4: A Formal Natural Law Society
So far, our group in Pastland hasn’t made any formal decisions about the type of society we have. We are just making decisions one at a time. In order to compare natural law societies to other types of societies, we need to set up some formal structures so we will know what a natural law society is and what specific characteristics a society must have to be a natural law society.
For the first two years, we don’t make any formal rules. The Pastland Farm is very bountiful. After everyone who has done everything to collect the grain nature provides, there is $2.4 million left. This extra money exists because extra rice exists and extra rice exists because the land is bountiful. We all share this bounty. We do it two ways: We use $400,000 of the money that represents the bounty to pay for electricity, water, internet, and other services we want everyone to have. We divide the rest evenly. Everyone gets $2,000 in cash and $400 in free services as a gift from the land each year.
This isn’t charity or relief or help for the poor. We don’t get this because we are disadvantaged. We get it because the land gives provides gifts to its animal residents. Our group is the entire human race. We—the members of the human race—share the gifts that nature provides equally.
We have a basic economy. There are restaurants, shops, bars, banks, bakeries, butcher shops, and various other stores. We have common services that include free electricity, free water, and free internet for everyone. Everyone has a basic income sufficient to meet their basic needs and people who work or make profits in business can keep everything they make: there are no taxes.
We don’t really have to change anything.
But, after a few years, some people are going to start acting on things they learned in the distant future, before we went back in time. We are from systems where people are told they have certain rights to exploit land and things land produces, even if this exploitation harms other people. They are taught that they have an obligation to get together with others of their ‘nation’ to fight for these rights. They are taught these rights are more important than anything else, even the lives of other members of their species or the health of the planet we live on. There will come a time when people will start to act on these ideas they took back with them from the societies they had before this trip began. This will force us make some rules to try to prevent our systems from breaking down into the chaotic, violent, destructive systems that existed before we went back in time.
The Pistol
One of the people who went on this cruise with us has a passion for guns.
Her name is ‘Alice.’
For some reason that I have never been able to understand, some people feel their lives are better if they can carry a tool that they could use, if they wanted, to instantly kill anyone who does anything to offend them.
Alice is like that.
She likes guns.
Cruise ships don’t allow passengers to bring guns onboard, for obvious reasons. But several thousand people board these ships with large amounts of luggage in a space of a few hours. The cruise companies don’t have the time to search everyone’s luggage for contraband. Alice was able to sneak a pistol onboard. She kept it in a special case in her cabin, together with a holster and a box of ammunition.
When we went through the traumatic events after the nuclear bomb, the case slipped behind one of the beds that were bolted to the wall. It was lodged in a cranny behind the bed that she didn’t know was there, because she couldn’t move the bed. She looked for her gun for many weeks, but she couldn’t find it. Eventually she gave up.
We have been in Pastland for two years now. Alice finally decides she has to clean behind the bed, and this means she has to unbolt it from the wall. When she does, her gun case falls out. She immediately puts on the holster and starts walking around with her pistol strapped to her waist.
Some people don’t like this.
Several of them tell her that guns make them nervous and they would feel better if she kept her gun in her cabin. But Alice loves her gun. She tells them that it is a free country: she has the freedom to carry the gun and they do not have the freedom to keep her from doing this. She tells them she is going to wear it regardless of what people think.
Our group in Pastland has regular meetings to discuss important issues. At the next meeting, several people bring up the gun. The issue of guns has never come up before because no one has had any guns. Several people say they would prefer that Alice keep her gun in her cabin unless she is leaving the ship. Alice says that there is no rule against carrying guns, so she is going to carry it.
Someone then proposes a rule against carrying guns in the public areas of the ship. We vote on the measure and the majority of the people vote for it. There is now a rule: No guns are to be carried on public areas of the ship.
Alice says she is unhappy with this but the majority has spoken. There is a rule and she will obey it. She leaves the gun in her cabin for the next day.
Then she starts wearing it again.
When people ask what she is doing, she says that the rule we passed is invalid because it is unconstitutional. We are in the United States of America. The United States Constitution prohibits anyinfringement of the right to bear arms. (The relevant text: ‘The right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’) The rule against carrying firearms in the public areas of the ship is clearly designed to infringe on her right to bear arms. Any law that infringes on her right to bear arms is illegal, so any attempt to prevent her or anyone from carrying arms wherever they want is illegal.
She says there is nothing anyone can do about it: her right to carry her pistol comes from the highest law in the land and is an absolute and unalienable right that can’t be infringed. The founders didn’t say it ‘couldn’t be infringed unless the majority wanted to infringe on it. They said it couldn’t be infringed, period, regardless of what the majority wants. Majority rule does not apply in this case; we had no right to pass this rule, it is invalid, and she will not let her principles be affected by invalid and illegal rules.
How Other People Can Benefit By Accepting There Are ‘Nations’ In The World
Kathy hears about Alice’s claim.
