Man is very bad at living in large societies, and has yet to figure out how to do it peacefully. If we can find a good structure soon, we will survive our global crises. There is a known structure that should get us close.

Primitive society

Small societies govern themselves well. Very primitive ancient societies were all egalitarian - for example all the houses were identical. Pirate ships were formal democracies - anybody could call an election for the captaincy at any time, except during battle. People are naturally able to self-organise, as long as their society is the right size.

But above a certain number of people, society tends to develop a hierarchy, which does not best serve the needs of its people. (The reason for this is not obvious, but might be this: It’s when society is big enough that not everyone knows each other. It’s easier to exploit people who you do not know, without shame from your family and colleagues. Because they don’t know the exploited people either.)

(“A societal organisation that serves its people” is not necessarily democratic and egalitarian and socialist, but the obvious example would be)

Hierarchy (example)

A mechanism of how hierarchy can develop is easy to imagine. The description below is certainly a common mechanism but may not be the only one.

Imagine a society where the wealth comes from farming land. Some people have land and some have not. The man with land can hire people to work the land, then sell the produce, then use the money to buy more land. He can do this with little personal labour, by utilising other people’s labour. So the personal labour he expends by owning land does not increase with the amount of land he owns.

He can embark on a cycle of acquiring ever more land and employees, and having ever greater annual revenue and profit. So after many cycles, the small landowners become large landowners, buying up the smaller holdings. The cycle continues until one man owns all the land, and is in control of all the employed people, and all the money in the society.

This cycle is an important mechanism in every society including our own. It is called “wealth concentration” by economomists. It is how inequality naturally grows, unless it is limited by a strong enough progressive tax. If it is not limited by some political process, the ultimate result is a monarchy.

You should recognise the above pattern from any (in fact every) history book.

The example above assumes a society with a currency and formal employment, and where wealth comes from farm-land, but this mechanism works just the same in other types of society. The type of personal freedom is also not relevant (for exmaple chatal slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, economic dependence, free employment). Even in a society with UBI, this mechanism would work just the same. But slavery is convenient for the wealth-owners, so they may create famines (for example the Irish and Bengal famines) to force formerly free people into bondage.

Mature hierachies and kingdoms

This mechanism naturally leads large societies to become kingdoms. That’s why kingdoms are historically ubiquitous. Non-kingdom societies before the modern age were very rare, excepting very small or sparse ones.

[There is a distiction to be made between a feudal society and a middle-eastern style kingdom. The example above is like the latter, where the king directly has power over everybody and everything in the society. In a feudal system, the king employs other (smaller) landowners as his employees (nobles). These people employ smaller landholders, in a formal hierarchy, down eventually to the serfs who work the land.]

Normally, history doesn’t play out quite like in the example. Once people become powerful, they hire soldiers to protect their wealth from the poor. They battle other powerful men for control over land. The final stages in the formation of large kingdoms are accelerated, because the power aqcuisition mechanism changes from economic (like purchasing land) to military (gathering armies and taking land).

The powerful, apart from gathering economic and military power, do one more important thing. The gather political power. First, they hire governers to control their staff. The governers make rules. As the number of staff (and their families) living there grows, the governance evolves into laws and courts. This is important for legitimising (in a moral sense) the power of the owner/ruler.

There is really only one stable economic/political system, and it is the monarchy.

This is the most basic explanation of why our society is how it is. Our laws and ideas about property and ownership, about the need for an all-powerful militarised state, about everything, were developed to legitimise a feudal monarchy. They have changed little since then. It is very difficult to conceive of alternative kinds of society, but anarchists have some good (and many bad) ideas about that. Our modern society is still basically like this. The differences, where we have moved away from this kingdom order are much smaller than the commonalities. Everything above applies to modern global society.

The role of religion is important, but can be left for another day. Religion is important for both the ruler in enforcing compliance with the laws, and for the poor in gaining some power. It is a tool that has been wielded in colourful ways in this universal power struggle.

Governing a mature society

The rulers of large societies need elaborate inhuman technical mechanisms to put order and and structure onto the society. This means documents (constitutions, law) gatherings (parliaments and private meetings within the government, military, spies, lobby groups, etc) layers of militaries and police and security groups, and much more. And even then, most societies have unrest and coups and unrisings and more.

(France is a good example that I’ll use here, because its history is violent and colourful. It has all of the features I describe in this article, well documented and widely understood. It seems that everything that can happen in human society has happened in French history.)

Societal unrest naturally ends in a new monarchic regime. Modern attemps to make egalitarian societies (for example France) have been difficult and violent and repetitive. In France there were many cycles of failure and return to monarchy. The result today is only partially successful, in the sense that it is not egalitarian, and has frequent violent confrontations between rulers and subjects. It goes through frequent revisions of the regime. (We are on the 5th republic now. The current violent struggle is over RIC, which would constrain the power of the ruler and give the people a strong democratic power over him.)

But making a large fair society is necessarily difficult, because it is unnatural. It is not natural for people to live in large societies so we don’t know how to do it, and it is economically unstable tending to revert to monarchy. Nobody has succeeded in making a well functioning democracy yet.

Why conventional society is failing us

The trouble with faudal, monarchic, and modern societies, is that they are rigid. They are very bad at adapting to shocks and changes. For example the struggle in ROI to legislate for abortion took decades. Legalisation of recreational drugs, decriminalising addiction, housing the homeless… These things are generally desired by large majorities, and are easy to fix on paper. But society struggles even with these. Vast energy is spent on protests, debates, writings. Even then, governments can take decades to deal with them, or may never do so.

Our political systems may be good at maintaining power for the large wealth-holders, but they are bad at nearly everything else.

Now there are appears the global ecological crisis. And everywhere the problem is identical. Societies desire to make big and urgent changes, in order to survive. But their governance is not suited to this. They are not competent for this job. They only know how to serve the short term interests of the wealthy.

The ecological problem is a good example to show the ineptitude of all global political systems. It is in nobody’s interest to fail. Nobody is at fault for the failure. Humans have not yet manages to make a large-scale society which is robust and adaptable in the face of big (or even small) problems.

How man can adapt and survive

But progress is being made. Each successive French republic is more democratic than the previous. The United Kingdom has split into many new republics (for example USA, India, ROI), each one more democratic than the last. ROI is a good example of a society both advanced towards democracy, and rapidly advancing.

It is quite well understood now, and in good detail, the options for how a stable and fair and effective democracy can be structured. The leading choice requires several minor constitutional changes. We are not far from monarchy, but if we choose the correct path, we are also not far from effective democracy. Particular changes are required to the role of the upper house of parliament (sortition), to electoral rules (score voting), and to the triggering of referendums (RIC). The changes are specific but they are minor and can be done incrementally.

But to change a stable system requires a great force. The challange new is to build the momentum to push for the change. That begins by educating our society through writings and the media. This effort must start today.