This book proposes an innovative transition strategy towards a global society that would support happy and fulfilled individuals living in harmony with nature in a much more effective way than the current global system does.
Successful innovations often combine previously successful ideas in new ways, rather than make proposals that are very far away from existing ideas. In the two previous books from this series we’ve explored what seems the most promising scientifically solid theoretical framework from recent advances in neuroscience and psychology. We’ve also looked at some interesting and popular ideologies and movements and seen what are their successes that we could build upon, and also what are their more serious limitations from the lenses of that theoretical framework.
In the following pages we are going to put together a proposal that aims at building upon the aforementioned good ideas and successes while at the same time avoiding their pitfalls.
The proposed strategy follows the agile principles of being iterative, reflecting on every iteration about the progress made and re-planning the following steps if necessary. An agile methodology requires just a rough idea of the final destination to start with, and that idea will be refined and made clearer as we are moving closer towards it. More detail will be needed however in the first stages of the transition, since we are closer to them and we need a clearer picture to take useful actions.
Let’s start with the assumptions from Effective Altruism, as defined for example, by Benjamin Todd in the 10th episode of the podcast “Effective Altruism: An Introduction” by 80.000 hours.
The EA proposition concerns anybody who wants to devote some effort towards the greater good and stems from this three assumptions:
There are ways to contribute to the greater good that are more > effective than others, by quite more than a trivial factor
Those ways are discoverable with a moderate effort
Some of those discoverable are neglected, which means that they are > receiving very few resources compared to their potential, > therefore any extra input would be highly valuable. This statement > is related to the diminishing returns expectations for any > endeavor, which means that even if something was very effective in > general, every extra unit of effort towards that effort will be > less effective than the previous one, and if there are a lot of > resources allocated there already, you are likely to find a better > target for your efforts.
From these premises it follows that it would be wise, for those who want to contribute something to the greater good, to spend a non-trivial amount of time thinking about how to have the best impact possible for the effort (or money) they want to contribute.
Let’s continue with the long-termist version of Effective Altruism. It claims that the amount of good that one can do when targeting the wellbeing of future generations is potentially much, much bigger than targeting present people. The reasoning is that there are potentially millions of future generations, which possibly could even span many planets and not just one. Therefore, targeting potential causes for early extinction, such as nuclear war, climate change or AI malfunction becomes much more attractive than helping the poorest people on earth alive today. The same reasoning applies to preventing the rise of a global authoritarian regime that would lock-in humanity in very miserable living conditions.
There are billions of dollars devoted to fight climate change but relatively few millions devoted to prevent catastrophic AI, and therefore the Effective Altruists tend to favor investment in the latter over the former.
What about preventing a political lock-in on a global authoritarian regime? There are definitely huge resources devoted there through the perspective of maintaining and increasing USA military hegemony, with the assumption that the USA is the leader in promoting freedom and democracy. There are also huge amounts of resources devoted to the rise of the European Union as an equal player to the USA in the domain of promoting freedom and democracy.
However, from the perspective of the theoretical framework presented earlier, those two efforts are missguided. True that in the short term the USA and the European Union present a window of opportunity for advancing freedom that the more authoritarian regimes of competing world powers, China and Russia, don’t provide. The window doesn’t consist of extending the Enlightment-Liberal model of competition in the labor market, in the government elections and globally among nation states. On the contrary, the opportunity is to use those to build a completely different political, economic and cultural system. One that actually helps the greater good rather than being a threat to it.
As we have seen the world that we live in is not the result of careful conscious planning, on the contrary it is the result of unintended emerging behaviors from a system built of pieces which, nominally, is supposed to do the contrary.
We live in a system that is supposed to promote individual autonomy through the free market: everybody can choose what skills to invest in, what to work on, and what to do with the money they make. We live in a system that is supposed to promote democracy and good governance through competitive elections of representatives grouped in different parties. We live in a system that is supposed to promote universal wealth by fostering an economy that is like a pie that every citizen gets a slice of, or like a tide that lifts all boats.
And yet, the reality is completely opposite to the narratives that we have built our society with. Most people are too poor and too uninformed to invest profitably in their education and have fulfilling, rewarding and well paid careers. Most people feel they have little choice on what jobs to take, and experience job insecurity and wealth scarcity. Economic interests dictate the policies of governments and manipulate the people through the media. The economy grows by stealing from the poorer and giving to the richer. Even most of the fortunate ones to be part of a dwindling middle class work many more hours than would be expected for the level of technology we have nowadays, and have little control on how much time they put on their job, even if they make more money than they need.
Therefore, from the EA premises we conclude something that in the EA movement nobody seems to be pushing for: the most effective thing that we can do is to devote our resources to building a utopia, in the good sense of the word. To build both a global culture and supporting institutions that serve the common good instead of private interests, one that promotes stability via universal cooperation rather than by threat of mutual nuclear annihilation. That utopia is reachable, it can be discovered with reasonable effort, it has a huge potential of helping the greater good for generations to come, and is clearly neglected.
