.1 The importance of political and philosophical ideas to the story
A few times, I tried to give things associated with the Republic names with great significance which would serve as constant reminders of the potential for corruption. When the story was still a Harry Potter fan-fiction, the capital of the Republic was on an island which the wizards raised from the ocean. I stole the name of the island directly from Tolkien by calling it Numenor. I created a map which can be seen below. I blurred out the names of cities because they were all ridiculous and I do not want to feel the need to explain them. When it could no longer be on an island created by wizards, the seat of the Republic would be a capital city named Armenelos, which is the name of the capital of Tolkien’s Numenor. The story of Numenor would warn against the danger of lusting after power. I am not sure If I ever decided on a name for the military organization which the Istarcanor are part of other than the Department of War. This name is a reminder that, even when they try to be as benevolent and peaceful as possible, their job is fighting wars, which is to say their job is to destroy enemies. As such, they ought to make sure that their enemies are only those things which ought to be destroyed, which is to say that their enemy is evil itself, raising the question of exactly what evil is. For this reason, part of the Istarcanor’s training is a never-ending philosophical and spiritual inquiry in which they debate this question in order to reach the best possible conclusions. My perhaps simplistic thinking went, in order for there to be a fundamentally good faction, it must be built on the correct moral philosophy, meaning the people it consists of must be moral philosophers. Of course, their philosophy was generally the same as mine. I am realizing that, of all the different media I enjoyed but felt was missing something, Star Wars was the closest to what I wanted in many ways. One problem was that prequels showed that the Jedi were corrupt and their philosophy is dubious. I wanted the enlightened warriors in my story to be driven by what I believed to be true and good, which was not simple.
I realized the only thing making it difficult to resolve the various moral conundrums related to the use of violence and create a story of a right side against a wrong side is the inability to define what right and wrong truly are. If there were an invasion by aliens, or some other monstrous threat, intending to kill all humans, then everyone would admire and approve of the defenders, but that is because everyone would prefer to survive, not necessarily because them surviving is fundamentally right. In a conflict between different groups of humans, there would be no such consensus or else there would be no conflict. It is not so easy to have a story of heroic violence depicting such a situation. One side’s heroes are the other side’s monsters. This can only be resolved by an objective moral truth independent of any person’s preferences. I am realizing the reason why the protagonists had to be the agents of a global government for my story to work was so that they would fight for universal good, not just that of one nation or group. As I will explain, I now have a different idea of how this should be done.
Philosophers and theologians have surely reached better answers than what I thought of, but this is what informed my ideas for the story. Being ignorant of any philosophy on this matter actually allowed me to have some rather unique thoughts when considering how to logically refute moral nihilism. All ideas of what is right and wrong seem to be ultimately meaningless. Good and evil do not seem to correspond to any real qualities of physical reality other than people’s preferences. Human preference is not sufficient for determining what is right and wrong. To say that morality is God’s command does not answer the question any more than saying that God’s command causes objects to fall to the ground. It would be an insufficient explanation and could gravity could still be studied. If morality were real, then it would be what the creator of reality commands by definition, but that does not answer the questions of whether the creator of reality says humans ought to do anything or what they ought to do. I find myself unable to begin to imagine how morality can be defined independently of human preference.
I thought of an answer using logic which I later found out is similar to that of Pascal’s Wager. While there is no proof that real objective morality exists, there is also no proof that it does not exist. My idea requires adopting a perspective of radical humility which recognizes that humans’ understanding of the nature of reality is so limited that we do not even know how limited it is. It is entirely possible that objective morality exists and no one would know in the same way people who lived a thousand years ago would not have been able to discuss the charge of an electron, but still observed lightning.
