Introduction

The history of humanity is the history of its emergence from self-ignorance. From prehistoric tribes to self-centered Greek city-states, from medieval realms to multinational empires, from militaristic police-states to the modern system of globally interconnected nation-states, we have grown in our awareness of humanity, the universe, and the planet. The regressive and default state of all beings is an acute ignorance to their wider surroundings that eventually disperses in the wake of a more comprehensive consciousness, the extent of which is directly proportional to the prosperity of that being and their wider community. The path of expanding the human perspective from individual to tribe and from tribe to nation does end with neither a fraction nor greater part of the universe, it is a perpetual and natural process given to sentient beings by nature, a means of survival and progress. It is possible for a humanity that is aware of these historical laws to accelerate on the road to an inevitably closer cohabitation. If we continue, as a species, making baby-steps to an inevitable destination it will be many generations before we see what’s over the horizon. 

The progress that has rendered this age more prosperous and possibility-filled than any that has preceded it is not of the political sphere.  The anonymous revolutionaries of civil society are what have greased the historical machinery to deliver political possibility. The historical figures that have provided us with our most cherished universal possibilities are not the blood-soaked generals or sly politicians of antiquity, but the inventor, the innovator, and the humanitarian. The heretics of history, those who have had the courage to follow alterative means and foster fresh perspectives, those who fight against the zeitgeist to usher in new eras, are an inspiration to us who are obligated by necessity to do the same in this era.

Since human prosperity develops in conjunction with the internationality and planetary awareness of civilization, it is necessary then to build an international creed and consciousness that is demonstrative of a commitment to historically-mandated development. The removal of hindrances that prevent the emergence from self-ignorance is defined by a campaign and intellectual framework that promotes humanity’s awareness of its own collective being – and how it is illogical and unhistorical to foster perceptions that do their best to divide humans, their consciousness, and allegiances tribe by tribe.

There exists, in the midst of the human line of reasoning, a rather distinct political necessity. To fulfill it is the first step to a wider revolution within the very framework of the international system. Anarchy and chaos, human disunity and disorganization, the loss of potential, and the divisive character of the means by which humans relate to each other as collective entities, is all part of a lack of regulation and primordial leadership at the helm of our destiny as a species. These features manifest themselves in an anarchic system of national states, the exploitative and disregarding actions of governments, and an inefficient apparatus of global problem-solving.

Within political and social spheres numerous interpretations of the world have undergone centuries of fine-tuning. What all these accounts have in common is a pervasive loyalty to the anarchic system of international relation and a heart made of the same core paradigms that cling to human thought like a cancerous infection. These ideologies overwhelm us with complex accounts that are mostly justifications so as to blind us to the true meaning of the global system, while hiding and discouraging the tools we have at our disposal to overthrow it. The web of ideologies that foster and justify the configuration of humanity are not conspirators but are merely negligent to the bigger picture. There does, of course, exist an entire crop of ideologies that have the potential and capacity to be elevated above the dark shadow of the norms, yet they are rendered ineffectual by the irrational preservation of faction and chaos. To do away with the systemic flaws that riddle planetary civilization is not an endeavor that can either be propagated or brought to bear by negative theories. Prosperity is not merely the absence of tyranny. In the same sense, the new unity of humankind is not, as suggested by the traditional array of globalists and hippies, merely an absence of conflict, struggle, and lack. The manifestation of true improvement must add something by adhering to a coherent and action-orientated ethos.

The fear of struggle, however, has left society, that has wasted the majority of its competitive energies on mutually destructive wars, decadent and stagnant, obsessed with limitless material gain, and isolated by the blight of radical individualism that renders it unable to collude for effective change. This is largely due to the prevalence of the three spheres of action and the marginalization of one sphere at to facilitate the dominance of the other two. The public sphere, namely the government, in theory is supposed to represent an internally (domestically) moral actor and is externally an indisputably immoral actor. The private sphere, consisting of capitalistic competition is, in its current definition, inherently immoral and potentially self-destructive since it is defined by the unabashed pursuit of individual gain. The civil sphere, consisting of voluntary groups and humanitarian organizations, is disorganized, fragmented, and largely subservient to the previous two spheres, but is potentially the grave-digger of all regression if only it elevated the intensity, scale, and synergy of its operations.