She never really thought about the laws of the United States of America being in force before. She knows we are living on land that, back in the distant future, was in Texas. The United States annexed Texas on December 29, 1845. All governments of annexed states have to accept the Constitution of the United States and adhere to its provisions. If the laws of the United States are in effect here in the distant past, she has very important rights to the Pastland Farm that she hasn’t been exercising.
You see, her aunt and uncle owned the land that we are now calling the ‘Pastland Farm.’ Kathy was doing some family research before she left on this trip and, as part of her research, she downloaded a file full of documents. These documents include the deed to this farm, in the name of her aunt and uncle.
Her aunt and uncle are no longer alive. She is their only living relative.
The property and inheritance laws of the United States are based on the property and inheritance laws of England that are based on the property and inheritance laws of the Roman Empire. Under these laws, the closest living relative inherits the land. If the property and inheritance laws of the United States are in effect, this land belongs to Kathy. It is her farm.
The United States Constitution has several provisions designed to protect property owners. The most important is called the ‘takings clause’ and is a part of the Fifth Amendment. It states: ‘nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.’
Under the property laws of the United States, all production from the land belongs to the owners. The owners must pay costs of production of course, they must meet any financial obligations they have (like mortgages), and they must pay taxes under the tax codes of the nation, state, and municipality they are in, but they don’t have to share anything the land produces with the people around them and absolutely have no obligation to share anything with the human race. The United States declared independence in 1776. People fought and a great many great people sacrificed their lives so that we could be independent. She is an American. She has rights. Others don’t like this. Tough. It is the way the world works.
Kathy decides that other people in this group have been taking advantage of her lack of assertiveness.
This is her farm.
It would have belonged to her if she were the only living relative of her aunt and uncle in the 21st century, and there is no reason she could accept it doesn’t belong to her because of the circumstances of our voyage into the past.
She decides that she is willing to let people keep the money they got in the past. She will consider it to be ‘charity;’ it helped a lot of people who wouldn’t have eaten otherwise.
But there has to be a limit to her charity. She can’t give money to every single member of the human race forever.
At the next meeting, she makes a demand:
We must accept that the land belongs to her. Her ownership rights come from a legacy of laws that originate in ancient Rome and had been in effect for thousands of years before we took this voyage. It is true that we have been administering this property as if it were ‘public use property.’ But the Constitution of the United States of America specifically prohibits taking private land for public use without providing ‘just compensation.’
Kathy says that she is willing to be reasonable. Back in the future, productive farmland was selling for a multiple of something investment analysts called the ‘free cash flow.’ At the time we went into the past, farms were selling for 20 times the free cash flow. Using the standard formulas that analysts use in the 21st century, the Pastland Farm generates a free cash flow of $2.4 million a year. This farm would therefore sell for $48 million; that would be its ‘fair market value’ in the 21st century world we left behind.
A few complex details:
In the 21st century, where people can buy and own farms and other parts of the world, people think of farms that are bountiful (produce a great deal with small amounts of effort and inputs) as money machines. You operate them according to rules that are already understood and in place. (If you buy an operating farm in the 21st century, it will already be ‘in operation’ and, most of the time, have a hired operating team already in place. You can take over the farm and leave the team in place, instructing them to do the same thing they have done in the past.) The operators will make the land produce whatever it produces (rice, for example), sell it as always (turn it into money), and use part of the money to pay themselves and all inputs.
If the land is bountiful, after they have done all this, there will be money left over that no one involved in production needs. This money ‘flows’ out of the farm ‘for free.’ For free means that whoever gets this money will get it without doing anything in return. Investment analysts call this the ‘free cash flow’ of the property.
In systems where human entities can’t own parts of the world (like our simple natural law society in Pastland and other natural law societies that existed for tens of thousands of years before territorial sovereignty societies came to exist) there is no natural place for this free cash flow to go. The people in each area have to have meetings and make decisions about what to do with it. Generally, natural law societies in the past have divided it pretty much as described above in Pastland: they use part of it to pay rewards to people who help do things that make life better for their people, then divide the rest in some way they agree upon. This leads natural law societies to characteristically have certain incentive systems which are explained below: people can get a share of the wealth the world generates simply by being a responsible member of the community.
In societies where violent and aggressive can ‘conquer’ territory and then own it, the free cash flow of any conquered territory goes initially to the conqueror. We will examine territorial sovereignty societies in detail later and see that, as a practical matter, military conquerors aren’t able to physically operate all farmland they conquer themselves (of course, they don’t want to either’ this is hard work) so they tend to set up systems where part owners operate the land and split the wealth with the warlord/king’s administration. The land gets divided into parcels called ‘feuds’ and each is under the administration of a ‘feudal lord’ that shares the wealth with the government. Governments have found they can get more wealth from land (higher tax revenues) if they set up a system where these parcels of land can be divided and transferred as individual farms. Generally, the people doing this transfer want money for it so they give the farms to whoever offers to give them the greatest amount of money for each farm.
