03-05-2004, 01:25
Every new form of government is just an improvement on an earlier one, all trying to reach the ideal. We started with anarchy, right? We were animals, and then we were early humans, and eventually we evolved into reasoning thinkers, and at that point anarchy became more relevant. We didn't like being killed or stolen from, so we fought against one another to end it - but this just produced mob violence, or at least that's what it would be called today. That wasn't fair either, and so we needed rules against that too, and eventually there became so many rules that we needed someone to enforce them and decide which were best and most relevant. In some places that led to a monarchy; in others, it led to democracy. Eventually the notion of equality began to surface as best, and that led to many governments moving toward democracy. But once democracy is established on a large scale, it begins to divide by nature. When currency is rallied as basically the only valid form of trade, those who can't find enough of it will suffer. Communism, then, is the next step - but there are problems with this ideology as well. If everything is provided by the government, then we have no way of obtaining other things that might match our individual interests and tastes. It also makes the government immensely powerful, and that unravels the underlying notion of equality.
In our modern technological world, I don't know what the best solution would be. If we still lived in small, agrarian communities, we could simply let each community make its own rules, and anyone could break off if they didn't like it, and we'd eventually come to a balance in a peaceful anarchy of a sort - people of the same values would come together, fulfilling "birds of a feather flock together." But in our global economy, global politics, global community where over 99.999% of the "community" comprises people we've never even heard of, I don't know if an ideal government is possible anymore.
In our modern technological world, I don't know what the best solution would be. If we still lived in small, agrarian communities, we could simply let each community make its own rules, and anyone could break off if they didn't like it, and we'd eventually come to a balance in a peaceful anarchy of a sort - people of the same values would come together, fulfilling "birds of a feather flock together." But in our global economy, global politics, global community where over 99.999% of the "community" comprises people we've never even heard of, I don't know if an ideal government is possible anymore.