Can Decentralization Save Humanity? - Why Smaller is Better in Politics 

The #Nashville Murderer was party to litigation against the church. The church was targeted. clearly. A #Hate crime law.justia.com/cases/tennessee/court-of-appeals/2016/m2015-02154-coa-r3-cv.html

Do not like the narration.

13:30 you quote toynbee. amazing. well done. this was a great treatment.

I'll add. You said 2 great wars came out of Nation States. Not true. WW2 had barely any nation states and it was empires. Also, I would urge you to consider the difference in what a Nation State meant for the West and what for the East of Europe. West had empires, empires turned to Nation states ... But still empires. For them it was a reformation to keep themselves as they are. Hence Portuguese and French even made their colonies the integral parts of the core. So did Russia with it's federalisation. The east had no states.. empires fell and Nation States were established. It was a protective measure which ensures the population of the new Nations would not be a minority and would no longer be ethno-linguistically supressed.

Feudalism, divide yourselves from yourselves 😒

Remember though, we are assigning value to ideas believing that we can agree on what is good or bad. The marketplace of ideas is amoral, so the actual determinants of a system is its effectiveness, not its morality. Sometimes evil ideas work for a time, with horrific but "effective" outcomes. You know the old adage, "at least in Nazi Germany the trains were on time"?

Absolutely and this fits with how humans naturally learn and evolve. If something really works and creates good outcomes people organically want to emulate and it doesn't require force. And when a particular unit became tyrannical or dysfunctional and enough didn't like it they could choose a different one and it would fail. What we repeatedly see in the big centralized models is they use power to eliminate the ability to reject their rule and rules.

@@elizaj4431 Exactly. Although centralization does have certain benefits (standardization of infrastructure, currencies, measurements, language, etc), it almost always blunts competition for the best outcome (in any field of endeavor). And that shackles not just freedom, but humanity's potential.

@Matthew Oates Yes, I agree. Decentralized bodies would still be able to coordinate and collaborate but can do so based on common needs and interests serving their members voluntarily. This is also deeply human. I've also been studying business arcs from major growth and success to demise and a common scenario I see is past a point many big companies became sclerotic. Drunk on success the money began to go to huge executive salaries whose output seemed to deliver diminishing returns, increasing lack of responsiveness, connection and cooperation to lower levels within the company and decreased innovation, money instead going to buying out or stifling promising competitors and leeching off their innovation. I think capitalism can be a positive force up to the point it becomes huge conglomerates, monopolies, and wealth congregated in a minority who use this to keep an advantage, rig the system and keep competition down. Now some are even trying to use power in government to bypass consumer choice entirely. Consumers are taxed to fund their product creation, then they are charged to buy the product, and now government can compel people to fund and consume products whether they want them or not! There's no perfect system though. Decentralization, limiting money influence in politics, and preventing monopolies are some ways to address some of it. The economic system also needs to not incentivise debt and debt shuffling but rather real value creation too.

I've been saying this for decades. Nations should be the biggest governing body, with regional and local governments given a lot more freedom. International politics works best on the basis of treaties and forums.

Bureaucracy with a face (populism) isn't any better

​​@@Myreactionwhen_80085 not if we a have a system of direct / participatory democracy

@@A-2-The-J that's never been attempted on a national level. I'm nearly convinced that's impossible to pull off on the national level. Although this doomer channel likes to exaggerate "modern" problems

aka small government, local reach & direct contact

Im afraid that 1: These ideas are nothing else other than an utopian dream, unable to be acomplished because of competition between super-powers in the modern world 2: You want to see how a decentralized world looks like? Go back to middle ages, there you will see.

Other states have this issue too. In Maryland, over 1/2 the population lives in Baltimore County. The Eastern Shore and western hills are at their mercy.

Freedom is a natural state. It cannot be given, it can only be taken away. When no one takes away your freedom, you have freedom. Most of the Universe is ungoverned and therefore free. It doesn't require an army of officials or agencies to maintain it.