The process gets quite complex and most of the discussions of it are in Part Four, which deals with the scientific and mathematical differences in societies. But the bottom line is that, in the end, the market value of an asset that generates a free cash flow is a multiple of the free cash flow that depends on the current market interest rate on loans to buy assets in this category. You can look up the interest rate for purchases of farms on the internet; the multiple will be the reciprocal of this rate. For example, if the rate is 5%, the multiple will be 20 (1/5%=20) so the market value of the farm will be 20 times the free cash flow, and a farm with a free cash flow of $2.4 million will have a market value of $48 million.
This farm produces a free cash flow of $2.4 million a year.
If the land is considered to be in the United States of America, and the constitution of the United States applies, the fifth amendment allows the ‘taking’ of private land for public use with ‘just’ compensation. Courts have ruled that paying the fair market value of the property is ‘just’ compensation, so if we pay $48 million in cash, we will have done everything legally and Kathy will have been properly compensated under the law.
If we want to take this land for public use, we have to follow the constitutional requirements. If we don’t want to or can’t follow the law, we can’t take the land. It belongs to her under the highest law of the land. Kathy was once in the United States military. All persons who enter the military must swear an oath to the constitution.
"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."
She swore this oath and takes it seriously: she has no moral right to let anyone violate the constitution. Her obligations under this oath are forever and don’t end now that she is out of the military. She will give her life to protect her constitutional rights to this land. It is hers.
Other Claims Under Other Principles Used To Claim Ownership Of Parts Of Planets In sovereignty-based societies
Other people have started thinking about this same issue.
If the laws and principles of the future world apply, Kathy isn’t the only one who can claim this land belongs to her.
A man named ‘Joseph’ speaks up. Joseph says that the Constitution is not the highest law in existence, not in this part of the world or any other part of the world.
The laws of GOD are higher.
He pulls up a copy of ‘The Bull Inter Caetera’ on his computer. In May of 1493, God’s personal representative on Earth, Pope Alexander IV, issued this document. It stipulates that God wants all land west of a line 200 miles west of the Azores to belong to the sovereigns of Spain, forever. He reads the relevant passage out loud in a public meeting:
By the authority of Almighty God, should any of said islands have been found by your envoys and captains, give, grant, and assign to you and your heirs and successors, kings of Castile and Leon, forever, together with all their dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances, all islands and mainlands found and to be found.
The Pastland Farm is very clearly in the part of the planet that God granted to ‘kings of Castile and Leon and their heirs or successors’ forever.’
Joseph brings out a DNA test that he had done before he took this trip. It showed that he is a direct descendent of King Ferdinand of Castile. (Ferdinand had a large number of children, 7 with his wife and a large number by consorts, prostitutes, and others. About 3% of the people of Spain have at least one ancestor descending from Ferdinand.)
As far as he knows, he is the only person here with any claim to be an heir to these kings. If others can come forward and prove a direct linage, he will share the land with them. But until such time as others come forward, the land belongs to him.
His rights don’t come from arbitrary decisions made by the 39 people who signed the United States Constitution. They come directly from the creator of all existence, God. No law could possibly be higher.
Still More Claims
A Chinese woman named ‘Doctor Lu’ speaks up. She tells Joseph that he made a legal mistake, and because of this mistake, Joseph is not the legal owner of the Pastland Farm.
Back in the future, Dr. Lu had been a professor of international law at Oxford University. She was a leading expert in her field and has a long list of letters after her name, and a long list of fellowships and awards acknowledging she is one of the best in the world in this field. She explains the problem with his argument:
God actually gave away the land of the Earth a long time before the Papal Bull was issued. Right after the great flood, God gave the world away to descendents of Noah. Here is the relevant text, from Genesis, chapter 10:
These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
God couldn’t give the land away again in 1493, because he had already given it away in 2348 BC, the year after the great flood.
The Papal Bull was actually an ‘affirmation of claim’ not a ‘fee simple land grant.’ What happened was this:
Christopher Columbus, acting as an employee of the kings of Castile and Leon, had discovered land. The inhabitants said they did not own it. Somehow, in the time since the land grants had been made in 2348 BC, the people who had been given this land had renounced their ownership.
Now that the land was unowned, it was available for anyone to claim. Columbus claimed this land for his employers under the accepted international laws. The 1493 document is an affirmation that states that God had been informed of the claim and verified that they had been made correctly and were therefore valid. God did not give the land to the king of Spain, he merely verified that the King had followed God’s laws for land transfers.
For Joseph to claim this land under the 1493 document, he would have had to have gone through the same ceremonies that Columbus had gone through in 1492. If he had done these things, the affirmation of claim might possibly apply to him. It would, of course, depend on God and we would have to elect a Pope to ask, but at least Joseph would have a shot at owning this land.
But since Joseph did not go through these ceremonies, the 1493 document is meaningless. Joseph does not have a claim.
However, someone does:
When Dr. Lu goes to cocktail parties, she carries around a little decoration to put on her drink, so she knows which one drink is hers and doesn’t get it mixed up. This is a little cocktail stick with a flag of China on it. She had it in her pocket when we landed.