Normally, it is reasonable to assume something does not exist if there is a lack of evidence of its existence. To borrow an analogy from another discussion which will become relevant soon, there is no proof that there are no blue dragons on Neptune, but none have yet been observed. However, this is a special case. This is not like other scientific questions, as the issue of whether any questions ultimately matter depends on this one. If there is no real objective morality, then there is nothing wrong with believing and acting as if there is. On the other hand, if morality is real, then it is probably wrong to believe it is not. This vague idea of unknown objective morality is enough to construct a system of ethics. It is possible that morality is such that is actually wrong for people to believe it is real or know anything about it, but it is at least as likely that people must know what is right in order to do what is right. Therefore, actions which might lead to the discovery of this unknown morality are good and actions which might hinder this are evil. There is no way to know with any certainty which actions are which, but there are some reasonable guesses. At a minimum, at least some humans must survive, or else there would be no one to discover what is right and then do right, so yes, it is right to defend against that alien invasion. Additionally, there is no reason to believe this discovery will be made within any person’s lifetime. For this reason, there needs to be some means of preserving and building upon people’s knowledge and accomplishments over generations. This means is called civilization. Therefore, people have a duty to create and maintain a peaceful and stable civilization.
Beyond these priorities, there is no way to know what might lead to the discovery of the truth of morality. Dealing with this issue again requires a perspective of radical humility. The means by which the discovery is made could be any kind of science, philosophy, religion, or some other unimagined means no one would have expected. For this reason, it is not enough that civilization survive. There must also be a certain amount of tolerance and diversity along with free speech and free markets. There should not be one culture or set of ideas which dominate, but rather, people should be free to explore any idea or activity which does not threaten the survival of civilization. If the truth about morality were known, then that which is right could be pursued with absolute certainty and a total war of annihilation could be waged against that which is wrong, but right now, it is not known whether morality exists. If it does not and nihilism is correct, then there is no justification for either tolerance or intolerance. As long as it may be possible that morality does exist and it is yet unknown, then there is no way to know whether a prohibition is justified or not and it is better to err on the side of freedom. This is the ideology of the Istarcanor which guides their actions. In most cases, it demands that conventional moral rules, such as prohibitions on murder and theft, be obeyed, but it is fundamentally consequentialist, meaning those rules can be broken if there is certainty that the results of not doing so would be too harmful, and it is the duty of an Istarcano to judge when this is the case. At the time, I thought this theory of morality justifies a republican form of government with a bill of rights, as this would be the way to maintain both peace and freedom, and such a government for the entire world would create the most peace and freedom.
When I was trying to create a unique and interesting symbol for the Republic, I made something consisting of two overlapping “L” shapes forming a square on a field of my favorite color, which is a very specific slightly purple cobalt blue which does not show up well on some screens. I would later overlay the “L” shapes on a grid of four squares just to make the design more interesting. When I tried to think of a meaning for the symbol, I decided that the two “L” shapes would be two lines on a graph representing the two ideas which compose this theory. The horizontal axis of this graph measures time and the vertical axis measures the relative importance of the ideas. The top-left “L” represents the value of liberal civilization and the bottom-right “L” represents the unknown truth of morality. In the present and foreseeable future, the preservation and advancement of liberalism is the main concern. The unknown truth of morality is an esoteric idea only really relevant for philosophical discussions and can be ignored most of the time. This is why the line corresponding to the former is above the line corresponding to the latter for most of the graph. If the truth about morality were to be discovered, then the importance of that truth would exceed all else and liberalism should even be abandoned if morality demands it. This is represented by the vertical part of the bottom-right “L” which goes through and above the top-left one
New ideas
Even at the time, I was fully aware that I was making the Istarcanor and the Republic of Earth too perfect. They are good at what they do and what they do is good. I knew that these organizations would be far from immune to corruption and abuse. The conflict in this Part Two of the story would involve dealing with the corrupt elements, so some of what I was imagining regarding the Istarcanor and the Republic might only be so after that conflict is resolved. However, I was unsure how to make them realistically imperfect, but still good and heroic. There were also many other things in the story I could not decide, such as who exactly the antagonists and their motivations are. If the protagonists are so good, why would anyone want to oppose them? After not getting anywhere for a while, I started to lose interest in this idea for a story.
After I had started listening to conservatives and libertarians, I realized how absolutely disastrous and just unnecessary a global government would be. A global government may have made some sense in the original story when the existence of wizards was revealed, (at least more sense than it did in Orson Scott Card’s Shadow series in which the alien threat is gone) but not now. It would have all the same problems as the United States but so much worse. Additionally, it would be antithetical to my theory of morality, as it would result in the dominance of one culture and ideology, as can be seen in the United States. Instead, the opposite would be best. Government should be extremely localized. This is the only slightly realistic way to achieve the goal of libertarianism and mitigate the problems of both big government and big business by approximating a true free market. I decided that the protagonists of Part One do not establish a global government after they defeat the evil people who tried to conquer the world. Instead, they secure the independence of a microstate, or at least one no bigger than the average state in the United States. I continued to refer to this small state as Armenelos.