This isn't a new problem. Look up razorfists video on Abraham Lincoln, as well as into the motivations connections and allegiances of the people being installed in western governments. They want to centralize power even more than it is, and for many, to a global scale in the model of China. Local was always better, (and more inclusive, to use a modern buzzword), but the amount of effort going to prevent this and centralize power more and more never sleeps, and plays dirtier than you can imagine.

Why do do many humans want to be "governed"? The base of the issue is right in front of people.

Look at california as well. I am a farmer in the central valley of California where my opinion is of no concern to the Hollywood elite who are drunk on power and control. Los Angeles and San Francisco's liberal elite are so far out of touch with reality its unbelievable. They continuously are scheming to figure out how to take more and more from us in the form of taxation and endless regulations that have nothing to do with reality or the way things actually work. They take as much as they can and return nothing as all of the taxes collected fund their cities to grow more and all of us are left impoverished in struggling communities trying to figure out how to survive on what little we have left. None of them have the slightest clue as to how our communities work yet they think they know everything and relentlessly continue to change laws and make a system that only benefit them and destroys us. They sit in their high rise apartments and chill all the time watching their televisions or go out to eat at all their fancy restaurants with their friends while we go out and work our asses off all day every day trying to keep our struggling communities and businesses afloat. The more luxury they enjoy means the more hardship we endure. All that time they have to chill means all the more time we have to work. They love this arrangement and are continuously trying to push it farther and farther as to have unlimited freedom to do as they please all day regardless of what hardship it means for us. The disconnect from individuals of communities that have nothing to do with them is where the problem of centralization lies. You cant rely on people from other communities who know nothing of the hardships you endure to make decisions that will benifit and promote growth for your community. The more power people attain the more it seems they lose empathy or care for others. Power doesnt corrupt all but it does corrupt some and thats the problem. Those "some"will always find a way to attain more power and that's how tyrrany becomes reality.

You sure it's grassroots ;)

Im super happy its getting attention. Ive been pushing it for years.

This phenomenon has a name, Groupthink They're all wannabe libertarians, in love with the idea of it, wouldn't be so much in love in its practice.

Wasn't methampphetamine the Master of Puppets? I think that's what James is talking about in the song. Anyways this is all a psy0p and the matrix isn't real, grow up All the best

@@robertporter7808 no msm is

That's also known as "The third way" or "Distributism" . Don't let the name cause you to suspect that it is related to socialism in any way. In fact it involves more private property not less and emphasizes control over the fruits of one's own labor. G.K. Chesterton + Hillaire Belloc wrote about it as well as Pope Leo XIII. There is an economics textbook about Distributism in the 20th/ 21st century by Prof. Medaille.

🤙

Funny that, I was just talking to my wife's son and we both agree that big government is the way to go.

I was talking to my son this morning and we both favour small state!

@@thefidgetspinnerofdoom I agree, but not for our species!

Agreed! This actor has a great talent but we miss your voice.

Yes, please do at least additional one with your voice. Thank you

Couldn't agree more. In fact, I would help donate to have this voice over redone and have this re-released. The topic is too important to have such a contrived aesthetic turn off any "normies" one attempts to present this to.

Careful that channel does not have a blue check mark ...

Agreed, though the cross-pollination with Clifton Duncan (who's pretty based-sacrificed a stage career for his principles) is pretty neat imo, so I think we can give him a pass

That is a very interesting model.

Beyond geographic borders wouldn't work and would be impossible to enforce. Someone breaks the agreement, they're half the world away, and would face no consequences due to logistics. You'd have people living nextdoor to one another living by completely different societal rules. If your neighbor is in a group that human sacrifice is allowed but yours forbids it, there's nothing to prevent him from deciding you're who's to be the next sacrifice. I know that's an extreme example, but the point stands regardless of what example you use. They want to be nudist and strut all over the neighborhood that way subjecting their neighbors to things they didn't agree to.

I agree with the first sentence. I wanna agree with your next point but Idk if I should. I shouldn't just blindly agree to something even if it makes sense or at least seems too.

There has to be tangible positive and immediate incentives built into a structure

States created the federal government. States have more power than the Fed. States can secede from the Union. It's well within our right.

