Chapter Two of the book focuses on establishing a monetary system for the new society in "Pastland." The survivors decide to use U.S. currency found in the ship's casino safe as a form of rice certificate, with each dollar representing one pound of rice. This system is implemented to facilitate the distribution of the harvested wild rice, which totals 3.15 million pounds.

The text explains the practical aspects of living on the stranded ship, including how the survivors manage power, water, and sanitation. It also describes the bountiful wild rice ecosystem they've landed in, highlighting the opportunity for humans to harness this natural abundance.

The chapter sets the foundation for exploring how a new economy and society might function, using familiar monetary concepts but applying them to a "blank slate" situation.

2: Money

We will look at several different types of societies in this book, based on different premises.  It will be much easier to understand the flows of value and the incentives these flows of value create in societies if they use money for transactions, so I want the group to have money basically from the start.

Kathy tells us that she expects to harvest 3,150,000 pounds of rice.  This will be an enormous amount, more than 1,500 tons of rice.  After the harvest, it will be very hard to distribute the rice among our members as physical rice.  If we had some sort of paper certificate that represents ownership of a certain fixed amount of rice, say one pound for each certificate, we wouldn’t need to weigh out rice to each person, many times over the course of a year, in order to distribute it.  We can distribute the rice that the land produces by distributing these paper certificates.

We want certificates that people won’t be able to counterfeit very easily.  After some discussion, one of us points out that we already have counterfeit-resistant paper certificates: the ship’s casino has a safe that contains a large amount of United States currency.  This safe hasn’t been opened since the wreck because no one has had any need for United States currency.  (The United States doesn’t exist yet, so its currency is basically just pieces of paper to us here.)  We can use the United States currency in the safe as rice certificates, with each $1 representing one pound of rice.

Here is how it will work: after Kathy has harvested the 3.15 million pounds of rice she will put it into the only place that we have that is going to be able to hold it and keep it safe, the cargo hold of the ship.  We will call this our ‘treasury.’ We will then elect a ‘treasurer’ to manage the rice, which we will call our ‘treasure.’

The treasurer will ask everyone with United States currency to turn it in to her; we don’t want anyone to start with any money.  (If they don’t turn it in, they won’t be able to spend money they hide because it will not be valid currency.  To be valid, it would have to be registered in the database of valid currency discussed below.  This means that we don’t really have to worry if people don’t turn in their money, it just makes it easier to understand what is going on if we accept that everyone complies and does turn in their money.)  She puts all the currency we have in the safe.  She then takes out exactly $3.15 million out of the safe, $1 for each pound of rice in the treasury.  She puts this currency onto a large table.

She scans the serial numbers of this currency into a database of registered currency.  She says, ‘This money on the table is registered currency and is all the money there is in the world.’ Only people who get this money will be able to turn it in for rice.’

 

Note about pronouns:
          In this book, female personal pronouns will be used to refer to unspecified individuals of either sex.  The treasurer, and all other decision makers referred to with female pronouns, may be male or female.

 

How We Will Distribute the Money

Before the harvest, Kathy asked various people with special skills to help her with certain tasks, and asked for laborers to come forward to help with tasks that didn’t require skills.  She told them that she thinks that people who help with work need to be paid and, after the harvest, she is going to propose that all of the people who helped with the harvest get paid for what they did.  She will fight for her workers and suppliers and she expects to win, because it really is in everyone’s interests that the group pay people who step forward and do work.

Here’s why:

If workers get paid, they know that the others who did not work are not taking them for granted: we are giving them something valuable in exchange for their work.  If we pay them this year, and they think the pay is enough to compensate them for their time, we can expect them to step forward happily to do the same work next year and every year after that, as long as we keep paying them.

At the meeting, Kathy is going to be very convincing and get her way: the people who work on the farm are going to get paid the same amount of money they would have made in the 21^st century for doing the same work.

The value of a dollar will be about the same as it was back in the 21^st century United States also; it was enough to buy a pound of fully organic, 100% chemical-free wild rice in both systems.

We will see that people can make a great many things out of rice or parts of the rice plant; people will start to make these things and offer them for sale at prices that reflect the input materials, their labor, and a reasonable profit.  Because labor and material costs will be about the same as in our 2024 world, the costs of the many other products they will make out of rice will be about the same as in the 2024 world, as measured in United States dollars.

Costs of Harvesting

Humans don’t make rice.

Nature makes rice.

When we got here, the rice was already here.  All we had to do was collect it.

Since we came back with an understanding of technology and a lot of parts to use to make machines, we were able to make machines that allowed us to harvest the entire crop in only a few days.  Kathy knew how much money people needed for doing these things back in the 21^st century and wants her people to make the same amount in Pastland.  She has put together rates that lead to about the same total costs of harvesting and replanting she would have paid back in the 21^st century.  These costs total $500,000.  There is $3.15 million in cash on the table.  She is going to ask for $500,000 to pay her workers and suppliers.

Since we collect all the rice, there will be no natural reseeding.  We therefore have to put some of this rice back into the ground as seeds for a crop next year.  She intends to buy the rice seed (trade money for it)  and she needs 200,000 pounds of seed.  If we want her to make sure the same crop comes in next year, we will have to give her another $200,000 to buy the seed.

She is therefore going to ask for $700,000 of the $3.15 million that is on the table.  If she gets this, she can make sure everyone who does any work on the farm or provides any supplies gets fully paid at rates that are about the same as they were in the 2024 United States, and we have enough to reseed next year so we will get the same crop next year.

Other Expenses

Kathy makes her request.  We vote on it and approve it.  Kathy doesn’t like to deal with money, so she has asked one of her friends to help with the money transactions.  Her friend is a professional accountant.  Her name is ‘Sara.’ Sara will keep the books and make sure everyone is paid.  Sara comes up to the front with a luggage cart and takes stacks and stacks of money, until she has taken $700,000 off the table and put it onto the luggage cart.

Sara will make sure everyone is paid.

Sara asks to speak.  She tells the group that not everyone who has done things that are important have been paid.  We have only paid people involved with operating the farm.  There are people involved with important management skills that she says should get something.

Kathy hasn’t asked for anything for herself.  She also has called in some favors from other professionals who provided services for her, and hasn’t asked anything for them either.  For example, she had Sara do the accounting.  After Sara finished the paperwork, Kathy asked another friend of hers, a professional auditor, to check the work.  she didn’t want to publish information about yields and other data that might have mistakes on it.  these people did the work this year as a favor to Kathy.  But if we want them to keep stepping forward to do the work, and make sure it goes smoothly, they should get paid.  Sara has made some calculations and determined that the people who did favors would have gotten about $10,000 total for the work they did, if they had been charging for their services at rates that were in effect before we took this trip.  Sara wants to give Kathy $50,000 of the remaining $2.45 million on the table.  Kathy can then take care of the people who helped her out and give them this much.  This will leave her with $40,000 for herself.  This seems like a lot of money to pay someone who didn’t do any work on the farm.  But this is the amount that a normal farm manager would have made back in the future, and most managers aren’t nearly as good as Kathy.  She really deserves it.

She asks for a vote and we approve the measure.

 call our new home ‘Pastland.’

How and Where We Will Live

First, I want to go over some practical realities of our existence like where and how we will live and where we will get food and other necessities of life, so you can see what we have to work with in forming societies:

We will live in our cabins on the ship for the time being.  Although the extreme bottom decks of the ship were destroyed, we can still use most of the rest.  The ship is sitting on land that is more or less level.  People need to sleep somewhere, and people have moved back into their cabins to have places to sleep.

We ended up next to a large river with plenty of flow to turn turbines.  Some of the passengers are handy with tools.  They salvage the ship’s propellers and some other parts and use them to make a power plant to turn the ship’s electricity generators.  Many people volunteer to help build the power plant because we really want electricity: it is hot and muggy where we are, and we want our air conditioners back on.

The ship has freshwater piping to all cabins.  Some people rig up a piping system to move water from a clear spring and pump it into the freshwater distribution system.  The ship’s waste treatment plant still works so, once we have water, we can use our toilets.  Since we have both electricity and fresh water, we can take showers, do laundry, and even fill the ship’s swimming pools so we can swim.

The ship that went back in time with us gives us a place to live.  We have water and sanitary facilities.  We only need one thing that we don’t have now to sustain us: food.

The Bounty of the Planet Earth

We are very lucky to have ended up where we are.  Although some people call our landing place a ‘swamp,’ some use an alternate term and call it a ‘freshwater marsh.’ Wild rice grows in this marsh in great abundance.  For thousands of years before we got here, this land has had a stable and productive ecosystem, producing large amounts of rice for the benefit of its (non-human)  residents.

In the spring, runoff from snowmelt on lands upriver causes the river to swell.  When this happens, the water level rises above the level of the land to a depth of about a foot.  This creates the perfect conditions for rice to grow.  Wild rice has grown here every year for thousands of years.

Qqq wild rice here.

Late in the summer, the river flows ease and the water table falls.  By early fall the water table has fallen below the level of the land and the land becomes dry.  The rice ripens to a golden brown and the kernels fall off of the stalks onto the ground.

This has been happening for many thousands of years before we got here.

The wild rice never went to waste.  Each year, giant flocks of ducks, geese, cranes, passenger pigeons, and other migratory birds arrived to feast on nature’s bounty.  When winter came and the birds had moved on, possums, raccoons, beaver, otters, minks, muskrats, weasels, deer, elk, and other animals came to share the rice that the birds missed.  In the spring when the water rose, schools of fish—sturgeon, cavefish, shiners, darters, paddlefish, sunfishes, bream, catfish, crappies, and black basses, to name a few—moved in to feast on whatever was left.

The animals didn’t always thoroughly chew the rice kernels, however, and many kernels passed through their digestive systems intact.  This provided seeds for next year’s crop.

The next year, everything happened again.

This land is bountiful and produces large amounts of rice without any need for human effort.  For all of history so far, this bounty has gone to other animals.

But this is going to change.

Humans have abilities that other animals don’t: we can collect the rice at the exact right time of the year and put it into granaries so other animals can’t get it.  We can take the bounty the land produces for ourselves if we want.  Other animals will only get any of this rice if we let them have it, either by giving it to them or by deciding not to take it ourselves.

Some Numbers

Some people are curious about whether the land will produce enough to support us and have made some calculations.

Two of them measured the rice-growing area and determined its size: it is 1,500 acres.  They have decided to call this area Pastland Farm.  One person carefully measured out one square foot of land, cut the stalks on that land, removed the kernels and weighed them to get just under 1/20th of one pound per square foot, which works out to 2,100 pounds per acre, or 3.15 million pounds for the entire marsh/farm.  We have 1,000 people so if we divide this rice evenly, we will have 3,150 pounds for each of us per year, or just over 8 pounds for each of us per day.

 

          The figures for rice yields come from two sources.  One is ‘Travels And Adventures in The Indian Territories Between The Years 1760 And 1776,’ by Alexander Henry.  Henry was put into circumstances (described in the book)  where he found himself the very first European living among natives in parts of North America where wild rice was a staple food.  He discusses the methods of collecting rice, the amounts of rice obtained from the land, and the trade value of rice in American communities before there was any significant influence from European invaders.
          The other is a scholarly work about the same issue: Alfred Jenks: ‘The Wild Rice Gatherers Of The Upper Lakes, A Study in American Primitive Economics.’ This book goes over the realities of existence for the people who lived in the lake areas of what is now Wisconsin and Minnesota, before the conquest of these lands began.  It provides detailed figures for the rice yields they actually obtained. 
          You can find the full text of both books on the PossibleSocieties.com website.

 

Each person needs about 2 pounds of rice per day, as a minimum, to stay alive, so we will clearly have much more than we need.

3:  Breaking Free
How Technology Reshapes Our Evolutionary Pressures

Let's break it down. The two main forces that historically drove us towards tribal territorial sovereignty (TTS) societies were:

 

1. Ever-growing populations

2. Limited food supplies

 

In the 21st century, we've developed technologies that have completely reshaped this equation. Remember when we mentioned our "superpower" of self-awareness? Well, it turns out that extends to family planning too. With the advent of modern birth control methods, we've gained unprecedented control over our reproduction.

The results are nothing short of revolutionary. In many parts of the world, particularly in developed nations, fertility rates have plummeted. We're talking about a drop so significant that some countries are actually worried about population decline.  We are rapidly approaching the point demographers call "Zero Population Growth" or ZPG.  After that, demographers project a decline in population levels, as many people feel uncomfortable bringing children into an overcrowded world.  At some point, the population will stabilize at a level where people feel better about this, and we would expect the lower population to remain stable. 

Now, let's talk about food. Remember those images of chimps fighting over scarce resources? Well, in much of the world, that scarcity is becoming a thing of the past. Thanks to advances in agricultural technology, we're producing more food than ever before. In fact, here's a mind-bending fact for you: in many developed countries, including the United States and across the European Union, governments actually pay farmers not to produce food. It's a practice known as "set-aside" or "crop reduction" programs.

Why?

Our agricultural productivity is so high (due mostly to new technology) that we risk crashing food prices if we produce at full capacity.  This is not a new fear.  In the late 1920s new technology made it possible to fill the larders as never before.  The innovations of refrigerated rail and truck transit, tractors, and fertilizer plants caused production to skyrocket.  Food prices collapsed and most farmers were unable to meet their mortgage payments.  Banks repossessed farms that they couldn’t sell and lost so much money that they couldn’t give back deposits when people wanted their money back.  The banking system collapsed, taking with it the industrial economy.  This lead to a global depression lasted more than a decade.  World leaders understand the danger of ‘overproduction’ of food, so they go to extreme lengths to production at levels far lower than the global industry can provide. 

Let that sink in for a moment. While hunger still exists in many parts of the world, the problem isn't one of global scarcity. There is plenty for everyone. The real issue stems from something far more artificial and, frankly, outdated: our insistence on dividing the world into 'nations', where some are rich and some are poor.

This division, a hallmark of our tribal territorial sovereignty (TTS) societies, creates artificial barriers to the distribution of resources. We have the technological capability to overfeed every person on this planet (in most countries, obesity related diseases like diabetes kill more people than hunger) yet, in some parts of the world, millions go hungry. Why? Because our global system, built on the idea of competing nation-states, prioritizes national interests over human welfare.

Think about it: in a world where we can produce more than enough food, where we have the means to control our population growth, why do we still cling to a system that fosters competition and conflict over cooperation and shared prosperity? Our TTS model, inherited from our evolutionary past, now serves as a straitjacket, constraining our ability to solve global problems.