The most defining characteristics of the world we are aiming for are that people would be free from coercion. More specifically, we want to build a world where people are free to choose their relationships, and collectively decide with them how to help each other fulfill their needs, emotional and material. They will be able to do so easily by virtue of having access to abundance of natural resources, as well as the knowledge and technology to use them effectively and efficiently. A different angle to look at this is that people will provide for each other through gifts, people's relationships won't be transactional, people won't do something in exchange of something else, but they will give to each other because they want to practice love, generosity and gratitude.
The above seems a good candidate for a compact description of a world that would facilitate the happiness and fulfillment requirements outlined in the theoretical framework: the ability to practice generosity and gratitude while having autonomy to build attachment relationships and seek mastery in disciplines of their choice.
Those characteristics are completely opposite from the world we inhabit today where most people are coerced to work for a living, because they need money to pay for the necessities of life, food, housing, health and so on. A world where many natural resources are hoarded by a very few, the same who guard with equal zeal the technology, factories and so on, required to process them efficiently.
Nowadays most people believe that coercion is needed to get anything done, otherwise people would just eternally fight with each other and not accomplish anything. Some people believe that the western “representative” “democracies” provide a good balance, where people fight every few years for a few weeks about who the next ruler will be, and in between they submit to the government’s rule. Others find the pantomime of elections and parliamentary debates wasteful, and point out the greater achievements by authoritarian regimes, of which China is the most prominent recent example. Convincing people that we can actually get more things done helping each other voluntarily rather than being coerced to do so will take some serious work.
The simplest and most effective way to organize such a world seems to be in the form of sovereign communities, each one of them responsible for the ecosystems of the area they inhabit.
Each community should have at least a few hundreds of people so that there is a good chance to cover all the knowledge and skills required for a contemporary group to function autonomously: advanced medicine, education, construction, transport, food production and processing, etc.
On the other hand, the communities shouldn’t be too large because after exceeding a certain number of people, trusting each other starts to become challenging. When people don’t trust each other the group stops being an actual community. It becomes an Imagined Community in Andreson’s sense (Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities, 1983). Imagined Communities have the property that people who believe that belong to them act towards each other in camaraderie like if they were equals but tend to feed dynamics that benefit just a small elite. Examples of imagined communities are Nations, ethnicities, gender identities, etc.
When people stop trusting each other it becomes tempting to assign people to policing each other, and then it becomes tempting to arm them, and then people worry about the police abusing their power and feel the need to create organizations to police the police, and it tends to go downhill from here. Investing community resources in policing each other is a waste of resources that is not justifiable by the gains in productivity and scale of collaboration. Those same gains can be achieved by collaborating between communities, rather than making a community larger.
Therefore a real community has an upper bound of probably around 3000 people, which is a number where, given any two individuals, either they trust each other directly because they know each other well, or they trust each other indirectly because they know somebody who knows them well. The upper bound will vary depending on the circumstances. In a community where everybody has done a lot of personal and communication work and is very aware of their feelings, patterns, etc. and has good communication tools the upper bound will likely be higher than otherwise. Similarly when a community becomes more powerful and gains control over more resources and technology, it’s members won’t need to spend that much time working, and will be able to indulge more time in socializing, which will also likely raise the upper bound compared to a situation where everybody feels compelled to work long hours and barely has time and energy left to keep up with the closest relationships.
Obviously it will be unfeasible, at least with a technological level similar to the current one, for every community to have their own factories for microprocessors, displays, cars, trains, boats, planes, spaceships and so on…. It will also be impractical that each community has a hospital capable of advanced heart and brain surgery for example.
These kinds of infrastructures make economic sense when they serve populations of hundreds of thousands, or maybe even tens of millions of people. Therefore communities should collaborate with each other in order to build and operate them for the benefit of the whole population in a large area.
Such collaborations could take different forms. One possibility is that an entire community would devote themselves exclusively to one such large infrastructure. In turn, they would be assured that their needs in other areas (health, nutrition, education, etc.) would be covered by other communities in the area.
Alternatively, each one of those big infrastructures could be maintained collaboratively by a few communities, maybe tens of communities, that would assign a few members to that infrastructure. Those members could commute, or stay there for some weeks in rotating shifts. There could be a constant number of people assigned or instead just have a very small number of people to maintain the infrastructure operational (in the case of a factory), and then periodically do sessions of a few weeks of work to build up inventory.
By definition of community, property will be held in common. A community is a group of people that organize themselves to help each other flourish, and therefore it makes sense that they manage and own resources collectively.
At the same time, a community wants to empower each one of their members, and promote their individual autonomy. So, for all practical matters people will have resources assigned to them that they will be able to use like we use property in the current society: clothes, phones, computers, houses, etc. it will just be more convenient because they won’t have to deal with mortgages, payments, insurances, repairs, … the community will take care of that.