@@Philosophaster like Sunday night football, and school's one can ditch their kids at.

@@viktorhumanities Right, we just need to organize some kind of large centralized power to combat them... oh wait.

@@viktorhumanities Sure, you can bring down your own central authority. With what I assume is some kind of nihilistic revolution, where there's no central authority of your own to act as leadership. But that only creates a power vacuum. All you do is create an exposed throat for some hungry warlord or outside organization to establish a new authority. Like it or not, we're stuck with central authority. No idealism is going to change that reality. You're just going to have to work to make what you have better. Or, you know, just piss in the wind while things get progressively worse.

Can you imagine the remnants of the US government if everything splintered? They'd be relentless in clawing their power back.

Not really. Nothing prevents areas around you from aiding you. They probably won't want dog shit countries like china taking hold near them.

Yes. It raises the question - can you have one massive, benevolent “empire” that allows all of these experimental states to exist within it, and plays arbitrator if there are egregious conflicts?

@@RegulusOrigin Of course not. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Every attempt at communism has proven this. Even if you have some well-meaning group leading the revolution, there will always be the unscrupulous megalomaniacal tyrants ready to step in afterward to stab them in the back and seize power. You'd have to be a tyrant to hold on to that power just to fight the onslaughts of coup attempts, lol.

@@RegulusOrigin ancient egypt already did that i guess they have a philosopher but not as famous as the greek one

True man, I find it a bit cringy

Cringe is one aspect, but for me the bigger issue is having to listen harder (and slow down the playback speed) to follow it. Both the early and new narrator voices are fine in their natural (non-accented) states.

The accents made this video unwatchable.

Yes, it made this feel like a kid's channel.

And who would be causing this decentralization?

Do you have any good links about that theory applying to society or politics?

​@@tuckerbugeater centralized decentralizers of course

@Philosophaster most ppls starting off point is "Antifragile" by Nassim Taleb. He has 5 books on complexity theory and its applications. For something directly about economics, there's 'The Economy As an Evolving Complex System II". Not sure about books about Complexity applied to politics. That specific application is pretty new, so the best place to look is probably journals. I listen to interviews and podcasts all day at work and there are some that talk about it, but I couldn't tell you when or where.

@Philosophaster the basic fundamental principle, is that efficiency (centralization) and anti-fragility (decentralization) are inversely related. For example, when we breed dogs for specific traits, they become more efficient at doing what they're bread for, but the are at a higher risk of health complications, whereas mixed breed dogs will be more resilient to those defects... they're more 'Anti fragile"

1000% I had ti hit mute an subtitles when the second accent began...lol. great stuff though..

I like the usual presenter.

​@@rza2385 thanks for the suggestion. Narration is absolutely awful and cringe

I only minded the accents, it was distracting me from what he was saying ☹️

@@rza2385 perfect. Thanks. I almost thought I’d have to miss one.

This^

I loved the accents 🤣

Im intrested

That ironically has been shown not to work. A healthy society needs a variety of thinkers and thoughts, a variety of everything, to function well. Making "like-minded" communities the standard is setting up Thought Police as the gatekeepers!

Lol! The sheer irony of that statement- even though I think I see your greater point. I think what's so ironic is that it's the same thing in the micro and macro scale. It's a matter of scale. Groupthink at a small level and groupthink at an organized level are insanely dangerous

@@haniamritdas4725 Not true. Immigrant communities in the US thrived in smaller self contained neighborhoods. So did Black Wall Street. Smaller self supporting communities within larger cities or states had no lack of variety of thinkers or thoughts. In fact most of our inventors came from such communities. Greater self governance with greater individual participation encouraged autonomy. The current concept of diversity is quite superficial and is leading to authoritarianism.

@@alexk48 Well I am sorry to point out that the belief that a culture is made up of "like-minded" people because they share the same ethnicity is called racism. Ethnicity does not mean uniformity, unless you count melting pots that turn dead bodies into the glue of society by forced conformity. But that is not culture, it's social tyranny.

