There's downsides wherever you look, not least is the greed for power. And
of course the more power, the more greed.
I'd like to think that politics could be spread thinly and that those at the
top would be in possession of a minimal set of powers. I certainly don't
think that the 'jackboot' version is a necessity, although it's always a
danger.
Of more importance, to my mind, is the ability to disperse economic power
before any attempt to centralise politics. If households could be made as
close to energy self-sufficiency as possible (to take an example), then the
ability to subvert political power through economic power would be
minimised.
Just a few what I thinks.
Simon: Is that the only form of world government imaginable?
Eric: What do you think? I don't know.
As an undergraduate, I took a seminar on utopias and dystopias, and got to examine a lot of happy and grim potential worlds. Seems hard to minimize the downside. _Ecotopia_ was a good read, for example, but it depended on a strong US government, from which it had seceded, to keep the other predators away.
Maybe the best thing is radical decentralization? Everything small enough so that people can truly care about it and make changes to it. Some sort of _Small is Beautiful_ world held together by nonviolent global glue? Don't know.
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