The problem with this, is that it would no longer make sense for the Istarcanor to go on military and espionage adventures across the world. I had learned how extremely problematic the United State’s interventionist foreign policy is. For a small state, this would also be simply imprudent as it could not afford to make enemies. This state would have to be militarily isolationist. This would be perfectly fine in reality, but for a fictional story, it is boring. I wanted to imagine a story of heroes doing great things, not just good things. I wanted a glorious battle between good and evil, like Lord of the Rings, but with modern and futuristic weapons in a setting which may have some fantasy elements, but is mostly realistic. This was yet another issue I could not decide how to resolve and I continued to lose interest in the story. However, I would find a solution as I continued to think about the political ideas I have been discussing.
Having always believed that ideologically pure anarcho-capitalism is unrealistic and that “ten-thousand Liechtensteins” is a seemingly reasonable way to come close, I still thought that the theory is generally correct and the non-aggression principle and private property is generally a good guide for thinking about issues of politics and government. The morality I have just explained is consequentialist, but libertarian principle is very much consistent with it by being one of both civilization and freedom. When some of the people I was listening to began to question or reject libertarianism, while speaking in ways I simply found obnoxious, I became more defensive of these ideas than I would have otherwise and thought about how I could argue to them that anarcho-capitalism actually is both morally correct and not totally fantastical, despite the new issues they are raising. These “post-libertarians” often referred to Curtis Yarvin and his criticism of libertarianism.
I had been hearing and reading about Hans-Hermann Hoppe and then Curtis Yarvin and their arguments against democracy and in favor of monarchy in comparison. This made me think about what form of government this microstate in my story should have. If I am being honest, ideologically favoring or opposing either monarchy or democracy is just absurd when you are able to think about decentralization and localism. However, monarchy is good for a fictional story because it is simple and allows a focus on characters rather than procedures. As I stated earlier, I spared very little thought trying to imagine the elected parts of the Republic. I had been thinking that the society created by the protagonists should be more traditionalist both out of necessity due to the conditions in the story and because it would reflect what I think is right, as I was beginning to learn of the many problems of modernity. This is when I began to think it would be very interesting and unique if this story might have the appearance of medieval fantasy in some ways, but in a futuristic setting. Hereditary monarchy could be one of those ways.
I looked into Yarvin’s writings more seriously when I started hearing more from the “post-libertarians”. If I understand correctly, his major disagreement with libertarianism is simply that he does not believe all property ought to be acquired through homesteading or voluntary exchange. Instead, what matters is whether sovereigns hold stable rulership over their territories as this results in the most peace even if that rulership was not acquired through purely and non-aggressive mean. If someone’s property is conquered by someone more powerful, then he does not actually have a right to that property. I should clarify that the only reason I am discussing this here is to explain my thought process. I do not know if I am representing Yarvin’s ideas accurately and I am under the impression that they may have changed somewhat since he wrote the kinds of things I am discussing here.
Yarvin describes an ideal arrangement he calls the Patchwork consisting of many small states each governed by a corporation in the business of maximizing the value of the land it claims ownership of and taxing the citizens for the privilege of making use of that land. My immediate thought was that, this is not far from what I and many of the libertarians, whom I had been listening to and reading, argue for. Compared to a few large states or a global state, many small states is anarchy. As such, it would have all the same potential problems as free individuals under no state. There might be war among the patches. The most powerful patches might dominate others through violent conquest or by simply buying them, resulting in large and centralized states in similar ways those which exist now were created. Additionally, this arrangement is very different from what exists now and there would need to be some way to transition towards it. Yarvin acknowledges these problems, but, in my opinion, does not give very satisfying ideas for solving them.
