women had, on average, the 2 children per woman needed to replace themselves and their spouses.  

The second exception involved natural law societies.  Both researchers noted that the standard rules that applied in the societies of Europe, Asia, and Africa, didn’t appear to apply to the societies of the Americas.  For some reason, the societies of the Americas tended to have far lower population growth levels than those in Europe. 

Why does this happen? 

We don’t have a lot of research in this area.  People who have speculated on the reason have speculated that it involves security.  The members of the upper classes in sovereignty-based societies, and all people in natural law societies have security: they know that they will still be able to eat when they get sick and old, even if they can’t work full-time anymore.  They don’t need children to support them in their old age or fill in to get an income when they are sick.  They can base their reproduction on other factors.  If they want fewer babies, they can take advantage of natural medicines that have been shown to reduce fertility.  (Darwin points out that the natives of America used various techniques, including natural medicines, to control birth.)  

He claims this is the natural condition of the working class.  There may be times when the working class does not live in misery for a short time, but natural forces create a cyclical pressure that will always bring them back to this natural condition. 

If their misery eases for a time, for any reason, they will take care of their children.  The population will begin to grow at its natural rate (geometric, the same rate as an explosion).  Within a generation, the wages will start to fall again.  They can only stop falling when the living conditions of the working class fall back to their natural level, ‘the maximum state of misery short of death.’

The Other Classes

The members of top level class get plentiful free incomes.  The rich get richer.  The more riches you start with, the more you will have to invest.  Investment returns come in as a percentage of the amount invested (we will look at this in more detail later) so the more you start with, the more investment returns you get (the free cash flow is an ‘investment return’) and the faster you get richer. 

The people with large investment returns can get more land two different ways.  A simple way to get land is to buy it.  They have money and people need money. 

But not everyone who has land will want to sell.

In fact, only the poorest will do this:  they will be forced to sell because the alternative is death. 

The class we often call the ‘middle class’ will have enough.  They will not sell. 

But the conditions of this society are not stable for the people in this class.  Their situation is precarious.  Some will have large families.  Their farms will be divided among the heirs.  If the original farm was barely able to support a family, the new smaller farms will be below the threshold.  A farm that would be fine to support a single family won’t be able to support four families (after a generation) or sixteen families (after two generations) or sixty four families (after three generations).  The owners of these very small farms will be forced to sell.  The large farms will get bigger.

Eventually, they will be very large. We often use different terms to refer to very large farms and call them ‘estates’ (these are the forerunners of the entities called ‘states,’ discussed below).   The owners of these estates will have many employees. Some of the employees will deal with problems that we would expect to find in any system where there are very poor people and very rich people:  the poor will try to steal from the rich to feed their families.  These employees will need to have access to organized force to do their jobs.  (If there is no organized group to oppose them, the bandits and thieves will organize themselves and take what they want.  The estate owners have to control enough force to prevent this.)

The owners of the large states will have militaries.  The owners of the very large estates will have to have quite large militaries. 

The people who run the estates can put pressure on the owners of the relatively small farms to sell, even if these people don’t want to sell.  If you watch the old westerns on television or in movies, you will see that this is a common theme: 

A ‘land baron’ wants land owned by a smaller farmer.  He offers to buy but the farmer doesn’t sell.  The baron then uses various techniques to force the farmer off of his land.  He kills the livestock, burns the crops, contaminates the water supply, he even (in some of the movies and shows) burns down the barn or home of the farmer or takes the loved ones of the farmer hostage.  In the movies and TV shows there is always some good guy that comes along to protect the farmer (a ‘high plains drifter’ or a ‘lone ranger’).  By the end of the show, the land baron has been defeated and/or killed, and the farmer lives happily ever after.  But in the real world, the people trying to take the land eventually get it.  As a practical matter, small farms are going to disappear. 

As this happens, society turns from a ‘three class society’ into a ‘two class society.’ 

The owners of the estates are the upper class.

They live like kings (they will become kings in time, as we will see); they have enormous incomes with no need to work. 

The ‘workers’ live, as Malthus said, in ‘the maximum state of misery short of death.’

Countries

Natural law societies have no need for the entities we call ‘countries’ or ‘governments.’  This seems to be so difficult to believe that people from societies that had countries seemed to prefer to believe that the people in these societies were could not be true human beings, because true humans need to be ‘governed.’  We need to be divided into groups with a ruling body or individual ruler directing our activities.  Bartolomé de Las Casas noted the extreme lengths to which people would go to deny that it is possible for humans to live in a world without countries or governments:

The ultimate cause for writing this work was to gain knowledge of all the many nations of this vast new world. They had been defamed by persons who feared neither God nor the charge, so grievous before divine judgment, of defaming men and causing them to lose esteem and honor.

It has been written that these peoples of the Indies, lacking ordered nations and structured governments, did not have the power of reason to govern themselves. In order to demonstrate the truth, which is the opposite, this book brings together and compiles natural, special and accidental causes which are specified below. Not only have the Americans [natives] shown themselves to be very wise peoples and possessed of lively and marked understanding, prudently governing and providing for their people and making them prosper in justice; but they have equaled many diverse nations of the world, past and present, that have been praised for their governance, politics and customs; and exceed by no small measure the wisest of all these, such as the Greeks and Romans.

This advantage and superiority, along with everything said above, will appear quite clearly when the Americans are compared with Europeans. This history has been written with the aforesaid aim in mind by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, a monk of the Dominican Order and bishop of Chiapa, who promises before the divine word that everything said and referred to is the truth, and that nothing of an untruthful nature appears to the best of his knowledge.

Countries and governments appear spontaneously in societies built on sovereign control of parts of planets. There are two forms these countries and governments can take.

The first is the form of a monarchy. Owners of large estates will have control of all the wealth of these estates.  A large part of this wealth is free wealth that flows from the land. (Represented by the free cash flow in societies that use money for transactions.)  There will be a lot of people around who don’t own any land and would like to get some of this free wealth.  There will be wandering thieves or bandits who raid their land and take what they can.  Neighboring estates may take advantage of any failure to protect livestock or stores of food by simply taking them.  The owners have to take various measures to protect themselves and their property. They will need some sort of armed security force, a ‘military’ or ‘police’ force, for serious threats. 

Once they have a military, they can use it for anything they want.  The owners may make rules and use their military/police to force people on their estate to follow these rules.  They can make any kind of rules they want.  Many people with this power have made rules requiring people to kow-tow when they pass. This basically means to get on their knees and bang their heads on the ground.  To enforce this, the owners may issue orders for their military to decapitate any who aren’t obeying with the proper amount of enthusiasm. 

This part of the book is about societies built on the concept of sovereignty, an absolute and total kind of ownership and control.  The word ‘sovereignty’ comes from the rights claimed and exercised by people called ‘sovereigns.’   The owners of the estates control all of the food and wealth.  They can decide who eats and who does not eat.  They can make any rules and require everyone to follow them. They can be sovereigns.  They can claim they have sovereignty over everything that happens on the land that is in their estate and everyone on it.  They can say that their property is not an ‘estate’ but a ‘state,’ the word that was used until recently to refer to the entities we now call ‘countries.’  

Governments

Bodies that ‘govern’ are optional in natural law societies. 

When we had the natural law society in Pastland, our group could choose to create a body that would have the power to ‘govern’ us if we wanted to do this. 

But we didn’t have to have one. Our system could operate perfectly well without one. 

Territorial sovereignty societies operate differently.  They can’t function without governments.  The main reason for this is that they need taxes. 

Recall that our natural law society in Pastland didn’t have and didn’t need taxes.  No one owned the land so no one owned the things it produced.  We collected this wealth and used it as we wished.  Part went to pay the people who helped in production.  This left the ‘operating profits.’  Part of the operating profits went to pay the people who planned and organized production (in the case of the Pastland Farm, only one person, Kathy).  This left the free cash flow, representing the bounty of this land.  The land was very bountiful so an enormous amount of free cash flowed from it.  We used part of this wealth to pay for common services.  We could have used it all, providing all services for everyone.  (For example, all meals could have been communal and free.)  But we realized that people have different preferences and want sufferer things so we only paid for the specific services that everyone needed and could be provided more efficiently if provided for everyone. After paying for these services, we had a large amount of money left over.  We divided this money among all people who met the basic requirements for social, personal, and environmental responsibility. 

You can find hundreds of different books explaining the realities of natural law societies in various places, with dozens available directly from the PossibleSocieties.com website.  I have read all the books listed on this website and hundreds of other documents about natural law societies and can’t find any record of any that had taxes.  Taxes are not necessary in natural law societies.  The people could have them if they wanted, but since the harm the system (they punish people for working hard and being efficient) they did not want them and didn’t impose them. 

Part Four explains a hybrid system that is a kind of mixture between natural law societies and territorial sovereignty societies called a ‘socratic.’  Socratic societies don’t need taxes either and probably won’t have them.

Everything is owned in territorial sovereignty societies.  This means nothing is left unowned to pay for common services.  Territorial sovereignty societies need a great many more common services than natural law societies.  The most important of these services is a military.  Since territorial sovereignty societies are built on excluding the majority (the people from outside the border are always a majority) from rights that are claimed by a minority (the people inside the lines are always a minority of the human race), they can’t operate without a military.  They must use force to prevent the people they are trying to keep from benefiting from the land from crossing the borders.  Since the people who are trying to cross can get together into organized groups and use force, the people who run the country must be able to use greater force. They must have a military and it must be quite large. 

Territorial sovereignty societies need a lot of national income to pay their expenses.  These needs can become enormous during times of war. 

Since they need taxes, they need another kind of body, a kind of internal army normally called ‘police.’ The government will assess taxes but some people will not want to pay them.  No one can be allowed to get away with this:  if anyone could get away with not paying, people would all want to be in that number and taxes would be so difficult to collect as to be impossible. The authorities that collect taxes just be able to take them, even if the people who are supposed to be paying don’t want to pay.  If the people who owe the taxes resist with force, the taxing authorities must be able to bring in superior force.  If the people who owe the taxes escalate, requiring the government to kill them to get its money (as in ‘you will get your taxes over my dead body’) the government must have the ability to use deadly force to remove the people from the equation so they can than confiscate the money. 

If an organization has the right to take anything you have away from you (by calling it a ‘tax’), using any level of force required and even killing you if this is necessary, you don’t control it.  This organization controls you.

What Is A Government?

In the schools of territorial sovereignty societies, children are taught that their governments are instrument of ‘we the people’ that is used to do whatever ‘the people’ want.  It is a tool to turn their collective desires and needs into reality.

But, when we leave school and enter the real world, we find that this is not what governments do.  Black’s Law Dictionary (the acknowledged authority on legal definitions) defines ‘government’ this way: 

The regulation, restraint, supervision, or control which is exercised upon the individual members of an organized jural society by those invested with the supreme political authority or the act of exercising supreme political power or control.

Note that a government is not defined as ‘a body that provides services for the people.’ 

This is the definition of a ‘service provider,’ not a government. 

It is not defined as ‘a tool that turns the will of the people into reality.’  In fact, the countries that are consistently presented as models of democracy don’t even have tools that can be used to determine what ‘we the people’ want to happen, let alone turn it into reality. 

The United States teaches school children that the people of the past of this country have fought many wars to protect something they call ‘their democracy.’  The wars will continue and these children will be required to make sacrifices for them.  At the very least, they will have to give a percentage of all income they generate to the government, which will use to keep the war machine going.  They may be asked to send their sons and daughters to the war of the day (whatever it is; the human race is in so many wars it is hard to keep track) and possibly give up their sanity (a very large percentage of solders who go to war come back with serious mental problems), their limbs, or their lives.  They are fighting for democracy.  If they die, they must be proud to have died for such a wonderful cause.

But is this really a democracy? 

Not a single national issue in United States history has been decided by an election of the people.  (Some states allow some things to be decided by the people, but no federal issues have ever been voted on by ‘we the people.’ )  But people vote for the people who run the federal government don’t they? 

In fact, only one of these people is even subjected to any kind of vote at all, and the vote for this one person is not an election, it is a non-binding poll that will be used by officials in the political party to determine which of the states party officials will select the people called the ‘electors,’ who will actually vote for the president.  All electors are party partisans, bound to vote as the party directs them (if they vote against party lines, they can be removed and their votes disqualified.) 

Nearly half of the time, the candidate that ‘wins’ got less votes than the ‘loser.’   In other words, the will of the people has the same influence on the actual results as would the flipping of a coin. 

Since no federal issues have ever been submitted to the people, and the only thing that is even called an ‘election’ is not binding, there has never been a popular election of any kind in the United States that determined anything.  Yet this is somehow held up to children and the world as the supreme example of democracy, something that the people must make any sacrifice asked of them to preserve. What, exactly, are they fighting to preserve?

The best way to see that the territorial sovereignty systems called ‘democracies’ are not  democratic is to compare them to truly democratic systems.  Part Three explains a socratic system.  In that system, the people allocate wealth in binding elections to programs they want funded.  If the people don’t want it to exist, it won’t get funding and won’t exist.  Part Four goes over a broad range of possible societies.  It shows that some societies both need and want governments, some don’t need them but will probably want them, and some neither need or want them.  When you understand the different options, you will see that societies built on the principle of territorial sovereignty have the most powerful forces pushing toward the need for government of any type of society possible.

Governments are bodies that control the people. 

Territorial sovereignty societies must have governments. 

They can’t function without them.

Different Kinds of Governments

Because governments make the decisions, it is important to understand that the entities called ‘governments’ have needs and desires that differ a great deal from the needs and desires of the human race as a whole (which the governments of ‘independent and sovereign states’ don’t even normally consider) and be dramatically different than the needs and desires of the people who live in the countries. 

If there is a conflict, the governments will do the things that meet the needs of the governments, and ignore the needs and desires of the people. 

….this chapter under construction, more to follow (please read on)

Things could have happened differently in Pastland.

When we first arrived, a lot of people argued about which country the land was around us belonged to.  In the example above, put off the fighting by having a moratorium on letting any person or country own any part of the planet, essentially creating a territorial sovereignty society.

We could have done something differently: 

Many people in our world today think that ownership of land is basically a good thing, but the problem is unequal distribution of the land.  If everyone had the same amount of land, everyone would be equal.  We could then live in harmony, even though we had ownership. 

Someone suggests that, to stop the fighting, we must make everyone equal.  We divide the productive land into 1000 equal parcels, one for each of us, and then distribute them by lot.  There are 1,500 acres, so everyone will get 1.5 acres. 

We really aren’t in a position to give the proposal a great deal of thought.  People are fighting NOW.  They are tearing apart the ship to make weapons.  We need to put an end to this so that we can get along.  Finally, we decide to accept this idea and divide the land.  We have people go out with whatever equipment we have (tape measures, levels, sticks, string) to divide the land.  We draw up a map and number the parcels one through one thousand.  We put slips of paper with the numbers into a hat and everyone draws a slip. 

You draw a number, let’s say it is 333.  Parcel 333 belongs to you. You have to look on the map to find it. then you have to trudge through the swamp to find the stakes that mark the corners. 

You are now a person of property.

Some part of the world belongs to you.

