this is a place marker.

Sound Societies

The term ‘sound societies’ refers to societies (organizational systems, see below) that are capable of meeting the needs of a group of technologically sophisticated thinking beings with physical needs.  This is the category of beings that includes humans on Earth.

Certain objective scientific requirements must be met to have ‘sound societies.’  Before we look at these requirements, lets consider the term ‘society’ in more detail to see what it means.

What are Societies?

The term ‘societies’ refers to the sets of rules and structures that determine how living beings interact with outside world and with each other to meet their needs.

Interactions With The Outside World

All beings with physical needs must interact with the outside world to get these needs met, or they perish.

All of earth’s animals and plants have physical needs.

This is because all of earth’s life is built on DNA.  DNA- based life recombines elements to duplicate DNA; this is essential for reproduction.  Each being must have inputs of energy to make these reactions happen. This energy generally comes from chemical reactions.  The book, The Meaning of Life explains these reactions in detail, as part of its explanation the process we call ‘life.’  But, in almost every case, the energy for the reactions comes from food that earth's life forms consume and process for energy.

We humans must eat food to provide energy.  Our bodies take energy (stored chemically in the food) out of the substances we eat. We use the energy to sustain our life processes and reproduce.  We expel the substances that have been depleted of energy as wastes.

The food always comes from the outside world.  We have to interact with the world to meet our needs.  At the very least, we have to do this to get food.  All beings that do not have the ability to think and plan on a conscious level interact with the world through instinct.  This is true by the definition of the term ‘instinct.’  This definition is from the American Heritage Dictionary:

instinct /ĭn′stĭngkt″/

noun

An inborn pattern of behavior that is characteristic of a species and is often a response to specific environmental stimuli.

"the spawning instinct in salmon; altruistic instincts in social animals."

A powerful motivation or impulse.

An innate capability or aptitude.

This means that all animals other than humans interact with the world (and other members of their species; this is discussed below) through instinct.

Humans are the only animals on earth that are not bound entirely by instinct.  We have self will and self awareness.  If we find that our instincts drive us to interact with the world a way that we don’t like, we don’t have to give in to the instincts. We can use our willpower to design something else.

For example, many of earth’s animals divide into groups to fight over territory.  Wolves, jackals, and hyenas, for example, form into packs to fight over territory.  Each pack defines a territory with marks (scent marks, for these animals) along the borders.  It then patrols the borders and uses force to keep out other members of their own species that are not members of their packs.  This kind of society is built on a principle called ‘territorial sovereignty.’   Lower animals that act this way (all animals other than humans) do so because of instinct.  They don’t have self will or the ability to formulate plans.  Various environmental and evolutionary forces compel them to live this way.  (Starting with the next chapter, we will examine these forces; we can’t really understand why we act as we do without understanding the forces that pushed our evolutionary ancestors to act as they acted.)   Instinct determines the way they interact with the world around them. These instincts push them to divide the land around them into territorial parcels, mark borders around each, and defend the borders with force.

Dogs are not the only animals that act this way.  The highest category of earth’s beings (as far as intellectual capability) is that of primates.  We are primates.  Many primates build their societies on territorial sovereignty.  Our closest evolutionary ancestors, gorillas and members of the genus pan (specifically chimpanzees) organize themselves this way. Current human societies are built on the principle of territorial sovereignty also.

The types of societies that dominate the world today are built on territorial sovereignty.

All beings with physical needs must interact with the environment around them to meet their needs or they will perish.

where the interests of the individuals within society align with the interests of

The chart below is a chart of possible societies.

Qqq road map of possible societies.

Global Food Cost Per Person Per day

The Average food cost per person per day, 2020 food prices: $4.55

This reflects the amount it would cost to buy the daily food consumed at retail market prices.

Where This Figure Comes From

Let’s start with a cost per gram, serving, and calorie for various foods.  The figures below are from the National Institute of Health article.

The Cost Of US Foods As Related To Their Nutritive Value.

Published in Am J Clin Nutr. 2010 Nov; 92(5): 1181–1188.  Published online 2010 Aug 18. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.2010.29300

Author information Article notes Copyright and License information PMC Disclaimer

Major USDA food groups	No. of foods	Energy density	Water content	Serving size (RACC)	Price per 100 g	Price per serving	Energy cost
		kcal/100 g	g/100 g	g	$/100 g	$/serving	$/100 kcal
Milk and milk products	134	182 ± 112	66 ± 17	112 ± 89	0.40 ± 0.31	0.26 ± 0.17	0.23 ± 0.13
Meat, poultry, and fish	196	224 ± 98	60 ± 14	89 ± 51	0.80 ± 0.44	0.63 ± 0.38	0.41 ± 0.31
Eggs	8	171 ± 74	72 ± 10	65 ± 28	0.32 ± 0.16	0.24 ± 0.21	0.22 ± 0.14
Dry beans, legumes, nuts, and seeds	62	330 ± 217	40 ± 33	76 ± 62	0.50 ± 0.47	0.26 ± 0.22	0.18 ± 0.17
Grain products	435	337 ± 110	24 ± 23	63 ± 53	0.47 ± 0.3	0.23 ± 0.20	0.14 ± 0.10
Fruit	93	67 ± 56	82 ± 15	157 ± 77	0.28 ± 0.22	0.40 ± 0.33	0.54 ± 0.48
Vegetables	257	83 ± 80	80 ± 17	102 ± 59	0.33 ± 0.26	0.29 ± 0.33	0.68 ± 0.69
Fats, oils, and salad dressings	51	390 ± 226	47 ± 23	22 ± 9	0.37 ± 0.18	0.09 ± 0.08	0.17 ± 0.19
Sugars, sweets, and beverages	151	242 ± 190	45 ± 39	119 ± 102	0.40 ± 0.41	0.23 ± 0.18	0.22 ± 0.21

They show global costs based on averages (the first figure) and high and lows (plus or minus the second figure on the chart).

Food cost per person per day:

The sections below go over information for different age groups, sexes, and levels of activity for different people.  It shows an age and sex adjusted average of 2,194 Kcal per day as the daily requirement per average person.  Using this information we can calculate the low, high, and average cost of food, per person per day, globally.  Then, using nutritional averages for ratios of foods, we can calculate the average food cost per person per day.

This figure works out to $4.55 per person per day.  This figure is based on people buying their food at market prices.  It is important to note that many people in many parts of the world raise their own food, so their actual cost will be lower than this. In other words, we would expect the actual average food cost, per person per day, to be less than $4.55. Let’s look at where this figure comes from:

Per the table, grain costs per 100 Kcal are between $.04 and $0.24, with an average of $0.14,  This leads to an average cost to feed a person per day with grains at:

1. Lowest cost (using grains at $0.04 per 100 Kcal):

   - 2,194 Kcal = 21.94 units of 100 Kcal

   - 21.94 × $0.04 = $0.88 per person per day

2. Highest cost (using grains at $0.24 per 100 Kcal):

   - 2,194 Kcal = 21.94 units of 100 Kcal

   - 21.94 × $0.24 = $5.27 per person per day

3. Average cost (using the mean grain price of $0.14 per 100 Kcal):

   - 2,194 Kcal = 21.94 units of 100 Kcal

   - 21.94 × $0.14 = $3.07 per person per day

The recalculated food cost per person per day for 2,194 Kcal, based solely on grain prices, is:

- Lowest: $0.88

- Highest: $5.27

- Average: $3.07

The same calculations for meats are:

1. Lowest cost (using meats at $0.41 - $0.31 = $0.10 per 100 Kcal):

   - 2,194 Kcal = 21.94 units of 100 Kcal

   - 21.94 × $0.10 = $2.19 per person per day

2. Highest cost (using meats at $0.41 + $0.31 = $0.72 per 100 Kcal):

   - 2,194 Kcal = 21.94 units of 100 Kcal

   - 21.94 × $0.72 = $15.80 per person per day

3. Average cost (using the mean meat price of $0.41 per 100 Kcal):

   - 2,194 Kcal = 21.94 units of 100 Kcal

   - 21.94 × $0.41 = $9.00 per person per day

So, the recalculated food cost per person per day for 2,194 Kcal, based solely on meat prices, is:

- Lowest: $2.19

- Highest: $15.80

- Average: $9.00

Together

A common global dietary pattern might look something like this:

1. Grains and other plant-based foods (including fruits, vegetables, legumes): about 75-80% of caloric intake

2. Animal-based foods (including meat, dairy, eggs): about 20-25% of caloric intake

For simplicity, let's use a 75/25 split between grains (representing all plant-based foods) and meats (representing all animal-based foods).

So for our 2,194 Kcal daily requirement:

- Grains (and other plant-based): 75% = 1,645.5 Kcal

- Meats (and other animal-based): 25% = 548.5 Kcal

Now, let's calculate the cost using the average prices we determined earlier:

- Grains: $0.14 per 100 Kcal

- Meats: $0.41 per 100 Kcal

Cost calculation:

1. Grains: (1,645.5 / 100) × $0.14 = $2.30

2. Meats: (548.5 / 100) × $0.41 = $2.25

Total daily food cost: $2.30 + $2.25 = $4.55 per person per day

This mixed diet approach gives us a more realistic estimate of global food costs, falling between our previous all-grain and all-meat calculations.

This would be about the rough price for food per day per person if people bought their food in markets with standard markup rates over wholesale and had to pay global prices.

We would expect the actual price per day to always be lower than these numbers for the following reasons:

1. Local price differences: If local prices are lower than world prices, no food will be imported and food will be sold for lower than world market prices.  In many areas, local food prices may be cheaper than global market rates, which would reduce the average daily food cost.

2. Self-production of food: When people grow their own food, they can significantly reduce their daily food costs, as they don't have to pay retail prices or account for transportation and middleman costs.

3. The $4.55 figure assumes "standard markup rates over wholesale," but in reality, there may be areas with lower markup rates or more competitive pricing.

4. Government subsidies, food assistance programs, or other interventions in some regions could further lower the actual cost for many individuals.

These factors combined suggest that the actual average daily food cost per person is likely to be below the $4.55 figure.

Details and Figures

Calories

There is no difference between calories listed on food labels and kcal (kilocalories). The term "calorie" on food labels is used colloquially to mean kilocalorie.

To clarify:

1. A calorie (with a lowercase 'c') is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius.

2. A kilocalorie (kcal) is 1000 calories.

3. The "Calorie" (with a capital 'C') used in nutrition is equivalent to 1 kcal.

When you see "calories" on food labels, it's referring to kilocalories (kcal). This practice can be confusing, as it's not technically correct, but it has become standard in food labeling and nutritional contexts.

For example, if a food label says "100 calories," it actually means 100 kilocalories or 100,000 small calories.

This convention is used in many countries, including the United States. Some countries, particularly in Europe, may list energy content in both kcal and kilojoules (kJ) on their food labels.

Nutritional Requirements

Here's a breakdown of estimated daily caloric needs:

Adult Males (19-30 years):

- Sedentary: 2400-2600 kcal

- Moderately active: 2600-2800 kcal

- Active: 2800-3000 kcal

Adult Males (31-50 years):

- Sedentary: 2200-2400 kcal

- Moderately active: 2400-2600 kcal

- Active: 2600-2800 kcal

Adult Females (19-30 years):

- Sedentary: 1800-2000 kcal

- Moderately active: 2000-2200 kcal

- Active: 2400 kcal

Adult Females (31-50 years):

- Sedentary: 1800 kcal

- Moderately active: 2000 kcal

- Active: 2200 kcal

Children:

- 2-3 years: 1000-1400 kcal

- 4-8 years: 1200-2000 kcal

- 9-13 years (boys): 1600-2600 kcal

- 9-13 years (girls): 1400-2200 kcal

- 14-18 years (boys): 2000-3200 kcal

- 14-18 years (girls): 1800-2400 kcal

These ranges account for different activity levels. The lower end is for sedentary individuals, while the higher end is for more active individuals.

Breakdown by age and sex

Certainly. I can provide you with an approximate breakdown of the global population by age and sex. Please note that these figures are estimates and can change over time due to various demographic factors. As of my last update in April 2024, here's a general overview:

Age Distribution:

1. 0-14 years: 25.3%

2. 15-24 years: 15.2%

3. 25-54 years: 40.7%

4. 55-64 years: 9.6%

5. 65 years and over: 9.2%

Sex Distribution:

1. Male: 50.4%

2. Female: 49.6%

total food consumption by sex and age group, table:

Age Group	Sex	% of Population	Number (millions)	Avg. kcal/person/day	Total 100s Kcal/day (billions)
0-14	Male	12.75%	1,020	1,900	193.80
	Female	12.55%	1,004	1,700	170.68
15-24	Male	7.66%	613	2,600	159.38
	Female	7.54%	603	2,200	132.66
25-54	Male	20.51%	1,641	2,600	426.66
	Female	20.19%	1,615	2,200	355.30
55-64	Male	4.84%	387	2,400	92.88
	Female	4.76%	381	2,000	76.20
65+	Male	4.64%	371	2,200	81.62
	Female	4.56%	365	1,800	65.70
Total		100%	8,000	-	1,754.88

Notes:

1. Numbers are rounded for simplicity.

2. The average kcal/person/day is estimated based on moderate activity levels and adjusted for sex differences.

3. The total 100s Kcal/day (billions) is calculated by multiplying the number of people by the average kcal per person, then dividing by 100.

4. The total at the bottom represents the sum of all groups.

Summary

1,754.88 billion units of 100 Kcal = 175.488 billion Kcal total per day

175.488 billion Kcal / 8 billion people ≈ 2,194 Kcal per person per day

This average of about 2,194 Kcal per person per day is much more reasonable and aligns with global nutritional estimates.

WHEN THE BIG FIVE CORPORATIONS first came to the Hawaiian Islands, they got the title to vast amounts of land. At first, they used this land to raise tropical crops for American markets. They needed people to do the labor and wanted the cheapest workers they could find. They went to China and found large numbers of people willing to work for almost nothing. Most of their workers came from China.

The Chinese wanted rice to eat and the islands had no native rice. The companies allowed the workers to bring seeds from China and plant the rice on land wasn’t suitable for the crops the companies wanted to raise for export.

In the 1950s, the big five corporations became the owners of large amounts of land in Central America. This land was much closer to their markets in the United States and shipping costs were far lower, so they moved their agricultural operations to Central America. They sent the Chinese workers in Hawaii back to China and began converting the farmland that had raised tropical crops to other uses, mostly as sites for condominiums, homes, golf clubs, and resort facilities.

The bogs and the swamps where the workers had raised rice weren’t very desirable properties for just about anything and the companies basically ignored them so they could focus on other parcels with greater potential to generate revenue.

Rice kept growing on these lands, but humans didn’t harvest it. The rice was left for other animals.

Frances has been looking for land that former officials of the company had ignored but that the company could use to generate revenues. She found a parcel of land that the company had ignored where rice grew. This parcel is 1,500 acres in size, the same size as the Pastland Farm. As of the early 21^st century, chemical contamination from genetically modified hybrid rice (which needs chemicals to grow) was spreading throughout rice-producing lands all over the world. Wealthy consumers wanted uncontaminated rice and were willing to pay more for it. By the time our group took this trip, the uncontaminated rice was getting very rare, because contamination was spreading very rapidly. As a result, the price of uncontaminated rice was much, much higher than the price of standard rice: by the time Frances did her study, pure, uncontaminated, organic rice was selling for nearly ten times the price of standard rice. Since rice was never a common crop on Hawaii, the hybrids that needed chemicals had never been brought to the islands. The rice that grew in the bogs was pure, uncontaminated, totally organic rice which would sell for ten times the price as standard rice.

Several years ago, Frances began putting together an operation so that the company could generate revenue from this land. She hired a professional farm management company to monitor the land, determine when the rice was ready for harvesting, call a harvesting company and get the rice brought to market, and arrange for replanting so it will produce more rice next year. Each year, the farm produced 3.15 million pounds of organic rice.

Organic rice was selling for $1 a pound, so the land produced $3.15 million a year in revenue. (The same as the Pastland Farm.) All of the workers and suppliers that the management company hired to take care of harvesting and replanting submitted their bills to the management company, which then submitted a single bill each year to Castle and Cooke. These bills totaled exactly $700,000 a year. The company paid these operating costs out of the operating revenue and was left with $2.45 million a year, called the ‘gross operating profit’ of the Hawaii Organic Rice Farm. (This is the exact amount of the gross operating profit of the Pastland Farm.)

The management company didn’t work for free. Each year, it submitted a bill to Castle and Cooke for $50,000, the cost of the management services it provided.

After Castle and Cooke paid this bill, it had $2.4 million of the money from the sale of the crop left over.

This was the free cash flow of the farm. This is the amount of money Castle and Cooke got each year from the land. Note that this is the exact same free cash flow as the Pastland Farm.

Different Ways to Privatize Land

Frances has a Ph.D. in the field of land tenure design.

She designs land tenure systems, including leasehold ownership systems.

She is not a rice farmer, she has no interest in farming, and has no time to devote to analysis of rice farming. Her department deals with thousands of different kinds of properties. Most of the properties her department deals with are residential, commercial, and resort facilities, like hotels, condominiums, shopping malls, and housing developments.

Her department has ONE rice farm.

Often, the management company taking care of the Hawaii Rice Farm has questions: it needs to know what Frances wants done with the waste straw and other plant materials generated from farming, how to deal with birds and pests that eat the rice, and other details.

Frances has a lot of properties to deal with. She can’t deal with the details of every single property. This one is taking up too much of her time. She needs to get someone else involved with the property, preferably someone who will have very strong incentives to make the decisions that would be in the best interests of Castle and Cooke, take care of the land, keep it productive, and improve it if this is possible.

She has a kind of standard leasehold system that she often uses for properties that generate free cash flows. This works for residential properties, commercial properties, resorts, golf courses, restaurants, and just about any other property she wants under private control. In this system, she sells the rights to the property in a way that causes the great bulk of the free cash flow to flow to the company in the form of a leasehold payment.

Some of the free cash flow will be available for the buyer of the leasehold to keep. Because the buyer will be buying the right to some free money, the buyer will be willing to pay a price. Frances wants this to happen because if a buyer has to put up large amounts of her own money in the property, she will have incentives to make absolutely sure that she follows all of the rules and makes the leasehold payment as promised. (If she doesn’t do these things, her rights to the property may be cancelled ‘without recourse,’ meaning that she won’t be able to get back the price she paid. People don’t want to lose money. They will pay their leasehold payment and follow the rules to avoid this loss.)

She looks over her portfolio and finds a golf course that the company offers through leasehold ownership. The golf course charges people to play golf. They charge a lot because a lot of people move to Hawaii specifically to play golf: the weather is perfect there almost all year long. They use part of this money to cover the cost of maintaining the facility. The rest of the money is the free cash flow.

This particular golf course generates a free cash flow of $2.4 million a year. Frances created a leasehold on this property and sold it under these terms: the buyer of the leasehold would have to turn over $2 million of the free money to Castle and Cooke each year as a leasehold payment. This would leave the buyer with $400,000 a year in free cash. Interest rates were 4% at the time so the buyer wanted to buy on terms that would generate a 4% return on the money they invested. (If you pay a price for a document that grants you rights to a golf course, you are investing your money.) They realize that if they invest $10 million, they will get exactly a 4% return on their invested money. ($400,000 is exactly 4% of $10 million.) Frances found a golf course operating company that really wanted this particular course added to their portfolio. (Hint: the company name starts with the letter T, ends with P and has um in the middle.) The company thought that, with its brand, it could charge more to get people to play and make lots of money.

Since the golf course operating company would be buying the right to $400,000 a year in free money, it could afford to pay $10 million for the rights to the golf course. Frances wanted this because she knew that, if the company had $10 million invested, it would never be late on the yearly payment of $2 million. If it was late, Castle and Cooke could cancel the leasehold ‘without recourse,’ meaning the operating company would lose $10 million. No one would try to come up with excuses for missing a payment of $2 million knowing that they might possibly lose five times this amount ($10 million is five times $2 million), so Frances was sure that the golf course operating company would never miss its payments and never violate any of the rules that Castle and Cooke put in place to protect the land.

You might intuitively realize that Frances could set up many kinds of leasehold ownership systems that work differently. She could ask for an extremely high leasehold payment (even higher than $2 million), transferring more of the free cash flow of golf course to Castle and Cooke. But if she did this, the buyer would be buying less of the free cash flow and wouldn’t pay nearly as high of a price. For example, if she asked for $2.39 million, rather than $2 million, as a leasehold payment, the buyer would only be buying the right to $10,000. At a 4% interest rate, the most the buyer could pay for the price of the leasehold would be $250,000. (Why is this the most she could pay? If she invests $250,000 to buy the right to $10,000, she will get exactly a 4% yield on her invested capital. She can’t pay more because if she paid more, her yield would be less. For example, if she paid $1 million, her $10,000 yield would only be 1%. Since she can get 4% in the market, it doesn’t make sense for her to accept only 1% and Frances will not be able to sell the leasehold if she asks $1 million for it with a leasehold payment of $2.39 million.)

Her company sells a lot of leaseholds and it has a division that makes calculations to show what combinations of prices and leasehold payments would work. This division starts with the free cash flow of the land. It calculates how much of the free cash will be left over and buyable at each different leasehold payment that Frances may set. It then determines the price the right to get this ‘leftover free cash’ will bring in the market, at the interest rate in effect at that time.

This division creates a chart so that Frances can see her options for the Hawaii Organic Rice Farm. She can set a very high leasehold payment and therefore get a very high percentage of the free money the land generates but get only a very low price. She can set a very low leasehold payment and therefore leave a lot of free money offered for sale. Or, she can set something in between, a system that will lead to a high leasehold payment and a very high price. Here is the chart this division gives her:

 

Chart 7.1

 

Amount of Leasehold Payment Frances Sets	Price that leasehold will bring in a market, if interest rates remain at current level of 4% on farm loans	Amount of Free Cash Flow Offered for Sale	Percentage of free cash flow that will go to buyer	Percentage of free cash flow that will still be owned by Castle and Cooke
$0	$60,000,000	$2,400,000	100.00%	0.00%
$1	$59,999,975	$2,399,999	99.99996%	0.00%
$1,000	$59,975,000	$2,399,000	99.96%	0.04%
$10,000	$59,750,000	$2,390,000	99.58%	0.42%
$100,000	$57,500,000	$2,300,000	95.83%	4.17%
$1,000,000	$35,000,000	$1,400,000	58.33%	41.67%
$1,500,000	$22,500,000	$900,000	37.50%	62.50%
$2,000,000	$10,000,000	$400,000	16.67%	83.33%
$2,200,000	$5,000,000	$200,000	8.33%	91.67%
$2,300,000	$2,500,000	$100,000	4.17%	95.83%
$2,350,000	$1,250,000	$50,000	2.08%	97.92%
$2,375,000	$625,000	$25,000	1.04%	98.96%
$2,399,000	$25,000	$1,000	0.04%	99.96%
$2,399,999	$25	$1	0.00004%	99.99996%
$2,400,000	$0	$0	0.00%	100.00%

 

She is eventually going to settle on the shaded line in the middle; this give her the best combination of price and leasehold payment. Let’s consider why the other options aren’t optimal to her, starting with the first line.

Frances can decide to sell a leasehold where the leasehold payment is $0. If she does this, she is essentially selling a freehold on the farm, not a leasehold. She is offering to sell the entire $2.4 million in free money the farm generates. If she does this, she will get the price that a freehold on this farm will bring, or the price that this farm would bring if it were sold in a state that didn’t do leasehold ownership, like Texas.

Note that it would bring $60 million.

 

Frances would like to have this $60 million for her company. But there are two reasons she isn’t going to choose this:

First, if she sells the land this way, she is selling a freehold on the land. Castle and Cooke doesn’t sell freeholds: if it sells a freehold, it loses its rights to this land forever. The company wants to keep its land forever. It is not going to authorize her to sell a freehold on this or any other land.

Second, this option doesn’t bring in one dime of revenue for the corporation. Frances works for a company that wants revenue. The more revenue she can generate for Castle and Cooke, the more the company will value her as an employee. Each year, the company shows how much it values employees with bonuses. Very valuable employees get multimillion dollar bonus checks. Frances wants this to happen to her. She wants a system that generates some revenue for the company, so she isn’t going to choose this option.

She could offer a leasehold with a leasehold payment of $1 a year. Note that, if she does, she isn’t going to get as high of a price. She will only get $59,999,975, or $25 less than she would have gotten if she had sold a freehold. (There is a reason for these numbers; they are not made up but come from standard formulas which work for very understandable reasons. See endnote 2, at the end of the chapter, for an explanation.)

This will get her a $1 a year increase in the company’s income. This is better than nothing, but not much better. She can’t expect the company to go crazy with their bonuses when they find she only increased their income by $1 a year from a property that generates $2.4 million in free cash each year.

Socratic Leasehold Ownership

Frances goes down the chart until she gets to the highlighted line. She can sell a leasehold with a leasehold payment of $2 million a year. If she does, her appraisers say she can get a price of$10 million.

This particular leasehold ownership system has a leasehold payment that is exactly 20% of, or 1/5^th of the price paid for the leasehold. We will see that leasehold systems that work to make this happen have certain very special properties that no other leasehold systems have. I will need a name to refer to leasehold ownership systems that sell property rights with a leasehold payment that is 20% of the price, so I can refer to it in discussions. I will call this kind of leasehold ownership ‘socratic leasehold ownership.’

I want you to consider one important reason why this particular leasehold ownership option might appear to be very attractive to Frances:

Let’s say that someone buys a leasehold on this property for $10 million. The buyer promises to pay $2 million a year to her landlord. What if the buyer gets lazy and decides not to collect the rice this year and not make her leasehold payment? If she doesn’t make the leasehold payment, she has violated the terms of her leasehold agreement and her landlord can cancel the remaining term of the lease. She will not get her $10 million back.

If someone buys this leasehold under these terms, you can be very sure she is going to make absolutely sure she always makes her leasehold payment on time and in full, without any need for anyone to notify her or ask for any money. She knows that if she doesn’t make this $2 million payment, she instantly loses $10 million. No sane person would miss a $2 million payment knowing that, if she misses it, she will be out five times this amount of money.

The buyer of the leasehold will make sure the leasehold payment is made every year even if the farm doesn’t produce enough to make it. She has $10 million to lose if it is not made and will sell her personal possessions, if necessary, to get the money. She will borrow, if necessary, to get the money. She will sell her blood to a blood bank, if necessary, to get the money. If all else fails, she will find someone who wants to buy the leasehold and sell it, always making sure the leasehold payment is made. (Note: not all leasehold ownership systems work this way, but the one that Frances set up in Hawaii did work this way.) Frances wants to get this particular property off her back so that she can worry about other things.

If Frances sells the leasehold under these terms, she will never have to worry or lose a second’s sleep about possible problems that might make her drive out to the farm to figure out why she isn’t getting paid. She will never have to do it. In fact, the company will actually come out ahead if the leasehold payment is not made so they have no reason to even send out a notice or ask for it. They might even hope that the leasehold owner forgets.

Why? If the leasehold payment is missed, they can cancel this leasehold and immediately sell another one for $10 million, which is five times the amount of money they missed out on.

There is another reason that Frances likes this option: it provides very, very powerful incentives for the leasehold owner to protect the farm from damage and to repair any damage, at the leasehold owner’s own expense, if it happens. Consider the reason: say the leasehold owner has not taken any precautions against floods and a massive storm floods the farm, doing $5 million worth of damage.

A renter or someone with no money on the line might just walk away. But the leasehold owner is NOT going to walk away. If she does, she loses $10 million. If she can raise the $5 million by any means, and fix the farm, she will still lose, but she will only lose $5 million. If you have ever lost large amounts of money, you will know that it hurts you a lot and the loss will haunt you the rest of your life. People are not going to take this risk if they can avoid it. There are things she can do to protect the farm from floods. She is going to do them. Although she is only doing this to protect herself, her interests are the same as the interests of her landlord in this case. (This is true if the landlord is a giant corporation or if the landlord is the human race, as we will see.) As long as the farm remains healthy and productive, the landlords will get their money. The leasehold owners will make absolutely sure that the landlord’s interests are protected.

If the leasehold owner can’t prevent the loss, the landlords still aren’t going to suffer as long as she can fix the damage for anything less than $10 million. There is very, very little that nature can do to this farm that can’t be fixed for $10 million. The owners of this land (Castle and Cooke, in this case) don’t have to watch the weather forecast and wonder if their land is safe. The leasehold owners will make absolutely sure that no harm comes to the land if they can help it.

We will see that the price plays an important function in leasehold ownership systems. They place this money at risk. They will lose this money if something goes wrong. Frances particularly likes the socratic leasehold ownership system because in this system the price is five times the leasehold payment. (If the leasehold payment is 1/5^th of the price, the price is 5 times the leasehold payment; this is saying the same thing two different ways.) Since the leasehold owners always have five times more money at risk than they have agreed to give to the landlords, they will never leave their landlords hanging; the landlords will always get every cent they have been promised, on or before the due date, and never even one second late.

Even if the leasehold owner should somehow miss this payment, Castle and Cooke (the landlords) still can’t lose. As soon as the payment is missed, they can cancel the leasehold and will again own all rights to the property. They can then sell another leasehold on the same property for another $10 million, getting 5 times more money than they missed out on. The landlords take on no risk whatsoever. Since they take no risk whatsoever, they never have to collect anything, never have to send out notices, never have to bother anyone. They will always get their money. We will see that this is a very important issue when the ‘landlords of the Earth’ are the ‘members of the human race.’ Money will flow from the land, to us, totally automatically, and totally without risk.

Systems Below Socratic Leasehold Ownership in the Chart

Frances goes back to the chart that her analysis department gave her (see chart 7.1, above, for details). She has decided that she doesn’t want to use any of the systems above the shaded line (the one that suggests she sells the leasehold for $10 million with a yearly payment of $2 million). The system at the shaded line has some great advantages. But what about the systems lower than socratic leasehold ownership in the chart? If going down from the top brings ever-greater advantages, why not keep going down, to the bottom of the chart, with the assumption that lower is better?

She looks at options that are lower on the list, below the shaded line, to see if they might be even better than the one that is shaded.

She could get even more as a yearly leasehold payment than $2 million by choosing one of these options. But if she does, she will have to worry about things that she doesn’t have to worry about if her leasehold payment is $2 million. These problems come because the buyers of the leasehold won’t have as much money at risk, and therefore won’t have as much money to lose if they don’t make their payments or if something damages the farm.

To see this, consider the next to last line on the chart. Frances could offer a leasehold on this farm with a yearly payment of $2,399,999. If she does, she won’t be able to get much as a price. The buyer is not going to be buying the right to get the full $2.4 million in free cash flow. She is only buying the right to whatever free cash the farm produces that she doesn’t have to give to the landlord. In this case, she has to give all but $1 a year of the free cash flow to the landlord, so she is only really buying the right to get $1 a year in free cash. The standard formulas show that a person buying the right to get $1 a year in free cash is only going to pay $25 for it, if interest rates are 4%. (This is the price for buying a $1 cash flow that generates a 4% return on the invested money; if you want more information, see notes 1, 2, and 3, at the end of the chapter.)

In the socratic leasehold ownership system (the one marked by the shaded line) the buyer had to invest $10 million in the property by paying $10 million as a price; the buyer had $10 million to lose if she didn’t make her $2 million yearly payment. No one would ever miss an $2 million payment knowing they would lose $10 million if this happened.

But in the second to the last line system, the buyer only paid $25 for the leasehold. At the end of the year, she will be sitting there with $3.15 million in her hands. She might feel honor bound to pay her workers and suppliers, and if she does, she will be left with $2.45 million. Her contract with Castle and Cooke requires that she give Castle and Cooke $2,399,999 of this money. If she does this, she will wind up with $1, for a year of work with $25 of her own money invested.

What if she doesn’t make this payment?

What if she keeps the entire $2.45 million?

If this happens, Castle and Cooke will cancel her leasehold. She will immediately lose $25.

But why care about this? She has $2.45 million. Perhaps Castle and Cooke will file a suit against her and try to get this money. But she can easily use a pretty standard excuse for people who get money that that doesn’t belong to them: it is gone. She had some bills and spent it. If she doesn’t want to make this excuse, she can simply open an account in Switzerland, wire the money to that account (at the rate of $10,000 per day, to avoid reporting to the IRS, which happens if you wire more than this), and then move to some other state.

Frances realizes that the price acts like a deposit to the buyer of the leasehold. If she offers the rights to the farm under the terms on the second to the last line, the buyer is basically posting a $25 deposit to protect a $2,399,999 million yearly payment. It just doesn’t make financial sense to make this payment if all you lose for not making it is $25.

I consider myself pretty honest, but I would have to think pretty hard about this situation if it were me. Should I keep the full $2.45 million, get myself to Switzerland where I could put the money into a bank and live in luxury on the interest my money will generate for the rest of my life. (At 4% I will get $98,000 a year; since Switzerland doesn’t tax interest for foreign nationals and doesn’t report it to the United States so the IRS can tax it, this will be tax-free.) Or should I be honest and make my payment, leaving me with only the $50,000 that I need to justify the work on the farm and a $1 return on my $25 investment? It is a hard choice. I think a lot of people would be on the next plane to Switzerland.

Frances doesn’t want people to get into a position where they will make more money defaulting on their payments to Castle and Cooke than they would make if they kept their promises. True, perhaps she will get an honest person who will pay. But perhaps not. Why take the chance? She can avoid this problem entirely by choosing one of the other leasehold ownership systems, one that is higher on the chart.

If Frances wants to protect her company’s interests, she is not going to sell with options that are either very high or very low on the chart. The options close to the top don’t get her company enough money over time to make it worthwhile; the options close to the bottom don’t give her company security and safety and don’t give the leasehold owners incentives to work hard to protect the interests of the landlords. The only leasehold systems that make sense are those close to the shaded line on the chart.

In this example, Frances has been in the field for many years. She has sold a lot of leaseholds. She has been studying land tenure systems for her entire life. She manages thousands of leaseholds for Castle and Cooke and knows how they work. She isn’t going to waste a lot of time; she knows what works and want doesn’t. She knows that the option called ‘socratic leasehold ownership,’ the one on the shaded line of the chart, creates the particular set of incentives she wants to create. (Again, don’t worry if you don’t get this now: this is a complicated issue and I just want to introduce it here; we will go over the details in the far simpler system in Pastland, when we sell an identical leasehold ownership there.)

The Sale of the Leasehold

She calls her company’s real estate agent and says she wants to put a listing on the property. She will offer it on these terms:

 

1. Price: $10 million.

2. Leasehold payment: $2 million a year.

 

A Different Perspective

Now let’s change perspective a to see why a person buying a leasehold might like this particular system too:

Imagine that you have just moved to Hawaii and are interested in possibly getting some property. You have some experience in farming and would like to find a farm where you could tinker around a little, be in touch with the land, and possibly make some money.

You decide that you don’t really want a very small farm (one that is only a few acres in size, or a ‘garden farm’) because you are experienced with operating a farm that is 1,500 acres in size. You know how to make things work on a farm this size. You know how to find contractors to bring in the harvest and how to negotiate prices, fees, and contracts. You know how to monitor contractors and draw up contracts that make sure they perform. You know about planting, negotiating the sale of production, and other details of a farm that is this size. You don’t want a few acre ‘garden farm’ because you don’t know anything about putting together the workers and getting things done on a small farm. You are looking for something at least 1,000 acres in size.

You call a real estate agent and she tells you there is a farm that is ‘in the pipeline.’ The agent has put up a notice on internet websites that post farms for sale (most common is Loopnet.com) that a farm will soon be listed but hasn’t listed any details. On the notice, this farm is called this the ‘Hawaii Organic Rice Farm.’ It produces $3.15 million worth of organic rice a year. The farm has operating costs of $700,000 so it makes operating profits of $2.45 million a year. The farm has been under professional management for five years. The current owner, Castle and Cooke, has paid the management company $50,000 a year for its services. In exchange for this money, the managers arrange contractors to do all of the work (the management company doesn’t do any work itself), makes sure production gets sold in a competitive bidding process, takes care of all the paperwork, and has an outside auditing firm come in to make sure that the people who deal with money, equipment, and anything valuable associated with the farm are all being honest and accounting for everything properly.

After all these costs, the company is left with $2.4 million a year. This is the free cash flow of the farm. If you go to any site that offers rights to farms for sale in our world today (on any terms at all) you will see that the free cash flow is a very important number to buyers: most of the ads put the amount of free cash flow the land generates in the headline of the ad.

You drive out and look at the farm. There is no one onsite at the time; you just walk around and look at the land to see if the ad has represented it properly. You call the management company and set up an appointment to examine their books. You find all the numbers are exactly as claimed. You tell the real estate agent that you might be interested, depending on the terms of the deal.

The agent calls you the next day and says that the terms are this: the owner is offering a perpetual leasehold on this property (perpetual means ‘no termination date’). You will have to pay $10 million as a price to buy the leasehold and a $2 million leasehold payment each year you own the leasehold. This particular leasehold has an unusual provision called an ‘option to sell the leasehold back to the seller:’ Castle and Cooke will buy back the leasehold at any time for the full $10 million you paid for it, provided the farm is in as good or better condition as when you bought.

If you buy this leasehold and then later change your mind, you can basically return it to the seller and get all of your money back, at any time.

Is this a good deal for you?

There are two ways people can pay the price that they have to pay to purchase property rights. They can pay it with money they already have in their pockets, or they can borrow the money with a mortgage. Let’s consider both options to see how the numbers look. We will start with what would happen to you if you already had the money and could pay cash.

A Cash Purchase of the Leasehold

Say that you have $10 million in a money market fund paying 4%. You get $400,000 a year in returns on this money.

If you take $10 million out of this fund to buy the leasehold, you will no longer be getting the $400,000 a year in returns that you now get. But after you give this $10 million to Castle and Cooke as the purchase price of the leasehold, you will own the right to keep all but $2 million of the $2.4 million free cash flow this farm produces. If it continues to produce as it has in the past, you will wind up getting $400,000 a year, exactly enough to replace the $400,000 in returns you had been getting on this $10 million before.

You will basically break even on this part of the transaction. You had been getting a 4% yield on your money. You will still get a 4% yield on your money, you will just get it from the income of the farm, not from the investment fund.

If you had left your money in the investment fund, you could take it out any time you wanted by selling your shares in the fund. If you put your money into the farm, you can also get it back any time you want by selling your interest in the farm. (Castle and Cooke has agreed to buy it back for the same amount if you ask for it.)

The farm is currently under management. The managers don’t do any physical labor on the farm. They just have a database of suppliers; they monitor the farm and, when something needs to get done, they call the appropriate supplier. They get $50,000 a year for this. If you want, you can leave it under management. If you leave it under management, you will have to continue to pay them.

However, your entire reason for looking for property is that you want to manage it yourself. You intend to go to the farm frequently. You will deal with the contractors yourself. You will take care of selling the rice the land produces yourself. You will write the checks and audit the books yourself. You have experience in these things. If you are working for yourself, you have stronger incentives to make sure you get the best prices than the management company does: the employees of this company don’t really care how much things cost, because they don’t pay the costs. You will pay these costs and you think you can manage the costs much better than the disinterested management company. If you can keep costs down, or do things that drive up revenues, you will get all of the additional revenues. You will also save $50,000 a year on management. This is a lot of money for doing something you already know how to do and which you know will only take a few hundred hours each year.

