An Idyllic World Order

There are, at the time of writing, somewhat over 8 billion live human beings on Planet Earth. And the planet can support at least twice this number with more than adequate contingency.

The Individual

Each of these 8 billion human beings arrived here with nothing. It brought nothing with it when it was born. It will leave with nothing: it will take nothing with it when it dies. But while it lives, it exists as an integral subsystem of the Earth's biosphere, from which it must continually receive its needs of life.

Each human being has an 86 billion-neuron brain — a vast analogue supercomputer housed in its cranium — which appears to accommodate a conscious 'self'. This enables that 'self' to reason and remember in order — through its biological body — to sense, classify, learn about and interact with its outside world. That 'outside world' comprises both a physical universe and a social universe.

Each self's physical body is, in the strictest sense, a mere object within the physical universe as a whole. It is, nevertheless, an integral part of Earth's biosphere, a particular small part of that physical universe, on which it vitally depends to sustain its existence. It must continually receive its physical needs: water, food, clothing and shelter in order to live. It must also return its waste to the biosphere in a form that the biosphere can naturally re-cycle.

Each conscious self's social universe potentially comprises [at the present time] the 8 billion or so other individual conscious selves on the planet. These form a society of sentient beings who randomly and arbitrarily interact with each other, as equal peers, according to a natural social protocol, which is ostensibly benign and self-regulating. This is because, in such a society, any extreme excursions from the behavioural norm is readily moderated by the presence of autoreactive peers.

Each of us arrives here with nothing. Not one of us can prescribe or determine the situation or circumstances into which he is born. Consequently, he cannot possibly have any conscious, physical, systemic or moral influence on what his biological forbears may or may not have produced or achieved beforehand here on Earth. Whether high-born or low-born, he arrives having neither produced nor achieved anything himself. He therefore merits nothing. And in this respect, all human beings are born equal.

Thus, to my mind, all should have equal inheritance in the planet on which they are born. Conversely, each must relinquish his planetary inheritance, to humanity as a whole, when he dies.

The Collective

Society is a collective of individuals, each of whom is separately and independently conscious. Each is self-aware with feelings, values and aspirations. Each perceives, observes, experiences, reasons, loves and suffers. Each is precious. Society, on the other hand, is not intrinsically conscious. So although people may imagine it as having a zeitgeist, it is not, in reality, self-aware. It has no feelings, values or aspirations. It doesn't perceive, observe, experience, reason, love or suffer. Therefore, it is only the individual that matters. Society is a mere consequence.

As bound by self-evident natural justice, any social order, must serve and protect the individual — all individuals, without exception or exclusion. Nation, state, community, company, union, church, clique — or any other socially divisive collective — matters nothing. So, in an ideal world, how should the biological and psychological functionality and well-being of the individual be sustained? How must a social order facilitate the individual's natural mission to turn his labour into his needs of life? A snippet of ancient wisdom offers a relevant pointer:

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. — Proverbs 6:6-8

This text may at first appear to be a chastisement by the writer to an archetypical lazy good-for-nothing layabout. However, I see within it something vastly more profound and relevant than just that. The first point is that the writer asks the reader to consider the ways of the ant [singular] — an insect, which is probably not conscious; not self-aware. In other words: look to nature. Look how an ant naturally provides for itself.

It acts as a participative individual within a 'society' comprising a vast multitude of ants which effectively cooperate in an enormous process by which all are provided with food throughout the whole cycle of the seasons. Yet the ant 'society' has no guide, overseer or ruler. In other words, there is no bureaucratic hierarchy managing the whole process with directors, managers, team leaders and supervisors telling each individual worker what to do and when. Consequently, each ant must act unilaterally on its own self-formulated orders according to its own assessment of its current situation with input from 'conversations' with its neighbouring peers.

The ancient writer may be implying that perhaps this is the way his reader should be providing his "meat in the summer, and gathering his food in the harvest". In other words, human society too should operate as an inherently self-regulating complex-dynamical system.

Property & Ownership

What about the ant's productive resources? Who owns the ant colony's accommodation and its harvestable hinterland? As the ant has "no guide, overseer, or ruler", so too it has no king, baron or landlord. So it neither rents its home or workplace, nor does it have to buy its productive resources. It simply works [without charge, let or hindrance] in the space it freely occupies and freely [without paying or incurring debt] takes its raw materials from its natural hinterland.

