Is a federation of nations or a world government possible?
Re: Is a federation of nations or a world government possible?
Yes, but only after most if not all government work is done by AI. As long as humans with their greed for power are allowed to seek political positions of power such a federation or world government is impossible. Differences born out of power struggles will always prevent it. AI is the only way it can happen.
Re: Is a federation of nations or a world government possible?
I find it more likely that the "state" as we think of it today as this formalized national body with a monopoly on violence will cease to exist entirely. In that ceasing it doesn't follow that a universal body of control will form, rather, the opposite. For most of human history there was no state. There were societies and cultures and complexity but no state. Even at the dawn of urbanism is took millennia for the state to form out of almost universally egalitarian societies, and those societies resisted this change vigorously where they could. During this birth of civilization the first cities and towns were generally egalitarian and stateless, and very rarely warlike. See Caral, Catalhoyuk, and others.
Throughout the history of the many empires that followed the state was rarely so organized as it is today. The concept of a hard border and restriction on the freedom of movement is only a 20th century phenomena. This understandably comes as shocking in context of past slave empires and the horrors of colonialism. But it must be kept in context that the state's power for all its horrors in past centuries and especially on the timescale of millennia came in ebbs and flows, especially before the industrial revolution. The state would gain control over a region and subjugate it's people, then for a variety of reasons it would collapse, break apart, and recede before another state would come and take its place, sometimes, soon thereafter, other times not for decades or centuries. And through all this ebb and flow the state was never universal, it still isn't today. The people of the deep Amazon have no state and no state controls them. Many other people today still do not participate in financial systems or many of the formalized institutions of their "countries" even though we show these institutions as having jurisdiction over them on a map.
I won't write about the reasons for this gradual shift towards more controlling larger modern states right now, this post would be too long and I wouldn't do the information justice compared to self-study; this is the root of my vagueness in the paragraphs above in respect to the fine details. Moreover, there is simply too much ideological bias that people who take the state as a given have for any individual on a forum to overcome. The topics to study in order to understand are anarchism, marxism, anthropology, sociology, economics, and political philosophy, particularly concerning Thomas Hobbes and the many fans and detractors he's had over the years such as Fredy Perlman. Within the forms that are political be sure to read primary sources, not anyone's opinions or propaganda on those sources. Within the schools that are not explicitly political focus on study of human forms of organization prior to, during, and after the transition from stateless societies to states. What were people motivated by before and after the state and why? How and why did organized violence first occur? What role does violence play in politics today? Why does the state hold a monopoly on violence, how is it used? These are all very important questions.
But I do think it follows that humanity won't remain in this fragile fleeting form of organization for much longer on a historical timescale. It's completely unsustainable both socially and ecologically and while it doesn't imply that we will simply retrace our history and revert to prior stateless forms of society (a reactionary conclusion,) it does imply that statelessness is possible and at the very least this form of the state we experience today is temporary.
Personally I hope for some version of Greg Egan's future outlined in his novel Diaspora. A myriad of free polises teeming with beautiful minds sharing a digital soup while the physical world holds hundreds if not thousands of different human species all freely participating in their relationship with the broader ecosystem.
See the Setting and Premise section.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)
Throughout the history of the many empires that followed the state was rarely so organized as it is today. The concept of a hard border and restriction on the freedom of movement is only a 20th century phenomena. This understandably comes as shocking in context of past slave empires and the horrors of colonialism. But it must be kept in context that the state's power for all its horrors in past centuries and especially on the timescale of millennia came in ebbs and flows, especially before the industrial revolution. The state would gain control over a region and subjugate it's people, then for a variety of reasons it would collapse, break apart, and recede before another state would come and take its place, sometimes, soon thereafter, other times not for decades or centuries. And through all this ebb and flow the state was never universal, it still isn't today. The people of the deep Amazon have no state and no state controls them. Many other people today still do not participate in financial systems or many of the formalized institutions of their "countries" even though we show these institutions as having jurisdiction over them on a map.
I won't write about the reasons for this gradual shift towards more controlling larger modern states right now, this post would be too long and I wouldn't do the information justice compared to self-study; this is the root of my vagueness in the paragraphs above in respect to the fine details. Moreover, there is simply too much ideological bias that people who take the state as a given have for any individual on a forum to overcome. The topics to study in order to understand are anarchism, marxism, anthropology, sociology, economics, and political philosophy, particularly concerning Thomas Hobbes and the many fans and detractors he's had over the years such as Fredy Perlman. Within the forms that are political be sure to read primary sources, not anyone's opinions or propaganda on those sources. Within the schools that are not explicitly political focus on study of human forms of organization prior to, during, and after the transition from stateless societies to states. What were people motivated by before and after the state and why? How and why did organized violence first occur? What role does violence play in politics today? Why does the state hold a monopoly on violence, how is it used? These are all very important questions.
But I do think it follows that humanity won't remain in this fragile fleeting form of organization for much longer on a historical timescale. It's completely unsustainable both socially and ecologically and while it doesn't imply that we will simply retrace our history and revert to prior stateless forms of society (a reactionary conclusion,) it does imply that statelessness is possible and at the very least this form of the state we experience today is temporary.
Personally I hope for some version of Greg Egan's future outlined in his novel Diaspora. A myriad of free polises teeming with beautiful minds sharing a digital soup while the physical world holds hundreds if not thousands of different human species all freely participating in their relationship with the broader ecosystem.
See the Setting and Premise section.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)