Practical Matters

If you want to get a mental picture of your farm, imagine a piece of swamp where wild rice grows.  It has been divided into 1000 parcels with stakes and string.  One of the parcels is parcel number 333:  this is your farm.  It is a square with sides 250 feet by 250 feet.  Your farm is square.  You have four neighbors, one on each side.  The property likes are marked with string stretched between stakes that are pounded into the soft mud. 

Divisiveness

Your land is marked by stakes that are pushed into soft mud.  Strings stretch tight to other stakes and these strings mark your property lines.  If you go to a stake, you can push it a little and it will move. 

If you can move your lot lines out by 1 inch, your parcel of land will be 21 square feet bigger.  This may not sound like much and it isn’t.  But this extra 21 square feet of land will produce about 2 pounds.  If it is in your land, it is your 2 pounds of rice.  If it is in the neighbors land, it is their rice. 

Each of the farms is quite tiny.  Many of us are not going to be good farmers and aren’t going to make our own farms produce enough to keep ourselves alive.   Others are barely going to make it.  A few square feet of additional land can make the difference between living and dying to these people. 

We could all live on the ship if we wanted to.  But if you are on the ship, you aren’t going to be able to keep an eye on your property.  Your neighbors may normally be honest.  But if you aren’t watching, there is a chance one of them may move her stake out to take away some of your land.  You won’t be able to take a chance on this.  Most of us are going to take whatever we can from the ship and set up camp on our land.

As long as the property lines are string with sticks, a lot of people are going to be afraid.  They need some sort of durable barrier, something that is hard to move.  A pile of rocks for a corner is harder to move than a stick, but if you leave for a few hours, it can be moved a few inches.  The best thing to do is to build a wall.  The higher and stronger the wall, the safer you are going to be.

If you look at any ariel photo anyplace that has territorial sovereignty societies, you will see the walls separating people from each other.  They are obvious.  Territorial sovereignty societies work in many ways that divide people into different groups and subgroups, most of which have opposing interests.  From our very first moments, we will see evidence of this.

Again, incentives are not behaviors.  Some neighbors won’t steal land no matter how easy this is.  Some neighbors won’t be suspicious of their neighbors and will not take any precautions to protect their land.  But we all see the walls all around us.  In some cases, they are high and strong walls with broken bottles set in the top to cut up anyone who tries to cross. 

Recall the way people from territorial sovereignty societies descried the societies they saw.  They were used to societies that walled everyone from everyone else and where everyone was suspicious—with good reason—that anything they didn’t protect would be stolen.  Peter Myrtar described the system in Haiti this way:

 ‘They seem to live in the golden world, in open gardens not entrenched with dikes, divided with hedges, or defended with walls.  They deal truly with one another, without laws, without books, and without judges.’

Other Divisions:  Classes

Our people are from all walks of life. We have butchers, bakers, bankers, brewers, mechanics, and equipment operators.  Most of us specialized in one skill.  We learned how to do something specific either in school or at work.  We learned what could go wrong if we made mistakes.  (Usually, we had to fix them, on our own time; some people had to pay for the damage they caused.)  Then, over the years, we did whatever it is that we learned how to do over and over. We have very specific skills. 

Only a few of us know everything there is to know about rice farming and are in a position to do all of these things themselves, without help.  In fact, even people who have been involved in this field are going to have a lot of problems.  Kathy is skilled at hiring people to do each of the jobs and making sure they do the jobs properly. She can’t actually do this work herself, because she is handicapped.  (She was badly injured in the wreck and can’t even stand up without help.)   There is a perfect time to take in the rice.  Harvest too early and it will be green and rot or start to ferment.  Wait too long and the grain falls off of the stalks onto the ground and you won’t be able to collect it.  Kathy knows the right time.  But she can’t actually do the work.  Most of the grain on her farm will be lost. 

Others will have no idea what to do. They may get some rice harvested, but nearly as much as a crew that had the right tools and a skilled operator making sure they did the work right.  Some people are likely to be overwhelmed by the prospect of being responsible for operating a farm.  They will see a lot of things that need to be done but won’t know which to do first. Others may simply be lazy.  They won’t get out of bed until noon and will stall so long that, by the time they are ready to work, there won’t be enough daylight to get the work done. 

Some farmers, of course, will realize the work has to be done and figure out how to do it.  They bring in the same amount of rice, per acre, as would have been harvested if a professional had been in charge of organizing the harvest and she had hired people she who could do each of the jobs. In other words, they could collect the same 3,000 pounds of rice per acre used in the previous example.  If you are good enough to make this happen, you will bring in 4,500 pounds of rice on a 1.5 acre farm.

It is easier to understand flows of value if we have a tool to measure the value, so let’s say that we start using dollars with the same value as before. 

Money in the society based on the principle of territorial sovereignty:

We could easily use paper money in the natural law society because no one owned the rice so we could put it all into central storage and then use paper certificates to divide it.  Since we all trust that the paper money will be redeemable for one pound of rice per dollar, we can accept paper dollars in exchange for things we sell with confidence.

In societies built on territorial sovereignty, people often don’t trust paper money because there is no general global agreement (among the entire human race) about the value of each piece of paper. When people don’t trust paper money, they often use other things, with the most common ‘things used for money’ being rare metals like gold and silver.  People refine the metals and cast them into coins with a standard size, shape, and weight. Each coin is given a name (for example, a ‘silver dollar’ or a ‘one troy ounce gold Koala’) and stamped with an image to help people identify it.  Often, when people aren’t willing to accept paper money printed by governments, the governments switch to gold or silver coins. 

When the United States was formed in 1776, the founders immediately began printing paper money, called the Continental Dollar and used it to buy things needed for the war against England.  People didn’t trust the issuer (which called itself ‘the government of the United States of America’ but had no real power at first) and wouldn’t accept the money.  It became worthless.  (There is a saying ‘not worth a continental’ that some people use today to refer to something that people claim has value but really has none.)  The government decided to adopt the Spanish silver 8 reales note (called ‘pieces of eight’ or ‘Spanish dollars’) for money and, when people wouldn’t accept the continentals, they paid in silver dollars.  The Spanish dollar had a fixed content of 0.7734 troy ounces of silver, alloyed with other metals to make a coin weighing exactly 0.8593 troy ounces.  Initially, the United States government used dollars minted by the Spanish mint.  In 1784 it began minting its own silver dollars with the same specifications.  United States silver dollars had these exact specifications until 1964.  

For this example, let’s say that the casino safe didn’t have paper United States dollars, it had silver United States silver dollars, minted before 1964.  Say the company was operating this cruse as a part of its silver jubilee (celebrating 25 years in business) and its casino was using only silver dollars for this cruise. People could by silver dollars with the currency of their country when they boarded and then would use silver dollars to buy things on the ship (at rates that state ‘in silver’ that were much lower than the prices in paper United States money) and in the casino. They were told that when the cruise ended, they could either sell their silver dollars back to the cruise company for the market price in their own country’s currency, or keep them as souvenirs and/or sell them later.  They were real United States silver dollars and have a market value all over the world, even in the 21^st century when they are no longer officially United States currency.

A lot of people bought silver dollars (or won them in the casino) and had them at the time of the wreck.  There casino safe also had a lot of silver dollars. When we divided the land, we also divided certain things that might be useful that were in the ship.  The silver dollars in the casino safe were divided equally:  everyone got the same amount.  After it was over, everyone had some silver dollars. 

After we divided the land, some farmers fell on hard times right away.  They started trading anything they had for food, including the silver dollars. These dollars made their way the farmers that were better off.  (They were the ones with food to trade for them.)  Eventually, many people had no silver dollars left.  They traded other things for food.  Eventually, they had nothing to trade except their land and began ‘selling’ their land, or trading it for food. 

Only farmers who were relatively good at running their farms had extra food left over to trade for silver and other things. These people wound up with the silver dollars.  They began to trade for the things they needed.  They needed something to use to measure the value of the things they were trading and decided to use silver as a common denominator.  At first, there was no fixed relationship between the value of a pound of rice and a silver dollar.  But, over time, a ‘market price’ developed. 

If we want to compare societies, it helps to have a common way to measure flows of value.  For the sake of this example, let’s say that the market price of rice is either exactly $1 per pound or so close to $1 that any differences aren’t important for practical purposes. 

Different Capabilities to Operate Farms

Our group had a very diverse population.  Some people are young, some are old.  Some are healthy, others have various ailments.  Some know how to tell if rice is ripe and ready to come off of the stalks; others wouldn’t be able to boil rice if they had a video to follow. At the end of the year, different people will end up with different amounts of rice. 

Some will not have enough to keep them alive for the rest of the year, until the next harvest.  They will have to trade whatever they have to offer with the few who have some excess or they won’t eat.

At first, they will trade their personal possessions.  They can get by without their jewelry; most of us brought more than one pair of shoes; we have a few personal items we can trade for food. (Laptops and phones aren’t going to be worth much because we don’t have any electricity; we don’t have any common income we can use to pay people to provide any services at all.) 

Eventually, some people who need food will have nothing to trade for food other than their land.  They will begin to sell parts of their farm.  They will start to trade their land for food. 

We would expect them to sell mostly to their neighbors.

They could sell one square foot at a time or they could agree to move the boundaries between their farms and their neighbors in ways that increase the neighbor’s land and decrease theirs, in exchange for certain amounts of rice or money.

Of course, if you can’t get enough to keep you alive on 1.5 acres of land, you certainly aren’t going to be able to get enough on less than 1.5 acres. Once you start selling, you will have to keep selling and selling.  If you have ever been hungry—I mean really hungry—you will know how painful the decision to sell land can be.  If you have ever heard your children crying with hunger, you will know how hard it is to leave anything unsold if you can sell it to get food to ease their pain.

Other people will be good farmers.  Even the best farmers aren’t going to have enormous amounts of rice however, because they only have 1.5 acres per person in their household.  They will have small surpluses and will able to buy small amounts of land.  But each time they increase the size of their farms, their surpluses grow.  They have more to trade for land and can buy more land.

As time passes, the land ownership will become concentrated.  This happens in all societies built on this kind of ownability of land.  We may try very, very hard to start out in with an equal distribution of land.  But it won’t matter how good of a job we do to start; the distribution won’t stay equal for long.

In time, some people will have no land at all.  They will now have nothing to trade for food but their time.  They will go from farm to farm begging for any work they can do to get enough to keep them and their families alive a little longer. 

Others will have large farms.  Some will own so much land they will have enough to support themselves and workers. They will hire people to do the work on their farms.

Aggravating Factors

Remember, this land is bountiful.  This was very easy to see when we had the natural law society: we could hire the best farm manager in the human race, in this case Kathy, to take in the rice. Kathy could then hire the best people available for each job.  They would all do their work quickly, efficiently and, most importantly for us, cheaply. 

No person is responsible for rice production.  Nature produced rice.  We only collected it and replanted it, so nature could do the same thing next year as it did this year.  Since we did everything with great efficiency, only a small amount of labor and other inputs were needed to collect the rice.  After we fully paid for these inputs, we had enormous amounts of rice left over.

People won’t be as efficient in sovereignty-based societies for several reasons.

The first involves skills.

Recall that the best farmer in our group, Kathy, was seriously injured and will probably not be able to do the hard labor needed to actually collect the rice, even on her own plot.  In the natural law society, she only managed and didn’t have to do any hard work.  In the hundred percent ownability society (sovereignty-based society), she will have to do everything herself.  Even the very best farmer on Earth is probably not going to produce enough to keep herself from starving to death (Kathy is very likely to soon lose her land and, since she can’t do hard work, she will have no income and probably starve to death).

A lot of other people had specific skills that Kathy found useful in collecting the rice, but these people didn’t have the general skills needed to be good farmers. Almost certainly, the land won’t provide as much grain for the benefit of the members of the human race (the human population of the Earth, which means all of us, taken together) as it produced in the natural law society. 

Free Cash Flows

A few people will be very good.  They will be able to produce enough to hire workers to do all the work on the farm, and even hire managers and organizers to make sure everything runs smoothly, and will still have money left over. 

Their properties will produce flows of free cash. 

If they don’t want to do anything, they don’t have to do anything. They just sit back and collect the free money. 

At first, when farms are small, people will only have small free cash flows.  But some will have so much in free cash flows that they will have money left over after they pay all of their living expenses.

They will look for something to do with the left over money. 

They will have opportunities to ‘invest’ it. 

They can find people who are in dire straits and can’t make enough from their land to feed their families and offer to give them a lump sum of money or a pile of food in exchange for some of their land.  In many cases, these people will have no choice but to accept the offer. Land will be ‘sold.’ 

The people with small farms, the poor, will get poorer.

The people with large farms, the rich, will get richer. 

Imagine that you are looking on the internet and find a cruise that has some luxury cabins available at almost unbelievably low rates.  Impulsively, you book passage.  I see the same ad and book a room myself.  The ship leaves from Tampa, Florida and heads southwest toward Cozumel, Mexico.

We are in the open water when a giant bright white cloud appears.  It surrounds us like a tornado and lifts us up.  It carries us along, faster and faster, eventually moving us so fast that light itself starts to bend.  The process then starts to reverse, and light straightens out.  We go slower and slower.  Then we hit against something hard—a piece of land.  The water starts to recede.  We are carried along on the receding water for several horrifying hours with no idea what is happening to us.

Finally, we come to a stop.

None of us on the ship realize this yet, but the realities of human existence have changed.  A government somewhere was testing a new type of nuclear bomb.  The military of that nation was trying to build a device that would send out a special kind of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) to destroy electronic devices.  Many of these bombs were tested in history, starting in the 1950s. But this one had some components that had never been tested before.  Sometimes, materials act differently than scientists predict in the intense heat, pressure, and gamma radiation at the center of a nuclear explosion. 

The scientists had hoped that the new materials would lead to a tunable EMP, one that would destroy the enemy’s electronics but not its own.  But they made a tiny, tiny, mistake in their calculations.  The materials didn’t act as they expected; instead, they created a momentary vibration in the space-time field. 

This was unfortunate for the majority of the people on the planet Earth: the vibration led to an ‘unsyncing’ of the motion of the electrons the in atoms that make up our world.  They were only out of sync for a tiny fraction of a microsecond.  But when the distortion ended, the electrons couldn’t find their way back into orbit around their nuclei.  All of the atoms of the great majority of the planet Earth disintegrated into bosons, quarks, and mesons that will never again be atoms—let alone a planet people can live on—for the rest of time.

The people on the cruise ship were lucky, however.

The space-time distortion field was shaped like a tornado.  It had powerful forces at the edges but included a calm eye at the center where almost nothing happened.  We were in the exact right place to catch the calm eye in the center of the distortion. The space-time distortion sent our people, our ship, and several thousand cubic miles of ocean water back a little more than 4 million years in time.  We are now in the remote past.

We have gone back to before the first humans arrived on this world.

This makes us the world’s first humans.

The First Human Societies

Since no humans have existed, no human societies have existed either.

This means that the people in our group don’t have to follow anyone’s rules about how societies are supposed to work.