The ancient writer may thus also be implying that perhaps this is where his reader should be working to provide his "meat in the summer, and gather his food in the harvest". In other words, human society too should operate [without rent, tax or whatever other imposition] in free terraspace. However, if land be open and free, wouldn't the individual occupation and usage of it rapidly descend into a self-destructive free-for-all?

Well, "look to the ant, thou sluggard". Is this what happens in a colony of ants? No. Somehow they seem to respect each other's working space and just carry on in benign coordination. The same is true of termites, shape-shifting shoals of fish, murmurations of starlings and itinerant herds of animals. So too with the air molecules within the weather systems of the Earth's atmosphere and water molecules within transoceanic currents. So too in all complex-dynamical systems.

The movement of individuals [molecules, insects, fish, birds, animals] within their respective 'societies' may appear chaotic. But it's not. It is rigorously deterministic and orderly. But it's complex. And the secret of its orderliness and benign complex behaviour is due to a concept known as the individual's 'mean free path' and the intrinsic rules by which the individual interacts with its neighbours so as to maintain that 'mean free path'.

Mean Free Terraspace

The mean free path of a molecule in the atmosphere or ocean is determined by a balance between differently scaled attractive and repulsive force fields. The mean free path of a starling within a swirling murmuration is maintained by each individual's ability to regulate, within prescribed limits, the distance between itself and its closest 5 neighbours. All under immediate individual control: no management hierarchy, civil administration or globally-enforced common law. A complex-dynamical system self-regulates through what is termed Fractal Law: a universal protocol that defines the behaviour of each pair of encountering neighbours.

The mean free path that an individual takes within a complex-dynamical collective defines, creates and maintains his accommodation, gathering and working space. It thus maintains what may be termed his 'mean free space'. So, does the individual [molecule, insect, fish, bird, animal] own his mean free space? Could it be rightly described as its property? In a general [non-legal] sense, yes; although since it is maintained by the individual's ability to regulate it within prescribed limits, its size and shape is somewhat elastic.

So, what about humans? Could human society operate on this entirely complex-dynamical principle? Yes. If the 8 billion human beings on Earth today were to occupy all the Earth's habitable land, each individual would have about 2 hectares [5 acres]. However, they would not need as much as that to provide their needs of life: water, food, space and recreation.

Suppose that 3-generation families, with an average of 7 souls per family, were distributed, with ostensibly equal spacing, throughout all the habitable land of the planet. Each family would have a mean free space of 152,475m² [just over 15 hectares = almost 37 acres] per family. Thus, each home would be at the centre of a circle of land of about 220 metres radius.

But should a human family own its mean free space? Yes, but in a very different sense from the way in which the ownership of land is commonly understood or recognised by law throughout the world today. Currently, ownership signifies that the owner has the right to fence and exclude other people from his land so that he alone can occupy it and use it as space to live and as a resource with which to generate — directly or indirectly — his needs of life.

The forces that determine the mean free space between molecules are highly non-linear. If one molecule gets too close to another, they repel each other with a force, which gets ever stronger the closer they are to each other and weakens the further they are from each other. Analogically, the strength or degree of exclusiveness, with regard to a family's circle of land, should become progressively stronger as an intruding stranger approaches their dwelling and progressively weaker as he recedes from it, falling to zero at its unfenced boundary.

A similar sense should apply to the family's economic use of its mean free space. The land can be cultivated intensively close to their dwelling, becoming progressively less so as one moves away from it and becoming fully wilded at the periphery. This regime allows the family to gain their needs of life from the land, while facilitating free passage for the traveller.

Semi-Nomadic Dwellings

Obviously, the homes of such a distributed population are high-science low-tech terrestrial dwellings, which are fabricated from naturally available raw materials. They provide modern comforts and services off-grid and function equally well within any habitable climate and land-type on the planet. A terrestrial dwelling is both a general and specialist workplace for its occupiers as well as a place for them to live.