@@alexk48 LoL

Exactly. Corrupt people are attracted to power. Just like flies are attracted to food. The notion of power creating corruption is like the notion of rotting meat creating flies.

Corruption can easily exist between two individuals.

@@tuckerbugeater yes, and the more people someone has power over the more corruption they can get away with.

power attracts the corrupt

aka small government, local reach & direct contact

That is the reason global centralization became more popular over the centuries, isn't it? Swish swish goes the pendulum.

As opposed to the wars constantly waged by large countries.

@@Gabrhil Don't try to forcibly change people and you won't have conflict. But some just can't help themselves.

@@hoonterofhoonters6588 Why are those wars waged?

​@@tuckerbugeater do you think that question too easily falls into vague and ineffective generalizations about The Human Condition?

Centralized states are not superior at managing a degenerate populace, it creates them. It selects for maladaptive high time preference behavior because the state can take anything from you at any time i.e How the state use inflation to steal from you and encourage spending. This of course make people more dependent on the state to get ahead, so its a win for the state as well. Decentralized structures selects for low-time preference behavior, that is because ones work is not undermined by centralized bureaucracy and justice is carried out by the local community and by the individual, which also create a strict sense of ritual propriety that enables high trust between individuals.

​@@巫轟 Yeah sure, but do you support a government?

​@@巫轟 Yes exactly. The death of small communities coincided with an increase in crime rates. Small tight knit communities are bound by the norms of those communities

@@巫轟 social policy is what selects for maladaptive personalities not centralized society , this is pure cope on your part

@@巫轟 why not use this “local community “ model on a larger scale and actually have a powerful nation ? There is literally zero reason this cannot be done

The roman empire did not go on a rampage gobbling up small states. It mostly gobbled up large states. Infact small states proved the hardest for it to conquer. And it eventually decentralised in order to cope with defending itself against moadlty small stated which consumed it. (the ottomans were tiny for example when they crippled and conquered eastern Rome)

Well, it still lasted longer and worked better than what we have now. Even Rome is preferable to a nation of well over 300 million people being ruled over by 10-50,000 government representatives and their employees.

lol

You can be ruled over by bots.

@@tuckerbugeater they're pushing for that it seems.

@Squishy_Oppai I respectfully disagree. Society is just indoctrinated to think it needs government, by design. People that desire power over others aren't willing to help people think independent of them and their systems of control. People can live without it, they just don't know it.

@Squishy_Oppai you don't need government for community tbf.

Or you like most of Americans could open up a history book for once in your life and learn about medieval Europe history for example.

Corperations prefure enlarge states to small states. Its easier to lobby and control 1 large state than multiple small ones. It's why Corperations pushed and continue to push for the increase in power of the federal governemnt in the US, and push for the EU to be more centralised and unified (openly starting they want a united states of Europe). The more states the more rules the Corperations have to adhire to. Smilar stories with banks. When states were small and decentalised banks were weak. Its only with the rise of the large nation state that banks became truely powerful.

Decentralisation is built into the modern military, orders trickle down but there room for input at each level of the heirarchy. A Lt. doesn't have to ask permission to give orders if he sees fit, hes like the mayor of the tribe of a dozen or so. In our society however it goes MP (10k people ) Mayor (~100k people) -> Prime minister (60 million) and none but the very top can make real decisions, and they can only do it slowly then theyre changed after a dozen decisions.

@@xANTHQNY and sometimes they get to make bad decisions with no consequences.

About being a slave under a technocratic state? Hope you don't die like the Ukrainians.

But the point wasn't to last a long time. They fought for their values and their independence. Who cares if people in a thousand years are impressed by how unchanging your state is? The state is fundamentally a criminal organization.

Whose morality?

@@tuckerbugeater Objective morality.

I'd go a step further than that and say what's missing is God. Without morality and God it's guaranteed that humanity will backslide into a debased form of nature; more apelike than what we would consider human.

@@badmen1550 exactly! God’s creation would not survive if it was not for the divine cosmic moral laws that rule our universe. beauty and harmony reign supreme in everything.

