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?