Imagine if we approached food distribution the way we approach, say, scientific knowledge. When a researcher in Japan makes a breakthrough, scientists in Brazil don't go hungry for information. Knowledge flows freely across borders, benefiting all of humanity. Why can't we apply this same principle to our material resources?

The persistence of hunger in a world of plenty isn't just a failure of distribution; it's a failure of imagination. It's a stark reminder that our current global structure – our patchwork of competing nations – is ill-equipped to handle the challenges and opportunities of our technological age.

 Reimagining Our Future

As we've seen, technology has reshaped the very forces that once drove us towards tribal territorial sovereignty (TTS) societies. We now stand at a unique crossroads in human history. The old evolutionary imperatives no longer apply, at least not in the same way. For the first time, we have the breathing room to step back, reassess, and potentially rebuild our societies from the ground up.

But here's the million-dollar question: will we seize this opportunity? Or will we cling to outdated models simply because they're familiar?

Imagine our global system as a vast, intricate machine. This machine wasn't designed; it evolved over time, existing before we did as a species and forcing us to conform to its requirements. War and destruction aren't bugs in this system - they're features. Just as our distant forebears fought over prime hunting grounds, we now wage devastating wars over oil fields and strategic borders. Our relentless consumption of the planet's resources is the inevitable result of applying tribal territorial thinking to a species with the power to trigger extinction-level events.

This realization is both terrifying and liberating. Our greatest enemy isn't some foreign power or impending natural disaster - it's the very blueprint of our civilization. To survive and thrive, we need to be bold enough to reimagine this blueprint, to draft new plans for a global society that doesn't treat conflict and destruction as unavoidable side effects.

The challenge we face requires us to flex our uniquely human capacities for imagination, reason, and foresight. We need to envision societies built not on the scarcity and conflict of our evolutionary past, but on the abundance and cooperation made possible by our present capabilities.

It won't be easy. The TTS model is deeply ingrained in our cultures and psyches. We've had it since before 'we' existed as a species. It was pre-programmed into our thinking before we could even think. We take it for granted as a given, something we can't change. But we can change it.

To dodge the bullet of extinction, we need to fundamentally rewire our collective mindset. The old stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we should organize our world? They're as outdated as stone axes in the age of quantum computing. Clinging to rigid ideas of nations and borders is like trying to navigate the internet with a paper map.

This isn't some ivory tower thought experiment. It's a rallying cry, a call to arms for every one of us. You're not just a reader; you're a potential architect of a new world order. Every time you question why things are the way they are, every moment you dare to imagine a different way of doing things, you're joining a quiet revolution.

I get it: The idea of challenging systems that have been in place for centuries can feel overwhelming, maybe even a little crazy. But here's a secret: every major leap forward in human history started with someone crazy enough to question the unquestionable.

So here we are, you and I, standing at the edge of a new frontier. Are you ready to push the boundaries of what's possible? To dream up solutions that would make the so-called experts' heads spin? The future of our entire species could hinge on our willingness to think and act differently.

We can all see we are headed for extinction.

The signs are everywhere, written in the headlines of our daily news and whispered in the corridors of power.

 

But is it possible for this to NOT happen?

Can we, as a species, defy what seems to be our inevitable fate?

 

Many of our most respected thinkers argue that escape is impossible. Let's consider their perspectives:

Religious scholars and theologians point to ancient prophecies, saying our doom was foretold millennia ago. They quote sacred texts that speak of Armageddon, Ragnarök, or the Kali Yuga—apocalyptic scenarios that mark the end of our world. To them, our current crises are merely the unfolding of a divine plan, predetermined and inescapable.

Political scientists and international relations experts paint an equally grim picture, but from a secular viewpoint. They remind us that the fundamental forces driving human conflict haven't changed in thousands of years. Tribalism, resource competition, and the hunger for power remain as potent as ever. What has changed, they warn, are our tools of destruction.

These analysts point to an arms race that has spiraled beyond our control. We've created weapons of such devastating power that a single use could render our planet uninhabitable. Worse still, in our quest for the perfect deterrent, we've begun to remove human decision-making from the equation. Artificial intelligence systems, designed to maintain a "credible threat," stand ready to launch these weapons without the hesitation or fear that might stay a human hand.

Environmentalists and climate scientists add their voices to this chorus of doom. They show us data charting the rapid decline of biodiversity, the pollution of our air and water, and the destabilization of our climate. The tipping points we once feared, they say, are no longer on the horizon—we've already passed them. The momentum of our destruction, built up over centuries of industrialization and exploitation, may be too great to overcome.

Economists and sociologists point to growing inequality, both within and between nations. They argue that our global economic system, built on the premise of endless growth, is fundamentally at odds with the finite resources of our planet. As scarcity increases, they predict, so too will conflict—potentially triggering the very wars we most fear.

Even technological optimists, once heralds of a brighter future, now sound notes of caution. The rise of artificial intelligence, they warn, could render large swaths of humanity obsolete. Biotechnology, while promising medical miracles, also opens the door to engineered pandemics far deadlier than anything nature has produced.

 

Faced with this convergence of threats—nuclear annihilation, environmental collapse, economic upheaval, and technological disruption—it's easy to succumb to despair. The voices of our most knowledgeable experts seem to agree: the end is not just possible, but probable.

But is this truly our inescapable destiny?

 

As we stand at this crossroads of human history, we must ask ourselves: Are we content to accept this bleak forecast as inevitable? Or do we have the courage to imagine—and create—a different future? Perhaps the very act of questioning our fate opens a door to possibility, one that challenges us to think beyond the confines of our current paradigms and envision a path forward that defies these dire predictions.

As we stand at this crossroads of human history, we must ask ourselves: Are we content to accept this bleak forecast as inevitable? Or do we have the courage to imagine—and create—a different future?

What if, instead, we choose to face these threats head-on? What if we summon the courage to confront our fears and look our potential extinction squarely in the eye?

Let's start by being be honest with ourselves:  The picture painted by the experts is grim.  It’s easy to feel paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the challenges we face. But let me ask you something: If we throw up our hands and do nothing, where does that leave us? It's like being on a sinking ship and refusing to even look for a life raft, because we are too paralyzed by fear to understand there may be something we can use to save ourselves.  Some say, when considering saving ourselves, it is a waste of time to look because there can’t possibly be anything we can use to save us.  There is no way out.  Looking for a way out is a waste of time and will put us all into the category of insane:  those who try to do the impossible are in this category. 

I say this:  Perhaps, if we look, we won’t find the solutions.  (I know for a fact that the are there and if we look in the right places, we will find them; that is what this book is about.  But, playing the devils’ advocate, say that we look and happen to miss the bins that have the life rafts.)  But this is not an excuse to not even look.  As long as there is any hope at all, we need to keep looking.

Two kinds of Solutions

All animals have instincts that push them to protect their loved ones and themselves, when faced by physical threats.  The reaction is unconscious.  Their heart rate spikes, their cortisal levels rise, and adrenaline is pumped into their system, giving them strength and stamina that they didn’t have in calm states.  Humans are animals and these instincts kick in for us.  Mothers have shown superhuman strength, for short periods of time, in order to save their babies. 

If the threats are intellectual and require thought to figure out, these instincts don’t kick in.  We need to use conscious thought and intention to find solutions to the problems that threaten us and, when faced by threats that require our higher intellectual capabilities, the instincts just aren’t there.  We seem content to wait until the end comes. 

This happens in the animal world.  Sure, let's illustrate this point with an analogy from the natural world:  Consider the dodo bird. Once thriving on the isolated island of Mauritius, the dodo had no natural predators. It evolved without the need for swift action or clever defenses. When humans arrived on the island, bringing with them rats and other invasive species, the dodo wasn’t equipped to deal with these new threats. It couldn't fly, it had no fear of humans, and it didn't possess the instincts to protect itself or its young from these unfamiliar dangers. The dodo's inability to adapt, to adrenalize, or to outsmart these threats ultimately led to its extinction.

Similarly, many animal species, when faced with threats that require more than just fight or flight responses, struggle to survive. They lack the cognitive ability to innovate, to strategize, or to understand the complex nature of the dangers they face. For instance, polar bears, faced with the intellectual challenge of climate change, cannot simply adapt their behaviors to stop the ice from melting. They can't innovate solutions to protect their habitat or food sources.

Now, let's bring this back to us. Unlike these animals, we humans possess an incredible capacity for reason, for innovation, and for problem-solving. We're not dodos or polar bears, helpless in the face of complex threats. We have the ability to understand, to adapt, and to create solutions. But here's the catch: these abilities don't kick in automatically like our fight or flight responses. They require conscious effort, intentional thought, and a willingness to confront our fears head-on.

Finding the life raft isn't just about physical effort; it's about the courage to challenge our deepest assumptions and confront our greatest fears. You see, the life raft isn't just a floatation device—it's a new perspective, a different way of seeing the world and our place in it. And that can be terrifying.

Imagine this: We've scoured the ship, and there, tucked away in a corner, we find the life raft.  But as we pull it out, we realize it's not like any life raft we've seen before. It's not made for one person, or one family, or even one country. It's designed for all of us, every single person on the ship. And to inflate it, to make it buoyant, we have to work together—all of us.

This is where our greatest fear comes in. We realize that using this life raft means accepting that the old ways aren't working. It means acknowledging that the divisions we've created—the countries, the borders, the ideologies—are not serving us, not if we want a future free from war and destruction. It means understanding that the world isn't divided by imaginary lines, but is one interconnected whole.

To inflate this life raft, people from East and West must work side by side. Capitalists and communists must find common ground. Those who have been taught to hate each other must learn to see each other as fellow passengers, all equally deserving of a spot on the raft.

And that's scary.

It's scary because it means letting go of our prejudices, our preconceived notions, our comforting hatreds.

It means the cowboy must see the world through the eyes of the Indian, and vice versa. It means the cat person must work with the dog person, not because they've suddenly started liking dogs, but because they understand that their survival, and the survival of all the cats they love, depends on it.

This life raft demands that we reimagine our world, that we abandon ancient ideas that no longer serve us, and that we embrace a new perspective—one that sees unity in diversity, cooperation over competition, and shared humanity over divisive ideologies.

We must also confront an even deeper fear, one that may be the most formidable obstacle of all: the realization that the most serious problems we face—war, destruction, environmental degradation—are not isolated issues that can be tackled directly. They are symptoms of a profound and pervasive illness rooted in the very structure of our societies.

Addressing these problems requires more than just band-aid solutions; it demands a fundamental reevaluation of the systems we've inherited. The true challenge lies not in the problems themselves, but in our unwillingness to question the foundations of our world. We cling to familiar structures, even as they crumble beneath us, because the alternative—change—terrifies us.

It is this fear of change, this desire to hold onto the comfort of the known, that keeps us from even looking for the life raft. It paralyzes us, blinding us to the possibility of a different, better future. To truly save ourselves, we must first overcome this fear and be willing to challenge the status quo, to ask the hard questions, and to imagine a world where our societies are designed not for competition and division, but for cooperation and unity.

But where do we begin? How do we start to challenge the status quo and envision alternatives? The first step is to understand the fundamental organization of our societies. By examining the structures that shape our world, we can begin to see the root causes of our problems and the pathways to solutions.

Let's take a step back and look at the basic organization of our societies. Today, we divide the world into more than 250 entities called 'countries.' (According to the CIA Factbook, there are 261 as I write this, but the exact number changes from day to day and week to week.) Each of these countries operates as a tribal unit, claiming sovereignty over a territory and organizing its wealth to compete with other countries over resources. This territorial sovereignty is a basic and integral part of the current Earth social structure.

How did this system come to exist? Did this arrangement come into existence through intelligent planning and intention? Did our ancestors gather around a table, perhaps under the shade of an ancient tree, to meticulously design this system? Did they debate and discuss, weighing the pros and constructive incentives of a world divided into hundreds of countries, or a world without these divisions, and eventually decide that the divided world was in the interests of the human race?

If this were the case, we would expect to find evidence of such deliberation and planning. We would have records of these discussions, documents outlining the rationale behind the division of the world into nations. We would see traces of a grand design, a blueprint for a society structured around competition and territorial sovereignty. Yet, no such evidence exists. There are no ancient scrolls or historical accounts detailing a global conference where this system was carefully crafted.

Instead, what we find is a system that has evolved organically over millennia. It was shaped by historical accidents, power struggles, and the ebb and flow of not just human migrations and conflicts, but also those of our evolutionary ancestors. The division of the world into nations may not be the result of wise, intentional planning by our ancestors, but rather a continuation and evolution of patterns that were already in place among earlier species.

You see, this system is not unique to humans. In fact, it closely mirrors the social structures of many animal societies—a system I refer to as Tribal Territorial Sovereignty (TTS) societies. In these societies, species split into tribal groups (packs, for wolves, troops for gorillas and chimpanzees) to identify, claim, and defend territories.  From ants to apes, this pattern repeats itself in many places throughout the animal kingdom.

It's not difficult to imagine that early humans, as they evolved and gained greater cognitive capabilities, may have inherited and built upon these existing social structures. What we see today—the division of the world into competing nations—could be an evolved manifestation of these ancient, animalistic patterns.

Our next task is to simply look at this system, as objectively as we can, to see how it works. This is not an easy task, as it requires us to step back from our familiar perspectives and examine the very foundations of our societies. We must be willing to question what we've long taken for granted and explore new ways of understanding our world.

As we embark on this exploration, we'll find that even the basic steps to understand this system have not yet been taken. In fact, we don’t even have a name for the system that divides our species into tribal groups, carves the land into bordered territories, and pits these tribes against each other in contests over resources and power. It's as if we've been navigating a vast, uncharted territory without a map or compass.

By naming and defining this system, we can begin to make sense of it. We can start to see the patterns and dynamics that shape our behaviors, our policies, and our interactions with each other and the planet. This exploration requires effort—it demands that we challenge our assumptions, ask tough questions, and confront uncomfortable truths. But it is a journey that promises valuable insights and a deeper understanding of our world.

In the following chapters, we will undertake this exploration together. We will delve into the concept of ‘tribal territorial sovereignty,’ which we will see is the foundational principle of the societies of modern Earth humans. We will see that many other species have societies built on this principle and that all of these societies have certain forces that lead to the same basic realities (‘problems’ if you want to make value judgments about the organized mass murder events that are inherent parts of these systems) and social structures we see in human societies today.

We will gain a clearer picture of the system that has governed human societies since their very beginning. We will be equipped to ask: Is this the best we can do? Or is there a better way forward, a way that harnesses our incredible human potential to create a future where we all can thrive?