It will also be easier to try different products. If you don’t like one just return it to the communal storage and grab a different one. In a market economy trying things out is very expensive because selling a used item is time consuming and typically a significant loss of money. And renting things out to try them is usually quite expensive as well.
Another practical difference is that if the house assigned to somebody increases in value they won’t be able to sell it or rent it for their own gain. On the contrary if they travel for an extended period of time they might be expected to put their quarters at the disposal of the community, to be used for guests or rented for profit for the collective.
Work will be organized along the patterns defined by Takis Fotopoulos for Inclusive Democracy. Everybody able in the community will be expected to work to provide every member of the community with the level of wellbeing decided collectively. This will include caring for the elder and infirm, building and maintaining housing, utilities, transport, food supply and processing, clothing, and so on. Alternatively, if the community was specialized in some advanced technology, the members would choose among responsibilities similar to current jobs in tech corporations: engineering, management, leadership, design, user experience, technical writing, etc.
The kind and amount of work that each individual contributes is negotiated collectively. Everybody expresses their preferences in the kind of work that they would like to do and if possible people are assigned according to their preferences and given an equal amount of working hours. From this starting point the allocations can be further refined. If there are areas that are in more demand than others, people can agree on rotating shifts, or maybe they can agree that those who work on the less desirable tasks do less hours than those who work on the most desirable ones.
This arrangement should be reviewed periodically as people’s preferences change. Both collectively and individually. At some times the community might decide to spend collectively more or less time doing work and have more or less free time. While individuals might change their preferences on the kind of work they’d like to do.
For the case of communities specialized in high tech activities, negotiating those arrangements will include the communities that provide them with the products and services that their members desire, as well as the resources for producing the product that they are specialized in. SImilarly if a community has an agreement to contribute a certain amount of work to a shared infrastructure (a hospital, airport, factory, etc.), changes on that agreement will involve negotiations with the other parties.
It's worth noting that in the not-so-distant future there won't be that much work to do, since we are very close to having the technology to automate most mechanical tasks. Probably there will be only a significant amount of work left in the areas of emotional work and creative work. Creative work though is of different nature, and it will be addressed later. For the purposes of this section then, the expectation is that in the near future there won't be much work left other than areas such as therapy, coaching, mentoring and education. Once menial work almost disappears the need for such careful planning might even go away.
It might seem that an arrangement that is so quantified and negotiated goes against the premise of working in a non-transactional way, to practice generosity and gratitude, but that's not the case. People don't have to earn their living. People are entitled to a livelihood for being part of the community. What they get is not proportional to the value of the work that they put in. Is not in exchange for the work they contribute. What they get is proportional to their needs, which might change when their health conditions change, or when they suffer an accident for example.
Some people might be a better fit and better trained for some work that happens to be very important to the community at a particular moment, in which case they will be lucky in a sense that they will be able to experience more generosity, as they will be contributing much more than they are receiving. At some other times they might be too old or too sick to contribute, or their skills might be of little use, in which case they can feel lucky to be part of a community that provides for them equitatively and enjoy practicing gratitude.
The differences between coercive transactional exchanges and voluntary gift giving are as important in the symbolic, constructed, aspect, as they are in the practical ones. It is important to build vocabulary and ceremonies to emphasize and remind the voluntary nature of the situation. Belonging to a community is voluntary, if one wanted they could switch to a different community, one that uses liberal transactional relationships, or authoritarian assignments, for example. Being reminded of that, strengthening the social construction, makes it easier to experience generosity and gratitude.
In a practical way, one doesn't have to worry about them or their property having an accident and struggling to survive afterwards. If one's house is flooded or suffers a fire, they will be entitled to the same level of comfort as before, without having to deal with annoying insurances that happen to have a clause that doesn't cover their situation and be broke as a result. If one suffers a heartbreak from a painful breakup they can excuse themselves from work, the same way that in the current system one can excuse themselves if they break an arm. Participating in the workforce comes from everybody's autonomy, and if somebody is excusing themselves all the time from participating in the workforce while they seem perfectly physically able the collective perception will be that they are suffering from some sort of depression, and the collective response will be in the area of offering support, rather than feeling contempt for their abusive behavior.
On top of the mandatory work required to fulfill the collective agreements on wellbeing, each individual can optionally request to have some extras. In that case, the amount of work required to produce such extras will be added to her commitment for that period. That doesn't mean that she will be working on something related to the production of that good or service, the extra work that she does will still be assigned according to her preferences.
This framework allows for autonomy and diversity. Different communities could take completely different approaches on the same aspect of life. For example, a community could consider that child care is an abundant resource because it is something that everybody enjoys doing and therefore is not part of the work plan. A second community could instead see child care as a chore that impacts everybody and therefore have it as part of the collective planning for common wellbeing. And yet a third community could decide that child care is something that falls into the realm of individual optional luxuries, and those who want to have children must plan it as part of the extras that will require more work from them in return.