The real estate agent tells you that there is another way to make money from this land. You can improve it. You saw for yourself, when you went to the land, that the land has never been leveled. There are high spots and low spots, neither of which produce the amount they would produce if they were exactly the right level. You can level the land and production will go up. You can keep all additional money. Quite often, leveling rice land causes production to go up by 20%. If this happens, you may end up with hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in income. Your leasehold payment will not go up: it is locked in and will never change as long as you own the leasehold. You will be able to keep all of the additional money the farm generates.

The real estate agent tells you that if you improve the farm, you can offer the leasehold for sale in the market and it will bring more money. In this system, the amount people are willing to pay for leaseholds depends on the free cash flow. If the free cash flow is 20% higher, and the terms of the leasehold remain the same, you can sell the investment for 20% more than you paid for it, leading to a $2 million gain. (We will look at examples below to show why this is true.)

Here is the bottom line:

If you buy the leasehold on the farm, you can get your $10 million back any time you want by taking advantage of the option to resell the farm. This is really no different than your current deal, with the money in the money market fund.

If you leave the money in the farm, it will generate a 4% yield, the same yield you get on the money market fund.

If you don’t want to manage the farm, you don’t have to: the management company is happy to take it over any time.

If you want to manage the farm, you will make $50,000 a year from this, plus any increases in profits that you can create by driving up production or reducing costs.

If you own the leasehold, you can improve the farm and may possibly wind up with hundreds of thousands of dollars a year without doing any additional work in the future.

If you improve the farm you can then sell it and pocket $2 million, increasing your wealth by an enormous amount.

If you have enough money to pay cash for the farm, this is clearly a very good deal: you get all of the benefits you want, and really don’t have any downside, as long as you take care of the farm and keep it in good condition.

What if you aren’t rich?

If you don’t have the $10 million, you will have to borrow it. At the time, interest rates are 4% so, if you borrow, you will have to sign a loan agreement that requires you to pay $400,000 a year to the lenders as interest.

If you take over management, you will end up with a $50,000 a year income for yourself. If you can cut costs or drive up revenues, you will get more. There is no limit to how much you can make.

If you level the land, your income will go up by whatever extra cash flows you generate. If you drive up production and costs by 20%, you will end up with $500,000 in additional income each year you own. If you decide to sell, you can sell for $12 million. You can use $10 million to repay the loan and be left with a $2 million gain.

Is this a good deal? I hope you can see that Frances isn’t really taking any chances here: someone will definitely buy this leasehold. She added the option to resell the leasehold to Castle and Cooke as an extra attraction: since people know that they can always sell the leasehold for $10 million, they never have to worry about the leasehold to this farm falling in value. Investors love this: it is very nice be offered the right to gain money but be protected from loss. Lenders also love it: they know that, if they should have to repossess the farm, they will be able to sell it for $10 million, so they aren’t very likely to lose any money on this farm.

Everyone wins.

And that is the general idea of this system. It is possible for everyone to win because the world gets richer each year due to the existence of this farm. If Frances sets up the land tenure system right, everyone will win.

Land Tenure Systems

Now that we are in Pastland, Frances is going to be in a position to design a land tenure system for the benefit of the human race. She understands how to align the incentives: to her, the alignment of incentives is a technical task. She can work out the incentives that would exist with each possible land tenure system that she might design. She can figure out the interests of the human race and design a system that has the closest possible alignment between the ‘incentives of the people who control the land’ and the ‘interests of the human race.’ This is what she has done her entire life.

In our 21^st century Earth, the land tenure systems were not designed to meet the needs of the human race. Most of the land tenure systems were not designed at all: they came to exist after warlords conquered land and used it entirely for the benefit of the warlords (who became ‘kings’ and were eventually deposed by ‘governments’ which took over the flows of value that had gone to the warlord-kings), or they were designed to meet the needs of certain corporations (like Castle and Cooke). In a way, we can be thankful that these companies existed because we can study the tools they used to get private individuals who did not own the land to make truly massive investments in the land they controlled, without having to ever sell any of the land to any of the improvers.

Our group in Pastland can take advantage of these things. As long as the moratorium is in effect, we have a natural law society. Once the moratorium ends, we may create any kind of land tenure system we want, including one that grants partial rights to private buyers provided they agree to rules we have passed to protect the land, and provided they share the bounty the land produces with the members of the human race.

What If You Don’t Pay Cash And Have To Borrow?

If you don’t have the $10 million, you can borrow the money. If interest rates are 4%, you will have to pay $400,000 a year in interest. You will also have to make the leasehold payment of $2 million to Castle and Cooke, so you will pay out $2.4 million of the $2.45 million in profits to others.

If you keep the farm under management, you will also have to pay $50,000 a year to the management company. But, again, in this example, you intend to manage it yourself. If you take over management, you will gain an income from the farm of $50,000 a year. You will have to manage. But it won’t be really a very difficult or time-consuming job for you. You will basically have to make a few phone calls, do a little paperwork, and make sure everything goes smoothly.

You can also make the improvement. If you do, you will gain the same benefit you would have gained if you had paid cash for the farm. Say that you level the land and all the numbers (costs and revenues) go up by 20%. The profits go up to $2.94 million. You will be paying $2.4 million a year as payments ($2 million as a leasehold payment and $400,000 as interest on the loan you took out to pay the price). You will be able to keep the other $540,000 a year in operating profits.

After you improve, you could also sell the leasehold for the same $12 million, leading to the same $2 million gain on the sale.

Either way, you will be able to get a $50,000 a year net increase in your income by buying the leasehold and managing the farm yourself. You can improve the land and will get the same benefits from improvements whether you have cash to pay for the leasehold or have to borrow.

The ending numbers are the same whether you pay cash for the leasehold or borrow, we just get there by a little different way.

Of course, if you aren’t rich, this is going to be a more attractive deal. Why? If you are a multi-millionaire, you may want to dabble a little in the farming, but you aren’t going to really care much about the $540,0000 per year you can gain through improvements. So what? You can already have everything you want. If you aren’t rich, that $540,000 is going to be a huge ‘invisible hand’ pushing you to get the improvements made as quickly as possible. Most people (those who aren’t already multi-millionaires) will stay up nights just thinking about this. They will make the plans as they go to sleep and dream about the workers moving dirt from spot to spot. They will be there before the workers show up in the morning to move the dirt and make sure they do everything exactly properly. Chances are that someone who is not already very rich is actually going to buy this leasehold, because the money that can be made from improvements is going to be a bigger draw for these people. But the point here is that, in the end, the actual incentives are the same for rich people and poor people. They have incentives to take care of the land, to protect it from harm, to make absolutely sure that the share of the free cash flow that belongs to others (the leasehold payment, which belongs to Castle and Cooke) gets where it is supposed to go, and to improve the farm if they can do this.

Frances set up the leasehold ownership system specifically to make sure all of this happened. As we saw earlier, she had a lot of choices. She could have set up leasehold ownership systems that had higher payments to Castle and Cooke but didn’t give Castle and Cooke as much in security. She could have set up systems that gave Castle and Cooke even more security than they had now, but at the expense of lower payments to Castle and Cooke. She chose this one because it was a kind of Goldilocks system, from her perspective: it aligned the interests of the buyer/owner of the leasehold with the interests of Castle and Cooke in a perfect way.

Details Of Socratic Leasehold Ownership

What about the buyback option?

Why did Frances put this option into the system?

We will see, later in this book, that the buyback option is a key provision in socratic leasehold ownership systems. If we, the members of the human race, include it, we will never have to worry about many things we otherwise would have worried about and we will guarantee an orderly and ‘liquid’ market for leaseholds. We will know that they will always sell, very quickly, and will have a reserve of funds that we can use, if necessary, to deal with any problems that may possibly come up in production.

Let’s consider why Frances included this provision:

First, she wanted the leasehold to sell quickly.

If not for the buyback agreement, people may have wondered about the price. Is it too high? They don’t want to pay a price that is more than the market value for the leasehold because, if they do, and they ever want to sell, they may not get their money back.

With the buyback agreement buyers don’t have to worry about this. The market valueof the leasehold cannot go down as long as they keep the farm in at least as good of condition as when they bought. If you buy this leasehold and, a week later, you decide you made a mistake, you can basically return the farm to the seller and get your money back, just as if the farm were an item you bought at Walmart that you decided you didn’t want. Adding in a ‘money back guarantee’ is going to make people realize they don’t have to worry about whether the price might be too high: if they find it is, they can always ‘return’ the farm and get their money back. Since there is no limit on the time for the buyback agreement, they can do this in a year, a decade, or at the end of their life if they want.

The money back guarantee is also going to make lenders far more willing to make a mortgage on the loan. Lenders can lose money if the price of the thing they are lending on falls. In 2007, the housing markets collapsed in large parts of the world and housing prices collapsed. If your house is worth less money than you owe on it, it is better just to walk away: why pay more for the house than it is worth, by continuing to pay the mortgage? Lenders lost trillions of dollars when this happened and the result was a collapse in the lending market (it doesn’t make sense to lend money in a situation like this).

The other reason Frances set up the system in Hawaii with a buyback option was that she wanted security. She wanted to protect herself and her boss.

The socratic leasehold ownership system has a price that is always 5 times the leasehold payment. This system works very much like a rental with a deposit system where the deposit is 5 times the rent. When Frances sells the leasehold, she can’t simply give the $10 million to Castle and Cooke to spend. She may have to give this money back, so she has to hold it in a reserve fund. If the leasehold owner wants the money back, Castle and Cooke must have it available to pay.

What if the leasehold payment is missed? If this happens, the leasehold owner will have violated the terms of the leasehold and the leasehold will simply expire. The (former) leasehold owner will lose all rights. She will not have any right to ask for the $10 million back: as soon as she missed her leasehold payment, she gave up this right. The company will get all rights to the farm back, just as if the leasehold had never been sold. But the company will have $10 million sitting in a reserve fund that it no longer has to hold; there is no longer any chance it will have to use this money to buy back a leasehold, because it already owns the leasehold. This money is just extra.

Before the leasehold payment was missed, this money didn’t really belong to Castle and Cooke. The leasehold owner could ask for it at any time, so it really belonged to the leasehold owner; Castle and Cooke was simply holding it in reserve. The very second the leasehold payment is missed, however, this $10 million belongs to Castle and Cooke.

Let’s say that the contract requires the leasehold payment to be made by 1:00:00 PM on the first business day of November of each year. This money must be paid into ‘the working account of Castle and Cooke’ in cleared funds to be considered paid.

Say that the first of November is a business day. At 12:59:00 PM on November 1, the $10 million is still in reserve; it doesn’t belong to Castle and Cooke. At exactly 1:00:00 PM, the computer checks to see if the leasehold payment is in the working account in cleared funds. If it is, nothing changes: the $10 million must remain in reserve. If the money is not there, the computer realizes that the reserve account has a surplus of $10 million. It has $10 million in the reserve account but will never have to buy back the leasehold to the Hawaii Farm, because the farm is no longer private. The computer transfers the ‘surplus reserves’ to the ‘working account of Castle and Cooke.’

This means that, by 1:00:00PM on the first business day of November each year, one of two things must happen: either the $2 million leasehold payment will appear, as if by magic, in the working account of Castle and Cooke, in cleared funds, ready for the company to spend, OR $10 million will appear in the working account of Castle and Cooke, ready for the company to spend. It is not possible for one of these two things to not happen.

Later, we will look at the idea of using socratic leasehold ownership in our system in Pastland. In that system, we may eventually have billions of private properties. You might think it would be a lot of trouble for us to go through each one and make sure the payments are made as required. But, if we set up our system the right way, we will never have to do this. Our money will come in completely automatically and without any risk at all, just as happened in Hawaii. Frances is never going to send out a notice or bill for her leasehold payment. She doesn’t have to. She doesn’t care if it is missed. In fact, she would be happy if it is missed: if this happens, her company will get an $8 million windfall. (It will get $10 million rather than $2 million.) She may have a dozen, a hundred, a thousand, or even a million separate leaseholds out there. As long as she sets them all up the same way, her company can never not get its share of the value the land produces. It is not possible for this money to not come in.

Selling Leaseholds

Say that you buy the leasehold to the Hawaii Farm. You paid $10 million for the price and have agreed to pay $2 million for the leasehold payment. Note that your leasehold payment is exactly 20% of the price. Your price is exactly 5 times the leasehold payment. (This is saying the exact same thing two different ways.)

If you want to sell the land, you can sell it back to Castle and Cooke for $10 million. You can also offer it to some other party for some other amount. Obviously, it doesn’t make sense to sell it to anyone else unless you can get more than $10 million from it. The leasehold agreement allows you to sell to anyone you want, any time you want, for any price you want that is $10 million or higher. However, if you sell it for more than $10 million, the leasehold payment for the new buyer will adjust upward to be 20% of the price you get, whatever it is. For example, if you sell it for $12 million, the leasehold payment will adjust upward to $2.4 million, which is 20% of $12 million.

Why did Frances put this provision into the contract?

Her company is in this land for the long run. The company has owned this land for more than a century, longer than anyone alive on Earth has been on this world. The company never intends to get rid of this land entirely. It wants to benefit from this land for the rest of time.

 

Frances put this provision into the contract because she wants the company to benefit from the incentives that private buyers of leaseholds have to improve properties. If you buy and improve, you will make money. When you make money, she wants her company to make money too.

It may seem that you are getting the biggest part of the benefits and the company is only getting crumbs. You get a one-time gain of $2 million. The company will only see its income go up by $200,000 a year, and this increase won’t even start until after you sell. But remember that the company is in this for the long run. Over the long run, it will get far, far more benefits from the improvements than you will get. In the next century after the land is improved, the company will get $20 million, or 10 times the amount you got.

If our group in Pastland sets up a system like this, we will have created incentives that lead to improvements. These improvements will not just benefit the people who make these improvements. They will make money but since our income depends on the amount of money they make, the more money they make, the more our income from the land will increase. We don’t have to just use this system for the Pastland Farm: we can use it for any properties we want improved. The buyers of the leaseholds make benefits that seem huge initially and really are huge compared to the incomes most people would otherwise get. But when they make money, we make money. Since our increases in income last for the rest of time, we will always get far more from improvements than any of the private parties involved.

In Hawaii, Frances set up this system for a very specific reason. She worked for a company that was in business to make profits. If she could drive up the profits of the company, she would be seen as a very valuable employee. Castle and Cooke had a long history of rewarding people who can drive up their profits with handsome bonuses. She wanted to help her bosses because she knew her bosses would reward her for this.

Frances is also going to set some common sense rules to protect the land, just as the Forest Service sets rules to protect its land. Frances wants to make sure no chemicals are used on this land so it will remain uncontaminated. (Chemical-free rice sells for five times the price of chemical-dependent rice and the chemical-free rice is getting rarer and rarer, because chemical contamination is spreading in areas where rice is commonly grown.) If she had sold a freehold on this land, she wouldn’t be able to protect it; as soon as the land was sold, the new owner would be in charge. But since she created a leasehold, instead, she can protect this land for the rest of time.

Why Does Anyone Care About Any of This?

We have seen that the societies you and I were born into are diseased societies. They work in ways that allow people to get very rich harming the land and harming other people. The incentives of the individuals in this society conflict with the interests of the human race.

These systems were not thought out. They weren’t the result of scientific analysis. They basically evolved, and they evolved in ways that often made them worse, not better. They started out very dangerous and primitive, and they are just as dangerous, and nearly as primitive now as they were when they were first formed.

These systems divide the land surface of the world into entities we were raised to call ‘sovereign countries.’ The leaders of these countries realized that if they could use their armies to ‘conquer’ land, they could then generate revenue from this land in various different ways. They could gain personal wealth and power by creating the conditions needed for wars to take place and then starting the wars.

They hired experts to manipulate the emotions of the people of their countries to make them feel the emotions needed for the war. If the experts the leaders hired could make the people live in fear and believe that the people that they would be asked to fight are horrible monsters worthy only of misery and death, the people would be more likely to make the sacrifices needed for wars and to participate in the wars. The leaders had powerful incentives to find ways to generate hatred, fear, and the strange emotion called ‘patriotism’ that makes people believe that the entity called their ‘country’ provides all wonderful things that exist and is worthy of any sacrifices necessary to defeat the ones the leaders tell the people to hate.

Not all national leaders respond to these incentives.

Incentives are psychological pressures, like an invisible hand pushing people to do certain things. Many people thought the things the incentives were pushing them to do were wrong and refused to do them, even though they could make themselves far better off, gaining both wealth and power, if they responded to the incentives. Not everyone responded, but some did and that is all it takes.

The conditions necessary for war became a reality. Wars became constant.

In these systems, the people and organizations who have control over the world and make day-to-day decisions over the land are notpartners with the human race. The entity we call the ‘human race’ has basically been banished, made to appear that it isn’t even real and has no common interests, by the paid propagandists who work for the individual clans/countries. The only thing that matters is the territorial goals of the clans/countries; those who think of the interests of the human race are traitors to their clans/countries and are often rounded up and disposed of.

These systems are hundred percent ownability systems, meaning that everything is ownable and owned (by some clan, country, corporation, commune, collective, or individual). Nothing is unowned and available for the members of the human race to use to meet the common needs of our race.

If we had anything at all; if any share of the wealth that flows from the land was unowned and available for us to control, we would have some power and some control over the important variables of our existence. But the people who built the societies that were here when we were born didn’t consider the needs of the human race, they considered only their instincts, superstitions, and beliefs about the invisible beings and unseen forces that they thought created a mandate for them to take the land and hold it.

We can’t do anything about the past.

We can’t do anything about the way the world worked when we were born.

But time has passed.

The people who set up this dangerous system are long dead. The people who were in charge are going away leaving new generations. The old beliefs are dying quickly, as technology makes information about objective analysis available to everyone. We can decide to try to keep the old beliefs alive if we want. We can choose to not allow ourselves to look at the world differently than people in the past. We can choose to not allow our children to know they have the right to think about the world the way they want and make it work they way they want.

But we can also make a break from the past. We can accept that there are many different paths that we can take into the future. We can analyze the landscape, figure out where the different paths go, and find one that leads to the type of world that we want to live in, and that we want our children and their children to be able to enjoy.

We are now in a position to do the analysis that the past generations that created this dangerous system were not willing, and not even really able to do. We have tools that include computers and the internet that can help us categorize the old beliefs and instinctual feelings as what they are: remnants of a primitive past. We can accept that we have the ability to set up systems that allow people to buy rights to the world in ways that give them rights to do things that benefit the human race and allow them to get rich if they do these things, without also having the rights to do things that harm our world and put our race and our world at risk.

How do we put such a system into place?

Before we can even think about such things, we have to know this: ‘What system are we trying to put into place?'

You can’t plan a journey until you have first decided on a destination.

We can’t determine the specific steps we need to take to change our societies until we know how we want our societies to work after the changes are complete.

The very first step that we must take is to figure out what characteristics human societies must have in order for them to be ‘healthy’ societies and able to meet the needs of the human race.

I know it is hard to imagine us making a transition from the societies we have now to sane, stable, peaceful, sustainable, and otherwise healthy societies. This is so hard to imagine that most people just want to give up on everything and not think about the issue. It causes real mental pain to think about and we naturally want to avoid pain, so we don’t think about it. But if we don’t think about things, we will never figure them out. We will never figure out how to get to healthy societies if we don’t know what healthy societies look like.

Once we understand how healthy societies work, and we have a destination in mind, we can start to consider what we must change about the societies that our primitive ancestors put into place to get from where we are now to the destination we have in mind.

We will look at the idea of societal change in great detail much later in the book. We will see that if we understand exactly where we want to go and know exactly what we must change to get there, the changes themselves are actually pretty easy. If you know where you want to go and have a map that shows how to get there, it is pretty easy to plan a route.

We must take this project one step at a time. The first step is to understand our capabilities. If we know that healthy societies are within our capabilities, we have taken the first step. We will then be willing to take the second step and do an analysis of the possibilities. We will see that a great many arrangements of human societies are fundamentally healthy. We can narrow down the options by looking for the specific healthy society that is the closest to the societies we have now, and therefore the easiest to get to.

Only after we know where we are going are we in a position to plan the trip itself. This, I believe, is the reason that attempts at societal change in the past have failed: the people who tried them didn’t have a destination in mind, they only knew they didn’t like what they had. (Marx basically said, ‘Kill all the evil owners and bureaucrats and destroy everything they have built; when the evil ones are gone, the good people who are left will figure out something better and put it into place.’ He had no idea about the destination and made entirely wrong guesses about how to get to better societies.)

The Pastland example is designed to make it easy to see that healthy societies really are possible. You and I and the rest of the people in our group are in a position to start from scratch. We can form any kind of society we want. We have incredible advantages, including all of the technology of the 21^st century, the skills of our time, and all information about the things that have been tried over the last iteration of history and the way they worked out. We can take advantage of these things. We are in a position to form any kind of society we want.

We have Frances and other people with skills and talents that can help us. Let’s go back to Pastland and consider what would happen if we decided to intentionally organize our society around a method of interacting with the land that was designed to align the interests of the people who control land with the interests of the human race as a whole. We will see that it is quite possible for humans to live in a healthy, sane, peaceful, prosperous society. Once we know it is possible and we have a potential destination in mind, all we have to do is decide if we want to go there and then make the trip.

 

2:  Practical Matters

Dunant’s book attracted the attention of a group of very wealthy people in Geneva, Switzerland.  They worked together with Dunant to form the organization that is now called the ‘International Red Cross and Geneva Convention.’  This organization is now a global corporation; it is not affiliated with any government of the world and provides various services and assistance to all of the members of the human race who need it, regardless of their country of origin.

It is a corporation or, more specifically, a network of corporations.  The heart of the organization is the corporate offices in Geneva; it has subsidiary corporations that operate in every country and unincorporated area of the world.  They work together with the headquarters to coordinate activities in areas of need.

Dunant didn’t have any real ideas about funding this organization.  It is now funded entirely through donations and endowments.  He hadn’t worked out all of the principles needed to build a healthy society, but he had figured out some of the critical defects in the societies that we have now and found ways to deal with these defects.  He realized that, to have a healthy society, we must go beyond nations.  We must form an organization with no allegiance to any country of the world, one dedicated to giving rights to all human beings.

Almost everyone in the world knows about this organization.  It does good work and they know it.  Because this organization exists, they know that if they want to do something of a truly humanitarian nature or give to a cause that will advance the interests of the entire human race, they can work for or give to the Red Cross.  It is the largest charity on Earth.  It is the largest corporation on Earth.  It is the largest NGO on Earth.  It has more than 100 million workers, some of whom are paid, and some are volunteers, making it the largest organization of any kind on Earth.

This is from the website of the International Red Cross:

 

The international Red Cross and Red Crescent network is the largest humanitarian network in the world with a presence and activities in almost every country.  The network is made up of all the national and international organizations around the world that are allowed to use the Red Cross or Red Crescent emblem.  It also represents all the activities they undertake to relieve human suffering throughout the world.

The global network is unified and guided by seven Fundamental Principles: humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity and universality.  All Red Cross and Red Crescent activities have one central purpose: to help those who suffer, without discrimination, whether during conflict, in response to natural or man-made disasters, or due to conditions of chronic poverty.

Why Dunant’s Efforts Failed

Dunant had a very wide vision for the organization that he created.  He didn’t want to just wait for wars or disasters to come along, and then provide medical care and burial services to those affected.  He wanted to take active steps to empower the human race and create an organization that would be a higher authority than the governments of the countries that were fighting each other. 

He wanted to use moral pressure from the masses to get the people in governments to agree to binding accords to take their disputes to a global non-partisan organization, one operated to advance the interests of the human race as a whole without any allegiance to any nation, and agree to accept its rulings.  He wanted to limit and restrict the power and authority of governments, transferring some of the rights of governments to bodies that weren’t governments and had the interests of the human race in mind. 

Unfortunately, Dunant was not rich. He didn’t have the money or connections to build the organization he had in mind by himself.  So, he had to take in others.  The group in Geneva included some very rich and powerful people. They had the ability to build the organization he wanted.  Unfortunately, they were highly religious people and had some religious objections to Dunant’s ideas.

Dunant was not religious.  He was, in fact, openly atheist. All of the members of the board of directors of the corporation were devout practitioners of a branch of Christianity called ‘Calvinism.’   Calvinists raise their children to believe that the words of the Bible are literally true.  The first five books of the Bible are considered to represent the word and will of the all-powerful creator of existence. 

These books are very clear: God created the ‘nations of the world.’  God gave these nations their power.  God defined the borders of the first nations.  God initiated the conflicts that led to wars over land. The Bible is very clear.  God is behind all this.  God wants all this to happen.  The Bible shows clearly that, once the wars take place, God accepts the results of the wars.  If the winners claim land, according to the principles of international law (which God must accept, or they wouldn’t exist), the winners are the new owners of the land.  It belongs to them with the full consent and approval of the creator of existence.

The name of this philosophy is ‘manifest destiny.’  It holds that God has a destiny in mind for every part of the world.  He makes this destiny manifest, or obvious, by arranging for the groups that want to own each part of the world to have wars; God then grants victory to the specific group that God wants to own the land.  Under this principle, nations that win land in wars own it by divine right.  God wants them to have it.  This principle was openly used in the Western Hemisphere to rationalize the genocide of the native people; the conquerors claimed that the wars were a part of God’s plan.  They didn’t just have the right, but rather they had the religious obligation to remove the inferior races from the land that God clearly wanted them to have.  If they didn’t participate in the wars, they were showing a lack of faith and would be punished for eternity in the afterlife.  This same philosophy extends to groups fighting over land in Europe and everywhere else in the world. God is in charge of everything.  Nothing happens without God’s knowledge and approval.

Calvinists accept the words of the old testament as the canonical texts.  They are the foundational principles of their religion. Dunant was suggesting that they try to interfere.  He was suggesting that humans were in control of war.  He was suggesting that, if we worked together, we could end war. This went against the canonical texts of their faith.  What Dunant wanted to do went against the will of God.  It claimed that we had power to do things that only God controlled. They couldn’t accept his foundational ideas and continue to accept the articles of their faith.

They could accept the details, however.  Their religion also accepted the words of the New Testament, which tells of the benevolent and humanitarian principles of the son of God, Jesus.  In their religion, the son of God clearly believes that his Father’s cruelty is excessive.  He wants to moderate it and give people a path to salvation.  He also wants to give relief to people suffering from the wars and other disasters that God brings and therefore God wants.  The Calvinists believed it was wrong to try to interfere in the foundational forces.  We have to leave the foundation of society in place.  Wars have to continue.  We must not even try to stop them: that would show a lack of faith and reflect the ultimate heresy, a belief that humans control things that the holy books portray as the exclusive domain of the Creator.  But we can come through, after the wars or disasters, and try to ease the pain and misery of those affected.

The first board of directors of the organization that Dunant created included Henri Dunant and four Calvinists: Gustav Moynier,Louis Appia, Théodore Maunoir, and Guillaume-Henri Dufour.

Dunant was the only atheist there. The others were devout Christians. They wanted to make it clear that this was a religious organization, designed to promote kindness in the name of Jesus, so they made its symbol the same as that of the Christian religion itself, the cross, and called the organization the ‘Red Cross.’      

Dunant proposed to build a wide-reaching organization that would work to help move toward a world where nations no longer fought over which nation owned each part of the world.  But the others on the board of directors didn’t want to go this far.  They had a far more limited role in mind for the organization.  At first, Dunant went along.  Better to have a very limited and small-scale organization than nothing at all.  But as time passed, he started to push.  He wanted to expand the role of the organization.  He didn’t want to create a Christian organization, he wanted to create a humanitarian organization. 

As time passed, the conflicts between Dunant and the other members of the board of directors grew.  By 1865, the two sides had come to an impasse: Dunant would not back down on his vision for the organization, and the other board members would not back down on their visions.

Dunant had certain authority under the bylaws of the corporation.  He could force his views through the board, even against a 4-1 opposition.  In 1866, the board filed suit in the courts of Switzerland to strip Dunant of these powers.

Dunant was not rich and could not afford to pay attorneys to help him preserve his rights.  His opponents knew this.  They probably thought Dunant would realize he was beat, back down, and do things their way.  But if he didn’t do this, they knew they would still win: they could ruin him financially by forcing him to pay never-ending legal fees to defend himself.

Dunant didn’t react as expected: he sold everything he owned and used all the money to hire attorneys to fight the other board members.  He kept fighting until April of 1867, when he could no longer pay his bills and was forced to declare bankruptcy.

By this time, the other board members were vindictive.  They wanted more than to have Dunant back down, they wanted him gone.  They found a way to do this: when people declare bankruptcy, they have to declare all of their assets in official court filings. If they don’t declare everything, they have committed fraud.  Most people in this situation miss something.  The other board members hired private investigators and found a few minor possessions that Dunant hadn’t declared. They had him charged with bankruptcy fraud.  Dunant—still the legal president and chairman of the board of the International Red Cross—was tried and convicted.

Now he was a criminal.  The bylaws of the company allowed the rest of the board members to fire him.  Dunant was removed from the organization he had created.

I am never going to say that the Red Cross doesn’t do wonderful work.  I would not be alive if not for them: I was born with a disease called ‘hemolytic disease of the newborn’ and needed a compete transfusion within hours of my birth.  The blood came from the Red Cross.  I have had family members saved by Red Cross ambulances and take shelter at Red Cross facilities.  Whenever I donate to a charity, I make it the Red Cross.  It does truly fantastic things. 

Over the years, the Red Cross has lost its fanatical religious leaning.  Recently, the organization changed its name: the cross is seen as the symbol of Christianity and billions of people of the world think of Christians as heretics and consider them to be very bad people, using their religion to rationalize truly horrible behaviors.  The organization has even changed its name to make it clear it is not intended to be an enemy of the Islamic people (as many people in these religions consider Christians to be) and now calls itself the ‘Red Cross and Red Crescent.’  This organization is now, by many measures, the largest organization of any kind on Earth, with more than 100 million people working for it either as paid workers or volunteers, and facilities in every country and disputed area on the planet.

But the company has never really taken on the role that Dunant envisioned for it.  It still focuses on waiting until disasters happen, and then helping.  We need this, of course; the world would be a far worse place without the Red Cross.  But this organization does not play the role that Dunant envisioned for it.  We can get some general idea what he had in mind after he was booted out of the Red Cross and created other global humanitarian organizations.

The rest of the story

Dunant was basically broke after the lawsuits with the Red Cross.  But he had met people who shared his vision, so he was able to form other organizations. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), he founded the Common Relief Society (Allgemeine Fürsorgegesellschaft) and soon after, he founded the Common Alliance for Order and Civilization (Allgemeine Allianz für Ordnung und Zivilisation).

He helped create an international court to mediate international conflicts; this grew into the ‘International Court of Justice’ (sometimes called ‘The World Court’).  He led the effort to create a world library, an idea that eventually led to the creation of UNESCO.

Eventually, he just didn’t have any more to give.  He had spent everything he had, devoted his life to the cause of societal change, and still believed that he had failed.  All of the organizations that he created passed to other leaders, none of whom had his grand vision.  Although he had worked to create a great many organizations, none of them had had the impact he felt they deserved, and he believed that none had changed the world in any meaningful way.  Nations were just as powerful as ever in 1892, when he gave up.  War was just as pervasive and destructive as ever.  The human race was just as powerless to get what it needed as ever.

He was broke and had no following or believers to carry on his work.  He retired to a tiny rooming house in Heiden, Switzerland and faded from the world scene, as if he had never existed.

One day a journalist from a local newspaper found out that a person who had once been famous and important was in his town.  The journalist was looking for a story and visited and interviewed Dunant.  The story explained all of the contributions he had made to the progress of the human race.  The story was picked up by larger publications and reprinted several times.

At the time, the members of the Nobel Committee in Sweden were meeting to try to decide who to give the first ever Peace Prize.  The members saw the article.  They thought Dunant would be a good candidate.  The committee eventually granted the prize to Dunant.

The prize came with a 150,782 Kroner cash reward, roughly equivalent to $1 million in United States money.  When he got the money, he was on his deathbed. He was bitter and believed that nothing he had done had worked out the way he wanted.  He decided to make a statement with his final will and ordered that the entire prize go to his landlady at his rooming house.  None of it went to any of the humanitarian organizations he had created. 

The largest of the organizations he built is now called the International Red Cross and Red Crescent. This organization did not do what Dunant had hoped it would do, but it did have incredible success and had a meaningful impact on several areas of human existence.  It is now, by many measures, the largest corporation on the planet, the largest NGO and, for that matter, the largest organization of any kind on planet Earth. 

Dunant’s effort showed that if people feel they can really make a difference they will volunteer their time, their skills, their talents, their efforts and, of course, their money. Dunant may have considered his efforts to have been a failure, but the results have showed that his faith in humanity was justified.  If people were given a chance to do something good on a global scale, they would step forward and help. 

 

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, I HAVE TRIED TO STACK evidence on top of evidence to make a very simple point:

Survival for our race is possible.

Most of this book presents arguments to back up this claim.

I believe that the technical steps that we need to take to prevent extinction really aren’t particularly complicated. If we know where we are now and how the society we inherited works, and we know how a sane, sound, and healthy society works, we can design a plan to get from here to there pretty easily. The plan itself isn’t the hard part of this kind of transition. The required steps really aren’t onerous or traumatic.

As I worked out the principles of this book over the years, I have tried to discuss its message with many people. Almost without exception their response has been the same: they have tried to argue with the premise. They claim that it is not possible to stop the forces now at work. We are on a path to extinction, we have been on this path for a long time, and there isn’t anything we can do to change this. Anyone who even thinks about what must be done to change it is the very definition of a fool: nothing could be more foolish than to think about trying something that everyone knows is impossible. If you believe a better world is possible, you are a ‘utopian dreamer.’ Nothing could be more foolish than to dream about something that can never be. Anyone who claims there is hope for our race is to be ridiculed.

It seems to me that we are like the engine in the children’s story, ‘The Little Engine that Could,’ only in reverse. We are ‘The Little Engine That Couldn’t.’ Logic and reason tell us we can do it. But there is something about the way we were raised or the way our minds work that somehow makes us believe we can’t. If someone tells us we can do it, our response is to first to laugh at them (they must be joking, right?) and, if this fails, to try to help them to see reality by pointing out the errors in their arguments.

What of the people who try to actually do something? What of Pythagoras, Socrates, and Sir Thomas More? How do we treat them? Do we embrace them: they are working toward a better world, something that makes them better than the rest of us? Or do we fear them? They are saying things that can destroy our world view and the way we look at reality. We want to believe that our depression and lack of action is justified. Those who act are foolish. We, who do nothing, are the ones who are reasonable: those who try to do the impossible are causing problems, diverting attention from important things that need to be done today (don’t we need to win the current war or put people to work to prevent a recession?). People like Pythagoras, Socrates, and More are dangerous. They can harm morale. For the good of society, they need to be removed from society: all three were put to death, with the claim that this was needed to protect society from their heretical and seditious ideas.

The cartoon family the Flintstones had a car that would go if they put their feet through the floor and run and would stop if they dug in their heels through the same hole in the floor. We are like a race of people on a giant train, which easily could make it up the hill ahead, but is full of people holding their feet through holes on the floor, rubbing them raw in an attempt to slow us down, all chanting ‘I think I can’t, I think I can’t, I think I can’t, I know I cant!’ There is something about our psyche, or perhaps the way we were raised, that makes us want to believe we can’t make it. As long as the people of the world think this way, they have a vested interest in extinction: it will vindicate them. It will prove that they were right all along, that they did the right things, felt the right things, and if there is an afterlife they can tell the souls there, ‘See, I told you so.’ Logic and reason are enemies to these people because logic doesn’t support their contention. Logic holds that we, the members of the human race, are the dominant species on this planet. Logic tells us that we are capable of organizing ourselves in non destructive ways.

I think part of the reason that people want to believe everything is hopeless is personal guilt. As long as people can keep believing there is nothing anyone could do, they won’t feel guilty about ignoring the topic. What if they find that solutions really are possible at some point, that there is something they could have done if they had simply allowed their minds to think about it, but their inaction led us further down the path we could have avoided? How must people feel? It must be much more satisfying to simply fight anyone who says that we might possibly make it. As long as they can convince themselves that everything is hopeless and our only reason for existence is to fight for our countries and pray for afterlife redemption, they don’t have to feel ashamed of their lives.

Others have seen this. George Orwell claimed that we are trained to resist any attempt to apply logic and reason to certain areas of our existence: basically, anything that involves thinking about changes that might alter the existing order is off limits. He claimed that we were trained to believe that we don’t even have the right to think about these things and, if we violate this training and let our minds go where they aren’t supposed to go, we are committing a kind of crime against humanity. He called this kind of thinking ‘thoughtcrime.’ He writes that we are taught mental techniques to help protect us from the dangers of thoughtcrime. One of these techniques is called ‘crimestop.’ He describes it this way:

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc [Orwell’s term for the philosophy behind the societies around us] and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.

I can read the frustration in his mind as he wrote these words. Clearly, he has tried to get people to look at the world logically. Clearly, he saw that we could understand things if we looked at the world logically that we couldn’t understand otherwise. But the people he talked to went to elaborate lengths to avoid thinking this way. Then, when he tried to press them, to get them to see things that were pretty obvious to him, they appeared to be trying to misunderstand even the simplest arguments. When he clarified, creating arguments so simple that no reasonable person could misunderstand, they changed their tactics, claiming that such analysis made them bored and even repelled them: we aren’t supposed to think about such things. They turned off their minds to make it impossible for them to think about societies logically. Orwell appeared to be describing something he had experienced.

In this book, I have tried to make the point that the problems that threaten us are structural problems. We can’t solve them with superficial efforts. We need to understand the way human societies work and the way they can work. Some foundations can support sound societies, others can’t. We happened to have been born into societies in the latter category. These societies have a disease which is clearly fatal.

This disease involves a belief. The people who created these societies started with the premise that humans are capable of owning anything at all. We can own the stars, we can own the planets, we can own animals, and we can own mountains, rivers, lakes, forests, and even nature itself. We can own anything at all if we form into groups, call our groups the right names (nations for example), sew up flags, compose anthems, and draw up documents like constitutions and declarations of independence. People born into natural law societies believe that nature is above humans and that humans depend on nature entirely for our existence. They believe that the dependence of humans on nature is a self-evident law of nature, one that all thinking people should understand. People in sovereignty-based societies somehow believe that we can trick nature into being ownable, provided we go about it the right way, create enough icons, songs, documents, and monuments, and raise our children to believe the same things we believe.

 

 

Is it really Mental?

The actual practical steps needed to create a sane society aren’t really difficult to understand; we will go over them shortly. The hard part is getting to the right mental state. To see this is true, consider this thought experiment:

Imagine that a group of aliens have a mind ray that can selectively erase memories in entire populations. They set it to erase all memories related to political education on Earth. People can remember everything else, they just can’t remember anything related to their country or the idea of countries.

You can still speak; your vocabulary is the same. You can add and do math just as well as before. If you knew how to drive before, you can still drive; if you could program a computer or play a piano, you can program and play. Anything you knew from before you still know except if it has to do with countries. You don’t know anything about countries; the word is meaningless to you. If someone were to ask you, ‘Does this land belong to your country?’ your response would be, ‘what is a country?’

Do countries have rights to own and prevent others from benefiting from mountains, rivers, lakes, and other parts of the world? This question would make no sense.

All of the people will look around them and see that they live on a wonderful world, full of bountiful farms, automated factories, and well-built homes. Who has the right to use these facilities? If we believed in countries, we would believe the documents countries have issued that grant rights to certain people, making them individual or corporate owners. But if we don’t believe in countries, we really have no idea who has the rights to these wonderful things.

