The Crisis of Homogeneous Authoritative Systems and the Future of Modern Tribes
Pavol Lupták
Omnipresent technology has completely changed our society. Most of us are still not sufficiently aware of this.
State education has lost its monopoly as an information provider. Even worse: compared to other information channels, state education is among the most boring.
Different views and opinions from hundreds of thousands of media outlets leads to information chaos. State education and the media oligopoly no longer have the monopoly on 'truth'. Anyone can become an information provider and use a blog to broadcast views to everyone in the world. This fact leads to a highly individualistic information society. It also means we have to face an extremely large number of conspiracies.
We live in a complex information society swarming with the diverse opinions of billions of people. Communists, socialists, democrats, monarchists, those who do not care and those who want to be free.
Despite this substantial opinion heterogeneity, we still stick to very homogeneous political systems like parliaments, direct democracy, various forms of monarchy and maximally homogeneous dictatorship regimes enforced upon millions of different people.
We vote and decide about the future of our neighbours we hardly know. Often, aside from sharing a language and passport or national ID, we have nothing in common with these people. Despite their physical proximity, we live in completely different worlds. We share more interests and values with people living thousands of miles away from us.
Virtual communities, for the first time in history, are replacing traditional ones. Yet on a political level, virtual communities are still ignored. We are still stuck within ‘national' communities with random people who share the same national tags and believe they can decide on the future of others inside their community.
Our society has become too complex for any homogeneous political system to be applied on a broad scale. Enforcing homogeneity has always had an adverse impact on minorities; not just on women, LGBT communities, discriminated races, weed smokers, etc., but also a new generation of free-minded Internet people who consider the current authoritative state system to be obsolete and can imagine a freer decentralised system based on cooperation and voluntary decisions. They know thanks to their birthplace – the Internet and its services – that this is possible.
We are witnessing the crisis of homogeneous political systems when applied to a complex society of individuals. In the times we live in, homogeneous systems are too fragile to survive without violence. The enforcement of violence within a well-informed society is extremely expensive.
In a well-informed peer-to-peer society, large homogeneous systems become inefficient and obsolete. This leads to a high amount of conflict. It does not work now and will not work in the future.
The solution lies in an entirely decentralised society. This society can be composed of modern physical dwellings (like private cities or smaller, natural communities) or virtual tribes with autonomous zones, legal systems, and a set of rules. Modern tribes are the most natural human grouping. Benefits include better cooperation and maximum loyalty, improved conflict resolution inside the tribe and decreased transaction costs.
It is high time to embrace modern tribes as the only natural extension of our individuality.
This article was originally published in 'Agorism in the 21st Century', Issue 02. It is reproduced on Logos Press Engine with the author's permission. The original can be found here.
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