In this country, we often find ourselves presented with a short menu of distasteful political choices, but this situation need not persist. “Choose the lesser of two evils,” we are told, as if having an only mildly evil politician in office is some kind of comfort. Let me suggest that we may be approaching this problem all wrong.
At the risk of revealing too much about my views on “good and evil” (I might as well say “choice and no choice” or “freedom and coercion”) I should note that the political history of the world demonstrates an endless and cyclical opening and narrowing of real options, pendulum swings from tyranny to liberty.
I confess that I, like millenarian Christians and assorted other cultists, believe that we are approaching a sort of inflection point past which things are going to get much better or much worse for most of humanity, very quickly and dramatically. We may be on the verge of a political renaissance, and not just in this country but across the world . . . and by that I of course mean that things have gotten very bad, many people have started to notice, and we have the tools to fight.
I do not believe in necessary evils, only evils we have not yet reasoned a way around. When we appear constrained by bad political options, options we would not choose if we were truly free, we must put aside the questions of the moment to restructure the underlying institutions that constrain our choice.
The Westphalian state has decayed, too long a tool of personal enrichment, racial oppression, nationalist violence, and moral crusade. It is tainted by the blood of “criminals” without victims, stained by the acts of its torturers and mercenaries, a monster behind the shroud of triumphalist mythology.
Our leaders, children of the state that they are, cannot be expected to point out its flaws. Even those who struggle against the state, the Bin Ladens of the world are little more than power seekers, thugs who differ from politicians only in their location and willingness to engage directly in the killing of people who oppose them. Even when these types embrace the cause of reforming the state, their actions only expand its power and reach, never reduce it.
And yet I am hopeful, principally because we have the element of surprise. Our leaders have refused to see the writing on the wall, failed to carry the diffusion of information technology across the globe to its logical conclusion.
In a world where participation in the political process is practically cost free, where ideas can cross barriers of language and geography instantly, notions of representation and sovereignty may become anachronisms, literally obsolete.
The ethical and technical foundations of network-based government are being laid right now. The presumption of freedom, total transparency, decentralized participation, and natural rights guide this new movement, and promise to inject a good dose of reason as antidote to the demagoguery and hatred of the past. Network rule, this elusive webocracy is not something that can be completed during the next presidential term, or even the next generation. It will operate first in parallel with the current system and then come to supplant it as people discover that their shared problems are better and more cheaply addressed by a politics stripped of its mythology, its money whoring and its absurd violence.
In the domestic context, we may only have two evils to choose from now, but with a bit of luck the donkey and the elephant will be distant and amusing memories to our children.