Producing scientific knowledge and art are very different from producing goods and services. Goods and services can be produced as a gift to somebody in particular while producing art and knowledge can be done as a gift to all future generations. With knowledge the distinction is very clear-cut, while with art it is a bit more blurry. When somebody invents a new art form, like a new style for painting or a new musical genre, clearly they are contributing something abstract to future generations. On the other hand, the performative aspect of art, acting in a theatre play, or playing in a concert have both a specific value conferred only to the people who are experiencing the performance life, which is quite different from the value conferred to future generations that will enjoy the recording.
Also the enjoyment from those activities is of a different nature, more abstract, more related to the mastery of a subject and pushing the frontiers of knowledge than on helping somebody in particular. Another difference is that potentially can benefit from very distributed collaboration around the world, where there will be very few people specialized in that field of knowledge, or mastering that specific art form, spread all over the world, with whom to collaborate.
The nature of funding and managing both endeavors is very different from the nature of funding and managing the livelihood of the people in a community. It would be very challenging for the same organization to balance a budget that contains items from these two spheres. It’s likely to cause a great deal of discrepancy between the communities, maybe some think that art is super important, others want to advance technology and a third group is interested in fundamental research. Also, it is very hard to quantify the outputs of the teams assigned to those tasks. The proposal presented here suggests avoiding this conundrum by considering those endeavors part of completely different spheres of life and deserving of their own organizational structures, orthogonal to the ones we’ve discussed until now.
It might seem unfair to artists and scientists to relegate their work to the sphere of personal pursuits compared to other professions, say masonry or plumbing that are in the communal sphere. But that’s not the case. One premise that makes this proposal attractive and viable is that we assume that the members of a well organized society will need to spend very little time to fulfill their daily needs, even at a very high level of luxury. We’ve argued that the reason why we are working so many hours is that the current economic system is designed for inefficiency and unequal distribution of work and benefits. It generates a lot of wealth but mostly goes to a tiny fraction of the world population, and for the rest, even those who are quite well off, they have to work disproportionate amount of hours to pay for mortgages, which is totally unethical because the land should be a shared resource, or for medical royalties, which is also totally unethical because most medications have been funded largely with tax money, also planned obsolescence, marketing, inefficient bureaucracies, inefficient competition (several firms duplicating effort because their output is guarded by copyrights and patents and can’t be reused), etc.
Based on this assumption, we expect the people organized according to the current proposal to have most of their time free to do what they choose. Given this premise it seems more reasonable to limit the communal sphere to what would be communal in a typical family, taking care of each other, making sure that everybody is fed, clothed, healthy and that the house they live in is properly maintained. After that, what each one does with their free time is their own business. One might decide to play videogames, another to write poetry and the third to work on a grand unified theory of physics.
Some of them might decide to invest in a collective artistic or scientific endeavor. They might require resources for that, like a building for an arts center or a research institute. They can get that done collectively, as long as the resources used are within the sustainability parameters set by the community, by requesting it, collectively, as part of their package of optional extra benefits and extra work. As a result they will work extra hours to get those buildings done, but they won’t necessarily be involved in the construction of the building or it’s furniture, the tasks will be allocated through the standard mechanism of preferences and personal fit. After the facilities they require are built they won’t need to work any extra time, and will be able to devote as much as their free time to the cause that they want to, and offer their art and scientific outputs as gifts.
With this arrangement we should expect that someone who wants to devote their life advancing the frontiers of scientific knowledge will be able to fulfill their obligations towards the community and do scholarly research at the same time, putting less hours in total that now they would devote to an academic career and still be able to devote more time to research, because now most scholars, except a few privileged to work in private research centers, spend most of their time between teaching, bureaucratic duties, and fundraisings,.…
Another benefit of this proposal is that when scholars are having an especially intense period of work, like when they are finalizing a paper, their closest friends might volunteer to cover their community duties. Same for an artist that is in a particularly intense creative mode, or intensely rehearsing a performance the days before the grand opening,... In this way, art and science are not funded collectively through coercive taxes to the general population who might not be interested in supporting them, but they might be supported, on a voluntary basis, by people close to the project that want to invest in it.
Expanding on this pattern we can see that big technological projects represent a similar kind of challenge, but at a much larger scale. Imagine building the largest particle collider in the world, or a new model of spacecraft, which is a very different endeavor from building one more instance of a proven model. Such a large project could be done in a similar way than nowadays crowdfunding works. A team of recognized and accomplished engineers and scientists could put together a proposal and advertise it to enthusiasts around the world. Then volunteers could come from all over the world to participate in that project, which could be organized like a transient community.
Is important to note that the governance model presented here won’t necessarily work for everybody. It requires a certain cultural approach to dealing with other people in the community and in the world. In particular it requires a willingness to work for the greater good and a desire for autonomy, equality and equity. From the theoretical model described in the first book of this series, based on the most recent knowledge from neuroscience and psychology, it would seem that adopting those two premises would be a good cultural choice for most people.