Individuals and collectives rarely act as adherents to planetary values because they are rendered by their localized condition unable to see the depth of their own interests. Thus, not only are they unaware of how to benefit universal humanity, they are unaware of how to benefit themselves due to the fact that they cannot see past the urges to primitive action dictated by the necessities of short-term gain. Ideologies that hold a low view of their supporters appeal to these primitive, individualistic propensities, always appealing to their greed and self-interested behavior thus masking the true inadequacies of the system in a veil of us against them logic. But the true foe of any ideology or self-interested person is not so easily personified in another group so much as inner-perspective. The evolutionary path is not defined by the confrontation and defeat of a rival group or thought system; it is to overcome the legacies of history and the archaic mentalities that harbor them. They will not be obliterated by metaphysical declaration but by the construction of a more appealing core set of universal paradigms that do not hide behind walls of opposing factors, but live their lives in the light of day.

The realization of a planetary system is the end-all revolution. Through the encapsulation of universal interest and the establishment of a human institution providing our planet with primordial leadership, humanity will fully emerge from the shackles of self-ignorance, enlighten itself as to its collective being, and thus usher in a new set of possibilities. Such a move is to break off from the bland monotone of conventional politics and change the very essence of the global system. 

  

PART ONE: WORLDVIEW  

 

 Chapter 1: Systematic Anarchy

Anarchy is the best way to describe the manner in which humans, organized into national units, interact with one and other, where there are no givens apart from the guarantee of eventual failure and decay of any state, individual, or organization that plays the systemic game. Anarchy, in this context, does not refer to a constant state of perpetual conflict, but merely to the lack of fundamental leadership and regulation of the international system as a whole. Such leadership is not synonymous with the abolition of national states and governments. On the contrary, a more orderly international system can only benefit governments who wish to perform their most fundamental task of governing without the threat of foreign invasion or sabotage. However, the current clashes of governments and other antagonistic actors determining the destiny of the planet is neither natural nor logical.

The state is inherently expected to advance the interest of their respective fractions of humanity. This renders it an immoral external actor that’s quest to maximize the well-being of its population is only countered by the quests of other states seeking to do the same. Because of the obvious inequalities of power and wealth implicit in international relations, far from cancelling each other out, these antagonisms make the powerful heavy-handed and expansionistic, and the weak desperate and resentful. As a consequence, an equally unappealing alternative has been to superficially engineer a legal equality between states, a task that is the foundation of the modern liberal-internationalist political and economic order. But the reality of it all has rendered this uneasy, quasi-international foundation hypocritical in the eyes of many as its spouts its idealistic theory while being unable to stop the undesirable practices that it itself facilitates. The foundation of institutions like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization was born out of the painstakingly slow (and yet still not entirely complete) realization of national states and intellectuals that a certain amount of transnational cooperation is necessary for self-preservation. Thus, unfortunately, subsistence has marked the upper limits of where support for an orderly system stops.

International relations, under an anarchic system, reduces transnational interaction to a mere power game. This gives rise to politics as being a distinctly ugly discipline, where the state is an externally immoral actor, and uses domestic righteousness and legitimacy as a justification for acts of imperialism, irredentism, exploitation, and international conflict. In doing so, states determine the collective condition of humanity in increments that all add up to global trends. Because all countries contribute to the melting-pot of maladies, nobody can be strictly blamed, nor can any government be invoked to change it. The result is a total deadlock when it comes to the negotiation and implementation of international, multilateral initiatives.  Due to the systemic anarchy, if a solution is not equally mutual to both parties, it is not implemented for reasons of political pragmatism. Simply put, states do not trust each other or have any reason to. Their competitive obligations are mandated in the domestic sphere; most governments are either bought to power or elected by the population because the population seeks benefit. Popular demand exerts its will even on authoritarian politicians, and these pressures force even savvy politicians into arrangements that they are convinced will lead to their country’s eventual ruin.