As soon as she heard that we might be in the ancient past, she decided to go through the ceremonies required to claim land, under the accepted principles of international law. She stuck her cocktail stick with the Chinese flag into the ground. She looked up the exact words that Columbus said and repeated them, with the only difference being the name of the country she claimed it for: she was claiming the land for China, not Spain. All land connected with the land where she put her flag belongs to China for the rest of time.
This means that Pastland Farm is on Chinese territory. Under the Chinese constitution, the land is to be administered for the good of the Chinese people. She is the only ‘Chinese people’ here so the farm must be administered for her personal good from here on.
The farm is hers.
She gets everything it produces.
Dr. Lu says she is claiming this land in the name of civilization. It is hers under the accepted principles of international law, as worked out over the centuries. Many people have given their lives so that land could be administered in an organized and legal way. If we refuse to accept these laws, we are refusing to accept civilization: we are no better than savages, living in chaos and anarchy. We have to accept her as the only person on Earth with any right to the things the Pastland Farm produces.
A Panamanian man named Manuel then asks for the right to speak. After the chair recognizes him, he says that he thinks Dr. Lu has made a critical mistake: she has no more right to claim the land for her native China than Columbus would have had to claim it for his native Italy. Columbus arrived on a Spanish ship in the employ of the Spanish king, so he could only claim the land for Spain. All other claims would have been meaningless.
The cruise ship we were on was registered in Panama. If Dr. Lu had been working for the Panamanian government, and had claimed the land for Panama, her claim would have been valid. But Manuel is the only Panamanian on this ship. The ship happens to be owned by a corporation that is partly owned by the president of Panama, Juan Carlos Varela. Manuel was working for the president of Panama on a Panamanian ship just as Columbus was working for the king of Spain on a Spanish ship.
Manuel is the only person with a legal right to claim this land. He hasn’t gone through the ceremony yet, but this is just a formality: he is the only one that has the right to go through the ceremony. He will go through this ceremony and claim it; as soon as this is done, the land will be his.
Various other people start to make claims. The laws that determine who owns which part of the planet in our 21st century world have a complexity that defies description. In some cases, the land is claimed to belong to certain people because a god (perhaps named ‘God’) gave it to their ancestors to pass down to their heirs. In other cases, land is claimed by right of conquest: the nation that mounts a successful war against people in an area and can force them to sign over their rights to the land becomes the land’s owner, in accordance with the principle of international law. In other cases, land is claimed to belong to certain people because they are good, moral, and noble people who need this land so they can bring justice and liberty to that part of the world. Sometimes, land is given to some group as reparations for harm or damage done to their ancestors. Nearly everyone here has some thread that they can follow into the minutia of legal arguments to make some sort of claim on this land.
At this point, people start to argue with each other. Some of the arguments start to get aggressive and, soon, we can see that violence is about to break out.
The Moratorium and a Temporary (Formal) natural law society
We have a chairperson who runs the meeting.
She calls for order. She says that we have a lot of things to cover at this meeting and we need to get back to the agenda if we are to make any progress.
We have chosen this particular person, Margaret, to chair our meetings because she is very good at keeping things moving along. She used to be an administrator in a highly bureaucratic organization back in the future and has learned some tricks about how to get people back to the topics she thinks are important.
One common trick used for this is called ‘tabling the issue’ (also called ‘sending it to committee’). Margaret thanks the people who brought up the issue and says that it is so important that we need to do some more research before we make a decision. She says that we need to form a committee to go into depth about this issue. Until the committee makes its report, the topic is ‘in committee’ and she won’t entertain any motion to discuss it in meetings.
Margaret says that some people have raised some very important issues and she wants to thank them for bringing them to the group’s attention. Unfortunately, our agenda for this meeting is already full so we won’t be able to take the time this issue deserves here and now. We will have to put it off for later. She wants everyone who believes the Pastland Farm is in a country and wants to help us figure out which country to sign up for a committee to discuss the issue.
Margaret points out that some of the issues the committee will work on will take a lot of time to sort out. For example, which legal principles have priority: rules made by and agreed to by a majority of the members of the human race (our group in Pastland, which has decided it has the authority to ban carrying of guns in public), rules made by the 39 signers of the Constitution of the United States of America (who have claimed that the ‘rights to bear arms shall not be infringed’ in any lands that are formally a part of the United States of America), the laws of gods or of a single god, perhaps named ‘God,’ as stated in religious texts and interpreted by the representatives of various religions, or the principles of international law, as worked out over the centuries in international dispute resolutions?
Margaret says that this is only one of many complex questions that we will have to answer before we can really determine whether this is in a country and, if so, which country it is in.
How much time do we need to solve this issue?
We are determining the future of the human race here.
We are better off not to rush; if we come up with the wrong answer, we could end up with a dangerous and destructive type of society, one that may destroy itself. She proposes that we give the committee a reasonable amount of time to solve this problem. She proposes that we might be able to find answers to these questions in 30 years, but it would not be reasonable to expect to have them before then. She asks that we call for the committee to report after this time.