How'd that work out for the Catholic church in the middle ages?

I don't think New York will be dominating Hawaii anytime soon. But I thought it was interesting during covid, when Australia had the covid c0ncentration camps, and someone escaped and they had helicopters and army dudes with dogs searching for him. Whatever Australia is, it's not an example to follow.

The fakeness I suspect.

This video explains these issues in a way that is also accessible to leftist city-dwellers: The City State Solution: How to Avoid a Civil War or National Secession in These Dis-United States ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-q427saV3PRs.html

WOW! We should write a constitution based on this.... and ... and... a bill of rights. Yea... yer smrt.

out of curiosity, which nations currently have a 'healthy' political system?

Good considerations, but it can also be said that large organizations usually devolve into bureaucracies that have as their primary purpose the perpetuation of their bureaucracies. As far as economies of scale, if I give $20 as charity to someone who needs it, that's 100% efficient, but if I give it to a large charity, most of the money goes to administration.

Thank you man, being dying to find one single comment down here with valid and good counter points to the video. You gave me hope!

@@billprep1855 it's hard to praise because as humanity we aren't very good at it yet, but from what I've heard Denmark is pretty good at it.

@@anatineduo4289 yes, I would say the bigger the organization the higher the maintenance cost, in general. The benefit would come from pooling resources together, not from 0 cost running. If you have an unbalanced towards a bigger political machinery than you need, it will be a waste of resources

I found his alternative accents that he used for different authors very funny..😅

Are you excited for your genofence prison system and virus testing checkpoint? LOL. You're so screwed.

I was just thinking about America and gun control, it would be so much easier that Americans who hate guns to live in their own state and those who want guns to live in another, rather than arguing about it non stop

Basically US States should be states, as they originally were, not provinces, as they now are.

I'd argue that it wasn't organic complexity, but rather folks deliberately seizing power and centralizing causing the complexity for their own gain.

The real reason the federal government got all the power is that they control the money. Once the dollar wasn't backed by gold, there was no limit to federal spending, and so the power dynamic shifted - where before, the states collected taxes and spent the money, now the states happily accept as much money as they can get from the federal government. So the key is the money. We have to use a money that no government can create. That's how we fix democracy, and in the process we'll decentralize.

@@fusion9619 That's certainly part of it. A big part. But probably not the whole picture.

All laws should have an expiry date - maybe 2 years in the future, and then we vote again. And all people should have the right to ignore any law not voted on within two day's walk from where they live. Just some ideas.

Precisely, that's what I want to know because power is a positive feedback loop and so smaller states banding together and splitting up the benefits they conquered is a natural strength of any system, much less any organism or its herd

I've also thought that. Certainly there is the deterrence factor of a large state, but a long term occupation might be more difficult with the many small states, especially if they all are aware that they may be called upon to fight and resist to preserve their way of treasured way of life. There is the possibility of defense treaties too. As counterexamples we have Vietnam, Afghanistan, N Korea... small states that resisted empires, sometimes with the help of other empires. Another consideration is that Europe's vulnerability to the Blitzkrieg might be because it was largish states already...France for example was pretty big.

@@anatineduo4289 Very interesting points

This entire lecture strikes me as an eloquent argument for a return to the medieval European system (some of which were more progressive & egalitarian… but most were tyrannical pyramid power structures). I suppose the authors envision themselves as rulers instead of serfs. I’m curious how the reality of “the power to choose” would play out in this decentralized “utopia.”

Blitzkriegs are expensive. All war is expensive. The solution to state wars or any other tyranny is to make tyranny too expensive. There's only two ways I know of that always make attack more expensive than defense - one has already failed to solve this s problem, and the other is strong encryption. I'm not worried at all about big conquering states - they can't beat strong encryption.

Liberalism was a core component in forming the modern nation state. Libertarians may superficially root for decentralization, localism,l, etc..But in practice l, the core ideological foundations of libertarianism (liberalism and capitalism) have lead to massive centralization.

​@@danielfigueroa6409 what do you base this opinion on? How is practicing the non aggression principle a road to central power?