We haven’t inherited a legacy of ‘national debts’ that we must repay.  We don’t have to accept that we have traditional religious or racial enemies anymore, and tax our people so we can build militaries to attack them and defend ourselves against their attacks.  We don’t have to make sure that the nations, corporations, and individuals who ‘own’ parts of the world are able to keep people who don’t ‘own’ from benefiting from the existence of the part of the world that belongs to them, because there are no owners.  We don’t have to make sure that the imaginary lines called ‘borders’ that determine the limits of ‘nations’ are respected, because there are no borders and no nations.  We don’t have to pay taxes to cover the cost of police to enforce the existing order, because there is no existing order to enforce.

We have complete freedom as to what kind of society to form.  We can determine what ‘modes of existence’ we want.  We can make our own rules.

Practical Matters

The space-time wave moved us hundreds of miles from our previous location and washed us up, along with several thousand cubic miles of ocean water, deep into the interior of a continent. When the water receded, it dragged the ship several miles and tore the bottom of the ship to pieces, leaving the upper part lodged in a muddy swamp.  The trauma killed more than a thousand of the people on the ship.

As soon as the ship comes to a stop, the people who were physically able to do so began working to rescue the trapped and save any who could be saved.  A few of our people had medical experience.  These people set up a triage center and makeshift emergency hospital on an upper deck. 

People who find injured people bring them there. 

A minister locates a parcel of land to use as a cemetery so we can bury the dead, to prevent an outbreak of disease. For several days, all able-bodied people help with the rescue attempts and a burial party makes sure the dead are buried.

Finally, we get to a stopping point and have a meeting so we can take stock of our situation.

The social director of the cruise ship opens the meeting.  She does this in part because she knows many of us—having organized the welcome party and some drinking games right after we left—and in part because no one who is in any position of authority is left alive.  The ship’s captain and everyone who might claim to have authority perished in the wreck.  She wants to make sure we realize she isn’t claiming to be in charge of anything: she has just come forward because no one else came forward first.

Like the rest of us, she has been digging through the rubble to try to find and help survivors.  She hasn’t slept for days, she is filthy, and her clothing is torn and covered with dirt and dried blood.  She thanks everyone who pitched in to help and says that this has saved many lives.  She tells us she has counted and there are 1,000 survivors, including people who are injured but are going to recover.

She says she has no idea where we are or how long it will take to get us rescued.  (She has no idea we are in the past.  She has been working so hard to save lives she hasn’t had time to worry about such relatively unimportant things.) She asks if anyone can shed some light on this and another woman comes to the front.

The other woman is an  engineer of electronics who has been trying to get the ship’s electronic systems working.  She has gotten everything going but hasn’t been able to reach anyone on the standard rescue channels.  The GPS, satellite TV and satellite phone appear to be working but she can’t pick up any satellite signals.  She had a simple battery-powered satellite finder in her luggage.  She has been scanning the sky to try to find satellites, but her device hasn’t picked up any of them. She finds this very strange: there are supposed to be thousands of satellites in the sky.  They seem to have all disappeared.

She is about ready to step down when she pauses to tell us something else: all of the clocks on the instruments have a reading that she can’t figure out: they read the year as ‘-4,000,000.’ She says that this might mean ‘4,000,000 BC.’ This seemed so strange that she didn’t want to mention it, but she says it is possible we are all in the remote past.  She will keep trying to reach someone and get us rescued, but in the meantime, she suggests we try to make the best of what we have.

We may be here for a long time.

Another woman comes up, this time an astronomer.  She tells us that the stars all appear to be out of position from where they should be. We are in an outer spiral arm of a galaxy and are orbiting the center of the galaxy at a speed of about one million miles per day.  This causes the view we get of certain stars and galaxies to shift.  She has calculated that the stars are where they would have been 4,002,020 years before we started on this trip.  This seems to confirm the information on the clocks. It is possible we are in the remote past.

Someone jokingly says, ‘Welcome to Pastland.’ The name sticks.  People start to call our new home ‘Pastland.’

How and Where We Will Live

First, I want to go over some practical realities of our existence like where and how we will live and where we will get food and other necessities of life, so you can see what we have to work with in forming societies:

We will live in our cabins on the ship for the time being.  Although the extreme bottom decks of the ship were destroyed, we can still use most of the rest.  The ship is sitting on land that is more or less level.  People need to sleep somewhere, and people have moved back into their cabins to have places to sleep.

We ended up next to a large river with plenty of flow to turn turbines.  Some of the passengers are handy with tools.  They salvage the ship’s propellers and some other parts and use them to make a power plant to turn the ship’s electricity generators. Many people volunteer to help build the power plant because we really want electricity: it is hot and muggy where we are, and we want our air conditioners back on.

The ship has freshwater piping to all cabins.  Some people rig up a piping system to move water from a clear spring and pump it into the freshwater distribution system.  The ship’s waste treatment plant still works so, once we have water, we can use our toilets.  Since we have both electricity and fresh water, we can take showers, do laundry, and even fill the ship’s swimming pools so we can swim.

The ship that went back in time with us gives us a place to live.  We have water and sanitary facilities.  We only need one thing that we don’t have now to sustain us: food.

The Bounty of the Planet Earth

We are very lucky to have ended up where we are.  Although some people call our landing place a ‘swamp,’ some use an alternate term and call it a ‘freshwater marsh.’ Wild rice grows in this marsh in great abundance. For thousands of years before we got here, this land has had a stable and productive ecosystem, producing large amounts of rice for the benefit of its (non-human) residents.

In the spring, runoff from snowmelt on lands upriver causes the rivers to swell.  When this happens, the water level rises above the level of the land to a depth of about a foot.  This creates the perfect conditions for rice to grow.  Wild rice has grown here every year for thousands of years.

Qqq wild rice here.

Late in the summer, the river flows ease and the water table falls.  By early fall the water table has fallen below the level of the land and the land becomes dry.  The rice ripens to a golden brown and the kernels fall off of the stalks onto the ground.

This has been happening for many thousands of years before we got here.

The wild rice never went to waste. Each year, giant flocks of ducks, geese, cranes, passenger pigeons, and other migratory birds arrived to feast on nature’s bounty.  When winter came and the birds had moved on, possums, raccoons, beaver, otters, minks, muskrats, weasels, deer, elk, and other animals came to share the rice that the birds missed.  In the spring when the water rose, schools of fish—sturgeon, cavefish, shiners, darters, paddlefish, sunfishes, bream, catfish, crappies, and black basses, to name a few—moved in to feast on whatever was left.

The animals didn’t always thoroughly chew the rice kernels, however, and many kernels passed through their digestive systems intact.  This provided seeds for next year’s crop.

The next year, everything happened again.

This land is bountiful and produces large amounts of rice without any need for human effort.  For all of history so far, this bounty has gone to other animals.

But this is going to change.

Humans have abilities that other animals don’t: we can collect the rice at the exact right time of the year and put it into granaries so other animals can’t get it.  We can take the bounty the land produces for ourselves if we want. Other animals will only get any of this rice if we let them have it, either by giving it to them or by deciding not to take it ourselves.

Some Numbers

Some people are curious about whether the land will produce enough to support us and have made some calculations.

Two of them measured the rice-growing area and determined its size: it is 1,500 acres.  They have decided to call this area Pastland Farm.  One person carefully measured out one square foot of land, cut the stalks on that land, removed the kernels and weighed them to get just under 1/20th of one pound per square foot, which works out to 2,100 pounds per acre, or 3.15 million pounds for the entire marsh/farm.  We have 1,000 people so if we divide this rice evenly, we will have 3,150 pounds for each of us per year, or just over 8 pounds for each of us per day.

The figures for rice yields come from two sources. One is ‘Travels And Adventures in The Indian Territories Between The Years 1760 And 1776,’ by Alexander Henry. Henry was put into circumstances (described in the book) where he found himself the very first European living among natives in parts of North America where wild rice was a staple food.  He discusses the methods of collecting rice, the amounts of rice obtained from the land, and the trade value of rice in American communities before there was any significant influence from European invaders.

The other is a scholarly work about the same issue: Alfred Jenks: ‘The Wild Rice Gatherers Of The Upper Lakes, A Study in American Primitive Economics.’ This book goes over the realities of existence for these people and provides detailed figures for the rice yields they actually obtained. 

You can find the full text of both books on the PossibleSocieties.com website.

Each person needs about 2 pounds of rice per day, as a minimum, to stay alive, so we will clearly have much more than we need.

Kathy and The Pastland Farm

I want to introduce someone who will be involved in some key decisions in this book: 

Kathy, a passenger on this ship, is an experienced rice farmer.  Kathy was seriously injured in the wreck and has been in a coma since it happened.

When she wakes up, lying in a cot set up in our makeshift infirmary on the top deck of our ship, she thinks she is dreaming because she is imagining she is back in her childhood home. Before she even opens her eyes in this dream she is having, she knows where she is from the smell and feel of the air.

The wild rice-producing marshes of Texas have native bacteria that ‘fixes’ nitrogen, taking it from the air (which is 69% nitrogen) and turning it into a form growing plants can use.  The bacteria evolved with the rice, millions of years ago, and the two living organisms depend on each other for survival. The bacteria provide nitrogen that the plant needs, and the plant’s waste products sustain the bacteria.

The bacteria impart an unmistakable smell into the air.  Kathy was raised in Texas rice country and grew up with this smell.  To her, this is the smell of home.  Before she even opens her eyes, she knows where she is.

Not only does she know where she is, she knows what time of year it is and roughly what time of day.  She can feel that the air is heavy with moisture with a powerful sun trying to bore through the mist, just as she remembers from her childhood home before a summer thundershower.  She is afraid to open her eyes for fear that she will find it is just a dream. 

When she summons the courage, she looks out to see the silhouette of the distant hills against the horizon she remembers from her childhood.  This is the same view she got from her bedroom window on the farmhouse that used to stand on this very spot when she was growing up.

She knows this land.  She can tell you what the dirt looks like and what it feels like if you take off your shoes and walk barefoot through the shallow marshes, as she did in her childhood.  (She will warn you that you can’t wear shoes, because they will stick in the muck and you will lose them.)  She can tell you how to locate good spots to fish in the big river and how to find the best spots for wild berries, grapes, fruits, mushrooms, sunflower seeds and other nuts in the surrounding forests.  She can tell you how to find straight softwood trees for poles and very strong hickory for working into tools and other products.

She was practically raised here. Her aunt and uncle had owned the farm that had stood on this very land and her family had spent a great deal of time here.  When she was very young, before her aunt and uncle had switched to hybrid rice that requires chemicals to grow, the farm raised the exact same kind of rice that grows wild here now. She helped with many tasks and knows how to raise it.

When Kathy recovers enough to attend group meetings, the rice is ready to harvest.  She tells us that we have to harvest it quickly because if it gets too dry it will fall onto the ground and be impossible to collect.  Some people are pretty handy with tools and have drawn up plans to build a harvesting machine with a gasoline motor and some other parts found on the ship.  We don’t have any gasoline, but we did find some tanks with ethanol and we can use this for fuel (for next year, people will make more ethanol out of rice, as you will see).

She says she can put the entire operation together for us because she has harvested rice before.  However, she will need to ask some people with specialized skills to help her and she doesn’t feel right asking them to work for nothing.  She wants the ability to pay them somehow.  She knows how to make this work if we have some kind of money.  She knows that the rice this land produced was ‘worth’ about $1 (one British Pound) per pound in the future we came from.  She says it would be nice if we had some kind of money so that she could ‘sell’ the rice (trade it for money) and then use the money to pay her workers.

Money

This book examines a great many different types of societies that are possible for thinking beings with physical needs.  All beings with physical needs must have some thing physical coming in from the world around them to survive.  Humans, for example, need food on a regular basis, to replace the sugars used by our live processes.  If we don’t have this ‘income’ (food) we die. This book uses the term ‘value’ to refer to items that humans need to keep us alive, together with the things we want to make our lives more comfortable.  We need some income in ‘value’ to survive.  If we have more income, we can have better lives. 

It doesn’t matter what type of society we have:  we need an income of value.  Always.

To compare all of the different societies, we will need some way to put the amounts of value in context.  How much value do you need to stay alive?  How much extra value might you get to make your life more comfortable if things worked differently?  People have created tools that can help us understand flows of value.

Later, when we look at territorial sovereignty societies, we will see that they have special needs that make some kind of money essential:  they can’t work very well, or for very long, on barter economies or economies that don’t have a standard way to measure and transfer value. 

Why?

War is an inevitable part of these societies. War is an incredibly complex process and a country which can organize itself for efficiency will have great advantages over a country that is inefficient.  Having a tool people can use to measure everything of value, from the value of a stick of chewing gum to a nuclear aircraft carrier, allows trading on a vast scale and creates great efficiency. 

The leaders of some countries in the past tried to keep their countries going without money, creating barter, labor credit, or other assorted accounting systems, but these systems were not as efficient as systems that had a tool that was a universal store of value that could be applied to all things that are for sale.  They couldn’t extract as much wealth from their citizens (as taxes) as countries that used money so they couldn’t build as many weapons or support as large of armies as countries that used money.  They had disadvantages in war and were defeated by countries that did use money, which moved their systems into these locations as soon as they took over.  As a result, systems that tried to operate without money disappeared and money-based economies have dominated territorial sovereignty societies for at least the last two thousand years (as far back as records go).  

When we get into the discussions of Part Three, we will see that the concept of money is actually quite complex, at least in societies where people can buy parts of the earth with the same tool that people use to buy bowls of rice.  (What is the right amount of ‘bowls of rice equivalent in money’ to pay for ‘the ‘the drainage basin of the Missouri river and its tributaries’ [the legal description for the Louisiana purchase]?  It is hard to compare bowls of rice to drainage basins of massive rivers. The tool of money doesn’t really appear to be versatile enough to use for both of these things, yet it is used for both.  How does this work?  It can be understood, but it is extremely complicated.) 

However, to compare societies in general, we don’t need to know all of the scientific details of money.  (In the same way that you don’t need to understand the scientific details of jet aircraft to understand how to book and get on a flight from Chicago to Paris.)  We all have practical experience with money and know how to use this tool in practical situations.  When dealing with the simple things that money can do, like helping to distribute the food a part of the world produces for the people, money isn’t hard to understand and will work basically the same way in all of the societies we examine. 

This means that, for most people, money is just a tool, in the same way that a hammer is a tool.  They may not know the science behind it and they don’t have to.  It is useful so people use it.

The people of any kind of society can use this tool, just as the people of any society can use a hammer.  We know from historical records that nearly all natural law societies used money of some kind.  American native people used a kind of money that was based on the premise of ‘proof of work’ (the same theoretical construct that backs up Bitcoin). Again, most of them probably had no idea how and why the things they used for money had the value they had, but they knew they did, so they were willing to accept them in trade for things they had for sale. 

Many books that are available on the PossibleSocieties.com website deal with prices in various areas. 

Lewis and Clark took a trip from Minnesota to Oregon and back in the early 1800s.  They brought ‘Indian money’ with them to pay for food, lodging, goods, and services along the way.   They discuss their budgeting before they left on the trip, based on their estimates of prices of the things they needed, the purchase of ‘Indian money’ in markets, and the costs of various things they bought along the way.  (The prices were significantly higher than they had anticipated so they ran out of money in Oregon and had to resort to theft, in some cases, to get the things they needed.) 

