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Hey thanks for your fantastic comment, sorry it took so long to reply -- life has been hectic at the moment.
Currently, the issue isn't that people aren't free to move into smaller groups and shift out of mass society, so much as it is that there are no alternatives to mainstream residential setups.
Different clades would allow for that though: Hippie-based clades would promote communal living, or living off the earth. "Normal" clades would do the atomic housing model we have today. As long as both clades provide a minimum living-standard that complies with the State, then all setups are valid.
how do you take decisions affecting vast swathes of people with varied interests, while knowing you can't escape your own biases, without having some kind of narcissism-inclined cognitive pathology?
Forgive me, this I don't quite follow. The State will be made up of random clade members. As long as we sample each Clade without replacement, the State should eventually represent all beliefs (over a given amount of time). Where does the narcissism come into it?
First, we... In this sense, clade's retain their principle of voluntary membership.
Nice amendment, sold!
Second, we will also retain.... Clades and cities, thus, will be contemporary formats of residence and economy--particularly, their simultaneous existence makes them active alternatives to each other. People, thus, are free to choose between living in a mass society/mass culture (cities) or a kind of distinct ideological conglomeration (clades).
Fair enough, who am I to prevent people from clustering in larger groups.
I'm against the idea of cities because I find them dehumanizing in the sense that you never really get to know your neighbours and build a community, and this is further exacerbated by language barriers, which makes it hard for groups to come together, unionize[1], and serve a common interest. However, ~Contrarian rightfully pointed out that such a mode would likely lead to a kind of eco-fascism in many clades. So... yeah, fair enough, maybe a boiling pot of different cultures, languages, and beliefs, all smushed into one chaotic space is a necessarily guard against such extremism.
The distinction is that the cities would retain that increasingly-homogenous rat-race culture of global metros as is familiar to us today (in varying degrees, of course; but trending towards becoming globally homogenous), while the clades are knowledge centres that allow for people, whether children or adults, to seek and gain membership based on whether they feel the tenets of its organisation resonate with them.
I'm liking the idea that clades represent a nicer alternative to cities, whilst cities still being present. I have the feeling that this will force cities to become nicer places overall, in order to entice people away from the clades.
Third, we remove government from the context of the clades almost entirely. Consider that the government is an organisation whose primary purpose is the maintenance and upkeep of cities. This includes infrastructure, law enforcement, healthcare--effectively anything under the purview of a central planning-based welfare state.
But then wouldn't clades just become private entities who have to secure their own funding in order to exist, ultimately just rewarding the more capitalistic-based clades?
"Normal" clades would do the atomic housing model we have today. As long as both clades provide a minimum living-standard that complies with the State, then all setups are valid.
I see your point. Just to clarify: I was talking about this more from the point of view of how clades may emerge from the current paradigm of living. Since we can't retcon existing cities into clades, my suggestion was that we allow clades to emerge as distinctly new spaces. This means the cities will continue to exist. The idea here was to incorporate this inevitability and sort of upcycle it into the new system (ie, of clades). In this sense, clades become to cities what gemini-site are to www-sites: a new network of sites/spaces co-existing with the sites/spaces currently on the same infrastructure.
Forgive me, this I don't quite follow...Where does the narcissism come into it?
Sorry, this was a bit of a rant (^~^;). My point was that central planning, historically, has played out in a way that tends towards increasingly centralised authoritarianism. And this, I speculate, stems from the human tendency to succumb to the greed for more power, which leads to arrogance and corruption (in one word: narcissism; that is, of those willing to do what it takes to seize and stay in power). Allowing for central planning in almost any capacity seems to bring out the worst in people over time and stifles fruitful/innovative economic interaction after a point. Often, it drives a liberal and diverse economy right into the immovable wall of nationalism (which would be antithetical to the clade-system that wants to be a constellation of sociocultural diversity and/or distributed authority). However, I am no historian so this may well be seasoned with copious bias.
I'm against the idea of cities because I find them dehumanizing...guard against such extremism.
Dehumanizing environments are great for commercial interests. My suggestion to retain cities was two-fold: the first, as mentioned before, was to conceptualise this new system as a future possibility that could emerge from the current system/context. Second, that I see cities as valuable for trade and commercial activity--both of which tend to be dehumanizing at the industrial scale anyway. So, an environment that directly addresses that would be great as a way to filter out the people who need/want that context to orient their lives against/within (this is especially pertinent to your example of migrant workers not being able to influence working conditions, but still needing that setup since it is the most familiar interface that they have for converting their labour into income. The advantage here comes from the clades becoming a viable enough alternative that they can then choose to voluntarily shift into a mode of income/participation offered by a clade that addresses their needs while giving them more autonomy and influence than the cities). In this sense, the best outcome for cities would be to evolve into a kind of trade/industrial/employment/financial hub.
I'm liking the idea that clades represent a nicer alternative to cities, whilst cities still being present. I have the feeling that this will force cities to become nicer places overall, in order to entice people away from the clades.
That would potentially be another ideal outcome for cities and their culture. However, the model of alternatives (ie, clades and cities co-existing) is such that cities don't necessarily have to become nicer. They can simply consolidate into spaces with a clear culture and the people that like or need that culture (whether it is ultimately nice or not) can harness and participate in it. This would also serve as a filter to weed out the people that enter clades simply for the novelty of it but are far too rooted in the current paradigm of urban existence to really give it up--which would otherwise only generate conflict and resentment over time that could infect the whole population of a clade.
But then wouldn't clades just become private entities who have to secure their own funding in order to exist, ultimately just rewarding the more capitalistic-based clades?
I think there's a part of my interpretation of clades that I didn't clearly state (^~^;). I see clades as not having to be 'fully furnished' spaces so to speak. That's not to say that they can't be so. But the idea is more like, say, a university town. While they're free to provide all amenities to their residents (hospitals, banks, markets, schools, housing, water, etc), they really don't have to. The cities exist precisely for this reason: not only do they serve to contain and limit the reach of government, but they simultaneously act as an interface for citizens across clades and cities (basically anyone that comes under the purview of the international aegis of the nation-state) to access basic/essential amenities.
The idea here is that this setup will encourage clades to prioritise what modules of society they choose to incorporate--essentially, what modules they require to sustain their own vision and principles while leaving out the rest (to be taken up by the government-city setup). This way, for example, clades focused on trade or academia can provide just the institutions necessary for sustaining that vision, rather than have their focus spread thin by attempting to also incorporate health, banking, and all those other amenities.
This balance is key: a clade that attempts to do more than it should and more than it can is one that is doomed to fail one way or another. Instead, a clade that wants to offer an all-encompassing living solution, but can't right off the bat, can plan for it and gradually incorporate more societal modules as it garners the resources (people, expertise, and funds) to do the same.
So, the clades don't have to act like startups in the sense that they should secure funding to support their platform/economy. Instead, they're more like intentional living spaces that need to plan and strategize for the long-term even before they secure their physical space or lay their first brick. A clade is only as real as it is sustainable, otherwise it becomes like any other startup/scam that's just trying to keep it together for as long as profit can be squeezed out of it (and always with an 'exit' in mind).