If we have no idea, we have to come up with something. What makes sense? We are intelligent. Why not figure something out that makes sense? What are the different ways that humans can interact with the land around us? (In other words, what ways that humans interact with the world apart from forming countries and letting countries make the rules?) We can find something that works and put it into place.

It is true that some people will try their best to come up with excuses to try to convince others that they have special rights. They are living in a home. Does that give them special rights? In Inca cities, it did not: the homes weren’t owned by the people who lived in them. They were built as common resources and then divided by lot once every 10 years. If you have been living in a home for 10 years, the Inca people would say that it is time that you give someone else a chance.

We might decide to think of the existing stock of housing and other buildings as similar to the existing stock of forests and mountains; no one owns them, they are common resources, available for the benefit of all. What is the best way to let people benefit from these things? Perhaps, we may decide to set up an auction system and lease them out.

Who will get the lease payments? Since no one owns the land and buildings being rented out, no one owns this money. We could put it into a common fund and then have general elections to determine what happens to this money. Without countries, we would have no particular reason for excluding people born in various other parts of the world from the elections. Everyone could participate. Later, we may decide that we want people to have incentives to improve the properties they are leasing, so we could make the leases marketable, turning them into leaseholds.

The above example was designed to make a point:

If no one had any political indoctrination at all, it wouldn’t be hard at all to move to a sound society. In fact, a little intelligent analysis, and we would move there almost automatically.

 

Treatment Plan, Phase One

Phase One of the treatment plan involves creating an organization that grants the human race authority over some aspects of global society, shifting some of the authority to make decisions from the entities called ‘governments of countries’ to the human race.

We can do this by going back to Henri Dunant’s plan, as originally envisioned, and starting again. Dunant ultimately failed in his attempt to transfer power and authority to the human race. But if we understand the exact reasons he failed and take steps to avoid the same pitfalls, we can increase our chances of success a great deal. Let’s start by considering what we can learn from Dunant’s efforts, his successes and his failures.

Dunant succeeded in creating a new kind of human body that basically goes above the heads of governments and puts certain decisions into the hands of bodies called ‘non-governmental organizations’ or NGOs. There are currently thousands of NGOs around the world, most of which are working to provide services to the people of the world that governments aren’t providing or don’t provide in consistent ways. Many of these NGOs are enormous organizations with global reach. The largest are the ones that Dunant created. It is true that these organizations aren’t playing the role that Dunant envisioned for them, but they definitely do things to benefit the human race that the governments of the world aren’t willing or able to do.

The fact that they exist at all tells us something very important: it tells us that the people of the world really do care about the conditions on Earth and really do want to help make it better. They have to give to their governments by paying taxes. We can’t really judge by their willingness to give to government-sponsored causes what they care about. But anything they give to NGOs (non-governmental organizations) is given voluntarily. We can tell by the level of support that people voluntarily give the NGOs that Dunant created, and the other NGOs that were created later on the same model, that people don’t just sit back and passively talk about these things. They are willing to back up their concern with their time (volunteering to help), talent, skills, property, money, and anything else they have.

The non-governmental organizations that Dunant started, including the World Court, the World Library (a part of the work of the organization now called UNESCO), the ‘Society For The Complete And Final Abolition Of The Traffic In Negroes And The Slave Trade’ (which provided the foundation of anti-slavery societies around the world which are still active today), the Red Cross, and the Geneva Convention, get support from all around the world.

The societies that Dunant started didn’t end up bringing about the changes he was trying to bring about when he formed them. As we saw earlier, both patriotic and religious forces came into play to prevent these organizations from altering the structural realities of the world, as they were originally intended to do. But Dunant’s efforts helped set up a new approach to dealing with human problems.

The pre-Dunant efforts were based on the premise that the governments of countries were the only real tools that humans could use to solve problems. Dunant realized that governments of countries really couldn’t do anything about the most serious problems of the world, because these problems were global, not specific to any country. In fact, the most serious problem of all, war, was the planned and intentional result of the activities of the governments of countries. It is rather silly to expect these bodies to be useful in solving these problems because the only reason that these problems exist is that governments undertook long-term plans and appropriated massive amounts of wealth to intentionally cause these problems. They not only plan the military activities themselves, but they also use all of the tools at their disposal to create the mindset needed to allow the governments to continue to do these horrible things. To expect governments to help eliminate these problems would be like expecting wolves, grizzly bears, and cougars to take the lead in efforts to protect lambs from predators.

Dunant realized that we can go over the heads of the governments of the world. The people of the world really are interested in taking steps to prevent wars and destruction. He wanted to create an organization that was not associated with any government, but which was intended to give the people of the world tools that they could use to meet their collective needs.

The organizations he created weren’t able go to nearly as far as Dunant intended for them to go. But even with their limited effect, they have done truly incredible things. When disasters come, representatives of the International Red Cross contact the local governments to get permission to help. If the governments allow them to enter (and this often doesn’t happen), the Red Cross moves in a very well organized and well-planned manner to deal with the hardship. It is very rare that government bodies can even come close to matching the resources and capabilities the Red Cross has to deal with disasters.

Dunant helped us understand a new way to deal with human problems: rather than begging our governments to stop spending so much effort on wars and stop supporting destruction of the world, we can give to organizations that are designed to and intended to advance the condition of the human race and planet Earth, without regard to which country is involved.

The organizations he created didn’t go nearly as far as he intended, but they still do things that the people of the world clearly want done. The success of the organizations Dunant created has made it clear to others that they need to transcend the boundaries of countries if they want to have any real impact on the problems facing the human race.

Dunant showed us that, if we set up these organizations and allow people around the world to help run them and support them as they see fit, people will come, help, and support them. We can see this: people want a better world. They are willing to sacrifice their time, effort, property, talent, and skills, to try to make the world better. If we build an NGO that is intentionally designed to solve the problems that threaten us, and which works in ways that move the human race toward better conditions at every step of the way, people will come together and make it work.

The basic idea behind the NGO I propose is not new. I am basically proposing the same organization that Dunant originally wanted, with a few additions and modifications that incorporate tools and structure that weren’t a part of Dunant’s plan.

You may recall from the discussions above that Dunant was trying to do something that the other administrators of the organizations he set up thought was against the principles of their religions. He was trying to do things to limit the ability of governments to conduct war with an aim to eventually end war. For example, he wanted an organization that would use lobbying, grassroots pressure, and other tools of influence to get the governments of the world to agree to binding accords that would require them to submit any disputes they had with governments of other countries to an organization called the World Court.

The World Court would have certain tools it could use to make sure that the governments in the accord complied with its rulings. If the tools of the court weren’t strong enough to make this happen, the other governments that were part of the agreement would have already agreed to support the World Court to ensure compliance.

The NGO called the ‘Geneva Convention’ would also work to limit the scope of war, should it break out in spite of the efforts of the World Court. It would work to organize agreements to NOT use certain weapons, to treat civilians in a civilized manner and protect them from the impacts of war, to resettle displaced persons in a humane manner, to provide humane treatment for prisoners, to notify families of prisoners of the status of the prisoners, to allow prisoners to get care packages and letters from their families, and to abstain entirely from certain unconscionable acts like the use of prisoners for medical experiments and acts of torture.

Although some of Dunant’s ideas were implemented in a very limited way, his grand plan never became reality because of opposition from key officials at the organizations Dunant created. He started the organization with a small group of very rich and powerful people who had the money and connections necessary to create the required legal structures. The members of this small group of people were religious. They shared a common religion, the ‘Calvinist’ branch of the Reformed Protestant branch of the Abrahamic religion called ‘Christianity.’ All Abrahamic religions are based on the principles of the First Book of Moses (called ‘Genesis’ in the Christian version). This doctrine holds that a spirit being who lives in the sky named ‘God’ had created the planet and then created humans. This being then let humans live without countries for 1,634 years but was not satisfied with the results, so he killed everyone except for the members of a family headed by Noah with a great flood and started fresh.

This time, he set up a different system: the spirit being divided the land into countries with well-defined borders. God then chose specific descendents of the surviving family to be the owners of individual countries, with the ownership passed down to descendents of the original owner. (You can find these discussions in ‘Genesis,’ starting with Chapter Ten.) Shortly after God divided the world this way, the countries started using war to try to take additional land. God makes appearances in the religious books from time to time and clearly accepts that the countries that are able to gain dominion over each area (the ones that win the war and drive out or subjugate the other residents of the land) are the legitimate owners of the land they conquer, with the same rights to it as they would have had if the land had been a part of the original land grant.

The religion claims that God has the power to do anything and nothing can exist without God wanting it to exist. Since God created the conditions that lead to war, allowed wars to take place, and accepted the results of the wars as changing the country that owns the land, this all must be a part of God’s plan for the human race.

Dunant wanted to tie the human race together into a world community which would limit the effect of war and, hopefully, eventually eliminate it. In fact, if Dunant’s efforts succeeded, the countries would no longer be the true owners of land: the countries would be subject to the rulings of the World Court, which would be under the control of the human race, so any rights that countries had would be subject to the consent and approval of the people of the planet Earth. If Dunant’s efforts succeeded, countries would no longer have the rights that God gave them (and therefore clearly wanted them to have); they also wouldn’t have access to the tools that they needed to protect these God-given rights. Dunant was trying to interfere in God’s plan for the human race.

Religious people thought they had some rights. Their holy books had two parts, the ‘Old Testament’ and the ‘New Testament.’ The second book is about a benevolent son of God that seeks to mitigate the misery caused by the principle character in the first book. After a war has come through an area, they have the right to come in and alleviate the misery, treat the wounded, and help rebuild the structures that have been destroyed. But they didn’t believe they had any real right to alter the structural realities of society. It was built around countries with God-given rights. The countries must continue to exist and keep these rights. This foundation leads naturally to war. The spirit being who is claimed to have created countries clearly wants war to happen and humans have no right to interfere or get rid of this.

The other key officials in the NGO Dunant created believed that humans did not have the authority to do the things Dunant wanted his NGO to do. They fought Dunant and eventually had him removed from any position of authority in the NGO he created. (As discussed earlier, they had to take all of his money before they could do this; they did this with a series of legal battles that they could easily afford—they were rich—but that Dunant could not afford. After he was broke, they found it easy to remove him.)

After Dunant was removed from the first NGOs he created, he created others, this time starting with allies with more open minds and fewer ties to organized religion.

But here he faced a different problem: the governments of the world would simply not do certain things. The key element of the societies of the world is the idea of sovereignty for countries. The countries claim to be sovereign entities, able to deal with all matters inside their borders without any interference from outside entities. You could say that sovereignty is their prime directive, their ultimate law, something that could never be violated.

NGOs like the World Court could issue rulings about what they think is right and they would happily assign someone to listen. But they wouldn’t agree to be bound by the rulings. To agree to this, they would have to give up their sovereignty. Nothing was more important to them than sovereignty. They wouldn’t give it up, period.

From Dunant’s failures, we can learn that there are certain obstacles that will be in our way. We need to understand this and find ways around or over these obstacles. These obstacles are formidable. But if we understand the tools discussed earlier in this book, we can use them to help us get to a system that transfers control over wealth, and therefore transfers power, to the human race. The more wealth the human race has the more power it has. Eventually, the human race will have enough power to make it the leading authority on Earth. We can be in charge of our destiny, with direct control of the most important variables through biding elections.

 

The Community of Humankind

We start with an NGO. I will call this NGO the ‘Community of Humankind’ in this example. This may be a new NGO, created specifically to tie the human race together and give us authority, or it may start with an existing NGO that already has a large organization and infrastructure and is willing to accept a model that will increase its scope and power.

It might even be the original NGO that Dunant created, the Red Cross. This organization has changed its orientation over the long period it has existed. As science advances, it becomes able to explain many things that, earlier, could only be explained with references to magic and spirit beings. People educated in science tend to look for and accept scientific explanations for the things they see. People with these education often think of the religious books that claim these same events happened by magic (as a result of the powers of a spirit being who can’t be seen or otherwise detected) as silly remnants of our superstitious past.

If we discard religion, we can see evidence that the human race is actually in charge of its own destiny. We are where we are now because of decisions other people have made in the past. If we want to change the basic structural realities of the societies we live in, we have the ability to do this and we have the right to do it. I think that people are more enlightened now and it is even possible that the organization that Dunant created and was then kicked out of may want to move back to the original plan.

Whether we start with an existing NGO or create a new one, the approach is basically the same: we want an organization that is intentionally designed to empower the human race and give us control over things that, currently, we can’t control.

What gives the human race power? The simple answer is ‘money.’ But money, as a one-time gift, doesn’t really meet our needs. The human race is forever. The money is only going to be available to spend once. If we want to empower the entire human race, including the members of the human race that have not yet been born, we need to set up a system that will allow the human race to have some share of the wealth the world produces over time.

This is clearly possible. We live on an incredibly bountiful world. It produces fantastic flows of free cash over time. This cash represents the right to share in the enormous wealth that flows from the planet. We can set up a system where some of this wealth flows into a fund that belongs to the human race.

The Community of Humankind will do this mainly by accepting endowments and bequests of real estate and corporate assets, then selling leaseholds on these properties. The properties will remain private and the leaseholders will own real rights to them. But some portion of the free wealth that the land produces will flow into a fund that belongs to the human race.

This system is likely to appeal to people for many reasons. One of the main reasons, I believe, is people’s personal attachments and concern for the particular part of the world they have experience with. Say that you were raised on a cattle ranch. You know every inch of the farm and what it can do. You are getting old and know that there will come a time when you won’t be there to work the ranch or even protect it. Many people look at real estate as nothing but a bit of land that sits on top of oil, coal, iron, or other resources. They want to get control of the land so they can destroy it. Say that you don’t want this to happen to your farm. Say you want your farm to continue to be a farm, to raise animals and allow at least some of the people of the world to live in commune with nature.

How can you make sure this happens?

In our 21^st century world, there really isn’t any way to do it, at least not any way that anyone is going to have confidence is going to continue working after they are gone. Trusts can be busted. Giving the land to the government isn’t a sure thing: the government can simply sell the land to a corporation that will start raping it right away. There are some NGOs devoted to conservatorship, but they really don’t have the ability to protect land that they own: they may be able to hire rangers to protect large parcels of land that are contiguous, but won’t be able to protect a ranch that is the middle of an area of private ranches. (Donate it to them and they are likely to sell it and use the money to buy land that is close to their existing land and that they can protect.)

The Community of Humankind (capital letters mean this refers to the NGO) will create a leasehold and sell the leasehold with socratic leasehold ownership. The buyer of this leasehold will pay a price that is always five times the yearly leasehold payment.

As a result of market forces, this price must be quite high.

The people who want to buy leaseholds will have to pay a lot of money for them. They know they can get this money back later, if they want, by selling the leaseholds to someone else, so they think of the price as almost like a refundable deposit. To get their deposit back, they have to take care of the property and follow the rules in the leasehold agreement.

The Community of Humankind will set up leasehold agreements with rules that require the leasehold owner to take care of the property and keep it safe from harm. Because they have a large amount of money invested and stand to lose all of this money if they don’t follow the rules, they have very strong incentives to follow the rules. (If they don’t, the Community of Humankind doesn’t lose; it can cancel the leasehold agreement without recourse, keeping the full price paid. It can then use this money to restore the land to its former condition and sell another leasehold on it, all without loss to the Community of Humankind.)

I know a lot of people who had close relationships with a certain part of the world. A friend of mine had inherited a forest in New York. He wanted to protect it forever. We talked about ways to do this and concluded that he could keep it protected while he was alive, but not after he was gone.

Forestry experts had told him that the best way to keep the forest healthy is to remove excess growth. Cut some of the trees each year and remove underbrush that may catch fire and destroy the forest. He had a logging company come in and do the necessary work. This not only protected the land, it provided a steady income for him: the logging company sold the logs, paid itself for the work it did, and gave him the rest of the money.

If a system like the Community of Humankind existed, he could make sure the land is protected forever by donating the leasehold rights to the farm to the Community of Humankind. The Community of Humankind could sell the leasehold with the provision that the forest must remain a forest and be operated as a productive forest, with strict rules prohibiting any potentially destructive use. The buyer/owner of the leasehold would have money on the line. The forest would produce an income. The leasehold owner would share this income with the human race, giving us our leasehold payment, and keeping the rest. The leasehold owner would take on all risk and make sure the interests of the human race were protected.

If the leasehold owner could find other ways to generate revenue from the land that didn’t violate the rules protecting it, she could keep all this additional revenue. For example, a lot of people in New York live in cities and would really like to get away to a nice cabin in the woods once in a while. If the rules that the Community of Humankind set up to protect the land didn’t prohibit this use, the leasehold owner could build some cabins and rent them out. She could keep any additional cash flows the land generated from the rental income. Then, at some point, she may want to get out of the forestry business. She may then sell the leasehold on the forest. Others will be able to pay significantly more for it than she paid, because the land now produces a much higher free cash flow. When the leasehold sells, everyone benefits: the seller gets a higher price and the human race will begin getting a higher leasehold payment (the leasehold payment will reset to 20% of the higher price).

People who control a part of the world and want it protected can donate the leasehold rights to the land to the Community of Humankind. The Community of Humankind can then sell the leasehold rights and give the money to whoever the donor wants to have the money. (It could be to her heirs, perhaps, to the Community of Humankind, perhaps, or perhaps even to herself; she doesn’t have to wait until she dies to donate.)

There will be three benefits to disposing of property in this way:

1. The property will be protected through a secure mechanism which is undiminished through time. A person with real estate to protect won’t have to worry about someone eventually finding a way to destroy the property. The protection will continue indefinitely. A person with a corporation that is designed to and intended to do things that make the world better can donate it and be sure that a leasehold will be sold that prohibits any activities that will turn the corporation to activities that harm the world or people on it. The buyers of the leaseholds will put up money as a guarantee that they will follow these rules. They don’t want to lose this money so they will have to follow the rules the donor creates. This system will align the interests of all future owners with the interests of the donor. There is no way to create this alignment in our world today; it will be easy for people who have built corporations or formed close personal relationships to real estate and want these things protected to do this by taking advantage of this system.

2. Donors will know that the property will soon begin to bring real benefits to the human race in ways that can be measured and easily understood. These benefits will never end; the donors will be doing something that they know can’t be turned against the interests of the human race, because the human race directly controls everything that happens.

3. Donors will be able to turn their properties into cash very quickly in this system. The Community of Humankind will be the guardian of the leasehold ownership system. This system will work much better if there is an electronic global market that is as large and liquid as possible to make sure that people who buy leaseholds will be able to sell them quickly and for the highest price the market will bear, and people who want to improve the world can easily find a leasehold property available for sale that matches their skill sets.

This is actually fairly easy to do because leaseholds have certain important advantages over freeholds that make it much safer and easier to buy them than to buy freeholds. (The reasons for this are rather complex so I won’t explain them here, but you can find an explanation in Possible Societies, available on PossibleSocieties.com website. The main reason is that leaseholds have a ‘correct value’ is that there is a fixed relationship between the free cash flow and the market value of each leasehold; because people know that this is true, they know they aren’t going to lose money through the dramatic price swings that are part of freehold systems.)

If there is a massive global market for leaseholds, with special structures included to make sure this market is liquid (something that people know how to make happen), leasehold properties can be sold very quickly. This will be very appealing to many people who have property and want to turn it into cash quickly and without trouble: merely donate the leasehold rights to the Community of Humankind and instruct that the money from the sale (the price of the leasehold) go to them. People who donate by bequest will know that their heirs will get checks within days, rather than the many years that are common for bequests in freehold systems.

The Community of Humankind will have both short-term and long-term goals. Over the short-term, it will provide services that the people want but that the governments of the world don’t want, or at least don’t want enough to actually fund them.

This is the great appeal of NGOs in general. Most of the people of the world realize that governments aren’t really working to make the world a better place. Governments not only aren’t putting out any serious efforts to solve the key problems of the world, they actually intentionally create the most serious problems of the world today.

The Community of Humankind will create a fund in banks throughout the world. People will make their leasehold payments into this fund. This money will come in without any need for the Community of Humankind to collect anything or even send out notices: the leasehold owners have paid a price for the leasehold that is five times the yearly leasehold payment. If the leasehold payment is not in the account of the Community of Humankind when due, it is late, and the leasehold owner has violated the terms of the leasehold agreement. The agreement then automatically cancels and all rights to the property revert back to the Community of Humankind. The Community of Humankind can then sell it and get five times the amount we would have gotten if the leasehold payment had been made. The price actually functions like a rental deposit. Since this ‘deposit’ is five times the amount of the yearly ‘rent,’ we have total security and our money will come in automatically.

Once the money is in the account, it can only come out of the account through an election process. Each registered voter will get votes that represent a certain amount of money each. For the sake of example, say that each vote is worth $1. Say that $2 million comes into the fund on a given day. This generates 2 million votes that are distributed among all registered voters. Voters may cast their votes for any fund that has been approved through voter referendums.

You can cast your vote to give the money to governmental organizations or non-governmental organizations. If you think that the governments of the world do a good job and nothing else is needed, you can cast all your votes to a ‘national and local government fund.’ This fund will divide any money put into it among the governments of the world, to use as the governments of the world want.

However, if you think that the governments of the world aren’t doing some of the things you want to be done, you don’t have to give them this money. You can send the money to one of the NGOs that are dedicated to providing specific services and solving specific problems.

In most cases, the Community of Humankind won’t have to form new NGOs to do the things the people want done. NGOs already exist to do most of the things the people of the world want done. Doctors Without Borders, for example, provides medical care all around the world. Habitat for Humanity builds affordable homes. The Red Cross provides disaster relief. If you think that governmental bodies aren’t doing a good job, and that non-governmental organizations can do better, you may decide not to cast any votes at all to the ‘national and local government fund.’ You can give all of your share of the bounty of the properties that are in the system to NGOs. If an NGO already exists that does the things you want done, you can simply cast a vote for it. Say you cast a vote for Doctors Without Borders. This vote will initiate an electronic funds transfer from the account of the Community of Humankind into the account of Doctors Without Borders.

Say that there is something that you want to happen to the world that governments are not doing, and that no NGO currently does. You can form your own NGO. You can use the same funding systems that are currently in use to form NGOs. Once it gets into operation, you can sponsor a referendum to add it to the ballot. If it gets enough signatures, it goes onto the ballot and anyone on Earth can cast votes for it. Each vote cast transfers $1 from the general fund of the Community of Humankind to the NGO you created.

 

Practical Matters

Global NGOs already exist. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel to have them. We know that people like the work NGOs are doing. We know this because they are supporting the NGOs; they wouldn’t support them if they didn’t like the work they are doing.

People who run NGOs know that they can get funding through their traditional sources of funding and through the Community of Humankind. They will know that there are 7 billion people who are all potential donors. They will know that the more they can please their donor base, the more money they will get. The people who run the NGOs will naturally want to broaden the appeal of their organization as much as they can, to attract the attention of more people.

The Community of Humankind won’t be a service-providing organization itself. It will be a conduit that will funnel money to other service-providing organizations. The people will control which services are provided. If the people like the services governments provide, they can vote to send money belonging to the human race to governments. If the people think that the governments do a very good job deciding what programs to fund, they can give the money to a fund that allows people in the government to do anything they want with it.

If the people of the world think that governments are not particularly good at providing services, they can give the money to NGOs. The money that goes into the Community of Humankind is under the direct control of the human race. The people of the world decide what happens to it. If we don’t want either the governments of the world or NGOs to get any of it, we can simply divide the money among ourselves: we can cast votes for a ‘basic income fund’ that will be divided equally among the people of the world.

Governments will still exist. Countries will still exist. But there will be a new entity, the Community of Humankind, that will also have power. If the people of the world think that the Community of Humankind is doing good work and making the world better, they can increase the organization’s power and wealth as they see fit, by donating their time, skills, talents, property, money, or any other resources they control to the cause.

 

Long-Term Goals

Over the short run, the Community of Humankind will be designed to help the human race meet needs it is not currently able to meet. Over the long run, the Community of Humankind will be working to change the foundational structures of the societies of the world.

People are self-interested. If a group of people that make up a minority of the human race controls wealth, they will want to find ways to use that wealth to advance the interests of that particular group. For example, no country includes a majority of the people, so all countries are minorities. They control wealth and they use this wealth to advance the interests of their particular minority. Over history, the people who control the wealth of countries have found that they can advance the interests of their group by using the wealth to form armies and then using the armies to conquer land in other countries, causing the wealth of this part of the world to flow to the conquering country. They act in the interests of the group, which usually are entirely different than the interests of the human race.

In this case, the group with control over wealth is the human race itself. If the human race acts in its own interests—something we expect every group to do—we use this money for things that benefit the members of our group. We will use it for things that make the world better for our constituency, the human race.

The flow of income-generating assets into the system is a one-way flow. Properties can get into the system very easily: any time anyone donates a piece of real estate or a share of stock, it becomes a part of the system and its bounty is used for things that benefit the human race. It can’t ever get out of the system unless the majority of the members of the human race want it out of the system: they need to vote to buy back the leasehold of this property and then sell or give away a freehold on the property. This kind of transition clearly harms the human race so, if the people of the world act in our best interests, this is very unlikely to ever happen. If it doesn’t happen, the flow of properties into the system will be a one-way flow.

The income of the human race will increase through three mechanisms. The first will be improvements. People may buy existing leaseholds, improve the underlying properties so they generate higher free cash flows, and then sell leaseholds on the improved properties for more than they paid. (All this was discussed in great detail in previous chapters.) They will do this out of greed: they want to make money and they can make money buying leaseholds on properties that are in need of improvements, improving them, and selling for higher prices.

They may be doing this only for their own benefit. But they can’t make money themselves without also benefiting all other members of the human race. When they sell the leasehold for a higher price, the leasehold payment will automatically adjust upward to be 20% of the higher price. The income of the human race will go up.

In this system, the interests of individuals align with the interests of the human race. In any system that has this alignment, we all benefit if people are greedy, selfish, and interested in profit: the more money they make, the more they advance the interests of the human race. Since it is highly unlikely that people will ever stop being interested in their own personal welfare, we don’t have to worry about our welfare: they will make sure that the power and control of wealth of the human race will constantly increase.

The second method of increase is donations. The people of the world will see that the Community of Humankind is doing things they want done. People can give to the organization in many ways. They can donate their time, their skills, and their talents. They can also donate property and money. All these donations either increase the revenues of the Community of Humankind or reduce the operational costs, allowing more of the endowments to be used for purposes that benefit the human race.

The third mechanism is purchases. The human race can use part of its income to pay people to look for and purchase freeholds on cash flow-generating properties around the world.

Over time, we would expect the power and wealth of the Community of Humankind to grow. As this happens, the power and wealth of the human race will grow.

Eventually, the Community of Humankind may have enough wealth to start to relieve the countries of the world of some of their financial responsibilities. Consider healthcare: most national healthcare systems are not particularly efficient and don’t run very well. Governments have a lot of other priorities. They often need large sums of money for emergencies like war or the subsidies on destruction that create jobs. They can often get this money by raiding funds that were designed to provide health care. (Virtually all of the money that was allocated to Medicare and Medicaid in the United States has been ‘borrowed’ by the United States government to use for other programs; the money is gone and the funds are empty, so the government can’t provide the intended services.)

Why should this be something governments do? Can’t non-governmental organization do it? If NGOs do it, they will have incentives that governments don’t have. They will have incentives to provide universal care, without any need for restrictions or qualifications, in the most cost-effective manner possible. Perhaps, with the Community of Humankind providing these services, the governments of the world will be able to cut back and eventually leave this particular service to non-governmental providers. This will allow them to reduce the tax burden on their people and, if the people in the government are responsible, they will cut taxes to reflect their lower costs.

Perhaps, over time, more and more services can be taken on by the Community of Humankind leaving less and less for governments to do. Remember, the Community of Humankind is run by direct elections and can’t send money to anything that the people don’t want. We therefore know that the people want the services the Community of Humankind provides. We don’t know whether the people want the services the governments provide.

Do we really need governments? Do we want them? The people of the world may decide that they do want governments, but they don’t want the particular governments that have formed over their history. They want different governments, governments that are under the direct control of the people.

The people may create a fund to create a global government. They may decide that they want a body with the authority to rule, control, or otherwise ‘govern’ the people, as there are certain things that need to be done that can’t be donewithout this power. They may then create a fund to fund this government. People who want more money to go to the global government they created can vote for it. People who want more to go to the national and local governments that already exist can vote to give money to them. People who don’t like governments at all may choose to give only to NGOs or to the ‘basic income fund.’

If the global government that gets created doesn’t do a good job, the people don’t have to overthrow it. They simply stop voting to fund it and it will disappear. If they decide they made mistakes in forming this government, and gave it powers they don’t want it to have, they can stop funding this particular government and begin to fund one that works the way they want it to work.

The people who run national and local governments will eventually start to realize that they can attract additional funding, without putting any additional tax burden on their people, by having their particular national or local government work with the global government or NGOs in a way that allows them to provide services better and cheaper than before. They can become local arms of the global government, playing the same role as the local chapters of the Red Cross play in providing disaster relief. Local and national governments that do a very good job at this will be able to attract enough funding from the Community of Humankind to eliminate taxes. After this time comes, the local and national governments will be in the same category as the global government: nothing but a tool that the human race uses to help it accomplish its common goals.

 

The Journey Part One (Basic Information)

How will such a progression work?

To explain this, I will need a visual aid.

The back cover of this book contains an illustration marked ‘the Road Map of Possible Societies.’

We were born into societies on the extreme bottom line (sovereignty-based societies, or societies with 100% ownability). All options on this line are sovereignty-based societies; they vary with regard to the degree of authoritarianism or, to simplify a little, the degree of government control.

All societies that exist as of 2020 are very close to the middle of the range. There are practical reasons for this: sovereignty-based societies have very powerful forces that push toward war. Societies (states, countries, or groups of states/countries) that are too extreme in one way or the other aren’t able to compete in war. Too much authoritarianism prevents innovation and progress (people must have the freedom to do things that lead to innovation) and make countries in this category unable to compete effectively against those with more advanced weapons. Societies too far to the right (very small governments and little authoritarianism) aren’t going to be able to be organized around war and will devote more to social programs and services, with less emphasis on keeping the military complex well-equipped and ready for battle. (Societies toward the right can work if we move farther up the chart, to areas where war risks are less severe, but they can’t compete in sovereignty-based societies. The book ‘Possible Societies’ on PossibleSocieties.com goes over the details.)

There are some differences between the different countries, sovereign states, unions of states, and countries in the world today, with some farther to the right of center and some farther to the left, but the differences aren’t very great. The numbers on the bottom scale represent the percentage of the total amount of value/wealth created that is under the control of governments. Most governments report these figures and the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) goes over these figures to make them consistent and reports them on its website. If you want to know what percentage of total value created (called the ‘Gross Domestic Product’ or GDP by the CIA) is under the control of the government in any particular country, you can find this by searching in the CIA Factsheet for ‘percentage of GDP controlled by government.’

Because differences between current societies are very small, I simplify the analysis here by representing ‘current societies’ by a single point, the point at the exact center of the bottom line marked ‘2020 Societies.’

If we want to change societies, we can’t choose where we start. We start where our ancestors put us, which is at the point in the center of the bottom line of the Road Map of Possible Societies.

If we want to move to a society anywhere on the chart, we will need to go ‘through’ other societies to get there. For example, say that we want to move to a socratic society that has the same basic level of government involvement that exists in the world today. This would be represented by a point at the center of the line marked ‘Socratic Societies on This Line.' To get there, we must go along a line that is marked ‘Journey Line A.’

We are starting with a system where 100% of the rights to the wealth of the world are ownable and nothing is left unowned, unownable, and under the control and direction of the human race. The center scale of the Road Map of Possible Societies shows the percentage of the wealth of the world that is unownable and allocated by the direction of the people of society. Note that at the bottom line it is at 0%. If you go up a tiny bit off this line, you move to a system where some very tiny percentage of the wealth of the world is unowned and unownable.

If we create a system like the one described earlier in this chapter, where an NGO like the Community of Humankind gains control of certain parts of the world and sells socratic leasehold rights to private owners, the human race will gain some automatic and risk-free income from the land. At first, there will be only one property in the system, so we will have only a tiny income from the land. To put this another way, a very tiny part of the yearly wealth the planet produces will be considered unowned and unownable and will flow to the human race through automatic mechanisms.

This will pull us off the extreme bottom line. It is true that, at first, the wealth that is unowned and ownable and directed by the human race will be very, very small, perhaps only a tiny fraction of 1%. But any positive number is more than 0%. As time passes, more and more properties get into the system and the properties that are in the system get improved so that they are more bountiful and then sold for higher prices, causing the wealth that goes to the human race to increase. As more wealth falls into this category, we will move upward along the line marked ‘Journey Line A.’ Each movement will take us to a society that is slightly different than the one we had before.

 

The Journey: Part Two (Changes in Latitude)

As we go upward along this line, we will move to societies with different flows of value and different incentives. The scales on the extreme right side of the Road Map of Possible Societies indicate the strength of two important kinds of incentives: incentives to destroy value and incentives to create value.

Some societies work in ways that send money/wealth to people who do things that harm the planet or human race. These societies destroy what we may call ‘value,’ which can be broadly defined to include anything that humans want or need. A clean environment is ‘value.’ A safe living situation, where people are free from the threat of war is ‘value.’ Some societies work in ways that send wealth to people who destroy value. This creates financial incentives to destroy value. This book calls incentives that encourage people to do things that destroy value ‘destructive incentives.’

Different societies work in ways that lead to incentives of different strengths. Some societies have very powerful destructive incentives; they send a lot of wealth to people who do things that reduce the amount of ‘value’ on Earth. Some societies send small amounts of money/wealth to destroyers; they have weaker destructive incentives. Other societies don’t send any money/wealth to destroyers; they don’t have destructive incentives at all.

The scale on the inside right of the Road Map of Possible Societies indicates the strength of destructive incentives. Note that sovereignty-based societies (those all the way at the bottom) have the strongest possible destructive incentives: they literally make all of the wealth the world produces and contains available to people who do things that harm the human race and planet. Anyone who can convince people that they are a ‘country’ and that she is the leader of that country can start war and start conquering land. Once she is the conqueror, she can take anything the land produces and contains and use it for anything she wants. If the part of the world she conquers contains oil, she can pump it and sell it.

The system at the extreme bottom of the chart represents systems where all of the wealth of the world is available to go to destroyers; it has the strongest possible destructive incentives, 100% in the chart.

Move up and you go to systems where some of the wealth the world contains and produces is under the direct control of the human race, leaving less to go to destroyers. Less is available for destroyers, so the destructive incentives are weaker. (The mechanisms that cause the wealth to go to destroyers aren’t really as simple and obvious as this explanation implies; the book ‘Possible Societies’ explains them in detail. Here, I am just trying to give you a general idea.) If we start our ‘journey through societies’ at the point marked ‘2020 societies here’ and then move up, we move through a range with progressively weaker destructive incentives.

Incentives are behavioral motivations. You could think of them as invisible hands pushing people to act a certain way. These invisible hands work by basically pushing people toward a river of money. The bigger the river of money, the stronger the incentives. (You may be able to see why Cheney and his minion George Bush were willing to risk a global war that might destroy the planet to get Iraq’s oil: $200,000,000 per day is a lot of money.) As we move up through the chart, we move to societies with weaker destructive incentives: the invisible hands are still there, they just aren’t pushing as hard.

Of course, at first, the destructive incentives will still be extremely strong, and we won’t expect a huge reduction in the amount of destructive behaviors. But incentives have a very well understood and very consistent impact on behavior: give people less money to destroy and, although many people will continue to destroy, some people who would have chosen to destroy if more money had been involved, will decide that it isn’t worth it and choose not to. Rates of destruction will fall. Perhaps they will only fall by tiny amounts, but they will fall.

The outer scale represents the strength of different kinds of incentives: some societies work in ways that allow people to get money/wealth if they do things that lead to invention, innovation, technological advancements, mechanization, and increases in the amount of wealth that the land can produce in sustainable ways. Some societies work in ways that allow people to get money/wealth if they do things that lead to more value existing in the world. Again, we can interpret the term ‘value’ in a very broad sense. The world has more value if there is no polio or smallpox available to kill our children. The world has more value if people are free from the threat of war and the risk of destruction.

Constructive incentives are the opposite of destructive incentives. One encourages people to create value (again, broadly defined) and the other encourages people to destroy value.

If you start at the point marked ‘2020 societies’ and go upward on the line marked ‘Journey Line A,’ eventually your journey will intersect with the line marked ‘Minimally Sustainable Societies Here.’

Part Three: Minimally Sustainable Societies

There are certain conditions that must be met to have a sustainable society. (I find it strange that many people advocate sustainability without even trying to define the term. How can we move toward a sustainable society without knowing what this term means?)

It is possible to create more value than is destroyed indefinitely. We can have better and better housing, better and better food, better and faster public transportation, cleaner air, increased health, all without limit. There is no point where life becomes too good and we all destroy ourselves.

However, it is not possible to do the opposite forever. If a society destroys more value than it creates, eventually some key item of value, say the atmosphere, the ozone layer, the state of health of the people, or something won’t be sufficient to support us, and we will perish. It is not possible to continue to destroy more value than is being created forever.

Any society that destroys more value than is created is unsustainable. If we know this, we understand the absolute minimum conditions needed for sustainability: the amount of value that is created over time must be equal to or greater than the amount of value destroyed.

If you start at the societies at the extreme bottom of the chart, then move upward, you move to societies that are different in two ways. First, destructive incentives are weaker as you go up, for the reason discussed above. Second, the constructive incentives—the incentives to create value—get stronger.

This happens for several reasons that mainly have to do with taxes and regulation. Sovereignty-based societies have no common income that can be used by the people to meet their common needs. These societies work in ways that create governments that need enormous amounts of income. War is a constant risk; it can come at any time and, when it comes, governments need every single bit of wealth (money in systems that use money) they can get for the war. Even during times when there is no war, they can’t stop spending, as they must be prepared for war. This is a fantastic expense and governments must get the wealth to cover these costs somehow. Generally, they get this wealth through taxes.

These societies also totally disenfranchise the majority class of society, the working class. The working class gets no share of the bounty at all; in fact, they get nothing, and starve to death, unless they can get jobs. Technology is causing jobs in production (creation of value) to disappear. Governments must find ways to create jobs. Most of the job creation programs in effect today focus on paying destructive industries subsidies so that they can compete with non-destructive industries and keep the non-destructive industries (which don’t create jobs) from taking over. These subsidies on destruction started out small but must get bigger and bigger over time to keep people working. As I write this in 2020, these programs are truly massive: globally, subsidies on destruction exceed a trillion United States dollars a year and the only thing that the global governments spend more on is military activities.

Governments spend such fantastic amounts in these two areas that they need massive taxes just to function. As a result, the tax burden is often about 50%.

Socratic leasehold ownership systems work in ways that cause wealth to flow into public coffers automatically and without risk. The money that goes to the public does not come from anything anyone has done to earn: it is always a part of the free cash flow and free cash is, by definition, free. It is always unearned.

If the public has revenue that comes from unearned income, there is no need to take money that people have done anything to earn. In the socratic society discussed earlier (for Pastland), people could keep everything that came from improvements that drive up cash flows on properties; there was no need for taxes and, since taxing people for doing things that create more value and make life better don’t make sense (you don’t punish people for doing things you want them to do) there was no reason to have them.

If we start at the point marked ‘2020 societies here’ and go upward, we move closer to a situation where people aren’t penalized for improving the world. As the Community of Humankind gains the ability to regulate international disputes, international tensions will fall and governments will find it isn’t necessary to spend as much as before on weapons, allowing them to reduce taxes. As the Community of Humankind takes over services that the people want, again, governments will be able to reduce taxes. People who improve anything will be able to keep more of the increases in revenue from the improvement. Constructive incentives will grow in strength.