The book The Wild Rice Gatherers Of The Upper Lakes, A Study in American Primitive Economics explains the economies of the people who lived in the Great Lakes of North America before the conquest of these areas and discusses prices of various items in that system. 

I want to use the same standards to measure value in all of the systems examined, to make it easier to compare them. You and I and everyone who might be reading this book will be used to using money for these things because all economies in the 21^st century use money for transactions. 

We will be collecting 3,150,000 pounds—more than 15 tons—of rice.  After the harvest, we will have meetings and make decisions about how to divide this rice. It will be very hard for us to do this by distributing physical rice.  Someone suggest that we create some sort of paper certificates that each represent a certain amount of rice.  For example, we could have ‘one pound notes’ that are worth one pound of rice. We could have ‘ten pound notes’ that are worth ten pounds, and for large transactions, we could have 100 pound notes that are worth 100 pounds. 

We want certificates that people won’t be able to counterfeit very easily.  (Otherwise, people will simply print their own money whenever they want it.) After some discussion, someone points out that we already have counterfeit-resistant paper certificates: the ship’s casino has a safe that contains a large amount of British currency.  This safe hasn’t been opened since the wreck because no one has had any need for British currency.  (The country of England doesn’t exist yet, so its currency is basically just pieces of paper to us here.) We can use the British pound certificates in the safe as rice certificates, with each $1 representing one pound of rice.

Here is how it will work: after Kathy has harvested the 3.15 million pounds of rice she will put it into the cargo hold of the ship.  We will call the cargo hold our ‘treasury.’  It will hold the real value we own, the ‘treasure.’  We will then issue a one pound note for each pound of rice in the treasury.  We will put this on a table in our meeting room.  We will then have a meeting to decide how to divide this money.  If you get a $1 note, you get a certificate that you can trade for a pound of rice any time you want (or at least any time the treasurer’s office is open). 

We will elect a treasurer to deal with the actual transactions. She starts by asking if anyone here has British currency.  For this example, let’s say no one has any.  (If they had it, they could turn it in; to make sure no one has any currency hidden away, she can scan all of the money that is valid to record the serial numbers and any currency with a number not in the database would be assumed to be counterfeit and worthless.  This could be done but it is easier to just assume no one has any.)  

Now, all British currency that exists in our world is in a safe.  She opens the safe, on camera and with a witness, and takes out exactly $3.15 million.

She puts this money on a set of tables in the center of the room.  We will now have a meeting and decide who we want to get the rice in the treasury. If we want a certain person to get a pound of rice, we will give her a one pound note.  The treasurer has posted hours where she will trade a pound of rice for a one pound note on request from anyone who has money.

Note about pronouns:

In this book, female personal pronouns will be used to refer to unspecified individuals of either sex.  The treasurer, and all other decision makers referred to with female pronouns, may be male or female.

How We Will Distribute the Money

Before the harvest, Kathy asked various people with special skills to help her with certain tasks, and asked for laborers to come forward to help with tasks that didn’t require skills. She told them that she thinks that people who help with work need to be compensated for their work at a fair rate. She told them that, after the harvest, she is going to work hard through whatever system evolves to make sure that they get fully compensated for the things they do, at the same rates they would have gotten back in the 21^st century. 

Kathy expects the group to agree to her requests.  We all know that it takes work to harvest grain.  We want people to be willing to do this work in the future.  If we pay them, at rates they think are fair, we can be confident they will do the work, year after year, and the rice will be brought in and put into the cargo hold, where people who need to eat can get it.

At the meeting, Kathy is going to be very convincing and get her way: the people who work on the farm are going to get paid the same amount of money they would have made in the 21^st century United States for doing the same work.

The value of a dollar will be about the same as it was back in the 21^st century United States:  it was enough to buy a pound of fully organic, 100% chemical-free wild rice there and it will buy the same amount here. 

We will see that people can make a great many things out of rice or parts of the rice plant; people will start to make these things and offer them for sale at prices that reflect the input materials, their labor, and a reasonable profit.  Because labor and material costs will be about the same as in our 2020 world, the costs of the many other products they will make out of rice will be about the same as in the 2020 world, as measured in United States dollars. 

Costs of Harvesting

Humans don’t make rice. 

Nature makes rice. 

When we got here, the rice was already here.  All we had to do was collect it.

Since we came back with an understanding of technology and a lot of parts to use to make machines, we were able to make machines that allowed us to harvest the entire crop in only a few days. Kathy knew how much money people needed for doing these things back in the 21^st century and wants her people to make the same amount in Pastland.  She has put together rates that lead to about the same total costs of harvesting and replanting she would have paid back in the 21^st century. These costs total $500,000. There are huge stacks of money on the table.  She is going to ask for $500,000 of this money to pay her workers and suppliers.

Since we collect all the rice, there will be no natural reseeding.  We therefore have to put some of this rice back into the ground as seeds for a crop next year.  She intends to buy the rice seed (trade money for it) and she needs 190,000 pounds of seed.  If we want her to make sure the same crop comes in next year, we will have to give her another $190,000 to buy the seed, and another $10,000 for the cost of planting, a total of $200,000. 

She is therefore going to ask for $700,000 of the $3.15 million that is on the table.  If she gets this, she can make sure everyone who does any work on the farm or provides any supplies gets fully paid at rates that are about the same as they were in the 2020 United States, and we have enough to reseed next year so we will get the same crop next year. 

Organization and Management of Food Collection

Kathy makes this request.  We vote and approve it.  Kathy has asked one of her friends to help with the money transactions.  Her friend is a professional accountant named ‘Sara.’  Sara will keep the books and make sure everyone is paid.  Sara comes up to the front with a luggage cart and takes stacks of money, until she has taken $700,000 off the table and put it onto the luggage cart. 

The treasurer has her sign for the money. 

Sara will make sure everyone is paid.

Sara asks to speak.  She tells the group that we have fully compensated everyone who provided labor, supplies, equipment, fuel, and other things needed for the operation of the harvest.  But we haven’t paid everyone who did anything important.  In fact, we haven’t paid the most important person. 

Kathy has not done any physical work. She was badly injured in the wreck and hasn’t been able to leave her bed.  She organized everything on paper, made calls to round up the workers, got them to give daily reports on their activity, and had people she trusted check on them to make sure they were honest in their reports. 

Kathy is a very nice and friendly person and a lot of people like her.  She couldn’t do everything herself because of her health, so she asked her friends to help out with some of the tasks needed to organize the operation, manage the workers, and take care of the accounting and other details. 

Sara falls into this category. She helped out with the accounting because Kathy asked her to help.  She did it as a favor.  After she started, she realized that Kathy really shouldn’t be doing this kind of work anyway:  Kathy was on meds and might make mistakes in her data entry or calculations.  Sara has done this kind of work for 20 years and could do these things in her sleep. 

If she had been doing this kind of work in the future, before she took this trip, she would have charged $5,000 for her services.  It didn’t take a lot of time so she wouldn’t charge for ‘hours of work.’  Her clients weren’t paying for ‘hours of work,’ they were paying to make sure a very complicated task was done properly.  In this case she did it all for free—this time, at least.  But who knows what will happen in the future?  If Kathy gets fully paid for all of the things she did, she can take care of Sara too, giving her enough to justify doing the same work next year.

A few other people also provided a great deal of assistance.  One person used to be in the field of ‘human resources’ back in the future.  Her job was finding out who could do what and finding out how to best utilize the skills and talents of the various people involved in the project.  The human resources expert created a database that showed what skills were available.  She found out who could do what and talked to the people who could do various things to see if they were wiling to help out.   After she found people who could help, she told them what Kathy had in mind:  she intended to ask for money to pay them at the same rates they had been paid in the future for the same work.  She found people who were willing to do the work, under the condition that Kathy kept her word and did everything she could to get them paid.  The HR expert helped a lot: if she hadn’t been there, Kathy may not have been able to find the people needed to make things work smoothly. The HR expert didn’t ask for pay, but Sara says we should make sure Kathy has enough to pay her anyway. Everyone who did anything to make sure the grain got into storage should get something, even if it is just a token to show that we aren’t taking them for granted and are going to take care of people who do these things in the future. 

How many people were involved? How much money should they get for the things they did?

Sara says she doesn’t know.

Kathy made these arrangements. Only Kathy knows. 

However, we can make a pretty good guess:

Back in the 21st century United States, certain companies kept teams of people to do the work of organizing and managing properties that generated revenue.  Sara says that she used to work for a company in this field and knows that they would have charged $50,000 a year to do the things that Sara did, if these things had taken place in the 21^st century.  Sara suggests we give Kathy this amount of money as her compensation for organizing everything and managing it, with the understanding that she will take care of everyone who stepped forward to help her so that they won’t feel anyone is taking advantage of them and that we all appreciate their efforts. 

We discuss this issue.

Later in this book, I will discuss some complicated arguments that we might expect at this point.  There are a lot of people who feel that it is immoral to pay people who simply organize and don’t do any actual physical work anything at all.  If we do pay them, they think that it isn’t moral for them to get more, per hour of work they do, than laborers get.  The people get angry when they find out that the people who don’t do any real work and merely organize—often not really doing anything significant at all—get paid at rates that work out to be hundreds of times more, per hour of work, than people who do hard physical work. 

They think this is immoral and won’t accept it.

We will also see that people in some real-world natural law societies refused to pay for organizational services at rates that encouraged people to gain the required skills.  In these systems, no one really knew how to organize tasks that were needed for complex operations like the operation of a rice farm.  We will see that it was quite frequent for people in these situations to not get enough to eat and end up with extreme hardship and mass starvation. No one knew what had to be done to keep food coming in and no one had any real incentive to go through the effort to figure this out.  There was food out in the fields but, because they couldn’t bring it in properly, store it, or make sure everyone was compensated for the things they did, the food went the same places it had gone before humans arrived (to other animals) and the humans starved to death.  Humans are capable of planning and organizing.  We can do these things.  But if we don’t do them (perhaps because of a belief that paying certain people is unfair), we have no advantages to compensate for our incredible disadvantages relative to other animals.  (For example, a great need for energy to keep our uninsulated and unprotected bodies at the proper temperature, the need to be basically unconscious for a third of the day while we sleep, and the need to spend more than a decade to raise each newborn to self-sufficiency; if we don’t have advantages to offset these disadvantages, we are not going to be able to compete with birds, fish, possums, and other animals without these disadvantages.) 

Some natural law societies refused to pay for organizational and management services, but some realized the importance of these skills and set up systems so that they had well organized systems to take in food and other necessities.  Those that did this survived; those that did not perished. 

It is important for the points of this book that the people in our group accept the need to have these things done and agree to take care of the people who do them so they keep doing them.

Sara has proposed we pay Kathy $50,000 a year, with the understanding that she use this money to pay the people who helped her enough to show that we aren’t taking them for granted; she can keep the rest of the money herself.  We approve the expense.

Incomes

This makes a total of $750,000 that has been taken out of the pile of money.  It started with $3.15 million, so now there is $2.4 million there. 

Everyone who has done anything associated with planting, management of the farm during the growing season, or harvest, has been fully compensated for everything they do.  No one in our group can claim to be responsible for the existence of the rice this extra money represents. 

Yet it must go somewhere. 

I want to skip over the discussions were we argue about how to divide this money for now and discuss what would happen if we simply divide it evenly. 

There is $2.4 million on the table. There are 1,000 of us.  Everyone gets $2,400.  The treasurer calls out our names, one by one, and we come to the front and get our cash. 

Everyone on earth gets $2,400 of this $2.4 million. 

This is a kind of ‘basic income’ that everyone gets:  it is the foundation of their total income.  People who work in production get more.  (It doesn’t make sense to exclude them from the divisions of the left over money because they worked; this punishes them for working.)  People who organize or help with management get more. But everyone gets at least $2,400.

A Basic Economy

You are there in Pastland.

You get a pile of cash.

Each $1 bill is a receipt for 1 pound of rice.  You have enough money to buy a total of 2,400 pounds of rice over the course of the next year.  This works out to 7 pounds of dry rice every day.  This is a great deal more rice than you could eat.  It would be enough (dry) rice to make 15 pounds of boiled rice each day.

You could not eat this much.

You would explode.

For a few weeks, however, most people live on boiled rice, because no other foods are available.

One of our people, a woman named Tanya, used to be an organic duck and goose egg farmer back in the future, before we took this trip.  She buys several hundred pounds of rice and puts it out to attract ducks and geese. She puts several small piles of rice out in the open that they will see from the sky, in order to attract them to the ground.  She then makes little trails of rice that go to nests she has built for the birds out of rice straw, in an area she can protect from predators. 

Ducks and geese see the rice piles and come down to investigate.  They follow the trails to the nests.  They like the nests and spend time there.  Birds have horrible night vision and have to bed down for the night; they often have a hard time finding safe places.  The nests are safe (Tanya makes sure of this).  They spend a lot of time there, eating the food Tanya puts out for them. They lay eggs in the nests. 

The birds are basically acting as protein factories.  They take in the rice, which is carbohydrates, turn it into eggs, which are mostly proteins, and then lay the eggs.  Birds’ bodies are very efficient at this conversion process.  (There is an evolutionary reason for this efficiency: eggs are very good food for many animals.  Most of the eggs that birds lay get stolen.  If they weren’t efficient at producing more eggs, they wouldn’t have enough chicks to replace them and would die out, to be replaced by more efficient birds.) 

Tanya knows how to keep her egg production high.  She keeps track of the amount that each bird eats and the number of eggs it lays. Birds that don’t have a very high ‘conversion efficiency’ of carbohydrates into proteins become dinner themselves.  Those that lay very well remain in her flock.  Those that lay extremely well may be allowed to keep their chicks and raise them, to make sure the next generation lays very well. 

The ship’s internet is still working. Tanya sets up a website she calls ‘Tanya’s Organic Eggs’ and offers eggs for sale.

Now people can buy two things with their money: rice or eggs.

One man sees some wild goats and puts out some rice to attract them.  Over a few weeks, he brings them closer and eventually he can pet them. A few weeks later he is feeding them daily.  Some of the doe goats he feeds are pregnant; they have kids.  Doe goats produce a lot more milk than their kids need.  He milks them and opens a dairy where he sells milk, cream, and butter. A lot of people like these things; demand is high, and the supply is low (at least at first) so he makes a lot of money doing this.  Others realize they can make money doing the same thing.  After some time, several people are offering dairy products and the prices come down to the level where everyone who wants dairy products can afford them.

Wild pigs live in this area.  A woman puts out some rice porridge to attract them.  They love it.  (Uncooked grains are very hard for pigs to digest so they generally ignore them.  But the cooked rice is like a feast to them.)  She puts out the porridge every night.  After a week, she digs a trap, covers it with straw, and balances a bowl of porridge on some sticks on top of the trap.  A pregnant sow drops into the trap and soon she has a dozen piglets and a sow.

She puts up an ad on the ship’s internet advertising that she will pick up anyone’s food waste at no cost, to feed her pigs.  People start putting out their food waste for her to pick up.

