I'm particularly fond of the idea of a European Federation (I don't think the "European Union" went far enough, that's why it's failing... but hopefully the fire can be rekindled in an upgraded "globalism 2.0" movement once people see how bad the current tendencies work). This is why I hate it when the EU forgets its true purpose of acting like an Empire for European Culture and Civilization, and starts behaving like some kind of petty authoritarian "European Nation", pushing out laws like this, instead of focusing on measures to accelerate growth of EU's economy and push back the profits into "synthetizing more imperial culture".
Empires bring civilization and prosperity - from The Roman Empire to The British Empire and The French "Empire(s)", to the decades of "American imperialism", if you objectively weigh the good and the bad, they've all brought humanity together and pushed it further in science and technology and integration.
A combination of "empires" or "federations-of-federations", whatever you'd want to call then, and "swarms of city-states" (depending on the preference for more anarchy or more centrallization of each region) would be the ideal way to organize and develop humanity in my way.
"Nations" and "national culture" are an illusion that only brought pain and suffering: the great genocides of the first and second world war were precisely the result of thinking in terms of nations, and of distorting this concept to become "race-nation" or something else. If you just wipe the N-word form conceptual landscape and dictionaries, there's simply nothing left for evil authoritarian dictators to distort... humanity falls back to "an organic order" that naturally leads to micro-tribes and micro-city-states that organize themselves inside empire-federations ("anarchy in the small" + "hyper-integration in the large", "order powered by chaos" in a way) bringing greater freedom for us isolated individuals, because and imperial authority's hand is always far away, easy to hide from it when it threaten's your freedoms if you're smart enough and know how to dissimulate what you're actually doing (and "more freedom for the cleverest" is what you'd want anyway), whereas local power is always close and inescapable.
The whole idea of "direct democracy" and "local decision making" above micro-level (province-size tribe, city etc.) is bad imo. These "local decisions" are always crap. They only satisfy local power hungry manipulative psychopaths. You can't solve planetary climate-change and ecological destruction with local decision making!
And EU's latest legislative decisions are crap precisely because they are made from a point of weakness, the bureaucrats have retreated in a small "holdout" and they started thinking like a "nation"! If they would think more like an empire, they would think at the technical efficiencies of how exactly technically a law impacts at the scale of an empire and the timeframe of centuries (because, at least in spirit and produced knowledge, empires and imperial cultures are meant to last thousands of years) the economy, and they'd realise that a strong EU doesn't need to "squeeze some petty cash" from corporations in the short term, it plans to out-grow and out-power any imaginable corporation (because it could operate beyond the "sandbox" of monetary economy and because it would be something people could believe in, like in a god, and be 100x more motivated / loyal / "fanatical" maybe than any profit driven corporate drones).
Anyway, I just hope that once humanity gets over the current "bottleneck" with some technical breakthrouhgs (let's say... going multi-planetar and developing self-replicatable intelligent technologies), we can get our heads out of our asses and reinterpret history in a more sensible way and refashion politics accordingly. The current worldview is "OK & safe for keepings us all alive and not killing each other" in this delicate phase, but utterly suboptimal, nonsensical, and hardly worth living for imo.
>Empires bring civilization and prosperity - from The Roman Empire to The British Empire and The French "Empire(s)", to the decades of "American imperialism", if you objectively weigh the good and the bad
No, Empires destroy regional governments, customs, and cultures, and bring upon them iron peace, of enforcing the will and customs of the winners. It's the peace of the graveyard.
And while the Roman empire is too far back, the crimes of the British, French, and other modern empires are too close for anyone to have the gal to call them "peace".
That's what jingoists and racist creeps called them in their time -- doing their "white man's burden" to bring civilization to those pesky Africans, Indians, and so on.
There have been lots of turf wars in History. None where more unjust, more unwarranted, bloodier, and more sick than the colonial wars and enslavement of over a billion people.
After the peoples in Europe fought to bring down the old empires and feudal kingdoms, and establish their own nation states, the ruling classes went for colonialism to expand their rule and build new empires, this time by exporting the exploitation globally (not that they gave up domestic exploitation completely, until the collapse of colonial empires after WWII reduced the power of the elites, and forced them to content -and deal with- their own population).
From the Belgians, who killed millions in the Congo, maimed kids, slaughtered whole villages, to the French, who killed thousands of protesters asking for their country's freedom as close as the 1960s, to the British, who gauged out prisoners eyes with spoons, and exhibited the last native survivors of their atrocities as museum pieces...
Hitler, even numerically, had nothing on those people. He just did those things to Europeans. Had he done them to Africans, Native Americans, Asians, Indians, etc, there would be people still applauding his empire and "peace" today.
And unlike the wars of the long past history, the people who ordered and performed the colonial "imperial" atrocities didn't have any excuse of not being well educated and well bread "gentlemen" of means...