Incentives mater. They affect people’s behavior. Not everyone will react every time the incentives change; in fact, most people won’t. But the incentives will make a difference. We can expect the behaviors related to the ‘creation of value’ to increase and the behaviors related to the destruction of value to decrease. We can expect the amount of value created over time to increase and the amount of value destroyed to decrease.

At some point, we will reach the line marked ‘minimally sustainable societies on this line.’

Minimally sustainable societies are NOT non-destructive societies. Destruction is still a part of these societies. They still have destructive incentives and, if destructive incentives exist, people will destroy value. But these societies work in ways that lead to far weaker destructive incentives than exist in the sovereignty-based societies we started with at the beginning of the trip.

Sovereignty-based societies also have incentives that lead to the creation of value and modification of the Earth so that it produces more things of value over time. Incentives matter: they impact behavior. Because of these incentives, we would expect far more value to be created in sovereignty-based societies than in societies without constructive incentives, like natural law societies. Minimally sustainable societies work in ways that lead to even stronger constructive incentives than exist in sovereignty-based societies. Again, incentives matter. They affect behavior. We would expect greater efforts to create value, to modify the planet so it produces more value and wealth over time, in minimally sustainable societies than in sovereignty-based societies.

Minimally sustainable societies are those that have strong enough incentives to create value and weak enough incentives to destroy value that the total amount of value of all kinds (including the value of having clean air, stable weather, and safe living conditions) does not decline. This is the minimum condition needed to have a sustainable society.

It is not the only condition. Obviously, if value is being created by turning wood into fancy sailing yachts but is also being destroyed by destroying the air and water the people depend on, the system will not be sustainable. In sovereignty-based societies, the human race has no revenue and no way to impact such variables. (The governments of countries can affect them, but governments of countries don’t have incentives to improve global variables like atmospheric carbon dioxide levels or war risks. We, the people of the world, care about such things and once we have control of wealth, we can create structures to deal with them.)

However, it is a minimum condition: the destruction of value must be less than or equal to the creation of value to have a society that is even potentiallysustainable.

Part Four: How Far Do We Have to Go?

I put the level of minimal sustainability at about 97% on the chart. This number refers to the percentage of the bounty (free cash flow) of the world that is buyable and ownable by private individuals and does NOT go to the human race. To put this another way, the human race would get 3% of the bounty of the world. To make this happen, about 3% of the cash flow-generating properties on Earth would have to be controlled by socratic leasehold ownership.

For comparison, a socratic society like the one described earlier for Pastland would be an 16⅓% ownability society; this means that 83⅔% of the bounty of the world would flow to the human race, more than 40 times the amount that goes to us in the minimally sustainable societies.

This is an approximation of course; it is basically a guess about the minimum amount of wealth that the human race would have to have in order to have enough control over important variables in our world to reach minimum sustainability.

How much money would we, the people of the world, get each year under this condition? The best figures I could find for global value creation come from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that provide estimates of these figures. The most recent figure on the analysis page for the World Bank (taken from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD) show that the global production of value is about $80 trillion a year. How much of this is bounty depends on many different factors and would be pretty much impossible to work out, but we don’t need an exact figure for this analysis, just a very rough number. A figure of half would be very conservative; in other words, it is almost certain that more than half of all production is bounty. We live on an extremely bountiful world and it gets more and more bountiful each day as machines replace workers, allowing wealth to be created and collected with no effort. (A system where machines produced everything would have zero labor costs. Many economists argue that labor is the only true cost of production: if things are produced without labor costs of any kind, with zero-cost energy systems like solar power running the machines, everything that is produced is bounty.) So we have a number to work with, let’s say that the total bounty of the world (the total global free cash flow of all land, corporations, infrastructures, and anything else that is ownable and generates free cash flows) is about $40 trillion. If we get 3% of this, we end up with $1.2 trillion ($1,200,000,000,000) per year. Remember how socratic leasehold ownership works: leasehold owners must put up a price that is five times the leasehold payment. Because they know they will lose this entire price if the leasehold payment is even a second late, they have powerful incentives to make this payment and the income of the Community of Humankind will be automatic. In the event they miss the payment, all rights to the property will revert to the Community of Humankind, which may then sell the leasehold rights again for five times the amount of the missed payment. This system works in ways that lead to an automatic and risk-free income for the human race.

This income does not come from taxes. It is a flow of wealth that comes from the productive properties of the world anyway. We, thenmembers of the human race, have set up a system that allows private individuals to control parts of the world without consent as long as they follow the rules that we have created to protect the planet and human race, and share the flows of wealth that come from the land with the human race.

When we start out in our journey toward a healthy society, we get none of this wealth. As we progress, we get more and more. At a certain point, we will get 3% of this free wealth. (For this to be true, about 4% of the cash flow-generating properties on Earth would have to be controlled with socratic leasehold ownership.)

Obviously, 3% is not much; it is nothing like the 83⅔% that we would get in a socratic society. But we live on an incredibly bountiful world. When we get up to this percentage, we, the members of the human race collectively, control wealth that works out to be about $800 per person per year. This may be easier to picture if we think of it as a ‘per family’ figure and multiply it by 4, to get $3,200 per year per family on Earth.

Again, this isn’t much. But it is enough to make a real difference. The human race has certain common problems that the governments of the countries of the world aren’t doing anything to solve. (In fact, the governments of the world are responsible for the most serious of these problems; they create them intentionally.) Once we get to minimally sustainable societies, we reach the point where we have enough power and wealth to set up global structures to deal with the most serious of these problems.

The governments of the world will have far less pressure on them to encourage destruction and make war. They will see that the creation of jobs, while still necessary over the short run, won’t be necessary over the long run. Even at this tiny percentage of the bounty, we will have enough money to provide some basic incomes for the people of the world.

We will all be able to see that there will come a time when the human race will have enough income, from our share of the bounty of the planet, to provide basic incomes that can meet the basic needs of the people. After this time comes, the people will gain nothing by having their governments take money from them and use this money to subsidize destruction or create military tensions to create jobs.

When the human race gets to this level (again, about 3% of the bounty of the world flowing to us) we will have more power than the great majority of the world’s governments. This will put us into a position to start to do some of the things that Dunant had in mind for the organization he created that have a real impact on international relations. We can create a true World Court, not the token organization that makes only non-binding decisions that we have now, but a body with tools that it can use to compel the governments of the world to accept its rulings, and to create agreements that will push the governments of the world to work together to ensure the compliance of governments that have lost cases at the World Court and are required to give up land or control over people that they have gained through activities the court rules are unacceptable.

We will have the ability to create binding limitations on carbon emissions and have the governments of the world sign accords agreeing to enforcement mechanisms that the human race has funded. (In sovereignty-based societies, governments can agree to anything, even somethings they have no intentions of doing, because there are no enforcement mechanisms in place. They can simply make up some excuse and ‘pull out’ of the accords, or simply modify them, or report compliance when it isn’t happening, and there isn’t anything anyone can do about this.)

Once we get to this point, we, the members of the human race, will have tools that we can use to get governments to back off on their attempts to prevent sustainable processes like solar from taking over. Currently, the great majority of the governments in the world have complex policies designed to protect jobs in destructive industries that can only work if the switch to sustainable processes doesn’t take place. When we get to a level of about 3%, we will have enough power through our control over wealth to educate the public about these policies so that they don’t support them and replace government officials who do things that harm the human race in the countries of the world. Again, 3% is not much. But there is already pressure in this area: more and more people are realizing that their governments are tricking them to prevent the world from moving to sustainable systems.

All the above changes will work together. It won’t eliminate destruction, but we don’t have to eliminate destruction to get meet the minimum conditions needed for sustainability. We merely have to reduce the amount of destruction enough, and increase the rate of progress and growth enough, to get the progress we are making to be enough to offset the destruction that is still taking place.

How far do we have to go?

This particular estimate, to a system where 3% of the bounty of the world flows to us, is just a guess. But I think it is, if anything, conservative (in other words, we may easily get to sustainability with far less of the world’s wealth flowing to the Community of Humankind.) Technology is already growing at an extremely rapid rate, creating many tools that we can use to pull the human race together and deal with common problems, even without us having any structural organization at all. The internet is making it harder for governments to convince their people that the ones born on the opposite side of imaginary lines are evil monsters who deserve only death and misery. We can get both sides of the story; we can see that the ones our governments want us to kill have children, feelings, and that they care about the same things that we care about. When we see a mother searching for her children in a war zone, it is hard to really think of her and her children as enemy monsters to be destroyed.

Solar costs have plummeted and now are so low that the old argument against solar—that it is too expensive to consider—aren’t even remotely believable. (The book, ‘Anatomy of Destruction’ shows that solar costs fell below the costs of the most common destructive systems as long ago as 1978, when solar technology was still primitive. Solar costs now are less than 5% of what they were in 1978 and the costs of destruction have only gone up. As a result, even the analysis that is designed by the gas and oil industry—like the BP energy survey, which would show that destruction is cheaper if there were any way to twist facts to make it appear to be true—shows that solar is the cheapest energy system available.) Governments have only been able to prevent a switch to sustainable energy systems with extremely aggressive action, restrictions on use of solar (like PURPA, which makes it illegal to sell solar energy in the United States; this is discussed in the book ‘Anatomy of Destruction’), massive taxes on solar, and massive subsidies on destruction. Even without any organized and concerted effort on the part of the human race, governments are having a very hard time preventing sustainable systems from taking over. I think that this particular estimate of the power the human race would have to have to counter the efforts of countries, with 3% of the bounty of the world flowing to the human race each year, is very conservative; we could probably do it with a lot less.

How far are we from the line marked ‘minimally sustainable societies here?’ We don’t have nearly enough information to determine this. However, once we begin on the journey and get started with the system, sending some (rather than none) of the bounty of the world to the human race, we will be able to map the progress and make a better estimate. Again, I think that the 3% figure is conservative. Chances are we will be able to meet the minimum conditions for sustainability long before that.

How long will it take to get there? Obviously, if we don’t know where ‘there’ is, we can’t really estimate the time it will take to get there. But we have evidence to show that NGOs that do things that the people really want done can grow extremely rapidly. I think it is reasonable to estimate that, if we started today, we could meet the minimum conditions for sustainability in less than 30 years.

A Look Around

Sometimes, when you are on a trip, you may see something that wasn’t on your agenda and stop to take a look. You may find a wonderful beach, a fantastic waterfall, a great museum, or a walking street (like La Florida in Buenos Aires, Las Ramblas in Barcelona, or Nan Jing Da Ja in Shanghai); sometimes, you may find something along the way that is so nice you decide you want to stay there, rather than go on to your original destination.

Once we get to minimally sustainable societies, we can look around. Do we want to continue down the path to the socratic? Perhaps. Perhaps we may want to pause a little, remain where we are so we can consolidate our gains. The socratic is a very nice society, of course, but we are starting from a terrible mess with many hardships. Rather than focusing on ‘getting there at any cost’ we may want to focus on expanding the quality of life for the people of the planet, dealing with the population so that problems related to population stress don’t get any worse, or take some other steps to make our eventual progress easier but will slow us down and push the ultimate goal farther into the future.

 

Population:  The definitive work about population was Thomas Malthus’ 1798 book ‘On Population.’ This book was and still is highly controversial but it really the only book I could find that takes an objective look at this issue.

The book points out that the population of the working class will grow exponentially if there is enough food to support higher populations. (More food means lower food prices; if a working class family can support more members, more will be born and grow to maturity, leading to very rapid population growth.) More recent analysts call this effect a ‘population explosion.’ This explosion only takes place in the working class and is very pronounced in the most impoverished areas: greater poverty means more rapid population growth.

Since he wrote this book, his basic theories have been confirmed and you can easily look at the data and see the result: populations with greater prosperity tend to have smaller families with the most prosperous half of the global population either entirely stable or actually falling. The most impoverished demographics have very rapid population growth, with some—the most impoverished part of the human population—doubling everyngeneration. If you look at a list of the countries with the highest population growth rate in the world today (you can find this at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2002rank.html) and cross-reference it with a list of the poorest countries in the world (available at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/221.html) you will see that it is basically the same list. All of the 25 countries with the highest grow rates are in Africa; all have total gross domestic product per person of less than $2,500 per person.

Why does this happen? Analysts point to two reasons. The first is a lack of birth control. Extremely poor people can’t afford it. We all want to have sex and, without birth control, sex leads to pregnancy. Once the woman is pregnant, she has no choice: there will be a baby (if she can’t afford condoms, she certainly can’t afford abortions). Mothers don’t let their babies starve to death if they can help it so they will do anything they can to keep the baby alive. If there is enough food, and any way for the mother to get it, the population will grow and can easily double each generation.

The other reason this happens is social security. Very poor countries don’t have it. People get sick and will get old. Without any family to care for them, they will die. Very poor families need to be large to be secure.

 

Most countries in the world today have enough prosperity to keep populations stable. (At least this is true for natural increase; immigration from poor countries is also driving up the population of wealthier countries.) But the population in extremely poor areas is exploding. It is growing at a fantastic rate that is putting pressure on resources all around the world.

Once we get to the point where we meet the minimum conditions necessary for sustainability in general, we may want to divert some attention to the population problem so we can reduce the pressure on resources caused by the need to feed an ever-growing number of extremely poor people. This is actually a pretty simple fix, but it will require allocating a lot of wealth to two areas that may not seem like a very high priority at the current time:

1. Reliable, affordable, safe birth control for everyone who wants it.

2.Global social security programs that are designed specifically to reduce the stresses that induce the very poor to have large families.

The problem of an exploding extremely impoverished population will make it extremely difficult to limit the power and authority of the governments of countries. As time passes, there will be more and more pressure on them to isolate their countries to prevent a massive inflow of people with no skills, no education, no wealth, no incomes, and no experience with the realties of life in the countries they flee to. We can already see the impacts of this: isolationist policies have been increasing in popularity for decades. These policies have widespread popular support among the wealthier nations of the world and it is very hard to enact policies that tie the human race together when so many people will do just about anything they can to make sure that the people from other countries can’t even walk on the land they claim as theirs.

What can we do about this? It seems obvious: the first step is to create a global birth control system that makes the highest quality pregnancy prevention methods available today available to even the poorest of women, around the world. The second step is to devote funding—a lot of it—to the development of better birth control methods so that, after these systems become available, the only babies born will be those that people want and plan for.

The third step is to study and examine the pressures that lead to the clear relationship we observe between poverty and population growth. If it turns out that the problem is a lack of social security, we need to extend the same social security systems that are available to people in more prosperous countries to the rest of the world. Obviously, this is going to be expensive over the short run. But any success is going to bring massive dividends. The population explosion among the poor will go away and, when this happens, poverty becomes a solvable problem. At some point, we won’t have to worry about the population of impoverished people exploding anymore, because there won’t be any more poverty.

Once we get to minimally sustainable societies, we have a little bit of time to reflect. We can look around us. We can stop worrying about how we are going to avoid extinction because extinction isn’t going to be a threat anymore. We can begin to examine ways to create the best society that humans can have, and then make it happen.

Life In Minimally Sustainable Societies

Superficially, minimally sustainable society are extremely similar to sovereignty-based societies. People still have jobs, they still get up early and drink coffee, commute to work, listen to the news, and shop at supermarkets. They still pay for things either with cash or plastic, and most of the income of most people still comes from their jobs, their business income, or from returns on wealth. The great bulk of the properties on Earth will still be owned and controlled through freeholds, with no real difference in the way this system works. (The minimally sustainable societies only need about 3% of the properties to be controlled by leasehold ownership.)

Girls will still try to make themselves attractive for boys, boys will still try to get girls to go to bed with them, the social games people at all levels play will be the same as they were in the sovereignty-based societies that used to exist. The financial structures don’t need to be significantly different than those in place in our 2020 societies, prices won’t be much different, the options people have for making money and spending it won’t be much different. Superficially, minimally sustainable societies are very similar to sovereignty-based societies. But they are entirely different structurally. They have flows of value that bring the human race together into a true Community of Humankind. The entities we call ‘governments of countries,’ although still very important, will no longer be omnipotent. They will no longer be able to dictate global policy to the people of the world and force us all to accept whatever they tell us.

The differences aren’t enough to completely solve the problems that threaten us. But they are great enough that people with at least reasonably good eyesight will be able to see that our situation is not hopeless. We will have a venue, authority, and power. We will have control over variables that we can use, if we want, to increase the amount of authority and power that belongs to the human race. We will see that our destiny really does belong to us and we can make the world work in a safe, sane, and healthy manner. If we want to do this.

Beyond Sustainability

It is hard to make any decisions of any real importance if you are being forced to pay a game of Russian Roulette and may blow off your own head at any moment.

Humans can clearly organize the realities of our existence many different ways. Which is best? This is actually a very complicated topic. I have tried to provide a starting place in this analysis in the book ‘Possible Societies,’ available on the PossibleSocieties.com website. But this is just a starting point. To really understand our options, we will need to take a lot of time. We will have to create new sciences and do research in them. I think that we will find when we approach this topic scientifically, it opens our horizons in wonderful ways. We will find that we are capable of having societies that bring us prosperity, peace, and a safe, clean world where we can ask important questions that will help us find a better future.

I needed to present an example of a healthy society for the points of this book, so you could see that a healthy society is possible. It is within the capabilities of the wonderful and terrible beings around us that we call ‘humans.’ The socratic is just an example. It is one of the places that we might go when heading toward a better existence.

Are socratic societies the best societies humans can form?

Probably not. You can’t expect to get everything right the first time. But it doesn’t have to be the best society to make the point I am trying to make: we can survive as a race. If we start where we are now, and then head in the general direction of the socratic, eventually we will get to minimally sustainable societies. Once we are there, we are out of the woods. We can take our time and find the best place to go from there.

It’s hard to make a long-term decision about your future while you are in the middle of a forced game of Russian Roulette and your head could become mush in the next second.

 

Once we get to minimally sustainable societies, we will be in a position to look at the next step. We may see that we can get to a better system if we simply keep heading in the same direction. We may want to go somewhere else. But either way, we will have taken our destiny out of the hands of the primitive and barbaric people who created the extremely destructive and dangerous societies that we had been in before and put our destiny into our own hands.

WE, THE MEMBERS OF THE HUMAN RACE, did not choose the circumstances of our birth.

We didn’t choose the time to be born, the place of our birth on this particular world, or even the planet on which we would be born. We didn’t choose the type of society that would be in place when we came to this planet. The people who came before us have put into place a very dangerous and destructive system.

What if we don’t like it?

What if we want something else?

What steps can we take to move to a different system?

I claim that humans are amazingly capable beings. We have the capability to organize our existence in many different ways. If we find ourselves in a situation that we don’t like, we have the ability to form a kind of mental picture of this situation and imagine the different situations we could be in. We can use our intellects to create a kind of mental model of a system of organizational structures that are capable of meeting our needs. We can figure out other possible societies, figure out how sane and healthy societies operate, and then determine the exact structural differences between ‘sane and healthy societies’ and the societies that we have inherited from past generations.

Once we know these things, we can figure out the minimum necessary changes to cause the societies we inherited to evolve in a steady and measured way to a sane and healthy society. Then, we can figure out all of the tools we have at our disposal to make this happen. Is there any new technology we may use? Are there aspects of the system that we have now that we can turn around and use to our advantage? Have other people tried something similar? If so, we can go over their work, figure out how it worked out, find out where they made progress, and what obstacles they faced. If they made progress in certain areas, we will know what works. If they hit obstacles, we will know what obstacles we will face and can figure out ways to get over or get around them. If a certain event stopped their progress before their changes were in place, can we set up something to carry on from where they finished? Are we in a position to use structures that they couldn’t even consider, perhaps because they didn’t have the technological ability to conduct global forums and elections? What, exactly can we do: what can we show is possible, not just for the ending system, but for the transitional system that takes us from the ‘the primitive and dangerous societies we inherited from past generations’ to ‘sound, safe, sane, and healthy societies that move the human race toward a better existence?’

I know that the idea of creating a system where the entities called ‘countries’ are not the highest entities in existence is hard for people raised in societies divided into countries to accept. They see that the entities called ‘countries’ have created training systems to get children to believe, not only that countries are real things, but that they are the most important things in existence. They need people to be willing to fight and kill, at the risk of their own lives, to protect these entities. They need people to be fanatical and emotional when they are thinking about the entities called ‘countries,’ and need to get their minds to accept doublethink and refuse to even think about the idea of countries logically. The countries use very well-developed training methods to create this mindset and they are very successful: a very high percentage of the people of the world adopt the mindset and stand ready to lynch any who may say anything that might cast even the slightest bid of doubt on the worthiness of the particular country where they were educated.

But we control our own minds. What if we want to use logic and reason in this area? If we want to do this, we can do it.

Logic tells us that these strange entities we were raised to call ‘countries’ are imaginary entities. If the people of the world stopped believing in them tomorrow, they would simply not mean anything anymore. An entity that would cease to exist if people stopped believing in it is not a real thing. It is a figment of the imagination of the people who believe in it. It is nothing at all to the people who don’t believe in it.

What is real?

This is reality: we live on a planet that is, as far as we know, the only planet in this solar system that can support advanced life. We are about 25 trillion miles from the next closest star system; if we wanted to travel there at the fastest speed ever attained by a rocket, we would need 17,296 years. This means that, for practical purposes, we are alone. This is our existence, this little planet.

We are the dominant species on this planet. This means we are in charge of our destiny. If we want something to happen, and some other species on this planet doesn’t want it to happen, the members of the other species can’t stop us. If we want a clean, safe, healthy, harmonious world, we are the only ones who can prevent this from happening.

The only really hard part of this kind of transition is to attain the right state of mind. We have to really understand that we are still primitive in important ways. Our minds can be influenced to accept the existence of imaginary entities, to believe they are real, to worship these imaginary entities, to refuse to listen to any who claim that they aren’t real things, and to fight, kill, and even give our own lives to protect and defend these imaginary entities. We have to accept that we have this weakness. We have to use the tools at our disposal to fight it.

Orwell talked a lot about the idea of doublethink. He claimed that we are raised and trained to split our minds into two parts. One part accepts the emotional rhetoric that comes from the people who trained us as children that claims that the world is naturally divided into the entities that have conflicting interests and we must devote our lives to defending and protecting the particular entity (country) of our birth. This doesn’t make sense, so we can’t let logic ever even venture near these beliefs. We need to build a wall to separate this part of our minds from the logical parts. We must react emotionally to any who propose we break down this wall: they are enemies and we must treat them as such. Socrates tried to break down the wall; he was an enemy and was put to death. Sir Thomas More tried to break down the wall and get people to examine societies logically. He was an enemy and was also put to death. John Lennon of the Beatles asked us to examine the wall, think about the world logically, and imagine a world with no countries. The state had trained its citizens well: Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, said at his trial that he believed he was acting properly to kill Lennon. Lennon was making young people think about things that they weren’t supposed to think about: he had to be stopped.

The really hard part is to break down this wall and allow our minds to use logic and reason on everything. If we can do this, we will see that there are many paths we can take into the future. Some of them lead to a clean, safe, peaceful, harmonious, and healthy global situation. Others lead to extinction. Logic tells us that we are in charge of our world. We can understand sound systems. We can put together plans to make the transition to sound systems. We can use modern tools to arrange global forums and elections to determine what the people want. Then, if the majority of the people of the world want to nudge us off of the path that we are now on, allowing us to get onto a better path, we can make this happen.

 

Healthy Societies

The back cover of this book shows an illustration I call a ‘Road Map of Possible Societies.’ It has a ‘place where we are.’ This is represented by the center of the bottom line. The bottom line represents societies built on sovereign (100%) ownability of land and other parts of the planet. We clearly live in societies in this category: every nation on the Earth currently claims sovereignty over some part of the world.

We are close to the middle of this line. On the road map, the vertical axis represents the degree of ownability we have, a measure of the relationship that we have with the world. One hundred percent ownability is an extreme, at the extreme bottom of the chart. (The other extreme, 0% ownability, is at the other extreme, the top line marked ‘natural law societies here.’)

The horizontals axis represents different degrees of authoritarianism, a measure of the relationship that people have with the other people on the planet. We can measure this by the percentage of total wealth that is under the direct control of the bodies we call ‘governments.’ Governments are, by definition, bodies that can control the people; they are authoritarian bodies. (They may be benevolent, in some cases, and use their power for the good of their people, but that doesn’t change the fact that the governments make the decisions and the people must accept them.) One way to measure the degree of authoritarianism would be by the share of total wealth produced each year that is under the control of the governments. Most governments publish this figure as the ‘percentage of GDP controlled by the government sector,’ and various bodies such as the United States CIA go over the figures to standardize them, creating charts of ‘percentage of GDP controlled by the government’ in various countries that use consistent measurement standards. (You can find these charts on the CIA’s website.) Although there are some minor differences, the appropriate figure for the great bulk of the world’s countries is right around 50%. If we think of systems all the way toward the left side of the chart as ‘100% authoritarian’ and systems all the way to the right as ‘0% authoritarian,’ the systems now in place on Earth are close to the center.

If you are trying to plan a voyage and have a map, it makes sense to start with what you know. You want to know, at the very least, where you are now and where you want to go.

Where do we want to go?

The companion book to this one, Possible Societies (available for free on PossibleSocieites.com), shows that there are a great many societies that meet the minimum standards we need to meet the needs of the human race. (On the Road Map, above the line marked ‘minimally sustainable societies on this line,’ about three quarters of the way down the chart, and the line marked ‘minimally progressive societies on this line’ about a fourth of the way down from the top, meet the minimum standards needed to create a stable, sound, and prosperous society. There are a lot of options, all with different characteristics.)

I need an example of an ‘intended destination society’ in order to explain a journey. I will pick, for this intended destination, the system on the far right of the middle line of the road map. This line is marked ‘socratic societies on this line.’

All societies on the horizontal line in the middle of the chart are socratics. Differences between them involve the different levels of governments. Socratics with large governments are toward the left, those with smaller governments are toward the right, and those with moderate sized governments are toward the center. There are some societies that absolutely need very powerful governments; they can’t function without them.

Socratics work in ways that can allow them to operate with very small governments or, if desired, no governments at all. (They need service providers of course, but service providers are not the same thing as governments.) In other words, governments are optional in socratic societies. If a group of people have a socratic, they may have needs that they can meet better by creating organizations with the authority and ability to govern them. If they choose to form a government, they may give it any degree of power, from 0% to 100%. (We saw this in the last chapter: if everyone in the society believed that the government was a wonderful idea, and we all cast all of our votes for distribution of the bounty to the ‘Government Discretionary Fund,’ the government would have all the money and all the power.)

Although socratic societies can have governments and the people may want to leave certain very unpleasant decisions to bodies with the authority to act without involvement of the people, I think it is easier to understand conversion to a system if we change to the simplest possible socratic system first, one with no government; then, after we have this system, we can add in complexities like governments later. This should be an easy socratic society to understand because our simple system in Pastland is in this category; it has no body with the authority to govern us (it does, of course, have many service providers).

If you are planning a trip, once you have picked your starting place and your destination, you must plan a route. You often have a lot of choices. Perhaps there is a short route that takes you from where you are to where you want to go but requires you to deal with serious obstacles, say very high mountains, perhaps through a labyrinth of narrow and dangerous roads, or perhaps through a crime-infested neighborhood that you want to avoid. You may plan a trip to avoid the areas you want to avoid, adding a lot of distance to your trip. You may also see that you can take a different route that, although it is longer and will take more time, will get rid of a lot of stresses that you would otherwise have to face if you go by the shorter route.

We will see that there are several different ways to get from ‘where we are now’ to the ‘destination society’ identified above. Sometimes, when you are planning a trip, you can talk to people who have made the same trip before. You can figure out what they did and how they dealt with the obstacles in their way. You might talk to several people and get several ideas. Then, you may decide to copy one of routes others have taken, or you may decide to mix and match, putting together the best of the routes you know are possible (because other people have taken them) and adding in some features that they didn’t try. Or, you may simply ignore their advice and head out on your own.

I will explain two different methods to get from the societies that we inherited to sound and healthy societies. I want to explain these approaches first and then go into more detail with each option. We will see, shortly, that both of these approaches have been tried already. The people who tried them did not succeed, but we shouldn’t expect every attempt to solve such a complicated problem to succeed. The people who tried these things went a long way but, eventually, they ended up with specific difficulties they couldn’t solve. We will see that we now have far better tools than either of these people, so the problems that stopped them wouldn’t be very likely to stop us now.

Let look at the two approaches first:

1.We can change from one society to another by creating a global non-governmental’ organization or NGO. An NGO is a special type of corporation that is not affiliated with any government and is never intended to be a government, does not operate for profit, and is designed for humanitarian purposes.

This NGO will take advantage of various tools (discussed later) to create a body of cash flow-generating properties that are controlled by socratic leasehold ownership. The leasehold owners of these properties will operate them as discussed in the examples above for Pastland. They will make their leasehold payments into a special fund that will be used as determined in global elections by the people of the planet Earth, just as discussed in the example above.

Such a system will necessarily start out small. The non-governmental organization (NGO) will start out not existing, come to exist, and then grow. There will be a ‘first property’ in the system. Then a second and third. When the system only has a few properties, only a small amount of money will go into the fund that is under the control of the human race. If the human race has only a small amount of wealth, we have only a small amount of power.

But a ‘small amount of wealth’ and a ‘small amount of power’ for the human race puts us in an entirely different position than we are in if we have no common wealth and no common power. As we will see shortly, people have used NGOs in the past to solve social problems and all existing NGOs started out very small. But some of them did truly incredible things and, today, some of the largest organizations on Earth are NGOs. (The example below involves NGOs built by a man named ‘Henri Dunant’ that include the International Red Cross, the Geneva Convention, the World Court, and dozens of others that have enormous impacts on the world around us.)

The larger the NGO gets, the more power the human race will have and, if it grows as some organizations in this category have grown in the past, it will have enough power to be able to have very significant impacts on society within a few decades. The second option describes how to use an existing ‘country’ of the world as a vessel to create a kind of starter socratic society in a certain part of the world. It then basically offers membership to this ‘country’ to any members of any other country who wish to break away from their country and join, or entire countries that are able to convince their leaders to join.

We will see that this particular approach is not entirely new either. Some 2,200 years ago, Alexander the Great, building on ideas about societal change that had been worked out by Socrates and refined by Plato and Aristotle, tried to do something very similar. If we examine his efforts, we will see that he was well on his way to success when he was assassinated. Since he had only been working on this project for 13 years (he gained power at age 20 and was assassinated at age 33), his amazing success shows us that this approach can work. Of course, Alexander didn’t understand the power that his opponents had (the people who killed him obviously wanted the old system to be brought back and were able to do this). But we can learn from his successes, and the successes of others who have tried to change the world, we can plan an approach with an extremely high likelihood of success.

The rest of this chapter goes over one of many attempts to help bring the human race together, empower us and give us a share of the wealth of the world that we can use to help us, the members of the human race, meet our needs, and give us tools that we can use to create systems that can be the foundation for healthy societies, using the kind of organization called an ‘NGO.’

The Creator of the World Bank, the Geneva Convention, The International Court of Justice, the Common Alliance for Order and Civilization, and the International Red Cross: Henri Dunant (Showing that One Person REALLY Can Make A Difference).

First a little summary, then the details:

In 1869, a businessman named ‘Henri Dunant’ got a chance to witness the effects of war firsthand.

He was horrified.

He saw that the effects of wars were getting worse with each war, as new technology allowed more and more destructive technology to be used. He realized that the governments of the countries behind the wars had no interest in limiting the effects of the wars and, in fact, worked hard to make the wars as horrific as they could make them.

He couldn’t hope to limit the effects of war by appealing to the governments of nations that were fighting the wars, begging them to stop doing such horrible things. People had been trying this for all of history and wars kept getting more dangerous and destructive with each passing year.

Dunant realized that, if we ever want to make a serious dent in the problem of war, we need to have some sort of system that would work independently of nations and governments. He eventually created the largest NGO (non-governmental organization) and largest humanitarian organization the world has ever seen. Later, he was subjected to a series of lawsuits designed to prevent the organization he had created from accomplishing anything meaningful; these legal actions bankrupted Dunant and forced him to leave the organization he had created. Even though he was broke, he kept working for a better world and created a series of organizations that still have a profound impact on the way the world works.

Dunant wanted to change the world in a meaningful way. Some would say that he succeeded as the organizations he created certainly helped a lot of people. But he considered himself to be an abject failure because he really thought he could change the nature of society and the people he dealt with wanted something else entirely. He was a bitter and disenchanted old man, destitute and not even able to afford his own apartment when he was informed that he had won the first ever Nobel Peace Prize, which carried with it a reward of about $1 million. He was so disenchanted by the results of his life work that he decided not to give a single dime of this money to any of the organizations he had created, because none of them did the things he wanted them to do.

I want to give a brief description of what Dunant did, why he did it, and more importantly HOW he did it, so you can see what we have to work with, what systems really can work and how well they can work if they are put together right, and why people will fight against changes (and did in fact, fight against changes) that would change the very nature of human societies, even if they personally believe these changes should be made and want them to be made.

 

A Memory of Solfierno

In 1859, Henri Dunant was traveling from Morocco, on the North side of Africa, to Southern France on a business trip. He traveled through a small town called Solfierno, Italy, on the 25^th of June, a day after the French and Austrian armies had fought a major battle there.

The two armies had moved out in such a hurry that they hadn’t had a chance to bury their dead or even gather and treat their wounded. The battlefield was strewn with dead bodies and wounded soldiers, most of them in horrible misery. Most of the town itself had been destroyed in the fighting. The citizenry that survived were dazed and confused. They had no idea what to do.

It was hot. The wounded who were able to do so had crawled to the available wells and water supplies. They couldn’t move from these areas and many died there. As a result, the wells and other water supplies were all contaminated. The water couldn’t be used for drinking or even for cleaning wounds. The armies had ravaged the village, taking all the food and medicine with them when they left. All major buildings had been destroyed so there wasn’t any place to treat the wounded, even if they had had water and medicine. Vultures and other carrion picked at the bodies, including bodies of people who were still living but didn’t have the strength to fight them off. It was a scene of unimaginable horror.

Dunant wrote a book called ‘Memories of Solfierno’ about the experience. In the last chapter of the book, he calls for the creation of an organization to try to provide prevent this kind of thing from happening, if possible, and to provide humanitarian assistance to areas affected if there were no way to prevent them:

On certain special occasion, as, for example, when princes of the military art belonging to different nationalities meet, would it not be desirable that they should take advantage of this congress to formulate some international principle, sanctioned by a Convention inviolate in character, which, once agreed upon and ratified, might constitute the basis for societies for the relief of the wounded in the different European countries?

Humanity and civilization call imperiously for such an organization. It seems as if the matter is one of actual duty, and that in carrying it out the cooperation of every man of influence, and the good wishes at least of every decent person can be relied upon with assurance. Is there in the world a prince or a monarch who would decline to support the proposed societies, happy to be able to give full assurance to his soldiers that they will be at once properly cared for if they should be wounded?

Is there any Government that would hesitate to give its patronage to a group endeavoring in this manner to preserve the lives of useful citizens, for assuredly the soldier who receives a bullet in the defense of his country deserves all that country's solicitude? Is there a single officer, a single general, considering his troops as "his boys," who would not be anxious to facilitate the work of volunteer helpers? Is there a military commissary, or a military doctor, who would not be grateful for the assistance of a detachment of intelligent people, wisely and properly commanded and tactful in their work?

Last of all—in an age when we hear so much of progress and civilization—is it not a matter of urgency, since unhappily we cannot always avoid wars, to press forward in a human and truly civilized spirit the attempt to prevent, or at least to alleviate, the horrors of war?

The practical execution of this proposal, on a large scale, would certainly call for somewhat considerable funds, but there would never be difficulty about the necessary money. In wartime, all and sundry would hasten to give their contributions or bring their mite in response to the committee's appeals. There is no coldness or indifference among the public when the country's sons are fighting. After all, the blood that is being spilled in battle is the same that runs in the veins of the whole nation.

It must not be thought, therefore, that there is any danger of the enterprise being checked by obstacles of this kind. It is not there that the difficulty lies. The whole problem lies in serious preparation for work of this kind, and in the actual formation of the proposed societies.

Practical Matters

Dunant’s book attracted the attention of a group of very wealthy people in Geneva, Switzerland. They worked together with Dunant to form the organization that is now called the ‘International Red Cross and Geneva Convention.’ This organization is now a global corporation; it is not affiliated with any government of the world and provides various services and assistance to all of the members of the human race who need it, regardless of their country of origin.

It is a corporation or, more specifically, a network of corporations. The heart of the organization is the corporate offices in Geneva; it has subsidiary corporations that operate in every country and unincorporated area of the world. They work together with the headquarters to coordinate activities in areas of need.

Dunant didn’t have any real ideas about funding this organization. It is now funded entirely through donations and endowments. He hadn’t worked out all of the principles needed to build a healthy society, but he had figured out some of the critical defects in the societies that we have now and found ways to deal with these defects. He realized that, to have a healthy society, we must go beyond nations. We must form an organization with no allegiance to any country of the world, one dedicated to giving rights to all human beings.

Almost everyone in the world knows about this organization. It does good work and they know it. Because this organization exists, they know that if they want to do something of a truly humanitarian nature or give to a cause that will advance the interests of the entire human race, they can work for or give to the Red Cross. It is the largest charity on Earth. It is the largest corporation on Earth. It is the largest NGO on Earth. It has more than 100 million workers, some of whom are paid, and some are volunteers, making it the largest organization of any kind on Earth.

This is from the website of the International Red Cross:

The international Red Cross and Red Crescent network is the largest humanitarian network in the world with a presence and activities in almost every country. The network is made up of all the national and international organizations around the world that are allowed to use the Red Cross or Red Crescent emblem. It also represents all the activities they undertake to relieve human suffering throughout the world.

The global network is unified and guided by seven Fundamental Principles: humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity and universality. All Red Cross and Red Crescent activities have one central purpose: to help those who suffer, without discrimination, whether during conflict, in response to natural or man-made disasters, or due to conditions of chronic poverty.

Why Dunant’s Efforts Failed

Dunant had a very wide vision for the organization that he created. He didn’t want to just wait for wars or disasters to come along, and then provide medical care and burial services to those affected. He wanted to take active steps to empower the human race and create an organization that would be a higher authority than the governments of the countries that were fighting each other.

He wanted to use moral pressure from the masses to get the people in governments to agree to binding accords to take their disputes to a global non-partisan organization, one operated to advance the interests of the human race as a whole without any allegiance to any nation, and agree to accept its rulings. He wanted to limit and restrict the power and authority of governments, transferring some of the rights of governments to bodies that weren’t governments and had the interests of the human race in mind.

Unfortunately, Dunant was not rich. He didn’t have the money or connections to build the organization he had in mind by himself. So, he had to take in others. The group in Geneva included some very rich and powerful people. They had the ability to build the organization he wanted. Unfortunately, they were highly religious people and had some religious objections to Dunant’s ideas.

Dunant was not religious. He was, in fact, openly atheist. All of the members of the board of directors of the corporation were devout practitioners of a branch of Christianity called ‘Calvinism.’ Calvinists raise their children to believe that the words of the Bible are literally true. The first five books of the Bible are considered to represent the word and will of the all-powerful creator of existence.