Pigs are like living garbage disposals.  They eat just about anything and turn it into pork.  She makes a deal with a person who used to be a butcher back in the future: she will provide the live animals, the butcher can turn them into bacon, ham, pork chops, and ribs, and they will sell the meat over the internet and split the income.

A person begins to grind the rice into flour and several people start baking breads, noodles, tortillas, cakes, and cookies with the flour and selling all manner of baked goods.  You can place an order over the internet and they will deliver the baked goods to your cabin door.

One person in our group, a man named ‘Dennis,’ used to own a microbrewery back in Spain.  The main ingredient in beer is rice.  Dennis starts making beer and selling it in one of the ship’s bars.

One of our people used to make ethanol for fuel for vehicles back in Indonesia before she took this trip. She made ethanol out of rice and understands the method: boil the rice for several days to turn it into a mash, let the mash ferment for several weeks until the sugars turn into alcohol, then distill the mash.  After the first distillation, she gets a mixture of rice water and alcohol, called ‘saké.’  This is an alcoholic beverage that a lot of people like to drink.  After the second distillation, she gets pure grain alcohol, called ‘ethanol.’

She makes both saké and grain alcohol. She sells the saké to Dennis to resell in his bar and sells the ethanol to people who need fuel, like the operator of the harvesting machine. 

Wild grapes grow along the river. Several people start making wine. They sell their products to Dennis to resell in his bar.  Crawdads, catfish, and lobster live in the waterways.  People catch them and sell them.  Various people open clubs and restaurants to serve meals and drinks. The clubs hire musicians to attract guests.

One of our people, a woman named ‘Sally,’ used to run a bank in England before she took this trip.  She knows a lot of people don’t like carrying cash. They would rather just have a card and pay for everything with the card.  She opens a bank here in Pastland: she will take in deposits, hold the money for the owners, and allow them to make withdrawals with cards. (On cruise ships, people use their electronic door keys for credit cards to buy things.  Everyone already has a card and there are thousands of electronic card readers all over the ship.)

Initially, Sally charges very high fees.  Several other people open their own banks to compete with her, driving bank fees down.  You can choose to keep your money in a bank; if you decide to do this, you can decide which bank to use.

Now that we have banks, most people don’t even bother with cash: they have their incomes deposited directly into their bank accounts and pay for everything through electronic deductions over the internet or with their debit cards.

How Do We Live?

No one pays for shelter.

We all live in our cabins on the ship.

Volunteers have set up an electricity system, a water system and an internet.  (We will vote to pay them soon:  we want them to know we aren’t taking them for granted so they will keep working.)  We get electricity, water, and internet for free. 

All we need coming in on a continuing basis is food.

Over the course of the year, people will trade their money for rice.  The amount of rice in the cargo hold will go down and the amount of money in circulation will go down at the same rate.  (When a $1 bill is traded for rice, the serial number is taken out of the database of ‘currency in circulation:  this is no longer money.  The bill is put back into the safe to be taken out after the harvest when we again have to trade rice for money.)  By the end of the year, a lot of people are getting pretty short on cash. But then Kathy organizes a harvest again, puts 3.15 million pounds of rice in storage, and we go through the same process. 

Everyone gets $2,400 again. 

Common Services

The electricity plant was put in place by volunteers.  When we first got here, it was hot and everyone wanted air conditioning.  A lot of people pitched in to build the plant and it now exists.  It has a turbine that sits in the flow of the ricer and runs a generator.  It doesn’t take a lot of work to keep it operating, but someone has to check on it.  A volunteer has been doing this.

The water system is also pretty automatic.  Most of the time, no one has to touch it.  But, once in a while, someone has to go to make sure the pumps are working right and keeping the tanks on the ship at the property level.  The internet works pretty seamlessly, but sometimes it fails and someone has to unplug the servers, wait 10 seconds, and plug them in again, to get them to reboot.  We also have a treasurer and granary operator who work for free.

 We want these people to know we appreciate their effort.  We decide to pay them and vote on the services individually.  At the end of the election, we wind up spending $400,000 on public services.  

This doesn’t reduce the amount of value that each of us gets out of the $2.4 million left after paying production costs.  We still each get $2,400 a year; we just get $2,000 of this in cash and $400 of it as ‘free’ electricity, water, treasury services, grain storage, and other services.  We are all getting a minimum of $2,400 a year from the land.

1: Introduction

Imagine that you are a member of a research team on an alien world called ‘cosmos.’

Your team is monitoring planets with life forms that have attained radio technology.  It has just located a planet that is new to the ‘radio capable’ club.  The people of this newly-discovered world call their planet ‘earth.’ 

Your team analyzes the different kinds of ‘societies’ or ‘arrangements of existence’ of the beings of other worlds which have gained technologies that the scientists on cosmos can monitor and analyze.  They want to know how intelligent beings on other worlds organize their existence, how they interact with the physical world around them and with other members of their species.  They have studied thousands of worlds that have attained radio technology over the course of the past few millennia. 

Now they have a new subject for study.

The earth is sending out vast amounts of radio information.  Nearly all computers have some sort of wireless connection; signals to go routers that divide them and send them to various towers or servers, which communicate with other computers wirelessly (using radio, light, or other detectable electromagnetic waves).  There are roughly 6,580,000,000 smart phones in use in the world today; they all communicate constantly with towers sending information even when they aren’t in actual use; people manage their appointments, make zoom calls, check the markets, check their security cameras at home, watch the news, watch movies, and even buy products with these devices. 

Computers on cosmos have been monitoring radio emissions from earth for the last 25 years.  They have very sophisticated radio receivers that pick up all the signals and send them to computers that sort them out.  Over the last 25 years, every internet web page on earth has been accessed by some sort of wireless modem, phone, computer, or other device.  The giant radio dishes around cosmos received and recorded all of these signals.  Computers on cosmos sorted out these signals and reproduced each individual page on the internet, each text or email, each silly video of a cat walking on piano keys, and each social-media picture of a baby, each red-light violator, each credit card transaction, and each recorded cell phone or satellite phone conversation.   Each has been filed both with the reference and file numbers they were assigned on earth, and using a second system designed by the scientists of cosmos to help them sort out all the information from all of the worlds they monitor, so they can compare features of these worlds.  Cosmos happens to be a remote world, thousands of light years from any of the worlds it studies, and since signals can only travel at the speed of light, they are looking at the signals that left the worlds they study thousands of years ago.  They can’t communicate with people on these other worlds, at least not without a lag of thousands of years so, for the time being, they are only listening and studying.

What Would Scientists On Other World’s Think of 21^st Century Earth Societies? 

The computers on cosmos have built a kind of mirror of the earth electronic infrastructure.  So far, this has all been done by machine.  No one has looked at any of the data.  But the computers have put it together in a way that will make it easy to understand.  Basically, they have a kind of mirror internet on cosmos with all information on the earth internet, together with large files of information that is not on the earth internet but they have recorded and indexed. Researchers there can submit a query in their own language; their computers will translate it into the appropriate earth language and search for results using the same search engines that earth people use to get results in earth languages, with a ‘translate’ key they can push to get it into their languages.  

If they want to know how tall the earth people are, they can ask; the computer will access height information, cross reference it for units that are the same on both worlds.  (The scientific definition for the unit of length called a ‘meter’ is:  1,650,763.73 wavelengths in vacuum of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the levels 2p10 and 5d5 of the krypton-86 atom.  Using this definition, scientists on cosmos could determine the height that earth people would be if we could be transported somehow to their world.)   If they want to watch the news for a certain date many years ago, they can ask and the computer will access it and present it.  If they want to know whether human societies have ‘governments,’ the can ask and the computer will tell them.  (We will see that not all societies of thinking beings with physical needs need governments to operate; in fact, there have been societies in our past that didn’t need or have governments.)  Whatever they want, they can find out.  Their computers don’t interface with any computers on earth, of course, because they are thousands of light years away.  But the information is there and they can access it there as easily as we can access it here on earth.  

No living being on cosmos has yet looked at this information. 

Your first day of work, your boss tells you that the managing team members aren’t going to be available for a few weeks.  She needs you and some of the other low-ranking researchers to go over the data from this newly-discovered radio-capable world and get some preliminary idea how the people on earth live. You are to provide background for the higher-level researchers.  She says she wants you to put together the basics in a report to be presented when all team members are available. 

Your boss tells you that you might start by immersing yourself in the earth societies.  Imagine you actually live on the tiny blue planet.  Pick a few spots that are different:  earth people may live differently in different places.  Watch the movies and television shows in that locations you select to understand what is entertaining to people there.  Check out whatever the earth beings consider to be ‘news.’  Surf  the web, just as someone on earth would do, following links to take you to whatever catches your interest. 

After you have spent a few weeks of this, try to find an objective and scientific way to explain what you have seen.

How do the humans live? 

Living things need food and other physical things to remain alive.  They have to interact with the physical world in some way to get these things. How do they do it?  Do they create organizations or select classes of people to own each part of the planet, then grant everything to the owners, who can then trade food and other items for other things?  Do they consider the world around them to be their provider, a giver of gifts that no one can own, and divide these gifts in some way among the people of their world? Do they mix these options, creating global rules that grant certain rights to share certain parts of the food the land produces among all humans, and letting people or organizations own other rights?  Do they have contests or wars where they compete to get the good things the land produces (or ownership of various parts of the world itself), then accept that the winners of these contests have the rights to everything in certain areas?  If they do this, what are the terms of these contests, what tools (or weapons, if the contests are violent) do they use?  How is the winner determined?  How are the prizes divided?

After you have analyzed the way the earth people interact with the world, consider the way they organize their interactions with each other:  Do they have leaders?  Are all humans given the same role or vote in global elections, or do some have priority? Do they have clans or gangs with greater power in the world and, if they do, how is membership in each clan or gang determined? 

Your boss tells you that she doesn’t want anything detailed, she just wants the basics.  When the team comes, they will need to start somewhere.  They have looked at a great many other worlds that have intelligent life.  They want to know where the system on earth fits in with the systems on other worlds.

Once you have put together something to present, try to name the system on earth. 

The team members won’t want to say ‘and the type of society the earth people have created’ every time they refer to this system.  They will need a name and part of your job is to come up with one, preferably one that is short and calls the system on earth to mind to anyone who hears it. 

The Foundation Of Earth Societies

As soon as you start looking at earth, you would see that there is something very important about the way the societies on this planet work:   The people of earth divide their world with imaginary lines into individual territories called things like ‘nations’ or ‘sovereign states’ or ‘countries.’ 

The exact number of these entities changes over time but there are about 200 of them in place as of the earth year 2000 (the starting year of your data) and the number is close to 200 as of 2021 (the latest year that you have information about so you can use this number in your report.

The earth people seem to consider nations to be extremely important. 

The people of each nation act almost as if the nation they were born into (‘their nation’) is independent of the world and its people are independent of the human race.  In fact, some nations even make a formal ‘declaration of independence’ stating that they are a ‘sovereign’ entity, with the right to make all decisions in the borders of their territory without any need to give any consideration whatever to anything outside of these borders. 

Maps show the borders between these entities very clearly, usually with the heaviest and most noticeable lines; map makers color the land on the different sides of these borders differently, to make it easy for earth people to tell which nation each part of the world is a part of. 

In many cases, the lines on the maps don’t correspond to any real physical geographic feature on the planet. The real lines on the maps therefore refer to imaginary lines on the real planet.  The people on earth would never be able to find the locations of these imaginary lines without a great deal of effort.  They hire surveyors who refer to the maps and use very advanced tools to locate the imaginary lines on the earth that correspond to the lines that have been drawn on the map. 

Usually, the lines on the map are drawn by treaty negotiators after events the earth people call ‘wars.’ Both sides in the negotiations appear to want more land on their sides of the borders and try to make this happen; if they can’t agree they go back to war until they decide to go back to negotiations.  This can go on for hundreds of years. 

After they have decided on the lines on the maps and marked them, and hired surveyors to find the places on the earth that correspond to them, the earth people hire contractors come in and build fences or walls.  These barriers are often very formidable and include some of the largest structures on earth.  (Walls and ruins of walls are everywhere in Europe and Asia; some are so large they can be seen from space with the naked eye.)  By their actions, it appears that the earth people to care more about the exact locations of these imaginary lines than just about anything else, even their own lives. 

Even after the complex negotiations have settled the locations, the people on earth keep squabbling and arguing over this issue.  Sometimes, these squabbles turn into the horrific activities imaginable: well-planned, well-funded, no-holds-barred orgies of mass murder, mayhem, and destruction that turn hundreds of thousands of acres of what once had been productive land into barren wastelands and leave millions dead.  They appear to be doing these things for no reason other than to determine the exact locations of imaginary lines and make sure that the actual lines, when they are located and marked, are put in the right places. 

They call these lines ‘borders.’

Borders appear to divide the land of the earth into individual parcels.  Earth people use a great many terms to refer to the entities they say are created by the borders, including sovereign states, republics, emirates, caliphates, kingdoms, countries, nations, commonwealths, and unions, to name a few.  You might pick one of these terms in your report to refer to these entities—nations for example—and have a footnote that explains that you are using this as a generic term to refer to the entities created by borders on earth in general, making no distinction between ‘nations’ or ‘countries’ or ‘sovereign states’ or the other entities the earth people use as names for the divisions. 

Footnote:  this book uses the term ‘nations’ as generic one to refer to the entities inside of the imaginary lines called ‘international borders.’  

The people who are born inside of each of these nations seem to act as if they believe the part of the planet inside of the borders belongs to them, in a sort of collective way.  They are possessive about it, as if they believe that this part of the planet was created by their ancestors, or by some creator that gave it to their ancestors, and they can treat it as if it they themselves made it and have the moral right to do anything they want with it. 

They act as if they believe the people inside their nations are different kinds of beings with entirely different rights than people outside the nations. 

People inside the lines, their ‘fellow citizens,’ have rights which all people in that nation must respect and help protect.  If they infringe on these rights in any way, even simply saying things that are called ‘racial slurs’ and hurt the feelings of others, they can be arrested and put into prison.  People outside of the nations don’t have these rights; in some cases, when the people of one nation have disputes with another (generally over the locations of the imaginary liens), they are classified as ‘enemies.’  All people inside the nation must contribute to fund to be used to buy weapons and pay soldiers to kill these ‘foreigners’ and destroy everything that these outsiders may possibly use to defend themselves, take care of their children, or simply remain alive.   

The nations issue a document to each newborn certifying the nation where this event took place.  In many ways, it is the most important document that people will ever see in their lives.  It will determine many realities of their lives, from beginning to end. When children go to school, they will be taught that the nation where this event took place is ‘their nation.’ They will be told it gives them human rights; it builds roads for them, creates order for them, and builds the schools that educate them.  People are free, inside that nation, because the nation gives them freedom.  Liberty, equality, majestic purple mountains, and the beauty of the sunset shining on the sea all exist because the nation provides them, out of love, to all its people. 

