On the nature of society and government, from a heavily biased perspective.

For society to truly work it must encourage individuality while still promoting action towards the common good.

This is an idealistic concept. But it is by no means an impossible one.

Unfortunately, human greed seems to cause all forms of governing to inevitably devolve into caste systems. Because some individuals desire to have power over, or more material wealth than, those around them.

A carefully balanced caste system can maintain itself for quite a long time. Centuries even. To be successful, a caste system must provide two things to (a majority of) the more numerous lower (working) class: some degree of ability to sustain themselves and their household, and some sort of rationale for why things must be the way they are. This rationale can be as simple as: fear.

If the balance is not maintained, if these things are not provided in a sufficient capacity to enough of the lower populace, it will collapse. It can be plague, a stronger force can invade and conquer, or it can be the old crowd favorite: revolution.

Generally the decline is gradual. Some rulers (governors) are better at maintaining the balance than others. A succession of overly incompetent, overly greedy, and/or overly cruel rulers of varying small degrees will encourage eventual collapse, but if a single ruling party (whether individual or group) is too much of one or more of those things, it can cause an immediate and rapid dissolution.

We don't really like to think of our species in terms of being a finite thing. We would like to believe that we will literally continue on until the end of the world. But while it is certainly true that if the planet is destroyed we will perish along with it, it is far more probable that Earth will long outlive the human race. The vast majority of all species that have existed in the history of the planet no longer do. Extinction is inevitable. But the more capable a species is of adapting to changes to its environment over time, the longer it is likely to survive.

It is the same with species as it is with governments, which is a handy coincidence, because if the human race wants to remain an evolutionary-viable species, we need to change our governing style. Well, actually, we need to change our societal structure in general.

This is not as much of a stretch as it seems. There are over 7 billion homo sapiens on the planet, and life-expectancy continues to improve, that number increases at a growing rate. There is a generally-held belief that population growth will max out at a certain point. That past a certain point, population growth cannot sustain itself, and (stabilized or decreased by way of disease, famine, war, or just good old conscientious awareness) will plateau. We won't actually know if that's true or not until we get there.

In the meantime we are doing an incredible (or alarming, depending on your perspective) job of mucking up the place. We're rapidly burning through a lot of finite natural resources, and polluting to levels that will take a long time for Earth's natural processing cycles to deal with.

We are generally being very short-sighted. None of this behavior will necessarily destroy the planet (or even necessarily make it merely uninhabitable), nor will it necessarily cause the human race to go extinct. What it will do though, is make life generally suck. Or if you think it sucks already, well, it can get worse. And hell, even if the planet becomes nearly inhospitable, society could continue on.

For awhile. Could be a long while, could be a short while. Not forever. But if we want it to be longer, sooner or later we will have to adapt. And typically speaking, later is not better.

We need to become an enlightened, global society. It's the 21st century, and yet throughout the globe there is war, genocide, famine, wide-spread disease, political upheaval and societal unrest. Inequality abounds...

...and there's absolutely no reason for it. There is enough food and clean water for the entire planet. Most diseases are curable, and cost little to do so. Advancements in micro- and nanotechnology abound. Communication is faster, easier, and more expansive than ever before. All the information in the world is literally at your fingertips.

And most importantly, we are all of one species. One human race. Where we are born, what color we our skin is, the social status of the family we're born into, it's all chance. The distinctions of who is better than who are completely arbitrary.

And whether or not we choose to admit it, we know this.

So let's stop being stupid, and all get along, yeah?


I feel like I never fully tied in my opening point, but it's almost 6am and I'm bloody tired, so I wrapped it up shoddily so I can go to bed. I apologize for this, and will hopefully return to the subject in the near future.

Mortality is that chest pain you get every once in awhile, the one where you're never really sure if it's your heart or your lung (but you're pretty sure it's your heart) and it only sticks around long enough to remind you that one day you are going to die. But not today.

And even after a over a decade, you're still only 27, and not quite even that.

That's mortality.