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Edited on Sun Apr-25-04 02:27 PM by starroute
I've worried since I was a kid about the totalitarian potential of a world government. It's not just a matter of freedom -- creativity also depends on having places that are outside the system, where you can do things that don't obey the current norms.
On the other hand, the current condition of endless wars over resources and exploitation of poor nations by the rich is not a good thing either. Especially if the world's resources are about to become a lot scarcer, we going to need to work cooperatively rather than competitively to get through the crunch.
What it comes down to is that governments, like corporations, are a bad thing no matter how competitive or monopolistic they are. Instead of squabbling over the question of world government, we should be trying to envision an alternative global system that can protect the entire planet and all creatures on it without trying to enforce a rigid set of laws and restrictions.
I'm not sure just how that would be accomplished, but I do know a few things about it. One is that it wouldn't look much like current governments or current corporations. Another is that is would have to be designed in such a way that it could not be perverted into an instrument of personal power, but would still be strong enough to resist attempt by warlords and pirates to capture or destroy it.
I tend to think that it might resemble the Internet in certain ways -- a distributed network of services and enterprises with no central core that could be either seized or destroyed. Over the next few years, we're going to see whether the Internet itself can resist the attempts of governments and corporations to control, co-opt, and regulate it out of recognizability. If it can, it is likely to become the paradigm for much else in human affairs.
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