Because the Patchwork would be very close to anarcho-capitalism and not much less problematic, I thought it might not be so unreasonable to imaging a similar arrangement, but which is more consistent with libertarian ethics. If a form of governance ends up working well in reality, I would not object to it simply because it is not ideologically pure, but in the realm of theory, I still wanted a compelling way to tell the “post-libertarians” that they are wrong. It is not impossible to have a society which operates in a way more or less in line with the non-aggression principle. I thought, what if the corporation governing a patch, or perhaps a currently existing government, were to allow the average person to be the sovereign owner of the land he lives on and not forcibly tax him in any way? What if an institution in the business of maintaining security and the general welfare, were to stay mostly the same, except for any changes resulting from it now funding its activities by selling goods and services which people voluntarily pay for?
I had listened to Robert Murphy’s lecture The Market for Defense in which he explains how insurance-based defense agencies might work. I did not think about it very much at the time because I thought the specifics of how an anarcho-capitalist society might theoretically function is just not something worth thinking about as it would never be relevant to any real problems. However, when I was thinking about how to deal with these issues in fiction, I remembered what I heard, thought about its implications and realized this might be the solution I was looking for all along. I have written about what I think of the significance of this idea before.
What if, instead of taxing its citizens and also instead of selling goods and services unrelated to its main functions, a government were to sell insurance? People who pay the premium will be compensated for any loss of property due to human aggression (reading more about the Patchwork right now, I see that Yarvin actually did suggest that the government of a patch might promise to compensate its citizens for damage resulting from criminality). The cost of the premium is determined by the risk of damage. Both the customer and the insurer are incentivized to reduce this risk as much as possible. However, instead of individuals buying such a service, microstates could buy it in order to maintain their security and independence against each other and potentially aggressive large states. If a system has them same potential problems as anarchy, then it might have the same solution. Thinking about this now, Yarvin’s idea of a patch being owned by anonymous shareholders who live elsewhere might solve the problem of the insurance-based model being unable to compensate customers who have been totally destroyed or conquered. I am not sure what I think about the idea of local governments being joint-stock corporations and might not want to use that in my story, but normal corporations like what exist now would still exist and need security services
This solves the problems I was having with the story. An insurance-based defense company would have all the incentives to be what I imagined the Republic of Earth’s Department of War to be. A private company, which attempts to maximize profits and is unable to tax, borrow, and print infinite amounts of money, would use the most efficient means possible to produce its service. Violence is dangerous, expensive, and would risk criminal liability for a private company, so they would prefer to avoid it. While the protection of property is a narrow purpose, the amount of factors which contribute to the success of protecting property is unlimited, so neither should the scope of the company’s activities. Other than employ armed men to violently stop aggressors, there are innumerable things which the insurance provider might do or demand its customers do in order to reduce the cost of insurance. In order for this company to accurately anticipate threats far in advance and judge the risk of property loss so that it can decide its prices and what action should be taken to reduce the risk, much of its efforts would be directed towards gathering intelligence of all kinds.
Unlike a state, there is no limit, in principle, to how much a non-coercive private company such as this ought to be allowed to expand. It can serve any amount of customers, hire any amount of employees and contractors, and gain any amount of profit. The larger and more wealthy this company becomes, the better it would be able to do its job of providing security. This company could become so large as to effectively become a world empire. It would be a humble empire, perhaps it could be called an anti-empire. The power of this empire would derive from the independence and self-sufficiency of its constituent microstates and communities, rather than their exploitation. The company might exercise significant influence over its customers by dictating prices in response to their actions, but the customers always have the option to stop buying. Those who want, but cannot afford the service can become indebted to the company, which might assume the right to compel them to act in ways which reduce the cost of insurance so that the debt can be paid as soon as possible, but this arrangement would be entered voluntarily. “The anti-empire” should perhaps not refer to a single company, but to any number of them competing to provide the best service, as well as to the people and communities they serve. There may be one which is dominant and operates on the largest scale, while others specialize in providing different kinds of security in particular places and some might be ready to overtake the dominant one’s place in the market if it fails. The insurance-based model would mean they would all suffer from escalating conflict, allowing them to compete peacefully. However, for the purposes of the story, it may just be simpler to focus on only one such company.
