Form: Short Note

[I]f you adopt paternalism: that your kin are an extended family, and that you will work with other extended families to cooperate non-parasitically with all other extended families, and that we produce nations not states, then you get this wonderful ability for us to religion, culture, race, class and caste. We struggle with a certain problem: that while small nations are better for the development of community and mutual insurance, large states are materially valuable for the conduct of war and less so for trade bargaining. But once we have nuclear weapons it is very hard to violate borders without committing suicide. So there appears to be no reason for large states other than aggressive warfare. And yes, some territory is objectively better than other territory. And some genes are objectively better than other genes. And we start from different levels of development. But states are as much a barrier to development as they are to improvement precisely because of scale. Scale increases the ability to engage in corruption. With scale we find anonymity. With anonymity we have informational asymmetry. With informational asymmetry we have opportunity for corruption (privatization of commons). So you know, I’m a CLASSIST, in that i recognize the problem of carrying a large and counterproductive underclass, but I am not a RACIST in that I want all groups to transcend the animal, become fully human, and evolve into what we imagine as gods. And its possible. We had it right. Unfortunately we blew it. And now we have to fix it.

[I]f you adopt paternalism: that your kin are an extended family, and that you will work with other extended families to cooperate non-parasitically with all other extended families, and that we produce nations not states, then you get this wonderful ability for us to religion, culture, race, class and caste. We struggle with a certain problem: that while small nations are better for the development of community and mutual insurance, large states are materially valuable for the conduct of war and less so for trade bargaining. But once we have nuclear weapons it is very hard to violate borders without committing suicide. So there appears to be no reason for large states other than aggressive warfare. And yes, some territory is objectively better than other territory. And some genes are objectively better than other genes. And we start from different levels of development. But states are as much a barrier to development as they are to improvement precisely because of scale. Scale increases the ability to engage in corruption. With scale we find anonymity. With anonymity we have informational asymmetry. With informational asymmetry we have opportunity for corruption (privatization of commons). So you know, I’m a CLASSIST, in that i recognize the problem of carrying a large and counterproductive underclass, but I am not a RACIST in that I want all groups to transcend the animal, become fully human, and evolve into what we imagine as gods. And its possible. We had it right. Unfortunately we blew it. And now we have to fix it.