A terrestrial dwelling is designed to impinge as little as possible upon the planet, causing minimum disturbance to nature. Its profile is streamlined so as to passively resist violent weather. It is able to abstract water and energy sustainably from the wilderness and return its waste to the wilderness in a form that can be sustainably re-cycled by nature. It is equipped with multi-function robotic agricultural machinery, specifically designed for precision small-scale operation, to provide an agreeable balanced diet for the dwelling's occupants, without them having to have profound agricultural knowledge.

A terrestrial dwelling is also vehicular — or, at least, easily transportable — so that a family may satisfy its nomadic desire to experience life in different parts of the world from time to time, without the trauma of having to move into a different dwelling. To make such moves possible, there is a centralised passive mechanism for dynamically allocating and re-allocating appropriate sized lots of 'mean free terraspace'. For this reason, there is a fundamental ethos, within society as a whole, which obliges each family to maintain its 'mean free terraspace' in good condition for the next occupiers if and when a move is made.

Anthropological Communities

A median of 2 hectares [the amount of habitable land available on the planet per human individual] would be more than sufficient mean free space for the whole of an average human family. Of course, the actual size of each such 'landshare' must flex according to climate and land productivity in the region of the planet where it is situated.

This contraction of the mean free terraspace occupied by each human family frees up most of the habitable planetary surface for natural conservation and free open itinerant travel. It also allows groups of families to gravitate into what I call anthropological communities. An anthropological community is a group of 50 or so families [100 to 150 souls] whose portions of mean free terraspace [landshares] pseudo-concatenate into a contiguous area to form a distributed intentional community.

NOTE: the size of a standard landshare could be set to anything from 2 to 5 hectares without encroaching too much on what is reserved for natural conservation and itinerant travel.

Such an anthropological community is almost certainly larger than the average city dweller's personal coterie in the world today. And it is located in benign and inspirational natural surroundings rather than in the isolation of a concrete & glass cage [apartment] in a city [what Desmond Morris called a human zoo †]. Such an anthropological community thereby offers a vastly higher quality of life and degree of social connection than does a modern town or city. It also enables collective economic endeavours to be carried out in distributed dwelling-based workspaces.

† The city is merely the physical container of the human zoo. The human zoo is really the system of implacable psychopathic hierarchical bureaucracies of corporate and political totalitarianism under which city-based populations were forcibly corralled, through rural dispossession, into the mutual isolation of their little brick cages, then set to work for the system, which condescendingly remunerates them to buy from the system the minimum needs of life to sustain their continued work for the system.

Unlike a socio-economy of physically distributed anthropological communities, populations today are crammed into cities, where both they and their large-scale enterprises are inherently vulnerable to destruction by both biological pandemic and invading enemies.

Social Transition

The first stage of transition towards this idyllic world order is to consider the natural habitable surface of the planet and, ignoring current urbanisation, map on to it a pattern of anthropological communities, each comprising 50 or so unit landshares, sufficient to accommodate the present global population.

Next, allocate and place on record a landshare [an appropriate sized portion of mean free terraspace] to each family. This landshare is their self-evident rightful inheritance of the planet on which they were born. Then, where possible, install each family, within a terrestrial dwelling, in its allocated landshare.

Each family, allocated to a landshare that is currently occupied by existing urbanisation, is to receive rent plus a portion of the economic yield from their landshare's current occupiers. Thus, taxation is no longer on labour but is on yield. It is a due paid to the lowly by the mighty: not a tribute forcibly extracted by the mighty from the lowly.

The socio-economic order of the present world bestows health, wealth and happiness upon the exigent, relegating the meek to misery and starvation, with a stress-ridden middle majority in a churning cauldron of economic uncertainty. In such a rancid dog-pile world, any cockamamie alternative must be worth a try.

Historically Dysfunctional

Small communities have existed in the past — and even up until recent times — with notorious catastrophic consequences. These include Pitcairn Island, the FLDS community at Bountiful in British Columbia, Colonia Dignidad in Chile, the Order of the Solar Temple in Switzerland, the Enslavement of the Moriori people in the Chatham Islands, the Rajneeshpuram community in Oregon USA and lots of others down through history.

All these purportedly initially-idyllic small communities descended into extreme hellholes of domination and oppression. Notwithstanding, all these communities shared attributes that would be self-eradicating in the global social order of anthropological communities that I have described above.

