So sort of a cross of the worst elements of Belgium, Lebanon and the Indian/Bangladeshi border?
An Examination of Extra-Universal Systems of Government
- Thread starter Ephraim Ben Raphael
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Now I'm imagining the government taking things even further and having exclaves of the ethnic homelands composed of individual houses inhabited by families from that ethnic group.
With shades of Bosnia, yeah.
That is exactly what I'm talking about.
In fact, to make it more absurd, have the "this system is broken" character be a young guy who talks in slang peppered with random words from various languages as part of a counterculture cryptolect. . "I met this bomb-ass chick, mate, and she Frisian, me Hellenic-Athenian, we be livin' same car for five years 'cause we ain't got no house rights 'cause we twosome cadre, we wanna tie it off and we ain't allowed to do shit about that 'cause we twosome cadre! That's some hot chien scheisse, kurwa!"
Hmm. One interesting thing to note about Nietzsche was that, although he was individualist, that does not necessarily translate into what we typically think of as democracy, because he thought that the democracies of the 19th century were actually suppressing individuality.
So, trying to work out a state that would have freedom as Nietzsche envisioned it while also not being a typical democracy will be interesting.
So, trying to work out a state that would have freedom as Nietzsche envisioned it while also not being a typical democracy will be interesting.
A state where a supreme autocrat is the individual allowed to express himself with no restrictions, which necessarily means that everyone else. "No free will, only my will." This could be some absolute monarch who read too much Nietzsche and has decided he's going to be the ubermensch. Of course this would likely lead to said monarch becoming incredibly self-centered to the point where he de facto delegates almost all responsibilities to his civil service, which is why nobody has bothered to depose him yet.
That seems less like what Nietzsche actually believed and more like what the Nazis said Nietzsche believed.
Also, that doesn't seem like it would stimulate the emergence of rational, value-creating Ubermensch in either the rulers or the subject. And it would end up continuing the master and slave moralities.
For what I'm thinking of, I might have an unconventional democracy which has power sharing/checks and balances between the "weak" and the "strong" rather than having a society dominated by one or the other.
Bookmark1995
Banned
This could occur in a TL where America broke apart, and the breakway nations had European-levels of hostility toward one another, resulting in World War style conflicts.
I've always thought that a reunification of the USA would be unlikely if the Articles of Confederation failed - the idea of a united American identity wouldn't even emerge then.
A better PoD might be the CSA winning the Civil War.
Anyways, upon trying to look into Nietzsche more to see if my ideas about what kind of government he would like are accurate, things just get more and more messy. There's a reason why everyone from anarchists to Nazis have made the claim that Nietzsche supported their ideology, after all. But I think I've got a somewhat better idea of what kind of society he wants now, which is good.
Nietzsche was quite the misogynist historically. The question is will his misogyny be accepted or ignored and just dismissed as a personal flaw of his.
I'm working on factoring that in. All states here have flaws, after all.
Bookmark1995
Banned
It would depend on how religiously he is viewed?
If people treat his text as the sacred law, the same way many people worship the words of Ayn Rand, then there will be a whole lot of the mistreatment of women.
I don't see him as the type to set down an permanent moral system. He did literally encourage people to come up with their own moral systems, after all.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Well...
The thing about any ideology is that many of them can be...creatively misconstrued.
Jesus teaches us not to make a temple into a cash machine, and the prosperity gospel does just that.
You have religious conservatives holding up the atheist Ayn Rand as an idol because of her love for the thing that Jesus despised.
You have Soviet officials who claim to represent the workers and the peasants behaving in a paradoxically classist fashion toward the peasants and the workers.
Ideology, like beauty, is often in the eye of beholder.
OK so I'm thinking about this Mega-Stupid EU idea. Probably formed in response to a bunch of fascist governments that got a lot of people killed for nothing. Like, fascists in every major European country and they all stalemated in a continent-spanning *ww2 that ends when everybody overthrows the government at once and most of the militaries mutiny in frustration when a Christmas truce gets stopped by all the governments and nobody on the ground wants to go back to shooting each other.
So because the fascists tried to purge and suppress minorities, all the small ethnic groups push through this idiotic system to keep what they still had hold of. The system is so insane it goes down to specific houses and apartments being legally bound to specific ethnic groups as they were understood at a month-long conference in 1946 or so. Demographics are in the toilet and immigration out of Europe is a constant stream to the point that they've tried banning it, but that didn't work at all. All the larger ethnicities want change and deossification of the system but hate each other; the little guys are rightly afraid of being pushed around if they change the system. It's a horrible mess and they all loathe each other. But even the idea of a multi-ethnic state is a non-starter because that would take power away from the currently powerful.
So because the fascists tried to purge and suppress minorities, all the small ethnic groups push through this idiotic system to keep what they still had hold of. The system is so insane it goes down to specific houses and apartments being legally bound to specific ethnic groups as they were understood at a month-long conference in 1946 or so. Demographics are in the toilet and immigration out of Europe is a constant stream to the point that they've tried banning it, but that didn't work at all. All the larger ethnicities want change and deossification of the system but hate each other; the little guys are rightly afraid of being pushed around if they change the system. It's a horrible mess and they all loathe each other. But even the idea of a multi-ethnic state is a non-starter because that would take power away from the currently powerful.
I remember someone having a similar idea on r/solarpunk, only they were advocating for it in the name of environmental fairness and were using native american reservation hunting and fishing rights* as a legal basis. Each group gets the same percentage of all total resources available, to be shared out among their total population. So individuals of populous groups would be legally forced to use a bare minimum of resources with communal living and property, mandatory veganism, etc, while individuals of less numerous groups could have a better quality of life. Essentially ecofascist apartheid.
* The tribes getting to set their own laws rather than follow those of the outside goverment.
Kitiem3000
Donor
The problem seems to be that they tie ethnicity explicitly to land. Of course, no single system would really work if everyone hates each other.
It sounds like a mix of United Kingdoms of Austria-Hungary-Slavonia, and the Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika
Who exactly holds the power here?
Quick suggestion: maybe we should come up with some form of distinguishing the various democratic USAs for the Index, because right now there are three entries in Chapter 6 simply titled "United States of America", which can be confusing. My suggestion is the following (@rvbomally bc he's the one in charge of the index):
- United States of America (Democratic/Republican) for the two Presidents one,
- United States of America (America First Party) for the one-party democracy one,
- Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika for the multiethnic one.
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A bunch of "democratically elected" ethnic leaders who've held power forever because every time somebody suggests reforming the system they get expelled from government until someone more suitable to the status quo is elected. Hardly anybody votes anyway because they've seen that there's little to no hope for change.
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