Before we set sail on this journey, let's revisit the life raft analogy. The first step in solving a problem is recognizing and understanding it. Before we take the effort to find a life raft seriously, we must accept that we really do need one. We must accept that the ship around us—our current societal structure—is no longer seaworthy. We must acknowledge that it is taking on water, that its hull is rotting, and that its engines are failing.

We must face the reality that our ship, as it stands, is not equipped to navigate the storms of the 21st century and beyond. The challenges we face—from climate change to nuclear proliferation, from resource depletion to economic inequality—are not mere rough patches that can be weathered with minor repairs. They are existential threats, and they demand a fundamental reevaluation of our course.

Accepting this reality is not easy. We want to take comfort in the claims of those who built the ship that it is unsinkable, that it will right itself after the storm. But this is a false comfort, a dangerous illusion, something that can cause a catastrophe if accepted. 

The societies we inherited are not sustainable. This means they are going away. While we can’t prevent this, we can decide which of two ways it happens: First, we can do nothing and wait. A war or destructive event will come along that is too great for us to deal with. This event will cause the societies to go away by destroying the ‘carriers’ of these societies, the humans on the ship. When there are no humans, there will be no human societies.

Second, we accept that these societies really are unsustainable. To extend the analogy, we can accept that the ship is going down. We can find something else. We can take the things that work well and do benefit the human race from the systems we have now (and there is a lot in this category) and use these materials to build a new kind of society, one that is designed intentionally to meet the needs of the beings we have evolved into.  To extend the analogy, we can take the soundest timbers and rigging of the sinking ship and build a new one, giving future generations a sound foundation that they can improve to meet the needs of those who follow them.

With this understanding, let's proceed on our journey. Let's explore the concept of tribal territorial sovereignty, let's scrutinize the very fabric of our societies, and let's ask the tough questions. For it is in this exploration that we will find the seeds of hope, the promise of a better future, and the path to a world where we all can thrive.

In the following chapters, we will undertake this exploration together. We will delve into the concept of ‘tribal territorial sovereignty,’ which we will see is the foundational principle of the societies of modern Earth humans. We will see that many other species have societies built on this principle and that all of these societies have certain forces that lead to the same basic realities and social structures we see in human societies today.

2.  A Look ahead

Now that we've laid the groundwork for understanding our predicament, you might be wondering, "Where do we go from here?" It's one thing to recognize the trap we're in, but it's another to find a way out. That's exactly what we're going to explore in the rest of this book.

Think of what you've read so far as the diagnosis. We've identified the disease that's threatening our species: our outdated tribal territorial sovereignty (TTS) societies. But a diagnosis alone doesn't cure the patient. What we need now is a treatment plan, a roadmap to guide us from where we are to where we need to be.

In the following chapters, we're going to embark on an intellectual journey together. We'll explore alternative ways of organizing our world, dive into the wisdom of past thinkers who grappled with these same issues, and ultimately, craft a vision for a future that doesn't just avoid extinction but allows humanity to truly flourish.

Part One:  Introduction

The introduction (the part you are readying now) is designed to lay out the general approach the book will take to dealing with the issue of our impending extinction.  It is designed to generate interest by generating hope.   It is designed to help you see that there is a very clear reason we are on the verge of extinction and that, if we understand this reason, we can understand the exact steps needed to prevent it and find the best way to take those steps. 

The main theme of this introduction is that the problems that threaten our existence—mostly war and environmental destruction—are not independent problems that can be attacked in isolation.  They are essentially growing pains in an evolutionary process. 

We evolved. 

All of the realities of our existence did not evolve at the exact same pace.  The mental tools that allow us to build weapons evolved very rapidly, due to evolutionary pressures inherent in the type of society we inherited from our ape ancestors, tribal territorial sovereignty societies (TTS societies).  This type of society divides the species into individual tribal units that act as teams to compete for feeding territory and other resources.  The teams that can’t compete well are wiped out, together with their gene line.  Any genetic influence within the team that slows the rate of growth in abilities t make weapons wipes out the team.  Any genetic influence that prevents a tribal unit (including a ‘state’ or a ‘nation’) from acting in a brutal and unmerciful way (for example, any intrinsic empathy or compassion that is ingrained in the national psyche) can lead to defeat for that tribal unit.  Any feelings or impulses that prevent maximal weapons production (for example, feelings of regard for the environment) can wipe out the entire tribal unit (nation or state) that harbors, fosters, or encourages these feelings.

The problems that threaten the existence of the human race are therefore not what we would call ‘bugs’ in an otherwise well functioning society, they are features of the type of society that we have inherited from our evolutionary ancestors.  If we keep this system, we keep these features.  If we keep them long enough, they will destroy us.  If we want to prevent this, we need to understand that we can’t get by leaving the animal system in place and trying to deal with problems one ware at a time, or one environmental catastrophe at a time. 

We need to accept that the evolution of our societal structures has lagged behind the evolution of our weapons design and combat skills.  We need to let our societies catch up to our progress in other areas, by rerouting the intellectual capital we now devote to research on weapons and indoctrination methods (to make people more patriotic and willing to kill and die ‘for their country’) to analysis of societies.  We need to accept our animal past and understand that we MUST transcend our animalistic feelings or we will grow no more as a species. 

The main purpose of this introduction is to generate a feeling of hope.  I want you to realize that we are actually in a fantastic position now.  We have new tools that never existed before.  We can see with our own eyes that the imaginary lines are artificial and people are basically the same no matter where they were born, in relation to the location of imaginary lines (none of us chose the place of our birth).   We have fantastic tools that we can use to get over these growing pains and get on to the next phase of our progress through destiny.

Part Two:  The Socratic

Part Two of this book explains a type of society I call a ‘Socratic’ 

 

There are many different categories or types of societies that can exist.  The TTS society is a category or type of society that has many different variants.  (Feudal systems, for example, are different than modern industrial systems, but both are built on tribal territorial sovereignty.)   More than 2,300 years ago, Socrates pointed out that societies that divide the world into independent and sovereign political units (he called these societies ‘πολιτείες ’ which would be pronounced ‘politiaks.”) are inherently violent and destructive.  War is an inherent part of these societies.  War is little more than organized and planned mass murder and destruction on the most massive scale possible.  We can’t start with this foundational element and build a sound society (one with the quality Socrates called ‘δικαιοσύνη’).  If we want a sound society, we need to start with some other foundation. 

Socrates then worked out the characteristics that societies must have to be sound (have ‘δικαιοσύνη,’ to use his term).  He pointed out the same things we have discussed in this introduction so far:  it requires rethinking of the basic realities of our societies, particularly the role of the entities called ‘states’ and ‘nations.’  It requires that we divert some of the effort normally devoted to building weapons and indoctrinating children to make them warriors to analysis of society. 

At the time, his country was at war.  The authorities thought these ideas were extremely dangerous, mainly because Socrates made them so understandable.  People, and particularly young people, accepted his ideas and, rather than devoting their lives to advancing the interests of their ‘country,’ started to try to advance the interests of the human race.  The authorities could see that the war spirit and patriotism of the youth of Athens was weakening and, because the movement Socrates was part of actually existed all over the Medeterranian region (it had actually existed long before Socrates was born; Fact Based History goes over the movement in detail), Socrates ideas threatened the very existence of the state-based system (the one Socrates called ‘πολιτείες.’)  They had Socrates arrested and, ultimately, put to death in an attempt to end this threat.  Of  course, after Socrates was arrested and executed, the authorities collected all of his writings and destroyed them, so we don’t have anything directly from his own pen today.  However, many of the people he had influenced didn’t want Socrates ideas to die with the man, so they did their best to reconstruct his work and circulate it.  We got Socrates ideas from them. 

These ideas were always considered dangerous and many attempts were made to wipe them from the face of the Earth.  We only have about 3 pages of what appears to be Plato’s key book  in the sequence, called Critias, as the rest, along with key parts of other books, was destroyed and seems to be lost forever.  But we do have enough information to put together a basic idea of idea of the foundational principles tht human societies must have to be sound societies (to have the quality Socrates used the term ‘δικαιοσύνη’ to describe).  The Socratic society described in Part Two is built on these principles.    

 

Socratic societies are one type among many types of societies that are within the capabilities of thinking beings with physical needs (the category of beings that includes humans, which almost inhabit many of the septillions of planets in this vast universe).  The book Possible Societies goes over the different things that can vary about societies of these beings and show that we can break down the different societies that are possible into different categories or types.  Some of the types of societies have forces that divide the individuals into tribal units that compete for resources, making them violent and destructive.  Others do not have these forces.  In these ‘other’ societies, peaceful cooperation and responsible relationships with the physical world are possible.  These other types of societies can be ‘sound societies’ or, to use the term Socrates used, they can have ‘δικαιοσύνη.’ 

The book Possible Societies shows that there are actually a great many ways that thinking beings with physical needs can organize themselves that are not destructive or built on competitive violence.  Possible Societies explanations the different things that can vary and shows how altering them can alter the types of societies that exist.  I think this information is fascinating, but the analysis is quite long and some of it requires understanding some fairly complex math and technical processes.  You don’t have to understand the details of all possible societies to understand that sound societies are possible.  You only need an example of a society that meets the basic requirements that Socrates set for societies to be sound. 

The Socratic society explained in Part Two is presented as an ‘example society.’  It is designed to show you that a sound society is a possible society.  It can exist and operate in totally understandable ways.  (In fact, sound societies are much easier to understand than TTS societies, because war based must have structures that encourage organized mass murder, and logic tells us that any society built to encourage this must use indoctrination to make people accept things that logic tells us are not true.  Their structures must work against normal human nature.  Sound societies can be far simpler because they can work with human nature, rather than against it.) 

I want this example to be as easy to read and follow as possible, so I have framed it as a science fiction story.  (As opposed to a technical analysis of society.)  It starts with 1,000 people from modern times, including you the reader and myself the author, who go back in time 4 million years.  We come ot a time before humans existed, so we don’t have to conform to any existing nations, alliances, or societal structures.  None of these things exist and, if we don’t intentionally create them, they won’t exist. 

We can make decisions as a group and vote on them.  Any decisions we make as a group and vote to approve will have been made and approved by a majority of the members of the human race.  This means that any decisions we make will reflect the will of the majority of the members of the human race as a whole. 

All of the people in our group are from the 21^st century.  We have all been through an education system that attempted to make us willing to believe the things called ‘nations’ were real things and had a right to sovereignty and willing to fight to the death to protect this sovereignty.  Some people were more swayed by this education than others.  Some of them want to build our new system on the same foundation as the old one:  they want to divide our 1,000 people into different nationalities, divide the land around us into different territories, assign each territory to a nationality, and let the fighting begin.  

But the great majority of the members of our group don’t think this is a good way to start our existence on Earth.  Since our group is the entire human race, this means a majority of the members of the human race don’t want to divide the human race and the world this way. 

The nationalists include some fanatics.  They say they have a right to sovereignty and will fight to get it, killing as many others as necessary to make this happen.  

We will hold a meeting to discuss how to deal with this issue.  The vast majority don’t want nations and don’t think it is a good idea to let a minority start organizing mass murder events to create something the vast majority don’t want.  We are in a hostile world 4 million years in the past.  We heed to work together as a group to survive.  We pass a starting resolution that will eventually become what you may think of as the ‘prime directive’ of the human race.   If people want to live with the majority and gain the benefits of organized and civilized life, they must accept rules passed by the majority, even if they don’t agree with them.  Any that organize for mass murder to try to get away with things the majority don’t want them to do will be asked to leave.  Only a tiny minority of our people are so fanatically nationalistic that they are willing to even consider using violence to get a right to form a nation and none of the members of this tiny minority are willing to have to face banishment from an organized community to have the right to do things that they want to do.  In the end, our prime directive holds:

 

The will of the majority of the members of the human race determines global issues on Earth.  The members of the human race agree to act together as a community to make sure no group that is less than the majority can force the majority to accept polices we don’t want.

The Evolution of Socratic

Our group in the remote past will call our new home ‘Pastland.’  We all have skills and talents that we brought back from the 21^st century.  We understand technology and the circumstances of our time transport have allowed us to bring substantial technology back with us. 

We will put our skills to work.  We will recreate the parts of the 21^st century Earth that we like and want.  We will find that we can build all of these things without having any need for ‘independent and sovereign nations.’  We will set up a system to propose rules we want to apply to the human race and set up elections where the human race votes, in popular elections, to determine which of these rules will be policy.  It isn’t necessary to have ‘sovereign nations’ to have any of the things we want.  We won’t need them and our prime directive essentially prohibits any group that wants to break way from the human race and become independent from doing so.  We have agreed that we, the members of the human race, are united in one thing:  we will not allow groups to subvert the will of the human race by force or use of violence.  Our prime directive really only prohibits one thing:  the entities we call ‘sovereign and independent nations’ can’t exist. 

Everything else is on the table.  

I want you to really understand the Socratic society, so I will describe it in great detail.  I will ask you to put yourself into the position of decision maker.  You have choices.  What do you want?  I want you to be able to relate to realities in Pastland so one of the first things we will create is the tool of ‘money.’  We will have a large number of the paper certificates that we call ‘United States currency’ with us and we will decide to use this as money.  We will follow an economy and see how prices are set.  You will see that the same basic forces determine prices in societies without independent and sovereign nations as determine prices in societies with nations.  (In both cases, the main forces are supply and demand.).  You will be able to see what is avaialble in markets and how much things cost. 

In the end, we will have a society that looks a lot like our 21^st century societies superficially.  Prices are similar, wages are similar, and rents and housing costs are similar.  But, while the details will be very similar, the foundational elements of the society will be entirely different.  The human race will be in charge of matters that affect the human race.  We don’t benefit from divisions and war and we don’t need them.  We are all harmed in very real ways from environmental destruction and, ince there are no offsetting benefits in Socratic societies (as there are in TTS societies, which need the destruction to have success in war), we won’t have policies that allow it. 

 

Part Three:  Reforming Societies

After we understand the Socratic, we will go on to the next step in the problem. 

Our group in Pastland can easily create a sound society because we are starting from scratch.  We don’t have a legacy of millions of years of tribal territorial competition, where the drive for sovereignty has been turned into policy through thousands of years of competition.  We don’t have to start with an existing system and convert it into a sound system. 

In our 21^st century world, we aren’t starting from scratch.  We must start with the system that was in place when we were born.  We can’t change the past or make it disappear.  It is there and we must deal with it.  

Part Thee of Preventing Extinction  is about making a transition.  After you finish Part Two, you will understand two entirely different kinds of societies.  The first is the TTS society, the one into which you were born on the real world and came to understand by experiencing it.  The second is the Socratic, which is built on tools that tie the human race together into a community of humankind, able to work together in an organized way on matters that affect the entire human race. 