Extreme Isolation: This can be geographic isolation where distance is the barrier to interaction with the outside world. Alternatively or additionally it could be cultural isolation. Such a community could have an internal social ethos and modus operandi that is vastly different from and incompatible with those of the outside world.

Authoritarian: Such a community labours under the strong hierarchically enforced control of a single exigent — often psychopathic — individual with an abnormally narrow idealistic or religious world-view, who dictates the whole ethos and modus operandi of the entire community. This individual has usually suffered extreme abuse himself before founding the community.

Biological Inbreeding: The leader of such a community doesn't want its members to be influenced by — diluted or corrupted by — ideas and practices from the outside world. For this reason, he will forbid interaction between community members and outsiders. This causes community inbreeding, which perpetuates physical and mental disorders and hence preserves the restricted community mindset.

A human community, irrespective of any artificial hierarchical control that may be forcibly imposed upon it, is essentially a complex-dynamical system, the component elements [atoms] of which are human individuals. Whenever a complex-dynamical system, such as a cloud, is divided into separate bits, each bit has exactly the same constitution and behaviour as the original whole. Conversely, the whole has the same constitution and behaviour as the separated bits. Any small community is therefore a microcosm that has the same constitution and behaviour as the whole of humanity.

Consequently, the erudite pontifications and antics of global leaders notwithstanding, it is abundantly obvious to any observant person that the global human community of this planet constitutes an unfair society: a veritable cauldron of stress, suffering and oppression. So these aforementioned sect communities are each a model in miniature of global humanity. So, leaders of the world, "consider the beam in thine own eye". The only saving grace for the continued survival of humanity as a whole is an implication of the laws of physics that make the resilience of a complex-dynamical system a positive function of its size.

The Idyllic Solution

For a global order of anthropological communities to follow a benign complex dynamical attractor, each such community and its members must have certain characteristics.

Optimum Community Size: Each community must be large enough to include at least one person of each personality type and small enough to ensure that everybody knows everybody else. This works out at about from 100 to 200 adults. A group of this size should, on average, contain the ideal mix of self-directed [neurodivergent] versus socially-directed [neurotypical] individuals resulting in a community that has a benign functionality with optimum interpersonal communication.

Adequate Coterie Size: Each individual must have a coterie of trusted friends, which overlaps other communities. It must include a majority from his own local anthropological community plus others from a variety of other anthropological communities. This creates complex interconnection of individuals at the grass roots level, which should guarantee global stability.

Flat Network Topology: The relationships between the individual members of a community must never be hierarchical — except perhaps between parents and their non-adult children. Interpersonal relationships must form a strictly flat overlapping network. The social ethos must include a mechanism that tends to stifle and defuse the formation of hierarchical relationships.

Benign Moral Principle: The individuals of a community — and indeed of the world — must interact in a spirit of love. Each must have an intrinsic desire and determination of good intent — to do unto each as he would wish each to do unto him. This is systemically self-evident. It would make human social interaction equally beneficial to all, ensuring that society as a whole deviated little from its most benign complex-dynamical attractor.

Convergent Personality: But there's a glitch. What does a sadomasochist do to each and wish each to do unto him? He would inflict pain and suffering on them, expecting others to inflict pain and suffering on him. This would bring rapid socio-economic collapse. So each must learn to love his neighbour as himself, which is predicated upon loving himself. This must include sadists, masochists and sadomasochists. Any deviation towards either extreme must be made to converge towards the central benign normality.

Implementation

How can the vast socially-directed selfish majority of human beings be brainwashed — or rather spirit-washed — into loving his neighbour as himself? From where would he get the desire and the power? Part of the answer is a universal system of education with an integrated error-correction mechanism for eradicating non-benign systemic flaws.

This re-educated socially-directed majority must then be accommodated in a benign socio-economic environment. This has intrinsic mechanisms to prevent hierarchies from forming. No corporations, no bureaucracies, no exclusive associations or cliques. All are shareholders in a unified society. Their assets are the resources of Planet Earth. Society's prevailing ethos is to love one's neighbour as oneself. Then all will naturally follow. A satisfying bounteous life-style for all will give each an overwhelming inner desire to conform. Passive peer pressure from those around him will keep him on track.