These books are very clear: God created the ‘nations of the world.’ God gave these nations their power. God defined the borders of the first nations. God initiated the conflicts that led to wars over land. The Bible is very clear. God is behind all this. God wants all this to happen. The Bible shows clearly that, once the wars take place, God accepts the results of the wars. If the winners claim land, according to the principles of international law (which God must accept, or they wouldn’t exist), the winners are the new owners of the land. It belongs to them with the full consent and approval of the creator of existence.

The name of this philosophy is ‘manifest destiny.’ It holds that God has a destiny in mind for every part of the world. He makes this destiny manifest, or obvious, by arranging for the groups that want to own each part of the world to have wars; God then grants victory to the specific group that God wants to own the land. Under this principle, nations that win land in wars own it by divine right. God wants them to have it. This principle was openly used in the Western Hemisphere to rationalize the genocide of the native people; the conquerors claimed that the wars were a part of God’s plan. They didn’t just have the right, but rather they had the religious obligation to remove the inferior races from the land that God clearly wanted them to have. If they didn’t participate in the wars, they were showing a lack of faith and would be punished for eternity in the afterlife. This same philosophy extends to groups fighting over land in Europe and everywhere else in the world. God is in charge of everything. Nothing happens without God’s knowledge and approval.

Calvinists accept the words of the old testament as the canonical texts. They are the foundational principles of their religion. Dunant was suggesting that they try to interfere. He was suggesting that humans were in control of war. He was suggesting that, if we worked together, we could end war. This went against the canonical texts of their faith. What Dunant wanted to do went against the will of God. It claimed that we had power to do things that only God controlled. They couldn’t accept his foundational ideas and continue to accept the articles of their faith.

They could accept the details, however. Their religion also accepted the words of the New Testament, which tells of the benevolent and humanitarian principles of the son of God, Jesus. In their religion, the son of God clearly believes that his Father’s cruelty is excessive. He wants to moderate it and give people a path to salvation. He also wants to give relief to people suffering from the wars and other disasters that God brings and therefore God wants. The Calvinists believed it was wrong to try to interfere in the foundational forces. We have to leave the foundation of society in place. Wars have to continue. We must not even try to stop them: that would show a lack of faith and reflect the ultimate heresy, a belief that humans control things that the holy books portray as the exclusive domain of the Creator. But we can come through, after the wars or disasters, and try to ease the pain and misery of those affected.

The first board of directors of the organization that Dunant created included Henri Dunant and four Calvinists: Gustav Moynier, Louis Appia, Théodore Maunoir, and Guillaume-Henri Dufour.

Dunant was the only atheist there. The others were devout Christians. They wanted to make it clear that this was a religious organization, designed to promote kindness in the name of Jesus, so they made its symbol the same as that of the Christian religion itself, the cross, and called the organization the ‘Red Cross.’

Dunant proposed to build a wide-reaching organization that would work to help move toward a world where nations no longer fought over which nation owned each part of the world. But the others on the board of directors didn’t want to go this far. They had a far more limited role in mind for the organization. At first, Dunant went along. Better to have a very limited and small-scale organization than nothing at all. But as time passed, he started to push. He wanted to expand the role of the organization. He didn’t want to create a Christian organization, he wanted to create a humanitarian organization.

As time passed, the conflicts between Dunant and the other members of the board of directors grew. By 1865, the two sides had come to an impasse: Dunant would not back down on his vision for the organization, and the other board members would not back down on their visions.

Dunant had certain authority under the bylaws of the corporation. He could force his views through the board, even against a 4-1 opposition. In 1866, the board filed suit in the courts of Switzerland to strip Dunant of these powers.

Dunant was not rich and could not afford to pay attorneys to help him preserve his rights. His opponents knew this. They probably thought Dunant would realize he was beat, back down, and do things their way. But if he didn’t do this, they knew they would still win: they could ruin him financially by forcing him to pay never-ending legal fees to defend himself.

Dunant didn’t react as expected: he sold everything he owned and used all the money to hire attorneys to fight the other board members. He kept fighting until April of 1867, when he could no longer pay his bills and was forced to declare bankruptcy. By this time, the other board members were vindictive. They wanted more than to have Dunant back down, they wanted him gone. They found a way to do this: when people declare bankruptcy, they have to declare all of their assets in official court filings. If they don’t declare everything, they have committed fraud. Most people in this situation miss something. The other board members hired private investigators and found a few minor possessions that Dunant hadn’t declared. They had him charged with bankruptcy fraud. Dunant—still the legal president and chairman of the board of the International Red Cross—was tried and convicted.

Now he was a criminal. The bylaws of the company allowed the rest of the board members to fire him. Dunant was removed from the organization he had created. I am never going to say that the Red Cross doesn’t do wonderful work. I would not be alive if not for them: I was born with a disease called ‘hemolytic disease of the newborn’ and needed a compete transfusion within hours of my birth. The blood came from the Red Cross. I have had family members saved by Red Cross ambulances and take shelter at Red Cross facilities. Whenever I donate to a charity, I make it the Red Cross. It does truly fantastic things.

Over the years, the Red Cross has lost its fanatical religious leaning. Recently, the organization changed its name: the cross is seen as the symbol of Christianity and billions of people of the world think of Christians as heretics and consider them to be very bad people, using their religion to rationalize truly horrible behaviors. The organization has even changed its name to make it clear it is not intended to be an enemy of the Islamic people (as many people in these religions consider Christians to be) and now calls itself the ‘Red Cross and Red Crescent.’ This organization is now, by many measures, the largest organization of any kind on Earth, with more than 100 million people working for it either as paid workers or volunteers, and facilities in every country and disputed area on the planet.

But the company has never really taken on the role that Dunant envisioned for it. It still focuses on waiting until disasters happen, and then helping. We need this, of course; the world would be a far worse place without the Red Cross. But this organization does not play the role that Dunant envisioned for it. We can get some general idea what he had in mind after he was booted out of the Red Cross and created other global humanitarian organizations.

The rest of the story

Dunant was basically broke after the lawsuits with the Red Cross. But he had met people who shared his vision, so he was able to form other organizations. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), he founded the Common Relief Society (Allgemeine Fürsorgegesellschaft) and soon after, he founded the Common Alliance for Order and Civilization (Allgemeine Allianz für Ordnung und Zivilisation).

He helped create an international court to mediate international conflicts; this grew into the ‘International Court of Justice’ (sometimes called ‘The World Court’). He led the effort to create a world library, an idea that eventually led to the creation of UNESCO.

Eventually, he just didn’t have any more to give. He had spent everything he had, devoted his life to the cause of societal change, and still believed that he had failed. All of the organizations that he created passed to other leaders, none of whom had his grand vision. Although he had worked to create a great many organizations, none of them had had the impact he felt they deserved, and he believed that none had changed the world in any meaningful way. Nations were just as powerful as ever in 1892, when he gave up. War was just as pervasive and destructive as ever. The human race was just as powerless to get what it needed as ever.

He was broke and had no following or believers to carry on his work. He retired to a tiny rooming house in Heiden, Switzerland and faded from the world scene, as if he had never existed.

One day a journalist from a local newspaper found out that a person who had once been famous and important was in his town. The journalist was looking for a story and visited and interviewed Dunant. The story explained all of the contributions he had made to the progress of the human race. The story was picked up by larger publications and reprinted several times.

At the time, the members of the Nobel Committee in Sweden were meeting to try to decide who to give the first ever Peace Prize. The members saw the article. They thought Dunant would be a good candidate. The committee eventually granted the prize to Dunant.

The prize came with a 150,782 Kroner cash reward, roughly equivalent to $1 million in United States money. When he got the money, he was on his deathbed. He was bitter and believed that nothing he had done had worked out the way he wanted. He decided to make a statement with his final will and ordered that the entire prize go to his landlady at his rooming house. None of it went to any of the humanitarian organizations he had created.

The largest of the organizations he built is now called the International Red Cross and Red Crescent. This organization did not do what Dunant had hoped it would do, but it did have incredible success and had a meaningful impact on several areas of human existence. It is now, by many measures, the largest corporation on the planet, the largest NGO and, for that matter, the largest organization of any kind on planet Earth.

Dunant’s effort showed that if people feel they can really make a difference they will volunteer their time, their skills, their talents, their efforts and, of course, their money. Dunant may have considered his efforts to have been a failure, but the results have showed that his faith in humanity was justified. If people were given a chance to do something good on a global scale, they would step forward and help.

 

Alternate Reality

I have stressed, over and over in this book, that the key to preventing extinction is allowing ourselves to fully accept logical analysis of societies in our minds. If we fully accept this, we will realize that we, the members of the human race, really are incredibly capable beings. We are capable of organizing the realities of our existence in ways that can allow us to meet our needs without destroying ourselves and our world. We are capable of building sound, sane, and healthy human societies.

If we can accept this, we can see that there are most definitely steps that we can take to move toward healthy societies. We can take advantage of the kind of organization that Dunant set up to make this happen.

Imagine that there was an NGO that accepted endowments and used this income to purchase freeholds on cash flow-generating properties all around the world. It then sold leaseholds on these properties, in part to protect them and in part to generate revenue for the benefit of the human race. So we have a name to refer to this organization, let’s call it the ‘Community of Humankind,’ or the COH.

The COH will buy the properties or accept them as endowments; the organization will then create a package of rights to the property that will be available for purchase. People will be able to buy the right to use the property privately, to collect the flows of value it produces over time, and to improve it in ways that make it more productive, provided they don’t do things that harm it. They will be able to own these rights in exchange for a payment that will transfer part of the bounty/free cash flows the properties generate to the human race.

Once the property is under the control of the COH, certain rights to that property will never be offered for sale again. No one will ever be able to buy a freehold on the property. No one will ever be able to buy and own the rights to destroy the land, harm it, or pollute it. The payments that are made to the human race are not owned by anyone, not even the human race. These flows of value will be considered to be gifts from the planet Earth to its inhabitants. The human race, as the dominant species on the planet, will decide what happens to these gifts on behalf of all the inhabitants of the world.

 

Why Would Anyone Want To Endow An Organization Like The Community of Humankind?

Many people who have cared for and improved permanently productive properties over their lifetimes feel a great attachment to those properties. They love them. My uncle Tony owned a cattle ranch in Montana. His parents had homesteaded it; he had been born in the house on the ranch and had grown up there. His parents ran it until they passed away, then Tony took over. He had inherited a half-interest in the ranch with his brother owning the other half; the brother had no interest in ranching and Tony bought him out and owned the land for the rest of his life.

It was his ranch.

He knew every single inch of it; he had dug every hole for fences or wells, he had built the corrals and other buildings with his own hands.

The ranch didn’t make a lot of money, so Tony never lived well. However, the land is in an area rich with coal and, in the 1970s, coal companies came in and started making offers on the property. They offered him so much money that, if he had simply accepted one of the offers, then had taken the money and invested it to collect returns, he could have lived like a king for the rest of his life.

He turned them down.

He loved the land.

He knew that, if a coal company got the land, it would immediately bring in equipment to clear off the topsoil so it could begin strip mining. The house where he was born, his barn, and workshop were close to the watershed and would be bulldozed, probably the very first day. The mining activities would contaminate the land and, when the coal company was finished, it would probably simply abandon the land, to leave the government to clean up the mess.

He didn’t sell.

I was at the ranch several times when buyers from the coal companies came over to try to see if they could get him to change his mind. He told me they would only rape the land he loved so much for profit. He didn’t want them to get the land, ever.

When he got cancer, he used all of his savings to try to make sure that the ranch wouldn’t go to the coal companies after his death. He hired an attorney to draft a will that put together a plan they thought would work. The lawyers created a trust and Tony then transferred the land to the trust. The trust had a set of rules designed to prevent the land from ever being sold.

When Tony died, several heirs inherited shares in the trust. The coal companies contacted them. Do they want to sell? They wanted to sell, of course. None of the heirs had any interest in living out in the middle of nowhere, to operate a cattle ranch that could barely generate enough income to keep them from being hungry.

But what about the trust?

Doesn’t that prevent them from selling?

The coal company said their lawyers were far better than the lawyers Tony had hired. The trust wouldn’t be a problem. A few papers were filed, and the trust was dissolved; the children signed the documents and the heavy equipment moved in. The land is now a devastated mess that no one would ever want to use for anything.

In fact, a great many people love whatever part of the world they have lived on and cared for. They want it protected.

But most people who inherit property feel differently. They already have their own lives by the time their relatives pass away. They only see the inheritance as a burden, something to be turned into cash as rapidly as possible.

Often, it is very complicated and expensive to turn the land into money; the estate often has to go through probate, there are arguments about the best way to get rid of it, and it can often take years. No matter what happens, the people who wanted to protect the land normally don’t have any way to make this happen. The land will be sold to the highest bidder. If the high bidder is a coal company, or a logging company, or a toxic waste disposal company, the land will be harmed.

What if there were a way for people who had worked to accumulate property, devoted their sweat and stress to making it nice, and truly loved their land, to set up a system where the land would benefit the entire human race for the rest of time? A great deal of the land in this world is threatened: resource companies want anything that hasn’t yet been destroyed so they can begin destroying it. What if there were a way for people with land that they loved to be absolutely sure it would never be destroyed with the benefits it brought to the human race in the future being just an added bonus?

A great many people in the world today have created innovations that have brought them into control of companies that generate million of dollars a year in free cash flows and could be sold for hundreds of millions or, in some cases, billions of dollars.  A lot of these people don’t want to simply leave their children with a huge pile of stock certificates that they could sell for cash and then live lives of meaningless leisure with endless money at their disposal. They want their children to have something of course, but what good does it do to give them more than a few million?

The people who have built up these companies want to do something meaningful with their wealth.

What options do they have in the world today?

Most of these people go a simple route. They simply sell the stock for cash themselves and use the money to create a foundation. The foundation then accepts applications for people who want to do good things, and then makes grants. There are many of these foundations.

It is true that these foundations do good things. The diseased societies we live in create horror and misery in immense measure. There are always people who need new legs after having the old ones blown off by land mines, need seeing eye dogs after having been exposed to phosphorous weapons, need chemotherapy due to cancer caused by exposure to carcinogens in the smoke from coal fired plants, and need special education for their children due to mercury (emitted when any fossil fuel is burned, mercury prevents brain development and causes autism). There is always going to be toxic pollution, runoff from mines that lead to landslides that destroy homes, and there will always be climate change-related fires and hurricanes that destroy entire communities.

But these problems are not the disease itself; they are only symptoms of the underlying disease.

As long as the disease is in place, the symptoms will continue. If you build and give a thousand artificial limbs to land mine victims today, you will have to build and give away another thousand tomorrow, and each day after that, and no matter what you do, you won’t ever solve anything.

I am not saying this is not a good thing to do, only that it is like giving cough medicine to people with tuberculosis. It treats the symptom but ignores the disease. It isn’t going to change conditions on this world, no matter how much money goes to help the people suffering.

But what if you know there is a cure to the underlying disease?

Do you want to keep giving cough drops to people who are going to suffer for the rest of their lives and die a horrible death, while almost certainly infecting their loved ones before they go? Or would you prefer to give them the antibiotics and allow them and their loved ones to live long and happy lives?

 

Practical Matters

In time, people will see that they can make a real difference in the world in several ways by working with the Community of Humankind. Just as you can now volunteer for the Red Cross, no matter where in the world you live, you could volunteer to work for the Community of Humankind.

People will see that the income of the human race depends on the number of properties that are ‘in the system’ and the productivity of the properties. If you want to increase the wealth that goes to the human race and make some money yourself as you do this, you can buy a leasehold on one of the properties in the system, improve it, and then resell the leasehold to make a gain on the sale. The leasehold payment will automatically go up (it is always 20% of the price that the buyer paid for the leasehold; if you sell for more than you paid, the income of the human race automatically goes up).

If you have a property that you love, and don’t want it destroyed, you can go to a website and fill out a simple form, get it notarized, and send it in to be filed. When you are gone and your estate is settled, the property will go to the Community of Humankind which will then sell the leasehold as you specified. It will give the proceeds of the sale to whoever you request. (If you want your children to get the money, they will get it.)

The income from that property from then until the end of time will benefit the human race. The leasehold will be sold under the rules of the Community of Humankind which will require special permission for any ‘potentially destructive use.’ The permission must be granted by a board of representatives elected by the human race. If you buy a leasehold, the human race will be your landlord. If you want to destroy, you have to get permission from your landlord.

The money that flows into the account of the Community of Humankind will represent a part of the bounty of the world. We live on an incredibly bountiful world. It produces enormous wealth. Why can’t at least some of this wealth benefit the human race as a whole?

Once the system is up and running, anyone on Earth can log on and register to vote. (There will be a system to verify that you are a human, not a robot, and not already registered.) Once registered, you can vote on what happens to the money in the fund and your votes count the same as those of all other voters.

If there is a tsunami, with enormous damage, you might log on and vote for some money to go to the organizations that are helping with the disaster. (The Red Cross helps with this so, if you want, you can send money from the fund that belongs to the Community of Humankind to the Red Cross.) If there is an epidemic and you want to help, you can do so through this venue. If you want to help build schools, or provide medical care, you can vote for this.

At first, with only a small amount of money coming into the system, your vote won’t represent a whole lot of money. (This system will work like the one in Chapter 11, that discussed ‘Government in a Socratic.’ The money value of each vote depends on the amount of money in the fund and the number of votes cast.)

But some effect is better than no effect.

One option that you can choose is to vote to transfer money to ‘the basic income fund.’ Money in this fund will be divided among all  registered voters. If you are a registered voter, you will get a share of this in cash through an electronic transfer.

You don’t have to contribute anything to have the right to vote. You merely have to be a human being. But you can contribute if you want to do this. Over time, people will realize that this is a unique charity. It doesn’t give money to causes that some executives sitting in an office support and you don’t have to take the risk that some of the money will find its way into the pocket of a bureaucrat and not benefit anyone but the person manipulating the charity. The computer will give a full account of every transaction in the fund. You will know how much went into the fund and the exact amounts transferred out, to the penny.

Hopefully, the ability to vote and determine what happens to the money will pull people in and let them know that there really is a charity that will do things that can make a difference in the world. Then, when they are in a position to help, they will start to help out themselves.

A large percentage of the world’s people wind up owning property at some point in their lives. It is a way to feel a part of the world you really can’t have any other way. They will grow attached to their little part of the world. They will care about it and want it to be protected. The Community of Humankind will mainly be looking for endowments of bountiful land and corporations, not cash. Cash gets spent and is gone. The bountiful land and the machines of the corporations keep on producing value and wealth, day after day, and this continuing flow of wealth from the land can benefit the entire human race for the rest of time.

From personal experience, I think that one of really critical things the world lacks today is a way for people who have built something to protect it and use it as a tool to do something good. I know a lot of people who were just sick about the idea of having to give property to their kids when they knew the kids would just dump it on the market to get money, without any regard for the features of the property that can produce value and the unique features they put into it. They were even more sick about the idea of the disposal itself, the kids fighting, attorneys struggling to get their piece of the pie, and the governments standing with their hands out waiting to take a large part, perhaps most of the value of the property.

What if there were a way that people could fill out a simple form and know that they would be doing something that would have real and measurable benefits to the entire human race, and that would ultimately create conditions that lead to a sustainable, prosperous, and peaceful planet? What if they could know the exact consequences of their decision and know exactly what would happen to the property after they were gone? What if they could make rules designed to protect the land and know for a fact that these rules would be enforced?

As the endowments grow, the power of the human race would grow. As of 2020, the human race is basically powerless; we have no voice and no way to make our desires known. There are a great many things that the governments of the world want to do that harm the human race and that the human race, if it had a voice and could make a difference, would not accept. For example, we, the people of the planet Earth, clearly do NOT benefit by having trillions of dollars worth of wealth each year allocated to tools of mass murder and destruction. War is not a good thing for the people of the planet taken as a whole, particularly in times when the next war could destroy the planet.

The decision-makers of the nations of the world clearly want the weapons and want the wars; otherwise, the money would not go to weapons and wars. The interests of the human race clearly differ from the interests of rulers of nations. In our world today (without any organization like the Community of Humankind), our desires and needs don’t matter; we don’t have any voice or power.

We, the members of the human race, benefit from a clean safe environment; this is what we want and if we could make the decisions collectively, this is what we would have. Of course, we don’t make the decisions collectively. We don’t even have a voice in the decisions. (No nation on Earth holds global forums to determine what the human race wants and then models its environmental policies to the desires of the human race. No nation even holds non-binding opinion polls on the matter or gives the human race any voice at all.) The decision-makers of the nations of the world clearly want to encourage activities that cause great harm to the planet. This must be true, or they wouldn’t be doing these things. Again, our interests don’t matter, because we have no voice at all: zero.

At first, the voice of the people won’t be very loud, because there won’t be much money behind it. But if the system described above finds a place in the world, we will have a voice.

People will make endowments that can be used to purchase new properties and add them to the system. They can endow the Community of Humankind with properties, increasing the inventory of properties that benefit the human race. They can allocate some of the yearly revenue of the human race to the purchase of additional properties to add to the system. They can personally buy leaseholds on real estate and corporations, make further improvements that drive up the amount of value these properties produce, and then sell for profits, leading to gains for them and higher incomes for the human race in the future. Over time, the human race will have a greater and greater voice and more and more power.

At some point, the human race will be powerful enough to begin to have real influence on the governments of the world. We might start like all other corporations and build a lobbying arm. The lobbying arm will work to influence legislation that brings the principles of the nations into closer alignment with the interests of the human race as a whole. Nearly all large corporations, including NGOs like the International Red Cross and Geneva Convention, monitor political events to determine when the political climate is changing. Many have political action committees that work hard to prevent unfavorable political change. The Community of Humankind can do these things too.

If the system works out, there will come a time when the governments of the nations of the world have to consider the needs and desires of the human race before they make policy.

Perhaps the governments may start to find that the only things they do that the people of the world—and even the people of their own countries—want them to do is provide services. Perhaps the people don’t want to be ‘controlled’ or ‘governed.’ They only want parks, schools, libraries, consistent reasonable rules (that are submitted to the people for approval), and courts to make sure the rules are enforced fairly and uniformly. Perhaps people may run for office on the platform of changing the very nature of the administrative systems.

Perhaps there will come a time when people will start to ask, ‘Do we really need governments?’ In societies where the world is divided into political entities that are sovereign and use force to prevent wealth from one nation from benefiting another, governments are clearly necessary. But as time passes and more of the wealth of the world goes to the human race as a whole, the very idea of using force to prevent the rest of the wealth of nations from benefiting the people of the world will start to seem more and more silly.

There may come a time when the flows of value to the Community of Humankind are such that the Community of Humankind can provide the services (perhaps paying agencies of the entities that used to be called ‘governments’ to provide the services that were once funded by internal taxes), out of the flows of free value from the land and corporations. Perhaps, some countries will realize that they don’t really need taxes to provide services (the human race pays for them) so they don’t really need taxes.

The socratic global system is a majority rule system. We live on a very bountiful world. The great majority of the wealth produced is a part of the bounty of the world. In the socratic society, the great majority of this wealth (roughly 83⅓% of it) goes to the human race, through a totally automatic process. Whoever controls the wealth of the world controls the world and, in the socratic society, the human race controls the world. We decide what happens on Earth.

 

Perhaps, given time, this system can make a gradual, smooth, non-traumatic transition to a socratic society—or some other kind of society that is inherently healthy—because this is what the people of the planet Earth want to happen.

If someone you love has tuberculosis, you can’t prevent her death by treating the symptoms. 

You can give her suppressants to prevent the bloody coughing fits; you can give her ice baths to keep her fever from reaching the point of delirium.  You can do dietary analysis to determine the nutrients her body is losing and give her supplements, to reduce the amount of ‘consumption’ of her body’s resources the disease causes. 

But the coughing, fevers, and consumption are not diseases and treating them won’t cure her.  These are only signs, symptoms, that tell us that there is something wrong with her body.  If you leave the underlying cause in place, she will die.  The disease will kill her.

The symptoms are not diseases.  They are the signs that tell us that we need to look for the disease.  Destroying them has no more effect on the disease than tearing down a road sign that ways ‘cross traffic ahead’ will have on the traffic.  It will still be there, you will won’t know it is there until it kills you.  

If you want to save your loved one, you need to understand the difference between a ‘disease’ and ‘symptoms.’  You need to understand and accept that there is a disease.  You need to figure out the exact structural differences between her diseased state and the state she was in before the symptoms appeared, so that you can restore that state. 

We were born into societies that have incredibly serious problems, including war, rape of the world around us, toxins pouring into the atmosphere in high enough amounts to change the climate, and immense poverty in the face of such incredible overproduction that governments around the world pay farmers not to produce and buy food, put it onto barges, and sink them to the bottom of the sea to balance supply and demand.  The problems seem like they are separate diseases.  They cause pain for the human race and will eventually cause death for our race.  But they are not diseases at all.  They are symptoms, signs that tell us that the ‘modes of existence’ or ‘societies’ now in place can’t meet the needs of our race. 

The Game of War

Consider the most pressing problem:  war.  War is a not an unusual event that shocks us when it comes.  We don’t say things like ‘this society was functioning totally smoothly and without a problem until this crazy event happened; how could such a wonderfully designed system have such activities?

War does not shock us.  We expect it.  We can see it coming years and, in some cases, decades in advance.  The events that lead to it are normal and natural parts of the systems we have around us.  Because war is so common, we follow events in ongoing wars almost as if they are plays in a giant team sports event.  The planet is divided for game play.  The teams are the entities we call ‘countries.’ 

How many teams are in this game?   Different record keepers have different numbers.  One widely respected keeper of statistics on the different teams is the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States (the CIA), which keeps a database on all of the entities the CIA considers to be ‘countries.’  The list contains 234 entries as I write this, but the number changes almost daily. 

Many of the entities the CIA recognizes as countries, with recognized rights to play in the game of war, are not considered to be countries by most of the other record keepers.  Kosovo, for example, is on the list and recognized by the CIA.  This country is entirely inside of the borders of another country, ‘Serbia.’ The Serbian government considers this land to be part of Serbia and claims it is not a country at all, but is an occupied part of the sovereign territory of Serbia. 

 

 

The Serbian government has never recognized Kosovo as a country, and more than 100 other countries, including the great powerhouses of the world—India, China, Russia, and Brazil—do not consider Kosovo to be a country either.  

There are a lot of examples like this.  In many cases, the teams are recognized, but the official league statistics that determine how much land each has conquered are in dispute.  Of the 234 entities the CIA recognizes as countries, 190 of them have border disputes:  they disagree with each other about which team has won certain territory.  In many cases, there are wars inside their countries (often called, ‘civil wars,’ as if organized mass murder events could ever be called ‘civilized activities’) to resolve these disputes. 

There are also a very large number of groups—estimated to be about 3,000—that claim to be unique nationalities with national identities and legitimate rights to be countries and play in the leagues.  They are fighting in various parts of the world to carve off the land that they claim belongs to their teams.   These teams will become ‘countries’ as soon as they have gained military control of land and official ‘recognition’ by the key keepers of league records.     

Usually, these nationalist groups fail in their attempts to take land.  They are overpowered by the nation that currently controls the land they are trying to take.  The groups protecting the land call these groups ‘terrorist groups’ and try to destroy them, often using brutal methods. 

Sometimes, the nationalist groups win.  They become new ‘countries.’  They then have to muscle themselves into the leagues with established players.  Brutality can give teams an advantage in this sport and the new teams are sometimes so brutal that they can stun established players.  Some of them eventually become major players in the global sport called ‘war.’  

From one perspective, it all seems arbitrary, like a bunch of gorillas fighting over rights to a patch of banana trees.  From another perspective, however, it is deadly serious:  these gorillas have nuclear bombs, ‘forever’ toxins that are far more deadly than any natural poisons and will kill and kill until nothing is left alive, and DNA altering weapons that can kill every living thing that has a certain protein.  They have billions of different kinds of bullets, each designed for a specific killing task, rockets that can send nuclear bombs into space to orbit the earth until needed, and submarines that can hide under the waves for years, each with the capability to destroy entire continents.

Organized mass murder is the strong suit of the ape-men that you see around you.  We understand it very well.  But there is giant hole in our understanding.  We don’t understand why we are drawn to this sport and why it is an all consuming obsession.  We don’t seem to have devoted any real thought to the aspects of the world that push what otherwise seem like intelligent beings to divide into teams, identify ‘territory’ that will be that team’s territory, then fight the members of other groups using the most powerful weapons and most deadly tactics they can find over silly things like the locations of the imaginary lines.  

Perhaps if we knew how the system that the human race has now came to exist, we might be able to understand this.  What was the first time that people divided themselves into teams to fight over which team had the rights to each square inch of land on earth?  What were the forces that pushed them to do this? 

Did certain people—at one point in the distant past—analyze different ways to organize society, decide that the team-based competitive model was the best option, and vote it into place?   If so, who were these people and why did they decide on this option? 

If not—if there were no human engineers for this system—how, exactly, did this conflict based team sport that uses mass murder as its primary play come into existence?  

I propose that we evolved from lower animals.  These animals organized their behaviors a certain way to adapt to the environmental conditions around them.  In some cases, nature needed these conflicts and created social organizations that were built on them.  I propose that we evolved from beings that had these social organizations.  The societies that we have around us now are not intentional creations of any being.  They are animal systems that are appropriate for animals but not appropriate for technologically sophisticated thinking beings with physical needs. 

We inherited them.  So far, we don’t seem to have taken the time to question whether we wanted this inheritance. 

Let’s consider this issue now.

Let’s start with the basic operating principles of these societies, see why nature needs some animals to have societies with these principles, then look at the way it got passed down to us.

The Principle of Group Territoriality

All animals have instincts that make them want to survive. 

This has to be true:  if a species came to exist that didn’t have these instincts, it wouldn’t care for itself or do the things necessary to perpetuate its species.  It would disappear almost immediately. 

In practice, some species survive, some perish.  Nature determines which will survive and perish by a kind of trial and error.  The animals try different things to get the things they need and to create conditions that will allow them to reproduce and perpetuate their species. 

Other animals (other than humans) don’t use logic, reason, and scientific analysis to figure out how to make this happen.  Humans are the only animals that have the capability to organize thoughts intentionally.  The other animals have to use trial and error.  Certain behaviors get them food but expose them to danger.  Others leave them safe but hungry.  They must find a balance.  Nature is not going to guide them through the process.  It rewards those who succeed with full bellies and babies that grow up to replace them, and punishes those who fail with death. 

What works?

Different things work in different conditions.  Animals face different environmental conditions.  They must adapt their behaviors to their environment or they perish.  In some environmental conditions, well-organized aggressiveness and murderous violence provides advantages.  If the environmental conditions favor these behaviors, eventually some animals will for mass murder and violence.  Nature will reward them with the grand prize:  they can continue to exist.  They will have a niche in the environment as long as the environmental conditions remain the same and they remain the same. 

Wolves provide a good example here.  Wolves live in areas where prey is abundant.  They organize t kill prey that are much larger than they are.  Normally, they isolate their prey, chase them to weaken them, and then send in specialized killers (who have been kept in rested condition while the others prepared the victim for death) for the kill.  Then, they can all share in the feast.  The pack is large and a kill only lasts a single feeding.  They need to do the same thing every day.   They perfect their techniques over time and get very good at their jobs. 

Wolves don’t just kill the species that they intend to eat.

They kill other wolves too. 

Each territory can only support a very limited number of predators.  Each wolf pack has its own territory.  If the pack members let wolves who were not from their pack hunt in their territory, their territory wouldn’t have enough food to support their pack. 

They need to keep outsiders out. 

They do this in a highly deliberate and well organized way.  They create borders and mark them with scent markers from a special gland that has evolved to help them identify their territory.  (This tells us that the system required a very long time to develop; it takes a long time for new glands to evolve.)  The scent markers fade over time, so the members of the pack have to walk the borders constantly and replenish them, so outsiders can identify the places where they will be attacked if they enter.  If the wolves on border patrol detect outsiders (members of their species that are not members of their pack) that are moving in ways that indicate they may want to violate their borders, they organize attacks. 

When they attack, they are fanatically aggressive and show no mercy whatever.  They kill and kill and kill.  They love their own puppies and will often give their own lives to protect them.  But they tear the puppies of their enemies to pieces if they find them.  They aren’t fair in their battles, attempting to create equal strength on the two different sides so have ‘proportional responses.’  They use any strategy they can to kill every last member of the packs that they see as threats.

They are doing battle against trained, skilled, and very well organized enemies.  They may not win.  If they lose, they will be killed and their bodies torn to pieces and scattered around the battlefield.  Of course, we don’t know what feelings and emotions wolves have, but we may anthropomorphize a little and speculate that there must be come chemicals their glands produce that cause them to have something similar to what we call ‘feelings.’  They don’t want to die.  (All animals must have a survival instinct.)  They don’t want to feel pain.  (Dogs clearly feel pain.)   They have worked their entire lives to gain social status in their packs.  If they die, all the effort they put into gaining status, preferential feeding and breeding rights, and preferential rights for places to sleep, will be wasted.  They have loved ones, sisters, brothers, mothers, and others who depend on them for support.   If they are killed, they can’t hunt and provide for their pack members, including those they cuddle with at night.  All these feelings tell them to protect their own lives. 

But another feeling tells them to make the sacrifice.  We might call this feeling ‘loyalty’ or ‘love of pack’ or ‘the dog equivalent of ‘patriotism.’  This feeling conflicts with their fear of pain and death.  Nature resolves the difference over time.  If animals can’t or won’t sacrifice their lives to protect the territory of their pack (if they aren’t patriotic enough), their pack won’t have a territory and will disappear.  Self sacrifice is a requirement of survival for wolf packs.  They must put the needs of their pack above their own needs, or the pack will not survive. 

Nature creates this loyalty (or patriotism or whatever we may call it), and makes sure it is strong enough to allow the pack to destroy its enemies, even if the great majority of the members have to die in the process. 

It is important that you realize that there is no intention behind any of this.  Wolves don’t discuss their situation, decide that they need to go to war and make sacrifices, then talk among themselves to determine which of them will die and which will live.  Only humans have the capability to use intentional analysis and reason. 

Wolves don’t do this.  They do form into packs that are tightly knit and loyal.  They do divide themselves in ways that allow them to carry out different roles in a complex attempt to wipe out other packs in order to take their territory.  They do sacrifice themselves for the good of the pack.  But they don’t do this because they have discussed the options and decided its what they want to. 

Group Territoriality

Evolutionary researchers use the term ‘group territoriality’ to refer to the principle discussed above.  The animals divide their population into groups, each of which has a territory.  Each group then secures the territory so the group can have exclusive rights to all the food and other resources it contains and produces.  (In human societies, we use the term ‘sovereignty over land’ to refer to the exclusive rights to it.  You could say the wolves are fighting to get sovereignty over land.)   Its members treat that land as if it belongs to them.  They treat it as if the some being above them (a god perhaps) made it for them and then gave it to them. 

Evolutionary science is a young field.  We do know that societies evolve, but we don’t know much about the way this process works.  This is important information and I think it makes senses to get some ideal why our information on the way societies come to exist and change over tim—and information about evolution in eneral—is so limited. 

Until very recently, the organizations that ran important events on earth and determined the things people were allowed to study didn’t want people to study or even think about evolution.  The people who run nations want their people to devote their time and attention to meeting the needs of the nation, including the need to gain advantages over other nations.  The people who run nations want people to be emotional about certain issues,  For example, they want them to accept that the people inside of other nations they want to fight are different than they are and don’t deserve rights or respect:  they only deserve the most horrible death the good people of their nations can impose on them. 

Logical analysis would tend to make people question these ideas.  If people were allowed to accept scientific information regarding where humans came from, the scientific perspective might spill over into the rest of their analysis.  The governments that need people to hate with white-hot passion and be willing to support organized mass murder will find it much harder to keep people from questioning the messages that are designed to create these feelings. 

The government strategists prefer that people keep their hatred pure.  This is much harder to do when people use science regularly to answer important questions, including ‘how did we get here?’. 

Many of the people who ran the entities that ran the nations simply banned all books in the field.  These same entities, governments, determine what schools can teach children.  They didn’t allow this field to be taught.  Some went farther than this and put teachers in jail if they told young people that the field even existed. 

Teachers didn’t like these rules . If people were doing research that gave us solid and scientific answers to key questions about how the world works, they wanted to be able to pass this information on to their students.  They fought the bans and eventually managed to get most of the laws against teaching the field overturned. 

But they didn’t win a total victory.  The leaders of the governments could still do a great deal to limit the way the field was taught.  Schools couldn’t teach it the same way they taught fields like chemistry or physics, where students had to accept the scientific conclusions as facts to pass the tests and weren’t able to question them and still pass and get credentials. 

.  When I went to school, I was told that evolution wasn’t really a science.  It was a ‘a highly controversial theory about how we may have possibly come to exist.’  I was told that there was a traditional view that had been accepted for thousands of years.  The traditional scientists studied these things and understood them.  New people come up with new theories all the time.  The term ‘theory’ is another word for ‘guess.’  Some people are guessing that the traditional ideas are wrong.  We need to consider their criticism very carefully before we reject it  (This is like saying ‘we need to give the spy a fair trial before we shoot him;’ his guilt is presumed in advance and the trial was never anything but a sham to convince outsiders we are fair.  The premise is that the ‘theory’ was a silly agues by some outliers that has been reected by all trustworthy scholars.) 

Even in the 1800s, the science behind evolution appeared to be rock solid.  (Read Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ and ‘Desent of Man’ and you will see what I mean.  It is hard to find a single sentence in either of these books that might be classified as ‘controversial.’  Darwin presents fact after fact after fact, all of which confirm the premise.  His many critics could not present any facts to support their case, they could just read out of religious texts.)   During the 1900s, the evidence kept piling up.  Every  new finding confirmed the premise.  None contradicted it. 

In the 21st century, new technologies allowed scientists to read out the codes in DNA and print them out.  They could do these tests on people, animals, plants, bacteria and viruses, including those that were currently living and those that had been dead for any time up to several hundred thousand years.     

Scientists began doing research determine exactly how different members of the same species that lived at different times had changed genetically.  They determined there were very clear links that were obviously sequential.  This provided totally objective information about how different genetic variants built on one another to create change from one species to another. 

This was mathematical evidence that evolution was working.  Scientists could apply standard mathematical tests to determine how likely it is that his data was caused by something other than evolution.  In other words, they can determine the odds against evolution being a ‘theory’ that might be wrong.  They did these tests.  (For one example, see a formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry.)   They found that it is simply not possible to explain the things we see in any way that is even remotely likely to be ccorrect unless evolution was happening. 

The evidence mounted that verified evolution.  But the pressure to pretend this was simply a ‘theory’ that might pssibly be wrong, not a real science, remained until about the beginning of the 21st century.  

At that time, the military became involved.  That changed everything. 

Military planners thought that it might be possible to make weapons that could kill only certain designated individuals (those with specific DNA profiles) if the weapons makers understood genetics well enough.   This might not be possible.  But if it was, they couldn’t afford t let their enemies get these weapons first.  They had to make sure thehir own countries had well-traind scientists who could look at DNA analysis with the same objectivity that designers of nuclear bombs look at the quantum forces needed to understand nuclear fusion   They would have to be objective to make this happen   They have to accept that there are certain laws that determine how genetic changes happen over time, and these laws are just as solid as the laws of chemistry and quantum mechanics.  If they had been educated in schools that left them thinking that the prp0osed laws in this field were actually just silly theories, they wouldn’t have the right mindset to do this research.

People started to take the field seriously.  People can now look for relationships between animals and humans and study them objectively.   They can publish the data in respectable peer-reviewed journals.  If the results meet scientific standards, they are considered to be facts, not ‘controversial theories.’ 

