A layman opinion on nation states

I’m writing this post just as a short personal note of thought on states in general. I might be very wrong with some opinions. If I am, I’d love to be able to acknowledge it in the future and look at the post in retrospective to better understand evolution of thought.

How states form, probably

• States and territories, that formed organically, were formed by ability to coordinate in that specific group which is to form a state.
• Coordination in real world relies on trust, and trust is established between groups which share the same or similar enough values.
• Even if some values weren’t an exact match, geography or some other physically forced events (conquest for example) would force groups to merge together and over time achieve values similar enough that it’s not a obstacle anymore to coordinate.

Humanity

I currently believe all humans are of the same nature but that the environment where that person is interacting/living in will highly influence opinions. In other words, I believe morality is pre-defined, objective standard in all humans. But it’s just a standard. Genetics, environment, experiences will form and move behaviour and opinions across the spectrum. Coordination becomes harder between two isolated groups after long enough period. but not impossible. (remember objective standard which states all humans are equal and deserve same treatment).

In practice, trust won’t be established without shared values. World was on the verge of nuclear war for most of the 20th century, and not without a reason. When you have two opposing systems of value, you’re subconsciously inferring that you don’t know how person B will react to action X, but you could guess in your group of people. By being able to assume, you make coordination much faster. Basically, establishing trust.

Coordination

It’s a very important topic for humanity, even if we aren’t aware of it, on how to keep our civilisation going without destroying each other. One of my favourite posts of all time cover this to a great extent, I highly recommend reading it here

Solution uno

Establishing humanity wide trust by eliminating the reason fuelling the need for it, fear.

• Fear can be either removed by achieving perfect coordination, trans-humanist goal of raising above the material.
• Or by removing the emotion itself, but that raises the question if we’d still be human after?

Solution dos

The other solution is much more practical.

1. We first assume that complexity of the world won’t allow us practically to find perfect common ground between everyone since everyone is prone to have a slightly biased opinion on various things.
2. Secondly, we make an axiom: “all human beings are valuable and equal”. Although this requires humility on everyone’s end since we’d also be saying that our opinion is also slightly biased and isn’t perfect, because no one is perfect. Subconsciously, that makes us have to accept that we might be wrong on a lot of things and need to keep an objective mind. Again, out of fear for survival or attachment to something, some opinions are very hard to change, and probably justifiably so!
3. Now that we are aware on why it’s hard but can value objectivity, we can build systems which require no trust and aren’t physically limited.

Basically the second solution is to create tooling which allows trust-less coordination between parties. Although I’m not completely sure on what exactly that tooling would be and the practicality of achieving it.

Network states

The effectiveness of the solution uno seems to be hardly achievable and the morality of it is highly controversial. Solution dos, although at the first glance less efficient, is much more human and personally more likeable.
I’ve just started reading on network states, but it seems like it’s a step in the second direction. It seems like there are a lot of things to be aware about before being able to give even a layman opinion. (incentives, conflicts, governance, obligations etc.)

Expect a layman look at network states at some point, you’ve been warned!