Centralized Political Power

This is a thread to discuss the merits of a centralized system for maintaining a society. In discussing anything, decentralization and distribution seem to be in vogue and for good reason; a decentralized or distributed system for certain things tends to be more reliable and is also resistant to certain attacks. This seems to break down at a societal level, however, when countries gain the power to cause nuclear war and so play with the lives of billions. Even at a smaller scale, history seems to have favored a centralized power structure, where decisions are made by few or one for an entire society to heed; while tribal societies and other models have existed, these societies never ruled large swaths of the Earth, to our knowledge. This structure is largely necessary for warring, as it typically requires the ability to make quick decisions. Roman society could elect dictators for times of war. A centralized power by no means necessitates censorship, nor overbearing, nor an inherent lack of freedom. It's entirely possible for a government to merely act as an interface for other countries and to provide for defense and order-keeping while under the control of one or few. It seems fair to say that some of the advantages of non-centralized systems dissolve when human lives are members of nodes. It's no issue and even good for a computing network to continue if one of its node fails, perhaps without even noticing, and to transparently delegate its task to another, but this seems less appropriate when considering a town or city being destroyed. It's also true that a non-centralized system can survive with malicious nodes or nodes under threat, but a society can't function well this way, as land is finite and, again, lives are at stake. It's most advantageous for a society to have large swaths of contiguous control, for the most part and for malicious actors to be stopped permanently. A centralized society does tend to take a decentralized viewpoint, internally. Maintaining order, providing resources, and normal human tasks are delegated in decentralized and distributed fashions in the forms of regions and states and colonies down to individuals. This differs from a non-centralized society by allowing the entirety of the whole to uniformly help any area with its full brunt and by maintaining a baseline of laws and whatnot that are enforced. As with an organism, societies eventually die. This is where a non-centralized system shines, whereas a centralized system tends to decay into a non-centralized model upon such death. A non-centralized system is capable of living for much longer by virtue of new nodes replacing dying nodes, whereas a centralized system by design has no such comparable fallback mechanism. To retort, it seems incorrect to design a society for an easier failure; creating a centralized system and forcing it to continue living through any means seems preferable for most societies currently alive. There's also the issue of corpses in this metaphor, which manifest as arsenals of heavy weapons and other resources being made available to those who could then take them by eating and picking at the corpse. This is an incomplete overview of centralized societies versus not; do reply to this thread with your own ideas on this.

protip: when you create a thread, be sure to make a question inside it, if you want people to interact. If you want it to be your blog post, then that's fine. I've read your post, but don't know what to question (or try to answer), since it's a discussion with a big spectrum of fields being evolved. For example: - If the hypothetical society is completely distributed, how would this society function without a hierarchy? No node should have priority to other, otherwise that would be a centralization. This mean that it would be the same old story of anarcho-communism. That simply don't work, we have seem it many times, and millions of dead because people tried to implement it to a big society. - If it's not completely distributed, what are the principal nodes? Who would take the decisions? How these decisions would be made? Then we go again to the anarcho-sindicalism think. And that also does not work in reality, doesn't matter Chomsky says otherwise. - Ok, then let's have an hierarchy to nodes, but with distributed processes. Who would command it? The difficulty about it is that we are talking about reality, not about computer topology. People behave different ways, mostly unpredictably, and we can't have a Mohism type of think in todays world, where everyone hugs you and spread Agape. But distributed economics is more realistic. Here's a good presentation about it: >Douglas Rushkoff | Distributed: A New OS for the Digital Economy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQKQKCe1xl0 The use of blockchains would do the work. A BPM (business process model) based on RUP (rational unified process) would control the organization (maybe). A system with goal ranking for every individual (actor), with decentralized decision making using AHP and something to predict and normalize bad human behaviors (cognitive biases): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_Hierarchy_Process If we do all by computing statistics, we would create a centralized point of trust. Would create something like Magi computer (from Evangelion series), in the best case scenario, or in the worst case scenario would create the world of Psycho-Pass. So on... this subject goes deep, deep, very deep down to so many areas of study, we can't really just be idealists, we're living in a real world, with real problems, that uses a very fuzzy logics to predict something that easy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

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>>1891 >protip: when you create a thread, be sure to make a question inside it, if you want people to interact. If you want it to be your blog post, then that's fine. Your advice is appreciated, but I know how I prefer to make a thread. >- If the hypothetical society is completely distributed, how would this society function without a hierarchy? No node should have priority to other, otherwise that would be a centralization. This mean that it would be the same old story of anarcho-communism. That simply don't work, we have seem it many times, and millions of dead because people tried to implement it to a big society. That's part of my point, really. >- If it's not completely distributed, what are the principal nodes? Who would take the decisions? How these decisions would be made? Then we go again to the anarcho-sindicalism think. And that also does not work in reality, doesn't matter Chomsky says otherwise. Decentralization could work across towns, but, again, I believe a centralized authority is the best for a human society. >- Ok, then let's have an hierarchy to nodes, but with distributed processes. Who would command it? I don't understand this question. >The use of blockchains would do the work. A BPM (business process model) based on RUP (rational unified process) would control the organization (maybe). A system with goal ranking for every individual (actor), with decentralized decision making using AHP and something to predict and normalize bad human behaviors (cognitive biases): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_Hierarchy_Process That's an interesting contribution to this discussion. >If we do all by computing statistics, we would create a centralized point of trust. Would create something like Magi computer (from Evangelion series), in the best case scenario, or in the worst case scenario would create the world of Psycho-Pass. I'm not familiar with either of those shows. >So on... this subject goes deep, deep, very deep down to so many areas of study, we can't really just be idealists, we're living in a real world, with real problems, that uses a very fuzzy logics to predict something that easy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle I agree, which is why I cite history and whatnot. >>1955 I've no idea why you would bump my thread while not actually contributing.

>>1956 Human, all too human.