All this happened very recently and, as I write this in 2024, is still in progress.  But new research is showing that the relationships between humans and other animals are not only not theoretical, they are extremely strong.  Roughly 99% of our DNA is a perfect mach with the DNA of chimps and bonobos, our closest surviving evolutionary ancestors.  The DNA determines our mental wiring and the way our brains work.  Our brains work similar to theirs. 

A great deal more than our DNA comes from these animals.  We share many aspects of our societies with other animals.  We can see evidence of the transfer of societal structures between species the same way we see evidence of the transfer of DNA.  If we accept that these societal structures were transferred, we can understand a lot about the realities of human existence that are very hard to understand if we reject this evidence. 

We can gain an understanding of ourselves by studying other animals. 

Many animals organize themselves around the principle of group territoriality.  Some higher primates organize their societies around this principle.  Those that do have extremely complex systems to determine which individuals will lead and which will follow, how they will organize their patrols, how they will mark and defend their territory, how the battles will take place, and who will benefit from conquests of territory when their group makes them.  People studying these activities in other primates are finding remarkable similarities to the way the same activities work in human societies. 

Two Different Types of Primate Societies

Group territoriality societies actually need very strict conditions in place for them to exist.  The can’t exist everywhere.  If the conditions aren’t right for them to exist, nature doesn’t let them exist.  Other societies will evolve that are better suited for the conditions.  The beings that organize to adapt to the environmental conditions will have advantages over those that use the unsuitable systems.  Their societies may not be territorial or form into the tight-knit loyal groups that group territoriality societies need in any way.  In fact, they can work in ways that are basically the opposite, with the individuals sharing and caring and cooperating, all without conflict. 

The group territoriality societies work best in what we may call ‘Garden of Eden conditions.’  Chimpanzees live in the most productive lands of tropical Africa.  They don’t have to work for their food.  It is all around them.  They simply reach above them and a ready-to-eat meal appears in their hands.  This land is clearly worth fighting over.  Animals that don’t fiht over it will be removed by aggressive animals.  These animals will compete with others to control the territory and those that are better at fighting will win.  They will have the best areas.  Groups that don’t fight will not perish, but they won’t get the right to live in the best areas.  

In the end, this led to a split in the species that are our closest evolutionary ancestors, called the ‘chimp-bonobo species.’ 

 

 

Lets look first at the way members of this species live in areas that favor the group territoriality societies.  The following quote is from a research study by the Institute of Human Origins at the Smithsonian Institution. 

 

When male chimpanzees of the world’s largest known troop patrol the boundaries of their territory in Ngogo, Uganda, they walk silently in single file.

Normally chimps are noisy creatures, but on patrol they’re hard-wired. They sniff the ground and stop to listen for sounds. Their cortisol and testosterone levels are jacked 25 percent higher than normal. Chances of contacting neighboring enemies are high: 30 percent.

Ten percent of patrols result in violent fights where they hold victims down and bite, hit, kick and stomp them to death. The result? A large, safe territory rich with food, longer lives, and new females brought into the group.

Territorial boundary patrolling by chimpanzees is one of the most dramatic forms of collective action in mammals. A new study led by an Arizona State University researcher shows how working together benefits the group, regardless of whether individual chimps patrolled or not.

The team — led by Assistant Professor Kevin Langergraber of ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Institute of Human Origins — examined 20 years of data on who participated in patrols in a 200-member-strong Ngogo community of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda. The study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Chimpanzees are one of the few mammals in which inter-group warfare is a major source of mortality. Chimps in large groups have been reported to kill most or all of the males in smaller groups over periods of months or years, acquiring territory in the process. Territorial expansion can lead to the acquisition of females who bear multiple infants. It also increases the amount of food available to females in the winning group, increasing their fertility.

Chimpanzees are highly intelligent, but they aren’t capable of what’s called “collective intentionality,” which allows humans to have mutual understanding and agreement on social conventions and norms.   “They undoubtedly have expectations about how others will behave and, presumably, about how they should behave in particular circumstances, but these expectations presumably are on an individual basis,” Watts said. “They don’t have collectively established and agreed-on social norms.”

Humans can join together in thousands to send men into space or fight global wars or build skyscrapers. Chimpanzees don’t have anywhere near that level of cooperation.

“But this tendency of humans to cooperate in large groups and with unrelated individuals must have started somewhere,” Watts said. “The Ngogo group is very large (about 200 individuals), and the males in it are only slightly more related to one another than to the males in the groups with which they are competing.’

“Perhaps the mechanisms that allow collective action in such circumstances among chimpanzees served as building blocks for the subsequent evolution of even more sophisticated mechanisms later in human evolution.”

 

The field of primate research in vivo (in a natural setting) is new.  For most of history, researchers sent hunters to capture primates, put them in cages and move them to the research facility, then studied them in cages.  The first researcher to do any significant ‘in vivo’ studies was Jane Goodall.  She was the first to show that primates live a lot differently in nature where they have to adapt to their conditions to survive than they do if they are put in cages and fed every day. 

Dr. Goodall has a website where she posts her important research and discusses issues related to in vivo studies of primates.  She focuses on chimpanzees.  She says that these animals need to be left alone if they are to survive.  Even traveling to watch them (as ‘eco-tourists’ do) changes the way they live in ways that place them more at risk. 

She was the first to describe the behavior of the chimps in vivo, and the first to show how closely their behavior resembles the warlike behavior of humans.  When she first published this information, other researchers didn’t believe her.  (She had no letters after her name at the time, and credentialed researchers generally don’t take non-credentialed people seriously.)   They thought she was projecting:  she saw wars in human communities and wanted to make it appear they took place in chimp communities also, to attract attention to her work.  So, she made up stories of their wars.  Credentialed researchers started doing work to discredit her findings.  They tried very hard to do this but couldn’t:  They found that her analysis was scientific and objective and she was describing things that were actually happening. 

Goodall showed that the chimps live in what she calls ‘monopolizable patches’ of land in tropical Africa.  These lands are very rich and productive.  In these areas, the days are the same length and same temperature all year long:  there are no seasons.  Fruit ripens each day.  The areas where chimps live are the richest of all.  They don’t have to hunt for areas where food may be and then gather it.  If they get hungry they reach out and dinner will be there, hanging on the tree beside them. 

Chimp troops ‘monopolize’ their territory, which means they don’t allow any members of their species that are not members of their troops to benefit from the existence of anything in their territory.  Not all land can be monopolized, for practical reasons.  One example from her research shows why this is true: 

The troop she has studied the most has a territory of about 2,000 acres.  There are about 150 chimps in this troop, including immature individuals (children).  The territorial border is about 7.5 miles long.  It takes the border patrol chimps about 4-5 hours to compete a circuit, if they don’t encounter any problems that delay them.  This leaves them enough time to go back to their homes, feed, groom, and even to take a bath if they want (chimps do this commonly).  If they live in a territory this size, they can do this every day. 

Chimps are ‘homebodies’ as the Smithsonian quote points out.  They are comfortable when they are ‘at home.’  The land outside of their territory is unknown.  It is full of dangers  (That is where their enemies live.)  They are not comfortable when they are not at hime.  

The chimps wouldn’t be go home every night if they lived in a larger territory.  If it takes more than ¾ of all daylight hours to do a patrol, there won’t be time to get back home, to feed, to take care of their personal grooming, and then sleep where they feel comfortable and safe.  They need to eat and keep themselves clean to remain healthy.  If they don’t have time to do the things they need to remain healthy, they aren’t going to be healthy and won’t be as good in fights as healthy chimps.  If they can’t win fights, they will be torn to pieces in the conflicts with their bodies scattered around the battlefield   They would be less likely to keep their territory if they tried to control a larger territory.  Nature balances it out.  A certain territory works.  They have found the balance. 

This 2000 acre territory produces enough food, all year long, year after year, to support 150 chimps.  This is how many are in their troop.  (The exact number changes of course, over time, but this is the average.)   The troop is at war constantly and a great many chimps die in these battles.  (This is one of the highest, and often the highest, cause of mortality in the subspecies.)   A lot of their members die. 

But this works out for them.  They make just enough healthy babies to replace those killed in war and that die by other causes.  Over the long run, the birth rates inside the territory (the chimp ‘country’) match the death rates, allowing the population inside that county to remain stable.  Nature has found a way to create a subspecies that can live in a stable and sustainable way in these rich areas.  The organized mass murder keeps their population stable. 

The Other Kind of Society (Bonobo Societies)

Bonobos have a different habitat than chimps.  They don’t live in areas they most fight to keep  They are cowardly:  If they find evidence of a border that might indicate a protected area, they run away.  They live entirely differently than chimps.  In fact, they live so differently, that scientists never even considered that they might be the same species as chimps when they first studied them.   The chimps were murderous, politically and socially hierarchical, territorial, and organized for violent wars.  The bonobos were generous, kind, tolerant, and didn’t have any tendency to form into loyal groups or mark territory at all. 

 

The following quote is also from the Institute of Human Origins at the Smithsonian.  It deals with the societies of bonobos:

 

Humans display a capacity for tolerance and cooperation among social groups that is rare in the animal kingdom, our long history of war and political strife notwithstanding. But how did we get that way?

Scientists believe bonobos might serve as an evolutionary model. The endangered primates share 99 percent of their DNA with humans and have a reputation for generally being peace-loving and sexually active—researchers jokingly refer to them “hippie apes.” And interactions between their social groups are thought to be much less hostile than among their more violent cousins, the chimpanzees.

Some, however, have challenged this because of a lack of detailed data on how these groups work and how they separate themselves. A new study led by Harvard primatologists Liran Samuni and Martin Surbeck on the social structure of bonobos may begin to fill in some of the blanks.

The research, published in PNAS, shows that four neighboring groups of bonobos they studied at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo maintained exclusive and stable social and spatial borders between them, showing they are indeed part of distinct social groups that interact regularly and peacefully with each other.

“It was a very necessary first step,” said Samuni, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Pan Lab and the paper’s lead author. “Now that we know that despite the fact that they spend so much time together, [neighboring] bonobo populations still have these distinct groups, we can really examine the bonobo model as something that is potentially the building block or the state upon which us humans evolved our way of more complex, multilevel societies and cooperation that extends beyond borders.”

Bonobos have been far less studied than chimps due to political instability and logistical challenges to setting up research sites in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the only place where the primates are found. In addition, studying relationships among and between Bonobo groups has been further complicated by the fact that subgroups appear to intermingle with some frequency.

“There aren’t really behavioral indications that allow us to distinguish this is group A, this is group B when they meet,” Samuni said. “They behave the same way they behave with their own group members. People are basically asking us, how do we know these are two different groups? Maybe instead of those being two different groups, these groups are just one very large group made up of individuals that just don’t spend all their time together [as we see with chimpanzee neighborhoods]

 

The chimp-bonobo species is one species. 

But its members live in different environmental conditions.  They adapt to these different conditions and live in entirely different ways. 

In one way, this makes sense.  All animals must adapt to their environmental conditions or they perish.  The practical realities of their environment make it impossible for members of the chimp-bonobo species that live in unproductive areas to act the same way they do in highly productive areas.  It costs a lot, in lives and resources, to mark off borders, patrol them, and then engage in wars to defend them.  If the resources aren’t there, they can’t afford to live this way and must find some other way to live. 

The bonobos themselves didn’t figure anything out. 

They didn’t have bonobo scientists evaluate the different ways primates could live, come up with the generous, tolerant, and cooperative systems described above, have an election, and decide to put it into place.  Humans are the only animals on earth that are capable of using intention to alter the realities of our societies.  Bonobos don’t have this ability.  There was no scientific analysis of options.  Different members of the chimp-bonobo species tried different things.  Nature then selected the members of this species who had successful strategies for survival in each area  It allowed them to live, while selecting those that chose wrong for death. 

In conditions where tolerance, generosity, benevolence, and cooperation work better for a species than organized warfare, they developed tolerant, generous, benevolent, and cooperative societies.  In places where war was appropriate, they organized for war.   

You and I were born into societies that were not designed for technologically sophisticated thinking beings with the ability to manipulate nature and change the way key variables of the world work.  They were designed (if we can even use this word) by nature in accordance with evolutionary pressure. 

Our ancient ancestors evolved and gained intellectual abilities very slowly, over the course of millions of years.  At one point, they became smart enough to chip rocks to make axe heads and attach them to sticks.  At some point, they became smart enough to take advantage of fires that lighting or some other force started around them.  They eventually became capable of making fire and tending it.  At this point, the animals were so different than members of the chimp-bonobo species that they either couldn’t mate with them.  They were not in the same species.

In fact, once they got to this point (able to intentionally build and maintain fires) they lived so differently than their evolutionary ancestors that scientists didn’t even think they should be in the same genus.  They put them into the genus ‘homo,’ the same genus that includes modern humans.  They were our primitive ancestors. 

They adapted and spread.  Their societies adapted along two lines.  On line started with the animals used to being ‘homebodies.’  They wanted to have a territory that belonged to them.  They found areas they could defend and lived much like the chimps had lived:  they built borders, patrolled the borders, and had armies waiting in reserve to wipe out any threats to their territorial rights. 

In other areas, the early members of the homo genus faced entirely different conditions.  They couldn’t mark off territory and defend it:  it wasn’t practical.  They had to adapt to these conditions to survive.  The people researchers call ‘denisovans’ are clearly well adapted for the lands that didn’t produce enough to the group territoriality societies.  We find their remains in remote areas of Siberia, Mongolia, and find their DNA in the genetic profiles of the people who came to be called the ‘Indians’ of the Americas. 

 

 

The denisovans and their descendents (including the ‘Indians’ of America) lived under and adapted to different conditions than the groups that eventually conquered their lands on behalf of the entities called ‘countries.’ 

They built entirely different societies that had entirely different rule systems.  The systems they built are not perfect.  We would not expect them to be perfect, because, like the fanatically territorial systems that eventually took over, they evolved according to evolutionary principles. 

 

 

Why Does This Matter?

This book, Reforming Societies, is about societal change.  It is the first book in a three book series called the Preventing Extinction Series.  It explains the first steps that we must take if we are to avoid the fate that we can all see lies ahead of us:  extinction.

Reforming Societies explains how we, the members of the human race and inhabitants of this little blue speck of dust called ‘earth’ can change from the kind of society that dominates the world now to a different kind of society.

We need to do this.

These societies are built on the principle of group territoriality.  Group territoriality societies are animal societies.  There is a place in nature for these societies.  Animals that band together into groups, mark territorial borders, and use violent conflicts to prevent members of their species that are not members of their territorial group from sharing in the food supply of that territory, fill an important niche in the ecology of this world .

But group territoriality societies are not suitable for technologically sophisticated thinking beings. 

We are a changed species, entirely different than the very first members of our genus that had these societies.  Nature does not allow species that can’t adapt to their changing circumstances to continue to exist.  We need to adapt or we will suffer the fate that nature has for all species that can’t adapt to changes:  extinction. 

Other animals would have to simply start trying things  Those who guessed right can survive.  But don’t have to use trial and error.  We can think through our situation and come to understand why we are here.  We can figure out the different paths through time that our ancestors (including the chimp-bonobo species) took to get us here.  We can figure out what paths we would be on now if our ancestors had gained self-awareness earlier and figured out a plan earlier.  We can figure out which paths through time can lead to healthy and sound societies.  We can figure out how to get from the path that we are on now to one of these paths.  Then we can use the tools that we have that no other animals have to get onto that path. 

Reforming Societies

This chapter has two points that I want to get across:

First, I want you to realize that problems that threaten us now, and will soon destroy us if they continue, are not separate aliments or diseases in and of themselves.  They are symptoms, signs that are flashing at us in great big neon letters that tell us ‘SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THE SYSTEM WE LIVE IN.’ 

It is not possible to prevent our extinction by dealing with wars and destructive activities one at a time, while ignoring the underlying cause.  To try to do this will be as fruitless as trying to save a loved one with tuberculosis by treating each cough as a separate event and leaving the leaving the bacteria in place to consume their lungs and other key tissues.  If we want to save ourselves, we have to understand that there really is something structurally wrong with the system we live in.  We need to figure out how it would work if it were healthy and how to change its form so that it works that way.

Second, I want you to realize that certain things that we are raised to believe are cast in stone are not cast in stone at all.  The system that we live in was not created by Jehovah, Allah, God, or a Great Spirit, something that would, if true, make it unalterable.  The system around us developed under the influence of forces that we can understand. 

If we understand these forces, we can use them to make changes that will cause these dangerous societies to evolve in ways that eventually lead to healthy societies. 

Our destiny is not in the hands of invisible beings with magic powers. 

It is not in the hands of fate or karma.

It is in our hands. 

Other societies are possible. 

They can exist.

Our history tells us this is true. 

How many different types of societies are possible?

How do they all work?

Are any of them able to meet all of the needs of the human race? 

The information we get from the past doesn’t tell us this.  We need to figure it out for ourselves.  The information that we get from the past does tell us something important however:  it tells us that, if we do try to figure it out, we won’t be wasting our time.  The answers are there if we look for them.

The next chapter starts explaining different societies so you can see the difference between the societies we inherited and sound societies. 

A Look Ahead

If you want to plan an journey, the first thing you must have is a destination.  You must know where you want to end up. 

We need to plan a journey. 

We need to get from ‘the conflict-based animal societies we inherited from our evolutionary ancestors’ to ‘societies that are organized so that they meet the long-term needs of a technologically sophisticated species of intelligent beings with physical needs.’ 

We can figure out ‘the best place to head toward’ using fairly objective criterion:  We can do an analysis of the different kinds of societies that are possible for beings in our category.  We can lay them out in a logical way so we can tell which are destructive and which are not.  We can then choose a system that is in the ‘non-destructive’ range as a ‘potential destination society.’  We don’t have to get this perfect because, as we are traveling, we can make minor course changes if we decide that a few differences will better meet the specific needs we have here on earth.  We need to understand this before we can even take the first step on our journey for a very simple reason:  We want to make sure, that when we head out on the voyage, we are not heading in a direction that will take us even deeper into trouble. 

If your town is covered with ash from a volcanic eruption, you don’t want to run in a random direction, because that may take you directly into the volcano. 

That is the first step.

We need to have at least a general idea of where we want to end up before we can start planning a journey. 

Starting with the next chapter, we will look at the basic elements of a type of society called a ‘socratic.’  Socratic societies are built on alignment of alignment of interests:  They are designed so the interests of the individuals within society are naturally aligned with the interests of the human race as a whole.  If people act in their own personal best interests (trying to get the most wealth they can for themselves) they do things that advance the interests of the human race as a whole (increase the total wealth available for the human race as a whole). 

I propose ‘socratic societies’ as what you may think of as ‘preliminary destination societies.’  I propose we head in the general direction of societies built on principles that Socrates worked out and discussed several thousand years ago.  They are designed to meet the basic minimum requirements that sound and healthy societies must meet. 

 

 

The journey will take time. 

I will show that we can identify certain waypoints that can help us measure our progress.  The first of these is a type of society called ‘minimally sustainable societies.’  Minimally sustainable societies are societies that meet the minimum mathematical conditions for sustainability.  This does not mean they are sustainable, only that all societies that we pass through before we reach them are not sustainable and can never be made sustainable.  When we reach the ‘minimally sustainable societies,’ we are at systems where it is possible for us to create conditions that lead to sustainability.  In all societies we pass through before we get there, this is not possible. 

 

 

When we get to the part of the book that deals with the journey we take from the societies we inherited to socratic societies, we will have to consider the pace of travel. 

How fast should we go? 

Whenever you are on a voyage, you have to decide what I more important to you:  do you want to get there as fast as possible, regardless of the cost?  Perhaps you want to get the maximum enjoyment from the trip itself, or keep the cost to the lowest possible level, regardless of how long it takes.  Most people trade these things off.  They don’t want the fastest possible trip (they can’t afford to hire a private jet, although it may be faster) and don’t want the cheapest or most scenic trip either.  They want something that gets them there in a reasonable amount of time at a reasonable cost. 

The trip speed I will discuss is one that is fast enough to get there in a reasonable period of time but not so fast as to make the hardship of the travel greater than the rewards we will get from moving toward sound societies.  In other words, it is designed to make us all better off (or at least not any worse off) not just at the end of the trip, but at every stage along the way.  If it turns out that we decide, after we have started, we want to go faster, we can accelerate the changes.  (In the above sentence, the term ‘we’ refers to the human race, acting together as a Community of Humankind using the tool discussed later.)  If it turns out that we decide we are moving too fast, we can slow down. 

The pace discussed will get us to minimally sustainable societies in about 30 years after we take the first steps.  Once we get there, we will be in a position to evaluate our situation. 

We can look around us.  Do we want to keep our destination the same?   Do we want to continue along the relaxed pace, or move faster or slower? 

As time passes, we can consider these matters.  But before we will ever be in a position to consider them, we need to know there is a destination that can meet our needs (that a sound and healthy society is a possible society) and that it is possible for us to get from where we are to that destination in a reasonable way. 

The next part of the book explain how a sound and healthy society works.  It starts out by explaining a hypothetical situation where a group of people is in the best possible circumstances to form such a society. You the reader will be in this group and I will be there too.  We will start from scratch, with no existing structures that restrict our decisions.  We don’t have to work within any rule structure:  we can make our own rules.  We also have all of the knowledge, skills, technology, background information, and tools that exist in the 21st century at our disposal. 

We will be in the best possible condition to form a society, with all advantages and no disadvantages. 

After we have examined the way such a society would work if it existed, we will change perspective.  We will come to the 21st century, where we are now.  We can choose our destination, but we can’t choose our starting place:  it was chosen for us.  We aren’t in perfect conditions.  Structures are already in place that do things that have to be done, but do these things in highly destructive and dangerous ways.  Some of these structures are not going to be part of our societies when we get to the end.  We need to build new structures that do these same things, but do them in ways that do harm the community of humankind. 

You will need a lot of information to really understand all of these things.  The basic ideas are entirely different than the things you learned in schools (which focus on teaching skills that help people advance the interests of their territorial groups, rather than the interests of the human race as a whole).  We are basically starting from scratch here in our understanding of the world.  We are changing our perspective:  Rather than look at the word as animals that join together into groups to defend territory, we are looking it as thinking beings trying to create sound and healthy societies for our future race.  It is a long and hard road to get there. 

The ancient proverb goes:  the longest journey starts with a single step.  If we want to get there, we need to accept that we want to be on that journey and take that first step. 

Intelligent beings on other worlds would see the earth as a tiny blue speck of blue dust.  That is, if they saw it at all.  We didn’t get the ability to see worlds in other star systems until we had space-based telescopes, and this didn’t happen for hundreds of thousands of years after the first members of our species gained self-awareness.

The dominant species on this little blue speck of dust are called ‘humans.’  Humans share about 99% of their DNA with violent and savage, highly territorial, and totally irrational apes.  (They can’t be rational because they do not have the mental capacity for rational thought.)  These humans live like their ape ancestors in many ways.  They divide themselves into a kind of teams, each of which defines a territory with borders.  They patrol the borders to make sure no members of their species that are not on their team (not legally allowed to be inside of the borders) are able to cross the borders.

Like other territorial animals, the humans seem to want (for some reason that intelligent beings on other worlds might wonder about) additional territory for their teams. They seem to want this so badly that they are willing to organize mass murder events of fantastic brutality to make it happen.  They even build weapons of such power that, when used, they destroy a large part of the world and kill hundreds of thousands of people initially, with residual effects that kill million more through diseases caused by the materials used in the weapons.

These humans are very good at developing technology.  But they seem to have a rather strange focus.  Rather than developing technology that can be used to bring the human race together and allow them to improve conditions for their race, they focus research on tools that are designed to kill and destroy.  They build devices the humans call ‘weapons.’  These weapons are generally destroyed with their very first use so they must devote entire industries to endless construction of replacements.  They need immense amounts of resources to satisfy these massive ‘military industrial complexes.’  To get these materials, the people who run the earth societies actively encourage reckless extraction of anything they might consider useful in the game of war that seems to be their primary occupation.

Anyone looking at the realities of life on earth can see that the conditions there can’t continue, with changes along the same line, forever.  These conditions are unsustainable.  Unsustainable means the conditions can’t be sustained:  they can’t continue indefinitely.  The systems the humans have are going away.  This is not a speculation, belief, or opinion:  it is a fact that comes directly from the definition of the term ‘unsustainable.’

It doesn’t matter how much people believe in these systems.  Even if the entire human population loves these systems with all their hearts, and refuses to consider anything else, they are still going away.

There are two ways this could happen.

First, we can use our intellects to work out societies that are capable of meeting the long-term needs of thinking beings with physical needs (the category that includes humans). We can find something better and put it in place.

Second, we can devote our mental capabilities to construction of new and better tools of war to help the entities the earth people call ‘countries’ gain advantages for their little teams compared to other teams in the territorial battles that match those of their primitive ancestors.  Rather than using our intelligence to find something better, we can use it to create better and better propaganda to make people in these worlds make greater and greater sacrifices for their ‘countries.’  We can use the schools to train children so they believe that nothing else is possible and nothing else has ever existed so they devote their time and effort to the strange tasks that meet no needs of the human race as a whole and move us closer to extinction each day that passes. We can train them to cover their eyes and ears when people try to tell them better systems are possible, and tell them there really isn’t anything to worry about because the team leaders love us and are going to fix everything (as soon as the current war is over and all national threats are brought under control).  This isn’t going to keep these systems from going away.  They are still going away.  If we choose this second option, they will go away when we go away.

These are our two choices. This book is for people who want them to go away by the first option.  It is about the idea of converting from a ‘society that focuses on the needs of the entities called ‘countries’ and ignores the needs of the human race’ to ‘a society that was is designed to meet the long-term needs of the human race as a whole.

The Preventing Extinction Series

The Preventing Extinction series is NOT about creating concern or awareness of the problems that threaten us.  It assumes that you are already aware of these problems.  There is no point in adding more information in this area: we all face a constant barrage of information from the world around us, from our social groups and peers, and from the media that goes into excruciating detail about the latest threats, shows how the dangers grow each day, and shows how the solutions that the governments of the world have claimed to be working on in the past were actually just scams to make us believe they were making progress when, in fact, they did nothing.

We are all aware.  We are all concerned.

We just don’t know what to do about it.

We need to know there are things we can do.  We need to know exactly what they are and exactly how these steps, if taken, will alter the conditions on earth in ways that cause the course of human progress through time to shift.  We are now on a path through time that leads leads to our own extinction.  There are other paths the human race can take through time.  We need to know that these other paths exist.  (In other words, we need to know that if our ancestors had made different choices in the past, we would be on a different path now.)   We need to know how the paths line up and intersect so we can figure out exactly how we can get from the path we are now on to an intersection that gives us choices.  We need to know which way to go when we hit various decision points so that, eventually, we can get onto a path that leads to sound systems that are capable of meeting the long-term needs of a species of the technologically sophisticated thinking beings that we have become.

That is what the books in this series are about.

The series has three books:

1.   Reforming Societies

2.   Anatomy of War

3.   Anatomy of Destruction

Reforming Societies

The type of society we inherited form our ancestors, and that they inherited from their ancestors, and so on going all the way back to our evolutionary animal ancestors, is not capable of meeting the needs of a technologically sophisticated species of thinking beings.

It is not a well-designed functional system built around the needs of being like modern humans.  It was not only not well designed, it was not designed at all:  it evolved from the societies of our evolutionary ancestors.  It is not functional and has no structures that are capable of turning the collective will of the human race into reality.  In fact, we will see, it isn’t even really a human society:  It is an animal society, operating according to the same rules as the societies of apes, hyenas, wolves, and many other species of animals who organize into groups to take control of territory that they intend to use as an exclusive hunting or feeding ground, then use violence to hold that territory and prevent outsiders from infringing on their exclusivity on that territory.

This system does not exist because some group of super-intelligent apes at some point in the past analyzed the different ways that primates could live and found this was the best option.  It exists because of evolutionary factors we will examine in Reforming Societies.

Here is a highly simplified description of the key process:  Nature wants to fill every niche in its ecosystems.  Certain niches can be satisfactorily filled by animals that divide into groups that work as cohesive units to mark off territory and then fight other groups over rights to hunt or gather foods in that territory. Nature fills its niches by trial and error:  animals want to survive and try to find ways to make this happen.  Nature rewards those that find successful strategies with survival; it punishes those that aren’t able to find a role in the ecostructure with death. Our evolutionary ancestors were among the species that wound up in environmental conditions where these societies brought advantages.  They adopted these societies.

None of this was logical or intentional.  Humans are the only animals that have the ability to use logic or intention.  The other animals were directed by force that we would call ‘instincts’ to act this way.  We evolved from them.  We inherited a great many things from them.  We inherited their DNA:  about 99% of human DNA matches that of our closest ape ancestors.  The DNA determines our mental wiring so our wiring is similar.  The instincts also got passed down.  We interpret instincts as ‘feelings.’  Our feelings tell us to do things that our rational mind doesn’t consider.  Our feelings tell us to bond together into groups that are loyal and cohesive and whose members are willing to kill or die to protect the interests of the groups.

Evolution took place over an extremely long period of time and there were a great many intermediate steps between ourselves and our closest still-surviving evolutionary ancestors.  Forensic History shows that the final stage in evolution alone took 6.7 million years.  During this time, the different species that we can think of as links in the evolutionary chain gained greater and greater thinking abilities.  They used these thinking abilities to help them do the things the instincts they inherited made them feel they had to do.  They felt they had to fight for territory.  They could fight better if they developed better weapons and better ways to train their children to grow up to be fanatical fighters.  They found ways to do this.  In time, they had gained the ability to use torches for light; this gave them great advantages over apes without torches.

They got better and better weapons.  Each large transition in technology changed the beings that had it.  They adapted to their new technology.  Animals that were able to use fire lived differently than those that didn’t use fire.  The transition took them to a different species.  There were many such transitions.  We are in the middle of the most recent of these transitions, where we adapt to electronic warfare and nuclear bombs.

The systems that were built on dividing the animals into groups which then fought over territory worked for our ancient ancestors, the apes.  They even worked for early humans in some ways.  They put incredible pressure on the species to advance its ability to think on a conscious level:  groups that had even tiny advantages in this area could easily conquer the land held by stupider groups.  When they conquered the stupid groups, they either wiped them out intentionally or moved them to territory that couldn’t support them, leading to the demise of the stupider group.  As the apes started to reach the point they had self-awareness, they realized they were fighting for their lives.  Loss in war meant death for themselves and extermination of the group they loved. They looked for advantages any where they could find them.  The groups that survived have better intellects than the average of their species. By consigning the groups that were not good at war to death and replacing them with those more capable at the complex tasks they need to perform, nature gradually strengthened the species as a whole.

It is a cruel, brutal, and inhumane system.  But it worked for early man.

Unfortunately, we have changed in ways that make the system we inherited inherently suicidal.  We are capable of destroying in ways that no other animal could destroy.  (No other animals have jet fighters, inter continental ballistic missiles, and nuclear bombs, for example.)  The system we inherited works in ways that force the competitors to use every tool at their disposal to advance their territorial aims.

Once we reached a certain level of technological sophistication, we outgrew these systems. They were capable of meeting the needs of the apes and neanderthals that came before us  and advancing their intelligence with this competition.  But they are not capable of meeting our needs now. We are at a decision point.  Are we going to use our intellects to find something better, or to build better and better weapons to destroy the members of other groups?  This is our choice.  If we choose to keep them, we will have chosen suicide.

We need to have our own societies.  We need to leave the societies that we inherited from our evolutionary ancestors behind and move to societies that were designed by intelligent beings to meet the needs of intelligent beings.

The book you are reading, Reforming Societies, is about ‘reforming’ or changing the form of the societies that are now in place on earth.  It is possible for beings that are on the verge of gaining the power of higher reasoning but are not fully there, and happen to have inherited dangerous animal societies, to understand their situation and plan out a set of steps that will take them to well-designed societies that can meet their needs.

Reforming Societies explains how to make this happen.

There are no magical forces involved.  We can’t do this by mumbling under our breath to some invisible being that we hope lives in the sky and expect the combined weight of everyone mumbling at the same time will wake this being and make it issue an incantation that will fix it all.  We can’t do it by whining (another word for ‘protesting’) against the people who are in charge of the dangerous societies and begging them to start to play nice.  We can’t do this by discussing what a mysterious ‘they’ would do if ‘they’ existed and had power to do anything at all.  We have already tried all of the magical solutions, the incantations, the witchcraft, the spells, the wishing and hoping, the love-ins, hand holding, and other short cut solutions.

None of them have worked.

There is no reason to think they will suddenly start working.  We need to accept that, if we want to survive, we will have to do the one thing that logic tells us will work:  We need roll up our sleeves and accept that we can’t really assume anything that people have worked out to meet the needs of the societies that we inherited is correct.  We need to be able to start fresh, without any prejudices. (Most of you have heard the saying: ‘if you assume you make an ass out of u and me.’)  We need to find a perspective that allows us to look at the big picture and figure out the needs of thinking beings with physical needs in general, wherever they are in this vast universe.  We need to figure out what works for such beings and what does not work for them. We need to accept that these laws apply to us because we fall into this category.  We need to figure out what practical steps such beings would take, when they first gain awareness of these basic realities, to move to sound societies.

Then we need to take them.

It can be done.  I am confident that, if you read this book with enough mental attention to really understand it, you will agree with this totally.  We, the members of human race and inhabitants of this tiny blue speck of dust in this immense universe called ‘earth,’ can make it happen.

You will see that the technical steps necessary are not particularly challenging or difficult.  They work by creating structures that allow the human race to work together in an organized way.  They are designed to ‘empower’ the human race and turn us into something I call a ‘community of humankind.’

The human race is not now a ‘community.’  We are a collection of eight billion people divided into several hundred teams called ‘countries’ that are all working at cross purposes.   There is nothing tying us together into a community. There are no tools we can use to work together to meet our common needs.

The technical steps involve building these tools.  This is not hard.  The hard part is getting people to let people accept, in their own minds, that the human race has outgrown the animal societies of our evolutionary ancestors.  The hard part is getting people to accept that the entities called ‘independent and sovereign countries’ are artifacts of our primitive past, and not tools that we can use to move the human race toward a better future. The people who run these entities (the ‘countries’) and tell you they love the human race and believe that all men were created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights that they are there to protect, then take money away from you to build bombs that can destroy this world, are lying to you.  They are not in the side of the human race.  Only one entity is on the side of ‘the human race:’  That is the human race itself.

We have to accept that we have conflict between two sides of our beings.  We have animal sides that make us want to fight and kill and even give our lives defending the territories that the people our group claims as its ‘founders’ and past members have conquered.   Our animal sides make us want to accept that victory in these fights is more important than anything else; it is, in fact, more important than existence itself.  If we must use bombs that can destroy the world to protect the monopoly rights to (or ‘sovereignty over’) a certain piece of dirt on this world, our animal sides tell us we have no choice.  Our priority is to protect our territory.  Existence can be sacrificed.

We also have human sides.

They make us want to end the fighting and work with others to gain the incredible benefits of cooperation that could allow all to live better.  They make us want to protect the wonderful world around us, rather than rape it to get materials for the wars.

We need to accept that the animal impulses are incredibly strong.  They have been honed by millions of years of evolution.  We experience them as emotions, loyalty for the entity we are raised to accept as our tribe, troop, or nation, fear and mistrust off outsiders, and hatred of any who organize to do things that advance the interests of different groups over the interests of people in our group. We need to accept that these feelings are all strong and we all inherited them.  But they are irrational.  They are animal impulses that we inherited from beings that didn’t have the ability to use reason at all.

We need to understand that our human sides just came to exist.  They are still babies.  The impulses they create have a hard time competing with the mature and well developed animal sides.  We need to accept there is a battle going on in all of us between these two sides of our beings and that, in most people, the animal side wins this battle.  We then need to understand that reason and logic are there in all of us and even the most animalistic have impulses that push us all to use it.

We can strengthen the human side if we use the right tools.  If we know how things work, we can show the people around us that they make a difference.  We can turn them from the animal side of the force to the human side.

As I pointed out earlier, the technical steps we need to take are not very difficult or complicated. The hard part involves getting a certain state of mind.  If we all had the right state of mind, we would all see the steps we need to take and take them.  (They really are obvious, as you will see.  People have been trying to put us onto the right path for a very long time.) If only a few of us know what to do, we can have some effect, but can’t do it all.  We need ‘enough’ people to understand what steps are needed, and how they work.  We need people who are doubtful and afraid to take the step to rationality to understand that they have allies and don’t have to do it alone.

This book, Reforming Societies, explains both the technical steps needed and the tools we can use to help people understand that, if we take them, there is real hope for our race.  This book is the first book in the three book Preventing Extinction series.  We must do more than simply reform our societies in order to survive.  The two other books explain the other steps. The first is called ‘Anatomy of War.’

Anatomy of War

War has been a part of our ancestral societies since long before we evolved into humans.  Our chimp ancestors made war and their gorilla ancestors made war.  (Both of these subspecies still do.)   As our early human ancestors gained the ability to reason, some people used this skill to take advantage of the forces pushing for war. They used their intellects to find ways to make themselves better off by preying on the forces pushing for organized mass murder within the different groups.

They figured out how to profit from war.

Once they could do this, they wanted as much war as they could create.  They found ways to make war happen when it otherwise wouldn’t have happened.  They found ways to strengthen the basic animalistic bonds that tie the people of the ‘countries’ together and to strengthen the mistrust and fear of those born outside of the groups. They found out how to kindle resentment of outsiders into passionate white hot flames of hatred and paranoid fear. They found ways to manipulate societies so that the great majority of the people in the world were helpless pawns who were forced to participate in an ever-growing military complex in order to stay alive.

If we want to prevent the extinction of our race, we must understand this:  Some very powerful people in our world profit from war. They will do everything in their power to make sure there is as much of it as they can create.  As we reform societies, we will move to systems where it is harder and harder for them to create the necessary conditions.  (The systems designed to unify the human race and give us common tools we can use to advance our common interests will make it harder to push us apart.)  War will become less and less likely. However, the risks of war are so serious that we can’t simply sit back and wait until it is no longer possible to create the conditions necessary for war, because even a minor war can escalate to a world-ending event.  We need to take precautions.  To do this, we need to understand the steps the rich and powerful take that lead to war, the way they rationalize these steps and induce others to support them, and the way we can reduce the forces that push the world toward war.  Anatomy of War deals with these matters.

The third book in the Preventing Extinction series is ‘Anatomy of Destruction.’

Anatomy of Destruction

The type of society we inherited form our animal ancestors is built on group monopolization of the resources of a territory.  Everything inside the borders belongs to the group, to use to meet the needs of the group. The primary need of the groups humans we call ‘countries’ is war.  Resources help win wars.

As human intellect grew through evolution, people learned they could take advantage of this important relationship.  They could manipulate the structures of the war-driven societies to make personal profit raping the world.

The reforms discussed in this book will transfer rights that currently belong to the largest destroyers in the world (the entities called ‘governments of countries’ and their primary assistants in destruction called, ‘global corporations’) to the one entity that has the strongest stake in protecting the world, the human race itself.

We all want a healthy and sustainable world for ourselves and our posterity.   We just don’t have any tools that we can use to turn our collective desires into reality.  The first book in the series, Reforming Societies, explains tools we can create to empower the human race and make our desires important.

We can use these tools to change the structures that tie the right to make profits to destruction.

As the changes discussed in Reforming Societies happen, destruction will become less and less profitable.  Eventually, the natural forces discussed in the text box above will hold and it will not be profitable at all.