As noted above, there are many different kinds of societies that thinking beings with physical needs (the category of beings that includes humans) can form.  Some are destructive and violent.  Some are not.  The Socratic system is an example of a society in the latter category.  It is not the only kind of society that can exist where the beings don’t divide into tribes to compete over territorial sovereignty.  It is an example of such a society, one that is ‘flushed out’ in a way that is designed to make you, the reader, comfortable.  It is designed to be as close to the type of society that we have in our 21^st century world as possible, and still be in the category of a ‘sound society.’ 

I didn’t pick this example at random.  I picked it to present as an example because it is the closest society to the TTS societies we have now that is structurally sound.  (The book Possible Societies shows that there are a great many sound societies that operate entirely differently than the societies we have now and wouldn’t even be recognizable to people from 21^st century Earth.)  The people who create the Socratic include you the reader and myself the author.  There are things we like and want.  We like and want nice meals, nice places to live, cars, roads, and stores, for example.  We are comfortable with money and wouldn’t know how to live in a system without money.  (Many systems have existed on Earth in the past that didn’t have money and humans were able to live good lives in them.  But it is hard for us, living with money all our lives, to imagine how they did it.)  

I chose this example precisely because it is so similar to 21^st century Earth societies.  Part Three deals with the idea of a transition between societies.  We start with what we have now.  (We have no choice about our starting society:  it was in place when we were born.)  We then start to create structures that will put it onto a path that will eventually lead to a Socratic society. 

Part Three is called ‘reforming societies.’  The societies we have now have a certain form.   Part Three explains a set of steps that, if taken, will empower the human race in a very specific way.  We will see that we don’t have to actually invent the structures needed for this.  Many people in the past, including Socrates have understood the basic problem with TTS societies and tried to create structures to correct it.  Part Three discusses the important attempts that have been made so far to change the course of human progress.  I think you will be surprised to find that many of these attempts came extremely close to working. 

 

You aren’t very likely to find analysis of attempts to change society in conventional history books, because these books cater to ideas consistent with tribal territorial sovereignty and are designed mainly to glorify war.  The book Fact Based History deals with historical issues that conventional history books—particularly those written to provide background information for children in government run schools—leave out.  We actually know a lot about the attempts to change the world and can see that many of them very nearly worked. 

 

If we understand the things that have been tried before, and understand the exact reasons that the people who wanted to keep our animalistic system were able to defeat them, we can see that nothing crazy is required.  We need an organization that represents the human race.  We need to find a way to create funding for this organization so it can actually have some impact on word events. 

We have prototypes of these organizations; they already exist.  We just need to understand the exact steps that must be taken to give these organizations power and control over world events.  This is one of the reasons we must understand a ‘destination society’ before we can create a plan that will get us where we want to go.  It just isn’t possible to plan a trip if you don’t have a destination in mind from the start. 

Part Four:  Details

The theme of this introduction to Preventing Extinction is that we need to make structural changes to our societies to survive as a race.  Part Three explains how to put us onto a path that will cause the course of human history to change direction.  We can’t make these changes overnight.  We must make a transition.  The transition will take time.

Part Three explains the general idea of change and explains how to get the process moving along.  You may equate this to the idea of using antibiotics to cure the disease of tuberculosis.  If you loved one is dying of this disease, you need to wipe out the cause of the disease.  This take time.  The antibiotics interfere in the reproduction of the bacteria that  cause tuberculosis.  The rate of growth of the tumors slows but does not stop.  Your loved one may still die, even after treatment has started.  You need to do your best to make her as strong as possible so that her body’s natural defenses will overpower the bacteria. 

The antibiotics don’t do anything for the symptoms of tuberculosis.  She will continue to have bloody cough even after treatment has begun and can have coughing fits that will kill her.  She will continue to have fevers that are so high they can melt her brain and may kill her.  Here body’s resouirces will continue to be consumed by this disease (that used to be called ‘consumption’).  You can’t just give her a few shots of antibiotics and expect her to walk out of the hospital in perfect health.  You need to have a treatment plan that focuses on the antibiotics but deals with all aspects of the disease.

If we want to prevent extinction for our race, we need to take the same approach.  We must understand that war and destruction are not superficial aspects of our societies, they are deeply engrained aspects of our systems.  Wars existed before humans even evolved and our societies evolved around them.  They are integral aspects of our societies and policy makers in the world actually use them, creating war intentionally to deal with certain other problems that are inherent parts of TTS societies. 

 

One example involves the problem called ‘unemployment.’  Over the centuries, rulers have found their countries can compete better in war if they have rigid hierarchies and ‘class systems,’ where the members of one of the classes, the lowest, have no claim on any of the wealth the world produces and will die if they can’t ‘get a job’ and sell their labor.  TTS societies that tried to operate in ways that gave people incomes without having to work couldn’t compete militarily and industrially with societies that accepted and enforced the class structure.  Cultural evolution wiped them out and, in our world today, the class structure exists everywhere.

This system can collapse if there isn’t enough work for all members of society born into this lowest ‘class.’   If there aren’t enough jobs they must compete for the few jobs that do exist by agreeing to work for less.  Wages fall.  Falling wages doesn’t create additional work and the unemployed must continue to compete for work.  Wages can fall below the level of substance.  (In times of high unemployment, even people who work as many hours as they can stay awake sometimes can’t feed their families.)  With fewer people working, and far lower wages for those who do work, spending collapses and factories and farms start to lay off workers.  This makes the problem even worse and, if policy makers can’t find a way to create enormous numbers of jobs quickly, the system will collapse. 

Policy makers know that wars create jobs.  They intentionally create wars, even if there is no reason for the war other than to put people to work killing each other.  World War Two appears to be an example of an intentionally created war.  The planet was in a depression.  Politicians in Germany, Italy, and Japan knew war would put people to work. They campaigned on the issue of war:  if they got into power, their country would go to war and this would pull it out of the depression.  They kept their promises.

The creation of work is not a good thing in all societies.  It is only good in societies that are forced, by the basic requirements of war, to create a class structure and leave one class with no claim to anything the world produces.  Socratic societies won’t need to create artificial wars and subsidize destruction to put people to work because it won’t be forced into the class system. 

 

As noted earlier, others have understood the steps that have to be taken and tried to take them.  But they had a hard time doing this because the majority of the people in society, having been raised and educated to act like animals and organize for war, didn’t understand what was happening.  Their minds were under the control of the animalist leaders of the tribal systems, who had total control over the information stream. 

18:  Conclusion

I am a child of the world, raised in many countries; I have not seen enough differences between the entities that the people around me call ‘countries’ to feel that there is anything essential that separates them.  They are, it seems to me, nothing but arbitrary remnants of a primitive past, with lines that represent things that are essentially meaningless to the human race, mainly the places where armies were stopped and decided to negotiate an end to the war and create the borders.  They don’t separate different races or different categories of human beings.  There is only one category of human beings and we are all in the same category. 

I went to many different schools and never stayed in any one long enough to believe it was better or had any more right to be cheered on in its football matches on than any other; I never had any school spirit. 

I feel no pride for the city I happen to be in at a given time, whatever it is.  There is a part of me that thinks of my current location as temporary, something that I am only allied with due to chance and that won’t be a part of my life as soon as chance takes me somewhere else.  I feel no sense of ownership for the city, the province or state, the country, or continent where my body happens to be located at a given time. 

I can’t remember my birth.  I don’t feel any connection with the particular place I was born.  I could have been born anywhere, really, for all it matters to me.  My family moved from the place where I was born when I was only one month old.  I never went back and have no reason to go back.  It is simply a place where something happened to my mother; my recollection doesn’t go back nearly that far.  It is just another place.  Why should I have loyalty to it?  Why would I believe that, because that place was in an area that had been conquered by the armies of a particular government, I have an obligation to kill to make sure that the interests of that particular government are protected?  I don’t feel the pride that would make me willing to fight. 

But I am extremely proud of one thing: 

My race, the human race, has done truly incredible things.  When I listen to Beethoven or the Beatles, I am in awe: such wonder to behold.  I flip a switch and nighttime turns into day: who figured all this out and made it happen?  The buildings and structures of the world are truly incredible, when I walk down the streets of Pu Dong, or Barcelona, or San Francisco, I can’t help but be amazed by the things I see. 

When I see the smiling face of a child, I can’t bear the thought of it all ending.

If we can keep it from ending, we must do this.  My pride gives me an obligation.  I love my race, the human race.  I love my planet, the planet Earth.  Both of the things that I love are threatened.  There are people who are working actively to wipe them out.  I have an obligation to do everything I can to save the things I love.  I hope I can get you to see things my way.  I hope to turn you into an ally.  We are all in this together.  If we perish, we perish together.  This doesn’t have to happen.

If you look out at the night sky, you will see more points of light than you could ever hope to count.  A small portion of these light points are star systems in our own galaxy.  Scientists believe that about 100 billion planets of the planets that are in this particular galaxy are in the ‘Goldilocks Zone,’ the zone potentially capable of supporting life. 

The great majority of the points of light are galaxies, with, on average, about the same number of star systems as our galaxy and probably have about 100 billion Goldilocks planets in each of them, with each of these planets meeting the conditions needed to sustain life.

If only a tiny fraction of the planets that can have life do have life, there are still more planets with life than the human mind could comprehend.  If even a tiny fraction of these planets with life have lifeforms that have evolved—as life on Earth has evolved—to the same basic intellectual level as humans, there would still have to be more planets near our part of the galaxy with intelligent life than we could count, if we started counting at the moment of our birth and counted as fast as we could for our entire lives. 

Perhaps most of them have fallen into the same trap the human race fell into.  Perhaps they started out with simple natural law societies; they believed that they depended on nature and the natural world and could not own.  But these societies are inherently stagnant and can remain unchanged for incredibly long periods of time, even though the people in them are quite capable of progress.  Perhaps, on most of these worlds, people eventually figured out how to use the same tools that are being used on Earth now to convince people that they are members of sovereign and independent states or countries.  Perhaps most of these worlds fell into the same trap that captured us, with their beliefs pushing them to do more and more horrible things until, eventually, they stood on the brink of extinction, as we do now. 

Perhaps the people on most of these worlds will passively accept and never really gain enough control of their minds to come to understand there is a way out and make the change to a healthy society.

If this is the case, the odds against any of these planets of intelligent beings surviving this period in their evolution are very high.  The great majority of them won’t make it.  We are a part of them; if the great majority of them won’t make it, the changes against us making it are very low. 

But I am arrogant and proud.  I don’t have school spirit or national spirit, but I am proud of my race.  If only one race of beings makes it, I want it to be my race, the human race.

 

 

 

Endnotes

Endnote 1:

In order to understand the need for jobs, and the reason it only exists in some societies, we need to understand that we live on a very bountiful world. 

Nature produces food.  Nature produced all of the resources around us.  For example, farmers don’t make rice.  Farmers take some seeds, throw them into the air (rice is planted by ‘broadcasting’) and wait.  The seeds fall to the ground and germinate into new rice plants, which eventually go to seed.  At the end of the growing season, nature will have produced enormous amounts of rice in areas where rice grows well.  Humans then collect this rice.  Generally speaking, collecting rice doesn’t take much labor.  A single person with a harvesting machine can harvest 3.15 million pounds of rice, enough to feed 1,000 people for a year, in a single day. 

Say you own a ‘natural’ rice farm that produces this amount of rice.  (‘Natural’ means that you do nothing on the farm other than seed it by broadcasting the seeds in the spring and harvesting the rice in the fall; you don’t use any chemicals, alter the land, or do anything else.)   You hire someone to come in and throw seeds into the air and operate the harvesting machine in the fall.  You pay her at market rates for her time but, because this doesn’t take a lot of work, you don’t have to sell more than a tiny percentage of the rice that nature produces to cover these costs.  This leaves you an enormous amount of rice. 

You may think of this as the bounty of your particular farm.  It happens to produce a lot because nature put rich soil in that area, nature made the rains fall, and nature has provided predators that keep pests from harming your crop.  You get this bounty because you happen to own a very bountiful farm.  (If you had owned a farm with poor soil that didn’t produce as much, your costs may have taken a much higher percentage of your total harvest.  This would have left less ‘bounty’ rice.  If it was a very poor farm, it may have only produced enough to pay the workers, and nothing would be left at all; the very poor farm would not have had any bounty at all.  In this case, however, the farm is extremely bountiful because nature has been generous.) 

We happen to live on an incredibly bountiful planet.  Nature provides wonderful caches of resources and immense amounts of food.  Only a small amount of labor is needed to collect these things.  If the owners of productive land sell everything, and then use part of the money to pay the people who collected it, they only have to give up a tiny part of their money.  This will leave them with a large pile of money at the end of the year.  The farm will produce another large pile of money (after paying all workers) next year, and every year thereafter.  The extra money left, after paying everyone who helps collect the things the land produces and contains, is called the ‘free cash flow’ of the land.  It is a ‘flow’ of money, like a river of money.  It is ‘free’ to the person who gets it because, whoever she is, she isn’t responsible for nature existing and producing value, so she is getting it for ‘free.’  

Later in this book, we will look at societies built on institutions that cause the people of the world to share the bounty of the world by sharing in the free cash flows that land produces.  People who do things to work, to manage properties, to improve them, or do anything, get paid for this.  But the unearned wealth of the world, the free cash flow, goes into a fund that is shared by the human race in accordance with rules the human race makes in global elections.  (Socratic societies work this way.)   We will see that societies where the people of the world share the bounty of the world not only don’t need jobs to operate, they don’t even want their system to have a lot of jobs.  Recall that the free cash flow is the money left over after paying all labor costs.  What if there are NO labor costs?  In other words, what if machines do everything?  If this happens, all of the revenue from the sale of production is free cash.  The human race has more to share and everyone’s income is higher.  The more jobs we can eliminate, the higher the incomes of the people of the planet.  In societies that work this way, no one would ever propose that we pay people to destroy our world just to give them jobs.  We would want fewer jobs, not more of them, and to destroy our world to create something that we don’t want would be insane. 

But we don’t live in societies that work in this logical way.   We live in societies that divide the human race into classes, each of which has totally different rights.  The largest class is called the ‘working class.’  Other classes (all classes other than the working class) get to share part of the bounty of the world by sharing the free cash flows.  (If you were born with wealth you get returns automatically; just put it into an account and you will be paid ‘returns’ that depend on the current market interest rates and the amount of wealth you have.  If you weren’t born with wealth, but got rich by any means, your share of this free money doesn’t come to you automatically—you need to set up accounts and invest in cash flow-generating assets—but after you go through these other steps, a share of the free cash flows of the world will begin to flow to you as ‘returns’ from then on; you will get a certain percent return, the same return per dollar of wealth as all other wealthy people get.  These returns don’t come out of the sky: they come from properties like rice farms, cattle ranches, timber operations, fishing operations, and other ‘assets’ that produce ‘free cash flows.’  They represent, as we will see, the bounty of our bountiful world.) 

