Corruption of governance is an existential threat to humanity because it empowers a few to leverage the power of the many for personal benefit. The larger a population governed under a system that rewards corruption, the more evil the rulers will become. This follows the principle that the larger a population is, the more extreme the talent of the most talented individuals, even if the average talent is the same as smaller groups. If evil is a competitive advantage in any system of government, then the ultimate evil will emerge as the world’s ruler.
Corruption is like cancer and eventually kills its host. The only question is who will survive and will the survivors learn the lessons by implementing new governance systems, or will they plant the seed for another civilization-destroying boom-bust cycle? With modern nukes, will anyone even survive?
Fractally builds on the principles of my book, More Equal Animals, where I systematically diagnose the structural problems with all modern governance systems. In particular, I underscore the fundamental problem with elections systematically rewarding corruption.
The partial solutions I outline in my book called for radical independence at society’s individual and local levels. The problem with a call for radical independence is that most people find dependence far more comfortable and convenient. Most people would rather be a lazy slave than a hard-working free man. Independence calls for redundancy, which is less efficient; therefore, the less redundancy one has, the more toys one can enjoy. Imagine choosing between a backup generator and a new Virtual Reality entertainment system.
Consensus Required
Any time people are working together, they need a consensus on how to direct their joint efforts. Working together produces more total value for their effort than if everyone worked separately. It is this principle which makes large countries much stronger than smaller countries. The return of economies of scale (and power) is non-linear.
The simplest form of governance is to follow a single leader. If everyone agrees to follow that leader and the leader distributes a meaningful percentage of the profits back to the people (a benevolent dictator), then a population can thrive. This depends upon the dictator having wisdom; ultimately, the problem we face is reaching a consensus on the dictator.
Most consensus systems, such as elections, will tend to select evil dictators rather than benevolent dictators. The evidence is all around us, so I won’t belabor this point.
Fractal governance, as described in my book, eliminates the need for political campaigns and maximizes each individuals influence in the final outcome; however, a political system is never independent of its economic system. If you replaced the election of the president, congress, and senate with fractal elections by state government and state government with fractal elections of counties then the final outcome would be most representative of the people and far more difficult to capture by corruption.
That said, if the people allow themselves to become dependent upon large tech companies or seed power to unacoutnable bureaucracies which are not governed by the same principles of representation then things will be corrupted. For example, corruption in media and schooling can indoctrante the masses and even turn them against the very system that is defending their rights.
The Problem with Technology
The rapid development of AI shows the writing is on the wall for video-based authentication of real identity. Before long AI systems will be able to participate in interactive video calls in a manner that is not objectively detectible. This is even more of a problem now that video streaming codecs are using AI to reconstruct 3D models from low-bandwidth data streams. This means that within the next 10 years the vast majority of all video conferencing will be high-resolution, reconstructions by AI running on your computer. There will be no way to know who is really pulling the strings on the other side of the data stream.
The only hope for governance that is representative of the majority is for all communication and debate to take place in person. In person meetings of random groupings of a local population allow information to be shared on a level playing field without the ballot being stuffed by computer generated participants.
AI Powered Propaganda
However, even in person meetings are not immune to mass produced AI-generated propaganda campaigns. If the masses are deriving their opinion of the world from online sources then they are vulnerable to the most powerful tools of deception humanity has ever known. AI will be able to respond to every facebook post and every tweet and create a false sense of public opinion of every topic. AI will be able to produce false video clips to support any narrative desired and those gullible enough to trust any digital video, images, or recordings will believe any lie. What is likely to happen is that there will be so much contradicting false-evidence on all sides of any debate that people will end up believing whatever they wanted to beleive in the first place.
The truth will end up buried under a pile of lies so thick that few will be able to find it. When someone finds the truth, no one will be able to believe them when they share it. Once achieved, the “truth” will become what ever those in power say it is because the masses will have lost the ability to discriminate amongst all of the false data.
In such an environment, it doesn’t matter what “consensus” algorithm you have. The signal to noise ratio of real vs. false information would be far too low. The wisdom of the crowds will have been corrupted by contaminating all of the participants.
What is the Solution?
There is no single solution to problems of this magnitude. The temptation is to look for more and better technology that can help us sort out the truth from the lies. We need our cameras to apply digital signatures on all of our pictures and videos at a hardware level and tools that can be used to verify whether a picture or video was captured from a particular sensor. The problem is that this creates a centralized authority in companies like Apple. Eventually these hardware keys are compromised and all videos signed by those keys can no longer be trusted. Tools like blockchains could timestamp videos and limit the damage of future compromised keys, but this would be far too impractical.
We can use digital signatures and a web of trust; however, this presuposes that the participants in the web-of-trust are not all consuming mass-produced AI-generated garbage data. The entire population would have to reject all data not produced by their web-of-trust and ban anyone producing AI-generated data and not labeling it as such. Lies and propaganda are treason against the rest of humanity and every member of society has a responsibility to filter it and not propagate it.