These changes will take time however.  We may not have the time, if we simply wait and do nothing.  We need to understand the forces behind destruction better if we are to take the necessary steps.  Anatomy of Destruction deals with these forces.  It shows how people have manipulated the system for personal gain.  It explains the tools they use and the way they trick us into thinking they are the good guys trying to make the world better so that the people who would oppose them if they understood what they are doing become their proud backers and help them rape the planet.  It shows what we can do to weaken the influence of these people and slow the rates of destruction while the reforms take place.

If we want to prevent extinction, we have to do a lot.

We have to change the mindset of the human race in ways that will get people to start working for the benefit of the human race rather than for the benefit of the specific territorial group (country) that claims they belong to that country.  We need to create tools that make it possible for them actually make a difference, once they have decided it is the right thing to do. We also have to keep the problems that threaten us under control for long enough for the structural changes to take effect.

I wish there were an easier way.

I wish that I had reason to believe there really is a all-powerful superbeing in the sky who will fix things if enough people mumble for it to do so.  I wish that wishes worked to fix problems.  But I don’t have any reason to believe these things. I know that I am a physical being that can affect the realities of the world around me by actually doing things. I know that there are eight billion other intelligent beings in this world who have this same ability.  I know my words can turn into their thoughts and these thoughts can help them come around to the above way of thinking.

I know this will be hard

But sometimes there is no easy way.

I hope you will take the time to understand the points of this the Preventing Extinction series.  It deals with unconventional ideas; this means that it isn’t going to fit easily with the things you were raised to believe about the way the world works.  It proposes that we evolved from primitive and barbaric animals and are only now barely gaining the ability to live as intelligent beings.  It proposes that the societies around us are not human societies, they are animal societies, built by animals and run in accordance with rules that apply to savage, barbaric, and totally irrational animals.  It proposes that there are tools we can use to transfer rights and powers from the entities that have all the power now (the entities we call ‘countries’) to the one entity that has the best interests of the human race at the top of its priority list:  the human race itself.  It shows how to do this and shows how you can help.

The books in the Preventing Extinction series propose that this is the only path that takes us away from the mess that evolutionary forces and our foolish ancestors have created and we are now in.

There are no other options.

No one is going to do it for us.  If we want it done, we have to do it ourselves.

Preventing Extinction

Book One: Reforming Societies Chapter One:  The Disease

If someone you love has tuberculosis, you can’t prevent her death by treating the symptoms.

You can give her suppressants to prevent the bloody coughing fits; you can give her ice baths to keep her fever from reaching the point of delirium.  You can do dietary analysis to determine the nutrients her body is losing and give her supplements, to reduce the amount of ‘consumption’ of her body’s resources the disease causes.

But the coughing, fevers, and consumption are not diseases and treating them won’t cure her.  These are only signs, symptoms, that tell us that there is something wrong with her body.  If you leave the underlying cause in place, she will die.  The disease will kill her.

The symptoms are not diseases.  They are the signs that tell us that we need to look for the disease.  Destroying them has no more effect on the disease than tearing down a road sign that ways ‘cross traffic ahead’ will have on the traffic.  It will still be there, you will won’t know it is there until it kills you.

If you want to save your loved one, you need to understand the difference between a ‘disease’ and ‘symptoms.’  You need to understand and accept that there is a disease.  You need to figure out the exact structural differences between her diseased state and the state she was in before the symptoms appeared, so that you can restore that state.

We were born into societies that have incredibly serious problems, including war, rape of the world around us, toxins pouring into the atmosphere in high enough amounts to change the climate, and immense poverty in the face of such incredible overproduction that governments around the world pay farmers not to produce and buy food, put it onto barges, and sink them to the bottom of the sea to balance supply and demand.  The problems seem like they are separate diseases.  They cause pain for the human race and will eventually cause death for our race. But they are not diseases at all. They are symptoms, signs that tell us that the ‘modes of existence’ or ‘societies’ now in place can’t meet the needs of our race.

The Game of War

Consider the most pressing problem:  war.  War is a not an unusual event that shocks us when it comes.  We don’t say things like ‘this society was functioning totally smoothly and without a problem until this crazy event happened; how could such a wonderfully designed system have such activities?

War does not shock us. We expect it.  We can see it coming years and, in some cases, decades in advance.  The events that lead to it are normal and natural parts of the systems we have around us.  Because war is so common, we follow events in ongoing wars almost as if they are plays in a giant team sports event.  The planet is divided for game play.  The teams are the entities we call ‘countries.’

How many teams are in this game?   Different record keepers have different numbers.  One widely respected keeper of statistics on the different teams is the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States (the CIA), which keeps a database on all of the entities the CIA considers to be ‘countries.’  The list contains 234 entries as I write this, but the number changes almost daily.

Many of the entities the CIA recognizes as countries, with recognized rights to play in the game of war, are not considered to be countries by most of the other record keepers. Kosovo, for example, is on the list and recognized by the CIA.  This country is entirely inside of the borders of another country, ‘Serbia.’ The Serbian government considers this land to be part of Serbia and claims it is not a country at all, but is an occupied part of the sovereign territory of Serbia.

The Serbian government has never recognized Kosovo as a country, and more than 100 other countries, including the great powerhouses of the world—India, China, Russia, and Brazil—do not consider Kosovo to be a country either.

There are a lot of examples like this.  In many cases, the teams are recognized, but the official league statistics that determine how much land each has conquered are in dispute.  Of the 234 entities the CIA recognizes as countries, 190 of them have border disputes:  they disagree with each other about which team has won certain territory. In many cases, there are wars inside their countries (often called, ‘civil wars,’ as if organized mass murder events could ever be called ‘civilized activities’) to resolve these disputes.

There are also a very large number of groups—estimated to be about 3,000—that claim to be unique nationalities with national identities and legitimate rights to be countries and play in the leagues.  They are fighting in various parts of the world to carve off the land that they claim belongs to their teams.   These teams will become ‘countries’ as soon as they have gained military control of land and official ‘recognition’ by the key keepers of league records.

Usually, these nationalist groups fail in their attempts to take land.  They are overpowered by the nation that currently controls the land they are trying to take.  The groups protecting the land call these groups ‘terrorist groups’ and try to destroy them, often using brutal methods.

Sometimes, the nationalist groups win.  They become new ‘countries.’  They then have to muscle themselves into the leagues with established players. Brutality can give teams an advantage in this sport and the new teams are sometimes so brutal that they can stun established players.  Some of them eventually become major players in the global sport called ‘war.’

From one perspective, it all seems arbitrary, like a bunch of gorillas fighting over rights to a patch of banana trees.  From another perspective, however, it is deadly serious:  these gorillas have nuclear bombs, ‘forever’ toxins that are far more deadly than any natural poisons and will kill and kill until nothing is left alive, and DNA altering weapons that can kill every living thing that has a certain protein.  They have billions of different kinds of bullets, each designed for a specific killing task, rockets that can send nuclear bombs into space to orbit the earth until needed, and submarines that can hide under the waves for years, each with the capability to destroy entire continents.

Organized mass murder is the strong suit of the ape-men that you see around you.  We understand it very well.  But there is giant hole in our understanding.  We don’t understand why we are drawn to this sport and why it is an all consuming obsession.  We don’t seem to have devoted any real thought to the aspects of the world that push what otherwise seem like intelligent beings to divide into teams, identify ‘territory’ that will be that team’s territory, then fight the members of other groups using the most powerful weapons and most deadly tactics they can find over silly things like the locations of the imaginary lines.

Perhaps if we knew how the system that the human race has now came to exist, we might be able to understand this.  What was the first time that people divided themselves into teams to fight over which team had the rights to each square inch of land on earth?  What were the forces that pushed them to do this?

Did certain people—at one point in the distant past—analyze different ways to organize society, decide that the team-based competitive model was the best option, and vote it into place?   If so, who were these people and why did they decide on this option?

If not—if there were no human engineers for this system—how, exactly, did this conflict based team sport that uses mass murder as its primary play come into existence?

I propose that we evolved from lower animals.  These animals organized their behaviors a certain way to adapt to the environmental conditions around them.  In some cases, nature needed these conflicts and created social organizations that were built on them.  I propose that we evolved from beings that had these social organizations.  The societies that we have around us now are not intentional creations of any being.  They are animal systems that are appropriate for animals but not appropriate for technologically sophisticated thinking beings with physical needs.

We inherited them. So far, we don’t seem to have taken the time to question whether we wanted this inheritance.

Let’s consider this issue now.

Let’s start with the basic operating principles of these societies, see why nature needs some animals to have societies with these principles, then look at the way it got passed down to us.

The Principle of Group Territoriality

All animals have instincts that make them want to survive.

This has to be true: if a species came to exist that didn’t have these instincts, it wouldn’t care for itself or do the things necessary to perpetuate its species.  It would disappear almost immediately.

In practice, some species survive, some perish.  Nature determines which will survive and perish by a kind of trial and error. The animals try different things to get the things they need and to create conditions that will allow them to reproduce and perpetuate their species.

Other animals (other than humans) don’t use logic, reason, and scientific analysis to figure out how to make this happen. Humans are the only animals that have the capability to organize thoughts intentionally.  The other animals have to use trial and error. Certain behaviors get them food but expose them to danger.  Others leave them safe but hungry.  They must find a balance.  Nature is not going to guide them through the process.  It rewards those who succeed with full bellies and babies that grow up to replace them, and punishes those who fail with death.

What works?

Different things work in different conditions.  Animals face different environmental conditions.  They must adapt their behaviors to their environment or they perish. In some environmental conditions, well-organized aggressiveness and murderous violence provides advantages. If the environmental conditions favor these behaviors, eventually some animals will for mass murder and violence. Nature will reward them with the grand prize:  they can continue to exist. They will have a niche in the environment as long as the environmental conditions remain the same and they remain the same.

Wolves provide a good example here.  Wolves live in areas where prey is abundant.  They organize t kill prey that are much larger than they are. Normally, they isolate their prey, chase them to weaken them, and then send in specialized killers (who have been kept in rested condition while the others prepared the victim for death) for the kill.  Then, they can all share in the feast.  The pack is large and a kill only lasts a single feeding.  They need to do the same thing every day.   They perfect their techniques over time and get very good at their jobs.

Wolves don’t just kill the species that they intend to eat.

They kill other wolves too.

Each territory can only support a very limited number of predators.  Each wolf pack has its own territory.  If the pack members let wolves who were not from their pack hunt in their territory, their territory wouldn’t have enough food to support their pack.

They need to keep outsiders out.

They do this in a highly deliberate and well organized way.  They create borders and mark them with scent markers from a special gland that has evolved to help them identify their territory.  (This tells us that the system required a very long time to develop; it takes a long time for new glands to evolve.)  The scent markers fade over time, so the members of the pack have to walk the borders constantly and replenish them, so outsiders can identify the places where they will be attacked if they enter.  If the wolves on border patrol detect outsiders (members of their species that are not members of their pack) that are moving in ways that indicate they may want to violate their borders, they organize attacks.

When they attack, they are fanatically aggressive and show no mercy whatever.  They kill and kill and kill.  They love their own puppies and will often give their own lives to protect them.  But they tear the puppies of their enemies to pieces if they find them.  They aren’t fair in their battles, attempting to create equal strength on the two different sides so have ‘proportional responses.’  They use any strategy they can to kill every last member of the packs that they see as threats.

They are doing battle against trained, skilled, and very well organized enemies.  They may not win.  If they lose, they will be killed and their bodies torn to pieces and scattered around the battlefield.  Of course, we don’t know what feelings and emotions wolves have, but we may anthropomorphize a little and speculate that there must be come chemicals their glands produce that cause them to have something similar to what we call ‘feelings.’ They don’t want to die.  (All animals must have a survival instinct.) They don’t want to feel pain. (Dogs clearly feel pain.)   They have worked their entire lives to gain social status in their packs.  If they die, all the effort they put into gaining status, preferential feeding and breeding rights, and preferential rights for places to sleep, will be wasted. They have loved ones, sisters, brothers, mothers, and others who depend on them for support.   If they are killed, they can’t hunt and provide for their pack members, including those they cuddle with at night.  All these feelings tell them to protect their own lives.

But another feeling tells them to make the sacrifice.  We might call this feeling ‘loyalty’ or ‘love of pack’ or ‘the dog equivalent of ‘patriotism.’  This feeling conflicts with their fear of pain and death.  Nature resolves the difference over time.  If animals can’t or won’t sacrifice their lives to protect the territory of their pack (if they aren’t patriotic enough), their pack won’t have a territory and will disappear.  Self sacrifice is a requirement of survival for wolf packs. They must put the needs of their pack above their own needs, or the pack will not survive.

Nature creates this loyalty (or patriotism or whatever we may call it), and makes sure it is strong enough to allow the pack to destroy its enemies, even if the great majority of the members have to die in the process.

It is important that you realize that there is no intention behind any of this.  Wolves don’t discuss their situation, decide that they need to go to war and make sacrifices, then talk among themselves to determine which of them will die and which will live.  Only humans have the capability to use intentional analysis and reason.

Wolves don’t do this. They do form into packs that are tightly knit and loyal.  They do divide themselves in ways that allow them to carry out different roles in a complex attempt to wipe out other packs in order to take their territory. They do sacrifice themselves for the good of the pack.  But they don’t do this because they have discussed the options and decided its what they want to.

Group Territoriality

Evolutionary researchers use the term ‘group territoriality’ to refer to the principle discussed above. The animals divide their population into groups, each of which has a territory.  Each group then secures the territory so the group can have exclusive rights to all the food and other resources it contains and produces.  (In human societies, we use the term ‘sovereignty over land’ to refer to the exclusive rights to it.  You could say the wolves are fighting to get sovereignty over land.)   Its members treat that land as if it belongs to them.  They treat it as if the some being above them (a god perhaps) made it for them and then gave it to them.

Evolutionary science is a young field.  We do know that societies evolve, but we don’t know much about the way this process works.  This is important information and I think it makes senses to get some ideal why our information on the way societies come to exist and change over tim—and information about evolution in eneral—is so limited.

Until very recently, the organizations that ran important events on earth and determined the things people were allowed to study didn’t want people to study or even think about evolution.  The people who run nations want their people to devote their time and attention to meeting the needs of the nation, including the need to gain advantages over other nations.  The people who run nations want people to be emotional about certain issues,  For example, they want them to accept that the people inside of other nations they want to fight are different than they are and don’t deserve rights or respect: they only deserve the most horrible death the good people of their nations can impose on them.

Logical analysis would tend to make people question these ideas.  If people were allowed to accept scientific information regarding where humans came from, the scientific perspective might spill over into the rest of their analysis.  The governments that need people to hate with white-hot passion and be willing to support organized mass murder will find it much harder to keep people from questioning the messages that are designed to create these feelings.

The government strategists prefer that people keep their hatred pure.  This is much harder to do when people use science regularly to answer important questions, including ‘how did we get here?’.

Many of the people who ran the entities that ran the nations simply banned all books in the field. These same entities, governments, determine what schools can teach children.  They didn’t allow this field to be taught.  Some went farther than this and put teachers in jail if they told young people that the field even existed.

Teachers didn’t like these rules . If people were doing research that gave us solid and scientific answers to key questions about how the world works, they wanted to be able to pass this information on to their students.  They fought the bans and eventually managed to get most of the laws against teaching the field overturned.

But they didn’t win a total victory.  The leaders of the governments could still do a great deal to limit the way the field was taught.  Schools couldn’t teach it the same way they taught fields like chemistry or physics, where students had to accept the scientific conclusions as facts to pass the tests and weren’t able to question them and still pass and get credentials.

.  When I went to school, I was told that evolution wasn’t really a science.  It was a ‘a highly controversial theory about how we may have possibly come to exist.’ I was told that there was a traditional view that had been accepted for thousands of years.  The traditional scientists studied these things and understood them.  New people come up with new theories all the time.  The term ‘theory’ is another word for ‘guess.’  Some people are guessing that the traditional ideas are wrong.  We need to consider their criticism very carefully before we reject it (This is like saying ‘we need to give the spy a fair trial before we shoot him;’ his guilt is presumed in advance and the trial was never anything but a sham to convince outsiders we are fair. The premise is that the ‘theory’ was a silly agues by some outliers that has been reected by all trustworthy scholars.)

Even in the 1800s, the science behind evolution appeared to be rock solid.  (Read Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ and ‘Desent of Man’ and you will see what I mean.  It is hard to find a single sentence in either of these books that might be classified as ‘controversial.’  Darwin presents fact after fact after fact, all of which confirm the premise.  His many critics could not present any facts to support their case, they could just read out of religious texts.)   During the 1900s, the evidence kept piling up. Every  new finding confirmed the premise.  None contradicted it.

In the 21st century, new technologies allowed scientists to read out the codes in DNA and print them out. They could do these tests on people, animals, plants, bacteria and viruses, including those that were currently living and those that had been dead for any time up to several hundred thousand years.

Scientists began doing research determine exactly how different members of the same species that lived at different times had changed genetically.  They determined there were very clear links that were obviously sequential.  This provided totally objective information about how different genetic variants built on one another to create change from one species to another.

This was mathematical evidence that evolution was working.  Scientists could apply standard mathematical tests to determine how likely it is that his data was caused by something other than evolution. In other words, they can determine the odds against evolution being a ‘theory’ that might be wrong.  They did these tests.  (For one example, see a formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry.) They found that it is simply not possible to explain the things we see in any way that is even remotely likely to be ccorrect unless evolution was happening.

The evidence mounted that verified evolution.  But the pressure to pretend this was simply a ‘theory’ that might pssibly be wrong, not a real science, remained until about the beginning of the 21st century.

At that time, the military became involved.  That changed everything.

Military planners thought that it might be possible to make weapons that could kill only certain designated individuals (those with specific DNA profiles) if the weapons makers understood genetics well enough.   This might not be possible.  But if it was, they couldn’t afford t let their enemies get these weapons first.  They had to make sure thehir own countries had well-traind scientists who could look at DNA analysis with the same objectivity that designers of nuclear bombs look at the quantum forces needed to understand nuclear fusion   They would have to be objective to make this happen   They have to accept that there are certain laws that determine how genetic changes happen over time, and these laws are just as solid as the laws of chemistry and quantum mechanics.  If they had been educated in schools that left them thinking that the prp0osed laws in this field were actually just silly theories, they wouldn’t have the right mindset to do this research.

People started to take the field seriously.  People can now look for relationships between animals and humans and study them objectively.   They can publish the data in respectable peer-reviewed journals.  If the results meet scientific standards, they are considered to be facts, not ‘controversial theories.’

All this happened very recently and, as I write this in 2024, is still in progress.  But new research is showing that the relationships between humans and other animals are not only not theoretical, they are extremely strong.  Roughly 99% of our DNA is a perfect mach with the DNA of chimps and bonobos, our closest surviving evolutionary ancestors.  The DNA determines our mental wiring and the way our brains work.  Our brains work similar to theirs.

A great deal more than our DNA comes from these animals.  We share many aspects of our societies with other animals.  We can see evidence of the transfer of societal structures between species the same way we see evidence of the transfer of DNA. If we accept that these societal structures were transferred, we can understand a lot about the realities of human existence that are very hard to understand if we reject this evidence.

We can gain an understanding of ourselves by studying other animals.

Many animals organize themselves around the principle of group territoriality.  Some higher primates organize their societies around this principle.  Those that do have extremely complex systems to determine which individuals will lead and which will follow, how they will organize their patrols, how they will mark and defend their territory, how the battles will take place, and who will benefit from conquests of territory when their group makes them.  People studying these activities in other primates are finding remarkable similarities to the way the same activities work in human societies.

Two Different Types of Primate Societies

Group territoriality societies actually need very strict conditions in place for them to exist. The can’t exist everywhere.  If the conditions aren’t right for them to exist, nature doesn’t let them exist.  Other societies will evolve that are better suited for the conditions.  The beings that organize to adapt to the environmental conditions will have advantages over those that use the unsuitable systems. Their societies may not be territorial or form into the tight-knit loyal groups that group territoriality societies need in any way.  In fact, they can work in ways that are basically the opposite, with the individuals sharing and caring and cooperating, all without conflict.

The group territoriality societies work best in what we may call ‘Garden of Eden conditions.’ Chimpanzees live in the most productive lands of tropical Africa.  They don’t have to work for their food.  It is all around them.  They simply reach above them and a ready-to-eat meal appears in their hands. This land is clearly worth fighting over.  Animals that don’t fiht over it will be removed by aggressive animals.  These animals will compete with others to control the territory and those that are better at fighting will win.  They will have the best areas.  Groups that don’t fight will not perish, but they won’t get the right to live in the best areas.

In the end, this led to a split in the species that are our closest evolutionary ancestors, called the ‘chimp-bonobo species.’

Lets look first at the way members of this species live in areas that favor the group territoriality societies.  The following quote is from a research study by the Institute of Human Origins at the Smithsonian Institution.

When male chimpanzees of the world’s largest known troop patrol the boundaries of their territory in Ngogo, Uganda, they walk silently in single file.

Normally chimps are noisy creatures, but on patrol they’re hard-wired. They sniff the ground and stop to listen for sounds. Their cortisol and testosterone levels are jacked 25 percent higher than normal. Chances of contacting neighboring enemies are high: 30 percent.

Ten percent of patrols result in violent fights where they hold victims down and bite, hit, kick and stomp them to death. The result? A large, safe territory rich with food, longer lives, and new females brought into the group.

Territorial boundary patrolling by chimpanzees is one of the most dramatic forms of collective action in mammals. A new study led by an Arizona State University researcher shows how working together benefits the group, regardless of whether individual chimps patrolled or not.

The team — led by Assistant Professor Kevin Langergraber of ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Institute of Human Origins — examined 20 years of data on who participated in patrols in a 200-member-strong Ngogo community of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda. The study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Chimpanzees are one of the few mammals in which inter-group warfare is a major source of mortality. Chimps in large groups have been reported to kill most or all of the males in smaller groups over periods of months or years, acquiring territory in the process. Territorial expansion can lead to the acquisition of females who bear multiple infants. It also increases the amount of food available to females in the winning group, increasing their fertility.

Chimpanzees are highly intelligent, but they aren’t capable of what’s called “collective intentionality,” which allows humans to have mutual understanding and agreement on social conventions and norms.   “They undoubtedly have expectations about how others will behave and, presumably, about how they should behave in particular circumstances, but these expectations presumably are on an individual basis,” Watts said. “They don’t have collectively established and agreed-on social norms.”

Humans can join together in thousands to send men into space or fight global wars or build skyscrapers. Chimpanzees don’t have anywhere near that level of cooperation.

“But this tendency of humans to cooperate in large groups and with unrelated individuals must have started somewhere,” Watts said. “The Ngogo group is very large (about 200 individuals), and the males in it are only slightly more related to one another than to the males in the groups with which they are competing.’

“Perhaps the mechanisms that allow collective action in such circumstances among chimpanzees served as building blocks for the subsequent evolution of even more sophisticated mechanisms later in human evolution.”

The field of primate research in vivo (in a natural setting) is new.  For most of history, researchers sent hunters to capture primates, put them in cages and move them to the research facility, then studied them in cages.  The first researcher to do any significant ‘in vivo’ studies was Jane Goodall.  She was the first to show that primates live a lot differently in nature where they have to adapt to their conditions to survive than they do if they are put in cages and fed every day.

Dr. Goodall has a website where she posts her important research and discusses issues related to in vivo studies of primates.  She focuses on chimpanzees.  She says that these animals need to be left alone if they are to survive.  Even traveling to watch them (as ‘eco-tourists’ do) changes the way they live in ways that place them more at risk.

She was the first to describe the behavior of the chimps in vivo, and the first to show how closely their behavior resembles the warlike behavior of humans.  When she first published this information, other researchers didn’t believe her.  (She had no letters after her name at the time, and credentialed researchers generally don’t take non-credentialed people seriously.)   They thought she was projecting:  she saw wars in human communities and wanted to make it appear they took place in chimp communities also, to attract attention to her work.  So, she made up stories of their wars.  Credentialed researchers started doing work to discredit her findings. They tried very hard to do this but couldn’t:  They found that her analysis was scientific and objective and she was describing things that were actually happening.

Goodall showed that the chimps live in what she calls ‘monopolizable patches’ of land in tropical Africa.  These lands are very rich and productive.  In these areas, the days are the same length and same temperature all year long: there are no seasons.  Fruit ripens each day.  The areas where chimps live are the richest of all.  They don’t have to hunt for areas where food may be and then gather it.  If they get hungry they reach out and dinner will be there, hanging on the tree beside them.

Chimp troops ‘monopolize’ their territory, which means they don’t allow any members of their species that are not members of their troops to benefit from the existence of anything in their territory.  Not all land can be monopolized, for practical reasons.  One example from her research shows why this is true:

The troop she has studied the most has a territory of about 2,000 acres.  There are about 150 chimps in this troop, including immature individuals (children).  The territorial border is about 7.5 miles long.  It takes the border patrol chimps about 4-5 hours to compete a circuit, if they don’t encounter any problems that delay them.  This leaves them enough time to go back to their homes, feed, groom, and even to take a bath if they want (chimps do this commonly).  If they live in a territory this size, they can do this every day.

Chimps are ‘homebodies’ as the Smithsonian quote points out.  They are comfortable when they are ‘at home.’  The land outside of their territory is unknown.  It is full of dangers  (That is where their enemies live.)  They are not comfortable when they are not at hime.

The chimps wouldn’t be go home every night if they lived in a larger territory.  If it takes more than ¾ of all daylight hours to do a patrol, there won’t be time to get back home, to feed, to take care of their personal grooming, and then sleep where they feel comfortable and safe.  They need to eat and keep themselves clean to remain healthy.  If they don’t have time to do the things they need to remain healthy, they aren’t going to be healthy and won’t be as good in fights as healthy chimps.  If they can’t win fights, they will be torn to pieces in the conflicts with their bodies scattered around the battlefield They would be less likely to keep their territory if they tried to control a larger territory.  Nature balances it out.  A certain territory works.  They have found the balance.

This 2000 acre territory produces enough food, all year long, year after year, to support 150 chimps. This is how many are in their troop. (The exact number changes of course, over time, but this is the average.)   The troop is at war constantly and a great many chimps die in these battles.  (This is one of the highest, and often the highest, cause of mortality in the subspecies.)   A lot of their members die.

But this works out for them.  They make just enough healthy babies to replace those killed in war and that die by other causes.  Over the long run, the birth rates inside the territory (the chimp ‘country’) match the death rates, allowing the population inside that county to remain stable.  Nature has found a way to create a subspecies that can live in a stable and sustainable way in these rich areas.  The organized mass murder keeps their population stable.

The Other Kind of Society (Bonobo Societies)

Bonobos have a different habitat than chimps.  They don’t live in areas they most fight to keep  They are cowardly:  If they find evidence of a border that might indicate a protected area, they run away. They live entirely differently than chimps.  In fact, they live so differently, that scientists never even considered that they might be the same species as chimps when they first studied them.   The chimps were murderous, politically and socially hierarchical, territorial, and organized for violent wars.  The bonobos were generous, kind, tolerant, and didn’t have any tendency to form into loyal groups or mark territory at all.

The following quote is also from the Institute of Human Origins at the Smithsonian.  It deals with the societies of bonobos:

Humans display a capacity for tolerance and cooperation among social groups that is rare in the animal kingdom, our long history of war and political strife notwithstanding. But how did we get that way?

Scientists believe bonobos might serve as an evolutionary model. The endangered primates share 99 percent of their DNA with humans and have a reputation for generally being peace-loving and sexually active—researchers jokingly refer to them “hippie apes.” And interactions between their social groups are thought to be much less hostile than among their more violent cousins, the chimpanzees.

Some, however, have challenged this because of a lack of detailed data on how these groups work and how they separate themselves. A new study led by Harvard primatologists Liran Samuni and Martin Surbeck on the social structure of bonobos may begin to fill in some of the blanks.

The research, published in PNAS, shows that four neighboring groups of bonobos they studied at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo maintained exclusive and stable social and spatial borders between them, showing they are indeed part of distinct social groups that interact regularly and peacefully with each other.

“It was a very necessary first step,” said Samuni, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Pan Lab and the paper’s lead author. “Now that we know that despite the fact that they spend so much time together, [neighboring] bonobo populations still have these distinct groups, we can really examine the bonobo model as something that is potentially the building block or the state upon which us humans evolved our way of more complex, multilevel societies and cooperation that extends beyond borders.”

Bonobos have been far less studied than chimps due to political instability and logistical challenges to setting up research sites in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the only place where the primates are found. In addition, studying relationships among and between Bonobo groups has been further complicated by the fact that subgroups appear to intermingle with some frequency.

“There aren’t really behavioral indications that allow us to distinguish this is group A, this is group B when they meet,” Samuni said. “They behave the same way they behave with their own group members. People are basically asking us, how do we know these are two different groups? Maybe instead of those being two different groups, these groups are just one very large group made up of individuals that just don’t spend all their time together [as we see with chimpanzee neighborhoods]

The chimp-bonobo species is one species.

But its members live in different environmental conditions.  They adapt to these different conditions and live in entirely different ways.

In one way, this makes sense.  All animals must adapt to their environmental conditions or they perish.  The practical realities of their environment make it impossible for members of the chimp-bonobo species that live in unproductive areas to act the same way they do in highly productive areas.  It costs a lot, in lives and resources, to mark off borders, patrol them, and then engage in wars to defend them.  If the resources aren’t there, they can’t afford to live this way and must find some other way to live.

The bonobos themselves didn’t figure anything out.

They didn’t have bonobo scientists evaluate the different ways primates could live, come up with the generous, tolerant, and cooperative systems described above, have an election, and decide to put it into place.  Humans are the only animals on earth that are capable of using intention to alter the realities of our societies. Bonobos don’t have this ability. There was no scientific analysis of options.  Different members of the chimp-bonobo species tried different things.  Nature then selected the members of this species who had successful strategies for survival in each area  It allowed them to live, while selecting those that chose wrong for death.

In conditions where tolerance, generosity, benevolence, and cooperation work better for a species than organized warfare, they developed tolerant, generous, benevolent, and cooperative societies.  In places where war was appropriate, they organized for war.

You and I were born into societies that were not designed for technologically sophisticated thinking beings with the ability to manipulate nature and change the way key variables of the world work.  They were designed (if we can even use this word) by nature in accordance with evolutionary pressure.

Our ancient ancestors evolved and gained intellectual abilities very slowly, over the course of millions of years.  At one point, they became smart enough to chip rocks to make axe heads and attach them to sticks.  At some point, they became smart enough to take advantage of fires that lighting or some other force started around them.  They eventually became capable of making fire and tending it.  At this point, the animals were so different than members of the chimp-bonobo species that they either couldn’t mate with them.  They were not in the same species.

In fact, once they got to this point (able to intentionally build and maintain fires) they lived so differently than their evolutionary ancestors that scientists didn’t even think they should be in the same genus.  They put them into the genus ‘homo,’ the same genus that includes modern humans.  They were our primitive ancestors.

They adapted and spread. Their societies adapted along two lines.  On line started with the animals used to being ‘homebodies.’  They wanted to have a territory that belonged to them.  They found areas they could defend and lived much like the chimps had lived:  they built borders, patrolled the borders, and had armies waiting in reserve to wipe out any threats to their territorial rights.

In other areas, the early members of the homo genus faced entirely different conditions.  They couldn’t mark off territory and defend it: it wasn’t practical.  They had to adapt to these conditions to survive. The people researchers call ‘denisovans’ are clearly well adapted for the lands that didn’t produce enough to the group territoriality societies.  We find their remains in remote areas of Siberia, Mongolia, and find their DNA in the genetic profiles of the people who came to be called the ‘Indians’ of the Americas.

The denisovans and their descendents (including the ‘Indians’ of America) lived under and adapted to different conditions than the groups that eventually conquered their lands on behalf of the entities called ‘countries.’

They built entirely different societies that had entirely different rule systems.  The systems they built are not perfect.  We would not expect them to be perfect, because, like the fanatically territorial systems that eventually took over, they evolved according to evolutionary principles.

Why Does This Matter?

This book, Reforming Societies, is about societal change. It is the first book in a three book series called the Preventing Extinction Series.  It explains the first steps that we must take if we are to avoid the fate that we can all see lies ahead of us: extinction.

Reforming Societies explains how we, the members of the human race and inhabitants of this little blue speck of dust called ‘earth’ can change from the kind of society that dominates the world now to a different kind of society.

We need to do this.

These societies are built on the principle of group territoriality.  Group territoriality societies are animal societies.  There is a place in nature for these societies. Animals that band together into groups, mark territorial borders, and use violent conflicts to prevent members of their species that are not members of their territorial group from sharing in the food supply of that territory, fill an important niche in the ecology of this world .

But group territoriality societies are not suitable for technologically sophisticated thinking beings.

We are a changed species, entirely different than the very first members of our genus that had these societies.  Nature does not allow species that can’t adapt to their changing circumstances to continue to exist.  We need to adapt or we will suffer the fate that nature has for all species that can’t adapt to changes: extinction.

Other animals would have to simply start trying things  Those who guessed right can survive.  But don’t have to use trial and error.  We can think through our situation and come to understand why we are here.  We can figure out the different paths through time that our ancestors (including the chimp-bonobo species) took to get us here. We can figure out what paths we would be on now if our ancestors had gained self-awareness earlier and figured out a plan earlier.  We can figure out which paths through time can lead to healthy and sound societies. We can figure out how to get from the path that we are on now to one of these paths.  Then we can use the tools that we have that no other animals have to get onto that path.

Reforming Societies

This chapter has two points that I want to get across:

First, I want you to realize that problems that threaten us now, and will soon destroy us if they continue, are not separate aliments or diseases in and of themselves.  They are symptoms, signs that are flashing at us in great big neon letters that tell us ‘SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THE SYSTEM WE LIVE IN.’

It is not possible to prevent our extinction by dealing with wars and destructive activities one at a time, while ignoring the underlying cause.  To try to do this will be as fruitless as trying to save a loved one with tuberculosis by treating each cough as a separate event and leaving the leaving the bacteria in place to consume their lungs and other key tissues. If we want to save ourselves, we have to understand that there really is something structurally wrong with the system we live in.  We need to figure out how it would work if it were healthy and how to change its form so that it works that way.

Second, I want you to realize that certain things that we are raised to believe are cast in stone are not cast in stone at all.  The system that we live in was not created by Jehovah, Allah, God, or a Great Spirit, something that would, if true, make it unalterable.  The system around us developed under the influence of forces that we can understand.

If we understand these forces, we can use them to make changes that will cause these dangerous societies to evolve in ways that eventually lead to healthy societies.

Our destiny is not in the hands of invisible beings with magic powers.

It is not in the hands of fate or karma.

It is in our hands.

Other societies are possible.

They can exist.

Our history tells us this is true.

How many different types of societies are possible?

How do they all work?

Are any of them able to meet all of the needs of the human race?

The information we get from the past doesn’t tell us this.  We need to figure it out for ourselves.  The information that we get from the past does tell us something important however:  it tells us that, if we do try to figure it out, we won’t be wasting our time.  The answers are there if we look for them.

The next chapter starts explaining different societies so you can see the difference between the societies we inherited and sound societies.

A Look Ahead

If you want to plan an journey, the first thing you must have is a destination.  You must know where you want to end up.

We need to plan a journey.

We need to get from ‘the conflict-based animal societies we inherited from our evolutionary ancestors’ to ‘societies that are organized so that they meet the long-term needs of a technologically sophisticated species of intelligent beings with physical needs.’

We can figure out ‘the best place to head toward’ using fairly objective criterion:  We can do an analysis of the different kinds of societies that are possible for beings in our category.  We can lay them out in a logical way so we can tell which are destructive and which are not.  We can then choose a system that is in the ‘non-destructive’ range as a ‘potential destination society.’  We don’t have to get this perfect because, as we are traveling, we can make minor course changes if we decide that a few differences will better meet the specific needs we have here on earth.  We need to understand this before we can even take the first step on our journey for a very simple reason:  We want to make sure, that when we head out on the voyage, we are not heading in a direction that will take us even deeper into trouble.

If your town is covered with ash from a volcanic eruption, you don’t want to run in a random direction, because that may take you directly into the volcano.

That is the first step.

We need to have at least a general idea of where we want to end up before we can start planning a journey.

Starting with the next chapter, we will look at the basic elements of a type of society called a ‘socratic.’  Socratic societies are built on alignment of alignment of interests:  They are designed so the interests of the individuals within society are naturally aligned with the interests of the human race as a whole. If people act in their own personal best interests (trying to get the most wealth they can for themselves) they do things that advance the interests of the human race as a whole (increase the total wealth available for the human race as a whole).

I propose ‘socratic societies’ as what you may think of as ‘preliminary destination societies.’  I propose we head in the general direction of societies built on principles that Socrates worked out and discussed several thousand years ago.  They are designed to meet the basic minimum requirements that sound and healthy societies must meet.

The journey will take time.

I will show that we can identify certain waypoints that can help us measure our progress.  The first of these is a type of society called ‘minimally sustainable societies.’  Minimally sustainable societies are societies that meet the minimum mathematical conditions for sustainability.  This does not mean they are sustainable, only that all societies that we pass through before we reach them are not sustainable and can never be made sustainable. When we reach the ‘minimally sustainable societies,’ we are at systems where it is possible for us to create conditions that lead to sustainability. In all societies we pass through before we get there, this is not possible.

When we get to the part of the book that deals with the journey we take from the societies we inherited to socratic societies, we will have to consider the pace of travel.

How fast should we go?

Whenever you are on a voyage, you have to decide what I more important to you:  do you want to get there as fast as possible, regardless of the cost?  Perhaps you want to get the maximum enjoyment from the trip itself, or keep the cost to the lowest possible level, regardless of how long it takes.  Most people trade these things off.  They don’t want the fastest possible trip (they can’t afford to hire a private jet, although it may be faster) and don’t want the cheapest or most scenic trip either.  They want something that gets them there in a reasonable amount of time at a reasonable cost.

The trip speed I will discuss is one that is fast enough to get there in a reasonable period of time but not so fast as to make the hardship of the travel greater than the rewards we will get from moving toward sound societies.  In other words, it is designed to make us all better off (or at least not any worse off) not just at the end of the trip, but at every stage along the way.  If it turns out that we decide, after we have started, we want to go faster, we can accelerate the changes.  (In the above sentence, the term ‘we’ refers to the human race, acting together as a Community of Humankind using the tool discussed later.)  If it turns out that we decide we are moving too fast, we can slow down.

The pace discussed will get us to minimally sustainable societies in about 30 years after we take the first steps.  Once we get there, we will be in a position to evaluate our situation.

We can look around us. Do we want to keep our destination the same?   Do we want to continue along the relaxed pace, or move faster or slower?

As time passes, we can consider these matters.  But before we will ever be in a position to consider them, we need to know there is a destination that can meet our needs (that a sound and healthy society is a possible society) and that it is possible for us to get from where we are to that destination in a reasonable way.

The next part of the book explain how a sound and healthy society works.  It starts out by explaining a hypothetical situation where a group of people is in the best possible circumstances to form such a society. You the reader will be in this group and I will be there too.  We will start from scratch, with no existing structures that restrict our decisions.  We don’t have to work within any rule structure:  we can make our own rules.  We also have all of the knowledge, skills, technology, background information, and tools that exist in the 21st century at our disposal.

We will be in the best possible condition to form a society, with all advantages and no disadvantages.

After we have examined the way such a society would work if it existed, we will change perspective. We will come to the 21st century, where we are now.  We can choose our destination, but we can’t choose our starting place:  it was chosen for us.  We aren’t in perfect conditions. Structures are already in place that do things that have to be done, but do these things in highly destructive and dangerous ways.  Some of these structures are not going to be part of our societies when we get to the end. We need to build new structures that do these same things, but do them in ways that do harm the community of humankind.