One class of society consists of people who don’t have any wealth collecting returns; these people don’t get any free cash flows each year.  They must work or get nothing.  We call this class ‘the working class.’ 

The problem is that we live on a bountiful world.  This means that it generates an enormous amount of wealth without any significant need for work.  There is a split of the wealth of the world: part goes to workers (we may call this the ‘earned cash flow’) and part goes to all classes other than the working class (workers don’t get any of the free cash flows).  As the need for labor falls, due to mechanization, the percentage of total production that is a ‘free cash flow’ increase and the percentage that goes to workers falls. 

As a result of mechanization, the percentage of money from the sale of all production that goes to workers tends to fall over time; they get less and less, leaving more and more to go to the other classes of society (all classes other than the working class get some share of the free money).  Jobs that are specifically related to the production of food and other necessities disappear. 

Workers get displaced.  They are now ‘unemployed.’  At some point, the charity, benefits, and help from friends and family will have reached their limits and won’t come anymore.  When this happens, they either work or die.  They swallow their pride and do the one thing that they know can get them work: they steal jobs from people who already have them.  They do this by going to the bosses and offering to work for significantly less than the people who do these jobs now.  The employers accept these offers of course: they always want the lowest costs.  This doesn’t create jobs, however: it simply shuffles around the unemployed.  The same number of people need jobs, and, at a certain point, they also get desperate: they swallow their pride and go back to their old bosses, offering to work for even less than the people who replaced them.  This causes wage rates throughout the entire system to fall. 

The working class is the largest class in society.  If wage rates fall everywhere, workers everywhere spend less.  If the economy was in balance before, with spending matching supply, this no longer happens: the stores can’t sell their goods anymore and stop ordering.  When the orders stop, the producers have to shut their production facilities.  They lay off their workers, driving up the unemployment rate, at the very time that wage rates are plummeting.  If the governments of the world don’t do something that creates an enormous number of jobs very quickly, the entire system can collapse catastrophically. 

In the 1930’s this happened.  The governments of the world couldn’t do anything about it: most taxes are paid by workers and if workers lose their jobs, the taxes stop coming in.  Unemployment rates rose from a fairly low level of 5% in 1929 to over 40% in 1933.  I have to say, ‘over 40%,’ and can’t give a precise number, because the government had to cut back and couldn’t afford to pay people to continue the surveys: they literally didn’t know the unemployment rate at the peak of the depression.  My mother was a child during this time and told me about it.  It was horrible.  Her father was lucky to get a few hours of work in a week, and pay was in potatoes because no one had money.  They went to sleep crying with hunger pains most nights.

Still, they were lucky: they lived in potato country and, while people didn’t have money, they did have potatoes.  They ate.  Hundreds of millions of people around the planet weren’t so lucky.  Since governments were shut down due to a lack of revenue, we don’t know how many died.  But we do know that demand for food collapsed and farmers couldn’t afford to harvest their crops anymore; the food rotted in the fields while millions starved to death each month.  Eventually, the farmers got tax bills or had mortgage payments they couldn’t make.  The banks or taxing authorities couldn’t leave them on the land because everyone was having trouble and, if they let anyone go without paying no one at all would pay.  They had no choice but to remove these people from their land.  With no one working the farms, and no natural plants to hold the soil, the farms literally blew away into the atmosphere.  Giant clouds of dust filled the atmosphere from the abandoned farm.  People in cities talk of the sun being blocked entirely for weeks on end. 

What happened in the end?  Luckily, a massive war, the largest in history, came along at this exact time.  (Many claim this was not luck at all: many of the rulers ran for office promising the only thing that everyone knew would bring jobs: war.)  Each worker or soldier killed in the war reduced the unemployment rate by one unit: a formerly unemployed could now have a job.  Hundreds of millions got jobs in the factories producing weapons.  After enough time, wages rose until workers could afford more than just enough to keep them from starving to death.  They began spending and demand for consumer goods appeared and grew.  Producers opened new factories to make new goods, creating more jobs and driving up wages even more.  The global economy began to work again. 

After the war, many prominent economists analyzed the results and determined that if it happened again, we would be in real trouble.  Another global conflict wasn’t a practical way to create jobs, because of the reality of nuclear war.  Current policy focuses on making sure that unemployment rates stay low, even as machines take away jobs in production.  The governments have very few tools available to them to create employment that don’t cause other problems, including environmental problems.  But they believe they have no real choice.  

We live in systems that can’t work well unless they create immense amounts of totally unnecessary drudgery and toil.  The design flaws that lead to this seemingly insane situation are quite complex and it takes some effort to understand them.  But you should be able to see by this quick explanation that the problems are definitely structural.  Only poorly designed societies will even want to have more unpleasant and dangerous things for people to do.  Only extremely poorly designed systems will collapse entirely and cease to function at all if they aren’t able to keep hundreds of millions of people working full time doing totally unnecessary work. 

We didn’t choose the conditions of our birth.  We were born into poorly designed societies.  

What is wrong with admitting this, and trying to build something better?

 

 

4:  About Me

I am a child of the world, raised in many countries; I have not seen enough differences between the entities that the people around me call ‘countries’ to feel that there is anything essential that separates them. They are, it seems to me, nothing but arbitrary remnants of a primitive past, with lines that represent things that are essentially meaningless to the human race, mainly the places where armies were stopped and decided to negotiate an end to the war and create the borders. They don’t separate different races or different categories of human beings. There is only one category of human beings and we are all in the same category.

I went to many different schools and never stayed in any one long enough to believe it was better or had any more right to be cheered on in its football matches on than any other; I never had any school spirit.

I feel no pride for the city I happen to be in at a given time, whatever it is. There is a part of me that thinks of my current location as temporary, something that I am only allied with due to chance and that won’t be a part of my life as soon as chance takes me somewhere else. I feel no sense of ownership for the city, the province or state, the country, or continent where my body happens to be located at a given time.

I can’t remember my birth. I don’t feel any connection with the particular place I was born. I could have been born anywhere, really, for all it matters to me. My family moved from the place where I was born when I was only one month old. I never went back and have no reason to go back. It is simply a place where something happened to my mother; my recollection doesn’t go back nearly that far. It is just another place. Why should I have loyalty to it? Why would I believe that, because that place was in an area that had been conquered by the armies of a particular government, I have an obligation to kill to make sure that the interests of that particular government are protected? I don’t feel the pride that would make me willing to fight.

But I am extremely proud of one thing:

My race, the human race, has done truly incredible things. When I listen to Beethoven or the Beatles, I am in awe: such wonder to behold. I flip a switch and nighttime turns into day: who figured all this out and made it happen? The buildings and structures of the world are truly incredible, when I walk down the streets of Pu Dong, or Barcelona, or San Francisco, I can’t help but be amazed by the things I see.

When I see the smiling face of a child, I can’t bear the thought of it all ending.

If we can keep it from ending, we must do this. My pride gives me an obligation. I love my race, the human race. I love my planet, the planet Earth. Both of the things that I love are threatened. There are people who are working actively to wipe them out. I have an obligation to do everything I can to save the things I love. I hope I can get you to see things my way. I hope to turn you into an ally. We are all in this together. If we perish, we perish together. This doesn’t have to happen.

If you look out at the night sky, you will see more points of light than you could ever hope to count. A small portion of these light points are star systems in our own galaxy. Scientists believe that about 100 billion planets of the planets that are in this particular galaxy are in the ‘Goldilocks Zone,’ the zone potentially capable of supporting life.

The great majority of the points of light are galaxies, with, on average, about the same number of star systems as our galaxy and probably have about 100 billion Goldilocks planets in each of them, with each of these planets meeting the conditions needed to sustain life. If only a tiny fraction of the planets that can have life do have life, there are still more planets with life than the human mind could comprehend. If even a tiny fraction of these planets with life have lifeforms that have evolved—as life on Earth has evolved—to the same basic intellectual level as humans, there would still have to be more planets near our part of the galaxy with intelligent life than we could count, if we started counting at the moment of our birth and counted as fast as we could for our entire lives.

Perhaps most of them have fallen into the same trap the human race fell into. Perhaps they started out with simple natural law societies; they believed that they depended on nature and the natural world and could not own. But these societies are inherently stagnant and can remain unchanged for incredibly long periods of time, even though the people in them are quite capable of progress. Perhaps, on most of these worlds, people eventually figured out how to use the same tools that are being used on Earth now to convince people that they are members of sovereign and independent states or countries. Perhaps most of these worlds fell into the same trap that captured us, with their beliefs pushing them to do more and more horrible things until, eventually, they stood on the brink of extinction, as we do now.

Perhaps the people on most of these worlds will passively accept and never really gain enough control of their minds to come to understand there is a way out and make the change to a healthy society. If this is the case, the odds against any of these planets of intelligent beings surviving this period in their evolution are very high. The great majority of them won’t make it. We are a part of them; if the great majority of them won’t make it, the changes against us making it are very low.  But I am arrogant and proud. I don’t have school spirit or national spirit, but I am proud of my race. If only one race of beings makes it, I want it to be my race, the human race.

 

 

3:  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.

Part Three: 
1:  The Solution

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. 

 

          Note the corner on the lower right that appears to be ‘missing.’  Societies in this range would have extremely high degrees of ownability but very small or nonexistent governments.  This is an impossible combination: large degrees of ownability harm the majority and so the majority have to be forced to accept them.  Societies with large degrees of ownability absolutely must have governments that are fairly large.  See ‘Possible Societies’ on the website ‘PossibleSocieites.com’ for more information.

 

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.

 

          Remember that a corporation is a cooperative entity that has independent existence from its founders.  It can carry forward a project with various people coming and going to contribute to the project, keeping the project going over time that may be far longer than the time any individual may be able to contribute or, for that matter, longer than any individual could even be alive.
          Governments are one kind of corporation.  (Many governments state this specifically, particularly in the United States, which was formed of profit-making corporations that made transitioned to incorporated states, townships, counties, and towns.)  Some corporations are ‘for profit’ corporations, that aren’t affiliated with governments.  Some corporations are non-profit corporations and many of the non-profit corporations exist for humanitarian purposes.
          In this book, the term ‘non-governmental organization’ will refer to an international non-profit corporation that was formed for humanitarian purposes (to advance the interests of the human race, rather than just the interests of shareholders or citizens of a certain legal jurisdiction). You can find lists of NGOs on the internet by searching for ‘list of NGOs.’

 

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.

 

Summary:   Chapter 9 introduces the concept of "scientific societies" and explores the potential for creating partial ownership systems that balance the benefits of natural law societies with the need for progress and innovation. It discusses the limitations of purely emotion-based decision-making and advocates for a logical approach to societal design. The chapter uses examples like Theodore Roosevelt's creation of the U.S. Forest Service and leasehold ownership to illustrate how partial ownership systems can work. It concludes by suggesting that the Pastland group has the opportunity to design a society with an optimal "degree of ownability" that could potentially avoid the pitfalls of both extreme ownership and non-ownership systems.

9:  Scientific Societies

 

Not all humans seem to have the same abilities when it comes to the use of logic and reason.  Some people are highly intellectual and use logic to solve nearly every problem they face.

Others rely on intuition and feelings.  they have instincts that tell them what to do in different situations.  The term instinct means ‘any behavioral motivation other than logic.’  We normally use the term 'feelings’ to refer to the mental pressures that push us to do things without having to first think them through.  In other words, you could say ‘feelings' are another term for 'instincts.'  We want to do certain things.  We don’t always think them through and, in some cases when we do think them through, they don’t make sense.  But we often do these things anyway.  Our feelings are stronger than our intellects.

 

          Sex is a pretty clear example of this.   If not for emotion/instincts, would people ever do this?  Talk to a kid who is too young to have these feelings and you will see that it is hard to get them to believe people actually do this.  (You put what in where?  That can’t be right.) 
          In many cases, our logical minds tell us that a person we find attractive and want to have sex with is not good for us and will make our lives miserable.  Some are strong enough, mentally, to override their feelings and stop seeing this person.  But I know many people who just can’t do this.  they follow their feelings and this often leads to horrible lives for them.

 

We are capable of incredible intellectual feats.  But we don’t always use these skills and talents.  Thinking through complex projects is mental work and can be very hard work.  It can take a lot of mental effort to work through complex projects logically.

In some cases, practical realities force us to do this work.

War provides a perfect example:  we want to attack and kill and keep killing and killing until all members of the tribe trying to infringe on our territorial rights and sovereignty are dead.  (These are instincts that we inherited from our ape ancestors.)  But our logical minds tell us that if we fight emotionally, and our enemies fight logically, we will lose.  If they have jets and isobaric bombs, and we attack them with knives and pistols, we will be killed.  We have to be logical and refrain from random and angry attacks.  We need to organize so that we can have weapons that are as capable as their weapons.  We can't let the people designing nuclear bombs use their emotions to determine how much plutonium to go into them.  They need to do mathematical calculations and get the amount perfect.

Over the centuries, people have found that any emotion at all (even one seemingly unconnected with the project) can interfere in the scientific calculations and lead to dangerously wrong answers.  For example, prior to Galileo’s findings in 1607, people designing cannons thought that heavy objects fell faster than light ones.  It just felt right:  a cannonball that weighs 200 pounds (a solid iron ball) will not fall as fast as one that weighs 100 pounds (a hollow metal casing filled with gunpowder that will explode when it hits the ground).  Because people felt the light ball would fall at a different rate, and in fact it doesn't, they were wrong in their calculations of the amount of gunpowder to put into the cannon to propel the different types of munitions.  They missed their targets when they could have hit them, if they hadn't been prejudice, and lost wars they would have otherwise won.

In his book, ‘Two New Sciences,’ Galileo showed that there is a universal law of gravity that works exactly the same way on all objects.  After accounting for air resistance, all objects ‘fall' (react to gravity) the exact same way and at the same speed.

Galileo was arrested and put on trial, shortly after writing this book, for ‘teaching false sciences.’  The things he said didn’t mesh with the things people had been teaching for thousands of years and were considered to be the absolute truth.  (They clearly hadn't been tested in a scientific way.   If they had been, they would have been proven false.)  Some of the people he was training in his class would one day join the military and some would become artillery officers.  They would make their calculations in ways that the establishment thought was false and miss their targets by even more than was common.  This could harm the war effort.  Galileo was dangerous.  He was put on trial and sentenced to life in prison.

