governance ideals

In a group discussion on the study of governance, we explored the idea of governance “ideals”– the “meta” goals of any governance system. We came up with this small set.

1. Agency and consent
2. Mobility
3. Transparency
4. Interoperability

These were features we mostly felt should be true of any system, and that IF they were true of every system, it would create an environment where the other differences could be sorted out through preference, competition, and natural sorting. there were some key points of skepticism and debate around mobility vs. pressure for systems to improve, and well as the reality vs. theory of mobility, and the role of privilege in the practical ability to opt out in practice.

we also discussed the modularization and decoupling of governance from territory, and between others domains or resources.

but what are the axiomatic elements of a political system? we tend to relate to the political ideas of communism and anarchism as though they are somehow foundational and represent two axiomatic, orthogonoal locations. but they actually overlap quite a lot. and neoliberalism isn’t a political ideal, it’s just a set of policies. is there a political philosophy at the heart of western democracies today? sometimes we call it democratic capitalism, and capitalism is often held up as a counter to communism and anarchism, but capitalism doesn’t really have an opinion about the State per se (well, except that we tend to think of the State as validating property rights).

“governance” is essentially political philosophy. “democracy” is a technical tool for decision making - in particular, a tool for delegating power to a minority of the total polis. and it is only one approach to decision making. democracy itself has some reference ideals. “Some cornerstones… are freedom of assembly and speech, inclusiveness and equality, membership, consent, voting, right to life and minority rights.” ¹. in this sense democracy can be both a tool and a philosophy– a philosophy that a system centered on these ideals will lead to “good” outcomes and that, at a constitutional level, this is sufficient. but anarchism isn’t against democracy categorically, and as mentioned communism and anarchism overlap quite a but in their goals, and differ in their methods, while capitalism and communism overlap in their acceptance of an elite.

it is also possible for people to make unjust or unethical policies at both the design level or the policies of any system. so ethical frameworks don’t help us identify what is or isn’t foundational in the design of a system.

how do we know that we have a “space covering” option when we introduce new concepts? and what is it, from a structural or principled level, that justifies considering these 3 (communism, anarchism, capitalism) as a) genuinely foundational (which tends to imply orthogonal but is clearly not the case here), and b) implicitly anyway, it seems we often also treat them as complete– as though there are not immeasurable undiscovered systems waiting to be brought to life and tried.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Democracy&stableid=934418720 ↩