You will need a lot of information to really understand all of these things.  The basic ideas are entirely different than the things you learned in schools (which focus on teaching skills that help people advance the interests of their territorial groups, rather than the interests of the human race as a whole).  We are basically starting from scratch here in our understanding of the world.  We are changing our perspective:  Rather than look at the word as animals that join together into groups to defend territory, we are looking it as thinking beings trying to create sound and healthy societies for our future race. It is a long and hard road to get there.

The ancient proverb goes: the longest journey starts with a single step.  If we want to get there, we need to accept that we want to be on that journey and take that first step.

 Humans are incredibly capable beings. 

We have the best minds of any Earth beings by far.  We can direct our thoughts by intention.  If we want to solve problems, we can organize our minds almost like a computer.  We can create pictures with mental or physical graphs and charts showing cause and effects.  We can lay out all the forces that lead to the problems in a logical manner.  We can then figure out how to turn the forces that are acting against us to our advantage. 

We can then come up with kinds of tests that Albert Einstein called ‘thought experiments’ to verify our analysis. Our minds can imagine taking the steps logic tells us will work.  For example, if we want to address problems in society, we can imagine the way the forces within our societies will cause the people around us to react.  We can imagine which forces will cause positive reactions and which will cause negative reactions.  We can devise ways to channel negative effects back into the system in ways that turn them into positive effects.  If we have things figured out in our minds, and determined that some of the solutions we have figured out have a high likelihood of working, we can create real experiments to verify the effects of the thought experiments.  If the experiments verify that our approach is sound, we can discuss the options among ourselves: This is a unique ability that only humans have on earth:  we alone, of all Earth animals, can communicate complex ideas to others, create images in the minds of others that correspond to our own images, and turn one mind into two, two into four, and four into as many minds as exist on Earth and are willing to think about the problem. 

Then, if a large number of people understand the proposed solutions, and a majority want the problem solved, we can move forward and keep moving forward until we have found something that works. 

Humans are the only beings on Earth with these incredible capabilities.

We don’t always use them in every area. 

In some areas, we rely more in on emotions and feelings to help us deal with matters that have impact on our lives. For example, if we are attacked, we aren’t very likely to sit down, figure out the forces that impact the people behind the attack, determine what factors in their history pushed them to want to attack us, and go through whatever complex analysis is needed to determine what we can do about these factors.  If we are attacked, we immediately react with fear and emotion.  We want to stop the attack and, since we can normally only stop attacks by killing or disabling the attackers, our first impulse is to kill or disable the attackers.

When we see people around us do things that harm us, the people we love, and the world we depend on for our survival, we feel as if we are being attacked.  We feel incredible pressure to act quickly and do whatever is necessary to stop the attack.  We don’t feel it is proper, in such a situation, to undertake complex analysis of the forces that may be pushing people to act as they are acting, so that we may find a way to alter these forces and end the pressure to destroy.

However, if the dangerous and destructive behaviors have a complex cause, the initial angry or aggressive acts are not going to stop them. 

Our efforts to stop the problems with emotion and instinctual action are almost certain to fail.  This doesn’t end our emotional response however; it generally makes it even stronger.  There is instinctual pressure in all animals, including humans, to react to this situation a certain way:  we push still harder and with greater passion.  Like a badger trapped by a bear, we only hiss and claw louder. All our energy goes into force which gets stronger as the threat gets more severe.   Eventually, every bit of our mental capabilities are focused on the fight and there is nothing left for rationality. 

 

Socrates and Pythagoras

 

When in this state, we see any who ask us to calm down and be reasonable as adversaries:  they are asking us to back off from things we feel we have to do and they must, therefore, be working against us.  Our emotions tell us that backing off is giving up on all the effort we have put into the project so far and will give relief so that those who harm us can build strength and continue do even greater harm. 

We see the ones who propose that we actually use our immense intellectual capabilities—capabilities that only humans have—as enemies. 

We have faced destructive problems for a very long time. 

Many writers have tried to tell us that we are on the wrong track.  The great mathematician Pythagoras undertook an analysis of society and realized that it had certain flaws that led naturally to organized violence and destruction.  He claimed that if we understood these forces, and worked through the right processes to alter them, we could make changes that could reduce their force and eventually get rid of the destructive forces, ending the problems that result. 

Pythagoras’ ideas actually made people angry. 

We are supposed to be fighting, not thinking. 

The anger was so severe that he began to get death threats. 

People saw his ideas as so dangerous that, eventually, an angry mob locked Pythagoras and his followers (a large group of people who were attending a lecture Pythagoras was giving) in a building and set firs to it, killing him and everyone else inside.  Socrates took up the message and he too incited anger: Socrates was arrested put on trial for ‘corrupting youth.’  He was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed. 

Pythagoras and Socrates were doing what we now call ‘out of the box thinking.’ 

There are certain standard modes of thought:  ways that people are supposed to think.  Pythagoras and Socrates guilty of the crime that the leaders of the society Orwell described in his book ‘1984’ called ‘wrongthinking:’  they were guilty of using their own minds and not following the wisdom of the crowd.  This is the kind of thought that can’t be tolerated.  The people who run the societies now in place want us to approach problem-solving a certain way.  When we are attacked, they want us to react with fear and hatred:  we are supposed to buy weapons, organize armies, and attach back. 

This is the way we think everyone is supposed to react to problems.

If people think as Pythagoras and Socrates thought, they are dangers to all of us.  they are trying to decouple the individual from the standard worldview so that logical analysis can be possible.  They are trying to interfere in our attacking, delegitimize the attacks, and prevent the efforts of all of the rest of us from working.  They have to be stopped so people like Pythagoras, Socrates, and even John Lennon (who also thought outside of the box) have to be stopped.  If they refuse to stop while they are alive, as all of the above people did, they have to be killed. 

Pythagoras, Socrates, Lennon, and many others claimed that the problems that threaten us have complex underlying causes.  We can’t fix these problems by applying force to one particular area.  This is likely to cause a different problem that may end up being far worse than the original problem we were trying to solve. 

We need to calm ourselves. 

We need to sit back and take advantage of our amazing mental capabilities.  We alone can build mental models of complex systems (our societies are complex systems). We can see how the systems work, what inputs flow into them, how these inputs are processed, and what outputs are the result of this process.  We can work out the way each different alteration in the process will alter the outputs.  If a system produces outputs that include rewards that encourage people to destroy our world, we can work out ways to alter the system so that these forces are weaker and eventually disappear entirely.

This requires that we put aside our anger and fear and not immediately think of any attempt to push our thoughts toward rationality as an attack on those who have emotions (all of us). 

The emotions interfere with the logical analysis. 

We also need to be willing to do something economists call ‘abandon sunk costs:’ 

Economists find that people who start making an effort in a certain area feel great pressure to continue with the same approach, even after they find out it isn’t going to work.  They have paid costs, either by giving up their time, their skills and talents, or their money.  Economists call costs that have already been paid and can’t be recovered ‘sunk costs.’  There is something about the human mind that makes us feel pressure to refuse to abandon sunk costs and start fresh with a new approach. 

This is true even if we have unlimited evidence that the old approach can’t possibly work. 

So far, the emotional pressures on us and our mental ties to the methods of the past that are ineffective have been enough to prevent any real progress in areas where we may actually make a difference. 

But…

We, the members of the human race, have incredible intellectual capabilities.  We don’t always use them in every area.  Sometimes, this is simply the result of mental laziness: it is easy to react with anger and hatred.  It is hard to take our minds through the disciplined mental calisthenics needed to go in a different direction, particularly without someone to guide us into these new areas. It is particularly difficult for us to put our emotions aside and work through complex problems when we see irreversible harm being done to our world, harm that will make life worse for our children and their children and all future generations after them. 

But I propose that this is necessary.

We need to look at the big picture. We need to see that some finesse is required.  The problems that threaten us don’t exist in isolation.  Everything is connected and fits together.  The simplistic approach (identifying bad guys and attacking them) has been tried, over and over again, for as long as the structural problems that lead to the destruction have been a part of human societies. 

They have not worked so far.

Most of us realize that nothing has changed since the time of Pythagoras in this regard:  the approaches that have never worked so far aren’t going to suddenly and magically start working.  We need a different approach.  We need to understand that there is really no such thing as ‘wrongthinking:’  We have mental abilities and it is never wrong to use them.  We need to evolve and move forward. 

 

A Web of Consequences

 

Most of the attempts to solve destructive problems in the past have involved trying to get governments to pass laws and enforce them.  These laws are designed to use force to prevent people from acting the way the normal pressures of the societies we live in push us to act.  There are very practical reasons why this approach can’t have any real impact.

The people who work in government have many pressures on them; they need to balance out a great many tradeoffs to make the systems they manage operate. 

Many of the things they need come from the destructive industries.

For example, we happen to have been born into societies that divide the people of the world into different classifications or ‘classes’ that have different rights.  The largest class, called ‘the working class,’ gets none of the enormous bounty of the world.  In fact, its members get nothing at all unless they work.  (Other classifications of humans—or ‘classes’—get wealth without working from various sources, but this particular class does not.)  These people depend on work being available.  They only have their time and labor to trade for work and, if there isn’t any need for their time and labor, these people have no way to get food; they will die, even if the world is prolific and produces fantastic amounts of wealth. 

This leads to problems in many ways. One involves technology.  As technology advances, machines gain capabilities and can do more and more of the things that used to be done by human workers. If energy is produced by solar technology to extract minerals, which are then processed into finished products like cars, boats and televisions, and run the tractors over the land that plant and harvest food, and turn raw food into finished meals, then no workers are needed in any of these processes.  The people in the working class get nothing and die.  Governments realize this is a problem.  They know that they need to find ways to replace the workers that are naturally displaced by technology or the largest class of humans on this planet will suffer a great deal.  Since the working class people have to work (they can’t simply choose not to work just because there isn’t enough work for everyone in this class), they can only eat if they can take away jobs from other people by offering to work for less. This leads to lower wages (the competition drives wages down) but does not create jobs:  it just changes the particular people who are unemployed.  The ‘new unemployed’ (those displaced by others willing to work for less) will have the same problem and have to compete by offering to work for still less. Wages can collapse to a tiny fraction of what they were before (this has happened), leading to massive layoffs in the industries that still employ people, as they can’t sell their products. 

We will see that class-based societies (those that divide the human race into different classifications with different rights; not all do) are subject to horrific problems in this regard. If downward pressure on wages continues for more than a few months, the entire economy can collapse:  the stock market will crash (why invest in companies that can’t sell their goods because no one has money?).  Businesses close and business profits stop, taking away the income of the other classes of people within this system (they get money without working, but only if the factories and farms are operating and selling their goods).  Government revenues also collapse:  governments in this system depend on taxes on wages and profits.  If their income falls dramatically, and they can’t simply print money to make up the difference (something that can’t always be done), they can’t do anything to solve the problem. 

The people who administer the type of society that now dominates the world knows that this is an inherent problem of this type of society.  The system can collapse if jobs disappear.  Once this collapse has started and reached a certain rate of decline, the leaders know that only two things in history have every had any real chance of preventing the decline: 

 

1.  A global war.

2.  Subsidies on destruction.

 

Why do these things work?

Destruction is naturally labor intensive.  War is organized and intentional destruction on a massive scale.  Any number of people can be ‘employed’ in war:  If leaders want, they can simply put people out in the field with clubs, rocks, crossbows, or guns and have them kill each other. Each person killed is one more job opening.  (Industrial warfare creates more jobs than simple warfare:  the more complex the weapons, the more work is required to create them.)

It takes a lot of hard work to locate, frack, and pump the billions of cubic meters of natural gas burned each year to make electricity.  The same electricity could be produced by simply setting out panels in the sun. But it takes no labor whatever to produce electricity using the non-destructive method:  since nothing is destroyed, we don’t need a continuing stream of resources (billions of cubic meters of new gas) being fed into the system.

The majority of the people in the word are in a class we call the ‘working class.’

These people depend on work for their only income.  (As we will see, there is another class that doesn’t have to work for their income and get it in the form of ‘free cash flows.’  The working class doesn’t share in these ‘free cash flows’ however, and if there isn’t enough work, they have no income, can’t buy food, and die.) 

They are worried about getting enough to eat. 

They are worried about jobs.

When the governments are able to create jobs, whether it is by starting a war or providing a massive subsidy on fracking that leads to totally unnecessary destruction, the people in the working class see the governments as meeting their needs.  They need the things the governments are providing: jobs.  In many cases, people are aware we have the ability to produce pretty much everything we produce now without destruction using different processes.

But they also realize that, without the destruction, the jobs wouldn’t exist.  

 

How many jobs depend on destruction?

Just consider one example: the energy industry.  As we will see, we can easily get all the electricity we want for our industry and to run vehicles using solar photoelectric devices.  (The first working solar device was constructed in 1839, long before the fuel-powered generators were built; the stories we have heard of the technology not existing are simply not true.)  The fuel used for solar is ordinary sunlight, which falls to Earth whether or not we use it; the material we need to turn this into electricity is silicon dioxide, the most abundant and cheapest material on Earth. (About 87% of the part of the Earth we can get to, the ‘crust,’ is silicon dioxide.  This is another name for ‘sand’ and ‘rocks.’) 

But we only have a few tiny solar facilities, so small that they really don’t show up in pie charts.  The great bulk of the energy comes from burning fossil fuels.  If you understand how much we burn, you can see digging up these fuels provides jobs for many hundreds of millions of people globally.

Global use of fossil fuels totals about 174 billion pounds each day.  This is such a staggering number that it is hard to imagine it, so lets put it into perspective:  a standard class eight truck (the largest highway truck in use, commonly called an ‘eighteen wheeler’) has a load capacity of 44,000 pounds. If we put all of the fuel burned in one day into the cargo trailers of a fleet of class eight trucks, we would need four million trucks to hold it all.  If we put these trucks end to end, the line of trucks would be 50,000 miles long, enough to circle the globe at the equator 2½ times. 

This is the amount of fossil fuels that will be burned today. 

During working hours today, workers must extract enough new fuels to fill up another 50,000-mile long chain of trucks to cover tomorrow’s needs.  Each day after that, that the same thing must happen, as long as we use the destructive energy system.  About 350 million workers (more than the total population of the United States) are employed finding, digging for, pumping, and otherwise extracting these fuels, getting them to the transport systems, moving the fuels to the furnaces and other places it will be burned, and burning these resources. 

Non-destructive alternatives exist. 

But they are NOT labor-intensive. 

A switch to the non-destructive options would be very dangerous for the roughly 99% of the world’s population that depend on jobs for incomes.

 

The people in the government know that they have to create jobs and quickly.  As we will see, it is possible to create a very large number of jobs with only fairly minor subsidies on destruction, but only if these subsidies are combined with laws that make the non-destructive options too expensive to use.

The people in the government may claim to care.  They may claim to be the biggest lovers of the planet ever.  They may be telling the truth:  they may really love the planet with all their hearts.  But love of planets doesn’t create jobs.  They have an economy to manage.  They know that destruction creates jobs.  Perhaps some of their people (particularly the young ones) will accuse them of hypocrisy and claim they really must not care about the world as they claim.  (How could they destroy as they do if they really did love the planet?) But the others (the parents of the idealistic young people), the ones who need jobs, will realize that the people in the government are doing what they have to do.  The people in the government will have their lobbyists create laws that create the appearance of protecting the environment, but actually do the opposite.

Imagine what the workers of the world would think of this: 

Say a group of benevolent aliens were passing by in a spaceship.  They saw us destroying our planet and wanted to help.  They beamed solar panels down to the roofs of all of the homes of the world so everyone would have free electricity, they hooked up our hydroelectric systems to be pumped storage so we could store excess electricity during the day for use at night, and they converted all of the cars and other vehicles of the world to electric power so they could run on this free electricity.

Tomorrow, we won’t need the 174 billion pounds of fuel.  No one wants it and no one is willing to buy it:  why pay for fuel to burn to get energy when you get energy for free? What will happen to the 350 million people who lose their jobs?  These people will try to get jobs from people in unaffected industries the only way they can:  by offering to work for less than the people now working.  The employers will accept their offers and wages will fall for those who have jobs.  But this won’t do anything about unemployment:  there will still be 350 million people without jobs who need them.  They will compete the only way they can, and wages will fall further.  As wages fall, the people who have jobs will start to worry about security and slow their spending: the hundreds of millions of people who lost their incomes will panic and spend only the absolute minimum they need to stay alive, and total spending globally will collapse.  Stores can’t afford to stay open due to a lack of demand and lay off their workers.  Factories won’t be able to produce things they can’t sell and will close.  The entire economy will collapse.  (This is essentially what happened in the late 1920s and 1930s in the event called the ‘Great Depression.’)

People care about the world. 

But they know that the societies we live in are designed in such a way that they can’t function if they have high levels of unemployment.  As long as we use the destructive processes, we will need hundreds of millions of people scouring the world for new things to dig up and destroy.  There are a lot of jobs that wouldn’t exist if not for the destruction. 

When these people complain to their governments about the destruction, they are careful about what they say. They want to say something that allows them to make the claim that they are trying to fix things (or at least care about the problem), but they don’t want to go too far and possibly end up with policies that really are designed to end the destruction. 

They really don’t have to worry about this, however.  Governments have a great many needs that the destruction helps them meet.  They aren’t going to do anything other than make token gestures.  They aren’t going to do anything about the problem.

 

Another Aspect of the Same Problem

 

Class-based societies have another need that can’t be met without destruction:  they need weapons.  These societies divide the human race in various ways and give the different groups different rights.  One class gets special rights that the other class does not get.  This class will need to set up a complex system of rules to allow them to continue to get their rights, so the others don’t take these rights away.  They can’t do this as individuals:  they need to form together into groups, set up a system that allows them to take wealth, and build police and military forces to protect their rights.  (We will see that there are societies that work differently and don’t have these needs.  But we were born into societies that have these needs and, if we want to design systems to deal with the associated problems, we need to accept this framework.)

In our world, this is accomplished by dividing the world into the entities that we were raised to call ‘countries.’  Each of these countries establishes its own rules to protect the people with special rights.  The leaders of the countries know that if they can ‘conquer’ other countries, they can appropriate the wealth of the people in these other countries and use it to benefit the people who their rules protect (the people in classifications that get free wealth, or the ‘upper classes’). Of course, the people in the other countries won’t want to be conquered.  (Perhaps some of them would be happy to be conquered as they think that the conquerors will treat them better than their current rulers, but the people in the upper classes definitely don’t want to be conquered.) They build militaries to protect themselves and their property.  Generally speaking, militaries with more powerful weapons have advantages over militaries without these weapons, so the people who run these systems have incentives to work hard to get the most powerful weapons they can make.

The largest countries of the world have enormous areas to protect and face adversaries with nuclear bombs. They will not be able to defend the rights that they claim unless they have at least as great of destructive capabilities as their adversaries.  If the other guys have nuclear bombs, they need them too. 

To make nuclear bombs, they need nuclear reactors.  (The key ingredient in standard nuclear bombs is plutonium; plutonium does not exist in nature and can only come to exist in nuclear reactors.)  Nuclear reactors are incredibly destructive, even when operating normally: they require fuels that can’t be made without destruction, generate waste that will remain dangerous for half a million years, and emit radioactive iodine and other very dangerous materials in normal operations.  If something goes wrong, it has the ability to lead to unimaginable destruction and death. (Prior to the Chernobyl meltdown, nuclear engineers claimed that this particular type of reactor was totally safe and could not melt down no matter what happened.  When it blew up and the radioactive debris melted into a ball, which created a nuclear reaction, they realized that they had made a mistake in their calculations.)  The people who run the countries need nuclear bombs and can’t make them without massive nuclear power facilities.  They are going to do anything they have to do to make sure these facilities exist, no matter what they have to do to make this happen. 

We didn’t choose our history. We happened to have been born into societies with certain structural problems and needs that can’t be met without destruction.  If we want to fix the problems that threaten us, we need to accept that we are where we are, not where we want to be.  We need to accept that the various aspects of the societies we inherited are woven together and we can’t simply take a sledge hammer to the things that are bothering us and expect that we can take out the parts we don’t want without affecting anything else.  We need to understand that we are working on a complicated mechanism and have to consider the way the things we change will alter the mechanism as a whole. Sometimes, when you are working on a house, you have to prop up certain structures so they don’t fall down when you remove the parts you want to replace and put in new systems. 

I think the main reason that attempts to eliminate the destructive problems have not been successful is that the people have not taken the time to figure out the way the structures of our societies fit together.  Everything is a part of a large system.  We can’t always fix a flaw in a complex system by getting a hammer, gun, or other tool of destruction, and destroying it. 

I like to use the death of George Washington as an example to show how trying to fix one thing without first coming to understand how everything fits together can cause catastrophic failure that can destroy everything:   

Washington died from anemia:  he bled to death.  The problem started with a fever.  Washington had gone out for a walk; it started to rain and he wasn’t dressed for it.  He came back soaked.  A few days later, he developed a fever.  At the time, people didn’t realize that fevers were a part of a network of integrated defenses that the body uses to deal with pathogens.  (We know now that most fevers are caused by infections by ‘disease causing agents’ called ‘pathogens.’  Most pathogens can’t survive temperatures of more than about 104^oF.  The body is generating a fever on purpose:  it is trying to kill the pathogens so the body can remove them. Attempts to treat fevers, say by blood letting or immersing the body in ice, defeats the body’s defenses and prevents it from dealing with the cause of the fever.)  Doctors treated fevers by letting out blood, which they claimed was the source of the heat. 

At first, Washington didn’t want to call a doctor for such a minor complaint, so he had his overseer cut open his veins and remove a pint of blood.

This didn’t help.  His fever got worse.  He called his doctor who decided that the overseer had simply not released enough blood:  he let out another pint.

The fever continued. Washington’s doctor called in a team of specialists.  They thought other bodily fluids might be creating the heat, so they gave him enemas to induce diarrhea and diuretics to induce vomiting.  This didn’t reduce the fever, so they let out another pint of blood. Now they were desperate.  None of the efforts to remove the source of the heat had had any effect.  They decided they just weren’t doing enough.  (The same is true for environment activists:  it never seems to occur to them that attacks on the individuals responding to the realities of societies are not going to help.  When these attacks fail, they think they just weren’t being aggressive enough.)  The doctors consulted.  They said they would have to take drastic measures.  They told Washington that the fever might win and instructed him to make preparations to leave this world.  Washington made out his will and called in his loved ones to say goodbye. The doctors let out another pint of blood and Washington passed away a few minutes later. 

This example illustrates a point. It is true that removing blood causes a fall in the body’s temperature.  If you think the fever is the problem, removing blood will help. But the fever is not a disease and not the problem.  If you want to prevent the death of the patient, you have to go deeper 

We can’t solve complex problems with simplistic measures.  If a system is a part of a complex whole, we need to understand the whole thing.  We need to understand how the various parts of it work.  If a system causes some sort of problem, we need to understand the anatomy of the problem.  We need to figure out how each of the structures involved works, how each interacts with the others, and what we must do to the system as a whole to fix the problem without harming the system itself. 

People trying to treat a human body need to understand that the human body is a complex mechanism.  Everything fits together and each part relies on many other parts.  If you act hastily and attack a single part, you may well cause other problems that are far worse than the problem you first tried to solve.  Most experts today believe that if Washington had lived in modern times and had access to modern medical techniques, he would have survived. They would have found the root cause of the problem (many things can cause a fever) and dealt with it.  They almost certainly wouldn’t have even tried to treat the fever itself; they would have focused on the bacteria, virus, ulcer, injury, or whatever it was that caused the fever.  After they fixed the root cause, the fever would have gone away on its own.

We will see that the destruction of our world is not really a disease of the human race, it is actually a symptom of a deep malady in the foundational elements of the societies our ancestors created and put into place.  We can’t deal with it unless we know how everything goes together and how everything fits.  We need to understand that human societies are, in many ways, like human bodies: they have a lot of complex parts that work together in complex ways.  The superficial approaches we take now are very much like the superficial approach that Washington’s doctors took:  blood is warm, releasing it makes it cool, so they thought that the best way to fight a fever is to get rid of that hot blood.  They didn’t look deeper.  We face the same problem when trying to solve the destruction. 

The systems that lead to destruction in the world around us are quite complex.  The people who set them up did so for reasons that we can understand. If we understand the way these mechanisms came to exist, the way they work, the way they affect other variables, we have a place to start when looking for solutions.  If we aren’t willing to take the time to do this, we must rely on methods that are totally superficial, have been tried many times in the past and have not had any measurable impact on destruction for all of history, and that logic and reason tell us are not going to magically start working now.

This book is about the anatomy of a complex set of structures that is behind the destruction of the world around us.  It shows how and why these structures came to exist, how they came to work as they do now, and exactly how they work now.  It provides the information we need to figure out what would happen to the system as a whole if we made various different changes to these structures. We will see, as this book progresses, that there is a general pattern to each of the progressions of structures. The people who create them mean well: they start with an attempt to solve a problem or meet a human need.  The structure they created to solve this problem then evolved in ways that led to other problems, and then they tried to solve them.  If they had understood the system as a whole they would have realized that they made mistakes early on that they could have avoided. 

A great many of the relationships discussed in this book are much easier to explain with examples.  Most of the examples involve the energy industry. A lot of this book focuses on destruction caused by energy production.  We will examine the structures behind this particular problem in great detail, showing why they were created, how they evolved, and the general pattern of evolution. 

But energy is just an example. After we look at this particular problem and see how it works, we will see that the same structures that lead to destruction in the energy field operate in all areas where destruction exists. If we understand the way this particular industry channels in destruction, we will be able to interpolate from that to understand the big picture. 

We will see that none of the structures that cause harm were designed to cause harm.  In fact, they were originally intended to solve real problems and meet real needs.  But there are forces within the societies that we inherited from past generations that turn them against us.  If we understand these forces, we will see that we really do have tools that we can use to make changes that reduce the severity of many of the problems and, in some cases, solve them entirely, without causing the death of the patient or some ailment that is even worse than the original.

 

The Possible Societies Series

 

This book is a part of a series called “The Possible Societies Series.’  The analysis started when I started to wonder about and look for information about things that I thought were important.  I couldn’t find the information I needed to understand these things, so I had to work it out myself.

I could clearly see that the world around me had horrible problems.  War was a constant event, so constant that we take it for granted and accept it passively.  The risks associated with war increased with every passing year as technological advances led to improvements in the tools that the militaries use to kill people and destroy the facilities that their enemies might be able to use to fight more effectively.  Destruction was going on at an ever-increasing rate all around me.  The organizations that I was raised to call ‘governments’ of the entities I was raised to call ‘countries’ were involved in truly horrible activities, including genocide and the diversion of incredible amounts of wealth that could benefit the human race into activities that clearly harmed the human race. 

I could see that people had been trying to solve the problems for thousands of years.  But their efforts hadn’t changed anything structurally about society.  It was as bad as it had ever been. 

The efforts that had been made in the past to fix the problems of society appeared to be superficial.  You could equate them to trying to cure a disease by treating the symptoms.  There were structural problems.  I thought that a good place to start would be to figure out if we humans were even capable of organizing ourselves differently.  Are their different societies that are possible?  Are any of these different societies less destructive and less violent than the ones we have now?   If there are differences in these areas, what are the specific structural elements that are responsible for the differences?  Would it be possible for these structures to work in ways that don’t produce the dangerous problems at all?  Are sound human societies even possible?  

Specifically:

 

1.  Is it possible, from the broadest possible perspective, for a group of beings with the general abilities and limits that humans have to organize themselves in sound ways?  Are sound societies of intelligent beings with the ability to think on a conscious level even theoretically possible?

2. What characteristics would a society have to have to meet the basic needs of the people in it that the societies we now have do NOT have? 

3.  If such a society is possible, is it even possible for humans to get there?  In other words, do we—the members of the human race—control variables that we could use to get to sound systems, or are the variables that have to change beyond our control? 

4.  If it is possible for us to get to sound societies, how much time will it take?  We are currently in a very dangerous situation that is getting worse at a very rapid rate.  If we know what must be done (again, from a very broad perspective), and want to do it, would we have time to get the key structures changed before the realties of the societies now in place destroy us?  If we think we may not have enough time, are there things we can do to give ourselves more time?  In other words, are there steps that we can take right now that will reduce the rates of destruction enough to give us time to make the structural changes that need to be made?

 

I eventually found that these questions all had positive answers. 

If these questions did not all have positive answers, it would mean that we are doomed as a race.

If the answer to the first question is ‘no’ it means more than that:  it means all beings with intelligence, the ability to think on a conscious level, and the other characteristics that we have that separate us from other animals, are all doomed.  They will all destroy themselves shortly after they gain the ability to do so. If there is no such thing as a sound society for such beings, their evolution is a mistake that nature will always correct by simply letting them destroy themselves.  It means that we are a mistake of nature and we were doomed before the path that led to our evolution ever started and our inevitable extinction is just as meaningless as our existence.  

But the answer to the first question is ‘yes,’ and there is hope.  There is an answer out there.  All we have to do is look for it.

The second question then follows naturally:  what specific characteristics would a society need in order to be sound that our current societies don’t have? This is a technical question that requires technical analysis.  To answer it, we must think as engineers:  what are the components that make up human societies?  How do they work independently and how do they fit together?  What are the different things that can vary in societies?  What aspects of societies are variables (things that might exist in some societies and not in others, or exist to different extents in different societies) and what aspects of societies are fixed, unchangeable, and identical in all societies that any race of intelligent beings may have anywhere in the universe? What, specifically, will be different about the resulting society if each of the things that can be varied is changed in each of the ways it can be changed?  What are the ‘settings’ of these variables that lead to the problems (in other words, how are they ‘set’ now) and what are the ‘settings’ that would be necessary to not have these problems? 

If we can get a ‘yes’ answer to the second question, the third question again follows naturally: 

Can we get there from here? 

Our ancestors made certain decisions and created societies with structural problems.  What tools do we have at our disposal to fix these problems? If we know what exactly has to be different to create sound societies, are there variables that we—the people of the planet Earth—control that would allow a transition from the societies we inherited to sound societies?  If we want to understand this, we need to understand the specific structures that lead to the problems; we need to understand how, why, when, and where they were created.  We need to understand the interactions between these structures and other structures that are necessary for us to meet our basic needs.  We basically need to do mental analysis to create a kind of map of history, one that shows the decisions made at each point, the path that these decisions put us on, and the different paths that we would have been on if our ancestors had made different decisions.  Then, once we know these things and have identified a path as ‘a sound path into the future,’ we need to know if there is a way to get from the path our ancestors chose for us to this other path with the tools that we have at our disposal. 

The first three questions involve what we may think of as ‘big picture’ issues. 

How did we get into our current situation?  What exactly is our current situation?  What if our ancestors had made other decisions:  how would our world work then?  Are there any ‘ways the world could work’ that would be better for us and give us the ability to solve the problems that threaten us?  Is it possible to get to one of these better worlds? If we can get ‘yes’ answers to all of these questions, we must accept that the people who claim we are doomed and that there is no reason to even try to save ourselves are wrong.  We are not doomed, at least not necessarily.  If we are willing to use our incredible intellectual talents for things other than figuring out how to win wars and get more of the pieces of paper with numbers on them called ‘money,’ we really do have hope.

The first two books of this series, Forensic History and Preventing Extinction, are about the big picture issues.  They present the information needed to answer the first three questions.  But the fourth question is not really about the big picture.  Do we have time?  We are currently in a very dangerous situation.  The problems around us are very serious and are growing more serious at a fantastic pace.  If we do have time, or leave our descendants time, to deal with the big picture issues, we need to start the analysis of one issue immediately. 

We need to understand the anatomy of destruction.

Some of the problems that we currently face are growing at such a rapid pace that they threaten to have impacts that may well destroy our entire race within a few decades.  Even if these problems don’t actually destroy us, the cumulative effects of large numbers of destructive acts, like climate change, may well kill billions of people and throw us back into conditions where most of the tools that we now have (in the relatively stable conditions of 2020) are not going to be available.  We can’t just focus on the big picture and the things that, if changed, will eventually lead to a sound society.  We also have to be willing to provide some sort of treatment that will give the people who will come after us the space and time that will be needed to make better societies a reality.

This book is about gaining this time.

As I pointed out above, I believe that the answer to all four questions is positive.

It is possible for intelligent beings to organize themselves in reasonable and sound ways.  Humans are in this category and these options apply to us, just as they do to any race of beings with the same general capabilities anywhere in the universe.  We can understand the specific structures that such a society must have that the societies that we have now do not have.  We can see exactly how these structures work individually and how they fit together to make a complex unit.  We can compare ‘sound societies’ to ‘the societies we have inherited from past generations’ point by point, and then come to understand the exact differences.

This will allow us to understand what we must change.  We can understand this, and we have very effective tools that we can use to make these changes if we want to do this.  It is possible, at least from a theoretical perspective, for the human race to survive.  This information is presented in one of the ‘big picture’ books in the series, Preventing Extinction. 

The changes are possible.  But if we decide to make them, we will not be able to wave a magic wand and have them suddenly appear.  The societies that we have now are extremely complex and we all depend on their structures to for various aspects of our lives.  Many of the structures we depend on are highly destructive but even if we could get rid of them instantly, we wouldn’t want to do this.  We depend on these destructive structures:  we need to phase in replacement structures and phase out the destructive ones so that we can continue to have the things that they produce. This is going to take time. 

If we know exactly what must be done, we can make pretty fair calculations for the amount of time it will take.  Preventing Extinction goes over the numbers and shows that, after we start the transition, we will need between 30 and 40 years for the system to reach the minimum conditions needed for sustainability.  (A society that destroys more than it creates is not sustainable:  it is not possible to destroy more value than is created forever.  A society that destroys no more than it creates is what we may call a ‘destruction balanced) society:  it is not non-destructive and destruction is happening, but the destruction is balanced by the combined effects of human mitigation programs and the breakdown of destructive byproducts by nature.  It does not meet the strict requirements needed to be indefinitely sustainable, but it will give us time.  I will show that we can get to this type of society in somewhere 30 and 50 years after we create the initial structures the new system needs.

Once we get to ‘destruction balanced societies,’ we can keep going.  After that, we can reach totally non-destructive conditions within another 70 to 100 years. 

This is a lot of time. 

Do we have this much time?

I think that, if we extend current trends into the future, it will be a very close call.  However, if we can change the trends, we can gain considerable working space.  We can increase the odds of us having this amount of time considerably.

This kind of analysis is entirely different than the analysis of the other two books in the Possible Societies series.  These other books deal with the big picture:  is it possible for the human race to survive?  If so, what are the exact steps required to make it happen?  Can we take these steps, eventually, given enough time?   In other words, it is possible for the human race to prevent its own extinction?

I claim it is.

The next question is this:   Is it practical for the human race to take the required steps? Part of this question involves an analysis of time.  Our race has grown into a very dangerous society type and the majority of the people of the world depend on its structures, in some way, to survive.  (The need for jobs is an example and the need for war and destruction to create jobs, when there is no other practical way to create them, shows the difficulty.)  If we want to get to survivable societies, we need to consider the balances.  We need to meet the needs of the present while preparing for the future. 

I don’t claim this will be easy. I only claim that it can be done. As a part of the practical analysis, we need to understand the structures of the societies we inherited (the ones now in place) that force us to encourage and foster destruction.  We need to understand the specific elements that push against changes that would reduce and eventually eliminate the destruction.  We need to understand who profits from destruction, how they profit from it, why they profit from it, how the structures that send profits to destroyers were first created, and what keeps them in place now.  We need to understand, again, the anatomy of destruction.

The other books in the series go into extremely complicated topics that most people never give a great deal of thought to.  They deal with the mattes that Pythagoras, Socrates, and John Lennon tried to get us to think about, including the idea of a world with no countries, no authoritarian religions, with a brotherhood of man (I prefer to think of it as a ‘community of humankind’) finding some way to organize the sharing of the wonderful things this incredible planet provides for the human race in some way that benefits the human race and moves us toward a better future with each day that passes. 

This book, Anatomy of Destruction, is the last book in the series that I wrote. When I started this book, I already had a good understanding of the large-scale structures within certain societies that can push them toward destruction, because I had worked out the principles of societies without these structures and could compare them.  I also knew what would be needed to create what we may call ‘hybrid societies,’ meaning societies that would incorporate the progressive forces that are a part of the societies in place now along with the structures fostering sustainability that were a part of other structures that existed in the human past.   (The societies of the pre-conquest American native people, for example, had certain structures that allowed the people to live in very sustainable ways for incredibly long periods of time.)   I could therefore figure out what specific differences would push the structures of the societies we inherited in the right direction, without taking away their ability to do the things we will need them to continue to do until we have replacement structures in place. 

This book moves from these abstract issues to extremely practical ones.  It focuses on the specific structures that push toward destruciton in our world today, giving names of the people who worked to create these structures and put them into their current form, dates that key changes were made, and the way the people who benefit from destruction keep the structures in place, in spite of natural forces pushing very hard to end destruction. 

 

A simple example: 

Solar energy is literally free:  no one has to pay for sunshine and the panels that convert it into electricity don’t wear in use and therefore will hold their value forever.  I have produced all of the electricity I used for free over the last 30 years. 

Why doesn’t everyone do this? 

As we will see, some very clever people run the power systems now in place and they have created some very ingenious tools to make sure the destruction keeps going. (Monopoly utilities, for example, with corporate structures that cause them to make more money if they destroy than if they don’t, massive government subsidies on fracking, mining, drilling, and other destructive events, hidden but very real penalties and restrictions on solar, and the organized purchase of patents on new solar technology followed by the absolute prohibition on its use, to name a few.) 

If we want to move toward a world that has survivable conditions, we need to understand these tools that people are now successfully using to prevent these conditions from existing, so we can know how to create tools of our own to make what we want happen.

 

This book is about practical matters.

I know there are a lot of other books about how to save the environment.  I have read a great many of these books, however, and I have seen a common thread in them that you aren’t going to find in this one:  they focus on emotions.  They want people to feel deeply about the destruction and dwell on the emotional aspects, the harm to things that are beautiful and irreplaceable,. and the horrors of watching people suffer and die from the destructive events.  But they don’t go into the method.  They don’t explain how the underlying structures of the societies we inherited from past generations basically force us into a corner and make us support destruction, by creating far worse problems when we try to end the destructive problems than the problems we are trying to solve.  They don’t go over the complex interactions between jobs and societies that divide the world into the entities we call ‘countries’ and organize around a kind of game where the different countries compete for special rights to the things the world produces using propaganda and indoctrination (to make people willing to devote their lives to the support of what Eisenhower called the ‘military industrial complex’) and competition that frequently takes the form of organized mass murder.  I wrote this book to explain the issues that the normal genre of books about creating sustainability don’t seem to address.  I try, as much as I can, to leave emotions out of the picture.   We all know about the pain and suffering, we all know that the beauty and majesty of nature is disappearing, we all know that children are suffering from leukemia and dying from emphysema due to the pollution.  What we don’t know is what practical steps can be taken to cause the rates of destruction to fall, eventually to zero. 

That is what this book is about.

I have put this book together so it can stand alone, meaning that it won’t be necessary for you to understand the discussions in the other books of the series to understand the points here. It helps to have the other information because that will allow you to see that we really are working with a very complex structure that has a very serious disease. 

We can cure the disease.  But this disease produces symptoms that are so severe that they will destroy the patient (us) if they are not also treated.  This book is about treating the symptoms.