As we have seen, happiness and fulfillment generally come from building strong secure attachments, practicing generosity and gratitude, and working for others because of intrinsic motivations of being of service and gaining mastery, rather than extrinsic motivations like wealth or coerced by the need of making a living. In order to achieve this it is crucial to build a culture that removes the implication that what we deserve is proportional to what we contribute to society. Instead, to facilitate secure attachments, the culture has to promote the idea that we all deserve to be loved and cared for, and we will be no matter what.
Still, there might be people who want to choose different premises. The expectation is that the model presented here eventually will become hegemonic but will coexist with fringe cultures with opposite values. People who want autonomy and want to practice selfishness rather than generosity will fit better in liberal communities. People who want to work for the greater good but don’t want to practice autonomy, that need to be directed on what to do, might fit better in authoritarian regimes. This diversity is ethical as long as those communities expose their members to the other cultural options and let them opt-out from their cultures and join different communities. If we truly desire the best for everybody we should encourage each individual to find a community that is a good personal fit for them, even if that implies a culture with values that are anathema to ours such as unequal power and wealth, hierarchy, patriarchy or holding magical beliefs. As long as such cultures remain fringe they won’t represent a threat to humanity or biodiversity.
Having a good cultural fit means framing one action in the context of contributing to the greater good. This means for example that when one goes to an assembly or other meeting is not thinking on how to influence the decisions for their own advantage, but instead how to contribute to decisions that contribute best to the greater good.
This doesn’t mean to ignore one’s desires and preferences, it means to look at them impartially and take them in consideration with the others’. For example one might want to use a certain situation to advance their own career. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, as long as the desire is framed in a collective mindset. One can ponder all the possible directions to advance their career which one will help the greater good the best, and use criteria such as considering the ones that are more needed, less popular, and still have a good overlap with their personal motivations and skills. Onse should also make sure that their moves wouldn’t be an impediment for someone else who could do more good.
A cultural fit in the dimension of autonomy means a desire to live with very few rules and that those rules are more like general guidelines for a purpose that one understands. Also having the willingness and skills to enforce those guidelines on oneself and help others do the same, being supportive and not coercive.
The more rules and structures the more overhead in getting things done. For a self-management culture to be effective and efficient it should focus instead on promoting awareness, of the collective goals, of the progress and challenges towards them, on how each individual is equipped to contribute, etc.
It should also promote trust which is key for effective delegation. With trust goals can be broken down into smaller tasks and those be delegated to teams and commissions. Without trust everybody feels the need to put their nose into each team, to keep track of what they are doing and attempt to micro-manage them.
It’s important to distinguish between authority and power. Authority is the credibility that someone, or some organization, enjoys through a combination of recognized work in a given field and a track record of success. An organization might be considered successful if it has a consistent track record of producing advice or predictions that turned out accurate, or if it has been delegated some responsibility and has earned a track record of executing it successfully. An entity that has authority is called authoritative.
Power in contrast is the ability to make somebody do something against their own will. An organization that wields power is called authoritarian.
In the current system both concepts are usually mixed in confusing ways. The media often talks about the authorities referring to the police or the government. However, as we have seen, even in the most advanced democracies, governments don’t have any track record of successfully executing the will of the people. Therefore, it is wrong to refer to it as an authority, it would be more accurate to refer to this as authoritarian. The charade of periodically conducting elections doesn’t really confer any authority if the resulting policies, laws and their implementations are consistently against the popular will.
Further confusion stems from the fact that the authoritarians can use their power to buy and coax authorities. For example, in a situation of a crisis, maybe an economic crisis or a health crisis, the head of a government agency, who happens to have had a successful academic career before that position, might advocate for some particular expensive policy to solve that crisis. Governments don’t have any credibility when they advise for expensive interventions. Take for example the USA government attitude towards expensive military actions. They lied about Saddam Husein having weapons of mass destruction to justify invading Iraq, they lied for 20 years about the progress of the war in Afghanistan, they had lied in previous wars as well to justify entering the second and first World Wars,.… Therefore, taking a dataset of previous events, one could expect that when a government promotes a new expensive policy the likelihood of them telling the truth would be, being generous, about 1 percent.
Often the advice comes from somebody who has authority in the field. Could the probability of the government telling the truth be higher when the advice comes from an accomplished academic? Maybe, but it wouldn’t seem that much higher either. If we look at past events, for example the enthusiasm in which economist pitched the globalization and failed to notice it would wreak havoc in the middle class, or how during the covid pandemic top scientists denied that the USA government had funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in Wuhan, which turned out to be a lie, it would seem that when an authority speaks on behalf of a government it doesn’t increase that much their likelihood of saying the truth.