The prime example of such a phenomenon can be seen in the negotiations that followed the end of World War I. Britain and France were adamant that the defeated Germany should be punished to the greatest extent possible. Statesmen in every allied country acknowledged the shakiness of the peace, one even predicting another world war taking place in 1940 – they were wrong by a year. But political and systemic necessity obligated the proceedings to reflect the popular demand to dismantle Germany. The unmoving certainly of the public wishing to punish Germany and the caution of wise statesmen wishing to be lenient on it led to the treaty of Versailles reflecting an ambivalence that angered the Germans enough to participate in another global war but did not prevent them from being able to do so. The moral of the World War One story is that even if humans know the right approach or consider something politically unfeasible, they will be forced by the systemic necessities to act in a way that will have dire long-term consequences.

The modern political system is therefore inept at governing the fundamental necessities of human survival and prosperity because it necessitates politicians to jettison the long-term considerations of humanity for the short-term essentials of politics. Thus the question of any revolutionary or innovator should not be what we can do within the conventional political system, but how we can manifest the solidarity to change it. Most enlightened politicians have the will and intellectual capacity to do great things, but they are kept down by mentalities of servitude to a system of volatile anarchy that eventually swallows their capacity to do anything on a grand scale.

Politics is much like the stock market. The anarchic international system projects itself on the entire discipline of politics making it a game of chance where there are no rules of thumb, no sacred ideas, just the feeding in of a bet to the gamble of intrigue and hoping that individually rational decisions have collectively rational outcomes.

To utilize collectivity, one has to take note of the modes of it. There are individual considerations, then communal, then national, regional, and universal. Through its messianic eras, politics focused largely on the national and communal implications of decision-making. Monarchs were only concerned with the affairs of the higher orders of nobility and the impact of that on their national power. Communal implications revolve around the monarch only being concerned with their surrounding nobility and national implications revolve around territorial and power concerns, namely the capacity to wage war, and keeping subjects oppressed but below the boiling point of revolution. This all changed in the Enlightenment during which time the individual was thrown into the political mix as a significant unit. The individual did not replace communal and national concerns, but merely modified them to accommodate concepts of individual sovereignty and human rights. After liberalism became the dominant political mode,  after the fall of communism, humanity began to develop regional consciousness and connections, most notably observed in the European Union. The next logical step, therefore, is to therefore give attention to political factors and development on the universal scale. Very rudimentary foundations have already been laid for transnational discourse in the form of the liberal internationalist global economic order and the mass phenomenon of popular culture – i.e. globalization. However, globalization is untamed, not political as much as economic and cultural, and not true universalism but a result of America’s cultural hegemony. Adding universal, human considerations into politics is in many ways the missing piece of the puzzle to a more effective model of political interaction. This new dimension of politics does not refer to mere increased diplomatic relations between national states, nor to forcing them together to form a world government, but to create an organization and a mainstream ideology that is representative of universal human interest and primordial necessities of survival and progress.

Transnational phenomena the likes of which have never been seen before are springing up all over the world. These phenomena have no respect for national borders nor can they be regulated, discussed, or harnessed in a way that doesn’t give over-bearing consideration to issues of sovereignty and power. With the growing awareness of humanity, there is a perpetually-maximizing need to harmonize and coordinate government activity as pertinent to issues that affect cross-border communities.

 It has been made abundantly clear over the last twenty or so years that these responsibilities cannot be bestowed upon a hegemonic state with massive global influence because while they may not be underneath helping the global population, they are not above pursuing national gain.

Equally undesirable is a coalition of states because they will to little more than harmonize their activities to maximize the gains of their respective governments. A state, when tied to a population and domestic responsibility, cannot be expected, no matter how powerful, to hold the world’s best interest at heart nor to fairly regulate the global system.