The appraisals of empires is because history is written by those who killed, not the killed. And the people doing the appraisals are the descendants of the murderers.
Thanks for the more informed comment to my "50% trollish" take :)
Agree, the colonial empires did unimaginable horrors, you're probably right on this, probably they should never be praised. ...my bad for ignoring the part of their history that happened outside Europe. Maybe the word "empire" is a bad one to use, too many bloody connotations for non-europeans.
But there is to be said that the industrial revolution and its consequences would likely not have happened without the colonial empires. And, as much as we want to consider our society the consequence of the French Revolution and the independence war and all those etc., I think our true culture we live in (not the one we imagine when we go to theatre or read some lofty philosophy) that brought us the current comforts, including the laptops we type from, is the (incredibly bloody) product of industrial revolution and industrial capitalism that was fuelled by imperialism. There's where we come from, and it just is, guild / shame etc. are practically useless with respect to a past longer than a lifetime, water under the bridge etc. We just need to be wise enough to not repeat the mistakes of the past. And honest enough to take ownership of the true foundations of our society. And to use the fruits of the spilled blood as much/best as we can and make them plentiful to all - the only thing to do about spilled blood is to make bloody sure it wasn't spilled for nothing!
And:
> reduced the power of the elites, and forced them to content -and deal with- their own population
...that's another issues. I'd rather have whatever elite crops up at the top of an empire fan out and dilute their exploatation as much as possible. Modern informational society will make it much harder for far off acts of bloody exploitation to go ignored and unnoticed anyway, with a globalist culture of social responsibility, call it a "global-PC-2.0" (hopefully less ridiculous than the 1.0 version of "political correctness") in lack of a better word.
These are the challenges I care about: (1) how to create a "globalism 2.0" that economically works (maybe the whole dystribute-everything and crypto things can be put to good use here) for the best and also produces "global culture" (the 90's brought some mildly successful examples of this), and (2) how to create some "global-PC-2.0" or "distributed global eco social responsibility" (this will need some true innovation, and it will need truly un-censorable and anonymous communication infrastructure too as a substrate to work on - think "global channels that could broadcast live and no nation state have the power to shut them down even if they discover it breaks their (local) laws").
Empires bring civilization and prosperity - from The Roman Empire to The British Empire and The French "Empire(s)", to the decades of "American imperialism", if you objectively weigh the good and the bad, they've all brought humanity together and pushed it further in science and technology and integration.
A combination of "empires" or "federations-of-federations", whatever you'd want to call then, and "swarms of city-states" (depending on the preference for more anarchy or more centrallization of each region) would be the ideal way to organize and develop humanity in my way.
"Nations" and "national culture" are an illusion that only brought pain and suffering: the great genocides of the first and second world war were precisely the result of thinking in terms of nations, and of distorting this concept to become "race-nation" or something else. If you just wipe the N-word form conceptual landscape and dictionaries, there's simply nothing left for evil authoritarian dictators to distort... humanity falls back to "an organic order" that naturally leads to micro-tribes and micro-city-states that organize themselves inside empire-federations ("anarchy in the small" + "hyper-integration in the large", "order powered by chaos" in a way) bringing greater freedom for us isolated individuals, because and imperial authority's hand is always far away, easy to hide from it when it threaten's your freedoms if you're smart enough and know how to dissimulate what you're actually doing (and "more freedom for the cleverest" is what you'd want anyway), whereas local power is always close and inescapable.
The whole idea of "direct democracy" and "local decision making" above micro-level (province-size tribe, city etc.) is bad imo. These "local decisions" are always crap. They only satisfy local power hungry manipulative psychopaths. You can't solve planetary climate-change and ecological destruction with local decision making!
And EU's latest legislative decisions are crap precisely because they are made from a point of weakness, the bureaucrats have retreated in a small "holdout" and they started thinking like a "nation"! If they would think more like an empire, they would think at the technical efficiencies of how exactly technically a law impacts at the scale of an empire and the timeframe of centuries (because, at least in spirit and produced knowledge, empires and imperial cultures are meant to last thousands of years) the economy, and they'd realise that a strong EU doesn't need to "squeeze some petty cash" from corporations in the short term, it plans to out-grow and out-power any imaginable corporation (because it could operate beyond the "sandbox" of monetary economy and because it would be something people could believe in, like in a god, and be 100x more motivated / loyal / "fanatical" maybe than any profit driven corporate drones).
Anyway, I just hope that once humanity gets over the current "bottleneck" with some technical breakthrouhgs (let's say... going multi-planetar and developing self-replicatable intelligent technologies), we can get our heads out of our asses and reinterpret history in a more sensible way and refashion politics accordingly. The current worldview is "OK & safe for keepings us all alive and not killing each other" in this delicate phase, but utterly suboptimal, nonsensical, and hardly worth living for imo.