This is how an insurance-based security company could be what I imagined the Republic of Earth to be. The heroic protagonists of the story’s Part Two can go on any kind of adventure, some involving violence and some not, and would not be restrained to a tiny territory. They would serve an organization which is fundamentally good and acquires wealth, power, and influence unashamedly as it does so through virtuous means for virtuous purposes. Equally important is that there are all kinds of sources of conflict and ways this could go wrong, but these are things which can be solved through the efforts of heroes. In reality, most businesses fail and only the few best succeed. This is how the market results in the most efficient production of high quality goods, but in the case of war, failure cannot be afforded. This is a large part of the challenge of the market-based production of defense, and why I have written that it would need to start extremely small and only gradually replace monopolistic states, and private defense providers would then be strongly incentivized to avoid full-scale wars as much as they possibly can. This is the benefit of such a system, but, in fiction, peace is boring, and it is normal to have extraordinarily competent and lucky protagonists.
When considering whether this system would have the same problem of being utopian, I had the thought that it might be the least utopian system imaginable.. It is impossible to create a perfectly just and peaceful society, but I have more recently been thinking that it is not possible to prevent violence at all. As much as the idea of anarchy is disparaged as violent chaos, history makes it clear that governments do not prevent violence. They only export it with foreign wars or delay it until they collapse. Rather than creating peace, the anti-empire would allow a certain amount of constant localized and low intensity conflict, so that people will always be prepared to fight for their independence. Perfect peace would lead to complacency and the insurance providers would never have a chance to demonstrate how reliably they will compensate their clients for damage as contracted. There may be real violence at times, but these kinds of conflicts may take the form of duels, training exercises, or sporting events with rewards for the winners and penalties for the loser and higher insurance prices for those who do not participate. To the extent that the anti-empire creates peace, it creates real peace, not the fiat peace created by mass-democratic states
The protagonists’ motivations would be more than just maximizing profit, or rather their view of profit and loss would not be constrained to monetary transactions. Instead they should have a holistic idea of what value is, although if they use hard currencies, value and money would be more closely correlated. The profit they seek is the independence and well-being of their communities, not just money, or else they would easily be corrupted and would profit by criminal means. The system I imagine does not eliminate that possibility, but it does allow them to greatly profit without being corrupt. The protagonists should act within a system with the right incentives in order for the story to be slightly believable; it is not enough that they just be such benevolent and extremely competent people. I am not sure exactly how all this would work or what it would look like. The insurance-based model might not be the best way to achieve what I imagine, at least not in some situations. Whatever the right business model is, it would be based on the principles that customers ought to be able to peacefully end their association and that those who receive the most wealth and power ought to bear the most risk. Perhaps a conventional state could be like this. Hoppe’s and Yarvin’s arguments for monarchy partly seem to be that it would. However, for the purposes of my story, a both private voluntary system be best because it can reach any scale after starting very small having been created by people of somewhat average status.
The details would need to be figured out as they would be important for the plot, but at least now, I have a better starting point.
While writing all this, I realize I have not thought about my idea of the unknown truth of morality very much recently. I still believe my reasoning was correct and that this is a way to construct a system of morality in the face of radical skepticism, but I am just not as enthusiastic about the idea and am not sure how important it is both in reality and for the story. There is not such a need to explain a theory of morality which can resolve all possible conundrums in order to have a story of admirable heroes, especially now that the way I imagine the beginnings of the anti-empire would be a few people trying to find a new way to deal with the particular problems they face, as I will explain later, rather than a global government trying to establish universal justice.
I once thought ideas of mine such as this were very important and should be spread and that this story would be the way to do it. Maybe my ideas are and maybe the story can, but I no longer think that should be a major concern. Perhaps the ideas regarding government which would be expressed in the story could make it the Hoppean Atlas Shrugged, in terms of being a the work of fiction by which people are often introduced to the ideology, but the purpose of incorporating those ideas is to make my original idea work, not so much to promote them for their own sake, especially since the story would not need to show that the system I imagine would be so much better, just that it would result in interesting conflicts. This idea about morality might be much harder to present in an interesting way.
There would still necessarily be a worldview underlying any ideas for a story, but I am becoming more certain that Christianity has all the answers, but I am very much not qualified to say anything about that, which is a problem because the magical and metaphysical elements of this fictional reality, which I will explain elsewhere, will make it impossible not to address whether any religion is true in the context of the story. In any case, I recommend listening to David Gornoski to best understand my recent thoughts in this regard and others.