In return for the wonderful things the nation gives them, they will have to make sacrifices.  They will have to turn over a large part of any money they make in their lives to the revenue service of their nation.  They will also have to pay fees and taxes on just about everything they do from the time of their birth until their inheritance matters have been sorted out after they are dead, and thousands of different taxes will be built in to the prices of everything they buy.  If they want to feed their children, they will have to pay their nation for the right to do this.  A very large percentage of the money they pay as taxes will go to pay for weapons, to provide support for the weapons factories, and to pay for soldiers who will use these weapons to kill people who the schools tell children are ‘enemies’ and need to die so that their glorious and noble nation can have all the wonderful things it has. 

They will be told of the great heroes of the past who made incredible sacrifices so that the nation could exist and provide the wonderful things it provides to the people it loves.  Many of them killed thousands and some killed hundreds of thousands of people in enemy countries for this goal.  Some lost their arms, eyesight, their sons, or their sanity (it is very hard to kill people who have done nothing to harm you, especially children, and remain sane) for this goal.  The greatest of them all, the heroes who we must all emulate and seek to follow, gave their very lives for their country.  They will be told that we are at the epitome of civilization; we have reached the ultimate in freedom, liberty, justice, and the majesty of mountains, due to the sacrifices of those who came before us.  If the children learning these things don’t continue their work, everything they have done will have been in vain.  The children will be told they must anxiously to be called forward and be given the opportunity to kill and destroy people’s life work for their nation.  The highest honor they will ever be given will be the honor of being called to give their lives for their nations. 

Perhaps on many planets with intelligent life, children may be taught that killing other people who have done nothing to harm them is wrong, something they must never do.  On earth, the schools seem to take the opposite approach:  as long as they are killing for their ‘nation,’ it is not only a good thing, it is the most moral and correct thing they could do.  To even think about whether this may possibly not be the right thing to do is an act of treason and betrayal of all that is noble, good, pure, and righteous.

A look at the adult news will reinforce the incredible importance of nations in earth societies.  The earth people have built devices called ‘three stage thermonuclear devices.’  These devices use an incredibly technologically sophisticated set of devices to create explosions of incredible power. 

The first stage is a simple ‘fission’ reaction. This first stage is so tiny it contributes almost nothing to the explosive power of the bomb.  It can barely destroy a city (the devices that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima were fission devices.)  This provides the energy to compress and heat a bit of hydrogen at the center of the bomb to the conditions that exist at the center of the sun.  This starts a second explosion called a ‘fusion’ reaction, which is the same reaction that lights up the sun. 

Although this secondary explosion is thousands of times more powerful than the first one, it also is so small, relative to the really powerful explosion, that it contributes almost nothing to the explosive power of the bomb.  In early testing of hydrogen bombs, scientists realized that the second stage releases an incredibly powerful pulse of gamma radiation, a kind of radiation with the ability to alter matter and turn it directly into energy.  This gamma radiation can cause atoms that would ordinarily not explode (because the energy holding them together is too great) to engage in nuclear reactions which, as far as we know, are more powerful than any natural nuclear reactions in the universe.  The third stage can be as large as desired.  It could be large enough to turn the earth into nothing but quarks, leptons, and bosons that will never again be atoms, let alone a planet that anyone can live on, for the rest of time. 

The largest bomb of this type that has been tested was equivalent to 50 million tons of TNT.  (A fully loaded train holds 10,000 tons, so to carry this much TNT you would need 5,000 freight trains, loaded to capacity, with an explosive so powerful a single pound will destroy an entire home.)  This bomb was tested on October 30, 1961.  Researchers didn’t test larger bombs than this for a simple reason:  They had determined that any explosion larger than this had a very substantial potential to destroy the entire planet.  Although they didn’t test them, they did build them. Military planners were in a cold war to build weapons of deterrence:  they needed the enemies to know that if the enemies used their weapons, the good guys would respond with an attack that was many times greater.  The goal was something called ‘mutual assured destruction’ (or MAD), considered to be the ultimate deterrent.  After they had built enough weapons to destroy the world hundreds of times over, they kept building because they didn’t know if this would be assured to destroy the entire planet.  (After all, they couldn’t test them.)  At some point, they realized that they had succeeded.  This point came after they had built enough to destroy the world roughly 100,000 times. At this point, they realized that they could safely cut back and would still have the assurance they needed, so they signed treaties and, at this time, there is only enough of these weapons to destroy the world 22,000 times over. 

Qqq nuclear bomb stockpile chart

As of 2021, more than 22,000 of these three stage thermonuclear bombs are in declared arsenals that are declared in public documents.  Most of them are in multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles in the nose cones of intercontinental ballistic missiles. If these devices are needed to defend the interests of the nations that own them, they can be exploded anywhere on earth within 90 minutes after the command to use them has been issued. There are another 78,000 of these devices in storage, ready to be activated in case destroying the world 22,000 times over isn’t enough to decide the war. 

These devices were created to protect the interests of the entities the earth people call ‘nations.’  If used, they will destroy the planet and exterminate the human race forever. 

The people who make military decisions on earth know this. 

But they have decided, for some reason, that the interests of the entities called ‘nations’ are more important than the existence of the human race and the planet earth.  This is a tautology, a self evident truth:  it must be correct or these devices wouldn’t exist.

What are these things that the earth people call ‘nations?’ 

How did they come to exist? 

What purpose were they created to serve?

What is it about the entities the earth people call ‘nations’ that makes them so important to the people on the tiny blue planet?

If you are new at the job on cosmos and have never studied a society that had nations before, you will probably have a hard time figuring this out.  We will see, in the course of this book, that it is very hard to understand the way certain structures within societies work if you have never seen anything else and have no basis for comparison.  If you had never seen a society that operated like this before, it will be hard for you to relate to the earth societies or understand them well enough to explain them to the other members of your team.

But, of course, you have a job.

You have to submit a report. You are a scientist and are writing a report for scientists.  You will naturally want to make your report scientifically.  How can you explain the entities the earth people call ‘nations’ in a scientific way? 

Belief Based Societies And Intellect-Based Societies

This book explains a great many different kinds of societies.  We will see that humans are truly incredibly capable beings, able to organize themselves/ourselves many different ways.  We are able to survive, function, and even prosper in a great many different types of societies.  They/we can start with several entirely different foundations and build on them in various different ways, leading to entirely different societies.

We will see that there are two basic places that a group of people who are in a position to build any kind of society may start: 

First, they may start with logic and reason.  They can do scientific studies of the different structures that can be part of societies of thinking beings; they can then figure out the different ways these structures can be put together to make finished ‘societies.’  Once they have done this, they can analyze their needs and come up with a idea of where the people of their world want to go into the future. They can find the system that has the greatest potential to move them toward that future and adopt it.

That is one way that a group of intelligent beings might go about building a society.  But it is not the only way.

If the people on a world evolved from lower animals, they might not have gotten their full intellects instantly, like turning on a light.  They may have advanced in some areas of their minds very quickly, but in others more slowly.  They may have had instincts and emotions that pushed them to act certain ways.  When they first gained intellectual abilities, they may not have turned these abilities to a scientific analysis of societies right away. They may have focused their intellectual capabilities in areas their feelings and emotions (manifestations of their instinctual pressures) told them were important, and basically left other areas (like the different ways social structures could work) unexplored. 

For example, imagine a group of beings on a world that are evolving over time, with their capabilities gradually increasing due to the effects of natural selection.  Say that, at some point in their evolution, these beings gained evolutionary advantages by marking off certain limits to their territory (most earth beings that do this use urine scent marks), identifying the members of their own tribe or clan (most animals on earth have better senses of smell than humans and can identify each individual this way).  They had some sort of instinctual pressure to protect the marked territory for the exclusive use of authorized residents. 

Even before these beings were true humans, they would have societies.  They would have organizational structures that determined how they interacted with others and the world around them.  They would interact with their world by dividing it into territories, marking the territories, and defending them.  They couldn’t have created these societies through a scientific analysis of the different components that were parts of societies because, in this example, we are looking at them before they developed the ability to think this way.  Their societal structures were built on instincts. 

At some point, these beings may make a transition and become true humans, with the same brain lobes and mental communication protocols as components as we have now.  They may have the power to understand complex ideas both as expressed to them from others and in their own communications to others.  You if you were there and could talk to them, you might ask them how they feel about their enemies crossing the borders.  They may tell you, if they had words for their emotions, that they felt fear:  the enemies were trying to kill them.  The enemies would stop at nothing in this attack and they might be killed.  They were very, very afraid. 

Then, if you asked them how they felt when they were killing their enemies, they may tell you their word for hatred.  The evil ones had to die. The didn’t sit down and work it all out logically.  They simply had feelings which were expressions of their instinctual pressures. These feelings took over when they were in battle and they didn’t analyze whether the people in front of them were bad people and had done something society needed to punish. They just wanted to kill them.

They felt these emotions:  They feared and hated the people on the other side of the lines.  Perhaps, when they first gained their abilities to think logically, they didn’t even consider using them to help them build societies.  They needed weapons.  This was their first priority.  They could think about other things once the ones they hated and feared were gone. They didn’t really build societies.  The inherited societies. Their societies weren’t built on a logical analysis of anything.  They had priorities.  They were surrounded by enemies.  They needed weapons.  they could worry about other things, like whether they could organize their societies differently, once they had killed all the people who used the wealth on their sides of the lines to build weapons to threaten them. 

If you gave them a little time after they became humans, they would be able to figure out how to smelt copper. (From time to time, going through ashes, they would find little bits of metal that had melted.  This was very useful and could be hammered into many shapes.)  It is a short scientific step from smelting copper to smelting iron and making steel.  Once they had steel, they would be able to make incredibly strong materials including steel tubes.  Eventually they would discover chemical mixtures that would explode. They could put some of this explosive mixture into a steel tube, put a projectile in afterward, light a fuse and send a projectile flying hundreds of feet at a speed capable of piercing skin. They would have guns.  They could then make rockets, grenades, mines, and bombs. The enemies would get these advanced weapons too so, to defend themselves, they would keep working on better and better weapons.  Eventually they would have engines, trucks, and planes. 

On earth, we got from the first diesel engines and trucks to ICBMS with MIRV warheads containing three stage nuclear bombs in about 50 years. 

For your report on cosmos, you have to provide some insight as to the reason the societies on earth work as they do. Perhaps you may speculate that something like this happened on the tiny blue planet. 

Perhaps intellectual talents of the earth people developed unevenly.  Perhaps they were very good at figuring out how to build new and better weapons and developed very advanced sciences to help them in this area.  But they didn’t use these science to help them understand the basic realities of their societies.  Perhaps they had primitive superstitious beliefs about why they were on the world that were created at a very early period in their development.  Perhaps they saw the wonders of nature around them and speculated that there had to be some sort of intelligence behind this.  How can flowers and bees, fish and trees, the beauty of the sunset and glow of the moon through the forest at night, the awesome sight of a fawn feeding next to its mother in a snow covered field, all be meaningless consequences of the operation of laws without any intention behind them? 

Perhaps people saw this and though that it all had to be the result of intelligent design. 

There must be a designer or creator.

This creator must have done everything for a reason.  What is this reason?  They may have speculated.  They say that the people of the world divided the land into territories and fought over the territories.  They may have speculated that this couldn’t be the case if the creator didn’t want it to be the case.  It must be the will of the creator that we act this way.  Perhaps, at some time in the past, the creator may have picked out a few people who were his favorites; the creator then split off certain parcels for these favorites and gave them to them, perhaps giving them special orders to use force to defend them (to ‘hold dominion over them’) and to do anything necessary to the land to make it better able to provide the things they needed (to ‘subdue’ the land). 

Perhaps they divided the land into territories and fought over it because this was supposed to happen:  The one who created the world they lived on had planned it and made it happen.

Three religions on earth are called the ‘Abrahamic religions.’  These three religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, are all built on principles established in Book one of the Torah, which is also known as the First Book of Moses, and, in the Christian holy book, Genesis.  This passage is common to parts of this book accepted by all three of the above religions: 

In that day LORD JEHOVAH established a covenant with Abram and said to him: “To your seed I shall give this land from the river of Egypt and unto the great river, the river Euphrates:

“That day” was in the year 1896 BC, or roughly 4,000 years ago, according to date calculations made by modern scholars.  To this day, the three religions above are fighting over the exact meaning of the above phrase.  Who is the rightful owner of all land between the Nile river in Egypt and the Euphrates River?

Moslems claim that Abraham’s first born son, Ishmael, is the only possible heir because only the first born son has any inheritance rights.  The founder of the Moslem religion, Muhammad,  descends directly from Ishmael and this makes this land the property of his seed, meaning the Islamic people.  No one else has any right to it.

Christians claim that Ishmael didn’t have any inheritance rights because he was illegitimate (the son of a family servant, fathered by Abraham).  He inherited nothing so the Moslems, being his seed, have no rights to this land.  The first legitimate son of Abraham, Isaac, was the ancestor of Jesus.  The bequest in the above passage makes it clear, to the Christians, that creator of this land wanted it to go to the Christians.  (Several passages in the same book indicate that the creator never intended an illegitimate son to inherit this land.)  It belongs to the Christians by the highest authority in the universe, the authority of the creator. 

Abraham had 12 more sons.  These sons were the patriarchs of the 12 tribes of Israel and the Jewish people are their descendents.  Jews claim that other passages in the text indicate they were the ‘chosen people,’ selected specifically by the creator to own this 3,200,000 square kilometers of the planet earth. 

 This dispute has been going on for thousands of years.  Today, and every other day for several thousand years, people who believe their religion (whatever it is) is right, and the other religions are wrong, are collecting money from their people (as taxes, tithes, and other contributions) to build weapons to enforce their claims.  The powers in the area officially spends more than $100,000,000,000 ($100 billion) a year on weapons, enough to feed more than 50 million people, and numerous other countries (including the United States, China, Russia, the UK and the EU) spend hundreds of billions more. 

If this is what happened on earth, you aren’t going to be able provide a scientific and logical explanation for many of the structures of their societies, particularly those related to territoriality.  In your report, you may simply state that certain aspects of the societies of the people on earth don’t appear to have been created for any logical reason. The earth people aren’t logical in every area and mix emotion and logic in their decision making in very dangerous ways.  This has led to structures like those the humans call ‘nations’ that appear to be very dangerous.

Territorial Sovereignty Societies

What might you call the foundational principle of the earth societies?  They divide the land of their world into individual territories. They then create rules and laws that grant the rights the earth people call ‘sovereignty’ to each of these territories. 

To understand the earth societies, we really need to understand the term, ‘sovereignty.’  Sovereignty is a legal term, used to define the legal rights claimed by certain people (the decision-makers of nations) on behalf of other people (the legal inhabitants of their nations). 

You can find entire books about this concept and descriptions of the meaning of this term from the perspective of national leaders, international courts, unions of nations, natural courts (the United States constitution splits sovereignty between the federal government and the states and the Supreme Court has issued formal rulings on this), and many others in many places.  Although there are some differences, the basic idea is pretty simple: sovereignty is absolute, total, complete, indisputable, uncontestable, paramount, authority and control over that territory.  The people with sovereignty over a part of the world claim and enforce the same rights that a being with the power to create a planet out of nothingness would claim for this creation: It exists only as long as the creator wants it to exist and the creator can do anything to it, without limits of any kind.