Some people who want nations think this is way too long to wait. They ask for the report in 5 years. There is some discussion where other numbers are proposed. Finally, we agree on a 20-year period for the debate to take place.
In the meantime, some people have very strong opinions about which country owns this land. We know that, back in the future we came from, people often used violence to get others to accept their claims about which country owned a particular part of the planet. In fact, this violence often escalated into all-consuming wars that killed millions of people and destroyed things that took enormous periods of time and effort to create.
We don’t want these things to happen here.
To prevent any problems in this area, Margaret proposes a rule that will help prevent such fighting: we will have a moratorium for twenty years on certain issues to allow the committee to discuss the issue in peace.
We will agree that if changes are made after 20 years from now, they won’t affect anything that happens before these changes are made. (For those with legal training, this means we will not allow ‘ex-post facto’ laws to be passed.) This will allow us to continue to distribute the wealth the land produces as we have been doing, without anyone having to be afraid that later rulings will judge the money people got was supposed to have gone to others and they have to give it back.
To make sure no one tries to influence the committee by putting any administration by any country, nation, or sovereign state in place, we will not allow anyone to create any structures that grant any rights at all to any countries, nations, sovereign states, kingdoms, or any other entity whatsoever. Since the rules of ownership are different from nation to nation, adopting any rule of ownership implies that the rules of one nation are valid; to avoid any disputes in this area, we will not allow any person or group to own any rights to any part of the world under any conditions whatever.
We are not passing these rules to create the foundation for a society.
All we want to do is prevent violence and allow our members to live together in harmony, at least until the committee issues its final report. If this report indicates that we need to divide the world into countries and grant sovereignty to the countries, we will do this. But in the meantime, we will administer the land as if it doesn’t belong to anyone.
Enforcing the Moratorium
After Margaret proposes the moratorium, she asks for a show of hands for people who oppose it. Several people raise their hands. They love their countries and are going to try to create new senates, houses of commons, and armies to enforce the constitutions that they left behind in the 21st century.
Margaret says that everyone is entitled to their opinion. However, no minority of the people has the right to try to use force to get the majority to accept structures that the minority thinks are right, but the majority doesn’t want. She asks the people who oppose the moratorium specifically if they intend to use violence or any kind of force to get others to accept that countries exist. In other words, she wants to know this: if the majority votes for the moratorium, are they going to organize for violence to force the majority to accept countries?
Most of the people who opposed the moratorium say that they will respect the decision made by the majority. They want countries but, if the majority wants to wait 10 years before forming them, they will comply with the wishes of the majority and wait 10 years.
Two of the people who oppose the moratorium are not willing to accept the will of the majority. They love their countries and they truly believe their countries own this land. They pledged their allegiance to their country thousands of times as children and hold this pledge to be sacred, more important than the will of the people here in Pastland. If they must use violence to recreate the structures of their countries and defend their country’s rights, they will use it. If they have to kill for their country, they will kill. They owe their allegiance to their country. If the only way they can get their country to exist is to give their own lives for the cause, they are willing to give their own lives, proudly and willingly.
Margaret then says she accepts their position. She is not going to try to change their minds. However, if the majority wants a rule, and the minority has pledged to use murder to make sure the majority can’t have the rule we want, the majority can’t let the people who have pledged murder remain with us. Any who aren’t willing to accept the will of the majority will have to leave.
We are lucky enough to have a ship, an electricity-generating plant, a water system, an internet, and the various facilities of the ship. We live on bountiful land and we have shared the bounty of the land equally among all of the people.
She asks that we add a provision to the moratorium: if people refuse to honor the desires of the majority in this matter, they will be allowed to live in peace, but they will have to do it somewhere else. People who refuse to accept the will of the majority will be asked to pack up their things and leave, never to return. We simply don’t need people who openly try to organize murder living with us.
We vote to add this provision to the measure. Then we have a vote on the moratorium as a whole and it passes.
Margaret then asks the two who had said would not honor the moratorium to come forward. She says she wants them to have a chance clarify their position. Do they think that they can wait until the moratorium is over until they start advocating for the formation of nations? If they can, they can stay. Otherwise, they will have to start packing right now, and be off the ship by sunset, never to return.
One says she was just trying to make a point that she loved her country. She had always been a patriot and loved her country more than life itself. However, her patriotism is strong enough to survive a short respite while we deal with other matters. She says that, in the interests of international cooperation, she will put her nationalism on hold. After the moratorium is over, she says, she will have a plan prepared to divide the land around us into countries, to assign nationalities to each of the people here, and to rebuild a nation-based system with all of the structures we remember from the 21st century.
But, until the moratorium is over, she will keep her ideas to herself, if we will allow her to remain with the group.
The other objector says, ‘Ditto for me.’
When our group arrived in the remote past, there were no humans here. We are the entire human race. Every single person here has agreed to follow the terms of the moratorium. This means that we have all agreed to follow rules built on the proposition that we are residents of this planet, but not its owners, and that no one may own or act as owners of mountains, rivers, lakes, forests, or farms.
