Thread by @yungneocon

The general pattern of states in the last 500 years has been division & localization—albeit while the state form itself has expanded its reach—while the trend of the economy is toward internationalism, globalization & greater market unity

In theory, from the standpoint of either capitalist efficiency or state socialism, a single global state is the one that makes the most sense, as long as there are checks and balances. It means the least loss to transaction costs or currency risk or factor balance.

In practice it doesn’t work this way because of the aforementioned power balance issue, but also because the information, enforcement, capture, & incentive compatibility issues become absurd.

But also because the main basis for states are:
1. City states & their polis
2. Empires
3. Aristocracies
4. Nobilities
5. Defending against other states
6. Nations
7. Religion
8. ‘The people’
9. Class struggle
10. Social contract theory

1 can’t countenance a global state for reasons of coordination & directness of sovereignty. 2 often can’t handle a world state because empires require an ordering of the world into metropole & periphery (tho it’s the most promising of the ten to justify it)

3 if based on heredity requires particular familial relations & alliances that can’t be generalized across a certain scale while those based on virtue run into normal issues of the republic, although technocratic Mandarin aristocracy could justify world states

4. Faces a similar issue as the first 3. And a single world monarchy would basically collapse immediately. It would need to recourse to feudal delegation & would quickly distintegrate. 5 obviously ceases to be meaningful in a global state & would generate endogenous conflict

That nations & nationalism can’t sustain a world state should be obviously. Religion in theory could if everyone had the same religion, but we don’t, and, anyway, even within single religion theocracies schisms & spin-offs are inevitable

8. ‘The people’ is an interesting one, but it doesn’t really work. ‘The people’ are always *a* people, and there’s only global humanity not global people. If there were a space empire perhaps populism would be powerful enough to sustain a world state

9. Seems like it could be a promising one but let’s be careful. If a global stAte already existed it seems that it would either have to allow capital etc and thus wouldn’t be based on class struggle or would have already eliminated capital & would be on the way to withering

10. I don’t think any social contract theorist things it could sustain a world state. Rousseau believes in peoples. Locke & Pufendorf in hierarchies of race & use. Hobbes sees states & sovereignty as defined against each other. Rawls admits cultural locality & concentration

So, for all 10 of these there are severe issues of several kinds:
1. Legitimacy—they have a hard time justifying it
2. Self definition of sovereignty—they require difference & distinction which would be eliminated
3. Scale issues
4. Implementation issues

5. Differences among peoples, nations, religions, cultures etc
6. Stability
7. Self erosion
8. Cooperation & solidarity mechanisms work in the opposite direction of sovereignty & aggregation ones
9. World states eliminate the competition & causes for their existence

10. Composition issues where, at scale or in aggregate, principles become contradictory

All 10 have justification & implementation issues. But one could contend that is irrelevant. Can the corresponding material structures of these build a working sustaining world state ?

Empire, aristocracy, nobility & religion fare best on these accounts. In some imaginary sci fi thought experiment of inter galactic states, the people, class struggle, and defending against other states would also work.

I’ve purposefully elided another set of justifications:
1. Rationality
2. ‘Civilization’
3. Teleology
4. Service
5. Stability
6. Merit
7. Efficiency
8. Peace
9. Global scale of issues
10. Global economy needs global state

3-10 are all instrumental and rationalist reasons for statehood. 1-3 are more ideological, and historical, with the aesthetic veneer of the instrumental, modern, and rational. There’s a reason these 10 are usually not far from world state advocates minds

But here’s the thing, no state in the history of the earth has been successfully built around, justified, and survived for the reasons 3-10. They usually collapse into the first 3 and from there into aristocratic projects by another name.

The arc of progress & teleology embodied in 1-3 are often given as reasons for why states should exist or what they do. But the thing is that these break down quickly. Rationality very quickly obvi cannot sustain the social bonds of statehood & devolves into force & mysticism

Teleology skips a step and goes straight to mysticism, and, has the added effect of nearly always being proven wrong in its Predictions but more importantly states don’t conform to its posited tendencies & simply expecting them to almost always results in collapse.

Could global civilization work as a justification ? Maybe except that civilization by its very nature requires expansion, stratification, differentiation, resource use, progress, urbanization, specialization, the division of labor, & separation of power & politics.

Many of these either:
1. Reach a hard limit
2. Become asymptotic and require ever expanding inputs & throughputs to maintain the same levels
3. Produce differentiation & difference that breaks systems apart
4. Entail competing class, social & ideological forms & justifications

Civilization in the critical sense is precisely the system of domination of man by man and of nature by man, and on a global scale it’s clear to see why this is a necessarily collapse prone system.