@@danielfigueroa6409 Yeah, so the bankers can rule while the peasants live in survival mode.

@@lynnex17 The non aggression principle is the road to slavery. LOL

@@tuckerbugeater non aggression doesn't mean you don't have boundaries and actively defend them. It means you don't initiate violence.

Well yes but actually no. No to the us being the most decentralised modern state. The UK had a much smaller government between the 1840s and 1910s. So small infact it was mocked as a 'night watchmen state'. But you are right that people try and accumulate power. The best method is balanceing the power between several competing insttutions/classes. The longest lasting decentralised systems did this well. The problem in america (and infact in medieval Europe for example) is events took place which were used to justify the unbalancing of the system which resulted in the march to centrilisation picking up speed.

@@matthiuskoenig3378 perhaps the US wasn't the smallest government, but I'd still argue it was the most decentralized, due to the nature of the federal system and state/local governments originally having authority over most matters. The states were even regarded like little mostly-independent countries for a while. As for the second point, I believe it's inevitable that governments will find excuses to justify grabbing more power. Even if there aren't any major wars or invasions, they can always create some sort of domestic ideological conflict (class war, race war, gender war, geographic splits, etc), or use another major problem to demand more power (such as we've seen with climate change and the pandemic). Decentralization and systems of checks and balances may help slow this down, but if it can happen to a nation like the US with such a system then it can happen anywhere.

@@thenew4559 fair point of view on which is the smallest. As for it happening everywhere what I meant is it happens everywhere, but it only happens fast when they can justify it which isn't always constant. Centralisation is like corruption, its always going to happen to some extent.

I am so glad that I am not the only one that thought this. I find it kind of distracting and I had to mute the video so I could focus. It just seems a bit over the top, and it does not give the philosophy the respect (not respect per se, but moreover some combination of focus and seriousness) it deserves. This is not (or at least should not be) some theatrical performance for us to get the most out of the material. Otherwise, it's kind of cringeworthy.

Incredibly distracting - my mind went to all sorts of places other than what he was quoting.

It's a weakening of any resistance to tyranny.

@Squishy_Oppai Except the Soviet Union couldn't prevent breaking up into small states, nor could the British empire prevent the US

@@tuckerbugeater Right..... because the US suffered weakened resistance to tyranny right after its secession from the British empire

@@OrthoHoppean Ask the Holy Roman Empire how well they fared against Napoleon

You are on to it. I didn't understand the 'tree of liberty' when young. I do now. But it is no less unpalatable. "Peace and safety," a promise as old as time, is a serpent that eats its tail.

This channel is not entertainment. Voice acting is entertainment. This is a serious issue of monumental proportions and the faux accents make it a joke at best.

That's why history repeats. We have learned the same lessons from the same mistakes forever. I guess it's called having a life. Growing up. Something like that.

It's much harder for those states to expand though if they're small.

@@haniamritdas4725 History rhymes. It doesn't repeat. So the solution to technocrats with ai, drones, bioweapons, weather warfare, etc. Is to run away? LOLOLLOLOOLOOL

@@apersononlineyes6554 Your life will be like Ready Player One. Because you refuse to think and take action.

@@tuckerbugeater Run away? I don't think I said anything like that. But if you can get away from something trying to kill you by running away from it, I do recommend that strategy now that you mention it. But I see nowhere to run from all that. I choose to just go on with my life without worrying about things I cannot control. In any case, it either will or won't be what we fear that kills us. Does that matter? Not to me. Life itself is repetition, recapitulation. Every child learns the same lessons. You can split hairs over that if you want, of course.

I also know other good authors. John Stossel, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Murray Newton Rothbard, Robert Higgs, Henry Hazlitt, Walter E Williams, Robert Patrick Murphy, Friedrich August von Hayek, Carl Menger, Böhm von Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, Thomas E Woods Jr, Larken Rose, Thomas James Dilorenzo, Stephan Kinsella, David D. Friedman

Good for a laugh. 🤡

Libertarians and anarchists live in a fantasy world that only be made real through surveillance technologies.