Sometimes supposed authorities speak from private firms or universities. When they speak on behalf of a corporation that is benefiting from the situation they basically lose all their authority since corporations have a mandate to put their profits above all. What economist at the payroll of a multinational corporation would say anything bad about globalization, or what epidemiologist working for a pharma that is producing an expensive vaccine or medication would say anything other than that the expensive treatment is the best option to fight the disease?
One might hope that when scientists speak from their position as researchers at universities they would have more autonomy and be conferred with some authority. And indeed, outputs from universities have historically had higher chances of being closer to the truth than pronouncements from governments or corporations. But saying higher than 1% is not much. Still at university there are huge pressures from power. Typically researchers need grants which come from either the government or corporations and are designed to promote their interests. And when that fails there is the fallback option of bribery. A famous case is the long campaign against dietary fat and cholesterol, theoretically the leading cause for heart disease since the 1940s, until it turned out that the head of nutrition research at Harvard had been bribed to downplay the effect of sugar.
The proposal presented here pretends creating favorable conditions for creating real authority. Is designed to enable people to pursue their scientific interests without being subjected to censorship in the form of control over funding. In this way, it should be possible to build organizations that acquire authority in different fields, and are truly independent, not connected to the hierarchies of economic and political power that we are used to nowadays.
Playful romanticism (not the drama version) and sex are tools that help building secure attachments. Obviously, a society that promotes happiness and fulfillment through autonomy and building secure attachments can’t prescribe a cookie-cutter form of romantic and sexual relationships.
The current society presents a narrow model of valid relationships namely the monogamous hetero-normative ecalator relationships. This model prescribes the quantity of relationships that is adequate, the acceptable combination of genders, and the expected trajectory of the relationship, from initial courtship, through getting married, moving in, having a mortgage in a suburban house, and raising a nuclear family.
Since the explosion of the free love movement in the 1960s the idea of such restrictive relationship structure has been increasingly questioned. In recent years there has been a proliferation of books and other media that promote much more open relationship frameworks with names such as poliamory or relationship anarchy. Those seem much more conducive to helping people find happiness and fulfillment. They encourage nurturing relationships and let them grow on their own instead of trying to force-fit them in pre-established shapes. Obviously those ideas shouldn’t be forced on anybody. People shouldn’t feel coerced to have more than one romantic or sexual relationship, having zero or one should be equally acceptable.
Sexualy Transmitted Diseases (STDs) are a very real threat to the spread of relationship paradigms that emphasize autonomy and choice. Living in communities that promote conscious relationships should significantly reduce those risks. It is already common in polyamourous groups to have clear protocols on using protections and having their members periodically tested. In the larger communities that we are envisioning, of hundreds or thousands of people, it could be commonplace to have testing facilities owned and operated by the community. People could be tested for free often, removing difficult access as a possible barrier (nowadays getting tested can be a shameful and expensive experience). Also the community could have a protocol of testing visitors and also people from the community that come back from trips. Finally a community where sex is not a tabu and testing for STDs is not shameful should be safer than the opposite. In current society where the norm is monogamy but cheating is commonplace STDs have an easier time spreading undetected. Estimates of cheating in monogamous couples range between 25 to 75 percent.
Paternity is another controversial aspect of the current social arrangements. To be clear, what is controversial is not that some men participate in parenting, but the need to track who is the father of each kid, and to expect the fathers to be responsible for their kids, and only theirs. One controversial aspect of paternity is that for fertile females implies either monogamy or careful pregnancy planning. The fact that the invention of paternity has been linked historically to the invention of private property, the rise of patriarchy and the subjugation of women adds to the controversy.
The fact that paternity is controversial doesn’t necessarily mean that it is wrong or difficult. With modern DNA technologies it might be something trivial to arrange. Nevertheless, it is worth being aware of the controversy and being careful about this aspect when designing the parenting arrangements of a given community.
A common impediment to parenting is lack of time or economic resources. Many people feel that their career is too demanding to have space for parenting or that it brings in too little income to provide for children. In a well-organized society along the lines proposed here people should have plenty of free time to be able to participate in parenting and also have plenty of time for their personal pursuits. Also the communities should have plenty of spare wealth to invest in their children. Furthermore more adults will participate in parenting, instead of just the one or two parents. Other lovers and metamours will likely chip in, and plenty of grandparents will also likely be available. In general, the traditional “it takes a village to raise a kid” adage will come back to life.
Despite all these advantages for child bearing and parenting, careful and conscious pregnancies should still be in order. Prospective parents should ensure there will be an abundance of consenting adults that will want to participate in parenting of the new kids. It would be unethical to bring kids to the world just to leave them to the care of the community and then move on to another community. Surely, if that were to happen the kids would be treated as family, and would have a much better fate than is common in kids raised in orphanages or foster care nowadays. Still, for the adults in the community, being given that responsibility without their consent would be a very serious breach of trust.