But even in the neutral sense of building ties across difference and social complexity, it faces the issue that bridging difference requires local translations & ties, the condition of possibility for unity depends on irresolvable plurality, which eventually creates conflict

Conversely, the more general & stable a set of systems etc, the less difference they can bridge, and, furthermore, the more likely they require externalizations of socio technical systems that ossify & take on a self perpetuating logic.

The former is the problem that systems for handling plurality cannot all co exist, and yet would have to at a global exist, while the latter is the tendency toward centralization & bureaucratic self perpetuation.

The first is the tension between local & global stability, & solidarity, at scale, in space at a time. The latter is the tension between these across time in a space.

The first is that composite systems across difference that are dynamic with regard to change become indeterminate while the latter is the issue that determinate systems eliminate difference & become static in the face of change.

In other words one could have an absurd number of patchwork institutions that successfully bridge all local differentiation implied by ‘civilization’, but then there would be no determinate unity or a single system (also required by ‘civilization’).

Or one could have a determinate unified system, but ultimately it would either eliminate local difference—undercutting its engine of change or be unable to specifically accommodate it and the Become unstable —undercutting its mechanism of consent.

The temporal problem is that ad hoc institutions & structures are unstable, and sufficiently complex, they no longer sustain the centralized unity that allows the dialectic of ‘civilization’ to occur.

But sufficiently stable institutions & structures are necessarily self perpetuating, segmenting, etc, creating structures of self perpetuating differentiation which, at the same time, either eliminate difference or ossify in response to it.

In other words, self perpetuating institutions are stable but ineffective and effective institutions are unstable, but the ‘civilization’ social system presumed a complex adaptive system that is both meta stable & effective.

In other words, over time, the global state, premised on ‘complex civilization’ as social system must either tend toward centralized stupid domination, or to smart, decentralized fragmentation.

This is why civilizations always require each other, and frontiers, and barbarians and enemies. Definition against others maintains self definition, and frontiers and outsiders guarantee sources of novelty & adaptation even for self perpetuating social bureaucracies.

A globalized unified world civilization must choose between being unified and being a world, between being global and being a civilization, and thus breaks down. Again, that’s why most civilization teleologies project themselves into a completely novel unending future like space

In Star Trek, in part it is ‘the final frontier’ because it is the frontier that never ends. Civilization presumed change, complexity, growth & difference. No frontiers means totality, unity, stasis, etc.

To abuse a metaphor, the arrow of time as entropy is the tendency toward ‘disorder’ except the end state of this is total stasis. So, then, if stasis does not exist, there is yet order & a set of changing states.

The fantasy of the final frontier is having ones ‘entropic differentiation’ and eating ones ‘never reaching stasis’ too. (Again i am fully aware this is abusing the scientific concepts in very odd metaphoric ways!)

But the flip side of this is that the final frontier is the final frontier for *some* particular entity. In a situation of total change & differentiation, there are no systems that dan be truly be said to persist across time in a coherent sense.

i.e. we can imagine an occasionalist ontology of physics where every instance is a unique event, and then metaphorically apply this to a society. But this is not a civilization, not an entity, snd thus has no frontier.

So the final frontier also is the fantasy that the ever expanding difference always provides sufficient distinction & exogenous others to maintain the stable coherence of social system reproduction.

This is a razors edge search/stay dynamic optimization problem, and one that is always at risk of totally ossifying or totally differentiating, totally stagnating or totally changing.

In the matrix they say the first matrix was a utopia but it failed, why? Because it couldn’t be believed. There are several interpretations of this:

1. The Lacanian be careful what you wish for thesis—desire fulfilled negates the desire for desire snd thus collapses
2. The Buddhist life is suffering in the wheel of change and escape is stasis concept

3. The idea related to both of the above of the hedonic treadmill & pleasure machine
4. The Marxian critique of capitalism, whereby the source of capitalism dynamism is the contradictions that tend it toward collapse but also dynamism

5. The reciprocal critique that the failure of state socialism was that it tried to remove this central contradiction from capitalism and in doing so ultimately defeated itself

6. But we can view it as the general dialectical problem that applies to all state & civilization systems as such, and not just capitalism, this razors edge search stay problem—utopia fulfilled is a dystopia of hedonic stasis, utopia abandoned is a dystopia of dynamic despair

A global single unified civilization state eliminates its outside, its external frontier that allows it to maintain coherence while expanding & changing, OR it eliminates its internal frontier, that allows it to form determine unified structures across plural difference

Or, of course, it can destroy both, and become a consensual, self perpetuating & naturalized sham—it is external to its subjects, almost entirely separate, while, at the same time, being insurmountable, self perpetuating without changing or growing.