Scale Matters
All governance must be local and among populations where everyone knows everyone. At the very least someone from each family should know someone from every other family. A community of 100 families (aka unique last names) is probably the proper scale provided within each family everyone knows everyone else. A typical wedding might have 100 guests, which means that the proper scale may be 10,000 people divided into 100 families.
Those seeking to control society have systematically destroyed and undermine the development of strong family ties. They have created incentives that divide husband and wife, father and child. Instead of relying our family as our social safety net, they have substituted government handouts. As a result few people in the western world can imagine large families living in the same area and supporting eachother.
Borrowing from history, each family (identified by last name), should reach consensus and their family representative (likely the oldest mentally competent family member) should speak for the family. In theory, this leverages the alignment of parents caring about their children and/or legacy. It also preserves the wisdom of accumulated tradition and protects against liberal polices of ignorant youth. The younger generations will object to such a power structure as they tend to rebel against their “tyrannical” and “ignorant” parents. More often than not; it is the younger generation that is ignorant. They are ignorant because they didn’t have to learn the consequences the hard way like their parents did.
Organizational Governance
Setting aside societal governance, what if a group of people comes together with a specific domain, say social media. Lets say their goal is to regulate moderation policies on who is allowed to publish data for all to consume. Alternatively, lets say they want to reach consensus on how to resolve a dispute on the communities version of wikipedia.
Presumably the people came together with a desire of sharing information with eachother but they have a need to defend themselves from those who produce spam, lies, or broadly offensive content. In my opinion, everyone is expected to abide by the community policy and if they violate it they are “taken to community court” and judged by a jury of their piers. The key is to make this efficient and the problem is few like the participate on jury duty.
If this were a small town then anyone who steps out of line brings shame to their entire family. In other words, a family must vouch for the individuals and all members of the family share in the liability of their family members. Each family would then have responsibility for punishing and or disowning members that are out of line. Imagine what would happen if your brother, mother, father, and/or kids all suffered to some degree because of their association to you and therefore your behavior. Your closest family is in the best position to encourage your good behavior while discouraging your bad behavior.
At a community level, governance could ban entire families if those families failed to properly police the behavior of their family members.
We can apply this same structure to the broader problem of governance. Everyone must join a family and any moderation against a family member harms the reputation of all members of the family to varying degrees.
Families need not be biological, but they must have strong bonds that are not easily broken nor re-assigned. Adoptions should be difficult and so should divorce and disownersihp. If a crypto currency were in play, then divorce/disownership should have a high fee associated with it. People would only pay the fee if they expected the future harm of association was greater than the fee of disassociation. Because of the high-cost of disassociation people would be careful in addopting new associates.
Implementing modern governance on the template of societies 1000’s of years ago may seem regressive; however, in all of history we have never been closer to destroying the entire planet! We are more alone than ever and less fulfilled. Perhaps we forgot something our ancestors knew and because we forgot it we are on our way to destruction.
The Ten Commandments
The principles of good governance have been right in front of us this whole time. They are known as the Ten Commandments. Two of them are particularly relevant to this discussion: honoring your father and mother and not bearing false witness. When society places no value on honoring our parents (even if they are wrong) then it sows the seed of its destruction. Division sets in and political power moves away from our families and toward corrupt political leaders. We neglect responsibility for caring for our parents in old age (supporting social security ponzi instead) and give no thought to dishonoring their name nor their wishes with our behavior.
Meanwhile, the root of all corruption is the bearing of false witness. The AI-driven propaganda distopia is the result of people abandoning the 9th commandment. You cannot have good governance if you cannot hold people accountable for their lies. Lies being treason against all of humanity and the Spirit of Truth (commonly known as the Holy Spirit).
Corruption prospers when people fear man before our Creator. They break His commandments in an attempt to make their life more comfortable. They tolerate others breaking His commandments when it is clear that our Creator punishes the entire community for the sins of its population they allow to prosper unchecked and without repentance.
I therefore conclude that there is no solution to governance of men who worship gods other than the God of Truth, the Creator of the Universe. They deny His existence and believe there is no accountability for violating the laws He wrote with His own finger. Aside from the 4th commandment (keeping the Sabbath), all of the other commandments more-or-less self-evident. If we don’t fear our Creator then we will not honor our parents, will be tempted to kill, cheat our spouses, steal, lie, and covet what others have.
Coveting is the root of communism and motivates people to lie, steal, and kill to get what they want.
All of that said, even the 4th commandment, to keep the 7th day of each week as a day of rest from our “work” is just sound, practical advice to avoid burnout.
Whether you believe all of the Bible or not, choosing to believe in our Creator and His Ten Commandments is fundamental to a prospering society. Not fearing our Creator’s judgment for breaking the His commandments is foolish, and associating with foolish people can be dangerous!
I challenge anyone to make a case for living as if there were no Creator and no ultimate judgment and for why disregarding any of the Ten Commandments would be beneficial for society as a whole.
Conclusion
No technology or process can cure the consequences of individuals systematically disregarding the laws of our Creator. It would be like trying to design an airplane while ignoring the law of gravity.