Let’s consider how this works on practice in earth by looking at a few legal definitions of the term.  The first is from Blacks Law Dictionary:

Sovereignty:

The possession of sovereign power; supreme political authority; paramount control of the constitution and frame of government and its administration; the self-sufficient source of political power, from which all specific political powers are derived; the international independence of a state, combined with the right and power of regulating all internal affairs without foreign dictation; also a political society, or state, which is sovereign and independent.

See Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 Dall. 455, 1 L. Ed. 440: Union Bank v. Hill, 3 Cold. (Tenn.) 325; Moore v. Shaw, 17 Cal. 218, 79 Am. Dec. 123. “The freedom of the nation has its correlate in the sovereignty of the nation. It is in and through the determination of its sovereignty that the order of the nation is constituted and maintained.” Mulford, Nation, p. 129. “If a determinate human superior, not in a habit of obedience to a like superior, receive habitual obedience from the bulk of a given society, that determinate superior is sovereign in that society, and the society (including the superior) is a society political and independent.” Aust. Jur. 

This is from the West’s Encyclopedia of Law:

The supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power by which an independent state is governed and from which all specific political powers are derived; the intentional independence of a state, combined with the right and power of regulating its internal affairs without foreign interference.

Next, consider layman’s descriptions. This is from Wikipedia:

Sovereignty is the supreme authority within a territory.  In any state, sovereignty is assigned to the person, body, or institution that has the ultimate authority over other people in order to establish a law or change an existing law.  In political theory, sovereignty is a substantive term designating supreme legitimate authority over some polity. In international law, sovereignty is the exercise of power by a state. 

Here is Britannica’s entry:

Sovereignty, in political theory, the ultimate overseer, or authority, in the decision-making process of the state and in the maintenance of order. The concept of sovereignty—one of the most controversial ideas in political science and international law—is closely related to the difficult concepts of state and government and of independence and democracy. Derived from the Latin superanus through the French souveraineté, the term was originally understood to mean the equivalent of supreme power.

History:  In 16th-century France Jean Bodin (1530–96) used the new concept of sovereignty to bolster the power of the French king over the rebellious feudal lords, facilitating the transition from feudalism to nationalism. The thinker who did the most to provide the term with its modern meaning was the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who argued that in every true state some person or body of persons must have the ultimate and absolute authority to declare the law; to divide this authority, he held, was essentially to destroy the unity of the state.

Notice the superlatives: 

Sovereignty means: 

Supreme authority;

Paramount control;

Ultimate and Absolute authority.

These are terms that legal scholars use to refer to the term sovereignty.

They are also the terms that religious scholars use to refer to the power of the creator.  The creator is a god.  (Some say he is ‘the’ god and there is no other; some claim there is only one god and his name is ‘God.’  This book does not capitalize the term ‘god’ when it refers to a general concept but does when the term is used as a proper name.)  There are no limits to the power and authority of a god.  The people who make decisions in nations have sovereignty. They have the exact same rights to the land they would have if they had created it.  The land exists only because they want it to exist.  If they ever decide they can gain some advantage by destroying it, it is their absolute right to do this. 

This book explains a great many different societies that humans can form.  We will see that humans are very capable beings.  We can build a lot of societies that divide the land in various different ways and for various reasons.  For example, in many societies, the people may want some common services like garbage collection.  They may divide the land into different districts, each served by a different garbage company.  Societies that divide the territories may create administrative organizations and give them various different levels of authority.   Most likely, a garbage company would not be given the authority to take money from the people as taxes and use the money to build nuclear bombs. The society would be territorial, but the administrations of the territories would not have sovereignty (this assumes that the garbage companies were the only authorities in each territory).

When we look at different societies, we will see that there are varying degrees or levels of authority for territorial administrations.  There is a limit to the degree of authority the administration can have:  it can have 100% or sovereign authority.  For some reason, the people of earth have divided the land into territories and granted sovereignty to the administrations of each territory. 

If we want to understand the different societies that we can have here on earth, we need objective definitions of different kinds of societies.  We need some sort of term to refer to different kinds of societies so we can compare them to other kinds of societies.  For now, let’s not worry about why the earth beings have created societies built on territorial sovereignty, how this came to be, or exactly how it works.  (We will go over these issues separately.)  The only point here is that territorial sovereignty is a foundational element of human societies.  A group of scientists beings on another world who are studying earth would be able to tell that we divide the world into territories and accept that the territories have and have the right to defend and protect their sovereignty. 

This book uses the term ‘territorial sovereignty societies’ to refer to societies that are built on the principle of territorial sovereignty.

Other Possible Societies 

People who are guessing about things they don’t understand may be in different situations and may make different guesses.

If people think that there must be a creator (perhaps because they see so many wonders in the world around them that they don’t think could possibly be the result of the operation of laws without any intention behind them), they may then guess about the intention of the creator.  In the above example, a group of people saw that they divided the land into territories and fought over the territories, so they guessed that happened because the creator wanted it to happen.  A group of people guessing about the intentions of a being that they don’t even know for sure exists may make other guesses.  If they come to accept that these guesses are right, the guesses become beliefs. They are things they think are probably right, but they can’t verify with objective evidence. (If they could verify their guesses with objective evidence, they wouldn’t call them ‘beliefs’ they would call them ‘facts.’) 

Once they had beliefs, they may decide it is wrong for people to act in ways that go against the things they think are true.  They may raise their children to act in the ways their beliefs tell them to act.  They may work with others to make rules that require everyone to act properly, in whatever way the beliefs tell them people are supposed to act. They may pass these rules and instructions down from generation to generation.  The children born into these systems would be born into belief-based societies. 

The earth has two major land masses that are separated by very intimidating bodies of water.  Both landmasses have had humans living on them for more than 25,000 years.  The people of the American landmass appear to have made different guesses, had different feelings, and created different societies than the people on the other land mass, Afro-Eurasia. 

The people on the Afro-Eurasian landmass appeared to have been highly territorial.  They made guesses about why they were territorial and appear to have decided that this happened because it was supposed to happen.  The territory of each group, clan, or tribe was seen to belong to that group, clan, or tribe.  No entity outside of that territory had any authority.  They had sovereignty over their territories.  

The people on the American landmass appear to have interacted with the land differently.  They did have some territorial instincts, but they seem to have been able to control them.  When they organized the principles of their societies, they didn’t organize them around territoriality.  They organized them around other factors.  They came to certain conclusions about the way humans were supposed to interact with the world around them.  They believed that certain things were right and other things were wrong.  They taught their children how they thought people were supposed to act.  Over generations, people made rules to make it easier to understand which acts the people around them would accept and which they wouldn’t.  Customs and organizations developed, all of which were built around the beliefs of the people and the guesses about ‘things that are important’ that were based on these beliefs.  This network of beliefs, rules, customs, and conventions defined their ‘society.’ 

The societies on the American landmass didn’t operate the same way as the societies that eventually gained control of the Afro-Eurasia landmass. 

They were not territorial sovereignty societies.

They were an entirely different types of society.

I want to give a short quote from someone who was raised in one of these ‘other types of societies’ and had a chance to compare it to the societies that were in the process of ‘conquering’ the land of North America at the time.  It comes from 1849 letter sent by Chief Seattle of the Duwamish to William Medill, the head of the Indian Affairs Department, a division of the Department of War of the United States of America.  It was a reply to a formal offer from Medill, made on behalf of the government of the United States, to buy the land where Seattle and his people lived. 

Medill worked for the department of war.  The department had been aptly named.  Its job was war.  Medill had been ordered to remove the people from this area no matter what it took.  He expected it would take war, but there was a chance the people could be persuaded to move without having to use force.  Medill had sent in negotiators to try to get them to move.

The negotiators presented their standard offer:  they would give the people some metal disks (gold) in exchange for a defined part of the planet.  If the people accepted and took the disks, the United States would own this part of the planet and would have the right to ask them to leave.  If they didn’t leave, they would be in violation of the law and could be removed by force.  If they refused to sell, the negotiators would inform the war department, which would then deal with them in some other way. 

Seattle listened to the offer and took it to his people. 

They held many councils and other meetings to discuss the offer, and drafted a response.  The passages below are from the response:

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.  If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.  We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man—all belong to the same family.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways.  One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's grave behind, and he does not care.  He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father's grave, and his children's birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert. 

This we know; the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see. One thing we know which the white man may one day discover; our God is the same God.  You may think now that you own Him as you wish to own our land; but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for the red man and the white. The earth is precious to Him, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

Natural Law Societies

It is possible for human beings to believe that the world we live on does not belong to us and can’t belong to us. It is possible for them to believe that we depend on nature and the natural world for our survival and nature can destroy us in a instant.  It is possible for people to believe that we all depend on the health of nature and if we do things that harm nature and make it less healthy, we harm ourselves. If nature is no longer healthy enough to meet our needs, we will perish.  It is possible for people to believe the laws of nature are above the laws of men and that, if we want to survive as a race, we must learn the laws of nature and respect them. 

If a group of people are in a position to form any kind of society they want, and they have the above beliefs, they may organize their behavior to match these beliefs.  They may teach their children that they must respect nature and their highest priority must be to make sure the world we all depend on remains healthy.  Children raised this way may grow up accepting that this is the right way to live, the way they want their own children to live, and the way they want everyone around them to live.  They may push for rules that require people to treat the world in accordance with these beliefs, regardless of the sacrifices they must make to do this.

A group of people who see this may guess about why we are here and the possible intentions of the creator, if they think there is one.  They may realize that they have great intelligence and great abilities that no other animals have.  They may guess that the creator made humans and put us on this world so that there would be someone here to take care of the wonderful things that the creator put here.  They may guess that this is their role:  the creator made a world that would take care of them as long as it remained healthy; it was their job to make sure it stayed in this condition.  

This book explains a great many different societies that humans can form.  We need names for important categories of societies so we can compare the different categories of societies to each other.  The term ‘territorial sovereignty societies’ refers to a category of society; all societies built in the principle of territorial sovereignty fit into this category, regardless of the specific details of these societies.

Once a group of people decide that they will interact with the world by dividing it into sovereign territories, the individual territories (nations) may organize themselves differently.   Some may choose communism, some may have feudalistic monarchies, some may be military dictatorships.  Although these specific systems operate differently, they are all in the same category:  they are all built on territorial sovereignty so they are all territorial sovereignty societies.

The term ‘natural law societies’ also refers to a category of society.  The Inca, Maya, and Mississippian people had natural law societies.  So did the Duwamish (Seattle’s people), the Nez Pierce, the Hawaiians, native cultures of Australia and New Zealand, and many other groups of people.  All societies built on the primacy of natural laws over the laws of humans (the principle of natural law, as defined below) are ‘natural law societies,’ regardless of the details of those societies.  

Like territorial sovereignty societies, natural law societies are built on beliefs.  But the people who built these societies didn’t start with the same beliefs as the people who built territorial sovereignty societies.  In fact, the beliefs that form the foundations of natural law societies appear to be the opposite of the beliefs that form the foundation of territorial sovereignty societies.  In both cases, people started out guessing about the role that humans are supposed to play on earth.  In one case, the people guessed that we are supposed to hold dominion over the land (dominate it by force) and subdue it (alter it any necessary to meet human needs). Starting with this belief, they built a set of rules that allowed them to do anything they wanted to the land and rationalized it as necessary to carry out the will of the creator.  As far as they were concerned, each part of the planet belonged to whatever people were able to gain and hold dominion over it. Once they held dominion, that part of the world belonged to them and they had the right to do anything they wanted to it. 

Natural law societies are built on the belief that nature and the natural world are in charge and all living things, including humans, depend on nature and the natural world.  We are obligated to respect nature.  Nothing could show more disrespect for a thing of incredible natural beauty like a majestic purple mountain or a rich valley than to claim it is nothing but chattel, a simple possession that only has the right to continue to exist if the human who has turned over some metal disks to another who claims to own it and agrees to allow it to exist. Natural law societies are therefore the opposite of territorial sovereignty societies in certain ways: they don’t accept any ownability at all.

Both of these societies are built on beliefs.  Beliefs are things that our minds tell us are true but that we can’t prove scientifically or objectively. (If we can prove they are true, we don’t call them ‘beliefs’ we call them ‘facts.’)  Generally, beliefs come from feelings, emotions, and guesses about things that we can’t study or understand with objective evidence.  We start with simple guesses.  We refine them.  We build on them. We teach our children that these things are true. They trust us and their instincts tell them to emulate us (all animal infants have instincts that push them to copy and emulate adults of their species).  They may or may not question these beliefs but, if the other people in their clan/tribe/group/nation all seem to accept these beliefs and act in accordance with them, they will do this too.  In time, the origin of the beliefs will be forgotten.  But people will continue to accept the beliefs, pass them down from generation to generation, and continue to build on and advance the laws and rules that require people to interact with the world and each other in ways that are consistent with the beliefs. 

Mental Resistance To The Idea That Other Societies Might Be Possible

Seattle was born in a natural law society.  He was raised in a natural law society.  He learned the rules of life while growing up.  His mother was raised in a natural law society, as was her mother so on, for hundreds of generations.  Their religious leaders, teachers, doctors, and everyone involved in administration and decision making had been raised the same way.  It was all they knew.  Until Seattle was an adult, he had never heard of a different kind of society and had no idea any other kind of society existed.  As far as his people knew (before they met the first members of the conquering society), nothing else existed, nothing else would ever exist, nothing else was possible. 

Nature was in charge, not humans. Humans followed the laws of nature or we/they perished. 

If you were to ask the people in these societies (again, before they had ever heard of the societies of the conquerors) to imagine other kinds of societies, and tell you how they think other kinds of societies might work, they would probably think you are crazy.

They don’t have a ‘type of society.’

There is no such thing as ‘types of societies.’ 

Their minds would have a hard time comprehending that anyone would seriously believe that humans could live any other way.  You can tell by the quote from Seattle above that, even after he met people with other kinds of societies and they told him the way the other system worked, he doesn’t seem to have been able to accept they really are possible.  Humans can’t survive if they their laws conflict with the laws of nature. Yet, here they were.  He rationalized this as a temporary situation:  yes, they have been given power from some source and for a brief time will rule, but since they violate basic principles of existence, this can not last.  Later in the letter he states:

The whites too shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own filth.  But in your perishing you will shine brightly fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man.

Clearly he is mystified.  The conquering societies should not exist and can not exist.  Yet they did exist. 

You and I were born in territorial sovereignty societies.  Our mothers were born in natural law societies.  They loved us and wanted the best for us.  They taught us the ways of life.  They only knew about one system.  Teachers, religious leaders, doctors, all the administrators and decision makers all understood only one system, a system that divides the land into nations and raises the children to be good citizens and follow the rules of the nation into which they were born. 

In school, we sang songs about the wonders of our countries.  We pledged allegiance to the flags of our countries, to the countries themselves, and to the principles for which they stand.  We learned that history began with the first countries and the first wars. We learned about savages who looked like humans and could say things that made them sound human, but who lived in chaos because they weren’t smart enough to divide themselves into countries and form governments to tell the people what they were required to do to contribute to the country.  They didn’t have liberty, justice, freedom or purple mountain majesties because they had no countries to give them any of these things.  We were taught to feel sorry for them and to ask our governments to put together programs to help the descendents of these savage animals with human form be taught how to live right and turn them into real taxpaying, patriotic human beings.  But we don’t associate them, or their ancestors, with a ‘type of society.’ 