As individuals, we all know that if we start organizing countries or treating the land as if we own it, the others have already stated their intention to ask us to leave. We know that if we try to use force to overcome the majority and make them accept countries or ownership, the majority will basically have no choice but to band together to use whatever levels of force are necessary to prevent this.
Why must they do this?
They have voted on a measure and passed it. If they allow small groups that don’t approve of the will of the majority to use force to make the majority back down, no one will take the will of the majority seriously anymore.
When we look at different societies later, we will see that sovereignty-based societies (societies built on the idea that groups of people can have sovereignty over land) are structurally inconsistent with majority rule (direct and binding elections to determine important common variables). The main reason is that this system grants special rights to a tiny minority (often as little as 1% of the people) at the expense of the majority. The majority would never vote for policies like this so, they must never be in a position to vote on this issue; if they could, they would vote the system that grants special rights to the minority out of existence.
Many types of societies are entirely consistent with majority rule. Natural law societies are in this category, as are the socratic societies we will examine later. You and I are not used to the idea of majority rule (instead, we have the idea of a ‘democracy,’ a system where people called ‘rulers’ make the rules but where, in some cases, the people can have some influence over the identities of the rulers).
Chances are that we are not going to have people actually leaving just because they want nations. As a practical matter, nations don’t bring any real benefits to people and there is no reason to suffer to have them. However, we have to be firm in this one area: if people openly organize mass murder and other acts of violence against the majority to create nations or for any other purpose, we can’t let them live with us. We will have to ask them to leave and, if they don’t, we will have to use whatever level of force is necessary to evict them.
A Formal Natural Law Society
We have not intentionally formed a specific type of society. But we have formed one. During the time that the moratorium is in effect, no person or group may have absolute ownership of any part of the planet. This puts our system on the same general foundation as the systems of the pre-conquest American people.
This book will use the term ‘natural law societies’ to refer to societies with a certain ‘prime directive’ (to use Star Trek terminology) or a basic law that forms the foundation for all other laws. It is possible for a society to exist that doesn’t allow humans to own rivers, lakes, forests, mountains, and other parts of planets. There are several ways that natural law societies can come to exist.
If a group of people are in a position to form any kind of society they want (in other words, if they aren’t being forced to accept the idea of a ‘country’ owning parts of worlds by conquerors), they may decide that nature is an extremely powerful force and all beings on their world, including people, depend on nature for their sustenance. If nature acts up, we get destroyed. We therefore must figure out what nature needs, to keep it from harming us, and provide these things.
To these people, the idea of a group of people owning a part if the world would seem as silly as the idea of a group of fleas owning the leg or stomach of the dog they live on. They depend on the dog, not the other way around. If they suck too much blood from the dog, the dog dies and they all die too. People who think this way, and aren’t being force to accept the idea of a ‘country’ owning a part of the world, may decide that any person or group who tries to prevent outsiders from benefiting from the existence of a mountain, lake, or forest, is violating a kind of natural law.
They may decide that their ‘prime directive’ will be this: they will not let anyone have special rights to the mountains, rivers, lakes, and forests. If people claim these rights, they will not accept the claims: they will ignore the people who claim a certain part of the world belongs to them. If the people who claim parts of the world belong to them try to use violence to get others to accept their claims, they will consider this to be the highest crime possible for a human to commit. It is not just a crime against humanity, it is a crime against nature itself. These people may consider the unownability of nature and the natural world to be a foundational law of nature. They may believe that the laws of nature are higher than the laws of man, and people who don’t accept and follow the laws of nature threaten the entire human race and commit the highest crime imaginable.
This book will use the term ‘natural law societies’ to refer to societies that are built on the primacy of nature over man.
Natural law societies are possible societies. They have existed in this vast universe. We don’t know how many worlds had or possibly still have them, but we do know there is at least one: earth. On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on an island in what we now call the Caribbean sea with a very large population. The official historian appointed to record the interactions between the newcomers and the existing residents, Petyr Myrtar, wrote this about them:
It is certain that among them the land is as common as the sun and water; and that Mine and Thine (the seeds of all mischief) have no place with them. They are content with so little that, in so large a country, they have rather superfluity than scarceness. So that, as we have said before, they seam to live in the golden world, without toil, living 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. They take him for an evil and mischievous man who takes pleasure in doing hurt to others.
The most prolific historian who was actually there and saw these people was Bartolomé de las Casas, who opens his book by explaining why the newcomers thought that the people who lived in the western hemisphere were not considered civilized (and often not even considered humans) merely because they did not have the entities called ‘countries’ that are so important in Afro-Eurasia and, without ‘countries’ didn’t have the entities called ‘governments’ that used police and armies to force the people to obey sets of arbitrary laws. He points out that if we examine the way they lived, and not focus on whether they had these specific structures, we could not fail to see that they were not only humans but were, in fact, more civilized than the people who arrived to conquer them. He introduces one volume of his history this way:
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 even a single man and causing him to lose his esteem and honor. From such slander can come great harm and terrible calamity, particularly when large numbers of men are concerned and, even more so, a whole new world.