If my idea is still relevant to the story, it is as a way for the anti-empire to justify itself by creating a moral imperative, not so much for liberalism as I thought earlier, but for anti-universalism; different people in different places ought to be different in peace. Every regime has some kind of narrative, ideology, or mythology which justifies it. Either the regime creates one to justify itself or the regime exists because a society’s beliefs justify it and those beliefs are further perpetuated by the regime. Recent history shows that the largest and most powerful regimes have universalist ideologies. No matter how well I argue for the merits of anti-universalism, powerful regimes normally have no interest in promoting it. A non-universalist regime opposes universalism by having its own particular non-univeralist ideology, but it might still try to conquer and expand and impose that ideology. One defining quality of an anti-empire is that its power partly depends on promoting universal anti-universalism. The elite class would have an interest in warning against the dangers of imperial leviathan states, because they would be in the business of preventing them. They may even have an incentive to promote every kind of division and tribalism, but not hatred, which makes centralized states impossible. They would confound the tongues of the builders of the Tower of Babel. This could be what much of the conflict in Part Two would be about. However, this does not mean all cultures and ways of life would be treated equally. Those attempting to maximize profit with the insurance-based model would judge which societal aspects are the most and least conducive to security and decide their prices accordingly. This is a way to resolve conflicts between the imperative to maintain civilization and the imperative of having tolerance and freedom. Uncivilized behavior which is not immediately destructive might not be forbidden, but it would be more expensive.
In any case, I would probably want a different symbol to for the anti-empire instead of the overlapping “L”s on a grid. I have been thinking that the blue dragon of Neptune would be a good symbol for a movement or organization based on my ideas either in the story or reality. As I have explained before, this comes from an analogy Curtis Yarvin used to say that true anarchy has never been observed and can therefore be reasonably be assumed to not exist and be impossible. Adopting this as a symbol is humbly accepting the challenge of creating or finding what has not existed before and seems impossible. This yet unobserved thing could be the anti-empire, but it could also be the truth of morality. More generally, it could be anything which is only discovered or created when the exploitation of innocents is rejected in favor of long-term planning, delayed gratification, and the self-sacrifice by the elites. Instead of some abstract shapes as before, the depiction of the blue dragon of Neptune would be a detailed image filled with symbolism and might resemble a heraldic charge, but I will not explain all the details here. There would need to be an in-story explanation for what inspired this symbol. This is part of the bigger issue of how any of my political ideas become implemented in the story. I will explain how this happens organically as a result of the events in the story, but the protagonists would also need to be familiar with these ideas and the thinkers who originated them to an extent. It might be difficult to do this without making the story into something which is obviously pushing an ideology. On the other hand, the point I have been trying to make in all of my writing here is that these ideas can be simple and obvious and do not need to be associated with the ideological baggage of libertarianism or anarchism. Localism and localized government are obviously right and it takes the largest propaganda and indoctrination machine ever to exist to make people believe otherwise.
I also wanted to create a unique and interesting flag which would be associated with the protagonists of the second part of the story. It might represent one of the largest insurance-based defense agencies and the microstate where it is headquartered and acts as its government. When I tried to create a unique and interesting design, I thought about the diagonally divided anarchist flags. I do not particularly like these flags, but they provided me with a starting place. Diagonal lines are rather uncommon in national flags, so this is a way to have a more unique design. The top-left half would have the blue dragon of Neptune on field of black, white, or some other color which contrasts with both the blue dragon and its golden trident, teeth, and spines.
I have not made a final decision as to exactly what the other half would be and I have made quite a few examples. It should probably have symbolism which is particular to the people and location the flag is associated with. The anti-empire would consist of many different polities and organizations which have their own flags, emblems, and heraldry. It might become a convention to have diagonally divided flags with the blue dragon in the top-left. This way, the many flags I made with different designs and colors can be used in the story. Of course these would only be used by groups which consider the dragon to be important enough to be in the top-left corner where it can be seen even when the flag is not being blown. I have more recently tried to make a design in which the dragon is on a chevron and I might like that better.