 

          A common misperception is that Galileo was jailed for claiming the Earth was a planet orbiting the sun like other planets.  This, the story goes, bothered the religious authorities, who brought charges against him.  This is not what happened:  the records still exist and he was clearly tried for 'Two New Sciences,' a book that doesn't even mention astronomy. 
          The academic establishment wants students to accept that academics know what they are doing, they always knew, they will always know, and anyone why disputes the things accepted by academia is wrong.  They don't want to show that almost everything that was taught as ‘absolute truth’ in the past has been shown to be wrong.  (Children won’t accept what they are taught if they believe the teachers might be wrong.  Then, if they are asked to fight, kill, and die for their country, they will ask 'why?’)   They can then make up stories like Galileo's fights with the religious authorities to make it appear that there was nothing wrong with their field.

 

Some artillery officers heard about the dispute.  They tried Galileo’s formulas.  They found that they predicted the paths of cannonballs much better than standard formulas.  They began to use them.  Those who accepted the laws based on science and observation hit their targets.  Those who didn't, did not.  Their feelings still told them Galileo had to be wrong.  But they were trying to kill people who were firing cannon to try to kill them.  Those that hit their targets lived; those that did not died.  Eventually, the ones that refused to accept Galileo’s ideas either reformed or were all killed off and his ideas became the standard ideas.  They were taught in military schools and cadets entering military schools were expected to have a background that would allow them to use these calculations.

We all think things should work a certain way.  Certain things feel right.  But we can’t let our feelings get in the way of our analysis, or we will get the wrong answer.  Physics just doesn’t work the way our feelings tell us will work.  (Einstein’s work provides another example. It doesn't feel right that matter and energy should be the same thing, or that there should be a top speed that anything can reach.  But people who refuse to accept these laws won’t be able to solve problems in physics, including the problems that have to be solved to make nuclear bombs.)

Military researchers have to follow science exactly and leave all emotion out of their calculations, or they would not be able to design and build weapons capable of protecting their country.

The realities of warfare have forced us to totally banish emotions and beliefs from analysis these areas.  Try this: look up journal articles about the correct use of prayer to help work out the ballistics of rockets or the configuration of bomb triggers; you won’t find any.

The same principles hold for societal design.  Unfortunately, in these areas, people haven't gotten to the point yet where they are willing to accept the things science tells them, when their feelings tell them something else.  So, our societies are designed almost entirely around feelings, emotions, instincts, and other non-scientific analysis.  We use logic to help us build weapons. But we don’t use logic to help us understand the forces that push us to believe that the people born on the opposite sides of certain imaginary lines are worthy of nothing better than being blown to pieces by these weapons.

 

Science in Pastland

 

Our group in Pastland is in a position to think about the world differently than people did before the event that sent us into the distant past.  We have a moratorium on accepting the principles that led to the conflicts of the past.  We can think of the interests of our group as the interests of the human race.  We can do an analysis of the different structures that we can incorporate into our societies, figure out which will help us, and which will harm us.

We have stared with a natural law society.  This is a 0% ownability society. Zero percent of the rights that are potentially ownable to the world are actually ownable.  We can all see that the natural law society has forces pushing against progress, growth, and the development of facilities that will allow us to replace the technological tools that we brought back with us from the future and build new and even better technological tools in the future.  If we keep natural law societies, we will not have these things, we will revert to primitivism, and all knowledge of the better ways of doing things will be lost.

We will realize that the societies that we left behind in the distant future had forces that led to improvements and progress.  We may come up with theories about the reasons for the difference.

Some may look back at the distant future societies and realize that people who improved in those societies often got very, very rich from this.  They owned rights to improve and they owned rights to keep the wealth they got by improving.  It might be possible to split out these particular rights—the rights that encouraged people to improve—from the other rights that they got and make these particular rights ownable.

We can work out the forces that lead to improvements.  Then we, the members of the human race, can discuss our priorities.  If a majority of the members of the human race want improvements, we can incorporate these structures into our society.

We don’t have to worry about what is ‘supposed to’ happen to do this kind of analysis.  We don’t have to search the heavens for invisible beings that may have created us and then determine the intentions of these beings.  We can simply determine the relationship between the structures that can be a part of human societies and the incentives. After we understand these things, we can figure out what incentives we want our societies to have and then put the required structures into place.

We have seen that 0% ownability societies have advantages and disadvantages, and 100% ownability societies have advantages and disadvantages.  If it is possible to build societies around the premise of ownability of no rights, and possible to build societies on the premise of ownability of all rights, it must also be possible to build societies around the idea of ownability of some rights or partial rights to the world.  I want to give a quick example to show you how such a thing might work:

Let’s consider partial ownability of the bounty or free cash flow the land produces.  If we sold 100% of the rights to the Pastland Farm, the buyer would be buying the right to get $2.4 million a year in free cash flow and all increases in production that she is responsible for creating. Imagine that we decide we are going to sell the right to some free cash flow but not all of it, and all increases in bounty that take place during the time that rights to the property are private.

For example, say that we decide that we want only $400,000 of the free cash flow to be buyable and ownable; the rights to the first $2 million will not be sold.  We can do this by creating something called a ‘leasehold’ and selling the leasehold, but not the property itself.  The leasehold is simply a document.  This document grants certain rights.  In this case, it is an agreement between the human race and the buyer.  The buyer will own the permission of the human race to keep all production of the farm above the first $2 million it produces each year.  (The buyer will not own any land; she will only own a permission slip.)

Essentially, she will be buying the right to lease the land for a lease payment of $2 million a year.  There are several different kinds of leases people can create.  If a lease is granted by a document that can be bought or sold, it is called a ‘leasehold’ (rather than simply a ‘lease’ or a ‘rental agreement’).  The yearly payment is called a ‘leasehold payment’ (rather than simply a ‘lease’ payment or ‘rent’).  The document itself grants ownership of special rights to the land to the buyer of the document.  The buyer will not own the land itself.  She will, however, own certain rights that we will see are extremely valuable and that can be sold for very large amounts of money.  A document that grants marketable leasehold rights, and which is sellable after it has been issued, is called a ‘leasehold title.’

 

Two kinds of property ownership:
          In our world today, there are basically two ways you can own property.  the first is called ‘freehold ownership.’  If you own with freehold ownership, you pay only a one-time price to the seller to get rights to the property and never pay anything else. You get a document called a ‘freehold title’ or ‘freehold deed’ to the property.  Because almost all sales in the world today are freehold sales, we typically omit the term ‘freehold’ in our discussions.  We say only that they get a ‘title’ or a ‘deed’ to the property.
           It is also possible to buy a leasehold on a property. Although leasehold sales make up only a tiny percentage of total sales, they do take place; we will look at examples shortly.  If you buy a leasehold on a property, you pay a price initially to gain control of this property.  This price is always going to be less than the price of a freehold on the same property, because it is not the only cost you will have to pay.  You will also have to make a yearly payment to the seller called a ‘leasehold payment.’ If you buy property rights this way, you get a document that is still called a ‘title’ or a ‘deed,’ but it is a different kind of title or deed, called a ‘leasehold title’ or ‘leasehold deed.’

 

If we decide we want to sell only specific, limited, and conditional rights to the farm, we can do this using a leasehold ownership system.

Now consider this:

A 100% ownability system sells 100% of the rights to the property.  A system based on 100% ownability is a 100% ownability society.

What if we create an entire society on the foundation of a partial ownability system?  The above example involved selling the right to 16⅔% of the free cash flow.  (The buyer would have to turn over $2 million of the free cash flow as a leasehold payment, leaving her owning only the right to $400,000 of it.  $400,000 is 16⅔% of the total $2.4 million in free cash, so the buyer of this document will be buying the right to get 16⅔% of the free cash flow, plus any increases in cash flows she is able to generate by improving the property.)  If this system was used for all properties that the group sold, people would be able to buy rights to operate land privately which will include the right to keep 16⅔% of the free wealth that flows from the land.  You might call a society based on a property control system like this a ‘16⅔% ownability society.’  It doesn’t sell all rights to the land, but it does sell some rights.

For now, let’s not worry about whether this is the ‘right’ percentage to sell.  We will look through the different percentages we can sell later in the book and compare them.  We will see that we can sell any percentage of the rights to the free cash flow that we want from 0% to 100%.  This means that, if we consider a scale of possible ownership systems that ranges from 0% ownability societies (natural law societies) to 100% ownability societies (sovereignty-based societies) we can go anywhere we want along this range.  Is the option here, 16⅔%, the best place to go?  That requires a lot of analysis.  Here, I am just trying to explain the basic idea. I want you to realize that there is something in between natural law societies and sovereignty-based societies. The two systems that have existed on Earth in our history are both extreme systems.  The example above is simply designed to show you that it would be possible for a group of people in the right position to build something that is NOT extreme.

If you look on the back cover of the book, you will see a chart.  This chart shows the different possible societies that humans can form.  The ‘degrees of ownability’ are on the vertical (up-down) scale.  Go up and you move to systems with lower ownability.  If you go to the extreme top, you get to 0% ownability societies, or natural law societies.  If you go down, you go to systems with greater ownability.  The extreme systems on the bottom are sovereignty-based societies. The scale on the on the right side of the chart shows the strength of various different kinds of incentives that can exist in societies.

Some societies work in ways that send wealth to people who harm the world and create violence.  I call these incentives ‘destructive incentives.’ You can see by the chart that destructive incentives don’t exist in natural law societies, they are very strong in sovereignty-based societies, and they have various strengths at various intermediate levels.

Some societies work in ways that send wealth to people who improve the world and make it capable of producing more value with less inputs.  (In other words, they reward people who increase the bounty or free cash flow of the planet Earth.)  Note that natural law societies don’t have these incentives at all.  Sovereignty-based societies do have these incentives.  Intermediate societies have these incentives with various strengths.

We will see that the incentives come from flows of value that can be measured with absolute precision.  Since they are measurable, we can quantify them and put numbers on their strength.  On the chart, higher numbers mean stronger incentives.

Incentives are not behaviors; they are behavioral motivations.  They are the forces that push people to act certain ways.  In other books, people have compared incentives to the idea of an ‘invisible hand’ pushing people to act certain ways.  For example, some societies have incentives that push people to deploy their ‘industry’ (their time, skills, effort, talent, and wealth) in ways that lead to more creation of value on the planet.  People have examined these incentives and said things like:

 

Every individual neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.  He intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

 

Not everyone reacts to incentives. Some people may feel the pressure of an ‘invisible hand’ pushing them to do things that create value, but may not react: they may want to spend time with their families or may not have the freedom to quit their jobs so they can devote their effort to something that they think will lead to the creation of value.  But the incentive/invisible hand is still there.  It pushes on everyone.  The stronger the incentive, the greater the force of the invisible hand.

This book claims that the problems that threaten us come from forces that are side-effects of the operation of the sets of structures our ancestors have created to determine who has the right to use the wealth the land produces and what rights they have.  These structures work in ways that generate very powerful destructive incentives.  They send wealth to people who do things that harm the human race and planet Earth.  We will see that we can measure the strength of these incentives with great precision. We can determine the impacts of small differences in the structures on the strength of the incentives.  We can see what changes are necessary to reduce the strength of the destructive incentives to manageable or acceptable levels.

 

As we will see, constructive incentives and destructive incentives are opposites and work against each other.  If the constructive incentives are weaker than the destructive incentives, progress, advances in technology, and mechanization help the human race and make our existence better; if the destructive incentives are stronger than the constructive incentives, progress, advances in technology, and mechanization are generally harmful, as they give the people with incentives to destroy more powerful tools to do the things these invisible hands push them to do. If the constructive incentives and destructive incentives have the same strength, we meet the minimum requirements needed to have manageable and at least potentially sustainable systems. 
          Destruction means the disappearance of wealth; production means the appearance of wealth.  It is possible to create more wealth than is destroyed indefinitely.  It is not possible to destroy more wealth than is created indefinitely.  The minimum conditions for sustainability lead to creation of wealth that matches destruction of wealth.  The chart shows societies that meet this condition on the line marked ‘minimally sustainable societies on this line.’
           Later in this book we will look at solutions that will cause our societies to gradually evolve in ways that move them upward on the chart.  We start with highly destructive societies (the societies on the bottom have the strongest possible destructive incentives) and move to societies with gradually less destruction.  At some point, we reach minimally sustainable societies.  At this point, we are basically ‘out of the woods’ because we have conditions that allow us to manage the destruction to keep it from exterminating our race.   If we keep going, we will eventually get to a system with no destructive incentives at all and with the strongest possible constructive incentives, represented by the middle line in the chart, labeled ‘socratic societies here.’  All these things are discussed as this book progresses.

 

If we understand all of the intermediate options, and know how to create them, we can basically pick and choose the exact incentives that we want our societies to have.  (We can do this by mathematical analysis described later, or by merely looking at the chart.)

Our group in Pastland is in an ideal situation.  We have passed a moratorium that is only going to run a few years more.  After it is over, we will be back basically where we started, with every single option on the table.  We can take advantage of the next few years to figure out what is possible, find the best system, and put it into place.

We are actually very lucky in this regard.  We have people in our group with many different backgrounds.  Some of these people happen to have experience in fields that can help us figure out how to make our societies work the way we want them to work.

Back in the future, partial ownership systems were used in certain specialized areas.  There were a lot of people who wanted to protect land.  They wanted to grant rights to it that would create incentives for the people who controlled it to keep it healthy and productive and even make certain specialized improvements to it. (The example below involves one of the most important of such people, President Teddy Roosevelt of the United States.)  They created partial ownability systems to make this happen.  We happen to have a few people in our group who have experience in these areas. They worked with leasehold ownership and other partial ownability systems their entire adult lives, until they took this trip.  We can take advantage of their specialized skills and backgrounds to help us create a system that brings the exact incentives we want.  If we want systems with zero destructive incentives (no forces pushing people toward violence and destruction), and very powerful constructive incentives, we can create them.  We can make our finished system work any way we want.

 

Tools To Use To Create Partial Ownability Societies

 

Theodore Roosevelt was born and raised in New York.  But he always considered himself to be an outdoorsman and moved to the part of North America called ‘the west’ and spent a lot of time there.  Roosevelt realized that the land in North America east of the Mississippi had been granted to and exploited by corporations that only cared about money.  They had no regard for the land and destroyed each area as soon as they arrived.