It has been written that these peoples of the Indies, lacking human governance and ordered nations, did not have the power of reason to govern themselves—which was inferred only from their having been found to be gentle, patient and humble. It has been implied that God became careless in creating so immense a number of rational souls and let human nature, which He so largely determined and provided for, go astray in the almost infinitesimal part of the human lineage which they comprise. From this it follows that they have all proven themselves unsocial and therefore monstrous, contrary to the natural bent of all peoples of the world. In order to demonstrate the truth, which is the opposite, this book brings together and compiles certain natural, special and accidental causes which are specified below.
Not only have the residents of the Indies [this was the name given to the lands before they were named ‘America’] shown themselves to be very wise peoples and possessed of lively and marked understanding, prudently governing and providing for their nations 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, in adherence to the rules of natural reason.
This advantage and superiority, along with everything said above, will appear quite clearly when, if it please God, the peoples are compared one with another. This history has been written with the aforesaid aim in mind by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, or Casaus, 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.
The book ‘Forensic History’ goes over numerous accounts from a great many witnesses that all agree on one important difference between the societies of the second-largest landmass on earth (to eventually be called ‘The Americas’) and the societies of Afro-Eurasia. The societies on the other landmass were built on the principle that nature and the natural world are providers for humans and not our possessions. We depend on nature, it was here before we arrived, and we must show respect to the natural world if we are to survive.
A great deal of evidence holds that the two great landmasses of the earth were isolated from each other for many thousands of years before 1492, with no significant interaction with each other. The societies on the two landmasses evolved differently. The societies of Afro-Eurasia evolved in ways that eventually led to highly territorial groups that fought over ownership of each mountain, river, and lake, organizing the resources of the territories so that they could build the strongest armies and fight the most vicious and violent wars their technology allowed. We will see that, once such a society gets started on a landmass, it will expand by ‘conquering’ people with different social arrangements and, eventually, take over the entire landmass.
The societies on the Americas evolved differently. They were extremely diverse with a great many differences between them. (The societies of the Inca, for example, were dramatically different than the societies of the people of Tierra Del Fuego, as described by Charles Darwin; the very advanced societies of the ‘Mississippians,’ as described by the five authors who traveled through the Southwest of North America between 1537 and 1541 with Hernando De Soto, were dramatically different than the societies of the Shoshone, as described by Lewis and Clark in their journals on their ‘Voyage of Discovery.’) The different groups had differences and conflicts with each other. But there was one area where they all agreed: ‘This world does not belong to us, we belong to the world’ (this quote is from a letter written by Chief Seattle to President Polk.)
They did not accept claims of people who claimed parts of planets belonged to them or groups they represented. These laws preclude the idea of humans being the owners of nature or the natural world. If individuals or small groups tried to claim that they did own, they would not respect these claims; if they tried to use violence to protect their claims, the people would band together to make sure these attempts did not succeed.
I claim that natural law societies are possible societies.
I do not claim they are perfect societies or even good societies, compared to territorial sovereignty societies or other societies humans can form. I claim only that they are possible societies. They can exist and operate in predictable and understandable ways for significant periods of time. If we understand the way these systems work, we will understand some of the structures that human societies can have that you and I are not familiar with, because they are not parts of territorial sovereignty societies, the kinds of societies we inherited. After we have examined natural law societies, we will examine territorial sovereignty societies with a new perspective: we don’t have to look at them in isolation, as if they were created by a God and work as they do due to a divine mandate; we can compare their structures with other societies that we know are possible for thinking beings with physical needs, because they have existed on at least one planet with thinking beings with physical needs: earth.
This will allow us to dissect human societies into their essential building blocks. Once we understand these blocks, we will see that they can be put together various different ways. We know how each of the structures work. We will be able to understand how societies that combine these structures in various different ways operate. We can then look at a kind of ‘sample’ society that combines the key structures of these two societies to create a new kind of society, one that is not like any society that has existed before. That is what Part Three is about.
Once we understand the society in Part Three (called a ‘socratic’), we can fill in the blanks. We can figure out all of the different ways the blocks can be put together and come to understand the kinds of societies that are possible for thinking beings with physical needs in general, including humans. That is what Part Four of this book is about.
Back to Pastland
Our group in Pastland didn’t start with an analysis of any philosophical premises about laws of nature or ideas about whether humans could or could not own parts of planets. We have a natural law society, but we formed it a different way.
We simply didn’t want violence. As soon as we got here, people started to fight with each other over which ‘country’ the land around us belonged to. They had been raised to believe their highest obligation was to their ‘country,’ and this was above their obligation to their planet or their race. they had been raised to believe that the sovereignty of their country was above all else and if they had to destroy their world or each other to preserve this sovereignty, they had an obligation to destroy the world or as many people as necessary to make this goal. They had been raised to believe that the entities called ‘countries’ were created by powers higher than humans, that without countries there could be no freedom, justice, liberty, or anything else worth living for.
