From: jimruttshow8596
What is Governance?
Governance, in the context of civilization design, refers to the toolkits by which communities live together and communicate, and how they maintain and develop social relations processes [02:40:08]. It addresses both embodied elements, like what makes a good city, and virtual elements, like what makes a good society, culture, or communication process, including conflict management [02:56:06].
More broadly, governance involves toolkits that enable solving large-scale problems such as food, water, power distribution, shelter, transportation, manufacturing logistics, and food production for large-scale social systems like cities and nation-states [03:52:00].
The fundamental function of governance is to protect the land and the people, and moreover, to ensure that the land and the people thrive [01:19:33].
Why is Good Governance Important Now?
Current tools and methodologies, while effective in the past, are insufficient for emerging problems like global warming, pollution, global equality issues, and ecological concerns [06:02:00]. Technology acts as a strong accelerant, increasing the rate of change and the stakes involved, due to larger populations and increased complexity [06:54:00]. This demands higher-quality choices to ensure long-term sustainability, ideally for hundreds to thousands of years [07:46:00].
Modern institutions often operate with short planning horizons, akin to “hill climbers” in complexity science, reacting only to immediate gradients [08:28:00]. This contrasts with the need for understanding complex networks with non-linear influences and authentic players [09:11:00]. The challenge is moving from a hill-climber world to a network world that can plan for the deep future [09:13:00].
Despite the challenges, increased resources like collective intelligence capacities due to technology, and advancements in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, offer new understandings of what constitutes a healthy person, community, or civilization [01:18:48].
Principles of Good Choices in Governance
If governance is about making choices, the core lies in understanding the principles of good choices [01:19:49]. This connects to ethics, where the study of ethics is the study of how good choices are made [01:21:07].
- Value Ethics: Instead of focusing on strict rules (deontological) or maximizing outcomes (utilitarianism), a value ethics approach considers what is fundamentally the nature of the relationship between value, meaning, and purpose [01:18:39]. This includes embodied notions of value like health, well-being, ecological thriving, and community thriving [01:19:17].
- Integrity and Goodness: Goodness is grounded in the integrity of the relationship between the subjective and the objective [01:25:25]. Choices that increase health and vitality in living organic systems (personal, interpersonal, transpersonal) are categorically good [01:25:49].
- Future Potentialities: Good choices not only produce good immediate outcomes but also enable good potentialities for future choices [01:26:30]. Avoiding choices that lead to increasingly worse compromises is crucial [01:26:54].
Necessary Conditions for an Enduring City/Civilization
For a city or civilization to achieve sustainability and evolve with conscientiousness, three balances are necessary and sufficient [02:59:22]:
- Social Balance: Pertains to how people think about social process and equity [03:00:00].
- Energy Balance: Ensures a sustainable energy input to keep the city or system functioning [03:05:00].
- Ecological Balance: Relates to sustainable practices with the surrounding environment, like farming, to avoid resource depletion [03:26:00].
Currently, global systems are largely not in these balances, highlighting the urgent need for civilization design [03:16:00].
Understanding Underlying Drivers: Human Nature and Instincts
Effective governance requires understanding fundamental human nature and the forces that drive behavior [03:50:00].
- Human Instincts: People are driven by instincts related to survival, sexuality, and sociality [01:42:17]. These drivers, if unconscious, can lead to negative outcomes like status games, arms races, and unsustainable consumption patterns [03:59:00].
- Conscious Choice: By becoming conscious of these drivers, individuals and communities can make choices based on mutual desires rather than merely wants (external) or needs (internal) [01:46:00].
- Balance of Competition and Cooperation: While competition (e.g., sexual competition) is a real evolutionary force, cooperation is equally crucial for civilization [01:00:44]. If competition outweighs cooperation, civilization can disintegrate [01:00:52].
- Absolute vs. Relative Metrics: Human behavior is influenced by both relative comparisons (keeping up with others) and absolute metrics (e.g., sufficient food, water, sleep). Governance design must account for both [01:05:01].
The Role of Culture and Values
Culture is paramount in shaping values and, consequently, the future [01:46:53].
- Nurturing Values: A culture determines what is valued and teaches it to future generations, influencing their resilience and capacity to thrive [01:47:00]. For instance, prioritizing face-to-face interaction over digital intermediation [01:47:50].
- Beyond Commercialism: A comprehensive value set must go beyond commercial or market-driven perspectives, which can only solve a limited class of issues [01:15:50]. It needs to embrace holistic and ecological thinking, grounded in care and love for what is valued [01:52:44].
- Re-humanization: The increasing disconnect between the virtual world (e.g., social media presentations) and the embodied world (actual lived experience) leads to incongruence and psychological distress [01:19:01]. Bringing the virtual and embodied back into congruence, or “de-virtualization” and “re-humanization,” is a fundamental goal [01:20:30].
Governance Structures: Subsidiarity, Pluralism, and Coherence
Effective governance structures must address the tension between different scales of decision-making and diverse human preferences [01:08:49].
- Subsidiarity: Decisions should be made at the lowest appropriate level, ensuring that the body making the choice is commensurate with the distribution of its effects in terms of people, space, and time [01:09:33]. For example, a choice affecting a thousand people should involve “a thousand people’s worth of wisdom” [01:10:22].
- Coherent Pluralism: While cultures naturally differ, the underlying desires and universal laws of physics and human nature remain common [01:13:17]. By connecting at the level of shared desire, different cultures can cooperate on larger-scale issues like global warming [01:14:26]. This means valuing life as sacred above specific cultural habits if they lead to ecological imbalance [01:15:05].
Path Forward for Civilization Design
Moving towards better civilization design requires several practical steps, particularly within communities:
- Good Communication Practices: Implementing the “right to speak, the right to be understood, and the right to know that you have been understood” [01:26:08]. This includes understanding the distinctions between thought, feeling, and emotion, and the difference between change, choice, and causation [01:26:21].
- Ephemeral Group Process: A technique for collective inquiry that leads to:
- Collective values discovery [01:26:55].
- Collective visioning of what thriving and wise living would look like [01:26:59]. This process is designed to be distributed and resist corruption and inequality dynamics [01:27:11].
- Collective Strategy Generation: Based on shared vision and values, communities can generate and embody strategies that are confident to uphold the vision and fulfill the values, leading to a healthy future for the community, land, and people [01:27:40]. This is seen as a design process, or “transcendental design,” rather than merely a voting process [01:28:06].
The path forward is clear, relying on a culture that is conscious of these principles and can translate them into practices of distributed, embodied collective intelligence and choice-making [01:28:51].