The corporations were running out of land in the east to exploit.  They were petitioning the government for grants of land west of the Mississippi. When corporations arrived, they took out the trees first and sold them, mostly in other countries (lumber was still relatively rare and therefore expensive, with the bulk of forests having already been destroyed in Europe, Asia, and the parts of Africa that Europeans had colonized).  They then concentrated on gold and other valuable minerals.  They took everything worth taking and moved on, offering the land to companies that would sell it as farmland.  But the land west of the Mississippi had not been under the control of the government for very long and most of it was still intact, preserved in the same pristine condition as the American native people kept it in.

By the time Roosevelt became president, most of the American native people had already been removed (either exterminated or transferred to barren and inhospitable reserves), but the land was still intact.

Roosevelt was in love with the land. He didn’t want it to fall under the control of the corporations, which he knew would destroy it.

But how could he prevent this?

He knew that the corporations had massive lobbies and basically owned enough government officials to get their way. If the government controlled this land, and the Congress had the authority to give it away, it would be given to the corporations (or sold for trivial amounts) and be destroyed.  To save the land from corporations, he had to take it out of the hands of the Congress and future presidents.  How to do this?

Roosevelt was an attorney from a family of attorneys.  His family and friends knew more about the law than just about anyone else in the world. He worked with these people to try to solve his problem.  He decided to create a new kind of organization, one that would control the land but not own the land.  It would be dedicated to protecting the land and would have the legal authority to take steps to protect it, but it would not have the legal authority to ever sell even a single square inch of this land to any corporations or any other persons.  The organization that would control the land would be called a ‘conservatorship.’

He called the organization he created the ‘United States Forest Service.’

Roosevelt wanted to protect the land, but he also wanted to make it available for people to use and enjoy.  He gave the conservatorship organization a mission: it had to provide uses that would allow people to enjoy the forests, but which would still keep them healthy and preserve them as forest lands.  One of the ways people might enjoy forests is to build little cabins where they can live in a protected forest environment.

People aren’t going to invest their money in building a cabin unless they own some rights to it; they need to at least own the right to live in the cabin and the right to sell this right to others, or it just doesn’t make sense to build.  The Forest Service could make this right ownable by creating something called ‘leaseholds’ on the land and selling these leaseholds.  The buyers of the leaseholds don’t own the land.  (The Forest Service doesn’t own the land and therefore can’t sell ownership of the land itself; you can’t sell it if you don’t own it.)  But they would own a document issued by the Forest Service that granted the permission of the Forest Service to build a cabin on a site and live in it for a period of time.  These agreements are issued for a limited period of time, usually 30 years, after which they expire.  So far, the Forest Service has always agreed to renew them, meaning they will offer an additional 30 years to the term, but there is an increase in the leasehold rate to reflect inflation.

A leasehold title is a document that grants certain rights to land to the buyer/owner of the document.  These documents are bought and sold in markets.  If you buy one of these leaseholds (and you can; many are for sale) you will not own any actual land.  If you buy one of these documents, you will be buying the permission of the conservator (in this case, the Forest Service) to live on land and make certain changes to it.  The Forest Service is very strict about the things you can do and can’t do on the land. Generally speaking, it wants the improvements to be small cabins (you can’t build a mansion) consistent with the natural forest setting.  Certain parts of the lot you have will be private property.  For example, inside the cabin, you will have the same rights to protection of your property as if you had actually owned the cabin.  If someone you don’t want in your house refuses to leave, you can call the police and they will arrest her and charge her under the same laws that protect private owners.

You won’t own the land or the cabin, but you will own certain specific rights to it.  If you ever decide you don’t want these rights anymore, you can sell them; many of the leaseholds sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, because people want the right to live in these homes.  (Most leasehold cabins are near lakes or rivers, or in mountains with fantastic views of the surrounding land.)  You can advertise the leasehold for sale, accept offers, and sell to the highest bidder.

Since you will be leasing, not owning, you will have to pay money over time to keep your rights to the property. You have a landlord: the United States Forest Service.  Your landlord has created very strict rules designed to protect the land, keep the forest healthy, and maintain the residential areas in a condition that makes them look like ‘a forest with small cabins’ and not a ‘residential housing development with trees.’

If you buy one of these leaseholds, you will have to agree to follow these rules your landlord has set. However, as long as you make your leasehold payment as required, and follow the rules, you will own certain rights.  You will own the right to live in the cabin and this right can’t be taken away from you without due process, under the same rules that affect people who own freehold rights to property.  You will have a document called a ‘leasehold title’ registered with the state, in the same way that a regular title, called a ‘freehold title,’ would be registered. This document will guarantee you the same protection of your ownership rights as you would have if you had owned freehold rights to the land.

 

A Restaurant In Manhattan

 

You may wonder why anyone would pay money for a document that only grants them the right to rent the land.

Isn’t rental a totally separate thing, and don’t people do only one or the other (either buy or rent, with nothing in between)?

Actually, people buy leaseholds all the time.  It is possible to mix and match owning and renting in many ways.  I want to give an example to show you why someone would buy the right to rent a property that should make it pretty easy to understand.

Say you are interested in opening a restaurant in New York City.  You first look for a building to buy with an open store on ground level that you can use as a restaurant.  Of course, most buildings in New York are high rise buildings and you aren’t going to find any high rise buildings for sale at prices that you, or anyone else interested in opening a restaurant, can afford.

You are not going to buy the building with a standard freehold ownership sale.  You are going to have to find someone who already owns one of these buildings that has a suitable space available for lease.

You can’t expect the space that is offered to be perfect for your particular restaurant.  You will have to put some money into it to fix it up. You may have to put in a lot of kitchen facilities, and this may cost thousands of dollars.  Obviously, you don’t want to make an investment like this unless you have long-term rights to the space.  If you only have a one month lease, for example, you could put thousands of dollars into the improvements and then the landlord may simply choose not to renew and you will be out all the money you put into the improvements.

You want a long-term lease.

The longer the better.

Say that you find two suitable sites. The first is unimproved, just basically an open room, that is offered on a lease with a rent of $5,000 a month, on a 20-year lease.  If you choose this option, you will have to put about $500,000 into improvements, like building the kitchen, putting in the tables and chairs, and all of the decorations.

The second site is the same except that the person who is currently leasing it already has a restaurant there that is already open and already operating.  The original lease of the person who runs this restaurant was for 30 years, but she has had it for 10 years, so there are only 20 years left on this lease.  She is offering to let you ‘take over’ this lease from her.  A lease that can be taken over is called a ‘leasehold.’  The leasehold payment on this property is also $5,000 a month.

The current operator of this restaurant has put more than $400,000 of her own money into the restaurant, including buying everything, getting it open, and establishing a clientele and a reputation, so that the restaurant currently makes a profit.  She will let you take over her leasehold, but she isn’t going to let you take it over for nothing.  You will have to give her $500,000.  That will cover the amount she paid to build out the restaurant and a reasonable profit for her time and effort.

If you agree to her offer, you will both sign some papers.  The papers will transfer the rights to the leasehold title from the current owner to you, in exchange for a payment of $500,000.  You will be ‘buying her leasehold’.

Your other option is to take on the lease of the unimproved property.  If you do this, you will not have to pay anything up front to ‘buy the leasehold.’  You will get ownership of the leasehold for free and continue to own it as long as you make the $5,000 monthly leasehold payment.  But you will have to come up with $500,000 anyway to build out the facilities and establish it as a restaurant.  You know that this is going to take a lot of time and it will probably be a year before you even open.  After you open, you will have to establish a reputation and clientele to begin generating profit and it may take a second year before you begin making a profit.

If you buy the leasehold on the existing restaurant, you can simply change the name and open the next day, without any lag at all.  I hope you can see that buying a leasehold is not a silly idea at all: it makes total sense.

 

A Cabin in the Woods

 

Let’s now look at the idea of buying a leasehold on a cabin.  The basic idea is the same:

Take two properties offered for lease, both at a rate of $50 per month.  One is unimproved and has the right to build a cabin, but no cabin. The second already has a cabin on it. Someone bought the leasehold and built a cabin for $40,000.  That was 10 years ago.  The lease has 20 years left to run.  She is offering the leasehold for $50,000; she wants to recover her money and get a reasonable profit for her time.

If you take out the leasehold on the unimproved lot, you won’t have to pay any cash up front, but you won’t be able to move in right away.  You can put a cabin on it for $40,000 but you won’t be able to actually move in until the cabin has been built, inspected by the Forest Service, and approved. This is going to take a lot of time and effort (the rules for these cabins are very strict and you have to follow them to the letter or your leasehold can be canceled and you will be out all the money you invested).

This is basically the same decision as the New York Restaurant.

What if you buy the leasehold on the cabin, live there for a year, and then have to move to another state so you can no longer live in the cabin?  Are you out the $50,000 you paid for the leasehold?

Not at all: you can put it back on the market.  There is a ‘market price’ for these leaseholds.  In this case, after a year there will only be 19 years left on the lease, so buyers won’t be able to pay as much as you paid for it.  But consider the fact that you will have been living in the cabin for only $50 per month, far less than you could rent even an RV or tent to live in the forest anywhere else.  If you would have been willing to pay $500 rent for the right to live in this cabin (and many are rented out for market rates), you actually saved $450 a month or $5,400 by owning the leasehold rather than paying simple rent.  If you sell for $47,500 (19/20^th of the price you paid), you are still $2,900 ahead of where you would have been if you had rented the property.

If you buy one of these leasehold cabins, you will not be buying and will not own the land or the cabin itself.  You will only be buying and owning rights to use the land and improvements, together with the right to make certain improvements that your landlord accepts.

You won’t be buying and owning 100% of the rights to the land.  But you will own more than 0% of the rights. The leasehold ownership system is an ‘in between’ system, that allows people to buy and own some rights to land without buying and owning all rights.

 

Who Owns The Land?

 

If you buy a leasehold on a national forest, you may think that someone must own the land and the cabin.

After all, someone owns everything in our world today, don’t they?  The Forest Service may not be the owner, you may not be the owner, but someone must be the owner, right?

This is where Roosevelt and his lawyer friends and relatives have made things very confusing.  Roosevelt knew that if anyone had the right to sell this land, the corporations would find ways to buy it.  The best way to make sure that the Forest Service never sold the land would be to make sure the Forest Service never owned the land in the first place.

Roosevelt made this happen by setting up a new relationship with the land that he called a ‘conservatorship.’

The American native people who still lived freely in the west when Roosevelt first visited western lands were basically interacting with the land as conservators.  They didn’t own the land, and so they didn’t have any authority to sell it (at least not in their own minds).

They were just there to take care of it.

Roosevelt wanted to set up the Forest Service to have the same basic relationship with the land as the American native people who had been taking care of the land for thousands of years before Europeans arrived.

Who does own the land?

Roosevelt knew a few legal tricks. He created something called a ‘public trust’ to hold the title to the land.  The ‘trust’ would own the land and ‘the public’ would own the trust, so ‘the public’ would be the technical owners of this land.  But the terms of the trust would make it so difficult for ‘the public’ to actually do any of the things that owners do that, for practical purposes, no one would be able to do the kinds of things that owners do to land.

The term ‘public’ is defined in such a way that it includes people who have not yet been born: the land is to be protected ‘for future generations to enjoy.’  Perhaps, if all members of ‘the public’ were to vote on the issue and consent to sell the land, it could be sold.  But the great majority of the members of ‘the public’ (as defined by Roosevelt) have not yet been born and therefore can’t consent to anything. You might say that the land is technically owned by ‘the public’ but, in practice, no one owns this land: it is unowned and unownable.

 

Partial Ownability Societies

 

Our group in Pastland is in a position to form any kind of society we want.  We have seen that we can interact with the land in extreme ways, allowing 100% ownability or 0% ownability, but neither of these systems will meet the long-term needs of the human race.  If we want a partial ownability system, we can build one.  In fact, we can choose from a great many different types of partial ownability societies, with different ‘degrees of ownability’ of the world.

What ‘degree of ownability’ do we want?

We might choose a high degree of ownability, one that is close to 100% ownability but not identical; we would expect systems that are close to 100% ownability systems to work almost identically to sovereignty-based societies, with only minor differences.

We might choose a low degree of ownability, one that is close to 0%.  We would expect systems that are close to 0% ownability systems to work almost identically to sovereignty-based societies, with only minor differences.

We could also choose somewhere that is not close to either extreme system.  If we do this, we will end up with property control that is entirely different than the property control systems that we have now.  If we use these systems as a foundation for our societies, we will end up with societies that operate entirely differently than the societies that have existed in the past.

If we want something in between, it makes sense to come to understand the different options.  It turns out that, due to a rather strange set of circumstances, there is one place in the world where people commonly buy rights that are very close to the middle of the range.  Let’s look at this system so we can see how it works:

 

SEO Snippet:  Pastland explores scientific society design, balancing natural law benefits with progress through partial ownership systems for optimal societal incentives.

Keywords:   Scientific societies,  Partial ownership systems, Leasehold ownership, Societal incentives, Sustainable development

 

 

Summary:  Chapter 8 explores the limitations of natural law societies, particularly their lack of incentives for innovation, progress, and risk management. It contrasts these societies with those that allow for ownership of certain rights, which can encourage improvements and technological advancements. The chapter discusses how strict adherence to non-ownership principles could lead to a reversion to primitive conditions over time. It introduces the concept of "partial ownability" societies, which balance the benefits of natural law systems with the need for progress. The chapter concludes by considering why exceptions to the "no ownability rule" might be desirable for a society like Pastland.

 

8:  Improving the World, Creating New Value, and Managing Risk

 

Some societies work in ways that cause people to get large amounts of wealth if they can do things that make the planet more productive.  They can also get fantastically wealthy if they can create new technologies or machines that can turn the super-abundant materials in the Earth into goods that make life better for humans.

Many of the entities called ‘countries’ that run our 21^st century world have found ways to allow individuals and groups of individuals (corporations) to make lots of money doing these things.

You can see the result all around you.  The cities have luxury steel and glass skyscrapers that allow people to live in what poets of the past described as paradise, high in the clouds with all manner of luxuries at their disposal.  We have devices that can produce electricity that allows us to turn night into day, to keep our homes comfortable in the coldest winter or the hottest summer, to talk to people on the other side of the planet in real-time video calls, to get on planes and travel to the other side of the world in a few hours.  People involved with the creation of these structures, goods, and services, clearly make money doing them.  Somehow, the system they live in transfers value to them in some way that encourages them to provide more and better structures, goods, and services.