When we arrived in the ancient past, we were starting fresh. We needed to prioritize our actions: our first priority had to be survival. If we started fighting each other over which country owned the part of the world where we lived, we would probably not survive. So, we decided that we would put off the question of which country owned the land around us for a certain period of time, 20 years. We passed a moratorium: for the next 20 years, no human entity, including a group that called itself a ‘country,’ owned or could own any part of the world.
If people claim to own, we will not respect these claims.
If they try to use force to make us accept their claim, we will band together as a group to make sure their efforts can’t succeed. Any group that tries to form a country or any other entity that has special rights to the world will have to fight and defeat the entire rest of the human race to get this claim accepted. We have a prime directive: while the moratorium is in force, no one owns or can own any rights to any parts of the world.
We didn’t form our natural law society the same way that the people of the Americas formed theirs. Theirs was built on their interpretation of the relationship between human beings and the planet we live on and the foundational laws of nature. We haven’t tried to analyze the foundational laws of nature or the relationship between humans and the world.
We simply want some time to work on other projects before we get involved with the entities called ‘countries.’ We didn’t ban ownership or countries entirely: we can have them if we want, we just can’t have them right now. The moratorium has an initial term of 20 years. Perhaps, at the end of this term, we will decide we want more time and extend it for another 20 years. If this is the case, we will have a natural law society for 40 years. Perhaps, during this time, our people will think about the basic laws of nature and the relationship between humans and the planet earth. We may decide that we really don’t have to go back to the system we had in the 21st century, before we went back in time. We may decide that we want to keep certain foundational elements of the natural law society, and perhaps add in specific structures that we know are possible because they were parts of our societies back in the 21st century.
But for the time being, we have a natural law society.
Natural law societies
Natural law societies were real societies. Over the immense periods they existed, billions of people went through their childhood in societies built on the principles of natural law; they met playmates and learned how to do the things they would have to do to meet their needs. They started thinking about the other sex, flirted and courted, and found the one they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with, all without having countries and governments to tell them what to do. They had their own children and raised them; they socialized, they played music, they danced, they had celebrations and festivals, they sat around fires at night and talked about things that were important to them, all without knowing that people could ever or would ever live differently.
Although a great many different natural law societies have existed in history, and these societies were different in many details, they all shared certain foundational structures and therefore all had certain similarities. (The same is true for the societies that we have now: each country operates slightly differently and its details are different, but they all have structural similarities that lead to the same basic problems.)
Since these societies have existed in the past, we can study them two different ways. First, we can look at the way life will work for the people in such societies in general, using logic and reason, with an example natural law society like the one with our group in Pastland. We can formulate theories based on the flows of value to determine how we would predict people are going to act in such societies.
After we have done this, we can take the second approach: we can go to the history books and see how natural law societies that existed in the past actually worked. We can use the information in historical records to test our theories. If we study the information the same basic way we study the sciences of physics and chemistry, we can come up with theories about how the societies should work, based on the operation of their basic structures, and then test these theories with empirical studies.
The next chapter goes over a few of the more obvious flows of value and incentives that are inherent parts of natural law societies, so you can see how people would be expected to act in such societies; it then goes over the records to show that people reacted to the incentives exactly as we would expect them to react. Natural law societies operate entirely differently than sovereignty-based societies (the type of society we have in our 21st century world now), but we can understand them. If we understand the inherent incentives in the two different societies, we don’t have to guess about the way people will act in them and the way they will live; we will see that incentives matter in all societies. Since natural law societies have entirely different incentives than the societies we have now, life will be dramatically different for the people in these two types of societies, but the same basic forces affect behavior in the exact same way.
If we look at societies consistently and scientifically, we can understand everything we see. We have enormous amounts of evidence that tell us that natural law societies dominated the Americas for an incredibly long time, at least 10,000 years; during this time, the people lived in great harmony with the world around them and kept it in pristine condition. To people raised in destructive societies, this seems impossible. We can’t even stop minor acts of destruction in the societies we inherited: the idea of them going thousands of years without harming the world seems impossible. But if we understand the way natural law societies work and understand the specific differences between these societies and the societies we have inherited, we will see that there are certain structural differences that totally alter the way these societies will work. No amount of good intentions, no amount of love or concern, no appeals to higher powers, can prevent very serious problems from existing in societies with these structural flaws.
I want to make it clear here that I am not advocating we try, in our 21st century world, to create natural law societies at this time, as a way out of the problems we face. As we will see, natural law societies have certain problems that prevent them from meeting the long-term needs of the human race. But even though we may never again want to have these societies, we still need to understand them.
If we want to understand how to build societies that can meet our needs, we need to understand the basic elements of societies and understand which structures are essential and which are optional. (For example, are ‘countries’ essential or optional?) I am not claiming that natural law societies are better than the societies we inherited and those who believe in their countries or the rights of countries are wrong and those who don’t believe in such things are right. I am only claiming that that humans have lived other ways, and this is proof that humans can live other ways. If we understand the ‘different ways humans can live’ and the different structures we can put together to make human societies, we can understand exactly what we must do to create sound and healthy societies.