Another problem with the state taking on any kind of trans-domestic role is that governments often find it difficult to reckon their internal priorities with their external ones. A self-aware population will, in most cases, not allow their government to undertake wantonly imperialistic and blatantly aggressive foreign policies any more than a self-interested population would allow its government to focus purely on external considerations. In history a ruling entity was only judged on domestic issues and the direct short-term consequences of foreign policy on the homeland. Nowadays, in many ways, populations, particularly in the Western world, expect the state to fulfill two contradictory roles: on one hand they want to directly benefit from the state’s foreign policy, but on the other they want the sate to pursue these domestic wills abroad while not harming some kind of pseudo-humanitarian image of the population. The foremost example of this can be seen in George Bush’s politically disastrous war against Iraq. After 9/11 the American population were baying for blood and this happened to coincide perfectly with the geo-political objective of Bush’s administration that wanted to invoke a wave of Democracy to spread across the Middle-East thus helping America’s oil interests by cultivating pliable allies in that region. While history has not yet delivered its final judgment on Bush’s actions, the contemporary American voter did and swiftly the majority of the population turned on Bush and the policies of his neo-conservative henchmen with a vengeance. For many Americans, including many in Bush’s administration, 9/11 was the final straw between them and an openly aggressive line against America’s enemies. As none of the chemical and biological weapons that Saddam Hussein had supposedly been amassing emerged, the years multiplied, and the Bush administration neglected domestic issues as a result of their international war on terror, the American population began to recoil into a shell of domestic concerns. Bush and his administration wanted to be externally moral actors by spreading their brand of freedom and democracy; however this came at the expense of domestic stability and support as well as the dissention of many foreign governments. Consequently, one can see a vicious duality emerge between domestic demand and foreign objectives, rendering states poor international regulators.  However, until the emergence of a better alternative states, for the sake of their own well-being and the sustenance of humanity, will have to act as the pivot of an uneasy balance between domestic and international interests.

By nature of their very definition, states are immoral international actors. To act moral in this sphere, or to hold moral pretentions, is to hurt one’s own interest and standing, to run in an endless, vicious circle of self-mutilation. Thus emerges the futility of civil society groups, opinionated individuals, and those within the jurisdiction of the state that wish it to act in accordance with certain ethics, trying to get the government to be some kind of omnipresent humanitarian while demanding that their own domestic interests and hunger be sated. It is a very difficult position to put politics in and a potentially disastrous one that makes all governments, no matter what their policies, increasingly fail in the eyes of the public.

Governments know no responsibility for other governments or the well-being of other states. Such concerns, however, are either seen intra-governmentally as either a burden that would justify breaking free of the international bonds that are vital for the mutual prosperity of nations, or a necessity that justifies an overly-missionary foreign policy the pitfalls of which, are more than evident.

The contradictions that arise as a result of a system of equally-strung nations, in politics, economics, and society, fuels the system of anarchy and the inadequacies of politics. In many ways, the notion that humanity has come to be more evolved than the system they inhabit exacerbates the anarchy implicit in the global system because the wills to change exist, the necessity to change exists, but there is no transnational apparatus to realize change in the essence of the global system. In the absence of the possibility of systemic change, humans devote their time and efforts to bring about progress that by the overriding primitiveness of the system is rendered practically insignificant or not enduring. The anonymous humanitarian who works in an impoverished village, in a brutal and tyrannical dictatorship, is not assisted in their cause or endeavor by macro-powers or the system. Indeed, their massive sacrifice and contribution is belittled by the empty rhetoric of politicians and the overriding concerns of division and state power. Their efforts exist at the mercy of the systemic political meat-grinder.  

Thus the point is not to be solely descriptive, observational, or objective. The point is to be revolutionary; revolutionary against the system rather than subservient to. The nature of real revolution is the nature of revolt against the outmoded means of political discourse and the inadequacies of the international system. The primary necessity of political activism and humanitarian endeavor is to end the anarchic breeding ground of global maladies to facilitate the inevitable emergence from self-ignorance.

Elemental leadership of humanity is a growing necessity in these times of spiraling awareness which is accompanied by an equally potent disillusion with conventional politics and the acute awareness of the limitations of conducting politics solely in terms of national states. A new alternative must emerge that provides not only a new vehicle for change and progress but a new dimension of politics at the universal and transnational levels. Through these means, the anarchic nature of the international system can be overcome by installing a human organization to protect the sanctity of planetary civilization collectively and completely.

The anarchic system is not an insidious or schematic formation. It is merely the legacy of self-ignorance, a time when humanity had no universal consciousness. Our emergence from the twilight of absolute ignorance, however, necessitates that we drag the means by which we organize ourselves out of the dark ages and into a more just and possibility-filled era.

First Draft Extract - Copyright Synthesis