We will see shortly that it isn’t necessary to allow people to own all rights to properties to have these incentives.  In fact, people actually have stronger incentives to improve if they don’t get the right to keep the bounty of the land (its free cash flow) as a benefit of ownership.

 

          For example, the Pastland Farm produces a free cash flow of $2.4 million a year.  Say you are given this land for free.   You star to get $2.4 million a year without doing anything.  Now say that you could possibly go out into the field and move a few thousand tons of dirt during the winter when the water was gone to make it level.  The level land would produce more than the land in its natural state.
          You could get more money if you went out and moved the dirt.  But why should you even go out to the dirty old farm?  (The free cash flow comes in after everyone who does anything, including manage the farm, has been paid.  You don’t have to do anything at all to get it and never have to set foot on the farm.)   To you, the money you can get from improving is actually pretty minor relative to the amount you get anyway. 
         Now consider a different system where the rights to the farm people can buy and own do not include the right to get the bounty of the land (its free cash flow).  You inherit all rights to the world except the right to the free money it generates.  (This right was kept by the human race when it arranged to set up ownability of land thousands of years ago.  It was never owned and the bounty has gone to the human race all this time.)  In this situation, the only way you can really benefit from the land is to improve it.  As we will see, in this system, the incentives to improve will be far greater than they would be in a system where people got massive amounts of free money as ‘owners’ without having to do anything at all.

 

Clearly, people do not have stronger incentives to improve property if they get money just because they have the title ‘owner of the land’ and they will get this money whether or not they improve.

People improve to get the extra money they get from the improvement, not because they are already getting huge piles of free money without doing anything.  This means that we can create even stronger incentives to improve by setting up a system where people can only buy and own certain specific rights to property.

But the point is here that natural law societies don’t allow any ownability of any rights to property at all.  Whatever rights are associated with improvements, they are not ownable, because no rights are ownable.  Almost always, improvements require people to invest their time, energy, skills, talents, money, or something.  They need to be assured that they will have legal rights to benefit from improvements before they can justify making these investments.  In other words, they must own something, even if it is just a document stating that they have the right to improve and the right to keep some of the benefits of improvement after the improvement is made.

Natural law societies don’t allow any ownability of any rights to land under any circumstances.  (This is the way the term is defined.   I will discuss this in more detail below.)  In fact, most natural law societies that have existed in the past not only didn’t encourage investments that would lead to progress and growth, most of them actually prohibited these investments.

This means that true natural law societies—pure ones that don’t ever make any exceptions to the absolute prohibition of humans to own parts of the world—are likely to not have any progress at all for incredibly long periods of time.  They may go thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years without any real change.  (Many of the pre-conquest American people lived pretty much the same way the first members of the homo genus lived when they first left Africa 1.9 million years earlier.)  In fact, without some sort of incentives to create things of value, even a group that starts with great advantages—as does our group in Pastland—will eventually revert to the most extreme level of primitiveness.  Let’s consider why this happens.

 

Reversion to Primitiveness

 

Our group in Pastland brought back a lot of wonderful things from the future.  We have the ship itself, made mostly of steel (an item that doesn’t normally exist in nature and has to be manufactured by humans).  We have computers, the generators and solar panels we use to generate our electricity, refrigerators to keep our food from spoiling, machines to help us sow the seeds and harvest the things the land gives us, radios, televisions, telephones, and the internet.

We have these things now, but they aren’t going to last forever.  When they break, we won’t have parts to fix them.

The ship is made almost entirely of steel.  If steel gets exposed to oxygen from the air, it starts rusting immediately.  Steel parts have to be protected or they will rust to nothing.  Ships are coated with paint.  The paint wears away and the ship has to be repainted every few years or it will start to rust.  A lot of paint was scraped from the ship in the events related to the time warp and many parts of the ship are already rusting.  Within a few decades, structures that were once thick enough to drive a tank across will be thin enough to poke a hand through.  Within a few generations, the floors and walls of the ship will be paper-thin and the ship will be so dangerous that we won’t be able to live there anymore.

We will have to move out onto the land.

If we still have an absolute prohibition on ownability and prohibit any alterations to the land, we will have to live in temporary structures like the teepees that the American natives in this area used before the first European people arrived.

When we arrived in the past, we had electricity produced by generators and solar panels.  We had a great many products that used electricity to operate.  These items have moving parts.  Generators have rotors that turn on bearings, and bearings eventually wear out.  Eventually our generators will break, and we won’t have the parts to fix them.

When the last of our generating devices fail, all our electrical devices will become useless.  All the data that was on hard drives will be lost forever.  If we have no paper factories, we won’t be able to write any of this information down and will have to pass it down to future generations verbally.  It won’t take long before the great bulk of the information about how to make things that we brought back from the future will be lost.

We will have babies: we don’t need any technology or factories for this; no investments are required.  Have sex and babies will come.  We have plentiful food; even without machines to collect the food, we will all have plenty to eat.  Babies will have good nutrition and grow up healthy.

Before modern birth control methods came into existence, the average woman gave birth about 8 times in her life.  If half of the babies survived to breeding age themselves, the population would double in a single generation.  (Four offspring would be alive and ready to reproduce from the original couple.)

If the population doubles every generation, it will increase by a factor of 32 every century and by a factor of more than 1000 every 200 years.  We don’t need technology for population to grow.  All we need is food and we have plenty of that.

The human population of the earth will grow.  We will spread out across the land.  Children will hear the stories of all of the wonderful things that people used to have, like giant ships that sailed the oceans, computers that stored vast amounts of data, and refrigerating devices that provided wonderful treats like ice cream on the hottest days.  In time, children will start to think of these stories as nonsense; stories told by adults for some unknown reason that really have no relationship to anything real or important.

They will stop believing these things.

Parents will not waste time telling their children stories that they don’t believe themselves.  All of the information we brought back from us from the 21^st century will be forgotten.

In later chapters we will see that it is possible to build societies that are almost identical to natural law societies, but have structures that allow people who want to build factories to do so, provided they agree to follow strict rules designed to protect the planet from harm and provided they agree to share the free cash flows the factories produce (once they have been completed and are in regular operation) with the human race.

We know that it is possible to have societies where factories exist.  We know this because we came from societies that worked in ways that not only allowed factories to exist, they encouraged factories to exist.

But we won’t have factories if we are strict about our prime directive and absolutely prohibit ownability or institutions that protect ownability of any kind.  To have factories, people have to be able to own rights to flows of value that factories produce, with their ownership rights protected by some sort of institutional structure.

 This doesn’t mean that people won’t make things in natural law societies.  They can produce a great many things.  They just won’t make things that are complicated enough to require large investments into things like factories to make.

People with natural law societies had a lot of fancy jewelry.  People made make clay pots and pottery.   Some metals can be worked without smelters, refineries, or factories: copper, gold, and sliver, for example, are all soft metals and can be hammered into thin sheets, drawn into wires, and otherwise worked with hand tools to make many different items.  People in natural law societies had these things.  We can have these things in Pastland, without allowing anyone to own any part of the world.

But we won’t have any additional refrigerators, television sets, paint, or any items made of steel; we won’t have cars, ethanol engines, jets, or bullet trains.  If we can make an item by hand, we can have it; if we need factories to make it, we can’t have it unless we have some sort of system that grants people some guaranteed rights to profit from their activities on land if they improve.  There has to be some sort of legal system that says ‘this right belongs to you.’  They have to own it.

 

 

Partial ownability societies

 

Territorial sovereignty societies and natural law societies are both extreme societies.  In one, everything is ownable, including nature, mountains, rivers, continents, corporations, and even naming rights to new star systems that are discovered.  In the other, no rights to any part of the world at all are ownable and can be purchased by anyone or any group at any price under any conditions.

Extreme systems of any kind always have limitations.  One obvious problem with extreme systems is flexibility.  Extreme systems do not allow any exceptions, no matter how great the benefits of exceptions may be.  Natural law societies are extreme systems because they don't allow any ownability of any rights to the world under any conditions.  It doesn’t mater how limited the rights or how great the advantages of allowing rights.  Humans and human entities can’t own them, period.

Our group in Pastland may not want an absolute system.  We may want exceptions.  If we decide to have them, we will no longer have a natural law society.  This is true by the way I have defined the term.  Natural law societies are zero ownability societies.

There is a reason for this definition.   The system we will look at starting with the next chapter, a socratic, is a partial ownability system.  In this system, people will not be able to own parts of the world around us.  The mountains, rivers, lakes, meadows, continents and parts of continents themselves will not be ownable.

But rights to use them will be ownable.

The human race can set up what you may think of as a 'permission slip' system for designated parcels of land that will allow people to buy and own the permission of the human race to use the land privately, provided they follow rules the human race sets for this system.

Here is a simple example.  Some people in Pastland may want private housing.  They may propose at a meeting that we set aside certain land for this purpose.  We can divide this land into ‘building lots.’  We can then sell documents that are essentially permission slips for each lot.  These permission slips give the owners of the land consent of the human race to use their lot as ‘a place to build and peacefully occupy a private home, as long as certain rules are followed.’

They buyers of these permission slips will not be the owners of any part of the planet.  They will only own the permission of the human race to use the land privately (provided they follow all the rules the human race sets for this, which may include payment over time to the human race).

In Pastland, we have a system built on majority rule.  If the majority want a rule, all have to respect it if they want to have the benefits of living in an organized system.

         This was the first rule we passed when we arrived in the past.  It is a defining rule that will make our system much different than territorial sovereignty societies, because in territorial sovereignty societies, the human race as a whole has no authority whatever.  (All authority is vested in the countries, which are sovereign entities.)   If the human race has no authority, it doesn’t matter what the human race wants. 
          A socratic system is built on majority rule for each ‘constituency.’  The primary constituency is the human race.  We make rules on matters that impact the entire human race.  If we (the members of the human race, acting collectively in a majority rule system) decide we want to divide the world into different administrative districts, we can do this and set up majority rule systems inside these districts.   But the rules for the human race will be made by the human race itself, in direct elections.

 

This kind of system is a sort of work around that allows private property without private ownership (or any kind of ownership at all).  In the above example, everything on the building lot will be private property.

But the part of the Earth that your home is built on will not be owned by you or anyone else.  No one will have a right to treat it as if it is a simple possession that they have the right to destroy as they would any possession.  You only own the right protection of your privacy on the land, not the land itself.

You could think of this as a ‘partial ownability’ system.  You could say that there is a certain package or list of rights that are potentially ownable by humans.  If everything on this list is actually ownable, we have a territorial sovereignty system:  the sovereign owners have absolute rights and authority over the land and can do anything they want with it.   in a socratic system, we don’t accept that all rights are ownable.  We do accept that people can buy and own rights to the consent of the people of the world to use land privately, and to have their privacy protected by courts.

If our group in Pastland decides to create a partial ownability system, we must decide what portion of the potentially ownable rights that we will make actually ownable.  We will see later that we actually have a lot of different options here.  Each of the ownability systems works differently.

We can think of territorial sovereignty societies as 100% ownability systems.  One hundred percent of potentially ownable rights are actually ownable (by dictators, kings, and the entities we call ‘governments of countries’).  We can think of natural law societies as 0% ownability societies.   Zero percent of potentially ownable rights are actually ownable.  These are extreme systems.  Partial ownability systems will be in between these two extremes.

It is possible to have systems that are very close to 100% ownability societies built leave some rights unownable and unowned.  You might expect these systems to work very much like territorial sovereignty societies. We will see that it is possible to create systems that are like this if we want to do this.  (This is going to be very important when we look at converting to a different system.  We can have a system that is almost identical to the system we have now, but where some rights to some properties have been transferred to the control of an organization called the community of humankind which represents the human race, and are no longer ownable.)

It is also possible to have systems that are very close to 0% ownability societies, but have some tiny, tiny bit of ownability of a tiny number of properties.  Such a system will look and work almost identically to a natural law society.

Since we know how the extreme systems work (both have existed) we know how the ‘almost extreme’ systems are going to work.  They are going to be almost identical to the extreme systems.   However, if we move away from the extremes toward the center of the range of possible ownability systems, we move into areas that aren’t really like any kind of society that has ever existed on Earth.

The book Possible Societies deals with all the options and shows how they all work.  To understand them all, you need a lot of information so Possible Societies is a very long book.  For the points of Preventing Extinction, you don’t need to understand everything, you just need to understand the specific system I call the ‘socratic.’

 

Why Might We Want Exceptions to the ‘ No ownability rule?’

 

Our natural law society in Pastland is actually pretty nice and comfortable.  If people respond to the inherent incentives of this system (if they try to maximize their own personal incomes) they will work hard, both individually and with others, to keep the land healthy and keep the environment clean.  In real-world natural law societies, the worst crime that anyone could commit involved harming the land.  In the societies of native Americans, it may be hard to see why they cared so much about keeping their environment clean and healthy.  In Pastland, we use money for transactions and the incentives stand out.  We share the bounty of the land.  Healthy land is more bountiful than land that suffers in any way.  We all get paid, in dollars and cents, to keep the land healthy and productive.  Some of us have other incomes (besides the bounty of the land).  But some depend entirely on the bounty of the land to raise their families.  If you harm the land, you are harming them directly.  You can’t expect people to not get angry at you if harm them and the people they love by taking money away from them, something that happens if you harm the land.

Everyone is also being paid to be personally and socially responsible.  The bounty of the land doesn’t belong to everyone.  It is a gift and belongs to no one until the people around you decide to let it become private and divide it in some way.  You can’t expect them to give you an equal share if you do things that harm them.  You need to cultivate good relationships with others.  It is in your best interests to go out of your way to help others if they need it, to share with them if you have more, and to work with others on projects that they think will make life better for everyone.  If you do this, and have a reputation for being responsible, you can get away with the occasional slip up (we all make mistakes that harm people accidentally).  If your do not have a reputation like this, when you slip up you could find yourself with a far lower income or no income at all.

We would expect people to go to extreme lengths to be environmentally, socially, and personally responsible.  Many natural law societies that existed in the past were able to function quite well without organized police forces and formal laws and court systems.  We may have such rules but, like other natural law societies, we could do without them.

The natural law societies bring some great advantages.  But natural law societies are extreme systems that place absolute limits on the things we can do and the polices we can have.  We can have exceptions if we want.  We won’t have a natural law society if we have these exceptions, but our group in the ancient past isn’t required to have an extreme system.  We can have something that is not a natural law society and not a territorial sovereignty society if we want.

 

SEO Snippet:  Natural law societies lack innovation incentives. Partial ownability systems balance progress with shared benefits, avoiding reversion to primitive conditions.

Keywords:  Innovation incentives, Partial ownability societies, Technological progress, Natural law limitations, Socratic system