When I was young, I grew up playing civilization games, and watching my dad play them. I have always been a fan of grand strategy, politics, economics, and technological advancements. I was fascinated by how in human history, even after inventing all the pieces and discoveries required to make certain advances, how slowly technology has advanced until recent history. My father, when he played nearly any civilization game, plays the same way, he goes for early science, and then typically goes for the ability to use a republic as his form of government, then goes for a transition into democracy. When he plays, he plays as America, or as Rome or Greece. It doesn’t really matter what he does around that, or what method he uses to win in the end, but that’s the path that he goes down nearly every time. I always thought that it was fascinating that his ideological beliefs led him to never touch communism, fascism, monarchy, even in a video game, when it would lead to an advantage in the strategem he was using to win.
Ironically, this is definitely a form of toxic nationalism, which he would also stay away from, but he would certainly say that a democratic-republic is the best form of government, hands-down, no contest, and that any other form of government is in some way fundamentally wrong. Of course, when I asked him about these other forms of government, why they were wrong, or did not work, I would get non-sequitur answers, such as “because the communists in China massacred a bunch of people”, or “because they starved their people”, or “the Italian fascists were the bad guys of WWII”. While I could see that those governments did bad things to their people, it just never really explained my fundamental questions about their governments, which was how they functioned, and how their functioning could be “wrong” or “bad” in such a fundamental way. To me, all forms of government had sinned, and that governments like the USA’s were also responsible for atrocities.
It even seemed that he couldn’t accept a really basic cognitive dissonance that he had about monarchies and the monarchical language with which he would describe God, and even when I would point out this inconsistency, seemed immovable about keeping both true, that God was a good king, but there are no good monarchies, and that the system was inherently evil and tyrannical. I could never understand the fanatical devotion to his ideal of democracy and republicanism, which has morphed into something unrecognizable.
The inconsistency however, sparked my journey to look back through history, to find what actually makes a good leader. Who were the “good kings”, the “benevolent dictators”, and the “evil prime ministers”? What makes for stable government? What prevents corruption? How do we even judge such things through the lenses of history? What causes empires to fall, and for famine to overtake idealism?
I believe that the best form of government for a country is based on a combination of factors: the available resources, the level of infrastructure development, the level of technological development, and the objectives of the government. Each form of government has its drawbacks that can put it at risk of structural collapse, but with the appropriate combination of applied concepts, most of those risks can be mitigated.
For example, in a government that wishes to have a highly educated populace, with a number of high-value services, such as scientist, doctors, lawyers, programmers, engineers, and others, you would need to have a government that allows for the free exchange of ideas with few barriers, and would allow for educational support to increase the likelihood of any given citizen going into one of those professions. However, the free exchange of information allows for common people to organize, a drawback for a single-power state, as it allows for the creation of rival factions.
On the other hand, if the goal of the state was to generate wealth, you would want to have a government that strongly considers the interests of corporations, though without appropriate redistribution, and the ability for some upward mobility and support of the working populace, you could easily end up exploiting your working class too much. This is often the temptation, to drain resources in the short term, but this is always at the expense of long-term growth, and a nuanced understanding of economies tells us that poverty is a drag on society, and that you actually want economic policies that pull people from poverty to a middle-class standard to keep them content, and to ensure that they are more productive.
Because of this, sometimes the desires of a state and the ability of a state to meet those objectives are limited by the technology available. A government that had some flaws in it, such as difficulty managing bureaucracy, or distribution and allocation of resources across a state, or the necessity to divert segments of the economy towards defense, could work at a different point in history, where the circumstances have changed, such as technology, location, surrounding cultures, and societal norms. An attempt at a centralized state may work on a very small scale, but become impossible to manage without the advanced infrastructure of reliable globalized transportation that has only recently become available by land, air and sea.
It is through this lens which I look at the histories of these political empires, on scales large and small. To see what works, and what does not, and to consider counterfactual scenarios, where we can consider what things could have made it work. It is a somewhat dangerous task, I must admit, to ask questions like, “What would have made Mao’s communist China work better?” Because we must also consider the negative consequences it would have had for our own way of life now, such as a much earlier rise of China as a global power had it had access to the better agricultural and manufacturing techniques of the west just a few decades earlier, or if the state had expanded its educational system earlier, or simply had a better system of distributing resources. Would communism have had the power to sweep the globe?
It is my hope that by looking at the mistakes of governance and their successes through the ages that when the next wave of governmental experimentation occurs during the next wave of frontier exploration (space colonization of course), that we will have a more complete view of governing, and will be ready to evolve governance to its next stage. I predict this will be a hybrid model of governance which will include technology and human oversight as a part of its fundamental functions.
/rant 