They didn’t have countries. 

They didn’t have governments. 

They didn’t organize for, prepare for, and fund wars to defend, protect, and advance the interests of any country. 

How could people without these things claim to be anything other than savage animals? 

You and I were born and raised in societies built on territorial sovereignty.  The people around us were raised in societies built on territorial sovereignty.  It is all they every learned about and studied.  If you were to ask people around you to imagine other kinds of societies, and tell you how they might work, they would probably think you are crazy. 

We don’t have a ‘type of society.’

There is no such thing as ‘types of societies.’ 

Dividing the land into territories and fighting over sovereignty for each part of the world is simply the way all thinking beings with physical needs live. 

It is the only way we have ever lived.

It is the only way any beings with true intelligence can live.  Our ancestors had this system for hundreds of generations.  They were smart people.  If there was something else, and there was any reason whatever to think about it, they would have found it.  They loved their children and would have given them something better if there was something better.  There is nothing better.  There is nothing else.

It is not a ‘type of society,’ it is reality. 

There is no such thing as ‘types of societies.’

There seems to be something about the human mentality that makes us accept that the way of life our ancestors created, our parents and teachers accepted, and that we were raised in is really the only way of life possible for humans. 

In some ways, this makes sense.

We all need mental anchors to tie us to the real world.

We need a foundation for our understanding of reality.

We get this from our parents, our ancestors, our teachers, religious leaders, the people who administer and organize our societies so they can meet our needs.  If these people don’t know what they are doing, if they have missed everything important, we lose that mental anchor.  We have to reexamine everything we were raised to believe, everything we were told are ‘our beliefs,’ and everything that we have accepted about how existence works.  We have to reevaluate the morality of the things we help to do.  (Your taxes go to pay for tools used to kill people both directly and by preventing them from benefiting from the good things produced on a part of the world that no one created.) 

The easy way to react to this is to simply deny that anything else is possible.  We can use the mental tool that Orwell called ‘crimestop’ when ever we feel yourself wavering.  We must block the thoughts before they can do too much harm to the way we were told we are supposed to think.  Here, he defines the term:

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc [this is Orwell’s term for ‘the type of society we are raised to accept’] and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.

Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. 

But stupidity is not enough. 

On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.  (From the unaltered version of 1984, available in full on the PossibleSocieties.com website.)

The easiest way to deal with the incongruity between what we see is true (that other societies really are possible) and what we were raised to believe (that the system that we have is the only true society humans can have) is to deny reality.  Then, when our minds try to make us accept reality, to exercise the mental tool Orwell described above, and create mental barriers to prevent the crossover.  We can pretend to not grasp the analogies, to not see logical errors in our own arguments; we can pretend to misunderstand even the simplest arguments if they in any way conflict with the things we want to believe about the systems we were raised to love and worship.

Seattle seemed to have had a hard time accepting that anything else was possible.  His mind struggles and, eventually, he decides that somehow a mass insanity has taken over the minds of a large group of people and they are in the process of committing mass suicide.  (Nature really is more powerful than humans.  No amount of conviction to the contrary can change this fact.  The conquerors will control the land, but only for a short time.  Then, the only societies that Seattle believed were truly possible would take over again.) 

People in territorial sovereignty societies—you and I and the people around us—seem to have the same mental problem accepting that other societies can really exist.  Even when we see other societies with our own eyes, can go to the areas where people live differently and live in other societies, can listen to histories that go back thousands of years, we don’t seem to accept. To accept they really are possible, we need to reject our natural trust and faith in the intelligence and love of the people who raised us and trained us.  It can only be the case if the people who came before us were totally ignorant.  They couldn’t have really understood the things they claimed to understand.  They must have left a very, very large portion of human capabilities totally unexplored and even unimagined.  The entire foundation that they taught us to accept was ‘reality’ must be flawed. 

This is a horrible thought to have to face. 

It is scary, like being little kids who get separated from their mothers in a crowd.  They have no idea what to do.  We depend on the wisdom of people who came before us to help us do everything.  When we find out they can’t help, because they don’t know themselves, how can we avoid panic? 

But it also a wonderful notion to allow our minds to accept.

If it is true, there is a giant door behind us that contains new worlds of understanding.  The societies we inherited may be only a tiny tip of a giant iceberg of possibilities. 

One way or the other, the societies we inherited are clearly going away:  They are unsustainable and that is what unsustainable means (they can’t be sustained).  If we accept that nothing else is possible, there is only one way they can go away: they will go away when one of the problems that are inherent parts of these societies destroy the human race. When we are gone, these societies are gone too.  But so is everything the human race has ever done, all of our successes, all of our music and architecture, and all hope anyone may have had about anything at all.

However, if the people who raised us really were ignorant, and didn’t know what they were doing, there may be wonders in front of us that no human ever in history has been bold enough to imagine.  The societies we inherited will still go away:  This is going to happen one way or the other.  But they will go away when they are replaced by sound, stable, orderly, peaceful, sustainable, and prosperous societies that move the entire human race toward a better future with each day that passes. 

We will see, when we examine other societies, that the science behind them isn’t really particularly difficult. Understanding the science isn’t the hard part of creating these societies.  The hard part is allowing ourselves to accept that the people who came before us, the people who taught us, the people we respected and trusted, didn’t know what they were doing.  The hard part is trusting our own minds, particularly when they tell us things that go against the things people before us have believed for as far back as our understanding of the past goes. 

Intellect-based Societies

If you had been hired on to a team on cosmos that studied other societies, you would have had to have had some sort of training to qualify you for this job.  You would have had to have learned at least the basics of a field we may call ‘societal analysis’ or ‘societology.’  If cosmos had studied a large number of other worlds with varying kinds of societies, they have some sort of classification system.

They would have observed that some societies work in ways that can’t really be classified scientifically, because they weren’t built on a foundation of science.  Some societies would be built around guesses about the possible intentions of invisible beings that may exist or divine forces that may or may not exist.  People work through the possible guesses, guess about which they think make the most sense, and accept that they believe these things are true.  They then build the laws, rules, customs, and economic systems around these beliefs.  To early people in these societies, the beliefs are nothing but guesses.  But after hundreds of generations pass, with the rules and beliefs being passed down and no one ever learning about any other rules and beliefs, people eventually accept that the structures built on these beliefs are natural parts of existence that they may take for granted. 

Scientists on another world, studying these societies, would not be able to find scientific reasons for these structures because they weren’t built on science. 

In your basic classes on societology, the professors may explain that it is possible for a group of people to build societies on logic, reason, and science.  But when beings are in an early stage of evolution toward intellectual capability, they may have other priorities and not even think about using their intellects to change the nature of their societies. 

You may learn about belief-based societies by studying two examples that illustrate the extremes that these societies can have.  The first example, territorial sovereignty societies, start with the extreme premise that the newly-evolved people are gods that have taken on the absolute rights and authority of whatever gods or god they think created the world.  (These societies may or may not have religions like the Abrahamic Religions—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism—that teach children that the creator gave away these absolute rights to certain people’s ‘seed.’)  This is an extreme system in that it accepts that the ownable rights to the world are unlimited and absolute.  These societies are built on the premise that the planet is a simple possession that exists only for the benefit of people born inside a certain territory.  It only exists if they continue to allow it to exist.  Their rules and laws are built on this absolute premise and they use any weapons their technology allows them to create, including nuclear weapons, to enforce these rules and laws.  

Natural law societies also start with an absolute premise.  They start with the premise that nature is in control of their existence and they depend on it entirely.  No rule, law, or structure that in any way violates the natural dignity of nature will be allowed.  These systems don’t accept that humans can own any rights whatever to any part of the world whatever for any purpose whatever.  It doesn’t matter what benefits the people of this society may possibly gain by creating private property, even types of private property that are very limited in scope and do not harm to the land that is controlled privately.  These societies aren’t built on analysis of the benefits various structures can bring to the human race and don’t even consider this.  If a structure violates the basic beliefs, it is wrong, period, and never allowed.

In your class, you may be given examples of these two simple societies.  (They are simple because they are extremes. Nothing is allowed that violates the beliefs, regardless of its benefits.  Exceptions always make systems more complex.)  You may watch videos that illustrate the way these systems work.  The videos of territorial sovereignty societies might come from the feeds of the earth internet, or the internet of some other world that is in the same stage of development.  You can see how these societies work by watching the videos.  You don’t have to know any scientology (any tenants of a science of society), you can feel everything in your gut when you watch the video.  I don’t have to explain to you how these videos make people feel:  all you have to do is go to any news station, right now, and watch some videos.  You will see how territorial sovereignty societies work.

You may also watch videos of natural law societies and read records of the way they operated.  Perhaps your teacher may ask you to imagine you had been born into and raised in one of these societies.  What is life like.

Then, after you had some kind of virtual experience with two different societies, you may compare them.  (If I were the teacher, I would have my students write a report on this.)  You would find that there are certain very important differences in the way these two societies operate.  These differences exist for very understandable reasons.  If we compare the two systems, we will see that there are certain variables within societies that can change; if they change, the realities of the societies change.  This means that, if you understand the different realities of at least two different societies, you can work out basic principles that will allow you to understand a large number of societies, most of which have never existed before. 

That is the way this book explains intellect-based societies: 

It starts by going over the basic realities of the two types of societies that we know are possible, because both have existed.  We will see that these societies have very dramatic differences.  We can compare the societies to figure out the reasons for these differences.  We see that if certain specific mechanical variables change within societies, the societies work differently.  (We don’t have to know anything about beliefs to understand these things.  The observed realities of the societies are the result of the operation of the mechanical structures of the societies.  Although these structures may have originally been built on beliefs, once they exist they operate the same way and the beliefs of the people who created them no longer matter.) 

We can understand these differences. We can understand the reason these differences exist.  Once we understand the mechanisms that cause the differences, we will see that they can work more than two ways.  (More than the two ways they work in the two societies we started with.)  Each different ‘adjustment’ in the mechanism leads to an entirely different type of society.  These other societies are intellect-based societies:  We don’t have any evidence that we have ever had intellect-based societies on earth, to this date.  But they are possible and can exist if we want them to exist, understand how they work, and intentionally create them. 

Why does this matter?

Once we understand the different societies that are possible we can compare them.  Some of them have forces that lead naturally to territorial divisions that fight each other in wars.  Territorial sovereignty societies do this.  Once the beings in territorial sovereignty societies reach certain technological thresholds, their situation becomes untenable.  They will have the ability to make weapons of great destructive power and they will use them.  They will have the ability to harvest resources from their planet (needed to make weapons and support the military industrial complex) with giant machines that leave nothing but devastation and they will use them.  Soon after they gain the ability to destroy themselves, they will do so.  

This is not the result of evil forces.

It is not the result of evil people.

It is not a result of not enough good emotions like ‘love’ and ‘concern.’ 

It is the necessary and natural result of the operation of certain mechanical forces within the societies. The people who set these societies up made mistakes.  They created systems that force the people in them to instigate and participate in destruction and organized violence just to meet their needs.  They will never stop doing these things as long as the human race lives in these societies.  If we want to survive as a race we have to have some other kind of society. 

What other kind?

We can’t even start to think about this until we know what other kinds of societies are possible societies. 

That is what this book is about.

Cosmos

I wanted to start this with the story of cosmos to create some perspective.  When you are extremely close to a problem, and deeply emotionally invested in details, you may not be able to see the big picture.   We see so many horrible things happing around us. The media sensationalizes them in an attempt to make every story seem like it is the most important thing that has ever happened on earth.  Its easy to get angry:  the writers are experts at making you angry (if you are angry, you will keep watching the feed; if you are very angry you will comment and tell others why they should feel the same emotions.)  Its easy to think that we need to drop everything and fix this one problem.  Of course, if this should work (and normally it doesn’t) there are new problems that are even worse.  It is never ending.  If we wait for breathing space before we look around, we will never look around.

If we keep ourselves mired in the details, we will never see the big picture.  We may never notice that there are structural forces that are going to create an endless stream of new problems, one after the other.  Try to fix them after they come off of the line and you will never catch up.  What you need to do is come to understand how the line (the assembly line that creates the problems) works, and stop it. 

I wanted to start this book with a chapter that would help you understand a perspective that would allow you to see that there really is a big picture.  If we look at earth the way scientists on another planet would, we can get a general idea of the nature of the problem.  The people who built the foundational elements of the societies we inherited didn’t know what they were doing.  They built an unsound foundation.  No matter how good we are at building, we can’t build a sound society on an unsound foundation. 

I am not saying that we need to abandon everything else while we work on the foundation.  We can keep working on them.  But, while we are doing this, we can devote some effort to expanding our minds.  We can accept that we are very capable beings, able to organize ourselves many different ways. We can examine the options, find systems that do NOT have the foundational defects, and start making plans to make a transition to one of these systems. 

The very first step we must take is to figure out our options. We need to figure out what kinds of societies are possible societies. 

That is what this book is about.

When I look out at the night sky, I see so many points of light that I couldn’t begin to count them all.  Some of them, the very brightest, are other worlds in this solar system.  Others, the next brightest, are star systems in the Milky Way galaxy.  There are so many that even the best scientists can only take stabs in the dark to estimate their number.  All they can say is that there are ‘hundreds of billions of stars in this galaxy.’ 

How many hundreds of billions? 

They have no idea. 

The faintest and by far most numerous of these points of light are not even in this galaxy.  They are other galaxies in and of themselves.  Each of them has such vast numbers of worlds that our minds would not be able to comprehend the numbers, even if we knew what they were. 

Perhaps millions or billions of species of intelligent beings in this mass of systems have gotten to the point where we are now.  Perhaps many or even most of these races were trapped in systems that couldn’t meet their needs, and didn’t have the intellectual courage to accept they had the right to start fresh.  They were trapped by their societies and their societies destroyed them.

What if this happens to a lot of the beings who get to this point, but not every single one?  What if some of them—perhaps even an infinitesimally tiny percentage—were able to get through this period? 

If we think of it as a numbers game, then it makes sense to have at least some hope.  There is some probability of us understanding our situation well enough to make the transition to reason.  Our minds can envision other words and other modes of existence.  Our minds can put together ideas and work through them. We can do thought experiments, figuring out what is likely to work, then create real experiments to test these theories.  Once we know what works, we can make it a reality. 

Maybe only one out of every thousand societies of thinking beings that gets to the point where we are now ever survives this period.  Perhaps only one of a million make it, and perhaps the number is much higher, say one in a billion.  But, if there are enough societies of thinking beings out there, at least one will make it.

I am arrogant and proud.  I never had any school spirit.  I never rooted for a sports team or adopted a religion.  I have lived in a great many countries and never did see any differences important enough to fight over.  I was never patriotic and was never able to feel anything but confusion when I met people who were.  But I really am arrogant and proud.  I think the human race has done wonderful things.  We may be at an early stage in our development.  But we show great promise.  If only a few of the races of thinking beings in this universe make it, I want us to be in that number.  If only one that makes it, I want my race, the human race, to be that one.