(Not) Everybody Wants To Rule The World
(A follow on from “what do we want”. But probably only a few people want to rule the world.)
What would happen if we let benevolent billionaires run the world? Who runs the world now? Does anyone in particular run the world? What do we even mean by “run the world”?
Our planet is a closed system that supports life. We don’t have anything like it with which we can compare what’s going on right now. The best we could do is to observe the history of human societies and see what happened and how they fared, depending on who was running the show. Then we might extrapolate or generalize.
First of all, let’s look at the history of the planet as life emerged and then evolved. When Nature was running things (and by this I don’t mean with the intentionality that humans have), life was just about survival. Success in survival meant that you lived and your genetic material was passed on through reproduction. There was no species that had a narrative idea of a future for individuals much less for their species, until humans evolved. As soon as humans developed the capacities to intentionally plan for a future beyond their own lifetime, they became the dominant species on the planet and Nature running things was relegated to a background character, who disrupted what humans were planning from time to time, but who couldn’t be said to be intentionally running things the way humans were.
If you compare humans with other sentient species, you can see that we want to run things. We want to plan for a long term future for ourselves and our descendants. Other species reproduce and love their children and want them to have a good life. But they don’t plan ahead like we do. They also don’t strive to control reality like we do. They accept that Nature just is and work with it. We don’t accept Nature and we seek to construct reality in ways that benefit us (or so we believe) more than in the minimal way Nature would have us live our lives.
When humans construct their societies, they build infrastructure, they farm for food, they figure out how to live together in relative peace. Humans are aware that we are responsible for the consequences of our actions. This is moral responsibility. We make rules about how we should treat each other. These are laws. When we make our societies, they become complex things that allow us to plan for our futures while living the lives we have reason to value. Ideally, that would be the case. However, looking at history shows us that most of the time, individuals emerge who try to amass enough power so they can run things their way.
There are some societies that don’t work like that. They tend to be smaller and maybe nomadic, and while they have leaders, they don’t tend to work against Nature and ignore reality. Certainly, the empires in human history have been run by powerful individuals who seek to construct reality in ways that benefit them, in whatever way they choose to interpret “benefit”.
In the history of humans running the world, we can look at empires to get a good idea of how it works. Over recorded history, the planet has been run by a few individuals and their descendants, or their dynasties. China, Russia, Great Britain, India, all have had centuries of dynasties that have been more or less successful in running large swathes of the planet. What “running the planet” meant then, was about having enough territory and power to control that territory, so that you got to decide what the rules would be, to advantage yourself over others. This also worked with smaller dynasties (small kingdoms); they just had smaller territories and less power. And this worked with religious dynasties, such as with Christianity and Islam. These dynasties would butt heads from time to time and there would be wars and changes in the boundaries of the empires. But it was all the same; individuals seeking to control reality to benefit themselves.
How these powerful individuals ran their empires depended on their particular view of human life. Many people have a hierarchical view of life. There is a whole thing called the Great Chain of Being where you have a god at the top and then humans and then animals and plants and so on. Within humanity, some people are viewed as higher on the chain than others, which is how you end up with the patriarchy and royal families and racism and all that. And usually, when you’re the emperor running your empire, you tend to only look out for some of the people, some of the time. You can’t afford to include all the people all the time; empires are naturally exclusive. And they see people as instrumentally useful to the success of the empire.
Only recently have humans become enlightened enough as a species to recognize that “all people are created equal” meaning each person should be seen as entitled to the same minimal treatment as everyone else. Each one of us is seen, ostensibly, as entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of a life we have reason to value” (mixing Amartya Sen with Thomas Jefferson). And so we invented modern democracy, with one person, one vote, and one person running things but this time, for the benefit of each one of us, and all of us, not just some of us. This is still a very new concept, in the big scheme of running the world.
Lately, we’ve seen that there has arisen a type of individual who has amassed power enough to control vast resources in the world. This is the billionaire. Billionaires get where they are by never recognizing that anything is ever enough. They can never have too many resources or too much power. Occasionally, a billionaire will become enlightened and understand they are harming humanity and then they will build libraries in repentance, or start a foundation to give people clean water. But mostly, we can treat billionaires as a class of humans who are like emperors of old and who want to run the world. They want to construct reality to benefit themselves, and they see other people as only instrumentally useful for achieving that end.
What happens when we let billionaires run the world? I think it’s very similar to when emperors ruled their empires, only now the entire planet is involved. What that means is, they will construct reality so it benefits them and it doesn’t matter if some people are harmed in the process. I also venture to guess that billionaires may tend toward a hierarchical view of the world and of people and so they are fine with treating some people better or worse than others. They are fine with excluding some types of people from things that ought to be common goods. They probably don’t even recognize that such a thing as “common goods” exists, because they seek to control or own as much of the world as they can.
Some dystopian fiction often portrays the world run by billionaires as great for them and their friends and hell for the other eight billion people on the planet. With climate change, billionaires are portrayed as not caring about the effects of climate change because they have bunkers where they can survive. But in fact, they probably do care about some of the negative effects of climate change because they don’t all want to live in bunkers. I think the result of billionaires running the world would be similar to empires of the past, where only a few live well and the rest have to eke out a living as best they can. The main problem with billionaire sustaining their rule is the income inequality and the fact that all the poor in the world vastly outnumber the billionaires running the world. I suspect the billionaires would soon be overthrown by the sheer numbers of the poor, provided the poor could get their act together.
The thing is, billionaires and emperors get to decide on their own where the resources go, who gets what, what the rules are, and all the rest. When you have a benevolent ruler, the people don’t suffer as much. But they also don’t get any say in how resources are distributed or whether there are things to which everyone should be entitled (common goods). That’s why democracy is messy; because everyone gets a say and you never have 100% agreement. All the decisions the rulers make serve themselves first and any idea of equality is out the window.
In futuristic sci-if, we sometimes have a world government, which is to say, a democracy running the world. It’s messier than the Empire in Star Wars, but you don’t have that exclusive hierarchy where the marginal people are ignored or worse. The starting point for a world democracy would be that every person is of value; every person matters. It may be that the least you can do for the most marginal person is to show that you acknowledge that they exist and they matter. But I think that’s better than believing that some people are more worthy of existing than others, and so the resources all go to them and the less worthy can just die.