In our present society there is a push for a clear separation between the romantic / sexual sphere of life and the professional sphere. Many workplaces discourage employees from having romantic relationships between them, some ban it, others require registering them with the Human Resources department.
The reason is that the workplace is a hierarchical environment, where people up in the hierarchy control access to scarce resources such as promotions or starring in a big movie production. Accessing such scarce positions gives people access to more wealth. Therefore it has been commonplace since work was invented a few millennia ago, for people higher up in the hierarchy to trade sexual favors for privileged access to those resources. Both in the private firms and government positions. It was already a known moral scandal during the Roman Empire that young boys were expected to trade sexual favors with senior representatives if they wanted to have a chance to move up the ranks.
The special consideration of sex in labor relations is rather hipocritical. The underlying arrangement of a labor relationship is not consensual since people are forced to take a job in order to survive in a market economy. This non-consensual relationship should be scandalous and is not. Instead in order to reduce the potential for abuse in labor relationships often mitigation mechanisms are in place such as minimum wages and trade unions. Given that it is socially accepted that people are coerced to take a job, further ethical assessments can be made about different kinds of jobs and compensations. It would seem unfair that jobs that are very exhausting physically or mentaly would have a poor pay, but when that happens, that's rarely scandalous. And yet, when a job that has a very high compensation, like the social capital of hanging out with rich and powerful people, or starring in a big movie, involves a sexual component, it becomes a scandal. The hypocrisy is that these arrangements are relatively more consensual than those of less-prestigious jobs without a sexual component, since one could reject the sexual part and still expect to make a comfortable living.
In the current society work happens in a different sphere than personal life. Work happens in a hierarchical sphere and sex is morally reserved for the family and friends sphere which is more horizontal and communal. In the social arrangement proposed here there aren't such distinctions. Work happens in a horizontal communal environment. Without hierarchies there is no potential for using sex to move up the ranks. Therefore it will be totally appropriate to spend time with lovers at work. That should be a much healthier working environment and it should also make it easier to find arrangements for kids to be close to their parents when they are working.
Even in communities with a thriving culture that promote autonomy and awareness there will be the need for collective decision making, both at the community level and supra-community.
The domain of collective decision making will be greatly reduced if everybody has access to multiple authorities on different topics so that they can guide their actions with trusted information, rather than relying solely on their more fallible intuitions.
Also the need for collective decisions will be reduced when there are established autonomous working groups taking care of different aspects of the economy.
Some areas that will still need collective decisions are:
The amount of baseline comfort that is desired in the community and > how that translates to workloads for individuals, as explained > earlier.
Establishing commissions and work groups
The level of effort devoted to environmental regeneration, and > sustainable limits on natural resource exploitation
Allocation policy of singular resources. For example, imagine that a > community has a few particularly desirable housing units, for > example, waterfront units. How shall these be allocated? Shall > they be used as vacation units and not be assigned as living > quarters, and be rotated for people who want to vacation? Shall > they instead be allocated for living quarters in short periods so > that everybody can enjoy them eventually? Assigned permanently > through lottery? Or maybe through seniority via a waiting list?
Accepting new members in the community. Deciding the acceptance > criteria, like cultural fit, and processes, for example trial > periods and community acceptance vote
Expelling members from the community. This should be reserved to > extreme cases because it’s crucial that everybody in the community > feels that they will receive unconditional collective support. > It’s fundamental to enable healthy attachment relationships. > Expelling should be reserved to cases where people have expressed > a strong and continued opposition to the community’s values, have > acted repeatedly against the community’s interest, and are > refusing help to redress that behavior. A case that shouldn’t > qualify is when somebody simply doesn’t show up to work for a long > time. That should be treated as a mental problem instead, and > support should be provided to heal and find the energy and > motivation to participate again.
Joining and leaving federations of communities and confederations of > federations
Choosing / Revoking delegates to federations
Ratifying the federation's decisions.
The ideas on how to govern communities in a way that respects the autonomy of each individual have been developed at length in the anarchist literature. There are some variations such as Fotopoulos’ Inclusive Democracy, Bookchin’s Libertarian Municipalism, Öcallan’s democratic confederalism, etc.
At this point, in order to get started with a transition to a global society governed with an anarchist framework, it is enough to be aware of the general points. The details can be worked out as the transition progresses and larger populations want to be part of it, both via theoretical developments and experimental studies. Also the details will have to adapt to the situation. Probably the first few hundreds of people to join will be highly motivated but also have a lot of uncertainty about the robustness of the project, later on, when there are millions of people in the confederated communities the people who will join will likely be more diverse but also have more confidence in the robustness of the project, a similar level of confidence than people have when applying for citizenship in small nation-states.
The main ingredients are:
Sovereign communities: No authority outside the community can impose > a decision on the community
Community governed by assembly: everybody who belongs to the > community has equal voice and vote in the assembly. The vote is > direct, there are no representatives.