However, within humanity as a whole, there is also a self-directed minority. These fall into two almost equally populous factions. 1) the self-directeds of good intent, and 2) the self-directeds of evil intent.

The self-directeds of good intent exist in society today. They have the intention and the will-power to live according to a benign modus operandi. The penalty they suffer as a result of living this way is ostracism and poverty. In present society, they are essentially misfits. They are frequently unjustly penalised by authority because authority neither expects nor believes that anybody would behave in such a benign way. To them, it doesn't seem natural.

From what I have seen, throughout my long time on this Earth, their strictly self-controlled way of life isn't powered by religion. Some are religious. But some are agnostics. And some are atheists. They would be ideal citizens of the new world order I have described. So why haven't they risen up and created this new world order? Because each self-directs only himself. He is diligent and hard-working but lacks exigence and the ability or desire to command and control the lives and endeavours of others.

The sad state of the world today is the work of the other minority faction: the self-directeds of evil intent. They are intrinsically selfish. Each of them individually endeavours to use everybody else as a socio-economic machine to pursue the unlimited gain of personal influence, power and wealth. He has zero concern regarding the collateral effects of stress, economic uncertainty, poverty and suffering his endeavours precipitate upon the hapless majority.

It is his kind that sits at the heads of states and corporations. It is his sycophants that power his corporate hierarchies and government bureaucracies. It is he and they who exert the authority that controls the majority with a rod of iron and unjustly penalises the self-directeds of good intent. His kind are ensconced and entrenched in their positions of power. They determine the modus operandi of humanity's present complex-dynamical social order.

Notwithstanding, as science is starting to know well, a complex-dynamical system can be made to operate in different modes, each with a very different structure and behaviour. For instance, the world climate, if perturbed far enough, could be flipped into what is known as White Earth mode in which the atmosphere would be considerably thinner and the whole lifeless surface of the planet would be covered in a permanent dusting of snow.

Likewise, human society is currently operating in what could be regarded as a counterpart of White Earth mode. If perturbed sufficiently, its powers-that-be could be dislodged, tipping the global socio-economy into the completely different benign mode of operation of the alternative world order I have described. But this perturbation would have to be done by a very strong overwhelming pulse from some external agency.

The Policeman Within

So, under the selfish nature of the human mind, could society be governed, in a sustainable way, by anything other than an oppressive hierarchical bureaucracy? Could individual human beings, each acting unilaterally according to the same benign fractal laws, become a self-sustaining and self-governing complex-dynamical society?

Some could. But the vast majority of humanity is intrinsically self-seeking. It would scupper any attempt by any faithful few to, out of the goodness of their hearts, adhere unilaterally to benign fractal law. The 'policeman within' is far too weak and ineffective. Society would rapidly descend back into disparity. Hierarchy would, once again, spontaneously rise up, conquer and oppress.

But suppose we could improve the 'policeman within'. This option has been explored in multiple ways by both science fiction and religion. One such way is to keep the people in a permanent state of passive obedience by means of chemical tranquillization such as depicted by the daily dose of the fictitious drug 'soma' in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". But this resulted in a society of sub-human zombies for whom life was futile and without purpose.

Another kind of personal policeman of science fiction is the remote control choker worn around the neck, which somehow administers pain or even death to the wearer in the event that he should stray from the 'straight and narrow'. A variation on this theme was explored in the film Wedlock (1991). Nowadays, the cumbersome neck choker could be replaced by an electronic chip implanted in the forehead. This "Mark of the Beast" could be remotely controlled by Wi-Fi or Bluetooth from a central base. Or it could contain the benign fractal law within its own memory, administering pain of a magnitude proportional to the seriousness of any infraction committed by the individual from time to time. Brainwashing and hypnoses are also options, although these can alter who the victim really is as a person.

Finally, there's the religious option. It is introduced in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. From what I can glean, it is a hyper-physical essence that can supply will power to the raw human mind to empower the 'self' within to do good and eschew evil. It empowers the human 'me' to love his neighbour as himself and treat others as he would wish those others to treat him. It is called the Holy Spirit and it enables the individual to follow this fractal law while remaining himself, i.e. without anyone or anything changing who he is. It would enable humanity to live as a benign complex-dynamical society in which each member rules himself: no bureaucratic hierarchies necessary.