Individuals have the freedom to opt-out from communities and apply > to join a different one. Communities have the right to accept and > revoke memberships.
Not everybody has to participate in all the collective decisions, > but everybody who wants can. Only people who feel passionate about > a particular decision and have invested effort in researching it > should participate. Those who are more indifferent would better > save their time and leave it to their colleagues. People shouldn’t > feel that participating in the assemblies is a burden, but rather > that it is an opportunity to contribute when they feel inclined to > do so.
Decisions should take place using the principle of subsidiarity in > order to minimize the burden on those taking decisions and > maximize the autonomy of the people in the community. The > principle of subsidiarity states that each decision should be made > at the smallest group possible. Therefore the decisions that > impact only one community should be made at that community, not at > the federal level. The decisions that affect only one working > group should be made by that working group, the decisions that > affect a housing unit should be made by the members who live > there, etc. For example, the community should decide what to > expect as outputs from a working group, but the decisions on which > technologies and methodologies to use, what are the criteria for > accepting people in that working group, how to distribute the > work, how to train apprentices, etc. all these should be decided > within the working group.
Assemblies might choose commissions to perform specific tasks, the > nature of those tasks is purely executive, is not deliberative, > they can only execute decisions taken by the assembly, they can’t > take decisions on their own representing the assembly, beyond > technical matters.
There is a debate in the anarchist literature on whether to use > majority vote or consensus for decision making. Here a pragmatic > approach is recommended. For decisions that impact the economy of > the whole community a simple decision seems preferred, since > waiting for a consensus would be long, exhausting, unethical to > the majority and potentially economically costly for everybody. On > the other hand, for decisions that impact a small co-living group, > they might decide to take certain decisions by consensus if they > judge that the emotional cost to the group of having a minority of > people in the group bitter about a decision is worse than the cost > of the majority waiting to reach a consensus, probably through > finding a middle ground.
Communities might choose to join a federation of communities to > tackle projects that go beyond the capacity of one community, and > to promote regional standards.
The federations of communities will be coordinated by assemblies of > delegates from the different communities. The delegates are not > representatives, they can’t make their own decisions, they have to > simply transmit the desires of their respective assemblies.
Federations might choose to join in federations of federations, > called confederations. And confederations might join together into > second order confederations and so on,... up to global > coordination.
Decisions must be ratified bottom up. A federal decision only binds > a community if that community has ratified it.
Delegates should transmit the full picture of the community’s > preferences and not just the majority opinion in order to avoid > introducing rounding errors. Imagine 3 communities with 100 people > each that vote on 4 options, A, B, C and D. If the votes are > distributed according to the table below the delegates from > community 1 would report that B is the winning option, community 2 > delegates would vote for C and community 3 would choose D. It > would seem that the decision must be made between B, C or D, while > in fact the most voted option across the federation is A, which > nobody would be defending, if delegates would only communicate the > majority vote.
| A | B | C | D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 30 | 40 | 10 | 20 |
| 2 | 30 | 20 | 40 | 10 |
| 3 | 30 | 10 | 20 | 40 |
| total | 90 | 70 | 70 | 70 |
Seen from the current perspective it seems that the world has a few very asymmetric features that might present a challenge to this model. Some resources are concentrated in mines in very few places in the world. Also there are some areas that are more desirable to live in because they have exceptionally beautiful landscapes and nicer weather.
It is not clear how much of those challenges are intrinsic in the nature of the world and how much have been created by human intervention. Some natural resources are concentrated in poor economies because the rich ones have already exhausted theirs. Also there are economic incentives to develop technologies that use as raw materials the cheapest possible ones, the ones that can be extracted with very cheap labor in poor countries.
Also humanity has played a big role in destroying paradisiac landscapes, polluting them and altering the climate for the worst. It is reasonable to expect that as the proposed model of society becomes more and more popular such differences will diminish, since there will be incentives to exploit natural resources more homogenicaly, to create more diverse technologies, to regenerate the natural environment and restore the climate.
Still it is plausible to expect that some of the asymmetries will persist, and also to expect that the system proposed here will be able to find better solutions than the current military-industrial-slavery has. In theory, since we live in a competitive market-state system, those states that have such scarce resources should be able to sell them at a very high price. Those who have rare elements used in every cell phone and laptop computer should be able to get a cut on each sale of those items. In reality, most countries that have tried such approaches, notably with oil, have ended up victims of a coup d’etat, a civil war, or something of that sort, that has destroyed the country and left their natural resources exposed to exploitation by the global markets.
With a global governance based on confederations of communities that promote a culture of mutual support, such rare resources and singular places should be viewed as global commons. From such a perspective non-transactional exchange mechanisms can be devised in ways that are convenient and equitable for all parties involved. A trivial solution could be rotating the people who work extracting those resources from workers from all over the world, but probably more convenient solutions can be found. As for the high demand singular locations, probably the best use can be to devote them to vacations, to be enjoyed by everybody in the world.
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